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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.
Speaker 2:Today is Monday, 11/09/2026. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology.
Speaker 1:The fortress of finance.
Speaker 2:The capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:Insane weekend timeline and turmoil. Jensen Wong, CEO of Naughty list. Yep. Over the weekend...
Speaker 3:Let's pull
Speaker 1:it up just so we have it.
Speaker 2:Yes. Right here. Bloomberg reported this. We did. Street Journal.
Speaker 1:The list is looking sparse right
Speaker 2:now. Wait. I thought there were short sellers on the Naughty list. Oh, we took them off?
Speaker 1:They got dropped.
Speaker 2:I think we got to flush this out. But we're not... You almost put short
Speaker 1:sellers on the nice list
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just based off their timing.
Speaker 2:Well, they've done very well.
Speaker 1:Because the AI trade was over. Yeah. They they were sort of right for the wrong reason.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They've done very well. Well, fortunately, we have, you know, a small... A smidgen of time before Christmas. We're we're we're minutes away, but let's actually count it down, let everyone know exactly how far away we are.
Speaker 2:There are forty five days till Christmas. Now, it's not a joke. We are actually in the endgame. We're very very close.
Speaker 1:Canner says... Forty five days away. Jensen is gonna be setting up some coal powered data center.
Speaker 4:Oh. Oh, because he's gonna get coal from
Speaker 2:the island. That makes sense.
Speaker 4:A
Speaker 2:lot. Yeah. Yeah. That works.
Speaker 1:Anyways, what what happened?
Speaker 2:So Bloomberg reported that NVIDIA Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang admitted that he had an affair with a woman identified in a series of reports as a suspected Chinese spy plunging the chip colossus into a crisis like none before in its three decades history. Truly, like
Speaker 1:This is one of those
Speaker 2:flawless business execution. Right? Like in three decades, there hasn't... There's never been an Nvidia crisis at all. Right?
Speaker 2:It had been like...
Speaker 5:I think
Speaker 1:there's demand
Speaker 2:crises. Small business things.
Speaker 1:Things that are things that are cyclical.
Speaker 2:But there's never been like, oh,
Speaker 5:he put his
Speaker 2:foot in his mouth and there's drama or like something weird's happening. Like, it's all been very clean.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Super clean. Yeah. So basically, I'm standing I'm standing in my kitchen
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yesterday. Yeah. And normally, when you get... When I get push notifications
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:From like legacy media
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It's not... It's like some like horrific crisis Yeah. Overseas.
Speaker 2:Some political or something.
Speaker 1:You know, like like a train accident.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But this one stopped me in my tracks and I screenshot immediately and I sent to you and and I was. That he admitted it. Yeah. Because that was the... Was...
Speaker 2:Because it was alleged earlier but it was like, who knows? It could be some...
Speaker 1:Going off of all the pictures that they had together, it looked really really bad. Yes. It looked like they had a special relationship. Yeah. That's all I would say.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? But at the same time, if you were doing a spying operation, you... Like, part of the spying operation could be, hey, just go get pictures where you're close with him and you pat him on the back, we'll take a picture, make it look like you're having an affair,
Speaker 1:even if he's not. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? But of course, the push notification revealed everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And again, so we... I believe it was October tenth of last year.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:We talked about... Alex. We talked about Alice. We discussed Alex Wong. I would...
Speaker 1:We discussed her access to Jensen. Yeah. We highlighted her state media background. Yeah. We questioned Mega Speed's activities.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We didn't explicitly say that she was a spy but it fit the sort of exact
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like archetype of what, you know, this this woman who was a reporter, suddenly she's running a multi billion dollar multi billion dollar, you know, Malaysian hyperscaler Yeah. You know, impressive run Yeah. If it was real but there was kind of cash appearing out of nowhere from shell corporations. And given that we have a similar background in media, didn't we... We were just sort of joke.
Speaker 1:We were just joking like, you know, very like Yeah. You know, we didn't necessarily feel qualified to set up a a hyperscaler. So That's on true. One hand, it was it was very impressive. But on the other hand, there was just like...
Speaker 1:It was just extremely suspicious, the entire thing. And there was reporting Yeah. In the New York, like a bunch
Speaker 2:of reporting in Vegas. We talked to a lot of Neo Cloud founders.
Speaker 1:It's like,
Speaker 2:oh, they've been working in real estate for a long time. They've been working in in crypto mining for a long time. They've been building things for a decade. And now they're having the AI moment. It's very rare that you talk to someone who's like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, I I've I've actually never seen a data center in person, but I set one up and I'm doing great. It's a
Speaker 6:little Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a little stretch. Actual, like, timeline... The The Wall Street Journal has done some investigation into Alice Wong's, like, you know, background, but it's still a complete mess. I I... I'm not at the bottom of it at all.
Speaker 2:Can read a little bit of a summary here. So she began her career as a state media journalist before moving into finance, including positions at major Chinese financial firms in HSBC. In early twenty twenty three, she took control of Mega Speed. And it's like, how? Like like, I would love to take control of a big company.
Speaker 2:That would be amazing. Anybody have a company that they want me to take control of?
Speaker 1:She was handed the keys.
Speaker 2:Normally, when someone takes control... I mean, either they have a ton of capital and it's very clear how they got the capital, like they inherited it or they made it in investing or something or they raised it from outside partners and now they own the company. Very odd that they just take control. Very unclear what... How that happened.
Speaker 2:It was a Singaporean company spun out of a Chinese gaming business called Seven Road. And she became its managing director, but was introducing herself as the CEO and maybe still introduces herself as the CEO. And then the basic pitch for Mega Speed was it was an Nvidia reseller, Nvidia AI compute provider and it served customers including Alibaba. Although she formally relinquished ownership and resigned as director in November 2023 when a Singaporean businessman, James Tan, took over, she apparently continued exercising significant operational leadership representing Mega Speed at NVIDIA's California conference in early twenty twenty four, meeting Jensen at Computex in June 2024 as well, and publicly interacting with him again in Taiwan in May 2025. A business partner told The Wall Street Journal she was still introducing herself as Mega Speed's CEO in August of last year.
Speaker 2:So she's out. She controls the company, then she sells... Maybe sells the company. It's very unclear. And so meanwhile, Mega Speed Mega Speed was acquiring GPUs from NVIDIA prompting a US Commerce Department investigation beginning in late twenty twenty four into whether restricted chips were being diverted to China.
Speaker 2:Again, I don't even know if you need to divert them, if you can just set up a data center in Singapore or Malaysia and then just set... Do the training or inference over the wire. But nevertheless, the US Commerce Department started the investigation. US officials also suspected Alice of passing information to Chinese intelligence and NVIDIA is investing... Investigating whether Jensen was targeted through their personal relationship.
Speaker 2:The key unresolved question is whether the November 2023 sale represented a genuine transfer of control or primarily a change in legal ownership while Alice continued running the business. It is a bizarre structure.
Speaker 1:Definitely like the most sus company in the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was saying like if you went to Silicon At
Speaker 1:in at least in tech.
Speaker 2:If you went to Silicon Valley and you were... So this is this is the actual structure. Seven Road International is a Singaporean subsidiary of a Chinese owned company that owns Wong Lei Limited which is Alice Wang's ownership vehicle that's registered in the British Virgin Islands.
Speaker 1:Wait. She doesn't own her ownership vehicle?
Speaker 2:And that owned Swift Data PTE Limited in Singapore, which is now owned by James Tan from November 23 onward. And that owns Mega Speed International. I'm I'm just trying to parcel all this out. I... There's a lot more investigative journalism that needs to happen to actually really piece
Speaker 1:this together. This is like... Yeah. Credit to...
Speaker 2:My take, but...
Speaker 1:Credit to the New York Times and other publications... Yeah. Flumberg, Wall Street Journal. This over a year ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You bring to me a seed round with this structure. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, We're Chinese Singaporean and we're owned by the British Virgin Islands, but then it goes back to Singapore and back to China.
Speaker 2:It's like the most circular...
Speaker 1:Yeah. I this was this was a was a black swan
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:For me. It was. Because... Yes. Look, it's been very obvious forever that Jensen has not wanted to lose the Chinese market.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He has constantly advocated for
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:For selling chips to China, clearly wants to do it. I don't think it's for malicious reasons.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I think he sees that China is the second biggest computing market. He wants to be there. I think he knows that China is going to remove their dependency on US chips ASAP one way or another. And so he's looking at it as I just want to make as much money. It's sort of like a loyalty to the dollar.
Speaker 1:Think he wants to make as much money as he can in the Chinese market while he can and understand that it will be lost either way over time. Yes. I don't think he... And another way to read that is that he doesn't believe in sort of ASI. Doesn't believe in X risk.
Speaker 1:He doesn't He's not worried about He just doesn't... He's like, I make computers. I sell them. I want to sell as many as And there's a lot of ways you can criticize that. There's a lot of ways you can criticize that.
Speaker 1:Duarkef is looking, you know, the the interview where he's pushing him on like, why are you selling nukes to China? Jensen says, that's ridiculous. Yeah. It's like, you know, this isn't... Stochastic merits basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, the the the analogy doesn't make any sense, blah blah blah. But you can read you can read into that as like, this guy does not believe in sort of any any anything like ASI related. He's like, I make computers. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I wanna sell computers. Totally. So all that being said, this was like just so incredibly sloppy and unnecessary. And like, you should have had a million people around
Speaker 2:you Yeah.
Speaker 1:That would step in and say like, you know, this looks really bad.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 1:Just why are you doing this?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You run the largest or one of the largest companies in the world. You're you're under incredible scrutiny. You have to be in DC constantly. And... There's
Speaker 2:a... There's plenty of demand in America. This was another thing. Was like, you don't even need to sell the GME's to China because there's so many Americans that wanna buy them.
Speaker 1:So it's like basically like greed and lust got him into this Yeah. Situation. Yeah. And I was still... I don't I don't know.
Speaker 1:I still... Going into yesterday, I wanted to believe that Alice was trying and and they were in the same places at times. Yeah. But, you know, he was just like, I'm all business. I'll sell you some some chips.
Speaker 1:And so Totally. Seeing him admit this was was super disappointing and I feel horrible for, you know, his family and and really everyone involved. It's like out of... Like, if you had told me this two years ago, I would have said like, like, that's a funny like AI 2027 scenario like that, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, it was a meme. Like last year, it got to be such a meme of like the CCPGF, oh, if you're doing anything in AI, like China's gonna send a honeypot for you. And a lot of people were saying like, okay, look, that's over the top, and potentially offensive. And also, dude, no one's sending a honeypot after you're like rapper. Like, you're not like actually that important.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But a lot of people were like, oh, yeah. Like, I like, the China would love to get what I'm building, you know, and it was kind of like Yeah. This ridiculous thing. But the fact that it was like a public meme that had been like beaten to death on the timeline that people...
Speaker 2:It wasn't even funny anymore and then it still happens is crazy. It's really, really crazy.
Speaker 1:No. A mistake of historical significance.
Speaker 2:Yes. Like... Yeah. No. Totally.
Speaker 1:Like Now... How how do you how do you let how do you let this how do you let... I mean, it's just like incredibly incredibly incredibly incredibly careless.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There is an interesting debate from... I saw Joe Weisenthal tweeting a little bit about it. I saw Ben Thompson writing a little bit about it, which is basically, if you play back the the old NVIDIA story, a lot of it is aligned with globalism, global capitalism that was encouraged. Like, we we...
Speaker 2:It's very easy to look around at the last few years and say, oh, well, like, of course, competition with China is really serious. Of course, AI is really, really important technology. But if you go back ten years, it's like, oh, no. China's in the World Trade Organization. Like, of course, we should sell our...
Speaker 2:We should try and sell as many of our products over there as possible. People were complaining about Facebook not being able to sell their products over there, about about a lot of American companies not being able to enter the Chinese market effectively. And so for a long time, the the mandate and like the cultural goal of America was, yes, export everything that we have that is good. Make all the money you can. This is the this is the social contract around our business community.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And only recently has it become very obvious, correct, but also consensus that, okay, maybe we need to be careful about what... How we do business with our geopolitical rivals. Maybe they are trying to overtake us. Maybe they're trying to copy stuff and not let us bring things in and then flood the international markets Yeah.
Speaker 2:With their competitors. Right? And so maybe you don't want to bring your best technology up there because they'll disassemble it, copy it. There's a whole bunch of other discussions and dynamics that are now in vogue that weren't twenty years ago, ten years ago. And so if you're if you're building your business for decades Yeah.
Speaker 2:Under that regime of like, you know, the government is basically incentivizing you. Hey. They're saying, hey, we will help you export your goods. Like, we want the GDP to grow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We want you to be big and you and you grow up in that. Then it's not it's not this crazy like, oh, America has always been against selling to China and he's like bucking the trend. It's like, no, he's just of the old guard. That's how I...
Speaker 1:Media has a massive r and d center in Shanghai. Yeah. Right? They've... That they've had, that I'm sure they've
Speaker 2:been scaling
Speaker 1:But like the two two things
Speaker 2:Two thousand's peak was like, oh, you're big enough to to expand to China. You've made it. You're you're an American hero. Like, you're bringing our stuff over there. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bill Clinton said the Internet will democratize China because trying to shut down the So Internet is so if
Speaker 1:Alice Huang never existed, never interacted with Jensen, I think he would have been doing all the exact same things.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:And that being said, the fact that she does exist, they had a relationship that he admits to, He's cheating on his, you know Yep. His his wife. Yep. And then he's been doing all this other stuff. It's like, it could not look Yes.
Speaker 1:It could not look worse. Completely destroys Mhmm. All his credibility in Washington. Sure. I don't think he can at at this point, he can't advocate one way or another without looking bad.
Speaker 1:Totally. Because if he advocates for, you know, the status quo Yeah. Which is like, you know, supporting, you know, broadly, know That's chip sales, advanced chip sales, all these things, He looks bad because it's like, wait, you've been having an affair...
Speaker 2:Are you just doing that because...
Speaker 1:And if if he now starts advocating the other way, it looks like he was compromised the
Speaker 6:whole time.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:Wow. It's like, he's in such a bad spot. Yeah. And this is somebody who he is on the road more than any other CEO on Earth. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's constantly... Like, the whole game has been... Jensen's game has been show up once or twice a day, three Every times conference, every news,
Speaker 2:more constant
Speaker 1:And and, you know, constantly be be spreading the gospel.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:I don't know that he can do that anymore. I mean, it's like it's hard to stand up in in front of a... In front of the same crowds and and say the the same things.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, yeah. I... It's it's... It's pickled. It's just it's just unbelievable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like...
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then and then also, I mean, we're still in the alleged spying camp, I think, with
Speaker 1:the... Not really. Not really.
Speaker 2:They're still probing. I... They they they don't have like a this is what information was transferred. This is what was stolen. This what the spying entailed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And there's a big question there because like is it espionage? Savvy... Sabotage? Is the idea getting into Jensen's phone screen recording?
Speaker 1:This is... This seems like this seems like not something... Email. This seems like really bad for for China's interests if they want chips because you had the top guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The one guy who should...
Speaker 1:The guy who's financing everyone. Yeah. Who already is aligned to your interests.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Seemed like it.
Speaker 1:For sure. Seems to be that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But maybe...
Speaker 1:And is is a a god among gods. Right? Like, when he is in a room Totally. Full of all the top people.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:He is the one that's going around, you know, Shaking hands. Like he... Blaying everyone. Everyone has to... Everyone is
Speaker 2:trying to get a computer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it seems bad. And and and to me, the disappointing thing is like he was he was one of the few people that was just sort of removed from all of the the pettiness and the infighting. Right? He was like, you guys might be fighting, but I'll give you compute, I'll give you compute, I'll give you compute.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And let's all be, you know, like he was one of the few people that was able to be, you know, basically like, as long as you're buying NVIDIA GPUs, you're my friend. Sure. We can all coexist. I'm gonna support this, that.
Speaker 1:Yep. But, yeah, truly a... Can I? Historical historical proportions and like it's just a very it's a very sad day for the American technology sector. And like...
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I'm surprised the the stock is not
Speaker 2:selling off hammered. It's down something 5%, especially relative to the Nasdaq, which is up two and a half percent. So there's actually been a broader rally in the market off of Thursday, Friday's turmoil. Right?
Speaker 1:Well, it's probably road people to some degree rotating out of...
Speaker 2:NVIDIA into... I I don't know.
Speaker 7:AMD is up almost 13% today.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's that's wild. Yeah. I like that we're getting
Speaker 1:some claps for NVIDIA. Yeah. Let me It's tell just like you didn't... Yeah. It's not like you needed the most elite security team to tell you that this was a bad idea.
Speaker 1:You didn't need to run... It's not like you needed to run... No. It's not like you needed to run a background check and be like, hey, should I be hanging out all the time with somebody with... That's working with that that Yeah.
Speaker 1:May or may not control the most suspect Yeah.
Speaker 2:Company Yeah.
Speaker 1:In technology. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Even if even if you even if you want to do business broadly, it's like, send a 65 year old sales rep who's like some just like complete suit who's like, I got the spreadsheet out. If you'd like to buy, let's follow the letter of the law and here's Yeah. Here's how much you can buy. Having the CEO go over there and and and drink wine and take pictures is rough. It's a it's a it's a tumultuous outcome.
Speaker 2:Well, ridiculous day. Anthropic... You saw this? Anthropic just dropped Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2?
Speaker 1:Boom. Is this is... Jensen's like, drop a new mind.
Speaker 5:I mean, I don't know. I it it it
Speaker 2:it's crazy. I mean, I imagine that this is just like they have their plan in the lead up to the IPO. But like, I have a feeling that it's gonna be hard to get this to break through today given...
Speaker 1:I don't know. I mean, I think it'll be Refreshing. Like the the AI is a relentless technology. Yeah. The people involved are relentless and it doesn't care about Relationship.
Speaker 1:The midterms. It doesn't care that, you know, the the the the sort of face of AI globally Yes. Is having an affair with Yeah. An alleged spy. It just doesn't care.
Speaker 1:The the progress is gonna is gonna continue.
Speaker 2:Do you think the pre training team at Anthropic was distracted over the weekend? I gotta keep
Speaker 1:reading these Bloomberg articles. I... Some of this... Yeah. Just...
Speaker 1:No. It makes it makes some... A lot of the imagery that's been coming out just feels like I just assumed it was AI because it looked so incriminating Totally. By itself that there's no way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think these were maybe pulled from some sort of like Snapchat story or Instagram story or WhatsApp story or something. But she had posted a number of photos. And yeah, they look... It's it's like really so many so many photos.
Speaker 2:Jensen's memo went out to the whole team. We read a little bit of it. There's a very funny there's a very funny screenshot, which I have no idea if it's true, but it looks like two people gave it the
Speaker 1:The crazy thing is pretty? Like, you play back the last couple years
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And you imagine there's a world where NVIDIA... Like NVIDIA is run by like a manager style CEO who's not a founder, who's just like, we're gonna do... We're gonna invest in continued r and d and buybacks. Like, I don't think I don't think you run around giving sprinkling billions of dollars all over the industry backing any team
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That that appears to be viable at all giving them...
Speaker 2:Central Bank of AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You you don't...
Speaker 2:You don't assume that role.
Speaker 1:I I just think if it's not your company and you don't like Yeah. Like Jensen is incredible Yeah. In so many ways. Yeah. And I don't think that this story needs to like take away from that.
Speaker 1:Somebody can be like very bad on some dimensions. Right? Like he's bad on not having affairs with alleged spies. Sure. And he's very good at, you know, being the face of of compute.
Speaker 1:Right? He's very good at at at playing that game.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think the the sort of scary scenario, at least if you're a venture capitalist, is like, well, what happens? You know, I... As of right now, unless the story gets like way way way worse, which it seems like it's possible
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I see Jensen staying in this role.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I think a lot of people are thinking like, what happens if you don't have this sort of like founder led company that's willing to throw $10,000,000,000 here, you know, $20,000,000,000 here.
Speaker 2:And do creative deals.
Speaker 1:Or do creative deals by companies that that aren't really working.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 1:It's felt for it's felt for the last year that there... If you were a if you were an AI company, Jensen was past the point of, let's say, north of a billion dollars, you're too big to fail in in sort of like Jensen's world view. It seemed like he wouldn't Sure. It seemed like he wasn't gonna let a company that had any relevancy fail. And I think that without him in that seat, like, I think that changes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He kinda loses some of the soft power, which he was...
Speaker 1:Totally. Now and now it's like he can he can go and do what he's always done very well. But it's like he's gonna it's like he's giving a talk with like an insane black eye. Mhmm. And it's just like this...
Speaker 1:Gonna be this like elephant, constant like elephant in the room. Mhmm. And and again, I'm still I'm still shocked that we're even having this conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What did Dylan Patel have to say over at Semi Analysis? He says nothing will happen to Jensen over the next six months. Is there a prediction market for CEO...
Speaker 7:Yeah. So right now, the chance that he leaves before July of next year is 31%.
Speaker 2:That's pretty high. Yeah. I mean, he has a like a... I I saw some reporting about the board structure. It seems like it's a lot of allies.
Speaker 2:He's the founder. It's...
Speaker 1:No. It's a weird it's a weird situation where it's like him being chief executive post having an affair seems like bad for NVIDIA, but also like the alternative is worse.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Don't know who would replace him. He's kind of a singular figure. Like who's the...
Speaker 7:Who's number two at NVIDIA? You don't really have it clear.
Speaker 2:His son-in-law. Excessor. I think his son I think his son-in-law right now. But Dylan Patel says nothing will happen to Jensen over the next six months. This story will largely die down in media slash finance, but Democrats will call him into Congress.
Speaker 2:They will investigate the GPU sales to Chinese companies and hammer him with questions. That's when the shoe could drop. So oddly, it seems like the AI safety folks, geopolitically minded folks are maybe breathing a sigh of relief because this will ultimately probably result in on net less smuggling of chips to China?
Speaker 1:Oh, I think you I think you default. They sort of... The the... Your default assumption is that they get what they've been asking for.
Speaker 2:Who's that?
Speaker 1:Like the the sort of like say, you know, the the sort of more the hawkish crowd. China hawks. The China hawks get what they Because like how how can you have your strongest soldier Yeah. On the opposing side Can't really offer. No longer has credibility on top is what I saying.
Speaker 2:The China hawks side has if he... China really wants these GPUs. They sent a spy for America's
Speaker 1:So top if he continues to advocate with what he's been advocating for, it increases the likelihood Yep. That he goes like like...
Speaker 2:In front of Congress.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that that seems like Yeah. Happening for sure.
Speaker 1:If he switches up now, now that he's admitted and under investigation, it looks even worse. So the question I have is Ross Douthit on 60 was asked was talking with Trump. Yep. And he talked about like a head of a major AI company who he called and said, kiss your wife and kids and do you like the color orange? Kids?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:And so I think you can... The the sort of one... And this apparently happened like a year ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I think it would be safe to assume that that was Jensen at that at at, you know... And again, it calls into question like so much that's happened over the last year. Yeah. Right? Like...
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's weird because when you when you hear about Trump being aggressive towards an AI founder or AI leader, you think you think Daria, obviously. Because there was a whole Darfeller in a war battle. But it seems like with what we know now, it's actually much more jostling with Nvidia
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:On the global stage.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there was there was a question why... At least I had the question why Jensen was so outwardly, like, the biggest fan of of Trump and was constantly in in taking all over the last year, taking any opportunity to,
Speaker 2:you know Yeah.
Speaker 1:Praise and and all these things. And, like, there was a... You know, he's smart enough to know that the the political pendulum is gonna swing back and forth and that going and being the loudest, most outspoken supporter Yep. It seemed like kind of a short term
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Kind of like a a short term arbitrage Yeah. That maybe wouldn't be worth the trip.
Speaker 2:Didn't Apple just play the Trump two era perfectly? Tim Cook, they know he's on the way out, so they send him to the Millennium screening. And then immediately, you get Turmoil in there. Clean slate. Never never overstep.
Speaker 2:Never overplayed the hand. Either way, did what they had to do, you know. But, yeah. Even even... I feel like
Speaker 1:But, yeah. Now now it's like the...
Speaker 2:Not like it being like badass that Trump got shot or something. But other than that, it wasn't so over the top. Like Jensen was definitely leading in charge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but when you look at the the pressure that the admin is gonna be under come January Oh, yeah. Combining that with now optically Mhmm. Jensen will probably be thrown in with a lot of those kind of Yeah. In in just general skepticism and investigations where it's like, hey, isn't your your buddy Jensen is also under investigation for, you know, blah blah blah?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So...
Speaker 5:Yeah. I
Speaker 2:think everybody needs to be on alert for for spies at this point. Tyler, where were you this weekend?
Speaker 7:I was at Michigan, University of Michigan.
Speaker 2:And are you are you loyal to TBPN or are you loyal to fraternity culture? Can you say that beer pong isn't fun? Can you say that with a straight face or...
Speaker 7:I don't want to comment on this.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting. I think he might be deployed by the fraternity industrial complex to keep tabs on some unks. What about what about Jackson over there? You were you were you lived in Texas before you came here. Right?
Speaker 1:Yes, sir.
Speaker 2:And were you were you deployed to keep keep an eye on us Californians out here? Are you working for the Texans?
Speaker 4:I want my state.
Speaker 2:Okay. Interesting. Can you can you say the the f one fifty is is not a great vehicle?
Speaker 8:I've only driven f
Speaker 2:three fifty. Fantastic. I I I think we're I think we're safe here. But everyone needs to be on alert. And it and it will be.
Speaker 2:I I I really do hope that the investigation unearths like, okay, like was there spyware as as a piece of this? Like was this...
Speaker 1:Well, that's the thing. That's the that's the thing. Bill Bill yeah. Bishop Bill Bishop has had some some great commentary on this. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:One of the things that he brought like if Jensen and Alice were ever alone and and Jensen had any of his devices. It's just like now you can't you can't guarantee that that somehow or another Yeah. The the Chinese state apparatus doesn't have more access to Yeah. What NVIDIA is doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, there still is the the question of like, if you get access to even the CEO of a major American semiconductor's phone or or computer, like, is that enough to actually speed up semiconductor production in your country? Like, because you might have, like, a bunch of sales reports. Maybe you have access to some schematics and some some Yeah. PDFs and design files.
Speaker 2:But is that enough to speed up? Or or do you need machinery that you don't necessarily have access to and you need to get the physical hardware? But I I I think as much optimism there as there is around this leading to increased chip controls on China from the China hawk crowd, there's probably a lot of pessimism around, okay, well, we have to assume that China has has way more information about our semiconductor supply chain in America. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which is risky. Yeah. The other thing that's rough is like, I think Jensen had given a quote over the last couple weeks
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Saying to, I think it was Bloomberg that literally saying like, our... My relationship with Alice Wong was nothing out of out of the ordinary. It was a normal... Some... I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 1:It's something to the effect of it was a normal business relationship. Then it was like, okay, you were just like lying Publicly. To public, you know, lying to the media, you know, within Mhmm. Within recent history.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, what else is going on in the timeline? Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents though. It made 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 2:I do wonder what's gonna happen with Fable 5.2, Mythos 5.2. Everyone's kind of expecting like a 5.5 jump and and then also Fable's been like expensive so it wasn't ramping as fast as Opus 5.5. So is the is this like a is the is the goal of this model to get more adoption and and actual revenue out of it or merely use it for the for the knock on effects that you get from having a great model. But I'm sure we'll see more reactions, discuss it tomorrow. Gavin Baker weighing in.
Speaker 2:NVIDIA's board stated today that it found no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised. Okay. That's what... That was my big question. As a result of Jensen's actions, they are initiating independent investigation overseen by a committee of independent directors assisted by outside independent counsel that will examine all available information.
Speaker 2:This will be an unbiased, exhaustive and thorough investigation given the fiduciary responsibilities of these independent directors. Jensen said that I support the investigation. We'll cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I'm committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security.
Speaker 2:I'm proud to and grateful to be an American. Gavin says, I've known Jensen for almost thirty years. I simply do not believe he would ever knowingly do anything to disadvantage either America or Nvidia. The only thing he has ever said to me about China is the absolute importance of keeping the American hardware ecosystem led by Nvidia ahead of China. That's it.
Speaker 2:Well, lots of lots of debate in the timeline. There's also a post here that I I don't know if it's confirmed, there's something around this idea that Nvidia doesn't have a contract with TSMC. I don't know how real this is, but Prakash, Adarsh, says NVIDIA does not have a contract with TSMC. That's really all you need to know. People say it's just like a hand Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, implication there is like he couldn't possibly be removed from
Speaker 2:Yep. He's a relationship.
Speaker 1:Because that that would... Oh. But but at but at the same time, it's not exactly like if TSMC was like, oh, one of our largest customers in Nvidia has a new CEO. We we we don't wanna give them...
Speaker 2:Call and see how much he wants to buy. Yeah. That's gonna be day one. Guess that was
Speaker 7:from the Dorkatch interview where you said Nvidia and TSMC don't have a legal contract.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:They just have this mutual trust.
Speaker 2:Oh, weird. That's very very interesting. I wonder what the advantages of that are. Anyway, anything else on the on the spy? You can look through this and I'll tell everyone about Shopify.
Speaker 2:Shopify is the commerce platform that grows through business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents. Just a couple days till Christmas so hit the hit the Shopify stores, pick out a couple things,
Speaker 1:Pick up... Please do. I'm hoping hoping that's the last of it. Hoping that it's investigated. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It all goes, you know. He didn't have bad intentions. Yeah. Just round of the mill affair.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And you can go back to being the central bank of
Speaker 5:of a...
Speaker 2:Ripping checks.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, in some much better news, it's forty five days till Christmas and the Rockefeller Christmas tree has been delivered. So let's watch through the timeline because we got the full story here for you. This is the tree that was identified. This is from West Edmunds...
Speaker 2:Edmundston, New York. I couldn't wait for her to reach Manhattan, I went to meet her in person, says my Christmas in New York. This isn't one of us. Guy rocks. This year's tree comes from Chernobyl County and she's 78...
Speaker 2:Seventy six feet tall, 50 wide. That's a great ratio. Estimated to weigh 11 tons. The crews are already preparing her for a journey to Rockefeller Center and I can't wait to follow every step. Let's go.
Speaker 2:Thank you. My Christmas in New York City. Then the New York Post actually went and found the owner of the tree and posted a little one minute interview here from her yard to the heart of NYC. Meet Rebecca Decker whose family donated this year's Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. I thought he was
Speaker 9:crazy. I have a guy knocking on the front door talking about a tree
Speaker 2:in the backyard.... Inside nice tree. We wanna put it in New York City.
Speaker 9:He introduced himself, who he was, what he did, who he works for. Started talking about the tree and had said that he had been looking at the tree since 2020. I thought Wow.
Speaker 1:He'd admiring the tree.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 9:Talking about a tree in the front yard. He
Speaker 2:This is
Speaker 9:went over the process, how
Speaker 2:everything a college football scout. You're just like watching a game tape. Hey. Headhunter.
Speaker 9:Said and done. He asked if I would be interested in donating it, and I said, yeah.
Speaker 2:Honestly, was like thinking about I I I was so expecting her to be like like, yeah, I I, you know, I negotiated, brought in a lawyer, wanted top dollar, being ruthless. No. Christmas spirit, overpowered. And the funny thing about the end of that is that she's like, I was thinking about removing the tree. It didn't really work for the property.
Speaker 2:I was trying to get it out of there. I was worried about it falling over and smashing the house because it was so big, in a storm. And so she was like, I was I was happy to get it out there. So, her and her family got to go and and watch it get installed. Lena New York on Instagram.
Speaker 2:The wait is over the iconic Rockefeller Center Christmas tree has officially made its grand arrival at Rockefeller Center. Look at this pulling up there. Looking great. It's a magnificent 76 foot Norway spruce. A lot of people had their money on Norway spruce.
Speaker 2:Congrats to you if you picked it correctly.
Speaker 1:In other massive news, friend
Speaker 5:of
Speaker 1:the show, Brian Chesky is committing a 100,000,000 to SF Parks in what, mayor Larry's administration says will be the largest contribution the city has ever received from one donor. Wow.
Speaker 4:Did we
Speaker 1:get a gong hit, John? Of course. For, this $100,000,000 to SF Parks. Boom. You know what I'm thinking, John?
Speaker 1:What? They gotta put some bench presses in the parks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Outdoor workout equipment, maybe?
Speaker 1:Just... Yeah. Basically, a sculpture of Chesky wrapping out, like, bronze sculpture of him wrapping out 02/25.
Speaker 2:You want it to be animatronic?
Speaker 1:No. No. Okay. Just just just cast him on the bench.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In every park. Every 10 feet or so.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Different different movements to really show off every...
Speaker 1:Yeah. Obviously dead lifts, squats as well. Yes. Yeah, just one bronze statue of Jesse.
Speaker 2:Wise. Yeah. Everything. Yeah. Everything.
Speaker 2:President of TBPN, Dylan Abrascado stopped by an open house and they got AI slop inside the open house. I was looking at this and I was like, I don't hate this. Do you hate this?
Speaker 1:I don't hate it either. The only thing is I don't necessarily trust it. So if this is telling me, you know, it's a ten minute walk
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:I would be assuming, you know, plus or minus thirty minutes.
Speaker 2:Minus You 30
Speaker 5:get there negative twenty minutes.
Speaker 1:You might be sitting already where you want to be.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it it is a violation of your... It is somewhat of a violation of... I'm cool.
Speaker 1:I'm cool with this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This doesn't really change the way the house looks in the listing photos. And this was in the open house like, as you walk in, you pick up a floor plan. The floor plan is the real printout, but then they have this little infographic for how you might walk to the town and that's AI generated. Seems realistic.
Speaker 2:Depends what model did they use? What thinking level did they use? They really gotta say, hey, we generated this with six pro maxed out thinking. We we assembled a swarm of agents to make sure every detail was perfect.
Speaker 7:If you just get the turns right, then it's fine. Like the actual... It doesn't need to be, you know, the the units don't have to be, like, match up correctly. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, what do mean... What do mean turn... The units? The units... To
Speaker 7:know left or right at, like, the correct roads.
Speaker 2:No. But what what I'm saying is like is like a model with less thinking might just try and guess. Like, oh, okay. This this house is about ten minutes. Like a a like a model that has computer use and tool use and is really reasoning might actually go and look it up on OpenStreetMap, calculate the exact thing, verify that, round it to the right number and be much more accurate, much less likely to just hallucinate.
Speaker 2:Because there's a difference between like going to Reddit or some website and seeing, oh, it takes fifteen minutes to go from this place to this place versus like going to the ground truth of like the GPS data. So what does the model do? That's what I want to know. They should have put the full reasoning trace here. I want pages and pages of reasoning traces.
Speaker 7:These 10,000 concurrent agents.
Speaker 2:10,000 concurrent agents. That's the only way to do it. Why is this hot tub hammock...
Speaker 1:I want your product review. I want your product review, John. So, John, tell me what you think. Let's pull this video up and then I want John and Tyler. This guy loves camping and he wanted to make a portable hot tub setup.
Speaker 2:This is the craziest.
Speaker 1:The watercolor. Let's let's start the video over. Let's get some sound.
Speaker 2:The murkiest. It is absolutely roasting. Alright.
Speaker 1:Start it over. Ready to Hot jump
Speaker 10:tub hammock prototype number two. This one is ready to jump in. We've got some No, it's not. Very natural river water, but it's steaming hot straight from the little creek over there. And it's just as natural as the material that this hammock is made from.
Speaker 10:No microplastics, no plastic at all. Taking the heat from the fire beautifully. You might remember prototype one had some leaking problems.
Speaker 2:I can imagine. All solved. It's completely This
Speaker 10:plant is ready and progressing. You guys had a lot to say about prototype number one. I listened to some of it, but obviously not all of it because we're back with
Speaker 5:number two.
Speaker 2:The cowboys are like, never do this. You're gonna... It's gonna break through and you're gonna fall down out of
Speaker 1:the fire, I would imagine. You wouldn't trust this?
Speaker 2:I would not trust this. Also, how... He doesn't mention how hot the how hot the water gets because the difference between the difference between 90 degree water and a 112 degree water is crazy. Right?
Speaker 7:I don't think this is that dangerous because if it breaks through, the water will put out the fire. Okay. So you need to worry about that.
Speaker 2:You still might like hit your back on that cylinder and that might burn you or, you know, at least like hurt you because it's
Speaker 1:a piece of metal. It's just a bit rough because like hypothetically, you know, it does get a little too hot and you pass out from the heat. You might boil alive before it breaks through, you know. So there's... I would say like, Tyler, I know you're looking at this thinking like, I I could be trusted without that panic.
Speaker 1:I I'll take... I could I could go camping.
Speaker 7:I would definitely try prototype when it gets to version three.
Speaker 2:You try version three?
Speaker 1:I'll try
Speaker 5:it out.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. I'm I'm also wondering like how did you get that... How how many trips to the hammock from the river to fill that thing up? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Is
Speaker 2:that... Yeah. What what what device... Does he have a hose that goes from one to the other?
Speaker 1:Like also why would you not set it up why would you not set it up down by the old river?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know? A lot of these a lot of these videos can be sort of like they bring in a team. All the ancient buildings, oh, they built it by hand and they have like a... You can see the the the tractor tracks there.
Speaker 1:So is it getting on the TBPN gift guide?
Speaker 2:No. Absolutely not. Avoid at all costs. Avoid at all costs. Go with an in ground in ground jacuzzi.
Speaker 2:Alex Kerr made a little iPhone duo app for exploring surf spots and beaches around the world. Is this gonna be what gets you to buy an iPhone Duo, Jordy?
Speaker 1:Maybe. I so. Think so. Looks like a good user experience.
Speaker 2:I'm excited. I I love that people are starting to have fun and and I imagine the vibe coding's helpful here, but also just having the having the devices available and people can play around with them. Somewhat gimmicky, who knows if this is the optimal way to get this information about the SURF report, but fun that someone's building something cool like this and will be interesting to see what else people build. Very, very fun. Super local maps.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:Sam Gold says, hint of lime is an astonishingly dishonest name for a tortilla chip that tastes like it was manufactured during an industrial accident accident at a lime processing facility.
Speaker 5:Can't even get through it.
Speaker 1:Hint of Lime is an astonishingly dishonest name for a tortilla chip that tastes like it was manufactured during an industrial accident at a lime processing facility.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a lot of lime flavor in every hint of lime chip.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like, would you have a Cheeto and say, oh, hint of cheese.
Speaker 1:Hint of cheese. I feel like I feel like hint of lime is a fair assessment when it's like a corona, you know, when they mix Yes. When they have certain like
Speaker 2:But they don't say hint of lime. Like a Bud Light lime is
Speaker 1:Full lime. Yeah. But it's more of a hint in that situation. So it's like it's inverted.
Speaker 2:What do they call it? BLLs
Speaker 1:or something like that? They call it the lime paradox.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. They don't... They they should call Bud Light lime, Bud Light hint of lime and they should call the chips just full on lime chips.
Speaker 1:Shannon is highlighting something important What happened? Which is that Oakland Airport is auctioning off the baggage tugs. You've seen these out the window and these look pretty interesting. All the way from 1999, they've got got TugTech m one a 30 baggage tractors.
Speaker 2:They get new stuff.
Speaker 1:I was I was thinking these could be cool to have, you know, if you're a smart start... Kind of like a smaller start up, you got 10 or so people in your office and you gotta do... And you wanna make your coffee runs more efficient, you know, if you're gonna step out.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Imagine just pulling out of the office, you know, 10 deep
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:In these tugs.
Speaker 2:10 deep?
Speaker 5:Where are
Speaker 2:you You're going the Brian Chesky bronze statue.
Speaker 1:No. Just around the corner to grab coffee.
Speaker 2:Okay. And you have 10 bags of tugs? I do I do feel like these would be great like, bases for props. If you need to build a float or or you need to build... You need to do a parade.
Speaker 2:Maybe a San Francisco parade, you can build a bunch of mascots on top of these. They're probably pretty functional as base vehicles for building on top of and creating some sort of fabricated structure, decorate them, livery.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, these look... You're... These look amazing.
Speaker 2:You need a tenth car. You do.
Speaker 1:You're I do. Short. This would fix me.
Speaker 2:How many cars do you have now?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Jay Leno podcasting right here. I want your review of this secret luxury terminal at LAX. As we were getting on a flight recently, I saw some folks jump in front of us on the...
Speaker 2:What's it called? The gangway? Is that the... Walking the plank onto the commercial air flight
Speaker 1:instead of... It was about five feet from the door of the plane.
Speaker 2:It was about five... They were about five feet from the door of
Speaker 1:the It was where sometimes they'll stop you and say...
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hey, you got... We we gotta take a
Speaker 1:bag We're confiscating. For
Speaker 2:And we're bringing people on that have extra bags. What's going
Speaker 5:on?
Speaker 1:Make it make sense.
Speaker 2:What's going on? Vanity Fair has a deep dive. They got the answer. First, I'm gonna tell you about public. Invest across all asset classes.
Speaker 2:Automate with everything with AI agents. Run trading strategies, risk management, money movements and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public. So navigating... As navigating commercial airports grows increasingly horrendous and upper class... And upper class Americans grow increasingly wealthy, one company is betting on members only terminals that allow travelers to escape friction.
Speaker 2:There are 10 terminals at LAX. Although one through nine are for the general public, Terminal 1 for Southwest, two for Virgin Atlantic, the international hub, the numberless Terminal B. I don't know why they did that. Each one is packed with weary edgy travelers lined up for security coffee or meal. You arrive at your terminal via rideshare and depart via rideshare so long as you...
Speaker 2:As long as your ride is a premium black car. If it isn't, you must take a twenty minute bus ride to a parking lot called LAX It where you wait amongst the hordes for your UberX to arrive slowly, as it slowly inches through crippling traffic. The 10th Terminal promises to deliver you from this misery. It's around the back of the airport complex off the 105 in El Segundo, next to several cargo holds and a gate gourmet facility where airplane meals are carted off to various jets on the tarmac. When you arrive, no one asks for your boarding pass.
Speaker 2:A security guard checks your name off a list and a valet whisks away your bags with care before you're ushered into your own private suite with amenities galore. Squishy velvet couches and chairs. A coffee table coffee table books, free iPhone chargers, chocolate covered almonds and gummy bears. A fridge comes with sparkling waters and canned matcha drinks, a far cry from the plastic Dasani bottles found at Hudson News. Private bathroom boasts the L'Abo soaps.
Speaker 2:When you're waiting for your flight, you can get a manicure, a table massage, or even a haircut. That's quite cool. You can request a pair of NormaTec Elite compression boots to help with your circulation before check off... Take off. If you're feeling more socially...
Speaker 1:How does it work with the... How late can you show up?
Speaker 2:That's a good question.
Speaker 1:Because that feels like the biggest factor. Because for you, if you could show up...
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm the guy that misses flights now?
Speaker 1:I did miss a flight last week.
Speaker 7:I was like
Speaker 1:You did miss a flight.
Speaker 2:I I incepted you.
Speaker 1:I had a I had a I had a pretty brutal
Speaker 2:It was
Speaker 1:week of flights. So the flight the flight last Monday, I so used to sitting next to you Yeah. On flights. Yeah. I was sitting...
Speaker 2:Mean the flight back to LA?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was sitting next to... John went to San Francisco.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm sitting next to this guy, and every time I would look around, the guy would sort of assume that I was like trying to get his attention. So he'd like...
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:And I was just like, yeah, I'm just, you know, looking for something in my bag. I'm not Yeah. Trying to get attention. So yeah, think funny funny story with this with this company PS. I randomly sat on a flight with the founder of Oh.
Speaker 1:PS. Cool. Probably a couple years ago. Yeah. And, you know, it was was being friendly and Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're sharing what we did for work and she broke down a PS and then and then at the end, it was like we're getting off the the gate and then she just bounced out the, you know, the secret exit which...
Speaker 2:Wait. So when you land, you...
Speaker 1:I think in some places you can do both because...
Speaker 2:Oh, wait. Well, I mean, I guess if you land at LAX, you could do the same thing.
Speaker 1:Go to
Speaker 2:the car that's at the private terminal. So overall, doesn't really solve the major problems of commercial air travel. Right? Delays, crowded planes, uncomfortable seats, food, all these things that happen on the plane. But it's not...
Speaker 1:Illnesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But if you're someone who's flying in and out of...
Speaker 1:Of course also.
Speaker 2:Dozens of times over the years.
Speaker 1:JetBlue. They notoriously don't allow you to, you know Pass back. Pass back, you know, a full meal. Batch your absolute boys.... Membership.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Whoever can solve that.
Speaker 2:If you get the highest status, you should be allowed to pass back.
Speaker 1:How's how's JetBlue's stock...
Speaker 2:Since we since this...
Speaker 1:Since we had the mix up. But... Down 73% over over the last five years since they... Brutal. Since they...
Speaker 2:And that's 100% attributable to the fact that they don't let you pass back steak to your friends if they're sitting in the back. Brutal. Annual baseline membership for this private terminal starts at $1,250. And so if you're flying business class out of LAX and into LAX regularly over the course of a year, you know, a few flights a month, you're looking at probably less than 10% of the cost to increase the the the value of your experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I remember learning about the business and being like, this feels like a super smart business. Yeah. It's like a very much a middle ground for people that that can't justify, you know Flying private. Chartering.
Speaker 2:Just flying private would be like 10 x. This is like 5% more of what you're spending.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It makes it like probably
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:50% better experience. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I do I I I do wonder if you can get there later. And I wonder if you can check bags later. Because that's the thing that gets you sometimes is like you miss the bag cut off. Right? Especially for international.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Anyway, good to see that they're doing well. Good to see that it's being used.
Speaker 1:What's what's going on in the world of Scott Galloway and Tesla?
Speaker 2:He's he's should be having like a great time. He's rehashing some very, very dark moments.
Speaker 1:Let's play this video. I'm curious. I don't want... The caption can't be......
Speaker 2:Story. I had I had a Tesla. Great car. You started shitposting me on Twitter, so I sold it not before taking
Speaker 1:value. Alright. We can move on.
Speaker 2:I think we can. I think we can. Ridiculous. Well, hopefully, he hopefully, he gets something with a naturally aspirated v 12, you know, Enzo or something. Enzo doesn't have a v 12, but something something special.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe you should get a Jessica. I saw one of those at Cars and Coffee amid all the terminal, all all the turmoil. Unusual Whales has an update on the Anthropic IPO. Says, Justin, Anthropic is expected to begin its IPO roadshow the week of November 9.
Speaker 2:That's today they dropped Fable 5.2. I would imagine that the next week or two are packed with Anthropic announcements, according to CNBC, which is the earliest window available to it. SEC's... Rules require at least fifteen calendar days between a public filing and the start of investor meetings. When the company filed its public s one on October 16, it plans to list class a shares in the Nasdaq global select market under the ticket ant with 22 underwriters led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
Speaker 2:So very interesting to see where this lands. People are going all over the place on price. Originally, 2,000,000,000,000, then 1.5 was floated. Now I've heard like 1.2, 1.1. And...
Speaker 1:They're looking for the pop.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And and and so there was some speculation that like the bankers might wanna leave a little bit for the pop. IPO at a more safe valuation. In general, it it feels pretty comfortable at 1.2 as crazy as that sounds for such a
Speaker 1:young person. Yeah. And I can I can I can imagine going to going to two?
Speaker 2:Very quickly.
Speaker 1:Very quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very very quickly. But it'll be interesting to see what else comes out. I mean, don't think we're gonna get new financial numbers, but we'll probably get more models and evidence and traction updates and anecdotes about different different implications of this technology. Very...
Speaker 2:Still like a tough moment because there's so much question about the overbuild and the NVIDIA story and all these different things around the the market broadly. Are the data centers gonna be delayed? Will there be compute available? What's the relationship with SpaceX like? But at the same time, it feels like at least their allies, their investors have had good answers even though they haven't been addressing them directly because of course they're in the quiet period.
Speaker 2:We will see.
Speaker 1:Mark Gurman is reporting that Apple i's autonomous agentic Siri as early as next year.
Speaker 2:And now 2027 is here.
Speaker 1:It's possible that they'll release it next year. They're watching the category, they're excited about it and it's possible they will release it next year as early as next year. And with how fast AI moves, it's possible that by the time they release it, there won't be an entirely new paradigm Yeah. That they will then have to try to catch up to.
Speaker 2:It's rough. I was using Siri last night, calculating the date... Number of days till Christmas. It does a good job. It told me how many days until this Christmas.
Speaker 2:But then, of course, I had a follow-up question. How many days till next Christmas? It says, would you like me to search judge... Would you like me to ask judge EPT? You can't tell me?
Speaker 2:You can't just add three sixty five to forty five? Like, what are we doing here? Insane that he would wanna hand that off. And when it does, it doesn't pass all the context still. It's like...
Speaker 1:I had a great Siri moment. Yeah. I wanted to figure out what a certain... The title of a certain song. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And it has Shazam integrated.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Shazam integration is
Speaker 1:good. Underrated.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I don't think that I don't think that any of the other... I don't think Muse, I don't think Dots, I don't think Opus five five can do that if you open up and say...
Speaker 1:I asked I even I even asked I asked Rocke because it was a song playing in a video on x. Oh, yeah. It's really
Speaker 2:bad at that, which is weird.
Speaker 1:Let me let me pull up...
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I think Rocke doesn't always have access to, like, the underlying m p four file and can, process it properly. It And probably doesn't have, like, tool used to go to something to...
Speaker 1:Yeah. If Rockefeller just said that it was... They just picked a word out of the caption of the video and and suggested that it was that song. Was like... It's completely wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyways.
Speaker 2:I mean, the... On the new iPhone, you can assign dots to the side... To the action button now, which I think is gonna be an an an evolution sort of like the serial replacement. You can't replace the this button the button on this side, but you can replace the button on this side. And with the dots call, you can just immediately start the conversation, start back up.
Speaker 2:And then you can also map it to text dots now because dots has a has a a an iMessage integration, basically, like Yeah. Text integration. So you can just text it there and it'll just text you right back, which might be good. But there's still these, like, hard things where a lot of times, like, the Siri pro... Like, the job to be done with a Siri product is very, very quick responses.
Speaker 2:Like, I want ultra, ultra fast. I want instant for almost everything because I wanna ask, know, how many days until next Christmas, basically. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what what happens with this. And and and also just the rollout of Apple intelligence. Like, we've heard about the Gemini deal.
Speaker 2:When is that actually coming? Do you need a new phone? Do you need an update? Is it still in process? Like, when is it coming?
Speaker 2:They'll update the UI and the visual, but then the capabilities don't seem to be updated. And it's all just, like, very confusing, like, when is it here? And then, of course, there's the question about the agentic stuff. Because it, like, one of the first demos I heard about Muse from somebody who loved it was sort of a sort of an unnecessary task, but he was he was able to get Muse to set up a Twilio account and go through his contact book and check for phone numbers that were dead and like delete those contacts or delete those phone numbers. So you don't ever try and call someone and it's like, oh, they've changed their number.
Speaker 1:Kinda realistically... Happens like so much. It's like... Much.
Speaker 2:But having a nice and clean contact book, maybe that's nice to scroll through. I don't I don't really use my contact book that way. Usually, just...
Speaker 1:I'd rather ask muse how do I my mindset.
Speaker 2:Yes. But Personally. Like Siri's... That that should be the domain of Siri. Right?
Speaker 2:Siri should nail that. And and if it can't, that's that's a feature that needs to be rolled out pretty quickly. Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:I mean we're we're we're joking here about Apple being behind on AI but they're not behind in the stock market. Like, it's the Number biggest number Number one.
Speaker 1:And it's
Speaker 2:and they haven't over leveraged themselves in any way. They're just doing great.
Speaker 7:Up 30% year to date.
Speaker 2:Up 30% year
Speaker 1:to date.
Speaker 2:So, know, hate it as a consumer maybe, but love it as a shareholder for sure. For sure. Well, our next guest is here live in person with us. I'll tell you about Figma while he comes in. Agents, meet the canvas.
Speaker 2:Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system contacts. And we have Jonathan from Sweetgreen. Welcome back to the show, Jonathan. It's great to see you.
Speaker 1:Incredible fit. Incredible fit. I need to get the same because I have more casual guys. You can see Yeah. That's kind of a good middle ground,
Speaker 4:you know.
Speaker 1:You can go anywhere. You can go anywhere in that.
Speaker 2:No. You're not getting turned away.
Speaker 1:Woah. Good to
Speaker 2:see you guys.
Speaker 1:What do we have here?
Speaker 2:What do we have?
Speaker 4:So we brought you brought you some new things we're launching tomorrow. These feel warm. These are our new sourdough chocolate chip cookies that are launching tomorrow. Amazing.
Speaker 1:Christmas came early.
Speaker 4:Every day. And then we're... The big launch, this is the this is a small piece of it, but we're launching dinner plates tomorrow. Dinner... We we
Speaker 1:brought it for
Speaker 4:everyone here, so...
Speaker 1:Amazing. Fantastic.
Speaker 4:To see some of the new things that we launched. Really the hero is this new chicken. So really leaning into the protein. It's a new rotisserie style chicken and it's 50% bigger.
Speaker 2:And this has 250 grams of protein in it?
Speaker 4:No, no, no, Not quite. But you'll see it's a lot more chicken, a lot hardier. So I know you guys are on air, but for later...
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is tough to sit here and be able to smell it but not want to eat on air. But it looks amazing. You've solved the younger version of me. I wouldn't have had to ask for double protein.
Speaker 4:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:You solved that.
Speaker 2:For sure. How's the business doing overall? Tell me how Q3 shake out.
Speaker 4:We just reported q three. Yeah. We're seeing a lot of momentum. You know, we saw a lot of disruption from Cyclospora, but I think this... The transformation strategy we're on is working.
Speaker 4:And we saw September comps get flat as Cyclospora started to fade. October comped 5% Okay. And November accelerated.
Speaker 2:That's good.
Speaker 4:So I think all the things are working. It starts just better customer experience Yeah. In restaurants. Lot of it's just the consistency
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And the investments we've made around training, development, how we pay our teams. Yeah. Lot of it's the menu Yeah. Working and resonating. So wraps, which we launched here...
Speaker 4:Launched six months ago. We launched, you know, a few different versions of it. We had this big collaboration with Molly Baz going this past month
Speaker 1:Awesome.
Speaker 4:Which has done really well. And so, yeah. And I think, you know, the marketing branding has all all all been a little bit more culturally relevant. So a lot of good momentum. A lot of good momentum for the...
Speaker 2:You been seeing any movement in agent to commerce? There's this post from OpenTable's native integration...
Speaker 4:On our company Slack.
Speaker 2:190,000 people to restaurants just in the month of September. At the same time, like last week we were talking about like, oh wow, agentic stuff is not taking off because there was some report that like Muse drove like 12 customers to DoorDash or But something like what have you been seeing? Like, what's actually happening?
Speaker 4:So it's interesting to me that we're seeing more agented traffic than companies that do, you know, million, you know A booking many many more times our volumes. Yeah. Listen, it's it's still small but growing rapidly.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:From June till October Yeah. Pretty much saw agentic orders... It pretty much doubled from June to October and you're seeing that accelerate now.
Speaker 2:It makes sense. The products are so complicated to use. They're buried in other apps and you gotta install a new app or or figure out the new flow and set it up and that just takes time.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so it works today out of the box. Yeah. You know, even The Daily had like an episode about Muse. Sure.
Speaker 2:In that
Speaker 4:episode, they order Sweetgreen.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:No. That's cool.
Speaker 4:We're now very close to announcing connectors with Muse Instinct Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah. All
Speaker 4:of know, we'll play with everyone. Yeah. We'll also have our own Sure. Our own agent where it will be more around the personalization and kind of brand voice that we want. Sure.
Speaker 4:Sure. Sure. Obviously, DoorDash and others are gonna have their agents. We see this as a very exciting platform shift.
Speaker 1:And that's because you want you want people to use... You'd you'd prefer somebody to use a sweet green agent. You guys get the order and then figure out how to get it to the customer Correct. Versus like having it come through an Uber Eats or DoorDash?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Oh, listen. DoorDash is actually our partner for the logistics side Yeah. Our native deli... What we call our native delivery, but we prefer if we have the direct relationship.
Speaker 4:We get... We have the data, we can email them and market to them, so we see the higher LTV of that guest. Yeah. Obviously, we make a better margin for the guest. It's much better because we charge...
Speaker 4:There's a markup on marketplaces. All restaurants are marking up on marketplaces to make sure the margin works. So coming direct, that becomes one of the big opportunities around this platform shift. But we're excited. It's growing a ton.
Speaker 4:We've set up our... You know, the investments we've made in our technology and infrastructure has set it up where we can move really quickly on this. And we're just seeing month over month increases here and I think over time this will be a pretty big force in the industry.
Speaker 1:What work do you guys do to track consumer trends and preferences around health when I think like sourdough chocolate chip cookies? Like that feels like you're, I've seen that kind of as a value prop like hero ingredient for baked goods and like I like the farmer's market Mhmm. Right? When I go near my house. So it's very exciting that you guys are like kind of closing the sort of closing the loop faster from like consumer preference to like, here's a product that you can get in tons and tons of in tons of restaurants all over the country.
Speaker 1:But like how early is your team working to like identify those trends? Because ideally, it's like you notice that this is something that people are wanting and then you can immediately start R and D and get the product out.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So you see it first in the coast and you see it on social media. Yeah. So, you know, we have a lot of restaurants on New York and New York and LA, but we also have a lot of restaurants in the middle of the country, in the suburbs, in Indianapolis. We have about 300 restaurants nationally.
Speaker 4:So we have to... We are watching all these trends and finding out like where is that right tipping point moment Yeah. Where with our help we can make something go mainstream. Sourdough is one of those examples, like us getting rid of seed oils was another one of those Post midterms.
Speaker 2:Bring it back? Post midterms are pretty...
Speaker 4:You know what's really funny? We got rid of seed oils....
Speaker 2:Weather fan. Okay.
Speaker 4:We got rid seed oils in 2022. And then after the midterms happened, after the election, we had a lot of people ask us. I had the New York Times ask if we got seed... We got rid of seed oils because of this. I'm like, no.
Speaker 1:We got the reason I was so bullish on that trend is like there's very few things where it's like better for you and tastes better. Right? And so like the combination of those two things just make it like a very natural decision.
Speaker 2:100%.
Speaker 1:It's not like you're making this big sacrifice. Like a lot of stuff historically like if you wanted to just eat... Yeah. If you wanted to be vegan and then you're eating like vegan chicken, it's like that's an extreme sacrifice. It's it's not gonna it's not gonna taste as good.
Speaker 1:So certain people will will make that call. But...
Speaker 4:You hit our exact... Like, what is Sweetgreen in a nutshell? Like, is our job? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Is making food that tastes better and is better for you. Like, that Yeah. Is like our number one thing that we try to think about how we do every single day. Yeah. On your question, there's also like a lot of these like trend spotters Yeah.
Speaker 4:That we watch. Like Infatuation came out with one today Sure. Around like trends and things like that. We're always watching those.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I'd say my partner Nick is probably like a little bit of an oracle as it comes to this, having done this for so long and so tapped in. Yeah. Really can kind of like see ahead on when those things are kind of growing and when they'll crest. There are a lot of now AI tools that are helping us. You know, use...
Speaker 4:You know, with Listen Labs is one that we use Oh, for understanding the consumer. They got acquired by Salesforce.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:We all... We've also looked at a lot of these digital twin companies. You guys have probably seen some of these ones. They're fascinating. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They can act... Useful for you.
Speaker 4:We're just piloting it. Sure. But it's really interesting. Yeah. We just looked at this one called Simile.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We've had the founder on. Yeah. Mean... So he was...
Speaker 1:We always mess with him where we're like, so how many times have you simulated this conversation? He's like, well I knew you were going to ask that.
Speaker 2:It's funny. Go back to Cyclospora.: Yeah.: Sweetgreen was not affected directly, but take me through a little bit of that story and how it wound up affecting you through the second order effects. This is the lettuce contamination that people heard about over the summer, but how did you learn about it, process that story? How did it actually affect the business? Why?:
Speaker 4:Yeah. So Cyclospora is a parasite
Speaker 1:--:
Speaker 4:Yeah.: that comes through the water typically. And what happened is there was an there's an outbreak because it was in some iceberg lettuce from a single farm in Mexico Woah. That got into the Taco Bell supply chain.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. I remember these.
Speaker 4:The number of... You know, what people have to know about cycle spores, it's an endemic. It happens every year. It's happened every year. You just never heard about it.
Speaker 4:Interesting. There's about... You know, there's thousands of reported cases every year. Okay. About ten thousand reported cases.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's small.
Speaker 4:It's small. There was a lot of reporting this year. Okay. I won't comment on to why. But there was a lot of reporting on it even when it was small.
Speaker 4:In the hundreds of cases, a lot of people were starting... The media was picking it up and talking about it. And I think it was one of those things that we weren't impacted, many others were not impacted. Most others weren't impacted. It was really a singular farm in Taco Bell being impacted.
Speaker 4:Interesting. But the media and then the derivatives of it and the memes started saying explosive diarrhea.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:Yep. You know, don't eat lettuce. At one point, they said don't eat blueberries. And then that the narrative just got out of control.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:And we did a lot to try to like calm that, talk about we know where our food comes from, we're not impacted.
Speaker 5:Yep. But people were just spooked.
Speaker 2:I mean Yep.
Speaker 4:You probably saw it in your own communities. People are just staying away from Lettuce. Produce, lettuce and all those things. And so you know, it took it took almost over two months
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Of that to kind of go away. Yeah. But thank God...
Speaker 2:That's why I went carnivore five
Speaker 5:years ago. That
Speaker 4:was that was the reason?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was just terrified of cyclospora.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I would eat steaks every day.
Speaker 5:It was a moment
Speaker 4:for us to like talk to our consumers more about... All of a sudden people cared
Speaker 2:a lot
Speaker 4:about where their food was coming from. Totally.
Speaker 2:Which is actually good for the benefit because you've already set up all the infrastructure. Yeah. Now you have to go pivot everything. No. We got you.
Speaker 2:It's just a messenger.
Speaker 4:And we we have something that most restaurants don't, which is traceability. So we have this fact that we can trace all of our ingredients directly to the farm at the case number. So we know like Yeah. You know, at this restaurant, at this time, this food was served, and if there was an issue, we could trace that back. So there's an opportunity to tell that story.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But at the of the day, people were spooked, you know, the the media with the narrative just got so out of control. And thank God, it went away and people are back to eating salads and...
Speaker 1:Yeah. Honestly, I forgot about it. Yeah.... This conversation. But I do remember at the time seeing the headlines and just texting my wife being like, hey, just be mindful of
Speaker 2:this. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Well, other thing is, know, Sweetgreen Wild, we're very known for salads. As you can see here, this doesn't look like a salad at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, and so it did give us an opportunity to really lean into the other parts of the menu, especially as, you know, we got ready. We knew this was coming, our big plates launch. Yep. So really pushing into really like the same sourcing ethos, scratch cooking ethos.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, hearty food, rice, chicken, broccoli.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We had Keller from Zipline on the show last week talking about... It's been fun to talk with him and get updates. Some... One of the things I'm most excited about is being able to access restaurants that are like typically like outside of so many of my favorite restaurants are outside of delivery range for my house. And, that just feels like something that for you guys as you're thinking about, you know, what stores you're you're currently in, what what new stores you're adding, something to be mindful of.
Speaker 1:Because I think at this point, there's enough momentum. It feels like... It feels very inevitable that like a lot of the food that you will get delivered will be through these sort of like, you know, local drone delivery networks. But how are you thinking about it timeline wise?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I love Keller. I met him, I don't know, 2018 or '19 probably and when it saw, you know, what he was building and was super impressed. We signed up to be an early partner with them. I think what it's gonna do is it's gonna accelerate what you've already seen, which is needing less restaurants to fulfill a demand.
Speaker 4:So whereas Yep. Typically, you know, maybe in New York, you'd have 60 restaurants. Yeah. Maybe you don't need 60, maybe you need 40 because because of the omnichannel nature of it. I think Yeah.
Speaker 4:Drone is just gonna accelerate that. It's still very early in terms of the number of orders they're doing, where they're doing it, mostly, you know, working... It's not really working much in the urban environment, it really unlocks the suburban. But I think the way he's kind of run his business focusing on Africa and like the medical supplies first to really prove out a business case and build a business model around it and then get into food and of course the partnership with Walmart was brilliant. So I think I definitely...
Speaker 4:I'm much more bullish on that than I am like the robots. Yeah. Like the robots, you know, on on... That are driving along the sidewalk. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Obviously, DoorDash has their version, DoorDash air. Think more and more people to get in But I think the way Zip Line has built it is is really clever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't... Quiet, people will probably be more receptive to the drone in the air.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I just think when when when they're ubiquitous, even in certain regions, people are gonna just order takeout a lot more. Mhmm. Because it's like ordering takeout is awesome and whatever, but depending on where you are, it's like every single time it arrives, it's not in the condition that it should be, which is like...
Speaker 4:And it's expensive. Yeah. It's expensive when you add the tip and everything and this can this can really actually start to solve
Speaker 2:for that. How have you thought about ghost kitchens? Have you ever done a physical location, a kitchen with you where you cannot walk in and buy something? It's delivery only.
Speaker 4:So early in the ghost kitchen days, we piloted a bunch of them.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:We found that they didn't really make sense because you still have so much of the capital.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it turns out that having your sign on the door and having people be able to walk in does drive a lot of demand. Yep. What we do do is we do effectively build a ghost kitchen in our restaurants. Sure. Some have...
Speaker 4:They all have at least like a digital make line, but we have probably 15 or 20 restaurants around the country. They're almost like our delivery catering hubs.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:So we have, you know, in kind of super dense areas, you'll have a full sweet green restaurant with its own digital line, but somewhere either upstairs, downstairs or in the back will be a separate
Speaker 2:More prep.
Speaker 4:Separate like kitchen in order for where we can move all the delivery and catering. And that helps us get the delivery drivers and the flow out of the restaurants nearby so they can focus on the customer there. And for large catering orders, they can be very disruptive to the to the core operation. So we kind of have this like hybrid approach where we build these hybrid ghost kitchen restaurants. Sure.
Speaker 4:I think that there's there's brands that have made it work, especially if you can work on multiple, you know, work multiple day parts and the guys that are doing like multiple brands under a kitchen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That seems like the more... And that's like knock offs.
Speaker 4:And it's good to... It's a good way to test into a market Sure. Because you can open for less capital. You can kind of test into it. But you'll see like, you know, even like Goop, they started Ghost Kitchen, they just opened a brick and mortar.
Speaker 4:Yep. So it kind of is... Think about it like the way like a DTC, like every DTC company will start as a DTC and if they're successful, they'll open... They'll go omnichannel and open retail. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I see restaurants in a similar way where it's a good way to like test your product
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 4:Be able to iterate quickly. Mhmm. But over time, if you want a real brand, you're gonna want brick and mortar as well.
Speaker 2:What areas or locations or types of retail locations are on the biggest upswing? Like everyone has been talking about like the death of the American mall for years. But what's growing? I mean, we were in New York and there were like lines down the streets for a bunch of stores. Is it more urban environments, wealthier communities, suburban areas?
Speaker 2:Like, where where are you seeing like an upswing in just retail value? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Well, it's it's actually interesting. In the restaurant world Yeah. What's... What was totally out of fashion is hot again.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:Two hottest of restaurants right now, public company restaurants, Cheesecake Factory. Yeah. And let me look at their...
Speaker 2:That's because of the aesthetics in there.
Speaker 5:That's... By the way, I'm curious
Speaker 4:I'm really curious to see what happens to their sales because they just reported earnings and it... They reported before the whole White House aesthetic conversation happened. I'm curious what that did to their sales. The other one has been Chili's. I think that younger consumer wanting experiences again.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Interestingly, malls
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Are... We don't have a lot of mall restaurants. We have like a handful of them. Yeah. But you are seeing an upswing in traffic in a lot of malls.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You're seeing in real estate is similar to what you're seeing in the overall economy. It's kind of this k shape
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Where like the best real estate is getting way more expensive and then there's like a divergence for the rest.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I love these chain restaurants but it's always hard to get a group of friends to go to one because my friends are hoity toity and fancy for these things. So what I'll do is I'll say, okay, yeah, I wanna go to The Cheesecake Factory, but I know you don't wanna go because you don't think that it's high quality. But let me tell you, the chef at this one in particular...
Speaker 1:It's like if you know, you know.
Speaker 5:Genius. He's a savant.
Speaker 2:And it will be unlike any other cheesecake. This one punches above its weight class by a thousand x, so we gotta go.
Speaker 4:They they do have an executive chef in every restaurant. Yes. I'll give them some...
Speaker 2:And there must be some variation. There's a huge... The worst Cheesecake Factory in the world in the world probably 10 times worse than the best.
Speaker 4:By the way, we have a kind of variation in our restaurants because if you're making your food from scratch Yeah. In the restaurants and you're not bringing it in bagged and putting it a microwave Yeah. You're gonna have that variance. Like the biggest thing we worked on in terms of launching this
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Is we had to upscale our our the chefs in all the Sure. Sure. In the kitchen. So we have 800 of these chefs, these are what we call kitchen leads, and over the...: Smells so good.
Speaker 5:This is brutal. Got a...: Should we wrap
Speaker 2:it up?: Next
Speaker 1:time, you're only allowed to at the end
Speaker 2:of You're the have lunch break during the
Speaker 5:show.: We got like
Speaker 2:cookie. You will be...
Speaker 5:But yeah,
Speaker 4:the vary... I mean, the variance in skill level really can drive the food quality. And Yeah. Credit like cheesecake, huge portions, maybe not so good for you in that respect.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:They actually make their food from scratch. Yeah. They are like do have a... We we've hired a lot of people from Cheesecake.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I like hiring them because they know how to deal with a ton of complexity. Like if you can run a kitchen... Because the menu is... Menu that massive, like you can come and run a Sweetgreen.
Speaker 2:I mean, I believe that...
Speaker 1:What's the state of like emerging restaurant brands? Because I feel like you guys... From from from what I can remember, you guys prompted like a wave of people being like, I'm gonna make the sweet green for x Mhmm. Whatever whatever their category was. And so many of them I imagine got to like a handful of locations and then real...
Speaker 1:Like for some reason or another didn't break out and get to the to to the hundreds of restaurant scale. But like, what do you what do you... When you're meeting a a early stage founder that is like maybe going from one to five locations, what indicators do you look for that they can go to to hundreds?
Speaker 4:So it's really hard, you know, I I advise a lot of these founders and I... What I tell them is you you gotta kinda pick. You either gotta stay in the like zero to five, maybe seven or eight restaurants where you can manage the whole thing yourselves and you can make a lot of money. Mhmm. You have seven successful restaurants.
Speaker 4:You don't need a lot of infrastructure and overhead. Or if you decide to go and wanna scale it, it's a totally different game. Because now you have to build real infrastructure, invest in G and A and restaurants are so capital intensive. I think one reason you saw Sweet Greens and others growing in the twenty tens is the Zurp era helped us all. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. We were able to raise enormous amounts of money Sure. Where, know, it's really hard to do that and most restaurants that get to that point kinda have to scale slowly and scale through their own cash Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, I mean, this happens with so many... Like in consumer packaged goods, people will be like, well, this company got to 2,000,000,000 of sales bootstrapped. And it's like, well, they did that over forty years. Yeah. It's like...
Speaker 1:And multiple years where they were growing like 5%. I'm gonna
Speaker 2:be like Red Bull. Yeah. Pretty sure that guy...
Speaker 5:It took it took a long it took a
Speaker 4:long time.
Speaker 2:And I
Speaker 4:think what'll... To answer your question, there's a lot of brands that I... That that do... That are awesome, but the the big question is always how scalable is it? Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Like if it works really well in like urban New York with five restaurants
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Most of The United States suburban. Like, you have to be able to work in the suburban strip center well as you work, you know Yeah. In Soho.
Speaker 2:How big of a cost is real estate?
Speaker 4:Real estate?
Speaker 2:Is it is it the majority...
Speaker 4:No. No. No. Labor is the driver of everything in a Like the the price of your food Because... Yeah.
Speaker 4:Is dictated by the cost of labor Sure. More than the cost of
Speaker 2:the food. Interesting. I always had this I always had this question about why isn't there a a chain restaurant that is a coffee shop in the morning, a lunch spot in the afternoon, and then dinner with drinks in a bar that goes until like almost 2AM. And so you're effectively willing to take customers money from six in the morning with a cup of coffee till Yeah. One p...
Speaker 2:One 1AM with a with a glass of wine or a beer. And the reason is that even though you'd be, you know, amortizing the rental cost or the the real estate cost over more hours in the day, that's not gonna do that much and you're adding so much more complexity.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's it's the complexity.
Speaker 5:Okay. So
Speaker 1:you try to find five people that are down to work every night Yeah. That have... Who would
Speaker 2:just work twenty three hours a day.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I would
Speaker 2:show them Jocko Welling's good.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And I would say,
Speaker 2:this is the path to greatness.
Speaker 5:But people people
Speaker 4:are trying, you know, like Yeah. What makes McDonald's great? Three great... Three solid day parts. Yes.
Speaker 4:They're one of the only brands that have breakfast Yep. Solid breakfast, a lunch and dinner.
Speaker 2:And it all works.
Speaker 4:All works. Wendy's, you guys are following that story. You know, they have the hostile takeover happening right now.
Speaker 1:Yep. And everything... What's happening with their stock with the Jensen news?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Didn't start at Wendy's?
Speaker 1:Up 2%.
Speaker 4:No, started at Denny's. So what's
Speaker 2:the Denny's stock doing? That's the question.
Speaker 1:Delist Real estate is about 8.
Speaker 4:You want it to be definitely sub 10% revenue. Like if you're good, a Chipotle is running like probably five or 6% of revenue on real estate.
Speaker 1:Wow. Your mental model was more wrong.
Speaker 4:But but you know where you're you're not... Idea. Is you are leveraging the CapEx Yeah. And you're leveraging the management labor
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so those are two big Yeah. Parts of it. But...
Speaker 2:So you're saying there's a...
Speaker 4:There there's a way like... You know, you guys have probably been to like Great White here in LA.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like, they do a great job because they've they've really figured
Speaker 4:out an all day menu. Like, they do great breakfast Yeah. Great lunch, great dinner, great weekends, and and it works. This is why I like... Why we're so focused on dinner.
Speaker 4:Yep. We have an amazing lunch. Huge. We have like an incredible lunch business, but only about a third of our business happens around after 5PM.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:Yep. And so like for us to win and really like achieve our mission and open thousands of restaurants, we need our dinner to be as strong as our lunch. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 5:Great to you.
Speaker 2:Great to see you as always.
Speaker 4:Always great to see you. Appreciate the pie
Speaker 1:shop. Hang
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you later. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform.
Speaker 2:That powers it. And we have our next guest in the waiting room. We are ready to move on to some funding news. There he is. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:How are you doing? Thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 11:I am doing fabulous. Happy Monday.
Speaker 2:Happy Monday. Chaos Great to have
Speaker 1:you.
Speaker 2:And in the in the Wall Street Journal. But fortunately, your business is going smoothly.
Speaker 1:Chaotic. Growth.
Speaker 2:All good news.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Violently violently up into the right.
Speaker 2:That's good. Yeah.
Speaker 11:Tell it... We got we got the real economy as a good theme for today.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 11:Yes. Definitely. Nothing but optimism in the real economy.
Speaker 2:Tell us about that.
Speaker 11:I love to. It's good to see you again.
Speaker 4:Good to
Speaker 11:see you. Yeah. We are announcing our $240,000,000 series c for Naughty. What? Come on.
Speaker 11:Big time.
Speaker 1:Blew my eardrums out.
Speaker 11:Honestly, mine too. I'm like, I'm gonna... I need to bring it down a notch, but... It's a good offer though. It's been
Speaker 2:for a long time.
Speaker 4:I know.
Speaker 11:Really, really, really well done. I think you, like, you really nailed the suspension apparatus to, like, maximize long term vibration, which which
Speaker 1:you can do with nominal.
Speaker 2:There we go. Oh my
Speaker 1:god. Lean head with the lights.
Speaker 2:It was warmed up from earlier in the show.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I actually... I think I think we just came up with... I think we need to, like, measure the vibration of that gong and keep you, like, a live tracker in the back on your all time gong hits.
Speaker 1:Oh, that would be good. If we had a we had a video play, like, a a monitor in here that we could actually measure the the power
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Of the hit, that would be excellent.
Speaker 11:Yeah. We we can do a lot more than power.
Speaker 1:This is exactly why was created.
Speaker 2:It goes ding?
Speaker 1:To solve this Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Definitely. Yeah. Tell you, jokes aside, talk about the growth of the business. 3.5 to date, huge.
Speaker 2:What's driving it? What... What's on the product development side? And then where's the customer adoption been?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Totally. And just just to reintroduce folks to Naughty, think Please. You know, we build software purpose built for the engineers. We're building in the physical world.
Speaker 11:So think, you know, across aerospace systems, advanced manufacturing, and energy, all over the place. Like, you know, we are very much in this moment of, like, the industrial world is getting just reinvented in front of us. Mhmm. And, you know, Naughty has been just an unbelievable beneficiary through all of that change, and and this has been a very just particular interesting year. Both, like, the tidal wave of, like, the change in the market.
Speaker 11:You know, I think we've had a a lot of really awesome success we've announced in our government business and, you know, what it does look like to serve the government directly as they make sure the complex things they buy for more vendors than ever work. But, you know, we're also serving all around the, you know, the supply chain now. You know, people developing in systems, rockets, planes, trains, and cars, and all of the subsystems that go into them, actuators and batteries and all the different things that have to come together in a supply chain to, you know, help you go build those things. And we're just in this moment where, like, people want to accelerate, and people need products like Nominal to do it, and they're just so dramatically underserved by anything else available to them. So 2026 has been awesome.
Speaker 11:A lot of this fundraise is actually really about... One of the one of the really important parts of this year has been we have really just, I'll just say, realized and stepped stepped into this role of helping this discipline, helping the industrial sector and engineers in the industrial sector adopt AI. Mhmm. And so you hear about it everywhere else. And, of course, like, it's changed the life of every software engineer you know and every banker and lawyer and marketer.
Speaker 11:You know, everyone kinda has, you know, either the purpose built thing for them, or they have, like, figured out a way to go build some kind of crazy set of tools around them. But this is a discipline where, like, there's just a ton of consequence and a ton of history and a ton of reality where it's hard for agents to make contact with reality in a way you can trust it as a hardware engineer. And that is really what our series c has been about is is stepping into that moment. We're announcing a lot of things with it. Yeah.
Speaker 11:But, yeah, it's it's really just all about that very particular Yeah. Intersection.
Speaker 2:Walk me through the... Like a hypothetical case study. So Audi recently just announced that they're establishing their first US production site in Georgia. They're investing $4,000,000,000 creating 4,500 jobs. That's a production site.
Speaker 2:Doesn't sound like a lot of R and D. Is that an opportunity for Nominal to plug in to a manufacturer, an auto make... An automaker at that scale? Or is this just something where you might try and plug into their R and D hub internationally? Where is the line?
Speaker 2:Where is the biggest value these days?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think we did ourselves both a wonderful justice in the market, but maybe a disservice to the broader tech industry by saying we help people things. Yeah. What people don't realize is that testing never stops in the life of a piece of hardware.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 11:You simulate something, you're testing it. Yep. You put it together for the first time, you're testing it. Yep. And by the way, as you build it on a manufacturing line, every single step you're having to walk yourself through the core question of, is it working in the way I expected it to?
Speaker 11:Yep. Or am I building the right thing in the first place? Mhmm. And so, you know, this was really about us positioning for our customers how to adopt us. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:But, like, very much, like, yes, that is like manufacturing use cases are amazing phenomenal because we can come alongside them and help them make sure, you know, every station is doing what it is supposed to. But probably more importantly, is it getting better? Mhmm. You know, we're in a moment where, like... Think, like, aerospace hasn't had to think about, like, volume in a really long time.
Speaker 11:And so much of our bread and butter business is in aerospace where, like, you know, we are coming in and teaching them a lot of, like, here's, like, what's happening at the bleeding edge of automotive. Yeah. Here's how you can think about not just making one thing go five times the speed of sound, a 100 things go five times the speed of sound and build them really quickly. Mhmm. And build them in a way that, you know, you can trust them and maintain them and and of
Speaker 1:course manufacture them. And that... How are you guys...... One by picture. Should...
Speaker 1:What's the best mental model for your guys' approach? Is it like a cursor where you are leveraging models from the Frontier Labs and then and then making your own, you know, post training, you know, open source models? Are you guys buying data yourselves? Like, where where is the focus? I I think it's like an interesting sort of resource allocation problem because you guys are gonna have the trust and the end relationship with these, like, organizations that need to have a...
Speaker 1:Yeah. Again, like a huge amount of trust because there's like national security implications. I can I can see how you guys can vend in a bunch of different solutions, but it's interesting? Like, do you spend the... Do you spend all this money and time trying to make your own models when you have to...
Speaker 1:By this point, you should assume that all the frontier models are just gonna keep getting better and better and better in in sort of like weird spiky ways that that weren't always perfectly predictable, like, let's say, like, year ago, two years ago.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I mean, think we we are a purpose built company.
Speaker 11:We purpose build for hardware engineers. And so what that what that... How that comes to life is it is not just about models, but, like, everything we build, we are thinking about how do we bring that technology the last mile into a way that they can adopt it. So, you know, what informs an AI strategy is thinking about, like, well, what constraints are on a hardware team? Constraint number one, connectivity sucks in the real world.
Speaker 11:You very rarely have a constant and reliable Internet connection even if you're on a manufacturing line floor. Mhmm. Sometimes that's because of IT infrastructure. Sometimes that's because of some national security security constraint. But it doesn't matter if you're building an aerospace, automotive, or energy, really anywhere in the industrial sector.
Speaker 11:Like, connectivity is a really big important problem, and it's a lot of, like, why the cloud didn't make its way here. They use it for simulation, and they use it for these variety of things. But, like, they are full stack in the truest of senses. You have to think about how computers and compute infrastructure is going to work in my organization. So how that informs Phenomenal is, like, if we are going to build agents for, you know, for these customers, for them to be able to trust them, yes, sometimes we have great access to Internet, and we should absolutely be using a frontier model in that moment and giving them a really clear picture of, you know, how that model is helping them make a decision and how do you audit that model and give them perfect responses coming back from it.
Speaker 11:That does look a lot like Harvey and Rockefeller and all of these companies building these, like, intelligence platforms, like, for a discipline. But Naughty has a really unique thing where, you know, we have a team of 15 who is only thinking about compute infrastructure. Yeah. How do we take everything we build and make sure it can work in a how about a waterproof on a navy ship?
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. Yeah.
Speaker 11:You know? So, like, that tells you what you need to do with models. So, like, you think our model strategy is not just about, like, we're gonna go build a frontier model because we need good gross margins. It's like, we're gonna build a model that works waterproof on a navy ship. Oh, by the way, we're also gonna go figure out what it looks like to work on a manufacturing line floor when you have gigahertz level data streaming into this thing and you have to make a decision.
Speaker 11:Or thirty years of records, then we have to make this warranty call. Like, there's just so many intricacies that come in hardware, but it is bigger than just, you know, asking a chatbot what to do. It's like managing a ton of context and helping them, like, build in the realities of the compute infrastructure they have.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Fascinating position and opportunity Yeah. To make sure that intelligence is accessible underwater, maybe a little bit.
Speaker 11:Least accessible to, you know, you're not in Yeah. If you're not in New York or San Francisco and you ask someone what they do and they answer engineer, the vast majority of the economy, that is Training. Mechanical, electrical, aerospace, chemical engineers. People that build the real world and we want them to benefit from AI too.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it. Great stuff, Bryce. Thank you so much for popping on the show. And we'll talk to Congrats
Speaker 1:to the team. Of course. Goodbye. Later.
Speaker 2:See you soon. Up next, we've Adam Blake, co founder and CEO of Mavria coming on the show. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Adam... What's going on?
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for hopping on the show.
Speaker 1:Great great setup here. You look more high definition than we do somehow.
Speaker 2:Oh, it looks great. Please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 6:Yeah. My name is Adam Blake. I'm the CEO of Mavria. And we started Mavria because we believe the next phase of the AI race is gonna be won or lost in the physical world. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And America's leading today in AI because of our technology and our people, but our physical infrastructure isn't keeping up. So that's the gap that we're planning to close. And we're starting with data centers as a product. So we actually make that infrastructure as a product. Terrain is a manufactured data center that integrates cooling, power, controls, and a structure into a repeatable five megawatt block.
Speaker 6:And we're building the first unit right now in Houston.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:We're starting with data centers, but our ambition is much bigger. We want to fundamentally change how America develops and builds the infrastructure behind AI. And then today is like the first time we're coming out of quasi stealth and unveiling the company and talking about our partners.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. Tell me about the the shape, the size. I imagine this is built in a factory and then delivered on a truck. Are we talking roughly
Speaker 1:It's five megawatts.
Speaker 2:Five megawatts. Are we talking shipping container size, bigger, multiple pieces that come together? How will this actually be instantiated in the physical world?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's gonna be multiple pieces coming together. Mhmm. And we we made some design decisions that were pretty important. We wanted to be standard and repeatable in these five megawatt blocks.
Speaker 6:So you could put this on a small site, for example, on the distribution grid, or it could be part of a multi 100 megawatt campus, for example. So, yeah, there's... Like, if you wanna think about, like, pure pure size, you can get five megawatts on, like, less than an acre.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And then, you know, 25 megawatts on, like, less than 10 acres.
Speaker 5:Not bad.
Speaker 2:Might have to do
Speaker 1:that Malibu.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're gonna have that from Malibu. So then then what what are the actual other integration points? I imagine that once you've built this structure, you are then partnering with a a neo cloud operator who will decide what in... What chips are in a rack, whether they're going AMD or Nvidia or whatever that's not on you.
Speaker 2:And then they still need to provide land, power, water. What else are they providing? What are the key ingredients to actually a successful partnership with you?
Speaker 6:Yeah. No. So you nailed it. So we're not a neo cloud. We're not providing the GPUs.
Speaker 6:We're partnering with those types of companies. Mhmm. And they typically bring basically power LAN, and then we do... We take care of everything else besides putting in the GPUs. So everything from the manufacturing of the product to the physical delivery and bring up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then and then on the water side, is that something that you're doing closed loop so you can, like, bring in a truck of water? Or do you need a a well on-site? Like, how how does that how does that fit into the modular story?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, basically, when when you use liquid cooling, you don't really need on-site water.
Speaker 4:I mean,
Speaker 6:you can truck it in to initially fill the closed loops. Yeah. And then anything you need on an ongoing basis is pretty immaterial. I mean, you'll typically have, like, bathrooms and, like, sinks and stuff like that on-site, a normal, like, office building would. Yeah.
Speaker 6:That's really all that you need the water for.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:What... Who are... Like, what are the right scale customers at this point? Like, I imagine, like, you might have a customer... Like, like, if a hyperscaler comes to you, are you set up to be able to deliver at that scale yet?
Speaker 1:Or would that be almost a distraction because you wanna just dial in this, like, modularity to start and then scale up from there.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So right now, we're building our first unit, like, as we speak in Houston. That's gonna be done by the end of the year, and then we're gonna be rolling out in smaller volumes in q one. And then we're aiming to hit full production capacity of more than a gigawatt per year by middle of two thousand twenty seven from our Houston facility.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's huge. Tell us about fundraising. What can you tell us? Who's been involved?
Speaker 2:And I'd love to hit the gong for you just to celebrate coming out of stealth.
Speaker 6:Oh gosh. So first of I'm not a big fan of celebrating fundraisers. Mean
Speaker 1:But we are. Wow. We have an... Public enemy
Speaker 2:number one here.
Speaker 1:Thing good thing we are.
Speaker 2:Good thing we are. I'm gonna hit the gong anyway. We're not celebrating. No.
Speaker 1:I I For coming out of snow. I... I'm I'm with you. You know, I do think I do think you shouldn't celebrate them, but the world inevitably does.
Speaker 2:Disagree. Take the whole team
Speaker 1:They're big.
Speaker 2:To The Bahamas for a month. Take the whole team to a month. Bahamas for a month celebrate the fundraise. Fundraise every six months. You're working
Speaker 1:No. Well, we're gonna have you back when you're at when you're at at least, you know, hopefully before you're at gigawatt production run rates. But
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But... Yeah. So you got Paradigm in. Yep. AMP.
Speaker 1:AMP. There you go.
Speaker 6:Fantastic. We're super grateful, you know, to have those guys. It's an honor. So we actually did a $30,000,000 pre seed seed round with Ange back in June. Was basically a day one check.
Speaker 6:So, yeah, he was the first investor in. And then more recently, we did this $100,000,000 round that was led by Paradigm.
Speaker 2:Congrats. Well, thank you so much for coming.
Speaker 1:Last last question. I know I know we're, like, running behind today, but your thesis that, what are the kinds of businesses that over the next few years are going to be buying the smallest version of your product, like a five megawatt mini data center that... And what are the kind of use cases?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, look, first of all, think the thesis is that the demand for compute is coming in all shapes and sizes. Everything from... You know... I think you're gonna see compute at the residential level, obviously, all the way up to the gigawatt scale.
Speaker 6:And we've really decided to go after this, like, five megawatt block increment because there are thousands of sites across The US that exist on existing distribution infrastructure. I mean, there's probably a 100 plus gigawatts that if you could use batteries and agree to curtailment, that you could deploy our product on Yeah. On existing infrastructure. So a huge difference versus going and building new power generation and building new substations. So that's the market that we're really excited about.
Speaker 6:But at the same time, this product could be deployed on these, like, multi 100 megawatt sites, which obviously have been the favorite for most of these labs and hyperscalers recently.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just quickly adding capacity. Makes so much sense.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to meet you, Adam.
Speaker 2:We'll talk you soon.
Speaker 1:Great milestone.
Speaker 2:Have a good Talk soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.
Speaker 2:And up next, we have cofounder and CEO of Foundry Robotics, Adarsh, coming on the show to talk about building stuff again. Thank you so much for taking the time. Please inter... Introduce yourself and the company. Tell us about Foundry Robotics.
Speaker 1:What's up?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker 5:Thanks, Ross.
Speaker 1:It's crazy to
Speaker 3:have you. Foundry builds autonomous factories. We build factories from the ground up. We orient them towards robotics and autonomy. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:We actually provide manufacturing as a service to our customers so they don't have to pay attention to how many robots are involved. We are announcing our series a fundraise. It's a $100,000,000.
Speaker 5:Wow.
Speaker 3:The company's ten months old. It's about a 120... Do I get a...
Speaker 1:What? What took you so long? You've been at it for ten months.
Speaker 3:I know, man. We're we're going as fast as we can. We need more factories. Yeah. So so we're also unveiling our 130,000 square foot facility across the bridge in Emeryville.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 3:We're scaling up people. We're scaling up robots. We are doing everything in between as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So cool.
Speaker 2:What's the...
Speaker 1:So needed.
Speaker 2:What is the the power law product going to be? What is the most manufacturable product? Cars? Chips? I don't know.
Speaker 2:There's so many things that you could manufacture. Everything's manufactured. Right? Tables, chairs, diet cocaine?
Speaker 3:It's a great point. So fundamentally, right, because we build many things and we're flexible, I can build drones on Monday, batteries on Tuesday, satellites on Thursday. Mhmm. That means, to answer your question, it's not a power law product, but instead more like a power law set of primitives. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so we focus on assembly, we do precise placement, we do cabling, we do fastening, And so that allows you to focus on a ton of different products. So, like, right now, I'm shipping to customers in defense. We do autonomous submarines. We do robot dogs. We do some telecom hardware.
Speaker 3:We have, like, six or seven paying customers right now that we work with. It's more about how can I build as many things as possible under one roof that sort of follow the same tenants?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so for the first time in history, the more products that I build, the better I become at building all products. That's the beauty
Speaker 2:of Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you... Does... Do you think that robotics are going to basically break the sort of like laws of lean manufacturing? Right?
Speaker 1:Like, I hear, like, we make this on Monday, this on Tuesday, this on Wednesday, my immediate thought is like just because you can doesn't mean that would actually be the most efficient, but maybe maybe that is the future if you want if we want more manufacturing in The US, it needs to be more malleable and and on demand and maybe it's maybe it could be wasteful to have a massive facility that's only set up to make one kind of thing.
Speaker 3:Spot on. So there's this four block that people talk a lot about. Right? There's, like, high mix, slow mix, and then high volume, low volume. Right?
Speaker 3:And people always talk about, you know, high mix, low volume or low mix, high mo... High volume. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But Foundry kinda sits at that, like, section of the quadrant that's normally grayed out saying it's impossible, which is high mix, high volume. Right? And the and the reason that works, the reason it's desirable, right, I get this question a lot. Like, you know, when a company scales, if if I'm a drone company and I scaled a building a million drones a year, why don't I just run my own factory? Well, you're never gonna invest the same amount of time, effort, and engineering into the factory as I am Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Because the factory is my product. Mhmm. You're never gonna have the same unit economics. It's not gonna have the same autonomy, and you're not gonna have the same data that I do. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:On top of all that, the underlying sort of CapEx rigidity that you have to deal with when you build your own facility to build the one thing, Like, I don't have to deal with that. So we we think about this a lot. My cofounder, he ran the model y program at Tesla. Right? Best selling car in the world.
Speaker 3:And to launch the most recent model y, they spent a billion bucks in CapEx. Right? Which is crazy. Mhmm. And so if you think about it, right, like the amount of time flexibility, product flexibility, design flexibility I can offer my customers by actually being a factory company that treats robots in the factory as the core product, It's actually pretty unique.
Speaker 3:Even as you scale, you still wanna work with us.
Speaker 1:What, yeah. What what proof points are you looking for with these early customers that that's actually true? Right? Because, like, I I think when you're... Like, the the question becomes like, yeah, I imagine there's a bunch of companies in the Bay Area that want to build...
Speaker 1:Basically, want to build a low volume of things and if and if you... If they can buy that from you at a fixed price, they're like, great. Like, you're you're solving a bunch of problems for us. But the question is like, yeah, they do start to ramp one of these products and you you you have to be able to retain them.
Speaker 3:Here's the good news. Our customers aren't just the startups. Right? Like Huntington Ingalls, HII is one of our customers. Right?
Speaker 3:We do work on autonomous submarines with them, which is crazy. That's like an OG product. Yeah. No. Right?
Speaker 2:They make...
Speaker 3:They're they're not... That's the
Speaker 2:right sound for Huntington Ingalls, for sure.
Speaker 3:I appreciate that.
Speaker 6:That was
Speaker 3:very fitting.
Speaker 2:That's spot on.
Speaker 3:But they're they're not they're they're not playing around. Right? This this is this is a serious engagement. And as they think about scaling up their autonomous surface vehicle and autonomous undersea vehicle, USVs and UUVs, Right? Like, they need a real production solution.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so a lot of our customers, as it turns out, are not actually that small. We do have some. Don't get me wrong. We we have we have some startups that we work with, but they come from all over the place. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so the very, like, real technical proof points we look at is, like, are we getting faster with each incremental unit? Are we able to see the improvements in the models across different base architectures and data collection paradigms across different kinds of products? Are we seeing the amount of overlap across the different paradigms? Like, There's always this technical activity that goes into our data collection program in conjunction with our model fine tuning program Mhmm. Which is actually what allows me to turn around and then on the manufacturing side, go scale up.
Speaker 1:How... What do you... If foundry is successful, does the idea that like hardware has like more moats like go away? Because historic... Like for basically the last couple years, I think a lot of investors have been investing against this idea of like, well, wanna back things that have some hardware component because hardware is hard and you have to figure out manufacturing and your supply chain and all these different things.
Speaker 1:But it feels like what you're building towards is, like, somebody can go to their favorite agent and say, like, I wanna make this sort of complex product and a smart enough model slash agent or harness will be able to, like, produce a file that you could then take and theoretically manufacture at small scale quite rapidly at at which point, like, it's unclear if the sort of legacy factory, it'd be... Is still, like, you know, a moat in in the way that it's been to date?
Speaker 3:I think the moat for a great hardware company is a mixture of your manufacturing prowess and your design excellence. Right? And I think that will skew towards more of the design excellence. I don't build or design drones or batteries or satellites or any of those things. There are amazing companies out there designing amazing products.
Speaker 3:The way the way I think the future is gonna go is when a company like Foundry is ultra successful and we have thousands of factories across tens of millions of square feet, is that the speed of hardware design innovation and new products being conceived of, prototyped, produced, mass produced, distributed will skyrocket. The way the pace of software innovation also skyrocketed when we saw the cloud sort of take over as the main form of how compute is handled. Right? Like, no company sort of AI aside coming out of YC is like, oh, cool. How do I go buy more servers?
Speaker 3:Like, that's not like a thing. Right? But today in hardware, if you wanna build three of something, it's a total nightmare. And so I think what'll end up happening is the economy will build so many more things, and the moat will come from designing an excellent product. Right?
Speaker 3:Because that's still not what I do. I don't design your product for you. That's your thing. I can advise. I can make it more manufacturable.
Speaker 3:We have this thing called design for robotic assembly that we've coined. We can talk about making it more manufacturable. But, like, there are drone experts. There are robot dog experts. There are satellite experts.
Speaker 3:They're gonna keep doing their thing. My job is to just build a million of whichever one we need a million of.
Speaker 2:In the short term, is the factory mostly like KUKA robot arms, spot welding, soldering, pick and place, be like putting in screws or are there like CNC machines, three d printers, Or are the parts assembled elsewhere and then you're taking in the parts? It's not raw materials in on day one. Right? It's not like aluminum gets dropped off and I get a drone out the other side. Right?
Speaker 1:Are you thinking what I'm thinking, John? Got We we have a little internal hardware project we're working on that's kind of a pretty difficult challenge.
Speaker 3:Actually am blanking on
Speaker 5:what you're talking about.
Speaker 3:Send it my way. Whatever it is, we can probably crush this.
Speaker 1:I I acquired the base.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. We do have some...
Speaker 1:Challenge that if you can do this, I'm gonna probably beg you to let let me invest
Speaker 5:in the company because... I
Speaker 3:am almost certain we can do it just fine.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Let's basically, today we focus on assembly because if you look at manufacturing, there's two categories. Yeah. Right? There's fabrication
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And there's assembly. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:So like winding a drone motor, that's going happen somewhere else. You're you take Exactly. But get seated in the right place, put the screws in, make sure it's at the right tolerances, get it all out the door, which makes...
Speaker 11:Exactly. Cool. Exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Especially because like if you look at the world now, in defense as an example, right, you do a ton of defense, we no longer need like five fighter jets a year. We need like 10,000,000 drones.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Which is very different.
Speaker 2:Totally
Speaker 3:And because that's very different, the the combinatory problem of scaling assembly is what we spend most of our time doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's so that's so exciting. Well well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love I love I love that you're working on this. This is like this is the thing that I I care most about Yeah. Is like going from from digital to physical and I think that that's that's where people are gonna feel like an excel... Like a real like feel the AGI will not be when you can get like a really
Speaker 3:cool Industrial abundance is like the most impactful possible thing you could work on. In my humble opinion, but I'm not biased. Physical industrial abundance, oh my god. We can't even begin to imagine the implications of that in society. Like it's gonna be awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love it dude. We'll come back on soon.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:And I will follow-up after this with the with
Speaker 2:TBPN bench.
Speaker 8:You can do
Speaker 2:it. You're goated.
Speaker 5:Have a
Speaker 2:good one.
Speaker 1:Great stuff, dude.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you later. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. We're going from the physical world back to the digital world with founder and CEO of Co Frame, Josh Payne. Building a living Internet.
Speaker 2:What's going on? Get ready to go digital. Josh, welcome to the show. What's up, guys? How are
Speaker 8:you doing? Good to see you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much.
Speaker 8:I'm doing great. How are you?
Speaker 2:Show. You raised some money. How much did you raise? I wanna hit the gun. I'm excited.
Speaker 2:It's warmed up. 25,000,000.
Speaker 5:We got... I didn't really realize we got this new lighting effect on the gong. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's good. We got a replay effect.
Speaker 8:That is sick. The gong is... As a percussionist, I can say great gong.
Speaker 1:Great great gong. There we go. A one from
Speaker 8:the percussionist.
Speaker 2:That's huge because every time we hit the gong, there's someone in the chat that always gets annoyed that we didn't warm it up. But I always say the first gong hit is the warm up.
Speaker 1:It's so rated.
Speaker 8:Comments on your gong technique. Yeah. Comments about the gong.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Okay. That's fair. That's fair.
Speaker 2:Anyway, we're not here to talk about Gongs.
Speaker 5:We're here
Speaker 2:to talk about Co Frame. Tell us about the company. Tell us about yourself.
Speaker 8:Alright. Well, high level idea here with Co Frame is that the Internet is dead. You know, typically it will take giant teams of people. We hate that. Take giant teams of engineers, designers, marketers, etcetera to build and optimize the user interfaces that we use every day.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And it's a huge problem. It's costing us hundreds of billions of dollars in losses every year and we're flipping the script on that. We see a world where the internet itself can have its own sense of life, where it can self improve and become this kind of continuously learning system. And this actually has two sides.
Speaker 8:I mean, is on the interfaces themselves, the websites, ads, apps, emails, etcetera. That's where Co Frame plays. And what we're already seeing is it also happens on the other side with personal agents starting to use the Internet more in fact on the rise and starting to overtake human traffic on the Internet,
Speaker 2:which is
Speaker 8:really And so we're building for that world and we're trying to bring the Internet to life.
Speaker 2:How how how possible is it to actually route an agent that lands on justa.com in a browser, computer use all that into something that feels much more experience, like an API experience. If I'm a website operator and an agent shows up, there are some situations where I don't want that to happen. But there are many situations where the website operator wants to give the agentic experience as much as possible and make it as easy as possible and make it not consume so many tokens for their potential customers because at the end of the day, they're selling something that's physical. They're selling something that they don't mind if if if an AI is buying or a human is buying. They just want to sell.
Speaker 2:How how how capable are you to actually route accordingly? How necessary is it? What does that look like?
Speaker 8:Yeah. The gap is really not that wide. It just really comes down to establishing a protocol that everyone agrees on and kind of a standard operating procedure. Yeah. From a technical perspective, super easy.
Speaker 8:The tools already exist. Know, WebMCP already exists. There's personal agent protocol which is a new proposed one that we're excited about as well. Oh. When you go to any website in CoFrame that is powered by CoFrame
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Or on-site for that matter and just add dot agent to it Oh. It will it will basically render an agent friendly version of it.
Speaker 2:That makes sense.
Speaker 8:That can talk back with the agent which is really cool. It's really just about like establishing that standard, right? And that's what we're trying to push for here. There's a ton of benefits and you know, I guess like this is gonna come down to like what what what are the what are the incentives here? Like, why would a customer want to do this?
Speaker 8:Why would a business want to do this? Yeah. You already mentioned token consumption. I would also mention speed, like when you go and ask Muse, which was amazing. Love Muse.
Speaker 8:Nat Friedman who leads a letter seed round,
Speaker 2:so Right.
Speaker 8:Love love the whole team there. Yeah. Yeah. But when you go on Muse and and you ask it to go book you a hotel or whatever, you're waiting for a while. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And I think that that doesn't need to be the case.
Speaker 2:100%. Yep. What what does actual onboarding look like? Is this a JavaScript snippet I'm throwing on the front end? Is it a Python package I'm importing?
Speaker 2:Is it something that lives in the GitHub and was reviewing code as it goes out? Like, how deep is the is the co frame integration process?
Speaker 8:Yeah. That's a good question. So we kind of start out... We try to start out really like seamless Yeah. With customers and that's by design.
Speaker 8:We'll get in with like a a snippet that they just add to their site and they'll take days. There's this one Fortune 500 company that that we did a pilot with recently and have since converted to a big contract. And they started out and basically implemented in three days from from initial contract to on the site. And from there Boom. The value there is that you're able to see tremendous results really quickly.
Speaker 8:So, like, with that customer, we are able to see a 70% lift in conversion in less than
Speaker 2:a month. That's really
Speaker 8:nuts. Like, it was
Speaker 2:What was going wrong before? I mean, that's good for you but it's like bearish for them. No offense to them.
Speaker 8:This isn't isolated though either. I'll say like...
Speaker 2:They didn't have a buy button or something. Like 70% is sucking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What it what it what's like... So when when you're talking to some of these customers, is part of the pitch really like hey, there's there's new companies out there that are really optimized for agents that are getting like the majority of their new their new customers from agents and you will literally die if you do not don't like adopt this new paradigm. I think we've just seen a bunch of different examples specifically with like developer infrastructure products where if you're not like, you know... Or people like shipping and paying for whole services without even knowing what they're paying for underneath the hood.
Speaker 1:There was like a viral post where somebody was like, how did you ship your app? And the person was like, I don't know. He's like, who did you pay? It was like, Codex. And so I feel like this is a big, you know, this will be like the probably defining trend over the next five years of like what businesses actually adopt this and which ones are like...
Speaker 1:Still think that humans are gonna make these like the majority of end purchase decisions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What luxury retail...
Speaker 8:Yeah. Lot people are thinking about this. It's like... It's something that a lot of people are thinking about. It's not a core driver.
Speaker 8:Like it's not on, you know, it's not a line item on a budget yet. So this is really... For us, we see it as positioning and it's something that we've actually talked about and posted about for like the last, you know, two years plus.
Speaker 2:Like Mhmm.
Speaker 8:It's not it's not new either. And it's it's not gonna be on the budget for another at least year, I think. However, it's growing incredibly incredibly quickly, you know, the usage metrics of these personal agents. I think by 2029, the majority of traffic in The US for commerce is gonna end up being, you know, agentic personal agents. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:That's my prediction. And so people are gonna start thinking about this but when we go and talk to companies to try to work with them, it's more focused on what are the goals and needs they have today. Mhmm. And just trying to have a practical point of view and positioning ourselves as a partner that's going to enable them to be ready when that transition happens because we do support this and we are gonna be able to allow that seamlessly when when it does.
Speaker 2:Of this some of this product, the value that you're bringing, it feels a little bit like old school enterprise SaaS. Are you just doing subscriptions? Is there a consumption based pricing model? Because I'm sure there's AI involved. But how are you thinking about positioning the the cost benefit to prospective customers?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, honestly, we probably should be doing performance based pricing.
Speaker 2:Maybe 70%. Yeah. Let me
Speaker 5:take half of that.
Speaker 8:Mean, there's others like like Dropbox, 158% lifts.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 8:Like Replit, 410% lift. Cash App, 60% lift. Woah.
Speaker 1:These are
Speaker 8:all the ones that we talked about, many, many, many more. Yeah. Like we're seeing a lot of great results. And if we were pricing on formats, we're gonna be a lot higher. You know, it's you know, very attractive.
Speaker 8:We're starting out keeping it simple. It's just like we'll come in, try to evaluate the ROI we're gonna be able to provide you. Usually targeting like 10 x plus, maybe even more, and then we'll just have a flat rate for the... For for an annual agreement.
Speaker 2:Old school.
Speaker 8:And that's how we do it today, but I I think down the road, it's probably gonna end up being interesting for customers where I could see a performance based approach becoming really successful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Performance based make make a lot of sense. And then on your side, I imagine that you'll be grappling with like the, well, if we throw a lot more compute at this, we might get better results. But then also if we just wait a couple months, like the models will get way cheaper and our margins will be better.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot there's lot that you're gonna have to puzzle out. But it's Yeah. Amazing that things are going so well. And congratulations on the on the series a. Glad to see...
Speaker 1:How big is the team? How big is the team?
Speaker 8:We're about 45 people now. I don't know about team size as being a key metric though. I think that Yeah. What's more interesting is revenue per employee. So that's what I'm really pushing for.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it's... Know, it's just helpful to get a gauge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just interesting to see Yeah. In the modern era where something like this grows. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And I think that, you know, this is said a lot, but Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Companies going public with less than a 100 people, even less than 50 people, that's gonna be a reality
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Pretty soon here, I think, with, the rise of what we're seeing with productivity and it's an awesome time to be building.
Speaker 2:It is. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Next round. Nice. Next round.
Speaker 2:That's nice.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Eventually... And I think that this eventually ends up looking essentially like a lab. I mean, we're... Know, one of the things that's been driving a lot of our growth is we're training this transformer based on all this data that we're seeing coming in.
Speaker 8:Sure. Sure. Incredibly rich user interactions. Yeah. Obviously, data that we're allowed to use and, you know, a certain company has agreements that we can't and so on.
Speaker 8:But Mhmm. That that's that's turned out to be extremely powerful. And I think this... Eventually, all of our people are just gonna be focused on making that model better.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much, Michael.
Speaker 1:Great to meet you. Awesome. Have a great rest
Speaker 2:of your day.
Speaker 1:See you soon, Josh.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 1:Jordy. Lulu is highlighting. So, Shakeel said, note that NVIDIA's spokesman John Rizzo has put out multiple statements in recent weeks that we now know are false. Unclear, of course, if he believed them to be true at the time. John said Jensen's interactions with miss Huang are not unusual or unexpected.
Speaker 1:And Lulu says, no serious comms person would ever lie like this. Rule number one is never lie to the press, never lie to anyone. I assumed he believed this to be true. If so, he was deceived by his leadership and made to be a useful idiot and should resign on principle. Palmer says there is another possibility, Lulu, one that dominates my group group chats.
Speaker 1:Jensen is sleeping with all his customers. And so when they say his interactions were not unusual or expected, they mean he is on a rampage seducing thousands of AI hardware execs with a glance. Anything's possible.
Speaker 2:It is it's a timeline and turmoil day for sure. For sure. Well, we'll follow the story more tomorrow and I'm sure there will be more updates on the investigation and what's going on in the stock market. Fortunately, it feels like if you tried to catch a falling knife over the weekend, you're looking pretty good. You grabbed the handle.
Speaker 2:You didn't cut yourself because the market is firmly up today. The Dow Jones up 2.15%, S and P five hundred up 2.35%, and the Nasdaq up 2.74%. So some some good news amid a lot of turmoil. But the last the last story, Richard Sutton, this guy, he needs to read this blog post. He says brute force computation is not enough for intelligence.
Speaker 2:Clever new methods are needed. The science of AI is far from finished. I I would recommend to this guy Richard that he reads this he reads this blog post. It's called The Bitter Lesson. And it kind of refutes exactly his his take here.
Speaker 2:But you know, maybe he knows something that we don't. Course he was the was the progenitor of the bit bitter lesson. And it's it's interesting to see him not be bitter lesson pilled in this particular moment, but we will we will see where it goes.
Speaker 1:Anyway, anything else... Anyways, chaos out there.
Speaker 2:You're just looking at the timeline and all the Jensen stuff?
Speaker 1:No. Just just everything.
Speaker 2:Everything. Hacks. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Jensen. Yeah. Lots of stuff. And it's just Monday. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's just Monday. We will be back in action tomorrow. We'll see you tomorrow. We're live from the studio day this week which we're very excited about.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And we hope you have the best Monday afternoon of your entire life. It is possible. I know it sounds fanciful but it's possible. So just go and do it. And without further ado...
Speaker 11:Rolling Flashback.
Speaker 2:Leave us five stars now for podcast and Spotify. Goodbye. We love you.