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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 TVPN. Today is Monday, 01/12/2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp.com. Time is money saved.
Speaker 1:Both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Bunch of fun news out of Ramp. They built a AI agent just for internal production.
Speaker 2:So their back end.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll we will go into that, but first, we gotta pay our respects to the big man Jerome Powell.
Speaker 2:Pull up the anthem.
Speaker 1:The anthem.
Speaker 2:This is this week's anthem. This is this We've been blasting it all morning here in the studio.
Speaker 1:Yes. It is
Speaker 2:It will make you emotional.
Speaker 1:It it's a very emotional song. It The trigger warning. I I guess it's AI generated. But it hits. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We should have gotten lighters for this for sure.
Speaker 3:Lord turn to leverage.
Speaker 1:Of course, this is on the back of it. New York Times reports that federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation of Jerome Powell.
Speaker 3:Mandate over men's
Speaker 1:He took to the
Speaker 3:They wanted loyalty.
Speaker 1:He Jerome dropped a video explaining his side of the story. But instead of playing that, we're playing this.
Speaker 2:Jerome Powell.
Speaker 1:I didn't wanna cry at the office today, but it's happening. Oh, what a story. Powell says the justice department served the Fed with subpoenas. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the US Central Bank has been served grand jury subpoenas from the Justice Department threatening a criminal indictment related to his June congressional testimony on ongoing renovations of the Fed's headquarters. In a statement released Sunday evening, Jerome Powell rejected the notion that the action was driven by his testimony or the renovation.
Speaker 1:Joe Wiesenthal has a post here. He says Powell confirms the Fed has been served subpoenas from the DOJ. Fortunately, we have Tyler Cowen coming on the show today. I'm sure we'll be able to talk to him about that and a whole bunch of other things in the world.
Speaker 2:We'll be asking him should we roll the Fed into Truth Social.
Speaker 1:That's a good that's
Speaker 2:one Or World Liberty Financial. We have options.
Speaker 1:Might be the most entertaining linear lineup and show everyone what who's coming on the show today because we do have Tyler Cowen. Also have Andrew Feldman from Cerebras coming on the show and a bunch of other folks. Harley is joining to talk about agent of commerce and
Speaker 2:Nathan top from Terra. He's building drones Yes. Africa. Excited for that one. And of course, Harley.
Speaker 1:And Ella Marina. Linear, of course, is the system for soft modern software development. Linear is building is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. We also might have a surprise guest joining at 12:15, just so
Speaker 2:you know. We'll see. Yeah. Anyways, watching Sunday night, I'm all excited. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. One more sleep until Monday. And I pull up this video. I've gotta watch Jerome
Speaker 1:A two minute talk. Exhibit. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, real really dark moment. It was funny. Buco Buco Capital shared, like, if it if it's illegal to run over budget on a remodel, my wife's getting the electric chair.
Speaker 1:You didn't give me the punish line when you said that the first time. And I knew where it was going. But anyways, Very political, very fraught, but it's created a number of entertaining
Speaker 2:People have been standing up. Have been up for
Speaker 1:Been been standing up for for the Federal Reserve chairman. And fortunately, I mean, the the administration sees these. They you know, we know that they're very online, and they see the support. So we'll see where the story says,
Speaker 2:like if you would let Jerome Powell crash on your couch for a few months. Sorry.
Speaker 1:AI is really at its best when you need a bunch of, you know, memes and images generated around a a current thing. Before we do the next one, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com. Making the show possible.
Speaker 2:Just said, you just created a million central bankers.
Speaker 1:And Jordy sent this to me. Just burst out laughing so hard.
Speaker 2:It is it isn't I mean, Fed chair, probably one of the worst jobs on earth if you care what other people think about you. Don't Right? It's just like every you know all the time people just have this massive fixation on on you and they're gonna form an opinion immediately. Yeah. But in this case I've never seen people so united
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Around which is heartwarming. Yeah. That's the only
Speaker 1:And it is it is weird because, like, the the prediction is that there will not be another rate cut in January. There's a lot of people that would benefit from another rate cut. If you're if you're long the market, you would probably benefit. But I think people do are generally still fans of Fed independence, they want Jerome to do whatever's best based on the facts and the data and the unemployment and inflation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm surprised there's no reaction in the from from the prediction markets at all. Cauchy still has 94% that the Fed maintains the rate in January.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. But you
Speaker 2:would think this would move
Speaker 1:the needle a little bit because it's
Speaker 2:But at the same time, he is posting opposite.
Speaker 1:Up He's You know I'm saying? I'm not I'm not leaving. You're have to prime me out with the jaws of life. Merrick says, absolute insanity. The Department of Justice just served the Federal Reserve Chair with a grand jury subpoenas threatening criminal indictment over a historic building renovation.
Speaker 1:And interestingly, I I don't know that the details of this building, but it's not like the White House where he lives there. Right? It's a workplace, I assume. It's not like it's his personal house.
Speaker 2:It's not like Based on this, He's not you would direct think he was fisherman. Using Yeah. You would think
Speaker 1:That's what feels
Speaker 2:like. Because the other who is a woman who they they also opened an investigation. I'm blanking
Speaker 4:on Their the
Speaker 2:Fed chair. But in that case, they said like, she she got a mortgage for a primary residence, but she actually ended up not living there full time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which Maybe not But
Speaker 1:at least the That was the sick cook.
Speaker 2:At the Lisa Cook.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, she's not cooked. We'll see. Jerome Powell is appealing directly to the American people and bluntly stating that the criminal charges are not about Congress's oversight role, but rather about the Federal Reserve's independence in setting the interest rate American equities traded a premium because of our respect for law, accountability, and central bank independence. Public service sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats. I will continue to do the job the senate confirmed me to do with integrity and commitment to serving the American people on a Sunday evening before market opened.
Speaker 1:What is the market doing? We should go over to public.cominvesting for those who take it seriously. We have stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more, all with great customer service.
Speaker 2:S and P five hundred is green.
Speaker 1:Green. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So anyways Last
Speaker 1:week Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think everybody expected last night for things to happen. Of course Nothing Nothing ever happens. But we'll see. In some ways, this this will just give the DOJ and the admin more confidence in their decision. Although they did come out and say, like Yes.
Speaker 1:The White
Speaker 2:House had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Trump said, I'm not pressuring. He said something like, I wouldn't even think to pressure him on this particular angle. He's saying, I might I might post something on Truth Social about where I think the interest rate should be.
Speaker 1:He's free to do with that what he will. So I'm sure the story will evolve, there will be a lot of reporting on it. Eddie Elfin Bean says, what are you in for? I gave imprecise information to Congress about the scope of renovations to the Federal Reserve's HQ.
Speaker 2:Trey in the chat says the funniest thing is the Fed renovation is self funded.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. By the actual Fed because it it makes enough money. I think they make a bunch of money don't they make money printing coins, coinage? I I think that they or is that the mint? Is the mint part of the Fed?
Speaker 1:I don't know. But I know that I know that there's
Speaker 5:a number of
Speaker 1:like, there's a number of government programs that are all self funded. Not all of them are, you know, taxpayer money pits. The the the CIA's In Q Tel, for example, isn't is not from the CIA's budget. It makes money because they invest in companies, and they put that money back to work. Very interesting.
Speaker 2:Bubble Boy says, I'm willing to die for the Federal Reserve. Mhmm. So he is Jerome's strongest soldier.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Bubble Boy's getting standing up. 2,000 likes. A lot of people are coming out in favor of Jerome Powell. Quickly, Graphite, code review for the age of AI.
Speaker 1:Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Go check on Graphite.
Speaker 2:Geiger Capital. Powell watching stocks turned green after thinking the mark market would defend him.
Speaker 1:Isn't that Biden?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the tough thing is like if if you assume that, rates are come gonna come down, like, don't exactly wanna sell Yeah. Assets. Yeah. You wanna own assets.
Speaker 1:There's this weird dynamic where you might not like what's happening politically, but there's a big difference between what should happen and what will happen, positive and normative analysis. And so if you you you could be like, I don't like the fact that, you know, the Fed's gonna be less independent. But if it means that interest rates are gonna come down, then that's bullish. That's a bullish catalyst. And so you wind up going long.
Speaker 1:Marco Rubio is finding out he has to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. I haven't followed the Marco Rubio meme too closely. I just know that he has a lot of jobs or keeps getting tapped for things, and so I've seen him in an astronaut outfit. I've seen him in, you know, different Venezuelan memes. I I I don't exactly know where this all came from, but I I'm I'm familiar with the concept of Marco Rubio doing everything, I guess.
Speaker 1:I don't really
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's some it's somewhat depressing because it just means, like, if you're in the if you're in the inner circle, you're gonna you're gonna be you're gonna get a lot of responsibility. And if you're out, you will eventually get the Yeah. The beam of the admin. Move.
Speaker 1:But Well, gold is through the roof today.
Speaker 2:Well.
Speaker 1:Hosts a chart. Gold jumped from forty five ten to forty five eighty five. Not a huge move, but a huge move for gold, of course. So people are bailing on the US dollar potentially. Silver's also up, says the COBESE letter.
Speaker 1:Silver surges above $85 an ounce for the first time in history. It's already up 19% in 2026. There's been a number of hard tech founders who have commented on the fact that silver is actually more of an important material than gold in manufacturing of semiconductor supply chain and a lot of different AI supply chains. And so there's an interesting narrative of, like, the knock on effects of high silver prices. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The Nothing Ever Happens. This is Nothing Ever Happens on steroids. I've never seen so much. Nothing Ever Happens, says Mike Bird, because the S and P five hundred is up on the news of chaos in the financial markets potentially. Very odd, odd scenario.
Speaker 1:Anyway, CrowdStrike, your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So the Apple Vision Pro is in the news because and I think we can pull up this video maybe of Trung Fan posted this. Mark Gurman was a big fan of this.
Speaker 1:Apple Vision Pro announced you can now watch a full NBA game in the Vision Pro, not just a little highlight reel, not just a trailer. And Mark Gurman asked the question, is the total addressable market for watching tonight's Lakers game in the Apple Vision Pro just me, or is anyone else tuning in? A couple of people said, I haven't booted mine up for a year. They still have it. They did turn it on.
Speaker 1:He wound up loving it. Mark
Speaker 2:Has this have they ever done this before?
Speaker 1:Is this They've never done a full game. So they've done MLS highlights. You could watch, like, an eight minute summary of an of an MLS game that had a ton of different cuts. Not a lot of people were not fans of that. There
Speaker 2:were This also release cadence needs to be studied.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. And I mean, that's what Ben Thompson wrote about today in Strathecari. He's he sees all this as, like, crazy own goals, a lot of really obvious things. Also, the reason that you see this video so grainy like this so Mark Gurman loved it in the headset. He said it's absolutely wild.
Speaker 1:It's like watching courtside. Trunk fan has the video here. You can't record what's happening in the headset. You can't just steal an NBA game because so you need to, like, put your phone up against it, and you don't really experience it here because for DRM reasons, you can't just pirate it. You can't just record what you're seeing.
Speaker 1:So the actual experience is better than this. I actually went to the Apple Store yesterday to try and pick up a Vision Pro to experience this, and they were sold out. I don't know if that means that they were just, like, not expecting to sell anymore, so they stopped stocking them. But they didn't have one. But but I've I've played with the Vision
Speaker 2:the I would wait to the real review would be getting the Apple Vision Pro, going to getting going to the actual game Yeah. Getting the ticket right next to the system that they're using, and then just having the headset on and taking it on
Speaker 1:At the game?
Speaker 2:Yeah. At the game. Right? You wanna see how real it is?
Speaker 1:Tyler, what would you do?
Speaker 6:Well, so this is cool because it's like emulating like what is happening in real life. But in VR, you can do like things that like you couldn't do in real life. Mhmm. So like I wanna see what is the point of view like if I'm the ball.
Speaker 1:You probably need so motion sick.
Speaker 6:I wanna be the ball. That sounds terrible.
Speaker 2:You know ball.
Speaker 1:He wants to be the ball.
Speaker 6:I know ball.
Speaker 1:Matthew Ball? Or who's the other ball?
Speaker 6:Dean Ball.
Speaker 1:Dean Ball. Dean Ball.
Speaker 2:Dean Ball.
Speaker 1:We haven't gotten Matthew Ball on the show yet. We need him. He's a great analyst. Anyway, so Ben Thompson wrote about this because he's obviously a huge NBA fan. Also, he's a Milwaukee Bucks fan, and the game was the Lakers versus the Bucks.
Speaker 1:So there's like a royal flush of, like, the sweet spot for Ben Thompson analysis. He had to jump through VPN hoops to watch the broadcast because it was only available in Lakers home market, which is California, also Hawaii, and I think one other state. It's somewhat tricky.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can't No.
Speaker 1:No. If you're in New York and you had a vision pro, you could not watch the Lakers play the box unless you had a VPN. Yeah. There's a lot of details here.
Speaker 2:And That's a huge detail.
Speaker 1:I know. I know. I know.
Speaker 2:Like, I have this I have this $3,000 device Yeah. That is just gathering dust. Yeah. And then you make this big deal about this amazing experience that I can have. And then if I'm not actually within the area that the game is actually taking place, I can't Yes.
Speaker 2:I can't experience it. What's the point of VR?
Speaker 1:So there there are a lot of reasonable critiques like that. Ben puts a lot of those in his piece. I think that there are logical reasons. I don't think Apple is dumb. I don't think they just made a mistake.
Speaker 1:I think these are all contract negotiations. And when we look at the history of sports and transitions through various eras of broadcast and new technologies, I think their decision making makes a little bit more sense, even though I agree from a user experience perspective, what you're saying, what Ben Thompson is saying, makes a ton of sense. So Apple clearly reads Strathecari. They've sent him multiple headsets. He bought his own, but they set they keep sending them to him being like, hey.
Speaker 1:You should try it. Like, we're we're coming out with something new. So they've sent him the new one, the m five Vision Pro, and and and he was ready to he was ready to watch this. He was ready to love this, but he was very disappointed because it it it cut from one scene to another, and so that takes you out of the experience. He says, do away with all of the preshow, special announcer, post show content.
Speaker 1:Just let me put on the headset. And if I put it on thirty minutes before the game starts, I'll just watch the players warm up. And then you don't need any overlays because if I wanna know the score, I'll just look up at the scoreboard. Like, you're in the theater. Like, people pay a lot of money to sit courtside, and they're not like, oh, I also
Speaker 2:having a bad experience because Please, I
Speaker 1:please, do give me an iPad with the score. No. No one cares. They just look at the score. They hear the audience.
Speaker 1:If there's if if something great happens, they hear the roar of the crowd. They see everything. They can even look up at the screen and usually see a replay if they need to. And so all of that should be possible with just one simple Apple immersive camera rig streamed the whole game, and that's it. Instead, they did four different camera angles.
Speaker 1:They're cutting between them, and every time they cut, you get kind of like, woah. Where am I? Like, I just teleported. It's weird. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So my my question was, like, was, like, he so Ben frames this as he calls it Apple. You still don't understand the Vision Pro. He's, like, taking shots at them. And I titled my piece Apple, they actually do understand the Vision Pro. And I think they I think they they've heard his response.
Speaker 1:They've clearly read his piece. He wrote about this maybe two years ago when he got a demo before it even came out, and he said the secret to success with this product will just be put a camera on the field. Let me sit there front courtside. That's it. No editing, nothing else.
Speaker 1:And then every time they delivered him something that was edited, he wrote a piece about how bad the editing was and how you don't need that and just let me let me sit there. And so my question was there's no one that really disagrees with Ben. Like, Ben comes out and says these these things. Every time there's an Apple Vision Pro piece of content that comes out, he comes out and says, too many edits, too many cuts, just let us sit there. And there's not like there's a lot people that are like, Ben's wrong.
Speaker 1:Actually, I love the edits. More edits. Like, they need to be even crack
Speaker 2:Well, be clear, no one's talking about
Speaker 1:except for Ben, So they should clearly listen to him. And no one's arguing that Ben's wrong. But my question is, like, why on earth isn't Apple doing this? Why or or at least why haven't they made it an option? Like, they have the single camera there.
Speaker 1:They could just be like, do you wanna watch the edited version, or do you wanna watch just the normal just sit there in the seat version?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:And then
Speaker 1:Ben would be happy, he'd be writing a glowing review right now. Instead, Apple's not giving what Strathcari wants, and they're feeling the pain because they got an article that was not very very complementary to them in the experience. So I think that this actually has less to do with the technology, less to do with the creative direction and the directorial vision within Apple, and more with just straight up contract negotiations. So and if you go back in history, Ben goes back to some other some other history. I went back to 1947.
Speaker 1:So TV adoption, I didn't realize this. TV adoption went through a fast takeoff. In for 1947, there were 16,000 TV sets installed in America. Eight years later, it was 32 and a half million. It's like Wow.
Speaker 1:Completely asymptotic, completely fast takeoff. So the technology trend was clear, but there was still financial risk to getting the timing wrong for your league. The NFL is obviously a huge beneficiary of TV today. They make a fortune from the Super Bowl ads that are extremely expensive. But in 1949, the Los Angeles Rams, because the Rams are in LA now, but they did they went to St.
Speaker 1:Louis, and then they came back. But they were in the Los Angeles in 1949. They sort of got wrecked because they jumped too early. So the NFL had gone to all the franchises, said, all the teams, we're giving you the permission to sell your broadcast rights this year. This season, if you want to put your your your particular team's home games on TV, you can do that.
Speaker 1:You can go out and negotiate. You can sell those. It's an option. Yeah. And the Rams said, yeah.
Speaker 1:We'll do it. We'll take the jump. They were the only one that did it, and it makes sense since they're in LA. There's a lot of production people here. It would be a natural
Speaker 2:They were a little too TV pilled.
Speaker 1:They were extremely TV pilled, they got burned. So attendance dropped significantly. On an inflation adjusted basis, they lost $2,500,000 of today's dollars. And so the Rams had to go to all the sponsors that sponsor the TV broadcast and say, like, hey. Can you just make us whole because we're gonna go out of business?
Speaker 1:And they did, and the sponsors basically paid the Rams for the difference in what they had taken in ticket sales. But it was not a good it was not a good outcome. And although the the NFL eventually got through all of this and figured it all out, that was not the case for minor league baseball. Minor league baseball attendance at minor league baseball events, minor league events, peaked in 1949 right during the TV install base fast takeoff. And so 49 people 49,000,000 people went to little went to minor league events that year, in 1949.
Speaker 1:By 1957, the total had dropped to 15,000,000. So it actually did wreck the minor leagues in terms of, like, their business model, and they never really recovered. And so the job of a league commissioner is to get the transition right. Like, if you transition too early, you'll have a really, really bad year while everyone just says, hey, I can just do the new thing, the new technology. I don't need to buy the tickets.
Speaker 1:If you do it too late, other leagues might have figured out their their their contracts, their ad sales, their their broadcast rights, all this other stuff. So Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, who we learned about through his connection to Josh Kushner, of course, He said, I think it's my job to incentivize our partners to be able to look out into the future. He's not saying, hey, my job is to get everyone out of the stadiums and into VR headsets ASAP. Like, the end result is like there is a separation between immersive rights and presence rights. So there's broadcast rights, and effectively, they're using the same framework.
Speaker 1:So when they sell a broadcast right, they're not selling the right to they're they're selling the right to broadcast with with an announcer, with multiple cameras, with different cuts and edits. They're not selling you're you're teleported into the stadium. Yep. And that's something that they might sell, but they haven't sold yet. And they're and they're I think they're deliberate about this.
Speaker 1:And so I think when they went to Apple, they said, yes, we can do something. Because they did a deal with Meta, and you can watch a number of NBA games in the Meta Quest, and it's the same thing. They cut around. Even though and and the reviews are bad. Everyone says it sucks.
Speaker 1:And so it's obvious that that the tech companies should, you know, Google, how did did people like this? And it's obvious. No. No. People don't like it.
Speaker 1:But I think the NBA is holding fast that they're like, no. Actually, our courtside seats are really, really, really expensive, and we want to keep it that way. We don't want we won't we don't want it to be substitutive on day one. And Ben Thompson, when he first wrote about the Apple Vision Pro, he said, I would pay thousands of dollars a year for an NBA league pass that allowed me to, in VR, sit courtside. And that's less money than courtside seats to every single NBA game, which is effectively what you're selling.
Speaker 1:So and then how many Ben Thompson's are there? People with Apple and so you so there's there's financial risk there. I think it can work out. I think that there's a deal and there's a price and there's a number. The install base gets to this level, and you price it at this level, and I think there
Speaker 2:are two I think in some ways, they could very easily be two wildly different consumers. Yeah. Like, Ben is probably like Ben Thompson knows ball. Wants to he wants to be able to watch courtside for the love of the game.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Whereas, somebody that's going courtside at the Lakers or the Knicks, they're going there to be seen watching courtside. Right? They're A little bit that. Willing to like it's not you're not just paying to watch basketball. Right?
Speaker 2:Because you could pay like, you know, a fraction to sit a couple rows back. Yeah. You're paying to be sitting courtside.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the other the other interesting angle is is is this, like, region lock thing. It almost feels weirder to allow someone in Los Angeles to watch the LA Lakers play because they really could just buy a ticket and go down to the stadium.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But maybe you should actually So be trying to get
Speaker 2:that's whole point. If you're if you're like a die hard Lakers fan Yeah. But you don't live in Southern California, then somebody says, hey, with the Apple Vision Pro Yeah. You can watch it Yeah. Like, you're courtside, that's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What you actually want is, Ben Thompson's in Milwaukee. He loves the Bucks, but they're playing in LA. He's not gonna buy a flight to go courtside in LA, and so you let him experience that game. And then when they're back in Milwaukee, he can go get the courtside seats in his hometown.
Speaker 1:So you almost wanna do the inverse region lock, something like that. I don't know. What what do think, Todd?
Speaker 6:Wait. So so is that deal where it's just a broadcast, not the actual, like, livestream, is that basically every single league? Can you do the same thing in f one? Because that's also, like I feel like that would be everyone wants that. You're in the you're in the cockpit.
Speaker 1:So so every deal is unique, and there's no there there are some there are some laws around sports broadcasting and and that solidified the blackout periods and made some of that defined some legal language around that. But really, it's up to the leagues to decide how they negotiate these contracts, whether every game's available, only home games are available, region locking blackout dates. There's all sorts of mechanics where for for I I don't know how how true this is today, but I know that if you have a home stadium and it's full, then you can be much more permissive with the broadcast rights because you've sold out all your tickets. But if you're if you're not selling out the the stadiums, then often you won't broadcast as much or you can't broadcast as much. So you'll you'll be in your hometown, and you'll go to watch the game, and it won't be broadcast because they want you to just go buy a ticket.
Speaker 1:Then and then the the equilibrium, like the clearing, the market clearing prices that people that are on the fence who are like, I really wanted to watch the game. I can't watch it here. I'll just go buy a ticket. Then over the time you fill it out. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're gonna be very excited about this. Please. Ben Thompson's gonna join the show.
Speaker 1:Really? No way. Amazing. That's that's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Someone in the chat earlier said you're Ben Thompson's biggest fan. I am. And you are. I am.
Speaker 1:We are. That's amazing. Oh, fantastic.
Speaker 2:So we're working on getting Ben on
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 2:To continue the discussion.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. This will be a lot more extra context because he is he is the expert in this. In the meantime, let me tell you about app loving. Profitable advertising with made easy with axon.ai.
Speaker 1:Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today. Maduro. We're back in politics land, but don't worry, not for long because we're going into watch land because he was caught rocking a Chopard Ganesh, a fantastic Indian watch that is incredibly, incredibly detailed. Look at all these different Swiss made. This is a crazy I feel like this is sort of a lost art.
Speaker 1:You know? Maybe Mark Zuckerberg should get into this. Wear a watch that has, you know, Sweet Baby Rays on the dial. The Sweet Baby Ray's Chopard dial might go incredibly hard. I would love that.
Speaker 1:Also, it was the Golden Globes. I know Jordy didn't watch because you probably haven't seen any of these movies, but they they did, in fact, happen yesterday. Robb Report has some images of the best watches at the Golden Globes. If the Golden Globes were any indication, Subtle is officially on hiatus, says the Robb Report. This year's red carpet made a strong case for statement watches with bold diamonds
Speaker 2:Did we kind of call this originally with the show?
Speaker 1:Did we?
Speaker 2:The Okay. Yeah. I mean, no. I mean, we we the the joke early on was like quiet luxury is over.
Speaker 1:Yes. Loud opulence.
Speaker 2:Not loud opulence.
Speaker 1:A lot of these are screaming loud opulence. In fact, I need to return to my let's start with the beginning of the slide show. We need to return to my our original statements about, you know, the the the value of loud opulence because I see these and I'm like, I couldn't pull these off with my life depended on it. But The Rock was spotted watching a Chopard much like Maduro. But this one is the Alpine Eagle Frozen Summit.
Speaker 1:Look at all those diamonds.
Speaker 2:I like it, but I'd like to see I mean, could we get at least a couple more
Speaker 1:Couple more diamonds.
Speaker 2:Diamonds on here.
Speaker 1:I think it's a little it's a little understated. He could have gone with you know, the rainbow the rainbow one, the gem set? It's the Rolex with all the diamond the different colored diamonds. Who else is wearing fine luxury watches at the Golden Globes? Adam Scott was wearing a Vacheron Constantin Tradition Annal Perpetual Calendar Ultra.
Speaker 2:This is nice.
Speaker 1:That's a very nice watch. I like that one a lot. I also like this Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra that that Glenn Powell was seen rock wearing. Marc Andreessen, notoriously an omega He's an omega guy.
Speaker 2:Omega guy.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:New fund. Maybe this was a nod from Glenn saying, like, I salute Hat tip. Yes. He celebrated $15,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:He probably read the packy piece.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And he says, you know what? I it's time to put on the Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra. In terms of Omega Seamasters, this one stands out to me. Gold is a is a choice, but I think it's working very well here. And you know who else is wearing a Omega Seamaster?
Speaker 1:George Clooney, also an Aqua Terra.
Speaker 2:I would love I would love to know the details of Omega and Rolex and the other brands Yeah. Like fighting over people like Clooney. Yeah. Right? Because, you know, I don't think Clooney's putting on a watch without getting paid.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, we have Ben Thompson in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV bid at Ultradome. Fantastic. Ben, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:There he is. Good.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for hopping on the show in such short notice. I I love your I
Speaker 4:have I have takes to drop. Please. I am
Speaker 2:I am Let's go.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Okay. So, I mean, drop your first takes, and then I wanna know,
Speaker 4:I have a Tudor GMT.
Speaker 2:Very nice.
Speaker 4:Nice. Very Yeah. It's great. But highly recommended. Tudor's great places.
Speaker 1:And and it's covered in diamonds, I assume, like the rocks?
Speaker 4:It is not. It is very basic with a rubber band because rubber bands
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Rubber band. That's good. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So, I disagree with your take. Please. So, my overall view, NBA was on the Vision Pro on Friday.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:They had an NBA clip when they watched the Vision Pro. So, I was there when they watched it, so I gotta try it that day.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:They took that clip out Yeah. For the demo that shipped, and that was in Apple stores.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So you only saw that clip if you were there the the first day. Yeah. And so I don't know if was a rights issues, which I maybe lends itself to your argument or whatever it might be. But it that was for sure, it was like three seconds. Yep.
Speaker 4:It was the clip that sold me on the VisionPRO more than anything because you felt like you were there. It was amazing. Yeah. So they have this finally, I have a live sports thing, which is a big deal. They they demonstrated that they can show stuff live.
Speaker 4:And it worked. It worked well. I don't think there was any technical issues. The cameras are quite small now compared to what they used to be. You could see them on, like, the sideline table and underneath the basket.
Speaker 4:So this technology works. You can watch things live in the Vision Pro, and it should be amazing, and it sucked. And and it sucked because you're getting jerked around all the time. Yeah. You're not you're there.
Speaker 4:You feel like you're there. It is immersive. The unimmersive part is the Apple part, which is some producer in a truck is moving you around. There's a pregame show. I don't need a pregame show.
Speaker 4:I'm sitting courtside. Can watch the players warm up. Yeah. And the reason why I disagree with your take that Apple knows this
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 4:And wants to do it is that every VisionPRO video has the same problem.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:The Metallica video, super cool. You walk in the opening scene of that is amazing. Well, there's the little bit where they're in like the the green room or whatever. Yeah. But you're walking in, you're walking in on James Heffield, and you're in the crowd.
Speaker 4:And it's like walking through and people are reaching and it's like, it's so amazing. And then suddenly, he's going up the stairs and boom, you're jerked to somewhere else. And you're seeing him come off this on the stage. You go back, they cut this MLS video, which they have the rights for. They're overpaying you wanna talk about the f one deal.
Speaker 4:Look how much Apple's paying MLS. Like, this is one of the most absurd overpays in the history of sports. I think they can do whatever they want. They cut a I love laugh tracks, but it's very distracting here. I'm sorry.
Speaker 4:They cut like a season in review video Yeah. That had like 56 cuts in it.
Speaker 7:It's like Okay.
Speaker 2:Do you it's production teams that are just trying to create work for themselves because they go in there and they're like, hey boss, actually the people just wanna let they just wanna put their goggles on and hang out. It's like, well, like, are you doing here?
Speaker 4:I feel like there's just a lack of confidence here. Like like, what I it feels very like it feels when you say it, it's like half assed that we're gonna go out, we're just gonna set a camera there
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And you can sit there and watch the game. Yeah. It's like no, There's this pressure in part because it's not popular. We it has to be a big production. We have to have a pregame show.
Speaker 4:We have to have dedicated announcers. We have to do all these things. The end result is you get six games which are physically uncomfortable to watch because you're getting jerked around. And like, they could have just the Vision Pro there
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:For every game, and I would pay a lot of money to watch that. They could have it at every concert. And this saw it's what's amazing is it, number one, it would make it better. I'm fully convinced of this. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And number two, it would solve their content problem because you could suddenly sell have tickets to every single concert in the world, to every single game in the world. It's Yeah. It it is a classic tech issue where you put in the upfront cost, you buy the cameras, you install them, and you have marginal upside forever, everywhere. And and it it's latching onto a major trend, which is live. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Which is this idea that when everything's commoditized online, everything's digital, live experiences are worth more and more and more. Like, you go back to like the Eris tour and Taylor Swift, like, when there's a big topic of discussion at that point. Because like, it it it this is something people are
Speaker 2:specifically are like pretty immune to AI because nobody wants to watch like the AI box play. Right.
Speaker 4:No one wants AI basketball. Right? Yeah. It's the it's the human aspect of
Speaker 2:the thing that was most crazy to me is that it was like geo locked to Southern California.
Speaker 4:I get so I get that. I I'm not gonna like beg on them for that because but part of it, the reason why it was geo locked is because Spectrum spent all the money to do all this production.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And so Right. Of course, they get the benefit. It's in their catchment area. But you don't need to do all that. They're they're overthinking this.
Speaker 4:Like, set a camera on the sideline and do nothing else. I will be happy as a clam.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. It is expensive to do immersive production. At the same time, Blackmagic has the Ursa Cine immersive that have you seen this thing? Two fisheye lenses on the front, 16 k.
Speaker 1:It's it it costs $30,000, and it feels like if this is the case, there has to be an opportunity for someone who's a little more agile, you know, maybe it's Red Bull, maybe it's some league that's not front and center to just go and do this. Either you have to pay 30 k upfront and then
Speaker 2:stream it.
Speaker 4:Expensive. Yeah. 30 k is nothing. Okay? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like, we're we're all in the tech industry. Yeah. We can laugh at figures like that. Yeah. Okay?
Speaker 4:So so third but that's an upfront investment. Mhmm. Like, the problem is they tacked on all these marginal costs to this production. Yep. So when you logged on for the game, there was a dedicated pregame host and show
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 4:For the Apple Vision Pro viewers.
Speaker 2:That's almost certainly not gonna be as good as the main pregame
Speaker 1:I know. Show. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That where they're paying like hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 4:What? Is sitting courtside and watching NBA players warm up and make 57 threes in a row because they're incredible. Yeah. Like, I don't know if you guys have ever sat courtside, but like, it's it's it's amazing. It's amazing.
Speaker 4:Speaking of watches, this is where I spend my watch money.
Speaker 1:Okay? Okay.
Speaker 4:It's it's it's an unbelievable experience. And and you and they have all like, they have like, for example, they have like replays in there.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Which okay. Yes. You can see the better replays. You know where else they show replays? On the scoreboard.
Speaker 4:How can I see the scoreboard? I can look up because I'm wearing a Vision Pro that's immersive and has this fish eye camera where I can see all around it. I don't need a scoreboard bug down at the bottom. I can look at the scoreboard. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like, I actually, during the game while watching it, it was actually kinda hard to see the scoreboard bug because it was way down at the bottom. Sure. So I was looking at the scoreboard in the arena the whole time. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's the whole that's the whole thing. You're there. It's it's and so all that stuff, the the pregame show, they had dedicated play by play announcers and and analysts for the Vision Pro. They had these multiple cameras. They had a production truck who's Yeah.
Speaker 4:Choosing how can I upset Ben this time?
Speaker 1:And every like, the
Speaker 4:other cameras. You didn't need any of that. Okay. And and and and you $30,000 is a one time cost. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You spend that money once and you put these cameras in every arena for every game, everywhere, and then you you suddenly have this exclusive selling tickets to live events in a way no one else can. I think it's a huge like, it seems so clear to me. This is the Vision Pro use case.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:This is your portal to every live event in the world.
Speaker 2:What you what do think about Meta Meta's efforts on partnership as well? The
Speaker 4:Vision the Vision Pro is better. Yeah. I mean, like the the the like, the Oculus has advantages relative to the Vision Pro. Yeah. Actually, the I love Mark Zuckerberg's post when the Vision Pro came out.
Speaker 4:It's like, oh, we're not surprised. We could have done that, but we didn't. Which was valid. Yeah. I'm also not particularly interested in the use cases that are good for that.
Speaker 4:I don't care about gaming. I don't care about a lot of the other Yeah. Like, this is, for me, the killer use case for sure. Like, being able to Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, it seems like the next, the next quest, if they stay in VR, will be better. We talked to James Cameron, and it seemed like he was pretty excited that they might have gotten the same screen from the Apple Vision Pro. Like, yeah, they're two years behind, but you bring that screen into the next quest
Speaker 4:But there there there's trade offs for that as far as like number pixels and the the field of view and all sorts of things. But like the the the the whole point is that $3,500 feels overwhelming Mhmm. Like, for what you get. Mhmm. $3,500 to be able to attend any sporting event in person is one of the greatest deals of all time.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Like How
Speaker 7:do you how do you think they should
Speaker 4:in Taiwan. I used to be in Taiwan. Yeah. I would fly over for specific games. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like, and guess what? I would spend more than $35 on my ticket. I'm not flying the back of the bus at this point. Sorry. Like, and so, like like, the this would this is it is like, it's like when the the Apple Watch, when they realized, oh, people it's it's fitness.
Speaker 4:Remember they watched with all these lists of different things and what you could do, like, remember you could like draw on your Apple Watch, and it would like draw on
Speaker 1:your Yeah. Yeah. Like The heartbeat texting to send someone a heartbeat, that never wins.
Speaker 4:Who's the Apple
Speaker 2:exec that's the most hardcore NBA fan? Because I feel like I feel like you got
Speaker 4:Thank you. I so I I know how much Golden State tickets cost because I sat. Well, I I actually I was poor. So I asked who's in the second row. Behind the seat that was inscribed with Eddie Q's name on it.
Speaker 4:Oh, can't Hell. Yeah. He would he would he would be the he's the guy that needs to argue for this.
Speaker 1:Okay. So do you think this is a next season they might get it right? Are are they already prebaked on the next on the next like, because they have, four more games. If this they they have the footage. Like, they could just not edit the next game, not do that broadcast, and do what you're describing.
Speaker 4:I hope so. Look, free advice Apple. This is your that's why I made I I've written this. So I know. Number one, the reason I disagree with your take
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:Is because every video they make suffers from this problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. They're they are produced in a TV style for a device that is fundamentally different than TV.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's the core problem.
Speaker 1:Is there is there at least a a possibility that Metallica also said, hey. We don't want a substitute of effect. We don't want people to
Speaker 2:help with Yeah. So it's so funny that
Speaker 1:they No. That's the same thing. But but but there's a meeting of others.
Speaker 4:Other videos. They've made lots of other like, every video they have suffers
Speaker 8:from Yeah.
Speaker 9:Even the
Speaker 1:Alicia Keys thing.
Speaker 2:You can you imagine if the if the NBA actually sold a ticket where, like, every thirty seconds, you had to stand up and go watch from a different from a different view? It's like they're like, it's amazing. You see every angle. You're like, please, sir. I just wanna sit and watch
Speaker 4:the I turned it off. I I I I watched both I watched half the game on TV because it was uncomfortable.
Speaker 2:What do you what do you think is the long term, like like viewing, like ideal viewing experience? Is it you have it on TV and you have your your Apple Vision and you're kind of like, you know, based on how closely you're paying attention, you're either like locked in with the Vision Pro on No.
Speaker 4:Or you have it on the whole time. I think that a big thing for sure, the the biggest missing experience is, of course, I wanna be on my phone half the time. Like like any I do have the the the m five Vision Pro. It's the first time I ever took a demo unit. I've always like declined to do that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But I'm like, there's no way on earth I'm paying for this, but I do actually wanna see if there's any difference. The my actually biggest takeaway is the pass through is much better. It just might be I did do a I didn't do a direct compare. That was just sort of my perception.
Speaker 4:And to be honest, I haven't used a VISTA Pro in a long time, so who knows how good my memory is. The pass through was really good. I had no issue using my phone at all. It did seem better than it used to be. So but maybe that might be placebo, just just to be clear.
Speaker 2:Getting screen time getting screen time through another screen. It's
Speaker 4:a lot older.
Speaker 2:It's it's we got levels.
Speaker 1:Wait. So your screen time app could potentially show more than, like, a hundred sixty hours I have twenty six hours a day I was in the Vision Pro using my phone, my laptop. Yes, mate. What a world. What a world.
Speaker 1:That's funny. Well, I mean, are you optimistic about any other Apple Vision Pro, like, opportunities? Because I was looking at this $30,000 immersive camera, and I was thinking, like, I I was actually advising some friends who they shoot a much more, like like, evergreen podcast, like, these really definitive interviews. And I was saying, maybe you should start shoot they they were shooting in eight k because they were like, hey. Maybe one day we'll license these to Netflix.
Speaker 1:We want the extra resolution. We're not distributing in eight k, but we have it now. And I was saying, well, you wanna go further? Why not 16 k? Why not immersive?
Speaker 1:Maybe you should get this thing. Start recording now. Now this particular device can only record for like forty five minutes, I think, and then you have to swap the cards or whatever. But I was like, maybe you should be doing the flow. Maybe not this year, but maybe next year.
Speaker 1:Are are are is there is there some opportunity where someone Sure.
Speaker 4:There's lots of opportunities. Like like like and I think like there's there's real enterprise opportunity like for like especially with the pass through and things that you can do on those lines. There's productivity sort of possibilities. But you need like, what is the anchor thing? Is it everyone knows that this does?
Speaker 4:And again, think the Apple Watch is a good example here. It took them a while to get to that. They launched with the physical fitness stuff, but it wasn't clear that that was the thing Mhmm. For a few years. And now every vision, every Apple Watch thing is fitness fitness, fitness, fitness.
Speaker 4:It saves your life and, you know, all those sorts of things. And to me, this is it. It it is you get live in your living room. That's the VisionPRO pitch.
Speaker 1:That's gonna be fun. We'll just have to wait another five years for them to back down from their their opinions.
Speaker 2:It's We're gonna find we're gonna find out that they have
Speaker 1:like You did write this
Speaker 2:A thousand.
Speaker 1:Two years ago. Like
Speaker 4:No. I wrote this the day wrote this the day it launched. I said, what's amazing about this is you don't need production.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:All I want is to feel like I'm there. And it delivers. It lets you of do you know do you of course, you don't know you're there. The resolution isn't perfect. Yeah.
Speaker 4:There is a bit of tearing if you go super fast. Mhmm. Like, the peripheral vision's not not not not perfect. Mhmm. But it is it's a it's amazing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's an incredible experience that that no one else can match. Quest can a little bit, but but the the vision pros, in part because Apple invented these cameras. Yeah. Like Blackmagic is making them, but it's Apple's whole Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's Apple like created the
Speaker 9:whole thing.
Speaker 1:Pipeline.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It like the it's it just feels like this is a company that it's like a lack of confidence.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:You let the device do what the device can do. Yep. Stop trying to, like, overdo it. Put no. Step back.
Speaker 4:Yep. Just step back and let it do its thing. And I'm more convinced than ever. I I again, I've been having this take a few times. I wrote about the MLS thing.
Speaker 4:I wrote after the Metallica thing. I put on the front page of Checkery today. I'm like, look. No one in the world cares about this device other than me. I know.
Speaker 4:But I'm desperate for someone to read this. So there's no paywall that you don't even I saw read
Speaker 1:And and they had to do the bucks too. It's so funny. I know.
Speaker 4:It's like the first one.
Speaker 1:Guessing it was a royal flush for you. I I have a meta question about just being in a position to review new technology and having to deal with, like, the Pepsi challenge. Are you familiar with the Pepsi challenge story?
Speaker 4:I am. I see. I'm Gen X. I'm
Speaker 1:very old. Okay. Yeah. So so the Pepsi challenge, for those who don't know, they they they had people taste a little a one ounce cup of Coca Cola, one ounce cup of Pepsi. And overwhelmingly, the random people that came and tested said the Pepsi tasted better.
Speaker 1:And what the result was is that Pepsi was sweeter, so it tasted better over one ounce. But over 16 ounces, a full can, it was more like fifty fifty, and people actually did prefer the Coca Cola. And I feel like with a lot of hardware devices, you put it on for ten minutes, it's amazing. You put it on for half an hour. It's incredible.
Speaker 1:But then then pretty quickly, the, you know, the big tech executive say, oh, that's enough of the demo. Let's talk to you about something else. Now write your review based on thirty minutes, and it's a very different experience than two weeks, a month, seeing if it collects dust, seeing if you churned. And I'm wondering just how you deal with that mentally where you have to talk about something, but at the same time, you're not getting the you know, you haven't been able to spend a year with a product.
Speaker 4:No. It's a good point. So my way to deal with that is I generally don't do product reviews. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:So, that makes it that makes it much easier. Yeah. I think with the the Vision Pro though is a great example of this phenomena. Yeah. It is like the first thirty minutes of using a Vision Pro is Yeah.
Speaker 1:One of
Speaker 4:the most mind blowing experience of your life and it continues to be. Yeah. I actually I remember when I first got it, I actually had I'm I'm stuck I felt perfect following from the watch segment. So I found like a total douchess thing. I had my assistant, I had it shipped to his house, and had him fly to Taiwan to bring it to me.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. Because it wasn't it was only available in The US. Yeah. And the and and and I remember actually, I was going I think this is awful. This is so embarrassing.
Speaker 4:I was going on a ski trip like a week later. So I'm I'm I'm up there, and I remember I'm sitting in this bar up in Naseko. And I'm like, all the ski instructors, like, I was friends with I had the same guy for many years. He brought all his friends over. They're all trying this.
Speaker 4:I I like, I hone my whole demo script. Yeah. And like we still talk about this afternoon Yeah. With the Vision Pro in in this bar in Naseko, try it. And it's it's amazing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's absolutely incredible. But then, what do you do with it? Yeah. Right?
Speaker 4:Like that's the big question. What I will say in the Vision Pro's defense is even now, I don't use it very often. Every time I put it on though, I'm like, this is so cool. Yeah. Like it it retains that aspect of there's something magical about this experience.
Speaker 4:It's just searching for that ongoing reason to come back that use case. And that come back use case needs to be something that only it can deliver. Mhmm. The productivity things are cool. I I would I I that's the
Speaker 2:other other thing that I think is really real is like, maybe from Apple's side, like, they have this device, it has so much potential, it's so exciting, it's so cool, and then it's it's almost disappointing that like, okay, the use case is just like live sports. Right? Because they're like, we wanna create the next computing paradigm. But the reason that it actually is is an incredible niche is that like, what's more mainstream than bread and circuses? Right?
Speaker 2:Problem.
Speaker 4:It's a chicken and egg problem. You you like, the way you get those those productivity experiences and those new things that weren't possible before is you have a large install base that draws developers in to those experiences. But to get there, it needs to be a market. So you need sort of the initial use case to create like this is why the iPhone was the greatest platform ever. Everyone needed a phone.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Like so like so you you got that built in sort of advantage so that developers Like they didn't have to do anything to earn developers. They just shipped the
Speaker 2:amazing live sports experience, you get a million people that are using it multiple times a week. And then and then they're using it. They're watching they're watching together. It's a social thing. Then they can be asked social thing, to be honest.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. When I look like, I don't grab I put it on. I don't look very social.
Speaker 2:No. But but I'm I'm talking about more like maybe you have a FaceTime call open with a buddy in the headset and you're watching it together, you're hanging out watching the game or something like that. Well
Speaker 4:I I would just say I think it's the VisionPRO is more of a single player experience.
Speaker 5:Sure.
Speaker 4:But what is the biggest single player market in the world? Productivity. Like when I'm doing work, like I I'm want my own working on it. Right now, I have four monitors. Like I I'm one of those crazy people.
Speaker 4:Like the Vision Pro, I wish I would have brought it with me last summer when I went back to Taiwan because I was actually doing work and I was working on my laptop and it was terrible. Like, oh, I can't believe I didn't bring this. It was the perfect use case for me to use it. But by and large, I don't need it. But if there were particular apps or use cases that were uniquely enabled by it, maybe that would be a reason.
Speaker 4:But you're only going to get those by drawing in developers. You're only gonna developers by having an addressable market that is worth putting investment into. Which means if this is always been a this is one of my big thesis on strategic read. It's always been a question on tech. Chicken or egg.
Speaker 4:What comes first? The device, the platform, or the developers? I was at Microsoft in with Windows eight. I'd spent a lot of time and spent a lot of Microsoft's money getting developers. That doesn't work.
Speaker 4:What matters is demand. Demand pulls in developers. You need the users, which means you need the core use case to sell a bunch of devices, and then you can start the virtuous cycle. To me, the core use case for the Vision Pro, if anyone remembers it exists, and I'm not sure that Apple executives do, is live.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Live in your living room.
Speaker 2:You do have a bunch
Speaker 4:devices and then you pull people
Speaker 5:in.
Speaker 2:I have a buddy TJ who worked at Apple at one point. When the Vision Pro was announced, he got it. He was so excited. He was like, I'm gonna spend the next three years building products for the Vision Pro.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:How long did he last? He lasted like Three months? Yeah. No, no, no. Like, less.
Speaker 2:He was what's the point of build what's what's the point of building for he's super talented, but what's the point of building if there's nobody there, you know, you know, it's
Speaker 1:not Are like are you you've mentioned the four monitors. Are you going in on the 52 inch Dell six k monitor?
Speaker 4:No. Why not? Way too low resolution.
Speaker 1:Way too low
Speaker 4:actually, I lied. No. I'm actually on the fifth monitor right now just for podcast. So There you go.
Speaker 5:I have
Speaker 4:I have two four k monitors on my laptop. I have another I live with that LG like square screens. Oh, yeah. It is relatively low resolution. But then for podcasts, have a 55 inch TV here.
Speaker 4:So
Speaker 2:Okay. Staying staying on Apple Yeah. Gemini The the Gemini Siri news dropped this morning. It had been kind of previously reported. So in some ways, it's old news.
Speaker 2:What are you what are you expecting out of, like, this new version of Siri?
Speaker 4:Well, the bar is 55 feet underground. I expect it to be a lot better. No.
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 4:it makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's now that the federal courts have approved Google and Apple combining to rule the world, Google has Google has the infrastructure to support the scale of Apple. They know how to work together. They've worked together for years. They're very natural partners in that respect.
Speaker 4:The Google can think big picture about this. Like, I'm sure Apple the report that Mark Gurman had last fall is Apple's gonna pay like a billion dollars, which again, we're in tech. That's no money at all, which but it's tied into the search deal. Like, they can massage it. The problem with working with an OpenAI or or an Anthropic is they need to make money.
Speaker 4:And so like Apple doesn't I think there there's a more sort of I scratch your back, you scratch my back sort of thing here. Google's talking about, you know, working with Apple's chips, adapting it, whatever it might be. Apple does bespoke stuff like that. So I I I think it makes a ton of sense for both sides.
Speaker 1:Do you think it do you think it ever flips? And do you think do you think Google will be paying Apple? Because there's this news also that you're gonna be able to do shopping through Gemini. And so you could imagine a world where you go to Siri, you ask for a product, and there's ads in that Gemini result. And and Google is the one that's monetizing that, so they're passing some of that revenue back to Apple.
Speaker 4:It's a good question. I mean, think when Apple talked about, like, the next generation Siri and Apple intelligence, I was pretty optimistic about this idea of Apple basically replaying the search
Speaker 2:That's that's my that's my whole thing. I'm like I'm like, in some way, if I'm Apple and I'm paying for an LLM to use it to power a product that can basically do search really well, that could eventually have an ads business attached to it, that eventually could have like commerce built into it. Yeah. Like it's this weird it's this weird situation where like Gemini is effectively helping like that's that's what I don't fully understand yet. Because I'm gonna
Speaker 4:Well, be like
Speaker 5:I think the
Speaker 4:the market structure was so perfect for Apple in that they need like it's just a default search engine. It's there's no sort of deep integration into the product. It's just like when you type in your search bar what engine is used.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so it's super easy like there there's like a concept when it comes to like figure out who's gonna win in the value chain. Super easy substitute substitute ability is good for whoever can plug whatever in. So they could choose over they want. So it it made sense the value flow that direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The difference with this AI stuff is it needs to be integrated deeply. Mhmm. And Apple is more on the defensive here. Like, they need to have quality AI features built into the operating system. And so I think the need is more on Apple's part and the benefit Google is getting my suspicion is less that they're is less about the ad thing and more they're getting some incremental revenue, and they're probably getting a lot more I mean, the Apple's gonna be pressured about the data.
Speaker 4:We'll see how that sort of works. But but they also don't need it's all incremental
Speaker 1:Even even internal reasoning rollouts and and all of that that happens in Gemini, like, the Apple's not gonna be able to call that back, so you're gonna have all this, like, reinforcement learning training on okay. Maybe maybe you're obfuscating the the the the privacy data, what the person asked for. But all those interim steps of went to a website, I interacted with it, I figured out how to click this button, like, that's that's gonna accrue to Gemini, you would imagine.
Speaker 4:Well, and what it speaks to, I think, is what what would be the red flags that would come up to this deal from an Apple perspective? It's like, well, they're not yet maybe they need to tough it out and build their own crappy LM so that in the future, they control their own LM such that if if you get to a world with say AR, right, where I'm I'm actually lots of dispute about this, but I'm pretty optimistic on just in time UIs. Where the idea that something pops up that is nothing but the decision you need to make in that moment for whatever it might be, and then it goes away. Like to me this is the the best part of the Orion experience was the the Facebook sort of AR glasses was when I received a call. Because the the the OS I used there was kinda like Quest just sort of dumped in there.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And it would it didn't really make sense. You have like blocky stuff. There's like an Instagram and stuff. It's like I I could just look at my phone.
Speaker 4:This is gonna be better here. But you could be we got I got a conversation right now. I could have a notification popping right now saying so and so is calling
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And I could use my own little wrist thingy and and dismiss it. And it's just there when I need it. It only has one option, accept or decline, and then it's gone. Yeah. And and I could see that being a future of UI and important for Apple to control.
Speaker 4:But by not shipping their own, by depending on Google, they might say pretty words about, oh, we're gonna simultaneously develop our own. No. That whatever. If you're that's not going to happen. You're gonna be so invested in this other one.
Speaker 4:And that speaks to the value is accruing to Google because they're the ones actually developing and pushing the technology and Apple is sort of trailing along. Given that, I have a hard time seeing if Apple's gonna get more and more deeper into this using Gemini, are they gonna be able to credibly go to Google, say pay up or else we're gonna switch to someone else? I think that's probably unlikely. So I don't think it's gonna play out like search, but we'll see. I was obviously wrong about this one, so I could certainly be wrong again.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 2:What was your reaction to the Manus acquisition? From my point of view, it's exciting, specifically because Zuck has just been spending all this money on talent. But if you look historically, he's been very good at like buying something, scaling it. It's sort of unclear to me so far whether he plans to take Manas from $100,000,000 run rate to multiple billions or just leverage the team's ability to build great agentic, you know, effectively work close product? How how are you thinking about it?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I just I I have a hard time seeing the meta in the enterprise sort of angle. So
Speaker 2:No. But I but I but even but even like
Speaker 3:talents than
Speaker 2:it is. But even it's like like, figure out the best product in this category and buy it for me. Like, that that kind of workflow like, that's what I can imagine the man's team being.
Speaker 4:That's my sort of understanding. Yeah. It's like, this is actually a really excellent product team that is doing very good work and is worth having on board. Sure. And does that mean growing their business into something larger that's a material source to our business?
Speaker 4:I think that would be a mistake. But I think the idea of agentic workflows is obviously a very compelling one. Actually, of my favorite things, Mark Zuckerberg has been all over the place on AI. I think I did an interview with him, like, nine months ago. That was kind of bizarre.
Speaker 4:It was right when he was clearly thinking through maybe I need to reset everything, and I thought that sort of came across in the interview at the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But one thing he did say is actually what is the largest sort of most profitable at scale agent right now? Facebook advertising. Which I think is a very or or Google advertising. I think a very astute point. You go in, you tell Facebook, I want
Speaker 2:Customers.
Speaker 4:I'm willing to pay a dollar 49 for a customer or $9.99 for a customer, go get them. And it goes out and gets them. Now is that a full LM denominated probabilistic workflow? No. It's it's it's not really LMs.
Speaker 4:It is more probabilistic for the way post ATT. But the idea that you ask for a job to do the focus is on the job to be done as opposed to specifying how you do it. And that is just by and large for most advertisers, particularly in the long tail. Probably at the fact part of the tail too, they just don't wanna give up control, the better way to do it. And I think there's gonna be lots of things like this.
Speaker 4:I mean, Google's announcement with Shopify and and this idea of of, you know, ads that are perfectly targeted to the user, very compelling, makes ton of sense. That's where something like Grok, by the way, fits in, like super fast inference so you can generate, Like, you think about how advertising works, these auctions that are run and you get ads in the time it takes to load a web page is absolutely incredible. Where the the next step is gonna be insert generative ads into there, which is gonna require very high inference speeds. So I think they'll and this has always been the most compelling short term AI monetization opportunity. It's basically Google and Facebook ads.
Speaker 4:That's why I've been super bullish on both of them. Things why Facebook needed to do this reset and why Google, you know, it's justifiably been sort of going to the moon recently.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Well, what what do you think of Eric Sufort's point that, that you might not actually need to put the ads in the LLM responses in the sense that you could be you could be going to an LLM and saying, tell me the history of the Roman Empire. It knows that you're shopping for shoes, for new shoes, and it shows you ads for shoes in the middle of your Roman Empire deep dive. Just like on Instagram, you can be scrolling one thing and your algorithm can be recommending you a certain type of content, maybe like dogs, showing you dog videos. But then it also knows that you need luggage for your next trip and it's showing you ads for luggage or something.
Speaker 4:No. I think I think I think it's a great point. I think Eric makes some good points about like you're running a real risk of conflict of interest, even the perception of conflict of interest.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Otherwise. And so I think that's a very good point. And the reality is that's a much larger business. Mhmm. Like, just be what you're looking for is inventory.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. The number one way to predict sort of the upside for Meta over the last several years, the stock market has consistently had it totally backwards. Mhmm. Every time they're sort of their price per ad would plummet because the stock market would freak out. This happened with stories in like '20 Yeah.
Speaker 4:'18, 2019. It happened with with reels a couple years ago. And what the what the the issue is that the reason why price brand plummets is because there's a massive increase in inventory.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And when there's a massive increase in inventory, it's just more places to show ads that is a huge opportunity. You saw huge run ups both times as they figured out how to monetize stories, as they figured out how monetize reels. And this should be an opportunity of how to like, it's it's gonna take a while to figure out how to monetize, you know, maybe it's maybe it's just an aspect of when they're reasoning, when they're thinking or image generation, that might be an ad opportunity. Yeah. And it's a big opportunity.
Speaker 4:A big problem is these folks, I think the OpenAI has hired so many meta people, it confuses me why they haven't been on board with this.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like, it's a win win win. You get you need money to fund your operation. Yeah. The best way to make money is to is to show ads. Why?
Speaker 4:Because you get to deliver a better product to more people. This idea that we're gonna commit to a world where if poor people get a worse product, that's not how tech works. The reason why tech is amazing is it generates a ton of consumer surplus. You do this upfront investment, and because it's monetized by ads, everyone gets the best product. It's great.
Speaker 4:And OpenAI like having this religious devotion for so long about not doing this, If they had launched, they could have watched the world's crappiest ads in twenty twenty three. By today in 2026, they'd be good. Yeah. They'd be making money and people won't rebel against it. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Now they're gonna have to launch ads, they're gonna suck, and people are like, this sucks, I'll just go to Gemini or whatever it might be. Just it it drives me bonkers. Yeah. Because like seem
Speaker 1:like there's a little bit of like a not to go back to chicken and egg problem, but like the first mover disadvantage. Like the first LLM that has ads, there'll be a whole press cycle about, oh, Gemini's the ad wow.
Speaker 4:Would've been a lot easier if you were the only LLM. Like, the the it's it it's it it it risks the entire company. Yeah. Like like, they need to get their opportunities in the consumer space first and foremost. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Because the consumer space needs to monetize via ads. Yeah. And the fact they didn't get there or start to get there, still haven't started to get there Yep. Is it it's a company imperiling Yeah. Poor decision.
Speaker 1:Last question from my side at least. Predictions, do do you think there's anything to the the prediction that OpenAI will buy Pinterest or partner up with a social network at a more deeper level than they already have?
Speaker 4:Well, so it's really interesting. This is one of my I was actually I was talking to I've been met when I was in New York a few months ago and I was at this off actually, was me and the semi analysis guys. Okay. Great guys. But they were sharing an office with like a hedge fund.
Speaker 4:And one of the guys is like, look, you're responsible for one of our worst all time decisions. And I'm like, what's that? He's like, we bought Twitter. I'm like, I never said to buy Twitter. That's terrible stuff.
Speaker 4:Unless you want them to overpay for it. And then he's like, but then I remembered what it was. It was I think 2017, 2018 when Twitter bought mopul. Oh. And my theory at the time was Twitter is just a very poor inventory for advertising.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Part of it is it's text based, then there were fewer images. There's also a mindset when you're on Twitter, you're like girded up for battle. Oh, And you're like you're trying to engage. Like, as opposed to Instagram, like Instagram, the ads might as well be
Speaker 1:The content.
Speaker 5:Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Axe is fight or flight.
Speaker 8:Yeah. No. Exactly. Exactly. And
Speaker 4:so, my theory then, but Twitter has the potential to really understand your interest in a really sort of deep way. And so what they could do is they could harvest signal on Twitter Mhmm. And they could manifest it with using mopub and inventory sort of across a bunch of apps. And that would be sort of a very compelling model. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Again, who knows if I was right? Twitter's executives or Twitter was incompetent for years and years and years. At one point I said I'm never covering this company again because this is pointless. That's that's a bit what sort of Apple even did who did buy buy mopub from from Twitter and has made a ton of money doing that. But I think that would be the thesis there, which is because we're people are dumping everything to this LM.
Speaker 4:We can get all this signal and understanding. What we need is inventory to monetize that signal. Mhmm. And could that be inventory to do so? The theory makes sense.
Speaker 4:It feels like they have a lot more important things to spend money on. I think probably at the end of day, particularly post ATT, like, and o, like, your owned and operated properties are always gonna be the most valuable. I think figuring out how to monetize in touch with these is probably the best. Yeah. But it's not a it's not an insane idea for that reason.
Speaker 1:I like that. Well, thank you so much for having on the show on Super fun. Notice. We're huge fans here. No.
Speaker 4:And congratulations. Look. I am on a app look. No one can go to Vision Pro but me. Yes.
Speaker 4:Probably take it upon myself.
Speaker 1:Know, everywhere Correct the record. And say
Speaker 2:The strongest soldier.
Speaker 1:Well, if you want. Yeah. If you want the the the most the the deepest analysis, the most, you know, the the hottest takes on the Vision Pro, of course, sign up for Strathecari. Get on the pro plan.
Speaker 2:Alright. No. This is
Speaker 5:a run.
Speaker 4:You don't need to look.
Speaker 1:This not a But you know there's gonna be
Speaker 2:We should hey. There's gonna be podcasts. We should we should hire we should get a plane, fly over, and drop the this one. The this new one has leaflets. Leaflets ever got to you.
Speaker 1:We'll do it.
Speaker 4:I'm down. Let's do
Speaker 2:it. Let's do it.
Speaker 1:We need to. We need to. Well, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your week, and I hope your 2026 is off to a great start.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to see you, Ben.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Have a Labelbox, good delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box. The label box. Every time.
Speaker 1:They didn't give us
Speaker 2:They didn't give us that tagline, but
Speaker 1:But we're
Speaker 2:using it anyway. Tagline. The Get in the box.
Speaker 1:Walmart partners with Alphabet's Google to allow shoppers to purchase products through Gemini. So Walmart is jumping in with Google. We're we're having Harley from Shopify on the stream later to talk about agentic commerce, what's happening there. There's a lot of other news. And Person probably.
Speaker 1:Woah. I have the audio on my phone. The Google is posting a video of Wing. The future of retail is landing. They're taking shots at our boy Keller launching a drone
Speaker 2:This one this this one hit me pretty hard.
Speaker 1:I know. I know. We love Zip Line.
Speaker 3:We love
Speaker 1:Keller here. We love Google. Obviously, there's Spencer.
Speaker 2:But Google just leave one future of x thing for
Speaker 1:For someone else.
Speaker 2:For someone else? Yeah. Right? I didn't even know about Wing until today. Was this an acquisition?
Speaker 2:Wing.com, one of the best domains.
Speaker 1:You're going to be texting Keller like Sam Altman and Elon were texting each other about the future of AI. You're gonna be like, the future of drone delivery is in our hands, brother. We gotta we gotta beat you wing. No. Google's been working on this for a long time.
Speaker 1:Obviously, this is going not to be, you know, the the only there's only gonna be one company with technology. There's gonna be variety. Tyler, do you
Speaker 2:have for us?
Speaker 6:Just on the point of of of Elon and Sam Yeah. Elon just said on the Apple and Google collaboration, he said, seems like an unreasonable unreasonable concentration of power for Google Mhmm. Given that they also have Android and Chrome. Oh, interesting. Still on the
Speaker 1:He's taking shots.
Speaker 6:He
Speaker 1:doesn't he doesn't like he does he's not a fan. Well, we are fans of Plaid here, and so 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. We talked about about Apple confirming Gemini, very excited for that. I want them to roll this out immediately.
Speaker 1:I know that it's probably gonna be, you know, some normal release cycle with very polished ads and on stage keynote and a developer preview, and there'll be a whole cycle to updating. But we are in the age of AI, Apple. Just ship it today. Just replace Siri with Gemini today. I'm sure a lot of people would be fans of that, but, you know, they operate the way they do.
Speaker 2:Eric, I pulled I pulled a little history on wing.com. Please. So started Wait. They own wing.com? Wing.com.
Speaker 1:That's the I guess one of
Speaker 4:the things.
Speaker 2:It's not only not only do this is an amazing partnership, but a fantastic domain. Yeah. So it started within Axe, Google Axe, the Moonshot Factory. It really is a factory. Original mission was focused on emergency medical response.
Speaker 2:Okay. So they wanted to deliver defibrillators to heart attack victims. The basically, they they pivoted away Mhmm. From emergency emergency services to last mile commercial delivery. They started doing their first, like, real world trials back in Queensland as early as 2014.
Speaker 2:It graduated from X in 2018. They later became, the first delivery drone delivery company to receive a part one thirty five air carrier certificate from the FAA. And, they've just been scaling the network since then. So, yeah, I guess they're gonna be able to serve 40,000,000 people by 2027.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, as an American, as a human, as a technologist, I want more and I want competition. But as a big fan of Keller at Zipfind, I want him to dominate.
Speaker 2:No. I think Absolutely. I think Google maybe did this. They knew Keller had the potential for to be one of the great the greatest in history. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And but they realized if he didn't have a viable competitor Yeah. Would never live up to his business.
Speaker 1:So they're inspiring him to grind harder. Exactly. That's what's going on. Okay. Now we understand it.
Speaker 1:Well, 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. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, now Anthropic, has Claude code for heart attacks or something like that. Health care and life sciences.
Speaker 1:Claude code. I'm dying. Give me give me blood transfer.
Speaker 2:Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 1:I I used Cloud Code this weekend in a funny way. I had I had it I was having slow WiFi, which of course is a weird thing to go to Cloud Code for because it uses the Internet, so you're gonna have slow interaction. I had it I had it diagnose my my I I I gave it a prompt. I said, what did I say? It's somewhere here.
Speaker 1:Maybe I maybe I lost it. But I I I basically told it I I I told it, like, hey. I'm having problems with my Internet. Can you just go fix it? It ran all these different diagnostics, pinged Google, pinged all the different DNS servers, ran through everything, ran speed tests, and it came back and told me to turn it off and turn it back on.
Speaker 1:And it actually worked. And I could have saved myself, like, forty five minutes of sitting there being like, yes. I'm okay with you using curl. Yes. I'm okay with you using WGED.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:The entire time, superintelligence was just turning it on, turning it off, and then back on.
Speaker 1:It's Lindy. It's Lindy. It should have just preempted me and just been like, look, dude, have you at least turned it off and turned it back on? Anyway, Tyler, what
Speaker 6:do think? If if Claude was being slowed by the because of the WiFi, then that's an example of, like, you know, self improvement.
Speaker 1:Self improve oh, it improved itself. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Boom.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It was it was a weird issue. Really high ping, really like, the bandwidth was fine, but the ping was really bad. And so it was very annoying, but it did resolve it.
Speaker 1:And, you know, at the end of the day, Claude Code did did a very thorough job of telling me some time honored advice. So thank you to Claude Code. And interesting that everyone's pushing into health care. I'm I'm I'm still waiting for the push into legal. I'm wondering if that'll happen or if that's more complicated than health care.
Speaker 1:I'm also wondering maybe health care is more lucrative, more viable, more I I would love to be in the meetings where they have prioritization of what whose whose lunch they're trying to eat off. Who's whose plate should we eat off of? Let's
Speaker 2:The lunch meeting.
Speaker 1:Lunch meeting. Well, New York Stock Exchange. If you wanna change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We love the night sea. Can't wait to be out there.
Speaker 1:Again, we're planning our next trip, so stay tuned.
Speaker 2:Cannot wait. Meta CEO Meta compute. Zuckerberg is launching Meta compute, planning tens of gigawatts this decade and hundreds of gigawatts longer term. This effort, will be led by Santosh, Gennard Hahn, and Daniel Gross, DG, back in the mix. Santosh will continue to lead our technical architecture, software stack, silicon program, developer productivity, and building and operating our global data center fleet and network.
Speaker 2:Daniel will lead a new group responsible for long term capacity strategy, supplier relationships, industry analysis. Let's give it up for industry analysis. I love it. Planning and business let's give it up for planning and business modeling as well.
Speaker 1:DG, this is not his first rodeo. Do you remember the Andromeda Cluster?
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 1:NFDG? That was really, really cool.
Speaker 2:Early and and right on that.
Speaker 1:They were they were doing, was it AI Grant was the name of the program? So they backed a bunch of companies, some crazy companies in AI Grant too, sort of an incubator accelerator model, a bunch of early stage companies, smaller checks. Me
Speaker 8:the details.
Speaker 6:Me just read this. So in in the first batch, they had Perplexity, Cursor, Replicate, Chroma. Chroma too. I think they had
Speaker 2:There's Didn't
Speaker 1:they have Julius? Julius is in
Speaker 6:maybe a second batch. One. It was it might have been in the second one. But there's so many bangers. If you just go to the site, looks all of them.
Speaker 1:It's And and so what they did was they went and bought a whole bunch of of GPUs. They built a cluster. And they They had a feeling that GPUs would be be important. And and it was. So basically, anyone in their portfolio was sort of default GPU rich, at least for a little bit, although, of course, the resources were shared.
Speaker 1:And I have heard about another accelerator doing this recently. I need to confirm with the head of that accelerator if it's if it's okay to share because it's very exciting as well. But I was asking them, like, what does it mean to build a cluster at this level? Did you buy land? Did you build a data center?
Speaker 1:Or did you just go to Microsoft and say, hey, cordon off this little, you know, rack of of GPUs. We want those to be dedicated leased instances. And I believe it was more of the latter, but still not their first rodeo here. So I think this project's in good hands with DG. So let's hear it for the Meta competitor.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Meta also brought on Dina McCormick. Oh, yeah. Join Meta as president and vice chairman to work on partnering with governments and sovereigns to build, deploy, invest, and finance Meta's infrastructure.
Speaker 1:This making wave on truth social. I saw
Speaker 2:Government. Yeah. Governments getting involved in financing Meta's infrastructure. So he's saying he's like, Sam, they said it. I'm gonna say it now.
Speaker 1:It's not a backstop. It's the front door.
Speaker 2:Dina was a former deputy national security adviser.
Speaker 1:Well, we have a new sponsor of the show, Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why fifth a 150,000 organizations use it to get their apps to keep their apps working. Love
Speaker 2:Sentry. Sentry.
Speaker 1:So welcome to them.
Speaker 6:To have you.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA is investing a billion dollars in the in an AI drug lab with Eli Lilly over five years. This will be very interesting. We're excited for AI. Eli Lilly progress. Drug
Speaker 2:lab sounds
Speaker 1:It's AI Ozempic. It's the two biggest super trends of the last of last five years, weight loss and AI. Could it get any better? Well, now it will. We'll have to dig into more of this partnership Tom
Speaker 2:Brady is now the face of the former CEO of Axe's new company, eMeds.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Did you see this? I I did. So Tom Brady, if if you're not familiar, he was the former face of FTX.
Speaker 1:That's a rough
Speaker 2:one. And also
Speaker 1:Was he actually the face? Because there were a lot of celebrities that partnered with FTX. Larry gave
Speaker 2:us He was some he was part of he was part of some of their bigger campaigns.
Speaker 1:He did a bigger campaign. He did a TV campaign. But again, you know, it's hard if you're if you're a celebrity to
Speaker 2:to But this is an interesting one because so so he's joining as the chief wellness officer of eMed. Yeah. And it's interesting because this kinda just makes him the face of GLP ones.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Right? Which is kind of a beneficiary, like, is beneficial to the entire industry. Right? If you sell GLP ones Yeah. You're looking Tom Brady.
Speaker 2:Well, Tom Brady Yeah. Is is down.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Wonder if he's
Speaker 2:That'd be interesting.
Speaker 1:Anyways his regimen is. Maybe he's just super AGI built. Maybe he maybe Sam said, hey, I'm an I'm an I'm an investor in Anthropic, and he said, well, I think Anthropic's gonna win. I'm partnering up with you. I don't care about the structure of your hedge fund.
Speaker 1:I don't care if there's a backdoor out of your out of your trading platform. I'm in on you because of your investing track record. What about that? Yeah. You know?
Speaker 1:If Anthropic gets out at a trillion, there's gonna be a debate at least about Sam Eggman Fried's legacy. He, of course, invested, what, 10,000,000 for 10
Speaker 2:Beyond 8%. 8%
Speaker 1:of the company. So that would be maybe like an $80,000,000,000 position today, something like that, 50,000,000,000, 10,000,000,000 with dilution. I don't know. It was a good investment. Just like getting your business on Gusto is a good investment.
Speaker 1:The unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses.
Speaker 2:Like us.
Speaker 1:Like us. Paramount Skydance has now initiated what insiders are calling plan d. They're running out of letters as they look to upend Netflix's winning bid for Warner Brothers Discovery. Hey, maybe the d just stands for Discovery. So, you know, maybe this is actually one of the earlier plans.
Speaker 2:But Maybe they're maybe they're saving the best for last.
Speaker 1:Plan w. Never take the l. Skip plan l. Go straight to plan w. Get the w.
Speaker 1:We're rooting for you, Allison. It involves bringing home banging home to investors the immense amount of regulatory uncertainty involved in the Netflix deal and how they could how that could spell trouble, not just for the transaction, but for Netflix itself. And so if Netflix finds itself in a quagmire trying to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, that could be bad news. And David Ellison wants to make that clear to all of the shareholders that going with a Paramount Skydance might be a little bit less bumpy of a road.
Speaker 1:We will see. From the photoshoots, seems like they're pretty happy together, but we will we will see what happens. It will be a proxy fight, and I'm sure we will be following it closely.
Speaker 2:Some more news, from Axios. Bessent told Trump that investigation of Fed chair creates a quote mess. Mhmm. And so basically, last night, Bessent was saying, the secretary isn't happy and he or no. Someone else said, the secretary isn't happy and he left the president.
Speaker 2:No. That's kind of a white pill. Right? Somebody in, you know, the admin that that seems to, you know, have just kind of a a steady view on things is pushing back a
Speaker 1:little bit.
Speaker 6:Nothing ever happens.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You need a secretary of nothing. Just did anything happen? No. Nothing happens.
Speaker 1:But Vanta happens and compliance happens. So get on Vanta, automate compliance and security, the leading AI trust management platform is, of course, Vanta. There was a massive debate that raged in a Google doc which was published on Substack. The battle between Jack Clark, who's at Anthropic, of course, the cofounder of Anthropic, and Dwarkesh Patel. They were going up against Michael Burry, Cassandra Unchained.
Speaker 1:They had a good discussion, and it's been published free to all on Substack where you can go and read it.
Speaker 2:Highlights. Very cool.
Speaker 6:Tyler? Yeah. Have some highlights. I mean, I went through. So one thing I it's not really a debate at all in this discussion.
Speaker 6:It's like there's a bunch of questions, and they go and they basically
Speaker 1:They're just like AI is amazing. I agree.
Speaker 6:Yeah. No. It it's funny. Like, all almost all the quotes I pulled were from Burry because the Dorkchash and Jack Clark, I disagreed disagreed with with everything everything they they said. Said.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. So So it's like, oh, it's like not that interesting. Like, I already I already know this.
Speaker 1:Boo. So one thing your own opinions, bro. I agree with everything you said. I I have no
Speaker 6:You're absolutely right. Yeah. So one thing I I it's always interesting Yeah. Jack Clark. You're right.
Speaker 6:I've been doing research on the cost curves of various things recently.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And the examples he gives are dollars of mass to orbit and dollars per watt from solar.
Speaker 8:Okay.
Speaker 6:So it's like, okay. Anthropic is looking at space AI centers. Sure. Right?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:Some other stuff, I I thought Brie said his one, like, policy proposal
Speaker 1:Oh, so just the fact that Jack Clark is doing that research indicates to you that they might be thinking about orbital data centers in the future?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, orbit. Okay. Mass orbit and Yeah. And yeah.
Speaker 6:I I don't know what else.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. It makes sense.
Speaker 6:I mean, maybe he's just interested in space.
Speaker 1:He might just be interested.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:He might just be like, I wanna go to the moon. I'm bringing Claude with me.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 6:Claude, go to moon. Don't worry.
Speaker 1:The other the other interesting Burry take was that he thinks that white blue collar work might be more susceptible to AI disruption than many people think. He made this point that he's been doing his own plumbing and electrical work, apparently. Thought I I don't know if that's how true that is, but Yeah. Said that yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you
Speaker 2:read it?
Speaker 6:I have the quote. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He says,
Speaker 6:picture and figure everything out I need to do Yeah. I need to
Speaker 1:fix it. So I mean, this
Speaker 2:for me. Yeah. I I forget who was sharing this, but somebody was like, yeah. They just took a picture Yeah. Of like the most insane Wiring diagram.
Speaker 2:Something. Yeah. No. Was just a bunch of wires going everywhere and it just wants You take a picture
Speaker 1:of your car. It needs engine out service. You're like, where do I screw? I'm doing it myself. Well, we have the perfect guest to talk about AI diffusion and its impact on the job market with economist Tyler Cowen joining in just a minute.
Speaker 1:First, let me tell you about 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. And without further ado, we will bring Tyler Cowen in from the Restream waiting room. Tyler, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:Good to see you.
Speaker 2:Welcome back.
Speaker 3:I'm fine. Good to see you. On the Vanity Fair piece.
Speaker 4:I loved
Speaker 1:it. Thank you so much. I'm so glad that you were able to to to check that out. It was a lot of fun. Very funny getting dressed up all fancy.
Speaker 2:When are you gonna be in Vanity Fair?
Speaker 1:They they really
Speaker 2:We're gonna We're gonna
Speaker 1:been doing their work.
Speaker 2:I think I I would love to see a Vanity Fair Yeah. Photoshoot with you as a subject. I think it would be fantastic. We should make it happen.
Speaker 3:A style icon. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yes. Definitely. Yes. Well, I mean, they they really should do do more, reflecting on, conversations with Tyler.
Speaker 1:The team's grown a lot. Did you just hit a recent milestone? I saw that there was an event. Can you just get me up to speed on on the organization and and how long you've been, working on the show?
Speaker 3:Conversations with Tyler is now ten years. It's a few 100 episodes. Night success. And last year, we did almost an episode a week.
Speaker 1:An episode a week. That is fantastic. Well, it's one of my favorite shows. It always has been for I I I feel like I might have been a decade long listener. Maybe maybe not the first year, but I got on early, and I've been very pleased the whole time.
Speaker 1:But, anyway, thank you so much for joining us. We we first wanted to have you reflect on this point from Michael Burry that artificial intelligence might displace more blue collar jobs than people are expecting because you can now take a picture of your toilet and learn how to do plumbing, or you can take a picture of an electrical panel and you can do your own electrical work. Does that resonate with you at all? Do you think that that there might be some substitutive effect in the DIY community that might have an effect on those trade jobs that previously have been know have been, you know, rumored to be very AI resistant?
Speaker 3:Well, that's true, but there's still a net job boost coming in those areas. Because there'll be all these new projects, new data centers, new sources of electricity. Mhmm. And they need plumbers. They're not all gonna use chat GPT to take the photo and try to figure out how to fix the thing under the water, whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So the house called plumber, maybe that goes down by 20%. Mhmm. But so many other new things happening, terraforming the earth, whatever. Mhmm. Other countries, Africa developing.
Speaker 3:Those jobs will be doing great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you
Speaker 3:That's it. I agree with his example.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. How are you tracking the overall data center boom? There's been this narrative that data centers are the only thing that are propping up The US economy. It feels like we hear about new data center projects every day.
Speaker 1:The numbers are getting bigger. There's a new zero every time there's a new press release. And at the same time, the overall power generation, the big, big, like, US national number is not yet started to move, but it feels like this might be the year where we see more electricity generated in America than before. How are you tracking the overall impact of of AI on the broader economy?
Speaker 3:We need to do much better, but I think it's wrong to feel that without the data centers, the economy would collapse. Mhmm. Those resources would be used to do something else and different. It might be less risky. It might be more immediate.
Speaker 3:Actually, consumption would be higher in the short run if not for AI in the data centers. So what we're doing is investing longer term, taking some risk, boosting medium term productivity. I'm all for doing that. But again, without that, we'd make more toys or more hotdogs or more something else. So no big deal.
Speaker 1:How also how often are you listening to AI music?
Speaker 3:I try it reasonably often, but I don't yet listen to it because I want to. Mhmm. It gets closer every time. Mhmm. I would say within two years, I think I'll be listening to it on purpose.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But right now, it's experiment and tracking the field, not for enjoyment.
Speaker 1:Sure. Do you find the the act of playing the game of trying to generate a song that you like more entertaining than the actual resulting music?
Speaker 3:No. I don't find either entertaining. For me, it's a pain. Yeah. You know, I have a very large collection of albums and compact discs.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. I can hear literally the world's best music at my fingertips when I want to. Mhmm. And the other is a distraction. I do it as my own investment in seeing where things are headed.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Do you think there's
Speaker 2:someone share an interesting anecdote recently, which is that a know, one one example, a professional singer who who made who's sort of top of their field within country music. They made something like $400,000 last year basically going into the studio and recording sample tracks. You know, basically, a songwriter would make a song, they would sing it, and then they go out or this person would sing it, and then it would get pitched to other artists to be made into like a a hit, right, and actually be produced. And his work literally went to zero because of because of Suno this year. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And he doesn't have the ability nobody hires like a backup singer to go on tour. Like, no. You can be a you can be like a studio guitarist and get live jobs. And so their work went from because now people can just prompt with Suno and say, hey, make make use these lyrics, apply it to this track, and make it sound like this artist. And so that's just been kind of an interesting space, and and I was talking to another friend yesterday that says basically everybody is using SunO at scale and nobody in the very few people in the industry will are willing to actually talk about it.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:So You know, played some for my wife recently and she said, I hate it. And I said, why did you hate it? And she said, I hated it because it was good. That's where we're at right now.
Speaker 1:That is. That is.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it's it's notable too that it's it's maybe not it's it's not great for like the end listening stage yet, but it's totally good enough for like the sampling for the professional kind of workflow side of things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Do you think there'll be sort of a a legal reckoning, figuring out how all the royalties flow through these models and saying that, okay, there's 1% Taylor Swift in this generative sample and 2% someone else and and then all of the the money from like sort of like a more complex rev share that might flow through these generative models?
Speaker 3:I don't know if that's practical. Mhmm. I mean, the Beatles took from Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, everyone
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Without paying and the world went on whether or not it was fair. And I think we're gonna redo that experiment. Yeah. I don't think it will be all that different. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Most musicians don't make from recording anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. Makes sense. Have you tried Claude Code?
Speaker 3:No. I have not. I've been meaning to, but I've been traveling and I'm finally back home and I will be trying it. Everyone tells me it's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. People are maybe one one click behind you. I I remember you declared o three AGI, and now people were maybe hesitant to call the game there, but many more people have jumped in with affirmations that clogged code as AGI because it can do so much more when it actually has access to your full computer. But it is a little bit more cumbersome to get set up.
Speaker 2:How did you how did you process Powell's video yesterday?
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 3:yeah. Well, it was terrible what Trump did. Mhmm. Fortunately, most of the markets did not react very much, but gold and silver went crazy. To me, that's a sign that the dollar is much less of a safe haven.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And Trump is going a bit, you know, what I call the captain qui group, and he's just not reliable. Mhmm. And that's very bad. But I don't think it's really gonna change inflation or interest rates very much.
Speaker 1:Is that just because he'll Powell hold steady?
Speaker 3:No. Because we already wrecked the independence of the Fed, which I'm not happy about. Mhmm. But that's the ugly little truth behind this story. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's why it's not been worse what Trump did, is because it was already wrecked.
Speaker 1:Why is Fed independence important?
Speaker 3:Sometimes the central bank needs to do things that are not politically popular, and they need that shield to do it. Mhmm. But the basic problem is our debt and deficits are so high that over time, we will monetize them to some extent and have higher inflation because we prefer that over higher taxes no matter what we might say. And so the Fed independence has taken away through that mechanism apart from whatever Trump said yesterday.
Speaker 1:Oh, so just
Speaker 3:like, I'm not telling you not to worry.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I'm telling you, you should have been worried to begin with.
Speaker 1:Black bill. So, yeah, you're you're saying that just by running high deficits, that reduces Fed independence.
Speaker 3:And that's an old story, but it's now closer to a tipping point. And Trump is making that much worse. So I would say his actions on the fiscal front do more to hurt the Fed's independence than his words. But they're both bad.
Speaker 1:Can you walk me through your mental model for thinking through what the right level of debt for a nation is? Some of the numbers get so big. It's trillions of dollars. It feels very abstractly bad. But then if you look at it more like a mortgage relative to, you know, debt to income, it feels maybe more reasonable.
Speaker 1:Like, should, you know, nations think about the level of indebtedness that's appropriate?
Speaker 3:United States is a special nation, and we can get away with more debt Mhmm. Which is great for our living standards, but it's bad for our political responsibility because our leaders all know we can get away with more debt. I think what we'll need to do at some point is have half a dozen years of something like 7% inflation, get the debt down, it won't at all solve the problem. The problem will never go away, but it will give us some breathing room, we'll then lower inflation, maybe have a recession and start all over again. And it's highly unpleasant and a lot of people will be thrown out of work and living standards will be lower.
Speaker 3:But we've already spent that money, we can't default. Mhmm. And that's facing us over the course of the next ten to fifteen years. But I don't think the world will end.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Is America's position in AI the biggest counterbalance to all that, like, sort of negative view?
Speaker 3:It is. So if AI would help our economy grow one percentage point more a year Mhmm. We could just afford the whole thing and we wouldn't even need to inflate. Now that would not be my best prediction, but it's not impossible that it could happen and I've been predicting half a percentage point a year, which still puts us right on that border of can we, can't we, we don't know. I wouldn't want to stake the whole house on that.
Speaker 3:But again, there's some chance we'll squeak by due to AI and assorted productivity gains.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But why not one percent growth? Why not 2% growth? These tools, they feel amazing. It feels like
Speaker 2:Or triple digit as as Elon alluded Sure.
Speaker 1:But but it does it does you use these tools and it feels like you're more productive. And there's some studies that say, oh, maybe You
Speaker 2:can generate documents that don't get read. Basically.
Speaker 1:Is is that what's going on? Like like like what is holding back AI from actually moving the needle on economic growth significantly?
Speaker 3:Well first, about half of our economy right now is just totally perpetually sluggish. Look at government, look at most of the nonprofit sector, look at higher education, parts of our healthcare sector. Add that up, you're at 50% of GDP. To some extent they use AI already, but in pretty trivial ways, like oh, it saves people some time, they don't work as hard, they take more leisure, they hang out more at the water cooler. That's fine, it's fun, but it's not going to get rid of our dead problem.
Speaker 3:And then you have some startups, you have programming, you have the dynamic parts of our biomedical sector that are already using AI a lot, but the more they use AI, the more efficient they become and the more the inefficient parts of your economy are left over. And it's just really hard to grow much faster. Interesting. Unless you're like China playing catch up.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the number's hard to estimate, but GDP is a huge mound of stuff, most of which is produced by people who are not neither white nor black pilled on AI. Sure. And it will take things a long time to change.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about the legacy of Thomas Piketty and the the new debate over Piketty in the twenty second century, I believe. Wait. Was it twenty first century, twenty second century that Dorkhash wrote about? 20 20 20 It's in the
Speaker 2:twentieth century.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Economic inequality, increasing gains to capital and increasing returns to capital.
Speaker 2:To our country Twenty second.
Speaker 1:Twenty second century.
Speaker 2:Pickety to the twenty first.
Speaker 3:He's too focused on the labor share. Mhmm. I think real wages will go up a lot. If real wages go up, workers are happy. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:They might be upset that Elon or someone else is a trillionaire, but I don't think that will drive our politics. I think if real wages go up, we'll be fine. People will feel good. So my view is very different. Wait.
Speaker 3:But, I mean, real
Speaker 1:wages will go up. They'll feel good, but then they'll also be upset that there's now multiple trillionaires walking around. And so won't those emotions actually drive the politics? It feels like
Speaker 4:they did today.
Speaker 2:People are
Speaker 3:that envious. They're envious about the people they went to high school with or maybe their brother-in-law. Most people are not that envious about the Llano Bill Gates or whomever else.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I was
Speaker 3:Envy is local for the most part. Yeah. Was to envy each other. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 3:You envy, you know, the sheikh Sure. The the richest sheikh in Saudi Arabia? I bet you don't even think about him that much.
Speaker 1:He does have a great
Speaker 3:you think about his role in the AI world, which is fine. Totally. But you're not upset that he gets however much hummus and you have less hummus than he is.
Speaker 1:It's all about the hummus. Oh, yeah. I was doing a thought experiment.
Speaker 2:You think, envy is is a factor in in the current wealth tax sort of discourse.
Speaker 3:California is a crazy state, but I think it's just more money grab than envy. And I think there's a very good chance they ruin the greatest engine of wealth creation maybe in human history. Mhmm. So I I hope it fails. And soon, even the risk of it, as you know, is inducing many people to leave or get ready to leave.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the what's the retrospective view on the Laffer curve in light of what's happening in California today?
Speaker 3:Well, at some tax rate, the Laffer curve is true. We're not usually in that range, but California is playing with fire and experimenting with that range. So I dearly hope they don't do it for their own sake. Be great for Austin, great for Miami, maybe good for New York.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 3:New York
Speaker 2:What's has a your personal investing strategy?
Speaker 3:Buy and hold. Focus on other things.
Speaker 2:Investing Yeah. Doesn't But buy what? Because if you buy individual it names, can end up being wildly distracting, and then you can't focus on the other things that are maybe more productive.
Speaker 3:Diversified portfolio. I thought now of buying some more gold just as a hedge. It's not that I think it will do well, but I see higher risk. Mhmm. And Bitcoin's not really a hedge, so maybe gold and silver.
Speaker 3:Again, I'm not saying it will make you rich. I'm just saying if everything else falls apart, you'll have something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you pushed any AI model AI labs to develop taste or smell technology to help with judging the judging of food. It feels like culinary aspects are particularly AI durable or resistant. But I don't know if that's if that's something that can be overcome with better technology.
Speaker 3:Maybe it's cheaper for now just to use humans and have the AI record what the humans say Mhmm. And judge the food that way. That seems to work well. Like judging food is not hard. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:It's one of the easiest problems for humans to solve. And humans will do it basically for free. How many food bloggers get paid? Well, they might get some free meals, whatever.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 3:so many people do it for free. I just wouldn't put AI money into that for a long time. I'd work on almost every every other problem first. You know, AmeriCorps, they wanted to hire some basketball analysts to make basketball commentary better by AI. I'd rather do that than food.
Speaker 3:It's harder. Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. That's very funny. What about this call for new aesthetics? What do you do you do you believe that we're in some sort of local minima for the development of new aesthetics? Like, what do you attribute this to just broad stagnation?
Speaker 1:What are the key sources that led us to this point where it feels like aesthetically we're stunted?
Speaker 3:I think poor taste is a big problem around the world, but especially in America. You look at the older parts of San Francisco, the Victorian homes, they're beautiful. You look at the new buildings, I like some of them, but a lot of them are just awful. Or you look at parking structures or you look at a new bank branch that goes up somewhere. Awful, awful, awful.
Speaker 3:Are we really so poor a society that we cannot afford to invest in more beauty? So Patrick and I are trying to get people to think more systematically. What can we do to try to make much more of our world just plain flat, outright lovely? It absolutely can be done.
Speaker 1:Is there an is there an element of the financialization or or, I don't know, like, multiparty, like, multipronged stakeholders that go into the development of a campus or a building now that maybe didn't exist a hundred years ago where one person could just decide that they have some crazy vision for a building and they go and build Hearst Castle and it kind of destroys them over their life. But it's a singular decision and now a company that builds a property or something, it doesn't have there's not a single person that can be maybe authoritarian about the decision and the taste. Even if they have the taste, they get overruled by a committee of investors and stakeholders that all kind of put the kibosh on whatever they want to do.
Speaker 3:That's one problem, and there are too many veto points. But if you go back earlier in time to the 1920s, say, you look at a neighborhood like Shaker Heights near Cleveland, where the homes are being built by different families for the most part, they're still far more beautiful than homes being built today. So I don't think that's the sole main root of the issue. I think just bad taste is.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Do you think there's a technology angle where I I it feels like in the modern era, a lot of young people lament high housing prices, but when I look at their choices, they'll often choose to live in a small studio apartment in a very dense city to be around other people. And when they go to their apartment, it is small, they don't have a library, but they have a Kindle. And they don't have a room to dance or something, but they have a TV where they can watch dancing. And they don't need a movie theater because they just have their phone to watch a show on or something like that.
Speaker 1:And so the the number of places, you know, if you were if you were rich, you know, century ago, you needed a lot of spaces to do different activities. Now, every activity can happen on the couch with a TV. Do you think that there there's some effect
Speaker 2:of you, John.
Speaker 3:Don't know. Well, if you do all that and you live in the West Village, you're surrounded by beautiful buildings. Sure. I'd like there to be more places in the country where you have that choice to be surrounded by beauty Mhmm. That you don't just have to be all scrunched in, that you can have reasonable living space and afford it, and what's around you looks nice.
Speaker 3:Again, people have done this in the past, even the distant past, sometimes in medieval times. So to claim we can't do it now, it's simply a failure of will. There are laws that need to be changed, procedures that need to be changed. But I think the first step is just to wake people up and increase awareness.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels like the Yimbe movement has a serious amount of energy behind it. And yet, in my lifetime, I haven't seen that much movement on it. Maybe the the the ADU the law in California is is moving a little bit, but it still feels incredibly slow to get permits. Is there is there a dynamic where landowners, property owners
Speaker 2:are actually I don't even think the I my my feeling, is that the ADU new like support for ADUs doesn't actually really increase the housing supply because a lot of people are like, you'll let me put another structure on my property? Great. I'm not Doesn't mean I'm gonna doesn't mean I'm gonna like suddenly like it's a new single family home. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know. What do you think?
Speaker 3:I think the Imbi movement could go much further Mhmm. If it could promise it would boost housing and make neighborhoods prettier. Mhmm. Right now, it's like, well, we're gonna boost housing, cost will fall, that's wonderful, but maybe your neighborhood will get uglier. So you do it in Buffalo, you replace the old with the new.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The new is probably uglier.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't like that. I think you would have a lot more successes when it can promise beauty.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sorry. On on on the new aesthetics, I heard a critique or an idea that new aesthetics come from problem solving. And so it's less about the taste and opinion and will and more of there's a specific problem in society in a particular neighborhood and then a design emerges to address that particular problem. And so the critique was that we won't get the new aesthetics until identify particular problems, or maybe the bland aesthetics are solving for a particular set of problems that are in front of us.
Speaker 1:Does that resonate with you at all?
Speaker 3:Not that much. I mean, would say the problem is ugliness. If you look at older structures around the world, especially in Europe, but often in The US, Yeah. They can be very ornate and have all kinds of flourishes and small details
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That are lovely. Those are not solving problems. Mhmm. They're put there because people think it will make the thing look better. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So it's not mainly about problem solving, but I'm not against solving problems hardly.
Speaker 2:Sure. Has there been any studies on the the effect, the local effect of brutalist architecture? Like does it make people like stay at the office longer or anything? Because I can actually it's funny. I can appreciate brutalist architecture when it is surrounded by nature Yeah.
Speaker 2:In a big way.
Speaker 1:It stands out as contrast.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a nice it's a nice contrast. Yeah. And it feels like, you know, a triumph of of man in some way. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it oftentimes will make a neighborhood much less warm.
Speaker 1:Oh, a shipping container home in a forest sometimes can look beautiful if
Speaker 2:you Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:See it as a getaway.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Is there is there is there any like, what what made brutalist architecture, you know, be such a force in the world?
Speaker 3:People don't like it once they live in it. Personally, as a tourist, I often enjoy it. I think it's interesting or sometimes creative, but it's not the model I would want to seek to spread through the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because to
Speaker 3:live with it all the time, I think it wears thin on you. Why it ever got as far as it did? Maybe England is the best example. The sixties, the seventies, it's just cheaper, they're in a hurry, concrete is easy to manage, you have a bunch of planners who think they know better, and a lot of it was a big mistake. And I would say maybe England got the worst brutalism, maybe parts of communist society got the best brutalism
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Because they really needed the structures after World War two. But I don't think it should be our emphasis moving forward. We wanna move away from that.
Speaker 2:Do you think there's 8,000,000,000 people on Earth? Because there's a What's popular
Speaker 3:exact number
Speaker 2:of No. People on No. No. So so
Speaker 4:Can keep
Speaker 3:telling me?
Speaker 2:The back no. The backstory is that there's there's a growing conspiracy theory specifically on X this weekend, movement of people that are just saying there's no possible way.
Speaker 1:Google says it's 8,200,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yes. But this is But many people many people are are disagreeing with And and one of China's official data
Speaker 1:of the arguments is that that in certain countries, China among them, there are incentives to inflate your local population numbers, so you get more resources from the state. You do that. You game theory that out across the entire country.
Speaker 2:There's homegrown there's a homegrown effort in China from people that are trying to prove this. Mhmm. And they're going and they're they're finding these cities that are just barren. Dissidents. A a city that that has, you know, a thousand homes and Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Thousands, you know It might just be over
Speaker 1:but yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But but but there's like a homegrown movement to to prove that China does not in fact have as many people as the official numbers claim.
Speaker 1:What do you think?
Speaker 3:I think there's a modest inflation there. Okay. If there's a betting market on this, I'd love to get in on it.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's good. That's good.
Speaker 8:I mean
Speaker 3:to bet on, you know, 8,000,000,000 or more. That's my bet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:But if
Speaker 3:it's 8,100,000,000.0 and not 8.2, that I can believe.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Yeah. That makes sense. Back on the architecture question and the aesthetic question, it feels like when people are dissatisfied with the current status quo of architecture or any aesthetic, there's often some sort of emotional response to return to a previous era to just go back in time.
Speaker 1:And I'm wondering if you think that that is the solution. We need more Art Deco or mid century or all sorts of different, I don't know, Gothic structures or or or go back in time to pull to just build new buildings that look like they're hundreds of years old? Or do you think we actually need something that's entirely new and never before conceived?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Draws from the past. Mostly, I think we need freedom to experiment. Mhmm. It's not that I want everyone to follow my preferred path.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. The city where I love what they've done with new things and somewhat older things is Helsinki, Finland. Mhmm. So personally, that's what I want. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But do I want every city to look like Helsinki? Of course not.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Or the modern parts of Copenhagen, I think, are quite striking and beautiful. So those would be my preferred directions. But most of all, it's about simply the ability to raise your hand and say, this is ugly. We don't want to do ugly things anymore. And we all look around for different ways of avoiding that outcome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean the risk is that you just have NIMBYs that say I think everything looks ugly and I don't want anything to build, I guess. If you have the option to raise your hand and say that's ugly, we shouldn't build it. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Earlier on the show, John was sharing how in 1947, there was a very, very small number of televisions in 16000.
Speaker 1:Eight years later, it was 32,000,000.
Speaker 2:So so we were talking about how that was effectively a fast takeoff in it's a hardware fast takeoff. Do you think we can see something similar in robotics? There's bunch of different exciting projects Yeah. A lot of which we've covered on the show. I saw a video of a robotic hand yesterday Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Spinning a screw perfectly. Oh. And it looks like it's sped up like 10 x, but it's actually in real time. So it's like spinning spinning a screw, you know Okay. 20 times faster than a human can.
Speaker 2:Interesting. But but yeah. So so I think people, you know, see the current state of humanoids today. They can do cool demos and and other robotic form factors, but it doesn't quite feel like, you know, we could have a population of a 100,000 a 100,000,000 of these in three years. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But who knows?
Speaker 3:I don't think we yet see the killer app in the home. Mhmm. So if I ask myself, what do I want? If I could have a fully functioning robot that would be like a maid or a butler, that would be useful to me. But most things short of that don't quite seem worth it.
Speaker 3:Do I have a Roomba? No. I don't know. What if there's a mechanical vacuum cleaner that goes around on its own when I'm at work? Mhmm.
Speaker 3:It's fine. It just doesn't seem that necessary. I do my own laundry. It's a welcome break sometimes. So I think we're still waiting to see the killer app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Any other technologies that you're excited about this year?
Speaker 3:Well, everything in biomedical. I mean, even without AI, progress against cancer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think youngish people today will die of old age and maybe live to 97 or whenever the time is. And that's already in the cards. You don't even have to be a big AI optimist. I don't think it will be soon. To me it seems like a forty year process where you have some gains coming now, but it's mostly complete within forty years, that you just won't die of most of the things that kill people.
Speaker 3:Cancer, heart attacks, there'll be accidents and there'll be deaths by old age.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's an extreme white pill. I love it.
Speaker 3:And that's likely. And again, it doesn't have to rely on AGI, though. Of course, AGI can help and accelerate that.
Speaker 1:How do you think about your information diet, your information consumption? It's obviously AI augmented, but I imagine you don't start the day with the prompt to an LLM, and maybe the LLM prompts come in once you've explored or read some source text and want more context? Is that how you're using them?
Speaker 3:Oh, you imagined wrong. I wake up in the morning. I had questions when I was lying in bed Okay. Questions when I was falling asleep
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 3:And to ask an LLM something can easily happen in the first ten minutes. Okay. Thinking and wondering Yeah. And I don't get up just to ask the LLM, once I'm up, it's like, hey, I'm here. Why not?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And if the question takes a while to answer, then I scroll through Twitter, email, whatever. Sure. It's perfect. You want to set your queries in motion early in the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I actually do find that often I'll kick off a deep research report before bed because I know it's cooking for me when I wake up. I love that.
Speaker 2:Actually a great report. Is a Okay. Is in flux. Very very hard to tell, you know, what the outcome will be there. But if you have a free Iran, how how should people be thinking about how that would impact world markets?
Speaker 3:I think it's unrealistic to expect a free Iran. I would like to see a stable Iran, which has been rare in world history, though Iranians are often very successful. There are so many ethnic groups in the territory, and they have expanded or contracted so many times. What they need is stability and some breathing space and a government that's not one of the very worst in the world. And I think the chances of getting that now are pretty high, maybe 50%.
Speaker 3:But we should set our sights a bit low and not actually reach for too much and let the Iranian people over time, you know, make it as good as they can and not have it be a question of outside influence. Oh, we're giving you this. We're making you do that. I think that's counterproductive.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. What about the looking back, the postmortem on the tariff and the trade war from last year? Obviously, the markets did very well even though they were tumultuous during the process. What what what's the economic view on the impact of the tariffs in 2025?
Speaker 3:Not as bad as we thought, but no gain, no upside. Manufacturing in this country, manufacturing employment, they're still falling.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Our allies are mad at us. People pay higher prices. When I buy my favorite Rainier cherries from Chile, they're £990 $9.99 a pound instead of $6.99 the year before.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:What's the
Speaker 1:point of that? So I'm against it. Against it. Well, we are certainly not against your appearances here. We love having you on the show and we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming Always a pleasure. And Always a pleasure. I'm glad your 2026 is off to a great start. I hope you have a great rest of the week. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Take care.
Speaker 2:Great to see you. Bye. Cheers.
Speaker 4:Have a
Speaker 1:great rest of your day. Fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin dot a I. And I'm also going to tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer.
Speaker 1:Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And up next, we have Cerebras in the Restream waiting room. Andrew Feldman is the co founder and CEO, and we will have him join us in the TVPN UltraDome. Andrew, how are
Speaker 2:He's back.
Speaker 5:Good. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 2:We're doing fantastic. Thrilled to not just have five minutes today. We have a the last last
Speaker 1:We really botched your
Speaker 2:botched. Schedule. You
Speaker 1:for taking a shot.
Speaker 2:Giving us a second
Speaker 1:chance. There aren't many second chances in life, but we appreciate you having taken one with us. But anyway, how are you doing? How's how's your new new year going? I'd love to just hear the state of the business and the level of optimism going into 2026.
Speaker 5:I think it's an extraordinary time to be in. Well, first, thank you for for inviting me back. I I appreciate it. It's always good to talk to you guys.
Speaker 1:Thanks.
Speaker 5:Look. It's an extraordinary time to be in AI hardware. Mhmm. I I think we have seen exceptional interest. We've seen validation in the market.
Speaker 5:We've been telling people for years that fast inference would be a separate category. And so important was this new category that NVIDIA spent $20,000,000,000 to buy the number two player in it. Wow. And so what an exciting time to see. I mean, you were just talking about the guys at Cognition, big customer bars what a great product, blisteringly fast, smart as can be, great coding tools.
Speaker 5:Is what we're seeing may maybe a way to think about it is this, is that that we had a GPT moment in 2023
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Where people first realized that the AI was interesting. Yeah. And in the '25, people demonstrated it was useful.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Right? And that that is exploding. They're different uses for it. These aren't demos. These are production use cases, and they're demanding vast amounts of AI compute Yeah.
Speaker 5:Underneath that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The fast inference thing is is so it's so obvious that it's become a meme. I'm sure you've seen these where people will be, you know, joking about, well, I'm coding and while I wait for my coding agent to come back to me, I I open TikTok and I scroll vertical videos. And so Right. I saw one guy made a made a script that as soon as he sends his prompt, it automatically opens them and then it closes them as soon as it responds so that he doesn't get sucked into a rabbit hole.
Speaker 1:But it's like it's brain rot, but it exposes a real a real behavior, which is that there's a lot of waiting involved in programming these days.
Speaker 5:How cool is it that other people are are are making TikTok videos about your value proposition?
Speaker 1:Exactly. It's like
Speaker 9:I mean, how
Speaker 5:cool how often does that happen that Never. An entire ecosystem's creativity
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Is being brought to bear on how shitty the competition is to use. Yeah. And what a what a cool thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And Since we have more time, I'd love to go back and actually get more of your full story, more of the story of the company, and and sort of take us back in time to the initial idea, the first things that you did, all of that. So if you could sort of, you know, reintroduce yourself and the company, I think that that would be a really good level setting experience.
Speaker 5:Great. I'm Andrew. I'm one of the founders. And with Sean and JP, Michael and Gary, we founded Cerebras in early twenty sixteen. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:What we saw on the There's horizon then was the
Speaker 1:still gonna be some soundboard here. The overnight success is real. Overnight success It really has been. Right? I mean, people No.
Speaker 1:People were skeptical at various amounts of times, and I think people are finally getting it now.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think that when you build real things
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Right, you don't get the same sort of rate of growth that you have in viral software. Right? I mean, when you actually build physical things, there's components, there's factory, there's real manufacturing work that needs to happen. And especially when you do deep tech Mhmm. And what we we set out to do, what we saw on the horizon was a new workload.
Speaker 5:AI wasn't the same. It presented fundamentally different challenges to the computer. And that if we were able to build a new design Mhmm. We would not be a little bit faster, not one or two or three or five times faster, that we could get to ten, twenty, 30, 50x faster Mhmm. On this work.
Speaker 5:And the way to do it was to solve a problem that had been unsolved in the computer industry for seventy five years, and that was how to build a really big chip. You know, most chips are the size of postage stamps. Yeah. And our chip is the size of a dinner plate.
Speaker 1:Right? So good.
Speaker 5:And so now it took an enormous amount of work
Speaker 1:to build. Walk me through exactly, like, you incorporate the company and then you're doing design and you're calling a manufacturer and saying, And have this crazy then I imagine, like, a year, years go by until the first one comes off the line, you can actually test it. Like, what were those early days like?
Speaker 5:They were unbelievably challenging. I think when you do really hard work, your first one is like that first pancake. You know, it's sort of messed You make the pancake and the pan isn't hot enough and the pancake is all nasty and and it's like that. And we had an idea that that we could solve this class of problems that had broken every other effort to build a big chip. And we spoke to backers that had vision and believed in us.
Speaker 5:And we put together one of the truly world class chip teams in the industry. There are only about half a dozen world class chip teams and we have one of them. And then we laid out a plan and we flew out to TSMC and said, we think we can do something with your process Yeah. That nobody else has ever been able to do. They listened, and and to their enormous credit, they listened and said, shit.
Speaker 5:That's a good idea. And in the meeting, they greenlit it.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 5:It was amazing.
Speaker 1:What was their That is risks were they identifying? What was their pushback? I mean, even if they say, yeah, we'll take your money and we'll build this thing, what are they cautioning you about at that moment?
Speaker 2:Well, think yeah, also, I feel like if you're a founder, you get a lot of no's. Sometimes it's customers, sometimes it's with investors or talent. But if you're building a chip and TSMC says no, like, you do you do you just go back to the do you go back to the drawing board? Like, do you you gotta give them that carries like quite a bit more weight than Mhmm. Just an investor saying, I'm I'm I'm
Speaker 5:Yeah. Mean, there's TSMC is the best in the business. And so we we heard noes. When you do when you're interested in pioneering work, when you're interested in fearless engineering, you're going to hear no a lot because everybody's afraid of the problem that you're trying to attack. And when everybody's failed at a problem, then those who are medium, lack vision, are always like, It'll never work.
Speaker 5:It can't be done. Others fail. Yep. And it takes a special type of person to say, Well, just because others fail doesn't mean we need to fail. The world has changed.
Speaker 5:The tools are better. We have better insight. We can use architectural techniques to avoid some of the things that broke previous efforts. And so what we did is we went out, we studied the previous failures. And we came to believe that that we could work around everything that had broken previous efforts.
Speaker 5:And we brought this back to our investors and they're like, wow. This could be really big. And we tuned it, we tuned it, we flew out to TSMC and they agreed. I think even when you do pioneering work, you encounter problems that nobody thought of. Yep.
Speaker 5:Right? I like to tell the story that, I mean, imagine before Everest was summited, you get to base camp and there's a team there having tea that just failed to summit. And you talk to them and you go, hey, guys. And they say, there's this part about halfway up that's really, really hard at beating
Speaker 2:No one's ever gotten past it.
Speaker 5:Right. And you go up and you go up and you come down and you're having tea with the same guys, and you lean forward and say, that wasn't the hard part. Right. And when you do things that nobody else had ever done, you encounter things that nobody else has ever encountered. And we had to invent materials.
Speaker 5:We had to invent packaging techniques. The problem that caused, for example, the the b 200 to be eighteen months late was a problem with the coefficient of thermal expansion that we'd solved in 2017. We saw it. We knew it was coming for them, and we solved it. The problem that that caused the Dojo project, the Tesla, to fail, we'd predicted we'd solved it in 2018.
Speaker 5:We had already encountered these problems. We'd found ways around them. And, you know, what fun is it to be an engineer if you're doing the same stuff everybody else has done already? I mean, it's only fun
Speaker 7:when you're doing What were
Speaker 2:the early kind of key customers that, because it's great if you can have a partner like TSMC that says, hey, you guys are onto something. We want to be a part of this.
Speaker 1:2016, there's no LLMs, right? So
Speaker 5:There are no there are no LLMs yet.
Speaker 1:Who's doing AI that's that might be a potential customer.
Speaker 5:That's right. So early customers included, you know, a visionary group at GalaxoSmithKline, not who you think of as likely to bet on us. Yeah. Truly visionary group and and one of the, I think, truly great minds in in the application of AI to pharma. There's a guy named Kim Branson who runs AI for for them.
Speaker 5:The the military and the national labs, they were accustomed to understanding what could be done with blisteringly fast hardware. Interesting. And so our our first our serial number zero one went to Argonne National Labs, part of the DOE Yeah. Infrastructure, and we have projects today with Argonne and with Sandia that and the and the, I guess, Department of War, it's now called, that measure in the hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1:dollars. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And so they were early customers, and they were willing to take early machines that that were a little rough around the edges. And that was our first generation. Then we delivered the second generation a couple years later, and it they got better and better. Then we delivered the third generation, and then it took off. And we had the rise of of inference as a meaningful workload.
Speaker 5:And suddenly, performance was everything.
Speaker 1:Talk about that early critique that I heard that part of what was going to be difficult about this was the fact that when you're operating on the wafer scale, if there's one defect, you throw the whole chip out as opposed to with smaller chips. If there's a defect over here, well, I still get, you know, 80% Right. Of the No.
Speaker 5:That was the received wisdom. The received wisdom remember how this works. I mean, imagine a wafer is like a big circle. Imagine it's a cookie sheet your mother rolled out into a circle. She takes a hat full of M and M's and throws it up in the air and they land throughout this.
Speaker 5:We'll call those the flaws. Right? They're randomly distributed. Yeah. And say you can't have a cookie with M and M's.
Speaker 5:Your mom goes like this and does a cookie cut through the entire thing. And if there's an M and M in it, she has to throw away the cookie. Yeah. Okay? This is exactly how it works.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. Now, historically, the bigger her cookie cutter, the higher the probability she'd hit an M and M. Yeah. And the more good silicon around it, good cookie dough, would need to be thrown away. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:This was one of the problems everybody said could never be resolved, and we solved it in fifteen months with $12,000,000. It wasn't even a hard one. Incredible. To Everybody. This And it worked like this.
Speaker 5:It's there is another way to solve that problem, and that's the way memory has solved it. Mhmm. Memory has lots of identical tiles. They're called bit cells. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And in the array of bit cells on a chip, they have redundant rows and columns. Mhmm. And if there's a flaw, they map it out and use one of the redundant ones.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 5:And that's it. Yeah. They're built to withstand flaws, not avoid them.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:And so we looked at memory and said nobody's ever done this in compute, but if we built a computer architecture with a million identical tiles Mhmm. And we took 5% of them and we held them aside for redundancy. We could withstand almost all failure patterns. And so, we thought about the problem differently. And it it that wasn't it was top of everybody's mind.
Speaker 5:They've just been taught that that big chips have lower yield. They they don't really understand the alternatives. In the same way, when Google first built their big data centers, they they said, we don't want servers that are redundant. If they fail, we'll route around
Speaker 4:them. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:We don't want to pay the extra cost of making them high reliability. If they fail, we'll shut them down. We'll get new ones. We'll route around it.
Speaker 1:So does that mean that from chip to chip, there might be a slight difference in the number of flops or power that can come out of Is the that like, a real thing? Not that it matters practically, but
Speaker 5:I'm just wondering We have to invent a a way to communicate across that little bit of cookie dough between the two cookie cuts that your mother makes.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Right? She she puts the cookie here, and she puts the cookie cutter here for her Christmas cookie, and there's a tiny little bit of dough. Yeah. Right? And usually, what she does is she lifts all that bit of dough up and rolls it and makes more cookies later.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But in the chip world, that's called the scribe line.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:And they run a laser across it. Mhmm. And that's how they dice the chips. That's how they cut them. Yeah.
Speaker 5:They obliterate that that tiny little bit of distance. We had to invent a technique to run communication across those. And we had to use the tools that were already being operated at at TSMC. Yeah. And so, you know, we we benefited from the fact that we had this extraordinary chip expertise, not not just how to write logic to make the chip work, but the back end design, what we call the physical design and timing.
Speaker 5:We knew EDA tools, and we knew manufacturing of chips. And so we were able to to think very differently than most companies.
Speaker 1:How does intellectual property play into this category? In so many tech startups, they say, you know, don't worry about patents. Worry about your network effect. This feels very different. What's your IP strategy broadly?
Speaker 5:Deep technology companies have to worry about technology.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Know, viral Statement of the century.
Speaker 5:You've been you've been talking to SaaS guys. Right. They worry about virality. Yeah. And they worry about network effects.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. We worry about the fact that we can build things nobody else can build.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And that that is a combination of protecting your IP with patents, with trade secrets
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:With segmenting your manufacturing so your manufacturers can't see
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 5:The the interaction between steps. It's using all the tools and all the wisdom in in your sort of in your toolbox to defend your invention. And sometimes patenting is not the right. Right? When you patent, you have to disclose.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Right? And if you have to disclose something that is then very difficult to tell if somebody else used, you might want to think about not patenting it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Truth is.
Speaker 5:And so, generally, you want to patent things that that you can then measure if someone stole.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And so, we have a very aggressive patent strategy, but we also have a very aggressive trade secret strategy and a collection of other tools that we use to defend our inventions.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about space data centers. It seems like if it does work, if the heating question is solved, you probably don't want a server rack with a ton of chips in space. That seems like more to manage, more networking, wafer scale compute in space could be a logical extension of that. Are you excited about that? Have you dug into it?
Speaker 1:Has it been something that's been on your
Speaker 5:road I out for was me digging into it this weekend with with some friends. I I think the following. I I think one of the real weaknesses Mhmm. Of today's GPUs is by being little tiny chips, it has put a lot of pressure on how you tie them together. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Right? And this is why NVIDIA bought Mellanox.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Why did it make sense? Because they knew that the individual chip would be far less powerful than a collection of chips. And if you're going to bring a collection of chips to a problem, you have to tie them together. Now that problem is made more complicated in space. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. You you would like bigger blocks up in space. I think there are a lot of hard problems yet to be solved with data centers in space. I think we ought to be working on them, but I I don't think it's something that you're gonna see in production in the three to five year time frame.
Speaker 1:Sure. What about on the topic of cooling? We were just talking to Jeremy from Semi Analysis about how Meta changed their data center design from this H structure that was air cooled, very efficient. It took them two years. They couldn't do water cooling.
Speaker 1:Now they're doing water cooling in their new data centers, the tents. What what what have you learned about various ways to cool? What's special about your product specifically with regard to cooling and and energy management?
Speaker 5:This is not a complicated problem.
Speaker 1:I love it. In in I'm sure. Yeah. You want to
Speaker 4:employ me?
Speaker 1:You want me to handle it? It's not complicated. Right?
Speaker 5:Got it.
Speaker 1:I can do it.
Speaker 5:In Buffalo
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:At a at a Bills game, there are always three idiots who have their shirt off. Right? It's 10 below Okay. And they've got their shirt off.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And, right, they've been drinking hard, but they're not dead. Yeah. Aren't they dead? If you're if you're in the water Mhmm. And the water's 45 degrees and you're there for eight minutes, you're dead.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. Why is that? It's because water's really good at sucking heat off of heat sources.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Right? We say in the technology, the thermal density of water is really high. It rips heat off you, whereas the air doesn't do that. So they can stand there with their shirt off and not be dead. It's the exact same thing when you're cooling a chip, that water has an ability to pull heat off a heat source that is vastly better than air.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. So you have two choices. You you can blow cold air over your chip, and you don't get the same cooling effect as if you ran cold water against the back of your chip or against the back of a cold plate. And so it is more efficient by an order of magnitude to use liquid, water in particular is great and low cost
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:To pull heat off the back of chips. Mhmm. And we were among the first to do it. Google started doing it with their TPUs in in 2017. It had been done previously in the supercompute world exclusively.
Speaker 5:And now, you know, the new we do it. I've been doing it for years.
Speaker 1:Gamers. I remember You used to build a gaming gaming rig. You get liquid cooling if you want that extra Yeah.
Speaker 5:That's exactly right. Gamers have been doing it forever because they wanna run those GPUs hot. Totally. And we it's Facebook was they they learned a lesson, they jumped on
Speaker 1:it. Well, they were optimizing for one thing, which was this energy coefficient, and now they're optimizing for speed and new scale. And so they have a different set of optimization parameters, and they adjusted their strategy. What else in the supply chain have you had to find partners for or develop in house? I know you have experience actually building servers, but how much else changes when I'm racking your product versus an NVIDIA product from Yeah.
Speaker 1:The energy that's outside, to the land, to the building, to the we talked about the cooling. What else is different? How do you solve those to actually stand up whole data centers?
Speaker 5:Right. So we designed to fit in the exact same footprint as an NVIDIA Yeah. Racket. L72.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 5:Right? And so we we are underneath that envelope. We will fit in any any data center designed for for that. Mhmm. You know, there are fewer little boxes to stuff in because we have a bigger box, but we fit in the standard racks.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:You just roll them in. They're exactly the same as you bought for your Dell servers or your for your super micro servers
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 5:Or your your Arista switches. These are we fit in exactly the same. We use the same power. We we require the same cooling that that all high end Yeah. AI chips now use.
Speaker 5:And so we we were able to were able to sort of fit in the envelope that they carved out to make it really easy for data center operators and owners to roll us in.
Speaker 1:And then on the demand side, are are customers who wanna use your chips asking, hey. We'd love for you to rack these with the hyperscalers or set up a deep relationship with a bunch of neo clouds or they wanna buy and operate themselves or they want you to buy to build the data center and just offer basically, like, an API for them or
Speaker 3:All of them. All of
Speaker 5:the above. We have an API service.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's ripping right now. We have customers who buy the hardware and ask us to operate and manage it for them in their facilities. We have customers who buy the hardware. They operate it, manage it in their facilities. We have customers that the the whole gamut.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. You can buy our hardware. You can rent it by the the week, the month, the token from various clouds. So it's the the customers have sort of consolidated around either they have a demand to buy hardware and operate it on one side or they're sort of under 30 and have grown up in the cloud world and don't want to think about hardware. They want to think about tokens Yeah.
Speaker 5:And that they pay by the token.
Speaker 1:How what what use cases outside of the coding agents? You mentioned Cognition working with you. That one seems super logical in the sense that people are waiting for these agents to complete their really long work rollouts, really long, like tons of tokens generated to build a whole app or build a new feature. Where else are you excited about the potential of not just AI this year, but faster AI, faster inference having an impact that might be tangible to someone like a software developer or even a consumer?
Speaker 5:I think some of the use cases we've seen in pharma are extraordinarily interesting. I think
Speaker 1:So that feels weird to me because if I'm developing a drug, it's going to take me three months to get mouse data. It doesn't feel like a couple minutes matters. What's going on in pharma?
Speaker 5:I think is exactly because the process is so long and painful and expensive that if you can rip a year out of an 18 process where the whole patent is only good for twenty seven years, you've made a huge difference. Interesting. And so you can run more experiments in less time.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 5:And the probability that once you run these experiments, you have to go to the wet lab, which is much slower. You the the probability that the the one you select out of the simulation, out of the AI is a good one and makes sense to go to the wet lab and take to the next level increases dramatically. Yeah. I think the the act of being a researcher, right, is really one that AI is particularly well suited to help. You want to scan the literature.
Speaker 5:You want to make sure that that whether it's in Chinese or French or English, that if there's a publication about the gene you're studying, that you're on top of it. Want to be able to scan the literature.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And Basically, every question is a deep research report. And so That's right. If you can go from half an hour to two minutes, that's some huge Absolutely. Huge speed up in your workflow.
Speaker 5:That's right. And so what you're speeding up is the researcher.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 5:And you're increasing the number of questions they can ask per unit time.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And that is a very, very exciting application.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Jordy? Out of your sweet spot, but how do you expect the memory and CPU market to evolve this year?
Speaker 5:I think, first, memory has historically been an extraordinarily cyclical market. Right? I mean, it has had painful troughs Mhmm. And and crazy high prices both. And I I think right now, what you're seeing is a tremendous amount of demand for HBM, which is a form of DRAM.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. I think those fabs aren't easy to build, so additional capacity isn't easy to bring up. Mhmm. And so you've had this steep upswing of GPUs, which are heavily dependent on this HBM. And as a result, all the capacity for for DRAM has sort of moved towards HBM.
Speaker 5:That's made traditional DRAM and servers more expensive. When it gets more expensive, the hyperscalers panic or panic maybe the wrong word, but their response is to place orders for for the full year, which causes the Dell and and the the server bills to go, holy crap. I need to buy more. Right? And you just watch this sort of crescendo of of price exploding.
Speaker 5:Right? You just see this huge movement in prices as everybody worries that they're not gonna get it, so they place all their orders for next year early. So it looks like the year is gonna be way bigger than it actually is gonna be. And you that's what's happening right
Speaker 4:now.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Mhmm. How are you thinking about the the financial management of the business? You raised the 1,100,000,000.0 series g last year. Are you thinking of building the company for a really long time in the private markets, taking it public?
Speaker 5:Thank you for the sound. That's perfect.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We knew it.
Speaker 5:That's that's what probably hit the gong again.
Speaker 1:Hit the gong probably. There you go. Hit the gong. Appreciate it. But but where do you see the company going?
Speaker 1:How do you wanna operate? What makes sense in 2026?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Unlike some of our our competitors, we we we sought to to to run a business that could be measured on traditional financial metrics. I we we
Speaker 2:like I love just taking taking shots on the way into that answer. Look,
Speaker 5:I mean, I think we do. We seek to run a business that people could look at and understand. And, you know, our gross margins are we're better than all our startup competitors. We're growing faster and we're bigger. And so, think that's really
Speaker 1:Give them the foghorn.
Speaker 5:I I I you guys gotta tell me, like, in in a pre briefing what the various sounds mean so I know what
Speaker 2:They're all powerful. Is this is the heavy tanker ship.
Speaker 1:You'll you'll you'll know if it's the. Right. The heavy tanker ship is backing up the truck for big business. We love it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Think we raised the money because we had a ton of opportunity to continue to invest in the business to produce extraordinary growth. I mean, that's the right reason to raise money. Right? You raise money because the opportunities in front of you are large and many, and maybe have a time element to them.
Speaker 5:So attacking them quickly is of value. Yeah. And so that that's that's why everybody I mean, if you go out and raise money from other people, that that's why you should do it. Is because your opportunity set is ripe for for pursuit. And so that's what we did.
Speaker 5:I I think we we will deploy it in expanding expanding manufacturing Mhmm. Which is a real value in the acquisition of additional data center capacity, a collection of other things, expansion internationally. These are all things that that the business is asking for right now.
Speaker 1:Let's hear it for opportunities that are ripe for pursuit. I like the And traditional financial metrics. Traditional financial metrics. See those a lot. When
Speaker 5:in the past has it been worth a clap to say that you like positive gross margins? That that you'd like
Speaker 2:You'd to surprised. We've had we've had some people We we we have people come on. They're trying to bait people by saying, don't care about gross margin. I don't care
Speaker 1:about gross Yeah. Do. They do. We care here. And we thank you for caring as well.
Speaker 2:What what can people expect Yeah. Out of big, you know, any any big announcements in the pipeline? And
Speaker 1:how can people work share
Speaker 2:specifics, but
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, interested in I
Speaker 5:think you you can go to cerebris.ai and you can try our our you can see how fast it is yourself. Right? I I think we the the beautiful thing about the cloud is that it's dead dead simple to demo and to try. And you we've got a free tier. Jump on it.
Speaker 5:Play around. Ask a GLM model, which is a great coding model. Just ask it to make a video game for you. Alright? And you will see in three seconds, it'll make Space Invader for you.
Speaker 5:That that that will be real code. Yeah. Right? Ask it to to to to play pool, to to make a two player player pool game, or if you're a physics nut, a a a three ball interaction according to laws of physics. I mean, just ask it to do interesting things.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 5:And you will see right away the the joy, how fun it is to engage with an AI that is truly interactive.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 5:And I I I think that's the best marketing. You you if you go there and you enjoy it, send us a note. We'll we'll follow-up. But play with the AI.
Speaker 3:I mean, Sounds
Speaker 5:extremely fun.
Speaker 2:Just use it. Thank you so much for taking
Speaker 1:the time to come chat with us. Yeah. Great. Great rest of your day, and congrats on all the progress.
Speaker 2:Time to really chat. And Congrats on the
Speaker 5:for having me back. It's very much
Speaker 1:appreciated. Anytime. We'll Alright, see you guys. Goodbye. Vibe.co.
Speaker 1:We're d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.
Speaker 2:Well said, John.
Speaker 1:And I'm also gonna tell you about Console. You see it here on the sticker. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's go. We are now entering the the our lightning round.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:The Lambda lightning round. That is real. The cloud is real. It is lightning Nathan. UltraDome.
Speaker 2:From Terra coming in.
Speaker 1:Nathan is in the Ruche room waiting room.
Speaker 3:Let's
Speaker 1:bring him into the TVP and Ultradome. Nathan, how are you doing?
Speaker 9:Very good.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for taking the time to hop on the show.
Speaker 2:Love the shirt. It almost look oh, I thought it was a jacket for a second. Very, very cool.
Speaker 1:Looks great. Please introduce yourself. Introduce the company.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Awesome. I am Nathan, cofounder and CEO of of Terra Industries. I'm a 22 year old software engineer. And, essentially, we're building Africa's first modern the first one.
Speaker 1:Wow. And what got you into the industry? What were you doing before? How did you recognize this opportunity?
Speaker 9:Well, I I began my journey in tech when I was 15. An accident that made me lose my eye
Speaker 7:lose my sights. Success. And
Speaker 9:at some point during the pandemic, I was 17 at at at this time. I went on to launch my first, you know, startup that was solving, like, the the education crisis, especially in emerging markets. Mhmm. And that allowed me to to understand that, basically, if we truly want to help industrialize the continent, if we truly want to help push Africa towards like a massive industrial growth, we have to solve much more foundational infrastructure problems. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And instead stick around, you know, what is the single problem that we could solve today that could basically cut across every every industry. And that's, you know, what that common denominator was was was was security. So sometime in 2024, I and my cofounder, Maxwell Maduka, we we decided that we wanna start Terra Industries to essentially give Africa the technological edge needed to to defend it it itself, its resources, and its critical infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Sure. How are you thinking about the first products? There's a lot of defense technology companies that focus on drones or maritime or ground autonomy. There's a whole bunch of different products. It's I imagine you wanna build them all eventually, but do you have a foothold that you wanna dominate in first?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So for us, we're thinking quite multi domain. The the question for us is how can you protect this critical assets from all sort of threats? And right now, well, this evolving threats are coming from the air, from land, and from sea. So in the area domain, we have our long range and short range drones.
Speaker 9:In the ground domain, we have our sentry towers.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And soon, in the maritime domain, we'll be deploying some USVs that will be that'll be carrying out large scale maritime surveillance.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:All these different systems are being powered by one unified software platform that carries out data intelligence, you know, collecting all this data from all the different systems, synthesizing that data, and align the six security agencies to identify and track threats in real time. So this is basically what we're trying to to do. You could almost think of it as kind of like the same strategy that Palantir did in the West, you know, but the major difference is we also have to build out the hardware infrastructure that is collecting this data because there's there's no, like, previous surveillance infrastructure that allows us to basically plug in our our software platform.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. How does the procurement process work in Nigeria? How is there a program of record concept? Are there grants for smaller projects? What what what's the goal
Speaker 2:of a couple million dollars in revenue. It sounds like that's growing quickly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How did that come together?
Speaker 9:Yeah. When we first started the company, we focused mostly on privately owned infrastructure assets, you know, lower barrier to entry, shorter sales cycle that allowed us to rapidly scale. So mostly owned by, like, corporations and billionaires. But over time, we're able to build an impressive enough portfolio that allowed us to then sell to governments Mhmm. And and militaries.
Speaker 9:So the the defense contracting model in Africa is, like, fundamentally very different from how it's done in the West. In the West, it's quite bureaucratic. It could take you one to two years before you get to, like, a program of of record. In Africa, it's quite very network based, you know, and also very solution first. So essentially, no one is is is really expecting you to write dozens of of of proposals and, you know, come to office and present them like PowerPoints.
Speaker 9:They're expecting you already have a solution to your problem. Sure. So in a very funny way, the unreal approach of, like, taking r and d head on
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And having the the the actual products to then go carry out live demos on the field works perfectly for the model of defense contracting on the continent. And that has allowed us to scale very rapidly. And that is something that most western companies don't understand, you know, but western Chinese, you they come here with papers.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 9:They end up with, you know, wasting a lot of time and not really being very productive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you guys have a dual use opportunity? I can imagine people that that have various assets on the continent that could be oil and gas. They wanna I could imagine maybe your century towers are applicable, drones, etcetera. Even for nonkinetic solutions, just surveillance from a security standpoint, what what kind of opportunities are you guys pursuing there?
Speaker 9:Yeah. We don't do kinetic at all. So we are entirely focused on building surveillance.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 9:Because, you know, essentially, the Nigerian army of today has enough firepower to, you know, basically destroy any terrorist group in West Africa. The the the problem with insecurity in Africa today is not the lack of firepower, it's the lack of intelligence, the lack of visibility, you know. Understanding where these attacks are be are are coming from, how it's being perpetrated, you know, looking at previous attacks to to to sort of like part out a pattern recognition that can help you predict future attacks. Mhmm. This is the major issue.
Speaker 9:So what Terra is trying to do is build that intelligence and surveillance layer across the continents, not necessarily, you know, building kinetics. You know, we don't ever intend to get into kinetics. Mhmm. I think it's the the the sort of struggle and war that African governments are fighting against terror does not require us getting into kinetics. You know, what the village of native kinetics.
Speaker 9:And that kind of takes me into, like, my second point of, like, data sovereignty. Because today, when we announced the rounds, there was a lot of, you know, viral tweets of how Palantir is now in Africa. We are sellouts and stuff So like I wanna just make it very clear, you know, this is an investment from, yes, a Palantir co founder
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And several other VCs, but this is a technology that is entirely owned by Nigerians. It's built by us. It's managed by us. It's operated by us. We have no direct relationship with Palantir.
Speaker 9:Sure. We don't share any data with Palantir. So that's just something to just
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Be very clear.
Speaker 1:No. It's a good point to make. Obviously, as you scale the business, you're getting to hire a lot of people. What where are the great talent pools in Nigeria or Africa broadly? What's the Stanford?
Speaker 1:What's the Waterloo? What's the Y Combinator? Where will you be sourcing candidates from?
Speaker 9:Yeah. First off, you know, Nigerians are some of the smartest people you could ever meet, you know, very underrated talent base. Yeah. There's there's already a lot of, like, software talent on the continent mostly because of that fintech boom of, you know, the
Speaker 1:M Pesa.
Speaker 9:Of the exactly. M pacer, pacer, sort of way. Sure. So there's a there's there's a lot of existing software talent. And in terms of hardware, you know, there's there was basically an a hidden hardware base, you know, that have been working mostly with the military.
Speaker 9:They have been doing a lot of side projects. They have never been able to kind of commercialize their skills at scale. And, you know, what we essentially went did was we we went to these communities, and we hired the entire communities. You know?
Speaker 1:Totally agree. I love it.
Speaker 2:Community acquisition.
Speaker 5:It's great.
Speaker 9:You know, so for us, really, in scaling talent is it goes beyond Nigeria Yep. Because part of our strategy is we we want to be with a decentralized manufacturing network.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:You know, so having a factory in each sub region, you know. Our manufacturing base right now in Nigeria would serve West Africa.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:In the next couple of months, we'll be opening a factory in East Africa to serve the East Africa region. And the reason that we're doing this is, you know, first of all, it's it's it's much easier in terms of of supply chain and logistical networks. But second, you know, the threats that are being faced in in each of these regions are actually quite different. You know, in in in West Africa, you have threats mostly in, like, the Saharan, you know, very hot climates, very desert climates. You're mostly deploying mostly aerial and ground systems.
Speaker 9:Or when you come to East Africa, you know, you have issues, for example, with mostly in the maritime, you know, with the Somalian pirates where you would mostly have to deploy, you know, maritime systems. So you you can't essentially have one centralized factory building for the continent. You know? Yeah. Africa is too big for that.
Speaker 9:Too big, too complex. You have to basically use this decentralized manufacturing network. Yeah. So each factory we open would tap the local base of the region it is situated at.
Speaker 1:Sure. Give us the information on the round. You raised some money. We wanna hit the gong for you. How much did you raise?
Speaker 9:$11,750,000.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:And thank you for taking the time to come chat with us here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to meet you. I'm sure I'm sure you'll be back on very soon, and Sure. Congrats to the whole team on a very cool milestone and getting a great group of people involved. You got ABC, of course, Valor Equity, Lux Capital Wow.
Speaker 2:SV Angel
Speaker 1:What a row.
Speaker 2:Silent. Mickey Malka.
Speaker 1:Is in.
Speaker 2:Alex Moore. Let's go. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Great hanging.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Phantom Cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. You see the ticker with the crypto prices in the bottom of the stream. That's from Phantom. And before we bring in our guest, I'll also tell you about Lambda.
Speaker 1:Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So up next, we're going over to LM Arena. Anastasios, welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Hey, brother.
Speaker 8:How's it going? Nice to see you.
Speaker 1:It's going fantastically. Going extremely well for you. You raised some money recently. Let's kick it off with a big gong smash. How much did you raise?
Speaker 4:150,000,000. 1.7
Speaker 8:plus.
Speaker 1:I have already good stuff.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Great stuff. Great stuff. Now What are
Speaker 1:you doing? Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:How you made? So our friend was just joking around Yeah. This account near. Yeah. They were saying LM Arena raised at a $1,700,000,000 valuation and they were using the Michael Burry very rude.
Speaker 2:Very rude. Very rude. But they're they're just joking around. But it's okay because you're you're here to tell us why that's a deal of a lifetime.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Explain. Explain us. Evaluation's a big problem. Evaluation's a big problem.
Speaker 8:People don't know how to solve it. You have all these different AIs. The space becoming more complicated.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:You have different modalities, different models that are doing all all these people competing in coding Yeah. Competing in, you know, software engineering, competing in the general chat.
Speaker 1:You have
Speaker 8:models from China, models from The US. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who are
Speaker 8:you gonna pick? Let's say Yeah. You're a consumer. You're a developer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're even even a business, you're gonna make a decision that you're gonna the you're gonna make a decision. You're gonna spend millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars on that. You gotta make sure you make the right decision.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Procurement procurement's a big market.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 8:And, you know, all these problems are are huge. I mean and and the ultimate problem is how do you help people find the best solution for them? And as a neutral platform, of course, it needs to be separate from the labs. It needs to be a third party that does this. We're positioned well to attack it.
Speaker 1:So I imagine I mean, Independent, we were joking around that if you ever wanted to return the capital, you could get one of the labs to pay you $10,000,000,000 just to put them in permanently hard coded at the top of the rankings. You'd be out of business in twelve months, but you'd walk away with a pretty penny.
Speaker 8:Well, that's the thing.
Speaker 1:I don't think that's what's happening.
Speaker 9:How do
Speaker 3:you make money?
Speaker 8:Value if you do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So how how do you make money then?
Speaker 8:Well, what we do is we help labs and enterprises get analytics on how well their models are doing. Help them understand the strengths and weaknesses
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 8:Of their models in different domains, like math, coding, instruction falling, multi turn. Think about it like a full body scan of your model.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And what distinguishes us from the standard benchmark is that it's all live, you can't overfit it because there's constantly new data coming in. Oh, interesting. And it's on real users. So we have Yep. Tens of millions of real users that are coming to Alamarina using AI for, like, this huge diversity of different tasks.
Speaker 8:And that's, of course, the data that's used as the basis for these analytics.
Speaker 1:Yep. Talk to me about the proliferation of different LM Arena categories. I imagine there's an exponential curve there as different models have different capabilities. We're not just testing math and science reasoning and chatting ability and Yeah, many of these. So how fast is it growing?
Speaker 1:How are you setting up your system to handle potentially tens of thousands of different benchmarks and models? Like, how how is that growing and scaling?
Speaker 8:That is a great question. And I think that we're honestly still developing what that, you know, big road map looks like. But that being said, here's where we're starting. We have a bunch of different categories. I I mentioned a few earlier like math coding instruction following.
Speaker 8:But we've recently also dug in a little bit more to look at different types of users. Basically, almost like user research. Mhmm. Expert users. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:What are experts saying about all these different models? We have a leaderboard for that. Occupational categories, law, medicine, you know, business. Mhmm. Which models are best for these different categories of usage marketing?
Speaker 8:We have that information on Element Arena so that it's a one stop shop for you to understand the different industry, economically valuable industry level performance of these models. But if you really think about it, the long term vision of this sort of thing, it's almost like every every individual should have their own evaluation. Mhmm. Which model is best for you? Yeah.
Speaker 8:You know, the technology brothers. Yeah. Technology brothers eval.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It needs to have its own kind of thing
Speaker 8:because you're you're doing your own tasks Yeah. And they might be very different from what I'm doing. And so eventually, the future, you can imagine of building a technology like this, we're building the infrastructure to do this, is to have evals for every individual person on Earth.
Speaker 1:How do you incentivize people to participate on the voting side, the ranking side? The human element's really important in terms of grading different LLMs. What's the current incentive structure? How is that evolving? What are the challenges that come up with running a multisided marketplace like this?
Speaker 8:Very good question. Incentives are really, really important. If you think about incentive is almost like a little hack into the human brain that tells you how to move, how
Speaker 4:to operate.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Right? So that's why games are so powerful. Games can get you into an incentive system that's just like, hey, I'm Flappy Bird or I'm doing my Candy Crush and I'm just swiping, swiping, swiping. We do not really incentivize users on Alamarina to vote. And that's part of the power of the platform.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Is that unlike, let's say, we were to pay people to vote, we don't do that. Mhmm. The reason we don't do that is because we want them only coming to do their real job. They come because they get value out of the platform and they vote only because they want to because they're intrinsically motivated because they got something to say.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. You can imagine if you incorporate incentives that it might hurt the leaderboard. So we're very careful about the way that we go about that. We are exploring how can we design the incentives in sort of incentive compatible way
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:In order to preserve the integrity of the leaderboard while also rewarding people to vote. That's on our minds
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:But not yet done.
Speaker 1:How confident are you that you can encode big model smell into a, you know, the taste, the vibes into a ranking?
Speaker 8:Well, if you look at the leaderboard Mhmm. It's there. It's there for you to see. Yeah. I mean, it does reflect
Speaker 1:it. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And it goes to show how powerful human preference can actually be. That people are seeing things that you wouldn't necessarily anticipate.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And that's why when, you know, when model developers develop their model, the big problem is when I put it out into the real world in the wild, what's gonna be the performance like? Mhmm. I don't know unless I see it. And that's because people react in these, you know, strange ways when they see a model for the first time. That's part of the power of this platform is that it puts it in front of those people and then we give analytics to try to understand how different individuals you know, what are the different usage patterns and who's who's voting for what.
Speaker 8:And so you can code things like big model smell, identify, you know, but it's not uncommon that model providers will find out through us Yeah. That their model's really great at math, they're really great at coding, they didn't even actually ever know.
Speaker 1:What does it take to get a model on LM Arena? Is it something that the lab is giving you preview access to? Is there an application form? Do you already have relationships with these folks? Is there an So we have a
Speaker 8:contact form on our website that you can use if you wanna, you know, submit a model. Of course, we have capacity constraints, but we try to be judicious and let, you know, everybody everybody participate in the battle. And to yeah. In terms of paying
Speaker 1:Someone was asking DeepSea four
Speaker 8:to get on the leaderboard.
Speaker 1:Deeps DeepSea four. What what does it take to get a model like that on the platform?
Speaker 8:We'd love to get DeepSea four on the platform. I don't know. Maybe it's already in progress.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. How much does hardware matter here? We were just talking to Andrew from Cerebras about the speed that comes from that. There's an element where plenty of people would rather use a dumber model if it's 10 times as fast or vice versa.
Speaker 1:Right? And so you have to create an apples to apples situation most likely or at least pre cash the results so then you're not noticing speed. But do you think that speed trade offs will become a bigger piece of what you do? How do
Speaker 4:think about that?
Speaker 8:Yeah. There's no question about it. Really, what the the ultimate question that people have is how do I, for myself or my organization or whatever, choose along the Pareto frontier of Sure. Speed, performance, and cost.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Right? Those are the three things. And usually, it's performance and speed number one and number two. Yeah. Because everybody's spending so much money right now
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:That it's like, know, ring the gong again, so much money.
Speaker 2:Why not? Why not?
Speaker 8:There you go.
Speaker 4:Go to gong. Money being spent, baby.
Speaker 8:Now, the issue with that is there's Gong twice. Let's go.
Speaker 3:Let's
Speaker 8:go. Speed. If you don't equalize it, you can get biased in the ratings.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Right? So we wanna be able to disentangle speed versus performance and that requires us equalizing. Sure.
Speaker 1:But if you
Speaker 8:go to direct chat mode, you can use the model, see it just as it is. And we're planning on expanding the leaderboard to get more of the speed in there, the latency Mhmm. As well as costs so that people can make all those trade ups right in our platform.
Speaker 1:Yep. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Would you ever do anything at the application layer? Or does it just get too chaotic because, you know, UI is a new variable and there's all these other factors?
Speaker 8:Mean, this is Alimarina is an application. No.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sure. But I'm I'm talking about, like, you know, two legal AI tools and and trying to because if you go if you go down the procurement route and you're and that becomes I don't know I don't know if that becomes a big
Speaker 1:Yeah. You could see like a g two cloud type of business here as well, although I have no idea if that is makes any sense for you.
Speaker 8:But the so the thing is that it's hard to do that for our users. Right? Because then we need to build 10 different product services or a 100 different product services.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And that's one of the exciting things about the ecosystem right now Mhmm. Is that it's actually the fundamental product surface where things are evolving very quickly and also a lot of value is being aggregated. Right? There's a reason why, you know, number one revenue stream of OpenAI is consumer. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Right? Yeah. It's a consumer application. Yeah. And, you know, other companies have different strategies, but ours can't simply cannot be to replicate every application.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So what the value that we hope to provide again is to help people understand the different trade offs of different models, evaluate them for their use cases, procurement, so on and so forth. And that might mean helping enterprises link together with their feedback, you know, understand their users better, perhaps, you know, warm starting from the large user base that we have and giving them those analytics and tools to help them make decisions. That's how I can imagine us moving into the application work flow.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Will you ever create a romance benchmark?
Speaker 8:How I think it's good
Speaker 2:how quickly I think it's good people fall in love?
Speaker 1:Comedy benchmark would be Let me
Speaker 8:ask you. Are you are you asking that for any specific question?
Speaker 2:Got him. Got me.
Speaker 1:Low we talk
Speaker 2:about we talk about comedy, you know, comedy bench. That's it's Difficult. It's something we we try to test internally. Yeah. It they usually end up being they usually end up being funny because they're so not funny that it's that it's brutal.
Speaker 2:It's pretty brutal.
Speaker 1:It's pretty brutal. Or or or if it is good, it's like recycling. Like, clearly, it went to Reddit, copied the top joke, and then just regurgitated it.
Speaker 8:Well, did it ever make you laugh? Has it made you laugh before?
Speaker 1:Yes. But accidentally. But when it's accidental, it's amazing. It's the best. I see.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where did the idea for this come from? Like, what was the inciting moment to start the company?
Speaker 8:Well, the so there's to start the company and there's the idea. I've been personally working on Alamarina for almost three years now along with Wei Lin and Jan. And there was actually a big group of students at Yeah. At at Berkeley. Sure.
Speaker 8:This came from an academic project. I was doing my PhD on like theoretical statistics Mhmm. Theoretical machine learning, you know, kind of abstract. I was in a basement proving theorems. I had no idea that I would be
Speaker 4:You build
Speaker 1:a basement with
Speaker 2:scraps. Scraps.
Speaker 1:So you build it in a cave of Seriously.
Speaker 8:There were rats rats in the ceiling.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 3:You know?
Speaker 8:Not kidding.
Speaker 3:I'm glad you
Speaker 1:have a $100,000,000 for a new office. Hopefully, it's nice.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Go bears, baby. And so what ended up happening is that I got looped into this project that was happening at Skylab which is, you know, Jan and Joey Gonzalez and Yeah. You know, Luca and all these people at Skylab were working on it. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:That's the lab where Databricks came out of and AnyScale and Ray and so on. Yeah. Yeah. They were working on, like, how do we evaluate? Early days of ChatGPT, you know, was model a and model b.
Speaker 8:They were doing one was doing better than the other on the benchmarks, then you would chat with them. And it's like, hey, these benchmarks are not reflective of how good it is at talking to me.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:So how are we gonna measure that? It was in the context of one of their early open source models called Vicuna that they had developed. Mhmm. And so the the sort of pairwise preference, hey, chat with the models and see which one you like better. That strategy emerged from there but it started with Amazon gift cards.
Speaker 8:It didn't start from organic usage. It started from passing around Amazon gift cards to people at Berkeley.
Speaker 5:Oh, wow.
Speaker 8:And then it sort of, you know, popped and then it went down and kind of sat at 30 users a day for a little while. And then it grew and grew and grew in large part due to Wei Lin's sort of consistent effort in Twitter and so on. It's awesome. Up until the point where it became this Juggernaut.
Speaker 1:A true overnight success
Speaker 2:Juggernaut mode.
Speaker 1:To see it over here. And thank you so much for taking the time
Speaker 2:to Yeah. Great to have you on.
Speaker 1:On all
Speaker 8:the progress. Hey. Great to see
Speaker 7:you guys.
Speaker 8:Thanks so much. Have a great day.
Speaker 2:Year. Yeah. You too. Have a We'll talk
Speaker 1:to you soon. Goodbye. Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper, and scalable. Shopify.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which is relevant to our next guest.
Speaker 1:It is. It is. We'll bring them in in a second. But DeepSeek founder is running a hedge fund as well in addition to building DeepSeek. Guess how much they're up?
Speaker 1:57% last year. Massive year. That's high flyer. Boost boasting the potential war chest for a company that's already shaking up the global tech
Speaker 2:Is this good for the AI
Speaker 1:It's good for the open source community. It's good for academics. What what do you think, Tyler?
Speaker 6:Oh, I I have some other breaking news.
Speaker 1:Give me some breaking news.
Speaker 6:Okay. So so Anthropic, the they have Cloud Code. They launched CoWork, which is Cloud Code for the rest of your work.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 6:So it's like everything else.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's
Speaker 6:very exciting. It's it's basically it's like a local app.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's a local app, so you don't need oh, you don't need to do the the the terminal stuff anymore. You can just use it in an app with a prompt box.
Speaker 6:Yes. That's then it can interact with with all, your local files, whatever, and then
Speaker 1:This is gonna be really, really big.
Speaker 6:I don't know if you guys have used the the Clawd Chrome extension, but it's, like, super good. I have. The the the computer use is super good. Yeah. So, yeah, this is very exciting.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Get ready for some threads, people. People are gonna be breaking it down on on all the fun things they had to do.
Speaker 1:I fixed my WiFi in under an hour by rebooting it. But, no, seriously, I was I was listening to Douglas Laughlin from Semi Analysis talk about how he uses Cloud Code in a knowledge work setting, and it's fascinating. So he'll kick off one deep research report about one company that he's researching, then a few more, and then he'll do a deep research report on top of that. But instead of it all living in the clawed web UI, it's just creating markdown files that then he stores in Obsidian, and then he can run these meta deep research reports on the other deep research reports that he's put together, interact with whatever's going on in the semi analysis private data world, all the data that collected, interact with their Slack. They have a Slack bot that interacts with it.
Speaker 1:And so he was he was talking he was very, very one shot by Claude Coad and was saying, everything is a skill issue now. Everything is a skill issue now. Much like generating AI voices. But thankfully, we have 11 labs. Build intelligent, real time conversational agents.
Speaker 1:Re imagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. Well, Star Wars has already begun in reality. Ask a ski resort in China. There is a robot that's skiing. This feels like it should be AI, but I believe this
Speaker 2:is not go.
Speaker 1:I believe this is real. This is remarkable. You know, you don't have to go skiing anymore, thanks to AI. Just cancel the skiing trip. I have a ski trip coming up at the February.
Speaker 2:Canceled.
Speaker 1:Canceled. I'm sending Yeah. This guy
Speaker 2:Just watch the video stream. You don't have to put on the boots. Realistically. Get cold. You don't have to sit on the lift.
Speaker 2:You don't have to be in lift lines. Yep. You don't
Speaker 1:You've seen you've seen the you've seen the drone that will follow you as you ski and takes really cinematic video. Yeah. How could it be more cinematic? Get the camera at waist height. You This can go is elite.
Speaker 2:Can go way harder. Hit Yeah. Hit the double black. Hit the cliffs. Right?
Speaker 2:You don't even have to worry about rocks. No. Right? Like No. It's stumbling down.
Speaker 1:I'm a geez. This is fantastic. I love I love the idea of having a robot follow me with a camera. I don't know what else you would use this for. Ski patrol?
Speaker 1:Surveillance? I I don't know why they built this other than it's really cool and fun. But the obvious the obvious use case is Red Bull viral videos, probably.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so the use case here is obviously, this is the new ski patrol. There's thousands of these on the mountain, and they monitor your speed in real time. And if you're going if you're skiing recklessly, it just skis into you and explodes. And so instead of ski Yeah.
Speaker 2:And really instead of Instead of getting pass pulled, you just get your life pulled. That's over.
Speaker 7:That makes
Speaker 2:a of sense. So anyways, that is that is a dark sci fi future.
Speaker 1:I have a prediction from Guillermo from Vercel. But first, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run-in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. Guillermo says there's definitely a nonzero chance that we get, quote, generate your own GTA six in a few minutes before GTA six.
Speaker 1:I think that mechanically, it's possible, but the humor is what makes GTA so special, The writing and the character development. I mean, also, the mechanics are very unique. It's not just a walking simulator. I don't know. Have you played GTA?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, but Sholto's game looks pretty good. He
Speaker 1:he Oh,
Speaker 6:yeah? Put out a screenshot of it.
Speaker 1:Are you are
Speaker 6:you I trust Sholto to make GTA
Speaker 2:Are you pretty sure it's not just image gen outlet. He's like, look at this crazy game
Speaker 1:I made. I mean, the Grok folks are known to to put up some some viral videos espousing video game development. But clearly, video game development is here. It's going to happen. But we have our next guest.
Speaker 1:And guess what ad I have to read before he comes on? Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, and on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And that's exactly what we're gonna talk about. We have Harley from Shopify in the team How'd
Speaker 2:we do.
Speaker 1:Of UltraDome.
Speaker 4:How'd we do?
Speaker 7:Is was that planned? It was amazing.
Speaker 1:No. It's somewhat random, but we timed it up perfectly. But we're very excited.
Speaker 7:Speaking of random, I've never done an interview in my life. I met NRF.
Speaker 1:I love this.
Speaker 7:Retail show in the world. Very good. There are 40,000 people here. This is the Shopify booth behind me. Wow.
Speaker 7:There's gonna be random people walking by.
Speaker 2:Amazing. See that snowboard there. That little Easter egg.
Speaker 1:That's how it
Speaker 7:all started. That's how
Speaker 2:it all started. Right? Wow.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. So you're in person, but today we're talking about Where is
Speaker 2:N R where is NRF? Is that Vegas?
Speaker 7:Javits Center. Javits Center, New York City. Cool. That's fun. Everyone yeah.
Speaker 7:It's just it's sort of the the largest conference actually on the planet for retail and commerce. It used to be more about the traditional retailers. Mhmm. But we've sort of hijacked it and made it about modern retail direct to consumer technology companies.
Speaker 1:You're of behind enemy lines there. I mean, you do have POS system, so it makes sense.
Speaker 7:We have a POS system. Yeah. But actually and and and they've given me the keynote four years in a row, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Not bad.
Speaker 2:And today
Speaker 7:for my keynote, I brought up Emma from SKIMS, which is amazing. And and Ben Francis from Gymshark, talked about. Basically, this idea that there'll be more billion dollar brands built in the next ten years than the last hundred years. And then both Emma I mean, think of it. Jim Shark and Skims, they're, like, ten years old, and they're they're dominating.
Speaker 7:So it was it was really fun. And we made some big announcements.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, what what what's the key to building a billion dollar brand if you're starting in 2026? It feels like it's incredibly crowded and yet there's a new breakout brand every year. What advice are you giving to people to get started other than just hop on Shopify?
Speaker 2:There's multiple new breakouts.
Speaker 1:And let that take out a lot
Speaker 7:of vertical.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and companies are growing the the the way the the bar has been set with with new ecommerce brands is insane. Like, best in class is like, okay, you're doing 200,000,000 in your second year.
Speaker 1:I know exactly who you're talking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And there's so many examples of this and it just it just You
Speaker 7:guys are hard graders. Doing $200,000,000 and no and no Gong for that. Yo. No. Of we're
Speaker 2:hitting the Gong for that. So
Speaker 7:so let let me say something. I brought on my my first time I was up on stage, I brought Richard from Mattel. Richard Dixon, who's now CEO of of of the Gap. Because basically what he'd figured out was that Mattel has this treasure trove of IP in their vault and he was like commercializing all of it. Sure.
Speaker 7:And so he just it was amazing that a company from 1945, I think Wow. Was basically, you know, dominating. Yeah. The next year, I brought cat coal from AG one.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 7:You know, and obviously you guys know the story well, but one skew, $600,000,000. Right? Like, unbelievable.
Speaker 5:Another gong.
Speaker 2:Another gong.
Speaker 7:Mean, there's gonna be a lot of gongs in
Speaker 1:this one.
Speaker 7:Then last year, I brought someone you know, Sarah Foster from Favorite Daughter, who's been on the show, who effectively I mean, Sarah and Aaron created a hit Netflix show to sell more apparel and succeeded with it. So this idea that so I I think one major thing, if you look at all of these different incredible brands, what they've done is they didn't just take a bigger piece of an existing pie. Sure. They effectively were TAM creators. I mean Yeah.
Speaker 7:Shapeware existed. There were companies like Spanx out there.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But the way that Kim and and Emma built, you know, skims is totally different what Spanx is. Is like almost like a cool version of of an old school product. And then we announced four big things, which which I'm very proud of. The first is that it it's fairly clear.
Speaker 2:Sorry, John. Something. You said you went down
Speaker 1:the wrong pipe.
Speaker 7:Crazy. This show is is so unhinged. Also, it's it's the end of the show, I think. Right?
Speaker 1:So there's more hinge as it goes. I'm I'm, like, five Diet Cokes deep at this point. So Oh, no. Anything could happen. I'm I'm anyways, I have no choice.
Speaker 2:I can't hit you. I just I didn't John was doing such a good job keeping it together.
Speaker 1:You caught me.
Speaker 2:You got me. That's
Speaker 1:okay. That's no problem. Sorry.
Speaker 8:So the
Speaker 7:first thing we announced was actually, Sundar announced it yesterday on stage, but with Google, we are making it possible for every agent to connect to every single merchant. We created this protocol called Universal Commerce Protocol, which effectively is this universal language. It's open sourced so that all merchants can speak directly to every single one of the agents. And Mhmm. The best way to explain it is up until now, it was really just about, like, a single transaction.
Speaker 7:So I can buy something on ChatGPT or Gemini or or or Microsoft.
Speaker 1:It was like a it could only do, like, a single item at that time. It couldn't really
Speaker 7:build whole of loyalty or subscription or bundling or, if it's furniture, for example, please don't ship it to me on Thursday, I'm not home Thursday, send it Friday. So this idea of creating this universal protocol that we co developed with Google means that now merchants can actually tell these agents exactly how to show their products on these agentic tools, And and it should be as good as it is on the online store. Mhmm. So that's a that's that was a really, really big one. The second thing we announced also with Google is that now we're actually expanding.
Speaker 7:You can sell everywhere commerce is happening from an agentic perspective. So we're going beyond the agentic storefronts of just ChatGBT, which is what we said, you know, in q three. Now it's also we're gonna be working with Gemini Yep. With with AI with AI mode in Google search and also with Copilot. Yep.
Speaker 7:And maybe the last one, which I wouldn't bring up in any other show than TBPN, is that we're actually bringing AgenTik commerce to every brand whether or not they're on Shopify. Mhmm. So if you're not on Shopify, but you wanna have your product syndicated and and indexed, you can do so with our AgenTic plan. And that seems to be the talk of the show, which is
Speaker 2:Oh, It's amazing. Interesting. Right. Right. Because that's Well, how do
Speaker 1:ecosystem. I like that.
Speaker 2:I like it. Yeah. I like it.
Speaker 1:It's very cool.
Speaker 7:I mean, if you're if you're going to I I I think if if AgenTic is going to do what a lot of us think it's gonna do from a commerce perspective, you have to give consumers all the brands. Yeah. We obviously want them all on Shopify, but there's some brands that wanna participate now, but it may take some time for them to migrate over. So this idea of opening up to anyone, we think, is a big opportunity.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Walk me through the the the customer experience journey that might shift over this year. We were following the agent commerce thing so closely that we were, you know, we were chat cheering for ads in ChatGPT back in, you know, June, when they were kind of like, maybe we'll do it. We were hoping that Black Friday would be the day that people were purchasing things in LLMs. Didn't quite happen yet.
Speaker 1:It's still in the experimental mode. I was using the shopping feature in Chachibiki do shopping research.
Speaker 2:Want we want the commerce fast takeoff.
Speaker 1:But yeah. But I'm wondering, like like, the early adopters, is this gonna be a more techie community that's buying their next TV in an LLM? Do you think it'll jump straight to the the skims and the, you know, the Takovas category first? Like, how do
Speaker 7:you see Oh, look at you with all your direct to consumer brands. Way to go.
Speaker 1:I got it.
Speaker 7:A couple things. I I think I think it'll likely be something that, like, most people use some of the time, and some people use most of the time. I don't think it's going to cross the threshold of most most the way e commerce does now. Yeah. It's just going to take some time.
Speaker 7:It's going take some time. I do think though that these are on very, very small numbers. But if you look at the velocity, I was asked as I was coming on stage today to do the keynote, the keynote after me was the CEO of PepsiCo. And he said, oh, you know, last year you talked about I asked you if Fagenta was overhyped, you said it's underhyped. And he said, well, you know, and he said, do still believe it?
Speaker 7:I said, well, if you actually look January 2025, the last NRF to this NRF, we've actually seen a 14 x increase in orders to Shopify stores coming from some sort of agent. Now that doesn't mean the transaction the happened link. Wherever it was. They may be going to the online store. Yeah.
Speaker 7:But 14 x is is dramatic. And it's, again, it's on a very small base. We processed 90,000,000,000, you know, last quarter. So it's a small base still, but I think it's gonna wrap up quickly. What I think is really cool is I think you're gonna see companies that are gonna actually have these drops.
Speaker 7:I think once you start seeing these like, for example, last night I did an n r NRF event with Tom Sachs, who is the designer behind the Mars Yard three shoes, which I think is the coolest sneaker in the world. He runs Nike craft. Imagine imagine he actually dropped something directly on one of the AgenTic applications.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Now you obviously have people that go there specifically for it. You now may decide, okay, that experience is pretty good. I'm now going to book my entire ski trip, everything I need for my ski trip directly in the application. So once you have a good experience, I think the actual friction reduces. You'll keep having it over and over again.
Speaker 7:But the thing that we felt was missing, and this is the reason why I think this UCP protocol is so important, is it was very difficult to do merchandising inside of these applications, and this protocol allows you to a lot more of that. You can say, like, back to Cat Cola and AG1, it's obvious that anyone who knows studies the company, subscriptions play a huge role in the AG1 business model. Well, know, up until UCP happened, you couldn't actually do subscriptions. Now you can. Or this idea of bundling, you know, for Gymshark, it's a huge part of their businesses.
Speaker 7:If you buy these, you'll also buy these as well. Yep. You can do that as well. So I think all of these things are sort of in line with creating a much more delightful experience in the chat. And and I think ultimately what it leads to is like, this will be merit based shopping Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Which will be different than I think some of the traditional retailers who were kind of leaning on their balance sheets to spend money on ads. You can't really game the system in this in in that way. You actually have to be, from a context perspective, the right product for the right consumer.
Speaker 1:How do you think creative assets will change or maybe stay the same? I've noticed that a lot of LLMs, when you pull a link, it'll actually hydrate that link with an image of the product that you're looking at. I imagine that a lot of people were previously thinking, well, everything's going to collapse down to text. I just need the facts and the data. But now maybe the creative, the photography, the videos, that actually just gets pulled into the chat apps that folks are using and it stays important.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about that evolving?
Speaker 7:I think you're probably you're not gonna I mean, the idea of SEO won't exist in AgenTic because, again, it's merit based, it's mostly based on the context history you've had. Sure. But I do think, though, you're gonna have these brands are gonna have people at their companies who are thinking a lot about, like, consistent updates to UCP, consistent updates to the catalog. So they may pull something off the catalog and say, don't wanna So sell it anymore this I think there's going to be, I don't know if they're gonna be actual jobs, but there's gonna be people inside of the company potentially in the merchandising department who say, actually, the way that we want to sell this, the way we want to describe this to these agents is a particular way. And then because of UCP and because of Shopify catalog, it gets easily disseminated across every single one of these AgenTic applications.
Speaker 7:The experience just gets better and better. I think you have to be a little bit of a of a techno optimist. You guys obviously are are certainly there as I am, to believe that even if the experience is not incredible right now, it's likely just gonna get better at this ridiculous pace.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are the folks that you talk about, the brands that you talk to, the leaders of those brands excited about ads coming to chat surfaces? It feels like new unexplored territory whenever there's a new ad product. That's opportunity for fast moving brands. But what are they worried about?
Speaker 1:What are they excited about? What's the mood?
Speaker 7:Most of the most of the excitement is actually around this idea of, like, is there a potential for this to level the playing field? Meaning, you know, if I've done a bunch of research historically on on the on a genetic application
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Like, about James Purse or about, you know, Tom Sachs or about the stuff that I love, the the brands that I love, and then I'm going on a hiking trip, it probably should not show me a generic pair of boots. It should probably show me on running because it knows to some extent that I actually favorite direct to consumer brands or more modern retail brands as well. So the excitement actually is around, like, is this going to introduce more brands that otherwise are unknown to more people or, you know, True Classic Tea, for example, which, you know, if you're looking for black t shirt, I suspect on a search engine, you're not gonna see True Classic Tea come up that much, but it's an incredible product. And and ultimately, it can be found on these agentic tools in a way that it probably couldn't historically. That seems to be a lot of the excitement.
Speaker 7:The other excitement is ecommerce as a percentage of total retail is still sub 20. You've heard that literally, you hear that at the show all the time that people are like, well, you know, we're inside the Shopify booth now, and people that are more traditional say, well, where when's this gonna eclipse 25%? There is a chance, there is a school of thought that says that one of the things that AgenTic might do is increase that penetration rate at a faster clip kinda a la, you know, COVID did. Sure. Because people that may not be big ecommerce consumers may be searching for recipes on ChatGBT, and through that process may end up actually starting to buy stuff there as well.
Speaker 7:So that could a idea.
Speaker 2:Thing is like, I think some of the time you go to a retail store, you're going because you wanna have a conversation about the product in a way that you just don't get with a website. A website is like a beautiful catalog. And if you go around in the right order and you look at the FAQ and maybe you talk with support and all the and hopefully they respond quickly and actually give you the insight, like, then you can get to the purchase decision. But so a lot of people will just be like, I'll just drive by the store and get it. But I feel like LLMs can provide that.
Speaker 2:They can give people understanding on a subject or a category or a specific product that allow that gives them the confidence to make a purchase. Right? And so Well,
Speaker 7:I shall go one step further. I think it's actually a better version of that because it's an unbiased discussion, an unbiased conversation. I mean, the bias is based on your context history and based on merit as opposed to being based on, you know, what spiff is that particular salesperson getting today in a commission structure. So Yeah. I it does I mean, know, it's so cheesy, of course.
Speaker 7:But like when I describe it to, like, my mother where this is going, I explain that this may very well be the greatest personal shopper in the history of retail who knows everything about you, knows your sizes, know in certain you know, in in European fashion, you you it's this size, but Americans like that knows where you're located, knows where you travel to, and can provide this unbiased objective recommendation. And then once you build in these applicate you build in checkout, which we're doing with with our agentic storefronts, right into the chat, it becomes this really delightful experience.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah. Well, congratulations will be progressing. Yeah. The most transformative year for the way online commerce happened.
Speaker 1:How can we how can we follow the numbers here? Right? Should
Speaker 7:we be I can I can keep keep coming on and telling you telling us numbers?
Speaker 1:High level.
Speaker 7:I will tell you that I did say on season to 5,000 people about an hour ago that I do think, like, this is the goal this is a golden age
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Of retail. And and I think you're gonna see brands. There are brands right now that none of us have heard of that in six months from now, we'll be like, I can't believe we didn't know that brand existed. And I think that type of velocity, you know, there there's going to be so many more of these skims and Gymsharks and Aloyogas and Viore's and Tecovis and AG ones and favorite like, you know, we know these brands because we kind of live in this world. It's what we're interested in.
Speaker 7:But for the most part, most consumers don't know, and I think they may end up knowing them a lot more readily through the And agentic we Shopee wants to power the
Speaker 1:whole thing. Yeah. It's gonna be so fascinating following this ramp relative to mobile in previous booms or or
Speaker 7:That's right. Or or actually social commerce be another one because there were some there was uncertainty around it, and then ultimately actually, social is a wonderful place start.
Speaker 1:Where, oh, you'd be able to shop under YouTube videos or under Facebook marketplace.
Speaker 7:Right. Concurrently as well. It turned out it was a great place.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. That's right. It was
Speaker 7:a great place for discovery, but the transaction still take took place on the online store. Yeah. This is different because the transaction happens embedded.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be fascinating to follow. I think I think we're in for a fast take off.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be a good year.
Speaker 6:Love it.
Speaker 1:A great time to be in business and a great time to be at Shopify. So congratulations on all this success.
Speaker 7:Very much. You guys impressed. Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 2:Thanks for being a massive from wherever. Fantastic. Amazing. Can we be massive here?
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your week.
Speaker 5:We'll talk
Speaker 1:to you soon, Harley.
Speaker 4:See you. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Bye bye. And you know their other partner, gotta tell you about Gemini three Pro. Google is powering all of that. It's Google's most intelligent model yet, Gemini three Pro.
Speaker 1:State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. You can build We there.
Speaker 2:Talked about this last week. Yes. California state reservoir levels are now at a 130% of normal, holding 7,000,000,000,000 gallons of water. It's remarkable. Ali Bell says, God wants us to feed Claude.
Speaker 2:And every model, every data center, there's plenty of water to go around.
Speaker 1:And Ashley had the same idea. Ashley Vance says, God is rewarding us for building AI. All the water all the water for people are super happy. Tyler, you have some breaking news?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So okay. So earlier on the show, I was reading into the Jack Clark Yes. Blog. I was like, oh, maybe Jack Clark is is pointing to something that
Speaker 1:Space data center.
Speaker 6:Anthropocene build space data centers. I posted that. He responded. Put me in the truth zone. He said, no.
Speaker 6:You should not be reading into this or any antidumping grand strategy, and he he totally ratioed me.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. You got destroyed. Yeah. Wow. Where?
Speaker 2:Brutal MOGUNG. Brutal MOGUNG.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 6:So no yeah. No anthropic data centers
Speaker 2:In space.
Speaker 1:It's your funny. I was we were talking to Andrew from Cerebras, and I was kinda giving him the layup. Like, I'd heard from other people that Cerebras would be a unique beneficiary of space data centers if it happens, and he was like, nah, it's not really on my roadmap in the next three to five years. But we will see. You know, everything could be pulled forward if there's, you know, new advances there, space, you know, payload to orbit comes way down.
Speaker 1:There's a bunch of ways that that
Speaker 2:could be exciting. But Hadrian
Speaker 1:All over.
Speaker 2:Raised additional capital at a $1,600,000,000 valuation. Their series c two, this was from the whole team. Love to see it. They got T. Rowe Price, altimeter d one, Stepstone.
Speaker 1:We gotta get
Speaker 2:$17.89, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, a 16 Z137.
Speaker 1:Deli and Company.
Speaker 2:All It was early. All the absolute Believe. Boys Yeah. Back in.
Speaker 1:What a run from Chris Power.
Speaker 2:What else we got? This post here from horse hater.
Speaker 1:Horse hater.
Speaker 2:Went very viral
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yesterday. I didn't I didn't like this post. The the whole post is horses. Don't like them.
Speaker 1:Boom. We love horses here. Horse hater was asked why and horse hater replies, they are evil creatures. I don't know that they're I I know that there is only malice in their
Speaker 2:hearts. Completely false.
Speaker 1:Fake news.
Speaker 2:Is exposing yourself Why or not
Speaker 1:is there
Speaker 2:not community note community note this.
Speaker 1:I I'm gonna write a community note right now. I'm gonna get kicked out of the program if I do this.
Speaker 2:Horse hater. Hates horses. Huge surprise. Oh. Alexis says is sharing an article, luxury watch prices hit a two year high in the secondary market.
Speaker 2:Partially due to and maybe almost fully due to tariffs.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Tariffs were a
Speaker 2:big part of the story. So if you like spending more money on The watches
Speaker 1:show is probably doing a
Speaker 2:lot you like spending more money on watches, you'll love tariffs.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. But Alexis says, a great anti AI bet I've been making is in human craftsmanship, human excellence, collectibles will keep thriving. If you needed an if you if you needed a reason to buy another watch, this is it.
Speaker 1:This is it. But it's interesting because he say he frames it as an anti AI bet. It's sort of an anti AI bet in that it's not a beneficiary of AI, but it's still it's a very AGI pilled bet, in the sense that in a moment when AGI AI is accelerating, maybe human's craftsmanship is more valuable than ever, and that it's sort of an anti slop, but it's still aligned with bullish view on AI broadly. So he's not saying, I'm not I don't think AI is going work, so I'm buying watches. He's saying, AI will work, and so I'm buying watches.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, humanoids are gonna have to be stunting.
Speaker 1:They will. They will need some something on the wrist of your humanoid, and why not an F. P. Jorn or Patek Philippe.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. So so it's interesting watches Yeah. Dublin goods. Right? More desirable as they get expensive.
Speaker 2:Yep. That means that if a robot can make a Swiss watch Mhmm. Like right now Rolex might cost $2,000 to make. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Some parts are Yeah. Automated, some is Yeah. You know, handcrafted. And suddenly Rolex can make the watch for, you know, $50.50 bucks just due to automation. It does they don't automatic they're not automatically gonna say like, okay, let's bring the prices down.
Speaker 2:Right? The price is part of the product. Yep. So I do think it's a I do
Speaker 1:think There is it's a little bit of a potential scoop here. Bobby Goodlatte replies to Alexis Ohanian here and says, yep, I love that both Zuck, we all knew Zuck is into watches, and Sam Altman are both into watches, shows that they still value handcrafted objects. I didn't know that Sam Altman was into watches. It makes sense. He's into cars.
Speaker 1:We know that. But
Speaker 2:He likes to double as you do like a Jacob and Co on
Speaker 1:E tapes. I haven't No. Truthfully, I've not seen a photo of Sam with a hitter on the wrist. I've seen him in the Koenigsegg. I've seen him in the McLaren f one.
Speaker 1:I know that there's a car collection there, but I haven't seen anything hit the timeline of a wrist check. But maybe 2026 is the year of the Sam Altman wrist check. I'm sure his PR team would love that going out on the Internet. But I would support it, and I will fight for you. I will be your strongest soldier, Sam, if you wanna drop, a little little photo on the Instagram of the of whatever's on your wrist.
Speaker 1:Anyway, fantastic show.
Speaker 2:Great show, folks. Great show, folks. Thank you for hanging out with us today.
Speaker 1:Well, there's one last scoop that we should that we should talk about is from Kylie Robison over at Core Memory with Ashley Vance.
Speaker 2:She's got another scoop.
Speaker 1:This was just from the weekend. We didn't talk about this, but xAI staff has been using Anthropic's models internally through Cursor until Anthropic cut off the start up's access this week. Everyone's using Anthropic apparently. So this went viral, got 7,000 likes. And
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think at this point, if you are a lab and you haven't had your access to Anthropic cut off Yeah. Polish up your resin. Because clearly, they're just gonna do this to any company that that is a meaningful threat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's another dynamic where you can be using the model because you think it's good, but you can also be trying to distill the model because if there's good data that can be pulled out, you you might just say, okay, we want this capability that's uniquely available at this model endpoint, so let's grab that. There's a whole bunch of reasons why this could be happening, but it is dramatic. Tyler?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I was just gonna say that was like the original deep deep sea controversy that they were distilling from ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:Yeah. GPT.
Speaker 2:Before we go, I gotta give a shout out to Cooper in the chat. Every single day when the market closes, he comes in and he says, time to like the stream.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. It's a movement. It's a movement.
Speaker 1:Thank you everyone for watching. Thank you for leaving us five stars and Apple Podcasts
Speaker 2:We and can't wait.
Speaker 1:Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter, tbpn.com. We will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Just one more sleep. Goodbye.