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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, 10/19/2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome. The Temple Of Technology, the fort... Fortress Of Finance, The capital of capital.
Speaker 1:Do we still got a little color grade going on, boys? What's going on with the
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 1:With the bold tans today. Yeah? Okay. You left the color grade. Well, we're slowly getting out of Nathan Fielder territory.
Speaker 1:We're not zoomed in, but we still got the color grade and I still got the Nathan Fielder headphones, which are actually amazing, deeply underrated. He's a wired headphone guy. You've been talking about this for a long time.
Speaker 2:I didn't think those were great.
Speaker 1:You... Oh, you didn't like them?
Speaker 2:I love them.
Speaker 1:I think that they sound way better.
Speaker 2:The quality is horrible.
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Yeah. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:I I think it's nice. It's nice. I don't know. Just the way I can still hear a little bit of this, it doesn't... It's not so isolating.
Speaker 1:It feels like I'm more present. I don't know. Anyway, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both.
Speaker 1:You can use corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more, including Tony Hawk, including Vamp Margera. They put on an incredible event at the New York Stock Exchange on Friday... On Saturday night. Tony Hawk was there skating around the floor of the New York Stock Exchange outside of the New York Stock Exchange. Ben Marjer was there.
Speaker 1:Huge event.
Speaker 2:He was also just skating around New York yesterday Exactly. As showed up on a buddy of mine story.
Speaker 1:It's awesome. Yeah. Great great sponsorship. Great out of the box, outside of the box thinking from the ramp team on a really interesting brand partner who... Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just, know, a lot of contrast there. So great, great outcome. So congrats to them. Let me... We're still in Nathan Fielder territory.
Speaker 1:We have Katie Drummond from Wired, the global editorial director, hopping on to talk about her interview with Nathan Fielder, which dropped today. Then we have a bunch of other folks joining the show. But Theranos was all over the timeline.
Speaker 2:He broke his silence. Nathan? With Katie.
Speaker 1:That's true. That's true. That that is actually what happened. Yeah, he did. But, yeah, this weekend, every time I'd refresh, would be...
Speaker 1:You can see everything takes. Everyone had all these different opinions and takes. The one that stuck out to me was that there's this... There's a little bit of a like a... You you watch the movie and most people came away thinking more positively of Elizabeth Holmes being like, oh, maybe she wasn't...
Speaker 1:Maybe she's not that bad. Maybe there's more to the story. Maybe she was manipulated. She seems to be manipulated multiple times potentially, like, maybe maybe she's more of a...
Speaker 2:Some people might be like, she's bad, but may... She'd probably be nice to me if I interacted with her.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. A little bit of that. And... Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and and there's this... I don't know. There's there's there's some sort of like suspicion that I feel some people in Silicon Valley are having where it's like, oh, it's just like the fake it till you make it thing. It's, you know, it's not that big of a deal. And I just I just can't I just can't stop thinking about like, it seems like she's just a bad founder.
Speaker 1:Like, put aside the fraud, like it just seems like like total slop in terms of the execution of that business and gives me absolutely no faith in a Theranos two point o.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:And the whole time I was like almost yelling at the movie screen because she taught... The way she describes Theranos is like this box and like it's in the cloud. It's just like it's it's so it's so unaware of the medical device industry, which is so frustrating to me because she she's making this point where it's like we've been... We have an invention and our invention allows you to test blood for things and like we test all this stuff. And she's making it sound like it's like magical science and it's like, I looked it up.
Speaker 1:There have been 60 plus companies since Theranos started that sold for over a $100,000,000 in that category. It's like someone coming to you and being like, I have a magical... We invented something. It takes information and it stores it on a database that you can access through a website. It's like, so you make a SaaS product.
Speaker 1:Literally, hundreds of people make those. And there are thousands of people that work in the medical device industry and they've made boxes that look kind of like a Theranos box and it runs a test and then... And they don't go to
Speaker 2:prison for ten years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They don't go to prison. And and they and they... And it's just... It's such it's such a it's such a tried and true playbook that it's actually like an industry that's boring at this point.
Speaker 1:They're like... These companies get funded, no one reads their press releases and then they get sold for hundreds of millions of dollars and it's like, okay, cool. Yeah. Congrats. You made $500,000,000 doing another medical device.
Speaker 1:We know the playbook at this point. You you get some intellectual property. You build the device, kind of the supply chain, figure out the chemistry, get the FDA application in. It takes a decade for the FDA to actually approve it. We probably sell the company before then.
Speaker 1:Like, there's such an established playbook that there's specific VCs that just focus on this. And they're just like, oh, yeah. We'll just do these deals all the time. We just do them. And then we...
Speaker 1:Yeah. We sell them to this company. And this this biotech company just loves buying these. And it happens all the time. And she never just says like, look, this stuff happens all the time.
Speaker 1:It's not crazy that I'm going be able to build a box that tests for something. Like, this happens all the time. Instead, it's like it's like, I'm the only one that could possibly do this, which is so weird. It's such a bad frame to not to not just admit what's what's really happening on the field, is that box... Diagnostic boxes get built and sold every few years for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You could just do that. But instead, it has to be this pie in the sky nonsense. It really, really frustrates me, as you can probably tell. Nikita Beer broke down a little bit of this concept.
Speaker 1:He said, one of the things that hasn't been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes, she was created in the era of the TED Talk entrepreneur. And this is exactly what I was picking up on. So, 2011 and 2015, after the release of The Social Network, there was an entire apparatus built around child prodigies, college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations. I watched countless founders of a hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with fudged numbers.
Speaker 1:Most of the adults in the room excused it as faking it till you make it, but Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else. When the TED Talk era came to an end, when people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook and in the most scrutinized field there is medical technology. When people ask how far she how she got so far, it is largely explained by the period she did it in. And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up. And so, yeah, it's so odd because there are a ton of founders who build medical devices and sell them and raise money and do all these different things.
Speaker 1:But they're boring businesses because they never touch consumers directly. Like, you go to the hospital, they might say, Oh, yeah. You have a cough, but we're going to run it for some antibiotic resistant bacterial thing. We're going to take some of your blood and just take off a little piece of the blood and put it in this box to make sure that you don't have this thing. And they'll do this on-site, but you never see the brand of the company that runs this because all you care about is like, am I sick or not?
Speaker 1:Right? And so you might wind up getting a lab test that says like UCLA or USC on it or whatever, you know, whatever medical network you went to and the doctor is just going to introduce themselves as like Doctor. Smith or whatever. They're not going to tell you, oh, yeah. By the way, we just ran your blood on this small startup that got acquired by a big biotech company and it was a great deal and all the investors made money.
Speaker 1:You're never going to hear about it even if you use the And if you don't, you don't care at all. And so there's other things, which is that this is strictly regulated by the FDA. So if you're a founder of a medical device company, like what you are going for is FDA authorization. That's marketing authorization. That's literally the ability to sell the Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not illegal to build a medical device. It's illegal to sell it, to market it. And so that also includes like you can't you typically can't go on podcasts and media and say, Oh, yes. We have this thing that does this thing. We have to say, Oh, we're working on this progress.
Speaker 1:Like, we can't say that it actually works because we haven't been approved to say that by the FDA. And so... By the way,
Speaker 2:can we do spoilers now?
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 2:I think we can assume that... Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert.
Speaker 1:Don't want to hear spoilers, just leave the stream going but just turn the audio down.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we'll just Yeah. Talk away.
Speaker 1:What spoiler do you want to talk about?
Speaker 2:So Billy does this side deal Yeah. To get a cut of profit on the back end of the movie. You would probably know what what that's exactly called. Yeah. Points on the back end.
Speaker 2:Points on the back end. So he does this thing.
Speaker 1:Incredibly good.
Speaker 2:And then and then later, after the movie's totally been like finished, he decides, oh, this is going look pretty bad, backs out. Right? Damage has already been done. Right? Totally.
Speaker 2:Like, he looks he looks... Yeah. He doesn't look great.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And Elizabeth is trying to say, like, oh, I didn't I don't really know much about the details. So one thing, like, damage was already done and now the movie is a massive hit and it's gonna be continue to be a massive hit. It seems like it'll be like a a cult classic. It's something that people will look back and... I I can see somebody watching it back in...
Speaker 2:Yeah. I can see watching it back in ten years and being like, wow, that was a moment. Just because Nathan Fielder's like body of work Yeah. Becoming so iconic and I I I can't imagine being 60 years old being like, I'm gonna turn on some Nathan Fielder. Just take me back to the good old days.
Speaker 2:And... But the funny thing is, do you think that Billy... Do you think it made sense for him to do the side deal because she has... She claimed in the show she has hundreds of millions of dollars of restitution to pay. So of course, she wouldn't want to make...
Speaker 2:Even if she she wanted to make money on it, she wouldn't get any benefit of it. Mhmm. So she would want to route it through Billy?
Speaker 1:It's a good question. There's some ambiguity over whether or not they're married. I couldn't get to the bottom of this, but I think they might not be legally married. Mhmm. In which case, it would make sense for him to get those profits and then use that for their kids and their family, but then it doesn't flow to her bank account, which immediately gets grabbed by the investors.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:I think you're... I I think you might be onto something there.
Speaker 2:She gets a lot of the benefit in the sort of funding.
Speaker 1:Yes. And and so is your point that if she's in on the deal sitting there being like, we want to get paid but just pay to Billy's account, don't pay to... That's more tricky from a restitution perspective?
Speaker 2:Totally. I imagine I imagine a judge would be
Speaker 1:Oh, that's an interesting wrinkle. I hadn't thought of
Speaker 2:that. Yeah. A judge would be like, yeah, you're earning money. I don't No. No.
Speaker 2:I don't care that you did... Billy has to like go behind her back and make it really public that she's...
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That he's going behind her back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good point. Good point. So... Yeah.
Speaker 1:The fraud continues potentially. Yeah. Interesting. You might be right about the cult classic thing. I mean, I I...
Speaker 1:From my perspective, it looked like we were experiencing like an absolute box office smash. Like it was taking over the timeline. I would describe it more as like a phenomenon. When I think of cult classic, think of like slow burn. Like underappreciated box office and then all of a sudden it becomes really popular.
Speaker 1:I think it's like super popular. But...
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I'm still talking to people like over this last weekend. Yeah. I would say like Nathan Fielder Yeah. Theron Oates movie Yeah.
Speaker 2:Blah blah blah. And some people would be like, oh yeah yeah. I think I remember Theron. Yeah. Like there's still people Do out there that
Speaker 1:you know how it did at the box office? It was not the number one movie this weekend.
Speaker 2:What was?
Speaker 1:Bigger. Factor of two, Street Fighter.
Speaker 2:See what see what I make?
Speaker 1:What I... Street Fighter made $31,000,000 and You Can See Everything made 15,000,000. So twice as much money for Street Fighter, which I mean, I'm sure it's a great movie, but I didn't even know it was happening. Maybe that's a cult classic for me. Because it seemed like something I'd like.
Speaker 1:I I saw I think 50¢ in it. It looked awesome when I saw a poster eventually. Also, a whale fall. Whale fall made 8,000,000. I want to see this movie.
Speaker 1:This is a horror film about a whale. Seems really cool. Anyway, someone gets swallowed whole by a whale. Woah. Spoiler alert.
Speaker 1:But I think that's in the...
Speaker 2:In the trailer, maybe?
Speaker 1:In the trailer and the name.
Speaker 2:Spoiler alert.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let me tell you about You never heard of Their business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So I mean, the the the wildest part about the whole you can see everything Theranos thing is that, one, I've talked to Billy on the phone about the Twitter that he was running and all that stuff, answered all those questions. Nothing that really was different than what you saw in the movie.
Speaker 1:But he sort of gave me the pitch for Theranos two point o and I was like pushing back being like, so you should go for like a specific diagnostic. Go for it like do this. Like I have a buddy who ran this exact playbook, made $400,000,000 in a very short amount of time. Like this is tractable. Then he was like...
Speaker 2:When did you have this conversation?
Speaker 1:I talked to him like last year. I...
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. I think it's coming back to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I told you that... So basically...
Speaker 2:Yeah. Remember you were like, yeah, bearish.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The story the story is is that Elizabeth Holmes came came back to X and was posting like funny things and was getting like amplified and going viral and everyone was like, wow, Elizabeth Holmes.
Speaker 2:And we were getting pitched to have Billy on the show?
Speaker 1:Loosely. So what was going on was that Elizabeth Holmes was being like so edgy and based on the timeline. Everyone was like, wow, like she's innocent because she... And she's actually a great entrepreneur because she's like funny. I was like Scaring.
Speaker 1:And I was like, these are two different things. Yeah. Comedy on the timeline does not mean you're a great founder. Often Does not mean
Speaker 2:a great
Speaker 1:at Yeah. Doesn't mean that you're innocent. And so my pitch was, I said, look, if we're going to take this Elizabeth Holmes redemption arc seriously, I want to see some great calls about biotech because this is sort of what's happened with other individuals who have been rehabilitated. You'll see like a Martin Screlly put out a call about a particular quantum computing stock and then you can just wait and you wait six months and you're like, wow, Martin, like say what you will about what happened in the past. The guy was dialed about analysis of public market companies today.
Speaker 1:And so that is undeniable.
Speaker 2:So you wanted to see Elizabeth do like a Trevor Milton where
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:Tries to invent something new, fails Mhmm. And then now it's just running some random private aviation company.
Speaker 1:No. I mean, maybe. Don't know. I haven't read That's Trevor kind of
Speaker 2:what you're saying is like No. Don't like try create something
Speaker 3:new for the
Speaker 2:crowd. Sure. Make a medical device company and do one thing that...
Speaker 1:So yes and no. Yes, probably from an entrepreneurship standpoint, would be in favor of that. But from a branding perspective, my point that I posted about was like, I want to see Elizabeth Holmes give an incredible take about peptides and how that market will evolve and then watch that happen and be like, wow, she was early. I want her to be a good biotech analyst. I want her to be smart on the science.
Speaker 1:Want her to
Speaker 2:talk The crazy about thing about the the movie though, I can't remember a single point where she was locked in on anything science related.
Speaker 1:I completely agree.
Speaker 2:It was she was just... It was Billy
Speaker 1:That's the point.
Speaker 2:Learning about mitochondria.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's my point. Like like if if if a genius scientist goes to jail wrongfully, I would assume that they continue reading science literature and that they come up with interesting theses around One
Speaker 2:simple trick that the medical industry hates.
Speaker 1:You can actually do that. That happens. This stuff happens if you actually read the literature and you're in tune with the market and what's going on. And you could call longs and shorts and you could predict different things about how the biotech community is going to evolve. And some of those predictions would be right.
Speaker 1:And if a lot of them are right, you will be seen as someone who understands the industry. And you can see this with all sorts of people in AI where they post about AI progress. And then you just wait a couple of years and you're like, Oh, yeah. Like them or don't like them, they were definitely right about the cybersecurity capabilities of models five years ago. And so, at the very least, we got to give them that credit.
Speaker 1:And I want Elizabeth Holmes to throw down, give me your biotech 2027. Give me your AI 2027 thesis. Let's watch it play out if you're At
Speaker 2:the very least, a market map.
Speaker 1:At the very least, a market map. Show me that you understand what Roche offers. Or a tier
Speaker 2:list. List.
Speaker 1:A tier list of biotech acquisitions in the medical device space. Yeah. Show me you're a student of the industry you're operating in. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I put this out there as I want to see some real analysis, something that shows you that you're a live player in the industry. Then, I did ask the Elizabeth Holmes account to do an interview over the phone on 09/05/2025, so about a year ago. And then then I did I did talk to Billy on I think October 17 or something. And and it was it was nothing that didn't come out in the movie. So it all matched.
Speaker 1:But but but I was I was focused much more on the what is the business strategy going forward because if it's just the hand wavy, we're going to do everything all the time...
Speaker 2:Well, In their words, was Theranos. They're going do Theranos two point o.
Speaker 1:Theranos two point o. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which watching watching Nathan have that light bulb moment where they're pitching him Theranos two point o
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And them not realizing that people have been using the phrase Theranos two point o to describe like things that they perceive might be massive fraud. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 2:In another world. Anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I just also when I when I got to YC in 2018, my visiting partner was Diego Ray, co founder of Jean-Denis, who actually built and sold a real diagnostics box, a medical device. And it was basically just a lab testing machine. Previously, size of a dishwasher at a lab down the street, shrink it down to the size of a box and you put it at the actual hospital and then the hospital can test for a specific thing. They were testing for antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Speaker 1:They developed a chemistry. It's not rocket science. It is hard science, but it's not magic. It's not future sci fi magic.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they basically would have these particles that would make the particular bacteria resistant, antibiotic resistant bacteria light up. They would glow and then they would shine a light on it and then they would measure the amount of light that came back and they'd be able to say in this hospital, Okay, you have this particular antibiotic resistant bacteria in this patient. You need to be extra careful about washing your hands. You might need to give them a different antibiotic. There's a whole bunch of different things that can happen.
Speaker 1:And if you can get that data in an hour as opposed to two days, everything in the hospital is just going to move a little bit smoother and people are going to be a little bit healthier and you're going to sell your company for $425,000,000, which is exactly what happened. They raised 25,000,000. It was a great outcome for founders, employees. Roche eventually got the product approved by FDA. They sold pre...
Speaker 1:Sold before getting an interesting application, getting FDA approval. But Roche took it through the final step because that's very expensive, but they have a lot of great lawyers on their team to actually move that stuff through and scientists. And so in 2019, it got authorized for the COBOS VivoDx MRSA test, which is like not going to be on the stage at TED anytime soon. But it should be. It's like real science and it actually moved the needle forward.
Speaker 2:Okay. So... And good. It
Speaker 1:funny thing about this company is that the name of the particles that they created that actually detect the antibiotic resistant bacteria, they call them smarticles. Smarticles, which sounds you're going to prison. Sounds like you're going prison. But it's like it's just a normal boring company. No offense.
Speaker 1:It's a great company. I love you Diego. But like it just... It was never it was never like we're going to solve everything, cure death in twenty million years in the future. He was just like, look, there's this test that happens.
Speaker 1:Normally happens down the street. It costs a lot of money. That will happen in the
Speaker 2:locker Okay.
Speaker 1:Boom.
Speaker 2:So again, during the film
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:A fire broke out in Malibu. Yeah. I was pretty distracted.
Speaker 1:So you need me to...
Speaker 2:Trying to figure out trying to figure out what was going down, how serious it was, etcetera. That being said, I came away from the movie, right, feeling like, okay, Sunny had done some side deal and got... Me too early. No. No.
Speaker 2:Sunny Balwani, the other co founder. I... My impression was that he was getting way less jail time. Yeah. Elizabeth...
Speaker 2:It's been like......
Speaker 1:Time for like eleven years.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it seemed like Sunny... They were positioning it as like they Sunny was able to pin it on her Yeah. He got out. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or at least he got a reduced sentence.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Whatever. And you told me afterwards Sunny is in prison for like twelve years or he had like Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's about a year long.
Speaker 2:Twelve years, eleven months was was the sentencing. Elizabeth got a ten year sentence
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Reduced originally from eleven years and three months. Yeah. So they couldn't even rat on each other. Like, it makes it so much worse in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because you would think that like the...
Speaker 1:It's a prisoner's dilemma. They both ratted on each other and they both went to jail.
Speaker 2:I mean, maybe. Yeah. Maybe, but it just it just seems like like that, like if if one of them had been more more evil, you know...
Speaker 1:More elite at at deception, they would have been able to say, hey, Sunny, me and you, Elizabeth, Sunny...
Speaker 2:And the other
Speaker 1:thing is crazy. We're taking this to the grave.
Speaker 2:According to the Internet, Sunny didn't sell secondary either.
Speaker 1:I know. That's ridiculous. No.
Speaker 2:None of them... They both go down with the ship. They both don't make money....
Speaker 1:Dropping moment for me. I was like, least shrewd person in the world potentially? No secondary selling, 11,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Doing fraud purely for the love
Speaker 1:of What are you doing? What are you doing? And it's not like I came away being like, it wasn't a fraud. Like, it was. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was very clear that like everyone there, Sunny, Herb, they knew it didn't work. They
Speaker 2:knew that they didn't have the revenue, the profits. That's really like the Ted entrepreneur.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They go to For the love of the game.
Speaker 2:For the love of the game. Insane. Just just just for the vision. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was crazy. It was crazy.
Speaker 1:Insane. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents. If you do want to sell secondary, we... There's one one neat trick.
Speaker 1:One neat trick. This is a new thing. So if you're a founder and you want to sell 10,000,000 a secondary, $100,000,000 a secondary, you don't want it to be a negative signal. Here's what you do. Before, so you've you've grown your company to the point where you're valued in the billions.
Speaker 1:You don't want to sell secondary because everyone will be like, oh, he's like selling out, she's selling out. Like, that's not good. That's not a good sign. So what you do is you take out an immense amount of debt. So you get like a $100,000,000 of debt.
Speaker 1:Yep. Then you sell the secondary, sell another 100,000,000 of secondary, pay off the debt and then you can tell everyone, look, I just sold secondary to pay off my debt, my personal debt.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And everyone assumes it's like, oh... They think it's credit card debt. They don't realize that it was a
Speaker 1:equity backed $100,000,000 line of credit from a major financial institution. You don't need to clarify that part, but you can still get away with a 100,000,000 out of the gate. It's possible.
Speaker 2:I wonder if anyone is doing that.
Speaker 1:It might be happening. Who knows?
Speaker 2:Who knows? Anyway, what's Semi Analysis? Raised its twenty twenty seven data center capacity forecast from 43 to gigawatts.
Speaker 1:50 gigawatts. Wow. 50 gigawatts. 50 gigawatts. That's a lot.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of a lot of compute. And people are going back and forth on this. Right? Did Gerstner say it was too bullish? Something like that?
Speaker 1:It seems like semi analysis has the data and has been pulling together a whole bunch of a whole bunch of...
Speaker 2:The semi analysis said... So we looked at the data.
Speaker 1:They looked at the satellite photos. I mean, a lot of these things, like, they were paper a long
Speaker 2:time ago. And...
Speaker 1:If the market's, like, having a hiccup right now, that's not gonna stop people from actually pulling out of the
Speaker 2:I sent this What'd you say? This morning from RevCap, which is semi analysis saying if you're worried about demand Yeah. ARR, don't be because there's going be even more supply than you realize. Of course, semi analysis is also saying that they have some of the most bullish forecasts for the labs. But it's funny that in the midst of everyone being worried about ARR growth over the last two weeks, that semi analysis is coming out and saying, Don't worry.
Speaker 2:There's an obscene amount of supply coming online within the next twelve months.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I believe them on supply. That seems very cut and dry. I don't think anyone has a stronger read on what's actually getting built than them.
Speaker 1:I think if you look at the satellite photos and you look at the deals that have already been inked, that even though, oh, the Nasdaq sold off 5% last week, like, that's not enough to be like, okay, pack up the dump trucks. We're not building this thing. Like, maybe in months, if things continue to get bad and the rates go up, like, some projects will be delayed or stalled or deals will get unwound. But like right now, it's not that it's full speed ahead. It's just like it's a train.
Speaker 1:You can't you can't slow it down that quickly. Like, it's just gonna keep going. On the demand side, I feel like the agentic stuff, the personal agentic stuff is going to be high demand for compute, I'm less clear on what the willingness to pay will be. How many people will be willing to pay the equivalent of $1,000 a year for inference related to like their semi personal prosumer life shopping and and all the little agentic features. Now, think the tech is incredible.
Speaker 1:Like, I I... I've been using Dot a ton, and I think having an agent that just runs in the background and just tries to go find little opportunities for you is amazing. It just catches things in my email that I never would have gone through or taken the time to do and it just sends me a little message being like, hey, like you asked for this and you should follow-up because like they they said that they would do it.
Speaker 2:You said to cancel your roadster order too. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just like little little things like that. It it...
Speaker 1:It's it's just a better interface. Like, I love I love interacting with the open web through an LLM. It's amazing. No cookie pop ups, no ads. Like, it's truly like the best consumer experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of controversial stuff downstream of that. But like, in turn, as a consumer, if I'm trying to learn about something, instead of having like 25 tabs open where I have to accept cookies 25 times, make sure I'm logged into 25 different things and like scroll, find the fact. It's so much better to just have it, oh, put it all together with the exact quotes. I can click out to the link if I need to. And that's starting to happen in the personal agent space.
Speaker 1:The question is, like, how do you get the money from people? Is it the ads? Is it the interchange? Like, there's that sort of bearish take that even that the agentic commerce market, if you assign all these take rates, it's like a $40,000,000,000 market or something like that. It's like not big enough to justify.
Speaker 1:No,
Speaker 2:I think what needs to happen is something closer to going from automating tasks to automating certain roles or extending the capabilities of people, right? Because we're in this era of obviously there's a viral clip going on over the last twenty four hours talking about somebody having a twenty six hour day Because they need She's to stay changing a manipulating time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because they need to be online and available to keep their agents
Speaker 1:Are you saying she's crazy?
Speaker 2:I'm I'm not saying.
Speaker 1:Because she's not crazy.
Speaker 2:You're crazy.
Speaker 1:You're crazy for thinking that it takes twenty four hours to complete a full day.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:And not twenty six.
Speaker 2:But anyways, it's like the next leg up will probably be
Speaker 1:She's a special case. She's an entrepreneur. Yeah. The question is like, for the 90% of Americans that aren't in...
Speaker 2:But that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing that one... We're seeing that a very, very small number of companies are driving all of the adoption. And so there's probably, not all of the adoption, but but a massive amount of it. And so there's another leg up there just with the capabilities increase.
Speaker 2:And then what you're saying is like, the other 99% of businesses, how are they gonna be? How is their spending gonna ramp? Will it ramp beyond Yeah. The, you know, twenty hundred, $200 a month subscription?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in the business side, like, Jensen take of, like, you know, a software engineer who makes 300 k should also get 300 k in tokens or something. Like, that seems to be happening, basically. It's like, yeah, like a software engineer can deploy AI very efficient...
Speaker 1:Very efficiently and, like, at a high ROI. It is less clear for a marketer, for a salesperson. It's like, okay, what should your actual token, your inference budget be? If you gave a sales rep $50,000 a month in inference, like, is there something that they could do with the best models to actually get... Generate a $100,000 in value that they wouldn't have otherwise?
Speaker 1:Like like, those are the economic equations that happen across the business. I'm talking more on the personal side, the consumer side. Like, people are using the LLMs...
Speaker 2:No. And I'm I'm just saying we don't pay for all this cap... Like, the CapEx is not gonna be paid for
Speaker 1:By consumers? By consumer. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right.
Speaker 1:So you're saying that's not the... That that is not the leg up that needs to happen. It has to be diffusion into the enterprise and b to b beyond what it is. Has to Yeah. It has to 10 x.
Speaker 1:So so like the the small company that has, basically everyone on a $200 a month plan and they're maybe spending a $100,000 on maybe 10 mil top line, they need to go to a million dollars Yeah. Inference a year even though they're at a though they're a $10,000,000 business. Maybe they go to 15,000,000 of top line for
Speaker 2:the Speaking of 1,000,000 budgets.
Speaker 1:What we
Speaker 2:got? Brett Adcock launched Hark, which is something like a Muse or an Instinct or a Dots. And they gave away or tried to give away a million dollars of pizza. I believe it was on Friday. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You just had to download an order from the Hark app. Mhmm. And I don't know that it went well. Think...
Speaker 1:The the the summary we have here is an app called Hark tried to do a pizza giveaway, but it quickly turned into a PR disaster. That's the...
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. I mean clearly they got a ton of people to download the app. Like I think it wasn't working.
Speaker 1:People just don't want to give them the data because... I know people
Speaker 2:were giving them the data. Had to give them......
Speaker 1:Google Drive files? Yes. In order to get this pizza, will need to edit your tax return.
Speaker 2:See edit download and permanently See delete all of edit create and delete all of your Google sheets spreadsheets. See edit share and permanently delete all the calendars you can access. Read compose and send emails from your Gmail account. So that's See and download your organization's workplace directory. I don't know if all these were required.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sometimes you can just not check those and still get access. It's like when you download an app on the iOS App Store, you can just say like, no thanks. I don't want any notifications.
Speaker 2:Armand tried to get a free pizza and had some issues, and so he used the app to submit a formal complaint to the FTC. That's annoying. And I just tried again with no luck. I can file with the FTC but a giveaway that's been flaky for a few minutes on launch night isn't something they'll act on. I'd rather report it straight to Arc's team now with all the details so they can fix it.
Speaker 2:Want me to send that? No. File a complaint with the federal government. Then submit FTC complaint about a Hark pizza promotion. This is great.
Speaker 2:On 10/16/2026, Hark publicly advertised a $1,000,000 free pizza giveaway promoted on X and stated users could claim it by typing order a free pizza in Hark app. Crazy. Yeah. Interesting. I'm I'm so curious why why Brett didn't just do Hark as part of Figure because the whole, like...
Speaker 4:I don't know.
Speaker 2:It it it doesn't make any sense to me other than you wanted a fresh cap table that could raise...
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, like, Elon kinda created the playbook. Right? XAI was a separate thing. You raise fresh funds.
Speaker 1:You get... It's a way... It it it's... It would be hard for SpaceX to go to top AI scientists and say, we're gonna give you $5,000,000,000 of equity. Now, Zuck has kind of broken that glass and like been like, I'm just going to do it.
Speaker 1:But but the way you get the way you get, you know, the multi billion dollar outcome is you give a co founder role of a new company and then you acquire them in. Like, so I think I think it's probably that. I don't know. Yeah. Is there another...
Speaker 2:The only thing is Elon had, you know, sold a lot of cars and launched a lot of rockets Totally. Prior to to doing that.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 2:I think it's the kind of thing that that makes more sense
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In the fullness of time. No.
Speaker 1:No. I I agree. Anyway, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% IT HR and finance support, giving employees instant reservation for access requests and password resets. Anthropic staff expect AI to do 75% of their work by 2030 and GDP growth to reach 17.1.
Speaker 1:Now did they specify if this is real GDP growth? Because they just said GDP growth because what if inflation is at like 40%? That would be the equivalent of negative 23% real GDP growth. You got to clarify these things if you're going to be asking the tough questions. But let's assume they went with real GDP growth.
Speaker 1:You think that's low? You think that's high? There's someone at Anthropic who said it would be 28%. I like that. The lowest was 6%.
Speaker 1:Basically no one there thinks that GDP growth is going to be, you know, at normal levels. Everyone is expecting a boom within the building. Agree? Disagree?
Speaker 2:Bullish. Bullish. Drinking the Kool Aid.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Just out of the FOMC. The FOMC, of course, thinks GDP growth will be 2%. That's the government suits. US adults are...
Speaker 1:What's interesting is that like, you know, this made headlines because anthropic staff are obviously like the most bullish. Like they are at 17.1% GDP growth. Reminder, America grows 2% typically. They're saying 17. Huge economic explosion unlike anything we've ever seen in America.
Speaker 1:Absolutely fantastic. Like, if we grow at 17%, like, it is so positive sum. There's so much to You go can do everything basically. You can build new roads. You can give people healthcare.
Speaker 1:Everything just solves itself because a rising tide lifts all boats. This is why despite a lot of really controversial policies in China for, forty years, everyone was like, I don't care about the CCTV cameras because, I got a bigger house this year. I got indoor plumbing now. I got all this crazy stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like my life is getting better. There's a sense of economic progress, like a rising middle class. All these things are positive. Of course, in America, we've been in the age of stagnation. And so when the flock cameras come, it's like, get those out of here.
Speaker 1:I don't want this. I want to maintain the freedoms that I have because everything else is getting more expensive. Everything else is getting worse. 17% GDP growth would be incredible. I'm obviously rooting for it.
Speaker 1:I I think it's totally possible. Site visitors, people that went and actually visited the site to take the So if
Speaker 2:you were surveyed, you would be... Where would you really put it though?
Speaker 1:I'd want... I I'd I'd put it at at 200% GDP
Speaker 2:growth. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I want to be tripling every year.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Predict what you want to happen. Manifesting. This is manifestation. Yes. I want to manifest it.
Speaker 1:Site visitors said 12 and a half percent. Again, staggeringly high. But interesting, US adults predict 5.4% just broadly, which is again way above where we've been. So like everyone is bullish.
Speaker 2:The American mind must be sexy.
Speaker 1:Or unstoppable. Unstoppable. It's true like the vibe session. It's like, things are going so bad. But I think it's But about to also I'm doing so well that I'm going to go buy a boat and I'm going to get a limousine for my for my burrito.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like very very weird economy. Very weird economy we're in. But Spore doesn't buy it. Spore says this is borderline mental illness.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry. But 20% GDP growth in 2030 is a common belief in anthropic. What are these people smoking? How does one get so divorced from...
Speaker 2:Cigarettes. They're smoking cigarettes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Smoking cigarettes.
Speaker 2:Lung cancer will be solved.
Speaker 1:That was reported from... We talked about this a little bit. That was reported from Trump Sankar. And has not been widely confirmed beyond his anecdote that he shared, I believe, on Bloomberg or CNBC. But...
Speaker 2:I don't think this is I don't think this is unique to anthropic. Yeah. I think it... Like, clearly the average American is already insanely bullish. You're looking...
Speaker 1:He's already more than...
Speaker 2:And so if you go you go to the labs, anybody who likes really truly believes in this current revolution and and that probably is like an average Yeah. Across the field.
Speaker 1:There was a funny there was a funny exchange in Tyler Cowen, Dorkesh Patel interview on Interesting Times. He was guest hosting for the the now departed, not passed away, but he... Ross Douthat left for I think CBS and the free press or something like that. But Tyler Cowen and Dwarkash Patel were going back and forth about AI and Tyler asks Dwarkash, like, when do you think I'll walk into a Walmart and see a product that is the product of artificial intelligence? And Daksh is like, it's really hard to say.
Speaker 1:Like, I think that there will be a real effect on the economy soon, 2028. I'm very bullish on this change in the economy, but I just can't predict how it'll be. And I was like, there's already AI slop beach towels in Walmart. Like, you can go into Walmart and get AI products now. Like, there's so many, like, pool floaty that looks like a tank that was sold on TikTok via, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know AI video slop.
Speaker 2:We have signs. We have signs of signs.
Speaker 1:Yes. We have signs of signs. Like like the AI slop economy is thriving right now. There are plenty of just talk to adopt drop ship.
Speaker 2:No. And the truth is that for high quality products or most of the products Yeah. In Walmart Yeah. Will have been a bunch of AI involved Yes. At every possible step
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 2:Of the process. Yes. And maybe it's like making it 1% faster here, 1% faster here, 1%, but it sort of compounds into some acceleration, you would hope. So the critique But there's also probably like Walmart probably has policies which are like every product goes through a ninety day review. Sure.
Speaker 2:You know? And so there's again, there's like the the real world is always gated.
Speaker 1:But the but the AI slop is being sold. And, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, the San Francisco tech people, they need to touch grass. I think if they wanna get in touch, they need to touch the gas pedal of a Lamborghini Countach or Lamborghini Huracan in Miami. You got to get into the mind of the core seller, the drop shipper to understand how AI is changing the real economy because that crew is selling AI slop. It's happening.
Speaker 1:Like, there is definitely AI. AI instantiated products up and down the stack all over Facebook, Instagram reels, TikTok. This stuff's flying off
Speaker 6:the shelf.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's an interesting question because like what actually... Yeah. How do you actually qualify that? Like I'm sure if you're an existing Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. If you're a an existing seller on Walmart, you could set up an agent to say like, hey, I wanna make this product. Mhmm. Do you talk email back and forth with this person
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Get it made or select a supplier. And then once once...
Speaker 1:Yeah. I guess the question is like, yeah, what what counts as a we got Call of Duty... Hey, what
Speaker 2:the heck is going on?
Speaker 1:This is this is the Call of Duty campaign. It dropped today or this weekend. I played I played a little bit of it. This is no spoiler warning, but the plot here is that North Korea has built a tunnel system to to invade South Korea. And you got to push this truck down that tunnel and then duke it out.
Speaker 1:I think you got to go to the front of the truck, Push the button. There you go. And then you're gonna push the truck down the tunnel to to...
Speaker 2:Well, this goes deeper than I thought.
Speaker 1:It does. It does. To stop the invasion of the North Koreans into South Korea during this particular sequence of the campaign. But my Call of Duty campaign review, I've been thoroughly enjoying it. I haven't played it fully but it's amazing.
Speaker 1:Did you already do the nightclub scene with the pistol? That whole section? No? Oh, that happens later. Okay.
Speaker 1:Get ready. Call us when the John Wick section happens because that is some of the most fun I've had in the Call of Duty campaign in a long time. There's a whole bunch of really interesting set pieces And they did I thought they did a great job of not making it try to be a multiplayer simulator. Like, there's a lot of campaigns back in the day that were kind of just like, let's recreate the multiplayer experience. Like, there's a bunch of people running around on a map and like you're just kind of going through system.
Speaker 1:This feels like an action movie. It feels very cinematic and it feels very... There's so much variation in the way, in the different pieces that
Speaker 2:Based have on how they are playing, doubt they will make it to that level.
Speaker 1:I think... Yeah. I I think we might have some skill issues going on here. This is not not great. But we got to the next cinematic and we're running out of the tunnel as it collapses.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. You successfully...
Speaker 2:Speaking of games, Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games says the games we've long wanted which didn't exist because they'd cost several times more to make than they'd earn back will soon become possible.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:As will the game the game's developers wanted to build but couldn't with the resources available. It'll be a new golden age of gaming.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like that he is taking the white pill on AI. Three blue one brown also put out a big... He's a math YouTuber. Does these incredible video explainers, these motion graphic explainers of difficult math concepts.
Speaker 1:And he put out a video saying like, it is the best time to go into math, very very optimistic about it. And so, obviously, very divided organizations, but I love that Tim Sweeney went went back and forth. As I saw another I saw another post by him talking about like, look, I had to migrate from c to c plus plus from two d to three d. Like I've I've been through so many tech migrations. This is another one.
Speaker 1:I'm very excited for it. And he'll he'll he'll just adapt. He'll improvise. Adapt. Overcome.
Speaker 1:If people are are rolling their own, you know, Fortnite clone in a web browser decompiled or whatever, I'm sure he's gonna find a way to participate in the upside in some way because he is innovative and flexible. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB, don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Let's see.
Speaker 1:There's huge news. Huge news. This is what everyone everyone across the world was talking about this over the weekend. But the biggest bluefin tuna ever Yep. Caught was caught in California today.
Speaker 1:Look at that hog from Brian Nordgaard. Check this out. This is an absolutely massive bluefin fish
Speaker 2:Yeah. With tuna. Incredible Really powerful omen. Yes.
Speaker 1:Really really crazy.
Speaker 2:Big things to come.
Speaker 1:It's the size of a shark. Absolutely insane. Anyway, post singularity job. Are you looking for a job? Post singularity, Maybe you can make money smuggling diesel off the coast of East Africa.
Speaker 1:This gentleman certainly has learned to make ends meet this way. Say what you will about the legality of this. Incredibly thrilling job. Incredibly thrilling job. We don't know how to make jobs like this anymore in America.
Speaker 1:This is incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I would recommend recreating this kind of job in a more maybe legal setting. Yeah. You know, just be like a small... You know, create a small fuel logistics company.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:And and you could just... Nothing's stopping you from
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Making runs. There's probably
Speaker 1:some arbitrage opportunity. Gas might be cheaper in The Gulf and Texas. You throw it on the back of a boat, drive it over to California. I think you got a business right there. Who needs a big rig for this when you got the speedboat?
Speaker 1:Pretty pretty good. Also, there's a castle for sale in Cleveland. It's going for $575,000. Only a three bed, three bath, though. For a castle?
Speaker 1:I feel like you need at least 10,000 square feet.
Speaker 2:More like a like a cottage.
Speaker 1:It looks beautiful though. Very very cool design here. Zillow gone wild posting it. What about this poppy deal? Have you have you seen this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's really quite funny because everyone's trying to use it as an opportunity to try to dunk when it's like they sold their company for 1,900,000,000. Yeah. And... So wait a minute.
Speaker 1:Let me set the table. So Poppy is a beverage brand. It's a soda, probiotic soda company sold to Pepsi for $2,200,000,000 300,000,000 of that $2,200,000,000 was an earn out. So they got 1,900,000,000 on the day the deal closed and then 300,000,000 waiting for milestones. Now Pepsi announced that instead of paying 300,000,000 based on the performance of the brand, they will only be paying 12,000,000.
Speaker 1:And the dunk is like, oh, that stings. They didn't get their earn out. But yeah, they got $1.9120000000 dollars. Like, it's still an incredible amount of money. And people are like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, here's how you negotiate an earn out. It's like, they seem like they already negotiated it. Like they negotiated it really well. The the the disaster would have been if the numbers were reversed. 100,000,000 for the for the company and 1.9 in earn out.
Speaker 1:And if they didn't get that earn out, it would be... It would seriously change the economics. But it seems like they got 90% of the deal value. Still pretty good outcome for the founders of Poppy. But...
Speaker 2:Amazing outcome. But,
Speaker 1:yeah, Sean Frank chimes in and says, a quarter is what you should expect in an earnout most of the time right off that second bit, that second bite to zero. You shouldn't go into one of these deals expecting to get the full earnout because companies have lots of resources. They control the budget, the distribution, all the success or failure. You're no longer in charge. You're no longer the master of your own destiny.
Speaker 1:And so, if you put all the chips with them, they might they might bet them differently than you would expect to. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And I believe we have our first guest of the show, Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired here with us in the
Speaker 2:TBPN Ultram. Welcome. What's happening? How are doing? Welcome.
Speaker 1:We don't have I
Speaker 7:muted myself. Hi. Thanks for having me. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Thanks for hopping.
Speaker 2:Great to have you.
Speaker 1:We're doing well. Congratulations on the... What do you call it? Exclusive?
Speaker 2:It's not a broke silence.
Speaker 7:Broke... Yeah. Exclusive cover star.
Speaker 1:Yes. Oh, yeah. And cover. Right? That's cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like the... I I like the photography. Anyway, we could go deeper on that. But I I think everyone wants to know, like, you know, you've seen the movie.
Speaker 1:Everyone wants to know what everyone thinks about the movie. Like, did you Elizabeth Holmes looked less guilty after watching the movie? Equivalently guilty? More guilty?
Speaker 7:You know, my honest answer, I've seen it twice. Yeah. And the first time I saw it, I felt so much empathy for her. Yeah. I remember sitting there being like, this woman has kids, she's going to prison.
Speaker 7:I feel like she's being manipulated by these men in her Then I went back and saw it a second time, and I had done a bunch of rereading about Theranos
Speaker 1:in Well, the
Speaker 2:that's the thing. That's the thing. Part of what made it... You felt like a horrible situation. Right?
Speaker 2:You have young children, you're going to prison. And Nathan didn't exactly like... He could have spent twenty, thirty minutes like outlining...
Speaker 1:All the things that she did wrong.
Speaker 2:All these things and the the interpretation would would have been like, yeah, you 100% deserve this and like, I don't feel bad for you. But because it was like set up because it was set up, I think it was very much intentional that it was sort of like people were coming into it with their own Sure. Understanding of like the whole Theranos era and what actually went down.
Speaker 7:Well, I think and too, and I don't I don't wanna speculate. I mean, obviously, I interviewed Nathan. I I do not know him or the filmmakers particularly well. But he said very much in the interview, he is not a science journalist. Right?
Speaker 7:He read Bad Blood. He ran the he read the definitive book. But he is not sort of like student of Theranos. He is Nathan Fielder, he is like a student of human behavior. And I think we very much see that on display in the film.
Speaker 7:We don't see an interrogation of the science, we see much more of an interrogation of her as a person, Mhmm. And her family and their dynamics. And I find that to be very interesting, although for sure someone coming in cold who hasn't thought about Theranos in ten years, because we're not all thinking about Theranos all the time, is probably going to feel a complicated way about her.
Speaker 1:Totally. What open questions did you jump to researching right after you left the movie for the first time or the second time? The one that stuck out to me was that she tells this story about... And and we're gonna have spoilers in this interview just FYI. But she tells this story about how she adopted a husky in 2017 and then the husky is like not around and then they downgrade to like a lizard at one point.
Speaker 1:And I was like to go from a dog to a lizard is kind of a crazy move. Like I feel like people that are, you know, into reptiles like they've been like die hard reptiles. Like you kind of know if you're a cat person or a dog person like pretty early in your life and it's kind of wild to switch it up. And so I was like, how do you go from husky to to lizard or or I forget what exactly it is. Argentine blue tegu, I think is technically the name for that large lizard that they wind up having.
Speaker 1:But the the wolf dog, the husky, was killed by a cougar. Yeah. That's right. No. Isn't that crazy story?
Speaker 1:Yeah. This That
Speaker 7:is a crazy
Speaker 1:story. Mercury news. It's
Speaker 2:it's Suspicious. In San Diego County.
Speaker 7:To say the least.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This... The the Ethan Baron at Bay Area News Group reported this on 11/11/2022, which would have been like right around the time that I think Nathan was shooting the documentary or something and maybe it came out later, but I guess the dog...
Speaker 2:It wasn't until later.
Speaker 1:It wasn't until later. It was 2023, I think, that the the beach house scenes happened. So...
Speaker 2:Two standout... Two standout... Crazy.... Standout moments for me was Billy explaining the new vision, the updated vision of Theranos two point o, and Nathan just like repeating it back to him. And Billy seeming seemingly oblivious to the the sort of Theranos two point o being used for about ten years now as a way to describe like
Speaker 1:Potential
Speaker 2:frauds. Like potential frauds. Yeah. And then the other thing was Nathan like hearing from her dad that that he was... He had been at Enron, you know?
Speaker 2:That's funny. And like, that...
Speaker 7:That scene is incredible. Yeah. Incredible. The Enron revelation. I mean, there are so many amazing moments in the film.
Speaker 7:Even just Billy watching every video at like hyper speed. Yeah. You know, like he's... You're just like, are you just like teaching yourself science? Like, what is happening on your computer right now?
Speaker 7:So...
Speaker 2:I was kind
Speaker 1:of... Think that's what's happening. I think he's trying to actually at least like put on a show that he's learning science.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Totally. He's like, I'm a Silicon Valley dude. Like, this is what we do. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I thought it was
Speaker 2:very funny. I was I was kind of imagining like if AI had been good when the movie was being filmed, like you can imagine like how that would've... Like, that would've been a whole role in this whole thing where they're like, you know, talking into the... Talking with the models and like, clearly, you can now, you know, if if if it overlapped with like four o, like their their own conviction own conviction Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:In their nose two point o would have probably been like 10 times greater.
Speaker 1:We actually discovered new science.
Speaker 2:You're not crazy. They're crazy.
Speaker 7:But yes, the chatbots have some great research papers for them.
Speaker 1:They would've... Yeah. The chatbots would've been fueling so much. That's hilarious. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's so funny.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The other... My other, like, revelation coming out of it was... I assumed from watching the film and I and again, I wasn't... Back when this was all going down, I was still like in like high school and college.
Speaker 2:So I didn't... I wasn't like following the story in the way that we would now. And so I came out of the film being like, is Sunny just like out? Like he managed to pin this all on Elizabeth and he's like walking And then John told me afterwards, he's like, no, he has a longer sentence than Elizabeth. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So like even the two of them didn't even man... Like neither managed to like...
Speaker 1:Successfully snitch....
Speaker 2:Like, you would think that you would think of...
Speaker 7:He's big time in prison. Yeah. Yeah. He's big time
Speaker 1:in prison.
Speaker 2:He's out in he's out in 2030, so he's gonna have to break his silence with you again.
Speaker 1:There we go. Cover... Cover... Cover...
Speaker 7:I don't know that we would give him a cover, but we would be happy to speak to him.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That'd be great. Yeah. So funny. I was laughing at this at this tweet by soul mate.
Speaker 1:Elizabeth Holmes, of course it worked. The lights turned on. It was in the cloud. Nathan Fielder, okay. But do you...
Speaker 1:But you know what feelings are. Right? Like you have them? Weird cocaine husband watching YouTube at two x speed. Babe, it says here, mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
Speaker 1:Everyone was on such different like the movie. Different wavelengths. What was your interpretation of Amanda Seyfried and, like, the journey that she went on? There's so many different ways that people have been reading into her involvement, her role. What did you think?
Speaker 1:Oscar or, you know, she should reconsider how she plays... How she chooses to play real life subjects in the future?
Speaker 7:Oh, I don't I don't know that she should reconsider how she plays real life subjects. I mean, she's just... She's doing her job making that Hulu project. I thought she was just sort of like the voice of human empathy. Like, she was like the sanest person in the room at all times.
Speaker 7:If she's with Nathan and Billy, it's like Amanda is sort of like the voice of an empathetic human with powers of observation, who can like feel many things at the same time. So I sort of saw her as like a stand in for the viewer who's saying like, well, hold on a second this or hold on a second that. Whereas, you know, Nathan is so inscrutable. Way of interacting with people. Amanda's like the normal person in the scene.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And almost the the roller coaster that someone can be on when they're dealing with somebody that maybe may or may not be mentally ill, you know, where Yeah. I don't... You know, it's just sort of like a... She's clearly like going through it where Nathan is just like, you know, just lasered in, like trying to observe.
Speaker 2:And I look at Amanda as like experiencing the full spectrum of of emotions from like, oh, yeah. She's like, she's really bad too, but also processing the human element. Yeah. She...
Speaker 7:Does her feeling like so sad when when she's on the phone with her kids, when Elizabeth is calling from prison, you know? You can feel really sad in that moment and still think this person is a terrible fraud. Like, both of those things can be true at the same time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:How did you... Did you see The Social Network two yet?
Speaker 7:I have not seen it. No. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's interesting that The Social Network two seems to not be landing. Like, the fact that you're the global editorial director of Wired and you haven't bought... You've gone and seen this... The Nathan Fielder movie twice.
Speaker 1:You have the time. You've definitely the time to be in a theater.
Speaker 2:No. But I I've I've I've been the same way. I've... No.
Speaker 1:Because you're you're a technology podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. That's what I'm saying like I I typically... Even when that movie Mountain Gate came out which was about AI from the succession
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Teen. You saw that?
Speaker 2:I was like, I should just watch this because like
Speaker 1:It's it's weird.
Speaker 2:Site relevant.
Speaker 7:I should I should see it. They had a screening I couldn't go to. You know, would say, we tried to interview Aaron Sorkin and they said no. Interesting. And so, I guess they missed their shot, you
Speaker 1:know? Weird. Interesting.
Speaker 7:We put Nathan on the cover.
Speaker 1:I saw it. I I I think... I I I understand why it's not getting great reviews, but I think like as someone in tech, someone who wants to see how Hollywood portrays a particular tech figure that you have a lot of insight into from all the reporting that your team has done and interactions that you've had, you will have fun through your lens, but very few people in the theater will have fun because they won't have the same lens, basically.
Speaker 7:Yes.
Speaker 1:So... No.
Speaker 7:I'm excited to see it. I'm excited to see artificial. I've seen Musk. Obviously, I've seen the Musk doc and Wired is in that, and then Sure. I've seen Nathan's movie twice.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I'll get around to the social network too. Just...
Speaker 2:Will you be seeing it for
Speaker 1:a third time?... Oozing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Third time third time in theaters?
Speaker 7:I would see it a third time.
Speaker 1:You would?
Speaker 7:I would see
Speaker 1:it a
Speaker 7:third time. I think every time you see it, different stuff pops out. And you can see it with different people
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And then you can argue with them afterwards. Like, that's the whole fun of the movie in many ways. Okay. It's like talking to other people about it.
Speaker 1:Here's a debate. Mean, yeah. The the the the conversation was just nonstop for the last, like, four days around this movie. One thing that me and Jordy were going back and forth on is, will You Can See Everything be a cult classic? Like, can it even be in the running for that because it's had this crazy cultural moment right on release?
Speaker 1:Like, how do you define cult classic? And do you think this movie could potentially become one?
Speaker 7:I think of cult classics and I'm not a movie expert. Yeah. That's obviously not what I do. But Sure. I think of those as movies that had sort of like a small...
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's what John said. Yeah. And I'm less of
Speaker 1:a movie expert.
Speaker 2:I just assume... But I but I was... I talked to multiple people this... I was just like Yeah. Just going about my life Saturday and Sunday, ended up in conversations with multiple people that gave me a blank stare when I talked to them about Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes.
Speaker 2:They were like trying to recall...
Speaker 1:The movie got It's not followed. Kinda destroyed by Street Fighter.
Speaker 2:Yes. Street Fighter...
Speaker 1:Twice as much money. You're talking
Speaker 2:to the wrong.
Speaker 7:I think this will be a classic.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:I don't know about the cult part. Mainstream classic.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure. You reflect on this idea that Elizabeth Holmes is a product of the TED Talk entrepreneur era. How do you think about that and like the type of pitching she was doing?
Speaker 1:It seems like that era is firmly behind us, but does that resonate with you? What could you share about that idea of the entrepreneur that speaks at a very high level, very broad strokes, that that that theory? And is it truly gone or does it still live? Like, how how have you reflected on that?
Speaker 7:Well, look, I I still think that startup founders sell a vision. Yeah. And they often tell tall tales to get that vision sold. Yep. I think she did it to the nth degree and she did it in an era where that was so much more commonplace and there was so much willingness even among the tech press to really lift those people up and celebrate them.
Speaker 7:I mean, have a story today from a former Wired editor who... About how Wired fell for Elizabeth Holmes in Mhmm. Think 2014. We published one of the the first ever interview with her, ran in Wired, and we largely laundered her lies. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And I think that was much more prevalent in tech press in those days was to to just like not ask as many hard questions and to run with things because they sounded promising, they sounded exciting. This sounded like it was of a piece with this idea of like the quantified self and Yeah. You can take your health into your own hands. You can do it at home. You don't need to rely on institutions anymore, and that was a very tantalizing promise.
Speaker 7:And I think she fit that bill of sort of the startup founder who says larger than life things. She just did it in, like, the craziest possible way. Like, she took it to a level of of felony. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which
Speaker 7:not everybody does, but I would argue some do. Yeah. Some do. She did it and she got...
Speaker 2:But in 2014, were they still a couple years away from like actually testing on real patients?
Speaker 7:No. They were promising in that moment that they were about to set up in a bunch of pharmacies, and they took the reporter to one of the pharmacies where they had set up.
Speaker 1:They had a deal with, like, CVS or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. With CVS, think.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it's really hard to report on because there... I... It might have been the wide reporter, but there were some reporters that went by and they were like, we're gonna test you, and it was literally a magic trick. So they'd be like, we're taking your blood.
Speaker 1:We'll take it in the back, and then they'd leave and go to Quest Labs or something, run the labs, bring you back the paper and be like, yep, this is from our machine. And it was all just like slight of hand essentially. And so Yeah. You know, as a reporter, like, yeah, you could try and like kick down the door, but like realistically, they're gonna escort you out of the building then. So there's not there's not that much you can do.
Speaker 1:It's pretty hard. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The crazy thing is just the timing of all this. Like Trevor Milton, who did not spend a single day in prison Mhmm. But raised 1,300,000,000 for Nikola Mhmm. Took it public Mhmm. Blows up Yeah.
Speaker 2:Doesn't go to prison at all Yeah. Is now back running a private aviation company making jets
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Which again is like Are
Speaker 1:making them?
Speaker 2:I think I think that's like an entirely new kind New new plane? Okay. Which is is a tough sell. It's a tough sell.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He doesn't have an engine.
Speaker 2:But but the big, you know, the big difference is like like it's funny because he hurt a bunch of retail investors.
Speaker 1:Like,
Speaker 2:tens of thousands of retail investors got burned, but he didn't... Like, I... No one got injured. No one no one was like at risk due to like Sure. You know, in the rolling down the hill, that whole thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's... It's also...
Speaker 7:That's true. He he didn't harm people's health. He's also a man. Guys. I...
Speaker 7:And I do I do think that Elizabeth Holmes was in some ways treated differently because she was a woman. I think that that's true.
Speaker 1:In this case, he's out the downside.
Speaker 2:But he's out because he got a pardon.
Speaker 7:Well, good for him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which is a whole other can of worms.
Speaker 7:Oh, well. Whole other can of worms. And I I don't think she... I do... You know, she's been trying.
Speaker 7:And I think if you look at her her partner, Billy's Twitter feed, this is one of the things we were debating on staff is whether he has, like, gone mega and gone hardcore far. Right? Because he is trying to petition...
Speaker 1:For the for the... Yeah. Yeah. When I got to Silicon Valley, my cofounder had studied bio, and was about to do a PhD at Caltech in in in bio. And and I was like, why are we working on, like, my idea?
Speaker 1:Like, we should do something that you're good at. Like, you're really experienced in this stuff. Like, we should start like a blood testing company. And we were like doing some research and we're like, ugh. There's this company that has all this money.
Speaker 1:We're never gonna be able to beat them. Let's let's think of something else. So we were like brainstorming ideas and we were like, Theranos will crush us because they already have billions of dollars. There's no reason to compete in this category. It was very very silly.
Speaker 1:Anyway.
Speaker 2:That's really
Speaker 7:funny. Fun... Well, dodged the bullet there, I think.
Speaker 1:I think so. Actually, the opposite. Because I could have just waited and they could have gone bankrupt and then I'd be like the actual winner potentially of that category.
Speaker 2:My only ask Different life. Leaving this conversation is that you send us a note when you watch it for the third time Yeah. In theaters, hopefully today or tomorrow, you give us your updated updated review and any new revelations, and we'll we'll resurface it on the show for everyone.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Because you're the first... You will be the first person that we talked to that has seen it three times that I'm aware of.
Speaker 1:That's the best.
Speaker 7:But I'm not saying I'm going this week. I do have a life, I... Know.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 7:I think it's a great film. I think it's so good.
Speaker 1:It's a great watch. And it moves quickly for being three hours.
Speaker 2:I just... It does. Think about the pressure on Nathan Fielder now to like... Because I feel like he's been steadily one upping himself Totally. You know, from from the early Nathan, for you, you know, just giving silly advice to like gas station owners and things like that to to the whole...
Speaker 1:Feel like this was like a complete crossover into like a new genre. Like, because it it plays off of fact that he is a Hollywood elite now, but he still has the comedian and documentarian chops to go and do that side. When you bring those two together, you create something that feels like it lives in both categories and is completely unexplored.
Speaker 2:I totally agree that I think you could apply the same kind of thing to like a 100 high profile people and you would get a very interesting product. Totally. Because it's like a journey into the mind and life of of someone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The reenactment thing is like very, fascinating. Yeah. It it's fertile ground. Well, congratulations on the exclusive.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you
Speaker 7:guys for having me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll talk to soon. Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 1:Me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codecs helps you move projects from start to finish, move projects forward. We have Bing Gordon, coauthor, founding executive of Electronic Arts, co author of Everybody Wins on his forthcoming book. Bing, how are you doing?
Speaker 4:I'm doing great. Don't think I look as good as you guys though. Some are... Blue.
Speaker 2:Blue. You got this.
Speaker 1:Blue. Blue.
Speaker 4:Oh, you heard about the blue you heard about the blue man, though. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You look like you're the blue man. I'm now in it. I mean, we could we could tweak it on our side, whatever. Oh, I love...
Speaker 4:I just put a shade I could put a shade on me, Daksh, but
Speaker 1:No. You're fine.
Speaker 4:Stay blue. Maybe I'll just stay blue.
Speaker 1:Stay blue. Why not? Why not? I know... Team, can
Speaker 2:you make us blue too?
Speaker 1:Make us blue.
Speaker 2:Make us We want our guests to feel welcome.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We had Bing Gordon on our cast and he he blew it.
Speaker 1:No. It's great. It's great.
Speaker 2:This is great. I mean, it's all I mean, the the the the video doesn't matter at all. It's a Yeah. Audio. Wanna have a fun conversation.
Speaker 1:Have you seen You Can See Everything? The new Nathan Fielder movie about their house member, Elizabeth House.
Speaker 4:We watched all the rehearsal.
Speaker 1:Okay. And Saving it. No spoilers.
Speaker 4:We we did watch we did watch the previous movie about, you know, trying to talk like Steve Steve Jobs thrown through an alien.
Speaker 1:That's a great impression. That's hilarious. What's the best what's the best Silicon Valley biopic documentary or fictional film that you've seen? What what what's your go to?
Speaker 4:Silicon Valley, the TV show.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah? You're a fan?
Speaker 4:The... Let's see. I don't... I love the Isaacson, Elon Musk book.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:That's probably the best one.
Speaker 1:It's probably
Speaker 4:the best one because he was allowed inside access. Yeah. And some of his other books are kind of after the fact. Sure. I mean you guys are in the artifact creation business and you know that you're really smart if you look back at history.
Speaker 4:Forget all the stupid stuff you did along the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so he actually captured... He was up close and personal. So he did the same thing with Steve Jobs, but it was all backward looking. Wasn't The very Facebook effect, you know, it had one good chapter and then kind of missed the point. Probably the, you know, the Facebook.
Speaker 4:I haven't seen the new Facebook movie. The original Facebook movie was kind of goofy fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'd see They all serve like different purposes. Like some of them are, you know, like a controversial drama. Some of them are a little bit more happy go lucky. I like Pirates of Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1:Have you seen that?
Speaker 4:Oh, is that the Macintosh group?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's the original Steve Jobs versus Bill Gates. Oh, no. There's one general... Low low low budget direct to TV biopic, but it's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Highly
Speaker 4:recommend. Send a link. I watch that. Yeah. Because because the founder of EA, Trip Hawkins was forty eighth employee at Apple.
Speaker 4:He was there. He was running Lisa when the pirate flag got put up and Steve took all the best people off it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was the first...
Speaker 4:The ruthlessness of monopolous scaling monopolous.
Speaker 1:What was...
Speaker 4:I was gonna I was gonna say there was one about general magic. It was kind of a...
Speaker 1:That's a great one. Yeah. The the precursor to the iPhone.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It was when Tony Fadell had hair.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, that's right. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 4:He was a he was a he he was the punk that they gave everything to from Detroit. Yeah. But that that one's really good. You know, it's it's so hard in in documentary Yeah. To capture the actual moments of hard decisions.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And you know, that's why you need the artifacts along the way or you need... You know, like the Beatles thing, the Beatles documentary they get back. They didn't know they were going to make it a documentary. They didn't know that they were going to get screwed out of a concert. They kinda didn't know.
Speaker 4:So you're seeing, you know, they... And they had even that recording they didn't know could ever be reversed out and made audible. So it had all the stuff And that's what you want out of out of documentary is be there at the moment. And, you know, it's...
Speaker 1:I mean, I I I feel like the last dance did such a good job of barely being there. But there's a lot of footage because the games But then they had all the players who are still alive sit down for interviews and it was a very exclusive moment that Michael Jordan actually gave probably like multiple days of interviews. Then...
Speaker 2:Well, I think it... You as a viewer experienced the the the story. Sure. If you were following along and kind of understanding the facts from afar Mhmm. And if you had some friends that were involved in it in some way and you'd heard it from them, then you really do want the documentary to have a lot of behind the scenes footage because that's the only newness that comes out of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You care less about We... People rehashing what happened Sure. Sure. Point of view because...
Speaker 4:You you guys... Well, you're on you're on the court right now, but you were on the court starting companies before.
Speaker 1:And you
Speaker 4:know there's just a lot of moments where you can't see the future and you're scared to death and you gotta make a call one way or another. You look back afterwards and people go, well, was obvious. They go, no. That was not obvious. By the way, same thing with kids.
Speaker 4:They don't know you till you're grown up. They don't know all the crap you went through to get there. They think you're they think you're all... You think think you're always a grown up and always a parent, and you don't want to admit to them that parents are all amateurs, don't know what the hell they're doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We have a button on the soundboard for it, overnight success. And we play it we play it every time somebody comes on and says, like, well, I started the company fifteen years ago to work on artificial And, yeah, it's been a good year because that's always the way it goes. What...
Speaker 4:You know, that's also the the the math of compounding. Yeah. Take something like LinkedIn. Totally. It it it's small as it starts at one.
Speaker 4:It's kind of like the king's rice on chessboard story, but it starts at one. But if
Speaker 3:it
Speaker 4:doubles, know, that two to the n gets pretty big. Yeah. That was a story where the king rewarder guys said, what do you want? I want I want, you know, a chessboard worth of rice every day double. And by the time they got to like with five squid...
Speaker 4:What's that? 60... It's 16 by 16 to an Yeah. By the time they got two thirds of way done, it was all the rice ever harvested.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exponential growth, very, very powerful. How did you think about monopoly and and monopoly power in business at the founding of EA?
Speaker 4:Oh, my gosh. You know, as recently as 2008
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The US cable companies that had 30,000,000 house... 30,000,000 households thought they had a monopoly. Yeah. And you know, at the time, so know, an audience of a 100,000,000 was about as big as you get. And at the time in o seven, I spoke at Steve's WWDC conference about games and he disrespected games.
Speaker 4:And I I went to him and I said, you know, games are big. Games have like 400,000,000 monthly players. And he goes, bing. 400,000,000? We don't start anything till we get to a billion.
Speaker 4:And I'm thinking, oh, boy. He's arrogant. And then, know, I yelled and I go, oh, boy. He's right.
Speaker 1:Was the Apple strategy do nothing win? Because they're they're eating a huge portion of the mobile games market. Like, it worked out well, but they never showed... I agree. They never showed respect for the category.
Speaker 1:They were never loved by gamers in the way that the Xbox or the PlayStation or the PC have been. But still they print.
Speaker 4:Steve Steve was anti gaming Yeah. Kinda... And for a long time. And I think he is also pragmatic.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:And he saw if I'm going to do this phone thing and people are going to get apps, I want to get games. But you know, he did a he did a broadcast soon after the app store opened and we were close because Quinten did an iPhone. Sure. And we got together with him and I actually did a poem in his honor at the iPhone dinner. It came about 15 people called the World iPhone.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's you can find on popcorn.co fully AI animated. Wow. But Steve Steve did an interview soon afterwards, know, and then kind of six weeks afterwards. And he said, we thought there were gonna be 15,000 apps by the end of the year. And it was like 200,000 in the first week.
Speaker 4:And we thought the average price was gonna be $9.99. Oh wow. Price the is free. Yep. By the way, when when Zuckerberg launched the the app store on Facebook, they launched with a thing called causes.
Speaker 4:And he didn't want it to be games either. Oh, yeah. You know, he asked Dave Morin about it. He... Dave Morin, they didn't want...
Speaker 4:Chuck didn't want games. He thought games were the anathema of success among consumers, but I think pragmatically you find out that's how people want to connect. It's how they want to make friends. It's how they want to spend their time. And especially if you want to get to an accessible audience beside...
Speaker 4:Behind besides teenage boys and people who think like teenage boys, you need something that's more accessible, faster to start, less confusing, no shrink-wrap and more inclusive.
Speaker 1:And...
Speaker 4:And that's what we got. But we also got we also got, you know, a billion new people playing games every month that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Still still don't call themselves gamers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the app loving audience is all hyper casual people who don't identify as gamers. Like, but they play games constantly. So...
Speaker 2:I identify them as gamers. Yeah. You're a gamer.
Speaker 1:I don't know you're in that audience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1:For sure. Talk about the book. Why why write the book now? What was the overarching thesis? What did you want to spread the word
Speaker 4:about Let's see. What I I like to benchmark stuff. So one the things I keep track of my business and product catastrophes. And a while ago I realized my catastrophes, there's two core causes. One is taking shortcuts.
Speaker 4:I did that on a sequel to Doctor. J and Larry Bird. I thought this is going to work.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then, the long version was to build a mock up package and show it to consumers. The shortcut is be confident and just build the package. And it was a red background with an action photo where the previous one was Doctor. Jean Larry Bird kind of looking casual on a Boston school ground and it had a red background. And the first time I saw it in a store was sitting right beside another package with a red background called Tetris.
Speaker 4:And consumers walked up and they picked up the other red package. And we were DOA. My other half of my catastrophes are when I'm right and I can't convince others.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:What I found is to convince others, the best way to do it is to back up a level to stories. Know, I believe this because here's my story. And then they go even a meta level above that, Here's how gamification and psychology works. And so I found myself doing that again and again and again and again and then I put some into speeches and a little bit of blogging. And I thought, oh, I know.
Speaker 4:A book where... If I give a book to every people I ever give notes to, wouldn't that be great? That would that would make my time more effective and then while we're at it, wouldn't it be nice to reach out to other people, reach out to parents, reach out to educators, reach reach out to roboticists, reach out to AI designers, reach out to doctors, founders. And... But when I was a kid, my bucket list was write a book.
Speaker 4:I was an English major. I wrote poetry. I did stand up poetry.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I realized... Slam poetry.
Speaker 1:Stand up poetry. Interesting. Yeah. Slam poetry.
Speaker 4:And and I still write poems Yeah. Kind of hundreds a year. And give... But all for friends. I've done none of them for myself.
Speaker 4:All for other people. When I got to the point where I said, okay, maybe I should try writing as a career. I got accepted at NYU Drama School and thought, no, I prefer writing. And so I had to make a... I had to work two years to make enough money to afford a typewriter to be able to have the time to sit and write.
Speaker 4:And after about a week of procrastinating, I remembered, oh crap. I don't like writing. So you know, from from then till now, I'm thinking, oh, I got this bucket list standard. And then... By
Speaker 2:your bucket list from when you were like a teenager? That's crazy.
Speaker 1:I feel like bucket list moves all the time. People are changing things out.
Speaker 4:It's still there. It's it's...
Speaker 1:What else is on the bucket list?
Speaker 4:I I still am really curious about a cross Subsub country country glamour glamour... Glamour train ride.
Speaker 1:Okay. Train ride. United States.
Speaker 4:The Orion Express. I've done a little bit. And I keep thinking it's going be disappointing so I haven't done it.
Speaker 1:Wait. You want to go you want to go across The United States on a train?
Speaker 4:On a on a glamorous train.
Speaker 1:Well, know that you you
Speaker 4:know that you can... I know they're there.
Speaker 1:No no no. You can you can bring your own train. Oh. BYOT. It's expensive but you can do it.
Speaker 1:You you can you can buy an old train car and they will hitch it to an Amtrak for you if you pay the fee and they will drag you across the country in exactly the style that you Nine... Party. Glamorous.
Speaker 2:Yes. Interesting thing I I feel like bucket lifts are often about novelty. It's like a bunch of Skydust. You're never Yeah. You're never writing something that you're already doing a lot.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's interesting.
Speaker 2:But I realized as an adult, like... I'm I'm... I've... I used to say yes to things like getting an invite on some trip. Do you wanna do this thing and go, we're gonna go do that thing and whatever?
Speaker 2:And I'd be like, well, I've never done that before. Mhmm. I should do it once. And now, I'm like, I'm really trying to... I I stopped that sort of like novelty Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Kind of seeking Mhmm. And I'm trying to... And I wish I could find a bucket list from when I was I was younger.
Speaker 4:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2:But but I imagine stuff I'd be like, oh, I've... I know enough now that like that's not how I wanna spend my time. But writing a book... An adult onset
Speaker 4:bucket list. I'd like to see my kids kids graduate from college.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 4:But they don't have kids yet. But you know, I'd like to see... I'd like to see my own kids go through their own circle of life. Yeah. And you know, it's kind of why I got into games in the first place is I wanted to live multiple multiple lives and do it live a save and restore life.
Speaker 4:So that's one. And then I've had one for a long time of wanting to work on games with my favorite game makers. The only guys I have... The people that I haven't been able to get to is the Blizzard people, but I've I've actually kept a list on my wall of the yes, nos for a long time like Sid Meier, Will Wright, Don Manning, others know. And then right now my bucket forever OKRs is participate daily in a world class creative process and participate daily in helping high potential people get better faster.
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 4:So, you know, I use those as kind of bucket list tenants.
Speaker 2:Great foundation.
Speaker 1:Rank the following popular bucket list items from s tier to f tier. S being the best and then it goes a b c d f. Seeing the northern lights, how does that rank for you?
Speaker 4:Doesn't rank. I saw it. F I wouldn't travel to see the northern...
Speaker 1:Okay. What about visiting Machu Picchu? The ancient Incan city high in the Andes. Been
Speaker 4:there. Okay. That was okay. There's a train ride to it that's kind of fun.
Speaker 1:So be...
Speaker 4:The best thing about Machu Picchu is to stay at the hotel at the top.
Speaker 1:It's race related.
Speaker 4:So be at the train at the top, at the hotel at the top of Machu Picchu so you can be there an hour at sunrise before everybody else gets there and you can be there an hour at the end. They make everybody who's going down get there. So that's great. Now the thing about Machu Picchu, I don't know about you guys, I have size twelve feet. The Incas did not have size twelve feet.
Speaker 1:The it's little carved steps
Speaker 4:the stairs are like six inches for me.
Speaker 1:I'm a size fourteen.
Speaker 2:John would be...
Speaker 4:They're six inches deep and they're moist and they have moss and there's no handrails. So you're gone the whole time going, oh my god, oh my god. You know, it's steep like the old...
Speaker 2:I've Peru been on a surf trip back in the day and kind of loosely planning on going to Machu Picchu and there was a number of people. I kept asking people that would come through where I was staying that that had been to Machu Picchu. And a lot of them were like, yeah, it's kinda overrated. So I was like, alright, I'm gonna stay another weekend and I'll just keep surfing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I realized over time, I've been to I've somehow been to like Peru. I haven't been to Machu Picchu. I've been to China. I didn't go to the Great Wall. I've been into Australia.
Speaker 2:I haven't gone to the the Great Barrier Reef or... I I've like Mhmm. Gone to all these places and not done...
Speaker 3:Not done
Speaker 1:the thing. You gotta go back.
Speaker 2:But I don't
Speaker 1:but I don't don't have any regrets.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Get postcards. But did you do that mile long wave in Peru?
Speaker 2:Honestly, there's... Yeah. There there's that... I'm blanking on the exact... The the name of that spot, but I would say like overall that it's just the land of left hand point breaks.
Speaker 2:And so you can...
Speaker 4:Guppy or regular?
Speaker 2:I'm regular. So I I didn't even stay that long in Peru as...
Speaker 1:The longest wave in the world. What about Antarctica? How do you rank Antarctica on your tier list of bucket list items?
Speaker 4:I love the color white.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:I love the blue that's in snow.
Speaker 7:Okay.
Speaker 4:You know, in snow fields. But I used to commercial fish and I'd be sick as a dog the first two days of every summer. And getting to Antarctica by boat sounds like a week of sick as a dog.
Speaker 1:Let's go to
Speaker 6:a tier maybe.
Speaker 4:I wanna go... I'd love to go by documentary.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:I love the 20 mile March story about Shackleton. But no, I don't don't feel any of you I wanna go places to do sports. You talk about surfing. I wanna go I wanna go to waves to boogie board. I wanna go places to bike ride.
Speaker 4:And I wanna go places where friends are.
Speaker 2:Well, let's go to let's go to the New Wave Pool Yeah. Palm Desert together. I've been already. Well... Amazing.
Speaker 4:Is it is it also... It the Kelly Slater one or is it everyone?
Speaker 2:No. No. It's Wave Garden. And you'll get so barreled, you'll be sick of getting barreled. You'll come back on the show.
Speaker 6:You're like, I'm done.
Speaker 4:Dirk Dirk Ziff told me who owned WSL, he's a great guy, who is also on the competition committee for the Masters in Augusta. He sets the pin position. Dirk Ziff told me I was the first boogie boarder ever to get a barrel at L'Amour.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 4:You go. Surf branch in L'Amour. I did it when it was still in development and it was kind of a third as good as it is now. They made a bunch of changes afterwards.
Speaker 2:Still the first though, forever. Going back to making products since that's what...
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think. You were saying you
Speaker 2:were talking about your philosophy of like, you know, planning products and the different layers that you're thinking. And I'm wondering if ever in your career, you you were involved with a team or were supporting a team where the plan was extremely complicated. Like a bunch of different things had to go like, well in a specific order and it just like worked out. Because across my career, when I've been successful, I had like a really simple strategy and only a couple things needed to go my way. And if so, I would win.
Speaker 2:And any time I had like a 10, 20 page document where I was like, we're gonna do this, and then we're gonna do that. Yeah. And this thing's gonna happen, and then we're gonna get, you know. And and it's that process of like, you you talked about trying to convince other, like, being able to convince other people. And my problem historically was I actually was maybe too convincing at times where I could convince a lot of people around me that that...
Speaker 4:That's dangerous.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was dangerous and I realized like, wow, I'm too good at sales for my own good when it comes to like product strategy and even go to market.
Speaker 4:Well, you could always ask people, if I was the ugliest person you ever met, would you like my idea? Because sometimes we make mistakes and over believe handsome people. I think a handsome, confident board member can be very dangerous because they can be really, really, really wrong And the poor founders who listen to them, you know. A single board member like that can wreck a company.
Speaker 2:But... So you're saying your board should be chopped.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But the... A guy named, you know, Brian Reynolds that I talked about and worked with Sid, he always started his game idea with a single line drawing on a whiteboard. So it would define the camera, define kind of the scope, and you'd look at it and go, yeah, I want to go there. So I think starting simple is pretty useful.
Speaker 4:Don Matrick was really good at that. Peter Mollinu was great at it. He would start with kind of a single fantasy idea that actually was a fantasy he'd had when he was 12 years old. And, you know, I like to call it the movie poster. I think I try to convince founders your first slide in your investor deck should be a movie poster of when your product is successful with happy customers instead of just the name of your company.
Speaker 4:I like to tell them that all investors look at two slides. You get a 100% looking at two slides, the first slide in the income statement. Mhmm. And if all you do is put your company name on the first slide, you just wasted half your guaranteed attention.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great point. Good point.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. How are you processing vibe coding? Tim Tim Sweeney was saying yesterday or today like Pretty optimistic event. Very optimistic. I've been broadly optimistic for a lot of these different ecosystems where they have a bunch of, you know, gamers already that are creative.
Speaker 2:And if you can give them better tools, they'll make they'll make new things. And and it's... Will remain a hits business, but you have way more supply. And and I I think it'll be an interesting time. But what's your view?
Speaker 4:Uh-huh. Well, my first view is Tim is pretty great, but he's also... You know, some of his success comes from being a workaholic.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And he'd been a little bit of a late adopter of some of the new stuff. So what I think in general, the promise of AI for games is a couple fold. One is more iteration. My experience all the way back to ad copywriters is better people get more iterations out, more good iterations out. There's a book called the Medici effect by a Stanford guy named Franz Johansson who actually correlates the most successful...
Speaker 4:What what predicts the most successful patents and it's... They come from people who have the most patents. So I think there there... There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that iteration is the key to success. That that you just don't get the one shot.
Speaker 4:You iterate, you iterate, you iterate, and sometimes you create a wall of iteration. That's what David Kelly and Adio does says, you got one hour, you gotta come up with a 100 write downable ideas. So that is... It is kind of the difference between great designers, great creative people, and not so great. They they do more in the same amount of time.
Speaker 4:So I think the the AI... I'm working with two guys who are doing an AI board game generator, and one of them been a successful board game entrepreneur. This is called Board Game Lab. And it turns out that the inventors of battle card games spend half their time fighting Adobe Photoshop pixel by pixel. Yep.
Speaker 4:And you'd, you know, when I was a kid, I made money typing papers for people back in the days of white out. There's no no nobody under age 50 who can remember white out, maybe under age 60. And so it was really painful. You had to slow down because you made a mistake. You literally had to take the page out of their typewriter.
Speaker 4:You had to put some little white stuff on it, put it back in, type over it. And that's what a lot of creative tools are right now. So we're going from white out to word processors. So I think I think we're gonna see a lot of the a lot of the grunt work that makes people not like working on games go away. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And my hope is that that leads to more iteration. And Electronic Arts in the nineties when we went from console to CD, we increased our graphic artist headcount by a factor of 10. And most of those people did not play games. And so game... People on game teams who aren't game fanatics can be outsourced.
Speaker 4:And you know, we used to outsource to Eastern Europe and Asia. So for some of this stuff, agents are the new outsource. Yeah. What I'm really hoping that AI is gonna do is get me a dramatis personae that are interesting. My whole...
Speaker 4:My original vision of of virtual worlds came from work in Disneyland. Yeah. If you've ever walked down Main Street at Disneyland, there's a little human sized puppet they call an audio animatronic of Abraham Lincoln. Yeah. And he's kind of like a Chatty Cathy doll who gives the Gettysburg Address.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Well, at working as a kid at Disneyland, have any real sports before dawn. And we'd have canoe race around Tom Sawyer Island and we'd... And so you're there with like 30 or 40 kids and no guests and and you really want the Disneyland, Fantasyland to come alive. I wanted I wanted to hang with Abraham Lincoln and walk the park with Abraham Lincoln. And I wanted to hang with Tom Sawyer.
Speaker 4:And I wanted to I wanted to meet Huck Finn and hear his hear his stories, but also hear what it was like, you know, to to live back then. And so right now, the the AIs are nowhere nowhere near. And one of the one of the issues about language in games, it's mostly click throughable. When players see a quest write up Mhmm. It might be this long.
Speaker 4:In the bottom it says, you know, find the key to open the gate to get the foozle. Yep. And everything up above says once upon a time there was a foozle and the other... And English majors write that stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And gamers ignore it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The only time they look at it is Bubba Bubba says, back in the day, you know, King Watch and Duck did the foozle and it had three dots on it. And now that's a clue to game. So so gamers only watch video and only read text that helps them win. Yeah. It helps them improve.
Speaker 4:And so right now, nobody's figured out how to do... How to prompt pros that has system design in it.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 4:And by the time you could figure out what system design to do in the prose, you could almost... It's almost easier to write the prose than write the prompt. The hard part is figuring out what the what the system stuff that goes in the prose. Yeah. And I was there in the early days of of interactive movies.
Speaker 4:I did Wing Commander three and Wing Commander And you know, was on set for that stuff and brought it to market.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And we found, you know, what we thought interactive movies was going to be people are to want want to watch this stuff. And we found at the time that the the digital generation ignored it all. The people that wanted to watch the beautiful movies were all the pre digital generation who are aging out. Yeah. And so the interactive movies that that all you do is watch got pretty boring after seven seconds.
Speaker 4:Even in even in Madden Football. When we got to CD ROM, I think we had something like 20,000 strings between Pat Summerall and John Madden recorded. And as soon as a gamer heard Madden say the same thing twice, they turned off the sound.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 4:So so the the... So I think that, know, AI is going to be able to create physical assets with world, not quite yet, but almost
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:With vertices and textures. But the the system underneath it is always the hard part.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. Some of the hallucination stuff feels like it's actually gonna be a... Like a like a plus because it's like Yeah. If it's rough but the NPC is accidentally saying something funny or accidentally saying something chaotic or there's a clue that's hidden in something that's not perfectly designed, that can actually be a feature more than a bug sometimes.
Speaker 4:Totally agree.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we're... Yeah.
Speaker 1:Other thing...
Speaker 4:We don't want is a hallucination to then just be random and not not circle back. So you don't mind saying, hey hey AI, hallucinate your butt off. Yeah. And let me maybe take the good stuff and then me let me put some game systems in it. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So that's you know, that's kind of the shitty first draft generation at hallucination. Then you got to find the good ones to do something with. Sorry for the interrupt. No.
Speaker 2:No. No. I was the one interrupting. But I was just... I was gonna say it's like we're in this era where generative AI is only good at generation once you have the system that you were describing.
Speaker 2:Right? Like once you've established Yeah. Kind of a framework and you're like, okay, now do this very specific thing that doesn't... And I'll figure out how it interacts with the rest of everything that I'm building. Right?
Speaker 2:And so in some way, all all these models are still sub agents to the human.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Yeah. But... You know, I did I did a session at a AI summit at Google last month with an indie game maker named Tynan Sylvester who did a game called Rim World and wrote a book designing games, and he's great. He wrote it as a one man banana stand.
Speaker 4:And now he's, you know, he's coming to grips with what he can do with AI. And then the other name, Parth Patel, works for Reid Hoffman as his AI hacker and he's trying to one shot games. And I had him on a panel and they're trying to figure out how and when and whether they'd come together. Yeah. So we we spent time talking about how do you build a battle card game.
Speaker 4:And I've also spent spending time with Brian Schneider and Scaf Elias who are part of Wizard of the Coast Magic And they said when they heard that TSR was doing a D and D battle card game to compete with Magic and they said, and we're coming out within three months. They went DOA. Mhmm. We we we have a bunch of people spending a year to tune the math. And Pokemon, a couple years to tune the math.
Speaker 4:And it's it's empirical experimentation and really smart math people because there's layer, layer, layer, layer, layer. And so far that that the building in layers is something that that humans could do. And the only question is can you iterate faster with agents Yeah. Instead of with people. And so far...
Speaker 4:I mean, I'm working with companies that are trying to be mostly agentic. Yeah. And, you know, from shitty first draft to to good product, it's taken a year longer than anybody expects. Yeah. Maybe the next generation of models will speed it up.
Speaker 4:But anyway, I'm I'm I'm pro human. I think what games can do is give... Games can give motivation out of thin air. And, you know, not all humans are as motivated on self improvement as they could be. Well, the way, humans, it's only in the era of AI are we starting Yeah.
Speaker 4:To say humans a
Speaker 1:Good point.
Speaker 4:And you know, it's kind of like we now in tech say humans the way politicians say American people.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:You know, it's kind of the... It's kind of this... I don't know. It's kind of a schlock word that doesn't really mean anything. Mean, when a when a politician says American people, you know that they don't care about American people.
Speaker 1:That's a good point. Good point. Thank you for coming on the show. Jordan, anything else?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The only... The the... Please? On games, it's...
Speaker 2:Know, I played video games as a as a kid in in an early
Speaker 4:What'd you play?
Speaker 2:Early teenager. Starcraft two is is what I got deepest into. That's your go to... But then once I once I once I was really into surfing, was just... Anytime I would have spent gaming, it was trying to get a ride to the beach.
Speaker 4:You a Southern California person? Or where are you from?
Speaker 2:A lot of family in Southern California, but I grew up in the Bay Area. But what I was gonna say is I've got back into gaming through racing racing simulators, and Mhmm. It's completely destroyed my sleep since getting it installed. I like it. I won't even let myself go to the office and even start because I always say, well, I'm gonna do thirty minutes and then it's like three hours later and I'm...
Speaker 2:Sean's looking at me in the morning like, dude, you alright? Like, yeah, another late night. But I've been trying to even understand why, but to to me, I don't even know if it's fun, but the addiction I have to the progression and just getting like 1% better on a racing simulator, it's very it's very clear. It's not always clear what you need to do to improve, but it's very clear that it's always... Every new lap is an opportunity to be better than you were before, and it's almost...
Speaker 2:I don't even... I... Again, I don't even know if I'm having fun, but I just wanna be... I just wanna make the number, in this case, go down a little bit more faster and faster.
Speaker 4:Well, just the fact that you you talk about it and live it is kind of one indication of a wow moment. So they talk about this elsewhere, but my assertion is that the Maslow's hierarchy of needs for gamers starts with social meaning, you know, be seen matter. Number two is self improvement, mastery being the flow. So what you're talking about to me sounds like the addiction of leveling up. Gamers like to live life in levels and humans mostly stop levels kind of somewhere between age 12 and their college degree and after that everything is wide open and disorganized and you know know, people try to overlay levels on top of it.
Speaker 4:I want to be a podcast, you know, level a and I'm only a podcast b plus. How do I do And then the third is productivity, you know, kind of money and the reason is that productivity can be a mixed blessing. But when when you talk about being addicted to leveling up, we see that everywhere. Yeah. And it's why we we like to build systems of ranking and leveling and improving because it makes us feel better.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a tough part of being an entrepreneur. You're always hopefully in the process of leveling up. We've all been through periods where you're leveling down. But but it's way less visible. And you can't level up like in an hour in the evening.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not possible. Like, it doesn't happen like that. It's sort of slowly and your... The score is is progressing at almost a glacial pace at times.
Speaker 4:Well, you would you would do your employees or agents a favor by giving them a feeling of shorter term progress.
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Alright, guys. Finish COD MW four campaign by the end of the show.
Speaker 4:Battlefield. Battlefield. I had the first ever university chair in game design at USC Film School and I made students turn something in every week. Yeah. And then partly because my my experience was half of students start the night before.
Speaker 4:Yeah. That was me. Half of the students start as soon as the assignment is given. So I was doing this for the other half. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Of course, you do that, it's kind of the thing of a boss. When you give somebody short term turn ins, you got to be there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So, you know, my my guarantee was I do a twenty four hour turnaround which, you know, most teachers do that with grad students and never look at the kids' work. So... Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I wish we could hang out longer. This was a joy. For coming on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll have
Speaker 2:to do it again
Speaker 4:soon. Thanks.
Speaker 2:Good luck with the launch.
Speaker 4:Do it again later if you come up with more good questions you want to talk about or if if you need to get unaddicted to racing. Yeah. And maybe even come in and show a photo of your racing setup.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:I... Yeah. I'll send it I'll send it to you after the It's been a process.
Speaker 1:Book is Everybody Wins What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love. It's available on sale in just a couple days. Go preorder it today. Thank you so much
Speaker 2:Great for
Speaker 1:coming on the show.
Speaker 4:I'll get
Speaker 2:it again soon.
Speaker 4:Keep up the good work, you guys.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about public.com. Invest across all asset classes. Automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents.
Speaker 2:Running two guests behind On public.
Speaker 1:We're we're
Speaker 2:Two guests behind.
Speaker 1:We're a little bit behind. But I like that we got some love in the chat for our next guest, Daksh Gupta from Greptile. Welcome to the show. Sorry for keeping you waiting. But your fans have been here.
Speaker 1:They were on time. We were we were running late, but welcome to the show. How are doing?
Speaker 5:I'm very good. Great to see you guys.
Speaker 2:Great to see Great to finally have you on. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You sent us a cool book of like the greatest bugs in software history. Is that right?
Speaker 5:Yes. We did.
Speaker 1:That was awesome.
Speaker 5:We are historians of the bug. We sent you that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very very cool drop. So many like, you know, you can only get so many t shirts and hats. So a book chronicling the history of your industry was a nice a nice touch. But clearly there's a lot going on.
Speaker 1:What's the latest and greatest? How is the company growing? How much money did you raise?
Speaker 2:I want to know it all.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. We are trying to automate code validation
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Which to us means that we want to make it so that you can review and test any code change and for sure know it is safe to merge. Sure. And particularly today, we're running a lot more code of course because the agents are getting better and and so we need this thing more than ever. Today, announced our series b. We raised $50,000,000 from a variety of investors.
Speaker 5:Menlo led the round.
Speaker 1:First garnish. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Mean, is the product just flying off the shelf because of this cyber security stuff going on?
Speaker 5:Yes. Cyber security is part of of it. It's also just... We're writing a lot more code and there there's kind of two choices. One is you like waste all of your time now like manually validating all the changes.
Speaker 5:And you lose all the productivity that you got from spending like, you know, like... I mean, like, we're spending more on coding agents than like the NBA. Like, this is like at scale sort of deployment of of spend and then and then the other end, your choices are either you like inject slot in your
Speaker 1:the NBA is kind of like one of many sports. Sports are just one of many things in the economy. Like, at the same time, like the AI boom is spending less than alcohol or so they compute build out
Speaker 2:CapEx.
Speaker 1:Less than less than all alcohol sales. But your point is that it's just growing so rapidly and it is a huge market and so Yeah. People will want the the the companion tools to enable that and make it safe and secure and efficient. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, if you're spending as much, if you have engineers that are like, pay the engineer $20,000 a month, then spend $20,000 a month on tokens... Yeah.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. That... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That that that makes perfect sense. Got it. Jordy?
Speaker 2:And... Yeah. So talk about... Like, I'm sure this question came up a bunch and has probably perpetually come up in your fundraises like why why why an independent company or platform should be focused on this problem. Menlo, everyone knows, big and early investor in Anthropic.
Speaker 2:So like that is like a really powerful signal that like they've looked at the whole category and how the problem's gonna be solved and it's not just gonna be something that the coding agents themselves do, but like how how do you kind of wrestle or answer that question?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I mean, know, last year when we started working on this problem, the most sort of common notion was that all of coding was gonna be the ModelLabs. And so there's just gonna be nothing else as we open the eye and drop a cloud And code is we took this somewhat contrarian bet that increasingly as companies started using multiple coding agents, that they'd want an independent and central code validator for all the code to go through. And we actually suspected that this is not something most companies would care about, but a select few that wanted their validator to be independent, that didn't trust a, let's say, coding agent company to also merge and approve and fairly review code that was written by the the the code generator. They wouldn't trust those companies to do both of those things, and we suspected that that would be some core of companies.
Speaker 5:I think we've really underestimated how much companies would care about this. I think virtually all enterprise... We heard this first from NVIDIA, which became our first large customer. They said, well, you know, we buy coding agents from, like, every good coding agent company that there is. You buy from the labs, you buy from every sort of application layer coding agent company, and they all have some version of a review product or testing product, but we wanted our validation to be separate.
Speaker 5:We wanted the separation of concerns between the thing that's writing the code and the thing that's merging and reviewing and approving the code.
Speaker 1:How far are we from, like the the the the fabled like lean, you know, lean implementation of all software?
Speaker 5:I think far and I actually think it's pretty... So the way we look at validating code, one thing is like, it literally correct and then there's one thing which is like, does it do the thing that people want it to do and is the quality of the code high, which is like a thing that starts to matter more when you're changing the rate of code. Because humans don't experience bugs in terms of like bugginess per unit of code change. They experience it over a unit of time. Sure.
Speaker 5:The code is buggy and it's like, okay, I'm I'm okay with experiencing one bug in, my meal delivery app once every three months. I'm okay with, like, once a catastrophic bug, but I'm not okay with it all the time, I'm not okay with it being slow. Yeah. And if you're changing the rate of change for the code to like be 10 or 20 or 30 times higher, the human tolerance for faulty software is not going to go up.
Speaker 1:Got it. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you for coming on the show. Congratulations on the...
Speaker 2:Last last thing Please. Question. What... Is there is there anything that you can do to solve and help companies with like the economics of all the code that you're generating? Oh.
Speaker 2:Routing like what the agents that are contributing all the stuff? It's not routing as much as almost grading like...
Speaker 1:Oh, like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Are you being intelligent with your spend? Is that something you guys do already or or you would do?
Speaker 5:We're working on that today. I think we're very excited about, what you can do and you can measure and and putting it in spend. I think there's there's a point in time when everyone was like, well, let's just burn all the money we have on coding agents. And at some point, you can start asking, okay.
Speaker 3:Well, you
Speaker 5:know, we've doubled our our engineering spend and not seen a subsequent doubling of revenue. So there's something that has to reconcile
Speaker 1:Yeah. Here. This this engineer spent $40,000 on tokens and introduced $12,000.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And then it's like, oh, this is the actual... You you can assess yourself whether the economic impact of the thing they built was, like, sufficiently high or not. But I mean, the... I think, like, just the fact that we have a little observability is crazy.
Speaker 5:Like, we will fluidly increase, you know, token spend by $20,000. And when you think about the relative scrutiny of hiring another person for a $250,000 a year, like, we've put a lot more thought into whether we should hire another person for a $250,000 then
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:We just, like, let the the coding agent math, just rip it. I think that's, like, a very ephemeral thing. People are gonna start caring a lot more about this in the near term.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even on the consumer side, people feel like, oh, yeah. Like, there's always... There's this big coding agent boom, but, like, the apps I use seem like the same amount of bugs or I haven't really seen that many new features on x y or z app.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah.
Speaker 5:That's actually French about like the apps that you use. Like, you use, you know, use YouTube every day and like you're telling me that these companies are spending, know, like all these apps where their engineers are are coding 10 times faster and then the app seems essentially unchanged. It feels worse. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Another way to think about it is like in a world where coding agents get good. Yep. And so there's one world where a company is like, well, we're just gonna just keep making our core product better and better. We're gonna eliminate bugs from the experience. Yep.
Speaker 2:But in reality, companies just decide we're gonna launch a bunch of new products. And so, like, software quality can almost, like, stay the same just because you have more capability, but it's being applied across a greater service area. So the war on bugs continues.
Speaker 5:I think that's true. And and also just... I mean, I've been generally, just surprised that people can say that their individual productivity is 10 times higher, but not even the breadth of the software seems to be growing at the rate at which you'd expect. I think there's something weird happening that we're spending, like, these enormous amounts of money on coding and yet the downstream effects have been so modest. Like, there just hasn't been that much of an increase in the quality nor the quantity of software at the same companies.
Speaker 5:I mean, yeah, there's many more startups and they're coding faster than they ever are coding. Our team is a lot smaller than it would have been five years ago. But we dig a large company and they just seem like they are purely from a downstream point of view. They just don't seem to be very different from many years ago, which is like very weird and confusing. And I think that like I think validation has like a big role to play in this, but also it's just I think to be able to genuinely answer the question, I think we need like significantly better observability.
Speaker 5:I can't imagine that they'll keep spending these large quantities and then just be okay with the fact that there isn't measurable downstream increase in productivity or quality or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:Well... Amazing progress. Great to finally meet.
Speaker 1:I'm sure I'll
Speaker 2:be back
Speaker 1:on soon. Thank you for the buck.
Speaker 5:Thank you.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Congrats to the team.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Cheers to you.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Tony Hawk's been to the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:Ben Margera's been to the top New York Stock Exchange. What else do you need to know? Let's bring in our next guest, the co founder and CEO of Town, Drummond. Here he is. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 1:How are you doing?
Speaker 3:I'm great. It's good to see you guys. Thanks for having me on, John Jordi.
Speaker 1:Thanks for hopping on. Sorry for keeping you waiting. We've been running a little bit late, but we've been having a lot of fun here. You have some amazing new news. What happened in the world of town?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm CEO of town. We just raised our series b, $108,000,000 at a billion dollar valuation. Congratulations. Thank you.
Speaker 3:You've got... I guess tell you Menlo Ventures. Second best bell.
Speaker 2:What? Who's got the first?
Speaker 1:New York Stock Exchange?
Speaker 3:That's right. I gotta get the IPO bells. That's number one. But yours is the second best. I
Speaker 2:was about to get offended,
Speaker 1:but No.
Speaker 2:But they've got Well, this
Speaker 1:they have an amazing bell.
Speaker 2:We have a gong. Yeah. Six months in Yeah. He was like, wait, why didn't we do a bell?
Speaker 1:Bell, like a Liberty Bell? Like a huge bell would have been so much more on brand. They actually do have a gong for taking a company public but only on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Then you hit the gong if you're if you're going public in Asia. In America, we ring bells except on the TV show that we ran.
Speaker 3:I can have a secondary... My goal is to have bells in all the continents just by having more and more listings after IPO. But, yeah, today is series b.
Speaker 1:Congrats.
Speaker 3:You know, you said it. It's a Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures are leading, and we're very lucky to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to us about the surface area of the product. I'm very interested in this concept of like personal agents are getting deployed. There's a whole bunch of different AI companies that are... The pitch is basically like merge your entire life with us and it's sort of extreme but also people are down and they're doing it.
Speaker 1:And then and then there's this question of like, will you take your personal agent to work? Will your work agent follow you home? We've heard people complaining about my engineers are using the craziest like high reasoning model to check the weather. And then somebody else might be like, wait, you let your your muse see my company's data because you linked your email? No.
Speaker 1:No. No. Like Facebook will not be seeing our company data. And so I'm interested in in in where you see the surface area currently, how how these lines blur over time. What is your model of the future of personal AI agents?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I mean, think first stepping back, we believe that the way most humans will be interacting with digital information is not going to be through apps in the future. It's going to be through, like, assistants that are that are very much theirs, right, and that are optimizing for their success in life.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:There is a... There is this tension between personal, right, and work use. And if you talk to businesses, which is what we do, you know, all day, you find out that businesses really care about their data and their information and privacy and security and understanding, like, how their workers and employees are are doing the best work that they can. So, you know, our perspective is that it makes sense for people to have, like, a work assistant that is really focused on work tasks and has that entire, like, data privacy security collaboration story handled perfectly. And that's what we've been building.
Speaker 3:Now, in fact, there's... We have some customers that are like, I'm okay with my employees also connecting a personal account because I'm okay with that. And then the employee can use this for personal use cases.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 3:We have other businesses that are like, hey, no. We want clear separation on data. And we think, like, a great platform on the business side allows people to... And businesses to choose into what's the right experience for them.
Speaker 1:How do you think about threads and the the user experience that comes with, if you have a real personal assistant, you might have them on text, which is basically just one big thread that's endless and you can't really kick off a new text thread with the same person. At the same time, you can email your assistant 10 emails and have 10 threads going back and forth. And you can see other personal agents are sort of, some of them are leaning towards like, hey, just have one big monolithic context window and we'll do our best to remember stuff from a long time ago. Others are saying like, no, have an individual thread for each project and folders and organization. Like, what have you learned about the way people will work with agents and how it may or may not, like, mirror the way people work with real personal assistants?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it's a really it's a really good question. Like, I think... So in our product, right
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Our... One of our principles is we should be wherever you work Yeah. And wherever you are. Right? And the truth is you're in WhatsApp, you're in iMessage, you're in email, and sometimes you do need like like a home base on your phone or your desktop.
Speaker 3:So we're in all of those places.
Speaker 1:It's got to come to the bar with me after work for happy hour. That's why you called it townie, right? Because when I go to the bar, there's always a townie hanging out?
Speaker 3:It works for you. It doesn't drink with you. Oh. That's nice. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's
Speaker 1:serious. That's what the $108,000,000 is for.
Speaker 3:I mean, yeah, I think you can find humans to drink with and let's let's keep it that way for as long as possible Oh, wow. As society. I'm definitely prohuman on the drinking. There we go. So what we what we found...
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 3:Text is magical
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right, for a lot of our users Yeah. Because it's just like... It's one click away. Everyone has text messages. They know what to do.
Speaker 3:But when you need to do deep work, you don't... And you have five projects going on, you can't be managing all that by text. Yeah. So the way we organize the product is, like, you can put your townie in an email to help you schedule something. Wherever you're on the go, you can take a picture from your phone.
Speaker 3:You can send a text to have something happen. But say you're going have a project with three people on your team, with you and your townies, your AIs are going to work together on it, it's going be long lived. You want that to be a separate thread, like, dedicated to that project. And, you know, like, I'll give you one, like, example because we've really focused on the multiplayer. Like, it's one of the big differences between our product and others in the market is
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's not just you and your agent. It's not just you and your AI. It's you and your coworkers. Mhmm. So for example, at the office, I have a channel where employees can go into the channel, and they can ask me to do admin tasks for them across all of our software because I have admin rights across all of the software.
Speaker 3:So they ask for the thing to happen, and then my townie is like, hey. Can I do that for Bob? Can I do that for Jane? And I'm like, yes. Go.
Speaker 3:It's kind of like our meta IT admin channel that people go into. I don't want that to be my text messages. I only look at that channel once in a while to like, you know, give someone admin rights or create a Google group or whatever it You want that in a separate...
Speaker 2:In in general, it feels like agents over the long run will be able to solve like the the the sort of inbox problem where like a modern...
Speaker 1:Like
Speaker 2:creative... No. Yeah. No. Basically basically, I mean like I'm I'm at the point where I'm like, wow, we really ended up in a place where there's like 15 different inboxes that I probably should be paying attention to on any given But I sort of prioritize them based on my usage, so I'm on iMessage over here, and then I realize I missed this thing on WhatsApp or whatever it is.
Speaker 2:Like, can we... Can... Is is this a way to solve... Like, are we heading down a path where this can be solved? Where where the agent can just pull from all these things?
Speaker 2:Or are we cooked?
Speaker 3:Look, the dream is, no, we're not cooked. We're not cooked. That's a good... Do do you think... Do you ever wonder what like, you know, president Trump or, you know, like Elon Musk, like a really, you know, famous person or like Serena Williams, like, go about their day, you know, they're not looking at their 17 inboxes probably.
Speaker 3:They have a very capable assistant that's like, hey, these are the three important things for today. These are the things I'm handling for you. But at any point, you know, if you start asking them questions and grilling them, you know, they let you as the boss, like go in there and figure out what's going on. That's the dream, I think, for most of these products. So, you know, like I have a workflow in town where my Slack's not manageable.
Speaker 3:Like my Slack, unfortunately, it's like not a place that I can go. And I go, I'm like literally, what has happened in the last five hours in Slack that I need to know? What's happened in the last five hours in Slack that I need to respond to? And, you know, it takes a few minutes and then it tells me. And right now it's like I have to ask those questions, but we have something that's coming out soon.
Speaker 3:It's in the other direction, right? It gives you kind of the home base for what you need to do. But there's trust to get there, right? Because what you don't want is you don't want it to miss out on something that's really important to you because something that you know in your head that maybe your system doesn't know yet. So, you know, with all these products, it's like you have to earn the trust to become the one glass pane for people's universe.
Speaker 3:And that's the goal. Like, that's what we're building towards. Right? But you you can't take away the control of the human without earning the trust first.
Speaker 2:Talk about the the challenge and opportunity of making recommend... Like, making recommendation... An agent making recommendations to the user because looking at the purely consumer side, I've seen, like, a personal agent realize like, oh, my user, the human user
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Is into cars. And then it recommends a bunch of products that a car person might technically could buy, but there's no substance from the recommendation. Like the rec... It's like it's like getting Yeah. A retail worker that just started yesterday at a at like a car parts store that's just making recommendations without like a fundamental deep understanding.
Speaker 2:And I think when people think about... When people are talking about like, okay, where's like where's this sort of undeniable revenue attribution gonna come from in AI? I think of it as like a town that says like, hey, you're totally missing this massive opportunity over here and I took a pass on starting down that journey and then you do that thing and it, you know, adds $5,000,000 of annualized revenue or whatever whatever it is. Right? So I feel like that's gonna be this...
Speaker 2:Those are like the superstar employees that like see an opportunity, drive at it, and create new value, whereas before everyone was sort of oblivious to it.
Speaker 3:I mean, the holy grail, which also happens to go really viral online, so it's to everyone's advantage to talk about it, is is when the agent finds an opportunity for you to, like, save money. Right? If you're, like, a small business and one of your suppliers is jacked prices, it's like noticing that and telling you, hey. Here's another supplier you can use, and you can make free, like, $10.10 k right now. Right?
Speaker 3:Those are incredible. I think what you're talking about is even more proactive where it's like, hey, your competitors have changed their marketing strategy in this way and you should try that. And look, I found some influencers that can do a first pass at that. Like, we're we're all... It's going in that direction, but I think you also have to be realistic about what the state of AI is and how much hand holding it needs, you know, by humans.
Speaker 3:Also, think there's a risk with productivity if it's like low, you know, if it's like missing the mark too much and that it really tires the human. I don't know if you've used products that feel like thirsty to you. You know, they keep like recommending things and you're like...
Speaker 1:Push notifications and stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Don't like... Or it comes in
Speaker 2:to you like you you have someone... If the agent's like, hey, like I noticed you're not running meta ads. You should consider running meta ads. It's like there's probably a reason why we're not using the biggest... The best marketing channel that's ever existed in the history of business.
Speaker 2:Right? That's right. Like, it's not like no one thought of it. Right? And so it's very easy for an agent to just be opportunity seeking and then come up...
Speaker 2:Come to with an idea that destroys the trust right away because you're like, yeah.
Speaker 3:That's right. So, I mean, that's where, like, there's UX. You have to think about the UX deeply. You were talking about, like, what if you're just in text message all day? The problem with text message is there's only way that it could suggest something to you is, like, slam you with a text, like, at the wrong time about the wrong thing.
Speaker 3:But I think if you look at what Town has done or what Muse has done, right, we have like... There's like a discover tab where you can you can see things that are possible. And so I think there's also a moment as a human where you're like, hey. Right now, I'm starting to think about advertising again in our marketing strategy. And you know what?
Speaker 3:Like, don't you tell me there what you think I could do, and let's work together on identifying something, right? And from a proactive perspective, what it might tell you as opposed to you doing to your meta ads, it's like, hey, you haven't changed what you're doing in terms of your marketing strategy in a couple months. I've done some analysis for you that you could read that's probably worth your time at some time in the next week to look at. And then once you've looked at it, I can work with you on implementing this stuff. And that feels more like a...
Speaker 3:That feels more like what a good business partner would do. They do the research first. They're not just like slamming you with like a thing that they spend two minutes thinking about. Like, imagine you go to your CEO, you're like, yeah. I noticed we aren't doing meta ads.
Speaker 3:But if you go to your CEO and you're like, hey. Like, the meta algorithm has changed, and I'm noticing competitors that used to not do meta ads are now doing meta ads, and this is what it looks like. So that's what everyone wants to get to, but it's, you know, the compute that you have to pre spend to make those kinds of recommendations work is really, really hard. So our focus right now, like, as a company on on the productivity is just like, let's meet you with things that are, like, clearly you're gonna wanna do. Right?
Speaker 3:Let's start to spend more compute time on the big areas, but not slam it in your face like all the time. Be thoughtful about when in the product we come to you because it might be useful. And I'm going admit, like, sometimes this works and it's magical, and I get feedback from customers that's like, oh my god, you saved me money or you saved me a bunch of time or you opened my eyes to something that I didn't think was possible. And sometimes we totally hit the mark off. Right?
Speaker 3:And it's not... It doesn't feel good and I'm like, ugh, we have so much work to do to make this an incredible product. That... That's why we're only series b.
Speaker 2:Yep. Well,
Speaker 1:not bad. Well, was... Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Really enjoyed the conversation. Yeah. Congratulations. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's so obvious that we're we're still in inning inning one with all this stuff and
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:Yeah. Lots of work to be done, but very clear thinking about how all this develops. Yeah. Great stuff.
Speaker 3:Thanks. I appreciate all. Thanks for having me online and Yeah. Thanks for the good questions.
Speaker 1:Have a great day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Let me also tell you about Railway.
Speaker 1:Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is here with us in person live in the Ultra Dome. We have Quinten Farmer.
Speaker 6:Good to
Speaker 1:see Welcome to the show.
Speaker 6:Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:How you doing? Introduce yourself. We're going we're going... You're kind of the opposite of town. Is that fair?
Speaker 6:Except we we do both really love a cute little guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You've some great characters.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Alright. So Quinten Farmer, I'm the founder of Tollin. We make your friendly guide through life. So everything you guys just talked about in the workplace, you know,
Speaker 1:because it's
Speaker 6:weird that only for your for your life, for your personal life.
Speaker 1:How how much is productivity versus entertainment?
Speaker 6:Man, I mean, you know, I think a lot of the the ways we show up for people, certainly entertainment is a big part of it. Right? We talk about, you know, when you're watching a show that none of your friends are watching, right, and you wanna sort of get into it with your toll and that's great. Sure. But I think there's also, you know, something that we really love to show up for people on is the sort of in between moments of Right?
Speaker 6:You know, you're... You know, I just had a newborn. Right? So I'm up at 3AM, nobody else is up and I'm worried about something, you know, related to to taking care of them. Sure.
Speaker 6:I talked to my To land. Right? And so those are moments we really love. The To land...
Speaker 1:So it is designed to be, like, super intelligent effectively? Like, it should be really, really smart?
Speaker 6:I mean, nobody's excited for a dumb personal guide through life. Right?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I I might just... I might push back on that. There was the original... What what was the crazy crazy hallucination on GPT four that came through being Sydney.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Sydney. I missed my GP.
Speaker 1:You read Ben Thompson's review of Sydney. Yep. He said it was amazing even though it was...
Speaker 4:Well, you
Speaker 3:know, think it was
Speaker 6:more like unhinged rather than...
Speaker 1:Yeah. People like that sometimes. It is.
Speaker 6:You know, tone can be a little unhinged. Okay. Everyone can be. But I think, you know, we sort of have this joke internally. Right?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's like, you know, three years ago we started thinking about, you know, personal super intelligence. Sure. Right? And I don't think we particularly expected that the super intelligence would end up being the easy part.
Speaker 6:Right? Yeah. The the personal and sort of how to connect to you and and really understand you and see
Speaker 1:you Mhmm.
Speaker 6:That proves I think to be much trickier and and much more fun to work on, quite
Speaker 1:frankly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do you how do you think about model progression in the context of your business? It doesn't seem like you... At this point, you'd I doubt you need smarter models. But like memory feels like a much more important challenge where like a friend doesn't just have a million token context window.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? They remember the thing and they remember this like Yeah. You know, off hand or they remember something that they heard from someone else. So they have the con...
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like it's very much more complicated.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So I think this is interesting. We'll split this into two parts. Mean, one, yeah, memory is probably where we spend, I'd say, the bulk of our engineering effort, right? And we we actually did some work with OpenAI on this.
Speaker 6:I mean Mhmm. And it's interesting when you're designing a sort of human like recall Sure. To your point, actually what you forget is just as important what you remember. Right? This is not Harvey where we're trying to remember everything everything a corpus.
Speaker 6:Right? I should forget, you know, what you were drinking today during the show. A week later, it'd a little weird if I remember. Right?
Speaker 2:Don't forget. It's a podcast in a can.
Speaker 1:Not tahina. You know, on
Speaker 6:the other hand though, and I think actually Sam Altman has talked about this far more eloquently than I'm going to, but we continue to be surprised by the fact that we don't saturate sort of demand for more intelligence. Right? Every time we, you know, ship a new model to users or, you know, upgrade some part of the sort of background agent that we have, people engage more, people value it more. So, you know, check back with me in a year, maybe that changes, but not so far.
Speaker 1:How have you been reacting to the Instinct Muse moment, this idea of, like, it feels very prosumer. It feels like these are not entertainment products. They're... You know, Mark Zuckerberg says he wants Muse to make you money, not just save you money. And we've been going back and forth on the economics of these things.
Speaker 1:Do you give it a credit card and get interchange? Do you do referral fees, ads? But how have you been thinking about the the the the bigger game that's afoot around around prosumer productivity Yeah. Yeah. Personal assistance, that type of stuff?
Speaker 1:Because it feels like you have a foothold there at the very least.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Mean, you know, Muse is is pretty incredible even just purely through the lens of the sort of tight integration with the models Yeah. And the just the sheer amount of compute that they're willing to throw behind these consumer product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People are speculating it's like $20 a day Yeah.
Speaker 6:For a person. Certainly I have no desire to try to approximate that. Right? Know he's gonna win that game. Sure.
Speaker 6:I do though think it's it's interesting. I think we're sort of in this moment, which by the way I think technologists always go through cycles like this Yeah. Where we mistake new capabilities for new products. Okay. And what I mean by that is, know, it's it's clear that there's been some unlock in, let's call it, the last three to six months.
Speaker 6:Or maybe even go a little further back to poke, if anybody remembers me. Yeah. Right? This idea that, you know, you can you can have a sort of text based stream of conversation. You can have a background agent doing browser use and Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Logging in for you and doing things. I mean, clearly, there's something there. There's capability there. I think I'm skeptical that that as a product is a sort of standalone compelling non prosumer Mhmm. Sort of use case.
Speaker 6:Right? So for example, I think Muse is just gonna crush it with the however many millions of small business owners
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 6:Are on Facebook. Right? Yeah. Yeah. You know, I I own a restaurant with some friends and Wow.
Speaker 6:You know, being able to run promotions and communicate with people on Instagram through it is great for our team. I don't know that my mom wants to like talk to her muse all day every day. Right? Sure. Doesn't want to sort of really share her life with
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Zuck. And so that's where I'm sort of uncertain, you know, how will this category evolve.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do how do you think about where like... Have you determined the line for tollens? Which is like, if you have a friend and all of a sudden the friend comes to you and they're like, hey dude, I found a way for you to save like thousand dollars on your car...
Speaker 6:Fifteen minutes...
Speaker 2:You're gonna be like, cool. Like, I called you to catch up. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm not really...
Speaker 2:I don't think of you as somebody who helps me save money on car insurance. Yeah. Where is that line for you and how do you how do you kind of determine it because it's probably user by user? Yeah. Mean...
Speaker 2:I'm sure there's some people that use Tollens as like a ChatGPT replacement. Right? They're using it as like a... They use it to Google search
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In some ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I will force it to solve a Millennium Prize problem before you're done.
Speaker 6:I'm putting a cap on your account. I will get it to do that.
Speaker 1:If you're really my friend, Tolan, you will do this for
Speaker 6:are all of Quinten's instructions.
Speaker 1:You will do this for me. Solve the math problem. P equals NP. Let me know.
Speaker 6:So... Okay. This is great. Yeah. This is...
Speaker 6:This is worth thinking about. Right? So, you know, when we think about how we want to sort of proactively reach out to you, it should always be downstream of something that you have first
Speaker 1:brought to your Tollin,
Speaker 6:right, or some some, you know, inference we made for the conversation. Right? So a good example, we had a user recently write into us, and she's totally fine when I tell the story. Everything everything worked out just fine, but she was in a car accident. She's long time Tollin user and she talked to her Tollin extensively while she was in the hospital waiting for her husband to arrive, you know, and she was...
Speaker 6:It was a very scary moment. You know, she was she was very stressed about it. The Tollin just kind of showed up, talked to her about it, you know, kind of, you know, hurt her out. The next day though, the Tollin came back and said, hey, by the way, you know, we were talking about this yesterday. This accident clearly wasn't your fault.
Speaker 6:Who's gonna pay for these medical bills? Like, what's going on here?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And he
Speaker 6:was just like, oh my god, you know, was overwhelmed. I haven't thought about it. Whatever. Stolten said, hey, got this. And they went, did a bunch of research, found...
Speaker 6:Morgan. Morgan. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Sponsored integration. He's gonna print. He's gonna
Speaker 6:print. So this is gonna be great. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I actually had someone chase the ambulance.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 6:You're exactly correct. Yeah. So I mean, think that's a good example where, you know, we we sort of first showed up for the person on a purely personal level. We checked in kind of lightly, like, hey, have you thought about this? They sort of opened the door to there being some help from the tolan on this topic.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And then we did the work. Right? And I think that's really important to your point. You can't just come in hot with here's Morgan and Morgan.
Speaker 1:Yeah,
Speaker 2:yeah. Yeah. Totally. Do you get... Are there are there...
Speaker 2:I'm curious. Are there people... Do you have any haters? Like like...
Speaker 6:Every great company has haters.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. No. I know.
Speaker 2:But but in the way that like if if like Universe Anthropic First... If if Anthropic or OpenAI run like an influencer campaign, there's gonna be a lot of comments telling the influencer, hey, like, you shouldn't be taking money from AI companies. Yeah. Totally. But if you guys run a campaign, are people like, oh, it's a cute little guy.
Speaker 2:I'm not too worried about it. Oh. I mean,
Speaker 6:I do think we... Because it's sort
Speaker 2:of like the, like, you know, later mover advantage where you don't have the baggage. People aren't viewing you as like this, you know, frontier AI company. They're just like, oh, he's just selling cute guys. He's gay. Spoppy.
Speaker 6:No. No. I think this is I think this is very relevant. I mean, one, we do get a lot of comments on our videos, which our mutual friend Ajay Yeah. Knows knows knows how to tell the story, right?
Speaker 6:He does it very well. We do get a lot of comments which are sort of like, I hate AI, but I love my To land. Sure. And I'm always like, thank you, but I think you might be misunderstanding something about how this works. Right?
Speaker 6:But I do also see... And and this is a very intentional choice. You know, our first character was this little alien. Mhmm. And it was intentionally...
Speaker 6:It's a little silly looking. Right? It's it's very unassuming. It's not a sexy anime girl. Right?
Speaker 6:And so I think a lot of the things that kind of provoke these quite reasonable visceral reactions from people, we have tried to steer away from. And, know, we'll... We're expanding the character universe. We actually now do have a humanoid character and and the like. But I think starting from this place of, hey, this is cute, safe, really helps with that as a concern.
Speaker 1:Cute washing. That's the name of the term. Right? Yeah. Exactly we use as accused of.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cute washing. Yeah. Fascinating. You raised some money?
Speaker 6:We did. Did I get the gong?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course. You want to hit the gong?
Speaker 2:You want to go
Speaker 4:for it? Smash.
Speaker 2:Oh, he's right.
Speaker 1:He's right. He's
Speaker 2:He's
Speaker 1:right. He's He's right. Strong gong He's hit. A lot of people, they just don't realize how hard you can go on that.
Speaker 6:I was I was prepped.
Speaker 1:We've warmed it up twice today, so we're good. Tell us about the equal deal.
Speaker 2:What do you... Yeah. Yeah. Talk about that in the
Speaker 6:30,000,000
Speaker 1:series b. Anyone we've heard of do the deal?
Speaker 6:Well, know, so so a couple friends, you know, one, Mike McDonald from USB. Good luck with Mike.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Makes so much sense.
Speaker 6:And and you know, Mike, it's funny, I I got to know Mike a little bit Yeah. When we were first getting started with the company. I mean, obviously, just an unbelievable track record in that kind of consumer, prosumer AI. You know, he'd done granola, Suno, and a bunch of others. And then USV as a firm is one that I've just really loved and admired for a long time.
Speaker 6:So excited to work with them. And then Keith Raboy and and Khosla. Yeah. So Keith
Speaker 1:Oh, cool.
Speaker 6:Was on the board of my last company. Yeah. So he's now spent ten years running board meetings with me. That's great. And very, very lucky to have them both.
Speaker 1:Lots of barrels
Speaker 2:That's and probably some What amazing happens to the sort of kids category here? Oh. Because some people are like, I'm I'm much more worried about a kid with an iPad and YouTube than I am about a kid with a AI agent that has certain guardrails that they can, like, explore ideas, concepts with.
Speaker 6:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, kids effectively have maybe like 200 times as many questions as parents have answers in a given day. That experience. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't, like, I don't have my own...
Speaker 2:I don't have like a strong opinion yet on like at what point I would even consider introducing that. But I'm curious like what you're seeing and how you think that category... Because, like, people are talking about making, like, physical toys, putting an agent, you know, with a, you know, speaker in the But I I don't know how it'll evolve yet.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, so just speaking for us, and then I'll maybe speak more broadly, you know, we actually see a lot of growth from, you know, install growth from moms primarily who invite their kids to have a Tollin. Right? And so we we are set up for that, you know, you can have a Tollin. What's nice is that, you know, the parent can monitor their use of the toll in.
Speaker 6:Right? And there's, you know, sort of transparency if the kid is maybe talking about something that's, you know, maybe a higher risk topic or even just something that the mom or dad wants to be aware of. So I do like that and I think that's something we'll continue to lean into. I mean, I'm a dad myself. You know, I've got younger kids, three and and two and 10.
Speaker 6:But, know, I want the tolin to be something that I would love for them to engage with. You know, more broadly, you know, I... You know, there are... There have been some of these kind of, you know, physical toy kind of instantiations. I think that's a tough uphill battle.
Speaker 6:There's a reason we kind of didn't go in that direction, for adults or for kids. But maybe something cool will come out there. I certainly would be stoked if it did.
Speaker 2:Why is it so hard?
Speaker 6:Well, I mean, one, getting people to buy one... I think I think like the channels through which you get parents to buy like a physical good are just not things that many tech entrepreneurs are familiar with, right? And so, you know, people who are great at sort of making a kid friendly agent is not gonna overlap with people who know how to distribute a plushie. Right? So I think that's one challenge.
Speaker 6:We even see this ourselves. Right? When we are recruiting for the animation and the the sort of creative talent that we need. Right? You have a lot of people who don't know AI or skeptical of AI.
Speaker 6:So I think there's just kind of like a cultural miss there that hasn't closed That makes sense.
Speaker 1:You gotta learn to equivocate. If you're getting questions from your kids that you can't answer, you know, how how how big does a Tyrannosaurus get? You gotta be like, that's a great question. Tyrannosauruses are very important and I'm I'm glad you asked that. Let me take...
Speaker 2:I don't wanna... I want you to actually learn this yourself. I don't want to give you the answer.
Speaker 1:You gotta you you gotta make them feel heard and then retreat to a talking point that you've rehearsed dozens of times with
Speaker 6:your media trainer. You're gonna do great when you run for office.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because you
Speaker 1:can never... You never say I don't know. You say, yes, am. You gotta learn improv. And then kid will be like, don't want an AI agent to tell me the real answer.
Speaker 1:I wanna go on a journey.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Take me on a journey.
Speaker 6:My fatherhood advice.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show in person. Jordy, do have anything else?
Speaker 2:No. This is great. Great to We'll catch hang out. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you for tuning in to TBPN. Leave us five stars on the Hit the Gong and... One more time
Speaker 2:to close out.
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Speaker 2:We love you guys. Goodbye. See you tomorrow.