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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, 09/16/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Good morning to everyone who's watching. We see you.
Speaker 1:We appreciate you. Welcome Two point to six. The Tuesday stream. Forgot. We have a ton of news to go through.
Speaker 1:First up, ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use of corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Second, we made it to the print edition of The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1:We made it to the print edition. This is really, really huge. If you're not familiar, not every article that goes out on wsj.com makes it to the print edition. You gotta pass the second hurdle, the second You gotta be newsworthy. Thank you to everyone who clicked on the link.
Speaker 1:That probably helped. I don't know. Sent signal. I mean, we got a lot of views on the screenshots that we shared, which was crazy. People
Speaker 2:were excited about Dylan joining.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People were excited. It's a it's a fun time. It's a big it's a big moment, and we're happy to make it into the journal since the journal has very much in in It's the same way backbone. Backbone of the show.
Speaker 2:As much as the timeline is the backbone.
Speaker 1:The timeline might be the femur of the show. But The Wall Street Journal is the is the backbone. Well said. And our sponsors are the are the tibias of of the show. That's right.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we we made it to the actual print edition of The Wall Street Journal. This is really, really big. We're very happy This about Been waiting
Speaker 2:for this moment since we started the show.
Speaker 1:Another bit of Wall Street Journal lore you might not be familiar with. The headline that they use online is often different than what they print in the paper because it's a slightly I different liked the print edition. So in the online version, they said, This podcast is eleven months old. It just hired a president to manage ad revenue. Fact check, true.
Speaker 1:But then in the print edition, they needed to kind of tighten it up. They didn't have as much ink to work with. That's right. So they shortened it to Young Tech Podcast Hires President, which I like a lot.
Speaker 2:I think they could have shortened it even more to just Young Tech.
Speaker 1:Tech.
Speaker 2:Or Young Technology.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Young So so we've been very, very happy with this. Anyway, you can go check it out if you're if you're interested. And people have been really, really supportive of the show. Thank you to everyone in the chat.
Speaker 1:Thank you to everyone who's been engaging with Posts on X. Of course, tomorrow, are
Speaker 2:having to sub set.
Speaker 1:We are interviewing Mark Zuckerberg live.
Speaker 2:And who else are
Speaker 1:we interviewing? We're interviewing Alexander Wang. There we I've interviewed him twice. He's a phenomenon. He is probably the greatest entrepreneur of generation z.
Speaker 1:And he is the chief AI officer. This gets shared
Speaker 2:around that much.
Speaker 1:It doesn't.
Speaker 2:But it's surprising because he looks so good.
Speaker 1:He looks fantastic. He looks fantastic. He's been lifting the weights and training the weights.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:He's all over the place. That's great. We're very excited to to sit down with Alexander Wang tomorrow.
Speaker 2:He really put New Mexico tech on the map.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. Not much going on there before Until he until he showed up. Showed up. Yeah. But he's been on a generational run and is continuing to build a whole team at Meta as their Chief AI Officer.
Speaker 1:We're going to have him break down the structure of the team, how he's thinking about hiring folks. Obviously, he's been on a talent acquisition spree. He got something like 20% to 30% of the Metis list together in one room and said start cooking. Also, Cryptocs has been has been posting about us. I have a printed post, a little throwback from Cryptocs.
Speaker 1:Cryptocs We says
Speaker 2:never stop printing.
Speaker 1:Cryptocs says, the rise of TBPN has to be studied. They how did it happen? They were printing my posts and now they're hosting the Zuckerberg. Not Zuckerberg, not the z The. The Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1:Well, it's A
Speaker 2:little lower. We still love to print.
Speaker 1:Still love to print.
Speaker 2:So much that we've been running through
Speaker 1:We've pushing printer technology to its limits. Familiarity with the Hewlett Packard or Brother printing system is a prerequisite for employment at TBPN Incorporated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, underrated that we ran the show on Brother printers.
Speaker 1:Brother printers did they took us a long way.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The first 10,000 subscribers were probably built on the back of the Brother printer
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which served
Speaker 2:us Real brand. We're not joking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is a real brand. It's called Brother And they're pretty reliable. We we got the black and white version, so it print faster.
Speaker 2:They have a great domain.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Some folks in the chat say, bring printing back. We're going to there was a we got to a point where we had so many posts that were in, you know, color and black and white and, like, this is a lot of ink. And we would hit print, and it would take, like, twenty five minutes to actually print the full run of show. And then we'd wanna look things up, and we wanna play videos.
Speaker 1:And so I think there's a world for printing posts. We want some printed posts. We wanna keep the the the the lo fi vibes. But then also, every once in a while, it makes sense to pull up a video for everyone or pull up some audio and and play it. And, of course, share it all and restream.
Speaker 1:One livestream. 30 plus destinations. Multistream. Reach your audience wherever they are. If you're streaming, gotta get on restream.
Speaker 1:Anyway, tomorrow, obviously, everyone has seen the leaks at this point. Meta's announcing some new glasses. We're gonna be hands on with them, take you through reactions to the keynote and then interview a bunch of folks from Meta's leadership team, which we shared. We shared Boz. We shared Zuck.
Speaker 1:We shared, Alex Wang, of course. But I wanted to get a state of the union on what's actually going on in the VRAR market. I've tried the Apple Vision Pro. One of our first shows was talking about the Apple Vision Pro. I had it for two weeks.
Speaker 1:I watched Citizen Kane in it. I experienced some of the demos, wasn't able to really stick with it, and so wound up returning it.
Speaker 2:At any point, did you say, this is the future. This this is it. There
Speaker 1:were pieces of the future that I liked. I liked the external battery were like,
Speaker 2:some of the other people that came out and said, this is it, and then retracted it like
Speaker 1:I remember because we had I don't think we'd started the show yet No. But you called me, and you were like, do I need to get one of these things? Like, timeline is just flooded with, like, insane, like, the future is here, like, you're missing the boat. It was like FOMO around Apple Vision Pro for a couple weeks, and then it sort of died off. But I thought that there were a few things that they did really well.
Speaker 1:The screen was fantastic. It really was a step above anything else in the category. And the external battery pack was smart. Of course, the overall headset was still really heavy. And I liked it even though I'd I liked Oculus for gaming.
Speaker 1:I'd played all of Robo Recall, the shooting game. Have a funny story about this too. Did I ever tell you about the first time I went skeet shooting with shotguns? No. So I go to my friend's ranch in California, avocado farmer.
Speaker 2:That's actually impressive cause eventually, we're gonna run out of stories that
Speaker 1:I know. Yeah. Yeah. You'd think I'd run out of them by now. But so I I go to the ranch, my buddy's ranch,
Speaker 3:and At some he's point,
Speaker 2:we have to explain this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We will be taking you through the
Speaker 2:The simple act we made a simple acronym.
Speaker 1:We cracked the code on OpenAI, by the way.
Speaker 2:Get a wide angle, please.
Speaker 1:So we will we will be sharing There we go. The the full breakdown. Tyler will be breaking it down for us.
Speaker 2:It's quite simple if you actually just, you know, look at all the the
Speaker 1:And and and we will be calling we will thank you for the zooming. We will be calling Dylan Field to help us create a red string mod for FigJam. Of course, if you want to take this level of design to a little bit more professional level, head over to figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together. So, anyway, I was going out to my buddy's ranch, and as one of the activities on the ranch, they had ski shooting.
Speaker 1:So shotguns, the over under two shells, And I'd never this was the first time I'd ever shot a shotgun. Never really shot a gun. And they were playing this game where it's kind of like knockout and everyone goes, and if you miss one, you lose. But if you if you if you miss and then someone else hits it, they get you out. And it's a competition and the best shooter wins, and I don't know if there's a prize.
Speaker 1:But I'd never shot. Completely new. But I'd been playing like four hours a day of virtual reality shooting in Robo Recall. That's a fantastic game.
Speaker 2:How old are you at this time?
Speaker 1:Oh, this was like 25 years old, 26 or something. Okay. I don't know. I I I wasn't I was a man. I was an adult.
Speaker 1:Okay. I wasn't kid.
Speaker 2:Four hours a day of Robo Recall.
Speaker 1:Something like that. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I'm not exactly
Speaker 4:Well, no.
Speaker 2:You can still put in $9.96 and
Speaker 1:play Robo
Speaker 2:Recall and Oh, yeah. Yeah. We we As we long as we know this. While you're playing Robo Recall.
Speaker 1:We know this. Yes.
Speaker 2:And and then so
Speaker 1:But I believe I had one of the highest scores in the world at the time. I was going up against a friend of mine who was actually a developer at Meta. And we were setting different scores. And there were little tricks that you could do to get better scores. But, basically, the whole conceit of the game is that there's a whole bunch of robots that are, like, running at you, and you have to, like, shoot them.
Speaker 1:So so you're I'm practicing in virtual reality, and I'm shooting all these robots. And I get out to the real world, and I'm phenomenal. And I win, and I beat everyone in this shotgun And shooting it actually transferred. Was sim racing. Was sim racing.
Speaker 1:It transferred. Transferred.
Speaker 2:Robo recall track.
Speaker 1:It transferred. It was fantastic. It was it it was like a remarkable moment. And I think that Quest, even though some of the hype has died down, everything's moved over to AI, there's still a massive opportunity to win gaming. There's also a massive opportunity, I think, to win just replacement for your TV.
Speaker 1:We were talking about this, like the TV is maybe maybe goaded, maybe gonna be around forever. I I when I watched It's great in in Apple Vision Pro, I was like, this is cool. I I could see doing this if it was lighter and cheaper and and a little bit cooler. And it also
Speaker 2:And I think we can we can wait to talk about implications of Metas and releases until tomorrow Mhmm. Because there's there's been some leaks. Yep. We've also been able to demo the products Yep. A couple times now.
Speaker 2:And can't share can't share
Speaker 1:our But what we can share is the Xreal
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:One Pro, which is a augmented reality. I don't even know I've how never heard
Speaker 2:of this until this morning. You Okay. Told me about
Speaker 1:So so this has been pumped very heavily online. They do a lot of sponsored content. They do a lot of ads. And it's a it's an augmented reality glasses. We got them.
Speaker 1:They're on Tyler's face over there. He's looking give give us a little review. Jordy, how do you think the the styles the style looks?
Speaker 5:Like, the lens is very, like, offset.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is. It is a little bit farther. So Yeah. Describe what you're seeing.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So it's it feels basically like I'm wearing sunglasses. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I don't know
Speaker 3:if you'd
Speaker 5:be able to see if I turn them around, but there's like the main lens, which you can see from, like, looking at me. Mhmm. And then on the inside, there's like a smaller lens
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:That doesn't cover the entire thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So I'm see I'm looking through that. So my the field of view of the actual, like, screen area is is is not actually that big. Mhmm. But it's basically just like I'm wearing like pretty dark sunglasses.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And then I can just like see I I have like a screen pulled up. It's just mirroring from my laptop right now. Okay. So it's over here.
Speaker 1:So they so basically, if you unplug these, there's no battery on board that I can tell. You have to plug it you have to plug in the the end of the the end of the what what's the arm on the on the sunglass arm? I don't know. The side little bar. You plug a USB C cable into that, and you plug that in your phone, and it mirrors your phone.
Speaker 1:Or he's plugging into his laptop. Is it a second screen or it's mirroring?
Speaker 5:Right now, it's like extended.
Speaker 1:It's like
Speaker 5:third screen.
Speaker 1:Okay. Oh, because you have two screens.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, there we go. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You don't need to rub it in. I mean
Speaker 2:So that's that's pretty that's pretty
Speaker 1:So so how much can you see? Can you see how many fingers I'm holding up?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Three. Okay. I mean, I can see pretty well.
Speaker 1:You can see pretty So
Speaker 5:there's three, like, levels of darkness.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:So I'm on the lightest one right now.
Speaker 1:You're the lightest one.
Speaker 5:It's still pretty dark. Like, it's basically like I'm wearing dark sunglasses.
Speaker 1:I think I had it on the on the darkest setting. Yeah. And I was using it at night last night, and I couldn't see
Speaker 2:through the Tyler Gold, really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. The chat says
Speaker 2:Looks like he belongs in the Blues Brothers.
Speaker 1:I think it's a pretty good look. It's I watched a full YouTube video on it about 50 last night. And it truly was full HD. Like, I I was not seeing pixels. I thought I thought the visual resolution was high quite high.
Speaker 1:What's your what's your review?
Speaker 5:I just turned on, like, the darkest setting, and I cannot see you guys at
Speaker 1:all. You can't see us
Speaker 5:I all can see the lights we
Speaker 2:have Okay. That's
Speaker 5:it. Like, faintly. But I I can't see you guys
Speaker 1:at all. So it's really oh, it's actually changing the the darkness of the glasses, too. That's pretty cool. I can I can see the change when you change those? That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow. There we go. Yeah. It goes dark.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you'll be able see that on the video, but I can certainly see it from here. Anyway, so what have What you you about
Speaker 2:the experience of having the screen on your face have to connect to the screen in front of you?
Speaker 1:I don't think it's that crazy. I always thought that like I want a very concrete, first killer app. So for the iPhone, you know, I was debating this with Marc Andreessen. I think the killer app for the iPhone was just the phone. And then, yeah, it had some problems later, but most people bought it just to be able to
Speaker 2:Chad's make phone asking for a wrist check. That's a Seiko, right?
Speaker 5:Yeah, Seiko SKX.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:I'm really
Speaker 5:a hitter.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're getting there.
Speaker 2:It's a college hitter.
Speaker 1:It's a college hitter.
Speaker 2:It's a tasteful choice.
Speaker 1:And so I thought that there could be a future where this is a $650 product. It's in the range of an external monitor. And so I think that maybe it's not going to be today, but if you have a college student who has a laptop and they want a second monitor and they're judging between these glasses that are portable, they can bring to the library if they're going there, and have a nice big second monitor or a physical second monitor from Apple or Samsung or anyone else, they might be able to compete on that, even if you just have to plug it in. But what do you think, Tyler? How close are you?
Speaker 1:How much cheaper than a true external monitor would these have to be for you to choose this over an external monitor?
Speaker 5:I think they'd have to be a lot cheaper than $750.
Speaker 1:They're not close.
Speaker 5:Yeah. They're also like I don't think I would wear these not sitting down, like if I was moving around.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:They're like a little too clunky. When you have it so there's like two modes. You can have it on like the world tracking or just like face tracking where it moves with your face.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:And it's like pretty clunky. Mhmm. So it's like a little bit I would I could see someone getting like motion sick. Yep. In VR, I don't really get motion sick ever, but Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like my dad does a lot. Yeah. So I could see him like not using this.
Speaker 1:Comp the visual fidelity to the to the Quest three s that you tested.
Speaker 5:I would say it's very close.
Speaker 1:It's close?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's so it's definitely worse than the Apple Vision Pro. Like, can still see kind of like, I can, like, do essentially like pixel peaking. Yeah. And if I move my head like this, it gets blurry.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But overall, I could I mean,
Speaker 1:you know The field of view is a little narrow. Like, it's pretty easy to cut off the edges if you
Speaker 3:move Yeah. Your
Speaker 5:It's a little narrow, but text is totally readable. Like, you could easily read or
Speaker 1:So far, I'm on the train of if I was on a plane and I was leaning back, I would watch a movie on this over just holding my phone like this and watching it there. But outside of that, there aren't that many occasions that I would select this. And even though it is AR and it is pass through, it's still
Speaker 2:I would I would just say isolating. I would just say this seems much worse than having your laptop on the tray table.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's it. It's like
Speaker 2:when are you on a plane and you don't have your laptop? Yeah. Can take a tray table. So I I I I give these.
Speaker 1:What's your review? Two thumbs down. Two thumbs down.
Speaker 2:That's my official review. Brutal.
Speaker 1:I mean What about you?
Speaker 5:I think it's pretty cool. I I've never used AR glasses before. I've only ever used VR that has Sure. Pass through.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:And I mean, it's like, you know, infinitely better because in pass through, can't really like you can obviously walk around
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But it's like, you it's a little jarring still. You have to walk a little slowly.
Speaker 1:Like with this, you can actually use your laptop. You can Yeah. Can move your your hands around and and and it doesn't it it's real time because it's just actually you're seeing the real light rays and
Speaker 3:stuff and then re projected.
Speaker 5:I would say I would say one thumbs up.
Speaker 1:One thumbs up.
Speaker 5:One thumb up.
Speaker 1:One thumb down.
Speaker 2:Are you being honest with us, Tyler?
Speaker 1:Are you being too
Speaker 5:No. I think this is really cool. Yeah. Yeah? Okay.
Speaker 5:I don't know
Speaker 2:if I cool doesn't mean that you're going to use it.
Speaker 5:It's a cool demo. I I would
Speaker 2:not Cool. Buy these Okay. One thumb up on the demo.
Speaker 5:I would not buy these for $700 Yeah. I would buy them for like $150 maybe.
Speaker 1:Okay. The question the the the the age old question here is we're always trying to get to a churn rate. I think Yeah.
Speaker 2:Goldman in the chat says, ripping analog bogeys. Glad the youth are keeping it going. I don't think yeah. I think he missed the part where they're
Speaker 1:There's cigarettes? Like, Oh, there's cigarettes in his pocket. Oh. Oh. Oh.
Speaker 1:There's cigarettes in thought he was
Speaker 2:calling the the sunglasses.
Speaker 1:No. No. No.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tyler's got some heaters in the pocket.
Speaker 1:Yancy here. I didn't wish I had a third thumb to give it three thumbs down. But so let's assume that they're free. Assume that you that that that you have won them in a TVPN gap semester challenge.
Speaker 2:You're not even you're not you're not using these
Speaker 1:Do you think you'll be a DAU in a month? Because we've tried to make you a DAU of Cluely. We failed. We tried to make you a DAU of the Quest 3s.
Speaker 5:We So on the Quest, I actually have used it
Speaker 1:Oh, you did?
Speaker 5:I've used it in the past month. I've used it maybe like three times.
Speaker 1:Okay. What did you use it for?
Speaker 5:I playing, I think I was playing Call of Duty.
Speaker 1:Okay. Back in the back in the trenches. The the new Call of Duty? The new Call of Duty is dropping soon. Maybe I
Speaker 5:don't know which one it was. Maybe the
Speaker 1:last Like on
Speaker 5:six or something.
Speaker 1:Oh, well.
Speaker 5:I would I don't I
Speaker 2:mean, Call of Duty needs to do the same thing as Apple at this point.
Speaker 1:What is that?
Speaker 2:Black Ops twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. They really should.
Speaker 5:It's Black Ops seven. Warfare twenty twenty, I think.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. They did that. Right? Yeah. Well, no.
Speaker 1:It was because they they reset the whole counter. So it it was Modern Warfare one, two, three, four. And then they just were like, let's start over. Let's do Modern Warfare again. And so any time that you would would need to confuse the old Modern Warfare and the new Modern Warfare, people would be like, Modern Warfare, but the 2020 edition.
Speaker 1:It wasn't Modern Warfare crawling
Speaker 2:out Dan the Ratliff in the chat has a good He says, get the chat ripping an inch from Tyler's face.
Speaker 1:Oh, I like that. Yeah. Can you pull up chat?
Speaker 2:Plug the chat
Speaker 1:into You can just see the chat
Speaker 5:right now. So I'm looking at myself right now. Okay. It they they're really dark. It looks like I'm, like, blind.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does So Well, it I I mean, that's mostly because you're indoors. Like, you were if we were outside To be and were on a sunny beach or something, I feel like you would look a lot
Speaker 2:more normal. But to be clear, that is incredibly sub like, that's not what you want. You want
Speaker 1:Yes. Glasses
Speaker 2:that look like normal glasses.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. I I agree. And and so, like, the meta Ray Bans, just the the the current ones that are already out, if someone is sitting at their office with those and they have them in in their clear frames, you would just be like, it's as weird as having headphones Like, it's just like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:They're they're wearing glasses. Like
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like, you can immediately clock these as like something is going on
Speaker 1:with Totally. Wire coming out of your coming down your your chest really is a nice accent. You might have to thread that through the tie or something.
Speaker 2:You're like, yeah, something something's going on This you look like an intelligence asset, you know? You're just like, oh.
Speaker 1:If you're
Speaker 2:in an SF party and a you know, and someone's wearing Yeah. These
Speaker 1:Pulls out this. Yeah. That's great. Anyway, Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously.
Speaker 1:Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Okay. The current thing. Elon, he posted, daddy is very much home. He's burning the midnight oil with Optimus Engineering on Friday night, then red eye overnight to Austin arriving at 5AM, wake up to have lunch with my kids, and then spend all day Saturday afternoon in deep technical reviews for Tesla's AI five chip design.
Speaker 1:Then he flies to Colossus 2 on Monday, walks the whole data center floor, reviews transformer and power production. Excellent progress there, he says. Departs midnight, then up to twelve hours of back to back meetings across all Tesla departments, but particular focus on AI autopilot, Optimus production plans, and vehicle productiondelivery. 16,000 likes. He is back in it.
Speaker 1:He's in wartime mode.
Speaker 2:What's your take? No, it's great to see. Clearly, you add politics into his current responsibilities, and it's too much. It's too much. It's just too much.
Speaker 2:It's too much.
Speaker 3:So it's great to
Speaker 2:see that he's out of that, focused on what he does best.
Speaker 1:The context switching between SpaceX and Tesla always seemed like, wow. How does he do SpaceX and Tesla? But, like, at the end of the day, you are talking to an engineer in one place and then an engineer in the other place. It's it's fundamentally the same conversation. Like, how can we design the parts, get them made, put them together, and then do the thing with the parts that least it's that instead of politics is like completely different.
Speaker 2:Anyway It's crazy to to be an entrepreneur
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And think to yourself, I gotta focus more, but then still have like six companies.
Speaker 1:It is crazy.
Speaker 2:It's like I I have to work harder and I have to focus more. Yep. And normally, if you're running one company, you can say like, alright, we're gonna like deprioritize this product. Totally. We're like shut this down.
Speaker 2:We're not gonna do that acquisition. Totally. Do this or that. But he doesn't have that luxury. He just has to
Speaker 1:This was the odd take. Daddy is very much home. You got a lot of houses, brother. You got a lot of houses. But at the same time, House Elon, as I'm calling it, does does have some synergies between it and a lot more now that you take politics out of the mix, like you mentioned.
Speaker 1:So, I was thinking, and I don't know if I wanna dox them, but, I was visiting two friends of mine who ran a design consultancy together, I pulled into their Los Angeles office space, which they had designed from the ground up. These guys are super into design. They have custom furniture, custom tables. Everything is custom. And I noticed they had two identical Tesla Model Ys parked in front of the building.
Speaker 1:And I was like, that's kind of a funny choice for guys who pride themselves on finding, like, unique and creative design ideas all day long. Like, everything they do is Considered. You considered unique. I would have expected some bespoke car, like the bespoke office building. And when I talked to them, they had a good rationale behind their decision.
Speaker 1:They said, What true luxuries are left in the automotive world? It's just self driving, and nothing comes close to a Tesla. That was their take. You can disagree. But for
Speaker 2:a We've lot of people had self driving. It's called having a driver. That's the truth. That's the truth. That's the last clearly, if if you you could make the argument that that is the final.
Speaker 2:Yes. Because we drove with them to dinner, and both cars
Speaker 1:made it. I wasn't in there, but, yeah, you were.
Speaker 2:I drove with them to dinner, and both cars made an extremely illegal left turn.
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh. So so a human driver would never do anything illegal in a car?
Speaker 2:I would fire a human driver that made that turn.
Speaker 1:Oh, Okay. That turn.
Speaker 2:It was a greed.
Speaker 1:It was a greed.
Speaker 2:But of course, I agree with the point broadly.
Speaker 1:Yes. Sure. Maybe it's not superhuman level. Maybe it's not the best self driving better than an actual professional driver. But it's on the path.
Speaker 1:And it's clearly a notch above the rest of the OEMs. And so Tesla's always been a bit of a wild ride. The company wasn't founded by Elon Musk. He sort of refounded the business. He joined the company seven months after two other cofounders started the initial corporate incorporation.
Speaker 1:It's been a wild ride in the public markets. There's a barrage of skepticism the whole time, pressure from short sellers. The stock's never traded like a traditional carmaker, but it's also never operated like one. So on November 6, Tesla shareholders, in just, what, two months or so, Tesla shareholders will vote on a very nontraditional pay package. It's $1,000,000,000,000 for Elon.
Speaker 1:And Elon's already restating his commitment to the company with this post. Daddy is very much home. He wrote on X this morning. I was debating whether or not the post was ghostwritten. And where do you sit on it, Jordy?
Speaker 1:You've read the post. Do you think this is written by Elon?
Speaker 2:The the original one we covered.
Speaker 1:The daddy not the Tesla. So the Tesla's secret plan v four, that felt like it was not written by Elon. It wasn't really in Elon's voice from what I know about him. It seemed like it was sort of written by a team or a committee or there were like multiple people at the table. There were a lot of Em dashes.
Speaker 1:So maybe there was like a Chechipiti pass or a Grok pass at some point,
Speaker 2:an LLM pass
Speaker 1:on
Speaker 2:of it
Speaker 1:like I can tell company
Speaker 2:just into his phone Sure.
Speaker 1:Thing. Then it instantiated it into a into a multi paragraph Yeah. Essay. But this this post, I am burning the midnight oil with Optimus Engineering on Friday night, then red eye overnight to Austin arriving at 5AM. Does this feel like Elon's voice to you?
Speaker 2:I mean, his voice to me is reposting on timeline reposting a meme
Speaker 1:Crying emoji. Saying, wow. Crying emoji. It's so true. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I don't know. I thought this this did feel like him. It felt like he just fired it off. But I don't know. There's people debating it.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think the more interesting thing is just like just like, does this reflect rational prioritization at Tesla generally? And so It
Speaker 2:looks up 20% in the last
Speaker 1:so he's prioritizing Optimus, which Optimus feels like this sci fi project that's far off. It feels like the demos that we've seen have been very teleoperated. It's not there aren't these crazy demos. It's certainly not shipping. But if you just think about what is technically possible right now and we've seen these videos out of China with companies like Unitree it doesn't seem that far off, right?
Speaker 1:Even if you assume that like he hasn't Tesla hasn't done any like quantum leap, done something that no one else can do, just catching up to unitary with great execution and engineering should be possible, right? Like they already make tons and tons of cars. It's a somewhat similar project. And there's also certainly investor demand for an American humanoid robot play. Today, Figure Robotics raised $1,000,000,000 at a $39,000,000,000 post money valuation.
Speaker 1:When was that announced announced This
Speaker 2:well, so
Speaker 1:Months ago. Right? Or leaked.
Speaker 2:It was
Speaker 1:like leaked Leaked. What, six months ago?
Speaker 2:It felt like something that was designed to generate interest.
Speaker 1:Sure. And there were screenshots
Speaker 2:and emails. The time, I was like I I was pretty blown away because because that round was being the the what it was rumored to be getting done at was greater than the market cap of Ford Motor Company.
Speaker 1:That's right. Where's Ford today?
Speaker 2:Ford is at 45,000,000,000 today. Oh. And so I I was I I saw the
Speaker 1:Age new like milk, Jordan.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I said to John, I said, you might not like this, John. This might trigger you, but Brett Adcock has created more enterprise value than Henry Ford. That actually proved to be true. Henry Ford, as of current marks, has generated about $1,000,000,000 more.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. We don't need to get into revenue or really try to get too into the math. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's skip all that.
Speaker 2:But yeah, the question
Speaker 1:I mean, read on this is just like figure is nowhere near as, like, in the zeitgeist as Tesla. And there are clearly investors who want to bet on humanoid robots in America. They can't even buy unitary stock. I don't know how you would. And so if you just believe that robots are going be a thing, investing in Tesla doesn't seem like that crazy of an idea, right?
Speaker 1:But mean, he's not just focused on that. He's also focused on the next Tesla chip design called the Well, AI
Speaker 2:one thing too, unitary is planning their IPO around the $7,000,000,000 mark.
Speaker 1:Sure. Oh, that's low. Wow. That's low.
Speaker 2:Where are they? In Hong Kong, maybe? It's going to be the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:I wonder what it'll do.
Speaker 2:And given that they are
Speaker 1:They're shipping a lot of those robots.
Speaker 2:They're selling a lot of pups.
Speaker 1:They're selling a lot of Oh, They're selling the pups. Robo pups. Anyway, worth a big deep
Speaker 2:dive. Want I think a Tesla Robo Pup would crush.
Speaker 1:That would be good.
Speaker 2:I would
Speaker 1:What would you use it for though? Would you not churn
Speaker 2:for that? Just to well, so so I pitched you on an office dog
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And you said, that's insane. And and I thought about it.
Speaker 1:It's a tragedy of the commons situation.
Speaker 2:But a Tesla pup that Elon would just be able to zoom into at any time and kind of bark at us if he had announcements, I would be pretty interested in that.
Speaker 1:What about a Tesla puffer fish? A turbo puffer
Speaker 2:fish? A turbo puffer.
Speaker 1:You'd search every byte, serverless vector, and full text search built from first principles in object storage. Fast, 10 x cheaper Nothing. And extremely scalable. Check out Turbo Puffer. He's also prioritizing AI5, the new chip.
Speaker 1:He's partnering with Samsung on that. Makes sense. You need edge computing in a self driving context. You can't do all the inference in a data center. Colossus, you can do inference in the data center.
Speaker 1:You're probably training a big model. Regardless of what XAI is doing with Grok, having a bunch of being GPU rich seems valuable to Tesla, right? And you know, there's rumors that maybe those companies merge at some point. But the plan overall, like how he's actually spending his time, it seems in line with the opportunity in front of Tesla. Doesn't seem like wildly wildly,
Speaker 2:like, off He's managed to almost 2x the stock
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Here since April.
Speaker 1:He certainly, like, got got the flow back.
Speaker 2:And I remember I I I distinctly remember mid curving it around April
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thinking just looking at the looking at Tesla earnings, look at them losing market share globally, look at the the quarters that they had had just in the core business of selling cars. Yep. And it was just looking really, really, really abysmal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cyber truck was rough. The Roadster two was delayed. They're just Model
Speaker 2:three is not selling well. Yeah. None of the cars have been rebuilt.
Speaker 1:And then there was all this political stuff where where where where conservatives gonna pick up and start buying Teslas in
Speaker 2:Well, You think about it.
Speaker 1:He Yep. Lost the
Speaker 2:And then he was losing the right by fighting with
Speaker 1:Trump. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Who's the base?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was like losses on both sides. But I I think that But I think that the car buyer has a shorter memory for these things and and will
Speaker 2:When you're selling return When you're leasing cars for $2.99. Less than an Equinox.
Speaker 1:And it and and like it does perform well on all the benchmarks, essentially.
Speaker 2:Self driving performance
Speaker 1:It's great value.
Speaker 2:Compared to any other car Yep. In that price range.
Speaker 1:Yep. Totally. And so the the the bear case here for for Elon bringing it back and returning home is that he has multiple homes. SpaceX, Neuralink, boring company, x x AI. It can't be easy to juggle everything.
Speaker 1:But at least he's been able to pull back time spent in Neuralink? No. I said Neuralink. Oh, you said. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it seems like there are new plans in the works to consolidate House Elon down to fewer entities so it's easier to manage. Overall, his current Tesla plan outlined in his post is a lot clearer to me than the Tesla secret plan v4 that felt written by a committee or even worse, an LLM. Even if you're seeing signs of being stretched too thin, it's very hard to root against someone who's already built such a large automotive company in America and is taking a serious run at a self driving network in a humanoid robotics play. There's lots of froth, But I like Elon being home at Tesla and focused on making science fiction reality. So that's my take on on Elon's latest John.
Speaker 1:John. Anyway, whatever they're building, they gotta do it on Graphite. Graphite dot dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. The we didn't really talk about the Sam Altman Elon Sam Altman Tucker Carlson episode that went out.
Speaker 1:It was a crazy news day, of course, with the Kirk assassination. But Chrisman went viral, who's a friend of the show. He said after spending seven minutes very politely accusing his guest of murder, Tucker just resume resumes a normal conversation to round out the interview. Incredible. Best to ever do it.
Speaker 1:And so it goes straight from
Speaker 2:suspicious That's death insane.
Speaker 1:To thoughts on Elon Musk? What jobs will be lost to AI? What are the downsides of AI? Is AI a religion? The dangers of deepfakes.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you do you think this was an not a win for Sam? Kinda went into
Speaker 1:Every I think every PR person thinks it's a it's a own goal or it's like a mistake to do. I don't know. It was so bold. It it was just it was so unexpected. Like, it was Remember Tucker
Speaker 2:had Soucir's Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. You know that that's what's gonna happen. So you're going into the arena. You're going into the lion's den. You're you're you're debating like the most critical critic possible.
Speaker 1:And there's something brave about that. I don't know. Yeah. I I took it as as Where
Speaker 2:you're able to overcome your fear.
Speaker 1:As bullish. The I think Luke Metro had this post where he was saying that he his fear of the going direct movement
Speaker 2:That's a great
Speaker 1:was CEOs would never do a hard interview ever again because there was always someone who was willing to do an easy interview with you. There was always, Oh, just do your own podcast. OpenAI has their own podcast. Sam Altman's brother has a podcast. He's friends with tons of people.
Speaker 1:He can come to us, and we'll talk to him just about AI and tech and the core business and stuff and have like a business conversation. To go to Tucker is a very, very aggressive, bold move. And I think it's good leadership. I don't know. I think it's like, it's hopefully closing the book on that very sad and tragic saga, but who knows?
Speaker 1:I haven't really dug into like the actual response. Were people in Tucker's community swayed? That's the real metric probably. Because you don't wanna come out of that and be
Speaker 2:like, Tyler.
Speaker 1:Wow, I have more.
Speaker 2:You're going to Middle America.
Speaker 1:You're going
Speaker 2:to thousands of Tucker Carlson super fans. And ask them, did he do it? Just ask them Did he do it?
Speaker 1:No. No, no, no. Explain to them this. Explain to them the full history of OpenAI, all the connections, and see if they're bullish on the stock. That's what I want to know.
Speaker 1:Do they think $500,000,000,000 is undervalued or overvalued in Middle America? That's what I care about. So we have our chart of the OpenAI and all the connections. Tyler, you were late here last night. You didn't leave last night.
Speaker 1:You were here all
Speaker 2:night. Kind of an all nighter?
Speaker 5:I was basically the goal was try to I want to explain kind of in an easy, simple way like how to think about OpenAI broadly.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:How to think about people who are influencing it
Speaker 1:I think you nailed it.
Speaker 5:In as clear of a way as possible.
Speaker 1:I think you nailed it. Okay. So who do we have here at the center?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I think it's obviously best to start here. Yes. This is right here in the middle. OpenAI.
Speaker 5:Okay. So obviously, same Altman, OpenAI. This is the core.
Speaker 1:Yes. And every line of string here is a real connection, correct? Yeah. Okay. Take us through some of it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So we can see over here, these are some of kind of the main deals. Yes. We have Larry Ellison, Oracle. Yes.
Speaker 5:We have Microsoft.
Speaker 1:$300,000,000,000 plan to build data centers. And then Broadcom is obviously doing chips, custom chips for OpenAI now. SoftBank is bankrolling some of it with Stargate. Microsoft has the
Speaker 2:What's the connection between Johnny Ive and Growing Daniel?
Speaker 5:Oh, okay. So so this this is actually a double so so this is most people on Twitter, they see this picture, they think Grow Daniel. But I mean, who that's
Speaker 1:It's actually Steve Jobs. That's Steve Jobs. Yeah. It's Steve Jobs.
Speaker 5:So it's really, know, double.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 5:So so you see, this is yeah, this is pretty good. I wanna talk about this. So we have Marc Andreessen.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:You know, famous kind of interplay between Growing Daniel and Marc Andreessen. Okay. Yes. But also, you know, with Steve Jobs.
Speaker 1:Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive. Yeah. Okay. Got it.
Speaker 7:And then
Speaker 2:You're saying that this goes deeper than
Speaker 1:This goes deep.
Speaker 5:Goes really deep here.
Speaker 1:How deep does it go? Let's find out.
Speaker 5:Okay. So then let let's just keep moving. So so let's go from let's go to some investors.
Speaker 1:Please.
Speaker 5:So we can go from OPI. Let's see Josh Kushner. Josh Kushner. Of course. Okay.
Speaker 5:But who's Josh Kushner's brother? Jared. Jared.
Speaker 1:Where's Jared?
Speaker 5:First Trump administration.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yes.
Speaker 5:Okay. Now we're now we're in, you know, politics. Let's go down PT.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Right? You can see a lot of strings coming out of here. Yes. This is a core player.
Speaker 1:Core player.
Speaker 5:So, I mean, there's so many directions we can go here, but let's go to Delian. Right? Yes. Delian, where does Delian work? Founders Fund.
Speaker 5:Who is Yes. You know? It's obvious. Okay?
Speaker 1:Yes. It's obvious. You're putting it together.
Speaker 5:Okay. Delian's first company. Yes. VARTA.
Speaker 4:No. Oh, first company.
Speaker 5:His first company, YC company.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. It was a YC company. YC company. That's right.
Speaker 5:What was another YC company? Alexander Wang.
Speaker 1:Oh, wait. Scale was a YC company. Okay. Does Alex work now?
Speaker 5:Where does he work? Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1:Oh, Zuckerberg. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Okay. Nat Friedman. They work together. MSL.
Speaker 1:Okay. It's so clear.
Speaker 5:Who did Nat Friedman sponsor? Who? Luke Feritore.
Speaker 1:Oh, Feritore?
Speaker 5:And where does he work? Doge. Go. Elon. It's all connected.
Speaker 5:And who did Elon start a company with? PT. It goes Here
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 5:Okay. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Let's see Wilmanitis.
Speaker 5:So Wilmanitis How is
Speaker 1:Wilmanitis connected? This is just a joke. He's not actually involved. Right?
Speaker 5:Well, Wilmanitis was a a what kind of fellow?
Speaker 1:Oh, a teal fellow.
Speaker 5:A teal fellow.
Speaker 1:That's right. Does go Dang. Pretty deep.
Speaker 5:And then we can go from Wilmanitis. He's obviously, you know, very popular on acts.
Speaker 1:He is.
Speaker 5:This is another kind of well, I at some point, I there were too many strings. I didn't wanna cover too much. Yes. But there's a lot of connections here. Obviously, we can go down to Dwarkesh.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:So he he's kind of another He's super connect power. Yeah. He's super
Speaker 1:connecter. He's interviewed
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Most of these folks.
Speaker 5:So let's go to let's go from from Dwarkesh to Gwen. Right?
Speaker 1:Okay. Yes.
Speaker 5:Gwen obviously connected scaling hypothesis, very influential on Ilia. Yes. This obviously goes back to OpenAI. Yes. It also goes to Carpathi.
Speaker 1:Yes. One of the co founders of OpenAI.
Speaker 5:Yes. Also, Tesla co Yes.
Speaker 1:Chief scientist.
Speaker 5:Autopilot. Yes. Back to Elon.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Okay. Let's go to this side of the board here.
Speaker 1:Yes. Who we got?
Speaker 5:So let's
Speaker 1:How is Let's see. How is Scarlett Johansson involved?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So so there's a couple ways she's involved. So so obviously, the first one, she was in Her, right? Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:Famously, when OpenAI voice mode was coming out, they wanted to do her voice because, you know, that's like the movie. And then she was maybe suing.
Speaker 1:And was it Sam or the official OpenAI account that just tweeted her? And that was seen with And it was unclear if the licensing was proper at that point. So there was maybe some backlash, maybe some legal Yeah. So letters traded.
Speaker 5:Who else was in her?
Speaker 1:Who else was
Speaker 5:Joaquin in Phoenix.
Speaker 1:Yes. Joaquin Phoenix
Speaker 5:He was based also the Joker. This is related to other things. But we okay.
Speaker 1:We're getting Joker fied. Yeah. It will happen.
Speaker 5:We're getting Joker so let's go back to ScarJo.
Speaker 1:In the Fast Takeoff, we all become Joker She
Speaker 5:was in a movie with another actor.
Speaker 1:Yes. Who?
Speaker 5:Joseph Gordon Levitt.
Speaker 1:What movie?
Speaker 5:Don John, I believe it's called.
Speaker 1:That's right. Don John. Yes. I remember
Speaker 5:the film. So so who is Joseph Gordon Levitt's wife? Deeper than I
Speaker 1:Woah. This does go deeper than
Speaker 5:I Levet's wife was previously a board member of OpenAI during the ousting.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 5:It took Sam Altman out. Wow.
Speaker 1:It's all connected.
Speaker 8:Like, can you
Speaker 5:not see this?
Speaker 1:It's so clear now.
Speaker 5:Okay. So so now we're in kind of this Yes.
Speaker 1:You ousting thing.
Speaker 5:Yes. This is all connected here. Yes.
Speaker 1:Melanie. Really It gets really jammed D'Angelo.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Because I I we can go from here to EA and then to Eliezer.
Speaker 1:Eliezer, of course.
Speaker 5:Right. And here here's, you know
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:Eliaser's first organization, MIRI, Machine Intelligence Research Institute Yes. That was, I believe, early on funded by PT.
Speaker 1:Okay. How is Eliaser connected to Grimes? Is that Grimes something?
Speaker 5:Well, okay. Do you not remember this famous picture between Grimes, Eliezer, and Sam?
Speaker 1:Oh, I do remember this. Yes. Good. Good. Thank you.
Speaker 1:I completely forgot that image. That is that that is lore.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Okay. So then Okay. Lieser, very influential on this famous book about safety Yes. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.
Speaker 1:Okay. Bostrom. Yes.
Speaker 5:He is kind of this online
Speaker 1:Yeah. Philosopher.
Speaker 5:Almost part of the blogosphere a little bit Sure, sure. And connected to Scott Alexander, right, who was on Dorkhush's podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He was AI 2027, part of that crew, right?
Speaker 5:Or loosely No. He was a commentator on Oh, I guess he I think he was actually an adviser on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't
Speaker 8:know if
Speaker 5:he was a co author
Speaker 1:or not.
Speaker 5:He's involved. He's
Speaker 1:implicated. He's a is. It's never been clearer that there's a connection.
Speaker 5:So let's go okay. Let's go back to our cash from here. He was on the podcast. Yes. How
Speaker 1:did Will how did Will catch catch a red string just from being a poster on X? Oh, he also works at OpenAI.
Speaker 5:He was just through oh, Will oh,
Speaker 1:Will the p q.
Speaker 5:Oh, Oh, well, he's yeah. Mean, he's at x AI. He, you know No.
Speaker 1:No. He's he's on X. He's at OpenAI. AI.
Speaker 5:Right? Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Okay. Right. Things make stuff here. Got it.
Speaker 5:Okay. But okay. We're at Dwarkech.
Speaker 1:Yes. At Dwarkech. Back to Dwarkech.
Speaker 5:Yes. An early guest of Roger Kesh was Tyler Cowen.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Now Yeah. That makes sense. Tyler Cowen runs the the Progress Studies Institute Yes. I think that's
Speaker 6:what it's
Speaker 1:called Okay.
Speaker 5:With Patrick Coulson.
Speaker 1:Woah. Now Oh, this does go deep.
Speaker 5:Patrick Coulson, famous for being Irish.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, okay.
Speaker 5:Okay. And we see Now we're getting here geopolitical. This is linked with a lot of, you know Yes.
Speaker 1:Who else is Irish?
Speaker 5:Irish cabal, some kind of
Speaker 1:True state. We see Barrene. Conspiracy. Yeah. Will O'Brien.
Speaker 1:See
Speaker 5:Jordy John.
Speaker 1:Jordy. Yeah.
Speaker 5:We're both Irish. Joe Lonsdale, I believe.
Speaker 1:Oh, he's Irish? No way.
Speaker 5:I I believe
Speaker 4:that is true.
Speaker 5:I have to fact
Speaker 1:check that. I have no idea.
Speaker 5:I think that's true. But, I mean, the the main connection here is Ireland to the Illuminati.
Speaker 1:The Illuminati are Irish? Why are they Irish?
Speaker 5:Well, it's just, you know, general conspiracy. And then here, we get a little off the rails. You see George Soros and Fauci connected with the Illuminati as well. Okay.
Speaker 1:I'm saying you're
Speaker 2:saying we're one degree away.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We're not beating the allegations here.
Speaker 5:Okay. But let's stick with Illuminati. Let's go up to Brian Johnson. Right?
Speaker 1:Okay. How is he connected to all this?
Speaker 5:Well, there's some sense rumors about, you know, blood of of children, maybe
Speaker 1:Sure. Okay.
Speaker 5:Transfusion or something. But but really, Brian Johnson is part of this kind of health movement. Yes. So who else is part of that? Obviously, Andrew Huberman.
Speaker 1:Yes. Andrew Huberman, of course.
Speaker 5:And so he's a, you know, health
Speaker 2:influencer And it runs here. Now you're kind of in the category of just experts broadly. Yeah. So that takes you over to Joe Rogan.
Speaker 5:Yes. Obviously, because, you know, he's a health influencer but really he's a podcaster at heart.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:So so now we're in this kind of manister. We see Theo Von, who's obviously connected in many ways to to Alexander Wang
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:To to to Zac, to Sam.
Speaker 1:Theo Von's really I mean, he could potentially be at the center of this whole thing. Yeah. For sure. Potentially. I mean Given how
Speaker 5:many Really, in the past year, he's become kind of a tech power player.
Speaker 1:That's the point of all this, all this registering. You have to see who has the most connections. Mas has got two. TBPN has, like, 12.
Speaker 2:And I see raw milk up in the left corner.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How does raw
Speaker 2:milk You're kind dancing around that. Are you afraid to talk about Yeah.
Speaker 1:Raw milk? How's raw milk?
Speaker 5:So we're at Joe Rogan. Let's go back to Energy Human. Okay. So another kind of person in the health Mhmm. You know, area, Justin Mares.
Speaker 5:Yes. I believe Former guest. He is a fan of
Speaker 1:raw milk. He's a fan of raw milk.
Speaker 2:Certainly is.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Then we would see the second string here. Let's just follow this down.
Speaker 1:How does raw milk Jordan. Oh, Jordan implicate it.
Speaker 5:Feeding the raw milk allegations.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But then Cuban Cuban was was taking
Speaker 1:Cuban was anti. Yeah. He's not on the
Speaker 5:He didn't make the board.
Speaker 1:He didn't make the board because he's not he's not implicated.
Speaker 5:He would have made the board. I think the next iteration is is three
Speaker 2:d board.
Speaker 1:What's going on with
Speaker 2:Larry up there in the center?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So Larry is
Speaker 1:Who's he connected to?
Speaker 5:Larry's implicated in a lot of ways. So let's just stay
Speaker 1:here
Speaker 5:for So a so so we're in this kind of, you know, podcasting space. Obviously, David Senra. Yes. James Dyson.
Speaker 1:James Yeah.
Speaker 2:Latest episode. Look. I mean, this is a very pure that's the most pure place on the board. Right? Yes.
Speaker 2:Hanging out on its own. Just connected to Senra.
Speaker 1:Well, he's connected to yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. James Dyson's just in his lane. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just hanging out in Founders Podcast.
Speaker 5:Exactly. But let's go from from Senra to Larry Ellison. Right? There's been a, I think Three episodes. Episodes.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's been
Speaker 5:Larry Ellison. Yeah. Larry Ellison is also Clear your ties. A lot of ways to Sam because of the, you know, the deal, but also to Elon, right? This famous
Speaker 1:He wrote a billion dollar check.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think I recommend $2,000,000,000 but whatever you think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Help fund the buyout. I see Rahul Sunwalker
Speaker 3:on there.
Speaker 5:Exactly, yeah. So Rahul is kind of an interesting person here. So he's connected to GrowingDaniel obviously because they did this famous stunt. Yes. His company is in YC Yes.
Speaker 5:Which again, I think we covered YC before but obviously Sam
Speaker 1:Yeah. All adds up now.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It pretty obvious there. Delian.
Speaker 1:Makes sense.
Speaker 5:YC. YC is also I mean, there's not a lot of strings here, but you can you could, you know, pull a lot of strings
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Just from YC.
Speaker 1:Now take me through the chessboard. What's going on over there?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. So let's go let's just start with PT again, right? Okay. So famous chess player.
Speaker 1:It all comes back.
Speaker 5:Famous chess player. Yes. So obviously, connection there. David Sacks also
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. They played chess together in that famous image.
Speaker 5:Where where Sacks is beating him. Yes. And then, yeah, we see from chess, we see two other famous chess players. Yes. Botez Sisters and Magnus Carlsen.
Speaker 1:Clearly
Speaker 2:They
Speaker 4:related to this.
Speaker 5:Were were I believe they were speaking at the All In Summit.
Speaker 1:Oh, they were.
Speaker 5:I don't know about this most recent one, but in the past, they certainly have.
Speaker 1:Puzzle pieces are starting to fit together.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So so chess is is is a board game. Right? What's another board game? Go.
Speaker 5:Lee Seedull. Yes. Woah. The famous let me let me go over here.
Speaker 1:Also cigarette smoker.
Speaker 5:Exactly. Yeah. Lee Seedull go to smoke. During the the famous DeepMind AlphaGo.
Speaker 1:That's what happened. Yeah. Remember.
Speaker 5:So so then obviously So he's connected to Dennis Yep.
Speaker 1:From DeepMind.
Speaker 5:Then we we see the rest of
Speaker 1:The Google team.
Speaker 5:Google here. We see Eric Schmidt again connected to PT
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:In, you know, their famous debate. Yes. You know.
Speaker 1:Is that Will Brown?
Speaker 5:Will Brown.
Speaker 1:How is he?
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 5:So Will Brown is I think you're letting him off easy here. Will Brown is teal backed
Speaker 1:Okay. Yes.
Speaker 5:Because prime intellect.
Speaker 1:Prime intellect, of course.
Speaker 5:Also frequent engager
Speaker 1:Reply guy?
Speaker 5:With Rune. I'm Reply guy.
Speaker 1:That'll get you on the board these days. If you're a reply guy into Rune
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you're going back and forth with Rune, So you're on the
Speaker 5:in Rune, there's also a lot of strings coming out up here. He's he's has his hands in a lot of lot of places.
Speaker 1:Yes. Fingers in a lot of pies.
Speaker 5:Exactly. Donald Boat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How's Donald
Speaker 2:Boat linked to?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So so Donald Boat was also one that I I could've had a lot more strings coming from. Mhmm. But the main one was I mean, Donald Boat's real recent rise to fame Yes. Asking Sam for a GPU Yes.
Speaker 5:Which was sent.
Speaker 1:It was sent.
Speaker 2:And he also just offered Sam some rice. I think he's Oh, really? I didn't hear
Speaker 1:about this.
Speaker 2:Got about 600 pounds of rice on some online arbitrage, and he was offering it out.
Speaker 1:Symbolism will be his downfall potentially. Let's figure it out.
Speaker 5:And then, obviously, Will was also heavily implicated in in these kind of Donald Boat sagas.
Speaker 1:Yes. I believe he sent him a CPU case.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think I mean, those are I would say those are mostly the broad strokes. I
Speaker 2:think you're close to figuring it out.
Speaker 1:I think it's pretty clear now. I think I understand.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So that that's kind of like, if you wanna think about OpenAI in like an easy way, like, who's Yeah. Kind of who's kind of, you know, making a lot of the decisions, how are they being influenced This because they're a not making the direct
Speaker 1:simple way to understand OpenAI.
Speaker 5:I would say this is kind of a good picture. Is good to start at least.
Speaker 1:Who players are.
Speaker 2:Masa, he didn't cover Masa, but he's he's sitting, you know, sort of quietly, confident, you know. Yeah. Not totally in his own lane, but not, you know.
Speaker 1:So he's the connection between Sam Altman and Donald Trump on Stargate. Yes. He was he was announcing the Stargate project.
Speaker 5:Obviously, Trump is linked to a lot of these people like, Sergei
Speaker 1:David Sachs.
Speaker 5:Just because of the recent dinner.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. They had dinner together.
Speaker 5:That merits some spring. Here's the sheik of UAE. Okay. I think there is some Stargate development
Speaker 1:Star Gate, going UAE. Yeah. They're working on it. Well, thank you for taking us taking us through it at all. It's pretty crystal clear to me, Jordy.
Speaker 1:What do you think?
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah. I mean, it's surprised it took people this long to kind of crack the code.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:It's all been it's all been out there in the open. Yeah. Symbolism will
Speaker 1:be there down. Pretty pretty easy. Pretty easy to figure out. Well, thank you for the hard work, Tyler.
Speaker 2:Well done. Done. All it took was one intern and an all nighter. Yes. And I guess a gap semester.
Speaker 1:We gotta load up all this into Julius and analyze it, find more connections. What analysis? Do you wanna run chat with your data and get expert level insights? In seconds, we saw Raul up on the board. They're loved by over 2,000,000 users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG, and Zapier.
Speaker 1:Let's continue. Rune, also on the board, was on the time line talking about making the argument that we are currently in the fast takeoff scenario. Very fun post. He says, Right now is the time where the takeoff looks the most rapid to insiders. We don't program anymore.
Speaker 1:We just yell at Codex agents, but may look slow to everyone else as the general chatbot medium saturates. And so Prinz, there's a bunch of reactions to this. We'll we'll go through it. Prinz says fast takeoff does not require automation of AI research. The loop starts when AI researchers' productivity starts accelerating due to availability of better and better AI models, including coding agents.
Speaker 1:Super Dario says, the that the this is a this is a little bit of a confusing post, but he says, Dario was wrong about 90 of coding being done by AI boys in shambles. So if you were if you were thinking that 90% of coding would not be done by AI, you are in shambles because 90% of coding is being done by AI. There's also
Speaker 2:And we have Alex who's running Codex at OpenAI coming on Yeah. Later today.
Speaker 1:We will we will press him on, like, are we are we just writing 10 times as much code? Or are we writing the same amount of code, just 90% more efficiently? What's actually going on? There's Are a lot of
Speaker 2:replacing engineers yet? Or are we just now that engineers can make do 10 times
Speaker 1:Is much just more leverage more
Speaker 2:of them.
Speaker 1:Yes. What abstraction layer are we operating? And then also just how much is just raw coding a gate to better and better superintelligence? Is that the critical path? Is it just an engineering problem where you need to write a lot of code?
Speaker 1:Or is there something where we need a vast amount of I was listening to Mark Zuckerberg on Dwarf Hash this morning, and he was saying that he's not a believer in fast takeoff because he thinks that at a certain point, it just takes time to marshal the resources to build all the chips and a certain amount of time to build all the infrastructure to generate all the electricity and that that will act as a natural slowing function. But there's some good economic news. There's a variety of different data points that we've been looking at to track how fast of a takeoff are we in. Are we going exponential? Or are we on our sigmoid grind set?
Speaker 1:And will we be plateauing at some
Speaker 2:That'd a good name for somebody's alt account.
Speaker 1:Sig Sigoid grind set. I mean, it's just progress historically has been a series of sigmoid functions. Yeah. And overall, progress looks smooth when you zoom out. But if you go inside of a of a chip company, inside of Intel, like the the creators of Moore's Law, Moore's Law looks very smooth, but if you actually interview the people inside of Intel, they'll tell you that there were tons of little gains that then plateaued, and they added all those up to get incremental gains.
Speaker 1:And when you zoom out, you see density of the transistors and the cost per performance increasing exponentially. But it was a lot of hard fought wins along the way. Yeah. And we're probably seeing something similar in AI. Well, if you need a generative media platform, if you're a developer, go to Fall, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.
Speaker 2:Look at those logos, John. Adobe, Shopify, Canva, Core, Perplexity Love it. Genspark, and many more.
Speaker 1:Dean Ball is replying to Roon. He says, if this mirrors anything like the experience of other Frontier Lab employees and anecdotally it does, it would suggest that Dario's much mocked prediction about AI writing 90% of code was indeed correct, at least for those among whom AI diffusion is happening quickest. And and Mark Zuckerberg's been on the record saying that he thinks that Meta will write 90% of code with AI as well. And Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has also said that the amount of code that's being written by AI is growing exponentially and is probably on the path to being 90% AI written. Certainly haven't laid off 90% of the engineers, and so there's some interesting dynamic going on there.
Speaker 1:But we'll Yeah. We'll continue to monitor it.
Speaker 2:On on Janae at at Andreessen's
Speaker 1:He's been on Tare. He's posting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's been posting it up. He says AI models with consumption consumption usage based pricing are decimating seat based pricing in ways most teams don't understand yet. SaaSpocalypse in full swing. He had some some some good supporting charts on that yesterday showing a bunch of, you know, seat based SaaS companies down into the right.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. Very tricky. We've seen some of them reposition. I mean, Salesforce, I think, like, over a year ago, Marc Benioff was saying, like, we're going to outcomes based pricing on on AI agents.
Speaker 1:We're gonna we're gonna charge per resolution, per value. But it feels like some of these models are really sticky and some a lot of the clients are like, we like our current setup or we're gonna go somewhere else. And it certainly allowed other people to kinda eat off their
Speaker 2:Outcomes based pricing when you're providing software to manage a process
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Is difficult. Yep.
Speaker 5:Because What's outcome?
Speaker 2:If if somebody's selling, for example, like coding agents and the and the agent can do something Yeah. And there's a certain economic value to that and somebody's saying, well, if I had an engineer do this, it would have taken them this this much time. It has like a clear value. But if somebody's using Salesforce Mhmm. To close a $20,000,000 deal, are they gonna wanna pay Salesforce some percentage of that just because they had that when it could've been, one sales rep just like grinding to get that deal done.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Lot lots of lots of questions for the public company SaaS CEOs. A lot of them will have to set up new narratives for how their pricing works going forward. They should be able to bring their products in line with consumption based models, but I wonder how difficult it will be for them to actually convince their customers to switch over to something that's more
Speaker 2:Yeah, which the alternative is I mean, Palantir specifically has said, we're doing value based pricing. Right?
Speaker 1:We're gonna
Speaker 2:we're gonna you're gonna get this much value from what we're doing for you. Yep. And we're gonna charge you this much. Yep. And you can run the calculus.
Speaker 1:And prices are high.
Speaker 2:So prices are high. But the example I think we were covering yesterday said, somebody's willing to pay $10,000,000 to do something that's gonna make or save them $100,000,000 That's a trade that people
Speaker 1:Yeah. Will does seem highly aligned when it can work. And so, I mean, it makes sense that so many of these companies that have the new business model are kind of ramping so quickly. And that's certainly the the result of the like, those crazy revenue ramps that we've been seeing. Anyway, get your brand mentioned in Chateappity with ProFound.
Speaker 1:Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Get a demo. David Senra has some sage advice from David Ogilvie.
Speaker 2:The investor in ProFound. Yes. He rarely invests. Rarely.
Speaker 1:David Senra says, quoting David Ogilvie, I admire people who work with gusto. If you don't enjoy what you are doing, I beg you to find another job. Remember the Scottish proverb, be happy while you're living for you're a long time dead. It's a good message. Find something that you love doing and stick with it.
Speaker 1:Work with gusto. And he's not talking
Speaker 2:What's going on here with World Labs?
Speaker 1:Yeah. If we can pull this video up. So this is one of the latest persistent generative three d worlds. So World Labs is Fei Fei Li's project. She's hiring generative AI model optimization engineers, biz ops folks, research engineers, lots of different folks.
Speaker 1:But they have a new world model that we can play the video for and see this. This is generated in real time. I think they upload a single image, and then you can move around it. And all of this is you like the music? It's pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it does feel like a video game.
Speaker 2:It's very pleasant.
Speaker 1:I I I I have a big question about how this productizes still. I was noodling on it months ago when we or maybe it was a few weeks ago when Google came out with their model. Tyler, do you remember that?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, so so this is were you talking about, like, the the video model that you can control around?
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. Yes. This is the same thing. Right?
Speaker 5:No. So so this is different. So this is you can actually go on. If you go to marble.worldlabs.ai
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:On here right now. It's pretty
Speaker 1:You can play with it?
Speaker 5:Yes. So if you move around, it's a Gaussian splat. Okay. Yeah. So it looks really good.
Speaker 5:And then if you keep going, you'll start to notice the little artifacts and stuff. And then if you go far enough away from the center spot where the world was originally generated, you'll notice it's you know, completely, like, random, like
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:So so yes. This is a different like, completely different architecture than the
Speaker 1:Than the Google one? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Because that was basically just a video model. Sure. But it would have the overlay of the keyboard. And then when you would interact with the keyboard, it would overlay, like, the keystrokes onto the video, and then it would continually be, like, rendering new frames. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So this is just like this one, it it generates the world, the Gaussian splat once, and you can just, like, move around in it. But it's not like a video that's constantly being rendered new.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it looks really weird once you leave. This is bizarre. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I remember Gaussian splats being popular, like, a year or two ago.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And then they sort of fell out of favor. I it felt like they were very compute intense just to generate a single one, and we never got to, like, the one click app that people can just download and then play with. There was no, like, game mechanic built around it. It was very much like tech preview mode.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I the the big thing that came out with Gaussian Splats, like, yeah, probably a year ago, was that it became very easy to render your own. So, like, I made one I think it's on my website, but it's basically like my room
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:That I made. And you like if you have like a if you can shoot on raw, you basically take a ton of pictures of your room
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:From all different or whatever it is Yep. From a bunch of different angles. Then you can like
Speaker 1:Load those up.
Speaker 2:Then you
Speaker 5:load those up. You basically train a model to figure out where the images were taken. Sure. And then from there, you can train a model from that, which you can do on So
Speaker 1:it's everything?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I trained it locally on my Oh, did? Okay. So it's not that compute
Speaker 1:you remember roughly how long the training run took on
Speaker 5:the So I have a forty ninety. It took, like, forty five minutes.
Speaker 1:Well, that's not that bad.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Not bad at all. Yeah. But this So
Speaker 1:you imagine with optimization, you could wind up and if you're running on server quality hardware, you could imagine an iPhone app where you take some pictures, upload it, and then it's like push notification in five minutes or ten minutes.
Speaker 5:Yeah. For sure. Yeah. But this is the first kind of thing, at least I've seen, of where it's totally, like, generated. Like, I mean, usually when you see a Gaskin splat, it's of, like, a real physical location that someone's taken, like, drone shots of or something.
Speaker 5:But, like, I mean, these are very clearly, like, AI generated in some way. Like, they're maybe they trained on video games or something like that. But yeah, usually when you see a Gaussian splat, it's of a physical location.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you think of any practical application for these? Everyone always says, like, oh, you'll use it to train robots or, like, robotic models or something. Like, this is, like, synthetic data for for training robot like, robotic systems. But I I feel like there's a consumer app in here somewhere, whether it's, like, generating video game levels or something or like using this as some sort of pipeline for creation of some video game.
Speaker 1:I keep wondering, and this is a question we'll have to talk to the Meta team about tomorrow. I keep wondering about the like, we're getting close to a point where someone should be able to make a game as easy as they make a meme and post it on Instagram. But there isn't really a place where that lives right now. We've talked to a couple of YC companies that are like, we will vibe code an app for you that you can put straight to test flight. But I feel like we're going do a deep dive on Roblox at some point.
Speaker 1:But I feel like there's something that's going to happen in AI enabled Roblox world where can describe and be leveraging a lot of AI tools to describe a Roblox
Speaker 2:for AI will be Roblox?
Speaker 1:Maybe.
Speaker 2:Just they're definitely not asleep at the wheel here. We've to get some of their updated numbers. I think they were pulling
Speaker 1:Yeah. Brandon sent me the the the data. We're gonna do a whole deep dive on it. It's We should probably it's in it's in the deck at some point. But We
Speaker 2:should probably set up a UltraDome in Roblox that people can watch the show to get the next generation Yep. You know, hooked on.
Speaker 1:So Dextero has a post here that says, steal a brain rot game has broken all time high concurrent player records. Roblox topped out at 23,400,000, while Fortnite reached 542,000. Are these similar products?
Speaker 2:The platform wide record, I guess, was August 23. Roblox hit a record of 47,400,000 players across the platform.
Speaker 1:Wow. That is a ton. Roblox by itself has more monthly concurrent users than all of Steam, Xbox and PlayStation combined. And Jeremiah Johnson says, even the most chronically online people have no idea how staggeringly, unfathomably big Roblox is right now. Is Roblox a public company?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? They got out.
Speaker 2:Are they ripping? Had a Hindenburg Research.
Speaker 1:Woah. Hindenburg got blown out then because Roblox is way up. It's a 94,000,000,000 company now. There's a isn't there think I
Speaker 2:think there's
Speaker 1:a VC that David Center did a did an episode about, or at least like Matt and and kind of did a deep dive on, who who invested very early and did very well. Fantastic. Do you do you have any more context to
Speaker 2:add?
Speaker 5:I mean, not about robots specifically. Yeah. But I I think broadly, like, for for gaming, I think there's kind of, like, two ways to think about, like, how how we can have AI gaming. So so one is, like, the Google kind of strategy of of what they've been doing, where it's like the frames are literally, like, rendered real time Mhmm. Where everything is, like, all the mechanics Yep.
Speaker 5:All the, you know, the person, the the setting, it's all completely, like, generated on the fly. Yep. And then there's, like, this kind of strategy, which is where, like, the world is generated, but you're still gonna have, like the the mechanics of the game are still gonna be, like, written normally. Yeah. So, like, if you if you play around with this, you'll notice, like, there's no mechanics at all.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You just you can move around, but there's no interaction or anything. I assume they're they're working on, like Inventory.
Speaker 1:Health bar.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Or or even just, like, you can't go through the wall.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So, yeah. I I guess we'll see. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I wonder it feels like it'll be really slow. Like, I haven't even heard about a
Speaker 2:Gabe says IKEA has a Roblox store that they pay employees a real wage to work at.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's hilarious. So you can go shop in in Roblox. You can buy stuff in the in the metaverse. Wonder what
Speaker 2:kind of sales that drives or if it's just
Speaker 1:It's just 75% of Roblox's revenue or something. Just printing for IKEA. It's probably Roblox has gotta be bigger than IKEA. What's IKEA's market cap? I IKEA market cap.
Speaker 1:Let's see. Oh, it's wait. Not it's private. Interesting. Okay.
Speaker 1:Private company. Anyway, I I Oh, god.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Their IKEA's revenue, I think, is well beyond Roblox. Roblox? Way, way beyond.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah? How how big is it?
Speaker 2:For 2024, it was ā‚¬45,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Okay. So But, you know, it's not SaaS margins here. Like, there is a marginal cost to making a table and shipping But, yeah, I mean, it's been a business.
Speaker 2:Order of magnitude more.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I do wonder, like, it feels like even the basic LLMs, like, passed the Turing test. We have the ability to just, like, talk to an NPC in a way that's more convincing than the prescripted chats that go into most video games. And yet, I still haven't at least heard a successful story of just a game that broke through that's really leveraging GPT-four level technology.
Speaker 2:So interesting.
Speaker 1:And even the generated images, just being able to use a older mid journey model to generate textures on the fly. There's this game called No Man's Sky. Are you familiar with this? Probably not. Are you familiar with No Man's Sky?
Speaker 5:I've never played it, but I
Speaker 1:think Yeah. It So it's a space exploration game. You move around from planet to planet, and all the planets are procedurally generated. So they're generated somewhat randomly, but then they are, like, baked down into a database. And so there's a whole bunch of different variables that are randomly, like, different sliders for, the size of the creatures on this particular planet, the color of the plants on this planet.
Speaker 1:How much water? Yeah. Exactly. And all of that's generated and then saved into the database. And then but it but it creates this, like, kind of unlimited canvas to explore.
Speaker 1:You could do that in a much more aggressive way with generative AI, but I haven't seen anyone break through. I think it just takes time to actually implement this stuff.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, I I mean, that's kind of what, like, Genie three is. Yeah. I remembered what it was called.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Genie three.
Speaker 5:But it's just so compute intensive. I mean, they still are like it's very much a research preview that they can't run because it's so expensive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You would just think that there would be like if you go two versions back, you get a model that can actually be baked down to the point where it can run on an Xbox or run on a PC and can generally
Speaker 2:Alright, gamers. I got some breaking news for you.
Speaker 1:Give us the breaking news.
Speaker 2:TikTok's US business. Details are starting to emerge. One, the deadline for the ban has been pushed back. And details are coming out. The Journal has some reporting.
Speaker 1:What's the polymarket at? Let's pull that up.
Speaker 2:Polymarket is Must be crashing. Right? Yeah. So right now, there is a 24% chance that a sale will be announced by September 30.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:60% chance that it'll be announced by the end of the year. Mhmm. But the journal is reporting that TikTok's US business may be controlled by a consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake. Oh. And guess the last one.
Speaker 1:Larry Ellison, personally. Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaker 2:Their framework, The US and China are finalizing as talks shift into high gear.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:The arrangement discussed by US and Chinese negotiators in Madrid this week, remember we talked to Bill Bishop yesterday about the meeting in Madrid, would create a new US entity to operate the app with US investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest. The people said this new company would also have an American dominated board with one member designated by the US government. Existing users in I wonder if Trump ends up with with a stake
Speaker 1:With a stake. Uncle Sam. With Uncle
Speaker 2:Sam. Existing users in The US would be asked to shift to a new app which TikTok has built and is testing. People familiar with the matter said, TikTok engineers will recreate a set of content recommendation algorithms for the app Mhmm. Using technology license from TikTok's parent ByteDance.
Speaker 1:Okay. Iffy.
Speaker 2:US software giant Oracle, a long time TikTok partner would handle user data at its facilities in Texas. Both sides are still working out the final details of what the proposed deal and terms could change. Negotiations over TikTok came as both Washington and Beijing lay the groundwork for potential meeting between President Trump and Xi with Beijing pushing for a Trump visit to China. That would be that would be crazy. They said, thank you for they wanna be they want that meeting to happen somewhere where Trump can't fly the the latest.
Speaker 1:Alaska shot that
Speaker 2:was wild. TikTok plan to comply with US law tech industry executive argue its algorithms must be created and maintained by an American engineering team insulated from Chinese influence. Beyond the financial terms, deciding how to handle TikTok's algorithm has been a tricky part of the deal because it is seen as arguably the most lucrative part of the company. We've got a deal on TikTok. I've reached a deal with China.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna speak with President Xi on Friday to confirm Trump set out of the White House Tuesday morning before leaving for a trip to The UK. These are very big companies that wanna buy it. The framework of the arrangement came together. Anyway, it's starting to just repeat it itself here. But it was big.
Speaker 1:Well, if they may if they wanna manage their software development process in the new American TikTok, they gotta get on linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products, Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, product road maps. I think if Andrew Reason's buying it, it's gotta be all Mark and Ben show. Whole the whole feed, 100% of TikTok content should be the market bench show.
Speaker 2:And Elon Elon, the attention he gets on tax.
Speaker 1:Sixteen z, it's a media company that monetize through venture. Put the Andreessen content. Put your thumb on the scale. Brent, Eric Torenberg, we want your thumb on the scale.
Speaker 2:Give Every other Give
Speaker 1:give TPN a little bit of a snack in the new TikTok, but I want mostly Andreessen Horowitz content with a couple American diamonds and vibe reels, please. That will make America great again. This is the plan.
Speaker 2:Portfolio company launch video, one Mark and Ben clip Yes. One regular
Speaker 1:Just make the whole feed. Every single TikTok user, they'll love it. There won't be any backlash. I want the thumb on the scale. Truly, I would I would I would that would get me to use TikTok.
Speaker 1:I enjoy the Mark and Ben show. I enjoy Andreessen's content. It'd be a lot of fun. Anyway, our buddies over at public.com launched a new account on X that you can use to just tag, like, ask Grock. Grock, is this true?
Speaker 1:You can tag at underscore at gen underscore assets, and you can tag it in any thread that mentions multiple tickers. And this bot will automatically run a backtest on their performance against the S and P 500. So I went to a a post that was about Tesla and Google, and I asked how are they doing as a pair, and it immediately told me that I massively missed out because over the last ten years, those two stocks, the tech titans, as they're called here, had ten year returns of 7,548. Of course, you'd have to you'd have to deal with a max drawdown of 56%. But if you held, you did very well with a 70% annual return, and it gives you the it gives you the the link right there if you wanna jump in to that.
Speaker 1:So if you're interested in investing, head over to public.com, investing for those that take it seriously.
Speaker 2:Very cool new
Speaker 1:Ashwin. Who is we we we've featured him on the show before. Ashwin says he's opening a coffee shop in Southern California. Here's how he's gonna win. He's gonna open at 5AM.
Speaker 1:He'll have baristas from New York, so it doesn't take eight minutes to make your cortado. I don't know what a cortado is. That must be some sort of coffee beverage, but, I like the idea of opening early. We were running into this earlier. We we left the gym, and there's this there's this cool new cafe on the corner that's making a big push into breakfast.
Speaker 1:They don't start serving breakfast till 9AM. And we were like, they didn't get the memo about the great lock in. How can you compete in the great
Speaker 2:breakfast wars? I've thought it's funny. Have you have you have you tried to get a coffee early in Manhattan? No. That's terrible.
Speaker 2:It is? You're in a if you're
Speaker 1:a I true thought he Ashwin is saying that it's the best in New York.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I've had rough I mean, if if you wake up at 05:30 in New York, good good luck getting a a coffee that's not, you know, something something premade at at Whole Foods
Speaker 1:or whatever. Bring a bring a case of the Mattaina podcast in a can.
Speaker 2:This post was funny. The zoo landerification of Kyle Simani should be studying.
Speaker 1:He's looking great. He's dice.
Speaker 2:He's called a glow up.
Speaker 1:It's a glow up.
Speaker 2:Think this happened. I've seen this happen to other people that make billions of dollars. It tends to happen, but it's not always. And I love to see it.
Speaker 1:He locked in. He's clearly hitting the gym. He's looking fantastic. I think this last image is from his guest spot on our show too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The very
Speaker 1:Which I love. So I'm glad that we're we're helping people This understand is the zoo
Speaker 2:land sulfate fat to fund the treasury
Speaker 1:working out. He's just getting in the gym. Yeah. We'll have to get his routine. We got Alex Karp's workout routine.
Speaker 1:We'll have to get everyone's workout routine.
Speaker 2:Geiger Capital here,
Speaker 1:S and P
Speaker 2:five hundred, all time high. NASDAQ, all time high. Gold, all time high. Bitcoin, all time high. Home prices, all time high.
Speaker 2:Time to cut rates.
Speaker 1:Time to cut rates. Cheers. Geiger Capital was on a tear. Another post. The Atlanta Fed is now projecting that Q3 GDP will be 3.4%, a massive expansion.
Speaker 1:The US economy is running hot. I mean, GDP growth is good. I wouldn't really call that running. I mean, it's running a little hot, but you don't wanna necessarily wanna pull that back if you're
Speaker 2:So hard to going. It's
Speaker 1:We're in a fast pace
Speaker 2:up somewhere. Is all data is is either real or fake. That's all I'll say.
Speaker 1:I know what's driving the the higher GDP growth for sure. It's businesses spending less time on sales tax compliance.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:They got on numeralnumeralhq.com. They put their sales tax on autopilot. They're spending less than five minutes a month on sales tax compliance, and now they're growing their businesses. They're growing The US economy. It's all Like crazy.
Speaker 1:America empire continues. The most extraordinary Fed meeting has yet to be kicked off or has yet has just kicked off. This is from CNN. Federal Reserve officials are convening Tuesday and Wednesday for a pivotal meeting under unprecedented circumstances on Wednesday. At the conclusion of their two day policy meeting, central bankers are expected to announce their first interest rate cut since December to support America's slower slowing labor market with hopes that President Donald Trump's expensive tariffs might only have a limited impact on the
Speaker 2:The Fed decision in September on polymarket has a 163,000,000 of volume
Speaker 1:Betting on it.
Speaker 2:Currently pricing that's total volume. But currently pricing 9595% chance of a 25 basis point decrease.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:So, yeah. I mean, the market's at all time highs. Gold's gold's at all time highs. Bitcoin's at all time high at all time highs. But job growth during the summer was anemic, says CNN Business.
Speaker 1:Employers added an average of about 29,000 jobs in three months ending in August, according to Labor Department data, slightly higher than July's average, which is the weakest three month pace since 2010 outside of the pandemic. There are now more unemployed people seeking work than there are job openings. New applications for jobless benefits in the week ending September 6 rose to the highest level in early, nearly four years. If the Fed cuts, maybe that will stimulate investment in business, new, you know, take on extra debt that works its way through the economy, you wind up levering up
Speaker 2:and know, then got something crazy. Martin Shkreli shorting Opendoor.
Speaker 1:Oh, he is?
Speaker 5:Right
Speaker 1:Is this happening?
Speaker 2:Going into a rate cut is crazy.
Speaker 1:That is
Speaker 2:bold. He said, I shorted open today at $9.36. This is the first trade I've made in the stock. I will be doing diligence calls with former employees Mhmm. Customers, competitors, and hopefully management too.
Speaker 2:I will send invites to the calls or anonymous transcripts as appropriate. So
Speaker 1:he's becoming a provocateur. Yeah. I mean, he's he's taking up the mantle of so many short sellers before him. Not won't be making a lot of friends, but good luck to him. We already covered TikTok.
Speaker 1:You put this post in here. In Brazil, an Australian pilot,
Speaker 2:Yes. This popped up. In Brazil, an Australian pilot, Timothy James Clark, died in a plane crash with a 180 kilograms of cocaine on board. Mhmm. Drugs packaged with SpaceX branding.
Speaker 1:Yes. Why SpaceX branding?
Speaker 2:I have no idea. That's why. I just thought it was it totally It's
Speaker 1:a tech story.
Speaker 2:It's really Yeah.
Speaker 1:You you saw SpaceX and you were like, this is business news.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I like following the the
Speaker 1:You love the traffickers. You love them.
Speaker 2:It puts me to sleep and I can't I can't when I'm trying to fall asleep, I can't listen to I can't watch tech content. Yeah. Then my brain's gonna start working.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:I have to just follow the
Speaker 1:So the drugs were packaged with SpaceX branding. They were recovered from the wreckage of a
Speaker 2:sling aircraft. I just need to know the mindset of somebody who's like packaging, making making drugs look like they're SpaceX branding thinking, okay, if the authorities find this. Yeah. They're just gonna be like, oh, this is this is something from SpaceX. I don't need I don't need to dig in here at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What were they thinking?
Speaker 2:This is this doesn't look sketchy at all.
Speaker 1:This is blatant trademark infringement. You did not license this logo. I wag my finger on this. I do not like this. And a very odd photo of the culprit, the Australian pilot, Timothy James Clark.
Speaker 1:He has a very odd photo with some scantily clad women. But dark story, hope they prevent future drug trafficking since we do not endorse anything of the sort on We this
Speaker 2:do endorse any any members of our audience trying to get trying to give tips on Nicolas Maduro
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. On that reward that we got to stop talk the narco trafficking. We also got to get on fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive Bake Offs, number one ranking on g two.
Speaker 1:We also endorse chess, which was on the OpenAI board earlier. Joe Lee has a story here. My friend was a chess grandmaster at 14. By 15, government officials invited him to dinners, he was giving talks to thousands. Every other type of nerd has gotten their pop culture recognition except researchers.
Speaker 1:We're lucky to live in an era where the weird nerd is celebrated. Chess GMs post their moves on Instagram and it's cool, not weird. Tech founders are household names. YouTubers get invited to the Met Gala. Poker players have TV shows.
Speaker 1:Gamers have become Twitch millionaires. Researchers get maybe two celebrity moments, winning their state fair at 10 and a Nobel at 70. Unless you're Demis. Demis got a Nobel. What?
Speaker 1:How old is Demis? He's not 70. Beyond that, the people working on the world's most important problems are invisible to everyone outside their niche. Demis, the founder of DeepMind and the Nobel Prize winner, is 49 years old. Wow.
Speaker 1:What a run. He's got another fifty years in front of him just researching. Easy.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, he's on Xi's timeline, 01/1950.
Speaker 1:01/1950. He could be twenty years out from a midlife crisis. He could be at 75. Does that mean how old is Xi Jinping? Because if he's going live to 150, he's he's 70 in his two?
Speaker 1:He's 72. So in three years, he'll be half he'll be at half life expectancy. We should expect to see him picking up some sports cars, maybe Crashing crashing out a little bit. Out as a as a going through a midlife crisis at 75
Speaker 2:if
Speaker 1:he's going to
Speaker 2:be 100 he decides that I don't want to be in the party anymore. I want to do something else.
Speaker 1:I want to I want to just be an entertainer. Maybe I want be musician. Maybe he turns into a DJ.
Speaker 2:Or he wants to create a social network like Trump.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Maybe. Beyond that, the people working on the most important problems are invisible to everyone outside their niche. Researchers are the final boss of nerd culture that we haven't figured out how to celebrate. Time to change that.
Speaker 1:Tyler, what's your job? What is
Speaker 5:he talking about?
Speaker 1:What what what she. Jolie.
Speaker 5:Oh.
Speaker 1:Yes. We're celebrating. We are we are
Speaker 2:We're celebrating.
Speaker 1:We have we have figured out how to
Speaker 2:celebrate bottom boss. Researchers emailing us saying, please take me off the business list. I don't want the attention.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. It's true. And the traded cards, we need to continue to celebrate the final bosses of nerd culture, the researchers.
Speaker 5:I think they are being celebrated. And I feel like in SF, if you see, like, if you see Ilya walking around Oh, yeah. It's the
Speaker 1:You're taking paparazzi photos of Yeah. Of of him.
Speaker 5:People go to the the OpenAI, that that cafe that Johnny and Sam were at. Yeah. They're like, oh, I'm at the OpenAI cafe.
Speaker 1:Give us an update on hype.tbpn.com. How's that going?
Speaker 2:Well, the video completely flopped.
Speaker 1:It did. We maybe the Vibrio meta is off. Maybe something is tricky. We also it's very hard to to to draw attention to a URL in general. But if you're interested in participating in our little questionnaire, where are we in the AI hype cycle?
Speaker 1:You can go to hype.tbpn.com. And we have the full Gartner hype cycle there. Starts with the innovation trigger.
Speaker 2:So we should we should screen share this.
Speaker 1:Goes to the the peak of inflated expectations. Then, of course, the trough of disillusionment. And finally, the the plateau of productivity. And Tyler has shared some of the results. We're still collecting results.
Speaker 1:And the I believe that the the consensus estimate of where we are in the AI people putting cycle
Speaker 2:their hands up. They're putting their hands up.
Speaker 1:They're I think they're so the yellow dot is where Tyler is, just past the peak of inflated expectations. You're cooling off. Is that correct?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, I
Speaker 1:Justify what
Speaker 5:So I I don't know if I'm exactly there. I mean, that it's very rough. I would say I'm near the peak. I don't know if I'm on the left or right side of the curve. I don't know if we're going down yet.
Speaker 1:Okay. What about you, Jordy? Where are you? You're not in the trough yet? Hard to be in the trough given all the good news.
Speaker 1:The market's at an all time high. Products are shipping. Products are getting better.
Speaker 2:I'm effectively where the yellow dot is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just And coming
Speaker 2:off that doesn't mean things aren't hyped. It's just people realize, like, wait, it's just better search, You know? Yeah. We don't have, like
Speaker 1:There was I mean, if you were if you were following the Elias or Yudakowsky crew, it was, like, in next year, there's not gonna be any jobs, and you're gonna be fighting for your life in a Terminator scenario. Right? And it's like, if I'm not holding a gun mowing down robots, I'm in the trough of disillusionment because that's where my expectations were.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You can see the bulk is is basically where where my dot is, if that's how
Speaker 1:to speak.
Speaker 5:But you can see all the way on the left, there there is one dot.
Speaker 1:Yes. Did you see this, Jordi?
Speaker 5:Way on the left.
Speaker 1:So Did you see this? I don't know. Can we go full full screen on this? Yes. So there is one person who says, when when it comes to AI hype, we haven't even started yet.
Speaker 5:Okay. So I made a tweet about this. Yes. And then friend of the show, Jacob Rinimaki. Yes.
Speaker 5:That's him.
Speaker 1:That's him.
Speaker 5:He's all the way in the left.
Speaker 1:He's all the way in left.
Speaker 5:Rationale was basically, you know No technology trigger yet.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:We're we're at, you know, one ten thousand of of
Speaker 1:How crazy.
Speaker 5:Solar, you know, usage of the sun.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:We're not even close. I mean, we're, like, we're not even close to to what AI could be.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:So he's just mega AGI pilled.
Speaker 1:Oh, he is.
Speaker 5:We're not even close to
Speaker 1:being high enough. To being Until we
Speaker 2:have the
Speaker 1:Dyson sphere. Started.
Speaker 5:I mean, how can we be going down if we don't even have a Dyson sphere?
Speaker 1:That's a great take. I I love Jacob. He's so much fun. I also like that there's someone on there. There's a few people that said, yeah, we are the hype cycle's done.
Speaker 1:I'm in the plateau of productivity. We went through it. They experienced the full and I would love to know from those people. Maybe we should have someone on the show or ask them to write out a little bit more of their rationale for where they are. Maybe that's in the v two.
Speaker 1:We could have put your point and then write a little free text response on why you said that. Because for that person, what is their hype cycle? Like, obviously, is the innovation trigger GPT-one? Is it GPT three? Is it chat GPT?
Speaker 1:Like, the default assumption is probably innovation triggers chat GPT, then peak of it inflated expectations No.
Speaker 2:Transformer architecture.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you go back further.
Speaker 5:It's neural nets, if
Speaker 1:something Sure. Like Sure.
Speaker 5:GPTs are probably a little bit higher on the curve.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So maybe the trough of disillusionment was like year five of OpenAI as a nonprofit. And you're like, yeah, they Okay. They did Okay against DOTA, but they haven't really created anything. I was so excited about this.
Speaker 1:My my expectations were inflated a year or two ago, and now I'm really disappointed. But now ChatGPT comes out, slope of enlightenment, plateau of productivity is, hey. We're we're we're building in codex. We got Claude code. We got different products coming together.
Speaker 1:We're actually delivering value. That then they're in the plateau of productivity. I don't know.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think in in that scenario, it's like early less wrong posts. Those were the peak of inflated expectation. That You
Speaker 1:makes go down
Speaker 5:and then you see actual people
Speaker 1:playing. Okay. Well, we'll have to ask the folks who responded. And if you want to play along, go to hype.tbpn.com and vote for where you are in the AI hype cycle. One thing that's underhyped, customer relationship magic from Adio.
Speaker 1:Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. And we have our first guest of the show coming in to the TVP and Ultradome from the Restream waiting room. Woah. Look at this.
Speaker 1:How you doing?
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Woah. You're shocked.
Speaker 2:We're the gong for all you guys.
Speaker 1:We're hitting the gong.
Speaker 2:What's the news, folks? What's the news?
Speaker 8:I'll bring the hardcore team out. We launched Rocks to GA. Fantastic. Crossed 25,000,000 Rocks revenue agents running in the February. It's real.
Speaker 8:There's real ROI and we're coming. So we're ready for business and ready to go.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 2:What else yeah. What what else give give us the update since since the last time you were on.
Speaker 8:We we came on February. Yeah. We said we'll come back and launch. We've we've landed obviously, we still have RAM, Cognition, and some of the biggest AI companies. But we've landed the number one for kind of global 2,000 in banking, construction.
Speaker 8:Also, Saudi Aramco,
Speaker 1:New Mexico. We've built a
Speaker 8:sales team, which is amazing. They're they're they're now kinda going head to head with some of the big incumbents.
Speaker 1:Wait. So how are you positioning the product? Shouldn't you be dogfooding? Why do you have salespeople?
Speaker 8:Exactly. So we ran up until recently without a sales team. But now, we gotta go for market share. So we have a small elite sales team who can go basically work with boards who are rolling out kind of rocks revenue agents after the coding agents. So every customer has rolled out coding agents over the last year.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:Now now they're rolling out revenue agents, and it's a game of market share and delivering ROI, and and we're the fastest to it.
Speaker 2:Yep. What's the yeah. What's the competitive dynamic like? I I don't I don't know a bunch of other companies in in your guys' kind of like category broadly. Meanwhile, because of how quickly coding agents have got to market?
Speaker 2:I know I can name a bunch.
Speaker 1:The big question is like seat based versus consumption based. This is the debate that a lot of people are having on the timeline these days, the SaaS pocalypse or something. How are you thinking about pricing as a durable advantage against incumbents?
Speaker 8:Absolutely. So our incumbents are obviously Salesforce. I saw the Carp episode. Yeah. We're team Carp here.
Speaker 8:We focus on time to value. Like, we deliver ROI in ninety days instead of nine months. We focus on pay for agent actions. So the agents do work and customers only pay when the agents do work. It's not seat based pricing.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And the last is we do the Palantir style full service forward deployed model. Right? So you don't need consultants on on professional services firms to implement the software. We do the whole whole lot.
Speaker 8:So competitive dynamics is boards want ROI in a quarter or two so that they can change their hiring plans for next year. And we're just trying to basically pedal downhill and deliver kinda ROI fast. And it's only possible because of the team. Like, we can out ship the market and have built product that that works, and now is the time. So
Speaker 2:How big is the team today?
Speaker 1:I was about to ask.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So kind of obviously competing with a multi thousand thousand employee organization. So core applied AI is about 25 and and kind of field plus sales is about 10 more, so about 35 people.
Speaker 1:Wow. That's a crazy balance. I like that. That's great.
Speaker 8:Yeah. You try engineering as as much as possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then what what's the feedback cycle like from the sales folks that you have that are actually using the product? I feel like are you hiring folks from product management into sales roles or vice versa? Or are there some product management skills that are uniquely useful?
Speaker 8:It's a great question. And one of our sales leaders is actually a pseudo PM. So we have no PMs. No product managers. No product managers.
Speaker 8:We have engineers who ship, and then we have salespeople who ship ship revenue. So the feedback cycle is once customers, we are pretty much embedded with these customers. We have field engineers and fiber to cloud engineers. They feed it back to all engineers, and our engineers, everybody here, they're all founders. They are customer facing, and they take all that signal and we try to ship in days.
Speaker 8:So we ship multiple times a day. We have major release every week, and and that's kinda been the the flywheel.
Speaker 2:What is the typical forward deployed engineer process look like for your guys' product? I imagine it it's not quite as complex as some of the build outs that Palantir is doing for different companies. So is it down to, like, you need to land an engineer at a company for or or a small team for a couple weeks, a week, a few days? What does that actually look like?
Speaker 8:Absolutely. So we try to do ROI ninety days, but the first three weeks is essentially set up. So we don't do any core engineering out in the field. So that's all done in San Francisco. Yeah.
Speaker 8:What our four different engineers do is deeply understand the domain. So the number one global 2,000 in the construction, vertical is different than healthcare. It's than than kind of the military. So we try to really understand the domain, how do they do customer acquisition and success, encode that into our agents, and then we actually build training content to reskill the whole org. Right?
Speaker 8:So our core mission, if you remember, is to to build agents that makes the best better and then reskill the rest to give them a path to be kinda AI native. So that's kind of, what our field is doing. So supercharging and then reskilling.
Speaker 1:Well, I feel like the opportunity cost of having everyone on your team stand behind you for this interview is
Speaker 2:I'm gonna hit the gong.
Speaker 1:Insane. We're gonna hit the gong and let you get back to the important work that you do. But thank you so much for coming on TV again today.
Speaker 8:Thank, thanks for having us on, and, of course, we're all huge fans. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Congrats on all the progress, guys.
Speaker 1:Super impressive. Cheers. Bye. Let's go to this post on the timeline from Jerry Howell quoting the Internet hippo. It this is this screenshot looks aged.
Speaker 1:Have you seen this screenshot? It looks like it's looks like it's screenshotted multiple times. It it it has, like, a lore to it.
Speaker 2:It's vintage.
Speaker 1:In the Internet Hippo says, I stepped away from my computer for a moment. When I returned, it was building something. I did not ask it to do this. We're not ready for what's coming. Tyler, do you have any idea what this image is in reference to?
Speaker 5:I I don't know.
Speaker 1:You've never seen that. Wow. Jordy, do you know
Speaker 2:what that's It's a screen saver, right?
Speaker 1:Do you know, like, from what machine or what era?
Speaker 2:Not a Mac.
Speaker 1:No. I believe it's like a Windows 95 screen saver. Maybe Windows
Speaker 2:just remember this like from like computer lab. Do you remember a school would have classes
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:Imagine For
Speaker 1:sure. That was one the coolest
Speaker 2:rated to just think that
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Used I learned to to type.
Speaker 2:A class called us, it was computer lab.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. No. You learn how to type on the computer. I you know, you get your your your words per minute up.
Speaker 1:Anyway, how did you sleep last night?
Speaker 2:Actually I put up the best
Speaker 1:rough night. You got me beat. Got, like, a 54. It was a rough night. But if you want to get Proof of work.
Speaker 1:Woah. 99. Let's go. Play some sound effects for yourself. Go to 8sleep.com.
Speaker 1:Get a pod five, five year warranty, thirty eight risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. We also
Speaker 2:You know what I did yesterday?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I reduced my caffeine intake by about a 120 milliliters.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's good.
Speaker 2:Dialing done something.
Speaker 1:Dialing it back. That's good. Well, we have Tony from Ingest joining the stream. He's in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him in.
Speaker 1:Welcome to stream. How
Speaker 2:are doing?
Speaker 3:Hey. Thank you so much for having me. How's it going?
Speaker 1:It's going great. Kick us off with just a brief introduction on yourself and then give us the news.
Speaker 3:Cool. Yeah. I'm Tony, one of the founders and CEO of ingest.com. I'm here just to talk about our series a with Altsummeta. We we closed the 21 nil round with them.
Speaker 3:Congrats. Thanks. Yeah. They're they're great people. Jammin's Jammin's a really, really smart guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And we also had the follow on and the continued investment from Andres in Notable and and Nafal, which is which is great. So, yeah, fun times. You know?
Speaker 1:Love it. Jordy, you wanna hit that
Speaker 5:Let's talk
Speaker 2:about I'll I'll wait till the end of
Speaker 1:the call. Okay. We'll hit the gauntlet then.
Speaker 2:Talk about what the company does. Yeah. What are guys up to?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. So we were we're we're an async execution platform, durable execution. We we we allow you to build workflows as step functions. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Make it really, really easy so that you abstract all of the infrastructure. Essentially, write a couple of different things like step run, step run, step run. We make sure they execute durably. You can write any code in those step functions. And a lot of people use this for AI and AI agents because turns out that, you know, that's a that's a really big thing as you heard all the time.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. How did you pick the level of abstraction that you're operating at? There's so many other like, there's companies that they just do the inference or they just do fine tuning or they go in even higher level and they sell a complete SaaS solution with an agent wrapped in it. You're in this kind of in between zone.
Speaker 1:How'd you land there? Do you see yourself moving up and or down the stack? It feels like such a flexible time right now in the market.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Super flexible. Super flexible. Maybe I'll talk about the origin stories, and
Speaker 1:then I'll
Speaker 7:talk about more.
Speaker 1:Be great.
Speaker 3:So I used to run engineering for a health care company, and health care is like, dude, health care is so hard. I would not recommend it. Really nice to help people, but the engineering is crazy. Yeah. Super workflow driven, and it would take months to build out what should take days.
Speaker 3:Know? When a patient does this, if they don't do something in a certain amount of time, x, y, and z. And so those are those are workflows. So we initially built the SDK to make it really easy for your product engineer that might be full stack to build these workflows without mucking around with infrastructure. So you don't wanna have to create workers.
Speaker 3:You don't wanna have to create queues. You don't wanna terraform new new things on Kafka. You just wanna write some code, deploy it in your existing code base, and have it work basically in a minute. And that, like, that level of abstraction is really key Mhmm. Because I think if everyone has access to the same models and if everyone has access to the same sort of compute, what really matters now is how fast you can iterate on your product, how fast you can actually build the experiences on top of those models.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And it turns out that, like, yeah, you can build agents for other people, but this particular layer that that executes the AI, that runs the workflows is really tough, and you have to have it done right in order to iterate fast. And so it's sort of this interesting sort of layer on top of the infrastructure that allows people to build and and execute. So that was kind of always the plan. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because I think, like, one of the things that we talked about is, you know, just infrastructure less infrastructure so that you can just write code, deploy it, and have it work, which is sort of a, I think, like, a modern version of what Terraform should be.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We we
Speaker 2:What what categories of agents are you most bullish on today and over the next year? Just Yeah, yeah. Because again, on the consumer agent side, felt like deep research was the first breakout killer app consumer agent. Before that, everyone was excited about agents but weren't necessarily daily, even weekly active users
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Of a lot of them.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's interesting. And you were just talking about with the with the with the person number four, you know, like,
Speaker 1:whole sales agents.
Speaker 3:Stuff. Right. Right. Forward deployed stuff, and you see a lot of, like, support. I think, like, for the day to day things that everyone uses internally, you know, like, it's it's kind of the the stuff that you're probably using day to day.
Speaker 3:Claude, Codex, that sort of stuff is, like, killer. You know? I use it for tests. It doesn't do distributed systems well enough for us right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But it's pretty it's pretty good. And then, like, in the future, you know, I think it's really interesting to see people craft experiences inside their own products. You know, like, Decagon and whatnot have done that for support for some time, which is super interesting. And I'm really, really curious where we go with context engineering and how people can build their own custom agents, which are essentially workflows.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So I'm like, day to day, for sure, the everyone the average ones that people are using. But you're like, you take nano banana, you throw that in a workflow, and you have this really sick agent experience on top of that. It's like, it's pretty good. The world is changing pretty fast, and it feels like everything will end up becoming this, which is craziness.
Speaker 1:How does how's SoundCloud using this? I think that's an interesting case study you have there. I'd love to understand more about how a company that just does, you know I think of it as like a music player, a library of music. Yeah. Like, what like, what's their strategy?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So music is tough.
Speaker 3:It turns out that every industry has a lot of depth that you wouldn't realize when you go into it. You know? Mhmm. Everything from, like, making sure that there's no, I guess, piracy, making sure that there's no Sure. Terrorism, making sure that if people wanna produce their albums and send it out to Spotify, iTunes, that entire music distribution is also kind of insane.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It requires a lot of workflows too. So there's a lot of stuff that you have to do to operationalize music, either distribution, production, content. And, essentially, they were trying to hack together this for for nine months. The CTO at the time found us somehow, and he had a lot of stuff up and running within a week.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 3:amazing. And the time to production was, like, insane from, like, nine months to one week. They ended up pushing us out to production relatively quickly within, like, the first few months. And I think I think they were live in maybe maybe, like, the first six weeks. So they use this for a ton of their stuff.
Speaker 3:I think they just shipped the ability to create vinyls your own music that you upload
Speaker 2:to Spotify.
Speaker 1:Like physical vinyls?
Speaker 3:Like physical vinyls. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna get the gong for
Speaker 1:physical vinyls. Yeah. Yeah. I want some Great, actually.
Speaker 2:We need we've been looking to make vinyl
Speaker 1:We wanna press the show onto vinyl.
Speaker 2:Of course. We've we've had people reach out and and complain that they they wanna listen to the show every day,
Speaker 1:but they only listen to audio. They've listened to the whole catalog, but they'd wanna listen at the highest possible fidelity. Do do you remember do
Speaker 3:you remember there was that Stripe thing they made that physical magazine back in the day?
Speaker 1:I don't know if you'd actually
Speaker 2:Like, with paper?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was
Speaker 1:like a physical magazine. This is from Stripe, the payments company. Wow. I know. I somehow missed this.
Speaker 1:I know Stripe They Press and the are print Maxis.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I know.
Speaker 1:I gotta get copy of that. That probably trades at a premium, probably in the muse it should be in the Business Hall of Fame, the Business Museum. That yeah. That yeah. That's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Well, we don't wanna keep you too much longer. Thank you so much for hopping on
Speaker 2:the Congrats
Speaker 1:the round. Round.
Speaker 2:I'll see you. We'll see you at the B.
Speaker 1:Say hello to all the folks at Altimeter. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 3:Take care. Bye.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Emmett Sheer has opposed the way that ChatGPT and Claude, etcetera, are all trying to be the portal for the entire Internet reminds me a good deal of the first Internet boom in Yahoo.
Speaker 1:I think the ultimate winners will wind up specialized just like last time, shopping, entertainment, search. So he's thinking Amazon, Netflix, Google, and we'll have similar breakouts. It's interesting. I don't know that I completely, like
Speaker 2:And this comment kind of puts them in the truth zone. Yeah. Be fair, Google Duane says Control Alt Dwayne says, to be fair, Google did become the portal for the entire Internet. Yahoo tried, but Google executed better. ChatGPT has already won for the moment.
Speaker 2:But whether they're the next Google or Yahoo of AI remains to be seen. They're doing a lot of things right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I wonder how much consumer AI or like Eminent
Speaker 2:Eminent fire fires back Yeah. To just to to close it out. Google's not a YouTube's Yahoo style portal. They're still way behind on shopping for specialists, for example. They are search first and foremost.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then also have extended into portfolio of adjacencies. It's not one interface to everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know. I I I do I do wonder how the consumer AI apps will fragment. We're obviously going to talk to the meta folks about personalized superintelligence. And we saw this chart that went up just recently about how people actually use ChatGPT, and there are some pretty clear buckets.
Speaker 1:Like, there are there are different people using different modes of ChatGPT from practical guidance, tutoring, teaching. Seeking information was 21% of searches. Writing was 28%. Multimedia, creating an image, that was 6%. And so you could imagine some of those getting peeled off and kind of becoming their own apps that are highly specialized.
Speaker 1:They tend to believe in aggregation. And like Ben Thompson has this point about Google. There was a moment when everyone was saying Google's cooked because of vertical search. So there's gonna be Yelp for restaurants, the Google of restaurants. They will do it better than Google can.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There will be travel sites. There will be mapping sites. There will be different sites for searching specific things that people will remember to go to. And Google really did change their entire model.
Speaker 1:They adapted. They improvised. They overcame. Yeah. And Well, I think there's question not ultimately damaged by vertical search.
Speaker 2:The question I mean, you have to kind of ask yourself how bullish you are on agents. Right? Because historically, you would search something in Google, and then you'd go to a stand alone. Maybe you'd go to a website or an application.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yet, there's a lot of websites and applications that I only maybe use once in my life, once Do a I actually want it? Do I do I'd oftentimes, I'd I'd prefer to have an agent, for example, like book me a hotel. Right? These are classic examples. And so I think the I think the paradigm is is shifting.
Speaker 2:But without further ado, we have Tomer
Speaker 1:Our next guest.
Speaker 2:Gusto coming in.
Speaker 1:From the Restream waiting room. Welcome, Tomer.
Speaker 2:How are
Speaker 1:you doing?
Speaker 7:Hey, man. Nice to guys. We're great.
Speaker 1:Me. So so much I'm for helping such a huge fan because I went through YC in 2012. I believe you were in the 2013 batch. Correct?
Speaker 7:We were in winter twenty twelve, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, winter. So is that I think winter at that point was after summer or maybe just before.
Speaker 2:It's usually after It
Speaker 7:is was March
Speaker 1:Yeah, it usually does come after summer. I remember that I was running the first payroll we ran for our YC company was just literally a $5,000 wire from one account to the next. And we were like, yeah, everyone needs to figure out what to do with the taxes. And then we got on Gusto, which was then, I believe, ZenPayroll, right?
Speaker 7:That's right.
Speaker 1:And solved a ton of stuff. It was an amazing experience. Yeah, Jordi and I have been using Gusto for a long time since.
Speaker 2:Ever since. Big big launch today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Take us through it.
Speaker 7:Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, very, very excited to be here. I'm also a big fan of yours.
Speaker 7:In fact,
Speaker 1:No way. There we go. There we go. Thank you. That's fantastic.
Speaker 1:And sorry. I need to stop you for a second before we get into lunch. Where are you? The the office behind you is teeming. Is this just your HQ?
Speaker 2:The same place that Josh was calling in
Speaker 1:for.
Speaker 7:It's remarkable. Thanks. Yeah. We're in Pier 70 in San Francisco. We actually have our office here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right next to the YC.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right in front of YC. Amazing. And today, actually, we have this showcase conference. We're doing it for the first time live, and it's really, really cool because you have hundreds of small businesses here, accountants who are all coming in, and we're unveiling a bunch of new products to them. So, you know, we have showcases twice a year.
Speaker 7:We've been doing it for a while. It's kind of our big, big two product moments of the year telling the world about all the new stuff you can do with Gusto. We start with payroll, expand it to benefits. We, you know, announced a couple of weeks ago about the guideline Guideline. Acquisition, pending approval
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:And, you know, all the different things that we've been doing over the year, time tracking, HR, and, you know, tax credits, compliance, and and other things. But, yeah, today, we're launching a bunch of really, really important functionality around cash flow.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So, you know, when I speak with small businesses, often what I hear is that that, you know, in the context of gusto is that the hardest thing that where they get frustrated the most and feel like most anxious and kind of unhappy is when they can't make payroll for their employees. Mhmm. They don't have enough money in their bank account. Right? And when you you dig into it and learn why and what's going on exactly, it's not that you don't make enough money as a business.
Speaker 7:The business is growing. They're doing really well. They're doing better than ever. So how can that be? Right?
Speaker 7:And it's all about cash flow. It's all about this tricky thing of, like, when does money come in and when money goes out. So often, know, think about it. Like, I talk with a customer who's like, know, they they do, like, equipment for, you know, different, you know, conferences and things like that. Right?
Speaker 7:Like, you know, lighting and AV equipment and stuff like that. So guess what? They need to buy the equipment and buy the stuff before the event, and they get paid thirty to sixty days after the event. Right? So you have all this money going out.
Speaker 7:You have payroll going out, all these expenses going out, and you didn't get paid yet. Yep. And this is, like, not a random, like, one off story. Like, this happens all the freaking time for small businesses, you know. And and that's true, like, for consultants that work before get paid and many other type of businesses.
Speaker 7:So that's what this showcase is about. I'm really happy to share more about, like, you know, this the the features functionalities.
Speaker 2:No. I I we're one of the few shows on Earth that actually wanna understand.
Speaker 1:I'm super interested. Have like Because, you we've we've
Speaker 2:run businesses our whole life. Yeah. I've been in that position, you know, early on with my first business where it's just like, oh, like, you
Speaker 1:know Totally.
Speaker 2:It's like every two weeks. It's like, you know
Speaker 1:They drain on the account.
Speaker 2:Public companies, they got the quarterly reporting. Maybe maybe it's gonna switch to every six months soon. But with a small business, it's like every couple of weeks, it's like that crazy.
Speaker 1:So I mean, where I want to start is like, this sounds like you're going to be lending money or bridging on a short term basis with small businesses who are on the platform. Where does the money come from? I feel like when we usually hear about a fintech company or a business to business company starting to offer some sort of credit like product, We usually hear, oh, well, they they have a facility on the other side. They raised money for this. They're not maybe funding it off their balance sheet.
Speaker 1:Like, what structurally, how does the the money flow to the actual customer?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Exactly. That's a that's a really, really great question. So, listen, there's a few kind of products here that come together in order to get, people to have better cash flow so they they're they're not late for their payroll.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:One is just, like, a set of functionalities about making faster payroll.
Speaker 8:Oh, sure.
Speaker 7:Payroll, you remember, often people need to run, like, the the historical standard is four days.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So you run it on Tuesday for people to get paid on Friday. That's four days of cash that could could could be in your bank account, and that makes a really big difference because payroll is often the biggest expense of customers that, you know, small businesses have.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So, you know, we are launching next day payroll. We're, like, we're launching same day payroll, and we're also launching instant payroll. So these are three new products all about making sure you have enough money in your bank account to the last moment. So that's
Speaker 2:How how do you how do you actually do that? Because payroll companies forever have loved probably loved to say, like, people will ask, can you make it instant? They say, it's not possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We've heard, oh, it's the ACH system. It's the government regulation. What what what's the unlock?
Speaker 7:Exactly. Okay. So so for these set of products, it's all about actually our relationship with the bank. So, you know, the nice thing about being well, one side, we're a tech company. We're still a startup.
Speaker 7:We look at ourselves as a startup.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:But on the other side, we've been around for twelve, thirteen years now. Over 400,000 small businesses use Gusto every day. And, you know, I knew you'd do that. I love it.
Speaker 5:I love it.
Speaker 7:I want a gunk too today.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:Always. You know, tell me when the gunk is coming. But, yeah, over 400,000 small businesses use our product every day. And, you know, with with that scale, we now have the ability to work with each individual bank and kind of create partnerships. So in the end of the day, we're actually not taking credit risk on it, and and it just uses the, you know, the kind of some of the newer rail rails that banks have.
Speaker 7:Sure. I can't go into all the specifics. Sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's not like us, but we didn't need to raise any money for this.
Speaker 1:But it's a technological solution, which is exactly what you want. You don't want just like, oh, wow. Now we have this great, massive liability that's growing on the balance sheet forever. Now I have to worry about justifying.
Speaker 7:One thing, though.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:There is one thing, though, which is, payroll bridge. So payroll bridge is, a different product. And that's, like, not about making payroll faster, but that's like even if you if you still don't have the money in your bank account, even on payday Yep. And you still need somebody to finance that that payroll, we can come in and help
Speaker 1:Or or maybe even just a piece of it because it's totally possible that I have a $100,000 in payroll going out, but I'm just 10 k short, and I don't wanna hold up everyone. So I could maybe take a smaller amount.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So so that happens more often than you would think. You know? Again, it's that kind of cash coming in, cash going out. So, we partnered with a company called Paraffin, as an embedded, partner Okay.
Speaker 7:Who's helping us with the loans here. So what happens here is, again, as a customer, you come in, to run payroll. Let's say it's a Friday. You need to pay instant payroll on Friday. And then, oh gosh, I'm missing 10 k.
Speaker 7:I'm missing $20,000, $50,000, whatever that is. You know, With our partnership with Paraffin, we take a look at all of your history, and we figure out, hey. Can we help you, kind of basically make that payroll on us, and then you're gonna pay us back later on? So that that's kind of that, piece. And I think, you know, honestly, it's the biggest, biggest, biggest pain point in the world of payroll.
Speaker 7:It's funny. Like, we've been doing it for twelve years. You would think like, oh, you've already innovated in everything around payroll. There's nothing else coming in. That's not true.
Speaker 7:Even twelve years later,
Speaker 1:it's more
Speaker 2:SaaS is forever.
Speaker 7:Kind of basic payroll stuff. Yeah. We're also doing it on the international payments, by the way. That's another fast payroll, faster international account issuer payments using stablecoin as, again, now technology that is available now was not available when we started.
Speaker 2:What percentage of of the businesses on Gusto do you think are, like, I'm I'm sure you looked at the data. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was this a big COVID There
Speaker 2:would have been opportunities to to launch this feature. You could have launched this a while ago. I'm sure you guys wanted to wait until there was regulatory clarity on stable coins. But was this something that customers were asking for? Because it's one of those things that that is it's it's helpful.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's helpful to both sides. Like the freelancer benefits because like they're like, okay, I got when the person hit pay, I got paid. I don't have to wait for, you know, it's it's ends up being more than four days. It can be longer than that. And the companies too, historically, would just be using these like, you know, random either like dedicated international payroll platforms or you know, special freelancer payments platforms, things like that.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So totally, I think, you know, the the the past couple years, again, there's new technology. So Yep. We can we can use now, and that's both on the banking side domestically as well as on the Stablecoin side. That's why we're able to do it today.
Speaker 7:It takes time until you you know, we work with these partners, and often, we're the biggest, kind of partner we they work with. And the reason is, you know, you may have a bunch of startups, technology, fintech companies that are using stablecoin payments or using, you know, kind of instant payments through banks, but they usually have small amounts. Payroll is huge amounts. Right? Tens of thousand dollars, sometimes millions of dollars per transaction.
Speaker 7:So, you know, you really a a of these kind of protocols fintech protocols, they come out, they have, like, a maximum limit. So we need to kinda work with the providers and get there. And then, yeah, you're right about the compliance side of it. Like, you know, we we work really, really closely to figure out that. Know, one of the things that we do is is, you know I think that that was a little buzzword before, you know, AI came in and, like, took away all the buzzwords.
Speaker 7:But compliance compliance technology. You know? So there's financial technology, fintechs, compliance technology. And in that world, you know, that's kind of what we do every single day. We think about how do we take all the compliance worries and anxiety that small businesses have that they don't want IRS knocking on their doors and then help them, you know, kind of figure out all the compliance for them.
Speaker 7:There's a couple more features that I wanted to talk about. So one is, just GustoMoney.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's a new platform. It's a new area for us. You know, when you think about Gusto, you always think about people. Right? Pay your people, onboard your people, benefits, all that stuff.
Speaker 7:Gusto money is us entering and expanding into a new world. So that's the world just just really focus on cash flow. So, you know, one of the things when we talk with customers is like, hey. Know, I get paid so much later. Wouldn't be like, can you help me get paid faster?
Speaker 7:Or, you know, when I pay my bills, like, oh gosh. That takes, you know, that you know, and they need to be paid immediately. Can you delay that payment for me? And that's why we brought in, invoice payments as well as, like, bill pay into Gusto, and we're gonna keep investing in that area because it's all connected. You know, payroll is your largest expenses, but you have a bunch of other expenses in the business.
Speaker 7:So if you bring it all together to one platform, I I think that we can really, really help people with that big anxiety around, not having enough money to run payroll and and kind run their business.
Speaker 1:Does that change are a lot of these different products feel like they might have different underlying economics? Do you think that they're like, the structure of the economic model of Gusto is gonna change over the next few years? Or is this sort of like purely additive? Like, how are you gonna think about actually underwriting like the core business? I don't know what your plans are for the future, but it does feel like some of these are are, you know, exchange fees or interest rate based or volume based.
Speaker 1:Others might be seat based. There's a variety of different financial models or economic models. Is any of that changing like the overall structure of where you think the business will be driving value in a few years?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. I think for us, you know, I would say, number one, we're really, really focusing on, understanding what are the biggest pain points for business for small businesses and figure out how we can help them. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Now sometimes it means, you know, business models are for different products are different, and we're okay with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:However, if you still zoom out at Gusto and you look at Gusto as a product and where we're going, by far, like, really, our our our majority of what we do is in terms of business model is software. Software as a service, you pay per employee, you pay for services, at very high margins. This is not like a, like a fintech sort of, you know, play. And as you noticed, we're using a lot of partners on the embedded side, when we do things, and, you know, that that are those type of kind of fintech businesses. And we really obsess and focus on the user experience to make sure that for the customer, they don't feel like they're being moved from one, you know, one system to another.
Speaker 7:It's all behind the scenes, all API. So for you, it's just one service. It's gusto. But, you know, that's kind of the core of what we do. We're really, really focused and and are really strong on the user experience side for small businesses.
Speaker 2:That's great. What's the most exciting thing in tech to you outside of payroll?
Speaker 7:In technology at all. Let's see. You know, I I I know And
Speaker 2:it's okay to say that that your your eyes never stray and that it's payroll The compliance. Compliance. Payroll compliance.
Speaker 7:I love compliance. Listen, I love compliance every single day. That's what I'm living and breathing. And, you know, with jokes aside, like, the truth is that when you talk with customers, this is not a cerebral sort of, like, analytical kind of, question and, like, you know, world for them. Like, for them, it's it's missing Friday night with their kids because of this sort of stuff.
Speaker 7:Right? For them, it's like, you know, the pain of, you know, the embarrassment of, like, needing to to call every single employee and tell them they got they they they can't make payroll on time. And then the employee on the other side sometimes, you know, you know, needing to manage all of that and what that means to your family. So, you know, for me, it's you know, I love technology. I live and breathe technology every day.
Speaker 7:I love your show. That always keeps me up to date to what's going on, in in the world of tech. But, you know, I think the the biggest connection for me and the thing that gets me going is that, customer, pain point and see what software can do to help them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fantastic. Amazing.
Speaker 7:Well Hey. I want you guys to come in here next time, though. By the way, we have we have the, again, the showcase Yeah. Here. Would be really cool.
Speaker 7:In six months, when we do the next one, it would
Speaker 6:be cool to have, a
Speaker 7:live live performance here from Glasgow.
Speaker 1:How many people are there?
Speaker 2:How many people are there?
Speaker 1:Let's ring the gong for the total attendees. How many
Speaker 7:I think there's around around hundreds of small businesses. Whoo. Alright.
Speaker 1:We got lot of small businesses to show
Speaker 2:up to us. They're Amazing.
Speaker 1:Because you love it.
Speaker 2:Great to see you.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Thanks so much for hopping on the show. We'll talk to you soon, Have a good one.
Speaker 6:Okay. Bye.
Speaker 2:Great to see you.
Speaker 1:Bye. And let's We
Speaker 2:no one loves software for small businesses more than more than me.
Speaker 1:I don't think so.
Speaker 2:I don't think so.
Speaker 1:Don't go.
Speaker 2:Daniel Tenrero says, the core political divide today is pickleball Americans versus letterboxed Americans.
Speaker 1:I would I'm I'm in neither camp. Don't really participate in either. I would put myself in the letterboxed American camp. Tyler over there is a pickleball American. Right?
Speaker 5:I guess. But I'm also I I would say I'm more of like a cinephile than a pickleball player.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:You're But I've never used Letterboxd.
Speaker 1:You've never used Letterboxd?
Speaker 5:It's just like a it's like Goodreads for movies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's Goodreads for movies. Okay. I feel like there's an
Speaker 2:opportunity Tiny to a stop snapped this up.
Speaker 1:Oh, Tiny owns it?
Speaker 2:They bought a 60 No way. Percent Woah.
Speaker 1:I had no idea. That's fascinating. Well, the Antichrist lecture is in full swing up in San Francisco. The the private the
Speaker 2:guy yet?
Speaker 1:Did they find him? The hunt for the Antichrist continues. And it has spawned a ton of fun posts on the timeline. Pablo Paniche says, Peter Thiel talked about this at the Antichrist lecture. No, he didn't.
Speaker 1:Did you attend the lecture? No. Did you? No. Just people naming Daniel.
Speaker 1:Growing Daniel says Peter Thiel announced the name of the Antichrist, but I'm not telling. And people are having a lot of fun. Will Menaudis said that
Speaker 2:It's crazy. I some of the protesters showed up, like disguised as Satan.
Speaker 1:I needed to put Because some of protesters in the truth one of the protesters said Peter Thiel's latest acquisition, the US government. If you know anything about PT, he doesn't buy whole companies. He believes in founder led firms. He doesn't do private equity So a little bit of a little bit of a misunderstanding of the financial markets there, protester. Anyway, Tyler, are you bummed that you're missing out on the Antichrist lecture series?
Speaker 5:I I was just gonna say the protesters are, like, pretty hilarious, some of the signs. I I sent them in the
Speaker 1:So the protesters, it's easy to get riled up by the images of the protesters and see the protesters as this like, oh, they're really over the top. They must really be aggressive. But for the most part, I've seen there were protesters at just some random FAI conference I spoke at. I actually interviewed Alex Wang there, who we're talking to tomorrow. Tune in.
Speaker 1:And this is just like Foundation for American Innovation, like a very vanilla tech conference.
Speaker 2:And Also, being able to protest things is important.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so the protester was outside with a funny sign, but people were taking photos of each other. Like, it it was very, very friendly. I I when I first heard, like, oh, we're being protested, was like, oh, what what does this mean? Is this, like, serious?
Speaker 1:Are they gonna be
Speaker 2:really outside of gusto if they didn't roll out instant payroll.
Speaker 1:For sure. For sure. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. We have Andre from console. Welcome to the How are you doing?
Speaker 9:Hey, guys. Doing good.
Speaker 1:How are so much for joining. Kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, what you do, what the announcement is.
Speaker 9:Sure. Thank thank you for having me. Big fans here, actually. The whole team, I don't if you can see
Speaker 1:them, kinda watching. Watching. I love
Speaker 2:it. Hey. Turn around, guys. We could see you. There's little bit
Speaker 1:of a time delay. Hello.
Speaker 5:Oh, there's a delay, baby.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. I mean, today, we're here to kinda, you know, talking about a series a announcement. We just
Speaker 2:There they are.
Speaker 9:A little delay now.
Speaker 1:What you got?
Speaker 9:We just raised our series a, DST Global, and Thrive Capital.
Speaker 1:Oh. How much? How much you
Speaker 9:raised? $23,000,000.
Speaker 2:There you go. There you go. Congratulations. Alright. Cool.
Speaker 8:Alright. What do you do?
Speaker 1:What do you do? What do you do?
Speaker 2:I gotta know.
Speaker 4:You gotta tell it.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I'm not gonna tell you
Speaker 1:Stop burying the lead. Stop burying the lead. What hell is what you do.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we automate IT support using AI agents that understand how your organization works.
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 9:I know. We're fired. We're not just a chatbot. You know? Under the hood, we're basically plugged into all your systems Yep.
Speaker 9:Your apps, your devices. We understand how everything's laid out. So we know, you know, this is this is John. This is title department manager, the direct reports, the apps he has access to, the permissions in those apps. So, like, all of this data is flowing into console from all these different systems, and then we let you build company policy and processes above that layer
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:In natural language. So we call these things playbooks, but, essentially, you're able to say, you know, when someone needs a password reset, first, ask them this question, then run this action, then do this thing. So that's not converted to code. It's just natural language instructions, uploads to the agent, just handles that directly in Slack.
Speaker 1:How modern is the wheelhouse customer for you? Because I when I started my first company in 2012, we were late enough in the rollout of SaaS that we had no on premise servers whatsoever. We had no local network. We just had Google Cloud apps and Gmail accounts. And so everything was managed in various dashboards.
Speaker 1:And it was an immense hassle to deprovision and provision. But there is a whole other world of companies that have much more complex IT policies. Where are you seeing the most value? What does the wheelhouse customer look like?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So we we've started with the kind of more, like, modern tech companies to get started. So a lot of our customers, you know, ramp ramp's actually one of our Oh, customers. There you go. You know, shout out to them.
Speaker 9:They're a great customer. Scaleai, Flock Safety, Webflow, these are all customers that are you know, they're kind of, like, internally looking to they're they're starting to think about what does it look like what does IT look like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:In the age of AI. Right? And I think kind of what happened was we got it right in the seventies, the eighties, right, where computers started being a thing. And, you know, IT was really this department that was coming in and showing people, like, look. Get off your typewriters.
Speaker 9:Here's how computers work. Here's how you can be more efficient. And they were, like, kind of optimizing business process. And somewhere along the way, kinda like you mentioned, right, we started adding too many apps and too many there are too many things that we're being kind of managed. Right?
Speaker 9:And, you know, IT kinda lost focus from being this kind of driver of innovation in the organization to just, like, stuck in you know, they're, like, on this ticket treadmill. Right? You come in. You've got 10 tickets. You log out.
Speaker 9:You've got 15. So, yeah, you're kinda just, like, always just handling tickets. And so our kinda mission here is, you know, how do we take IT back to where it was where, you know, take take off the support load from them, handle all of those tickets for them using AI that, again, works the way they do, and then get get them back to, you know, working with other teams and finding ways to, like, optimize their their process, essentially.
Speaker 1:How does security fit into all this? I feel like the the this the IT professional is very much the unsung hero, the enemy of the fishermen, the the phishing scams. I mean, I every place I've worked that's, like, professional or had a professional email, you get these phishing scams. And I feel like Sherlock Holmes, when I clock it and send it to the IT guy, hey, we're getting a phishing scam. And he's like, I set that up.
Speaker 1:I sent that to you. I was testing you. It was a test. But yeah, talk to me about security and how that fits in. It feels like I really don't want my IT professional to be able to be prompt injected.
Speaker 1:There needs to be a human in the loop still maybe, but maybe you know something else.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So, yeah, I guess you you hit on a couple of things. So but first, we obviously spend a lot of time internally on security, making sure things work really well. This is my second company. First company we were doing applicationsecuritycom company we're selling to US government, Fortune 100.
Speaker 9:So very familiar with, you know, building secure software. And so that that's, like, the first thing. I think, you know, next, we think about, well, how do we actually kind of, like, give the LLM and the AI agent control over the process and, like, the order that things get done and, like, kind of, like, you know, this this ability to flex with the user and work with the user, but then build more deterministic processes for things like API calls and actually, you know, the things that are more sensitive. Right? And so our sensitive actions are actually quite locked down, and you have the ability to, you know, get approvals on them, do MFA checks, you know, honestly, just lock them down.
Speaker 9:Some companies say, hey. We don't wanna reset any passwords with console. Right? Like, we just don't have to. Right?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So you can kind of adopt it as you're comfortable. And then lastly, yeah, if if if you don't support, you know, let's say password resets your your company, you decide that's too risky, we will loop in a human when those requests come through. So the way, you know, the way kind of console works high level is we sit in Slack instead of having to go to, you know, like, a Jira ticket form or something, and you have to fill out, you know, the subject line, and you're answering, you know, the laptop you have, and you're like, should MIT already know what laptop I have? And you're kinda just going through this list, and you hit it and you wait for wait for some response.
Speaker 9:You go into console. You type in your issue just like you're messaging a coworker. That request goes in. 50 to 60% of the time, we handle it entirely with the end user. And then when we can't, we actually loop a human in.
Speaker 9:So on the back end, we'll, you know, basically message them and say, hey. Like, you know, John is having this issue. Here's everything you need to know about John. And they can jump in, and then the end user stays in Slack. Right?
Speaker 9:They don't have to go to a separate portal or anything like that.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. What's the go to
Speaker 2:market Did any you numbers related to the fundraise outside of the headline number? Anything on on the business side? Or restate
Speaker 9:or I
Speaker 8:I don't
Speaker 9:know that we're sharing too much yet. We're doing really well. So we are hiring someone who's watching.
Speaker 2:Sign that sign that the company's ripping.
Speaker 1:Give it give it away. The the the number that I got, like, kinda off the record, but I'll share is is one, and that's and then and that's Contracts with Ramp. So Yeah. That's really the headline KPI. The It's more of a binary metric for success, but it's really the only metric of success that matters in Silicon Valley these days.
Speaker 1:So congrats on passing that binary test. Talk to me about the go to market. Based on the size of customer, I'm super interested to know is this, like, steak dinners, hand to hand combat, phone calls, you know, just direct response? Are you g two hacking? What's going on?
Speaker 9:I mean, we are very flexible. We'll do what it takes. Right? I think, the the standard process is actually you know, we'll connect with some, you know, some folks, you know, some on the IT team. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Usually, you know, head of head of IT, director of IT. Mhmm. And we'll give them a demo. Usually, they have some AI initiative internally where they're, you know, looking at, again, how do we make IT more efficient or or kind of, like, rethink how we do this. We do a demo.
Speaker 9:Usually, they're sold. We do a POC right after that. So to get into a POC, we do, an on prem sorry. We do, like, a full full product deploy Sure. Into their systems.
Speaker 9:We'll do things like, you know, company review security review, legal, whatever. Then we'll go live. About three weeks is usually how long we do, like, a POC for. So usually within the first week, what we like to say is you're actually in a good enough spot to go come live company wide.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:We spend the rest two weeks just kind of, like, dialing it in, but we go live pretty very pretty quickly. I think Scale actually went live in about three weeks, during the POC, company wide, because they were just seeing so much success with it.
Speaker 1:Are you positioning the product as, like, purely additive to the existing IT systems, plug in with everything? Are you seeing folks rip out, legacy systems that they maybe develop themselves or legacy competitors? What's the what is the trade off that the buyer is making at the moment?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Shouldn't be any trade off. We our goal when we started the company was, like, look. You're already managing a bunch of systems. If we come in and we say, well, if you wanna use console or you wanna use AI, you have to replace half your systems.
Speaker 9:Like Yep. That's just gonna be a nonstarter for really busy teams. And so what we do instead is we actually build really deep integrations into, you know, as much of your tool stack as possible. So we integrate very deeply into, like, Okta, Google, you know, Slack, you know, even your Jira. Right?
Speaker 9:Like, we don't have to replace your ITSM. So, your ticketing tool, you can actually keep that. You've spent a lot of time configuring and building it out. You can actually build you can basically put console in front of that and act as, like, your first line of defense. And the reason we're able to do that, you know, I know it's kinda like an odd situation.
Speaker 9:I I what do you mean? You're not replacing any core system is Yeah. You know, we're actually, like, doing work. Yeah. So we don't need to replace your your ticketing tool because we act actually do 60% of your, you know, the request that you're getting, with again, without human involvement, and so that's often Do
Speaker 2:you just try to generally charge for the value? Obviously, if you're doing 50 to 60% of the work, that's saving that's at least, like, sound sounds like one to many people's time. But how do how do you charge for it?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So we we just charge per end user per month, basically. So
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 9:The number of employees you've got in the company, we kind of have, like, a a a base price that we use, and we discount as as a company gets gets larger. But we try to keep pricing pretty static. I know there's this trend to, you know, look at usage based pricing and so on. What we found is, you know, one that can be a little confusing, you know, credits and things are hard to, like, estimate, especially up front. And so what we found is, like, IT teams actually really like the predictability of knowing, okay.
Speaker 9:For this year, I'm gonna pay this much money for this tool. And, you know, we kind of think of it as if you feel like you're getting a a a you know, you're getting more value out of it than you're paying, then, you know, great. That's good for you. So.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, thank you for driving efficiency in the enterprise.
Speaker 1:This is something we need. I don't want to share I don't want to dox anyone. But we definitely have some interns running wild with access to systems that I would love to be able to just fire off an agent to go clean up because you can't trust Tyler with these the access to the root keys to this kingdom. Anything could happen. I want to be able to snap my fingers and deprovision him and turn off his ramp card before he buys more.
Speaker 1:Awesome.
Speaker 9:We know where to find him.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk to
Speaker 5:you soon. To appreciate hands
Speaker 2:and congrats on the round. Bye. What else we got going on?
Speaker 1:We got a break We Bezel. We got getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now. Source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.
Speaker 1:Also, we got a new news from Donald Boat. He's been traded.
Speaker 2:Trade deal.
Speaker 1:Trade deal. He's going over to Substack. He says he's unless he's granted a retainer and a favorable contract from Nikita and Elon Musk, he will be taking his talents to Substack. He's been having some fun. Is he really six, seven feet tall?
Speaker 1:That's very tall, if that's true.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I I I didn't meet him in person, but I knew I know someone who did meet him. Yeah. He's apparently super tall
Speaker 2:and very
Speaker 5:very slim.
Speaker 1:He says low John
Speaker 2:a John sized Yeah.
Speaker 1:In order to get him on the team, you gotta give him a low mileage used Corvette z o six, c five, or c six. It's funny. He's he's a funny, funny guy.
Speaker 2:How how much is a low mileage z o
Speaker 1:Probably $30,000, I would estimate. I mean, Zio six is like the performance package. I believe we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room.
Speaker 2:Do we? Believe Are ready?
Speaker 1:Ying is is joining. Oh, thank you so much. Welcome to Yes, sir. Welcome to the stream. How are doing?
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Good to meet you.
Speaker 4:Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for hopping on early. Great to meet you. One to have you on the show to get an update on, you and and and everything going on, but then also there's so many questions about AI, AGI, UBI, so many acronyms. I'm sure we'll go through all of them. But, why don't you just give us a little bit of a reintroduction for those who might not be familiar what you're up to these days?
Speaker 4:Sure thing. People remember me from my twenty twenty presidential campaign saying that AI was going to come. It was going to eat the jobs, and that we should shift to putting money into people's hands more quickly and broadly. Imagine making that case in Iowa in 2020 at truck stops before AI had actually arrived on the scene. But now here we are five years later, and I dare say a lot of the folks who are watching this are nodding their heads being like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Know, we're we're gonna do a number on a lot of rank and file entry level workers. So over the last number of years, I've been trying to figure out how to get money back into people's hands. I was inspired by my friend Mark Cuban who started cost plus drugs. You guys had Mark on recently.
Speaker 4:Right?
Speaker 1:We did a couple weeks ago. He was great.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I thought, can we cost plus anything else in American life? And I realized that we're spending a 170,000,000,000 or so on our cell phone services and data. I was paying Verizon over a $100 a month, 140 a month to be precise. And meanwhile, Verizon and AT and T paid out 18,000,000,000 in shareholder dividends in the last twelve months.
Speaker 4:So you can kinda start doing some math and realize that Americans are paying twice as much for data as people in other countries. So today is the kickoff of Noble Mobile where we try and put money back into Americans' hands and hopefully have people dooms grow a little bit less, live a little better. We're having a big party in New York City on Thursday night. You guys are not in New York, right? And you guys come as VIPs and hang out.
Speaker 3:We would we'll
Speaker 2:be there spirit we'll be there spiritually. But breakdown breakdown, I I I know kind of kind of the mechanics of Noble Mobile, but break it down for for the audience. How how does what's the how does it actually work?
Speaker 4:Well, but before I get into this, I'd actually love to put you guys on the spot and ask who you use for your wireless provider. So I I said I was into
Speaker 1:I use Verizon. They've been fleecing me for years.
Speaker 2:Verizon. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They don't seem bad saying. I I actually have a I actually have a iMessage here. Your bill is ready. This is not a joke. 1145, this came in.
Speaker 2:Your bill is ready.
Speaker 1:$20,000. Pay it, and I and I don't I don't think too much about it. But I'm sure I'm getting fleeced because I probably signed up on some, like, super cheap contract about a decade ago, and it's gone up every month. And, you know, it's Dude, it's it's been up.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, lock in the price in parentheses because we're just gonna keep on raising it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But the the craziest thing is when you guys travel abroad when I was on Verizon, I went to Europe with my family this summer, and the travel pass cost $10 a day, to put yourself on the the foreign carriers' towers. You know how much Verizon, AT and T are spending to put you on, the their partner's towers? About $2.50. So why aren't they gonna charge us $10 or $12 a day if it's gonna cost you $2.50? Like, the the entire industry, when you start digging in, there's just a lot of profiteering.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So
Speaker 2:So you guys pay you guys pay people to use their phone less. Does that mean I start out with like, but but break down the actual mechanics of of how that works on a on a month to month basis.
Speaker 4:Sure thing. So check it out. I'll use myself. I I know I use my phone for doom scrolling and social media a little bit too much. But at the same time, I consider myself an effective in touch individual and kind of need my smartphone and, you know, don't wanna count how how much data I'm using.
Speaker 4:So the way Noble Mobile works is that you pay a $50 flat fee for unlimited data. And if you use it up the wazoo, then you paid 50, and that's the end of it. But if you use less than 20 gigs per month, then we'll give you cash back, in the form of an end of month payment, data dividend, we call it, of up to $20. And then any money we give you will then grow at a 5.5% interest rate annualized so that your cell phone plan becomes like a mini savings vehicle, without you having to think about it or do anything. And so this way
Speaker 2:Do you guys hold on do
Speaker 1:you guys do you
Speaker 2:guys hold on to those funds as long as somebody's, like, a a customer? Is that how that works? Or or, like or
Speaker 4:You can take the money out anytime you want. It's your money. But if you leave it with us, we'll grow it at a higher rate than you're gonna get someplace else risk free because we wanted to it to be a set it and forget it savings plan. One of our first investors was a guy named Scott Galloway, professor g, who you guys probably know. Has he been on the show?
Speaker 2:Not yet. Not yet. We gotta he's gotta come on sometime. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I'll try it.
Speaker 4:I'm I'm seeing him later this week, so
Speaker 1:That'd be amazing. Yeah. Please let him know.
Speaker 8:It'd be
Speaker 4:in your direction. But Scott's very passionate about trying to help young people in particular, young men. Save money in a set it, forget it way. And so Noble Mobile, we'd wanna do three things at once, which is a lot, but whatever. Number one, we wanna see you actually pay closer to what you should be paying true value for your data.
Speaker 4:It's about half of what you're currently paying. Number two, we want to incentivize you to dooms for a little less and look at your family's face a little more. And number three, we wanna make it easier for you to save money without having to think about it. So those are the the the things that we think we can accomplish.
Speaker 1:That's a really cool flow.
Speaker 2:What what's the customer acquisition strategy besides you telling as many people as possible about it? You're starting there. But Yeah. But what what's the GTM look like?
Speaker 4:Sure thing. So one of the things we figured out was that I've got a following. Scott Galloway's got a following. Sharplane's got a following. A lot of people have followings.
Speaker 4:And so if you want to help them save money and live a little better, you can tell them about Noble Mobile. And for every person, you tell you help them, but then we also will reward you. So what you're gonna see is that there's gonna be something of a collective that's now helping acquire customers and let people know about this. The model that everyone's familiar with is Ryan Reynolds, Mid Mobile. Ryan Reynolds shows up on commercials Yeah.
Speaker 4:And whatnot. And so one of the jokes I tell is, like, I'm talking to various celebrities or influencers. It's like, look. Instead of one Ryan Reynolds, they're gonna be, like, 30 of us or or 50 of us or whatnot. And then when I tell them Ryan Reynolds made $300,000,000, then they they're, you know You did fantastic.
Speaker 4:And enlightened self interest kicks in,
Speaker 1:and people are like, okay. Like, yeah. I'm self interest.
Speaker 4:Ready to to to, you know, tell my people. So we're in conversations right now with some very, very fun and fascinating figures with followings.
Speaker 6:That's a
Speaker 1:lot of refs.
Speaker 4:But the this is, like, a consumer centered human based movement to try and make this industry work better for us.
Speaker 1:It's very cool.
Speaker 2:What what does it take to actually build a new, a new telecom company like this? You guys obviously aren't setting up your own towers, but are you are you partnered with with some bigger existing players, or or what did that look like?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It was it was a lot of work setting up our own towers. You know, I had to, like, get out the tool belt now. So you're you're obviously right. What we did is we we licensed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of data from one of the big carriers.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And the point I wanna make to your incredibly savvy audience is, like, look. You talk about you chose Verizon ten years ago. I chose Verizon twenty five years ago. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And we chose it based on something that we thought was, like, network quality. Like, I'm an important person No.
Speaker 1:There's a map. And the Verizon map was more red than the other maps. That was Oh, it
Speaker 2:was like in in little towns where fewer cities, it was like, well, this network's better than that one. Yeah. This one, and it just vibes vibes based, basically.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So over the last ten to twenty years, what happened is all three carriers bulked up their networks to the point where they're all pretty excellent. And then now you have some satellite data that's getting piped through the network. So what what happened is that we made a buying decision x years ago, and then in the time since, it kind of got leveled up and became commoditized. So what we're what we're doing is we licensed hundreds millions of dollars worth of data from one of the carriers, T Mobile, And then and now we can make it available to people, in a way that's really going to, again, accomplish multiple goals.
Speaker 4:And the great thing is that it's in this day and age too because check this out, guys. Like, you're like me, I bet, and I have approximately zero experience actually switching carriers. Like, because maybe you've got it zero times. Yep. I was the same way.
Speaker 4:I've had I've been on Verizon for twenty five years. Every device manufactured from 2018 on now has an eSIM where you can direct it to another network. You keep your number, keep your phone, takes five minutes, and you can just bingo, bango, switch to, another network. Most consumers do not understand this. And even I knew it technically, but then when I actually switched from Verizon, even I was like, holy shit.
Speaker 4:I just ended a twenty five year relationship in five minutes, and now I'm saving myself, you know, $1,200 a year. Like, that this is like magic.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 4:great. So so now in many ways, the goal is to to spread the magic to as many Americans as possible.
Speaker 2:Are you guys like, how does it what's where what's T Mobile's or Noble Mobile's integrations with the actual hardware manufacturers? Are you guys working on deals with with, like, with companies at the device level?
Speaker 4:You know, so we we think most people are happy with their device and will just bring their own phone. There are some people that are under a contract with their carrier, and, obviously, there was, like, a new iPhone launch just last week. Yeah. So there are some folks who and by the way, this is true of you guys too. I love talking to people like you because we're we're on the same boat.
Speaker 4:So there was a period when every time a new iPhone came out, we were like, oh my god. I need that.
Speaker 1:You need to line up camp out.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Remember the lines? Yeah. And then that stopped being true, like, a number of months ago where we're like, what's the difference with this one?
Speaker 4:You know, the camera's a little better. Like, I'm not even really seeing it.
Speaker 1:This one's orange.
Speaker 4:And and you can see that the the device replacement cycle has just gotten longer and longer. So I talked about before about how the networks have become at parity and commoditized. Our devices have kind of converged around a level that we're perfectly happy with. And so most people we think don't want a new phone necessarily. They just want, like, you know, to not be getting gouged every month.
Speaker 4:If you do wanna get a new device and you decide to go through the carriers by the way, I I've done this. So I get a new iPhone or Verizon, and, like, the device is free, but I'm tied up in a two year contract where I'm paying Verizon a certain amount over this period. And I want the folks listening to this just to think about it for a second. The carriers' contracts with us are so profitable that they can zero out and subsidize a $1,200 device or a thousand dollar device and be like, hey. It's free to you because we're making so much money off.
Speaker 4:You were gonna pay I mean, obviously, Apple's not giving them that device for free. Apple's, like, you know, like, getting paid lot of money.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:So it would be more cost efficient for someone who really wants the iPhone 17 to buy one unlocked and then sign up with Noble. If you did the math, you'd actually save money on that versus getting it for free from a carrier. But most people are perfectly happy with their current device and might just wanna to try a different network.
Speaker 2:Cool. Well, congratulations on the launch. Super exciting. I'm excited to see the different partners that you put together. And I feel like you just can hit the campaign trail again, but this time for Noble Mobile Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know the playbook.
Speaker 2:Hang in just go truck stop to truck stop and just, like, help people switch over. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You guys just read my mind. You know, I'm coming to a truck stop near you in a hot minute. It might not just be me. It might be Scott Galloway. It might be, someone else in the Noble Collective.
Speaker 4:But this is gonna be a really fun company to grow, because, Noah, it's it's an industry that's really past due for some modernization and some humanization.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Last question. Did you did you raise a bunch of money for this already?
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I think you guys get to do a sound effect. But, yeah, we raised
Speaker 2:What you got?
Speaker 4:We we raised 10,300,000.0
Speaker 2:Wow. From various sound effects and authentic
Speaker 1:We have a real gong in the studio.
Speaker 4:I did enjoy that. I wanna bang that gong in person.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. Anytime. Anytime you're in LA, let us know.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. I'll I'll let you know. I'll be in LA before you know it. Fantastic. Scott's an investor.
Speaker 1:Great. A lot of
Speaker 4:other fun people investors. Shout out to Corazon Capital for leading the round.
Speaker 1:That's me.
Speaker 4:And, you know, we're we're gonna grow like a weed. It's gonna be fun.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:Well Great. Congratulations. Great to get the update, and we'll see you soon.
Speaker 1:Have a We'll talk to you soon, Andrew. Thanks so much. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 4:See you in LA.
Speaker 1:Appreciate you
Speaker 2:having me on. Bye.
Speaker 1:And if you're thinking about going to his event in New York, you need a place to stay, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top two cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home but better, folks. Find your happy place on wonder.com. Hey. There's some folks that are traveling, some folks that are gonna be in LA, some folks wondering
Speaker 2:John Exler says
Speaker 1:What's the
Speaker 2:Galloway appearing on TPPN would be a milestone for me, the very first time I force quit my YouTube app.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was about to Honestly, I'm about DM I Scott actually to know, is he that anti Scott? Because I feel like we have a wide breadth of guests here. We can have a conversation with all sorts of people. But if he's
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm I'm gotta let John weigh in on
Speaker 1:We do.
Speaker 2:Key decisions like this.
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 2:I think so. But yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, what else is in the news? Someone's hosting a website on disposable vape. Did you see this on Hacker News? Taylor Ottwell says, me stressing about how we're gonna build the best back end infrastructure for the future of agentic work flows and quantum MCP factories.
Speaker 2:Are they making internet connected vapes now? Is that
Speaker 1:They are. I've seen these in Thank you. Finally. The LCD screens, the actual screens have gotten so cheap that you can run an entire computer on them, basically.
Speaker 2:And these are disposable Can you run an AI factory or a supercomputer?
Speaker 1:I don't think you can mine Bitcoin effectively. I don't think you can inference the most cutting edge frontier AI models. But you can do a lot more on a disposable vape vape. We should should get Tyler
Speaker 3:Bobby Bobby.
Speaker 1:To build something.
Speaker 2:Bobby Cosmic, our the lone soldier in the on the on on our Yes. TVPN Twitch.
Speaker 1:Yes. Thank you for
Speaker 2:if I wanna stream TVPN for three hours a day on five g, would Mobile be a good fit?
Speaker 1:That's the benchmark. You can't have a carrier I
Speaker 2:have a feeling that
Speaker 1:three hours of live streaming a
Speaker 2:day. This is critical. I think it's interesting. So, Mobile Mobile,
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I think I think the messaging is like a bit, you know, they're trying to do a bunch of things at once. Sure. I think I think just a $50 phone plan that helps you use your phone less is like enough of messaging. And I'm I'm I think that they can get a bunch of people to sign up for that.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Is it gonna be a competitive bloodbath? Yes.
Speaker 1:Don't know. There's something about saving saving money that can create these interesting fly flywheels. Remember Acorns? Didn't that company do very well? It was a believe it was a consumer credit card that every time you swiped it, it would round up to the nearest dollar and put the cents in a savings account and compound.
Speaker 1:And so it was a way to save money. And I believe they got to maybe a billion dollar valuation. It felt like it was Yeah.
Speaker 2:They they almost spaced. They got They had a 120,000,000 of revenue. This this was one of those things, like early fintech company that was, like, winning but then didn't I don't think they've ever gotten out of it. I'd be interested to see what happens with that business. But yeah, the just save money on your mobile plan Yep.
Speaker 2:Is like a simple message. I think Andrew building a coalition of celebrities that are Yep. That feel good about promoting this. Use your phone less. But again, I mean, it's gonna be like like you said, you you don't think that much.
Speaker 2:There's we're not the target audience, I think, for Noble Mobile. Yeah. But there's a bunch of people out there that Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think I like the savings concept. I've I'm worried about the revealed preference of people say they don't wanna scroll. People like to scroll.
Speaker 2:No. I think I think his argument would be even at $50 a month, it's still cheaper than
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, if you're scrolling x, you're gonna be treated to a somewhat tweaked algorithm that Nikita's been working on. Peter Yang breaks it down.
Speaker 1:He says he hasn't seen a, quote, it's so over, RIP product, or this changes everything, cringe tweet on here in days. The algorithm must be working. And so, Dylan Field put it to the test. Founder of Figma, of course, he said, it's so over. RIP cringe tweets.
Speaker 1:New x algo changes everything. And as funny as that post is, it didn't go viral. And so I think I think that they might have, nerfed that meta. We're seeing a new meta emerge already with the b b Jeff Bezos, b Sam Altman, b Elon Musk, spawn in, like, the the the four chan style.
Speaker 2:One meta dies, another is born.
Speaker 1:Yes. There is always a new meta. Never lose hope.
Speaker 2:I've actually I've been liking Never stops. I've been liking the new ones. I think it's a funny way to tell a story, and I've actually been learning something.
Speaker 1:Yes. And it is more in-depth. Like, has more to unpack. It's typically hard to get a lot of text to go viral. The viral posts tend to just be like one or two sentences, but these longer stories, when they're told in this format, seem to do quite well.
Speaker 1:At the same time, they're rife with misinformation a lot of times, as we've learned from actually reading them. But you gotta go to the you gotta go to the source sometimes.
Speaker 2:Well, I think we have Tim Higgins
Speaker 1:We have our next guest room. Let's see. From The Wall Street Journal. Tim Higgins, welcome to the stream. How are
Speaker 2:you doing? Hey.
Speaker 10:Thanks, guys, for having me.
Speaker 1:We were I believe we were just reading some of your reporting about Elon Musk and the pay package. I believe you you authored that. Correct?
Speaker 10:Yeah. You know, I write a lot about Elon. Yeah. And it's the trillion dollar man.
Speaker 1:The Oh, it's story of
Speaker 7:the end of the month. Right?
Speaker 2:You have trillion dollar hair.
Speaker 1:Fantastic hair.
Speaker 2:So it's fitting that you would that you would write.
Speaker 1:But, I mean, we don't need to wade into Elon territory. Give us the update on the book.
Speaker 2:Congratulations on the launch.
Speaker 10:Well, thank you. Thank you. IWAR. It is out today. It's a great corporate drama about Apple, about all of these rivals who wanna displace Apple as the gateway to the digital world, the gateway being the iPhone Yep.
Speaker 10:The App Store that really changed the world almost twenty years ago.
Speaker 2:Yep. The the ultimate tollbooth.
Speaker 1:We were feeling the power of iMessage and the lock in there and how hard it is to build other products that wanna deal with communication in your life. If you're in the iMessage world, Apple has you. They have I
Speaker 2:mean, there's so many there's so many different angles.
Speaker 1:And people don't yeah. People think, oh, you just switch the phone and then you're in a different ecosystem. Like, there's there's a lot of threads holding on. So, yeah, walk us through the inspiration, the reporting process, how much was FOIA ed, how much was reading through, you know, leaked tech emails versus original reporting talking to sources? What what is the process?
Speaker 2:You start writing this book, by the way? Because this is a story that's been unfolding
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. For years.
Speaker 10:Well, you know, it's to your point, it's been a ten year fight for Apple. I mean, people started complaining about that power almost from the get go. Yeah. But you really started to see the seeds of of what I think of as a rebellion, almost like a Boston Tea Party moment of these colonists in the new world that Apple created, kinda rising up over that Apple tax, what they call it, Apple tax, the 15 to 30% commission that Apple takes on digital services and sales. Right?
Speaker 10:And also more so the rules. Right. Exactly. And so when I I so I'm a business columnist at the Journal, but I had been the Apple beat reporter at the Journal. I had been the Apple beat reporter at Bloomberg.
Speaker 10:So I've written about Apple for many years, and I I followed the Tim Sweeney epic lawsuit against Apple very closely, and it it paid attention every day during that lengthy trial in 2021 and just was struck by the scale of the drama. You know, in one way, Tim Sweeney is a very interesting protagonist. He's started the company from scratch, had this vision. He's a world builder beyond just being an entrepreneur. He's thinking about the future, whether it's the metaverse and how Fortnite might play in that.
Speaker 10:And he was looking at Apple as as going too far, you know, taking too much, really kind of against that idea of the of the the open Internet. Right? And then you have Apple, which is also a a storied US company, which had really built something very important to everyday life, the the iPhone, clearly the center of many people's digital lives, digital experience. And and their kind of argument is, we built this. We keep it running.
Speaker 10:We're we're giving you all of these customers. You you kinda owe us a little, and and isn't that fair? And so you have these kinda really great clash of of what is how should this play out? And so it just it struck me as interesting. And as I started kind of thinking about it in a bigger way, it really seemed as if it wasn't just Tim Sweeney.
Speaker 10:You got the the Spotify element. You've got the regulators in Europe. You've got other tech companies in The US and around the world really kind of rising up in this kind of interesting moment, which I thought, in a lot of ways, was surprising. Right? If you went back several years ago and talked about monopolies in The US And Microsoft, the old Microsoft, of course, was attacked by the DOJ and fought those allegations.
Speaker 10:But in the more modern era, Google, Amazon, those were the big tech companies that were painted with that monopoly brush fairly or not. But Apple, in a lot of ways, especially in Washington DC, was seen as, you know, something to aspire to. And, you know, what we've seen in the last few years because of Epic, because of Spotify, because of others, has changed the conversation around the power of Apple and the power it has, and not just if that tax, if you will, but about the control they have on the the digital the digital world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How did you
Speaker 2:Is is Apple good or bad?
Speaker 1:I'm kidding.
Speaker 2:I'm kidding. I'm not gonna make you I'm not gonna make you condense it down. I did have a so so, you know, we we're extremely sympathetic to the to the startups, businesses, building in the Apple ecosystem and creating a value for Apple users and then, obviously, paying the tax. I had a funny funny experience, John and I, the other day. I was like trying to download an app.
Speaker 2:I realized I downloaded a fake app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 2:And then I got to get the benefit of the Apple Tollbooth because I just immediately went into my subscription to cancel it in one click. Yep. And I was just thinking at that time, if this was just some regular app on the internet, it would've just They
Speaker 1:would've taken
Speaker 2:harder it away. Or they maybe would've, like, tried to not let me,
Speaker 1:you know. And that's Apple's argument. They say, you know, this isn't a tax. This is your licensing our software.
Speaker 2:It's and it and it can be It's off the
Speaker 4:fair. Yes. They're providing
Speaker 10:a service. They're providing security. They're providing a a ecosystem that the user wants to be part of.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Were you able to uncover any special deals that Apple has brokered with big companies?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And give
Speaker 1:me feel like 30% sometimes. They they certainly don't want to mention that that's ever been, you know, negotiated down. But
Speaker 2:Well, there's also, like, the way like the way in which Audible does their pricing. You can't just like buy books. You gotta subscribe to that that Credits.
Speaker 1:Part of
Speaker 2:their weird is their system like designed to like get around Yeah. These rules? I'm curious interested to know about like what are the weird edge cases? Yeah. What are the
Speaker 10:special deals? So one of the things about Apple Mhmm. And you compare it to the Android system, Google's operating system, is that Apple likes to pride itself on not doing special deals. Now, you know, its critics would point to some edge cases that they feel are leaning towards helping others. But generally, that's kind of the deal, is that Apple has some rules and it wants everybody to kinda follow them.
Speaker 10:Now they it gets confusing because sometimes there's categories and, you know, we can get into that. Sometimes Roblox is perhaps treat treated differently compared to Epic Games in in the old way, but but just kind of put it under the category if they don't like to do special deals. Whereas Android does do special deals in part because they feel that they have to compete against Apple to win those hot apps. Right? The hot video games that drive so much of the sales in this ecosystem.
Speaker 10:If they're seeing the games go into the App Store and and Apple, they feel at a disadvantage. So they're always trying to create an Apple like experience in the Google in the Google world, if you will. And it it creates an interesting dynamic out there and kind of shows how these kind of things play out. Right? And so one of the things you see in the book is, well, why did Tim Sweeney why did he go to war against two of the most powerful companies at the same time?
Speaker 10:And when I mean say the most companies, I mean Apple and Google. It's because he first went to Google and tried to do tried to get his app so you could go outside of the App Store in the Google world and Android world and download it that way. He didn't get a lot of success. And part of that was, he would find out later, was that phone companies and some of his competitors in the video game world who he was trying to partner with to create an alternative App Store that would be available on the the Android system. They were getting deals from Google not to do stuff like that.
Speaker 7:Now they
Speaker 10:could do that, but they didn't have any incentive to do it. Right? So he figures this out, and then he's like, you know, he's gotta go after them both at the same time because Google is accusing him of of basically not complaining about Apple's deal when it's he's got a lot of complaints about that. So it really he gambles that he can take to the courts this case that that Google and Apple are out of line, and it it doesn't go very well for him at the beginning. You remember his lawsuit against Apple, he basically lost most of it.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Now he would be successful against Google later on, but Sweeney essentially loses most of the case. And in Apple, the way they handled it, probably pushing too far, angering the judge, over the one thing that she was upset about, this idea of, that Apple wouldn't allow developers to steer users to, other websites to make payments, and she wanted them to be able to do this. And Apple made it so difficult, that she really came down hard on them earlier this year. And, essentially, very cleverly, these companies now are able to do that.
Speaker 10:And you see Spotify and and Epic take advantage of it immediately, directing users right outside of the the walled garden of Apple to make their upgrades to the apps or pay their or video game stuff that is pretty remarkable crack in in the in the in the Apple
Speaker 2:have been have they been super effective at driving the majority of users to pay outside of the ecosystem or is it more like half of the users are opting for these alternative payment rails and half or or are they just saying like the only way to buy is now outside of the Apple walled garden?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's pretty remarkable. The what I understand is that the early early data is pretty, pretty good, for companies that are doing this. One of the other kind of data points that I look at is that Spotify, several years ago, is it was thinking about how it could fight Apple in this regard. Essentially, started doing a b testing in Europe, with its Android app just to kind of run a a testing that was essentially like, if this was Apple, this would be the Apple rules and without the rules and kind of variation of all that to see how much that was hurting them.
Speaker 10:And the data, according to the records that I that I've looked at, was pretty significant, that it was, a, considered a bad user experience, and, b, they were losing out a lot of upgrades. And so the early suggestion is that users like to like to do that.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Like to go outside? Yeah. Interesting. Bullish.
Speaker 2:Bullish. Well, bearish. For everybody but Apple.
Speaker 1:It's exciting.
Speaker 2:What what what else are you following going you know, I don't wanna I I want people to buy and read the book.
Speaker 1:I just bought it on on Audible. I'm looking forward to listening
Speaker 2:Perfect. To
Speaker 1:but Downloading
Speaker 2:it now. Did you just pay the Apple tax?
Speaker 1:Yeah. How much do you get? You charge me $16. Are you gonna get I you don't need to break
Speaker 2:it all down. But what is Audible's deal? I'm actually curious. Do have any idea?
Speaker 10:You know, it's one of those it's interesting. Just take a step back to Amazon and Apple and how they they were some of the early fights in this kind of war. You go back several years ago, and and Steve this was back when Steve Jobs was alive. And Amazon is advertising that you can buy your books and not have to and you can you can read it on the iPhone and you don't have to pay for it. It doesn't go through Apple's system.
Speaker 10:And they and Apple was just steaming over this.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And essentially, they came out with these rules that if you were selling it in the digital world, you had to you had to basically use Apple's system. Yeah. And so that's why you would see on the Apple on the Amazon app, you couldn't buy through the app. You couldn't buy books
Speaker 6:through the
Speaker 10:app because they didn't wanna pay the the Apple tax, if you will. And and one of the first companies after this rule earlier this year was changed because of the court ruling was Amazon. Mhmm. You can go buy your digital books now through that the app because it's it's directing you outside the Apple system.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I remember. I would click and wind up in a web browser even though I had the Amazon app installed
Speaker 3:What
Speaker 1:every time.
Speaker 2:What should people be paying attention to going forward? I know a lot of these cases Apple has an opportunity to kind of fight, you know, even after the judge decides one thing, can come back and say, you know, continue to continue to fight it. But what what else is working its way through the courts?
Speaker 10:I mean, Apple's appealing. They feel the judge got it wrong in The US. They have been fined in Europe where, regulators there, fined them over their the conduct of how they treated music apps like Spotify. Spotify behind, along with other tech companies, pushing for the the DMA, that kind of landmark, tech bill that was passed a few years ago that aims to limit big platforms like Apple. Apple's already been fined for that, but they are are working to to to make rules that they think are fair, but that the folks that are against Apple would say, don't kind of take the spirit of the law and and really kind of an example of how Apple fights this stuff tooth and nail.
Speaker 10:So that's to watch. The bigger issue here, perhaps, is just the the way that Apple has been kind of painted as a monopolist, fairly or not. It it overshadows or it kind of tails them now as they go forward into new technologies. Everything they do is looked at as is Apple abusing its power as they move into new spaces? So in AI, for example, I think investors would say the Apple's behind in AI right now.
Speaker 10:There's a lot of frustration out there. And so even when they do a deal with OpenAI to help kind of bolster their chat capabilities with Siri, you see Elon Musk come in and sue and say, wait a second. This is this is monopoly behavior. Apple is using its power to hurt other AI companies with this kind of deal. Right?
Speaker 10:So put aside the merits of the lawsuit, you got Apple's getting this position where it's having to defend basically everything it does against the idea that it is a monopoly. And and that is a distraction that the company has to deal with, and that makes me remember a generation ago where Microsoft had a very similar situation as the DOJ went after it, and regulators in Europe went after it, and Bill Gates and others at Microsoft have talked about how that period was a massive distraction and contributed in them falling behind as the new edge technologies took over. They they missed out on mobile, if you will, and some other, things. And you know, there there's some similarities here as you look at at AI and where Apple is at this moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fascinating. It is such a distraction because, yeah, with these high stakes lawsuits Cannot experiment. The CEO has to go. Like, you just can't delegate it fully.
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm sure there's teams of lawyers and whole legal departments that handle 90% of it. But it's still
Speaker 2:something that's tough. Big M and A, right? They're doing these little they're doing a bunch of little deals Yeah. But nothing.
Speaker 1:It's hard to get locked in and focus on next generation technology.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations, Ken.
Speaker 1:Congratulations on the book. The book is IWAR. It's available everywhere books are sold. Please go.
Speaker 2:Excited to read it. Come back on anytime.
Speaker 1:Leave a review if you buy it. Leave a five star review.
Speaker 2:Said earlier on the show, we made it into the journal for the first time ourselves yesterday.
Speaker 1:It's a it's a full circle I
Speaker 2:read that.
Speaker 1:Today. Congratulations, guys. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:The journal is the backbone of TBPN.
Speaker 1:It it really is. The reporting is fantastic, and we appreciate everything you do. Thank you so much for hopping out, Cheers.
Speaker 5:Thank you both.
Speaker 2:Have a good Talk
Speaker 1:to soon. Bye. And up next, we have Alex from OpenAI coming out of the Restream waiting room into the TV panel
Speaker 2:for I'm gonna let you
Speaker 1:you start it. I'll be right I will kick it off with Alex from OpenAI. We are bringing in Alex. How are you doing? Good to meet you.
Speaker 6:Hey. How's it going? Nice to meet you too.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Thanks so much for joining. Would love to get a brief introduction on yourself, your role within, OpenAI, and then the update today.
Speaker 6:Sure. So, hey. I'm Alex. I'm the product lead for Codex. And, yeah, actually been it's been a pretty fun morning.
Speaker 6:We've been spent the morning, like, looking for GPUs because we shipped a new model yesterday, and demand was a little bit too higher than, forecasted.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:And
Speaker 4:so we are we
Speaker 6:were running the model, actually a lot slower than we were hoping, and luckily, we just fixed that. So the update Yeah. We just shipped a new model for Codex. Codex is our coding agent.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:It's an agent you can work with everywhere you code. So, like, in your terminal, your IDE, GitHub, even your phone, which is actually a crowd favorite.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 6:The goal for Codex is to build it into an AI teammate. So, you know, just like a human teammate
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You start out working together with it. Eventually, you start delegating tasks to it. And then eventually, just give it a laptop, some permissions, and a job, and you just say, like, please prompt me with tasks that you think are worth doing. Yeah. So go ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I've I've so many questions. I mean, first, I'm I'm interested running the model slower actually helps you if you're in a GPU crunch. Is that just because you're spreading the amount of, inference across, like, a broader user base, essentially?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Just think, like, if you know, on your laptop, like, if you open, like, way too many programs, they all just kind of run a little slower.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:So that the solution you know, you could close programs on your computer, but we don't want
Speaker 1:No, of course, because you have other clients and other users and businesses and stuff. Like, take me through some of the use cases. I mean, we were talking to, Doug O'Laughlin over at Semi Analysis Fabricated Knowledge, and he was saying that he'll use what is traditionally like a coding agent to actually go and do something that looks like a deep research report. I had a sort of magical, result where I used, a a coding agent to do a deep research report but then instantiate it in HTML. And then I was able just to open an HTML page locally, and it was this amazing thing because it just has a different set of UI that it can pull from that's not native to just the Chattypity app.
Speaker 1:And so that's one world, but then I'm sure there's people that are using this in the business context, deploying it into, like, large code bases. Where are people having the most success these days?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Totally. I mean, coding agents are really flexible. The primary use cases for coding agents and, you know, in Codex as well are to write code, answer questions, and review code as well. And that's really what's been sticking.
Speaker 6:So we've seen, like, well over 10 x growth in usage just over the past month.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 6:And most of that is improvements in how people use it to write code and answer questions. But we're now just be clear,
Speaker 1:you said 10 x growth in the last month?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Over over that. It's, yeah, it's growing like crazy. And and most of this is just because we've been improving a ton. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So, like, you know, if you go back, rewind a little bit over a month ago, we had the Codec CLI, which is a coding agent in your terminal. Yep. We've landed a ton of improvements to that.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:You know, some people like buttons. So and they like using, you know, the coding agent next to the code that they're editing themselves.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:So we shipped the Versus Code extension. Versus Code's a, you know, really popular IDE.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 6:And, you know, that's quickly becoming a super popular surface as well. And, you one of the special things about Codex is that it doesn't only run locally on your computer. Like a teammate, it can also run on its own computer, and we call that Codex Cloud Tasks. And so we've landed a bunch of improvements there as well to make it, like, way faster, you know, and other things.
Speaker 1:So that's a huge unlock for mobile probably. Right?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. It's a huge I mean, you basically can't really code on mobile unless you have that. And so a lot of the work we've been doing is just, making those, like, fundamental surfaces where you use codecs better.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And, you know, that kind of started that growth curve, which we're really excited about. And then yesterday, sort of building on the success of g p t five and listening to a lot of the feedback we've been seeing around how people use g p t five specifically for coding in Codex, we shipped a new model, which is g p t five Codex
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:A version of Codex that's, like, basically, like, further optimized specifically for the Codex type use cases. And that's been really cool. You know, for example, one of the the big areas of feedback people had was that, you know, they sometimes g p five would think a little longer than they were hoping specifically when they asked the coding question in codex
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:When they were just asking a quick question. But then sometimes they wanted it to work longer. And so one of the things we did, is we made it so that with g p d five Codex, we can actually more dynamically change how much time we're spending solving the user's question. And so for instance, if you ask a quick question, you just get an instant answer. But also we're seeing people, you know, using this thing and just, like, letting it run for over seven hours.
Speaker 6:And that's an arbitrary number. I'm sure you can get it to go longer depending on the problem. That's wild. And yeah. So we're seeing a lot of feedback like that that people are are really excited about.
Speaker 6:The model's also you know, because we had the opportunity to really go deep on on software engineering and train for those use cases, the model is also a little better at things like code quality, front end steerability via agents.md some other things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I saw a post earlier from Theo. He said g v d five codex is as far as I'm, as far as I know, the first time a lab has bragged about using fewer tokens. Hope this becomes a trend. Do you think that's gonna become a trend?
Speaker 6:I mean, I guess, like, tokens are not tokens. Like, really, thing is, like, fast. Speed is really important, and I think we're gonna brag a lot about speed. It's kind of fun. We wanna brag about both sides of it.
Speaker 6:Right? We wanna brag about being really fast for the interactive use cases, and that we also wanna brag about being able to do a ton of work independently.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So, yeah, that, that graph got mixed reactions on Twitter. I don't know if you guys wanna pull it up, but, it's it's a little hard to read, but I think it's the really fun graph where you basically see the skew of, like, well, I don't know how mirrored here. But, basically, on easy queries, we're using, like, 90% fewer tokens to answer your your query.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And then on hard tasks, complex tasks, we're, like, basically using, like, double
Speaker 1:other tokens. Are you using the term, model router? Is is there something that you can share on the architecture there that that is actually driving that? Because that feels like a huge unlock. It was, of course, magical the first time you went to ChatGPT and got it to dump out, you know, pages and pages of coherent text.
Speaker 1:And you get to the bottom, and it's all coherent still. And you're like if you're if you're coming from the g p t three world, you're like, wow. This is a huge breakthrough. But then quickly, realize, like, I don't necessarily always need 20 pages of response. I can have a smaller, output.
Speaker 1:And so are are is there anything that you can share there?
Speaker 6:Yeah, I mean, the team really cooked here and I expect us to it's like part of the exciting stuff that we're doing with Codex is like these like very bespoke interventions. No, it But doesn't have a there's a little bit of secret sauce there that we're not going go too much into.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, of How are you thinking about, like, model naming conventions and model numbering conventions? There was a time when model number correlated to, like, big circle, and then GPT-five was, like, a much more almost holistic set of improvements. You've brought those to Codex with Codex five. But is there is there a world where Codex diverges? Are you always building on top of the same, like, release cadence now?
Speaker 1:Is there anything, about how you think about messaging? What actually changed, to the actual user to know, hey, it's time to dip back in if you tested this or you want to go deeper in a certain area?
Speaker 6:Totally. I mean, so our goals with with Codex are just to build an amazing coding agent. Mhmm. And if you think about what an agent is, it's a combination of, like, the model and what we call the harness, which is kind of like the set of tools that the model has and then an interface for the user around that. And so the reason we put Codex in the name is because, basically, we wanted to just, like we're really investing in Codex and, like, in software engineering generally.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And so we wanted to have the opportunity to go, like, much deeper and push harder on things that, like, might not benefit, like, sort of general users of a model. And in fact, we wanted even the ability to, like, make certain things worse. So not that I've gone and checked, but, like, g p five codecs, if you're not using it for codecs, it's it's probably gonna do worse at, like, a bunch of general tasks than g p five will.
Speaker 1:Sure. React to this RunePost. Right now is the time where the takeoff looks the most rapid to insiders. We don't program anymore. We just yell at Codex agents, says Rune on x, but may look slow to everyone else as the general chatbot medium saturates.
Speaker 1:People have been saying, oh, this is the 90% of code being written by AI agents. And there's this debate on, are we just writing 10 times as much code? Are we doing ten ten times less work? Like, give me a little bit more color on how you're using Codex internally to build the actual product.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, we use Codex internally a ton or a lot. Yeah. And, you know, we're I think we're at the point now where, you know, for, like, writing code, these coding agents are, like, massively adopted.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And, you know, it's kind of a stylistic choice, like, how much of the code it's writing, but it's, like, the vast majority.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You know, I will say that our goal isn't to, like we don't actually have a goal of, like, yeah, let's, like, make sure the maximum amount of code is written by agents. It's, like, really what matters is, like, your velocity Yeah. As a team. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 6:But, sort of my, like, maybe slightly spicy take here is, like, actually, one of the greatest limiting factors, on the utility of coding agents right now is not, like, the model's ability to write code, but it's actually the human ability to, like, just prompt it and, like, make use of the agent. So for example, we shipped a code review feature that's, like, you know, doing really well a few weeks ago. And, you know, the model is capable of doing code review. We actually did a ton of work to make it even better at code review. So, when Codex does a code review for you, it'll, like, actually get a whole copy of the code base.
Speaker 6:It can, like, go read everything even outside of your PR. It can even execute code to validate, which, like, a human is probably gonna be a little too lazy to do normally. Mhmm. But the big unlock isn't isn't even necessarily that. Like, even g p d five is a great code reviewer.
Speaker 6:But the limiting factor is, like, are you gonna go prompt the model to code review every single PR that you get? And the answer is no. So what we did is we just, like, automated that, built it in a nice way, like, integrated with GitHub, and now we're seeing, you know, just reviewing the vast majority of PRs in the bin open OpenAI repos and catching, like, serious bugs. It's actually kinda become a meme when, you know, if so we ask people internally, like, hey. React with thumbs up if it's good just so we can, like, kinda see.
Speaker 6:And whenever and, like, reply with what's wrong with this review if it catches an issue that the engineer disagrees with. And, you know, often, it'll be the case that an engineer will kinda see this issue, reply and say, yeah. I I disagree. And then, like, two days later, it'll be like, actually, this was a mistake, and we need to we need to actually follow the model's catch.
Speaker 1:What does it take to make it on the OpenAI Codex team these days? I mean, feels like the skill set of just someone who's a programmer is changing. Now you're prompting, designing. Is it give me some advice for young people or people entering the the workforce.
Speaker 6:I think the thing I would say for OpenAI coding team and by the way, we are hiring both folks externally and then also, you know, so people can transfer internally.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Probably the two most important things is, kind of the you can just do things attitude Mhmm. And speed. Mhmm. And I think those are pretty general things that I would recommend. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 6:know, if you you mentioned, like, advice for young folks. Like, I think it's, a a sort of crazy time now to be early career because so much is just possible to do Yeah. And possible to learn quickly. But at the same time, because of that, everyone else is, like, just doing a lot of stuff and learning a lot of stuff quickly. Right?
Speaker 6:I think to, like, really make the most of that, the the key is is to just, like, really do stuff, especially, like, if you're in a technical field, start doing stuff beyond your coursework but actually start building things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Increasing returns to, like, high agency. It's funny. We're in the era of agents, but then also high agency. People seem to be doing better than ever.
Speaker 1:It's kind of a paradox, but, it's a good time to be able to have a positive attitude and actually go and, just, just try and build things. It's good time.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And I think this Go is true ahead.
Speaker 2:No. Go for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:No. I was just gonna say, I
Speaker 1:think this is true
Speaker 6:as well at work. Right? Like, maybe before, you would have a number of, like, very specialized role, like, PM, designer, front end engineer, back end engineer, like, know, SRE. And now, because of all these coding agents, like, everyone is able to just do a lot more, and so you can have people, like, owning, like, entire problems end to end. You know, one one fun example actually leading up to to yesterday's launch is, our designer built this, like, really cool ASCII animation of a coin that's rotating.
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 6:And, you know, that's, like, kind of a hard thing to get right.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:And so, over the weekend, he just, like, vibe coded an ASCII animation editor. Woah. He vibes that lets him, like, edit the That's wild. Yeah. And, like, that's, like, such, like, stack compression.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 6:And it's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, there used to be a time when it was, like, you're a front engineer. You know JavaScript. But you don't know Ruby on Rails or Python in the back end. And, like, the back end guy doesn't know or gal doesn't know JavaScript or whatever.
Speaker 1:And they got to talk to each other. And there's loss in translation stuff. So yeah, it's an entirely new era. Very exciting.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And it comes with problems, too, right? Like if you have all these folks, like, the the Asci animation viewer I mentioned, like, that's throwaway code. So I guess there's not much tech debt. It's just, like, pure acceleration.
Speaker 6:We actually write a lot of throwaway code, like different kinds of dashboards
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:Editors, mini tools. But then, you know, sometimes you have folks who are, like, specialized to one thing now, like, able to write code for a different thing. Mhmm. And, you know, that actually creates a different kind of problem, which is, like, code review and expertise. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And so that's why, like, what we're trying to do with Codex now is, like, we're investing in making, like, the fun you know, fundamental, like, cogen experience great in just writing code, but we're also starting to, like, reach out now. So we're really investing in code review because that's, like, actually becoming the bottleneck, like, having qualified people be confident in code. Yeah. We're really investing in validation. So, like, before you review the code, like, can you assert functional correction correctness?
Speaker 6:One thing the Codex can do now is, like, take screenshots. It'll, like, actually write a playwright script
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:To, like, manipulate the website and then take the right screenshot of it so you can actually look before you read the code. And then we're we're thinking about, you know, where else can we make it really easy to to engage the agent, before it actually, like, gets to you on your computer doing work.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Thank you for the update.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for hopping on the stream. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 6:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 2:Good luck out there.
Speaker 1:Have a good rest of your day.
Speaker 2:APU is on fire.
Speaker 1:Bye. Good luck. Well, that concludes our guests for the day.
Speaker 2:Basically,
Speaker 1:got to jump. We got to catch a flight. I got to listen to Eyewore, which is in my Audible now by Tim Higgins. You can go find it in Audible, find it on Amazon. We will see you tomorrow live from Meta Connect.
Speaker 1:Later show tomorrow. Later show tomorrow, 04:30, where I think we're starting. We'll be posting updates on X, keeping you updated. And stay tuned. Thank you so much for tuning in.
Speaker 2:Have a wonderful day.
Speaker 1:Thanks to Bobby Cosmic for holding it down in the Twitch chat. Legend. Thank you to John Exley in the YouTube chat. We'll see you
Speaker 2:guys team's like unfading it out. We love you guys.
Speaker 1:We'll see you tomorrow.