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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
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Speaker 2:Today is Friday, January 23.
Speaker 1:It's casual Friday. It's casual
Speaker 2:Friday because I got the semiannual There
Speaker 3:we go.
Speaker 2:Jacket on. Zoom in on this. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Normally normally, I'm the casual guy.
Speaker 4:I thought I'd let John
Speaker 2:Thank you to Doug.
Speaker 1:Get to
Speaker 2:experience over at Semi Analysis. This is fantastic. It's extremely comfortable. And I I look like I'm ready to go tour data center. Feel
Speaker 1:like It's built for Abilene.
Speaker 2:I feel like this is built for Abilene. You throw this on, you're ready to go. See what the hyperscalers are up to. Maybe wire up some GPU racks, do whatever you need to do. Incredible.
Speaker 2:I I love it. So thank you to everyone over at Semi Analysis. We have another we have another gift that came in the mail from a friend of mine, Alex Moore, over at the ARC phone case. ARC pulse thing. It's got it's a phone it's so heavy.
Speaker 2:Feel how heavy this is. It's a it's a fantastic presentation.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It has a certificate of authenticity in metal. The ARC Pulse exclusive edition titanium opal Damascus.
Speaker 1:The new iPhone has really been testing my Fantastic. My free lifestyle that I've been running for.
Speaker 2:Yes. Oh, yeah. You know?
Speaker 1:So many years.
Speaker 2:For cases. Like, my my my phone's only a couple weeks old, maybe a month old. And it's just like completely destroyed on all the corners. It's really bad. So born from a fascination with precision engineering and material mastery, the ARC Pulse titanium opal Damascus unites advanced metallurgy with sculptural intent.
Speaker 2:Every case is forged from over a 100 individual layers of titanium purged with argon gas bonded at temperatures exceeding 3,000 Celsius. So thank you to everyone over at ARC with this fantastic case that has been delivered with his own case, series of cases. So so it's it's sort of a Russian nesting doll situation. So do you have news or can I tell everyone about ramp.com? Time is money.
Speaker 2:Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:Couldn't have said it by myself. What did wanna chat about? What what did you write about today, John?
Speaker 2:I wanted to dig into the question that we had with Joe Wiesenthal yesterday. What does China actually import? Obviously, this was off the back of Davos. Vice Premier Healy Fang highlighted China's determination to become the world's market. They said, hey.
Speaker 2:We we're the world's factory, but we also can buy stuff. Send us your stuff. We'll buy it. But what are they gonna buy? So he said boosting domestic demand was now on top of their economic agenda.
Speaker 2:This is in their their fifteenth five year plan, something like that. And we were going back and forth. I'm like, what are they actually importing? We were saying semiconductors, but, you know, obviously, there's there's chip deals and and GPU bands. Now, interestingly, China is like, the number one trade deficit for China is semiconductors, and it has been since 2005.
Speaker 2:So they wanted they they they they wanna buy semiconductors. Obviously, US trade policy oscillates. But semiconductors are the single biggest deficit for China. In 2020, even before the AI boom, China imported 350,000,000,000 worth of semiconductors, which was more than the value of the crude oil it it imported that year. And it's been the largest importer the largest importer of chips since 2005 and accounts for huge chunks of revenue for Qualcomm.
Speaker 2:It's over 50% of Qualcomm's revenue, I think, and over 25% for Intel. So everything that you get from China, if it's an electronics product, it's some gadget, it has a chip in there, that's probably gonna be made in the West, know, fabbed in Taiwan or made in in an Intel fab, sent over to China, assembled, and then
Speaker 1:sent back out.
Speaker 2:And then sent back out. Exactly. So they they aren't imported there. Energy is a big driver of the trade deficit with China. China imports 74% of its oil supply and 42% of its gas supply.
Speaker 2:Soybeans, which you mentioned, and iron ore are also big categories. The iron ore, goes into a lot of, again, the factory, the world's factory.
Speaker 1:Why can't China make enough soybeans in China?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:It must be climate related. They love making stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. That's a good question. We should we should dig into that. But luxury was what you said, and you're right.
Speaker 2:Luxury is a clear net import category for China. Estimates are around 100,000,000,000 annually. Now it's not the it's not the biggest driver of their trade deficit or trade surplus, but it is and it's also not critically important in the way chips or oil or soybeans or iron ore are, but it is but it is an important story. And almost all of Chinese luxury good imports are from European conglomerates. You gotta think LVMH and Kering.
Speaker 2:It's not strategically important, really, and the the foreign luxury market in China, so European conglomerates sending their goods to China, it actually completely fell off a cliff in 2024. Imports went down about 20% based on more more international shopping that was happening, travel, and a boom domestic boom. So domestic Chinese luxury brands are on the rise. Laopo Gold is now drawing this from the same customer base as Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Cartier, Bvlgari and Tiffany. Gucci is closing stores.
Speaker 2:I think around 18 stores are closing, while the local champion, Songmont, is seeing significant growth in their handbag business. So China does want to be the world's market, but they're also buying domestic a lot. The other dynamic that changed recently in the East versus West brand dynamic has been the acquisition of successful brands by Chinese companies with more competitive supply chains. So Morris Garages started in the 1920s and became synonymous with affordable British sports cars under the badge MG. Are you familiar with MG?
Speaker 1:Not super familiar.
Speaker 2:We gotta pull up some videos of old MGs to show you. My family actually had one when I was a kid. Woah. A really old one. Do you you familiar with MG?
Speaker 5:I think my grandparents also had one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. It it it was like a cool it was really, really cool, like, British not luxury, not high end, but a true driver's car. So we'll pull up one of these videos while I tell you about the brand.
Speaker 2:It's changed hands a ton. British Aerospace owned it at one point, so did BMW. But the MG business just collapsed because British Britain had a lot of, you know, sports car manufacturers. They had Jaguar and Land Rover and Aston Martin, and there's a whole bunch of other companies. But the MGs, the old MGs, they still look great.
Speaker 2:Here's a video of one of them. Jordy, give me your review. Would you pick one of these up? I like the soundtrack too. This is a good this is a good song for for an old retro video about an MG.
Speaker 2:These were these were iconic back in the day. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I like it. It's got a nice silhouette.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Certainly certainly a throwback, sort of a Porsche Speedster style. I like it. But eventually, the company failed 2005, and the brand was sold off to Nanjing Automobile Group, which was rolled into SAIC Motor, which is China's largest state owned automobile manufacturer. And so the acquisition, it actually worked.
Speaker 2:Sales of new MG motor models have picked back up. Since 2019, MG has been China's most exported car with more than 88% of sales happening internationally. So they bought the brand. Any idea where? Europe, Canada, basically everywhere except The United States.
Speaker 2:They sell them in England. So the MG brand is still well known better known in Britain. And with the new models, they're selling pretty well. We can pull up a video of the newer MGs because they have a sports sedan. They actually have, I think, like, sort of minivan as well.
Speaker 2:But here's here's a review of the sports sedan. See the quad exhaust.
Speaker 6:Golf of the world has look
Speaker 2:at this. They have this crazy, like, tail fin that comes out. They have a lot of, like, fun gimmicks on here. But there's the MG brand. Still alive and well, thanks to China.
Speaker 6:No question. This is one of the best looking MG cars on the market. At the front, you can see the LED headlights with the striking DRLs Mhmm. 19 inch alloys, sleek, fast back profile with aerodynamic lens that run down this 4.9 meter long car, and frameless doors. At the back, have wide hips with flowing LEDs with not two, but four exhaust tips, and surprise, they actually work because this Chinese car is not electric.
Speaker 6:Finally, I know. And after all that sportiness outside, in here, you find
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does the the rear ends nice.
Speaker 6:375 liters of Hatchback. Lift back design. So it's super easy to load and unload stuff. So this car is not just sporty. It's also daily friendly.
Speaker 2:They also have a sports car that we can pull up that has some very interesting features. It has some scissor doors. It's electric. There's there's a reveal video that we can play here. Look at this.
Speaker 2:This is the MG it's like Sportster, Speedster, something like that. Cyberster. Cyberster. That's what it's called. The Cyberster.
Speaker 2:Look at those doors. That's kinda it's it it kinda ribs. It looks
Speaker 1:Tyler, I mean, we've been we've been wanting you to to for your next
Speaker 2:car, they should go up.
Speaker 1:Go up Yeah. To kind of, like, establish dominance in the in the I don't know
Speaker 5:if I can read the the Chinese
Speaker 2:No. Yeah. Yeah. Let's play the review of the Cyberster from Forest Auto Reviews. I really like this creator.
Speaker 2:He does one minute vertical video reviews of cars from start to finish. So it could be essentially compressing like and
Speaker 7:this is an electric drop top sports car. And he just goes through everything this thing is gorgeous. You have these awesome headlights. I get these gorgeous body lines. But I think my favorite part has to be the way the door opens.
Speaker 7:I just come over here, push this button,
Speaker 2:and it just pops right up.
Speaker 7:So cool. But don't worry because if it's gonna hit something It's hard
Speaker 2:to get those doors. BMW I eight, that's the only option in America really.
Speaker 1:They really are cooking here.
Speaker 2:They are. Paddle shifters in an electric car, it just changes your drive mode. But you could imagine with an update, you can do the, like synthetic DCT. Yeah. Digital DCT, which has been very popular in the, I I Storage
Speaker 1:space down there.
Speaker 7:Storage space under here. Tons of storage back there.
Speaker 2:More so So it really gives you, like, a full tour of the car in just sixty seconds.
Speaker 7:Back here. In the back, you get literal arrows as your taillights. This can do three twenty three miles on just one charge. It does five forty four horsepower and because it's all wheel drive, if I put
Speaker 1:You cannot buy these in The US?
Speaker 7:No. Do zero to 60 in three point one seconds.
Speaker 2:And then he rips it up.
Speaker 7:Boom. Loses some safe stock. You get Brembo brakes. And if this were sold in America, it'd be $41,500.
Speaker 2:That's not bad. Right? Like that's a kind of a steal. Quickly, let me tell you about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast.
Speaker 2:That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So this this trend has been going on with American or, you know, storied brands, European automobile manufacturers selling to Chinese companies. Volvo changed hands from Ford to China's Zhizhang Zhili Holdings Group. In 2010, the deal valued Volvo at 1,800,000,000.0, and it also basically worked out. Sales have grown from half a million vehicles in 2015 to over 700,000 vehicles in 2023.
Speaker 2:And when I told you this, you were like, what? Volvo? And I I couldn't believe it either. Gillies also bought Lotus, the maker of the Lotus Elise, the Avija. There's a bunch of other sort of, like, more affordable sports cars, ultralight sort of tossable cars.
Speaker 2:And so Lotus is also another British sports car manufacturer to wind up in China. And so the the basic trend is like China excels at developing efficient supply chains, streamlined manufacturing operations. And it doesn't stop with cars. They're doing it with TVs now. So on Tuesday, Sony announced that they would be spinning off its home entertainment business, which includes the TV brand Bravia, and to their Chinese rival TCL Electronics Holdings.
Speaker 2:Sony is selling a 51% stake to TCL, while the brand will remain Sony. The display technology will be TCL. And so Sony's been falling behind Samsung, TCL, LG, Xiaomi in terms of TV shipments for a while. But the brand still holds a ton of value. Like, TVs were the best Yeah.
Speaker 2:A decade ago. And still today, people like the the software a little bit more. And the Sony brand, it still has the aura of the Walkman, the PlayStation. Like, it's just beloved electronics, and you see the Sony logo, and it's just way more familiar than
Speaker 1:Japanese excellence.
Speaker 2:Yes, you do. And so Sony has been falling behind on the manufacturing front. TCL has been basically delivering a much stronger value prop on a price to quality basis, and the panel technology loved and and very competitive. But there's just more faith in the Sony name. So the Chinese manufacturer is effectively pulling forward heritage and brand legacy by buying the name.
Speaker 2:And this feels like a trend that will continue for a while. China's fantastic at quickly grinding down manufacturing learning curves, developing high quality products at affordable prices. But creating an iconic brand, it just takes decades, and so it's better to buy than build. Like, this is the one thing you buy instead of build. And so Western companies, after getting beat up on margins and seeing their market share slowly shrink, I think the Sony TV market share was dropping to less than 1%, while I believe Xiaomi's at like 6%.
Speaker 2:I didn't even know Xiaomi makes TVs. I don't think they use phones and cars, but apparently they make everything.
Speaker 4:It is such an interesting
Speaker 1:dynamic because you have Western brands and manufacturers that have just been saying, yes, China's out competing us on manufacturing by 2x. We're getting destroyed. We basically need tariffs Mhmm. And things like that to protect Mhmm. To protect market share, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But the one thing that they'll never have is brands. Right? More. It just takes so long.
Speaker 1:Yeah. MGs. Know, building up the volume 20. Of not just like an advertising budget. Totally.
Speaker 1:It's time. Yeah. And it's their safety record and all these things that go into that. But of course,
Speaker 2:if you if you're out if
Speaker 1:you out compete just on manufacturing long enough and then you're Yeah. And then you get these opportunities to actually buy the the the top brands, eventually, can actually own the full stack.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. So we gotta look at one more MG, their hypercar. It's a concept car, probably will never ship, but I want your review on whether or not you would step into this and take it for a spin. This is the MG hypercar or supercar.
Speaker 2:This is from Supercar Blondie. And Supercar Blondie has an uncanny ability to get access to every concept car ever made. I'm constantly seeing Supercar Blondie content about cars that feel like they barely exist or or So
Speaker 1:it's single seater.
Speaker 2:Single seater. Like, this is like this is like a competitor to the Valkyrie and the or something Valkyries two seater.
Speaker 1:Two seater.
Speaker 2:But it yeah. It's like a crazy, like, I I mean, this is pure probably just for show during a big conference, something to turn heads and draw eyes, but pretty pretty remarkable to see this from MG, the company that made, you know, these open top Roadsters in the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 4:Anyway Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, it just looks like looks pretty close to a Speedtail.
Speaker 2:It does look like a McLaren Speedtail.
Speaker 1:Which is also the center Yeah. Center seat.
Speaker 2:Also, McLaren Speedtail, inductive charging. Have you seen this? No. So there's a pad that when you drive over it, it will charge the battery.
Speaker 1:And I think that's also available in like a regular trickle charger.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you don't so it is still a trickle charger.
Speaker 1:That's nice.
Speaker 2:Eight hours, but you don't need to plug it in.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 2:think that's also happening with the the new Porsche SUV EV, maybe the Cayenne EV.
Speaker 1:Ferrari should pick that up. Yeah. I know. Loves to put put their trickle charge
Speaker 2:Tesla should pick it up. Tesla's the obvious one.
Speaker 1:No. But but but Ferrari is notorious for being like, oh, that thing you need to use every time you drive your car, we're gonna put it buried in the trunk. You're gonna need to crawl in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the the like, the Tesla charging, do you remember the the robotic arm, the snake that was gonna do you remember this? The Tesla was at one point teasing this might have been, like, a decade ago, but they were teasing basically a a robotic snake like arm that could go and plug in the car, like, autonomously. So you would just pull in, and then at some point, it would just go and plug in. And they never shipped it.
Speaker 2:I I you're looking at me like I'm crazy.
Speaker 5:I've never heard that.
Speaker 2:I've never
Speaker 5:heard of this. I think they should also do the Look
Speaker 2:it up.
Speaker 5:You know, there's the Chinese EV where the battery explodes at
Speaker 1:the side. That thing is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. We gotta
Speaker 5:pull that up. Now if you're next you pull up next to your your ops, your enemies, you just hit them in the shins with your battery.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Jordy, I want you to try and pull some of that up. But first, I'm gonna tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Speaker 2:Do we have any luck? John Arnold says, I don't know if Chinese manufacturers will ever make money, but I came away not wanting to invest in any manufacturing business in the rest of the world. And Ian Rountree says, I'm gonna keep investing in American manufacturing. So people are still still pushing it. There's also big news.
Speaker 2:Anderrill is bringing a 1,000,000 square foot union built campus, along with 5,500 jobs, to the city of Long Beach. The the the office of mayor Rex Richardson, the Long Beach mayor, posted this. Over the next three years, Andrew will be building this. This is the largest private investment in Long Beach history, and it's a major vote of confidence in Long Beach's leadership in aerospace and advanced manufacturing. It's accelerated by '28 and grow Long Beach in action.
Speaker 2:Great work. Lex, love to see it, says Daniel. It's fantastic. And what a banger. Thousand likes on this.
Speaker 2:Everyone's happy about the new Andoril campus in Long Beach. Anyway
Speaker 1:I have this pulled up on Futurism. China unveils EV that can violently eject its battery
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:In case of a fire.
Speaker 2:Okay. Send that to the team. I'll tell everyone about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with amazing customer services. Okay.
Speaker 1:If you scroll down to this video, and we can see this in action and see what kind of situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is so wild. I remember when this video went viral. It's like, what is the point? Oh, it's because if it crashes, it's gonna burn.
Speaker 2:It'll shoot it out. But, oh, that just seems like so so dangerous. But, yeah, at the same time, people people, you know, watch these videos and they and they think like, oh, this is like widespread Chinese best practice when really like, this is probably like their gundo equivalent. You know, just like a couple dudes
Speaker 1:It is interesting that they're like, we don't just need to get it 10 feet away. We need to get it 30 feet away.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Because you could just like like gracefully drop it out or something or like or like slide it out sort of slowly with a little pusher, but they have to like shoot it out like a cannon. It's amazing. Anyway, Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet.
Speaker 2:Next level, vibe coding, state of the art reasoning, and deep multimodal understanding. And speaking of Google, I think we gotta watch the video about AI industry news. Every two weeks, one of these models is destroying someone else's model. And we we we we found a fantastically funny video on Instagram Reels that we will play for you today, folks. So let's play the read the comedy game.
Speaker 8:Destroyed Pinterest and ChadGPT. ChadGPT destroyed perplexity and Google AI. LinkedIn AI just ruined WhatsApp We met AI. No. IRCTC AI just destroyed UberOli AI.
Speaker 8:Wow.
Speaker 2:Wow. It's so good. What is that last one? IR c t c a I? I'm never
Speaker 1:even He's just making
Speaker 4:stuff up.
Speaker 1:He's making
Speaker 2:up acronyms at this point. But it really is so true that, like, there's just a time honored clickbait title of, like, destroyed in all caps. I used to do it on my YouTube videos. Always went viral. It's it's been proven.
Speaker 2:I was I was taking credit for for inventing that format on YouTube. Brandon Gurrell put me in the truth zone and and said that I did not in fact create that. That was created long before the BuzzFeed the BuzzFeed era and and is is potentially time honored.
Speaker 1:Anyway Don't worry. I will I will drop I will drop the video link in the Yes. In the YouTube channel.
Speaker 2:And while you're doing that, I will pull up the linear lineup and tell you who we have on the show today, folks, because we have a great lightning round coming up. We have Turin from Base Ten, Bryce from Nominal, Max Sparrow, the AI Slop janitor from Pangram, and then Russ closing out with LiveKit. Some fantastic funding rounds coming up. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces are using Linear with agents, and you should be too.
Speaker 1:So That's right. What's going on with TikTok?
Speaker 2:TikTok is it it's sort of the reverse, honestly. It's very interesting. You have this dynamic of, like, the American companies or the Western companies, MG and Sony selling to Chinese because they have great manufacturing. And then TikTok, you know, we want America wants control over the algorithm, over the data, security. And so you have a Chinese company that's now going to be operating in The US, and The Wall Street Journal has a piece here on it.
Speaker 2:First, I will tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So the agreement was negotiated to comply with a 2024 law requiring the company to do a deal to address US national security concerns. Of course, there was it was a total, like, will they, won't they, for all of 2024 with TikTok. And then also in 2025, we were constantly tracking, like, when will this happen?
Speaker 2:It took years and years and years. Like, the actual TikTok should divest discourse is now, like, three or four years old. Lots of people have been working on this for a long time, but Rome wasn't built in a day, and TikTok was not divested in a day. But TikTok officially established a joint venture that would allow it to keep operating in The United States. The company said Thursday, resolving a years long fight to address Washington's national security concerns.
Speaker 2:Under the terms of the deal negotiated by the Trump administration, the popular video sharing app will be operated by a new US entity controlled by investors seen as friendly to The US. Its data management and algorithm training on American users will be overseen by Oracle, the cloud computing giant that has safeguarded its data for The US for years and has close ties to the Trump administration. The deal was negotiated to comply with a law passed in 2024. President Trump delayed the implementation of the law a year ago after starting his second term to keep TikTok operating in The United States. He signed a series of executive orders to extend the deadline for completing a deal until it was met Thursday.
Speaker 2:Trump said in a social media post, I'm so happy to have helped in saving TikTok. He sang he thanked Chinese leader Xi Jinping for working with us and ultimately approving the deal with a capital d. He could have gone the other way, but didn't and is appreciated for his decision. Trump and TikTok's investors and allies pushed the deal through despite lingering concerns among lawmakers and security hawks that China could still influence the new entity through TikTok's parent ByteDance,
Speaker 1:which Yeah. So so
Speaker 2:percent of it.
Speaker 1:Makes It sense that this took so long. It sounds really simple. Just divest. But in reality, you have to effectively rebuild an entire app. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's gotta be it's gotta be it's gonna be like a new app Yeah. Figuring out the logistics logistics of of that. That. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's also just a ton of hair on the deal, right? There's a huge revenue share that's going back to ByteDance in perpetuity that is obviously reflected in the valuation. And so and then the other the other factor is, like, if you have a US TikTok now and then you have normal TikTok. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:If I'm on The US TikTok, am I sharing content to international TikTok? If I'm on the international TikTok, is it sharing my content back into The US app? Yeah. How does that all work out? Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so there's a lot of stuff that still needs to be handled. You know, I I would say, like, most of the social media app pretty much every social media app that you use, if you just cut off international content creators, the experience on the app would get worse.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So there needs to be, like, some content still flowing back and forth. Yeah. But figuring out how exactly that works is still in process.
Speaker 2:Yeah. TikTok CEO, Cho Chew, said in an internal note to employees, the majority American owned joint venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for US users. There was a the whole TikTok debate really erupted when TikTok CEO, Shochu, was in front of congress and was not really acting like he was the boss, basically. That was the main criticism. It felt like he didn't have full control over the entity because, of course, it's a subsidiary of ByteDance, and some of The US lawmakers were pressing him on how much control he actually has.
Speaker 2:Did they send the right person to the congressional hearing? But it seems like he's held on, and he's done well. He's also Singaporean, by the way. So, you know, easier to, you know, be a part of the new US TikTok organization and and allay any concerns of Chinese control, which is certainly at the heart of the of the administration's goals here. So who's in the deal?
Speaker 2:You got Oracle. You got private equity firm Silver Lake. You got Abu Dhabi based MGX. They will each own 15% of the new entity, while TikTok investors will own about 30%. Other notable investors include JD Vance's former revolution former firm Revolution and tech executive Michael Dell's Family Investment Office.
Speaker 2:Dell's getting in the deal. Vance spent a brief stint at the firm founded by AOL cofounder Steve Case during his time as a venture investor, which preceded his twenty twenty two senate campaign. I didn't realize that JD had been at at Revolution. I I know he was he had a separate venture firm, but I didn't know that he was hanging out with Steve Case, the former cofounder of AOL. Vance has said previously that the deal values the new entity at about 14,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:A lot of people thought that that was really, really low given TikTok's immense growth, but there is another side of this, which is that TikTok, I don't believe, was ever monetizing or as profitable as the its competitors, YouTube and and Instagram. And Mark Zuckerberg and and the and the Google team were not, exactly slow to move and launch competitive products. And so a lot of the you see this continuously where Snapchat comes out, Stories is on a tear, and you're looking at the Snapchat growth curve, and you're like, this is going to this is gonna kill kill Facebook. It's gonna be the next Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg needs to acquire it. He puts in an offer, gets declined.
Speaker 2:And it looks like it's over, but then the Instagram team moved really quickly. They launched Stories. And that effectively and you can see in the chart, Stories launches on Instagram, and people stop moving on to Snapchat. And so a lot of people went back who had who were on Snapchat, they went back to Instagram, and Instagram continued to grow. And Snapchat, it didn't flatline, but it, like, definitely put a dent in their growth.
Speaker 2:And I think the same thing is true for TikTok. Like TikTok, a lot of people who just want that format, vertical video, endless scrolling slop, they can get that now. We we we got we got American made troughs all over the place, everywhere the eyes can see. So the investors are paying the US government a multibillion dollar fee for arranging the deal, a concept Trump previously called a tremendous fee plus. Interesting.
Speaker 2:TikTok said it had 200,000,000 users in The US, up from its twenty twenty four estimate of about a 170,000,000 users. So decent growth, but I don't know. I mean, 200,000,000 in The US is a lot. Like, that's pretty much everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I guess the question is, will they ever get the rest of The US in the in the way that YouTube, you could assume, has, like, effective
Speaker 2:You think they have, 300 mil?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Probably. I would assume that that I
Speaker 2:don't know. There's a of Philistines out there. There's a lot of the Luddites who are just like, no. I want I want DVDs. I want VHS tapes.
Speaker 2:Anyway, Trump touted his popularity on TikTok earlier Thursday posting on Truth Social that his posts on the platform TikTok get more engagement than posts on TikTok competitor, Instagram, which is owned by meta platforms. TikTok Trump said that TikTok helped him win for
Speaker 1:what it's worth, that's always been the case. Right? Like TikTok has always had allegations that they were botting
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Like as a platform Yes. Effectively. Yes. People would go on there and they'd be like getting a tremendous amount of followers, tremendous amount of just engagement broadly
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Far more than, than they would have on Instagram with the same content. Mhmm. And, you know, some people would say, oh, that's because the TikTok algorithm is so good. Mhmm. But, and there certainly are a bunch of very real people on TikTok.
Speaker 1:I don't I don't mean to say that it's all botted. But Mhmm. The experience of using TikTok, a lot of creators will just naturally have six times as many TikTok followers as they do Instagram followers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like the algorithm is set up to, like, serve you more content in a ten minute session because you're more quickly scrolling. And then there's also accounting issues, like on some platforms, if you just scroll past something for even one second, that counts as a view. On other platforms, it might take three seconds.
Speaker 2:On other views, other, you know, platforms, it might take ten seconds, a minute. You might need to watch the full thing. So there's always like accounting abnormalities there. Anyway, if you wanna stream on TikTok because it's American owned now, you wanna bring, you know, some Oracle focused content to TikTok.
Speaker 1:Some SaaS focused content? Get on Restream.
Speaker 2:One livestream at 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multi stream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 1:This might hit you like a sack of bricks. Yep. But breaking news, JD Vance is younger than future.
Speaker 2:That's a crazy stat. The 22
Speaker 1:future is straight up an elder now. He's an unc. No. He's beyond
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. He's an I suppose. Yeah. You're right. He's Not quite an OG.
Speaker 2:But Oh, no. It goes it goes OG, then elder. Right. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2:Gen z are arriving to college unable to even read a sentence. Says Fortune reposted by Tyler. Wales.
Speaker 1:See if
Speaker 5:I can read this.
Speaker 1:See if if you you can can read read this. This.
Speaker 2:Try and read this. Wow. He can't can't can't do it. He sloughed.
Speaker 5:I I just I need like some subway surfers or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm gonna need some subway surfers to read this next sentence.
Speaker 2:Anyway, Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. Get on Gusto. We have we have some drama that's continuing to unfold in the in the payroll space. The Justice department opens a criminal probe into Silicon Valley spy allegations. Subpoenas seek information on allegations that deal valued around $17,000,000,000 recruited a spy inside a rival company.
Speaker 2:This is a huge story last year, and then it's been pretty quiet, and both companies have just kind of been chug chugging along.
Speaker 1:Spending a lot on legal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation. Grand jury subpoenas were sent out in recent weeks by Craig mass Masakian Masakian, the US attorney for the Northern District Of California. The documents show they seek information related to a spying operation that Deal allegedly ran inside a rival company, Ripley, an Ireland based Ripley employee, in case you've forgotten. Keith O'Brien alleged in an affidavit filed in April that Deal's CEO, Alex, recruited him and gave him instructions for what information to take from Ripley.
Speaker 2:O'Brien alleged that other executives were involved in the spying plot, including his father, who is Deal's executive chairman and chief strategy officer. A spokeswoman for Deal said the company isn't aware of a criminal investigation, but is willing to cooperate with authorities. That's an interesting statement. The The Wall Street Journal is reporting this, and and and you find out from a Wall Street Journal reporter. That's that's wild.
Speaker 2:So the company has previously said, we deny any legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims. So deal says we didn't do anything wrong. Of course, the affidavit from Keith O'Brien is is extremely dramatic. There's that whole, like, you know, oh, send that watch to London. We're gonna be like James Bond.
Speaker 2:Like, it's a it's a really dramatic read. And you can go back and watch some old TVPN episodes if you wanna hear a full take on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting. They're not they're they're Yeah. Yeah. I wonder I wonder what what information is actually available Yeah.
Speaker 1:Kind of publicly on this. Because like, obviously, in a situation like this, you have both sides that are kind of, like, feeding the media their side of the story.
Speaker 2:But I
Speaker 1:mean What we do know
Speaker 2:facts of the facts here, like, the Justice Department did open this because the because the The Wall Street Journal confirmed that the Justice Department opened the investigation. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway Anyway. Yeah. It wasn't it wasn't until they I think a lot of people weren't expecting this to
Speaker 2:Last October.
Speaker 1:Actually have any type of, like, criminal component.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think a lot of people were just expecting, like, a lot of drama, a lot of, you
Speaker 1:know And they would eventually just, like, settle.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Settle. And, like, the worst case was, okay, maybe it's like a like a, you know, like a series d size payment for rippling, but they're both gonna just keep grinding. But it seems like it's going to the court, so we will see. Maybe there will be maybe there will be, you know, courtroom sketches of these folks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway, Nick, the chief
Speaker 1:OpenAI OpenAI creator.
Speaker 2:Some breaking news from CNBC. OpenAI chair Brett Taylor says AI is, quote, probably a bubble, expects a corruption in the coming years. And Nick is he he his camera roll is truly just filled to the brim with images of Sam Altman in various, like like, you know
Speaker 1:The guy has probably the largest collection of sales.
Speaker 2:Rare Altman. He every photo that's ever been taken of Sam. And and Nick just says, LMAO.
Speaker 1:Yep. I don't know.
Speaker 2:This could be true. Like, you know, who knows? Wonder what what more of the context was that
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, a a Bret Taylor quote taken out of context turned into a headline and then and then it and then it's like nowhere of course would Bret Taylor be like, oh yeah, I think I think LLM usage is gonna fall off a cliff. Yeah. It's like yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a variety of different companies Yeah. And kind of subcategories that could be overheated.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. You could take you could you could easily dig into that. And he's like, there's a bubble in, like, seed stage valuations. Like, I can't get an angel check-in at less than 50 pre. Like, you know, like, the bubble can take a lot of different shapes and stuff.
Speaker 2:Who knows what he was actually commenting on? Anyway, CrowdStrike, your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Another clip from Dennis from the Big Technology Podcast.
Speaker 2:He's taking shots at open air according to Yuchen Jin.
Speaker 9:Actions speak louder than words, going back to the original conversation we were having with Sam and others claiming AGI is around the corner. Why would you bother with ads then? So that is, I think, a reasonable question to ask. But I think, look, from our point of view, we have no plans at the moment to do ads. I think if you're talking about the Gemini app, right, specifically.
Speaker 9:I think we are going obviously, we're going to watch very carefully what the outcome of what Chachi Pitea is saying they're going to do. I think it has to be handled very carefully. Think actions speak louder than
Speaker 2:a really good AGI, the clankers need to advertise to each other. You gotta do ads for the clankers.
Speaker 1:Ads I mean, the the thing here is like OpenAI has to not only like figure out how to actually implement ads within the product, but they have to build out all the advertising like infrastructure, the platform infrastructure in order for for people to run campaigns
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Successfully and at scale. Yeah. So Google already has all of that. It is far ease like, it it is what do you think it's like a 100 times easier for Google to turn on ads in Gemini? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? They already have all the customer relationship. Literally, any company that advertises online Yeah. Is already working with Google.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so it's really just like you can just flip the switch. Yeah. And so I could easily, you know, don't have any inside knowledge, but I could easily see Google just like having it all basically ready to go Yeah. And it literally just being like, okay.
Speaker 2:There there is launch this whenever we want. There there is an interesting steel man here. Let me try and do it. So Do you
Speaker 1:need Sam the helmet?
Speaker 2:I I I might need the helmet, but I'm I think I'm good for now. So so Sam and others well, first, let me tell you about advertising. Vibe.co, where d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta. So, the steel man on Sam Altman claiming that AGI is in the corn around the corner, but we still gotta do ads. Well, around the corner, even if that means six months, like, if you have an incredible capital expenditure to get over that hump to create AGI, it's only six months away, but you gotta do that last data center, and you gotta raise that last 50,000,000,000 and all of the investors
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's easy to say, like, we don't wanna do ads when you have hundreds of billions of dollars in existing ad revenue coming in funding everything that you're doing. So anyways, I think this is
Speaker 2:know, mean, we can also debate whether or not ads will exist post AGI. I would argue that they would. But what do you think, Tyler?
Speaker 5:There was that headline about how OpenAI maybe they're thinking about, like, taking a percentage of the of the share of, like, the discoveries. I don't know how they would actually do that or if it's, like, they're being serious at all. But that's, like, much more AGI pills,
Speaker 2:right, than ads. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that yeah. That's a good point.
Speaker 2:So they're doing both. They're doing both. Anyway, New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just just do it.
Speaker 1:Just do it. Just do it. Apparently, Vimeo almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off Yeah. Including the entire video team. I would assume that else most of do of their team.
Speaker 1:Unfortunate. I have some fond memories of being a teenager when Vimeo was really
Speaker 2:Vimeo was so differentiated. It was where there was a level of quality that it wasn't just I would
Speaker 1:go there to watch random person. Short films. My case, Yes, it was like surf yes, It was like if somebody was putting a ton of effort into making like a surf movie or or, you know, some snowboarding movie, it would be on Vimeo.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And they wanted higher quality footage. You could get higher bit rates, four k, HD. Like, they they were really on the frontier of that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I remember watching a lot of ski videos there. There were some great ones. And also just like it was a place where people would put their their short films. They had the Vimeo, like, you know, awards with the little wreath
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Laurels that you could rest on. But eventually, YouTube just went everywhere, all places. The ads went away for the people that care about that because they had premium subscriptions. And ultimately, the quality on YouTube just got better and better and better. And now you can get four k, really high bit rate on on YouTube, and it's indistinguishable from Vimeo.
Speaker 2:So fewer and fewer fewer and fewer ways to make a case for, you know, consumer adoption,
Speaker 1:essentially. Like, I I
Speaker 2:I I certainly would not recommend anyone who's making video content distribute on on Vimeo. I I put everything on on YouTube because YouTube has a massive audience and it's
Speaker 1:an Discoverability.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Discoverability is just so
Speaker 1:High yield Harry has the meme for the moment. He says, but now we shall both surely drown, said the frog. LOL, said the scorpion. Don't think I
Speaker 2:don't I I don't think this is exactly right. Like, if if you buy if you're a private equity firm and you buy an asset like this and you and you lay off the team, like, you're likely there are still people that are going to be trying to extract the value from that asset. It just might be a team on a different in a different section of the firm or an outsourcing agency or something else. I would be surprised if this means that Vimeo is shutting down. I would imagine that they're trying to continue whatever business relationships they have and whatever subscriber base they have.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway
Speaker 1:says, Vimeo was cool, but if you know about Vimeo, it probably means you're old. That's true. That's certainly true.
Speaker 2:You know about Vimeo?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I know what Vimeo is.
Speaker 2:What's last thing you watched on Vimeo?
Speaker 5:I have no idea. Yeah. But no. But I remember yeah. It was like like artsy Yeah.
Speaker 5:Films with me on there or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's good. Anyway, Applovin', profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today. What is what is all this?
Speaker 2:So Matthew Zeitlin says, my basic model of modern artificial intelligence labs is that they are like emotionally intense graduate school programs but with unlimited money.
Speaker 1:This is Matt Levine.
Speaker 2:Matt Levine is writing about this. And Mary says, my friend is dating a guy who works at one of the Frontier Research Labs in SF, and his sole job is to think and come up with a big idea every six months.
Speaker 1:Capital b, capital I.
Speaker 2:So his workday consists primarily of long walks spent pondering.
Speaker 1:That's a Very good Wilmanitis coded. That's amazing.
Speaker 2:I mean, seems like, honestly, in the age of research in the Ilias Setskiver world, like, this is probably a good use of time as opposed to there are plenty of people that will that will lock in and, you know, improve, make minor improvements to the consumer application or the consumer side of the business. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. In a world where you have, you know, infinite minds Mhmm. When you're a manager of infinite minds, what did Satya was quoting Yeah. Notion
Speaker 2:Yeah. Ivan.
Speaker 1:Co founder. Yeah. You're probably just walking, pondering, thinking about what what the next set of tasks to assign to your Infinite minds.
Speaker 2:Well, Epic Games and Google apparently have a secret $800,000,000 unreal engine and services deal. And the quote in their scoop, quote, sorry, I'm blowing this confidentiality. What a crazy quote to give to a verge reporter. But we're gonna dig in. Adi Robertson and Sean Hollister have the story.
Speaker 2:A judge is questioning whether Epic Games and Google are settling their long running antitrust fight partly because of a previously unannounced partnership involving the Unreal Engine, Fortnite and Android. In a hearing in San Francisco today, the court revealed that Epic and Google have struck a new deal that apparently includes joint product development, joint marketing commitment, and joint partnerships. California judge James Donato expressed concerns that the agreement, which he indicated would involve Epic, quote, helping Google market Android and Google, quote, Google's newly, quote, using Epic's core technology could have led Epic to soften its demands for changes to the overall Android ecosystem. Donato allowed Epic and Google to keep most of the details of the plan under wraps, but during the hearing, he quizzed witnesses, including Epic's CTO, Tim Sweeney, and economics and economics expert Doug Bernheim on how it might impact settlement talks, revealing some hints in the process. Quote, you're going to be helping Google market Android, and they're going to be helping you market Fortnite.
Speaker 2:That deal doesn't exist today. Right? Donato asked Bernheim, who answered in the affirmative. He also described it as, quote, a new business between Epic and Google. Sweeney's testimony cracked the mystery a little further.
Speaker 2:He referred to the agreement as relating to the metaverse, a team a term Sweeney has used to refer to Epic's game Fortnite. Epic's technology is used by many companies in the space Google is operating in to train their products so the ability for Google to use Unreal the the Unreal engine more fulsome. Sorry. I'm blowing blowing this confidentiality, Sweeney said. Oh, that's a great line.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, we we we've seen a a number what was it? What is the what is the DeepMind model that does that plays the games for you that I'm in the market for? Because I don't have any time to play video games, so I need an AI agent to do it for me. They have a number.
Speaker 2:So they have Genie three, which generates basically a three d world that you can walk Sima around two. SEMA two will play the game for you, and both of those should, in theory, benefit from using Unreal as the backbone.
Speaker 1:Elon's probably pretty excited about that as well. Right? Why? Because he likes to play on accounts that are
Speaker 2:Oh, yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Highly ranks, but he
Speaker 2:Oh. Oh. Oh. All the time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So instead of needing to hire someone, you could you could bot your account. People already do that with, like, aim bots and stuff. Usually, you get banned. But, it makes a lot of sense in terms of training Google's generative AI models, use Unreal, create a bunch of virtual worlds, walk around in those, interact in those, use them as reinforcement learning environments for agents, and then bake that out into a bunch of different models that can be used for a bunch of different things. I'm I'm I'm super excited for all of this.
Speaker 2:But it's it's just funny the way it's coming out. Anyway, if you need a reinforcement learning environment, you've got to go to Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Coinbase established an independent advisory board on quantum computing and blockchain. Quantum computing, if if built at scale, have the potential to reshape entire industries. We were talking to Kathy Wood about this a little bit yesterday. From finance to health care to material science and national security, for blockchain, the stakes are especially high. The cryptographic foundation that secures digital assets today could be challenged by the advances of the coming years.
Speaker 2:At Coinbase, security is our highest priority, and preparing for future threats, even those many years away, is crucial for our industry. Most people, I think, handicap the quantum thing at, like, 2030, 2032, 2040. I think Kathy Wood's estimate was 2040 for serious quantum adoption, even if you get on a Moore's Law type adoption curve. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:Nick Nick Carter's been super vocal on X about quantum just being, like, the biggest biggest headwind to, like, further Bitcoin price appreciation.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, there's also this question maybe I'm just, like, very I'm, like, super out of the loop, but, like, if you can crack, like, whatever the the Bitcoin or or any, like, blockchain with Quantum Yeah. Like, surely, you can also just get into like, you know, banks or like tons of like actual like things that are like probably way more important than than crypto. Yeah. It's like if we have a world where you have like these incredibly powerful quantum computers, is crypto actually the most important thing that you need to be worrying about?
Speaker 5:Or is it like the nuclear codes that are
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 5:I'm surely those are stored
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're probably right with the nuclear codes. But in terms of just like fiat stored in a bank, there are a series of backups that are offline. Even deeper backups at certain points. And so, like, the financial system, although they probably don't want to talk about it, does have the ability to, like, effectively roll back.
Speaker 2:So if there was, like, some massive quantum hack and, like, all the Morgan Stanley or JPMorgan accounts or Goldman Sachs accounts were, like, drained, they would just be, like, let's revert. But you can't do that on a blockchain necessarily. So but there is still the dynamic of, like, what happens if you crack Bitcoin? Like, how much are you stealing? How many new Bitcoins are
Speaker 1:you Yeah.
Speaker 5:I mean, if you, like, steal any Bitcoin, Bitcoin just goes to zero. So
Speaker 2:that's But actually the that's obviously still a threat, even if you just have some malicious actor who's just like, I'm going to take out a short position on Bitcoin, tank it and profit from that, that could potentially be disruptive, certainly disruptive to Coinbase's business. So good to see them taking it seriously. Anyway, MongoDB, Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Let's go to Scott Bessent.
Speaker 2:He was complaining about the food in Davos, and he did an interview on Real America's Voice, I guess, with Jack.
Speaker 1:So again, if you're looking at Davos as though it's a bunch of kick streamers
Speaker 2:Yes. That is the correct Effectively.
Speaker 1:That is the correct effectively been just clip farming Yeah. This whole time.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's watch the Scott fascinating.
Speaker 1:Carnivores here in Davos with the with the food here. You're not a huge fan of the food here, heard, by the way. You know, I I know. And no, I know if you remember a couple of years ago, one of the recommendations from the Davos Elite was we could all be eating bugs and insects. Yes, the insect food.
Speaker 1:Yes, right. I would tell you, after a couple of days of the food here, I I may switch to to bugs and insects. You have to take your insect food. Okay. Or unless that's what it is.
Speaker 1:Or or I'm gonna tell you. I'm I'm gonna Forget snacks fell off. They did. Do you remember? They were really people really pushing this.
Speaker 1:They were saying Yeah. Oh, the protein content is so high. And I think humanity rejected it.
Speaker 2:Well, you know you know the story of Magic Spoon?
Speaker 1:Were they gonna put cricket originally?
Speaker 2:They did a previous company called Exo.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:It was an American insect food company. They made some protein bars using cricket flour from pulverized house crickets.
Speaker 1:House crickets? House crickets. Guess. That sounds like you're taking the pets.
Speaker 2:They did a Kickstarter in 2016. They raised $55,000, which was more than their $20,000 target. They raised $5,600,000 in series a funding. I wonder from who? There's an article in the journal.
Speaker 2:There's an
Speaker 1:article in Business Insights. That's why I'm
Speaker 2:on it. Nas invested. No way.
Speaker 1:Woah.
Speaker 2:Legendary rapper Nas invested in a company that makes protein bars out of crickets.
Speaker 1:Okay. So on the XO Protein site Yeah. All bars are sold out. No. A couple, you can still get banana bread cricket bread bars.
Speaker 2:Company was acquired in 2018 by Aspire Food Group.
Speaker 1:You can get salted caramel cricket bars. Okay. And you can just get one pound of cricket powder. You can get a quarter pound.
Speaker 2:They should just get into selling live crickets. Just just just deliver them. Get your enemies addresses Yeah. And just deliver them. No.
Speaker 2:But so I think they one
Speaker 1:eight hundred cricket.
Speaker 2:I think they would they Fresh crickets. The team certainly found a niche, a weird breakthrough. You're gonna get a lot of earned media with a bizarre ingredient like that. But the ultimate traction, I think people just have an aversion to bugs and they they just conjures, you know, images of bugs crawling around
Speaker 1:Blood memories.
Speaker 2:Like it. Yeah. And so they sold the company, but then they started Magic Spoon, the not cricket based
Speaker 1:Which just immediately ripped.
Speaker 2:It ripped. It was a fantastic business. And I'm sure you've seen a ton of podcast ads about Magic Spoon, and everyone's familiar with that company. So if you're in crickets, if you're in bugs, pivot to cereal, I guess. And that's what Besson's saying.
Speaker 2:He's saying he wants Pop Tarts. Pop Tarts, basically Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon might even make Pop Tarts. Don't know.
Speaker 1:And Draphic published a new constitution for Claude. The constitution is a detailed description of our vision for Claude's behavior and values. It is primarily written for Claude and used directly in our training process. Was it written by Claude? Did Claude write its own That's a good question.
Speaker 2:You think, yes.
Speaker 1:Rahul over at Ramp said, basically, TLDR is I love you. You love me. We're a happy family with a great big hug and a kiss for me to you, won't you say you love me too?
Speaker 2:You really know the Barney song.
Speaker 1:I It's amazing. I didn't just sing it as a kid, I studied it.
Speaker 2:You studied it, yeah.
Speaker 1:More importantly Yes. Buzzballs. Incredibly important. Thank you. Is selling a $35,000 diamond engagement ring shaped like its drinks.
Speaker 1:The ring will be auctioned on eBay starting February 3. So I don't how is it how is it actually gonna be is 35 k like the
Speaker 2:Opening opening bid? Or or maybe it's it's $35,000 worth of diamonds. It cost them $35,000 to make it and they're gonna put it on eBay starting price a $100, and then it'll get bid up, guess. I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Proceeds will from the sale will benefit a heart related charitable cause. It's kind of odd for an alcohol brand to be like, we're we're
Speaker 1:I don't know. That's cool. I mean, if you're if if anyone out in the audience is wanting to propose and like doesn't really know how to is struggling to figure out like the right kind of like moment or way to propose, This is like Toss a buzz out of the box.
Speaker 2:That's the woman
Speaker 5:in your
Speaker 2:life. A buzz
Speaker 1:ball at the
Speaker 2:she catches it, woman she has to marry you. She has to say yes. Yeah. Is this rage bait? Is this good marketing?
Speaker 2:Do you think this is good for buzz ball strategically? What do you think?
Speaker 1:I don't know if it's I mean, I I find plenty of moments to talk about Buzzball already. So
Speaker 2:Unnecessary. Mean, is it is gimmicky, but the whole brand is sort of gimmicky to begin with. And so it doesn't feel out of context. It doesn't feel like they're trying to be a serious company and then they did something wacky on the side and I'm confused. This like feels within the the within the Buzzball's lineage, within the Buzzball's brand world very much
Speaker 1:so. Anyway Woah. This If is
Speaker 2:you're heading to Cisco AI Summit, be sure to bring some Buzzballs. Because on February 3, Cisco is bringing together leaders from NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy.
Speaker 1:We will be there.
Speaker 2:The whole thing will be live We will be there for Did
Speaker 1:you know?
Speaker 2:What? Do you
Speaker 1:know who came up with the idea for Buzzballs?
Speaker 2:Absolutely not. I have no idea.
Speaker 1:A public high school teacher.
Speaker 2:What?
Speaker 1:Marilee Kick, a former public high school teacher, has become one of America's richest self made women after selling her ready to drink cocktail business Buzzballs for at least 500,000,000.
Speaker 3:500,000,000?
Speaker 1:What started as a side hustle has now transformed into one of the biggest brands of the entire ready to drink cocktail industry. Kick founded Buzzballs in 2009, inspired by a simple idea while grading papers by her pool. I thought, I shouldn't have this glass container out here. I should have a plastic pool safe type of cocktail. From this spark of inspiration, Buzzballs was born.
Speaker 1:Fun, high proof cocktail served in colorful plastic spherical containers. Buzzballs quickly gained popularity as an asshole at supermarkets, liquor stores, and convenience stores. She says, I've been living the American dream. We've built a legacy. We've become a contender in a space where women never went.
Speaker 1:Brutal. Kick says.
Speaker 4:The
Speaker 1:brand has grown intentionally distributing 29 countries with an estimated annual revenue of $500,000,000. Wow. This is an incredible story.
Speaker 2:Monster company.
Speaker 1:In April 2024, the drinks firm Sazerac Okay. Acquired Buzzballs in an all cash deal No way. Estimated 500,000,000. Though Kix suggests the figure is much higher.
Speaker 2:No way. Kicks is
Speaker 1:an absolute dog. It has also cemented her place among America's richest self made women with Forbes estimating her net worth at 400,000,000 after taxes. So yeah, of course.
Speaker 2:She's gonna 10 x that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's get in the market. I'm sure she's on On her next idea.
Speaker 2:Run it up.
Speaker 1:Run it up. Kix journey is remarkable because she never raised money from investors. She bootstrapped her business.
Speaker 2:Gotta get her on the show.
Speaker 1:She used a small inheritance. Maxed out
Speaker 6:Where is
Speaker 2:the founder's podcast episode about
Speaker 1:it? Took out a loan from a local community bank to get started. I scraped and scrambled, I she took every bit of every penny I could find and That's poured it into the incredible. What an amazing story. Her unique company started making a profit in the second year with 1,000,000 in sales and a 100 k in profit.
Speaker 1:Not bad. By 2014, the brand was expanding quickly and the drinks were sold at major retailers. Mhmm. By 2019, annual sales were over a 100,000,000.
Speaker 2:Get her on the David Semper.
Speaker 1:Wow. She I mean, she she is elite. A key to Buzzball success was owning its supply chain.
Speaker 2:She vertically integrated on day one? It's just like Like, most like d to c founders in in in California like can't figure out how to get off a co packer.
Speaker 1:She moved production of the patented plastic spheres and the spirits using buzz balls in house to ensure the brand's quality and reliability. Wow. Despite many investor offers over the years, Kick held onto her company until she found the right partner. Elite. I wanted somebody that was gonna come in and have big guns.
Speaker 2:Big guns.
Speaker 1:She's She explained to us, Saz which owns over 400 brands brought the resource and the expertise to scale buzz balls.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Kick and her family are still part of the business. I didn't sell because I didn't like what I was doing or wanted to leave, she explains. I sold for the exponential growth and because it's selfish to hold it it back. It really has legs. From a teacher grading paper by the pool to a multimillionaire, sent a millionaire, Merrily Kicks' story shows the power of a good idea and the determination to make it happen.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That's That is an incredible story.
Speaker 2:We gotta get her on the show.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2: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. Before we move on to our, to our lightning round, let's debate Kylie Robinson's latest post. She says, do you think if the AI company's IPO this year will get, insert Frontier Lab arenas, like the crypto.com arena. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Should there be a Gemini arena, an Anthropic arena, an OpenAI arena? Should they do this? Is this good for the brand? They're already buying, Super Bowl ads, so it doesn't seem out of the question. What do you think the probability is?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like, these type of advertising on like a an arena like that, you typically see this with like somewhat commodity, like products that are
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 1:That are in large markets, but are, you know, in the case of like crypto.com, they're just compete like, the the products crypto.com is very interchangeable with Coinbase. Right? Yeah. It's a place you can go, give them USD and you can buy Bitcoin or whatever digital assets you want. And so they're really just competing on, like, brand entirely.
Speaker 1:And, like, currently, the way that you're seeing the market evolve, like, I don't I don't know
Speaker 2:that Competing on technology. Like, how does the model actually answer? What are the benchmarks? They're competing on products? Like, how does the app work?
Speaker 2:How what what are the mechanics? What can you do? Can you generate images in there or not? Can you generate video? How good is the video?
Speaker 2:Does it do deep research quickly? Like, there's a million different things. How's the voice mode? Like, they're they're they're definitely playing like a product race right now. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There is a marketing
Speaker 1:Yeah. I guess the question is
Speaker 2:At the same time.
Speaker 1:Was there ever was there any of like the OG search companies? Did they ever get out and like did Yahoo ever have interesting. But An arena.
Speaker 2:I do know that it's interesting that she mentions the crypto.com Arena here in Los Angeles, the former Staples Center, because crypto.com is not a public company. So there's nothing that says that you can't buy an arena before you go public. Who knows? Maybe we will have a Vanta arena by the end of the day. Automate compliance and security, Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform, and I'd love to head to the Vanta arena no matter where it lands.
Speaker 2:Anyway, we have our Lambda Lightning round starting now with Base Ten. We have Turin, the cofounder and CEO of Base Ten in the restroom waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP and Ultra. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:Hey. How's that? How are doing?
Speaker 2:Good to see you.
Speaker 1:Welcome back.
Speaker 2:Welcome back.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Thanks for having me again.
Speaker 2:You've been busy. You've been busy. Give us the news.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Look. We've we've had a crazy year. Yeah. So we're 10 x of last year.
Speaker 1:10 x alert. Hit the gong for the 10 x. Sorry to interrupt. Alright. Back back to you.
Speaker 2:Back to business.
Speaker 3:Last time I was on here, was telling you about our series d. We've raised up series d now. We've raised $303,100,000,000 dollars. It's a $5,000,000,000 valuation Mhmm. Led by IBP and with participation from NVIDIA and a few others.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Look, it's just been I just to remind you as well that what we do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Please.
Speaker 3:AI infrastructure platform, we focus on production gradient inference serving the fastest growing companies in the world. So a bridge, OpenEvidence, Cursor, Notion, ClearGamma, right? You look at that crop of companies and how they're growing, and we're playing a supporting role in making sure that they can run their models Yeah. As fast and reliable as possible. And, you know, just on the back of that, you know, we've realized how big this could potentially be.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Go ahead. Yeah. Take us through how quickly enterprises are ramping up running their own models. Like, if we go back to 2022, Google had Palm internally. They hadn't really launched Gemini.
Speaker 2:OpenAI had GPT three, and then they launched ChatGPT. Yep. But Microsoft had you know, they were vending GPT four through through Bing and stuff. But big companies were not really running their own large language models. Is that roughly correct?
Speaker 2:But now it feels like we're in the hundreds of companies. But out of the Fortune 500, like, how many how many companies are actually running their own models at this point in time?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I look, I I I think it's still relatively small Okay. Growing growing rapidly. Mhmm. I think, you know, if you go and look at like, when we go and speak to enterprise customers, it's still incredibly early.
Speaker 3:But I think what they are doing is that they're looking at, you know, these these other companies that, you know, they you know, you and I would probably agree that other fortune future fortune 500 Yeah. Kinda eat their lunch. And if they don't, like, figure out how to move at that pace, I know it's been left behind. And so, like, what we we focus really, really heavily on, you know, those really fast growing companies because we're we think not only are they gonna be the future Fortune five hundred, but the Fortune five hundred gonna look at them as, like, how do we bring these models up to speed as quickly as possible?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so, I mean, that makes perfect sense in the case of of a company like Cursor. Obviously, they're they have a ton of training data. They have a need for a custom model. Are we years away from someone like a Coca Cola or, you know, developing their own?
Speaker 2:Or how does that how does that play out? Yeah.
Speaker 3:I I I think, look, there's two things that are happening, right, which is, like, if you go look at OpenAI and drop the adoption of these at these companies, it is there. Yeah. It's definitely it is definitely there. Once you've proven out these use cases internally, then you start to think about better, faster, more specialized, more secure, running on prem. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:All these types of problems. And so, you know, that is coming. Like, is it, like, six months away? Is it twelve months away? Is it eighteen months away?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Who knows? I think the other trend that is pushing the enterprises online is RL Sure. Which is, like, how do how do you take these open source based models and RL them and get them to be as good, if not better than these frontier models for very specific tasks.
Speaker 2:And, you
Speaker 3:know, the big focus for us as well, we recently made acquisition around that. But we do think that'll be a big driver of enterprise adoption
Speaker 2:of this model. Walk me through the pushback from a large enterprise that says, yeah, it's great. I can I can train a custom model on But my I looked at the smaller models for a variety of benchmarks, and it feels like the big models just sort of are better at the small models tasks as well? Like, I should just use the latest and greatest big model for everything because the frontier is better at the specialized tasks as well. It just one shots things.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Totally. Well, I I think we and I I think, obviously, a lot of times, they'll be valid there. Okay. You've got yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, I I I don't disagree with you. I think what what you will see though is that as the frontier is getting better, open source is already you know, if you go look at the open source models that are out there today, like the GLMs, the clients, and and the deep sea, it's not like they are eighteen months behind. Yeah. You know, would argue that they're, you know, within a quarter and for certain tasks are better. The complexity actually comes around honestly from enterprises.
Speaker 3:Not so much like, can I get a better outcome?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's, hey, you know, these large lab companies have massive inference teams.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Do I have the skill set to be able to run the service at scale Yeah. Within my premise with all my enterprise requirements?
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 3:That's ideally where we can help in and be that partner to them Yeah. To bring them on line.
Speaker 2:Okay. So walk me through what it looks like when a Fortune 500 company says, okay, we're getting off of just a generic model. Want to do something that we have control over the inference. We're working with base 10. We're doing some custom RL.
Speaker 2:There's going to be some proprietary data in there. Who's involved? Are they hiring you or consultant to set up the RL environment? Who's doing the training?
Speaker 3:No. No. No. No. Think yeah.
Speaker 3:I think it's the engineers and infrastructure engineers. I think that that is, like, one of the realities right now is that I don't think engineers who don't know how to grapple with AI just, you know, they don't I don't know if they exist in the future, to be honest. But that being said, like, all of the engineers, it's like, hey, how can we make it as easy as possible for you to take this custom model, deploy it, scale it up, either, you know, in our cloud or within your own cloud. And so that is, you know, the job of the software. We have a a really amazing forward deployed team that is very happy very happy to help if necessary.
Speaker 3:But our goal is also just, you know, to enable them to do these things. And that is happening. I think it's early, though. That's gonna be an approach that.
Speaker 1:From your view, do you think we need more NeoLabs? Like, based on the conversations that you have with customers? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Unpack More models are great. Mhmm. I think more people developing models are amazing. Look, I I'm making a bet with my career with this company Yeah. On on the long tail of models and that their existing models outside of, two amazing companies.
Speaker 3:And so, I think more people developing models gives consumers and developers more choices down the line. Like, look, do we need more of the same? Probably not. But like, you know, all these companies have their own takes on on on the problem.
Speaker 2:Help me understand your current thinking around model routers, routing inference across big heavy duty models that might be very expensive. Like, using all parts of the Pareto frontier, what are you seeing on the inside? Are companies trying to handle parceling out the workloads themselves? Or do they want that to be something that's off the shelf that you sort of provide? What are some of the trade offs that people are considering these days?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Look, think it's a spectrum. I think, you know, the most advanced companies are 100% doing that. They are breaking up their their tasks almost like model by model and then figuring out how to route. I think less sophisticated folks or people earlier in their journey are relying on other people to do that.
Speaker 3:The model companies are doing this themselves. I I think the the place where I struggle a bit is like, you know, some of these routing things are just, you know, routing for failover.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Just, hey, model just stopped working.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:I we we believe that, like, reliability, like, should should be table stakes Yeah. For serving models. And, you know, ideally, you don't have to build across what happens when x model provider falls over, y model provider falls over, and have that And that that is a different routing problem. Yeah. Routing based on capability is happening.
Speaker 3:It is happening Mhmm. Outside the model, it's happening inside the model. And then as the long tail model comes on come online for specific model tasks, I think that's more and more gonna be the case that that is being handled by inference company or inference platform like base 10
Speaker 2:Yeah. As well. Yeah. I mean, that certainly happened in the database market. Like, you have a big Postgres installation.
Speaker 2:You don't have a MySQL installation there as like a backup Yeah. But you might have a Redis casting layer in front of it. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:So what is help me understand that at the hardware layer. I know you're you you have some insight into NVIDIA's strategy here. I'm very interested in how you or other partners, other, folks at Inference might be thinking about the future of NVIDIA's, like, big powerful racks versus their more legacy chips that might be depreciating, but you can still run a great model on it versus some of the more exciting stuff that's happening with Grok in the future.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Look. I I don't have a ton of it to do this strategy.
Speaker 3:They're very good. I could hypothesize. Okay. You know, look. They're they're amazing partners to us.
Speaker 3:I I think Mhmm. We are we are chip agnostic, we think, look, every every every task and every you will have different requirements from a latency perspective, from a cost perspective Yeah. Even what type of model runs on it. Sure. And so, yes.
Speaker 3:So, like, we use h one hundreds, you will use a 100, but we also use e two hundreds and g b two hundreds.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And as as we get these new types of chips across the browser, we'll be working on that as well. So if you think about the NVIDIA and Grok stuff, what are they solving for? It's breaking out prefill and decode using GPUs for prefill. If you have a compute bound problem, you can saturate the GPU, you can do batching and have really good throughput. But then you have the LPUs or like the Glock chips for the decode, which are memory bound.
Speaker 3:You're not doing a lot of new math per token. Why this is hard is that that's a pretty complex orchestration problem between up handling workloads that are doing stuff on GPUs and on LPUs. And I think NVIDIA's, know, obviously built amazing software around this to break out, refill, and decode Dynamo as the name of the software Yep. And that we work pretty heavily with. But, like, I think that would just be a new type of chip that the chip providers Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Provide. And, you know, I think one thing I don't think you can understate is how much how much how powerful NVIDIA supply chain is CUDA is CUDA is and and their their ability to, you know, be dynamic with architectures changing. And I think Yeah. You know, we we are very, very much bought into that ecosystem and what that enables, especially for inference and customers.
Speaker 1:George Can you give us your take or any insight on how companies at the application layer are kind of wrestling with the laziness specifically? Like everyone at this point has experienced a product like asking basically wanting a product to be able to do something that you know it can do and then and then, you know, running into this like laziness element. What
Speaker 3:what do you what do you mean by laziness? I I didn't quite get that.
Speaker 1:I would say like, you know, thinking about let's let's pick the, know, biggest not not to pick on anyone, but like the biggest consumer AI app, ChatGPT. Right? Like, everyone has experienced asking ChatGPT to do something that you know it can do. Yep. Like sometimes it will just kind of like circle around or or like not really get to the thing that Yep.
Speaker 1:You want it to do. Yep. Sure. Even if you're paying for it on like the max plan or something like that. And so and and so I would like I would assume that every company at the application layer Yep.
Speaker 1:That gets to the point where they're caring about margins Yep. Is like starting to get to the point where they're like, okay, like, you don't always because sometimes the model can be lazy and you're like,
Speaker 2:great.
Speaker 5:Like
Speaker 1:Yeah. You got me you got me what I needed and I can just move on. Yeah. Yet other times, it's like wildly frustrating because it's like Yeah. You know, asking if like It's like asking an employee to do something at 05:00 and they're like, oh, like, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I I isn't that like to to me, that's like what defines a great application layer company. Right? Like the
Speaker 2:Oh, sure.
Speaker 3:The yeah. The the ones that aren't good are just wrapping around, you know, GPT and you or or whatever model. And, you know, you as a user are left to figure, like, deal with that laziness. I think the best application layer companies, you know, being It's
Speaker 1:like serving the right amount of intelligence for the And
Speaker 3:and setting up the harness and how to use it for the problem that your user is asking you to solve for them or you were trying to solve. Like, you know, I if open if if a company like OpenEvidence was just, you know, doing something the lazy way, that would not only be really, really expensive, but they wouldn't do a really good job of solving that problem for their users. And it wouldn't be a great business in a long term. But, like, you know, what makes these companies so good at how they use the models, how they use multiple models, and how they architect that to, you know, the thing the user is asking them, and then then layering in how do we do this efficiently so we can make a business out of them. Like, know, to me, there is, like, going to be a great divide in solving that laziness problem.
Speaker 3:I think it's a good way to put it, actually.
Speaker 2:You said two things that I'm sort of having trouble reconciling. Yep. You said that you're chip agnostic, but then you also praised the the the dominance of the CUDA ecosystem. Yep. Is it is it getting easier to implement LLMs in a way that run on multiple chipsets?
Speaker 2:We've obviously seen really strong performance from DeepMind on the TPU stack and Anthropix talking about TPU But for a long time, the narrative was like, oh, it's gonna be really cumbersome to replatform off of off of the ecosystem. How are you thinking about Yeah. Just multichip architectures these days?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I mean, look, I I I think it is getting easier, but it's not it is not easy. You know? Welcome
Speaker 2:to entrepreneurship.
Speaker 3:But, you know, it's like, you know, it's a and, like, look, just sitting on top of, like you know, that's why, like, NVIDIA is such a great partner for us.
Speaker 4:It's, like,
Speaker 3:sitting on them doing this stuff. You know, we were I mean, did you guys play FIFA or anything like that when you're growing up with Madden? I was
Speaker 2:more of Counter Strike, Call of Duty. But sure. But did
Speaker 1:you StarCraft. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's pretty amazing that when we are doing stuff for GPUs today, we're downloading from this a website looks exactly the same as the NVIDIA driver page
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. From
Speaker 3:the early two thousand. But that is also amazingness of it. It was like how rich that is and how powerful it is. And I think that is, you know, yes, it's getting easy and like like, hey, Diversification is great everywhere downstream, but also, like, NVIDIA is just amazing at what they do. And and and Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and being able to run a model on AMD does not necessarily mean that it will inference at a lower total cost per token or vice versa. Might be a little higher on certain models. Yeah. Blah blah blah.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, there's all these different trade offs, but that's why companies come to base 10. Correct?
Speaker 3:Totally. And and that's why the open source ecosystem is so important.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? That's why, you know, like, you know, you you mentioned databases earlier. Like, think similar to databases Mhmm. At the in the fullness of time Mhmm. Open source has the fastest runtimes.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And so I think that would like, with NVIDIA, you'll see that, which is like, know, you know, will be really good at running stuff on NVIDIA chips. This is gonna be NVIDIA. This will be really good at stuff running stuff on AMD chips. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's gonna be AMD. And so working with these providers of chips, I think, to get the best run times from them Yeah. It is very important. I think like this cross compilation stuff while important. You know, I I I I'm a little skeptical.
Speaker 3:I'd say it's just like, you know, like it's fanciful for me to think that we'll be better at running software on NVIDIA chips than NVIDIA or or better. Yeah. At at at the lowest level. Obviously, there's all the orchestration software stuff that we are building that we think is very important, but we also very, very invested in those ecosystems.
Speaker 2:Well, I believe in you. I think you can do it. But, you know, I I I take your point, of course. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Great to get
Speaker 2:the update. Time to hop on the stream. And have a great rest your day. A great
Speaker 1:rest back on
Speaker 2:Every day now.
Speaker 3:Hopefully not. Yeah. Thanks for having me, and appreciate you guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Phantom Cash.
Speaker 2:Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Up next, we have
Speaker 1:Bryce. Bryce.
Speaker 2:Phenomenal. I believe Bryce is the brother of the previous guest from nominal. Cameron McCord.
Speaker 1:Technology brothers.
Speaker 2:No. No. Not brother. Sorry. Co founder.
Speaker 2:Got it. Okay. Well, you know Nailed it. You you've held a business with someone for a while. People just assume you're brothers, but anyway.
Speaker 4:Plus second spouse is what I like to say.
Speaker 2:But Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. That's real.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for taking the time to come Where
Speaker 4:are you where
Speaker 1:are you calling in from?
Speaker 4:Guys, hello from Daytona, Florida.
Speaker 1:No way. Way. You are in
Speaker 4:you're the you're in the garage. You're in the pits. I'm gonna be incredible. With the Rolex 24. So
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 4:We are here. So I'm yeah. Nominal Yeah. You know, the company Cameron Cameron, Jason, I cofounded. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We announced our partnership this week with Pratt Miller Motorsports. That's amazing. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Great timing.
Speaker 3:Oh, come
Speaker 1:on. Come
Speaker 2:on. Come on. That's fantastic.
Speaker 4:Yeah. If if you if you don't know who Pratt Miller Motorsports is, you know, they are the heart and soul of the Corvette racing team in the MCA race series. So, you know, this is this is full on heavy metal
Speaker 1:sports car racing. Dynamism right here.
Speaker 4:This is Hey, man. I'm about I'm about 30 feet from a McLaren. Know? Anyway, oh, you know, this entire garage is full of pretty probably every every famous sports car you know, but I don't know if you know, but the most dominant of them all for the last thirty years has been this yellow Corvette right here.
Speaker 3:Very nice.
Speaker 4:And that yellow Corvette
Speaker 1:Incredible. Look at that.
Speaker 4:Wow. Has a nominal sticker.
Speaker 1:Here we go. There we go. Incredible. So How's the
Speaker 4:good stuff.
Speaker 1:Have you caught any of qualifying yet, or have you just been too locked in?
Speaker 4:Yeah. This is the epitome of forward deployed because we just sent a founder to make sure this went perfect. But it's been it's been really fun. Yeah. I've been here for a couple days.
Speaker 4:We are so think, like, last night, we were running our late night practice sessions. So Daytona itself is a, like, brutal race to start the season. It's a twenty four hour race. I'm not sure if you, like me, have now seen a best picture nominee, but in the f one movie, Brad Pitt's f one movie, the first seven or eight minutes is actually Sonny Hayes, Brad Pitt racing here at the Rolex twenty four.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And it's him racing the night shift. So Yeah. Amen. But, yeah, him racing the night shift. And so, you know, last night's practice session, every team gets one night to go out and actually, like, see the race conditions at night.
Speaker 4:You know, different temperature profiles, totally different, you know, race profile. You have, like, I found out, like, at turn five right here, you have headlights from the parking lot that you have to deal with. Like Oh, interesting. Yeah. It's been a wildly interesting journey, but, you know, on the, you know, on the nominal partnership side, it's also been just really fun to see, like, you know, we've we've had a lot of wonderful meetings and things about strategy and race strategy and this and that.
Speaker 4:But, like, you know, we are watching it come alive here. So a lot of the practice and qualifying and everything else has come back to, you know, how do we help them use a lot of data to win.
Speaker 1:And the the pressure's on. Right? They're going for the fifth fifth win this weekend. Is that right?
Speaker 4:Impressive.
Speaker 1:Been falling we've been falling a little bit. Mostly the mostly the team.
Speaker 2:The Shopify team we've been following a lot.
Speaker 1:Toby and really
Speaker 2:funny. There's lot of tech people out there. It's great.
Speaker 4:There is. Yeah. The the tech community here is like small but strong. It is like the epitome of motorheads. Heads.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, it's people that late in life, you know, found thermodynamics in their life and are like, this is the coolest thing ever. This is way cooler than the Kubernetes. Best.
Speaker 1:It's the best. Yeah. And and for us, we're we're the timing's great. We were at the track with with a friend of the show, Paul, on on Sunday, and we were just doing, like, really quick laps. We'd go out for, five Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, five, ten laps, and then take a quick break and kinda, settle down. And we'd be spinning out on like the like the fifth on like the and like realizing like actually, when you're going, like these endurance races Yeah. It's it's
Speaker 2:Also just like from an engineering perspective, you know, you take the car off for a couple laps and you let it cool down and check the tire pressure. Like twenty four hours is endurance, not just for the humans, but for the actual vehicle. So can you talk a little bit about what goes into bringing that level of performance to the vehicle, what your role is, who the key players are in your world, who are you interfacing with?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Oh my god. Okay. So, yeah, twenty four hours is brutal. You are right.
Speaker 4:You know, the the rest of the season there there is a twelve hour race in the season. I think that's in Sebring, but, you know, the rest of the season is one, two, three, four, five, six hours, and you, you know, you rip the car as hard as possible. So think twenty four hour race, the strategy you're bringing in is much more around, you know, of of all the things you have to care about more than anything, the cars get beat to hell, but it's fuel. You know, it's like this this bad boy will burn a full tank of fuel about once an hour. And so a lot of the pitch strategy, a lot of, like, the totality of the race comes down to really, like, managing all twenty four hours well.
Speaker 4:And so our our role in this, you know, we we come alongside this absolutely elite engineering team and help them, you know, make those make those calls. Sometimes it's the high you know, highest level. Mhmm. You know, do we need to switch drivers earlier? Do we need to do something else?
Speaker 4:I have a I'm gonna leave another oh, okay. I got a fun one. Last night, one of the things we were looking at is I can't give away all the secrets, but I know everyone says they do this, but Pratt Miller, like, actually does this and does it better than anyone else. But last night, they were talking about, you know, managing fuel from a, like, consumption standpoint. So think, like, you know, we're watching how throttling is happening, a bunch of other things.
Speaker 4:Think when this comes into play as the car is you you know, you're behind someone else, and your goal ends up being, how can I get them to stay on the throttle as much as possible? Because if they burn more fuel than I burn Yeah. And we both go into the pits together, the long pole in the tint of a pit stop is refilling the tank. So they refill for five seconds, we refill for one second, and we run right past them.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 4:And that type of stuff, like, that is not a, like, trivial thing to do. Like, that is complex math happening. That's tons of different telemetry, you know, like, nominal and prep and to be clear, like, Pratt Miller has building been building elite software here for Mhmm. Twenty five years. I was in, like, this third the second grade when they started building race software.
Speaker 4:You know, like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:This is much more around, like, teams like this are amazing because they just are obsessed with winning. Mhmm. Yeah. And so this whole partnership has really blossomed out of, like, that openness. You know, like, we have plenty of wonderful elite, amazing customers that have interesting things that they've built and like, you know, there's a journey with getting them to like really adapt the way that we think engineers should work in nominal, where Pratt Miller is like, okay, cool.
Speaker 4:I have all of
Speaker 1:this Well, like an engineering
Speaker 4:it's an engineering sport.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's an engineering sport. Like, I imagine a lot of those engineers could go in a second and walk down to El Segundo Yeah. And be hired on the spot. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? So Amen. And the
Speaker 4:amount of the amount of people that have left the Pratt Miller team to go to like the Andorals of the world, it would lose a lot. Lot. And so, you know, Pratt Miller's in my past life.
Speaker 2:Please stay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Please stop poaching.
Speaker 2:But zoom out for me and and try and make a little bit clearer the involvement of nominal in this, how the product's being used, where the endpoints are. Are you working on manufacturing new parts for the car, managing supply chain, testing? Like, what else goes in and then maybe contextualize it with with the work that you do with other defense contractors and other businesses.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Totally. So think like Pratt Miller selected us and brought us in the thing. Like, how can we transform engineers and all of their partners so they they don't just build these two cars, but they also build three more Corvettes in the field for other teams.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 4:You know, how can they come in and, like, rethink fundamentally testing, telemetry, decision making across race operations? So these are producing terabytes and terabytes of data this weekend. Mhmm. You know, we have to do a whole lot with that during the weekend to make really good calls. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And way more importantly, we need to like catalog and catalog and index and manage like all of this volume of data. And then like, you know, what we do for the team is, like, it's not just about these 10 races a season. Like Yeah. You win when you have the same system integrated into your driver SIM.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Pratt Miller's also been way far ahead in the way that they think about driver SIMs in the names of sports car racing league. So Sure. All of the data from the driver sim is making it back into nominal. You know, we're helping them do, like, actually, like, rethink the, like, procedural operations of that and automating a lot of pieces of that. And this is, like, almost verbatim, you know, how companies in aerospace and defense, how companies in energy, you know, how our customers go get this work done across the board.
Speaker 4:It's just they have, like, win or lose on the line. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:They just What about they
Speaker 4:they rip it out of our hands.
Speaker 2:What about the other simulations that go on during a race series? I'm thinking back to the f one movie. Most people are familiar with the scene where the f one car is in the wind tunnel. Everyone can visualize the wind, the smoke flowing over a vehicle. Is that the type of data that someone could pull into nominal and then analyze?
Speaker 2:Or are you acting more as just like a data layer and then there's another visualization software that would pull for that specific task? I imagine that there's a lot of point solutions still in place. But how do you fit into
Speaker 4:Totally. Okay. I'll I'll tell you about the old world, we'll go to the new world.
Speaker 3:So Sure.
Speaker 4:They have a team here that manages, like, all of the Corvettes on the field. So not the Pratt Miller race team. It's like the Corvette racing team. You know, I, last night, was sitting with them and watching them flick through somewhere between six to eight different pieces of software to, like, root cause a problem. Yeah.
Speaker 4:A little bit of analysis here, a little bit of data management here, go find the thing over here. Like, nominal has been built on the principle of, like, clarity really, really fast comes with an end to end stack. Mhmm. It it is how you manage the data. It is how you monitor the data, and it's how you analyze the data.
Speaker 4:So Mhmm. You know, these engineers have been phenomenal, and they're doing everything from figuring out, you know, yes, wind tunnels and other things are important. That's you know, it's ultimately, like, small, small, small parts of the team thinking about something like aerodynamics. You know, like, way more of the team is thinking about, you know, how are these settings affecting, you know, this particular force? So it's pressures, temperatures, voltages, vibration, video data, log data, you know, all the different word people use in engineers, multimodal.
Speaker 4:You know, like, all the different types of angles that you need as an engineer to make a judgment call. But at the end of the day, it's like, you know, we wanna help them make really good judgment calls and then have a really good record of why. And if they can do that really fast, like, we've kinda succeeded in the partnership.
Speaker 2:You mentioned, like, terabytes of data coming off the car. What's the telemetry like? Like, how is that actually is it, like, over there? Are they connected to Wi Fi? Like, how how do you get the data off the car while it's on the track?
Speaker 4:Oh, man. That is a fun complex thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Okay. So, you know, every race league actually just has a lot of regulation here. Sure. So, like, NASCAR, you can't pull any data off the track. Interesting.
Speaker 4:F one has, like, a mesh network for the first bus ripping streams all day long. Yeah. Huge, really high data rates, like, all kind of all the things. Sports car racing is actually, like, a really interesting middle ground here where
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:They do have telemetry coming off the car that, you know, race engineers are sitting in double decker, you know, fold out pit stations.
Speaker 2:TVs and stuff.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. With everything around them. It's like
Speaker 2:They're monitoring the situation.
Speaker 1:Monitoring the situation.
Speaker 2:They're situation monitors. We love it.
Speaker 4:It's it's the epitome.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, yeah, so they'll they'll have data come off the car. But then the really interesting part is like it can't be that high rate of data. Only allowed to bring very specific sources. Yeah. And then every time it comes in for a pit stop
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:They'll do things like they put an umbilical into the car and that is like actually how they have a secure communications line with the driver.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:The rest of the race, everyone can listen to everyone else.
Speaker 2:Oh, no way.
Speaker 4:But if you wanna if you wanna give your driver a little edge
Speaker 2:Plug in. Amen. Light in
Speaker 4:And and then if you wanna get the high the high volume data off, there's a technician that goes in and like, you know, pulls out a data stick and puts in a new data stick. Sure. And all that starts go getting processed phenomenal in another tool. So that's the that's the fun.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Well, good luck to everyone. Thank you so much for taking some time out of a busy day to come chat with us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So many so many more questions. This was awesome. That's great.
Speaker 4:My only ask
Speaker 2:is Yeah.
Speaker 4:Please. Please. I need you to if you don't have a team in Imsa, I need you to pledge allegiance to the yellow Corvette.
Speaker 2:I'm done.
Speaker 4:That's that's all I think. I'm not plans for the weekend. Rolex 24.
Speaker 2:For watching. Thank you. I love an American manufacturer.
Speaker 1:He loves. He's he's got his eye on the the z r one Yeah. Ax already. So
Speaker 3:It's a good car.
Speaker 1:Anyway great Great hanging, Bryce.
Speaker 2:Rest of your day. Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to hust to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. And up next
Speaker 1:Scares you the chess. Our deployed CEOs. That's the new meta.
Speaker 2:I like it. Our Lambda Lightning round continues with Max Sparrow. The what do we call him? The slop janitor? Pangram Labs?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Slop janitor. Pangram Labs. Max, how are you doing? Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show.
Speaker 2:How are doing?
Speaker 10:I'm great. I'm great. Yeah. I'm just cleaning up slop on x.
Speaker 2:It seems like it. When did this project start? I feel like I've been start I I've seen most of the viral stuff, in the last few weeks, but have you been building this company for a while? Give us a little bit of the prehistory.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So the company's been around for about two years. We've building models to detect AI generated content.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 10:And just building Good night. Doing a lot of the research
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 10:And trying to be the most accurate in the market. Sure. But it wasn't till, like, 2025. December 29 actually was the first day where I launched the Twitter bot.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And it's really just blown up since then. People are using it
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:On articles, on basically all these long form posts that people are just posting slop
Speaker 2:Yep. Online. Are are are you already monetizing it? Because I imagine you have a ton of attention, ton of people that wind up on the tool. I interact with it mostly through I see the screenshots that people post, or I see your post.
Speaker 2:But are there businesses who have an incentive to partner with you? Are you talking to big platforms, small companies? Like, have you have you started like, what what does the business look like today?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yeah. So individuals can either sign up for a free account on Pangram. They can get a Chrome extension
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And check things
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:In the browser, or you can pay $20 a month to get access to a lot more checks.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:But we also work with Internet platforms. Okay. So one of our biggest customers is Quora.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:So they
Speaker 10:send most of their content through Pangram That makes sense. To understand, like, is it AI generated or not? Because that's against their policy, and they wanna keep the platform high quality. And so, yeah, we've had a number of API users, a bunch of different Internet platforms, large and small. Are you Reservais,
Speaker 2:people basically reasonable. Like, yeah, either, like, officially RL ing on you or, like, basically DIY reinforcement learning by just generate me an essay, go into Pangram. It's at a 100%. Make some changes and remove the em dashes. Okay.
Speaker 2:Went down to 70. Rewrite a couple sentences and just keep iterating until I get it down to 0%.
Speaker 10:People are trying. I think that's part of the fun is, like, that this is such an adversarial space. Oh, yeah. So, like, part of keeping up with it is just making sure, yeah, we're robust to these GRPO attacks and this, like, RL Yeah. On the model.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Does it make you mad when people are sharing an article on x and it's obviously written by AI, but they're just like, this is the bet this is the most well written
Speaker 2:Sit down.
Speaker 1:Essay I've ever I've studied this read on this topic. Changed my life. This changed
Speaker 10:my life. Infuriating. And the person probably spent, like, fifteen seconds just typing in chat GPT. Make it really deep. Make it really good.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The worst one that I read
Speaker 2:was Yeah. Yeah. Tell us.
Speaker 10:Was this, like, the one that went viral about the, like, supposed Uber Eats or DoorDash whistleblower. That's right. Like, they wrote on Reddit. Their entire post was AI generated. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:They're talking about how, like, you know, the company's so evil. And it I think it went viral just because people wanted to believe that it's true, even though it's, like, obvious slop.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Wait. Were you able to clock that as AI just personally or with Pangrom? Because when I read it, it didn't jump out to me as AI generated, but there were other flags that just seemed like factually inaccurate or just inconsistencies and like logical To me
Speaker 1:to me, it immediately read like fan fiction. It was Yes. Yes. I'm on a I'm in a public library
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Burner laptop.
Speaker 2:It's like, does that? Like, you can just post on Reddit anonymously. Like, Reddit is not gonna come and, like, arrest you. I don't know. Anyway yeah.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, how how did you clock it? Personally, with the tool, both? What were you thinking?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yeah. I was reading it. I'm like, this reads like a store this reads like a story and not, like, real life somebody writing this. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And then I checked it with Pangram, said a 100% AI. I went to the comments, and there are so already other people were saying that, you know, this is obviously AI.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. And and then, yeah, talk about the the the impact. Like, are you is this an AI safety project? Do you think that there's there's, like, a societal, you know, disaster that comes from AI slop?
Speaker 2:Is it something we'll adjust to? Is there a white pill, good outcome here? How do you, like, process the the the, like, philosophical part of your work?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So, I mean, I think a lot of the big labs are already doing a great job on the internal AI safety side, which is making sure Claude doesn't go out and, like, autonomously decide to kill everybody. Sure. But I think there's this, like, application layer, the, like, external AI safety of, like, can people use AI for harm? And I think this is a great harm that people just, like, aren't really, like, thinking or even trying to tackle.
Speaker 10:I think, like, this threatens the Internet as we know it today. I I don't if you're aware of, like, dead Internet theory of Yeah. Just the idea that it the Internet is just gonna become bots talking to bots, and it's like a ghost town where people can't participate anymore because their voices are drowned out by bots. And I think we're very much at risk of this if we don't have any technology to solve it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What do you think about the inverse? I I posted that you could probably drive someone insane by just quote tweeting everything that they say with the 100% AI Pangram screenshot. Because so I I I write a daily newsletter, and I write about 500 words. And I always I never use AI to write it or even proofread it.
Speaker 2:There's typos in there.
Speaker 1:It's so it's so pretty clear.
Speaker 2:Of using AI, and so we're like, maybe we need to livestream me typing it or something. And I don't know. It just doesn't matter. But it is sort of infuriating when you take half an hour, you write out some thoughts, and then someone's like, oh, this is AI. I'll share the prompt.
Speaker 2:Even if they're joking, it's like, kinda gets under your skin. What do what do you think about that?
Speaker 10:No. It's it's annoying. And, I mean, I think that's another reason why, like, we're building this technology is Sure. There are other AI detectors out there that have 1% or 5% false positive rate. Sure.
Speaker 10:And so they'll, like, incorrectly flag a lot of things, even, like, the declaration of independence. And so we so Pangram has a one in ten thousand false positive rate. Wow. So the goal is we are almost never flagging something incorrectly. If we say it's human, like, we're we know it's human.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are you working with any of the big dating apps yet? I can imagine that this is something they'd want in kind of like actual, like, on on the user side as you're uploading because they wanna not have AI generated content because that would create a bad experience for users broadly.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. I cannot say. I've I've heard some, like, about some issues from people who work in dating apps.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 10:And I think the issue is growing.
Speaker 2:I heard an interesting story from a a former dating app engineer who said that they're they they had bot problems ten years ago. People would just go and write Python script to just swipe on everyone and just send, like, basic messages. And he said that when they detected bot activity, if they ban them, the the the botter would create another account. So what they did was they put them in, like, bot hell, basically, where they would only talk to other bots, which is a funny solution because then their system says, hey. I'm still on the app.
Speaker 2:It's still working. I'm still seeing all the API requests. Everything's working. But they're just only interacting with their bots. But you can imagine getting false positive in that and just it being the worst experience.
Speaker 2:You're like, I didn't meet anyone. Everyone out of this app's a bot. So there's a whole bunch of funny funny new things. I do wanna ask about image image generation, image detection that somewhat relates to
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. What I was trying to get at is, like, where I I assume over time, like, most AI most written content will have been run through some type of model before it's published, almost like a spell check even. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So I'm trying to think about like where Mhmm. Where do you really not want AI content? Right? Like I don't care if somebody uses an Gen AI to make like a headshot. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because like if they just want a headshot that looks somewhat like them Yeah.
Speaker 2:Photoshop anyway and add some color correction, increase the contrast. Yeah. It's just just Pimple or something.
Speaker 1:Not that big of a deal. But where where I do think is like the probably the most pressing issue right now is just like any anything news related. Mhmm. So if like if you're if you're sharing things that are like news or or any content that people are using to understand the world Mhmm. Like, I could like, are we moving to a world where you'll have to add like a pangram watermark to the to the post?
Speaker 1:Like like, is that the kind of behavior that we want? Because like, if you if if an AI generated image goes up, 2,000,000 people see it, and then six hours later it gets community noted and says like, okay, this is Yeah. This was generated by AI. It's too late. Like 2,000,000 people like, you know, may have
Speaker 10:thought That's it was a huge problem. And actually, like, this is happening today. So if you know, like, all the, like, the Russian troll farms where they're, like, posting comments and, like, news articles, they've basically, Russia has expanded this to basically just use LLMs that they have fine tuned themselves. And they've we've seen news websites come out of Russia that just have 50,000 articles that are completely AI generated. Most of them are, like, normal news, and then some of them are really pushing the, like, pro Russia, anti Ukraine stance.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And they're just posing as, like, random, like, Oregon local news. Woah. And yeah. And these are crazy, and and they're popping up faster than we can take them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, we can didn't the White House the White House shared an AI generated image? Modified image. Yeah. AI modified, but
Speaker 2:Got community noted on X. Got quote tweeted. But, yeah. I mean, it's an increasing increasing issue. What what is the state of potential bots on other platforms?
Speaker 2:It's great that you've got the bot working on x, but it seems like we really need it on Facebook. I I you know, if there's a couch the size of a room that is in the shape of a gorilla, there should be Pangram in the comments saying this is AI generated. So the the the elderly generation perhaps is protected from slop.
Speaker 10:So next up for us Mhmm. Is Reddit and LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:So I think Reddit, there's a bunch of viral posts that are AI generated. Think people know that they can karma farm an account and then sell it to a bot farm or something. Mhmm. And on LinkedIn, I think it's just funny because, like, people are, like, genuinely posting slop. Like, they're not bots.
Speaker 10:They're just, like
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 10:Posting AI slop every day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are what is the state of of wiring up a bot on a a modern social network these days? I feel like a lot of the APIs have closed down a fair amount. Is it something where you need to have a relationship with the business to actually run a, you know, a useful bot that I would say, I as a user, I want this. It's not malicious activity, but you're still getting API access.
Speaker 2:You could slop yourself if you wanted to. You have the access. So what's involved in actually spinning up a bot and keeping it online and keeping it posting regularly without hitting rate limits?
Speaker 10:So for Twitter, it's actually pretty easy. I mean, besides having to pay $200 a month Okay. And then if we pass some limit Yeah. Well, now they have usage based API. Sure.
Speaker 10:But otherwise, before this, the next tier up was $5,000 a month, which is absurd. But I It's still it's still doable
Speaker 2:for a for a startup that has funding if you're growing. Like, it it it's it's not you know, it's
Speaker 10:not It's not a secret. Yeah. You can't do that as a hobbyist. Sure. But, yeah, it was not too bad with x.
Speaker 10:And then the other platforms seem to be a lot more locked down. So LinkedIn, I've been waiting for API approval for two weeks now. Okay. And Reddit, kind of same thing. Yeah.
Speaker 10:But, I mean, Reddit seems to be pretty bot friendly, so I think we'll get there eventually. Yeah. I've never seen a reply bot on LinkedIn,
Speaker 1:but I really want by conversations with any of the platforms? Because in some ways, they just want more content that's engaging. So there's kind of like this dilemma where they might say like, yeah, we're looking to crack down on on, you know, fake imagery. But in reality, they're like, okay, this is driving engagement. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:This is not like, you know, it's a it's it's like even with X, people have always said like, do do they really wanna crack down on bots? Or like, do they just say they wanna crack down on bots? Some ways, like, it's just driving notifications for people that might not otherwise be having a lot of activity.
Speaker 2:One man's slop is another man's filet mignon.
Speaker 10:The the LinkedIn trust and safety folks seem so resigned. It seems like they're having such a bad time. Oh. Because in every single text box, there's a little little, like, write with AI button.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 10:sure. Like, in I wanna compose a post. I write 20 words and then have it expand it out into, like, a long essay. Yeah. Or same with, like, InMails.
Speaker 10:They'll AI generate InMails that are customized for the person's profile. And so, like, they can't actually do anything around, like, AI slop or using AI as a signal because it's so integrated into the platform
Speaker 2:at this point. And I
Speaker 10:think to the detriment of the platform, like, the quality of content there is so low now.
Speaker 1:It is of text do you actually need to detect if something's
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've seen some people tag Pangaram with, like, someone will post, like, one sentence and it's just, like I don't know I don't know if it's a hallucination or something, but it's it's a funny funny meme.
Speaker 10:So so our our official line is 75 words Mhmm. But I made it smaller for Twitter
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Because, obviously, there's so many short posts. And, typically, what is gonna happen is just gonna say it's human. Like Yeah. Unless it's, like, really obviously AI or, like Yeah. As an AI language model, comma.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the main the it it almost doesn't really matter because, like, I really wanna know if something's AI if it's really long. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna read this for the most part if I know that somebody put in a lot of effort to, like, you know, actually Yeah. Say something.
Speaker 2:And there is the flip side, which is, like, I I if if if someone does a really cool deep research report in one of the LLMs and then they just shared a link to it, and they're just like, hey. I was interested in this particular research report. I generated it. You can just click here and read exactly what I what what the prompt result was. I might be down Because I like reading deep research reports sometimes if if I prompt them, and I might be interested in what you prompted.
Speaker 2:The funniest the funniest short Pangram request is always someone will say, you know, is this article AI? And And then Pangram will come back and say, yeah, it's a 100% AI. And then someone will say, is that is is the request to call Pangram AI? And Pangram will say,
Speaker 4:no. It's not. No.
Speaker 2:But anyway, so so so what's next what's next with the business? What's the state of the company? How large is the company? Where where where do you see this all going?
Speaker 10:So far, we're I mean, we're pretty small. We're still seed stage, nine people. Mhmm. But since July, we've grown 25 x in terms of users and number of queries. There
Speaker 1:we go. Not that
Speaker 10:like 20 a lot of Yeah. We've seen a lot of interest basically in this consumer level interest. Just like, I wanna know what's slop or not. I I'm not, like, a teacher. I'm not a writer.
Speaker 10:I just want to know that what I'm reading is authentic. Yeah. And so what's next for us? Yeah. My opinion, look forward to a Chrome extension that's like AdBlock but for Slop.
Speaker 2:Oh, I like that.
Speaker 10:Automatically slop block everything that's Slop on your on on the Internet.
Speaker 1:Do you own slopornot.com?
Speaker 10:I do not.
Speaker 1:You should. It's not for sale. Somebody else somebody else beat you to it. But
Speaker 10:Somebody has it.
Speaker 3:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations on all the progress, the virality. I love seeing it, and thanks for all the hard work.
Speaker 1:It's really really doing good for the world For
Speaker 6:sure.
Speaker 1:In the slop era.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Thanks so much.
Speaker 2:Have good rest of
Speaker 3:your day.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Talk soon.
Speaker 2:Bye. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Speaker 1:Next up. Next up. Actually next guest
Speaker 2:will be in the restream waiting room Still
Speaker 1:waiting on Russ from Live Kit.
Speaker 2:The meantime, we have some massive news. Johnny Carson's former LA estate just listed for $40,000,000.
Speaker 1:Woah.
Speaker 2:Little teaser of the mansion section, we will be getting into it later in the show. But, the Los Angeles estate that late night TV legend Johnny Carson once called home has hit the market for a dash under 40 mil. All proceeds from the sale have been earmarked for three charities, Cedars Sinai's Medical Center, the David Geffen Foundation, and SHARE, which supports disabled, abused, and neglected children. Compass is sharing He's the a longtime host of The Tonight Show, which and he died in 2005 at age 79, an absolutely legendary talk show host. Big inspiration for me.
Speaker 2:If you haven't listened to the Johnny Carson episode of Founders, you absolutely should. It's fantastic. Do it. We we we previously reviewed his other house, the Malibu compound, that recently hit the market for a $110,000,000.
Speaker 1:Still sitting on the market.
Speaker 2:So originally built in 1950 for Mervyn Leroy, the late film producer and director, best known for his work on The Wizard of Oz. Have you seen The Wizard of Oz?
Speaker 1:Yes. Wow. But I think I was forced to watch that in school at some Yeah.
Speaker 2:The Yellow Brick Road, Dorky. It's Toto. It's good. The the estate rests this particular estate rests on 1.5 acres in the prime Eastgate Enclave, a gated driveway bolstered by a security booth empties at an expansive motor court with two garages with room for four vehicles, with sprawling stucco and stone accented structure at its center offering six bedrooms and 11 bathrooms. It's 9,000 square feet across single level.
Speaker 2:It's introduced via a marble clad foyer with access to an elegant wet bar equipped living room that wraps around to a cozy wood paneled den. I like that paneled den.
Speaker 1:You love a wood paneled den.
Speaker 2:I love wood paneling generally. Ideally, mahogany, the official wood of business.
Speaker 1:We need we need a mahogany sponsor. We do. It's truly huge missed opportunity. From there You've been mahogany's strongest soldiers.
Speaker 2:We love mahogany. From there, a spacious living room sports a fireplace and pocketing doors spilling out to a pillared loggia loggia. I'm not familiar with that word. While a formal dining room connects to a kitchen with an eat in island and a breakfast nook, a soaring rotunda flows to a posh primary estate which has a fireside sitting area and dual walk in closets and baths. It has a tennis court Of course.
Speaker 2:A basement with a wine cellar, detached two story guesthouse that once housed Carson's office. The amenities continue outdoors. The manicured grounds host a sundeck encased pool and spa flanked by an open air cabana with a fireplace as well as a lighted tennis court and a viewing pavilion holding a kitchenette and powder room, you can view the the tennis that's played. Per the Wall Street Journal, Carson had to convince Joanna to relocate from the East Coast to the West Coast. She was truly a New Yorker at her core, so it was hard to move her out to California, the nephew said,
Speaker 1:who's 60 of the acres in Bel Air. Not Will that do it?
Speaker 2:Not a bad not a bad option. Well, there are some other there are some other stories in the in the mansion section which we should go through. First, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run-in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in.
Speaker 1:I loved hanging with Jake yesterday.
Speaker 2:He is He is. Potentially a Joe Rogan CEO. A fantastic conversationalist, fantastic. The way he breaks things down, tells stories, I I really enjoyed that conversation. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He'll be back.
Speaker 2:He's he's on a generational run, and congratulations to him again on the good news. So the Call of Duty creator, Dave Anthony, has a custom Bel Air mansion. It just sold for $22,000,000. And we will tell you more about this property after our next guest joins because we have Russ from LiveKit in the TVP in Ultradome. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:How are doing, Russ?
Speaker 11:Yo, Jordan. How are doing?
Speaker 2:It's Good to see you.
Speaker 11:Great to be back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thanks so much. First, kick us off. Give us the news. What happened?
Speaker 11:Dude, the news. LifeKid is a unicorn.
Speaker 1:Woah. Woah.
Speaker 2:A $100,000,000 series seed. A $1,000,000,000 valuation led by Index Ventures, Salesforce, Altimeter's in, Redpoint's in, and you're now a billion dollar company. How does it feel?
Speaker 11:Feels amazing. The job making.
Speaker 2:Is the job finished? Yeah. Yeah. Overnight. True overnight success.
Speaker 2:Success.
Speaker 11:Definitely not. It's day zero, but, yeah, it took twenty years. It's What pretty
Speaker 2:were the key growth unlocks, the key KPIs? What was the first slide in the deck that got the the deal done? Is there a break in the graph, or has it just been continual growth and you're ready to take the next step?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think it's really been kind of a I think, like, voice AI has really just started to grow and explode. And, you know, I kind of I sometimes refer to us as the accidental AI company Yeah. Because we never meant to be an AI company. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:We were video conferencing, live streaming infrastructure, and then we started to work with OpenAI on ChatGPT voice mode, and everything changed at that
Speaker 1:moment. History.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what do you see as the key, like, user experience UI features to a great voice mode experience? I I I deliberately daily drive all of the major LLM platforms now, and I'm starting to notice little subtleties about does this one have the ability to go back fifteen seconds, forward fifteen seconds, make it like a podcast player, more familiar UI? What do you think is the most important for a potential customer to if they're implementing a voice experience, how much should they make it feel like a podcast versus, you know, an avatar that they're interfacing with? What what's your what's your feeling on that?
Speaker 11:I think it depends on the use case. So I think if you were to separate it into two broad buckets, I think that there's, the personal assistance Mhmm. Right, that you kind of talk to as a friend or a companion. Mhmm. For those kinds of use cases, I think feeling very human like.
Speaker 11:So latency, I think, is an important factor across both like b to b use cases and b to c use cases. But I think especially true in the b to c use cases, kind of expect that an assistant you talk to is going to feel like talking to a human being and have a level of empathy that is not always necessary in a B2B use case. So for a B2B use case, I'll give you an example. If you're trying to do patient intake at a hospital using an AI, All of them the phone, really the goal, the job to be done there is to get on my doctor's calendar, right? It's, do you need it to sound like a human or to respond with the absolute lowest latency possible?
Speaker 11:No, you need it to be reliable. So you need to make sure that it's going to actually qualify the user calling in, make sure they have insurance, figure out what's their affliction, and then get them onto the doctor's calendar you know, 99.999% of the time or a 100% of the time. And so the reliability of the voice agent is most important for the b to b use cases. And then maybe, like, the the empathy and realism is is the more critical for for kind of these b to c use cases.
Speaker 2:What are your predictions or keys to success with the new Siri? There's been a bunch of news about Apple did a deal with Google. They got the best model. They got a great model powering it, but there's a lot of work that they need to do on the actual voice experience side. What would your best practices be for Siri v two?
Speaker 11:Siri v two, I think the two most important things. I think the realism aspect is is gonna be there. I mean, if they're using a model from Google like Gemini
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Live, their their kind of voice to voice model is quite good. Mhmm. Feels quite realistic. Maybe, one area where it could use a a bit more, it could be it could use a bit more empathy in some places, think, and they just acquired a company called Hume in the space, which
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Has a pretty strong, like, kind of deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The the licensing deal. So they that that model has a lot of, like, emotion and it's can does, like, sentiment analysis in real time.
Speaker 11:And so Okay. I think I think that'll be an important unlock for for Apple as they're using the the Google model for for this new Siri.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 11:I think the other thing is just, having access to, the right knowledge and reliability. Like the thing that just kills you with the original version of Siri is it's not reliable. It can't do half the things and sometimes it does like a web search when you actually just want an answer. So I think, like, the the reliability of it and and making sure it has access to the right tools and can build those tools at the right time. I think that's gonna be another critical thing.
Speaker 11:But, you know, Apple's
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Pretty incredible when they when they focus and try to nail an experience. So I think I think they'll I think they'll get it done.
Speaker 2:One one interesting thing about Siri is there there is a woman who voiced Siri. There's like a singular voice, and I think everyone, no matter how much they use Siri, that they hear the voice, they're they're familiar with that identity. How do you think about companies that offer either one singular voice and they just build a brand around it, and that is really an embodiment of this particular AI system? They give it a name and a personality, and it has one voice, versus giving the consumer the option to have multiple voices or even steer the voice over time with, like, real time sentiment analysis.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think it depends again on the use case. So I think I'm glad you brought this up. So for Apple for, for like Siri two point o, right, we're talking about we're talking about a digital assistant or a voice assistant that is running at like the scale of the entire world. Right?
Speaker 11:Like Apple devices are everywhere. And so when you think about delivering a great experience at scale like that or at that level of scale, you have to think about kind of how do you meet the user where they are. So to speak on voices in particular can't just be one voice. I mean, like, it has to speak different languages well. Right?
Speaker 11:That's one thing. It culturally, like, you know, you have to think about accents and, some of the paralinguistic cues, you know, if I say or the way that I the way that I speak also varies or the way someone speaks varies across cultures as well, varies across languages. There's different customs. Mhmm. And so if you're trying to build a a voice assistant that can meet the needs or feel like the right experience at the scale of the entire world, you have to go really deep on kind of all of these different aspects, conversational dynamics, what are the right voices, do they have the right accents, Do they speak the right languages reliably?
Speaker 11:All of that stuff matters. And Yeah. And so that's a you know, that's that's something that at Apple scale and scope, they have to solve that. For something that's a bit more contained, like at a hospital in a particular part of The US, you may you may not have the the same kind of constraints or requirements.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:What what's your opportunity in robotics?
Speaker 11:It's the it's the next big wave. I think that, like, robotics has kind of this 80% overlap with with voice AI and that, you can think of, a humanoid robot, which are a lot of the robots that are getting built now by companies, you're not gonna interact with that that robot with a keyboard. You're gonna you're gonna talk to it, it's gonna have this additional capability where it's gonna have eyes and be able to see you and move in, you know, in response to what you do and your actions. And so you're gonna talk to that thing, and that's the overlap. But then there's a lot of other new stuff that you have to do in the robotics use case because it has vision and because it has limited connectivity.
Speaker 11:So that robot may be out there in the field. It may not always be able to to connect to the network. You may need to be able to do things kind of locally or on a local network, if connectivity is compromised. So there's, like, a lot of opportunity to build in the robotics space. It's still a bit earlier than than I would say Voice AI is now in terms of, like, how it's scaling up and being adopted, but it's a it's a wave behind Voice AI that I think is gonna be even bigger than Voice AI.
Speaker 2:Are you tracking benchmarks around latency? I'm interested to know what you think about the progress to reduce latency in voice interfaces and particularly what the bottlenecks are. Do we need to just distill models down further? Do we need custom silicon? Are there gonna be dedicated chips, ASICs for inferencing voice models?
Speaker 2:Because I I'm not sure if you've seen those Instagram reels where people are doing, like, the human impression of ChatGPT voice mode, and they sort of, like, pause. And it's and it's funny. It's a very
Speaker 1:talk about the guy who's, like, I'm I'm lying in front of the train tracks.
Speaker 2:Oh, no.
Speaker 1:No. Not that. But You've probably seen these. You've seen you're seeing your product in action. Honestly, it's a great ad for
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:For voice mode.
Speaker 2:But it feels it feels very much like we're we're almost in like the dial up Internet era of these voice interfaces where there's this like little delay and that's clearly going away, but I'm interested to know like technically what what needs to happen to remove the delay from voice interfaces.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So the way to think about it is that there's kind of a a bunch of different components to this end to end experience of, like, I speak
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Model thinks Yep. Model speaks back. Right? Along along that kind of path, you have the network latency. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:I I'm speaking only to the primary components. There's a bunch of little things too in the middle as well, but there's network latency. So getting the voice from me to the to the machine wherever it's located. Then there's, like, the process of understanding when am I done speaking. That's called turn detection.
Speaker 11:Like, when have I done am I done sharing my thoughts? And then the model can now speak back to me or think and then speak back to me. So there's the the step of figuring out when is the user done speaking. That introduces some latency. Then there's the actual inference part of it, and it depends on whether you're using a full voice to voice model.
Speaker 11:So a model that takes in voice directly and spits out voice, or whether you're doing a cascade approach where it's the first model converts it into text. Mhmm. The next model is the LLM, and then the next model is taking the tokens coming out of the LLM and turning it back into speech. If it's the kind of the cascaded approach, then you have, like, three different spots where additional latency can come in. Right?
Speaker 11:Like, there's three models here. They all have to run, and then they have to pass information between each of those models. So there's another latency or place where latency creeps in. And then when the model finally spits out voice, whether that's from a TTS model or from the the voice to voice LLM itself, then you have latency of the network where the AI's voice travels over the network and then is played out on my on my phone. And so it turns out you can actually, like, shrink the latency in each of these different components.
Speaker 11:Where are you gonna get the biggest bang for the buck? I would say there's two places where you get the biggest bang for the buck. The first one three places. The first one is that kind of three models or one model. So is it voice going straight into the model and then being processed and then spit out, or are you actually doing this kind of like handoff between three different models?
Speaker 11:That's the first spot where you're gonna get a big reduction in latency. The second place where you'll get a big reduction in latency is on the current detection piece. So figuring out, like, when is the user done speaking and, you know, having the delay be as short as possible between, okay, the user's done speaking. Let me pipe the data straight into the model, or maybe I'm already streaming it into the model, and then it's deciding when the user's done speaking and has its response ready to go. And then the third place is on queuing.
Speaker 11:So, like, you have many, many people that are trying to hit these models at once. They're all using voice mode or etcetera at the same time. How do you figure out how to load balance that workload, that demand that users have, that speech data that the users are are sending to the model? How do you figure out how to make sure that there's a model already waiting and consuming that speech versus making a queue up and wait, and then this person goes and gets a response, and this person goes. So doing the load balancing across those GPU workloads is another.
Speaker 11:And then and then as you mentioned, I think, like, you can get a speed up on the model side from hosting it on on better hardware or, you know, chips that are dedicated to to a particular type a particular type of architecture.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Yeah. That's exciting.
Speaker 2:Are are you focused? Like, you're raising a lot of money right now. Is this focused on OpEx, CapEx? Are you gonna build your own data centers? Have you have you con confronted, like, the build versus buy debate internally?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think for data centers, I mean, we have really healthy margins now, so there's no there's no pressure to go and, you know, build our own metal yet, but we'll we'll get there over time. Sure. You know, that's something that we've always talked about eventually kind of kind of fully vertically integrating the stack. But, you know, I think that the capital for us is is gonna be used in in two primary ways.
Speaker 11:I think the first one is that we started our life as, network infrastructure. Mhmm. But it turned and and that's used to be the product that we sold even for voice AI companies. But it turns out that, like, when we have when we were selling voice network infrastructure Mhmm. Someone would say, well, how do I how do I, like, test this model?
Speaker 11:You know, built it with your software, and now I'm running it on your network, like, but how do I test it? We're like, well, over here. Yeah. Use this vendor and figure it out. Like, glue glue this stuff together.
Speaker 11:And then they were like, well, how do I deploy it? Yeah. And we're like, well, you know, use this vendor. And then they're like, how do I observe it? And like, well, you know, all the data generated like, which I use Datadog.
Speaker 11:What do I do here? And like, well, you can kind of piece it together this way. And we kept hearing this over and over and over. And then we said, okay, well, we're just going to start building out all the pieces because right now, building a web application is very familiar, very easy, and you usually have one single platform that allows you to build out the entire thing. Right?
Speaker 11:Like, Next. Js has kind of become this default Next. Js and Purcell have become like the default platform for building out a web application. But a Voice AI application, a robotics application, these things are actually very different from a web application. It's a completely different architecture.
Speaker 11:At the top of the iceberg, it looks like, oh, well, instead of typing in and clicking a mouse, now I'm talking, and the AI can see me. But just that kind of change at the input layer underneath changes everything about the underlying architecture of how that application is built and all the infrastructure you need to get that thing built. And so what we're doing is we're really building every single piece of that Yeah. Across the entire development life cycle so that you can start with LiveKit from zero, just a dream Mhmm. Scale to the moon in production Yeah.
Speaker 11:In reality with LiveKit. And you don't really need to, like, go anywhere else. You can do everything within the platform. And so the first part is just building out Mhmm. This product.
Speaker 11:Right? The surface area of it is much wider than where we started. So that's the first thing for the capital. And then the second thing is is, you know, really investing in DevRel and some go to market around education, like helping developers understand how can they leverage this platform to accelerate what they're trying to build. You know, it's like lots of sample apps and workshops and and things like that, events to to make sure that people know that there's this tool that's kind of magical and can accelerate, you know, their their road map and and and their their kind of progress towards the vision of what they're trying
Speaker 1:to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes sense. Well, congratulations again. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. And Thank team.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 11:You too. You too. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code backed prototypes and apps fast. Back to the Robb Report.
Speaker 2:Call of Duty creator Dave Anthony's custom Bel Air mansion just sold for $22,000,000. It was down in price. They first listed it eighteen months ago for 27,000,000, and subsequently undergo it underwent a number of price drops. He was the pioneering video game writer, director, and producer. He offloaded the residence in the posh Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles he acquired fifteen years ago in 2010.
Speaker 2:He paid 3 and a half million dollars for it, did some renovations. Now he has sold it for 22,000,000. The sprawling brick and limestone home sold to an unidentified buyer repped by Ron f Ron Smith and David Berg of Compass for 22,000,000, which is a lot less than the creator of the blockbuster Call of Duty Black Ops franchise originally wanted. However, it's still a whopping 18 and a half million dollars more than his he and his wife paid for an existing nineteen forties house on the Hillside property before razing it and embarking upon a custom rebuild in 2018. So they bought it in when did they buy it?
Speaker 2:They bought it fifteen years ago, and then eighteen years go by, then they do the custom rebuild. Wow. Completed in 2022. Fantastic. You're a fan.
Speaker 2:It's it's set on a gated and hedged hillside parcel spanning almost three quarters of an acre. The Orindothan designed abode now offers seven bedrooms, eight full baths, and two powder rooms in roughly 9,000 square feet of h shaped living space across three levels. English country inspired interiors by Marie Carls Carson and ML Designs Sport plastered brick walls and floors, clad in wood imported from Germany's Black Forest, plus smart home and security systems. Standing out on the main level is a fireside living room with a vaulted oak beam seat.
Speaker 1:John, if you've seen Star Wars, you'll you'll love this room.
Speaker 2:That's that's Have
Speaker 1:you seen Star Wars?
Speaker 2:I have seen Star Wars, Jordy. I've seen all of them multiple times. I am a fan. The kitchen is outfitted with a fossilized stone eat in island, decor and sub zero appliances and a windowed breakfast nook with built in banquet seating. While the primary suite has a projector and a retractable 100 foot screen.
Speaker 2:Wow. That is a big TV or projector. A seating area that opens to a balcony and a marble bath anchored by a nickel soaking tub. Lower level features a soundproof movie theater. So they have a 100 inch projector in the master and then you go downstairs and there's a soundproof movie theater.
Speaker 2:This guy liked media. Makes sense.
Speaker 1:Film enjoyer.
Speaker 2:Maybe he was playing Call of Duty on these on the movie theater screen. It has cashmere recliners and an entertainment lounge with a bar and acclimatized wine cellar. And upstairs, a mere gym in a dark hued study. We love the dark hued studies here. This is the second one we've found so far.
Speaker 2:It's also soundproof. It has a wet bar and bookshelves, concealing a server area that doubles as a panic room. Interesting. Outdoors, the grounds host a tiled zero edge pool with a Baja shelf and spa, grilling station, fire pit, conversation area, and fountain with lights and jets choreographed to music. Interesting.
Speaker 2:There's also a cobblestone motor court flanking a two car garage. Born in Liverpool, England, Anthony relocated to two in 2004 to Los Angeles, where he worked on Call of Duty, one of the best selling video game franchises of all time, with more than half a billion copies sold to date. His breakout came in 2010 with Black Ops, which he directed and wrote. He also wrote and directed the sequel. He went on to launch the gaming studio Deviation Games, which recently closed up shop.
Speaker 2:As of now, he's reportedly pursuing a new challenge professionally. Well, we'll have to have him on the show and get him get the update
Speaker 1:Would love to.
Speaker 2:What he's doing next. Have you played Black Ops? Or were
Speaker 1:you I have.
Speaker 2:Strictly Modern Warfare. You played Black Ops? I enjoyed Black Ops as well. Were you Tyler, were you a Black Ops kid?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Black Ops two.
Speaker 2:Black Ops two is the one?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I guess Black Ops three maybe.
Speaker 2:Sort of underrated. I I've always been a fan of the single player experiences, I think more than the average. The multiplayer is still
Speaker 5:like You mean like zombies or
Speaker 2:No. Campaign. Campaign. I feel like there there was actually one Call of Duty recently
Speaker 1:You would be just a campaign
Speaker 2:like campaign. It's very cinematic. It's like a James Bond movie. You know that meme of what Greenland's gonna look like and it's from I think it's from Black Ops too where they're on the snowmobiles and they're shooting people going through the forest. That's an iconic scene.
Speaker 2:I like the big set pieces. I like the stories. Yeah. It's not the it might not
Speaker 1:be most memorable campaign moment in any
Speaker 5:No. It's definitely no Russian.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No Russian.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Did you ever play that, Jordy? Wow.
Speaker 1:No. What gamer version of gamer.
Speaker 2:It's in Modern Warfare. Right?
Speaker 5:I actually don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 4:I think
Speaker 5:it's Modern Warfare. Was that the
Speaker 2:No. Russian is they go it was a very controversial scene.
Speaker 1:That one was super dark.
Speaker 2:Because you you play you you go behind the scenes, and you're you're embedded as a as a Russian. You're doing like a false flag attack, basically. And your job is to, like, shoot a bunch of people in an airport, which is very aggressive, very controversial. Dark, but certainly memorable. As is Shopify.
Speaker 2:Shopify, the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 1:Let's head over to Montana.
Speaker 2:Okay. We're going to Montana.
Speaker 1:What's mountain going town with Montana's most expensive real estate. Once remote ski outpost, Big Sky has transformed into a destination of wealthy home buyers. In Southwestern Montana near Yellowstone National Park is Big Sky, a mountain community that merged around 1973 with the opening of remote ski area, Big Sky Resort. Over time, Sky has transformed from a scattering of residences and businesses into a true town. Lately, the ten year Big Sky 2025 plan added added added new world class ski infrastructure, modern luxury residential resort to reshaping the property landscape.
Speaker 1:This is helping push Big Sky to the top of the state's price charts with a median listing of 3,050,000.00 in December. Mhmm. Despite this growth, the community keeps an authentic Montana feel. Dressing up still means putting on cowboy boots, jeans
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And maybe, just maybe, a cowboy hat. Town Center is a new newer commercial and housing hub with a mix of dining, shopping, hotels, and recreation. Nearby, the established Meadow Village has a small business area. Let's give it up for small business areas around the country. And a residential field.
Speaker 1:Together, these two districts have merged into Big Sky's growing downtown. Lone Mountain Ranch, this historic guest ranch with a western vibe dates back to 1915, so before, I guess, the town actually formed.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:It's known for antler adorned horn and cantal restaurant.
Speaker 2:We gotta give some tips to folks who are heading out to Big Sky. There are memberships that you must obtain. Big Sky has three exclusive ski in, ski out private residential clubs. You got the Yellowstone Club founded in the nineteen nineties. Offers classic timber aesthetics, private ski terrain, and a Tom Westkop designed golf course in addition to a variety of housing options.
Speaker 2:Montage Big Sky Resort opened in 2021 and is within Big Sky's Spanish Peaks community, which you mentioned. It has a 139 room hotel and private residences. Ownership provides an opportunity to join Spanish Peaks Mountain Club. And then there is the one and only Moonlight Basin Resort on the grounds of the Moonlight Basin Club.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This just opened.
Speaker 2:This is great.
Speaker 1:I have two friends there right now. It looks it looks incredible. And they have homes. Montage is set up where I think it's only fractional
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:For their residences whereas Moonlight Basin are the one and only. You can actually buy entire homes. The business model of just buying a bunch of land for cheap and then building a bunch of homes and selling them
Speaker 2:It really is sort of like a Montana forever environment. You know? Silicon Valley talks a big game about building new cities.
Speaker 1:California forever.
Speaker 2:Head out to Montana, and they're like, yeah. We built three of these, like, just recently. We built, like, whole cities. Ski season is obviously the big headliner. Big Sky's calendar is actually a tale of two high energy peaks.
Speaker 2:Winter at the ski resort spanning 5,850 acres, and one of the largest in The US is the undisputed king. But in the summer, the Big Sky PBR claims the throne as the premier event. It brings together the world's elite bull riders to an outdoor air arena in town center, pairing the raw grit of professional bull riding with pyrotechnics and mountaintop sunsets. We got some advice for the buyer. The majority of the full time residents typically live in the vicinity of Meadow Village or Town Center where there are more condominiums, a real estate broker says.
Speaker 2:Within a quarter mile outside downtown, there are single family homes, part time, and second home residents, and the on the other hand, often buy in the mountains where there is ski access. Bullis suggests keeping an open mind. Some prospective buyers initially want a single family residence, she says, but even those who thought they needed a four or five bedroom house may be swayed by a well designed condo aesthetic or the convenience of being able to easily lock up and rent out the unit.
Speaker 1:Alex Alex Waters, who we're with on Sunday with Paul, he is running the racing program out at Willow Springs. Mhmm. He's setting up a new members club
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:In in Bozeman that allows you to buy garages
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Which means that you can you will have a primary res or not necessarily a primary, but you will have a residence on Montana, which means you can get away with not Oh. Yeah. There was a loophole with you could set up an LLC in Montana for cars then. Buy a car and then avoid the 10 sales tax or whatever it is
Speaker 2:The old whistling diesel, man.
Speaker 1:But that's been getting cracked down on. It never really was obvious that it was legal at all. I think it I think it wasn't. I I think it wasn't. Also was
Speaker 2:aesthetically it was a little offensive to some people. They said there was sort of a carve out if it was like, oh, you had to do it because of certain regulations, like a certain car couldn't get approved. But there were there were a lot of people that were like, hey, you bought a $800,000 car. Why can't you just afford to pay the taxes, the sales tax or whatever? Why are you why are you nickel and diming?
Speaker 2:Like, can you really afford that Lambo if you can't just put a California license plate on it? It it always had like a little bit of like an aesthetic like, you're you're
Speaker 4:you're skipping.
Speaker 1:Well, some some people were doing that specifically because their cars wouldn't pass small Exactly. In California.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're older retro, like Yeah. Sort of get a pass. Graphite. Code review for the age of AI.
Speaker 2:Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster than I do with Graphite.
Speaker 1:Did you see Amman is headed to sea? No way. Got a video here.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's play it.
Speaker 1:Pull up this video. Amman at Sea. They they're calling it a philosophy.
Speaker 2:Is it a It's a boat? It's a cruise ship? Let's play this. Looks nice. Got a nice big bedroom.
Speaker 2:This is on a boat? Is this AI slob? Is this AI or CGI or is this real? We now need to know. Let's go to the comments.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank god. I I honestly thought that goat was in the video. I I that that did fool me. The horse. That is a big boat.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's a big boat. They they they actually built this thing. That Will this get you
Speaker 1:cruises, John.
Speaker 2:Incredibly. I absolutely incredible. You truly nailed it. Wow. The comments, adoring.
Speaker 2:People love it. Amangati is the embodiment of space and seclusion comprising just 47 spacious suites. The yacht is imbued with the same quiet elegance as Amman sanctuaries on land with unparalleled surface from the onboard team attuned
Speaker 1:to John, but it's a lot of people. Yeah. You're looking at hanging out with like it's over a 100 people with the staff, I would assume. You've got 47 suites, couple of people per suite, and then staff. That's a lot of people to be on on a boat.
Speaker 1:I'm sure it'll be an amazing experience. Are you are you signing up?
Speaker 2:I would because I'm not I've been anti cruise for a very long time. I I think that there might be an over rotation against cruise culture. It's been been degraded in many ways, where many cruise ships, the aesthetics are very like, okay, you're just basically drinking and gambling the whole time, and it's sort of like boring and bland. And it's certainly not the correct cultural way to visit country. Like, if you're just like, yeah, I've been to, you know, France.
Speaker 2:No. I didn't go on land. I was just on this boat drinking and gambling the whole time. It's a little bit it's a little bit it feels uncultured sometimes. But I think that certain cruise ships might offer specific things that people might enjoy.
Speaker 2:Depends on depends on what what you're what what you're going for and what the community will be like on the boat, what the goals are. Who
Speaker 1:slot machines on the Amman stayed in Montenegro for a couple weeks once and it was so funny because you'd just be in like the most quaint little village Yeah. Like by the sea. Yeah. There's tiny little boats out.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's totally idyllic. And then just like this massive cruise ship would just like roll into the to the port of this tiny town and and it would kind of it would kind of kill the vibe.
Speaker 2:I like the smaller boats. Like the catamaran, something you can scuba dive on.
Speaker 1:I guess like my I guess like my big question with the Amman cruise
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Is like if you're staying in Amman Mhmm. It's probably think like 50 k Mhmm. For the week Mhmm. For a room
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:During peak season.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And and so assume and like renting like a pretty nice yacht with a full staff that's Yep. Is like probably
Speaker 2:It's around the same. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Potentially like slightly more, but I'm not sold that this is gonna be that great of a trade.
Speaker 2:Well, the the so the thing is
Speaker 1:Especially if you're going with friends. You're just Like, do you wanna go on the Amman? Do you wanna go on the Amman boat? Yeah. And you've got You're sharing it with a 100 other people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or do you and if and like friends You might like wanna get your own boat.
Speaker 2:You might like hanging out with other random people that are there at the on the Amman boat. Like, there might be serendipity that comes from the community. That might be a
Speaker 1:I've met some cool I've met some cool people. Yeah. What if
Speaker 5:you get like a 100 of your boys?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Just load
Speaker 5:the whole thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe like 200. Pack them four in each suite. Yeah. You know, you take the mattress off the bed and then half the dudes sleep on the box spring and then half the dudes sleep
Speaker 1:on the would be such a funny to run on the Amman. Yes. It's basically pick the most, like, figure out, like, what is, like, the least desirable dates, like, next year Yes. For cruising in general. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then all of your friends book it at the same time.
Speaker 4:It's like a in front
Speaker 5:of the off-site.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That would be good. Yeah. Mean, there's nothing
Speaker 1:sweet. How it it would be cooler to rent, like
Speaker 2:crew in there.
Speaker 1:It would be cooler to rent 10 yachts with your friends all at the same time Yeah. And then just, like, park them and hang out.
Speaker 2:I like the idea of just smuggling as many of your boys into one room as possible. Just be like, sir, you you selected just two guests. Why are there 14 dudes in your room? Why do
Speaker 1:you have thirty
Speaker 2:seventy cot to add to your to your to your room, sir. What's going on? Like, don't worry about it.
Speaker 1:The other the other thing with with the man is the most like first world problem ever, but like some of the menus are just like so, you know, makes sense, but like so focused on like sushi.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So raw fish heavy
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:That at some point you're like, I need to venture out. Like Oh. By like day five, you're
Speaker 2:like, hey. Mean, I I think is the actual value prop with the Aman is that you're potentially reducing the standard deviation or like the variable experience. Because if you're chartering something privately and you're getting a private boat, like, you might have an amazing captain or you might have a mediocre captain. You kinda gotta figure out the reviews and process that, and then Yeah. Oh, the the chef, how are they doing?
Speaker 2:And then all the crew, are they all good? Whereas, Amman, you kind of know that there's, a standard that's being held within that group, and that everyone will be trained to the same standard, that there will be an organization that's maintaining some sort of base level of experience.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Anyway, 11. Build intelligent real time conversational agents. Re imagine human technology interaction with 11. We had some breaking news yesterday.
Speaker 2:Caroline Ellison has been released from federal custody. She, of course, was involved in the FTX drama that erupted a few years ago. She's out. And Martin Scrella quote tweeted us into the oblivious Ratio. Ratioed us by changing our change he didn't even use nano banana pro.
Speaker 2:He just scribbled all over our trading card and said snitch.
Speaker 1:Honestly, it worked. Yeah. It did. Was thinking, like, that felt very fast.
Speaker 2:It does feel fast. It does feel fast. But I'm excited to see what she does next. Will she build something? You know, we've seen some other folks get out and go on to redemption, and we will see.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, at some point, she tells her story. It'll be interesting to see her side of it. Maybe she has convincing arguments.
Speaker 5:I heard she wrote a book. Really? I think there were some leaks. I don't know how true it is, but apparently, she she was writing.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well,
Speaker 1:Jay Yarrow is sharing. Joe was highlighting Intel Plunging. Sold off after earnings yesterday. And Jay is particularly disappointed because he says a US citizen and our sovereign wealth fund owns this one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Bad day bad day.
Speaker 1:We all lost something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Bad day to be a to be a US citizen.
Speaker 1:What Do we should we talk about
Speaker 2:The the the news on Intel really quickly. Intel post loss after spending increase swung to a loss for the fourth quarter on Thursday and forecast further losses in the in the first quarter as the company spends heavily to ramp up production of its latest chips. Company reported a net loss of $333,000,000 for the last three months of the year, and analysts were expecting them only to lose $294,000,000 so they lost more than expected. Revenue was $13,700,000,000 And a year ago, it was 14,300,000,000.0 So revenue is declining. Losses are expanding.
Speaker 2:It's a bunch of bad news. Shares fell 6.7% in after hours trading. The CEO, Lip Buuton, said, Our priorities are clear: sharpen execution reinvigorate engineering excellence and fully capitalize on the vast opportunity AI presents across all of our businesses. The CFO said industry wide support supply shortages were a factor weighing on results and said the problem would worsen in the 2026 before starting to ease in the spring. Well, I'm rooting for Lip Bu Tan.
Speaker 2:I'm rooting
Speaker 1:for
Speaker 2:the folks over at Intel. I'm rooting for the American taxpayer who owns a little bit of Intel, so good luck to all of them. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent
Speaker 1:with Okta. Well said, John. We should talk about this out of home campaign.
Speaker 2:OpenAI has purchased a ton of billboards. They have hit San Francisco. We got a whole bunch of folks at Clay, Valfos, Decagon, Unified GTM, and Christina, of course, from Vanta is sitting there on the billboard. I like the aesthetic, the black and white, the big. There's a lot of white space in the design.
Speaker 2:It's not too cropped in. I think they I think they executed these billboards very well. And and and and it's it's fun. OpenAI is such a it's easy to collapse it into. It's just a, you know, app on your phone.
Speaker 2:It's singular a business, but they do have a lot of partners all over the startup ecosystem. And they are paying tribute to them with this out of home campaign.
Speaker 1:I like to think about the 10 people left in San Francisco that have never heard of AI or OpenAI or ChatGPT, and they're just very confused, walking around looking at these nice pictures.
Speaker 2:It it I mean, it is
Speaker 1:It really is for the builders.
Speaker 2:It is it is another example of San Francisco billboards being very insular insider jokes. Like, you know, there aren't that many people in many cities that would be able to identify all these founders by name or know these companies even, especially at the size they put there. They didn't even put taglines. They just put this this person's name building this company. You have to know.
Speaker 2:It's an if you know, you know campaign. But I think there's a lot of people in San Francisco that do in fact know. So congratulations to everyone that is sporting their their fits on a billboard in San Francisco now on Well an AI's dime.
Speaker 1:Let's head over to Faye Faye Lee. Yes. According to Natasha at Bloomberg, she's in the fundraising market
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:With talks. Early talks, advanced talks, we're not sure. But their talks to raise 500,000,000 at 5,000,000,000. That's right. I do I do think it when you think about the leverage that Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Founders like Fei Fei Li have to be going out and raising this much money this early and just still being like, sorry, the most I can give up is 10%. It's like they all wanna do these 10% or less.
Speaker 2:She deserves the GOAT sound effect. She deserves the GOAT on the screen
Speaker 1:because she's a on the screen. We got a GOAT on the screen.
Speaker 2:Former TBPN guest. Very happy to have chatted with her. Her company, World Labs, has been posting some very interesting demos. Obviously, there was that box that you could see a virtual three d world inside. That was very cool.
Speaker 2:And the way she talks about it is funny because it makes me feel like she's a gamer. And now I just wanna, you know, get on Rust with her and and and and experience whatever game she plays because she's she's sort of becoming an important player in in like the future of video games potentially, the future of gaming, the future of the metaverse. And I wonder I wonder if she has any favorites or or has has has dabbled on on COD late at night on voice chat screaming at people.
Speaker 1:What's what's going on with so Green Oaks, Altimeter Yes. Have initiated trade dispute with the government of South Korea. They're suing
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:South Korea of unlawfully attacking e commerce giant
Speaker 2:Kupong.
Speaker 1:Kupong. Yeah. I think Neil went into detail on on their investment Okay. In Coupang on invest like the best.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:It's a great episode.
Speaker 2:It feels rare to have the venture firms be doing this suit, the lawsuit, or to initiate the trade dispute? It's interesting, like, where where this lawsuit is sitting. Because typically, you know, if you if you back some company and then they get in a dispute with a local government, the company is the one that's sending their lawyers. But in this case, it is Green Oaks and Altimeter. But people are coming out in force supporting Neil Mehta.
Speaker 2:Gary Tan said Neil Mehta is who you want by your side when it gets real. Not a lot of investors would go up against a sovereign to defend a founder. South Korea's government is about to find out that Americans don't take well to being bullied. And Brad Gersner gets in the replies with the American flag and the salute. Let me tell you about Cognition.
Speaker 2:They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team for sure. Substack. What's going on with Substack?
Speaker 1:They're going into television.
Speaker 2:They're going into television.
Speaker 1:They're taking on big TV.
Speaker 2:Big TV.
Speaker 1:They say, according to Max, they're launching Substack TV app on Apple TV and Google Users will be able to watch video posts and Substack live streams. I think this is a so much of Substack's opportunity right now Mhmm. It's just that X is rolled into x AI
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And is, like, not operating, you know Does it total as, like, a pure play stand alone company. Yeah. And so yeah.
Speaker 2:I think Substack has been the most has been definitely ramping up the video functionality. We've done some live streams there. There's a lot of opportunity, and it's a very interesting community. I think that's the strongest thing about Substack is just that it's a very high signal place. Like, you were I'm I'm I'm you know, the Substack experience is not scrolling random posts, random creators, but I feel very confident about if Substack were to serve me a random piece of content that was doing well across the Substack network, I would enjoy it because the creators that choose to be on Substack, there there are just so few, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:You could see you could see a new kind of like we were talking about Vimeo earlier, the the dynamic that you used to have between Vimeo and YouTube where Vimeo was like a super intentional place. Yeah. You could see something emerging again where, like Vimeo is like maybe or sorry. Substack TV is like a somewhat more intent intentional version of of YouTube. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just because it is like based on like your actual audience less around just, like, raw discoverability now. Yeah. Logging on to the Substack TV app and, like, seeing exactly content just from the people that
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And also, with Substack, if you're trying to create, like, a signal on a piece of content, the fact that people pay is really, really high signal. Like, it's hard to clickbait someone all the way to putting their credit card down and being like, I support this creator, and I'm willing to pay, you know, 5 or $10 a month for who knows how long. And so that just feels like a really, really strong signal to pull across the network if you're surfacing things.
Speaker 2:It's like, yes. This person isn't just good at clickbait. They're not just good at driving traffic. They're not just good at thumbnails and titles and hooks. Like, they are good at at creating such a response from their community that their community puts down their credit cards.
Speaker 2:And in the case of, like, Emily Sundberg at Feed Me, maybe they pay more than they have to because people really do enjoy the relationship they're having with the creator. And so has been very, very unique in that. Anyway, there are always more posts
Speaker 1:Did you see these people clearly have not read Rocco's Basilisk?
Speaker 2:Yes. What did they say?
Speaker 1:They're tearing up the Waymo's in SF.
Speaker 2:That's not good news.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Video here.
Speaker 2:They're really jumping on this. This is a new one because Waymo's have been This is a new
Speaker 1:Two words I haven't said They're put together
Speaker 2:really breaking the windshield. Wow. What is this did the Waymo drive through a particular protest? Did these people just did these people just descend upon a random Waymo? And also, like, this is a crime.
Speaker 2:This is property
Speaker 1:what would your mother say?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Also, I'm just thinking about, like, the Waymo's aren't cheap. Like, you're gonna be hit with, a $500,000 bill even if you just have to pay for repairing the Waymo. Very, very odd. But of course people are calling to give the Waymo's weapons and people.
Speaker 2:That is the rallying cry of tech. I don't think Google will be doing that anytime soon. I think there were other ways to solve this. But it is terrifying if
Speaker 1:The we were Bird and Lyme the Bird CEO, if he was looking at this, would be having a little bit of PTSD. You remember Bird Graveyard, that account? Yes,
Speaker 2:yes, yes. The autonomous technology really needs to get put through the wringer. Although a lot of I mean, the New York City bikes seem to have been you know, made it through the whole destruction phase and seem to be continuing to exist, at least. Anyway, what else? Sam Sheffer had a post here that I wanted to read through.
Speaker 2:He said, I'm waiting for bangers to post. The at bangers account on x apparently has not been posting very often. He's waiting for the Tesla Roadster. He wants another Starship launch from SpaceX. He wants Apple's folding iPhone, and he wants Daft Punk to be resurrected.
Speaker 2:I thought it was a good list. I think the another Starship launch from SpaceX. That's, like, for sure gonna happen. Apple's folding phone, maybe next year. I don't know.
Speaker 2:We'll have to talk to Mark Gurman about it, but it seems like it's coming. Certainly working on it. The Tesla Roadster, that might be a ways away. That feels like that project has been fully mothballed in favor of other things like Optimus and data centers in space and whatnot, but I would still love a Tesla Roadster. There's still something it is remarkable how few electric sports cars there have been.
Speaker 2:Obviously, there's the hypercars like the Ramaz what is it? The Ferrari. There there there's a few other, like, hypercars in the electric world that are, like, a million plus.
Speaker 1:Ferrari has, like, this really weird
Speaker 2:It's a pinotrina Battista. The Battista is, oh, I think over $1,000,000 in fully electric and has not been met with positive reviews from the car community. But if you put that that level of performance in something that costs $200,000, it is a different equation. And, I mean, you take the Cybertruck's aesthetics and you take those type of design risks, and if it's low volume, you could at least create something that's
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, curious to see on on the street. And a halo car would be would be fun. I'm I'm excited for that. Anyway
Speaker 1:Funny funny story Hey, what else? Out of from Semaphore. Liz Hoffman writes in Entrepreneurs, thirteen hours in Davos jail. The food was phenomenal, says Sebastian Heinemann's stint as a suspected terrorist started in the most daubious way possible, hunting for something to eat. The 31 year old entrepreneur and first time World Economic Forum attendee was scouting for a salmon roll at a party hosted by Digital Life Design Tuesday night at the Grand Hotel.
Speaker 1:He set the prototype of the machine he hopes to sell, a verification device to to fraud proof money transfers on a pillar. When he came back, it was gone. Hotel security was waiting to tell him the police had some questions. I'm the idiot, and that Heinemann, founder of StartUp Vertico readily admits. It's a black cube with hot glue blobs and wires coming out the side.
Speaker 1:He left it unattended in a small town police state. What followed was thirteen hours in the custody of the fatigue clad but unfailingly polite Swiss belief. We spent all week thanking in broken German. Semafor reviewed his release ticket from the police, which said that Heinemann was noticed within W. F.
Speaker 1:2026 Secondurity zone with a tech device that seems suspicious and its use for illegal purposes could not be excluded. And anyways, the view from a Davos jail cell out the Belvedere Hotel Security, there's this detective mid forties Swiss who searches me extremely thorough. They handcuff me and put me in the back of a BMW. Nice, nice. Swiss police riding in style.
Speaker 1:I meet another officer who has the best English. The jail is right next to the train station. They bring out a fingerprint scanner, and the guy tells me, I want to see if you're an international spy. I asked for my Lunesta pills because I have insomnia, and he said, I can't give it to you because I don't know if it's cyanide.
Speaker 8:Woah. It
Speaker 1:was an insane story. Woah. You walk into the office and there are two cells. Everything is all painted white.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Very antiseptic and Swiss. There's a metal bed drilled into the concrete and a toilet sink combination. I love this founder. It's like they're just like hustling trying to trying to get some customer interest and just goes to Davos Jail and it's like, well, I may as well make the most of it. Try to try to get a story out of this.
Speaker 1:Anyways, there's a metal bed drilled into the concrete and a toilet sink combination. They said it was spring water so the water was good to drink. The food was phenomenal. Better review than Bessen.
Speaker 2:Scott Bessen. Best. They
Speaker 1:brought it from the hospital apparently. Chicken lasagna, amazing. Only complaint I have was the smell. The next morning they bring this guy named Chris, a technical expert. He says, come out here, explain your tech.
Speaker 1:I do my pitch. I say, look, I'm not a very good hardware engineer, but I'm a great user of AI. I was one of the top users of Cursor last year. I did 43,000 agent runs and generated 25,000,000,000 tokens. We opened my machine.
Speaker 1:Chris and I go line by line through the code. I don't know the language the code was written in because it was written with AI. So Chris actually explained the code to me. They come back and they say, you're free to go. You can take all your stuff with you, but you're banned from Davos between now and 6PM on Friday.
Speaker 1:What? I'm gonna apply for another hotel badge next year. So anyways, insane story. Don't It's funny. Don't bring your hardware device that you don't fully understand with a bunch of hot glue in a in a plastic box.
Speaker 1:Very very very sketchy. But
Speaker 2:That's risky.
Speaker 1:It could got a good story out of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The other interesting takeaway from Davos, Alex Heath summed it up in the sources. News newsletter. He says, after my conversations with AI leaders this week in Davos, I came away with the impression that the industry has collectively decided to gang up on open AI. And so you saw Demis and Dario hanging out, talking about how much they're open to collaboration, open to pausing, if that makes sense, open to working together, and and, you know, Elon on stage, but not a lot of open AI love from all the other lab leaders.
Speaker 2:Sort of an interesting dynamic, the open the anti open AI alliance. And we're also following the Kalshi market on will Elon win his case against open AI. The volume's gone up. It's now a 58% chance that Elon wins his case against OpenAI. So, like, we're getting close to fifty fifty.
Speaker 2:The market's pretty stable. Nothing's really moved it significantly one way or another. But I'm sure it'll be moving a ton later once we have more news that comes out, more back and forth, more people sharing facts and figures.
Speaker 1:There was some reporting from the New York Times on Kash Patel's demands for a work trip to The UK. Yes. A lot of people were getting very angry about this. Yes. But I want your reaction, John.
Speaker 1:So every May there's a Five Eyes conference with the head of every intelligence agency. This year, it was in The UK. Kash Patel is going. In the lead up to that, his detail that starts making crazy requests. You can tell me if these are crazy.
Speaker 1:He's got special requirements on everything and the Brits are getting pissed. Mhmm. Before the conference, his staff says he's unhappy because he doesn't like meetings in office settings. What he wants is social events. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:He wants premier soccer Premier League soccer game.
Speaker 2:Now now that's deeply un American.
Speaker 1:He wants to go jet skiing.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Helicopter tour.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 1:fun. So, yeah, I wanted to ask. Is Yeah. This fair? He wants to go and develop, you know,
Speaker 2:I think you need to go much further. You you don't wanna ask to go to some soccer match, do some European nonsense. You wanna ask for American football match. Bring the NFL over there. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The Super Bowl is happening. I want the All Star game played here while I'm in town. Yeah. Bring the Patriots.
Speaker 1:I also think you're you're excited about helicopters, you're excited about jet skiing. Why not combine the two? Jetpack. Combine the two.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:Like, bring them out at the same time. Oh, Head down to the lake. Yeah. Head down to the lake. That'd be good.
Speaker 1:Or the river. Right? And just be zooming around together. Yeah. Jumping off, you know, trading trading places kind of thing.
Speaker 2:What about wing suiting? Let's get some wing suiting going. Some bungee jumping. I I wanna do, you know, that Red Bull jump from space. That's what I wanna do on my trip.
Speaker 2:We're going up the edge of space. Felix Baumgartner. Yeah. I'm jumping out of a weather balloon into into the Central London.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That that's that's a that's a good bit. You're going going to tour another another country and meet with people and say like, actually I wanna go to space.
Speaker 2:Very high up.
Speaker 1:I go to space.
Speaker 2:I wanna go to space. In other news, Eric Jorgensen has announced pre orders for the book of Elon Musk. It's sixty one days until the launch. David Semra, who got an early copy, he says it's awesome. He highly recommends preordering.
Speaker 2:If you're not familiar with Eric's previous books, he wrote the the almanac of Naval Ravikant, which did sit fantastically well, sold a ton. Jack Butcher is involved in the Book of Elon. That should be very fun. And Naval wrote the foreword, which is very cool.
Speaker 1:Equipment share went public today. IPO. YC Winter fifteen. Yeah. They say from Missouri to 373 locations nationwide, 7,700 team members, and 8,000,000,000 of fleet under management.
Speaker 1:They built the operating system. Construction has been missing. Yeah. Our friend Mitchell from Lead Edge is a big investor
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:In EquipmentShare. We're working on getting the c CEO on any any day now. But congratulations to the entire team and cap table at Equipment Shares.
Speaker 2:That'll be fun. Well, it's time to plant the bomb and wind down the show. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in today. It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:We hope you have an incredible weekend ahead. Only three more sleeps. So we're back here. We'll be counting them down.
Speaker 2:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the TBPN newsletter, tbpn.com. Visit some of our sponsors. Look in the description.
Speaker 1:Go browse around on the website.
Speaker 2:There's lot of good stuff.
Speaker 1:Lot of good stuff.
Speaker 4:And Thank you
Speaker 1:to our whole team.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank you to the team. Tyler.
Speaker 1:Much of legends. Bunch of legends. Cool crew. And We will see you guys.
Speaker 2:Chat. We will see you
Speaker 1:on Monday. Cheers, folks. Good luck. This is weird. Nice work, brothers.
Speaker 1:I'll see you on the next one.