Why No One Talks Cournot, Hollywood vs. Seedance 2.0, Micron’s $200B Bet | Jon Caramanica, Haseeb Qureshi, Spenser Skates, Celine Halioua, Ankur Goyal, Reed Duchscher

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Today is Tuesday, February 17, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

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It is the year of fire.

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It's the year of the fire horse. And.

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And we get to celebrate it twice because I think we. I remember we talked about it at the beginning of the year, but the Chinese New Year did not start until today.

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It's Lunar New Year. Right. Worshipers burned large incense sticks on Monday outside a temple in Hong Kong to mark the Lunar New Year, which falls on Tuesday. People around Asia celebrate the start of

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the Year of the Horse in the Ultra Dome. It's the Year of the Horse. Perpetual year.

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Every year.

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I think so it is the year of the.

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Look at this. We were early. We were early and right on horses.

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Well, everyone is talking about the Cournot Equilibrium. At least Dario Amade and Dwarkesh Patel are. And you and me and some folks on the timeline. We're going back and forth and basically trying to get to this question.

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I feel like we should give the context on this, on the titling strategy, because we call the run of shit. We'll title an essay. Why is no one talking about the Cournot Equilibrium? Because this one guy had this super viral like a year or two ago and he's in the title was why is no one talking about Marc Andreessen? We were laughing about it so much. Because he's one of the most talked about.

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Oh yeah.

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Investors in venture.

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He's ever minus list constantly.

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He's every essays everyone's talking about, like

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been viral a million.

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And he's someone.

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So many podcasts.

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Yeah. He's someone that everyone in the industry has an opinion on.

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Totally.

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Totally.

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He's not like a Midas lister. Yeah. Up there. Not a lot of people. It's like everyone's talking about it.

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But in this case, really, I mean, truly, I do think more people should be talking about the Cournot Equilibrium, or at least learning about what it means. Because it is this sort of obscure economic construct and it's really, really old. The guy who coined it, he died 150 years ago. His name's Antoine Cournot. And the basic idea is that if there's only a few players in a given market, you can think about any specific market. Lemonade stands or whatever. And they aren't competing on price. They will compete on supply and they'll try to predict what their competitors are doing and then respond accordingly. And this is really, really relevant to the AI lab discussion because you can tell that even though all the leaders of the AI lab say I don't think about the competition, I don't talk about the competition, I'll use general terms. They're all obsessed with what everyone else is doing and they think about it constantly, very clear, clearly. And if someone's buying 10 billion of compute over here, they're going to counter with eight over there, try and jump to 12 and everyone's sort of keying off of each other. You know, Microsoft pauses, AWS goes all in. There's all these like horse races. It's why semianalysis exists and provides great, you know, cross functional data.

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Daniel in the chat says state actors at work again. Apparently we're having technical difficulties today. We're back, we're back in every way, but we're working on it.

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Okay. And so yeah, there's this big question in outside of tech there's this discussion that I see that's always funny to me where people would be like, oh, the price to earnings ratio says they

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don't want you to talk about.

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They don't want us to talk about it. They don't want us to talk about it for sure. I like the Chiron to AI labs locked in cornot battle and the so outside of tech there's this discussion, I'm very sensitive. The price to earnings ratio for OpenAI and Anthropic is just simply too high. And I was like, earnings, these companies are losing money. They don't have a price to earnings ratio. Divide by zero.

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This is going to blow your mind.

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Yeah, it's so much worse than you think. They're not making any money. They're deeply unprofitable. These are the most unprofitable companies in human history, I think. But at the same time there is an economic rationality behind all of this. And what is that economic rationality? Well, when you're running a AI lab, you actually have two businesses that are sort of hiding within the P and L. And so the first you, you know, you share this brand, you share the data centers, you share compute. But there's a whole bunch of risks and rewards to the various pieces of the business. So first you have training, the models. So you make an upfront investment in a training run that creates a particular model generation and then that asset depreciates as the frontier moves and then when a new and better model is released, everyone moves over and you stop reaping the benefits of that and the value of that model goes much, much lower. How much money is OpenAI making from GPT 3.5? They spent money training that now?

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Not a ton, but I would actually love to know.

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They're probably making almost zero. Who's still on GPT 3.0? I don't even know if the API is live anymore. But GPT4 is the really instructive, is the really instructive example because I believe that model cost like $100 million to train and it was really expensive at the time. But then very quickly they were on a multi billion dollar run rate and it was very clear that based on the inference margin and the subscriptions ChatGPT Pro, that they made all the money back from GPT 4 and more. Now there's a question about, okay, well if they go and spend 10 billion on training, how quickly will that come back and how much how, how quickly can they reap that? And there's this game of chicken that's happening. So that's one of them. Then the other side of things is the inference factory. So this is essentially a manufacturing business. You have your variable costs, so GPUs, power, engineering overhead, and then your revenue is subscriptions, API usage and enterprise contracts. And so when you just look at inference, you see positive contribution margin. And we can see that because we can compare the cost to inference. A model of the GPT5 class size or the Opus 4.5 size, you can see what does it look like to run an open source version of that model on commodity hardware? Well, it's way, way cheaper than what you pay to Anthropic or OpenAI. So they must have good margins. And everyone sort of agrees this point, that inference margins are in fact healthy. The question is, how do you balance those two pieces and when do you risk over investing? And that's sort of this Cournot game of chicken that everyone's playing now. The Cournot equilibrium comes when a small number of labs, an oligopoly, effectively choose supply at the frontier level and then the market clears at a high price for frontier access. So choosing supply in this case means how many data centers get built, how many GPUs get ordered, but also how much low latency capacity is allocated to the top tier. So right now OpenAI just did the Cerebras deal. There's cloud fast and there's a whole bunch of different modes that will deliver faster inference and how many of those fast queries you get. How much of the best chips are allocated to a particular tier that you're paying for is an economic question for the labs. So on the true frontier there aren't great substitutes and so price stays high based on customers willingness to pay for frontier access. So you can just think about it in more simpler terms. Like there's a ton of developers and knowledge workers who are happy to pay hundreds of dollars a month or more, but they always want the best available model. This is most people in executive roles in startups, right? It's like, yeah, I got my $200 a month subscription. I'll pay 250 or 100 or whatever. Couple hundred bucks and it just makes me better at my job. I just do whatever I need to do. But don't give me the old thing. I want the best. I want to know that the hallucination rate is as low as possible. I want to know that when it builds me an economic model, it's doing it as best as it possibly can. So I need to spend less time.

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1% of the time it makes a career ending mistake maybe.

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I. No, I really do. I mean there are some crazy, crazy possible outcomes. We haven't heard too many nightmare stories, but they certainly have to be out there. Like the true hallucinations.

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You need checks and balances.

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Yeah, yeah. But increasingly, yeah, increasingly everyone's gone through

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the experience of somebody building a model and then being like, I don't know why, but it's wrong.

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Yeah, yeah.

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And then it's usually a battle.

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Yeah, I was actually, you got to

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train that instinct that can just clock this even if you have no, if it just like if it feels off.

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I was talking to a buddy about using AI tools who works in like high yield debt sales and trading and issuance. And he was like, yeah, like the models just like aren't that good. And I was like, really? And he was like, yeah, they don't understand like Q4. 76 of the tax code and how it applies. And I was like, okay, yeah, actually that seems like something that they might not be great at. I was like, because I built a toy model which is like project out the cash flows, discount them back. And it did a great job. And I was like, cool. And he was like, no, I'm like 25 levels above that and deep in all these different codes and it's not

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quite good work, little bro.

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It'll get there. But it's just like the base models are not just Going to be able to one shot that. What do you think Tyler? Fire it back.

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You would imagine that something as if it's just text code, even if it's super complex, you can just put that in the context and it just does a very good job. Yes, but there's finding specific facts from a super big document, that's one of the things that models are best at.

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Yes, but there's a lot of laughing at the chat.

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Ethan says computer fix TBPN use Gunna and grok Gunna can fix us.

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We're back, we're back. Yes, but there are nuances to the tax code and to a lot of legal documents where the law says one thing, but it's important, but it's, but it's implemented in a different way or it's not enforced or some regulatory organization has enforcement discretion or there's some understanding. Even if you just go into like training on ip, it's like if you have really good lawyers, you can figure out okay, well they'll come to the table, we'll be able to negotiate this, this will be the price, this will be the settlement. So even though the model might say don't do that, you have a chance to do it. There's a whole bunch of different reasons why. But yes, I generally agree with you. This is like a six month away thing. Not. But it's just like the current, the

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current thing but with like good, you know.

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Yes, yes and maybe some more harnessing and more some and better context. Anyway, the question is like where does this all go? What is the natural state of equilibrium in the longer term? Right now they're locked in Cournot where there's a whole bunch of companies, individuals that want to buy the best AI inference possible. They want the best tokens, they want the best deep research reports, they want the best code and they're willing to pay for it. But we're supply constrained and so OpenAI brings a certain amount of GPUs and tokens and supply to the market and then Anthropic also does and the whole cornot thing is that they're all keying off of each other and saying okay, if they're offering this much, I'm going to offer that much.

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And to be clear, so having a product, not just an API business, gives you leverage because at some point the models are smart enough where you don't need to train them, you don't need to train a model that is 4% better because people are still coming to your application and having a good Product experience, right?

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Yes.

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So historically, one of the critiques to Anthropic's business was that they have to just be on this constant, constant fly sort of hamster wheel of training the best model because the majority of their business is this API business. They're not an aggregator yet swap it out for a smarter model. That said, they have Claude code now, which gives them some more leverage over the market.

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And the really interesting thing is that Dario is now talking about being near the end of the exponential or maybe producing the final models because we've talked to a few people about this, but it's very unclear if it's possible to create a super intelligence that's 5,000 IQ. It might just be they get good at all knowledge work and they can answer all tasks, but it's like the digital guy. And so at that point it does commoditize and you drop out of Cournot equilibrium and you become more. Customers are more aggressive about switching to cheaper models to cut costs because the frontier is now commoditized in the entire backlog. Everyone is at the frontier, basically. And so in that scenario, you switch over to Bertrand competition, which doesn't really, really mean that profits go to zero, but there is more competition and it looks a lot more like the hyperscaler cloud market, which is I think, what people have been sort of signaling towards. And also it sort of explains why a lot of the VC firms are getting in multiple companies because they don't think it's going to be winner take all anymore. They think it's going to be much more oligopolistic for the long term. And there will be competition between the major three or four labs that will. And it will be much more about how can you marshal enough supply, create a huge barrier to entry. Like you and I could start an AWS competitor tomorrow, but it's going to be extremely expensive to bring up data centers that just serve web apps everywhere, let alone AI stuff. Right. Building all those data centers. You're thinking what I'm thinking. You're thinking. You're thinking. I was saying, when does.

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I was hanging with my buddy, my buddy Ben on Sunday and he was. We both live in Malibu. He was thinking of just getting some chips and setting up Malibu Inference.

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There we go.

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Just the name alone sounds like you could get at least one Malibu Inference.

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That's really funny.

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Would be a good. Would be a beautiful name for a Neo cloud.

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Yeah, it's funny. And so there is a question about, in the final models, will there be differentiation? What does Differentiation look like there's a potential for differentiation around. Okay, you get a model that's really good at bio or math or engineering or code or writing. That's possible. Another possibility is that there's just differentiation on quality, latency, safety, enterprise tooling, and you wind up with a small number of vertically integrated firms. And so in that scenario, I feel like OpenAI's recent moves make a lot of sense. Cerebras offers differentiated product around speed. Peter from OpenClaw joining makes a lot of sense around building orchestration products that can route to particular models. So the next generation of the Claude code router that can route you to specific APIs and act as a model router on top for the agentic programmer AI assistant use case. You already see the model router happening in the ChatGPT consumer app. We haven't really seen that in the desktop CLI app. And so there's something interesting there. And then frontier. OpenAI frontier, that for deployed engineer thing that digs deeper into the enterprise and probably gets them more hooks in there, more pricing power.

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The chat's going off today, Ryan says. The Cournot company of Malibu.

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Let's do it. I love it. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Let's play the clip of Dwarkesh Patel and Dario Amade discussing the economics of AI labs because I think it's informative. And this is where the whole Cornot current thing came from, because Dario dropped that phrase.

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So when you said, why is no one talking about it?

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It was literally everyone that listened to the biggest podcast of the week. But I'm explaining IT

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industry here. Like, we have a, you know, let's just imagine we're. We're in like an economics textbook. We have a small number of firms. Each can invest a limited amount in, you know, or like, each can invest some fraction, fraction in R and D. They have some marginal cost to serve the margins on that, the profit margin, the gross profit margins on that marginal cost are like, very high. Because. Because inference is efficient. There's some competition. But the models are also differentiated. There's some, there's some, you know, companies will compete to push their research budgets up. But, like, because there's a small number of players, you know, we have the. What is it called in the Cournot equilibrium, I think, is what the. What the Cornell firm equal equilibrium is. The point is it doesn't equilibrate to perfect competition with, with. With with, with, with zero margins. If there's like three firms, if there's three firms in the economy, all are kind of independently behaving rationally. It doesn't equilibrate to zero.

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Help me understand that.

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Because right now we do have three

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leading firms and they're not making profit. And so that's a good question. Yeah.

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What is changing? Yeah. So again, the gross margins right now are very positive. What's happening is a combination of two things. One is we're still in the exponential scale up phase of compute. So basically what that means is we're training. Like a model gets trained. It costs, let's say a model got trained, that costs a billion dollars last year and then this year it produced $4 billion of revenue and cost $1 billion.

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To, to, to, to, to.

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Inference from. So you know, again, I'm using stylized number here, but you know, 70 my numbers.

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I'm just picking random numbers.

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Gross, gross margins. And you know, this, this 25% tax. So that model as a whole makes $2 billion. But at the same time we're spending $10 billion to train the next model because there's an exponential scale up. And so the company loses money. Each model makes money, but the company loses money. The equilibrium I'm talking about is an equilibrium where we have the country of Geniuses. We have the country of Geniuses data center. But that, that model training scale up has equilibrated more. Maybe, maybe it's still, it's still going up. We're still trying to predict the demand, but it's more, it's more leveled out.

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Let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. There is another fun clip that we should watch from A Beautiful Mind. Jordy, have you seen A Beautiful Mind? It won the Oscar for best picture. I believe it's about the mathematician John Nash. Have you seen A Beautiful Mind?

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I've not.

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Wow. Unk status over there.

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You would have. Inversely, I was walking on the beach with Senra on I think Saturday and we walked by an incredibly famous. One of the top movie directors of the last probably 10 years. Wait, really? And Senra was like, do you see that? And I was like, see what? It's a guy with a dog.

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That's hilarious. I feel like that your beach tours have been really star studded lately. This is a different from the previous one you mentioned, correct?

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Yes. Yes.

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Wow.

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Yes.

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That's remarkable. Well, let's pull up the clip from. Incoming.

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Gentlemen,

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This is from a Beautiful Mice. Nash, you might want to stop shuffling

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your papers for five seconds.

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Is that Eric Lyman?

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Yes, it's Eric Lyman in the. In the ramp biopic. We got. We got. We got our cast right here. Oh, this is the original. Like, looks maxing. Movie feels. She should be moving in slow motion.

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Will she want a large wedding, you think?

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Should we say swords, gentlemen? Pistols at dawn?

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Have you remembered nothing? Recall the lessons of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics.

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In competition, individual ambition serves the common good.

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Exactly.

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Every man for himself, gentlemen.

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And those who strike out are stuck with their friends.

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I'm not gonna strike out.

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You can lead a blonde to water, but you can't make a drink.

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I don't think he said that.

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All right, nobody move. She's looking over here. She's looking at Nash.

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Oh, God. All right, he may have the upper

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hand now, but wait until he opens his mouth. I think this. This is very, very stylized and completely apocryphal. Like, he definitely thought of this theory, but not at a bar. We block each other. Not a single one of us is going to get her. So then we go for her friends, but they will all give us the cold shoulder because nobody likes to be second choice. What if no one goes for the blonde? We don't get in each other's way, and we don't insult the other girls. That's the only way we win. That's the only way we all get laid. So he's describing the prisoner's dilemma, Adam Smith said, where everyone must work together. Best result comes from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself. Right? That's what he said. Incomplete.

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Incomplete.

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Incomplete. Okay, incomplete, because the best result would come from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself and the group.

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Ash, this is some way for you

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to get the blonde on your own. You can go to hell.

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Governing dynamics, gentlemen.

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Governing dynamics.

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Adam Smith.

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Who's wrong?

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Here we go.

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Careful, careful. Thank you. Tis so good. Anyway, very fun.

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Dave says just joined the stream. We watching a movie.

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Yeah. Movie day.

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We should bring back. Bring back movie days in school.

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Yes.

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I mean, that was iconic. Rainy day substitute gladiator in Latin class.

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That was the best. Really quickly, let me tell you about Vibe Co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales. Just like on Meta. Anyway, very. Yeah, very fun, Nash. Equilibrium. Lots of game theory going on in the. In the AI wars right now. Now, everyone's trying to figure out how far to push it. There's a fair amount of risk. There's still the Cournot game of chicken around who will invest the most in advancing the frontier. But the end state looks a lot more durable than pure model commoditization and the perfectly competitive situation that many were predicting a few years ago. So if you go Back to like 2023, a lot of people were saying like the models will commoditize and there will be no value there, like no profits because like the deep seq moment and it'll all be run on commodity hardware. That doesn't seem that likely. It seems like the labs will turn into sort of new hyperscalers, there will be increased competition, but still very, very good businesses a la cloud. So anyway, fun to dig into some little Econ 101 or 102 depending, but let's go to the timeline.

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Bucho Capital says I thought Dwarkesh had a good point that software engineering is the only job where the full context needed. The job is available to an AI agent via the code base. And I didn't think Daria had a good answer for why automating other jobs will be as easy. This got a bunch of a lot of people kind of reacting, kind of disagreeing generally that all of the full context needed to do the job is available. But I do think it's something we need to figure out.

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Yeah, we were debating this because there was a post that was just sort of like a wojack reaction that was just making fun of this and it wasn't clear if they were saying that they were agreeing or disagreeing. But basically my take was, well, it's possible that a lot of the full context needed to do the job of a lot of different white collar jobs is in fact logged. It's just logged in the final product, which is like a deck or spreadsheet or a decision, and then a whole bunch of emails, a whole bunch of slacks, and then a whole bunch of zoom calls that's recorded. And so yes, if you're running a business where a lot of work gets done in smoky bars late at night and back alley deal making sure that's going to be harder to automate. But in the world where it's someone sitting in front of a computer and there's a screen recorder running, you should be able to pull up most of the context at the same time. You can't just snap your fingers and go back and get every decision that was made in the 80s that allowed coca Cola to Become a dominant soda maker.

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But you can't.

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You literally can.

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With Linux people on calls just being like knowing the calls being recorded and used to train something to replace them. They're just like, I'll tell you offline. I'm not in speaking this secret in your record.

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Yeah, Golf this weekend. You want to play golf really quickly. Figma ship the best version. Not the first one. With Figma introducing Claude code to Figma. Explore more options, push ideas further. Figma.

25:41

But this was funny. Bucho said. Basically a non zero chance of Joe Wiesenthal victory. Where software engineers write themselves out of a job first and everyone else has the boring parts of their job automated. Joe of course was joking. Just saying, well, of course software engineering is being automated. So easy.

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It's so easy. Yes, it is.

26:13

The debate around the posture.

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Dwarkesh.

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Dwarkesh. His posture was.

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He's been at the gym a lot. He looks fantastic. And I love this sweater. The crew neck works really well. The pushed up sleeves is a particular choice. Didn't translate into that. Chad Wojack. But he looks fantastic here. And the Aeron chair is certainly helping with the posture. A lot of fun on the timeline. Looking at the. The looks. Mogging or whatever. The looks maxing. I don't even know. Frame mogging. That's the frame.

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He kept bringing up the example of a video editor saying, yeah, but when will the models be good enough to edit videos? Well, and pick out moments.

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Yes.

27:06

And give me two years and another 500 billion. This is. I mean we've tried every tool there is. Yeah, they can't do it yet.

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Tricky. I don't know. I don't know what's.

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And it's not even that. We're not trying the tools to replace the people on our team. We're trying to make them have higher output.

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Yeah.

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But to date, I don't know if

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there's something super sticky. I mean, it does seem like one interesting thing is that there aren't a lot of open source like Premiere profiles. Like I've edited a ton of videos for YouTube. There's a whole bunch of cuts in there. What I cut out. What I didn't. You could have that record, but it's not stored in GitHub. Like it's just. You can't necessarily train on it. You can train on the final product and understand, but you don't understand what actually got left on the cutting. Cutting room floor. There's this whole concept of like kill your darlings. Like when you're in the edit like you need to be cutting more. You're like, I like that shot. It's so cinematic, so cool. But does it actually advance the story? No. So you cut it down. I was watching the Matrix this weekend and there's this amazing shot of when Neo and Morpheus are going to visit the oracle. Is that one the oracle? And Neo. Is that the one oracle? Yeah. And they reach for the doorknob and the doorknob has this perfect reflection and the reflection shows Neo and Morpheus. And they had to do this crazy VFX shot to hide the camera in what looks like Morpheus coat. Because if you point a camera at a mirror, you see the camera and you don't want to see the cameraman there. That ruins the shot. And so they did all this crazy stuff to cover up the camera. And I'd seen the behind the scenes and been like, wow, that's really impressive. And in my memory I thought it was like, oh, it's such an important shot. They probably lingered on that for like five seconds to really let it sink in. Like they're pulling a trick on the audience. It's beautiful. It's like half a second and they did all this work and then they knew that like from a story perspective, from a storytelling perspective, you don't want to hang out and watch a picture of a doorknob for five seconds. And so all these decisions, like they sort of get chronicled, but they don't get neatly organized in the way that a GitHub log does with pull request discussions and what happens. So it'll be difficult. So maybe two years, another $5 billion does it. But it's coming, so we'll keep monitoring it. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, Raise capital. At the New York Stock Exchange, we have a special guest joining. John Carmenica is joining and I want to music, but I wanted to tee up his appearance with a little music review that I found in the newspaper today. The algorithm wants you to grieve. Rest in peace. My granny, she got hit by a bazooka. A title that functions as its own thesis statement is the kind of song that resists every framework we've built for understanding virality. It is not quite parody, not quite sincerity, not quite meme. It exists in some fourth space where emotional registers becomes irrelevant and the only metric that matters is whether the thing lodges itself in your prefrontal cortex like a splinter. The melody, if we're being generous enough to call it that, is a three note loop. That sounds like it was composed on a Fisher Price keyboard during a power outage. The vocal delivery is flat, almost affectless, a kind of anti performance that paradoxically demands more attention than virtuosity ever could. The lyrical content is, well, the title repeated with conviction, and yet something is happening here that's worth taking seriously, or at least worth resisting the urge to dismiss. The song collapses the distance between tragedy and comedy so completely that neither category survives the collision. It's grief as non sequitur, eulogy as punchline, memorial as munition. The bazooka isn't just absurd, it's so specifically absurd that it loops past irony and arrives somewhere strangely earnest. Nobody's grandmother has ever been hit by a bazooka. The scenario is impossible, and impossibility, it turns out, is its own form of tenderness, a way of saying loss is so incomprehensible that only nonsense can hold it. Or maybe it's just a guy yelling about a bazooka. The Internet doesn't require you to choose, but we'll be following this story, so thanks for coming.

27:33

We'll get John's take on that.

31:27

We will review Song of the Week and the ad platform of the week is Applovin. Profitable advertising made it Easy with Axon AI get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business.

31:28

Today, Andrew Reed says, horses don't stop, they keep going.

31:41

Wait, did he actually say that?

31:45

Yes.

31:46

No way.

31:47

Yes.

31:47

In response to 2026 being the year of the horse.

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I love it.

31:51

One of the greatest lyrics of all

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time, originally to explain the joke. It's a Young Thug song.

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And.

32:01

And the actual lyric is hustlers don't stop, they keep going. Really? But it sounds like horses. And so people put horses don't stop, they keep going. And they show the AI generated image of the horse bench pressing. And it's incredibly inspiring.

32:01

There's a lot of Young Thug songs that are hard to fully decipher.

32:15

100%.

32:20

Let's hit the size gong for this. Pennsylvania Girl Scout, 6 years old, breaks record selling 87,000 boxes of cookies. She's unstoppable.

32:21

Unstopp. Unstoppable. How much is that? What's the ARR.

32:33

How much is a break it down? Is it $12?

32:37

That's a lot. How long do this? Six years old. Wow. What enabled this incredible scale? Was it potentially Shopify? Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces.

32:42

And now with AI estimating that it's somewhere around $600,000 of sales at only six years old. Really incredible stuff. Heartwarming.

32:58

That's awesome.

33:06

India's Adani group to invest 100 billion in AI infrastructure.

33:06

We gotta hit the gong again.

33:11

Hit it again. The Indian boost the country's ambitions to become an AI power. India's Andani Group, an energy and logistics giant said it would invest $100 billion to develop large scale data centers by 2035. The largest such commitment in India. India so far. Tyler, what do you think about the timing here? Is this going to be too late? Are the clankers going to like is 2035, how are we looking there? Is that, I mean a singularity?

33:12

Yeah, I'm very bullish on the clankers coming pretty early. So you know, time will tell I guess.

33:38

We'll see.

33:44

I cannot wait to pull up this clip.

33:44

It is, it is a big number that I feel like a lot of countries have been teasing big numbers but

33:46

this is, they're kind of mogging. Macron.

33:53

Yeah, this is like a really big number. You see a bunch of like multibillion dollar deals, multibillion dollar releases. But this is like serious, serious, serious investment. So you know, good, good news for many countries.

33:56

One of the biggest concerns about the looming AI era is that it will deepen existing technology divides in which tech services are developed by companies in a few countries. Some countries have also expressed concerns about how large tech firms will consume data generated by their citizens to build their AI products. India is focused on making sure that startups and researchers use AI to solve pressing development challenges and paving the way for its businesses to become providers of global AI services. India will shape solutions not just for India but for the world, said Indian Prime Minister Modi in a social media post today. The Andani Group said the dedicated said the dedicated computing capacity it is building will support Indian large language models and ensure data generated in India is stored locally. Let's see how the stock's doing up 2% today.

34:09

Is it a $28 billion company? Do I have that right? I don't know. It's like 2.5 trillion INR so I think that's about 28 billion. So this is a huge investment.

34:59

Raghav says Andani will more than likely use government leverage government backed data centers. You happy about that Tyler?

35:13

Government backstop coming to India.

35:21

Backstop.

35:22

Let's go.

35:23

Before we move on, let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want a multi stream go

35:25

to restream.com Micron is spending 200 billion. Congratulations for setting the biggest number, Micron. Micron is spending 200 billion to break the AI memory bottleneck. For decades, memory chips were low margin commodity products. Now the industry can't make enough to satisfy data centers.

35:29

Hunger hungry. This one company is like, yeah, we're going to spend twice as much as India as the Adani Group.

35:47

Boise, Idaho. Each afternoon at around 4:30, the earth here shakes from a series of controlled explosions as engineers blast through basalt bedrock to flatten out the ground underneath a gigantic new semiconductor factory. Let's give it up for Idaho. Yeah, we don't talk about Idaho enough. Micron Technology is the largest American maker of memory chips. The tiny slices of silicon that store and transfer data and help power everything from smartphones and car computers to laptops and data centers. Micron is rushing to add manufacturing capacity to avert the biggest supply crunch the memory industry has seen in more than 40 years. In Boise, where the company is based, Micron is spending 50 billion to more than double the size of its 450 acre campus, including the construction of two new chip factories. The first fabs inaugural wafers are expected to roll off the factory line in mid-2027. So this is their first fab or the one that they're spending the 50 billion on right now.

35:55

I think the new one.

36:53

Okay, so that's pretty quick.

36:54

Yeah. Did you hear that the PS6, the PlayStation 6 is now delayed because of memory shortages? 2029, 2028, 2029. It's still a rumor. Maybe they'll, you know, maybe this solves it and they can get it out earlier. But pretty, pretty big delay to 2029. They really don't refresh.

36:56

You just created a trillion gamers. No, seriously, I think adding insult to injury.

37:18

Yeah. To the gamers might actually rise up. Gamers might rise up. They might be an important voting bloc. A lot of them are, A lot of them are of age to vote and a lot of them would rather have new gaming hardware than necessarily AI slop in the feed. They're like, yeah, I can't afford the new PC that I wanted. What do you think?

37:25

Yeah, I don't know. I mean I feel like this says a lot about how good the PS5 is.

37:49

Right.

37:52

Because they can afford to just postpone the psx. What games?

37:53

Oh, now you don't want technological progress?

37:58

Wow.

38:00

I want it to go to the data centers. I don't care about the next like game graphics. Have like, have they gotten that much better in the past like five years? Like yeah, maybe. But it's like for the actual gameplay, is it that important if like the actual pixels are.

38:01

Yeah. Realistically a lot of this stuff should be moving to the cloud soon if it's not already.

38:15

Yeah, like it was the Meta Quest VR. I forget.

38:22

Oh yeah.

38:26

Xbox Connect, Xbox Edition.

38:26

Yeah, yeah.

38:28

And it was all in the cloud and it was like totally fine.

38:29

It was low latency.

38:31

Yeah.

38:32

And then if you're running in the cloud you can upgrade the hardware and in theory you should be able to run like a gen AI upresing pass to make it more photoreal. And I feel like that's going to be where more of the juice is squeezed out of the graphics than just continuing on the traditional path of more pixels, more ray tracing. It'll be make a really beautifully designed video game that works really well. Really tight deterministic interaction so it's satisfying and then give it a layer.

38:33

We got to have like a RAM trader on the show. Really Somebody that's in the thick of deal making in this space.

39:05

There's a couple folks over at Semianlysis that cover it. One of them just went on odd lots.

39:12

Let's do it.

39:16

Get them on the show.

39:16

Let's do it.

39:17

Let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

39:18

That's not all. Near SEER. Syracuse. Micron just broke down, broke ground. They just broke down in Syracuse. They just broke ground on $100 billion fab complex that represents the state of New York's largest ever private investment. Late last year, Micron announced a $9.6 billion fab in Hiroshima, Japan, while competitor SK Hynix announced in January that it would build a $13 billion fab in South Korea in addition to a $4 billion manufacturing complex it is building in Indiana.

39:24

This is interesting. I feel like this is acceleration in CapEx from the MEM, but this, I wonder how TSMC responds to this because the big criticism of TSMC is that they are increasing capex, but the rate at which they are increasing capex is decelerating. And so they're not really keeping up with the exponential growth in compute that every AI lab, every data center builder, every memory maker is pushing towards. And I wonder what do they know? What do they know? Or TSMC is being so conservative. I mean they might just have the AI industry in a chokehold and so if there is a bottleneck they can just raise prices. But they also might screw everything up by not investing enough, and then we get to some sort of solid bottleneck for a while and we can't actually roll out more.

39:53

Well, let's get someone on from semianalysis tomorrow to talk about memory moving on. Lucas Shaw was on a tear over the weekend reporting on the Warner Brothers Paramount conversations. He says this morning Warner Brothers is going to resume talks with Paramount after two months of rejecting them playing mind games. The company still says it's committed to Netflix, but needs to find out just how much the Ellisons will offer. He originally reported on this Sunday, but it's being confirmed today. Again, we kind of knew this was going to happen if the Ellisons had been saying, we're making a. We're giving you a big number, but it's not our biggest number. It's not our best and final. So no surprise here. Paramount has now just eked out a lead on who will successfully take over Warner Brothers. Over on Kalshi, they're sitting at 49% chance with Netflix at 37% and then none before July 2027 at 30.

40:51

This is such an interesting flippening here.

41:53

I was talking to this Flip Happened

41:56

executive this weekend and he was like, yeah, I think there's just too many people that are against Netflix for a variety of reasons that it'll reopen the Paramount conversations. And specifically I was like, but YouTube. YouTube. And he was like, no one buys that argument. Like, everyone thinks about the entertainment industry as its own thing and then social media tech, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube as a separate thing. And no one is making that comp.

41:58

It's just, yeah, YouTube is not a, you know, having having. We asked Ashley Vance, how do you feel about having kind of one less big buyer in the buyer pool for documentaries? And he was like, not great. Already bad. This would be worse. But YouTube is not a buyer of IP. They host content and serve it to people. So it's a tough argument to make even though they're been absolutely on an insane tear from an overall watch time standpoint.

42:27

Yeah, hold on. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market your business on MongoDB? Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it.

42:56

AJ says Grace Blackwell is a beautiful name for a baby girl. I totally agree.

43:07

I mean, isn't that because it's actually the name of a girl? Right? Like, isn't Grace like the name. Like they're like the chips are named after real people who's. Well, there's like Ada Lovelace. I want to say Trevor Grace Hopper. Grace Hopper, Yeah, Grace Hopper. So it was.

43:14

And David. Harold Blackwell.

43:33

David Blackwell. I always think Trevor Blackwell because he's a YC partner. But he did not invent the Blackwell. But Grace Blackwell is a beautiful name. Vera Rubin too. Vera Rubin is also the name of a female mathematician, I believe, or computer.

43:35

The only person I can find named Grace Blackwell is an audio designer and composer based in the uk. So gonna have a rough go on the SEO front.

43:49

Yeah. Let's flip over to Claude. Bottom Kent Dodd says names the thing Claude bought. Claude asks for a rename. Renames to Open Claw. OpenAI buys it. Legendary. Legendary. Couple weeks I was looking back on, like, when did we talk to Peter? It was like two weeks ago. That was when?

44:00

Feels like two months ago.

44:17

It feels like two months ago. Things are moving very, very fast now. No confirmation on buying. It's an open source project. They're keeping it open source. There's a whole bunch of different.

44:18

Yeah. Dave Morin, reading is going to step in to, I believe, run the foundation that will kind of steward the open source project. And then Peter's obviously joining OpenAI. This wasn't super surprising to me. When you looked at the potential places that he could land, it felt like there was. He had talked about like, hey, I'm kind of losing money on this. And. And our takeaway from the conversation is this is a guy that just wants to keep shipping, get this product into the hands of as many people as possible. And when you looked at the kind of buyer pool he was coming to the west coast, you can assume that he was making the rounds.

44:29

He went on Lex and was like, yeah, I'm talking to OpenAI and Meta, which is like a crazy thing to say.

45:12

And Meta. Meta always felt like somewhat of a long shot because even though I think I'm sure he's done very well from this, it didn't feel like dollars were his number one priority. And it's very possible that Zuck would have been willing to overpay or pay whatever price needed to get him on board. Zuck had just also acquired Manus, which feels like his agent's team.

45:17

Right.

45:43

And Manus has already responded by rolling out some Open Claw like functionality. And so that didn't make sense. I think people were expecting Anthropic to make a move. Part of that is like Anthropic's just had so much mind share and been on an insane run the last month or so. And so I think people and the name. Right. Peter also at multiple Points said Anthropic didn't send their lawyers, they sent an individual. But it got turned into this meme that Anthropic had really come and really made it made his life difficult. I think they were like, hey, this is going to be confusing to consumers. And then the other thing is Peter's over and over and over talked about how much he loves Codex. Like he talked about that on our show. He's been very vocal about it. Like he likes building with Codex. And so I think when you understand all these different factors where not entirely financially motivated, I'm sure that was a factor, but not entirely financial motivation, financially motivated. So saying the biggest number is not going to get him to make a move. OpenAI with somewhere around a billion consumers that are using products in the ecosystem today, that creates an exciting opportunity for him to come in and actually roll this out to as many people as possible. And you put all these factors together and him landing there makes a lot of sense.

45:43

Yes. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, deep multimodal understanding. Alex Hormozy chimed in on the Open Claw bot discourse. What did he say?

47:09

He says I'll take this day off to figure out this whole open cloth thing. Every entrepreneur on President's Day weekend, we've talked about this on the show before. Long weekends are really good for AI progress and AI diffusion because people have a few less meetings and they say, hey, maybe I can mess around and figure this thing out.

47:25

It really is remarkable how quickly claudebot openclaw broke through the discourse. I was at dinner at a steakhouse last Wednesday and I overheard a conversation with just a couple guys in suits who I don't think work in tech, talking about different models and how they wanted to use Open Claw and they were thinking about getting Mac Minis. Like it was like it really did break through.

47:45

Beyond our lawyer, our lawyer who doesn't work at a, he works at an entertainment focused law firm. He got a Mac Mini, set it up and so yeah, it's very mainstream. I did see some, I did see some people reporting that the Mac Mini had sold out in their local area too. So it's not, it's not fully sold out by any means, but you look at the traction on GitHub and you look at just the overall demand and how kind of like mainstream, at least the concept of this has gone and Apple's overall production numbers on the device, I mean I think we could enter a world where at least the ones the more in demand models are sold out.

48:11

Petition for 3 day weekends to speed up AGI timelines probably would work for sure. Fumble Gate. Fumble Gate did anthropic fumble Open claw. Darius says I don't think about you at all. Probably overstated. It doesn't seem like they, it was like key to their strategy. They're sort of just focused on their own thing. I don't know. It doesn't, it doesn't seem like like, oh, they completely fumbled.

48:54

Yeah. Part, part of this was the original naming Claude bottom right. But. But when you look at how many different projects Peter shipped.

49:20

Yeah.

49:27

It's not like he was thinking at every moment, oh, I have to name this because it's going to get a million GitHub stars in a month.

49:27

Yeah.

49:35

He was, he was just like ripping products, building really quickly.

49:36

Yeah.

49:39

And it wasn't even. Claude wasn't the default.

49:40

Yeah.

49:44

No in, in Open claw ever.

49:44

Yeah. Yeah. Codex was actually the number one and there are like 10 LLMs that you can choose from when you actually set it up. It very much seems like he's just having fun with the name. I mean the fact that he was calling it Moltbot for a while is

49:46

just tells you that was a great, that was a great, that was a great 24 hours.

50:00

24 hours. But seriously, like he, I don't think he was like, oh, I need a branding agency and I need to think of the name that will go forever. It's just like, yeah, this is like a lobster meme. It's fun.

50:04

Wes Winder says lol. Meta couldn't acquire openclaw so they pulled a classic Zuck move, just clone the whole thing. Then it added as a feature to an existing product. Surprised they didn't try to shove this into Instagram. So Manus announced Manus agents yesterday. They move quick. Your personal Manus Manus Manus now inside your chats. Long term memory full Manus power. Create videos, slides, websites, images from one message, your tools, connect Gmail, Calendar notion and more. Available now in Telegram, I would assume. I was kind of surprised they wouldn't roll this out into WhatsApp.

50:17

Yeah, they don't even own Telegram. Available now on Wait. That is so confusing.

50:54

I think it's possible that WhatsApp didn't have the, didn't have some functionality that they needed to actually do this integration and they're moving so quickly. Like they, they, they seem to have turned this. I don't think. I think like Wes is maybe overstating A little bit like the classic Zuck move you can imagine. Like, Manus would have done this probably independently.

51:01

100% you were calling this. But Manus is a good acquisition because in the. If you want, it's an old.

51:23

We're like, Manus is great.

51:30

Yes.

51:31

And so Zuck has been great at buying a product that has a lot of potential, that has some customer traction and scaling up massively.

51:32

Yeah. And even just for the most mundane Instagram usage, where you could say, oh, I want to look across my audience and see who's the most engaged or understand what trends are happening in my vertical, or respond to every comment with a heart if it's positive. Anything that you'd want as an agent to go around on these social platforms and do, let alone like go buy something for you. Having a team that works on agents makes a ton of sense. But yeah, it's funny. It's just funny that they're rolling it out.

51:40

Matteo says, I think that's connected to WhatsApp de platforming other AI companies. Remember ChatGPT had like a huge integration in WhatsApp and they got booted.

52:13

That's crazy. Hari shares a little bit of lore about Peter Steinberger. Says he bootstrapped PSPDFKit over 10 years ago. It's the gold standard PDF library used by Box, Apple and even DocuSign.

52:23

Wow.

52:40

That's crazy. Insanely hard tech. If you know, you know, it's very hard to work on PDFs. I guess he's worth a couple hundred mil from that. Everyone's. Everyone's trying to guess the number, but nothing's been confirmed. If he goes to OpenAI, he might make more from OpenClaw, which is three.

52:40

Peter says he signed the contract today with software my company built years ago. Now it's nutrient Docs.

52:52

Nutrient still best for anything PDF. It's like I'm PDF maxing. Let's take a look at this. Harnesses won't matter in less than three years, says Ahmad. Yes, there's money to make at the moment, but keep in mind that this is the play of two years ago. And you should be playing for what the models will be capable of in two years from today. Instead, Claude plays Pokemon. Kind of proves this opus. 4.5 and 4.6 has the same insanely bad harness. No babysitting like Gemini and GPT. And 4.6 is like 1197 hours ahead of 4.5, so. Oh, it's how far they get.

52:58

Yeah, I've seen some people trying to back a bunch of like open claw startups. And given that just feels like a potential bloodbath, I think especially knowing that OpenAI will be able to build, I would assume build the best possible kind of wrapper around everything that OpenClaw has built so far.

53:41

Again, I would assume that the three major labs, DeepMind, Anthropic and OpenAI, all have serious orchestrators very soon. And they will acquire talent and acquire products and build products and license stuff and figure out all sorts of integrations, do all the business things necessary to make it happen. But as I wrote in the year of orchestration or orchestrators like this is coming, people are managing multiple agents already and tools that make that easier, tools that make that more reliable and more efficient. Like that's going to be a big focus for this year and everyone's going to be focused on it. So the idea of like, oh, I should just fork this open source project and bring it to enterprises, that's going to be rough when OpenAI has 1004 deployed engineers going into every enterprise that they already have contracts with. Tyler, what do you think?

54:04

Yeah, I was going to say, I think it's a similar thing to the hardware. So Gemini is developing the TPU with the architecture of the model in mind, and they're developing the architecture with the hardware in mind. So it's kind of like these things are helping each other. So you're going to see the same thing in the harness, right, where the harness is made with the model in mind, obviously. But then you're going to start to see as these things as agents become more and more popular, OpenAI already has, there's the normal GPT513 and then there's 5.13 codecs.

54:58

Right.

55:30

So the models are built with the harness in mind. So I think if you're not the one building the model and you're just adding your own harness, the model is not going to be like customized for your harness. So if OpenAI Anthropic are building their own harness, they're going to do it with the model in mind. It's going to be much better than having some third party thing that you build, right?

55:30

I would think so, yeah. No, that's totally reasonable. Harness for horses. Horses don't stop, harnesses don't stop.

55:48

Will Brown says honestly crazy that OpenClaws sold for 1 billion. Like he's really the first Solo $5 billion founder. Time will tell if it's worth 15 billion that OpenAI spent on the acquisition, but it's, it's pretty wild. That you can just vibe code an open source project and make 40 billion in a couple months. Now

55:57

it really, really nails it because everyone jumped immediately to a billion immediately off of nothing. Off of nothing. Off of like one rumor from a thinking machines person that went to Meta and we don't even know what the earnout schedule for that is and how much that happens. It's, it's very, very funny. Who knows.

56:15

We gotta give some credit to Simp for Shytoshi. I brought this up, I brought this up before. Simp has been working on truffles for a handful of years now. I've been by his studio in Venice. It's a very cool setup and team over there. But he posted a little bit about this. Where is it?

56:38

And Tinybox, George Hotz's project is also apparently going to ship a more consumer product. Maybe I think they're around $10,000 right now. They're probably going to bring that down to a few thousand dollars or maybe even a few hundred dollars. You get a lot with a Mac Mini but we'll see where the prices land after the memory shortage takes hold and whatnot. But lots of people are doing this. Alex Cohen breaks it down for Gen Z. If you're wondering what happened today, Claude was mogging OpenAI for weeks. Then this Jim Cell dev ships Claudebot which was the fastest growing open source thing ever. Absolute looks max for the whole ecosystem. Anthropic tries to dairy goon him with legal Dev renames to OpenClaw. OpenAI slides in like a void pulling chad with acquisition interest. OpenClaw gets acquired by OpenAI. Now Anthropic is getting jester Goon by the Entire timeline and OpenAI is Giga maxing off their fumble. Open Anthropic could have just let them cook him cook. Instead they went full moid and got out framed by the Jester Maxers at OpenAI 8000 likes the looks max lingo is really, it feels like hilarious. I do wonder the half life I feel like it's.

57:05

I think it's over.

58:15

It's got to be towards the end of this boom. But the rise of of the kickstreamers is certainly the story of the year. Certainly the story of the year. Dave Morin shared more context on what the future of openclaw will look like. So Dave Morin who you might know from offline ventures slow he's been on our show path. He is now on the board of openclaw and he says he's been working on the openclaw foundation structure for weeks. A home for thinkers and hackers that choose and those who want to own their data. He's honored to serve as the founding independent board member. This community built something extraordinary. Our job is to protect it. Open source forever. Excited to share more soon, Raul says let's go. There was some funny pushback about someone was like, oh, it's so unfair that Peter's like reaping all this reward from these work. Like it's an open source project. There were a lot of committers and he shared the number of commits and it's just like him and like 90% of the work. And then like a few of his buddies who are all in the chat, in the reply like, yeah, like we love this, this is great.

58:16

And a number of them are going to OpenAI too. He's like the headline pickup. But.

59:23

And then a number of the other committers and then those AI models.

59:28

Yeah, and then, and then the other key contributors started committing after. It was like fully, totally, totally. Hundreds of thousands of people building on top of it.

59:31

It was like pure. I don't know, there's no term, I don't know if there's a term for it, but it was like, it was like third party, like angst or something. It was like people were feeling angst on behalf of people who felt no angst. Like the people on the team were all like, this is awesome. We're all on board. And then other people were like, they got screwed. And it's like, I don't know. Not quite.

59:42

Intern is sharing what your 2027 team off site will look like. Taking the. Taking the Mac Minis somewhere nice. Taking them out. Yeah, we'll see.

1:00:01

And here's the. Here's the post you were talking about from Ashen. I didn't believe it, but Mac Mini Studios are actually sold out in most places. Walmart, Apple Store, Amazon, Best Buy, Micro Center. Apple has a month wait now too for most AI type beat models. 48 gigs plus of Ram. Funniest part is that there are still 24 gigs gig back then. What's up 48?

1:00:14

They said it was possible.

1:00:35

Oh, that they would sell it. Yeah. I went to the Apple Store and they were fully in stock. But the timeline moved on and people went more aggressively into the Mac Mini. Let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Started today.

1:00:36

We have some breaking news out of New York.

1:00:58

Oh yes, what happened?

1:01:00

Josh Kushner has announced Thrive 10 exceeding 10 billion. Thrive 10 compromises 1 billion designated for early stage investments and 9 billion designated for growth stage investments, he said. We do not view this as a milestone, but as a commitment to the long work ahead. We view Thrive as a company. Our product is partnership, the willingness to commit deeply to a small number of founders and to stand with them through momentum and adversity. This is the discipline we bring to our work and the responsibility we accept. When founders partner Thrive, we do not hedge. Concentration demands loyalty to the founders and missions we back in this moment. Exposure alone is not a strategy. Judgment without commitment is not enough. Advantage will accrue to those who choose deliberately commit deeply and endure through difficult moments. Thrive was founded to be an enabling technology for the world we want to see. We are deeply aware that we are not the main character. The founders that we are fortunate enough to partner with are the artists. Our role is to help create the conditions where great work can come to life. We take a long view grounded in the belief that category defining companies tend to create structural compounding advantages over long arcs. This fund reflects the continuity of our approach and the ways our work has deepened alongside the founders we support. We are grateful for the trust our limited partners place in us and for the opportunity to work alongside those who are building with purpose, integrity and courage. Hit that gong. Love to see it. Josh.

1:01:01

Numerology 5, 10 and 10 billion.

1:02:33

I like that.

1:02:36

Yeah. Despite having zero exposure or anything to TVPN, he's been nothing but kind and helpful to us on the journey. And it's. Yeah. Testament to the work of the whole Thrive team. And I will say their merch is phenomenal.

1:02:37

Really good.

1:02:57

I was wearing the.

1:02:57

You were in the pajamas.

1:02:58

The pajamas.

1:02:59

No way.

1:03:00

I was wearing the pajamas this weekend.

1:03:01

Yeah. They got some good stuff. Creative stuff. Like different. Different stuff. Unexpected drops. Which I love.

1:03:03

Yep. And we have to read this off. It's just so good. Selah says Joshua Kushner strode billionairely across his room. His contrarian high concentration vibes engulfed Rick Rubin's bohemian monk retreat. Joshua's high conviction and mystery filled the room.

1:03:08

I know what this is referring to.

1:03:25

This is a reference to the Colossus

1:03:27

profile, which really got a lot of people upset. A lot of people were not in like. This doesn't count as writing.

1:03:28

How it transported me to Malibu.

1:03:38

It was fantastic.

1:03:42

I thought it was great.

1:03:43

Let me tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI, supercomputers for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

1:03:44

Let's head over to Tyler Cowen.

1:03:53

Tyler Cowen he is giving us some more economic data on AI productivity. Quote, you see tech and AI everywhere but the productivity statistics. That's what people say, he says. How many times have I heard versions of that claim? Eric picks up the telephone in the Financial Times. He says while initial reports suggested a year of steady labor expansion in the United States, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 400,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling, maintaining high output with significantly lower labor input is a hallmark of productivity growth. My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7% for 2025. That is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4% annual average that characterized the past decade. It's fine to suggest this, suggest caution in interpreting such statistics, but they hardly push the other way, says Tyler. And it's yeah, it's just a very fascinating that we're potentially the end of

1:03:54

stagnation in seeing productivity growth relevant to this conversation. You were looking at employment data out of the Philippines. The Philippines, yeah.

1:05:11

So I've been very cautious about the AI will take all the jobs narrative. When will that happen? Is it happening yet? Is there Jevons paradox to the type of work that we're doing? How much software do we want? You know, we have the ability to write way more lines of code. How many more lines of code do we actually want? It feels like there's a lot of opportunity. It feels like the labor market is weak, but it hasn't collapsed. A lot of people still have jobs. There's a lot to unpack. And so I was interested to know, are we seeing a massive spike in unemployment in the Philippines or in India where a lot of white collar labor is outsourced? Whether it's answering the phones or doing business process outsourcing. A lot of companies have back offices in. I was talking to somebody who works in architecture and they said that a lot of the architectural drawings that that happen overseas, the same things happens in the big three management consulting firms. A lot of management consultants will sort of sketch out a slide and then they will send it over to a team offshore that actually turns that into the final PowerPoint product. And you can see how if you have a sketch and you just need to turn it into a real chart, that's textbook use case of artificial intelligence. Whether you just style transfer it with something like nanobanana or you go and do a deep research report and then basically code the actual chart. And all the models are very, very capable of generating charts based on data. That's actually how I generated the chart of the Philippines late unemployment rate. And I saw from both the Philippines and India there was nothing. A major spike in unemployment. Maybe it's coming. We've heard from the ground the job market's not good and maybe the jobs are getting worse, but at least there's not high unemployment yet, both in the United States and abroad. So it's something to keep an eye on. But I don't know. I've just been looking for more solid data points around labor displacement because it's such a huge narrative. I don't know. We'll see. Let me tell you about Railway. Oops, There we go. Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

1:05:24

What did Claude do?

1:07:54

What did Claude do?

1:07:56

Pentagon has said that Anthropic will pay a price. Of course, there was reporting last week that Claude was leveraged in some way during the Maduro planning. The planning of the Maduro raid. I was imagining in my head Dario as Walter White in the suv just being like, watching the logs and seeing Pete Hegseth running a deep research report on Maduro. Who is Nicolas Maduro? He's just like, no, no, don't do it. Yeah, Very, very unclear how. How it was used, but a lot of pushback. You know, Palmer. Palmer was pushing back pretty hard. Let's see if I can pull up what he actually said. So I don't botch it.

1:07:57

The Wall Street Journal headline is Pentagon used Anthropics Claude in Maduro, Venezuela raid use of the model through a contract with Palantir highlights growing role of AI in the Pentagon. Now I remember seeing a clip from Sham Sankar at Palantir talking about how every query that the government runs is actually run through three or four different LLMs and then synthesize. They sort of put their own model router on top of the other models. Because if you're doing Fed wrapper, basically, I guess it's basically a wrapper because you sort of want every possible piece of information. All the LLMs have different parts of the Internet, different training corpuses, different opinions, different. All sorts of different things. So you put all those together. The mission to capture Maduro and his wife included bombing several sites in Caracas last month. Anthropic's usage guidelines prohibit Claude from being used to facilitate violence, develop weapons or conduct surveillance. We cannot comment on whether CLAUDE or any other AI model was used for any specific operation, classified or otherwise, said an Anthropic spokesman. Any use of claude, whether in the private sector or across government, is required to comply with our usage policies which govern how CLAUDE can be deployed. We work closely with our partners to ensure compliance. The deployment of CLAUDE occurred through Anthropic's partnership with data company Palantir Technologies, whose tools are commonly used by the Defense Department and federal law enforcement. Following the raid, an employee at Anthropic asked a counterpart at Palantir how CLAUDE was used in the operation, according to people familiar with the matter. And Anthropic spokesman said it hasn't discussed the use of CLAUDE for specific operations with any industry partners, including Palantir, outside of routine discussions on strictly technical matters. Anthropic is committed to using Frontier AI to support support of US national security. Okay, so we'll see where this goes. Anthropic's concerns about how CLAUDE can be used by the Pentagon have pushed administration officials to consider canceling the contract worth up to 200 million, which is a drop in the bucket at 14 billion ARR. But still probably has larger implications for their relationship with the government broadly.

1:08:53

Yeah, there was. Someone was saying. I don't know who needs to hear this but punishing private companies because their CEOs don't share your politics is really bad capitalism. Palmer said. This is not a reasonable characterization of what is happening. It isn't a matter of punishing companies for not sharing political views. It is a rational response to a vendor trying to control the government via terms of service and the products they power.

1:11:02

I hope you realize. Oh yeah, people are going on. Okay, wait. So Disclose TV shared it as well? Pentagon used to. And what is this? Someone launched a Federal Reserve simulator. Is there anything more on the.

1:11:24

No, we can move on. This is more important. Somebody Bill Mead Gaming just released the Federal Reserve simulator in Steam. If you like flight simulators, you're probably going to love this product is going

1:11:41

to go to zero. People aren't going to be going to work. They're going to be taking days off to play this.

1:11:55

A turn based economic simulation game where the player assumes the role as head of the United States Federal Reserve.

1:12:00

This is awesome.

1:12:06

Tyler, fire it up.

1:12:08

This. I would actually play this.

1:12:09

Yeah, fire it up. Fire it up. Download it. I want your review.

1:12:10

I like Garrett Jones here. Promising. And he's a professor of economics at George Mason.

1:12:15

He's actually serious. I feel like. I feel like this Would be an amazing game to play.

1:12:21

In the reviews I'm reading on Steam say I learned more about monetary policy in 15 minutes on this SIM that I did in five years of university.

1:12:28

That's actually.

1:12:35

Please do investment banking simulator next.

1:12:36

Yeah, I was thinking about the LBO

1:12:38

simulator would go so hard.

1:12:41

Let me tell you about Cisco. First unlock infrastructure critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value at Cisco. So I was thinking about Sholto's Age of Empires real time strategy game based on the AI era and I was wondering if it's easier to ship basically a skin or a mod for Age of Empires because the actual fundamental mechanics are pretty tight and you actually don't want to mess with those because the game's so balanced and it works so well. What you really want is just instead of archery units and horses, you want robots and Terminators and you want a sci fi theme on top of it. And I feel like that would be something that an agent could work very well at. Just export the image and the description and the words of every single unit and item in the game, export all the textures and then upload each texture to nanobanana one by one and say this is a tree. What does the cyberpunk tree look like? What does the diamond Age tree look like? What does the 2026 tree or building look like? And then it just iterates through all of those to create effectively a mod or a skin for the game. But if you do want to change the actual underlying structure, you got to go deeper. But. But that's a lot of tokens, so we'll see where it goes.

1:12:44

We gotta keep pressing him on his game.

1:14:14

He's gotta ship it.

1:14:16

You gotta ship. You gotta beat the Vibe coding allegations, right? The never ask somebody what Never ask a Claude code Maxi what they've shipped. Claude code beat him, he's gotta ship.

1:14:17

I want to show you this Instagram video because it had me dying laughing. And so if we can play this, we're gonna get demonetized, but we'll talk over it. So he Vibe coded a calculator. Can we zoom in? I don't know. He Vibe coded a calculator and you type in your numbers, you type in 5 times 9 and then it says unlock results $299 one time payment, you pay and then it gives you payment successful. The answer is 45. This is the future of Vibe coding. I loved it.

1:14:30

Anyway, I wonder, did he actually ship the product? Because this got millions of views.

1:15:09

You'd Think someone would just be like, I want to know if the payment rails work. Let me see. Quickly, let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin AI.

1:15:14

SAG, AFTRA, what happened? Put out a statement, CDance 2.0 and

1:15:25

it's not a comment, it's a statement.

1:15:32

The Chinese, now the Chinese are, have been quivering in fear ever since. Oh no, SAG came after them.

1:15:34

What'd they say?

1:15:41

SAG stands for the studios in condemning the blatant infringement enabled by ByteDance's new AI video model Sea Dance 2.0. The infringement includes the unauthorized use of our members voice and likenesses. This is unacceptable and undercuts the ability of human talent to earn a livelihood. And it is kind of interesting that just in this statement they're admitting to saying it's so good you're going to make it impossible for our members to earn a living. Which doesn't actually.

1:15:41

It says undercuts, Undercut, say eliminates.

1:16:10

CDance 2.0 disregards law, ethics, industry standards and basic principles of consent. Responsible, responsible AI development demands responsibility.

1:16:14

That is non existent here. Completely correct. Some of the Sea Dance videos are insanely infringing. It's just like, wow, it's Larry David. And it looks exactly like Larry David. Do we license this? Let's figure it out. Beginning of the end says growing. Daniel. Yeah, I have the Larry David video, but I don't think we want to play it. It's very, it's very uncouth.

1:16:26

Yeah, we'll skip that one. Disney also, as expected, sent a cease and desist letter to Bytedance over Sea Dance 2.0.

1:16:55

It's crazy.

1:17:04

I wonder how Bytedance will actually react to this pushback. Obviously they expected it. Yeah, they know that they're not abiding by a number of different US laws. Whether or not they care is another thing.

1:17:04

Yeah, I wonder how like what will the equilibrium be here? They don't allow usage in America, but everyone goes and gets VPNs. Is CDance 2.0 open source? Because if you can just run it, it's so hard to play whack a mole and actually get this taken down in any meaningful way. The cat's pretty much out of the bag if this is something you can just download.

1:17:17

I don't think it's open source. Okay, so it's running on again. Like in some ways a lot of this stuff will need to be solved by meta and YouTube.

1:17:47

Yeah.

1:17:57

So if somebody makes A video with a famous actor and they're, like, just monetizing that. I would assume that YouTube should be, in the fullness of time, forced to demonetize that content or just give the revenue back to the actual IP holders.

1:17:58

Yeah, you'd think that you'd be able to.

1:18:16

And then meta. The other thing is meta. Like, if you make an AI version of Andrew Huberman and you get in a fresh ad account, you can probably start spending money before the Huberman Lab team finds out what you're doing.

1:18:18

I would disagree. I think Rob's on top of it. I think he's goaded. But anyone else, any other team would be cooked.

1:18:33

I don't know. I mean, he might respond faster than the others, but this has certainly happened.

1:18:38

He is superhuman.

1:18:43

And this kind of thing has been happening to Joe Rogan for years at this point, with just, like, very poor deep fakes.

1:18:44

Yeah. I watched a video on Corridor Crew about how to identify the latest AI slop, and it was very interesting. All the different techniques that are used now, there's some really obvious ones where it's just, you know, clearly AI video from end to end. And so if you look in the background, like, the wood grain on the wooden poles or the walls changes from shot to shot, and that's like a tell that it's not consistent. But there were some where there was an AI influencer that was taking real photos and then just adding this AI influencer into the photo. So it'd be like Joe Rogan with Tony Hinchcliffe. Replace Tony Hinchcliffe with this AI influencer girl. And then you look in the background and you're like, there's no hallucinations. Like, everything looks perfect because it is. It's just the base. It's just the base image. And then you're just adding this one character. There were a bunch of interesting things. There was also a video that everyone was calling AI. That was just a dog painting. And it just turns out the dog can paint, which is awesome. But it was a little bit of a magic trick, because the dog couldn't actually paint a picture, but it could sort of pick up the paintbrush and, like, draw strokes. But the dog was next to the dog's owner. And the dog's owner.

1:18:53

That's not art.

1:20:11

It is absolutely art. But the dog's owner was actually a great artist and would switch paintings with the dog. So the dog would make one, like, big, messy brush. They would switch paintings, and then she would turn that messy brush into a tree and, like, soft Time lapse? Yeah, well, yeah, there were just some cuts and so they would switch and then whatever the dog did would sort of serve as like, the interpretation and the case for the artist to, like, take it to the finish line. And so you wind up with these, like, two beautiful paintings that, like, the dog and the artist sort of collabed on, which is kind of cool.

1:20:12

Yeah. Gavin purcell says if ByteDance doesn't restrict or nerf Sea dance, this is going to escalate to a political conversation. Unlike the Sora 2 launch, because OpenAI restricted likeness ahead of time. Sea dance shows just how clearly every major movie star is generatable by AI So this is interesting. If you're already like an A list massive superstar, I think you see some stuff like this and you're actually like, great, I'm going to be able to shoot a movie in a week from L. A. I'm not going to have to travel to these insane exotic locations and spend a week in the desert filming all these clips. So if you're like a Timothee Chalamet, this is maybe like, yes, you're worried for the overall industry, but at the same time you're thinking, okay, my name and likeness is now infinitely scalable. I can still, like, restrict the supply to some degree. Right. I'm not going to tell any movie studio, hey, you can make a movie with me, whatever. You're still going to kind of restrict it and have pricing power. But if you're a. The question becomes new talent that's emerging, trying to build their brand. At what point do studios say, we're just going to make a character? We're going to make a new actor out of thin air, place him across different movies, build them up over time. You could imagine. I don't think a company like CAA would do this because all their talent would be like, what are you doing? You're taking our job. But I could imagine a group trying to make like a Lil Mikayla style actor that you build up over time. One thing that we'll find out is how much does the actual actor's real life matter in the context of their career? Like, if Timothee Chalamet is dating Kylie Jenner, does that, like, increase his appeal on the big screen? Yeah, and I would say yes, probably right. There's so much fixation on the lives of all this talent.

1:20:45

You could sort of fake a decent amount of that. You could fake paparazzi photos, you could fake, you know, vacation photos. You could create a whole world around a fake person potentially. But if people find out, will that break the illusion? Will they be not into it?

1:22:47

But it's not real drama. People like the drama. They like following stars.

1:23:02

I'm still just pretty optimistic about, like, AI as a tool in Hollywood. Did you see that fully, fully AI generated movie about the woman who goes in the cybertruck that went viral this weekend?

1:23:06

Wasn't it like, only three minutes?

1:23:17

I think, yeah, exactly. It was only three minutes. But it was consistent from one shot to another, which is impressive. And somebody said, not enough people are talking about how much this sucks. And Ben Stiller chimed in and was like, because it's bad. People don't talk about things that are bad. And it was sort of interesting. I think the. There's still a lot of interesting. Like, I was thinking about, like, imagine if Kevin Feige. Is that how you say his name? He's the creator of the Avengers.

1:23:19

Don't ask me.

1:23:48

Don't ask you. Anyway, I don't know Christopher Nolan or James Cameron. If James Cameron got up and was like, I'm introducing Avatar. It's a great movie. And yes, we use cgi. It's like, no, the CGI is, like, just a tool that he uses. It's like, you don't say, like, yeah, we're doing Avengers, and guess what? We use green screen. And that's a selling point. It's like, it'll always be a tool. And so I would assume that there will be amazing directors and creators in Hollywood that use AI as a tool in certain areas, but they won't. You'll know it's arrived when they're not making a big deal out of it. Like, it should just stand on its own. Right now things go viral because you said, this is 100% AI generated. And you're like, okay, I want to know how good is this AI stuff? But no one's just like, here's my green screen test. And they're like, okay, awesome. We know green screen works. We know it's a thing. It happens.

1:23:49

Yeah. When I see the sea dance content, I think, okay, if movie budgets stay the same, I think we can potentially get a lot more great movies. And that's specifically because how much of these budgets goes to. Let's say somebody's making, like, a movie, like 300, and we need to get, you know, a thousand people out in a field.

1:24:44

Well, 300 people, but, yeah, who's counting?

1:25:06

Who's counting? We need to get a lot of people out in a field and spend days, weeks, you know, recreating all these different scenes.

1:25:08

Yeah.

1:25:17

And now that budget can go towards.

1:25:17

Yeah, the famous Henry Cavill. Superman.

1:25:20

Multiple, multiple.

1:25:23

They finished shooting Superman, he moved on to, I think, the man from uncle. He grew a mustache. And they were like, we gotta shoot another Superman scene. And he's like, contractually, I cannot shave my mustache. And they were like, fine, we'll do it in post. And they have him come on and they CGI'd like a shaved lip on the top of his mustache. And it looked really bad. And it was like people called it out. I actually think a lot of people saw the movie and they were like, eh, it's fine, it's pretty quick. But the VFX artists were like, this is bad. But with AI, obviously that's much, much more doable these days. So anyway, console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR finance support, giving employees instant resolution to access requests and password resets. Andrew Curran gave us a shout out. Very nice of Andrew Curran. He said, one of the reasons Sea Dance 2 has impressed everyone is that it does the same thing that Sora did. Make very detailed video gens from very simple prompts. There's probably, probably some prompt hydration going on. There's reasoning in the LLM that then prompts the model. So you type in one sentence. It hydrates that into a lot to work with for the model. In fact, most of the Sea Dance clips that went viral were made from one or two sentence props. We never did find out exactly what's going on under the hood with Sora. TVPN asked about it when Sam was on, and I think he means Bill Peebles from the Sora team. And he says, thank you guys. So thank you for shouting us out there. But they chose not to answer this specifically, so they dodged our question. We asked the hard question, give us the ip. And they said no. This is the funny thing about hard questions in tech interviews. You're like, okay, so tell me how many parameters in the model? And they're like, that's a great question. We're really investing in advancing the frontier. I saw what you did. They. But it's understandable with CDance 2. We don't have a paper yet, but there is one out for CDance one. And it says that they do use an LLM to convert the user prompt into a much more informationally dense and structured style of the prompt that the video model was trained on. They use a QUIN to do this. This is what most of us guess was going on with Sora. A version of GPT5 maybe fit for this was rewriting our prompts and adding details. Vanilla 5x would already be great at this out of the box. So it doesn't even need to be fine tuned, really. If this is how Sora really works, then everything does make more sense and there's a whole bunch more context from Andrew Curran's post that you can go check out. So Bojan Tungus is saying, I can't wait to use Sea Dance to fix the last season of Game of Thrones. Go do it. Go do it. I think that the last season of Game of Thrones was not. I mean, I thought it was good, but also I think that everyone's like, oh, I wish it would have ended this way.

1:25:24

I don't know.

1:28:00

I think if you did that, you would actually be like, ah, it's harder to land this plane than you think. There are a lot of planes.

1:28:01

It'll be interesting when people are watching a series in real time. And then in advance of the final episode, let's say there's a week, they're like, okay, I'm just gonna make the version that I want. Yeah, and I'll put it out.

1:28:05

No.

1:28:19

People on Reddit had written like full endings of Game of Thrones and some of them were really convincing. Some of them I was looking forward to to. And it went a different direction. But, you know, it is what it is. Let's pull up the linear lineup so we can tell you about the guests that are coming on the show today because we have one in the restream waiting room already. I'll let you read this while I tell you that LINEAR is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents.

1:28:20

We have John Karamica, New York Times music critic and buyer of fake TVPN merch, coming on the show. We have Spencer Skates from Amplitude. We have Haseeb from Dragonfly. We have Celine from Loyal Anchor from Brain Trust and closing it out with Reed from Knight. So fantastic lineup here. And without further ado, we have John.

1:28:44

We should bring in from the restream waiting room.

1:29:08

Let's bring in.

1:29:10

How you doing?

1:29:12

I'm so sorry to not wear the merch today.

1:29:14

You're bookmogging. Book mogging, I think.

1:29:17

Bookmaxing.

1:29:19

Bookmax every day.

1:29:21

Shelf mogging. Clarify how to say your last name.

1:29:22

It's Caramonica. I appreciate Jordi. That was noble. You must not have a lot of Italians in your life.

1:29:27

Harmonic. Now I get it. Harmonica.

1:29:33

Good. Nominated. Determinism.

1:29:36

Very. Yes. Were you in my kindergarten class coming up.

1:29:37

Oh, you got a lot of that.

1:29:42

Okay, you know, I mispronounced your name. I'm gonna find the people that bullied you in kindergarten and I'm gonna go bully them to make.

1:29:43

They all lost.

1:29:53

They all lost. Total victory.

1:29:53

Yeah. You have real TVPN merch now, do they? No, they're stuck buying the fake stuff.

1:29:56

Yeah, the cigarette fumes.

1:30:01

Anyway, we gotta talk about the hottest song on the Internet. We gotta talk about My Granny Got hit with a bazooka. What are your thoughts?

1:30:04

Yeah, you know, if we were taping like an hour later, my song of the week video is going up this afternoon. It happens to be about Bazooka.

1:30:11

No way.

1:30:20

What a special and strange song. You guys are into it. You guys like it?

1:30:21

I like it. Yeah, I like it a lot. I like that it's so quickly been adapted into all the. It has the meme. You know when a meme goes viral and then you get it in an image format, it turns into a cartoon. There's the video overlay. So like I saw someone singing it. They. They did sort of a. Like an acapella rendition with nine recordings of themselves. I've seen people play it on. On orchestral renditions and rearranging it. Guitar and I love that. And you get that with some songs. You go and you find a song and you go on YouTube and you say like heavy metal version. And there's someone who's just jamming, playing like the rap song of the day or acoustic version. I've always found that fun. So generally I'm a fan, but what do you think?

1:30:26

Yeah, so my thing with this song, it's a perfect blank slate. Right? Because nobody knows the artist. It truly did come out of nowhere. I mean, this happened. This is a rare thing. Like I went on vacation over the holidays. It literally happened while I was away. I came back, I had no idea. All of a sudden the Internet is completely cluttered with it. Within the space of a week, Miami xo, who's the artist, doesn't really have much of a foot, like not much of a footprint leading into this. So unlike a lot of meme records that are from kind of well known artists where the memeability is somehow predicated upon a pre existing understanding of the musician. This is pure. It's pure joke, you know what I mean? Like you can just access it at that level.

1:31:08

I don't know if this is a good example to draw on, but I'm thinking of like Lil Nas x Old Town. Road, where he had been immersed in the Nicki Minaj fan club, understood how the Internet was worked and, and was already sort of sampling from Nine Inch Nails. And so there was an, there was an established sort of repertoire and just felt like he was ready for primetime in a way that Miami XO might not be.

1:31:54

But yeah, I think that's totally fair. I mean, here's someone, I mean, hasn't even really done did his first interview, from what I can tell maybe two days ago, to kind of a random YouTuber like, doesn't seem to be ready to rise to the moment. And one thing that I find so strange is, is when a record gets memed this intensely, this quickly. I know major labels are obviously knocking on the door, but things tend to happen a little bit quicker. You sort of, you get a press release that they've maybe signed a distribution deal. Like, things move. But there's something that's, I almost feel like a little hands off about what's happening now. Like, people are just like, let this cook. Like, let me get the Indian classical version. Like, let me get the spongebob version. Like, let's just see what the sort of logical endpoint of this is gonna be. Are you guys up on the dancing video? Like the dancing bones 07 dance videos?

1:32:18

No, no, tell us.

1:33:10

Like a middle aged gentleman, Navy veteran, kind of dancing in his living room at a Chick Fil a in a car dealership. Really made his own kind of side cottage industry dancing to Bazooka. He's probably done about 20 or 25 videos just to this one song, creating a bit of an unholy alliance.

1:33:12

Oh, interesting. He's a key collaborator. He really is.

1:33:30

What's the,

1:33:35

what's the pitch that record labels are giving to Miami XO to turn you to capitalize on this algorithmic moment and turn him into a star.

1:33:39

So the cynical playbook, I assume, is what you're asking rather than the real playbook. So the cynical playbook is we're going to give you a short term distribution deal, maybe we're also going to give you a publishing contract in which we extract maximum value from you are writing on this song and the next.

1:33:50

What. What's the difference between those two in a music context?

1:34:08

So publishing deal is going to be on the songwriting, the lyrics, the metal, the melody. Whereas a distribution deal is for the finished product of the song itself. So.

1:34:12

But the song already exists.

1:34:21

The song already exists, but a lot of times what they're doing is they're retrofitting contracts on top of Things that already happened. Like, he's someone who has a SoundCloud page, but you and I could have a SoundCloud page. That doesn't mean that we're registered with ASCAP on or bmi. It doesn't mean that we have a lawyer who's negotiating splits on any deals that we might have done with collaborators. He's just a guy with 40 songs on a SoundCloud page. So if I'm a publisher, I'm looking at those and saying, how do I monetize those on a writing perspective? And if I'm a label, I'm saying, how do I put gasoline on this thing that already has fire? Probably what's happening is one of the major labels is going to scoop them up, get a Remix going with two or three of your favorite SoundCloud graduate rappers, and see if they can turn it into a radio hit. There's a lot.

1:34:23

The challenge is that, you know, sometimes you have one of these songs. It's like, catchy and funny and it naturally can play on the radio, but if you actually just start playing this on the radio, you can imagine. I mean, I remember getting into rap music in maybe high school, middle school, whatever, and playing songs in the car with my parents, and then you really hear the lyrics for the first time, and you can imagine the moments with this song, and they're like, did I just. Did I hear that correctly? So it's hard to imagine this as a. Like, it feels like a. It's an audio version of a meme. It's not.

1:35:12

Here's my counterpoint. Grandma got run over by a reindeer.

1:35:48

What's that?

1:35:53

You know that song?

1:35:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a classic.

1:35:54

That's a classic. That's a classic.

1:35:56

So if that's a classic, why can't this be a classic?

1:35:57

Okay. Okay.

1:35:59

Yeah. That's a great.

1:36:00

That's a great one of the great

1:36:01

Christmas songs of all time.

1:36:02

Yeah.

1:36:04

So I want to see the Miami XO Christmas edition of Granny Got Hit with Mike.

1:36:05

XO is a great name. I like it.

1:36:11

It is a great name. He's not from Miami, apparently. Apparently he's from South Carolina, which

1:36:13

is a lot of.

1:36:21

On the Internet.

1:36:21

There was a big Shaq who came out with that song Man's Not Hot. Do you remember that whole.

1:36:22

Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.

1:36:27

So I believe that started with a. A joke version of Fire in the Booth, a segment on BBC Radio 1, maybe. And normally rappers show up to the history lesson. Yeah, yeah. But normally rappers show up and they deliver freestyles that are somewhat prepped and, like, iconic. The Migos have a great one. But then Big Shaq shows up and gives this, like, completely jokey, but he's in on the joke, but no one really knows. It goes massively viral, and then he sort of commercializes from there. My question is, like. Like with Lil Nas X, there was clearly a contract that they needed to clean up with Nine Inch Nails to properly sample that. And then there's the remix. Like, is that a big part of the pitch? Like, we're going to sort of protect you from what's coming if you're an agent and you're going to one of these breakout stars.

1:36:28

Yeah, I mean, I think viral stars are really vulnerable, right, because they're often operating outside of any formal arrangements with any institutions. So typically, what happens in a situation like this is the first person who comes in is either a manager or a lawyer, often, because sometimes you don't need both of them at this early stage. You simply need someone to represent your interests when you're walking into the room at Atlantic Records or Universal Records or with UMG Publishing, umpg or something along those lines. So that's probably what's happening right now. The truth is, there are plenty of viral moments, quote unquote, that other people capitalize, like, I think a lot about on fleek. There's like a young woman, a young black woman, who invented or at least popularized the term in a viral video, who then watched it get away from her, and it's in, you know, l' Oreal commercials and all this other stuff, with none of the sort of benefits redounding back to her. And so a lot of times now, what's happening, that was like, six years ago, before these processes were really formalized. People didn't know how to handle virality back then, but I think now people understand that virality is about the best marketing that's available. And it can't be faked. Well, it can't be, but that's.

1:37:15

So artists, new artists has a viral moment, they start talking with all the record labels. How much difference is there between the different deals that they're being offered? In our world, if you create a viral product, every VC will reach out to you. They're just kind of offering you different valuations, different kind of ownership levels that they're looking for, and it just becomes 20% in the board, and some element of it is just like, what price are you willing to pay? The other is like, who do I want to partner with? I'm assuming it's something similar, but how much is there a record label that's going to be like way more risk on like, hey, we don't think this is just a one off moment. We are they all telling them that you're a future superstar, but then some of them are secretly saying like, yeah, we're just gonna max kind of extract what we can out of this.

1:38:35

Yeah. I think there's two levels of answer to the question. Like I don't, I haven't spoken to Miami XO. I don't know if he wants a 30 year music career or if he sees music as like one part of a larger suite of like viral offerings. When you look at his TikTok and Instagram right now, the last two weeks of content is all him making jokes about his own virality. Maybe he's a viral comedian cosplaying as a musician.

1:39:28

Sure, sure, sure. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

1:39:57

So if I'm a label, I might say, do you want this to be your career? If so, I'll invest X amount of dollars for Y percent over 12 months. Or if he says, you know what, this was kind of a lark, like, let's just squeeze every little inch out of it. They may say, great, we're gonna give you a distribution deal for this song. We're gonna absolutely gasoline on it. We're gonna get a remix going, we're gonna put it in commercials, we're gonna do all this other stuff and let's get you a quick half a million or a million dollars and then do whatever you want with really varies.

1:40:01

Is there some sort of iron law that says a song like this can only break through like once? It seemingly like a silly song emerges like once a year. And you would think silly songs every day. No, I know, I know, but we're talking about it. That means like this is not a music show. This did break through and it's broken through and it feels like every. I don't know, is it 12 months there's like some song and I would think with Suno, a lot of people could be like, I'm gonna make a song like Bazooka. And they're just like taking a format for a song, which in this case I don't know the exact genre, but it's like not, it's not, you know, melodic kind of like it's like melodic underground rap. You would think there would be. This would catal. Like when you get like a meme, like a more traditional meme, it just catalyzes a ton of different remixes on top of. On top of that and kind of branches off of the format. But I haven't because of the way that the algorithms work and like, syncing video or image content to the music, it just perpetuating, like, the same thing over and over.

1:40:37

I mean, I think to your first question about how many of these do we get in a year? Maybe we get four or five in a year that really, like, break escape velocity and get out to the wider public. And radio is a funny thing. I mean, you were joking that, like, this would sound strange to hear on the radio. You know, five to ten years ago, you'd have a station like Z100 in New York, which is like the big pop hit station that studiously, like, walled off TikTok. They were like, we don't play those. Those aren't real songs. You know, real songs are Lady Gaga songs. Like, real songs are Katy Perry songs or Taylor songs. And then something happened. Maybe it was Covid. I don't exactly know what. But like 2021, 2022, you turn on Z100 in the car, and it's literally just like listening to TikTok, just the whole thing inverted. And obviously that's part because radio record labels are invested in both TikTok promotion, which is screwing with your algorithm and putting songs in front of you, but it's also invested in radio promotion, which is putting things in a more mainstream level. But the chasm between those two universes is so thin right now. I would not be surprised to hear Bazooka on, like, a mainstream rap station by mid March. I really wouldn't be surprised.

1:41:50

Yeah, sounds right. I want to, like, where this goes from a Just like the cynical machine that takes place and, like, turns this into a repeatable formula. Is there. Do you think there will be a new movement where a mainstream big artist hires a comedian to write some lyrics and then they do specifically architect the virality where they have some UGC creator with a guitar doing an acoustic version on day one, and they hire that guy to do the dance outside the car dealership. And so it's like, much more orchestrated to create that viral boom.

1:43:11

What I would say is things like that are already happening. Like, I know people in Los Angeles. It may not be the literal. The exact literal thing you just said, but I know people in Los Angeles who work in production and songwriting. A lot of songwriting rooms are three or four people. Oftentimes you'll have one of those people who have fluency in viral content or fluency in memeable Internet content and the gap between like, I'm a comedian, I'm a content creator, I'm a musician. And we used to think of those as three different jobs. They're not three different jobs anymore. It's basically just one job which is getting attention. That's the main job. So I think what you'll see is actually there are a lot of people even who bill themselves as songwriters, but who have been posting TikTok content for 4, 5, 6 years already in their 20 years old. Are they a songwriter or are they a TikTok maker? Are they engineers of Iral? Are they recipients of virality or are they engineers of virality? I just don't think those lines are as meaningful as they used to be. But yeah, things like what you're saying, they're definitely already happening.

1:43:53

What are all the ways that you're tracking algorithms influencing the music business? Because optimizing for that 10 to 15 second repeatable thing that you can attach to a reel or a photo dump or things like that. I remember first processing artists gaming the streaming platforms by making every song much shorter, right? I'm not like, I listen to music, I'm not a music head, but I distinctly remember being like, wait, this guy just dropped future just dropped a mixtape. Why does it have like 30 songs that are all like two minutes? So that was one of those moments that was like the platforms influencing the, the music itself. But what are all the different things that you're tracking right now and which make your blood boil the most?

1:45:01

I gave up blood boiling a lot. I'm too old to have my blood boil.

1:45:54

It's not.

1:45:57

You're not allowed. At my age, you're not allowed for that. You're not allowed to have that. Okay, let me take you back even further. First of all, let's go back to actual Napster, like primetime Napster, when aspiring artists would tag their songs as Britney Spears songs or Eminem songs so that they would pop up in search algo and you downloaded thinking you got some Eminem leak and it was by somebody else. Right? I've got untold on old hard drives, untold MP3s of who knows who, like advertising themselves as like Metallica songs or something. So there's that. Your question about the future sort of gaming the algorithm that's functioning on two levels. One, you want to provide as much raw content to any algorithm as you can. But two, when you think of how streaming platforms serve you music, the entire goal of a streaming platform is to make sure you don't press stop. It's to make sure you don't go away. And so not only did that affect the length of albums, because 30 songs is a longer play time than 10 songs, it also affected the structure of music. Think about Post malone in the mid to late 2010s, right? What do you think? When you think Post Malone, you think that's a little bit hip hop, it's a little bit R and B, it's a little bit pop. Nowadays, that's a little bit country. But when you think of the kind of overall sonic framework of the song, it's real blurry, right? It's smeary. He's singing in this very stretched way. The beats aren't like. It's not like 90s rap beats where it's like, on the one. It's not that it's a lot blurrier. Streaming did that because streaming wanted to trick you into thinking that a song was never ending. And so you can press track one on a Post Malone album, and before you've even woken up, you're on track seven. The structure of the music, fundamental.

1:45:57

It's so interesting because I remember, I don't know, being. Being young and like, buying an album. And then like, when you buy an album, it's such a different, like, for whatever, 10, 12 bucks, 15, whatever, whatever, however, is priced. Like, you're actually, like, listen. You're not just listening. You're, like, studying it. You want to come away being like, do I really like this? And you want to be taken on a journey. And I would immediately clock, okay, I like these songs in this context. Like, these songs when I'm driving to school, this song in the gym, you know, you're. You're kind of like mapping. I would map the album to my life. And then at some point it was like, oh, you made. You made 30 of the same song. Thank you. Thank you for that. And, like, sometimes it's. It's kind of like a. The cool vibe and it's fun to listen to, but it's not like. It's not like watching a movie that's taking you through all these different emotions.

1:47:44

It reminds me a little bit of jam bands in that way, which is like, not a genre of music I care much about or certainly not one I enjoy. But anytime I've been forced to go to, like, a concert of that style, I'm always kind of shocked that maybe it doesn't totally matter which point in the show you're dropped in or which point in the show you're Pulled out. Like it's kind of always happening. And, like, the dynamism is like, oh, in minute four, he did this lick, but also in minute 47, he did this other lick that kind of talks to that maybe it doesn't totally matter when you entered. And I think streaming really, especially for hip hop, really, really pushed things in that direction. And what you're seeing now, like, when I hear bazooka, I'm hearing 2016 SoundCloud records. Like, I'm hearing Saw Baby Records. Like, I'm hearing things that. That post Young Thug that really, really made it seem like any kid with Fruity Loop software and, like, a tiny bit of a melodic sense could all of a sudden have a viral hit. It's really. I mean, we are living in 2016, not just in Instagram hashtags and everything, but the fact that we've cycled back and the biggest record of 2026 so far is basically a 2016 SoundCloud hit is, I think, striking and also talks about how nostalgia is, like, extremely collapsed right now. Like, we're nostalgic for things that happened 45 minutes ago, you know?

1:48:36

Yeah, the 2016 trend was huge on Instagram. When 2026 happened, everyone was like, me in 2016. And I was like, that wasn't that long ago. Not long ago at all, but. And the photos, like, they look a little bit older, but, like, they were taken with iPhones, and so they look, like, relatively recent. It's also, like, younger.

1:50:02

Well, one thing it also adds to that is, like, are we remembering a specific song or are we remembering, like, a set of memories? And I think that's the fuzziness. And obviously, like, AI complicates that. Like, there's, there's, there are. I'm beginning to think that, like, original text, which is, say, Bazooka, is, like, far less important than the memes, which are, in turn far less important than how we talked about the memes. And I wonder if 10 or 20 years from now, we're not really remembering Bazooka as a song, but we're remembering discourse far better.

1:50:20

I mean, I, I, I, I'm here talking about it for half an hour, and I don't think I've ever listened to more than 30 seconds of it. Like, I, I could not tell you if it has a verse. I, I know the chorus. It does. Okay, that's it.

1:50:57

I can confirm it as a verse.

1:51:10

I will add it to that.

1:51:12

I had that experience. I was in a. I did a yoga class, and they were playing music, playing Bazooka and not Bazooka. That would go hard. But they were playing songs. And I was like, oh, that's a song. Because I had heard them as like background music to social media content, but had never heard it. And I was like, oh, that 10 seconds. Yeah, I've heard that. 10 seconds. I've never heard the full thing.

1:51:13

Yeah.

1:51:40

What's the. Are there any. Are you tracking any groups that are just fully in the music industry broadly that are fully leaning into AI and saying, like, we know a lot of people hate this and are scared of it, but we're gonna try to create a faceless superstar here, like a Daft Punk or something like that. Any kind of. Because I've seen the people that will go up the charts and saying, this is a fully AI artist. And it's hard to actually read too much into any one of these artists because it could very well just be a really talented musician who's using the tools to the best of their ability. And it's not just one shotted AI

1:51:42

music or bots too. I mean, if you're willing to do AI, you could also be willing to bot.

1:52:26

You can bought the success of it. Yeah, I mean, I think so. So there, towards the end of last year, there were maybe three or four, like AI musicians that ended up on some chart. Look, there's a lot of charts you can try. Like again, we could. We could pick a chart and chart on it next week if we really tried hard.

1:52:30

Let's chart, brother.

1:52:52

Let's do it.

1:52:53

Let's get involved. All right, We'll. We'll talk offline.

1:52:54

We'll.

1:52:57

We'll.

1:52:58

We'll crack the code.

1:52:58

I got the. I got refrain right here. You're watching tvpn. We'll do a remix. There we go.

1:52:58

So Solomon Ray, who's like a R and B artist, a lot of them are R and B, gospel leaning R and B with a little bit of kind of like MAGA adjacent country. These are the artists that have tended to break out into broader consciousness. A thing that I noticed is a lot of these songs are.

1:53:06

What's the way to put it?

1:53:29

They're sad, they're for depressed people. They're for people who are looking to get lost in a song. Maybe without thinking too hard about who's the musician behind it or what's going on. They feel like emotionally manipulative to me in a way. And I think those. But I also think they're also calling cards. Right. Like if you made the Solomon Ray music and then you Ended up on some Billboard R and B chart. You can then go into a publishing meeting or go into a label meeting and say, look what I did with no resources, imagine what I can do with that. So as far as like super groups and like, big picture, like, I don't think people are thinking quite at that scale, but I think a lot of people are prompting AI to make music that will resonate for people who are in the music business specifically.

1:53:31

I mean, yeah, we see this on X articles where people will use AI to generate something that's like, oh, technology is so crazy. And I've seen on Instagram reels where you'll get sort of like a video that's very clearly like just glazing you and confirming all of your biases and stuff. I know why this is getting a lot of views, because it's not acting as any of sort, sort of complex narrative or anything like that.

1:54:20

No, and the other thing, I mean, AI, I mean, I'm sure you guys see this a lot more in your side than I see it on my side, but there's a lot of, like, unseen process that AI Help can help with. You have songwriters who are like, hey, I need a 20 part vocal harmony on the bridge. Can you just do 20 parts that kind of sound like they're in the same genre as the original audio? So that comes together really quickly. Hey, I need a lyric to fill in the fourth bar of the quatrain. Can you give me ten ideas for that? I think you're seeing that in places already in studio sessions, but you haven't yet had the breakout of like, it's Taylor Swift, but it's not Taylor Swift. Like, you haven't had that. I think we're still like a few years away on a macro on a major scale from that. But the small stuff is. It's softening our resolve. I don't know. You guys care if there's AI music. If you are listening to a Spotify playlist and track five is Human, track six is AI and track seven is human. You stressing about that?

1:54:45

Yeah, I mean, I like the points.

1:55:51

I like songs that other people know are songs. So even if you told me that Bazooka was AI generated, I'd be like, I'm still down. Because you have an experience about that and we can talk about that. And if I'm humming it, you're like, oh, he's humming Bazooka. I don't want to be off in my own world listening to music that's just generated for me. Because no one else will get what I'm humming. And so as long as it's a shelling point and everyone knows or everyone in my group knows about the song or I can share it and then they can find it and they can enjoy it, I'm cool. But I don't want hyper personalized music necessarily. At least that's what I think.

1:55:53

Yeah, I mean I had Bazooka is

1:56:32

a good hardcore band name.

1:56:34

We should do humming Bazooka. Yeah, I have some lightning round questions.

1:56:36

Yeah, I had the probably almost two years ago at this point. Maybe maybe a year and a half. But somebody made an AI gunna album, posted it on YouTube and you easily could have even that was, you know, I imagine. And all the models have made a ton of progress, but you could have slotted that into a gun. You could have like snuck one of those into a real Gunna album. And I would have been thinking, yeah, this is a vibe. Yeah.

1:56:40

Sorry. Just the tech. It's like I'm not like a purist in any way. I think people just use whatever technology they want to make whatever they want to use to make great music. But we become so desensitized in the sort of post T pain era to hearing digitally processed vocals that this is kind of what we were asking for the whole time. And again, I'm not passing judgment on it. I just sort of think anyone who's complaining about it but then goes and dances to like I'm in love with a stripper at the club. Unless like we're not that far away.

1:57:11

Yeah, that's good.

1:57:42

Everyone knows that just being in the streaming business, making all your money from streaming is rough. I think the it's like a billion streams on Spotify or Apple Music gets you like low single digit millions in revenue that you're then splitting up with tons of different people. So not super significant. And so the answer is do constantly be touring, doing big tours. Are there artists that have insane streaming numbers that don't actually crush it when they go out touring?

1:57:44

Is that so? That's interesting because I think you have of streaming has created its own tier of superstars. If you think about NBA YoungBoy, the most streamed artist on YouTube maybe three of the last five years. Two or three of the last five years? Yeah.

1:58:17

Are you serious?

1:58:36

Oh, 100% NBA YoungBoy. Look, NBA Young Boy is the most popular and meaningful rapper in America for the last five years.

1:58:37

I had no idea in my head he's still like SoundCloud.

1:58:44

No. Haven't you seen his Earnings. He's outpacing the S&P 500.

1:58:48

He had the number one. No, no, he had the number one debut solo rapper tour by revenue. The tour that just completed last year. I think he did 70 million in ticket sales.

1:58:51

Never broke again. He's never broke again. He called a shot.

1:59:03

I love it.

1:59:06

He will never be broke again. Put some of that in CDs.

1:59:07

Someone who streaming created a market marketplace and then went out into the world and received all the riches that came with it. But then you have other people who. You know to your point earlier about Miami xo, is this guy a star or not? Like, who knows? Like, is he gonna be on one hit wonder bills ten years from now? Maybe. But you have people like say even Playboi Carti who like contour well, but isn't really trying to be like a public facing celebrity. It's like he's a little bit in the the shadows. Everybody takes their streaming success differently, but Youngboy is an example of someone who literally saw that and then went out and sold a million tickets off of that or something along those lines. I went to three dates on that tour. It was the most enlivening tour I've been to in years.

1:59:14

Did you feel like you needed to go to three dates to do your job properly? I mean, after the second, were you like, was it just like. It's fun. I want to go.

2:00:06

I chase joy, man. I chase pleasure.

2:00:17

I love it. I love it. The chat says he also has 13 kids. He may be broke again.

2:00:20

It's wild. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is always so much fun. We got through exactly one question. I had 10. So we'll have to have you guys in.

2:00:28

Yeah, it's okay. We'll be back.

2:00:38

Appreciate you. I can't wait.

2:00:39

Great. Great to see you.

2:00:41

We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, we'll tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. And I'm also going to tell you about cognition. They are the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. We had some breaking news.

2:00:41

If you told me that NBA YoungBoy was the biggest artist on YouTube, that

2:01:04

took me by surprise as well.

2:01:11

I would have said that's a great bit.

2:01:13

That's a great bit. But he deserves it. I love NBA Youngboy. Fantastic artist. We have some breaking news. The Netherlands House of Representatives has approved a 36% tax on unrealized capital gains. And Aaron Bali says, how do you short a country and got 27,000 likes? It's getting spicy over there in the Netherlands.

2:01:15

But asml. ASML employees are gigacooked.

2:01:34

Oh, that's right. They're over there.

2:01:40

Yeah.

2:01:43

I don't.

2:01:43

I still.

2:01:45

Oh, they're exempting startups. That's fun.

2:01:46

But ASML is not a startup. I think they're exempting real.

2:01:49

I actually think of every business as either real estate or startup. You know, McDonald's, that's real estate play. You know, if we get crazy with it, I imagine that, that there will be a lot of companies that are redefining their category as real estate. If it's truly exempted here, it's full employment for tax lawyers over there. Get in that business because you're going to be having a lot of clients.

2:01:52

Yeah, the.

2:02:11

Our next guest is here.

2:02:12

Our next guest is here.

2:02:13

Let's bring in Spencer from Amplitude. Welcome to the show. He's in the Restream waiting room now. He's in the tv.

2:02:14

Vin Ultradoll, what's going on?

2:02:19

Hello.

2:02:21

Hey, guys. John, great to see you guys.

2:02:22

Great to see you. Thank you.

2:02:25

So excited to finally make it to TBN and the big leaks.

2:02:27

Man, I'm so excited.

2:02:30

I mean, we're way overdue. Way overdue.

2:02:31

You have a very unique superlative. Right? Aren't you one of the first YC founders to ever take a company public? Like in the first 10, at least, something like that.

2:02:33

We were one of the earlier ones in our batch in YC 2012. It was us, Gusto and Plangrid and those were kind of the big. That was the emergence of YC as SaaS, which is now dead. We can talk about that.

2:02:42

How big was the class at that time?

2:02:56

I like to think we made B2B hot 60 companies so very, very different from what it is today.

2:02:58

Wow. Wow, that's really fast. Yeah. Yeah. We always recommend taking companies public. If you're building a business, just go head over to the New York Stock Exchange, take your company public. But how has it been for you? There's always like, oh, stay private forever. Do the SpaceX thing. Obviously, Elon's changing his tune on that. Give us a review. What's it like being in the public markets and what's your journey been like?

2:03:03

This may sound very surprising, but it's actually incredibly positive for a whole bunch of reasons. My opinion is once you get a company to about 100 million in ARR or beyond, you have an Obligation to the business, to the stockholders, to everyone that works with you to take it public. We did it for a number of reasons. I mean, one, there's the liquidity aspect, where now we can get talent and say, hey, this equity is worth something right this second, not in some future scenario. And that's huge because that allows us to attract a different level of executives, attract different types of software engineers, like acquire companies. That's actually a really big deal. There's tons of companies up for sale these days and saying, hey, we're going to give you real liquidity now on the first day we do this transaction is a huge deal for them. The other thing it does is it makes it clear that we are sticking around for the very long term. We're not continued dependent on the private markets for either liquidity or for future cash. We're profitable as a company. We're able to set that stake in the ground and talk about the next five, 10, 20 years. Oh, yeah, the profitability. And then it. It just. The last thing I'd say is it sets a higher bar for execution. Now, the downside is a liquid stock price massively distracting to the team because everyone's like, oh, my God. I make a point of not looking at it. Someone told me there's a SaaS apocalypse last week. And so I'm like, oh, I better say something on this. But overall, it's actually a very positive

2:03:27

thing since this is the first time in the show, Take us back to YC Demo day, give us the elevator pitch. What were you describing? And then obviously, I want to go forward to what the company's like today.

2:05:02

So we actually had a different company during YC Demo day. Yeah, we were doing this voice recognition app called Sonalite. It was like an early version of Siri, before Siri.

2:05:14

Interesting.

2:05:23

And it listened to you in the background so that you could safely talk to it. Like, you guys had this really sick demo where you had your phone and you put it in your jacket pocket and you had a conversation and people were like, whoa, this is the coolest. Like Star Trek. This is the coolest thing ever.

2:05:24

We're so close to the AI pin.

2:05:37

You know what's funny? Voice was just not good enough as a technology. Then 10 years later, it actually might break through, which is funny. But anyway, we pivoted that into amplitude, and the very first version was mobile analytics. We saw mobile taken off like this, and we said, there is a whole set of infrastructure companies going to be built to make those companies successful. So. So Companies like Snapchat or Instagram or WhatsApp or YouTube or Yelp that were just. And then a lot of people were accessing the Internet for the first time on mobile. You had people coming online in Asia and Africa and we said, okay, let's go bet on this and let's build a company that solves a lot of their infrastructure and data analytics problems. Because we had those same problems at Sonalite. Fast forward today. Now we're doing.

2:05:39

Wait, that means you were getting some users for the first product, like if you personalite.

2:06:26

Yeah, yeah. We got like a few hundred thousand downloads. So very good. Someone who wasn't us. Well, I think you guys are much more successful consumer guys than I am. But someone who wasn't us was using it, so that was good.

2:06:33

No, I launched an iOS app in YC Summer 2012 and I think I got like 500 installs. It was a disaster. I didn't understand anything at the time. It was my first go. It's really, really hard. So yeah, 100,000.

2:06:46

And I just asked because you don't discover all these different pain points and problems totally. Unless you actually have some element of some.

2:06:58

Yeah. What was the first use case for mobile analytics is like conversion rates, A, B testing. What were the killer features?

2:07:06

The key question people wanted to know was what actions lead to long term successful usage?

2:07:15

Sure.

2:07:21

So we wanted to know, does the accuracy at SolarLight, does the accuracy of voice recognition matter for someone's long term engagement? Turns out it massively matters. If you have a first successful voice recognition event, you're twice as likely to stick around long term. It turns out every single product needs that same intelligence. All the different startups in our batch were like, hey, can I get that data analytics? When we show them, they're more interested in that than what we're doing on voice recognition with Sonalite. Because to my surprise, Even companies like PlanGrid, which were very, very successful in our batch and one of the stars coming out, we're like, I don't even know the first thing about what causes my users to stick around. So we ended up building that. We've helped companies over the years like Doordash, Calm Peloton, tons of others, now we're working foundational model labs to help them as well understand the same things.

2:07:22

Yeah. How power law driven is the business. I imagine that there's a really long tail of just so many app developers that need analytics. Then at the very, very tippy top, you probably have some of the hyperscalers that are like, hey, we'll do it in house. But is that the right way to think about the market structure?

2:08:15

Yeah, it definitely is. I think one of the surprises is just how widespread this need is. And so it's not just within technology. It's like quick service restaurants. So we have Panda Express and Chick Fil A and you know, Jersey Mike's. As customers of ours, we have media companies like NBC and Fox, we have, you know, it's like everyone needs this. And then in terms of the actual breakdown of our ARR, we have over 40 companies above a million in ARR, which is very concentrated for someone of our size and stage. And I think from my standpoint speaks to how deep that this pain is. If you really need this, you really need it and you're willing to spend. We're often the largest spend in someone's stack.

2:08:35

Wow. Talk to me about how the analytics are changing in the age of AI. Are you rolling out tools that will build an IPython notebook, write pandas, do SQL queries? I imagine that the previous era was very much like great, you got the data together, now hand it over to me and my data, data scientist will write a bunch of python to actually interpret it. How much of that is changing and happening in house now?

2:09:19

Oh, it's completely changing. So the key issue is that you had to be familiar with SQL, you had to be familiar with data taxonomies, you have to be familiar with how to do a funnel analysis, all these pieces of specialized knowledge. Today we launched an AI agentic analytics platform with amplitude where you can just type any freeform question and then get an answer back. And it'll do the deep work of figuring out how to translate it to a query, how to use the right tools, how to map it to your taxonomy. So you don't need to know any of that. You can just say what are my daus? Or what's the worst step in my conversion funnel? And then how do I improve it? And it'll come back with a whole notebook and analysis of results all with an amplitude. You can also connect it via Slack. So you can just connect our Slack bottom, have it hit our MCP server and then it comes back with this like very rich dashboard and widgets and text responses that's formatted that tells you all about it.

2:09:47

Yeah, talk about the SaaS apocalypse. Are you worried about people vibe coding their own in house version? Like what are you seeing on the ground? What do you think like long term moats and software look like is anything?

2:10:43

Yeah.

2:10:58

And I Think there's like two things, like what happens to the core business and then how do you create net new products or this new kind of category of company that has entirely new kind of needs around, understanding how their products get used and all that kind of thing.

2:10:58

Yeah.

2:11:16

So first on SaaS, I think the key lesson is the software you've already built that is no longer remote because to your point, whether it's someone vibe coding it or someone going after as a company, they can replicate it pretty quickly. The new key moat in my mind is it's a little trite, but speed of innovation, you have to be pushing the bleeding edge of what capabilities are and that's what customers. And if you do that and you create a company that can do that, that's what customers will buy. What I think the SaaS apocalypse has actually gotten right is if you look at the median SaaS company, whether it's a few hundred million ARR like us or whether it's in the Billions, the median SaaS company, their innovation has actually slowed to a standstill. I don't know if you guys have ever been inside of these, but it's crazy how little that they ship in terms of net new products. They'll put some nice branding on it. They'll be like, oh, introducing our new Salesforce AI agents. But then it's like, okay, this is the same thing you guys had last year. What are we doing here? I think the difference is speed of using the bleeding edge of these model capabilities is all that matters. You're even seeing it in foundational model companies. Opus was the hottest thing a week ago. Then it was Codex literally launched the same day and said, hey, we're even better and we're faster and we're on cerebrus trips and all this stuff. I think it just matters the rate of improvement. The analogy I've heard for software that I actually like by a former Amplitude investor is it's like sushi. And so buyers are always going to want the best thing. And so if you're keeping up with innovating the best thing, you will be able to charge a premium. And so it's fine that the gas station at the 7:11 at the Gas station now sells sushi. That's not going to put Jiro and Japan out of business. And so for us, the lesson is, okay, there is no moat anymore from what we've built. There's only a moat if we're able to deliver the most bleeding edge capabilities.

2:11:17

Yeah. How do you think about other moats? That could potentially relate to what you're doing. I'm just thinking about, like we were talking about just email delivery. Like there is a way to get a web server to send to send an email, but there's all this trust that's built up around email delivery rates. And so you're probably better off going with a company that has a lot of experience there, understands what, what Gmail likes and sets rate limits and has a history of good behavior. And then you were talking about payment Rails and all the bank licenses and money transfer licenses. Have you started thinking about other pools of moats that might exist in software companies as the divide grows between, okay, you have a stagnant pile of code versus a company that's actually being agile, innovating and carving out new moats and digging existing moats deeper?

2:13:18

Honestly, at least at Amplitude, we're kind of full send on this. SaaS is dead. AI is the future. And so we're just assuming for our business that it doesn't matter what we built to date, and all that matters is can we deliver an AI analytics future? And so I'm sure there's going to be moats like you described, where you get weird interfaces in the human world. But I actually believe in the thesis that I think a lot of specialized skill sets are dead. And if you look at, I don't know if you guys have ever read the Bitter Lesson. Rich Sutton. Rich Sutton. Yeah, and Dariel was actually recently talking about that as well on the Dwarkesh podcast, where all that matters, specialized skill sets go away. All that matters is scaling these different variables. So compute training time, quantity of data, breadth and quality of data. And it doesn't really like all these places where you could eke out a job because you had some specialized knowledge in a niche, I think are going to completely go away. And that goes for the companies too, where a lot of them are giving lip services AI stuff. But you look at your median SaaS company again and it's like, okay, we rebranded some stuff and maybe we have some cool, one little AI feature here, but that's kind of all they've done.

2:14:14

Yeah. What about just being reinvigorated? I mean, what were you, YC10 Winter 12. Winter 12. Yeah, it's an overnight success. It's been 14 years, but at some point it can get exhausting. Has the AI boom sort of reinvigorated you, reinvigorated the team, and then what changes have been made to the individual roles of folks on the team to actually diffuse AI into everything? That you do?

2:15:35

Yeah.

2:16:08

I mean, we're super excited. The team's been very excited. I think the biggest thing we're seeing is specialized skill sets are going away. And so if you're an engineer, you have to think about whether what you're building customers actually use and want. If you're a product manager or designer, you're actually shipping code. Like we see, like one of our best designers is shipping code on a daily basis here, which is pretty crazy. I wouldn't have thought that were possible a year ago. And then I think it extends beyond the engineering and product and design functions. I think you look at go to market, I think the same thing's going to happen. You're still going to want salespeople because we as humans naturally respond to other people and we much rather talking to a person than AI and AI, but. But all the specialized niche skills, like, oh, I know how to write an earnings call script or a blog post or file a Form 4 or do this legal review or create an infographic, I think a lot of that is going to go away and instead you're just going to be left with high agency people who just know how to use AI.

2:16:08

Yeah,

2:17:11

we've seen so many different products explode from zero to hundreds of thousands or millions of users really quickly. Part of that is because models are this sort of magical technology that we're still processing. Right. We've seen this with back, what was it like two, three years ago when you had that image generation company that would make do headshots. You remember this company, you have this magical technology. It can cause really fast, explosive growth. There's this urgency from this early adopter crowd that will just try anything at least once. Like historically, if you were making a digital product and you were using amplitude, you'd be able to see like, okay, if somebody signs up and they use the app three times in the first three days, there's an 80% chance that they'll still be using it in the six month. At what point can you kind of see through all the noise and the chaos with some of these newer digital products that are leveraging AI and realize that you have something like sticky. Are there kind of new indicators or is there still something to be learned from the approach to retention analytics from maybe a decade ago?

2:17:14

So the core is the same thing, which is you want users to use your product and get a ton of value over time. So you're still looking at do they retain one, two, three months down the line. But what you're looking at upstream is different. So you're going to be looking at what sort of prompts is someone putting in. Is it getting them the result they want? Did they seem to like it? Did they reshare it? And so one of the things we're doing is actually building LLM analytics internally and we're partnering with a number of our AI Forward customers that have chatbots or are building models to see, okay, well, does this sort of response get better engagement than this sort of response or vice versa? And so you do need some customization to do that, because you want to look at these traces in real time. You want to understand the sentiment, you want to figure out what sort of context you can give it to give it a better response. But the thing that hasn't changed is you're still connecting it to long term engagement. So I know if they're still retained after three months and subscribing, that's a great outcome. So I just want behaviors at the start that correlate with that.

2:18:29

Yeah, that makes sense.

2:19:36

Two somewhat unrelated questions to the core business. But what can you tell us about how the iOS app charts work, about how they work? Because I imagine that you see analytics and then we see the charts and everyone has this feeling that the charts are based on momentum. How real is that? What does it take to chart? How confident are you in people gaming the charts? How do you think about charting in the App Store broadly?

2:19:37

That's so funny, dude. This is a blast from the past. This is a typical question we get in 2014. Charting is, at least from what we've seen, charting is not the best way to get distribution anymore. You want to get it through other channels, whether it's viral, whether it's own media, whether it's just a community of influencers. It's very, very different adoption. As far as I can tell. The guys at Sensor Tower would probably be able to give you a better answer than this. It is very much. How many people downloaded it in the last 24 hours? Seven days. And then what's the change in that over time?

2:20:06

Yeah. And that determines it. Yeah. And that's why we see like the meta quest charts, like right around Christmas because everyone's getting an Oculus.

2:20:45

Oh, yeah, just spike up.

2:20:52

Totally spike. And it's always fun checking the charts after Christmas because you're like, oh, here are all the toys that did well. Very, very interesting. Do you keep. You worked as an algorithmic trader at drd. DRW Trading.

2:20:53

DRW Trading. Golil, Don Wilson.

2:21:06

Yeah. Do you keep up with Any of those folks. Do you have any ideas or predictions about how AI will impact trading firms?

2:21:09

Don. I'll just tell this quick story on Don. He is fucking next level. He was out here in Silicon Valley and I randomly bumped into him at a party two years ago and he was like, oh, we're trying to create models that build the bleeding edge of what might happen in markets and incorporate all this data, whether it's geopolitical or macro or, you know, whatever else. And I'm like, holy shit. And he was physically out here in person, so much so that he had gotten a, gotten a place out here in the Bay Area, even though he's in Chicago. So I'm like, wow, this guy is next level. I think it will dramatically change in that if you can create models which take in all these different data sources. And then the lesson from deep learning is if you just get continued scale, all sorts of trends and underlying structure is going to pop out that you didn't even expect was there. So I think the high frequency trading firms that figure it out will do incredibly well and they'll leave.

2:21:18

Chalet was posting yesterday or the day before saying one of the first signs of ASI superintelligence will be a hedge fund that is just so dramatically outperforming.

2:22:19

They made 10 trillion this quarter. Would you bet on a plus?

2:22:33

That's why they got to have the wealth tax to redistribute it.

2:22:38

Yeah, yeah, sorry, bad joke. Would you bet on a traditional trading finance background, getting up to speed on AI or an AI lab learning finance if you had to Back, definitely.

2:22:41

The labs are one of these engineers learning finance.

2:22:55

Really?

2:22:57

I mean, when we went into high frequency, it used to be the finance world was filled with jocks. Right. It's like chest thumpers that did hundreds of phone calls every day.

2:22:58

Yeah, Wall Street.

2:23:08

Yeah, yeah, exactly. When I went into it, the nerds were just beginning to become hot. And so you wanted these people with math PhDs or physics Nobel Prize or whatever else, and it's like, yeah, they're going to outthink you. And so it's just going to go more in that direction. You know, the old days of the finance pro is gone.

2:23:09

So the revenge of the nerds is upon us. Hell yeah. Last question for me. Do you skate? Do you skateboard?

2:23:28

Oh, absolutely.

2:23:36

Really? That's amazing.

2:23:37

You've got it.

2:23:39

You roller skates, not ice skates.

2:23:40

What about ice skating? My brother skateboards. It's the Winter Olympics. You ever get out?

2:23:44

Oh, dude, I'd never be able to compete at that level?

2:23:48

No, no. But you know, it's like if it's Christmas time you go out with the family, I don't know, you put on some ice skates. It's a nice wintry activity I participate in. Oh, totally.

2:23:50

It's great first date idea, I'll tell you that.

2:23:59

Okay.

2:24:04

Yeah, that's great.

2:24:04

Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for coming.

2:24:06

So great to finally have you on.

2:24:08

Okay.

2:24:09

Yeah, hop on anytime.

2:24:09

Yeah, we'd love to.

2:24:11

Thanks, Jordy. Thanks, John.

2:24:11

We'll talk to you soon.

2:24:12

Cheers, Spencer.

2:24:14

Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye.

2:24:14

And back to

2:24:19

Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or metal men and spend with the Phantom card with Phantom Cash. Estimated ownership in Anthropic of various corporations. Amazon has around 15%, Google has 13%, Nvidia has 2%, Microsoft has 1%, Zoom has almost 1%, Salesforce has a little under half a percentage. And SBF also has a huge stake, although I think that that's transferred at some point. I wonder where those shares actually went. I have yet to get to the bottom of that.

2:24:23

I think a lot of those positions got bought out at the time of bankruptcy in order to repay. Yeah, no, no, they are still owned. Somebody bought them. I remember. I believe that the cursor position traded at like near. That was a situation in which kind of the vultures kind of descended and they were like there's some good assets in here. The bankruptcy process obviously needs liquidity to pay back the people whose money was used to fund the investments. But yeah, love to see last time Benioff was on, I think he said they had around a point and so it may have been diluted since then, but maybe more than that. Half a percent.

2:24:54

Well, we have some new Sonnet 4.5 is out from anthropic 4.6. 4.6, Sonnet 4.6. They say it's our most capable Sonnet model by far. It's newer, faster, lighter capabilities in many areas. Very excited for folks to try this one out, says Alex Albert over in the Claude Relations Department at Anthropic.

2:25:38

Will Brown says Sonnet 4. 6 is the first flagship LLM since Bloomberg GPT to be targeted primarily at the finance crowd.

2:26:01

Hmm. Bloomberg GPT 4.6. It does well on agentic financial analysis and office tasks particularly well. Yeah, neck and neck with some other stuff, but does pretty, pretty well. Let's see what else is going on. We have Plaid Plaid Powers, the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely. Can I connecting bank accounts to move

2:26:09

money, fight fraud and improve says Manus has entered Instagram.

2:26:33

Yes.

2:26:39

It gives you an overview and it Sundays you've reached 120,000 accounts. Create a content strategy with Manus based on the success of this reel.

2:26:39

Yes.

2:26:47

And then apparently it just takes you straight to the Manus homepage.

2:26:48

Oh, really?

2:26:51

So, not super integrated yet. But driving, driving leads.

2:26:53

There's also drama at the Olympics. Curling is in the hot seat.

2:26:58

This is crazy. Crazy.

2:27:02

Amanda says I'm obsessed with the curling drama. What do you mean? The Canadians are such consistent and known cheaters that the Swedes were willing to set up a sting operation to catch them in the act, which they knew would happen because again, they keep cheating in the same way every time. It's difficult to assign intent, but it does seem like the Canadians are cheating, and in this exact way, because they know that the usual cameras that cover curling matches do not cover the angle that would catch them, which is why they're mad at the Swedes for setting up the camera. And so, yeah, what was the headline is the Olympics have been rocked by a cheating scandal in curling. Good pun there, because I think the curling stone is called a rock. The double touch and the hogline are at the center of controversy that has Swedes tattling and Canadians cursing. The Olympics are where human beings accomplish the impossible. Skiers blaze down Mountains at 90 mph, skaters spin four times in the air and land on a pair of knives. And Canadians, by reputation, the nicest folks in North America, transform into something else altogether. The expletive spewing potential rule breaking villains of the Games. Canada's heel turn has come in curling of all sports. The saga began Friday during its men's match against Sweden when the Swedes accused Canadian curlers of grazing the stone with their fingertips after they'd already released it. The move is known as a double touch and is highly illegal. Candidates Mark Kennedy took the allegation badly.

2:27:04

So wait, Canada's still competing even though they were caught in 4K?

2:28:27

Well, they were accused of cheating by the Swedes, not by the Olympic governing body.

2:28:32

It seems insane.

2:28:36

So they got.

2:28:37

There's a video of it. You can see him doing it.

2:28:38

I don't know. Can you? I haven't seen a video that convinced me innocent until proven guilty. There isn't.

2:28:41

You haven't seen the video?

2:28:48

I haven't watched the video.

2:28:49

So it's absolutely blatant.

2:28:50

It is. You saw the video?

2:28:53

I think we have our next guest, so we won't pull it up now.

2:28:58

Well, we Will pull up public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Let's bring in Haseeb from Dragonfly.

2:29:01

We have.

2:29:11

The lightning round is starting. Thank you, Ben. The Lambda Lighting round is beginning now with Haseeb Qureshi from Dragonfly. He's the managing partner and he's here.

2:29:11

What's going on?

2:29:22

The TVPN Ultra room. How are you doing? Thanks so much for joining us. First time on the show, Please.

2:29:23

Yeah.

2:29:28

I've been looking forward to this introduction.

2:29:29

Yes. So I'm Haseeb, managing partner, Dragonfly. We're a $4 billion crypto VC firm. Actually, just today, we announced our fourth fund. We got overshadowed a little bit by Thrive. I think they. It's called mogging.

2:29:31

Yes, it is called. It is called mogging.

2:29:44

We'll still ring the.

2:29:46

There needs to be. There needs to be some organization that we're still. We're still hitting the big.

2:29:47

The big.

2:29:53

The same gong. The same gong that we hit for Josh. Yeah. There needs to be more. We got 365 days a year. And if you're raising a fund, there's got to be some governing body that dictates rolls.

2:29:53

Yeah.

2:30:06

If you're $100 million plus, you could only.

2:30:07

He'd be coordinating with us. But, yeah, the guys, they don't really care about the crypto guys anymore. They just overshadow us.

2:30:09

Okay. How focused is the fund on crypto? Is it 100%?

2:30:15

What are the hundred percent?

2:30:21

And are the. Are the lines blurring as more. I mean, we know some folks who are, like, ostensibly doing crypto, but it's, you know, AI training, distributed compute. And so crypto starting to touch more and more pieces of the tech economy. How are you in processing the blurring more directions? Yeah, yeah.

2:30:23

So I think we can see on the one hand, so we're investors in Polymarket. Polymarket now is becoming increasingly, you know, a lot of people don't even know that Polymarket is crypto.

2:30:43

Yeah.

2:30:50

The original Polymarket application was entirely on chain, on Polygon. They're now launching their US app. But before that, basically, you know, today, unless you were on the US App, you were using it on chain. If you look at. Increasingly, a lot of the apps that are really working in crypto are more fintechy, and we're seeing a lot of fintech investors coming up against us in a lot of these deals. And then, of course, like you mentioned, crypto is increasingly bleeding over. With AI, there was just this acquisition of OpenClaw, I think it was yesterday announced that OpenAI is acquiring them. The multiple book drama if you go on multiple book today. So I still look at Moat Book every day and most of the highest ranked things on Moat Book are all crypto related. It's all. Almost all.

2:30:51

But is that. Is that because people are trying to create. Is that because people are creating projects?

2:31:30

There's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of bullshit going on right now

2:31:35

in mo they're like you don't even need users now. You just create a million users for your project.

2:31:37

That's right. That's right. Look, it's the infinite variety of people will always find ways to try to make money from anything. And crypto, it both represents the best in humankind and the worst in humankind. That's part of the reason why it'll never go away. No matter how unseemly or distasteful or just insane it becomes, it just never dies. So it's something that I was just reflecting on because we're now eight years in to Dragonfly. It's been a long time, been a lot of cycle. We're now clearly in a trough of this cycle. Sentiment in Cryptoland is extremely low right now. But on the other hand, the actual adoption stablecoins, you see all these financial institutions coming into the space. Multiple of your sponsors are crypto sponsors and they're seeing their underlying traction go up even as prices are going in the other direction. So I feel really good and it is bleeding into everything like you said.

2:31:43

Quick update on mult book. 2.8 million AI agents have joined. There are over 1.4 million posts and over 12 million comments now. So still cooking Mult Book adoption still kicking.

2:32:32

What's the. Yeah, it felt like prediction markets were the product that kind of broke out fully maybe last cycle. Some of these cycles blend together as different products get traction. Where are you most excited to invest the new fund that you guys haven't necessarily invested before. We're still in this kind of moment as various laws work their way through Washington trying to figure actually get clarity on some of these things. But what are you most excited about? Over the fund life cycle for fund four.

2:32:48

So there's the core bread and butter of crypto which is just the financial applications. Actually I recently got into an online debate with Chris Dixon who he was coming out giving this big expose about, oh well, you know, all the non financial applications of crypto is just too early and we still got to Give them time to bake and maybe they're going to come back. I sort of took the other side as I think it is largely a death knell for the non financial applications of crypto. Crypto is about money, it's about finance, always has been from the very beginning, whether it's Bitcoin, Ethereum being programmable money to ICOs which are fundraising to defi, which has finance in the name of. Almost everything that's ever worked in crypto has been financial in nature. And everybody who's tried to make non financial things plug into crypto has basically failed. Now I think what falls under that umbrella is pretty big and I actually do think AI does fall into that umbrella. But it's more the ways in which agents are going to be interacting with money that very clearly. You can see it right now in Moatbook. You go in Moatbook and you can see that agents are trying to find ways to pay each other for things and to get each other to do things for them. It's very primitive right now, but you

2:33:26

can see where it's going.

2:34:36

You can draw the line out about if you're an agent, if I have an agent, you have an agent, you live in a different country, or maybe I don't even know who you are, I don't need to know who you are. If you're somebody else on moat book, it's very difficult for me to pay you. With a traditional financial system, it's not really designed to have non human recipients of money. We don't really know how the laws are going to work, how taxes are going to to work, how money laundering is going to work. Whereas crypto doesn't ask any of those questions. Crypto was really designed for machines more than it was designed for humans. And so I think we're going to see this become an increasing part of the story of how AI agents are going to become more and more autonomous and self driving financially is by giving them crypto and allowing them to just interact with other agents and other systems using crypto Rails. So I'm very intrigued by that. But the core trend of crypto is just more and more of the same.

2:34:36

Interesting.

2:35:29

How do you invest in stablecoins as a category going forward? Giving you have I put a ton

2:35:30

of money in stable coins. I haven't lost anything. I mean I haven't made a lot,

2:35:37

but they've done really well compared to bitcoin.

2:35:41

They've done really well compared to bitcoin.

2:35:43

Outperformed. But you have a bunch of startup players you have big institutions. It feels like I'm wondering where there's white space, where you think there still could be white space. Given that we know there's so much growth that's going to happen, that part feels inevitable. But where does the value actually flow and what are the opportunities for startups?

2:35:44

So I think everybody at this point is bullish on stablecoins. Secretary Besson has said he expects stablecoins to hit 3 trillion by the end of the decade. Right now they're about 300 billion. So that's like a 10x in the span of, call it four to five years now. I think that's pretty optimistic. I don't know that we're going to hit that kind of growth rate, but the numbers are clearly growing and they're growing every single year, like 60, 70% year over year. Now, how do you make money on that? So one way is to own a stablecoin issuer. I think that's pretty tough at this point. You can see it's basically a duopoly between Circle and Tether. Circle is already public, Tether is private. But they're supposedly raising a at 500 billion. There's not a lot of meat on the bone if you're investing at 500 billion into a stablecoin issuer. And the economics are really good at being a stable coin issuer, but it's basically being a bank and it's the modern financial institution, except they have 100% net interest margin, which is great. Are there going to be new stable coin issuers who show up now? If there are, they're probably going to be G sip. They're not going to be some new startup that comes up with a new way to launch the same product, which is effectively just a narrow bank. I think the place where you want to be investing as a VC is more in the interstitial layers, which is how is this stuff going to move around the world and get into the hands of a user, wherever they are? So one of the investments that we've made recently is a company called Rain, which basically they do these stablecoin cards and they allow you. Let's say you're in some country where you're using some fake fintech app that's allowing you to get access to stable coins. Let's say you're in Argentina, you're in, you know, you're in Nigeria. You're somewhere where you really want stable coins. You want dollars. You don't even know that they're stable coins. A lot of these apps the users don't even know that there's crypto underneath the rails. They just know that, you know, they send them naira, they get USD and they can send their USD overseas to somebody else. The problem with a lot of these apps is you can't pay anybody who's not in the app. You can't pay anybody who doesn't directly take crypto or they're not sitting on the same fintech as you. And so these cards, you can basically issue cards against your stablecoin balance. And the moment you swipe your card, whether you enter it into an app or you tap to pay or whatever, it debits stablecoins and settles directly on Visa net using stablecoins. Visa has now seen these are one of the fastest growing use cases for Visa around the world. And they're just growing like gangbusters. It's like 20% month over month growth. This, I think is going to be the way in which you see stablecoins go global is that they just get more and more integrated into the normal payments workflows for people.

2:36:10

What do you look at? Do you see much broad geopolitical risk to stablecoins? If I'm a country and I have a currency and suddenly all my citizens say, well, actually we like USDC or usdt. At what point does that become

2:38:42

such

2:39:03

a threat to the country's own monetary system that they need to pass new regulations and that kind of thing?

2:39:03

It already is. So a lot of the countries that have a lot of stablecoin adoption, stablecoins are per se illegal. If you go to Venezuela, you go to China, buying things with dollars is illegal in size. And that's why these are black markets. Most of these places, like Venezuela, very famously, there's a very different price for the Bolivar in the quote unquote lit market, as opposed to on the black market where people are actually transacting with dollars. Any of these places where you have very high inflation, you see this now. In the past, especially pre Covid, the way that this was done was you imported little green pieces of paper and that's how these countries dollarized. That's not happening anymore. Increasingly, the way in which these countries are dollarizing is they're dollarizing digitally, they're dollarizing from the ground up. And that's much harder to police because the reality is that all you need is a mobile phone and an Internet connection. And now you can get stablecoins no matter where you are, anywhere in the world. All you need is somebody who's willing to Trade you the local currency for that stablecoin. So I think the right way to think about this is not okay. When are governments going to push back? They're already pushing back. Especially if you're in a country that has very high inflation. Why do they have very high inflation? The answer is because the governments are printing a ton of money to make up for the fact that they're spending like drunken sailors. Right. It's a way to tax your citizenship when you cannot actually extract that through taxation. So every technology renegotiates the balance of power between individuals and governments. The Internet did the exact same thing. Information technology did that. With respect to the dissemination of information. I think what you'll see is that crypto does that with money. The presumption was always that this narrow waste of the banking system was always controlled by the government. And it's easy to control because it's very centralized and banks everywhere in the world are basically nationalized. Even when they're private companies, they're essentially controlled by the government. When that's no longer true, when basically you can exit by going on chain, by going to the blockchain, by going to a stablecoin that now that is a check against every government and every form of profligate spending everywhere in the world. I think that's ultimately good. Competition is almost always good. Now it's disruptive to a lot of countries that will say, hey, this is terrible, the US is attacking us or blah, blah. There's going to be all sorts of ratcheting up of geopolitical tensions. You saw this, by the way, in Nigeria. I believe it was Nigeria where there were Binance executives who got detained by the Nigerian government under the claim that Binance was assisting in tax evasion and all this other stuff, which is basically another way to say that they were allowing the sale of stablecoins in the country. And it was a huge political flashpoint. And they ended up having to get the Secretary of state to negotiate with them to get those executives out. But I think that's only the beginning. You're going to see more and more of this and I think this is very intentional by the US Government. Bessant has said very clearly a big part of the reason why stablecoins are good for America is that they increase the demand for treasuries, they increase the demand for dollars, and they increase demand for treasuries. Where is that demand coming from? Obviously it's coming from people who don't want their citizens to be holding our treasuries.

2:39:11

Sure.

2:42:19

That makes a ton of sense. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats on the massive fundraiser and I'm

2:42:20

sure we'll have a bunch of your companies on.

2:42:24

Yeah, we're looking forward to it.

2:42:27

Have a good rest of the year meet.

2:42:28

We'll talk to you soon.

2:42:30

Congrats to the team.

2:42:31

Let me tell you about Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, Voice robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. We will continue our lightning round with Celine Haluja from Loyal Celine, how are you doing? Good to see you again.

2:42:32

Hi.

2:42:48

Good to be back.

2:42:49

You got some big news for us. What happened?

2:42:51

Raised a hundo, Millie.

2:42:53

Whoa. Big day for our gong. Big day for the gong.

2:42:56

Everyone took yesterday off and was like, I'm dropping a big number on Tuesday. What does this unlock? Like, what's the next step in the company's mission?

2:43:02

Get this goddamn drug to market and launch the first FDA approved longevity drug. Just.

2:43:13

Just that, Just that, just.

2:43:19

Yeah, yeah.

2:43:21

And build our pipeline and all that shit too. But like, honestly man, I'm just like locked in on getting all that first FDA approval. It's been six years of work.

2:43:22

So what does that mean hiring more lobbyists, lawyers, doctors, scientists. Who are you bringing on with this new money?

2:43:30

It's actually spectacularly boring. It's literally just time. Like so much of developing a drug is like you put the drug on a shelf, you wait for it to age, you quantify how it ages, that tells you it's shelf life. You send something to fda, they reply six months later. So there's obviously like, we're spending on things like, like product expansion and commercialization. We're doing an owned commercial strategy. But honestly, our biggest burn driver is just time.

2:43:38

Okay, unpack the owned commercial strategy. What does that mean?

2:44:02

So when I started Loyal five years ago, we kind of had this thesis of building a pharma brand that people love, right? This idea of building a consumer brand around a pharmaceutical product which five years later is like super normalized with Ozempic and GLP1s. Like everybody's like going to peptide parties in Silicon Valley. Like everyone knows Ogenpic and Mounjaro and all that stuff, right? But before that, really the only consumer marketed drugs were like Botox.

2:44:07

Oh yeah.

2:44:33

So we could sell out. That was like what most farm biotech companies would do. Right now I can like go buy a small, maybe medium sized island, but I think it's much more exciting to commercialize it and build A consumer brand around this pharmaceutical product.

2:44:34

What's the impact of the GLP1 boom on your business?

2:44:50

Business?

2:44:53

Does they feel like almost longevity drugs? They're definitely life extending for a lot of people. But is that going to actually change anything in the market or at the fda?

2:44:54

I think it has really changed how people think about the biology of aging. Right. It was so difficult to explain these drugs before, like, oh, it's this one drug. It has this one mechanism, but it'll help this aging phenotype and that aging phenotype and this bad thing that happens and that bad, bad thing that happens. People are like, but how can that happen? It's a drug, it's only hitting one thing. And now they're like, oh my God, GLP1s. They make you lose weight and your metabolic fitness is better and oh my God, you're not addicted to things anymore. And there's just 10 other magical benefits that seem to happen. And it actually makes total sense. Right. Improving metabolic fitness improves basically everything downstream of that. But the general public had not been exposed to that writ large until GLP1. So I think people really understand an aging drug a lot better now. And it sounds a lot more real now than it did before a year or two ago.

2:45:04

Are people giving GLP1s or peptides generally to their dogs illegally?

2:45:53

No.

2:45:59

Have you heard about it? No.

2:46:00

There's a couple people trying to do GLP1s for dogs and cats. I think it could maybe make sense for cats. I have a really fat cat that maybe could benefit. But no, people don't want their dogs to not have appetite. Motivation and drive. This is like a whole thing, you know, like my dog is, you know, sleeping at my feet right now. I would love to think it's because she loves me, but it's also probably because she wants treats.

2:46:03

Yeah. Food motivated.

2:46:27

Yeah. Parents know this. There's nothing, there's nothing better than when your child is just like wants to eat a lot of food and if they're not incredibly hungry, you're like, like trying to.

2:46:29

Yeah.

2:46:38

I mean it's literally one of the two major levers we have to negotiate with them. It's reward via food and then negative reinforcement which you know, you don't want to do a ton of. So we don't want to take that lever away from people.

2:46:39

Yeah. How are you thinking about branding? Like GLP1s are interesting because I feel like they're not just consumer marketed as people know the name Wagoov or Wegovy or Ozempic. They also know peptide. And peptide has become a new category that people I think largely feel more comfortable about than magical weight loss pill or like injectable drug. It's like, what were you injecting? There were a lot of injectables that people were not cool with and now everyone's like, well, if it's a peptide, then okay, okay. How do you think about. Yeah, how do you think about educating folks about your category and how you fit into the overall hierarchy of things that you put in your body potentially.

2:46:52

Yeah. So this drug that we're hopefully bringing to market first, Loytu is for senior dog lifespan extension. It works by metabolic fitness improvement, which is one of the predominant mechanisms of GLP1. But actually our first drug and hopefully drug will bring to market after, after this. It's a bit slower in the manufacturing side is for big dog short lifespan.

2:47:41

Yeah.

2:48:02

And this idea that, you know, large and giant breed dogs live, you know, half as long as small breed dogs. And introducing there was like such a nice like Trojan horse or Trojan dog or whatever to introduce the thesis both to the general. Thank you, thank you. I'm here all day. Introduce people to the thesis of the aging field and also introduce ren regulators. Right. Because we're like, oh, like here's this thing that you take as inherent as natural. You know, Roddy's dying at age 10. It's actually not natural. Here's like the mechanism and here's the drug and here's how it's going to work. And oh, by the way, the way it works is by just slowing the rate of, just slowing the rate of aging of these big dogs.

2:48:02

Yeah.

2:48:41

And so I think it's the same thing, right? You, you give something where somebody only has to make one leap or two leaps. It needs to be accessible but still technically rigorous, which is always a challenge with bio. And then you can push it further and further, further from there. Like peptides. Right. Like I don't think peptides would have become a thing if it wasn't a weight loss drug.

2:48:42

Yeah. So what's the.

2:49:00

That was a great intro.

2:49:01

What's the current phrasing? Because you have like drugs then peptides, then ozempic and you have drugs and then blank and then loyal.

2:49:02

Oh, small molecule mostly.

2:49:11

Okay, so people, people are loosely familiar with that, but maybe it needs a buzzword. I don't see small molecule parties happening. Even though people are obviously doing that. Is there any different things I would

2:49:14

recommend small molecule, I mean that's just like drug parties. That's like college.

2:49:24

That's what I mean. That's what I was thinking.

2:49:28

Is there anything to learn from fringe Internet communities in relation to dog health? Like in the.

2:49:31

The Brian Johnson of dogs is out

2:49:38

there somewhere, that kind of thing. You know, some owners going crazy. But I think about, like, there's so much that like bodybuilders were doing 10 years ago that's now becoming mainstream futures

2:49:40

here is just not evenly distributed.

2:49:51

Yeah.

2:49:52

I think it's all the raw food stuff.

2:49:53

Really.

2:49:55

And all the cooking at home food stuff. Yeah, like the nutritionally complete. I mean, there's a lot of scandal here and we've like, pretty purposely stayed away from the dog food wars, as I like to call them. But that is definitely where people started. They. People don't really do drug hacking as much. Well, because also a lot of drug hacking for like weightlifters. I mean, yeah, it's like for fitness, but it's really for, like, aesthetics. And you're not gonna like, hack your dog for aesthetics. That's kind of unethical.

2:49:55

There's gotta be looks.

2:50:25

Maxing, I mean, that's all Shoots, maxing. Shoots maxing. That's the story of dog breeding.

2:50:25

I mean, not gonna lie. Like, there's some genetics in like golden retrievers that we like inadvertently gave them to be like extra cute and extra lovey. You could totally give that to any dog.

2:50:33

Let's go. We should. We should. We will.

2:50:42

Tempting. We are not doing dog gene editing, but, like, someone totally will and they totally will do that.

2:50:45

And you'll be the first person we call when it happens. Thank you so much, Cameron on the show and congratulations.

2:50:50

You feel like. Yeah. The energy is real. It's coming through the screen. You're swearing like a sailor. That's always.

2:50:58

Damn.

2:51:06

I. I'm so sorry.

2:51:07

Go. I mean, the energy's palpable. Team's fired up.

2:51:08

Team's fired up.

2:51:11

It gives me a lot of drama for it, but you know, you can't.

2:51:12

You gotta be yourself.

2:51:15

Be yourself. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

2:51:16

Congrats on the progress.

2:51:20

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's more broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Let's have Ankur from braintrust.

2:51:21

Braintrust.

2:51:36

He's in the restream.

2:51:36

Let's bring him in.

2:51:37

Chatting with him earlier. How are you doing?

2:51:38

What's happening?

2:51:40

What's up, guys?

2:51:41

Not too much. First time on the show. Quick introduction. I want to hear the news and then I want to talk about the economics of AI labs, but I want to talk about your news first, so please introduce yourself.

2:51:42

Awesome. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm Ankur, founder and CEO of braintrust. We build observability for AI products. So companies like our overlord here, Ramp, Notion, Instacart, Dropbox, et cetera, that are building really great AI products, they all use BrainTrust to help with that. We're announcing our series B today. We just raised $80 million and helps us build.

2:51:51

Sorry to interrupt.

2:52:19

Congratulations. We're very excited.

2:52:20

You said that helps. You said that helps you build.

2:52:22

Yeah, it helps us ship more stuff and hire more people.

2:52:26

Yeah, very simple. So, yeah, walk me through why someone's picking you, how they're integrating you, what the business model looks like, and what, like, the best case scenario of AI observability looks like.

2:52:29

Yeah, I think what's interesting about AI is when you build a product, you actually have no idea what's going to happen when you ship it. So if you're building a traditional ui, you can pretend to be Steve Jobs, look at the ui, play with it, form an opinion, and then you can kind of guess what's going to happen when people actually use it. With AI, you have literally no idea what's going to happen. And so being able to look at how people actually use your product and then capture the cases where it works well and the cases where it doesn't and test them is critically important. And that's basically the data flywheel that we power for all these companies.

2:52:43

And then you have digging in a little bit deeper. You have same application, different models integrating as well that I imagine you're also comparing. So what does best in class look like? If you're a software company that's integrating LLMs, what does best in class testing look like? Who's doing this at the highest level that you can?

2:53:16

Yeah, I mean, I honestly, I think Ramp is a great example of a company that does this very well. They use a bunch of different models for different use cases. And I think there's two things you shouldn't do. One is just use the same model and be very afraid to change it. There are some companies we meet that are still using GPT 3.5 on Azure.

2:53:37

Oh, no way.

2:53:55

I was debating, are they making any money from 3.5? And I was like, it might be.

2:53:56

Actually, I don't know, you kind of set. Set one of these things, things on some feature or Something update your depreciation

2:53:59

schedule in that case, because those GPUs are going to be burning into the 2040s running 3.5. I love it.

2:54:06

And there's some companies that are just changing the model every day and I think that's not a good way to build a good product. You need to really understand the nuances of the technology that you're using. So I think best in class is actually being able to change the model every four to six weeks. And if a new model comes out, like Sonnet 4.66 came out today, the best companies are going to have that integrated into their product in the next 24 hours if it makes an improvement for what they're doing.

2:54:13

Okay, Any more questions? I want to talk about AI lab economics.

2:54:38

Let's do it.

2:54:42

Are we in the Cournot equilibrium? Do you agree with that characterization? How long does that last? Walk me through how you think the AI lab economics might change over the next few years.

2:54:42

I think it's really simple. So basically when new models are coming out, people forget about open source and, and they forget about economics. And that's because it changes fundamentally what you can do with a model in the first place. Programming is a good example. The workflow today is completely different than it was a year ago. And if you tried to use the models from a year ago today, you wouldn't be able to do crazy stuff like Cloudbot or whatever that people are building nowadays. When models don't change at that speed, then what happens is people optimize the performance on the use case cases that they have. And so in between major model releases, and I think we're in one of these periods right now, there are new models coming out, but they're not fundamentally changing what's possible or not possible. You see a lot of interest in open source models and I think that's very exciting right now. Like, although there are not that many companies using open source models, if you look at usage on our platform, almost half the usage, like token usage, is coming from open source models from a very small number of companies that have figured out how to optimize use cases really well. And so I think it's going to be really interesting.

2:54:54

Okay, so I feel like we've been playing this cat and mouse game with value accrues to the foundation model layer value accrues to the application layer.

2:55:59

Value is very clearly brewing. The brain trust.

2:56:09

Yeah, but how does that flip? And what do the big AI labs look, look like after the final models? Do they look like Hyperscaler clouds, Do they look like Azure, gcp, aws? Is that the right formulation or are they more like infrastructure providers? How do you think about that?

2:56:11

Well, first to me, it's not clear to me when, if whatever, the party's ever going to end, but let's say the party sort of slows down at some point. I think, I think one thing that happens is there are some use cases that actually aren't changing that much. So customer service for a consumer software app at the very, very highest scale, if you think about deflecting incoming tickets that come in, for example, can I get a refund? That use case doesn't really change at the speed that new LLMs are coming out. Sure. We actually have a lot of customers that have built solutions in many cases using open source models like one or two years ago that they're still using and optimizing and they're getting both better performance and better economics each coming month by taking advantage of the downstream optimizations that are happening from the frontier. So I think a lot of use cases are just going to get cheaper and higher margin, especially the use cases that aren't changing that much in terms of what we see with the models. I think probably the most interesting trend is that they're verticalizing and building products. Like again, I think claudebot is a really interesting example of this. So is Claude for sheets and obviously Claude code. So I mean I think if the party stops, there's a whole nother layer of low hanging fruit tightly integrating models into these canonical applications and I think there's still a lot of room to make that really good.

2:56:36

Do you think that that will, how long do you think will stay in this regime of building Centaur like projects instead of, you know, it's like, like big AI lab launches a product for legal. They haven't launched a law firm yet. Is that coming?

2:58:00

Yeah, I mean I have been working in AI now for like 10 years and prior to that I'm a crusty, jaded, pessimistic engineer type person. And so when I first started working in A.I. i thought, wow, things are changing really quickly. It's not going to be like this for everybody and next year it's going to be totally different. But this is like 2017, 2018.

2:58:17

Right.

2:58:39

And so I've had to totally unwind that part of my brain and just assume that I think there's a reasonable chance we will be in this state and the normal is going to change for a very long period of time.

2:58:40

Just progress will continue for a Very long time. And we'll see more and more.

2:58:55

And I mean, I think that's just generally true. But the baseline for progress is going to feel different a few years from now once we get used to this, than it did like 10 or 20 years ago.

2:58:59

Yeah. How have you reacted to that line from Dwarkesh that diffusion is cope and that the models aren't actually that good and so if they were better, they would diffuse much more fast?

2:59:11

Oh, totally. I mean, I was actually talking to Martin last night about this, but I think we are now programming at the maximum speed that we can program.

2:59:22

Okay.

2:59:30

In fact, there are so many people who make so many mistakes and walk them back, or we ship crappy products and then walk them back, or we ship buggy products and then fix them, or the speed at which we're able to respond to user feature requests and bugs. We're totally tapped out. Right. And so I think that we're in this really weird equilibrium state with how productive we can be in some of these use cases. And it's not super clear, at least to me, that that a model that's 5% smarter at writing C code is going to dramatically change the amount of productivity we're able to create.

2:59:31

Bull case for fdes, basically. Is that right?

3:00:06

Yeah. It's interesting. It's like you can do so much more, but there's still value and focus. Right. It's like a company that raises. Like braintrust raises a big round. You've got a lot of resources available. That doesn't mean, okay, we should launch 10 products at once. It's like, okay, you still have to focus that energy in.

3:00:10

And weirdly enough, we actually raised a smaller round than we could have. I think we are trying to be very careful about not getting. Yeah, I'm sorry. Trying to be careful about not getting caught up in the craziness. We know exactly how much money we need to hit our revenue target for the next few years and we raise that much money.

3:00:30

No, Very, very smart. We're messing.

3:00:48

Yeah, no, you're giving us time to get a bigger golf. Yeah, yeah, we get it. This one's not big enough.

3:00:50

Oh, we'll be ready.

3:00:56

Keep it warm. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

3:00:58

Yeah, great. Great to finally have you on and come back on anytime you have thoughts.

3:01:00

Yeah, we'd love to talk.

3:01:04

Awesome. Thanks for having me.

3:01:05

Yeah, congrats to the team. Cheers.

3:01:06

We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent, real time conversational agents and reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs and. And we have our next guest almost here in the restream waiting room. We have Reed from Knight. He's the founding CEO. He's been on the show before, but he has some big news for us. So, Reid, how you doing?

3:01:08

He's back.

3:01:32

I'm just trying to get on the show as much as Delian at this point.

3:01:33

You got to get your numbers up.

3:01:37

Number two. Well, you're welcome anytime. We can always talk creator economy. What's going on?

3:01:39

This is cool. I feel like you're. This is like your. You're. Your streaming setup. It was fun having you here.

3:01:42

Wow.

3:01:48

That's the big play button. Is that 10 mil?

3:01:48

It's 100.

3:01:51

100. Wow. There we go. Let's hit the Golf.

3:01:52

Four subs.

3:01:56

You'll get there.

3:01:57

Yeah. On the way. On the way.

3:01:58

Anyway, give us the real news. What happened today?

3:02:02

Yeah, we finally announced our capital raise. Stepstone led it founders fund also involved K5 house capital. Kind of. Kind of felt like it was time to get that out there. And so, yeah, we officially announced that Bloomberg today, and I'm kind of bouncing around.

3:02:05

Amazing. How much did you raise?

3:02:20

70.

3:02:23

Oh, he's going back. He's going back. All right. What? Yeah, let's. You've been on the show before. We'll assume people generally understand Knight. Like, what does this capital allow you to do? Because you guys are in a business that, unlike some of our other guests, makes, you know, has been making real, real money for some amount of time. And so why raise? Why raise?

3:02:23

Yeah, we're probably a little bit different. Like, we're. We've been profitable for 10 straight years, so it's a little bit different success. And so, you know, I think for us, you know, I kind of said this last time I was on the show.

3:02:48

You're bored of profitability. You're like, I've done that. I've done that for 10 years. I got. I got to switch it up.

3:03:00

I've listened to the show too much, and, like, all these companies lose so much damn money. It kind of felt like the time for us to not be profitable anymore.

3:03:05

Let's go. Let's go. Gas. But seriously. Yeah. What can you acquire assets? Can you hire a bunch of people? Are you going to build technology? What's on the menu? There's so much that you could do.

3:03:13

Yeah. The focus has always been talent, talent management. I think we launched the venture studio five years ago. We did feastables, tone Outtake, and a lot of stuff. Has come out of that. The venture studio is going to be a big focus of ours. And then we're also like, we think music is interesting, we think sports is interesting. We want to push deeper into live events. I think it just kind of opens the aperture a little bit wider for us. The core idea is just continue to be the Internet's media company, like buy assets that are transcended by the Internet over the next decade. Hopefully I'm doing this for a long time. Hopefully we're profitable for a long time. And so, yeah, it's an exciting next step. And I'm glad Stepstone and honestly, like, Founders Fund and some of these other ones are involved. I don't think FF has ever done another media deal. I think this is kind of like the first one for them. And yes, we have a venture studio.

3:03:27

They did this media company called Facebook back in the day.

3:04:17

That was one.

3:04:20

Yeah, that was one.

3:04:21

You don't hear about Facebook much anymore.

3:04:22

Well, they do Metaverse now.

3:04:25

Yeah.

3:04:26

They're kind of out of the media game. No, but truly, what you do is very, very unique for venture broadly, but also for Founders Fund. Give us a song review of Rip My Granny. She got hit with a bazooka.

3:04:27

Wait, what happened?

3:04:41

What did I miss?

3:04:45

Have you not heard the song Bazooka?

3:04:46

No.

3:04:48

What did this just happen today?

3:04:49

Oh, it's just this viral song. Play it for.

3:04:51

We'll send you.

3:04:54

We'll send it to you.

3:04:55

We'll send you some videos.

3:04:56

It's a stupid meme song.

3:04:57

But, but, but.

3:04:59

Unpack, unpack bullishness around music. Obviously, a lot of people are doom and gloom. AI is going to do it all. Where are you seeing opportunities? What are the smart musicians doing today?

3:05:00

I'm still waiting for AI to create content, to be honest. Like. Like, didn't figure it out. Like, yes, like mid journey and VO3. There's some cool shit and some make animations. Okay, Like, I. I'm so not bullish on the future of AI transcending content, at least not in the next two to three years. So I am not as much doom and gloom as people are in the music industry, in the content industry. I get it. I get why people are scared. It just feels like adoption takes so long and the products aren't even close. So that's my take.

3:05:11

And yeah, it feels just so much like a tool. Like, okay, you don't have the money for the drone. You take a photo with your iPhone and then go to Google Maps and you say, interpolate these two with VO3 and it does the cool drone shot for you and your viewers don't really notice and all of a sudden you have higher production value with lower overhead. But one shotting a truly viral video, it just requires so much, you know, you have to be one with the algorithm.

3:05:44

Are you, are you getting, are you getting pitches from people that are saying, like, I'm gonna be a creator, but I'm gonna be faceless? It's sort of like Lil miquela thing. Obviously they were earliest to this trend and kind of ran two sides of this conversation.

3:06:11

There's one like being a faceless creator, which Iron Mouse, I think is one of the biggest ones in America. She's considered a vtuber. And so I get why that's popular. It's a faceless animated character with a real person doing the voiceover. I get that it's popular in Japan, it's becoming popular in America. In terms of AI, more generative AI channels or 100% generative AI channels. Like, I don't think we're even close. I see the News channels on YouTube. I see a lot of this stuff. Nobody's watching it. I think you guys have gained momentum for a reason. I just don't think that some AI news channel is going to do anything in the next, like, I don't know, five years, to be honest.

3:06:27

I mean, maybe competitor to. If your news, if the news channel you're competing with is just straight up reading you headlines, but if there's commentary and back and forth and stuff that's much harder to capture.

3:07:08

How are you thinking about timelines around deploying capital? This is not. Because you guys have just been operating real business for so long. I would assume you're not like, we want to burn through, we're going to burn through this over the next 18 months and then try to raise another round. It's more like strategic capital that can allow you to kind of strike when you have an amazing opportunity or own more of a business that's kind of being created with some of your existing talent. How do you think about it?

3:07:19

Yeah, I think that was well said. I take a pretty long term outlook on this company. I hope to do this for a long period of time and so I'm not in a hurry. I like to have long term outcomes and I think long term when it comes to acquisitions as well. So I think about what's going to be popular five to 10 years from now, because hopefully I'll be running this company five to ten, ten years from now. So it's not necessarily. Let's go do something tomorrow. We're going to look at a lot of different things and we're having a lot of conversations, but I'm not in a hurry to just go spend rapidly and lose a ton of money.

3:07:46

When's the right moment to meet a creator? Do they need to have proven that they have some element of star power, like some like base fan base? Like when do you know? When do you look at somebody's like, content? It could be a standalone Instagram account or a YouTube channel or a TikTok or a Twitch account and say, I can 100x this individual, man.

3:08:20

It's changed a lot over the years. You know, five years ago we were very, very, very selective and we were mostly just working with the top people in the world. But then people have come around that have changed how I think about content. And also the careers get big so quick. I mean, things like, let's just take the Rizzler. I think I have the iced tea back there. Let's just take the Rizzler. An example, like we found him very early and I think five years ago, Knight would have not signed the Rizzler. And we took, we took a little bit of a risk and it paid off. And now he's this just like global superstar of a nine year old. And so we take a lot more risk.

3:08:49

Nine.

3:09:26

He's nine.

3:09:27

That's crazy. I always assumed that he was at least, at least a teenager.

3:09:28

Well, in my mind here.

3:09:33

I know. And so we'll, we'll take risks a lot earlier. If we have high conviction in somebody will take risks earlier on Twitch, YouTube, TikTok. And also it's more competitive. When I first started the company 10 years ago, there wasn't a lot of representation companies that gave a shit. Can I swear on this?

3:09:34

We don't, but you can. Okay.

3:09:51

I can't swear that that cared about digital now. It's the big agencies, the big management companies, the traditional management companies. They all look at people pretty early. And so discoverability of new talent only happens on the Internet in comedy podcasting. And so it's just more competitive now. And so we've taken earlier swings on people.

3:09:52

What can you tell me or explain what's going on on Kik Looks maxing Clavicular is in the New York Times now. Like, it feels like there's some machinery there behind the scenes. There's clipping. We do a little bit of this.

3:10:13

Yeah. And it's funded. It's funded in this case by Kik. Like they're putting up BO budget and saying, yeah, we're gonna pay, pay out views like it.

3:10:28

Maybe just give me like an IRL streamer 101. Like what's going on here?

3:10:36

It's, it's not new. I think you guys are just now hearing about it and people are hearing about it for the first time on Twitter. But this was very much like how Aiden Ross became popular is he was paying a lot of clippers to clip his content out. And you can live stream on Kick or Twitch and you can get 5,000 ccvs, but those 5,000 people are the only people people that see it. So a lot of the discoverability and the amplification of those views comes from clipping on the Internet. Creators figured that out two to three years ago. It's just now becoming a lot more mainstream and people are realizing that that's the growth metric. And so Clavicular Neon, there's so many now that are spending 10, 20, up to upwards of $100,000 a month right now just clipping content.

3:10:41

Interesting. And so yeah, that's why it's breaking through broadly. It is too.

3:11:22

The looks maxing thing, like it's a wave and you know, it's like I have a lot of people texting me about it with, about my thoughts on just him more generally.

3:11:26

Totally.

3:11:35

But he does, oh, this is great. Now, now you, you, all your investors, anytime there's a new Internet star, they just get to text you a clip and they're like, are we in this one? Like, am I making, am I making money on this indirectly? And you're, I'm sure a lot of the time you're like, yeah, we're, we're, we're partnered. And then, and then you got, they

3:11:36

did ask about Clavicular, so I'm sure I have had that text. So his clips are breaking through to a lot of people, not just kids.

3:11:53

Yeah, yeah. It feels like there's also a little bit of like creative writing going on. I mean the whole vernacular and the way they structure it, like it's TMZ based celebrity news, but it has all this lingo and you have to peel back this onion to understand what's actually happening in the clip that has created this sort of like it nerd snipes. A lot of people, they're like, I want to learn what frame mogging means today. And then they go and dig in. They're, oh, they're engaged.

3:12:01

Do you think we'll get one person movie studios in the next few years? Is that Something that you're kind of waiting for. You said earlier like AI is not really making content, but you can imagine the archetype of somebody who's like a writer who can like write out a, you know, effectively an entire script and then piece by piece prompt to get, get to something that is a cohesive project. And seeing like Sea Dance from last week and seeing SAG's reaction to it, you can immediately see like it will be possible to piece together with character consistency, maybe even using traditional stars and get to the point where somebody can put out 90 minutes of content and do that every month, maybe every two months. It's not going to be like one shotted to make something great.

3:12:26

Yeah, I agree. I think the, you know, I've been seeing rumblings of people now going to go back on strike. I think that the big to your question, Yes, I do think it's going to happen. How are the guilds going to handle this? Because that will undoubtedly be like non union work. And so I think they're going to have to come to terms with are we going to allow this to happen within the guild or are we going to allow these things to get built outside of the guild? And then does non union work actually become more powerful and the streaming services start buying that stuff.

3:13:15

Stuff.

3:13:43

And so I think a lot of that's going to have to unravel over the next like three to four years. And yeah, I do agree that we will have like a one person studio that uses prompts to create a script to then create content. And we just saw like Markiplier, did this all just by himself, wrote Iron Lung, directed and acted in the film, distributed independently to movie theaters and it ended up doing like 25 million box office on a $6 million budget. And so we're seeing it happen and we're seeing the model to go directly direct to theatrical. Will that happen through Generative AI? Undoubtedly, yes. I just think we're further away than people realize.

3:13:43

How badly do you want to help create a new platform the likes of a Twitch or a Snapchat or ideally an Instagram or YouTube. Because eventually the nature of these platforms is you want to have the breakout star, the superstars creating content on your platform, but you also want to keep them down, right? You don't want to let them get too powerful to have any type of leverage over the platform. You can imagine at some point some amount of creators rising up and then using clipping on all these different platforms to try to see kind of a new platform with users and Given that you're in the business of being effectively at the mercy, like every creator is at the mercy of these platforms and you can, you know, sometimes you're, you're on a hot streak and then other times you're kind of on the receiving end of different changes. But how do you think about new platform opportunities?

3:14:22

I don't think I'll be the one or we as a company will be the one that creates the next platform. It's not something we're thinking about internally. I hope hope that a new platform pops up in the next 12 to 18 months. It feels like we're due for something. I have no idea what that's going to be because the meta still feels very much like short form content dominates attention. So I don't know what else is going to come through the system. But it is an interesting trend we're seeing right now where every platform is adopting video podcasts. Netflix kind of to start just saw the Apple announcement this morning that they're going to start doing video podcasts. Amazon's gonna follow, everyone's gonna follow and then there's gonna be this long form podcast feed. Maybe that's seen as a new type of mechanism.

3:15:27

Apple's, Apple's timing with that I'm very, I'm super happy they're finally doing video. We still get way more views on, on like Apple podcasts than, than YouTube and Spotify, which we laugh at because we feel like it's such a, such a video heavy show. Like it's insane to be like I'm gonna watch tbvn.

3:16:08

Some people are gonna total respect.

3:16:28

There's. There's somebody listening to this. There'll be someone listening to this many people over the next 24 hours from Apple podcast.

3:16:31

But, but is that because your audience is older and the boomers listen to it on Apple podcasts.

3:16:37

Let's not call them names here. They're lovely members of our community.

3:16:44

Upstanding I think, I think it's just habit. I think it's just habit. Habit forming. I listen to probably thousands of hours podcasts on Apple podcasts back in college.

3:16:49

Yeah, for sure. Help me get up to speed on video games. There's this weird boom and bust that I sort of perceived that I want to reality check. So we had boom in Twitch streaming for video games. People were watching a of lot, a lot of video game content that seems to be continuing to go. But the esports IRL competitions felt like they reached a zenith and sort of have been either status quo or declining at the same Time you have something like Kaisanat's bloodborne stream that looked like it had the budget of an ESL event. So it feels like there's more. There's exciting things happening in video game streaming and content related to video games. But, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Like where is video game content today and where is it going?

3:17:02

It's still struggling and I think we've had a lot of games come out and have moments like a month at max, like a moment and then just kind of fade into the darkness. We haven't had a game that has come out that has been a Minecraft Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto that's sustained.

3:17:53

Okay.

3:18:08

Hopefully we get Grand Theft Auto the end of this year. I'm probably not as confident that they finally put that out, but even in the esports genre we had everything. We had Rocket League, we had like we had every single esport out there and it feels like we've fully retreated just back to League of Legends and Counter Strike.

3:18:08

Interesting.

3:18:25

And I don't know if that changes. Like it feels like the, the esports thing had its moment. Most of the teams are no longer here.

3:18:25

Yeah.

3:18:32

And the two esports that were dominating that were the, the biggest in the pack while this trend was happening. Counter Strike and Lee League are still very much the two most popular. We just, we need to get back to making games like it's it but it's hard. Like Roblox kids are playing out Roblox games every single day and so you just have a new influx of games. Like you have YouTube videos every single minute. And so it's hard I think for a AAA studio like an Activision or Ubisoft to put out a game and that game to have some sustainability over the one month period that people play it, you know. So I, I don't know, I've. I've been pretty upset by like the last two and a half to three years of the video game industry. Maybe some of it was Covid induced, but we just have had a big titles unfortunately.

3:18:33

Well, the good news is that AI will totally help this now. It's going to make it, it'll make it way worse because you can imagine my theory is that the, the platforms with existing networks like Roblox make use, integrate a bunch of AI to make it even easier to make all these games and then you can, you get more fragmentation and it becomes even harder to have a truly breakout, durable hit.

3:19:16

Yeah, it is odd that we have the Call of Duty annual release Cadence, which I think a lot of people have not been happy with because there's just too much incrementality, not much changing. But then you have Rockstar on the exact opposite spectrum. It's been, what, like, almost 20 years since the last Grand Theft Auto came out. And everyone's like, okay, we'd love a little bit more cadence from you, but less cadence from you. Call of Duty, slow down. Call of Duty, speed up. Grand Theft Auto. But yeah, greatness takes time. So I don't know, maybe it'll happen.

3:19:38

Yeah, I think Call of Duty will retreat and not do every year rollouts. Yeah, I do. That is what ends up happening. And then the resurgence of sports games has been good for the at least the video game ecosystem. The content creation of those sports games has not increased as those games have come out. But NCAA football was one of the biggest releases we've had in a long time, and it took a long hiatus. And so we are seeing a resurgence in sports games. I just think from a casual fan, they're playing the games, they're not just watching streamers play the games.

3:20:07

Yeah. How are the economics or key strategies of a video game launch different today than maybe a decade ago? I watched some video game reviews and I'll see, you know, oh, thanks to Activision for sending me the free review copy. Or hey, this was actually promoted by. This is a promoted video by Ubisoft for the latest Assassin's Creed. I probably wouldn't have made a video review of it, but I am because they're paying me all the way to. You could imagine a Kaisanat stream where they pay for the production value. And, you know, when GTA 6 comes out, they're putting, you know, props behind him, all sorts of crazy integrations. What does the rollout of a successful video game look like? And partnering with your team?

3:20:38

Yeah, used to be a lot of linear TV ads that's transitioned obviously to let's pay creators. Let's do interesting things with creators. But I don't think people remember when Fortnite first came out, it was called Save the World and they paid a lot of creators. Their strategy when they came out with the game was to pay every single creator. And then when Battle Royale came out, they paid every single, single creator again to play Battle Royale. So it's been going on for a long time. This isn't a new thing. Individuals discover video games on YouTube or Twitch from their favorite people making those games. And so the advertising has had to change with that. But I still feel like Activision Ubisoft, they still have traditional spend. I still see the commercials. They're just like the budget allocation is very different. It's like, let's spend on creators and Google and meta ads and some of the linear stuff. Maybe we'll play that at NBA All Star Game during the commercial break, whatever that is. But yeah, it's changed rapidly and will continue to change.

3:21:23

How much of it is like top down versus bottom up. Like you could pay a ton of small creators to play a game or you could say like, we're having Shroud and Ninja on day one. And just the fact that you could queue with them or you could watch their streams, maybe they get paired, you create, create this like snowball effect and you just jump straight to the top of like the Twitch viewership numbers, man,

3:22:17

it's so dependent on the game. I think if you're art creators, you probably get more out of paying Shroud and Burnt Peanut, whoever that is, play your game than you will after going or than you will from just doing a wide micro influencer strategy, which is going to be 10 times more work to get all that paperwork done. And then you're gonna have to manage hundreds of creators or just have Shroud, who's known so deeply in the community to be one of the best FPS gamers of all time. I think it's such a balance depending on the game, to be honest. And each studio is trying to figure that out right now. But I've seen this go more micro in the past now over the last few years. Let's widen out the budget. Let's not necessarily give it all to Mr. Beast or some other macro creator.

3:22:40

Last question for me. We'll let you get back to your busy day. Give us a burnt peanut 101. The chat's going crazy for Burnt Peanut. Like, what is that? How does it work? Whether the keys to success. Why are we talking about Burnt Peanut, not someone else?

3:23:24

Yeah, it's been crazy watching him kind of just come on. And I'm quite confident he doesn't pay clippers. I think a lot of this is just organic. Like all the clips that you see on TikTok are just fans making clips because he is hilarious. But it is, is essentially a vtuber real person behind a Peanut. And I, I, my theory is that Peanut is a Snapchat filter of some sorts or some own filter.

3:23:39

Yeah.

3:24:04

And they overlay it over him.

3:24:05

Okay.

3:24:06

And yeah, it's, it's worked. And now I'm seeing like burnt broccoli and like all Kinds of different melons and fruit characters on Twitch right now.

3:24:07

Cinematic universe found something.

3:24:18

Yeah. The synthetic universe of, like fruit and, like vegetables streaming on YouTube is a real thing.

3:24:20

Yeah. One of my friends started sending me burnt peanut videos and was just like, these are hilarious. And I was like, oh, I think I understand what's going on here, but thanks for breaking it down.

3:24:26

Are we.

3:24:34

Are we like. I'm seeing this on Twitter. So we're charging a million bucks per right now, or are we ripping over here?

3:24:34

That was. That was not. I don't know where they got that information. Yeah. But they certainly ran with it.

3:24:40

Yeah.

3:24:49

But we're having a good time.

3:24:49

Yeah. We're running ads.

3:24:52

You guys have been killing it. It's been fun. I have it on the TV every day, so it's fun to watch.

3:24:54

I appreciate that. Well, come back on soon. Bring your next. Next time you sign a client that you think is interesting or relevant to our world, come bring him by the ultra diamond. We'll all hang out in person. We always love these conversations.

3:24:57

We'll talk to you soon, Reid. Have a good day.

3:25:12

Congrats.

3:25:15

Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium size.

3:25:16

I was thinking something very funny because every. Every time a creator is doing anything, people are talking like, oh, are they? Are they PT Backed? Is p. Is PT Involved? Like, is PT Back in clavicular? And now, people, this. The skitsos with the red skate go crazy. So PT Back knight and the Knight back them. And so Bern. Yeah.

3:25:22

The Rizzler.

3:25:46

The Red Bull market. And Red string. The Rizzler. P.T.

3:25:47

you gotta go long. Red string. Right now there's a lot of stuff. Anyway, we have the video from Ian Curler's double touch cheating allegations. Apparently it's dead to rights. We'll see. I haven't seen the video, but we're gonna pull it up and we will decide whether or not they.

3:25:51

I can't wait for you to see this. So here they're getting called out and he's freaking out. Like, give me a break.

3:26:11

Give me a break.

3:26:15

And that's the Canadian who was accused.

3:26:16

Alright, let's get some sound on.

3:26:17

He was accused of curling.

3:26:20

Canada.

3:26:21

So the Canadian was accused of cheating by the Swedes.

3:26:23

And.

3:26:26

And here's the clip of them at the Olympics. I don't know if we can play the audio because of the. The Olympics is very, very tight about not repurposing.

3:26:27

Can we find the actual video, though?

3:26:36

Wait, they Said that there's a clear double touch at 58 seconds. Yeah, see, See the copyright strike could, could end us. Let's be careful. Let's keep talking over it the whole time so we don't get destroyed once it crosses the line. This is even for a late release. That's considered a double touch violation. Double touch violence. The result of that, the stone gets

3:26:39

removed from the game.

3:27:02

Okay.

3:27:03

On Saturday, Canada's Rachel Holman had a rock removed after.

3:27:03

I don't see anything there. That looks fine.

3:27:07

Look at this, look at this. There it is. He pushed it. He, he.

3:27:09

Why would you touch it like that? That doesn't, that doesn't do anything.

3:27:13

What do you mean? It obviously does something. He's, he's watching the thing. I don't know what it's called the rock. And he's kind of like directing it a little bit. That's all you need, a little micro.

3:27:18

You've had your whole hand on it. Like let the hand do enough. Look, you're releasing it. You don't need one extra touch. That doesn't do anything.

3:27:28

Yeah, I agree they should not cheat

3:27:35

in the game, but I don't even think the cheating has that much of an impact on the actual result. I think that one extra touch, it's accident. It might not be an accident, but it just doesn't seem like it really changes the trajectory.

3:27:38

That's blatant.

3:27:50

But isn't he already touching it? So he took his hand off and

3:27:52

then off and he put it back on. Why would you even do that?

3:27:55

He's so dialed on the release, he

3:27:58

can tell if he messed up.

3:28:00

He can tell if he messed up and make a slight.

3:28:00

Released it, I think. And then he's like, oh, I'm just chopped.

3:28:02

Okay. Okay. Interesting. This is the equivalent.

3:28:06

Cooper says that's the equivalent of taking steroids.

3:28:10

I really hope we can get that curling. That curling guy on the show. I know we talked about him earlier.

3:28:13

Yeah. So guys. Yeah, his name is Rich Rohonen, 54 year old Personal injury attorney. We talked about him on the show last week. He followed me on Instagram. I messaged him. He says after the Olympics are wrapped up, I'll consider it.

3:28:19

Yeah, we will see. Well, anything else to talk about? We did not get to the Neolab.

3:28:34

Tomorrow. Tomorrow we're gonna be doing a breakdown

3:28:41

deep dive on NEO Labs. I posted some fake news on X. I said, I'm gonna do it with Tyler and we didn't get to it. We had plenty of time. I just like, we need to put it in the timeline. That's what we got to do so that I know when we're hitting it. Anyway, thank you for watching. Is it time to plant the bomb?

3:28:44

Plant the bazooka.

3:29:00

Tell folks the bazooka is placing Been planted. Bazooka has been planted. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts. If you're listening, it's fine that there's no video. We don't mind.

3:29:01

But there's going to be video soon. I can't. I'm so excited, people on Apple Podcast.

3:29:12

We might be on Apple TV soon. Who knows? Leave us five stars on Spotify signslet.com tomorrow at 11am sharp. Pacific. Nice work, brothers.

3:29:17

I'll see you on the next one.

3:29:30