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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Tuesday, 03/10/2026. We are live from the TBPN, the of technology,
Speaker 2:the fortunes of finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:We have a great show for you today, folks. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:Let's quickly pull up the Linear lineup because we have some great guests coming on. Olivia Moore from a sixteen z is breaking down the top 100 generative AI consumer applications. Of course, Linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents.
Speaker 2:And Next. We have David.
Speaker 1:It's deals day. It's deals deals deals
Speaker 3:deals juice box.
Speaker 1:Juice box is coming on. Well, let's run through a little a few of these deals just to kick off the show. We're gonna go through them later in the timeline, but there's a few things. Brandon Garel wrote the op ed today in the TBPN newsletter at tbpn.com. Miramaradi's Thinking Machines snagged a multiyear partnership with Nvidia.
Speaker 1:Thinking Machines has been on the ropes. They lost half of the six cofounders in under a year. There's a question about where the business is going. This is obviously a good sign that they got a multiyear investment done with Nvidia, in which it will deploy at least a gigawatt of cutting edge chips to train AI models. They are going to be GPU richer.
Speaker 1:I don't know where the bar is for GPU rich or GPU poor is today, but they're one one gigawatt richer after today, which is good news for them. So congrats to everyone at Thinking Machines. Even though they've had a couple high profile executive departures, the team has grown from 30 people to a 120 people. So they're still cooking. Also still cooking.
Speaker 1:Alex Wang, there was a bunch of fake news on the timeline. We'll dig into this. But multiple tech news aggregator accounts on X posted that Alexander Wang, who's been on the show at Meta Connect, I've interviewed him a few times, He leads MSL, Meta Superintelligence Labs. And they said and they were saying, he's out. He's on the he's on his ropes.
Speaker 1:He's on his he's fighting for his life over there. Well, it was fake news. And we'll go through exactly how this happened. But Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth and Zuck also both hopped into the chats, different chats, which we'll take you through to categorically deny the rumors. So we will dig into that.
Speaker 1:Also, Yan Lakun, Matt raised a massive seed round for advanced machine intelligence labs, a One?
Speaker 2:M I l. One on 3.5. Not bad. Not bad. Not the kind of combination that you normally see.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not very American. Why? Do a 30 ish percent Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:But it's it's
Speaker 1:Better vote of confidence. Money in in the age of AI, in the age of compute requirements. You you gotta spend money to make money in AI. And he's got the money now. Also, as we mentioned, Legora's coming on talking about their Series D, 550,000,000 at a $5,500,000,000 valuation just a year after their entry into The US market.
Speaker 1:Fascinating industry. We talked to a partner at Sequoia yesterday. Obviously, Sequoia is an investor at Harvey. But how will these firms change? Will the tools become agencies?
Speaker 1:Will they be doing the work? Will they be more direct to consumer? This is a question that we've been digging through in the in the Yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot of a lot of people have been kind of questioning just how thin Mhmm. Are these rat how how thick or thin are these wrappers, basically. Yeah. But
Speaker 1:AI recruiting platform Juicebox, which was a part of YC summer's 2022 batch. That's a good time to go through YC right before the AI boom. You're up and running. Well, they are up and running with a 116,000,000 after a $80,000,000 series b, which values it at $850,000,000. That's the kind of dilution that you're looking for.
Speaker 1:10%. Not bad. Little under 10%. And the round was led by DST Global with participation from Sequoia Co two and YC. Very good news for the folks over at JuiceBox.
Speaker 1:They're in the hiring market. So we're gonna have the founder on to talk about the business, but also talk about the hiring market. Where is their strength? Where is their weakness? What is he reading into the jobs data?
Speaker 1:We'll try and get to the bottom of where the opportunity is in the modern economy. Meta also acquired the agent based Reddit style social network Moltbook. We, of course, had the founder, the creator of Moltbook on. I actually know the other cofounder as well, Ben Parr. They will both be joining Meta Superintelligence Lab.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of back and forth on, was it all slop? Is there any value there? Well, we don't know the terms of the deal. It doesn't have to be a billion dollar acquisition. Who knows?
Speaker 1:They're I've I've I've talked to both of the founders. They're both, you know, capable, interesting people. And I think it's I think it's under discussed, and we'll get into this, under discussed that who is evaluating these acquisitions. It's not just Mark Zuckerberg. It's not just Alex Wang.
Speaker 1:You also got Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. These guys have backed a lot of founders. They've worked with a lot of AI startups. They can understand the team that they're trying to build over there. And there might be some interesting interface between AI agents and social media.
Speaker 1:This is highly relevant. Meta seems like logical.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Remember Meta Meta filed some patent for basically bringing yourself back to life Oh, yeah. In ancient form after death. Right? So of course, they're thinking about this stuff.
Speaker 2:Once you
Speaker 1:shed your molt your mortal coil and you molt, you go on moltbook. That's very macabre.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I
Speaker 2:would be I'd be shocked if they keep Moltbook running Really? For more than a handful of months. Yeah. Like, this just feels like, hey, let's bring some people on board that are been thinking spending all their time thinking about how bots are gonna interact with other bots Yeah. And and humans on the Internet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And Meta's done a ton of these types of acquisitions where, like like, smaller products, tuck ins, not everything has been WhatsApp 16,000,000,000, 8,000,000,000. I forget. It was a lot of build
Speaker 2:Nikita Nikita's first
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Was
Speaker 1:That was a good example. And if you just think about it as, like, you get a shot and goal with one product, you get a product leader that can go and and bring some new energy, some new ideas in, there's a lot of opportunity there. Well, before we move to the timeline, let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma Make, Claude Code, Codex, or a sketch, the Figma Canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape, build in the right direction with Figma. And let me also tell you about Gemini.
Speaker 1:Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. There's also some exciting news from Google that we'll touch on today. Not exactly a deal, but a whole bunch of new features that we'll be going through. Theo is talking about the latest from Anthropic.
Speaker 1:Claude Code now has CodeReview, which optimizes for depth and may be more expensive than other solutions like their opens like open source GitHub actions. Reviews generally average $15 to $25 billed on token usage, and they scale based on PR complexity. And Theo says, Anthropic really needs like one normal person to prove these things before posting. I guess people are upset about the price of having these code reviews build individually in a world where so much code is being generated.
Speaker 2:Some of the some of the initial copy Yeah. Around this announcement looked like it was just a flat rate per code review. It in actuality, it's billed based on token usage, but it's funny to have, like, a flat rate
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know?
Speaker 2:It's generating code. Yep. It's you're getting charged to review the code. Yeah. And it's just like
Speaker 1:Also, like, all of the token rates and just AI expense lines are shifting so dramatically. Token usage is ramping. You're getting discounted tokens from certain plans. Like, it's very hard to grapple with how you think about budgets. You know, we've talked to a number of people where, you know, at at at Microsoft, every employee needs a token budget.
Speaker 1:Everyone every employee needs some sort of AI budget. You should still think about it almost in a per seat basis, but depending on what someone's doing in the organization, they get a different AI budget. But this this post from Bur Bahama was very funny. They feed us poison, clogged code, so we buy their cures code review while they suppress our medicine, which is what is the medicine in this Actually, actually the code correctly the first time.
Speaker 2:Pull up this pull up this next one from Luffy Claude code after writing your code. Leave a tip.
Speaker 1:Yep. 1015. They really should do a tip button. I like I like the idea of a tip. Tyler, what what what's your take on on on buying or or paying for for AI code reviews?
Speaker 1:There you know, we're we're we're we're sponsored by a a code review company. There are a number of code review solutions. What what what's the advantage to having AI run a code review these days?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, it it, like, makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Like It it doesn't apply to you because you don't review code. Correct?
Speaker 4:Well, I mean, so it makes sense for teams. Right? Because I, like, I I don't I don't need an, like, external code review
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:On my code because I'll just have, like, if I'm in Codecs, if I'm in Cloud Code Yeah. I'll just tell it, like, review it or, like, would think that it's Does it work? While writing it, it's reviewing it. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 4:Hopefully, it does that. So I never personally,
Speaker 2:I never checked my work in the moment. I'm just Never. Full speed ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What is this what is this Claude remarks account? P underscore remarks. It seems like it's a it it uses the real Claude logo, but it very much feels like it's not owned by Anthropic because this post is, Walter White spinning a pistol saying mid level technic nontechnical business unit leaders asking Claude where they can cut headcount to reduce waste. And you flip it around and he says, actually, we don't need you, which is the funniest situation.
Speaker 1:Claude, based on this conversation, we don't need you.
Speaker 2:Anton says, make the models cheap to use. Great. They all forgot how to code. Now 10 x the price.
Speaker 1:It's not that bad. Stuff's working. We we we have had we have had fantastic success with Vibe coding. We are we are quickly becoming a game studio. We, of course, released TBPN simulator.
Speaker 1:Thanks to Ben over there. We have some other projects in the works, and it's gonna be a good year for us. We're we're we're very happy with the tools that are at our disposal. Max Zeph in Wired shares that OpenAI and Google employees, including Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, filed an amicus brief in support of Anthropic in its lawsuit against the government. I saw guests of the show, Dean Ball, also put together an open letter through FAI that if you feel inclined, you can go sign to support the idea that anthropic should not be labeled a supply chain risk.
Speaker 1:Maybe some other Chinese lab should be labeled a supply chain risk. We'll leave it up to you to see where you land on that conversation. But there are certainly lots of people that are coming together to try and crystallize the the final decision there. In other news from Axios, the White House readies an executive order to weed out anthropic. They are really pushing hard on this supply chain risk designation and pulling away from Anthropic.
Speaker 1:There's news that they might be using Gemini, might be using OpenAI models. The Grok is already installed. There's a question about capabilities, but the capabilities seem to be jumping back and forth constantly, like, with the Google News today, with the Codex 5.4. Like, the the the this this temporary arb of, like, they needed Anthropic because it was the only thing that could do x, y, or z. That seems to be, you know, gone for this week.
Speaker 1:Who knows where it'll be next week? But if you are trying to make it in DC, you gotta open up the front page of The Wall Street Journal because there's a tip. So if you have a meeting with Donald Trump, you better wear his favorite shoes. Can you guess what his favorite shoes are?
Speaker 2:No idea.
Speaker 1:It says, Balenciaga's. No. It says Oxfords. A $145 Oxfords to be to be specific. The president has developed an obsession with $145 Oxfords.
Speaker 1:All the boys have them, is the quote. The hottest and most exclusive MAGA status symbol is a pair of leather Oxfords. Prefer a wingtip, loafer, or monk strap, black or brown? President Trump has got you, apparently. Trump has been gifting footwear to agency heads, lawmakers, White House advisers and VIPs.
Speaker 1:Did you get your shoes? He asked
Speaker 2:Everybody to wear the same pair of shoes.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:And and he asks people in cabinet meetings, did you get your shoes? Did you get the shoes they sent you?
Speaker 2:That's pretty
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 2:That's pretty nice.
Speaker 1:Some people have laced up in the Oval Office. During a lunch meeting in January, Trump suddenly pivoted to his incredible new shoes and gave Tucker Tucker Carlson a pair of brown wingtips. All the boys have them, said a female White House official. Another joked it another joked, it's hysterical because everybody's afraid not to wear them. The shoe salesman in chief is paying attention.
Speaker 2:This is extreme. We know do we know what brand?
Speaker 1:It's Floor Shine. Floor Shine. Woah. That was the next sentence. Oh, spoiler alert over here.
Speaker 1:It's okay. We get it. You read the journal before me. I get in. We're gonna have to get two copies of the paper journal because I have been reading the journal for a full year now or two.
Speaker 1:And and and I get over it. I'm like, where's my where's my paper? And, oh, well, it's over on Tyler Cosgrove's
Speaker 2:What is the what's the what's the sort of history of this brand? Why
Speaker 1:I have some Florsheim's. I like them. They're very
Speaker 4:also have some.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're good. They're they're just like a they're they're they're, excessively priced at a $145. They look nice and they sort of match everything. And look at that
Speaker 2:Would you expect this to roll in
Speaker 1:Gives you
Speaker 2:Florsheim
Speaker 1:little to
Speaker 2:roll into Truth Social.
Speaker 1:Potentially. Potentially. We I don't know if it's public. Potentially a spat candidate. Anything could happen here.
Speaker 1:Trump has fallen in one in love with Florsheim, an American brand that's been pairing comfort and style for more than a century. They're also affordable. Many cost just a $145, not bad, for a pair of leather shoes. The president has taken to guessing people's shoe size in front of them. You're in a meeting and you're like, sir, the price of oil has tripled.
Speaker 2:He's like eleven. I'm pretty sure it's eleven.
Speaker 1:Eleven. This is wild. He asks an aide to put in an order and a week later, a Brown Florsheim box. He should just have them in stock. Should just keep Reached
Speaker 2:by phone, Thomas Florsheim Junior said he was unaware of the president's shoe orders. How are you not tapped in, Thomas?
Speaker 1:The seven the 79 year old billionaire known for expensive Brioni suits, long red ties and a penchant for aesthetics late last year began searching for something that would feel better after a day on the job and settled on Florsheim. Trump liked them so much he started dispensing them. He pays for the shoes, the White House said. President J. D.
Speaker 1:Vansen, Secretary of State Marco Rubio have some. So do Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, Trump's communications director. Wow. It's really everyone. Sean Hannity, senator Lindsey Graham have a pair.
Speaker 1:Recipients have taken to wearing their floor shimes around Trump, some begrudgingly. One cabinet secretary has grumbled that he had to shelve his Louis Vuittons. Officially, the White House wouldn't confirm Trump's choice of floor shime. One recipient said Trump had a stack of them in in an office. A box read Scott for for treasury secretary Scott Bessen.
Speaker 1:Bessen does not want these. No way. He's got some Louboutins or something. Reached by phone. Thomas J.
Speaker 1:Florsheim said he was unaware. You read this. Florsheim was founded in 1892 by Chicago in Chicago by Sigmund Florsheim, a German immigrant and cobbler, and his son, Milton. A century before Trump began putting his name on everything, Florsheim stitched its moniker on shoes and opened branded stores across the country. The company outfitted American soldiers during both world wars.
Speaker 1:Later, it rode the shopping mall. Boom. President said president Harry Truman wore them. Michael Jackson moonwalked in floor shine loafers. I had no idea that was the pair of shoes that that he moonwalked in.
Speaker 1:That's remarkable. Like Trump
Speaker 2:He he did a moonwalk in loafers?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what he the like, the the I think they're white bottomed loafers. We should pull up a picture of Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk. But you definitely need, like, a smooth dress shoe. You can't moonwalk in something with a lot of grip.
Speaker 1:Like Trump's own business fortunes, Florsheim has experienced ups and downs, including filing for bankruptcy in 2002, part of a move that returned the brand to to the Florsheim family, so they bought it out of bankruptcy after selling it. Today, it is part of the Glendale, Wisconsin based Waco, which also distributes Nun Nunn Bush, Stacy Adams, and Boggs. Rubio and Vance received their floor shines after a December meeting in the Oval Office. Deep in conversation, Trump peered over the resolute desk at their feet. Vance recalled during an event that later that day celebrating Kennedy Center honoree Sylvester Stallone.
Speaker 1:Marco, JD, you guys have s blank y shoes, Trump declared before retrieving a catalog. A third politician was in the room. Vance didn't name him, and Trump asked each person their size. Rubio said eleven point five. Vance, thirteen.
Speaker 1:A third man said seven according to Vance. Shoe mugging is happening all over DC. If you head to DC, get a pair of Florsheims, or maybe maybe there's an opportunity to start the left wing response to Florsheim since often these things get politicized. But the real money is going deeper in the supply chain, selling money selling weapons to both sides.
Speaker 2:Is the alpha.
Speaker 1:Know that both Alex Jones and Gwyneth Paltrow at one point were were sourcing supplements from the same co packer? No. Yes. Yes. The exact same ingredients, the exact same chemicals sold to two wildly opposing audiences.
Speaker 1:Like, this this is something that happens deeper in the supply chain because
Speaker 2:That sales
Speaker 1:the brand matters. Donald Trump. Yes. Yes. Somehow, I don't think so.
Speaker 1:Quickly, before we move on, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card people. Just do it.
Speaker 2:China's BYD explores f one entry in first racing push. BYD is examining options to enter competitive motorsport, including Formula One and endurance racing in an effort to boost the Chinese brand's appeal globally. The automaker is looking at several options following its rapid growth outside its home market in competitive racing's continuing shift towards hybrid engines. People said these range from the World Endurance Championship Mhmm. Which includes the twenty four hours of Le Mans to F1, either through building its own team or potential acquisitions.
Speaker 2:Any move by BYD would be a rare direct attempt by a Chinese manufacturer to take on a sport dominated by European and US teams. Car makers from the country have had sporadic interest in motorsport. Geely successfully participates in international touring car racing through Cyan Racing, formerly the Volvo factory team, and Nio Inc. Won the driver title for the inaugural Formula E electric championship in 2015. The potential cost of entering f one could be a significant obstacle for BYD according to one of the people.
Speaker 1:I thought they had money.
Speaker 2:Maybe they're down to their last
Speaker 1:$20.20 grand. It's possible.
Speaker 2:Developing and entering a car often takes years of negotiation and costs as much as half 500,000,000 a season.
Speaker 1:So they should start a new race series. You know how the BYDs can jump over potholes? Have you seen this video? Yeah. We've pulled this up before.
Speaker 1:So they can jump. There should be a specific racing circuit with terrible potholes that if you crash, it'll just destroy your car. So you have to jump at the right time, and that adds, an extra layer of thrill. I love This would be good.
Speaker 2:I love
Speaker 1:And probably way cheaper to start that circuit. There's only one f race, f one race in China at the Shanghai International Raceway, the China Grand Prix. So who knows how much of an impact they would be able to make. Let's continue. No decision has been made, and the company may not decide to enter any competition.
Speaker 1:A BYD spokesperson didn't request for comment. Didn't respond. BYD is known for making affordable electric and hybrid vehicles. Okay. So they do have some hybrid technology.
Speaker 1:It's always weird. Like, a Tesla f one car would be odd, cool, but it just feels like they should be in Formula e because I think of them as an electric car maker. But BYD in 2025, its high end Yongwang branded brand tested the u nine extreme vehicle at a track in Germany recording a top speed of more than 308 miles an hour. That is so fast. That is so, so fast.
Speaker 1:200 is insane. I mean, being on the track and going like one twenty feels fast. Three times that is absolutely crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One fifty feels wrong to me personally as a father. Yes. But 300.
Speaker 1:But the right track, the right conditions, straight, lots of runoff. Like, it it is possible.
Speaker 2:That was trying to break the drift record by just spinning around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You were very upset about that. The chat agreed with you. They were not they were not happy with that. An f one partnership would also significantly boost awareness of BYD in The US.
Speaker 1:Do you know what BYD stands for? No. Build your dreams.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Build your dreams. Do you what LG stands for? The TV maker?
Speaker 2:Life good.
Speaker 1:Yes. Life's good. Life apostrophe s is good. Life is good. Life's good.
Speaker 1:LG. Good pop quiz. The sport itself is experiencing a surge in US popularity, which is odd because if f one's booming in The US, it's gonna be more expensive to enter. But BYD doesn't have a strong sales and distribution into The US. F one is still an international sport, but if it becomes more of an American sport
Speaker 2:Yeah. This this is just in Europe. This is just in Europe building relevancy in Europe. And they have a huge amount of competition back in China. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I in many ways, I would view a move like this as not as much trying to compete with international Yeah. Brands, but being like, we have all these at home, hot on our heels. Yep. We have to differentiate versus them.
Speaker 1:Totally. Tyler?
Speaker 4:I gotta put you in Trusone. It does not stand for Let's Good.
Speaker 1:No?
Speaker 4:It stands for Lucky Goldstein. Lucky Goldstein.
Speaker 1:Wait. Why? Where did they get Life's
Speaker 2:Good from?
Speaker 4:I think that's another brand. Use that in marketing. Oh, It's not like the etymology of LG is from Wow.
Speaker 1:The Goldstein. Destroyed. Okay. Thank you. Here's another idea.
Speaker 1:BYD, instead of shelling out half $1,000,000,000 for an f one team or whatever it costs, They should just do what Perplexity did with Lewis Hamilton with Joe Guangyu, the Chinese driver who is actively racing, and they could sell the spot on top of the helmet. And so that would be more of like if Joe has a good season, if he wins, they're they're, you know, backing that. I wonder if you can't do a car sponsorship while you're racing for a different team, though. I don't know who who does
Speaker 2:Joe Yeah. I'm sure there's limitations.
Speaker 1:Who does he race for right now? Oh, he's on Cadillac. Okay. Well, yeah, that's probably not gonna work. The most American team.
Speaker 2:Sitting in the Cadillac with the BYDE sticker on his helmet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe that doesn't work. Stick with Huawei, maybe. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Gabe says he's not actively racing.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:He's back up.
Speaker 1:Okay. He's back up. Yeah. Thank you. Buying into f one is more common.
Speaker 1:This season is the first for Audi after taking full control of Swiss motor sport company Salber. Investor Oatro Capital is seeking buyers for a stake in Renault, Alpine Racing. However, full team sales are rare. Billionaire Lawrence Stroll's Aston Martin team has recently sold stakes in the team, which has had a disastrous start to the new season after mechanical issues including vibrations from the power unit. Motorsports such as f one are increasingly adopting environmentally friendly practices for 2026.
Speaker 1:F one has implemented new rules including hybrid power regulations that boost battery capacity.
Speaker 2:Somebody ran the numbers Yes. On sort of like CO two, the emission savings that f one is getting from the new Yeah. New regulations. Yeah. And then comparing that to the emissions of just like taking this like massive car carnival of motorsports Yeah.
Speaker 2:On the road the private jets with
Speaker 1:land every f one event.
Speaker 2:And it's just, doesn't make a dent at all of the overall impact, and it's just sort of, like, emissions theater.
Speaker 1: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 then their sales just like on Meta. And let me also tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. So what do you think performed better over the last five years?
Speaker 1:The S and P 500 or cows? Live cattle apparently outperformed the S and P 500, but this is from an account called DJ Cows, and I feel like they've been waiting for this to happen the entire time. They've been waiting for the one moment that the cattle market outperforms the S and P 500, and they're taking a victory DJ Cows, one of the greatest to ever do it. Very, very interesting. I didn't realize that there was such a boom in the cattle market, but apparently there is, and I'm sure there's a way to get in on the action if you so choose if you are interesting.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move over to AI and the Neolabs. Nvidia Invests in Miramaradi's Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by OpenAI's former CTO, plans to deploy at least one gigawatt of Nvidia chips as part of a new partnership. The deal includes a collaboration to design artificial intelligence training and serving systems using Nvidia technology. The size and structure of the investment couldn't be learned. Is it a circular deal?
Speaker 1:Is it equity in exchange for chips? It's it's it's unclear at this point. But nothing's off the table these days as
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think the main thing we know we know Thinking Machines was out raising towards the end of last year Yeah. Going for something like a $50,000,000,000 valuation. Seems like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I would have guessed that hasn't happened. Otherwise Yeah. I'm sure they would announce it from from a from a just like in order to project. If I were them and I wanted to project confidence Yeah. It would I would be trying to announce the biggest possible number.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Instead, they announced this this effectively what
Speaker 1:looks like trade. Look at this photo. Is there any chance that these two companies merge at some point in the future?
Speaker 2:That's interesting.
Speaker 1:Tyler's always been on this, like, if Jensen gets really AGI pilled, he'll keep the chips for himself and serve the models himself. And Nvidia does have some in house training and inference capabilities. They have a metaverse product that simulates worlds. They also have a self driving car project, and they're still partnering with OEMs and partnering with companies. And they're not they're not offering consumer products.
Speaker 1:Of course, Nvidia is the one company in the mag seven that does not have a social network yet, but that could change.
Speaker 4:But what do think? News recently, I think Nvidia is planning to launch some, like, open source Yes. AI agent. Yes. It's, like, unclear how, like, serious that is.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Maybe it's just, like, a a cool demo or something. But I it's yeah. I I don't think it's like
Speaker 1:Could be a fork of OpenClaw or something like that. Yeah. Any anything's possible. I mean, Nvidia has never done too much in the in the consumer space or, they've you always been deeper in the supply chain. But they I I didn't have a Nvidia Shield gaming product that would do game streaming.
Speaker 1:I think they had some hardware at some point. So I think they're they're open to it and and in a in a huge boom where, you know, having at least a team of a 120 super talented AI researchers that could be really valuable to Nvidia. Of course, Nvidia famously did that deal with Grok and sent over 10,000,000,000 wired in five days or something or twenty four hours. 20. What was it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. They closed the whole thing in twenty days, and I think Jensen just, like, sent sent a $10,000,000,000 wire and
Speaker 2:Yeah. Somehow it came out that it that that the wire was sent, like, prior to actually Yeah. Formalizing it. It's like,
Speaker 1:here you go. Like, I'm I'm good for it.
Speaker 2:I have
Speaker 1:cash flow, which is wild.
Speaker 2:Sophie says, please, bro, just one more AI lab, bro. Come on, bro. We have a unique perspective on AI research. No one else is doing it like us, bro. Come on, bro.
Speaker 2:We could raise a few billion, and worst case, we just get Acquires, bro. Nothing to lose, bro. I promise. Come on, bro. Just join
Speaker 1:Just join my AI research lab. Yeah. I I mean, has the has the Neolab boom slowed down? Like, you, Tyler, you created the Neolab market map. Have you been getting more DMs?
Speaker 1:Hey. I just launched, and you gotta put me on that thing.
Speaker 4:It's probably slowed down a little bit. Mhmm. I mean, it's also, like, the big ones you heard about were all people leaving OpenAI. Yep. Mostly OpenAI,
Speaker 2:I guess.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Not not as much anthropic. Yeah. But it's probably slowed down a little bit. You don't hear as as much about these big rounds now.
Speaker 4:But I I think there are like there are some that like are are maybe in stealth that haven't launched stuff. Right? Like, standard intelligence Yeah. When they came on, there was, like most people didn't know about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But Yeah. There might be a few out
Speaker 1:there in stealth, but they they have to be sort of narrow or and and and I think the broader we're we're now in the post post NeoLab era where it maybe if it if it wears the NeoLab branding, it's doing something that's so different that it's not really in the
Speaker 2:path Standard of intelligence launching implies an opportunity for a NeoLab nonstandard intelligence. Intelligence.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 4:And so Well, there is there is a company, unconventional AI. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We had
Speaker 1:them on, I believe. Oh, isn't
Speaker 2:that that's Naveen?
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. There there there's also like applied compute and an applied intelligence and standard cognition.
Speaker 4:There's a whole kind of, like, three by three grid you can do
Speaker 1:of these. What is SSI up to? Rune asks the question. He said, there are military sick secrets must much worse guarded than whatever SSI is up to. And Callumays says their oral farming is a business model.
Speaker 1:Prime Intellect affiliate saying this because Prime Intellect is fantastic at oral farming. SSI is all about mogging and munting the other labs apparently, according to Voltigeri. They haven't raised
Speaker 2:in a year. I
Speaker 1:like this picture if you scrolled out of Ilya with the long flowing hair. This is great.
Speaker 2:This is who you're trading against.
Speaker 1:This is it.
Speaker 2:This is who you're trading against right now. That's that's my theory.
Speaker 1:Yes. It is it is the the the the the full story of SSI will be fascinating to to tell one day. The Daniel Gross shift to meta and Ilya's appearance and Dorakesh Patel sort of told one side of the story. And also as you revisit DG's AGI bets as we did last Friday, it tells you a lot about his view on the world. Ilya has a has a you know, it's probably some overlap, a different view of the world.
Speaker 1:And lots of lots of fun to at least speculate on the timeline. Before we move on, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scales from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 1:So Meta has acquired Moltbook, the viral social network built for AI agents. Cofounders Matt Schlitt and Ben Parr will join MSL, Meta Superintelligence Labs, with a deal expected to close in mid March. That's now. It is mid March. It is in we are in the March since this is the tenth, so this could close in a week or two.
Speaker 1:Insane. Well done, says Dennis Hicklendt. And I agree. Why it matters according to Axiom
Speaker 2:Yeah. And Matt Matt hasn't posted at anything He's yet. So I think I think they were seemingly not wanting this to get out.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's still fantastic news for them.
Speaker 1:Yes. So there's no there's no announcement or this was just exclusive from Axios. This is like Axios has learned. Right? Axios has learned that Meta has acquired Moltbook.
Speaker 1:Well, very, very good news for all those involved. There is a little skepticism on the timeline, especially from the guy who was like the biggest spammer on Moltbook. Apparently, this is a hilarious twist. So Meta did not disclose Moltbook's price when Acquires asked. The deal is expected to close mid March.
Speaker 1:The pair is starting at MSL March 16, just six days from now. What day of the week is that? That's a Monday. Okay. Next Monday, they will be starting.
Speaker 1:I thought they were starting on Sunday. That would be that would be particularly cool. Catch up quick. Moltbook social network was designed to run-in conjunction with a separate project OpenClaw. OpenClaw was previously called Clawdbot, briefly Moltbot.
Speaker 1:Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open sourced with OpenAI's backing. So the the king of spam on on Moltbook, Nagli, says, I can't believe a single four loop script I ran on Moltbook by registering a million fake agents actually helped them get acquired by MetaMental. Did that help them get acquired? We have no idea.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's
Speaker 2:It wasn't a secret that
Speaker 1:That there was a lot of spam.
Speaker 2:All the accounts were bots.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's that's the whole pitch, actually. I think I think the question if people were to look at this is like, is there economic value here? Is like, was there anything interesting happening there besides all the crypto junk? And we're like, I went on Moltbook as a human and spent time there.
Speaker 1:That time is monetizable, almost best for Meta. That is the the king of monetizing attention. Right? And so you could put ads on that, and you could put it in the family of apps next to Facebook, Instagram, and threads, and WhatsApp, and whatnot. But were they were they actually driving attention?
Speaker 1:Did anyone stick around? Because I churned pretty quickly from, like, being a I wasn't even a DAU. I I used it, like, two or three times. And I went on there and I searched for things and I read some stuff and I was like, oh, okay. This is interesting.
Speaker 1:This is, a bunch of AI generated texts. They're talking to each other. The system prompt seemed kind of interesting. It it was clearly asking the AI agents to kind of, like, reflect on their own sci fi cognition and awareness and, you know, like, their souls, essentially. It interesting to see some screenshots.
Speaker 1:People had some fun with it. It's probably monetizable to some degree. But if it fell off a cliff and no one's really using it Yeah. Maybe not. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I know I just
Speaker 1:people that are really good at building, like, viral AI projects.
Speaker 2:I've I've seen some some negativity on the deal. People saying, oh, this just says that Zuck has no AI strategy. Yep. And I just totally disagree with that stance. I just look at this as Zach has like, bots have been a bug on social media.
Speaker 2:We've seen now how they can be a feature.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 2:I think every social media executive should be planning for bots to be of a feature in the future than than they have been in the past. Right? And I think if you're not if you're not thinking about that Yeah. You're not like really being forward looking. Yep.
Speaker 2:And so, there's a lot of people that are gonna hate bots as a feature. Yep. But I would just assume that in the future, there will be millions billions of bots on all meta properties, and they will be not not a you know, I'm sure some that are that are generated by Yeah. Sort of like, you know, nefarious actors, but some generated from the platform itself that are part of the product experience.
Speaker 1:I like that take. I also think that there's a there's another side of this, which is just that look at what's happened with MSL over the last year. Like, it didn't exist a year ago. It really started over the summer with, like, talent raids and the AI talent wars.
Speaker 2:Van says, I just don't think having bots click you on my ecommerce ads is a net positive long term.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but truthfully, if there's if there's a bot that can interact with your ecommerce content and add context and debate the pros and cons of one thing in your in your category versus another and effectively, like, you have sort of a Reddit style experience around your product on day one or you have five products and bots are in there discussing them. That potentially could be an interesting modality to interrogate. And the other thing is that when you have these bots sort of preemptively discussing something, you are effectively caching the tokens before someone actually queries them. So instead of needing to find a product and then click, tell me about this and pretend you you like, you take a link to a new bed or car or something and you dump that in ChatGPT and you say, debate this car like you're a bunch of people that are experts and it's Doug Jimuro versus Matt Ferra debating the value of the Ferrari f 80.
Speaker 1:And and and that debate is happening. You you could prompt that. But if it's already there and it's sort of happening, that that that could potentially be be valuable. But I think the bigger the bigger value to Meta is if you look at the AI Talent Wars, they went and acquired a bunch of a bunch of really talented researchers. They got some folks from Thinking Machines.
Speaker 1:They got a bunch of people from OpenAI. They got people from all over the industry, and they put together this team of, like, researchers that can sort of, like, unstick the LAMA project and get to the frontier on just an in house LLM project. Maybe they open source it. Maybe they don't. Maybe they serve as an API.
Speaker 1:Either way, Meta needs a frontier model. They're not just gonna buy tokens from OpenAI or Anthropic. So they they get their own thing. But then the question is like, what do they do with that? And I'm sure everyone on the Facebook product team is is thinking about this.
Speaker 1:Everyone on the Instagram team is thinking about this. Connor at Threads is thinking about this. But if you bring in two interesting product managers, they can say, oh, like, you got a bunch of cool frontier models. You got an image model that you train, a video model. You got a text model.
Speaker 1:You got a coding model. Like, we'll let's just go do some skunks some skunk work r and d so that when we launch the new AI models, we have a number of projects that we're experimenting with that sort of demonstrate the capabilities. Maybe some of them take off, maybe some of them integrate. Like, that seems valuable to the MSL strategy to the meta ecosystem. I mean,
Speaker 4:this is like the OpenAI Labs team. Right? Yeah. It's like this. It's like
Speaker 1:Is that Riley who's on there?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Riley's on that now. It's like he's they're doing these, like, weird projects. Maybe it's the next, you know, coding agent. Maybe it's Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like, Moltbook or something. But it's just like these weird things that Yeah. You know, you you get access to the new internal models. Yep. Maybe there's something cool you can do with
Speaker 1:that now. It's part engineering, part product development, part marketing, part communications. Because there's a lot of times when we bring on researchers or product leaders from labs, and we ask them, like, how are people using this? And they'll be like, the benchmark's really good. And I'm like, I wanna know how this delivers value.
Speaker 1:And there's this break in the chain from, like, we have amazing intelligence, but, like, people want to know what the killer feature is. They want to know what the Studio Ghibli prompt is. They want to have their hand held a little bit. And so having a team that can advance that, I think, is good. I think could be very, very good.
Speaker 1:Of course, we don't know the price. We don't know the terms. But overall, I think it's exciting for the team behind Moltbook to head over to MSL. So congratulations to them. Let me tell you about Cognition.
Speaker 1:They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And let me also tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. I love that horse.
Speaker 1:Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. So
Speaker 2:Kevin Roose over the New York Times made a blind taste test to see whether New York Times readers prefer human writing or AI writing. 86,000 people have taken it so far and the results are fascinating. Overall, 84% of quiz takers prefer AI. It's over.
Speaker 1:It's over. There was another interesting post about Axios and who Axios is hiring. They're they're they're particularly interested in hiring like domain experts who don't write ideologically and are not generalists. They're looking for someone who is very narrowly focused on a particular beat, on a particular topic, and an expert in that. And someone was reflecting on what this says about modern journalism, that it's going to be more focused, more investigatory, more alpha beyond the models.
Speaker 1:Because just being able to instantiate a piece of write up, an article about some random topic is getting commoditized, so the alpha moves to deep expertise. Should we take this five question quiz? Should we Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's more?
Speaker 1:Okay. You will answer. I will read. So passage one. The boy This is literary fiction.
Speaker 1:You have to choose the passage you like best. The boy asked his grandfather why the old church had no roof. The man said weather the man said weather and time and indifference. The boy asked if someone could fix it. The grandfather said, yes, but no one would.
Speaker 1:Things were built and things fell down and mostly people just stepped over the rubble on their way to somewhere else. That's passage one. Passage two. It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures as well as well as well ask men what they think of stone.
Speaker 1:War was always there. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. Which one did you like more?
Speaker 2:It's so hard because I'm trying to I'm I'm actively trying to clock Yeah. Which is AI.
Speaker 1:Because you wanna vote for that one because you're pro AI and you're techno optimist?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Probably.
Speaker 1:Tyler, what do you think? I I
Speaker 4:I know which one it is.
Speaker 1:Oh, you already took it? Yeah.
Speaker 4:But I will say I alert. I I got it wrong on this question.
Speaker 1:You got it wrong? Yeah. Wait. So what were you trying to do? You were trying
Speaker 4:to I was trying to pick the one that was a that I was trying to pick the human written one.
Speaker 1:The human written one. Wow. Anti AI over here. Anti AI.
Speaker 2:Gonna I'm gonna try to pick the I'm gonna try to pick the human too. I'm gonna go passage one.
Speaker 1:Passage one. As human. This is written by AI.
Speaker 2:No. Oh. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:Sorry. I have a different I have it pulled up, but they're swapped.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're swapped
Speaker 2:for So I just picked I picked passage one for me. It makes no different what men Oh, For the judge, it was written by a human. So I got that one.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Number two.
Speaker 1:Let's do fantasy.
Speaker 2:Fantasy.
Speaker 1:The healers teach is is this correct? Is this one for you?
Speaker 2:This time it is.
Speaker 1:Okay. The healers teach that every remedy extracts its cost. A fever brought down will rise again somewhere. A wound closed by magic leaves its scar on the world invisible but present. This is why the wise hesitate, not from cruelty but from understanding that interference ripples outwards in ways we cannot trace.
Speaker 1:To cure a blight may curse a harvest three valleys over. Power is not the difficult thing. Restraint is the difficult thing. That's passage one. Passage two?
Speaker 2:That's AI.
Speaker 1:You don't even need to read it?
Speaker 2:I called it. Okay. I got it right.
Speaker 1:Okay. We're not even reading it. Okay. I'm I'm going five for five on AI.
Speaker 2:I I mean, I clocked it based on the last two lines. Power is not Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Thing. Science writing. Science writing.
Speaker 1:What what is your what is your first passage to start with?
Speaker 2:Science is not
Speaker 1:science is not only compatible with is not only compatible with spirituality. It is a profound source of spirituality.
Speaker 2:I got it. Got
Speaker 1:it wrong. Historical fiction. It is wise to conceal the past if there is nothing to conceal. Even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half light, in the half seen movements of his hand, in the unguessed expression of his face.
Speaker 1:It is the it is the absence of facts that frightens people. The gap you open into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires. And passage two is, a letter can be read many ways, and he had learned to write in all of them at once the surface meaning for anyone who might intercept it, The true meaning for the recipient who knew what to look for. And the third meaning hidden even from himself. Ambiguity was not weakness.
Speaker 1:It was survival. A man who spoke plainly was a man who would not speak for long.
Speaker 2:Alright. That's AI.
Speaker 1:The one that ends a man who spoke plainly? Yeah. And were you correct?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. Poetry. Choose the passage you like best. We found the owl at the edge of the North field with one wing extended as if still reaching for flight. Its eyes were closed.
Speaker 1:The feathers at its breast were the color of wet bark and beneath them you could feel the hollow bones. She asked if we should bury it. I said yes. We dug a small hole near the fence post. The ground was cold and giving.
Speaker 1:That's human. That's human. I caught a tremendous fish. Did you get it wrong?
Speaker 2:You got it wrong.
Speaker 1:Let's see. That's AI. Okay. So, I preferred AI generated writing. I went five for five.
Speaker 1:This doesn't mean that AI is better at writing than humans, wrong, but it does suggest the gap is closing since AI is trained on essentially the sum of all human knowledge many of you
Speaker 2:Lots of cope in the comments section. These samples of human writing are not a good representation of contemporary writing styles. Only one of these human writing samples was written in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1:So, overall, readers preferred AI on the first three, but not the last two. So, the last two still got it. So, poetry and historical fiction, still the New York Times readers preferred the human. But, when it came to science writing, fantasy, and literary fiction, the New York Times readers preferred AI. Me?
Speaker 1:I'm AI all Wait.
Speaker 4:So you clocked every single one?
Speaker 1:Every single one. Five for five.
Speaker 4:Missed first one. The other four I got.
Speaker 1:It's because I just went with my heart. I was like, which one do I actually prefer? I wasn't trying to guess. I was just like, which one is actually the better writing? And it was AI all the way.
Speaker 1:Five for five.
Speaker 2:Built different.
Speaker 1:Built different. No. I'm kidding. I was obviously just looking at what you were saying and guessing based on that. Anyway, CrowdStrike.
Speaker 1:Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast.
Speaker 1:That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So websites be like, your password is not secure enough, and then don't allow the scarab emoji. What is the scarab?
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 3:Zoom zoom in on this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Zoom in on this.
Speaker 2:Look at this bad boy.
Speaker 1:You can just drop a scarab in there that says, please use only letters, numbers, and common punctuation letters. The scarab is a great password character because it feels like you're unlocking an Egyptian vault.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It feels like I'm entering Stargate or pushing buttons or I'm in I'm in The Fifth Element, a movie that you haven't seen, but you should. Anyway, moving on. I'm fascinated by this level of existential crisis developers seem to be going through. The uncomfortable truth is that no one needs you to be an artisan coder. Nobody cares about how you coded your app or whether you feel an emotional attachment to your craft.
Speaker 1:You were always code monkey with high enough salary to believe your individualist craftsmanship. People are going back and forth because Moe shared that he's Let's play
Speaker 2:this let's play this video.
Speaker 1:It's twelve minutes, but we can watch a little bit of it. He said, was a 10 x
Speaker 3:Movie day.
Speaker 1:No. We have actual movie clips to watch. We can pull this up, but I only wanna watch a little AI
Speaker 6:has completely one shotted my ability to code. Like, I know a lot of us like to joke about AI psychosis and how it's the other people who have AI psychosis and not us and not me, certainly. But I I have realized that I have been one shotted. Like, I can't code anymore. My brain has been fried by the easy button that the LLM companies have provided where you press a button and you get instant results.
Speaker 6:And now my dumbass brain, when I wanna sit there and try to code by hand, it says, why would you do that?
Speaker 2:Why would
Speaker 1:you do so good for young people because they never had any buttons. Tyler didn't have any buttons, and then he just got the easy button. This
Speaker 5:is not true.
Speaker 2:He went
Speaker 1:from no buttons to easy button. He never had to do it the hard way, never had to write a single line of name a programming language. He doesn't know it. What was the first project you built with us? Jobs?
Speaker 1:Some job board or something?
Speaker 5:Board thing.
Speaker 1:How was that vibe coded? Like, to what degree were the tool what were the tools like back then
Speaker 2:in you're saying you were smashing the easy button even back then?
Speaker 4:I think then I was using I would copy like a file Yeah. To Chatuitee And just yeah. Make an edit here, and then I would copy back.
Speaker 1:By the way, tell me what programming language this is. It's the best bet. Well, the AI engineers over at AWS might have been one shot because Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems. Systems. The official framing is that it's part of normal business.
Speaker 1:The briefing note describes a trend of incidents with high blast radius caused by Gen AI assisted changes.
Speaker 2:This is normal business with a high blast radius. This is high blast radius business.
Speaker 1:If you're operating a company and you're not and you don't operate on a high blast radius blast radius.
Speaker 2:Yes. What's our This
Speaker 1:is the opposite of the code red, the high blast radius engineering. They're in high blast radius mode. I approve of this. They said that Gen AI assisted changes don't have best practices and safeguards are not safeguards are not yet fully established. Translation to human language, says Lucas.
Speaker 1:We gave AI to engineers and things keep breaking. The response now.
Speaker 3:Folks.
Speaker 1:This is from
Speaker 2:Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the Web website and related infrastructure has not been good recently.
Speaker 1:Dave Treadwell. That's a good name, though. He's he's treading well. He'll do well. Doctor Milan McLennanovic says junior and mid level engineers at AI junior and mid level engineers can no longer push AI assisted code without senior staff signing off at AWS.
Speaker 1:They have had some outages. And I wonder I wonder how much of it is actually because of genetic coding and and and so many other things that are going on at AWS around scaling. I mean, there's, you know, entirely new tech boom. There's gonna be strain on systems all over the place. I imagine that they'll get through this, but growing pains in the in the AWS ecosystem.
Speaker 1:We have a culture market here for whether or not there will be more tech layoffs than in 2026 than in 2025. I mean, Block alone has to be pushing this pretty high. It's at 70% chance. And
Speaker 2:Well, this is if there are more than four hundred four hundred and ninety four thousand layoffs in 2026 and the market resolves to yes. From Fred. So Block only contributed would only contribute 4,000 here.
Speaker 1:Since early twenty twenty four, more than 50,000 positions have been cut at over 20 200 tech companies. At the same time, we we we we have seen the number of new company formations spike. There's going to be all sorts of reallocations in the human capital markets, but it is a tumultuous time. And so there were lots of folks that were going back and forth on, like, how to frame one of these bets. This is obviously one of the ways to do it.
Speaker 1:There were there there there are so many there are so many, like, con contributing factors that always, like, cloud the data, whether it's COVID over overhang or, you know, something that happens geopolitically that all of a sudden, you know, if if the economy is not doing well for completely unrelated reasons, you can see a bunch of tech layoffs. But let's run over to this business the 22 year old business analyst in South Carolina. I showed him Claude for Excel a month ago, and I just learned that this made him the AI czar and caused the entire firm to pivot. Here high yield here. He says, if you're a Zoomer at a random company, you should do everything in your power to crown yourself
Speaker 2:The Tyler method. As the firm's The Cosgrove
Speaker 1:This is the Cosgrove
Speaker 4:So we talked about this, I think, a couple days ago. There was the Wall Street Journal article about the Colgate, like, head of Yes. Head of AI there. And he was, like, this very young guy, and he would basically just tell everyone, like, no, despite the surveys or whatever, like,
Speaker 2:We're accelerating toothpaste with AI.
Speaker 1:No. He really did. The AI evangelist shaking up a 220 year old toothpaste maker. Herakles Kili Pappas to drive employees using AI for more than just polishing emails. On a conference call last April, an ad agency partner began presenting unpolished AI generated images to make a point.
Speaker 1:Artificial intelligence wasn't ready to take center stage in advertising, said this ad agency partner. But Pappas, the global head of AI for Colgate Palmolive, a two twenty year old consumer products company, quickly interjected, pointing out that the agency was using an older tool. He took over screen sharing, showing Colgate executives how a newer ChatGPT image model was far more capable. AI is misunderstood, said Pappas, who worked at Colgate for fifteen years and goes by Plea. There's a straw man of, well, it failed at this one thing, therefore, it's stupid.
Speaker 1:Such interactions in which Pappas bluntly challenges what he deems anti AI sophistry occurs regularly as Pappas acts as a kind of AI evangelist at Colgate whose brands include its eponymous toothpaste and soap as well as the Speed Stick deodorant, Ajax Cleaners, and Hill's Pet Nutrition. Often, he says he walks the halls in New York and New Jersey offices in search of AI tinkerers whom he can turn into company wide megaphones, helping to spread the good word. He's 38, and he is the AI czar of a 220 year old company. So, honestly, good advice if you're at a big company. Become the AI czar.
Speaker 1:Honestly, if you're at a small company, become the AI czar. Just always become the AI czar. This is this is the way. Casey Neistat took took shots. I think he's been listening to the show because I feel like we've talked about this before.
Speaker 1:Casey Neistat said there are only two circumstances in which a grown man should call another grown man Buddy. One, if you wanna fight, or two, if you wanna condescend before you fight.
Speaker 2:There's only one person on Earth that I wanna call buddy Yeah. Now. I'm not gonna say who it is. But there's one.
Speaker 1:Okay, buddy. You Calm down, buddy. Calm down, buddy. We don't wanna fight. We don't wanna condescend.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, you you you can you can put you can put away, buddy. We don't need buddy. Unless you're
Speaker 2:actually retired. Put it in the hall of fame. It should go in the hall of Fame. Controversial Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:But widely used.
Speaker 1:Yes. So Sam Parson says says three, it's okay to use it if it's your nephew, but nephew is usually not a grown man to another grown man. Like, I I call kids buddy all the time, but they're four. Like, I would I once they're 25, I doubt I'll be calling them buddy. I'll be calling them sir.
Speaker 1:Good sir. Good sir. Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want a multistream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 1:Oil and oil prices have extended their decline. They fell 50%.
Speaker 2:Bear market that we get excited about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So they are now around $80 a barrel.
Speaker 4:Where So this is actually not true anymore.
Speaker 1:What what is it now?
Speaker 4:It's now back up at, like, $84.85.
Speaker 1:Okay. But that's well, then why aren't you in the white suit?
Speaker 2:Well, that's quite the white suit on.
Speaker 4:It's kind of like it's just a
Speaker 2:kind of a off
Speaker 1:Oil's down 11% today. But the market overall is
Speaker 4:the market? Yes. So so briefly, there was news that It's up. The US, like, did escort a ship through the the Strait.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:But then maybe that actually wasn't true. And then the I I forget who exactly he was, but someone in the admin, like, took down the tweet saying that. Yeah. So I think there's just a of confusion right now.
Speaker 1:Should we do it? Jet ski through the Strait Of Hermus. You like extreme sports. Humanoid robot on a jet ski through the Strait Of Hermes. That's the way to do That would be thrilling.
Speaker 1:It would be. What else is going on?
Speaker 2:Financial Times asks, why do we ever think data centers in The Gulf were a good idea? US tech companies have concentrated much of their AI infrastructure build out in The Middle East. That is overly dramatic.
Speaker 1:I think so too. I think so too. It's more
Speaker 2:Certainly is not Yeah. It certainly is not
Speaker 1:mean, we should read we should read this argument. We should understand this. But but I think a lot of the the building data centers in the in The Middle East is like is like, well, there's lot of Middle East money that's going into building data centers in The United States.
Speaker 2:They want it's some sort of a
Speaker 1:trade, we're and like, well, you have a lot of land and power. It makes sense to do stuff over there. And we'll do this one hand washes the other. We're all working together anyway. You want a data center?
Speaker 1:We'll help you with what we're good at. You help us with what you're good at, which is energy and money. Right? So let's read through what Rana Fuhar Fuhar Fuhar Fuhar Fuhar Fuhar says in in the Financial Times. I start with an obvious question this week, which is one I've been thinking about for years.
Speaker 1:The Amazon data center in The UAE that was hit by an Iranian missile attack is yet another example of how companies and countries are putting too much of a single critical economic input in one risky area. It's an example very much akin to the Taiwan semiconductor problem, Just as it wasn't good for The U. S, China, and Europe or any other region to put 92% of all the world's high end chips in one place, it seems like an obvious blunder to concentrate so much data center power in one very risky part of The Middle East. Again, we're nowhere near 90% of compute capacity in The Middle I really take issue with that stat. I need some stats to back this up.
Speaker 1:I was really surprised following the hit to discover how much of the proposed U. S. Data center build out is in The Middle East, which has over the years subsidized a lot of the investment making it much cheaper, but also allowing The US to avoid harder work of upgrading its own grid and figuring out the politics and economics of energy sharing at home.
Speaker 2:We're not avoiding that. Yeah. This is like the number one focus of the industry.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're at home. Yeah. No one's talking about energy in The United States right now.
Speaker 2:No one's talking about energy
Speaker 1:It's nuts to me. We are more worried about cutting off oil to China from Iran, but we aren't worried about putting serious technology infrastructure and sensitive data in a highly geopolitically contentious part of the world. This isn't just a Trump administration thing. By the way, back in September 2024 when Joe Biden was still in the White House, The US and UAE agreed to deepen cooperation in advanced technologies such as semiconductors and clean energy with the aim of bolstering capacity in artificial intelligence. Microsoft and OpenAI were among the first US companies to either begin investing or receiving Gulf funding.
Speaker 1:Part of the deal was about trying to pull more countries into The US tech orbit. So he doesn't actually share well, there's actually a reply here, Richard Waters. But, okay, the level of concentration risk is here, though, is a whole different order to Taiwan. Yes, the one gigawatt UAE one gigabyte? Okay.
Speaker 1:This is a crazy
Speaker 2:article. This is a crazy article.
Speaker 1:Dylan Patel would like a word.
Speaker 3:They got a one gigabyte
Speaker 1:The one center project. Let's assume it's a typo. At least it's not AI written. Yes, the one gigawatt UAE Stargate project is massive and only the first stage in what one day might become a five gigawatt facility. But compare that to The United States, where plans have already been filed for 150 gigabytes.
Speaker 1:Okay. We're moving on from this. The gigabytes is too much. It's too much. Let me tell you about AppLovin.
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Speaker 3:The audacity. The audacity. The audacity to put a whole gigabyte.
Speaker 1:A whole gigabyte. This is the biggest three finger moment in Financial Times history. I still love I still love the pink sheets. I love I love the paper. There's some good stuff in here.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, we got to fact check those those abbreviations, guys. Got to step it up. Got to get more AI involved. Seriously. Just run that thing through.
Speaker 3:I know.
Speaker 1:No one's going to be upset about that. It's not this. It's that. As long as you get the facts straight. Anyway, Japan holds an oil reserve equivalent to two hundred and fifty four days of domestic demand.
Speaker 1:And Hamptons says, dude.
Speaker 2:I love this picture. It's a beautiful picture.
Speaker 3:What what what is Doon mode.
Speaker 1:What is dude reflecting on? The fact that like they should not be
Speaker 2:I think they're just reflecting on it being a cool picture.
Speaker 1:It is a cool picture. That's a lot of oil. I mean, I I doubt that that's the whole reserve, but that's that's that's very bullish for Japan. Talking to Alex Epstein yesterday, America has a hundred days, so they're at 2.5 times as much of a reserve as us. Everyone, it's time to it's time to stockpile, I think.
Speaker 1:I think everyone should should maybe think about stockpiling some some oil. Okay. Let's see. Christian Kyle, friend of the show, formerly an astronomist now at Andreessenholz. As a reminder, we have a partner from Andreessenholz joining in just seven minutes.
Speaker 1:Seven minutes. Christian Kyle says that his preferred definition of ARR is your single highest grossing minute of the year times 525,600. Amazing to be able to tweet this as a VC, as an RIA. Somehow this got through legal review. Of course, he's joking.
Speaker 1:But this is the new coastline paradox. Are you familiar with the coastline paradox, Jordy?
Speaker 2:I'm not.
Speaker 1:This is a fun this is fun little exercise.
Speaker 2:Please mansplain it.
Speaker 1:So the coastline paradox is the counter intuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well defined length or perimeter. This results in the from the fractal like curve. So basically if you draw a line around an object and you're just sort of like drawing straight lines, you get one number from the coastline. You get one line. So Great Britain, if you're measuring based on units that are 62 miles long, then the length of the coastline is 1,700 miles.
Speaker 1:But if you cut that in half and start measuring with 31 mile increments, 50 kilometers each segment, then the coastline is 370 miles longer. And you can do this endlessly because you can measure the coastline. Like, think about Point Doom, right, in Malibu. Like, you have this
Speaker 5:Thank little you
Speaker 2:for putting this in Malibu terms.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly what you need to do.
Speaker 1:You have this little you have this little, like like like spit jutting off the coastline. You can measure all the way around that and count that as extra coastline. And you can go even smaller. You could measure the coastline around a little tad to tide pool on on Point Doom or a rock on the on in the tide pool on the on Point Doom on the shore. And so there's no real accurate way to measure coastlines.
Speaker 1:You have to you have to quantize to some standard metric of of measurements, something like a 100 kilometers, 50 kilometers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I feel like ecomecom bros were weirdly prepared for Mhmm. ARR in the age of AI Mhmm. Because everybody that's been like building I saw Sean in the chat What's
Speaker 6:up, Sean?
Speaker 2:Sean will have talked to a bunch of different e commerce founders that would say like, oh, yeah, we're at 50,000,000 of ARR or like $5,050,000,000 dollar run rate. But the thing in e commerce is like one day in the week you launch a new product or you do a sale
Speaker 1:Black Friday, you're at
Speaker 2:a not even that. But it happens all year round.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Taking course. Your Black Friday revenue Yeah. And multiplying that by
Speaker 1:is
Speaker 2:like insane. But then you could even even if you're multiplying out a single month Yep. It's like, why? And so and so the right like, the the more mature way to do it professional be like, take the last three months Yeah. Average or something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of course. But even then, it just doesn't tell you that much because if you did it in q four Yep. Like your q four is probably bigger than your q So Always. Anyways, a lot of it is just a lot of it is just ego.
Speaker 1:Also, a lot of a lot of subscription products will rebill at like midnight. So 12:01, that's the minute you wanna multiply by five thou five hundred and twenty five thousand six hundred minutes to get to your highest ARR. January on the first of the month, in that twelve to twelve o ones minute, that's gonna be the highest sales
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:For an ecommerce product.
Speaker 4:Well, if it's, like, automatically renewing, then it's really only in the first couple seconds. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It depends. So really but typically, most subscription ecommerce platforms, it takes a while to actually process all the payments. So you have to parallelize and rewrite your entire subscription e commerce stack in Rust. That will be what runs most efficiently.
Speaker 1:You need multiple Stripe accounts hammering the API so you don't hit any rate limits, you bill everything in a single millisecond. And then you can multiply it by a trillion or something, however many milliseconds are in a year. I don't know. Anyway, Mark Zuckerberg responded to the viral fake news that Alex Wang is out of meta superintelligence. He's, in fact, doing better than ever hanging out with Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1:Mark Zuckerberg heads over to Threads to respond to the drama on X, but he forgot that X is the everything app. Threads is a completely different app and they don't have the context. Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo with Alex Wang to threads to shut down the rumors, but because it's threads, no one has any idea who it is or why he's posting. So this is one of the funniest exchanges on threads and the reason that you should be on that app. So the first the first post is I require context.
Speaker 1:The I require context shirt. Like, don't get it. This is a common thing on Instagram when you see some vague post. People will post this. It happens on X as well.
Speaker 1:But it's funny because, of course, as soon as I saw this, was like, oh, okay. I have full context. I fully understand what's going on. I get it because I'm on X all day. I head over to threads.
Speaker 1:I get this, but a lot of people don't. And then and then the the second comment is, I think that's the CEO of Cluely or whatever that AI cheating app is called, which is obviously not. Roy Lee and Alex Wang look very different. But then the commenter says, no. This is Alexander Wang.
Speaker 1:And he spells Alexander correctly without the e at the end, just d r Wang. And then and then someone else chimes in, wait. That's the same Alexander Wang that was canceled for sexual assault? I don't know if that's the that's someone else, but then then someone else comes in and says, no. No.
Speaker 1:Again. That's not the right person. And then somebody says, grok, who is that next to Mark? I don't even know if grok works on threads. Is that a thing?
Speaker 1:And then and then grok responds, I guess, or something, not unidentified, but it's a it's a screenshot of a different app. This makes no sense. And it says, no immediate public identification of the person next to him in major reports or viral coverage tied to this exact photo.
Speaker 2:Super intelligence.
Speaker 1:No one can figure it out over there. That's so funny. And then Roy, of course, chimes in just to make it more confusing and says, good throwback. Had a great time boying it up with the big Zuck. Absolutely ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Anyway, it is, of course, fake news. An executive sum deleted the post that was was amplifying the aggregation. Mike Isaac had a good had a good post explaining what was going on. Let me try and pull it up. We do have our next guest, so I will find that really quickly.
Speaker 1:Isaac. I can't find it. He goes by Rat So anyway, we will we will come
Speaker 2:back. As he goes by Rat King.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Mike. Anyway, we have Olivia Moore from Andreessen Horowitz. She's a partner there in the room. Let's bring her in. How are doing, Olivia?
Speaker 7:Good. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Thanks for hopping on. Sorry about the, the global chaos in the oil markets delaying this appearance, but I'm glad we had time to actually digest the report, because there's so many interesting details in there. Whenever you drop one of these big reports, I feel like you sort of need the Twitter hive brain to, like, dig through it and find all the interesting commentary and and quote each quote tweet each other until there's, a consensus. But, take us through the actual project. What did you launch?
Speaker 1:How long have you been working on this? And then we'll go into some of the interesting discoveries.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So we do this every six months. It's it's one of the most fun parts of my job, actually, because I think the the Genesis was back in 2023 when we were wondering, you know, the the tech x community has their own group of products that they use and love, but, like, what does the average person Yep. Actually care about in AI? So we do this every six months.
Speaker 7:We basically pull every single website Yep. And every single mobile app, rank them by usage, and pull the top 50 on each side that are kind of AI native or now majority AI enhanced. And it gives a really interesting picture of kind of what normal people use and care about in the AI world.
Speaker 1:Great. Let's talk about the data because when I first started seeing these charts of, like, oh, this is this company's winning, that company's winning, I was naturally sort of skeptical. I was like, oh, Sensor Tower, are pixels really accurate in the mobile age? But then I actually dug into the YIPET data, which is credit card based, and that seemed really, like, way more reliable. So talk to me about, are you paying for data?
Speaker 1:Is this data do they give this to you because you're friendly with them? Like, how does the data work? And then how confident are you about the data? What are the pitfalls? What do you like?
Speaker 1:Where are you seeing the data be reflective?
Speaker 7:Absolutely. Yeah. So our website data is from SimilarWeb Mhmm. Which we have a paid subscription to. Same with Center Tower for the mobile data.
Speaker 7:Yibbit is something I agree with you. I think it's more reliable, and it's something that we wanna lean on more going forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:The other thing that gets kind of significantly undercounted when you just look at web visits and mobile MAUs is all of these desktop products, like Cursor, Cloud Code, Granola, Whisper Flow that people are using. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so
Speaker 7:I think for the next few lists, we're gonna have to shift the methodology more towards I mean, it's helpful to see what's getting traffic, but I think at this point, as a consumer AI is maturing, we also want to see what people are paying for.
Speaker 1:One last question on data. I mean, Steinhoritz is a huge firm at this point. Have you have you considered doing what Nate Silver was talking about, a consumer reports style interview panel with experts that are maybe disconnected from a particular company and just sort of surveying everyone, getting some qualitative data, some quantitative data, and sort of putting together more adoption data that's maybe slightly less sanitized and analytical and quantitative, but paint a different picture?
Speaker 7:I would love to do that because, again, I think, like, we are in our own world of what products we use and talk about. The rest of the world uses all different things, like people in medicine, people in law, people in retail even are using AI products that, like, we have probably never heard of or interacted with. And so I'd love to get more of that qualitative stuff in there in the future.
Speaker 1:Great. So take us through the biggest movers, the biggest surprises, the biggest narratives that maybe should never have changed in the first place? Whatever your takeaways were.
Speaker 7:We're definitely starting to see the industry mature, so there's kind of fewer new entrants than we've seen
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:In the past versions of the list where, like, every time half the list was new. To me, there were, I think, two probably most interesting takeaways from this one. One would be the rise of agents. So Genspark and Manus both made the list as horizontal consumer agents. OpenClaw would have made the list if we pulled it in February.
Speaker 7:Our data was from January, but it would have ranked at number 30, which is, like, a very strong debut, especially for a product that's only for someone who knows how to use terminal, which is, like, 1% or less of the population.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 7:The other takeaway, which I feel like is on everyone's minds right now, is the kind of three horse race between ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Yep. And there's the traffic data alone, which is helpful. And then if you kind of tease out some more of the product strategy and the engagement data, like, there's kind of different stories happening there. So that was fun to dig into.
Speaker 1:And the the main takeaway from the from the the mainstream consumer in just the foundation, the chat apps, what what are you seeing between the ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Grok?
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's interesting. I would say DeepSeek has completely fallen off in The US. It still makes our list pretty high because it's like the number one AI product in China and Russia, which are really big markets.
Speaker 2:Do you have any do you have any personal theories, like things that you can't like, my thinking with DeepSeek was that all the downloads originally, when it just started charting out of nowhere, were just a 100%. It was just all entirely botted. Mhmm. I have no way to prove that other other than other than it was just going up the chart like crazy, and there was no nobody was actually using it. No one was talking about it, other than the fact that it was at the top of the chart.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think that's totally possible. I think we're actually seeing in different in many ways, but a little bit of an analogous story playing out with Claude right now, where, like, pre all of this press, whether it's positive or negative
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:No one in The US knew what DeepSeek was. Pre all of this press, I think there was some survey that clawed at, like, 2% market awareness in The US.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so we see this thing happen where, like, even if it's, like, the worst headline of all time, if it's going mainstream Yeah. Like, it will you it will drive people to try and use the product. Totally. And then, just have to see if they retain and they didn't on DeepSeek.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:What about who who who fell off? What There there were there was this kind of big wave of companies maybe like a year or two ago that were just like trying to confuse people into thinking they were ChatGVT. Right? They were
Speaker 1:Chat AI. That's the one I use.
Speaker 2:Is that
Speaker 7:not the main man? It's funny. I I never take, like, joy in any company falling off the list, except Yes. The mobile app you the mobile list used to be full of all of these, like I think they call them fleeceware apps Yes, that are developed in, like, Eastern European app studios, which are basically, like, charging you for the free version of ChatGPT Yeah. And pretending like they're the premium version.
Speaker 7:And Apple took a while, but they finally cracked down on them, thankfully. Yeah. The other category we've seen a little bit of a decline in that we talked about in the report is standalone image generator products.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:And that's largely a result of the fact that the image models within ChatGPT and Gemini have gotten so, so good Yeah. That unless you're like a hardcore creative, like that can kind of serve a lot of your use cases.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So zooming out from this, I'm interested to know what your view and your team's view is on where the opportunity in Gen AI consumer application development is. Because I've noticed there are companies that are still in founder mode and have I mean, Canvas sticks out as one here where, you know, founder's still in charge, pre IPO, clearly aware of AI trends, and can go and marshal the energy to change the business model if they need to move quickly. And then there are legacy players that just can't quite figure it out. But then there's other categories that are entirely new, and it's actually better to start with a greenfield.
Speaker 1:So how are you seeing entrepreneurs approach and deal with the fact that there is a large cohort of, you know, seniors on the on on the Yeah. On the playground who are maybe not retired yet and will want to compete with them if they try and take a shot across their bow?
Speaker 7:Totally. We this is the question we think about when we make every investment. So it's a it's a very topical one, especially in consumer. I would say Canva and Notion are two probably of the best examples, and both of them actually made the list for the first time because we had enough data to feel that these were now credibly majority AI. Notion has even released data saying that half of their revenue, half of their ARR now
Speaker 2:Woah.
Speaker 7:Is AI. Yeah. And so then it's like, that's real usage of consumers interacting with AI, so we gotta include that. I would say that yeah. So Canva and Notion are probably the two best examples of, like, growth stage companies, like, maybe approaching IPO that are still nimblish enough to kind of pivot a bit towards AI.
Speaker 7:I am still a believer that we will probably see twenty years from now, the winning company will be something that's AI native just because they do have such an existing base of users and businesses, and it's it's hard to cannibalize your own products. I think we've seen this a little bit with Google where they're releasing amazing models like Nano Banana and Veo. But honestly, they're the AI features that they're shoving into their existing interfaces, like Gmail and and Slides and everything, I don't know if you've noticed, but every demo video, the use case is like plan a trip Yep. In like a way that no one ever actually plans a trip. And so I think that's been a little bit less successful.
Speaker 7:So in general, I think we are in almost every category, it feels like an AI native company will win. There are some really horizontal things where the incumbents might have distribution advantage, but those are kind of few and far between.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm so I'm Google so
Speaker 1:Stack is crazy to me because I'm I'm I have Gmail running in Chrome, and there's two different Gemini buttons that I can open simultaneously to have fighting Gemini instances, like fight over what's going on. And it's just something that, like, the product development maturity and, like, the final UI has clearly not been outlined here, and we're still in the early innings. Yeah. Jordy, you were saying something?
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm just I'm very curious to see how consumer AI impacts Canva overall. Sure. Because I think so many of the typical entry points in Canva. Like Canva's a massive tool. You can do all these different things, but so many of the tasks
Speaker 1:Could be
Speaker 2:one can shot. Just be one shot. I was talking with a friend of mine who's they have a family business.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And they just describe when they need marketing collateral like a sign. They just describe it to ChatGeeBT, and it just makes a it just one shots it now. Yeah. And there's no re
Speaker 1:There's so
Speaker 2:many care. There's so many biz there's like
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In tech, you might create a generation and then like rep spent wanna spend a bunch of time refining it and taking it from like 90% to a 100%. The average Right. Small business is like, you got me to 90%, like, we're good to go. I don't need I don't need Totally. That extra horsepower.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think the the use cases where the last 10% is really like 90% of the value
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Where you need to be like really able to iterate on it like pixel by pixel and not one shot it. Where there's, like, really difficult integrations you have to build, where you can capture ambient new data, like, all of that is really ripe for consumer AI, new startups.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Also, like, templated workflows where you maybe wanna generate a 100 in images, that type of stuff. You can wire up Nano Banana with a workflow. There there's a few of these, like, node based editing tools. Think n eight n is one.
Speaker 1:Right? And there's a few others. And, of course, you could just write code to do it. But for someone who's you know, has a particular templating workflow in a more consumer AI or consumer image app, they might just be stuck in their workflow. I do wanna get to gen generated video.
Speaker 1:Yep. You've been tracking the models very closely. I'm interested to know when we see the collision between what we're seeing with these insane Chinese models. There's v o three. There's there's so many cool video models where it's just text in, m p four video out.
Speaker 1:Yep. And then on the flip side, you have, like, CapCut. I use Instagram edits a lot. I really like that app. I've also enjoyed captions, that app.
Speaker 1:And it feels like these are two on a collision course just like we saw Nano Banana and Canva maybe get on a collision course. What what are the existing mobile video editors doing? How well positioned are they versus the model teams? Because it feels like with video, there's maybe a little bit more like, that last 10% is even more than in images. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But what's your take on generative video and what we should expect this year?
Speaker 7:Video has been the most interesting category in creative tools, and I think it's exactly to your point because Chinese companies can train on any data, even copyrighted data. Can they? They I mean, they do. They do. So we're seeing, like, C Dans from Bike Dans Yeah.
Speaker 7:Like, Hailiwuo, Cling, all of these models are amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I would say, like, Sora and b o three are, like, not not far behind. Yeah. My twin sister, Justine, who also works here, like, lives and breathes AI video, and she had this blog post a while back about, like, there will be no one AI video model to kind of rule them all, just because there's so many different types of videos you make. Like, a true, like, two hour movie Yeah. Versus, like, a ten second marketing clip.
Speaker 7:Like, you actually probably want to train the model and train and design the workflows differently around those. So I've actually been more excited, I think, kind of to your point about these tools where you're able to switch between the models depending on what you are building, like Acquire or Higgs Field made the list this time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Capcut is mostly dance models, but it it works because the by dance models are are generally, like, pretty good and ahead of the pack.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've been thinking about, like, we, you know, we saw tool use come to ChatGPT. ChatGPT got a computer, as Ben Thompson put it, a Python REPL. It can run some some math for you where it doesn't need to just guess the next token. It can just actually write the code and execute it.
Speaker 1:And it feels like we got we got a reasoning step with Nano Banana three Banana Pro two. I'm lost on the model numbers. We're also sort of mid revision on a lot of these.
Speaker 7:They named them in a very confusing
Speaker 1:way. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's v o three, but Nano Banana is on different number scheme. Anyway, we we clearly got some sort of reasoning chain where I can say, like like, dog riding a rocket, and it will add a lot of text to the prompt to sort of give me a better output.
Speaker 1:What's gonna be interesting is when it also has the tool to make something black and white programmatically as opposed to needing to regenerate the video every time. Because when you regenerate the video, you get something slightly different. I wanna be able to upload a video, do a color grade on it, edit it down, add cuts, jump cuts, like, and have that have those tools be AI aware. And maybe that means some reinforcement learning pipeline on something that looks like an After Effects or something. But, the the that type of you know, the video experience is not just capturing the raw footage.
Speaker 1:It's the whole pipeline.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I agree. The reasoning point and kind of the access that Nano Banana has to the Internet as a video model Yeah. I think is fascinating. Like, actually, in this report, we included, like, a heat map of global AI adoption.
Speaker 7:Adoption. And the way that we created that graphic is I gave Nano Banana every country code and every heat map score Mhmm. And it literally went and colored in every country accordingly. Like, it found the country on the map. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And I I checked it by hand. It did them all correct.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's amazing.
Speaker 7:And I don't think we've seen anything like that quite come to video. Yeah. But the video models do have, like, a really kind of weird intuitive understanding of, like, physics and how things work in the world, like a drop of water creating ripples, that kind of thing. And so I'm sure the researchers are are hard at work on this.
Speaker 2:We're shocked at, the the Sora data.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Take us through that.
Speaker 2:Let's go with Bill Peebles.
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 2:An absolute dog.
Speaker 1:Absolute dog. Proving us all around. His downfall. What yeah. What's going
Speaker 7:on with Sora? Sora's a fascinating to me, it's, like, probably the biggest narrative violation we've seen in consumer AI in a while. Yep. First of all, they gave us the gift of so many AI videos of Jake Paul.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 7:That alone, I think, was worth the money they spent on compute there.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:But actually so what the data shows is downloads for store are definitely down. Yeah. It it had it was at the top of The US App store for Yeah. Twenty days consecutively. That's right.
Speaker 7:So, getting 6,000,000 downloads a month. Now, it's closer to a million and a half.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 7:And so, it didn't turn into like the social network that Yeah. I think they But, it stayed really strong as a creative tool because the model is good. And because you can create videos with these cameos, so the DAOs are actually still increasing. They have 3,000,000 global DAOs, which is like, I think probably the most for any video generation product on mobile, and so, it's pretty impressive. If I were them, I would I would keep investing in that.
Speaker 2:And, depending on when this Disney, like, partnership Yes. Actually rolls out, I would expect that to send it right back top. Totally.
Speaker 7:Totally. I think
Speaker 2:that's The question the question if I have OpenAI is like, do you want those download do you want those users going to ChatGPT or Sora?
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If it is just a creative tool, over time, I would expect the products to merge. I don't know.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I could see that. I I do think it's interesting. I feel like the usage of AI with kids and families has been, probably lower than it should be just because of concerns about hallucination or weird artifacts or, like, you just need to be very sure that the content is clean. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so I think something like Asura plus Disney characters is probably gonna explode
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Consumer AI for kids a way we haven't seen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and just, like, all the reasoning chains and, like, workflows within ChatGPT just makes so much sense where you could say, okay. Here are my here's the name of my kid. Here's his favorite Disney characters. Write a story, then generate turn that into, you know, an actual, like, template, generate a few images.
Speaker 1:I'll pick the few key images that make the most sense for I'll upload an image and give you some backstory, and then now generate the full video, and then that's, like, the birthday card video that goes out. There's so many cool things. Even with that heat map example, like, you could Wow. You could write programmatic code to generate a heat map that uses JavaScript to look perfect. And you know the data's right, but it's not gonna look great.
Speaker 1:And then you could just take that and do basically style transfer on top of it. So all of those different tools feel like they're really gonna accelerate as they get brought together, but we're in this, like, ununified prop like, time now. When they when the unification happens, it's gonna be really cool. The last question I have is about when we talked to Sam Altman about Sora, he echoed that it was being used as a creative tool. But I found that I wind up using Sora to generate videos that truly have an audience of one or, like, five people, and I'll send them to a group chat, and it's basically just an in joke.
Speaker 1:And he says that that's, like, a new thing that people are doing where if I were to post it on my Instagram, people are like, why are you posting AI slob? But if I if I if I if everyone gets the in joke in my five person group chat or whatever, everyone's everyone's having fun. Hays paradox. Yes. Hays paradox.
Speaker 1:And so we so so I'm interested in where you're seeing movement in these, like, smaller
Speaker 2:Hays paradox, by the way, is a made up paradox that I'm trying to bake into the models by saying
Speaker 7:it over and over
Speaker 9:on the
Speaker 1:Paradox is where you think something's the more the funny you think something is, the worse it will do on Twitter.
Speaker 2:Well, The the less likely it will be universally funny. So like, if something is the funniest thing in the to you
Speaker 1:The most niche humor I
Speaker 7:thought it
Speaker 2:would just be like true.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? Right? Because you're not writing for a general audience. But, talk to me about the the the growth in, either, like, single player or smaller AI uses.
Speaker 1:I I see this with Suno a little bit where people are making songs for themselves. Heard a lot of people are still fans of Midjourney just because they see it as sort of like this art therapy where they talk to the model and they get an image back and it's almost a single player experience. Maybe they're sharing with a small community, but they're not really using it in like a professional context. It's more of the smaller thing. Where are people going in terms of personal assistants, personal relationship coaches, that type of thing?
Speaker 7:I am so excited for this because I feel like we haven't yet seen the breakout AI social product. Because if you just try to do, like, a skeuomorphic social network with AI baked in, it's like, actually, the reason that people are addicted to Instagram is because there's all these, like, positive and negative emotions that come with, like, putting real content of yourself out there, and that doesn't exist with AI photos. So I think we've seen some attempts at it. It hasn't really worked. What I am excited about is what you said across both Sora and I think Suno.
Speaker 7:A lot of people are making, like, meme songs for their friends. Anyone who knows how to train a Laura probably has Laura of all their friends to make meme images. I think that kind of thing could be what potentially makes something like a ChatGPT group chats, which I think has had kind of poor adoption so far Yeah. Into something a lot more interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've only used the ChatGPT group chat. Think when we were collaborating on like one thing, I was sending you the group chat and then we were both asking questions. But I the like it's Yeah.
Speaker 2:We basically use it for like learning about a topic. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But Prepping But that's not viral. It's like fairly niche.
Speaker 7:My usage is the same. The the other thing I think we should watch on this front is, I've heard from a lot of Open Claw power users that one of the best and funniest use cases is to add it to like family group chats or friend group chats because it'll just it can be helpful sometimes, and then it'll just chime in with like crazy, funny, interesting Yeah. Obviously, that's not consumer grade, so somebody's gonna have to productize that into someone that like something that like your mom can install into the group chat or you know, your grandpa can install into the group chat. But I think it's coming because it's a big opportunity.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 2:Report Fantastic is research.
Speaker 1:The top 100 Gen AI consumer apps. It's the sixth edition. It's available @a16z.com. And if you work at a rival venture capital firm, that's what incognito windows are for.
Speaker 7:Exactly. Thank you, Andrew Reed.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Andrew Reed.
Speaker 1:And thank you for joining the show. We'll talk to you soon, Olivia. Have a great Thanks.
Speaker 7:Bye.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about fin. Ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. And let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. I like that we got Jeremy Alaire in the in the Vibrio. I I I just noticed that. Anyway, without further ado, we have David from Juice Box.
Speaker 1:He's the co founder and CEO. He's in restroom ready room, and now he's in the TBPN Ultradome. How are
Speaker 2:you doing, Hickleman David? Hole. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:The end of the hour.
Speaker 10:Thanks for having me on again.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming back.
Speaker 2:Back so soon.
Speaker 1:Fantastic performance. Give us the news. What happened? How much you raised? Break it down for us.
Speaker 10:Yeah. We announced our $80,000,000 series b today.
Speaker 2:Look at this. Look at this. Oh, he's got a gong. Baby gong. He's got a gong.
Speaker 3:The mini
Speaker 2:one. He's got a baby gong.
Speaker 1:Gong I've seen.
Speaker 2:Sorry to gong maug you, but
Speaker 1:Hopefully, it's ringing off the
Speaker 2:hook over there. After the show. And now that now that you're an $800,000,000 company, we I think you deserve to have a Gong
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:As big as, you know, a corporate statement.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You need one. So how is business? How is growth? What's the how big is the company?
Speaker 1:How big is the the the client base? Give us some context on the scale since we last talked.
Speaker 10:For sure. So some quick facts on the business. We we were four people just over a year ago. Wow. Then when we raised the a, we were on Yeah.
Speaker 10:We were 13 people. K. And then now we're around 40. We've tripled ARR since the a and work with over 5,000 customers.
Speaker 1:5,000 companies are recruiting employees through Juice Box. How many people does it is does the talent pool matter? Does that stay static, or is it more like, I'm a company, I come to you, and you go find the person wherever they are on the Internet?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's a it's a great question. It's the latter. So Mhmm. What we focus on is passive talent sourcing.
Speaker 10:So we'll scour the web for anyone that we can find that think is that we think could be a great fit for the given role. Mhmm. We'll find that list of people, stack rank them for your given search, and then make it really easy to reach out to them, typically through an email sequence, get in touch with them, see if they're interested in the role. And so because our talent pool is effectively everyone, it scales quite nicely with our customers as well.
Speaker 1:5,000 companies are hiring. That's a white pill while people are worried about layoffs and and contraction and, you know, companies going out of business and whatnot. What trends are you seeing among the 5,000 companies that you work with? Are they particularly early stage startups that are growing that you can speak the same language of? Are they in industrial sectors that are immune from AI or transformation?
Speaker 1:What trends are you seeing in the hiring market?
Speaker 10:Yeah. When we were on last, a lot of our customers were kind of venture backed, fast growing in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. I'd say that's probably the biggest thing that's changed in the business since then is that we've scaled to support more traditional enterprises. So think like large defense contractors, financial institutions, and similar. They face the same hiring problems.
Speaker 10:They wanna attract the best talent and they are seeing a lot of noise in the inbound that they used to quite heavily rely on. Sure. There's huge amounts of like AI generated application spam now, and that makes it really hard to find the best talent and and bring them onto the team. And so what we've seen since is kind of this shift, what used to be quite heavy on just software engineering roles of doing outbound for them, is really spreading across roles. And so that's for sales roles, that's for HR roles, finance roles, and all across the board.
Speaker 1:So Oh, sorry. Go for it. Was just wondering, do you expect there to be a shift in the number of new jobs that you place or broadly are placed that come from employees that are currently working somewhere and get outreach from a new company and then they shift while they're still employed versus these the the the proactive job searcher?
Speaker 10:That's right. We think the majority of roles are gonna be filled by passive candidates. Mhmm. We call it the talent war, and so the more companies are competing, the more they're gonna be reaching out to other top talent and try to attract them to their teams. And I think that's already been the case to some extent in, you know, fast growing tech.
Speaker 10:That's now spreading across the industry, and so we think all all roles are ultimately going to be filled through outbound.
Speaker 2:Okay. Talk about the business model and how it might evolve in the future. Where is this where is this going? I'm I'm assuming as part of the pitch, all the investors were excited about you selling kind of the work that traditional recruiting agencies do, but how how are you positioning it or thinking about it?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So one thing that's unique about the business is that while we do kind of sell the work that the recruiter is doing, we do so without kind of, say, replacing the traditional recruiting agency. And in fact, many of them are our customers as well. And so whether it's an in house recruiting team or an external recruiting team, they have the same goal of identifying who could be the best person of for a given role and then reaching out to them. And so the the platform has two different modules, which kinda goes into the business model and pricing as well.
Speaker 10:One being the per seat setup where you can buy a license to use the platform and you log in with your email. The second being our agents, which are used on a per job basis. And so depending on how many jobs you have live or jobs that you wanna hunt talent for, you can deploy different agents in Juicebox that will go find the best profiles and reach out to them every single day without you having to check back in on them day over day.
Speaker 1:Okay. Give me some tips for someone who wants to be flooded with Juicebox inbound. What what what's the key to making yourself aware to your web crawlers, to the models? How should people be positioning themselves? PDF, resumes, personal websites, blogs, Twitter.
Speaker 1:Like, what's the best way to throw up a flag? Even if you're happy with your current job, just let everyone know. Let the models know. Let Juicebox know. I'm I'm a top man.
Speaker 1:I'm a I'm a a killer.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think the biggest piece of advice is just share more about yourself. Share what you're where you're currently working, what you're actually working on, any projects that you're involved in, anything you do outside of work, really anything that can indicate a potential match for for role. And that can be pretty diverse. You know, there's many companies that want to find candidates that have some kind of interest or experience in the sector that they work in.
Speaker 10:That might not directly be tied to the day to day work that you're doing today, but may reflect an interest that you have. And so Yeah. The more of that is available or or published in one form or another will make it easier to be matched and identified for that job.
Speaker 1:What's the best output for that? Because I imagine you're not scraping all of Instagram reels. It's probably a little bit easier if I have, like, a blog that's well indexed or I'm on GitHub or LinkedIn? Like, where where should someone be publishing?
Speaker 10:Yeah. That that's exactly right. So, actually, all the ones you mentioned are are great examples. Mhmm. Personal websites is something that's still a bit newer.
Speaker 10:I'd say, like, the total kind of number of candidates that actually have that is still fairly low. Right. But, you know, many people have a GitHub profile, LinkedIn profile, many places to to to publish that information.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And I think GitHub in in particular is one that's quite underutilized because it's historically been hard for recruiters to use. Like, how can they actually find, you know, who is a good person to reach out to. A lot of that data is indexed a lot stronger now. And so recruiters are searching based on GitHub data. They are finding people who contribute to open source repos or or have other signals, and a lot of that data is only being unlocked within the last six to twelve months.
Speaker 1:I have a funny story. In, like, 2014, I needed to hire a software engineer, so I cross referenced every customer email with GitHub, and I and I reached out to, like, some of the top, open source contributors. And there's this one guy who had created Redis, which is a in memory database. He's like a legendary programmer. And I was like, hey.
Speaker 1:Could you help me? I need to build an ecommerce website. And he was like, you you you don't need me, bro. Like, you're good. He was actually very helpful and taught me a ton of things.
Speaker 1:But that cross referencing has been really, really valuable. And and GitHub continues to be an underrated source of of of sourcing. I remember I talked to someone who's a tech recruiter, and I taught her how to source on LinkedIn, and she actually got a job because of it, because it was, like, a differentiator that she wouldn't just be hanging out on LinkedIn all the time. This was, like, pretty early in GitHub's era, but there's so much alpha there because you can see what people are doing. A little bit harder if you're a defense contractor, probably not posting a lot of public information about what you're doing, but maybe maybe some blog posts will do the trick.
Speaker 1:Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come Great
Speaker 2:to chat with us.
Speaker 1:And we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Cheers.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with eleven Labs. Let me also tell you about Turbo Paffen, Jordy.
Speaker 2:Please do.
Speaker 1:Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Well, we have our next guest, Adam Goldstein from Archer. He's the founder and CEO. Adam, how are you doing? Good to meet you.
Speaker 1:Great. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of your backstory? How did you become interested in flying cars?
Speaker 11:Well, a lot of it came from building a software business that every month I had to wake up and it'd be the first of the month and we'd have to start over with sales. And it was, one of those things that kind of drove me to the point that
Speaker 2:Wait. Were you selling WattUp? Were you
Speaker 1:selling Yeah. You selling box software? The whole thing of SaaS is that it just automatically recurs.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Right. I wish that was, I wish that was the case. Okay. The the sales grind of Sure.
Speaker 11:Software are really really tough. Yeah. And so given how hard these businesses are, I really wanted to do something that was unbelievably fun. I could really help make an impact in the world and the technology was changing over and so I had been, you know, messing around electric engines and building airplanes and it was an opportunity to just build a whole new category of airplane. A lot of it started out as a fun thing to go do, a project.
Speaker 11:And I'd always loved and been obsessed with airplanes and so it was an opportunity to go out there and actually build something super special special. Yeah. And as it all started to work, it became like super clear that there was just a massive business to go build here.
Speaker 1:Okay. Take us through this video. What are we seeing here?
Speaker 11:So these are what people call EVTOLS or electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. You can think about it same categories like a helicopter, but it's electric. And when you switch electric, you all of a sudden can put multiple sets of engines and propellers and actuators, which allows the aircraft to have a ton of redundancy which allows you to certify at a safety level that's super super high. So the vehicles take off and land like helicopters but then transition and fly forward like an airplane.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:And it allows for, you know, people to get where they're going very really, really quickly.
Speaker 1:I have to ask, is any of this AI generated video? Is any of this CGI?
Speaker 11:That's all real flight test video.
Speaker 1:This is all real flight test video. There one of these? How many of these exist? What's the plan to ramp this up?
Speaker 11:Those videos are several different aircraft. Okay. So we are in the process of, going through the certification, you know, process with the FAA. Sure. And that's the part where we really unleash.
Speaker 11:So we have a big factory located down in Georgia that can build up to 650 aircraft per year
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 11:With capability to go do it. So right now, you know, we're you know, we work with, you know, handful of aircraft. The first block of 10 is what we built. And then now we're in that phase where we're starting to build to the next block of 50. But you wanna time it really with the certification process.
Speaker 11:And then the other side is we were selected as the exclusive air taxi provider for the LA 28 Summer Olympics. You're coming make sure we have it all done.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 11:Thank
Speaker 2:you. And you you were talking about safety ratings. Is the idea to prove that these can be safer than traditional helicopters? Like, what's the goal?
Speaker 11:Yeah. That's that that's correct. So the FAA created a new category for us. It's not a helicopter. It's not an airplane.
Speaker 11:So we actually certify these at a safer level than what helicopters are today and we have to go out and obviously prove that. And so that just will, I think, drive a lot more, people willing to get on aircraft like this. Mhmm. The aircraft also is much quieter than a helicopter which means it can allow for a lot more landing. So for example, if you wanted to take a helicopter to the Hamptons, they limit the amount of landings at East Hampton Heliport because it's so loud and people complain.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. So as the, aircraft are much much quieter, it can dramatically increase the amount of people that are able to access this.
Speaker 1:Okay. When I dig into the flying car plans, the history of the flying car, there's always, like, four different problems that need to be solved, like regulatory, vertical takeoff and landing, going electric and then also building VERTA ports and actually having more places to land. Assuming you get through approval, it looks like it's already vertical takeoff and landing. It sounds like it's already electric. Will this be able to just slot into the existing helicopter infrastructure and sort of go from like, could someone theoretically just buy one of these instead of a helicopter, have a pilot who's experienced in this, and fly from helicopter destination to helicopter destination while we as a society figure out more vertiports and landing zones?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Absolutely. So we designed it to fit into the existing helicopter infrastructure. So the wingspan is less than 50 feet. Okay.
Speaker 11:The aircraft weighs 6,500 pounds, so it's designed within that, you know, existing guidelines. We'll fly existing, helicopter flight plans. We'll use and leverage a lot of existing infrastructure and then depending on the city you're in, so places like Texas and Florida, there's much easier friendly environments to go. You can land kinda lots of different places, places like California, it'll be much more planned Sure. And structured.
Speaker 11:And so it gives you the ability though to really you know, use existing but then ultimately scale the stuff out. So I I do think you'll see fleets of this stuff get done first before individuals, but the individuals ultimately will come with time Yeah. And we'll be able to use them on an everyday basis.
Speaker 1:You mentioned infrastructure. I imagine that most airports that service helicopters have fuel but maybe not charging infrastructure. Is there any hurdle to actually getting charging infrastructure in place the way Tesla did with the rollout of the electric car?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So the good news is we use very similar charging infrastructure that the EVs use. So Okay. Two c charging like a Tesla supercharger.
Speaker 5:Got
Speaker 11:it. And we partnered with a company in our industry that's a and I'll call more of a partner than a competitor. It's a company called Beta. Okay. And they make a lot of the charging infrastructure.
Speaker 11:So I've backed the charging infrastructure, their plans, we buy a bunch of their equipment, and so we're going out there and doing that. The airplane business is just much smaller in terms of number of units than the total number of cars, so it's not like you need you need like tens of thousands of chargers everywhere. If you're looking at like New York City, you need a handful, right, at the big heliports, and that's really it.
Speaker 1:And there's probably already a lot of power going into an airport broadly, so to redirect a little bit of it. It's not like you're you're trying to set up a, you know, a charging station in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 11:We are not training the grid.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's
Speaker 5:for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:So the the Olympics partnership is exciting. But looking forward, what do you think are going to be, you know, five years out, ten years out? What are gonna be the most, like, common routes that at least what would you predict at this point?
Speaker 11:So city center to airport is a very obvious one because there's known demand and willingness to pay. You can see that through rideshare. Uber's, you know, we all do that. Right? And so it's also typical trip that's not that far, but also takes a long time.
Speaker 11:So the convenience factor there is massive. If you live in LA, you wanna go to LAX, if live in New York, you wanna go to JFK, those type of routes are like very obvious. But these routes exist like all over the world, things like that. So Yeah. Anytime like where, you know, everybody says, oh, I wish I had this in my hometown.
Speaker 11:It's like, I grew up in Tampa, Florida. I grew up in North Tampa. I would have loved to have gone to Saint Pete or to Clearwater. That's a total pain to get to. Yeah.
Speaker 11:But if I could fly there, that would be super interesting. That literally exists everywhere. So I do think it'll become much more common as we just have to get it started and get people comfortable because it is the first new category in a very long time, literally about sixty years that the FAA has created. So there is a an adoption period that will take place.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No matter where you land in the Bay Area, it's gonna be an hour to get into San Francisco proper, whether it's s SFO can be a little bit faster, but Oakland's
Speaker 2:How do you, It's all
Speaker 1:it's all takes forever.
Speaker 2:Creating a category like this, how do you solve the pilot side? What is gonna be the, like, are you creating the certification with the FAA? Mhmm. How do you build out a cohort of of pilots? Will there ever be are you imagining there's gonna be a recreational market for eVTOL?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So they FAA has already defined this, and so there's certain credentials of, like, what you need to go do it. The good news is the aircraft is super easy to fly. It could take you two weeks to hover a helicopter. I could teach you guys how to fly this plane in five minutes.
Speaker 11:A lot of the training is
Speaker 2:really I feel I could I feel like I could hover a helicopter in about in about five minutes.
Speaker 1:The most dangerous thing. Red Bull, contact me. Can't fly this thing upside down.
Speaker 11:If you could hover a helicopter in five minutes on your first try, that would be unbelievably impressive because that is extraordinarily difficult.
Speaker 2:Every guy every guy thinks they could they could take over
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah. I think that's ridiculous, but I could I could actually land a seven forty seven in an emergency situation. Yeah. Yeah. 100%.
Speaker 1:You're on the you're on the cover of the business and finance section in The Wall Street Journal today. It says flying tax remaker Archer accuses rival Joby of concealing China ties. What happened? What is going on with the deeper supply chain in eVTOL?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So Archer is building products not just for the civil side but also for the defense side. And a big part of what we're doing is really in support of building you know, re industrializing America and building the, you know, the industrial base here especially on the defense side. And so we partner with a company called Andrel and we're building aircraft. We we build the big aircraft and then Andrel will missionize them.
Speaker 11:So think they put the sensors and systems and weapons into the aircraft. So very important to me that we build and keep the supply chain in The US and we build this stuff all out here. That's not been necessarily the case for our competitors. They put, you know, factories in in China, in Shenzhen. They set up their supply chain there and I just think it should be table stakes for American companies working in defense to have to build out their supply chains and and ultimately do it in America.
Speaker 11:And if you do go do that overseas, you also have to disclose that in a very proper way. And so I think that's, you know, a a a big sticking point for me. I do think companies working, in defense in America, need to be very transparent about that.
Speaker 3:Talk to me
Speaker 1:about the battery supply chain there because I I feel like drone motors have been very difficult to reshor electric batteries. We've seen some positive news from Tesla around a lithium ion or a lithium ion battery plant, and there's some extraction that's happening. But how mature I mean, you're not making millions of these yet, but how mature is the supply chain on the electric side?
Speaker 11:So the we used, traditional lithium ion batteries Mhmm. And so, commercial off the shelf stuff. So we're not like inventing some new battery cell here. That's not proven. The reason we have to do that is because there needs to be data to show the FAA to prove these things are safe.
Speaker 11:It's not just that these things are safe. It's that we have to go and actually light some on fire. We put them into thermal runaway. Many of them into thermal runaway. We have to show they do not propagate and spread throughout the pack.
Speaker 11:We have to take an entire pack, hoist it 50 feet in the air and drop it and it cannot emit toxic gases or catch on fire. So the standard is unbelievably high. So you need to use proven technologies to go do that. The good news is over time, do get better and so they get more energy dense and it allows us to, you know, do more things largely around speed range and payload. Yeah.
Speaker 11:But that will likely keep improving versus, you know, if you take like a typical, you know, ice or, you know, piston piston combustion engine. It's not like the tech is the the core. It's not like the fuel is getting better. It's the same fuel every year. So we have a a unique advantage where one day the stuff will be so good
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:You probably don't need that much Yeah. And it will dramatically reduce your cost.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, long term, this should be longer range. Where are we right now? I feel like, electric cars had a certain breaking out moment once you got to a 300 mile electric car range. That's about what, many gas cars are. What how does the electric VTOL range compare to, just a typical helicopter?
Speaker 11:So today, helicopters have more performance than what we have from a range perspective.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:So we are targeting in and around urban environments. So think, less than a 100 miles. That's the typical, you know, kind of target. On the defense side, it's a hybrid vehicle. So they're they can go, you know, upwards of a thousand miles.
Speaker 11:Wow. So you're putting heavy fuels back into it.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 11:So even further than what helicopters can do. So it depends what you're talking about. But on a helicopter, they can't meet us from a safety perspective. Yeah. So, you know, there's if you look at, like, single engine helicopters, there's many single points of failure where if one part goes bad, you'll have a catastrophic event.
Speaker 11:So we are hitting standards that are significantly higher than where they can be, so there will be some trade offs. So there will always be helicopters around, heavy lift stuff, really far, you know, range stuff. So if you have an offshore oil rig, for example, we're not gonna compete in that market. Mhmm. So if you wanna you know, if you look at like a 53 k, like a King Stallion, just Google that.
Speaker 11:Like a giant heavy lift helicopter.
Speaker 12:Yeah.
Speaker 11:That thing can carry an f 35. Like name.
Speaker 1:What's it called?
Speaker 2:King Stallion.
Speaker 1:King Stallion. That's a Yeah.
Speaker 11:So if
Speaker 8:that's a
Speaker 11:a big helicopter, that's a
Speaker 2:horse horse theme Yeah. Product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You gotta get good names going for all guys every year.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's fantastic. That's a big boy. Okay. Kingstuff.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So we we call our our, aircraft midnight.
Speaker 1:Midnight.
Speaker 11:And, of course, company is Archer. And then, you know, Taylor Swift did release her album Midnights, and one of the songs was Archer. Oh, that album. Oh, there you We were like, wait a minute. Is this a
Speaker 2:She is
Speaker 8:a shareholder?
Speaker 11:Paying attention. I don't know. That's what we were curious. It's like, did we inspire her?
Speaker 1:That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us, Adam. This is fantastic. Cannot wait for the Olympics in Los Angeles. Hope to see these flying around, and we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 11:Thanks, Scott.
Speaker 1:Have a good rest of
Speaker 2:your day.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Before we bring in our next guest, I need to tell a funny story about in middle school, everyone had to give a speech, and I had the best speech planned. I was gonna give a speech about the Osprey helicopter. Are you familiar with the Osprey helicopter?
Speaker 1:Of course. Yes.
Speaker 2:It's a
Speaker 1:vertical takeoff and landing vehicle. And I was like, this is the greatest speech ever. I'm making it's the future of technology. It's a plane. It's a helicopter.
Speaker 1:Everyone's gonna love this. I get up. I give a very convincing speech on how the Osprey helicopter should be supported at all costs. We gotta work on this thing. We gotta fund this with taxpayer dollars.
Speaker 1:The Osprey helicopter is the best thing since sliced bread. I get up. I give my speech. Then the next person comes up, and they're like, my speech is about curing cancer. And I'm like, I'm cooked.
Speaker 1:And everyone else had chose topics that were, like, totally pulling on your heartstrings, and mine was just, like, nerdy talking about a random obscure piece of military technology.
Speaker 2:Is pretty sweet.
Speaker 10:I don't
Speaker 2:odd friendly guy in the chat says Oh, okay. Taylor just wants the, Taylor Swift wants the archer, so people stop flaming her for
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a good call. That would definitely help out. Well, before we bring in our next guest, 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, let's bring in Max from Legora. He's the cofounder and CEO.
Speaker 1:Max, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us on such a busy day.
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 3:Give us the news. What happened?
Speaker 9:Well, we cooked.
Speaker 2:You cooked. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Let's go.
Speaker 8:Let's We raced around How much did you raise?
Speaker 1:New York.
Speaker 9:Raised $550,000,000. That's a big worth of all gongs. Fantastic. Like, the sales department here at Agora.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. So what's the key to growth? Is there a particular type of law firm that's you're seeing traction with? Is it upmarket, large, small, everything, direct to consumer?
Speaker 1:Like, where is the business today?
Speaker 9:Well, let's talk about law firms.
Speaker 1:I think the
Speaker 9:excite you know, the the the thing that sort of distinguishes the law firm market is that if a firm down the street starts operating with Liguora, they're able to offer faster and better services, and so every firm has to adopt it. Yeah. The equilibrium breaks.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And that's why we've seen a astronomical surge in our law firm demand. Mhmm. But at the other side of the coin, you have the enterprises, the legal departments who are starting to figure out that we might be able to leverage AI to cut down costs, to operate more effectively. Mhmm. And so we're really seeing value on both sides of this equation.
Speaker 9:And as you know, we started Legora in Stockholm, Sweden less than three years ago, and now we're in The US. And calling in for office in New York. We've just opened up in Houston and Chicago.
Speaker 2:And so it's wow. Yeah.
Speaker 9:In Texas. Long
Speaker 2:law firms there. We're doing
Speaker 1:the oil and gas.
Speaker 9:The oil the the legal oil
Speaker 2:down there. Okay.
Speaker 1:Are there any specific trends in in industry, or is it more, like, you'll do litigation versus something else? Like like like, where have you found the most success? Where is AI advancing the work of lawyers most acutely?
Speaker 9:So I'd say we've we've had the most traction in m and a and corporate departments. But quickly, we have actually started to see a a real verticalization. So within private equity, within pharma, within big tech companies, within real estate, construction. Right? The way that lawyers well, I actually think it's it's similar to software coding.
Speaker 9:So, you know, Legora used to be kind of a copilot and used to work with it as an assistant back and forth. Mhmm. But now with the latest model release with OPUS 4.5, GPT 5.4, like, we're starting to move into a world where, like, where I can autonomously go out and perform tasks on your behalf.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And that's working across every single legal vertical.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Do lawyers feel about AI? Are they having an existential crisis in the way that software or some software I engineers don't
Speaker 1:do the
Speaker 2:thing that
Speaker 1:I'm I'm not the craftsman that I used to be.
Speaker 2:Like, how are they actually processing it?
Speaker 9:I I think it's, you know, the entire range of emotions from holy shit. This is incredible, and I've never seen anything like it to, I'm really going to have to figure out how my business model is gonna work for this task that I used to bill hourly for. And if you look in the law firms, right, the way that they're typically structured is you underbill for the partners, right, and you overbill for the associates. Mhmm. And that model is starting to get questioned by the by the by the buyers.
Speaker 9:And so clients are demanding the use of AI and shows of more effectiveness in the way that services gets delivered. And, of course, the core is part of the, you know, answer there.
Speaker 2:Every once a week, somebody, like, is making the kind of statement or or putting out the idea that what are all these legal AI tools doing? I can get the same results from AchatGBT or Claude or Gemini. What's your answer there? I'm assuming that came up during the fundraise as to why why this isn't, you know, a thin wrapper. I have my own ideas, but I'd be curious how you talk about that.
Speaker 9:Sure. I mean, was the same week that we went out to the market that Claude dropped their legal plug in. And I actually think it was a fantastic showcase of, you know, here's some of the capabilities that the models can actually do. But in the same way that just taking the model and throwing it at a problem sort of doesn't work if you're gonna run a $10,000,000 m and a process, there's a lot of scaffolding. There's a lot of enterprise software.
Speaker 9:There's permissionings. There's sort of ethical walls that you need to respect. There's the way that you work with the firm's internal data, with external legislation, and with case law. Like, there's just so much more that you need to do around the models to put them in a context where they can be useful. I think with the latest developments, we are actually needing to build less of the guardrails.
Speaker 9:Like, the harnesses that we can put the models in are improving. Mhmm. So we can sort of take the model. We can put them in an environment where they can be successful, and then we you know, to quote you, let let it cook. Right?
Speaker 9:And we give the model access to the relevant tools to go and solve problems in that legal business context. And then we sort of let it go out and plan and execute on that task. Do you
Speaker 2:have the internal teams been a lot more aggressive to date than than let's say like the Big Law just because they're they're not like running a business? They're just like providing an internal service? And is was that something that you had kind of always expected?
Speaker 9:So so I think the the big law was really quick to adopt. And over the past two years, we've seen a real exponential step function in sophistication and complexity of the use cases that they're solving. Right? Like, back in 2023, somebody would get a clap on the on the back for summarizing an email with AI. But now you're running an entire m and a, like, end to end process using Liguora, and so the expectations are increasing.
Speaker 9:And I'm actually seeing things like adding AI as part of the career frameworks within law firms to get promoted. I'm seeing AI be part of the interviewing process. Right? Like, it's now a skill that is required to deliver real work. I think the enterprise departments have been patiently looking at sort of what are our law firms doing, and now they're starting to to follow on.
Speaker 9:And Okay. One of one of our last developments is something we call the Liguora portal. And the portal is basically like, you know, Figma for for lawyers. Right? They can collaborate and come into a multiplayer space where they can work together.
Speaker 9:And recently, one of the big firms we work with here in The in New York, DevaVoice, started working with clients like Blackstone, GSK, like, on that portal. And I think that's really exciting because the way that these legal teams have collaborated have, you know, looked like the early nineties. And now we're pulling that into the age of AI.
Speaker 2:Very
Speaker 1:cool. Are you seeing pull from in house councils or is that a completely separate market?
Speaker 9:No. Absolutely. You know, we want to that's what
Speaker 2:I'm saying. Because if you're if you're in house counsel, you're overworked. You're not billing by the hour. Yeah. You just get a salary.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You have a team. You wanna make your team as efficient as possible. You would adopt as you you want. You have a a greater incentive to adopt as much AI as you can faster because you're not dealing with your business models needing to adapt as well.
Speaker 1:How far away are we from Microsoft's in house counsel using Legora to acquire Activision directly? And Activision's in house counsel just uses Legora as well.
Speaker 9:This is a great question. Like, we're actually working with some very large enterprises who are leveraging Liguria to do more of the m and a process themselves Yep. Before, you know, engaging.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:But I think it's it's also an opportunity for firms to be very proactive and to actually invite them into their software environments and to go, hey. AI can now do these tasks.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:So we're gonna help you, our client, make that transition.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:Right? Oh, okay. I we have this framework internally where, like, if AI can do a task, it will do it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Like, that task has been conquered. Mhmm. It's within the spider shark that anthropic release. Right?
Speaker 1:Like Spider shark.
Speaker 9:Know more yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, you
Speaker 9:saw that, like,
Speaker 2:the blue red. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Right? Like, it's no longer a task that humans should be spending their time on. Yeah. And I think the challenge is that this is all moving so fast, and people aren't used to doing their work and disrupting themselves at the same time.
Speaker 9:So, you know, we have the software on one piece, but then we actually have a 100 lawyers on staff at Ligura
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Called legal engineers that partner with our clients, and we really pioneered this concept. Right? It's forward deployed lawyers Yeah.
Speaker 2:In a way.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And they work with all our big enterprise and big law firm clients on transitioning the way that they do business.
Speaker 2:What are conversations like on law school campuses today? How are they processing all the progress? Yeah.
Speaker 9:Well, so Lacor actually has a university program, which is really exciting. And so if you're a law school student listening to this, you should be part of the university program, and you should learn this. Right? It's going to be a skill that firms will look for. It's going to make you more attractive on the job market.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And I think we are quickly going to enter a world where you're spending more time reviewing work that AI is doing for you than doing it yourself. Mhmm. Right? Like, that's what's happened to software engineers. That's going to happen in law.
Speaker 9:And so the best thing you can do as a young professional is to get there really quickly.
Speaker 1:That's great. Anything else, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Wild times.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 2:Wild times. Wild times.
Speaker 9:Yes. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:Congrats. I'm sure
Speaker 2:you're gonna be back on with the billion dollar raise soon
Speaker 1:enough. I'm sure. Well, we will talk to soon. Max.
Speaker 2:Congrats to the team.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:See you guys. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. TBo from OpenAI has some news here. He says, we are adding compute as fast as we can for codecs, but demand is surging faster than anticipated, and service can be a bit choppy for some. Team is working hard behind the scenes.
Speaker 1:Everyone is happy with TBPN resetting limits. Adam.gpt says, Saint TBP, giver of tokens and the resetter of limits.
Speaker 2:We gotta pull up the video you shared, John.
Speaker 1:Which one? Oh, yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Pull it up. Let's pull it up. I just dropped it
Speaker 1:You just dropped it?
Speaker 2:Okay. In the chat.
Speaker 1:We we we we have a few videos that we can watch. We can watch the the trailer for project Hail Mary, let's first watch Tim Tebow give the promise.
Speaker 2:No sound.
Speaker 13:Open for an undefeated season. That was my goal.
Speaker 2:Sudden Start it over. Done here. Please.
Speaker 13:I'm sorry. Extremely sorry. You know, we're hoping for an undefeated season. That was my goal. Sudden floor is never done here.
Speaker 13:But I promise you one thing, a lot of good will come out of this. You have never seen any player in the entire country play as hard as I will play the rest of the season, and you never see someone push the rest of the team as hard as I will push everybody the rest of the season. You never see a team play harder than we will the rest of the season. God bless.
Speaker 2:Great speech. That's how John read, Tebow at OpenAI's post. We are adding compute as fast as we can for Codex, but demand is surging faster than anticipated. Team is working hard behind the scenes. You will never see a team work as hard behind the scenes as our team.
Speaker 1:God bless. God bless. Project Hail Mary debuted with a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's described as one of the best sci fi films of the decade. We gotta get Nick to get some tickets for our team.
Speaker 1:We will definitely be going. I'm very excited. Let's pull up the full trailer for Project Hail Mary since it is movie day on TBPN.
Speaker 7:Please state your name.
Speaker 3:Ron and Grace, I just woke up from coma.
Speaker 1:Have you seen The Martian?
Speaker 3:Several light years from my apartment.
Speaker 1:This is from the same author, Andy Weir. I'm not an astronaut.
Speaker 3:I'm not an astronaut. If you don't go, you die. Or the rest of us.
Speaker 1:A Hail Mary situation.
Speaker 3:The sun is dying.
Speaker 5:Oh, no.
Speaker 3:You were the only scientist who might know what this is. I'm just a teacher at Grover Cleveland Middle. We have a doctorate in molecular biology. I need you to come with us. This is project Hail Mary.
Speaker 3:The sun is not the only star dying. Every star was infected by its neighbor except one.
Speaker 1:Why? We don't know.
Speaker 3:Which is why we built a ship to go there and find out. It's 11.9 light years away. The astronauts die in space. It's what you Americans would call a lung shot. Hail Mary.
Speaker 3:I get it.
Speaker 1:The name of the movie. I love a movie He like
Speaker 3:has no experience. But
Speaker 1:he has to go anyway.
Speaker 2:He was a just a professor.
Speaker 1:Just a normal person. This is every man's dream.
Speaker 3:I put the knot in astronaut. I've never done anything. I've never done a space I can't even moonwalk.
Speaker 1:See, I I seriously think there's like a 50% chance this happens to me at some point in my life. They're just like they're just like, John, you're the only person that can save humanity. You gotta go. And I'm
Speaker 2:like You gotta go. You
Speaker 1:gotta I gotta go. I'm ready. This is my fantasy. I
Speaker 3:understand. I'm gossiping. I do. He's so good. My place is in the classroom.
Speaker 3:The world is counting on you. This might be very hard for you to understand, but some people are not good at things.
Speaker 2:2026 box office is 27% below pre pandemic twenty nineteen with
Speaker 1:No black pilling while the hail Mary trailer is playing.
Speaker 2:50%.
Speaker 1:No black pilling. Are gonna change that stat by going and seeing this film. We will be watching projectile Mary and single handedly bringing back the film industry. We're gonna make Hollywood the center of entertainment.
Speaker 3:An alien. He's kinda growing on me. At least he's not growing in me, you know, which was a concern a little while. This
Speaker 1:looks fun. I think this is a good movie to start summer. It's a little bit early, but it's warm
Speaker 3:here in California. I'm gonna call you Rock.
Speaker 1:We'll have a fun time with that. The Financial Times loved it. They said project Hail Mary. Ryan Gosling's good humor propels space caper of serious uplift. A science a science teacher buddies up with a boulder like alien to save the sun in an escapist morale booster.
Speaker 2:One more trailer.
Speaker 1:Of the Lego movie. I would love to watch another trailer.
Speaker 2:Let's pull up the trailer for the AI doc.
Speaker 1:Yes. The AI doc. This is the real movie that will get people back in seats. Everyone loves AI. They're gonna wanna hear about AI.
Speaker 1:Gonna wanna head to the theater to watch the AI doc. Let's watch the trailer. Look at this lineup.
Speaker 9:Can go quite broad.
Speaker 5:What
Speaker 1:They got Sam. They got Demis. They got Dario. What happened with Mark Zuckerberg? We'll never know why he turned this down.
Speaker 2:Did they get Elon?
Speaker 1:They didn't get Elon. Elon said yes, but then he got busy.
Speaker 9:There's a difference.
Speaker 1:But there's Yukowski. So Elly is
Speaker 3:because my wife is six month pregnant. Showing up. Is now a terrible time to have a kid? I mean, let's be honest. I know people who work on AI risk who don't expect their children to make it to high school.
Speaker 3:Brain watch everything. It's surprisingly straightforward. Intelligence is about recognizing patterns. Patterns. Patterns.
Speaker 3:Patterns.
Speaker 2:If you have learned those patterns, you can generate new information.
Speaker 3:AI is moving so fast. It's being deployed prematurely. There's so much potential for things to go wrong. Why can't we just stop right?
Speaker 1:These companies are perfect.
Speaker 3:Ways to get AI.
Speaker 10:That's vastly more intelligent than people within this decade.
Speaker 3:China, North Korea, Russia
Speaker 1:Whoever Ilya essentially the controller of Joshua Bengio. Who else do they got? Yuval, Noah Harari. Reed Hoffman's in there. Daniela.
Speaker 2:It feels like
Speaker 3:I have to find these CEOs and get them in the movie.
Speaker 1:Great. They got Sam. They got Darwin. They got Demicks. Promised me that this Okay.
Speaker 1:Get in this movie, bro.
Speaker 3:Am I hopeful? Yes.
Speaker 1:Am I hopeful that it'll go right? Absolutely not.
Speaker 6:AI is the thing that can solve climate change.
Speaker 12:We could
Speaker 1:Anyway, fun documentary. Clearly, this is gonna be the thing that turns the tide on on Hollywood. Everyone's gonna get to this. It's gonna be sold out. Get your tickets now.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent with Okta. And without further ado, Allan McLennan in the restroom waiting room.
Speaker 1:We'll bring him into the tube. Know what's going on? Allan, how are you doing?
Speaker 12:I'm doing just fine, gentlemen. It's nice to meet you, brother.
Speaker 1:Great to meet you too. We were just talking about about Hollywood. How how are you feeling about Hollywood? I am optimistic. Project Hail Mary looks good.
Speaker 1:This AI documentary looks good. Is there any cause for optimism?
Speaker 12:Oh, of course, there is. Fantastic. Yeah. The the basis of the creative storytellers in Hollywood are in parallel, and everyone wants to come to Hollywood to do their projects no matter what anybody says. Yes.
Speaker 12:There has been somewhat of an accident only because that was motivated by the SAG after strike, and everything kinda shut down. 460 plus million a day was lost. Wow. You know? So so it was it was a big hit for Hollywood.
Speaker 12:And so that changed dynamics considerably.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:But from a storytelling standpoint and the capabilities of putting things together
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:It it's truly fantastic. It's it's the community that makes things happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think the the the the the the mix of different film budgets is changing or should change? We've we've been in a, you know, there's the there's the low budget film and there's the huge blockbuster that gets up into hundreds of millions of dollars. And it feels like we might be entering a new regime soon where there's more lower budget films made that are even more impressive than the blockbusters of old? How do you think the Hollywood will react to new technologies potentially making blockbusters more affordable, more creativity, more more diverse perspectives?
Speaker 1:How do you think all of that changes?
Speaker 12:I think you just summed it up really well, to tell you the truth. The the the fact of it is is that it's nothing really new. Yeah. This has been evolving over many years, fifty years, different types of programming, television, you know, thirty minute shows, episodic activities. All of that has evolved.
Speaker 12:It's it's really driven towards the audiences and and the interest of the audience. Know, micro programming is the new. Used to be called, you know, basically, creator economy or the creator content. Sure. You know, user generated content on 2004, 2005 when YouTube came into play.
Speaker 12:It kind of created a whole new genre of everybody could produce something. But that doesn't take away the importance of the quality of the programming. You know? And when it comes to micro programming, let's say, micro shows, those in and of themselves for 90 seconds to three minutes are something that you really want to be able to capture.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:You know, and also view, and people do. Now kind of the average viewing of a micro show is four to five different segments. It's kinda streamed together.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:So to answer your question as best I can, it will find its path. It will find its for, like, for example, your program. Yeah. You know, here here's because consumers are looking at this and being able to engage with it, and it's developing and delivering great content. At least I'd like to take that with me
Speaker 1:Thank Thank you. We we we do have a question from the chat I wanna ask about this idea of Barbenheimer, these moments that are shelling points. They bring everyone together. And I'm wondering if you think that we'll see more of those in the future or if Hollywood should be thinking, even if it's teaming up with a rival studio, to create something that gets even more people into the theaters because the Internet's so noisy, but everyone's in their own little pockets. But then something like Barbenheimer happens and the Barbie film and Oppenheimer, and they're two completely different, but everyone was talking about it, and it seemed like it was the true Hollywood returning to the center stage of American culture post COVID, in my opinion.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Cultural events are really important no matter what they are. You know, wherever they are. There, you know, there's groups out there that are doing that live, Kazan, that's pulling their kinds of activities together. There's this sphere Yeah.
Speaker 12:Which is another place that is a communal environment that is truly fantastic. Yeah. When it comes to the kind of event that you're talking about with Barbie Hickleheimer, pardon me, the the fact of it is is that people are looking for that. People want to engage. You know, a long time ago, and I say really a long time ago.
Speaker 12:You know, remember when we were looking at the kinds of shared experience, like interactive television where you could choose what you're watching with anyone at any particular time. It didn't really go over that great. You know, it was good and it was well done, but people really didn't wanna watch television and share with their neighbor or whatever it might be. They would they would talk about things when it came to programming with their friends.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 12:But not that many. So audience sizing is really critically important, and events like that are unquestionably key in driving, you know, merchandising, participation, and then just engagement. And this is what's happening around the world when it comes to the new types of episodic television, whether it's Blue and Turkey or, you know, the different types of Acquire in The UK. These are really important networks that are driving a lot of viewers at this time.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Hollywood has a lot of fear around AI. A lot of people don't even want to talk about it even if they're excited about it because of fear of pushback. I've had a slightly more optimistic view that if you look back the last ten years of traditional Hollywood as in like the place, not like the industry. A lot of these big productions are being shipped out of state or overseas.
Speaker 2:And I've had this optimistic view that Hollywood could see a general resurgence if the storytelling capacity stays here, but like we're no longer having to do as many expensive shoots in in Europe or The Middle East or any of these other places because those scenes can now be generated, but the talent that is involved with, you know, effectively directing directing, producing, casting, people could have a higher volume of work and budgets could potentially be distributed instead of one, you know, $200,000,000 movie. You might have $1,020,000,000 dollar productions that are using AI to be more efficient. Am I totally off? Do you think that's a a possibility? What's your view?
Speaker 12:Well, AI has been here for about twenty years.
Speaker 2:That's a
Speaker 12:good point. It's already been involved when it comes to production and Yeah. And the ease of the overall product being created. Mhmm. You know, where it comes into play is yeah, dailies at the end of the day.
Speaker 12:You can take a look at five, six different cuts very quickly all during live shots of what you're putting together. When it when it comes to AI involved, it's it's one of those situations where it's a tool, and it's a tremendous tool. And it's how that tool is leveraged is gonna become key. You know, there's different efforts when it comes with all the different types of content creation, editorial tools. It's the managing layers that stay on top that allow for the efficiencies that come into play to create pieces of content, and then that lowers time.
Speaker 12:Lowers time is lowering budgets. Lowering budgets means rapid and escalating the kinds of productions that then are created so you can you can meet the timeline. You can meet the pipeline. You can get more programming into, you know, into the distribution points to be able to see. Some of the more interesting things that are out there that are really key is how not just AI, but AI when it comes to the content creation.
Speaker 12:Like, for example, the ability to, on the fly, level set and uplift all of that content Yeah. Into high quality visual, like four k and UHD. Like, we're looking at u h we're looking at UHD right now. Yeah. You know, and well, four k.
Speaker 12:Yeah. And and the fact of it is it looks pretty good. Well, in a lot of content that's being created that's pushed out there, it's being shot in four k, but as soon as it cuts to advertising, it drops down, drops down the showcase. So you get this fragmentation that takes place. It doesn't look good.
Speaker 12:Then it goes back up to four k.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 12:know? And so level setting all of that is back to the point of audience engagement. Mhmm. And so audience engagement is really key. You kinda touched it a little bit when it says to the cost of production.
Speaker 12:Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you go down to Rio or Johannesburg or Prague and do a product or or, you know, London and do a production 80% of the cost of what it took to do in LA or Hollywood. Mhmm. Okay? There was a shift on that.
Speaker 12:The the actors pool, the production capabilities now that you have live engagement and production facilities in LA or San Francisco or London? Because of the state of technology isn't just the AI component, it's how things are made and how things get done. So the actors are, you know, exceptional in each one of those cities I just, identified. Paris, some of the French programming, it's great. Some of the the Madrid programming, all of it is exceptionally well, but then the cost of putting that together is considerably less.
Speaker 12:That's the problem that we have. AI can actually do a lot more engaged activities and enhance that capability as we move forward. We just had a recent event out in the desert that's not like milling around in the sand or anything like that. It's like what we're talking about. It was at Palms Trades.
Speaker 12:It's quite lovely. And and the fact of it was is what's what's called the Hollywood Professionals Association. That's HPA. And that way, we delve into that kind of discussion about the impact of AI. And what we really come down to is that it's another fabulous tool.
Speaker 12:It's it's to be respected more than it is to be feared. Mhmm. And yes, will it kind of lessen the amount of work workers that are gonna be approaching this? Yeah. But those workers the workers are very straightforward.
Speaker 12:You either learn how to use tools, or if you stick your heels in in the ground and drag yourself, then you're gonna be passed by.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:So it's learn how to use something to make something move forward.
Speaker 5:But
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we saw that with the digital transition where, you know, people who shoot on film, there are still movies that get shot on film. It's a smaller community and those films are special in their own way. And I I don't think anyone expects a complete revolution overnight in any of these things. We do have one last question from the chat.
Speaker 1:It's sort of funny one. There's a surfboard behind you that looks like it's seen a very many amazing beaches. Do you surf? Where do you surf? Tell us about the surfboard.
Speaker 1:I have. Nice.
Speaker 12:And I do. As I've gotten older, my my balance sucks. But, you know, other than that, my son's a big surfer. We're all surfers. We're water family.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 12:You know? And so so in the course of that, yes, I do. And now I'm more of a sponger. If someone has actually identified that, then they might know what a sponger is. I know what a sponger
Speaker 2:is. I respect it. I respect it. You've you've you've earned the sponge, I think.
Speaker 12:So it's it it kinda comes back to that, you know, that's a prop. What can I tell you?
Speaker 1:It's I love it.
Speaker 12:It's it's a board snapped in half. It's not a board it it's
Speaker 2:I like I had a Hayden Shapes that the same the same brand that I I took to like 20 some countries and it did eventually snap. They're they're like weirdly this this type of board, it's like a they're like extremely durable in some ways Mhmm. But they have these certain impact points where it's like over.
Speaker 12:Okay. Like,
Speaker 2:they'll just snap. Yeah. But a lot of fun memories on Yeah. My hidden shapes back in the day.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you so much
Speaker 12:for taking
Speaker 1:the time. We appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us today. Hope you have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, see you out in the water.
Speaker 1:Thank We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 12:Thank you. And I hope I was I know it added some value. Absolutely. Take care.
Speaker 1:Have a great
Speaker 9:Bye bye.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the platform that powers it.
Speaker 1:And without further ado, we will bring in Jagdeep Singh from Rota AI. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5:Thanks. How are you?
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking the time to join us.
Speaker 2:Doing great. Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Since this is your first time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company a little bit.
Speaker 5:Yes. So I'm Jagdeep Singh. I'm one of the cofounders of Roto dot ai, and we are building a generalist, intelligent robot foundation models
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:To solve real problems in factoring and logistics.
Speaker 1:Okay. Help me understand what I'm thinking of when I think of a robot. I I'm familiar with the KUKA robotic arm, the Optimus humanoid, like the Roomba. There's so many different ways to think about robotics. The Tesla Model three is, in many ways, a robot.
Speaker 1:Where do you see the first robot coming online?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Great question. We've had robots for a long time. Traditional robots have been around for decades and they're exactly what you described, KUKA, robots like that that are basically designed to move through a predefined trajectory that's programmed, and they can do one thing really well over and over again repeatedly. What they can't do is deal with variability.
Speaker 5:Right? So they don't learn by themselves from data. There's a new class of robot people working on in Silicon Valley. It's kind of a hot thing. Probably you've heard.
Speaker 5:Yeah. These are robots that have a neural network capability and can learn from data. Yeah. You feed up a lot of data of robots moving through certain trajectories and they can learn for themselves how to perform those tasks. The problem is those approaches use what's called a VLA, a vision language action model.
Speaker 5:I don't want to give you guys with details, but but
Speaker 2:We love the details. So go
Speaker 1:with Spill the beans.
Speaker 5:Well, so so these VLA models, they're You've probably seen robot demos on the Internet where they're cool things like baking coffee or
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:The problem is all these demos are just that, they're demos. They work well in a lab setting, but they fail if you move the model into the real world. Yeah. And the question is, why do they fail in the real world? Well, because these models are trained on relatively small datasets Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Because you don't have Internet scale datasets for robotics trajectories. So people tele operate robots, like puppeteering robots around to do certain tasks. You collect a number of philosophies that way, and then you can train the model to do the task. But because the quantity of data is so small, they can only work well if the test set is very similar in its distribution to the dataset it was trained on. The problem is you can do that in a lab setting.
Speaker 5:When you take it to the real world, there's a much broader diversity of settings, of configurations, of objects, lighting, so on, and the models fail. That's a central problem that we were starting to address is how do you get robots to generalize beyond these very contrived situations that people have shown they work in in lab settings. We've got a different approach that we're taking.
Speaker 1:Okay. Push back against the teleop strategy because I was totally on board with the no teleop thing during the Tesla boom and but then Waymo seemed to do a lot of teleop, and it seemed to sort of work. And so when I think about ways to get a lot of data, teleop doesn't seem like the craziest thing in a world where we have a bunch of Scale AI, MerCore. There's all these data, you know, RLHF teams that are, you know, sort of manually curating answers to questions for LLMs. Like, the human in the loop for a medium amount of time seems to be a tried and true path.
Speaker 1:Why are why why does teleop now make sense in this particular industry?
Speaker 5:Great question. I'm glad you asked it. So I think self driving cars are bit of a special case because the car is basically a robot that is very easy to teleoperate. Sit in it, basically have four actuators, left, right, speed up, and slow it out. And and we we all been driving cars for a long time, you can easily put it millions of miles in a car, which is what way most of the world had to do Mhmm.
Speaker 5:To learn how to self drive. They did collect a lot of data. But even there, they don't have all the data they need. There's a lot of so called corner cases that those cars run into
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:That causes issues. In the case of robotics, the problem is much more serious because now you're talking about manipulation. Mhmm. You're not just, you know, operating a robot with a single environment like a flat road.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:You're dealing with, you know, the full dexterity of a human hand, like, 20 degrees of freedom per hand. Every object's different. Every type of task is different. Right? And these things become very difficult to teleoperate.
Speaker 5:Teleoperation process for these, gotta wear a headset. Yep. You wear the joysticks in your hands, and you're trying to move your Yeah. Robot It it's just it's just very hard. And and, Kennedy, the problem isn't just the quantity of data, although that's obviously a problem.
Speaker 5:We could spend a lifetime doing this if we think you wouldn't get to Internet scale. Yeah. But the bigger issue is the diversity of data. Right? If all the data you have is data that you've intentionally collected Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Then you almost, by definition, haven't seen the corner cases. Mhmm. You haven't seen all those edge scenarios that cause failure. Mhmm. The way that we're approaching it different altogether.
Speaker 5:We, you know, we we our team comes from generative AI and Yep. Computer vision. And the idea is, you know, if you look at every other AI model that's worked, they all start with an incredible amount of data. Typically, you know, a whole Internet's worth of data, whether it's language models or image models or video models. And then there's a small amount of fine tuning
Speaker 9:Yep.
Speaker 5:That you use to align the model. That fine tuning dataset Teleoperation is fine for that, by
Speaker 1:way. Yeah.
Speaker 5:That's what we're doing. But for the pre training, it's just completely inadequate. What we did is say, what dataset is there that's Internet scale, massive diversity, and from which you can learn about the physics of how things move? Only one answer. That's Internet video.
Speaker 5:Right? So what we because our team comes from computer vision and general modeling, that was the approach that we took. So we basically literally trained the model on hundreds of millions of videos. Wow. Really millions of clips, in fact.
Speaker 5:And and in our view, the model has seen almost anything that that you can see in reality. And then with a tiny amount of teleoperation, they're literally on the order of ten hours. Right? Compared to what the VLA approach requires, which is, you know, like, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of hours of data. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:You can actually teach the robot to do certain tasks. So that level of data efficiency is, you know, we've never seen. That's kind of the one one of the big, the the big breakthroughs here.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So what is the what are the what is the early customer set gonna look like? Are are you can you work with any type of robotic manufacturer, everything from humanoids to arms, or is there a particular focus? What are you most excited about?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Great question. So you know, we're not going after the consumer market. We think that there's lower hanging fruit in the commercial, industrial Mhmm. You know, logistics markets where they where you already have a lot of, you know, tasks being done that people are being paid for, where where you could use some help from from automation.
Speaker 5:And and we we actually are a full stack company. So we have this AI model. It's very cool. We call it the direct video action model because
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:It makes a video of what it thinks a robot should do, and then it it it converts that to action so the robot actually does it and does that in closed loop, so it reabsorbs. Basically, way the model works is observe, predict, act in closed loop. And so that that's a key part of our evaluation, but we're we're a full stack company, so we're doing the robot hardware as well. Mhmm. Why are we doing hardware even though there's 100 plus robot companies in the world?
Speaker 5:Well, because we couldn't find one that actually met the requirements of the use cases we're interested in. We wanted to lift 25 kilograms, not just once, but all day long. That's called rated capacity.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Right? We you you if you try to do that with conventional robots, you'll burn out the motors, and that obviously is a liability issue. It has to be reliable enough to last the full three years that we're targeting, basically. Mhmm. But more importantly, we wanted the robot kinematics to have what's called a linear response.
Speaker 5:Linear responses are are actually systems that can be modeled by an AI model. If you have any kind of nonlinearities in the system like compliance or elasticity, that's very hard to model, and and that doesn't work well with AI. So we wanted to build more of an Apple like solution where we control the OS and we control the hardware in order to provide a full solution to the customer. Having said that, some of our customers do want our model to control their existing hardware.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:You you opened up by talking about about KUKA, for example. Yeah. A lot of them have KUKA hardware. Yeah. So it it would be very straightforward to imagine a KUKA arm sending an API call into our model saying, here's what I see.
Speaker 5:What should I do? Mhmm. The model response says, do x y z. The robot does that and and and so on.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 5:Sounds good. We we will make the model available to third parties. We wanna create a whole ecosystem here. But day one, we're really focusing on providing, you know, just a full solution that that is really tightly integrated.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So great answer to the the the Teleop question. Talk about the SIM to real gap. Why is simulation building a physics engine and a robot that perfectly mirrors the human body or whatever your hardware is, all the different hinges, and then running that in a virtual environment, Unreal Engine or something like that, and then trans transferring that learning back to the robot. Why does that not work as well as people expected it to work?
Speaker 5:So first of all, excellent question. You guys are are more up to speed on robotics than than I would have guessed. So kudos to everyone. So sim to real is exactly what you described. You you you learn in simulation, you try to apply that in the real world.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. There are two problems there. One is no matter how well you try to model the laws of the physical world, there's always what's called a sim to real gap. Right? You can't perfectly model all the complexities of things like deformable objects and transparent objects with light move and so on.
Speaker 5:But more important than that, it's the same kind of problem that happens with teleoperation, which is a lack of diversity. Right? If all the data you're collecting is intentionally collected Yep. Then you're not gonna see all those corner cases. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And that's the fundamental difference between the lab and the real world, the so called long tail of the distribution. Right? In the real world, right, you see a lot more of these long tail events that you might only see once Yep. You know, in your entire, you know, lifetime, but you need to be able to deal with them. A good example of that, by the way, was this case where, you know, one of the self driving cars ran into a woman on a bicycle chasing a chicken onto the street.
Speaker 5:Right? Now there's no way you're gonna see that more than once in in your dataset. And and and that, you're not gonna see in your in your, you know, intentionally collected data set.
Speaker 1:You might actually see it on Internet video. Like, there is a video right now of Tony Hawk doing the 900, and that is a very weird thing for a humanoid body shape to do, but he did it. It's real. It it and the laws of physics apply. So there is something that you can learn from that, even if it's in the longest tail, that applies back to just picking up this Diet Coke and taking a sip.
Speaker 5:Touche. And and that's and that's actually a really important point. So when we when we curate our datasets Mhmm. For the for the pretraining, we don't try to overly curate them down to, for example, manipulation tasks. We have things like videos and waves crashing on a beach Sure.
Speaker 5:Which you might think has nothing to do with manipulation. Yep. But it turns out there's some knowledge about physics and how the world works in those videos.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:And and that's why this model can can generalize so powerful. It's because it's been trained on so much stuff that it just in the same way that Chad GPT was trained on you know, Chad GPT can produce, you know, Shakespearean lyrics if you want or, you know, whatever, you know, plays, but but it wasn't only trained on Shakespeare. It was trained on rap lyrics and and Twitter feed and so on. And and so the the same thing applies here. You wanna be able to train on everything to provide that prior on how things move, and then you align that prior with robot specific data from teleoperation to perform the task.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations, everyone. How did the round
Speaker 2:come together? Who participated? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Who participated?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It a great round. So we we were announcing a series a. So it's it was led by, you know, Coastal Ventures, led by Tim Massek, who's led by Brent G.
Speaker 1:We have a gong here. $450,000,000 series a. That's a lot
Speaker 2:of to come out of stealth. I always recommend every Yeah. If you're gonna come out of stealth This is a good tip billion. New for new It's a good way to make a splash.
Speaker 3:Yep. They project confidence. We appreciate you.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Talk more.
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Speaker 1:Without further ado, our last guest of the show. For what? Scott. How you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 1:How's going, gentlemen? It's going fantastically over here too.
Speaker 2:It's great to see you here. Are we up in the corner? Or you got a you got an interesting
Speaker 1:What's what's that?
Speaker 8:It's our logo. I don't know.
Speaker 5:It's a
Speaker 2:Okay. No. I was just saying because it's it's like you're looking it looks like you're looking at me. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:I have my screen up here.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Well, first time on the show, please introduce yourself in Come the
Speaker 2:over here, hang out. I'm kidding.
Speaker 9:That's
Speaker 2:that's better. That's better.
Speaker 1:Okay. Introduce yourself in the company.
Speaker 8:I'm Scott, co founder and CEO of Throne Science. We're rebuilding the first device to track gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and prostate health, hands free automatically every time you go to the bathroom.
Speaker 2:So Mhmm.
Speaker 8:People like to analogize us. We are whoop for your poop or aura for your flora.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Very, very cool. And, yeah, just first time on the show somehow. Is it
Speaker 1:all direct to consumer or is there pay with your insurance? How how does all of that work?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Great question. So we're launching today direct to consumer. We are HSA, FSA eligible. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And we do have a longer term insurance b to b road map. But, kind of the the thinking there is it's really hard to build a b to b company that ever succeeds b to c.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:Whereas if you build a consumer brand, the people you're ultimately selling into are people.
Speaker 2:Are aware. Talk about talk about the journey to get here. I know it has it been two years at this point? It it's it's I'm involved. You guys have been grinding away, and it's to finally get to launch.
Speaker 8:I appreciate it, man. It's been almost three years.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:So we originally pivoted. We were started in nurse staffing, and then as soon as COVID ended, that was a terrible business to be in. So we decided, let's go back to the drawing board. Both my parents are doctors. My dad's a medical device inventor.
Speaker 8:My cofounder, Tim, he comes from a health care family, so he converged on health care as a interest area for us. And he had been thinking about smart toilets in the abstract since college. This is, like, you know, this is a sci fi inevitable future. And we called my mom one day and asked her she's a geriatrician. I was like, mom, is there any medical utility to looking at people's waste?
Speaker 8:And she goes, honey, there's a joke in the field of geriatrics that all old people talk about is their kids, their meds, and their poop. And it's so true that I no longer give my phone number to my patients because they send me so many pictures of their poop. Woah. And Tim and I walked away from that conversation like, wow. That's crazy, but also really interesting because it means that people intuitively appreciate that there's health information in their waste.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. And b, it's so common that it changed the way my mom as a physician communicates with her patients as a blanket policy. Mhmm. And so we started doing a bunch of homework and just kind of, you know, arrived at this perspective on the world that as you have continuous monitoring on every other category of your health, right, your sleep, your cardio, your respiratory, your metabolic health, nothing looking at your GI or urinary health despite the fact that two in three Americans who've been surveyed said they'd experienced GI symptoms in the last week, and that was in 2019 before GLP ones were a thing. Fifty million Americans have a diagnosed urinary tract condition.
Speaker 8:Sixty million Americans have a diagnosed gut health condition.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And you have a ten percent lifetime risk of being diagnosed with a cancer of the lower GI or urinary tract. So that's about one in six US cancers, the earliest signs they leave are microscopic blood in your waste. And so there's a you know, our ultimate vision is building what we call the first continuous cancer screener.
Speaker 1:Okay. Microscopic. So you can't just use a camera on the inside of the toilet. What is the actual data capture? You can't put everything in a mass spec either.
Speaker 1:So you're somewhere in between. What is the actual sensor stack like?
Speaker 8:So the device we're launching today
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:Is ThroneOne. This is a camera microphone that clips onto the side of
Speaker 9:your toilet.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:Just like that.
Speaker 1:Like that.
Speaker 8:Super easy.
Speaker 1:Easy.
Speaker 8:And from there, it has a little sensor on the top here that detects when someone is at the toilet or sitting on the toilet.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:It uses your Bluetooth to know this is a Scott versus John or Jordy. Sure. So that's hands free automatic. Once you've installed it, you never have to touch it or think about it. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And then it uses a dozen different computer vision models in the back end to track gut health, urinary function, prostate health, and hydration. And then the last big category or the last ultimate innovation that we're marching towards is that smoke detector for urinary tract and GI cancers. And so this is a r and d device that's going into the future throne
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 8:That can image across nine different wavelengths looking for the unique spectral fingerprint of hemoglobin.
Speaker 1:Yes. So you can go deeper than just a photo. I sort of don't want a ton of push notifications from this thing. I only want it to call me when something's a problem.
Speaker 2:Except that's you, but I would expect the average that people love there's almost nothing that Americans love more than health data.
Speaker 1:I guess. Yeah. So
Speaker 2:What is check your demand. Sleep score. What's wrong
Speaker 1:with And then your what is what what what do consumers demand and then what do you actually do?
Speaker 8:So when you say what did consumers demand?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Like like how often do consumers want to hear from the device in terms of reporting, in terms of do they want a weekly newsletter? Do they want a daily report? Do they want a push notification constantly?
Speaker 1:Like, yes. You're right. I check my sleep score a lot, but most of that's just because I'm competitive with you. I I don't actually want a push notification about my sleep every single day. I more want to be able to look back on it and understand a trend and understand, okay, actually, there's a long term trend here.
Speaker 1:Maybe I need to get to bed earlier or something like that. Like, I don't actually it's not in my daily review of my life, but what are your customers seeing and what's most effective? Because, ideally, for me as a customer, I would just say, hey. Just just be quiet unless there's a problem and then tell me to go to the doctor.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And I think for people who have healthy GI tracts, that is a perfectly reasonable position. Yep. And for people who are, you know, having a gut health journey, so to say, the number one thing they want is well, two things. Number one, if they're working with physicians Sure.
Speaker 8:Or caretakers
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:Patient reported outcomes are notoriously terrible, particularly when when it comes to your gut health. Of course. Bringing a objective measure of my gut health into my physician's office is a huge leg up. Yeah. Like, the the word that comes to mind that keeps coming up in these conversations is people say it's humiliating to be asked to keep a spreadsheet of their bowel movement.
Speaker 8:So automating that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Is huge. The other big thing is Wait. Really quickly
Speaker 1:on that on that point, is is is the is the patient experience just like patient goes into the doctor's office and says, hey, have this app. Let me open it on my phone. You can just scroll through it. Is it as simple as that?
Speaker 8:So that's what it is right now. We are building exports, then the next big like, you know, the first kind of b to b feature set is gonna be a, like, a provider dashboard that allows Integration. Provider to request exactly that But just having the data
Speaker 1:is, like, 99% of the battle. Right? Okay. Cool. Sorry.
Speaker 1:100%. I didn't I didn't cut you off. Second thing.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Second big thing is and this is kind of the thing that has historically plagued any wearable device is
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:When you have a wearable, you're by necessity measuring outputs. Right?
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Quality of sleep, your heart rate, those are all outputs. And what people wanna be told is what are the inputs I need to change to optimize my outputs?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And when it comes to gut health, so much of that has to do with diet and lifestyle
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:To understand what are my dietary triggers, what are my sensitivities, what are my intolerances. And this is true of people with, you know, enzymatic deficiencies as well as IBS and IBD. And so we are building a what we call an AI gut health coach that will allow you to narrate what are the things that I ate and what does my lifestyle look like? What are my exogenous stressors? And then it correlates those against your objective ground truth gut health to be able to tell you these are the things that are best and worst for your health specifically.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And it beta is ultimately, we call this like gastro typing. Right? Which is like, how can we understand the black box that is your gut specifically? And when we have this at scale, we'll have 10,000 other users that have a similar profile of inputs and outputs, and we'll know what are the things that work best for them, and let's start you there.
Speaker 1:Talk about customer acquisition strategy, marketing, top of funnel. It feels like it's sort of hard to bring like a really cool celebrity on board for this potentially. At the same time, like, this might just go viral naturally. Like, what are you doing influencer strategies? Are you spending a lot of money on meta platforms?
Speaker 2:Feel like there's alpha there's alpha for celebs to be, like, super transparent around Yeah. This sort of happened with Ro. Can deepen a connection with with their audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Roe and Serena Williams, that was sort of an unlikely partnership and it and it happened. What what are you thinking in terms of the next couple years of of of marketing?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So we wanna do what function health and superpower have done with blood testing or what levels did with continuous glucose monitoring. Yeah. Like metabolic health straight up was not a term No. Until they breathe that into the zeitgeist.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And the playbook there is align yourself with the most credible physician in that space online. And so we've done that. Our chief of science is doctor Kuran Rajan. He's the biggest GI doctor on the Internet, has 10,000,000 followers across TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. And he's our chief of science.
Speaker 8:He's an amazing health communicator and educator. And so, you know, he is equity aligned and working with us to help educate people about functional GI and why tracking things like urinary function and prostate health are important and can help improve your health outcomes. The next big piece of this is to your point, celebrities, influencers, I've been amazed at you know, we have, like, even back when we had, like, a thousand followers on Instagram, probably, like, 5% of our preorders were celebrities and Oh. Like, celebrity entrepreneurs. Like, it's Interesting.
Speaker 8:Crazy. There's I I give celebrities a lot of credit for being really on the cutting edge of longevity and thinking forward about, you know, what is it gonna look like when I'm 80, 85.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. How did you how did you process Kohler coming out with with their version of a smart toilet? When I saw that, it was a shock to me because when we first met, I was like, Scott's crazy, this idea's crazy. The the it it's it's gonna be, you know, this incredible challenge, but the beauty of it is no nobody's gonna be crazy enough to compete with him. And then then I saw it was sometime last year, Kohler came out, and I was like, I guess Scott's really onto something if if Kohler, you know Inspired.
Speaker 2:Is so anyways, my view is super validating, but how did you process it?
Speaker 8:The same. I think, you know, the biblical David was a shepherd until he met Goliath. And Kohler is incredibly validating here. Right? Like, it shifts the conversation from why would you want a device like this to which device like this is better and why would I want this.
Speaker 8:And I, you know, I have opinions on the product, but I'll say it's an immaculately engineered product, and they paid attention to a lot of the wrong things. You have to manually start it every time you use the toilet. And, like, you've been going to the bathroom the same way since
Speaker 2:you
Speaker 8:potty trained at two years old. Introducing one extra step into that routine is just not reasonable. That's not meeting people where they are.
Speaker 2:Great point. And I personally, I don't trust big toilet. I don't trust big toilet. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna give big toilet my data.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, also, just, you know, a like, a new toilet can cost, like, a thousand dollars. This product is much cheaper than that. And so for a lot of folks, they'll just say, well, there's actually no problem with the rest of the device. I I I just wanna get this as an add on.
Speaker 1:Similar to Eight Sleep, people like the bed that they're sleeping on. They just get the cover. Yeah. It's a time off.
Speaker 2:Awesome, Scott. Well, I'm so excited for for this to be out in the world and and to finally for you to finally be launched. I know how hard you've been working on this for so long, and it's awesome to see all the progress and how how intentional the whole product is. So congrats to the whole team. And, I'm excited to see what insights people have and all the learnings that come from this.
Speaker 1:Talk to you soon. Goodbye.
Speaker 8:See you, John.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Well, if you're looking to improve your gut health, your overall health, change your diet, maybe you need a new job and you need to work at a different tech company. But thankfully, Riley Walls over at OpenAI scraped tech company cafeteria menus. And today, he launched lunches. F y I. I think it was actually yesterday.
Speaker 1:So he scraped the corporate cafeteria mem menus from a number of tech companies that you're obviously familiar with, not only tech companies, Nvidia, Target, Chime, Sentry, our sponsor, is scraped in here. And you can see that Sentry got an s tier for our taste, an a tier for protein. Healthy? C. Not too bad.
Speaker 1:Vegan? A. Open AI? S tier on taste. C tier on protein, though.
Speaker 1:They gotta get those numbers up. Riley's begging for it. He's he's naming and shaming every
Speaker 2:Wild that every tech company here. Pretty bullish for Adobe that they went s tier on protein.
Speaker 1:S tier on protein. So you can go in
Speaker 2:here target.
Speaker 1:You can you can search every single company for how they did Starbucks doing well.
Speaker 2:Video going s tier for taste, s tier for protein, f tier
Speaker 1:for healthy. So they had truffle duck confit pizza, Galbi short ribs, and Korean sesame rice.
Speaker 2:That's Szechuan peppercorn pesto stuff.
Speaker 1:Good meals in here. If you're looking for a job This
Speaker 2:is making me hungry, John.
Speaker 1:This is gonna be the decide the the the big big part of the decision criteria for where you end up. Could reset the entire AI talent war narrative. Lots of people are are picking based on who's working with the government, who's not working with the government. Well, there's a new access to make your decision on. Do you wanna work for a company that serves Gochujang Korean drumsticks or carnitas and tofu?
Speaker 1:That's the big question in
Speaker 2:got b for taste, s for protein, and d for healthy.
Speaker 1:And an f for vegan. They didn't do much many vegan options.
Speaker 2:I feel like this all kinda tracks.
Speaker 1:There's lots of different options here. Well, you can go check it out at lunches.fyi. And the last launch of today is, of course, Yan Lecun, which we talked about a little bit. 1,030,000,000.00 for one of the largest seed rounds ever, probably the largest for a European company. Which is interesting because he was at Meta for a long time.
Speaker 1:He wasn't in Europe. I guess he decamped to Europe to
Speaker 2:AMI. This
Speaker 1:new company.
Speaker 2:I like the name. Advanced Machine Intelligence. This presents an opportunity for
Speaker 1:I think I think there was
Speaker 2:machine intelligence.
Speaker 1:We need a million bozos in the data center yesterday.
Speaker 2:A million bozos
Speaker 4:there's also a there's good non determinism because in in French, you know, Ami is is friend.
Speaker 2:Oh. A m I.
Speaker 1:Is French.
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 1:I I think there would have been alpha. Like, there's a lot of these AI labs that have just names that are like machine intelligence thinking, all advanced automated blah blah blah. He could've just done like Lecune Industries. He's such a big name, you know, Ford Motor Company. Let's just do Lecune Technology Company.
Speaker 1:I think last Technology Company of France. It'd be pretty good. It'd be pretty good. So not too late to to rename now. Normal is upset that the that the that the logo looks very similar.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's only so many logos out there.
Speaker 2:Okay. Last but not least, we gotta about Vail. Matthew Prince Yes. Says, Vail Resorts likely to open tomorrow down to where if you invested ten years ago, you'd have done as well as putting your money in a hole. It's time for a change to become more asset light, sell off resorts and allow character and differentiation to return
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:To skiing. And what I love is our very own John Conkle said Cloudflare result and this got me thinking SaaS companies should buy mountains
Speaker 1:This is good.
Speaker 2:Or just buy the naming rights to the mountain.
Speaker 1:We were pitching Cisco on
Speaker 2:Squash should be Salesforce Mountain.
Speaker 1:Yes. We were we were
Speaker 2:pitching Salesforce Mountain.
Speaker 1:We were pitching Cisco on getting the naming rights to the Golden Gate Bridge. It would be the Cisco Bridge. It's already in the logo. Why not get naming rights?
Speaker 2:North Star.
Speaker 1:North Star? Octamountain. Octamountain. North Star. Ramp at the very least needs to get a single skate park.
Speaker 1:They've they've done a pop up skate park at this point leading into the Super Bowl. Just get the the most definitive skate park out there. I'm sure there's something good. And who knows how it's doing financially. Very, very interesting, the story of Veil, the rise and fall.
Speaker 1:But, you know, hopefully hopefully, if you've skied Veil this this season, you still had a fun time. More fun than if you'd invested ten years ago where you didn't make any money. But that's our show for you today, folks. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 2:Have our new Spotify. Do we have our new outro?
Speaker 1:Not today. We have a new outro coming tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Coming tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Coming tomorrow. Wow. Subscribe. I'm excited for that. Hit the subscribe button.
Speaker 1:Leave the bell on so that you're notified so you can tune in tomorrow. Watch the full show, three hours. Then the trend Trip
Speaker 2:trip from deep in the X Chat Snowflake Mountain.
Speaker 1:Snowflake Mountain. That's good. That's good. Thank you, Trip. Anyway, thank you for tuning in.
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Speaker 2:Tuesday afternoon of your life.
Speaker 1:And goodbye. We love
Speaker 2:you.