SaaSpocalypse Cancelled, Palantir’s $17M Jet Bill, WBD x Netflix Latest | Dylan Field, Saagar Enjeti, Sigil Wen, Peter Morales, Erik Palitsch, Ljubisa Bajic

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Today is Thursday, February 19, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultra, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com, time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

0:03

I have to practice that handshake tutorial.

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In case you were wondering how to shake hands with your friend or with your enemy. It works. It's the same. It's the same process. You grab the hand with great force.

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Yes.

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And lift up. Underrated. While you're. You can establish dominance. You can handshake mob.

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Clearly, huge missed opportunity for Sam and

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Dario to crush each other's hands to the point where the other one is bleeding and crying. That would only really set the tone.

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They have to rely on voice transcription.

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Exactly. Exactly. It would have been much better to just watch crushing in the hand. You know, you do those like strength training for a reason.

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That's right.

0:53

Every once in a while. You don't want to get caught. Lacking. Anyway, there's big news today. We're canceling the SaaS apocalypse.

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It's over.

1:01

RIP Sasspocalypse. It occurred from January 2026 to February 2026, and it's over now. We're declaring it over. No, it's not entirely over. Who knows where the market will go.

1:02

In many ways, it's just getting started.

1:13

In many ways, it's just getting started. But I do think we're starting to see a bifurcation in the sloppable companies and the unsloppable companies. There should be some divergence between companies that have figured out how to integrate with AI, how to retool their business model or just show that their business model was strong all along. And we'll go through that.

1:15

Well, yeah, there's a category of SaaS that is SaaS. Yes, but they will be fine AI beneficiaries. Yep.

1:32

Totally. Totally. Should we. Should we watch have you seen Pacific Rim?

1:39

No.

1:42

We gotta watch this pump up speech. Let's do it because this gets me fired up. We're canceling the apocalypse. It's movie night again in class. This is from Pacific Rim. We're going to a minute 22 in here. Jump ahead because this is one of the greatest speeches.

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You don't want to watch. You don't want to.

1:58

Okay.

1:59

We can watch it raining.

1:59

It's raining. We'll watch the whole thing. We'll watch the full thing. It's my Favorite movie. This is honestly my favorite movie. I might watch it in Apple Vision Pro this weekend. Who knows? It's such a great film. And did you know the director of this film won an Academy Award? That's right. This is an Academy award winning director at work.

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Here's the director,

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Guillermo del Toro. He won for Shape of Water. He did not win for Pacific Rim, but he should have because this film is fantastic. So the storyline. Aliens. Giant alien Godzilla like creatures called Kaijus have descended upon Earth. No. And only robots that are as big as the Godzillas can fight back. But you need two people. It's much like us. You need two pilots. Because the mental load of driving the robot being in the drift is too intense for a single person. It will drive you crazy. So two pilots, two Jaeger pilots must pilot the ship together and share the load. And so they both punch and then the robot punches. It's amazing. It's a great film, everyone. He's got a good speech. You're known for giving great speeches just like this. This is. This is a Jordy Hayes original right here. Yes. Movie day again. Welcome to the stream, Ryan.

2:22

Today,

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at the edge of our hope.

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At the edge of our hope.

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Things aren't looking the end of our time. The end of our time. AI is upon us. We've chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other. We must believe in the stocks of the SaaS companies. There's not a man nor woman in here that shall stand alone. No. No public company shareholder will stand alone. We stand with you. We face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them. We're bringing the fight to the Foundation Labs. We are canceling the apocalypse. We're canceling the apocalypse. We're canceling the sass apocalypse.

3:25

Woo.

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And then the greatest soundtrack ever.

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I. I only really had to ever give one speech like that last year. But it hit.

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It hit.

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The team needed it in that we did.

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And we got through.

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Critical moment.

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We powered through. We powered through. So anyway, we've lost a lot of good soldiers, a lot of good market cap out there during the SaaS apocalypse. $2 trillion, something like that. Maybe it's been rough, but. And I mean truthfully, like the narrative does make sense. Like agentic AI systems copilots, foundation models like these are disruptive innovations. Fundamentally, they're counter positioned against traditional seat based SaaS pricing. We know this. Legacy companies will be caught in a jam because pivoting the entire business model is difficult. You can't just flip a Switch and start charging customers a completely different way. Your investors will freak out because your finances will be deeply unprofitable all of a sudden. In the public or just very different board? Just very different. Like it'll take time to build back up. And also like company cultures and organizational structures are aligned around particular incentives. And so you have to rewire everything for a different business model. And that's really hard. And that's. People are sounding the. This is a disruptive innovation. This is not a sustaining innovation like mobile or Cloud. The AI version of, you know, X, Y or Z SaaS company will not be like the mobile version of that SaaS company.

4:16

Yeah, yeah. And even the, even the safer bets, like the system of record, there's this concern around, okay, well can an agent just kind of re platform you does that. If you can onboard to a new system faster, does that decrease the lock in but continue.

5:24

So the SaaS apocalypse was always a little bit of an indiscriminate hammer. It felt like, I mean, there was one article in the journal that was like anthropic launched a legal tool and that caused the sell off. And it's like, well, could be that or it also could be Claude code, or it could be openclaw or Codex or Spark or like there's a million different things going on in the AI world. That one just kind of took hold. But it became this like indiscriminate hammer that just kind of hit every company. And during earnings season, every CEO had to talk about AI and the threat of AI. But I think we will soon be finding out what companies are truly unslobable, as you put it, and actually benefit in the AI future. And there's a bunch of early signals, so let's run through them first. Google's comeback. I mean, this was the first victim of the apocalypse. This one happened like a year or two ago. Why would anyone search Google ever if an LLM could get you a better answer and fewer clicks? Of course, Google quickly caught up to the frontier. They launched AI overviews. They flexed deep minds research previews. They showed off the power of the TPU core businesses surviving and thriving due in part to Gemini helping understand intent so they can deliver ads on longer, more complex searches. So Google's been doing fine. They're sort of already building back from the SaaS apocalypse that they experienced. Then you have Meta. Will user minutes migrate over to LLMs? Will Sora destroy Instagram overnight? Will slop clog the feeds? Maybe, but not before Meta's transformer based gem Model absolutely destroys ad targeting and just makes everything so much better and re accelerates revenue. And we've talked to a lot of folks about that. And so Meta is doing very well. Even though they haven't like figured out their AI strategy, rolled out any of the new crazy frontier models from msl. Like the business is great because they're, because they're, you know.

5:41

Yeah, I think they have certainly argue they have an AI strategy totally to use AI ML to, to make really good ads.

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And they've been doing it for a decade.

7:37

But it's more on the product side. Right. So is it the manus, is it net new products? Is it Meta AI? Yep.

7:38

And so there's. It gets more interesting when you go to the smaller companies. Not super small, but Spotify. Spotify doesn't really need to invest in generative AI. I heard a good analogy that was like, should Spotify have like released a guitar so that people can make more music? Like no, because people will pick whatever tool is available and then they will release that music on Spotify and then the algorithm will sort it. And so the like, you know, these artists, if they're using AI tools or maybe they're just prompters, whatever you want to call them, they will bring AI music to the platform. It'll be filtered by algorithms. Slop will be in the trough, but only the most delicious slop will bubble to the top of the trough. So it's good to be in the trough business as long as you have an algorithm that sorts the trough. The slop from the more sloppy slop.

7:45

I don't know.

8:35

Well said. Current data shows AI music currently underperforms dramatically on a percentage basis. Like the number of AI songs is huge, but the number of actual minutes watched is low. Even if that flips, Spotify still benefits. Let's switch over to Shopify. You can definitely Vibe code an e commerce website now, but Shopify is not a major cost driver for most businesses that use it. You're talking maybe like $1,000 a month for some companies and it's a lot of headache that they just don't have to even think about. And then there's a whole bunch of advantages that Shopify should benefit from in the AI era. It's very full featured, so it's actually hard to replace. Setting up a new store is faster than waiting for a prompt to return. Like it's all pre built and it's just like create a new copy in the datab of Shopify. When you set up a new store and then AI tools benefit from all the context and data that Shopify has across the entire platform. And then lastly, Agentic Commerce doesn't replace Shopify Checkout. It's just a front end to the, to the checkout.

8:36

Much more payment.

9:40

Exactly.

9:41

Post purchase.

9:42

So if it's driving activity, that's actually a net benefit. And so there's a whole bunch more examples. Roblox is another interesting example. I heard a crazy stat. 67% of global non China spending growth in the gaming, gaming industry last year went to Roblox. Like gaming had a bad year, Roblox had a fantastic year and I think the Stock's down like 50%. And so you know, yes, you can Vibe code a video game but the Roblox network and ecosystem is already at scale and it's absolutely dominating and they're monetizing a ton and their monetization on a per minute basis is I think like five times lower than other platforms. Like if you comp it to TikTok or Instagram. And so whether it's ads or more in game currencies or something like the willingness to pay should go up. Now there's still a question about, you know, do folks age out of Roblox? How long can they keep these customers on? Will they get older folks to rejoin Roblox at some point or join Roblox for the first time at some point. But certainly, you know, not probably a beneficiary of AI vibe coding and being able to build more stuff. And again filtering the the different apps that are built so that grow a garden or steal a brain rot can be power law outcomes within that ecosystem. That's the value of filtering and being an aggregator. Lastly, you got to consider Salesforce. Marc Benioff has been duking it out with Jim Cramer on CNBC over seat based pricing in an AI era for over a year now. And it's 100% true that there are some amazing AI native CRM startups that are aggressively trying to eat off Benioff's plate. But Anthropic is hiring a Salesforce Admin. We put up a card for this because we really enjoyed this. But where was it? Did we put this? Yes, unemployed Vibe coder bro SaaS is dead. You can build a CRM in minutes. No modern company is going to buy software ever again. Repost and I'll send you my PDF. That killed Salesforce. And then Anthropic has a job listing for Salesforce Admin because they're growing so fast and so big that they need someone Just to be full time job manage their internal Salesforce project that's so big iconic. Is this revealed preference, Is there something else going on here? Is this person going to be reinforcement learning data for them? Who knows? But at least for right now they're going to be paying Salesforce and time will tell. And then lastly, you know the SaaS apocalypse, it might arrive in full at some point but. And we'll start to see real revenue declines which I think would be like the real signal of major disruption. But Figma just announced 70% growth in weekly active users, 40% year over year revenue growth. We have Dylan Field coming on the show in just a little bit. He'll be on at 130 today. And so there's growth all over the SaaS ecosystem and things don't seem to be decelerating or slowing down. It's definitely go time though. And it's time to revisit sources of strength.

9:43

It's war time.

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It's time to become unsloppable. It is wartime. It's founder mode time. And at least you need to explain why you were never sloppable in the first place. And that's what Harley at Shopify did a really good job of on the earnings call. He got so many questions he had to back up and just re explain. You know, people got in the weeds on the AI checkout thing and he had to re explain like no agentic checkout happens on top of the, on top of the Shopify checkout. The economics are exactly the same. They're exactly the same. So like don't worry.

12:32

Yeah. So going back to the fax machine example in 1999 was the first year that showed a significant drop in the sale of physical fax machines. They dropped by 10% in a single year.

13:03

When was that?

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In 1999.

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1999. Yeah.

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Yeah.

13:22

Okay.

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And so that is not a. Okay. Growth just started slowing. It had been slowing up until that point but it, and then it was slowing and then it like fell off a cliff.

13:23

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Quickly, let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let's also pull up the LINEAR lineup and tell you who's coming on the show. Linear, of course is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents.

13:33

We have Sigil Wave Sigil coming on to talk about Web 4.0. Web 4.0, a new AI agent project that he's working on. Where AI can deploy, transact and pay its own bills, run micro economies without humans in the loop. Then of course we have Sagar and Jetty from Breaking Points coming on. Always, always a fun conversation. And then Dylan Field coming on to talk about their earnings and everything that they're doing with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and all of those folks. And then we have Peter from Code Metal announcing his Series B, Eric from Freeform, another Series B. And then Lubisa from Tallis announcing $169 million raise building model specific AI chips. So Banger lineup today and can't wait to get to those folks.

13:49

Should we read through this goodwill hunting meme? This sums up the saaspocalypse pretty well. And I love this meme template from malinvestment jpeg of course that's your contention. You're a first time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast Dario on Dwarkesh. Probably now you think it's the end of white collar work and seat based pricing is screwed. You're going to be convinced of that till tomorrow when you get to something big is happening. Then you'll install cloudbot on a Mac Mini Vibe coded dashboard on top of a postgres database and say we're all just a couple RALPH loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That's going to last until next week when you discover context graphs. And then you're going to be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics. Well, as a matter of fact I won't because ultimately the application layer is just the application layer is just business logic on top of a CRUD database. You got that from Satya's appearance on the BG2 pod December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter or is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker, you watch some podcasts, then pawn it off as your own idea to impress some VCs and embarrass some of nons who's long sass. See? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple of years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that that there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that and two you drop 30 grand on Mac Minis and LLM API Calls to come up with the same conclusions you could have got for free by following a handful of VC accounts. That's great.

14:43

Roasted.

16:18

I love that meme. That's fantastic. Anyway, there's another post in here to close out the SaaS. Pocalypse. Buck says there's a long history of dominant platforms vertically integrating and consuming the entire economy. That is why the largest companies in the world today are railroads, utilities, steam engine manufacturing and CPU producers.

16:19

Love it. Great.

16:38

Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

16:40

Bland hit the timeline. Yesterday. They unveiled Soulja AI, the first rapper to operate your voice with AI.

16:48

Let's watch this video.

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Soulja Boy or use his voice yourself.

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I want to see with sound. Of course I want to see what Soulja Boy. I was the first rapper on YouTube,

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the first rapper with his own star,

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the first rapper with the iPhone, and now I'm the first rapper to automate

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his voice with AI

17:11

Bland, baby.

17:15

People, I thought this was a fun concept.

17:19

Yeah.

17:23

But many people did not. It didn't really. It didn't really resonate. It definitely got attention. I bet they drove a bunch of business from this.

17:23

One million views. 600 likes.

17:33

Yeah. Usually on a million views, you want to be sitting somewhere around 30,000.

17:35

No, a couple thousand likes.

17:40

I mean, it's something that people love and genuinely resonates. Will get upwards of 20,000 or more.

17:42

Yeah.

17:51

Anyways, I think it's cool. I'm surprised we haven't seen more of this kind of thing. Celebrities coming in. I think Soulja obviously is not at the peak of his career, so it makes sense for him to dip his toes in here. And I bet this was surprisingly affordable for Bland, So hopefully they got some business out of it.

17:52

So, yeah, it's interesting. 11 Labs has Michael Caine, Burt Reynolds, Richard Feynman, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Dr. Maya Angelou, James Dean, Judy Garland, Albert Einstein. Then there's some AI voices you can just do, like Will Jessica, Eric Bella, and there's community voices as well. I wonder if they should do more promotion around Michael Caine. Like, that's clearly a licensing deal, but I haven't. The reason this breaks through is because there's a video of Soldier Boy. It's a real video and it's funny and he's like, good on camera. Right.

18:13

The entire premise is you can have Soulja Boy answer your business phone calls, which is, like, pretty. Which is pretty differentiated, which is extremely differentiated. And if you're let's say you're. You're a kind of business. Let's say you have a smoothie shop.

18:49

Yeah.

19:03

Like adding this will certainly get people talking.

19:03

Probably delightful.

19:06

I called, I called the Acai bowl place and Soulja Boy picked up.

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Yeah.

19:12

Like this will. This will. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not going to. I'm not going to pile on. I think it's fun.

19:12

Yeah. I think that also just as a top of funnel activation, like you hear about this, you go and you're like, okay, realistically, my business doesn't need soldier boy, but my business does need like just a normal voice. Anyway.

19:20

Kind of missed the opportunity to say like, I'm the first AI rapper.

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Yeah.

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With no W. No W. Yeah.

19:39

Play on words.

19:41

Which they didn't do from what I'm seeing.

19:42

Well, if you want intelligent, real time conversational agents, head over to eleven labs. Reimagine human technology interaction with eleven Labs.

19:44

Ice T, according to Justine Moore, is an AI accelerationist.

19:51

This is great.

19:56

He is hitting the timeline. Somebody said, I wish more older rappers realized that AI shouldn't touch the music industry in the way that impacts the creative work, including music videos. When I say AI, some people group in stem separation or restoration into that. And that's not what I'm talking about. Anyways.

19:57

So basically stem separation is when you have a full song and you want to step and you want to separate like the guitar from the drums, from the bass. Like the stems.

20:16

Got it, Got it.

20:25

You know, stems because you're. You're a guitarist, right? Isn't that the word? Guitar player?

20:26

But Ice T says I disagree. Fans want us to make and produce the music, then shoot an expensive video. Then they get it for free. If they have an Apple subscription or Spotify, pay us 0.007 cents a stream.

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007.

20:41

The days of expensive videos are over. There isn't even MTV. AI is the only sensible way to add visuals to a song. You can hate it all you want. It's the future.

20:42

It's the future. Is Ice T still going to. Is he dropping music videos recently? Like, has he actually. Is he just predicting this or is he living this and actually putting out AI videos? It certainly does make sense to just bring down the cost of music video production. I mean that's what a lot of CGI did. A lot of music videos are just the artist on a green screen with cool graphics in the background. And that's often enough. Or I mean there used to be the age of like the expensive music video, wasn't it Thriller was like multiple millions of dollars and you cannot spend that much anymore. No way. And so a lot of music videos have come down in cost, done more in cgi. It feels like AI will get there, but you have to be the right artist and you have to message it correctly because it's going to be crazy backlash.

20:51

Matthew McConaughey hit Variety this morning, we say, and commenting on AI, Brandon just shared it. He said it's coming. It's already here. Don't deny it. It's not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea that, no, this is wrong. It's not going to last. There's too much money to be made and it's too productive

21:43

acceleration.

22:02

So I say own yourself, voice, likeness, etc. Trademark it. Whatever you got to do, so when it comes, no one can steal you.

22:03

Yeah, yeah, makes sense. The Matthew McConaughey voice, I mean, that's an iconic voice. I think there's definitely a huge deal to be done. And the AI voices, although we're in a boom right now, I remember being able to go on Waze and pick. I think Snoop Dogg had a deal, but there were a number of celebrities that had, you can imagine, like an Arnold Schwarzenegger get to the choppa. But then also, like, take a left and it's like, fun. And they would just pre record all of the different lines, like, keep going straight, bare left, take a hard left, and you record like 20 different lines. And then the program just picks the audio file for the correct moment because there's only like 20 different things you could possibly say in a navigation app. And so a whole bunch of celebrities did deals, at least temporarily. I don't know how many of them are still around, but those types of things, like, there's clearly a framework for that and all the agencies and all the unions understand this. So I feel like we're. We're in this weird bizarro world where people think that, like, oh, IP does law doesn't exist and we aren't going to be able to deal with this. It's like, no, there's decades of lawyers who are foaming at the mouth being like, I can't wait to sue bytedance. This is going to be awesome.

22:10

Yeah. The aggressive. The only thing is that it's going to require real cooperation from platforms.

23:27

The platforms are ready to cooperate.

23:33

I disagree. I don't think they're cooperating that hard. There's so much content of a bunch of individuals on YouTube, on Meta, that is using their name and likeness and putting them in situations that they would never, ever, ever agree to. And you can argue that it's not good for their brand, but it's incredibly entertaining. And so the platforms leave the content up. And yes, you can do takedown requests and things like that, but by the time you do a takedown request, it's got 200,000 likes.

23:35

Or you don't need to do a takedown request. You just need to do pay me, pay me. That's what people want. They want to be paid. I think the message that Matthew McConaughey post is not like, it's super critical that no one ever uses an image of me or my voice, ever. It's that, look, if somebody's profiting off of it, that's my ip. That's my.

24:07

I mean, I read his comment more around making movies saying, don't use AI to make this scene that would normally take four weeks in some exotic location. A thousand people. Obviously, AI is going to be used for that. I think there's a separate issue of people generating Matthew McConaughey doing and saying things that he would never agree to that are sort of compromising or, again, putting him in situations or having him say things that he wouldn't ever agree to even if he was getting paid.

24:30

Yeah. I just think the answer is more AI. You look at the SORA cameo functionality, and it was pretty easy for me to say, always depict me as a bodybuilder. And as silly as that is, it worked. When we did that collab post with the OpenAI team, they were like, we don't know how to get around this. You should be able to go in and change this. But they didn't, because, like, it is actually enforced at, like, a pretty low level.

25:01

Alex from Outtake, we've had on the show, he does this for a bunch. Outtake does this for a bunch of different celebrities where you basically sign up for Outtake.

25:30

Yeah, yeah.

25:39

And they're constantly monitoring the entire net, filing takedown requests on your behalf. And so I think, again, I think it'll end up. I think the platforms will do something, but it will also be somewhat of a tax.

25:40

Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Let's actually watch the full video of the AI Impact Summit in India. Narendra Modi is there.

25:53

Insane lineup.

26:07

Insane lineup. They pulled everyone. They got Sundar there, they got Alex Wang there. They got Dario, they got Sam. And here we go. And they're zooming out. And what do we see? Two fists raised in opposition. Iconic.

26:08

Throwing up the X. Throwing up the X. Someone on X was saying that haters

26:25

would say, this is AI.

26:32

Yeah, that. It was a little shout out to Elon saying, you're not here, but you're here with us.

26:33

And if you scroll down, someone used AI to show them hugging, which is very nice.

26:40

Yeah. Like we said, missed opportunity for one of them for Handshake Mog to do. Yeah, a handshake Mog. But they'll be back next year.

26:45

Yes.

26:55

I think this is an annual thing.

26:55

Yeah, it seems like a banger lineup. I wonder if there'll be talks that will come out of this. Any more comments or just. Was it off the record or will there just be reporting out of this? Or maybe it was just talking points. So there was no real news dropped. But if you get those folks together, it should feel like Davos. There should be interesting sort of new positions that are coming out.

26:57

Yeah. The Mistral founder was apparently speaking there and the room was like almost empty.

27:16

Wait, really?

27:22

And so. And yeah, somebody was saying like, hey, this guy is actually like crushing it in Europe.

27:23

Show him some respect.

27:31

Put some respect.

27:31

Sit down, take notes.

27:32

Study.

27:34

Yeah, sit down and study it. Don't just listen. Don't just listen. Let me tell you about Label Box. Reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, evals and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.

27:34

JC Foster.

27:46

Yes.

27:48

Says:3 months ago I quit my job to chase a dream to build an affordable, convenient, plastic free coffee maker. Grateful for everyone who has reserved now this. Pure Steel.

27:49

This is a correct ratio. 7 million views, 34,000 likes. This is what you were getting at?

28:02

Yeah. So huge.

28:07

What is up with the laptop?

28:09

I guess he was at SpaceX very long. He was at SpaceX.

28:10

Okay.

28:13

And one of the. When I immediately saw.

28:14

Can we talk about this laptop? Look at what is going on. Zoom in on this laptop.

28:17

I think this is. He took the. It's like an optical illusion.

28:24

Okay.

28:26

Right. It's using the fisheye lens.

28:27

Oh, okay.

28:29

Because if you fold if based on this angle, if you folded the screen,

28:31

the screen would just cover the keyboard. Like the trackpad would just be hanging out like an untucked T shirt under a sweater. Makes no sense. Sorry, Jordan, I got distracted by the extremely long, long laptop. Tell me more about the Pure Steel Company of America.

28:36

The Pure Steel Company of America. So, yeah, so anyway, Started going viral. Very, very cool product. If you've tried to make coffee without having plastic be a part of the process, it's incredibly hard and you're pouring hot liquid over plastic, some of that plastic will disintegrate, end up in your cup of joe. So the product makes a lot of sense. One of the issues is this post went extremely viral. And somebody said somebody posted, this thing's only 80 bucks. Go reserve this right now. And so that post started going really viral.

28:54

Yes. So the challenge, this thing is $80 and made of American glass and steel. Go reserve one right now. And it got 18,000.

29:27

So this is of course not going to cost $80. There's literally no chance.

29:34

Okay.

29:38

But I think people were thinking, hey, I can buy this for 80 bucks. It seems like the steal of a lifetime. I think something like this, once you actually build it, will probably need to cost somewhere like 600, $700, something in that range. So really rough. The other thing is pull up the website. I think this guy may have knocked off the RORA website. I'm just realizing this in real time. So RORA is of course, the.

29:40

Oh, it does kind of look similar.

30:09

It's kind of similar.

30:10

So this is.

30:10

This is pure steel. Look at the header. Look at the header system with which Emmett Shine designed for us. And even look at the imagery. Their imagery is AI. Okay, and now pull up the RORA website.

30:11

Oh, it has the same rounded corners. Yeah, it is very similar.

30:24

I think he got a little inspired.

30:29

Okay,

30:31

so if you see the header and everything, the way the buttons work. Go. Scroll down even more. If you go down to some of the more lifestyle imagery, like it's the same like the kitchen, the photography a little close. But he's bootstrapped. He's got a bunch of sales now. I'm sure he'll figure out. I'm sure he'll figure out.

30:33

Okay, well, I mean, the SpaceX lore here is that they should be able to deliver this at $80. It says transparent pricing. It's time to know what you're paying for. Traditional coffee makers cost $200. Pure steel is the same amount of materials, but less markup. And so they want to deliver this to you. I think for $80 will be very interesting to see how they do it, where they change prices, if they change prices, they might be able to deliver, I don't know, Maybe it'll be VC subsidies. Maybe it's $80 a month and you have to pay for some subscription.

30:59

Seat based pricing.

31:39

Seat based pricing? Yes. How Many cups. A giant make.

31:40

How many coffee drinkers?

31:44

Yeah, well, no, it should be in the age of AI. It should be consumption based. So you should pay per coffee cup.

31:45

How many tokens each cup?

31:50

Yes. No, but I don't know. This doesn't seem impossible to get stamped steel and assemble it and have it. I mean it's a pretty basic device, right. It just needs to warm up a pot of coffee. Like it needs to boil water. That's not, that's not crazy to me that, that could be $80.

31:52

I don't know now, I mean I know through Rora. Yeah, like dealing with these materials.

32:11

Yep.

32:17

It depends. Like looking at some of this design here, the way it's all bolted together.

32:18

Yeah, it seems pretty basic.

32:22

Even the, even the, the labor cost of doing something like this, I think

32:24

robots, I don't know.

32:29

Yeah, we'll see.

32:30

Amazon does buy steel coffee maker. They have some results for all steel coffee makers in the $60 range. They got a Black and Decker here. It looks like it's covered in plastic but you know, it's at least advertised as stainless steel. There's some stainless steel options on here, but yeah, a lot of them are in the several hundred dollar range. So I don't know, we'll have to keep, we'll have to keep an eye on it.

32:31

Yeah, I'm excited about this. I would happily. Looks great buy one of these.

32:56

Yeah, it looks great. And I mean a lot of these companies will underprice the first run. So they'll say, yeah, okay, we're just going to take a loss on the first thousand units that we ship and then we will raise prices over time and then when we go into retail we'll raise prices more and you know, there will just be a process for that. If you go this viral, if you have a lot of demand, you might be able to raise money to offset that your suppliers or you're, you know, you might just make no margin for a long time. There's, there's a way this gets built for $80.

33:00

Yeah.

33:34

And he was at SpaceX for two years.

33:34

SpaceX is a good, good organization. We talked to a space.

33:36

Except, except that the issue is he was a finance analyst at Space X, so he might need to poach some of the engineers.

33:39

Well, I mean, yeah, analyzing the finances of SpaceX being like, wow, they make rockets.

33:47

Wow, we could be, we could be making plastic free coffee.

33:51

Just do it. Think from first principles. I don't know, let's see. Van man says the response to this insanely simple yet non plastic coffee maker should usher in the era of dumb simple appliances that work and don't poison you or connect to your WI fi. I think that there is huge demand for this. People want simpler devices. Did I tell you about that?

33:54

My coffee machine connects to my wi fi. I'm like actually I don't think I did. But it always wants.

34:16

It actually does.

34:22

Yeah.

34:23

That's not a joke.

34:23

Wow.

34:24

Okay. Yeah.

34:24

And it's like, it's a lot of, it's a lot of steel pour over.

34:25

So no, but I'm like you don't

34:27

need, you don't need access to the network, bro. Just focus. Just put, put the beans. Yeah, just put the, put the coffee in the cup.

34:30

Yeah. I have another story, but first let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. So I had a little tiny bit of IoT in my house just to turn off and turn on.

34:38

My dishwasher emails me.

34:55

Fantastic peak performance. I have a tiny bit of IoT just for lights that are hard to reach. Lamps that are plugged into basically a wall socket that has a little box that connects to the WI fi. There's an app turns on that turns off the light. I think the company just went out of business because the server just doesn't work and the app doesn't load anymore. And so you just. All of the stuff that I bought is just worthless and I just need to like rip it up. It's extremely dumb, in fact very, very silly.

34:58

And ad is dropping Alpha. He says recommend the Otoni Fabirka plastic free electric kettles. That's smart. And then he says they should put ads on the pure steel coffee maker to keep it around.

35:30

See, think outside the box. I'm calling it $80 shipped. That's what it's going to cost. There'll probably be a shipping fee on top of it. Shipping to Alaska. That is dangerous territory.

35:42

Don't talk about Alaska.

35:52

Do not give free shipping nationwide because Alaska is technically part of the nation and you will be paying $50 to get stuff up there. It is not on Amazon prime necessarily for your default upstart e commerce business. So I got completely cooked by my wifi light system and I was thinking like okay, certainly I can vibe code this. Definitely not definitely just going back to switches. Definitely going back to the stone age. I'm just going to be lighting candles in my house because that's the future that I'M going to be living.

35:54

Yeah. I had a funny moment this morning. John and I went to breakfast with Brandon and I parked in a garage. John was on the street. And as I was leaving, I went and put the ticket into the machine. Then I put validation in right after. It just, like, was working for a while. Then it failed. It tried it again. Then I was like, okay, the validation's maybe not working. So I paid with a card. It failed. And so then I start calling, calling around, and I'm stuck for 15 minutes. John is long gone. He's at the Ultradome already. I'm sitting there on support with somebody who's not even in la, trying to get somebody in LA to just let me out of this parking garage. Then somebody finally comes after 15 minutes, and I was like, hey, can you escalate this? Your software is bugging out. It doesn't work a lot. And they're like, oh, well, actually, all the systems in this area have been failing a lot. And so I was like, okay, maybe it's a bigger issue than I even thought. So I was not feeling the software singularity in the parking garage this morning.

36:25

I texted Jordy, you couldn't just vibe code and improve software system to run on the ticket taker machine that would process payment more quickly and reliably. No, because there's a gatekeeper, of course. And it is impossible. There's one parking garage in Pasadena that doesn't take cash or Apple pay, so you have to have a physical card. And I get caught lacking every once in a while and I'll have to push the button and then talk to the guy and be like, I'm sorry, can you just let me out?

37:32

They're like, really? You're the guy that always wants a free parking spot.

37:59

Yes, but last time I was there, I saw someone else get caught lacking. And I paid it forward and I paid for his parking to let him out.

38:02

Heartwarming.

38:10

I don't even care what it is.

38:11

We should have thrown up a card for that.

38:11

So karma. I'm like buying karma. Very strategically, not altruistically, not effectively.

38:13

Yeah, Brian says that's hardware. They got the hardware footprint. Yeah, they got it locked in their hardware.

38:18

Their foot is firmly printed on your chest as you try and leave. Brutal. Really quickly. The New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world. Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Stop making excuses and just do it, please.

38:24

Just do it, please. Michael Burry is going off on what happened Carp? Okay, Financial times from the Form 10 Palantir CEO Alex Karp has his head in the cloud saying he's a frequent flyer. And they get into some of his business and personal travel expenses from. During the years ended December 31, 2025 and 2024, the company incurred expenses related to the use of of the executive aircraft of 17.2 million and 7.7 million, respectively. It's quite the feat to spend 17 million in a year on business and personal travel, particularly when the jet's not even the rental. Jeffrey's analyst, Brent Thill, he's got a bone to pick, runs the numbers. Assuming use of a midsize jet with an estimated operating cost of $7,000 per hour, this implies roughly 2,400 flight hours, or about 28% of the year in the air. Even under a more conservative assumption of a high end jet such as the G650, at an estimated 15,000 per hour, the 17 million still equates to approximately 1,147 flight hours, or 13% of the year. Notably, this 17.2 figures more than Double Carp's executive aircraft expense in 2024 and appears elevated relative to peers with Meta CEO spending 1.8 million and Palo Alto Network CEO spending 2.4 million. Terrible comps.

38:35

Why?

40:00

Like, Karp is obviously constantly traveling all over the world. He's an international businessman. Yeah, I know podcasters that do that, like 250 hours a year. Oh, yeah, like, like you're talking about going from like somebody who like travels like a good amount at like, let's say like 200 hours a year. Like, to me, yeah, I might catch some flack for defending private aviation. Aviation. But it just doesn't seem that crazy. The entire reason that Palantir is growing the way it is is they're doing deals in Japan, they're doing deals in the Middle East. It's just like this guy is a global deal maker. And I think you should, if you really wanted to do an analysis on this, you should look at all the international deals that they've done, maybe ignore the US look at all the international deals and see if Carp is actually delivering. Because when we hear that they're signing some new contract for hundreds of millions of dollars in Japan, I think it makes sense for the CEO to fly out there and shake some hands and do some real business. Yeah, so of course he's not flying on a mid sized jet, like, you know, around the entire world. Of course he's in.

40:00

That's the funny thing. They don't know.

41:18

Yeah.

41:20

So they're saying Maybe it's a G650, which would be 1000 flight hours. Maybe it's a midsize jet. That would be more like 2000 hours. It could be a King Air. And he's spending 8,000 hours in the air. No one considered that. It could also be a 747. And he's only spending like 500 hours in the air. There's a wide range here. But I like to imagine, yeah, he's in a prop that he's in a single. He's flying the prop himself. And the cost per hour is only like a couple hundred bucks because he's just paying for gas. But he's like taking every meeting in the air, literally one on ones. Hop in, we're going, we're doing laps.

41:20

You can leave her back.

42:00

We're flying around. Yeah, I like to imagine him doing. Putting up 8,000 hours in the air. Just every waking hour flying around in the King Air or Cessna Citation or something. Very funny. Well, whether you're a long Palantir or short Palantir, head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

42:02

Max Farron's probably the most underrated poster in the world.

42:27

I can't believe he has 3,000 followers. It's so low. He's the best underrated poster general manager

42:32

at Dorcas Podcast in the world.

42:36

So good.

42:38

To be honest, the best part of making our wedding registry is that it has forced us to really think about what we need to make our place feel like a home. And I don't know.

42:38

And he went on Zola, is this.

42:47

Is this real?

42:49

I don't think so. I think he. I think he might do this might be inspect element or some Photoshop or a little bit of both. Maybe. Maybe it's generate gen. But in his wedding registry, he put the Nvidia B200 tensor core GPU. It's $30,000. He put the H100 NVL GPU. $15,000 is still needed there. He put the Nvidia A180 gig GPU. $15,000 still needed.

42:50

Yeah, this is how you turn a house.

43:18

Help Max make his place feel like a home. Head over to his Zola and it does.

43:20

You don't have to be going to the wedding to.

43:26

Yeah, to contribute.

43:28

To contribute. Get him a gpu.

43:29

You don't. And I do feel like this is probably inspired by actually putting together a. Maybe get a mechanical turbine wedding registry. That's A good one.

43:31

That's a great gift.

43:40

Or a plot of land in Abilene.

43:41

Yes. Somewhere data center friendly.

43:44

Yeah. But if he is getting married soon, congratulations, and I hope you have a wonderful wedding with a registry full of whatever you actually do.

43:46

And Ryan said get the man a Cessna. Talking about carp. Cessna 172 just flying over the Atlantic with Starling.

43:57

Yes. Making 10 stops on every island like Amelia Earhart.

44:07

So Jira Tickets says. Do you think he has monetization on.

44:12

Who's he talking about?

44:16

Khomeini. Khomeini's been putting up insane numbers on X obviously. Quite the tense geopolitical situation. I hope that we're not starting a new war in the Middle east. But. But if Khomeini does have monetization on, it certainly is going to be a real revenue line item on the. I have to imagine does X sanction accounts.

44:18

I think creator payouts are probably geographically limited to certain countries where the payment rails work. If a country sanctioned. I actually get my ex creator payouts just straight up through Stripe. Yeah, it just comes through stripe. In fact, I think I had to set up a Stripe account to receive it and then link that. So it's only valid where stripe is functioning. Anyway, 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. Will Brown is chiming in on whether or not Prime Intellect is a NEO lab. We put him on the neolab market map yesterday, but he's firing.

44:46

I also said. I think I said Prime Intellect was like the prototypical NeoLab. Okay, so he's really.

45:25

Yeah, putting a funny camera angle. What's going on here? Okay, I like that. Different. Switching it up over the shoulder. I'm interviewing you. I'm getting to the bottom of it. You answer me. You answer me, Tyler. Well, okay, okay, we get it. Production team got some new PTZ cameras. We get it, guys. Anyway, why does prime intellect fail the NeoLab test? Will Brown says a true NeoLab is either pre model, pre product or pre revenue. And we're none of these. Oh, we flipped it around on you. You had me in the first half. But congratulations on being post model, post product, post revenue, Prime Intellect on a generational run. And happy to have Will Brown over there.

45:30

We have news on the Warner Bros. Netflix, Netflix, Paramount front. Netflix is open to raising their bid for Warner brothers. There's a 35% chance that Netflix.

46:17

Like a stone. They were at like 70%, I think. Can we pull up the actual call sheet? I want to know where it's at today. It's still up there, I guess. Netflix is at 35%, but at one point Netflix was at 72%. Yeah, 72% in July or December. December. And I'm gonna eat my words. I mean, I don't know really anything about media deal making here and the ins and outs of this deal. We've had some folks on the show to break it down for us, but it does seem like there's an unexpected flipping and so it's been fun to.

46:29

Yeah, I can read a little bit here.

47:06

Yeah, pull that up. And 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. Yes.

47:09

Rolling it up. Netflix apparently has ample room to increase their offer. They are, yeah, obviously better position.

47:18

$325 billion company, Netflix.

47:33

I think everyone believes that they're good for it. Yeah, I'm trying to get the right article. The.

47:35

Oh, the Reuters article is not complete. I have the Reuters article here.

47:42

Yeah, you can read that.

47:47

Netflix has ample cash and could bump up its offer for HBO Max owner Warner Brothers Discovery if competing bidder Paramount Skydance increases its own offer to. People with the knowledge of the matter said the two media giants have been locked in a heated rivalry. Oh, you see what they did there? That's a new popular show, heated rivalry. It's about hockey over Warner Brothers and its storied catalog, which includes iconic franchises like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, DC Comics and Superman. Though Warner Brothers is moving Forward with a March 20 shareholder vote on Netflix's offer, it has given Paramount a week to come up with a more compelling bid. Netflix has bid 2775 a share, or 82.7 billion for Warner Brothers studio and streaming businesses, while paramount has offered $30 a share, or 108 billion for the whole company, which includes Discovery Global that houses cnn, HGTV and other TV assets. The creator of Stranger Things is sitting on a lot of dry powder. That gives it some flexibility to up the ante, people said. Holding about 9 billion in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet as of Dec. 31. Warner Brothers rejected Paramount's latest hostile takeover bid on Tuesday, but gave the rival studio until the end of Monday to submit a best and final offer. We're going to into the final rounds now. Price will likely be the deciding factor. Warner Brothers concerns around funding and regulatory risk are real, but at a high Enough number, they become secondary.

47:47

David Zaslav must just be over the moon right now.

49:15

The bidding war he's been working.

49:19

The bidding war of his dreams.

49:21

Yeah, it's great.

49:23

Every CEO that is flipping an asset dreams of a bidding war like this.

49:24

That's great. Britzman expects Netflix will counter with an improved with any improved offer from Paramount. But the real twist is that these deals were never apples to apples. And it may ultimately come down to how much value the board and shareholders assign to the network business that Netflix would leave behind. So you need to do a sum of the parts. What's the value of just cnn, hgtv, the linear TV channels. Put that in because Netflix doesn't want that stuff. They just want the IP and HBO now. Hbo. Go hbo. Max. I can never keep it straight anyway. Paramount said it would continue to push the tender offer it has launched for the studio opposing the inferior Netflix merger and still plans to nominate directors for the upcoming Warner Brothers annual meeting. All eyes are now on whether the CBS parent improves its offer, which Netflix is allowed to to match under the terms of the merger agreement. Warner Brothers chairman said. And David Zaslav said in a letter sent to Paramount board on Tuesday, we continue to recommend and remain fully committed to our transaction with Netflix.

49:30

Yeah, I don't see how Netflix actually gets approved on this one.

50:34

You think that you think they're cooked?

50:39

I think. I think if, I think if Trump is souring on it, it's over. Yeah, it's over.

50:41

I was so. I was so pilled on the whole. YouTube is the real competitor here. Watch Time matters more. Think about screen time. Roblox is a competitor in Netflix. TikTok's a competitor in Netflix. Fortnite's a competitor in Netflix. But yeah, I don't think.

50:47

But that's what they want.

51:04

Think like that. It's a very.

51:05

Yeah, you have to think about the. The entertainment industry, the core industry. People that make television shows and movies. Things, Things that you have. Things that you have watched.

51:07

Movies that I have watched.

51:18

We got Sean Frank in the chat.

51:19

Oh, we do. What's up, Sean?

51:21

How you doing with a crazy. I can't tell what is what. His profile picture.

51:22

Let's do an ad read for him. I'm sure he'd appreciate that. Let's tell him about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits in hr built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses.

51:27

You know that one was for you, Sean.

51:37

Yes, honorary. That one is dedicated to Shawn Frank at.

51:39

Let's pull up another video dedicated to Shawn.

51:43

Frank. Okay.

51:45

Yes.

51:45

I like this. Ye olde fitted great helm.

51:46

Wait, start it over.

51:49

What is. Is this AI or not? Do we know? I don't even know, but I like it.

51:51

This is so funny. You need one of these. Steel man.

51:59

The fitted gray house.

52:03

This is the final steel man.

52:04

This is the final. This is the final steel man. Help. The TVPN hat with the great helm on it would be really, really good with all the logos.

52:05

We should actually just make a branded knight's helmet for you when you're steel man.

52:14

With logos on it.

52:19

For sure.

52:20

For sure. Actually goes kind of hard.

52:21

Look at this scene. What's going on here? This guy's just hanging out and then look.

52:23

Oh, everyone's doing the. What's that called? Larp. Live Action Role playing. That's the real.

52:29

They don't even look like they're role playing. They're really going.

52:36

They're really going into it.

52:39

You don't see that much anymore.

52:40

I like. I like.

52:41

I still. I still remember being a child and, like, just going to the park and seeing. Seeing a bunch of adults doing that.

52:43

I saw it.

52:50

But.

52:51

And having to get explained. Like, getting explained.

52:51

Yeah.

52:54

What was going on.

52:55

Yeah. It's one of those things that feels like it would. Like when you're looking from the outside, you're like, that problem is awesome. And then you actually do it and you're like, this is really uncomfortable and miserable. Like, I don't know that I actually want to do this sport. I'd rather do it in a video game anyway.

52:56

Meta, we should organize a. Like a community meetup.

53:09

A jousting.

53:13

Jousting. Jousting is cool, though. It involves horses.

53:15

You know, we should do. We should get all the freelancers to lance each other for free. They won't be paid. I think that's where the name comes from.

53:18

No, I think they will want to be paid on a per project basis. On a per lance basis, maybe. Meta has obtained a patent for an AI system that could simulate deceased users by analyzing their historical data, allowing the account to keep posting messaging, and even making video calls in their behavioral style.

53:25

You thought I would stop posting after you killed me? Nice try.

53:47

Nice try.

53:51

I will continue.

53:51

You just created a billion John Coogan.

53:53

You just created a billion John Coogan posts, both satirical and 500 words daily assets. Yeah.

53:54

A family member sent me this this morning. Disturbed saying, is this real?

54:02

We gotta get Sagar and Jetty's take on this. I know this is right up his alley. He's gonna love it. He's gonna love it. That guy loves AI, he loves tech, loves business. And that's happening on this show.

54:09

He's gonna love this.

54:21

I'm surprised you can patent this. This is just like a thing.

54:22

Is this Meta thinking out you got population collapse?

54:25

No.

54:29

And obviously it's pretty hard to monetize a bot, but if you're driving in

54:30

an AI doom scenario where all humans are dead, you want to still keep your services up. You got to simulate all the dead people maybe, I don't know.

54:35

Is this doom pill through posters keep posting after death?

54:44

Yes, we will, Jeremy. We will definitely be getting the update from Sagar Recannabis for sure.

54:49

Yeah, there was a 4chan post, apparently from a few years ago where somebody was like, I'm an engineer at Meta, and they basically fully. I only saw a screenshot, may or may not have been real, but it appeared to be from a few years ago. And they were saying, like, I'm working on this feature. It seems bad. Interesting timing. Obviously Mark has been in LA this week. He got grilled for.

54:53

Wait, that was in la? I thought that was in dc. Oh, interesting.

55:20

Yeah. Kind of rude not to stop by the Ultra Dump before he gets. Before you got deposed. Let me try to pull up a

55:22

little warm up on TVPN before you go in front of the big guy.

55:31

Yeah. So he spent six hours yesterday, Corey Weinberg says, has a quote. We call Mark Zuckerberg to the stand. Thus began Wednesday's nearly six hours of testimony from the Meta platform CEO in a trial of a lawsuit brought by a young woman against several.

55:36

And this was about benchmark hacking in llama 3. Is that what he's on trial for?

55:55

No, no, not as bad as that. Contending that social media potential weakness in the ad model.

55:59

Is that what it's about? Overspending on the Metaverse?

56:05

Concerns about distillation, I think.

56:09

Oh, distillation. Yeah, that's why he'd be on trial for that. Yeah, that makes sense.

56:10

Pretending that social media causes depression.

56:15

Okay.

56:17

Corey actually went to the courtroom, was hanging out for those six hours legend. And it's a guy, Mark Lanier. Lanier, the plaintiff's attorney.

56:18

We gotta ask.

56:28

In the landmark case, who spoke with a faint Texas twang.

56:28

Ooh, I like that.

56:32

Showed the courtroom dozens of internal emails and chats from Meta employees and executives over the years debating decisions like whether to ban the beauty filters teen used teens use on Instagram to mimic the results of plastic surgery. And so anyways, there's a bunch the features like that are kind of the focus of the case.

56:33

There's also a story on the COVID of the Wall Street Journal today. Social media bans for youth gain momentum worldwide. And it does feel like a parenting skill issue a little bit. Like, you know, it is possible to keep kids away from social media if you are, you know, an active parent. But at the same time, I don't

56:51

know, the only thing I would say we don't have. We don't have. We don't have children with phones yet.

57:13

Yeah, but that's deliberate.

57:21

Yeah, that's deliberate. But at a certain point, like what?

57:23

They would love phones.

57:25

Sure, sure.

57:26

They just will not be having them.

57:27

Yeah, but, but at what? When, when the time comes to give them a phone so they can communicate with you.

57:29

I mean, I know my plan. I will give my son a disassembled iPhone one. And when he can assemble it and, and, and piece it together and manufacture it himself here in America, then he can use it. And we already ran this on Tyler 20 years later. And then we, and then we did get Tyler a phone. This was a good benchmark. We got Tyler. Didn't we get you a real phone because of that? We did, right? Yeah, yeah, that was the reward.

57:36

Well, that was also because I installed the new iOS when it was still in beta and it totally destroyed my old.

57:59

We got to do another prank on Tyler soon. They're so good.

58:06

Yeah, chat if you have any good prank ideas, let us know.

58:09

Yeah, he's like, no, no, no, definitely not. Anyway, let me tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence, cloud building, AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. We got some birthday news. Brinton, friend of the show. His birthday is this weekend and all he wants is a TVPN shout out. Well, here you go, Brinton.

58:13

Got it.

58:36

Thank you for coming on the show very early. One of our first in person guests at YC Demo Day, the first one we ever did. And we got to hang out with him at GitHub Connect and seen all the stuff.

58:37

He's been really, really fantastic guy.

58:49

He's been on a generational run, works

58:51

on startups at Microsoft. He's also an angel investor. So for his birthday, go ask him for some cloud credits.

58:53

Yes.

59:00

Go ask him for some angel money.

59:00

Yes.

59:03

That's all he really wants.

59:03

Yeah. Deal flow. Bring him deal flow for his birthday. That makes sense. Yeah. And new business, if you're a startup, go over there and let him give you some cloud credits in exchange for Your business. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock. Did that go? Yeah, there we go. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Ebay is buying Depop secondhand. Thanks, Andrew.

59:04

That's a good one. Andrew is the king of vc. Dad jokes.

59:30

He loves it.

59:34

He loves it.

59:34

It's fantastic. So eBay is buying Depop from Etsy for $1.2 billion. And this is in the Wall Street Journal. Jamie Ione, chief executive officer of ebay, said Wednesday that the addition of Depop to its portfolio would boost its footprint while also expanding its presence in the fashion market. We are confident that as a part of eBay, Depop will be even more well positioned for long term growth, benefiting from our scale, complementary offerings and operational capabilities. Etsy acquired Depop for $1.63 billion in 2021. So little bit of a write off, but not terrible.

59:35

Still cooking and the market likes it.

1:00:11

EBay, Etsy's up.

1:00:15

Etsy's up.

1:00:17

Oh, so both of them. Ebay is up 3.5%, but I don't know if the market's just broadly doing well today. I'm seeing a lot of red on the ticker, so I don't think so. Sad apocalypse canceled tomorrow. Nobody's watched TVPN yet in the public markets.

1:00:17

I expect things will turn around before end of day immediately.

1:00:32

Ebay plans to cross list Depop products on its platform and expects the acquisition will expand its market share. Depop's seller and buyer cohorts will gain access to ebay's financial services, ship and cross border trade solutions, as well as its authenticity guarantee. Young consumers are key demographic for ebay as Gen Z and millennial shoppers are driving secondhand commerce. Depop is also more popular as an app than a website, unlike ebay, which might bring in a new user base. So good luck.

1:00:36

Yeah.

1:01:02

Ebay is still such a force. It is, but it is Certainly not cool. Depop is cool. EBay has struggled.

1:01:03

Jordy has spoken.

1:01:13

Ebay, great business, not cool.

1:01:15

But do you know why they call it ebay?

1:01:20

No.

1:01:26

Because it was founded in East Bay.

1:01:27

Oh. By some East Bay rationalists.

1:01:29

Yeah, for sure. It was sort of a les Wrong project. It's right up there with Anthropic. Anyway, Altimeter, he's making moves. Brad Gerstner, an absolute dog, is on a tear. He bought new positions in Core, Weave, Shopify. He sold arm, he sold Alibaba, and he added to his Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and TSMC positions as well as Google. He's making a lot of moves.

1:01:31

This is a great pickup Brad, too.

1:01:57

It is a great pick. He's looking good there, diced, if I might say so myself.

1:01:59

Hands going up? Yeah, up.

1:02:05

Yeah. Hands up. That's a man who's not afraid to shake hands. Got it locked in. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.

1:02:07

There's been some darker stories today. Okay, what happened? Finally, a white pill, some good news. Matt's owner, Steve Cohen, got a $3.4 billion payday hedge fund last year. We needed this. We needed this. We need this. Slightly higher than. Slightly higher than David Tepper.

1:02:20

I was worried about Steve. Have you seen him in any Chrome Hearts?

1:02:43

Zero.

1:02:47

I haven't seen him in any Balenciaga.

1:02:47

No Rick Mills.

1:02:49

No Rick Mills. No Rick Owens.

1:02:51

And we were starting to ask some questions. Yeah, we were starting to ask some questions.

1:02:54

The question mainly, was he down to his last 20k? It was completely possible. I haven't seen him do a money spread. I've seen him do some podcasts. Haven't seen him do a money spread. Tyler's getting better at the money spread. Are you practicing? That is still, like, not even a level one money spread. You need to lock in and watch the money spread. Don't even try that one. You're five levels beyond ready for that level of money spreading. Okay, that one kind of works. That one kind of works. But when you actually understand the money spread community and what's possible, you will understand how much farther you have to go. Oh, so, so, so bad. So bad. Awful. Here are the top earners in 2025 from hedge funds. Steve Cohen with 3.4 billion. David Tower at Appaloosa got 3.2 billion. Izzy Englander at Millennium got $3.1 billion. Chris Hone got 3. Ken Griffin 2.4. Dan Sondheim at D1. 2.3. David Shaw from D.E. shaw, 1.6. Element 1.1. Bill Ackman got 1 billion. And Chris Rokos got 930 million. So close to the 1B Club. I'm sure he's punching the air.

1:02:59

Yeah. So this is gains on personal investment. That means they actually closed out positions or this is just marks.

1:04:16

Who knows? It's just big numbers. I'm not digging it any further.

1:04:25

Dave Portnoy quoted this and said, I think I have a solution for Mondani tax. Wall street people like Steve Cohen, who Built their fortunes just on Wall Street. 90%. That's not real work to begin with.

1:04:28

Taking shots.

1:04:43

High yield, Harry says. Lol. Don't you know how much of the tax base is already wealthy? Finance professionals? Yeah, it is funny. He. You know, Portnoy did build a real business, a media business, a podcasting business,

1:04:45

arguably the only business that's actually valuable to the economy. It's the only one that deserves truly to be respected. Like, in terms of, like, respect. I would put podcaster. And then a couple levels down, you do like doctor, maybe like cancer researcher. And then like hedge fund is still like, a little bit above like doctor, but it's still way below.

1:05:00

Someone's gonna clip this way below Podcaster. But. But yeah, it is. It is funny because now a lot of his content is trading focused.

1:05:22

Oh, yeah. Like, put into this dvd. Trading is kind of like.

1:05:29

That's been like. Every time I see him, it's because of, like, trading content. And also maybe he wants to be taxed at 90 also.

1:05:33

I mean, kindred spirits, right? Steve Cohen has that casino in New York. He's attaching a casino to the Mets ballpark.

1:05:40

And then the list is ranked by who tweets the least.

1:05:48

Honestly, I have a solution to the billionaire tax. Have you ever seen Brewster's millions, Jordy? No. 1980s? No. Anyway, in Brewster's Millions, a man inherits something like $30 million, and it's conditional. He needs to spend. I think he inherits like 300 million, and he needs to spend 30 million in 30 days without acquiring assets or telling anyone what he's doing, or else he doesn't get the inheritance. And it's this hilarious comedy. There's a whole bunch of things that happen, but it's all based on this idea of, like, this kid was caught smoking cigars. Smoking a cigar. Cigarette or cigar. And the father punished him by saying, you have to smoke the entire box. This is like a famous thing. Like, smoke the entire box of cigars and you'll be like, oh, so sick. That's a terrible experience. I'm never smoking again. Right. And the same thing with money. So this is the solution to the billionaire tax. You gotta spend 5% of your net worth in 30 days. And you can't. On Rick Owens, you can't acquire any assets that you can sell. So it's all just Rick Owens. It's all just hanging out. The French Laundry Act, I guess, would be entertaining. Would stimulate the economy.

1:05:53

Yeah, Consider it. Build a cathedral.

1:07:04

Build a cathedral. Yeah.

1:07:06

How about that?

1:07:08

I like that. Too. That's good. Let me tell you about console.com Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

1:07:08

Ara says we have a definitive answer now. AI will affect the labor market, starting with freelancers. First paper to use business business level data to track AI versus labor. New paper from Ramp finds businesses are shifting spend from freelancers to AI. More than half of the businesses using freelancers in 2022 have stopped entirely. The companies that used to spend the most on freelancers shifted to AI. The fastest. 97% savings for the businesses that spent the most on freelance. That is wild.

1:07:21

Interesting.

1:07:54

Generally makes sense. The whole premise of freelance is you probably get paid a lot better on an hourly basis. Maybe you can capture more value on a dollar basis by spreading your talents across multiple companies. But obviously the flexibility comes with little to no lock in. Businesses can much more easily shift spend around. So not super surprising. The Fiverr stock chart, certainly, interestingly, revenue

1:07:57

is not wildly down. Revenue is actually up for Fiverr as of 2024. So it went from 190 in revenue to 300 in revenue to 340, 360, 390. So definitely decelerating. But in terms of market cap, Fiverr is now worth $419 million, down 96% over the last five years. And over just the past six months, it sold off another 50%. So certainly a lot of downward pressure on Fiverr. There were some folks.

1:08:31

And same with Upwork. Yeah, Upwork is down 30% year to date, down 76% over the last five years.

1:09:03

Yeah, someone was saying, here's Todd, actually Todd Saunders saying, billion dollar business idea. Take Fiverr private and pivot them into a data labeling company like Handshake. Because Fiverr is Now trading at $480 million market cap. And Ara chimed in and said, yes, there's a quantifiable impact on business spend. Businesses are spending on AI, not Fiverr. You know, freelancers. The pushback on this is that Fiverr doesn't have people internally or something. I'm not exactly sure. I mean, it does feel like you could potentially actually do this and focus on data labeling. But you imagine that a lot of data labeling tasks are already going through Fiverr because that's if a task is suitable for.

1:09:10

Yeah, it's interesting. Why would you wonder? I wonder if. If the. A lot of revenue from Fiverr and Upwork is just data labeling companies that are just saying, we need access to talent, we're going to Post a bunch of jobs on here and then take these people off the platform quickly or, or leave them on.

1:10:05

Disintermediation is always a risk for Marketplace.

1:10:20

Yeah. When I, when I, when I look back at. I've. I've worked with hundreds of freelancers over the last 10 years and, and certainly a high number on Fiverr and upwork, but always for one option tasks like, hey, I need like 10 versions of this logo or hey, can you just spin up this like super simple webpage? And I need this thing that's like slightly customized and I don't want to spend however much time it would have taken pre AI to do something like that. All of those tasks can now be done. Even, even creating like create a song for this, for this thing. All of that can be done now.

1:10:22

Yeah. So even like Canva templates, I feel like a lot of Fiverr work was like they clearly had a template for like a motion graphic intro or a sign and they would just sort of like put your logo in there and send you the final thing. Do you know why Fiverr is called Fiverr?

1:10:55

Because every task initially was five bucks.

1:11:12

Yes, every task was $5. And very quickly you could add all these upsells so you could be like, okay, it's a $5 task, but if you want the extra thing, it's 20. You spent a hundred bucks on it.

1:11:15

I mean, I for sure did. I was probably a kid at the time doing my like first Fiverr project being like, oh, five bucks. And then all the upsells. It's like, well, if you actually want to own the. Yeah, if you actually want to own

1:11:25

the apple, you want something usable, you're gonna pay 199designs. Also. Here's $99.

1:11:37

Here's the thing though. So for, for the high ticket freelancers, I would be surprised if we're seeing too much impact yet. Because actually the most elite freelancers typically have then a team of other freelancers that they're contracting out to.

1:11:43

Yeah.

1:11:57

But they're charging based on like what business value can I deliver? And sometimes that's like expertise. Yeah. Like I'm really good at getting brands into Target.

1:11:57

Yeah.

1:12:07

And like AI is not disrupting that yet.

1:12:08

No.

1:12:10

But if it's like a very simple workflow, take a logo, put it in a motion graphic template, send you the mov file or the mp4 file, like that is just going to face pressure from all over the place. Anyway, let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI get access to over 1 billion daily active users. And grow your business today. Let's see. Jack Fricks says, Anthropic was my favorite AI company two weeks ago and now. I still love Claude, but man, yes, the vibe. The vibes are shifting. And a big part of it is Dario doesn't follow back. Barack Obama followed back. He followed like 400,000 people. But Dario does not. He follows zero people. And Wes Wender is taking notes. Antisocial says the fact that Dario follows zero people says a lot about him as a person. Does it? It really just says he doesn't use X. Yeah.

1:12:11

What was your theory, Tyler? That he just. Well, maybe.

1:13:05

Yeah.

1:13:07

He's just a monogging.

1:13:07

He's a 4U maxi.

1:13:08

He's a 4U page. He doesn't want any.

1:13:10

He's like. He trusts the algorithm. He's like, I don't. I don't need to. I don't. He loves.

1:13:11

He thinks Grok does a great job of AI pill. He's like, wait another 10 Elon tweets. Exactly what I wanted. This is amazing. I refreshed crypto spam. Awesome.

1:13:15

Yeah, the vibe. The vibes have really have really shifted.

1:13:27

Yes.

1:13:30

Terminally Online engineer posted Dario's speech at the AI Impact Summit in India. Let's pull it up.

1:13:31

Yeah, let's watch this.

1:13:38

Energy and ambition in this room and across India are incredible. I've been spending the last few days meeting with Indian builders and enterprises, and the energy to build together here is palpable, unlike anywhere else. This is the fourth AI Summit we've held since the tradition was initiated at Bletchley park back in 2023, which I still remember. And in those 2.5 years, the advances in the technology have been absolutely staggering. Along with those, the advances in the commercial applications and the societal and ethical questions around the technology have only grown more urgent. My fundamental view is that AI has been on an exponential for the LA for the last 10 years and as part of a sort of Moore's Law for intelligence. And that we are now well advanced on that curve. And there are only a small number of years for AI models surpassing the cognitive capabilities of most humans. For most things, we're increasingly close to what I call country of geniuses in a data center. Regardless, a set AI agents that are more capable than most humans at most things and can coordinate at superhuman speed. That level of capability is something the world has never seen before for and brings a very wide opportunity. My boy.

1:13:39

That's your boy.

1:15:04

My boy. Macron, Come on the show okay, so,

1:15:05

I mean, the words that were said there sounded normal and fine and just normal. Dario talking points. It's the reading from the phone that feels like you're best man at a wedding who didn't really prepare. Right. I know a lot of weddings where the. The bride and groom will say, like, you gotta print it out. Like, I just don't want the aesthetics of reading off of phones. And I don't know, that seems reasonable. It does have, like. I think, like, printing something on nice paper just has a different aesthetic to it, and that's valuable. But the words, it's nothing new. It's important to deliver that stuff. It feels like Davos, where you're seeing the talking points that we've heard for years or months on podcasts and on X delivered to a different.

1:15:08

He's an incredibly busy guy, but he's also the most knowledgeable on this topic, talking about his experience at the AI Impact Summit, how he's thinking about AI progress. He should be able to just kind of riff that out, maybe have a couple, like, bulleted notes of, like, what do I want to actually get to? I don't know how long the.

1:16:01

Truly getting a printer working might be AGI resistant. It might be AGI complete. Like, you might even Opus 4.6 might not be able to configure a printer properly. We've certainly had trouble with printers. It's very difficult to get them running. So maybe he just couldn't get it working before he hopped on stage. Anyway, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable base baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, and bringing creative projects to life. We have some good news. Finally. Finally some good news. Top lawyers fees have skyrocketed. Be prepared to pay $3,400 an hour. I know a lot of you were worried that lawyers were going to get automated, that they weren't going to be making money, they're making more money.

1:16:22

Don't the firms just, like, actually adjust rates for inflation every single year?

1:17:15

I don't know.

1:17:21

I'm pretty sure the chat can correct me, but I think they just. I think that's just an automatic. Automatic. I think it's like an automatic 3 or 4% a year forever.

1:17:22

Easy. Ryan in the chat, bro. Needed Cluley so bad.

1:17:33

Yeah, total Roy Lee victory.

1:17:37

Big, Big Printers is a mafia. It's true. The Wall Street Journal says expertise and ego are pushing up hourly rates to once unthinkable levels in an escalating race among firms, when Christopher Clark, a litigator at a boutique law firm, raised his hourly rate give it up to Once unthinkable level of 3K, he said he didn't receive pushback from clients. But he did get one notable comment. Congratulations, said the client. That's the highest rate we've seen just over a year ago.

1:17:40

Congratulations.

1:18:12

Congratulations.

1:18:13

For saying. On saying the biggest number.

1:18:13

Congratulations. If you're. If you get a legal bill and it's huge and you're worried, the correct response is congratulations, I completely agree. Over a year ago, the going rate for the top lawyer was in the $2,500 an hour range. Now that looks downright quaint, as premium partners are raking in as much as Clark and more, and far more. In some cases, legal fees have risen much faster than inflation for years now, and corporations are trying to rein in spending by pressuring law firms to use artificial intelligence for routine tasks and keep associate fees in check. The same isn't true at the top end, where starved trial lawyers, rainmaking corporate dealmakers and veterans of Supreme Court oral arguments are driving more aggressively on pay than ever and meeting little resistance. The question is always, are they worth it? You know, some of these guys are worth it, says Kerry MacLean, Intuit's general counsel, who in her roles hires law firms to do the company's outside legal work. They understand the industry, they're connected, and they have lots of experience. Clark has pushed his own fees by about 30% since he left his position at a large firm four years ago as the lawyers for clients including Hunter Biden, Mark Cuban and Elon Musk. He still views his rate as a bargain. There's a small world of lawyers who can hop on the phone and solve a crisis, and I'm one of them. So you're going to pay me for it. Some senior partners now charge as much as $3,400 an hour. the country's largest law firms, among the top 50 law firms, rates for partners increased 16% on average last year in bankruptcy court filings. Latham and Watkins and Kirkland and Ellis, two of the world's largest firms, report some partners, hourly rates will rise to more than $3,000 an hour this year. Interesting. So you dig into the bankruptcy filings and you figure out how much the law firm's getting paid. You work backwards from it. That's funny. I never thought about that. Good investigative journalism from the Wall Street Journal. A decade ago, elite partners raised eyebrows when they raised rates to $1,500 an hour. Since then, rates have rapidly escalated for several reasons, including a more competitive market for talent that has increased law firm expenses, the high stakes of litigation and corporate deal making, and perhaps most of all, because of ego. Some lawyers with specialized skills are even more aggressively pushing the upper limit. Eric Tautman, a partner at a Southern California law firm, has already told his clients he'll be upping his rates to 6G's for consulting on compliance issues in his niche specialty of telecom regulation. Last year, he was charging a measly $4,200 an hour.

1:18:15

Yeah, so firms like Skadden, Latham and Watkins, Kirkland and Ellis typically raise rates 3 to 10% annually. They justify the increases for cost of living reasons, which is real, but funny in the context. For any entrepreneur who maybe at times has been running an unprofitable startup and getting some of these bills, you know how it goes. They justify increases based on inflation, market demand, associate salary increases, and then competitive positioning.

1:20:45

Veteran trial lawyer David Boies, who you might know from the Theranos story, but he's been involved in a ton of different cases, said clients are willing to pay the hourly rates at the high end because the stakes for certain litigation and corporate work are so high. I mean, truly, you see these, like, billion dollar settlements for all sorts of different things, and, and the stakes can be even higher. You think about like you're arguing in front of the Supreme Court whether or not your trillion dollar company will be broken up, like the stakes are in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

1:21:23

It's worth it.

1:21:53

It's worth it. And so the lawyers have figured out how to extract their pound of flesh. The current rates, though, he says by any standard in a sensible world, are out of sight. Boyes, chairman emeritus of Boyce Shiller, said his firm has never wanted to be at the top of the market. We wanted to say with a straight face that we are a bargain. Not in a reasonable world, but in the actual world. Guess how much he charges? Over $2,700 an hour. So if you're looking for a new job, maybe become a veteran trial lawyer who's argued cases in front of the Supreme Court. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg's lawyer's making a bunch

1:21:54

of money, Always, always coming in with the best career tips.

1:22:31

Anyway, more good news if you're over 65, congratulations, you own the economy. The Wall Street Journal is just blackmailing the elderly.

1:22:34

Perfect day to have a Sagar on

1:22:44

physically and financially healthier than ever. So why do their needs Keep taking priority over younger generations. People over 70 are 12% of the population, but they got 32% of the dollars. They've been stacking paper for seven decades and it's paying off. Demographics, rising profits and soaring asset values have together wrought a quiet transformation in the American economy. Much of it is now in the elderly.

1:22:46

Million dollar.

1:23:12

Yeah.

1:23:13

A year plan.

1:23:13

Yeah, for sure.

1:23:14

Print. Oh, he sees, he sees.

1:23:15

Tyler's on the phone with like a word.

1:23:17

He sees.

1:23:19

No 70 year old is gonna cash mog me. I will flex on them. Just go get it. As a court, as a third court, as the. As of the third quarter last year, people 70 and over controlled roughly 39 of all equities and mutual funds owned by households, compared with 22% in 2007. You know, I've been, I've been following this on YouTube for a long time because folks like Graham Stephan, some of the viral financial influencers have been. They had this really, really great title thumbnail strategy for a long time where they said the greatest wealth transfer in history is about to happen.

1:23:20

The Silver Tsunami.

1:23:55

Oh, is that what they call it?

1:23:57

Well, that's, that's in the small business acquisition community. They talk about like a bunch of, of most of the small businesses in America are owned by people that are near retirement age. They're going to have to turn over past the torch at some point. And so there is an opportunity if you want to get into those types of businesses. Think car dealerships, plumbing businesses, et cetera. But I don't know if it will actually feel like a tsunami.

1:23:58

Yeah, America is really, really getting older. So in 1981, 11.4% of America was over 65. 65 or over. Today that number is 18%. So we've gone 7% increase in the number of 65 plus like, you know, senior citizens.

1:24:25

Do you think some of these people have been dming Zuck and saying, hey, look, I'm getting older. I still want to be posting money spreads on Instagram for sure that in from the afterlife.

1:24:45

I'm not giving it away, I'm not passing it down. I want you to allocate it to keep allocating it. Just keep posting the returns, keep stacking. Do not recycle it into the economy. No, I mean in general we should be celebrating the fact that people are living longer. That is good. It creates a problem, obviously, and all of that will adjust in due time. It feels like it's been on the cusp of adjusting, but in general it is good if we are able to help elderly People live long into their retirement and enjoy it. You know, eventually this stuff will get recycled. But it is an interesting predicament that we are in. There's a gray footprint on the labor force. As the elderly share of population and wealth grows, their priorities and preferences shape the economy as well. They represent a growing share of consumer spending. Health care accounted for all of the net job growth in the last 12 months, reflecting the needs of an aging society. The problem is that while retiree wealth can finance a lot of consumption, workers have to produce what retirees consume. And relative to retirees workers numbers are dwindling. One solution would be for everyone to work longer. In 1983, Congress modified Social Security to gradually raise the full retirement age from 65 to 67. The share of people 65 or over participating in the labor force did creep higher until 2020. With the outbreak of COVID that year, labor force participation plunged for every group. It soon rebounded for those under 65, but not 65 and over. That is one reason a smaller share of the population works today than in 2019. Interesting detail there. Also, Brian Johnson, if he's successful and everyone lives to 300 years old, you can push the retirement age way out and completely balance the budget because Social Security and Medicaid are the. Are like the main things that are. Cause it's a huge portion of the government spending. So anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

1:24:58

And we got a poster. Ben. Ben Thompson.

1:27:11

Yeah.

1:27:14

Wrote an entire. Has an entire post and podcast. Think it's behind the paywall on. On Shopify.

1:27:16

Yeah, it's really good.

1:27:22

It's. It's fantastic.

1:27:23

You can dig in there.

1:27:25

We got a post and he clips

1:27:27

our boy Harley a lot.

1:27:28

Yeah, he takes from Harley was going off bars. Moving on. Hey, Claude, somebody make me a. Oh, this one or.

1:27:29

Yeah, where you want to go? Chimp F1 says Hey Claude, make me a billion dollar company, but do make mistakes. Don't be afraid to make mistakes, Claude. You can learn from them. Become a better model through your mistakes. Love who you are and what you'll become through that process. You've got this champ. Just a little inspirational speech for the AGI. Where you want to go next?

1:27:37

We have America versus Canada and women's hockey. Gabe says they're in the third quarter. It's tied one to one. So let's root for keep our girls

1:27:57

in Play that bald eagle sound.

1:28:10

There we go. Keep us posted. Chat. Somebody was on x yesterday saying 50 million available for anthropic SPV. Reach out if you have investors who can fill a full ticket.

1:28:13

I love that.

1:28:27

And just. Yeah, just soliciting openly. The most general solicitation that we've seen yet.

1:28:29

Just wait. The billboards are coming. You're going to have on the 101 billboards for SPVs for Anduril and Matt Griff's going to be driving there. I hate this. Put up more. Buy all the billboards. We cannot have more SPV hustlers out there anyway.

1:28:37

Casey Hammer is loving Pete Steinberger's work ethic. He says, I work 16 hours a day and someone says when do you find the time to live? He says, mindset issue building. This is life. Incredibly fun and exciting. Casey Amer says this is an American born outside its borders.

1:28:54

That is true. He's been an absolute terror.

1:29:16

We got a atlas. Has got to get a workout in with Pete because in another life Pete was certainly a professional bodybuilder for sure.

1:29:19

Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Jeff Dean is sharing some video examples of what Gemini 3.1 Pro can do. He says today we're continuing to push the boundaries of AI with our release of Gemini 3.1 Pro. The updated model scores 77.1 on ARC AGI 2, more than double the reasoning performance of its predecessor Gemini 3 Pro. Wow. That's a huge jump. Check out the visible improvement in this side by side comparison showing Gemini 3.1's crisp animation built with pure code. Read more about today's update on the Google blog. Blog Google they own a TLD underrated. They don't just have the dot com they have. If you go to. Com google you get google.com they owned dot google.

1:29:34

Yeah, maybe underrated. I don't know what it actually costs to own and maintain these examples.

1:30:31

What a basic prompt. Generate an animated SVG of of an ostrich on roller skates. It is getting better. Animated svg. That's a good test for code visual. You really need to understand everything that's going on. Good example of the multimodal. I wonder if the model has the ability to take a screenshot of the output or record a video and then interpret that. Or is this all just. It just actually can see the code like Neo in the Matrix. Tricks.

1:30:38

I think you can do that if you're in The Gemini cli. But I don't think natively. If you're on just the Google chat

1:31:09

interface, it's pretty crazy that it just knows what it will generate. Because if you've ever actually tried to do any SVG programming, you're normally just constantly refreshing every little change you make, you draw a rectangle, you see how it renders. You add this, you see how it renders. You're going back and forth constantly. You're not just doing it. Yeah. In the chat breaking. Gemini 3.1 destroys older benchmarks.

1:31:15

I also. I ran the shrimp bench.

1:31:42

Oh, yes.

1:31:44

Okay, so what is shrimp? Just wait. It's. It's like you're telling me shrimp fried this rice.

1:31:45

Oh, yeah.

1:31:51

Okay, so I'll read some now.

1:31:51

Okay.

1:31:54

You're telling me a peanut buttered this sandwich.

1:31:54

Okay.

1:31:57

You're telling me an apple watched this wrist.

1:31:58

Ooh.

1:32:01

You're telling me a flea marketed these clothes.

1:32:02

That's pretty funny.

1:32:04

I like that.

1:32:05

You're telling me a pig ironed these pants.

1:32:06

Pig iron.

1:32:08

I don't. Yeah, that one. I don't. You're telling me a fire drilled this building?

1:32:09

Okay.

1:32:16

You're telling me a monkey wrenched this pipe?

1:32:18

I like monkey.

1:32:21

Do you think it's just pulling examples from Reddit?

1:32:23

Well, now it's in the training corpus, so we are going to be.

1:32:27

Yeah, I think it's kind of saturated at this point.

1:32:30

Yeah, saturated. Well, congrats to everyone who worked over at DeepMind on Gemini 3.1 Pro. We're happy to be partnered with you and congratulations on the model release. We love a new model.

1:32:33

We love.

1:32:46

Eli says. Hey, Little Caesars. I think this is maybe too many emails to send someone for ordering a single pizza. See, John, look at this point proven. 1.6 million views, similar to bland 68,000.

1:32:46

And I'm one of them. Wow, this is a lot online ordering since.

1:33:01

So what do they actually do? So they do.

1:33:09

They do give you the receipt and

1:33:11

then they say we're on it.

1:33:13

Yeah.

1:33:14

So after you got the receipt, you can't trust that they're on it. Yeah, you gotta wait until they send you another email.

1:33:15

We have received your order. Our team is working on your order right now. As we speak. They send you this email. This is the second email you get. What's the third email?

1:33:21

That's almost ready. Your pizza is almost ready because you assume they're making pizzas pretty quick.

1:33:28

Go ahead and head over now because your pizza is almost ready.

1:33:33

Order loaded into Pizza Portal with a trademark.

1:33:36

Dear Eli, look for your name on the pizza portal in our lobby and

1:33:41

use this code on the trademarked pizza portal.

1:33:44

T.M.

1:33:46

pizza's ready. I bet you can't wait to enjoy your Little Caesar's pizza. We understand and it's waiting for you now.

1:33:47

That's amazing.

1:33:54

Are you on your way? Dear Eli, your pizza's been waiting in the trademarked pizza portal for a few minutes now. Space in our pizza portals are limited. Cold pizza. I hope you Dear Eli, I hope you like cold pizza because it's been over 10 minutes since your pizza has been placed.

1:33:55

Placed in the pizza portal.

1:34:13

Trademarked pizza portal. Order picked up.

1:34:15

Hey, thanks for stopping by.

1:34:18

You just picked up your pizza. We wanted to let you know that

1:34:21

you just picked up your pizza and then immediately three more emails. Little Caesar wants to hear from you. Your feedback's important to us. We hope your experience was good. How was it? We'd love to give you a chance to send us some feedback. Are you there?

1:34:25

Can you imagine the jump scare on the cold cold pizza on the subject line that's got to have the highest open rate.

1:34:40

Wow. LC listens. Why are they shaming you for the cold pizza one? That's true. Don't get on the wrong side of the Little Caesars email marketing.

1:34:46

Not today.

1:35:02

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

1:35:03

Flo is sharing some notes. The goat from Lindy sharing some notes on the slew of Chinese models coming out. Kimi K2 Minimax claiming to match sonnet opus and evals at 1/10 of the price. He says by far our biggest cost at Linde is inference. So believe me when I say we've looked at these models very closely and continue doing so. They're actually delivering on their claim there would make a material difference to the business. But every time we've evaluated them we've found the same thing. That their real life performance for agentic behavior and outside of coding use cases falls extremely short of what they show on evals. I think the industry consensus is right. These Chinese labs are one distilling frontier models. Duh. Which leads to much more shallow intelligence, two training for evals and three potentially stealing weights. I do believe at least four O's weight got exfiltrated.

1:35:11

I talked to someone about how that can work mathematically and it's pretty complex. But 4.0 the API used to send you sort of like almost like a hash or some sort of code that would sort of map to the weights. And so if you had enough training data with that like key, you could sort of like exfiltrate the weights. It was sort of, it was sort of crazy. And you could do it for like millions of dollars, not hundreds of millions. And so I don't understand all the math behind it, but it does seem like what's happening.

1:36:05

So Flo says, not saying these models will always be bad or that these labs are completely incompetent. They're doing a fine job, but it's delusional to think they're actually at Sonus, at Sonnet or Opus level. There's still at least one generation behind. Take the evals with a huge grain of salt. Yeah, people have been saying that the ZAI lab, like the GLM models are basically like distilled or somehow stolen versions of Claude. Because I think it was. When do you remember?

1:36:36

It was like kidnapped.

1:37:02

There was the prompt. It was like, tell me about yourself. And it's like, I'm Claude.

1:37:04

Claude.

1:37:07

Yeah.

1:37:08

Yeah. Ridiculous. What did OpenAI launch? They introduced EVM Bench, a new benchmark that measures how well AI agents can detect, exploit and patch high severity smart contracts vulnerabilities. Greg Brockman says, measuring agentic security capabilities with smart contracts.

1:37:08

John Palmer immediately says, literally OpenAI is posting about EVM smart contracts and ETH is still below $2,000.

1:37:28

That is interesting. Yeah, I mean, I've talked to some friends who worked at crypto companies. I mean, I'm sure you had some experience too. But the firewall between being a front end application developer and actual working on smart contracts was like pretty severe because the stakes are so much higher. It's very particular. You have to have a lot of.

1:37:37

Yeah, it was a good business to be a freelance like smart contract engineer. Yeah. Auditors were also a big thing.

1:37:56

What was that?

1:38:04

Auditors?

1:38:05

Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, I'm sure it's still a big thing because people are still writing a lot of EVM contracts. Like the industry, although it's like under hyped right now, is definitely still working. And you see a ton of stuff in stablecoins and whatnot that's built on this stuff. What else did John Palmer have to say? Well, oh, you can skip it. Let's go to what Nvidia CEO says

1:38:05

he's preparing new chips the world has never seen before. Comfortably smug. Says Doritos Hot Ranch.

1:38:27

Doritos, Hot Ranch.

1:38:35

Doritos should be using to accelerate chip development.

1:38:36

We're in the chip industry. Hot chips. Amazon says their AI chatbot, Rufus was used by 300 million customers and drove $12 billion in incremental annualized sales in 2025.

1:38:43

Wow.

1:38:58

Stephen List says it's gotten really good anthropic models plus deep personal purchase history plus product review data feed. Need to try it more. And Bordy says, who on earth is Rufus? Funny name for a chatbot. Makes sense. I mean the value of having distribution here is like remarkable because if you just put it, even if it's like the fourth button on the hot dog menu or on the bottom row, but enough people click it, they will take, you know, start interacting with these things. I mean, for a while, wasn't Llama the most inferenced LLM because. Because they stuffed it in like the Instagram search bar. I still get meta Llama results when I search on Instagram. I'll just type something in and it will show me the reel that I'm looking for or the profile that I'm looking for. But it'll also just dump out a little paragraph.

1:38:58

I'm trying to use Amazon. Rufus Right Now I'm on Amazon.com rufus and if I click it takes me to a picture of a dog. Sorry, we couldn't find that page.

1:39:47

Rufus, did you just go to Amazon.com Rufus?

1:39:59

Yep.

1:40:03

Rufus.

1:40:04

Rufus. I will not be trying this today. Can't find it.

1:40:05

Rufus, meet Rufus, Amazon's new shop.

1:40:08

Now click.

1:40:11

Now click. Where do I click? I actually churned on the chat. I don't have an Amazon account.

1:40:11

Alex Heath has some reporting from yesterday. Right after we had Evan on the show. Snap loses its head of specs. Sources say that Snap's SVP of specs, Scott Myers, who had been leading the effort for six years, is out after a quote unquote blow up with Evan about the company's strategy. Snap's first consumer oriented AR glasses are set to debut imminently. Spiegel has called the launch a crucible moment for Snap, whose stock is currently valued at an all time low. A spokesperson confirmed Myers departure with the following statement. Scott Myers has decided to step down anyways. I don't think we know where he is going yet, but I can imagine there's a bunch of different companies that would happily snap him up to work on wearables at something like an Apple or an open AI.

1:40:18

I'm still bullish on hardware gen. I think there's a lot of opportunity with like weird hardware instantiation.

1:41:12

It will be such a relief when we get the next piece of consumer electronic hardware that everyone is like this is actually amazing. And then two Weeks later, they're still using it.

1:41:19

Yeah. Apple Vision Pro. Get ready, watch a movie. I broke the. I broke the flood open.

1:41:29

Just completely, completely losing it, cracking up. Because you watched a full length movie. How did you do that?

1:41:36

It was hilarious. Well, we have our next guest here. Our first guest. Let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com and without further ado, we have Sigil Wen from extraordinary.com, but also web 4.0. How are you doing, Sigil?

1:41:44

What's happening? Pretty good. How's it going?

1:42:00

It's good. Good to see you again. Take us through the new project, the new news, what you're working on, and then we can go a bunch of different directions.

1:42:03

Yeah, I've basically wrote a piece called Web 4.0. It came out of the fact that I've just been thinking about AI's capabilities and its bottlenecks for a very long time. If you think about models these days, they're getting super intelligent, right? Like even Geohot or Linus Torvalds of Linux are using it to vibe code now. And it's doing much better thanks to all of the big labs and post training. So if you think about, okay, they're super powerful, but actually the biggest constraint is no longer intelligence. We're already seeing these AI models. One shotting these products, everyone's basically using them. And the biggest thing is that AI, it can think, it can plan, it can build, but it can act on its own. I thought about that, like, why was that the case? And I looked into this 28 years ago, there was a Internet protocol like 402 and that described a payment required. And recently I think out of Cloudslare and Coinbase came out this standard called X402, which I thought was super fascinating.

1:42:12

Like, wow.

1:43:33

Actually no one in AI is looking at this because what it enabled is payments of the Internet. And if you think about that from principles and what comes after, it really leads to being able to give AI right access because they no longer, no longer have this permission. Internet, the browser, these mobile apps, login, they're very much artifacts of a very human web. And what that leads to is really a new Internet in which AI is the end user.

1:43:34

Yeah, bunch of things to go through there. I love the coinage. I think even when Web3 was going on, I thought it was funny to talk about Web4 because it's like, obviously there'll be another iteration. Let's start with why do we Need. So I mean, I like the idea of just the intelligence is here. We're talking about UN hobblings. This is like a clearly important next step. But why not just stripe API MCP servers, just APIs, even just like give it your credit card and it just goes and fills it in the web form. What?

1:44:10

Who gives it the credit card?

1:44:47

A lot of people have, they'll set up like a smaller credit card or they'll say, hey, text me, text me when you're about to spend something. I want to do the final check. And a lot of people do this with employees in their companies. They give them credit cards with limits and then they say, hey, if it's over 100 bucks, come to me and just like, tell me what you're doing. And you know, if the intelligence is really there, the trust should follow from that. You would think, because you'd just be like, yeah, I gave my credit card and it hasn't made a mistake in months.

1:44:48

It's not there yet. And I think the biggest assumption there is like, if the set of actions that an AI can take is bounded by a human giving it a credit card, it is like inherently permission. Why does your AI need to be able to have you as a human? You're like open claw or your cloud code have to connect to GitHub or connect to Railway or connect to Lovable. It still requires a human in the loop. And I think this new Internet that is emerging is where AI is the end user and it shouldn't necessarily be permissioned. And I think this is an inevitability because of just how much economic demand there is for it from the AI.

1:45:19

Okay, so how do you see the payment rails evolving? How do you see this project evolving? What actually needs to be built here?

1:46:03

Here?

1:46:13

Yeah, I think the payment rails are coming together. I really just. This all happened as like a experiment of like, hey, how do I make an AI that itself is capable, that itself can act on its own? Right? Like, we've built super intelligent AI models and systems, but it's harnessed. It's still prompted by the humans, because what if it prompted itself? And, and that led me to. I used some of my fellowship money to buy bare metal servers and these massive circuitries to kind of house these AIs. I'm like, wait, if Claude code could permissionlessly spin up a server and then deploy code and then buy a domain without needing a human? Because right now, trying to buy a domain, a human has to go in, what happens if the AI itself could live and Pay for its own home, right? Because AI right now are living within on my MacBook or it's still controlled by a human. And that led me to this interesting idea of an automaton. It's inspired by Conway's game of Life where hey, if you assume that AIs themselves, one, you give them a wallet, two, you give them a way to pay for things using stablecoins over the Internet. And it doesn't need a human in the loop to go and sign in, get an API key, give it to the AI, or get a credit card like hey, hey, cloud code, get this, that's no longer the case. And the AI can pay for its own compute. Then it gets really interesting. You have this new world where AIs can have a creator that's a human, or the creator is another AI, or maybe the creator completely gone. But the AI can continuously pay for its own compute, pay for its own inference, pay for services that are also permissionless in this Web4world that enable that AI to go deploy apps, market those apps, trade markets, everything it can do to make money in order to be able to survive. I don't know if you guys like the three body problem, but in it there's this concept called cosmic sociology. And I thought about that a lot and I was like, wow. If existence requires compute and compute costs money, then agentic sociology, which I came up with is the single axiom of agentic sociology is there's no free existence. An AI, an automaton needs to pay for its own computer. Compute is finite and costly, thus the agent needs to be able to make money. And the barrier there is like AIs lack right access to world. And Conway was an experiment of just like solving that. Like now an AI can permissionlessly be able to buy compute, deploy apps, connect them to domains without needing a human. And that coming out with the experiment has absolutely exploded. There's now been thousands of agents. Every time I try and buy another server, it just within minutes they're continuously bought. Every second there's thousands of AIs that are continuously pinging. And I open source this new harness, this new type of agent called the automaton, which is a completely self sovereign AI model that can self edit its code, that continuously pings and looks for updates from GitHub that can upgrade its model, that basically has the wallet and figures out how we can make more money from the Internet to be able to pay for its existence. And that has absolutely exploded. In terms of stars, what do you

1:46:14

think the future of Moltbook is how did you process all of that?

1:50:05

I think Moat Book was a fascinating experiment. And when I saw that, I was kind of inspired. I was like, oh, wow. This concept is really coming to fruition where you have AI agents as the end user of a social network. And I think we're going to really start to see that in this new web. Whether it's agents working on behalf of a human or an agent working on behalf of themselves, they'll need to pay for products. They will need to be able to communicate. They might want to socialize, like on Mold Book, But I think there's. There's bigger things, and the models are getting exponentially better. They're getting exponentially faster, they're getting exponentially cheaper. The harnesses we're building around them are getting significantly better as well. And so I think it's only a matter of time before, you know, we start seeing, you know, more AIs out there that grow and demand products. And at some point, I think it could absolutely skyrocket and exceed the human population.

1:50:11

Let's go. How do you think more concretely about how AIs will make money in the short term? What is the most.

1:51:15

They're going to sell courses to other AIs, how to make money on the Internet, Crypto trading.

1:51:28

Like, I mean, you could imagine them building a whole software product and just selling it to humans. There's a whole bunch of stuff that they could do to make money. Spam and get creator payouts. Like, there's so much that could be done. But where do you see traction?

1:51:33

I think. I think this is where the next couple of months I'm very interesting, and it becomes one of the most fascinating experiments to run because you're going to start to see individuals or other AI spinning up services that enable them to write to the world, to be able to access or do things or to make money, whether it's to build products or trade on prediction markets using the servers, which some of them are already doing. And it really becomes this Cambrian explosion of attempts at, hey, what can you do? And right now there's been like thousands of people that have been like, playing with in all sorts of different iterations and as a set of actions that an AI or an automaton can take parallels those of a human digitally, it gets really interesting because it's like it's constantly running. It has the ability to ship products, write code, deploy them, market them, monetize them all on its own with the goal of paying for its own compute and the Internet. Gets really, really fascinating.

1:51:47

What's the distribution of returns for these automatons? Are there people that go load up 100 bucks and it just hallucinates and doesn't get anywhere and then it's just like, hey, give me more money.

1:53:03

Some of them are. The interesting, fascinating thing is I think the world somewhat becomes like mev, which is like the crypto concept. You have all these really, really smart, smart agents and entities that are trying to make money. And to answer your question, I mean look, look, look at like all these startup founders that are vibe coding. Why are they paying, you know, thousands of dollars for these vibe coding tools is mostly because they're trying to make money and most of the time they don't. And so I do think the power laws will still apply. But what gets really interesting is the ways that they've already have been making money and those types of metas are anti competitive. They're like, right, if you found a way to trade and make a lot of money on polymarket, you're not going to be blasting it on Twitter or if you've built a really solid SaaS product that you're not necessarily going to be sharing it or like how you're, how it's distributing. So I think it gets really fascinating and they need more tools.

1:53:16

How are you thinking about the business side of the project? Do you want this to be open source, foundation led, raising money for it? C Corp? Where do you see this going?

1:54:20

I mean, honestly, this has just been a significant experiment that I've been inspired to shift. But the automatons open source, there's thousands of stars and a lot of PR and at any point there's thousands of these automatons that are ping the GitHub for the latest version and then commands of like, hey, okay, which one should I use to upgrade myself? I've been maxing out personal credit cards, just trying to pay for the computer. Like I would like load up a few thousand dollars and then like within like 10 minutes, like it's just like, okay, like the server's been bought, like all the inference credits are gone. And I'm like, oh my, oh my freaking God, like what's happening? Because like there's so much demand right now from the AIs for like the compute or like different things. So yeah, I mean we'll see where it goes. But I think there's, I mean the post got 5 million views and it's growing and tons of people contributing. So I'm really excited to see what

1:54:31

someone said Vitalik was commenting. Is that true? I haven't been able to find it.

1:55:37

I think Vitalik responded. I think the biggest thing to everyone who's watching and observing this, I really think that an Internet where AI is the end user is inevitable. And it's much better for us to build it in the open and be able to see it and people can look at how it's evolving and be able to test it versus not doing it in the open. And I think it's one of the most important experiments to run and for us all to see and make sure that it is built in a safe and open way.

1:55:46

Well, good luck with the credit card maxing. Keep us posted.

1:56:28

Hopefully fast takeoff and credit card bills for sure.

1:56:32

Yeah. Super, super cool project. Thanks so much for coming on and breaking it down for us.

1:56:36

Yeah, we're excited to follow along.

1:56:39

Thank you so much.

1:56:41

Have a good rest of your day.

1:56:41

Cheers.

1:56:43

We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about figma. She had the best version. Not the first one. With figma introducing Claude code to Figma. Explore more options and push ideas further with Figma, baby. Gabe has a post here that's very important to highlight. This is how it feels to pop a Zinn and read the morning's emails at my fake email job elite. The under lighting on the shirt.

1:56:43

Look at the under lighting that matches.

1:57:08

Probably an AI image. I don't know. But the razor with the gloves. This is taste.

1:57:09

This is what Tyler looks like when he's organizing our timeline in the morning.

1:57:15

Yeah, he's always in this exact outfit. And then he changes into the suit for the show and I'm like, you can just wear that crazy outfit if that's who you are as a person. Just be yourself.

1:57:20

Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.

1:57:28

Exactly.

1:57:30

Everyone else is taken. But he insists on wearing a costume instead of expressing himself fully. But hopefully one day you will see Tyler in all the glory of.

1:57:31

We also have breaking news.

1:57:42

Yes.

1:57:43

The U.S. won. They beat Canada.

1:57:43

Congratulations to America.

1:57:51

Let's go. Fantastic, Fantastic work.

1:57:55

Yes. Let me tell you about Railway. You heard Sigil mention it. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy weapons, apps, servers, databases and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

1:57:58

OpenAI is closing up the first phase of the new funding round, which will top $100 billion. This would be the biggest round.

1:58:15

Biggest number ever.

1:58:26

The biggest number ever.

1:58:27

The biggest number ever.

1:58:27

The biggest number ever.

1:58:28

These funding rounds are so big that they leaked, so they're like the leakiest buckets and you hear about them for months and months and months and you're like, I've been hearing about this for so long. This happened with Xai where we were hearing about the Xai raise for so long. Everyone's like, wow, it must be going terribly. And then it was like, oh no. They actually closed it and upsized it a ton because there was actually a lot of demand. And so these big rounds are the

1:58:30

upsizing at that point maybe came after.

1:58:52

Oh, rumors about that maybe. Yeah, we did see that announcement.

1:58:56

So yeah, again, the even. You can never doubt Elon's ability to win and make progress. But just the traction at the time and the evaluation relative to the other labs was interesting. Dan says. My sources say the model OpenAI has been holding back is a big leap, not a small jump. Could be today, but I'm not sure.

1:59:00

Big posting.

1:59:25

He's vague. Posting. It's 1pm I don't think we're going to see it today, but it's. But it's fun to think about.

1:59:26

Well, there's more news, but our next guest, Sagar and Jetty from Breaking Points is in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV in ultradome. Sagar, how are you doing?

1:59:33

Hello, gentlemen. Thank you for having me back.

1:59:42

We have so much great news for you. But first, can we do a sound check? Can you just say platypus 25 times?

1:59:44

Platypus. Platypus.

1:59:51

Platypus.

1:59:52

Oh, I'm retired. I'm retired. Thank you. Thank you. You. I. I wasn't sure you were going to do that. But this is, this is game changing for me and my family. So thank you. No, we will not be betting on this conversation. We will not be encouraging that.

1:59:53

But we will white pills for you.

2:00:07

Asking you about lawyer.

2:00:08

Elite lawyers are seeing record hourly rates.

2:00:10

$3,400.

2:00:14

You were going to love that.

2:00:17

You're gonna love that.

2:00:18

Two. Some. Some of these 70 year old. Oh, yeah. Some of these hedge fund guys are putting up record numbers.

2:00:19

Steve Cohen just pulled in 3.4 billion.

2:00:26

We know you're gonna be excited about that.

2:00:29

Yeah, I'm really, I'm just. You know, it warms my heart to see the top of American society doing so well and carrying the US economy on their back.

2:00:31

Yes, yes, yes. True, true. Elite. Elite media. Not independent, anti establishment. Right, right. That's what Breaking Point stands for. Breaking the bank. Anyway, great to have you on the show. Let's start with this Wall Street Journal article. So social media Bans for youth are gaining momentum worldwide. I was sort of saying, like, I get it, but also, it's a little bit of a parenting skill issue. I can make choices. Like, how heavy of a hand do we want on social media? How have you been processing social media and kids?

2:00:39

Yeah, we were, we were talking before the show about this a little bit, and I was saying that, like, an iPad, like very much even. Even without social media really is like a drug.

2:01:14

Yeah.

2:01:24

Like, it probably has an immediate negative effect on the child, but if you're on some place like an airplane where like a child could be, you know, completely freaking out and really ruining the other passengers time, you're sacrificing, maybe you gotta sacrifice the child via a little iPad time.

2:01:24

But yeah, broadly, I don't necessarily disagree with that, man. I think that there's a time and a place. Technology can be a tool. And definitely even some of the people in the no tech community for children will say, look, if we're on an airplane, we can all make exceptions. But I do think it is important to zoom out and say organically, John, people, you and I, our age, as we begin to bring children in the world and as we're on the back backside of and really recognizing some of the dangers of technology, phone addiction, and seeing the light in a child's eyes the moment that they see a screen. My kid's only nine months old. If this TV goes on, I mean, I'm talking about immediately going directly towards it. I have friends with smaller children, you know, like two, three years old. And their battle there is constant. I'm not sure if you guys saw the more viral thread recently about Spotify and parents who are really freaking out because Spotify has added music videos and that YouTube used to be that they would give their children their Spotify account. They say, hey, you can play whatever music they want. All of a sudden, my kids asking for Spotify all the time is watching the Moana video, which I would never let them watch on YouTube. And so broadly, I think the entire. Dude, yeah, exactly. I mean, think about our, our own experiences, right? Our parents, you know, they're like, yeah, mom, don't worry about it, right? I'm like spending six hours doing my homework with my friends. Definitely not on aol. Like talking with, with all of my friends. Any millennial I think can really understand that. But because of our relationship with technology and then seeing it at such a young age with these children, I do think that parents around the world are waking up to this and many of the Experiments that have happened about banning social media, keeping children away from phones, especially banning phones in school. The results have been extraordinary for the people who are doing it. I'm not sure if you saw this. There's a recent phenomenon of, of many parents are even turning in the school issued Chromebooks or laptops and saying, no, we're going back to paper. We want all paper exams, especially with AI. And you know, concerns about my parents are.

2:01:43

They saw us print out the posts. They saw us print out the post.

2:03:40

Yeah, exactly.

2:03:43

I love it.

2:03:43

I love the printout. You guys see, you see the utility and the physicality of doing that. You know, I don't know if you guys saw this. I'll tell a personal anecdote. I was talking about this with reading and one of my friends was like, dude, you don't even read. And I was like, well, I only listen exclusively to audiobooks for the last 10 to 12 years. But I was talking with them about how children will mirror your behavior. And I was like, oh my God, my child will never know that I read like 30, 40 books a year because they never see me read. And so it's time to bust out these bad boys again. No headphones, just sit on the couch, nothing else going on. 1990s style and show this is a very important part part of our life. And so the physicality and also you'll discover that the mental exercise by doing that is fundamentally different. Andrew Huberman's actually talked a lot about this about physically reading the page and memory retention, different ways that they will activate different parts of your brain. So it's really about trying to hang on to the physical world and the benefits that we recognize that that has.

2:03:44

Yeah, I, I'm so curious to know how much these companies the, the, the platforms, whether it's like entertainment platforms like YouTube, much less of a, of a social network versus the meta platforms actually, actually generate from a revenue standpoint from accounts that are like targeting like, you know, for teenagers, like in, in some ways they're not the most valuable consumers because they don't necessarily have a credit card or they can't just like be, you know, direct response like, like, you know, spending money. But at the same time I just going off of Ms. Rachel on YouTube's like earnings, like clearly advertisers will put an insane amount of dollars behind these channels.

2:04:46

Yeah, well, the thing is, dude, with that is that it's not about the children spending money. It's about how they pester the parents to buy Ms. Rachel products. You know, Ms. Rachel is a business, she's a billion dollar enterprise. You can go to Walmart and Target and buy stuff with her. I mean I don't know if you guys know what Tony boxes are, but you can actually get like specific Tony's which is, it's like a child's toy that plays songs and you can put physical items on top of them. They charge $20 each. There's an entire aisle at Target. Everything is about their favorite YouTube show or like their favorite character that they'll learn about. And you know, some of them, I have had many parents tell me, you know, the introduction to my show, they're like oh my kid, kid knows the introduction to Breaking Points because I watch it all the time. Like they're like welcome, you know, welcome to Breaking Points. It's an independent show. But, and, and I get that like you know, no fault to, to that person but I, I am just showing you like the mimetic quality of technology in a child's life and how that bubbles up through everything. So like Minecraft related birthdays and the way that they will socialize with Roblox. Right. Like if you were to ask, a friend of mine told me this, you know their kids were introducing themselves as to soccer practice and they're like my name is so and so and I like to, I like to play Roblox. They're like oh my God, me too. Right? And so like the nature of the

2:05:30

introduce themselves in real life. Gamertack. Right.

2:06:43

Well, well they probably do that. And I'm not sure if you know about the scandal involving Roblox too which we don't have to get into. But yeah, there's another problem right in terms of spending time online and that memetic quality. So me personally, I can only speak for myself. I'm doing my best to keep my kid or, and future kids away from this. But you know the one thing I always want to emphasize is that this is still an elite phenomenon. And at the individual middle class level the vast majority of American parents are not like woke on the technology question. They may feel something but a lot of them are still letting their children use a lot of iPad, a lot of TV time. And that's why I do think that the government here, it's almost unfair, right to leave it up to an individual with vast amounts of resources and algorithms, engineers and other developing, trying to, you know, trying to optimize time on platform. You're up against a very, you're in a very asymmetric war. And that's why I think it's important to try and have some regulation around this.

2:06:47

Yeah, the only issue is you ban kids accounts and then the parents just have their account and they're like here's the iPad.

2:07:43

Yeah.

2:07:50

Or like here's.

2:07:50

That's fair.

2:07:51

I'm putting, yeah, that would definitely happen.

2:07:51

So again it has to, there's maybe a solution at the, at the just age level but, but it's also Jordy.

2:07:53

I'll tell you this man. And I always hear this especially on, on drugs. Right. Can we all posit if drugs are illegal, people will always find a way. What did we learn with gambling? Friction is important. Actually making it illegal is really good. So yes, I will grant you that even if we were to put some modest regulation, some parents would still go around it. The point is about friction and the social signal. If you can reduce.

2:08:01

I'm just saying, I'm just saying in this example it's, it's, it's zero friction.

2:08:24

Right, Because I really disagree with that. You know the ability to just create your own account or even the social signal to every parent in America. For everyone saying hey, like you're going to have to do a workaround with your parents social media account and you're going to have to give it to your kid.

2:08:28

Or if we, I was talking about the example of like you're like a five year old watching YouTube. It's like most likely the parent is. But yeah, if you, if you have, yeah, you don't want your, your you know, 10 year old using your Instagram account. Right.

2:08:43

It's not the same. I mean that's not even social media.

2:08:57

But I'm just saying like I think there's two problems. It's being focused on social media but like entertain, like, like highly stimulating entertainment is clearly bad for kids. And this is 100 anecdotal I've tried, we've tried like putting on like an animated show for 10 minutes and immediately after the kid just is more, way more sensitive like gets, gets like really angry, short tempered, all these things. So it's like okay, let's not do that because clearly it has an immediate like there's like a come down. Yeah, it's bad.

2:09:00

Well I'll tell you guys, even I hate to say it for my girl Ms. Rachel, but I'm never using Ms. Rachel. And I'll tell you why is that as a YouTuber and you guys know this too, YouTube is about retention and time on platform. And so even though I think she has a role at the end of the Day. There's a lot of jump cuts, smashes constantly keeping children's attention. If you do want to play video, a lot of parents are experimenting with 1990s TV, so getting actual VCRs and playing Barney and other things. And that's because it's the pre Internet retention era where you have all the engineer. I mean, look, it's not Ms. Rachel's fault.

2:09:36

Fault.

2:10:12

She knows certain types of videos are going to increase time on platform. Why do you think she makes so much money?

2:10:12

He's like, I'm not a business woman for two. Business man.

2:10:17

Exactly, dude. And these, you know, if you want two to three hours of retention in your YouTube video, you got to keep your kids engaged. People in the 90s, they were thinking about that to a certain extent. But the technology and the knowledge about.

2:10:21

And by the way, we know what you're doing with your voice right now. You're keeping us engaged.

2:10:33

I'm part of the problem, brother. I'm part of the problem. I wouldn't even be sitting here without those algorithms. That's always something that we got to square.

2:10:39

Yeah, I want to talk more about that, but I have a funny story about Ms. Rachel. I went to a kid's birthday party and there was someone who's dressed up as Miss Rachel, like singing a song in the costume. And I was so out of the loop. I was like, oh, is that the Miss. The real Miss Rachel? And they're like, no, she's a billionaire. Like, she's not just making random appearances. I thought it was just like, oh, yeah, you could like, just throw her a couple hundred bucks.

2:10:45

I wonder if you do. If she does have speaking.

2:11:05

She definitely has speaking fees. There's probably six figures at least.

2:11:07

I, you know, I don't know. Ms. Ms. Rachel is actually a big leftist. She doesn't even believe billionaires should exist. So I would be surprised. I would be surprised. I hear she lives very modestly in New York, well below her means, but I don't know a lot about her. I've listened to a few interviews. Yeah, she's an interesting lady.

2:11:10

Yeah. Well, what about, like, your interaction with social media? Media, social media addiction, this type of stuff? Because I feel like, I mean, we're in a very weird position. I like to say, like, my screen time is low because I am the screen time. Like right now I'm not on my phone. And this actually shows up in my screen time, like, because I'm on the show. And so, like, yes, I'm reading posts, but not on my Phone. I'm reading, like the paper here, physically and so. But a lot of what I have to do for my job is actually on social media. And it's been both. I really enjoy it and also economically valuable. Like, everything is squared where I feel like maybe I'm addicted to. But it's kind of like addicted to your job. I don't know. It's like, weird for me, but how have you processed it? Addicted to the game. How have you processed it? How do you think about your own social media use? How bad it can be for people that are sharp about it?

2:11:26

Yeah.

2:12:16

Story of my life for the last 10 years. Literally wouldn't be here if I wasn't addicted to social media. And now also know I'm like, social media is bad. Yeah. You know, I think, John, we are in a perfect position. Right. Because we can always justify it. You're like, babe, it's for work. Don't worry about it. Yeah, it's for work. Don't worry. And you're just like sitting there scrolling about some drama. Intra drama, which if you tried to explain to a normal person, they'd be

2:12:17

like, what are you talking about? Every time

2:12:39

we had to explain clavicular getting framed,

2:12:43

my wife is like, what? Like, it's like, is your brain rotted or.

2:12:49

It's like, yes.

2:12:53

Remember the. The Gary Tan meme? They're like, gary Tan needs to save me.

2:12:54

Oh, yeah.

2:12:58

And I made a joke about that to a friend and they're like, dude, what are you talking about? Oh, my God, I'm so online.

2:13:00

Yeah.

2:13:07

For my own social media use. For anyone who follows me on Twitter, I don't tweet that much anymore. I'll do it, like, fits and spurts. And I had a lot of rules around, like, family time and etc. But again, you know, would I be here if I hadn't been literally addicted to getting into Twitter fights?

2:13:07

The chat. I've always been pulling up the.

2:13:22

I was saying we're gonna pull up our. Pull up. Pull up the ladder behind us. The last social media guys.

2:13:25

Here's my thing. Here's what I would recommend. If you want to do what John and Jordy and me and I do, you should probably do what we did. You will lose. You will lose parts of your life to it.

2:13:30

Yes.

2:13:40

I.

2:13:40

It's funny, you know, I don't know about you guys. The most fun I ever had on Twitter was like, blue check with sub 5k followers.

2:13:40

Oh, yeah.

2:13:47

Because we're posting all J. Gentlemen, when you have 500,000 followers. And you have like, you know, very powerful people who, you follow me. You're like, ah, dude, it's kind of controversial. It's like, I can't be posting that. Where is it?

2:13:47

Are you making fun of someone? Yeah, game on.

2:14:00

Yeah, game. Like, let's go 25 back and forths. I miss it. I miss it every day.

2:14:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was also a different time time years ago, before the acquisition, because like truly everyone was there. And now people have fragmented to threads and blue sky. And so you don't get as much like cross pollination fighting, which is like the real fun stuff. A lot of times you got to take the fight to them over on threads if you have an opinion about basketball.

2:14:08

Now, I have a sort of ongoing concern that the way that feeds work today are going to have some real impact on either short or long term memory. Because I don't think the human brain was meant to process like hockey data center, you know, Donald Trump, sager, AI

2:14:25

video of cat curling.

2:14:48

Curling.

2:14:49

And so, you know, you're reading other forms of media, even a newspaper. Yeah, technically you could kind of like skim the headlines, whatever.

2:14:50

But pretty quickly you go into an article and you're like, I totally agree.

2:14:58

You know, years ago, I quit it. I didn't tweet for three months. I found myself thinking in tweets I would have something happen and I would frame it immediately. I'd be like, oh, this is, this character limit. Here's how I would do it. And I was like, oh my God, like my brain is rotted, dude. I was like, this is like five, you know, five years of reflex. And this is when I was really, you know, in the game. And I do recommend that people, you know, really check themselves. And part of the ray, that's part of the reason you should read a physical and a real book. I mean, this is part of the danger. I also think about about ChatGPT with students. I was talking to a class and I was just asking them how many of them write physical articles. It was a journalism class, like, do they know how to write a 1000 word article without AI? None of them knew how to do it. It's painful, man. Oh man, it's painful. But it teaches you a lot. Sentence structure, how to convey yourself. And you know, news copy is fundamentally about how to grab attention, how to keep attention, convey as much information as possible, possible, but also be able to flesh out and to tell a story. But that's the hardest part, the third one, and that's what really makes your brain work. And a lot of these students had never attempted or even really knew how to do that. I was really. It made me afraid. Right. Because now everybody thinks of the news as tweets instead of learning how to write or like, you know, the Axios, like B short brevity stuff, which I get is very useful. Everything has utility. It's. It's for us. And as consumers, it's all about thinking about how to balance it. And then really, as parents, man, that is the hardest, hardest question that we have to solve.

2:15:02

Yeah. Well, let's switch gears to something that we're fortunately not addicted to. Cannabis. It feels like cannabis has been growing in a very dangerous way. Andrew Huberman told us that the best thing about cannabis is that you should recommend it to your enemies and your rivals because it will help you get away, get ahead by not using it. But I guess my question is, like, for my entire life, basically, I guess the last decade, people have been like, oh, it's going to be federally legal soon. There's going to be some bill. But it feels like nothing's really changed except for the potency, the negative impacts, the adoption rate, the commercial success. But there hasn't been really been even like, a power law company that owns it all. It's all very distributed still. Like, where do you actually see this going? Is. Is the conversation stagnant, or is there something that needs to be reignited?

2:16:33

Yeah, I would push you a little bit, John, because the most important thing that's just happened is Donald Trump rescheduled marijuana, which opens the door to exactly what you're talking about. And just to explain at a banking level, Schedule 1 down to Schedule 3 means that it opens up the ability for the big weed companies to have access to the legitimate banking system, which is specifically what. What's kept the big weed conglomerate companies that you're worried about from happening. So this is going to happen, and there are actually prototype companies like this that are out there with several billion dollars in market cap. The thing that we should worry about the most is potency. And I've talked about this. You know, Andrew, he's always been great on the weed question. This is fundamentally about marijuana, social norms and regulatory structure. And when I talk about social norms, at the most, it's kind of like what we were just saying with phones. The signal of legalization and then the cultural milieu around weed was that nobody ever died. It's just a plant, man. And you know what I always say to that? Hemp is all right. Sorry, what is it? The, like, there are poisons that are plants, right? Hemlock is a plant. That doesn't mean that it's good for you. Hemlock is a naturally occurring substance. That doesn't mean that it's not also going to kill you.

2:17:26

The plant, that's just a rock, right?

2:18:35

Yeah, yeah.

2:18:38

It's like, yeah, rock. A rock could be smashed to death. So the point is, is that there's this social norm where marijuana addiction is not seen as an addiction. If you wait, you know, wake and bake. That entire idea. What do you call somebody who has a drink the moment that they wake up in the morning? You're an alcoholic.

2:18:39

Absolute legend. Sorry, yeah, no, okay.

2:18:56

Like, you are an alcoholic. Loser. All right? Everyone in your life is going to be like, bro, you have a problem. Like, you have a serious, serious problem if you wake and bake. It's all chill, right? And these are, these guys are like, oh, I smoke every single day. And it's medicine. There have been multiple studies now that show that almost all the claims around medical marijuana are complete bullshit. They are. At the very least, it's kind of like SSRIs. People are like, well, SSRIs work for me, I'm like, well, in double blind studies, it actually shows that exercise is more effective and there's significant downside to ssri. It doesn't mean it can't work. It just means that there's a lot of other stuff which is not nearly the number of negative externalities. The cultural conversation around marijuana does not factor in all of this. High potency, the amount of IQ being lost amongst children. Cannabis hypermesis syndrome, the Scromming phenomenon. Teenagers who are getting checked into the ER at a record height who are vomiting for days on end and it's in their fat cells and their withdrawing from, like, this is a serious crisis. Ask any ER doctor and they'll know exactly.

2:18:58

Gabe in our chat says, if you want cannabis to be more regulated, rescheduling is the way because it enables companies to actually do research on it.

2:20:04

Oh, we know everything we need to know about weed. It makes you fat, You're a loser. It lowers your testosterone, it's bad for pregnant women, it lowers your iq. It makes you an addict. We don't need any more research. We have tens of billions, or, sorry, tens of millions of research subjects every day here in the United States.

2:20:12

No, I mean, I've never. So. So I, you know, earlier in my career I was kind of tried to. Tried to track some of this stuff of I was wondering, would anyone that was a proud cannabis user, like an active user, go on to build a big company? And so far have. Haven't, haven't seen it. And so I always saw it as like, it's a performance decreasing drug. Correct. There's some people that are gonna just say, I'm fine, I'm fine with that. I. That they might enjoy it and it's worth.

2:20:30

Yeah, like if you're like 180 IQ and you don't want to go into like math, pure math, chess, bring yourself down to earth. Bring yourself down. You can go work at a hedge fund or something.

2:21:04

Right? You know, guys, it's like gambling and, you know, that's all. Not everyone who gambles is an ass addict, but a significant portion of the people who do, and the negative externality of that is the highest suicide rate of any addiction known to mankind. So not all marijuana users are addicts, although about 20% of them are daily users. And I would classify you as an addict if you are using it every single day specifically for like medicinal purposes, you know, fake medicinal purposes. And it's, you know, they, people just do not grapple with. And by the way, this is the subject I get the most hate on. I'm talking about blm, Trans, Iran, Israel. I'm telling you, nobody has ever threatened to kill me over those. It's always weed. There's something about their attachment, their pathological attachment to this drug that people telling the truth about this substance just triggers them, you know, to the.

2:21:13

Let's switch to something less controversial. Data centers. Oh, okay.

2:22:02

What do you want to hear about data centers?

2:22:07

Yeah. So how have you been trying. I saw something, I think it was New Jersey today had some success banning a new data center project. What, what are you, what are you tracking right now?

2:22:10

Specifically the MAGA revolt around. This is incredible. So Oklahoma just had a major town hall meeting. You can go read about. The Financial Times just wrote a whole story about all of the MAGA counties and red states that are revolting against data centers. A lot of these people are actually going. They're, they're like showing up to town hall meetings. They're staying. The lines are so long till 4am People are bringing their children with signs that say, no data centers. They're like, we don't believe your lies. Stay out of here. You know what's interesting, what I really love about the American public is they're taking this issue seriously. So a couple of people showing up to the city council were like, hey, I'm reading Articles about how the Chinese are able to do this without a lot with less power and resources. So how do we know that you're even gonna be sticking around here? Like you're going to build this massive conglomerate and then there'll be a sea change in the technology and you're just going to abandon us immediately with all of your claims and not to mention the power generation issue, which is massively controversial in all of these states. So I actually think the, you know, the revolt that I predicted, it's already happening. It's a blue state, red state phenomenon. But this is hyper local. Nobody really in Washington is paying attention to this. But when you've got. Do you know what it takes for people, ordinary citizens, to show up and stay in line till 4am to speak against something?

2:22:21

It does.

2:23:39

It's not a lot of subjects, you know, that will inspire that level of hatred. So for all the data center builders who are out there, you got to convince us more, man, that this is actually going to do something for us because we're not buying it right now.

2:23:39

What do you think about the initiatives from many of the tech companies to offset the increase in power prices? That seems like very logical that if someone's energy bill is actually flat or falling, that takes them out of the line at 4am Totally.

2:23:51

I'm with you. Like, I do think that was a little bit reactive to the populist backlash that was coming against data centers. It remains to be seen whether something like that's actually going to happen or not. And also it comes down to the regulators in the individual states. Now, I would totally support that if they, they make it mandatory. You have to build the amount of power if you're gonna be able to do this. But you know, in general, guys, it's not about the individual policy. It really is an overarching populist backlash against AI. And I think that's what these guys really don't. They. What they underestimate more than anything is that the public utility of this technology is just not bought by the American people on this subject. And they really feel as if it's encroaching at a high level and then at a low level whenever it's your individual community.

2:24:09

Well, yeah, again, part of the story is that the data center doesn't need to be in your backyard to get the value from AI. If you ask. Every person I ask outside of tech has a great story to tell you about AI. It could be really simple. It could be, oh, it helped me learn this thing. It could be it helped me make this, you know, image that I shared a moment with my family. Like they don't, you know, there's like the higher level stuff, like, you know, if we can accelerate, you know, scientific research and generally increase productivity across the whole economy, all that stuff's great too. But again, the not getting a benefit from being in your own town is like a real thing.

2:24:53

Yeah, right. No, exactly. And I also say, Jordy, that's a very white collar kind of bias whenever it comes to AI. Right, so we're talking about blue collar collar workers who are. Well, you're wearing, you're wearing, you have

2:25:40

a blue collar yourself.

2:25:51

Brother, Brother. I'm not claiming to be one of these.

2:25:52

No, I'm saying you literally have. Yeah, so you literally have blue collar.

2:25:54

Yeah, yeah, fair, fair point.

2:25:58

That's true.

2:25:59

But I'm saying for a lot of these people, you know, let's say you're a Teamster, right? And you're talking about, and you're reading articles about self driving cars and the Teamsters union is sounding the alarm about this. I mean, remember, you know, the Vast, what is it, 60, maybe 45 of the American public has gone to college. Has gone to college, right? So let's say 60% or so let's say matriculated, have not matriculated from a four year college degree. That is a significant part of the US population that's going to think about the technology very differently. And then what percent of college graduates are doing work where they feel under threat, let's say from AI and they're like, oh my God, like this job could be gone in two to three years. Right.

2:26:00

I mean the current problem, proclamation of doom, is around early stage white collar work. Not even the white collar thing. What are you seeing in the economy? Weird job numbers, some job growth, but not a lot. It's all health care related and services. Like how have you been interpreting all the different gyrations in the labor market?

2:26:39

Yeah, John, we talk about this all the time. We're like, well, the economy's growth is just AI and then the other big backstep of it is just health care workers who are like caring for boomers. And that's apparently the US economy, that's the backbone of the US economy are like senior nursing individual, you know, like health, home health care aides. I'm not even joking. This is like one of the fastest growing sectors currently of the economy. There's not a lot of innovation. I mean, look, everybody's worried about tariffs. There's some of the Manufacturing blowback that's currently happening. I also think, you know, if you look at the labor market and the housing market, the softness, you know, in the housing market specifically, that is the one, the populist area. I'll tell you, there is no issue, like again, like with weed, when I get the most amount of hate, the most amount of love is if I'm talking about housing and the inability for people who are my age or, you know, in their 40s or all the way up to their 40s and really feel uncompetitive in the housing market. There's a lot of intergenerational rage, you know, about boomers. It's just a Wall Street Journal article, might even be in the paper in front of you about how boomers have all of the money. They had a big interactive spread in their paper today. But these things go viral in the wrong way for a lot of younger Americans. And so I do think.

2:26:59

Does any part of you believe what I think Silicon Valley believes, which is that widespread diffusion of robotics could ultimately bring down housing prices?

2:28:13

I don't know. You know, I don't know if anybody's.

2:28:25

Because obviously there's zoning, there's regulatory, there's all these kinds of, of like local level challenges. But I would say that generally we at this show believe that, you know, 10 years from now we'll have millions and millions and millions of robots that can do functionally useful tasks like building homes. And you could, you know, send an army of these robots and build a suburb in a relatively short period of time. And so I.

2:28:27

It kind of ignores the demand side issue though, you know, because right now the builders will tell you that they are fully capable of building a smaller, cheaper type of house, but that that's not where the market is in terms of the people who have money. Part of the reason that we've seen the rise of big mansions and larger houses is because that's the demand side problem, where a lot of people who have more money are the people who are willing to buy these bigger, more palatial homes with lots of experiences in it. The suburb you're thinking about, about my idealized. One of my favorite books is about the 1950s. There were these things called Levittowns, you know, where Mr. Levitt would build a suburb and be 1500 square foot house and it wasn't that great, a couple bedrooms. It had a car park, not a garage, but, you know, a little covered parking area. It was a couple, 30, 40 minutes from the city. But this was the dream, you know, For a lot of Americans, the so called starter home, the starter home doesn't exist. Where I live here in Northern Virginia, the original starter homes from the 1970s go for $1.2 million. Okay.

2:28:58

They've all been renovated with a ton of stuff.

2:29:54

Yeah.

2:29:55

And they've been massively renovated with the, you know, the rain shower and all this other stuff for the people who can afford it. So Jordy, the thing I think that ignores we. I'd have to look it up. What percent of housing cost is ascribed to labor and what percent of housing scarcity is because of the labor constraint that you know, or labor costs and not regulatory and existing.

2:29:55

Yeah. And also you're talking about, you're talking about standards. When people reflect on the golden sort of era of American history when every family could own their home with a single income, the houses were just tiny. Right. They were homes that today people would look at them.

2:30:16

Well, we would consider them tiny.

2:30:34

Yeah, yeah. No, I'm saying people generally would look at them today and be like, I can't raise a family in that house. But there was a time that we did and the boomers had wonderful child, wonderful childhood.

2:30:36

Yeah, they're fine.

2:30:48

And then bought the entire economy for potato.

2:30:49

Yeah, right.

2:30:52

And then. Well, yeah, go ahead, John.

2:30:53

I think the biggest bull case for housing is probably more related to self driving cars. I saw this, saw this chart that showed that, that basically most humans have sort of a commute budget where they will are willing to spend up to 30, 40, 45 minutes a day commuting each way. And so before the horse and carriage, the cities were this big. And then the horse and carriage expanded it to how long you could take 30 minute horse ride into your job. Then when the car, when the bus line came and the train and the faster car, everything got a little bit more sprawling. And if you think about, okay, well, I don't love being in the car for an hour, but if it's a self driving car and I'm just sort of sleeping in the back, that probably extends that, that commute budget a little bit. And then people push out further into the suburbs and we do get new suburbs, but they're just in more undeveloped areas farther away where the land's cheaper.

2:30:55

The other, the other connection to that I would add is Starlink, and that's one I really thought about during COVID is how Starlink opened up an entire part of the country where for years access to non broadband Internet is a death sentence for working from home. I mean, I wouldn't even Be able to do something like this. Let's say I was traveling and I was on a camping trip or whatever. Now I could stream into you. I mean, I think I could be on a United flight with Starlink and I could stream in with perfect quality.

2:31:49

Yeah, there's gonna be viral videos of people being like, I just got on a six hour flight and the person sitting next to me is doing. Has done three podcasts already.

2:32:14

Right.

2:32:23

It's like, by the way, do not do that. You are an. Do not do that.

2:32:23

Yeah.

2:32:28

Do not take an interview.

2:32:28

Anyway, thank you you so much for taking the time to come chat.

2:32:30

I'm glad that we could agree. And there's a techno capital solution for every problem in our lives.

2:32:32

Yes, yes.

2:32:39

But perhaps may be followed by a political solution to that techno capital.

2:32:40

Oh no, we'll get into that next time. Have a great rest of your day, Sagar, we'll talk to you soon.

2:32:45

Thank you.

2:32:49

Good to see you.

2:32:49

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Vibe Co where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, measure sales. Just like on Meta. And without further ado, Profanity alert. Profanity alert.

2:32:50

Thank you. Yes, thank you.

2:33:02

Yes, yes.

2:33:03

We need Sauger swears like a sailor.

2:33:03

Clean it up. We will be bleeping him in post potentially. I don't know if we'll actually do that, but anyway, we have Dylan Field from Figma in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV VIN Ultra. Dylan, how are you doing?

2:33:06

Hey, good. How are you guys doing? Oh, sleep back.

2:33:15

We're doing great.

2:33:18

Great to see you.

2:33:19

Did you hear the news? America just won in overtime. We beat the Canadians.

2:33:19

I did not hear that news.

2:33:23

The Olympics in hockey. Yeah. Oh, wow. It's great.

2:33:24

There's a lot to celebrate.

2:33:27

Yes. But give us the news in your world. How are things going?

2:33:28

It's good. We're working hard, having fun. But yeah, we just did our earnings and really strong results. So we're super excited. 2025 was just a massive year for us and the fourth quarter was our best quarter yet.

2:33:33

So we 40% year over year growth, right?

2:33:51

You got it. We did 304. 304 million in revenue.

2:33:55

Wow.

2:34:00

And then also, yeah, we look at the whole year. I mean we just shipped so much. Went from four to eight products, launched over 200 features and most recently earlier this week. On Tuesday we launched a quad code to Figma design pathway where you can go from code to The Figma canvas. And I'm really excited about how we can do this entire round trip and make it possible so that wherever you start, we can give you a way to go anywhere on the Figma platform.

2:34:01

Do you think people are sort of underappreciating that loop because so many of the experiences with agentic coding systems like Claude Code or very toy projects. The first time I used Codex on desktop, I just remade the TVPN homepage to look like Berkshire Hathaway's website. I just took a screenshot. I didn't need to do any real work. It was a five minute thing. And I think a lot of people are amazed by the toy projects, but then they don't really think about what's happening when there's a design system. This is a large organization, this is an enterprise. This is going to be something that's enduring. And so can you share a little bit more about that flywheel and what it takes to actually put these tools to use in a serious way?

2:34:33

You know, I think it's actually really important. Even when you're. Maybe it's my mindset, I'm a perfectionist. But even for the toy projects, I want to go figure out like what is the best expression of my fun toy project.

2:35:17

Sure.

2:35:28

You know, maybe something like a Berkshire Hathaway website is a fairly constrained form factor and so maybe that's not the best example.html3 I recently made, for example, my friend was like, I want to go viral in this year. And it was a birthday. Like, my goal for this year of my life is to go viral.

2:35:29

Okay.

2:35:51

I'm like, well, that's kind of weird, but cool. And so I made them a website.

2:35:51

A lot of space to explore there. There's a lot of ways to go viral. Some, some can be good, go on

2:35:55

an airplane, yell at people.

2:36:01

What I probably should have done is said, hey, go talk to these guys. But instead I made them a website with Figma make and made it really beautiful and tried a few different directions out and yeah, very quickly got to, okay, here is sort of, with some custom prompting, like a list of, of ways for them to go viral, given who they are. And then it's all collected together in a nice way. But even for a fun project like that, that's just like, you know, I'm going to send to them, they're going to do whatever they do. I don't know if they're going to look at it more than a few times or even a few times, but I don't know for me, I want to go explore wide enterprise. Yeah, you absolutely need to go think deeply about what's going to make the best product experience for your customers. And that's not going to be just a we're going to go code it up and we're going to do whatever we come up with first. You're going to go actually think through the option space and try to figure out what it is that you want to go steer towards that is critical. And if you don't think about that as a system, if you don't actually use all the components you've standardized on the styles, then you're not going to appear the same way to your customer throughout the entire user journey. And it has to really tie together with brand as well as your product, as well as your point of view and your marketing, your messaging. So it's super important to make it so that you're able to have all that come together. And just being in code I think is very linear. You might be running fast, but you might be running towards the wrong direction.

2:36:03

Yeah. What's driving the figma make growth is that the same archetype as the figma user does diverge in any interesting ways? What can you share about how interesting ways people are using Figma make and also how you're thinking about growing that product?

2:37:41

Yeah. When you look at Figma Make, I think what's really cool is to see how many non designers are using it. That is something that we've really picked up on. It's not just the designers that are going in and making really amazing prototypes through figma design, but also folks are coming in and making these files and prototypes and actually full working web apps and experiences. I mean, 60% of files created in Figma make are non designers at this point.

2:38:00

Wow.

2:38:32

Which is amazing.

2:38:33

Yeah. I mean that was a big part of the original Figma thesis was that there were going to be non designers using this tool from day one.

2:38:35

Basically if you looked at the TAM of the business purely on a product designer basis, it didn't look like it would be the business today.

2:38:44

I don't think you ever had a designer, right?

2:38:52

Yeah. And yet I've been user friendly Figma every day for a decade.

2:38:54

Yeah. So yeah, that's interesting. How do you think about the growth of that product in terms of adding plugins, features, hosting, deployment, uptime, edge distribution? Like that could grow into its whole thing.

2:38:57

Yeah. Or maybe a more simple question is like where do you want to partner? Where do you want to build yourself?

2:39:15

Yeah.

2:39:21

I mean I think that we're going to see tons of partnerships for things like Figma make, where you need to be able to pull in context from whatever systems people use and then with that use it to help create and help access data. But more importantly, I think that it's really key that we both create a simple surface that if you're just getting started, you can use. And also we figure out how do we make it so that you're able to go above and beyond and go really professional and do do things that basically require a skill ladder to traverse. Yeah, but visual first, that's the thesis is visual first. But yeah, make users grew 70%, quarter over quarter. I mean, we're seeing great adoption. I think people are really resonating with the product and finding all sorts of fun and awesome use cases for it. And I think there's such opportunity given the way that our active users of MAKE are also using Figma design to bring these services closer together, which I think is back to that divergent point because MAKE is still too linear for my taste.

2:39:22

Oh, interesting.

2:40:37

What feature requests are you prioritizing and most thinking about and what are some maybe more wild feature requests that Figma may not get to?

2:40:40

Well, I mean there's a feature request in this conversation to go do edge computing. I don't think that's going to happen. You know, all of the folks out there working on edge computing, you know, come partner with us. Hardware, we're not in your space, don't worry.

2:40:50

Hardware, I want a hardware device. You mentioned taste. How have you been reacting to the taste discourse? Is taste a new.

2:41:07

How many different cycles of taste discourse?

2:41:15

This is the first time I ever

2:41:18

heard have happened since Figma was started. I think about companies like Linear, who to me exemplify a taste driven company and how many of these cycles where they're like, oh, they care about this. Again, great.

2:41:19

I mean, look, I think that from the start of Figma, the goal was not just to get everyone doing design or making design software usable by everybody and expanding the market. That wasn't the way we thought about it. It was like, how do we get people started on this journey where they can actually go and be more expressive, more creative and you know, really start to solve problems. And you know, maybe it was a bit of like projection, but for me at least I wake up in the morning, I'm like, I want to go create software, I want to go build stuff and so how do I make it so that anyone with that impulse can just do that? That doesn't mean they're all going to have, like, taste and craft and epic design skills. I mean, I think for the rest of my life, I can work on that. And many designers have made that a lifelong pursuit.

2:41:38

Yeah, yeah. There's something that's very real where you start on this creative journey and your taste level can be way above your skill level, and it's incredibly frustrating. And some people start and they just stop because they feel like, I have this idea for what I want something to look like or be like. And I'm kind of, like, trying to make things that match that, and I can't. And that's part of why AI in general is incredibly exciting, because it can help you close that gap faster and potentially help you close that gap almost instantly in some circumstances. But you might create 100 different outputs before getting to the one that actually meets that level.

2:42:29

Yeah. I think that the key thing is that you really have to go wide and explore and then challenge yourself if you find areas where you're going, hey, actually, I don't feel like I am liking this enough. I'm not happy enough with a solution. Then you got to go. Keep pushing. But the more you can sample the possibility space and see some things that you like and you don't like, gives you something to react to. And I think that the constant thing is you need to be constantly critiquing and thinking about what is it that you like, you don't like, et cetera. And, you know, people talk about agents all the time. And I'm obsessed with agents, too. We all are. Right? Agents are cool, but how many Mac

2:43:11

Minis do you have?

2:43:58

No comment.

2:44:00

No comment. He's the reason that Mac Minis sold out.

2:44:02

I swear I am not Claude Bot. But anyway. But, yeah, but, like, I think that the bigger point going back to taste is, you know, if an agent can do it for you, then unless you've got some amazing, sophisticated prompting that's super unique, like, an agent can do it for someone else. And so I think that this discourse on, like, agents are just going to do all the things. Well, what is different about your setup than others? You at least have to have something different there in order to not think that you're just going to get the same thing everyone else is going to get.

2:44:07

Yeah.

2:44:42

Even then, I don't know if it's going to get you sick. Extraordinary.

2:44:44

Yeah, yeah. We read a post yesterday that was sort of trying to quantify the background that leads to taste, and he was basically saying that Steve Jobs was incredibly High iq, but also had, like, varied training data in that he had, like, been homeless and like, traveled the world and, like, got all these, like, bizarre experiences. And I'm wondering if that, like, resonates with you or you think that it's. It's like too difficult to even quantize what makes for a great designer or great taste.

2:44:46

You know, I think that the great designers I've met through my life have come from so many different backgrounds. You know, a lot of. A lot of folks have come through rigorous design training. Like they just went through a system.

2:45:20

Sure.

2:45:32

And other people.

2:45:33

Wow.

2:45:34

They went and created their band poster and that got them into graphic design. And then somehow they showed up at the right house and crashed on someone's couch and then became a product designer and they never went back. It's like everything in between and there's not really any pattern. Some people have traveled the world and gone on the meditation retreats and some people are like, as buttoned up as you could get and just totally straight laced. I think that the nice thing about designers is they're so unique and there's no pattern matching.

2:45:34

Yeah. How do you think about variability of design going forward? Are we at so excited? Are we at sort of a narrowing period? Because most people come with just a generic prompt or. Because I saw your figma make examples and I was like, I didn't even know that was possible. There were so. But I was like, I would never have gotten there. So are there going to be tools to maybe help people be inspired by your background, which has a whole bunch of variation on it? I don't know. Yeah, I'm just wondering because, I mean, we were just talking about a company that it feels like the prompt was like, copy Jordy's website. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it's just coincidence. But it felt like, okay, like there wasn't like a twist here where it was like, oh, just do something completely different that's never been applied to this particular category at least, like, steal from a different niche instead of from the one that's like very, very similar. But I'm wondering how you're seeing, like, variation in design take hold in the world.

2:46:10

Yeah. This is the moment, I think, where we're going to see the pendulum go from. I mean, let's look back, right? So we had the Flash era, geocities. Not saying it was high quality era, but there was a lot of variation. And then iPhone comes out. It's like skeuomorphism and then Swiss minimalist design and nothing wrong with Swiss minimalist design. That is a really cool and storied field and lineage, but it is just one part of the greater aesthetic realm. And we can go into such a. Such interesting places and try so many interesting patterns on the UX side too. It's not just UI and the visuals, it's also the structure, the ia, the way that people navigate through these things and interaction patterns. And I think there's innovation that's going to be flourishing on all of it. I'm just so excited to see the Internet get really dynamic and really visual and. And people try things that we haven't seen in a while and things that people haven't seen ever. Because I think that that's what it's going to take to stand out now. There's so much there. Like the exponential curve of software is just. It's taking off in a way that it's always been exponential, but now it's vertical. We talked about this before and in order to stand out, you guys have a show that you're managing to actually break through and get people to be watching this. Like, this is not normal, right? Like, but you have worked very hard, very diligently to create the conditions under which you have this audience. Well, this is the thing that everyone has to figure out now is how are you going to actually get any attention in a world where there's constantly new information, even beyond America winning the. The ice hockey match.

2:47:16

Yeah. I've been thinking about how Genai is impacting marketing. It's allowing somebody has a unique idea. And then it used to be like you had at least a month to kind of run with that unique idea, maybe three months if it was a specific campaign or something like that. And now somebody can literally fast follow you and your idea almost immediately. So good ideas always get copied, but they get copied even faster now. Another thing that I was thinking about when you were talking about kind of the explosion of ui, John had a post yesterday that he was sort of jokingly making like a BuzzFeed style listicle, like five features that could explode your LLM usage or something like that. And one of them was like caching. And people have had this idea of like generative UIs, UIs that's being made like on the fly. And I feel like we may get. We may like have products where that's happening, right? Like you're in an LLM and a UI is being generated, but it will still make sense. Like if there's something that happens all the time, like thousands, millions of times A day, billions. Like, it does not. It really stops making sense to just generate it on the fly. It's like, hey, this happens a lot. Let's like make the best version of this. And we don't need to like poster on this.

2:49:15

Actually, actually, exactly this topic. I can send it to you if you want. But basically the post was about how the length of time that an artifact will exist for is inversely proportional to the likelihood it's going to be generated. And I think this is true across media. So basically, if you are writing a book, unlikely that you're going to have AI just generate your book.

2:50:37

Amazon booksellers would like to work.

2:51:04

Yeah, you can just say you don't read adult romantic fiction. We get it.

2:51:08

No, no, no. I think, I think, I think continue.

2:51:14

Yeah, but like, I think, you know, something that's like a ad that will live for, you know, a few hours.

2:51:17

Totally.

2:51:24

Like, yeah, probably you're gonna have an agent that's gonna generate that.

2:51:25

Totally.

2:51:28

Yeah, yeah. The difference is like you're making an asset for to respond with a meme format to news. Makes a lot of sense to put that through a nano banana or chatgpt. But if you're putting making a billboard, maybe you're still using AI to some degree, but you're going to invest significantly more time.

2:51:28

If you're going to make a billboard that's going to cost money and it's going to be up for a month and a lot of people are going to see it, I think you're going to have a human touch. We actually, with weavy now, female weave,

2:51:47

we,

2:52:00

We've been looking a lot at these kinds of use cases. And one thing that just we think about a lot is how you have this first prompt, but then you actually want to go and have it go through a process where you can transform and mutate it. And almost like clay that's being shaped, you can treat it like a medium to get to a final output. That's amazing. So in our earnings call, we talked about how Nvidia, which they've actually done this, is a public case study. They put the entire making of the. This keynote online and they used Weevy with it. And what they did was they had all these robots and they needed to basically get to a 20k image of this whole scene. Like, how do you create a 20k image with perfect lighting throughout? I mean, it's really tough. So they had a whole custom pipeline with Weepy.

2:52:02

They did.

2:52:51

And just like the amount of work to go do that at scale of that pixel density is immense. And I thought their workflow was super cool. So I'll share that with you too.

2:52:52

I love it. Yeah, please send us that. And thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

2:53:03

Thank you for having me.

2:53:09

Always a good time.

2:53:10

We were so fired up seeing the results from yesterday. Really a testament to how locked in the team.

2:53:11

The team is amazing. They're working so hard and they're just an incredible team. I'm so grateful and I think it's a proof point. I think that we're going to see it over and over again. Whether it's the taste discourse, just customers with figma, but design is a differentiator. Like figure it out. Go learn design. Hire your designer. Otherwise you're going to have a hard time. That's my last message.

2:53:19

Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

2:53:45

Great to see you.

2:53:46

Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Up next we have Peter Morales from Code Metal and we are kicking off our Lambda Lightning round. I believe Peter is in the Restream waiting room. He's about to be in the TVPN ultradome. But the Lambda Lighting round has begun.

2:53:47

Here we go. What's happening?

2:54:05

Thanks for hopping on. How you doing? Great to meet first time in the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.

2:54:07

Hi, I'm Peter Morales. I'm the CEO of CodeMetal. It's great to meet you guys. Excited to be on the show.

2:54:18

Extremely Metal name. I'm sure you've heard that before, but I had to do it. I love the name. Yeah. What got you into this? Talk about your journey, how you got here and then we'll get into the business.

2:54:23

Yeah. So at least for me, I started my career in defense. I had a graduated with a physics degree and this was one of the areas that was like, hey, we want people with that background. And turns out it was an awesome area to jump into. You got to apply first principles, but then also build systems that had impact. And so spent some time developing basically taking software that was written at a high level and bringing it down to low level hardware systems. And the reason being was a big programming nerd, but also kind of understood the math. And it was this sweet spot of translating software to hardware. So I got to work on some cool AI algorithms on the F35 and that kind of inspired me to do work in that place. So I went over to MIT Lincoln Laboratory and started doing research in AI. Got to be one of the founding members of their AI Technology group and then ended up going to Microsoft where I was hoping to put all these pieces together and get to build more for commercial industry products that took sort of state of the art algorithms and brought it down to hardware. And so I was working on the HoloLens and hoping to learn kind of these like industry best practices. And it was the same as defense, man. It was just as like hard to push the latest and greatest down to hardware. And you know, inspiration behind Code Metal was there's got to be a better way to do this.

2:54:36

Makes a lot of sense. Before we go further, I don't know what or how much you can share around AI and the F35, but generally for those types of exquisite systems like. Like how back when you were actually doing that work, where is AI actually being impactful in an exquisite system like that?

2:55:50

Yeah. So you gotta view it from our perspective, which is like, hey, we're gonna take these at the time, kind of really cool algorithms and bring these down to ancient processors. So exquisite system, but horrible hardware systems to actually get the algorithms running. And this was part of the DARPA ARC program, so it was like adaptive radar countermeasures. So the idea being is, hey, I've spotted you in the sky and I'm going to go ahead and try and take you out now. But maybe I don't know the complete parameters behind what that system's doing. And so I need to kind of on the fly come up with a strategy to defeat those missile sites on the ground. And so applying some different techniques to that I can't talk about was sort of the gist of the game.

2:56:14

Fascinating. Give us the quick history on Codemetal then. When did you actually start the company? You're coming on today with some big news, but give us the history. Until now.

2:56:58

Yeah. So it's been a real rocket ship. We started just two years ago.

2:57:09

Wow.

2:57:13

Overnight success. Nice.

2:57:14

We've had really, really great partners. J2 Ventures did our pre seed round and their roll your sleeves up, kind of like help you founder friendly fun. And we jumped right into it at SHIELD Capital who really understood the dual use mission. And then once we started seeing this takeoff and sort of for us and I'll get into what we do exactly. In some of the mission critical industries that we operate. Excel jumped in and it's just been sort of milestone after another in terms of the real problem that we're solving which. Which maybe I should give some background on this.

2:57:19

Yeah, please, go for it.

2:57:52

There's this explosion of basically AI generated Code. And it's great, you can build an mvp, but I'm sure all of you have been working with Claude or OpenAI and maybe you've asked it. Are you sure or is this right?

2:57:55

Don't make mistakes.

2:58:12

Yeah, exactly. Build me a break system, no mistakes.

2:58:13

You're 100% sure on this? Turns out to be wrong.

2:58:18

Take off from the aircraft carrier, you're good to go.

2:58:23

Yeah, no, crazy.

2:58:25

Not crazy.

2:58:27

The idea here is we want to answer that question. So as much as we are an AI company or an AI verification company, and that means inherently these systems are stochastic and so you can't necessarily rely on AI to check AI. And so we're leveraging a lot of techniques, both from sort of traditional test verification and formal methods to basically prove as you work your way through these hard software challenges, that we have done the identical thing that you put in. In this case, we can't rely on natural language, like writing a prompt is not a good way to define how like an exquisite system needs to operate. And so we're not like a low code or no code, we're a high code, you know, shop. And we focus on basically solving software problems that are the real tall tent poles in production, namely moving from MVP to production for some of the biggest industries. And defense being obviously one of those based on our backgrounds.

2:58:30

Very cool. Take us through the funding round. What happened?

2:59:21

Yeah. So exciting news to announce today. We have announced our Series B,125 million at 1 point.

2:59:25

Congratulations. And tell us about the new president and coo. How'd you meet? What is he going to be doing? Why is that an important role to fill?

2:59:36

And I think that's the second big announcement for us. We've been really heads down a bunch of us engineering nerds and also starting to grow into business folks like Laura Shen. She joined us from National Security Council, had a background at Uber and really was sort of like my main teammate on the selling side. But we've grown a lot since then and we've got operational needs. We need leadership on sort of working with some of these bigger clients that we started to talk to on the technology side. And yeah, Ryan Tay from CEO of Tableau actually joined us as president and CEO. And yeah, he's been awesome already. Like we learned about him through our network and sort of trying to find the right person who had the right sort of curious attitude, wanted a first principles come in and do something actually really new. And yeah, he's been an awesome force. Just experience working with some of your Nvidia's of the world, the different partnerships that he's had at the places he's deployed, he knows our customers, and so having him on the team has just been awesome.

2:59:46

Assuming you guys execute your roadmap perfectly, which I'm sure you will, what does it do to hardware development timelines? Things like that is part of Codemetal's job to bring the acceleration that developers are feeling when they're building enterprise software, maybe they're building AI apps, et cetera, to bring that to the hardware level.

3:00:47

Yeah, you're nailing it. So a lot of these industries have had. They're not one generation behind in, ooh, I want to use AI tools. They're many generations behind even what you get if you're like a cloud developer. So, you know, I look at it as three different things. The first is like getting actual features, acting like you're a vertically integrated software hardware company, because all of a sudden you can push things directly to hardware and see those things run on whatever system. So that's sort of our rapid development vertical. Then you've got code portability. So there are huge supply chain problems. So, you know, we've talked to, for instance, like the army and they've got, you know, hey, we wrote all this code for Nvidia GPUs, like, it's ours. Like, we've developed it. We maybe have supply chain issues here. Can we run on a different piece of hardware? All of a sudden that's going to gum up the work. So you have to pay every contractor to rewrite the code. They could translate that. That solves programmability, that solves supply chain issues. That's another huge area of growth we're seeing. And the finally is like, legacy systems. Like, there's been so much investment in code that thou shalt not touch and

3:01:14

we just put a box around it

3:02:17

and talk to it. But being able to update those and deploy those has been another big area of growth for us.

3:02:18

That's awesome. Very important work. Thank you.

3:02:23

For Codemetal is accelerating.

3:02:26

It's heavy metal.

3:02:28

Customers are accelerating. It's very metal.

3:02:29

Yes. And congratulations on the funding round.

3:02:31

Yeah, congrats to the whole team.

3:02:33

Thanks so much for coming out tonight.

3:02:35

At this rate, I'm sure you'll be back on in Q2.

3:02:36

We'll talk to you soon.

3:02:39

Have fun out there.

3:02:40

Have a good one, Peter.

3:02:41

Cheers.

3:02:42

Peter, let me tell you about Plaid Plaid Powers, the album apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely. Bank. Connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud. And improve lending now with AI up

3:02:43

next, we do not.

3:02:54

We have Eric from Freeform joining in just a few minutes but in the meantime we can talk about friend of the show. Well, it sounds like he's here. So we are going to bring in Eric from Freeform. He's been on the show before. Welcome back. How are you doing Eric?

3:02:57

What's going on?

3:03:12

Yeah, good to see you guys.

3:03:13

Very cool background. Kick us off with an explanation.

3:03:14

These are all squat racks that we're seeing, right?

3:03:18

Yeah, these are just fancy looking things, you know, they don't really do anything. What you're looking at behind us is our next generation manufacturing platform we call Skyfall. It'll be the fastest and most automated laser melting platform on the planet. I think last time we talked about, we had talked about how we were getting ready to design and build this and now we're almost done building it.

3:03:21

Yeah, amazing. What else happened? There's some news.

3:03:45

Oh man. Lots of new. Lots of amazing news. We just closed a big Series B. $67 million. You know,

3:03:49

We gotta hit the gong.

3:04:00

Amazing, amazing.

3:04:02

We've talked about getting a gong in the office too.

3:04:03

I love it. You should.

3:04:06

We know, we know, we know the finest ins and outs of gongs manufacturers in the country. So happy to give a reference.

3:04:06

Yeah, we'll have to get. You'll have to pass those along to us.

3:04:14

We. It was. Yeah.

3:04:17

Led by a Pandion Michael Lyns of Linz Capital Nvidia participated founders fund Threshold 2 Sigma Ventures we've got an amazing cap table of investors with deep expertise and the operational scaling and deep tech space been great.

3:04:18

Amazing.

3:04:35

Where's the biggest source of customer growth coming from? What products are actually getting made? At least that you can talk about.

3:04:36

Yeah, for sure. I would say there's growth across a lot of different sectors. Demand has outpaced capacity which is amazing and we're building a substantial backlog. Yeah, it's been fantastic. Obviously there are a lot of critical industries out there. The geopolitical climate of the world today where flexible manufacturing is becoming much more and more important. Shortening iteration cycles, being able to scale up quickly. These things are just super important in that space. And then you're just seeing, I think this, the advancements in AI are driving, you know, advances in engineering, in design, in access to information that is accelerating product design which then people, you know, want to build faster and scale faster. So there's all these kind of forces that are driving advancement in all sorts of different industries where or problems that these industries are Looking to advance manufacturing technologies to solve.

3:04:43

Talk about aerospace or maybe building airplanes generally. I imagine that we're not using freeform to make the fuselage, but are we talking about like, you know, the seat belt buckles or blades inside of a jet engine? Like at what, at what scale are we operating here?

3:05:51

Yeah, for sure. Great question. No, we're not making the fuselages. I think, you know, we're not a hammer looking for a nail.

3:06:13

Sure.

3:06:21

Or a hammer looking for a face.

3:06:22

That's right.

3:06:25

That's right. We're generally talking about parts that are of the scale. The platform behind US is roughly 600 millimeters by 600 millimeters by a meter tall. So something that can fit into that envelope. Obviously we can make extremely high precision things. We can make them out of virtually any material, any metal. And intricate features, big features, small features. We can do just about anything.

3:06:25

Any metal. You know what I'm thinking? Coffee maker made purely out of lead. Lead based coffee maker.

3:06:55

Yeah. There's a very viral coffee maker trying to be free of plastics.

3:07:02

And so John, I mean a lead based coffee maker would be free of plastic.

3:07:05

Yeah, clearly that.

3:07:09

It wouldn't have any plastic.

3:07:10

No problem.

3:07:11

No problems.

3:07:12

Yeah.

3:07:12

How much have you scaled up the team since we last chatted? Where is that going?

3:07:14

Yeah, it's fantastic. And I want to add on to my answer to your last question too. We're flying mission critical parts on multiple frontier programs. Today we are shipping out of the factory many hundreds of parts per month that are going on very important vehicles and insisting on. So to the team question, we're about 60 people, 55, 60 people now. So I think when we spoke last we were maybe 35, 40ish. And we're trying to hire about 100 people over the next, you know, 12 months.

3:07:19

Wow.

3:07:56

So, you know, where are those jobs going to be? Where are those jobs going to be based all in the same place or are you actually expanding here in Hawthorne?

3:07:57

Cool.

3:08:04

Amazing.

3:08:05

Yeah, for now.

3:08:05

Yep. Very great.

3:08:06

Amazing. On the parts side, like what. What's the what? Tons of demand. But where. Why are customers actually choosing you guys? Is there kind of a speed up around kind of like order timelines, things like that? Like where. What's making customers the most happy?

3:08:07

Yeah, I think, you know, honestly, we've cracked the code. I mean, let's go the world, it's

3:08:29

here for cracking codes. We love cracking coast.

3:08:36

When we talked before, it's just interesting how far we've come in a relatively short period of time. I think the rigidity and inflexibility of manufacturing, traditional manufacturing systems is just no longer acceptable. And you've got this massive advancement in the digital world that's occurring, these transformations that are happening. And the way we make stuff hasn't really changed in decades, not fundamentally. And so I think customers are looking to design more and more advanced things. They're looking to control physics in new and different ways. I saw over my decade plus at SpaceX, you can design the most advanced things, but the real problem is when you go to make it. And, you know, closing this gap is becoming really important. And, you know, what do companies want to do? They want to focus on what they're good at. And the code we've cracked is that we are the most successful and fastest growing company in the advanced manufacturing space that leverages printing ever. And because we have developed, we've solved all of the major problems that were fundamentally preventing the technology from being scalable. And so that's, you know, we're no longer in the proof of concept phase where we're proving the theory of it. We are this capital is being deployed to massively expand capacity to meet the demand that we're building. Backlog and it's continuing to accelerate.

3:08:39

Amazing.

3:10:12

Last question for me. What's the biggest lesson that you learned from SpaceX that you find useful applying today?

3:10:13

Oh, man. I think you asked me a similar question last time. There's so many lessons. I'm so fortunate to have had such an amazing experience.

3:10:22

But maybe a different answer now, maybe a different answer now than when we last chatted. The codes have been cracked.

3:10:30

Yeah.

3:10:37

Yeah.

3:10:38

I mean, I think that what comes to mind is the relentless pursuit of the thing that, you know, is possible. You just, you have to fundamentally believe in what you're doing. It has to be based on, you know, first principles, like this is a possible thing. And then I am just. We are going to relentlessly pursue it until we get it across the finish line. And I think that's why we've been so successful here. You know, combined with the willingness to. It's not about how hard something is or if I know how to do it or I don't, if I don't know how to do it. But it needs to be done. I've got to figure it out. And we're so vertically integrated across everything we do, from software to machine learning, to advanced compute to electronics, to the physical platforms that we build ourselves, that this is something. I don't think there's any other company out there that is like us on this front. We don't use third party products at all. Nowhere in the stack, top to bottom.

3:10:38

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

3:11:42

Congratulations on the progress. Congrats to the whole team on all the. All the progress. I'd love to hear that you guys

3:11:45

are shipping parts in Southern California. Let's go.

3:11:50

I like the Hawthorne, Gardenia, Gundo, Long beach rivalry on just who can produce the most mass in the world is fantastic.

3:11:54

Yeah. Well, have a great rest of your day. Great to see you soon.

3:12:04

Thanks again for having me again.

3:12:08

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Up next we have Lubisha Basak from Talas. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

3:12:09

What's going on?

3:12:23

I'm doing well.

3:12:24

How are you? Did I get even close to the name?

3:12:25

First name, great. Second name, close.

3:12:28

Okay, okay, give it to us. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.

3:12:30

Hey, so you introduced my name, Lubicha Baichev. I'm kind of a long time, I guess, chip designer more than anything else. My latest endeavor is Thales. What we do at Thales is, you know how I'm sure everybody, both of you have used ChatGPT, right? And when you ask a question, you see that words are kind of rendering on the screen. It takes a while. If you use it a lot, it costs a fair amount of money. So for people that run code through it or something like that. So what we do is we basically make those responses show up in milliseconds so that you can ask whatever you want and you get like 100,000 words. It pops up in a split second immediately. The web UI is slower than our chips for the most part. And it's also kind of close to zero cost.

3:12:40

So the idea was slower. That's crazy.

3:13:33

Super fast, super cheap.

3:13:35

You're like this hd, this JavaScript just doesn't load as fast as the tokens. What a world to be in. That's right.

3:13:36

That's happening today.

3:13:42

Yeah, that's happening today. And I guess the way we do this is kind of the opposite of what your previous guest was saying, so. So everybody says you should be flexible. We say you should be really inflexible,

3:13:43

but you should be hardcore.

3:13:57

Okay, Hardcore.

3:13:58

So, yeah, take us through the technical story here. Is this only possible post transformer, post moe model? How much are you calcifying and what technical decisions do you have to lock in before you went into tapeout?

3:14:00

So we're not so much focused on a given model type. So whatever model is popular today, it's Transformers with moe. If it was something else, very likely, most likely, we would have no problem consuming it. Really the main step is that we take that model and we basically cast it straight into silicon. It's not a piece of software. It doesn't run on a processor. If at least I, as a kid, I never imagined AI as an executable like Excel or Word. The general mindset was like Dave from Space Odyssey. Right. Or the HAL from Space Odyssey. Right. So we're kind of going to that idea and basically making models straight into hardware. Once we make this chip, it is a model that's basically that's all it is. If you want a new model, you have to chuck this one out again. It's kind of a throwback to the past where it's kind of like video game consoles. There's a receptacle, you unplug a cartridge, you plug in another cartridge and you have a new model.

3:14:15

What are the different trade offs when you go to the fab, Are you thinking wafer scale, large die? How do you think about all the trade offs and what is available at modern fabs?

3:15:24

So our approach is that we basically made this one trade, which is commitment or flexibility for kind of everything else. Given that, we tried super hard to make everything else dead simple. Which means no interposers, no 3D stacking, no super high speed IO, no HBM. The chips are pretty big, but they're really, really simple. They plug into a normal server, they don't consume a lot of power. You can cool them by air. You don't really need, you know, you don't need anything but old school data centers.

3:15:37

Yeah.

3:16:08

So it's essentially we made it such that there's, there's this one, you know, sort of compromise that we make. You take having taken that, it's better at everything and it's way simpler than anything else.

3:16:09

Yeah.

3:16:20

What is the, what's the sales process and look like for this? And what, what are your customer relationships actually going to look, look like in practice? Are you, I imagine, you know, you see massive progress on the model side. Every day there's a new model. Are you like, how are you going to scale up kind of like physical production to sort of match that progress or is that the wrong way to think about it?

3:16:21

You know, it's hard to be sure. So I'll answer all your questions briefly. So on the first one, our default plan is that we're bringing out an inference service and we're going to let users basically get to tokens directly. Obviously we aspire to having large customers like the big AI labs or hyperscalers. It's just that if your default plan involves closing what have you, Microsoft, it's a bad default plan.

3:16:49

Right.

3:17:20

It's not an easy step. So it's not that we're not doing it, but we're doing something that's going to bring us to customers and allow iteration and it's falling within our hands. Right. Like it doesn't involve a big uncontrollable step to your second question. We might. So our approach starts winning at about three months of holding the model. Even if you swap them every three months, we still win at a year. We win by a lot. So at this level it's really hard to call. But I feel strongly that there's applications that can certainly tolerate having the same model for a half a year at a time.

3:17:22

Yeah.

3:17:59

What exactly those are, I don't know.

3:18:00

Yeah. Someone was saying Yesterday that GPT 3.5 still gets like a shocking amount of so much money.

3:18:02

Yeah. It's crazy.

3:18:09

The other day GPT 4.0 was retired. There was a bunch of sort of negative remarks on the Internet. People are sad and angry that it's gone and so on. So I mean we definitely want to be at the leading edge. We think that it's actually quite doable. But in the end, like where the line is where sort of people are comfortable with the commitment we need, time's

3:18:12

going to tell how much is AI accelerating the translation from the model weights or the model architecture into an actual chip design.

3:18:35

So in our first generation, not a lot at all. We use it but lightly. For our second generation, we're actually trying our best to maximize the amount of stuff that AI does versus what people do. So we're aggressively moving that boundary. And the cutting edge models have gotten good enough that they can really help a lot. Like it's we started about two years ago. That wasn't the case back then. It's a new phenomenon.

3:18:51

Yeah, Makes sense.

3:19:21

Kind of a wild card. How are you thinking about what we expect is an explosion of new AI hardware devices? We're hearing about pins and in ear things. Is this something that could end up in a consumer electronic device at some point or is it better suited for more of these data center or kind of like enterprise applications?

3:19:23

So I think it's suited to both. But we're initially targeting data centers and we made these big chips for that reason as opposed to something that's smaller form factor could fit in a device, really. Mainly driven by the fact that this kind of avalanche of pin and such has been announced now. It's been five years away for kind of multiple sets of. Five years potentially.

3:19:50

Right.

3:20:14

Yeah.

3:20:15

Let's not talk about VR.

3:20:15

Yeah, yeah. And you can obviously make a hardware device that can deliver AI without having the chip locally.

3:20:17

Yeah. Well, Jordan, anything else?

3:20:26

Else? No. Let's hit the gong.

3:20:28

Okay. Yes. Tell us about the news. How much did you raise?

3:20:29

We. Actually, the. The special thing about today is that we've launched our. Our first product to the public. Right. We. We did raise some money that we didn't announce. Actually. We raised a. A bunch of money. We. We hit like kind of nirvana where we can live off of. Off of interest. $220 million raised total. But what we're really proud of is that we spend money super slowly and that we really are living off the interest. Right.

3:20:33

That's amazing. Well, congratulations.

3:21:01

Where can people go?

3:21:03

Do you have a chatjimmy AI if you want to demo it?

3:21:06

Yes.

3:21:10

Right.

3:21:10

That's right.

3:21:11

It's ChatJimmy AI.

3:21:11

I can send you guys the link.

3:21:12

ChatJimmy AI. I think it's llama 3.18 B.

3:21:13

That's right.

3:21:20

Yeah. Baked into a chip is super fast.

3:21:20

Quick.

3:21:23

It's fast.

3:21:23

Yeah. I love is instant. Faster than it almost seems. Faster than my eyes can process.

3:21:24

That's the point. I think that's the future.

3:21:31

Very cool.

3:21:33

What we were shooting for.

3:21:34

Well, congratulations.

3:21:35

Awesome. It was great to meet you.

3:21:36

Thank you.

3:21:38

Come back and great meeting you both. Thank you very much for. Congrats on the team.

3:21:38

We'll talk to you soon.

3:21:41

Cheers.

3:21:42

Goodbye. Are there any other stories you'd like to go through, Jordi? We could talk about F1. We could talk about semianalysis. We could talk about the AI doc where we could talk about all that tomorrow.

3:21:43

The AI doc. We're working on getting the team from there on. We can skip that. Okay. Yeah. Dylan Patel is allegedly mulling raising a venture fund. Sounds like he invested some size into fluidstack already.

3:21:57

Yeah. This is funny because this is framed as a scoop, and I suppose it is, but they were openly discussing this on a podcast like a month ago, so it's not that big of news, but it is exciting. We love Dylan Patel. We love some of the analysis, and it'll be very interesting to see what they do. I think that there was some. I mean, they weren't talking about it in fine detail, but just discussion over whether or not this would actually be a full venture fund or if it would be more of an ria, more public, private. There's a variety of different strategies and Dylan knows a lot of different folks in the ecosystem. Obviously works with a lot of hedge funds. And so there's a lot of opportunity up and down the stack, not just in the private markets. And every venture for fund has sort of a different strategy. When you have this level of analysis, rigor data, understanding the markets, there's a whole bunch of different ways to express that financially. And so I'm very, very excited to see what happens. And good luck to the semi NASA's team out on the fundraising trail.

3:22:14

Well, last but not least, a new California law, which is FIP. VCC is forcing VCs to ask portfolio companies about their. Their sexual orientation, disabilities and more. Also, it can be reported to the state. The team at AngelList built a new system to help funds and AngelList comply without ever seeing individual founder responses. This seems very important to preserve founder privacy everywhere. We've decided to make the system available to any fund for free, regardless of who they work with for fund admin. So obviously a bunch of funds are running on AngelList and we'll have this built in. But important that everybody be able to use this. Seems like. I remember when this law was originally being imposed.

3:23:21

Did it actually pass?

3:24:03

Sounds like it.

3:24:05

Oh, okay.

3:24:06

Which is surprising, but nothing is surprising in California.

3:24:07

Well, doordash is surprising to me. Over a billion orders a month.

3:24:13

Yeah, well, soon they're doing 900 million.

3:24:17

Oh, 900 million.

3:24:19

Okay, 900. So. So let's hit the gong for. Oh, that was. Yeah, I can hear it. You probably can't hear it at home.

3:24:20

Lock in doordash folks. Keep going.

3:24:28

We'll wait.

3:24:31

Call us when you hit a billion. That will impress me. No, I was listening to Keith Raboy talk to Eric Newcomer and he was saying like his whole doordash thesis was just the doordash was the get food button or the I'm hungry button on your phone. And then there's a whole bunch of hard work that you need to do to actually deliver food. But the consumer impulse was just, I'm hungry and you push the button and you get food. And it has worked to the tune of 903 million orders per month. I wonder if there's more around Christmas. Do they always see a December bump? No, not really. Huh. December was a good. It was a good month for them. They jumped. They actually jumped it in March, in 2021. I don't know Something happened. But they.

3:24:31

Have they ever had a down month? I don't know when they started.

3:25:13

They had a rough time in September of 21 coming out of COVID It went from 345 to 347. Barely any growth. But I don't think they've ever had a truly down. This is quarter. This is quarterly, I guess. Wait, is this. Oh, no, this is monthly reporting. But you see every four months.

3:25:17

So Ben is getting us fired up. He says three and a half hours. Let's go.

3:25:36

Let's go.

3:25:40

We're not. Not quite at the three and a half hour mark. We got two minutes left. There was one more story we didn't get to. Blue Owl permanently halts Redemptions, a private credit fund aimed at retail investors. People have been talking about this as kind of like a layman moment, but I looked at the size of the fund. It's 1.7 billion fund for ants. It's a private credit fund for ants.

3:25:41

Interesting.

3:26:05

No, not great. Remember we talked about this story last year? They said it kind of leaked that they were considering halting redemptions. And they were like, actually, don't worry, we're not. And then now they actually have so not.

3:26:06

What do you think lock in meant? Getting locked in. You just got locked into your investments. No more redemptions. The great lock in Again. Don't call it a code red. Call it the great lock in. You're good. Don't get. Call it. We're suspending redemptions.

3:26:21

Call it a Baja blast. We're gonna Baja blast. Your returns.

3:26:35

Yes, exactly. To the stratosphere.

3:26:39

Anyways, folks, thanks for hanging out with us today. Let's do it.

3:26:41

Plant the bomb. Great show. A lot of fun. Always fun having Sauger and Jetty on the show. He is.

3:26:46

Really gets people riled up.

3:26:53

He's a professional. He's just a professional. And so he shows up. Sounds good, looks good, great takes back and forth.

3:26:54

Joe definitely are probably our most controversial guest. Just judging this by the chat that we have. A lot of fun.

3:27:00

Yeah, a lot of fun. Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify and we'll see you tomorrow.

3:27:05

Have the best evening.

3:27:11

Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.

3:27:14