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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Monday, 07/06/2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultium, Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money saved. Both easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:Happy July 4 to everyone. I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend. How was your fourth? Jordy? Incredible.
Speaker 2:It was incredible. Cinema. Tyler, how was your fourth?
Speaker 3:It was electric.
Speaker 2:Can you tell us about that white party that you went to? You can't talk about that? What about the wedding you went to? Was that a fun one? That was in New York.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 4:New York. Yep.
Speaker 2:Manhattan?
Speaker 4:Yep. Madison Square Garden.
Speaker 2:But you can't you can't break it down for us?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's they they told us not to
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Got it. Well NDA? I'm glad you had fun.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you had fun. I'm glad everyone had fun. My fourth of July was great. It was a
Speaker 1:little was it humid? Did you even get sunburned? No. You don't even look sunburned.
Speaker 2:Not sunburned. Can't say that for the rest He's of the larping. Half the team
Speaker 1:over He's larping around saying, oh, I had the best fourth of July, not even sunburned. No. Make it make sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Shade. Shade. You stay in the shade at the right times. UV index You're not sunburned.
Speaker 2:Why are you
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm dreadily sunburned.
Speaker 2:Oh, on the back.
Speaker 1:On my back.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. That makes sense. UV index. Was it humid in Malibu?
Speaker 1:A little bit.
Speaker 2:It was a little humid in Pasadena and it made it feel very East Coast. Like it felt like an East Coast 4th Of July to me. I went I did East Coast Yeah. Did. I did East Coast fourth of July a couple years ago and it was sort of refreshing.
Speaker 2:I don't know. It was nice. But
Speaker 1:Drone shows were in this year?
Speaker 2:Yes. Fireworks are out given the Palisades fire, the Altadena fire. So a lot of townships are playing it safe with drone shows instead of fireworks, which is I don't know. I feel like it's cool. I like a drone show.
Speaker 2:I've only seen one when we were in France. It was cool. I don't have a problem with it, but I'm anticipating a backlash. I'm anticipating that people will be like, we got to go back to the organic authentic fireworks. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're like, I like when the air quality is terrible.
Speaker 2:Okay. It's an air quality risk for you. You noticed that?
Speaker 1:I didn't notice this year.
Speaker 2:Did you see fireworks I
Speaker 1:I honestly I didn't see a single sleep. I didn't see a
Speaker 2:single firework. Was up at 6AM, so I went to bed at like nine.
Speaker 1:I did not see a single firework on the July 4 which Yeah. Is crazy. I heard some Yeah. Around. But I remember when I lived in LA Yeah.
Speaker 1:The air quality would genuinely be terrible Yeah. For at least a few days Yeah. Because it just sits in there and if there's no wind.
Speaker 2:When I lived in Echo Park, it was like fireworks everywhere. It's the craziest neighborhood because people in the neighborhood buy the production level fireworks. You know how normally you get like a sparkler or you get something like Yeah. Shoots off a little? No.
Speaker 2:They buy the the same thing that you see at like Dodger Stadium like the cannon that goes off and goes boom. That but they they don't coordinate them. So it's not like there's music that's playing and then it's sync sync synced up and there's some finale. It's just whenever someone feels like lighting one off it goes full fireworks scale. There's some really cool like helicopter video shots of Los Angeles during I think fourth of July where they go really really crazy but feel like that's a Probably dangerous.
Speaker 1:Stallion would do is like I'm gonna go Yeah. Fly my plane at 9PM on the fourth of July Yeah. And just get into
Speaker 2:I have some crazy video of the fireworks show at Dodger Stadium before there were regulations around drones. I had one of the first drones and I flew it like through the fireworks and in spectacular footage. I'll I'll have to play it on the show one day. Wildly illegal by modern drone standards but at the time no one knew how to regulate those things so you could just fly them anywhere which was really really crazy but a lot of fun. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco.
Speaker 2:Critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real time experience and new value with Cisco. So big changes at Microsoft, big changes at Xbox. Xbox is cutting 3,200 jobs by the end of next year and here's where it gets interesting, it's not because of artificial intelligence. AI, the new CEO of Xbox has been very clear that they're not stuffing AI everywhere. They're going back to their roots but they are focused on efficiency and so the newly appointed Xbox CEO, Ashish Sharma has announced this morning that Xbox will lay off 3,200 staffers by the end of twenty twenty seven with 1,600 layoffs taking place today.
Speaker 2:She posted her full email to Xbox employees on X and it's very candid about the operational Very
Speaker 1:failures and trajectory of the notable Yes. That the first major layoff from a major company just admits that the business is not healthy
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And doesn't blame it on have not seen a layoff of this scale
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:That wasn't at least partially credit credited to like the productivity increases that we're seeing from AI. Yes. And this feels like the most honest layoff. And they're sort of forced into doing it because of the gaming community is like so anti AI. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think And we get even worse.
Speaker 2:New things that are going on. So, yeah. We need to break this debate into strategic. Should they be doing layoffs? What does this mean for the Xbox business?
Speaker 2:And then the communications around it as well because the communications, we can dig into what she actually said. In her email, she says the business is not healthy unless a bunch of surprisingly bad trends and aspects of the operation. One, Xbox is operating at margins three to 10 times lower than its competitors. It released its latest console to a smaller install base while the cost structure of the console itself was higher. Of course, memory prices are going up now and so the cost of these consoles is going to be even higher in the future.
Speaker 2:And in some parts of the company, work has to pass through as many as 14 layers of management. Wow. That's a lot. In a typical year, Xbox lost 64¢ for every dollar it invested. In addition to the layoffs, Asha said that Xbox will spin out game studios that it acquired over the years.
Speaker 2:Compulsion Games, Double Fine Productions, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, and Arcane are all getting yeeted in one way or another.
Speaker 1:Sox has been running Xbox into the ground for the love of the game.
Speaker 2:You mean running it unprofitably for the love of the game?
Speaker 1:No. No. No.
Speaker 2:Because I do do agree that they face really fierce competition. PS five has a ton of amazing exclusives and then Nintendo has Nintendo the N 64 used to compete directly with the PlayStation. It was like, do you get an N 64 or a PlayStation? And then once Xbox came in, PlayStation and Xbox, they fought for every exclusive. And by and large, you could play Call of Duty on either.
Speaker 2:You could play most of the games Madden was on both of them. And so you would sort of decide, oh, I got some friends on Xbox. I'm on the Xbox crew or I'm in the PlayStation world. But then Nintendo went off and just did something completely different with the Switch. PC gaming continued to grow and became more and more accessible on more and more, you know, devices.
Speaker 2:So even a laptop that you might get for school can still play most of library on Steam. And so you have more competition. And then you also have mobile. Like, the hyper casual games are taking mindshare. People are scrolling TikTok.
Speaker 2:There are tons of free entertainment resources that they compete with. This is something all the all the movie studios love People to
Speaker 1:are making Yeah. Podcasts like
Speaker 2:Podcasts. We're
Speaker 1:we didn't have this.
Speaker 2:No. You can be gaming while you watch this.
Speaker 1:We we approve. No. I'm saying because you're making this, you're not gaming.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. No. Okay.
Speaker 1:You were spending Yeah. At least back in the day Yeah. Pretty penny on
Speaker 2:That's true. That's true. So, yeah. They they're they're tightening up operations at Xbox. The question I think on everyone's mind is will Xbox be spun out as a standalone entity at some point?
Speaker 2:Is it too far afield from the core Microsoft mission? There was a move. Xbox was seen as a foothold into consumer for Microsoft. Of course, with the way Azure has grown in their cloud platform and their cloud business, really it feels like Microsoft is having the biggest win in in enterprise and teams cloud and all of the workforce and productivity tools that they launch. Obviously, they're very big in AI.
Speaker 2:And so the idea that the Xbox would be at one point, it came with the best four k Blu ray player, an Xbox One S, I believe. You can get one of these for a $100 right now. It's actually a great steal if you want to go physical media, which is very popular with parents these days, instead of, oh, yeah, scroll the endless feed of Netflix and Disney plus Instead of that, it's like, you like Toy Story? We got you Toy Story on four ks Blu ray. You can put it in the box and it's a $100, which is six months of a streaming service.
Speaker 2:So a lot of people are starting to physical media max a little bit more. But the idea was that you would get this Xbox and you would get it because you were a gamer, want to play games, but you also had an HD DVD player, Blu ray player and they would also serve as like your home media console and they would grow from there, get the foothold into the consumer market. But that never really materialized. Most people, if they have an Xbox they use it to play one specific set of games. They might have a PS5 as well and Nintendo Switch as well.
Speaker 2:And then if they're in the Apple ecosystem and they play Xbox games on the weekend, they're not lamenting the lack of integration there. They're like, yeah, it's fine. Play the games over there. I talk to people on the iPhone. It's fine.
Speaker 2:So let's read through a little bit of Asha's post to see because there's this key decision to announce 3,200 layoffs throughout fiscal year twenty twenty seven but announce only 1,600 today. The question is strategically, what does that do for morale? Like, because you sort of have this guillotine hanging over everyone. Is this a good incentive for everyone to lock in and not and make the cut because you know another cut is coming? Is it is it going to stop complacency in the organization?
Speaker 2:Or is it going to make everyone start looking for other jobs and think, oh, like I could get fired at any moment. They've already teed up 1,600 layoffs. If I'm likely to be in that, maybe I should be looking for another job right now. Now, that could be good because maybe those aren't the missionaries who you want on the team, but what do you think about the idea of announcing to your company that there are layoffs today and there's also a whole bunch more coming down the pipe?
Speaker 1:XboxMicrosoft Gaming has around 16,000 employees, so this cut is quite significant. Yes. I think that at least in startups
Speaker 2:It's 10% within the next year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. At least in startups, the best advice that I've ever gotten and and would typically talk with founders in my portfolio about is, like, if you need to do cuts, cut deep. Right? Yeah. And this is, like, maybe at least this is like a talking point for at least, like, five significant founders and investors.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, a lot of people just repeat this. Right? And I think it I think it generally holds true. It's better to I think the question is, like, why did they feel like they needed to cut 1,600 today and then also keep a 1,600 cut in the in the tank?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, do they need like, is is there some
Speaker 2:And do they know who those 1,600 people are?
Speaker 1:And they're like Yeah. Just need
Speaker 2:twelve months to let them finish what they're doing? Or is it that we haven't even identified them. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We just suspect And either way it doesn't necessarily seem that great, right? Because if you've identified who you're gonna cut like you should probably just do it now.
Speaker 2:It's much better to just do a big cut and then say, look, everyone who's still on the ship, we're going on the offensive.
Speaker 5:We're going
Speaker 2:to be hiring in these areas. We're this is where we're winning. So everyone get on because we're going on a big run right now. We, you know, had to shrink a little bit, but now we're on the offensive in this particular with this particular strategy.
Speaker 1:For But who knows? Perspect. They certainly understand the implications of doing this. Yeah. So there's probably there's there's certainly a strategy to it.
Speaker 2:Microsoft as a whole is laying off 4,800 employees, which is 2.1% of its workforce. This is a massive company. And you have to wonder, because they're obviously hiring as well, like, will the company shrink this year on the back of these layoffs or will they just do 2% layoffs and then wind up growing the company 3% and so they wind up a larger organization at the end of the year. There's some interesting history here because Microsoft has had a long history of rank and yank stack ranking they invented. It was always a hardcore culture.
Speaker 2:People sort of forget this about Microsoft because it's such a dominant tech company that, of course, they got lumped in with the nap rooms and free lunches. But, in fact, back in the late '70s and '80s, Microsoft was famously intense, very tiny teams, huge deadlines, technical arguments. Gates, Bill Gates was personally reviewing work and they had a culture that rewarded extreme competence. It was sort of an Elon Musk type endeavor at that time. Was not nice, still founder led and product obsessed.
Speaker 2:Vanity Fair had a profile in the company in 2012, describes young Microsoft as thrilling but also unnerving with Gates demanding intense commitment from hires and Balmer joining in 1980 as the hard charging business operator.
Speaker 1:Asha wants the new culture at Xbox to be thrilling and a little unnerving.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Maybe. So in the nineties, they started to develop a monopoly. In Windows '90 five, Office, there was a lot of lock in to Excel, Word. Business was just printing cash.
Speaker 2:And Microsoft became enormous, rich, internally competitive. The company still had the old smart people, brutal review, ship or die energy, but it was becoming more layered as we saw 14 layers of management at Xbox in some cases. Stack ranking became part of the culture, but no one really knows exactly when exactly what date it went into effect. But a former Microsoft employee writing in Geekwire said stack ranking had been an integral part of Microsoft culture for decades and that when he joined in 1999, it was often viewed positively as a part of Microsoft's meritocracy. And so so stack ranking was you rank all the employees, you put them on this bell curve, you're sort of grading on a curve.
Speaker 2:You have a couple a players but then there's certain people that are falling behind and and everyone knows where they sit in the organization.
Speaker 1:Did you illustrate this for me? Yeah. Just with the team? Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 1:That would be helpful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I'd give myself s tier, u, f tier and I think I think we can start and end there. No. But Balmer came in and people started pointing to stack ranking as a little bit more of dysfunction.
Speaker 2:Of course, were other strategic missteps during the Balmer era and the stock was flat and this is what birthed Strathecari is as soon as Ben Thompson left Microsoft. He had tons to write about because he was there during the pre Satya era when they were trying to get into mobile and did so unsuccessfully. Then Satya comes in, the pivot to cloud, the business does very well. And everything's off to the races again. But during the infamous Balmer era, there was a forced curve performance review.
Speaker 2:Managers had to distribute employees into buckets, so even a strong team had to produce winners and losers. So even if you love everyone on your team, the bottom 10% is going to be labeled the bottom 10% and that creates a lot of stress. But it can also create a lot of incentive and a lot of excitement. It can be tough but fair sometimes. But ABC Thrilling and unnerving.
Speaker 2:Thrilling and unnerving.
Speaker 1:ABC describe your corporate environment? Thrilling and unnerving?
Speaker 2:Better than just unnerving. I'd rather have some thrill in there. I don't know. Sort of opt into it, you know. Ideally ideally, this is all out in the open.
Speaker 2:It comes out in the hiring process. You don't go in blind. You know what you're getting. But of course, cultures change over time. If you've been with a company for a decade, you might say, I signed up for, you know, a chill monopoly.
Speaker 2:Why are we wartime? I'm a peacetime employee, you know, or vice versa. And then it might be time to find another opportunity. So ABC summarized it as managers grading on the bell curve. Vanity Fair's critique was harsher.
Speaker 2:They said former and current employees described stack ranking as the most destructive process inside Microsoft because it made employees compete with teammates instead of competitors. It's a good point. I mean, you should in some ways just be like, yeah, you smoked the competition. It doesn't matter that you were the worst at smoking the competition. At least you did some smoking.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But they always did normal so the question is like like is the layoffs that are happening at Xbox, the layoffs that happened last year at Microsoft, they laid off 9,000 people. This year, it's under 5,000. Is this new? Is this Is this a new trend or is this just a continuation of the stack ranking process? It actually is new.
Speaker 2:Stack ranking would push out low rated people. Sometimes it would block promotions, reduce bonuses, force transfers, But they weren't necessarily doing mass layoffs around it. That's sort of a misconception. So, even if they look at all the stack ranking at the end of the year and they say, okay, these people are clearly in the bottom 10%, they saw it more as an opportunity to reallocate talent from different pieces, different teams. And it wasn't always, okay, every at the end of every year, we're we're just firing the bottom
Speaker 6:10%.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Bottom 10% on one team might be top 10% on another team.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Which again, thrilling. It's not it's not full guillotine you're going to be out of a job if you're in the bottom 10%. It's more, okay, you need to find a better opportunity within the organization. You're still on the team.
Speaker 2:Now we are in a different we're in a different a different world because the first mass layoff at Microsoft actually came in 2009 after the great financial crisis. It announced a plan to cut 5,000 jobs during the financial crisis and it was the first mass layoff for Microsoft. I mean, that's forty year, thirty year run without any layoffs, just growth, growth, growth. But layoffs eventually became a more normal corporate behavior. In 2014, under Satya Nadella, Microsoft announced up to 18,000 cuts, mostly tied to integrating Nokia's phone business.
Speaker 2:So post acquisition, they de duplicated some teams. Of course, Nokia has, you know, marketers and finance people and a lot of things that are not directly tied to that product. They're bringing the companies together, there might be some reduction in force. Microsoft's own announcement frames reorganization focuses on this reorganizational simplification. Reuters reported that about 12,500 of those Nokia related cuts were related to the acquisition directly.
Speaker 2:The system officially ended in 2013 so they're not doing stack ranking anymore just before Nadella took over. Microsoft killed the numerical forced ranking and moved towards more qualitative frequent reviews.
Speaker 1:I bet there's still some OG managers there that are doing a little cheeky stack ranking.
Speaker 2:I miss it. Maybe. Who knows? But overall, is there cause for optimism with Xbox? It's the hardest gaming platform to be excited about.
Speaker 2:When you think about Valve, it's just a money printing machine on top of PC. The PC gaming industry broadly is is doing well and and PlayStation's done such a good job. Sony's done such a good job with PlayStation with creating like true intellectual property. You think about Last of Us which is now an HBO series and that is a PlayStation exclusive at least for a certain amount of time. I believe they own Naughty Dog, the publisher of that or the game developer.
Speaker 2:And so there's a lot there's fewer and fewer exclusives. And when Microsoft bought Activision, there was talk of will Call of Duty go exclusive to Xbox because that would be sort of a killer feature that would get a lot of gamers. Even if they're in the PS5 ecosystem, they say, well, I want to play Call of Duty, I'll get an Xbox as well. They chose not to do that for potentially antitrust reasons. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You can't necessarily cut Yeah. The I don't follow the video game industry.
Speaker 2:Loser alert. Loser alert. But
Speaker 1:the thing gets you to get excited about with Xbox
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is Modern Warfare two Rust
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And one v one ing Yes. Your best friends.
Speaker 2:Yes. But you buy in the secondary market, that's not any pennies and income statement. It's rough over there. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market?
Speaker 2:Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Well, if you've done enough Forza Horizon five, Forza Horizon six, you've burned out on your gaming simulator with your Xbox. You got to get over to Ferrari and pick up a Dolce Tralindri Manual.
Speaker 1:Let's pull up this video.
Speaker 2:The 12 Cylindri is the first car with a gated manual shifter to come out of Maranello since 2012.
Speaker 1:Have you noticed that they said shifter not transmission?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Shifter. That's what people wanted. Right? We'll debate it.
Speaker 2:Let's play this video.
Speaker 7:And a shifter. It's a 60
Speaker 2:Let's see. Hell is frozen over, pigs can fly,
Speaker 7:and Ferrari is building a new car with a manual transmission. This is the 12 cylinder Manuale. As you can see, it's a manual gearbox in a Ferrari. And what it really is is a mode of the eight speed DCT, but Ferrari has added a clutch pedal and a shifter. It's a six speed shifter.
Speaker 7:When you switch to manual mode, the shift knob turns amber in color, but you can also leave it on automatic. Unlike the other 12 C Landry's, there's no paddle shifters, which you'll notice. There's if you want manual mode, you push the clutch in, provided you're going under 62 miles an hour, it'll go into manual mode and then you can start driving. They tell us you can stall it. So if you are too quick with the clutch, too quick with releasing the clutch, you
Speaker 2:try to start it in
Speaker 7:second or third gear and you pop the clutch, you'll stall it. If you push the clutch in, you can rev it to the 9,500 RPM redline and do a massive clutch drop. It does have some safeguards if you try to do you know a six to one shift or some shift that isn't allowable. It won't let you do it. Ferrari put a ton of effort into the shift feel.
Speaker 7:So you can sort of as you move from the center plane, there is a little bit of resistance sort of simulate the synchronizers meshing and then it sort of falls into gear. So it feels very much like a manual gearbox in a Ferrari has always felt, provided that gearbox is warmed up. As you can see, the gated shifter is here, clicks the are very much here. Although the DCT is an eight speed, you only get six speeds with transmission, which lowers the top speed from over 200 miles an hour. I think 211 miles an hour in seventh gear at red line to sixth gear, which is at the 9,500 r v m red line to a 196 miles an hour.
Speaker 7:So if you wanna go just that little bit faster for top speed
Speaker 2:You gotta go and switch it in
Speaker 7:mode. The The Manuale goes on sale at the beginning of next year, at the beginning of twenty twenty seven. Ferrari has said that the price will be right around half $1,000,000 for starters. I'm sure most of them will be optioned out with lots of goodies and cost a lot more. They're building 1,499 of them, and I would imagine they're already spoken for.
Speaker 7:But this sort of does give us a look that Ferrari sees the value in the manual transmission. They love the connection of it. Their customers had been asking for it. They didn't really have a manual transmission to put in the car. But with this solution, this essentially a manual mode with a shifter and a clutch, they have shown us that it is possible to take a dual clutch and make the manual experience happen for buyers.
Speaker 7:So I'm hoping this trickles down into the rest of the lineup.
Speaker 2:Okay. Manual by wire, they're trying to answer every they don't make them like they used to complaint. How does it land with you? Do you think this checks the box? Does this count as a manual Ferrari?
Speaker 2:Are they giving their manual fans what they want? Or is this a poor simulacrum of what it means to have three pedals?
Speaker 1:I think it's a obvious step in the right direction.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people will be satisfied with this. I don't know. I think this checks enough of Pure
Speaker 1:assertions. Shambles. Yeah. I'm in shamble over the spec that they use in that example.
Speaker 2:Why?
Speaker 1:I just think it looks terrible.
Speaker 2:It does look very base spec.
Speaker 1:But but I think this is a fantastic
Speaker 2:TJ Parker does not like it. He says this is far more embarrassing than the Luce face plant. And people are saying, wow, that's bad as long as it's fun. Who cares? TJ Parker says he cares.
Speaker 2:It's corny, but Look. Koenigsegg approved by the new Bugatti CEO seems
Speaker 1:Look. When I see this, I think that they're going to sell at least 1,499 luches because you have to imagine
Speaker 2:You think so?
Speaker 1:If you
Speaker 2:want They claim they're not doing it. They claim they're not doing it.
Speaker 1:Then you're gonna need to buy a luche. They claim they're not doing it. They obviously will be doing it. You think so? These are never things that are these are never rules that are written down anywhere but they are understood.
Speaker 2:The details are are hilarious and kind of brilliant. Look at listen to this. You can skip gears, heel toe downshift and even stall the car if you mess up the clutch but the system will also stop you from doing something truly stupid like over revving the engine or money shifting the car into the wrong gear. If you're not familiar with the money shift that's where you shift you skip a gear too much and it grinds the gears and you have to pay for to fix your engine which costs a lot of money, especially in a 12 cylinder Ferrari. It's slower if you shift it yourself and you need automatic mode to hit the full 211 mile per hour top speed, but that's basically the whole point for our customers.
Speaker 2:Apparently told the company that they were willing to trade performance for the old school physical joy of driving a gated manual
Speaker 1:I like that they're partially listening to customers.
Speaker 2:It seems like
Speaker 1:Or not necessarily fully Yeah. Listening to customers Yeah. Because I don't know any of Ferrari's, you know, out of the handful of Ferrari's top customers that I know Yeah. I don't know any that were like, yeah, give me a fly by wire like gated man you know, gated manual. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They were not asking for that. Yeah. But they were asking for the experience. They were asking for a knob that you Yeah.
Speaker 2:Put your
Speaker 1:hand on
Speaker 2:three pedals. Yeah. But they want the third pedal. I am thinking of the Hyundai Ioniq five n. Are you familiar with this vehicle?
Speaker 1:You've told me all about it.
Speaker 2:The Hyundai Ioniq five n is a an electric hatchback essentially, but the gentleman who runs Hyundai's N division formerly ran BMW's M division. What's the letter that comes after M? It's N. So he went over to Hyundai and said, give me a bunch of your cars and I will create m versions, performance versions of these cars. Now Hyundai is funny because it's like a family car company for the most part, not the same muscle car German performance ultimate driving machine base to work with at Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like at BMW. But that individual has done a fantastic job adding some drama to what it feels like to drive an electric Hyundai, specifically with the Hyundai IONIQ five n. It has something like 600 horsepower, very quick on the track. Because of the position of the battery, it stays very planted even though it is a heavy vehicle. So it is good on the track in automatic mode but they added paddle shifters and a simulated dual clutch LARP mode.
Speaker 2:LARP mode. And it pipes in fake noise from a fake engine and you can red line it virtually and it's almost like Can
Speaker 1:you roll it physically?
Speaker 2:You can physically roll it if you get really crazy, I'm sure. But it's a very interesting it's very interesting because it has all the hallmarks of something that would be hated by the car community. But in fact, when I watched a lot of reviewers, a lot of car fans drive it, they said, yeah, after a couple laps on the track, it just felt like a lot of fun. It was just And also, at the price point, you're getting the performance of a 2 to $300,000 car probably, 600 horsepower. It feels like a manual.
Speaker 2:And you can really throw it around and drift it and do all sorts of fun stuff with a much lower entry price. And so Yeah. I was surprised that we didn't see that technology quickly come to the Taycan and other electric sort of sports cars. I think it will eventually. I think it takes time.
Speaker 2:Also, the the the sound choice was interesting. They used they used the exhaust from another Hyundai instead of like licensing something more brawny or powerful or more exciting. But there's clearly something there that I don't I don't know if the car's selling very well, it was at least satisfying to the critical eye of, you know, Matt Farah Yeah. Which was interesting. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's funny because our our dear friend TJ, no matter what Ferrari does Mhmm. He just hates it. He's just I haven't I haven't seen there has not been at launch.
Speaker 2:He was sort of pro Luche. He was he was relevant.
Speaker 1:But he says this is far more embarrassing than the luche. Yeah. You're saying that's a positive stance?
Speaker 2:He took a he took a heretical stance on the luche.
Speaker 1:I'm actually the the Ferrari that I'm most excited about is the is the street legal version of the two nine six challenge.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I think that's gonna be a hit. Because that's that's obviously it's gonna be paddles. Sure. But internal combustion engine, they're ditching the all the the hybrid stuff.
Speaker 2:They should they should have a version. You know the really old Model T, the really old cars where you had to crank them to start from the front? They should have a virtual version of that. So it's like a fully electric car, 2,000 horsepower, 400 mile range. But you you can get out a crank from the back of the trunk and crank it to start it.
Speaker 2:That would be very fun. Yeah. Something like that.
Speaker 1:But anyways, step in the right direction.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Give them some credit. They're partially listening to their customers. Mhmm. I think between the Luce Mhmm. And the 12 c manual Should they're solving their emissions
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Problems in the headed in the right direction. And I do think that the Luce will have been a big enough wake up call because it's something that no one can defend.
Speaker 2:Okay. The Luce, famously low slung, famously small windows. Should they do a version with huge square windows like this old Land Rover? Do you see this? Was just noticing how bad this has gotten.
Speaker 2:One of the primary appeals of retro cars is the big old square windows. Are you a fan of this? Is this a Discovery? I don't know which one this is, but I've I was watching an old nineties
Speaker 1:Is that not a range?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I was watching an old nineties like
Speaker 1:Okay. Pull up the car there
Speaker 2:reference Which one?
Speaker 1:If you click in.
Speaker 2:Woah. That is so ridiculous. Why are we building cars where the window sills are at chin level? Why is greenhouse why is the greenhouse less than a third of the height of the vehicle? Oh, the greenhouse is the top.
Speaker 2:Interesting. I've never heard that term. Why is the DOT where's the DOT? Can we maybe add seat height or reduce waistline maybe
Speaker 1:But you know where we're
Speaker 2:Safety headed, standards. What?
Speaker 1:You know where we're headed? The pod. No windows. Yeah. Cars.
Speaker 1:No windows. Yeah. TVs on the inside.
Speaker 2:Reels. Scrolling reels. It's the future. Waymo. They own YouTube.
Speaker 2:YouTube shorts. Put them right in the Waymos.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They like to put YouTube shorts everywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the
Speaker 1:experience of using YouTube today is just searching for a long form video and
Speaker 2:There's a lot of
Speaker 1:25 reels.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 1:Would you like to scroll past 25 reels
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Before we get to what you actually want.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I wouldn't be surprised if we see reels going up the front of the Waymo.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Maybe. Separate companies. We'll see. We'll see how long they stick together.
Speaker 2:The Model YL from Tesla is coming to The United States. It's now available in The United States and Puerto Rico. Deliveries are still a couple months out, but it's a three row, six seat configuration for the Model Y. It's longer than the standard Model Y. It brings exceptional interior space with ample headroom and legroom for all passengers, zero to 60 in four point four seconds, three twenty five miles of range, front row, heated ventilated seats.
Speaker 2:They all have power recline, improved airflow, more trunk space, active damping, staggered tires for an enhanced grip, longer tailgate for better rear visibility, upgraded 50 watt wireless charging pads. I haven't seen the wireless charging pads in the wild yet. That seems like a cool innovation for your home charger. It can be a little bit slower because it's overnight but every night. So you don't even need to deal with the plug.
Speaker 2:I remember at one point Tesla was going to build that crazy robotic snake that was going to plug in. Do you remember this thing? No. We got to find a video of this. Look that up, Tyler.
Speaker 2:The the Tesla Powerwall at one point had a robotic snake or I can only describe it as a robotic snake and it would find your Tesla's power port no matter where you parked as long as you were in range of the robot.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's cool.
Speaker 2:And it would plug in. And they were they were pitching this as something that they would roll out, probably extremely complicated from a mechanical perspective. And so it never wound up delivering to The United States at least, but or anywhere. But cool idea but wireless charging pad obviously much more easy to just throw on the floor. Also, used in the McLaren Speedtail.
Speaker 2:The McLaren Speedtail uses an inductive wireless charging pad that is and I think the Macan EV might also have or maybe the Cayenne EV. One of the Porsches also has the wireless charging pad and there's a whole bunch of smart technology in it to make sure that if like a mouse doesn't go across, it doesn't get fried or or an animal is injured by it. It's a pretty high-tech device. But we can find the Tesla the Tesla charger snake. Here it is.
Speaker 2:The the image. Look at this, Jordy. This is a crazy image. Look at that. This is clearly a demo unit.
Speaker 2:But you can imagine how you pull into your garage and it it finds itself and plugs itself in. Seems like depending on where you park, that could be extremely annoying because if it if it if it plugs in, you have to kind of climb over or climb under this thing. That could actually be worse than just a normal
Speaker 1:Yeah. It would also be unfortunate when Good racks backers discover a backdoor
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 1:Rises up and it, you know, kills you in your sleep. Yes. So I can see why they didn't ship this at least yet.
Speaker 2:Well, there's other Tesla announcements. The Tesla Model Y dual zone fridge, $600, fits in the sub trunk and has two separate compartments that can be fit set to different temperatures from zero to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. You plug it into the outlet. I I love this. I think it's so cool that there's like this gadget that fits into the other thing they have.
Speaker 2:Like they have the front trunk. No one's really doing anything with it. Why not throw a couple
Speaker 1:Yeah. Not a lot of manufacturers are really willing to promote having 30 to 40 beers. Hit the road and having 30 to 40 beers.
Speaker 2:I don't think these are beers in this image. What is
Speaker 1:Tesla went
Speaker 2:Is this Ollipop? I don't know. I think it's, oh, Blood Orange. I don't know which one this is. But they did put some ice cream.
Speaker 2:The ice cream looks pretty generic. I don't know if that's a a known brand.
Speaker 4:There's also a mattress.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mattress is Cyber truck mattress. Cyber truck mattress. That's I don't know.
Speaker 1:They've always they've always
Speaker 2:Had those mods.
Speaker 1:I I've always thought their accessories are are quite
Speaker 2:cool. I think it's I think it's difficult for other car manufacturers to do first party accessories because they have so many SKUs. Whereas when you're selling as many Model Ys as they are and as many vehicles that have that exact trunk configuration with that exact port, you can you can underwrite the mass manufacturing a lot easier than if you're, you know, Kia or Hyundai and you have 25 different vehicles all with slightly different configurations. Yeah. Well, where else should we go?
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They have stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. There was a team that figured out how to order pizza with iMessage using artificial intelligence and people are not as impressed as they should be because the the image is AI, please press the order me pizza button and it is wired up to press the order pizza button. Yes. DoorDash sort of already created an artificial intelligence for having food delivered to you.
Speaker 2:There is a button. And you can sort of reimagine the UI in a very, in a different way. Vibe code a button that orders you the most recent thing or interfaces with a text message. Somewhat cool. I think the bull case for what Arlen is working on is that iMessage is a more universal interface.
Speaker 2:Text is the universal interface in a future world where you know, everything is done via voice or via an agent or via text stream. Having a centralized place and not having to use a bunch of different apps and have the best app at the right time and this one's on discount and that one's not and this one's your payments information safe. Having all of that happen below the fold is just another layer to the user experience in the modern era that it feels like it's on the way. You've been able to order an Uber with Siri for a decade but no one does because it's not ready. It was not ready for prime time but we are getting there to the point where this will happen.
Speaker 2:But it is a slow slow rollout. The AI chat apps were on a dominant run for a long time. OpenAI at the top with ChatGPT. I think Gemini and Claude were sort of going back and forth from number two and three and you were lamenting. You were saying like, what's going on in the App Store?
Speaker 2:All
Speaker 1:Yeah. This morning I was I I was checking the App Store charts.
Speaker 2:It's actually
Speaker 1:good Good indicator of interest. We have Kalshi at number one.
Speaker 2:It's the world title.
Speaker 1:Netflix game controller at number two. Mhmm. Peacock at number three. Fox one at number four. Let's give it up for Fox.
Speaker 1:Trump accounts at number five. ChatGPT at six. Threads at seven. Let's give it up for Connor Hayes.
Speaker 2:Connor Hayes.
Speaker 1:Telemundo at number eight.
Speaker 2:Telemundo? Oh. Polymarket
Speaker 1:Gemini at number closing out the top Yeah. 11, Fubo. Fubo. 12, Claude. Okay.
Speaker 1:13, Depop. Depop. Depop out of nowhere. That's shopping. Google Okay.
Speaker 1:Number The fact that Google
Speaker 2:All over the place.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then from there, it's a bunch of a lot of, you know, real short, drama wave, all these short. There's there's a company called Vibe Short, AI comic dramas.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 1:Bite sized comic dramas. Tyler, can you watch like a few hours of these and and report back I absolutely do not. Tomorrow?
Speaker 2:Absolutely do not.
Speaker 1:No. Actually I'm genuinely curious. This this app has come out of nowhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we and we talked to the founder of TrueShort or is it RealShort? TrueShort is the American company. RealShort is the Chinese company. And he's True Short, he's working on true crime AI generated Yeah.
Speaker 2:Short form video. Interesting to see where that's going. Mean, certainly demand for this stuff. The trough must be filled. Let me tell you about Railway.
Speaker 2:Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider, user favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while on it. Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.
Speaker 1:Can we play this video?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:From
Speaker 2:Joe Rogan.
Speaker 1:Joe Rogan.
Speaker 2:Joe Rogan is talking to the CEO of Perplexity, Arvind Srinivas.
Speaker 8:Of show. Two paths to curiosity, one that can kill it and one that can supercharge it. In my opinion, the one that kills curiosity is algorithmic feeds.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Like,
Speaker 8:the the brain rot that you're fed every day with just, you know, this continuous doom scrolling
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:That's bad. Mhmm. And the one that can supercharge it is AI. Okay? Like, now that you could just ask
Speaker 1:Pause.
Speaker 8:Whatever you want. If everybody
Speaker 1:Thank you. This is probably true from a from a maybe more macro sense. Like, if you're sometimes good ideas do come to you. Some people say in the shower, to me, it's in the sauna. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I think there's clearly inspiration that comes when you're not doing anything at all. Yep. But that being said, I get so many ideas from the feed.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Don't you? Hot take. I like Like, so
Speaker 1:how many yesterday, I sent you something. From the feed. Yeah. Yesterday, I sent I sent you a link that I saw on X and I was like, hey, we should do something like this for this other thing.
Speaker 2:Sure. I don't remember what you were talking about because I completely zoned out. Were in
Speaker 1:the feed. Maybe. I don't typically, once I have inspiration, then I'm going to AI, Right? Yes. Then I'm going and exploring the idea and saying how has this been done before in this way?
Speaker 1:Yes. Or I was looking at incidents where heads of state have interfered with the World Cup.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Which was interesting. Yes.
Speaker 2:So I I think that I I like your I like your hot take pushing back on that idea. I do
Speaker 1:think Because where would we scrolling Pre Internet, if you wanted inspiration, you would go to the library or
Speaker 2:Stumble upon, baby. Stumble upon. You ever used to stumble upon?
Speaker 1:Post internet.
Speaker 2:That's not post internet. That was like web one boom. It was like take me to a random website
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I'm saying before before the internet was popular Yeah. Yeah. If you were an artist and you wanted inspiration, you would go buy books, you'd watch movies, you would go look at media to get ideas.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Think my take on this is that he is pointing to something that is correct, which is that AI feels very pull. You choose what to pull out of the AI system. You prompt.
Speaker 2:You ask for information about a specific thing. So you have to come with an idea and then you're exploring that idea. And that's very satisfying for curious people. Whereas, the algorithms feel very push. You go to YouTube Shorts or TikTok or Instagram and you're just being fed things and you're not starting your journey with an affirmative declaration, I want to learn more about the new Dolce Trelendri Manuale and I'm going down that rabbit hole.
Speaker 2:And, I think your frustration that you voiced earlier about YouTube shoving a bunch of random shorts in your face is that otherwise you would be more likely to search for something specific. You want to learn about a history of a specific thing. And, this was the case at the dawn of YouTube. It was just a search box. They'd surface a couple things at the editorial front page, but by and large, you would go and be like, I want I I I remember people would just go and search like sick backflip.
Speaker 2:And then they would just watch like the backflip videos. Right? I had friends who would just search like cool thing. Cool cool video. And they would just find cool videos because they were in the mood for that.
Speaker 2:And it was sort of algorithmic in one sense but it was very like the user was driving that that direction and with the algorithms you you are taking a much more passive seat. Now, the odd thing is that where does AI go? Where does Perplexity ChatGPT? Where do these apps go? Do they become more push in the sense that you show up and there's already a bunch of interesting prompts already done for you.
Speaker 2:I was talking about this
Speaker 1:Oh, That was Pulse.
Speaker 2:Pulse was but I was also when there was a rumor about the social network features, I was saying that like, I would love to just scroll a timeline of like, what are the deep research reports that Tyler Cowen is doing? He he probably searches a ton of stuff. If there's something interesting in there and he can just click share, I would love to scroll that feed and I'll also subscribe to Tyler and see what
Speaker 1:It's so funny because stumble upon is such a good example.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Great feed.
Speaker 1:Because there was random elements, you could also make it more focused. Yeah. And that's generally what a feed is now. Yeah. Just stumble upon for like, axes just stumble upon for like things happening online that you're interested in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Random That is an algorithm. Yeah. Know, chronological is an is an algorithm. But I think what we're getting at is like is more of this like algorithmic algorithm where the optimization function is attention and time on-site that people find Yeah.
Speaker 2:Dissatisfying because they have like regret afterwards because they're like, yeah, you sucked me in with a bunch of stuff but that's not actually what I wanted. I wanted something more focused and directed. I wanted more CrowdStrike. I wanted to know that your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 2:I also want more videos of peregrine falcons flying at 390 kilometers an hour. That is incredibly fast. You were giving me
Speaker 1:I was skeptical. A little bit of shade about falcons last week, and so I needed to put you in the falcon zone.
Speaker 2:Okay. The truth zone on the falcons. What is this video? This is a video of fastest attack animal in the animal kingdom. The peregrine falcon.
Speaker 1:Content warning.
Speaker 2:390 kilometers
Speaker 1:Look at this.
Speaker 2:Hours hour. Also, they live all over America. Fantastic animal. Beautiful creature.
Speaker 1:Crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you think that there's a business to be built around home defense peregrine falcons. Take me through your thesis.
Speaker 1:I did. I did.
Speaker 2:Yes. Sort of an andoril for the aviation, aviary world?
Speaker 1:Andoril meets falconry.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Or sort of an organic andoril for the home. Yes. Yeah. A lot of, you know, guard dogs are popular. Why not have peregrine falcon, you know, perched in, you know, the highest tree on your property
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Ready to go.
Speaker 2:I like this chat from Nicola. A falcon with a bicycle is the most efficient animal on the planet.
Speaker 4:I completely agree. Sits very well with that early idea from the show with like bear security.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Bear private military contract. Idea early on.
Speaker 2:Think it's probably easier to domesticate a falcon than a than a bear. Many falcons are already, you know, domesticated. Falconry is a historic historic technique.
Speaker 1:I just reached out to a local falconer
Speaker 2:You did?
Speaker 1:To set up some time. Okay.
Speaker 2:I'm not I'm not even Before the show?
Speaker 1:No. Not for the show.
Speaker 2:But that would be cool. Wait. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:Before the show you did this?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow. The team had the team had that video pulled up and I just Yes. Thought, you
Speaker 2:Now the question is can we bring back carrier pigeons? Yes. Because we sent
Speaker 1:John, Sunday morning, he's often reading an article. Yes. He'll text me, hey, you should read this.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:But what if he could send what if he could just take the newspaper, he didn't have to go find the link because obviously he's reading on a physical copy. Yes. What if you could just hand it to a smart bird Yes. And have it fly it over to my house? Be way more convenient for me.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't need to be on my phone. It's the weekend. I don't wanna be as as online as during the weeks. And you don't have to be going getting on your phone trying to find the right article. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think there's something there. Think
Speaker 2:I wonder I know Mike Tyson was really into pigeons. I don't know if he got into carrier pigeons, but it does seem like it could have a huge boom. I feel like there's an Instagram account to be built around someone who gets really into using carrier pigeons for everything and lives some sort of like pastoral trad life and it masses millions of followers on the back of of falconry and and carrier pigeon
Speaker 1:Home falcons. Yes.
Speaker 2:Home falcons. It's good content for social media. Also, if you don't wanna fly on a Falcon, you wanna fly on a helicopter, be like Michael Dell, get a helicopter and then brand it. He was caught on a hot mic talking to president Donald Trump. He said, sir, we don't have a helicopter.
Speaker 2:We have a Dellicopter. What a funny portmanteau. And what a funny way to correct the president.
Speaker 1:He's really speaking the president's language.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's play it.
Speaker 5:Every question of the kettle. Sir, we
Speaker 1:we don't have a helicopter, we have a helicopter. What
Speaker 2:if this is a hard line?
Speaker 1:I like how it kind of flopped in per in real life but is doing numbers online.
Speaker 2:It did. It did. It did. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world?
Speaker 2:Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Let me tell you about finally some good news. Finally finally some good news. Circle K, the company won the lottery. Did you hear about this story?
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:It's true. Yeah. So there's a crazy story out of Arizona. They needed to win. They needed to win.
Speaker 2:Actually, they've been a fantastic partner to my company, Lucy. Shout out Circle K. But let's tell you about the Circle K winning lottery. So there's a crazy story out of Arizona that's been brewing over the last six months. Back in February, a Circle K customer named Soon Chun Kim asked the cashier for $85 worth of $1 lottery ticket.
Speaker 2:So she shows up. She wants 85 tickets. But after all 85 were printed out, Kim found out that she only had $60 on her, only $60. So the cashier gave her 60 tickets and left the remaining 25 tickets on the counter. The next morning, Circle K manager Robert Galizza learned that the leftover tickets included the $13,000,000 winning ticket.
Speaker 2:So he clocked out, took off his Circle K shirt and bought the tickets from another Circle K employee being like, what?
Speaker 1:No one no one's gonna So
Speaker 2:when Circle K, the company, found out about the purchase, it ordered the ticket be held in its corporate office and filed a complaint against the manager who bought the tickets and the Arizona Lottery and claimed that it's right that it that Circle K, the company, is the rightful owner of the lottery ticket. As of a week ago, at least three people slash entities are claiming ownership of the of the of the ticket.
Speaker 1:Wait. So the original buyer that didn't have the cash Yes. The the manager who's like, I don't care if I lose my job as long as I win the lottery. Yes. And Circle K is like, we really need to win.
Speaker 1:We really need we need to win like
Speaker 2:We need things we to need this. Yeah. So Galitsa, a Circle K employee that Galitsa got to sign the back of the ticket, not sure why he had her do all of this, and Circle K. Additionally, the judge presiding over the complaint has ordered that the woman who bought the tickets but couldn't pay for them, Sun Chun Kim, be found and brought into court before making a decision on who gets it. So she's gonna have to testify and explain her side to to make sure that that's exactly what happened because this is just claims at this point.
Speaker 2:How did the the local Circle K wind up with 25 lottery tickets?
Speaker 1:Who are going with? I'm going with manager.
Speaker 2:I'm going with big corporate. Big big big I'm
Speaker 1:going with the manager. Not because I think it's ethical, but I think that
Speaker 2:I think he's gonna
Speaker 1:I think that there's No way. I think it's unlikely that there is a rule at Circle K that says
Speaker 2:100% there's a rule that if you work at that company, you can't buy lottery tickets at all from your own store.
Speaker 1:Oh. Okay.
Speaker 2:Obviously. You have the machine right there. You can
Speaker 1:tamper They this employee and think
Speaker 2:control That's probably line number one of employee handbook.
Speaker 1:No. But but it seems very unlikely that that the Circle like, it's it's a machine that just prints tickets. Yes. It's like Yes.
Speaker 2:But there's so many ways you could tamper with it. You're watching the news. You're printing the ticket at the right time. You have access. You refill the ticket.
Speaker 2:Oh, the corporation
Speaker 4:can buy its own lottery tickets?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 4:Why? But the manager can't? That seems also strange.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Maybe you got it.
Speaker 4:I think I got a ride with the woman.
Speaker 2:You think she's owed it?
Speaker 1:The manager?
Speaker 2:But then but then then the strategy
Speaker 1:Or the original buyer.
Speaker 2:But then but then you can just shift the odds in your favor by constantly going to circle $100 of $100 of of tickets. Oh, I only have $50. And then you're basically doubling your odds because you still have a claim on those says
Speaker 1:these clerks aren't super hackers, John.
Speaker 2:Just wait. Just wait. You get the right amount of AI. I think it's
Speaker 1:an edge case. I think ultimately the the the person that that paid for the winning ticket Mhmm. Wins.
Speaker 2:Who paid for the winning ticket?
Speaker 1:The manager? Comes down
Speaker 2:But the manager knew that the ticket won. He didn't have to put any money
Speaker 1:that yet.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. He did.
Speaker 2:He did. So there were 25 tickets there.
Speaker 1:Rule if there's a rule that managers cannot buy lottery tickets at their own store Mhmm. Then you're correct. Mhmm. But if there's no rule that explicitly I, you know, basically spells that out, I think he might he might might be golden.
Speaker 2:He might be golden? You think so? I don't know. Let me tell you about Shopify. Lottery Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 2:And our next guest is here, I think a few minutes early, so we can bring in Baiju from Cowboy Space Corporation. Actually, oh, we're good. Let's bring him in. Baiju, how are doing? Didn't want to keep you waiting.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:What's up, boys? How are doing?
Speaker 2:How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Good to have you back.
Speaker 2:Good to have you back. Was your fourth? How was your fourth?
Speaker 3:It was good. It was good. I went went up to to Oregon, got a little sunlight. It's pretty cloudy out in my part of California, so
Speaker 1:Going to Oregon to get sunlight. That's why it's kind of a contrarian move.
Speaker 2:Florida or something?
Speaker 3:Florida's far.
Speaker 2:Florida's far. Yeah. What is your reaction? We gotta get to the important news. What's your reaction to the Ferrari Dolce Trelendri Manuale?
Speaker 2:The manual by wire. You knew this question was coming.
Speaker 3:I I'm I'm smitten. I've been waiting
Speaker 1:Woah. For this.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think I'm awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And and and and so the natural pushback is, oh, this doesn't count because it's out of an unnatural transmission. Why is this cool? Why is this good?
Speaker 2:Why do you like this idea? And I also wanna know, do you think it will spread within the Ferrari portfolio?
Speaker 3:Why do we like this idea, first of all? Because I think at this point with cars, we take what we can get. And I think this is gonna be pretty cool. I don't if this is true or not, but I heard that the reason they're doing this is because the the gearbox, they needed it to be able to handle that much part. That's why I didn't go with a totally normal, know, but who knows?
Speaker 3:And do I think it is going to it's to other cars? I hope. I really hope so. I mean, just in general. Right?
Speaker 3:Like, landscape of modern cars is pardon my language, but it's fucking apocalyptic. Like, guys ever go driving down the road? I don't every car on the road is either gray
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Black, silver, toilet bowl white.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:With the number of cars that look like toilet bowls on the road is just exploding. And it's, you know, it's depressing. It it kind of I feel like it's a weird commentary on on human society this day and age. Like, why does every need to wear need to drive the exact same ugly, boxy car and
Speaker 2:ugh. Hey. We're we're having some connection issues. Can we flip you back to the production team? We'll bring you back in a couple minutes.
Speaker 2:Does that sound good? Yeah. Thanks a lot. We'll see you in just a few minutes. Let me tell everyone about Figma agents.
Speaker 2:Meet the Canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system. Was great.
Speaker 1:Text. We got them in. We asked the questions that were on our mind. And we could not No. We were So we
Speaker 2:were having an issue. Face.
Speaker 1:And he's dropping some gems.
Speaker 2:Okay. We wanna get rid Wait. Is this is this a real video? This No. This is fake.
Speaker 2:No. No?
Speaker 1:This is good though. Costa Yes. Runs the fastest growing oil change only QL in The USA. He says, for kicks, I started using Chachibati to give our employees huge muscles in social media posts we use. And finally, last night, an employee told me on Slack, a customer said something about them not being as jacked in person.
Speaker 1:That's lame. Look at this second picture here. That's This guy, if you look like this, you're not changing oil. You're going for the Arnold.
Speaker 2:You're going to the Arnold. This is so good. I like that Max Sparrow is in here just tagging Pangram data. Is this is this the idea that he's Oh, he's adding to the training corpus. Interesting that he just goes around on the timeline hunting for known edited images to build the build the build the model.
Speaker 2:Very, very cool. Let's talk about Maggie's refuel. Speaking of cars that need to be refueled, if you got your Dolce Trelendry Manuale and you need to get a full tank of gas, you might stop by Maggie's Refuel here in Los Angeles. A new high end gas station brand just opened in Los Angeles. It builds itself as a high end convenience store brand, plan to modernize and innovate the current gas station experience.
Speaker 2:Think Auto Grill meets seven Eleven Japan, matcha, local croissants, premium CPG, and yes, a soft serve cone all all alongside a gas or EV fill up. Will they have white in.
Speaker 1:It's not actually open yet.
Speaker 2:It's not open yet.
Speaker 1:It's not open yet. It's open soon. This is gonna be their first location. If you've been in LA, this location is incredible. It's an incredible historic structure.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. We actually don't know how to make gas stations like this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you look at the first image in that thing, you can see the sort of curved ceiling that looks very I don't know. It looks nice. It also looks like it's a nightmare in the rain. Tyler.
Speaker 4:Yes. Some people are saying this is just Buc ee's for Californians. Have you guys ever been to Buc ee's?
Speaker 2:I've never been to Buc ee's.
Speaker 4:Buc ee's is an elite gas station.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like mostly like South
Speaker 2:The US. There's only like 20 of them but they're like Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like a wall of beef jerky, every It's incredible. You guys gotta go next time you're on the East Coast.
Speaker 2:So it's just great selection?
Speaker 1:They have I mean, so so there's like a of like a kind because I have been to a Buc ee's. Yeah. But I just went in and said, hey, where's the bathroom? She used the bathroom and left. I didn't get to I didn't even You didn't get the full experience?
Speaker 1:Everything inside of Buc ee's is trying to kill me.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So I I tend to avoid. But Maggie's is very cool. Mhmm. I actually invested in in Maggie's with my friend Jonathan.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 1:And this was like almost a couple years ago at this point. Building a gas station chain is a lot harder than it sounds. Yeah. But the idea and and Alex, John, Rossi in the chat is sharing. Alex Alex's family started Cantor's Deli, very popular deli here in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1:So lots of lots of lore in the family. But the idea and the frustration that that I had had, you know, even prior to meeting Alex is like everything inside the average gas station is trying to kill me. Yeah. Right? It's like almost end to end wall to wall poison.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And there's a lot of Oh, yeah. Fine. Poison. But
Speaker 2:Not poison. There's the drink of kings.
Speaker 1:And we're running the AB test.
Speaker 2:The drink
Speaker 3:of kings.
Speaker 1:We're running the AB test, John. Okay.
Speaker 2:That's gonna be in the gas station soon. Huberman's ripping.
Speaker 1:It'll definitely it'll be in Maggie's. Yeah. But but yeah, the idea is like, okay, how much money would you spend if you were getting gas at a place where you could get a nice coffee Mhmm. Or maybe some organic fruit.
Speaker 2:I do hate getting gas at a boring gas station.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's gonna be fun.
Speaker 2:I'd probably stop by there if I saw it. It'd be good.
Speaker 1:How are we doing on our guests?
Speaker 2:We're gonna bring them in in just a minute. Make sure that connection is dialed. We can talk about common printers. We are big on printing. We print every day.
Speaker 2:I got some papers here. But I agree. Printers have not seen enough innovation yet, but CR thirteen thirty seven, LEET, I like that, says we all know what the three biggest problems with common printers are. One, ink rip offs. Two, planned obsolescence.
Speaker 2:And two, got the numbers wrong. You know it's not AI. Unrepairable hardware. Today, I stumbled upon OpenPrinter, a fully repairable open source inkjet that uses cheap refillable HP cartridges without DRM, print sheets on rolls with an auto cutter, Raspberry Pi powered, no drivers needed on any operating system. If I ever get a printer again, this will be the one open printer.
Speaker 1:It's so funny. This person's, like, gassing up this printer and was like, yeah. If I ever get one again, I would do this one.
Speaker 2:This is the story of so many like, we have to go back to this thing where it's like, oh, I really want this and then somebody makes it and they're like, well, I don't need that thing at all anymore. So now we understand why it doesn't exist and it became an extreme niche. There's another making things the old way. Like this video. Look at this.
Speaker 2:The series of machines. This is from this is a paper organizer. Look at this, Jordy. So this will just take a messy stack of paper and jiggle it until it's nice and even. Look at this.
Speaker 2:So you just take a bunch of papers and then it just sort of shakes it and then you got a nice clean stack of paper and you have a whole machine for this. Can your iPhone 17 Pro Max do that? No. You gotta get the paper jiggler 9,000. Whatever it's called.
Speaker 2:The electro jog. The electro jog. We don't know how to name products like that anymore. Tyler, are you in the market for this? Should we get one of these for the studio?
Speaker 4:This could be good. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This could be good. Take all the newspapers and jog them together. Just it's just such a beautiful simple machine, you know. You just want a nice look how clean that looks. You got papers around your house.
Speaker 2:Don't you want them nicely lined up like that? It's great.
Speaker 1:I like it. So open printer
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I think we just looked at. It's not even actually available for preorder yet.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So Okay. We'll see if they get crowdfunding
Speaker 2:Well, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. There's there's a new job in Washington DC. If you're looking for to make your name on Capitol Hill, you can be the Rocco's Basilisk explainer.
Speaker 2:You go and read less wrong and then you break it down for our elected officials on Capitol Hill. Is Put
Speaker 1:it into the form of based memes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. That's If
Speaker 1:you really wanna
Speaker 2:This is a real job in the modern economy. The Financial Times has a bunch of there's a bunch of news around AI. There was some news that might be joining up with with their world. One, they're closing China loopholes. That seems like good news.
Speaker 2:They're also potentially involved in The The US public ownership. Ownership. But this Financial Times report says, among his strange duties as Silicon Valley's translator to Washington, he said was explaining Rocco's Basilisk, an internet thought experiment about a vengeful future super intelligence quote to a bunch of the cabinet. Fun times in Washington. But Let's break it we over have our guest back in the TBPN UltraDome.
Speaker 2:Let's welcome Baiju back to the show. How you doing?
Speaker 3:I'm back.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Crystal clear.
Speaker 2:Crystal clear.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was extremely painful Yeah. Listening to you do this incredible riff on
Speaker 2:It's one of your favorite stuff.
Speaker 1:The state of modern cars and I couldn't couldn't agree more. Yeah. Couldn't agree more. You'll happy you'll be happy that my the the the the three cars in my driveway right now are blue, green, and brown. I'm rebelling against more subtle, you know, toned down.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Toned down far away. They don't look too crazy, but I'm rebelling. Mhmm. Rebelling against the beige and the Good.
Speaker 1:The blacks
Speaker 2:and the whites. Why do you think the colors went away? I understand the transition to electric because of environmental concerns, the move to automatics because it's less to learn for the average consumer. But why did we lose red?
Speaker 3:I don't know, man. It's it's sad, honestly. It's just sad. I and I think it's like yeah. I I think it's like a commentary on, like, the modern state of society and human affairs.
Speaker 3:Like, why why do we all wanna have cars that just disappear into the background?
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Well well, one thing is like, to me when I think about like a VW Bug. Mhmm. Right? Very popular car throughout history. Even if it's regardless of the color, it's like a fun car.
Speaker 1:But then you add some like exotic color yellow or green or red
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like it's it's even more fun. And I and I just feel like when every car every car blends in just the silhouette now Mhmm. Yeah. And so I think people are just like blending in is just the current meta. We're seeing it.
Speaker 1:It's funny. Fiat has some new car
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That they're coming out with what is the I think it's the Topolino, maybe? Topolino. I think Cute is gonna come back.
Speaker 2:You think so?
Speaker 3:Sounds like Topo Chico.
Speaker 2:Topo Chico.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. It's the the multi plena. I think it is. Don't know.
Speaker 1:I guess they all they all kind of run together but
Speaker 3:Still sounds like Topachico.
Speaker 2:I mean, some of it's safety standards. A lot of things have had to standardize around crash, crumple zones, whatnot. I think that creates somewhat of a consolidation around silhouettes. But the color thing I would imagine is more like tall poppy syndrome. You don't want to stand out and be the guy with the red car that became too flashy So everyone went quiet luxury and that meant black, white, or gray.
Speaker 3:Why do why do why does everybody need to fit in? Why does everybody need to be the same? Like, people should just be individuals. Like, that's kind of the natural state of human affairs in my opinion.
Speaker 2:I don't know. At the same time, something crazy comes out and people reject it. Look at the Ferrari Luche. That car doesn't really look like anything else.
Speaker 1:Looks weird. To be clear, I reflected it purely on price. Let's go. There we go. Let's be honest.
Speaker 1:Let's be honest. They said if you want the if you want the 12 c manual, you're getting the loose yet. It wasn't said out loud, but it was understood.
Speaker 3:No. No. I guys, I I got it because I'm a huge Johnny I fanboy. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think it's I know. Think the interior is gonna be incredible. And the spec matters a lot. What color did you go with? What do you like, did you do anything to make it your own?
Speaker 3:I haven't done that yet. Okay. I'm gonna confess right now that I'm gonna probably make my wife drive it.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think it's gonna be an e mobile.
Speaker 2:Hey, I mean, you want five seater, it's the only option. It's the only option.
Speaker 1:No. It's gonna be an incredibly fun car to to drive.
Speaker 2:It'll be an experience.
Speaker 1:My only my only criticism was was purely like it felt like they set out to make a 300,000 car and they accidentally made
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, $600,000 car. But fortunately, there's there's there's not a there's not millions of Baiju's in the world, but there's enough that they're gonna sell some.
Speaker 2:Let's pull up the picture of this Fiat. Yeah. I wanna Yeah.
Speaker 3:Let's let's take a look at
Speaker 2:this thing. I wanna get Baiju's reaction to see if he's gonna pick up one of these. Can we share this image Boy. That's in the timeline of the Fiat Topolino. Hilarious that it has a what is that?
Speaker 2:Like a it's like
Speaker 3:By the way, I like that you guys brought me on just talk about cars.
Speaker 1:We're gonna get to
Speaker 2:gonna get business.
Speaker 1:We'll get to news. It's July.
Speaker 2:We also got a half an hour here. We're
Speaker 3:hanging out. Yeah. Let's do it. Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Can we can we share the the image of the top of the line? Yeah. Let's see this. It has a it has like a rope for that you would expect at like a nightclub, like a velvet rope to stop people instead of a door. It looks great.
Speaker 2:Anyway I put a
Speaker 1:link here that you can that you can pull up as well.
Speaker 2:What is this?
Speaker 3:Is this Why are you guys pulling that up? Yeah. Have have you guys seen that, what is that? That that new Audi? The the one that looks like it's like out of cyberbunk?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. That's I really cool.
Speaker 1:Same designer as the new Jaguar. Yeah. Did you know that? Oh, that's cool. The God.
Speaker 1:And and so
Speaker 3:the I thing was excited about that for a minute. Come on. Why are gonna
Speaker 1:do that? No. But but the issue with the Jaguar was not the silhouette was like very cool.
Speaker 2:It was
Speaker 1:one of those like the future is here moments and then the way that they did the rollout of it and the rebrand like obviously got a lot of pushback. But like fundamentally, I thought like this is what Batman would drive Yeah. In the year
Speaker 2:2050. You see that thing in matte black? Looks a lot different than like the pink and pastel blues. There was just like a little bit too much contrast but then we're getting that colors. Maybe we gotta spec it in
Speaker 8:some If I if I
Speaker 3:were one of those Yeah. I would go full Batman the animated series. Like, I would go with like a like a cream color
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:And make it look as like art deco as possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That'd good. The Nuvalari the Nuvalari is great.
Speaker 1:The Nuvalari is crazy.
Speaker 2:I have
Speaker 1:a friend specking one of them in like this crazy crazy color. I'm not even gonna I'm not gonna say what it is. I wanna let him have his moment. I think it will be one, you know, one of
Speaker 2:And also a lot a less pushback for the Audi because it's it's built on the Lamborghini platform, I believe. Temporary or v eight. It has a, you know, internal combustion engine. And I think, Jaguar, like, changed a lot of things at the same time going electric, going huge sedan, going crazy colors, very bold marketing. And when you shift seven different things, get a lot of visceral Fiat.
Speaker 2:Let's see this. There we What do you think about this? You picking one up? Oh.
Speaker 1:Oh, You're not you're not ripping one of these things around with the boys. Imagine imagine having so okay. So one of these is kinda silly, but if you're with your your buddies and you each have one and you're rolling deep, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Put a mansory kit on that. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 3:Mansory kit on that thing.
Speaker 2:I think we got a picture of a there's a convertible version, I guess, with the ones.
Speaker 3:Can you imagine? Hang I I kids cannot imagine hanging out with my friends and us, like, caravanning these. It'd be we'd look like such dweebs. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:No. Sorry Fiat. Is 12 engine swap might say that. Just wait until
Speaker 2:you fire up the V 12 engine that you swap in that thing. That'll I
Speaker 3:think I'm sitting on top
Speaker 2:of it now. I know it won't do it at all.
Speaker 1:Impossible. We got we got one more.
Speaker 2:Okay. What else we got?
Speaker 1:The Twizzy, the Renault Twizzy. Twizzy The doors go up. The doors go up. You sit one behind.
Speaker 2:Saw this in Europe. We were in France last week or two weeks ago and these were extremely popular with like young teenagers. They'd have a whole bunch of them sort of caravanning around. Seems like particularly good for narrow streets. Again, it's the right tool for the job.
Speaker 2:Is it going to take it to a track day? Probably not, but in the right in the right environment, I think the Twizzy. The it's a Renault. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Renault Twizzy.
Speaker 1:Let's see. The team's pulling up. Imagine
Speaker 2:Look at this.
Speaker 1:Imagine at least two of us in here together going on a coffee.
Speaker 2:Wait. Is that a three person?
Speaker 1:No. One somebody's gotta stay behind.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It looks like that person's sitting in that person's lap.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A tight squeeze. It's more than a
Speaker 1:It's not car. It's not very spacious. I will say that. But
Speaker 3:How many wheels does this thing have on it? Is it two or four?
Speaker 1:It's four. It's four. Okay. It's four.
Speaker 3:You can't quite tell from that angle. It might be a bicycle.
Speaker 1:Look, I know you have a great car collection, but clearly there's some holes. Right? No twizzy. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You don't have five
Speaker 3:At the same time. Yeah. That this hot garbage is coming out. The rest of mod community is making some good stuff right now. I'll just put that out there.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yes. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about this. Hot girl cars, old Land Rovers, old Defenders, modified Sydney Sweeney has one. What is your take on what makes for a good restomod in the SUV world?
Speaker 3:As long as you're not swapping it out for an electric powertrain, I think. I'm I'm I'm down with it.
Speaker 2:You're good? I had Yeah.
Speaker 1:I had a I saw one because
Speaker 3:I had people that Yeah. That are like, oh, I'm into cars. And I'm like, okay, cool. Like, what kind of cars are you into? And they're like, well, I bought, you know, like an old Bronco and I'm heated electric.
Speaker 3:And a little part of me just sort of dies when I hear them. I'm like, ugh.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, yeah, I'm I'm in favor. I like when they're kept, like, very pure. Right? I don't like when the Mhmm.
Speaker 1:When the badges or or any of the the markings are changed. I saw a Bronco on Saturday where all the badges were swapped to just say vintage. And I was like, clearly, it's a vintage car. Like, you don't you don't need to like Yeah. You don't need to like spell it out.
Speaker 1:And so I I personally, I I I appreciate when it's like as left, as pure as possible, and then just like modified to make it slightly more comfortable or or redoing the interior, etcetera.
Speaker 2:What about a sound like the what about a 1955 Cadillac Coupe de Ville swapped with a Tesla model plaid so you can get 200 miles an hour in it? That seems good.
Speaker 1:I like
Speaker 3:Model s battery in.
Speaker 2:Sorry. What were you saying?
Speaker 3:I was I was saying I was with you until we got to the electrification bit of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But at 200 miles an hour bombing down the Autobahn in a 1955 Cadillac Coupe de Ville and
Speaker 3:So that is gonna be a rattle box at 200 miles an hour. Can you imagine just the whole thing just like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Death machine. What's your I are are you are you gonna be racing at all? Ferrari challenge? Challenge, maybe? You're too you're too
Speaker 3:Not much of a racer. Not much of a racer. I'm I'm much more of like a hot rodder and like driving on, you know, beautiful beach roads kind of guy. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I I you know, it's one of those things, like, lot of people really love that side of it. I've never had that much of a need for speed, personally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I
Speaker 3:we to be totally honest.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We enjoy going to the track, but there's there's people that enjoy going to the track that are like putting it all on the line every time. And I I can't do it. Like with young children, I just like I I I'm I'm building out like a a really robust sim right now
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:To to see
Speaker 2:See what you got.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just to just to actually try to push myself. But again, I don't know that I would ever want to replicate what I'm gonna do in the sim actually on the track. But
Speaker 2:Are you are you
Speaker 3:guys going to car week?
Speaker 1:It's really poorly timed with the arrival of my next child.
Speaker 2:Like,
Speaker 1:very like within within days. Within days, Yeah. So I'm I'm gonna probably have to
Speaker 2:Get ready to deliver the baby in the back of a
Speaker 1:Home birth at Car Week.
Speaker 2:At Car Week. You've heard of babies delivered in backs of
Speaker 3:No. You'll you'll be at
Speaker 2:a A taxi you'll
Speaker 3:be at the racetrack watching vintage racing and like the beating sun and having to rush to the hospital.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So I'm I I as much as it pains me I won't. Think I'm gonna be sitting this
Speaker 2:Maybe next year. Maybe next year. If you had to do one, which one would you do? Cannonball, New York to LA, Paris Dakar rally or Gumball three thousand?
Speaker 3:The Gumball three thousand is across the What is that across? Tundra. Oh, I would definitely do that one.
Speaker 2:A little bit. Think the Gumball moves around. But it's a long it's a long rally. But it's less of, you know, track focus. It's less at the limit as the cannonball which is New York to I think La Jolla as fast as possible.
Speaker 3:I feel like that one feel like the gumball would have have a lot more of like eating beans out of a can like on the side of the road which is kind of the vibe I'd go for.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. It seems really fun. Anyway, we're not here to talk about cars for forty five minutes. Let's
Speaker 1:You know talk we about could.
Speaker 2:Space. Let's talk about business.
Speaker 3:Totally could.
Speaker 2:Okay. So get us up to speed on progress since we last spoke. I want to specifically talk about launch vehicles, what it takes to get to space at scale, what you're thinking there. So take us through just the general update and then we can go more specific.
Speaker 1:Then we can get back
Speaker 2:to Yeah.
Speaker 3:So pretty pretty busy times here at the Cowboy Space Corporation, which I love the mission statement. We're on a we're on a mission to power humanity from the high frontier.
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 3:just like got that little bit of country twang to it.
Speaker 2:That's good.
Speaker 3:So we we announced fundraising and the plans to vertically integrate into launch vehicle plus data centers and space architecture. Yeah. And a little bit on that. Right? We I we've we've talked a little while ago, but I'd kind of since I started the company, I've been pretty focused on figuring out the energy economics.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And in particular, trying to figure out what the path is to making compute from space or, you know, energy derivative services from space competitive on a cost basis with doing a terrestrial. That's kind of the north star. Mhmm. And when when we kind of got to the architecture architecture that that we we announced, announced, that was the the moment.
Speaker 3:It's like, when you look at the whole when you look at the entirety of the problem, including the launch vehicle, the path to get into data center in space along with the architecture of the data center part in space, and and you and you optimize the entire thing, that's one of the paths to getting to the cost competitive economics was when we really doubled down on building the launch vehicle as a part of the data center space. And I think also it's become, you know, more and more clear over time that the launch capability that people will need to do all this interesting stuff in space, like, it's it's it's gonna be a while before it's there. SpaceX is obviously running ahead with that, but they're gonna end up using a lot of that capacity for themselves. Yeah. And so we we knew that if we wanted to control our destiny, we'd have to go down this path, which I did not think I was gonna start a rocket business when I started this company, but
Speaker 2:So what dials that you're turning on launch vehicle? Are you going the
Speaker 1:data anti data center movement here.
Speaker 2:Oh. Catalyst. That's a tinfoil hat. It's
Speaker 3:a it's a blue hair conspiracy.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:And so see me protesting outside of a data center.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Maybe. Put them in space.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But you gotta you gotta go boot
Speaker 2:People will be protesting that in due time. Don't you worry. But but on the launch vehicle, what dials are you turning in terms of the amount of mass to orbit or the size of the vehicle, the fuel like like what how do you want to develop something that's different? Or do you just want to have a secondary option that's as close to the sort of standard interoperable market standard launch vehicle? Or do you want something that fulfills a specifically different role and and fits a different piece of the stack?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So first things first, you guys will see a much more detailed update from us on overall launch vehicle architecture, kind of an unveiling of what the rocket looks like, how pointy it is, stuff like that. Stay tuned I'll you I'll give you a couple of breadcrumbs to that right now. First one is on the launch vehicle itself, we want to optimize for simplicity of architecture and speed to market. Those are kind of high level objectives.
Speaker 3:We don't have to build the Bugatti Veyron of rocket engines here. We wanna build something that's much more the Honda Civic of rocket engines.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And what that looks like, it's down selecting each one of the the core trades in the system to optimize for what can we build relatively quickly that gets the job done and starts getting payloads to orbit. Because there's there's different paths we could take with this. The the the North Star for me is like cut out the arts and crafts projects. Like, just focus on building data centers in space, building a rocket architecture that is purpose built for that.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And
Speaker 1:and notably not focused on reusability at all, at least initially. Is that right?
Speaker 3:No. I think we're we're gonna aim for reusability as quickly as possible.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:One of the things that we we hope to do on the path to getting there is having economics that support making something that's viable with a nonreusable version of it
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So that we're not waiting forever to to start getting payloads up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because
Speaker 3:I I imagine already.
Speaker 2:The I imagine with some of the AI projects, the AI compute is so valuable economically, so economically dense that nonreusable payloads might actually make sense, at least in the short term. Of course, you want to save money over the long term. But when you think about the value of a of a of of, you know, large scale compute in orbit, that could be potentially higher than some of the other payloads that are going up right now. Right? So that sort of pulls forward your roadmap.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I think this if if I understand you right, I think one of the things that is an interesting observation here is more on the the sort of business and economics of the rocket business.
Speaker 1:Hold on
Speaker 6:one sec.
Speaker 2:My light just cut off here. No worries. You're good. Let me tell you about console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password reset.
Speaker 1:We got an add in and a nice view of the the art right behind you. So thank
Speaker 3:I can't get away from the technical difficulties, say. My goodness. So as I say, on the economics Yeah. And the business of rocketry. I think there's something that's pretty interesting that's happened here, which is if you look back in time towards kind of when the first commercial rocket businesses were getting started, Blue Origin, SpaceX, etcetera.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. The primary business model, as I understand it, was third party launch. Build a rocket to take stuff to space Mhmm. And the taking the stuff to space is the monetization. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Which if you're winding the clock ten to fifteen years ago, the majority of that activity was driven by government. Right? It was government needs, government payloads, national security, etcetera, etcetera. What we're seeing now is the bulk of the payload that at least, you know, that is going to be going to orbit, a lot of it is commercial. And in particular, the AI component is is commercial in nature by and large.
Speaker 3:And when you when you realize that that fundamentally changes the way that you think about the rocket business, you you you realize that, like, the how how to say this? The development path starts to change. Right? Because as you're if you're launching first party payloads, you look at the economics of what does it take to get a successful launch to orbit, what is the cost of a failed launch to orbit, and you control the entire economic stack there. So if you have a failed launch to orbit and you're and the sort of consequence of that is a first party payload, it's very different than if the failed launch is for a government payload.
Speaker 3:To say it differently, when it's purely commercial, the incentive, I think, is much more to try early often Mhmm. And to get to that that sort of, like, successful launch and eventually to get to reusability and get payloads to orbit that start monetizing along the way. And I think that flows through the entirety of the decision making of how you build a rocket company in 2026. Right? Said differently, we're building this thing for our data center and space payload.
Speaker 3:We're not building it for third party payloads. We're not building it for human space flight or any of that stuff. We might do that at some point in the future Yeah. But we think that the majority of, like, the actual substance and the revenue of this is gonna come from the first party payloads of data centers in space.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very different company from Robinhood. What lessons are you actually taking? What are you drawing from the Robinhood playbook, if anything, for this company?
Speaker 3:Well, it's kinda interesting because the the technoeconomic analysis of how do you how do you make a service make sense like this. There's there's some overlapping in thinking there of, like, how do you make the economic cases make sense?
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:The other part is building engineering teams. Like, that that translates over pretty well. And building them I think the interesting thing here is that it's a largely distributed engineering workforce. A lot of it is quite different, I'll be honest. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:There's less consumer product involved. There's much more manufacturing involved.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But at the end of the day, the the the circumstances in some ways are similar. Right? It's like starting out from the standpoint the Robinhood, you know, era of my life, I guess, is still going on. But the the starting of that was how do you build something that competes against these existing brokerages, and how do you really, really focus on a very specific set of things that gets a meaningful use case in the market. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think that part is actually kinda similar. It's like, how do you make a meaningful rocket space company by being hyper hyper focused on a small number of things? Because, like I said,
Speaker 8:we're not in the
Speaker 3:business of doing human spaceflight and all these other things, but how do you find that that niche that you care about and say ultra focused on on making that happen?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. In thirty seconds, because I know you have to hop. SpaceX is in the cloud business now. They have a launch business. You can imagine that Elon just wants more and more and more and more of that end market.
Speaker 1:Has that changed the dynamic of conversations that you're having with say, other hyperscalers and labs that are competing with with Elon, Inc, and don't wanna end up in a situation where they are, you know, basically forced to purchase from a monopoly, you know, or, you know, cloud from monopoly, etcetera.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I think the the overwhelming dynamic here now and in the future is just the need for compute. Right? And I think there's there's definitely people that are concerned about controlling their own data centers. But if you kinda look around at the marketplace right now, people are trying to get capacity whenever and wherever they can get it.
Speaker 3:So Yeah. There's I'm sure there's a little bit of that behind the scenes, but I think the the primary thing that I'm seeing is just the the need for compute and trying to bring it online as quickly as possible. And I don't know. I feel like we all kind of live with that on a day to day basis. Know?
Speaker 3:Like, I was asking, you know, Fable to I was asking Fable to make some The Gathering decks for me. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Over the weekend. And
Speaker 3:I I kept hitting my limits. I'm like,
Speaker 2:come on,
Speaker 3:guys. Like, just make the deck for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. It is a crazy time. Like, Apple is leasing GPUs from Google. Google's leasing GPUs from SpaceX.
Speaker 2:They're dropping, like, everyone is Google's selling Meta like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sorry. Don't
Speaker 2:have And then Meta's like we have too much capacity to sell. And so everyone's doing a deal with everybody else. So it's a good it's a good business to be in since everything's growing and demand is demand solves so many headaches and and and justifies so many risks.
Speaker 1:Let's get a couple of these fiats. Let's bomb around car week, the three of us, maybe a few others. Maybe car week twenty twenty seven.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I don't
Speaker 3:I'm totally down. Totally down. I love it. I I go most years.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Well Great
Speaker 1:to see you. On the progress.
Speaker 2:Congrats on the progress, and we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Thanks, boys.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Our next guest is Daniel English from Legacy Investments. He's a managing partner there.
Speaker 2:We'll bring him in to the TBPN, The Waiting Room. Legacy Investments does private real estate and infrastructure investment platform. Daniel, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 5:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:How was your fourth of July?
Speaker 5:In the nation's capital. So I was here for all the storms and the fireworks.
Speaker 2:Very fun. Alive. Well, since it's your first time on the show, I would love for you to kick it off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself and legacy investments, get us up to speed.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Absolutely. So my original background was tech entrepreneurship, probably similar to you guys, and then saw the opportunity in infrastructure for the build out of the Internet. And Yeah. Fifteen years ago, started investing in data centers, and data centers and e commerce warehouses.
Speaker 2:Yeah. E commerce warehouses as well. And also some life life sciences real estate. Is that correct?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Sort of all takes the same kind of infrastructure. So Okay. The whole idea was own the infrastructure that, you know, the the digital world is being built on top of.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thesis makes a ton of sense. Take us through the very first deal. Like, did you have to marshal capital? Is it like raising a venture fund?
Speaker 2:Are you just deploying your own capital and working with a bank for a mortgage? Like, what was that first deal like?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's very similar to Venture. Right? So, you know, just huge sums of money. I mean, today, our typical deal is $600,000,000
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Just just each. So and that's a small data center investment. Right? So so big big dollars. But yeah.
Speaker 5:I mean, you go out, you raise your money, you have a pitch deck, the same basic same basic process. So we started you know, I think fifteen years ago, nobody understood what a data center was. So it's fascinating. In fact, I got laughed at a lot by private equity who was like, you left tech Wow.
Speaker 2:Who's laughing now? Because Yeah. Exactly. They're like, hey, we'd love to catch up and get coffee and you can tell us about how
Speaker 1:this So I I I wanna understand data centers went from being something that no one really cared about to suddenly everyone cares about them all the time so much so that if anything happens at a data center tied to any hyperscaler, it gets like reported to the front page of The Wall Street Journal or even The New York Times. Right?
Speaker 2:It's like satellite photos monitoring the Yeah.
Speaker 1:So through that process, how how did the game change from an investing standpoint, you know, rewinding, let's say, early twenty two
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:To to '23? And then I wanna go from, like, 2023 to 2024 and, like, understand those those changes because it's just been ramping up to such an extreme degree, and it still feels like there's a ways to go.
Speaker 5:No. Absolutely. I I mean, the first transition was in, call it, 2010 when cloud really came on the scene. Right? So so you had data centers before 2010.
Speaker 5:2010 at sort of '22, you had a big run up in cloud. Mhmm. And and so that was a whole era of data centers that shifted. But really with with the introduction of AI, you've got this huge increase in density and demand. I mean, demand was already growing astronomically, but but as you guys know, AI is really pushing pushing that.
Speaker 5:And and at the same time, and we're also constraining on power. So the biggest transition was just the amount, like, of of power. So in in 2010, you know, a five megawatt data center was a good one. 30 megawatts was sort of peak. Now, you know, 30 megawatts is a small data center.
Speaker 5:You're you know, everybody wants a gigawatt. And and so that scale is just astronomical versus what we had before. And so what we're seeing is, you know, really everything we're doing including this show is happening in the data center. Yeah. And what's fascinating to me is most people like
Speaker 1:Somebody's gotta tell Theo Von that. I don't know if you saw saw that clip where he's like
Speaker 2:Data centers.
Speaker 1:No one wants these on his, like, video podcast.
Speaker 2:Distributed via a million data centers all over the world. It's fascinating.
Speaker 5:But when when we talk like, my branding firm interviewed a bunch of 20 year olds, they're like, where do you think everything that's happening on your phone is happening? They're like, what's happening on my phone? And we're like, no, it's not. It Yeah. It happens in a building.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And but but that creates an arms race right now around AI because everything we do in our lives happens in in a building in digital infrastructure. And And there is a massive supply constraint because of that that increase in power demand. I mean, there's only so much power. And frankly, there's only so much land, particularly with the political sentiment right now that you can build these. And so having access to a building to house your compute becomes a distinct competitive advantage Sure.
Speaker 5:In the AI. So
Speaker 2:so what does your search process look like? If I'm I I mean, I've seen data centers in downtown where it's like a converted office building, no windows. That's probably for a CDN or some local delivery. But if you're just driving through the middle Of America and you see some land, are you thinking about power or is there natural gas in the ground? Are you so how are you like, or are you doing more of the deals where it's like what happened at Colossus where there was a building that already had a lot of power for manufacturing appliances like washing machines and then it was easier to convert and upgrade that building?
Speaker 2:Do you do everything? Like, what's the process for finding a a site?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, data centers are really giant machines. Right? I think that's probably obvious. And and what's exciting to me is it's the first time in human history we had buildings that weren't designed for humans,
Speaker 2:truly.
Speaker 5:Right? You think about most buildings you interact with or real estate or private equity invest in are designed for people. Mhmm. Data centers are it's not about a person. It's about a machine.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. So so in terms of where do you pick a data center, you're really picking on where the machine wants to go. Mhmm. Machines care about power. Right?
Speaker 5:So power is, you know, to get quick power, you need infrastructure. So so we're really looking at infrastructure, and then you're looking at fiber so that we can get all the digital bits around. So that's also a form of infrastructure. So you're really gonna power and fiber first and foremost. Water, obviously, is a hot topic.
Speaker 5:Any more, most of particularly what we're building, it's all closed loop systems, so you're not using a lot of water. And so really, it's it's fiber and and power infrastructure. And and then the third piece is latency. So how much time does it take to deliver those digital bits? How close are you?
Speaker 5:And so historically, you did not see data centers downtown other than for networking. Yeah. Today, like, we bought the Chicago Board of of Options Exchange building on on Lasalle Street downtown, and we're turning that into a large AI data center right now. And that is wonderful because I've got great latency, great fiber, and lots of power infrastructure I can tap into. But what's fascinating is I can put 50 megawatts in about 40,000 square feet in that building today because of densities.
Speaker 5:In 2010, I may have gotten four megawatts in that building.
Speaker 2:Wow. Interesting. Fascinating. What does your your government relations team or strategy look like interfacing with neighbors to data centers, regulators, senators to, you know, mayors, all sorts of different who are the important constituents to get on board when you're working on a project?
Speaker 5:You know, it's a part right now, I mean, you guys, obviously, are are highly aware of this. The political problem with with data centers is very real right now. Mhmm. And and it's interesting because we all use them. Right?
Speaker 5:Our our lives are dependent on them. But I think there's a need for partnership with the cities and the communities. So that's something we take very seriously. You know, I got a question recently about, you know, what data centers are are bad or ugly or using all our water and power. A lot of those are either misconceptions or, you know, somebody did build a bad building.
Speaker 5:You can always build a bad building. And so I would say something we work very hard at is partnering with cities on deploying data centers that are not using all the water, are using existing grid infrastructure, and frankly, not ugly.
Speaker 3:I I mean, I
Speaker 2:think part of part of the problem
Speaker 6:is it's
Speaker 2:not ugly. Yeah. Is there a mean, we were talking about the the cell phone towers in Los Angeles. They're sort of dressed up like trees. I don't know if that's that effective at being beautiful.
Speaker 2:Although Yeah. It's every time. They do sort of melt in the background. Of course, like, when you're up close, can clock it. But when it's just on, you know, the horizon, you don't really notice it.
Speaker 2:Have you seen any trends in sort of like low hanging fruit in like, oh, if we just do this, yeah, it'll increase the cost 1%, but the response response from from the the community community is is gonna gonna be 50% better because we did x y or z.
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. Absolutely. So I converted a or my team and I converted a glass office tower in Downtown Minneapolis into a large AI data center. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:It's a beautiful building. And and in fact, nobody even knows there's a data center in there for the most We're doing, you know, the Chicago Board of Option Exchange building is a beautiful architectural building. Sure. Part of what I love about data centers is it's really infrastructure, and so you can bury it underground, you can put it on top of a roof, you can do these mixed use. They do not have to look like prisons, some of them do.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And and so that gives you a lot of creative flexibility. Like, we're we're building a a greenfield data center in Texas right now, and our architecture team found ways that to do fencing that effectively you can imagine Frank Gehry's, you know, museums. It it sort of looks more like that. And and so there are actually a lot of windowless buildings that, you know, we all like culturally. And and so we take a lot of inspiration from that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Basically, every every sports stadium is sort of windowless from the outside, and yet we love them, and they look great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are you are are you involved in any conversations or have you heard of any conversations where local communities are effectively asking for direct payments in order to provide support for a data center? Because you said like, we all use data centers, but the thing about data centers is Google's gonna find a way to serve me no matter what regardless of of if they're my neighborhood Yeah. Or my community
Speaker 2:And it's like
Speaker 1:open to a data set.
Speaker 2:Three milliseconds of extra latency to put it five counties over. And so it's very easy to push the not in my county rhetoric if the only impact of that's gonna be a millisecond of latency or something like that.
Speaker 5:We're seeing yeah. I mean, there is a lot of pressure, obviously, on where data centers go right now. Yeah. We are seeing communities make direct asks. We're seeing tenants and investors such as ourselves do as much as we can to benefit the community.
Speaker 5:There there are significant benefits. So let let me take my building in in Downtown Minneapolis. That building's recently sold for we still manage it, but it recently sold for the highest price of a building in Minneapolis or in Minnesota. And so you imagine that building when I stepped into it was basically mostly worthless. It was an office building, mostly vacant, let's call it less than $30,000,000 of value.
Speaker 5:And and now it's one of the the highest priced buildings in in Minnesota. I mean, that shift is and and it still looks like a beautiful glass office tower.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's not using huge amounts of water. And so this And you're saying
Speaker 1:that it's, like, massive yep. Massive increase in property tax revenue.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because the new sale price, that makes a lot of sense. Interesting.
Speaker 5:Oh, and then you you also have hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure going in from the tenants.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:You've got hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from us. We did create new jobs.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:And so so those are good. Those are obviously positive benefits. Yeah. On a you know, we are seeing everything from tenants and and investors sponsor everything from new fire stations and fire trucks to, you know, benefits for for housing, schooling, in addition and on top of sort of just tax benefits. Right?
Speaker 2:What is your process for sequencing out finding tenants? I imagine it's sort of a if you build it, they will come moment for you. But in terms of talking to hyperscalers, neo clouds, doing something yourself, partnering with a chip company, I mean, is participating in various levels of the stack. What does it look like for you as you're sussing out an opportunity?
Speaker 5:Yeah. And obviously, it's a it's a big deal right now for anybody to have access to to to infrastructure for compute. Right? So the the hyperscalers, the the neo clouds, everybody's competing for the same space. In fact, we often see that the same we've had video game companies, Neo Cloud, Cloud users all try and get in the same building.
Speaker 5:Right? So so everybody's competing for a fairly limited supply. It is very, I would say, it functions much more like partnerships. Similar cities, very partner oriented. Tenants, it's very partner oriented because these are huge massive capital investments.
Speaker 5:Right? So on the low end, you're looking at half $1,000,000,000. On the high end, you're looking at $10,000,000,000. Right? And so but they're making just as
Speaker 2:big of
Speaker 5:investments. I'm guessing that's obvious. But, you know, they're they're the ones providing the chips and and serving their customers too. And so and so there's a mutual investment on both sides. So there's a, I would say, a tight relationship between the tenants and developers and capital partners such as ourselves, to help make sure these are successful.
Speaker 5:Nobody wants them to not be successful. Mhmm. But it is speculative on the capital's part. These are not build to suits. Like, we're not we're not sort of buying land with a tenant in tow.
Speaker 5:We're buying land and getting the development going and risking capital to make sure that they have it on time that they need it.
Speaker 1:A friend of mine is in the art business. I know you're a collector. He was telling me over the weekend about what a mess the the the art world is right now in the art industry. Does that make it a great time to be a collector?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, there's what I love about art collecting is it's a lot like investing. Right? There Yeah.
Speaker 1:You wanna buy low and sell high. Yeah. If like the market's in turmoil and it's bad, it's probably a good time to acquire things that you love. Yeah. Before a a a correction upward.
Speaker 1:But how have you been approaching it?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, I would say, yeah, exactly that. I think the art market, the the argument is always bet on art history. Right? So so what's fascinating about art is it captures this moment in time, right, where there's there's a shift in perspective or ideas or thinking.
Speaker 5:And and that's where the great art really is and the value tends to be captured in those pieces. And so so I would say my particular art investment leanings, collectings are on, you know, what's big in our history. So, like, I just picked up a Dan Flavin, who is famous for light light art light bulb art Mhmm. In the sixties. And and so I got the piece this month.
Speaker 5:The the first piece he ever did with multiple light bulbs, and the the whole thesis to that is, well, one, it's beautiful and I and I love it. But but two, it's it's an important moment in art history. And so, you know, you're sort of it's it's like betting on core real estate or or I suppose, you know, a great tech tech company that's building something brand new.
Speaker 1:Does does does buying a historically significant piece of art feel more risky than buying than buying, let's say, like a a rundown building or a billion a a building like you described Chicago, or is it feel about the same? Do you have a similar confidence level when buying both?
Speaker 5:I would say what I love is both of them have a lot of specialized knowledge. And so if you have the specialized knowledge, you can do sort of that risk adjusted analysis. So I would I would say they feel equivalent to me, at least the ones that that I've been the best that I ever making feel equivalent to me. But, you know, data centers, adaptive reuse, you know, real estate, all all of that is just highly specialized. Right?
Speaker 5:And so so, you know, I like a lot of people, I surround myself with other really smart people to give me good guidance, but it it feels like a safe bet.
Speaker 1:Have you ever thought of combining the two passions? I know that you're describing this glass building which which sounds amazing, but have you thought about working with a contemporary artist to try to make the world's most beautiful data center? I feel like that would be a good kind of flagship project for you that I at least would like to see.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yes. We have some things in the works in Chicago, in fact. One of
Speaker 2:my
Speaker 5:favorite this is maybe slightly different than where you're going, but my favorite example of this is what Louis Vuitton did on 5th Avenue in Manhattan where they wrapped a construction project in what looks like a giant Louis Vuitton trunk. Yep. And, I have an apartment right around the corner from it, and I see people photographic constantly.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And and I I love that idea, but but I keep thinking, can we wrap data centers in something that's interesting and beautiful Yeah. That that people wanna photograph instead of hate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Something where if aliens are are monitoring us, they're like, what what are these crazy things that they're so obsessed with? I wanna do it. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thanks for thanks for the update.
Speaker 2:Have a fantastic weekend, Dan.
Speaker 5:Absolutely. Pleasure. Thanks for having
Speaker 1:We'll talk soon, Daniel.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Goodbye. Our next guest is the president and head of artificial intelligence at Replit. Michele Catan is in the waiting room, and we're we're excited to talk all things vibe coding. The shift from vibe coding to vibe building.
Speaker 2:Break it down for us. Welcome to show. How are you doing?
Speaker 6:Hey, guys. Subscribing. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for taking the time.
Speaker 1:We're doing great. Three day weekend. Yeah. What did you build? Oh, good question.
Speaker 1:I built a sunburn Did it? On my back. I worked hard.
Speaker 6:I was flying to Paris.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 6:I'm calling you from Paris right now. Yeah. I'm going to be sick in the race summit.
Speaker 2:Oh, thanks for staying up late. Of course. Why don't you set the table for us, introduce yourself a little bit, and explain how you fit into the organization, what the top projects are for Rapplet in your world they are these days.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So as I said, I'm president and head of AI. Basically, it means everything technical the company currently rolls up to me. Mhmm. And the person who, you know, came up with the push of creating Rapid Agent and led the project from day one.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. And this happened back in September 2024. If you recall, back coding didn't even exist as a term back then. Yeah. It was coined in February 2025, if I recall correctly.
Speaker 6:So we're the first one to launch in the space, and we we basically pioneered them. You know, we chart this new market that keeps expanding like crazy. We had four major agent releases in the meantime. And if anything, I'm more exciting about the months that are about to come rather than the crazy roller coaster we went through in the last couple of years because the capabilities are expanding so much
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:That naturally, the scope we have as a company will just extend like crazy.
Speaker 2:So pitch me like it's three months from now. It's September and October. And I'm nontechnical. Someone who has, you know, heard about the AI boom but doesn't really know where to start, what are you instructing someone in a few months from now? How should they be interacting with Replit and Replit agents to do something?
Speaker 2:What's a good hello world on absolute steroids project for them to get started with?
Speaker 6:Think about it this way, for the last two years at least, we have been talking about agents all the time. Mhmm. But it's still extremely difficult for everyone to build their own agents. Mhmm. And in a sense, you know, we have been lucky because in a company like RuralRapid could grow so much because we pioneer the space.
Speaker 6:But now I want everyone to be capable of creating their own agents. And the reason is fairly simple. If I can make a prediction, I do believe that sooner than later, we're gonna be seeing far fewer apps being used rather than agents. And the reason is we we built UIs, we built computers in this way in the last decades, because the only way we had to interact with them was keyboards and mouse and click and data input, which is very much server prone. The way you work in studies, you talk to your colleagues, you discuss, you decide what to do, you express natural language or intent, and then you either delegate or you do you get the job done yourself.
Speaker 6:But guess what? Agents do exactly that. You know, the more autonomous we make them, the more capable we make them, the more they're gonna be able to complete tasks end to end. And I want everyone to be capable of building their own customized agents. So three months from today, if we chat again, I will be mostly talking about that and our product will be pushing that direction very much.
Speaker 2:Okay. Talk to me about the split between these three use cases that I see coding agents generally being used for. One is the ad hoc go and do something. Pull a bunch of information. I did this most recently looking around my neighborhood, looking at different lots and registrations of the government.
Speaker 2:Go pull a bunch of data, organize it into a spreadsheet, turn that spreadsheet into an infographic, work through all of that like you were a a super powerful powerful executive assistant who knew how to write Python and scrape the web to produce a single report, basically deep research on steroids. Then the second bucket that I see a lot is I want a daily summary. I want you to do something for me that requires AI and LLMs to summarize information, put something together, something that runs continuously. And then the third is go build me a piece of software one time, deterministic software, and then I will interact with that software on a regular basis. So Ben Thompson just went on a vibe coding journey.
Speaker 2:He built an inventory management system for his house. It is a piece of deterministic software that runs on his local network. And then once he is interacting with it, it is pure deterministic software. There is no AI inference that's happening really. Maybe it calls out to an API.
Speaker 2:But those three buckets, is that a good way to think about the way people are using AI today? What's the breakdown and how do you see it evolving?
Speaker 6:I think it's a great way. And the last bucket you mentioned, the deterministic software, the fact that you can build a lot of internal tools Yeah. And you see a lot of solopreneurs creating software, zero to one or rapid. That's where most of the effort went
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:In the last couple of years.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:I think we're gonna be seeing a shift very quickly away from that. Yep. Apps are not gonna be disappearing overnight. They still play a role. SaaS will play a role in companies for a long, long time.
Speaker 6:Yep. But it's also true that some of the software can be replaced by agents accomplishing tasks hand to hand. And that's Yeah. Why I think if we
Speaker 2:And is that is that is that the fat models? Like you used to go to an LLM and ask it to do two plus two and it would guess four, then it was able to write a little bit of Python. But and and that's just expanding to the point where the actual LLM itself, the API for the model, can do more and more capabilities and the agent harness will be able to do more and more as well. So you essentially instantiate whatever software you need ad hoc on the fly, and you expect that to grow.
Speaker 6:Exactly right. LLMs have become much better at long horizon tasks. Mhmm. And you see them working like even four hours in a row.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:The additional layer that we put on top of them, the agent harnesses
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Are such that you can also introduce verification criteria. So that, for example, you come up with a high level goal. Say, you built an Apple Rapid, and then you want to optimize the conversion rate, and you set up 5% as a goal. But guess what? You can have an agent doing that for you.
Speaker 6:You don't have to prompt it on the specifics on how to make that happen. It will connect to your app. The agent will decide to improve conversions, maybe I need to change the copy of the website. Maybe I need different images. Maybe I need, like, a different pricing page.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. And then you keep measuring until it accomplishes the goal. That's what you've been hearing more and more been told, you know, in the industry as loops. Mhmm. And I would call this like the post prompting era.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. We don't put much effort in prompting anymore. Even if you hear anthropic researchers and engineers explaining how to use Fable-five, the main insight is stop giving it prescriptions, stop giving it rules. Just tell the model what you want to accomplish and then trust the process. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But that's the type of product that think we're gonna be seeing more and more in the future.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. The goal finding. Jordy?
Speaker 6:So The goal finding. Exactly.
Speaker 1:You you mentioned going going back to your earlier call out on you know, people building customized agents. What are are these are these is this like entirely personal software or do you see this as like one person companies where they'll build an agent and sell it to other people? Is it both? I'm having trouble. I've been just experimenting lately and trying to every time I think, oh I should try to use, oh, I need I need some information from an app.
Speaker 1:So like I use surf report as an example.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Like I'll just ask Chad, hey, what's the surf report for this spot? Yep. And it does it quite well. You can do it for the weather. You can do it for so many different apps.
Speaker 1:And I expect that agents as they get better and better will just be able to anything that I could imagine a custom agent to do personally, the agent The models can models
Speaker 2:can just where people will go and build the vibe code a solution to something that the model can do natively. And then you'll be like, have a piece of Determinator software that does all it it summarizes all my emails. And it's like, well, you can actually just integrate your email directly and
Speaker 1:ask Yeah. And so part of me part of me is like, just I don't know if I'm I have I'm being creative enough to think of use cases Yeah. Or or what?
Speaker 6:The rule of thumb to be as creative as possible is you need to think in general terms. Mhmm. You don't have to narrow down on, I want an agent that asks me to connect to the few applications that I use on a daily basis. You need to start to think in goals. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And the moment you have a goal and you wanna get some type of work done, then allow the agent to decide what are the steps necessary and allow the agent to create the codes in order to make that happen. Mhmm. Now there's one advantage only if you actually create a piece of deterministic software, is that you trade that inflexibility for the cost of tokens. Yeah. So every time you just allow the model to do the majority of the work, you're actually spending quite a bit of money, especially if you need to use frontier capabilities.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So a lot of the tools in the internal tools built on rapid today, they tend to be very deterministic also for the reason because if they start to be used by hundreds of thousands of people in a company, you don't want them to be, you be hitting with the frontier models. Otherwise, it's, you know, financially responsible to do that.
Speaker 2:Last question for me. Get me up to speed on the state of solopreneurship and I want a prediction from you on when you think we'll see the first one person, $1,000,000,000 company?
Speaker 6:It doesn't really happen. You probably read about that in the New York Times.
Speaker 2:That one I don't think that one counted.
Speaker 6:I know.
Speaker 2:I don't think
Speaker 6:it okay.
Speaker 2:I I It was close. But it it it It
Speaker 6:was close.
Speaker 2:There were too many too many complaints from customers. It seemed like they bent the rules of the marketing and they were getting hit with some FTC, FDA issues. I want I want a clean
Speaker 1:Baking documentation.
Speaker 2:$1,000,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 6:Let's give you another shot. Would say by the end of the year. Wow. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We have several 9 figures company built on Rapids. So it's it's gonna happen. Yeah. We're almost there.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it. Well, yeah. Definitely shoot us a note when it happens. If you see it inside, wrap it, have them pitch us.
Speaker 2:We'd love to talk to them.
Speaker 6:Or make little more. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But thank you so much for Great coming on the
Speaker 1:to meet you.
Speaker 2:Enjoy, friends.
Speaker 1:Safe travels.
Speaker 2:Safe travels and we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.
Speaker 6:Will do. Thank you, guys. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Should we close out with this rule post? Guy selling post trained open source models. If you don't own your own models, you don't own anything. Guy selling harness on top of models, if you rely on one model, you are cooked. Guy selling tokens instead of manually prompting your models, just put them in a loop where they prompt themselves.
Speaker 2:And Paula says, guys selling GPUs. Yes. Which is accurate. Everyone has a very different version of their modern sales pitch. We did not
Speaker 1:Let's close out on this. Yeah. What? What are Tony Robbins says his AI agent bought a robot dog to merge with.
Speaker 2:Oh, I didn't realize it was a dog. I thought it was a I thought it was a humanoid but I was talking to Ray Kurzweil. It's a one minute clip. We'll pull this up and play Tony Robbins in conversation with Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, one of the most accurate AI forecasters in history. Ray Kurzweil, called the date of the touring test twenty years in advance almost to the day.
Speaker 2:Very impressive forecast. He's calling Singularity 2035, I think. Maybe 2045.
Speaker 1:This might be Technology's Daily Show but today is not our day But with
Speaker 2:this this is not a technology issue. This is a this is a near peer adversary attacking us. They want to keep us from watching this video. And so
Speaker 1:People are talking about a SpaceX AI rebrand. Oh. What's going
Speaker 2:on there? I thought that was already a thing. I thought they already said they were gonna call it SpaceX AI, which really sort of a mouthful.
Speaker 1:Let's pull up this video.
Speaker 2:SpaceX is doing It's still a $2,000,000,000,000 company. The float is still low and they're unlocking more and more of the shares. But the the the value has been holding strong north of 2,000,000,000,000, which I think a lot of folks who were giving very bearish takes saying that the company doesn't make that much money that it would be, you know, it would be worth a paltry 100,000,000,000 by now. But no. It has been cooking.
Speaker 2:We Don't try and pull things up, George.
Speaker 1:This video livestream does not have the technology
Speaker 2:It doesn't. It doesn't. To do live. There were timeline was in turmoil before the break on July 2 over some Andoril SPV action that happened. Matt Grimm took a shot at Paki McCormick saying that Not Boring raised an SPV that bought into around a couple years ago of Andoril.
Speaker 2:And then Paki came back, set the record straight, and said that he didn't sell. And that in fact, it was an LP that had sold. And it all underscores just how complicated some of these later stage investing deals get. Sometimes, if you're, you know, an investor and you have an LP and they're going through some financial situation, maybe a divorce, maybe a lawsuit, they could need liquidity for something, they're moving things around like, the the ask the can be more serious than I think people normally jump to. They always jump to, oh, are they just like trying to flip the stock or something?
Speaker 2:And that is, you know, not the activity that you want to have happen, but it is it is a very tricky situation. Lots of gray areas. And I think the the end result is that open conversation almost always benefits. No surprises is the rule. And also, I don't think you should be able to buy or sell Andoril secondary unless you can beat Mad Grimm in a MRF.
Speaker 2:I think that would solve a lot of this. I think it should all come down to your MRF time. In order to redeem your shares in Andoril, you should be able to you should have to post video evidence of you doing a MRF. Probably sub forty five minutes, maybe sub forty minutes would be Yeah. Ideal to really get access.
Speaker 2:Is the future of investor relations. Could apply to all companies, honestly.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You wanna buy or sell, you gotta do you gotta run a mile, do a 100 pull ups, 100 push ups, hundred hundred sit ups?
Speaker 6:What is it?
Speaker 3:100 pull ups.
Speaker 4:200 push ups, 300 squats.
Speaker 2:300 squats. He's been practicing. He's trying to get in on the next standard all SPV for sure. Win Matt over. Anything else you want to touch on today, Jordy?
Speaker 1:Yes, should we Ben. The video is playing for
Speaker 2:me. Okay. Well But it's a skill issue apparently. It is a skill issue.
Speaker 1:Anyways, folks, Portugal, Spain, zero zero at the half.
Speaker 2:We missed nothing.
Speaker 1:We missed nothing. Thanks for tuning in with Go flip over, watch We'll be back tomorrow.
Speaker 2:We'll back tomorrow July 11.
Speaker 1:That means we get a little silly around here.
Speaker 2:You're gonna hear lots of car questions from our for our interviewers, for our guys. But if
Speaker 1:you have tech news Yeah. Hit us up. Let's You know, it is funny.
Speaker 2:What's up?
Speaker 1:It is funny. You know, we get into these slower summer months Mhmm. And then all of a sudden you have just insane days. Yeah. So you gotta be live every day.
Speaker 2:So You gotta be ready. Yeah. I mean, the basic cycle of of tech news will slow down. Venture capitalists are famously on vacation from May 15 to September 27. Right?
Speaker 2:That's when they go on vacation. Right?
Speaker 1:Mid October is like real
Speaker 2:When they come back. Yeah. But that leaves opportunities. Last year, got the talent wars. Zac didn't take any breaks.
Speaker 2:He poaching left and right. So we'll always there's always a chance we get a wild card. But things have been slow. So lots of time to discuss vehicles and other fun topics. But stay with us.
Speaker 2:We will see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. Have a great weekend. Have a great day.
Speaker 1:Let's go USA.
Speaker 2:Leave us Fox, Stars, Apple Podcast, and Spotify. You for that for news on tbpn.com.