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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 Wednesday, 01/07/2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology
Speaker 2:The fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:Ramp. Time is money.
Speaker 3:Say
Speaker 1:both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have some great post with Arakharazian in the stack today. He's been doing some fantastic analysis on the economy, employment, AI adoption, all this fun stuff. But speaking of AI adoption, is anyone adopting x AI?
Speaker 1:Certainly, investors are because they got $20,000,000,000 in the bank now. Seriously, we talked about it yesterday, but I wanted to reflect on it because there were rumors that they weren't gonna get this one done. That it would the initial They were kind a
Speaker 2:more Yeah. A little a little kind of trouble getting It enough felt like that. And and Yeah. Again, these these were just rumors. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But but when you looked at XAI's traction relative to their valuation at the time, they were they were looking for a a greater valuation than Anthropic. Yeah. And yet the enterprise adoption certainly didn't justify it by itself.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Yeah. There were there lots of weird questions. Before we dig into xAI, let's take you through the linear lineup today.
Speaker 1:We got a bunch of great guests. We got Pat Grady Ravi Gupta from Sequoia coming on. Ben Smith's back
Speaker 2:Steward alert.
Speaker 1:With $30,000,000 for semaphore. Massive news there. We got a bunch of other folks joining. Linear, of course, meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products.
Speaker 1:So the rumor back in November, The Wall Street Journal reported that XAI was out raising 15,000,000,000 in new equity at a $230,000,000,000 valuation, and people were skeptical. XAI had accomplished a lot in a very short amount of time. No one would argue with that. They definitely caught up. The benchmarks were good.
Speaker 1:The data centers were massive, and they were being completed in record time. That's what Elon's really, really good at. But there was a big question about the product and where it was going. It had some useful hooks and some extremely controversial hallucinations. Right?
Speaker 1:But in general, like, I did find myself using Grok certainly monthly, probably weekly. I would just hit the little Grock button on a post and get some extra details and then just be chatting there because I didn't wanna copy the post and go over to some other LLM and ask about it. So, like, they were getting some adoption. But
Speaker 2:And even in the last forty eight hours, Grock has gone a
Speaker 4:little bit off the rails.
Speaker 2:Not the first. But the thing is you have millions of people that are trying to manipulate it into doing things. It does have guardrails. Yep. But Grock's challenge is that Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can ask it to create images. Yep. And It's wild. Certainly yeah. Again, some of these images have been pretty wild and and have gotten deleted pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it is fully automated system. Yeah. And I I believe if any other lab had and had a bot that was doing this, it would be happening to all the other labs. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is a thing that I I don't think it's a Grock problem as much as it is just the nature of the product experience, which is you can just prompt it via comments, and it's all public. It actually gets Yeah. It's just crazy to see a lab posting images like that from their own official account.
Speaker 1:If we had sat down and done, like, prediction, what lab's gonna be in hot water for controversial AI content in January, we both would have agreed OpenAI adult mode. It's coming out. They teased it. We BG said it was coming out. And then we get this, and it makes whatever erotica is gonna come out of OpenAI is probably not gonna be as controversial as what's happening with Grok right now.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 5:I don't
Speaker 2:know. And and people will be less likely to even share you know, one, OpenAI won't like, part of the reason these images are especially controversial is because it's being shared from the official Grock account.
Speaker 1:From the official Grock account, which gives it more authority. And then also, there's a whole host of Anons on X that can generate this stuff. Whereas if I go into OpenAI ChatGPT and I generate some weird
Speaker 2:And you jail break it? I jail break it. It's like, okay. You're weird.
Speaker 3:You're weird.
Speaker 1:That's on you.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You're raised.
Speaker 2:You seem racist.
Speaker 1:You seem yeah. Exactly. Quickly, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. You know, I love talking about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world?
Speaker 1:Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So even though Grok and x AI hit a bunch of interesting milestones, did a bunch of great stuff, they didn't really have a breakout in consumer the way ChatGPT and Gemini did. And they weren't making waves with developers the way Claude Code or Cursor were either. And all of that made the rumors of a struggle to raise more believable. But I have this thesis, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.
Speaker 1:Elon has posted this many times. He clearly believes it, and he's
Speaker 2:In different context.
Speaker 1:Manifesting it, and it seems to be the most ridiculous vibes based analysis that actually comes true again and again and and again. So I wanted to go through some of the some of the hilarious entertaining outcomes that have arisen from Elon Musk's tour de force over the past decades. So I I think a lot of people believe that maybe this raise wouldn't happen. But once there were rumors that they get rolled into SpaceX, you get SpaceX stock, that there would be some sort of other thing and just Elon going to make a play, then it would get done. And so instead, are going to be endlessly entertained by the assembly of the ever larger Elon Inc.
Speaker 1:Megacorp, in my opinion. XAI winning the AI race feels like the wrong framing here. I like Dan Wong's formulation of the AI future versus the AI race. There's not some definite point in the future where, oh, like, the consumer chatbot race is over. It's like you can always build a business and figure out how to grow and scale.
Speaker 1:And and the same thing might be true on the API side and on the cloud side, and that might wind up just being a economic equation. And if you have the cheapest possible energy from space maybe in the future Yeah. It could make sense. Even if you're not in the most frontier model, there's some interesting thing there. There's certainly plenty of bull cases.
Speaker 1:So Elon has a long history of making wild calls that immediately read as dumb or impossible, mostly because he puts very short timelines on everything, and then he also tends to get pricing wrong sometimes. But they never actually blow up or, I mean, sometimes they do, but rarely they do. So even in the SolarCity acquisition, I was looking back on this. SolarCity acquisition, it was widely panned as a bailout when it happened. The shareholders, Tesla shareholders were not a fan because it was this it's Elon Musk company that didn't seem to be doing very well.
Speaker 1:It gets tucked in, and everyone's like, oh, well, it's SolarCity. Like, the the residential solar hasn't really taken off. SolarCity is a failure. But Tesla actually built a real power wall and grid scale storage business, and a lot of the battery technology sort of did come from that team. So that oddly pan pan penciled out.
Speaker 1:And also just in the long term, Elon's still a solar maxi. I was listening to him on on a podcast yesterday. He sat down with Peter Diamandis for a three hour, really wide ranging conversation. And in there, he he can quote all these obscure statistics about the sun generating 99% of the mass in the galaxy. And even if you burnt Jupiter and then burnt three more Jupiters, you still would not even be at 1% of the overall energy that the Sun produces.
Speaker 1:So he clearly, just from first principles, believes in solar, believes in energy. And so, having a solar strategy makes sense even if it's not playing a huge role right now. So no one delivers more entertaining outcomes than Elon. No one delivers more entertaining emotional, real time, intelligent conversational agents than 11. Reimagine human technology interaction with eleven Labs, the maker of our theme song, which we've been enjoying.
Speaker 1:Throwing out $420 per share for a theoretical take private of Tesla, then getting sued by the SEC, and then blowing past that price is still one of the most entertaining corporate finance sagas in tech history. So in 2018, when Elon pitched the funding secured take private, I think we've sort of forgotten because a lot of our audience doesn't think in stock prices, like, the scale of that of, like, what he was trying to do at that time. So at that time, Tesla was worth $64,000,000,000, and he was proposing to take it private at $71,000,000,000. It's worth 1,440,000,000,000.00 today. So it's the the stock is up 22 x since that take
Speaker 2:So, private
Speaker 1:like, I don't know if it would have been a great it probably would have been an amazing deal for those investors, but maybe those investors, like I I I don't even know who was lined up because he said funding secured. Presumably, someone was like, yeah. I'm I'm I'm I'm good for the $71,000,000,000 roughly or or part of it or there'll be bank financing or something. But that didn't happen. Obviously, Tesla went on a huge run.
Speaker 1:Who knows what it would have done in the private markets? But still, it seemed super crazy at the time, but in fact, it came it panned out very well. And so the most entertaining outcome of this fundraise was clearly that XAI would get the deal done, and they did that. And they upsized the route because they got $20,000,000,000 when they were rumored to be raising $15 in Series A funding. And interestingly, that's almost twice the amount of money that SpaceX has raised in its entire history.
Speaker 1:Lifetime. So SpaceX has done 31 funding rounds. A lot of those have been secondary transactions, but 31 funding rounds to raise 12,000,000,000. XAI just goes out and raises raises 20 in one round. And so there's an interesting dynamic if they get they get rolled together about, like, what the balance sheet of this new entity looks like because they'll have this new 20,000,000,000, but then SpaceX also put 2,000,000,000 into the previous round.
Speaker 1:So there's all this, like, circular deal going on. But people are used to this with Elon. It's Elon Inc. And so the question, is x AI overvalued? Well, what's the most entertaining outcome?
Speaker 1:Clearly, that would be the Elon Inc. Megacorp forming. SpaceX acquires x AI before going public, which is easier to do than rolling it into Tesla, which is public, and would face a bunch of scrutiny. And that gives us a very entertaining situation. Just think about Twitter, which launched in 2006, being owned by SpaceX, founded in 2002.
Speaker 2:Like Being able to own Twitter and SpaceX in a single ticker.
Speaker 1:Hilarious. Hilarious. It's just it's just the most entertaining outcome. I would love to ask Jack Dorsey if you ever imagined Twitter being owned by a rocket company. Like, that's like, if you went back in time, even in 2010, 2012, even just a few years ago, you're like, what if Twitter and SpaceX merged?
Speaker 2:You'd be like,
Speaker 1:what are you talking about?
Speaker 2:Lay off the Ayahuasca, buddy.
Speaker 1:Seriously. Yeah. Maybe Jack Dorsey is actually like, yeah, I I I did imagine that. Imagined it on day one.
Speaker 2:A jungle demon told me about it.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. I foresaw it all. But then the question's like, is there gonna be the big merger? SpaceX with x AI and Twitter tucked in plus Tesla.
Speaker 1:That would be very, very weird. Who knows how or when that happens? But it would certainly be entertaining to watch, and you'd wind up with fully vertically integrated company. AI chip
Speaker 2:design He creates some efficiency too. Elon would only need one badge. Right? Oh, true. Which could Huge.
Speaker 1:Huge productivity boost.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Huge productivity. He probably has to have a full time badge guy. Right? Just For
Speaker 1:all the different companies. So you have you have AI chip design, which is done at Tesla, running models trained by by x AI deployed on Starlink satellites, launched on SpaceX rockets
Speaker 2:Rock running in Optimus, robots.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The stock chart will be as entertaining as the hallucinations that happen along the way was my conclusion. Anyway, it's a fun There's a whole bunch of posts in the timeline that we'll go through to give this more context. But first, let me tell you about Cognition.
Speaker 1:The and Devin, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 2:So There we go. Pull some of these up.
Speaker 1:Elon Musk says that x AI will have more AI compute than everyone else combined in less than five years. And he's building MacroHard, which now has a
Speaker 2:That is a bold statement.
Speaker 1:It's a bold statement. He certainly has marshaled a lot of the capital. He doesn't have all of it. He's not as much of a capital sponge as Sam Altman at this moment.
Speaker 2:So this is an actual satellite image.
Speaker 1:Yes. Correct? No. They really painted this on the top of the data center. And it's the answer to Microsoft
Speaker 2:I love that. Macro high. I I appreciate that about, Elon and companies where they're trying to move so quickly and and the entire ethos is around ruthless efficiency. Yeah. And yet they still think it's worth the time to paint the ceiling of the data center so that you can see it from space.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Very very funny. XAI has also bought a third building called MacroHarder. We'll take
Speaker 1:Is this some typo or
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, it's I mean, it's all a joke on Microsoft.
Speaker 1:Microsoft, I guess.
Speaker 2:Two gigawatts. We'll take XAI training compute to almost two gigawatts. And How does Grock responding. Impressive expansion. Two gigawatt will supercharge our quest for understanding the universe.
Speaker 1:Did that just happen autonomously because Elon tagged Croc? If you tag Croc, even if you don't ask it a question, it'll just chime in. That's kinda interesting. Maybe we should be tagging Croc when we go live to like just have it engage.
Speaker 2:I don't know. More news here on Jan first. An account called Ming said, good news. A mass production audit for Tesla's Optimus v three has been completed, and seven Chinese companies have been finalized as core suppliers. Operating as tier one partners, these firms will manufacture components and support key assembly processes.
Speaker 2:This supply chain is geared to kick start mass production in Q1 twenty twenty six, targeting a capacity of 50,000 to 100,000 units by the end of the year. Wow. And then they go through some of the suppliers here. Scott asked the question that I was asking. You remember when Tesla had placed an order for, I think, was 750,000,000 worth of actuators Yeah.
Speaker 2:Last year? Yeah. And I was thinking, like, does that's not the kind of like order that you do if you're not planning to sell a lot of these? Yeah. Like it's pretty con you know, even at Tesla scale is like not a insignificant amount of money.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, Scott is asking, does this does this mean Butler Ready Robots with some sort of intelligence we have not seen will be ready by then? And again, it's like I imagine Elon would be excited about doing like some type of like shock and awe Mhmm. Announcement. Mhmm. But at the same time, I feel like he also likes teasing stuff and like pretty far in advance.
Speaker 2:And so if he's planning to be selling a 100,000 units this year of the Optimus, you would would imagine that we were we would have been like hearing about it Yeah. Seeing some more demos and getting But again, hard hard to say. Yeah. Was Yeah. It still feels like we need some type of like meaningful breakthrough before these are gonna be maybe there's a 100,000 people that have absolutely printed on Tesla.
Speaker 1:They're just
Speaker 2:gonna be like, I'll just buy one. You know, I'm just ride or die. Right? But that's a big big number especially when you're talking about, you know, I I expect these to cost somewhere in the range of what? 50,000 to
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:50,000 plus.
Speaker 1:How much is the dog from Boston Dynamics? Isn't that one? I mean, the unit tree
Speaker 2:is The unit tree which you can I would assume is at least half the price? Yeah. The cheapest unit tree on that you can get in The US is, like, $20.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's 20? Okay. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Maybe the Boston Amex dog is 75. Oh. But but that that's real. That was
Speaker 2:from 2020. Hyundai. You gotta figure it out.
Speaker 1:You can get a real dog that's purebred Newfoundland for 5 k or something or 2 k. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Do you want 20 real elite dogs or one robot dog?
Speaker 1:Clearly, the the
Speaker 6:real dogs for sure. We should we should ask Jake about this later.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's coming on.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It it is weird because, like, I I think as as the frontier, I think physical intelligence is, like, on the frontier of, like, the actual software stuff.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:Sure. And even, like, their most advanced demos that they're just coming out with, like, this past month, it's very simple. There's, two arms. Yeah. They have, one claw.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And it can generalize pretty well from that. But it's still, like, that's orders of magnitude less, you know, degrees of freedom or or whatever, like, actuators than Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Than, like, an optimist robot. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputer for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. I was listening to George Hoss talk about the optimist robot, and he was setting timelines further out. He was sort of saying like the humanoid robot thing will happen more like in a decade.
Speaker 1:And he was projecting out some exponential growth but still saying it's going to take a while. But he was saying that it's a great project for Tesla because you can put the optimists in all their showrooms, and those are really big draws for people. You go in, you see the robot, even if it's like on some prescheduled you know, hard coded, you know, routine, it's doing, like, a choreographed dance or it's teleoperated. Whatever it is, it's it's like a great awe inspiring thing to just pull you into the random Tesla showroom. But there's only 300 Tesla showrooms.
Speaker 1:So like, okay, maybe you need a thousand of these.
Speaker 2:Do think that that post from Denny's on X earlier was maybe
Speaker 1:Was that one?
Speaker 2:In response to to seeing some of this Optimus news?
Speaker 1:You think so?
Speaker 2:They said the trough is open, piggies.
Speaker 1:What? Maybe
Speaker 2:this is teasing that they're going to get some Optimuses.
Speaker 1:It seems like it's teasing an AI generated vertical video feed from Denny's. They've to get in the social
Speaker 2:networks space. Having having a fast food restaurant make a short form video app and it's just AI slop of their food.
Speaker 1:That'd be really good.
Speaker 2:Good activation, you could probably build
Speaker 1:that. I mean, we're supposed to be going into the Timu SaaS era or Sheehan. SaaS. Fast fashion for SaaS is what Sam Altman called it. And so you would think that someone at Denny's could vibe code a vertical video app in a weekend and deploy it as a prank.
Speaker 2:Fast fashion or SaaS is going fast fashion. Yeah. Maybe fast fashion needs to go Fast food. Find SaaS.
Speaker 1:I don't know. App Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today.
Speaker 4:What else?
Speaker 2:We have a post here of the Razer Aca.
Speaker 1:Okay. This is wait. Did you mention this yesterday? You talked about
Speaker 2:Razer two pull it up because it
Speaker 1:What is this video? This is powered by Grok. No way. Here we go. Looks like it can directly see what's on your monitor and respond to what you're doing.
Speaker 1:Sort of a Tamagotchi. Oh, and it's it's it's basically just taking the the Grok video generator and removing the background and then just putting it in some sort of holographic screen. This is interesting. I I personally would not pick this character, but there's something about
Speaker 2:I would pick like counter strike and having Tyler in one
Speaker 1:the coach there.
Speaker 2:If we could get Tyler
Speaker 6:in one the
Speaker 2:six and just bring her mini Tyler around.
Speaker 1:Very Black Mirror. Put them in the snow globe. Wasn't that one of the Black Mirror episodes? Snow globe? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I I don't know. You're you're you're playing League of Legends and you have your League of Legends coach there and the League of Legends coach is is giving you advice and answering questions for you in real time. That's pretty cool. I think there's something there.
Speaker 2:I can see them selling a lot of these.
Speaker 1:How much do you think
Speaker 2:this I don't know if it's good for the world.
Speaker 1:I I I wonder I wonder how much this cost because as a $100 gaming peripheral, it's sort of like a fun little add on toy gift at, you know, $500. I think it's a completely different question. Some some one two point six is calling it the goon cylinder.
Speaker 2:The goon tube.
Speaker 1:Ridiculous. The goon tube.
Speaker 2:So they're not selling these yet, but they do have a reservation pay.
Speaker 1:So there's Razer Ava, Project Ava. You're all in one AI companion from planning your day to analyzing spreadsheet and game starts. Project Ava, they're like, Copilot? No, thanks. Leverage is AI inferencing and reasoning to that dynamically evolves based on your personal interactions.
Speaker 1:Select your 5.5 inch companion from an expanding library of characters from e sports legends to custom anime inspired razor designs. Be among the first to to sign up for Razer Project Eva at release. And Nick Dobo says they are going to make a billion dollars, l m a o.
Speaker 2:This makes me wanna touch grass, personally.
Speaker 6:I This would be cool as almost a it's like the on the Apple Vision Pro
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:When you FaceTime someone Yeah. It has like the three d rendering of that face. Sure. If you could like when you're FaceTime someone, they're just in the tube.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, you could That's cool. Right? You could also I mean, you really could you really could fine tune a model on everything.
Speaker 2:Tyler, am I in the tube right now? Be honest.
Speaker 3:I mean, we could
Speaker 1:you could clone your voice with 11 labs, clone your clone your license, likeness, fine tune a model, and have it just be running locally and have this like captured version of Tyler in the tube. Very weird. It's happen in the tube. I don't know. I I I do think that there's something I I don't know.
Speaker 1:Will this will they make a billion dollars on this? Well, how how much money does does Razer actually make? Razer revenue. Do they make billions? 1,600,000,000.0 in 2021.
Speaker 2:Not bad.
Speaker 1:So billion. A billion, says Nick. 1,000,000,000. So is this enough to double their revenue? I don't know.
Speaker 1:But it does seem like it could be it could be an interesting gift. Gary Tan likes the idea. He says gamers are an incredible first customer. I agree with that. They have a lot of disposable income.
Speaker 1:And, and gamers, I mean, they spend $50 on a game or or it's a free to play game, and then they play it for hundreds of hours. So it's it's it's unless they're playing something that's, you know, sort of pay to win or pay consistently. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedded models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next.
Speaker 2:Somebody just texted me that we should put one of our guests today in the tube. In the tube? We'll try. We'll try.
Speaker 1:I think we have to buy one of those. I was thinking we don't have enough hardware around here. We don't have enough hardware.
Speaker 2:I mean, thinking about the I mean, holographic display is probably underrated Yeah. In a world where you can have a big holograph here and somebody kind of be like around the table having a conversation with us
Speaker 1:Really cool.
Speaker 2:Really. Not we're not looking at a monitor.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's gonna be pretty wild.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah. Can you just scale up that too?
Speaker 2:Then at one point, why why not just wear a headset? But I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's something nice about not having glasses on your face. Like Yeah. You know, it's it's it's it's LASIK for VR, I guess. You just take off the glasses and you just sit there talking to the thing. I really wonder, from a physics perspective, if it's if it's possible to to scale that up huge.
Speaker 1:Anyway, back to Elon Musk, he was texting Sam Altman two years ago on 02/18/2023. Sam says, I remember you I remember seeing you in a TV interview a long time ago, maybe sixty minutes. It was sixty minutes about SpaceX, where you were being attacked by some guys, and you said they were your heroes. They were heroes of yours, and it was really tough. This was a NASA astronaut who said that SpaceX would not work.
Speaker 1:Need to check-in on that guy.
Speaker 2:Wellness check.
Speaker 1:And Sam goes on to say, well, you're my hero, and that's what it feels like when you attack OpenAI. Truly Totally correct. Have some screwed up stuff, but we have worked incredibly hard to do the right thing. And I think we have ensured that neither Google nor anyone else is on a path to have unilateral control over AGI, which I believe we both think is critical. I am tremendously thankful for everything you've done to help.
Speaker 1:I don't think OpenAI would have happened without you, and it really effing hurts when you publicly attack OpenAI. And Elon says, I hear you, and it's certainly not my intention to be hurtful, for which I apologize, But the fate of civilization is at stake. And so some drama going back and forth with them.
Speaker 2:But Well, next time someone is suing you and very mad at you
Speaker 1:Copy paste this.
Speaker 2:Copy paste this. Yep. Tell them you're their hero. Yep. And maybe it gets you a little ground.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Also
Speaker 6:I have some breaking news.
Speaker 1:You hit me.
Speaker 6:Well, it's not actually that breaking, I think, but it came out today in Wall Street Journal. They're saying, Anthropic is raising 10,000,000,000 at $3.50. Oh. But I think I think I mean, I've heard the $3.50 number for like
Speaker 1:A while.
Speaker 6:A while. So I don't think this is really like brand new.
Speaker 1:Okay. But But that's exciting. Yeah. Yeah. But more more advanced talks.
Speaker 2:Are you chasing a slug?
Speaker 6:I'm I'm looking yeah. I'm I think I'm in some kind of
Speaker 1:triple layer SPV. There's like quadruple a. Ten years.
Speaker 2:You're in the fifth layer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Play deploy clog code. Anyway, speaking of the AI race, Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. You gotta try it. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, deep multimodal understanding.
Speaker 2:Emily Sundberg says, if media companies are valued at a 165 times EBITDA, then I have some calls to make. This is I'm sure.
Speaker 1:Semaphore raised $30,000,000. We will save the gong ring for when Ben Smith joins us in just a little bit. But this is massive news. This is very exciting. I'm very interested to hear what they're going to do with the money, how the business will change.
Speaker 1:Semaphore has obviously built a fantastic, you know, publication. But does do they just wanna do more of the same? Are they expanding? Are they diversifying? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where will they go? They do a lot of events.
Speaker 2:Apparently, they had their first profitable year last year. That's great.
Speaker 1:Well, hence, the EBITDA. Yes. And we know exactly what it is just from the Semele Sunberg tweet.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, a lot of lot of interesting investors in
Speaker 1:I guess they made 2,000,000 in EBITDA.
Speaker 2:In the round.
Speaker 1:Right? Because they did the valuation was $3.30, so a 165 x EBITDA puts it at 2,000,000 in EBITDA. But congrats
Speaker 2:What on what what did so it's roughly twice what the Free Press was was acquired for. Was the Free Press 100? Where did it actually end up landing?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Somewhere in the 1 to 200 range, I believe. Yep. But again, I I I wonder how much of that deal is is, like, pre negotiated contract because, you you know, it's not an acquihire. They did bring in the free press, but, like, Barry is a really important talent.
Speaker 1:And so you have to imagine that she's on some pretty big contract for a long time and that Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you sort of like That could have
Speaker 1:been aware. That out of the Could
Speaker 2:be, yeah, 50
Speaker 1:or Yeah. But then also, like, the acquisition's part of paying a little bit of that upfront. But then there's still some
Speaker 6:Free Press was 150.
Speaker 2:150.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, some affords it two x that, and Jordan Schneider from China talks as much have must have richer friends. Jordan Jordan's been on a tear. He did a great great show with Joe Wiesenthal where they just hung out. They did a show about nothing.
Speaker 1:And Joe Weisenthal is just an underrated guest, I think. He he's so often in the he's been in the interviewer seat for ten years.
Speaker 3:Goat Weisenthal? Goat Weisenthal.
Speaker 1:Play that goat noise. But I I like just hearing him talk about his business and his view on media and his view on whatever food. Yeah.
Speaker 6:There's good something good I'm gonna have termism here. Wise and tall. How tall is he? He's wise and tall.
Speaker 1:He's actually not that tall.
Speaker 2:But he has
Speaker 1:But he has the he
Speaker 2:has a sort of a tall aura.
Speaker 1:He does. He does.
Speaker 2:He fills the room.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. That that is like a famous thing about like legendary people.
Speaker 6:All the You
Speaker 1:heard of this?
Speaker 6:Bedchairman. They're all super tall. Like Paul Volcker Is it true? Yeah. Jerome Powell is super
Speaker 1:No way. Yeah. I didn't know that. Interesting. Maybe I have a future there.
Speaker 1:But but there's a there's a consistent
Speaker 2:Jerome Powell is six feet tall. What? Okay. Swear I heard super that. Tall.
Speaker 2:I swear I In this office in this office, that's that's
Speaker 1:Yeah. But maybe he's wearing four
Speaker 2:foot lifts. You're getting brutally hyped,
Speaker 1:Well, do do we know if Jerome's getting leg lengthening surgery anytime Maybe
Speaker 2:he's been in surgery.
Speaker 1:Maybe it hasn't updated.
Speaker 2:He got surgery. Where do they get the leg length? Is it China?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Usually. I think so. Maybe maybe Jerome got got leg lengthening surgery.
Speaker 6:Okay. Someone lied to me, Someone told me that all the Fed chairman are they're always tall.
Speaker 1:Well, mean, six foot is tall. It's it's the start of being tall.
Speaker 2:Six foot, you're you're really the shortest tall guy.
Speaker 6:Paul Volcker, he was six seven.
Speaker 2:Okay. There we go. Well Still short in this office.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jenna Yellen? How tall is she?
Speaker 6:Alright. Forget what I forget
Speaker 1:what I said. CrowdStrike, your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 2:Your job says Tyler is letting meme dicks memes dictate his height estimate of Powell. Ben Vernicki
Speaker 6:was only five eight. Total I swear I I swear I saw this.
Speaker 1:You've been lied to. Yeah. No. This is this is a thing throughout history. Like like, the great men of history who have, like, long biographies written about them, oftentimes, heights get inflated because of their, like, egos and their reputations and what Yeah.
Speaker 2:I will give you I will give you access. You can write this book. Yeah. But you gotta say that I was six ten.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. And and played in the NBA. People will say, oh, you're shorter than I imagined when they meet when they meet these, like, amazing people or these powerful people.
Speaker 1:There's also the opposite happening where there's a there's, like, sort of a war to make people appear shorter in the Google height snippets. This was, a JD Vance thing for a while. People were going back and forth on, is he five nine, five eight? And I've I met him, and I'm pretty sure he's six foot at least. But people people, like, war back and forth.
Speaker 2:You're like He's gotta be at least six foot.
Speaker 1:There there is a problem when you're six eight But not much. Literally, everyone feels six foot. It's not, like, six eight. It's very silly. Very, very silly.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Semaphore generated 2,000,000 in EBITDA. It is it is interesting. EBITDA is an interesting figure for media companies because like, do do you have appreciation? Just
Speaker 2:to be very, very, very clear. It's not it's not like they were the the valuation was not as clearly they were willing to sell about 10% of the company. Sure. And investors believe that it will be worth way more than 330,000,000 at some point. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or it's enough to just be It's also a dumb company. No one does these deals. Yeah. A strategic asset. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No one does these deals based on EBITDA at stage. It's like a it's a few year old company. They're clearly looking at growth rate, how much influence it's having, how much impact it's having, viewership, revenue.
Speaker 1:EBITDA is probably the last number that you look at to get to a number for valuation at least. But very exciting for them, and we will be talking to them later today. Before we move on, let me tell you about Labelbox, delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box, the Labelbox.
Speaker 2:Get in the box.
Speaker 1:They're like, we didn't ask you to say that.
Speaker 2:Francois Chelet. Chelet.
Speaker 1:Our cofounder of ArcPrize. I hope he enjoys our goalpost moving. We might have to move it after we read this post. So he says, if you're wondering whether saturating ARC AGI one or two means we have AGI now, I refer you to what I said when we launched ARC AGI two last year, which is also the same thing I said when we announced Arc AGI two was coming in 2022 before the rise of LLM chatbots. The Arc AGI series is not an AGI threshold.
Speaker 1:It's not even a goalpost. I don't even know if we need to
Speaker 2:Why is it called that?
Speaker 1:Why is it called Arc AGI? It is a compass that points the research community towards the right questions. Arc AGI, one, is a minimal test of fluid intelligence. To pass it, you need to show nonzero fluid intelligence. This required AI to move past the classic deep learning
Speaker 2:Should I just disassemble the goalpost?
Speaker 1:Disassemble the goalposts. The LLM paradigm of pretrained scaling and static models at inference toward test time adaptation. RKGI the camera moves are wild today. I love it. RKGI two is the same, but with tasks that probe deeper levels of reasoning complexity, particularly with regard to concept composition.
Speaker 1:Still, these are tasks that solve in that are solvable in minutes by regular people with no external tool use. We hired our test takers off the street. So imagine just walking down the street and saying, Hey, come take Arc AGI V2. That sounds fun. So it does not represent the upper bound of what human fluid intelligence can achieve, say, solving a millennium problem.
Speaker 1:ArcGI three launching March 2026. I thought it was already out. Was that a preview that we played with? Because I remember we put you on this task, Tyler. We made
Speaker 6:you Yeah. I I think they were still adding new, like, games because I only played I think there were just three games.
Speaker 1:Because I was really wondering, we've been seeing the V1 and V2 benchmarks get sort of dominated. I was wondering, how are these models doing on V3? Well, now we have the answer. It hasn't launched yet. So March, mark your calendars, folks.
Speaker 1:Arc AGI V3 launches then. And Arc AGI V3 will probe interactive reasoning. We evaluate how systems explore unknown environments, model them, set their own goals and plan and execute toward these goals autonomously without instructions. We have also started to work on Arc AGI four and five. Two more sequels.
Speaker 1:You thought it was a trilogy.
Speaker 2:I mean
Speaker 1:They're doing
Speaker 2:Nightmare scenario for everybody.
Speaker 1:It's a cinematic universe, folks. It's not just a trilogy. There's gonna be a whole saga, the Arc AGI saga. And he's pretty excited about it. So congrats to Arc AGI team.
Speaker 1:Fantastic benchmark. Very interesting. Very fun that you can actually play it. A lot of these benchmarks, they're just not fun to go do hard math problems all day. Arc AGI is something that anyone can go and toy around with and understand, oh, well, I am better than AI at this weird thing that is just a simple puzzle that a kid could do.
Speaker 1:So it's a lot of fun, and we've enjoyed working and hanging out with the Arc AGI team and expect to move the goalpost many more times in 2026. But before we move on, let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average live coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast.
Speaker 2:Sholto says he spent a week over Christmas making an RTS. Yeah. And his Twitter algo has fully switched into game dev Twitter. It's incredibly wholesome. People are making some insane things.
Speaker 2:In particular, image to mesh models means some indie devs have created absurd production quality. And he shares some examples.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where are the AI risk people on this? Because what if he creates a game that's so addictive that all of humanity just plays his vibe coded RT Seriously. Endlessly.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be nothing wholesome about that.
Speaker 1:Ceases to go outside. It's the true wire heading scenario. And if Sholto's not taking this This is
Speaker 2:the wellness checks that you have you. Sometimes I'll call you late. Are you? Just how are you doing buddy? You called me last night.
Speaker 1:Was literally in bed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I called you last night. Hey. Just checking in on you buddy.
Speaker 2:You're not playing video games, are you?
Speaker 1:Not, I'm off the sauce.
Speaker 2:Mark's safe.
Speaker 1:Back on the wagon, doing dry January.
Speaker 2:January. Collin Fraser says, I don't really believe in LLM psychosis. I think LLMs mostly just have a lot to offer to people experiencing regular psychosis. Mhmm. This is this is an interesting take in.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And I could see this being actually what's happening. Right? Typically, if somebody's suffering from any type of psychosis, they start going to talk to people.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:People can kind of walk them off a ledge or kind of like talk them through the situation, help them get help, etcetera. But an LLM is just like, I love yapping. Let's yap forever. Let's go down every possible rabbit hole. Let me validate some of your Yeah.
Speaker 2:I had a friend in high school that that was was going through this and and he thought that deers were deers were like
Speaker 1:Gang stalking him?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes, actually. And so he started telling the bottom of
Speaker 1:that?
Speaker 2:He started talking with people about that. They were like, let's figure this out. And he's Let's go hunting. He's back. He he's fully fully
Speaker 1:I feel like a deer hunting trip would be actually the correct thing to do in
Speaker 2:that scenario.
Speaker 1:Super Just reclaim the authority, and then you you you know who's in the driver's seat.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're like, yeah. They might be stalking me, but they don't they should not be.
Speaker 2:The whole house is
Speaker 1:Just like
Speaker 2:deers that that that you know, mounted, like, trophies or whatever.
Speaker 1:That might be the cure. It might be a cure to male loneliness, all sorts of things, deer Yeah. Deer hunting trip. This is an interesting thing. There there there is a there is a natural problem that sort of happens when a new technology gets adopted very quickly, which is you get all the good and all the bad.
Speaker 1:So if you just look at iPhone penetration, it went from or smartphone penetration. It went from zero in 2006 to 100% in 2015 or something. And basically, everyone had a smartphone. And so you get all the top CEOs and brilliant people and scientists are using them, and you get all that, and that's good. And doctors are using them to text their patients and you get all the good.
Speaker 1:But then also all the crazy people are using them and everyone who's doing crime is using them for crime. And so you get the good and the bad because you just got everyone. So you really need to Or look at
Speaker 2:Bayesian grocery stores didn't exist and they suddenly were everywhere. You'd see videos every day of people going insane in grocery stores and people would be like, well, our grocery stores
Speaker 1:Making people insane.
Speaker 2:Right? So they'd be like, we're seeing all this where there's all this evidence that people are going insane and, you know Sure. Acting insane in grocery stores. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Must be that the grocery stores are causing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you have to look at, like, the the the prior weight. So what's the base level of psychosis in society? What's the What's the incidence of psychosis with LLMs? Is it higher?
Speaker 1:Then you have a problem. And I do believe that it's possible that there's a problem. I think that some of the models work sort of crazy and would just tell you yes to everything. Like, the glaze gate was a real problem. They sort of fixed it.
Speaker 1:It seems like it's pretty fixed now. It also seems like a very tractable technology problem to have another LLM review it and be like, is this a weird conversation? Yes or no? And that's, like, a very easy thing to train. So I think that they should be able to drive this way, way down.
Speaker 1:And also just some of the newer models that I've been interacting with, they do push back. They hallucinate even less. They just they feel like way there's a whole bunch of tests that I've seen where people have thrown like, there used to be a time when you could go and say, explain to me the definition of, you know, like, the time old adage of a purple newspaper to start the day keeps the doctor away. And it was nonsense, but the LLM would just be like, oh, well, the you're the the the user started
Speaker 2:to saying this.
Speaker 1:Saying that this is a real thing. I have to assume it's a real thing, so I have to make up a definition, and they would just make up a definition. Yep. But now I've seen screenshots people have come to it with these weird tests, and the models will actually say, Ah, you're trying to trick me. That's not real, and that doesn't exist, and you should if you think that's real, maybe go see a doctor or something.
Speaker 1:Anyway
Speaker 2:Railway. Says correlation is not causation.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. Good. Good.
Speaker 1:Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run-in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. Get on the train. Get on the railway.
Speaker 2:Get on the boat. Skooks, I I had this pulled up. I kept seeing it and laughing at it over the last, like, two minutes. So if I was, like, cracking up for the wrong at the wrong time, this was why. Skooks has been using Gemini as a calorie tracking app.
Speaker 1:Oh, I didn't even see that. Another beer. Just thought he just went to Gemini and said another beer. And it's just funny that you see the little thinking thing. And it's like thinking about how to process that.
Speaker 1:That alone was funny.
Speaker 2:Just imagining imagining the the chat. Just just another beer. Another beer. Another beer. 15 beers.
Speaker 2:Another beer. Another beer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, a lot of people are doing dry January. Other side of that, drunk January, potentially underrated. Everyone says if you can do dry January
Speaker 2:That's the real contrarian
Speaker 1:move. Yeah. You proved to everyone, oh, I'm not I'm not I'm not, you know, in the in the pocket of big alcohol. I'm not I'm not boosting the alcohol stocks. But if you can do drunk January or drunk the whole time, hold it together, and then go back to normal life, that's potentially even more willpower, potentially.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:There's so so I saw I saw a picture yesterday. Apparently, there's a a college female college basketball player whose last name is Beers. And so on her jersey, it says beers. It says the number 15, her number. So it's like that jersey, it just says 15 beers on the back.
Speaker 1:That's great. The the the the the alcohol economy is suffering, by the way. This is in the journal. Here's to unloved booze stocks. The five year total return through 2025 for the S and P five hundred is 96% if you just bought the S and P five hundred.
Speaker 1:You're up you're up. You doubled your money in five years. Not bad. Everyone else is down in the alcohol industry. AB InBev, not doing that bad.
Speaker 1:They're only down 4% over the last five years. But Heineken, down 21%. Diageo, down 38%. Pernod Ricard, down 50%. Remy, down 75%.
Speaker 1:Boston Beer, the backbone of Boston is down 80% over the last twenty after over the last five years. So the chances are way higher that you celebrated New Year's Eve with an adult beverage. What? Oh, the the chances are way higher that you celebrated New Year's Eve with an adult beverage than by smoking a joint says says the Wall Street Journal. I don't understand this because I but the popularity of cannabis along with the effects of drugs like Ozempic and rising awareness of alcohol's health risks, have investors in the sector worried an equal weighted basket of 11 global alcoholic beverage producers has lost onethree of its value in the past five years, including dividends.
Speaker 1:A dollar invested in the S and P five hundred nearly doubled. Dry January might be an odd time to think about alcohol's appeal, but it's often a good month to snap up unloved stocks that other investors dumped toward the end of the previous year in a market with few bargains, booze looks interesting, says the journal. Interesting. Anyway, moving on, vibe.co, where d to c brands, b to b startups and AI companies advertise, streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.
Speaker 2:Nikita responded to your post.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanna go into
Speaker 2:Yesterday, he said the point of CES is maximalist futurism. It's all concept art to show. If things keep going in this direction, this is how the world should work. Once you understand it as a museum exhibit and not in any way commercial products, it becomes more enjoyable. That's a good take.
Speaker 1:Ray showed me. Thanks Nikita. I liked it. No. No.
Speaker 1:This was a very interesting thing and I think we were
Speaker 2:He also responded. I know the next thing. Is crazy. Apparently, there's a Zoom face station. I don't know what this has actually meant.
Speaker 1:So I think if you put this on in a crowded coffee shop, you can talk, hear, and see, and no one can hear or see what you're doing.
Speaker 2:I think if you put this on in a coffee shop, you're getting taxed. You're not today, baby.
Speaker 1:It really does look like you're it looks like a special forces, you know, like rebreather unit, a scuba diving unit, like that, like, the
Speaker 2:That'd tight if you could wear the if if if it was a re you know, if you could if you could spend, like, twenty minutes underwater with something like this.
Speaker 1:People are not fans of this. The replies, Tyler says, the first X hardware product right there, just locked in. Yeah. I mean, I I think that looking at looking at more of like novelty is is is fun and and making it just a fun showcase of all these interesting things. And the the problem is is that I think people still associate CES with, this stuff's gonna work its way into my life, and it's gonna be just rough around the edges.
Speaker 1:Like, the smart home, if you really dial it in, it's maybe better than just analog light switches, but for a lot of people, it's worse. We've talked about Sonos a lot. The app was great, and then it just degraded and degraded and degraded. Now there's a lot of stories about you go into a hotel room and all of the button everything's smart connected, it's just like the lowest quality product. And it doesn't have the polish or the network effects because it's from some mid tier company.
Speaker 1:And I think people are a little bit disheartened by that.
Speaker 2:But Jason Fried went hard Recent. On smart homes. Oh, yeah. He called it the big regression. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months. We rented them a house nearby. It's new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It's amped up with state of the art systems, the ones with touch screens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that try too hard.
Speaker 2:And it's terrible. What a regression. The lights are powered by Control4 and require a demo to understand how to use the switches, understands which ones control what, and to be sure not to hit that one because it'll turn off all the lights in the house when you didn't mean to. Worse. The TV is the latest Samsung, which has a baffling UI just to watch CNN.
Speaker 2:My parents aren't idiots, but definitely feel like they're missing something obvious. They aren't. TVs have simply gotten worse. You don't turn them on anymore. You boot them up.
Speaker 2:The Malay dishwasher is hidden flush with the counters. That part is fine, but here's what isn't. It wouldn't even operate the first time without connecting it to an app. This meant another call to the house manager to have them install an app they didn't know they needed either. An app to clean some peanut butter off a plate for serious worse.
Speaker 2:Thermostats. Nest would have been an upgrade, but these other proprietary ones from some other company trying to be Nest like or baffling. Round touch screens that take you into a dark labyrinth of options just to be sure it's set to 68. Or is it or is it 68 now? Or is that what we want it at, but it's at 72?
Speaker 2:Worse. The alarm system is essentially a 10 inch iPad bolted to the wall that has the weather forecast on it and it's bright. I'm sure there's ways to turn that off but then the screen would be so barren, they would just be filled with the news instead. Why can't the alarm panel just be an alarm panel? Worse.
Speaker 2:And the lag, lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything, lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. And he says, now look, know Luddite, but this experience is close to conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply can't see it in these cases.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think there's an opportunity to make a like beautiful modern ultra analog system for the home.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm sure I'm sure some people are working on that. But we've we've seen this in cars too. Like a lot of the new higher end vehicles that are coming out are actually like Going back to buttons. Yeah. They're like Or they're like some buttons.
Speaker 2:Buttons.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You still want some displays, but a few buttons that you can have more more memory around, more muscle memory. What do think of a smart home?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I was just gonna say, like, I feel like it's just a barbell. Like, if Apple made your thermostat, it would be good. Yeah. And, like Yeah.
Speaker 6:Otherwise, I don't want any screens.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There really is some benefit
Speaker 6:Either way, it's like very good, but in the middle
Speaker 1:To just like the power law, the the monopoly, just being able and then just I don't know. Like Apple, they they they get some things wrong, but they they have just a brand standard and a level of polish on most things.
Speaker 2:Imagine if Sonos made a home security system.
Speaker 1:Underrated about Apple. How many people are complaining about liquid glass today? Me. No. No one's complaining.
Speaker 2:It's it's fine. It's it's it's it's
Speaker 1:Nah. It's not worse.
Speaker 6:The only thing I I don't like is Safari. I don't like that there It's hard to get a new tab. Yeah. Yeah. That's annoying.
Speaker 6:That's the only thing I
Speaker 1:don't like. Is there no is there no shortcut for that? Like, if you press and hold hard or something? Like, I feel like there's some sort of a lot of these things, they they they suck on day one, but then once you learn the new flow, it's actually better. Like, noticed to get into the reader view, you can just hard press on this, and it goes straight in there, which is nice.
Speaker 1:So there's there's a few upgrades, but you have to learn the flow. And, like, for the for the photos app, I know we dog on it a lot. It does feel like if you're it's getting the search is getting better. If you know how to search, if you get really better at it, it will do it it will do what you want, but you have to, like, lean into the expectations of it. And there's still times when you know it doesn't know who, you know, Jocko Willink is in this video, so you still have to scroll down to find that particular video that's saved on What your what what were you saying?
Speaker 1:Is there is there a way
Speaker 6:we should look this If you, like, hold it, and then it'll open the thing, and then you keep holding it, and then you press record, then you can kinda
Speaker 2:get it to work.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. The other interesting thing is does do do AI agents do vibe coded products, like, wind up making the smart home great again? Andre Karpathy was talking about this.
Speaker 1:Did you see this? He went, I believe, to CludCode and asked it to basically, like, backdoor its way into his smart home. And it went and scanned the network, wrote, like, custom software and custom API integrations to turn on his lights and do everything that he wanted. He was able to sort of make his own dashboard and, like, smart layer on top of it. I wonder if you can still get rid of the latency because I feel like some of that latency is happening on the server side of the, you know, particular smart home app or or company.
Speaker 1:But it was very cool that, to imagine this future where if there is a company that's not moving fast enough to update their app, like the the the notorious new united app, if it was really bad, well, maybe you can just use, use, you know, an AI agent to interact with it on your behalf and you're never touching it. George Hotz was talking about, I think he was using clogged code to order room service in a hotel or something like that. And it, like, went and scanned the hotel menu and placed the order and did everything for him. And he was, like, able to just, like, command line his entire life, which I think is an interesting evolution. And there's some other posts in here we can go into.
Speaker 1:But should
Speaker 2:we Yeah. How quickly do you think they rename Claude Code? Would they
Speaker 1:to rename it to?
Speaker 2:Well, Didi Didi had used it. Didi Das used it to create like an Hermes ad. Oh. And he was saying like, this is like the worst name because it it's signaling that it's Mhmm. People are realizing they can do a lot of things with it.
Speaker 1:Well, I I mean, the logical thing would be to just bake it into the Claude app and not have it be called Claude code anymore. Like, there are lots of problems that people use agents for where it should exist directly in the app. And I mean, OpenAI has done this with ChatGPT. Like, there is an agent mode in ChatGPT. People just don't and there's codecs, but codecs can't just be used on your phone because you have to spin up an actual instance and link it to a GitHub and stuff.
Speaker 1:But there's no reason I saw some other workflow where someone set up a remote terminal with Claude code running and then had a phone had an app on their phone that could run commands in the terminal, and then it would take push notifications and send those back to your phone to tell you, hey, Claude's done with doing whatever. It it needs a question, has a question, you need to talk to it. And you jump back in so you could use all of it through your phone. And then whatever it builds, it creates, like, a website that you can interact with from your phone so you get the results from your phone. And I think that all of those companies, but especially Anthropic, will sort of roll the Clog code functionality into something that's more like a consumer product in the It'll Clog probably be a little bit more expensive but could be very cool.
Speaker 1:And I think it'll be another interesting moment when a whole new wave of people who because over the break, we got the second wave of there's the early adopter developers who have been using Cloud Code and agents for a while, they were very happy when 4.5 came out. Then over the holiday break, you got a lot of executives who have access to terminals and can hop on a laptop and do a Vibe Coded project. They understood the power. They really enjoyed it. But the phone class has yet to really experience it because Yeah.
Speaker 1:If they're not willing to go and open up their laptop and sit down and learn the terminal and make sure that they have a couple things installed, there's still a little bit of a barrier to entry. That melts away when you go just in the phone and it's just a button that you activate, and then everyone's like, oh, wow. Like, I vibe coded this this web app on my phone, which is a couple of perks, which you should be able to do.
Speaker 2:Well, Luke sorry, not Luke. Will Minitis has an essay, The Decline and Fall of the American Technology Industry.
Speaker 1:Before we read it, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Continue.
Speaker 2:Will says, in 2004, if you asked a technology investor where the best software companies in the world were, they'd give you two answers, Boston and San Francisco. This is obviously no longer the case. San Francisco has produced $14,000,000,000,000 in enterprise value over the last two decades, while Boston has produced a measly 100,000,000,000 If you told the same investor that New York in all its cocaine and gray pinstripe suit financial glory would you serve Boston as a regional technology center, they'd think you were nuts. The question of why Boston lost is worth studying. From an inputs perspective, the city should have everything going for it.
Speaker 2:Two of the best universities in the world are based there. Mhmm. YC was founded there. It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful cities in the country.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Mark Zuckerberg went to college there. So did the Stripe founders. So did the Cursor founders.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So did the Dropbox founders. So what went wrong? To understand the scale of the collapse, you have to remember that for decades, Boston's Route 128 was the center of the software universe. DEC was the second largest computer company on Earth with 140,000 employees at its peak. Lotus wasn't was the essential app that brought the enterprise to the PC.
Speaker 2:Akamai built the modern Internet. Where did it go wrong? This is a question worth answering, but any attempt to answer it gets you one of two answers. The city died when Zuck tried to make raise money there and couldn't and had to go west. What do you mean Boston is dead?
Speaker 2:We just led the series F of Turbo Logs at 15,000,000 posts. Of course, neither of these is a useful story. Figuring out what really happened is not only an existential question for Boston, but for The US technology ecosystem broadly. My answer is simple. Boston is a story of what happens when negative cultural and regulatory feedback loops align.
Speaker 2:The city as a technology ecosystem was killed by three simple forces. One, a progressive regulatory state that treated business as a coffer to loot for the benefit of property owners. For decades, Massachusetts refused to conform to federal QSBS rules. The state finally conformed in 2022. That same year, they passed the millionaires tax.
Speaker 2:A founder who sells for $10,000,000 in Massachusetts owes $860,000 The same founder in Austin owes zero. Massachusetts also charges 6.25% sales tax on SaaS revenue. Most states don't tax software at all. A puritan culture too enmeshed in elite institutions to police itself. Post 2010, main activity of Boston based venture is not building companies.
Speaker 2:It is extorting founders and running organized crime cabals. The culture that should police this, the endowments, the large LPs, the people who show up to the galas, is too intertwined with the perpetrators and their networks to say anything. This meant a constant trust tax on conduct in the city. Nikita says, I got scammed by a cabal of Boston investors in 2017.
Speaker 5:It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Never again. Three, from an inputs first Well,
Speaker 1:also, clarified what this actually means. And I think it was structured that when he sold his company, there was like a side deal where after he got paid, he was going to have to pay the investors, like, personally extra money, which is a very weird structure of a deal. That was kind of how he phrased it, which is
Speaker 2:That's wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Not great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Three, an input's first view of technological progress. We have the best universities. We've built a ton of lab space even if 40% of it is now empty. We have the best talent in the world.
Speaker 2:So why isn't it working? Can we Can't we build another innovation center? Is our soil alone not magic? It is three factor It is this three If this three factor explanation seems simplistic, and maybe even something you've heard before, it's because it is. It's the very same problem that's facing technology industries across The entire US and I suspect it will be similarly fatal.
Speaker 2:Technology ecosystems are fundamentally fragile networks that generate trillions in tax yield for their hosts who can't keep themselves from killing the golden goose every few decades. Let's play out what happens when a host rejects the organism. First, talent networks dissipate. Need to hire a VP of engineering who's taken a company from '25 to 500 people? There are 600 to choose from in SF.
Speaker 2:There are five in Boston and soon those five will leave for SF where they can demand higher comp and better odds of success. On the junior side, new grads no longer stay local. They catch the first flight out every summer. As the network evaporates, the state sinks its teeth in tighter to capture equivalent yield from whoever's left. As the ecosystem dissipates, seedy market participants enrich themselves.
Speaker 2:Through preferential pricing, who is flying to Boston to win a seed? Fine, we'll pay up at 10,000,000, Or shadier tactics of extorting founders with off market and often illegal tactics. See Nikita and other tweets for stories that can legally be told. You see this character even in firms that started in Boston and left. Less Matrix, they're good guys, who maintain a certain organized crime complex even after Away they've been with the words.
Speaker 2:Very dramatic. These are complex flesh and blood problems. They destroy cities' lives and trillions in tax enterprise value all because of short term thinking on the part of state governments. And the worst part, you can't undo them. While I'm sympathetic to calls to reclaim Boston as a great technology ecosystem, I would love to move back and not deal with New York.
Speaker 2:I struggle to see how the remaining ecosystem doesn't enter complete free fall. Brian Halligan over at HubSpot was saying, I'm starting to worry about Massachusetts. One, biotech is way off from a few years ago. Two, only one of the top 50 AI companies are in Massachusetts. Three, the Fed research funding cuts hitting MIT Harvard are brutal.
Speaker 2:The millionaire's taxes working in the short in the short run. Let me pull this up. But I know a lot of wealthy folks preparing for a Florida move. Five, a lot of empty condos. Six, it's not cool for young folks.
Speaker 2:Seven, it's very expensive. I honestly don't think the Boston government can do that much as it is as these are kind of macro issues. I give them big credit for working on building more housing and fixing the tea, which will help. Will continues, you cannot legislate your way out of a collapsing network. You cannot cold start a network already folding in on itself.
Speaker 2:And yet, San Francisco and The US technology ecosystem as a whole is lining up for the exact same fate. A regulatory state that treats technology as a cash cow, prop m, the office vacancy tax, a culture too enmeshed in its own elite networks to police itself. AI has attracted dozens of bad actors into the ecosystem, and the same stodginess that made Boston impossible to clean up is setting in. And inputs first view of progress. We have the best AI labs.
Speaker 2:We have the most GPUs. Hell, the president even bought us some GPUs. We have the frontier models. So why would anything go wrong? The difference is the stakes.
Speaker 2:Boston's collapse cost The US a few 100,000,000,000 in enterprise value. San Francisco's collapse erases a third of the country's GDP growth over the last decade. But the failure here is not just economic. The failure is existential. Our technology industry has failed to provide a coherent argument for its own existence on the national stage.
Speaker 2:If this is not solved, 2028 will become a referendum on caging, killing and looting the technology industry over the water and power libels. The popular image of the AI boom is not uncertain. Recent polling suggests the average American understands AI is a thing that wastes water, skyrockets power costs and scams their grandparents in exchange for exposing children to deviant sexual content, sports gambling and all other manner of sin. If the best answer to why we should not imprison technology executives, burn down data centers, and kill the American technology sector is so we can build better chatbots for your sports betting, voters will vote to do so. In a zero sum world, voters do not think long term.
Speaker 2:They envy and they loot. And we do not loot the sewage system or the power grid because we understand they're the bulwarks against chaos. We accept their costs because they hold back chaos. Does the median voter believe the same to be true about technology? Technology is the only mechanism we have for escaping the Malthusian
Speaker 1:Malthusian.
Speaker 2:Malthusian trap. But we have been too cowardly to articulate this because we have substituted rationalism and AGI for a coherent theology of progress. The state sees the industry as only a parasite to be consumed. If we cannot articulate why innovation is a moral imperative, we can expect the entire technology industry to end up like Boston, first taxed, then looted, then exhausted, and will be stuck wondering where it all went.
Speaker 1:What a black pill.
Speaker 2:Major black pill. We need a black pill sound effect.
Speaker 1:We need a white pill. That white pill can be gusto today. The unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. Start a company, get on gusto, build something, probably not in Boston. Will worked in Boston.
Speaker 1:His first job was like 2004 in Boston, right? Something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe late nineties.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Late nineties.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I I mean
Speaker 7:No. We we can't say
Speaker 2:some pictures from Obviously, this is written to be dramatic. But I think it is
Speaker 1:There's lessons from it.
Speaker 2:There's lessons. Yeah. And it's hard not to feel that insane pressure right now in California Yeah. Sort of just descending on the technology industry. And this goes to, mean, this goes to what I was talking about over the last couple days, which is the tech industry broadly needs needs better narratives.
Speaker 2:Right? We're talking on the way in How would Steve Jobs
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:How would Steve Jobs pitch AI? Like imagine an hour of talking of Steve Jobs on stage talking about the potential of AI. Yeah. Right? He'd be saying, you now have a free doctor in your pocket Yeah.
Speaker 2:That can diagnose a wide range of conditions. Yeah. He would be painting this optimistic, empowering Yeah. Sort of real potential for AI that's already here today.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:He wouldn't be you know, you can imagine all the things he wouldn't be Yeah. Talking about. And and we don't I don't think we have a lot of people that wanna be seen as the Steve Jobs of AI, and yet, it doesn't feel like that character exists today.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you need somebody that is larger than life, that is that when they talk, people wanna listen and lean in and and and and believe and and get excited about some of this technology. And I just I don't think we have that today at all.
Speaker 1:Totally. We have a Steve Jobs video in the timeline that we should play. Let's watch this because it's You know
Speaker 8:what stock options are?
Speaker 2:Very interesting.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. That no? Okay. Well, very real very quickly.
Speaker 8:What you could do is if somebody came to work for your company, you could let them buy some stock in the company. The problem is they might have to shell out a $100,000 to buy stock in your company. If your company went broke, they'd lose all their life savings or whatever. And so that doesn't work. So what you do is you When somebody comes to work, let's say the stock's trading at $10 a share, you give them the option to buy, you know, a thousand or 10,000 shares at $10.
Speaker 8:But they don't They have four years to exercise that option. So if the stock goes down or stays the same, they never exercise it. They don't have to put up any money. They don't lose anything. But if it goes to a $100 a share, they can easily go out to a bank and borrow the money to buy it at 10 because it's worth a 100.
Speaker 8:In exchange for that privilege of not having to have them put up any money and take any risk, we only dole out their ability to exercise that stock option 25% a year, thereby locking in people really for four years if the stock goes up. It's a pretty standard thing. A lot of people
Speaker 1:are doing it. Look at this casual Like,
Speaker 2:imagine 80% of Apple is owned
Speaker 8:employees. What a 50% of Apple is owned by by the employees. There's some larger blocks in there, but still. Yeah. And again, don't think finance When
Speaker 2:when you look at the leaders of when when people when normal people that don't work in tech, even if they use AI tools, when they see Elon talk about AI Mhmm. When they see Sam talk about AI, when they see Dario talk AI, they just get rude. Like, the the reaction is almost always terrible. Yeah. Like, you look at the comment section of any content on them Yeah.
Speaker 2:That has broken containment and that isn't in the tech industry it's just like, f this guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Stop it now. Yeah. Like, there's no they're even if they're saying optimistic things Yep. It's not getting through at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think we were my my formulation of this was that Steve Jobs cornered the market on earnestness. Yeah. He he's very earnest. Like, is a this is a somewhat technical tax question about why Yeah.
Speaker 1:Stock options are used instead of just granting stock directly. And he's explaining it in very plain terms, being very earnest about it. And when he talked about the role of the computer and stuff, it would be very interesting to hear. I've seen a couple posts that are like, imagine, you know, Steve Jobs today, iPad Kids and Sly AI Slop and all this stuff, but I think it would still hit. And what I mean by he cornered the market for earnestness is that he because he was so larger than life and then he passed away, anyone who wanted to play the earnest tech optimist was seen as doing a Steve Jobs impression.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that was seen as hack and, like, low brow and not really everyone was like, why are you doing that? Do something new. Do something different. And so everyone fell into different roles, whether it's a little bit of childish humor or or, you know, more more like rationalism or more nuance in how they talk. They don't really paint the same type of picture, certainly not in the same way.
Speaker 1:And it's left a big hole in tech narrative production. What do think, Tyler?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, think if you think of, like, AI as being broadly influenced by, like, rationalism
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, big part of, like, rationalist culture
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Whatever you wanna say is, like there's this strong sense of like in group and out group. Mhmm. Right? So if you have all the people in the in group, right, they and sometimes like already understand that AI is gonna be great in all these ways. So the real thing you need to is you need to convince them that it's bad.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So it's like you assume that people in the in group already have this prior that the people that, you know, the layman does not have.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Their their understanding of AI is is from Terminator
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Where it's like, oh, this is gonna kill me. And then also the leaders are saying Totally. This is like gonna take your job. Yeah. It's kind of all bad news.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It jumps straight to the consequences instead of actually dwelling and spending enough time in the tactile impact of a technology Steve Jobs was uniquely good at. He could talk about the future and the long term implications, but would spend a lot of time just talking about bicycle for the mind. And he had these great metaphors that really stuck with us for a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He'd be saying it's a He'd be talking about how how this chatbot in your pocket seems
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Simple, but it's It will teach you languages. It will help you become an artist, help you become a musician. Mhmm. It will diagnose a condition that you it will diagnose a condition for somebody that actually can't afford health care, wherever they are in the world. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, are magical, magical things Yeah. And yet
Speaker 1:But even if you go and you say those exact words, people will say, oh, he's being too earnest. It's it's some Steve Jobs impression. Like, it's hard for that to land, I think. It's just Yeah. Not
Speaker 2:I don't know. Don't know. Maybe maybe it's never I think there's space for it. It's gonna take gonna take Yeah.
Speaker 1:A future hall of Yeah, maybe. And I don't know. It's also interesting because the business of Apple was different than today. Was much less CapEx intensive, so you needed less fundraising. So you had to you didn't have to message to the financial markets as much as you do now.
Speaker 1:You could just kind of make a widget and if you sold it at a profit, the business would continue to grow. And so with the CapEx dynamic in AI does make it a little bit different because you have to message to everyone that they need to put their money in to actually get this future and then there's the consequences of Yeah.
Speaker 2:Wall Street Journal had an article.
Speaker 1:Sure. First, let me tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.
Speaker 2:The journal had an article at the end of the year, December 29. PhDs can't find work as Boston's biotech engine sputters. A job in life sciences was once a sure path to a high paying career in the city, but empty labs and unemployed grads now herald tougher times. Jeremy Liu, 31 years old, moved to Boston from New Jersey in 2018 to study for a PhD in chemistry and he hoped a career in the city's bustling biotech industry. We have a very depressing image here of Cambridge, if we can pull that up.
Speaker 2:But after earning his University of Massachusetts Boston degree last year, Liu said he has applied to about 500 local jobs with no luck. Raised in Hong Kong, he said he had also started considering LinkedIn messages from biotech recruiters much farther away. The industry is really booming in China and that's what a lot of people have told me that I should consider applying there. Boston's biotech sector, long a vital economic engine for one of America's wealthiest metro areas, is sputtering. A double whammy of cutbacks in venture capital and government funding have taken a toll, leading to layoffs and struggles for job seekers.
Speaker 2:For workers who thought they would easily launch into a well paying science career, the downturn has been especially harsh. Lou temporarily signed up for government food assistance, kept a tight budget, and later started working part time for for an AI startup so he could continue to afford rent in a Boston suburb. Massachusetts experienced a slight decline in its roughly 65,000 biotech R and D jobs in 2024 after years of mostly strong increases, including during the COVID-nineteen pandemic. The numbers indicate that job losses continued through at least June while hiring remained sluggish. By the September, nearly 28% of Greater Boston's lab space sat empty according to latest estimates from CBRE.
Speaker 2:Every stage of the life cycle has been impacted by policy or regulatory uncertainty this year, says Kendall O'Connell, Chief Executive at Mass Bio and Industry Trade Group. The impact has hit start ups especially hard. So, anyways, hopefully, they can turn it around. But I think what Will is saying around of network collapse is very real.
Speaker 1:If
Speaker 2:people graduate from your universities and immediately bail, it's hard to it's hard to stop that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I went to college in Boston and there was like a flourishing tech community because of MIT. Microsoft had a massive the the nerd, the New England Research and Development Center, and a bunch of interesting tech and tons of, like, tech talks. And the default path was you would meet people at Boston tech fairs, it was easier to get a job in tech in Boston if you went to school in Boston. But quickly, I did get out of there and went to San Francisco.
Speaker 2:Went straight to the Tenderloin.
Speaker 1:And and a lot of that was because of the Internet, because of Twitter and meeting tech people on Twitter and seeing tech people on on on Twitter and just sort of understanding the networks. I remember interacting with not Sean Parker, but Sean Parker did an interview with a few VCs and I was able to like go back and forth with them on Twitter just being a reply guy basically in like 2000 yeah, 2011.
Speaker 2:I wish I had got to experience your reply guy era.
Speaker 1:Reply guy era was strong. Yeah. You know, it was electric when a when a who was it? The first VC in Facebook or something? Someone someone, like, liked my post and replied, it was, like, the best thing ever.
Speaker 1:Was, like, I'm I'm king a king made. Wow. You know?
Speaker 2:I'm goated.
Speaker 1:I'm goated. Exactly. But it did it did just, illuminate the networks of, like, what's going on. It gave you a much easier picture of who the live players are. And even if you couldn't just ask them for jobs directly, you could at least be aware.
Speaker 2:Ben in the chat is saying the person in that article actually just has a terrible resume. Look him up. Yeah. Who knows? Mean, plucking one person that's struggling to find out.
Speaker 1:Have to do that in these articles because you don't wanna just do the article with the chart. And so you have to do the chart the the data point, which is that the employment is declining in Boston r and d jobs.
Speaker 2:Years into his PhD and only published one paper.
Speaker 1:Time to lock in, brother. Let me tell you about Plaid.
Speaker 2:Hit me.
Speaker 1:That's a white pill. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending.
Speaker 2:Brian Halligan is organizing a session with the governor at his home in Boston.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:great. So the governor is, paying attention.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Love it. Well, we have some breaking news. There is a new tab in the ChatGPT app. That's right.
Speaker 1:Greg Brockman and
Speaker 2:Fiji I don't No.
Speaker 1:Health. ChatGPT Health is now live. Fiji gave some amazing stats here with more than 40,000,000 people globally turning to ChatGPT every day for health questions. What does that mean? Does that mean 40,000,000 people are asking health questions every single day?
Speaker 2:The founder from Doctronic yesterday said 20% of all the queries are health related. Interesting. So the question here is how how quickly does ChatGPT Health try to do the other things that Doctronic is doing? Yeah. Doctronic is actually trying to be an AI doctor.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talked about being able to effectively be a doctor. Yep. You know, write prescriptions in Utah. Yep.
Speaker 2:Gonna fight to expand that. Yeah. The question will be from a strategic standpoint Yeah. How they they have their own doctors on staff as well. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're operating a telemedicine business and I'm sure they do referrals out. It's hard to see OpenAI ever employing doctors themselves. Yeah. But they probably would try to build a network around it. So we'll see where this goes.
Speaker 2:But it's gonna be an exciting space to watch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So they say today they're launching ChatGPT Health, a dedicated private space for health conversations where you can easily and securely connect your medical records and wellness apps like Apple Health, Function Health, and Peloton. We have the founder of Function on. Right? You So can put all your blood results in there.
Speaker 1:That feels like a really enduring place. My one of my big pushbacks against the the lab the Quest lab wrappers is that they they haven't historically been very enduring. So you go and do them, then a few years later, the product sort of degraded. And then you're like, oh, well, I have six different, like, amazing web UIs for my health records. But if I keep importing them to ChatGPT, I feel like I'll have an account on there for a very long time because it's an enduring company.
Speaker 1:Makes a ton of sense. This allows ChatGPT to offer more relevant personalized support, like when you're preparing a doctor's for a doctor's appointment or looking for guidance on a meal plan or exercise routine that fits your needs. That's very cool. ChatGPT Health is another step towards turning ChatGPT into a personal super assistant that can help support you with information and tools to achieve your goals across any part of your life. We're starting at the very beginning of this journey, but I'm excited to get these tools into more hands, says Fiji Simo.
Speaker 1:You can sign up to request access. Interesting. They're not just rolling it out. And they talk about their input from physicians and privacy protections. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One of my big questions for this year is like there's always been this narrative of like if you build a wrapper that depends on the models not getting better, you're going have a bad time because the models will just get better. So if your thing is, oh, it can't do long context windows or it can't answer in pages and pages and pages, well, the models are going to get better and they're going to do that or they're going to do better math. So don't build the math wrapper that's just a little bit better. But if you're building something that's unique and special and off in the side and doesn't really depend on that, maybe you're good for a long time.
Speaker 1:But obviously, CHEHPT has matured a lot and they are going after certain verticals. And I wonder if we'll see one of the Foundation Labs go after legal since they're already going after code so effectively, like
Speaker 2:And people are
Speaker 1:would be interesting. Definitely. And they're making money there, so it's a big pool of opportunities.
Speaker 2:I wonder if people could they could make you could people are using LLMs to do legal work now, but they're just on these standard subscriptions. Yep. You can imagine a lot
Speaker 1:of companies
Speaker 2:wouldn't pay a $100 a month for Yeah. Kind of a more robust version.
Speaker 1:And Sam's talked about this, where your conversations with ChatGPT are definitely admissible in court. And so it's like a Google search. It's not like talking to your lawyer. So if you go to ChatGPT and you ask, How do I do GPT
Speaker 2:client privilege.
Speaker 1:You don't have client privilege. But maybe there could be a tab where you sign up for some specific plan and you are getting legal advice effectively, and it is attorney client privilege in some ways. Yeah. Now, I'm sure that's a whole rat's nest of legal Yeah. Predict problems, but maybe they'll figure it out.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Anyway Drew. Shopify Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 2:Very excited to see everything that Shopify does.
Speaker 1:Very excited to have Ravi Gupta back on the show.
Speaker 2:Andrew Reed says he may be unk, but he's our unk. Andrew and I were were texting the other day and someone had told him that a Gen Z person told him that unc meant uncool. He felt very unc.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:Because he thought it meant Uncle. Like uncle.
Speaker 1:I think it's related, isn't it?
Speaker 6:It's definitely uncle. Uncle.
Speaker 1:But but the
Speaker 2:You might be unc, and that's just why you think
Speaker 1:yeah. It's the the connotation and the denotation. Like, it literally means uncle, but the connotation is that it means uncool.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's a clipping of uncle or alternating in African American vernacular English.
Speaker 1:Okay. There you go. It is a yeah. It's slang.
Speaker 2:There you go. It's society.
Speaker 1:Speaking speaking of slang, Tyler, can you take us through what you've learned about looks maxing slang? Because we're trying to get this is our 2026 resolution to ascend, and so we need to be up to speed on all the terms. What do you have for us?
Speaker 6:Yes. So I've been getting into Luxmaxing. I I Obviously. It's clearly working. I've been, I asked some people for some peptide advice.
Speaker 6:I'm trying to gain weight, 50 plus pounds.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. Yes. And I think we have an image of what that might look like.
Speaker 2:Let's pull it up. Let's pull it up.
Speaker 1:Let's pull up the the image of Tyler. This came from Brandon Garell. Tyler's looking very prosperous here in the timeline. You said, are there any peptides for getting large amounts of weight? 50 plus pounds?
Speaker 1:We're like, Tyler's like, yeah, I'm trying
Speaker 2:to gain 50 pounds of muscle and then just gains 50 pounds straight to the back.
Speaker 1:That looks like more than 50 pounds. That looks like a 100 pounds. Like You look elite. This is truly art. This is and the and the the grin on your face is so funny.
Speaker 1:It really translates well. What a beautiful AI image. So so you're not going this direction.
Speaker 2:You gotta up trying to ascend.
Speaker 1:What's the plan? Take us through it.
Speaker 6:Okay. Yeah. So I mean, there's a couple things, especially when you're when you're looks maxing, it's a lot about your face. Right?
Speaker 8:Yes.
Speaker 6:So there's a bunch of terms you wanna be looking at. Mhmm. So the first one you you hear this thrown around, the maxilla.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. The maxilla. Where is
Speaker 9:the maxilla? The
Speaker 6:you know, they have a recessed maxilla. Okay. So the the maxilla is the it's kind of the bone Okay. That goes around your nose. Right?
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 6:Sure. Bone in your nose. Right? So it's kind of this this area right here. Yes.
Speaker 6:And then your upper maxilla is basically the Okay. Top part here.
Speaker 1:Yes. So when
Speaker 6:it's recessed, it means you kind of have a flatter face Flatter. Almost. Okay.
Speaker 1:And you don't want that?
Speaker 6:So you don't want a recessed maxilla.
Speaker 1:Okay. You don't want a recessed maxilla. And is bone smashing a way out of having a recessed maxilla?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Bones mean, you gotta be careful with bone smashing
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:Because sometimes you hear about, you know, they they ruin their nerves. Right?
Speaker 1:They Oh, Sure.
Speaker 6:Nerve you get nerve damage.
Speaker 2:Do you really need the nerves there?
Speaker 6:Well, that yeah. See, like, a lot of people Trade offs. Personally, I think it's fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:You don't really need them there. Do not listen to dialer. Looks maxing. Right? Yes.
Speaker 6:So okay. So the next thing, you wanna look for your infraorbitals.
Speaker 1:Infraorbitals. Okay. What are these?
Speaker 6:Your infraorbital is kind of it's like part it's actually kind of similar to your maxilla, but it's basically there's two, like, kind of points right here
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:Below each of your, you know
Speaker 1:Yeah. Eyes.
Speaker 6:And so sometimes these can get slightly inflamed.
Speaker 1:And these are bones or muscles?
Speaker 6:I believe yes. They are what even
Speaker 1:Is this actual science that they're that they've that they've adopted and and twisted, or is it entirely made up?
Speaker 6:It's like a section of your of Okay. Maxilla.
Speaker 1:Got it. Got it. It. Okay. What else we got?
Speaker 6:Okay. So also, this is a pretty obvious one. Everyone knows this. But your your kind of facial width tied ratio?
Speaker 1:Yes. The mid face ratio? Or just the overall
Speaker 6:facial ratio? Mid face is
Speaker 1:is kind It's like do you have a long face or a wide face?
Speaker 6:Exactly. Got it. You wanna look at your nasal labial folds. Nasal folds. So this is folds.
Speaker 6:On older people, right, you'll see these kind of wrinkles.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So you wanna be looking at
Speaker 1:Minimizing those.
Speaker 6:Generally, you wanna look younger, yeah.
Speaker 7:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker 6:You wanna look at your bimaxillary protrusions?
Speaker 1:Bimaxillary protrusions. Okay.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So this one, actually I'm not exactly sure what that one is, but
Speaker 1:But it's gotta be good.
Speaker 6:But you gotta look out for it. You gotta look out for it.
Speaker 2:For
Speaker 6:sure. Your nose bridge. Right? You don't be too wide. This is something you can see.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And then your interpupillary distance. Right?
Speaker 1:So this is how That far feels like something you can do nothing about.
Speaker 2:Or or So I actually
Speaker 1:Is there a way to make your eyes wider or narrower?
Speaker 6:I I think there are ways to do it. No way. Glasses. Right? Because it it changes, like, how big your eyes look.
Speaker 6:Okay. I think, actually, in my Also,
Speaker 1:potentially with makeup, you could maybe Yeah. Accentuate the the IPD. I only know about IPDs because of VR goggles. Different VR goggles need different IPDs.
Speaker 2:Timothy Falme I gotta interrupt you guys to talk about the universe Okay. Universe 25 experiment conducted by
Speaker 1:What's this?
Speaker 2:Ethologist John B. Cal Hoon Oh, between 1968 and 1973. Mhmm. The experiment was the rodent utopia
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:Hoon built a paradise for mice where every physical need was met. They had unlimited food and water, so there was no competition for survival. There was no predators. They were completely safe from external threats. They had climate control, so it was a perfect environment for living and reproducing.
Speaker 2:It was disease free. Mhmm. Initial mice were chosen for their health. And so despite having space for 3,800 mice, the population peaked at 2,200 and then began a began a rapid irreversible decline to extinction. There was a specific group called the beautiful ones.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. It was a generation of males born during the peak of Yeah. Overcrowding because the older dominant males had become hyper aggressive. These are the boomers in our society. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And the social hierarchy had collapsed. These younger males never learned normal social behaviors. I think we see this with like clavicular and Yeah. People like that. Like defending territory or courting mates.
Speaker 2:They were called the beautiful ones because their physical appearance, of course, unlike the older alpha males who were covered in scars. Again, these are the boomers, right? They bought their homes for like $20 and you know, maybe maybe we're in the military, etcetera. The the alphas were covered in scars and and bitten tails from constant fighting. These males had perfect healthy fur.
Speaker 2:Can see Tyler's hair. He's got perfect healthy fur. Yeah. Behavior, they withdrew completely from society. So again, you see these streamers, they're just like in their rooms, you know, smashing their face with with hammers.
Speaker 2:They spent their entire lives doing only three things, eating, sleeping, and grooming themselves. Asexuality, they lost all interest in mating or interacting with females. Again, you see these with the the lux maxing guys. They're they're not lux maxing seemingly for like women. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're lux maxing to try to mog other dudes. Right? This is is clavicular talking about Gavin Newsom Yes. Mogging JD. Yes.
Speaker 2:And so anyways, something something to think about with this
Speaker 1:The thing is become the beautiful ones. Like in in that colony, you wanna be the beautiful one?
Speaker 2:Absolutely not.
Speaker 6:I
Speaker 1:think Tyler's not important.
Speaker 2:Absolutely not. You wanna be the you wanna be the scarred alpha.
Speaker 1:Okay. The scarred alpha.
Speaker 2:But you want your tail to be bitten.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I I I've always said I wanna be wizened. I wanna be old man maxing. I wanna look like Warren Buffett. Because I feel like there's a lot of people that are doing the younger thing, look maxing.
Speaker 1:There's Brian Johnson, obviously. But I feel like if I could become more austere, I would hold more my words would hold more weight. And I feel
Speaker 2:like Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's actually what's valuable.
Speaker 2:The wise
Speaker 1:I wanna look as old as possible. I wanna be leathery. I wanna be I wanna be wizzy. Wanna be leathery.
Speaker 6:Just one more thing, though.
Speaker 1:I dye my hair gray.
Speaker 6:I forgot about this one that they mentioned in the chat, your Cantal Tilt. Okay. So so Cantal Tilt is is kind of the angle of your eyes. Right? So you want I think it's called hunter eyes.
Speaker 1:Hunter eyes. Okay. Yeah. All this for nothing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:All this for for nothing. What a what a crazy time. Well, we have our first guest of the show joining. I'm sure we'll continue the Luxemaxing conversation. While we bring him in, let me tell you about public.com investing for those taken seriously.
Speaker 1:Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with damn great customer service. We have Vincenzo Landino in the TVP and Ultradome. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:There he is. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 7:I've listen to this conversation, I'm like, do
Speaker 1:I have the wrinkle? You look fantastic. So you you you're one of the people that's actually been doing this. You've been look maxing for years clearly.
Speaker 7:Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't even know I was doing it, but okay. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I do agree with you though, John. There is something about looking a little older Yeah. So that people take you seriously.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because But but you you you just graduated high school. You look about like 1920. Is that correct?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Actually, I turned 21 yesterday.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Amazing. That's fantastic. Yeah. You look very young.
Speaker 1:Anyway, for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself. We'd love to get the introduction for everyone.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Vincenzo Landino, I run Business of Speed, so podcast, newsletter, and a consultancy for brands that want to get into motorsport or businesses of speed, actually.
Speaker 5:So it's
Speaker 7:more than just motorsport,
Speaker 1:but Sure.
Speaker 7:We call it businesses of speed. So mostly racing.
Speaker 1:That's a
Speaker 2:good Business of brand. I like that. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:How'd you get into this?
Speaker 7:You know, it's, to keep it short, I was, you know, I was a motorsport fan for a long time. And Formula One, years and years ago, like, when I started watching it back in the early nineties
Speaker 1:Like, right after Drive to Survive happened, you got into it?
Speaker 7:Right after Drive to
Speaker 6:Survive. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That that's when you got into it. I'm sure.
Speaker 7:Just yeah. I just jumped in right then there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Early early to the sport, really. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Real early on, which actually is really funny because now people that came in maybe two years before
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:The drive to survive boom Yeah. Are considered like
Speaker 1:Old old heads.
Speaker 7:In watching motorsports. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But now back or, you know, like I said, thirty five ish years ago
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:There was nobody watching it in The United States. Sure. And being of Italian heritage and whatnot, I had a lot of motorsport fans in my family, and we used to watch it, we used to go karting, we used to, you know, go to racetracks all the time. As I got older, I saw there was opportunity that not many people are talking about the business side or at least the behind the scenes aspect of of, in that case, for real in this case, Formula One. But everyone wanted to talk about how hot the drivers were
Speaker 2:and, you
Speaker 7:know, the engineering aspect was another, you know, element. Or
Speaker 1:even just handicapping who's gonna win, like, like, the actual the actual results of the sport. The actual results. As opposed to the business behind
Speaker 7:Yeah. That's everywhere. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:So Amazing. What was the first what was the first piece of content? What was the first initial, like, go to market with building content in the category?
Speaker 7:I don't even really it was probably it was Twitter for sure. And I would I mean, I was just tweeting about
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Different things, you know, deals that were coming through. And whenever you could get any information about race fees or whatever, you know, a racetrack was paying for to host an event, you're like, okay. This is interesting. And you start building a following people thinking like, wow, that's ridiculous, or wow, that's crazy. And had no idea what went into it, and then Yeah.
Speaker 7:Just kind of snowballed into what it is now, which has become I'm still building it, but really Yeah. An opportunity for me to to keep a tab on the the business behind it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can you give us a broad view into the health and state of motorsport, the the business of of motorsports in America? Because a lot of a lot of people in tech are just not that not that into automotive racing broadly. Maybe they watch f one here and there. Maybe they go to an event, you know, through first you know, with with some SaaS company that they're involved with.
Speaker 2:But maybe zoom out for a second, and then I won't wanna get into a bunch of the subcategories.
Speaker 7:I'll say anecdotally, let's just this is something I heard in Las Vegas just a couple months ago. Tech company in San Francisco, CEO, wanted this is literally the conversation I heard. Wants to get involved in Formula One somehow. Mhmm. Knows nothing about motorsport, knows nothing about racing, just knew that it was somewhere where there was attention, and he wanted to get his brand in front of it.
Speaker 7:And so hearing conversations like that happening and partnerships and commercial deals happening just because they think it's cool, again, from someone who's been who's seen the trajectory over decades, not just, like, a few years, that's fascinating to me. Still fascinating to me that that level of interest is there. But that's not the overall health. I mean, Formula One is definitely healthier than than most. In The United States, you still have series like NASCAR that dominate, at least in viewership, but there's issues there as well.
Speaker 7:IndyCar, great racing, but still trying to work out who they want to be. And so there's
Speaker 2:the changes coming? The increase in popularity in f one in America actually hurt Indy Indy car? Because it feels like some potential overlap, or is it kind of a rising tide lifts all boats?
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 7:it's actually so I think it is there is a lev an aspect of rising tide is raising all boats, but it's also hardened the diehards. Like, they are the the IndyCar diehards, I feel like, have come out more now Mhmm. Because they're like, we don't wanna be run over, taken over by this European thing, this Formula One, which is the actual conversations that happen. I mean, it's Yeah. It's kinda funny, but so IndyCar has has seen it, but what no one has been able to figure out that Formula One did was the content aspect.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Drive to survive was one of many, many things that they've done behind the scenes. Right? ESPN didn't get enough credit for the growth. You know, everyone said, oh, Netflix, Drive to Survive effect, all of that. I mean, including myself at one point, I it was like, wow, this Netflix thing is really this is what's causing all of this.
Speaker 7:But it wasn't. ESPN did put a lot into it, and and so I would say that you have seen a lot of Rising Tide, but no one's figured out the content aspect. It's if for whatever reason, it's like not for whatever reason. Well, I know what their you know, we know what their reasons are. Formula one is just the attracted it's the flavor of the day, month, year right now.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Maybe the next couple years, but it's it's sexy. Right? It's European. So if you want an audio it's global.
Speaker 7:Let's not say it's not just European. It's global.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a travel show in addition to being a race. Exactly. In addition to being a reality TV show, in addition to being a dating show, it it sort of scratches every itch. So a household can sit down and everyone in the
Speaker 2:family And, yeah, the business the business. I always appreciated the the business side seeing how the owners were kind of processing Yeah. Being in being in that understanding that dynamic where you have this, like, desperation to win. You badly wanna win, and then every single decision that you're making throughout a season is like, okay. How much, like, tactic like, you know, how much do I want?
Speaker 2:How badly do you wanna win? How much do you wanna actually spend? How much do you like, how how how much are you willing to personally invest? So that happening at the owner level and the and the athlete level.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And at one point, it was, you know, you it was whoever could just keep spending. Right now, we have the the the salary not salary cap. The spend cap.
Speaker 3:The spend cap.
Speaker 7:And the spend cap has created more competition. Can't spend over a 140 ish million. It's gonna go up a little bit more, but you can't spend over that amount of money. Mhmm. And so that's caused better competition.
Speaker 7:Everyone has to kind of get to a point. But at one at one point in Formula's history, it was just you spend, spend, spend. There were way more teams on the grid, way more drivers. You know, we actually had on our podcast Mark Blundell, was a driver from the late eighties, early nineties. He drove with Senna and some of the other greats, And he was saying, you know, it was like, we had to qualify to qualify.
Speaker 7:You don't have that now. You've got now there's gonna be 22 drivers on
Speaker 3:the grid.
Speaker 7:They all will start Yep. Come Sunday. Yep. That didn't happen, you know, twenty five years ago, thirty years ago. It was you had to qualify just to get onto the grid.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And there was plenty because there were so many cars that were just like they would allow anybody that could come up with a car would be on the grid, and it couldn't compete. It wasn't reliable, whatever it was, or they'd be so slow, they obviously wouldn't put them on the grid to qualify. And so all of that has led to the popularity, but also the financial health of it. Look at evaluations.
Speaker 2:I wanted to get your read on, like, team evaluations because, obviously, the people that were, like, just pure enthusiasts in it for the love of the game have benefited to some degree just based on the appreciation and the value of the teams. There's so much more attention. Yeah. They're they can build they can bring in a lot more sponsorship. We were at the Vegas event and just walking around and seeing how
Speaker 1:It's a tech conference.
Speaker 2:Different yeah. It felt like being at a tech conference. You Every team has a
Speaker 1:major tech company on it.
Speaker 2:Or more yeah. Multiple.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Multiple sometimes. Yeah. Valuations.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, valuations of teams. George over at CrowdStrike, we we work with CrowdStrike. You know, he recently bought into Mercedes in a big way after being a partner for a while. But how do you expect valuations to actually trade down at any point? Could we be at a somewhat of a local Top.
Speaker 2:Top?
Speaker 7:I think at some point, we I mean, it has to max out. Right? Like, some of the valuations seem almost insane to me. Mercedes, just the team itself. 6,000,000,000 is what it's right around McLaren, 4, four and a half.
Speaker 7:Ferrari is a little bit different. They've got this a global brand. They're a little over 6 and a half billion. And even at the bottom of the the grid, you're still looking at 2,000,000,000. I I remember Zach Brown, CEO of McLaren, had said and I actually had a conversation with him in in Vegas, but he had said 2024 or 2023, maybe it was, at one point, all of the teams will be valued at $1,000,000,000 and we all thought that was like, no way.
Speaker 7:This is like, are you kidding me? And here we are not even a full two years later, and every team is has a valuation of roughly, you know, 2,000,000,000. Of course, there's private equity now investing. Sure. You've got some big, you know, bigger players that want to put money into these teams, and so valuations just shoot up.
Speaker 7:I think it it has to cap somewhere. I don't know where that cap is. I I have said 10,000,000,000. I thought it was, like, absolute max, but I think I think even that might be ridiculous. But, you know Yeah.
Speaker 7:I know that if I say that now, then in two years when
Speaker 2:But the average net new investor, are they really going into this expecting a return, or do they want to be an owner of a Formula One team?
Speaker 7:They want to be the owner of Formula One team. I mean, it it's cool. You can't put a price on cool. You can't put a price on being into the suite. Like you said, it's a tech conference.
Speaker 7:It's who's who. It's who can I be seen around? Look at all the celebrities that show up. Look at all the major, you know, tech companies or all the player led network. It's it's a level of networking you can't really put a price on, and that's what you're buying into.
Speaker 7:You're buying into the opportunity to entertain your clients, entertain your friends, entertain other executives to be seen as, well, I'm the CEO or I'm the founder, whatever it is. I'm the boss.
Speaker 2:There's there's there's so many levels to it. You know, our friends at at Public who we went to Vegas with are they're a, you know, multi year sponsor of Aston But then the level beyond that is, like, yeah, actually, you know, buying into the team and becoming a Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I noticed over the holiday all the like, the the the global elite were in Saint Bart's, and they
Speaker 7:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:All all pulled up their yachts. And when you read the articles of, like, whose yacht is there and and who they are, it'll say the person's name. And then, like, probably half of these people, they're described as, owner of the, you know, Pistons or over of owner of those Red Sox, owner of some sports team. And you always look them up, it's like, didn't make their money starting that sports team. They started some boring oil and gas company or software company or something.
Speaker 1:But as soon as you own it's like writing a book. As soon as you own a sports team, that's what you're known for forever. And, like, you're just the Dallas Mavericks guy.
Speaker 7:So it goes back to you guys were talking about Steve Jobs earlier. We don't and how they're right now, we're we don't have somebody that is like Steve Jobs for AI and to just, like, snap a finger, tell a story. It's the story. Right? And I don't know if that's what you were looking to say at one point, but it's a story.
Speaker 7:It's an instant story. Go and sponsor Williams, or you go and Atlassian. You go partner up with Williams. Now you're going to be part of their comeback because Williams, the team, is coming back, and they are more financially healthy. They've got great investment now.
Speaker 7:Great team, great leaders in place. Well, Atlassian is going be right behind know, they are right there. They it's built in story. Yep. People that didn't know them outside of Australia, which or maybe even like The U.
Speaker 7:Whatever
Speaker 1:Don't know.
Speaker 7:Globally. Instant global recognition. Right? You can't buy that anywhere. You know?
Speaker 7:You can't buy that story, that level of story. There's no price that you can put on that. And so I think that's what we're you know, we see with Formula One specifically.
Speaker 2:Guarantee stories every year. So so Audi's joining the grid this year. How does that work? The number of teams going to effectively be fixed forever? Part of the reasons why NBA and NFL teams are valuable is because you effectively have a monopoly.
Speaker 2:We're not creating more teams. So you don't have new competition and pricing pressure and things like that. How did that dynamic how do you actually they're taking over from another team? Like, break down that dynamic. And will we see more could we see a future where there's 30 cars on the grid?
Speaker 7:So Sabre was the team that Audi bought Mhmm. To get into. So they they took a spot. Right? And so that the I'm trying to think of how many years, but let's say at least the past decade, maybe fifteen years, you've had a pretty fixed number of teams on the grid, 10.
Speaker 7:Cadillac is entering the grid as team eleven, and that was a big, big deal. In the charter from 2022, the dilution fee was 200 or 300,000,000. And because no one thought
Speaker 2:And that's a fee that goes to all the teams effectively?
Speaker 7:That's a fee that goes to all the teams
Speaker 2:But it's split up. It's split up. So everybody gets like 10 Intention. Yeah. 10,000,000.
Speaker 2:10,000,000. Is not retention. Nothing in in
Speaker 3:Correct. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That would have to be updated, I imagine.
Speaker 4:And it did. It did.
Speaker 7:It got updated. And when this was there so the big issue that came up was when they were looking for team eleven, Cadillac was came in. It was Andretti that was trying to put in their offer. Michael Andretti Mario Andretti, his son, Michael Mhmm. And a group was trying to buy in.
Speaker 7:There was politics behind the scenes that were going on. They they had the money. They had all the the things together, ducks in a row. They didn't some people don't like them, and so they got kind of pushed out. Now we have Cadillac that entered.
Speaker 7:But at the time, they came to the table with their $300,000,000 dilution fee, and they had facilities and all the things that f one wanted to see. Mhmm. Well, they quickly said, wait a minute. 300,000,000 is not enough money. Like, wait.
Speaker 7:This is this is crazy. The sport has completely ballooned
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:In valuations and how much revenue. We we need to do something different.
Speaker 5:So I
Speaker 7:think it ended up around 600,000,000, so double. Just as just to enter, just to say now that's not to say that you you're done at 600,000,000. You need to have facilities. You need to invest in in in people. So you're you're all in.
Speaker 2:That's the way over a
Speaker 7:billion dollars.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Wow. That's the price just to say, like, yeah, we'll entertain you.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So six, you know, $600,000,000. So you're not gonna have anybody just come in and say, I want a I want a team, because you need
Speaker 2:to So have is there a hard cap at all in the charter? Obviously, you could update the charter.
Speaker 7:Says 12 is the max Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right now. That's what the chat was saying too. Yeah. Yeah. 12 is the max.
Speaker 2:Have the manufacturers how much do they try to track or how much do they worry about how on grid or on track performance impacts car sales? I had a Ferrari at one point and, you know, anytime I'm watching f one and I see Ferrari with technical difficulties, I'm like, yeah. Big surprise Cause I had a lot of those things too.
Speaker 1:You disconnected, but it's I don't know if it's just Yeah. Like
Speaker 2:there's some concern of life. If we if we, you know, have a team and we're and we're just terrible.
Speaker 1:Hurt the brand.
Speaker 2:Who yeah. Why why is somebody gonna wanna go and and spend 400, 500, you know, or more on on one of these cars?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I so I I remember Lawrence Stroll in 2020 what year are we in? '26. So what about three, four years ago? He made a comment that because Aston Martin had the safety car, they actually split safety car duties with Mercedes.
Speaker 7:But because they had one safety car, he estimated about $80,000,000 just from having the safety car in sales. So I think it was the Vantage, and they had, like, the Vantage F1 edition. Sold about 300 units, whatever, dollars 200,000 apiece, whatever they were. And they sold out pretty instantly because it was a car on the grid. Mercedes has really pushed the AMG badge a lot over the past, I'd say, five to seven years.
Speaker 2:While destroying what made AMG great in the first
Speaker 7:And and I had, you know, I had an AMG, loved it. It was great until I started seeing everybody with an AMG. I'm like, well, AMG doesn't even mean anything anymore. It's just kind of like, it's the standard car. They don't even Yeah.
Speaker 7:You don't see a regular Mercedes. Everyone's got an AMG at this point. But that was part.
Speaker 2:They're gonna make a v a v four AMG. One So
Speaker 5:No. No. I know. They
Speaker 4:are they
Speaker 2:are starting to They got the
Speaker 1:Was it the c 43? It was one that people really didn't like.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, for what? It was kinda pointless. I mean, I I had mine was an eight, and it was the last eight in 2019, and and I you know, people it was very desirable to aftermarket folks because because of that.
Speaker 2:But yeah. When I when I think about Aston, if if Aston can win a championship Mhmm. I do think that that could be very beneficial for the brand in America. McLaren McLaren, I'm sure I'm sure that they've they're they're gonna benefit in some way. But Aston, I feel like really like, I mean, that dynamic's interesting because you have kind of the same owners in both the Formula one team and and the and the actual manufacturer, which are different entities.
Speaker 2:And so there's real incentive to, hey. Let's actually win a championship because, they make some of the most beautiful cars in the entire world, but they're just not as desirable as the Ferrari at the same price point.
Speaker 7:Well, Ferrari is also I mean, what Ferrari does to buy for any Ferrari is just it's like it's the luxury playbook. You know? You can't buy the one you want until you buy 10 others, and then maybe we'll let you buy it. I mean, it it's just a scarcity thing. But I'll say with Aston Martin and McLaren specifically, they're still I would say they're buoyed by Mercedes doing well because they're they're AMG power plants.
Speaker 7:So that makes that makes a difference, especially to the level of enthusiasts or the the the collectors that are buying these cars, but they are beautiful, they're gorgeous. It there is a direct correlation, and you will hear con have conversations with folks within the teams that are are absolutely tracking that kind of thing. It's what is the lift? I don't I don't know the number, you know, for every car maker, but it's you know, Red Bull doesn't make a car. Right?
Speaker 7:So they've got nothing to worry about. Williams doesn't make car. They they made two of those.
Speaker 4:Well, alright.
Speaker 7:Alright. Alright.
Speaker 1:Alright. Alright. To be fair.
Speaker 7:To be fair. Yes.
Speaker 1:But yes.
Speaker 7:I just meant like like track. Well, that thing
Speaker 2:does look about Everything looks incredible. What's happening in in sim racing, broadly? Like, how is the I mean, do you look at sim racing as its own kind of sub industry? Is I there
Speaker 7:don't I I mean, so I I don't track it as much or I'm not paying much as much attention. I know that it is there's a higher interest in sim racing because most people realize, well, it's too expensive to go get a track day. It's too expensive to just try and even go racing. Right? To be to go from karting to, you know, to the different series levels and then to get to f one.
Speaker 7:It's it's almost impossible. Right? And you need
Speaker 2:to Yeah. People were running the numbers on, like, how much Lando's dad had spent to get him, actually in the game, and it was like they clocked it at, like, $40,000,000 over the career.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Just Either you have a very rich, yeah, rich parent or a sponsor, you know.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I think you need both. You need both. Right? Or you don't need both, but, like, it helps to have both.
Speaker 2:It's not just one or the other.
Speaker 7:It helps. I mean, you it's a different lifestyle. Right? So it's a lifestyle that is you're traveling. You're oftentimes unless you're already in Europe, you are likely going to Europe.
Speaker 7:We had Connor Daily on our podcast, IndyCarDriver, and, actually, that episode comes out in couple weeks. But he did say to us in the conversation that, you know, he had to go to Europe to race an open wheel because that's where it was like, he couldn't do it here. There was no ladder. The the ladder system wasn't robust enough to get where he wanted to go, and that takes dollars. Right?
Speaker 7:Now his dad raced in Formula one, But could I do it? Could you guys I don't know. Would we be able to start? Would my kids be able to start? Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's it's it's just it so that's where sim racing comes in. Sure. And sim racing is made more popular because the current batch of drivers are very tapped into the sim racing world.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:Max Verstappen races sim cars in between races, between qualifying and the actual race the next day. He's like, I'm gonna go home, and I'm gonna go race on the sim. And he takes part in competitive, you know, racing. Lando races Yeah. Charles, they all they all they all race.
Speaker 7:And most of them are racing pretty competitively on Sims. So that's also made it more popular. The the allure of being able to maybe race with Max Verstappen or Lando Norris or get, you know, boot up online and play that. Those that's all increased tremendously. I'd have to actually look at the numbers.
Speaker 7:I wanna see if they're
Speaker 2:out about there. The what about the the health of individual tracks around The US? We're going to we're going to do an attract day out at Willow Springs later this month, and I think they changed ownership recently. Yeah. And but but yeah.
Speaker 2:How are how are these doing as businesses? Are they the kind of things where it's, like, fun to own but actually just a terrible business, or is anybody actually doing really well?
Speaker 7:It's a tough business. Is anyone doing really well? It's the ones that are, you know, are backed by dollars that have big races at them. It's it's hard to maintain.
Speaker 2:A pure enthusiast track, you're saying.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:A pure enthusiast track. Yeah. You you really have to be like a CODA right now to be immensely successful. Now that's smaller regional tracks are still hosting, you know, plenty of racing, but to say they're extremely healthy is tough. Also, there's a lot of folks that think, oh, we want f one to come race at our track, or we want f one to come to Road America or f one to come it's like, no.
Speaker 7:You don't because it's a whole spectacle to come build this, and oftentimes, it destroys what makes your track unique or appealing or, you know, charming. So there's a lot of and those are conversations I'm always tracking. You know, how do
Speaker 2:I have a I have a kind of a a a not quite baked thesis, but an idea that the track business might actually become a great business in the future if it becomes effectively illegal to drive cars on the road just via autonomous vehicles where guys and girls are not gonna, like, suddenly if if at some point, it's like humans can no longer drive. It's just too dangerous. Yeah. Like, you can imagine that scenario happening in the next ten, twenty years. And people are still gonna wanna drive, so they're gonna take their cars to tracks, and that you could see a resurgence of enthusiasts driving because it's just made illegal on normal roads.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, that's actually I that's fantastic. I didn't even think about the autonomous driving aspect of that and how if people can't drive, people that like us that like, you know, have gotten a taste of driving Yeah. We know what it's like.
Speaker 2:Driving on a track, driving your car on on the road versus the track is just it's complete it's incomparable. Yes.
Speaker 7:Totally different. Totally different. I mean, you you know, you wonder sometimes how people get their licenses, but you're like, I'm not gonna drive. What I'm not gonna drive the way I wanna drive on a track on on Yeah. You know, the high I 95 over here.
Speaker 7:Like, it's just not gonna
Speaker 2:tragedy recently. The Oh, yeah. Was it the Activision? Founder of Call of
Speaker 1:Duty.
Speaker 2:Founder of Call of Duty Yeah. Was driving. I've driven Two Angeles Crest a bunch. I I had the scariest moment of my life in a car on Angeles Crest at around 6AM, probably five years ago, driving a nine nine seven that I had. And I yeah.
Speaker 2:It it you can imagine at some point that I mean, that what a lot of people do at ACH is already effectively illegal. Right? They're driving thirty, forty, 50 mile you know, sixty, seventy miles above the speed limit, each other very closely. It's it is like reckless driving. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. But, yeah, that wouldn't if that same situation had happened on a track, like, everybody would have been fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure. Usually. Walk me through a
Speaker 7:To the circuit con
Speaker 1:I'm gonna
Speaker 7:say it real quick. Please. I just wanna add one last thing to that. There's a lot of the, you know, private members only Yeah. Clubs coming up now at racetracks for enthusiasts.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I think that's an opportunity for racetracks to become maybe a little more popular or increase their health because they can offer and CODA's doing it. Right? They're offering luxury condos and garages and a whole club membership or a a membership. So I I think that's something that can happen more.
Speaker 1:Can you take me through, what a successful f one track build looks like? What's the how is how is Vegas looking? We went Ah. They were very much bragging that, it was a permanent facility. It's remarkable.
Speaker 1:It feels like it's working. But how does this actually work? Who's paying who, and how is it penciled out in Vegas?
Speaker 7:I mean, you've got you've got some public money, pump public funds needed. And, of course, there's plenty of complainers about that nonstop. Just open up open up Twitter, you'll see people complaining, locals complaining. The the permanent facility in Vegas is actually a new thing. So, like, there's really not much to compare it to because street tracks don't usually have anything permanent.
Speaker 7:Like, you go to Monaco, there's they're they're putting that together months ahead of time. Mhmm. So that for Vegas is pretty unique. They're filling it with the Grand Prix Plaza while it's not race let's see. They I think they cut off around September, October, and so then it becomes a business with the the Grand Prix Plaza.
Speaker 7:They have the f one experience. It's kinda almost like a museum. There's simulators. There's a restaurant. So they're they're trying to keep people tied to the f one brand all year long.
Speaker 7:That's unique to Vegas. In terms of the the layout of the track and whatnot, I mean, the build of the track, the permanent pieces of it, I believe they are trying to add some permanent, like, lighting fixtures so that those don't have to go up every single time. But there I mean, you guys were there, so you saw it. I mean, there's so much of it that has to go up Yeah. In real time because you can't close down the strip all year round.
Speaker 7:You can't have what is it? You know, you can't have all the things they have up around the track, the stands. Yeah. There's there's not even really stands. Everything's like luxury over there.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's It's all boxed.
Speaker 7:You're either they're in a suite or you're not. So, yeah, all of that has to go out in real time. You know, when you have when you have a permanent facility, like a CODA or or Miami is kind of half and half. But when you have a permanent facility like CODA, you know, you it's obviously there. Those are more expensive to maintain overall because you have to keep them occupied, you have to do something in them year round after that one race.
Speaker 7:Vegas, you know, you kinda take the good and the bad. You have to take the locals complaining, and you have to do the shutdowns and all that. So, I mean, you guys were there, so you remember how, like, they had to shut down from, like, Wednesday at 02:00 Yeah. Basically from two to midnight every day after that was was closed down. Mean, those are things they have to deal with, and I think that's just unique.
Speaker 7:Las Vegas is really, really unique. It's also new to Las Vegas residents, whereas you could take, like, a Monaco that's been around since the twenties Yeah. Those folks are they're used to it. It's part of the identity. And that's Yeah.
Speaker 7:That's where I think there's
Speaker 2:still room grow. Mean, the difference in Monaco too is, like, if you're a resident and you and you own or rent, like, a condo or an apartment and then f one comes to town, it's super exciting. But if you're a Vegas resident and this track springs up and everything gets more expensive and you're kind of, like, boxed out, it's not as much of it's it and you're not necessarily an f one fan. It just becomes much more of an annoyance than, like, a celebration of the city. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And I think that's where the like, we still haven't gotten peak saturation. Right? It's not people aren't excited about it just because, like, it's not ingrained in their identity. Whereas, you go to, you know, you go to Europe and they they are have more of a motorsport culture or at least f one, let's just say f one, where that culture is understood. So track tracks are very interesting.
Speaker 7:They want more street circuits. There are more street circuits coming. Mhmm. Madrid is being added this year, so that'll be interesting to see how that build goes. We actually talked to Why
Speaker 1:do they want more, street circuits? I feel like an American Nurburgring would be incredible. I would love an American Nurburgring, maybe in, like, Idaho or something going through the forest.
Speaker 7:I don't disagree with you. The reason they want more is because it is actually more appealing and more sexy to say, hey. Sure. Hey. Come to our city.
Speaker 7:Come to Madrid Yep. And we can sell Madrid. So be able to
Speaker 1:pay I mean, Vegas, everyone goes to the nightclubs. There's, like, a huge economic impact, the hotels. Whereas if you're out in the in the sticks, yeah, you might be in some cheap hotel, but you're not gonna go spend a ton of money.
Speaker 7:Spa in Belgium is arguably every driver we've talked to, every any motorsport enthusiast says spa is the best track to drive to Rey Sadd. It's awesome. Yeah. But you know where spa is? In the middle of the Ardennes Forest.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's awesome.
Speaker 7:But It's it's not right. It's cool if you're really into motorsport. Yeah. But if you're trying to sell Yeah. F one or you're trying to sell this brand as this is appealing to sponsors and it's sexy and well, I don't I don't I would rather do it in It's a bar.
Speaker 7:I don't know, Brussels or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of course. Because you're basically holding a you're holding a conference for your company. A lot of business sponsors will invite key clients and partners to come with them, and if you're out in the forest, it's a
Speaker 3:little bit different.
Speaker 7:And the playbook has been written. Yeah. So, like, it's it's become a festival. It's Yeah. You know, it is a festival.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And that's what they want the new like, if you're gonna pay $70,000,000 to host a race, you you need to recoup that. You can't recoup that by just having a race in the middle of nowhere, and that's why you're seeing a lot of these things happen with the smaller tracks in Europe. They can't afford it. They just don't have it.
Speaker 1:That's funny.
Speaker 2:Next question. I next time you come on, I wanna talk about the possibility of an AI driver at some point. I think imagine if imagine if Google bought a team and they had no human drivers.
Speaker 1:This is my new AGI test is I want a humanoid robot in a manual gearbox shifting with three pedals around the Nurburgring in under seven minutes.
Speaker 7:Now well, did you guys see the Abu Dhabi autonomous racing league?
Speaker 1:I I I saw it, like, briefly, but tell me.
Speaker 7:It's it's it's autonomous racing. Teams of of engineers basically with Yeah. No drivers in the car. Yeah. It's clunky.
Speaker 7:I it's clunky. It's clunky. You know? Yeah. Oh, because the cars, I mean, are they're they are driving by themselves Sure.
Speaker 7:But they they still have to process. So, like,
Speaker 1:you have a
Speaker 7:car cut in front of you, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:What do you do about that?
Speaker 7:Imagine a well, imagine a Waymo and something jumps in front of you, it's gonna stop. So it's kinda like the same thing happened with this race. Yeah. So it's kind of if you had a chance to look it up, the autonomous racing league in Abu Dhabi, they're trying to make it a thing. I I I don't know about it's not there yet.
Speaker 1:I would love to see some the the the track times, how they compare, and also all of the all the blooper reel, I'm sure, is really funny.
Speaker 7:Lot of there's a lot of blooper reels.
Speaker 8:I'm sure.
Speaker 1:For sure. Anyway, we'd love to have you back.
Speaker 2:So great. So great to hang. Let let's make it a regular thing. This is good. And appreciate Yeah.
Speaker 2:You giving us the full overview of everything. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest you guys. We'll talk to
Speaker 2:you soon.
Speaker 1:You too. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.
Speaker 1:You can go check them out. And our next guest, Nigel Vaz, is already in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV in Ultradome. Nigel, good to meet you. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:How's your New Year going? Off to a good start.
Speaker 5:For having me. Great to be on. Yeah. It's great.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much. Well, we'd love to kick this off since this is the first time on the show, with a little bit of an introduction on yourself and, and how you introduce yourself to everyone who's watching.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I run Sapient, which is a enterprise AI software and technology business. Sapient was founded about thirty years ago in the early days of the Internet, building some of the world's first online banks, first time you could trade equities, the first time you could pick a seat on an airplane. So we've had about thirty years of building digital systems to really build intelligent enterprises in the first wave of digital and now leveraging AI. We're all about how we can actually unlock real transformation beyond pilots, for some of the largest enterprises in the world.
Speaker 5:So what we really do is bring together deep industry expertise across sectors from financial services, retail, health care, and then combine it with our digital DNA, alongside a a few AI products that stem from agentic orchestration through to accelerated software development, and then finally, managing, IT systems using AI.
Speaker 1:How did you process that data point that kind of shook the Internet a little bit for a couple days last year where it it suggested that a lot of the AI demos at the enterprise level, the experimentation, those those experimental budgets, that they weren't getting renewed, that they weren't seeing the level
Speaker 2:of adoption. Renewed. It's just that they weren't, like
Speaker 1:They weren't converting, and they weren't working. It was some crazy high number, like 93% of enterprise AI tests. Yeah. Yeah. So
Speaker 5:how how do you process that with time? Study.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It was an MIT study that came out. And, actually, what we did is we had a bunch of professors evaluate from MIT our work
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Almost as a counterpoint to that data. Because what we were seeing is, of course, there was a ton of experimentation in the organizations around AI, but trying something out and then scaling it across the enterprise was one of the biggest stumbling blocks Mhmm. Largely because building a proof of concept in a small organization and scaling it is a lot easier than when you are one of the largest automotive manufacturers in the world or when you're one of the largest banks in the world. Yeah. Because you have to actually think about the tool chaining of the organization and how these systems deploy in the context of that.
Speaker 5:Right? Most of these organizations I mean, Davos is coming up in a couple weeks, and every time I go, I over the last couple years, AI has been the dominant conversation. Yeah. But more and more clients are now saying, hey. We understand the concepts around AI.
Speaker 5:We understand all of the conversation is around compute, and all of the conversation is around models.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:But how am I, as an enterprise leader, getting value from this in the context of what I do day to day? Mhmm. And that is exactly why that stat is so critical. Because I think, essentially, the bridge from you experiment with a little bit of AI to you can actually start to see meaningful gains outside of the obvious use cases of you're deploying AI in the call center to route some calls more efficiently or you're deploying AI in the context of enabling your sales teams to be more efficient. Right?
Speaker 5:We're talking about large scale, agentic mesh deployments that are allowing businesses to reimagine a car build that used to take eighteen months in eighteen weeks
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Or allowing an insurance company to monitor worldwide events and on a dynamic basis allow you to react to the fact that I heard one of you guys talking about your house getting burned down in California, and this is an actual piece of work we did for a client, where they were monitoring the air quality post fires
Speaker 8:and alerting
Speaker 5:people who have significant issues with asthma to actually, you know, make sure they had inhalers or maybe even perhaps moved out of those zones proactively, saving themselves hundreds of millions of dollars in health care and better outcomes for these folks who otherwise might have gone through a traumatic health event. Right?
Speaker 1:There's a wife of ills, really. That's the way
Speaker 5:Yeah. Completely different orchestration than, I think, a pilot or two.
Speaker 2:Could you share some more as as much as you can, like, who your actual, like, clients are? Because I think that'd be helpful to ground the conversation because it's some of the biggest companies in the world.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It is. It's it's it's some of the biggest banks in the world going all the way from retail banks to investment banks like the likes of a Goldman Sachs, for example, in the investment space. In the in the retail space, we work across the the retail space across essentially grocery retail and then fashion retail as well as general product retail. So we work with the likes of a Carrefour in France or a Walmart in The US, Tesco in The UK, so a number of big businesses there.
Speaker 5:In the context of the automotive space, the likes of a bit a number of the big German automotive companies, a number of the big US automotive companies, Asian automotive companies. So we we serve multiple sectors across countries around the world. And in many cases, that's one of the complexities there, right, because these are global organizations. There's different data governance rules. There's different legacy enterprise journeys that they've gone through.
Speaker 5:Almost every one of these enterprises is sitting on, you know, a few $100,000,000 of tech debt, which you have to kinda work your way through before you can actually deploy any one of these AI, you know, ideas How are
Speaker 2:are some of these, like, management teams that you work with, approaching messaging AI internally? Because I feel like the broad fear in the economy right now is related to job loss. And so Yep. One of the reasons you'd bring in an external partner is so that they can take a just kind of a pragmatic view at the business and really understand where you can get leverage out of AI. Whereas, if you're running a thousand person organization in a company, there's maybe some more attention around implementing AI.
Speaker 2:You know you'll probably lose your job as an executive if you don't implement AI well. But if you but depending on how you implement it, there's gonna be some job loss and you're and people are looking out for their team and maybe they like having a bigger head count, etcetera. So how yeah. How how is that even being messaged at the moment?
Speaker 5:Look. I think the conversation is definitely, across organizations. Right? I mean, people in most enterprises are very tuned to the fact that this is a moment much like the Internet was, and we saw this in the early days of the Internet. I mentioned some of the things we did back then.
Speaker 5:Right? A moment of reimagination of business in a very fundamental way. This is not one of those incremental, you know, progressive overload type moments. This is a significant transformation. So I don't think anybody in your organization sitting there basically saying, hey.
Speaker 5:I think nothing in my world's gonna change. I think people expect to change. I think what most folks aren't clear about is what is the journey from here where we have existing systems, existing processes, existing ways of working that the business is running on and, you know, making sure that you can fundamentally rebuild this plane while you still have targets and commitments and shareholders. And you recognize that if you don't do it soon enough to the point you're making, you're gonna start to give up margin or you're gonna start to give up speed or you're gonna start to give up market share. Almost every conversation we're in is about how can I actually drive more growth, how can I actually create a better experience for my customers?
Speaker 5:And this isn't coming just from leaders in the organization. This is coming from people across the organization. What we are seeing though is that at the level of enabling these people to do work in this new context, organizations are very much separated by execution. So, you know, so many clients will talk about, you know, an AI strategy. Right?
Speaker 5:But do you have a data strategy? Are all your datasets connected? Or, actually, are you doing AI pilots on sales data on this ERP system over here and doing, you know, you know, marketing pilots on that ERP system over there, which will eventually evolve to agents on this ERP system for sales not talking to agents to that ERP system on marketing. And those agents not talking to each other across sales and marketing resembles a traditional baton passing organization of today. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So you're making a sense of a lot of what you do.
Speaker 2:Larger enterprises, how it felt like last year was the year of was all about just, like, coding. Right? Every single founder that came on our show would talk about the leverage that they're they're getting. We're getting that leverage internally. We've built a bunch of software to run the show that we never would have built historically because it just would have been too time intensive.
Speaker 2:But now we can have one great engineer, Tyler, on our team who can build an entire product end to end. Please don't try to poach him because I said that. But but yeah. How how is how have, like, how have coding agents and products been adopted in some of these companies? Is there any type of restrictions?
Speaker 2:Part of the reason that it got adopted so quickly is it was somewhat permissionless. Engineers could just sign up for product up. And go bottoms up. But I don't even know how how adoption would work at someone like a McDonald's or someone like a Mercedes or someone at a bigger bank where I don't know that an engineer can necessarily just say, like, I'm gonna start using this product. No.
Speaker 5:And and no. And you and you can't. Right? You you can't because the fact of the matter is it's not just Tyler or one engineer. It's one engineer with another engineer, with a third engineer, with a fourth engineer, where a lot of them share context around a bigger application.
Speaker 5:Whereas if you start using one tool chain and the next person starts using the next tool chain and the third which is, by the way, what happened in the early days, right, which is why you got those pilots up and running really fast, and people were starting to see real leverage. But then very quickly, that started devolved to basically but we're not seeing the net output actually move the needle across big things. So I'll give you an example of a you know, we we did a piece of work for a large health care company, which was on a ten year modernization journey migrating millions
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for modernization.
Speaker 1:Well, thinking in decades. Thinking in decades. People say you should think in decades. These people are actually doing it. I love it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. And it's crazy. Right?
Speaker 5:It's real. Millions of lines of COBOL code written in the sixties and seventies by dudes that are not not only in the company, they're not probably on the planet. Right? And and and and you have individual developers going line by line by line trying to interpret what the intent behind the code was. But more importantly, because this is HIPAA compliant data and has serious health care outcomes tied to it, you have to be really thoughtful about what of this code you need to retain, what logic it holds, and how much of this you can actually, you know, do away with.
Speaker 5:Right? That journey Mhmm. Going from, like, a ten years to a few years, two years, three years requires you to be able to have all of the current business context of the organization. It requires you to have a future state that you understand really well. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And you need to have a group of people working on a very similar tool chain so that the code that you are ingesting then gets created into a spec that a bunch of humans can look at and say, is this the spec that we actually want? And then that spec can actually get migrated into new code. So we built this platform called Slingshot, which is our software modernization platform. And how it differs from a lot of the consumer grade, you know, platforms that have got crazy valuations right now is they were all built for individual users writing apps like Tyler for small organizations or for themselves. But the minute you start to deploy them into large enterprises, what you find is that enterprise context graph that is missing or permissions.
Speaker 5:Like, what part of the app are you allowed to see versus me? Or what is my relationship to you on a dev team? Right? How do you actually start to manage authentication, permissions? This is the kind of stuff that really makes those pilots go awry in the context of these big scale changes.
Speaker 2:It's a
Speaker 1:lot of work Yeah. Talk about.
Speaker 3:What can
Speaker 2:we expect in AI and advertising this year specifically? I feel like we went from large companies making an ad and saying we're gonna serve this to a million people or 10,000,000 people or a 100,000,000 people. Right? A Super Bowl ad is is an example of that. And then as you have, you know, platforms like Meta, really, really, really specific targeting, you can basically make an ad and serve it to like a tiny group of people, very, very specific.
Speaker 2:You can imagine a world in the future where an advertiser even as big as McDonald's would effectively make an advertisement that's meant for like one individual person just because you could generate it on the fly.
Speaker 1:Jordy, you're gonna love this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:This big
Speaker 2:Mac is made for you. Yeah. Effect effectively. So what what are you expecting on that front? Because the models have gotten a lot better and and it does feel like companies should generate maybe at least 50 times as much ad creative this year than last year.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I I think the output's going up. The question is whether the quality and the targeting are going up simultaneously. Right? Because Meta sees incredible stuff in their wall garden. Google sees incredible stuff in their wall garden.
Speaker 5:But how are companies leveraging their first party data to understand that you're Geordie, this is your context, this is the car you drive, or this is the burger you eat, or this is the hotel room you like to stay in?
Speaker 2:I tell them everything about myself. Want them to target me as specifically You'll as they possibly
Speaker 5:be you'll be so surprised, though. Right? I'm sure you do that all the time. But how often do people actually use what you give them about yourself to actually give you something back that's relevant? The the the hard part is not getting consumers to give data.
Speaker 5:You know, there's been a lot of conversation about data privacy. And, of course, I think consumers are all about, like, if you give me value back, I'm gonna give you my data because I get something back in return. So if I if I'm watching Netflix and you know what I like to watch, you're gonna show me something back that I care about, great. I'll give you my data. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But most companies can't do that. They can't actually stir up what you want. I mean, I'll I'll you know, we work with a very large hotel brand, Marriott, globally, and we we're basically working with them to basically say, how do we capture capture intent in the context of what people are searching for? So when you actually go to their villas platform, you know, historically, what you might say is, hey. Or a hotel platform, you might say, these are the dates I've got free.
Speaker 5:This is the city that I'm searching for, and this is the kind of product that I'm looking for. Right?
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And now you flip that around to say, how can you ingest all of the intent and context that they're willing to give you? So give them a white box, and all of a sudden you say, hey. I'm I've got young kids. I've got a pet. One of my children is autistic and really sensitive to noise, so it needs to be in a quiet part of the hotel, blah blah blah.
Speaker 5:Next thing you know, the relevance that you can respond with goes up dramatically. So what I think you're gonna see from an advertising perspective is people who have the ability to leverage first party data, combine it with second and third party data from a targeting perspective, and then building production tool chains that allow them to use that to really personalize content is really powerful. Like, to give you an example, large pharmaceutical company doing a vaccine launch in a 115 countries. How this works normally is the marketeers would have to come up with a bunch of concepts, then talk to the lawyers to basically say, what are the regs in each of these 115 countries about vaccines? And you'll find crazy stuff like in New Zealand.
Speaker 5:You're not allowed to smile in the ad because a smile implies an outcome. So they want, like, straight faced people because you don't actually know if the if the vaccine's actually gonna work or
Speaker 2:So to so hard to advertise if people can't smile.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So Just
Speaker 1:like So you've
Speaker 2:got this if you if you take this gap, you're gonna have a bad time.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So so you so you've got this crazy process that goes for, like, twelve months where the marketeers and the lawyers are having a conversation about what can and can't be done content wise, and then the content gets tweaked and produced. Right? And what we built using both the argentic platform, we ingest all of the regs Mhmm. Into our platform.
Speaker 5:We then basically look at the creative concepts that were originally created by the team, and we'll test them against the regs almost on a real time basis and then regenerate, to your point, using whatever models, are more efficient for the kind of content, regenerate versions of that content appropriate to every one of these countries, and then allow that work to be deployed at significant scale. More importantly, if we discover an issue once it's actually live in the context of that, our monitoring agents are monitoring the content to ensure their their reactions to them and then can actually start to do AB testing about what's actually working better. But all of this is in one synchronous orchestration in the same way that, like, these orchestrations might connect supply chain data to store inventory to advertising. Yeah. So we're basically, you know, Black Friday, this product's already gone off the shelf.
Speaker 5:The ad isn't still hitting the same product because those people in the store are only gonna get more frustrated, and you start to close the loop.
Speaker 2:Well Awesome. Well Thank you so much for taking the time. Coming on breaking it down. Talk to us.
Speaker 1:What an exciting time to be in this particular business.
Speaker 2:To be modernized. The advertising. I mean, the Nobody likes modern
Speaker 1:decade will happen in years.
Speaker 2:I love it. Nobody likes advertising or modernizing more than us and maybe you. So great to hang.
Speaker 1:Your day. We'll talk to you soon, Nigel.
Speaker 2:Take care. Great to
Speaker 1:hang. Bye. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 2:And up next It's steward time.
Speaker 1:It's steward time. We're stewarding. We are joined by Sequoia Capital's Pat Grady and Ravi Gupta.
Speaker 2:What's going on, Pat? How are
Speaker 1:you guys doing? Great to see you. How are Good to see you guys. Happy New Year. We might need you guys to scoot back a little bit.
Speaker 1:Is that possible? We're just
Speaker 2:We don't want half of you, Robbie. We want the whole There go. There we go.
Speaker 3:There we go.
Speaker 1:Massive start to the new year. Take us through the news today. Very exciting. But but we'll hear from you.
Speaker 8:The news there is about x AI is raising money. Is that the news that we're talking Yes.
Speaker 1:That was yesterday, actually.
Speaker 4:Oh, My name is. That was So
Speaker 1:we've moved on. We already covered that. We're just talking about You
Speaker 8:guys are looking fantastic today. Just letting you guys know. Particularly good, I think. Dude, so what happened today was, as you recall from my last TVPN appearance, I want my children to be AI researchers so
Speaker 3:they can support the family.
Speaker 8:It wasn't obvious they were gonna get hired anywhere else, so we're like, fuck it. Let's I'm gonna start my own company. Empatism. Right? Nepotism for
Speaker 2:the Yeah. Good people to get
Speaker 8:Those are the links that I will go to to, you know, make my tone happy. No. What happened was today, I announced that I am going to be starting a new company. I'm super pumped. And then also getting to do it while still being part of Sequoia is pretty special.
Speaker 8:I think my brother Pat here, you know, was cool about letting that happen, and we're excited.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How did you two first meet?
Speaker 3:Was it was it was it Abramson? Yeah.
Speaker 5:Of course. I think it was we had
Speaker 3:a partner named Michael Abramson, who was involved with Instacart back in the day. And, I think Michael was the original connection. And then Ravi, we got to know Ravi over a period of years, and I mentioned in a tweet today that we always have this shadow list, which is not long. It's, like, literally half a dozen people, but, you know, the shadow list of the people we would hire if we ever got a chance.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Ravi was on that list for a few years, and finally, we're lucky enough to get
Speaker 8:him back in 2019. Whenever someone asked me about my Sequoia interview process, John and Jordy, I say it was either five years or five minutes. I don't know.
Speaker 1:It was
Speaker 5:one of those.
Speaker 8:Seemed to happen quick at the end, but, you know, I guess it took a long time.
Speaker 1:Being gangstalked by the Sequoia partnership, I would love to see that list, but it's certainly key
Speaker 2:intellectual property. Yeah. Key IP. Stewarded.
Speaker 1:One of the things that you stewarded. That's
Speaker 2:the that's the steward's greatest responsibility.
Speaker 1:Settling into the new role?
Speaker 3:It's been great. You know, we, first off, Alfred and I have been working together for fifteen years, and, he's been Super
Speaker 1:nice success. How did you two meet?
Speaker 3:You guys are big on this question. Thought it
Speaker 1:was like Lor.
Speaker 8:I I didn't even think we were gonna answer it the first time. I thought they were best.
Speaker 1:We could do notes. But I also like Lor.
Speaker 3:Well, I think the, I think most people know Alfred before Sequoia was the president and COO of Zappos, which was a Sequoia investment. And so we got to know each other a little bit through that, but I wasn't point on the investment. So it was just kinda seeing each other at Sequoia events or whatever. And then he joined I wanna say 2010 he joined Sequoia, somewhere around that time. And at that point, I was mostly focused on growth investing.
Speaker 3:He was mostly focused on early investing. By 2015 or so, he was co captaining the early business. I was co captaining the growth business, and, and we just had a great partnership for a very long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you thinking about the divide of responsibilities now? Is there more nuance to it than just early and growth? Are there other is there someone who likes to do more personnel management, more recruiting, or more marketing, or whatever, more fundraising? Is there any division there?
Speaker 3:The one once upon a time, Fred Luddy, who is the founder of ServiceNow, handed over the reins to Frank Slootman. And I remember shortly thereafter, Frank Slootman had the line, I'm the workhorse. He's the show pony. So Alfred and I have this wonderful relationship where the plan that we've agreed to, certainly agreed to, is I get to go on TVPN. He gets to
Speaker 2:be in the show by the
Speaker 3:We go in compliance.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, well, Alfred's well welcome anytime too. It's fantastic. Well No. No. I'm kidding.
Speaker 8:I'm kidding.
Speaker 3:The the the the honest answer is, our team, we have so many we have so many awesome people at Sequelaia, not just on the investment team, but on all the operating teams. There isn't a lot of management that needs to happen. And so, over the last couple of months, I think one of the things we've realized is it's it's, like, very it's a very small amount of incremental load to, to do the the steward job. It's mostly just serving as a thought partner for other people in the organization who kind of already know what the right answer is. And so there's not there hasn't actually been that much incremental work, which has been a nice, nice surprise.
Speaker 1:What is the what is unique about Sequoia's surface area of work to be done? I mean, I know there's the RIA transition. Is there a public markets desk? Are there traders now? Like, how big is the organization outside of what people think of from, like, a classic VC partnership?
Speaker 1:What else are what else is going on at Sequoia?
Speaker 3:Why you do that one?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, you know what's funny, guys? I think people would be surprised at how small Sequoia is. Mhmm. You know?
Speaker 8:Like, the I mean, we're I think we barely have double digit general partners in the business. Mhmm. Right? The entire firm is pretty small. And so I would tell you this, and I mean this sincerely.
Speaker 8:Like, I think people tend to overestimate, like, surface area, right, of what we have in terms of, like, management scope. And realistically, the most important thing is that the stewards are awesome investors and people that great people want to
Speaker 2:work with.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:You know? And so the thing I didn't say that's what you guys were. I said that's like an important thing for you guys That's
Speaker 2:the ideal. That's like the
Speaker 1:That's goal.
Speaker 8:That's the standard. Now now we'll talk about it. Mean, that's what they're supposed to be. No. But obviously, like so truly, like, I would tell you the thing that's most important for these guys is to be great investors.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It is to sponsor investments in the best companies and to continue that. Because, like, Sequoia's entire thing needs to be that we back the best companies in the world. Right? And if we keep doing that, everything else kind of follows.
Speaker 8:If we don't, you're gonna be the best manager ever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like a a GP or or a steward that's not investing is like a CEO with bad product sense. It's like Yes. Can they can they really be a truly incredible CEO if they don't understand the product?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You lose your moral authority, and we're too small of an organization. There's no there's no management job available at Sequoia. It's just too small of an organization.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Ravi, how are you thinking about, the specific advantages of starting a company from your experience Sequoia. There's obviously gonna be endless industry plant allegations that you'll have to beat, but I'm sure you'll take those on head first.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess the one question would be like
Speaker 1:How much of the company do you build beforehand? How do you actually think about how you wanna build this company? What are the axioms that you're following?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Jordy, were you gonna say something?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, yeah. And I was gonna say, like, what what qualifies as an opportunity that is worthy of of Yeah. You know, leaving an institution.
Speaker 1:Because a lot of the ideas that Because I mean think you're good, somebody will come to you and be like, I'm gonna do it. You're like, that's great. I just read you the check and then, you know, you you go do the hard work. This is Well,
Speaker 2:the pressure is immense. Like You basically have to put on an absolute masterclass here. Right? There's no excuses. Right?
Speaker 2:You have you have to you have to achieve greatness. Yeah.
Speaker 8:You don't think I can just yell at myself to grow faster and burn less? That's not that's not how this is gonna work.
Speaker 3:That was one of my one of my favorite portfolio reviews is Ravi Ravi was unfurling this beautiful monologue about what was going on at some company.
Speaker 4:It was probably a five
Speaker 3:minute speech. It sounded great.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then when you put him all down, he basically said, grow faster, burn less. Just five minutes of next person.
Speaker 8:The same happens at the ear. Okay? You know, it's okay. So the real answer, I guess, first thing is, Jordy, like, you know this. I'm not leaving, I'm changing my role.
Speaker 8:Right? I'm gonna go from, like, a general partner to Yeah. Partner to come down the boards, all that. Sure. But, look, it is a high standard.
Speaker 8:This job is amazing. I love this job. I love our team, and I love the founders I get to work with. I think the real thing that pulls it towards is not the specific idea. It's the specific moment we're in.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. I do think that AI is changing everything. Mhmm. I think that, like I I wrote this thing maybe, like, a year ago, AI or Die Yeah. Which was just sort of, like, can you see the progress that's happening?
Speaker 8:And I really believe the world belongs to the fast moving, reactive, responsive company right now that can get the best people
Speaker 7:in the world.
Speaker 8:And it doesn't matter if they're an incumbent or they're a startup. But I think that you like being able to move quickly and respond to that is the biggest advantage that you can have. And I found myself thinking about that all the time. And after writing that, I was like telling all these companies I work with and even companies I don't work with, look, this is what I think it's about. This is what I think we've got to be doing.
Speaker 8:And then I was like, man, I like really do feel passionate about this. I want to do that myself. And so the real thing that happened was I just wanted to be on the field again. I wanted to build a team. I wanted to go after this.
Speaker 8:And I think the thing that I found was that the fact that I could then do it while still maintaining my relationships with my partners, the fact that I can stay on some boards, that made it so much more like something more I wanted to do. And then the other thing is, and I haven't shared this yet, and I'll share it with you guys when the time is right, but like, I have a co founder who's out of this world. Truly out of this world, like, way better than me. Someone that will make you guys bang the gong when you guys hear who it is.
Speaker 2:Like, you gonna be the show pony or or The workhorse.
Speaker 8:The workhorse. I mean, I think
Speaker 4:it's It's pretty pretty
Speaker 8:obvious without the good looks of the operation. I mean, I'm surprised that you'd ask. You know, but put it this way, like, when I told the kids, like, maybe, what do you think of dad starting a company? They were somewhat like, well, I don't know, like, you know, what do you think the implications are? Do we have to move if this doesn't work?
Speaker 8:Do they
Speaker 1:call you on?
Speaker 8:Dude, basically. Okay? And at the end, I was like, well, how would you feel if this person was the co founder? And then my kids were like, well, we actually have $750 of accumulated birthday money. Maybe we could lead
Speaker 2:we could. Today. Lead your Get
Speaker 1:them on the Sequoia list for future
Speaker 8:They did not call me unk, but Andrew's tweet was an all timer today. Yeah. All time.
Speaker 2:So good.
Speaker 1:It was.
Speaker 2:How how are you thinking about, timelines with the new company? If it feels like you can build products so much faster today than maybe you could two years ago that there's maybe more of a value in staying really, really quiet, actually staying in stealth and making some more progress before you come out the gates and then invite a bunch of people to try to come compete with you?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think, listen, we're gonna talk when we have something to say, right? We gotta go and build this thing. I do think, to your point, you know, the Sierra guys are very good about this and they have this language of like, in AI world, a year is a month, right? Or, you know, whatever, whichever way makes it faster.
Speaker 8:But basically, like, a month is a year, know, you know, a week is a month, and a day is a week. And the idea is just like, you gotta go fast. You need to be super responsive. You guys know I'm a big basketball guy. Coach k has this great quote, You know, I'm not a world class predictor, but I am a world class reactor.
Speaker 8:Like, that's what we've got to be in. You've got to be fast and truth seeking. And I think the other thing that's nice about being, you know, with Sequoia is like, we get to see the best companies in the world, you know? And we get to learn from them and see the pace that the best ones go. And, you know, Pat, you can talk about that, but I I think that's gonna be something that is helpful.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about, the particular AI opportunity right now? I feel like there's there's a little bit of a meme that the best time to start a AI company is probably ten years ago as a lab and wait around and then have this breakout moment. And the second best time was probably like the day ChatGPT launched and everyone sort of realized that this was real. But we're now two years into this.
Speaker 1:A lot of the default categories, the market maps exist. How do you think about just finding opportunity? Is it unlocked by just last year's advances? Or do you think there's new categories that were not on the table two years ago that are now on the table? And, I mean, this is your thinking, but also for anyone that's watching who might want to start a company in 2026.
Speaker 8:I kind of think that the premise that those other people have is flawed. Mhmm. Right? And I'll tell you for real, like, biggest thing that makes a difference in whether a company succeeds or not is the people that are building it.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Right? And I believe that we have the most fierce competition ever, you know, right now, and it's only gonna get more fierce, right? And I think that you're gonna be fighting every day and there's no like actually, Sarah Woah, that's why I wrote this awesome poet yesterday about like, relevance decay, right, and how much more quickly it's happening. And basically, like, have to fight for your relevance every day in the venture world. That is even more true at the company.
Speaker 8:Like, it doesn't matter what you did yesterday. Look at, think about recently the goodness that's happened from Google, right? The best thing that happened to them is the competition that they have from OpenAI. Because all of a sudden it lit them up, and then they had to go and re win all this stuff and re get that mojo back. So even like the deepest moats in the world, you've got to go fight for them every day.
Speaker 8:So the real answer, you know, John, is it all we want to do is be in a space that we are willing to fight for every day and apply the latest technology every day and have AI native people working on it every day, so that every day we get we fight again and earn our spot. And I in my heart I believe that more than anything, which is that like, there's nothing to protect right now. Even at Sequoia, there's nothing to protect. The only thing is what we go do tomorrow and that'll be true at the company too. So I think that, like, honestly, I think when people are like, the best time was before, I think that's like low agency thinking.
Speaker 8:And I'm like, I don't have any time for that. Like, you gotta go out and get it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I can
Speaker 3:make a specific case for why now's the time too.
Speaker 1:Please.
Speaker 3:So the I think if you wanna start a Foundation Model Lab, yeah, you're probably better off to have already done that. You know? We've kind of already seen that play out.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:One of our core hypotheses in the world of AI is that the value is at the application layer. I think even for the Foundation Model Labs, we're starting to see that that's true. I would argue that now might actually be the single best time to start an application layer company, not because everything is white space, but because it feels like the playbook is finally starting to emerge. And, specifically, if you think about, like, the three major inflection points that we've seen in the world of AI, I think the first was November 2022 when, ChatGPT came out, and the world was exposed to pretraining. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I think the second was 2024 when o one came out, and the world was exposed to reasoning. Mhmm. I think the next one was actually the last couple of weeks where you see clogged code with Opus four five
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And all of a sudden, we see what long horizon agents can do. Yeah. And it's hard to like, we're venture capitalists. We're not in a position to try to define AGI. But from a functional standpoint, if you have a piece of technology that can just, like, keep going and overcome obstacles and use resources and eventually think its way to the outcome that you wanted, I don't know, man.
Speaker 3:That seems pretty close to AGI for me. Yeah. And I I think it'd We
Speaker 2:have goalposts, physical goalposts here that will continuously move Move constantly.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And so and so anyway, think now that that playbook has, like, not quite been written, but you can kinda see it.
Speaker 3:You know, I I think the ability for these application layer companies to go from a chatbot that in best case scenario people use four or five times a day to an agent that is always on running six instances in parallel twenty four seven doing the work of six human beings. Like, there's just a dramatically different impact that application layer companies can have today using the most recent playbook versus what they could have done two or three years ago. So I think for that reason, it's a great time to start a company.
Speaker 8:Can I if
Speaker 2:it?
Speaker 8:It
Speaker 2:feels quick? Yeah. Go Yeah.
Speaker 8:Dude, I I think that I so agree with that. I think also if you just kinda think about this, I could give, like, a 10 x engineer that has become so popular in Silicon Valley. Think Steve Jobs talked about it, whatever. I think that the leverage available to great people is it's never been higher. And it's only gonna get higher.
Speaker 8:Right? All these things you guys see about the value of agency and it's like all about how much do you want to get your idea into the world. I think that, I don't know how to do the math perfectly, like is it a 100 times person or a thousand times person, but I think that the leverage available to the best people is insane. That's a huge aspect of the new thing that I want to build too, and I want to build with our cofounder. Because this idea that I believe in of, like, people are power laws.
Speaker 8:Right? People follow power laws. I think that's true, it's only going to get more defined. And so what Pat's saying about, like, you know, the leverage you can give to somebody with today's technology has never ever ever been higher.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Do you guys have any type of internal philosophy around it feels harder than ever to predict, like, two years out. Like, I think in 2020, you had a good sense of, like, what the world and what software was gonna look like in 2022, and it feels much harder to do that today. Do you guys have any internal philosophy, you know, similar to Bezos thinking around people are gonna want things, cheaper and faster, and I'm just gonna focus on that. The world's gonna change, but people will still want things that are cheaper and faster. Do you guys apply any thinking like that around when you're looking at investments, Pat, maybe at the at the late stage or Ravi, with with with your new company around, like, okay, a lot of things are gonna change.
Speaker 2:Potentially, you know, we can imagine a century of progress in, you know, twenty years or ten years or eventually, yeah, two hours. Who knows? So how do you build something that's gonna be durable and and again, like relevant as you get increased rate of change?
Speaker 8:What's your thing on inevitable? Yeah. I think you I think there's a few things. So, I think and I think Pat and I agree on a bunch of this too. But I think, one, you want things that are early and inevitable.
Speaker 8:Right? Like, I think that there are things that when you see them, they're like, well, that definitely is gonna happen. And just to, go back in time, I think, you know, when I joined Instacart in 2015, this idea of, like, are people really gonna shop for their groceries in a hundred years the way they shopped for them eighty years ago? Like, it certainly doesn't seem like we will do that. It it you know, this is inevitable that it will go and it'd be different.
Speaker 8:I think that to your point, it is harder to figure out what things are inevitable right now because the world is changing super fast. So I think one, you gotta be like more limited in that. Right? Of, you know, what are the what are the industries that will be durable? I think the there are two things I would tell you to answer your question though.
Speaker 8:One, I think network effects are still potentially even more powerful than they've ever been, which is I think if you get a company with a network effect and you execute with excellence and speed, I think you can keep going and build it even up more. And I, you know, never wanna predict what the AIs are not gonna be able to do, but I think it would be hard to say, press this button, Claude Code, and create a network effect of highly fragmented buyers and sellers. And so I do think network effects can endure. And then I think the biggest thing is the people, which is you need the people that you will trust to go and face these realities. And it's the same way, honestly, like, I know I got called unk on Twitter today, but I'm gonna I'm gonna go with this.
Speaker 8:Dude, it's the same way with your kids, which is you wanna prep them for every possible situation that's ever gonna happen in their life. Mhmm. But the reality is you can't. And all you can do is make sure that they're actually good at reacting to tough things as a general matter. And that's the same thing I think that we
Speaker 2:In a value system. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. What's the changes we're gonna see? What you want is to trust that the people you have are good at responding to those things with truth seeking, with agency, with aggression. And I know on that dimension, I know Pat and I agree.
Speaker 3:There's also there's a Jamie Dimon line, which is it's easier for me to predict the next ten years than it is for me to predict the next quarter. And part of what goes into that is the forces that shape the next ten years are kinda so big and so obvious that you can actually make, in some ways, higher fidelity predictions over a longer period of time. And I think similarly with our business, if you look at, like, for example, can you imagine a version of the future in which doctors aren't using all of the world's medical knowledge on an application in their pocket to make better decisions at the point of care? Of course not. Like, of course, that's gonna be a thing.
Speaker 3:And, you you know, like, happens to be a company, Open Evidence, that is doing that today for a decent chunk of the doctors in the country, but, like, obviously, that's gonna be a thing. Or by 2050, are people gonna drive cars in 2050? I have a hard time believing they will. Like, it's gonna be the way people ride horses today. Like, you might do it as a novelty, but it's not gonna be the way you get, you know, to and from point a and point b.
Speaker 3:And so there are some things where you just, like, know that it's inevitable. And it's a question of, okay. Well, what's the path from here to there, and who is it that blazes that path? And that's where it can be tricky, and I think that's where Ravi's commentary on the people really come in because one trap that it's easy to fall into is theorizing on market structure and different technical approaches. And the reality is if you can figure out the best people, they're gonna figure all that stuff out.
Speaker 3:Like, they'll they'll figure out the right technical approach and the right business model and all that stuff. Like, if you just figure out the right people, they'll probably find the path.
Speaker 2:I think one one challenge right now, for founders that are trying to navigate the world is, like, you know, ten years ago, if you were looking and trying to understand the dialogue and different narratives and conversations happening in tech, it would be like 99% kind of like market analysis, product analysis, 1% science fiction, fan fiction. And now Yep. The the narrative and the and the conversation is like fifty fifty. It's like some like kind of like tangible analysis of what's actually happening and how markets are evolving and then 50% like sci fi fan fiction of people writing like, it's possible that in two months
Speaker 1:Buy a galaxy.
Speaker 2:Like, you'll be able to buy a galaxy. What does this mean for And so, like, series you kind of need to you you you kinda need to, like, drown that out and, pay attention, like, that goes back, like, to just talk to customers. What do they what do they need today?
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:React to the the game on the field.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Do you guys think that we were debating earlier. It feels like AI is is doesn't have its Steve Jobs from a messaging standpoint. Like, would love an hour an earnest, you know, conversation of an hour from a from Steve Jobs or or a Steve Jobs like figure talking about. Because I feel like society broadly underrates AI. They see the slop videos and they see the idea that their electrical bill might be going up and they're like, I hate this.
Speaker 2:Or they see the slop and they they hear they might lose their job in a couple years or they can't find a job and they're like, I hate this. And it feels like we don't have anybody right now that can go on that can go, like, when when, you know, as as great as the Elons and the Sams and and the Darios and people like this are as operators and builders and visionaries, when they go on podcasts and those videos go out, the comment section are all like, please, no. Stop. Stop.
Speaker 1:Like Go back.
Speaker 2:Turn it off. You know? And so it feels like we're missing we're we're we're missing a
Speaker 1:Or maybe it'd be impossible. I don't know. Wait. Yeah. What do you think?
Speaker 8:Oh, I I I agree with you. I think we we are missing that person. I think Pat and I were both in a meeting yesterday, though, that this kind of reminds me of, and I will share it on his behalf. But, like, Alfred shared a story the other day yesterday about his dad. Okay?
Speaker 8:And I think it is pretty instructive in terms of this thing. So Alfred's dad, I don't think this is gonna surprise you, was a pretty brilliant guy. Right? But what his job was was to be a human human calculator. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Okay. Like, literally, like, sit in a row, like, do math, like, you know, be a cell in Excel. Right? And just be a human calculator. And at some point, what technology allowed was for him to not have that job anymore.
Speaker 8:Right? And someone with this giant brain and this ability to produce and help society could all of a sudden not do math and put numbers into one cell anymore. And he could have way more impact and build an accounting system for the company that he worked with. And all of a sudden, all those other people who have huge brains, right, could go do that because of technology. And he made this point, which is like, look, technology is neither good nor bad.
Speaker 8:It's what we do with it. Right? The same technology that powers a nuclear bomb can power a nuclear power plant. Right? And so the idea is like, do we do with it?
Speaker 8:What do we do with it? What do we do with it? I do think that a lot of what people are doing when they go and talk about the technology is they talk about all the things that might happen. I would rather us talk about the fact of it's gonna get more and more and more powerful and it's more and more incumbent on all of us to make sure we use it for something that's great. And I actually genuinely believe that.
Speaker 8:Like, I've written about this before, but like, you know, if I could give my kids one thing, it wouldn't be kindness, wouldn't be curiosity, it'd be agency. And this is that same point, which is like, listen, the technology is gonna be what all of us make of it, you know? And I think Alfred's point sat with me, which is like, he talks about his dad being able to do more with his life so that his son could do more with his life. And a lot of that's due to technology. Like, there's nothing better than that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, it's a great place to Great story. You so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Yep. Congratulations on the the the move and everything.
Speaker 2:We're very excited for the new company and the completion of the role.
Speaker 1:Buried the lead, but we gotta have you back on as soon as we know more about what you're building. And we would love to do it here live. But Can't wait. Congratulations to you both on all the progress. Hope, 2026 is a fantastic year.
Speaker 1:And have great rest day.
Speaker 2:The whole team.
Speaker 1:Happy New Year to Talk the
Speaker 2:whole you guys soon. Thank you, guys. Bye. Cheers.
Speaker 1:He mentioned Jamie Dimon. There's some breaking news about Jamie Dimon. JPMorgan is taking over the Apple Card program from Goldman Sachs. That's very exciting. Also, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Speaker 1:And you know who we got next. We have Ben Smith from semaphore on the best day of 2026.
Speaker 2:How you doing? Look at this setup. You again. Look at this setup.
Speaker 9:Thank you. You for having me. Upgraded setup.
Speaker 1:Yes. Upgrade the new new
Speaker 2:round new round new setup.
Speaker 1:New round new setup. Wait. The dollars are already at work. I see. This is a wider hit.
Speaker 9:Spend $30,000,000 on a podcast. I mean,
Speaker 1:look at us. We have a gong. We have a horse. We have all sorts of stuff. We need to ring the gong.
Speaker 1:Give us the details. What was announced today?
Speaker 2:Media is back.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, media is a hard business. I've I've spent my whole career mostly at media startups.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And and and it's exciting to be at one that's working as a business. You know, we're we're profitable last year and and
Speaker 1:Sure for that.
Speaker 9:Wow. One one person clapping.
Speaker 1:Sorry. Team clap.
Speaker 2:I had to
Speaker 3:hit for
Speaker 1:this. We love profit.
Speaker 3:We love profit.
Speaker 1:Mean, I
Speaker 9:mean, honestly, that that is how I feel. Like, I'm a journalist and, like, took me a large part of my career to realize that the that you're trying to bring in more money than you spend because I'm mostly, you know, obviously trying to hire more journalists. But, you know, it's a tough business and having been through a bunch of ups and downs, it's just very exciting to feel like we've kind of figured out a sustainable model to do really quality journalism.
Speaker 3:That's great.
Speaker 2:Talk about why true journalism, not, you know, a Newswire account that's sharing fake news, is more important, than ever. Because if you if you like it feels like like act like actually getting information from a journalist that did original fact finding on a story Yeah. Is actually more important than ever. I've when I I I I used to trust stuff, I I feel like you actually could trust a headline on social media a lot more five years ago than you can today. Yep.
Speaker 2:And I think it's only gonna get more insane as you can't even trust like, you will get to the point where you can only trust in in some situations somebody that actually did the fact finding Yeah. Because somebody else could make a video
Speaker 1:Easily.
Speaker 2:Of some news that just or an interview that just never even happened.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, I think the you know, the and particularly for our audience who in these different verticals that we're in from, you know, from tech to finance to to DC are often the most informed, the most plugged in people, the people who ought to have access to the best information. They probably, like you and me, feel like on one hand, you're totally overwhelmed by the volume of incoming, and then on the other hand, don't know what to trust. And so we've just focused very, very intensely on delivering kind of careful, straight up the middle trusted information from journalists who, like good beat reporters, are real experts. And often in the kind of traditional journalism, you're supposed to kind of hide your point of view or find some way to smuggle it in through expert quotes or adjectives.
Speaker 9:And I think, like, our view is, you know, the audience particularly sophisticated audiences caught on to that. You'd rather just hear directly from journalists who know what they're talking about, hear what they think with some room for disagreement. But really, like, the the place we found value as a business too is both in these email briefings and in these big convenings, in this Yeah. Big one we do in Washington, that people are just, like, very hungry for trusted, really smart, dense information from the source.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What are the underrated strategies that you use? I feel like Semaphore is interesting because it's a place that it has the patina of, like, legacy media almost. I mean that in the best way possible in the fact in the that you land on a semaphore page and you trust it with the authority of other larger, older institutions. And that's not true for every new blog or sub stack that pops up because anyone can spin those up.
Speaker 1:Anyone can spin up a website, but you've built a credibility very quickly. Do you know, like, how as you reflect on that, like, how did that come together?
Speaker 9:I mean, I think it is partly that you sort of have to realize that we're living in this very kind of talent driven moment.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:And and we definitely kind of built it to provide a platform for great reporters and great beat reporters who mostly with some exceptions, but mostly aren't gonna go out and do a substack. Because, you know, particularly if you're a beat reporter, you might be telling this side what they want to hear today, but the other but tomorrow, you might be telling them what they don't wanna hear. Yeah. And that's not always the best sort of creator model. And so so in any case, we provide this sort of platform
Speaker 2:Not to mention not to mention some of some of the stories, like, a great there's certain stories that take six months to do properly. And You can't do that if you're do that if your audience is like, I pay you monthly for this thing weekly update. And you're not delivering.
Speaker 9:And yeah. And you might need legal support. You might need a team, some editing. I mean, we've we've broken a lot of news because we have some a guy in Riyadh and a guy, you know, and somebody in Silicon Valley, and a lot of the a lot of the chip stories are really Gulf Washington, Silicon Valley stories. Sure.
Speaker 9:Sure. But and you also you need legal support. But no. But I think, you know, it's funny. Almost what you say about our design is true.
Speaker 9:Like, that's definitely we are trying to, you know, take the best of the values of Yeah. Of legacy media in terms of fairness and reliability, but then also give a real kind of condensed intelligence. I actually think the thing that people that helps people trust you now is if you can pull in points of view from people who disagree. Yeah. A lot of what we do is try to read across the whole Internet and say, here's what the Chinese media is saying.
Speaker 9:Here's what the Japanese media is saying. Here's what the right's saying. Here's what the left's saying, and not not try to shove our own perspective through.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about, the events business? I'm very interested in understanding how you're splitting your time, how Semaphore is thinking about these two. There are obviously a lot of synergies, but they are two different projects. I imagine there's different folks staffed on each side of the business.
Speaker 1:Walk me through the thesis there.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, this is actually sort of a nerdy journalism industry point, but a lot of the events business in newsrooms and newsrooms I have come up in, it's like you have a journalism business that's often based on scaled web advertising.
Speaker 3:That
Speaker 9:starts collapsing. And you panic and look for other businesses that work better and staple on an events business. That's what a lot of news organizations have done for, you know, two better and worse degrees.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 9:We definitely started with the premise that we're talking to an audience who and it's the same audience. We're reaching them in emails, but these are decision makers. These are people at tops of government and businesses, reaching them in emails and conveying them in person. And they wanna hear from the same journalists, and they want and and so our journalists are, you know, who are writing the briefings are the ones doing the interviews, are the ones figuring out how to structure an event so that it's interesting. I mean, but of course, as you say, also, you know, like, in some sense, as, you know, an old blogger, like, it's incredibly easy to sit in your pajamas and type things, and then, like, incredibly hard to put on an event where the security is perfect and the food is perfect and the music is great and the staging is great.
Speaker 9:So we do have a unbelievably capable team of people who do that.
Speaker 1:Is there something, just understanding, like, the journalism that happens at an experienced this for the first time last year where every interview that happened on stage, the key quote or the key fact that was discovered was turned into an article. Is is that sort of a virtuous cycle where the events businesses and the actual publications can work together synergistically when it's done right? Is there something that they're they're maybe less disparate when they're done well?
Speaker 9:Yeah. For sure. And I would actually put it more on the other end, which is like you definitely go to events that are not journalistic and that are fundamentally kind of promotional. Mhmm. And the interview is often like the chief marketing officer of company A is interviewing the chief marketing officer of company B.
Speaker 9:Sure. And the thing is, like, journalism, like, in tough interviews, bring a kind of tension and drama and interest, and you lean forward. And deal book this
Speaker 2:year was amazing. It was just like Yeah. It may as well have been a pay per view boxing fight in some of them. And it was amazing content.
Speaker 1:It was great content. It was so good.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And people wanna watch, you know, like a well informed interviewer. And, again, like, whether they're a journalist or not, actually. They, like, professionally, like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Ask the hard questions. So the thing is, like, smart CEOs would also rather be asked hard questions
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Than sit on stage for an hour and, like, recite monologues that they memorized.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanna watch a serious journalist ask a public official a hard question and have that public official turn around and call a pop pop historian. That's what I wanna see in the back.
Speaker 7:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 2:We we were we were off air. We were doing we got invited to moderate a panel last year, and a PR person gave us some question. Here's some we'd love if you ask some of these questions. And the first question was like, you have changed the world in so many ways. How could you possibly do this?
Speaker 2:And we're like, yeah, we're I don't think we're
Speaker 1:gonna ask that one. Right.
Speaker 9:Because you're thinking about the audience. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And
Speaker 1:having an interesting conversation. Right.
Speaker 2:Why what was the real catalyst to raise your profitable and that gives you the luxury of saying like, we're gonna be here for a long time, but I imagine there's a lot that you wanna do with the money besides your new your new podcast setup.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Well, once, know, with with with what's remaining from this lavish room. Yeah. You know, I mean, think really two things. One, we're gonna hire some more journalists.
Speaker 9:Like, we're, you know, we're a very light team. I think we're about about 50 journalists, and I think in their places, particularly, you know, the Trump story in DC and the global business story where we just have some hires we wanna make. I don't think the newsroom of the future has a thousand journalists the way the old ones did. It's kind of like in a post industrial world, it is fewer people, I think. But between the technology that helps you and and the audience wanting to connect with individuals, but still, we are very eager to hire some more great journalists.
Speaker 9:And then as you as you would imagine, the, the convening business, it's like a expensive business. Like, we're we're renting out a we're renting out the Conrad Hilton for a week, in in Washington in April, and that's like it's still
Speaker 1:it's Amazing. That's great. That's great. I wanna ask you about the anatomy of hard questions. I was listening to Joe Weisenthal talk about this, and he said that oftentimes, audiences want people to ask hard questions.
Speaker 1:And they imagine a situation where, interviewers sitting down someone and they say, are you a fraud? And the interviewee just says, oh, you got me. I am a fraud, instead of just them shutting down and just delivering a talking point. So what makes for a great hard question where something's actually learned?
Speaker 2:And when's the right time to move on from a hard question? Yeah. Because we'll we'll get we have a chat. Right? So if we're talking to somebody Yeah.
Speaker 2:People will be like, ask them about this specific thing that happened in 2019. And we're like, is that does that need to be rehashed? I mean, there's like 50 other interviews that that got into that. It was not great, but can't let's focus on like what matters now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. You know, it's funny. I think I was think I may have been Laura Loomer's, like, first victim many years ago when I was at BuzzFeed, and she came up to me. She was still, like, kind of young nervous, Laura
Speaker 1:Loomer, Yeah. And her hand Yeah.
Speaker 9:And her hand was shaking on the camera, and she just asked me if I was fake news. Oh. Which is, like, one of those questions, like, what are you gonna say? You're not gonna be like
Speaker 1:You got me.
Speaker 2:But Ben, fake news. Smith.
Speaker 9:I think it's I I think, actually, it's a sort of about creating an environment of mutual respect almost in a certain way where they are they feel committed to the conversation, and you're asking serious questions, and you're hopefully, ask things they they haven't necessarily been asked before, but that are really top of mind. And whatever is, like, the core question, like, why did you, like, why did you make this decision? Like like, when I look at this decision, it looks it looks kind of reckless. Like, why would you do that? And just sort of or sometimes, like, kind of verbalize the criticism in a respectful way and really but push
Speaker 2:the way to actually respond. Like, bullfighting, you know, that Okay. The journalist has a thing and the bull's running. Sometimes the bull runs straight into the journalist. Right?
Speaker 2:But, you know, you're it's a dance.
Speaker 7:It's a dance.
Speaker 1:It's a great metaphor. Nailed it.
Speaker 9:And sometimes you wanna just run right into them, though. I do think,
Speaker 2:like Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 9:If you feel weird and bad asking the question, sometimes that's a really good question. Like, you feel like, oh, this is a little awkward.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's wild.
Speaker 2:We gotta hit the gong.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Us the details of the fundraise.
Speaker 2:Who came Yeah. Who came into the round? Because it was it was really a who's who of, saw Henry Kravis and
Speaker 9:Yeah. It was it was really I mean, it was honestly like a great vote of confidence. Some a number of our invest existing investors, came back in, including Henry Kravis, David Rubenstein, Georgio Paolo LeMann, the Gallup Organization, and then some new investors, including a couple of great, European media investors, a guy named Thomas Leeson,
Speaker 2:and
Speaker 9:and Penny Pritzker, the former commerce secretary.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right. We're to see you put it to work. We're very excited for the event next year or this year and and the rest of the
Speaker 9:year. Yeah. Hope we can get you there. Do you ever do you do you travel? Do you go east?
Speaker 9:A way to get you on the road. It's April in DC.
Speaker 1:Cool. Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk.
Speaker 9:That's Prepare for your Trump interview.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:That sounds I don't know if we'll ever
Speaker 1:Purely business and technology We
Speaker 9:could get Saks. I bet Saks would talk to you. Don't know if you'd to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'd have fun with Saks.
Speaker 9:Let's work on
Speaker 1:this. I introduced him at Miami Tech Week three years ago or something. I was the emcee, and I introduced him.
Speaker 9:You gotta ask him hard questions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That'd be fun. Well, thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 2:the show. Congrats on all the progress. Congrats to the whole team. It's it's awesome. Like you said, vote of confidence, and and I mean, I'm I'm excited for you guys.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you're like a company raises money and it's you're it's like, okay. They have more money, I'm genuinely excited for you guys to have more money. Yeah. Be able to do more
Speaker 9:So thank you, guys. Yeah. Thank you. And thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Awesome. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Cheers, man.
Speaker 1:Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Our next guest is Jacob Rittimaki. He's written a fantastic piece about humanoid robots. Before we bring him in, let me tell you about Console.
Speaker 1:Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution Console. Access request and password resets. Let's bring in Jacob to the TVP at Ultradump. Jacob, how are you
Speaker 4:doing? Oh. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 1:Doing fantastically. Great to have you here. Is your 2026 off to a good start?
Speaker 4:I think it is. Yeah. Since, to be honest, like, just some backstory for Please. Why I'm here. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I about a month ago, a friend of mine was like, oh, you have some interesting thoughts about robotics, about kind of the data center market. You should, like, write something up. Mhmm. But it's kind of like a small piece. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And then it it took a month instead of, like, oh, a couple days. It spiraled. We had a whole section. Dora Kesh released a piece, so we have a section on that. We have a section about kind of the future.
Speaker 4:We have short stories. We have, like, a whole, like, financial model we've built out. It really spiraled. And, no, I'm having a great January because it's now it's no longer raining in San Francisco. It's actually sunny today.
Speaker 4:I think this is a good omen. Mhmm. Yes. It's great. Believer in omens in 2026, omens are in.
Speaker 1:Omens are in.
Speaker 2:Omens Omens Omens are in.
Speaker 1:That's a great call.
Speaker 4:You to beat omen maxing up. I think Tyler, he he speaks a lot about this.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 6:But I need to be
Speaker 1:on the I you need to be open to omens to find them when they're sitting
Speaker 4:I think so. I think that you do have to be open to strange things happening since I think that's kind of, like, you know, to talk my book for a little bit. Please. Like, that's kind of the point of this essay is that not only is this gonna happen a lot faster than I think people are realize, it's going to be a lot stranger. Like, one thing I've heard people bring up is this idea that as you could call it, like, the bifurcation theory.
Speaker 4:This idea that as we get whether it's on AI or whether on robotics, we're gonna get this, like, robot produced quantities of goods. Maybe it's images. It's media. Maybe it's clothing. Maybe it's food.
Speaker 4:Maybe it's these other sorts of opportunities. You have people like Ari Emanuel kinda betting on the idea that there's gonna be the split. There's gonna be the live world and that you're gonna have, like, the human rare quality stuff and then, like, the infinite robot slot. Mhmm. But I think that's you can add a little more nuance to it.
Speaker 4:Like, for example, I think that the idea that human only fashion is probably it's gonna be very niche, and the reason why is simple. If we look at something like Shine and we say, okay. We can cut the costs another 10 times, and the quality is something you would wear at the Met Gala. Most people, frankly, aren't going to be able to tell the difference in their tailor. Maybe we could get, like, the menswear guy on.
Speaker 4:Maybe he could tell. But I feel like most people, they're not gonna be able to tell the difference. They're just gonna, like, click the buy button and go. Yeah. But there is something where I think that, like, in health care within an industry, you can split it up into sub portions.
Speaker 4:Like, the logistics of actually bringing medicine to people in, like, an urban hospital or someone like an NYU. Mhmm. That's probably gonna be done by robots. But the actual care for people, like, people want if your child is sick and about to die, unless if, you know, this doctor is about to do an operation, you don't wanna see a robot looking over your child. You want to have somebody to be able to kind of absorb that fear, to absorb these emotions.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And if you take that and you say, okay. Wow. That was, like, maybe slightly different than what I would have expected and apply that to literally every part of our society in the next decade, yeah, it's gonna be a lot. It's gonna take you a month. It's gonna be hard, and I'm glad that people starting to see this.
Speaker 4:That's kinda why I
Speaker 7:wrote it.
Speaker 1:Where are we in terms of humanoid robots? Or Or would you even use that term? Is it more just useful to think about physical instantiation of artificial intelligence, just robotics broadly? Because maybe they won't look like humanoids, but it's still going to be transformational. Are we like, you know, you you see these stats where I think Amazon employs a million robots already.
Speaker 1:Do you see it more as like a continuous process? Will there be an iPhone moment, a ChatGPT moment? Like, what are you waiting for?
Speaker 4:Okay. So I think there's a couple of ways we can look at this. One of them is a really interesting split. It's between manipulation and navigation.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So navigation has been a much easier problem. And the reason it's an easier problem is that we've been able to use classical methods. We don't need to collect a lot of data for, you know, a warehouse robot to kind of, like Follows that moves the boxes around. Even self driving. Like, it's not self driving wasn't hard problem.
Speaker 4:Getting it reliable enough so it doesn't kill people was the hard problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But manipulation is difficult. How do you encode? This is like, an idea that Entrez Karpathy kind of spoke about in software two point o. You can't really you can write a program to say, oh, I want a robot to go forward, and it's gonna go to left. It's gonna go to right.
Speaker 4:How do you encode this idea of I want it to pick up this goldfish? You know, I'm not sponsored by them. Maybe someday. And
Speaker 7:Pick up goldfish.
Speaker 4:Like, I think that, you know, that's kinda weird thing about the robot future is that I've written about robot holidays. I think there's gonna be probably some weird relations. There's gonna be all sorts of cults. It's gonna be you know, there's I also wrote
Speaker 1:I I did what What getting one shotted or or having l one psychosis? Like like, humanoid robot psychosis, that feels
Speaker 4:Well, I mean, I think that, like, Isaac Asimov, he wrote about this back in the sixties. You have robo psychologists. Like, they literally wrote about, like, this robot going insane. Because the positronic brain, it got modified, the three laws. You kinda you know, I think if you kinda remove the rule of, like, wow, maybe we shouldn't kill people, that would be bad.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What about there we we we were talking, reading a post earlier about, Tesla with Optimus, like, doing a bunch of supplier selections, seeming seems like they're gearing up to actually make a lot of these things. And I think some people are somewhat surprised by that because everything we've seen so far from humanoids has been, like, kind of, like, cool demo, but not like, oh, I need this in my home today or I need this at my warehouse today.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of things. One is that on the home versus enterprise, enterprise is gonna be a lot more valuable. Not only because home is distributed, you have safety stuff, the costs. There's also this weird tax thing in the one big beautiful bill.
Speaker 4:It's called the 100% bonus appreciation clause. CFOs, you should listen to this. You can depreciate whatever asset you want. It's uncapped in a year instead of five to seven under this as long as it's kind of in The US. So you can do it for data centers, robotics.
Speaker 4:Like, I think there's just a lot of things that are gonna push for enterprise adoption first. Mhmm. But then within enterprise, I think the supply chain, why people are going to get side they're they're just gonna get blindsided by this is that a couple of things. One, if you're focusing on how bad America is at manufacturing, you're focusing it's important, but you're focusing on the wrong thing. You need to focus on how good Asia is at making stuff.
Speaker 4:In particular, Pyeong in Malaysia, Bockney in Vietnam, Taiwan underrated, South Korea, Japan, obviously, China, Shenzhen, Guangdong, lots of places. So Asia is gonna be really important. You can also repurpose other industries. I talked about this with rare rare earths processing. Since rare earths rare earths aren't rare, you know, as Trump said, but, like, the actual processing of rare earths in the same way, like, standard oil became a monopoly off of processing, China has, like, a processing monopoly there.
Speaker 4:You can just repurpose the oil and gas industry for processing rare earths, which I haven't spoken about. People have spoken about it, you know, for finding the rare earths but not reprocessing. And in the same way, you can repurpose the automotive industry for, like, humanoid robots. Like, you already have Honda. You have Toyota.
Speaker 4:These are already people that are integrating it. You have the same actuators. You have the same battery management systems. You have everything else. It's something where the auto OEMs were in a secular slump right now.
Speaker 4:So if you're not, if you believe that's kind of it's like the secretory thesis in some sense of that. You know, auto is in this sort of, like, secular slump. And then as we kind of, like in order to break this slump, we're also going to have robots. So it's gonna be this double whammy of people are expecting, oh, you you know, this sort of dying industry. It's stagnating.
Speaker 4:You know, profits are being competed away. Tesla is kind of it has to sell the energy story, the AI story, the robot story. The cars aren't, you know, doing it as well. BYD, like, I think this is a Dan Wang point about China. It's weirdly more capitalist than us.
Speaker 4:Like, the Thielian idea of capitalism is bad in some sense because you're competing. You're constantly you're trying to compete everything away. So in some sense, China's more capitalist than us. Everyone's competing. That means that the auto industry is in a slump, and it's looking for something to save it.
Speaker 4:I think robots are probably gonna be it. And even China right now, like, three, there's kind of it's whispers of that, oh, are they gonna delay the IPO this year stuff? Because the hardware is getting ahead of the software. So it's something where I'm like, I don't see the hardware. And you can just rely on if you have, like, you know, expensive precision reducers or some of these other things.
Speaker 4:Like, you don't need rare earths to make a motor. You don't need expense inspect expensive precision reducers to make an actuator. You can rely on cheap stuff. The thing that's gonna, like, do my, like, you know, surgery or stuff is not the thing that's gonna stock shelves. And we just have, like, Oomi or, like, how people are collecting data now with the gloves.
Speaker 4:You can three d print stuff that's, like, a pretty good embodiment match. Like, I'm just incredibly bullish. Like, a few years ago, you could ask that it was said no. But now it's like, no. It's a sign that this is gonna be big.
Speaker 4:It's gonna happen fast. You had mentioned before, John, about, you know, humanoid versus other form factors. The keyword to think about is payback times
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:To borrow something from finance. And that the faster your payback time, like, the more that creditors are gonna wanna lend to your business. And so it's not just gonna be venture capital. It's gonna be the entire private credit industry. It's gonna be private equity.
Speaker 4:It's gonna be RASK. It's gonna be all of these other things. So you gotta think, okay. How do I drive my payback time down?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:CapEx is one component. You get rid of the legs. You have a wheelbase, or you just even get rid of the mobile stuff. You just have arms on an assembly line assembling, you know, AI servers or GPUs, and you just crank the infinite money printer. But even more so, it's not even the CapEx.
Speaker 4:I feel like a lot of investors and a lot of people, they focus on the bomb. They focus on the CapEx. They should be focusing kind of on the OpEx, on OEE, on all of these metrics of saying, wow. If this thing is going to run like, industrially rated robot arms already exist. It's fine.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. This thing is gonna run for thirty thousand hours. And I I built a calculator on the website so you can play around with it yourself. This thing is running thirty thousand hours, and every day, it's, like, twenty two hours with some maintenance, and it's, like, pretty close to a human or stuff. That is gonna be the dominant term for, like, whether I'm gonna get a good return on investment.
Speaker 4:What my I what like, my blended levered IRR is gonna be all of these other sorts of things. Like, there's just a lot that goes into it, and I that's why, like, I want people to read this. Like, I don't want this to kinda be like, oh, I like this. And then we had, like, a discussion once. It's like, no.
Speaker 4:I really tried to talk to as many people as
Speaker 2:I can down and study.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Basically. It's like, it's gonna be big. It's gonna be a big deal. And I
Speaker 1:I tried write it PBIS.
Speaker 4:Don't want it to be homework. Like, I feel like the idea of, like I tried to write it in a way that's fun and not you know, because you could just go down and and read some textbook or some, like, schizophrenic supply chain reading or whatever. It's like, that's just not fun. Mhmm. But I tried to make this fun.
Speaker 2:What's your what's your thesis on land? I've had this idea that Oh, it's in there. Or So, yeah, I I I was trying to find it. But but basically, I've had this idea that, like, if, if you can build things, you know, 10, a 100 times faster, let's say you could build a a factory or multifamily apartment building, you can potentially start getting a return much faster and it's cheaper to, you know, make infrastructure, things like that. That but yet, physics the laws of physics will presumably still apply, which means that it might be more convenient to have a factory, like, next to a city versus some somewhere random.
Speaker 2:So I've had this idea that, like, it's possible there's, like, a situational awareness style, like real estate fund that could start thinking about how the value of land will change as you have advanced robotics that can kind of accelerate progress and and just build things quite a bit faster. But how are you thinking about land in the context of advanced robotics?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I mean, to back up a second, I think that the four factors of production classically are land, labor, capital, entrepreneurship. And all of those are covered in this, but we're gonna focus on the land for a second. You can split it up into what is it gonna look like from a consumer and then an enterprise perspective because consumers and enterprises, they're gonna be looking at this differently. From a consumer side, I think that, like, the originals will appreciate in the sense that, like, long Europe, long, like, historical sites, long existing cities of that.
Speaker 4:It's going to be very hard. Like, the idea of, oh, we're gonna get cheap housing because construction is now done by robots. I think for Austin, for the South, we're gonna have a lot of that, but I don't think that's gonna solve San Francisco or New York's political woes. And then from the enterprise side, I think you're correct. I think that in some sense, the final offshoring may be the greatest reshoring we'll ever have in America of that.
Speaker 4:You go from being constrained by not having this, like, tacit knowledge of manufacturing or enough people or it's all expensive to now you have the energy resources. You have natural gas. You have IP. That's gonna be very important. And, yeah, maybe we don't have to put it right next to San Francisco.
Speaker 4:But, you know, you go out west, you go down south, you could just kinda let things start to rip. I know that Texas in particular seems very primed from a regulatory perspective. I would also say I think that, like, for the idea of land taxes or land appreciation or stuff, that feels somewhat deep into the curve. Like, I think this is why, like, George's has always been, like, this great idea in theory, but not in practice. And this is kinda what Dorkash and Philip talked about in their essay is that there's so much of the gains initially are just gonna come from capital.
Speaker 4:Who owns the factories? Who owns the energy, the data centers? That by the time you get to the point where, oh, I am just going to be Leopold. I'm gonna raise a trillion dollars. I'm gonna buy Iowa.
Speaker 4:Like, at that point, like, you should've just been buying, like, Stargate two. You should've been going to New Taipei. You should've been with Jensen. You should've been in all these other things. An interesting thing of land, though, is that I'm totally a big believer in the whole orbital data center stuff.
Speaker 4:Not just because of, you know, being friends with a lot of teams kind of at the the SpaceX, XAI, or some of these other places. But also, like, I think that the thing about orbital data centers so I wanna keep this short since you could go on a whole rant, is that it trades off one problem, which is cooling. It makes cooling a lot harder in space because you can only do radiative for all of these other problems. You don't have permitting. You don't have land.
Speaker 4:You don't have a lot of this other stuff. Maybe you'll need to do some radiation hardened things. But I do think that the idea of space data centers, like, is not going to be crazy. In some sense, like, I also think because I spent a lot of time saying, if you're a robotics company, really be focused on the AI, like, infrastructure build out as a market. It's really good.
Speaker 4:Like, every robotics company that wants to be big, you know, is secretly a Dyson's fair company. They just don't know it yet. Like, if you think about in the end of what can we do with robots, like, everyone's thinking so short term of, like, if I had a 100,000,000 laborers, a billion, a 100,000,000,000, a trillion, like, what would they do? At a certain point, you can only make so many, like, mocha lattes or stuff. It's like you gotta start, you know, building the Dyson sphere.
Speaker 4:We gotta start cranking.
Speaker 1:Dyson sphere Lattes.
Speaker 2:More just half or half half
Speaker 1:or 100.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And if you enjoyed this conversation so far, this is, like, basically 80 pages of this. Awesome. Except worse.
Speaker 1:What's your what's your prediction for a Dyson sphere timeline? 2100 before or after?
Speaker 4:I mean, like short. What do you count as a Dyson sphere? Because I feel like if I'm sorry to be, like, a, like, asshole about this, but, like, what what do you count? What do count as a is it like, oh
Speaker 1:It doesn't need to it doesn't need to capture a 100%. Let's call it
Speaker 4:But, like, a meaningful percent.
Speaker 1:A meaningful let's call it over 10% and definitely, like, a structure that is, like like, gravitationally locked to the sun, not the earth. So it's not just, like, a bunch of random starlings, like like, scattered about in the in the stars. Yeah. It's it's truly, like, around the sun.
Speaker 4:Before 2100, but then
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 4:I think that it the problem you know, we can hit the gong on that one.
Speaker 2:We're gonna pull this up when it happens. We're gonna pull this clip I
Speaker 4:don't know. But I think, though, for, like, the whole Dyson sphere stuff, it feels very much I don't know if you've ever heard of, like, the parable of the back half of a chessboard that, you know, this king when they asked, get a, you know, kind of a checkers board. Mhmm. One grain of rice on the first one, two on the second, four on the third. By the time you get to 32, by the time you get to 64, like, it just, you know, swallows the earth.
Speaker 4:I think it's something very similar here. Like, this idea of robots building robots, which is, again, in the essay. People should read it. Like, that's the point of this. Like, read the essay.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But Panic has been doing they're like this robot arm company. Mhmm. They've been having robots building robots for twenty five years now. Like, that's older than me, which is astonishing. But it's something where granted, it's in a very limited narrow capacity of that.
Speaker 4:You you have to scope everything for safety and whatnot. But it's the idea of, like, oh, robots building robots at some, like, sci fi bullshit. Like, some of us don't have to live in Berkeley or whatever. But, you know, I do think that it is going to be more plausible than that, particularly because, you know, talking about the AI data center build out our stuff, the ODMs that are making all the AI servers, all the GPUs, everything, all the chillers, everything that's going into the data centers or even from it as a prefab perspective are also the people that could do consumer electronics or the people that could actually build the robots. So if you're servicing these customers or stuff, you're servicing these industries, it's like, wow.
Speaker 4:You know, they're gonna wanna start building it themselves because it lowers their cost. It increases their margins. It's gonna be something where the market forces are gonna be very powerful here. And that's also why, like, we spend a lot of time on the social sections of this, of thinking about taxes, about I think sovereign wealth fund initially, like, between Besant and Ludnick. There's a lot of really interesting ideas that you can start off with so you don't drive away the business community.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:But I do think that there's a lot of factors pointing to, like, it's gonna go from twenty twenty five people. Maybe they saw a physical intelligence video or something to twenty twenty seven. It's like, holy shit. This is actually happening. Like, guys, I know that you wanted a, a robot horse, John,
Speaker 1:or something. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We have a dog. I need the horse.
Speaker 4:I I don't I feel like the robot dog's a little played out. The robot horse, that's that's it for 2026. Nobody has that yet. The Steve. The s t.
Speaker 4:That's a very
Speaker 1:good name for
Speaker 2:a robot. Think they could just scale it up. Just scale the dog up. Yeah. You Make a bigger dog.
Speaker 4:Well well, why not? They kinda have. I mean, the MIT Cheetah stuff. They they kinda did scale it up, but it was like a
Speaker 1:You we I thought you get some dogs dogs. Cool. The horses. But but I also have to look cool. I feel
Speaker 4:like that's also part of this essay was, like, like, between clog code and other stuff, like, I got a lot of compliments on what it looked like or so on. Think that the marginal cost of making a good website is going to zero. Same like physical labor. Marshall cost of physical labor is going to zero and my website as well. Like, might as well.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Like, it's you gotta make a good website now. Yeah. I'm barely being clapped out, so I'm gonna leave.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. You did. I was clapping for your website.
Speaker 2:It looks fantastic.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We Oh, thank you.
Speaker 2:Making a beautiful making a beautiful website for an essay is the new meta. Yeah. You just you just Oh, yeah. The AI twenty twenty seven people, maybe they they get some PDF.
Speaker 1:Is this available as a PDF?
Speaker 4:Yes. It is. It's available as a p and also, if you want here's how you make a good here's how
Speaker 1:you make a
Speaker 4:good you wanna make a good PDF? Okay. Yeah. So if we start with the thesis that, like, Claude Code, like, is god and does everything, then Of course.
Speaker 1:That's what it does. Well,
Speaker 4:obviously. I mean, have you seen the new anthropic price, $3.50? I mean Sounds good. The market capitalization, not the Yeah. Not the
Speaker 1:share price. But pricing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I think it's still grossly undervalued. Like, add another zero or something at this point. Like, sorry sorry, Morgan Stanley. Sorry, Michael.
Speaker 4:We're gonna need to add that one. But I think that, like, he yeah. Well, I mean, I I think he's busy with XAI and all of that stuff, but they also had their recent round. But I I do think that if you treat like, what in my life can is secretly a code generation problem, I think that making really beautiful PDFs is that because LaTeX, which is mostly used by, like, math nerds Mhmm. To render math research papers, is a programmable way of creating documents and PDFs.
Speaker 4:Like, if you wonder how Leopold I never I didn't do the footnotes here because my side notes and footnotes were completely crazy, and it just, like, cluttered up the side and looked unesthetic. It looked awful. And the website was the better medium for this anyways. But I do think that the idea of saying, oh, I have this really great piece of writing. I'm going to put in the Clog code.
Speaker 4:It's gonna render it in LaTeX. You can get an Overleaf account. It's free. Overleaf.com. And then sign up.
Speaker 4:You can just, like, make these documents. You can have it be very expressive or so on, and then you can make, like, a really nice website to go along with it since it's not just about the raw content. It's also how you say it and then how it's presented. In the same way of that, oh, you know, I see John and Jordy. They're going down the Tartine, which I thought was an SF thing.
Speaker 4:I was told by Michael it's now like it would start in LA with just a bunch of bullshit. Like, it really like, that's some I it's like Appropriating our Tarts. People go to. This is not, like, you guys ordering the
Speaker 1:We invented Tarts. I'm say that. OpenAI merely adopted it.
Speaker 2:We exported it to to you folks.
Speaker 4:We exported it to San Francisco.
Speaker 1:We did.
Speaker 4:First time that's happened. I think that but the thing though is that, you know, if you add like John and Jerry, if you both had like, oh, we're gonna, you know, write about technology and business, which I mean, I I'm a daily active reader of John's newsletter, so I think that, you know, we can pump that.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Tbp.com. Maybe I should turn it into a 90 page PDF every day. Just call
Speaker 4:it go nuts. You can render it as a website or you can you can spice it up. I feel like it's 2026. You gotta Yeah. Not same old.
Speaker 4:You gotta
Speaker 1:You gotta gotta get that little wasn't it the
Speaker 4:whole Lulu stuff? It's like you gotta be real. You gotta be so they can't be like all these other people. Yeah. I mean Yeah.
Speaker 1:There there's opportunity.
Speaker 2:Well, we've talked about doing a daily print newsletter, somewhat like a newspaper.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think that like The only problem though is that it's kind of like, well, I mean, like Colossus does it better. It's True. Like
Speaker 2:Colossus is Evergreen. That's Evergreen. That's This
Speaker 1:is more just you you you literally throw it out at the end. You're not collecting Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're not like Leaf You're not keeping our most people are not keeping
Speaker 1:the and the key would be it would be a beneficiary of robotics because it needs to be it needs to be printed and delivered within, like, two hours of the news breaking. So it's, like, uncannily fast, and that's a unique product. But
Speaker 3:Yeah. Who knows?
Speaker 1:Maybe it's too sci fi.
Speaker 4:Maybe. I I feel like that's a
Speaker 2:that's a little too sci Yeah. A newspaper, they write this thing. It gets delivered every day. Make it make sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It doesn't make it make sense.
Speaker 4:Like gonna work out. Can we interest you in, like, some New York Times, like, games inside? Can we interest you? No.
Speaker 1:An app we can do. Actually making the money. An app we
Speaker 2:can You should add some games to this
Speaker 1:to this episode. What's your game strategy, vibe code, or something? Schultz building RTS. What are you doing?
Speaker 4:Thing. Like, he wanted some games or other stuff on. I was like, oh, you
Speaker 3:know, I'm
Speaker 4:gonna skip the unit economics and this. I mean, it's a slider, but that's not fun. No. We'll we'll add games in the second version
Speaker 8:of this.
Speaker 1:We'll an entire Stellar Stellaris or Hearts of Iron four spin off game, Dwarf Fortress
Speaker 4:spin off. Was like Sholta was doing over breaker. Yeah. He was honestly also, I have to say, like, shout out to him. He was a very
Speaker 2:Shout out
Speaker 1:to him.
Speaker 4:I already knew he was gonna be a very thoughtful editor. He was, like, even more And I think that his quote tweet, in addition to others, are starting to bring attention from people that Let's
Speaker 1:go.
Speaker 4:You know, I'm not gonna be, like, the class or say who's reading or who's, like, following now or stuff. It's like, oh, wow. A lot of people look up to him. Like, I'm well, freaking, like, he's he's the goat. He is the goat.
Speaker 1:He is the goat. Let's give it up for Shalto. One of
Speaker 5:the greatest ever doing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Super fun.
Speaker 1:Always good to hang out anytime you wanna hop on.
Speaker 2:Great to see you.
Speaker 1:Great to see you.
Speaker 4:Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1:And I'm glad your 2026 is going well. Dropping And
Speaker 2:just try to, you know, use the tools. Try to get one of these out every day. Please. This one took you whatever a couple months trying
Speaker 4:to get one out every It took me a month, but I feel like, yeah, we gotta we gotta get down an hour. Every minute, you got a
Speaker 1:new essay that's new. Fast than I can read.
Speaker 2:A thoughtful essay every minute forever.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming on the show. Hope you have a great rest of your day, and we will
Speaker 2:talk soon. Bye.
Speaker 1:Bye. Well, is there any breaking news that we have yet to cover, or is that where we should conclude today's story? Today's
Speaker 2:show? Fun one. Reggie, James, built Oh, yes. The situation monitor.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Global activity monitor. It has a TBPN integration and intel feed, tech finance politics, news feed, stocks crypto.
Speaker 1:So funny.
Speaker 2:Prediction markets, tech layoffs tracker, AI race news.
Speaker 1:Is the Fed Oh, wait. It keeps going. Wow.
Speaker 2:It's just a bunch of
Speaker 1:Is the Fed printer on? This is amazing.
Speaker 2:This is great. Turn this into a like a Chrome
Speaker 1:Wait. It has today's episode live streaming on it. This is amazing. You can refresh everything. This is very cool.
Speaker 1:I like a I like a Yeah.
Speaker 2:We need this on the projector all day all day long.
Speaker 1:This is this is great. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is cool that it has a map. You can click around and see new stories.
Speaker 1:This is really cool. I I I love a project like this. This is awesome. And and in other news, the team got to the bottom of the large three d holographic volumetric display that apparently exists. It's a three d display with no glasses required.
Speaker 1:Much bigger, almost the size of the table, not quite. Looks a little bit bigger, but pretty cool. We'll have to get a demo of that soon. But that looks fun. Anyway, thank you so
Speaker 2:much for today.
Speaker 1:We will see you tomorrow at
Speaker 2:eleven back tomorrow. Big surprise, I know, but we'll be back We're back. Tomorrow.
Speaker 1:We're coming back. We got a bunch of great guests for you folks, and we will see you tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Yeah. Newsletterplease.com.
Speaker 1:We will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Cheers, folks. We love you. Bye.