Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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. Today is Wednesday, 10/14/2026. We're live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital capital.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 3:Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp also donated a...
Speaker 3:Maybe more they donated to...
Speaker 2:$100,000....
Speaker 3:Fundraiser. A $100,000. Very generous for them. Jordy, you get us up to speed on what's going on with Ben Wilson, the creator of How to Take Over the World, the podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Ben Wilson is on David Senra, by David Senra today. Ben, very unfortunately, has stage four cancer and four kids under the age of five. Senra says I want to help him as much as possible, so I invite him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history's greatest leaders and what it's like getting told he's going to die at 38. He's a good friend. He's a good guy, close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters.
Speaker 2:His work has benefited millions of people all across the world. Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine introductions or donations. So we just want to share this at the top of our show. And I've only met Ben once, but a really, really amazing thinker and incredible show, and I recommend checking out the show as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, moving on. Thank you to Ram for supporting and you should as well. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas.
Speaker 3:Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We covered at the end of the show yesterday, but I mean pretty huge news in the world of corporate espionage. OpenAI caught someone planting a bugging device by having a hidden camera behind one of its TVs. And so this was all over the timeline we discussed at the end of yesterday's show. But Abdulrahman Al Fazan, the alleged OpenAI spy, used an AI generated image of himself speaking at Stanford University as his LinkedIn and profiles despite having no documented connection to the school.
Speaker 3:So but there's a community note on this. There there's a lot of people going back and forth. Apparently, his actual profiles now show the real information. But there's a whole bunch of back and forth. But it seems like it was a pretty simple device.
Speaker 3:I I saw some reports that it was a cheap Chinese made recording device wrapped in toilet paper and inserted in the back of television in an executive conference room. And folks are saying that it cost maybe $15, something like that. And so there's also debate over, you know, is he he's is he American citizen? Is he Saudi national? There's a picture of him alongside Saudi prince...
Speaker 3:Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018. But, you know, anyone can stand in line for a photo op. But this story is developing. The FBI is truly investigating this. And so it'll be interesting to see what comes of this, what the motivation was.
Speaker 2:Kylie Robinson called it amateur hour, chatbot account associated with the engineer's spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts about building and concealing a continuous audio recorder, adding WiFi connectivity, listening remotely, and encrypting its memory card according to the complaint. The account also submitted questions containing details specific to the recovered device, including its unique network identifier.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Pretty simple, like, how do I commit a crime? Like, typing that into the computer. And so not discovered preemptively, oddly enough, but seems like a pretty smoking gun if you're searching. How do I spy?
Speaker 3:How do I
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Create a recording?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The whole thing the whole thing is just very con... Confusing. Like would would make it seem like he's a a lone wolf. Right?
Speaker 2:As if there was any type of like sophisticated operation.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:You would think they'd be like, don't worry about learning how to spy, little bro. We got you.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Totally. That is weird for sure. And then the other thing that's odd is that the AI safety world, the general AI companies will be spying on each other. It's usually around...
Speaker 3:Or nation states, it's usually around like stealing the weights or... And and using the weights for the frontier model for bad purposes or stealing the intellectual property. There's been a lot of back and forth lawsuits around intellectual property. But you don't get that from eavesdropping on an executive conference. Right?
Speaker 3:An executive like there's no there's no meeting between like Sam Altman and Greg Brockman where where they're just like, let's read off the weights to GPT seven starting at the beginning. Zero, seven, five.
Speaker 2:Doing a table reading. Two. They're doing a table reading.
Speaker 3:Seven, nine. No. Like they don't... That that's... You're not gonna get anything.
Speaker 3:You're going to get like strategy, like corporate strategy, which is maybe valuable if you're like trading the stock market. But it's not it's not like you're gonna listen in on a conversation and be like, okay, I know how... I I the can just reverse next model, which is very odd. So the motivations here are complicated. Like it could be purely financial.
Speaker 3:It could be something more nefarious. We'll let the FBI investigate. I think that's the photo of David Senner that just slammed down. We got a new one in the Ultra Dome.
Speaker 2:Very good.
Speaker 3:Looking good.
Speaker 2:Always with us.
Speaker 3:Anyway, the the OpenAI spy listening device story, I mean it's all over the timeline. People are having fun with it. People are worried about it. I'm sure the FBI will investigate and we'll have more information. But I don't really have a strong take other than like it's bad.
Speaker 3:Don't spy. And it and it reinforces the stakes like security is really important. We know this. We've been talking about this. But it was weird because yesterday, I was talking to somebody and they were and they were saying, oh yeah, the Instagram meta ads are so good, you know, because they, you know, obviously because they they listen to
Speaker 4:my phone.
Speaker 2:It's so funny. Like covering up covering it up with toilet paper. Toilet paper. Like, would that not... If you're looking behind a TV and you're like, what's that electronic device covered up with toilet paper?
Speaker 2:Like, that to me is much more interesting and concerning than...
Speaker 3:If it was just a USB stick... You would never... Oh, somebody left USB stick because they were looking at photos on the Yeah. On the... Or if they just put like a fire...
Speaker 3:An Amazon Fire Stick back there...
Speaker 2:Wouldn't notice it. You would only notice it if you were actually sweeping...
Speaker 3:And you just like go back there and it's like glue and tongue depressors and Lincoln logs and some Legos back there. It's like, what... Yeah. It's gonna draw your eye because you're like, toilet paper should never be in an electronics cabinet, period. Like, there's no reason for it to be there.
Speaker 3:As opposed to like USB USB cables are... Belong back there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or something that looks like an HDMI...
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Anything. Put put a put an Xbox back there.
Speaker 3:Put... I mean, you could literally put like a... Something in the shell of an Apple TV or in the shell of of of a Nintendo Switch and somebody would just be, oh, it's a Nintendo Switch. And you could put something inside of the device. Sorry.
Speaker 3:We're giving spies like ideas now. This is bad. Forget what I said. Don't do this. Don't spy.
Speaker 3:You're gonna go to jail. It's really really bad. Anyway, yesterday, I I I just laughing because somebody was like, oh, yeah. Like, you know, the Instagram ads are like so good now. But and like, you know, obviously, they're listening to they're listening to the audio around my phone, like ambiently, and that's why it's so good.
Speaker 3:And they weren't like alleging this as like a conspiracy theory that needs needed to be uncovered. It was just like a given. It was just like, oh, yeah. That's like one of the strategies and one of the features. Like, it's like, of course they like listen to everything you say and then they target ads and the ads are better.
Speaker 3:And it was just like, it wasn't it wasn't like and I'm mad about it. It was just like and it and it obviously happens... Business. This has been debunked many times. It was investigated by Wired in 2017.
Speaker 3:Antonio Garcia Martinez talked about it on Joe Rogan in 2022. His his reaction is actually funny. We should pull up the video that I put in the timeline of of Antonio Garcia Martinez on Joe Rogan. I think it starts a couple minutes into this clip, but at around like one minute twenty seconds, something like that. Because he like just sort of laughs and then explains like his position on like, do they need to actually listen to you?
Speaker 3:But let's play this because it's a fun clip from Here's tech an ad for it. Let me ask you about this because we've talked about this multiple times in the podcast. Sometimes you're having a conversation... Oh, God. The microphone thing.
Speaker 3:The mic... Is that real? No. It's not real. No.
Speaker 3:No. I mean... Dude, I don't believe him. Do believe...
Speaker 2:I haven't searched for it at all.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:And I got an ad for it. Something me and you were talking about.
Speaker 3:What was it?
Speaker 2:I I... If I remember right, I couldn't remember, but it was something we're talking about after the show.
Speaker 5:Six hours later, I'm getting an ad for it.
Speaker 3:Here's what I'd bet on. One of you two either searched or went to some website? Not only one
Speaker 6:of us.
Speaker 3:What? So if I do, he gets an ad? Yeah. Potentially. Yeah.
Speaker 3:How? Because it has your geolocation, which is also kinda crazy. But if it has your geolocation, your friend's geolocation, there's so many times when someone will recommend a product to me and then I'll see an ad for it and I'll be like, it was listening. And it's like, no. It has the receipt from the person that I'm connected with on Instagram and then it saw that we were both in the same place.
Speaker 3:So clearly, we talked about that. Like it just inferred that. And then it shows you like 10,000 ads a day and so five of them are gonna be like creepily accurate. Are you gonna put on a tinfoil hat? Are you are you a truther on this or are you are you a plan truster?
Speaker 3:Plan trustor. Plan trustor. Okay. Okay. Well, Facebook like straight up has on there like about page.
Speaker 3:Like we don't use your microphone unless you've given us permission and are actively using a feature that requires the microphone. So sometimes, like, if you are in a Meta product and you turn on the microphone, like, yes, is listening then. And so there are instances where people have, like, accidentally left that open and then obviously does have that data. And like if you if you upload a bunch of video of you talking about all the products you love...
Speaker 7:Yeah. If you
Speaker 2:turn on the microphone for a split second, there's an alert that goes off in Meta HQ. 10 people run into a room and they just listen and then they sort of brainstorm ads that could... That they could, you know, deliver based on that that...
Speaker 3:I would I would like a social network that was like handcrafted ads. Like, there's a guy who's like, you know, a Don Draper. He like sips a couple martinis, smokes a cigar, and then really thinks about like, okay, what would be the perfect ad for this person to see? And they pick it. Curation.
Speaker 3:That's the future. But I I was wondering like like how far are we from this actually happening? Because I know Meta will hold the line on it and they're not just gonna like go in the background of the phone because it would be such a scandal. And like after seeing the social reckoning like the in the like the opportunity to whistle blow is just so huge that you could be just a, like, a a rank and file meta employee. If you find out that they're actually doing the the ambient voice recording and using that for ad targeting, it's just quit your job immediately, get the whistleblower status, Netflix doc, book, tour, like you're gonna make way more money.
Speaker 3:Like the like the incentive to whistleblow on that is just so high. I think that
Speaker 2:it's Hour of capitalism.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I I think it's probably like like that's a that's a huge pushback. But I was wondering like, is it possible that ambient voice recording does wind up influencing your meta ads somehow? And I found a chain that actually can make this happen. So there is a company that handles, that handles business phone calls.
Speaker 3:So if you're on the call with a with a particular company and they use a particular AI AI system, they will actually transcribe that and then they put that data, I think through LiveRamp, which can actually get into Meta Ads Manager as an audience. But this is a little bit... It's not quite what you think because it would be like if you're on the phone with Bottega Veneta and you're talking about products that you like, then that could wind up getting retargeted. Yeah. Which you normally wouldn't think it would be retargeted because you're like, there's no pixel on the phone.
Speaker 3:But they are transcribing that. But it's it's direct to that particular that particular brand. And so it wouldn't be the really like, woah, like I wasn't talking... I wasn't even talking to a company. It's like you are talking to a company.
Speaker 3:But do you remember the LG drama that happened like last month? No. Do remember this? Okay. So Palmer came on our show I think last year and was like talking about how terrible smart TVs are and I think everyone sort of agrees that at the very least they're like clunky and they have too many features and they wanna be like updated every every like five days when you use the TV.
Speaker 3:It's like, we need a software update and have so many different like, they can things and they wanna show you ads and it's all very annoying even though the TV is like look nice these days. But last month, Gamers Nexus, they put out this two hour YouTube video showing that LG TVs are like aggressively using spyware effectively. That's the allegation. So they scan the local network for third party phones and other devices. The LG G5 crawled the entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices including smartwatches and phones of the staff who didn't even know we were working on the the...
Speaker 3:This investigation. Even when the TV wasn't online, the LG TV they tested was able to record sound around it. Quote, we were even able to capture microphone audio while the TV was unplugged from the network. This is because there's enough Wi Fi hotspots in most neighborhoods now that are just, like, public, basically, through, like, a Comcast or Spectrum, like network sharing. They can like hop on something and just say, oh, okay.
Speaker 3:I got access to the Internet. It's it's crazy. Like... And so...
Speaker 2:I don't think we need to go down the whole, like, you you can see through walls with
Speaker 3:wall. That's crazy too. Yeah. So We're all good. Burke said the audio was reportedly stored locally via plain text, could potentially allow the data to be sent to LG if the TV connects online again.
Speaker 3:And so, like, hard drives and memory have gotten so so cheap that you can basically be recording recording the audio, transcribing the text using, like, basically, like a local transcription model. It's not like running a big GPU. It's just, like, transcribing text pretty easy, and then it's just storing that as plain text. And it can store, like, years and years of ambient text on, like, you know, like, gig drive, basically. Like, it it's it's just so small.
Speaker 3:And so LG responded and said, like, look, we're like, we're not really doing all of that. But they said, we don't do continuous conversation recording. Now, if you push the button...
Speaker 2:Don't worry. We take a break when you're not talking.
Speaker 3:If you're if you're doing active voice session, which is where you like press the button to talk to the TV, so you so you actively wanna do it, it will pick up conversations that are happening in the background. So, you know, the the the privacy implications are like your, you know, your roommate is pushing the button and saying like, put on Red Bull TV or something or the X Games. And and in the background, you're talking about, you know, your plans for the weekend and then that that gets saved in the in the data. But that seems kind of obvious, like you've turned on the microphone. They did deny supplying ambient audio...
Speaker 2:By the way says What? Xfinity has a feature that turns your home WiFi router into a motion sensor.
Speaker 3:That's interesting. They actually productized it. That's kind of... I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 3:If you're away, why not just have your WiFi, see if there's motion in your in your in your vicinity. Can it detect aura too or just motion?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That... Mean, that's that's the most important question.
Speaker 3:So so LG has this ad solutions product which can potentially feed into meta ads and make your Instagram ads scarily accurate. But they say they're not doing the full chain yet. But... So there's still a confirmation bias where you see a bunch of ads but you see one ad for the thing that you were talking about and you're like, oh, it's so scarily accurate.
Speaker 2:Wait. Rewind. Yeah. Saying that your LG TV might be listening and then they might be passing that?
Speaker 3:They say they're not, but they are listening. They have an ads product and it can connect to Meta. So, like, we're we're like, the technology exists, but they haven't turned it on. I think is like the claim.
Speaker 2:Or they could have stopped doing it while they responded to that article saying, we are not currently doing this and then re...
Speaker 3:Potentially. Personally, I don't really mind it that much. I I kinda just don't care if the ads are scarily accurate. I'm used to it. But but it is it is odd.
Speaker 3:And also it's just like TV, stay in your lane. Just show me the thing. I don't I don't want I don't want a bunch of other junk. Just charge me what it costs to make the TV. The dumb TV that Palmer has has kind of gestured towards I think will be really successful.
Speaker 3:And but what what's interesting is that amid all this like privacy concerns around LG and it potentially listening to you and some backlash there, I think they fire... I I think they did the crisis BR effectively. I think it is like pretty clear that they're not actually just full open channel all the time piping it everywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So on that note, how likely are you to purchase an LG TV going forward?
Speaker 3:I already did. They're the best. Like I I just don't wanna mind it. It's just gonna know that it's just gonna listen to my my, you know, voice recordings and be like, wow, this is sick. Like, this guy's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Motion detected.
Speaker 3:Motion detected. Exactly. No. Yeah. LG...
Speaker 3:The LG G5 that they that they tried is actually like the best looking TV, think. Yeah. But I would love a dumb one. I would love one without all those annoying features. It's really it's really annoying like the software is the worst part.
Speaker 3:I actually think that pretty soon I'll be able to jailbreak it and then I'll just have the panel and I'll and I'll take off all the software. And so I think that will be the great trade is that I bought the version that they think they're subsidizing Yeah. All their spyware.
Speaker 2:There's no TV that good for that cheap. Yeah. You are the product. I mean, truthfully But you're flipping it on
Speaker 3:its own.
Speaker 6:This is
Speaker 3:this is the Amazon model. Right? Half of the half of the profit comes from ads. And so, like, if there's a world where you can get the product and rip out all the spyware and junkware and adware, you're getting it for basically half off. Or like you're you're taking half their margin, which they hate.
Speaker 3:But I don't know. I'm I'm bullish. I need to figure out how to actually go and and revert. I need I need a million agents. I need a million dollars to compute to to get this $3,000 TV to perform the way I want.
Speaker 2:To not listen to every conversation.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I need I need to marshal a million dollars of compute. But what's interesting is that LG has this drama and then like last week we touched on it briefly, Apple partnered with LG. And Apple has this like, you know, really solid brand.
Speaker 3:And yesterday on the show, had it wrong. We were talking about how Google has Nest, Amazon has Ring, Apple doesn't really have enough smart home stuff. They finally solved that. So they did this really deep partnership with LG and like two other manufacturers where the products... I mean, let me see if we can actually pull up the images.
Speaker 3:Because the products look sort of Apple esque. Like they they they fit within the Apple ecosystem, I think.
Speaker 2:Let's see. Let's see about that.
Speaker 3:He's gonna judge. I think they look nice. And I think if you are an iPhone user, there's probably a benefit to going all in on one e... On one system. And I think if you went with these devices, the integration into HomeKit would be solid.
Speaker 3:I don't know if I can... There we go. What do you think? What tier are you putting it in? Should we go one by one?
Speaker 2:C tier.
Speaker 3:C tier. Okay. But compare that to the home view.
Speaker 2:Why don't we compare to this ad of... This new ad for the Apple Home View?
Speaker 3:Yeah. The ad was was a little rough. We can pull it up and play it. But the Home View is less exciting as a product and more just exciting about like, it feels like Apple has had a bunch of irons in the fire around home and Internet of Things and like they finally have a strategy. But let's play the ad and see if it's Hey, Carmen.
Speaker 3:If it's tracking.
Speaker 8:About it.
Speaker 3:So I didn't realize this, but you can just... How is this version?
Speaker 2:We need audio. Yeah.
Speaker 9:What was that? Was that like that was a shot or...
Speaker 10:Well, he
Speaker 9:is helping me back off.
Speaker 11:Is that a shot?
Speaker 9:What? Yeah. I'm the guy
Speaker 3:that does food. You're the
Speaker 11:guy that what?
Speaker 9:You you you start a 100 different businesses and have zero
Speaker 10:follow. Carmen, I need you to check the frenzino.
Speaker 5:I feel like
Speaker 11:that was a shock, This
Speaker 9:is why this is why
Speaker 3:I didn't wanna come home.
Speaker 8:This is why
Speaker 3:I'm like
Speaker 9:Oh, fuck you. Oh. Fuck. What? What?
Speaker 9:What's your
Speaker 5:fucking Do
Speaker 2:you have
Speaker 3:a sensor button? That is so annoying. Remarkably annoying, but great edit by whoever put that together. Very, very funny. No.
Speaker 3:But, I mean, the critique and a lot of people have been saying this is like, if you're if you're trying to get the family out the door in the morning, like, do you really want an extra screen in the mix that's following you around? You were saying that, like, around kids, like, this is just gonna be a complete disaster. They're gonna be either, fingers all over it or like toppling it over. You can get a wall mounted version, which I think actually makes more sense in terms of like you might already have like a home security thing mounted or thermostat Yeah. Mounted.
Speaker 3:Just mounting that and then at every point, you can...
Speaker 2:It's like an iPad that's attached
Speaker 3:to Yes. The Yes. Insane. But it's cheaper and it's smaller and so maybe that's good. I don't know.
Speaker 3:And it's designed to be like hardwired in. Like it's it it it thinks of itself as like more of an IoT device as opposed to, like, it needs to go on the plane and perform on the plane too. So it needs a battery and it needs all this and that. So, like, you're probably getting something of potentially better value. But I think that, like, home view aside, whether you want that product or not, I agree.
Speaker 3:It's probably the least exciting Apple launch in recent memory for me.
Speaker 2:In decades?
Speaker 3:In a while. But I like the strategy. Like, think I think they're actually starting to crack like, okay, we have a doorbell, a thermostat, camera, and few other...
Speaker 2:Partnering with LG does not count as having a...
Speaker 3:It does if it works as well as an Apple product. If it works like Beats where, like, it's actually
Speaker 2:But what are they what are they... Like, either either take the category seriously and deliver
Speaker 3:an amazing product Buy Sonos. Buy a
Speaker 2:bunch of You're telling me Apple can't make, like, a doorbell?
Speaker 3:They don't know how.
Speaker 2:Don't know how. They literally don't know don't how. Know how anymore.
Speaker 3:I don't know. Is it intellectual property? Why don't they just buy a doorbell or build one?
Speaker 2:Who knows? But I I like... I would be the biggest fan of them actually taking the category seriously and going all in and making something that would was amazing enough that you would wanna rip out whatever you had in your home.
Speaker 3:Okay. So...
Speaker 2:But it doesn't seem like they
Speaker 3:Let me give have you four options for a theoretical smart home. You can put them in a tier tier list. Everything must be a tier list. Okay. So the first option is going the the the cornerstone of your...
Speaker 3:The the the first option is just chaos. The first option is just you get whatever. Somebody gives you an Amazon Echo, it goes on the countertop, you got an Amazon Echo. Then you buy a Nest Thermostat, you got Google over there. Then you got an iPhone in your pocket, you got an iPad over here.
Speaker 3:It's just chaos. It's just random. What where does that sit for you tier tier wise? That That's b tier?
Speaker 2:B tier.
Speaker 3:B tier. That's not so bad. You like
Speaker 2:the Obviously, whatever is below f.
Speaker 3:Below... Okay. F tier is the chaos mode. Random chaos. Okay.
Speaker 3:Now, let's let's do... You're going all in on Google. You get the Google Nest Thermostat and then you have to go get whatever their their Google Nest home thing is and you you can't have a home view. You can't have an Apple HomePod speaker system. You're you're buying from Google when you want an IoT thing in your house.
Speaker 3:You got the Google lock.
Speaker 2:A tier.
Speaker 3:A tier. Okay. Even though you carry an iPhone, you like the all Google products. Now, Amazon. You get the ring camera.
Speaker 3:You can get the little drone that flies around your house. You know that one? They have a drone Yeah. That is like for home defense inside. That's a plus.
Speaker 3:You get Amazon Echo though. So you're talking to Rufus a lot. How are you feeling about the Amazon ecosystem? Where does that go? We're getting the dog sound effects.
Speaker 2:S tier.
Speaker 3:S tier.
Speaker 5:S tier.
Speaker 3:For Amazon. Okay. And then the last one is Apple. Apple, you already carry an iPhone. But you're going all in on Apple and that means an LG lock.
Speaker 3:You don't get a ring camera. You get an LG. You get a thermostat. You're not getting Nest. You're getting the LG.
Speaker 3:But it all connects to home home
Speaker 2:kit. Signing up for global spy services.
Speaker 3:It's all global spy services. It's all global. They're all global spy services. Apple is maybe the least We
Speaker 2:just spent twenty minutes talking about how LG is absolutely the worst.
Speaker 3:LG is the worst, but Apple's the best, and so it averages out to, like, Google and Amazon quality in my opinion.
Speaker 2:That's a good point.
Speaker 3:Right? That's
Speaker 2:actually a good point.
Speaker 3:And and since Apple Apple came, they brought their sterling reputation, crystal clear messaging, and they said data is encrypted end to end in Apple Home. So your your your voice, your your secretly recorded voice is encrypted, and then it's transferred to the data broker who unencrypted for him now. No. It is encrypted. I I have faith in Apple security.
Speaker 3:But but how do you feel? I don't wanna influence you too much.
Speaker 2:Trey says Apple LG is Hublotier. Hublotier. Shots fired.
Speaker 3:Oh, no. Xiaomi is the real spy server.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Alright. So Amazon... Actually pull Amazon down into a tier.
Speaker 3:A tier?
Speaker 2:And... Can't believe you'd be an actual guy. A fully analog home... Is s Okay.
Speaker 3:Fully analog, no devices. The WiFi goes off at bedtime.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:Light switches. Light switches.
Speaker 3:To living the old way. Doorbells. Yeah. Light switches, actual doorbells.
Speaker 2:Home security on film.
Speaker 3:A cuckoo clock
Speaker 2:to
Speaker 3:tell you what
Speaker 2:Yes. Time it
Speaker 3:the... I completely agree with you. A grandfather clock. Maybe a cuckoo clock and a grandfather clock. Yep.
Speaker 3:Yes. This is the actual correct thing. I think the fact that that's s tier every... Google and Amazon need to move down to b tier. They cannot be that close to fully analog.
Speaker 3:Right? Doesn't that feel more accurate?
Speaker 2:No. Think
Speaker 3:you're But now, final question. Apple LG, spyware meets privacy company. The best of both worlds. Where are you putting it? Is it better than Google and Amazon?
Speaker 3:You would go Google or Amazon over Apple and LG?
Speaker 2:I I like... I wanna buy American here even if it's made overseas.
Speaker 3:Which one does that mean?
Speaker 2:Google Google, Amazon.
Speaker 3:Wait. They're all made in China. Literally, every company makes everything in China. What are you talking about?
Speaker 2:Isn't isn't l...
Speaker 3:Life's good. LG. I I think that's fake news, actually. LG. They're all they're all made abroad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. LG is a South Korean multinational.
Speaker 3:That manufactures in China. Of course. I'm pretty sure they sold Of course. TV fans. They sold the windshield to China.
Speaker 2:I'm going No. I'm going... I'll I'll give them one up from Random Chaos.
Speaker 3:You you would go Google Home, Nest Thermostat, Amazon Echo, and Rufus over the thing that's on your phone that you carry everywhere.
Speaker 2:I just don't see the... It's like the the the most mid collab of all time. Okay. Apple and LG. Apple Home Products and LG.
Speaker 3:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:That's horrible.
Speaker 3:It's horrible.
Speaker 2:I'd rather stay... I'd rather keep
Speaker 3:it in Camber Console.... Electric. Or
Speaker 2:keep it in the Google family....
Speaker 3:In mix. So you got that too. I don't know.
Speaker 2:And fully analog, you also have cans with string.
Speaker 3:Yes. That's a good one. Instead of an intercom system that electricity.
Speaker 2:Like if you have... If somebody's like at at... Like if you have a a gate outside your house and someone's at the gate like Yeah. To deliver something and you can just talk to them through through the Yeah. Through the can and it'll run through the string.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The audio's crisp.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Okay. I I have the A tier suggestion. I think A tier is is somewhat random chaos but puppeteered by your agent your AI agent. Because I do think that there are specific products that are better.
Speaker 3:But if you bring them all together in one interface that you control, I think that that will be within time people will be like, yeah, just talked to Chewy GPT and it goes and writes an API binding to Google's
Speaker 2:You know what Apple could do to win me over? What? Dirt says a laundry chute. If Apple came out with the Apple Home View smart laundry chute.
Speaker 3:Okay. What what is smart about it?
Speaker 2:It use... It has a Palantir integration to track Okay. Your laundry.
Speaker 3:It could do biosecurity and see if you've been infected with a bioweapon. Yeah. Could scan your clothes way down. It could also it could also be running a constant inventory of your clothing and the value of your clothing on the secondary market to see if you've lost money or gained money on the rare pieces of ChromeHards that you've been collecting. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So as you take off your Chrome Heart, your head to toe Rick Owens in Chrome Heart's outfit at the end of the day, you throw it down your smart laundry chute and it looks on Vinted for what the value is. Is that what Vinted does? I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 3:Okay. Yeah. It goes on Vinted and says, you you just gained $500 in market value on this outfit today.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 3:Maybe that's the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What would be the ideal home product collab? Could it be like a Monster Energy GoPro collaboration? Mhmm. Like, you're talking about Apple and LG, I think you've gotta expand into other Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Other consumer electronic Okay. Brands and and just imagine what what a GoPro Monster Energy Yeah.
Speaker 3:So it's like a fridge that has a GoPro inside. And if you're out of Monster Energy, it orders more. Yep. So you're always in stock. Yep.
Speaker 3:That seems completely reasonable.
Speaker 7:Yep.
Speaker 3:I love it. Anyway, very very fun. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing, for those who take it seriously, invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public. I got a fun business idea, a way to make a little extra money this Halloween.
Speaker 3:So with the power of artificial intelligence, it's easier than ever to file a lawsuit. So here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna go to popular places where trick or treaters are. You're gonna find the kids that have handmade costumes from characters that are not in the public domain yet. So Iron Man, that's still Disney intellectual property.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:So you show up and you act like you're doing one of those TikTok like man on the street, oh, I love your costume.
Speaker 2:Serve the match.
Speaker 3:Is it homemade? And they're like, yeah, did make it myself. I didn't buy this. I didn't pay the royalty. And you get their name and then you generate a lawsuit and you say, like, I'm I'm here to serve you with intellectual property theft small claims lawsuit.
Speaker 2:So John, LG actually makes a pocket photo printer. Really? And so why not generate the lawsuit on the fly and print
Speaker 3:it. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Serve them. Serve the parents.
Speaker 3:Serve them. Right? Yeah. And so then they're gonna be, oh no, I don't I don't wanna get sued. You know, do you work for Disney?
Speaker 3:And you have to be like, oh, don't worry about that. And then so then you you you offer to settle the lawsuit on the street over Venmo or something. Wildly illegal. But then there's a second step. So once you have all of these, you know, adorable kids with their homemade, but intellectual property infringing
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Costumes, You go to the studios. You take the meeting with Disney and you say, look what I've done. I've found so many instances of intellectual property infringement. We can clean up here. And they're going look at you like, are you insane?
Speaker 3:You're going to ruin our brand. Homemade costumes are the lifeblood of our fandom. If this gets out, it will destroy our brand. We will look like an evil corporation. And then you'll say, yeah.
Speaker 3:It'd be a shame if this got out. Let's settle. Over Venmo. So you can Venmo me to make this go away. I won't release the footage of lawsuits for the kids who are wearing Kinda sit...
Speaker 3:Intellectually properly. Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:You got got them pinned over here.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Easy money this Halloween. Yeah. Couple extra bucks for you if you're trying to be entrepreneurial. Anyway, let me tell you
Speaker 2:about Shopify. The beautiful mind.
Speaker 3:Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents. There was something else that I wanted to talk about but we can run through some other stuff. Let's see. Oh yeah. The...
Speaker 3:Oh, the other thing with the IOT discussion is just like Anthropic is warning that rogue AI agents may self replicate hijack everyday devices. Like they did some studies that show that inference can run on commodity hardware. Think like a PlayStation, an Xbox, even a doorbell. It'll be really slow, but it could potentially self replicate. So it's another vector of like, you might not think security is important.
Speaker 3:You might only think like the Neo Cloud, the GPU cluster is important. But the Financial Times put it in a very funny way, very different language from what Anthropics said. They said self replicating AI worms will be able to hijack smart homes, Anthropics said. So, yeah, maybe the analog home is the future. Maybe you do need to have no smart doorbells because it'll just be ringing doorbells constantly trying to communicate with the other agents and swarm or something.
Speaker 3:Who knows? The other funny thing today is that KKR bought the front of The Wall Street Journal. They stole the windshield. They stole the windshield. I go to open up The Wall Street Journal today and the entire front page is just a full page ad for KKR's fiftieth anniversary.
Speaker 3:It's a beautiful ad. It says people are counting on us. We say it every day at KKR because behind every investment are people counting on what comes next. A teacher counting on her pension. An investor building for the future.
Speaker 3:A portfolio company employee sharing in the value they create. A business shaping its next chapter for nearly fifty years. That responsibility has shaped how we invest. And they go on to talk about what they do at KKR. So happy birthday to KKR.
Speaker 3:Very exciting. What a better what a great way to celebrate fifty years in business, the business of private equity, than with a full paid spread in in The Wall Street Journal. Course, there is a real full first page that that appears be behind the the front page ad. But I thought that was a funny ad unit. Underutilized.
Speaker 3:More people should be running the full page Wall Street Journal ad. But there's a whole bunch of other stories. Anyway, I thought that was just a funny funny way to advertise your fiftieth...
Speaker 2:That they also have another ad. They still have the normal ad on the back of...
Speaker 3:Oh, the... You know, in inside?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's a full wrapper.
Speaker 2:Blanketing ad.
Speaker 3:It's the it's the front of the journal and it looks like the front of the journal. So when you go and you pick this up from a new stand, it will look like this. And then the back is a KKR ad, then on the inside, you get the full grade spread.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 3:Beautiful. So, yeah. Somebody in your life turning 50, what a better way to celebrate than this?
Speaker 2:I like it.
Speaker 3:I can't think of something.
Speaker 2:What's going on over Xbox? Xbox.
Speaker 3:They started a lab to lean into vibe coding and decompiled games. They recognize that it's good for players, but it might challenge the business model. But they're in a unique position being owned by Microsoft to potentially change their business model and not be so reliant on quarterly earnings. And so, Asha Sharma over at Xbox is winning accolades. A lot of love on the timeline for her.
Speaker 3:So she said, today, we're standing up Xbox Labs. Labs.xbox.com. And you should pull up the website because it's very, cool design showing all the different Xbox intellectual property and some fun things that you can like click buttons to change the style. But she sent this note to the team. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Look at this, Jordy. And then click the different... Not the email sign up, but at the bottom there's like keys that you can click. You can click like, yeah, you can make it dark mode, light mode, color, black and white, green and you can cycle through all these things. It's a pretty cool design and it looks like you can like draw on it and stuff.
Speaker 3:It's fun. The first video games emerged some seventy five years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them and best of all, more people playing than ever. That growth has made Xbox what it is today. In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally intended to support.
Speaker 3:Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple silicon, ported to run inside of a web browser using WebAssembly. But perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another. We saw this with Call of Duty and Minecraft. Right? These experiments challenge how long held assumptions about our industry.
Speaker 3:The tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play and how people discover and experience games. While it's hard to predict the future, it's easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access. So these are unmistakably good outcomes for players even when they challenge our existing business models. To explore these possibilities, they stood up Xbox Labs, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job it is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn what from what people can do.
Speaker 3:And so people are excited. John Palmer said, if Xbox launched an official version of decompiled Halo with a Forge mode and a marketplace slash discovery of mods akin to how Roblox works, they would make $1,000,000,000,000. Okay. Maybe a little hyperbolic since you can do a lot of these mods for free, but it is it is very interesting that they're at this threshold of do you wanna completely burn down the old business model in favor of something new? Or do you wanna try and fight it out and squeeze the the last egg out of the golden goose that is the traditional model?
Speaker 3:I don't know. Well, there's a deep dive on on GTA six in Bloomberg. It's pretty fun. Should we go through Read
Speaker 2:the highlights.
Speaker 3:Let's read the highlights. GTA six has been in development for eight years. I thought it was longer. I thought they started it like right after GTA five, but I guess it's only been eight years. It's still a really long time.
Speaker 3:The original version included large areas of North And South America, but the scope was eventually reduced to Vice City, Miami, and its surrounding regions. Rockstar initially planned to develop GTA six alongside Red Dead Redemption two, but RDR two required most of the company's resources, delaying GTA six's development. Rockstar shifted from developing multiple games simultaneously to focusing most of its workforce on one major game. Rockstar's workforce nearly doubled growing from 2,441 employees in 2018 to 4,711 in 2026 spread across 12 offices. Rockstar's three heads of development has three heads of development.
Speaker 3:The game's basic story was established by 2019. Wow. They locked the story seven years ago. That's crazy. Crazy.
Speaker 3:I mean, probably iterated a bunch, but pretty pretty cool how much they worked on this. The developers experienced a difficult early development phase described as a dark period when the game's overall vision remained unclear. By 2022, though, enough of the game system had come together for developers to begin seeing the complete vision. GTA VI features Rockstar's most realistic and detailed open world yet, heavily on systems introduced in Red Dead Redemption two. They invested heavily in making NPCs feel believable rather than simply populating the world with generic characters.
Speaker 3:The developers struggled to balance realism and entertainment debating how interactive everyday activities should be such as purchasing drinks or preparing food. Jason and Luca... Lucia can spend time together throughout the open world rather than interacting only during scripted missions. Very fun. There's a whole bunch more.
Speaker 3:Wow. There are so many so many takeaways. This this synth potato thread is really, really long. Anyway, thanks, I'm excited to play when it comes out. Also, Xbox introduced a new controller, the Xbox Nano controller for $49.99.
Speaker 3:The controller works on Xbox consoles, Windows PCs, mobile devices, and TVs.
Speaker 2:This looks like it's for casuals?
Speaker 3:It It's for casuals.
Speaker 2:And I'm a casual. I'm potentially the most casual player. And even I look at this and I think, no, it's not... I don't know if that's for
Speaker 3:me. Okay. Well, I'm sure people will hack this to work with everything and probably run everything as well. I saw I saw some people vibe coding different controllers. There's a Star Wars pod racing game and some had really sweet controls that mimicked the actual movie pretty effectively.
Speaker 3:Whatever your vibe coding, do it with Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, where you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. A Brooklyn store employee prevented Kelly Clarkson from buying an animatronic bird and the post hit the timeline like a thermonuclear explosion. Did you follow this?
Speaker 3:You said you were getting a lot of fake news. We have a truth nerd coming in.
Speaker 2:Uh-uh. I have no idea what happened here other than what you've already told me.
Speaker 3:It's pretty aggressive. That's still not fast enough. Still not my tempo. So, Pablo Torre actually went and did a deep dive on this. I don't know where we should start, but it's a it's a it's a pretty wild wild story.
Speaker 3:So Kelly Clarkson started with a post on October 10 that kind of put this on the timeline. So she said, just drove all the way to Brooklyn to check out this store I thought looked really rad and had a few things in mind to buy and literally was looked at as if I couldn't afford it and was told he could find something comparable for me. Wow, dude. You're an idiot and just lost a huge sale. But y'all should go check out Art of Play in Brooklyn and she name drops them.
Speaker 3:If you enjoy being treated like Julia like Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman, for sure check it out. Thumbs down. And Eliano from Palantir says, Kelly, you would never be treated this way in the Palantir pop up shop in Seoul, South Korea. That's very funny. And so, Art of Play fired back.
Speaker 3:They said, yesterday Kelly Clarkson visited us in Brooklyn and inquired about buying Molly, a one of a kind singing and dancing bird automaton who plays an important role in the magic shows we host here. Molly is permanently attached to the wall and isn't for sale. However, the negative experience Kelly described on Twitter would resonate with anyone who has felt judged in a shop. At Art of Play, whether someone comes in to make a purchase or simply look around for a while, they are equally welcome. We greet everyone who walks in the door with the invitation to pick things up and play, and they do.
Speaker 3:Many stay for hours enjoying our puzzles, games, and toys. Imagine our surprise when our small local business was suddenly attacked by 8,000,000 people who have never visited our store. Yeah. They're getting review bombed and like a lot of a lot of negative messages. It's been a surreal experience to be the focus of such widespread outage...
Speaker 3:Outrage after just one mention by a celebrity. Thanks to all our friends for their support, and welcome to all the curious folks who have discovered us amidst the drama. We're gonna keep our heads down, and hopefully, we can clear things up with Kelly someday. As a talented popular singer once said, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Clever response.
Speaker 3:Hot take. I think if you go in a store, everything should be for sale. I think you should be able to buy the point of sale system. If I want that square reader, you got to sell it to me. Now, it's gonna...
Speaker 3:Might cost me a pretty penny. Yeah. Because what happens if I buy your Toast device? You're gonna be out of business for that day. It might take you a couple days.
Speaker 3:That's lost revenue. That's lost profit. Yeah. I want you to build a discounted cash flow analysis. Think about all the different inputs.
Speaker 3:It's not just that you're gonna be offline not taking any revenue in, not earning that margin over the days while you're waiting for your next Toast reader to come in the mail. You also might suffer brand damage. You might be closed on a day that you're not and your your vast customers might be upset. All of that is quantifiable. Put it in the spreadsheet, discount it with a cost capital, and get me a number.
Speaker 3:I want to be able to buy it if I want to buy the chairs. It's always number. The countertops, the ceiling tiles. I should be able to buy anything when I go in a store whether or not it's something that people normally buy. Let me tell you a story.
Speaker 2:More simple solution What? From Alexander in the next chat. Just don't go to Brooklyn.
Speaker 3:That works too. Let me tell you a story. I had a buddy from the old country. He was from Eastern Europe, Middle Eastern area. He said, oh, man.
Speaker 3:Clubs are different. Very opposite side of the world. Okay? And he said, oh, man. Like clubs where I come from are very different.
Speaker 3:You can do anything in the clubs. And I'm like, okay, what? And he's like, like bottle service? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:They'll they'll bring out bottle service with sparklers. And he's like, but they go further. There's one club that will allow you to burn the club down. And I was like, oh, what does that mean? Like you can just go crazy and like have the bottle spraying everywhere?
Speaker 3:He's like, no. You can literally burn the club down. They have figured out how much it costs to rebuild the club from the ground up. So if you have the money, at the end of the night, they will evacuate the building and you can start a fire that burns the club to the ground. And it's gonna cost you a ton of money because the club's gonna be out of business for six months while they rebuild.
Speaker 3:But they have thought of that and they have priced it and it's an option.
Speaker 2:It's on the menu.
Speaker 3:And this is the way business should be done.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? I agree.
Speaker 3:Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlocks seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Pablo Torre has gotten to the bottom of the Kelly Clarkson bird story. He got the camera footage from the security camera footage for the bird encounter.
Speaker 3:It it's a pretty busy
Speaker 4:A large journalistic moment.
Speaker 3:Sports head to the at the moment. It's actually sort of hard to tell. I didn't come away being like, this is really bad on one side or another. I don't know if I just didn't watch the video closely enough. Do you have a take on this or are you okay?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I don't understand why this is a story at all.
Speaker 3:Well, it's a story fundamentally about humanoid robotics and robotics. Because because she's buying a bird automaton. This is AI demand. This is demand for artificial intelligence. I I insist that animatronics should be included in the artificial intelligence boom.
Speaker 3:You go to Walt Disney World and you see it's a small world, you're looking at AI. Yeah. You're welcome. You're
Speaker 2:welcome. Agreed.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. I think people just like it because she's such a big celebrity and she's, know, sort of having this like, you know, minor conflict with this local store And they're going back and forth and going and and and, you know, trading trading shots across the across the Internet. I thought the bird was $5,000. Now, it's allegedly $15,000.
Speaker 3:But it's pretty cool bird. Have you actually seen the video?
Speaker 2:No. It's awesome. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:I haven't. I still am not...
Speaker 3:It has a bunch of wires. It has a bunch of wires and it actually dances around. It looks it looks incredibly accurate and it sings. It's fun. And you crank it.
Speaker 3:It's it's the original IoT. It's the solution. This is There
Speaker 2:you go.
Speaker 3:This is for your your
Speaker 2:There you
Speaker 3:bird song. You're not gonna get a little speaker that plays a cute little noise. You need an animatronic bird. She said, she she literally just put Apple...
Speaker 2:Do you think she was trying to build like a cuckoo clock? Was trying to
Speaker 3:go analog. You think
Speaker 2:she was trying to build an analog cuckoo clock?
Speaker 3:Maybe. It's basically that. Yeah. It's basically... But I guess you have to crank it, so it's timed up.
Speaker 2:Have you have you gotten any cold emails lately?
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 2:No? No. Powerful. I've been getting a lot of cold emails, AI cold emails. Ryan Hoover describes one that he received.
Speaker 2:Hi, Ryan. I saw your podcast interview from 2016. You talked about your morning routine at Phil's Coffee, an Investments in Deal, Mind Bloom and Passport. Well, we're building instinct for cats.
Speaker 3:Is that real?
Speaker 2:No. I've actually been getting emails that are formatted like this. Oh, interesting. The format is basically like, show the recipient that you've done your research on them. And then it just so it's like states a bunch of random facts.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Like clearly pulling from LinkedIn and Yeah. And you know, media and all these things. Maybe email. And then and then just like serves up just like something completely...
Speaker 2:Effectively completely unrelated. But it's like, okay.
Speaker 3:Should we become physical mail guys? Just get PO boxes and just give people that if they ask?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then you just like send me a letter. Send a calendar invite Send a letter. To my physical address.
Speaker 3:No. Just write me a letter and I'll see is the wax stamp legit. If it's not, I'm not really opening it. I want it to be embossed with your seal. And then I will open it at a time that's convenient for me.
Speaker 3:Perhaps on a on a Sunday evening with a with a cup of hot cocoa by the fire, by the hearth. This is the way to communicate in the future. You can't be getting you can't be getting cold email slop. That's not... That that's that's gonna make me churn from email.
Speaker 3:I'm just gonna turn off email
Speaker 12:Yep.
Speaker 3:If this is what's
Speaker 2:So gonna
Speaker 3:back to papers. Back to letters. Anyway, we
Speaker 2:have I think we're way I think we're way over. Yeah. Way over. It's time to bring in our first From Fragment. Of the show.
Speaker 2:The co founder of the Dear friend.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:There he is.
Speaker 3:How are you doing?
Speaker 6:Good luck, guys.
Speaker 2:What's up, dude? It's only been a few years. It's great to see your face.
Speaker 6:You too. Looking good, Jordy.
Speaker 2:Looking good. So
Speaker 3:you two know each other, but I don't know if the audience does. So why don't you kick it off with an introduction?
Speaker 6:Me or Jordy?
Speaker 3:Yes. You, the guest. Tell the audience.
Speaker 6:Honestly, they're guest. We... Ran a company called Party Round back in the day, and I had a company called Cove. Cove was a... Kind of like a...
Speaker 6:An automated fund admin for private investments. And we took on the task of administrating Party Round's deals.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Yes.
Speaker 3:Cool.
Speaker 6:Well, along the way, we are actually... So Party Round was one of them, but we we administrated a bunch of real estate deals and private equity deals. Mhmm. And that's... Doing that with two people was was a pain...
Speaker 6:A super big pain, and that is the catalyst for building Fragment.
Speaker 2:Alright. So catch us up to speed. You go from from Cove, it evolves into Fragment. You raise, if I remember correctly, a seed round from from Stripe. Was this in 2022 or or maybe 2021?
Speaker 6:We raised a a pre seed from from, from Box Group
Speaker 11:and then a
Speaker 6:seed from Stripe. Yep.
Speaker 2:There you go. And then, yeah, catch us up to speed on the last on the last couple years.
Speaker 6:We we built a ledger API, which is basically a system of record for fintech companies. And fintech companies built all of the products that run those companies on this system of record. So companies like WAP and Ramp and build.com run on that infrastructure. And over the course of the last six months or so, we saw that those those those folks were really pushing the system with different types of transactions and these adjective transactions. So they were using the system...
Speaker 6:Using agents to actually run a lot of the back office work for these fintech companies. And so we started following those that track very closely and have built now a financial system that's purpose built for agents and just announced a funding round with with First Mark.
Speaker 2:John, why don't you hit the gong as hard as you possibly can?
Speaker 3:Would love to.
Speaker 2:And I have some follow-up questions.
Speaker 1:I would love to. Bang.
Speaker 2:Oh. And it shook shook the room. Alright. So go... I I I would love if you could get more specific around how this actually works today and how you think it'll work in the future because we've been getting agentic...
Speaker 2:Various like agentic payments pitches for a while now, and none none of them have been that compelling, at least to me. What I'm not hearing you say is like we're gonna we're gonna replace Stripe because Stripe couldn't possibly be good at at at at moving money. It's more... It's like a different layer of the stack. Is that is that right?
Speaker 3:I I mean, I... The... All the sustaining innovation pitches that I've heard have been like a 100% I'm on board. Like Stripe saying, like, yeah, agents are gonna be moving money over Stripe rails. I'm, like, I'm in.
Speaker 3:Plaid, I... You know, I've I've I've used Plaid in Chatuchiki to authenticate a bunch of bank accounts. It's great.
Speaker 2:Or even with personal agents, the the the most compelling pitch on how they're gonna make money Generally, short a term is like, yeah, interchange fees. Yep. But but you're talking about working with these enterprise companies that are using agents to, like, basically run processes on the back end and then update a ledger, trigger payments, things like that.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we wanna automate commerce.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And we're gonna do that by outsourcing the the work of finance to agents. And agents can't really do that work by operating all of these sort of human operated financial systems. Why? Well, so to automate commerce, you kinda need to know what commerce is. Commerce is a set of of promises.
Speaker 6:It's it's like these instructions for who owes what, to whom, when Mhmm. And money money is the system that settles them. And so where do these where do these instructions exist? Well, in b two b, they're, like, contract terms. They're they're buried in PDFs and docs and whatnot.
Speaker 6:And what what do those terms include? Well, they're they're like invoicing terms, and SLAs, and payment terms, and refunding, and return rules, and billing, and accounting rules. And in existing... In in traditional commerce, those instructions for settling them are are distributed across all these different systems. And that makes it really hard if you're an agent to go across all these systems and and and settle.
Speaker 6:Each system sort of has a portion of the story, and each system plays its own part. And humans sort of carry the context across them. And it's that human bit where the humans are are are part of that story that, you know, once transactions exponentiate, creates economic strain. That's... That that creates a problem.
Speaker 3:Is that true? I'm I'm so confused about, like, agents can't go across different systems because it feels like the narrative over the last couple months has been, like, the agents are in too many systems. Like, it's, like, the opposite. It's, like, like they're reading PDFs they shouldn't read, and they're in the system that they weren't even supposed to be in. It feels like agents are, like, really good at, like, reading rules and then, like, interacting with different systems, like writing API code on the fly, using MCP, using computer use.
Speaker 3:Like, I I I understand that, like, there's a lot of problems with that, but it feels like it's, like, firmly in the path. But I still think there's, like, a lot of value here. But I'm wondering, like, like, how does the how does the company interface with, like, the model capabilities getting better? So
Speaker 6:the model capabilities are gonna get better at intelligence and reasoning. Mhmm. The modeling capabilities are a little bit less likely to get better at the deterministic stuff that are the rules of money and variants and the instructions that exist in these contracts.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 6:So it... Let's just like take take an example. If if you're an agent and you are trying to, like, disperse a claim, for example, an insurance claim, well, one system is gonna have the the balance for the claim. Another system will have, like, what's already been paid. Another system will have what you've accounted for.
Speaker 6:All these rules exist in different systems.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 6:And the... In order for the agent to know what to disperse or what to account for, it doesn't have a... It doesn't have all the context. It doesn't have a a clean view of the instructions across all of these different systems. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So you're basically telling an agent to go into each of these system and operate the flow that the that the the application prescribes. What we want to do is let the agent go nuts. Like, let them actually... Let them let them let them be intelligent. We're going to constrain them from doing anything stupid, but we want them to be intelligent so that they can refund what they need to.
Speaker 6:If... When you're solving a problem, you you need to refund what you need. You want account for the the way the the deal is supposed to be accounted for. You want to pay maybe a little bit now and a little later on. You might want to use credits.
Speaker 6:There's all these different ways that you're going to Sure. Sure. Easily solve the problem.
Speaker 3:Very cool. Yeah. That's...
Speaker 2:Put it more simply, like, there's a lot of stuff with money that you want to be deterministic. Is that is that another way to think about it? And like have...
Speaker 6:Yeah. You want the agent.
Speaker 2:You don't want the model like reasoning through... You want it to be reasoning through like maybe like certain parts of the process but not...
Speaker 3:And probably not every Yeah. Time. Like you don't necessarily want your... Like every time you you you get a transaction on your e commerce site, you don't want like, you know, GPT six pro to like figure out if it's the right amount of money. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's like, just use a calculator. Right?
Speaker 6:Well well, you want the agent to take the rules out of all these contracts.
Speaker 3:Yep. The
Speaker 6:the the rules in these contracts are what programs the money.
Speaker 3:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 6:So you take the rules from all these contracts Yeah. You put it next to the balances that those rules need to update
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 6:And now you have now you have programmable money. And the agent will execute the... Those rules and update those balances accordingly. Yeah. That's that's that's the system we're building.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. That's very cool. Awesome. Well,
Speaker 2:thank you. You hiring anybody?
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Got a bunch
Speaker 3:of new...
Speaker 2:No. Got a bunch of money? Where are you guys building the team these days?
Speaker 6:We're in New York. We are hiring like crazy go to market folks, Yeah....
Speaker 2:Anyone.
Speaker 3:Very cool. Crushing it too. Yeah. New York is New York is crushing it. It's been it's been awesome to watch.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you so much for coming on the Great
Speaker 2:to get the update, dude.
Speaker 3:Have a great rest your day. Congrats. And we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Alright. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guest, Danielle Jane, here with us in person in the studio.
Speaker 3:When you spend as much money as Airwon... As at Erawan as Jordy does, they send down the chief growth officer to check-in... Is that what's going on?
Speaker 5:Brought you guys some personal gifts too. There we go. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There we go. Nice hat. This is a nice nice material.
Speaker 3:But yes, introduce yourself and...
Speaker 5:Good to meet you guys.
Speaker 2:I'm pulling up my app right now.
Speaker 5:I already looked you up before coming in here. Don't worry. You're up there.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I've never met anyone that can pull up the app. Yeah.
Speaker 5:You're up there.
Speaker 3:I there's a whole slide on him in the board meeting.
Speaker 5:There is. There is. It's like,
Speaker 3:let's project out Jordy. What does that do for...
Speaker 5:I also thought of the whole conversation where everyone thinks they're the top spender at Air One and no one's ever even remotely close to being the top spender
Speaker 3:Okay. At Air
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's part of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. That's funny. I'm just saying I've never met any... I've never gone app for app with anyone.
Speaker 3:That's hilarious. But yeah, introduce yourself. Yeah. Talk about the day to day.
Speaker 5:Talk about
Speaker 3:the challenges and the...
Speaker 5:Chief Growth Officer of Air One. Yeah. If you don't know... If you're not from LA, you may not know what it is. Some people probably do.
Speaker 5:We're a chain of grocery stores at its core. We've got 14 stores across the Los Angeles market today. Yeah. We are premium in everything we do. We're top of the market in terms of the brand, the food, the store build outs, the retail experience and we just try to push the bounds in everything retail and food and beverage.
Speaker 5:Been there eight years. It's been a ride. I worked in the back of a grocery store when I started.
Speaker 2:No way. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I went from the Beverly Hills private equity world to going in the back of the dairy cooler at The Grove to my office.
Speaker 3:That's cool.
Speaker 5:And we've grown up. Did
Speaker 2:you like get a bunch... Like, how did how did that series of events happen? Because you were just going in for lunch I was every day playing a
Speaker 11:great job.
Speaker 2:Seeing the guys seeing
Speaker 5:the guys... No. And the truth of it is I was I was in the private equity world for a long time Yeah. And wanted to transition and learn how to run a business. Wanted to be a GM one day and I met everyone...
Speaker 3:So you wanted like true operations?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Met I met people in UNLA and I got very lucky to meet our owner and CEO, Tony
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Who was looking to bring someone on to help him grow. Yeah. And we're still a family owned business but we were a much more mom and pop business back then. We only had four stores, no corporate offices. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And we've just grown since then.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What's... What is the overarching thesis on 15 stores in one Fourteen. Region? 14 stores in one region?
Speaker 3:I guess the fifteenth store opened in Thousand Oaks?
Speaker 5:That might have been 14.
Speaker 3:I guess.
Speaker 5:Palisades closed its reopening, So
Speaker 3:anyway, All the stores write in one Yeah. Mentality. What's the benefit? What what what's the thesis around expansion?
Speaker 5:We run out of a commissary model. Okay. That's the reason. Yeah. So we have a commissary kitchen in Downtown LA.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:We call
Speaker 5:it Air One Disneyland. Sure. It supports all of our stores. Okay. So any normal cafe Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Can't do what Air One can do without the support of a central kitchen.
Speaker 3:That makes sense.
Speaker 5:That allows us to do sort of this hub and smoke bottle and grow. Got it. Okay. And it lets us do what we do.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We've got to be really really big until you can do the second Yeah. Hub. Exactly. Because you can't jump one
Speaker 5:store in every key mode.
Speaker 3:Because there's world where it's like, yeah, there's one in San Francisco, one in Manhattan, but that wouldn't work.
Speaker 5:It doesn't work. It works for grocery stores. Yeah. It doesn't work for food.
Speaker 3:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 5:And the prepared foods will make everyone one, at least we think.
Speaker 3:Yeah. A 100%.
Speaker 5:We think about growth in terms of everywhere we can drive from our Comms or Kitchen. Yeah. So further south's in play, the Bay Area is in play. Yeah. As soon as everyone talks about Air One New York City, which would be a smashing hit, we know that.
Speaker 5:Yep. You got to have the supply chain to support it.
Speaker 3:Got it. Okay. Yeah. What is the what is the model for platforming or accelerating new and upstart brands? Like there was a there was a while ago where I believe maybe a decade ago or two decades ago before the Amazon acquisition, Whole Foods had like regional buying.
Speaker 3:So like, you could get in one Whole Foods, you could use that as a toehold as like a CPG company. Mhmm. And I'm interested in like, what role do you see Era One playing in being a curator, a taste maker, an important pillar in the growth story of modern CPG companies?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, it's it's been organic. But we are the top of funnel for every CPG brand or we try to Whole be. Foods was it at some point. I have a background in CPG before this and every brand wants to be in Erawan.
Speaker 5:Yep. We like to remind people you can't make a business on 15 stores. Yeah. You have to grow from there. Yep.
Speaker 5:But you can get the volume, the velocities that you can take in Erawan and prove that to other retailers, other investors,
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And it's happened organically. We just have a cache of bringing in the best and the newest and Yep. And knock on wood everyone wants to be in Air One without us having to go out and forge all those brands today.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 5:And it seems to work.
Speaker 3:What's the...
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the other thing that's notable is like I I know and I'm I'm sure there's multiple, but I know of one one SKU at Airwon, that's the number one SKU at Airwon and the number one SKU in its category on at at Amazon as Oh, interesting.
Speaker 9:Which one?
Speaker 2:So like think Salt and Stone.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 3:Do have
Speaker 2:a company? Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Just got bought.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Friends company.
Speaker 3:Oh, interesting. Yeah. What what what is the life cycle for a brand from first meeting to actually being on the shelf? Like, how quick is that? Is that years of of building a relationship?
Speaker 5:Could be
Speaker 9:two weeks.
Speaker 3:Two weeks.
Speaker 5:Could be two weeks.
Speaker 9:Woah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So we That's crazy. We try to operate very differently from the traditional grocery store and
Speaker 3:that Yeah.
Speaker 5:Allows us to be fast.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So Whole Foods, you know, Sprouts, six month category reviews, they cut in new products.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:We're reviewing products every Thursday
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:The office.
Speaker 5:And we're reviewing categories on the Wow. And we can self distribute and bring them into our distribution center. We can go through distributors we already have. Yeah. And allows the brand to get on shelf really quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And how how quickly do you know if something's gonna work?
Speaker 5:Couple months.
Speaker 2:Really? Couple months.
Speaker 5:And it's hard. I mean, getting into Air One is not the hard part. Selling at Air One is the hard part. Yeah. You guys have been there.
Speaker 5:Look at the beverage wall.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There's tons Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's a ton of stuff.
Speaker 2:No. Every every time I... Somebody every time somebody pitches me a beverage brand, say like, go to Air One and be honest with yourself when you are on this wall. Are you gonna do And and this mark... And Air Ones are I think a place where people are probably more inclined than ever to try something new because of that curation element and because like people are novelty seeking when they're when they're in in a narrow one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? They're like... They might go in and get their favorites but they also wanna try, I'm gonna get five things I've never had before.
Speaker 5:For sure.
Speaker 2:And... But be honest with yourself. Are you actually gonna win on that wall? Because it's like the most competitive market I
Speaker 5:take that beyond beverage. I mean, I'll take my air one hat off. If someone wants to start a CPG brand, say, don't do it. Like, it's incredibly competitive. It's really hard.
Speaker 5:Can see it from the inside angle.
Speaker 2:Know it's really hard.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What what have you learned about retention curves in like where we see with like software, you know, you you get somebody in, they might churn for a little bit, but then they become a weekly active user, then a daily active user, and this curve kind of smiles. What does success look like for a launch? Is it like really high conversion as soon as they're in and then some reasonable churn? Or how do you even think about Yeah.
Speaker 5:From a
Speaker 3:brand perspective. Like you're putting a new brand on the shelf. You know, it's been a couple weeks. You're moving quickly.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But then you need over three months or six months to see good turn data. But what is the shape of that turn data? What other metrics are you looking at?
Speaker 5:Yeah. The reality is the brands control the brand's performance at One.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 5:We we can't... They're on the shelf and it is what it
Speaker 3:is. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And brands will invest or not invest. They might be local, they might not be. Mhmm. Retention groups, we think about from the member perspective. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:There is a... Air One's a fascinating business for a lot of reasons. There is everything the customer sees and there's everything the customer doesn't doesn't see.
Speaker 9:Sure.
Speaker 5:And where me and my team focus on are all the things the customer doesn't see. Yeah. And talk about retention, like membership drives Air One. Yeah. Sales from members are well over half of our business.
Speaker 5:Okay. And that drives our entire business. We might try to be Costco one day where we're not a 100%, but we're close to a 100% membership The evolution of a customer at Airwon is they will come with a friend.
Speaker 2:And part of that, it's like, if you live near an Airwon and you're going even a couple times a month, it's hard to justify not getting a membership. Yes. Because it's actually really good. I mean, it's...
Speaker 11:But it
Speaker 5:starts way it starts way before You you will have never heard of it and someone will say, let's go get breakfast at a grocery store. And you'll say, why are we doing that? And you'll come get a breakfast burrito and it tastes good and you might come back and get a smoothie and it tastes good and you might come back the next time by yourself and get a couple things and on your third or fourth or fifth visit, you've bought the membership. Once you're a member, unless you leave LA, you are not leaving the membership program. Because like you said, you come once every week or two and it pays itself off.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So that's our evolution and we just launched the tiers program. You got it on your app where we're just getting people further and further into the cycle to keep them as long as we can.
Speaker 3:What's the thesis on celebrity collabs? Very unique, very interesting.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Are you ramping that up? How do they work?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So they... I would say the thesis is that's top of funnel. Yeah. They don't make or break the business from like a dollar's perspective at all.
Speaker 5:But you get a lot of eyeballs and you can leverage audiences that we may not have already.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It feels like it's you know, Hailey Bieber's smoothie was like globally relevant. It was like global news or at least national news.
Speaker 5:I mean that skew that in particular was Broke the Internet. Anomaly. Yeah. Like, they'll do h b s case studies on that Yep. Individual item.
Speaker 5:It... You could run businesses off of that item alone. Yep. But we run them every month. They're successful.
Speaker 5:They usually last thirty days. Yep. We leverage another audience. Then we've kind of built system and a process, we can just keep kind of going with them.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do you how do you think about balancing the in store experience for people that live in the area and are like DAUs or weekly active users versus the the most frustrating times I've had in store are like a summer weekend and it walks in and it feels like it's a tourist attraction.
Speaker 5:Beverly Hills?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Beverly Hills is crazy. Venice can get Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it ends up, you know, I might rage quit, you know. I might just walk out. And and I feel like that's a champagne problem. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like there's people traveling from around the world. They're like
Speaker 5:Or local.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Local, but also like, I'm in LA, I gotta go. This is like part of my stop.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Champagne problems for sure. Cannibalization is good for our stores. I will not go to Beverly Hills on the weekend. I won't go to Venice on the weekend and I work there. It's a terrible customer experience from my personal perspective.
Speaker 5:And so we... Our stores have theoretical limits of capacity and a good customer experience, we believe. And so we have lately infilled West the Hollywood store opened. It pulled away from Beverly Hills.
Speaker 3:Oh, sure.
Speaker 5:Believe it or not, Calabasas was our best store. We opened Thousand Oaks to pull away from there a little bit. Interesting. And it helps the overall experience to offset that whether you're a member or you're not or you're local or you're not Yeah. If you go into Beverly Hills and it's slammed in Canyon, it's just another spoke.
Speaker 5:Absolutely. Interesting. Yeah. And it helps fill that capacity.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. How how how have you guys thought about technology and like the consumer app experience over the years? I I felt like it actually took me a while to like even be... Use the app just because like my association with like a grocery store made an app.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was is so bad. Right? It's like, sorry, I'm not gonna download I'm not gonna download the Vons app. I'm just never gonna do it.
Speaker 2:Right? So eventually downloaded it and you guys ship a lot of updates. It's, you know, it feels like a startup is shipping it
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In a In a good way? Interesting way. In a good way. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:In the sense that like some stuff will break but it'll get fixed quickly. Yeah. And it's constantly improving and Yeah. Things like that.
Speaker 5:I appreciate that. We... I mean, feels like a fraud coming on a tech show working at a grocery store. But it's all built in house. So we operate a team of 10 folks and every piece of software you see, we built ourselves from the ground up.
Speaker 12:Yeah.
Speaker 5:We didn't have it before. We had a third party app and you... If you had it at the time, you'd probably agree.
Speaker 2:Dude, the app the app when I moved to LA It disgusting. It was so bad.
Speaker 5:Because this... Shut it down because the retail experience Oh, was
Speaker 2:yeah. It like... Was irs.gov level. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was And so like we put... In hindsight, it was like I actually had... You... When the the new app came around, I had pretty low trust level with it because I used to like with with Connor and and Sean, we'd all order breakfast burritos on that and the app was just like so horrific. It was it was so bad.
Speaker 2:But it got good. So you guys fixed
Speaker 5:it. Thank you.
Speaker 3:10 people seems like the right amount of... The the right size. Like it's it's a big enough team, but it's not overstaffed.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's a
Speaker 3:team, basically.
Speaker 5:It is. It's it's an internal tech software team with developers data engineers and and all of that. Mean, we're sitting on treasure troves of member transaction data Sure. Starting to layer into the app. And so we made a conscious decision that that app was terrible
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And we needed one that reflected our brand in our stores and we put in the time and the money and the effort to build it. And that's where we got. And and the numbers speak for themselves because Yeah. People that go on the app and shop omnichannel are Yeah. Not novel to air once.
Speaker 5:It's a
Speaker 3:lot of So
Speaker 4:you...
Speaker 3:10 people on technology or on the app, Who else is on your team? Who else sits in growth? Like what other disciplines Yeah. Fit under growth?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So our team, we define it as what are all the ways Air One can grow outside of opening new stores.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We will
Speaker 5:continue to open new stores and we are
Speaker 3:that's like an obvious way to grow.
Speaker 5:That's not because we have that. We're focused on everything else.
Speaker 3:So the function of growing.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And so what do we do? We do all things e commerce and digital. Yeah. And so that's the app, that's the website.
Speaker 5:We run a separate DTC Shopify site standalone that we're merging in nowcom. Oh, interesting. Okay. We built a data warehouse. We have data analytics.
Speaker 5:We just hired a data scientist to help our team to start churning through all the transaction data. We've got applied applied AI engineer who's internal tools using AI.
Speaker 3:What's the history?
Speaker 2:I should imagine your job is to apply AI to Airwon. It's fun.
Speaker 3:You're super intelligent with supermarkets. What what has the the the evolution of the journey of like third party delivery services just delivery been? Like I I saw this report that there's a secret network of In N Out delivery. Have you heard about this? That that there's like a...
Speaker 3:It's basically just like a WhatsApp group. Bootleg. Like like... So In N Out has turned down Right. DoorDash.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like you can't DoorDash In N
Speaker 5:Out. Correct.
Speaker 3:And that's a brand standard. They've decided to do that. But there's people that are like
Speaker 2:Life finds
Speaker 3:a I got another idea. Life finds a way. And so I'm wondering about the evolution of delivery, what's worked, what what you know, what have you learned along Yeah. The journey.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Every restaurant has to deal with it separately. In N Out might have done it from a capacity perspective
Speaker 3:Yeah. Potentially... Always a lineup.
Speaker 5:Always lineup. There's only so much throughput they can put to the kitchens. Yep. We we keep both. We have three p and one p.
Speaker 5:Okay. One p is what we're talking about.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 5:Three p is Uber and Postmates, we're exclusive to them. Okay. And we like to balance both. Uber is a marketing machine.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 5:We could turn it off, but they are bringing in net new customers to us
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 5:All day long. Yep. Maintain margin neutral on them because we mark up to offset the fees.
Speaker 3:And are they getting... I know most of those Uber customers getting like food and smoothies or are they doing like their full grocery
Speaker 2:shopping?
Speaker 5:Oh, super prepared foods.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:Most super foods. That makes sense. And then our app is our one p. Yep. We're margin neutral, but if you're a member, you're not getting points on this side.
Speaker 5:You're getting points on the app only. Yep. And so every member that shops digitally, I'm guessing you...
Speaker 3:Flows over.
Speaker 5:Oh, okay. And the... Can bring over here. Yeah. That's...
Speaker 5:And we keep this on for eyeballs and people coming into our system Yep. And then we use our marketing effort to transfer them over here. And as long as this experience is good, if not we think better than Uber Eats
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. We've got them. That's how we think about it.
Speaker 2:What is... Do you guys spend a lot of money on on traditional advertising? Zero. Yeah. Figured.
Speaker 2:Zero. Because the products really like... Air One has managed to like stay like in the conversation at least at a low level like perpetually Yeah. And it's... And it almost feels like it does.
Speaker 3:But I mean the obvious that marketing thing would be like buy an f one team. Right? Like if they got an F
Speaker 2:one team. It's on
Speaker 5:the road map.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm not saying you should run like D to C ads that's, you know, potentially low...
Speaker 5:But in all fairness, we've been in Southern California. Yeah. So when we go to market number two
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:There will have to be more
Speaker 3:Yeah. Outward marketing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It feels like you guys have exercised like insane self control around expansion.
Speaker 3:It's a family business. Like, this is always the story. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But but but still, it's like the amount of people that are like, when are you opening in New York? Yeah.
Speaker 3:When are opening
Speaker 2:New York. Like for like years and years and years and Yeah. And then letting people like front run you the market. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And in some ways I feel like they'll do a service to you because they're just introducing people Yeah. To the model. Then because they don't have the the scale and the playbook, like the the experience is ultimately like inferior.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But they're getting people sort of like bought into that idea of like going and getting. You can get breakfast, lunch and dinner at the grocery store.
Speaker 3:I I
Speaker 5:think there's two elements to it. We can't miss on a store. It's too costly. And so we don't want to open New York or Vegas until we're ready. And if you miss on a store from a brand perspective, it can it can hurt.
Speaker 3:Why is it costly? Is it just the build out cost?
Speaker 5:The No. Sorry. Ten year lease No. Like the brand impact on a miss. The brand?
Speaker 5:Okay. Yeah. Would be Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 3:that's the empty one.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. No one... They messed up.
Speaker 5:They should went to New York too early Sure. Not gonna work in a second market, Yeah. But discipline, we are a family owned business, that's true. But our owners, Tony Justine, have maintained a lot discipline on opening stores. They bought the first Air One, which was at The Grove in 2011.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And then they waited three years to open a store. They waited two years to open a store. We open a store every year, then every six months, and now we're opening three a year.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Three year for Air One is very
Speaker 7:fast.
Speaker 5:Yeah. These things are titanics. They're like operational behemoths. But the economics suggest take out as much capital as you can and open as many stores as fast as you can because they pay back like that. Yep.
Speaker 5:But if you do that, the model breaks.
Speaker 3:Yep. So we've
Speaker 5:taken the route of going slow. But three this year was good for us. We've got three openings next year in the Palisades reopening, Downtown LA and Newport Beach, which will be a slam dunk for us, and then we'll kind go from there.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. It's exciting. Yeah. I love it.
Speaker 3:Thanks for coming by.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Super cool.
Speaker 3:Any other questions?
Speaker 2:Had I've had like my adult life perfectly tracks with like my Erawan experiences. Like moving to LA, I drove into LA with like a with a with a gold colored Prius that had 200,000 miles on it. And I would drive it to Erawan, I knew that I couldn't afford anything in the store. And so I would just bring these big glass jugs of water and at at the Venice location, I'd be filling up these jugs and I'd always be looking inside.
Speaker 3:Never understood that. You've told this story before, but like, Erawan gives like free filtered water? No. No.
Speaker 2:No. This was like... You maybe have removed it by now, but you could pay like $2 and fill up a jug like with like water. So I would just drive in there and I would never... I just like knew that I couldn't afford anything in there.
Speaker 2:I just wouldn't go in at all. And then and then over time I just like I just
Speaker 5:it just sucked me in. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It sucked me into a vortex. And then and then other... Like all these memories tied to like whatever car I was driving at the Okay. Yeah. I distinctly remember I was on like a pretty long drive, pulled into Erwan, the spot right in front of the opening And in went in, had dinner or whatever, bought bought some groceries, come out.
Speaker 2:Car doesn't start. Luckily, I knew all the valet guys like super well. Like, they were my buddies. Like, I would talk to them all the time. So I'm like, oh, guys, like, this thing looks pretty cooked.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna be working on this for the next couple hours. But they're the best. So many so many great memories. Stuff. Yeah, really really cool how how sophisticated the operation is.
Speaker 2:And yeah, excited to hear how you guys effectively apply AI to get me to spend more money.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But it's it's joyful. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Yeah. Have a good one.
Speaker 2:Of course, dude.
Speaker 3:Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support. Giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. I had to get my headset back on. Got a Here
Speaker 2:we go.
Speaker 3:The waiting room. We have Danielle Axman from
Speaker 2:Wild Another market.
Speaker 3:Kitchen, the founder and CEO on launching a new... And I got a spider here. I got a spider. What should I...
Speaker 2:Wait. The timing of this is crazy. Wait. What? Did the team do this in...
Speaker 2:Must have done this in
Speaker 3:last when I was talking about a spider?
Speaker 2:No. I'm not talking about spider timing. I'm talking about our next Oh, yes. What's going on? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Welcome to show. Sorry. Was a spider my desk.
Speaker 10:You guys so much for having me. My husband and I are huge fans.
Speaker 2:Oh, amazing. Amazing.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Great to meet you.
Speaker 3:Since it is your first time, can you introduce yourself and the company?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Of course. So I'm Danielle Axman. I'm the founder and CEO of Wilder Market. We just announced today.
Speaker 10:We're opening up our first one in Midtown Miami Mhmm. This fall. Yes.
Speaker 9:Very cool.
Speaker 10:Like I said, to share more about it. But yeah, thanks again for having me.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. What goes into opening it? What what what is the competitive landscape like in Miami?
Speaker 3:Why now with Miami?
Speaker 10:Yeah. This is a great question. So I moved to Miami a couple years ago. I grew up on Long Island. Spent a couple years in New York City post college and then actually in LA for a few years.
Speaker 10:And I share that because it's where I see premium food shopping, boutique grocery stores more abundant, and moving to Miami, we don't have something like that. So I moved here a couple years ago, but really when I became a mom, I started to look at food differently. I really cared more about what I was bringing home to feed my family. I did a lot of research. I learned a lot and was really, you know, the more that I learned as...
Speaker 10:The more I learned about food and and the ingredients and what was important to really provide for my family and my kids, I became more empowered as a mother, but like more frustrated as a consumer where I wasn't finding what I was looking for at the grocery stores. I became really chaotic and I go to the farmer's market for certain things and somewhere else for dairy. And honestly, even when I found something that checked all the boxes, felt like this was really clean and safe for my family. It didn't taste good either. And so I wanted to put together...
Speaker 10:Create this this experience, this market that combined thoughtfully sourced ingredients, culinary excellence, and hospitality all under one roof. I'm so excited to share more details about that as well.
Speaker 4:Want to
Speaker 3:go back to Baked Rose. Tell me the story about your involvement because that's a that's a very fascinating story that I think people were, like, skeptical of and then it got acquired. And what what was the journey there?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Oh my god. Had so much fun doing that. So I joined the founding team at Babe Rose. After I left, I worked for the founders SoulCycle, and I was actually there during the the acquisition of Equinox.
Speaker 10:So then joined the team at Babe Rose. We sold the business to Anheuser Busch. That was for fun. But really, even though my my background is working with consumer, I would say, like, disruptive consumer businesses. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And then while those businesses were very different, they both taught me so much about building consumer brands, understanding what people want, and creating these experiences that people genuinely connect with.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So what did... What what did you... What lesson did you learn from the Babe Rose journey that you're either taking or adapting for this in terms of like working with celebrities, influencers, social media? Like, do you think your marketing will evolve over the next few years as you grow this the store?
Speaker 10:I love that. And I think I'm taking a lot of lessons that I've learned from those experiences. I think one of the biggest ones is that the strongest brands don't just sell products. They really understand what their consumer wants. They create something people genuinely want to be a part of.
Speaker 10:I think community is a really big aspect of that, and you see that the Soul Cycle with Babe Rose and so much about what we're doing. We wanna reimagine the neighborhood market, this place that used to be a hub of connection for the local community where you... You know, the owner knew you by name. They knew your favorite order. You had this closer connection to your food, and I think community is one of those things.
Speaker 10:We're meant to be social beings, and it's super important in anything, you know. We crave human connection.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Jordy? Yeah. To me to me, the thing that, that's like most exciting with a concept like this is just the focus on like, we had, one of the founders of Yes Chef on yesterday and I was realizing how much... I'm I'm just really not a foodie at all.
Speaker 2:But I am obsessed with ingredient quality. So, like, for me, I can't enjoy something if I don't have confidence that there was at least, like, some amount of effort put into the ingredient selection. And so, to me, it's like ingredient quality comes before taste. Taste is like very much secondary to that. And I feel like grocery stores and markets, like all over the country outside of obviously, you know, Erwan and and some other...
Speaker 2:A handful of other concepts, have always focused on like taste before ingredient quality. And so that ends up netting out where like I just won't I just won't shop in places like that. And I think that there's like this whole new wave of consumers that are in these key markets that very much think that way, which is like, I don't care how good it tastes if you didn't, like, put in the effort on the ingredient side first. I
Speaker 10:actually really agree with you. I think there's a huge new wave of people who care more about what they're putting in their bodies and on their bodies. We have more information now than we've ever had before. Right? And this is like something that's really important to me and to so much of our community.
Speaker 10:And so we developed something called the Wilder Standard. So it's basically a vetting process that that evaluates every single product that we sell. And it was really important to me that when I had this idea, sure, I've done my research. I have figured out what works for my family, but I'm not here preaching that to everybody else. I'm not trying to create something that's like super exclusive either.
Speaker 10:This is meant to be developed by independent experts. So I went out and put together this incredible team, that spans across nutrition, epidemiology, food science, agriculture. Ken Cook, the founder of EWG, Environmental Working Group, is one of the advisors as well. Actually, just with him this morning walking the store. If you're familiar with EWG, they come out with a clean 15 and dirty dozen list every year on produce, which ones retain the most pesticides and which ones retain the least.
Speaker 10:And I think, creating a standard based on experts is really what we're built upon. So that's the that's the thoughtful sourcing piece of this. And then you combine our partnership with Grass Fed Culture, which is a Michelin star culinary group based here in Miami with the same sourcing standards that we have. If you haven't been to one of the restaurants, you have to go. It's incredible.
Speaker 10:They developed the entire culinary program, the food and beverage menu, soup to nuts based on the standards that we've created. So that, again, you compare both thoughtful sourcing and culinary excellence. And then the third thing that I have to mention is Major Food Group came on as a founding Oh, yeah. Investor and strategic adviser and and I mean That's amazing. They're legends.
Speaker 10:I mean, truly the best in the business at creating hospitality experiences. I also was with Mario today walking the store, thinking about the entire customer journey from walking up to the store, what did the flow looks like. They've been really instrumental in helping us bring this vision to life.
Speaker 3:Well, congratulations.
Speaker 7:Do you have
Speaker 2:any idea on how many stores you think Miami specifically or the greater Miami area can support?
Speaker 10:Definitely think there's a lot of opportunity, not just in Miami, South Florida and even beyond in the Southeast Region. You know, if you think about... Well, to me... So we... The local sourcing is really important to us.
Speaker 10:We have incredible relationships with Bulbivarms. In my research, found that the agriculture in Florida is actually pretty incredible most of the year, something I just didn't probably even, like, thought about learning before this. But, with that, we have, Miami is... This is the local sourcing that we're focused on, and then we also have great partnerships with farms, in the Southeast Region. And to me, that's local because there's, like, a lot of, you know, things that you could grow in Georgia, Carolinas, you don't necessarily grow in Florida.
Speaker 10:So we wanna focus on those partnerships, and I think there's a lot of opportunity with post pandemic, the migration of people that have moved to these these cities, and are craving this type of experience.
Speaker 2:I'm very excited that you're set up there. Look forward to, visiting the store next time we're in Miami. Last time we were in Miami, I kept ordering bottles of water Mhmm. And they would show... I would order glass bottles, they would deliver plastic.
Speaker 2:I would get really frustrated at the substitution.
Speaker 4:You're looking at
Speaker 2:the solution? No. I know you... I know we won't have that problem with Wildlife.
Speaker 10:So you gotta come check out our glass juice, our organic cold pressed glass juices. You'll love them.
Speaker 2:You so much for coming on the show. Congratulations.
Speaker 10:Thanks so much.
Speaker 2:Have a good rest
Speaker 3:of day.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Talk soon.
Speaker 3:Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. We have John Urschel with us in the waiting room.
Speaker 3:He's an assistant professor of mathematics at MIT. You know him because we discussed the Wall Street Journal article about them, and we're very excited... Professor. Welcome How to the are you guys? How are
Speaker 4:I'm you doing well. I'm looking forward to hanging out with you guys.
Speaker 3:You so much for I taking the wanted to start in a very maybe basic place. Like, what is the day to day life as an assistant professor at MIT? I think a lot of people are grappling with the fact that AI can do some mathematic research, prove theorems or disprove them. But how much of how much of your time is spent like working on hard math problems versus teaching versus doing something else? Like, what is a day in the life of a MIT mathematician?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So this is something that I feel like if you don't, you know, if you don't study mathematics at a high level, it can be hard to sort of know. You know, we spend so much time teaching, so much time talking with each other, trying to, you know, think about good math ideas
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Trying to teach our students. These days with AI, it certainly looks different. I would say the thing that really is universal is that there's still an emphasis on understanding, whether it's ideas that a human came up with or ideas that, let's say, chat, GBT, or Anthropic came up with. The idea is trying to look at a proof, look at a solution, and understand something about what that means for the broader ecosystem.
Speaker 3:Yeah. How much of mathematical inquiry is, I I don't know, discovery versus understanding the process and then actually diffusing that information? I I feel like maybe I went through a small version of this like five years ago. I was interested in in business history and journalism and I'd go and and compile these these essays about a certain technology's evolution. Certainly not at the level of a non fiction writer, but it was very edifying work.
Speaker 3:Chatuchipiti can do that and has been able to assemble an essay about a technology and how it evolved and do some historical research. It's still fun for me. It's still edifying. And then I still have, I think, a purpose explaining that to other people and sharing that in different formats. And I feel like I've grappled with it, but how different is your experience is the experiences of the mathematics world to, like, the experience that I just described, which was I got steamrolled by AI, like, five years ago, maybe.
Speaker 3:I I don't know.
Speaker 4:No. I mean, it's true. I mean, the latest frontier models can do what a lot of good mathematicians have been doing for a lot of years. And the question now becomes, where do we focus our effort? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Understanding was always a crucial part of the process. Yeah. It's even more important now. Yeah. I still think there's room and I still think there's importance for problem solving even when AI systems can do this well.
Speaker 4:I think this is a fundamental joy of doing mathematics. You know, just because, you know, a computer can solve the crossword puzzle for you doesn't mean you don't want to do it yourself. I think there's personal joy and enjoyment in honing your skills to work on these things, but definitely there's a completely new aspect to doing mathematics, which is having this tool that can really crank in a way that, you know, humans just haven't been able to do.
Speaker 3:How do you think about mathematics progress in the very long term? It feels like AI can duke it out with the top mathematicians and solve really, really hard problems, but people are joking about mathematics is solved, but that doesn't seem like it's the case. It seems like this is sort of a rabbit hole that might just go deeper and deeper and deeper. But do you have an intuitive sense, or is the mathematics community coming to a consensus around how far we are away from actually the last mathematics question being solved?
Speaker 4:So definitely we don't have any consensus, I'd say, about how we should be using AI, what things are going to look like in a couple years. But I think we have pretty good consensus that, you know, math is not going to be solved.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I
Speaker 4:mean, the amazing thing we're seeing is that we're pushing the frontier of what we understand and know mathematically faster than we ever have in history. And so we're understanding more, we're pushing boundaries further. But there's so much farther to go and there are so many things we don't understand, so many tools that can be helpful, not just in mathematics, but in other areas. So, you know, these modern developments, this is just like, you know, people used to climb a mountain, you know, using their own little ropes and things. Now we have a helicopter, but still, you know, there are further places we need to explore and things that we need to understand.
Speaker 2:How, how is AI being used to come up with new problems? Like, is that is that... Is there any
Speaker 3:Progress there?
Speaker 2:Is... Are... And you or any of your peers, like, thinking, like, well, if if you can use this to solve problems, can you generate
Speaker 3:Can we create new millennium problems?
Speaker 2:Can we at least create new problems faster than we can
Speaker 3:them, maybe?
Speaker 4:No. So this is the question. We're trying to understand, you know, these tools are very, very good at solving a well posed problem that we've been thinking about for a
Speaker 3:while.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The thing that we're still trying to figure out is how generative can this be?
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 4:How well can this technology actually recognize what are important directions that we need to study and understand to help push ourselves forward technologically and mathematically?
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And that's the part that it's still, you know, the consensus is not there yet. I'm not gonna make a prediction for fear Sure. Being horribly wrong, but we're gonna have to wait and see.
Speaker 3:How do you think about the progress of mathematics education at this moment? Like, there's, you know, algebra and basic geometry. Like, these things are taught to... Almost every American gets exposure and learns a little bit and then calculus a little bit less. And I'm just imagining a future, maybe like the good outcome would be, yeah, everyone can actually sort of explain Navier Stokes and has gotten to a place where even the really, really hard math has been so so digested by AI and top mathematicians and understood that it's been turned into YouTube videos and turned into curriculum.
Speaker 3:And and maybe it never gets down to high school level, but at least if you're in college, you could go much further than we are currently. And it feels like humanity has been progressing towards more and more mathematical understanding even among like average non mathematicians. And that feels like it would be a really good outcome. But how do you grapple with that that fact or or or that potential outcome? No.
Speaker 3:I mean, you've got
Speaker 4:it exactly right. This is this is definitely the hope that Yeah. You with these new technologies, it somehow, like, levels the playing field for education. It somehow, you know, opens up possibilities for people to learn more advanced concepts much quicker. I mean, I remember when I was a kid, the fact that the internet existed and that, you know, top professors at universities would post lecture notes and things like this online.
Speaker 4:This was huge for me as a kid in Buffalo, New York. I can... You know, I have a computer and an internet connection and all of a sudden it's like I'm learning from top professors. Yeah. And you know, when I compare this to the way people learned in the eighties or seventies, know, you have to go to a library, you rent out a book.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It was just a game changer
Speaker 5:for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was funny as as like a as a teenager realizing like, wait, this top university just publishes the entire course. Was like, why would I go to this school? Obviously, there's other, you know...
Speaker 3:Well, I I I wanna talk more about like the the the competitive dynamics between universities. We've seen some prize money up there, million dollars for a millennial millennium prize. I've seen $25,000 prize pools. This is not the funding mechanism for mathematics, correct? Is tuition, there's scholarships, there's government funding.
Speaker 3:But I don't know how deeply you're embedded in that side of it, it feels like there's a potential that much like chess has been solved by computers, I don't know that I'd want to go to a university where it had a really, really bad math program just because they're not winning the prizes anymore. Like, it feels like there's still a lot of value in having a fertile mathematics education program that's pushing the frontier both in terms of exploring new problems and working alongside AI, but also just being the best human mathematicians, that's going to have knock on effects around the entire organization. But how do you see it evolving?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think you've got it exactly right. Okay. I think our roles are certainly going to change with the advent of AI. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But we're very much going to be needed. And I think understanding mathematics at a deep level, being able to help communicate that to young people, to help people gain the tools to be able to empower themselves Yeah. To solve problems in all areas of, you know, science, technology and engineering, I think it's important. And I think we really need to try to adjust to this world we're in and try to serve our students as best we can.
Speaker 2:So so do you think math ends up tracking exactly like chess has in that, like, chess was solved and then people just kept playing it and and kept watch... You know, kept following it and and and and the the sort of field continued to progress. Because the way that you're describing this just feels like, you know, one, the understanding is key, but then then the just enjoyment enjoyment of of understanding and like individual progression, I feel like is limitless regardless of the abilities of the models.
Speaker 4:So I feel that it's a bit different. So I'm not that good of a chess player. Mhmm. But okay, I play a bit of chess. I feel like chess has very much hit some sort of like plateau in equilibrium.
Speaker 4:Like, yeah, you had Kasparov and Deep Blue, but really after, like, you know, this AlphaZero stuff from DeepMod, you know, there were some great chess innovations that were really new things that affected actual top players and how they played. But really, things started to sort of like level off, and, you know, there there is only so much in
Speaker 9:chess.
Speaker 4:You know, there's so many moves. Yeah. There's so many optimal things that you can do. Whereas in math, I really do think it's generative. It's really not nearly as limited in the same way and the directions you can sort of move forward in.
Speaker 4:And the directions we're going to need sort of four applications of applied math, I think are much more limited. So I I really don't see it going that way. Instead, I see it sort of really exploding. Like, the field of mathematics and what falls under math is just going to get bigger and bigger.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Do you have... This is an odd question but you're like the person to ask this. Do you have any intuitive feeling for how AI might change football?
Speaker 4:Oh, that's a great question.
Speaker 3:I'm just thinking even like when you go for two points like these things, statistical models, money ball has been around but we're in a new territory now where you might see a team be like, what if we spent a million dollars of compute crunching all the numbers and we don't even know but we just call the plays this way. I'm just wondering if you have any feel for it.
Speaker 4:No. I think I think there's definitely potential because, you know, fundamentally, football is so much harder a problem than baseball. Yeah. Like, if you think about sabermetrics, like like, Moneyball worked in baseball because it's so... Such an easy problem if you think about it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. One player at a time.
Speaker 4:People are in set pieces. Yep. The rules are so straightforward.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 4:Like, you know, it... You know, someone's batting, someone's pitching, then something happens and it's really well understood.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Whereas football, you've got 22 guys on a field and it's just complete chaos from a data statistical point of view. And so bringing, like, better technology to bear on that, I think, can definitely be useful. Because I remember, like, even a couple years ago, it was not easy to take player tracking data and actually recognize what play just happened.
Speaker 3:Oh, sure.
Speaker 4:You know, was the defense in cover two? Were they in cover three? What was, you know, what run play did the offense do? What was the passing scheme? And so I think there's a huge potential for AI to help
Speaker 3:with that. Interesting. Yeah. Very cool.
Speaker 2:Jordy? Yeah. My big... Biggest takeaway from this is just this side... Like, this idea of, the the models are...
Speaker 2:Don't seem to be generative in the sense of like coming up with like what to solve. Right? And and we experience this when anytime you see a piece of AI content, the models are good at making content now. If you have like an amazing idea. Right?
Speaker 2:And it's always like one human out there came up with the idea of like combining like these two different IPs into something that is like entertaining or funny. Yeah. And and even with with marketing, you can have a brilliant marketing idea and then an AI can like one shot it really quickly. But the AI, again, is not generative when it comes to marketing. It's not on the fly coming up with great marketing ideas and that's still the domain of of humans.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It just feels like the intelligence moment. It's very spiky. Yeah. Very interesting.
Speaker 2:Pure execution.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, okay. We'll we'll see how long that persists.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Way right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I don't know if you're fan of like the the bubble with the spikes and then the doll just gets bigger until it just goes over everything. But yeah, we are in this odd transition moment. But but thanks so much for coming on here. We really
Speaker 2:appreciate it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers, John. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:You're the man.
Speaker 3:Bye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 3:Our next guest is Nicolas Sharp, the cofounder and CEO of Adio. He's in the waiting room. He's been on the show twice. Welcome back. Nicolas, how are doing?
Speaker 8:Hey, guys. Good to see you again. Good to be back.
Speaker 2:Great to have you back.
Speaker 8:Always a... Yeah. Always a good sign. It means we've launched something.
Speaker 3:So that's a
Speaker 8:good marker for us.
Speaker 3:Yes. Yes. What is
Speaker 2:your Always launch so so so late. So thanks for
Speaker 3:That's hanging right. That's right.
Speaker 8:No, you've got to remember that in Europe, we wake up late and set up late, so it's very normal.
Speaker 2:West Coast hours.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Awesome. What's new?
Speaker 8:So what's new is a really big launch from us. We have launched our new architecture, hybrid architecture, for AgenTic revenue. So it's all about allowing agents to be unleashed on your data while maintaining all of the guardrails you'd expect from business applications. So it's trying to drastically blur the lines between infrastructure and having just a raw fire hose to your to a database, but all of the stuff you'd expect when dealing with customer data, guardrails and policies and all those sorts of things What's more to unlock.
Speaker 3:What's more important to people right now? Because if you go to some frontier model and you give it slash goal and you just say like
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Look, I got a spreadsheet here. I got... I'm pointing you in the general direction. Go figure out how to get into my, you know, this database and then this this SaaS product and like figure it out. A lot of times it can write an API binding and then build an integration on the fly.
Speaker 3:But so it feels like there's the unleashing, like adding capability then there's the adding the guardrails. And it feels like right now people are shopping for guardrails, but what are you feeling from customers?
Speaker 8:That's right. And then, you know, and and what we wanna do is we want people to be able to do that. We want people to be able to point an agent at the CRM at Atio and say, hey. Go and find me these customers and have all of the context. You know, we shipped universal context earlier in the year, which is this kind of full three sixty view of all of the unstructured data in a vector store so that the agent can go and search all over it.
Speaker 8:And so you do want to unleash them. You do want to allow them to go and do all of this really difficult work. And they will write amazing queries and they'll blow your mind. But equally, you are dealing with customer data and a lot of it. And there's a lot of orchestration that goes into that.
Speaker 8:There's a lot of governance and policy and all that kind of stuff. So we're really trying to push the best of both worlds.
Speaker 2:What are the best sales teams and and GTM teams in the world doing? We were talking about cold email on on the show earlier and this frustration now with like, you know, feels like 90% of the emails I get are like, you know, hi, Jordy. Here's some random context from something you shared online at some point.
Speaker 8:Yeah, like two years ago. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Years ago. Now here's the product and it's like, obviously, like very low effort. Yeah. But what are you seeing like the best teams in the world actually do?
Speaker 8:Well, it's... So so you had one of those teams, I I think, like, if if not already on your show, on your show today, Model Yeah. Is one of our other customers and has built some awesome things on Ateo. But what we see with these great go to market teams is essentially that they are not just trying to do what was done in the old world with agents. So they're not just simply replicating the kind of like SDR, you know, outbound SDR to inbound SDR to, you know, hand over to sales rep, etcetera.
Speaker 8:They're rethinking the customer flows entirely and and not just building a skew... Skeuomorphic version of what they did before. So And what that looks like is being much more personalized, doing way more work per customer and being able to deliver a experience that might only be safe for your very highest value customers to absolutely all of them. And for companies that might be PLG have sign ups, that means doing a ton of research on every customer and making sure that when they show up for a call or when you reach out to them, you actually have the full picture. There's no need for all those handoffs.
Speaker 8:You don't drop the ball, etcetera. Yeah. So I think we're seeing the, yeah, the best teams are just being way more imaginative and and are are in real build mode and first principle mode.
Speaker 2:Do you... Where where are you most excited for models to make meaningful progress? It feels like for a lot of this work, like, using using sort of cheaper models or open weight models, like, probably can can get a lot of the job done.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, we're pretty excited about some of the decision models as well because it's really nice. There's so much of this stuff that's making lots and lots of decisions before you actually need the output of a traditional LLM. And we're very excited about what we can do there and the next order of magnitude of scale it allows. And especially when you start being able to get access to probabilities as well, then you can start building very, very different types of workflows.
Speaker 8:And so much of what you need to do before you actually get into a reasoning model and into unstructured output is just lots of decision making. And so we're very excited about the capabilities of those models.
Speaker 2:Makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3:How much are you dogfooding Adio? Like, how pro are you in terms of... How key is Adio in, like, your actual growth story?
Speaker 8:We are the... We're we're patient zero. We're... Mean, it's sometimes to the frustration of the team because we get the the very, very kind of, you know, day zero releases. And we are we really use our own team as guinea pigs of this stuff.
Speaker 8:So sometimes you have to remember that the version of the product that your customers has is a month or so behind what we have. And we're always kind of very excited to to show them the latest and greatest features. But, no, we're we're we're huge ATEO users.
Speaker 3:Amazing. Thank you so much for coming
Speaker 2:on Great update. Congrats.
Speaker 8:Thank you, guys. Nice to see you again.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Great to see
Speaker 5:you. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Cheers.
Speaker 3:Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Mary Coke over at the Wall Street Journal shares a story from Palantir chief technology officer, Sham Sankar, friend of the show, says some AI researchers have started smoking cigarettes because they are confident that technology will cure cancer. The trend is a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI.
Speaker 3:He told CBS News, if that logic is sound, AI optimists might soon hitting the bottle and eating cake for breakfast sometimes. Seems like we're begging AI to replace us. She's not a fan of this. We we we were pitching this months ago. We were saying if you really believe it's gonna cure cancer
Speaker 2:Didn't we say cigars?
Speaker 3:Start smoking cigars. We said everything. Everything. You know? Eat cake for breakfast.
Speaker 3:Hit the bottle. I wanna I wanna see it. Yeah. This all started with the sunscreen thing. Oh, I don't wear sunscreen because AI's gonna cure skin cancer.
Speaker 3:There's still a chance. And I I like the idea of the the revealed preferences. You know? You gotta be aware. It can't just be the stated preferences.
Speaker 3:Gotta be the revealed preferences. We have yet to see an AI lab leader smoke a cigar in an interview. Yep. But that feels like something that might happen in the next month.
Speaker 2:I'd like to I'd like to see that.
Speaker 3:I hope so. Yeah. Put your put your money where your mouth is. Put your lungs where your where your mouth is, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'd like a a sit down founder, you know, interview podcast Yeah. Where they they actually have a live smoke break. So they keep taping...
Speaker 3:But it's just ripping darts the whole
Speaker 2:time. Yeah. Yeah. That's actually an under explored... Cheeky...
Speaker 2:Like the last like white space in tech media is just like smoke breaks. Yeah. Because we have running We've done it. We have the walk and talk interviews. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We now have running interviews.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No one's done like a Marvel Yeah. Red
Speaker 2:tour.
Speaker 3:Show. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But like a ten minute mini podcast where somebody's having a smoke. Yeah. You're just rattling off questions, riffing.
Speaker 3:Dwarf Kasch is right. Could do it.
Speaker 2:He's the guy.
Speaker 3:Or, you know, maybe the next Dwarf Kasch. A challenger. A spin off. A knock off. It's Dwarf Cash with cigarettes.
Speaker 3:Cheeky heater. Yeah. Heaters. Well, they're on a heater. There's some other news.
Speaker 3:Muse was just knocked out of the top of the app store despite Alex Wong, Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint, amazing model. They couldn't go up against what company? Dave's Hot Chicken. Dave's Hot Chicken. They have a new discount going, I think.
Speaker 3:Have you had Dave's Hot Chicken?
Speaker 2:Never have. Delicious. Never will.
Speaker 3:It's so good. It's kind of the air one of fast food. No. It's ridiculous. But...
Speaker 6:How
Speaker 2:does Vinted do it?
Speaker 3:Vinted is really on such a run. Vinted is is doing really well. But fun to see Dave's hot chicken up there at number one. Anyway, what else is... What else needs to be discussed?
Speaker 3:People are people are really feeling the cheeky pint debating when will the first person drink 12 Guinnesses or delete 12 Guinnesses and pick a fight with the film crew. We got a little preview because I think Will O'Brien...
Speaker 12:Yeah. He's going on. So... Well, he's already been on.
Speaker 3:He's already... He's been on once or he's... Or they filmed it but they haven't released it
Speaker 7:yet.
Speaker 12:So that like trailer...
Speaker 3:He's in season two.
Speaker 12:We know that he already filmed it. Okay. We don't know how many Guinnesses he's deleted.
Speaker 3:But he... Wasn't he backtracking? I thought he was saying that, oh, well, the real metric is not total Guinnesses but Guinnesses per hour.
Speaker 12:Yeah. So independently, he texted me a slightly different metric than just mass because... He's a freaky.... Elon interview was so long. I think if he's only on there for an hour, like, can't expect him to actually put down 12.
Speaker 3:I think we can. I think we can. You get one...
Speaker 2:What if John has to go back to work, but he just stays and they just let the... They let let it run. True. And he can and he can just start getting some work done, have a few more drinks.
Speaker 3:True. Yeah. I don't know. I I I love Will. I'm sure he put on a masterful performance, but I'm getting some some red flags with this fuzzy map.
Speaker 3:This is a vanity metric. He wants to switch to to beers per hour as some, you know, non GAAP metric here. I think, like, the the the standard has been established. If you want to put down more beers, you've got to keep the conversation going. You've got to be good content and then you get the opportunity to spend more time drinking beers.
Speaker 3:So if you only have an hour of content, you gotta be really be chugging the whole time. You gotta get as many as possible because Elon's gonna be able to go on a run for hours and hours and hours.
Speaker 2:You're going to run This is important stuff. Right
Speaker 3:now. This is important stuff.
Speaker 2:It's time for our next guest.
Speaker 3:Our next guest.
Speaker 2:From icon. Jason Ballard. Welcome to
Speaker 3:the show. How are doing, Jason?
Speaker 2:We're getting carried away.
Speaker 9:Really good. Nice to meet you, Jordy. Nice to meet you, John.
Speaker 3:Nice to meet you.
Speaker 2:Great to meet you.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:How many how many beers would you drink on Cheeky Pint?
Speaker 9:You know, I think the beers per hour is a good metric. I I I appreciate that it's not a gap metric. I think I'm good for four or five.
Speaker 3:Four or five? Yeah. Time period are we talking about?
Speaker 2:Four five minutes. Four five beers in four five minutes.
Speaker 9:I respect that I gotta be interesting enough to be on for a couple hours, but I think I get on there for a couple hours. I could do four five.
Speaker 3:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that seems reasonable.
Speaker 9:Brett, record the record is three right now.
Speaker 3:The record is three, but...
Speaker 12:You know how you could speed it up?
Speaker 9:In I would be going in to win.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You'd be going in to win.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But you know how you speed it up is get one of those those hats that have the beer and the Yeah. And you know.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You guys...
Speaker 2:So you don't even worry
Speaker 3:about your hands.
Speaker 2:You focus can and...
Speaker 3:How everyone was sort of dancing around the Cheeky Pint thing. Are people gonna be... And now season two came and it's clearly a competition. Like every person that goes on Cheeky Pint now is looking at that chart and thinking like, I got to be number one. And so I think anyone who takes the...
Speaker 3:Anyone who accepts the invite is going to be thinking I gotta at least be number one for
Speaker 2:a little...
Speaker 3:I gotta be at the frontier.
Speaker 9:I wonder I wonder if people are gonna start doping like taking charcoal pills and stuff to like really... 100%. Mean, there's already been
Speaker 2:doping allegations. Or just or just have a huge...
Speaker 3:There's already been doping allegations in terms of size of the glasses and whether or not they're alcoholic Guinnesses or they're zero zeros because sometimes there's founders who come on the show who don't drink alcohol at all and they still want to participate so they drink non alcoholic Guinness and then sometimes they're filmed during
Speaker 9:That the doesn't count. That clearly doesn't count.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So maybe you get disqualified for that, but you still get to do the show. But for the founders that do drink alcohol, it see... It stands to reason that there's going to be a competition. They're to want to get to the frontier.
Speaker 3:You agree with me, Jordy. You do.
Speaker 2:I wanna talk about icon I think I think it's time. Okay. I think it's time. This guy this guy this guy is ready to ready to... I think you...
Speaker 2:Let's face it. You wanna go on Cheeky Pie. You wanna you wanna...
Speaker 3:I've technically been on Cheeky Pie. We did a crossover episode. I drank a Guinness with
Speaker 2:them. Right.
Speaker 3:Right. That was technically a Shakey Pie episode.
Speaker 2:Right. Anyways, Jason, it's it's... Thanks for hearing us out here and riffing with us. Yeah. It's
Speaker 9:great to good debate.
Speaker 2:A great debate. But but we have a big gong. We want to hit it. Oh, yeah. Yes.
Speaker 2:What what's the news?... Some news.
Speaker 9:Yeah. We just closed our series d led by Bailey Gifford and BlackRock. $200,000,000. Boom.
Speaker 1:Boom. You
Speaker 2:Fighting for him today, John. Yeah.
Speaker 9:So... Well done. I appreciate... I feel honored. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It shook the room. What... Why'd they give you so much money?
Speaker 9:So I found the construction... Question. My my family back in East Texas wants to know the same... Yeah. Icon is a construction technology company.
Speaker 9:We giant robots, the the big three d printers to to build things faster at lower cost and at higher quality. And as as you guys know, there's a thing going on called the global housing crisis. We are like not building correctly and shelters are really basic human need and we we feel like we've got lightning in a bottle. We feel like we've got the receipts to prove it and ready to scale this thing up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what... Like, how have you been proving out the thesis? Like, are you... What's the core...
Speaker 2:Well, what's the core metric that you Okay. That you track
Speaker 9:to... So there's there's a lot there sort of inside baseball. The the whole industry itself and construction revolves around this metric of dollars per square foot. Foot. Homes are underwritten that way.
Speaker 9:Construction's measured that way. Homes are appraised that way. So you kind of have to... Even though we have our own internal metrics on, robotic performance, materials, cost, and thing, that... That's really where it resolves.
Speaker 9:The automation in particular with three d printing, you know, we're replacing the wall system of a home. We started with wall systems because wall systems historically are the slowest, most labor intensive, materials intensive, and expensive part of the home. Also, walls create like the form and feeling of a home, so it's just like a very powerful thing to automate. The average cost of delivering a wall system in America right now is approaching $40 a square foot. Our new Titan system that we'll be scaling up now delivers wall systems at about $20 a square foot.
Speaker 9:So about half the cost of construction for the most expensive part of construction.
Speaker 3:Interesting. Heard so many I've heard so many like like hot takes about three d printing not being necessary because you can just, you know, mill. Like like we have a lot of machinery that's good at making flat things. Like Yeah. How do you get over that?
Speaker 3:Like why isn't it better to just make a flat wall structure in a factory, for example? Or there's a lot of folks who are building houses manufactured in house in like shipping containers, for example.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So I've I've been in construction for almost twenty years inclusive Yeah. Of my time at Icon. Mean shipping container houses, prefab houses, modular houses, everything have been around for quite some time. If that wasn't going work, it would work.
Speaker 9:And like like, come on. Come out to the field and compete.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 9:I I don't think it works for a number of reasons. Number one, a lot of the gains you get by automating, you surrender those gains by shipping. I mean, it's expensive
Speaker 2:to ship
Speaker 9:a washing machine. It's very expensive to ship a house.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 9:Number two,
Speaker 2:sidetracked. So over the weekend, John and I were driving. We were in the car together, and we see some guy with a big truck driving a house down the road, and then he just pulls off the road and just drives through Like a field. Like it was like an... Cuts the corner.
Speaker 2:Cuts the corner in a big rig with a house. I've never... I was like that that's the most... Seems like the most illegal thing I've seen on the road
Speaker 13:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:In my whole life. It was crazy. It was like he was bouncing through the field.
Speaker 3:But little did he know he was just trying to help the the bottom line. He was just trying to help the margins.
Speaker 2:Just get there a little faster.
Speaker 3:He's gonna burn more
Speaker 9:fuel if he goes around the corner. Every bit counts.
Speaker 2:That's... Well, yeah. Yeah. Because basically there was a just a normal... He could have just turned right on a real road Yeah.
Speaker 2:But instead he like cut the corner across this huge field. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Any any thoughts? You know, my thought my thoughts are... I bet that's not the way to deliver a dignified housing to Americans. I I appreciate I appreciate his chutzpah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:But that sort of maybe makes my second point for me which is to make houses in a factory and ship them, you actually end up having to design the house for the roadway, for the vehicle. And houses aren't for roads. Houses are for people. And so I think that's another limitation of that model. And then finally, you have to standardize a lot in that model.
Speaker 9:And I think there's like cultural resistance. You need like a million people to want the exact same house or something... Some near variant. Yeah. And I think those three reasons, the economics, the the design problem, and the standardization problem are why those models haven't worked.
Speaker 9:Three d printing, can think of it. It actually is a factory that comes to the site. Yeah. But because the building material is fluid when you're depositing it, it's like a bespoke housing factory that arrives on-site. It's a lot easier to ship a machine than a house.
Speaker 9:Sure. And then once it
Speaker 5:gets there, can do a lot
Speaker 9:of a lot of very good work. And so
Speaker 3:How vertically integrated are you? Like, can you just buy a plot of land, build a house, and then sell it on, like, Zillow or Redfin? Yes. Or are there more steps
Speaker 9:So we're not vertically integrated into, the land development itself. So we make our own... We make and manufacture our own robots in our factory
Speaker 7:in Austin.
Speaker 9:We we develop and manufacture our own materials, print material that we call Formpreit. Yep. We make our own software stack. We've developed our own architecture. Okay.
Speaker 9:And even like the wall system itself has had to be optimized. Maybe if you remember the early desktop printers kind of fought over how to do the internal geometry Yeah. Yeah. For the most efficient printing or whatever. So we've done a lot of that work too.
Speaker 9:So the sort of full technology stack, we are vertically integrated too because it's it's not enough just to hand people a robot and say good work. It really is a new way of building and you have to deliver that way of building fully formed to the market.
Speaker 3:So who are your customers? Is it like commercial real estate developers that already have like a couple acres of land, they want to build 25 homes and they come to you to actually go and build them but then they will be selling the individual houses?
Speaker 9:You got it. That's exactly how it works so far. We've we've kind of run like a build business using our own technologies to prove that a construction company using these technologies can be very profitable, very powerful, very fast, exciting. The newest business model we launched, which is part of this fundraising, is this technology business model where the technology now is performance enough, stable enough, reliable enough, and the costs are in the right spot that we really want to equip builders and developers all over the world with these tools themselves. Right?
Speaker 9:The builder of our past showed up on a job site with nail guns and saws. The builder of the future is going show up with robots, advanced materials, and a tablet to operate the whole thing.
Speaker 2:What about builders on the moon?
Speaker 9:You know? Yeah. Yeah. We do hold the contract with NASA to develop the lunar construction system. It's very similar thesis.
Speaker 9:Right? If we're gonna build on the moon, number one is gonna be robots. It's too difficult to spot for humans to build. Number two, you need to use the local resources of the moon to build on the moon because it's too expensive to get things to the surface. Every other plan NASA had involved bringing everything with you.
Speaker 9:It's the shipping problem again. The number three, versatility beats specialization. You need a single system that can do landing pads, roadways, walls
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 9:Reactor shielding, habitats, everything. And so we've been developing that system. We have hit all of our performance gates, kind of blew all our performance gates out of the water. And now the new NASA administrator is talking about moon base, moon base, moon base. And I think we'll have some very exciting news to announce on that front soon.
Speaker 3:That's very cool.
Speaker 2:I like the sound
Speaker 3:Congratulations of on the fundraise. Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 9:Thank you very much. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:It was a great time.
Speaker 2:Great to hang, Jason.
Speaker 3:We'll talk to Looking forward
Speaker 2:to make make sure make sure we get you on the show Yeah. That next announcement.
Speaker 9:Yeah. That'd be great. Yeah. Thanks, friends.
Speaker 3:Have a good one.
Speaker 7:Great to
Speaker 3:see you. Bye bye. Up next, we have Eric Modell, the co founder and CEO. I've got a... I'm glad the Gong's warmed up.
Speaker 3:You know, I warmed up the Gong earlier and I'm glad it's warmed up
Speaker 2:because he's ready for the...
Speaker 3:Here he is. Welcome back. How are doing?
Speaker 2:Good. How are you? The man. Fantastic. Legend.
Speaker 3:Tell us what happened.
Speaker 2:Is this your third is Third time.
Speaker 3:Your third time on the show?
Speaker 2:Third time.
Speaker 7:Was it
Speaker 2:the Did we Repeat. Did we get the... Did you do the series a with us or was it the series b? Was that the first one? Trying to remember.
Speaker 7:B c and d, I think.
Speaker 2:I forgot c and d. I'm I'm upset we didn't get the a. I would've liked to start earlier, but you've been on absolute tear. And John really wants
Speaker 3:to How get this much did you raise? Go
Speaker 7:ahead. We raised a
Speaker 2:bunch of money. Boom.
Speaker 3:A bunch of $750. $15,750,000,000 valuation. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Amazing progress.
Speaker 3:What's working other than...
Speaker 7:We see so much demand from all these incredible AI applications out there, you know, Cognition, Ramp, Suno, Runway, Decagon, DoorDash, and Mhmm. There's so many companies out there building incredible stuff running on model because they like the building blocks that we give them, inference and training and sandboxes and and all kinds of other stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What what... What's then been your... Other than capital, like, what's been your binding constraint? Is it power, chips?
Speaker 3:Like, where
Speaker 7:is We your run data centers. Run capacity today. It might change in the future. But, yeah, capacity has certainly been constrained where a lot of the capital we're going to use towards ramping up capacity a lot to serving all the demand out
Speaker 3:And so what's been the secret between balancing? You're basically load balancing between all the neo clouds, bringing your software to bear, your techniques, and then also balancing against all of your customers. But what has been the secret to actually being able to reliably deploy across different clouds? I mean, follow the semi analysis cluster max 3.0. It feels like there are some differences between these different platforms and these different neo clouds.
Speaker 3:What's your experience been like?
Speaker 7:Yeah. There's a lot and we have our own internal modal max rating. I mean, in general, like, we aggregate capacity from 20, I think maybe 25 clouds today and Yeah. It's painful, right, and they're all somewhat different. But I think that's also the value prop of using modal for our customers is like you don't have to deal with that nonsense.
Speaker 7:And then we add like a pretty rich software layer on top of it to to write a few lines of Python and deploy incredible applications and run sandboxes in a way we don't have to think about all this Yeah. Cloud idiosyncrasies.
Speaker 3:What's the state of load balancing across time and geolocation? Is that becoming a priority? I remember hearing early on that mid journey had some inference capacity in Asia because there were people that were generating mid journey images in America during daytime. As we get into more agentic workflows, I'm thinking, oh, this is something that ran in the background that I wouldn't mind if it ran at 3AM local time. Totally.
Speaker 7:So... This is something we think a lot about. As we aggregate and and run larger and larger percentage of the world's compute, still pretty small, but hopefully growing over Those those things become like really optimization problem. Can we run things overnight? Can we run things on weekend?
Speaker 7:Can we like arb the geo stuff? Run things in Asia when they're sleeping and stuff like that. There's a lot of opportunities to do that. And we can do that transparently because we aggregate all that capacity with Cheetah as one big pool. Sure.
Speaker 7:Our customers don't have to think about
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sorry. How how are you thinking about diffusion timelines? Like, I imagine your customers, like the ramps and the and the DoorDashes of the world are doing things that, like, the Fortune 500 might be getting pitched these ideas from various like AI, like consulting companies and things Yeah. Like that.
Speaker 2:But they're probably not like at the frontier of whatever that new capability is. So how are you how are... Yeah. How how does like what is what is the current state of diffusion from the sort of like scale up, you know, sort of tech tech companies Yeah. That still have a bunch of like really AI pill talent versus the rest of the world where they have smart talented people but they're not necessarily like watching...
Speaker 2:Listening to Dwarf Cash or or watching TBPN. TBPN or whatever it is. Right? They're just like Yeah. They don't really care about AI.
Speaker 2:They're like, I'll I'll adopt it if if that's what we're gonna do, but I'm not spending time on the weekend.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, I think this is like a massive shift. We basically opened up a whole new set of capabilities for software. It's... You know, I've been programming since early nineties, seen a lot of these things in the past, you know, whether it's cloud or big data, mobile or a lot of these shifts in the past.
Speaker 7:And it takes time to transpire and, like, you know, to reach the enterprise customers. And I think we're still very early, very early in that adoption. But, you know, we're starting to see... Initially, we had a lot of AI natives adopting this, you know, all the companies I mentioned kind of building things from scratch. Starting to see slightly more mature companies.
Speaker 7:I mentioned DoorDash as one of our customers. And over time, I think it's gonna be, you know, Deutsche Bank or whatever. Like, eventually Yeah. We'll get there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but it's... But it doesn't feel like there's still like a large gap between this sort of AI pilled scale ups.
Speaker 7:Massive. Massive. Massive. And and I think a lot of it is like it's harder to work with these things. And so that's a big problem that we're obviously very focused on.
Speaker 7:It's like, with this new technology, you need a new set of tools. Like, you need to kind of build the right building blocks and, you know, what are those? I mean, we think they're, you know, the things I mentioned like inference and training and sandboxes, reinforcement learning and post training and a bunch of other stuff. Like, kind of packaging that up and making it easier to take things from research to to production and scale it up. Like, that's really what we enable a lot of these companies to move fast and get value into production.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then
Speaker 7:we don't have to think infrastructure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But because we're so early, it's like you guys can only do so much and then you're sort of relying on your own customers' creativity to, like, fully be able to apply this set of tools Exactly. Their
Speaker 7:Yeah. And that's the beauty of software. It's all about creativity. Like, we give them the building blocks, They can kind of combine them in an infinite way and Mhmm. You know, that they can build software.
Speaker 3:How much demand are you seeing or how many CEOs are talking to you about the potential of bringing an ultra fast product to their experience? I'm thinking about Suno. If I install that app, they got me to like get over the hump to do the install. That's important. And if they were able to inference the first song I generate, I mean it's already really, really fast.
Speaker 3:But if it was like milliseconds, that might get me over like the conversion hump a little bit faster because I don't even close the app while it's queuing for five seconds. And you can imagine developers wanting an ultrafast product, something on Cerebras or Gocker. Like there's whole bunch of chips that are out there. Yeah. And the labs are...
Speaker 3:Have their strategy, but you have the opportunity to sort of bring that to to everyone. And I'm wondering how much demand you're hearing from that and if you're planning on solving it.
Speaker 7:So I I I think the beauty of Monol is is that it's really a general purpose product and you can build almost anything on it, and that includes things that that need to run very fast. Mean, we're very focused on real time voice, real time audio, things like that that need streaming. We're also looking into alternative chips, like maybe Cerebras, like things like that. Like Yeah. It's still kind of early, like, we'll see what happens, but I think there's some really exciting stuff.
Speaker 7:And I think that's like the sort of general purpose nature of Modal is that we can cater to all these things, like batch jobs on one side of the latency spectrum, really low latency inference on the other side of the spectrum. We're spending a lot of time optimizing LM inference as well and getting some really good performance. So there's a lot of that for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's exciting. When do you feel like inference platforms are going to be are they starting to diverge like, you know, the other companies in your space? Are they starting are are we in a period of convergence or divergence in the sense of like, Claude Code and Codex have been sort of like looking more and more like each other in in many ways, and then there's a bunch of other applications that end up looking more and more like each other. But I can imagine, like, I can imagine there's...
Speaker 2:There there becomes more separation just because there's so there's so We much to
Speaker 7:we certainly think that we're very unique in the sense that we're more general purpose than than pretty much all the other players in the space. I I do think just because the market turned out to be, like, 10 x or a 100 x or a thousand x larger than anyone thought, including myself, by the way, I think by just virtue of the market being large, like, we're... I think we're gonna see a lot of specialization. The market's gonna fragment a lot of stuff. And and and I think a lot...
Speaker 7:Our role there is to to cater to a lot of those different needs, like, bring a lot of the products. Like, Inference is itself, just vanilla straight down in the middle, you just want Kimi k three. I I think it's gonna be a very competitive space. But if you do all the stuff around it, you know, sandboxes, agentic stuff, like reinforcement learning, I think you can build a really really strong generational company. Something that can grow and, you know, grow and grow and grow for many many years.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. I mean, we're seeing it every day. Yeah. It's awesome.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Well, congratulations on the milestone.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much.
Speaker 5:Thank you
Speaker 4:so much. Looking forward
Speaker 2:to the next one.
Speaker 3:Hanging with us. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks.
Speaker 2:Cheers, Eric. Goodbye.
Speaker 3:Up next, we have Josh from The Atlantic, a writer who talks about... He wrote the November cover arguing that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are racing to vertically integrate the space economy. So we'll get to the bottom of it. Who you got? Musk?
Speaker 3:Bezos? We'll figure it out with Josh. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Hey, guys. How are you? What's going on? Dude, I'm I'm envious that you get to work with Mike Isaac.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 11:I... I'm very excited. I've been trying to work with Mike for like fifteen years.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 5:Oh, here
Speaker 2:you go. You made it over.
Speaker 3:Very cool. How'd you get started on this particular beat? How long have you been writing about space, writing about Musk, writing about Bezos, etcetera? Give us
Speaker 11:some background. So I, you know, I used to be the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and the chief content officer there. So I I've been dealing with technology and business for a long time. Yeah. In '20...
Speaker 11:End of twenty twenty three, I started writing a column about AI for the Washington Post. And I I just took it on for a year because I don't want to be a columnist. But AI was happening, and they really needed somebody who could kind of step in and explain to normal people, like, what is this? And I've been covering AI ever since and trying to cover it in ways that are different from the sort of standard beat reporting. I don't really care about startups and their valuations.
Speaker 11:I don't think most people do. I care about what the tech does. Yeah. What it might do. Yeah.
Speaker 11:I care to some degree about the representations being made by the founders Sure. And the and the hyperscalers, and the and like the the frontier models. Yeah. So I like practical applications. I like seeing what it'll do.
Speaker 11:I didn't originally intend that... You know, I didn't even know when I started thinking about this story that it would, of course, as with all things, end up back in AI land. But it did. Yeah. And so I guess I feel qualified
Speaker 2:for Well, isn't that sort of the nature of the... Of life in 2026 where everything...
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like you can be a sports podcast and you still have to talk about AI at least a couple times a month because there's some some crossover.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or even like the health... Every health podcast Yeah. Like just ends up having... Stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Yeah. It does.
Speaker 1:And and
Speaker 11:look, I think that part... That is part of the reason ordinary people are exhausted Totally. By the subject. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 11:Is that they're just like, do I need to hear about this everywhere I go?
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 11:Also, look, part of the reason that I like doing what I do is that I feel like there's a a very unfilled bit of white space, which is actually explaining both how the tech works and looking past these kind of like statements that, you know, when I was a columnist the first eight weeks, the number of times I heard the following phrases, and you guys are very familiar with this. AI is going to cure cancer, and it's going to mitigate climate change.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 11:And then by the fifth time, you're like, say more. Yeah. Tell me tell me what that means so that we're not just dealing with this kind of like, you know, level of bullshit that people have wash over them. And at a certain point, you're like, I don't believe anything you say.
Speaker 3:Step one is we all smoke cigarettes because then we have to cure cancer. That's
Speaker 2:what I'm hearing. Create the incentive. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Exactly. I... If you make AI cure cancer cancer claim, you have to smoke a cigarette on the spot.
Speaker 11:Right. That would be a good way to at least
Speaker 3:get it Yeah, back to exactly. Okay. Well, let's go over to the space economy. I think most people are familiar with like the Musk vertical integration strategy. SpaceX has been widely talked about forever.
Speaker 3:He's very noisy. We know Starlink is available on planes now and he's going direct to cell and he's going to put the data centers in space. The Bezos side of the story feels not not like it's a secret, but it's just less discussed because Bezos is a little bit less noisy than Musk. But he's been taking this very seriously for just as long as Elon. But can you break down what the Bezos space empire will look like, currently looks like, what's real, what's promised.
Speaker 3:What what do you see over in that world?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Look. I mean, Bezos is actually... Blue Origin started two years before SpaceX.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 11:So Bezos had a head start. Yeah. The fir... I can tell you the first twenty years of the company's history really boils down to just they took two very different paths. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Bezos, you know, had Amazon when he started Blue Origin. And he founded Amazon with his head, and he founded Blue Origin with his heart. Mhmm. And so he really... He allowed it to kind of drift a
Speaker 3:little bit. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And it was described to me by a former senior NASA official who visited both of those companies in their adolescence. This person said, look, Blue Origin was an academic lab. Right? It was like a science project. They had beautiful three d printers and beautiful buildings, but nobody was working.
Speaker 11:There's like no energy there. Whereas this person went over to to SpaceX and it's like everybody was dirty, everybody was young, they were sleeping in the office. And that's a product of the fact that Elon just didn't have as much money as Jeff. Yeah. And he basically said, you got to eat what you kill, and I don't mind losing it all if on the on the chance that we actually win.
Speaker 11:Yeah. And so they moved very quickly. Blue Origin for years, Jeff just was not fully dedicated to it. That gets us really up to the the current day where SpaceX is responsible, as you guys probably know, for 80% of what was launched in the world in 2025. And the next closest competitor is the Chinese government.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So blue origin is that. And Mhmm. It feels like dominant margins and economics. It feels like a monopoly business, and yet there might not be a structural monopoly like a network effect there.
Speaker 3:So it feels like something that another company, Blue Origin or someone else could actually go after, get market share and get some of that margin if that's possible. So is this a your margin is my opportunity all over again?
Speaker 11:It's a little bit of that. It's also that the race is about to change. Right? Okay. So the first twenty five years is about lowering launch costs Yeah.
Speaker 11:Which Elon has successfully done. Yeah. And then covering your other costs by having a business like Starlink. You know, launch is not a great business. Yeah.
Speaker 11:High risk. Small. Very expensive. Boring old telecommunications is a fantastic business.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 11:That's where you get Starlink. And and obviously Blue Origin and Amazon are now in their own satellite race. Yeah. So if you think about the... There are four steps on the ladder of vertically integrating all of this stuff.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. Those are the first two. They're pretty well established. SpaceX is ahead. The next two are where things change.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. Okay? Number three is data centers in space. You guys have covered it. I know that a a lot of your listeners and viewers are aware of it.
Speaker 11:But basically, the compute costs dealing with NIMBYism on Earth, dealing with energy costs, the fact that it can be throttled at any point and it's highly competitive, make data centers in space not only logical, but by some people who I reported on, They feel like it's inevitable that we're five to seven years away. Mhmm. And of course, because this is a ladder, if you don't have launch, your ability to have data centers in space is going to be really problematic. There's a reason that a year and a half ago, Sam Altman mused about the fact that maybe OpenAI needs a space company and tried to buy Stoke Space, which is a startup, very successful. Yeah.
Speaker 11:Didn't end up doing it. But if you don't have a launch, you have issues.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 11:So that's the third rung. And the third rung is yet to... We... We've yet to figure out who exactly is going to be able to deploy and build these data centers in space. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX have big plans for it, as you saw in the SpaceX Perspectus.
Speaker 11:That's really what they expect to make most of their money on.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:The fourth rung is AI models on earth. Right? Which we all know how people are imagining the financials around them. The number one issue is the throttling of compute. If you can't compute, you can't build and fine tune new models.
Speaker 11:You can't have inference. You can't service people's products. So the ability to have unfettered compute depends on satellite infrastructure and launch. And then your ability to build out your model becomes very different. Yeah.
Speaker 11:The other thing that's different between these companies is what the AI models themselves do. Elon has largely invested in Grok, which is basically an LLM infrastructure. It may at some point change, but that's what it is. Bezos wants... Bezos has a project called Prometheus, which like Blue Origin, he kept very, very secret.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. And then last year, sort of came out of the closet on it, and he's the co CEO of Prometheus. So he has an operational role in the company. And Prometheus is, you know, it's... The closest thing to compare it to is a real world model.
Speaker 11:It's a world model in which physical data makes up most of the model. He refers to it and others as an artificial general engineer. Mhmm. What they mean by that is that it's trained on physical data in the world and tries to make physical things from that data. Tries to model things that are really hard to model.
Speaker 11:The end game, if you believe we will get there, is a machine that makes machines. And if you're Jeff Bezos, and you own Amazon, and need dexterous robots everywhere, and you have plans to colonize the moon, and you need all sorts of machinery there, It makes sense that that's the kind of AI you would be going for. So the two of them, that's what they're both aiming for is this flywheel where everything leads to everything. Now the other thing that that does is if you don't have launch capability, you're out of the game. So...
Speaker 11:And so it's... At some point, if this space economy becomes real, inevitably there will be scrutiny around non competitive practices because they'll have lockdown on it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But there's a lot of hyperscalers that don't have launch capacity, but they feel like they've like sort of dipped their toe in. I'm thinking of like that solar plane that Meta was working on maybe a decade ago or Google had a balloon project and Sergey Brinz built a big blimp and like there's little experiments that are happening and I'm wondering if there's rumblings of, you know, are we gonna hear about Meta and Google and maybe Microsoft and maybe NVIDIA saying like we like we we we... Well, at least one of us is like going for it and we're going to try and partner up with a Rocket Lab or Stokes space and really get into launch.
Speaker 11:I mean, maybe. The problem is how far behind even Yeah. Blue Origin is. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 11:Totally. I went to watch a Blue Origin launch in April. It was lovely. The mechanics of the rockets are gorgeous. Very brilliant people there.
Speaker 11:Right? It was the third time they had reused a booster. And as we discussed, like reusable... Reusability is the key to the whole You drive the the cost to get of kilos to space. They celebrated.
Speaker 11:Was the third time. And as I was driving away, I opened X, and Space X very casually posted they had just reused a booster for the six hundredth time.
Speaker 3:Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 11:And so it's 600 to three. Yeah. And Stokes Base and Rocket Lab. All these places are really smart. They're really Yep.
Speaker 11:But that's an indicator of how far behind they are. And so if you're Google and you're thinking, hey, we ought to get into rocketry. Well, call me in twenty five years.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It really does take that long.
Speaker 2:Well, and they also own a bunch of SpaceX. Do they not? Yeah, they do. So they've been they've been sort of like at least developing Benefit. A financial relationship for a while.
Speaker 2:I wanted to... Yeah. What what what is your view on this sort of how... I I imagine talent flows were very one directional over the last twenty years where people would be at Blue Origin. They'd be like, I wanna work on space.
Speaker 2:And then they'd realize like, I don't know what my equity is worth and like, it seems like SpaceX's valuation sort of tends to go up every few years and I can sell some shares and it's more tangible. Now, Blue Origin's raised outside capital. They have a new valuation. I imagine that they're gonna need to start making, like very very serious offers to try to peel people away from SpaceX back to back to Blue Origin in order to catch up in a bunch of different ways. But what are you seeing?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think that's alright. I also think that these are tribal companies in ways that... Some of it is endemic to the space industry. Like, are very...
Speaker 11:It's a really interesting subculture. These are very sweet, smart people. Right? These are... Even low down the chain, you're dealing with people who have a sophisticated understanding of science.
Speaker 11:They really love what they do. They're very invested in space. They dream science fiction dreams. Right? And so they are tribal in that way.
Speaker 11:But you can't help but be at one of these companies and constantly track how the other companies are doing. And so people have gone back and forth, but not as much as you might think. Now that the money is out there and that... There's some there's some people at SpaceX who are ready to go. They've been working for it.
Speaker 11:They got their equity moment. They're ready to roll. But I don't think it's as cut and dry as other other businesses that are comparable like where, you know, an AI researcher might defect for a certain amount of money. One, the money isn't that size. Right?
Speaker 11:It's still... It's good money, but it's not like AI researcher money. And two, they're they're often in different places and they're... These are much more community oriented companies. So I don't think that that Blue Origin is gonna get there simply by rating talent.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. You can't really just like take everything with you in the same way you can with an AI research project where you kind of know, oh yeah, there's this one pitfall in how you train the model.
Speaker 3:I'll take that over to another lab and immediately we'll jump. A lot of these things are like industrial processes that build up over years and years and years. And yeah, you might know, hey, we need 25 more machines over there, but that takes time to build and takes time to organize.
Speaker 11:It does. And the other thing that's interesting about it is that, you know, it's incredibly collaborative between the sort of theoretical space side, the physical engineering side. And so it it's it's a kind of different type of person. And so you are knitted into your environment in ways that are much different than technology or software engineering.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Last question. Is Jeff Bezos as space pilled or like excited about space as Musk? I mean, Elon has been talking about going to Mars. We got to get multi planetary.
Speaker 3:It's existential. Earth could get wiped out. And he's been excited about space for so long. Is Bezos equally excited and just less outgoing about it? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 11:Listen, the the the difference in their personalities may be attributed to lots of things. But one thing that I... The people I spoke to said, look, Jeff's a little bit older. Mhmm. And so his view of business was really formed by being a D.
Speaker 11:E. Shaw. Yeah. Which is you keep your secrets close. Yeah.
Speaker 11:You don't talk about your failures or your passions. Yeah. You produce your results on the field. Sure. Elon's just young enough to really like love social media.
Speaker 11:To have almost no inhibitions about what he says out loud.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But
Speaker 11:all the people that I spoke to said, Jeff, you know, listen. His high school girlfriend told reporters when Amazon was first happening, the reason he was trying to get rich was so that he could go to space. And I think what he's been doing all these years is real.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 11:I did not speak to him for this piece, but the number of people I spoke to who mused about the fact that he really wished he could have left Amazon earlier to focus on Blue Origin was significant. Mhmm. And I think he's trying to make up for a lot of lost time Sure. Because he loves space as much as Elon, if not more.
Speaker 3:Interesting. Fascinating. Well, if you see Mike Isaac, give him a banana from us. We I'm coming out to see him next week. Fantastic.
Speaker 11:I might try to expense more than a banana but There we go. If you guys want
Speaker 2:to keep Yeah. Make sure he's eating because he'll just go he'll he'll just go black coffee all day and we just want him to be...
Speaker 3:You know what? That's me too. So maybe we'll
Speaker 11:just find the finest black coffee we can and sit there and admire each other.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks
Speaker 2:so much. It was great to meet Josh.
Speaker 3:Have a good rest guys. We'll talk to
Speaker 2:you again soon.
Speaker 3:Goodbye. Cheers. Up next, we have Ada Baradari from D Valence coming on to talk about what you need to do to stop unapproved audio recording in and around you. We'll talk about how to fight this. Boom.
Speaker 3:How are you doing? Welcome back.
Speaker 13:Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Yes. Perfect time. Kick it off with an...
Speaker 2:Behind this?
Speaker 3:Is this a marketing...
Speaker 2:Because the whole scheme seems so silly. It's like you're covering it up with toilet paper, using using your employer's product to try to do research on how to do the crime. It was very silly.
Speaker 13:Yeah. I mean, it it is very silly and I mean, in many ways, can totally understand the skepticism from people. Yeah. I would say... But that's exactly the point as well because actually, that's a chip that is super simple and easy to get.
Speaker 13:We actually have originally tested some of these. This is the baseline chip for this, So, that's the point with AI. Anyone these days can really become an expert at something that they don't know and they can just build this. So in many ways, it was exactly what we have been preaching for a while. Yeah.
Speaker 13:And seeing that come up here is, of course, very concerning. Yeah. So, yeah, I think I don't... I mean,
Speaker 3:Yeah. We... Please reintroduce the cases. Re reintroduce the company and the product. And, yeah, should I get one of these to block my LG TV at home?
Speaker 13:Great question. So the Valens builds for devices that prevent unauthorized audio recordings, in particular Spectre prevents microphones from recording use, so we have been developing this technology. It's based on innovations in both hardware and also physics, as well as we're building our own in house models with AI to make sure that we can specialise exactly in this area. So I would say it is the perfect time to think about how can you protect your physical security because we are really moving from a digital security based cybersecurity time into also a physical one with middleware bands, with TVs making innovation also content recognition, you know, all of these things, there's a lot that's coming up. But the OpenAI case in particular shows that AI recorders and recorders overall are going to be very cheaply accessible for anyone.
Speaker 13:So if you care about your privacy, if you care about keeping your conversations where they're being held, this product is for you. We also have another product that's called Calypta, which prevents AI transcription during online meetings. But that's a bit separate on this issue.
Speaker 3:Okay. I signed up for Calypta for the beta. I put my email down. That's not shipping yet. But you can order the Spectre one today.
Speaker 3:Preorder. When is it shipping? Take me through the the the process of actually building, manufacturing, distributing these.
Speaker 13:Definitely. So we have been developing Spectre, so it is still in r and d phase to make sure it really works as well as it can. So the preorders are more so to secure your spot. We're hoping to ship it early next year, And there are also demos that we are planning to release up until the end of this year to showcase our progress on the technology. So I would say that is the general understanding of Spectre.
Speaker 2:And recording devices, what's happening on the spyware side? I've... There's... There was people talking about how some of these devices can be, you know, significantly smaller than than a penny, like, you know, something that you would never notice. Right?
Speaker 2:I think what was interesting Yeah. About this, case that that came out yesterday is just like, it it was not necessarily very sophisticated hardware. It was, you know, they were trying to cover it up with toilet paper, but it feels like there's... We now have... Humans have the capability to, you know, capture information in a form factor that that...
Speaker 2:And much smaller than ever before.
Speaker 13:Yes. So that is especially that's why we're focusing on a lot of R and D, and we're actually looking for enterprise partners to make sure that we can specifically protect against these cases, because they're very particular, they're usually in meeting rooms, so there's a very normal design that we can go through to make sure that it's for meeting rooms. We can do more than just putting one device in there, so we are looking right now into mesh capabilities for room level protection instead of just on the go protection, which is what Spectre one was originally. But now the question for enterprises is how do we protect entire rooms? So we're looking to partner with people up on that front as well.
Speaker 3:That makes a ton of sense. Yeah. The the the Spectre One device, I'm looking at the landing page. It it it seems like it's maybe the size of a donut or maybe a little bit bigger. It's not like key chain size.
Speaker 3:So it's a it's a commitment. But I feel like if I wear this around a necklace, everyone will get the idea don't spy on me. It could be kind of a fashion statement, I suppose.
Speaker 13:That is very true.
Speaker 3:Are are is miniaturization on the road map? I imagine that this could shrink down. Also on the cost side, $1,200 feels a little high for something like this. But what's been the response? What's the road map to get to something that's more just like everyday consumer friendly?
Speaker 13:Definitely. So when it comes to, for example, business rooms Yeah. Positioning multiple in there, that would allow us to shrink down the form factor a little bit. For consumers, we're also looking to shrink it down. It is the size of a speaker approximately.
Speaker 13:Main problem is, you know, we are using compute on these devices so everything can run locally. So that's why the price point is at that level because we are running our own models on it in order to make sure that everything stays secure and private on the device as well. But we are working on this and it is in the pipeline. It's just good things take time, so we are working through it.
Speaker 3:Interesting. Is the device able to detect if recording is happening or does it matter? Like, if I'm in the forest and there's no electronics around me at all, will it still be scrambling and and and blocking? Or does it turn on proactively when it knows, hey, those Metairie bands are on and they're listening?
Speaker 13:So right now, it's doing it regardless of whether something is recording or not as long as it detects there's a
Speaker 9:device that can record. Got it.
Speaker 3:Okay. So, it's it's hearing like Bluetooth.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you'll have time this holiday season, but next holiday season, if you could release a Christmas themed device that sort of...
Speaker 3:That might do it. I think if you're just constantly rattling the jingle bells, it's gonna throw off a lot of the AI recording. That's the low tech solution.
Speaker 2:Put you in the Christmas.
Speaker 3:Really loud actually.
Speaker 2:Put you in the Christmas spirit.
Speaker 3:Yes. That might
Speaker 2:be... Really glad you're doing this work. Yeah. Thank you for... More important than ever.
Speaker 3:Yes. Congratulations on the progress. Good luck with the next product revisions and have a great day. We'll talk soon.
Speaker 13:Sounds great. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 3:Goodbye. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Well. Well, folks. Thanks, Urschel. What a good run. It's been a great run all over the place today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. From Erwan to mathematics to
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:D valence.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We did go all over the place. Very fun. Any breaking news in the timeline, Tyler? Anything you do?
Speaker 3:No? You good? The only thing that I saw that we got to talk about first, we got to go back to alcohol. But this is a crazy stat. Today, Leonard Heim, former guest of the show, says, Global spending on alcohol is still larger than AI infrastructure spending this year.
Speaker 3:$1,700,000,000,000 spent on alcohol, $1,500,000,000,000 spent on AI infrastructure. So if we all band together and start teetotaling, we got another leg up.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 3:We got another leg up.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 3:We might have to do it. No. Really really puts in perspective. I I had no idea that the alcohol market was so huge but it in fact is. It's bigger than AI and Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It really is. We'll see how it goes. Well, there's what? Seventy one days till Christmas?
Speaker 3:How How many days until Christmas we got? Let's count it down. We got plenty of stuff going on. Here we go. Merry Christmas.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 4:Rolling flashback.
Speaker 3:Was We've got five stars on Apple Podcast.