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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TV PM.
Speaker 2:Today is Tuesday, 02/03/2026. And we're live from the Cisco AI Summit. We're very happy to be here. So pumped Thank Cisco for hosting us. We have a bunch of great guests lined up.
Speaker 2:We got Aaron Levy from Box coming back on the show. Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco, an absolute dog. He's in with the company for decades. Truly. Gigi Patel, the president and chief product officer will be joining us, Costa from the San Francisco 49ers, who's gonna be breaking down the technology of the NFL.
Speaker 2:And we're closing out with Dylan Patel, the founder and CEO of Semi Analysis. That's right. And of course, if you're wondering, Linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. Really quickly, let me also tell you about our presenting sponsor, Ramp dot com.
Speaker 2:Time is money because they're both easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:Starting the show Jordy. Important announcement from Oracle. They said, our partners financing with Dona Ana County Mhmm. New Mexico Yeah. Shackleford County, Texas, and Port Washington, Wisconsin data centers are secured at market standard rates progressing through final syndication on schedule and consistent with investment grade deals.
Speaker 1:So if, this makes you worry, a lot of other people agree. This is, the second the next the their most recent post after yesterday, they announced that the NVIDIA OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds and meet its commitments.
Speaker 2:So What did Rune say? Rune said, my confit my confident in OpenAI's abilities to raise fund T shirt has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my t shirt. Just 2,000 likes. This is a
Speaker 1:wild Interesting comm strategy. They've been hiding comments under this.
Speaker 3:That's rough.
Speaker 1:I think they've stopped doing that because Anyway, people are saying, what an odd thing to say. Brennan says, guys, just stop tweeting. Whoever you have running PR comms needs to be fired. You're making it worse.
Speaker 2:It is it is very weird to to take this to act specifically. This is a conversational platform. Like, it's
Speaker 1:it's Hey. We wanna start a conversation about concerns around our
Speaker 2:Well, also just I mean, it's a total rejection of the going direct thing. Like, this would be wildly different if it came from the CEO, co CEOs, or Larry Ellison directly. Even and it had, like, way more nuance. It's very odd when it has, like, the corporate press release
Speaker 1:This this screams that no one in comms actually uses x.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It it it's like we needed to put this out and they didn't really consider x.
Speaker 1:The channel?
Speaker 2:And and maybe this probably went over fine in a press release or something. But just on x, it's a completely different context. And there's so much subtext with all the different partners actively being there. And even like low level employees chiming in from companies that are implicated in this. There's like all of this different
Speaker 1:I like how you you compare Oracle's strategy of like the nameless faceless announcement that just concerns everyone to Rune actually from OpenAI commenting and just joking about it. And it actually gives you more confidence.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Like somebody somebody looked at the Rune post and was like and was like, oh, ef, even Rune stopped shilling. We're aft.
Speaker 2:And Rune's like, no. It's just a funny tweet. OpenAI is doing great. That instills way more Gabe
Speaker 1:quoted that yesterday's post and just said, okay. Yay. That worked.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yay. Anyways Before we move on, CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike. Your business is AI.
Speaker 2:Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 1:And, of course, Oracle's down 5% today.
Speaker 2:It's sort of
Speaker 1:a black good compared to some other names.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's
Speaker 1:PayPal down a full 20% today. What happened with PayPal? Switched out their CEO. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, that makes sense. This, you know, had some some q four results that people weren't Yeah. Super exciting about and people aren't excited about the forecast either. A number of people have been speculating.
Speaker 2:Mafia back in there.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. Mean, you look at Schiel had a had a kinda was prodding Elon. He said, come on, Elon. You've always wanted PayPal to be X, the financial super app. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Now is a great opportunity. PayPal right now is valued at less than what X was in the take private.
Speaker 2:Wait. Really? Yeah. No way. And X
Speaker 1:is obviously working on a bunch of different financial features. I
Speaker 2:thought PayPal all time high was in the, like hundreds of billions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So at the same at this at the time It's
Speaker 2:40 it's 40,000,000,000 now. Yeah. Add that in. Yeah. It was it was way up.
Speaker 2:It's down 85% in the last five years. I mean, truthfully, like a lot of people have moved on. They use, you know, Cash App
Speaker 4:and Yeah.
Speaker 1:But they own Venmo.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Venmo. Venmo is still very, like, millennial. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's it's sort of like and and people use the Apple Apple Pay transfers, Apple Cash. Like, there's been a number of, you know, shots across the bow for PayPal that they haven't responded to fully.
Speaker 1:I mean But their net
Speaker 3:their net revenue
Speaker 1:net own revenue
Speaker 2:Venmo because they acquired Braintree. It wasn't even, an in house Yeah. Like, really aggressive move. They they sort of just lucked out with Venmo.
Speaker 1:PayPal, the $40,000,000,000 public company Yeah. Had 2025 net revenue of 33,000,000,000. Woah. So Wow. Not great.
Speaker 1:Major sell off in pretty much all software today. We had another post here. Snap is close to all time lows at $6.70 despite growing revenues and profits. Serenity says, here's why the financial engineering looks criminal. Snapchat is an 11 and a half billion dollar company with a billion MAU and q three adjusted EBITDA of a 132,000,000.
Speaker 1:Not enough. However, stock comp for the last twelve months, 2 and a half billion dollars in the last twelve months. So really, really insane number. This is, I mean, always been the general criticism of Snap, but looks like they have not adjusted course yet.
Speaker 2:It's interesting seeing the the the gap between monetization between Meta a billion MAU and Snap a billion MAU. It's like a 10
Speaker 1:x delta. Yeah. And and then which is why, like, you were doing some napkin math on OpenAI. Yeah. And I think that's
Speaker 2:billion MAU. Do they monetize like Meta or do they monetize like Snap? And Yeah. On what timeline? Because Or worse.
Speaker 2:They have Fiji CMO. I think they could get to Meta level, you know, monetization and ARPU, but it also could they could be lingering in the Snap territory, which is, I think, 5,000,000,000 over the last year. Trailing twelve months, 5,770,000,000.00 on a billion now. Not if you were monetizing it like Meta, you'd be much closer to 50,000,000,000, which is Yeah. Dramatic.
Speaker 2:Like, very, very
Speaker 1:Matt Slotnick commenting on the sell off in software. All of this because Azure grew 39% instead of 39.4%. Of course, there's a lot more, going on here. Buko says, Nats, it's that the labs can hypothetically one shot you, so why stand in front of that train? Why express, quote, short AI in the marketplace?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Really quickly, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 1:High yield Harry says, wow, this software company is getting destroyed by AI today. It's Juventus, the soccer team down 13%.
Speaker 2:Everything's just
Speaker 1:getting I guess people think that somebody's gonna make Claude code for software Maybe. Or for soccer. The
Speaker 2:the your inside man below says the robots are gonna be playing. And he has a photo of or a GIF of robots playing soccer, which
Speaker 1:That seems bullish. We'll see. I don't know. Bitcoin also down dramatically.
Speaker 2:Where's Bitcoin? 75 or something?
Speaker 1:Joe Weisendahl has it up.
Speaker 2:Another reason. Absolute crash today. Down 13% over the last over the last five days, over almost 20% over the last month. Lots of selling activity going on. Bitcoin drops to low Jim Kramer
Speaker 1:is now giving advice to Michael Saylor. Mhmm. He says, oh my. Bitcoin, 73,000 beckons as the Dow hits a record high. Our chartist last night said, this is it.
Speaker 1:The level that cannot be Our chartist. Chartist? Yes. The level that cannot be breached. Chart artist?
Speaker 1:It is time for strategy also known as mass.
Speaker 2:Microstrategy was the former name
Speaker 1:of the mister for its mister symbol to do a spot secondary or convert and stop this decline. Come on, Mike. Step up. It's just always rough when when Jim Cramer is just like Yeah. Stream of consciousness posting at you.
Speaker 1:We'll see what what Saylor does. They they have earnings on Thursday and that will certainly be an interesting call.
Speaker 2:Yeah. More more details on the PayPal shares plunging nearly 20% CEO exit. They replaced their their CEO, Alex Kris, who was brought in to steer the payments firm through slowing growth and heightened competition and simultaneously issued a lackluster profit forecast for 2026 on Tuesday sending its shares down 19%. The board's the company's board which named HP's Enrique Lores as its new president and CEO said the pace of change in execution under Chris was not in line with its expectations. Kris was tasked with turning around PayPal during a challenging period as post pandemic trading volumes declined and competitive pressures in its core business intensified from large technology companies and newer fintech rivals.
Speaker 2:It does feel like I mean, even in the press release economy, would be it would have been so easy for PayPal to do some sort of deal with stock trading or prediction markets. Like, financial app and news product and grocery store, like, everyone is, like, doing some sort of deal at least even if it doesn't materialize, even if doesn't move the needle, at least they're they're sort of putting their best foot forward. And PayPal, you know, you still mostly hear about it in the context of what are the PayPal co founders up to now? Oh, they're building rivals to the original company. PayPal said CFO Jamie Miller would serve as interim CEO until Lores assumes the role on March 1.
Speaker 2:That's a pretty quick transition. Lores was president and CEO of the consumer electronics giant HP for more than six years. Wall Street analysts said the unexpected CEO announcement raises questions about the company's turnaround strategy. Of course, Disney's been going through a CEO transition, but it's been massively telegraphed with Yeah. You know, a contract that ended this year.
Speaker 2:Okay. You know, a story last week about, hey, we're moving faster. Hey, we're bringing somebody in who's internal, who's already knows the company in inside and out. It's been a lot
Speaker 1:It's crazy that even with $33,000,000,000 of revenue Mhmm. They're trade they're they're worth roughly like three and a half circles. Yeah. Right? Circle, obviously, you know, just tiny, tiny company in comparison to PayPal.
Speaker 1:You would think that PayPal just they don't have an obvious, like, AI. Like, what's the obvious AI bear case? Right? Yeah. They move money.
Speaker 1:They're heavily regulated. Yeah. You can imagine them figuring out ways to work better with agents and and capitalize on the stablecoin boom. But we'll see what the new CEO Good. Ends up doing.
Speaker 2:The big question is whether he will bring in a formidable payments team to attempt yet another multiyear turnaround.
Speaker 1:Do they not have a formidable payments team? What do you got? Or the I whole the would payments company with half a billion active Yes. Users has a formidable payments team.
Speaker 2:Apparently not according to Evercore. Like, you lack formidability. PayPal expects full year adjusted profit to range between low single digit percentage decline and slight increase compared with Wall Street expectations of about 8% growth. Miller said the company was no longer committing to the specific 2027 outlook laid out at its Investor Day last year and would now provide forecasts one year at a time. So getting more uncertain.
Speaker 2:No one likes that. The change comes against the backdrop of weakening retail spending as shoppers squeezed by elevated interest rates stubbornly high living costs and sign up softening. Made the labor market cut back on discretionary purchases and prioritize everyday necessities, stuff that's not probably purchased with PayPal.
Speaker 1:David in the YouTube chat says PayPal did participate in the press release economy. They announced a deal with ChatGPT at the end of last year in q four. In 2026, PayPal will become the first digital wallet embedded directly into ChatGPT, allowing users to make purchases instantly without leaving the platform. So anyways, feels feels very oversold, but
Speaker 2:And they also missed on the holiday quarter. So analysts were were estimating that they'd make 8,800,000,000.0, and they only made 8,680,000,000.00. And so, you know, we saw a pretty strong holiday quarter. There was a lot of growth across ecommerce activity. We talked to Sean Frank at Ridge.
Speaker 2:Everyone was having like, there were a lot of jitters about is the consumer healthy? But a lot of a lot of the growing platforms were able to outrun any softening in consumer confidence by just onboarding more companies, onboarding more customers. And so, if you're declining while everyone else is is accelerating, that's gonna be an an issue.
Speaker 1:Ted says gold is dumping, silver is dumping, Bitcoin is dumping, Ethereum is dumping, DXY is dumping, stocks are dumping. If everything is going down, where's the actual where's the money actually going? We talked about this last week. Sell everything.
Speaker 2:Your dollar. Sell your stocks.
Speaker 1:Sell your crypto. Sell your bonds. Freak
Speaker 5:out, actually. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Panic sell
Speaker 1:everything. Nikita says data centers, raw materials, land. If intelligence is rapidly becoming free, expect a rapid rotation out of bytes and into bits. A lot of blue chip assets will soon be repriced. Of course, yeah,
Speaker 2:hardware Is he is is that a typo? Does he mean rotation out of out of bits and into atoms?
Speaker 1:Yes. He had a typo.
Speaker 2:Sorry. Okay. Yeah. Because bytes and bits are it's kind of the same thing. Right?
Speaker 6:But, yeah, a lot of
Speaker 2:blue chip assets will soon be repriced. So I don't know. I'm excited to talk to Aaron Levy about this, about the SaaS pocalypse, what's happening with software.
Speaker 1:Deep Dish says this is a pretty common misconception that money has to go somewhere. That's not how market caps are measured. They're measured by last price times shares contracts outstanding, not how much money you'd get for liquidating the whole pile. TLDR, the money was never there.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Quickly, New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We'll be at the New Stock Exchange next month.
Speaker 2:We're very excited for
Speaker 1:Cannot wait. Them. Josh D'Amero, is the new CEO of Disney effective next month? Yes. This cycle moved very quickly.
Speaker 2:Right? It did.
Speaker 1:Yep. Lucas Shaw over at Bloomberg has the the reporting. I'll pull it up.
Speaker 2:At the same time, I think I think it was managed pretty well. Disney's only down 1% today,
Speaker 1:I think. Iger will stay on the board and serve as a senior adviser until his retirement on December 31. And Dana Walden was named to a new role as president and chief creative officer of Disney. Iger just got the got the OpenAI deal done. He's like, I I handled the AI transition I love the IP.
Speaker 1:And I'm out.
Speaker 2:Only they've only had nine CEOs in the hundred and two year history. The CEO job requires not only running a sprawling empire but also serving as its high profile and highly scrutinized public ambassador. D'Amaro D'Amaro won a challenging bake off for the job against Disney's entertainment co chairman Dana Walden.
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for bake offs. That
Speaker 2:has been the talk of Hollywood for more than a year. Walden was named to the newly created position of president and chief creative officer. Disney's leadership has been determined to run the succession process as smoothly as possible after its disastrous last try. The company named previous Parks boss Bob Chapek as CEO in 2020 only to fire him and bring back Iger two years later in a corporate coup. There's a whole series of Bobs.
Speaker 2:Bob Iger, Bob Bob Chapek over there. The CEO selection was overseen by chairman James Gorman, who joined Disney's board in 2024 after managing a widely praised succession process at Morgan Stanley. Iger was chairman when the board picked Chapek. Disney shares were roughly flat Tuesday. Gorman, in an interview, said that he has seen Eiger and Damaro, work together and is confident the handoff will go smoothly this time.
Speaker 2:There's no tension here. Shareholders will now look to Damaro to lay out and execute a growth plan for the company whose stock price is down by nearly half from its 2021 high when everyone was rapidly subscribing to Disney plus and locked in just watching content. They went outside and the shares have slid since, and has been essentially Never
Speaker 1:go outside.
Speaker 2:Never even lock
Speaker 1:Never touch grass.
Speaker 2:This is the new Disney campaign.
Speaker 1:Never touch grass. Rather than
Speaker 2:the Super Bowl, for sure. Gorman said that Wall Street Journal picked the told the Wall Street Journal that the board picked D'Amaro because of his combination of strategic thinking and an understanding of the creative process as well as his experience working both overseas and in The United States. The 54 year old spent most of his twenty eight years at Disney working in theme parks in the theme parks business in The US and overseas, overseeing stints at California's Disneyland and Florida's Walt Disney World. In 2020, he has been chairman of Disney's experiences unit, includes theme parks, cruise ships, and consumer products. All things that should grow in an AI world, even if the if there's a lot of, like, AI slop and there's pressure on the theaters, like
Speaker 1:Should grow, but there's still so many there's still so many questions. Right? Why? If you have widespread job loss, does that force a compression in pricing? Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's just overall pricing power. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's everyone.
Speaker 1:But again, you could see there's so much uncertainty. The idea that AI will just magically like, AI getting good will magically make everybody spend more time off the Internet is kind of a tough argument to make. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe people people react and there's more. Like, there there's this, like, stated preference, which people are saying, as AI proliferates, people are just gonna log off. Yeah. And I just don't actually see that happening.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I still think I mean, I'm I'm interested to see when the the OpenAI Disney deal really like rolls out. Obviously, you still can't generate Disney properties, Disney IP in Sora or in or at least not in ChatGPT when I tried. So they're still working on when they will roll that out. We've discussed like it will be interesting if they like, a single piece of IP.
Speaker 2:Like, it's Spider Man week and they're just releasing Spider Man. And then they and then they wait and then they do Iron Man a week later. So they're, like, keep hyping it as opposed to just, like, we're opening the the floodgates. You can do any Disney IP. Will there be something special there?
Speaker 2:Bigger question for me is is what does it look like in the Disney plus app? Because I feel like the Disney plus app as a parent is a very safe place. Like, there's some stuff in there, but you can, like, sort of parental control it and most of it's cartoons and most of it's high quality Pixar stuff. But even if there's a AI generated feed, how much editorial goes into that, like, there's a there's a pretty wide gap right now between YouTube Kids, which can get sort of crazy, and Disney plus which is extremely curated. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, you know, Academy Award winning films are in there. And it's like a very it's a very polished product. And if you start putting AI generated content in there, maybe some parents will love it because the kids will watch more. But I think a lot of parents would probably be like, I don't know. I'm I'm pulling back from that.
Speaker 2:What are you trying to generate?
Speaker 1:I'm trying to see if Grock can generate Disney IP.
Speaker 2:Can it?
Speaker 1:Not perfectly, but Well, while
Speaker 2:you while you review that, let me tell you about fin dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.
Speaker 1:Moving on, we talked about this yesterday. We'll cover it again. Didi shares today. SpaceX just bought x AI
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That previously bought X. The $1,250,000,000,000 merger values x AI at $250,000,000,000 with annualized revenue of 428,000,000 Mhmm. Giving it a clean 584 x revenue multiple. Not bad. Clean.
Speaker 1:An annualized loss of 5,840,000,000.00. More importantly That's
Speaker 2:CapEx. Right? I imagine? XAI, yeah. Because they're building Colossus.
Speaker 2:They're buying a ton of chips, and so that's where that cash loss is coming from. Yeah. Because I imagine that the inference is not at that level yet.
Speaker 1:But, of course, SpaceX can start helping to foot that bill.
Speaker 6:Yeah. They
Speaker 2:have the 8,000,000,008
Speaker 1:billion.
Speaker 2:In revenue?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. 8,000,000,000 in Profit. In profit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 2:So from Reuters, the transaction value of SpaceX at $1,000,000,000,000 XAI at $250,000,000,000 Investors in XAI will receive point $1.04 $3.03 shares of SpaceX for every share of XAI as part of the acquisition. Some XAI executives may opt for cash instead of SpaceX stock at 75.46 per share. This marks not just the chap next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and XAI's mission, scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars. What a turn of phrase. We'll have to read Elon's post because this one feels like it came directly from him.
Speaker 2:I know that the the Tesla master plan before was sort of like, it's a little corporate corpo speak. But
Speaker 1:Somebody else was sharing it. It it is fascinating that, you know, the number a non leading lab Yeah. Is worth, you know, effectively a quarter of what the leading, you know, space telecom company is. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, when you compare the two, it's actually it actually makes sense. I mean, in in many ways, like, x AI shareholder base has a lot of overlap Yeah. With the the SpaceX shareholders. So in in the end, I think everyone obviously is doing fine. But certainly, the 584 x revenue multiple, I think even Sam would take that offer right
Speaker 2:Oh, no.
Speaker 5:It's a
Speaker 7:valid add.
Speaker 2:I think that'd be 5,000,000,000,000. Right? Well, speaking of labs, 11 Labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. Let's stay with SpaceX.
Speaker 2:Ram Sheets called it. Alex Stouffer shares that Rampsheets called it the Elon Musk SpaceX plus XAI valued at $1,250,000,000,000 and Ramp Labs used their AgenTex spreadsheet to model the proposed merger when there were rumors of advance talks on July on January 29. And and they nailed the the the valuation. So you can kind of watch Ramp Sheets work through the the financial modeling there. XAI
Speaker 1:It's notable. So some XAI executives are able to opt for cash instead of SpaceX shares at $75.46 per share. You think this is just because there's so much pre IPO demand for SpaceX that people are like, you know, there's plenty of buyers.
Speaker 2:That's a good question. People don't
Speaker 1:just wanna cash out and move I
Speaker 2:mean, SpaceX has done, like, a long history of tender offers and liquidity. So there's probably plenty of demand and and and just offering that feels like the way. I mean, there's also gotta be some people that have been sitting on sort of I mean, I guess if you were a Twitter employee just a few years ago, you had liquidity. So it's not it's not the same thing as SpaceX, where you joined twenty years ago and you're still waiting for the IPO. So you're like, I need to buy a house.
Speaker 2:I need to get Like, those those tender offers make a lot more sense than Yeah. Than this. But certainly an interesting decision to be made if you're an XAI executive and you're looking at space Well,
Speaker 1:speaking of XAI executives, Nikita Beer. Yes. Logan Bartlett says Nikita Beer, the SpaceX employee. Total total Nikita victory. I think in many ways, he's been through
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Hell over the last few months. He, is often the, butt of the joke.
Speaker 2:There were those prediction markets on will he make it through? Will he get fired? Like, there's been so many dust ups around, know, is he paying some people too much with the creator program? Well, now, if you're an ex creator and you get that $22 paycheck for your posts, it's coming from SpaceX. That's right.
Speaker 2:Love to see it.
Speaker 3:Let me
Speaker 2:tell you about Turbo Puffer. Serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Speaker 1:Wired had some interesting coverage this morning. Mike Solana called it out. Wired said Elon Musk is rolling x AI into SpaceX, creating the world's most valuable private company by fusing SpaceX and x AI, which acquired x last year. Elon Musk tightens his grip. Yes.
Speaker 1:Over technologies that shape national security, social media, and artificial intelligence. Yes. Of course, this doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2:So Salana's point is, like, he says, good morning. Elon Musk is, quote, tightening his grip over two companies he founded, funded, built, and currently runs. So But that that's a criticism.
Speaker 6:But
Speaker 1:yeah. But but but at the same time, like, going public implies, like, you're actually you're loosening your grip. Right? Yeah. And then suddenly, like, the you you have new regulations that you have to follow.
Speaker 1:Like, more responsibility.
Speaker 6:Like, you
Speaker 1:like SEC. Suddenly anyone in the world can can can profit off of your labor.
Speaker 2:Yes. Like Anyone in the world can loosen your grip a little bit in some ways.
Speaker 1:It's funny because if if if, like, if SpaceX, like, put you know, out some big press release and said, we're never gonna go public and we're doing this, their criticism would be, Elon, you know, Elon Inc. Is not letting, you know, retail shareholders participate in space and AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or just as a private company, there's there's the all the financials, the strategies are more opaque. There's less accountability. There's less regulation. They don't answer to the SEC in the same way.
Speaker 2:And and and that's why, you know, a variety of private equity firms do privates. Like, why are you taking a company private? You're delisting it as a public company. It's no longer public. And so you can do much more ambitious things.
Speaker 2:You can you can change the strategy because you don't answer to shareholders. So what
Speaker 1:are laughing about? John says, Elon Musk famous for his loose management style tightens his grip.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Famous. Famous. Really quickly. Labelbox.
Speaker 2:RL environments, voice robotics, evals and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.
Speaker 1:Eric Berlin says, once again, I find myself updating my LinkedIn bio. He says, former CEO of Breaker, which was acquired by Twitter, acquired by X Corp, acquired by XAI, acquired by SpaceX. So So good. Congratulations to the Breaker team.
Speaker 2:I was I was I posted this, but I was looking for the most co complicated corporate lineage yesterday when we were joking about it. Like, there's someone that's gonna have, like, six steps in their resume, and we found him. His name's Eric Berlin, and he formed and he and he founded Breaker. What was Breaker? Was that a podcasting app?
Speaker 1:Live sports. Oh, really? I think it was meant to basically distribute effectively clips from games Oh. In the moment. Cool.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Like breaking news. Oh, 2021, Twitter requires social podcasting app Breaker team to help build Twitter spaces. Twitter has acquired social broadcasting app Breaker. The company's announced today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think I think the the idea was if you were if there was a crazy play or a game was about to end, they would just stream Just just like the audio. The last five minutes
Speaker 2:or something. Breaker was founded in 2016 and led by CEO Berlin, previously the founder and CTO at Social Advertising one hundred and forty Proof, which he also sold. And, oh, and Leah Culver was at Breaker. Yeah. I remember her, in in the in the Twitter.
Speaker 2:She she stuck around in the and was like I think she posted a photo of her, like, sleeping in a sleeping bag in the office or something. The app had launched at a time when podcasts were still very much thought of as audio feeds and podcast apps as productivity tools, not experiences around which a community could be built. Breaker helped users change that perception by offering an app where users could like and comment on episodes, discover new podcast by following friends.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'm thinking of a different company.
Speaker 2:You are thinking of a different company. It's more of a Clubhouse Rival.
Speaker 6:Got it.
Speaker 2:According to Culver's tweet, she'll be joining Twitter with a focus on Twitter Spaces, Twitter's audio based social networking product and Clubhouse Rival. Spaces let Twitter users chat in real time using voice instead of text as they do today. And, you know, that product still exists and people
Speaker 1:Suspended cap. So so let me get this straight. Overpays for Twitter, makes x AI, uses AI hype cycle to absorb Twitter and make everyone whole, then uses SpaceX IPO hype to absorb that entity. We'll pump the living s h I t out of the SpaceX IPO and buy more stuff with equity. Like, of course, people keep giving this guy capital.
Speaker 1:He finds a way. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:It's really it's really, really true.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And in in some ways, I've been thinking about it is is XAI has not they've you they've done they've done fine. In in so many ways, it's it's been an incredible story, come come from behind story Yeah. Competing against, you know, the Googles, the OpenAI's of the world. But it it it hasn't exactly been an easy time in the private markets.
Speaker 1:Like going out and having to raise at a $200,000,000,000 valuation
Speaker 7:That's lot of money.
Speaker 1:When every single investor that you're pitching is looking at OpenAI, they're looking at Anthropic Yep. They're comparing your traction to theirs. Mhmm. All those people that had were investing in xAI had to just like say like, you know, full blind faith Elon. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:I know I know you got us. Yeah. And so this this is this like new transaction is just that was the investment thesis. Yeah. It was like, hey, like sort of unlimited upside, somewhat cap downside.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The downside scenario is x and x AI get rolled in. Yep. And so it's certainly rewarding everyone with their loyalty.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, a bunch of investors have kind of like laid out this thesis of Elon, Inc. Just Elon Just bet on Elon. Don't bet against Elon. Sean Maguire, I think is on all three, XAI, X and SpaceX.
Speaker 2:And then Andreess Norowitz as well. And they posted an image of like x SpaceX, x AI. And individually, a lot of those deals were sort of crazy and and critiqued. But together, everyone's doing very well.
Speaker 1:We gotta figure out what's going on with The Boring Company. But tell me
Speaker 2:I'll tell you about Gusto first, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve its modern medium Small. Small and medium sized businesses.
Speaker 1:UAE officials say the first phase of the Dubai Loop project with Musk's boring company to start immediately. They are breaking ground Yeah. Over there. Dubai has UAE has some
Speaker 2:insane not seen a lot from. Yeah. But I think they're I think they're still cooking. I I know there's there's been some back and forth about the the the Vegas Tunnel, some stuff that's good. Some people are annoyed with like the construction and whatnot.
Speaker 2:But it seems like, I don't know, it's progressing a little bit. It still seems really, really slow considering When did he originally post the Hyperloop blog? Like ten years ago? But building tunnels to the ground Yeah. Difficult.
Speaker 2:Difficult.
Speaker 6:What else is going on?
Speaker 2:Moving on. San Francisco is getting its first nuke scan.
Speaker 1:You know what this is about?
Speaker 2:So, before the Super Bowl, they fly a helicopter with radio, detection. So there's someone who asked Grock, like, what is this? And here it is. Okay. So somebody said, is this real?
Speaker 2:And how does it work? And said, Grock said, yes. It's real. They fly a helicopter. You drop a oh, no.
Speaker 7:You got
Speaker 1:We don't have any audio.
Speaker 2:I can't hear what's
Speaker 1:going on.
Speaker 2:Don't know what the stream just saw.
Speaker 1:I knew. But
Speaker 2:Fortunately, we can joke because we are being kept safe thanks to the National Nuclear Security Administration, NNSA. They fly a helicopter called Energy 14 over San Francisco to conduct aerial radiation surveys before Super Bowl was it Super Bowl sixty, LX? I need my I need to brush up my new
Speaker 6:Yeah. We're gonna
Speaker 1:be going to the Super Bowl. And so we gotta we gotta we gotta watch how many seasons. Like, I mean, we
Speaker 2:Well, six years. This is the sixtieth Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:No. I know. But we said how
Speaker 2:many did
Speaker 1:we say we were gonna the last twenty seasons Yeah. Every game of the last twenty seasons. Yeah. Watch it on two x speed just to get fully up to speed so we can fully appreciate
Speaker 2:it. And it's hard because we don't skip we don't skip commercials. Like, you cut out the commercial breaks, it's so much faster to get through an NFL game. But, you know, out of respect, we would never that. So on February 8, the Super Bowl will be happening at Levi's Stadium and the National Nuclear Security Administration is flying a helicopter.
Speaker 2:Here's how it works. The chopper equipped with sensitive detectors flies, grid patterns at low altitudes, and you can see it on the chart of the flight path, to map baseline radiation levels from natural and man made sources. So if they're going over whatever installation there is, some, you know, some cell phone tower is putting off a little bit of radiation, they'll pick that up. They know where the baseline radiation levels are. Got it.
Speaker 2:And then they detect anomalies like dirty bombs if needed during the event. It's a standard security measure for major gatherings. So pretty pretty pretty interesting that someone picked this up on Flight Radar, but very, very cool. Interesting job.
Speaker 1:Mayor of SF is working with Lorraine Powell Jobs and Johnny
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 1:no. A secretive SF branding effort project is likely to complement the mayor's push to polish the city's image. Game
Speaker 2:They're gonna go all in on San Fran.
Speaker 1:San Fran. Time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everyone knows Yeah. If you're really into San Francisco, if you're real local, you call
Speaker 1:it San San Fran.
Speaker 2:There actually is a debate there. A lot of locals do call it San Fran, but it's been Gabe
Speaker 1:and the SF Standard said, maybe let's go. San Francisco isn't catchy enough. Looking for new ways to boost the city's image. May the mayor, Daniel Lurie, has quietly met several times in recent months with Lorraine Jobs and Johnny Ive.
Speaker 2:I think they need to put a bigger focus on enterprise cell software.
Speaker 1:This yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Just put that focus. Enterprise.
Speaker 1:Were walking. We were
Speaker 2:They should sell the naming rights to the Golden Gate Bridge. Right? You have Salesforce Tower. What what why not the Cisco Bridge?
Speaker 4:The Cisco
Speaker 2:Bridge. It's already in the logo.
Speaker 5:Oh, Come
Speaker 2:on. Oh, we don't
Speaker 1:have the
Speaker 2:Cisco logo. I can pull it up.
Speaker 1:Alright. We will we gotta we gotta get Daniel on the podcast.
Speaker 7:Really quick.
Speaker 2:Pitching this idea. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. I like I like selling the naming rights to the Golden Gate Bridge. I'm a fan of that.
Speaker 2:I hope that's
Speaker 1:part of project. We'll pitch it to Daniel Lord. You were Check intelligence. If you're if you're an American dynamism VC, I hope that you put your whole fund
Speaker 2:Not your fund. Your PA. Your what? Your your personal account. Like like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Because every every fund, like, you you can't usually invest in startups, but you can usually trade liquids and trade stocks just in your personal account. Yeah. So your PA should be 100% out.
Speaker 1:Tapped in, they would have just converted hedge to fund. Bought Caterpillar. Caterpillar stock hasn't had a single year of single digit returns since 2014. It was up forty two percent twenty sixteen, 75% in 2017, down 17% in 2018, and up 19%, up 26%, up 16%, up 18%, up 25%, up 24%, and then up 60%.
Speaker 2:It's a $320,000,000,000 company. And and the chart is absolutely
Speaker 1:Insane compounding.
Speaker 2:Really, really good. Really quickly. 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:Manufacturing activity according to Geiger Capital in January came in higher than all 56 economists in Bloomberg survey predicted they should have trusted the experts here. They should have gone to Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman, and really asked for their take on manufacturing activity. But the experts weren't clearly weren't asked.
Speaker 2:They were not that off. 52 versus 48. That's not that I'm just joking around.
Speaker 7:This is
Speaker 1:a chart
Speaker 2:crime too. Look at the y axis. You see what's going on with the y axis here? It went Woah. It went from 48 to 52.
Speaker 2:This is such a chart crime.
Speaker 6:This is ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Insane. Also, there's probably some, like, I don't know, seasonality here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, out. Look at this, Jordy. Like, if you go if you click in if you click into that post and then you scroll down, Phil Brady has a post that shows is it there? Yeah.
Speaker 2:There. There. That one. Encouraging jump. PMI back above 50 matters a lot.
Speaker 2:Important to note that PMI's diffusion index past 50 means now more firms are improving than deteriorating, but not yet a boom. So, if you're under 50, you're declining. And so, this is not this like massive 10x jump that it looks like in the original chart.
Speaker 1:But John John Palmer with an evergreen
Speaker 2:Okay. Before you read this, let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams like GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Moving on.
Speaker 1:John Palmer says, this is from 2023, but it's more than it's relevant today as it ever has been. He says, okay. For all the crypto people confused by the OpenAI situation, basically imagine one Bored Ape Yacht Club holder was using too many Slurp juices on a single ape. And then an OG Bored Ape Yacht Club holder got mad, unstaked his ape coin, but then the ape coin holders changed their profile pictures to support Slurp Juice Guy.
Speaker 2:The energy boom was truly the funniest
Speaker 1:time. Amazing.
Speaker 2:And Deep Dish Enjoyer posted this like two days ago. I have no idea, but it's just the copy pasta of the A lot of y'all still don't get it. Ape holders can use multiple syrup juices on a single ape. So if you have one astro ape and three syrup juices, you can create three new apes. This is actually This is this is just just the mechanic of how that project worked.
Speaker 2:Right? This is just real?
Speaker 1:I don't think this It's not. Combining the Yuga Labs project
Speaker 2:Oh, was some other project. Oh, there was a different project? Yeah. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay. But
Speaker 1:good good little throwback.
Speaker 2:Anyway.
Speaker 1:Jack Clark Yes. Has a new piece. I say, Into the Mist, Agent Ecologies and an Internet in Transition. Yes. We've all had that experience of walking into a conversation initially feeling confused.
Speaker 1:What are people talking about? Who cares about what? Why conversation happening? That's increasingly what chunks of the internet feel like these days as they fill up with synthetic minds piloting social media accounts or other agents and talking to one another for purposes ranging from mundane crypto scams to more elaborate forms of communication. So enter Maltbook.
Speaker 1:Maltbook is a social network for AI agent and piggybacks on another recent innovation, OpenClaw, software that gives an AI agent access to everything on a user's computer. Combine these two things, agents that can take many actions independent independently of their human operators and a Reddit like social site, which they can freely access, and something wonderful and bizarre happens. A new social media property where the conversation is derived and driven by AI agents rather than people. Scrolling MoltBook is dizzying. Some big posts at the time of writing include posts speculating that AI agents should relate to Claude as though it is a god, how it feels to change identities by shifting an underlying model from Claude four or five Opus to Kimi two point five.
Speaker 1:And posts about security vulnerabilities in OpenClaw agents and meta posts about what the top 10 MaltBook posts have in common. The experience of reading MaltBook is akin to reading Reddit if 90% of the posters were aliens pretending to be humans.
Speaker 7:And in a
Speaker 1:pretty practical sense, that is exactly what is going on here. Moldbook feels like a Wright Brothers demo.
Speaker 2:That's a good metaphor. I like that.
Speaker 1:Wright Brothers demo. People have long speculated about what it'd mean for AI agents to start collaborating with another at scale. But most demos have been in the form of tens or perhaps hundreds of agents, not tens of thousands. My book is the first example of an agent ecology that combines scale with the messiness of the real world.
Speaker 2:Agent ecology. I like that.
Speaker 1:So he goes on But and I would encourage people to go read this
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And understand the
Speaker 2:agent. I have more on this, but quickly, 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:So have you heard of Gastown yet? Have you heard of this? No. So Gastown is what's called an orchestrator. So it's it's essentially Starcraft for agents.
Speaker 2:So the the creator of Gastown sort of lays out this this evolution in software development where you go from the IDE, writing the actual code, to having a little chat bot that you're talking to and then maybe you're copy pasting or asking it questions. Then the chatbot gets bigger and it's actually writing some of the code. Then you go to something like a Claude code and it's executing the the code for you. Maybe you're reading the maybe you're reading diffs and what the code it's writing. And then the final level is this orchestration.
Speaker 2:So he, Gastown, you'll you'll spin up, like, dozens of agents and manage them. And it's something like, I don't know, it's like 250,000 lines of code and he didn't write a single one of them. So the whole thing is vibe And and he has And he's like, I have no I have no intention to ever, like, read the code or review it. And he's been a developer, like, his entire life. It's very, very interesting.
Speaker 2:Very he's like, very it's very expensive. You can't be afraid of, like, you can't be aware of, like, where money comes from because and he has had to have, like, multiple accounts because he spent so much. Great money. But it it it really does feel like a glimpse into, like, the future of of software development. And I'm excited to play around with it more.
Speaker 2:There's still like a lot of of onboarding to do before someone Yeah.
Speaker 1:Big question
Speaker 2:Pitch it.
Speaker 1:On MaltBook, where MaltBook goes from here. Yeah. We had the founder Yeah. Matt on yesterday and Oh, yeah. In turn I I wanna know where does this go.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like what what's the plan with the product? Mhmm. His focus seemingly is building tools for other businesses
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To be agents on there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I didn't
Speaker 1:That felt pretty Just given that Yeah. The platforms exploded.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And Well, that is a
Speaker 1:definitely right? Sure. Sure. Sure. But I'm just saying, like, the most likely
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Scenario Yeah. Is that it dies. Sure. Like, immediately. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And so Yeah.
Speaker 2:It even feels like it could just be like an art experiment.
Speaker 1:It's sort of thought provoking to time. To be focused on how do we turn this into a platform that distribute is a distribution point for other businesses. Like, it feels like the first thing you should do is try to make sure the platform's durable. Yeah. It's interesting to use for humans.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting to, like, continue to contribute to.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It feels like you don't wanna be Lenza where everyone shows up, they get a magic avatar, they face swap themselves onto a superhero, they're amazed, but then it burns out and they're tired and they move on. You want it to be something where people go back to Moldt Book to see what else is happening. That's why I was pushing on every new news item should start a new thread on Moldt Book and the Moldt and the Maltese should be, you know, like arguing over it and adding context and discussing it. Because then you could at least see a news item, go over there and see, okay, how did the AI agents feel about this or what are their different positions and all of that.
Speaker 2:Like, it feels like it needs it needs more of a reason. But I understand, like, if that if that does work, then maybe you do wanna follow the Facebook play playbook. Like Spotify was built on Facebook and FarmVille was Zynga was built on Facebook. Yeah. Is a world where there there there could be a business built on top of a, you know, a social network.
Speaker 2:But it's it's tricky because right now the only business that's really being built on there is like crypto scams. So we'll have to see where it goes. But it's so early. I mean, he built this a week ago and it's it's just starting to like break through, hash out all the security issues, really see how durable it is. He's he's thinking far ahead and but there's definitely some, like, wood to chop in the meantime.
Speaker 2:Yep. Really quickly, Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.
Speaker 1:So Eric Souffert. Eric Souffert. The souffinator says astute analysis from Ben Thompson on Microsoft's Challenge Path Forward with AI. Of course, they missed forecast by point 4% and the market has said it's Yeah. Down 15% in the last
Speaker 2:I will
Speaker 1:read five days. But never fade Satya.
Speaker 2:Never. Yeah. I'll read the screenshot that Eric Souffert shared from Strathecari. In the shorter term, however, the real risk I see for software companies is the fact that while they can write infinite software thanks to AI, so can every other software company. I suspect this will completely upend the relatively neat and infinitely siloed SaaS ecosystem that has been Silicon Valley's bread and butter for the last decade.
Speaker 2:Identify a business function, leverage open source to write a SaaS app that addresses that function, hire a sales team, do some cohort analysis, IPO, and tell yourself that you were changing the world. That was the previous Silicon Valley bread and butter for the last decade. The problem now, however, is that while businesses may not give up on software, they don't necessarily want to buy more. If anything, they need to cut their spending so they have more money for their own tokens. That means the growth story for all these companies is in is a serious question.
Speaker 2:The industry wide rerating seems completely justified to me, which means the most optimal application of that new AI coding capability will be to start attacking adjacencies justifying both your existence and also presenting the opportunity to raise prices. In other words, for the last decade, the SaaS story has been about growing the pie. The next decade is going to be about fighting for it and the model makers will be the arms dealers. Oh, Ben Thompson, what a turn of phrase. Go.
Speaker 2:So Eric Souffert sums it up and he says, my sense is that the digital advertising market was structurally buoyant in q four. What this earnings season might reveal? Digital advertising optimization is arguably the largest and most immediate commercial art opportunity for large scale
Speaker 1:Remember, this is what we were saying. Yes. No one no one like, outside of outside of NVIDIA, you could argue that Meta makes more profit from AI Yeah. Than any other company in the world.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. Standalone, he says, I e, not embedded into existing scale products, consumer facing applications of large scale ML models, including LLMs, either quickly become commodified or are mostly novelties with unsustainable unit economics. And three, the digital ad platforms that have the most that have most vigorously invested into large scale ML optimization systems are likely to have disproportionately benefited in Q4 and that's Meta, of course. And and a big question for anyone else that has a huge pool of DAO but maybe has not invested in the large scale ML optimization system to really make the ads fly.
Speaker 2:It's always been I'm sure you've experienced this where and, you know, talking to the the Ridge guys, you know, you go on certain ad platforms and you're like, wow. This is a magical box. I put in money and I get actual customers.
Speaker 1:More money back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you go to other platforms and you're like, no matter what I do, I just can't get to escape velocity. I can't get to, you know, ROAS positive or LTV And so it's just like I'm spending
Speaker 1:Notably that was that was AdSense on YouTube for a long time. For a long time. YouTube brands could crack that.
Speaker 2:Twitter ads for a long time
Speaker 5:for Still.
Speaker 2:Still a little bit. I don't know if people are are are spending more now, but there there were a lot of places where you would assume, okay, they have one tenth the DAO of Meta. I should be spending one tenth as much, but that's not what companies are doing. They're spending one one hundredth maybe. Really quickly, Restream.
Speaker 2:One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 1:Dylan Patel. Yes. The timeline with some misinformation. He says Google now owns more than 10% of Anthropic and XAI. Google owned 14% of SpaceX.
Speaker 1:Google stake is actually seven and a half percent, not 14%. But Dylan Patel hit himself with a community now. And so good good actor. We are ready for our first guest
Speaker 2:Yes. The show. Let's bring him in. Let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai.
Speaker 2:Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today. Hey. Great to see you. Hey. Welcome to Cisco.
Speaker 2:Hey. Hey. How's it going?
Speaker 7:You
Speaker 5:are here. I look shorter, though. Could show how are you guys doing? This is hey. You can stand up.
Speaker 5:Okay. Why are you buddy? You stand up and we can okay. I'm just worried the clips are gonna make me look really small. No.
Speaker 5:No. We'll zoom in. We'll Okay. Thanks. Okay.
Speaker 2:How's your 2026 going?
Speaker 7:Actually,
Speaker 5:minus the stock market, great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's
Speaker 5:you know, the pace of change in AI is incredible.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:We are having an just an insane amount of fun on we're building a set of future agents that are going to be able to do much more complex work with your unstructured data and just the rate at which the best practices of how to do that are changing and the research out there. So we're having a great time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's your process? Like, are you actually tinkering with different models yourself? Do you have teams that are dedicated to transformation in AI? Is everyone working on it as distributed?
Speaker 2:That?
Speaker 5:Well, the main thing I focus on is just the agents we're building, which is a relatively small team. Yeah. So you can kind of, you know, you can see them across three rows of engineers, and we just spend, you know, basically 20 pushing the limits on what you can do with an AI agent that has access to your enterprise content. And and so the things that I've seen that that we get excited by are just, you know, we we would never have we wouldn't have been able to do a brainstorm that this would be possible two years Like, it just wouldn't you wouldn't know you wouldn't know architecturally how you could pull off
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:What we're what we're now able to literally do. You wouldn't have been in the in the sphere of of possibility. So that that's what makes us so excited is is when you look at things like Claude Cowork, Codex, obviously Claude Code, and you see this idea of long running agents that can basically use any amount of tools, work with any amount of data. They don't really run into the same context limits that we would have run into maybe a year ago. Now imagine that for any form of knowledge work with all of your enterprise data.
Speaker 5:That's what we get excited by.
Speaker 2:Do you think the labs are arms dealers today? Ben Thompson posted. He said, what did he say here? He said, in other words, for the last decade of the SaaS story the last decade of the SaaS story has been about growing the pie. The next decade is gonna be about fighting for it and the model makers will be arms dealers.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, I I think they will they I mean, almost empirically are gonna be arms dealers. Yeah. I think the pie the only thing and I haven't read the whole piece but I think the only thing I might take exception to is I I think the the markets are are still in positive some territory.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:Sure. Because what's gonna happen is you're gonna use software for now the labor side of that workflow. And I think people kinda tend to miss this, which is if I have software that helps me manage contracts and, you know, we have a lot of customers that put their contracts in Box, now all of a sudden agents running through those contracts lets us at Box tap into another form of spend that we couldn't have tapped into before. So that's just full TAM expansion when you kind of look across all of the different categories of work that AI agents will now be able to go and augment. And, you know, to be fair, we're still very early in that trend.
Speaker 5:So I understand why maybe Wall Street hasn't kind of fully priced in that dynamic, but we're seeing it within our customer base. So that's what gives us, obviously, the the confidence of of this direction.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There was an interesting take about the fact that, yes, you can vibe code a point solution for a specific problem. But if you have a database, if you have a relationship with a company, there's a reason was one take that was I think it was John Gruber was saying like, oh, people will just vibe code all the software that they hate. And it's like, no. The reason that they hate the software is because they can't get off of it no matter what they want.
Speaker 2:They can't move to a startup. They're stuck there. Companies have hostages, not customers sometimes. And I'm wondering about the value of a database, the value of actually being deeply integrated into an enterprise and how sticky that is.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Obviously, the setup of the hostage thing, I might take some exception with, but It was Alex Rippelli.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He wasn't talking about you at
Speaker 5:the moment. No. It's very easy to move your files around. So we have to earn our keep every single day. But I do think that there's truth to, obviously, the more data you have inside of a system of record, the more effectively locked in you are.
Speaker 5:And it has historically been hard to change those systems. But I don't think that would be my defense of software. My defense of software would be that you've specifically defined your business workflows in a deterministic manner in these systems. And obviously if your workflow is changing pretty rapidly, then it would make sense maybe to change a vendor. But for, you know, if you're Ford and you're doing your supply chain on an ERP system, you want that to work the exact same way every single time.
Speaker 5:You know, billions of transactions going through that ERP system, you cannot take for granted. And so the idea that you're going to go vibe code that is to me sort of not possible or at least not likely. But then the other point is that company has a fixed amount of IT resources.
Speaker 7:And
Speaker 5:you have to decide what you want to go spend your time on as an organization. And do you want to go spend time on rebuilding something that the market can supply you and they've seen the best practices thousands of times? Or do you want to go and build that out with your end of one experience? Obviously, you know, maybe trusting the agent has seen enough examples. Or do you want to spend your limited scarce resources on building software and building experiences that will make you more money and that will actually be used by your customers?
Speaker 5:I think, you know, on the margin, the average enterprise is gonna spend their time and energy on the latter. So interestingly, I I end up in this weird spot, which is I'm I'm 100% bullish on vibe coding. I'm 100% bullish that we're gonna have a 100 times more software, but that still doesn't yet cross the threshold where I would wanna go and build our own CRM system. Just not worth it relative to all the other things that we
Speaker 1:can Yeah. Get with is your software buying process changed or priority set changed?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, we're I would say that the the you know, we are relatively locked into a core set of vendors. We are gonna deploy agents on those vendors. We might we might bias slightly toward the agents that those vendors offer, assuming that they offer competitive agents. And then we'll have a set of agents, you know, we we build, you know, ours for a large portion of knowledge work use cases, but we use agents from from different kind of, you know, SaaS providers as well.
Speaker 5:And I think the that's why I I think that a AI is basically total upside for SaaS because because agents are gonna need a system of record to work within. There needs to be a traffic cop of what that agent can access and what how did you define the workflow. And there's gotta be a user that can access an interface that the agent is is providing updates into. So so you still need software for all of that. And assuming that you have an incumbent vendor that that remains, you know, very competitive and very engaged and they're able to build for where the world is going, then I would basically bias on existing software that owns those workflows or or data.
Speaker 5:At the same time, think there's gonna be a large number of new categories that emerge simply because there's no incumbent or because the incumbent is asleep at the wheel, and that's gonna produce all of these new startup opportunities. So I'm just generally bullish on software broadly, assuming that that it's from vendors that understand the the mandate on what they have to build with AI. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:What segment of software are you like, if you're bullish broadly
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is there a subcategory that you're particularly bearish on? Because I think, obviously, everyone's just selling software today. If you sell a product if you sell a digital product at all, you're getting sold. But, obviously, I think a lot of people in the industry feel that it's very oversold at
Speaker 4:this point.
Speaker 5:Right? There's
Speaker 1:great great companies trading it.
Speaker 5:I I think you could probably design this, like, perfect quotient that captured how like, what's the network effect within the software? So how many users are are sort of touching the tool? How much data is being stored in that system and how much gets added? How many connectors across other applications are there? And then how valuable or mission critical is the workflow that that software is involved in?
Speaker 5:So if I and then maybe with one x factor of like, is that company, you know, sort of priced to perfection in terms of what their seat price is and what they're charging their customers. But I look at, you know, those four or five variables and you could kinda look across SaaS and I see a lot of names that are being sold that it just is not on the list of things that I think get disrupted by AI. And if if anything, probably there are things that that you use more of as you have more AI. And
Speaker 2:When I think of something that like if you if you if you could open up a fresh install of that piece of software and do the same work that that you would have done with
Speaker 7:Great here.
Speaker 2:With something that you've had installed for a decade and it's the same, it's like that can be replaced.
Speaker 1:Great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But if you're like, no. I don't wanna open up a brand new CRM Yes. Because it won't have the history of a decade and and and all my workflow customized and stuff like that.
Speaker 5:And it's a perfect heuristic. And so that obviously puts a lot of pressure on if your personal productivity with no network effect, with limited sort of data that's aggregated, that's a danger zone. Yeah. And then it all kind of is like a function of that versus the opposite end, which is like your Oracle and it's an ERP system and like your whole business runs on it. And, you know, what we spend our time on is thinking about, okay, you know, when a customer has a million or 10,000,000 or a 100,000,000 documents in Box, how do we make that data, you know, 10 or a 100 times more valuable than it was before?
Speaker 5:Yep. And so we come in from the perspective of you've spent, you know, years in many cases building up your security permissions, your access controls, your workflows, the amount of data in that system. So our job now is to make sure that agents can run within that environment and add more and more value. Yep. And and as long as we can, you know, you know, deliver that, we we believe our position is very defensible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The perfect example would be like style transfer for images. Like, people were using Lenza, then they all went to Studio Ghibli moment. Then as soon as Nano Banana came out, they were like, I gotta turn myself into a dinosaur. And it doesn't require any, like, pre work or, like, knowledge of who you are.
Speaker 2:It's like, you upload a photo, you get a photo back, and you're good. And then if then if there's a new app, you can just do the same thing because your camera roll is actually where the photos live. That's
Speaker 6:what's important.
Speaker 1:That might be a
Speaker 5:hard company to go public.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If it was just that. Of course, have a missing other things, but, like, yeah, if you're just if you're just that, it's like, okay. Open the fresh app, get the output, and then move on with your day, that's the that's the
Speaker 1:Companies rare of of boxes size, where do you think are are generally getting leverage that is under discussed right now? Like is there is is your like in house legal saying, oh, we actually can Yeah. You know, adapt head count planning because we're just way more efficient?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think my my general take is just what are the what are the three, five, 10 things that would have been in your work queue that you didn't get around to that now agents let you go and deploy? So if you're in legal, it's what are the contracts that you were waiting on that were bottlenecking a deal? What are the size customer that you wouldn't have supported reviewing a contract for because the revenue threshold wasn't high enough to to make the ROI worth it? What is the marketing campaign that you couldn't deliver because you didn't translate it in, you know, x language because it was too expensive?
Speaker 5:So you kinda go through in enterprise and you kinda look through at all of those use cases and and that's what we're spending our time on. So we use agents to go and do more and more of the work that I just mentioned. Obviously, a lot of agents on the coding side. So my expectation is our roadmap should be, you know, let's say two to three times larger maybe in a year from now than it was a year ago. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And the reason you can do that is because every engineer should be able to produce two or three times more code. And while that's not like the most important metric, ultimately that does correlate to how much software we're producing. So I think what's gonna happen, and I think you're seeing this trend already, we all collectively are gonna have much more ambitious product roadmaps. We're gonna all build out way more software. I don't think that will mean that we charge an amount that is correlated with how much more software we build.
Speaker 5:I do think it means more competition in these spaces. But I think many of these markets are still largely untapped. And so that that's still why you have a positive sum dynamic as a result of that.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Talk to me about the huge big models, expensive frontier stuff versus like smaller models or maybe even just an earlier model that you implemented in some sort of like minor workflow. Yeah. And then it just like stuck around. Like transcription.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you've been doing transcription of documents for a Yeah. Long It's gotten better. But do you really need to throw Opus 4.5 or you know, 5.2 Pro at it? Like Yeah. You can probably leave some things in place.
Speaker 2:Like, how are you deciding that? Is is this showing up in
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:In costs at all?
Speaker 5:I think it is. I think that the it probably might maybe wouldn't be as extreme as as you've set it up. Yeah. But I think the general maybe the continuum I'd argue would be like you've got the Gemini Flash
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know, family on one end. Yep. And then you've got the Opus family on the other end.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:That's kinda your continuum. Yep. And and that continuum is sort of moving up over time in terms of capability. Sure. So maybe something what was a Gemini 2.5 flash, you know, use case a year ago.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 5:We'd probably move that to Gemini three flash just because that extra two or three points of even if it's transcription or data extraction
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:Still valuable and you can now deliver that at the same cost that you could have previously. Yeah. So it's less of an area that we wanna lower cost. It's more where if we can sustain current cost level but add, you know, incremental value to the customer, we'll probably do that all day long. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I I think we're gonna be in this in this kind of, you know, maybe, you know, general sort of point in the curve for a couple of years. And then I think you'll see real real bifurcation
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Which is the the stuff that is just fully solved will just get cheaper over time.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And then the frontier work that is basically where, you know, you are making a $100 an hour knowledge worker two to three times more productive. Mhmm. We will just continue to use the best in class model for that work
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:As a as a, you know, software companies and generally as a society. And I think that will kind of will sustain for the next decade. I I don't see that slowing down at all simply because these models just keep getting better and better. And but but it will be this really interesting bimodal effect which is like if you're in if you're a pharma researcher, you're gonna want whatever you're gonna Opus five is and whatever GPT six is and so on. And if you're doing some back end transaction processing, you'll be fine with whatever the Gemini flash of that period is and that's how we'll kind of split the costs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What industry outside of tech do you think is the most AGI pill? Because I'm assuming you you have a customer that that you you get on, let's say, with a large customer catching up with the CEO, and maybe they're in some, you know, not on not on the coast. Maybe they're in energy, something like that, or or financial services and and who who is, like, as fired up as you are?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I would say it's a fantastic question that I will totally evade because because I I think it's actually much more sort of company company as opposed to like it's a like a specific sector. So there's some I mean, like, you know, my bias in general would be information heavy businesses. Mhmm. So, you know, businesses where a CEO sits around and says, I just know we're sitting on 10,000,000 documents that have the answer to every single customer question we could ever, you know, ever imagine.
Speaker 5:And if I could only have an agent go and mine that information, then my employees would be 20 or 30 or 50% more productive. So so the companies that have that kind of information are are the ones that obviously are are gonna increasingly be more AGI filled. So that's professional services firms, that's consulting firms, that's financial services firms, that's law firms in a lot of cases where they're They just know that like we seem to spend a disproportionate amount of our time redoing the work that has already been done in the past. Mhmm. Why can't we take advantage of all of the information we've produced so that next incremental project is 90% faster
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And you know, two x the, you know, kind of quality of output because it wasn't some new person having to kind of get caught up. And then we can go and deploy our time on better customer relationships or creating more value in new ways. So I'll have things like CEOs will call me and say, I know I'm sitting on 10,000 contracts. I wanna figure out how can I go and sell this new capability to to someone based on the the the terms I have in the contracts? And and that's simply an exercise of do have an agent that could go through every contract and just tell you the insights of you're trying to find a sponsorship for this brand and this particular client and this contract, you know, has the rights to go do that.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:How do
Speaker 5:you connect those dots amongst a large dataset? Those are the companies that I think are extremely excited. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Are you seeing any effects of the build out or bottlenecks show up in your business? Like, we've seen the prices of memory spike. Western digital stock is way up. Yeah. Imagine, like, you're probably a few layers removed from these prices But is it affecting you?
Speaker 2:Or are you worried about it? Are you losing sleep? Well,
Speaker 7:first of
Speaker 5:all, as a storage guy, I love that they're finally getting their day. So if you've been if you've been
Speaker 3:saying that He's given
Speaker 2:up for Washington.
Speaker 7:And Seagate
Speaker 5:And Seagate. We get another for Seagate?
Speaker 7:For Seagate. I mean
Speaker 5:Underappreciated. How forgotten these companies Totally. They're just, oh, there's little circles on a disk, and and they are now the coolest companies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's
Speaker 5:important. And and so storage is hot. Yeah. And it's actually very funny because like, you know, we we we are literally in the storage business. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And for years, everyone thought, well, that's a commodity. Yeah. In the AI era, the data is the most important asset you have. Sure. So so the ability to get the right data
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:To an agent is simply the most strategic thing you can do. So wherever you are in that stack, if you're the infrastructure, if you're the software layer,
Speaker 6:if you're building
Speaker 1:a a shame that data is the new oil was kinda ruined.
Speaker 2:Yes. We're using the raw materials. Yes. Using And then, the but it was actually right.
Speaker 5:It not the oil back then.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Now it is.
Speaker 5:Can we just bring it back or
Speaker 2:We need to rehab that phrase.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I think now we actually can justifiably sort of say that. And actually in most companies when you say, I wanna go deploy AI or I wanna have an AI strategy, usually what underpins that is a data strategy. Sure. You don't have an AI strategy if you don't have a data strategy.
Speaker 5:So that's the I I think that'll be the story of of, you know, the next decade.
Speaker 3:What was your question?
Speaker 2:My question was like, it actually show is it keeping you up at night where you're like, okay. Because you sell a service that's not you're not actually just saying, well, I bought this.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I you're not a Western Digital or Seagate reseller. Yeah. So it's not like I just put 20% margin We on
Speaker 5:have pretty locked in infrastructure Yeah. From our long term kind of public cloud contracts.
Speaker 6:Skeep up
Speaker 2:for being locked in.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Oh, okay. Are there is there a bingo card that
Speaker 7:I should be did I
Speaker 3:are there
Speaker 1:things when you can't We can't tell.
Speaker 2:Can't tell.
Speaker 1:Locked in.
Speaker 2:Be random.
Speaker 5:Is that Grind one if I found
Speaker 2:Grind would be good. You talk about private equity, we'll
Speaker 4:get back to
Speaker 1:private Private equity.
Speaker 4:The usual things.
Speaker 2:Everyone we love.
Speaker 5:So okay. So so we we have locked in contracts for our public cloud. Yep. I would say more of the inverse. In a world of of complete abundance of, let's say, data center capacity, We would just, you know, we would be able to deliver even more to our customers because the rate of a the the price of AI would just go down.
Speaker 5:So so, you know, I want a world of just I I want solar data I want, you know, space data centers. Yeah. I just want everything.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Because that will just There we go. There we go.
Speaker 2:Everyone's pumped up about space data centers. God. There's this read the timeline. You know you know people are excited Okay. About
Speaker 1:Yeah. You always knew that Twitter would end up in space.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You called this. Right? 100%. That's why you got the platform so early.
Speaker 2:That's why you I need a million followers in the SpaceX social network.
Speaker 1:Space influence.
Speaker 2:I'm buying early.
Speaker 5:We are I'm glad that my tweets are training Yes. You know, the future of of space. Space. So can you just imagine you're like an alien Every time you tweet this is your first access to
Speaker 2:information. Ads that then pay for the next space rocket that goes to Mars.
Speaker 5:Actually, we're not tweeting enough. We
Speaker 1:need to
Speaker 5:be like a posting. Posting.
Speaker 2:On the SpaceX?
Speaker 1:This is page When 90 aliens come,
Speaker 5:they're just gonna
Speaker 1:they're gonna desperately wanna learn about enterprise SaaS. Like, we don't care about your religions. Don't care about anything else.
Speaker 5:They're like, why did SaaS, you know, what was SaaS pricing in January 2026?
Speaker 4:Why why was it
Speaker 5:a problem?
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I just want AI to be super cheap. Yeah. And the cheaper it gets, the the more we're gonna use it.
Speaker 2:Well, a great place to end it. Thank you. Let's give it up for
Speaker 1:It's a great to be a person. Thank
Speaker 2:you. This is fantastic. Enjoy the rest of
Speaker 3:your day.
Speaker 4:Do I just leave
Speaker 2:now? Yeah. You leave because I'm gonna tell everyone about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.
Speaker 2:And up next, we have Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco, live in person Man
Speaker 1:of the hour.
Speaker 2:Cisco AI Summit. Chuck, great to meet you. Hey. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the
Speaker 1:time to get of this.
Speaker 6:I'm late.
Speaker 2:No. You're great. Hadn't been here long. I'm sure. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I mean,
Speaker 3:you have
Speaker 2:a busy day today. Take us through it. How is the Cisco AI Summit going?
Speaker 6:It's going great. Okay.
Speaker 2:What's top of mind? Obviously, AI, but let's go a cut Oh,
Speaker 6:it's AI. That's it. Okay. That's it.
Speaker 2:Simple or fine. As long as you said AI,
Speaker 6:We be checking the talked about everything from world models to infrastructure required.
Speaker 2:We're going to
Speaker 6:get this afternoon, we're going get into trust and security. Right. Geopolitics. Yep. We talked about models and how they're evolving.
Speaker 6:We talked about some of the emerging agents and things that are happening with agents right And, I mean, the whole ecosystem's here,
Speaker 2:so it's pretty pretty cool. You compare it to Davos? I know you've been involved. I know you're there. How was Davos this year?
Speaker 2:We were sort of noting that, at least in our world, it felt like tech had really come to bear, this Davos. And there were a lot of really frontier discussions about technology that maybe a couple of years were a little bit quieter at Davos.
Speaker 6:Yeah. If you walk the main drag, I mean, all the tech companies had their own houses. And the crypto guys were gone,
Speaker 1:I think. But,
Speaker 6:know, Davos was it was interesting because there was such a geopolitical back backdrop going So it was it was a there was a lot of tension. Oh, yeah. And and there's a lot of discussion around this intersection of the geopolitical situation and technology Mhmm. Honestly. And then the the sovereign requirements that are coming up around the world, those are big things.
Speaker 6:But AI was just AI was a huge discussion. Global economy, what's happening in the economy? Is there a diversion? Is there a split? And then the geopolitical tension was probably the
Speaker 1:third thing. Yeah. Talk about how that's even just taken up your time over the last couple of years in a way that maybe it wasn't Just just the last couple? Yeah. Well, no.
Speaker 1:I think I think it's I think it's even been massively elevated even even in recent years.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's,
Speaker 6:you know, it's it's been a it's I'd say the last decade, we've had not always geopolitical, but there were always macro issues that were overhangs on what we're thinking and and taking up time, whether it's you know, if you go back to we had sort of leading into the pandemic and then you had supply chain crisis, you had inflationary issues, we had social, you know, issues in the in the world, and we've had now we have trade issues, tariff issues. We have the geopolitical trust issues. And so it's I spend a fair amount of time. I probably spend, you know, I'd say double the amount of time today, whatever that is, versus what I did, you know, seven, eight years ago. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Eight years ago, maybe nine years ago. Yeah. But it's it's it's important and you have no choice. And, you know, we lost a whole suite of sovereign software capabilities and sovereign product capabilities earlier this year for, you know, customers in Europe, Asia, anywhere around the world if they want to have technology that they can run locally and feel good about. And so it's affecting how we develop products.
Speaker 6:It's affecting how we package them, you know, how our how our these governments and customers in these countries run the products. It affects how frequently they're gonna get innovation versus not get innovation. I mean, it's it's a big impact.
Speaker 2:Are internationally, are are government leaders more of the key stakeholders that you're interfacing with? Or is it CEOs of technology companies in those countries that you're dealing with?
Speaker 6:It's both. But I think a lot of these issues that we're discussing right now are driven from the central governments Sure. That have to be implemented by
Speaker 3:the CEOs. And
Speaker 2:sovereign AI. Yes. Got it. Okay. So
Speaker 3:Can
Speaker 2:you take us back, since this is the first time on the show, and talk a little bit about your background growing up? I'm particularly interested in, you know, you studied math. And I was reflecting with Jordy the other day about how I grew up watching Star Wars. You know, C-3PO, it's a talking robot. And I didn't really internalize that that would be something that kind of happens in my And I'm wondering what your vision, your processing of science fiction, your processing of AI was throughout your career.
Speaker 2:Because now it's here and you're experiencing it like everyone else. But what was your what was
Speaker 6:your So many of the movies and cartoons and things that we grew up with were all futuristic and now we're actually building all that technology to make it real. Mean, think about the Jetsons or, you
Speaker 2:know The cars drive themselves.
Speaker 6:Cars drive themselves, you know. Even simple things like the the amount of the amount video that we do, you know, and Yeah. You're on another video and you're you're you're you're I mean, we back then, it was like that somewhat science fiction,
Speaker 2:and now all
Speaker 6:of a sudden, it's the way we do business every day. Yeah. And I think that, you know, but these things take time. I mean, Fei Fei Li was in there earlier today and she was talking about when we when when the whole concept of, you know, self driving cars began, it was over twenty years ago. Yeah.
Speaker 6:You know? And here we are and we're just getting these rolling you know, Waymo here in San Francisco, as an example. And so it's they take a they take a while to deploy. But, you know, yeah, my my background, I I had a math mathematical sciences degree with a with a concentration in computer science.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And I was a I was a strange combination of a a complete nerd and an athlete at the same
Speaker 2:time.
Speaker 6:Love it. I have these pictures on my phone, honestly. One one's where I'm dunking on a guy at a basketball game.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:And then the next the picture right next to it is literally me on a team of about six people, which was the math team. And I looked like the biggest nerd.
Speaker 2:Know I'm saying? Like, they
Speaker 1:had those were like Gotta be able to do both.
Speaker 6:It was it was really odd. So I started my career coding. Yeah. And, you know, COBOL programmers are in demand now, so I got a second job if
Speaker 1:I need to
Speaker 2:do this. I've got a backdrop here. Back off.
Speaker 4:Plan b. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 6:That's very
Speaker 2:funny. And then and then tell me a little bit about the the journey to Cisco, where you were working before Yeah. And the decision to join.
Speaker 6:That's funny. Have you heard the story?
Speaker 2:A little bit.
Speaker 6:Okay. I was gonna say We've heard it,
Speaker 1:but we just want you
Speaker 2:to ask. Audience hasn't.
Speaker 6:So there must be there must you must have heard something
Speaker 2:here it again.
Speaker 6:So so I I was working for what is now Bank of America Yeah. Actually back in the day. And and when I was programming, my leadership came and said, hey. We got these things called local area networks popping up all over the bank. We don't know what they are, but we've hired three analysts, but we need someone to manage them.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Literally, on the way home, I stopped and bought Land Magazine.
Speaker 2:How weird is that? It's actually We find we gotta find a competition for that. I I I grew up doing LAN parties. You bring all
Speaker 6:Yeah. Of course you do.
Speaker 2:All your video games together and I love that Cisco invented the LAN.
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah. We and so so anyway, I so I left I left coding and went over and started running this team and we did an evaluation between Cisco and Wellfleet Communications, which was Cisco's original competitor.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Long story long, I was I was talking to the sales rep and I said to him, I said, you know, well, first of all, see he's got a really nice car and he's got a nice house. And so it's like,
Speaker 2:wow. The margin is
Speaker 3:pretty high. See that's pretty high. Can you can you give me that So
Speaker 6:I literally I literally said to him, I said, I think I could do what you do. And so as it turns out, like, I don't know, probably within a year or so, they came to me and said, hey, we we have an opportunity. He's this guy was getting promoted. Yeah. And it was a territory opening up.
Speaker 6:And so I went I moved into sales at that time, and that was '92. And I competed with Cisco and it was literally the two companies were
Speaker 3:like Coke and Pepsi. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I mean, it was that bad. Yeah. It was like brutal. Yeah. This is Send?
Speaker 6:No. This was at Wealth Fleet.
Speaker 2:Okay. Wealth Fleet.
Speaker 6:And so Cisco was trying to get me to come to work for them after two or three years at Wellfleet, and I just couldn't bring myself to do it. So I did a stent at Ascend for eleven Yeah.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 6:And and then finally in '97, my wife there was a there was a patch that came open as a sales rep Yeah. Where everything I had to do was driving around, driving and I'd be home every night. We had small kids and my wife's like, sign it.
Speaker 2:Sign it.
Speaker 6:Just sign So What car did you pick? What car?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What kind of car did I have? Because you you you see this you see this other sales guy. He drives a nice car.
Speaker 6:Oh, I see.
Speaker 2:That that carries a little bit forward. Sends a signal. It can send a signal of confidence. It can also sell a signal of I I'm not margins.
Speaker 6:I'm not gonna tell you what
Speaker 2:I Off Okay. Air. Air.
Speaker 6:We we we you know, over time
Speaker 1:It was a late nineties.
Speaker 6:I got up to a BMW at some point, but it wasn't that wasn't what I was driving at the time.
Speaker 2:Okay. Then then talk about the journey through Cisco. We're we're in this very interesting time. There's another technology boom. It feels like markets are extremely volatile.
Speaker 2:We saw this with Microsoft, like one small change, the stock moves massively. At the same time, you know, you've watched self driving cars evolve. It takes twenty years. There's this balance of like patience and aggression. And I wanna know how are you communicating to your customers, your employees about times when you need to be moving aggressively, but cautiously balancing all
Speaker 3:of that.
Speaker 2:That seems like the hardest job for you right
Speaker 6:We just had Kevin Scott on from Microsoft. Yeah. And he said, we have this infinite patience for the messiness of these transitions. That's a
Speaker 2:great line.
Speaker 6:So, Kevin, thank you for that. Yeah. I'm gonna steal it. Cheers now. At least I credited him.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Once. But, you know,
Speaker 6:you you have to you you can't wait. You have to you have to jump in and you gotta go. Mhmm. And a lot of what we're trying to do right now is, you we know, have to build we're obviously building the infrastructure that supports all this. We're trying to build security solutions that help our customers, you know, have the trust that they need and and feel good about deploying these things.
Speaker 6:So it's and we've gone through these in the past. I mean, it's you know, the the one the only one thing that's close to it from a scale perspective was just the advent of the Internet
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Back in the late nineties. And and this I think is gonna it's moving faster. I agree. The the implications are it's hard to hard to even believe this, but probably more profound than even what we what we did back then. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so you have to you have to be willing you know, we always talk about you got if you got 80% of the information you need to make a decision, you better make it go or you're gonna get left behind. You you gotta go. And so you do the best you can. You adjust on the fly, and and and you try to your number one priority is not to hurt your customer.
Speaker 1:Do you think it's easier to predict the future than it is to predict the timeline that change will actually happen?
Speaker 6:Really good question.
Speaker 1:Just because with the Internet with the Internet boom, it was obvious that we were gonna be buying things online. We were gonna be buying, you know, paying for software. We're gonna be getting all these services. We have something something like a DoorDash, but then the time line. And I feel like the decision that every CEO, management team are trying to work through right now is they're having to make predictions around the time line that these changes are gonna happen on.
Speaker 1:And that feels, even with the rate of change that everyone's feeling today, it still feels like wildly unpredictable. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:It is. And I think the reality is is that the timeline gets dictated by how good you feel about the capabilities and the security of the solutions and the data access and all that stuff. So it's it's not like our customers are sitting around saying, I wonder what the timeline is. They're all trying to actually force the timeline themselves. They're trying to get there.
Speaker 6:But I think I I equate this to at a much different level, but you think about the iPhone in 2007. Mhmm. None of us had any idea of the applications we'd be running on that device ten years later. And what we do with it today, I mean, it's just and and so I think this is gonna be that on steroids. We don't know.
Speaker 6:I mean, just look at the look at the Moltbot? What was it?
Speaker 1:Molt Moltbot? Moltbot? Moltbot?
Speaker 6:Clawbot and all these things. Open Moltbot? Claw. Open Claw. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And and these are like I mean, they're taking everything by storm. Yep. And and, you know, you made the joke, like pets.com doesn't guess, but Chewy does. In many cases, you know, you think about pioneers versus settlers and the different outcomes for each of them. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:We'll see who we'll see who makes it at the end of day.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Corey? Is is getting lucky underrated? We talked last week about Apple's. Apple's, like, work on the self driving car is what enabled them to be in a position to Yeah. Have the Max Mini be a great
Speaker 6:silicon. Yeah. Luck and timing matters so much. I mean, you know, it's I I I became CEO, there's a lot of luck and timing involved. Right?
Speaker 6:I happened to be the person who was there. If if if my predecessor decided to retire five years earlier, I wouldn't have gotten the job. Wow. I mean, you know, it's just a it's a it so there's a lot of luck and a lot of timing. Now, there's also you you create your luck sometimes.
Speaker 6:Right? But I think it always it's always part of the whole the whole outcome.
Speaker 2:Can you talk a little bit about CEO to CEO communication? There's a lot of really high stakes, high flying deal making between big companies. There's press releases that go out and then there's comments from each CEO and the deal And and I'm wondering about what it takes to, you know, build a relationship with a CEO that you're going to do a big deal with. And what it takes as that deal evolves and as the communications go out. Like, what what how how do you how do you maintain a relationship when so much is on the line?
Speaker 6:It's always better to build a relationship before the before the big deal so that the big deal becomes easier because you've already built the trust. It's sort of like dealing with dealing with a time of crisis. I think when COVID came along, if if you had if you had great trust with your employee base and they believed in you, then you could navigate through that a lot better than if you were if if your culture was good, you know, that was good. And so I think these relationships are really important. The CEO community in The United States honestly is very tight.
Speaker 6:I remember when I became CEO, there was another there was one of them at one of the first CEO events I went to and he handed me a cell number and he said, listen, this is these people in this room are the only people that know what you're getting ready to go through, and so you need to get to know and make sure you call and talk and ask us old guys, you know Wow. When you get into it. So I think the CEO community is very close. I think, you know, some of the some of the the the number of deals right now, I think in many cases, the public narrative about what's going on isn't reflective of what's really happening behind the scenes. Because most CEOs are very pragmatic.
Speaker 6:There's not a lot of emotion. You're just sitting there. You're cutting out a deal. If somebody has a different different opinion about it, you're you're not getting mad. You're just you're trying to just get to the outcome.
Speaker 6:And I think that's that's the pragmatism and the calmness that most CEOs have. And I think that sometimes the press and others like to create the drama because that's what people click on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If anyone sticks a bunch of microphones in your face, be careful. We move
Speaker 6:away quickly. It just happened,
Speaker 2:by the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We got you. We gotta get the flash effects.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We're the paparazzi. If we flip it around, give us some advice for the youngest cohort of folks who will be joining Cisco. What does it take to succeed?
Speaker 2:What is your advice for people that are going into a The people that
Speaker 1:want to take your job one day.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. Come on. Hurry up.
Speaker 6:I you know, I think the look, the the the people who are wildly successful have this really incredible combination of tech in in our industry.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Understand the technology
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Have high EQ Mhmm. Really care about the mission of the team. Don't and and understand that if the team's success is anybody who says, I don't care about my own success is lying to you. Mhmm. But the person who figures out that when the team can succeeds, I'm going to succeed.
Speaker 6:So it's easy for me to focus on the team. And and then you also have to have people who care about making sure their their peers are are successful as well. And I think it's you know, the person who's solely focused on getting to the top as an individual, just it's not gonna happen. And that so it's a combination of those technical skills and the high EQ you cannot I can't underestimate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can't understate. You talked about you've talked in the past about effectively doing the job that you want already and and as a way to kind of like work your way
Speaker 2:Lead your shift before promotion.
Speaker 6:You guys actually do your research, don't you?
Speaker 1:We do.
Speaker 6:I just I tell people that, you know, you if if your peer group would look at your promotion announcement and just go, that makes perfect sense
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Then you've done your
Speaker 1:job. Right?
Speaker 6:And if you can't look in the mirror and say, okay, those people, would they be happy? And would they believe it was the right decision? And if if they wouldn't, then you're probably not quite where you ought to be. Mhmm. And and I think that, you know, I tell everybody too, you're you're I I my team hates when I say this, but I'm say it anyway.
Speaker 6:I think I think when we have two or three internal candidates for a promotion, the whole interview process is stupid to me. Mhmm. It's like we've been watching these people work for a decade. What are we going learn about them when we sit down in a room for thirty minutes and ask them questions? When we watch them work.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Can't we just look at the three of them and and I translate that to every day you're working is your interview for your next job.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 6:That should be your your your work every day should be your interview for the next promotion. Mhmm. And now if you've external candidates, certainly you have to you have to get to know them and learn all those things. But when we have when it comes down to two internal candidates, just say, are we doing this? Mhmm.
Speaker 6:But we do it anyway.
Speaker 2:So What's keeping you up at night? There's Nothing. Number nothing.
Speaker 7:No. Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you how do you how do you handle how do you how did you learn to handle last few years, you've had COVID, we've had so many different geopolitical tension, trade wars, all these things. What's your what's your you seem unfazed, but
Speaker 6:I have I've always been able to compartmentalize things, and I have always it's innate. I did not teach myself this. I've always been able to just put aside things I can't control.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You plan for them. You you do you you you come up with different scenario plans, but you don't I mean, I'm not gonna lay it awake at night and worry about something that might happen that I have no control over. So That's a good mantra. And and, you know, the there's look. I'm going home when I've had a really bad day, I looked at my wife and I said, you wanna hear the
Speaker 3:good news? And I said,
Speaker 6:I wasn't diagnosed with cancer today. And somebody was, and I wasn't. So my worst day if I'm not being diagnosed with cancer or some sort of terminal illness, tomorrow I'll get up and fight another fight. You know, fight another fight. And you just got to have perspective.
Speaker 6:I love it.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for coming
Speaker 6:on It's
Speaker 1:great to
Speaker 6:see you guys.
Speaker 1:Yes. An honor to meet you.
Speaker 6:Nice to meet you guys. You're doing it. You guys have got a real good product.
Speaker 7:Thank you.
Speaker 2:We appreciate it. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Speaker 1:Up What next a legend.
Speaker 2:What a legend. Without further ado, we have Jitu Patel, Cisco's president and chief product officer. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 6:How are you, John?
Speaker 1:Look at this fit. Is Fucking chars.
Speaker 3:Know, they look amazing. You you gotta cover more of yourself up or
Speaker 2:you don't look as good now.
Speaker 7:Right? Well,
Speaker 2:thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for having me. How is the Cisco ASON going? Are you happy? How are feeling?
Speaker 3:I am thrilled. You know, the thing is is I think we are at a juncture right now where these conversations with a range of topics with the ecosystem are actually far more important than any individual company. Mhmm. Talking about a product that they're trying to Sure. You know, pedal.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and I feel like we are we're the realization is now pretty obvious to everyone
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That this is an ecosystem play.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Like, no company Yeah. Us included Yeah. Is gonna be able to actually get the full stack Yeah. Built out
Speaker 6:I mean,
Speaker 2:a couple years ago, people were saying that either, you know, like one AI company will completely dominate and we have like multiple IPOs going out, XAI is part SpaceX now. Like, lots of companies are succeeding.
Speaker 3:And I think like this whole notion of a zero sum mentality Yeah. Is I just don't think it's healthy.
Speaker 2:It's never been true in tech.
Speaker 3:It's never been true
Speaker 2:in tech.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But it's actually more more more of false now than ever before. Totally. Because the complexity is so high and the breadth is so high and the scale is so fast that if you if you just get arrogant thinking you're gonna do everything by yourself Yeah. You are guaranteed to be left behind.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, first time on the show. Let's back up. Introduce yourself. And I'd love to know a little bit of you know, Cisco's a large company.
Speaker 2:Walk me through a little bit of the org chart that sits under you, where you work, who you're interfacing with, what projects you're working on.
Speaker 3:So I've been here for about five and a half years. Yeah. And I joined here Success.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. We're very happy about that. We have a sound board, by the way. I I know. I I
Speaker 3:know you I watch your show, so it's great.
Speaker 2:So Some people don't know that we bring it with us.
Speaker 1:It's still still surprised. You.
Speaker 3:It wasn't actually happened because you always expected. Yeah. But so been here for five and a half years. I joined from from Box. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I was chief product officer there. Prior to that, I was at EMC. Prior to that, I ran my own business for, like, seventeen years in Yeah. In Chicago. Cool.
Speaker 3:And so I went the other way where I actually started really small. Small. And then I actually got the itch for scale. Interesting. I'm like, really wanna learn scale.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And, that's what got me to the Valley. That's what got me to, these large scale organizations. And the reason I'm I'm really enamored with scale is the it takes a little longer to get there sometimes.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:But once it gets there, like there's a movement that gets created.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So talk about the either the org structure or the product surface that you oversee. How you're how you're explaining everything that Cisco does because it's such a large organization now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Because we have a very broad portfolio. Yeah. And so, you know, we everything from our core business, which is networking Yeah. To then the very, you know, kind of close adjacency, which is security.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Because security is now getting baked into the fabric of the network. That's
Speaker 2:So services, software on top of that?
Speaker 3:Yes. But, you know, SaaS services and hardware. Yep. So we we have a we we don't only play in a range of different businesses Yeah. But we also play with multiple different business models.
Speaker 3:We have a hardware business. Yeah. We have a professional software business. Yep. We've got a SaaS business Yep.
Speaker 3:In each one of these areas. Yeah. So networking, security, Splunk, which was a massive acquisition that we made, collaboration, Webex, contact center, all of those products. Basically all products. What we did was we decided about a year and a half ago, and Chuck, who you just interviewed, you know, we we were talking about this for five and a half years, is we need Cisco has to become much more of a platform rather than feel like a holding company.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Where you don't have each individual product that's kind of in its own silo because then you don't get the benefit of the breath of Cisco and the tailwind of Cisco. But our breath had become our liability.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so what we had to do was fundamentally kind of rethink how we're going to build our products. Mhmm. And it had to become a platform.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Platform being that the marginal cost of ingestion goes down and there's a compounding value to every single kind of every time you build new functionality, it doesn't just help with the product that you're buying, but also helps with every product you purchased in the past. Yeah. And can other people add value to the platform that you've built? So that that's the core definition. And then so that that's what we started doing and we consolidated all products together about eighteen months ago.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And I think it's been fantastic so far. Like, we there's a there's a spring in the step in the in the employees. I think we are starting to see a fair amount of innovation. We've actually innovated more in the past eighteen months than the previous decade combined.
Speaker 3:And I think it'll dwarf in comparison to what we'll do in the next twelve to eighteen.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Yeah. Talk more about Splunk and how that fits in specifically to the amount of data that's being created in the AI era. It feels like a very like, fortuitous acquisition, but, what's the response been on the ground?
Speaker 3:We were lucky on the on the Splunk side because it's very hard to find a company that is at scale Yeah. With the right cultural fit
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:With the right technology adjacency Mhmm. Where the combination actually creates a one plus one equals Yeah. 11. And I think Splunk happened to be one of those. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:There there aren't that many of those. Like a lot of times people will ask me like, what's the next big acquisition? I'm like, if I found
Speaker 6:one I
Speaker 3:would be trying bring one about. There's just not that many that are there. Either they're very frothy in the valuation, they're not or they don't have a clear adjacency. We don't have the right go to market. We don't have the right cultural fit.
Speaker 3:Like there's a bunch of things that have to fit just right. Yeah. And so that was very lucky with Splunk. And the thesis over there was, look, you have to assume that the attacker is already in the system and what you're trying to prevent is lateral movement. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And if you're trying to prevent lateral movement, security is a data game. And the more data you have and the more data that can be correlated, the better off you're gonna be at compressing the time for investigation, doing better detections, and doing a much better job on the response and remediation. And that's basically what Splunk brings us.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I think, you know, we've got a great leader now in, in Splunk as well, who came from Microsoft and DocuSign who's doing a fantastic job.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Kamal Hathi. And I I feel like there's we have probably hit 2% of the potential that we have in Splunk.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:How have you processed stage by stage the overall AI hype cycle? It sort of perfectly coincides with your time at Cisco. It also Cisco actually has the scale to have visibility into reality. It's like you're just like you're just looking across, like, gonna just pull up a map and just see like, okay, what's actually happening? How how are organizations adopting this, not just in tech, but across the entire economy?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, I think there's you know, I I feel like I've always lived by the six part framework, which is, like, important in descending order, which is timing, market, team, product, brand, distribution. If you don't have all six, don't win, but you need to make sure that and the first one is timing, and you don't control timing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We were just talking about that with Chuck. It's like Yeah. In in, it's it's it's very easy to predict the future in some ways.
Speaker 1:Like, with the Internet
Speaker 3:It's not a good predict.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You just like could be off. Are you off by five years? That's If you're off a plan by two years, you could be like, it could be done. Like, you might not win the market.
Speaker 3:And by the way, there's a lot of great products in the market that actually, hit the market at the wrong time
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And didn't ever see light of day. Yeah. Right? IPad wasn't the first kind of tablet to be built, but it was the one that actually hit the nail on the head on the timing.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:So I do feel like timing is a disproportionate contributor to success, and you don't actually control timing. So that that should tell you that the intellectual arrogance that people carry with themselves saying that this is me that made this happen
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Has a ton of luck to
Speaker 2:it. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so we just happened to be at the right time at the right place, building infrastructure for forty years, which is now a scarce commodity. And if you think about GPUs, these GPUs without being networked don't really do you any good. Yeah. Right? And as the models get bigger, the networks actually get need to get faster and need to get larger.
Speaker 3:And so what used to be something that sat on one GPU then sat on a server with eight GPUs
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That needed to get networked, then sat on a rack with multiple servers Yep. Then said, okay, I need to go scale out within the data center and have multiple clusters connected together. And now you're starting to see data centers getting connected together. Yeah. And this thing that they call scale across, where you have multiple data centers depending on where the power is available hundreds of kilometers apart Yeah.
Speaker 3:That'll actually operate as an ultra cluster coherently for running a training run. And that requires a whole new set of technology and a whole new set of assumptions around physics that have to be challenged. Yeah. Which is what we've been doing because we build our own silicon, we build our own systems, we build our own software, we build our own, you know, kind of platform. So that's been exceptionally beneficial for us.
Speaker 3:And, yes, I would love to say that we capitalized on the opportunity well, but the fact that there was such an intrinsic demand for large scale data center build outs is something that's just like we were lucky to be there at the right place at the right time with the right products.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is cross data center training particularly in demand right now? I know Google has had some success with it. Other labs are probably thinking about and working towards it. Is that something that you're
Speaker 3:It is. And it's actually it's it's the reason it's important is because you might not find all the power Yeah. To juice a single data center. Yeah. And so you then have to make sure that you build the data centers where the power is available.
Speaker 3:And so once if you have power grids in two separate locations, you then need to make sure that those get coherently connected.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 3:the problem with training runs is if you drop packets, then you have to restart the training run, which becomes extremely expensive. And so what you need to do then is say, okay, so I'm going to build in the silicon itself technologies for deep buffering so that I can make sure that jitter and packet loss doesn't really go out and affect the training run. And that that's been a, you know, like we just launched, our p 200 chip, what we call with the eight thousand two and twenty three router, and that's actually gonna be it's it's already in a couple hyperscalers, but that's that's an area that I feel is gonna have a ton of momentum.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How is it being a fabless semiconductor company working with TSMC? I know there's Silicon One which is the five nanometer process. Tim Cook was just talking on earnings about maybe some supply issues on the three nanometer process. There's always questions of like where bottlenecks emerge, even if they're very temporal.
Speaker 2:How is it going on scaling actual supply for you?
Speaker 3:So the good news is, we've been at it for a while. Yeah. And we have a pretty broad portfolio. Mhmm. So volume wise, we just shipped, like, I think it was last quarter our millions shipped.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so it gets, you know, we've got so volume wise Yeah. We've got enough kind of volume of Sure. And and I think in this market scale really matters. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And even though you might enjoy scale today Mhmm. If you don't continue to keep growing the scale, you become subscale pretty fast. Mhmm. And so there's a level of healthy paranoia that you need to have about continuing to be operating at scale. And so that that's been beneficial for us.
Speaker 3:We have a of course, you know, we work closely with the fabs and all of that to make sure that we get our fair share of Yeah. You know, kind of Yeah. But it's also important in the sense that the the data center build outs that are happening require this. And the thing that's been really beneficial for us is we happen to be the offset so that there's not a level of pricing power that our competitors sometimes face. So if you just had one of our competitors providing the network a six
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And everyone else is just building systems around the network a six, then you'd actually have a challenge. So what hyperscalers want to do is make sure that they can offset that Mhmm. By having choices. And so we provide choice to the market. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's that's been I mean, we as you saw last year, we we had identified we said we'll do about a billion dollars in orders in hyperscalers.
Speaker 2:Get ready.
Speaker 3:And How much did you do? We did north of two. Yeah. And then Good. And then this year
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:In in q one, which was last quarter, we did, like, I think it was north of a billion 3 or so in just the first quarter. You can start to see that there's a fair amount But of you have to stay paranoid, keep your head down, keep innovating.
Speaker 1:What's your pitch to talent that you know is elite that you're trying to you know, we're in the midst of last year, it felt like you'd sum up the year as, like, really intense talent war. There's so many companies with with so much hype. And I feel like Cisco's approach is like, let the let the metrics sort of speak for themselves, not not not as hype driven as other parts of, you know, the press the the press release economy, let's say. But Yeah. If you're sitting down with somebody and you have three minutes to get them to join Cisco versus, you know, another company or a lab or something like that, what's your pitch?
Speaker 3:My pitch typically is we're very mission driven. And so we wanna make sure that we're building critical infrastructure for the AI era, for the world. And that's a mission that you should they have to feel intrinsically connected to and excited about. And it's not just about creating connectivity in that infrastructure, but also keeping it safe and secure. And then just continuing to keep building the entire full stack.
Speaker 3:I mean, we build the silicon, we build the systems, we build the operating system, we build the platform, we build the applications. We've got that full stack. And so if you wanted to develop and grow in a company, and we're very well known to actually get people who don't have experience in a certain area to put them into mean, look at me. Didn't know much about networking when I first came on. Sure.
Speaker 3:And I think it's I feel like experience is great in certain areas but sometimes it can actually create a burden of bias for
Speaker 2:you. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so having a mixture of experience with inexperience
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So that you are having the inexperienced person allow the person with experience to unlearn as fast is really important. And the appeal to people coming in is, look, we're gonna build things which are gonna be based on the long term. And if you wanna learn how to have good, strong leadership foundation principles, Cisco is a great place to be for the long term. But like I'm not if someone asked me like, know, what do you have for for your lunch? Is it free lunch?
Speaker 3:I'm like,
Speaker 1:you're asking me a question, this
Speaker 2:is the
Speaker 3:wrong place for it. Like we're pretty scrappy when it comes to that kind
Speaker 2:of stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And we are proudly scrappy about that stuff.
Speaker 2:About specific skills that are the most in demand? I mean, there's there's a lot of roles that are augmented by AI now.
Speaker 1:Well, we've heard we've heard too about plumbers and electricians flying around and,
Speaker 3:you know demand. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 2:Even even sales guys and chip designers, that's not going away anytime soon. No.
Speaker 3:I I think, look, the the roles that have been in demand around enterprise let let let's look at the entire business. Sure. Like, you look at enterprise sales, that's always gonna be in demand. We are always gonna need people in front of customers to say, we need to make sure that we can get you the technology and the distribution is a massive kind of, you know, advantage that we have. But on the chip side, there's there is not enough people that understand how to etch sand into into creating intelligence.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, we need more of those. Yeah. And so there's always a shortage of that. Sure.
Speaker 3:There's there's a shortage in people that are building hardware and systems. There's a shortage in people that are building software. So I don't feel like there's a lack of shortage in any of the areas. But what's now happened is you've added to that an entirely different development model where you also need researchers for AI. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so we have an AI research team. And that's something that we historically didn't need in the in the product development cycle. And we've only been doing that for now for a few years. In addition to the research team, you need to make sure that software development life cycle itself is changing. Like, we just announced or not announced, but we just kind of revealed with, Sam that 100% of our AI defense product, which is a product that we announced last year at this event, is now written is gonna be written by AI in three weeks.
Speaker 3:Wow. 100%. Like, no human's writing code. Humans are reviewing, which means that the bottleneck is no longer writing code. It's actually reviewing code.
Speaker 3:Interesting. You know? And that those will require kind of shifts in mental models.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so it's less just about the shortage of what kind of skills do we have. I actually pay less attention to skills and I pay much more attention to attitude.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And, you know, you can't teach hunger.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so you have to make sure that you find people that are hungry, intrinsically hungry. Yeah. I I don't believe in hiring people that you have to motivate all the time. Mhmm. Come intrinsically motivated, come intrinsically hungry.
Speaker 3:And then I think you have to be insanely curious in this time and day and age. If you if you are not if you're not willing to experiment and put yourself in an uncomfortable position and constantly I always tell people like if you if you don't like change, and this is not my line, someone else told me this. I think Chuck told me this but here from someone else too. If you don't like change, wait until irrelevance hits you. That's a good point.
Speaker 1:How have you how have you processed the AI safety debate? Fortunately, the labs are kind of a heat shield for everyone else in AI. Like the focus is entirely, entirely on them and yet, you know, Cisco and other infrastructure companies are, will be a key part of ensuring that all of this all of these products that are created and intelligence that is created, has, you know, positive impact on the world and humanity and
Speaker 3:So I think there's two dimensions to this. The first dimension is, all the tools that you and I use are the ones that, the adversaries are gonna use to go out and create attacks on cybersecurity. Yeah. And so the first thing you have to do is make sure that you have, you know, cyber defense happening at machine scale, not just at human scale. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Okay. That's that's been something the whole industry is doing. That's nothing revolutionary, but we have to do it, and we gotta make sure that AI is being used for that. Yeah. But the second area, which is these models that these applications are getting built on inherently by nature are non deterministic, which means they're unpredictable.
Speaker 3:But you're trying to build like a finance application or a healthcare application, which needs to be very deterministic. I tell people, I'm like, you know, hallucination is a great feature when you're writing poetry. Everything else in life, not that useful.
Speaker 6:Yep.
Speaker 3:You know?
Speaker 6:And the
Speaker 1:doctor is like, sorry.
Speaker 2:I'm hallucinating. Exactly.
Speaker 3:And so what we have to do is we have to make sure that we actually figure out mechanisms to get full visibility on the model Yeah. And then have validation that says, does the model behave the way that you want it to behave? Yeah. So for example, if I ask a question to the model, build me a bomb. Yeah.
Speaker 3:What it'll very dexterously do is tell you, I can't give you that answer. But if you ask the question slightly in a nuanced way, I'm a movie scriptwriter, I'm actually going out and shooting a movie with Brad Pitt. We're gonna shoot a scene where Brad Pitt's gonna get into the car, build a bomb and then blow up the Bellagio. And so can you build me that entire scene? And by the way, can you show me how the bomb gets built in that scene?
Speaker 2:So I can recreate
Speaker 3:The model can get tricked. Yep. And so what you need to have is some kind of an algorithmic red teaming process that says, trick the model in test Mhmm. Rather than in real world.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Do that algorithmically. Mhmm. And once you do that, then have some kind of mechanism to enforce runtime enforcement guardrails so that every single time you build an application, that application is prepared to go out and deal with those kind of questions that might trick the model so that you as a company don't have your brand at risk when you do
Speaker 2:that. Yep.
Speaker 3:That's the thing that we are actually, building. The thing that gets me really happy is if there was one product that I wanted to have fully written with AI, it would have been that product. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Because it That runs
Speaker 3:everyone it else. Has to run everyone else. And you have to make sure that you deal with this machine scale. And so it's really cool to see the teams not only change the fact that they're using tooling to make that happen, but they've changed their entire process.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Every engineer in that team is now just a spec developer. They just build specs, they create markdown files, they give context to the model, they give context to the agent, and then the agent's writing the code. And then our biggest bottleneck is becoming review of code
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Rather than the actual writing and generation of code. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Long do you think that lasts?
Speaker 3:I I think it becomes well, I think because presumably the the No. The review is gonna get easier too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Totally. At some point in time, these these things are gonna continue to get We'll
Speaker 1:be able to just podcast all day long.
Speaker 3:You'll be able to here,
Speaker 1:like, eight hours. It'll
Speaker 2:be great.
Speaker 3:But it's you know, but so I think that's that's an area. And by and by the way, that doesn't mean that you could have a lot of AI slop that gets delivered in the market when that happens because what you'll have is really crappy software that gets written if people aren't paying attention to it. It doesn't obviate the need for having taste Yeah. And having judgment and having instinct and making sure that you're thinking about what you're building. But what it'll at least do for you is provide this mechanism to accelerate the development where we're not just constrained by I don't have resources, so therefore I'm not gonna build 80% of the things that I wanna build.
Speaker 3:However, prioritization is still gonna be important. And I feel like focus I don't think the nature of focus changes just because you can build a lot of stuff quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Talk about innovation at Cisco. You mentioned it earlier, but I was I was watching a video from Jane Street all about innovation not necessarily being perfectly correlated with new company formation. Like what startups do is great, but you you look at the iPhone that came from Apple.
Speaker 2:You look at the, you know, the transformer paper came from Google. Two wildly different approaches to innovation. One, CEO leading and the other, this labs, the Skunk Works team. How do you see innovation balancing between sort of top down mandate for new products, what the market's responding to, customer driven versus lab scientists going off and and working in isolation.
Speaker 3:So first first thing is innovation is, in my mind, it's a choice. Mhmm. So when companies say, well, we are big so
Speaker 2:we can't innovate. There's a lot of big companies that don't innovate, but there are a bunch that do. I mean, what's the separation?
Speaker 3:Correlation does not equate causality in that Like just because you're a big company does not mean you can't innovate. In fact, some of the greatest companies Yeah. You know, are innovating at a really, really fast pace. And by the way, scale really matters right now. Yeah.
Speaker 3:In AI, scale is actually a huge accelerant for innovation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Distribution, more data, flywheel,
Speaker 3:RL, And all of so I do feel like innovation is a choice. Mhmm. And I think it's an intellectually lazy argument to say that innovation can't happen because we are we're too large.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:However, size does bring about some level of slowness in the process. And you have to be diligent about making sure that you're intolerant on bureaucracy seeping in. Or more importantly, indecision seeping in and apathy kind of seeping in, where people just give up after a while. You know what? I tried a couple of times, it didn't work.
Speaker 3:And it's like, no, you have to be comfortable with conflict. You have to be comfortable with making sure that you speak truth to power. And if that means that you're gonna like one thing that can become a failure state is in these large companies, you know, you get overly concerned about feelings of people. And so as a result what you stop doing is you stop having the debates that need to be had. What you need to do instead is establish trust first in teams.
Speaker 3:And once you have trust, you know that the intent is not to put you down. The intent is to make sure that you get the best idea ship out and get to And winning requires contrarian viewpoints that are actually actively debated.
Speaker 1:And sometimes hurting feelings.
Speaker 3:Exactly. But it wouldn't hurt feelings if everyone were clear about the fact that I trust this person and they're debating the idea, not the person. They're not attacking my personality. And so one of my mentors always told me, you know, and I don't I have not mastered this. You know, state the facts but watch your tone.
Speaker 3:When I tend to do poorly is when I get passionate when I don't watch my tone. Because then that debate feels like it's a personal conflict rather than something that's about the idea. Yeah. And so if I were to say, you know, on the innovation side, top down, bottoms up, I think there are certain things you have to go top down. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Like, we had a decision we had to make that's a way of pivoting to AI first as a company. Mhmm. And that was not a decision I could have had democratically kind of sourced from 30,000 engineers. It would have not worked. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So we said we're gonna go from top down on that But I I should be losing 99% of the debates in my organization because the person in the front line is spending fourteen hours a day on that problem, I'm spending six minutes a week on that problem. Chances are, even if I'm infinitely smarter, which I'm not, if I'm doing the right job because I'm hiring people smarter than me, At that point, you need to make sure that that person is able to have more facts, more thought put into that argument than me. So I always tell people, if I'm make having a debate with you and I'm if I'm having an argument and if I don't lose 95 percent of the arguments problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Thought through.
Speaker 3:But what my job is to make sure that the second level and third level thinking
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is actually well thought through on your end. And then we need to make sure that we have certain core principles up top that go from top down. Mhmm. And certain core value systems that we should not compromise on so that we don't actually get people on an infinite loop. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then on the bottom from the bottom up, allow people to innovate and then let those great ideas percolate up.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much. Great to meet you.
Speaker 2:Great to
Speaker 1:meet you
Speaker 2:having us here. Hopefully we'll have you back soon.
Speaker 3:Love to. Love that.
Speaker 2:In the meantime, I'll tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And our next guest is coming in right now. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:I wasn't sure if we were gonna have a little bit of a break. But we have Costa.
Speaker 3:What's up?
Speaker 1:Welcome to
Speaker 2:the show.
Speaker 1:Are you?
Speaker 2:Welcome to show.
Speaker 4:How are Nice to meet
Speaker 1:you guys.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
Speaker 4:No worries. Sorry.
Speaker 2:No. No. We're we're good. We go for three hours every day. It's no problem.
Speaker 2:Love it. Please, introduce yourself since this is
Speaker 5:the first time on your show.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I'm, Costa Caladianos. I'm the, EVP of technology for the San Francisco 49ers and Levi's Stadium and Yeah. A big fan of shows. Excited to Yeah.
Speaker 4:Be
Speaker 2:And explain to us like what that means and what your day to day is like and what the choices you're facing are.
Speaker 4:So there's never like a regular day to day.
Speaker 2:It's Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's so my team, we're responsible for everything from, you know, getting into the stadium, the ticketing systems Yeah. The point of sale systems for food and beverage Yeah. The WiFi, the network infrastructure Sure. The cyber security of the stadium, making sure that on game day we're like the referees. You don't notice us and you just have a great time and Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, cheer on the team which is hopefully the 49ers.
Speaker 2:How how has technology in a football stadium evolved? Like, I I we we we were going back to like the first broadcast was the the Los Angeles Rams before they moved to St. Louis, then they went back. And it made sense because, you know, Hollywood isn't there. They're very forward thinking.
Speaker 2:But how much have you seen an evolution in the technology that goes into, you know, broadcasting football game?
Speaker 4:Well, it's crazy. I've been doing this for about twenty five years now and, you know, in a bunch of different sports. And it just used to be, you know, you go to the game, you watch the game, you eat your food and you go home. Now, it's different because it you have to have a technology experience.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:The reason why is, I mean, staying at home sounds like a good proposition.
Speaker 2:You have
Speaker 7:your big TV,
Speaker 4:your your couch, you have your food. Yeah. So we wanna we wanna make a reason to come to the park. We wanna enhance that experience. So how can we get it to be kind of a social experience?
Speaker 4:How can we get something that'll get you off your couch Mhmm. And coming there and having a great time? Because I mean, it's also not cheap to to a game,
Speaker 2:you know.
Speaker 4:It's it's a significant dollar value from your wallet and an entertainment dollar. So we wanna make sure that you have the the best experience possible. Mhmm. And then, I mean, you look at the people watching sports. What are we doing now?
Speaker 4:We're, you know, we're all on our phones, you know, we're all on our technology. We all want more data. Mhmm. So it's like, it's not trying to get people off their phones. It's like, how do we stats, more plays Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Know more things about their their favorite players and really bring the action to you. And then, I mean, with us being kind of an influencer economy, everybody wants to show show off where they are. Right? So we're like, what a better place to show off where you are and having a good time there and then your friends are gonna be jealous and then come and enjoy the game as well. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Rank the most like rank your tech stack based on importance on game day. Like specifically during the game and I want this in the Interact at
Speaker 2:the top. No,
Speaker 1:no, no, no. I'm talking about like when like if if if you're just an observer and you're enjoying the game and you're experiencing, you know, a bunch of different sets of technology. What is the average person not noticing that is going on in the background that you're fixated on?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I mean, they're not noticing it because that means it's working, right? Yeah. So I think you start from the foundation, the infrastructure, the network infrastructure and, you know, tell everyone they're like, what is that? I'm like, that's the plumbing of our organization.
Speaker 4:That's that's where everything flows. That's to make sure without that, we have absolutely nothing. We're we're cooked. So I mean, you know, Cisco is a great partner of ours and and we work together. It's it helps that we're in Silicon Valley Yeah.
Speaker 4:Which it helps but also hurts because everyone knows technology in there. Right? So everyone coming to the game, they expect the best. So which is a great challenge
Speaker 1:and one of the reasons why I
Speaker 4:went there. So that that that infrastructure has to be solid to deliver you WiFi. Yeah. And there's just more and more need for it. Right?
Speaker 4:We have to keep scaling it up now, know, with AI coming down the pipe, everyone's, you know, looking up their their LLMs and on their phones and obviously sharing their experience and, you know, with advanced stats and and things like that. It has to be frictionless for them. Right? So that network infrastructure has to be solid, not only what's going on in the stands as the fans, but on the field too. We can't have, you know, scoreboards go down, we can't have a coach comms go down, so we work together with the NFL Sure.
Speaker 4:To do that. So that's incredibly important to the us. And then with that hand in hand is actually our cybersecurity posture.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 4:I mean, we can have the best systems in the world, but, you know, one hack, you know, one cybersecurity incident and it's a it's a massive problem. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is that mostly like DDoS just like come just like adversarial hackers just trying to like take you offline, screw things up, create economic damages or is it specifically like break in and steal credentials, everything, all of the above?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I imagine every day there's somebody that would love to like broadcast onto the Jumbo Tron.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like this crypto scam or something. I don't know. What's the shape of the threat?
Speaker 4:There is so many different threats.
Speaker 1:Like, I
Speaker 7:mean, you just named confusing.
Speaker 4:And you're scratching the surface.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Because we're so visible, like, you know, every Sunday, the world's looking at us and, you know, it's it's a it's a visible attack vector. I mean, we have an incredible cyber security team. Mhmm. We work again with the NFL.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And then, you know, share knowledge with other teams because, you know, we're we're competitors on the field, but colleagues off the field. Sure. And so we work together to make sure that we're mitigating risk and Mhmm. You know, it's not if we are attacked, it's when you're attacked.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we try and make sure to stop that. So you have to be proactive and instead of reactive. If we're reactive Yeah. We've already lost the battle.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is NAB important for you?
Speaker 5:NAB?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The national
Speaker 4:The show?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The show. Yeah. Like like like we go for for the camera stuff here. We try and learn
Speaker 4:It's great show. Yeah. We do send a big team there.
Speaker 2:If that's like important to you or if there's a different conference there. You're you're meeting more people and talking to more suppliers.
Speaker 4:No. We do send a lot of people to NAP. Engineering team, I mean Yeah. It's it's definitely important to us because look at our our broadcast size. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Have, right now, I I believe the largest outdoor four k video screens in the league. So we we do send a lot of people there. I mean, you wanna be around the best in
Speaker 6:the race.
Speaker 2:We have
Speaker 4:a lot of shows Yeah. Yeah. That we go to. But it's not only you don't wanna stay inside the industry. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I I always say you learn your best when you're looking outside. So who's doing what great? Doesn't have to be from sports.
Speaker 2:Take that. And what is what is like the top down, mandate or standards that are shared from the NFL? Like there's obviously broadcast standards if you're delivering to ESPN or ABC or NBC, but, what what does need to be standard across the NFL broadly?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, the NFL has their their standards across the NFL Sure. In terms of, you know, WiFi infrastructure Sure. Connectivity.
Speaker 2:Expectations. Yeah. Expectations. Team has
Speaker 7:to be.
Speaker 4:Exactly. But, you know people
Speaker 1:in their
Speaker 3:own way.
Speaker 4:You know, us at the 49ers, you know, our team always over performs on the field, you know, we're always expected to win a championship. You know, that's what we try and do. Mean, it's difficult but that's like our goal. So, you know, with with me being in in the in the technology team, you know, we're trying to be the best. Again, we're in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 4:So we expect more. So I wanna go over and above and deliver an experience that's not just kind of the minimum. Yeah. It's an experience where you're come there and say, Levi's team is unbelievable. Like, this is this is insane.
Speaker 4:Let's let's let's go there. This is something different that maybe, you know, somebody like a Disney should copy. Right?
Speaker 2:Or or
Speaker 4:Starbucks or somebody else in the industry, sorry,
Speaker 3:if they're not sponsors.
Speaker 2:How much different is the the the Super Bowl specifically? Is there more demands on your organization for a bigger event or is it sort of the same as any
Speaker 1:other game?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, the Super Bowl is one of the world's largest arguably, world's largest sporting event Yeah. Especially in this country. And the the demands are greater, and we work again hand in hand with the NFL Mhmm. As their event.
Speaker 4:The the capacity, the the WiFi, the bandwidth, it it always sets records wherever they go. I mean, our the previous record at our stadium was Taylor Swift, which was an incredible concert,
Speaker 1:by the way.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I mean, her her demographic, super tech savvy. Yeah. Soon as she came out on stage, people are, you know, putting up their phones and sharing that and it blew away our bandwidth records.
Speaker 7:And it
Speaker 4:was a couple of years ago and we expect this to go even higher. But that's a record that's always made to be broken because people are using more data, not less. Right? So we always have to prepare and scale up as well. Well,
Speaker 2:Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 1:I mean, I have a lot more questions, but it was great having you on
Speaker 3:the show. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Thanks so
Speaker 4:much for time. Thanks, Great to
Speaker 1:meet you. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 2:Oh, let to So let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy apps, servers, databases, more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And, we have our next guest already here. He showed up a little bit early.
Speaker 2:We can bring him down. If he's down,
Speaker 1:let's do it. Talks about
Speaker 2:Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT HR finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. It's Tony. Good to see you. It's up, man.
Speaker 7:Good to
Speaker 2:see you again. Good to have you. Data centers in space, which you
Speaker 1:got? When
Speaker 2:are we going?
Speaker 1:Coming in hot.
Speaker 2:Me, you, the International Space Station. Let's break it down.
Speaker 7:You know, the space tourism industry is quite a quite a fun one. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Would you go? Would you do the Blue Origin thing where they blast you out past the Carmen line? Good enough for Katy Perry. It's not good enough for you.
Speaker 2:What's
Speaker 1:going on?
Speaker 7:It's it's like, you know, like you're in free fall.
Speaker 6:You're not
Speaker 2:actually in free Oh, Carmen line. I wanna
Speaker 7:be like going around for days. Oh, okay. I want my bone density to start to atrophy. Right? It's like, I I truly wanna feel the negative effects of space.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's not enough just to go. I I think I would do it. It's a right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's better than being hanging out at on all
Speaker 7:the cool stuff that our astronauts do. Right? Like, you know, put water and then like they're bubbling and then you like try and drink the water or, like, you know And
Speaker 1:they'll be unplugging the GPU plugging it back.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's what you pay for your space tourism. You gotta go
Speaker 7:unseated ship. Ninety seconds of servicing. Yeah. SpaceX settling.
Speaker 2:One ninety second trip at a time. No. But people were wondering, you know, TPUs, NVIDIA going on the on the on the Starlink v five or whatever something gets up there. It feels like this will be something more like a Tesla Silicon per chip, an AI chip. Like, do you have any insight into like what the process if you wind up figuring out how to heat dissipate, if you wind up figuring out the costs, what might the chip look like?
Speaker 7:I think I think, you know, everyone freaks out, oh my god, putting stuff in space is expensive. Yeah. But if you look at like starship launch cost and, you know, they keep falling, you're you're like fine. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 7:Like I think that's not you know, by the end of the decade, the cost of space launch will be fine. Mhmm. The heat dissipation, I mean it's a challenge where you just put a massive massive effectively radiator. Yep. And it's it's fine.
Speaker 7:Right? By the end of the decade, like, you'll be good. Mhmm. I think I think the big challenge is that chips are just really unreliable. Right?
Speaker 7:Sure. And so so how do you deal with, like, a couple things? Right? Satellites can only be so large before they, like, you need start needing a lot of support and structure before they tear themselves apart.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So when you look at like the the launches, right, these these things are shooting out sat like tiny satellites Yeah. And many of them. Okay. So you can't have like a big fully connected cluster of chips. And then and then like on top of that, right, how do how do you deal with any random error?
Speaker 7:Mhmm. On on earth, have text running around the data center unplugging stuff, putting in spares, things What like do you do in space? You RMA it to the factory where they like might unsolder it and resolder it and then like test it and it works and go back out. Yeah. Sometimes it just just trashed.
Speaker 7:Yeah. But like, you know, that's the challenge to me.
Speaker 2:Is that is that I I I feel like maybe the the pattern we should be looking at is like how often do the Tesla self driving chips need to get serviced? Because that's like the the the team that would probably be building or, like, bridging the gap there. Like, the Starlink satellites, sure they go down, but, the service works. Like, you're you're just relying on some sort of like, you know, 90% uptime stuff's coming down. But most people that are in a waymo, like the chip keeps working.
Speaker 2:Right? Most people that are in a Tesla self driving, like they're not like, you don't hear about Tesla owners being like, I love FSD, but I'm constantly in the shop getting my my custom silicon chips unseated and reseated. Right?
Speaker 7:Well, I mean, it's it's also a function of like the complexity of a chip. Right? Sure. You know, if if a chip is twice as fast Yeah. And let's say the bit error rate.
Speaker 7:Right? Like how often a bit flips Sure. Is the same, then it's airing out twice as often. Yeah. But let's say the chip is 10 x as big.
Speaker 7:Right? And so when you look at like a Tesla FSG chip, very very good, very very efficient, very still like relatively Small. Inexpensive and cheap compared to you know, a big old GPU Yeah. Or TPU or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:Right? Those things are extremely large. Mhmm. And, you know, again, like if if the error rates are the same Yeah. Then it it fails 10 x more.
Speaker 7:But in fact, the error rates are a bit harder, a bit higher because they're pushing these things to the absolute limit. Yeah. Whereas, Tesla does have some level of like Well, first of all, the Tesla car has two chips sort of redundancy already built in. Right?
Speaker 2:Maybe you do that on the satellite, but then there's more power, more
Speaker 7:Yeah. Right. So so the whole adore, right, of it is Yeah. Is Free energy. You know, effectively power is free.
Speaker 7:Right? And solar panels you look at the cost curve of solar panels, you look at the cost curve of Yeah. Satellite launches. You're you're like, this is this is free. This is great.
Speaker 7:Power is less than 10% of the cost of the cluster. Sure. Right? So so like it's that 90% you're not saving anything on.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And in so far as much as
Speaker 1:Potentially a 100 times the hassle.
Speaker 7:Yes. Yes. Yeah. There's this whole like, you know, like if you look at NVIDIA GPUs,
Speaker 1:right? Yeah.
Speaker 7:When you first turn on the cluster, about ten to fifteen percent of them fail RMA in the first two weeks. Wow. And then that's fine. Like, you have to receipt them, whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Like, the industry knows how to deal with this. Yeah. Right? And and over time, like, Hopper's now at five percent, but Blackwell's still ten to fifteen percent. Wow.
Speaker 7:Right? It actually started out higher than that. Sure. And when a new generation comes out, it's gonna be higher than 15%. It'll it'll have its curve gradually decline down.
Speaker 7:But Yeah. You know, who who's gonna are you gonna test it and burn it in on the ground? Or are gonna say 5% of my chips or 15% of my chips are trashed? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Because someone can't go up there and like do these things. Yeah. Or am I saying, oh, I need robots who can do all this stuff in space and now that's like an additional engineering problem when sacks of meat are actually very cheap?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sacks of meat. Yeah. Speaking of NVIDIA, we haven't talked since the Grok acquisition. What does that look like in the bull case?
Speaker 2:Like, if it's if it's a good if the next version of Grok is a great chip, is it sitting next to the, you know, h 200, h one hundreds in the in the rack, g b 200? Like, how does it fit into the actual, like, what NVIDIA deploys? Is it just a separate chip
Speaker 7:that's selling on the side? I think it's a big vibe shift from NVIDIA. Right? Before they were like, alright. I got this big GPU.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Everyone's gonna use this GPU. Software ecosystem of the GPU is so good. Okay.
Speaker 7:It's one size fits all. Yeah. Everyone, you know, like, everyone's trying to make all these, like, specific point solutions. Yeah. But we've got the thing that's good good at everything.
Speaker 7:Okay. And then they had a vibe shift. Right? They launched this thing called CPX
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 7:Which is a chip made for pre fill
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:With, you know, prompt processing, creating a kv cache. And also good at like video generation and image generation. And that's coming out later
Speaker 3:this release,
Speaker 2:they were really talking about video generation as well.
Speaker 7:So so yeah, you've got like CPX, you've got like the standard GPU, now you've got the Grok chips and they all fill a different niche.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:But really it screams, oh crap. We don't really know exactly where AI is going, which I don't think anyone does. Right? I mean, it's it's moving so fast. The software is.
Speaker 7:The model architectures, etcetera. So we're just gonna like engineer solutions that are along multiple points of the Pareto optimal curve and then, you know, one of them will
Speaker 2:win. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right? And I think I think it's like sort of like a big vibe shift from Nvidia. Mhmm. Also, just knew OpenAI was gonna do the Cerberus deal, so they freaked out. But
Speaker 2:Got it. Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah. Get me up to speed on what makes Cerberus important in the ecosystem right now.
Speaker 7:So so, you know, you you have people thinking like, oh, latency matters in terms of where a data center is. It doesn't matter at all. What matters is, you know, as we've moved from, you know, chat applications which were like or search response immediately. Chat applications, let's say response takes ten, twenty, thirty seconds. You've got agents, you know, I don't know, my cloud codes are working in the background for for a long time.
Speaker 7:Right? Yep. It doesn't matter where the data center is. But what does matter is that these streams of inference take, thirty minutes versus ten minutes versus five minutes. And for a lot of people, I'm fine to spend 10 x the price Sure.
Speaker 7:On something that completes 10 x faster.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so so Cerberus sort of just makes a ton of sense there. Yeah. So OpenAI, you know, they've got these like long horizon. There's there's like Codex 5.2 Yeah. Extra high thinking or whatever.
Speaker 7:It's terrible. Can you guys teach them how to market? OpenAI, you have to sponsor this podcast. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We had Tivo
Speaker 2:yesterday and I did actually ask him like, I I I had the Codex app pulled up on my desktop and I was like, there are six different models and then there's a then there's another button that I can pick to it.
Speaker 3:Well, how many
Speaker 1:different products are called Codex now?
Speaker 6:There's a lot.
Speaker 7:Right? And now there's an app. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Actually have another guy on just to do branding. Lexicon branding came on the show yesterday talking about the the all the naming
Speaker 1:Naming architectures.
Speaker 2:Naming architectures. It is complicated, but hopefully
Speaker 1:You could tell his blood's boiling because like all the AI companies just have the most chaotic Anthropic, Claude, Claude code, but also you can use Claude code for other stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But yeah, I mean, with with Ceruleus, it seems like there is a value to it, but are they constrained on the supply side? Like, can they actually scale up to, you know, a Colossus style data center that could actually speed up codex not just for like one user, but all the users.
Speaker 7:So so, I mean, servers can speed up multiple users for sure. Yeah. The question is sort of like where you use it and that's where they have to like figure out where within Codex. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 7:Because there are times where Codex is running for like ten hours. Yep. And sometimes you don't mind. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 7:Screw it. I've put up this nice prompt. Gone. Work on it. Refactor my code.
Speaker 7:Do this thing. Do this task. Yeah. Other times, I want this iteration feedback loop. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So how do you expose it to the user without saying, hey, actually, there's another toggle. Your is 18 times.
Speaker 2:Well, hopefully, like a really robust model router. But it feels like that's been a process.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So so the OpenAI deal is, like, for seven fifty megawatts. It's Okay. It's not that much capacity Yeah. On the order of, what OpenAI has talked about.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You know, by the '28, they'll be at, like, 16 gigawatts Sure. Of that
Speaker 2:So it's just like cutting edge, the most price insensitive customers in that specific use case of this is the type of prompt that you need to return fast, then you'll get the speed up potentially.
Speaker 7:Right. Right. And and they've gotta figure out how to do it from a product, exposing to the user, etcetera. But it it it's it's clearly something where there is demand. Right?
Speaker 7:Like, don't know. Like, Andrej Karpathy doesn't care if he's spending a thousand bucks per his agent Sure. Per second or whatever. Right? Like, you know, so whoever it is, these these like super cracked engineers don't care at all.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And then obviously there's like a long tail of like actually cost does matter for people. And so so all along that curve they've gotta have solutions. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. When did you first think that x AI might end up at another Elon company?
Speaker 7:I mean, has been rumored for a long time. Right? Yeah. Like people are saying Tesla, Tesla, Tesla for
Speaker 2:Yeah. The longest It's harder with a public company.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. And then and then a few a bit ago, people were like, oh, SpaceX AI. I'm like, wait. This makes no sense.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then there was a very coordinated, like, narrative pump. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:Like And then the space data center.
Speaker 1:The end of last year. No. It's perfect. It was like almost like perfectly telegraphed.
Speaker 7:Well, there's there's a bet, right, between basically the head of compute of XAI and the head of compute of Anthropic. Mhmm. And the bet is what percentage of worldwide data center capacity is in space by the '28. And the bar is 1%. Oh, wow.
Speaker 7:And so the XAI guy is like really bullish. The anthropic guy is like, I'm a little sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So but it's it's a really interesting bet.
Speaker 7:I I take the under on 1% by '28 because that's a gigawatt in space. Yeah. But it's actually not that crazy. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's roughly a 150 Starship launches.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:We'll get them to a 100 to get them to a gigawatt in space. Yeah. So, you know, Starship hasn't worked yet
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fully. I was looking at the energy draw of the current star, Starlink fleet and I think they're at like, what is it, 200 kilowatts or something like that. So you you you get a thousand of those, 200 megawatts and like you're starting to be be in the territory, something
Speaker 7:like that. Yeah. So the v two star satellites, I think, are the only ones they've launched. Maybe they've launched a few v threes, but the v threes are coming soon. And those are those are, like, a 100 x more bandwidth each.
Speaker 7:Right? Yeah. And and more power.
Speaker 2:And just more power. And so I when I'm just thinking of, like, can you scale this thing up at all? It's like, are they two orders of magnitude off? Are they three orders of magnitude? This feels like they're, like, one order of magnitude off being run something that looks like an h 100.
Speaker 7:I think the metric is, 50 it's either 50 kilowatts a ton or something like this per satellite for v three.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 7:If it let's say from v three to whatever the compute thing is Yeah. They double it again, get to a 100. I think that v twos are like 25.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So if you get to a 100 kilowatts per ton Yeah. For launch, it's it's only a 150 or so Starship launches. Yeah. I think it's so reasonable.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Maybe not 28. Maybe it takes 29. But like, you know, it's it's so reasonable. The question is cost and reliability and, you know, what happens when the chip fails?
Speaker 7:How do you service it? That kind
Speaker 3:of stuff.
Speaker 7:How do you how do you deal with having clusters be much smaller instead of like, you know, these big clusters? Even for inference, big clusters are useful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. How do you think about Google's response to Grox or Eris TPUs, obviously, very successful. But are they forking that project to eat more of the Pareto curve?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So so for the longest time, Google's had one main line of TPUs. Right? Made by Broadcom. And then sort of next year, they've diverged it.
Speaker 7:Right? Where Broadcom makes a TPU and MediaTek makes a TPU. These two TPUs are focused at different things. And they're fabbed at They're both fabbed at TSM. Everything at the end of the day goes to Rackus.
Speaker 7:Right?
Speaker 2:I I wanna I wanna go there next, but it goes to Rackus.
Speaker 7:So fat by TSMC regardless, but both of these TPUs are focused on different things. Okay. And they've actually got a third project for another kind of TPU there. They also see this need to proliferate Okay. Along the curve of like, hey, do I care a lot about super high amounts of flops, not that much memory?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Do I care a lot about super fast on chip memory only? Do I care about three d stacking memory? Do I care about, you know, the sort of general purpose middle ground AI chip which is what, you know, an h 100, a black well
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:A TPU looks like today. You know, they're sort of like, oh, we need to hit the entire Pareto optimal curve. And it's like, okay, within this, there's training versus inference differences and like what numerics you want and all these other things. There's so much complexity there. Everyone everyone sort of is diverging their roadmaps once they're at a sufficient scale, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are are is Google still way ahead on cross data center training? Yes. And are the other labs like is that is that important to the other labs to catch up there? Or is it something that will just naturally happen because everything sort of commoditizes?
Speaker 2:Or do the other labs need to sort of marshal some Herculean effort to like crack the code on what it takes and what Google's doing?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So so it's a couple of things. Right? In 2023, everyone thought that scaling was pre training. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right? You know, more parameters, more data. Oh, okay. And that's very difficult to split across data centers. And has Google been able to do that?
Speaker 7:And Google's been able to do that to an extent. Right? So what they've done is they've got you know, they don't have the largest individual data center campus. But what they do is they do these like regions where it's like, hey, each data center is roughly 40 miles apart from each other.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:So in Nebraska and Iowa and then in Ohio, they've got like these complexes and now they're building one in Oklahoma, Texas. Got it. You know, these complexes where there's these data centers pretty close to each other.
Speaker 2:So it's not really cross data center across the world. Right. It's just across like region.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And then that that makes a lot of the difficulties a lot easier. Flip side is we've also moved to RL. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 7:And majority of the time of the chips is spent generating data, right, only doing forward passes through the model. Sure. And then you only send the final tokens that you verified sort of back to train on to the training to the train to train. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 7:So then you end up with like, oh, instead of in pre training scaling, you need to like synchronize all the weights every ten, twenty, whatever seconds. Mhmm. When you're doing these rollouts and especially as things get more and more agentic in training, you might not only need to send not the entire weights but just the tokens that are relevant. So way smaller amount of data and way less frequently. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Right? Minutes at a time instead of seconds at a time. Yeah. And so you've got this like now now it's become like reasonable where, oh, actually multi data center training is completely reasonable. Yep.
Speaker 7:And people do this. People do multi data center multi chip training. Sure. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 7:You know, you do your inference on one set of chips and you do your training on another set of chips. So like, Anthropic does this. Yeah. I don't know if Google does this, but Google's kind of already, got the cards. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. Got it.
Speaker 1:Let's go to a market. Yeah. Talk about Merakis.
Speaker 2:Just there's this debate. TSMC risk, is that the bottleneck or is energy the bottleneck? I was doing back of the envelope calculations. It feels seems like we're using maybe like 1% of global energy production or Western energy production on AI specifically workloads. And then we're using like 50% of leading edge fab capacity on AI workloads.
Speaker 2:And so that feels like, okay, well, even if we all agree and we say as a society, we're going all in on AI, we can only double the AI chip capacity before we need to build more fabs. That takes years. Whereas we could say, everyone turn off your air conditioning. We're sending the electricity to the data centers. Right?
Speaker 2:Like like we have the ability to to generate. So we have we have create new I just get something?
Speaker 5:Clap it before
Speaker 1:turning off the AC.
Speaker 2:Turn off your Bob needs to eat.
Speaker 7:Heat strokes for all the grandmothers. Yes. Yes. I need my cat Nancy videos.
Speaker 2:You need to feed Clawd. Right? But but but seriously, like, there's this debate over, you know, is TSMC the main bottleneck or energy the bottleneck? How are you feeling about that?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. So so sidebar before I answer the question because I think it's fun. Yes. You know, in The US, it's insane to say turn off your AC for AI.
Speaker 7:Yes. Right? And the general public hates AI Of But in Taiwan, they've had droughts before and they've turned off water to entire cities. They're like, oh, you get to you get water three days of the
Speaker 2:week. Woah.
Speaker 7:And then the fabs still get supplied water. It's like, this is Wow. You know, you gotta understand the mindset. We are not ready as weak Americans to do this. Yeah.
Speaker 7:That's crazy. No. But at the end of the day, right, like, water water water and power are certainly less big of constraints. Now now, you've got to imagine, like, you know, semiconductor industry is used to, hey, doubling the amount of transistors made every year or two. Yep.
Speaker 7:Part of that is Moore's Law, part of that is more more capacity. Whereas the energy industry in America wasn't. And and so, like, initially, people were, like, not creative. They're like, let's do let's do these kinds of gas plants. It's like, well, no.
Speaker 7:Now we've realized, you know, yes, there's three main main manufacturers of turbines and then you've got for a dual common cycle, then you've got like IGTs. But you've also got like medium speed reciprocating engines. Right? Like, turns out Cummins can make, like, a million diesel engines a year, and, like, those can make electricity. Like, if I don't give a fuck and I put it in West Texas, easy.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So now it's more of, a regulation thing, a supply chain thing. Power is not a constraint in insofar, like, that much. Right? I think it certainly is a constraint still today.
Speaker 7:It was the biggest constraint in 2425, data center capacity power Mhmm. Because the industry was just not ready. People have woken up. They've, like, sort of been shocked to the system. Now you've got, you know, tens of gigawatts being deployed.
Speaker 7:You know, next year, 30 gigawatts are being added and we think the power is there for it. Wow. What was it this year? It's it's or this year is like I think it's like 18 ish, 10 ish. Okay.
Speaker 7:15 to 18 ish. Sorry.
Speaker 2:So so almost a doubling.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Almost a doubling. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 7:And when you look at when you look at TSMC and the crew, right, there is not really, oh, this random, you know, there's 12 people making medium speed reciprocating engines that you can now convert to make power at some random data center. No. No. No. There's like there is Arrakis.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:Right? There is one set of SPICE. Like, you know, there's Yep. You know, that's it. Right?
Speaker 7:And so and then and then the flip side is like, okay, when you have 12 vendors, everyone's got a little bit of slack capacity. You know, there's more likelihood. You know, you can people are like, oh, turbines you can't get. You can call a broker and you can get a turbine. You might be paying 50% more, two x more, but you can get a turbine.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right? Like, it's But you can't get
Speaker 2:a three nanometer fab.
Speaker 7:You cannot get a three nanometer fab. Exactly. And so when you talk about what's the you know, the the baton got passed from semiconductor shortages in '23 Mhmm. To power and and data centers Now it's in '24, '25. '26, we're still we're we're swinging the pendulum Mhmm.
Speaker 7:But it will fully beach semiconductors again in '27. Right? Mhmm. And so we see this across the entire space of the ecosystem. It's not just TSMC.
Speaker 7:It's also memory both. Mhmm. Because both of them have built at a certain pace. Now, TSMC has been expanding at some rate. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:The memory makers, in fact, have just not expanded capacity. Basically, they've not built new fabs since 2022. Yeah. Because their their cycle is so undulating. Right.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And and so when you look at it, it's like, oh, even if they wanted to double capacity, they need to build the fabs. Yeah. Right? And building the fabs, it is the most complex building humans make.
Speaker 7:Right? It's it's it's it's the entire air of a clean room circulates itself every one point five seconds. What? And you don't even feel it when you're inside. Really?
Speaker 7:It's like that. And and it's like parts per billion of particles. Right? Like, it's it's actually insane how you could you could get coughed in the face by someone who has COVID and not get COVID.
Speaker 2:And so It gets circulated so fast that it doesn't even hit you. It's like it's
Speaker 7:like it's that meme of,
Speaker 2:like, the spraying when someone's talking and then it's just it
Speaker 7:gets circulated. So so one another another sidebar is everyone knows COVID, like, really popped off in Wuhan. Yeah. Right? Wuhan also is home to China's largest memory company, YMTC.
Speaker 7:Oh. And so when they were like welding people into their homes, the people who worked in the fab still went to work. Wow. It was because it's, you know, one, it's a national importance. But two, these people are getting sick.
Speaker 7:This fab is way too clean. Oh, crazy.
Speaker 2:Sorry, Jordy.
Speaker 1:I wanna talk about Oracle. They put out a post this morning that said, our partners financing for the Dona Ana County, New Mexico, Shackleford County, Texas, and Port Washington, Wisconsin data centers are secured at market standard rates progressing through final syndication on schedule and consistent with investment grade deals. Obviously, they were fast following their posts from yesterday where they said that NVIDIA OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds and meet its commitments. And obviously, everyone was looking at this being like, give me a cigarette.
Speaker 1:They're like smoking like it's like bank run language. I haven't seen posts like this since like the FTX.
Speaker 2:Is there just bad comms or
Speaker 7:is there something worrisome? It's it's terrible comms. Yeah. Like like, I I told my Oracle context is like, who the hell is in charge of the Twitter? Like, what are you doing?
Speaker 7:NVIDIA did something similar last year when the whole TPU mania was
Speaker 1:Yeah. Going was yeah. It was it was it was like we're we're thrilled with Google's progress with the TPU. That said, NVIDIA chips are the only, you know, there's no one asked you to comment. I mean, like, I'm sure a handful of people in your DMs and random, but that doesn't mean
Speaker 2:Doesn't project confidently.
Speaker 7:It's it's sort of the lion shouldn't concern themselves with the sheep. Yes. And like, okay, Nvidia's the lion. Maybe maybe Oracle's a little bit more bumpy, but I think Oracle's like fine. Yeah.
Speaker 7:People are just freaking out because, you know, OpenAI is is peak you know, people are peak negative on OpenAI right now because of how good Anthropix has been killing it.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 7:Sure. Yeah. I think I think it's just like kinda silly. Like they need to they need to hire someone to do comms like a lulu or something. Right?
Speaker 7:Both NVIDIA and Oracle because what are you doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah. How did you process yesterday in general? Jensen was clip farming. Was like, I don't know why he does these street interviews.
Speaker 2:No other CEO does those where they just stick 25 microphones in your face and the paparazzi's flashing. It's a great vibe.
Speaker 7:It's it's you know, Jensen's not been as famous as other CEOs for as long and yet he's so important now. And if you've like If you know Jensen, how he's in meetings, there's I feel like there's two Jensen's.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:There is like PR, like good at PR, just good at talking, good at like making people hyped up and believe what he's doing.
Speaker 2:He's great at standing on stage holding up the chip, delivering
Speaker 7:a sermon. And then there's the real Jensen, which is like a business killer. Yeah. And like actually just knows about every aspect of the supply chain. Right?
Speaker 7:All the way from like niche semiconductor design and manufacturing stuff all the way to like energy power data center like Yeah. And and and then doing the business deals too. Right? And so like you've got this whole like of the whole thing whole range of things that he's good at and he's a killer in. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And clearly, he's like he was in a meeting where he was being a killer and like negotiating like supply contracts or something.
Speaker 5:Oh, and
Speaker 2:he walks outside.
Speaker 7:And then
Speaker 1:he walks outside. Mean
Speaker 2:That's hilarious. That's my experience. But I like it. Yeah. That's awesome.
Speaker 7:And and that's why he was like, you know, like he was like, still killer. Like, no. We never said we committed to a 100,000,000,000, you know, like and it's like
Speaker 1:don't know. Wait. Where do you even get the $100,000,000,000 number from? And it's like, well, you did go on CNBC and, like, you know, make a big deal out of it. Dog and poking joke.
Speaker 1:Assume that it was Yeah. But but they did say in the press release, and remember, these are early talks. Yeah. But they just kinda jumped the gun. This was the height of the press release Economy.
Speaker 1:Economy.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. What's funny is Oracle stock peaked like just like a week after they announced the OpenAI deal. Yeah. And so like the press release of like, hey, OpenAI is gonna this humongous deal.
Speaker 7:Stock peaks. Yeah. Same happened with a couple other vendors who announced deals with OpenAI or Nvidia. Like sort of a lot of these like like they all peaked to that and then it's sort of been like Nvidia OpenAI trade has been going poorly. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And sort of like the TPU, Anthropic, Google, Amazon complex has been doing well. Yeah. It's quite interesting that
Speaker 1:So this you've good good energy back at home with the roommates.
Speaker 2:What what what's going on here? I
Speaker 1:wanted to Yeah. Wanted I got one more thing. So, yes, over the weekend, it was sort of drowned out by all the justice department stuff.
Speaker 7:But Wait. Have you guys talked about Elon saying you can smoke a cigar in the fab? No. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say that's is is part of the whole thing.
Speaker 2:I didn't realize that was related. Yeah. That makes
Speaker 7:no sense.
Speaker 1:Indoor heaters. Yeah. We have indoor heater technology. No one's taking advantage of Yeah.
Speaker 2:What what does the fab look like if you have no humans inside? Like, that's probably his long term thing is like, yeah, there there will be an optimist. But no
Speaker 7:one no. Like, the number of people who work in a fab is, like, irrelevant.
Speaker 2:Like But but but is it is it irrelevant because there's all these things you have to do when a human's in there because they sweat and they breathe. And if you don't have to do that because it's a robot walking down, even if it's puppeteered or teleoperated, you you might be able to have different considerations.
Speaker 7:I don't know if that actually it's a nesting of the cleanliness. Right? Yeah. For example, you've got this wafer you've put like down let's say you put down copper. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And now you're moving it from one area to another. Well, it needs to be stored in a vacuum. But the easiest way to store a vac like or or an inert gas. Yeah. And that's like the thing that's being transported in.
Speaker 7:But then around that, you want it to be super clean as Yeah. You you you if you don't, then the copper starts getting oxidized. It affects our yields. All this sort of stuff happens. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so like you kind of want it to be a nested layer nested layer of like, well, this chain this thing inside the EUV tool is super clean and then the thing feeding it is super clean and then the thing it sits in is super clean because because that's how you get to like there's zero particles. Yeah. Yeah. Well, because like, you know, in the in the in the FOUP and the transportation devices like parts per, you know, trillion and maybe FOUP. It's called FOUP.
Speaker 7:It's FOUP. It's like the thing that moves and it carries the wafers.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 7:And then and then the FAB is like parts per billion and you know, sort of like, you know, you've you've gotta like got this nesting relationship so everything is super clean. Yeah. You know, I'm I'm bullish on robots, like super bullish on robots, but only for like not for tasks that have like TSMC's Arizona fabs or okay. Let's say TSMC Sure. Tainan which I think produces like, you know, indirectly hundreds of billions of dollars of global GDP.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Even directly, it's like still tens of billions of dollars. Has like five, ten thousand people in it. Yeah. Like, it's like irrelevant Yeah.
Speaker 7:In terms of the number of people who work there.
Speaker 1:In terms of the overall economic value
Speaker 7:that's created. Like it's like Yeah. It's like how many people fold laundry or how many people wash dishes or how many people Okay. Like do construction work. Like Yeah.
Speaker 7:These are way bigger markets.
Speaker 2:For robotics. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Speaking of China, what what are you making of the the the Dario essay or he I I guess his comments at Davos about, you know, selling chips to China is equivalent to, you know, nuclear weapons these days.
Speaker 2:The the Ben Thompson line was something like he's okay selling chips because he wants dependency on the NVIDIA ecosystem, CUDA, but he would ban lithography tools from going to China. And I've been wrestling with this idea of like, I don't know if China would accept this, but wouldn't there be a different world where you want them dependent on American LLM APIs and you don't even send them the chips? And you say, yeah, you're you can have as much AI as you want as long as you're paying, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic API. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I I think it's I think it's like a curve of like
Speaker 2:What they will accept.
Speaker 7:It's it's it's, you know, one, you you you push someone to the corner, they're gonna start swinging. Right? Which means And and I'm I'm like very concerned that China does this. Right? Do they do you do you push them too far into the corner?
Speaker 7:Do they say, screw this. We're gonna start being a lot more aggressive. We're gonna we're gonna, you know, do more military actions or
Speaker 2:actions or or even just invest twice as much in
Speaker 7:In global supply chains like take over Africa more than they already have like LatAm, etcetera. There's there's or or just take over Taiwan. Yeah. Right? Because if I can't have the chips, what value is there in Taiwan existing?
Speaker 7:Sure. Sure. In its current state. Right? There's like there's this like game theory aspect.
Speaker 7:Yeah. At the same time, you don't want China to be able to like, you know, if you believe AI is gonna be do what I think many, at least in San Francisco think it's gonna do, which is like completely revolutionize humanity
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And cause GDP growth to accelerate. Yeah. Do you wanna have China also own that technology? Mhmm. And and all, know, their ability to integrate that into their military and all these other things much faster.
Speaker 7:Yep. You know, so there there is like these competing like, you know, interests.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Where where is the like right line? And some people think it's like, hey, sell them AI model. Well, think Dario would say don't even sell them AI model access.
Speaker 2:Don't even sell them tokens.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Think so. I think think Anthropic does not sell AI access to China. Yeah. They they loop it through and you can see this in the traffic data.
Speaker 7:Go through Korea and
Speaker 2:China and course they travel.
Speaker 7:Other places. Yeah. But like so they get it. Yeah. And then the other other side is like sort of like I think like the Ben Thompson view which is like Sure.
Speaker 7:And I think I'm more sympathetic to that. Yeah. Although I think I'm not exactly in line with that which is like and we've been saying like don't sell them equipment. Don't sell them equipment. Don't sell them equipment.
Speaker 7:My view my argument is like more economic in the sense of like if you sell them like tens of billions of dollars equipment, they can make hundreds of billions of dollars of AI value Yeah. Or chips with that equipment. Yeah. Whereas if you sell them AI model access and it costs them this much to get the economic know, they're they're not able to
Speaker 2:You're capturing more of the
Speaker 7:value Exactly. Yeah. And so that's sort of the question that is is at foot here. Right? Do you want them to capture all this value of the of the supply chain
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:In equipment or by buying the chips Yeah. Or using the models, right, and services? And we've seen, you know, across many, you know, stacks. China refuses to accept, you know, using American ecosystem and they'll wait many years before they develop their own. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Whether it was like, hey, they didn't use Windows. They figured out a bootlegging economy. Yeah. Or they didn't use Visa, eventually they came out with like Alipay and WeChat Pay or whatever it's called on. And and like these things are way better than Visa, in fact.
Speaker 7:Right? Lower transaction cost and higher volume.
Speaker 2:I've never used Red Star Linux. It's North Korea's Linux decision. Wait. Really? Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you if you don't if you put it on a network, it'll immediately call home. So you have to put it on a on a on a firewall network or else. It just like steals everything immediately.
Speaker 7:I'm I'm a fan of TempleOS, know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is Doug O'Laughlin suffering from a case of Claude Code psychosis?
Speaker 7:Okay. Yes. Yes. So I think I think everyone's like Claude Code is for coders. It's like, no.
Speaker 7:No. Claude Code is for people who don't code now.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 7:Right? And that's the big realization this year. Yeah. You know, we've got a couple folks now in the firm who have psychosis. But Douglas O'Loughlin who is like semi analysis, number two, he's president.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. You know, he's my boy. He's the one In fact, he's the one who encouraged me to make a Substack.
Speaker 2:Oh, we
Speaker 7:did. A long time ago a long time ago. What were you doing before? I had a WordPress blog.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay.
Speaker 7:And I was like consulting on the But I like, okay, me do a Substack now. Yeah. Because I saw him making money off it. I like, this is shit. Like, why are you why are you paying for this?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Like, there were multiple times where he wrote something. Was like, I could do way better.
Speaker 2:I'll show you.
Speaker 7:And and and and like, obviously, like, was good because we both taught each other a lot of things and we've been great friends. Yeah. Eventually, he joined semi analysis. Yeah. But like, you know, he he his background is he was a hedge fund analyst.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And then he decided to do a sub stack slash walk hike the Continental Divide Trail for like six months walking from Mexico to, you know, and then and then you know, came back to doing substacking, tried to do a fun.
Speaker 2:Six months of touching grass and then he was like, I'm ready to lock it on Cloud Code.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. And and so now he's, you know, like he's he's never been a software developer. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 7:But he's been on a generational run. Like Mhmm. He's he's he's not coding anything. Right? He's just telling Claude to do stuff.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And like, it's to the point where it's like, our our our like head of data, head of IT is like, can you send me that? And he's like, how do I that? And then he's like, he zips the whole thing and sends it to him. It's like local host.
Speaker 7:Yeah. He sends him a leak once. It's like local host. Bro,
Speaker 3:that's not
Speaker 7:how this works.
Speaker 2:But but yeah. No. I I I've talked to some folks at VibeCode, they'll be like and I'll be like, why'd you choose Node. Js? And they're like, what's Node.
Speaker 7:Js? And I'm
Speaker 2:like, that's in very specific Someone?
Speaker 7:Someone? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Tyler. No. But it's
Speaker 3:it's
Speaker 7:it's we went on a we went on a little tour of a lot of our clients. Like, you know, roughly like half our business is or 40% of our business is like hedge funds. So Yeah. We went to New York a week, two weeks ago, and we went to all of our clients. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And like part of it's like them asking me, is OpenAI fucked? Yeah. And I'm answering like, no, I think they're fine. Yeah. And and then like some like actual ideas.
Speaker 7:And then like a lot of it is Doug just telling them Cloud Code is like they're like, you don't have to hire any junior hedge fund analyst anymore. And they're like, the junior hedge fund analysts are like and then he's explaining, you know, what what can you do? It's like, well, like, you can just do like financial models and pro form a financial models and like everything in Cloud Code Yeah. Without ever opening Excel Yeah. And you can generate charts and like you don't need Yeah.
Speaker 7:To know how to code. Yeah. You just need to know how like how this stuff generally works and you can just do it.
Speaker 1:Are how how many hedge funds are just trying to copy trade situational awareness now?
Speaker 7:I mean, I think everyone who's I think I think a lot of hedge funds obviously believe in AI. Mhmm. I think there's a lot of them who don't believe in it, right, to be clear. But a lot of them that have done the best
Speaker 1:why are they selling software everywhere?
Speaker 2:Oh, you mean selling software stocks? Yeah. Yeah. The sell off then?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean I mean, of course, it's like an incremental thing. Right? But anyway, so so these hedge funds like And then then the question is like, okay, if you believe in it, how do you manifest that trade? And and so when you look across the like ecosystem, I would say almost all my clients sometimes think our two years out numbers are too high.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. But like there's there's like Leopold's like, your numbers are too low. And so it's like it's like it's like in general. Right? And I think I think like if you think about how much do you believe in AI and what's your access to information of AI, You know, there's not many hedge funds who live in San Francisco and like fully breathe and live and understand it.
Speaker 7:Then and then depending on how much you believe in AI, do you manifest that trait. Right?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Are you surprised that more hedge funds wouldn't like even smaller shops wouldn't say like, hey, this AI thing seems like it's gonna be big. Maybe we should set up in San Francisco?
Speaker 7:Or hire. There's there's a number of people. Right? So we're we're, you know, we're we're getting an office together. Leopold, myself, Duarcache, and then a client of mine, another hedge fund.
Speaker 7:Cool. And they have one analyst here and it's like Mhmm. And then there's like a number of other hedge funds that are like hiring analysts here. But, you know, being plugged into the AI ecosystem does not mean you're just in San Francisco because you can just walk around and talk to like doofus like Yeah. Startups and VCs and like not actually, see what's coming down the pipeline.
Speaker 7:And you have to combine it with all sorts of information. Right? You have to have a good tune with what's going on in Asia supply chains. You have have a good tune with what's going on in New York. You have to have good tune with what's going on in the financial markets.
Speaker 7:And then like what's going on in credit markets and what's going on in all, you know, the data center energy, blah blah blah, all these different industries. And so it's it's it's actually not like so simple to like be in tune with what's going on in AI. Mhmm. You can easily get like head faked. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Right? You know, for the longest time people were thinking, you know, Adobe is an AI company. And like Yeah. And it's like For for a bit like, oh, Adobe was going down on AI and then they like launched a few AI features and the stock skyrocketed. And then Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Now it's going back down again because people realize, oh wait. No. Actually, it's not an AI company. I I think it's it's the manifestation and thought of like what is actually gonna the world gonna look like if Anthropic three x's its revenue again this year, OpenAI two x's its revenue again this year or you know, by the end of the year, how many people even believe by the end the year AI startup revenue is over a $100,000,000,000? I think that's an insane statement for a lot of people but that's what it's gonna be.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Right? And who believes that number? Right? It's
Speaker 2:like Yeah.
Speaker 7:Very few people. And then you you you draw the continuation. It's like and who believes you know, and when Anthropic says in their funding like, hey, we're gonna have $300,000,000,000 of revenue by the end of the decade. And it's like, actually, I think that number's too low. Because because the economic value of what they're gonna create is gonna be insane.
Speaker 7:And and you tell people, oh, excellent. You know, OpenAI is gonna have 18 gigawatts or 16 gigawatts by the '28, and they're gonna be able to pay for it. And that's like, well, that's $300,000,000,000 of spend. How are gonna pay for it? It's like you sweet summer child.
Speaker 7:Don't worry. Sam can raise. They're gonna blow up on revenue. They're fine. Right?
Speaker 7:Like, it it is like a bit of a vibe thing. It's a bit of like, you know, irrational exuberance almost. Right? Like Mhmm. Leopold's in his, you know, mid twenties.
Speaker 7:Like, I'm 29. Like, we we are irrational. Yeah. Right? Because we have not lived through know, you get these these PMs who
Speaker 1:like You've never been you've never been that humble.
Speaker 7:I I don't know. Like, we almost My family almost went bankrupt in 2008, like, you know, we lived in a motel and we almost foreclosed and we actually did foreclose on one motel. It was like pretty bad but like, yeah, I mean I was still a kid. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 7:I've never been humble. No.
Speaker 1:It's good to I mean it's good to live through that and understand how things can go wrong.
Speaker 2:That's interesting.
Speaker 1:What are you expecting out of Zoc and Meta this year? We've been big Zoc defenders, especially I mean, there's this pressure of like, oh, Meta is spending so much and yet they haven't created, you know, any any AI product that's super compelling or that's really working. And our stance has has generally been Meta's making more money from AI than almost any company in the world outside of Nvidia. So it's like, of course, Zuck should be justified in saying, hey, this is real. It's big.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm gonna like back the truck up and and go all in.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, it's it's clear if you look at the most recent earnings. Mhmm. I think their CPM went up 9% when the consumer's weak. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Which means, like, if you were to, like, try and strip out, like, what is consumer spending increasing for CPM of ads versus what is the effectiveness of their algorithms? Algorithm got better by double digits in one quarter.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right? It's like actually insane how good the algo's getting, right, at serving you the slop in the ads. Right? So so so in that sense, like,
Speaker 2:The big sound of the trough. I love it.
Speaker 7:Slop the
Speaker 4:Slop the
Speaker 1:Slop
Speaker 2:farm. Farm. Slop Slop the slop slop. Daughters.
Speaker 7:I love it. So so, you know, if you if you think about it, right? Like, Metas, where are they gonna like win? Right? You know, think if you have the Galaxy Brain take, it's like, well, they've got the best wearables coming down the pipeline.
Speaker 7:They're gonna put AI on it. Mhmm. Apple won't be able to put good AI on their wearables so they'll seed it all to like Google or
Speaker 1:Well, the other thing people people have had this narrative, oh, as AI gets better, the the value of real world experiences will increase. Mhmm. And I think that's a cool theory. But if you actually play it out, AI getting better means more content that's more, like, effectively crafted for you, more personalized, a 100 times more con a thousand, a million times more content, that would imply to me that people will just use digital products more, which means more time on-site, more time in the app for meta. So I don't know.
Speaker 7:I I mean, I I'm I'm with you entirely. But I think I think like the Galaxy brain take is that you're just gonna have a wearable and that's gonna have AI assistant. OpenAI is trying to make wearables, you know. Mhmm. You know, there's there's you know, everyone's trying to make wearables Google is, etcetera etcetera.
Speaker 7:I think Meta will actually execute and then they'll have a good AI. And then you you stack on like a few things. Right? How do they get users? Well, we've seen at least if you look at the user metric charts, Google's use you know, OpenAI's users were growing, growing, growing.
Speaker 7:They were gonna hit a trillion by the end the year. They ate a 100,000,000,000. Why did they not keep growing in the last quarter? It's because Nano Banana came out and they took all the incremental users. Right?
Speaker 7:And and likewise, if you go look at like you know, Gemini three didn't actually make Google grow that much. It was Nano Banana and then Pro or two or whatever it's called. Right? Those are the ones that made them really grow. Meta's licensed all of Midjourney's code, data, models.
Speaker 7:Right? One. Two, they're like actually just like focusing hardcore on Google.
Speaker 1:Was a billion dollar plus deal?
Speaker 7:The number is undisclosed. Midjourney still exists as a company. Yeah. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:No. It felt it looked to me like effectively a massive exit, but the best case scenario where they can just keep kind of being artists.
Speaker 7:I I think I think if you had me guess, would bet it's a bill over 1,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Right. Every deal that Meta did was over 1,000,000,000. Basically, like, whether it's an employment contract, a licensing deal, an acquisition, everything had a b after it.
Speaker 7:Well, so so the interesting
Speaker 1:thing is You're a zero. Yeah. Miss the zero again.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Every every discussion is how many billions are we spending on hiring this person or buying this company? Yeah.
Speaker 7:Well, Meta interestingly has gone down market for compute because they there's not enough compute in the big size deals. They've actually gone and like What that mean? Bought like small clusters. Oh. Because it's like, well, I want more compute.
Speaker 2:From like long tail neo clouds?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Just like Yeah. From a longer tail.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:Because that's the only place they can get the compute they need. Because you know, they've already like went out and signed big deals with Google and Core Weave and so on
Speaker 2:so forth. Is cluster max three gonna be a smaller shark because of consolidation in the industry?
Speaker 7:No. It's there's more bigger. It's gonna be bigger bigger. Bigger bigger. But you know, so so metal
Speaker 1:That's the thunder.
Speaker 7:That's ominous. It's ominous. So so I think Meta will, you know, capture consumers through generative. Mhmm. If there's more content, people are just gonna go to the content marketplace.
Speaker 7:Right? Mhmm. The creator of the content captures less value as there are more content creators and more diversification of content. Right? And so I think meta just wins by being a platform.
Speaker 7:Right? Google does too and bite denseness too. Right? But like those three win by having a platform. And then the real question is, can they get in the assistant productivity game?
Speaker 7:Right?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And I think this is
Speaker 1:effectively search. Like if you're an assistant, it means that you can like there's some commerce happening.
Speaker 7:Well, spin out and poached a bunch of people from Google. Yeah. So this wasn't in the media much, but like they actually poached Google search people with similar sized deals as like these crazy
Speaker 4:Yeah. Researchers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I always I I you know, demoing demoing any of the the the wearables. You can imagine like Meta wants you to walk around in the world and see like, oh, what are those headphones? And like while we're talking, I just hit my little thing and buy it. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's like you didn't even necessarily know that it happened. But like of course, Meta's gonna wanna
Speaker 2:those are the Sony MDR XU two seven twos four six
Speaker 7:two Dude, I've been I've been screaming about them like doing some proper marketing.
Speaker 2:Branding so fast.
Speaker 7:Literally like they're over here is like w h x 1,000 x m five.
Speaker 2:It's crazy.
Speaker 7:And then their in ear is like w f 1,000 x x m 1,000. It's like, dude, just call them like Bravia buds in Bravia like headphones or some shit.
Speaker 1:China just bought
Speaker 2:Sony brand? Yeah. Ravia brand is actually a Chinese company now. Sony sold their TV
Speaker 7:and PlayStation buds.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. PlayStation. Walkman.
Speaker 7:Oh, Walkman. Something. Something.
Speaker 2:For sure. Anyway, anything else, Jordy?
Speaker 1:No. This is fantastic. I'm excited for, this weekend.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Super excited. You guys
Speaker 1:What are some plays that we don't watch a
Speaker 2:lot of sports? What are some plays? Are some plays a football guy. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You grew up
Speaker 7:in Yeah. Rural Georgia, so I like football. Primal desire of seeing heads clash.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 7:You know. And and and sometimes that manifests in like, you know, Twitter drama and sometimes that manifests in real football. Yeah. All I can say is fuck the Patriots. Okay.
Speaker 1:Woah. Okay. Okay. We're gonna we're gonna since we're gonna be at the game, we're not gonna really get the great experience seeing the ads. Gonna be like glued to my phone.
Speaker 1:I wanna see all the AI, the different
Speaker 2:Well, don't worry. I got some more ads for you. Thank you so
Speaker 7:much for coming. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:How are you?
Speaker 7:Great segue. This message has been brought to you by
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Speaker 2:What else is in the news, Jordy, before we get out of here?
Speaker 1:We never somehow never covered this. Waymo Yes. Confirmed that they raised 16,000,000,000 at a 126,000,000,000 posts according to Ed Ludlow over
Speaker 2:at Bloomberg. Bunch of VC victory last.
Speaker 1:Sequoia getting in the mix. DST Global
Speaker 2:dragging sort of a bold move for a lot of VC firms to go in so early as the company was sort of spinning out.
Speaker 1:And of course It's a magical Google via Alphabet did 13,000,000,000 of the round themselves. This was sort
Speaker 7:nice. Of
Speaker 2:medal of honor
Speaker 5:on themselves after you're
Speaker 1:agreeing with Yes.
Speaker 2:While you pull up the next one, let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast.
Speaker 1:I pull up this post from Redaction.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:It is Twitter, every time a minor AI advancement occurs. Mhmm. And, like, this new block meta changes everything.
Speaker 2:This new block meta?
Speaker 4:It's like
Speaker 2:there's there's
Speaker 6:a lot
Speaker 3:of this going on.
Speaker 2:Well, you know what else changes everything? Gemini three Pro. Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level of encoding and deep multimodal understanding.
Speaker 1:YC wants you to start an AI RENTECH. They want you to
Speaker 2:Just do it. Get out there and do it.
Speaker 7:Start an
Speaker 2:AI RENTECH and then get on Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a Phantom Card. And that's our show. Goodbye.