TBPN Live - Apple Unveils iPhone Duo, Muse AI Agent, Keith Rabois Joins | David Cahn, Mikey Shulman, David Perell, Jim Reilly, Fletcher Richman

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

(01:44) - Apple Unveils iPhone Duo (13:08) - Steve Jobs Predicts ChatGPT (21:38) - Apple Kicks off Ternus Era (30:03) - Meta Launches Muse AI Agent (45:41) - Anthropic Researcher Quits Over AI (54:08) - David Cahn discusses how AI is reshaping venture capital through concentrated investment in leading private companies, an approaching wave of IPOs, and massive data-center infrastructure needs. The Sequoia Capital investor also highlights opportunities in energy, hardware, robotics, and industrialization, emphasizing defensible intellectual property, strong founders, and aligning investment timelines with market demand. (01:10:39) - Mikey Shulman, co-founder and CEO of Suno, discusses the launch of its faster, more expressive V6 music-generation model and partnerships designed to share revenue with artists and rights holders. He also explores how accessible AI tools can inspire everyday creativity, enhance professional music workflows, and become commonplace throughout music production. (01:35:25) - Keith Rabois discusses the durability and valuations of AI companies, emphasizing talent density, sustainable advantages, and the risks posed by disappointing IPOs or regulation. The venture capitalist and managing director at Khosla Ventures also shares his optimism about technology, skepticism toward AI doomsday predictions, and belief that investors should back companies aligned with their values. (02:01:26) - David Perell is a writer, educator, and host of the interview series *How I Write*. David Perell discusses his approach to interviewing, ambitions to create enduring media, the success of his Cultural Tutor project, and how architecture and design reflect society’s values. (02:41:32) - Jim Reilly discusses his entrepreneurial background and Charleston AI, a storefront consultancy that helps individuals and businesses understand, implement, and benefit from artificial intelligence. He explains how AI improves productivity, addresses common fears and misconceptions, and shares plans to establish a strong foundation before expanding the business. (02:52:49) - Fletcher Richman discusses Type, a shared AI workspace that helps nontechnical teams collaboratively build and deploy AI-powered tools. He explains the company’s focus on midsize businesses, particularly direct-to-consumer e-commerce teams, and its recent $4 million funding round. TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.comCodex - http://openAI.com/codexFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, September 9th, 2026. You want to tell us how many days we got to Christmas because we are live from the TVP and Ultradown, the Temple of Technology, the Fortune Finance, the Capitol Capitol. How many days until Christmas? 106 days until Christmas. The countdown really makes it feel like it's going faster. I feel like just the other day we were at 112. It's flying. It's flying by, start shopping, just do it. Yeah, and you actually have time to, again, like we talked about yesterday, remove your flooring, floorboards, all that stuff, and just dig straight down and install a permanent Christmas tree. Yeah. Don't just get ready for Christmas 2026.

You also need to start thinking about gift giving. It's harder than ever to find good gifts. The best gift you can give someone is helping them save time and money. Get them on ramp. That's right. Time is money. Save both. is use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more.

Mom, I got you a corporate card that you're going to love. Anyway. Pull this up. Pull this up. iPhone Duo is going to be under a lot of Christmas trees, but what's more important? But what's more important than the new iPhone? Pulled up this graphic. I was hoping that Apple would announce this today.

If you zoom in, you can see the tree is actually, the house is actually built around the tree. Yeah. Okay. Stop building a home. and adding a tree to it. Yeah. Find a Christmas tree and build a house around it. Exactly.

Yes, that's the Christmas spirit. Our mutual friend John sent this to me this morning. So he's on top of it. Cool. Let's do it. Well, Apple has announced the iPhone duo, their foldable phone. It's, we'll pull up some video and react to a little bit of it. Big question.

right away. What? How is this going to impact screen time? Does your screen time go twice as fast? Because you're actually locked in on two screens? Should you do pixel-adjusted screen time, too? Like, if you're watching a laptop versus an Apple watch, if I spend an hour in Apple watch, is that like 15 minutes on the laptop,

on the triple monitor setup, getting triple the screen time? Should we have the AirPods with the cameras? They didn't do that. They haven't announced those. I don't think they're going to. Not yet. But when that comes, that can potentially help you add to your screen time by tracking screens out in the real world. True. True. They aren't getting picked up.

True. Yeah. Digital billboards. That should go on your screen time. Eventually it's going to be 24-7 screen time. Everyone's looking at a screen everywhere. There's our screen everywhere. You're looking at the windshield of your car. That's the screen. Can we pull up some real pictures of the duo? Here it is. Here it is. The duo. So in this video, there is no crease. I'm sure the YouTube tech reviewers will be hunting in all different lighting for creases. But it feels like Apple waited long enough to avoid a crease whatsoever.

So you will get no crease in your... That is crazy. Sitting there, boom. It's cool. I think this is going to sell like hotcakes. I think people are ready to spend... It's going to be like two grand, maybe three grand when you max it out. I think the Apple buyer, the Apple fanboy,

is ready for something that actually is a flex beyond like a slight upgrade. You paid 30% more for the pro. This says you pulled out the big next. You dropped two. Well, and that's been the thing that the relative to how much value you get out of a phone. Phones have always been incredibly cheap even the highest price. Yeah, you spend more time on your phone than you do in your car and your car is 10 times the price of your phone always. Like that's if not more.

And so I think this will sell very well. It'll be interesting to see if any new apps come from this, if people need to redesign stuff. Like we're having Mikey from Suno on the show later today. And Suno has an app that's really full featured for iPhone. You can make songs. You can scroll a feed of other people's songs. But you do have to pop over to desktop if you want to get into their composer and actually deconstruct the song and shift around different pieces of the song.

And then you get a sort of garage band interface. What's his plan? Is he thinking, okay, this is going to sell enough that I need to re-engineer my app for a different flow? You've seen even using a lot of normal iPhone apps on iPads, it usually just doesn't feel quite right scrolling. So I think there'll be a couple UI, UX. Opportunities, challenges, both.

Interesting little bezel there where you can see the screen is curved, but it's on a blocked out, squared off edge there in the center. Two cameras on the back, one on the front. Yeah. Leaving room for the iPhone Duo Pro with five cameras or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, it really shows that the phone seems to be, at least the iPhone, is certainly in its final form, right? This feels like the biggest step forward in a long time, and yet it does.

absolutely nothing new for you. A rave review. Until they do the iPhone newspaper that folds out to be. It's moderately exciting because we're all, it's moderately exciting because everyone's addicted to their phone. And it's like, cool, new, new screen. But it does nothing new for you. It doesn't move humanity forward any way at all.

Dr. Do you're going to be able to watch two reels at once. And they're both going to be vertical. You think so? Yeah. Yeah. What do you mean? From the demo that I saw, it looked like you put the video up top and then you, I messager, I messages, as well, that's because that was an horizontal video. I don't think you'll be able to open two copies of Instagram on the same time. No, I think it'll be more like the iPad OS where you can have different windows. So you think you'll be able to do YouTube shorts and Instagram reels side by side? Ideally, hopefully. Ideally, brain rot, final boss over here wants to do it.

And then you can have the third one on the back. Well, it's definitely going to be better for looking at charts on public.com. investing for those to take it seriously. They've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. What is Apple actually doing today in the markets? Brian says this could literally 2x GDP. Does the market like this? I mean, all this has been, you know, priced in, but let's check on Apple. Down 1.27% today, down 5% over the last five days, but sort of flat on the month.

It's exciting to see John Turnix get a big win, like early. Like first thing as the CEO, first major Apple event, and it's an entirely new product, the foldable phone, something that's been rumored for years. They didn't tee them up just to do a minor. A Mac Mini Refresh. Exactly. Yeah, it's exciting that he got to come out strong with this. And it's also less of a risk.

than the Apple Vision Pro, if they'd thrown him there, then he'd be remembered, oh, his first thing was sort of a flop. Yeah, I think this is going to be a hit, even though it doesn't matter at all. I think it's going to sell very well. I think a lot of people are going to buy them for a variety of reasons. But I think it's just a good way to kick off a really strong decade-long run. Hopefully four decades. Cook couldn't make it to 95 in the seat, but Ternis, I think you got it what it takes.

Turnus running this place. So you're 100% getting the duo. Yeah, I think I'll get it. I'll need to feel how it feels my hand. But at one point, I was considering carrying an iPad mini as my daily driver phone because I was like, so they come with Wi-Fi. 6-8. 6-8, so I have big pockets. And so it would actually fit in my pocket. And I don't like the phone feature of the phone. I don't like getting phone calls. So you lose that because it doesn't have a cellular connection. So it doesn't have a phone. So you can never call me. And it's not like you need a phone number for anything else besides calls, like logging into pretty much any service. Yeah, you can do two factor on an actual like authentication app. I think you can get by. You might need to have a Mac mini hooked up

somewhere that has a phone number attached to it that can route you two factor codes or something. But it did seem doable or you know, you just check your phone, your actual phone. with the phone number at home later. But every day you just have this, you know, iPad mini that you pull out and it has a cellular connection. I don't know that it can actually get phone calls, but it has a cellular connection. So you can get data while you're out and about. So you can be out in the world and scroll real.

Data. What else do you need? You don't need to make. Big data. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it really comes down and look that the phone is lighter, thinner. It's not lighter.

It's not thinner. It is probably faster. It's bigger. This is the opposite of your meme. Typically, they come out and they say, it's lighter, thinner, faster, thinner, faster, fit thinner, faster, 12 times. It's the best iPhone ever. This is actually a different direction. This is a response to your joke.

Here's something. Yeah. Would you rather search work and I message or be able to get the duo? Search work and I message? What do you do that? search and I message. Yeah. Oh,

you want that to work. Yeah. Personally, I would be excited about functional features of the core software that I use with the iPhone. Yeah. Among, you know, many other things. But Kate over on X says mentally ready for my iPhone to start being slow, laggy, and having a bad battery.

You have that to look forward. Absolutely. So did they, they also updated like the normal iPhone. Is that right? Did you watch a little bit of the early? earlier keynote? Yeah, I already said. That one is thinner, lighter, faster, better, stronger, all the different things.

They updated Apple Intelligence a bunch. Oh, yeah. There was like, all the things that you would expect. I thought they haven't launched it yet. I thought this was the launch of the series. Like, it's actually going to go out now. Correct. Yeah.

Yeah. This was in the launch video. Okay. And also the old iPhone, or not the old iPhone, but the new normal iPhone, they were like, oh, the battery is like much better. So all those things that Jordy, they like said about the new iPhones. Which one do I have? Because I got mine last year, I believe.

About, I have a 26. No, 17. I have a 17. So they launched the 18, which is the same form factor, just lighter, thinner, faster, better, stronger? Correct. Okay, but it looks exactly the same. From what I, I mean, I'm sure some people can tell difference.

Okay, okay. But yeah, better chip or something. So, I don't know. Maybe you'll notice it with Apple Intelligence. I wonder if there's any gated features, because I know that there were initially some gated features for the pro models. You need more memory, for the on-device stuff.

I don't know. It'll be interesting. I'm excited to get it in hand, see how it works. I don't, it might be too much to open that thing up. I'm thinking like, it's pretty easy just to like swipe up.

Because you're such a newspaper guy. I do like a newspaper. Put your feet up on the desk and fold your phone open. I'm scrolling. Yeah, something like that might make sense. I don't know. I don't know. I was reflecting on Steve Jobs.

I saw a viral video about Steve Jobs predicting chat GPT in 1985. And the video is incredible because he arrives to this talk. He's giving a talk at a university on the future. It's just Steve Jobs view of the future in 1985. And he arrives on a helicopter with an entourage. And they all get out of this helicopter and they go into this. It's amazing. But more of a...

Where is it? King in the castle. King in the castle. Because the video kind of takes place in the castle. But we can probably play this video here. Let me pull this up. I'll send it in. Because you got to watch Steve Jobs in 1985

predict modern AI pretty well. What is that sound? No idea. Is that us or is that the soundboard? You got a new like, just like vibe chatter in the background. Anyway, while we pull that up, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider.

Use your favorite agent to deploy web app, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. So yeah, let's play Steve Jobs predicts chat, GPT, in 1985, because I had a bunch of thoughts based on this. And I read this, I became immensely jealous. And I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal. So pause. He's the lead-in to this. What is that second video that's playing? I think you guys have two videos playing.

He's saying, I'll just read the transcript, he says, do you know, did you know that Alexander the Great's tutor for 14 years was Aristotle? When Alexander the Great had a question, he would just go to Aristotle. I think we can play the clip from the beginning now. Let's see. Who Alexander the Great's tutor was for about 14 years? You know, Aristotle. And I read this.

I became immensely jealous. And I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal. And through the miracle of the printed page, I can at least read what Aristotle wrote without an intermediary. And maybe if there's a professor, they can add to that. least I can go directly to the source material. And that is, of course, the foundation upon which our Western civilization is built. Glazing the printing press.

But I can't ask Aristotle a question. I mean, I can, but I won't get an answer. And so, I'm going to write. Perfectly timed soundboard. My hope is that in our lifetimes, we can make a tool of a new kind, of an interactive kind. And so my hope is someday, when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle in a computer.

And someday, some student will be able to not only read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question and get an answer. And that's what I hope that we can do. It's so crazy. He's just like, we got to compress all the data down and be able to give it a conversational interface. Large language models with a simple interface that anyone can use. It's a crazy, crazy prediction, 40 something years ago. And, I mean, there's so many interesting details about that video.

Steve Jobs is probably the most famous techno optimist, the most successful techno optimist, the bicycle for the mind quote, that one. continues to hit constantly. But you can see his excitement every time he gives a keynote. He'll just be on stage like giddily testing garage band. But his delivery there too is something really, really special. I mean, you notice that, right? Where he, he asks a hypothetical question, then, you know, well, I could ask, but I wouldn't get an answer. And he kind of like lets the laugh line kind of land and lets the audience. He has really good time. He's basically the Mark German of CEOs.

I guess. Mark German's a goat. Yes. Journalist. Yes. And Steve is the greatest, you know, founder's CEO ever. It just, it's a really, really cool timing. I'm surprised it took you that long to.

Because I thought you were talking about Mark German's comedic timing, which is fantastic. But Mark German's delivery of Apple truly, he truly has Apple intelligence. And his delivery is phenomenal. So, yeah. I mean, you can see. see, Ben Thompson's called this out a few times, but when Steve Jobs introduces Garage Band, he is just so excited about this product. You can see him in this one video, introducing Garage Band 1.0 with John Mayer, which is really cool. He has John Mayer come out

and just like play some stuff on the guitar. This is where I want to show you loops. And I'm going to show you what a non-musician... And he's just like chilling there on this computer on this stool using this tool. And just doing a live demo. And if you scroll forward about halfway, you'll see John Mayer comes in and plays some songs. Toward the end. There you go.

It's a British invasion. He's just having fun. And so, you know, with the power of modern LLMs, like you can ask, you can ask, you know, an AI version of Steve Jobs, what would he think about AI? I did. And I think the answer is, somewhat interesting. He said probably yes with very strong opinions about what makes

what makes AI worth using. That's speculation, but his own words give us a surprisingly good basis for it. In 1985, Jobs Imagine computers capturing a thinker's underlying ideas so that a student could interact with them. You could actually ask Aristotle a question. He was already enthusiastic about something resembling a central promise of conversational AI. But his enthusiasm would come with three demands in this hypostal. hypothetical Steve Jobs analysis. One, you've got to give people new abilities, learning, designing, composing, building would probably excite him most. Two, you have to make it effortless. I'd expect him to push for AI that understands what you want with minimal instruction. And three, you have to make something excellent. I suspect he'd value AI's ability to help someone realize an original vision much more than its ability to produce enormous quantities of generic content. He would be anti-slop, but pro-AI. Aristotle also had an interesting AI take in this imagined LLM version of Aristotle. He'd care more about what AI does to our character than how intelligent becomes.

The conclusion of this is Aristotle would favor AI as an instrument of human flourishing while resisting the idea that a life requiring less human effort is automatically a better life. You must continue to create, you must continue to work, you will be unsatisfied. Create more than you consume. Yeah, exactly.

Forever. Exactly. AI that strengthens our ability is what's important. And so what I was going back and forth with you about was like, it seems pretty clear that Steve Jobs would be excited about AI or some form of AI, but what would the reaction to that be in the modern era? because I tend to think that there would have been the natural cycle of reaction because of there's a whole host of things, political polarization, economic stagnation, wealth inequality, negativity bias, and social media. There's so many different incentives that the desire, the impetus to tear someone down is unavoidable. And so I think we would be in this weird era where a lot of people would be excited about that particular vision for AI. And yet there would still be, you know, viral videos complaining about the latest Steve Jobs keynote.

But what do you think? Because you've called for like the Steve Jobs of AI, someone who's an optimist, someone who talks about empowering humanity, focus on human flourishing, agrees with the Aristotelian philosophy around AI. But what would the actual reaction to be? Is it actually a panacea? Or would it fall by the wayside? Like all other attempts that positivity seem to have fallen by the wayside? Yeah.

I've come around to the technology itself being fundamentally scary, even though it's very cool. And then you factor that in with certain actors that are trying to position it as even more scary than maybe it is, you know, inherently. And I think even if we still had Steve with us, it would still be a mess. And he might be nicely counterpositioned, but it doesn't stop other people from, you know, poisoning. Maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe not. Poisoning the discourse. What do you think is P-Doom would be?

Over under 10%. Like 1%. Probably. He seems like a 1% guy. He's the 1%. He's the 1%. What did Joanna Stern have to say about the Apple launch? There's a video here. You wanted to react to it. New feature called Live Rewind. What is this feature? Let's play it.

Let's see it. Welcome. Today's specials are the Airwind Tomato VLT, Cesar Salad, Codd, Coulouse, lentil, chicken, al-Pratin, the smoked salmon and the avocado tartarkey. Just double-press the digital crown. In Live Rewind, Transcribes, what is just said. You can ask Siri about the content of that transcript. What if you can't read?

David's been a good job to revisit later. This is great for when you're trying to recall book recommendation, a colleague's brilliant idea, or something you didn't hear the first time. The next audio intelligence feature will help you remember key moments from daily conversations so you can be more present.

So is it just recording everything? Because that seems genuinely useful, probably not in the... I mean, Joanna Stern, her take here is... I don't know, maybe just ask the waitress to repeat herself. That's a good point. But if you're actually talking to some... someone, you know, like your lawyer is breaking down a contract and you forget which part of the contract that the lawyer flagged as important for you to go dig into and get to the bottom of.

Having a transcript there makes sense. And you could ask the lawyer to repeat themselves, but it costs a thousand bucks an hour. So maybe you don't want to just transcribe it. I don't know. What do you think about this? If I was over here, there's got to be some people, there's got to be some people out there that are, that are, you know, thrilled and, and, you know, incredibly excited about this new feature and and I would be surprised if there's more than, you know, a hundred of them globally. Yeah. But, you know, there's, there's, there's, it's just,

it, it just feels like, it's, it's, it's, it's, this whole event is hard to be excited about anything at all. A lot of these, a lot of these demos, they get harder and harder to feel natural and human. Like the garage band example is like pretty, it's so much easier to make it look cool because you're there with John Mayer and you're imagining, okay, I got a buddy who can play drums, but I can't play bass. So I'm going to get, you know, garage band to fill in the bass digitally and I needed to compose everything together. I don't really have an alternative that's super logical like just asking someone to repeat themselves. Anyway, It's got to be a tough job working through the, like, how do we showcase this in a non-black mirror?

At semi-analysis says how we feeling on the crease. Yeah. Are we feeling? I haven't been able to get my eyes on the crease. No. It feels like whatever they did in the photography or measuring. That's the one thing you would expect from them entering the foldable market. You would expect them to absolutely.

They are not going to get. There's not going to be a. on this thing. I will be shocked if there's a visible crease whatsoever. Is there, um, ooh, Arthur from Vibe just resigned today. That's a joke.

Oh, that's a joke? It's obviously a joke. Okay. Read it out since you brought it up. I didn't, I spent the last three years during TV ad performance at both Vibe and Walmart. Neither company is acting responsibly.

They are racing straight to self-improving TV advertising performance and gambling with our ROI. More thoughts below. I like it. Very good. I only read the first line. Stupid. Apple foldable crease. Let's see if there's anything here. Okay. This is how Apple dealt with the crease issue on the iPhone duo. This is definitely going to be the best folding on the market. I think passport size of it.

There's some photos. This is a canyon. It's not a crease. It's a canyon. The crease in the middle isn't very noticeable. It's been handled well. I don't know. we'll see. It definitely seems like they were waiting for the technology to become post-crease before they launched this because foldable phones have been out for five years, seven years or something like that, and they've always been a little bit rough. The hinge gets dirty. This feels like it will hold up for at least one year to get you to the next one. What do you think? I think that's the plan. Yeah, until the battery shot is. Hinge lifespan of 11 months and 27 days. We engineer. I'm trying to find an image of the new Apple Watch, which I think they're calling the Apple Watch. What is that for? Because it is just crazy to look at. It's got the Jubilee bracelet, right?

It's got a really chunky metal bracelet on it. Anyway, let's see what the Grubinator says about the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro. So last year, an unplanned personal hiatus coincided with the time. I should have been reviewing the then new iPhone 17 and 17 Air. He said, 354 days is arguably more than a few. But given I missed the window for reviewing them when they were new, I thought it might be interesting to consider the iPhone 17 Pro and air on the cusp of their being obviated by the next generation of iPhones.

So iPhone Air is the nicest phone Apple has ever made. Probably the nicest device Apple has ever made, period. It's just so nice. He loves it. I've seen it in 17 Pro I'm eagerly awaiting the daring fireball review of the of the new foldable phone

but he's got to get his hands on it I got to know what he's thinking about yes the Hermes Paris Apple Watch is this the Ultra that is a chunky chunky device yeah this is the Ultra 4

Ultra 4 you don't like this it's not to like It's horrific. It's horrific. Is that the dial or the bracelet? Everything about it. It does have a very odd interface to the actual watch with that bar that comes out of the clasp.

Like the clasp doesn't actually integrate fully into the watch. It sort of has these two points that bolt on there. Yeah, pretty chunky. But honestly, the Apple watch, Ultra, this device had gotten so chunky that I think the chunkier band might fit better with the chunky watch because if you put a really thin strap on that, then you just have this massive bulge on there. Yeah, I almost think they should have launch it as an ankle bracelet. Imagine checking your super chunky watch by just pulling up your foot on it.

An ankle monitor. The Boston Rolex. And you could be in a meeting just looking down. Yeah. I've seen some guys doing that with their whoops. They put it on their ankles. Or yeah, yeah, people are saying, Bobby

Cosmic says no pendant. Imagine you have this really skunky teeth. The flame of flavre. Yeah. This clock. Yeah. John Ternis was vague posting before this at 6 a.m. He posted just a light and it was maybe a little bit too vague.

Was that it? It was just a light? It didn't really hint at anything. Was this a... What's wrong, Ternis? I'm afraid you might say something? Was this a teaser that... Is there a folding thing here that's... That I'm not picking up on?

Is this an homage? Samsung Mobile US hit X and said, so far, so same. Hashtag it's time to switch. Throwing shots. Use the hashtag in 2026. They're going to go so, they're going to be so dedicated to the hashtags on that brand account, but it's going to become ironic and cool again to use hashtags, and they're going to be in the perfect spot.

Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. In the Wall Street Journal, they didn't talk about math. It made it to the digital version, didn't make it into the paper. Navier Stokes did not make the paper edition of the Wall Street Journal. But meta, and their new personal AI agent did, it's right here, meta launches the absolute state of traditional media. Hey, this is probably, it's more profitable as a business perspective, right? It's like, what are you going to do, sell math?

theories. Navi A Stokes was a $1 million price. You don't think Alex Wang can pull a million bucks out of this? This could be a trillion dollar price. They can get, they haven't monetized it yet, but they got to put ads in this thing. And will they do agentic commerce? What will they do? We were very excited talking to Sufinator yesterday about AGI for small businesses for folks who run ads on meta. I still love that idea. But they're going a different direction. They're doing personal super intelligence. Zuck's been talking about this for a year at least. He's put out a lengthy blog post about how he wants AI to diffuse, how he wants everyone

to have AI. And now everyone does with the MetaMuse app. That's a separate app that you get that will book restaurants for you. The Walser Journal has a little bit of a story here. Meta Platforms is betting that making AI agents easy to use will get mainstream. stream consumers to start adopting them in their daily lives. The company on Tuesday announced a new personal AI agent that can buy goods online. I think they partner with Stripe on Link.

So I don't know if that just means that when link is enabled on a particular checkout, it'll be a little bit smoother. Or if it's like it's going to try and steer you towards things that are linked, right? Because some websites do it. It's really nice when they do. but certainly getting closer to this. I can respond to emails and so do you have to link it to your Gmail I guess to get to get that working

and complete other tasks users authorize you to do for them the agent called Muse is accessible via a dedicated app users operate the agent by conversing with it like a typical chat bot and can choose their own names for it I saw some really funny ones. Tyler called his mark. I saw someone else that's... Someone gave it a really funny name.

Like, they said, like, you can pick one. And then the name of the agent was just, you can pick one or something like that. A bunch of funny hallucinations. Always happens with these products. Everyone's going to have fun with them. The new tool is Meta's latest attempt to monetize its massive AI investments, which are expected to top $130 billion this year. The AI agent is free to access for most of what people need and has two tiers of subscription plans for power users,

$100 bucks a month and $20 a month. Anthropic and OpenAI have quickly built multi-billion dollar businesses around agents capable of performing complex computer tasks, but most of that usage is driven by software coding or other business applications. Consumer adoption of technology lags behind offering meta, Apple, and other companies potential for catching up. the fact that we've given such a powerful technology in a package that is going to be really digestible for the product is one of the things that will set us apart from lots of other agentic products. Meta's AI chief Alex Wang said in an interview. Ben Thompson was raving about the fact that it gives you a pretty powerful VM, eight gigs of memory and eight gigs of storage that is yours sequestered. And they're also implementing a lot of the security features that they have done with WhatsApp, where. There's end-to-end encryption.

Yeah, they got Moxie pulled into it, apparently. That's really cool. Moxie's a legend. So great on the recruiting front. Everyone loves Signal and great team there. Yeah, the question is how it sounds like if they're actually giving every user a computer. VM, but yeah. It's like virtualized.

But yes, the serious computer resources. Yeah, yeah. But the cost is going to probably be pretty significant. So the VM. most likely, like spins up when you use it and then gets, you know, like, you know, taken down when you're not using it. So the actual compute hours that are associated to anyone but a power user. And of course, very quickly, you can wind up spending 20 bucks or 100 bucks, and that's enough to just pay for a virtual machine. Like, you can go and rent, you know, a true virtual

machine to, like, host your website on DigitalOcean for, like, 20 bucks. So, Kaz, the CEO of Open Door, uh, went to X and posted a screenshot of him asking meta AI and WhatsApp. And he said, please make WhatsApp the main interface for these things, Alex Wang, please. And he just says, how do I use Muse? And meta AI responds, Muse is a free AI assistant from Anthropic. You can use it on the web, on mobile, or through their API. Go to clod.a.ai, create an account, log in.

So I'm looking at this post. I'm trying to find why is nobody talking about how meta AI thinks that Muse is, a product from Anthropic and is telling people to go log in there? That is weird that it would hallucinate that Muses from Anthropic because there's not even any connection between those. It's not like Anthropic ever had a product called Muse that I know of. Very odd. But MetaI, of course, is running an older LLM.

And then I believe you still get thrown into a Lama model, I think, when you're on Instagram, if you wind up in a LLM chat. And so there's going to need to be unification around all of these different products. and they're going to need to eventually talk to all the same models. But of course, there's like scaling and all sorts of different issues that you need. Because some of these products that they've gotten to scale are pretty significant, even if they're not like the most talked about when you are a hyperscaler with billions of users and you vend an LLM into something like you've deployed that at scale.

It's doing a lot. And it's like, you know, the needs to do. new Gemini 3.7 flash, a bunch of great reviews, great benchmarks on things, but like they can't just stuff that in Google search on day one. Like they have to actually scale it up.

Yeah, the question I have is do you think they, does it seem like this was something they were working on prior to instinct gaining traction or is this an instant clone? I saw one post that was saying, you know, that, a rumor that they tried to buy it,

which makes sense. Arfah Rock says, there's a rumor. going around that meta and others made a 10 figure offer for instinct that's a crazy valuation for a what one year old company something like that uh instinct turned less it down uh now meta has launched music something something and that's literally what the post is uh meta has launched muse and now the timeline is reacting it'll be a big deal sounds familiar um yeah i saw some people saying like now the people with distribution are coming in uh i it'll be interesting

to see how much, what distribution looks like in the meta ecosystem because, yes, like meta was able to win stories. How did they do that? They didn't win by launching a Snapchat clone as a separate app. They won by putting it in Instagram, which already had the install base. And so if Muse works its way into Instagram, which a lot of people do use, it'll probably get a lot of adoption. If it's a separate app, it's a little bit trickier. Now, the Threads playbook worked.

They routed a lot of people to there. Thread shows up on Instagram. It has an advertising surface area. It's pulled over. What are they at? A couple hundred million MAUs. Hundreds of millions of MAUs. And again, it's hard to fully understand the value of that because they're counting somebody

who click through clickbait on Instagram. Yeah, there's that. And then also, there's a political question. There's a robust, like, real community of just pure threads. users. The other thing that I think about is like meta has the advantage of being able to, when you open all their apps, just put a huge billboard. They make ad inventory just for themselves. Yeah, with the radiance. With the specs where you open around Christmas. Sorry, sorry. Sorry. Just a little slip there. But when you opened Instagram in Q4, it's like buys some of our,

you know, classes, right? And so I would expect, I don't think they're going to do that until Muse has like significantly more traction. Yeah, they'll get the early adopters on and figure out the kinks and stuff. John Shoe says meta has been working on Muse for almost a year. Now, you have to believe that that's true. The Manus Acquisition ties into that. The Zuck messaging around personal superintelligence.

I mean, when we interviewed him a year ago, we were asking about, oh, am I going to be able to use your AI to actually buy, if I see a pair of shoes, while I'd be able to just buy it? And he was kind of like, I'm not ready to announce that yet. But it was very clear that. that's where this was going. So I don't think it's an instinct clone. I think it will compete with instinct. And I think it's tricky because instinct is pretty early and they are going up against

a big company that's been investing and has a lot of resources to go after this very, very hard. At the same time, consumers come to meta to be entertained. Mews feels like a product for productivity. And I'm not sure that people will pull. put them in the same buckets. Like that, it's very unclear. At the same time, people do a lot of shopping on Instagram,

basically, just scrolling. Really? Oh, for sure. Not, not actually check, are you joking?

Go ahead. I'm just, no, no, so like, it's like the most dominant shopping app of the time that's positioned as, but particularly people will like go there and not just search things,

but just like casually scroll and like linger over things. so that they get retargeted, visit websites, and then have the ads come to them. And so you can imagine that on the shopping side, that there's a lot of traction there. Yeah, a lot of excitement around this. Climbing the chart is currently, Mew's is number three on the charts in the app store

after ESPN fantasy sports and more in chat GPT. ESPN fantasy sports. Growing Daniel came in with an absolutely brutal ratio. What is that? He quoted Zuck's announcement with a screenshot of the exchange that Zuck had with with somebody during the early days of Facebook where he said, yeah, so if you ever need info

about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, and student numbers. What, how do you manage that one? People just submitted it. I don't know why. They quote unquote, trust me, dumb Fs.

Anyway. Growing to it never forgets. Obviously, suck has grown up a lot Since then. Who punched him in the nose? That's the question Brian Peterson is asking. Let me find the...

You send me the image. Is this true? So... Yeah, so here's the thing. His nose is starting to look like this guy Marab, who's a UFC champion. And Marab has one of the most busted up noses in the UFC. And Marab was the UFC fighter that Zubh was. Zach was training with on that, on that deck.

That's a lot of people are asking. So pull up this picture of Marab and you can see their noses are starting to look quite similar. That's a really, that's a really good sign. Look at this. Zoom in there. Zoom in there. He's pushing.

Look, their noses, Zuck was like, give me one of them right now. Give me a nose like that right now. I like it. Do you think, and I would expect, you know, who knows, Marob could go and get probably surgery to correct this. One, it's a very cool battle scar. Yeah. And two, it, you know, this, this tells me that Zuck is going way harder in training and he lets on in the video. Totally, totally. Which I, which I love to see. He's like, he's ready for that Elon fight. He's like, there's a chance. I might catch Elon on a good day. He opts in.

I got to be ready. He's also going extremely hard on the Irish countryside, buying castles. We call them Lord Zuck. We got a video now. breaking down his latest real estate purchase, Strankali Castle in Ireland. Let's play a little bit of this because there's some good voiceover, some good context. And it can be found on the banks of the River Blackwater

in County Waterford. This Gothic Revival mansion was designed by the famous Pne Brothers. For John Kiley, a local landlord, former Tory MP for Clon Mel and High Sheriff of County Waterford. The house was complete in 1830 and its scale... He's got a bunky under there?

According to records, it took a brisk four and a half minute walk. That is a bunker. Just to get from the kitchen to the dining room. Within the grounds, there was a folly. Five minutes walk. Chinese pagoda and an aviary.

The folly, which is known as Strand Callie Tower, was built in 1826. We're having David Perel in the show later to talk about architectural revival. Look at this. This is awesome. He's going to have the resources to actually restore this and do this. Some of these castles are like cheap relative to like how epic they are, but the carrying cost of actually renovating or living in even visiting any of these places.

Just like cleaning out the cobwebs is probably six figures a year. and the landscaping's got to be extremely expensive. But I think this is the answer to like, where's the tech wealth going? Like at some point, he's either going to get bored of this or donate it or pass it on or it's going to fall out of the family because seven generations later, the family's like, yeah, we don't really want this castle anymore. And boom, you got a beautiful museum that was properly renovated and brought up to modern standards in 2026. and is prepared to actually house a bunch of AI art. We're going to watch this quick video, and then we're going to talk about absolute doom and despair.

Okay, let's doom it up. But first, this little pallet cleanser. What are we doing? Emperor, dude. Does that feel like that ever? No, no. I wish that people did what I wanted them to do. It's like that would be fun.

But in the meantime, you can have some fun. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I would have a chopper. I don't even know what I would have. I would have an underground tunnel. I do have an underground tunnel. Do you really?

Yeah. It's like more of underground storage type situation. But yeah, no, it's a... Oh, wow. Like a damn emperor, dude. Does that feel like that? I love that the Theo Vaughn arc happened where, like, for some reason, all the tech CEOs were like, it's right at passage now.

We got to go. I'm disappointed we didn't get Sacha on Theo. and I'm really disappointed we didn't get C.C.W. He got a bunkey. Zucky got a bunkey. All right. Let's talk about Doom. Doom.

An anthropic researcher is quitting the artificial intelligence industry. Whoa. He didn't just quit the company, quit the industry over fears that the lab and its competitors are racing to build systems that could spiral out of control and destroy humanity. this was not received well. A bunch of back and forth with another researcher chiming in saying that they have a P-DOOM of 10%, which is something that's come up years ago and we kind of went back and forth on. This all started with Jacob Coxon, who said, I resigned from Anthropic today.

I spent the last three years doing pre-training research to both Open AI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. racing straight to self-improving super intelligence and gambling with our lives. He is not happy with where things go and it got a hundred million views and 600,000 likes. It's going straight on a Bernie Sanders billboard for sure. I worked on an actual thermonuclear weapons project, Martin Casado from A16Z says, and the dissonance was less bizarre. And so he's comparing it to what it was like working on very skinny. technology, very different than what's going on today.

And Evan Hubinger, who works on alignment science at Anthropic, previously, Miri, OpenAI, Google, Ripple, Yelp. I guess he works at the, Ripple is the cryptocurrency. Is that right? Isn't Ripple XRP? He says, Jacob is correct here. We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it's above 10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for super intelligence and are clearly not on track to.

So everyone's sort of pushing for a slowdown now, but then you go into the regulatory capture thing. I've been seeing what? Jess Buckingham says, bro, got that pip? Yeah, a lot of people are like, are you giving back your equity, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, odd. Nick Carter says, if you actually believe this, you'd be committing acts of violence, sabotage, and terrorism against your employer. you clearly do not. So stop self,

stop it with this self-aggrandizing twaddle. Eliezer on the other side says, thank you for saying plainly what you believe. I do appreciate it. And the world could be even grimmer than it is otherwise. We have, we have Eliezer Yudkowski's co-author coming on the show tomorrow, Nate Sauras,

to talk about, if anyone builds it, everyone dies, we'll continue the doom debate. It seems like it's in the news. Lots of people were just going back and forth on everything. Ryan Peterson sees it as a bull case. He says, I need to buy more stock in this company. I've never seen such a commitment to making money regardless of the consequences. Yeah, it is, it is a dare says if you publicly assign a greater than 10% probability to human

extinction within a decade, you owe people a clear explanation of how you reach that number, plus what would change your mind. Yes. Yes. So, yeah, a lot of people were upset that this felt like a vibe prediction, very, like, you know, unrearched. And he did link, Evan did link to the Anthropic Risk Report, which you can read in full. They have a reasonable scaling policy. And they're talking about pacing the frontier, collaborating with other labs. And I'm oddly optimistic that this will happen. Obviously, you know, there's the Sam and Dario can't even hold hands.

on stage and that India conference, but AI has made strange bedfellows out of people. Like, if you had, if you had said, oh, yeah, in six months, Elon Musk, the guy who's calling anthropic misanthropic will be doing a deal and bring in Shulto to watch rockets take off at Star Base, I would have been like, no way. No way can Elon Musk and Dario, become friends. Like, that just seems like impossible. Uh, but the funniest outcome is the most likely to quote, uh,

you know, uh, maybe there's this weird, you know, oh, people wind up working together. Uh, there are other consequences of that.

Um, there are some very serious. Just thinking, thinking that, you know, believing in your whole heart that things are that serious and then just rage quitting. Yeah.

and not leaning in and trying. Do you really think that the rage quit method is? I don't know. I mean, some of these organizations are really big, and if you're at a certain level, it can be very hard to actually get things done in a large organization. So you can be there and say, like,

yeah, I've been sending a Slack message and emailing the whole executive team every day that this is the thing that I want to have happened, and it's not happening. And, like, I don't have the authority within this particular role, to actually have the change. People sort of tend to think,

oh, if you work for the company, you can exact your will, but that's not true. Like, you can work in the marketing organization and think you want to run billboards in, you know, Tallahassee, Florida,

and not be able to get that done because someone higher up than you said, no, we're not doing billboards in Florida, right? Like, things get vetoed for a variety of reasons. So it's not like, you know, you just take a job at a 5,000 person company and then you can just do whatever you want.

That's not the way companies work. It's, yeah, it's weird, weird time. We'll see. But there are serious, there are serious, like, regulatory frameworks for not allowing collusion between big companies. And so we might wind up in this other weird scenario where if all the big labs are like, yes, okay, the government's not stepping into regulating, we're going to self-regulate,

we're going to work together, then that could actually be a legal problem because you're not allowed to price fix. You're not allowed to collude with your, that is, like, textbook antitrust, right? And then the other thing is that there's this weird dynamic I've seen playing out where people, the AI leaders make a prediction. And then the outsiders criticize that prediction is like they're only saying that to raise the next round. Or they're not, they're only saying that. And this is the same thing with like all the labs we're saying like, we want regulation. And then and then they're only saying that for, you know, regulatory capture.

And it's like regulatory capture might be a side effect of regulation. but the labs can still want it. And now I'm seeing people online look at what's happening and say, we do need regulation and I'm willing to put up with that regulatory capture that may happen under that scenario. And so there's all these weird like predictions that happen way too early for everyone to digest because the people inside the lab see things much earlier and understand, oh yeah, okay, the next leg up is going to work. The agentic era is going to arrive. Swarms are going to be a thing.

And we're on more on track to solve this. Anyway, Jordy, one last thing, and then we'll bring in. One last thing. One last thing. Friend of the show, Bucco Capital, quoted Evan with his 10% prediction and said, hey, quote, Hey, Dario, congrats again on the great quarter. Nice to see Enterprise reacceleration. Hoping you could provide a little color on that 10% extinction number in some of the puts and

takes that might have on further enterprise adoption. And then just a quick follow up after. Yeah, what are enthropic earnings calls going to be like? It's just going to be CFO and Dario or are there Daniela going to be on? I don't know. It's like that that's not that crazy to imagine that that happens. That's like a thing that happens on the call. Very, very odd.

I mean, I guess you do have like defense tech companies that have earnings calls and or defense primes and they make it asked about geopolitical things that are pretty heady. I don't know. Anyway, we'll figure it out. In the meantime, 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. Up next, we have David Khan from Sequoia Capital to talk about the state of AI. Good news.

There's lots happening. There's plenty to talk about David. Anything going on. Welcome back to your show. Thanks so much for helping out. How you doing? I'd see you guys again. You guys got a lot of range from Zucks Castle to P. Doom.

There's a lot of range. There's a lot of range. You think he's got a bunkey in the castle? Or do you think he has enough bunkeys? It seems likely. I think he's got a doomsday dungeon. Dungeon? Okay.

The doom dungeon to go with Zuck's bunky. Yeah. He's bunky. Anyway, what is on the top of your mind? Because there's so many different things happening in the applicationally. We had cognition on. Harvey just raised a bunch of money. Like, things are going really well with diffusion

and the actual application of the technology, there's value, jobs apocalypse is delayed. And should P. Doom be factored into financial models for Series A investments? Yeah. Well, I think broadly in AI right now, I mean, the thing that seems really interesting to me is just the concentration of capital

going into these big companies. It does seem like the thing top of mind for me is just like the way the venture landscape has changed. When you think about doing this job five, six years ago, you had 100 interesting companies that everybody was looking at and you're trying to find the next one and that's still happening. And yet so much of the conversation today is about the top 10 companies. Yeah.

And then. On that point, is the biggest, is the concentration of capital into opening I Anthropic, maybe XAI, SpaceX 2, is that the biggest driver or is when you're talking about reshaping venture, I've been much more keyed in on the fact that you get hugging face and open router. And there are now many decacorn liquidity events. But I would think changes the underwriting if you're a VC and you're like, yeah, it's an early round. It's a billion dollar valuation. But there are plenty of examples of 10x returns at this scale. Well, I think, I mean, to me, that's always been the case.

We were early investors in Hugging Face. And I think there's always been this thesis on you have a big community and you have a lot of bottom up adoption and that there's a lot of option value in those type of companies. I think you'll see that get reflected back into the market where there's always these companies where investors ask 100 questions about what does this become, and yet you just have so much sucking sound from the market that those are going to become interesting companies. And it's so hard to be relevant and build something important. And I think HuggingFace did that and OpenRouter did that.

And so I think they'll continue to be examples of that. The thing that's interesting to me just in this moment, and it's like the fall of 2026, we're about to see these IPOs, is this precipice of moving from so much capital. And honestly, this is not even like a tech market, VC market thing. Like the entire universe of capital has concentrated on this one sliver of the market, which is kind of pre-IPO, late stage AI companies. And we're about to see that transition into the public market. And so I don't think anybody knows how exactly that's going to play out. But it does feel like we're on the precipice of something pretty interesting.

It is wrong to think that it will play out as a binary one-day liquidity wave, correct? because there will be lockups and then many LPs will receive their stakes and want to hold some venture capital firms registered investment advisors will hold as well. So we're looking at like how exactly does that change the market? Because there will be the optionality of liquidity, but not necessarily actual cash on balance sheets ready to go into the next generation of startups. Yeah. I mean, one thing I've been thinking about it, you guys remember 2021, you had like crowd

strike and data dog were public and then you're investing in like private crowd strike and data dog right there was data bricks right and you could go invest in data breaks and it was the same business follow you sort of understood how this thing was going to trade when it was liquid and I think that's what's that's what's interesting about AI right now is like there's no real call of like comps for any of these private companies but as soon as one of these companies let's say Anthropic is the first ticket out as soon as one of these companies gets out then I think you actually have a better valuation framework for the rest of the market and so I think it is a healthy thing for the

market when you kind of can look at the liquid, you can look at the illiquid. You see how these things trade and it will provide a lot of clarity, I think, to the private market. Why is, why is SpaceX not a good comp for Anthropic, Open AI, and then even the smaller firms? I think it is. I think SpaceX was the beginning of this. Obviously, it's held up really well and for all the volatility and every day. My brother and I always joke of like, you know, every day you see a news headline that's like stock was up 2% and it's like stock's up and 2% every day. Nothing happened. There's always like some reason why it happened, by the way. You know, it's like, oh, when I haven't done.

I mean, SpaceX has held up well. You know, there have been liquidity unlocks. Everyone was super worried going into the liquidity unlocks in the media and nothing. It was like a non-event, you know, we're still. I remember the day of the big unlock somehow traded up like 7% if I remember correctly. Probably like a short squeeze for all these guys are shorter than they got squeezed out. Yeah. So I do think SpaceX is the bellwether.

And it's not, to your point, it's not going to be a one-day event. But I think it's an exciting time that these companies are growing so, so fast. I think there's a lot of demand for these companies, and it's going to be interesting to see that play out. I think the second thing that we're paying attention to you, and I think a lot of investors are focused on is just like the full stack of the data center build out that's happening. Yes. I wrote this blog post maybe a year and a half ago, server steel and power are kind of the three pillars. Obviously, everyone's paying attention to the server side, which is chips. Steel side is the industrial side.

You know, you have Elon now making his own gas turbines. So there's a lot of emphasis on the industrial revolution component of this where, you know, we're at, of we can't make more of the components that go to data centers. And then of course, the power piece where everyone's looking at, hey, we know how to get power for the next, there's no more power for the next, you know, 24 months. And what are the timelines? And

with these cap-x, these big cab-ex projects, you have to plan two, three, four years out. Who even knows what the world's going to look like, two, three, four years from now? So I think that, you know, deeper below the, you know, cusp of opening Ianthropic, the frontier models, just all the things that make them possible. And I think the market is pretty well

educated on the compute market now. And investors are familiar with all parts of the stack, but I think there's going to be a lot of innovation all across that. Do you think that the opportunity in the grid opportunity in power plays out more like the neocloud market than the rocket launch market? Like I've always said like, ah, it'd be amazing if we had an Elon of solar or even an Elon of nuclear. And there's some nuclear companies that are doing really well.

Some of those founders could go on to build like the trillion dollar energy. company. But it feels like everyone's focused on it. There's so much capital flowing in energy. Default would be very oligopolistic. A bunch of great outcomes, but not this winner take-all behemoth. But what's your model for where energy and grid buildout goes? Yeah, my mental model is probably closer to the Elon case than NeoCloud case. And I can explain why. I think on the Neocloud side, the primary innovation was financing. That's that sort of how I look at it. It's like real estate, private buy a bunch of chips. Yeah, exactly. Like, we're buying a bunch of chips from Jensen. And Jensen, to his credit, was an amazing player in the ecosystem and has helped really build the ecosystem.

He made Corey of what Corey Viz today. There was sort of this moment where Corey realized we can buy these chips. You can finance them with Blackstone. Somebody's going to finance the GPUs. So there's a lot, a lot of financing innovation. Now there's a lot of companies that have followed suit. Obviously, you need to be a good dealmaker. But in some ways, you know, you could start a neocloud tomorrow. You know how to do it. Getting access to power is hard. It's not easy. But there's 15 neoclods. going to be more. I think my contrast, and my partner, Sean McGuire, always has a great framework around this on the hardware side. He wrote this hardware manifesto long before hardware was cool. And he had this concept of, you know, in hardware, there's potential energy. And these hardware

companies spend five, six, seven, eight years building this potential energy. And it's because they're doing real, very difficult R&D work. And at some point, that potential energy converts into kinetic energy. And that's when, you know, stock prices move. And you see that with SpaceX, which took 24 years to big in these harbor companies. And so at Sequoia, as we're looking at the energy ecosystem, we've sort of chosen a few places to make investments. Sean was on the show talking about Valor, which is our nuclear investment. Last week, we announced our investment at a company called Form Energy, which is doing

grid scale batteries. That's a company. It was founded by the guy who ran the energy business. He actually started the energy business at Tesla, a guy named Jetman Chang, who is probably one of the top three battery experts alive today. So just a very, very strong team. And they're nine years in. They spent nine years building these billion-dollar batteries.

They just signed up a big project with Google earlier this year. And then you ask yourself, okay, well, we're going to have a lot of solar and wind, or we're going to have a lot of batteries on the grid. I think the answer is yes. And then you have a company that spent nine years building IP to go put those batteries on the grid and then this unique moment to go scale that up for AI. So I think there's going to be, to your question, like I think there's going to be three, four, five interesting kind of companies with deep,

deep IP that you can go invest in. But I think it's different from the neocloud space where what you really need is capital and access to GPUs. Whereas on the grid side, you actually need, you ideally want some real fundamental IP that is difficult. And then, of course, you need access to capital, right? So I think on the nuclear stuff, what's interesting and a lot of these companies, you need to raise billions of dollars before you get to the promised land.

And so that alone, one thing I say to founders, I meet a lot of seed stage founders in hardware. And I'm like, even if I think your IP is amazing, I can't invest if I don't think you can raise a billion dollars. Sure. Because you just won't get there, right? And you'll end up getting consolidated. And so access to capital and consolidating capital obviously is an important part of building these companies as well. So what are you looking for?

Like what are the tells of a founder who can raise a billion dollars? Is it great storyteller? Is it just actual? I mean, Isaiah is like a great example because even early on at the seed stage, like honestly, I look at the gundo crew and I look at Augustus and Isaiah and their ability to sell you their vision was just on another level even before they had raised like $10 million. Like when they were raising their first round, they were just different. Like they had a natural talent and then they've refined that and you have to be in a category that allows you to sell this vision of a trillion dollar opportunity, a hundred billion dollar opportunity. what that is. But I think you have that like natural talent and selling ability that is somehow

inherent to some people. Like there are people that are just way less compelling naturally and they get more compelling over time because they get more confident in their business and round after round and hundreds of pitch meetings and meetings with candidates and they just get better and better and then some people just start on, you know, at the 10 yard line and they just refine it a little bit and then they can go from raising the $5 million round to raising a billion dollars. In our partner meeting, we actually talked about this a lot. I mean, actually, this is probably the most important question

that you have to get right in early stage investing. The framework we often use is, would you go work for this person? Because I think everything is sort of subsumed in that. Like if other people have to be willing to go work for this person, the decision of whether to go work for person is effectively putting 100% of your equity in this one company, right? So would you put 100% of your equity in this company?

and often, you know, we had Mateo, the Form Energy CEO, come in. You have people kind of come and say, wow, like this person seems really serious. This person seems like they're, you know, they have an incredible track record. In his case, he had built the energy business of Tesla. They sort of done something that's really impressive early on in life. And I believe, and then there's a clarity of thought component, which is, so sometimes pictures are coherent and sometimes they're not coherent, right? Like, there's sort of a coherent story, which is like, okay, you know, we're Form Energy's

building an iron air battery. Iron's really cheap. Air's really cheap. That is why they're building an iron air battery, right? It's so simple and yet kind of makes sense. And then it's like, well, why do we need batteries? Well, you know, there's no sun out at night. You know, it's really simple things. And I think something we look for in a lot of these conversations with the founders is a priority of thought. If you can articulate to an investor who's not the most sophisticated, the investors are never the most sophisticated people around the table, if you articulate to an investor, a very clear articulation of why this vision makes sense, why your plan makes sense, then you're going to be able to articulate that to an employee. And then we have people like Sean who have PhDs in physics and

incredibly deep on the science and technology behind it. And you sort of marry those two things. And I think that's kind of how we make these decisions. And we spend a lot of time with people. We spent a lot of time getting to know the founders as well. So Mateo, I had known for six years before he invested. Sean knew Isaiah for a long time before we invested. Yeah, that's right. You're not making the decision in a single pitch. How are you thinking about trying to time the acceleration of the real world. Right now, it feels like it's much faster to do things on your computer, and it's creating efficiencies and a bunch of people and companies and all these things, but we're not

seeing the kind of GDP growth that has at least been predicted, and it feels like in order to have that, we're going to need to see one of general advancements of models and and AI models that can actually be a drop-in sort of addition to your team or replacement or whatever that ends up being. But it feels like we're going to need to make a lot of, do a lot of things in the real world to feel that acceleration. And even with, you know, the launch of Astra, we haven't actually played this video on the show yet today, but somebody had basically hooked up Astra like, and it can just drive your

car now, right? And it's not designed to, you know, it wasn't something that the model was designed to do, but the models are getting sufficiently advanced at understanding the world. And it feels like we're on the cusp of this like acceleration of the real world, which I think is going to be way, it's very a magical experience to like, say, generate me an image of this scene in my head and be able to see it on your screen. It's going to be a hundred times more magical to be like, make this thing in the world. And then it just makes it, right? and that can be applied to real estate, to building widgets, you know, the list goes on and on. But robots building other robots and building things, I feel like will be the greatest investment cycle ever and much more exciting for normal people than just, hey, we made this software feature, you know, in two weeks versus, you know, 20 weeks. Two thoughts on that.

I mean, one is, I think it's so important to synchronize the timeline of your investment with. the timeline. It's your point on like, you need, you need to understand when the market opportunity is going to convert. And ideally, you're synchronizing the timeline of the company with the timeline of the market. So, for example, if you're trying to solve AI power and you're starting today, it's kind of late. We need more power like literally in a year. So it's like, hopefully you've been working on that problem already for a few years. If you're trying to solve nuclear and that's a 2040s problem, great. You can synchronize the timeline of being an early stage company chasing an opportunity that is really going to hit its inflection in the 2040s.

So I think that synchronization matters. And then I think the second thing, you know, it is interesting that VCs have really shifted toward hardware investing, right? Like, there's this broader trend. I think Andrew came on the show and talked about cent cut, like we've been doing a lot of stuff in the hardware, reindustrialization space. Part of that is because of this feeling that the timelines are so fast in the digital world that it's hard to create moats and it's hard to create value. So I think there's a reason why in hardware there's a feeling that you can create modes over many, many years.

And eventually, obviously, the ultimate mode to your point is going to be the machine that makes the machine, right? It's the reindustrialization of this country. And I hope we're going to get there. I think we're going to get there. I do think sci-fi kind of preempts reality. And so Isaac Asimov obviously imagined the most in I robot, the most valuable company in the world is a company that makes all the robots. And there's a reason, I think, a lot of investors own Tesla for that reason,

because I think that he's going to win on Optimus. So anyways, I think there's a lot of companies that should benefit from acceleration in the physical world. And there's a lot of investment going in there. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, working it down for us. I'm excited to have you back. soon. Always a good time.

Great to see you. Have a great rest of your day. I appreciate the takes. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about console. Console built AI agents that automate 70% of ITHR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We have Mikey Shulman, co-founder, CEO of Suno here with us in the WERG. Let's bring him in. I go.

I go. I go. Yes, since, I think since you came on the show last, we have all been completely one-shotted by Suno. It's time to talk about Suno safety. We come into the studio. We're blasted Suno songs. We have a lot of fun with them. Make a Suno song for our friends,

whatever the news is of the day. We're having a great time. But how are things going with you? Much better now that I know that you guys are enjoying the product. I will say, okay, I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you, like, I'm going to give you, I'm going to tell you one thing.

I'm going to tell you another thing. I'm going to tell you another thing. Okay. This is a compliment sandwich? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, compliment sandwich. You don't need to compliment sandwich me. That's fine. No, no, no. So one, the product is like the AI, you know, is probably the AI product that has brought me the most belly laughs. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a joy to use daily user. Like, we have so much fun with it on the team. Yep. I've pulled it up in situations in my own home that I think are hilarious to me, less, less funny. to members of my family.

Sure. Anyways, the product is just, like, amazing. It's wonderful. I get so much joy out of it. I think the software quality is bad in the app. Like, I think that it... Not on the model side. Not on the model side.

Like, the model is amazing. Like, the things that matter are, like, so good. Like, it's so unbelievably fast. And I haven't even tried the new model yet. Yes. But the actual software, I think you've been... Hard to navigate? No, no, no.

It just feels like... Okay. kind of buggy and it feels like you guys feels like you've been vibe code and too hard. Okay. I want you guys to like, you know, basically do some cycles on just cleaning it up a little bit. Okay. Okay. More optimized.

What do you think? That's a good compliment sandwich. Let me, um, let me say actually, I only got bread on one half. The final bread. And it's amazing. No, no, no. No, the actual quality of the, of the output is, is at the level of listable. Whereas like video generator is, you know,

you're looking at it and like no matter how much ever you put in it's still like not quite there this is like it passes the touring test of like listenable so you can have fun with it anyway continue i appreciate that we should probably stop releasing models while you guys are on air so you can actually have some time to test them out but um yeah well i'll just take the opportunity to talk about what we're doing today which is releasing a new model okay and so way better than the last one okay it's actually way faster and so you'll see the way that you can use it when the songs come back so faster. It's just very different, much more fun, way more expressive. Wait, it's faster? I don't know why it needs to be faster. Like, it was already fast enough because I would type the

prompt and I would click the button and then it'd be available immediately. And I think that's because you stream it in, right? Like, it's still rendering in the background. Is that right? No, we're still streaming it. Okay. But, no, when I feel like it's slow is when I'm, when I'm in one-of-these, you know, when I'm one-shot by a song, but I want to change like a certain word and the lyrics and I'm like, change this and that. Okay. Well, then you get on this, you go. get on the loop. But yeah, that was the thing when I first, when we first started using, when we first got one shot by Suna, we would fire off a prompt and put your phone down and be like, I'll come back to it and like, you know, five minutes, see where it's at. But then it'd be back

in like 20 seconds. Yeah. Okay. I think the thing that people don't realize is that when you're building things in entertainment, actually the loop speed, how quickly you give something to your users ends up mannering a lot. We can actually measure that pretty directly and we know how much it matters. But just going back to the model, so V6 is better, it's faster, the songs are way better, it's more expressive. We have V6

Wild, which is a model that makes just some of the most interesting stuff, even though the songs themselves may not be quite as good. I'm having a ton of fun with that one. And it's actually like a big day for Suno and actually for the whole music industry where

this is done in concert, in partnership with some of the best music company. in the world. It's really kind of laying out a blueprint for how we think AI can really grow the entire music ecosystem. So we're super, super excited. Yeah, we were talking to, Johnny. Say more on that. Yeah, we can go there. Sure. On the partnership. Yeah, the partnership, the partnership. Everyone's waiting for a partnership. Everyone's been interested in how the economics will flow, what happens to songs that are used in training. Obviously, there's a fair use argument. There's obviously the Spotify. I want a royalty on everything forever.

And it feels like this is the start of moving the conversation forward at least one click. This is definitely an amazing start. The way I think about this is, yes, these are now not only new business lines and new revenue streams for rights holders, for artists, for all kinds of creatives, most importantly, these are really long-term partnerships that let us build products together with the greatest music companies with the best creatives. And the thing that's so exciting is that for the first time in a long time,

there's actually product differentiation. There's the ability to build things that are just different. And I think we've been so ingrained in the last 20 years just to think about digital music as one thing. And so we'll be releasing more products in the near future

that let you play with the content from your favorite artists when those artists stopped in, when users play with their content, the revenues that are attributable to those users, a portion of that will flow to those artists. And then, again, just building more from that in the future of what should the future of music look like? What are the most engaging fan experiences? How do we pull people deeper into music

and change the place that music has in their lives to change a place that music has in culture? And the thing that's so amazing is that there's kind of acknowledgement from all sides here. Like, we have a very good start. We don't know what all of the products should look like and we're excited to build them together. How does AI video play into this? I notice that when I open Suno, I often get served a vertical video feed of other Suno creations that are often AI video animated in a pretty convincing way. Like you get a full music video basically.

Is that something that you're planning to, is it already available for everyone? Is there just a button that can make these? Or are there sort of like more pro creators that are. using outside models bringing a music video to the platform. It's a great question. Right now that is mostly creators bringing outside technologies to bear. I would just back up, though, and think the purpose of Suno is actually to inspire you to do things that you haven't done and not just to do the old thing of scrolling again.

And so what you may have noticed is those videos are actually really tailored to get you to lean in, to take a piece of content. You can actually remix it right off of that video. I think we're not used to thinking of ourselves as creators, us mere mortals. Maybe you guys are. You guys are on TV every day. Sure. But it feels amazing to be creative.

And just getting people over the hurdle of actually I am a creator and I will find it really enjoyable to be creative. That's kind of the magical spark that we're trying to bring to people. Yeah. And I have that all the time. John will send me a Suno song and I'll be thinking to myself, John, even though John, even though all I know, I know that John just wrote like a handful of sentences and he put the words and the letters in the right orders and it got that output, I'm still thinking there's a spark of like John is a genius for putting this set of ideas together. And I know that he

was like thinking about the lyrics and how to arrange it and things like that. And so that joy of creation and compacting it into something that, and again, I just, I've always seen this as like, net new, right? Like John, like the idea of like a gag song, you know, like a joke has been around forever, but but the friction to do that. I thought we were enjoying it specifically because it allowed us to go after music that was basically low tan. So we could make a song about most feared lawyer, about John Quinn, a corporate lawyer that would never exist in any timeline other than when you drop the cost of creation to effectively zero, then you can actually get this. And I thought that was just us, but when I was scrolling sooner, I saw similar experiences

happening in other pockets. Like someone made a song about the Revolutionary War and they took a bunch of history. And it's like George Washington. Have you seen this video? I don't know. But it's all animated with AI. And I was like, oh, like, this sounds like a Fourth of July banger, but it's historical. but no one is really going to sit there and arrange that.

And all of a sudden you have this like very niche overlap of like you want a July 4th hard hitting song, but you also want to learn history and like it puts it together in this really weird niche way, which I think is like happening all over the place. Yeah, look, let me say two things to that. One is I'll plug. You can go all the way down to a tam of one or two people. You guys, I'm sure, have I messages with one another. Yep.

You can actually access to No right from iMessage. if you have the latest version of the app and so it'll just be easier to interact there. Let's go. But the other thing I would say is I think maybe the best examples, I don't know if you guys saw this so-called Oreo Gate. No. Oh, this is a lady who took the text messages

from her mom's chat about her kids eating Oreos or sending Oreos to school and just using music as a platform to express, I don't know, what is special and absurd. and been all about everyday life. And when I think about what was the alternative for her to be expressive like that to use her vantage point, she basically would have had to become a stand-up comic to bring this to

life. And now you can use something like music, do this in an entirely new way. And it's something that I think like tons and tons of people really can relate to on a fundamental level. How do you think about all the ways other than speed and overall feeling of music or musical quality going from, you know, model generation to model generation. One thing I noticed with the last generation was that it would just constantly be referencing like glass in different ways. Like in a bunch of different songs, it would come back to this like, you know, the glass

shattering, you know. Yeah, I was talking to John. To me, to me, it was like a tell that like it was like, Suno developed its own turns of phrases. Yeah, it's not this. it's that or you're absolutely right. Like the Suno version of that was different, but it seemed to exist. How much are you hunting for those tells? You know, it's a really tricky thing in music, unlike, let's say, the big labs, LLMs, intelligence,

there are no benchmarks. And so these questions of taste end up mattering a lot, lot more. And even just measuring these things is really hard. So we are always on the hunt for, kind of that telltale sign. And then, yeah, there's a good amount of judgment that goes into how do we fine-tune, how do we post-train these models.

Actually, what we're releasing today, having both a V6 and a V-6 Wild, V-6 Wild being very differently post-trained to be way more interesting and basically a little less good at making full songs, is kind of a start at bridging that of how do we make sure that people actually have the most creative experience that they can?

Back on the deal with, Warner Music Group, BMG, believe, I'm interested to understand how you're talking to investors, how you see the market evolving over the long term. Because the most extreme economic share might be something like what we see with Spotify. I think they give maybe 30% of top line to artists across everything. There's a huge stake of revenue that goes to creators. Still a $100 billion company, fantastic business. We love Spotify. And I'm interested to think about as the industry outside of sooner, but just AI-generated tools,

what type of economic structure would you see landing in equilibrium? I think about this in a couple of ways. There are things where we can think about, how do we take the existing technology and really lower the cost and give it to way more people? And that's what you said before. And you would never be savering these moments if it weren't so easy to make music.

And then there's the whole, other side of things of how do we actually now apply this to markets that people couldn't even fathom before. And this is actually something that I, you know, kind of live and breathe every day. If you rewind a couple of years ago and people think music is really small, I don't want to invest in it. And then you realize that it's not just that old Tam. Actually, what we're doing is fundamentally changing how people interact with media, how people entertain themselves, and realizing that that actually is much bigger. And so to answer the question more directly, this is actually.

evolving. This is like we have some economic models now. We have a lot of alignment to build products together and figure out the economic models that go with those products instead of having to figure everything out all at once. The crazy time that we live in about AI progressing so quickly, we kind of don't have the luxury of trying to get it right in this very moment because things change so fast. What's the, what is the demand side from consumers on editability, the Pro workflow. Obviously, the model is outputting basically a complete waveform, but you can also use AI to deconstruct that into stems, into notes, into sheet music, and then a more experienced

musician can go in and make fine-grained tweaks, and just like you can generate an image and bring it in to Photoshop if you want. What is demand like? What are you building there? Where do you see that side of the business going? We have a pretty broad product suite here from you can type in a few words or access it from iMessage all the way down to Suno Studio, which is our digital audio workstation, which is really professional workflows. What we've seen is actually by making those workflows not only different and powerful, but actually much more fun, more of the professional tooling ends up just appealing to average people who fall in love with making music. I think this is a lot like I might buy the signature guitar of my favorite guitarist.

I don't think I'm going to be a famous guitarist, but it actually makes me feel really good, knowing that I use the same tools that the greats use, and it makes me feel better about my creativity. And I think that it's only for lack, or it's a failure of imagination to think I can't actually fall in love with digital tools in the same way. Like, I know I'm using the same tool set,

at least in part, that makes some of the best music. I feel more creative as a result. I fall in love with making music, and there are virtual cycles there. What are you learning from the early sparks, of progress in AI video. I was trying to think about the biggest AI video, the most viral AI video from last year.

And I couldn't put my finger on it easily. I can think about the previous year because that was Harry Potter Balenciaga. That was the moment we were like, wow, this really worked. And I think for this year music, like rubbers by Phoenix Flexing, it's now out there. that it was AI generated.

I don't know if he used Suno or not, but it sparked the conversation. And then I'm wondering what next year looks like if we are trying to pattern match against the ebbs and flows of progress in AI video. It's a great question. I almost think video is having a super interesting moment right now as there's a lot of new models

and they're getting more convincing. They're getting easier to use. And so we look at that very closely. I think the one may be easy thing for me to say here is that actually speed ends up mattering a lot and as it becomes more affordable to really iterate a lot on video because if you remind, let's say, six months,

it's actually kind of prohibitive to make a full-length video. I would imagine that we're going to see some very interesting cultural moment. And I think of these less as technology per se. It's actually, you gave the technology to somebody who has an interesting, point of view who's able to express that point of view to the world with these tools.

And so I think it's very hard to predict exactly which point of view that will be. It's like a very cultural zeitgeisty moment. Yeah, I remember I talked to Ahmad Masjad. There are going to be, there's going to be at least one very big cultural moment. I will tell you that. That's all I can say right now, but there's going to be a big cultural moment involving music and technology. Yeah, I was talking about Ahmad Mustafa stock after Stable Diffusion launched. years ago, this was maybe 20, 23, 2022.

And he was predicting that by 2025, there would be full movies that were AI generated. And we kind of got there, but they didn't really break through. But AI video is actually really successful. It's just taken a very different approach, and it's diffused in an interesting way where it's making its way into VFX workflows all over the place. and it's become very useful,

but there hasn't been like the fully AI-generated movie that is so good, it gets over the hill of like, oh, I don't want to like it, but I have to like it because it's good. And I'm wondering if that will be what next year in AI music looks like.

It's a tool that's in every studio, every production, and it's something that certain artists take off the shelf occasionally, but it's not fully AI-created albums that are out, but it's also not fallen by the wayside. Is that a reasonable prediction, or do you think that's too conservative?

No, I think that's actually not too conservative. For the reason that an album is a, or even a song, is a point of view. And it's very hard to just one-shot the point of view that is going to really resonate with the whole world. Yeah. It does happen. but I think of this as it is a process of refining your own point of view over and over again

and you may use an AI tool set you may not use an AI tool set and so like I think that you know a year from now it's actually quite mundane that there's a lot of AI in music it's like used in every single part of the production chain some of it will be sooner, some of it will not be sooner but the idea that like there's just going to be

charts full of one shot at AI bangers to me actually kind of misses the point of, it doesn't express the point of view of the artist. And I think that this is kind of a, this is kind of a faulty comparison to, let's say, you know, we just saw Open AI maybe prove a huge math theorem. And like this is something that is long-running, that is verifiable.

Music is just not that way. And so I'm not sure we expect to see the same types of things. Wait until I'm spinning up one million agents to command. One million. 10 billion instances of Suno to create the gigabanger chart topper that sits at Billboard Hot 100 number 1 for 100 years straight. Yes, yes. The final song. I'm sure you can do it.

What was your takeaway from like the Astro launch over the weekend? Because lots of like blender models, lots of video games created. And I feel like the answer isn't going like like. A million one-shotted web games were spawned this weekend, and I could not be more optimistic about GTA-6 blowing out the predictions. At the same time, I feel like as soon as I stop playing GTA-6, I'm going to get a text from a friend with a really hilarious micro game that they vibe-coded. That's GTA-6, but for TBPN or for tech or something. And I'm going to be, oh, this is cool. This is the special thing that only makes sense to me and you.

And so is that how you process that, or is there anything new on the overall AI capability side that's exciting to you these days? Maybe I'm too dumb to predict the future. So I would just look at, let's say, the last revolution there, which would be Roblox letting people really start to make their own games. And at the beginning, it starts really small and people are really just playing their own games and eventually the technology progresses where you get more of that power law, you get people playing other people's games, et cetera, and then you make an ecosystem there.

It's not crazy that we'll see something similar there. But again, I think a game is a very, it's a game's purpose is to be played by people. And it is very different from the general intelligence model of things. And so I think it's hard to really apply logic from one into the other. Yeah. Do you think that how much should we read into the iPhone Duo launch? Do you think Apple's so sunopilled that they want, you know, every person to have more real estate to be able to make music? What's your read?

I really hope Apple's so soonopilled. You know, humbly, I don't think we're the reason that they're making that they're making that phone. But if you want to suggest that, I'm very happy to take it. I'm suggesting that. As somebody who makes mobile apps, do you have you guys, are you guys already looking into like the implication? of this and how it'll, like, how you're going to need to change your application to be able to adapt to this kind of new. Might just be one prompt, make it work on the duo.

For a lot of developers, that might be the answer. Yeah, absolutely. I think about this as opportunity of if there is different interaction with your phone, we actually are able to now inspire you at different times. And like, you can take out your phone and do something without unlocking it. you can use one camera versus the other camera. I don't know what the plans are for the Vision Pro, but when I think about a final form of Suno,

it's actually, how do I get a Vision Pro app that I can put on and conduct an orchestra? And so I think when we think about interfaces, this is where in the creativity game, we will just work on forever. You know, there's no end to working on how we delight people by letting them interact with technology in new ways. Last question.

Have you ever, have you guys ever run any building? billboards or wheat pasting campaigns. Not that I know of why you, if you have good ideas at the billboards, we should buy it. Well, I just feel like you should rerunning a billboard that says make a song with a sentence. And you should just go, go hard on that. Because it's just like people, people need to experience the magic of this product. It's just like, we got to not get people to pick up their phones while they're driving. That would be, that would be bad.

But we got to place those billboards in the right place. Everybody's in Waymo's now. Tesla cybercabs, maybe... Bolt case for billboards. Waymos, you can... No, no, no. It's actually a bear case because everyone's going to be on their phone. Yeah, maybe. It's going to be rough.

Anyway, thank you so much. The future is bright. You know, you're going to be sitting in your way mo. You're going to have a lot more time to be creative. Way better than driving. Way safer than driving. Yeah. Yeah, you say nothing for my end thanks. And then you go back to making Suno songs. Great to see you, Mikey. Congrats on the launch.

I'm excited to try the new model. A little high this time. Have a good one. Go by. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

Thieves raided the Renoir Museum in the latest French art heist. We'll get to that story after we chat with Keith Rabeau. managing director at Coastal Ventures, returning to the show for the fourth, fifth, sixth time. It's always great shot. Keith, how are you doing? Great, it's great to be back. Have you been following this French art heist?

Is this bearish for France? I have not been following it. I don't know how I missed it. I was just in France last week and somehow. Oh, you were in France last week. Are you guilty? Let's figure it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, you never know. Maybe I was stealing, purloining some, you know, artworks. Okay, okay. Well, you're back in a market. The private markets are too frothy. I'd rather swipe some fine art. Yeah. Are they too frothy?

It feels like there's a lot of value. A lot of the companies, they're growing revenue. The products work. They're magical sometimes. Is it too frothy right now? Well, I think the revenue traction is real, as you pointed out. And then there's a variety of different categories of companies. Some are producing meaningful margin on that revenue and others are not.

And so I don't think you can paint with one broad brush and say, hey, all these companies are worth X or Y or not worth X or Y. You have to kind of understand the fundamental drivers. But many of these companies have significant traction. I'm not worried about that. And, you know, I don't think multiples are the right way to evaluate private companies typically anyway. But if you work backwards from 2030 and say which of these companies are going to be sustained,

which ones have durable advantages, as I like to talk about it, or communicated through accumulating advantages, that's less clear. The attraction is off the charts by any historical norms, the ability to go to 100 million in revenue from two years or so, or hundreds of millions and four years, basically unprecedented. But you still do have to ask questions about what's the sustainability of that revenue, not just because customers may or may not change their mind or there may be new competitors, but the way the ecosystem evolves around AI is not at all easy to, forecast. So we struggle with this and debate this in our partner meetings constantly.

The founders are impressive. The teams are impressive. The revenue and the adoption is impressive. And even the usage often is impressive. But if you still say, is this going to be an iconic company that's around for 20, 30 years. In many cases, the question is not so, the answer is not so obvious. Now, if you play your cards correctly, you may be able to get acquired. And that can be fine. And it feels like the powers that be an AI, I'm thinking of one guy, I won't name him, is almost not willing to let any AI companies fail at this moment. At the moment, he is playing an interesting suit.

That company means money. Yeah. They're growing really fast and they have lots of profits. If you're in those shoes, you know, and your revenue depends upon people buying what you sell that are mostly AI companies, the strategy is incredibly coherent. Now, they are starting to move from being a platform company to a product company. You can see it with the recent acquisition. As they start shipping products, maybe they ship products in other areas, they will compete

with more people than they ever have before. Right now, any AI growth is great for Nvidia. But as they start having their own products, that may change how people perceive them and how they perceive others. And I think to continue and sustain their growth for whatever. of reasons they believe they need to have their own products. Yeah, and there's one thing that's interesting is there's so many companies that are marked up into the tens of billions of dollars that are actually insignificant to the overall AI trade,

but their valuations are such that if one were to fail, you would have all over the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, all the newspapers, $30 billion company, you know, it would be like a we work with Theranos level failure, which, it would be for a very different reason, but like it would be that big. Yeah, and I think that the market would be able to process it generally. But like you said, there's just when the cash is flowing, there's an incentive to make sure that, hey, let's buy this company an extra two years, right? Even when there's no other investors lining up to back the company.

Yeah, I mean, it's in self-interest. The longer the AI wave continues, the best. better it is for Nvidia, without doubt. And the bigger of the amplitude, almost surely, is better for Nvidia, unless and until there's a better version of Nvidia or, you know, somebody obviates their competitive advantages, which could happen. It always happens in technology at some point. You know, we're seeing this play out now that what's the future Google? Who knows? But that was, you know, even five years ago, even formula-in that question kind of felt silly. But now it feels very realistic that, you know, a chat or similar interface may displace all of searches.

I mean, the advertising revenue will lag. And so the business itself will show signs of life for a while. But people I know, and not all my friends and colleagues in different fields are tech forward, have substituted huge fractions of what used to be searches with things they do with Chachi Chiby Yeah. Yeah. I don't think that's provostable.

Yeah, the last, you know, obviously I'm, I'm, you know, quite, uh,

quite biased here, at least like, uh, but I went from last year, not making any real, like, commercial decisions with, with AI to suddenly everything I buy.

All that research is happening within chat chb-t. And I feel like I'm buying better, better products and I'm having a better experience, right? I don't need to, I have, like very specific, you know, I have very specific things. Like my frustration with Amazon was always, I just want to buy products that where the

company has been around for 50 years, right? I don't want to buy the drop shipped thing with a name that doesn't make any sense that that's going to fail within the first year or whatever. I want to buy the thing that I'm willing to pay 30% more to buy the thing where the company has been around for 50 years. And so now I can just- Now you can afford it. It's great.

Yeah, but I'm talking, yeah. The example he uses like paper towels or like the paper towel holder. That's very funny. Anyways, I wanted to get right into how you are, like, what is your, like, how much are you pricing in a, like a data center freeze or real friction to bringing in. And like, what is your mental model for what happens then? Because on one hand, existing compute that's in a powered shell becomes potentially a lot more valuable and starts to trade hands as certain companies are able to monetize it, you know, much better than others. But then there's potentially, you know, millions of GPUs that aren't plugged in that the world is figuring out how do we shuffle these around the world to get them to places that they can be plugged in.

And the capital flows that happen there and the impacts to the labor market. Like there's so many downstream implications of that. And when you have both sides of the political aisle that are realizing, hey, I can get points for pushing back here, then it's hard to imagine that there isn't like very real friction ahead. So let me simplify sort of the AI exposure first and then come back to that. the most devastating thing to the frothy hype and the traction that we're seeing with AI and the funding of it from VCs would be of Anthropic and our Open AI have a blip in their public exits, their IPOs. Do they have to show metrics over the next month to first few quarters that cause people to value either company less than the current belief that they will trade in the trillions? is so they could have a miss on revenue tracks, they can miss on margin, something, something like that would be catastrophic and it immediately reset virtually all valuations in the AI world and probably deprive half the companies that are raising money from access to capital. Well, yeah, and I've been asking that.

I don't know that's going to happen. I'm not saying that's going to happen or as likely. And I think if they miss, it would be more on the margin side than on the revenue side right now. But if they do, everybody, is predicating the idea, their valuations and new investments in dollars on the idea that you can build a trillion dollar company within the life cycle of a venture fund. There's two examples currently and there's several companies that people believe have the potential to get there. If that changes and you cannot sort of predict that more trillion dollars or companies can be created, then the valuations that people are investing in the dollars that are being invested do not make that much sense. Let me backtrack one second.

Basically, in the history of venture, a very successful company was $10 to $50 billion, maybe $100 billion at the max. That's like a home run. That's like we all dreamed about sort of thing. It is possible now that at least one order of magnitude, possibly two orders of magnitude, have been added to the upside potential of a startup, which does adjust the prudence and irrationality of a VC investing, $50 million at $500 million or whatever the case. is compared to, you know, when I invested in an Airbnb, it was at 1.7 million per year post.

1.7. Yeah. So, like, that role may or may not be coming back, but certainly by adding a zero or two zeros to the upside potential, you can rationally look yourself in the mirror and, you know, say, okay, sure, I'll take a shot on goal here. But how do some of these investors, and I'm seeing these rounds, let's call them like series B and C stage rounds where a company has a much richer revenue multiple than, let's say, the labs, leading labs, and they're growing, like, often, like, not even necessarily

as well, and you know they're not as talent dense, and all these rounds are getting funded. And I, and that is, that's like the, that's like the place of frothiness that I don't understand, where I don't understand how. I don't understand how you look at the business and say, like, oh, yeah, this has a path to a trillion when it's like, okay, every single person working at this company tried to get a job at like four other companies, couldn't and then is now here. And that doesn't mean they're not great. And they could very well build a billion dollar company. But I just, I don't know how you underwrite these things to that trillion dollar mark. That's crazy.

No, it's a very astute observation, nor do I, which is hopefully on your list of companies that are getting five. that have those three criteria. None of them are, none of them are in my investment. But if you told me, like, hey, company is growing less rapid clip in the frontier labs with less density of talent. At lower scale. At like 100x lower scale. And what's a higher multiple? My answer would be no.

You know, I have some competitors I'll introduce you to if you want. You know, and I'll be in France. stealing some fine art. I'll go find a startup in France. There's one or two, apparently, that are quite good. But the fundamental driver, though, you identified, which is key, and a lot of people lose side of, so it's worth double-clicking on. The critical density of talent does matter.

And so if a company is in the short term at low-scale, growing at X-Clip, that's not that critical. If they have the right team assembled against the right challenges, that is investable. you know, up to some dollars amount. And whether you're like multiplying, you know, using metas multiple or Open AIs implied multiple or Nvidia's multiple doesn't matter in the earlier stages if the team is stellar. But your point is the team is often not stellar. And it doesn't have to mean the same people that would work at Anthropic for Open AI.

But they have to be world class at what they do at their craft and you have to be able to, you know, assemble a density of them. In some ways, you want to find people who are mispraced. and that the labs don't necessarily value you as much as they should. And there's an archetype you can scale a company on, but you still have to believe you're scaling with incredible talent, like top one basis point, 10 basis point on some dimensions, to really believe that you're going to create a trillion dollar business from scratch in less than a decade.

Do you think that differences in philosophy, whether it's P. Doom or AGI pildness, can create subpockets of talent density? We just had Scott Wu on the show, brilliant mathematician, cognitions on a tear. I don't know if this is just because he's at the application layer, but not a lot of doom, a lot of optimism because he's interfacing with the real world. And I love that energy. And you see with Ramp too where incredible talent density, but not of the crazy doom scenario, weird. Like, you know, that pocket is a different group.

Those folks are really talented, but they have different beliefs. And so I'm wondering if there's like the hyper talent actually scatters across different pockets of philosophical alignment. Absolutely. You know, it drives back from Peter's old expression of, you know, your building a cult. Yeah. Well, think about cults have tenants. Yeah. And so some of that is a philosophy of life.

Yeah. And I think that's right. Like, ramp, we're optimistic about the future. Yeah. We use technology to improve society. We're optimistic about, A, our ability historically to do that and our ability in the future of you. That's why people come to work at ramp and that's what they do every day. And all of them are thinking like the world's going to be better than it was a decade ago and it's going to be better than it was 20 years ago.

And we're going to wave our magic wand to make it better if we have to. Yep. Yep. I'm a firm devotee of the cult of saving time and money. That is for sure. But what do you make of the conversation around Doom? There's been this back and forth around regulatory. capture and the evolution of this. And I've watched some people from the outside, friends who are not in tech, but critique tech from a political angle. And they were upset about the rhetoric leading

to potential regulatory capture. But now they are worried about some of the developments and they're calling for regulation. And so they're sort of begrudgingly giving the labs their due on the calls for regulation, but how have you been processing just this year? Has it updated you at all on how we should think about the probability of the bad outcome and doom and all of that? Well, I'm an opt-I think people start often in life of, you know, orientation, optimism, or doom. Yeah. And, you know, maybe from the time they're like seven years old. I'm an optimist. I'm a tech optimist. That's what I do. If I wasn't a tech optimist, I wouldn't be investing in tech companies. And there's a question of whether these people should be building or working there

or forfeiting their equity if they really believe they're doing something that's bad or evil. In my opinion, like the world is getting a little tired of some of this because, you know, we had the boom and doom about jobs. All jobs are going away. There's no human jobs. It could still happen, but all the evidence as of today is to the contrary. Every single piece of evidence. You can look through, you can be the Sherlock Holmes, you know, look through their magnifying gas. You can't find any evidence that AI is causing creating jobs. loss of anything it's creating jobs. So, okay, so they're 0 for one, let's say, as of now.

Then they're like, oh, my God, the world's going to end. Okay, well, hard to falsify that. AI, AI jobs, at least you can falsify. You're like, no, that's not happening false. This one's a little hard to falsify. But then I think as a couple of people pushed back today online is, well, articulate how the world ends. Because then at least the precepts or the predicates, we can start trying to falsify.

And then prove or try to disprove that, you know, there's some risk there. And I do think that the reality is the world is always going to be subject to some risk. You know, people like to compare her to the advent of the nuclear bomb. And, you know, there's a very strong argument. It's not, you know, QED proven, but the nuclear bomb in many ways probably made the world more peaceful. If you went through the arc of history and like how many citizens died, you know, it's a fraction of, of the population of the globe in conflict before and after the advent of the nuclear bomb, you have a pretty strong case.

It certainly wasn't negative. And is it, but was that known that would play out that way, you know, on day one when we dropped, you know, a nuclear bomb or two in Japan? No. Even, you know, there's a scene in Oppenheimer where they don't even really know what do we do to the atmosphere and they go to consult with Einstein to make sure it's not going to blow up the world. And he's like, it doesn't give him a very compelling, like, definite answer.

sir. So, you know, like the world is free of, is not risk-free. And I think, you know, all of us make decisions every single day. We drive a car, we find a helicopter, blah, blah, blah, blah, that, you know, take that into account. So I don't think a zero-defect approach to life really works either for humans. But I think the burden is on the people arguing for regulation or slowing progress down of articulating, well, what goes wrong, why and how, and so that people can probe and push back and try to evaluate and quantify that risk. And I have yet to see a compelling answer to that.

That's not just like, oh, I know it because I was working on this. And it's really dangerous. How many of these ideas do you think? Wait, wait, hold on later on one other political point. Even if that was 100% true, the idea that politicians are going to make it better is also subject to historical debate. If you said we have a world-class problem on our hands, would you entrust it

to the federal government or to a bunch of private citizens? Not obvious. Yep. Yeah. Do you think that basically these ideas around PDUM end up in the S-1? Because I would expect them. I would expect Anthropic to

actually put this as a real risk factor. People are saying, like, oh, you know, the, you know, they got to stop the employees from posting this stuff. But if, but if it's coming top down, then then, upper SEC disclosure. It could very well end up in there. And it would be a, it used to be a securities litigator. So I can argue a couple kind of fun points on this.

You can say, hey, like if the real risk is the world's going to blow up, buying a anthropic shares is no more dangerous or risk going to buy anything else. That's a good point. It's not a risk factor associated with the anthropic. Sure. A more nuanced view might be, hey, if the political environment were to appreciate that we can. Couldn't you make the argument that the company could with a runaway AI incur such massive liability that it is a risk to the actual investment? That's probably fair and there probably will be language like that, but it'll be so toned down that most people won't even understand it.

There's an old Peter Tillion lesson here too, which is if you have like risk factors, you want the most possible risk factors. So no one can really tell which one's really important. So you might see an anthropic prospectus that has hundreds of pages of risks. So you can't like isolate. Oh, this is the one I should actually care about. Got it. But the most acute risk probably would be something like, hey, we scare enough politicians that, you know, they implement policy that's particularly in, you know, not certainly imprited. but it could, it would, it could, you know, constrain our growth.

And that is, you know, a real risk if they can't control their employee blog post or ex post sooner or later. You know, I think people are seeing through some of this. You know, there has been significant exposure of the fact that many of these anti-data center, crusades are being funded by China intentionally by our adversary. there is, you know, real proof that these data centers certainly do not waste energy, you know, waste water and things like that. It's kind of a silly, it's almost like a walking IQ test. That doesn't mean that the political class doesn't have to rebut it,

but it is kind of a walking IQ test for someone if they really believe that data centers are going to like make the world run out of water somehow. Yeah, yeah. It's very ridiculous that the origin of that is like just a simple calculation error that was off by a couple orders of magnitude and it just ran away before the horse people. Fortunately, you can use chat GPT now to solve math problems. I know. But it reveals like a different problem, which is that like people don't do the calculations.

They don't, they don't even need to. They just go off of whatever. How do you tell me about your read on the dynamic between effective altruism and venture capital because I think there's a lot of like VCs out there that are just sort of. of have like generally pretty like down the middle beliefs about the future and maybe they're generally optimistic and then you get you know the pitch from a budding young effective altruist and part of it is like you know this person is just going to be extremely generally at least we've seen points like extremely risk on it does qualify as a pretty good venture investment

but there's I feel like now there's been enough of a pattern of blowups that you need to be like kind of wary, right, where there's like extreme upside, you know, potentially, you know, your downside's capped as a VC. So you're kind of like, if you blow up, like, it's more your problem than my problem. But, but there's so much upside. And so I just think that like that specific dynamic, there will be like a book written about it. Sure. You know, fast forward 10 years, but I'm curious your view on it.

Well, I think venture when it's practiced as a craft at its. best is a matchmaking exercise between founders and a team and a vision and your sort of views about the world. So I think that some types of founders with some beliefs about the world, whether you label them, you know, affectual altruism or something else, could be a good match for a VC who sits around all day and worries about that stuff. It would be a bad match for someone at founders for, I'd say. So I think that, you know, the best relationships between a founder and their investors and a consigniary or board member, are when you have alignment, kind of double entangra,

between how you think about the world and what's good for society and how the founder does. I do not, for example, I do watch and am friendly with many people who work at prediction markets, but I personally don't believe prediction markets are good for society. I believe in the Trump quote. And actually, I actually used the line before he did. But there is just another casino for Americans at the moment. And I don't think we need more forms of speculation in the United States for normal people.

And the evidence is that, you know, 99% of the people who engage in prediction markets are going to lose money. And I don't think that's necessarily a positive, you know, thing either. I don't really love sports betting, even though I love sports. So, but that's why I would probably be a bad match for someone who wants to build polymarket, even though I like Shane or, or Kelsey, even though, you know, I hang out of territory. But it's just not what I believe that the future of the world makes the world a better place. Yeah. And I would just say that I think there's a lot of investors that have their beliefs about the way the world should be and then are willing to completely discard their values and beliefs to back companies because they're just like,

well, the return is just going to probably be so good. I got it. And I would say the percentage of investors that will discard their beliefs in order to get returns, It feels like it's like 80, 90, 95%. I agree with that assessment. It's just why do you do what you do in your professional career? And at least at KV and this is true at Founders Fund too, we wake up and say, is this going to have a positive impact in society? We have more money than we need.

We have more money to deploy and invest than we need. We could be doing lots of things with our time and we want to apply our energies to solving problems that we think would move the world forward. you know, Peter and Trey have pretty strong filters on this stuff. And Vinod and I do and I think all my colleagues at KV do. But that's not for everybody. I mean, some people, you know, work at hedge funds. I don't want to work at a hedge fund either. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is always great. Great to catch up. It's been too long. Too long. Yeah, definitely. Enjoy that art. Let's make it.

I miss the first month of you guys when I was like on every day. Yeah. Come back to you. You're always welcome. This came up. because I was like, we haven't talked to Keith. It's been way too long. It's always a good hang.

We'll talk to you, soon. Have a great rest of your week. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the Canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files

with design system context. We have David Perel here with us live in the TBPN Ultradown, David. Good to see you, man. How you doing? Not much. Hanging out, doing the news, talking about new eyes.

iPhone talking about AI. You were excited for another screen, two screens in one. Yeah, I just saw the news and the Uber over. Yeah? Yeah. You getting one? Of course. Really?

Of course. Okay, the fold thing. He's going to be writing by hand on the screen more. It does have a bookish look to it. Yeah, you don't need an iPad mini anymore, you know? Yeah. Do you do the iPad for the notes when you do an interview? Have you toyed with that?

You know how Chris Williamson, a lot of people have the iPad? Had there, not the full, I do the full computer, but. You know, I've actually gone, uh, key to a good interview. I've actually gone full smartphone. Okay. I've gone full smartphone. Interesting.

So what I do is, yeah. If you watch the interviews, on the right side, I just kind of keep the phone. And then what I can do is I can just do quick pulls of like, hey, check this thing. Check that thing. I feel like if I pull out, I feel like if I go on my computer right now, it's like, oh, he's doing something serious. But if I've pulled up my phone right now, you're like, this guy's really distracted. scrolling reels.

It feels a little disrespectful, but you've gotten over that hump. Well, the other thing is I don't do it live. So I do a bunch of editing. So I think. So you might say, hey, I'm going to look this up and then I'll hit you with me. That's what I do. I say, hey, if I'm looking something up, just keep talking, prep them on this. Cool, cool, cool, cool.

And then what I do is I watch every interview back. Which I've now done 130. So I just, that's my game film, you know. Yeah. What's been the biggest one? Dark room. Yeah, exactly. Screen on, just locked in.

Just locked in sitting there. What's been the most recent interview that, you, that you came away from being like, this is what I want the show to be. There's an interview I did with Dana Joya. He's Ted Joya's brother. You might know the substacker. And Dana is just so, so well read.

He lost a son when he lost his first son, I want to say, to sudden infant death syndrome when he was four to six months old. And you can just feel, you know, our friend Jeremy Giffon has the line where there's prefall and postfall. And you can feel when somebody is postfall, They sort of wrestled with grief.

Yeah. And then you combine that with these really well-read. And so I flew out to Sonoma. We recorded for seven hours, chopped into a three-hour interview. Wow. And it was phenomenal. You know, it was funny because you're asking about recent interview. And this is what I love about YouTube is that interview did okay.

And then the algorithm found how to distribute it like 15 months in. And now it's Rithin. So like last month, that interview was our most watched interview in terms of watch time. And it's two years old. Wow. That's fascinating. How much are you thinking about booking guests that can go viral in the YouTube algorithm? You're sitting down with Clav anytime soon? You know, there's always like these people who come off on the customer.

I don't care about that. And it's like, if you get this person this time, you got one of the first interviews, you know, playing that game. No, the game I'm trying to play is. I think Patrick O'Shaughnessy's crushed it. It's like, you know, you have these people who are coming on. You don't hear a lot of who's the guy who he did, the hedge fund guy with like John Paul. speak slowly. Paul Tudor Jones. Paul Tudor Jones, exactly.

Like, I want to do interviews like that. Totally. Right? Like, Paul Tudor Jones hasn't done a bunch of podcasts, get them on. I don't really care about having something that crushes right away. I want it to be like the Paris Review interview series where you look back and I want in 50, 60 years. People would be like, this was. Snapshot.

Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. But to give Patrick even more of his due. I feel like he has a couple of products in one, in the sense that, yes, he does those interviews where it's like, wow, I haven't heard from this person a long time. I'm so glad I did. This is amazing. But then he'll also do like a super timely interview with like Sam Altman about the news and the expectations for that company right then at the turning point. And then he'll also do, you know, a catch up with Gavin Baker regularly, just getting up to speed.

And so it feels like he has a couple series, a couple like, okay, this person's coming out of stealth and it's Gavin Huberti at etched. It's the first time you're hearing from this person. He's almost breaking the news. And I'm wondering how calcified you think about different products. If you want to add. We have a few. We have like a lightning round interview. Founder Young, not, hasn't done hours and hours of interviews.

Comes on for 10 minutes. Tell us about we hit the gong. Another person we might yap with for 30 minutes. We might have somebody in studio for an hour. We have different products. I'm wondering if you're thinking about where, how I write goes. Yes. And whether you want to have different skew.

within the main feed. Dude, 100%. Okay, so here's how I think about it. I want to get the best riders in the world. That was my first goal. And so, like, this month is Andy Weir did Project Hail Mary, Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl, Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell. It's so good.

We're like, let's get the best rider. Yeah, yeah. You've nailed it. Let's go. Wait, are you the reason that you're in L.A., J.K. Rowling's yacht is in L.A. Is it happening? You saw this, right?

I wish I was here for the big reveal. That way, the mystery yacht has been unveiled to be, I love it. But I mean, you're going to get, like, I'm just so excited for that level of interview to happen soon. And so then the game is it's like a T. So then you go up, you kind of reach the top here and then break into, I want to do music. I want to do music. I want to have screenwriters.

And then just trying to break into that. But the thing is we're kind of in a local maxima with the YouTube algorithm. Sure. So this is sort of the grand irony of the whole thing. I got into this because I love posting. Yeah. I love posting. That is my thing.

Wait, is it posting on YouTube before I'm posting? It kind of is. But the people who I, like, really feel a kindred spirit with, it's like, you guys. You know, you had the YouTube channel. Like, you were kind of going there. But then what happened, but then what happened was the novelists, the poets, they were the best interviews. And they were the ones that crushed. And so now I'm in this, like, weird situation where, like, that's what I do.

Yeah. But I like, I don't know. But it's just being a nym cell in a particular community. It's niche, but that's valuable. What's a nym cell? NIM cell is niche internet. micro celebrity. It's like, you know, if we go to YC Domodea, we'll get recognized.

We get a sound effect for that. We get a sound effect for that. But we can walk around anywhere else and you don't get recognized. Like, there are certain areas where, like, there'll be some cooking influencer where like every chef knows them or like an auto influencer. We're like every car guy, cars and coffee, everyone will stop. Doug Jumuro. But like, you know, he doesn't get stopped if he just goes to like a Costco, right?

It's just the modern, the modern incantation of the celebrity as we've created these pockets. But interesting. What are you excited about in terms of actual growth? You're growing on YouTube. You're also growing on Instagram. There's some stats for us. I want to hit the gong.

What you got? You got some stats? I got some stats. How is the product doing? It's been a crazy year. So we're going to do 6 million views on Instagram this month. What about YouTube? 3 million on YouTube.

No, that's been good. That's been good. But the big thing, I think this one deserves the big gong. So we started a YouTube channel. I found this guy named Shee and Quirk. Crazy story. And we made this pilot episode with him. His last name is Quirk.

Quirk. Quirk. Quirk. That's what I call him. Quirky quirk. He's the cultural tutor. The cultural tutor. Yes. And so I found this Twitter account, 2012. And I was like, this account rips.

Like, this is so good. And so it was an on. And I was like, hey, we got to talk on the phone. So I get on with him. and I expect like 65 years old. He's writing about culture and like ballards and like buildings. And he's like 24 years old. And I'm like, what?

He's like, yeah, you know, I live in the north of England. My parents just got divorced. I have no money. I'm like, cool. Like, what do you do for work? He goes, I just quit my job at McDonald's. And I'm like, okay, that's a little bit weird. He's like, yeah, that's why I started this cultural tutor thing

because I'm going to tutor people in culture to make some money. Terrible way to make money. And then he goes, yeah, I'm going to go join the British military if it doesn't work. I've been my dream to die for my country. And I'm just like, I've known him for 10 minutes. Like about as long as I've been on the show right here for today. And I'm like, dude, that is a bad idea. So I just raised some money for my writing business at the time.

And I made him a writer in residence. Okay. He had 100,000 followers at the time. Three years later, 1.6 mil on Twitter. We're in London last year walking around. He's giving me a tour every day. I'm like, dude, you can write well. But you are an amazing speaker.

You are the next Bordane. Sure. So I said, hey, let's make a pilot episode. Put in 150 grand of my own money. I really believe in this guy. And we went to Hollywood. They said, no, we're not interested. Go make a pilot episode.

So we had a pilot Tommy Lee, the director, in the back right there. There we go. And we published it from an account with zero subs. It was our goal to get 100,000 views and then go pitch Hollywood. And we did 100,000 views and 18 hours and then 5.6 million views now. Wow. And just from that one video, almost a quarter million subs. Are you optimistic about being able to break into Hollywood?

This year has been like the crossover year with Markiplier, obsession, backrooms, right? Like, Hollywood is seeing that they can print on adaptations of Internet IP. But do you need Hollywood? Do you need Hollywood? Now you walk in with your pilot. It's like I shot your freaking pilot. There you go. But then it's like, do you actually need them?

Can you figure out a way to? This is the driving question of my life right now. Yeah. This is, we're trying to figure it out. It's like a spite show. Spite show. We went to one of the major studios here yesterday. We got a meeting with them.

This is what Hollywood tells us. They want exclusivity of person or exclusivity of place. Sure. So if you can go film in the Sistine Chapel and other people can't, they love that. And then if you're like, hey, Brad Pitt's really interested in architecture. Let's have Brad Pitt be the host. They also love that. They're like, we'll give you money for that.

So Brad Pitt and the Sistine Chapel and they're like one more change, it needs to be a low budget horror film too. Low budget horror. We're just going to have a one note. No. But I don't think we're going to go that route. No. No. I mean, I would.

I don't think we're going to go. Their pitch isn't compelling. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, the thing is that. What is the actual pitch? It's capital and then we'll get you. Yeah.

Well, I would say even more, like, in what way is a streaming service exciting? I think that streaming service is exciting in two ways. One, you have Amazon, HBO, Apple, whatever. They can give you budget to make something awesome. That's the first thing, budget. The second thing is prestige. And, you know, I think the root of prestige translates to illusion. And I just always try to remind myself of that.

Because YouTube is, you know, you can really get views now. Yeah. They are not going, they're not in the business right now of talent development. They will attach Brad Pitt, but they are not going to allow you to spend their money building the cultural tutor into the next Anthony Bourdain. You're going to have to do that on your own platform. And then when you're ready and you've ready to rest on your laurels, they'll be like, welcome. The door is finally open.

So this was funny about that. So Sunday I was at Sundance in Utah, not at the festival, but just at the hotel. And that's where Robert Redford started the film festival. Yeah. And so as you walk through the main room, they just got all these photos of old Hollywood. And it was so cool. It was like a bunch of risk taking and all that. And what happened, the reason why Hollywood is boring and the reason why a lot of the modern world is boring.

And I credit Derek Thompson with making this observation is the money. balification of our world. Okay. What happened is things are boring now because we've gotten smart. Yes. And they've gotten good at pricing risk and all that sort of stuff. But the problem is then you end up getting Spider-Man 74, Lord of the Rings 7, rather than some new show.

And that's just the state of our world. The funny thing is that the later, I feel that. I feel the stagnation. We're also, the internet will strike back. And also the latest Spider-Man made a billion dollars. So, like, the irony is, like, I feel the same, you know, of Marvel fatigue that everyone does. And yet the latest Spider-Man was a fantastic. But here's a counter example.

So, like, the model still works for them. Nathan, Nathan, like, is on an incredible run. And I feel like that is a set of new ideas and forms of content, right? where that are like that are meaningfully novel that are rooted in this like talent so I would almost argue there's not a shortage like anybody can make media now it's cheaper than it's ever been production and distribution and like as much as you can argue like all the capital is flowing into these like big bets spider-man 12 at the same time for talented people people, it's like the best time in the world to do anything.

I agree. And in a lot of ways. And in some ways, like Nathan Fielder is like the best modern instantiation of like being yourself in Hollywood and like finding that mix of commercial appeal and new ideas. Where like for me, I'm more excited to see the new Elizabeth Holmes movie than anything. If you, if I could only watch like the Odyssey or the new Nathan. Did you see The Odyssey? Yeah, yeah, I did.

What did you think? I thought it was a good movie. It was a good movie. Have you seen it? Yeah, I liked it. It was good. It was a lot. I don't think it's like a rewatch it every year like the dark night.

Yeah. That was my take. So I got to see the Chinese theater, which if you. Yeah, we went there. Amazing place to watch a movie. Holy cow. Nah. You don't like it.

Absolutely not. I came out of that and I was like, you got to be kidding me, guys. How do we end up? How do we end up? Universal is you're much closer to the screen. And I. Same, same size IMAX screen. You're closer.

No, but you have to walk out of the theater. The theater is fine. I thought it was, I didn't, I didn't personally like that it was grungy and, and dirty feeling, but that was, I did feel like I was like to get more done my way.

But the second that you get out of it, it's like, you know, you're watching this beautiful film, work of art, and then you come out and it's like, the worst place on Earth, you know,

sunset Boulevard. It's like, completely, completely brutal. Hollywood is so seedy. That's been my biggest takeaway of being here. What is going on? I always has been.

That's like they... I didn't realize that. Yeah. It's crazy, right? Because you're just like, wow, it's my dream to go to Hollywood. And then you get here, you're like, this is what it's like? I'd like to go to West Hollywood instead. I'd like to go to Beverly Hills.

What's on your wrist? Oh, good question. I just went to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Yeah. So this museum opens September 22nd. Okay. So it's just kind of like these previews. Preview tours.

Dude. So good. Oh my goodness. What's good about it? Okay. So the reason I have this. Is that not, is the whole project not like a massive white pill that we can still make? Honestly, it is such a massive white pill.

The only thing that bums me out is San Francisco and Chicago said no. But then L.A. got it. Let's go. Well, is that not victory for Los Angeles? Were they saying no? Like, this needs to be in L.A. This, this. It would just be wrong for us to.

To take this. Or they were just like, yeah, the idea is kind of mid. Like, it would suck to have a billion dollar. Museum. It's like 44,000 pieces of art in George Lucas's collection, 13,000 at the museum, only six of them on the loan. And so I thought that what I was going to walk into was like Star Wars Band. That's actually not what it is at all.

Getting ready to dress up as Chewbacca. So this is what the narrative art museum gets, which is modern art, most of what you see kind of stinks because it's super abstract and you're like what is going on. This is the best non-canal. canonical collection of modern art museum I've seen. And what I mean by that is I think the MoMA has a better collection. Okay. But at the MoMA, you see the canon pieces of modern art.

You see everything from Van Gogh's Starry Night to, you know, cubism to then stuff that comes out of World War II. This is very different. This is a lot of paintings that I did not know. And almost every painting feels like a freeze frame in a movie. And you almost feel like somebody stopped it. So the lighting is super dramatic. There's like these dramatic scenes.

That's cool. there's a whole range of styles. And then the other thing for people like Norman Rockwell, it must be one of the largest collections of Norman Rockwell paintings. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Love it. And then also the way that they organize the museum is super different. So usually it's all around jargon or time period. This is different. This is around family, school, like friendship, stuff like that or specific artists. So because of that, it doesn't feel like heady as a museum. It feels like the kind of that'll be both good and super mass market.

That's cool. Almost like Star Wars itself. Is there at least one Chewbacca? Do you see any Star Wars? I only saw, so this is why I have this. I just went and I went up to the front desk. And I was like, this is so good. Can I leave, go on TV, and then come back?

And she was like, fine, we'll make an exception. So we're booking it back to down to see the Chewbacca for you. I will send you a selfie. I will send you what Chewbacca selfie. I want that. I see this modern art. I love Star Wars. What do you think of Mark Zuckerberg's new castle?

You know, the critique is that tech wealth is not going into beautiful things. Which is true. And he just bought a beautiful castle in Ireland. And it feels like the beginning, you know, I think the Stripe founders bought a castle in Ireland. Yeah. There's the seeds. And I think that there, I understand the critique of tech wealth is not going into beautiful things. We're not getting the museum, the libraries.

Yeah. But I think that there is a world where. Wait until they're 45. They'll buy the castles. They'll get sick of them at 65. The kids won't want to live there. And then they'll be museums and libraries because that's what happens when you renovate an 18th century castle. And you stop wanting to pay the $5 million a year to maintain it.

The museum of Zuckie's bunkie is going to go so hard. All these little antique firearms that are like halo-style. He's got a needler? He really had that on? He really had that in 2026? He's got a needler. He had the good supply of... If he has a needler and we don't know about it, that's a major issue.

It's interesting in those two examples. Both of them bought existing places. Yes. They didn't... Okay, so building's important. They did not build them. Like you look at Hurst Castle. You know, William Randolph Hurst.

I'm actually staying. I love the story of... First castle. And I both aspire to personally embark on such a crusade that I die with it unfinished like he did. And also I encourage other people to take on projects that are so unwieldly that they will ultimately never be, never see the fruits of their labor and only the next generation will. Yeah. I mean, beyond that, you know, it's really easy to talk about castles and palaces and stuff like

that. What about just like the tech initiative to make the panhandle, like one of the most beautiful parks in America? You know what I mean? Or like, let's restore Fillmore Street. I heard of a project that's exactly that. It's like four or five blocks of film war. Like, we, I think that the beauty conversation is way too much about these giant big buildings.

Yeah, you got to start small. Corgi Cafe. Corgi Cafe. They're starting with a cafe. You scale that up. Corgi Library, Corgi Museum, Corgi Central Park. We'll save the world. Could happen.

You never know. They're a reinsurer now. Well, this was so great about New York. Like, I think it was, is John Paulson the investor? I think so. Who made a lot of money in the, financial crisis. He's the one.

The one. Yeah, exactly, one guy. But he donated $100 million to Central Park. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's cool. That's good. Okay. The simple stuff for the people.

Yeah. What about on the overall architectural malaise and just this, you know, is there a linkage from housing prices? We can't build anything. Stagnation and the critiques from you and the. the cultural tutor on. Oh, that's interesting. So I think that the way that people see it is something like this. We can't build.

And because of that, we need to make it cheaper and uglier. And it's like a cost problem. Actually, there's a new article in Works and Progress that basically makes this point, that one of the reasons why it's hard to build is that things aren't beautiful enough. So like if I look at... Yeah, why go through the hassle? Yeah. And also for the neighbors, they're like, I don't want something new being built.

It's going to be but ugly. It's going to make my neighborhood less nice. Yeah, it's going to be a square box. And so it's this weird kind of compounding loop where things are ugly, so then there's more regulation. Then there's more regulation, so it's more expensive. Then we need to save money so things get ugly. And maybe there's a way to reverse that where you have nice buildings and people are excited about building a little bit more. And you begin to change that.

Yeah, I've been, there's things coming down the pipeline. I was hanging out with a friend of a friend who's an architect based in Europe. and he was just showing me like all the stuff that he has in the works. And to me, I got incredibly excited because I was like every single one of these things, you know, he's a rising star, every single one of these things will end up being in every mood board. Like they are like net new creations that are inspired by the past, but also just new ways for buildings to exist. And I have another friend who does real estate development in the American Southwest. West and he is showing me things that he's actively building right now. And I'm like that

entryway to the home is going to be iconic. And so a lot of these are like, I still, in some ways, I think you're going to see like the world is so Instagram driven now that there are beautiful things being built purely for the feed to basically like stop people and to get attention. and I think that I'm excited to see what you're pulling up. Oh, you got it. I'm trying to get them to pull it up. I got to show you this. Yes.

So I think that the side-by-side format will change the world. It already is. And all the side-by-side format is super common on Twitter, super common on Instagram. All it is is you show one old thing versus one new thing and you just say, what happened. And this is one of those formats that we've all seen that no one is taken seriously. Yeah. So this is, oh, hold on. Okay, we got to cut that for the clip.

Well, we're going to pull it up on the big board here too. This is the old home alone house. Here you go. Here we got both of them. This is scroll up. Scroll up. This is 1990. 1990.

This is the old home alone house that we all love. Iconic. Yes. Wallpaper, carpets on the stairs. Character, vibe. Lots of warmth. Yep. What happened?

Now scroll down. This is what they did to it. Stunning. Stunning and brave. Okay. The white, the different shades of white and gray are really. It's so much white. It's so much white. So this sells better. I mean, look at the rug. I mean, who would be bold enough?

Is that why they did this? Well, so here is what happened. So there's a few things that changed. One is that housing went from something that people would build for themselves to something that was done by real estate agents and real estate companies. And so housing became a market that you thought of as something liquid. And then you basically need to increase how generic something is so that it basically is a more liquid asset. Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

And then the other thing is a lot of these projects are built by people who won't live in them. And so they sort of see the world through a spreadsheet. Yeah. Spread shit. That's exactly what it's about. It's called a spreadsheet. It's called a spreadsheet. So they see the world through a spreadsheet.

Yes, but when I look at this, I think buying opportunity, buy this. buy this and remodel it to look like the home home house. It can't be that hard to put carpet down on the staircase, right? I like this style. I think it's called pre-modern. This is generally the, like, what this is referred to now.

Yeah, yeah, you're saying something that's very real. A friend of mine bought a place years ago invested a bunch of money into it. And I think like legitimately for 99% of people made it way worse. Oh, I know what you're talking about. Like for him, For him, he's like, he's like, yeah, like it's so much character.

I'm like, maybe too much character there, buddy. Like some of the rooms, I'm just like, this is horrific. And you need, and it actually, even though he invested a lot of money into the property, you actually have to deduct that basically an equal amount from the new purchase price, which is going to be lower than what they paid because you have to rip all this stuff. You looked, you liked blue. You made your house blue. But I do think that, I think that, like maximalism is a,

100% coming back. And you're seeing this in... You think of loud opulence, maybe? Like, even look at cars. Like, cars are a wonderful way to express yourself and just enjoy the road. And it's this, like, symbol of freedom and all these things. And cars got very boring to the point where if somebody was, like, spicing it up, they're like, I got a green car and a tan seat.

And then it's like, well, now there's a whole, for years, there's been Instagram accounts dedicated to this combination, which I think is beautiful. I have a green car with brown seats, but it's almost to the point where it's no longer even a way to express yourself. It's just like it's as basic to me as like a black car. And so I've been, I've been intentionally going the other direction. I'm, I'm, um, I'm, I'm in the process of speccing a car that is, is like a rose metallic. And, and it's like completely insane. I've shown it to some people and they're like, Wow, that's interesting. You know, like, it's going to be, it's going to be a controversial.

We need a TVPN card that looks like a NASCAR that you guys can drive around with all the sponsor logos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've thought of it. We have a lot of us to play TVPN over there. Right there. And I think that you're not just naturally seeing a shift. People are rejecting minimalism. And I actually already, as much as this is happening, again, I don't think you're going to ever get back to spec house.

Like the spec house is naturally designed to appeal to, it's like I view a spec house. house, like the one you're showing here basically, as like a canvas on which someone else can come on and paint. And it allows you to have that liquid asset. The thing is, I'm not pro-maximalism or anti-minimalism. I'm just pro-quality and anti-crap. And I think that what has happened is we're like, okay, here's minimalism. And we're like, okay, minimalism is cool. Like Johnny Ive really understands minimalism well. The Japanese really understand minimalism well. But then what happened I got a house to sell you. If you don't really understand the form,

you end up with that meme of the guy who just has his mattress in the room and nothing else with like the little video game. The ultimate male setting. Yeah, the ultimate male living situation. I love it. Hey, you know, you got to invest in that guy. Would you like the glass or the cup

for whatever you're drinking? I'll wash these sheets in six months. Do you know the... What you got, Jordy? Do you know the architect John Lottner? No. Oh, you're talking about a place in Alaska? You blew the punchline. Oh, I'm sorry.

You blew the punchline. But, yeah, the... John Lottner's the protege of Frank Lloyd Wright. Okay. Has created some of the most, to me, the most beautiful homes in the U.S. There's even like this weird sort of like roadside motel out in Palm Desert area that you can go stay in. That's a Lottner. I recommend you check it out.

think you would enjoy it. But I track John Lottner homes that are for sale, and there's two right now that stand out. One is in Pasadena, which is like seemingly like an extremely, at the time, it would have just been like, I'll take one home, please. You know, it's like a two-bedroom, two-bath. But then there's this other one that's only 1.37 million, potentially a great starter home candidate. And this is the one in Alaska. One issue. It's in Alaska. That's not an issue. That's a plus. And so this is two acres.

You got a John Lautner, an architecturally significant home in nature. And I think you got to go for it. I think you got to like, you know, take some of your own medicine here. And I want, I think you need to. No, no, no. This is redfin. This is for sale. This is for sale.

1.3. I've been extremely tempted just because I'm like, yeah. It's sort of group chat. See if we can pull. 1.370. It's five for a bunky too. Yeah, yeah. This would be good for like a TBPN satellite.

Satellite. Satellite. Look at this. Look at this wood, wood paneled interior. It's like every material in this home was actually designed to last for. There's room for the Christmas tree there. Indoor waterfall-ish thing. That's awesome.

So anyways, what I'm hoping to see is the young John. John Lottner that just build a couple, just dedicate your life to building a couple hundred homes like this. But I think that the truth is that we look back and we look throughout history and we see homes, we see things that were built like this. And people are like, you know, we've got to return to like that era of design.

But the truth is that for every one of these homes, there was 100, a thousand that were just cookie cutter. The thing is, I don't want to return to any era of design. I want us in 2026 to have a sweet era that reflects who we are, what we value, that, like, projects a bold vision for the future that's like, let's go. And we should have all these awesome visions of what tomorrow can look like. And what I love about talking about homes and, like, making nice streets is, like, that is a way for every single human being to, like, put their footprint, their stamp of optimism and, like, promise for a better future into the world. Yeah. And that's why I think this is important.

We have about 10 minutes. No, I want to go through the rest of the show and tell what else do you have for us in the stack. The team has the PDF you shared. Are there any other images that you'd like to share with us? By the way, we definitely don't have. We do. We're rearranging the schedule. And Fletcher, Richmond, from Type, will be joining us at 150 after Jim O'Reilly from Charleston AI.

Have you seen the new Obama library? I have. Yes. New Obama presidential center. People are going back and forth about it. Yeah, let's get it up on the screen here. I'm a fan. You're a fan. You're a fan.

Because it's clearly a data source. A data center. It's a data center. It does seem like it has a resource inside. I'm generally in faith. I love brutalism, just that period. I think it's beautiful when contrasted right with nature. Here is the thing with brutalism.

Good brutalism rocks. Yeah. But a good style. is works when average people do it. And so the problem with brutalism is the variance is so big. Like most brutalism absolutely is awful and tyrannical.

But like you're saying, you get some Brazilian brutalism, some DC brutalism, and when it works, it is absolutely awesome. Yeah. Every time I think brutalism I go to Abad Abad,

Osama bin Laden's cow compound. You know what I'm talking about? The Osama bin Laden house is very brutalist. I lived in a house that looked exactly like it for a while. It's crazy. Would you practice in there in case you got the call?

No, no. Keep it in counter-shund. So the new Obama Library, this is where, this was built in 1893. So the Obama Library, this was for the Chicago World's Fair. There's three photos here. And these were in 1893. And basically, these were temporary houses. So they were made out of plaster.

They were not made to laugh. The second one was a temporary house? The Chicago winners. It was for the World's Fair. So it was a big deal. Don't get me wrong. But I think it says so much about who we are. Like, first of all, I'm not sure what we could build this now.

And there's no way that we would do something temporary like this now. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, what else is going on? How many other photos do you have here? We don't need to go through all of them. Oh, I want to know the story of the humble telephone. Well, so what we did in the, yeah.

Yeah, so I think this another... Actually, here's one that has a personal story. So this is San Francisco. When I was a kid, I don't know if you guys have walked here. When I was a kid, this is... Beautiful photo. Where I would walk. Wow.

And I used to, like, marvel at these chains. Yeah. I think these chains are sick. Yeah. And also, like, this is the kind of world I want to be in, where, like, you know, it's by the bay. There's always the big cargo ships coming by. Yeah.

And I'd always used to, you know, check out these chains. My mom would say, you'll touch those. you're going to get tetanus, you know, whatever. And, you know, it's time to replace the chains, which is fine. And they replaced them with this. Oof. And, like, this is the thing. You know, each one of these is not a big deal.

But if you have 10 or 100,000 decisions like this in a country and a culture, you really stamp out the soul and vitality, the spirit of who we are. And that's what I want to fight against, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's rough. What's going on in the world of high fashion? What's wrong with, what's wrong with Stainland? steel?

Well, it just lacks character. Well, I think it's because it's new. Yeah, what happens when that gets patina and starts giving you tetanus? Will you be satisfied then? Will you be satisfied then? I think we could have done better.

We could have done something with like little Golden Gate bridges in it. Something that would... To tie to the aesthetic of the space. Or like a Louis Vuitton monogram. We talk about cost. There's an artist somewhere that would happily do this at cost.

Sure, sure, sure. To make something else. Yeah. You know? Might be a safety thing. You trip over the chain, but you don't do this. But again, yeah, you're getting into. The R word regulation.

I think they want to keep people from surfing. They don't want you to discover the thrill. No, they want you to lock it in and continue building your startup. Because as we know, if you go surfing, you'll be less productive. So you've got to stop people from surfing in San Francisco. They've got to get the share price up. That's the key. Patagonia founder.

His book is called Let My People Go Surfing. Oh, really? It's like the whole premise. They're like, yeah, we're going to build a company. And that's why we get to a billion dollars. And that's why he never hit one trillion market cap. Yeah, Patagonia would have been the first trillion dollar company. It could have been.

It could have been. A little less surfing guy. Lock in. Yeah. And then we got the same thing happening in logos. Yeah. Just see. It's the same pattern everywhere.

And this is what's so. This has to change soon, though. This is an opportunity. You have to imagine that there are plenty of brands that see this. I don't want to be a part of the meme. I'm going to go a different direction. The reason why I've just utterly astonished by this and think about it every day is I think that aesthetics, people think of like little icing on the cake. You know, like you put on a tie, now you'll look good or something like that.

But the thing is, like society's aesthetics represent the spirit of a time. Like it's the outer reflection of the inner spirit of an age. And all this is how we see who we are, what we value. And the thing is, when I look at these designer logos, you know, it's easy to say, oh, there's no style there. Really what you see is a culture that values efficiency and conformity above all else. And I just, I don't want that to be who we are. And also a kind of global sameness. Like, I want a world where there's like radical diversity.

You go to different places. They feel completely different. And that the things that are made have the unique character of the people making them. That's the world I want to live in. That's the world that inspires me. How do you get into a museum if it's closed? There's actually a hack for this. Tell me.

Okay. So if you go to Paris or something. Spend a decade developing a personal reputation. Spend a decade building a reputation of someone who cherishes. Millions and millions of views on YouTube and Instagram. So there is a hack for this. So if you go to Paris, I was in Paris like a month and a half ago. Buy a fight to Paris.

any city, any city, New York, L.A., Chicago. Any city. And you show up, often they'll say, hey, you can't get into the museum. You needed tickets in advance. A ticket at most museum has cost like $30. So if you're going with their friends, like $60. And you'll say, can I get in?

They'll be like, there's no way. You'll say, can members get in today? They'll be like, no problem. You say, how much is a membership? $120. So if you just pay $60 more, $30 per person, you can basically get into any museum in the world, no lines. Your answer is just pay?

Just pay for it. It's one simple trick. But it's the thing. It's just about the membership, which is not advertised. Yeah, no, no, no, that's a good point. But the new Lucas. The new Lucas. Some, like, go in the back door, walker, you know, like dress up. The New Lucas Museum is also, I don't think if you're a member, they're not, I'll take, if I walk up there and say, I'll take one membership, please, they'll be like,

come back when we're open. Yeah. Yeah, you got to get a job. That's the real hack. You got to get the job. You got to get the job there. Or build a great brand, build a great crowd. I feel like my first You Can Do Anything moment was sneaking down at Warrior games. Had season tickets. I convinced my dad to get season tickets as a kid.

We're all the way up in the third deck. Again, you paid to get a trick to sneak in, buy season tickets. We got the cheapest tickets. I sat outside of the first deck six games, went to every game for the season. I just snuck through. Okay, this is a good one. This is a good one. Got really good at getting the free pizzas and the T-shirts.

I knew, like, where the T-shirts were, like, most likely to go. Okay. We're thunder. Coming out of the T-shirt gun or no? Yeah. Okay. Actually, my ultimate hack for sports was when I was a kid, I was obsessed with catching baseballs at games. So, you know, you can get the baseballs off the bat.

Yep. But what I would do is I'd go to the stadium. I'd get the away team hat, the away team shirt, then sit by the, the opposing team dugout. Less competitive. I went to Wrigley Field Darren Oliver starting pitcher. I knew the name of Darren Oliver,

the bullpen catcher, walked away with six baseball. Six baseball. I was like a fifth grade kid. I was like, I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. All right, boys, thank you. Great to see you.

Yeah. Great to see you. Chubaka picture. Yes. Today, I will tell everyone about Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlocked seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

And I'll also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Up next, we have Jim Riley from Charleston AI. You've seen him on the internet. We've discussed him multiple times with his partnership with San Blanc, Monaco. And now we are pleased to be joined by Jim Riley from Charleston AI. Jim, how are you doing?

Welcome to the show. I'm doing really, really, really. well. Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. For taking the time to come chat with us. I would love to know a little bit of the backstory. I'm sure a lot of people have seen the viral video, but what is your career story? How did you get into this particular business? And then, of course, we can talk about where it's going from here. Okay. Well, I've been doing different things for many, many years. You know, the only boss I ever had was my father other than when I was a bus boy and worked in a movie theater. So it was a family business. I grew up and I did many things.

Yeah. And where do I go from there? Recently, during the pandemic. Yeah. What got you, at least interested in AI? Yeah. Okay. Well, my partner, we started this produce delivery business during the pandemic because the farmers couldn't sell produce. There were no farmers' markets and people were kind of locked down. So we saw a need. We saw something that we could do together. And he's the geek. I'm not. And so we put together, you know, delivering produce directly to people's houses. We put it right on their, you know, front porch by their door. All model is that we deliver it. They don't come pick it up. We deliver. days a week, 365 days a year.

And so then he's... Did this business grow out of that? Yes, well, we're partners in Rainbow Packaging, and he's always been into AI. You know, he was an engineer from IBM, so he's, like I said, he's a geek. And this is one of his, like, pet projects. He's really into AI, so he got, he infected me a little bit with it. And we saw the opportunity. soon we thought it was time. Let's open up a storefront. That's what we have here is basically

a storefront, even though it's a nice office to just introduce people to AI, help them where they need it. And that's what we've been doing. We started January 1st. Amazing. So January 1st, who were your first customers, clients that were coming in? When we originally saw the viral video, it made so much sense to me to actually speak. put something like a storefront because everyone in Charleston is, I'm sure, reading about AI, watching videos online. Some of them are excited. Some of them are scared. And to give people the opportunity to come in and just talk to somebody who's actually in their local community and learn about it actually makes a ton of sense. Right. In the beginning, it was slow. I have to

admit, it's taken a while. But what I've come to realize, this is the FUD period, which is fear uncertainty in doubt when it comes to AI. And people are gradually getting over it. So my partner, he can do the elaborate stuff. He can do the systems integration. I'm the one that can talk to people and tell them how it's benefiting me. And that's what I do. Do you see more people coming in with sort of a consumer lens on?

They want to know how to use AI products in their personal lives? Or is it mostly other businesses in the Charleston? It's a combination of both. Okay. Okay. So, like, I'm pretty good at talking to people, and I'm asking you using AI. So, you know, I don't want to plug it, but my favorite is open AI work right now. It's fantastic.

So I'll tell people about my little experiences, how I've saved time by using it. And they said, really? So I'll say, here, load chat, GPT. you know, play with it for a week or two, and I'll come back, and I'll show you how it can benefit you. And mostly, you know, they're small business owners, so it's easy for them to, you know, adapt to it. I mean, a lot of people would like to do it, in my opinion, but they don't have time. And they're so used to doing what they do that this is just not natural to them. Yeah.

And then the other side of the corner, the people that have larger-sized businesses who are really into AI. So they spend two or three days, or two or three hours a day. doing it, and then they realize they fall behind on their work. And so that's why they need us to come in and help them, you know, put it together and make it work for them. What is your business model? Do you charge people hourly for training sessions or do you work on affiliate commission if you refer someone to a particular product?

No, we're just, we're like vendor neutral. We'll work with anybody's AI. You know, my partner will learn it. and he'll install it. And our customers choose the AI they want. Sure. And we just help them make it work. So training implementation?

Correct. And, you know, we charge the first visit is free. You come in, sit down, let's talk about it, see what you want, what you need. And, you know, we'll come up with a plan for them. Do you think the model will be scalable? Do you think you'll be able to hire technicians and educators and needs to. other markets and set up similar franchises? Absolutely, yes.

That's exciting. I think it has appeal. The time is now. We have a few years. And AI is changing so drastically, so quickly, in my opinion, you know, and people can use it. And the other thing I noticed, like, with individuals, we take this open AI work, which I refer to it as. I went away on vacation for a few days.

I'd get up at five. I normally get up at four, so I slept in late. And then for two hours, I would do my work. And in five days, I did more than I would do in six months previous. So that sold me. You know, so I have an agent that works for me every day. And if I don't have her working on something, then that's my fault. That's my, you know, my bed.

And it's just, I find it fabulous. I think it's tremendous. And with that, too, that I noticed personally is that I'd be uptight with, I got to do this, I got to do that. I'm short on time. I'm thinking about it. But now, this AI companion, she does it. And I'm free to think about other things during the course of the day. I'm freed up.

And I think a lot of people, once they adapt it and start using it, they're going to be the same way. They won't be so uptight and so, you know, bothered with what they think they have to do. Because it's already done. Or it's being worked on. What's business been like since the video that broke the internet? A lot of attention. People stopping by. Sunday, I work seven days a week.

So Sunday, and we're still continuing our produce business. So, you know, we have customers there. We got to satisfy. So I come in early pick, pack, go deliver. Then I start working, you know, contacting people, responding to emails. and, you know, people stop by randomly. We're in Charleston and we're going back to Florida. We're in Charleston.

We're going back to Charlotte. Well, come on in. Let me give you a little tour. Let me talk to you. Tell me about your story. What is it? That's great. I like to talk to people myself.

Yeah. What are the most common concerns that people cite when they're talking to you? What are they worried about? What are they nervous about in terms of AI? Mostly unknown fears. Sure. You know, and they, you know, they, you know, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, read something, they hear something that somebody said, they're not real.

So until they get to know it, hold it, see it, and use it, they'll have that. But I'm trying to break that barrier down, you know, and kind of infect them with, you know, the benefits of it. Yeah, that's good. How much do you wish you had today's AI when you were starting your career and your family business? I can't do that. It's not realistic.

I like this. Super grounded. So grounded. I mean, because did I have it, I wouldn't be here now talking to you. That's true. You'd be retired, maybe. I had to experience everything I experienced to get to this moment. Yeah.

All my mistakes, all my failures, my victories, things I did right, things I did wrong. But, you know, I needed all to do all that. And I know I could save a lot of time and be more efficient by using my agent in the morning. Yeah. My AI agent. Yeah. When's the second location opening up? How aggressive do you guys want to get around expansion?

Are you still kind of dialing in the curriculum? Well, everything has to be done as proper time and place. This has to be up and running and functioning, and then we can devote a little time to the next one. I believe there's going to be demand for it. I believe there is demand for it. And now that it's arriving at the point where AI is being more accepted by people and being used, they're still confused, and AI's changing so much with all these

different applications they have, they're going to need some help. So I want to get a firm foundation, and then we talk about expanding. Do you pay much attention to the conversation around AI, fear, and doom and safety that's happening primarily in San Francisco, or do you kind of ignore all that mumbo-jumbo? No, it's noise, in my opinion. I'm looking at the benefit. If I spend an hour, two hours, and it takes care six or seven hours worth of work, I don't have to worry about that.

I can enjoy life. I could spend more time in a moment and having my head filled with things that are not going to happen that may happen. But now it's done. So next. Yeah. That's a good mindset. Great mindset. Well, congratulations on the process.

Yeah, this has been amazing. You're welcome on the show anytime. Let us know how we can. we can help if there's any AI founders that you want to meet, there's a good chance that we've spoken to them at some sort. We'd love to support, and hopefully we can stop by the store at some point. Please do. You're always welcome. Thank you so much. And Charleston's a nice city to visit. Yeah. I've heard. The restaurants are really good. Fantastic. Amazing. And the people are friendly. I love it. I can see that. It's great to meet you, Jim. Thanks so much for coming on

and congrats on all the success. Have a great rest of your week. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Have a wonderful day. We'll talk you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops

breaches. Amazing story. Amazing mindset. Yeah. And I've seen enough. Give him 200 on a billion. There are some wild posts in the chat, which I really enjoy. So thanks everyone who's tuning in and chiming in with

some fantastic takes about what's going on. We have Fletcher Richmond from Type, the co-founder and CEO here building a shared AI workspace. Welcome to the show. What's going on? Sorry for the mix-up. We got caught up with David Perel. He brought whole show and tell for us. We had to go through with it. And then we had to, of course, talk with Jim Riley, who I would already suggest you should pursue some type of partnership with. Anyways, introduce yourself and the company. Yeah, nice to meet you guys. Thanks for having me. Funny enough, I actually go to the same gym as David, so that's a small world moment of the day. Nice. That's great.

Who lives heavier? I can't disclose that. Oh, that's why I got a bond for sure. Anyway, tell us about the business. What are you building? Yeah, so type is a, you mentioned it shared workspace for teams to build with AI. A lot of work right now in AI is still happening, very single player mode. People are working with Cloud or chat GPT on their individual computer.

and that's not really how businesses work. And so we make it really easy to take that work, starting in Clotter in ChatGBT, BT, and push it up into a shared workspace where you're all actually building together. Crazy as it seems, multiplayer AI still isn't really solved. Yeah. Are you trying to narrow in on a particular type of work, whether it's code that's generated, the blender 3D models that we saw, spreadsheets, like there are collaborative environments that are point solutions for each, of these to some degree. GitHub sort of collaborates with code. But how do you see finding a

beachhead or is it important to be sort of omnipresent across the organization? Yeah. So we're focusing more on non-technical teams. We think that the engineering teams have a lot of this pretty figured out. Like you mentioned, they've been doing these workflows for a very long time. But the non-technical teams that are suddenly all now writing code that we're used to be writing code. They don't know what GitHub is. They don't know how to deploy to Versailles. They don't know how to do a lot of this stuff. And so we've just given them these magical agents that can do it all, but they need tooling to actually make that work. What are you targeting in terms of early adopter? Do you want to go into new companies that

don't have anything to rip out faster moving startups for early adoption? Or are you going to go duke it out in the Fortune 500 and try and get someone to, you know, either add this on to all the other tools they're paying for or maybe rip something out. Yeah, so what we found at the very beginning, you got a couple people, you can just use Cloud. It's not a big deal. So that's not really a pain point. We've been targeting, I'd say, more in the 25 to a couple hundred employee range has been

our sweet spot so far. I know you know a lot about this space. Interestingly, the direct-to-consumer e-com space. Oh, yeah. Those teams have just been loving it. It is, I think, one of the best use cases for agents, if you kind of think about the business and what it is. It's a series of pretty structured inputs. Hey, I have this landing page.

I run these ads. I have this Amazon listing. It runs this stuff. And then that comes out. I need to order more inventory because this ad is doing really well. And the whole loop just kind of runs. And so agents are, it's crazy what you do in some of these econ businesses. Totally.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we were talking to Sean Frank at the Ridge. And yeah, every, every e-com business is like, okay, there's the churn spreadsheet, and there's the script for conversion, and there's something that synthesizes all of our performance marketing. And then we have all our influencer ads over here and how much we're spending. And the opportunity to bring it all together is huge. When did you actually start the company? We started a year ago. So we were just obsessed with this multiplayer AI concept.

I've been crazily enough, it's weird to say now, but spending about a decade building in that space, of collaboration in chat. Exactly. And I built a company before this that was acquired by Slack, or sorry, that Slack was an investor in and that was acquired by Atlassian. Okay. Open AI was a user of it. It was called Help.

So I've been thinking about how do people collaborate in this chat environment for a really long time? And this just felt like the next generation of tools was necessary because we've got these agents now. And it's just a totally different way to work. Very cool. Give us the funding news. Tell us about the news, yeah.

How much did you read? raise. Yeah, we raised four million bucks. We're going to have our Liercifo here in New York City. And haystacked as well out of the West Coast. And my buddy's matchstick. I'm from Colorado.

So Colorado firm in there as well. Love those guys. Very cool. We're going to, we'll get the team on it. Yeah, you guys should play around. I think you'd like it. That'd be awesome. Awesome.

Yeah, great to meet you. And we'll see you in the next round. See it. Nice to meet you. Let me tell you about Shopify. Speaking of D-2-C e-commerce, Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business lets you sell in seconds,

online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Jordy, do we have time to tell the story of the heist, the thieves. They raided... Absolutely. Not. We'll see you tomorrow.

See you tomorrow. It's been an honor and a privilege. Little teaser. I mean, today, today, this is, this is TBPN at its best. Yeah. In my opinion, in my opinion, you got Jim, O'Reilly, Jim O'Reilly, Mikey,

got the hot AI found, got the B.C. You got everything. A little bit of everything. Living the dream here. You app about the current thing, the Doom, the new iPhone, all of this. Let us know what you think. Are you picking one up?

Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at TBPN.com. and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific, Sharp. That will be Thursday. It will be 105 days until... King in the castle. King in the castle. Goodbye. I love you.