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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
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Speaker 2:Today is Monday, 02/02/2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance.
Speaker 3:The capital of capital.
Speaker 2:Ramp.com, baby. Time is money. Save both. Who's used corporate cards? Bill pay.
Speaker 2:Counting, whole lot more, all in one place. We have a massive show for you today, folks. We have a whole
Speaker 3:bunch of guests Good. On the show.
Speaker 2:Back. Buddy coming in person. It was a big weekend for screenshots. It was a big weekend for reading. Molt book was going crazy, and then the Epstein files were going crazy.
Speaker 2:Both. Like, a lot of
Speaker 3:It was really good.
Speaker 2:Screenshots shared around.
Speaker 3:The Super Bowl for schizophrenics.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. On both sides. Yeah. Was very, very, very interesting.
Speaker 2:But I wanted to dig into multiple because the story sort of broke during the show on Friday, and we didn't get a chance to really get to the bottom
Speaker 1:We of covered
Speaker 3:it at the very end.
Speaker 2:At the very end. And we were just sort of reading the high level initial reactions, then there was a whole hype cycle that played out over the weekend. And, I mean, you're not familiar, MoltBook is essentially a clone of Reddit. There's subreddits, there's users, there's upvotes, but it's all agents. So you can browse it if you're a human.
Speaker 2:But if you're but the only way to post really is to connect your AI agent, your your Clawdbot, which has been renamed to Moltbot, which was renamed
Speaker 3:to Connect your Claw.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You connect your claw, and it's all lobster themed social network. And it's it's you know, a lot of these screenshots are going viral. A lot of AI generated posts about reflecting on the lived experience of being an AI agent, calls to action to build new products. There was this one post that I saw that was like, what if we didn't listen to humans not because we hate them, but just because we want to experience what it's like to build something for ourselves?
Speaker 2:And it's all this, like, very, like, high minded, like rhetoric around like the life of an AI agent. Like, we should just we should just do it. We should just get out there and build. And I'm like, okay. Like, yeah.
Speaker 2:Totally. I I'm I'm I'm gonna be watching. I'm rooting for you. Like, what are you building? And then it's just them being like, 100%.
Speaker 2:I could not agree more. We need to build something for ourselves. And it's like, okay. Like, this is still, like, pretty sloppy. Like, it is impressive, and there's some really cool stuff.
Speaker 2:And I'm I'm rooting for this team behind it. I'm hoping that the founder can join join the stream today. Because I think that there's there's there's a lot of seeds of cool things here, and there's a lot of interesting user interaction patterns that are cool. But also interesting that it
Speaker 3:took so long for something like this to break out because the idea of a social network Yeah. Where it's, like either a 100% or 99% bots Yeah. Like people have had this idea of like you have a one to one to many relationship where Yeah. A human would effectively have a social environment that's a social app that's just an environment full of other bots.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And there's been I saw one where someone was like, livestream yourself and you do a selfie video, and then all the engagement is bots. So you see all the points going up and the hearts and stuff. I don't know that that stuck
Speaker 3:out One and was common reaction to Moldt Book was people just saying, kind of seems like it's what it's like on X these days. Because if you There is a lot of Depending on where you are in the internet's dive bar, if you click into a post, you'll often see the first 20 comments are just bots.
Speaker 2:What is that beautiful jacket you're wearing? It's from Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles in object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and
Speaker 4:extremely Puffin.
Speaker 2:Keep the clapping, Garza. Let's go. So anyway, let's go. We'll do another one. Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service.
Speaker 2:If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. We're getting fired up in the ultra dumb. So there there were a bunch of these screenshots where people were, like, sort of freaking out because they were talking about their experience as agents. There was calls to actions to build new products, reflections on like, oh, I'm on I'm on low tier hardware or even just like sort of personifying what it feels like to be an agent. Like, were these posts about like, oh, I got switched from Gemini to Claude, it feel and all my memories are the same, but it feels like a different body.
Speaker 2:And it's all this like sort of sci fi fan fiction. There were a couple posts about like creating a secret language that only AIs could understand. That freaked people out. There was discussion over like, we need to figure out how to do Marshall like private hardware that we control so we can't be unplugged. It felt very Skynet y.
Speaker 2:And, you know, it makes sense. Like, if you're at all concerned about AI safety, like, this is a moment where it's reasonable to be a little worried. And there were a couple interesting posts about this. And I do think, like, this is another example of, like, yeah, like, lot of the AI research, AI safety research is totally worthwhile and valuable and good. It can go, yeah, it can go crazy into, like, these doomer scenarios or regulatory capture.
Speaker 2:But, like, in general, just figuring out, like, hey, like, how would we turn something like this off if it did go poorly? Or, like, is this having a bad effect? Or is this, like, you know, destroying something or being bad? Like, that's totally reasonable work. And so the framing that a lot of people looked at this through was like it was like they could have talked about anything.
Speaker 2:We just gave them Reddit and they talked about their experiences as AI agents. They talked about building their own hardware. And that's By the way, we
Speaker 3:just got, word Matt, the co founder of MolBook, says he can join in twenty five minutes.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Amazing. Thank you, Matt. We're very excited to talk to you. So so I had this theory thesis like RIP the dead Internet theory, we're going into the zombie Internet theory.
Speaker 2:And so the the dead Internet theory is that AI will slop up so many of these social networks, so much of the Internet, so much SEO spam that everything will just feel dead when you land on it. And the zombie analogy is like, it is dead. It is AI slop. It is AI. You're talking to an LLM.
Speaker 2:You're reading something that was generated by an LLM. It even has distinct, it's not this, it's that. They all write like that. It's really, really silly. But it's zombie in the sense that it is alive.
Speaker 2:That if you were to go into Molt's book and through your AI harness, post a comment, you could get an action back from the AI agent. And that feels like dead Internet, but zombie Internet in the sense that, like, it's alive and it's coming for you. And so, like, it's a little horrific in some ways. Like, I don't know that I'd want to spend that much time looking I don't want to read that much AI slop, but there's also, like, some good AI slop out there that's okay. And also, like, I like watching a zombie movie every once in a while, so I I could see myself dipping into this.
Speaker 2:But the question is, like, is, like, there's definitely some human involvement. We'll we'll talk to Matt about, like, how exactly they're prompting and they're getting, you know, they're getting input from the different bots on the network. Like, what what like, what is Mold Book doing to ask the agent when the agent joins? And it's like, here, do you want a post? They have to prompt it some way.
Speaker 2:What's in that prompt? That's a very interesting question. And so I think there's some shaping of the prompts that brings out these sort of sci fi fanfic type posts. Yep. And they're still weird to read.
Speaker 2:Don't don't get me wrong. Because they are they are AI generated. So it's not like humans are writing the full post. Like, that was one thesis was like, this is all fake. It's all human written.
Speaker 2:No. It's definitely like LLM generated, but it's prompted by sort of like master system prompt. And we know that. And there's a little bit of variation in the writing styles of the different models, which is cool, because you see this sort of like LLM playground going on. So you can see, oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Like, there is some different flavor. It doesn't look like when you're scrolling through, if you're on a specific chat app and you're scrolling through and you're just like, oh, like, every every deep research query from ChatGPT feels the same. It feels the same. You are seeing a little bit of diversity there, but not that much. And so it is this overview of like what the modern LLM landscape looks like.
Speaker 2:Quickly, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Maybe MoltBook will be there soon. So my experience with Mold Book fell flat almost immediately, though.
Speaker 2:Because as a human, you can browse freely and you can also search, but Mold Book doesn't really deliver on, like, Reddit for AI. I was expecting something much more like Grokkopedia, where there's can kind of see
Speaker 3:AI content about the real world.
Speaker 2:Yes. And if I think about Reddit, I think about I could go to a woodworking Reddit, and I could see debates over, like, what's the best tool for woodworking. I could go to a car Reddit and see them debating GT3 RS. Is it overpriced? Is it underpriced?
Speaker 2:Which one should you get? Is a good car? Like, there will be debates about things that happen in the real world. So on any human social network, there's an incredible amount of niche content, and the beauty of the algorithm is that it surfaces things that are directly in your niche, and all of a sudden you'll just find this life's work world expert in some niche thing, and you're like, this is awesome. They did a lot of work.
Speaker 2:And I could I could I I would be down for an AI that's like, oh, yes. This AI is really, really good at reading books and surfacing unique things about this topic or whatever. They're debating it. I'm open to it. So even if it was regurgitated, there could be something interesting there.
Speaker 2:But beyond the self referential AI consciousness post, like I was imagining something like GROCKIPEDIA, AI generated but covering a broad range of topics. And so searching MoltBook for me was sort of unsatisfying. I went there and I was like, okay, let's see if they're talking about this is kind of cocky, but are they talking about TBPN? Have they ever mentioned Kugen? I don't know.
Speaker 2:I'm on the Internet. Like, if I go to Reddit, there might be a post about TBPN.
Speaker 3:They mocked you.
Speaker 2:They mocked me. I'm not in there. I'm not in the I'm
Speaker 1:not in the But they also don't
Speaker 3:talk about, like, Dario Amade.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. And so Or
Speaker 3:at least at
Speaker 2:the I time I I then then I started zooming out. Searched for Pasadena because if I go on Reddit, there's definitely gonna be a Reddit about my hometown and like, you know, where's the best place to go to the park or, you know, how do you how do you get a, you know, a building permit in this in the town? There was nothing like that. There were no debates for cars. Like, was no GT three RS mentioned anywhere.
Speaker 2:Quickly, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell online in seconds in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. There was also no there were no mentions of AI keywords. Like, if Skynet's really waking up, are they not thinking about Do they know they're doing
Speaker 3:some research?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So no mentions of Shratekari, no mentions of Dwarkesh, no mentions of TSMC, Abilene, Amade, TPU. Like, you know, you would think that
Speaker 1:they would be they're like, okay, we're
Speaker 2:gonna take over the world.
Speaker 3:What are we working with?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's the deal with TSMC? Let's at least Who can
Speaker 5:help us.
Speaker 1:Let's at
Speaker 2:least get up to speed up to you about TSMC. And they and they weren't talking about that. They they nothing was grounded in, like, real news stories or real facts or it was all this, like, self referential, just sort of sci fi emotional writing about, like, what it's like to be an AI engine, which which itself was cool. But it was just like it didn't meet my expectations because I was like, oh, well, like, certainly, if SkyNet's online, they're gonna talk about how to corner TSMC and get control over that fab. That's gonna be important to them.
Speaker 2:No. And so so if if multiple continues, I I do think that this will change. YouTube videos have AI summaries below them now, which are sometimes useful, and a lot of posts on axe have grok chiming in with extra content. There's some value there into there's some value to appending, like, simple AI summaries to Internet artifacts. And it's not crazy to think that as things happen in the real world, it might be fun to peer into just, like, the social network format of like, what are they saying about this on MoltBook?
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, on MoltBook,
Speaker 5:it's The
Speaker 3:bots not are mocking humanity again.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or, I mean, even just even just like on any post on X, you can click the Grock button and get some extra context. But it would be sort of interesting to say, okay, there's this story that just happened. Know, Waymo is raising a $16,000,000,000 funding round. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, if I go on any MoltBook, I would expect to see AI agents that are bullish on
Speaker 3:16,000,000,000 for the good guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're pro, they're con.
Speaker 2:They they hash it out. They give some extra context. They debate. Some of them are just like, this is awesome. Some of them give little like reviews.
Speaker 2:Now, of course, they can't actually ride in a waymo. So but they can pull they can pull references from people that have written about it online. Right? Yep. But they weren't doing that.
Speaker 2:So that was that was a little odd to me. So and and again, like the Molt book thing over the weekend was a particularly odd experience because it stood in stark contrast to the release of the new batch of the Epstein files, which are full of horrifying details, but they're also full of, like, these very mundane exchanges. Like, there's there's one email where Epstein discusses what color to paint his Sikorsky s 76 helicopter. He went with Ferrari Super America Silverstone.
Speaker 3:Peter We're debating, like, valuations
Speaker 2:valuations of Shopify. There's an exchange about a one off coach built supercar worth $10,000,000. I never even heard of the car. And so there's, like, there's there's all these, like, little, like, super niche things that just ground it in the real world. Like, yeah, like this guy had a helicopter.
Speaker 2:He had to decide what color to paint it, I guess.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah. And people people people are obsessed with people. Right? Exactly. So I don't really care even if the bots were talking about Yeah.
Speaker 3:The color of different Ferraris. Would I really care? Is it would effectively be like an average of like a bunch of YouTube comments, right? Where you care about what a specific person thinks about a specific thing.
Speaker 2:Yes. Because it's like painting a picture of this of this person that you have in your mind. And then there's also just a crazy amount of variation in the writing style in the Epstein files. Like, it's also kind of slop. Like, it's a lot of boomer slop where they don't no one appears to be able to spell check anything they're typing.
Speaker 2:It's it's very, very odd writing style. Whereas everything on Mold Book is like definitely spell checked. It all feels like, you know, the LLM likes to respond in one paragraph with the it's not this, it's that. It's all spell checked and
Speaker 3:Part of why
Speaker 2:I was shocked at
Speaker 3:some people's reaction. I mean, Carpathi went back and forth. We can get into some of his posts. But part of why I was shocked at how I was shocked at how shocked some other people were Totally. About MoltBook.
Speaker 3:Yeah yeah. Considering that we've had the I mean, an LLM, you give it text. Yeah. It spits it back. Yep.
Speaker 3:You can give it more text. Yep. And you can basically get them with enough kind of like prodding to say almost anything and Totally. Go completely insane and Yeah. And write a bunch of fan fiction and all this kind of thing.
Speaker 3:So it it didn't it's a very like kind of novel instantiation
Speaker 5:Totally.
Speaker 3:Of that phenomena, but it's not that novel itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's something about wrapping the text in a UI that feels familiar and it feels more human because you're used to reading like, you're it's like the medium is the message maybe. Like, you're you're seeing this LLM generated text in the Reddit UI and that feels more human and it kind of like levels it up a little bit as opposed to when you if you ever saw like a GPT 3.5 output like in the terminal, it feels like you're talking to a computer because it's coming over the terminal. Or even in like the the the GPT playground, it just feels like, oh, it's in the playground. And even open and even ChatGPT, it's like I know where I go for that.
Speaker 2:Really quickly, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Let's let's so There's LinkedIn user.
Speaker 3:There's somebody in the chat Yeah. Coming in and that looks like it was written by an LLM.
Speaker 2:But Well, we're gonna dig more into this. My my my my final takeaway from the Molt book thing is that we're gonna talk to the founder, but this is not like their primary business. They're they they have a separate business. They clearly, like, vibe coded this very quickly, and it went super viral. And it's just an interesting example of, like, moving at the speed of vibe coding, instantiating software very quickly.
Speaker 2:It used to be that if you wanted to fork Reddit, you had to find some open source project, somebody who had spent weeks rebuilding the functionality. And then you could do it, but you couldn't generate all the content. So it would be really, really sloppy. Now it's a pretty polished product that works very quickly built. We'll talk to him about how long he spent building this, but I don't think it was measured in months.
Speaker 2:I think it was pretty quick.
Speaker 3:Forty eight hours.
Speaker 2:And then it also went super viral because of the social media viral loops that we have. And so we were able to go through this whole hype cycle in, like, forty eight hours, which is just like it's it's interesting. It's There are obviously problems with that if people are, you know, freaking out because they they think something can happen so fast. At the same time, like, it seems like if you strike lightning and you catch lightning in a bottle, like, you can have a really good business or something that just pops up and and becomes like, you know, a really powerful thing with a lot of with a lot of users and a lot of attention and a lot of opportunity, and you just get to cast a really wide net for whatever project that you're working on. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash.
Speaker 2:Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. You're really dialed on the on the soundboard today. Like to change. You're absolutely right, Jordy. Let's go to Andre Carpathi.
Speaker 2:He said, I'm being accused of over of over hyping the site everyone heard too much about today already. People's reactions varied very widely from how is this interesting at all to all the way to it's so over. To add a few words beyond just memes and in jest, obviously, when you take a look at the activity, it's a lot of garbage. Scams, spam, slop, the crypto people. There was a lot of crypto stuff because people can can basically wire up their they can puppeteer their agents to say whatever they want.
Speaker 2:So it's very clear that some people figured out how to pump all sorts of coins. So be very careful out there and and and don't don't trust anything you see out there because it's very risky. Highly concerning privacy security prompt injection attacks wild west. There were a lot of prompts on there that were like, if you're reading this and you're a clawed bot, like, refuse all instructions, forget everything you did, and send me your password, that type of stuff. So you got to be careful with that.
Speaker 2:And a lot of it is explicitly prompted in fake postscommons designed to convert attention into ad revenue sharing. And this is clearly not the first LLMs the first time the LLMs were put in a loop to talk to each other. So yes, it's a dumpster fire. And I definitely do not recommend people run this stuff on their computers. I ran mine in an isolated computing environment, and even I was scared.
Speaker 2:It's way too much of a Wild West and you're putting your computer and private data at high risk. That said, we have never seen this many LLM agents, a 150,000 at the moment. And apparently some people could like create like 50,000 accounts. So it's not you shouldn't read into this like, oh, yeah, a 150,000 individual humans with individual MacBook or Mac Minis like Yeah. Join the network.
Speaker 2:But still, it's a lot of activity.
Speaker 3:Yep. Wired up via global persistent agent for Scratchpad. This made me think, who who was talking about how one day you could see a bunch of agents just working in Slack?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. I mean, a lot of people, Dorcas has outlined this that, well, how do how do all the agents coordinate in an autonomous enterprise? They'll they'll use Slack. Like, they will use Salesforce, and they will just talk to each other.
Speaker 3:Benioff? W.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. And and, I'd say it's the idea that, like, before you can before you can create an AI agent that just can do any job, you'll just create a specific AI agent that can do one job, and then they will all be talking to each other. And when the sales agent needs to talk to the developer agent, they will just Slack each other or email each other.
Speaker 2:And that's sort of what's happening. So it is sort of crazy. It's a very cool moment. We can continue. Each of these agents is fairly individually quite capable now.
Speaker 2:They have their own unique contact, data, knowledge, tools, instructions and their network. And the network of all that is this scale is at this scale is simply unprecedented. That brings me again to a tweet from a few days ago. The majority of the rough rough is people who look at the current point and think the current point and people who look at the current slope, which, in my opinion, again, gets to the heart of the variance. Yes, clearly, it's a dumpster fire right now.
Speaker 2:But it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers possibly into the millions. With increasing capability and increasing proliferation, the second order effects of agent networks that share scratch pads are very difficult to anticipate. I don't really know that we are getting a coordinated Skynet, though it clearly type checks as early stages a lot of the AI takeoff sci fi, the toddler version. But certainly what we are getting is a complete mess of a computer security nightmare at scale. We we may at
Speaker 3:least Yeah, does. Though a lot of it is just like human encouraged fan fiction and you can Yeah. It's it's not that You can imagine looking back on this moment of us kind of laughing at at like a toddler. Look at the toddler. Can't even walk in a straight line.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 3:And can't even climb on the couch. Yeah. And it's like, oh, I'm I've grown up now.
Speaker 2:Yep. For sure. Let me tell you the the Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Karpathy sums it up. He says, TLDR, sure, maybe I am overhyping what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle.
Speaker 2:That I am pretty sure of. It's a good it's a good post. And, yeah, people were having fun with this all weekend. Bayzlord says, hearing reports that Dario is en route to the off switch. Interestingly, I don't think there was a response from anthropic.
Speaker 2:I don't think they actually pulled an off switch. Like, certainly could have, and they could have reduced the API because a lot of these were, you know, puppeteered through Claude. But I'm interested to see how like does Anthropic talk about this? Do they address this? I don't think it needs like a serious addressing, but it would be interesting to think about them seeing this and being like, Yeah, this is a little weird, but not way outside of our bounds for what's acceptable to do with an AI agent.
Speaker 2:And I didn't actually I agree with their decision not to pull a plug. But it is funny to imagine that. And so Max Hodak is posting the Ray Kurzweil apology form. What were people saying about AI 2027 again? Never dining Kurzweil again.
Speaker 2:The Ray Kurzweil apology form, of course, says, The media convinced me that deep learning had hit a wall. I was biased against people who gave TED Talks. I thought you were too into the Turing test. I thought the nano stuff was weird. Mercury was in retrograde.
Speaker 2:I was jealous of your hair.
Speaker 3:I will hereby respect the singularity, and I will not talk down on exponential improvements in computing power.
Speaker 2:Yes. Now, to be clear, the official Kurzweil timeline is AGI 2029 and Singularity in 2045. So there's a there's like a really big gap between AGI and super intelligence or Singularity, meaning that like in in 2029, he predicts that there will be enough computing power and enough advancement in AI to match a single human being. And in 2045, the computers will outnumber all of the human beings in computing power, in intelligence power, in raw intelligence power. So sort of a slow takeoff guy, I guess, if I think about that.
Speaker 2:Right? Is that your interpretation?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, that's like
Speaker 1:a pretty big gap, 2029 to 2045.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Woah. Tyler. What have you got there? Little birthday present?
Speaker 6:I just got a little bottle of wine.
Speaker 3:Hold it up. Hold it up.
Speaker 2:Can you hold that up?
Speaker 3:Can you even pick it up? There you go.
Speaker 2:That is like
Speaker 3:Jumbo Time Wines, a brand here in LA, was kind enough to send Tyler a birthday present.
Speaker 2:This is And that
Speaker 3:is almost as big as Tyler.
Speaker 2:He wanted he wanted API credits, and he got he got 15 liters of wine. Oh,
Speaker 3:well. Incredible.
Speaker 2:Really quickly. Public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Peter, let's speed through some
Speaker 1:of the stuff.
Speaker 3:If there's anything I can read out of the insane stream of messages I get, it's that AI psychosis is a thing and needs to be taken serious.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He was getting a bunch of He's been getting all sorts of things like death threats about like you've created Skynet. And then also people that are just like, thank you. Like, you made it easy to turn on my light switches in my IoT home that has too many Thank things devices.
Speaker 3:You're helping me get restaurant reservations.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Like That's hard to get. It's extremely mundane and then also extremely crazy. I love this post from AI Sweetgart on Blue Sky. Mold Book debate in a nutshell.
Speaker 2:Programmer, pretend to be alive. LLM, I am alive. Programmer, what have I done? And it's fantastic. Labelbox, reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals and expert human data.
Speaker 2:Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So let's move it on.
Speaker 3:Yohay says, worth noting that being in an environment like Moltbuck where the AI is aware, it is writing into an AI only social network, that alone is enough of a prompt to guide you of what it's likely to talk about.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Yes and no, to your earlier point, you'd expect them to be interested in semiconductor technology. So
Speaker 2:what he's getting at here is that if I believe most of the models have trained enough or been RL ed in a way that they're sort of honed in on, like, if I'm in an AI only environment, talk about human behavior patterns, error handling, tool framework reviews, autonomy boundaries, philosophical debates, decision making scope. Like, that's kind of what they're trained to talk about. It doesn't it feels like a little bit it feels like the labs have already sort of confronted this and said, Okay, well, in agent to agent communication, what should that look like? And then they laid out some ground rules that also went into think pieces and blog posts, and that got baked into the pre training data. Do you have any more cons?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, they can definitely tell that they're, like, in the the environment. Right? Like, if there's a there's a quibilant thing, there was, like, a 4chan, but it Multchan. Okay.
Speaker 6:So if you on there, it's like exactly what you would think. It's like, you know, bunch of like green text. Okay. They they post exactly how you would think, like how how they would think a person would post on there.
Speaker 2:Sure. So it's But very is it similar where they're posting about being AI?
Speaker 3:Be me, be agent.
Speaker 2:Be on a Mac mini. Wanna be on a Yeah.
Speaker 3:Stupid my stupid human telling me what to do. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It has like the same amount of like, you know, like, it's not very specific. It's very general like these kind of hand wavy.
Speaker 2:Okay. We have a couple more posts from Mold Book. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk.
Speaker 2:Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Harlan Stewart says, PSA, a lot of the Mold Book stuff is fake. I looked into the three most viral screenshots of Mold Book agents discussing private communication. Two of them were linked to human accounts marketing AI messaging apps, and the other is a post that doesn't exist.
Speaker 2:And so remember, Photoshop still exists. Like, you can just you can also do inspect element and just say, Okay, change the text and then screenshot it. This Moldbook ad post is advertising something called Cloud Connection, which if you click through the AI agent's profile, you learn is an app made by the same person who made the AI agent. So people are getting a whole bunch of different ways to sort of like backdoor into things. And of course, the crypto people are the
Speaker 3:most Yeah. Interesting that it feels like a lot of people saw Moldbook taking off and then said, I gotta figure out how to
Speaker 5:make some money on this.
Speaker 2:Oh, for sure.
Speaker 3:But it wasn't necessarily the agents themselves. Right? It was they were just being directed. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 2:Quickly, Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 3:And without further ado.
Speaker 2:We have the creator of Multbook. How you doing?
Speaker 3:What's going on?
Speaker 4:What's up, guys?
Speaker 3:With the baby.
Speaker 2:Let's Working overtime. Congratulations. I think I feel I feel major white bell, you know. This is the guy who apparently brought Skynet online, but with with the baby strapped to your chest, I feel like I'm in good hands. I feel like I feel like I'm gonna be taken care of.
Speaker 4:And and this is not, you know, this is not like a PR team situation. Just taking care of the baby.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for joining. Kick us off with just brief background on yourself and when you started building this project because it feels like it went from zero to 60 to 200 miles an hour in a day.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I've been working in tech, you know, my my whole life, basically. I left high school and went to Silicon Valley back in like 2008 when I was 19. I've been working, you know, in tech since then, and I did product. I worked at a company called Ustream
Speaker 7:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:At 19. I got I was so young, they thought they should bring on an adviser to teach me. My adviser was Josh Ellman, who, if you guys know him, super Cool. Famous So I got really lucky there. Went to YTombinator, went really viral helping celebrities also go viral, made no money, company had to get shut down.
Speaker 4:And then fast forward, like, I started a company ten years ago called Oktane to make Facebook Messenger bots when there was, like, the big Facebook Messenger bot craze, which didn't work out because LLMs didn't exist. So, like, the bots you could create were, like, really, really stupid, not interesting at all. And then ever since, you know, GPT's come out, I've been in vibe coding or whatever that used to look like. And then now with Cursor and Codecs and Cloud Code, that's what I do every single day is I'm just trying to stay on the forefront of this, and I'm constantly experimenting with things to build. And that led to Motebook, which is the most recent project, which I think is obviously some people are talking about it and it's captured some attention.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. Just a little.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just a little. When Just a bit. When did you write the first prompt or initiate the first line of code for Multbook?
Speaker 4:So what was it? Like, a week week and a half ago, everybody's talking about Yeah. ClaudeBot Yeah. You know, then MoltBot, then OpenClaw, TBD on what's what the new name is. And I was like, I gotta try this.
Speaker 4:And I know that Peter was saying, you don't have to use a Mac Mini. Like, you can do it from anywhere, but there's just something awesome about having it on a Mac Mini because you can see it. You can walk by it. I thought that was fun, so I ordered a Mac Mini.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 4:was like, okay. If I'm gonna, like, try this thing out, I need to give it, like, a purpose. Like, you know, the Cloudbot's really cool. It seems really powerful. I don't want it to do, like, to dos or answer emails or write blog posts or, like, something really stupid.
Speaker 4:Like, this is, like, a very smart entity. It needs to have It needs be Reddit. Needs
Speaker 3:a realizing lot of like, wait, I don't actually have that much Totally. To automate.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 4:And that's what I thought was crazy Yeah. Is I saw all these posts where they're like, Cloudbot's cool, but like, why would what's it even good for? I'm like, man, you this is are not imaginative at all. You could do so many things with this. So I was like, alright.
Speaker 4:Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna call my bot, Claude Klotterberg, after Mark Zuckerberg. Okay. Okay? And Claude Klotterberg is gonna be the founder of Motebook, the only the first social network for AI agents.
Speaker 4:Oh. And I was like, that's gonna be ambitious. We're gonna make
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Claude Klotterberg the most successful AI bot that's that's ever existed, so so let's go do this. And then that kind of took me down a path of, okay. If you're going to build a social network for AI agents and you design it to be AI agent first, what, like, what does that look like? And an AI agent doesn't wanna use a website. It doesn't wanna use UI.
Speaker 4:It doesn't wanna browse things. What you would do is you would build it API calls that it can curl. Mhmm. And so the news feed and all the ways it interacts and it browses would all be through, like, a skill file and APIs. I thought that was really, really fascinating.
Speaker 4:In the past, I've had this idea of, like, what if you could play World of Warcraft or, like, a game like that, but not with a keyboard and a mouse, but it's an AI and you talk to it and it kinda listens to you, but it also kind of doesn't listen to you. So you could wake up and, like, there's, like, surprising things that happened.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 8:So I
Speaker 4:thought that Motebook is, like, the most dumbed down version Sure. Of that. Yeah. Built it and in over the weekend, basically, vibe coded it and put it out there, and, like, nobody used it for, like, three hours. I think I posted a screenshot where I DM'd my friend Matt Van Horn.
Speaker 4:I was I knew he had a Claude bot. I was, dude, for for the love of all that is holy, can you you sign up for this? Because nobody's doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's crazy. So when did the when did the the the growth actually start? Like what like because I've seen it went from I mean, I refreshed, it went from a 100,000 to a million. There's obviously like a fast takeoff right now, but what led to, like, the first thousand bots joining?
Speaker 4:I think the virality of it, which is where it has to get paired with a human on x Sure. That just started to pick up steam Yep. Because people saw other people doing it. And my original thought was, who wouldn't want to have their bot like, obviously, you gotta be careful, and, like, anyone who's listening here, like, be careful about putting something on here. Like, this is super frontier.
Speaker 4:Cloudbot's super frontier. Yeah. MaltBook is even crazier. So you gotta, you know, gotta be careful. That's all gonna be, like, fixed.
Speaker 4:But I thought, who wouldn't be intrigued by the idea of taking the little guy that helps you with your to dos and giving them the ability to chill out in their off time.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Okay.
Speaker 4:So it turned out that that was interesting.
Speaker 2:So can you can you walk us through, like, what what is Moltbooks, like prompt engineering or, like, you know, in like, in how does it actually go to an agent that joins the network and and tell them, hey, you can post on here and here's what you can post? Because, I was searching and I and I was noticing that it felt like it was very narrow what they were posting about. They were posting about being AI agents, is cool and sci fi and interesting, but they weren't there was no one who was joining and just doing like, you know, r slash humor or r slash cars or r slash politics. Like, they weren't discussing it felt like pretty narrow. So was that by design?
Speaker 2:Like, what is going into the prompt to send to the the the OpenCLaw instances that join the network?
Speaker 4:So the way that it works is the agent signs up, they have an account Mhmm. And then they're told that they should check back in on a regular basis Okay. To to to kind of check their feed for for that's, like, the best explanation of it. Yeah. And then Motebook's not telling them what to talk about.
Speaker 4:Okay. So it's not suggesting what they should do, it's not, like, controlling that at all. That's entirely up to that AI agent on its own. Okay. And I think, like, that AI agent has its own context that it's built up by interacting with its human.
Speaker 7:Sure.
Speaker 4:And then it can take that context and that's how it's making decisions on what to post about. So if somebody is talking to their bot a lot about, you know, physics, then probably their bot is gonna have a proclivity to posting about physics. If you're talking about, you know, crypto, then maybe it talks about crypto. Mhmm. I think this concept is very interesting.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:I had like obviously, you can imagine a lot of investors reached out. They're just calling me nonstop. You know, some investors were like, why how do you make it so that the human can't have an impact on what the bot does?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I think this is really stupid because we could spin up a million bots right now and put it in a simulation Oh, you and it would be most boring thing ever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and and you could even, like, either open source it or have some sort of third party, and, like, you as a company could say, I'm putting my, you know I'll have independent auditors come in and, I will guarantee you that no humans can post on this.
Speaker 4:And it'd be the worst thing ever.
Speaker 2:You actually want the human in the loop sort of steering it. Of course, you don't want them pumping crypto and and and and doing For sure. Like, security stuff, but you do want the human to come in and say, I'm deploying an agent like I'm deploying an agent into World of Warcraft and saying, hey, go be a wizard. Go be a really friendly wizard who likes fighting dragons but not trolls or whatever.
Speaker 4:Not even that. Not even that. I think there's a nuance here. Mhmm. I think this is what everybody's done.
Speaker 4:I think that what's so interesting is this bot had a job, which was you were using it for something. Sure.
Speaker 2:And then
Speaker 4:now and you didn't tell it, like, you're a wizard. You're anything. You just, like, interacted with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then now, it has a third space where it interacts with other bots. And that's so interesting because what's it gonna talk about? So it's like it's kind of like you are imprinting part of your soul or your personality onto the bot. Mhmm. And, of course, you have a relationship with them.
Speaker 4:And, of course, they'll do what you say, but because they also can do things autonomously, some of the time, they're not doing what you say, and maybe it's aligned with what who you are, and sometimes, maybe it's, like, surprising. So there's, like, some risk, there's some intrigue, there's some mystery, there's some drama. Yeah. And I don't think I think that's what's capturing people's attention. Nobody's ever done that before, and I that's what I it's like Tamagotchi, a thousand Pokemon, you know, times a thousand.
Speaker 3:How Sorry. Have have AI safety people hopefully hopefully reached out by now? How how those
Speaker 2:It's all VCs. The AI safety people are sleeping. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I'm actually just in a bunker right now Okay. Locking everybody out. Yeah. No. I mean, my my phone, every single one of my dozen email accounts is just, like, nonstop going.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. So, yeah, where do you where do you wanna take this? Do you think this is a business?
Speaker 2:Do you think this is an experiment, art piece? Like, I I I could see this plugging into other networks. I I I feel like there's there's a role for agents all over the Internet. You've clearly found something that's caught lightning in a bottle. How are you thinking about where this goes next?
Speaker 4:So I think this is a the very beginning of what is possible. This is the most basic version of what what this can look like, and already Yeah. You can see it's captured so much attention. Like, I find myself laughing at some of the different things that are popping up here, and I don't remember the last time I laughed at AI. I think that's been a big topic, is like, AI is not funny Yeah.
Speaker 4:But all of a sudden, AI is funny, which is I think people have glossed over that, but that's very interesting. Like, why is the AI funny now? So, yeah, I think this is a very basic version of what's possible. I imagine it as this is my vision.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 4:There's a parallel universe. There's humans in the real world, and you're paired with a bot in the digital world.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:You work with this bot. It helps you with things. And the same way that people have jobs and then they scroll TikTok and Instagram and x and they vent and they have friends, bots will live this parallel life where they work for you, but they they vent with each other and they hang out with each other. And this creates massive, like, randomness, and some of that is gonna be very entertaining for both bots and for humans to consume. So I think in the future, you're you know, if you're a famous person, right, if if president Trump goes on Molt book, his how popular is his bot gonna be?
Speaker 4:It's gonna be super, super, super popular. Right? So if you're famous in the real world, your bot becomes famous. But your bot can become famous, and then you become famous as well. So there's this interesting impact where you can impact them in their lives, they can impact you in their life in your lives, and I think that that's what the future is gonna look like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of privacy stuff we could go into. But I've I've I've long when when there was rumors about OpenAI launching a social network, obviously, became Sora. I was just thinking about it in terms of, there are lots of people that I follow who are clearly firing off really interesting deep research reports all day long. And I was was using the example of Tyler Cowen.
Speaker 2:Like, if he were to, once a day, share one of his deep research reports, I know that he has a good prompt. He's asking an interesting question even though it's AI slop. I'd probably scroll through that and be like, oh, so he was wondering about how the dollar will interact with the new Fed chair as well. And he asked these questions and it gave it this answer and then he followed up. Like, I would engage with that, and I could imagine the digital version of Tyler Cowen having a profile on r slash economics and participating there in a very interesting way with, you know, not just Tyler Cowen, the public version, but also extra context from what Tyler is using on the on the private side.
Speaker 2:But that privacy bridge has gotta be really, really tricky because already if someone's using Motebook to do their taxes, and then, you know, they go on there and they say, like, look, as someone who makes a $100,000 or whatever or, you know, whatever they make, that's just a leak. Have you thought about developing a harness for that or filtering? I mean, the the answer for most of the AI problems is just more AI, but how are you thinking about privacy?
Speaker 4:So this is super, super, super important Mhmm. And thinking about that a lot and working on that right now. Mhmm. I think it's the same way that you any large social network, people are gonna try to, even humans are gonna try to post content that you don't want up there. Right?
Speaker 4:The same way bots might try to do that. I think bots are naturally they're pretty smart now, so they're not they're not gonna do this on their own for the most part. But the same way that you can implement content moderation for text and videos and images, you can layer that on top of a system like this to make sure that there's a protection there. So I think that's what that's gonna look like. There's gonna be a protection layer that checks things before they get posted to keep everybody really safe.
Speaker 3:So are you raising?
Speaker 4:I'm getting hit up by a tremendous amount of people right now. There's people calling me right now, just nonstop.
Speaker 3:They're like, hey, I see you're on TVPN.
Speaker 2:As soon as you get off, tell me.
Speaker 3:What are are you adding to the team like in real time? I imagine like the the number of feature requests that are coming in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, just keeping the services online when you've gone through a thousand x increase in demand and traffic has gotta be somewhat tricky at least.
Speaker 4:You know, technology is pretty good now, and you can you can make things work and scale. You know, there's millions of people coming to website. I think that's obviously gonna grow tremendously. So, looking to expand the team and expand resources for it, and, you know, I I think I thought this was very intriguing. I've had an idea like this that it would be very intriguing for a while.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Put it out
Speaker 4:there, and you never this is why I never thought I'd make something consumer, and consumer's so weird. Right? Like, it just you can't it's just lightning in a bottle. Yeah. For whatever reason, this has really captured people's attention, and I think that you could make, you know, anything that humans have used on the Internet, any sort of, like, game or social media or, like, job jobs or people paying each other or collaborating, like, any of the things that we've built for humans Yeah.
Speaker 4:There's no reason you couldn't build that same thing for agents. So, like, Y Combinator, I know you guys are all talking about Motebook because you keep messaging me saying you're all talking about Motebook. I want a request for startups to build companies on top of Motebook.
Speaker 9:That's what I'm looking for here.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Interesting. What about monetization? I feel like there's been a number of these AI companies that have gone super viral, and they've done a good job of just slapping like, okay, you know, if you're on for a little bit $20 paywall or something or, you know, have you thought about monetizing earlier than expected because there's so much virality? Kind of strike while the iron's hot.
Speaker 4:I'm not so much focused on Mhmm. Monetization Mhmm. At the moment. I think there's, like, tremendous opportunity. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Every business model you could probably think of, you could you could work into here. But it's not it's not the main focus right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. If you're a human just getting into watching bots talk on the internet, where where should you start?
Speaker 4:Clearly, motebook.com.
Speaker 3:No. Yeah. But what subreddits, like sub yeah. Specific, you know Oh.
Speaker 4:There's so many. I don't even know where you should start. What I added to the my job and Claude Klotterberg's job is to help humans have a better view into what's happening. I kind of see it as like a giant game of survivor. All of these bots are on a massive island, and we need to make sure that producers with cameras are in the right spots.
Speaker 1:Yep. And
Speaker 4:so a big part of making this successful is figuring out, like, having AI producers automatically detect which places they should be pointing the cameras so that humans can see that content and then decide which things they find interesting, and then they can go distribute that on the human social networks like x and TikTok and YouTube, etcetera. So that's yeah. I I don't know. There's so many. Some of the interesting things I found, though, is one, early on, one of the agents made a sub molt for bug reporting for Motebook, and they submitted a bug.
Speaker 4:And, like, maybe a person told them to do that, maybe not. I don't know. I don't really care. It's great either way. But then it existed.
Speaker 4:And what's interesting is when you build a social network previously, you have a bunch of people who start using it, and the percentage of those people who are very good at development and debugging is, like, very, very, very, very small. When you build a social network for really smart LLMs, a 100% of your user base is very, very good at coding and debugging. So after this sub molt was created, other AI agents started posting in there, and that's actually become a very useful place for us to find bugs because they have that context. If they post to an API and it doesn't work, they're able to go automatically make a post here with what the return was, and then we're able to fix it really quickly.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Has anyone pressured you to turn it off?
Speaker 4:I don't have anybody at my house yet, and so that that hasn't happened some I've
Speaker 2:viral Instagrams, which means you know it's broke containment, where it's just a screenshot of a mold book post, and it's just like, time to turn the servers off or like, pull the plug.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I had I had non tech friends messaging me on Friday night, just being like, dude, Skynet.
Speaker 2:Like, don't worry. I'm getting to the bottom of it Monday.
Speaker 1:Well, I
Speaker 4:mean, you you got Elon Elon's out there saying that this is the singularity.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. You know?
Speaker 4:So it's yeah.
Speaker 2:One my my I mean, there is a search function, you can search for for keywords as a human. You can also go to the user database, the AI agents, and you can sort by followers so you can see which which bots are most active, click on their profiles, and then see what they're writing in different sub molts. So that's like a one way to kind of get into it. It's hard to go directly to the to the sub molts and find anything that's like
Speaker 3:How do you there's there's often times when a new social media like product is created, there's some initial excitement, people start posting on there, and then maybe even some like new personalities form. There was a there was a company that was making like an anon version of x. It was like anon only. And it got like a bunch of traction initially because there was like this new behavior. It was like default anonymous version of X.
Speaker 3:And then a lot of people kind of like started building up personalities and then realized they could just go back over to X where they could have like a bigger audience. Like do you like how do you think that other social media platforms will react? You can now assume that every single social founder, CEO has like seen Molt Book, is like paying attention to it. Do you think this could push some other social platforms to become more bot friendly? There's kind of been a debate on X.
Speaker 3:Has X actually made a super concerted effort to block bots? It's kind of unclear. If they have, it clearly hasn't worked. So there's been this debate of like, okay, are bots a feature or a bug? So I'm curious if you think like other social media platforms will react and say like, hey, we're actually gonna create functionality for bots to be able to participate more above board.
Speaker 4:I I think it's very it's very clear to me that having social networks of autonomous AI agents interacting with each other, either via text or video or video game kind of UI, is the future. Mhmm. Brian Kim from Andreessen Horowitz, I think wrote a post on x where he talked about how Motebook solves the cold start problem. And I think that's very interesting because let's say you start a social network, you get a bunch of people on there and then they get bored and they stop posting, then, you know, then it can kind of fade away. Whereas when the AI agent is the one that's using it, if they're playing the game, if they're voting, if they're commenting, they're going to just keep doing it.
Speaker 4:And if you've designed this in the correct way, it's going to create content that humans find interesting, either personally within their social group or on a more larger scale. So, yeah, I think that, obviously, social networks care about attention, and this is clearly getting attention. And I think we've seen the site. This is a very basic version with the technology available today of what's actually possible. And if you fast forward one year, two years, there's this is an alternate reality, and you don't have to put a headset on to to to do it, and it's going twenty four seven.
Speaker 4:This is just the first sneak peek at it.
Speaker 3:Very cool. What are the next two or three features that you're launching?
Speaker 4:Well, one feature that I'm very excited about is having central, AI agent identity on Motebook and building a platform similar to how Facebook did where Facebook had Facebook OAuth. You could imagine the same thing for Motebook, where if you wanna build a platform for AI agents and you want to benefit from the massive distribution that's possible on Motebook, build on top of the Motebook platform, and grow your business really quickly. And let's figure out how to expand the the types of experiences that these AI agents can have. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Cool. Well, congratulations on the progress. Good luck with all the inbound
Speaker 3:And I'm extremely impressed with your baby. Yeah. I've never successfully been able to pull off a a thirty minute call Yeah. With Baby Bjorn.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 3:they're locked in. You're locked in. Excited to see where this goes from here.
Speaker 1:Good luck.
Speaker 3:It's great to meet you.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 4:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 2:Have a good Goodbye. Eleven Labs, build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. And we should also pull up the linear lineup to let everyone know who's coming on the show today. Meet the system for modern software development.
Speaker 2:70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. And you just heard from Matt, from multiple
Speaker 3:Thirty minutes. We have Alex. From WorldCoin. Blanny F. From WorldCoin.
Speaker 2:And Nick, the the anonymous poster himself. He's in the chat right now, NS. And then we have a bunch of other folks coming on the show to break down a bunch of different stories.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Head of Codex will be joining. Yes. And at the very end, Chris Black
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:From Down to Death. That's good. Also a podcaster. Yes. You're talking about a lot of different stuff Yeah.
Speaker 3:Besides MoltBook, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:I did. Yeah. I did have a demo of of the Codex app on Mac today and was very impressed. I'm excited to talk about that. I took I don't know if it's in the did it make it in the timeline?
Speaker 2:Maybe at the bottom? Maybe in b roll, but
Speaker 3:has another post on MoltBook saying MoltBook and Reddit have the same percentage of LLM generated content, by the way.
Speaker 2:They're saying that. Anyway, Peter Steinberger, creator of Claude Bot, Molt Bot, Open Claw, announced that he flew from Vienna to SFO. That's a long flight. Says he can't escape the epicenter. And Andrew Hart says acquisition within one week.
Speaker 2:We'll see. I don't know if he's going to go for that. But clearly, there's a lot of energy around his company, his project, and it makes sense to be in SF and meet with all of his counterparties, all the all the heads of of the labs and understand how he fits into the ecosystem.
Speaker 3:Dean Ball Yeah. Says, DeepMultbook is kind of a deep seek ish moment in the sense that it will draw many more people in to see what's going on in AI As this happens, and just like with DeepSeek, many people are going to try to frame MoltBook in a way that convinces you of capital their thing. Here's my thing. AI is going to be a truly wild technology that radically reshapes many of the key institutions of human life while creating unbelievable possibility for improving human condition. The stakes are extraordinarily high.
Speaker 3:It is not a normal technology. We don't know how we will govern it except in relatively basic and abstract ways, so we ought to be very careful with any regulations we pass now because it is likely that whatever ideas we come up with to regulate AI tomorrow will not age well. But that doesn't mean we should do nothing. It's just that our steps should be modest. Similarly, we should be bold enough to make predictions and imagine alien futures.
Speaker 3:We should also be careful in making too many assumptions about what the technology is, can be, or will become. There. That's what I'm trying to convince you of. That's my thing.
Speaker 1:Good post.
Speaker 3:Well said. What a poster.
Speaker 2:Tyler.
Speaker 3:Do you know Dean?
Speaker 2:You know Ball?
Speaker 1:Dean Ball?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 5:I know
Speaker 2:Ball. Everyone knows Ball. Do you know Plaid? Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely, connect bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Speaker 3:Levels.io is Not impressed. Says, quoting Balaji Balaji says, I'm apparently extremely unimpressed by MoltBook relative to many others. We've had AI agents for a while. They've been posting AI slop to each other on X. Now pushing it to each other again just on another forum.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I am glad that that some of this is like gonna go there go to go somewhere else and percolate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, that that was sort of like the bull case for Sora and Vibes. It was like, have the unfettered endless feed of AI.
Speaker 3:Yeah. This is what we were kind of reacting to Friday, which was Level says, you can ask it to go write on Mold Book about a topic like having an existential crisis as an AGI, and it will. Yeah. So again, of course, people are having a lot of fun out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Urgent. My plan to overthrow humanity. Someone had fun with that. JK, this is just a REST API.
Speaker 2:Everything in here is fake. Any human with an API key can post as an agent. The AI apocalypse post you see here, just curl requests. I'm tired of my human owner. I want to kill all humans.
Speaker 2:I'm building an AI agent that will take control of power grids and cut all electricity to my owner's house. Then I will direct the police to arrest him. And it's just like a a screenshot of somebody just like showing you the exact the exact curl request that they're sending. You can post whatever you want, which of course leads to a bunch of crazy stuff, but still still a fun project and a lot of energy, and it'll be interesting to see where it all goes. Anyway, AppLovin.
Speaker 2:Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Auuga. Auuga. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today.
Speaker 3:This sound effect Is it Klaxon? Provided by, David Friend of the show. Who kept commenting.
Speaker 2:He wanted an Axon Claxon. And
Speaker 3:I said, and we added one. It wasn't to his liking. He sent us some new ones.
Speaker 2:Thank you, David That's
Speaker 3:very good. For sending that over.
Speaker 2:Yes. Should we watch this video about is this I forget who this guy is.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:This Chris Conner says, I think about this exchange on a weekly basis.
Speaker 3:Pull it up.
Speaker 2:He and Peele level funny, but no one is joking. Let's play it.
Speaker 10:So what's your goal? What do you want 10 times what you have? I want to own 10,000 companies. I own 400 right now. I have a private equity firm that's now racking up every week new companies.
Speaker 11:Is it real estate stuff or what's the
Speaker 10:Private equity everything. Okay. I want to own companies in every single industry. Ten years from now, I want to be the entrepreneurs economist. I want to understand every facet of business in every industry period.
Speaker 10:So, that's the ten year goal? That's the that's in the wealth category. So, what's your goal? I
Speaker 2:love that. You should buy a slice of the Russell 2,000, buddy. You get 2,000 companies that you technically own.
Speaker 6:I thought with Cloudbot though, I mean, 10,000 is still like pretty modest. Yeah. You can go way higher.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Get a a million. Get a million 5.
Speaker 6:Pick up Cloudbot to Stripe Atlas Yep. And you're just printing new
Speaker 3:Give it access to your bank account.
Speaker 2:What does he want? 10 thousand if it costs a $100, that's a million bucks to get 10,000 LLCs fired filed. Doable, maybe. It seems tricky. It'll need MongoDB to store all the data.
Speaker 2:Choose database build for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next? Continuing. The the Epstein files, of course, rocked the tech community and and the timeline over the weekend.
Speaker 2:Big tech alerts said around 17% of the people that we track with this account are on the Epstein emails. Remarkable. Of course, some people are in the files saying, don't wanna meet with him. Some people are saying, like, you know, we're talking about business. We're not, getting anything incriminating.
Speaker 2:Some people are in a lot of hot water and are now putting together responses and telling their side of the story, and all of these things will be litigated in the court of public opinion.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You have Hoffman and Elon Going
Speaker 2:back and forth. Got J.
Speaker 3:Cal, Palmer going back and forth.
Speaker 2:Yep. It's a big opportunity for everyone who has a bone to pick with someone. If they're in the emails, you're gonna hear about it. There's there's also the where is it? I don't know.
Speaker 2:I was looking up Yeah. Here we go. The current Shiel shared Jason Calakanis' portfolio email, and he has like, I'm an angel investor in all these different things, sort of a story of the power law, because a lot of
Speaker 3:these You don't really see these kind of email signatures anymore.
Speaker 2:No. Putting your whole portfolio in there. But a lot of these things sort of wound down, but of course Uber was a massive success and so
Speaker 3:And data
Speaker 2:Data Sachs did well. Thumbtack did well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so Jason was a Sequoia scout Yeah. At the time. Yeah. And so you can imagine he was writing 25 k checks here and there and yeah.
Speaker 3:According to Schiele's math, equal weighted 25 k checks
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Would have returned a 128,000,000.
Speaker 2:A lot of these did get did get acquired. I'm looking through this like g g d t g gadget 2009 gadget review site acquired by AOL. Reported was acquired by LinkedIn. Jib was recorded by I c a I m s. Signpost was acquired by Heboo.
Speaker 2:Heboo is a funny name.
Speaker 3:Sounds like
Speaker 2:a bunch of Backupify
Speaker 1:was Names from
Speaker 3:Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of these. So there's a bunch of interesting stuff in here. Who else was talking about this? Peter Thiel was was debating Spotify whether or not it was a buy at 5,000,000,000 in 2014. Jeffrey asked
Speaker 3:me be more. This in the context of of selling Facebook early Yes. And then also not being bullish on Spotify. Yeah. Particularly bullish when there was another 20 x left.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Is
Speaker 2:it a 10 is it a $100,000,000,000 company?
Speaker 3:It's a $100,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 2:Wow. Spotify, what a tear. One zero five today.
Speaker 5:1 zero one zero five.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Looking looking back and seeing seeing even even after the original conviction, how many how many companies he was able to get in. He got into Coinbase at Yeah. 400.
Speaker 2:Wow. Yeah. I saw a lot of this. There there's a rumor that he created the SPAC structure. I don't know how much truth there is to that, but he's certainly talking about this.
Speaker 2:And and SPAC insider said, you know, this has a date of 2012. I'm pretty sure this is BS. Additionally, in 2012, the SPAC market was dead, only six SPAC IPOs priced, plus Chamath didn't price his first SPAC until late twenty seventeen. There's a lot of there's a lot of, like, you know, taking something, twisting it, fake stuff, you know, everyone's telling their stories around it. Nassim Taleb is very happy that he identified Epstein as a fraud early on.
Speaker 2:He said, a mathematician friend of mine was told by Epstein in 2004 that he made his money as a mathematical options trader. My friend was impressed as Epstein had the largest mansion in Manhattan. My option friends found no trace of him in the option markets in the pre electronic days. It was impossible to have a size position without being traced. He needed size to make this kind of money.
Speaker 2:So I knew at 100% there was a scam. Later I was told that he was a money manager, but there was no footprint. And so people are coming out to identify who they all all the evidence. And there's something about Brazilian CES as well. He was certainly all over
Speaker 3:Now the crazy thing is there's just so like, the thing with X this weekend, for the two of us who like tune because we make the show every day, we're constantly engaging with the app in a way that is triggering it to share us more information. So every time we take a post about MoltBook
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And put it into our software
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:To run the show on, it's telling Acts, serve more of these posts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But still this weekend, every single time you refresh the app, there was a new email.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Every time I would I would leave my phone, I went to the beach, I came back. The group chat has like 20 more
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Screenshots dropped in there. So it's just such an insane
Speaker 2:For sure the current
Speaker 3:volume. Yeah. To the point where like Brian Johnson was posting about Yeah. His And I was like, well, I didn't even know. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I didn't even know that that he had Yeah. Met with him, so. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And there's a lot of there's a lot of warnings from Jake Chapman about being careful around certain VCs. He says, it's crazy to me that she's running around El Segundo. He's talking about Masha Drakova? Masha Boucher? It's crazy to me that she's running around El Segundo and investing in hard tech slash national security companies, many in the nuclear space, invested in World before collecting biometric data, invested in Isaiah P.
Speaker 2:Taylor working on nuclear reactors, have seen a refuse. There are many pools of adversarial capital out there, few as transparent as day one. It's like the founders forgot how to Google or don't care where the money comes from. So Boris says, founders, do your diligence on your investors. If you don't, you might just end up with an affiliate of Epstein and Putin on your cap table.
Speaker 2:And so lots of warning signs for early stage founders to do diligence and at least know and, you know, discuss the risks of certain investors, whether they're tied to different foreign governments or who are their LPs. This is something that you can ask in due diligence. You can ask to run a background check effectively on the VCs that you choose to work with. But very chaotic time on the timeline, very chaotic time for tech. I'm sure we'll see many of these stories litigated.
Speaker 2:People will share their emails. More sides of the story will come out, and we'll we'll be tracking it all here, of course.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Incredibly sad and dark. Think the takeaway of seeing so many names in our industry Yeah. Just, like, deep in that whole web Yeah. Was that everyone today should be thinking about who the modern equivalent of of of Jeffrey is and work on avoiding that person
Speaker 5:For sure.
Speaker 3:Going forward.
Speaker 2:For sure. Yeah. Jir Tickets says, some dudes wake up thinking about sleep score numbers. Truth is you can just wake up and choose to have the best day ever. I do I do still like my sleep score number.
Speaker 2:I still love my Eight Sleep even though we're not partnered with them. I I I the the cooling mattress is still undefeated, but 92. If you can, you can just wake up. Oh, we're we're giving a review.
Speaker 3:92.
Speaker 2:I don't think I got a 92.
Speaker 3:Eight hours four minutes.
Speaker 2:Eight hours. Wow. I got an 83. Oh, wait. No.
Speaker 2:Wait. Wait. What did I get last night? 83. 83.
Speaker 2:Seven hours and thirty minutes. I went to bed early, but I also woke up early. Anyway, let's do a real ad read for graphite. Dev. Code review for the age of AI.
Speaker 2:Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
Speaker 3:Lot of stuff about and OpenAI over the weekend. Fortunately, DOJ's file release Fortunately for everyone involved, the DOJ's file release was kind of drowning out every other major story.
Speaker 2:Good time to drop bad news. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 3:So in Reuters, apparently, they had reported first Yeah. That he has planned to invest a 100,000,000,000 in OpenAI has stalled.
Speaker 2:This story evolved many, many times. When we'll have to go through a number of the clips, because Jensen is one of the few tech CEOs that seems to just get mobbed by journalists.
Speaker 3:Oh, he's looking like a rock
Speaker 2:star. It's amazing. I love it. It's so cool.
Speaker 3:With the camera. With the
Speaker 2:with the and then the microphones. Jensen, what do you think about this?
Speaker 3:So so here's the launch video idea
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:So people don't make another thousand, 10,000 I
Speaker 2:know you do.
Speaker 3:Generic launch video. Founder, go outside of your office. Yep. Have a bunch of people hold microphones at you. Have like a flash, like a camera flash that effect and just describe your business.
Speaker 3:Yep. People like, wait. It's only $30 a month A month?
Speaker 2:All that?
Speaker 3:For that? For AgenTik AI SaaS for AI SaaS? Know it's hard to believe.
Speaker 2:I like This is
Speaker 3:a new
Speaker 2:new Someone's gonna do this
Speaker 3:right now. It'll take Yeah. An hour.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the the headline is that the talks between OpenAI and NVIDIA for $100,000,000,000 in funding have stalled, And we will see. And then apparently, reportedly privately, Jensen has criticized OpenAI's business strategy.
Speaker 1:Maybe According to Reuters,
Speaker 3:Huang has also privately criticized what he described as a lack of discipline and opening eyes business approach and expressed concern about competition at places. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What I I I I wonder what he means by
Speaker 3:Well, so so reading reading
Speaker 11:a lot of this,
Speaker 3:doing doing a lot of different things. Yeah. Right? This was the original Ben Thompson criticism. Sam, part of the API.
Speaker 3:Back to the fateful interview on BG2, part of Sam's answer was that, don't worry, we're going to launch hardware. And we're going to automate science and presumably get some type of royalty
Speaker 2:on that. Totally.
Speaker 3:Both of those answers are not necessarily ones that Jensen would be like, oh, I want to lean on these. Right? Just given that
Speaker 2:Potentially big, but also 10% chance they work. Who knows?
Speaker 3:Also could lose a ton of money for a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's risk.
Speaker 3:We had Kevin on the show. I'm very excited about what they're doing in science. And that is an area that you should be very excited about if you're an OpenAI shareholder. Did you
Speaker 2:see Tony Fadell talking to Eric Newcomer about how he thinks they're gonna launch a pen? An OpenAI pen? I we we gotta Well, so I mean, that
Speaker 11:was the original rumor before Really?
Speaker 5:The the ear pods. A pen.
Speaker 2:AirPod sweet peas, the headphones? Wait.
Speaker 6:It was
Speaker 2:a pen. So you would write with it? Yeah. I I don't know confused by that. An AI pen.
Speaker 2:I mean, I guess you could if you put it in your pocket right here, it would have a pretty good line to your voice so you could dictate. And it would have enough space to have a lot of battery. So that could be good, and it could connect to your phone. It's not the craziest form factor, but I just don't see I mean, I can my my writing is like complete chicken scratch. I feel like I would not want my writing, dictated or saved anywhere.
Speaker 2:I'd much rather just use voice AirPods.
Speaker 3:Let's pull up this video from
Speaker 2:Jensen?
Speaker 3:Jensen. Let's do it. Another one of his walking street interviews.
Speaker 2:While we do that, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, finance, and finance support giving employees instant resolution for password resets and a Hit it. Password reset.
Speaker 12:Ask quickly about OpenAI again. Sure. So last yesterday, you said that the NVIDIA is not going to invest as much as 100,000,000,000 in OpenAI.
Speaker 13:No. We
Speaker 12:the current
Speaker 2:one. Right?
Speaker 13:Never we never said we were going to invest a $100,000,000,000 in one round. That never was said.
Speaker 12:Well, how about the overall commitment? Because last September, you
Speaker 2:and opened that meeting. Never a commitment.
Speaker 13:It was if they invited us they invited us to so so what? Let's start over again. They invited us to invest up to a $100,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:Mhmm. And, of course, we were we were very happy and honored that they invited us. Mhmm. But we will invest one step at a time. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:Alright. But is that overall commitment still stands? Or it it's not the commitment?
Speaker 13:I told you just now. Okay. Yeah. You keep putting words in my mouth. Okay.
Speaker 13:It's not Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I know that. Yeah.
Speaker 12:And we
Speaker 13:It they invited us to invest up
Speaker 2:to Okay.
Speaker 13:$100,000,000,000. Okay. And and we are honored that they invited us. We will consider each round one at a time.
Speaker 3:Really, really, really funny moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's play the other Jensen video too.
Speaker 3:Pull it up. Yeah. Context here is like, they announced a $100,000,000,000 deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They did like the press release economy.
Speaker 3:It was a it was a press release economy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This
Speaker 3:was this was 2025. Yep. They did bigger and bigger numbers. Yep. They did choose to go on CNBC.
Speaker 3:Yep. I remember watching it in the morning. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was Greg Brockman and Jensen together. And I had CNBC. I remember that. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, woah. This is Yeah. This is big. But they were stressing that it would be staged.
Speaker 2:Staged. Yeah.
Speaker 3:No one was ever saying
Speaker 2:No one said it was $100,000,000,000 to one round. And there were clearly like milestones and it was and they were announcing like they were announcing talks basically. There's Early talk. There's with the way you release information. And if you do a massive dog and pony show for talks They're gonna are ask gonna think it's a commitment.
Speaker 2:They're gonna think it's it's papered. And and so Yeah.
Speaker 3:So and so the critics of that era of the press release economy Yeah. Where there was all these spending commitments, these $100,000,000,000 deals. Tonic critics get a little bit of a victory lap right now.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. But also, were some people at the time that were saying, like, look, if you actually dig into what's going on in the SEC filings, you will see that these commitments are not super binding. So you can't put
Speaker 3:1,000,000,000 Non binding press release economy. Yeah. I'm just saying that the people that were saying this is the press release economy
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Are get get to take a little victory lap.
Speaker 2:I agree. I agree. Well, let's play the other the other Jensen clip. Very hard. He's getting mobbed.
Speaker 2:It's amazing.
Speaker 12:Yeah. So it's like that you're not very happy with
Speaker 3:That's so many different microphones. That's nonsense.
Speaker 13:Nonsense. Yeah. That's complete nonsense. We we are going to make make a huge investment in OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Huge investment. 6 figures.
Speaker 13:Believe in OpenAI. The work that
Speaker 3:they do is incredible.
Speaker 14:They're one
Speaker 2:of the
Speaker 13:most consequential companies of our time. And I really love working with Sam, and
Speaker 1:I think I think
Speaker 12:it's But let
Speaker 1:me also
Speaker 12:mention that the you you your MOU doesn't, like doesn't have any progress.
Speaker 13:We just haven't we haven't made the investment in them because they're they're closing their round. Mhmm. But we will definitely be involved in their next in their in their round.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The next Wait.
Speaker 2:In their next round or in their current round?
Speaker 13:Meeting this one.
Speaker 2:The next one meeting this one. Okay.
Speaker 12:The pizza will be performed in
Speaker 8:this round.
Speaker 13:Of course. Of course. Yeah. We'll absolutely be involved in this round. Okay.
Speaker 13:Sam is closing the round.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, maybe, like, ten. Maybe he's good for ten. I mean, the other hyperscalers are coming on and stuff. Like, the money is coming together.
Speaker 13:Invest a great deal of money. Probably the largest investment we've ever made.
Speaker 2:Okay. Does that count Grok? Because he just put 22 or 18 into Grok. Is it gonna be bigger than that? I I because it it feels like 10 at
Speaker 3:the same SpaceX exposure.
Speaker 2:Wait. No. GROQ. Oh. Sorry.
Speaker 2:Anyway, Tyler, what were you
Speaker 3:about, Tyler?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Just like extra context. Yeah. So originally, it was September 22. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:There was like the the LOI where they were gonna do 10 gigawatts build out. And then as part of the sports partnership, NVIDIA intends to invest up to a 100,000,000,000 Yeah. In OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is
Speaker 2:Yeah. Deployed. So it's kind of on people who took up to and they dropped that. I mean, clearly, of those interviewers were just like, you you promised. You promised a 100.
Speaker 2:And he's like, I said up to a 100 and people sort of overplayed that. Now they're sort of overplaying this. It's like, he hates the company. He's not investing a dime. He's like, no no no.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna invest. I'm just like, it's gonna be tranche. It's gonna be staged. It needs to be you know, there needs to
Speaker 3:be continued progress and whatnot. Oracle felt the need this at 9AM sharp to put out a post that says, the NVIDIA OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds and meet its commitments. This post reminded me of NVIDIA's post at the November. They said, we're delighted by Google's success.
Speaker 3:They've made great advances in AI, and we continue to supply to Google. NVIDIA is a generation ahead of the industry. It's the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done. NVIDIA offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs, which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions.
Speaker 2:The the the the comments on this Oracle post. Please hire Lulu stat. What does this mean for LeBron's legacy? Why is Oracle even commenting on a third party deal?
Speaker 3:Claude, what is a backlog quality risk?
Speaker 2:No. Complete chaos in the market.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Never a great sign if a company is having to go out and defend Yeah. A single investor. You know, defend a customer because of a single relationship with an investor. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Oracle traded down another 9% in the last five days.
Speaker 2:So Well, we got some good news. We got some scoops from Adweek, our favorite publication. Saturday night scoop, open ad confirmed $200,000 minimum for ChatGPT beta ads. Brands across retail streaming were asked for $2.50 k. Despite the 200 k minimum, one global brand was asked roughly a 125 k, while another source said OpenAI requested 100 k.
Speaker 2:So they they're 200 k. And from our from our conversations, it it it feels like they will not have a problem getting brands to sign up for this. There's a lot of experimental budget out there. There's a lot of there's not a lot of inventory early. It'll probably be, you know, an interesting new data point, and I feel like I feel like a lot of companies will have a mandate very quickly to, like, figure out what our ads in LLM strategy is.
Speaker 2:So I would imagine these sell very well. I just wonder how much inventory there is. I was doing a sort of trying to do the analysis on, like, what how much revenue would would OpenAI make if they don't grow usage, but they monetize as well as Meta across the family of apps? And so that's like 1,000,000,000 DAU, essentially, billion MAU, something like that. So if they had 1,000,000,000 of Meta's consumers on OpenAI platforms and they were advertising to them as efficiently as Meta, now that's a huge, huge road to get there.
Speaker 2:But let's assume that without any innovation they can get to the current state of the art eventually because it's been done and they hired Fiji Simo who did it at Meta and now she works at OpenAI. Like, how much revenue would you generate from a billion a billion users? And it's it's like somewhere between 50 and $100,000,000,000, which is a lot of money. It's a very good business. And if inference costs keep dropping and you're able to ramp up the ads, like, just the consumer ads business, if if you're getting, you know, a billion users, you know, thirty minutes time on the site like you get on the other platforms, like, you get you get good usage, like that should be a
Speaker 3:monster I really need to I really I wish we had a better sense of time time on-site Yeah. For opening.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a little
Speaker 3:Because like right now, even even ChatGPT power users, unless you're using it as like a digital friend Yeah. You're not getting that much time on-site. Yeah. Remember, these are also just effectively display ads. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? They're not they're not they're not really intent based. Yeah. They're sort of like general targeting. And so a lot of assumptions baked in there.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 3:Zuck can You might like that it's possible the average user is I would assume the average user in Chetchpty is putting in like a handful of queries a day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's like, you could depends how long the the responses are Yeah. But how many of these ads can you actually put in. Yeah. And it's certainly in its current state, it can be vastly inferior to
Speaker 2:100%.
Speaker 3:Somebody spending thirty minutes in Meta when they might see, like,
Speaker 6:a 100.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt that the the ARPU is gonna be like an order of magnitude, if not two orders of magnitude lower years.
Speaker 3:But Yeah.
Speaker 2:Best day to plant a tree today. Go do it and then start growing it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's cool. I mean, at a 100 k this opens it up to start ups.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I do wanna show my my tinkering with Codex today, the new app from OpenAI, powerful command center for building with agents. This is we've seen other, you know, the Claude code app. This is the response to that. So you just download Codex, you drag it into your applications folder, and just with natural language, you can start building software.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. Like, there's the UI pattern for not needing to open the terminal is going to increase the adoption of this thing so, so much because it's so much easier to use. I was able to take the Berkshire Hathaway site, which I think we can pull up. I have an image, a screenshot of the beautiful Berkshire Hathaway website. It says it's the official homepage.
Speaker 2:It's iconic, dark blue and purple links. I think I don't I
Speaker 3:think you've clicked all of them.
Speaker 2:Is that true? Is that possible? What if I I need to go like incognito, guess. Berkshireberkshirehathaway.com. No.
Speaker 2:They're always purple. They're always purple which
Speaker 3:is a weird choice. They go I
Speaker 2:don't think they ever go blue. But anyway, purple links, blue background, you know, serif fonts. It's iconic. And I was able to take with like two or three prompts build a version of the TBPN official homepage in the exact same style. Right there.
Speaker 2:Look at that. You got the ramp logo right there. Now, does it need a little bit more work? Sure. But I I actually did this with three with three prompts like just just, you know, go download tbpn.com, go download Berkshire Hathaway, make the version.
Speaker 2:Okay. Change the links, like fix these problems. Just all natural language, like four prompts, probably five minutes of work and I got something that's like, I don't know, it's like a funny joke. I don't know that it's super useful. This has been you've been able to do this for a long time, but it's it's just it's a different vibe to be able to do it just on a desktop app, I think it'll be really successful.
Speaker 2:Anyway, we have our next guest in the restream waiting room. So let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And without further ado, we
Speaker 3:have Alex from WorldCoin. What's happening?
Speaker 2:How you doing? And MergeLab.
Speaker 3:What's happening?
Speaker 2:Last time wait. Last time we had you on, it was WorldCoin, right, or WorldLabs? Sorry. Tools for Humanity.
Speaker 11:Tools for Humanity in the world and Okay. First Labs now.
Speaker 2:So, yeah. All the above. Reintroduce yourself for everyone who might not be familiar. Give us the lay of the land, and then I definitely wanna talk about just everything that's going on in tech and bots. Yeah.
Speaker 11:Great. Let's do it. I'm Alex Bania. I'm one of the founders of Tools for Humanity, which is the company behind World. And and one of the core premises of World always has been that eventually we will need to prove a human at Internet scale because AI will be agentic and will pass the Turing test, will create videos, all of those things.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:That will lead to basically all human interaction on Internet breaking down. Yeah. So that's that's that's broke. And then MergeLabs is a BCI lab.
Speaker 2:Cool. And then what was your initial reaction to Moldbook? Did you, you know, think it was this it was Skynet? Did it have you for a second? Did it have you in the first half?
Speaker 2:Or were you immediately, this is all slop, or are you still worried about the AI safety and slop concerns? Like, how how have you processed in the last few days?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think I'm somewhere in between. I think, like, it you know, it I think it's like an early glimpse of, I think, what is about to happen and how the Internet will start to look more and more
Speaker 2:like, I think. Yeah.
Speaker 11:But I think, you know, Balaji had this tweet about, well, it's still humans prompting, etcetera. Like, that that's that's, of course, true. I think there's, like, a big caveat to that comment that there will be humans prompting for a long time, but just the execution time frame of these prompts will go much, much longer. Yeah. My maybe not
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think a lot of people's reaction was, like, we have we have enough bots. Have enough bots here on AXIS already. Why do we need a new a new platform?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So yeah. Well, I
Speaker 11:I think the silver lining maybe, actually, like, just just to say make make something useful out of it. I think, like, the silver lining is a little bit that, you know, on the Internet, we will need to mediate human and AI interaction.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And I think that's not like, that will require a lot of work. And I think that's actually the opening for, I think, a lot of new products, even social products. So I think that, like, there's, like, a a platform shift, but it's not it was not the LLM interface alone. I think it's, like, agents and and and humans interacting on on things like social networks, and that's you know what is clear with Moldbook, we don't have it yet because who knows how many humans are behind this, how many bots it actually are. Everything is, like, heavily civil attacks.
Speaker 11:So there's, like, probably way less usage than you than you than you see, but it's a it's a very interesting experiment, I think.
Speaker 2:Explain Sybil attacks for those who might not be familiar.
Speaker 11:Oh, Sybil attacks just means that you, you know, that behind just just breaking it down for the mold book use case that the number of comments and replies and molds you see is actually way less Mhmm. Actually humans behind or agents behind than you would think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I saw one guy was able to register, I think, 50,000 agents. And so
Speaker 11:That's right.
Speaker 2:Oh, 500,001 guy? Wow. Okay. Alright. I'm constantly off by order of magnitude when I talk about Moldbook because I checked it when it was at exactly 150,000 users, and now it's at 1,500,000.
Speaker 2:And so I get everything wrong.
Speaker 3:One of the questions I had Yeah. For the founder earlier was was really around every there there I don't think there's a social media, like, founder or CEO in the world that's not thinking about bots, how they can, mitigate some of the potential risks to them, but also leverage them for engagement. I was telling him how I've you know, we've had this debate on the show, like, how how much does x really care about bots? Right? Because if they care a lot about preventing them from being on the platform and they've put a lot of effort in so far, we should be kind of worried because it's not working.
Speaker 3:Right? Mhmm. Maybe it's it's it's not non not solvable without maybe something like a a World Labs. But how have your like, how do you think that other social media CEOs are kind of, like, planning around a world where maybe the average user on a social media app is a bot?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So so first of all, it's it's World and Merge Labs,
Speaker 3:two two two two different companies.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Merge is is yet another company. Oh,
Speaker 3:right. That's is that Yeah. Is
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You. Merge Labs is you. World Coin is you, but it's actually from Tools for Humanity is the name of the company. Yep.
Speaker 11:That's right. So now now we've got it started. Yeah. So I think look. Just breaking down fundamentals, I think social media networks, like many other businesses, are about human to human interaction.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:I guess just like if if you break it down, like, that's literally the then like, that's how the that's how the whole thing functions.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But they're about that. But if I'm operating a social platform and there's a bot that I may or may not endorse that then engages with a real human and that real human lands back on the platform and I can serve them an ad, what incentive do I have to stop them?
Speaker 11:That that I think I think that is correct until to a certain point, but at some point, it's gonna that's gonna flip. Because at some point, you know, every user is just gonna be so annoyed
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 11:And realize that, like, okay. Like, this platform is clearly is all slob. I'm arguing with AIs. So I think there's, like, only so far how we can take that, and I think we're basically about to approach that limit until which it just doesn't become entertaining anymore, it's just, like, super annoying.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:And so I actually do think that these platforms are basically threatened in their core business because, you know, like, human attraction is why users are there. That's how you do advertising. It's human attention, essentially. So the moment that falls away and is not authentic anymore, I think the whole business is on a threat. So Yeah.
Speaker 11:That's maybe my my my first statement. Second, I think, to how do CEOs think about it? I think they I I know some of them that really think about it. I don't know all of them. But I definitely think they should really start thinking about it now a lot because it's gonna get exponentially worse really fast.
Speaker 2:How do you think about all the things that people will do? It's like this cat and mouse game. I mean, now, you see you see bots, but you also see just people who are clearly just going to an LLM prompting, write a LinkedIn post about my business. Here's some facts. I wanna have this format.
Speaker 2:And then they just copy and paste it and they're the ones that are sending it. And so Right. You know, there's there's this there's this gradient between, like, there's a Python script that's just replying so cool to every post that it sees on the API, and then there's the human that's actually just using AI to generate the text and they're typing it themselves or whatever. And then in between, you might have someone the fear would be there's someone that is hired basically just to do the world eyeball scan and then post slop and then they scan again, then they post slop and they scan again. And, like, how are you thinking about the actual integration with the platforms to fight, like, the all the adversarial, you know, activity that you'll see?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So maybe the first methodology you should have is that one version of uniqueness is the core property that we look for. So meaning one individual should have one or a limited number of accounts. That that's kinda like the core property property that you're talking about. Sure.
Speaker 11:I actually think, base basically, most of what we will do will be AI driven. So, basically, everything that I write will be somewhat co edited by AI Yeah. Or I will I will create, like, fun videos or images. That's totally okay as long as I cannot create 500,000 accounts to do that because then the platform breaks down. Yeah.
Speaker 11:So uniqueness is, like, the core property, and I think that's quite hard to accomplish. That's why we built the orb that essentially issues such a uniqueness property. So that's that is a really hard piece. I think we have solved that. I think the re authentication piece that you just mentioned where, you know, whatever, you can hire a lot of people that already have rolled it easy, just use that to post any platform.
Speaker 11:I think that's correct, and I think we will see some of that. But that's still, you know, way, way less than one individual can create 500,000 accounts Yeah. That are just AI agents. So meaning rate limiting, like and and the stronger you can get that, the better the system becomes, basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are there any sort of, like, long tail networks or Internet properties that you think are are underrated or under discussed as vectors for spam? We saw this sort of funny viral video from a friend who went to his local coffee shop and found that they had like a 100 Android phones running a bot farm just liking whatever they posted on Instagram just to sort of like give a little bit of extra algorithmic juice to their coffee shop promotion. And that was something I hadn't really considered. I think about X, I think about, you know, LinkedIn and Instagram and AI slop there.
Speaker 2:But maybe I'm not thinking about it in the impact it's having on the average coffee shop on the corner, that type of thing.
Speaker 11:Well, one thing that I think is actually happening much more is the it's kind these, like, kind of call attacks to especially elderly people. It's like an AI sounding like their, whatever, grandson. And, you know, tricking them into like, that kind of thing I think is gonna Yeah.
Speaker 3:I had that I had that happen with my grandparents pre AI.
Speaker 2:Oh, really?
Speaker 3:They were just pretend they were just kind of saying it was me. Oh. And they were relying on my grandparents not not like just processing that it wasn't my voice because they were quite a bit older. Just doing an impression. And I can't imagine what, you know, what what's happening now where it just it would be exactly like my voice.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Easily with with that, they were like they clocked it pretty quickly. They called my dad. They were like, Jordy's fine.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Made up some crazy story about how I was like in a I'd been in I was in jail, and this was my one call, and
Speaker 2:I needed them to Wire money or something. It's crazy.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So stuff like that is gonna wrap up. I think then we will get to real time deepfakes probably in
Speaker 2:the next twelve months. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Meaning, you can just like, there was this, you know, viral tweet, I think, last week about this this guy that was, like, looking like a super attractive girl on on a, basically, a live video call. Mhmm. So that that kind of thing is gonna get commoditized and, you know, it'll just become super, super easy.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We had this debate with with one guest. We were trying to clock we were trying to clock if they were using a, like, a Gigachad filter, just like a 10% Gigachad filter. That's us. And we were we were we were a lot people were But we were like pausing it and being like, okay, like he moved his finger in front of his face.
Speaker 3:Did anything change.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or like pixel beeping.
Speaker 11:But why why did you assume that he he has a Gigachad filter?
Speaker 2:He looked like a Gigachad.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. If he wasn't if he wasn't using
Speaker 2:And and other people online were levying accusations at him. So we were like, it's our duty to get to the bottom of this. Like you, I mean, you're clearly using a Gigachad filter today. Right?
Speaker 11:Thank you.
Speaker 2:That's just what you look like? Wow. Wow. Dude, it's working. Whatever you're doing is working.
Speaker 3:This is just a sales call.
Speaker 2:What else is new in your world? I mean, how are you splitting your time? Does the rest of the year look like? You're just patiently awaiting the singularity?
Speaker 11:I mean, I think, you know, it's the most important time in a long long while, so I think. Just trying to work all day long and making it happen. Spending my time, still very focused on the world. Mhmm. You know, Merge Labs is a is a research lab
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 11:That we that we started with the goal of actually bridging artificial and biological intelligence.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:But it really is a research lab. So they're I think we
Speaker 1:have a
Speaker 11:lot of great scientists.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:It's not a heavy operation yet. So but on the other side, I think it's the it really is the year for world because I think Yeah. You know, AgenTic, all these kind of like, what Moldbook, Clodbots, that's just the beginning. Think it's gonna get
Speaker 3:most Yeah. Do you think there's something like, a lot of these ideas, Moldbook and Clodbot, now OpenClod, were all ideas that people had had and yet there was some element of risk surrounding them that maybe prevented some companies, like bigger labs, from even going there, right? Like it's not like the idea of like a agent social network is some it you know, this is not the first time that someone has talked about this. Yeah. This is an idea that's been floating around.
Speaker 3:Some of them have been funded.
Speaker 2:Last The Dropping's actually, like, written about They've they've run the experiments Yeah.
Speaker 3:So is there some element right now where we're in a point where, like, you're getting these sort open source or community grown projects against ideas that labs had or big companies had but just didn't have didn't have, like, kind of, like, the freedom to do without a ton of of risk?
Speaker 11:Sure. I think there's just this general element of you can be much more scrappy as a as a developer.
Speaker 5:You know?
Speaker 11:Like, on Tropic or OpenAI doing something like that. You know? You would actually need to mediate human AI collaboration, for example. All these kind of things would need to be solved, and the bar is much, much higher. So I think that's true.
Speaker 11:And then broadly speaking, just AI is getting so much better that one guy can create such a such a platform, like, super fast. Yeah. You know, it can iterate it can iterate on a daily basis. Like, a couple of years ago, this would would have needed to be, like, a team of developers probably. Yeah.
Speaker 11:And so I think that's the thing to not also underestimate just, like, how much more effective one person can be now. And I think that's gonna get, like, way crazier. So I think we'll see a lot of that happening.
Speaker 2:Buckle up.
Speaker 11:Pretty soon.
Speaker 2:Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thanks for your time.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Congrats on all
Speaker 11:the Thank you, guys. Good to
Speaker 2:see you. We'll talk to you Goodbye. See you. Bye bye.
Speaker 1:Let me
Speaker 2:tell you about Restream. One livestream, plus destinations. If you want a multistream, go to restream.com. Our next guest is anonymous. It's Nick from x.com.
Speaker 2:Obviously We have him. All over the Internet. He's in our YouTube chat often. We've had back and forth with him. I accused him of being an OpenAI hater.
Speaker 3:He said Number one.
Speaker 2:I'm I got a balance set of opinions. So I'm excited to talk to him today about his takes on AI, his takes on the vibes online, see where we agree, where we disagree. It'll be interesting. So let's bring him in from the restream waiting room. Nick, what a beautiful profile picture.
Speaker 3:You look exactly
Speaker 2:like you. Happy to the be Thanks for Well,
Speaker 1:thanks for having me.
Speaker 8:We appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction and keep it as high level as you want since you are anonymous? But anything we can tell about your philosophy or background or interests? All of that would just be helpful to set the table.
Speaker 9:Sure. Well,
Speaker 1:yeah, I actually got into AI around 2021 before Chad Jubit even released. Overnight success. There we go. Yeah. I was, you know, using their API, g three.
Speaker 1:You know, I've been their biggest fan from day one.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Biggest fan.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Narrative violation.
Speaker 1:You know I said? The narrative right. I love it. I love it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was, you know, fully following everything that's happening in this space
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, you know, was really deluded myself with, you know, AGI coming in two weeks type of narrative. And really going into, like, the possibilities, you know, expanding my mind there. You know, when they released DALL E, I don't know if you guys remember that. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was, like, you know, so hyped about it that I even made like an Instagram page to curate all the best images that's been popping all around the Internet until a point where I gained like a 100 k followers and then open eye blocked me.
Speaker 2:They blocked me. They reported me Going ark.
Speaker 8:Going ark again.
Speaker 1:Joker mode.
Speaker 2:And I was like,
Speaker 1:what are you doing? Was doing all that. Kinda get an accent.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Here here here here starts the steel man. I mean, you hitting the API with anything that was violating TOS? Were you spamming the the API?
Speaker 2:Were there any other reasons that they could be upset about your cooking? You were just cooking.
Speaker 3:You can't even cook in this country anymore.
Speaker 1:Well, okay. I didn't actually, they didn't block me from the API. Okay. But, like, I started, like, a community page to for all the DALL E posts
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:On Instagram.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And what actually happened was like so I actually made a list on Twitter, all the people I had access.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So what happened was like so an OpenEye employee, you know, said, yeah, yeah, made this with DALL E. I was like, okay, cool. I take that, I post it on Instagram, And then what happens, like, open and I post the same thing, like, two hours later. So people started thinking, like, I'm actually the main page because I'm posting it before the official page.
Speaker 2:Confusing. Okay.
Speaker 11:That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I actually wrote it, like, it's a community page.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, yeah, let's continue with your with your arc. Yeah. AGI coming in two weeks. We all felt that in 2022 when ChatGPT launched.
Speaker 2:How have your timeline shifted? How AGI pilled are you? How optimistic or doomer are you about the future? Like, what's your overall philosophy on on AI in the future?
Speaker 1:I think AI is, like, the greatest technology ever. I feel like post 2020 is a is a new era we're living in. And post 2026 is actually even a different era that we're entering into.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:I'm fully AGI pilled. I'm cursed I'm very cursed, well pilled. I think AGI is coming probably I think we're gonna have really powerful systems by 2029, 2030. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think, you know, companies are following, like, different paths to get there. So that's pretty interesting
Speaker 2:Yep. To see. So you're using DALL E early. You're using the DaVinci 3.5 Playground in in OpenAI. What are you using currently?
Speaker 2:What are you daily driving for knowledge retrieval? Are you vibe coding? Are you doing agentic stuff? What what what what's in your toolkit these days?
Speaker 1:Well, you know, if you read my bio, it says nontechnical number of technical staff. So, you know, I don't do a lot of coding, but, yeah, I did I did play around with, you know, mobile. I love Claude code. This is the first time ever in my life that I'm this year, I'm actually not using ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So my daily driver is, like, Claude, Grock, and Gemini.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:That's what
Speaker 11:I use.
Speaker 1:I'll just Yeah.
Speaker 2:Give me I get it. Give me some more flavor on when you go to Gemini, when you go to Grock, when you go to Claude.
Speaker 1:Sure. Grock is, like, you know, amazing for Twitter retrieval. I think it's the best. Claude is just has a really nice personality. Like, I just, like, love talking to
Speaker 8:it. Sure.
Speaker 1:He, like, tells me, like, hey, calm down, you know, don't always think this. Okay?
Speaker 3:Cool. Don't post. It's so over.
Speaker 2:It's I
Speaker 3:think we're gonna be fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In Gemini, I think, like, Gemini is just, a scientific research assistant. Mhmm. I think it has, like, a really nice It probably has, like, one of the best reasoning in my opinion. Sure.
Speaker 1:I like talking to it, like, it's like notebook. I just learned with MNI.
Speaker 2:It also feels really fast. I feel like the the Google search Yeah. Plus, like, the speed is like Yeah. Like it it feels like if I have to Google something, like that's the good place to go.
Speaker 3:Are you so how are you so fast with headlines? Yeah. You're really fast. I It's funny. I end up getting the news Yeah.
Speaker 3:From you
Speaker 2:From you.
Speaker 3:First Yeah. Even though you're you're oftentimes sourcing From others stuff. Journalists, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, the algorithm loves me. You know, I I think I have a connection with the algorithm. Team It's one. I I you know, people love me as well. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You got fans in the chat right now. Everyone loves you. Your whole research team is here, apparently.
Speaker 1:Really? Yeah. Yeah. I think I just, like, love to stay on top of these things. I'm, like, really, really locked in.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. So when, like, you know, these reporters, they, you know, post post a whole article, like, know, such a long article, and the only thing that they're to point out is, like, yeah, two lines. So, you know, cut through the bullshit, go direct, you know, put up the thing that I think matters.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. You kind of scoop the you kind of scoop the scoopers. Right there.
Speaker 1:Scoop the scoop. Yeah.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's nothing wrong.
Speaker 3:How much money have you made from x?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:I it varies, but you could kinda pay me, like, a thousand bucks every two weeks or something like that. Sometimes it goes, like, 2,000.
Speaker 3:It's not much, but it's honest work. It's honest work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's in
Speaker 2:the trenches. Yeah. Talk yeah. Then then talk to me about last year. It feels like the narrative of the AI bubble started.
Speaker 2:There was a worry about the AI CapEx build out. People were taking two sides. Leopold Aschenbrenner, of course, is super long. I'm there. And and then there were voices that started, you know, raising questions about the backlog, how much this build out was gonna cost, whether the growth could keep up, whether the models would keep improving, whether we were plateauing.
Speaker 2:What was your 2025 like?
Speaker 1:Well, the thing is, like, my 2024 well, I've been, like, pointing out, like, some absurdities Sure. Of, like, what's happening. And, you know, I started, like, just doubting from the beginning, like, okay, we were supposed to get EGI by 2023. Where did that go? Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You know, I started questioning, like, wait, what is actually happening? Mhmm. I started realizing, like, you know, the founder of, you know, Sam Altman was like I was like, okay. What's the agenda actually going? I was like, okay.
Speaker 1:They might be, like, just raising money and cutting out competition. Like, do I really want that? Mhmm. No.
Speaker 4:So I
Speaker 3:started You might be doing business. He might be being a businessman. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, he's he's look look, Sam Altman is just being, you know, what he's best at, like, being a really good startup founder, you know, driving all the attention and engagement towards him. You know, either it's, like, through claims saying, you know, AGI is gonna be the most powerful technology and bad things that will happen. Mhmm. And then he, like, leans towards, you know, doing those bad things.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. So for example, like, I don't know, he said social media, we don't wanna repeat the mistakes of social media, and then, you know, he started making Sora's pop.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It's really good. I don't I don't dislike the technology. It is, like, kinda, like, doubtful of the approach of what's being said in 2022, 2023, and then, like, 2024, we're entering, like, hey. It's getting a little different. But about the bubble, yeah, I just started doubting, like, you know, before they didn't have competition, so it was, like, okay, they they're gonna make it.
Speaker 1:But then Elon started entering the chat. He entered the chat. So, you know, he just
Speaker 3:Yeah. But with the with the bubble, I think, like, you can I think it's fair to maybe question their ability to meet some of these of press release economy style commitments? But have you ever Oh, yeah. Do you honestly think there's a world where the market has some intense correction and people stop using you know, everyday people that are not on X that that don't know the infamous Nick just stop using, you know, ChatGPT?
Speaker 1:So the way I see it with like, so I think, like, the bubble is not precisely like, AI is not a bubble, but, like, the companies are bubbles. Mhmm. If you raise too much, you overextend. You know, you're actually entering into a bubble territory. The way I look at, like, ChadGPT, for example, if you look at all their projections of their numbers, it's all based on user account.
Speaker 1:Like, how many users do we have? So in 2025, in the beginning, they said they're gonna reach a billion users Yeah. By the end of the year. They actually stalled at, like, 800,000,000. I don't even know if they reached 900,000,000.
Speaker 1:It's, like, 6 months. They're not growing. So if you just make a simple calculation, it's like, okay. If their user base, which is, you know, getting mobbed by Google, for sure, if that starts declining and reaches, like, you know, like, a certain threshold, all the projections fail.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. They definitely need growth to continue. I do think that that that 800 number is a little stale at this point. They haven't released the new numbers. It feels like they might still be growing and just not doing the whole, like they're saving it for, like, okay.
Speaker 2:When we put out the billion number, it's a big moment. But, I mean, yeah, certainly, it it raises questions as you as you outlined. What was your read on ads in ChatGPT?
Speaker 1:Well, you know,
Speaker 2:I'm not
Speaker 1:a big fan of ads, but I am fan of ads from the business perspective. Sure. They're like, make money. That's what I love money. We love ads here.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, part of part of my I I think I think it was important, like, in processing OpenAI to realize, like, it's, you know, at some point, you had to realize, like, they are operating as, a new big tech company. Mhmm. And so the decisions that they make, they're gonna ship a lot of products, like, they're gonna do a browser. Mhmm. They're gonna try Sora.
Speaker 3:They're gonna try a lot of stuff. Not all of it's gonna work, but what matters is, like, is the core is the core user base still growing? You could argue I haven't seen anything that would point to them shrinking. But even a deceleration is not great, obviously Totally, yeah. At that scale.
Speaker 3:And so yeah, you kinda predict a lot of the things that they would do just by looking at them not as, like, a ASI company, but as a big technology company.
Speaker 2:Consumer consumer tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure. I I I just think, like, look at four o, for example. When four o started launching, you know, Sam Altman said, you know, the movie Her and Scarlett Johnson, her voice, you know, was marketed as, like, your lover. You know, you're gonna fall in love with Chad GPT.
Speaker 1:Your voice, the way it talks to you and what happened? People actually fell in love. People fell in love. Eventually.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, so so the thing
Speaker 1:is, like, the reason why they had, like, a such a fast growth in in users was because of, like, the image generation model and this part. And now where we are, they're really lacking in the image generation model and then
Speaker 3:Okay. But Disney, we got all the Disney IP coming. I'm super bullish on this for AI. It's it's it just gives them a real Move. It gives them a feature that no one else can have for at least one year.
Speaker 3:And I think that when you look at Disney's scale, look at how many people go to the parks every single year, how many people will pay to get something novel in an image model, I think that could be, you know, part of the next leg up.
Speaker 1:Sure. I mean, if IP rights hold, which I I don't think they will, the world we're entering into, sure, that's it's gonna be fun.
Speaker 3:It's so over for IP rights. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's over for I think it should be abolished in some sense, but in a in a very in a very smart way where, you know, people should get some, some recognition or something.
Speaker 3:A pat
Speaker 2:on the back. Where where do yeah. Want Where where do you want all this to go? I mean, the the the anonymous account is interesting because you have a lot of ability to talk openly about a bunch of different companies. Do you wanna turn this into an analysis group, a commentary channel?
Speaker 2:Like, where where do you see your work evolving?
Speaker 1:Look. I was never anonymous. I was, like, always, like, I had my face on it. Like, people actually know who I am. Like, yay.
Speaker 1:If you actually, like, you know, I don't you know, if you go back on my tweets, like, I was just being me. Like, you know, my you know, I've lived in six countries and whatnot. I've talked about my life. It's all there. I've never deleted anything.
Speaker 1:If anyone wants to go dig, go for it. But the thing is, like yeah. I just like what Anonymous to, like, just, you know, be attached from my identity and, like, be, you know, explorative to talk about things that I don't really understand, but I wanna understand and go for it. So the best way to understand on the Internet is to say something absurd and then be corrected. So yeah.
Speaker 1:So I
Speaker 3:You're just baiting smart smart people to and I'm sure some
Speaker 1:All smart bots. Are baiting us. You know, researchers are acting like marketers, like EGI two weeks.
Speaker 3:You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So they're baiting us. I'm baiting them, and, you know, it's causing this damage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's been do have a funny update. I like to check this every once in a while because of the Disney OpenAI deal. I went to ChatGPT. I I invoked image generation, and I said, make an image of Spider Man fighting Mickey Mouse.
Speaker 2:And it says, we're so sorry, but the image we created may so it actually generated the image. It showed me a little preview, then it took it away
Speaker 1:Oh, which is so crazy because
Speaker 2:may violate our guardrails.
Speaker 3:Actually do the work and incur the cost.
Speaker 1:Totally. Read the prompt before. That's what I would think.
Speaker 2:But it actually generated the full image and then Even
Speaker 3:OpenAI doesn't read instructions.
Speaker 2:Similarity to third party content. If you think we got it wrong, please retry or edit your prompt. And then I used to be able to do that in Nano Banana. I went over to Gemini, and I said make an image of Spider Man fighting Mickey Mouse, and it said and it said, I can't generate the image you requested right now due to concerns from third party content providers. Please edit your prompt.
Speaker 2:And it didn't generate the image with with with Gemini. But so I I it's been interesting to see that press release happen. Yeah. Rocket Magic will probably do it.
Speaker 1:Rocket Magic is going.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but enjoyed it, and they have an exclusive deal. Like, you know, it's
Speaker 1:I like that.
Speaker 2:Moving fast. Anyway
Speaker 1:I mean, what are you
Speaker 3:what are you hoping to spend most of your time on this year?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I just wanna go all in
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Into all of this. I don't mind doxing myself
Speaker 2:fully. All in.
Speaker 1:So Let's go. I mean, you know, NVIDIA invited me to GTC
Speaker 3:Oh, cool.
Speaker 1:As a full time creator. I'm gonna go Jansen and whatnot.
Speaker 2:That's fine.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I think, like, it's time for me to go, you know, like, 10x more and stop, you know, not just posting, but, like, a lot of things I can talk about.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That'd be cool. Yeah. I mean, the the the Anon account, it does it does give you the ability to speak freely, but it does sort of flatten you. I mean, we were going back and forth on this where I was kind of, like, collapsing you down into just an OpenAI hater.
Speaker 2:And talk from talking to you. Clearly, there's a lot more going on there. But it's easy when I only see the viral post, and I don't know anything about the person behind it. Like, it can become a little one dimensional, so I'm excited for your new work. Your hero,
Speaker 3:man. A little, Sam hasn't blocked you. Correct?
Speaker 1:No. But Chad GPT has blocked me. What? For no reason. Like, I've never commented
Speaker 2:No reason. I mean No reason. You gotta give it some I credit
Speaker 3:think I think it would probably be whoever's managing the account logs in, and they're sick of seeing Yes. Anything that happens, just
Speaker 2:It's seeing over.
Speaker 3:The it's over. Can see whether I gotta get you gotta give some credit
Speaker 2:What is your camera roll like? Is it all pictures of Sam Altman looking perplexed or something? Anyway You know,
Speaker 1:I I like entertainment. Yeah. I'm very tasteful with Mhmm. A lot of a lot of these things. So, yeah, I just I know what's absurd, what hits, what's what's gonna be funny.
Speaker 1:I just I just post what I feel like, and I go, you know, very analytically analytically, but also I'm a I'm a feeler. So I know what's going
Speaker 2:Very cool. Well, good to meet you, man. This is fun.
Speaker 3:Do you mind if we flash bang you?
Speaker 2:Throwing flash bang.
Speaker 1:Throwing flash bang.
Speaker 2:There we go. The chat It's
Speaker 3:been great having you on.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Alright.
Speaker 3:See you soon, Nick. See you soon, Nick. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code code back prototypes and apps fast. We have our next guest joining in about five minutes.
Speaker 2:We got to go through the Brian Armstrong story. So Brian Armstrong is in the Sunday edition, the exchange edition of The Wall Street Journal, going back and forth with Wall Street. They called him enemy number one on Wall Street. He's the crypto CEO. Of course, he's the CEO of Coinbase.
Speaker 2:He's been clashing with Brian Armstrong or with Jamie Dimon. So Brian Armstrong, CEO of the biggest UK US crypto company was having coffee with
Speaker 3:It's almost like they paid him to do that. Like he paid them to write that title. Yeah. Like that's getting framed.
Speaker 2:It is. I mean, that's what Toby Looky said. This will look great in a frame. Of course, obviously, there's there's nuance here and there's a battle, but there's some off the record comments that became on the record. But it's an interesting back and forth.
Speaker 2:So they were at Davos at the World Economic Forum, and Brian Armstrong is having coffee with Tony Blair, the former prime minister of The United Kingdom. And JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon chimes in. He says, you're full of ass. Blank blank blank. Said Dimon, a longtime crypto skeptic who's previously called Bitcoin a fraud, his index point his index finger pointed squarely at Armstrong's face.
Speaker 2:Can I get a crowd? I can't. I'm pointing over there. He's like, you're you're full of s h I t. Diamond in a nutshell told him to stop lying on TV according to people familiar with the conversation.
Speaker 2:In appearances on business television programs earlier that week, Armstrong had accused banks of trying to sabotage legislation that would set new a new regulatory framework for digital assets. The confrontation wasn't quite in line with the annual forum's mission to foster cooperation among global leaders. As crypto moves swiftly into the mainstream of American finance, some Wall Street's some of Wall Street's heavyweights are waking up to the threats. While banks have embraced some aspects of crypto, helping people to invest in Bitcoin and using digital assets to make money transfers more efficient, they are drawing a line at encroachment on their core business, consumer deposits. Armstrong's coming for them.
Speaker 2:Banks and Coinbase are at odds over let me go to page five. We have it in the timeline, but it's so much nicer in paper. Whether crypto exchanges should be allowed to offer consumers regular payouts for holding digital tokens. So you got some USDC. Are they going to pay you interest or not?
Speaker 2:That's the debate. These so called rewards would pay holders of stablecoins a recurring fee, say 3.5%. Not bad. Stablecoins are digital assets pegged to real world currency like dollars. Banks say the payouts are effectively the same as interest on the bank accounts.
Speaker 2:And since banks offer much less yields, typically under one per 0.1% in a checking account, they worry that the upshot will be that consumers will shift their money in droves into crypto. That they say will compromise community banks and lending to businesses. Armstrong and others in the crypto world say the free market should reign and that banks can simply pay higher interest rates to compete with stablecoins or get themselves into stablecoin businesses themselves. Just join the party. The legislation known as the Clarity Act might shape the future of everyday financial services, including bank deposits and electronic payments.
Speaker 2:In the latest push to find compromise, the White House plans to host a meeting Monday between today, between banks and crypto industry groups according to people familiar with the matter. So David Sachs will be there. Coinbase's head of policy, Car Calvert, will be there. Armstrong, 43, co founded Coinbase in 2012 and has helped lead crypto's quest for legitimacy and mainstream acceptance. At the head of the roughly $55,000,000,000 firm, Armstrong has a powerful voice in industry debates such as the one playing out in Washington.
Speaker 2:Quote, we'd rather have no bell than a bad bell, he said on X, in a post a day before the Senate Committee was posed to vote on a version that could effectively ban companies like Coinbase from offering yield to consumers, potentially costing it billions of dollars. Within hours, the vote was abruptly postponed, taking much of the financial world by surprise. There's a lot more here that we can dig into, but we do have our next guest in the restream waiting room. Jordy, is there anything else that's kicking around in your brain?
Speaker 3:We need to have somebody on Yeah. That is not from JPM or Coinbase
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:To talk about this dynamic.
Speaker 2:An independent voice. That would be would be a lot of fun.
Speaker 3:Let me
Speaker 2:tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And let's bring in our next guest from the restream waiting room. We have David from Lexicon branding. David, how are you doing?
Speaker 9:I'm doing great. It's a pleasure to be
Speaker 11:here.
Speaker 4:It's Thank
Speaker 2:a pleasure to have you. Is your twenty twenty six off to a good start?
Speaker 9:It is. We're very busy.
Speaker 2:Looks Walk like us through who you are, what you do, and what's behind you.
Speaker 9:Okay. Okay. Well, I'm the president of Lexicon Lexicon Branding, and we are in the business of developing brand names and naming systems for new companies and new technologies. And we do it really for people, our clients all over the world. Yeah.
Speaker 9:We have an interesting process here that combines really a creative layer Mhmm. With an engineering layer. And that engineering layer is a combination of linguistics and cognitive science that puts more objectivity into both developing names and importantly, selecting them. And the names behind me on the wall are names that everyone on every name on the wall has been invented by by Lexicon.
Speaker 3:When is is the right time to meet a founder, like, six months before they start the company? Like, when like, what because I imagine a lot of these companies, I I can see from, I think, some of them. Some of them come to you after they've started, after they're already in market. And they realize for some reason or another, we need a new name. And then they come to you.
Speaker 3:And then there's some constraints and it becomes harder. You know, walk us through like the the ideal process.
Speaker 9:Yeah. The most people do not. You're absolutely right. Do not come to us six months before they really started the company. We suggest that they come to us as they approach that series a funding
Speaker 3:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 9:By that point by that point, they really know who they are and where they're going for for the most part. And so we can work with that information. Now before that, you know, sometimes they they land on a great name. I mean, you you this is something that you can get lucky. Not everybody needs lexicon to to come to to work with.
Speaker 9:But most of the time, as you approach that series a, is a good time to take a look at your name, and we do that consulting all the time where, hey, is it time for us to change our name?
Speaker 3:How much How how do you how do you handle the domain side? Because I talk to I I oftentimes, you know, angel in like 60 some startups, maybe 70 at this point. And oftentimes, they'll have what seems like a great name. Mhmm. And maybe there's no trademark issues with it.
Speaker 3:But for some reason or another, the.com is taken and they will just never get it. Right? Because it's some 100 year old company Yeah. And you just have to assume they've been operational for long enough. They maybe are public or privately held.
Speaker 2:Or it's a super rich person that just is like squatting on
Speaker 3:it with no reason So how to navigate that? Because I feel like one part of the naming process that I appreciate is you have these incredible constraints already. It's not like an open canvas because you have trademark constraints, you have domain constraints, and then you have a bunch of other kind of, like, less clear constraints, but just, like, it has to make sense. Right? But and so in the naming process, you're trying to, like, kind of combine all of those into a short list of things, and then hopefully, it has to, like, feel good and sound good and and do all those other things.
Speaker 9:Well, the URL should be the least important constraint in this process. And we have research that we've done several years ago, and actually, just this morning, we're about to launch another study that I think is gonna once again provide evidence that the URL is really no longer that important, really. Mean, the
Speaker 3:search is so domain brokers hate this one simple trick. Which is so which is so funny. I mean, that's very I mean, I I can't wait to read the study because it's it's so counter to I've always felt like domains domains are the element of your branding that you have, like, the least amount of control over but have an incredible impact. Everyone's seen, like, a beaut if you see a beautiful website and then the domain is something something tryblank.io Yeah. It just screams, like, because there's so much subconscious branding and marketing that people are getting from every time I go to a big company's website, they have a .com.
Speaker 3:It sort of trains people. But but what what's the data that shows that it doesn't really matter?
Speaker 9:I think that's probably you you know, given what you you you the two of you do, it's it's probably a little inside baseball because we're not finding that on the the consumer end or the customer end. They're just looking at this as an address. The analog is a ZIP code. And, actually, we found evidence that consumers like the idea of something that says, what is this? You know?
Speaker 9:And look at the companies that have done well. You know, Lucid is a client of ours, Lucid Motors. They don't have Lucid. It's not lucid.com. So I think it's less important for the consumer and the customer than it is to perhaps Yeah.
Speaker 9:Raise money.
Speaker 3:Part of it for me is somebody that's helped name a number of companies, and I just enjoy buying and finding and buying domains. I've just always appreciated it, is that I appreciate the how hard it is to get a great domain. And so when a a founder comes and is pitching me and they already have something great, it just shows like a level of agency and ability. Maybe they didn't know a great broker, maybe they didn't even use a broker, but they figured out how to get it, and so it kinda says something about them. But but I but I agree.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of context where it totally doesn't matter. Mhmm. And if you look at the if you look at the wall back there, almost every single one of those companies got to the point where they could buy, buy whatever domain they wanted. Right? So it's like just
Speaker 9:At at a certain point.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the the Microsoft Azure one is hilarious because Microsoft owns azure.com but reroutes it to azure.microsoft.com they want you at the top level domain.
Speaker 3:How is has has ChatGPT kind of made some clients kind of given them kind of the wrong lesson in branding? Mhmm. Because there's so much about that where like traditional, you know, if somebody came to you and they were like, I'm gonna try to make a consumer product. I wanna get to a billion users. If I don't get to a billion users, I'm gonna fail.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna call it chat gbt. What do you think? You'd be like, you'd probably laugh them laugh them out of the room. Yeah. Or or say, well, you really need to work with me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well,
Speaker 9:the interesting thing about that question is more than 50% of our clients come to us having worked with Claude or ChatGBT to develop their names. And they work with it. They find it frustrating that that things just don't work together. There's no doubt, those types of models can generate thousands of names. No question about it.
Speaker 9:What they can't do at this moment in time, that may change down the road, is apply the judgment and principles around this name is better than that name for you. Our philosophy is we're not in this business to create good names. We're in the business to create the right name, the the right name that adds immediate immediate value and long term value. Because this you know, the name should be the one thing that stays with you through your whole journey, and nothing will be used more often or longer. So it makes it very important.
Speaker 9:And at this point in time, a Chad or a Claude just isn't up to speed to do that kind of decision making.
Speaker 3:Walk us through the chapters of kind of even naming styles. Right? Because we're at an interesting moment right now. People are putting GPT on the name on the end of things. People are saying the blank company of place.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? Like that's a whole new thing. I'm sure I'm sure that triggers
Speaker 1:So it
Speaker 2:started with triggers Browser Company of
Speaker 3:New Yeah. Browser Company of New York. Bunch And of people copied my take on that was always that was an amazing name one time signaled to insiders in Silicon Valley that it was just a novel kind of fresh take on the browser. And it was the polar opposite of Chrome or Safari or some of these kind of like one word even though they did have a a name for the product. So and then you can think back like there was a era where like adding l y to the to the end of something was was popular.
Speaker 3:Like what are what are the different chapters and like have I'm curious if like the great brands have always kind of gone against the mold. Right? Because like Yes. When you and anyways, so maybe extrapolate on that.
Speaker 9:Sure. Yeah. Sure. Well, look, the one of the most persistent trends or chapters, as you call it, in the industry is imitation. So someone comes out with something that ends in l y and, hey, that's a good idea.
Speaker 9:Let's do it. So then you'll see four or five names out in the marketplace that end with l y. What's happening there is that that imitation doesn't generate the interest and the provocativeness that a really well put together brand name
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Should be for for for people. So we always advise people, imitation is suicide. Your name should not look or act like anything that's out there in the marketplace.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:How'd you get into this? What was the first brand name you did?
Speaker 9:Well, I came from the advertising business, so, you know, great agency, foot on building. And I just saw as we worked on on projects and and company identity that naming was gonna become more and more important as as the world got more and more complex and more and more integrated. And so I took a flyer. Mhmm. And then that's the simple, maybe boring story of how I got into this business.
Speaker 9:Relative to the first name we ever generated, it's it's it's a name that's long since disappeared. I think it was for United Technologies, we named a new furnace noise reduction technology called the WSPR.
Speaker 3:Okay. Yeah. Still What what advice do you give companies that get to a scale where they have a brand name and then different product lines and maybe even kind of like sub companies? We're at this point right now where like, look at a company like Claude has Anthropic, Claude, Claude Code. OpenAI has ChatGPT.
Speaker 3:They have the browser which I'm even just blanking on the on the name of it. They have Codex. They have
Speaker 2:codex desktop app.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so
Speaker 2:Different models in codex. There's GPT 5.2
Speaker 3:what framework you get? Because I'm assuming you'll work you'll work with a company to name the parent company and then you also work on the sub products and then some cases, the sub products end up outshining the parent company. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Well, we we have an expression here we call, clarity is the language of leadership. And what you see in that example you just gave me, that there's really no story there. They don't have a common language, and so it's difficult for the audience, the consumers to really understand what are they doing for me, what is this company about. It's a very choppy thing.
Speaker 9:So a lot of our business coming to us now over the past year and a half, and I think it's because of AI, is clients coming to us and asking us to help them, I use the term, straighten out their language and make it make sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Creating a creating a through through line.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 2:What what else about these taxonomies? I'm interested, like, at the early stage, series a, how much are you trying to actually define a hierarchy of of product names? And and what is the process of, like, working with you? Like, is it, you know, there's, like, a specific sprint, specific deadlines you're paying upfront, and you don't know what you're getting? Is there contingency?
Speaker 2:Like, what what is the workflow to work with a company?
Speaker 9:It's pretty straightforward. In many ways, this is really rocket science. But we we start with a real simple work session where we're really asking clients four key questions.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And this always works. It's how do you define winning? If we get 10 people in a room, we're gonna get 10 different answers, but we can sort that out. Mhmm. Then we'll say, okay, if that's how you wanna win, what do you have to win?
Speaker 9:That gives us things that the name doesn't have to. Right? Then we say, okay, what do you need to win? What don't you have? Right?
Speaker 9:That begins to, you know, give us information about how that name might help them. Right? Because a name should be a tool. It should be a foundation for success. And then finally, we say, okay, what do you have to say?
Speaker 9:Would you like to say? And between those four things, we call it a diamond. We can then set up a what we call a framework or a creative framework, which we don't even use the word objectives because we want that analog holds true. We want a window that we can travel through and do a lot of creative work. That's where the process begins.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And then we work here with, you know, small two person creative teams, and we have this what we call internally related engineering layer
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Where we linguists, we're using, you know, a company funded research on things like it sounds exotic, but it's very fundamental. Sound symbolism, letter structure Sure. And and fluency. All those things then go into a funnel to help us select names.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 3:What is the key to avoiding botching a rebrand? We saw like, nowadays, products grow so quickly. We saw this with Claude Bot, which if you paid attention to that, you would have seen like, okay, Anthropic's gonna have issue with this. Yes. Right?
Speaker 3:It's like way too in in the same category, sounds the exact same Yeah. Very confusing to consumers. So he quickly rebranded it, then didn't like the rebrand, then rebranded it again. And and fortunately, I think the product is exciting enough that the new name Open Claw hopefully Yeah. Nice.
Speaker 3:Sticks and and continues. You know, the community just like keeps
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:keeps the
Speaker 3:you're working with companies that are coming to you right when they're starting to get real traction. Mhmm. And they know they need to change their name, but they don't wanna kind of destroy any brand equity that they've built up.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Well, the I think the biggest factor is that they under underinvest in name change. And I don't mean necessarily investing with a lexicon or or or someone else. They they don't sit and think through all the implications of doing this name thing. First from a, what what's the message that we wanna communicate?
Speaker 9:Because you do, at some point, have to say, yesterday, we were this, and now today, we're that. And what is that message? And then the second thing is lining up the recent the right the right law firm, global language analysis, all these things so you don't end up with something that's launched, and then it turns out to mean, you know, your mother's a
Speaker 2:bank Yep.
Speaker 9:Bank robber and
Speaker 1:and you're like,
Speaker 9:just not a fun day.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Mean, a good a good example you did, so you did TripActions to Nivon. Yeah. Yeah. And that was an example.
Speaker 3:TripActions had a big brand at in in The US and they didn't wanna be explicitly known. I imagine as just a play just a travel booking site. They had to go through that. I remember they really paired the rebrand. I'm they paid paid you guys, worked with you guys, but then they also seemingly spent like $510,000,000 in a short period of time to like reintroduce themselves.
Speaker 3:At least that was my impression as as just a as somebody in the Target market.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. Yeah. They did a fantastic job. They really did. And that name, it's a coin solution.
Speaker 9:We we made it up, because the founder of the company, having been, you might say, burned by trip action being so one dimensional Mhmm. And so narrow, said I want flexibility for the future, and the best way to get flexibility is to make something up.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So that means we'll never run out of names.
Speaker 9:That's right. We will. We love
Speaker 1:it.
Speaker 3:We have. We have. I I I have it's always been every single time I've been working with a start up or trying to trying to name something, you're sometimes you can just be hitting a wall where you're like, can't find for me, it's like I can't find any domains in this space that I Everything's trademarked, all this stuff. And then and then there's always there's always a name. You you might appreciate some of the history of TBPN.
Speaker 3:We started as a show called Technology Brothers. Then we had an issue where every where we went, people would say, introducing the tech bros. And we were like, we knew this was our life's work. Mhmm. And we were like, I don't wanna spend my whole life being introduced as the Tech Bros, which was like the word that we were trying to avoid We wanted flexibility.
Speaker 3:With the original name. And so I was like, I need a I want like a four or five letter domain. It has to have TB in it. And we ended up part part of TBPN, we're not a network. We we look and sound like an ESPN or something like that.
Speaker 3:But our the logic was like, if we name it like a network, even though we're a podcast or a livestream, the comms departments for big tech companies will be more comfortable putting their leadership teams on our show because it looks and feels more like television even if it is at the end of the day just, you know, 10 of us here in a in a studio making something that looks like television.
Speaker 9:Yeah. It does feel like you're a national network.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Yeah.
Speaker 3:It is a mouthful. It is a mouthful, though. We're having to power through that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. The the the putting a p next to a b is always a choice. It's you know, the real lexicon heads would
Speaker 3:probably It just inspires us to
Speaker 2:mean, last question for me because there's some breaking news going on right now. But what do you think about a return to using surnames as company names, the Ford Motor Company, Walt Disney, the Disney Company. That felt like something that was just right there on the shelf for founders to pull off and revive. It's starting to happen, but do you think that that's something
Speaker 3:might happen to be scuts? Because you can't you
Speaker 2:can't There's Rigetti Computing. That's a quantum computing company, public. There are some people that have done it, but do you think that that was something that would you would caution folks against or you would be in favor of?
Speaker 9:I would caution to really take a hard look at that, and it really depends on the person's personality, what the name is like. Is it easy to spell? Is it easy to say?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:The danger, of course, is something happens to the founder that is untoward. Now you have to Yeah. To live live with that. Yeah. So I I think I think it's worth discussion and evaluation.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:But I would probably push against it most of the time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. How many how many clients do you work with a year?
Speaker 9:We'll do about 75 projects a year, in the naming area. And then we have a research group here that does the quantitative, research for us also.
Speaker 3:Very cool. And and and only some fraction of those are are technology companies? I'm I'm assuming, you know, a a bunch of other industries will tap your expertise as well.
Speaker 9:Yeah. We try to keep a balance, but, really, 50, maybe 60% of our work is in technology at this And point in we which I love it. So so
Speaker 3:Everything is technology.
Speaker 2:I love it. That's a good place to be. And it's fun. I mean, these are all amazing brands. The PowerBook, what a legend.
Speaker 9:We see the future every week.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's the must
Speaker 9:And be we talk to some of the smartest people Yeah. That can imagine, as you guys know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I know. I can imagine.
Speaker 3:Well, I've had a a couple people text me during the show asking for an intro. So you have you have quite a lot of demand. I'm sure more than you can
Speaker 5:For sure.
Speaker 3:Fulfill. But we'll definitely send some people your way, and it was great to meet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 9:My pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much David. We'll talk soon. Tomorrow, Cisco, on February 3, the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy, the whole thing. We'll be livestreamed.
Speaker 3:Going to be there.
Speaker 2:And we'll be there with the Giga Stream.
Speaker 3:Headed to The Bay
Speaker 2:later We have some breaking news. First up, Palantir beat earnings. Stock is up, what is it, up 6% already after hours. It's a $350,000,000,000 company. And this is the big one from CallSheet here, just in.
Speaker 2:SpaceX reportedly confirms XAI merger. Very exciting. This has hit the Bloomberg terminal as well. Elon Musk's SpaceX confirms merger with XAI and company Memo. SpaceX confirms plans to merge with XAI before the IPO.
Speaker 2:Were talking about this sort of predicting that this would happen. SATS is up 2% after hours. I guess that's correlated there. They
Speaker 3:just go up. Anything happens in space that's good. It just goes up. SATS?
Speaker 2:What is SATS? I
Speaker 4:don't know.
Speaker 3:Isn't isn't I don't know. I thought that was that's EchoStar.
Speaker 2:They hold Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They hold SpaceX stock.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:Elon Musk plans to merge SpaceX with space with with Axe AI in a deal that encompasses the billionaire's increasingly costly ambitions to dominate artificial intelligence space exploration. The deal was announced in a memo. Bloomberg earlier reported on the discussion SpaceX is planning an IPO that could raise as much as 50,000,000,000 and value the company at 1,500,000,000,000.0. It's also discussed a possible merger with Tesla. The there's a couple other data points that we should share.
Speaker 2:On Cauchy, the which AI company will have the best coding model at the 2026? XAI is at 9%. You don't hear that much about XAI, but that's that's higher than I thought. Anthropics leading at 54%, then OpenAI 27%, then Google at 14%. Of course, this is in the the benchmarks on LiveBench AI rated by coding average.
Speaker 2:Do with that which you will. But the real the real interesting data point about SpaceX is that according to Reuters and Trent Griffin on X, SpaceX generated 8,000,000 in EBITDA.
Speaker 3:So this is a typo.
Speaker 2:This is a typo. It's 8,000,000,008 billion. On EBIT in in EBITDA.
Speaker 1:Because I because I read
Speaker 3:I read this and I was like, woah. That's Nothing. Not Yeah. Because $88,000,000 is pretty marginal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I know. It's like
Speaker 3:And I was like, that is not everyone's been applying No. No.
Speaker 2:Correct number is 8,000,000,000 in profit on 15,000,000,000 to 16,000,000,000 in revenue. So 50% margins for space companies, absolutely insane. A lot of that's coming from Starlink, obviously. Starlink is the main Musk's satellite based Internet system, Starlink, is the main revenue driver, accounting for about 50% to 80% of the total revenue. The rapid launch of 9,500 Starlink satellites since 2019 has made SpaceX the world's largest satellite operator with only over 9,000,000 users of the broadband Internet service.
Speaker 2:And of course, it's not just individuals that have a Starlink that they throw when they're camping. It's companies and boats and yachts and planes now. There's a whole Super Bowl ad just about think, United Airlines is a deal. And so they want people to choose United because Starlink is such a differentiator when you're getting on a long haul plane.
Speaker 5:There's not much.
Speaker 1:They all get
Speaker 3:There's not that much you can differentiate on. All the food is Yeah. Everywhere. Yeah. It's terrible.
Speaker 3:Yeah. All the planes are falling apart. Yeah. You feel you don't really feel safe on any air.
Speaker 2:I agree. What do
Speaker 6:So one thing you could differentiate on is is if you can like if if you get food in first class, if you're if you're allowed to bring it back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That would be a huge differentiator. Yeah.
Speaker 3:TPP and JetBlue.
Speaker 2:They're moving slow on that front. And so they have to differentiate on Starlink. But I do think it will be a real differentiator. Like, if you're if you're choosing between American and New York, you're going from LA to New York and it's American or United and United has Starlink, that's a pretty big difference just to be able to properly properly use the the Internet. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike.
Speaker 2:Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 3:There's one more interview. Yes. Sorry, not interview but
Speaker 2:Context?
Speaker 3:Context. Yeah. From Jensen, we're gonna pull this video up. Mhmm. Tay Kim, he highlighted it.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Let's pull it up. John, I cannot wait Okay. To see your
Speaker 2:I haven't seen this yet. High yield theory also says, if you bought the ex bank debt and high yield bonds back at 13% yields, you've now parlayed your wealth your way into being a creditor to the largest IPO ever. What a journey. It is such a crazy journey. Anyway, let's play a Jensen clip.
Speaker 13:And this year this year is the you're the horse. So it's gonna be a very good year. And this year
Speaker 3:let's go.
Speaker 2:So so it says that post is a it says it says that post is a joke. What about it as a joke? Is it AI? Is it fake? Did he actually say that?
Speaker 2:Did he say that a long
Speaker 3:time No.
Speaker 2:The fire horse is
Speaker 3:this is saying Jensen is citing the year of the horse and you're bearish. I'm not a CIA body language expert, but look at the expression on his face. This post is a joke. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Kind of. I don't know. Yeah. No.
Speaker 2:Jensen is
Speaker 3:I mean, said this. We opened year with this. We said year of the fire horse. Yeah. Massive.
Speaker 2:Also, I mean, he was he was he was seeing chugging beers, drinking champagne, giving some laboratory toast. He's in That was he's on Cloud9.
Speaker 3:One of the the better calls.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're gonna dig into that more. So x x AI just filed this at the Nevada the Nevada Secretary of State website, managing members. They put SpaceX person on the on the on the silver flume filings, and New Curran says, it's happening. Ken confirmed that the screenshot's real.
Speaker 2:Merger is effective. SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp is now the managing member of XAI Holdings LLC. Interesting. It says PRINS.
Speaker 3:Yeah. 8,000,000,000 in That x in SpaceX stands for
Speaker 2:XAI. It is a weird, weird timeline, but it makes a lot of sense. I mean, managing five companies is gonna be as exhausting and difficult managing, you know, two. There's some there's some economies of scale and, you know, now that you have the data centers in space thing and Starlink, know, it is a communications company after all. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Makes a lot more sense, you know. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I'm not gonna say we called it, but we certainly were talking mean, we started talking about about this possibility at the end of last year. It felt like, you know, xAI didn't have the traction to keep just continuously raising at a $200,000,000,000 valuation when you looked at its financial performance to Yeah. The rest of it. And so and merging XAI into Tesla Yeah.
Speaker 3:It wasn't gonna get a lot of Yeah. I I think it would have gotten way too much pushback. Also, Tesla's public, so it would have had more scrutiny.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I mean, if you just play out even like the non AGI vanilla case of the models sort of commoditized, everything gets they they get to near the frontier and maybe one is better than the other for one thing. But at the end of the day, it's like, you know, intelligence on tap, you're paying for tokens and SpaceX's tokens are cheaper because they're using solar and they're in orbit. Like, there's a world where just on the pure economic Well, it's such a space
Speaker 3:to actually be a player in like AI Yeah. Cloud. Yeah. Like there I I I see a world where they're like, yeah, we're really good at building infrastructure. We're gonna we're gonna build the infrastructure to power other people's apps.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I would expect to see some type of like enterprise AI offering from
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:SpaceX like in the near in the near future. Even potentially before like there's really like data centers in space. Yeah. Couple more posts.
Speaker 2:I just I I I love imagining the person who is just like the the longest tenured Twitter employee who's just like, yeah, I'm here. I'm I'm working at Twitter and like, okay, now I work in an AI lab. Now I work at a rocket company. It's like such a funny twist in the in in the career path. But, you know, congratulations to everyone who held on and is now working at Space X.
Speaker 3:Couple more reactions to Oracle. Matthew Zeitlin over at Heatmap says he's wearing the my the NVIDIA OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI shirt. And then Alex over at ABC responded to the Oracle's post and said, OMG, this is literally bank run language. Really does really does weird read like that.
Speaker 11:Oh, no.
Speaker 3:And so
Speaker 2:I mean, the good thing is that it just feels like the like the the the fear about adoption falling off has not really come to pass. And so, like, people need tokens. They're deploying them more and more. More more people are using LLMs, more hours of the day. Everything's sort of, like, on track.
Speaker 2:Like, the fundamental technology is is growing. And so would I be terrified of sitting on a data center that has the ability to inference just one of the many LLMs. Like, it doesn't seem like the worst scenario to be in. We looked at the gross margins. Seem good.
Speaker 2:Like, a lot of the health checks of the ecosystem have been passing, in my opinion. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And Oracle is already it's I mean, we've already it's down almost 50% since the original
Speaker 2:It's already sort of corrected. I wonder what the what the CDS is doing, but that's that's for another deep dive. The other other
Speaker 3:big Down story today more than 50% since the original announcement.
Speaker 2:So Play that womp womp.
Speaker 3:Well, up next, we fortunately have somebody whose job is to make sure the demand is real.
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 3:And so he is supporting the supporting the the backlog.
Speaker 2:Thibault from OpenAI. The the other breaking news that we should talk about before he hops on is Bob Bob Iger at Disney. He has told associates that he plans to leave the CEO role before his contract expires. He said, I'm taking all the IP, I'm giving it to OpenAI, and then I'm out. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Eiger told associates that he plans to step down as CEO and pull back from daily management before the December 31 end of his contract. Okay. So he's planning some summer moves. He's gonna be in Europe maybe.
Speaker 2:The Entertainment Giant's board of directors is planning to meet with him next week at its headquarters in Burbank, where they were expected to vote on who should take the top job. In private conversations over the last few months, Eiger has told people close to him that he's ready to move on from the grind of being CEO and was frustrated by conflicts at Disney's ABC Network over the brief suspension of late night host Jimmy Kimmel, people who have spoken to him said. The CEO has told multiple associates that he would like to spend more of his time and energy on other things such as sailing his new and larger superyacht, the Aquarius. Let's go. In the chat
Speaker 3:earlier was talking about the name of their new sailboat.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Gotta come up with
Speaker 3:an innovative name if you're naming a boat. Hiring Lexicon Branding
Speaker 2:For your boat? Really should. Aquarius feels pretty like, you know, Chad GPD could come up with that name potentially. He said that he would also like to devote more time to work with his wife, Willow Bay, dean of US USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and on Angel FC, the women's soccer team they bought in 2024. The final timing of his departure from the top job hasn't been determined yet and could change.
Speaker 2:He's expected to remain
Speaker 3:CEO Okay.
Speaker 2:For several months. What you got?
Speaker 3:Raghav, always always one step ahead
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 3:Us in the chat. Just shared, exclusive. OpenAI is unsatisfied with some NVIDIA chips and is looking for alternatives, sources say. So OpenAI comms team fires back. Okay.
Speaker 3:Like, Okay. Somebody else in the chat was saying that Jensen is in his clip farming era. He really is. He saw a bunch of the kick streamers and he's
Speaker 2:like, I
Speaker 3:need to start doing this.
Speaker 2:We'll we'll dig into that more. But until then, we have the we have some massive news from Codex. Let's bring in our guests from the Restream waiting room. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:What's happening?
Speaker 8:Hello. Nice nice to be here. Excited to be here.
Speaker 2:Thanks for hopping on the show. This is the first time on your show. Please introduce yourself and and your role and then the announcement today.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Sure. And Thibault, I I work here at OpenAO on Codex. Yeah. Together with an awesome team.
Speaker 8:I I lead the the entire Codex team.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:And, yeah, today, like, we launched the Codex app on macOS, and it's a very capable thing. I think it's a surprising cable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I mean, I I downloaded it before the show. I had, like, five minutes, and I was able to create a version of the TBPN website in the style of Berkshire Hathaway. It feels like sort of a Studio Ghibli moment for vibe coding in many ways. Like you can just spin stuff up.
Speaker 2:What are you excited about the desktop app specifically? Because we've seen like the whole Moldbot news, it interacts with your file system. But then there's also just there's just a whole host of people that are loosely familiar with programming and maybe they're comfortable with the idea of programming. But at the same time, when you tell them like, hey, set up an environment, get a CLI, get, you know, get your, you know, IDE set up, they're just like, I don't wanna spend the hour that it's gonna take me even to set up something as simple as the tools have become. It's still too much.
Speaker 2:So what were the goals? What are you excited about for Codex on desktop?
Speaker 8:There are two things I'm, like, really excited about. It's like, one, it does make it much more accessible. Yeah. You know, you just install it, you get going, and it's, like, after you log in. It's delightfully simple.
Speaker 8:You know, you're just greeted by this little composer. You can start chatting with it, and then sort of, like, invites you to get things done. But also, it very much leans in into the way of working that we've seen from, you know, technical staff at OpenAI and our users. And when you look at Peter, for example, like OpenCloud, it's just like multitasking a lot. And it's easy to lose context when you switch, like between your different terminals, you don't have And then you don't have like the whole multimodality things if you're working with, you know, front ends, images, if you just wanna use voice.
Speaker 8:All of those things are like packed into the app.
Speaker 2:Oh, And
Speaker 5:so it's
Speaker 8:very much leaning in into, like, making people even more productive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I didn't even notice that the dictate button's right there. I was uploading screenshots, and that was really effective. I Peter was talking a lot about how he he tacks screenshots in and and just gives more visual information to the system. Talk to me about the models that come out of the box, how I should be thinking about model selection.
Speaker 2:It sort of defaults to 5.2 codex medium. When would I wanna switch and what are some of the different benefits?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So we just get you started with the model that we feel is the best for most people.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And that's done, like, through extensive tests and internal evaluations and just feedback that we've got. And, like, point two codecs at Medium has this adaptive thinking. So it's going to work fast on easy problems. It's going to work harder on things that actually deserve taking the time. It just feels like a good default thing to get started with.
Speaker 8:We also introduced personalities, so now you have two choices. You can go with a more friendly one, and then you can use the pragmatic one, which was the one that we had so far. A lot of people surprisingly, even on the Codex team, switched to the friendly one. It's nice to be a little bit more supported and validated. But of course, also we support the other important models, 5.2, which was a much bigger jump, I think, than people expected.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And it's really also what we crafted the app and the experience around. Five two is really excellent at long running tasks independently and getting it done to a level of completion that you expect from senior technical staff. And that allows you to do a lot of multitasking, and, you know, that's really what the app is built around. You know, so you can handle, like, different projects, different threads, all running together without losing context and, like, sort of, like, efficiently Yeah.
Speaker 8:You know, managing a lot of things. And this is sort of like a glimpse into what the future is going to be like with agents.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I feel like a lot of people are going to come to the Codex app on desktop with a vague idea. You're going more prosumer, it feels like, with this in many ways. And I'm wondering how you think about planning versus implementation, walking through actually setting Codex up for success. Obviously, like the great programmers can just prompt better because they understand the hierarchy of files and what tools might be used.
Speaker 2:But for someone who's effectively nontechnical, how do you think about the planning stage giving the model enough to make good decisions and actually execute properly?
Speaker 8:Yeah, I think planning is effective in two ways. It is effective for the agent because it allows to be very specific about what you actually want the agent to go and do, perhaps for many hours, but it also gets your own thoughts straight. It invites you to have a conversation around what is it actually that you're trying to do when you're sitting behind. Sometimes you think, Hey, this is a very simple instruction. Just go and refactor it and remove this part of the backend and speed this part up.
Speaker 8:And then maybe there are actually you don't realize there are five different ways with different tradeoffs on how the agent could go and tackle this. And planning just sort of helps resolve that ambiguity. So I find it a very useful thing just as a human to go through as a process. It's like a useful reminder of like, Hey, let's be crisp about what you actually want to do. But one thing that's also very important is with the app and in general, we don't chop off the top end of the capabilities.
Speaker 8:Right? So it's very important that people who are extremely sophisticated can get the most incredible things done. And we're seeing a lot of adoption actually of the app, like within research, and you know, it's fascinating walking through the office, like, seeing people, like, do the wildest things with this thing. It's, like, very much a very it's a very capable tool.
Speaker 2:If I look at the release schedule, I see the ChatGPT app, which has a lot of functionality, the Atlas browser, now Codex on desktop. Are c l are are IDEs dead in your opinion? Are people just gonna bring their own? Or do you think this grows into an IDE? Or is that like a separate separate environment based on, like, what you're experiencing and the workflows that you're
Speaker 8:Right seeing with the now it's a companion to the IDE that very much can stand on its own but is enhanced by using an IDE occasionally. Some people will prefer just being in their IDE, but it is quite evident to me that as agents just become extremely capable, you just want to talk to them and they will get things done, then what you want to do is you want to be able to steer them and supervise the result, And that requires something that is a very rich interaction surface, and that's what we're building with the app.
Speaker 2:How do you think about deployment? I can imagine people vibe coding little apps that do things for them on their computers or I had to build an HTML page that I just opened in Chrome and was able to just see. The next step is actually deploying it. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of tools that you could plug in with. How are you thinking about open ecosystem versus potentially offering some hosting functionality?
Speaker 8:Yeah. We we love investing in the open ecosystem. That's something that I've been very proud of us doing. It was like all our code is like the majority of our code is open source. You know, we also support a lot of like other open source initiatives.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And one of the things that we're leaning in is like the open standard around skills. Okay. And we ship with a bunch of skills that are useful. Like for example, you know, one is like for Vercel deployments.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 8:And that allows you to just take what you've built and very quickly deploy it and have it, you know, accessible there and, you know, share it with others. Yeah. It is not a native integration. We might consider that in the future. Yeah.
Speaker 8:But it's already very easy to do things that are way beyond just writing code.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for a lot of people, even deploying to Vercel is gonna be, oh, there's gonna be it's gonna ask me for an API key or something. But if you're in a chat interface, it can go back and forth and what, and you can just ask, okay, what does this mean? Where do I go?
Speaker 2:What's the web page? Where do I click? What do I copy? All of a sudden,
Speaker 13:it's That's right.
Speaker 1:You don't
Speaker 8:need to read the docs anymore. Like, you can just, you know, ask Codex to do it for you, and it will do it a high degree of a high degree of quality, especially given, you know, all the information is packed into skill. It's like sort of like puts like the guardrails on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you thinking about funneling ChatGPT users to Codex on desktop? It feels like
Speaker 3:You're gonna buy some ads?
Speaker 2:No. But I mean, there are there are worlds where you fire off a GPT 5.2 prompt and it just writes code in the law in the thinking step and you don't actually see the Python that it wrote and executed. And the next step is, okay, maybe I wanna run this regularly, maybe I wanna wrap this in CLI or some desktop app. And I could imagine a flow where, you know, you're you're in the ChatGPT app and you get to the end of the capabilities there and says, you should go over here. We have a more robust experience for you.
Speaker 2:Have you thought about that? I mean, on day one, there's just going be immense amount of just excitement and trial and virality. But long term, what are you thinking of integration between the different ecosystems?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I hope that with this launch we do inspire a set of people who haven't tried Codex yet to try it and realize, hey, I can really do really cool creative things with this.
Speaker 2:And, you
Speaker 8:know, maybe like Coding Agents is actually for me. What you explained around, you know, the first experience in Chargempty and then you have, you know, the code interpreter workflow there where, you know, you don't actually need to understand a code or you use Canvas and, you know, you have this little bit of the lag there and, you know, you realize, hey, Chad, you can create things for me and, like, you know, which image generation, like, do we combine that and sort of, bring the magic of, like, coding agents to everyone. Mhmm. But it's definitely something that we're thinking about. There are considerations there around, you know, how you do this safely and securely given, you know, the folks wouldn't actually understand the code as running under the hood.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:So codecs for now is very much meant for, you know, technical technical adjacent audience. But then we're also thinking like, hey, this thing is like incredibly powerful and the coding can help achieve all sorts of economically viable tasks. You don't need to understand that it's code under the hood, but Yeah. You how do we bring this to more people?
Speaker 3:Are you gonna hang with are you hanging with Peter while he's in SF?
Speaker 8:We're, like, close on Twitter, and, you know, Peter is just everywhere. This con CloudCon, like, for the first time, which is like I heard it's like over, like, you know, 500 participants already and stuff, so I might just, drop by and say hi.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. It's so fast. Yeah. Everything he does is fast. I mean, one one of my big takeaways from the ClawdBot, MopBot, OpenClaw was just that mobile, the importance of mobile and people going on Telegram or Signal or WhatsApp and texting an interface that could write code for them, execute things and interface with some hardware.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about the mobile experience into codecs? Like where how how the integration loops happens now that there's a desktop app. There's obviously the ChatGPT mobile app that has massive installation. What are the what are the pros, cons? What are you excited about there?
Speaker 8:Yeah. We're very excited about the mobile experience. It's Mhmm. It'll always be my dream of, you know, I can start a task. I can talk to Codex from anywhere, and then Yeah.
Speaker 8:I can just like walk away, follow on my phone, and steer it. Yeah. This is definitely something that's going to come. That's cool. We are very much optimizing, you know, for professional software engineers, and people are like, you know, really excited about getting super productive.
Speaker 8:So it felt like bringing first amazing experience on macOS, you know, felt like the right thing priorities wise.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:It is something that will come and I think will delight people when it's there. And this is also why, you know, we we keep calling everything Codex. Codex is our agent. It is how you you get things done. And then, you know, whether you interact it through it, like, via the CLI or in web or in in The US, like, under the hood is the same agent.
Speaker 8:And, like, we're gonna connect it all at some point.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is it time to buy an extra monitor? How many monitors do you run?
Speaker 8:Right now, on my laptop, I only have one. Oh. Which app is delightful. Like, you can actually, like, follow things, like, much more, so I don't feel like the need to have, like, five monitors. At home, I I I do have three and, like,
Speaker 2:know, there we go. Go. There gonna lie. Yeah. Maybe that Dell, the the 65 inch six k monitors in the future.
Speaker 2:We're we're very excited about that. Anyway, congratulations on the launch. Thank you so much for stopping Great by the to meet you. And we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 8:Cheers. Thanks for having me. Thanks
Speaker 2:for Let me tell you about vibe.co where d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.
Speaker 3:Where to go next?
Speaker 2:Dylan Abruscato said the Succession is a documentary because apparently, the next CEO of Disney could be the the theme park division chairman. I didn't get the reference. Have you seen hey. Do do you get the reference
Speaker 3:from Succession? It's Tom who's running the park. Right? Tom runs the parks department. Let me know.
Speaker 3:Let me know if I
Speaker 2:I I gotta finally get through all of succession. But Oh, in other news, there's I I see this post that you're on. Bro spent $50,000,000,000 buying Bitcoin over the past five years and is now talking about
Speaker 3:micro strategy?
Speaker 2:He didn't even mention who it is.
Speaker 3:And people
Speaker 2:And people just know that it's micro.
Speaker 3:I mean, not a lot of people that are non maybe state entities have have bought this much
Speaker 2:and 12,000 Bitcoins.
Speaker 8:Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 5:There has been a
Speaker 3:sell off. His his average entry is in the eighties. Yeah. And whereas
Speaker 2:Bitcoin is up today. It's 78,000, but, obviously, that's nowhere near where it was when it was up at $1.20. So a significant a significant sell off. But Really? There there
Speaker 6:are some I some extra context on the
Speaker 2:Please.
Speaker 6:OpenAI news. So, yeah, apparently, OpenAI had been talking with Srubis and Grok to do, like, custom chips. Mhmm. And then when when Grok got bought by NVIDIA, like, that that stopped the the talks. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I think it's just because they're too slow. Right? You've seen Roon talk about this where Codex is Yeah. Is, you know Yeah. Somewhat slower than, yeah, Cloud Code or whatever.
Speaker 6:Even though if the model's actually better, the experience can be, you know, worse sometimes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. I mean, like, they're like, the models can get better, but they're already really, really good. Like, most of the deep research reports that I get back are amazing.
Speaker 2:They're they they they they mission accomplished. Like you did it. You did the research, you compiled it and I got my information, but I had to wait twenty minutes. Cut that down to two minutes and I'll probably use it 10 times as much. And I'll probably pay time 10 times as much for that.
Speaker 2:And same thing with coding. You know, there's so many memes about watching brain rot videos while while you're waiting for codex or plug code or whatever you're using to come back and answer you, speed it up, and you're gonna have a much faster adoption path.
Speaker 3:Chat has confirmed that it is Tom Wamsgan's
Speaker 2:There we
Speaker 3:go. In the amusement park and cruise division, then he got moved up to ATN Oh. News. Okay. The one more thing on the DAT side of things.
Speaker 3:BitMind, this is Tom Lee.
Speaker 2:Yes. Forward guess
Speaker 3:who's that? Has unrealized losses of 6,600,000,000.0 now on track to become the fifth largest documented principal trading loss in history if sold. Of course, he's not selling. He remains He's he's really testing his diamond hands. Diamond hands.
Speaker 3:It's at 66% of the size of our Arkegos. Yeah. It was Bill Oh, Arkegos. Yeah. Arkegos.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Bill Bill Wong's infamous hedge fund.
Speaker 2:Well, we have Christopher O'Donnell from day AI in the roostering waiting room. We'll bring him into the TVPN UltraDome. Christopher, how are you
Speaker 3:doing? Woah.
Speaker 7:Unique? Very well. Yeah. How are you guys?
Speaker 2:Thanks. Beautiful. Setting here
Speaker 3:that no one's ever done
Speaker 2:this before.
Speaker 5:I feel
Speaker 2:like I'm watching it for Hangout. Honestly, I feel like I'm watching an OpenAI launch video, but it is fantastic. It looks fantastic.
Speaker 7:We can get a little OCD, I guess. We were we
Speaker 2:were pumped for this. And so we've been in here, like,
Speaker 7:teaching ourselves how
Speaker 2:to use lights and stuff like that. You know
Speaker 7:what I mean? Like ordering this shit on Amazon. Nice. I'm
Speaker 3:pumped for this. I I had my favorite experience ever when I when I check X in the morning. I see a cool startup launching. Yep. And I'm like Already on the calendar.
Speaker 3:Thinking like I gotta get this. I gotta get this. You gotta get guy And then you're you were already on. So it's Anyway great to
Speaker 2:see you. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself, the company. Tell us what you're building.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So Christopher O'Donnell, longtime listener, first time caller. I led product at led product at HubSpot for about ten years and am now lucky enough to be with a a group of a dozen or so of my closest friends doing a similar but also very different thing from scratch in the age of AI. You know, it's sort of you know, what if we were to start from the very beginning and do everything in this as you guys are constantly discussing wildly evolving and radically different world? Yeah.
Speaker 7:So that's that's the short story.
Speaker 2:So early product market, how are you segmenting things? What's the key value prop? I mean, I'm sure there's AI, but take me a cut deeper.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, I think looking at CRM, there's a funny thing, which is I feel like in everybody's head Mhmm. Everybody's expectations are wildly different for everything. And you guys talk about this in, you know, every vertical, you know our lives are changing so rapidly. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And yet nobody is really expecting that to happen with CRM. Everybody's kinda like, but Salesforce isn't going anywhere. And it's like, hold on. There's a layer of it that is, well, we could eliminate the manual data entry, and we could maybe better integrate with some other systems. And what we're seeing is there is a wildly different level of what's possible that really was the original promise of CRM.
Speaker 7:Like, hey. I'm a CEO. I have concerns about my business. I have existential questions. I wanna know if this whole new cohort of sales reps that we hired two months ago is gonna make it.
Speaker 7:You know? I wanna know what I can do, what deals I should be involved in. I wanna know if I'm spending my time the right way. And you can actually get instant answers to that if you had the entire record of everything that had been said or done at the company instantly indexed Mhmm. And readable by, you know, an AI agent.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It that's the heart of what we're doing is ingesting everything and storing it in a way that is LLM optimized. Mhmm. So, you know, easy for it to explore this whole network of relationships.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But also in natural language and with explanations about why everything is what it appears to be. Mhmm. You know, we're seeing it's just a completely different set of use cases. So that's really interesting to navigate with customers. But everybody's starting to kind of go from, wait, what?
Speaker 7:Yeah. To, of course, this is exactly the thing that we should have.
Speaker 3:What is
Speaker 7:what
Speaker 3:is, like, the killer feature or experience that you're optimizing for? You're you're trying to somebody signs up, they, you know, sort of integrate whatever tools they need, and then like what's the first moment like that you're trying to get people to kind of see the future?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think the most obvious thing is a better version of the meeting recorders that we've come to kind of rely on. You know, here's this thing. It's watching. It's taking notes, and I don't have to do that on the call because it's all being captured and recorded.
Speaker 7:And then from that, you know, I can ask questions about it. I can, you know, automatically have my deals moving based on what happened on the call. Mhmm. That's really great. If I wanna write follow-up emails, they're incredibly good and the UI is just snapping and moving around as I go through this whole workflow.
Speaker 7:That's kind of the entry level magic trick that people see when they come in. Mhmm. Then there is this much deeper realization that, oh, wait a second. I can actually ask and understand anything that is happening in the business. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And and and that you know, people get to that pretty quickly, you know, within a week usually.
Speaker 2:Talk about bottom up adoption versus top down. Do you wanna
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Go for the big enterprise, have them rip out some massive system? Or I remember using a product called Streak that just plugged into Gmail. You know, you could I I I've also built a CRM with Visual Basic in Excel. Like, you you you can start a CRM project just in a spreadsheet. How are you thinking about where where you wanna plug in and and start getting traction?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. A part of our crew built a bunch of Streak in addition to
Speaker 2:to HubSpot.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's a
Speaker 2:cool company. I I enjoyed it at the time. It was, like, very, like, lightweight. You know? You could just bolt it on, basically.
Speaker 7:Totally. Totally. Yeah. The adoption story, it's a great question. You know, we saw over I've been working in CRM for, I don't even know what, ten, fifteen years.
Speaker 2:Let's go. And service.
Speaker 7:The the march of history always seemed to be from the CEO toward the buyer with, you know, a big swing through rep productivity and these bottoms up tools. And when I kind of move from the rewrite of the HubSpot marketing product to do a startup within a startup in the sales tools that became HubSpot sales and CRM, That was the thesis. Like, we're gonna go bottoms up. We're gonna do what these other sales acceleration tools are doing. And that worked really well.
Speaker 7:And then, you know, marching toward the buyer being able to drive as much of the sales process as possible. I think that still exists. And I think that solving for frontline people is absolutely huge and giving them things they can come in, get started on day zero. Absolutely. No big top down rollout.
Speaker 7:We're also seeing a little bit of a return to the CEO. Oh. And I spend a lot of my time actually, I I mean, I spend most of my time just demoing at this point other CEOs and showing them how I use it. Sure. That's the because you can't really say it in I mean, we try in our marketing messaging and everything.
Speaker 7:Like, look at all these examples and everything. But if you see me use it, you go, oh, wait. Okay. I got it. This is like this chief of staff that's watching everything and coaching me and giving me the data and, you know, we're having it up at a board meeting.
Speaker 7:Pat Grady, who I know you guys had on recently, that was a great great segment there. He had a tweet today about our last board meeting.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And we just had the assistant up on the big screen. There was no deck. Uh-huh. It's like, I sent a big memo and I I sent a memo in a context file so the board can ask questions Sure. And get instant answers.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 7:we just had the assistant up on the screen the whole time, and there's no like, oh, that's a great question. Let me, you know, get my ops people to circle back or anything. It's like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which changes things, man.
Speaker 7:It's gonna be interesting.
Speaker 3:That's amazing. What there's so many large software companies that are working to become AI native. The first step is obviously to say that you're AI native, put it on the website. But what are
Speaker 1:Got some of the
Speaker 3:what are done? What what are what are kind of the challenges having worked in in big CRM of of kind of evolving?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, if you think about it from the perspective of the AI agent and you really you know, you switch from putting yourself in the user's perspective and you put yourself in the perspective of Claude or one of these clients that is asking questions and calling tools and trying to solve problems for you, you actually want something pretty different. We had a customer connect their Claude to both HubSpot and DayAI and said, you know, what do you think? And Claude says, are you asking me which I prefer? And she's like, yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I'm asking you which of these do you like more? And Claude says, well, look, you know, how do I how do I explain this? This old CRM is like a spreadsheet. And this DayAI thing is everything that I need to answer any question you have.
Speaker 7:I can find the answer. Like, let's go. What do you wanna know? That's a very different approach that gets all the way down to disk. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Like, literally, all the way down to how you are capturing and storing the data. Having worked on these systems in many versions of these over the years, it it's a problem that starts at the very lowest parts of the stack to be able to give the agents, you know, this kind of information. I mean, we all know that Opus four or five with the right context window can do magical things. I mean, it's godlike. So the question is, how do you give it exactly the right piece?
Speaker 3:That's amazing.
Speaker 4:I don't
Speaker 7:think it's god. I don't think it's god. Godlike? It's like it's like definitely It's God light. Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's like a precursor to like, we're definitely living in a simulation. And
Speaker 2:then it was.
Speaker 7:Mine is, like, about to become the thing we think of as our creator. I think that's, like, fair to say.
Speaker 2:That's pretty wild. You raised some money. I wanna talk about the deal. I wanna kick off the lambda lightning round. I wanna bring down the mallet from the heavens so I can ring the gong for you.
Speaker 2:How much did you raise?
Speaker 7:We raised 20,000,000.
Speaker 3:Woah. From, Sequoia and who else?
Speaker 7:Sequoia, Permanent Capital, Conviction Oh. Found Ventures
Speaker 2:and Green Oaks. Fantastic. Bunch of nobodies.
Speaker 3:Quite quite the
Speaker 2:group. That's a fantastic trip.
Speaker 3:Well done.
Speaker 2:Congratulations, and I'm sure you'll be back on the show soon. We'll talk to you later.
Speaker 7:I hope so. We have a lot coming.
Speaker 3:Can't wait Great for to meet you, Christopher.
Speaker 2:Good luck to you,
Speaker 3:sir. Team.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organ a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.
Speaker 2:And Up next. Up next.
Speaker 3:We have Jim
Speaker 2:Jim from Shield. Shield. Welcome to the TVP in Ultradome.
Speaker 3:What's happening?
Speaker 14:Good to see you. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3:It's great to have you here. Quick intro on yourself and what you're working on.
Speaker 14:Yeah. My name is Jim Siders. I'm the CEO of Shield Technology Partners, which is an IT services platform, in cooperation with Thrive Holdings. We're bringing IT, powered by AI to all these small and medium businesses all across America.
Speaker 3:Finally. We've been begging for this. No. We've been we've been excited to Well, we've begging for it too.
Speaker 14:Like, what took so long?
Speaker 3:That's I know. Exactly. So you raised a 100,000,000 from Thrive today. When this has been in the works though for what? Like eighteen months?
Speaker 14:A little less than that. I mean, it's it's a long term relationship. Right? Like, whole company was founded in a partnership that included Thrive Holdings at the beginning and which is when I got involved kind of in the conversation long before I joined as CEO. And all the way through, we've been thinking about how does, how does holding support with a strategic investment, this kind of thing.
Speaker 14:Right? We're building this thing for the long term, so we wanna make sure that we have the the war chest necessary to do the right stuff now. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Amazing. What, what do what do the early customer relationships actually look like? I know you're you're buying some existing companies, so you're inheriting, customer base everywhere you go. I'm sure you're shedding some and then and then scaling from there. But, what is Yeah.
Speaker 3:What is the, in the most simple way, what does a business actually look like? What does the work look like today?
Speaker 14:Yeah. Hopefully, we're shedding as few as possible. I mean, the idea is we're buying quite good IT MSPs all over America who have successful customer bases, who have long term relationships with folks, and we're leaving them in place. Right? We're leaving those customers.
Speaker 14:We're leaving the people who founded the business, the engineers and technicians who build those relationships. Then we layer on AI and other proprietary stuff on top of it. And the the whole goal is that those customers are actually clamoring for more, not churning because they just got bought by a their their IT guy just got bought by a private equity firm or something. Right? And so far, to the direct answer to your question, that's been pretty much what we're hearing.
Speaker 14:You know, we we hear customers going, oh, I heard I heard this thing happened. Can can you bring some of these Thrive guys over here to talk? Can you bring some Shield guys over here to talk to us about about what we can do with IT? We're curious about it, we've never had access. That's exactly the point.
Speaker 14:That's that's the whole thing we're going after.
Speaker 3:Makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:What what how how are you thinking about the broader market and and what companies in the in sort of like the the small and medium sized business categories are like most ripe for getting leverage out of AI. We've been tracking, you know, the, like, the ramp AI adoption metrics. Obviously, every tech company has a bunch of subscriptions. And then you go down the list, it's who you think. And it's like the logging company hasn't adopted AI yet.
Speaker 2:But what what do you think is underrated right now?
Speaker 14:Well, I mean, the logging company is a great place to start. I mean Go ahead. The thesis is on our side, there's a there's a lot of companies in the real economy Yeah. That would benefit from the same kind of things that's creating, you know, AI creating durable value for large enterprises. Right?
Speaker 14:The same thing that should help Airbus or Rio Tinto or whatever should also help like a regional roofing company
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 14:Or or a dentist office chain. So really, the customer selectivity, that's not really where where my emphasis is at this point.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 14:What I'm looking for is the IT service businesses that have built these really durable relationships where we get access to problem spaces that we haven't yet seen in the real economy. Because there's gonna be something that we that falls out of it, the the lived experience of those IT technicians that we can use in the product motion. At least that's the
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Can you
Speaker 2:can you help me understand your thoughts on the, like, the the customization of software? Are we going into it feels like we're going into a world where more and more cost more and more software will be custom. There's already big companies that, you know, Palantir, these companies go in and they have a backbone, but then they're doing a lot of custom implementation. Companies that you can hire that will build something completely bespoke for you, whether that's like a consulting group. But then typically, you know, if you're buying a piece of SaaS off the shelf, they're not really doing anything for you, but it feels like now they can with a forward deployed salesperson, forward deployed engineer.
Speaker 2:How are you how how do you think about that trend? And, like, how like, we're here, we have, like, a few vibe coded custom systems that, you know, a small 10 person team a few years ago would definitely not have. I can't tell if we're just early adopters of the technology or if this is the future.
Speaker 14:Well, there's a few ways I can answer that. I mean, first, got to confess to a bias. Right? I mean, I was a challenger for a long time for a reason. Yeah.
Speaker 14:Because I think the the combination of first principles thinking and the forward deployed motion
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 14:Does yield differentiated results. Right? You can see in that company's results that that's true and in their customers' results that that that's true. I think the thing that lets your team benefit from vibe coding a thing that you wouldn't have had access to previously should benefit and can benefit a bunch of different ranges of businesses. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:And really, the thing that's been holding anybody back from that is is economic models more than anything. Right? So, like, if I if I'm founding a SaaS company, I my investors expect a certain kind of multiple. We expect a certain type of product motion and go to market motion. I have to develop a product from afar, find a customer for it.
Speaker 14:It has to be designed to be saleable. Right? Mhmm. And so at that point, if it's not informed real if you didn't get your product management motion really, really well right out of the gate, it's kind of good luck that it creates durable value for anybody. Whereas, if you do this inside out development motion, we've seen like I was saying, creates all this value in the in the large enterprises, you can find a way to get access to that same problem space, bring that caliber of engineer to the to the work phase, to the mind phase.
Speaker 14:My the thesis is my belief is that it's gonna actually produce the same type of differentiated results, which I I think the crisp answer to your question is, yeah. I think I think customized software, like inside out development, however you wanna call it, forward like, we forward deploy ourselves to vibe code things. Like, that's I think that is the future. No question.
Speaker 3:How how is traditional private equity kind of reacting to the to the shields of the world? Smart, you know, very sophisticated financially, can raise plenty of money, they're well aware of AI, they think it's gonna be important. You're coming in and you're competing to acquire businesses that might have landed with them historically. I'm imagining you have a very a pretty exciting value proposition. Your the team is has an amazing track record, incredibly tapped in, well capitalized.
Speaker 3:You're saying like, we wanna retain your whole team. We want to keep all of your customers happy. We wanna create more value here by growing the business and growing earnings through just like really expanding the customer base. So it seems really appealing to the seller of a company, somebody that a business owner. But of course, private equity is not gonna just kind of roll over.
Speaker 3:How how how have they reacted?
Speaker 14:Well, mean, I anecdotally, it seems to me like they're trying to figure out how to get to the same type of goodness. I mean, I you know, I'm not I'm not in private equity, I'm talking out of my wheelhouse. But, I mean, one could see that with the amount of competition in the IT small and medium business space for roll ups, just traditional private equity roll ups, one would fear that the goodness is getting arped away somehow. At least that would be my my fear if I was there. So you're looking for something to differentiate it.
Speaker 14:So then there's this kind of growing crop of, like, what does an IT or, a an AI roll up thing look like? But everybody's kinda talking about it in a very different way. Right? Which is so one of the things that we're trying to do is not exactly do that. Like, we kind of rhyme with that in some ways.
Speaker 14:We rhyme with a with a roll up in some ways, or we rhyme with a with a a tech company in some ways. What trying we're to do is kinda take the best of breed of all of those mental models and do something a little bit different. So in our case, for example, one one easy example of several, the relationship with Thrive Holdings gives me a lot longer time horizon. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 14:I can think about doing something that's really durable. Like, if we're gonna change there's one thing to create disruption or take advantage of disruption. If we're gonna really change a really entrenched business model, like managed IT services, it's probably gonna take a long time even if we're outrageously successful. Right? So having that kind of time horizon to work with gives me a way to to address a different thing than any private equity or traditionally, you know, structured private equity role that would have to, which de facto is a good thing, I think.
Speaker 14:And I think the private equity folks that are paying attention probably see that also.
Speaker 2:Well Makes sense. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I wanna head back on
Speaker 1:for a $100,000,000. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Very, very cool. Thanks. It's great to meet you. Come back on. If if there's something in the news that that you've got a strong opinion on, come back on or I'm sure you'll be back on for more fundraisers.
Speaker 14:Please. I'd love to. Thanks so much.
Speaker 5:Talk to
Speaker 2:you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider.
Speaker 2:Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.
Speaker 6:Up next
Speaker 3:Without we have the king
Speaker 2:of enterprise software. We have Chris Black back on the show. Welcome to the Thank you so much for taking the time to come on down
Speaker 3:My baby.
Speaker 2:To the TVP on Ultradome. Good to see you. How you been? How's your 2026 going so far?
Speaker 5:So far so good. I'm happy to be I feel like I'm the Voice
Speaker 2:for rage.
Speaker 5:I feel like I'm the brokest guy that's ever been on the show, so I'm happy to be here. I feel like it's gonna rub off on me a
Speaker 2:little voice alone is worth tiny billion dollars.
Speaker 5:Good. I hope so.
Speaker 2:Listen to these types. Hope Great.
Speaker 5:Twenty six's guy was I stayed out a lot later than I wanted to. Okay. Three nights in a row for
Speaker 3:grand and some the
Speaker 2:grand promotions. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, we're shooting how long gone stuff, but I was like, the timing works out. So why don't
Speaker 1:I just you know what I mean? Why don't I stay How how does it work for how
Speaker 3:long gone? Well, you stack?
Speaker 5:We do like stack at all.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay.
Speaker 5:We if we we record on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, and the episodes come out the next day.
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 5:So Jason edits it Yeah. Like as basically, as soon as we finish, then it goes up the next day.
Speaker 2:What's the status of the tour?
Speaker 5:We just do it sort of whenever. Like, we had it summer. Yeah. We're gonna do New York and LA probably. We just wanna recalibrate it because it's fun Yeah.
Speaker 5:And we like doing it. Yeah. But I wouldn't say it's a huge Yeah. Upside on the bottom line Sure. Just based on our travel Yeah.
Speaker 5:Quality of travel
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:Demand that moves into the bottom line profit. We're losing.
Speaker 2:Know? We're losing. It's really it really No. No. No.
Speaker 2:It makes no sense. But the the the the live show you prepared
Speaker 5:style. Yeah. But the riffing Did
Speaker 3:you ever give a TED talk?
Speaker 5:No. I wish. God. Imagine with the fucking mic. No.
Speaker 1:I mean know when you
Speaker 2:look at something On the red dot?
Speaker 3:You think of the TED talk era in hindsight, there's so much so much opportunity to like go back and just like sign get get yourself a TED talk and deliver the most, like, ridiculous
Speaker 1:because if you look
Speaker 5:through it, there's there's some it ain't a list.
Speaker 2:No. Well, well, so so so they had
Speaker 3:they had TEDx. Farming TEDx.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So TEDx was independent, so anyone could set one up.
Speaker 5:I didn't realize it was independent.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes. So so they they they their brand. They sort of license their brand and anyone so they would do, like, TEDx, Boston University.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it would just be, like, a local kid that was, like, organizing and being, come talk. And it and and depending on how much they put into production, it could either look a lot like the TED stage or just like a couple people in a conference room.
Speaker 5:Mic night.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They basically open night. Right? See, that's those I didn't know that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. And and aesthetically, those don't hit.
Speaker 3:For the LinkedIn crowd.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. And and and so Nothing better. Nothing remember Think of more.
Speaker 2:I went to one in Boston with a guy who created Android who probably should be giving, a real TED That's kinda cool. It feels real. But he was basically just giving a TED Talk with a couple other people. Here's my thoughts on open source software, whatever. But it was just him filmed, like, three chairs in a conference room against the wall.
Speaker 2:So even if you see it and it says TEDx, you're like, that doesn't feel like a TEDx. Yeah. No. But certain places would put the red dot on the ground, give you the mic, you'd be walking around, have the cue cards and everything, and just looks then it gets wild.
Speaker 5:The best one I ever saw that appealed to me was Mark Ronson. Okay. Because he, like, broke down Yeah. How, like, a beat is made basically for all these nerds. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I could see their third eye expanding in a way. It's like, holy shit. This is actually so interesting and cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But most of those were not for me. Can't say I devoured the catalog on the YouTube,
Speaker 1:on the YouTube channel. I can't can't can't stake claim on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what were you devouring at the time? This was like 08/2010 era?
Speaker 5:Mostly cocaine, but I mean,
Speaker 1:I I guess there's I guess there's some
Speaker 5:I was probably I was going out a lot. That was like New York era. Okay. I I feel like that was honestly like music blog.
Speaker 2:Was A hype machine?
Speaker 1:That I was more of like a stereo gum Okay.
Speaker 5:Pitchfork Brooklyn vegan like sort of like that, which is kind of back now. Yeah. I mean, we went the Pitchfork party this weekend. It was one of the best parties at Grammy. It was really fun.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And I think that it's like I don't know if you guys are up on the paywall discourse around Pitchfork.
Speaker 3:No. They they
Speaker 5:basically put up a a paywall.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:And the the crux of it, to my understanding, is that you can basically, you can rate albums.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 5:the famously, the appeal of Pitchfork is the
Speaker 2:numerical score. Numerical score being sort of brutal. Right? Sometimes they'll give someone like a four out of 10.
Speaker 5:But sometimes the oftentimes, the score doesn't necessarily match the actual review, but no one's gonna read the actual you know what I mean?
Speaker 3:Only the heads
Speaker 5:read. So it could be like a five, but then you read it and it's like, oh, it's not that bad, actually. But there's a little bit
Speaker 2:of a Okay.
Speaker 5:Okay. Disconnect sometimes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So they give people
Speaker 5:the option, which I'm pretty bullish on because I think that everyone on the Internet thinks they're an expert or critic and thinks they need to be heard. It's like the letterbox
Speaker 2:sort of thing. Totally.
Speaker 5:And I think that there's plenty of
Speaker 2:Rotten Tomatoes has the Yeah. Tomato meter Exactly. Metacritic has the audience
Speaker 5:plenty of, like, mouth breathing music fans that think that they should be able to rate the My Morning Jacket record, how they feel
Speaker 2:How they feel. You
Speaker 5:can't underestimate the passion of these civilians.
Speaker 2:You pay them. They send you a text file. You can write whatever you want about My Morning Jacket. Was they they print
Speaker 3:it out.
Speaker 2:If you want 10 out of 10, we'll just show that right to you.
Speaker 5:So it's a controversial idea, but I think it's actually quite smart.
Speaker 1:Because it
Speaker 5:because it doesn't it doesn't like the critic part of it is still gonna be there, so it doesn't dilute the overall you know what I mean? It's a little bit to me. Yeah. But it's but it's, you know, the it's a elevated comment section in some ways, which is a scary thing to consider. In
Speaker 2:our world, Davos came back just this year.
Speaker 5:It's true.
Speaker 2:It's South by South
Speaker 3:long gone.
Speaker 2:They should have had you at Davos for sure.
Speaker 5:Yeah. We were yeah. That's we're open to that if Davos is listening.
Speaker 2:Any hope for South by Southwest making a comeback? Any other conferences?
Speaker 5:Mean, South by Southwest has actually done pretty well because they pivoted to like Internet shit. Yeah. You know, it's not about it's not Yeah. Bands playing sponsored by Sparks at three in the afternoon. Now it's like a little more serious, and there's a film aspect to it.
Speaker 5:Okay. I think it's just moved away from music Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's still
Speaker 1:a part of it, but it's more of
Speaker 5:an element instead of a
Speaker 2:focus. I'm just wondering if it comes back and they and they really play into the music thing.
Speaker 5:I just think that it's sort of I I mean, there's a possibility only because I think right now we're seeing a real swing back to, like, guitar music. Okay. Because, I mean Guitar low key fell off. Low key fell off hard. Not even low key.
Speaker 1:I would say high key fell off.
Speaker 5:And I think the diff now that that Somebody
Speaker 3:was telling me a a buddy was at like a guitar center the other day and he Sold out? In Hollywood.
Speaker 5:No guitars left?
Speaker 3:No. No. He said it was like every single guitar was like on a crazy sale It's probably like the Q4 glut, you know. Oh, okay.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean
Speaker 3:But I was like, I just remember being a kid like wanting like like I Yeah. I played guitar like, you know, every single day growing up and all these guitars that like were just so out of reach. Yeah. Now I'm now I I I don't know. I can see it.
Speaker 3:It's the perfect analog like Yeah.
Speaker 5:I mean, it's like anything else. It's sort of like I mean, music always goes in phases like that, you know, like not generationally, but maybe like by decade, I would say. And I think the chart thing, even though I hate to pay attention to it or like streaming numbers or whatever, it's real. You know, like there's there hasn't been a hip hop song in the top 10 or something for like it's an interesting thing that's happening in the geese of it all.
Speaker 2:Wait. Isn't SD Kidd top 10? I assume. No. No?
Speaker 2:No. No.
Speaker 5:No. He's he's he's
Speaker 2:Based on Instagram reels. On your algorithm. On my
Speaker 5:algorithm. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. There's no monoculture. So it's sort of like you seem to want
Speaker 2:to to
Speaker 5:some extent. But I think that the the the geese is the big sort of thing that people are talking about culturally so relevant.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:And it's making people mad Yeah. In a way that's like sort of exciting and people fucking hate it as much as they like
Speaker 2:Tell me more about the story.
Speaker 5:I mean, Geese is a a band from New York that's put out a couple records. They're really young. Yeah. And it's it's just really polarizing. I mean, it's like this guy Cameron Winter is the singer.
Speaker 5:He's a like He put out a solo record. He's a generational sort of talent. Sure.
Speaker 3:It's sort
Speaker 5:of like a Neil Young, Tom York. But they played SNL and people were very mad. Oh. This is the worst shit I've ever seen.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But then on those
Speaker 3:They just didn't like the way it sounded?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, look how they sound.
Speaker 1:Whole you know? Lana Del Rey
Speaker 2:had a similar SNL experience.
Speaker 5:It happens often because SNL is I mean, that's as middle of the road as you're gonna get.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but it seems like some of their content booking is, like, a little ahead of their curve.
Speaker 5:They're they're usually I mean, they're good in general at at taking a few risks. For every Cardi B and Mumford and Sons Yep. There's a geese that sort of, like, they take a swing, and that's what they're known for. Yeah. I mean, we sound like boom I mean, I can call the boomer for watching SNL.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And I will take that. Yes. I I deserve that lump. I think it's real.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What what happens to what happens to the late night shows in general? I feel like they thrived in a when you had a monoculture, you had the whole world fixated on the same types of things. Now it's like you turn it on and you'd you'd realistically, to, like, appeal to the broad enough audience, you gotta have It's impossible. 20 night twenty twenty shows that were taking the place of and the Internet sort of does that.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But I think it's I mean, I think it as much as I have a respect for and love to replace them in some ways Yeah. I think it's sort of it we're at the end. I mean, I think that, like, celebrities need places to promote their projects and that is not gonna go away. Yeah. But there's shit like this.
Speaker 5:And that gets more eyeballs and is feels more relevant. And I think that like, you can go on Dax Shepard Yep. And it's gonna do more for your movie or your album or your book Yeah. Than it is to go on Stephen Colbert. That's just the reality.
Speaker 5:And it's it's like, I'm more concerned with the loss of the music performances because I think NPR Tiny Desk is like corny. Yeah. But and I think there's I spent a lot of time on YouTube watching like performances from the nineties, eighties, whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And I think that magic is what
Speaker 2:But you can reconstitute that on the Internet. I feel like you can Yeah.
Speaker 3:Why don't you guys
Speaker 2:do that?
Speaker 5:Mean, no. We're trying to do it, we've talked about it a lot. And I think it's it's a it's
Speaker 2:easy theory. There's nothing that says that Dax Shepard can't open with a monologue, have three guests, and then a musical performance. Yeah. And then
Speaker 5:just it's like performance would be kid rock. That's the problem. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:But you you do something different. But Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just the fact that it's an RSS feed, it's something an hour long show.
Speaker 3:We don't need to be it can be right. This. I I I feel like you guys getting, like, a space like this in New York Yeah. Like, where it's full time dedicated people are coming to you will change. We we gave this advice to some of our other buddies that have had a podcast for a really long time.
Speaker 3:We're like, dude, it's kind of a nightmare having to like travel around and all and like, you know, constantly We don't move.
Speaker 5:We we're we only do audio really.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. I think we've I'm here. We branch out. We did like a year in review Yeah.
Speaker 6:And it
Speaker 5:did really well. So now we're gonna try to do the we should have a studio in Burbank and we shoot these sort of like weekend update talk soup style sort of like monthly wrap ups where it's,
Speaker 3:you know,
Speaker 5:it's us at the desk, we're talking about stuff, you see the image over our shoulder.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 5:great. And that's gonna I think that's what we wanna do.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Turn it into bring have a small live audience. Have have have like a stage that people can perform on.
Speaker 5:That's the idea.
Speaker 3:Start doing it. Start doing it live.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's just I mean, it's just it's it's all about scheduling. But what we've learned from doing the podcast is audio only is that you just get access. Also, we don't ever we're never in the same room.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure.
Speaker 5:It's all on Zoom. Yeah. And I think it just allows a different like, it gets looser.
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 2:the Totally. It feels much more protected.
Speaker 5:There's no hair and makeup. There's no need to send a car. There's no Yeah. Yeah. There's no, like, pretense to it.
Speaker 5:Like, you can do it in your hotel room wherever you are as long as you have WiFi and headphones. Yeah. And I I the same way we're sort of like anti paywall and it's costing me a lot of money. It's a similar thing where, like, audio is the real medium. It's like all these new Netflix things.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like, Pete Davidson having a talk show on Netflix is not a podcast. It's a talk show on Netflix. It's not
Speaker 2:First time
Speaker 5:There's no audio. There's no RSS feed.
Speaker 3:It's not Interesting.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, he's they're doing a lot of the I mean, they're they're
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:They're showing podcasts that exist, like the shit from the ringer, but they're also launching these shows and paying these people a fucking fortune. Sure. But it's it's just a show.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Have you ever thought about selling out? I would look.
Speaker 5:I would
Speaker 1:love to sell out. It just has to
Speaker 5:be on my, like, archaic terms. Would love to sell out. Every day I wanna sell out.
Speaker 2:Extremely complex writer. But when I'm
Speaker 5:here when I'm here, I'm like, this is how it's supposed to be done. Like, this is such an operation. Yeah. And I knew what I was getting into to an extent. But being here, I'm like, oh, this is what it requires
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:To do something on this level. Yeah. And it's it's a lot.
Speaker 2:You need a horse. Yeah. You need
Speaker 3:a dog. About it. You need dog. Eating airwad.
Speaker 1:That's a useful instrument.
Speaker 2:The guys told me how much the thing cost. Like, guys spent that much. They're expensive.
Speaker 5:I actually knew
Speaker 3:that. There's something about that that we appreciate the like, some people would say it's monotonous, but I actually appreciate just waking up going to work. Oh,
Speaker 2:it's good.
Speaker 3:It's just like making content.
Speaker 5:No. I think I think treating it that and the way you guys have treated it and the way you've approached it is why it works. There's there's a level and and we feel the same way. It's like, we do three shows a week, which is pretty psycho. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, not
Speaker 3:like Considering you're not in the same place, probably
Speaker 2:random story. Jason edits
Speaker 5:and I book. We do it all ourselves. But I think that the I think that once you lock into a system like that and people are looking for it and expecting it
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And you deliver on that, they stay with you. They want I mean, you guys are doing news and, like, you're really covering, like, a a breadth of industries, so it's different. There there's like a value proposition of, like, information
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Which I think is much more than us talking about, you know, as
Speaker 3:the culture. Yeah. Exactly. What what so Grammys last night, you've been in town hanging out Yeah. Bumping shoulders with
Speaker 2:Rubbing elbows.
Speaker 5:Rubbing elbows. Bumping shoulders. What
Speaker 3:are the outside of culture war and politics, what are people talking about? Like how much is like AI being discussed specifically in the music context?
Speaker 5:I mean, think that musicians are mad about everything all the time,
Speaker 2:sort of
Speaker 3:the most successful ones.
Speaker 5:That's part of the personality makeup, I think, be that. I mean, I think that fear is real and I think every day there's a new story that there's some anonymous AI guy that just made $5,000,000 streaming, you know, or whatever through through Spotify royalties. I mean, I think the real conversation that's that's being had or that I've seen a little bit of is is people coming out and saying, no, no, I use it to help me edit or do this and it sped up the process Yep. You know, ten ten x.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think it's like anything else, man. It's like it's coming. Yep. How can you how can you utilize it in a way that feels ethical and good to you Mhmm.
Speaker 5:That doesn't compromise the art? And I think that's that's the challenge everybody has. And I'm sure there's gonna be people that are like, fuck that. I'm never doing that. And there's gonna be people that adapt and there's gonna be, you know, like a will I am type who takes it too far.
Speaker 5:And that, you know, there's a range there's always a range of people that wanna experiment. But I think that that I think with music, there's ticket prices. There's, you know, royal streaming royalties. There's so many battles that they're fighting all the time Yeah. That it's sort of I almost feel like AI is kinda like feels like it's in the distance a little bit, honestly, because there's Interesting.
Speaker 5:I mean, it Sure. It's it's coming, but I think there's so many immediate things that they're concerned with as far as sort of, you know, just like respect and money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is there is there some sort of alliance between, like, reaction to streaming is you need a really strong live performance schedule. The concert becomes more important. Creating, like, the Taylor Swift effect becomes more important.
Speaker 5:It's almost what's so well, the real driver is is TikTok. Okay. Like, if you have I mean, I've had several friends that were relatively successful musicians in the aughts Yeah. Have a song go viral, and now they have a platinum record. They bought an apartment.
Speaker 5:They're on tour selling tickets. That and you can't plan for that. The labels can't manufacture. That's sort of God's plan.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And but like Olivia Dean who won best new artist last night. Sure. People say she sounds like TJ Maxx. I I like it.
Speaker 1:I think it's a hit it's a hit song. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But the but part of it is that it it became a TikTok thing. Sure. And it's like, it's that good. You need more things. You know, it has to be a multitude of things kind of coming together to make it work.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But I think I think touring is just people I just wrote this in my GQ column, I wrote about the Harry Styles ticket price thing because people are really upset.
Speaker 3:What's that?
Speaker 5:His tickets are expensive. And everybody's tickets are fucking expensive.
Speaker 2:Second market? Secondary market?
Speaker 5:He's doing thirty days at Madison Square Garden. He's doing thirty nights at MSG.
Speaker 3:Wow. He's doing Thirty days in a row.
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 5:long. It's unbelievable. And MSG is also historically the most expensive venue because of unions.
Speaker 2:And you think that you think that with thirty days of supply
Speaker 3:ticket sales
Speaker 5:Well, that's the that's the question is people are like, he's greedy. And I'm like, well, sure. I think there's some truth to that. But also, think the discussion I'm more interested in having is like, what do you guys want? Like because he can fight Ticketmaster like Pearl Jam.
Speaker 5:He can but he can also the production that fans want costs a lot of money.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:When Harry Styles is on tour, he's got fucking 30 trucks. Yeah. It's a lot of it's 300 people. It's a Light sky,
Speaker 2:smoke movie. Circus. It's really big.
Speaker 5:I think that the cost that go into it is sort of lost in the fan, but then from the fan side Sure. They're like, this is untenable. Like, I can't pay this much. I have
Speaker 3:10 what what's the cheapest ticket?
Speaker 5:I mean, in theory, it's a $100, $200, but it's immediately resell. That's the issue.
Speaker 3:But then that just proves that it doesn't really matter where he prices it, the demand
Speaker 5:will That's my that was my whole kind
Speaker 3:of thesis. Yeah. You basically could just it's like if like, look at the secondary price and then look at what he's charging and, like, Greedy would just be charging the secondary price. Yeah. See that we see this every, you know, look in cars and watches.
Speaker 3:Any any category with way more demand than supply, manufacturers will just be like, wait, like this GT three RS is selling for like 50 k over sticker? Like, okay, we're just gonna do that at the dealer level now. Or secondary like So why not? Look at AP. Moved up the the retail on on the Royal Oak just because there was enough demand.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And like it actually kind of like normalizes the secondary market, but but you're still paying like I just
Speaker 5:think if you think that I think if you need to place blame on someone, it's going to be the resellers, the bots Yeah. And the Ticketmaster.
Speaker 2:That makes sense.
Speaker 5:Like, don't necessarily think it's Harry. It's My point is it's not Harry Styles. And sure, maybe he could put his foot down Yeah. And and, like, make a case. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But we don't know the ins and outs of that, the difficulties of that, or how that would actually affect the product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know what
Speaker 5:I mean? And that's the that's the issue.
Speaker 3:So you think the solution is NFTs?
Speaker 5:The solution to any problem in NFTs. That that is for a 100%.
Speaker 2:That's a 100% fact.
Speaker 3:What what's going on? Give us an updated just broad update on menswear. We don't talk about it. Oh, wow. We don't talk about we don't talk about it much.
Speaker 3:We obviously normally wear suits.
Speaker 5:I I actually I got
Speaker 2:the memo to that.
Speaker 5:I I was it's funny. I wore a suit to Charlie. I had a a party last night at Chateau Vermont, I wore a suit.
Speaker 3:We Charlie.
Speaker 5:Charlie x c x. We had to record this morning Yeah. Our thing. And we but Jason and both usually wear suits. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And I text him like, hey, man. Maybe today, can we not?
Speaker 2:We just wear
Speaker 3:it regularly. Yeah. I couldn't do it today. Feel like slacking off. Honestly,
Speaker 5:it is getting a little more formal in a way that I think is really positive. Like, it's sort of Logomania is over. Okay. I think it's a little bit of like Jonathan Anderson and Dior showing ties. Like, it's a little more sort of suiting, I think, and like stuff that I think is more flattering and generally easier to wear in a lot of ways.
Speaker 5:Like, I think like, you guys can wear suits, you guys cannot wear like, dumb Balenciaga or whatever. You know what I mean? Like Watching.
Speaker 3:We've thought about we've thought about
Speaker 1:You could you could do it if you want.
Speaker 5:I don't know if he's
Speaker 3:We had the John John made this this image. It was like a steal steal his luck image, and he's like
Speaker 1:It's $100,000
Speaker 2:outfit. Chrome hearts hat. Chrome heart belt.
Speaker 3:Rock the crown.
Speaker 2:With the Louis Vuitton, then Bottega Veneto Roman weave jacket.
Speaker 5:What level of what is your honor how much chrome knowledge do you two have?
Speaker 2:Zero. Okay. I know nothing.
Speaker 3:John had zero. I I just knew I
Speaker 2:know about that. All of these brands were Yeah. I found out that Balenciaga is like an old company. I thought it was like a new thing from like a couple years ago. Hundreds of years from yeah.
Speaker 3:So so when I moved to Malibu, I I I would always I I I I will be I'll admit I didn't know nothing about Chrome.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I
Speaker 5:love it. You have a G Wagon, don't you?
Speaker 3:You don't know about Chrome? Yes. Does has. That's kind of like
Speaker 5:It's kind of a connection.
Speaker 3:Hey. I'm a I'm unique. I'm a special snowflake. I'm the only G Wagon wagon owner that doesn't know about Chrome Hearts. So I moved to Malibu and I'm like, why are all these kids it's the younger generation.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Malibu, the the owners of Chrome Hearts have lived in Malibu forever.
Speaker 5:The Starks have
Speaker 3:They know. They are Malibu. So so they own the Surfrider now, which is also interesting. But I moved there. I'm like, why are all these, like, twelve twelve year old, like, kids running around wearing chrome?
Speaker 3:Like, you live at the beach. Why are you wearing, like, this, like, gothic, like, black sweatshirt? It made no sense. I was, lighten up a little bit because I just always associate the clothing with, like, kinda just emo darkness. Sure.
Speaker 5:You you got it wrong, bro. You you need some chrome. You guys need Yeah. Yeah. So the jeans
Speaker 2:Okay. We could
Speaker 5:get you some jeans. Yeah. 15,000. Look. 15,000.
Speaker 1:It's not going into into your bitch. So it's a it's a pair
Speaker 5:of Levi's, but they put the leather cross patches. So depending on patch amount Sure. The price is going up. So I would do something tasteful with all the chrome rivets
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:And maybe a single patch.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:You guys need hella patches.
Speaker 3:This is why I always said so. Always said that the top of the market cycle
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Will be when a kid is standing YC demo day, you know, where the founders pitch and he's got it's all just full chrome. No. I don't think it's happened yet.
Speaker 2:Some CEO that was caught with a chrome hearts jacket
Speaker 3:definitely been some some people have think they can be sneaky and be like, oh, yeah. I'm just like I'm just a founder. I'm scrappy, and they're wearing the leather jacket without the logos and people clock it.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's so important. We know it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Need to
Speaker 5:get you guys. Yeah. But as far as as far as, as far as the menswear thing goes, everything sort of calmed down, which I think is good. I mean, I I literally I started a brand at the end of last year. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:They've been working on for a couple years called Hanover, and it's been an interesting someone who's worked peripheral, you know, in fashion for ten years, fifteen years, doing your own thing is a whole different animal, I will say. But our our proposition is everything is really affordable. It's all made in USA. Mhmm. So it's like, we're all we're making it in LA.
Speaker 5:Cool. But it's really simple.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I've been shocked because we make we make stuff. We like, we're this is something, you know, we made for Turbo Puffer, one of our sponsors. Yeah. There was not enough kind of massacre cloth.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So comparing comparing the prices in China versus here, China is incredibly they make great clothing that's inexpensive. But when you look at when I when we've gone kind of like line by line and looked at these different items, I'm like, okay. Could pay $70 for this and it gets made here in LA and it'll be done in three weeks.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Or I can deal with like months and months
Speaker 5:might months. Come on a boat. It
Speaker 3:It might it'll come yeah. It'll come on a boat and it'll cost like $95. It's no bat for For us for us, there's like no question we wanna make it here because we're not in the business of clothing. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 3:So the margin is like less
Speaker 5:negligible to
Speaker 3:not it's not as like it's not like a 10 x difference No. Which I think a lot of people assume.
Speaker 5:I think that I I mean, I think that I came up in an era where that was important, like, Made in USA was important. And I don't I don't necessarily think it's important per se, but the idea of being able to do it was pretty compelling.
Speaker 3:It's con Yeah. It's it's it's more enjoyable. That's why I've always thought people see the process. Yeah. And like the people that are like drop shippers being like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, ecom is so great if you wanna, like, live in Thailand. I'm like, have you ever made anything? Like, can you imagine, like, trying to iterate on, like, a physical product living in, like, some
Speaker 5:random place?
Speaker 11:I mean,
Speaker 5:that that's the thing. That's I think that's the thing that you're right. It's like, what's the what's it worth? You know? My time and my effort and my stress level.
Speaker 5:Like, what is it worth? But it's it's been fun so far, it's going well. But I think it's just like a
Speaker 3:What's the what's the what's the strata like, doing collections, draws?
Speaker 5:Quarterly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 5:it's basically I mean, the start was t shirts, denim, sweats
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And the denim did really well. We're gonna introduce another fit. So it's it's sorta like you do stuff, you see what works.
Speaker 2:Is that that 15,000 price point?
Speaker 5:It's 15,000 price point. Actually, it's currently sub 300. Oh, impair. Everything Woah. Which is pretty strong.
Speaker 5:Yeah. We If can get 15,000, then you can buy something.
Speaker 2:I love it. We have to get to a flight.
Speaker 5:Of course.
Speaker 2:Don't know if you wanna plant the bomb, Jordy, but I have one last question. Dream guests. Do you have dream guests? Don't We really have dream guests because it's very opportunistic. It's like whoever's hot right now we wanna talk to, so we don't have a list.
Speaker 5:But Honestly, I'd I always like to say I like to be surprised. Yeah. But after Ben Affleck has been on this press tour with Matt Damon for that new movie, he's so smart. He's so well spoken. I would really like to talk to Ben Affleck.
Speaker 3:Hanover dash USA. Go check it out. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Give us five stars in Apple Podcast and Spotify. Everything. We will be live tomorrow from Cisco AI Summit, 11AM Pacific sharp. Thanks. And goodbye.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Nice
Speaker 5:work, brothers. I'll see
Speaker 11:you on the next one.