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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
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Speaker 2:Today is Thursday, 01/22/2026. We are live from the TVPN trough, the temple of technology, the trough of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital
Speaker 1:capital. Capital.ramp.com.
Speaker 2:Time is money. Save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. Thank you again to Art Carazi for coming on the show yesterday, breaking it down for us. That was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:And thank you to Mark Benioff.
Speaker 2:Mark Benioff. Acquired a one of one. Truly. He says aloha.
Speaker 1:Mark one Master Puppets record signed. Signed by Hawaii resident.
Speaker 2:He was keeping us guessing. When we had him on the show, we were like, can you send that to us?
Speaker 1:And he was like, no way. It's incredible. Look at this thing. Look at this thing.
Speaker 2:We got
Speaker 1:it. This is going in the business hall of fame Yeah.
Speaker 2:Here. The Museum of Business.
Speaker 1:The Museum
Speaker 2:of TV and UltraDome.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Let's pull up the linear run of show. Meet the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents and you should be too. We're gonna take you through the story, talk about Davos, talk about a whole bunch of news in the timeline. Then we have Keller from Zipline coming on, Jake from Railway.
Speaker 2:Joe Weisenthal is returning.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:We're very excited to get a whole bunch of updates.
Speaker 3:I mean,
Speaker 4:look at look at the range
Speaker 1:here today.
Speaker 2:We're going with cold feeling. The Axanox is coming on.
Speaker 1:Kathy Wood. Kathy Wood's coming on. Karamika.
Speaker 2:Is coming on.
Speaker 1:Brother Joe. Big time. So Jake announcing a big round.
Speaker 2:First, Davos is winding down. We're finally getting like the final, you know, surprise guests. Elon is the big one.
Speaker 1:Elon had to come in.
Speaker 2:He had to come in.
Speaker 1:The last buzzer beater jester match.
Speaker 2:How do you think that works? Like, how do you think that that Elon do you think he just has like an open invite and then he makes the call like a few hours before and just says, oh, it's going well. I'll be there. And then they just throw him on. Or do you think he he said he said yes a week ago and then I
Speaker 1:think Elon calls up Jay Cal
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And says, hey, save me a seat.
Speaker 2:Save me a seat. And then That could be it.
Speaker 1:They they figured out
Speaker 2:from there.
Speaker 1:Okay. I think I think when you're tracking to be the world's first teen air
Speaker 2:You got an opening by
Speaker 1:they just have a stage Yeah. Kind of set up. Yeah. Say, come come
Speaker 2:the the the the the events go really, really long. Some of the interviews go at 10PM, some start. It's like a full full tilt across multiple multiple event spaces. There's different houses. All In was doing something at the Freedom House.
Speaker 2:They had a really cool interview with Satya Nadella that I watched. Tech was out in full force, and that's what I wrote about today in the TBPN newsletter. Before we go through a little bit of this, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. So fun fact, Davos makes half $1,000,000,000 a year You in think of yes.
Speaker 2:Tyler's clapping. It's good news. It it's a nonprofit, an NGO, a think tank. But you're thinking what I'm thinking, Jordy? For profit conversion.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Let's make it happen.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:right. Let's make it happen. But, you know, it's a, you know, old old organization. Klaus Schwab, who you probably know as the face of it, he he was the founder. He started the he started Davos in 1971, the World Economic Forum.
Speaker 2:It was called He was pushed
Speaker 1:out last year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's been on the ropes. I my thesis is that Davos is back. It was a really good year. I think tech is gonna double down on this.
Speaker 2:But the first decade, it just sounded like it was an amazing party. One person in 1981 told Time Magazine that the forum offers a delightful vacation on the expense account. What a great what a great line. Time was really doing great reporting. Also, time owned by Mark Benioff, friend of the show.
Speaker 2:So it's been a rough decade for Davos. Liz Hoffman teased the concept of an inverse Davos index in semaphore, which I thought was sort of funny. And she sort of wrapped up a few times when the consensus at Davos wound up being, like, woefully wrong. And so she went through a few things. First was that everyone got together at Davos.
Speaker 2:There was an economist who went on stage in 2008 and said, it is inconceivable, repeat, inconceivable to get a world recession. It's like the one thing, like, not mincing words, not hedging at all, just like my prediction is that we will never see a world recession. And of course, we did. The Davos crew, they also missed Brexit and and the rise of MAGA. And then in 2020, they had a forum that Davos in 2020 it's always in January in 2020.
Speaker 2:It was January, and there was really no talk of a global pandemic or being worried about that. There was one panel about about sort of risks from antibiotics or something, but they certainly weren't talking about the coronavirus. And just a week later, Balaji posted that famous going viral post on January 30 saying, like, hey. I'm tracking this. I've been tracking this for a while, and this seems really serious.
Speaker 2:And a lot of people in tech were already tracking it. So there was this disconnect between, like like, you go to Davos and you hear, like, the number one thing this year is the metaverse. Apparently, they did a big metaverse push. And then the the year plays out, and it's a wildly different story. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I personally stand behind the idea of Davos in the metaverse. I would love the all of the global elites coming together to create ultimate BR skills to be simulated.
Speaker 1:Has anybody built the world economic forum in Roblox?
Speaker 2:They should.
Speaker 1:Minecraft, something like that, you know, one to one replica?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It would be good. There's been a bunch of interesting, like, behind the scenes videos because, obviously, the big the big tent pole media groups, Bloomberg is there, CNBC is there. But then there's also a few just folks I follow on Instagram who went and are doing sort of walk and talk vlogs, and that honestly gives you more of like the lay of the land, like what it's like getting around. Pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:But before I continue, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. It seems like there may be the internet. I certainly wouldn't say the internet has forgotten about the iconic line, you'll own nothing and be happy. But I haven't seen it so much over the last week. A lot more focus on
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting. That line was all about just financialization and was really
Speaker 1:I like to think it was about enterprise software.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. We're moving away from box software Exactly.
Speaker 1:To SaaS. You're gonna own nothing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You don't own this particular version of Turbo Puffer, you pay for consumption. Exactly. That's what it was about anyway. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Turbo Puffer of serverless vector and full text search built from first principles in object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. So this feels like this year feels like a big turnaround. Dario Amade, Demis Hassabis, Sachin Adela, all their interviews have been going viral on the timeline. In California, there's been a bunch of articles written about what they've said at Davos. And the there there isn't there hasn't necessarily been a huge reversal in the positions of these tech leaders.
Speaker 2:They're saying things that they've been saying for a year or two, sometimes more. But there's some feeling, like, where when you say a line like we could have 20% unemployment in two years, it just sounds different when you say it directly to a bunch of world leaders, a bunch of global elites, a bunch of international executives than when you say it on a tech podcast that's a little more insider y, a little more inside baseball. So it just hits different. And then it's also an interesting reflection to hear, like, the Satya Nadella all in interview had had an interesting, like, almost like high low aspect to it, where Satya was talking about very specific details of copilot implementation, what the future of the workstation could look like, whether people will be running, you know, sidecar
Speaker 1:He's a product guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he's going in in a lot of detail there, and then he's also zooming out and reiterating what he told other business leaders just about the general wave of AI adoption that's still pretty early on the global stage. And so it's felt like there's two different conferences going on. We've read this a take from a couple different people, where tech leaders are talking about research progress, employment impacts, sovereign AI, data center build outs, then the politicians are talking about Greenland, Venezuela, and trade deals. But even though there's this bifurcated vibe going on, it still feels like a win win because the tech industry is getting their messages into the global stage now where in an audience that will ultimately determine how quickly this technology rolls out and how it will be regulated.
Speaker 2:And I imagine that the tech industry is driving a lot of growth for the World Economic Forum because every company you've seen the Palantir House. There's a lot of different tech companies that have really gone big on sponsorship, gone big on their presence. And I imagine this will get bigger. OpenAI was sort of notably absent or not absent, but take didn't take over the stage. And you would imagine that next year, given the vibes around this one, that there will be more of a presence from
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Basically all the big tech companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We had a we had an opportunity
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To have a presence there, and and we didn't think that it fully made sense for this year just given Yeah. Travel and stuff. Yeah. Travel was a big factor. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did like the fact that, Demis and Dario presented this, like, friendly and cooperative united front for what American AI progress looks like, it was particularly in stark contrast to last week when there was this incredibly messy AI drama, the opposite of cooperation between Elon and Sam Altman. And so last week, we were like, oh, no one
Speaker 1:Or between Tinky Machines and Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Talent mix up. That's been a big drama story. And and then you see you see Demis and Dario sort of hanging out, talking about how how friendly they are and how much they wanna work together.
Speaker 2:And it feels a little bit like faith in humanity store restored. It's very it it it really captures the spirit of this, like, global cooperation, which I think is good. And and so I I think Davos is back. I think it's time to ski. And congratulations to everyone that's been having fun and making waves in Davos.
Speaker 2:There's a whole bunch of videos that we should go through. First, let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent.
Speaker 2:Did you wanna watch this clip from Midnight Capital?
Speaker 1:Jensen Hold up.
Speaker 2:Wong is Midnight Capital has given us some instructions. He says or they say, listen to this, then watch the second video.
Speaker 1:And this host over at Fox Business has given us a run for our money in the costume department.
Speaker 2:Maria Bartiromo knows how to dress. This is a fantastic outfit. Let's play Jensen Wong.
Speaker 1:Doing and trying to compete. Is the space getting more competitive for you today?
Speaker 5:Our space is incredibly competitive. I've got a lot of competitors. It's hard to It's to imagine. You know, Google has been here for a while, and they're excellent AI company for a very long time, and and they're an incredible company. But we have competition from from all sides.
Speaker 6:And?
Speaker 5:Well, we just have to run fast.
Speaker 1:You know? NVIDIA is the only You're doing in trying to compete.
Speaker 2:Is this Midnight Capital says watch the sun.
Speaker 1:Company has an insane monopoly if they're trying to convince you
Speaker 2:that I think that's where we're going with this. You're giving away the punchline. Play the teal clip at the London School of Economics.
Speaker 1:Oh, didn't even know we had it.
Speaker 2:Just scroll down.
Speaker 1:It's This very is the
Speaker 2:whole one two punch that Midnight Capital's serving up for us.
Speaker 4:The people who
Speaker 7:have monopolies pretend not to have them, and the people who don't have monopolies pretend to have them. And so it gets kind of confusing. If you're Google, you will never say that you're a search engine. You will say you're a technology company, which and technology is a vast, incredibly competitive space. If you're in a completely competitive business, let's say you're trying to open a restaurant in London, and you'll say, well, this is totally different from any other restaurant.
Speaker 7:It'll be the only British Nepalese fusion cuisine within a five block radius of the LSE. The people who have monopolies pretend not to have them. Yes. A
Speaker 2:very
Speaker 1:good I studied.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Jensen studied and said, you know what? I I'm incredibly it's incredibly competitive. Of course, he's also going through an acquisition with Grok. And it's not it it seems like the Grok deal will go through.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:It's like I have so much competition, had to spend $20,000,000,000 on a team.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, please define my market as also including CPU and also including ASICs and also including like everything else that could possibly compete with NVIDIA.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The journal had a good summary of kind of some of Jensen's points of view Yeah.
Speaker 2:What he
Speaker 1:said? Out of Davos. NVIDIA CEO says AI needs more investment in defiance of bubble fears. Yeah. Jensen called for higher investments to further spread the technology across developed and emerging economies.
Speaker 1:Speaking at the in Davos, Huang described AI as a five layer cake consisting of energy chips, cloud infrastructure, models, and application. He said AI's applications, how the technology is used in a specific industry, is the most critical layer of that cake as it is where the economic benefits lie. Sectors like energy or semis, both key to developing and harnessing the technology, are already growing thanks to AI. But he said more investments are needed to ensure the benefits of the technology spread to more industries across both developed and emerging economies. The AI bubble comes about because the investments are large, and the investments are large because we have to build the infrastructure necessary for all of the AI layers.
Speaker 1:I think the opportunity is really quite extraordinary, and everybody ought to get involved. Everybody. It's open for business, folks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. On the on the
Speaker 1:topic
Speaker 2:of just just do we need more investment? There was an interesting detail in the TSMC earnings this this week that Ben Thompson highlighted. Basically, they had this they had this earnings call, and they announced a planned capital expenditure of 52,000,000,000 to 56,000,000,000, up 27 to 37% from last year. And there was and there was some pushback from an analyst. So I'm not sure that coming in at the top of the predicted range qualifies as, quote, higher level of CapEx spending.
Speaker 2:An analyst pushed CEO C. C. Wei on this point, noting that TSMC's revenue has grown 50% since 2022, but CapEx has only grown 10%. There weren't many ants there weren't too many answers from TSMC about this, which is understandable, given that they won't announce next year's CapEx numbers until next quarter. And so Ben is sort of pointing out that TSMC is potentially the biggest bottleneck.
Speaker 2:TSMC has reiterated this, that we're not bottlenecked on energy, we're bottlenecked on chip production. We're going to scale up, but at the same time, they don't want to be caught holding the bag. So Ben Thompson says, the implication of cloud service providers showing huge financial gains from AI now combined with the admission that there is insufficient supply of silicon is that foregone revenue isn't a theoretical risk. It's being foregone right now. And you've and you've heard this from all the labs.
Speaker 2:If we had more chips, could actually deliver more services, charge more, make more money. We are bottlenecked on compute. And yet at the same time, notice that Wei led his answer admitting to his fear. TSMC doesn't wanna get stuck holding the bag, spending billions of dollars for demand that might disappear. This is a legitimate concern for TSMC, but it's a big problem for TSMC's customers.
Speaker 2:The only way they're going to overcome that fear is by helping bring competition to bear such that such that TSMC worries more about losing business than they do about investing too much. And so who who will be the competition? Maybe it's Intel, maybe Samsung. There there's a number of other foundries that could potentially ramp up and and put the screws to TSMC. But the the NVIDIA TPU, the I I not Grok, but Cerebras, and a few other of the chipmakers are all sort of still constrained by TSMC.
Speaker 2:And so there's still some worry that if we don't expand just raw fab capacity, that that will be a bottleneck for AI. But anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits in HR, built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. Let's go to who is this? We have a clip here from well, Philip Johnson's having fun at Davos. But before we do that, let's head over to David Phillips.
Speaker 2:Me defending my vibe coded CRM I made in one shot with GPT four o.
Speaker 5:Sometimes it's too slow, for sure, and needs to be reformed, for sure. But which is predictable, loyal, sometimes
Speaker 1:He's on one right now.
Speaker 2:What what was the story behind the glasses? Somebody I I saw some meme that I think he suffered an injury or something, and some people would say do an eye patch, but he went with the sunglasses. It's fantastic. A
Speaker 1:rock star.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He looks like a rock star. Elon Musk has has hit the timeline on Davos. Love how
Speaker 1:I love how Philip is just like
Speaker 2:In the front row
Speaker 1:of his phone camera.
Speaker 2:It's incredible. Incredible citizen journalism here. Let's play this clip from Elon Musk at Davos. What's he saying? Why did he go to Davos?
Speaker 2:What is his message? What is he gonna talk about?
Speaker 1:Is that the lowest cost place to put AI will be space, and that and that'll be true within two years. Maybe three. Three at
Speaker 5:the latest. So looking ten or twenty years out, how would you describe success with a
Speaker 1:Three at the latest.
Speaker 2:Three at the latest. That's a aggressive timeline Yeah. For that. Blue Origin launched satellite Internet to rival SpaceX and specifically to rival Starlink. Bezos backed Blue Origin is launching a satellite network for enterprise data center and government customers, TerraWave.
Speaker 2:The company aims to begin deploying the first of 5,408 satellites in the 2027, so little over little under two years. The service will compete with Starlink, and it will also compete with Amazon operated LEO, which is interesting. I guess they'll maybe work together at some point. The network called TeraWave is targeted for enterprise data center and government users. The company said it will provide speeds of up to six terabits per second from satellite position in LEO and medium Earth orbit, regions of space that are between a 100 miles and 21,000 miles from Earth's surface.
Speaker 2:Blue Origin says it expects deploying the constellation the fourth quarter of twenty twenty seven. Bezos is entering an increasingly crowded satellite Internet market that's currently dominated by Starlink. Starlink has more than 9,000 satellites in orbit and roughly 9,000,000 customers. Amazon, which Bezos founded in 1994, has also ramped up its own offering. That service recently rebranded from Project Cupier to LEO.
Speaker 2:The company has set up a 180 satellites since last April through a series of rocket launches handled by partners such as ULA and actually SpaceX. Several future deployments are expected to be handled by Blue Origin. Amazon aims to build a constellation of 3,236 low Earth satellites that will serve business, governments, and consumers. Last November, the company opened up an enterprise preview to select users ahead of a broader commercial launch. Bezos predicted in 2024 that Blue Origin would one day be a bigger company than Amazon.
Speaker 2:That's a wild prediction. He founded Blue Origin in 2000, and Dave Lim, Amazon's former device boss, serves as CEO. Quote, I think it's going to be the best business I've ever been involved in, but it's gonna take a while. You set a deal buck in 2024. Blue Origin is primarily a rocket launch company flying research flying tourists and research to the edge of space on short trips.
Speaker 2:Last January, the startup notched a major milestone when it successfully launched its towering New Glenn rocket for the first time, though it was unable to return the rocket booster back to a barge for reuse. They nailed the landing of New Glenn rocket last November following a successful launch of a pair of NASA spacecraft. So good progress over there at Blue Origin.
Speaker 1:We gotta do some more research on the Chinese Starlink Oh, yeah. Equivalents. They have Guowong, which is their, like, state led effort trying to get to 13,000 satellites by 2030. Currently, they have around a 150. And then there's Qianfan, which currently has around 100, also trying to get they're trying to get to 15,000 by 2030, and they're they're more commercial focused.
Speaker 1:So it'd be interesting to track.
Speaker 2:And you would you would think that the Blue Origin news, the the news that that Starlink has a second competitor, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos, major players. Well, what does that do for AST Space Mobile? The stock is up 14% today, and it's up 24% over the last five days, days, 35% over the last month, and a 100% Space Mobile can't keep going.
Speaker 1:There's no way.
Speaker 2:Over the last six months. It's at all time highs. It is at all time highs. And the market cap is now $42,000,000,000. I have I have some friends who are obsessed with AST Space Mobile and fascinating run.
Speaker 2:They keep they keep running. Anyway, moving on. Elon also gave some timelines for Optimus humanoid robots at the World Economic Forum. He said, by the end of next year, we will be selling humanoid robots to the public to the public, not just enterprises. You're gonna be able to just buy one of these the way you buy a Cybertruck or a Model s Plaid or anything else.
Speaker 2:That is a very, very aggressive timeline. But he does he has been buying the parts to actually manufacture them. And, you know A lot of parts. What is selling to the public mean? Does it mean a thousand deliveries, 10,000 deliveries?
Speaker 2:I don't know. But he's he's definitely pushing that project forward.
Speaker 1:Having having an optimist that is just on on staff here that can just go hit like, if I can hit a button and have the optimist hit the gong physically Mhmm. That would be fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Priceless, really.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Priceless. There's really no amount of money that we wouldn't pay to be able to get that kind of experience here in the Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm excited. I mean, we've seen Boston Dynamics, we've seen with the the the Chinese humanoid companies. There's like, you can do cool things with these, with one x and whatnot, even if it's teleoperated, even if it's prescripted. Like, there there are the technology does work. It's more just, like, how impactful will it be?
Speaker 2:How expensive is it? How reliable is it? Is the battery one hour or more?
Speaker 1:Has he has he spoken about teleoperation? No. I don't Seems like he'd just be generally against Yeah. It mean on principle.
Speaker 2:Know that don't the Tesla robotaxis do some teleoperation? I think in the test zones, there was the ability to take over on that early demo. So I don't think he's dogmatic about it, but he certainly is if you're against LiDAR, you gotta be against
Speaker 1:Tragically Sane says robots replacing humans hitting the gong. Okay. Never mind. Shut it down.
Speaker 2:I'm full of LiDAR now.
Speaker 1:Don't don't worry. That that will be the last job
Speaker 2:That will be.
Speaker 1:In this studio. It's hitting the gong.
Speaker 2:Let's move on to this clip from Satya Nadella at the All In AI Summit in Davos. First, let me tell you about vybe.co, where d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. So let's play this clip from Satya Nadella explaining how he was thinking about
Speaker 8:Jobs had the best line, I would say, for PCs or computers was to say, if you it's a bicycle for the mind. Bill had a line which I liked as well, which was, it's information at your fingertips. We kind of need now a new concept metaphor for how we use computers in the AI age.
Speaker 1:You have one?
Speaker 8:And the one I like came from the CEO of Notion, which I like, you know, that manager of Incredible product.
Speaker 1:You haven't bought it yet.
Speaker 2:Just not But
Speaker 8:it's both management of, basically a manager of infinite minds. That's a nice way to think about it. Right? If you remember, you know, Jobs had the best line, I
Speaker 9:would say, for PC.
Speaker 2:So the manager of infinite minds. That is a I that is a good framing. I like that. No. It's it's nice that
Speaker 1:How many minds are you managing, Tyler, right now.
Speaker 9:Right now, it's probably like four because I have every every LLM,
Speaker 1:like Okay.
Speaker 2:Actively running.
Speaker 1:You gotta get those numbers up.
Speaker 9:But, yeah, I I I'm not I I've never really used multiple cloud instances yet.
Speaker 2:Okay. So but, yeah, good good framing and and good to see. Yeah. It it is interesting. Like, the the manager of infinite minds concept, obviously, that that essay from Ivan, CEO of Notion, it went viral over the holidays.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people in tech read it, but it did not necessarily break through to the Davos community. So having Satya Nadella there just further popularized that concept, bake it down into a repeatable phrase that can prepare people for what's coming, adapt, that is valuable and that's what we're
Speaker 1:Anyway. Seeing It'll feel like you're playing StarCraft now.
Speaker 2:I like the StarCraft analogy.
Speaker 1:The StarCraft analogy is real. Zerg army. Let's pull up this video that was posted by the New York Times popcast. John Karamika posted this video yesterday. Somebody sent it to me.
Speaker 1:Actually, Leaf had public sent it to me. Yeah. And I was so confused because there's only about a 100 of these rugby's out in the world. Yeah. And we kind of knew exact we kind of Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like everybody on the team, like, kind of sent them out. Yeah. So I was I first thought this video was AI generated.
Speaker 2:It did. And it's about AI, so let's play the video.
Speaker 1:And I think we maybe don't wanna do sound.
Speaker 2:Okay. So, yeah, it's about Bruno Mars and and if we if we I don't know if we can scroll back to the beginning. Is that possible on Instagram reels? If you repost. But, yeah, if you zoom in here, he's dancing.
Speaker 2:And the dancing, this part, I was like, maybe this part's AI, but then when he sits down, you can see that he has a microphone, a lav mic clipped to his collar. And so everything about this says this is not AI generated. This is real and the hand motions are so accurate and they're occluding
Speaker 1:And he just looks extremely cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's great. And so he goes on to talk and we're gonna have him on the show later.
Speaker 1:Anyway, so Dylan messaged John, and we figure out that John accidentally purchased fake TBPN merch online
Speaker 2:Be careful.
Speaker 1:But at least he's still looking great. Yeah. So Yeah. It works. Silver lining.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I mean, our saga to battle the fraudulent merch, the knockoff merch has been incredible. I I this site popped up, and we assumed, okay, they're not gonna take payments certainly. They're definitely not gonna print and ship anything and we'll be able to get this taken down in two seconds. And we I actually sent them an email saying like, hey. Hey.
Speaker 2:Like, I assume you're a fan. Like, just so you know, like, we don't want this out there. Like, I'd be happy to talk to you about maybe working together or something. But can you please just not use our brand and our trademarks and all this stuff out there on the Internet without without talking to us first. Like, let's have a conversation about this.
Speaker 2:Did not get a response. Not a fan. And I think some other people on the team were like, yeah, John. That was never gonna work. And they were right.
Speaker 2:And You
Speaker 1:tried to go Golden Retriever, brother.
Speaker 2:I did. I did. I was like, I'm gonna I'm just gonna assume the best. I'm just gonna assume this is an overeager fan or someone who just is entrepreneurial kid who's just No. Trying to just
Speaker 1:This is a Canadian. We know it's a Canadian.
Speaker 2:We know it's
Speaker 1:a Yeah. Anything could happen up there. Need a in the chat says, you guys have a good line of Shopify. I assume most of them are hosted there. No.
Speaker 1:It's not hosted on Shopify.
Speaker 2:And It's and at one point
Speaker 1:We've already gotten them taken
Speaker 2:down from From a number of platforms where we know the CEOs and we'll say, hey, we have have this fake site. Can you take this down? They will, and they'll pop up on a different site. And so it's been a true game of whack a mole. We've sent a number of, like, you know, sort of, you know, demand letters at this point.
Speaker 2:We've really pushed it a lot, but they they keep finding a way. And at this point, they are, in fact, taking people's money and shipping fake product now and and and fooling people that are discerning.
Speaker 1:And apparently, it smells kinda funny. Uh-oh. Which is a big which is an issue. Oh, good. The real merch is coming.
Speaker 1:The real merch is coming.
Speaker 2:We do
Speaker 1:have We've been sampling
Speaker 2:a bunch of different stuff. Of course, Shopify.
Speaker 9:We we need to put out like a a Maduro style bounty.
Speaker 2:We Oh, yeah. Put a spec on there. Shopify, of course, is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 1:Trey says Mark Carney is selling fake TVPN merch. Crazy.
Speaker 2:He heard he he saw your post about him
Speaker 1:His cortisol spiking?
Speaker 2:Cortisol spiking. He was like, you know what? I'm not doing anything about this. Canadians, it's
Speaker 1:concerning the number of people that didn't understand that my post was a joke.
Speaker 2:You're very online and you're very early to a lot of these things. You were trying to make aura happen back like over a
Speaker 10:year ago.
Speaker 1:Q one of last year.
Speaker 2:Didn't happen.
Speaker 1:It was flopping.
Speaker 2:Was long time. Then you tried to make motion happen. I still think people are just waking up to motion. This this will happen, but you gotta you gotta let it simmer. I mean, I've seen this I've seen this multiple times.
Speaker 1:But I just the the idea of, like, processing Davos as though it's like a bunch of kick streamers. Yeah. It's like so funny.
Speaker 2:It is it is very funny to, you know, look at the aesthetics. And the whole kick, like, clipping economy is crazy. I I I found one of those clips, and then I went and looked at the account, it's, like, like, dozens of posts that are the same format, where it's, like, they have a word in all caps, and then they have an emoji, and then they have this. And it's, like, very sensationalist. It feels like paparazzi on top of a kick stream or something.
Speaker 2:Very, very
Speaker 11:odd The
Speaker 1:thing that is real is the drama that's going on at Davos is not that different. It's not. You see Bessent taking shots.
Speaker 9:There might be some cortisol spikes.
Speaker 1:They're they're definitely spiking each other's cortisol, getting each other to crash out.
Speaker 2:I still don't even I just don't even know what cortisol spiking means. Is it just like getting angry? What does it actually mean?
Speaker 1:If you get into any type of, you know, verbal, physical altercation.
Speaker 2:Is it the fight or flight?
Speaker 1:Yeah. The
Speaker 2:Cortisol floods
Speaker 1:your Cortisol. Just
Speaker 2:makes you okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, yeah.
Speaker 2:Gets your Anyway, private credit investors' cortisol has been spiking because they are cashing out in droves redemptions by individual investors in funds soared at the 2025 after performance declined reviving questions about suitability. This is from Matt Wirs in the Wall Street Journal. He says, for the first time since the start of the private credit boom, large numbers of individual investors are trying to get their money out. Several of the big funds eligible to wealthy individuals received requests from about 5% of shareholders to cash out at the end of last year, well above the normal volume according to the SEC. One managed by Blue Owl got redemptions for about 15% of its shares.
Speaker 2:This was something where, you know, people were were were were nervous about the data center build out, the private credit, you know, the expansion here. Apparently, what's driving it primarily was Asian clients asking for redemptions from BlueOwl specifically. The rising redemptions come at an awkward time for private credit fund managers for the Trump and for the Trump administration as they push for new rules that would democratize private markets by encouraging their inclusion in four zero one k retirement plans for all Americans. Private fund managers, including Apollo Global and Blue Owl, blame fear mongering about a recent spate of corporate bankruptcies. This is the whole cockroaches back and forth with Jamie Dimon and some of the some of the folks in the private credit world, Blackstone, Apollo, Blue Owl.
Speaker 2:And because there was an automotive supplier that went bankrupt, First Brands, we talked about. Yep. And there was a surge of withdrawals. Analysts say there could be a simpler explanation. Individual investors are falling into a similar pattern, a familiar pattern of selling out when an asset class underperforms expectations.
Speaker 2:These investors got really surprised when their dividends went down, said Robert Dodd, an analyst at Raymond James. BDCs, the business development companies, they typically make high interest loans to mid sized corporations with junk credit ratings using the interest income from those loans to pay dividends. A handful of these funds have cut dividends because the yield on their loans are falling in lockstep with benchmark interest rates. For more dividend reductions will follow, Dodd said, likely prompting more redemptions. Total returns from five of the large largest private credit funds aimed at individual investors declined to an average of about 6.22% in the first nine months of 2025 compared with 8.76 in the same period 2024.
Speaker 2:And back in 2023, if you were in these funds, you were making 11.4%. Not bad. Money managed by BDCs has tripled since 2020 to about 450,000,000,000. So there's been a bit of growth, and the funds still took in more new money from new investors than they paid out in their most recent quarter, a sign that they are still popular among investments investors and advisers. Let's move on.
Speaker 2:But first, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen, and spend with a Phantom Card. The COBE SE letter breaking. SpaceX is set to hire Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley to lead its IPO. That's a whole host of murderous
Speaker 1:Got them all.
Speaker 2:Pro. The IPO is expected to be valued as as much as 1,500,000,000,000.0, making it the largest IPO in history. But the community notes put it in the truth zone because Saudi Aramco's IPO in 2019 sported a valuation of 1,700,000,000,000.0. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Very different. Raised 25,000,000,000, 25,600,000,000.0.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, anyways, obviously, Elon targeting more than that Yeah. On an actual dollar basis.
Speaker 2:Well, there's other news about Anthropic. The revenue run rate for the 2025 was 9,000,000,000, up from 4,000,000,000 in July 2025. What an incredible growth. Iconic Lightspeed and Menlo are set to join the new funding round from Techmeme here and Bloomberg reporting. This is maybe a deceleration.
Speaker 2:I was debating this with Tyler. I mean, they went from 100,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. They 10xed, then they were gonna 10x it again. So everyone was expecting 10,000,000,000
Speaker 1:And then 10x it again.
Speaker 2:And they landed at nine on run rate. Yeah. Was trying to find I see in deceleration.
Speaker 1:Did they they predict $10,000,000,000
Speaker 2:I don't know. I I actually don't know the exact quote. I think Dario was pretty loose about it. He was just saying that we've seen
Speaker 9:He was
Speaker 1:saying order of magnitude.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He was saying we went a full order of magnitude from 100 to $1,000,000,000 We're going to do a full order of magnitude again. Is it a full order of magnitude to go from one to nine?
Speaker 9:And he said he only expects, like You got around. Three or four more, you know, 10 x's.
Speaker 2:He said that? No. No. No. I I I specifically remember him saying, like, like, we cannot keep that level of growth going.
Speaker 2:Like, He
Speaker 9:said it's like he said it'd be pretty crazy if
Speaker 2:that Yeah.
Speaker 9:I don't think he said we can.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. He said it'd be pretty crazy. Yeah. Okay. Well, obviously He
Speaker 3:said if
Speaker 9:that continues then, like, you're really in the, you know, the the biggest companies in the world are on that scale.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, a certain point, like, there's no company that's doing a trillion dollars a year in in revenue, and you're only two orders of magnitude away from that. So we'll see. We'll see. But obviously, Anthropic's been on a tear, and the new round, it seems to be coming together nicely.
Speaker 2:There is other news from the information. Amir says that Anthropix inference costs on Google and Amazon servers were 23% higher than the company projected. Of course, when you're growing so fast, you're probably willing to pay more for inference just to make sure that everything stays online.
Speaker 1:Better to better to service the demand and not and not get that frustration Yeah. You know, people hitting rate limits, etcetera.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I I think later in the summer, there were there's a lot of news about how the Anthropic API is, like, always down. They're looking for issues. Yeah. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:There was that. And then there was there there were also some, like, FUD type articles about negative gross margins, about, you know, margins being really, really bad at these labs. Like who's where's the real where's the value accruing? Is it all going to accrue to NVIDIA? Last month, Anthropic projected it would generate around 40% gross margins from selling AI to businesses and application developers.
Speaker 2:But I think that gross margin came in a little bit lower. But there is so much more that they can do to optimize. They're buying TPUs now. They're gonna build new data centers. And also, there's it it does feel like we're going to enter a world where inference is load balanced across a variety of semiconductor stacks.
Speaker 2:And so for really fast things, you might be going to a Grok or a or Cerebras or, know, you might for more basic stuff, you might be going to a legacy model that's cheaper to inference, and all of that might be blended together into something that's more profitable. And then also, you know, the the the dynamic of the of the equilibrium in the ecosystem could just be higher prices if it's delivering a lot of value. People are really happy with
Speaker 1:the value that they're from you. And Beth Jasos posted a real picture of Dario. Fact check. True. That you can pull up here.
Speaker 2:Dario Amog DA. The jawline is crazy on this.
Speaker 9:AI is good. Claude's gonna be able
Speaker 1:to do this to people shot.
Speaker 2:No. Claude will not. They're not launching an image model. Claude will
Speaker 1:have No. No. I'm I'm saying you're gonna be able to talk to Claude and say like, turn me into a into a mugger. In real life. And it will, you know And it will orchestrate the jaw implants.
Speaker 2:Okay. Got it. Got it. The double jaw surgery.
Speaker 1:Leg lengthening Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Surgery. Purposes it all for you and just create a schedule for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Call the Waymo to take you to the, you know
Speaker 9:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:To the dentist or whatever to do the surgery.
Speaker 2:Well, if you're in San Francisco on February 3, you need to call Waymo and head over to the Cisco AI Summit. It's bringing together leaders from NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy. The whole thing will be livestreamed, and will be there for a
Speaker 1:big Hope to see there. Very exciting. Apparently Yes. Google DeepMind is signing a licensing deal. It really is a licensing deal economy that Last we're year was the press release economy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This year, very, very much the licensing deal economy. Mhmm. Hume AI Mhmm. Which builds emotionally intelligent voice interfaces.
Speaker 1:And they're gonna hire CEO Alan Cohen and seven of their engineers.
Speaker 2:Is this the same ghost ship story that we've that we've seen so many times before? It's essentially an acquisition? Is that what we're we're reading this?
Speaker 1:Or Yeah. That's that's
Speaker 2:Major licensing?
Speaker 1:I mean, that's yeah. The CEO's joining DeepMind. So
Speaker 2:I I I never thought of of Google as particularly behind in voice interfaces. It doesn't I I'm I'm wondering what else is going on here. I mean, certainly, it's an important part of the stack if you have an app that people are chatting with and talking to. Obviously, NotebookLM was sort of a viral success, but I do really wonder about the longevity and retention. It feels like they were maybe like, I don't know, 80 or 90% there in terms of people.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's just a speed thing, maybe it's the actual cadence. I've talked to some people that have
Speaker 9:been Didn't that team leave and start their own
Speaker 2:They did. They did. I mean, you gotta be able to backfill that if you're if you're googling DeepMind. Like, you have a great product with a lot of people talking about notebook LM very positively. I think a lot of the notebook LM functionality eventually got baked into the Gemini app.
Speaker 2:And so but this but there still is just it feels like when you have a latency step where you ask a question, okay, prepare a deep research report and turn it into a podcast. Read it to me on the Roman Empire. And you have the option to just go to YouTube and just find a video of or pull up hardcore history or something and just listen to it. As soon as you click, it just starts playing versus you have to wait, that's gonna induce churn, that's gonna increase.
Speaker 1:I always thought No Pets Got LM was the product that I wanted to cram for college exams. Yes. I get that. Remember My history final. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's so many moments in college where I was like riding my bike to an exam
Speaker 2:Yes, and
Speaker 1:being like, could really use these fifteen minutes to
Speaker 2:learn No, no. 100 to write
Speaker 1:a paper on or whatever.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, for probably 99% of high school exams, the the the the topic is well studied, and there's already, like, SparkNotes when I went to high school, like, SparkNotes existed. And if you were you if you were doing a book report on The Odyssey, there was already a prewritten summary of it. You didn't need an LM. Like, LLMs are particularly good. Notebook LM is particularly good when you need to generate a report or an essay or a deep dive or a podcast about something that no one has ever made a podcast about before.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But if you're just looking for an hour of really thoughtful content on peptides, like the Huberman Lab Podcast exists and has created a very polished product around that. Opinionated. Opinionated as well, which I think people want. But even just in terms of in terms of just facts, like like Yeah.
Speaker 2:The facts are already polished, and the most important thing is that it's there, just one click to start that video. So I'm sure that, you know, a lot of a lot of high school students are pulling up YouTube videos that summarize the topics that are going into their calculus exam or whatever they're about to walk into. There's plenty of pictures.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You didn't have streaming video on the Internet when you were going through college, right? Does that exist?
Speaker 2:A little bit. It was it was YouTube YouTube was there, but the library of YouTube videos
Speaker 1:The catalog value was
Speaker 2:It was truly like, hey, come in this dorm room. Let me show you the three YouTube videos that I know about.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, it's a great sign of my culture and respect to show you, like the greatest YouTube videos that are like viral in my world. Anyway, MongoDB, choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next?
Speaker 1:Rumor. News from Sam Altman.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:He shared today we have added more than 1,000,000,000 of ARR in the last month just from our API business. Oh. People think of us mostly as ChatGPT, but the API team is doing amazing work.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. Yeah. I mean, we saw they just did a huge deal with ServiceNow. Like, they're they're definitely cooking. They've been cooking for a long time.
Speaker 2:They have a they have an enterprise go to market motion that's definitely working and and somewhat disconnected from, like, whatever the hot story of the week is.
Speaker 1:People are people are pretty funny in the comments going, brother, 1,000,000,000 of IRR out of 5,000,000,000 valuation? You're gonna need to make that MRR. Obviously, this person misread Pose, which is they added 1,000,000,000 in the last month.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's pretty good. So of course, I would imagine their plan is to continue doing that and actually scale that. Yeah. Well Bubble Boy
Speaker 2:sharing I love Bubble Boy, but I I I do not believe his rumors. I don't I don't go to him for rumors necessarily. But I don't know. Maybe a lot of likes on this. Maybe it's real.
Speaker 2:There's no there's no community note. What's the rumor from Bubble Boy?
Speaker 1:The rumor. Yeah. Google is spinning out the TPU team into a separate entity under Alphabet umbrella to sell hardware to third parties directly. Okay. It could happen.
Speaker 2:Somebody calls it a cross chain atomic swap. That's funny. Anyway, would they even need to do that? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, you can see the Who knows way that? Waymo, it's like did they need to raise money Yeah. At the Waymo level. Right?
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's helpful for, you know, a company to be have its own
Speaker 2:Alphabet structuring and how they report out earnings Yeah. Whatnot. Anyway, staying in the big tech world, let's head over to Mark Gurman's latest report.
Speaker 1:The Gurminator.
Speaker 2:Apple is revamping Siri as a built in iPhone, Mac, and chatbot to fend off OpenAI. And there's an image here. What is this? The Gemini Google, Google Gemini AI chatbot on a Galaxy s 25 Ultra smartphone. So Apple plans to revamp Siri later this year by turning the digital assistant into the company's first artificial intelligence chatbot, thrusting the iPhone maker into a generative AI race dominated by OpenAI and Google.
Speaker 2:The chatbot, codenamed Campos, will be embedded deeply into the iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems and replace the current Siri interface according to people familiar with the plan. Users will be able to summon the new service the same way they open Siri now by speaking Siri command or holding down the side button of their iPhone or iPad. The new approach will go well beyond the capabilities of current Siri for even a long promised update that's coming earlier in 2026. Today
Speaker 1:John, say Siri again really loud. Really triggered that. For anybody that's watching on their TV at home or in their office.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the feature is a central piece of Apple's turnaround plan for the AI market where it has lagged behind Silicon Valley peers. The Apple Intelligent Platform had a rocky rollout in 2024 with features that were underwhelming or slow to arrive. Shares of Apple gained on the chatbot news, climbing as much as 1.7%. The previously promised non chatbot update to Siri, retaining the current interface is planned for iOS 26.4 due in the coming months.
Speaker 2:The idea that the the idea behind that upgrade is to add features unveiled in 2024, including the ability to analyze on screen content and tap into personal data. It will also be better at searching the web. Chatbots capabilities will come later in the year according to people who asked not to be identified. The company plans to unveil that technology in June at WWC Campos, which will have both voice and typing based models. Tyler, what's that sound like?
Speaker 2:Typing? You're gonna be able to type to Siri.
Speaker 12:An app and forth.
Speaker 2:An app. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Wait. You can can you type to Siri?
Speaker 9:No. Right now, you can't?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I haven't used Siri. Maybe. But you don't
Speaker 2:have an app. You you don't have a place to store all your conversations, which was my take.
Speaker 9:Okay. Cool.
Speaker 10:I would. But I
Speaker 9:I still care about I still care about the model being implemented way more than I care about Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Course. Like where where where are mean, they're like, the model's gonna be good. Like, they're using Gemini. We we know that.
Speaker 2:But like what like, what specifically are you looking for on
Speaker 9:the Gemi boys.
Speaker 2:Gemi boys.
Speaker 1:Gemi boys. Gemi
Speaker 2:where where are you like, what are you worried about them not implementing correctly?
Speaker 12:Like, you want, like,
Speaker 2:an agentic harness so it can do, like, clogged code style work, like, for a long time on your phone directly?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I don't know. There's just, like, like, the current Apple intelligence is so bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:I just like have very low like I I it's I think there's a real possibility that they just like make it so every time you have to talk to to Siri, have to like press an extra button or something. Mhmm. There's just like random stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But what if it what if it's just you press and hold the button, and then you're just submitting a Gemini prompt, and then it just returns exactly what Gemini would have returned? That's like not implementation. That's just like normal.
Speaker 9:Yeah. But like why I mean, they could have already done that.
Speaker 1:You think they
Speaker 9:might Like an open source model. They like they could have done that.
Speaker 2:No. They needed a deal. They they they they can't just Apple can't just go and implement anything. I I I think it's I think it's gonna be tricky for them. Like specifically
Speaker 10:But I'm Lama Yeah.
Speaker 9:That would be great.
Speaker 2:So so specifically, Lama has in the in the terms of service, like, you cannot use this. It's open source unless you have more than, 800,000,000 users or something like that. Like, there's some specific part about the big tech
Speaker 9:OpenAI trained their open source model for, $5,000,000. Like, Apple could do it for a 100,000,000?
Speaker 2:You think so?
Speaker 1:Yeah. People always talk about how amazing the open source model is.
Speaker 9:Okay. It's way better than the current Apple intelligence.
Speaker 2:That's true. That's true. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 9:Like, source models are are are pretty solid.
Speaker 1:So you're saying you want Apple to to make the phone with Foxconn and run DeepSeek.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Come on. They're not doing that. They're not putting DeepSeek on there. Other than the chatbot interface, the operating systems aren't getting a big aren't getting big changes this year.
Speaker 2:Of course, we got Liquid Glass. So Apple is more focused on on improving performance and fixing bugs. Last year, it rolled out a major design overhaul unifying the look and feel of its operating systems. Internally, Apple is testing the chatbot technology as a standalone Siri app. Let's go.
Speaker 2:Similar to the Chattypete and Gemini options available in the App Store, the company doesn't plan to offer that version to customers though, so we might not get an app. I'm on a roller coaster here. Instead, it will integrate the software across its operating systems like the Siri of today. I still think they need an app because I'm gonna I'm gonna hit it. I'm gonna ask it a question.
Speaker 2:I mean, I wanna come back to it. How am I gonna do that? So I don't know.
Speaker 9:Hey, Siri, go back to the recent Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe. But it's gotta be good. Then then it is, then the implementation has to be good. Because even in Gemini and ChatGPT, there are often times when I will I will fire off a query, it will come back with like thousands of words, and if I search a keyword in the search box of previous chats, I have so many previous chats that I can't necessarily find the exact one that I'm thinking of.
Speaker 9:Okay. So so one implementation thing that I think is important is like, if it's super long, if the runs if the response is super long Yeah. It reads it out to you, like, you should be able to pause or something like like that. Like in Claude, you can't do
Speaker 1:that right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like,
Speaker 2:can't even fast forward five
Speaker 9:Like, that is an important thing that materially affects, like, how
Speaker 1:good it to use.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Embracing the chatbot approach represents a strategic shift for Apple, which has long downplayed the conversational AI tools popularized by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.
Speaker 2:Executives have argued that users prefer having AI woven directly into features, something Apple has done with its writing tools, Genmoji, emoji generator, and notification summaries, rather than stand alone stand alone chat experiences. That's not that's not an unreasonable take. Like, I I I do I do I do see why they landed there. And in the long term, I I wouldn't be surprised if that's if that's if the if the AI woven in the features, like, the AI that's in the Photos app is better than, okay. I gotta open up the chat app and ask it to edit this photo and import the photo from my photo.
Speaker 2:Like, no. You just wanna be able to go into the Photos app, have the, you know, change the color temperature, change the brightness, draw on it, add text, and then also have AI features in there, I would imagine. So I I I am bullish on Apple diffusing AI into all the other apps, but it's taking a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What do think? Yeah. I just I just hope the team specifically that designed the new version of the Photos app from the ground up takes the lead on Apple intelligence because You're not
Speaker 2:a fan. I it's been getting better. It's not perfect, but it has been getting better. I've been I've been learning how to do it. I know there I I know the quirks.
Speaker 1:Is it getting better or are you getting better?
Speaker 2:I'm getting better. It can't hold You're me
Speaker 1:It's come out and said, hey, we hear that you guys don't Massive. Photo app. Skill issue.
Speaker 2:Billboard campaign.
Speaker 1:Skill issue.
Speaker 10:Skill issue.
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just the Apple photos icon and then just the text skill issue.
Speaker 2:Skill issue. Stop complaining. Anyway, Graphite. It's code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
Speaker 1:The Germinator had more news. He says just now Apple quietly gave hardware chief John Turners oversight over the company's hardware and software design teams at the end of last year, marking the first evidence he is being groomed for the eventual
Speaker 2:I like Ternis.
Speaker 1:CEO role.
Speaker 2:I like Ternis. I'm a Ternis fan. I'm Ternis head.
Speaker 1:And I think
Speaker 2:I'm I'm bullish. I hope he gets it. I don't know. It feels like it's still very up in the air, very rumor based, but he's been putting out good vibes. He's been delivering.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I I'm I whoever that whoever that source that was,
Speaker 1:we should
Speaker 2:make a hard decision.
Speaker 1:I we should start making edits of him talking
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Doing Apple keynotes.
Speaker 2:Yes. We need to get a Ternus Vibrio out for sure. Start the prime the pump. Prime the pump. If he doesn't get it and we've been pumping Ternus and becoming Ternus heads, it would be it would be a big L for
Speaker 1:us. Ternus.
Speaker 2:We'd see. We we we'll see. Let's see. We we we already talked enough about the the thinking machines drama. The New York Times is reporting on the on the internal drama at thinking machines now.
Speaker 2:Who who wrote this? Was this from
Speaker 1:Mike Isaac.
Speaker 2:From Mike Isaac? Oh, seven minute article. Okay. Defection, secret conversations, deal talks that fizzled, and a battle for control. And the and the quote from, Andrew Curran that he pulls out says, but in less than a year, mister Zof, mister Metzen, mister Schoenholz had become deeply unhappy with the start up's direction.
Speaker 2:I wish they'd unpack that more. The the the these these pieces have not gone deep enough into the nature of the dispute around the technical direction. I would really like more more answers there because, like, they like what specifically are they unhappy about? Because just, you know, the like b to b fine tuning that seems like a good business, like opening eyes, having a lot of success with it, has thinking machines is it go Yeah. To market problem?
Speaker 2:Has it been implementation problem? Has it been Yeah.
Speaker 1:Overall, there's nothing that kills motivation like having to show up to work every day and believing that the company is moving in the wrong
Speaker 2:direction. Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But what specifically?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm sure the team at OpenAI has maybe a rough idea. And that was, again, part of what Miro, it sounds like, frustrated with.
Speaker 2:Thinking Machines lagged OpenAI and other rivals in releasing products and was struggling to raise new funding at an eye popping $50,000,000,000 valuation. The men had urged Moradi to strike a deal with Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, had discussed buying Thinking Machines. And Ms. Moradi had developed closer ties with the chief executive of Anthropic, a leading AI company, but no traction had resulted. At the meeting, the men lobbied for Mr.
Speaker 2:Zof, Thinking Machines chief technology officer, to oversee decisions
Speaker 1:This is just a strange this has been It's a weird part.
Speaker 2:It's a very, very
Speaker 1:weird Which is like, why would the CTO not be overseeing decisions about the company's technical direction?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I don't know. Maybe job title inflation or something. It it happens sometimes. People give funny funny joke jobs.
Speaker 2:You you give some random intern the chief CIO officer CIO title. And then
Speaker 9:What are you trying
Speaker 1:to
Speaker 2:say? Around. I don't know. I'm just saying that, you know, many people might see your title and think that you're the chief information officer or the chief investment officer. And and then you might come around and say, hey.
Speaker 2:Why am I not in charge of all the information here? Anyway, Cognition, they are the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Elon Musk has essentially confirmed Space SpaceX is going public this year and will use the funds to build solar panel AI satellite scaling to one hundreds hundreds of terawatts in three years. And Elon Musk replies to Nick.
Speaker 2:He says, no. The probable case, fiftieth percentile guess, is reaching an annualized rate of a 100 gigawatts of year a year of space AI satellites launched from Earth in three to four years. A 100 terawatts a year requires manufacturing satellites on the moon at massive scale that are shot into deep space with a mass driver, which is ten years away. Worth noting that average US electricity consumption is only half a terawatt, so that would mean launching 200 times the current
Speaker 1:electricity output of Earth. Nick Nick's response here? Yeah. Scroll down. I
Speaker 2:love that Nick's Elon's just like, Nick Nick, you're too bullish on me. You're too bullish.
Speaker 1:Relax.
Speaker 2:Let's dial it back. I I am going to deliver something incredible very quickly, but it's going to take longer to get to the truly unfathomable scale. Anyway, OpenAI's CFO, we could take a cut of customer revenue from AI aided inventions. Is it a fantasy? Asks Amir from the information.
Speaker 2:Maybe, but scientists have been going gaga for LLMs as idea synthesizers and research collaborators, and OpenAI is actively trying to license proprietary biologypharma and data for training. Cut AI discoveries. So you would think that this would happen in sort of like a joint venture or some sort of investment. Obviously, OpenAI has the OpenAI startup fund. And so and they have made investments.
Speaker 2:So there's a world where, if they're particularly bullish on a biotech company, they could participate in it early around and then participate in the upside. This is sort of framed as more of, like, they will, they will just randomly be taking revenue if you sign an enterprise contract. That feels like
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Really rough headline, but I'm sure they'll work on clarifying this. Obviously, I saw some people getting really upset about it immediately. Of course, I don't I think it's too early for that. They definitely need to clarify, right? It's like if you were working on a startup and you use Google search to do some research and then said,
Speaker 10:hey.
Speaker 2:Hey. Know what they should We
Speaker 1:see your search history. We know we know that you've looked up Restream, John. We know that you wanted to livestream. Yes. And we played a pretty big part in that.
Speaker 2:That's true. That's true. I'll tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 2:They should implement tipping. They added a billion dollars in in enterprise revenue. You get your enterprise API bill. Why don't throw a little turn the iPad around fifteen, twenty, 25%. Throw a little tip in.
Speaker 2:Why not?
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 2:know? Hey. If you cure cancer
Speaker 1:Adding tipping to your consumer SaaS product is a great Enterprise
Speaker 2:SaaS product.
Speaker 1:And enterprise is a great way to test product market fit.
Speaker 2:I completely agree. I completely agree. Staying in OpenAI world, Sheeran has a scoop here in Bloomberg. Sam Altman met with investors in The United Arab Emirates recently to discuss new a new funding round targeting around 50,000,000,000 at a 750 to 830,000,000,000 valuation. I think the $7.50 was pre, 08:30 was maybe post.
Speaker 2:Talks are early and
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for early talks.
Speaker 2:Well, fortunately, our next guest is beyond the early talks phase. He's has some amazing news announced announcing here today. We have Keller from Zipline in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring him in as soon as I tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast.
Speaker 2:That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we will bring in Keller from Zipline out of the restroom waiting room and into the TBP and UltraDump. Keller, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:There he is.
Speaker 10:Hey, guys. How are you?
Speaker 2:Fantastic, but not as good as you. Give us the news. What happened?
Speaker 13:So yesterday yeah. Yesterday, we had some big announcements. I mean, first of all, you know, company the just raised more than $600,000,000 to fund US and global expansion. Gotta go to Gong. But even even cooler, mean, you guys know, like, on x, ZipLine is constantly, you know, kinda celebrating how fast the system has been growing.
Speaker 13:It's been growing about 15% week over week over the last year. But we are finally announcing new metros. So we announced Houston and Phoenix as the metros that we're gonna be launching over the next couple months. And then every quarter that passes now, we'll be announcing new major metros that we're bringing autonomous delivery to.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about what it takes to launch your metro. Is that the the mayor's calling you? You're calling the mayor? Is there a form that you're filling out? Like, how what's the process?
Speaker 2:Do you have sales reps going? Do you set up an office? Like, do you do tests? What's involved?
Speaker 13:And the main thing, you know, this is different. People think of hyperscalers and people adding metros, you know, with some of, you know, the the rideshare companies, for example, where you were just hiring people who already live there. Mean, Zipline is building infrastructure in these cities. Sure. It looks a little bit more maybe like how Tesla was building Superchargers.
Speaker 13:Sure. And we are actually building Superchargers, but for airplanes rather than for cars.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:Yeah. And so we're going in. We're building maintenance depots. We're creating a lot of high paying jobs for both maintenance as well as as well as all the people who are doing, you know, community engagement, government affairs, permitting. There's a lot of complexity for each metro that we launch.
Speaker 13:But, you know, the the reality is that we're we're we're trying to scale. I mean, 50% week over week growth is really hard to keep up with. And and so we're trying to add you know, we'll add multiple metros every quarter as we go here Mhmm. As we accelerate.
Speaker 1:What makes what what makes for for a metro area that that that's exciting to zipline.
Speaker 2:Both of those don't seem very snowy. Is that important?
Speaker 1:Well, yes. And I know you're going to be announcing a lot more in the future, but for people listening that are excited to have zipline in their area, I feel like if you kind of describe the sort of ideal metro, maybe people can kind of start figuring it out. Mhmm.
Speaker 13:Yeah. I mean, ultimately, we're gonna be in every metro in The US in in the in the next couple of years. One thing that we just did that, know, I was I was posting some cool stuff on X, We just launched a brand new test site in the Cascades, which is in Oregon.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 13:We have a team that is operating there in insane snow, insane ice, insane sleeting conditions, day in and day out. All of Zipline's test sites operate twenty four seven, by the way. So why are we doing that? We're doing that so that we can be ready by the end of this year to start launching cities in a wide variety of climates across The US and then eventually across the world. So it just takes time to basically validate all the different technology Mhmm.
Speaker 13:Aircraft, ground infrastructure across these different conditions. And you really wanna do it comprehensively and test before you then operate, you know, over tens of millions millions of people's heads.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's the hardware life cycle like? Is there a, like, a v two, v three that comes and gets rolled out to all the metros? Is there testing? Like, are there new innovations that are happening deeper in the supply chain that you're excited about implementing?
Speaker 2:What needs to happen, or what are you excited about on the development of the actual platform?
Speaker 13:Well, you know, funny you should ask. So, basically, right behind me so I'm standing in a new part of the manufacturing facility. Zipline's manufacturing facility tripled in size in the last two months.
Speaker 1:Two months?
Speaker 13:This was
Speaker 2:all this
Speaker 13:was all nothing.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 14:Actually, Actually, don't know, you
Speaker 10:know, if you realize, but like Yeah.
Speaker 13:15% people don't put it together. We just had a board meeting last week Mhmm. Where we started the board meeting by being like, oh, yeah. You know, flight volumes and revenue tripled since the last board meeting three months So the manufacturing growth is pretty much in line with the business growth. Yeah.
Speaker 13:Yeah. But, you know, this space was all empty a month ago, and it is now the new line for our next generation aircraft. It's called EV three. Mhmm. The advantages of of this next generation mean, right now, Zipline is rapidly cycling through hardware, software, plus all the operational improvements we need to make, you know, to to continue to advance the the technology.
Speaker 13:But the, you know, EV three has a huge number of performance improvements relative to the system that we've been operating over the last year.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:And it's half the cost. Mhmm. So, you know, there's giant, you steps being made, improvements possible because the technology is so early. It's 12:01AM when it comes to automated logistics. This facility where I'm standing will be capable of building 20,000 aircraft a year.
Speaker 13:It's the largest autonomous aircraft factory in The United States.
Speaker 2:How do you get something like a 50% cost reduction? Is that automation or d or buying bigger purchase orders deeper in your supply chain? Or is there just, like, a cost curve that's coming down and the price of motors is just dropping and you're just a beneficiary of that? Like, what what's driving cost savings on the vehicle?
Speaker 13:And there are a lot of things. I mean, first of all, the best part is the is no part, the part that you delete. And we were able to delete a lot of parts on this aircraft relative to the previous version. We we, you know, we've been able to yeah. Deleting things is the best way to you know, the the most reliable part, the part that never breaks is the one that isn't on the aircraft at all.
Speaker 13:Mhmm. We've also been able to redesign a lot of parts and fundamental subassemblies on the aircraft to make them easier to manufacture or just less expensive from a component perspective. And then finally, Zipline now has enough scale with a lot of these suppliers that, as you said, you know, you can get much better deals on on a lot of these key components. And so all of those things add up to just a a vehicle that's significantly less expensive.
Speaker 2:Are they also getting quieter over time? I've seen some incredible demos of drone rotors and and propellers that they're shaped in a certain way, and they're way quieter. Is there progress there? Is that happening in, like, physics labs, and then it gets implemented? Are you doing the research?
Speaker 2:What's going on acoustically?
Speaker 13:So, yeah, Zipline, I mean, they we've always had this attitude that, like, this technology can only scale if it is wider, more serene Yeah. For neighborhoods than the traditional delivery mechanisms of cars. And so, you know, Zipline has a big team of aerodynamics engineers and aerodynamic aeroacoustics engineers who have been focusing on this question of, like, how do you design something that's really, really quiet for the last five years? And by the way, you can't planes aren't like cars. You can just put a muffler on the back of it and make it quieter.
Speaker 13:Like, the the design of the aircraft has to be from the ground up made with aero acoustics in mind. Zipline is despite the fact that we operate bigger, more complex vehicles, Zipline is six times quieter than the next closest competitor when we're making a delivery to someone's home. And we'll actually make significant improvements to the aerodam aero acoustic profile of the vehicle this year. We actually think we're gonna get about another eight decibels of improvement this year, which for non engineers, you know, think of eight decibels as being, like, about half as loud to the human ear. So having, again.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's awesome. What about congestion as you scale? How much of the routing is proprietary software maybe on your network, sort of your own flight control, interfacing with more national level flight control, or even just like on the actual drone, just cameras saying, oh, there's some random object over there that I need to steer away from.
Speaker 13:I mean, all of these you know, Zipline has a a huge autonomy team that is responsible for not just how these vehicles route themselves to go and make deliveries, how they navigate the physical world because we're flying at about 400 feet Mhmm. But also how we how we detect and avoid other air traffic. And there are many different layers of Zipline's air traffic control. Well, detect and avoid system, we work closely with air traffic control. We build you know, we're we're essentially building in partnership with the FAA a new version.
Speaker 13:It's called unmanned traffic management or how you manage thousands, soon to be tens of thousands of vehicles. But in the long run, you know, we're already used to our cities being full of these, like, loud, dangerous, polluting vehicles creating tons of traffic driving around in our neighborhoods.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:Small 50 pound vehicles that are silent and electric are gonna be way better for neighborhoods. They're way less, you know, they're less, like, obtrusive. People generally don't notice them. I mean, we do a lot of deliveries to people's homes where they didn't even realize the delivery happened.
Speaker 2:Do you have a timeline for me or you actually getting into an eVTOL and the the true flying car vision, maybe it's not like like, let's say, Waymo level adoption of a human in a in a vertical takeoff and landing, not a helicopter, not a single rotor, not a plane, but something like that. Are we five years away from that? Longer? Is there something fundamental? Because this has been something that's been promised and I've been excited about my entire life, and it feels like there's a lot of serious companies working on it, we're not quite there yet.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about that market generally?
Speaker 13:I'm also really excited, it's a question that I'm very interested in.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:I think that I think a lot of the technology has made probably faster progress than people realize. Like, these you know, you can build vehicles that achieve that are electric vertical takeoff and landing fixed wing hybrids that, like, achieve a lot of the core performance characteristics. I think two challenges that I would point out, one is on the autonomy side. Like, those companies are still putting human pilots in the cockpit. And it's not gonna be like Uber if you have to hire an FAA certified pilot to come do your Uber ride to get you to work in the morning.
Speaker 13:Like, that's doesn't scale. It's a little too expensive.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 13:So I think from an autonomy perspective, who is gonna design that autonomy layer? It's always seemed kind of obvious to me that the company that does that is gonna do billions of autonomous deliveries delivering nonhuman things before you wanna carry humans. I think humans will be more comfortable with that. Mhmm. The other thing I would kind of point out is a huge part of this actually has to do with, like, integration, which is, like, you can totally do the flight.
Speaker 13:There are vehicles, again, flying those kinds of mission profiles today, but where are you landing? I mean, there are no heliports in cities. They are getting shut down rather than built. And I think that it's all about the it's all about integration. You know?
Speaker 13:If you wanna get design a vehicle that is more than just, like, a an electric version of a helicopter that can do, like, 20% of missions that a normal helicopter can do, I think if you're really talking about flying car, the key is to solve the integration problem. Like, can you actually get picked up directly from your home and delivered directly to your office for your daily commute? That's the core question.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what at what point do you think curry like, having a courier feature will make sense? This is top of mind. I I left my laptop at home Monday, and it felt that it was super silly that I just, like, I was I ended up having to, like, use Uber Courier.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you're using, like, a huge car
Speaker 1:for just one tiny laptop. Yeah. Made no sense. I was I was thinking about you guys. It feels like an edge case.
Speaker 1:It's, like, not really
Speaker 2:It's not a big market.
Speaker 1:It's not a big market.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's the
Speaker 1:thinking around it?
Speaker 13:Well, I think you might be surprised. I mean, I you know, similar for what I just said, you know Mhmm. With flying cars, integration is the thing that Zipline is most focused on.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:And we're launching all these amazing new partners. I mean, you know, a lot of the statistics that we're seeing in in in the cities if you look at Dallas, I mean, there are municipalities in Dallas where more than 50% of homes are ordering from zipline. Wow. We had an all time new record on Sunday. It's good.
Speaker 13:We blew away the previous record by 25%, which had been set a week previously.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:And we had 10% of all homes in a municipality place an order with zipline on Sunday.
Speaker 1:Wow. Was that was that football? Is that like does that spike with like football?
Speaker 13:It the holiday weekend? Yeah. But, you know, these are like shocking statistics. I mean, we have, you know, a lot of the restaurants that we serve
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:Zipline is a huge percentage and a a majority of deliveries happening from those restaurants today. And so I think that, you know, the usage is way different than what we were originally expecting, and the key is integration. You know, we wanna be able to add so many different and and this is why we announced ZippingPoints.
Speaker 1:This is
Speaker 13:a really simple new kind of ground infrastructure that we can install for free next to any partner, whether it's a hospital, health facility, retailer, restaurant, or even eventually someone's home. You know, you can almost just think of it like a new kind of mailbox for autonomous logistics.
Speaker 2:Do you think you'll be able to put a camera on them such that you can scan an ID so that you can deliver alcohol?
Speaker 13:We will do that. You don't need a camera on the vehicle. What you actually need is you just you'd need a camera on the person's phone.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 13:That's the way that a lot this delivery works today.
Speaker 1:Got
Speaker 13:it. They'll basically be able to place an order. They'll be able to use their phone to upload a picture of their ID, and we can deliver. And then you can basically require signature on the phone itself.
Speaker 10:Okay.
Speaker 13:Yeah. In the exact same way that it works for UPS or FedEx, we can deliver, you know I mean, today, from a lot of our partners, you know, we deliver over a 100,000 SKUs. I mean, people are ordering Legos and, like Sure. Weird little nozzles for a gardening hose and birthday cakes and rotisserie chickens and prescriptions. That's a crazy one.
Speaker 13:It's everything.
Speaker 2:I I I I don't trust a normal delivery a human delivery driver with a birthday cake. That could go disastrously wrong. So, yeah, the
Speaker 13:flight stability systems are yeah. Exactly. Our like, look, automated systems aren't gonna eat significant percentages of the food, you know, before it's
Speaker 2:delivered to them.
Speaker 13:There's also there's also way less safety risk. Yeah. I think it's very similar to Waymo, where, a young woman who, like, suddenly looks up from her phone in a, you know, in a rideshare and is like, where the heck did my driver just drive me to? Yeah. You know, people have similar similar experiences with delivery where it's like someone's looking over your shoulder like, are you home alone tonight?
Speaker 13:Mhmm. A lot of these, like, service
Speaker 3:a lot
Speaker 13:of these kinds of services, it is much safer to have automated systems that are supervised by humans serving people. By the way, what we are observing is like there really is no comparable. Like, when we look at the frequency of customer ordering right now, you know, you there are lots of lots of people who are ordering from Zipline every single day. Yeah. And so I think it's it's this is not something that you see with traditional instant logistics.
Speaker 13:You see it once you make it 10 times faster, half the cost, and zero emission.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for
Speaker 1:helping us Every time you come on, I can't wait for more people to experience it because given given the the you know, how focused you are in in, you know, places like Dallas, it's I I think it's one of those things like Waymo where you have to experience it until you can really realize that the future is here. So congrats.
Speaker 13:Alright. But you guys
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:I have a surprise for you.
Speaker 2:Please.
Speaker 13:Someone's here auditing. One of your guys' sponsors is here
Speaker 2:Hey. On the Impact.
Speaker 1:A year long sponsorship from TBPN. I'm telling them about the oral farming benefits. The PBPN top tier sponsorships. Lambda line.
Speaker 2:God is here. God is there. Cloud. That's the lambda lightning round.
Speaker 1:Taylor's strong. No. Wrong angle. That's the
Speaker 2:The lambda cloud.
Speaker 10:Taylor's slimes there.
Speaker 1:Esther and Lambda and he's and and Yes. And he's he's really we're just been grinding it out in the hardware founders
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Complex coordination business and we just punch people in the face really hard. Are you are you delivering He
Speaker 11:said he was so pleased
Speaker 1:with this interview that he's
Speaker 13:gonna be quadrupling down on the partnership with
Speaker 2:Fantastic. There
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 13:Exciting new impact. Their advertising.
Speaker 1:Good to see you guys.
Speaker 2:Great to see you guys.
Speaker 1:Teleportation as a service.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Are you getting hopefully, you're getting if those GPUs need to get to the data centers faster, hopefully, they're they're flying in ziplines. That's right. And, you know, we'll eventually turn them into distributed You need compute.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 10:That's what Tesla's doing.
Speaker 13:Maybe Zipline will do this with Lambda. We have GPUs in all the aircraft.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Amazing. Well,
Speaker 2:thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations again.
Speaker 1:Fun. Wish we were there.
Speaker 2:The awesome performance. Overnight success. You gotta hit him with the every time he comes on. This man spent a decade in the making. Ten years in the making, and now he's growing We're bringing him to every day and doubling the business with incredible speed.
Speaker 1:Great stuff, guys.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Cheers. Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 2:And without further ado, we will continue our Lambda lightning round and bring in Jake Cooper from Railway. He's the co founder and CEO, also a TVPN sponsor.
Speaker 1:There he
Speaker 2:is. Jake, good to see you. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Get that going. How are you
Speaker 10:all doing?
Speaker 2:We're doing fantastically.
Speaker 1:So It's fun to have you on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to have you here. Give us the update. What happened?
Speaker 4:Cool. Yeah. I mean, we raised a bunch of money. So Oh, we raised a $100,000,000 round See. To build data centers, and make software just way easier to use because the definition of a developer is melting before our very eyes.
Speaker 4:It's melting. It's melting.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So anybody can ship code, which is crazy. Yeah. We're making it trivially easy for anybody to go and do that. So it's a really exciting time to be, you know, in the business and also just, you know, on the planet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What, what how is that actually playing out? We've talked to some folks about how there are designers that there's one idea that AI will create will take a one x engineer and turn them into a 10 x engineer, and that's probably true. But there's also this idea
Speaker 4:It's of gonna be like a 10,000 x engineer.
Speaker 2:10,000 x engineer.
Speaker 4:Like, we have people internally moving so, so quickly. I've, like, rebuilt a bunch of the internal organizations Yeah. So we can move it. What I'm calling it's super cringe, but I'm calling it agent speed. Okay.
Speaker 4:Sure. Because people are just moving way, way faster.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So, like, you get a 10,000 x engineer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 3:But then
Speaker 2:but then there's also the zero to one x engineer where you take a designer, and then they're able to actually ship production code or a manager or a sales development representative. Anyone can build a tool. Which one is more of more central to the current railway pitch when you're talking to customers?
Speaker 4:I I think there's, like, resonance across the entire space. So we have, like, larger companies who are you know, they're spending 6 figures. They're they're building something, like, of deep consequence, like, critical, critical, critical for their business. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 4:And then you have, like, teams of, you know, a thousand essentially, all kind of, like, vibe coding, and they're building, like, really, really kind of smaller things. But they're really, really important either for client infrastructure or internal tools or anything else like that. And, you know, we've got everybody internally now on, like, a cloud codes cloud code subscription. Sure. You know, in including our recruiting, our operations, etcetera.
Speaker 4:There's just the boundary of your ambitions needs to be deeply, deeply reevaluated just with how good these tools are getting. And we're excited
Speaker 1:to What's be personal framework internally and guidance? Or how are you and the team thinking about when it makes because right now, I feel like there's this obviously so much excitement. You can build an internal tool in an hour or something like that. But every time you build a tool, you're creating some type of ongoing maintenance burden or something like that.
Speaker 4:Tech debt.
Speaker 1:Tech debt. So what's your framework of, hey, this should be something that we just should build versus finding a point solution or even using something as like a Google Sheet or at the at the kind of low end?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so we use Notion a lot internally. And I think lots of, like, deeply flexible tools are gonna be really, really key because now that the agent can kind of go in almost, like, orchestrate these things in general, you can kind of compartmentalize very, very flexible tools together. Right? And so I think that when you're thinking about kind of the build versus buy boundary, right, it's a lot on kind of pushing into the tool so that you can access a lot of the context and take advantage of it.
Speaker 4:Right? So I think the the burden for almost buy goes up a lot because the ambitions and the capability of you being able to build something that's purpose built internally is actually so trivial now. Right? Like, historically, I've built a lot of internal tooling to allow us to do project management releases, etcetera. And now I can actually just kind of push the boundary on lot of those things.
Speaker 4:One of my hot takes is that, like, you know, ERP software. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 3:Do you familiar with it? Right.
Speaker 1:We love ERP software.
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 4:born ERP software. Right? Only useful at scale to build an organization to manage resources or whatever. Right? Now you can kind of build those, like, organizational structures way way earlier.
Speaker 4:Right? So the way that railway runs has historically been different than organizations. And so I think what you're gonna see is almost this Cambrian explosion of various different ways that you can run your organization, which I think is super, super cool. So, unfortunately, like, I'm an engineer, so I have engineering brain damage. I think everybody should be building kind of their own stuff, So you yeah.
Speaker 1:How is your thinking on product management evolved over the last year?
Speaker 4:Oh, man. Yeah. I I had this this tweet that I I was like, oh, Engineers are gonna turn into PMs, like, faster than, you know, PMs can turn into engineers. And I think, like, a week ago, I like, that's completely wrong. You know, like
Speaker 1:I like I like that you're willing to to just be like, yep. Bad take.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 14:I mean,
Speaker 1:you gotta you gotta take
Speaker 4:your lumps too. Right? Like, I don't mind like take can be awful, but if you're gonna stand behind it, just like almost like go down with the ship and be like, alright, the take was awful.
Speaker 14:You know, we're going down. You know,
Speaker 4:don't delete the tweet. Yeah. But, yeah, I think I think the there's only three things essentially left if you assume that the agents are gonna kind of be able to do pretty much anything. Right? It's taste, agency, and structure.
Speaker 4:Right? So when you think about almost anything that you can go and build, those PMs have a lot of that context. Right? And so you don't need to be a Rust engineer to write Rust anymore. You don't need to be a JavaScript engineer.
Speaker 4:You don't even have to be an engineer. Right? Like, we're almost doing this, like, like, double shift right where you have, like, knowledge workers, programmers, engineers, architects, and scientists, right, based on how nebulous your work is. Right? And I think that if you're a knowledge worker, you should probably actually just be like, yeah.
Speaker 4:I can just engineer things now.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 4:What it takes is kind of a bit of critical thinking, a bit of kind of like, okay, how will this system kind of roughly fail? And now you can do it in kind of a lower stakes environment. We hope to provide with Railway is actually those kind of, like, bleeding edge industry best practices, like, really annoying stuff like VPC peering, like, you know, versioned infrastructure so that you can move quickly, but also safely and build these kind of bigger and bigger structures over time. So I think I think the role of the PM evolves a lot, and and you're gonna see a lot of these kind of almost, like, merging or melting of these kind of roles together. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, software engineers will have to become PMs because now it is completely trivial to just go and and write code. Right? Like, I wrote, like, 5,000 lines of of code yesterday. Right? And I spent most of my yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean and and this is, between meetings. Right? Between meetings. And and I spent most of the time not actually, like, auditing the code itself, but auditing a lot of the logic, going in, working, talking about the architecture, all all of those other things.
Speaker 4:Right? So I think, again, the the burdens or the the boundary of your ambitions needs to be deeply, deeply pushed. And so if we at Railway can kind of almost unburden the developer so that they can think about those bigger and bigger things, our hope is that you can build those kind of almost like massive massive structures. Right? Like, if you look at the Golden Gate Bridge, in this current day and age, my first kind of response is like, how the do we build that thing?
Speaker 4:It's so big and so impressive. Right? And so now you actually have these wonderful tools that push the boundary of that. So you can build these massive things. Right?
Speaker 4:And it's super exciting to just you know? You know, I was telling this to an investor, which is probably the wrong thing to tell the investor. But I was like, even if we get schmucked here, like, what a time to
Speaker 1:be alive. And they were like, cool, dude.
Speaker 4:Alright. So we're gonna pass it.
Speaker 2:But yeah. That's wild. How are you thinking about No.
Speaker 1:I do I do think that, like I mean, obviously, you know, play to win and and, you know It's refreshing. It's it's very it's very refreshing versus the I know exactly how the next Yeah. Five to ten years will unfold day by day. It's like no no one knows. Like, the space is moving so quickly.
Speaker 1:You need to really deeply understand like who's signing up for your product, who loves your product, why do they love your product, how do you can, you know, expand your product and continue to be, you know, critical infrastructure, for those customers.
Speaker 2:We have some questions from the chat. Yeah. Sorry. What were you about to say?
Speaker 4:I was just gonna say, yeah, like, I I think, like, during this period, you should kind of take those risks. Right? Like, it's it's almost a deeply almost like risk by default period. Right? And and I think that, you know, there's like a like, what does Elon know that that probably other people don't know?
Speaker 4:Right? And I think you've heard, like, Peter Thiel talk about this too. And and it's almost the calculus of risk is not it's not just purely there. Right? Risk is less risky than you you actually think.
Speaker 4:Right? So I think people should kind of push those boundaries. And if we can kind of create those safety nets for people in general, I think we can we can build wonderful, wonderful things. And as a side note, think we've made risk and failure a bit too expensive in our current society. And if we can re, like, rewind that essentially, we can open people up to, like, sweet success and a bit of bitter failure because when you take risks, some sometimes things don't work out.
Speaker 4:But that forms a baseline experience that allows you to kind of drive these unique kind of tastes forward.
Speaker 1:So to the To
Speaker 2:the chat, we have to ask you about your bike.
Speaker 1:Your Oh. And Nakunj says your motorcycle liability clause on your Yeah. Term
Speaker 4:We have key man insurance. Okay. Yeah. I'm I'm kind of like, you know, I'm counting the days until somebody really asked me to, like, go up and give up the bike.
Speaker 1:And Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's funny because people people ask me, like, oh my god. You ride a motorcycle? Like, I I feel like I should get into that. Was like, answer is like, absolutely not. I do not do that.
Speaker 4:Like, I I've been riding dirt bikes since I was like, 13, basically. And so and so, like, I've had I've had a bike for a while, and I've I've kind of worked my way up. Right? You know? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Don't just don't be stupid.
Speaker 1:No. You gotta I was gonna say
Speaker 2:the riskiest thing you can do is not take any risk. Get on the motorcycle. Ride.
Speaker 4:My Sunday ride is Is that good? Basically I I live near the Inner Richmond, so I basically just, go up and drive through the Presidio, maybe in the marina. There's that, like, nice coffee
Speaker 10:That's great.
Speaker 4:Like, truck, basically. Yeah. I I go to the gym in the marina. They've got a sauna. It's wonderful.
Speaker 4:So I just
Speaker 1:ever try to find, like, a super steep, you know, classic SF Hill and go a little too fast on the way up? No.
Speaker 4:I I those those days are, like, behind me because, yeah, I I I promised the investors that, like, I wouldn't do anything stupid. So the unfortunate thing about the bike is, like, it's a nice bike. And it's like the bike I wanted growing up Mhmm. But I don't ride it like like it should be, Bryd.
Speaker 1:What bike? What bike?
Speaker 4:It's a it's a Ducati, like the pedagogical.
Speaker 1:There we go. There we go. We
Speaker 2:have another question from the chat. Everyone's loving the bookshelf behind you. Give us some book recommendations. What's on the shelf?
Speaker 1:What's the underrated bookshelf?
Speaker 2:The most underrated? What's the favorite book? What's the one with the most highlights and motes?
Speaker 10:Well, this
Speaker 4:is actually my wife's side of the
Speaker 10:the bookshelf.
Speaker 4:So I'll go off things that are maybe not on there. I know I do see the
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 4:the Steve Jobs book is somewhere out there, which I don't It's pretty good. One of my favorite books actually is Getting to Yes. I don't know if you y'all have kind of read it.
Speaker 2:So is it
Speaker 3:it's about like
Speaker 2:a sales negotiation?
Speaker 4:It's a book essentially on compromise. Right? And so essentially, it allows you to break down problems in a way that is not kind of me versus you, but it's me versus the problem. Right? And so one of my favorite analogies in there is, like, you know, we're splitting an orange.
Speaker 4:Right? We could split it down the middle, essentially, and, you know, I could like, you could have half and I could have half in general, or we could figure out what we care about in general. Right? And maybe I'm making mixed drinks, and maybe you're taking your kid to the soccer game, right, or anything else like that. And so in in essence, I want the peel and you want the whole orange.
Speaker 4:Right? We can both come out on top roughly. Right? And I think that figuring out ways that you can almost, like, have a solid compromise with people is is deeply, deeply important, you know, on on that one. So I I like that book.
Speaker 2:Love it. Back to back to AI and how it's changing software development, database selection, database migration, switching something is ingrained in an organization as a database has historically been very difficult. Oh, yeah. Are AI agents making it easier? Are you actually seeing companies move around from one database to another, maybe based on cost, maybe based on features?
Speaker 2:Is the is the fact that a particular LLM is in love with a Redis or a MongoDB, like, is that going to be relevant in the future?
Speaker 4:So I'm unfortunately a little bit, like, too Dario pilled in terms of
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:Like, the the fundamental laws of physics. Right? And so I think it's it's actually probably the hardest thing to change about your your system is the the database, roughly. Right?
Speaker 3:Because you
Speaker 4:have that storage. You have all of those other things. Right? Like, this is fundamentally also why we build data centers. Right?
Speaker 4:One, you you need more production roughly in the world, and we can start with data centers, and that's that's wonderful. Mhmm. But two, it's actually a really, really solid mode in terms of, you know, you can't just will into existence a data center, right? And at some point, potentially down the line, like those things will get more and more expensive just because of the cost of labor, but like the cost of capital is decreasing, right? And so I think the similar thing kind of applies roughly with data centers if you kind of move roughly up the stack.
Speaker 4:And so we actually started building or sorry, databases. We actually started building databases. Like, we're originally just a, you know, click a button, get a Postgres instance or a Metas instance or anything else like that. And we've slowly worked worked our way back up, right, up to building, know, web apps, you know, launch CDN a at some point in the future Cool. Stuff like that.
Speaker 4:So I I think that when you look at that lens of, like, fundamental physics, I think the database is, like, a very, very important part of your your kind of rough calculus. And I think the agents are making it easier to go and almost manage those migrations. But when I was talking about those 5,000 lines of code, you have to think about kind of what you are roughly building. Right? And so you're still going to need to audit it.
Speaker 4:And that's sort of why I say moving from engineers to, like, architects, Right? Where you're thinking about that kind of bigger, bigger vision. And so, you know, as as Jordi said it earlier, like, I don't think anybody can roughly pick predict the the future for a lot of these things, but I do still think that fundamentally, there are going to be requirements for how do you integrate the things that exist in the physical realm. So roughly on those data databases to storage to data centers and and with with kind of your expected reality, basically.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Right? And the hope over time is is that Railway can actually help you do that. Right? So we do this on a software level, and we've built tooling internally to help build data centers. And so we've actually virtualized a bunch of those racks.
Speaker 4:So now you can almost drag and drop those servers into them. And at some point, we can get to a point where we're working directly with the Super Micro API. You can drag and say, hey, I want this data center of this size in general. You'll create POs for that, that, and say, okay, cool. Hit a button.
Speaker 4:It'll cost you 25 mil or something like that.
Speaker 1:Right? And that's the goal. One click checkout for data centers.
Speaker 4:One click checkout for data centers and stuff like that. And and moving towards a world where you can almost because it's easier to build things on the Internet. Right? Like, it's just it's a fundamental, like, fact. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:If you
Speaker 4:can simulate it and simulate that small section of it, then you can create almost APIs to reconcile, like, this is what Terraform did really, really well. Like, expected state versus desired state. Mhmm. And if we can do that with your intention as you kind of move through time and give you those safe kind of primitives to say, okay. Cool.
Speaker 4:Like, I wanna make this change. Let me fork my entire environment. Mhmm. You know, get copy on right storage for everything, make some small change. I make it in production.
Speaker 4:It merges, and you deploy it instantly. Then you're kind of moving at agent speed. Right? And that's that's what we think a lot about in terms of building the next fundamental layer of software development and then physical production beyond that.
Speaker 1:You were at Bloomberg. Did you get to work directly on the terminal?
Speaker 4:Yeah. A little bit. I bounced around a bit at Bloomberg. I was only there for about six months. But it was it was a really, really cool time to kind of work on stuff like that.
Speaker 4:I was working on a bit of the internal tooling. Mhmm. So I got a couple of commits that I think are probably still inside Let's go.
Speaker 2:Powering the Odd Vots podcast, making Joe Wiesenthal's job easier. We love to see it.
Speaker 1:Putting Joe Wiesenthal in agent mode.
Speaker 2:Yes. Hopefully. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 1:Congratulations to the whole team. Congratulations. The chat loves you. Yeah. Come back on again soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Love to. To go way deeper.
Speaker 4:Thanks for thanks for having us as sponsors. Sponsors. Like, we're just we're big proponents of, like, rich taste and, like, we we believe that TPPN has a rich taste that y'all are sharing with the world and we're just happy to be here. Have have me on any time. Love to to join and and hang out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thank you for making this possible.
Speaker 2:Awesome. See
Speaker 1:you on for the sea very soon,
Speaker 2:I'm Bye.
Speaker 1:Cheers, Jake. Peace. Bye.
Speaker 2:And in case you've been living under a data center, Railway, Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers, and databases run-in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. We're very happy to be partnered with Railway. We have Joe Wiesenthal coming in to the
Speaker 1:He said he was running five minutes behind. Perfect. So we can get back to the timeline.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Let me tell you about eleven we got him. Build intelligent real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs, and we do have Joe Wiesenthal in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him into the TV in Elstradon. Joe Wiesenthal.
Speaker 1:Brother Joe.
Speaker 2:How are
Speaker 1:you doing? It has been
Speaker 2:eons. It's been far too long. I'm so glad you're here.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much
Speaker 2:for taking the time.
Speaker 10:I missed you guys too, and it has been far too long. It probably hasn't even been that much time, but probably, like, there's just been so much that's happened since the last time we connected. It feels year it feels like years.
Speaker 9:There there really has been.
Speaker 2:Really years. So so do you have Davos FOMO right now? I I feel like it's been a good year for Davos. You're normally our foreign correspondent. You're on the ground at all these big hoity toity events.
Speaker 2:I go to you, but your it appears you're in New York.
Speaker 10:I'm in the New York studio. You know, I was in Davos in January
Speaker 2:Woah. We get it, dude. We get it. We get it. Get it, Joe.
Speaker 2:You've been to Davos.
Speaker 1:2015,
Speaker 2:2015. They said ten years that he wouldn't lose touch.
Speaker 12:Apparently,
Speaker 2:he's just completely lost touch.
Speaker 10:No. This is a real story. This is a real story, though. I got, like, I got, like first of all, it's, like, very cold there. It's not that nice.
Speaker 10:I got a flu or I got sick I was so miserable
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 10:That when I got back Yeah. I told the people inside Bloomberg, I said, never invite me to Davos again lest I feel tempted to say yes. Because I don't because it's like, oh, do you wanna be part of our Davos team? Of course. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 10:Okay. Maybe. So I didn't even want the temptation to say
Speaker 1:I thought you were gonna I thought you were gonna say you got back and you immediately switched up on your day one. You never you never looked back.
Speaker 2:It's not where you came from. No. No. No.
Speaker 10:It was like, I I I do not want the temptation go back. But I've always been the same as everyone else. I was like, oh, Davos. Born. Blah blah blah.
Speaker 10:And then finally
Speaker 2:Nice year.
Speaker 10:There's a good Davos. Ten years or however many years it's been since I went. There's finally a good Davos where there's, a bunch of news and action. Yeah. And I guess, did I have a little fun, Moe?
Speaker 10:Maybe I did. I don't know. It seemed like a fun one this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's been fifty five years, something like that, going strong. What headlines have stuck out to you for that have come out? We've been tracking most of the AI and tech stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Has anything popped up on your radar that's sort of updated you?
Speaker 1:Did anything spike your cortisol?
Speaker 10:With without question, the Mark Carney speech,
Speaker 2:the
Speaker 10:Canadian prime minister Mhmm. It was, like, pretty out there in terms of, like, the old world is dead. Mhmm. There's no point in nostalgia. Everybody for themselves, sovereignty, power politics is back.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. And this is like you know, it's one of these things where, like, you the three of us could have had this conversation a couple years ago. Mhmm. But to hear it from someone like a Mark Carney who's like he's such an institutional man. Right?
Speaker 10:So he used to be the head of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada for the matter for that matter. Like a true internationalist Davos man. I mean, I think if you thought of who is Davos man, you would think someone like Mark Carney. Mhmm. So to hear him basically says say, like, we shouldn't be in this that world is dead, and there's no point in spending time being nostalgic for it, I would say it's sort of a it is a mark to market moment, I would say.
Speaker 10:And so without question, I think, like, that was from a sort of geopolitical standpoint, the highlight of the whole event. The other one the other speech that I thought was really remarkable or very important was the Chinese vice premier. They're talking about how China doesn't wanna just be the factory to the world. It will also wants to buy our stuff because for all the anxiety that we have here in The US, every other country is feeling that stress as well. Their manufacturing sector is getting hollowed out by Chinese competition.
Speaker 10:So it's clearly a source of, I would say, a different an anxiety for China that every country around the world looks at them and thinks, wait. Are you gonna kill my domestic champions as well as you've done to, you know, European Yeah. Automakers, and so forth.
Speaker 1:It's it's great. It's great that they're saying that, but does anybody actually believe it? I mean, ask ask like Elon, do you think do you think Yeah. Do do the Chinese really wanna buy Teslas?
Speaker 10:No. I mean so I I wrote about this, and my take is that, like, they have been saying this for years. This is not the first time, and they're like, oh, we're gonna lift domestic consumption, and that's gonna create imports, then that'll benefit the rest of the world and so forth. They've been saying this for years, and I think there is this view that's like, well, this is just lip service. It's just they just say it every year, and they then they say it again the next year.
Speaker 10:I think, however, in their defense, what I would say is the structure of the sort of domestic Chinese political economy makes it very hard. And if I could just get technical for a second, they have this very decentralized approach to fiscal policy, which is, you know, all of the different provinces basically run their own economies, and the provincial leaders, they try to achieve goals that are set by Beijing. And, basically, this is how you get this crazy race to the bottom, which is every, you know, every province wants to have their BYD, their, you know, battery maker, etcetera. And so the issue isn't so much whether Chinese leaders in Beijing are serious about wanting to, like, boost imports. The question is whether their system will ever allow them to get out of the sort of game theory equilibrium where all of the provincial leaders feel incentivized to just export as much as possible.
Speaker 10:And it is probably a tricky thing to turn around that political system in the same way that we have difficulties that are very difficult to turn around even if someone in Washington DC says otherwise.
Speaker 2:What's the sweet spot for Chinese imports? Because it feels like they're Yeah. They are exporting a ton, cars Yeah. And phones and all sorts of stuff, rare earth elements.
Speaker 1:The sweet spot is plugged to goods. Is it? The one thing. It's like you can't
Speaker 2:But they wanna import chips, but we've, you know, we're really putting the kibosh on that going back and forth
Speaker 1:Well, the companies do.
Speaker 2:The companies do. But does. You know, the the China seems to want to be a buyer of semiconductors and silicon. But is there a sweet spot product that you think that they'd actually be well suited to scale their imports of?
Speaker 1:I think this
Speaker 10:is, like, this is the real serious question. So, I mean, even on the chips thing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:They wanna be an importer of chips now, but they don't wanna be an importer of chips in five years. Right? Yeah. They want to be an importer of chips only so long only for so long as it takes for them to have domestic capacity to produce the world's most advanced chips. They certainly I mean, they clearly do not want to, like, have this permanently be importing Nvidia chips or whatever.
Speaker 10:They would like Huawei to supersede them. Yeah. But then on the other things, you know, the intuitive answer is, oh, you're, like, gonna import luxury goods and fine wines and all that stuff. But even there, like, there was a great Feet story in December talking about how China is becoming a booming producer of caviar and sparkling wine. These things that we don't associate with China at all or really nice, like, organic cherries and stuff like that.
Speaker 10:And so even there, there's the sort of effectiveness of their domestic productivity, their ability to sort of identify a sector and get really good at producing it really fast, which you can't knock them for it. That's progress. But it does create these very intense strains. And so you ask, okay. You wanna import more from the rest of the world.
Speaker 10:Well, what do you imagine that's gonna be in 2035? What is the rest of the world making that you can't make domestically? You can't really knock the country for it. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 10:Being good at building things is awesome. Yeah. And everyone would like to do it, but you can't what is that thing? And I don't think anyone really has that sweet spot answer. I think it's really
Speaker 1:Yeah. The luxury good side, they're so good at making stuff. They can make you a watch that looks exactly like Yeah. Richard Mill. Like, it looks a one it looks like a one to one.
Speaker 1:The only difference in the the well, the kind of saving grace for r r m is, like, you can't just, like, snap your fingers and have, you know You can't backstory of brand and the story.
Speaker 10:But if you can you definitely can't sort of establish the backstory and the brand, the legend. That's gonna take Yeah. A long time. But I think, like, even in I bought a Chinese a very cheap Chinese watch last year. But I sorta looked into the Chinese watch industry and the sort of, like, the watch nerds online, you know, people would talk
Speaker 3:about Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Luxury watches on Reddit, etcetera. They're full of praise at the quality of the mechanical gearing or whatever
Speaker 2:The heraldi.
Speaker 10:In a lot of this sort of so they're catching up, you know, they're catching up fast to what they can do in Switzerland and elsewhere even in that category.
Speaker 1:Interesting. What's going on with Japan? What's going on over there? So, you know, we did it. We actually we have
Speaker 10:a we have a great episode that came out today. So we talked to the CEO of PIMCO, which, you know, owns the world's largest bond
Speaker 1:fund.
Speaker 2:That's on the Odd Lots podcast, which is available in your podcast hours. Podcast?
Speaker 10:Wherever you get your podcast.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Making it handmade for over ten years. Over a decade.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Handmade in New York City
Speaker 2:for over a decade. But So the Potchef Elite of podcasts.
Speaker 10:That's right. That's right. Yeah. Many people say that. Yeah.
Speaker 10:It is. I haven't said that,
Speaker 2:but It has a of history.
Speaker 10:It does. This is what everyone always says. Oh, Odd Lodge. Yes. That's the Patek Philippe of podcasts.
Speaker 10:That's right. But there you know what? Everyone is looking at these bond yields in Japan, and they're surging. And people are saying, you know, Japan has a lot of government debt. That's very true.
Speaker 10:And they're they're saying, is this the big one? Right? Is this the moment where the bill comes due and they're gonna have to print a ton of yen and the yen, you know, is worth as much as confetti or whatever? His argument is like, no. That's he just he had just gotten back from Japan.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. He said, no. That's not what's going on at all. What's happening is that Japanese economic growth, etcetera, has been stagnant for thirty years about, and there is actually a reinvigorate reinvigorated domestic investment. And that has an inflationary impulse, and that does push up rates, you know, just in the way that rates have come up in The US since the Zurp era of the twenty tens.
Speaker 10:And his argument, which I find compelling, is that if you look at the the Nikkei, the their main stock index, and you look at it in US dollar terms, that is surging to new all time highs. So we're not seeing a collapse of the yen at all. Okay. And you would not expect you know, if this country is like, oh, this is the prelude to hyperinflation. Yeah.
Speaker 10:You would not expect to see such robustness in the stock market, and I find that I find that compelling. So for now, I'm gonna take it as Wait. Wait. This is a sign of a country of risk.
Speaker 1:That a little bit more because hyperinflation, you can have asset prices going up even if even if there's not necessarily the fundamentals But you
Speaker 10:would not expect changing. Yes. But you would not expect to see that happening in other currency terms. So it's like, yes. If you look at the Venezuelan stock market in in the 20 tens, I mean, you just look at a line and it looks like it's going through the moon because it to the moon existed.
Speaker 10:And then you just like on the Bloomberg, you just toggle that and now I wanna look at the same stock market in US dollar terms
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Not in boulevards. And then you see the stock market's basically gone to zero. To zero. And so it's like a simple test.
Speaker 1:Got it. It.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Like, in the period of, like, broad scale devaluation of the currency, you get the phenomenon that you described where everything goes up. But when you see it going up in dollar terms, there has been some dollar weakness. But when you see it going up so much in terms of foreign currency, then it's no longer a story about debasement.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. What did you think about some of Ken Griffin's comments? I I thought it I I I appreciated his perspective on the AI boom and job loss, specifically because he's somebody who's, like, been heavily focused on automating trading specifically for a very long time working with some of the best
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did he say?
Speaker 10:Now I feel bad. What what was the what I missed
Speaker 1:the Oh, he was just basically saying that like this sort of job loss concept is is overblown in in Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just in in the short of His example was
Speaker 1:said it was he said it was hype.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He had a commodities trader come to him with a report that was AI generated, and he said he was he was, you know, amazed with the title, amazed with the intro paragraph. And then as he dug in, he he basically called it slop. And it's a classic debate on, well, are we about to turn the corner? And Ken Griffin's the next person to be impressed because Andre Carpathi was not impressed with the code that these models were writing a year ago.
Speaker 2:Now he's like, I'm falling behind. It's amazing. And so is Ken Griffin the the next domino to fall, or is he a canary in the coal mine for some true plateau?
Speaker 10:It would be really interesting. I would love to if I could the jury if I what I would really love is not to hear Ken Griffin's take on AI, but what I'd like to hear is a pod manager within Citadel. Yeah. Because so many of those jobs of, like, running the pods or the you know, I've talked to a bunch of them now Mhmm. And they're coding jobs.
Speaker 10:So there's someone who gets hired as a junior analyst within a pod. Right? And they're gonna study you know, they're gonna track industrial stocks. So they're gonna track they're gonna trade chemical stocks. But those jobs are, like, basically coding jobs or a large part, and they're they're running back tests and so forth, and they're trying to see, okay, what information corresponds to useful signal, what sort of economic data, and so forth.
Speaker 10:And these are all just you know, they're computer jobs. They're engineering jobs. Yeah. And they're, in many cases, competing at some of these firms for some of the same talent as, in many cases, as big tech. Yeah.
Speaker 10:That's that's So I agree, like like, you I I think it's many people would agree with Ken Griffin that you are not gonna get some gem of insight about what stock to trade or anything like that or any commodity from a sort of AI generated report. I but, you know, like, it's also we know at every every engineer every software engineer we talk to talks about how much how impressed they are right now with, like, Opus 4.5 and so forth. And so I, you know, I would be curious because we've talked to we have an episode of the podcast coming out next week with the head of a major bank. They are seeing you know, the the I'll say the tenor of the conversation has changed from last year to this year. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Last year, when you ask executives, well, what are you actually getting value out of from AI right now? They would say, well, we have tests everywhere. Right? We all of we're all we're testing a bunch of stuff. We're really excited about
Speaker 1:it. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Now they come back with clear examples of this is a workflow process that was more costly or time intensive last year than it is right now. And so I think I think from my perspective, clearly, talking to people
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:People are finding productivity gains that are real from
Speaker 3:it.
Speaker 2:That's so funny because, yeah, I remember more of the Ken Griffin quote. And one of the lines he said was that he specifically asked a bunch of business leaders to give examples of how AI is improving their business. And he was taken aback by the fact that none of them were citing generative AI as the core driver.
Speaker 10:That's interesting.
Speaker 2:But I but I I I agree with you generally. There was an interesting report in The Wall Street Journal about how the c suite is reporting much more time saving from AI tools than workers in the non suite c suite category. And I wasn't sure what to make of that, whether it's just like stuff fills the gaps more, there's some sort of incentive. I don't know.
Speaker 10:I do look. I I I still think, by and large, at this point, probably it's modest what people in terms of, oh, this is, like, really moving the dial or this is a dramatic change in how productive our employees can be at any level. And I'm sort of, you know, even at the c suite, I'm like, I I'd be curious to know what exactly they're doing that, okay, this is saving them time. I mean, maybe in some cases, it might just be they're having an AI draft an email for them that's a lot quicker, and there's probably some
Speaker 2:Yeah. When when I think about the C suite job, I think about a lot of deep research reports for every every business decision that they're making. And they're probably they're not working less. They're just saying that, you know, well, to make this one decision, I need to I need to get a survey together of all the companies in this category that I could potentially do business with before I walk into this meeting with this one company that I might do business with. And, yes, that would take an hour on Google and a spreadsheet to pull together.
Speaker 2:Deep Research just does it in ten minutes in the background on your phone. And so I I feel like there there are real speed ups there. And maybe workers just haven't been diffused in that way or it's less relevant in, a non knowledge work, non executive functioning task. It's it's just a different diffusion level. Anyway, I I wanna talk to you about the future of the New York Times homepage because Oh, great.
Speaker 10:I love this topic. I love this topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You were black pilling a little bit saying that it's not gonna be maintained in a future where, you know, the news is is collected. And my point was maybe if the cost to maintain the New York Times homepage goes down because AI tools are more available and more diffuse and cheaper, that you might actually see a continuation of the greatness that is, you know, beautiful homepages. What do you think?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think that's a great take, actually. And I I I I guess my concern isn't like, okay. We're not gonna have websites anymore
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Per se.
Speaker 2:I mean, we still
Speaker 1:have newspapers. Right.
Speaker 10:Yeah. But it's more that, you know, if in a world in which we are communicate you know, I buy my auto insurance through an AI agent of some so of of some source. Like, why did that does that auto insurance company really need to have a web presence as we know it? Or why is the web presence optimized for human consumers as the sort of human consumer becomes less and less a factor less and less relevant for them? So, you know, I I I wasn't even like, when I wrote that, like, I wasn't even, like, dooming or black pilling or any of that per se.
Speaker 10:And actually, you know, even going back to the New York Times example, you know, the post homepage era is actually you know, it's been there for years. Right? So Yeah. If you think if you think like the digital digital media at the New York Times, what are they probably really excited about? Well, it's probably, like, getting their many of their reporters to get comfortable doing reels or going out doing TikToks where they talk about that story.
Speaker 10:So, like, in a sense, the sort of post web page era has been around for a long time, but it feels like with, like, the sort of efficacy and the clear usefulness of agents and scraping, etcetera, it's just not obvious why it's gonna be much of a priority. Maybe for you know, The Times isn't really nice homepage. And so to your point, it would be easy to maintain and so worth it's probably very easy to maintain as it is or a lot certainly a lot easier than it used to be. It's just not clear that this is gonna be the sort of dominant way that we sort of trade digital information.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They might they they have a big, obviously, games division. We could see them we could see them continue to invest or maybe get into gaming, open a casino in Vegas. Oh, yeah. The New York Times Casino.
Speaker 10:New York Times. Great. That would be It was great ride Vegas. Hanging out by the pool at the New York Times Casino.
Speaker 2:I want high stakes Wordle. I'm putting a 100 g's down on Wordle. Let's go.
Speaker 10:I would love people would love that.
Speaker 2:They gotta do it. People probably would love that. Yeah.
Speaker 10:The thing about The New York Times is, you know, other than there's a handful of others perhaps, and I'd like Bloomberg is one of them. Yeah. But, you know, it is a brand. It is a lifestyle brand. Right?
Speaker 10:In a way that very few news outlets of any sort have ever been able to achieve. So, you know, they go into cooking and they have cooking shows. They go into, you know, simple games on the phone. There are not many news entities of any sort that could pull that off. And I've always been for years sort of not literally, but a a New York Times bull because it's just been so obvious to me that there is this one news brand that is also this big lifestyle brand, and their core subscribers will follow them into all of these new ventures.
Speaker 10:And it's just something, you know, like Yeah. Don't wanna name names, but, like, other, like, big publications, similar national general news publications do not have that same cachet where if they get into some totally new line of business, that they'll have subscribers who will pay up all of that money. So The New York Times is sort of a sort of a special entity.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. You know, I completely agree. It's also interesting that The New York Times has managed this, like, sort of influencer transition remarkably well. When I go on YouTube, I'll see the Ezra Klein show or Ross Douthat or Hard Forken.
Speaker 2:And Ezra and and Ross have, like, their own brands, but they Yeah. Still, like, has the aesthetics of The New York Times, and they brought that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Into YouTube, and they do these collabs. Like, just watching how they've actually mechanically positioned as the talent is more forward, but it's still under the umbrella. Very, very smart.
Speaker 10:And every and again, every publication would love to pull that off, but it's really tough because then you get this situation which the talent says, like, oh, wait. Why am I still here, etcetera? I think it actually speaks to just, how powerful that New York Times brand is Yeah. That someone you know, Ross Douthit, Ezra, etcetera. No.
Speaker 10:This is a very good fit, but it's tricky. Every publication is gonna try to do some version, have their own, you know, equivalent of their substack roster, right, or have their equivalent of that. And I think very few are really gonna be able to pull it off at scale.
Speaker 1:Are you one shotted by vibe coding?
Speaker 10:Yeah. You know what? I I have, like, full on AI psychosis, and I'll tell you. Here's here's the here's the evidence that I realized
Speaker 2:Complete victory for TAC.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So here's I I I'll I'm gonna admit this here, but here's here was the moment that I knew I had full on one shotted psychosis, which was whatever whatever term you wanna use. So I was, like, vibe coding. I was using clogged code
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:And I was, like, very impressed. And then I opened up a second Clog code window. Mhmm. So because I wanted to be able to work on a couple, like, aspects of the project in parallel. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And then the second window, it made a suggestion for what I work on that was actually a very bad suggestion. It was the first. Had I actually said yes to the suggestion, it would have really set me back quite a bit. It was and I'm glad I paid attention, overrode it. And my first thought in that moment was, like, the original window would have never made that mistake.
Speaker 10:You know? It's like, the the original window that window really got me.
Speaker 1:That window doesn't get me at all.
Speaker 10:And I was like, I'm I'm I'm sticking with the window on the right side. And in that moment when I, like, had that thought that, oh, this window doesn't get me the way the other window I was like, Joe, okay. I gotta step away from the computer a little bit. That is those are early signs. I think I'm, like you know, I'm very proud of myself.
Speaker 10:I think I avoid psychosis of all sorts. I've been on Twitter for fifteen years, and I haven't gone crazy. And so I was like, okay. I saw that in myself. I like, step away from the computer.
Speaker 10:It's just a computer. There's no personality. Yeah. There's not one screen that gets me better. But when I noticed that, I was like, okay.
Speaker 10:I am I am more at risk perhaps than I thought.
Speaker 1:What have you been building?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So I'm very obsessed for years with this idea that people write and speak fundamentally differently. And when we give speeches, we use various things. We rhyme and we speak in rhythm and we use mnemonic aids and we say first and you and all these different linguistic things. That would just been a personal interest of mine.
Speaker 10:And I sort of think that as as digital media has saturated our lives over the last fifteen, twenty years, even our written text comes to resemble more spoken text. And so
Speaker 1:I thought, well, it would be fun if you
Speaker 10:could, like, build a piece of software that actually empirically tested this question. Like, do does a piece of writing in a newspaper today resemble more written word than, say, that same column or whatever twenty years ago? I'd like
Speaker 1:to be able
Speaker 10:to test this out. And there are various lexical markers that linguists and others have used to work on these things. So I thought, okay. It would be fun to see if I could build this. And so I've actually been able to build it.
Speaker 10:People go check it out, havlock.ai, and you just drop a piece of text in
Speaker 12:Sound good.
Speaker 10:And then it says, this sentence looks literate. This sentence looks like the spoken word and so forth. And it almost works. Like, I'm actually astonished. It's not perfect by any stretch.
Speaker 10:I still have a lot of work to do. But basically, I sort of was able to vibe code this sort of machine learning model where I trained a model to to detect this is rhyme, this is not, etcetera. And then it breaks out every sentence and then sort of scores the whole piece. And it works. And I'm sort of astounding on Davos.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Like, so I, you know, I tested on the Mark Carney speech and the Trump speech, and the difference is remarkable. It's every sentence, it sort of classifies one as this resembles the spoken word. This resembles the written word. And the difference you know, we hear this.
Speaker 10:Right? You hear the two speeches. It's like, okay. They're speaking at a very different register. This feels very different.
Speaker 10:And it's cool that, like, I've been, you know, with two weeks of hobby coding, been able to build this model. And I actually I trained you know, I'd learned how to I don't know what I learned. But I was able to build this little machine learning model that identifies each sentence and categorize in one. And I'm like, this is crazy. It actually kinda works, and I don't know anything about code.
Speaker 10:And this is something that I've wanted to exist for a long time, and I was able to just build it. It's so Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's cool because it's something shouted. Yeah. It's something it's something that, like, I'm I'm sure you could find a way to turn it into a business, but it's actually a tool that just should exist. Like, there were so many tools that didn't exist because there was no business justification to devote hundreds of hours.
Speaker 10:Exactly that. Right? Like, so this is an interesting thing, but who's actually gonna take the many, many sort of hours that it would take to actually
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Code this because I don't think there is, like, some obvious path to riches here.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:But it was a you know, I did, like, an hour or two a day for a few days at five in the morning before my kids got up, and it is a properly working piece of software that I can use. I still need to fine tune a little lot. There's still mistakes and so forth, but it actually works.
Speaker 1:You have to
Speaker 10:turn mind is
Speaker 6:kinda fun.
Speaker 1:Turn into, like, a vibe coding slash mindset influencer every morning. It's like, it's 5AM. I'm tired. Are you crying? Still at my I'm up at my desk.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Everyone else is sleeping.
Speaker 2:I'm fine. Gets the photo of the watch every day.
Speaker 1:It's 2AM on the West Coast. Every all my enemies are sleeping.
Speaker 10:Yeah. That's right. That's right. I'm gonna
Speaker 2:That's great. Just ran my most recent I just ran my most recent
Speaker 10:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 2:Essay through havelock.ai. I got a 76% orality score. I write very, very loosely strongly. Part part of that is that we do Okay. I I started the essay Trump, Greenland, Elon, blah blah blah.
Speaker 2:Let's focus on the important thing. I like, because I I deliberately write exactly like I talk. Yeah. But I
Speaker 10:don't know if do I and, like, I'm pretty happy about that. It sounds like it scored it pretty well. A 100%. That also means that you are writing in a way that connects with the modern Sure. You know, the modern audience.
Speaker 10:And so I think that's great. And you could test that, and now you can know. And is this in the contemporary register? And I don't know, like, high score, low score, better or worse. I just think it's cool that this thing can actually sort of figure it out.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it. Anything else, Jordy?
Speaker 1:No. Super fun.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 10:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Always great. Can't wait to talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Great to hang.
Speaker 2:Have a good one.
Speaker 1:Talk to you, Joe. Have fun out there.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma so outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build. Create code back prototypes and apps fast.
Speaker 1:That is
Speaker 2:right. So up next, we have an anonymous guest.
Speaker 1:An anonymous poster.
Speaker 2:Healing. An anonymous poster joins us.
Speaker 1:An internet anthropologist.
Speaker 2:A TikTok anthropologist, cold healing, Midwesterner in exile, lonely in this epidemic super spreader, and a dark statistician. I'm gonna tell you about CrowdStrike before we bring him in to the from the restream waiting room. CrowdStrike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So without further ado
Speaker 1:Chat is saying that Microsoft is down. Microsoft Why? Is down. What happened? People are not getting emails but Oh.
Speaker 2:I thought the stock was down.
Speaker 1:Wyatt is in the chat hanging out with us because Microsoft is down. So little silver lining there.
Speaker 2:Well, without further ado, let's bring in Cold Healing into the TV. Woah. This is his profile picture. This their profile picture. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:What what is your profile picture of?
Speaker 3:That is a photo of me. It's in my apartment in Peoria, Illinois that I lived in when I was posting a lot on Twitter. I took it it's I'm holding a sword in it. Yeah. It's like a self timer photo that I set up.
Speaker 2:For some reason, thought it was an RPG. Yeah. People hard
Speaker 3:to say this. I really don't get this RPG thing. Mean, it's I mean, it is kind of sharp like an RPG is. But Yeah. I did.
Speaker 1:I initially I I now see the sword outlined. You thought RPG? I did think RPG.
Speaker 2:Too many too many hours
Speaker 1:in COD. Too many hours in COD. Sure.
Speaker 3:It does have a very small hilts, but, yeah, thanks for having me on, guys.
Speaker 2:Thanks for joining. Great to have you. Anyway, give us a little background on like how you see your work, what you post, how you select content, how you curate, what what are you trying to achieve with everything you do?
Speaker 1:I'll start by saying I I think that something that I like, one one thing about your account that I think is really important is like algorithms like make us view the world and the Internet in a specific way. Yes. Right? Like even with Davos this week, I've been thinking like, wow, Davos was like All tech.
Speaker 10:All AI. All tech.
Speaker 1:And obviously, it was not. Right? Was like Tech was was a part of it and that's just my algorithm, you know Yeah. Serving me content that it knows I'm gonna be excited about. You're content from all over the Internet.
Speaker 1:I don't even I I'm sure you have like a bunch of different instances and accounts that have different interests. But I feel like the work that you're doing is is a is a is a new science.
Speaker 2:Anthropology is the correct term.
Speaker 1:And it's very important.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That yeah. That's very nice to say. I mean, I think my goal is to just try to be, like, on the crest of what's happening on the Internet. I mean, there there's so much happening.
Speaker 3:I think that in a lot of ways, institutions are not fully chronicling what's happening, if that makes sense. Like a lot of the cutting edge culture on TikTok especially Mhmm. I felt was not I'm just also being unnoticed by other people on the Internet, I think. I mean, I sort of accidentally came into this role quite honestly. I mean, I've been on TikTok since 2018, and I was, like, you know, viscerally loved the platform.
Speaker 3:Like, first time I got on it, you know, the the algorithm of it is just so good, and I was just, you know, instantly, like, you know, just pulled in of, wow. I can just, you know, see so many different parts of the world really quickly. And so, you know, I was doing YouTube anthropology even before that of just, you know, getting into different niche subcultures online then. But yeah. I mean, basically, it's just, you know, I think this is all, like, worthy of studying and worthy of just further thought.
Speaker 3:And so I try to share the things that I think are, you know, worth commentary, to my audience. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What, what videos are most memorable? You were, surfaced the the product manager.
Speaker 2:Poolside PM.
Speaker 3:Poolside PM. The product manager. I think that's of all the ones that's like number one most memorable. That's like for sure. Because I was like, you know, it really like blew up my account in a lot of ways and also just, you know, the downstream impacts of, you know, it it kind of causing the You kind
Speaker 1:of destroyed product management. You know?
Speaker 14:Yes. You
Speaker 1:set the product management deal back.
Speaker 2:They were early. They were early. They understood that there would
Speaker 1:be a lot
Speaker 2:of downtime while you're waiting for the agents to respond after you fire off a big long prompt. And so best to spend it at the pool. They were just early. The future's here is not not evenly distributed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But what what was the response to the poolside PM's thing? Because when you surf and when you recontextualize some of these videos, sometimes there can be pile ons, there can be Yeah. You know, like, positive things that come out of it. Like, how were you processing that moment of, like, mega virality?
Speaker 3:I mean, yeah, for sure, I was definitely like, me reposting it changed the context of it a ton. Right? It was initially posted by, like, you know, a girl on TikTok excited to share, you know, her, like, you know, her somewhat comfortable life, and she's posting it in a tongue in cheek way too. Right? She's aware this is, like, you know, not her normal way of going about her day.
Speaker 3:She's posting it, you know, because it's like, oh, this is a funny afternoon that I spent. But then, you know, it gets into, you know, Twitter discourse and especially in, like, tech Twitter discourse, you know, becomes kind of like a a representation of the the excesses of the 2010 twenty twenties, like, tech hiring boom. Yep. And yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 3:I think that it you know, that recontextualization definitely brought, like, a whole new audience from it. It was very interesting. I mean, like, she, like, had, like, multiple responses to my my reposting of it, which was not really just me reposting it. You know? Mean, I think it was also all the other, you know, external commentary because I didn't really say that much.
Speaker 3:I mean, for me, I reposted it because it felt like my own life. You know? That's what I was doing back then, you know? I was working a work from home job and Yeah. You know, I felt represented by the fact, you know, like I wasn't in the pool, you know?
Speaker 3:But I would go outside and sit on my patio, you know, and it's it's really not that that dissimilar. And it's, you know, it's great. It's it's great to sit in the sun with your laptop and, you know, you can go inside when something important happens. I really don't think that that's, like, you know, an end of the world way to work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk to me about, day in the life videos generally. Every time Yeah. I see one surfaced, the comments are always like, there's so little work getting done. If you personally, I I've made enough videos that I can imagine if I tried to make a day in the life, there would be a lot of downtime that I would cut out because taking one phone call isn't as engaging as watching me assemble a meal from six different things.
Speaker 2:Just Yeah. Just visually, it makes more sense to take a video of the commute, the the the coffee that you get, the meal that you have. Then, yes, there's one frame of you at doing Excel for six hours, but you don't Mhmm. Put you don't put that doesn't take up forty five seconds of the one minute clip. But have you thought about, like, what the what the medium is that is the message with of these videos?
Speaker 3:No. A 100%, know, it's like it's initially shot or these earlier videos, like twenty twenty two Day in the Life videos that I was posting of, you know, like the product manager Pool Girls, those are sort of shots in this way that's aspirational, that shows all all the fun parts of their life. Yeah. One thing that I've been talking a little bit on my account recently is how it's kinda flipped the other way recently. You actually see kind of people shooting these day in the like videos in an intentionally mundane looking
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. These people like day in the life of of a middle manager at an accounting firm. And Really? They just show, like it it just looks like Just like it look like grinding. They're like, wake up.
Speaker 1:Protein shake. Go on a go on a one mile jog. Drive to work.
Speaker 9:Oh, yeah. It's like it
Speaker 1:it it it it's like the least
Speaker 3:have some sombre music in the background.
Speaker 2:Yes. Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and yeah, it's it's such an interesting Yeah. Interesting view. Some something about the day in the life is just so triggering to people too. Like, whatever life is being lived, people just develop an opinion.
Speaker 2:Like because everyone has a life. Everyone has a day in their life, and they immediately compare it, I suppose. Yeah. What what what do you think about this if I remember correctly, the original Poolside Day in the Life video, at the end, she sort of remarks that, you know, her she's been making personal social media content because everyone might post a photo of an engagement or a wedding or a kid announcement. But then at a certain point, if your account gets big, it's it felt like she felt pressure from her colleagues to actually make content about work, this was her expression of that.
Speaker 2:And I'm if you've reflected on, what the role of the lower level employee in brand building around a corporation's work life balance and what it's like to work there that could go either way. Is that an interesting new trend? Are there pitfalls there?
Speaker 1:How how
Speaker 3:do you reflect I on I think that's already over, to be honest. I mean, this was, you know, three years ago that that video was posted. I think that now people would not represent that. You know what I mean? Like, if you were a you you especially would not say what company you you work for.
Speaker 3:Like, if you are representing like, if you're a Palantir employee, you're not gonna make a day in the life of a Palantir employee with, you know, the fun little lunch that you get, you know? Yeah. Like, that's not like, it's it's very discouraged by HR departments. You know, it's also just socially discouraged. So I think that people have that become, like, aware of the context of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, mean, in that video, she does say at the very end, she's, you know, like, hey, my my friends were encouraging me to share about, you know, my life. I didn't have the if you look at my post, it looks like I didn't have a job. And, you know, it's definitely just like a playful post that she was making.
Speaker 1:How are you Yeah. How are you how have you processed generative AI content on these platforms? Feels like, you know, from our point of view over the last few weeks we don't we don't use TikTok, but our point of view over the last few weeks is that it's getting really good, and there's, like, entire entirely new genre of of of creators that are just leaning in, and this is the only thing that they're doing. But what's it been like on TikTok?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's definitely there. I see it more on Instagram reels than you on TikTok, personally, but there definitely is generative AI content on it yet. I still don't think it's at the level where it, like, viscerally wins over human made content. Like, we have, you know, all these, you know, like, viscerally, I just mean, like, you know, every person sits and they watch it and they see, like, which one they spend more time on, which one they're compulsively drawn to.
Speaker 3:I don't think generative AI content is at the point where it's winning at scale yet, but there are some niches it's really good at. It's honestly really good for lower budget creators. I see it, like, a lot from content that feels like it's from not like, not in America. Like, it's someone that's maybe not in as pretty of a place, you know, they're in, like, a country that's not as good and they, you know, make content that ends up, you know, with generative AI that kind of can, whatever, represent certain things. And, yeah, I I feel like that's where it's it's doing well.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I have one more on the generative AI question.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I've I've noticed that we it does feel like we're at a tipping point. On Instagram reels, I'll notice that oftentimes there's AI content, and you and and and if I can clock it, I usually go to the comments, there's other people that are clocking it. And then there's usually a secondary discussion about AI being bad, or displacement, water usage, electricity, blah blah blah. But I recently saw a a cinematic AI movie trailer all about the Beckham drama. Have you been following this at all?
Speaker 2:Are you familiar with this Beckham drama?
Speaker 3:What is the what is the Beckham drama here?
Speaker 2:I I'm not gonna explain it well, but Victoria Beckham and David Beckham are having some sort of interfamilial feud of some sort where the son is is posting
Speaker 1:We we end up in the Hollywood reporter once
Speaker 2:and suddenly John is our new culture expert. No. But but basically but basically, like, there there is there is a there is a traditional, like, big Hollywood celebrity drama story that has bubbled up, and people are making front facing videos explaining it. The Beckhams themselves are posting about it. There's PR stories about it.
Speaker 2:But some creator used generative AI to create, like, a dramatic like like movie
Speaker 3:Not the creator.
Speaker 2:About it. And what was interesting is that it's obviously clockable as AI, but everyone in the comments, including the the actual the the tagline on the video when they upload the title of the video is like, okay, AI this is a good use of AI. And everyone in the comments was like, I approve this use of AI, which is very interesting because truthfully, like, there is no one that's getting displaced from that because if you're like, you're not going to go and do a $100,000,000 budget video shoot just to make a joke about the Beckham drama. Like, maybe that will be made Mhmm. You know, a few years or something or Netflix will do something, but you're not displacing anyone.
Speaker 2:And so it it does feel like we're at this turning point, but it requires a lot of context, a lot of human element, a lot of creativity to really break through in a way that re reaches, like, universal acclaim. I don't know if you have a comment on that.
Speaker 3:No. It's a great point. Like, there's yeah. Trying to phrase my thoughts exactly here.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Like, generative AI content is widely disliked by people. Think it is the starting point. Know, there are lots of people if you post anything that is generative AI content, you will get comments about, you know, water usage, you know, get contents about, you know, take take comments about taking away jobs from artists. And those those comments do, you know, tend to go away if people like it more, if it's, you know, high quality AI content. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:To be honest, mean, I think a lot of the comments about, you know, art and water usage come out of, like, a place of fear from people of kind of not understanding what what the future holds. And I I'm I'm it does make me optimistic, honestly, when I hear people say things like, oh, like, I like this particular AI usage. Even if I think that that's not the right way to think about it, I think that it's a good kind of sign of at least the culture starting to adopt these things. I do think it's it's going to inevitably happen that people adopt it, like, I'm not really worried about the long term, honestly. I mean, I'm not like a a hyper AI optimist.
Speaker 3:I think that the technology does a lot of positive things. Also going to be some negatives as a result of it, you know? But
Speaker 1:I really there's a new kind of content which is content that could be made by paid actors, but no paid actor would ever agree to, which is like Yeah. An Epstein reenactment Oh,
Speaker 2:of like sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You've seen you've seen some of these Yeah. Like You know, memes of like them on like, yeah, face swap videos, things like that where if you ask an actor like, okay, you're gonna play, you know, this like billionaire financier. He's based in New York. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And they'd be like, okay, like, I'm out. Yeah. Right? Anyway.
Speaker 1:What about what about other platforms? I feel like content has been flowing from these, like, IRL streamers pretty heavily Yeah. Into acts, you know. There seems to be this whole culture of Mhmm. Kick.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, a lot of those are, like, clips and highlights, if that makes sense. Like, there are people who sit and watch IRL streamers all day, but then a lot of those are kind of second order like, lot of those spend a lot of those are really kind of content farms to make clips for TikTok, which are then the primary form of consumption. Like, there's this guy who I followed for years, World of T shirts. He's kind of one of my, like, favorite personal Internet creators. He, like, started as a guy who wandered around New York City and, like, filmed content, but has gradually become, like, a live stream.
Speaker 3:He he's he does, like, crazy stuff in his real life. We'll kind of like scream at people on the streets, and so he he now has like crews of people that follow him around and livestream him. I don't know. Very interesting man. But, you know, kind of the ecosystem is, yes, you can watch the livestream, but most people kind of watch the highlights of the livestream, which I think is an interesting kind of concept farm angle where at the end of the day, still the censor of it is these, like, short form vertical video apps that can kind of be like the end of the sea for any form of content.
Speaker 3:Like, it all flows into the scroll of these Scrolls.
Speaker 1:Endless scrolls. Feed the feed the trough, as they say. The pigs out.
Speaker 2:Talk about talk about publishing in in GQ. I I I wanna know both about the process. Have you have you written for prestige publications before? Do you do you enjoy the written form? And then I wanna know the thesis of the essay as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I wrote yeah. Just forgot for your audience. I wrote a piece about Target for GQ. I didn't go to Target for, like, seven years.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And then I went again, and so I wrote a piece about that for GQ.
Speaker 2:And why'd you stop going?
Speaker 3:I stopped going just like I just I didn't like the brand. It was essentially a you know, like, I it's like it's so red and over the top. Preferred it felt like dishonest to me, basically. Like, when I was I was I was going inside Walmart, and Walmart felt more honest. Oh.
Speaker 3:And so Okay. Yeah. But then then I kind of, you know, I that that stopped being true for me. Like I was, you know, I was getting more back into brands in America Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I
Speaker 3:was like, I'm ready to go back to Target. Also, inconvenient. I live in New York City now. I used to live in Peoria, Illinois, which is about equal distribution of Walmarts and Targets. Now in New York City, there are no Walmarts at all.
Speaker 3:And so if I wanted to go to a large convenience store, Target was the only option. And so I was actually making my life more inconvenient for the first year I lived in New York as a result of following this rule. And so I thought it's just an interesting I mean, the essay is about that, but also kind of about the larger concepts of like purity rules that you follow in life, you know. I think that there's so many rules like that. I mean, people love setting purity rules around their phones right now, a really common, you know, thing that people do of like, oh, I need to have x amount of non phone time or I need to set down my I
Speaker 1:can't sleep more than five five feet from my phone. I gotta Yes. I gotta keep it close, you know, or I can't sleep well. Okay. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yes. The inverse.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I I just wrote kind of about like that that concept of like purity rules in general because I thought this was like it it's such a silly one, like the idea of not going to Target is, you know, obviously, there's no ethical impact on that and very little even moral impact on that. Right? It's even aesthetically yeah. For for for like, it's very low impact on almost all parts of life, but it's a rule that I followed for a really long time.
Speaker 3:And so I kinda wrote about that. Yeah. I mean, it kinda just came into being like one of the GQ editors. I had like a a long form blog that I post on every once in a while, and he just liked the long form blog and reached out to me and asked if I wanted to write for GQ. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It was really cool experience to do. You know, I I do really believe in working with editors. It helped a lot to work with, you know, like, high quality editors. You know, I I studied writing in school, but was never, like, to get to a professional level. I don't work as a full time professional writer, and so it was really cool to work with, like, editors who could help me, you know, refine my voice.
Speaker 3:Think it was it was a good experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a great publication. We We'll find an old profile in GQ every once in a while that just breaks down something in a very interesting way. We read a whole deep dive on the history of Richard Mill and stuff in GQ. It's a fascinating publication that I think has been maybe discounted because it's not putting up breaking scoops and news every day.
Speaker 2:It's not in your face, but there's a lot of really timeless stuff that goes on there. There's more to breathe, more breathing room. It's an interesting canvas to have the opportunity to to paint on. That's exciting. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sorry, Jordy. Yeah, please.
Speaker 1:I don't have anything.
Speaker 2:Oh, I wanted to ask on the question of purity rules. Do you think we're still in a bull market for purity rules? I don't know that I saw a ton more activity in 2026 around New Year's resolutions, people stepping back. There was obviously the big anti alcohol move, which I see as part of that. I don't know if you put that in the same category, but Yeah.
Speaker 2:Are are we becoming more puritanical as a society? Less puritanical? Like, where where do you think culture's moving?
Speaker 3:I I think culture moves I mean, I I don't know. I don't think there's, a hard direction. I think where where culture is setting purity rules more and more is around, like, phones. Like I was saying at the beginning, I I think that's kind of the big trend that I would clock for in increasing of that. I think that I think we're clearly getting to a point at which, you know, just maximal pure enjoyment on your phone is not the most pleasant way to live your life.
Speaker 3:You know what I mean? Like, just letting yourself get pulled into your phone at all times
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is not the most pleasant way to live, and I think that we're gonna gradually, like, come up with a set of rules that works for everyone on what the most, you know, the the best etiquette on phone usage is. But I I don't know what that looks like, but I would expect a lot of, like, experimentation over the next, like, five years or so to try to figure that out. So, yeah, that's my purity rule, like, that for the next few years is is is that we'll see a lot more of, phone purity rule usage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense. Last question for me on New York City. We talked to Adam Faiz about how New York is experiencing a boom in content creation, and Mhmm. His analysis was that a lot of it was around TikTok creators and those man on the street style videos.
Speaker 2:What do you do for a living? If you need a lot of random extras effectively, there's no place better to do it than specific parks in New York City. Are are you experiencing that? Is it annoying? Have you ever been asked what do you do for a living?
Speaker 3:I've had one time where someone approached me for Man on the Street video. I kind of just walked away from it. I didn't wanna be in it. Okay. It's not super common.
Speaker 3:I I do think what I I love the concept of all these kids coming to New York City because of TikTok or whatever other reason that they're pulled there on the Internet. I I I kind of I think it's really magical that I don't know. It's it's really cool that they're all kind of pulled to one location. I think if you compare the the migration arcs of other generations, right, like the the Gen X people who went to Portland, they're trying to, like, get away from something. The millennials were kind of going to these, like, mid sized cities.
Speaker 3:I think it's really beautiful that, you know yeah, like Austin and Nashville, Denver. Yeah. But I think it's really like, really seems like Gen Z I mean, I am one of the Gen Z people. I mean, I guess I'm, like, I'm very old Gen Z. I'm 28.
Speaker 3:Sure. But that, you know, that I think it's really cool that Gen Z in general, it seems to me, my read on on the ground is that they're coming to New York City, like, biggest city they can. Already It's established. They just, like, wanna be around other people and participate in these systems. Yep.
Speaker 3:I think I think it's really special and cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I like some of that that content. It's interesting when you see a video of someone just, like, playing music, and they're a musician.
Speaker 2:And they could just play it in their apartment, but if they go out in the street, they'll get a stronger reaction. And sure Mhmm. You could go to Hollywood, but there's just more random people on the street in New York. So a lot of creators have just kinda coalesced around that.
Speaker 10:Anyway, Jordy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for coming on. Yeah. This is great.
Speaker 1:As these cultural moments pop up, we'd love
Speaker 2:to have
Speaker 9:you back on.
Speaker 1:This is a lot
Speaker 2:of fun.
Speaker 1:Hard hitting analysis in real time Yes. From the source, from the anthropologists. But it's great to hang in. Thank you for doing the work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Appreciate everything Thanks you
Speaker 3:for having me on.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest your day.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Let me tell you about fin dot ai. It's the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.
Speaker 1:We have some breaking news. Yes. Breaking news is, without further ado, Brex has been acquired by Capital One. Hit that gong $5,000,000,000. Boom.
Speaker 1:Wrong Okay. Wrong header there, boys.
Speaker 2:We already just so, yeah, Hunter in the chat was asking if we already discussed OpenAI planning to take a cut of customers' discoveries. There was some back and forth. We did discuss that a little bit, Hunter. But thanks for showing up in the chat. Always good to see you as always.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Capital One strikes 5,150,000,000.00 deal Mhmm. For fintech. Brex deal would give credit card issuer access to technology used by thousands of companies for corporate credit cards. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Brex, of course, was valued at 12,300,000,000.0 in in 2022. They hadn't hadn't raised in a while outside of, I believe, a debt facility. Yeah. But, anyways, I think I think this this deal makes a lot of sense. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Brex
Speaker 2:is. When we had when we had Pedro on, the CEO of Brex, we talked to him about how they were doing more enterprise offerings. They were starting to explore some of this powering businesses behind the scenes. Right? Wasn't that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they had that deal with for first third for what what's Fifth Third Bank. Fifth Third.
Speaker 2:Fifth Third.
Speaker 9:Fifth Fifth Third
Speaker 1:Bank. It's the we they were the fifth third bank.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. Anyway, so a little more details. 515000000000 in cash in stock in a deal that give the card issuer more firepower with corporate clients. Founded nearly a decade ago, offers corporate credit cards, expenses, rewards. It also oversees nearly $13,000,000,000 in deposits held at partner banks and money market funds.
Speaker 1:Acquisition comes at a key moment in the payment world as fintech and crypto firms threaten to siphon business away from banks. Some established players have looked to, looked to team up with these firms to stay competitive. Capital One with roughly 670,000,000,000 in assets, Not bad. Obviously, acquired Discover last year for 35,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Caribus.
Speaker 1:You know No way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Capital One bought Eric Lyman and Karimatia's previous Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I knew that, but I didn't I
Speaker 2:didn't put that together. We've seen that Capital One. Capital One is yeah. They they want they want Silicon Valley founders, and they want the companies that they built.
Speaker 1:This is this is so funny because I I was with I was with Art, the the chief Oh, yeah. Business officer at Brex hanging out. He was hanging out with my neighbor, Ben. I saw him like less than probably a week ago. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Was hanging out at the beach and I'm sure I'm sure he was He's like
Speaker 2:I got something cooking.
Speaker 1:I've been doing business. Excited for this news to hit the timeline. How much did they actually raise?
Speaker 2:But, yeah, it's a big number and it's big business. And so congrats to everyone over there. Let me tell you about Labelbox reinforcement learn reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. We have Kathy Wood joining in just a few minutes.
Speaker 2:We can play this video about AI industry news every two weeks. We've been we saw this on Instagram reels, and I was cracking up because it feels like this comedian on Instagram
Speaker 1:And just just to close the loop, Brexit raised a total of 1,670,000,000 in combined equity and debt financing. So anyways, certainly going well beyond the stack and solid outcome. Fantastic. Great
Speaker 2:outcome. Congratulations to all of them. So Advit Mojunta says,
Speaker 1:can
Speaker 2:these AI products stop going against each other? And he plays a video called AI Industry News Every Two Weeks. Let's see if we can play it. Is it available? We might need to come back to that.
Speaker 2:In the meantime, let me tell you about Applovin' profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today. And without further ado, we have Cathie Wood in the restream waiting room. Let's bring her in to the TV here at Ultradown. She is the CEO
Speaker 1:of Arc Investor. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to How talk to are you doing?
Speaker 6:Oh, thrilled. I'm I'm so happy to meet you. I've heard so much about you. Congratulations on all your success.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you. How is your 2026 going so far?
Speaker 6:It's great. It really is. I wrote a new year letter new year's letter.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 6:And then we put out big ideas yesterday. Mhmm. And it's been a whirlwind. A whirlwind. I feel this is a very important year for us.
Speaker 2:And is AI the only thing that you're tracking? Is it is it as all encompassing in your world as it is has as it has been in ours?
Speaker 6:It is by far the biggest catalyst to innovation out there today. But we're very focused on our five major platforms, and AI is involved in every one of them. So robotics, energy storage, AI itself, blockchain technology, and multiomic sequencing in the life science space. And so we're really focused on the convergence among those platforms. They involve 15 different technologies.
Speaker 6:And so AI is part and parcel of all the convergence that's taking place today.
Speaker 2:And how are you setting up the firm to actually cover those five trends? What does the team look like? Who do you like to work with? And what are the keys to success to growing a career at ARC?
Speaker 6:That's a great question. We have set ourselves up very differently from traditional asset management research. In that world, the research responsibilities are organized by sector or industry or sub industry. And in fact, many firms are very proud that they have five different health care analysts following very narrow silos of companies, or five consumer analysts. We have set up ARC around this idea that these technologies are converging and are going to impact every sector, every industry.
Speaker 6:So our analyst research responsibilities are broken down by technologies. So the 15 different technologies involved in those five innovation platforms. And what they are looking for is, okay, how is this technology going to scale across sectors? How big is this opportunity going to be? I don't think traditional research is set up to do that.
Speaker 6:I think to really understand how big the opportunities are going to be out there, you almost have to set up research this way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Mean, you're you're you're famous for taking very large positions, very concentrated positions in really important companies. What is it what does it look like to get comfortable with a a new management team, a new CEO? Is it just endless phone calls, meeting in person?
Speaker 2:Do you have any rules for how you grow a relationship over time with a new business leader who you think is working on a breakout technology?
Speaker 6:Well, I think very important is understanding the background of the new business leaders. You know, I've been in the business for a very long time. I actually started in college in the late seventies. And while most of my career had
Speaker 1:Overnight success. And it's a true overnight success.
Speaker 2:We love it.
Speaker 6:No. But we know I know a lot of people out there.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 6:And I've always loved the part of our business where I get to meet the people making these companies happen. So I'm a devout follower of talent, where it's going, where it has come from. I usually have some frame of reference that I can use as a line of questioning just to see, you know, is this the kind of leader and the right leader for this company at this time?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. How do you what's your framework for understanding if a management team or a CEO is really set up for this AI transition that every company is going through. Because every comp every CEO wants to say that they're getting the most out of AI. They're getting the most Well,
Speaker 11:I'm getting the
Speaker 1:most They're running the most pilots, etcetera. But clearly Yeah. Many companies are are are just kind of, you know, doing the demos but not actually evolving their businesses.
Speaker 6:So now are you speaking about more in the startup world or are you talking about enterprises?
Speaker 1:Both. Both, really. It's it's everything from a Okay. From a company, you know, like like an enterprise software company, maybe a system of record Yeah. That that is looking to evolve Yeah.
Speaker 1:All the way through like a manufacturing company who Yeah. You know, maybe has been using robotics for years. And so they're like, I don't really see why people are are, so
Speaker 2:Yeah. We've seen a number of founder CEOs that have been completely reinvigorated by the AI boom. They've built a great business, but you can tell that they are completely in a new gear, working harder than ever. There's also legacy players that just place the right bets at the right time, and they're just paying off and reaping the reward. And then there are some big company CEOs who it does feel like they got caught a little flat footed and have to adjust their business models.
Speaker 6:Yes. And the way we do our research and again, a lot of people know us for our top down research, so the big ideas that came out last We are as bottom up stock research driven or equity research driven as any other team you'll find out there. That's where I came from. So we took from a top down point of view, two years ago in big ideas, we took the position that because we were seeing it play out in the numbers that the tech stack would change. You have the infrastructure layer, which of course, very strong.
Speaker 6:You have the platform as a service layer, poster child for
Speaker 1:that,
Speaker 6:Palantir, was gaining share, significant share. And then you had application layers, software as a service growing but losing share of incremental growth. We put that chart in. And we had no idea how quickly this was all going to happen. Software stocks, more traditional software stocks last year were terrible.
Speaker 6:And even this year they're still suffering. So AI is happening faster, I think, than anyone could have imagined. Anyone who thought they had time to adapt, I think, has been mistaken. And I even see it with large enterprises. When we go in there and ask them, Okay, what's your AI strategy?
Speaker 6:They treated it in the beginning like, Yeah, we'll let our teams experiment with all these new tools coming up, ChatGee, GPT. No, no, no, no, no. That's not the way this is going to work. There's going to have to be complete restructuring around AI, or else you're probably going to fail. Maybe not outright, but you'll become irrelevant.
Speaker 6:So I think even ARC, for example, we have brought in Palantir. We're only 70 people, but we've brought in Palantir, and I can see we brought it into research first. I wanted to see how could we transform our research process. And we're already seeing incredible results in terms of productivity gains by the research team. But I can see that in the rest of the firm, it is going to take well, first of all, you have to have someone other than the CTO, and that's true even in our case, saying, We're doing this.
Speaker 6:We're doing this. Our research is telling us this is the way the world's going. We cannot be caught flat footed. And so I really think you need the CEO, not the CTO CEO, CFO to drive this change. I think many people think, Oh, the results are so immediate.
Speaker 6:And they are with our writing and editing, perhaps. But when you're trying to transform an enterprise, it takes hard work. You have to collect all the data, even data that you didn't know existed, so you have to figure that out. You have to clean it up. You have to integrate it.
Speaker 6:You have to map out workflows in excruciating detail. And that all takes time, and a lot of people in this world are impatient. They don't see results right away. But I think the results are going to pay off. I think the way Palantir is doing it, just put its software on top of legacy, no rip and replace, and over time it will usurp the role of all of that inefficient legacy software.
Speaker 6:So I think it's going to take time in the enterprise. And I know there was the MIT study that said, hey, this isn't happening. This is a figment of Silicon Valley's imagination. And we disagree mightily on that. How
Speaker 1:are you hoping to see the private markets evolve in the next five years or so. We've seen this tremendous growth of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, etcetera, these sort of
Speaker 2:xAI.
Speaker 1:Leading xAI, leading labs that are happening all in the private markets. And if people really, really work hard, they can probably figure out how to get exposure to them, but certainly it's been cut off. And I know you guys have your the private side of the business as well. But any sort of wishes or hopes in terms of how the interaction between the private market and the public market can evolve?
Speaker 6:Well, I think the lines are going to start blurring a bit, hopefully, because the SEC, under Paul Atkins, is going to get rid of all of the regulations and bureaucracy. And I do think his aim is in that direction. In terms of the private markets, I think we're starting to see venture capital firms move into crossover funds? First of all, there was a big arbitrage opportunity when innovation in the public markets was getting crucified and believe me, we were the poster child for that I think a lot of these funds were looking at the valuations in the private markets so much higher than in the public markets that that kind of started the conversation going. Then of course this administration is talking more and more about the democratization of opportunities, venture of course being a big one, and this idea that you have to be accredited in order to have access to companies that are investors, the younger investors in particular, they don't have the net worth or even the annual income, but they know more about these technologies than many of the institutions investing in ventures.
Speaker 6:We felt it was important to open it up and to be very complementary to what's going on out there. We're not taking board seats, we're not leading, but we are putting out research and we are willing to bring visibility to companies in our venture fund. We're bringing a new kind of investor who really has been yearning for this opportunity for years.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. I wanna talk about Bitcoin, and specifically, was news yesterday. Coinbase is rolling out an advisory firm on quantum computing and blockchain. There's obviously been kind of FUD, people talking about the potential implications for quantum and Bitcoin and crypto broadly. How are you thinking about the asset today?
Speaker 1:I know this is certainly a topic that you've talked about many, many times on CNBC and other shows, but we'd love to hear the latest.
Speaker 6:Sure. First I'll start with quantum. So in our Big Ideas report, and it's in the first section called The Great Acceleration, there is a page in there. I think it's titled Some Interesting Technologies Disruptive for twenty to forty Years. Brett Winton, our Chief Futurist and with that title, Chief Futurist, you've got to be thinking about these things and coming up with analyses that either support or refute the conventional wisdom out there.
Speaker 6:So if you go in, you'll see a very interesting chart. Google has doubled its number of qubits. It's taken four years for them to do that. So it's even slower than Moore's Law in the semiconductor space. And so what Brett did was illustrate, okay, let's assume they accelerate progress here, if they can, to a Moore's Law pace.
Speaker 6:Okay, then in 2044, let's talk about quantum computing and the risks that are in sort of the whole blockchain technology infrastructure, particularly Bitcoin. So we are not worried. We are seeing whales so the original, the OGs they are shifting Bitcoin from wallet to wallet because of quantum fears. So that's happening, but it's also created some FUD for the markets. Are they selling because they know something we don't know?
Speaker 6:Are they selling simply because they don't want to go through the downside of another four year cycle? Have we hit the low at down only 35% this time instead of 85%? So we're in that kind of a market. I do think we're in a basing period, really started on tenten, the flash crash. It was the software glitch at Binance caused a lot of auto deleveraging.
Speaker 6:It was kind of crazy to learn about that kind of deleveraging, meaning firms who thought they were hedged if they were on two different exchanges, and Binance was one of them, they were auto deleveraged on one side of a trade, and so they were totally exposed in a way they never expected. That caused, we think, dollars 28,000,000,000 of carnage, and we think that is washing through the system. We are very positive on Bitcoin for the three reasons I always say. It's a new technology, really important. It is a new and a first rules based global private, meaning no government oversight, monetary system.
Speaker 6:That's huge. That is huge. That is its calling card. A big hedge against inflation and a hedge against deflation if we end up in a banking crisis like 'eight-'nine. And it is the first, the leader of a new asset class.
Speaker 6:Many people are looking at gold and they're saying, well, wait a minute, gold has doubled in the last year or so. Bitcoin's way behind. Well, if you start the clock at the end of the bear market in 'twenty two, gold is up, I think, 170%, and these are maybe dated by a couple of weeks, and Bitcoin by 360%. So we think that Bitcoin oh, what happened?
Speaker 1:That was just a little error word we used. I did you said 360%. It was a nice number.
Speaker 2:Sound effects over here.
Speaker 1:Not be not to be jarring.
Speaker 6:They didn't prepare me for this. Anyway, okay. So
Speaker 2:Did they brief you about our flash bang? We will we will save that one for another But, yes, sorry. Continue, please.
Speaker 6:Can yeah. So I'll just say, it's very interesting over the full market cycle from '20
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:To now. Yeah. Gold and Bitcoin's correlation hardly
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Hardly anything. Nonexistent. Hardly anything. But we think Bitcoin is is especially as intergenerational wealth transfer takes place in the next five to ten years.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yep. It is the digital gold, and its supply growth is lower than gold's will be. And especially now that the gold price is up, miners can go out there. They're being paid to find even more. So that can't happen with Bitcoin.
Speaker 6:I think in a big ideas you'll see, we expect Bitcoin to scale to $16,000,000,000,000 in market cap by 2030, and it's below 2 now. Can you
Speaker 2:talk about the name of the fund? Where did the name come from? What does it mean?
Speaker 6:The name of the company?
Speaker 2:ARC, yeah.
Speaker 6:ARC, yeah, yeah. So there are two ways to talk about this. I can talk about this from a regulatory point of view, or the personal point of view. And I'm happy to share both.
Speaker 1:Please. I would love to.
Speaker 6:Okay. So the regular ARC was the name I chose for a personal reason, and I'll get into that. But I was or we were told by the I think it was SEC that we could not have all caps. We had to have lowercase R and K unless it was an acronym. And so as soon as we got that word, immediately I thought, okay, ACTIVE research, knowledge.
Speaker 6:Active means more in the public world, because there's passive in the public world. Doesn't mean as much in the venture world.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 6:that's why we have it in all caps. The personal reason was in 2006, I decided I needed to figure a way out of the traditional asset management world because it was going passive, it was going benchmark sensitive, which means you take the QQQ, so the NASDAQ 100, if that's your benchmark, then you pretty much invest in all of those companies and tweak a little bit here, a little bit there. That's what benchmark sensitive is. To me, that's not investing. And in fact so back then, I would just I was trying to figure out how to do this, because if I quit my prior position, I would have lost all of my deferred comp, which was sizable.
Speaker 6:And so I worked took me seven years, know, should I say seven lean years, but whatever seven years. And I just used to open the Bible, and this started in 'six. Open the Bible. Okay, God, just tell me. This seems like an impossible situation.
Speaker 6:What do I do? Just help me, help me. And how many times did I hit Ark of the Covenant? Ark of the Covenant, which is what the Israelites took into battle before them, believing it was the presence of God and that they would be protected because they were going into battle. And so it kind of was appropriate.
Speaker 6:I was going counter the pendulum swing to passive and benchmark sensitive. And especially after COVID, a lot of people, they just thought we were going to fail because this was not the way to do things.
Speaker 2:How do you think about the relationship between religion and markets? I've always been fascinated. We've had Pat Gelsinger on the show, and Yeah. He there's been a number of times when he was either quoting scripture or bible verses. And people were sort of reading into that, how he was processing, what's going on at Intel at the time.
Speaker 2:I would love to know more about the interaction between religion and investing because it's so rarely discussed, but it's a fascinating topic and crossover.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It is interesting. So I can say I was moved in the way I mean, you could the way I think about what happened there and what I just described is many people would use the universe. They're responding to the universe or the Force or the Holy Spirit. Right?
Speaker 6:So we're all moved by something. Sometimes it's unhappiness, you know, whatever. I use prayer as other people would use meditation, let's say. And I certainly don't go in there day to day and say, Okay, God, what should I do? Buy or sell this stock.
Speaker 6:No, not at all. Not at all. I would say it's those moments of meditation that bring mental clarity. You clean the brain waves out or whatever. And that's more it's also, you know, I would say it's a way of living, just generally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sorry. Not to completely change gears, but back to AI productivity. I want your reaction to this Wall Street Journal report yesterday that, it showed that, CEOs, reported that that, you know, 20% of the c suite executives at the journal, interviewed said that they were saving twelve hours a day or twelve hours a week, some massive number. And then they polled workers and workers 40% of workers said they're saving no time with AI.
Speaker 2:And I'm wondering if what your read on that is, is it that one thing that we were kind of kicking around as an idea was potentially that the work of the C suite executive is more ready to be transformed by AI because, like, in your role, you are a CEO. You do a lot of research. Every question that you're faced with over the course of a day in your life, you probably want more information. You want it neatly organized and delivered to you. And AI is uniquely good at that, whereas many workers might not be in that level of information processing role.
Speaker 2:But how do you do do you think that this is gonna be a report from the journal that we look back on, like that MIT study where it was just sort of an anomaly in the data, and everything continues unabated.
Speaker 6:Well, this is a survey, of course, right? It's not quantitatively measured. And so, what could be going on is, you know, the C suite is really trying to lead the charge into the AI world. And we're all in the knowledge industry. It's going to change everyone's job dramatically.
Speaker 6:So those who are saying it's not saving me any time, I don't believe, or they're not harnessing any tools. What I do believe is they are saving time, and if they're saying they're not, then it might be going to a longer lunch hour or an earlier end of the day. The history of technology is that it increases productivity, and the number of work hours goes down over time. During the Industrial Revolution, big decline in number of work hours. Farmers used to have to work six and a half days a week or whatever.
Speaker 6:And their families, the children, they got room and board. There wasn't much more. But then they went out into the working world. So the farmers and these unpaid family members, you know, their work week got shorter, and I think that's part of what's going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We've been tracking the optimism around AI and progress sort of loosely along two axes. There's a view that GDP will start growing as AI diffuses and we go into a new technical revolution. We're already seeing some green shoots on the GDP figures, but it's still early. We're not at 10% GDP growth, but that's what some AI leaders are predicting.
Speaker 2:But then you also have the employment question, and there's some leaders of AI labs that say the future will be high GDP growth, high unemployment, which seems like it will have, significant social consequences, we will have to grapple with that as a society and deal with those problems. But I'm wondering if you have a view between what we should expect in a decade from AI as it rolls out. Do you fall into that camp of high GDP growth, high unemployment? Or are you more, you know, the jobs we'll find new jobs. And so maybe we will see an economic boom, but we will also still all find ways to, you know, fill our time during the day with employment.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think that one of the reasons this question is popping up more and more well, first of all, is our imaginations. But also, the unemployment rate for 16 24 year olds has increased much more than the overall unemployment rate. It's now up to double digits, 12%. The average duration of unemployment, the average, is about twenty four weeks.
Speaker 6:And so that's kind of scary. A lot of entry level jobs are going unfilled. In other words, maybe the people answering that survey are now being faced with the reality that, wait a minute, they're not going to hire someone to come in and handle this grunt work? I have to do that too? Maybe that's what's happening at the low end to give them some credibility, or at the lower end there.
Speaker 6:We're in the camp and you'll find this in Big Ideas as well and we've been saying this for a while, and at first when we said it we probably said it three years ago for the first time we think there's going to be a step function change here in real GDP growth, just as there is with every technology super cycle. So just to illustrate that, in the four hundred years between 1500 and 1900, Bret Winton, working with academia, found out or learned that real GDP growth was 0.6%. Then we had railroads, internal combustion engine, telephone, electricity, and it went to 3% for the next hundred and twenty five years. Here we are.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:We think it's going north of 7%. And that's conservative. That's conservative. I think it's conservative. Really productivity driven.
Speaker 6:Yes. And and we think that that this is one of the greatest times to start a business. I started ARC, there was no ChatGPT to say, okay, do a deck for my startup because this is what I want to do. There wasn't anything like that. I had to create everything.
Speaker 6:Now you can look at an unmet need out there and say, Hey, ChatGPT, or Hey, Grok, come help me build this business, right? So we think that fears of unemployment sure, there's displacement short term, but think about what's also happening. One point three million baby boomers are retiring every year.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 6:And we've just had or we're in the midst of an exodus of immigrants and little in migration. So that, I think, is helping keep the unemployment rate low. But entry level jobs can be done by AI. And so that's what we're seeing at the younger level. So what I say to young people is you all, in your mind, have thought of a new business that would really fulfill an unmet need, something that frustrates you,
Speaker 2:why
Speaker 6:don't you do it and use AI to do it, to plan it, and just get going while you also look for a job if you're unemployed? I think we're going to see the biggest entrepreneurial explosion in history.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it. Thank you. We gotta hit the gong for 7% GDP growth. We have a gong
Speaker 1:around here. I love the sound of that.
Speaker 2:We have we have real sound effects in addition to the soundboard.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 2:Give yes, please.
Speaker 10:What
Speaker 6:what's give you one more stat?
Speaker 2:One more stat. Please.
Speaker 6:We think we think inflation will go negative.
Speaker 2:I love that.
Speaker 1:Yes. And technology.
Speaker 2:This is amazing. This is very optimistic picture of the future and I'd love to hear it. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and Yes. That Thank very wide ranging conversation. I love the history and the personal story and everything that you're doing.
Speaker 2:So thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day. Thank you, John. With a funny soundboard. Yeah. We will see you later.
Speaker 2:Hopefully hopefully, we made a good impression and you will be back soon.
Speaker 6:You did. Now I know why you're famous.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Goodbye. Goodbye. Have a great day. Jordy.
Speaker 2:Oh, that was amazing.
Speaker 12:Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you
Speaker 2:use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Go and check
Speaker 1:it keep it together. The chat the whole time
Speaker 2:I know. The the chat was going
Speaker 1:insane. I could I literally I was fighting for my life.
Speaker 2:Oh my god. The
Speaker 1:I every time I look up at the screen, I was just trying to
Speaker 2:I know. I
Speaker 1:know. Enjoy a
Speaker 2:crazy day. Wall to wall flash bang, and I'm just trying to hold it together. I love I love you guys in the chat. I love you. Also, you make the job a little difficult sometimes.
Speaker 1:That was the hardest battle of my life.
Speaker 2:That was insane. I'm like and there's nowhere to look because I look at this cat. I look at Tyler. I look at my phone. I have a 100 notifications.
Speaker 2:I assume as people texted me to pull the flashback. And also, by the way, I can't I can't trigger the flash bang. That's Jory exclusive. We need a smoke to clear the air. We need we need to tell you about Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, next level vibe coding, state of the art reasoning, and deep multimodal understanding.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Some news. So we're gonna have Pedro from Brex is We're working on getting him on. Amazing. Dalian's also gonna join separately, of course. I don't know who's coming on first.
Speaker 1:We can But we have whoever's in the waiting room.
Speaker 2:But we have another guest jumping on right now. We have John.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're gonna push We're gonna push John just because the stories
Speaker 2:And and he's okay. He has some time, so we'll Yeah. So we'll hop on with him later in the show. Fantastic. Well, before we
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So bring in our next guest, let's tell you about public.com. I saw someone in the chat asking for public.com. Read. Here it is. Investing for those who take it seriously.
Speaker 2:Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with amazing customer service.
Speaker 1:I've never I've never cried on there before, buddy.
Speaker 2:This is a unique experience. The the chat is is a wild wild wild wild wild experience. But thank you to everyone who's been supporting. She was a great sport, had a bunch of interesting things to share. And I do I I truly do love the optimistic view because we so we we had actually written a chart for high growth high GDP growth, high employment, low employment, low GDP growth.
Speaker 2:And we were trying to track where the other AI leaders were because Dario, of course, came out and said, I think we'll have high GDP growth, and I think we'll have high unemployment. I think there's gonna be a lot of labor displacement. And me and Jordy and Tyler were going back and forth on where we all sit. Where does The US sit right now? Where do different leaders feel like they the world is going if they're charted on this two axis chart?
Speaker 2:And and I kind of jokingly put myself all the way in the most optimistic camp. I said 10% GDP growth and less than 5% unemployment. I don't know if I have my I don't know if I have it in myself to truly believe that. I do think that there might be some gyrations in the employment market, but it was great to hear it from her, and we appreciate her taking the time to come hang out with us while we throw soundboards and flashbangs around. Anyway, it sounds like we have someone in the restream waiting room.
Speaker 1:Who do we got? John. Oh. Well John. Got John.
Speaker 1:Let's bring John
Speaker 2:in to the TV but also dumb. John, thank you so much for taking the time. Been a bit of a crazy shot. Look at
Speaker 1:this setup. This is incredible.
Speaker 2:What do you have behind you?
Speaker 12:The home library. What else would it
Speaker 1:be? Incredible.
Speaker 2:Give us some recommendations. What's the best thing on that?
Speaker 12:There's an incredible history of Houston rap music that I highly recommend on this book.
Speaker 2:What era? Like This
Speaker 12:is a screw era. Like screw into Paul Is it like Mike Jones?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. That that's I led up to that moment. Oh, interesting. Okay.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Okay. Quick introduction.
Speaker 1:Was this was the last fifteen minutes or so have been one of the more chaotic that we've ever had. We had Cathy Wood on talking about a variety of of theses she has on on markets. The our chat, we have some sound effects. Our chat just kept telling us to spam the sound effects and I couldn't couldn't keep it together. But we're super excited to have you on here.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking the time. Yesterday was was kind of a funny experience. Somebody sent somebody sent me the video that you posted with the rugby and there we only made like a 100 of those. We came out we gave them out to friends. We would have happily sent you one if if we knew you were in the market, but of course
Speaker 12:I was tapped in. I was tapped in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You were tapped in. I found it.
Speaker 1:You were tapped in. You found it online. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm glad I mean, even though it was bootleg, I'm glad that it looked great.
Speaker 12:It looked great.
Speaker 1:Great in
Speaker 2:the video. Great. Yeah. There it is. There it is.
Speaker 2:Well, we have sent out a an official TBP Yeah. The mail. It should be And what did it I'm excited.
Speaker 1:Like when it arrived from Canada?
Speaker 12:Okay. So can I Yeah? Please. Candid? Can I be candid with you?
Speaker 1:Yes. Course. Of I feel like we can be candid.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 12:When this package arrived in my package room in my building Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It looked like it
Speaker 12:had been assembled by a small child. It was it was packed into like a mailer, like a like a regular mailer
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 12:That was tattered at the edges.
Speaker 1:No. It
Speaker 12:had a label from Canada.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 12:And there was a full retinue of packing tape layers, like four or five layers on top of the mailing label. I opened the package. I had ordered one. Yeah. I got two.
Speaker 2:You got two. Okay.
Speaker 12:I got two.
Speaker 2:So there's a bonus one for you guys.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'll send it over. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Do a swallow. Smelled like cigarettes.
Speaker 12:No. Smelled like cigarette.
Speaker 1:Wait. So you think a child would smoke cigarettes. Selling food
Speaker 2:like TV smoking merch. Child is is selling food like TV merch.
Speaker 12:Noun Fumar. Yeah. And but I will say Yeah. As a clothing as connoisseur, when I saw the images that you guys have posted of your polo, was like incredibly high quality material.
Speaker 9:Yes.
Speaker 12:I could see it in the photos. Mhmm. I knew that the embroidery would be like Yeah. Robust to the touch. Yeah.
Speaker 12:I knew. I get this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh. This looks like it
Speaker 12:was made from a you know, you get like a 10 pack of terry cloths
Speaker 2:No. On basics? No. No. Not good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. See, this was an issue. A lot of people when when I first I posted that that we had that that there was bootleg merch floating around and a lot people are like, oh, what's the issue? Like, you guys are a podcast. It's not your core business.
Speaker 1:We don't make merch to make money. Right? But the issue was like I knew people would buy it and they'd get it and they'd be like, this is low quality. Yeah.
Speaker 12:I was like, on the on the flip side, you guys are popping and you're getting bootlegged. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a good Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Anyway, sorry. For your first time on the show, please introduce yourself for everyone who might not be familiar.
Speaker 12:Sure. My name is John Karamonika. I am a pop music critic at the New York Times. I am the cohost of Popcast, which is our pop culture talk show.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Check us out. Youtube.com/podcast. Sticker. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then and then and then the reel that started this whole thing on Instagram. Break down the And then Sure. And then, just to clarify, none of the footage in that is AI generated. Correct?
Speaker 2:No. Okay. It's just But the I just like that. I mean, no. No.
Speaker 2:No. No. It's it's something about, like, the camera movement and your dancing was, like, a little bit like, woah. There's a lot going on. Okay.
Speaker 12:Well Movie magic, baby.
Speaker 2:Movie magic. Movie magic. But what was the thesis? Week.
Speaker 12:Yeah. So every week we do a song of the week. It's not necessarily pure endorsement. It's usually a song that's reflective of a bigger idea in pop Obviously, we've been talking a lot about AI in pop in recent months. We had a big episode on that before the holidays.
Speaker 12:I listened to the Bruno Mars song that just came out, and I was like, if you had told me that this is just some guy trained on
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:The pop charts of 1972 and made this, I would have totally believed it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 12:So, typically we film in my car. My car unfortunately is in the shop, so we went up to the South Bronx and filmed a dance video in my mechanic's garage.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. I mean, it's a beautiful set. I don't know what you shot that on, but it is it's like a it's a beautiful like, piece of media.
Speaker 1:Did you argue that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:Did go to the Bruno Mars concert in the steal a brain rot game in Roblox? What? Did you not hear about
Speaker 2:this? I know.
Speaker 12:What are you talking about? I know about this, but I don't know.
Speaker 1:You know? So Bruno Mars played a concert in the game steal a brain rot in robots, which by itself, just reading that sentence, it kinda feels like it would give you brain rot. I guess you it is stealing a brain rot. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, let's zoom out and talk about AI music.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We were talking about it earlier, and and I've always been on this this train where the AI tools are incredible. The it's, you know, it's hard to tell the difference. But there are always whenever I see a viral piece of AI media like Harry Potter Balenciaga, I returned to the fact that AI didn't come up with the concept. AI was used to instantiate the idea that was created from a human. And in fact, after Harry Potter Balenciaga, I went to, I think, ChatGPT and I said, here's the here's this thing that's going viral.
Speaker 2:They're mashing up a kid's classic with an iconic fashion brand. It's this high low, create a new viral video concept that will absolutely take over the Internet. And it just was like like, you know, like Star Wars Louis Vuitton. And it was like, that's not actually gonna break through in the way that Harry Potter Balenciaga did because it's not innovative. It's not the first time it's had something happen.
Speaker 2:And and I'm wondering, like, how much do you think we're, you know, you're seeing music that's, like, purely just the AI did it, or it's more of a tool? Like, how are you processing the AI music boom right now?
Speaker 12:Sure. One note on the Harry Potter Balenciaga thing. You know that there is an actual Balenciaga Fortnite collaboration. Really?
Speaker 2:Are you aware of that? No, I'm not. Wow.
Speaker 12:So when Demna, who until recently was the creative director of Balenciaga
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Had a really, I would say, a robust sense of humor and irony about the types of clothing that he made. Sure. And a lot of times, he did some unlikely garment collaborations, and he there's a sanctioned Balenciaga Fortnite. I think it's a hoodie. Wow.
Speaker 12:Maybe a shirt.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Two or three pieces. So they were the troll outrolled the AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There you go. There you Yeah.
Speaker 12:As as far as AI as a music tool Mhmm. You know, one of the things I think is causing
Speaker 2:a lot
Speaker 12:of people anxiety right now Mhmm. Is you look at some of these artists who are cut from whole cloth. Right? Solomon Ray Mhmm. Purports to be a sole musician, but really it's just a guy running a bunch of Anthony Hamilton songs through a program and coming out with a new one, probably.
Speaker 12:Allegedly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 12:Now, that doesn't scare me because eventually, Spotify, Apple are gonna say, there's gonna be some banner, some badge. It's like, this is not a real person Yeah. To the extent that that matters. Yeah. Here's what I think is interesting.
Speaker 2:Or or it's not fair use, and we need to shuffle the revenue over there. And so you're effectively
Speaker 12:In the same way that sampling Yep. Had many years
Speaker 2:And mashups.
Speaker 12:Shadows, and then everything kind of came into formality, that's gonna happen with AI. And frankly, it's gonna happen much faster.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 12:What I think is interesting is if you go into any songwriter, producer studio in Los Angeles right now, which is where all the sort of hits are written typically, the the hierarchy of that room is typically famous person. Mhmm. Famous person's guy. You know, like songwriter, helper Yeah. Melody person.
Speaker 12:A name producer who you probably maybe would have heard of, one or two songwriters, and then one or two kind of studio hands who are sort of like moving the knobs. I would bet anything that in every single one of those sessions, one of those low level folks is already deploying AI in unexpected ways. There's an interview with Teddy Swims, who's like a moderately successful pop star, a couple of months ago, and he said, oh, yeah. AI. Yeah.
Speaker 12:I use that to multitrack my vocals. Use that to try out what if I change the key? What's it gonna sound like?
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 12:I would bet anything that in the same way that auto tune was quite quietly used for a long time and then became completely accepted, these AI tools are gonna get used and deployed in these not totally discernible to the ear ways, but in terms of workflow and process, I bet they're already there in everything we're listening to on especially on pop radio.
Speaker 1:I heard an interesting story from a friend from a friend about a friend of theirs who was a like a backup like studio singer whose work went to basically zero because Right. They were working on tracks that were just meant to be demos so that a songwriter could share it with different labels or artists or And then suddenly it's like, you don't need somebody to go into the studio to like sing your song. You just like prompt it and Yeah. And so yeah, I think
Speaker 2:What you're obviously a student of history. We talked about the book the books behind you. What I read them all. What anecdotes can you share about previous technologies rolling out in music, backlash to electronic drum machines, backlash to electronic music? Give me some more like, what are you drawing on for its core
Speaker 12:Okay. So, I mean, the the the story that I think becomes really it looms large in a lot of people's mind, Dylan going electric. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Is an era of folk music where everybody's like, you know what's authentic? It's me. I don't smell great. I'm strumming on an acoustic guitar. I perform at four cafes a night in the village.
Speaker 12:We all hang out and write together and have sex with each other, and that's that's the scene. Yeah. And then Dylan sees what's happening with technology and sees what's happening especially with the guitar. Mhmm. And the electric guitar has become a a creative tool for an entire legion of rock musicians.
Speaker 12:Mhmm. And Dylan brings it to the Newport Folk Festival and says, I'm I'm plugging in. I don't care what you guys think. And, of course, people call him Judas and and say that he's doing heresy, and the fact is he's just following. He was a follower at that I also mentioned Auto Tune earlier.
Speaker 12:You may remember Jay Z put out a song called DOA, Death of Auto Tune. This is at the peak of T Pain. Yeah. T Pain is dominating radio with essentially computer music that sounds a lot like Zapp and Roger from the late seventies into the early eighties, that kind of like synthetic funk music that was really popular after like the earth, wind, and fires of the world. T Pain comes along, formalizes it, becomes a go to songwriter, producer, and collaborator, and all of a sudden, everything on the radio sounds like a computer.
Speaker 12:Jay Z comes along with Death of Auto Tune and says, actually, stop all that. And then people are like, that's nice, old man. Like, let's keep it pushing. And Auto Tune is now widely accepted in every genre. You hear it in country music.
Speaker 12:You hear it in pop. You hear it in reggaeton. You hear it in hip hop. Those these questions that were sort of like anxious critical anxious critical discourses when they emerged Mhmm. Nobody really gives two thoughts to anymore.
Speaker 12:I think that's probably what's gonna happen Yeah. Twelve to twenty four months from now with AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I wanna go so much deeper and and have you back to spend way more time with all this. I'm interested Anytime. Your thoughts on on the the downstream implications of AI music because I I I could imagine that if you're a particular artist that can create one of those, like, shelling points where there's a specific tour that everyone's talking about. You've got to go see the Eris tour.
Speaker 2:Or this particular tour at The Sphere was something that so many people took Instagram Reels of and posted that everyone just knows it's real. It creates this proof of authenticity. I'm wondering what other downstream effects might are you thinking about as artists react to competition from some anonymous person with AI that can create music that's maybe indistinguishable so they got to specialize.
Speaker 12:Here's the thing. Here's the anxiety that it brings up for me.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:And I think it's an anxiety that I've long felt Mhmm. Before AI posed itself as a problem. Mhmm. I'm a very intense listener. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:It's my job. But also, just even before it was my job, I was always an intense listener. You guys may or may not be an intense listener. I don't know. Sure.
Speaker 12:What I can tell you is that for every person like me, there's 50 people who are casual listeners.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 12:Which is to say they press play on a Spotify playlist Yep. And walk away. And don't think too hard about what the second song is or the fifth song is.
Speaker 1:They're not studying. They're listening.
Speaker 12:They're not studying. And they're not preoccupied. They're not every song that comes on, they don't do a gut check with themselves and say, do I like this? Am I curious about this? Is this an artist I respect?
Speaker 12:They just kinda let it go in the background. Everything is dentist office music. It's moving in that direction. There are plenty of real life artists who are making music like that. And those are the people who have been shutting out some of the bigger and more creative people.
Speaker 12:AI accelerates that process, but AI didn't start that process.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 12:Sure. And I think what it's also gonna accelerate is more and more people, as consumers, are gonna get trained to try to not pay too close attention
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:To the specifics of what they're listening to.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Okay. I have 50 more questions, but we do have to But move thank you so much for hopping on in short notice. Want me to burn? No.
Speaker 2:No. Keep it. It has lore now. We've we've discussed it on the show. It lives on forever in the Instagram reel.
Speaker 2:It's great. I love it.
Speaker 12:One thing I'll say before I go is that many of my favorite rap shirts from the nineties are all bootlegs. Yeah. This may be this may turn out to be the thousand dollar shirt twenty years from now.
Speaker 2:It's been discussed on the show. Yeah. Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Let's, like, actually schedule your next appearance
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Today. We'd love to have you back on. Yeah. There's so many times. Too much longer.
Speaker 2:Have a
Speaker 12:bunch of questions. Are You killing it. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:So much. You too. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Great to hang. Goodbye. Talk soon. The
Speaker 2:New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock And
Speaker 1:Pedro is in the waiting room. We have him on in.
Speaker 2:Brett Brex.
Speaker 1:$5,000,000,000 ready. Wow. What a day. Pedro, how are you doing? How are you feeling?
Speaker 1:Congratulations. How are you guys?
Speaker 2:Thanks so much. You. Big.
Speaker 1:Superbops. Good to see
Speaker 10:you as well.
Speaker 2:Give us the news. How'd this come together? What happened? I wanna ring the gong.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:So so today, we're announcing the largest bank fintech merger in history with between Braxton Capital One. I'll let you go for it. Go for it. 5.15.
Speaker 1:Crowd Congratulations.
Speaker 11:Thank you. We we're really excited about this. Yeah. And and as we as we thought about this, right, Capital One is the first fintech ever. They invented concept of bringing technology into financial services.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right.
Speaker 11:And as we got to know them, what we realized was there was a a really obvious one plus one equals five scenario here. And and and, really, when you look
Speaker 8:at the of world that
Speaker 11:they operate, it was completely different Mhmm. Than anywhere else compared to Brex. They had the, you know, hundreds of millions of consumers, millions of businesses, you know, a $150,000,000,000 of market cap, $900,000,000,000 in car GMV. And, really, the way that we we thought about this is when we combine the product that we do with Brexit, we created this new category of company that brings financial services and software under one platform to help customers make better financial decisions. Right?
Speaker 11:Mhmm. And we combine this with, you know, the the the product and the platform with Capital One's unprecedented scale, brand distribution, and balance sheet. We have this unique opportunity to accelerate our go to market and product with a level of investment that we would never be able to match as a stand alone company. So it's really about how do we build the most important financial platform for businesses in The US, and this is such a unique combination of being two founder like companies that fundamentally believe in growth and be here to win.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. They always say, what's the phrase? Like, you meet your acquirer, you you know Years before a
Speaker 2:deal happens. When did guys Capital One?
Speaker 1:Like, first, how did the conversations first start?
Speaker 11:So so I've I've heard of Rich and the Capital One team for many, many years. Actually, even when I was back in Brazil, they were already an inspiration. And these guys have been building in fintech for for a long time. They invented this idea of bringing data into underwriting, which, of course, is one of the big things that we pioneered back in 2017, as you know. So so a lot of this has been, you know, deep admiration and respect.
Speaker 11:And then as we started to spend time with them, I think the biggest thing to me was the deep respect they had for technology. And the fact that when you think of a bank, m and a, people really think about, okay. We're gonna go and integrate all these teams and spend all this time and make it super slow. And and, really, the the the main idea is keeping Brax independently and just accelerate, like, accelerate the growth. And we're gonna integrate a few parts of the business, but the majority of it will run independently.
Speaker 11:And and, you know, when you put in behind the $6,000,000,000 r and d budget of Capital One, the $6,000,000,000 marketing budget, that gets a very special a very special combination. And and I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe that this was the easiest and fastest path for Brex to be the number one player in our space Mhmm. Operating with this, unprecedented scale and ambition with them.
Speaker 2:What what I wanna talk about other exciting areas of plugging bringing, like, a Silicon Valley ethos to a larger company. How much of what you see over the next few years is like deploying AI transformation and bringing like that high energy early adoption of AI throughout the organization or any other areas, like even just marketing. There's so many different areas that you have a unique view from the founder seat in.
Speaker 11:Oh, 100%. 100%. And and and look. I think I think the thing that about Bell Capital on this special is being a founder like company is just this ability to make, you know, quote, unquote, bold decisions much more aggressively than others. Right?
Speaker 11:Yeah. And and when you look into, for example, the engine that they've built on the go to market side for a small business Mhmm. I think I think it's nowhere in the world matched in to the scale in which they operate. When you look into the technology and data and what they do on the credit side and underwriting, it's really sort of an n of one thing. So I think there's a lot for us to learn from them.
Speaker 11:And and I think the the things that we're really excited to bring to the table is, especially when you think about this space, right, and bringing financial services and software into one, it is really just AI and the direction of the road map that we're building as a stand alone company. And and now that we can, you know, double, triple our level of investment over the next few years together, it's gonna be a really unique thing to do and just bring this capability to the millions of businesses that are already on their platform Mhmm. Will also be huge. Right? So, you know, super super and and and maybe the biggest thing to say is, you know, we're not going anywhere.
Speaker 11:I'm saying that I think this is gonna be the most exciting years of my career. Yes. We're making history here.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Super great Yeah.
Speaker 1:Was gonna ask, are you coming for Rich's job? Are you going for the top spots? Some people wanna sell, you know, they wanna, you know, just rest Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's no rest. But I know your
Speaker 1:ambition. I could see you going.
Speaker 10:No one
Speaker 1:can get to the top. Straight going straight for the top.
Speaker 2:We advocate for this for every acquisition. We want the founders to get inside, take over.
Speaker 1:I I
Speaker 11:have immense respect for Rich. He is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of this generation. Yeah. And and he's incredibly private and doesn't talk a lot about the he says that the, you know, the story of Capital One is the book that would never be written. And and and there are some there are some amazing stories there.
Speaker 11:Yeah. But which is the way in which he runs the company is founder mode to to the extreme. Yeah. And and and there's a lot there that that that inspires us. But, look, the reality is, for now, there's so much to build in the space that we're in.
Speaker 11:Right? We're still Brexit's 1% of the market.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:When we bring it together of the existing, you know, commercial card, there's a lot more room to go. We're gonna be the third largest corporate card issuer in The US.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And there's a very clear path to build the most important financial platform for businesses in the country.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 11:Really excited.
Speaker 2:What about location? I think of you as a San Francisco company. I'm sure you've expanded. I think of them as New York company. Do I have that right?
Speaker 2:Or are are gonna be like Yeah. They're mostly just lots of flights or yeah.
Speaker 11:Yeah. They're mostly based in Virginia.
Speaker 3:Oh, Virginia.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So in DC. So the the biggest thing for us is we're actually keeping Braxton mostly standalone
Speaker 12:Okay.
Speaker 11:And and large you know, operating largely independent. So the idea is I remain in San Francisco. Our leadership team remains in San Francisco and, you know, spread over The US.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:We continue to hire in Brazil. We continue to hire in Seattle. We continue to hire in New York. And, really, it's like, how do we add fuel to the fire? That's that's really the mindset.
Speaker 11:That's amazing. And we're gonna integrate a few parts of the business that are important, like some risk management functions over time or finance reporting and all that.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 11:But but, fundamentally, the cool thing of this is, you know, how do you play this game at a completely different level of scale and just get ahead, like, five, seven, ten years of what we would as a stand alone company, and we're really excited about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Lessons for entrepreneurs, you know, looking back at the since 2017. I mean, crazy ride. Yeah. One of the fastest growing companies of its era.
Speaker 1:Then through COVID and Zurp, like, it's been an insane roller coaster in in, you know, the last few years, you know, focusing on on you know, just navigating through that whole processes and getting to this outcome is super inspiring. But any any lessons that you're taking from it? Mhmm. Learnings?
Speaker 11:I mean, so many. Right? I I I think, you know, it's it's I started this company when was 21. I didn't know a lot about about about things in the world, and and I think a lot of the journey of the company is is, you know, also a reflection of the founder journey. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And and over the years, you know, we've made a lot of mistakes. We've learned a lot. And and I think the last few years, honestly, were the most challenging, but also the most rewarding years of my career because I ran this company, you know, as sole CEO. I have an amazing leadership team, and I have a fantastic team across all of Brex, but it was a it was a very different game to play. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And then when you see what we did on growth, what we did on the enterprise side, and the level of deals that we're winning across every single player, the majority of AI companies are operating on Brax. When you look at the momentum and the revenue growth as well as, you know, profitability, right, it's it's really remarkable what the team did here over the past few years. And I think the biggest lesson is, you know, continue to believe in the in the things that made you start and things that keep you going because there are roadblocks. Right? Brex wasn't in a great place in 2023, but I just had this belief that we were not living to all to all our our fullest potential, and we could be much more as a company.
Speaker 11:And and I think where we got today is, first, a really exciting milestone that this was all worth it, but the most important part is what the company gets to become and just cementing Brexit as a a part of The US financial system forever. Mhmm. And the fact that a company will be around, this product that we've created, that we have so much conviction and belief, will be around for ten, twenty, thirty years at a massive scale. So really sort of unique and emotional moment for me. I I really have so much gratitude for the team we built at Brex.
Speaker 11:Some of the most talented, hardworking, smart, and kind people that I know, and that without them, like, none of this would be possible. So just just immensely grateful for for everyone that contributed to the journey in in getting us here today. And, again, we're just getting started in this new in this new phase.
Speaker 1:What a moment. Congratulations. We were we were joking earlier. It it it is interesting that you now have more common ground with with Kareem and Eric over at Ramp and that you've both sold the company to Capital One. So but great stuff.
Speaker 1:Super super inspiring, and congratulations to the to the whole team and the whole cap table on the milestone, and it's great great to catch up. Amazing.
Speaker 4:Thanks for
Speaker 11:having me.
Speaker 1:We'll talk
Speaker 2:to you soon.
Speaker 1:Cheers. See you. Up
Speaker 2:next, who got do we have anyone in the restream waiting room?
Speaker 1:Got Dalian. I think we got
Speaker 2:Dalian coming through. Coming in from Founders Fund. Is he available in the restream waiting room? Let's bring him in to the TVPN UltraDome. Welcome to the show, Dalian.
Speaker 2:How are you doing?
Speaker 14:Yo. Just great day. Great day.
Speaker 2:Very good
Speaker 11:to be here.
Speaker 2:What are you hitting with?
Speaker 1:No. Not the flash bang. Did this hit you
Speaker 2:like a flash bang or were you expecting this?
Speaker 14:No. I mean, how was I supposed to know
Speaker 1:this afternoon? They did good job of, you know, sort of keep
Speaker 3:it keep it down low. And I
Speaker 14:wanna start where it ended. Common ground with Eric and Kareem. Right? There is some common ground. They both have now sold a company to Capital One.
Speaker 14:Yeah. There's a lot of distance between the two of them. Kareem and Eric realized it is impossible to have a significant influence on the world by being within the structure of Capital One. The only way to save customers time and money was to go out and build an independent generational company. Okay.
Speaker 14:Pedro somehow believes the exact opposite. Okay. He believes the only way for him to accomplish anything is to go into an old soggy bank, convince them to overpay for his company by 50% and probably accomplish nothing with
Speaker 1:Woah. Most of his Woah. Okay. Woah. So we're not we're not yeah.
Speaker 1:We're not we're not doing we're not doing we're not gonna do any grave grave dancing here as much as
Speaker 2:Who who knows? I mean, you know, what if he what if he does his earn out? He leaves. He starts a new company. You know?
Speaker 2:Are you gonna are you gonna sign up? You say, hey. You know? I've backed people that sold to Capital One before. Seen this story before.
Speaker 2:His next company
Speaker 1:might be backed by you. What if you end up inspiring him to go do the earnout, come back, start a start a ramp competitor?
Speaker 2:What if he starts a moon base with a mass driver? And you're just like, wow. He actually cracked it. You know? This could happen.
Speaker 10:I don't know.
Speaker 14:Look. As Josh Wolfe likes to say, chips on shoulders, but chips in pockets.
Speaker 2:You're putting
Speaker 1:a chip
Speaker 2:on his pocket.
Speaker 14:You are. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. The thing that I'll also, you know,
Speaker 3:sort of point out,
Speaker 14:and this is more of like a, you know, sort of, you know, general company building, you know, sort of macro point. But it's an analogy that I, you know, learned from Keith back in the day, which is building companies is a lot like laying cement. Mhmm. In the early days, you have the ability to, you know, manipulate it, shape it, etcetera. Right?
Speaker 14:It is either sort of soft and malleable. The moment that it starts to harden though, trying to change company culture requires like a jackhammer. It's loud. It's painful. It's disruptive.
Speaker 14:It breaks your structural, you know, sort of integrity. And so I think the thing, you know, was kinda listening in to, you know, sort of Pedro's interview, and it's a little bit of a, you know, sort of joke or quip, but it's still funny to me that throughout the entire interview, there's never a time where he, Rick, really deeply was focused on how this is impacting his customers, in particular, is it going to save them time and money. Right? And I think that just comes down to what the early days of the two companies were like in the terms of focus areas. The early days of Brex were focused on celebrating go to market, celebrating basically like signing up logos, celebrating wins.
Speaker 14:I'm not saying that's, like, necessarily a bad thing. I'm just saying that is what the culture was. Mhmm. They celebrated the champagne campaign. They set up the, you know, sort of South Park Cafe.
Speaker 14:And those types of micro decisions feed into what employees want to work on because they see what the, you know, sort of founder celebrates versus you guys know. What Ramp celebrates from the get go has always been saving customers time and money through better product, better automation, better savings. Mhmm. And that's what ultimately the individual employee online, you know, celebrates and thinks about every single day because they see that that's what the founder is celebrating. And so I think as you see this, you know, the two sides of the story basically play out, I actually think it comes down to those early, early cultural micro decisions.
Speaker 14:And I think companies and founders should be thinking about that a lot even in completely unrelated, you know, sort of categories of, like, what is gonna be the penultimate, you know, sort of winning culture? You know, when I think about the space industry, are you relativity space and you're celebrating, like, renders and capital raising? Or are you SpaceX and you're celebrating, like, technical accomplishments and actually, like, landing rockets?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 14:And, ultimately, that's gonna be what, you know, sort of plays out. Relatively goes and raises three and a half billion dollars, never launches a rocket. SpaceX obviously launches their first rocket on, like, know, I think $60,000,000 total raise. Mhmm. So
Speaker 2:On the on the question of, like, ramp strategy, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on, like, the actual structure. Like, if you think about Brex and Capital One, they now have, like that that combined entity has a consumer business. I've pushed Gliman. Get me a personal ramp card that I can pull out for my personal finances. I actually talked to some people who set up, like, whole LLCs just to run their personal finances through Ramp.
Speaker 2:It's, like, very cumbersome because Ramp does not have a consumer business. Is that in the cards? Is that do you think that there's a world where RAMP grows into a bank, or is or is focus, like, the actual correct strategy for now, forever? How do you see it progressing?
Speaker 14:I think focus really matters. Right? Like, we have a, like, you know, sort of core ICP, which is just like, you know you know, the all basically enterprises of America. And I think like there's so much more that we can do to serve our customers even better. You you know, sort of seeing us, you know, basically spin up, you know, sort of ramp labs.
Speaker 14:And, you know, today we just you know, they launched, know, a new version of, you know, sort of
Speaker 4:ramp budget. Mhmm. And I
Speaker 14:think any additional energy spent on just continuing to develop next generation products, especially ones that obviously utilize AI that is focused on the core ICP for ramp, is a far better utilization of our time. And, you know, to take it back to like the Peter Thiel philosophy, we believe in building monopoly. Right? And, ultimately, anything that isn't serving that core ICP is a distraction from the potential to build a monopoly. I think what I find particularly exciting about today and about the news about Brex is that it is probably the strongest monopoly thesis for Ramp that has existed since the company's basically start.
Speaker 14:If you remember when we funded it, you know, and it, like, know, came out and launched in 02/1920, Amex still had, a really big, you know, enterprise business. Brex was a multibillion dollar company. Divvy was still super, you know, sort of fast growing. Bill.com was still super, you know, sort of fast growing. Expensify was fast growing.
Speaker 14:Like, there were so many players in the market. You fast forward today, Divvy basically got acquired. It's barely around anymore. Brex obviously, you know, sort of got acquired. Amex has almost entirely shifted their focus their consumer business.
Speaker 14:Right? If you look at how much of their gross profit basically comes from consumer business and how rapidly that's growing relative to enterprise, it's all the CEOs basically talking about on quarterly earnings calls. Their entire, basically, like, you know you know, FMV, basically, growth over the past three years is entirely based on the consumer business. And so enterprise corporate spend, card spend management, budgeting, just the, like,
Speaker 2:smart CFOs suite.
Speaker 14:The CFO suite that smart CFOs use, dude, they, like, field is somehow more open today than it was five years ago. There's less funding going into it, less like super competent teams that are, you know, sort of focused on it. And so why would you ever like give up focus on just continue to maximize that when like, you know, we're still only one percent of the way there. There's so much more basically to do. And so, yeah, would I as a consumer like love to have that level of power like in my hands?
Speaker 14:Sure. But like as a ramp shareholder, why would we not give up the
Speaker 3:fact that we literally have
Speaker 14:the best monopoly opportunity since the company got started that we need to continue to go capitalize on?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Jordan, anything else?
Speaker 1:No. I I'm I'm happy I'm happy for the Brex team and I think it's I think it's a great outcome. And I can also see why you are excited about this moment. Simply because a lot of people probably mocked you for, you know, investing in a corporate card company
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:When you, you know, initially led the round into ramp. Even with the quality of the team, it seemed and, you know, like like you were saying, it seemed like the the the cards had already been, you know, fully dealt and and there wasn't, you know, some type of greenfield opportunity. So I I guess congratulations to you too. Congratulations to everyone. But yeah.
Speaker 1:Congratulations to everyone. Honestly, like, I hope I hope the the industry can just, like, move past this, like, kind of, like, rivalry. It's, like, we're all we're all, like, serving to to we're all building tools to to grow Yeah. Grow grow the economy, and that's something I can The
Speaker 2:Dellian's gotta say something nice. Aren't you a YC founder, Dellian?
Speaker 14:You know, September 2014, but, you know,
Speaker 2:top tier. Y c thunder. This is a good outcome for the y c community. Let's give it up for the y c community. Deliver returns.
Speaker 1:Jordy and Pugen, you guys are much better people than I am. I think that's why you have much better hair than I do.
Speaker 14:I unfortunately am incapable of not being anything but like a vengeful paranoid. So that's all I've got in me. And, you know, I'll say the, you know, the ramp story, as you guys may know, started on Fortnite. You know, Kareem and I playing together, seeing his brilliance. I'm happy to, you know, to the end of the Breck story and the rivalry on my favorite, you know, basically saying in, you know, gaming, which is g g w p, you know, e e z, no re, which stands for good game, well played, easy game, no rematch.
Speaker 1:No rematch. Savage.
Speaker 2:Who knows? There might be a rematch. We'll see what the next company is. Anyway, have a good rest of your day. We'll see you later, Dalian.
Speaker 2:Cheers.
Speaker 1:Bye. Bye, boys.
Speaker 2:And that concludes probably the most chaotic stream of our
Speaker 1:Definitely the most chaotic. We had technical difficulties. We had flash bangs. We had
Speaker 2:Surprise gas.
Speaker 1:$5,000,000,000 deal get announced live. We had bootleg merch.
Speaker 2:Bootleg merch. We had a good time.
Speaker 1:But but no. This is fantastic moment for Capital One and Brex and we are we are excited for them. I'm excited. I think that's it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's it. Think that's it. Plant. Chat, the the the concerning thing is the chat knows that now they can just say
Speaker 2:It's so
Speaker 1:start spamming flash bang into the chat.
Speaker 2:It's so awkward.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna be able to keep it together.
Speaker 2:Nope. It's gonna have to happen every once in while. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to the TBPN newsletter at tbpn.com.
Speaker 2:We have a great show for you tomorrow. I think we're a little bit lighter on the guests as we've been doing on
Speaker 1:our shows. We'll be
Speaker 2:hanging out, bringing you
Speaker 1:the section.
Speaker 2:Doing the mansion section. Of course. And tomorrow, 11AM Pacific, sharp.
Speaker 1:We love you. Goodbye. Nice
Speaker 9:work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.