TBPN Live - Chip Bottleneck vs. Energy Bottleneck, Amazon’s $200B Capex, Big Tech Earnings | Doug O'Laughlin, Max Levchin, TJ Parker, Arsalan Tavakoli
Episode Date: February 6, 2026Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(01:05) - Chip Bottleneck vs. Energy Bottleneck (16:12) - Amazon Plans Record $200B Capex (29:31) - Inside the Search for Iger's Heir (34:3...0) - TikTok Fuels "Dirty Soda" Craze (46:25) - Anthropic Tanked the Software Market (51:21) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:17:31) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:29:31) - Doug O'Laughlin is a developer deeply engaged with Anthropic's AI coding assistant, Claude Code, utilizing it extensively in his daily workflow. He discusses the integration of Claude Code into GitHub, highlighting its role in automating tasks like drafting pull requests and code reviews, thereby enhancing developer productivity. Doug also explores the evolution of AI models, noting the rapid advancements in Claude's capabilities and their impact on software development practices. (02:03:13) - Max Levchin, a Ukrainian-American software engineer and entrepreneur, co-founded PayPal in 1998 and currently serves as CEO of Affirm, a fintech company he founded in 2012. In the transcript, Levchin discusses Affirm's impressive 36% year-over-year growth in merchant sales volume, reaching approximately $1.1 billion in revenue for the quarter. He attributes this success to seasonal sales events like Black Friday and the rapid growth of the Affirm Card, which has seen 100% year-over-year growth across various metrics. Additionally, Levchin highlights the success of Affirm's self-created shopping holiday, "The Big Nothing," offering 0% APR deals without fine print, which significantly boosted their numbers. (02:21:20) - TJ Parker is the co-founder and former CEO of PillPack, a pharmacy service acquired by Amazon in 2018, where he later served as Vice President of Health and Pharmacy until 2022. In the conversation, Parker discusses the controversy surrounding Hims' compounding of GLP-1 medications, highlighting the FDA's recent warning letter addressing safety and efficacy concerns. He also touches on the implications of the new Wegovy pill for the weight loss market and the potential impact of AI in healthcare, emphasizing the importance of integrating AI with comprehensive medical histories to enhance patient care. (02:40:51) - Arsalan Tavakoli, co-founder and Senior Vice President of Field Engineering at Databricks, discusses the rapid evolution of AI, emphasizing that while technological advancements are significant, the real challenge lies in organizations learning to effectively deploy and utilize these tools to derive value. He highlights the importance of having a unified, governed data platform to support both small and large-scale data projects, noting that even seemingly simple tasks can quickly expand in complexity and data requirements. Tavakoli also underscores that, despite the proliferation of AI agents, many enterprises struggle to move beyond pilot phases to achieve meaningful production outcomes, often due to issues related to data quality, governance, and integration. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRestream - https://restream.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coSentry - https://sentry.ioCisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.htmlOkta - https://www.okta.comKalshi - https://kalshi.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive
Transcript
Discussion (0)
You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, February 6th, 2026. We're live from the TBPN Ultruam.
Temble of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. It's a white suit day.
That's right. For the rally. Don't check what the market did yesterday. Check what it's doing today.
You never doubted, did you? You never doubted. You never doubted. You. When the fear and greed index was, you levered up was on full fear.
And now, you're post-economic. Scared for its life.
This happens.
Ramp.com.
Time is money.
Save both.
Easy use corporate cards,
bill pay, accounting,
and a whole lot more.
All in one place.
We have a great show for you today, folks.
We have Doug O'Loughlin from Semi-analysts joining the breakdown in Codd Code.
T.J. Parker's hopping on.
We got Max Levchin, part of the PayPal Mafia,
co-founder and CEO of a firm.
And we're bricked up.
We're going into Data Brinks territory.
It's going to be fantastic.
We also might have a surprise guest for you, folks.
Anyway, linear, of course, is the system.
for modern software development.
70% of enterprise workspaces on linear
are using agents.
Get on there, folks.
Big week.
Bottlenecks, bottlenecks.
I mean, we're going to talk about the Claude Code
moment, the Claude Code psychosis,
sort of the software singularity.
Doug O'Loughlin's coming on to talk about his experience,
why he thinks this is a key inflection point.
Tyler Cowan was talking about this with the 5.3 launch,
Opo's 4.6 launch.
There's clearly signs of a takeoff.
It feels like a slow takeoff.
but there's a whole bunch of sort of recursive compounding elements that are starting to form.
A recursive, you say.
Yeah, recursive, literally recursive.
Like, the models feed back into themselves, give them more tasks.
We saw this with a gas town.
There's a whole bunch of stuff going on in orchestration that's interesting.
And so I wanted to sort of reflect on, like, if there's going to be a break,
if there's going to be a damper on the party, if someone's going to pull away the punch bowl,
who's it going to be, the semiconductor industry or the energy industry?
At the start of this year, I said it was going to be the year of energy.
I still think it's important to think about energy because that it will be a bottleneck.
But this year, it's about chips.
And not even just because of AI, just for overall human flourishing.
Totally, totally.
Yeah.
And yeah, so we had some great conversations this week, Sam Altman.
We talked to Dylan Patel.
We talked to Shultow.
We talked to, you know, we reviewed what Ben Thompson was saying.
Dwork Keshe interviewed Elon.
So there's a lot of new data points about how people.
people are thinking about the trade-offs between semiconductor fabrication capacity and energy
production capacity.
So I wanted to sort of like crystallize like where I think the debate and consensus is right now.
So first I'll tell you about ACTA.
Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity.
So you get the power of AI without the risk.
Secure every agent.
Secure any agent with Octa.
So there's been this like TikTok going back and forth in the AI supply chain.
What's the key bottleneck to growth?
It does feel like only if you have to work at an AI lab to really feel the bottleneck.
For most people, they're just like, I open the chat app, probably chat GPT.
I ask it a question.
It gets back to me in a reasonable amount of time.
I'm not really hitting rate limits.
The rate limits come when there's big moments, the studio gibbley moment.
I think people have always felt the rate limiting is very real.
Really?
With using anthropic products?
Yes.
If you're actively...
Which is why I asked Schultz.
yesterday.
Yeah.
How, what are, what are free limits going to look like?
Well, that's why you asked him that.
Just, you just, it was just random that you asked.
Well, I also was interested in the ad.
It was completely in the context of, of compute.
No, but they, they've consistently been compute constrained.
Yeah, yeah.
At least they've talked about it more than, more than most.
And users have talked about it quite a lot.
So I'm just quite curious, what is the free experience going to be like Sunday?
If somebody downloads the app sees the ads, they're like, I want, I want LMs without ads.
Yeah.
even though no other popular LLM actually has ads yet.
I do wonder, yeah, about the Claude app experience.
They're pretty upfront with you about the fact that if you're on the Opus model,
like you'll hit your rate limits faster,
and even just a couple prompts deep,
it will take a second and kind of compact the conversation
so it can keep talking to you.
I know they're increasing the token context window,
but it feels like it works like it works.
works fine, but it is a smaller user base, although I'm very interested to see where it goes in the app store.
Chatjpg is still at number one.
GROC is oddly doing incredible in the app store, way higher than X, the social networking.
Yeah, for no obvious reason.
I mean, like, there's just not a lot of hype about GROC.
Like, they're doing okay on benchmarks.
Obviously, Elon has a very solid playbook for like scaling and higher and growing.
Yeah, but to me, to me, I don't care as much about hype.
Yeah.
When it comes to the app store, there's plenty of apps on the app store charts that have no hype.
One of the top, one of the top, ask, is it's called free cash.
Free cash.
But that one makes it.
I understand why that one is.
Is free cash.
Get paid real money.
Hot on chat Chbutees heels.
Yeah.
Well, let me tell you about Figma.
Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool.
It lives in Figma.
So Outposts look good, feel real.
And stay connected to how teams build.
I would say, code back prototypes.
As part of, you know, we have the Open AI, Elon, Lodon.
As part of that, what if part of the settlement agreement is Open AI has to give 4-0 to GROC?
I mean, they might just wind up.
Yesterday was seriously one of the craziest experiences if you weren't watching our Sam interview live.
And honestly, the entire show, there was thousands of messages from people from 4-0 soldiers saying keep 4-0.
Yeah.
Keep 4-0.
Throwing hashtags.
You don't see hashtags that much anymore.
but they were thrown hashtags around Keep 4-O.
Yeah.
So I think maybe if Elon can negotiate for that,
so thank you to the TVPN Army, the day ones.
We'll never switch up on you.
We'll never let the money change us.
We'll never forget where we came from.
Yeah, Bobby was going to...
You guys in the chat were doing overtime work,
keeping things somewhat sane.
There's not much you can do in that situation.
Interestingly, a lot of people were saying,
oh, is it bots?
Because there is this world where, okay,
if you're playing really, really dirty, you could be a different lab and you could say,
okay, this 4-0 thing, maybe it's a little bit of a deal, but I could amplify it with some fake
bots that post more, generate extra content. It's very easy to generate a slop post that
sounds like a 4-0 deranged person. And then you could just amplify it, and it would all of a sudden
look like, oh, wow, there's millions of people that are affected by this. But I don't think
they were bots in the chat. Like the messages looked human to me.
They weren't copy-paste.
We get spam in the chat every once in a while.
We get this spam for a company that wants to route us to a specific URL to like buy stream viewers,
basically fake our account.
And so that bot knows go around and find live streams all over Twitch and pitch the Twitch
streamers fake bots that will watch the stream to help them climb the charts, right?
So that business model makes sense for those people.
You have to do like seven other steps to get to the point where like,
Like, okay, you're a rival lab and you don't like Open AI and you're trying to create a headache for them.
So you create all these bots.
And then you have to have the bots ready to rock on a YouTube chat that you had an hour notice for.
Like, that's pretty hard to set up all these YouTube accounts.
It's not the friend butter.
Just say you're not open claw pills.
Okay, okay.
Maybe it's possible.
But it didn't feel like they were bots.
And I think the chat agrees.
They were not possible.
They were not possible.
Save me.
Yeah.
So there was a Reddit group that shared the stream links.
So they all came here.
there were some bots, but it felt pretty crazy.
And yeah, it'll be interesting to see 4-0 is fully going offline.
It's already very hard to reach.
You have to go into turn-on legacy models and the settings.
It's going offline right around Valentine's Day.
I think February 13th.
And I don't know how to respond.
In truth, it feels odd to me because it does seem like you can get the 4-0 experience elsewhere
with a fine-tuned open-source model or, you know, prompt engineering.
But the 4-0 fans really care about that specifically.
I think there's some sort of parasycial relationship with even with the UI, with the app,
but with everything that's going on, they feel like it's not something that's perfectly
replicable elsewhere, which is just like, it's just a fascinating weird time that I don't
think we ever seen.
Because people were upset when Facebook launched the feed, and they were like, we want to go
back.
And they made these groups, and the groups got a lot of implication.
Ironically because of the feed.
Is that when Microsoft stopped investing as heavily into Clippy?
That's true.
That's true.
But I was never logging on to a Twitch stream and saying, I got, bring back Clippy.
Yeah, the notable thing is they didn't seem to be able to process that it wasn't just a show about Sam.
Yeah.
Even after Sam had left, they just kept going.
Yeah.
Which is very, very strange.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyways, I hope all of those people are able to find peace.
and hopefully help in real life.
Yeah, yeah, very odd.
Anyway, back to the bottleneck.
Back to someone that's helping unblock the bottleneck.
Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider.
Use your favorite agent to deploy web app, servers, databases, and more.
I got to issue a slight correction.
Wow, Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
I think Railway is actually contributing to the demand.
Potentially.
But that's, you know, it's important work.
Anyway, so right now it feels like chips are the more important piece of the bottleneck to talk about.
Sam Altman put it this way.
I asked him like chips versus energy, what's the bigger bottleneck right now?
He says it goes back and forth, but right now it's chips.
It's different at different times.
It may get solved on its own.
Normal capitalism may solve it, but I think somehow deciding is this society that we are going to increase the wafer capacity of the world?
And we're going to fund that and we're going to get the whole supply chain and the talented people who make that happen would be a very good thing.
do. And so why do we have a chip bottleneck to begin with? Semiconductors have been doubling and, you know, we've been on this Morse law curve. What's interesting is that the
the semiconductor industry should be better equipped to avoid a bottleneck because it's already been on an exponential.
Whereas energy production has been like flat, sort of like a malaise for a long time. Getting on, getting that unstuck is hard, but I think that's a problem for 2027 potentially. So the chip bottle neck comes down to
consolidation. Power plants, data centers, cooling technology. There's a bunch of suppliers in each of
these industries, and you can parallelize them, and you can steer resources from adjacent areas
to focus on AI projects specifically. Even a company like Boom Supersona can turn into a turbine
manufacturer, and there's a lot of other industries that are able to move over. And Dylan Patel
gave us some extra context there. So he said the semiconductor industry is used to double,
the amount of transistors made every year or two. Part of that is more advanced nodes. Part of that's more
capacity, whereas the energy industry in America wasn't built for that kind of growth. So initially,
people weren't creative. They were like, let's build these combined cycle gas plants. But now we've
realized, yes, there are three main manufacturers of turbines. And for dual combined cycle, you've got
IGTs, but you've also got medium speed reciprocating engines. Turns out Cummins can make about a
a million diesel engines a year, and those can generate electricity.
If I don't care about aesthetics and I put them in West Texas, easy.
And so there's all these different areas where you can reallocate.
You can't just take an Intel CPU and do anything useful in AI with it.
Yeah, Elon also on Cheeky Pint with Dorcas and John Paulson.
John talked about the Tesla team adapting.
He thinks they'll have to actually make turbine blades because they can get a lot of the other components,
but they may have to actually make those.
Okay.
Yeah.
So back to the leading edge fabs.
It's a completely different beast.
These fabs cost tens of billions,
30, 50, 75, 80 billion I've seen to build.
And it takes three, four, sometimes five years to go from breaking ground
to actually getting up to producing volume.
And we have like the perfect example of this because TSM
announced a plant in Arizona in 2020.
And in 2025, it's still not producing.
ed volume. It's doing really well. It's great, but that's five years and it's not just like,
oh, yeah, it's, it's as effective as what's in Taiwan. And so, uh, ASML is, is, uh,
the only viable producer of EUV lithography machines. And so there's this bottleneck within
the chip bottleneck, which is the TSM supplier, ASML. And they ship around 50 EUV machines per year,
maybe 50, 60. Each one costs 350 million dollars and leading edge fabs need dozens. So if you want to build a
more fabs, you need a bunch more tool makers and ASML has its own supply chain for different
lenses and glass and all sorts of stuff. They work with Zyce, Trump, a whole bunch of different
companies. And that supply chain is not very diversified. So you have another bottleneck even deeper
in the supply chain. And so all these vendors are highly specialized. And then even after you get
the fab built, there's still at least a year of processing, engineering, maybe 12 to 18 months,
where you actually work to get to high yield production. We're seeing that in TSM, Arizona.
and TSM just has decades of intellectual capital locked in the heads of engineers that they can't easily transfer or parallelize.
And so this has made TSMC the real bottleneck.
Hyper-scalers are pushing KAPX numbers into hundreds of billions of dollars.
We'll talk about this more on the show.
But the supply curve for leading edge wafers is relatively inelastic.
There's also this bullwhip effect when during COVID, we weren't shipping cars.
So a bunch of people cut back on demand.
And so that pulled things back.
And it takes years for these to work through.
Then you get overcapacity.
everyone demands way more, and then you over expand, and then you collapse, and it's this constant,
and the further out you are in the supply chain, the more the bullwhip affects you.
So TSM controls 90% of the advanced node market with Samsung and Intel far behind, and this is why
Ben Thompson, aside from the geopolitical concerns about TSM, is really urging tech companies
to wake up.
And so he says, the reality that hyperscalers and fablish chip companies need to wake up to, however,
is that avoiding the risk of working with someone other than TSM incurs new risks that are both
harder to see and also more substantial.
So there's a huge risk if you say, you know what, I'm going to go and place a huge order
with Samsung or Intel or I'm going to take a huge risk and be the anchor customer of their new
cutting edge, leading edge fab.
But Ben Thompson's saying there's a risk to not doing that.
And he says, except again, we can see the harms already.
Forgone revenue today as demand outstrips supply.
Today's shortages, however, may prove to be peanuts.
If AI has the potential, these companies claim it does,
future foregone revenue at the end of the decade is going to cost exponentially more,
surely a lot more than whatever is necessary expense-wise,
to make Samsung or Intel into viable competitors for TSM.
You really got to wonder what conversations are like between Jensen and TSMC right now,
given that it just doesn't feel, I mean, Taiwan is, TSM is not, they're certainly not going out and making, kind of going risk on, right?
They're staying relatively probably more conservative than some of their downstream customers would like.
Pop quiz, do you know where TSM is listed?
The New York Stock Exchange.
Want to change the world?
Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.
Just do it. Just be like TSM. Just build a $1.5 trillion semiconductor company. That would be nice. We need more of these.
Anyway, let's move on to the hyperscalers. Compound 248 says, poor Jassy, Andy Jassy. He's going to learn something about Amazon today.
When Google announces a crazy number, it's because it's playing offense. But when Amazon announces a crazy number, it's because it's playing defense.
It's ipso facto.
So Amazon said it will spend $200 billion this year on AI buildout.
This is from Bloomberg.
But this is worrying investors that the company's colossal bet on artificial intelligence will pinch profits while it waits for the investments to pay off.
The shares fell in extended trading.
The company reported spending $130 billion on property and equipment in 2025.
Analysts expect those expenses would reach $150 billion.
this year, but Amazon's saying, we're going to 200. We're going all in. So the stock's down
maybe 8% in after-hours trading, likely back up today because things are going better. But we'll
see. How is Amazon doing today? Not as down, but not as violently as it was after hours last night,
after earnings. So over the last month, it's sold off 15%. Yeah. And a lot of frustration from Amazon
shareholders, obviously they had the fastest growth in 13 quarters, and the stock is still
down 10%.
Amazon, looking back over the last five years to early 2021, only up 23% over five years.
So, of course, you did quite a lot better if you bought, you know, after the overall ZERP sell-off.
Yeah, just not as, not as sexy as a narrative as the rest of the hypers.
Duck, obviously, is a huge beneficiary of advancements in AI.
We see that with the accelerating ads market.
Microsoft, even though, yeah, it's getting beat up a little bit now.
They have that massive position in Open AI that feels like fully in solid place.
They got the IP.
They got, you know, a real hold on the AI question.
Google's obviously in a fantastic place.
Nvidia, clearly.
But Amazon's had a little bit rougher.
Yeah, yesterday was just such a strange day.
It was.
Trader says software stocks are cooked for not investing in AI.
Mag 7 stocks are cooked for investing heavily in AI.
Hope that helps.
It is crazy.
You need to do both.
Invest and don't both.
And don't invest.
Oh, this is the image.
I love this image.
What's this from?
Matt Damon in...
Which one?
I don't know.
In Rounders.
Oh, that's Rounders.
Last night we were just talking about this.
That's Rounders.
I thought Goodwill hunting for some reason, but same era.
So this is a summary of the 2026 Kappex numbers from the hyper-scale
Google is going to do 175, $185 billion versus 120 estimated.
Meta is doing 115 to 135 against 110 estimated.
Tesla's going to $20 billion from $11 billion estimated.
And Amazon, they were estimating $145, but they're going to do $200.
And so they're going all in.
One of the top comments here is very funny.
It says, what exactly is meta buying?
They don't do anything with AI.
That's not true.
Open up reels.
It's AI.
They are recommending all sorts of stuff.
Yeah.
L.A. purchaser says he could,
talking about somebody says,
is English, Jassy's first language ripping off the headphones?
And they say, he could just say,
this is a generational investing opportunity
that Tam is in order of magnitude bigger
than anyone is contemplating.
We are the market leader.
we are investing to be the cost leader.
What did we, what we did in retail?
We were doing here.
The more money we spend, the more excited we get about the opportunity.
There is a very tangible ROI.
We see it.
You're going to see it in the numbers.
You are seeing AWS accelerate.
It will keep accelerating.
It says, instead we got a word salad where you can pick your own conclusion.
Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't, nothing about the earning, like people can feel the emotion and the energy, right?
There wasn't, they can, there wasn't anything to like, obviously the business is doing great,
but there wasn't anything to like rally around and get really excited by it, right?
There's zero vision.
And yeah, even in the Cheeky Pinet Elon episode, you know, Dwork Keshe and John are pushing Elon on the data centers in spacing.
And I thought that Elon could have done more to really get people basically the same thing.
The Tam is an order of magnitude bigger than anyone is contemplating.
and we are investing for that future, right?
It was a lot of like trying to just justify putting it up there.
Yeah, when they were saying like, hey, there's a lot of land in the U.S.
we can blanket the U.S. with solar panels.
We do a lot here.
And so again, I think people are getting kind of caught up in the details.
When if you're going to spend, you know, you would hope
AWS making this kind of investment that they have more conviction than to,
Tyler does on the opportunity, right?
I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's possible.
Tyler's in the white suit.
He's looking good.
Yeah, looking good, Tyler.
Yeah.
Round of applause for Tyler.
Round of applause for Plaid.
Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest,
securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Bubble boy.
It's a classic Elon thing where, you know, he will lay out a vision that takes 10, 20, 30 years,
but he says it's going to take 10, 20, 30 months.
And so you have to sort of grapple with the short term,
but still you can't lose sight of like the long term
because like we did get rockets that land
and we did get space internet and whatnot.
Yeah, I think he said like 36 months is his estimate
for like when we start getting like computing space
like probably 30 months, I think.
But then so there's like kind of the,
that's like the shorter term thing.
But he did talk about like terawatts in space, right?
So, like, the U.S. is currently, like, half a terawatt, but we're going to be putting
terawatts in space of compute.
He's sort of, like, falling back to first principles and just talking about...
Yeah, he keeps repeating, like, oh, if you just look at, like, physics.
Yeah.
But it's kind of the sketch-all term he uses when he doesn't really know what to say.
It seems like...
Yeah, well, yeah, it just seems like it's, like the physics, it all checks out from the
physics calculations, but when you map that to the economic reality is the human capital
and financial capital realities.
You're just looking at a very long timeline
and he doesn't like talking about thinking in decades,
even though it's very clear that he does think in decades.
He just doesn't articulate things in decades.
Yeah, it seems like the short-term, like, bullcase for space data centers
is basically just like, you know, regulatory, right?
It's just going to be way too hard to find this,
to find, like, the actual land.
Yeah, didn't Wilmanitis post something about that?
He said that it's going to become really, really difficult
to build any data centers in the United States,
Although, you can certainly go to other countries with that.
I'm sure there's plenty of countries that would love the jobs and the taxes.
You know, you see India already saying, hey, we'll just take a slice in 20 years.
That's how AGI pill they are.
They're like, come build a data center here.
You can be tax-free for 20 years.
But then we're going to be making money in, what, 20, 46?
They're ready to rock.
Quickly.
Graphite.
Code review for the age of AI.
Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster.
You wanted to talk about...
Magnus in the chat.
None of you nerds, no physics.
They were feeding him drinks.
Chill out.
It is actually crazy.
I mean, we've never seen a cheeky pine episode
where they actually drank.
They did drink on this one.
That was the main feedback from last year.
Everyone's like, hey, great show, cool concept, great guests.
Well, they were filming a lot of them during the work day
with people in San Francisco.
So it was somebody who would like pop over,
film an episode.
And then you've got to go back to work,
so you don't necessarily want to be changed.
chugging pints, but it is funny.
Yeah, it feels like Yon took down three pints,
there's four pints or something.
You did the math, right?
So we'll talk about this later.
There's some posts, but, you know,
they seemed a bit smaller than normal pines, maybe,
so is it really, but I counted three, like, full glasses.
Okay.
The other thing, so Sam was obviously quite bearish
on space data centers in the near term.
It is worth calling out that there was a rumor last year
that they were kicking, he was kicking the tires on
Rocket Lab.
Do you remember that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I think, like, long-term, I'm sure he'll want to have his own space company.
But I think he would rather, like, if there's a hype cycle, like, he doesn't need it to be
about him.
He can let this one pass by and focus on the other things that are going on with the business
because there's so much going on with the business.
Like, if you add too many narratives, it can actually confuse things.
the X, X, A, SpaceX combination is crazy, but the space data center thing actually does sort of
streamline the narrative, in my opinion. What do you think, Tyler?
Yeah, I mean, I think Elon Dorkesh asked a question about this, which is like, it's so
crazy that, like, SpaceX, they have this super ambitious mission, but they keep seeming to
find these, like, good businesses on the way, right? So first, it's like Starlink with Falcon
and then with Starship, it's like, I mean, can you, do we really need that many Starlink?
But if you can get space data centers, if you're putting up terawatts of compute, then like, yeah, you need like massive, you know.
OTP in the chat says, dude just turned 21 and he can already eye up behind.
He's been studying the last week.
What did Bubble Boy say?
$660 billion of CAPEX this year on AI data centers.
To put a number like that in perspective, this is more than what we spent on the U.S. interstate highway system, $630 billion, more than what we spent on the U.S. interstate highway system, $630 billion, more than what we spent on the,
the Apollo Moon program, $257 billion, more than what we spent on the International Space Station, $150 billion.
It's more money than Walmart's revenue last year, $650 billion.
It's about 25% of all military spending globally.
It's equivalent to buying 50 Gerald R. Ford aircraft carriers.
It's the equivalent of spending $1.8 billion a day, $750 million an hour or $1.2 million a minute.
This year alone is, without a doubt, the biggest project in the history of capitalism,
and we are spending it all, we're spending all of it in one year.
God's sake of us.
He did, Bubble Boy did do the inflation adjustment here.
The Apollo program cost something like 25 billion.
Yeah, also putting it into perspective, France announced an initiative earlier this week.
They want to lead in AI research.
So through their 20, France 2030 program, they have invested.
more than 30 million euros in this initiative.
Macaron says science has found its home.
And Sean Frank says France is investing 30 million in this new AI initiative.
That's how much Google will spend in 90 minutes.
No joke.
Every 90 minutes, Google will spend 30 million on Cappex this year, one company.
Wow, one company.
They can hire Ilya for like an hour.
I know.
One hour consulting call.
Yeah, he's got to get an intro.
Yeah.
Intro.
Hit up, Brad.
Vibe.com, where DGhc brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV,
pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on meta.
Take him is breaking down the Nvidia news.
The stock is up 6.22%.
InVIDIA shares barely moved in after I was trading last night.
Yeah, this is what I said.
I was like Amazon just announced, hey, we're going to spend, you know, $200 billion.
What are they going to buy with those?
I mean, they will buy Traneum and in friendship, but they're going to buy a lot of InVig.
you know it, take him said, you all know I was already insanely bullish on
Nvidia's NVL-72 super cycle this year. These CAP-X numbers from Google and Amazon
blow away even my most optimistic expectations for Nvidia's main and consumer
market. And we also saw from Greg Brockman that GB200 is off to the races. The
Blackwell chips are now in full force over at OpenAI powering 5.3. There's a little bit
a debate over whether that was involved in training or inference, but it doesn't really matter.
Blackwell's here, and it's going to improve things.
And that's probably good for chip designers, which NVIDIA is obviously one of.
Let me tell you about Lambda.
Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building, AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
Stephen over at Lambda was the one who sent me that post from France,
originally.
Yeah.
You were, you was, uh, you gonna get some.
You were not kind.
You were making fun of them, but it's a good post.
Going all in on AI with $30 million.
It's really like the, it has the, uh, what's like,
yeah, the one billion dollars.
Cause you're not aware of inflation because you've been frozen for 50
years or something like that.
Let's go over to the Wall Street Journal.
Yes.
Behind Disney search for a lasting successor to Bob
Bob Iger.
Yeah.
Company's succession committee reviewed information on over 100 candidates before the race was narrowed to two.
This seems crazy.
Update your message.
You've got to be thorough.
If you were reviewed, you've got to put it here.
So the trio, which is Bob Eiger, Josh DeMorrow, and Dana Waldgen.
They were meeting in Disney's executive dining room.
Trio sat in a private room with panoramic views of Disney Studio lot and surrounding San Francisco Valley,
where Iger discussed scenarios.
the board of directors was considering.
Could DeMorrow, is it Diomaro or Damaro?
Demiro, Doug Jimiro, is he related to Doug Dumiro?
Diomaro.
Chair of Disney's experience business, including theme parks and consumer products,
Walden, co-chairman of the entertainment business,
lead the company together.
What about with one in charge and the other as deputy?
Deaumaro and Walden, who by that point were the finalists to succeed,
Eiger said they were open to all the scenarios. Disney's board of directors was scheduled to meet in the
same building and hold its final vote on who the next CEO would be the following Thursday. People
close to the company predicted D.M.R. would be given the top job with Walden elevated role to ensure she
stayed. The only surprise turned out was the timing, keenly aware of the intense public anticipation.
Disney's 10 directors, including Eiger, voted unanimously Monday to make tomorrow CEO and Walden
and chief creative officer.
We were ready to go and I didn't like
sitting there with the news board chairman
James Gorman, who led the succession process
said in an interview.
Yeah, that was really fast.
It was like rumors hit
the various outlets and then it was like
confirmed immediately. That was smart.
At an employee town hall,
Diomaro described the moment as surreal
and said he was initially embarrassed
by his reaction.
I got a little choked up when they let me know because it's a big responsibility.
It is a big responsibility.
His ascension will, save for any unexpected snafus, marked the end of a decade-plus search
for a lasting successor to Bob Eager that has been marked by delays, missteps, and reversals.
Employees said they are happy to have the biggest question about the company's future finally resolved
and anxious about what a former parks leader running the company with a veteran television executive
as his top deputy will mean for Disney's...
Let's give it up for veteran television.
So Gorman had previously run a leadership succession project at Morgan Stanley.
He took over Disney's process in 2024 after joining the board.
He said the Succession Committee reviewed information on more than 100 candidates and homed in on several outsiders,
along with four Disney executives tomorrow, Walden, Entertainment Co-Chairman, Alan Bergman, and ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro.
Gorman said the board interviewed the candidates formally and in intimate lunches.
They conducted 360 interviews with Disney executives talking to subordinates and colleagues as well as bosses.
By last summer, the race had narrowed to two candidates.
DeMorrow and Walden traveled to Orlando in August to present their visions for Disney's future at a board meeting.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported this.
In ensuing months, they met with board members in a less formal setting.
both executives talked to Iger frequently about what it took to run a company like Disney.
Employees noticed and gossip was rampant.
Staffers speculated about whether DeMaro's background in parks would hurt him
given that Bob Chappack had also run the company's theme park before his short-lived tenure as CEO.
Yeah, that'd be wild.
Hey, we had a misstep with a parks guy.
No more parks guys.
Yeah.
Disney's leaders wanted the succession process to be as clean as possible without runners
up leaving the company given the
Chepec fiasco, we wanted to get this
right, said Gorman.
As a result, a few were surprised
that Walden was named president, a position
no one has held at Disney in 20 years.
With a recommended
retention bonus worth $5.3 million,
Walden's creative
officer positioned is
a new one for Disney. Some in the
company's movies division are nervous
about what Walden's rise will mean
for their business, which he hasn't worked in
before now.
which she hasn't worked in before, and now she oversees it.
But there she is with the Founders Award at the International Emmys, New York,
getting an award.
A few company leaders were told.
This is the Founders Podcasts Award?
I don't know what the Founders Award of the International Emmys is for.
Like, it's not for a founder because she was an executive.
It's a prestigious honor bestowed by the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
to individuals or organizations making a significant impact on global television.
Founders.
Anyways, let's move on to...
Dirty soda?
Dirty soda.
We got to talk about the Utah mom.
Had you heard of Dirty Soda before?
Dirty Soda before.
I'd never heard of dirty soda before.
Have you heard of this?
Yeah, yeah.
This is big in Utah.
This is big in Utah?
Yeah, yeah.
Have you been to Utah?
No.
How do you know that it's big in Utah, then?
Exposed.
My friends, like, send it to me on Instagram.
They're like, look at this.
Okay.
All right, what is Dirty Soda?
You have friends who live in Utah?
It's like soda and they put, like, cream in it and stuff, right?
Okay. Well, we'll dig in. I think we'll let the Wall Street Journal get the facts trade.
But first, I'll tell you about phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.
A mom with five children ages six to 16 in St. George, Utah. Nicole Tanner didn't realize she was on to something with dirty soda.
That's what the creator of the chain swig calls spiking Coke, Mountain Dew, or Dr. Pepper with fruit, purees, and flavored cream served in plastic,
cups stuffed with pebble ice, microplastic.
Nightmare?
Nightmare.
Really?
I didn't know pebble ice was at risk.
No, no, no.
I'm talking about it.
I'm just saying plastic cups.
Oh, the plastic cup.
Her business took off a few years ago when pop star Olivia Rodrigo was in Utah filming the TV series
High School Musical and posted an Instagram photo holding a cup from Swig.
Now hashtag, hashtag, big chains want in.
McDonald's recently tested sprite with lemon vanilla syrup, dragon fruit, Taco Bell, squirrels.
It's teal-colored Baja dream freezes with vanilla cream and calls it a Mountain Dew Baja Blast dirty freeze.
We forgot to ask Sam Altman if he's going to issue a Baja blast.
Because he did the code red.
It's time for a Baja Blast.
It's time to Baja Blast.
He's back to the top of the charts.
Maybe that's what the Super Bowl had, Codex.
Oh, that would be good.
The Baja Blast Codex collab campaign for the builders.
Yes.
TGI Fridays last year started offering a line of dirty sodas and can be amped up with shots of
Jack Daniel.
Okay.
That sounds,
when I hear dirty soda,
I feel like it's spiked with alcohol,
but.
Or Cody.
Just,
uh,
dirty Sprite.
Yeah,
that's right.
That's right.
The future zone.
And drive-in chain Sonic
has encouraged customers
to make it dirty by ordering
creamer and mix-ins with their sodas.
Okay.
While the heart of dirty sodas may still be
Utah and the mountain west states,
Swig has expanded to around 140 locations.
That's big.
That's fast.
This is insane.
To me,
to me,
this feels like a really,
tough business to be in long term because if if the product becomes popular everyone has it
everyone has it immediately have no real IP yeah right because you're just using sodas off the shelf
sure so yeah I'd be interested to see what happens to these 140 locations even though the product
is ahead yeah Tanner's main investor family investment office Larry H. Miller co brought in a professional
chief executive who has taken other companies public and he is talking of an eventual initial public
offering for the chain, which had around 100 million in sales last year.
Tanner, I mean, these must be incredibly simple to run.
It's literally a box.
You have soda and creamer.
Yeah, yeah.
So I could see even...
They don't sell food or anything here?
This is like such a simple operation.
We're doing what Starbucks did for coffee, but for soda, said Swig CEO, Alex Dunn.
So Alex Dunn says, pull up here, 6 a.m. on the way to the gym, grab a big soda.
I feel like you'd need more caffeine if you really wanted to displace Starbucks.
People will really just stop at a dedicated place just to get a tasty soda.
That's a crazy thing.
Gabe is sharing a quote from future, dirty soda and a styrofoam.
Spend a day to get my mind block.
Oh, L.H. Miller was the owner of the Utah Jazz.
Did you have more context here?
Well, I was just going to say on the caffeine thing isn't the whole point that it doesn't have, it's like not caffeinated, right?
Because they're Mormon.
Oh, okay.
So it's a Utah thing.
I think so.
Yeah.
Okay, okay.
At least original.
Or there's like a little caffeine, but you can.
probably do caffeine-free Coca-Cola or something. I started, I did something recently that,
that felt, uh, it felt really wrong, but the result was good. I mixed a Yerba with a Mexican Coke.
Ooh, okay. It was, it was fantastic. Matayina. Yeah. Mexican Coke. Yeah. That's fun. Gemini
3 Pro. Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning. Next little vibe coding.
Deep multimodal understanding. Tanner grew up on an Idaho dairy farm, the fifth of eight children.
and she got her associate degree in office education.
That is a sweet degree.
Wow.
Who runs office education here?
Office education.
We need some.
Maybe we do.
Here's how you use Claude Code.
And started working in marketing for a library system software company.
Let's give it up for library system software company.
I bet you that, I bet you this is a more durable business than the other SaaS out there.
She got married and by 23 started family.
Tanner started working for Mary Kay.
selling makeup and skin care products and eventually building a team of 18 consultants.
Let's give it up for MLMs.
I think they would just use that, right?
Yeah, anytime you...
They don't like the pyramid scheme term, but I don't know.
Multi-level marketing, I think, is just a strategy.
In 2007, the Tanner's moved with their five children to St. George from Colorado.
She was a 38-year-old mother of five craving caffeine and tired of watered down fountain soda.
Okay.
when she decided to turn her cravings into a business in 2010.
Oh, wait.
So coffee wasn't a choice.
Tanner is Mormon and adherence typically traditionally abstained from coffee,
but you could have caffeine in soda?
I didn't realize that.
That seems like a loophole.
This is, I love this.
Tanner and her husband used savings to avoid taking out a business loan to buy a 700
square foot commercial building in St. George with a big parking lot.
It's like people are like,
I moved to San Francisco and I had a mattress on the floor. I have so much conviction. Okay,
buy a building for your untested. With all your savings. With all your savings. That's real
conviction. Her idea was to serve super cold soda with a twist like lime, fruit, or purees.
Tanner initially leased a fountain machine from Coca-Cola. When she asked PepsiCo for the same,
Tanner said the company took a pass. Soda rivals typically push restaurant chains to stock their
products exclusively. So Tanner bought two-liter bottles of Pepsi and Mountain Dew from grocery stores.
I love seeing your face when you asked for a Diet Coke on a plane. They say, is Pepsi okay?
And you just say, absolutely not. After about a month, Pepsi relented, she said.
She started with limes, lemons, and six flavor shots. She recruited her eldest daughter or niece
to work in the store. Her 15-year-old son held up signs outside, advertising that job is not going away.
Sign spinning.
I've been getting so many sign spinning reels with the you broke my heart.
That's just one guy.
But I see all of his reels.
And it's just like him being,
I don't have a job.
And then it's crazy.
He can actually spin that into an interesting digital ad business.
Oh, yeah.
Because he could just do the signs.
Whatever's on the sign you see.
I honestly never see what's on the sign, though, because it's spinning so fast.
No, I know.
But use that as a lead-in.
Sure, sure, sure.
And then promote ramp.
Yeah.
That's good. Tanner, in the beginning, price for drinks at a dollar for any size.
That's crazy.
I didn't know you could get anything for a dollar in this country anymore, helping draw students from nearby Utah Tech University.
In 2013, a local news broadcast found customers waiting to get a mango, puree, mountain dew, or big al-soda.
That's interesting.
I saw the...
I don't know if this is a big owl soda or big AI soda.
So they said a few years ago, Olivia Rodriguez promoted it and it went viral.
I thought this business was only a few years old.
I guess.
No, it's an overnight success.
It's an overnight success.
That's pretty remarkable.
After customers started referring to Swig's Dr. Pepper and Cream Combination as Dirty Soda,
Tanner latched onto the phrase encouraging customers.
They got to pay future royalty here.
I won't stand by this.
They should get future as a influencer.
That would be good.
Yeah, he's like, when I said dirty soda, I meant.
Swig.
By 2017, Swig had grown to more than a dozen.
stores. The staff was spread thin, and Tanna realized she lacked the expertise to grow further.
She and her husband separated in 2020 RIP and is no longer involved in Swig. And I hate what I'm just
like reading this incredible story of entrepreneurship. And then they kind of interrupt the flow there.
In 2025, she married Greg Robinson and they continue to live in Utah. It was held together with
some duct tape and hairpins, said Andrew Smith, a Utah-based investor who's savory fund invest in CPG.
They took a majority stake.
Interesting.
They bought the whole thing.
In recent years, Swig has gotten a boost from the cast of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and reality TV show chronicling a group of Utah-based TikTok influencers.
Interesting.
We're at Swig so I can tell you exactly what my Swig order is.
It's sparkling water, sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach, sugar-free vanilla, raspberry puree with a fresh lime.
That's crazy.
So over the top.
Anyways, what a cool story.
Yeah, Tanner says we're in extreme high-growth mode right now.
The company estimates it serves over 2,000 drinks in a single conference.
The White House has posted biggest period, bowl, period, run, period, ever, period, starting period, now period.
Did they post this? Did they post this?
Did they scroll down?
Yeah.
No, so they're sharing a fake screenshot from True Social where Donald Trump says, let the gains begin.
I mean, he really did call the bottom.
At least a local bottom.
Of veracity and truth?
No, I'm just saying, like, if you bought,
if you bought Nvidia when he put,
when this fake post was shared by the real account,
is, but White House post is not even the real account, right?
That's just a fake 14,000 follower account.
Everything about this is fake.
everything about
and then they follow up.
I highly recommend you follow White House
Grandpa. It's like, what are we
doing here?
Very strange. Absolutely.
Well, do your own research and
get on public.com.
Investing for those who take it seriously
not from fake news
on a podcast.
Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries,
and more with great customer service
that isn't fake news.
Goldman Sachs is tapping Anthropics AI model
to automate accounting and compliance roles.
Embedded Anthropic engineers have spent six months at Goldman building autonomous systems for time-intensive, high-volume back office work.
One of my first jobs.
Bowmarket and forward-deployed engineers for Anthropic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, it will be funny if, like, true diffusion requires two decades of just millions of consultants working with businesses of all size to implement AI systems.
Yeah.
Probably.
I mean, the task horizon, every time I see it, six hours, that's amazing.
And you were making the comment of, like, you know,
how many times do you really sit there and spend six hours working autonomously?
But there's a different frame, which is, like, a consultant can come in with a goal
and work pretty much autonomously for, like, months.
And so there is a world where, you know, to not have a forward deployed engineer in the loop,
you need the task horizon to be, like, years, basically.
Yeah, building a company, like, takes your whole life.
Exactly, yeah. So keep the doubling going, which I think puts us back to like 2035.
I think it puts us at like 2035. It's about a decade until you get to like the task horizon is a lifetime. It's like the average life expectancy of a human.
Pull up this article from the Wall Street Journal. Okay. What are we looking at? Which one?
Anthropic ORA Farm, the Journal this week. This is one of the most insane headlines. It's the weak Anthropic tanked the market and pulled ahead of.
of its rivals once a distant second or third in the AI race.
The company is moving to the front with a focus on caution, coding, and business clients.
Well, they didn't fully oral farm because the journal sort of takes a shot here.
So it's Anthropic once appeared as an also-ran in the chaotic race for AI supremacy.
This week, the sophistication of the startup's products upended the stock market,
a simple set of industry-specific add-ons to its clawed product,
including one that performed legal services, triggered a,
days-long global stock sell-off from software to legal services, financial data, and real estate.
Then Anthropica unveiled Super Bowl ads that taunt rival OpenAI.
On Thursday, Anthropic unleashed its most advanced model yet, capable of synthesizing data and
analysis, running teams of coding assistance and functions akin to product management.
Shares of software companies, including Salesforce, Intuit, and others fell again Thursday.
although less precipitously than earlier in the week.
The viral moment for Anthropics models is, quote,
the most important thing happening in AI since ChatGPT's launch said,
Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation,
who I know Ball.
You know him.
Everyone knows Ball on this show,
who writes an artificial intelligence newsletter,
quote, it's infinitely interesting.
Industry prognosticators and AI evangelists have spent months
foretelling the toll Anthropic and other sophisticated AI tools would take on software as
service companies that were darlings of the previous internet era tools made by companies such
as Workday, Monday.com, and Adobe have become the digital backbone for American corporations.
Anthropics tools, however, which include agents that can act autonomously to carry out increasingly
complex user requests for hours, have offered a preview of the threat, sophisticated AI
models pose to entire companies.
It's a good article.
I mean, obviously, we'll see how fast the diffusion happens.
Some of these systems have things that you cannot simply vibe code.
We'll talk to Max Levchen about, is it possible to vibe code a financial software product?
A global payments network?
A global payments network.
Can you vibe code a bank charter or money transfer license?
And I think more and more companies will emerge, and there might be a divergence between
companies that have moats that are, you know, that are resistant to software-based disruption,
but then maybe they should trade it in a different multiple. So there's sort of a re-evaluation
of the market broadly. Yeah, you also can, with the payment stuff, again, I'm super
excited for us to talk with Max, especially on this week when PayPal is obviously in the news.
But you can imagine a world where it does become possible to technically vibe code a global
payments network. Yeah. But various regulators just say,
like, hey, we're not, like, we're going to start having requirements. You need to be,
at least have 100 people on your team, right? Things like that. Oh, that's interesting.
You know, basically, if you're getting inundated with a bunch of requests of somebody that's like,
hey, I started this company a week ago and now I want to be able to process payments,
state by state, globally, et cetera. People are just going to be like, hey, this is probably not
responsible. Yeah. Let me tell you about gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits in
HR built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses. I want to
a vibe code a payments platform where when it's when it's when it's when it's payday a humanoid robot
comes around just does a money spread in your face and just says here's your cash that's the future
you don't need to know this money transmittal license no these no these recordings money spread
yeah oh Tyler's got the money spread money spread you're actually quite amateurish at your money
spreads from what i've seen on instagram you could you there are levels and you are on level one
You need to learn all the different ones.
The money counter spread.
That's not bad.
For anyone watching.
But I want to see it go all the way down your arm.
That is prop money.
Okay.
Do not break.
Not exposed.
Exposed.
First time money spread.
Future would be mocking.
Rookie.
Money spread rookie.
Claims to love.
Claims to know all about dirty soda.
Never been to Utah.
Never been to Utah.
Claims to be able to money spread.
Can't do a money spread.
Can't do a money spread.
Can't do a money spread.
I'm broke boy.
Wait, Jordan, do you have like 20 bucks on you?
I actually do.
Oh, he got you.
Mog.
He was going to say, that's what I thought.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
That's what I thought.
He can't even hold his mic down.
He can't hold the mic button.
Turbo puffer, serverless vector in full text search,
built from first principles and object storage,
fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.
Take him in a funny take.
He said, y'all are clowns.
Clowns!
The anthropic legal plugin uses
software. It doesn't replace it. In fact, the co-work legal plugin uses Microsoft 365, GERA slack,
and box software to accomplish its tasks. No one in Anthropic has replicated any of these
applications with ones coded by the company's cloud code agent. What is this X that you can put up there?
New feature. Just exit out? New feature. Yeah. Yes, yes. There are plenty of situations where
where the token cost of regenerating the software is much lower than just using the software.
people will use the software. Jim Kramer said, Anthropics power is so daunting that all they have to do is say they are going into cybersecurity, and that's the end of the group. I don't want to be against them, but they are not the all-powerful firm that they think they are. Well, we'll talk to Doug O'Loughlin about exactly how powerful Anthropic is and whether he has vibe-coded everything in his life or if he is still using an operating system at this point. Who knows? Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows,
with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on
marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Joe Wisenthal shared yesterday, silver down 19%.
Anthropic must have launched a silver extension.
Yes.
It's just chaos in the markets.
It's just absolute chaos everywhere.
One of the most chaotic weeks of my adult life.
Yeah.
But it's been, lots of green shoots, lots of interesting projects, lots of interesting applications
and progress all over the place.
Derek Thompson said, for me, the odds that AI is a bubble
declined significantly in the last three weeks
and the odds that we are actually quite underbuilt
for the necessary levels of inference usage went up significantly in that period.
Eric Thompson is AGI-I-pilled.
I think AI is going to become the home screen
of a ludicrously high percentage of white-collar workers
in the next two years,
and parallel agents will be deployed
in the battlefield of knowledge work at downright Soviet levels.
And Kevin Ruse over at the New York Times, host of the Hard Fork podcast, says,
this is why everyone was freaking out about Claude Coat overwinter break.
Once you see an agent autonomously doing stuff for you,
it's so instantly clear that all computer-based work will be done this way.
This is why my serious AI policy proposal is to sit every member of Congress down in a room with laptops for 30 minutes
and have them all build websites.
Yeah.
Get them vodka.
So we were joking about this yesterday with Shultz.
So, like, we maybe need more long weekends for AI adoption.
But I wouldn't be surprised for a big company to, like, actually do something like this,
which is like, hey, we're going to have like a, we're going to have the next Thursday, Friday off.
Hackathon.
Yeah, basically.
Congress is a whole other thing.
You got to go to Congress, sit all the Congress people down and get them, get them vibe coding.
What would they build?
I feel like they don't use a lot of software.
so there's not that much to build.
They're so abstracted away from it.
It's all lunches and phone calls and dinners and meetings.
There's not that much that actually...
This is the thing with like OpenClaw,
there's some people asking, like,
what are you actually using it for?
And people are realizing, like,
a lot of my day is not...
You know the thing that I wish I could automate?
What?
My mail at home.
Okay.
You can do that.
Have you seen Earth-class mail?
There are a few of these virtual...
mailbox.
It sends it.
So basically you forget your home address.
You don't share it anywhere on the internet.
You never put it anywhere.
You only use this other address.
Mine was like 830 Market Street in San Francisco.
All of the mail would go there.
If it's addressed to me, it gets opened by a robot scanned, and then you have a web dashboard,
but also it just goes to your email.
And then you can actually say, shred it.
So they've been aged for decades.
Decades.
No, it was really important when you set up a business.
use a fake address or one of these virtual mailboxes.
And then you can actually click a button, send this to me physically, if it's like a magazine
or a gift or something.
You can say, like, keep this or you can say, like, shred it.
And then you have a virtual, you know, representation of it forever.
And you could run an agent over it.
So maybe that's the next thing you pick up is a virtual mailbox.
That would be good.
How does that work there?
There are certain situations where you need your ID to match, like, your utility bill.
So you just still, I guess you just use, still use your home address for utilities, but use everything else.
Or passport.
Like there's usually other ways to approve residency besides the bills.
But also, I don't know if you can actually get the utility bill to not go where the utilities are.
Yeah, that's what I was saying.
But hopefully the utilities don't leak it.
I'm talking about like the broad, like, you know, your address gets on the Internet and then it's just like spam and like credit card offers and stuff like that.
I'm just saying I never want to open up a physical piece of mail again.
I wanted to come someplace, have an AI agent, like, you know, you get a, you go on a toll road,
just pays it automatically.
Yeah, yeah, stuff like that.
Optimus opens it for you, takes a picture.
Does a money spread.
Does a money spread.
Walks to the post office, mails the next letter, mails the check.
This is the future.
powered by MongoDB.
Choose the database built for flexibility and scale.
Built with best in class embedding models and rerankers.
MongoDB has what you need to build.
It does. Michelangelo drawing just sold for 27.2 million. Let's hit the gong for that over 13 times. It's asking price.
We bring down the gong? The Renaissance master earned a record sum with the sketch of a foot. Let's bring down the gong. Let's hit the gong for the Michelangelo painting and then you'll get. Give it a clean hit.
Let's give it up for the team for really dialing in the special effects.
Michael Angelo. Overnight success. Truly. What do you think, Tyler, overvalued, undervalued?
27.2 million. I think I'm going to have to go with Tyler Cowan. I'm pretty sure on marginal
Revolution. I saw this earlier this week. He said way overvalued. Way overvalued. Whoa. What was the
what was the thesis? I mean, it's not, uh, I'll give you the bare thesis. Look at the picture.
It's just like a, yeah. It's a foot. It's not even like a painting. It's just like a sketch.
I think we know what's going on.
There's people that are into this stuff.
I'm not going to judge, but it's not me.
Not for me.
Get it off.
I've discovered Michelangelo a drawing of a foot sold for 27.2 million of Christi's on Thursday.
A record for any work created by the Renaissance Master in a sale likely to kick the art market into high gear.
Previously unknown, Red Chalk's sketch is one of only a handful of Michelangelo's surviving studies still left in private hands.
hands. My AI diffusion model could do this. That's the new phrase. My kid couldn't do this,
but my AI diffusion model certainly could. This is not that impressive. Not a 27, maybe at five,
give me a break. The five-inch drawing depicts the right foot of the Libyan Sybil, a blonde prophetess,
from wearing a cremcicle gown painted onto the chapel ceiling of the eastern end.
Let's get the feet off of the screen. Get that feet out of here. Moving on, back to business.
Petrini says in response to Opus 46, I have not shied away from buying scary dips.
Neither has been on our team.
Producer Ben always buys the dip.
Buying tech in 2022 is scary.
Yes.
It's really good that buy the dip is like so like people have really, it's really the backbone.
Because freak out and sell everything would really be bad for our capital market.
Yes.
Yes, yes. Okay, so COVID.
Buying tech in 2022 is scary.
As were banks after SVB, I bought plenty of stocks when COVID seemed like potentially the end of the world.
But this doesn't really seem like an overreaction in software.
If anything, it's delayed.
It's a rational response that isn't even trying to front run the capability improvement.
The capability is here.
I respect anyone who is actually smart enough to know who survives and thrives.
I just don't think I can foresee that far ahead right now.
And Gary Basin has a devil's advocate.
I think the bottleneck will still be knowing the details of what to build, which depend on what your customers need,
not even necessarily what they say they want.
I use these tools daily to close to close to their full power, and they're amazing,
but the flashy demos are all examples of extremely precisely specified tasks in example-rich domains,
build a compiler, build a web browser, etc.
These have very specific rules on what success entails.
And I've seen like the Gastown, one of the big demo projects was like,
re-platforming some open source software to rest.
And it's like that's pretty verifiable from start to finish.
If you're looking at like build a new social network, it's like, okay, how do you get
distribution?
Distribution is still really, really important.
Like you can vibe code stuff, but driving traffic is harder than ever.
What do you think in Tyler?
I just need to clear something.
So before I said Tyler Cannon was talking about.
Michelangelo.
Yeah, Michelangelo.
That was incorrect.
He was actually talking about a Rembrandt.
Oh, okay.
It was 20 million.
20 million.
That one, okay.
Thank you for the fact check.
Really quickly.
Restream.
One live stream, 30 plus destinations.
If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com.
Wall Street Logic right now, says Chris Camillo.
Punish big tech for wasting CAPX on AI.
Punish SaaS because AI will replace them.
And punish GPU manufacturers for selling the chips that power the waste.
Sell everything.
Sell your dollars.
Remember to lock up your capital in late-stage private companies at the tops.
says base day 16 Z that I think has been deleted.
I can't see it, but I can see the screen.
Really good post.
Anyway, the fear greed index is at five out of a hundred.
Extreme fear.
Extreme fear.
Yeah, I mean, good timing.
Freep out and sell everything.
This is Lindy.
When he posted this last night.
Yeah.
4,000.
Got a rally.
I think this might have turned the tide.
This might have turned it.
He did it.
Anyway.
Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era.
Unlock seamless and real-time experiences.
and new value with Cisco.
Toma Bravo, managing partner Holden Spat, says,
I just finished a week of board meetings
with several of our portfolio companies
and their strong results in growth and profitability
seem to be, in my view, another piece of evidence
against the overwrought headlines
that AI is eating software.
Anaplan, bottom line, Cupa, DeForse, and Jepison for flight
are navigating the AI transition quite well
with Q4 bookings growth of 22% on average
and high margins.
Let's go.
These are large companies operating at billion-dollar revenue scale, not small startups and the growth numbers look to be accelerating, not decelerating.
That kind of growth doesn't square with the notion that enterprise customers are cutting software spend so they have more money for new AI applications.
We don't view our portfolios companies as being caught in either or zero-sum competition like that.
They're building and integrating AI functionality into their products, and customers are voting with their dollars.
systems of
transitioning
systems of record
with powerful AI
and agent capabilities
built to enterprise
requirements and workflows
have shown themselves
to be quite capable
of profitable growth
and I believe
the value of profitable growth
will endure
in the face of technological change
let's go
not biased at all
but I think
this is what we want to see
six months ago
Google was considered disrupted
now it's accelerating today
SAS is considered disruptive.
Now SaaS is accelerating.
Let's see.
It's certainly not time to take your foot off the gas if you're building a SaaS company.
You've got to figure out how to survive, how to thrive in the age of AI.
Can't be asleep at the wheel.
You've got to be building.
You've got to be innovating.
You've got to know your value.
You've got to know what really makes your company valuable.
Tom Dale says, I don't know why this week became the tipping point,
but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health.
health crisis. I saw another post in the same vein from somebody saying, well, at least we're
getting it over with before everyone else, right? Software engineers might be prepared for a new
reality just because they're probably closer to the beginning of the wave. Justine Moore has
the other side of it. She says, I love how everyone is saying SaaS is dead like you're going to
get the Fortune 500 to ditch Salesforce for a CRM vibe coded by a 13-year-old. And,
Matt Levine says, what's kind of funny is that people on this website have internalized,
quote, you hire McKinsey for air cover and a throat to choke if things go down, go wrong,
but they haven't internalized you hire Salesforce Workday and Atlassian for very similar,
albeit not identical reasons.
And there's some disagreement.
Montagg says that's not even remotely true, and Matt Levine says, wrong.
This is the other Matt Levine, by the way.
This is not the Bloomberg writer.
This is a software guy with some finance thrown in.
He's been at A16 Z and JPMorgan.
Let me tell you about console.com.
Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support,
giving employees instant resolution for access, requests, and password resets.
That is right.
Good Alexander says, just to be clear, people are shorting the economy of bits,
just as software, EBIT of margins are about to run to 70% and rotating into the economy
of Adams into mass unemployment.
Rotating into the economy of Adams into mass unemployment?
I'm saying, like, if you're buying Disney,
right now saying like, okay, they have the parks business.
Oh, yeah, and they have IP, it's not as immune to AI disruption,
but then if a bunch of people are unemployed...
They're not going to go to Disney.
Yeah, in theory.
Theoretically.
Theoretically.
They might go more.
Who knows?
The fact that crypto and silver are getting clobbering at the same time as SaaS stocks
makes me think that the AI disruption story is a little bit too pat of an explanation
for what's going on.
There might be something else going on in the global economy.
Yeah, this is why giving anthropic full credit.
for the correction in the journal.
It really like amps up the aura and the power.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, it's great for anthropop.
And people are running the numbers on like, okay, so, you know, yeah, the valuation
of anthropics probably doubled an extra 300 billion, but we're seeing like a trillion
dollar sell off.
It's like, is that really the exchange rate that we're talking about here?
We will see.
Jensen is pushing back on the AI will kill all software.
Let's play the video.
Just like he pushed back last year on the Deep Seek Panic.
Let's play this video of Jensen.
Software is.
Software is a tool.
There's this notion that the tool in the software industry is in decline and will be replaced by AI.
You could tell because there's a whole bunch of software companies whose stock prices are under a lot of pressure.
Because somehow, AI is going to replace them.
It is the most illogical thing in the world, and time will prove itself.
Let's just give it, let's give ourselves the ultimate thought experiment.
Suppose we are the ultimate AI, artificial, general robotics, the ultimate AI, the physical version of us.
You could, of course, solve any problem because, you're humanoid.
You could do things.
If you were a human or robot, would you use a screwdriver or invent a new screwdriver?
I would just use one.
Would you use a hammer or invent a new hammer?
Would you use a chainsaw or invent a new chainsaw?
Just don't, first of all, ideally they don't use it at all.
A lot of disagreement in the timeline.
But do you understand what I'm saying?
If you were a human or robot, artificial general robotics,
would you use tools or reinvent tools?
The answer, obviously, is to use tools.
And so now do the digital version of that.
if you were a artificial general intelligence, would you use the tools like ServiceNow and
and SAP and cadence and synopsis? Or would you reinvent a calculator? Of course you would just use a
calculator. Okay, Tyler. Okay, I'd like completely disagree. So like if you're, yeah, if your robot
you'll use the calculator, right? Like, you'll just build the calculator if it costs you a lot of money
to use the calculator. Yes, yes, yes. So like, I think,
like, you know, digital, like, agents will, like, use Salesforce, right?
But if Salesforce becomes, like, very expensive, or if it's already fairly expensive,
it's at some point it becomes cheaper to just build it themselves and then you run.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, especially when they're like, I can work the equivalent of 2,000 lifetimes today.
Yeah.
Yeah, like, obviously there's use for tools, right?
Yeah.
Open AI doesn't, or Chitbtee, like, will write out Python script to run some, like,
big math problem, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not going to like use tokens to try to like...
Yes, yes, yes.
At some point if a single prompt can say like, build me a clone of this software and
re-platform me and onboard all my customers and employees to the new vibe-coded version
of software and maintain it for free, yeah, you have a problem.
But as long as the cost to re-implement the software and re-platform and transition over...
John Palmer in the X-Chat and Deepak...
Deepak in the YouTube chat say,
would you watch TBPN or reinvent it?
Would you invent a new podcast or listen to a podcast?
Yeah.
Canter in the chat was talking about trains,
the indomitable will of trains or the unstoppable force of trains,
just being extremely bullish on trains.
I don't know, just trains.
It was just like a very random train anecdote.
Yeah, I just like that there's a hype train for trains in the chat.
Shmoseby says you met me at a rather illiquid period of my life.
It's rough out there.
Yeah, I mean, going back to Jensen, like, it's in Jensen's interest for the
economy, for the markets not to collapse, even if he doesn't necessarily believe this,
even if Tyler's take is right.
Yeah.
It's all, it's all a matter of timelines, I think.
Yeah.
Like, the models are expensive to actually go and re-implement something very, very large
and re-platform when the current thing is working.
Do you see this screenshot of some mapping software
suggesting you could go straight or you could go in a loop?
This is a car guy software.
It is?
Yeah.
Who's car guy software?
Like this map is probably by somebody who just appreciates a nice drive.
I think this is actually Google Maps,
but basically it's like you can go in a straight line
or you could take a right and go in a massive loop
and it's eight minutes slower.
And it's like, would you like to go the slower route?
But yeah, if you want to do a hot lap, like, go for it.
I guess that's a good, I guess it's a good take.
We got to actually pull out the post from Amtrak.
Amtrak hired a poster.
What they do?
This is where the train thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, yeah.
Sorry.
This was probably, you know, one of the posts of the week.
Amtrak says the unbridled greatness of trains will endure for a million years.
Yes.
Yes, yes, yes, this is what he was quoting.
I thought it was so funny.
The unbridled greatness of trains will endure for a million years.
How many likes does that have?
That's a banger.
4,000.
54,000.
That's great.
Let's go over to the Guinness Talley.
Tyler has it.
He counted it up.
He sat down.
He studied the Dorcasch Patel Cheeky Pint crossover episode with Elon Musk.
And he counted three pints for Elon.
four pints for John and three-quarters of a pint for Dorcasch,
but there's a suspicious refill.
Yeah, so, I mean, it's a bit hard to really tell because,
uh, if you,
so if you're tracking Dorcasch's, you know, volume, right, throughout the episode,
it kind of goes down and he's at maybe like, uh, you know, 80% full.
Okay.
And then it goes back up.
That sounds like a refill.
But it's like a direct, so it's after a, um,
there's like an ad read and then it goes back up.
Oh.
So the question is like during the, you know, whatever happened during the ad read, right,
did he just like slam it?
True.
And then he filled back up all the way or is it just kind of a partial fill?
I think you got to give them 1.75.
Okay.
Can we pull up the screenshot?
Yes.
Is this a Rahul?
The other debate was just around the actual size of the pines?
Yes.
Is there some of them that?
They look like full size, full pine classes.
So, yeah.
Those look like full size pine class.
Another photo of Elon holding the pint?
Yes, three down.
You got to pull that up, Tyler.
Okay, yeah, yeah, no, no, it's here.
This is really important.
So yeah, you see this and it's like, okay.
Looks pretty small in his hand.
It's a little small.
And then let's click over to Timothy Chalameh.
Timothy Chalemay, I mean, he's a smaller person, but it looks the same size to me.
I think these are fair pint glasses.
I think these are accurate.
I'm not seeing anything that's, that's, uh, so Timothy Chalmey's 510, Elon is 6.2.
Okay.
So a slight height difference, but I mean, I don't, I feel like, uh, yeah, maybe,
yeah, I think, I think they're just potentially wider.
I think they have different.
And this is the kind of hard-hitting analysis that you can really only get on this show.
No other, no other technology media is really breaking down.
I'm going, I'm going normal-sized pints on this, but it is.
is an interesting.
That one looks, this one looks, yeah, this one looks
incredibly... It's a little bit of an optical illusion.
It's close, it's close. I mean, either way,
even if it's a half pint,
John drank four, so that's two full pints.
Even if it's a half pint, you know?
I think, I think these are full pining glasses.
I'm going full pint.
Okay, you know who else is going full pint, John?
Who?
The founder of Crypto.com.
Oh, yeah?
who just bought AI.com for 70 million.
Let's go.
Big, big, big.
He is running an ad for AI.com.
We don't know what AI.com is yet,
but I'm assuming you're going to be able to get some artificial intelligence there,
much like you can get crypto.
It's a response.
Haven't been people in saying, if you're in crypto, pivot to AI,
you took it literally, right?
I'll read through this.
Chris, founder, says, plans to launch a new site with a Super Bowl ad this weekend.
The founder of trading site, Crypta.com, just bought AI for $70 million.
He actually bought it last year in April.
Highest price ever disclosed for a domain sale to launch a new entrant into the AI race.
The site will offer a personal AI agent that consumers can use to send messages, use apps, and trade stocks.
That's very, very American.
send messages, send memes, order DoorDash, and trade stocks with your new AI agent.
Last year, an opportunity came up for me to acquire this domain, and I thought,
if you take a long-term view 10 to 20 years, that AI is going to be one of the greatest
technological waves of our lifetime, and so it would be a good investment.
Marsda-legged did not comment on the purchase price, which was confirmed by the deal's broker,
Larry Fisher, of get-yourdomain.com.
Huge win for Larry.
on this deal.
With assets like AI.com,
there are no substitutes, said Fisher.
When one becomes available,
the opportunity may never present itself again.
Of course,
AI.com pitched itself,
was pitching itself aggressively
to all of the different labs.
Everyone was like, you know,
we, Anthropics like,
well, we may not have
at Anthropic on X, but we do have
Anthropic.com.
Who owns?
Who owns AI.com?
That's a good domain.
because Claude owns,
or Anthropic owns Claude.com,
but they also own Claude.AI,
and they reroute clod.com to Claude.
Which is normally the opposite of the flow that you'd go.
You'd start with the dot AI or the other TLD,
and then you would, as soon as you get the dot com,
you would reroute everything to dot com.
Anthropics so AI-pilled that they're using the dot-a-i as their main domain.
Or maybe their Anguilla-pilled?
Oh, yes.
Maybe they just like supporting it.
Maybe they just like supporting and Guila.
Tyler, is using AI.com to launch a personal AI agent?
Is it your Gen Z?
Is this Chugi?
Wait, what is Chugi again?
Chugi's like Gen Z slang.
I think it's like millennial slang.
Really?
I don't know.
It feels a little chew by to me.
I'll say that.
I know enough about that.
It feels like Chubai.
It's chopped.
It's Dubai.
Dubai would want like the name of the thing.
But it's chopped.
Chugi is a slang term often used by Gen Z to describe someone or something that is uncool, outdated,
or trying too hard to be trendy.
Yeah.
Typically referring to millennial trends from the 2010s.
So it's a dig at millennials from the perspective of Zoomers.
Yeah.
It describes a post-basic aesthetic that is slightly cringe-worthy, such as live, laugh, love signs, skinny jeans, or side parts.
Okay.
Interesting.
Vanta, automate compliance and security.
is the leading AI trust management platform.
Let's go over the mansion section.
There's some good stuff today.
Hit me.
We've got a bunch of stuff.
So Miami's Coconut Grove.
They're calling it Billionaires Grove.
The ultra-wealthy buyers have discovered Miami's once sleepy coconut grove neighborhood.
Cam in the X chat says Chugie is being carried by millennials.
Okay.
Interesting.
Thank you, Cam.
Van says, what an unk term.
What an unk term.
Once known.
is a bohemian enclave. Miami's leafy coconut grove neighborhood is quickly transforming into a
billionaire's playground thanks to a string of mega sales in the area. Unlike hot spots like Miami Beach
and Indian Creek, the grove with its massive banyan trees, winding streets, and small gated
communities was little known to people outside of Miami until recently. Most people hadn't
heard of it unless they were local, said real estate agent Danny Hertzberg. Now the secret is out
in a big way and it's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal Manson section. Since
Late December, Google co-founder, Larry Page, has spent $188.4 million on three properties in Coconut Grove, while businessman, Jorge Moss, a co-owner of professional soccer team Inter-Miamy.
Okay, but what did he actually do?
Yeah, that's a good question. Look him up. He just says he's busy. Introduce, just getting introduced as businessman is incredible. That's a life.
Jorge Moss, president of Real Zaragoza.
Okay.
soccer guy?
No, American billionaire businessman and chairman is the largest shareholder of
mass tech and Miami-based construction and engineering.
There we go.
Founded by his father.
Let's go.
So he spent $100 million.
Both of those properties are within a few miles of a waterfront estate billionaire Ken
Griffin purchased in 2022 for $106 million, a Miami record.
Locals are now competing with out-of-town buyers from homes.
Real estate agents said, and housing prices in Coconut Grove,
especially for waterfront property have surged.
The median single-family home sale price in Coconut Grove was 2.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2025,
more than doubling from under a million dollars, 995,000 in 2019.
So more than double in just six years.
A $10 million home is now a $50 million home.
Wow.
Live, work, play.
Coconut Grove was a hub for nightlife galleries and artists in the 1970s, 80s, 90s,
but its retail and cultural scene faded.
The housing market became kind of sleepy.
Then about a decade ago, the neighborhood's reinvention began with the redevelopment of the cocoa walk.
Open-air mall and construction of luxury condos was introduced $20 million pound houses to the Grove for the first time.
When COVID struck an influx of families relocating from out of town were drawn to the area, which is walkable with high-end restaurants and retail, but little tourist activity.
Part of the Grove's appeal is its proximity to downtown Miami and the Brickle neighborhood
where Griffin is building a new headquarters for Citadel.
The Grove also has prestigious schools like Ransom Everglades School and Carrollton School
of the Sacred Heart.
Although the Grove isn't gated, there are a small number of gated communities within
the neighborhood such as Ye Little Wood, the Moorings, and Camp Biscayne.
They're subtle, hidden, lush, you don't know they're there.
That's a big appeal.
The condo boom.
condo buildings have been at the epicenter of Coconut Grove's market resurgence a decade ago.
Large new luxury units were relatively unknown in the area, said a developer.
People thought I was crazy, Martin said, but his gamble paid off. Martin sold his own penthouse
in the building for 17.8 million in 2023. Now CMC Group and Fort Partners are developing a four
seasons branded condo in Coconut Grove. Prices raised from 5 million to 16 million,
excluding penthouses, which are expected to sell for $120 million combined,
although that is far more expensive than any other condos sold in Coconut Grove to date.
We think it's achievable, said Colombo.
Great name for a Miami real estate person.
The buyers looking for that before they would only consider Miami Beach.
Now those buyers have Coconut Grove on their radar.
Then there's bigger homes, too.
The average lot size in Coconut Grove is under an acre, which is smaller than lots and other luxury enclaves.
that used to deter buyers who wanted more land.
But since 2020, developers and end users alike have been expanding existing properties.
People are starting to knock on the door of the neighbor next door
and put together bigger assemblages.
For example, Page bought a $101 million waterfront property
owned by the late restaurateur, Jonathan Lewis,
then acquired an abutting property for $15 million.
Page also purchased a nearby property for $71.9 million,
from Eris Sloan Lindemann.
A few waterfront homes in Coconut Grove are highly sought after, agents said.
He recently sold a $16.5 million bayfront estate owned by Susie Welch,
the widow of former General Electric co-chairman and CEO Jack Welch.
Wow.
I'm sick of Miami.
Can we go to the mountains?
What else we got?
Yeah, let's go to the mountains.
What's the next story here?
That is actually my general experience with Miami.
It's amazing for a week.
Then I'm ready to mix it up.
Well, we could go to Manhattan or we could go to Beverly Hills.
What do you have in mind?
Neither are particularly mountainous, but I guess the hills are slightly more mountainous.
So there's a California villa here built for James Cagney.
Do you know the famed Hollywood film star James Cagney?
Never heard of him, John.
Wow.
What were you doing in the 1930s and the 1940s when he was making gangster films such as Angels with dirty faces?
Crazy name.
He built the stone villa around 1939, property records.
We don't know how to name movies like that.
Angels with dirty faces coming to a theater near you.
Buy your tickets today.
A year later, so he died in 1986.
A year later, his widow, Francis Cagney, sold the property to the current owner,
Stephen Dunn, founder of the baby product supplier Munchkin.
Dunn didn't respond to coming.
Cagney lived in Beverly Hills while filming, but otherwise,
I spent his time at his farms in upstate New York in Martha's Vineyard, actor Robert Wagner,
a friend of Cagney wrote in a 2014 Vanity Fair piece, the California house was unpretentious,
but had a studio with a wooden floor and a record player where Cagney practiced dancing.
Wagner wrote, after purchasing the Beverly Hills estate, Dunn expanded the villa to approximately
6,000 square feet with three bedrooms, said a listing agent. In the 1990s, Dunn
purchased an adjacent parcel combining the properties into a compound spanning five acres.
In addition to the main house, the property has a pool and a roughly 2,500 square foot guest house.
Over the years, Dunn has added more space for desks.
I don't think it has a moat, but does it have a lot of stone.
I know the stone was signaling maybe there's an alligator moat.
So 38.5 million, six bedrooms, multiple houses, tennis, pool, and your favorite pickleball.
A tennis pool?
Tennis court and a pool.
Okay.
It has a pool cabana with an outdoor kitchen.
It's landscaped extensively.
It has pickleball courts.
What do you think?
38.5 million for a six-bedroom.
I like it.
You like it.
It's very unique.
It's a by at 38.5?
It looks like it would withstand a wildfire.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
The luxury market in Los Angeles is picking up after battling major headwinds,
including a mansion tax and geopolitical uncertainty.
World in the, in the check.
Chat says copped the estate boys new ultradome.
We might have to, John, while we were live, our latest Ultradome that we had an offer in on.
They're out for New Reef.
We've had truly, if anybody has just a big building in the center of L.A.
We want to give you money for it.
Let us do it.
We've had such a fascinating time trying to get the entertainment industry in L.A. has collapsed.
ghost town, it's a modern Detroit. And yet, we cannot find a building. I don't know why people
like me. I keep talking trash about them in this town. You got to glaze. You got a triple glaze them.
It's the best. It's the best town. We just want to build it even better. Yeah, all we're trying
to do is bring media back to Hollywood. It's not degrading at all. When you say it like that,
maybe we should move to Milan. It's the gold medal housing market. They're saying the city co-hosting
the Winter Olympics is a fashion hub with Europe's hottest luxury residential market.
When the world's winter sports elite gatherers this week for the opening ceremony of the Milan
Cortina Winter Olympics, they're starting this week.
Have you been to that arch?
No, I've never been to Milan.
Quite nice.
I've never been to Milan.
It's a fashion and design hub that has long been the country's main economic center.
It is increasingly becoming a tourist destination.
And in 2017, Italy introduced tax laws favorable to new residents, which led to a data centers.
Yes, let's convert Malaga.
A data center with that original arch aesthetic?
For sure.
Would really, would really be, would put, it would fix me.
It would fix me.
It would fix me.
I mean, imagine it, we don't know how to make data centers that look like this.
Everyone's talking about putting them.
Shams Sankar.
Everyone's talking about putting them in space.
Why can't we convert some of these?
We're not just putting them in Milan.
We're putting them in the most expensive neighborhood in Milan.
That's Brera.
Brera is a small exclusive neighborhood just west of the city's premier shopping district around Via Monte Napoleon.
Residential real estate in Brera, where most homes are apartments, is currently the city's most expensive.
Brera's high-end sector had an average sale price of $1,868 per square foot.
what would it cost to put Colossus there?
How many square feet is Colossus?
I want to know how many,
because we got to go apartment by apartment
racking NVL-72s in Milan,
in the Barrera neighborhood specifically.
A renovated duplex sold for just over $28 million,
the most ever paid for a Milan apartment,
the adjacent Quatera della Modaf,
or fashion district,
home to brands like Gucci and Cartier,
was once the city's most expensive,
but Brera has suddenly surpassed it.
It's more livable.
Well, for now, until we put these data centers in there.
You can walk to the shops,
but you're not living in a shop.
People want penthouses with views
and the...
There's a couple other things in Brera.
I don't know.
Maybe that's the location of the next Ultrodome.
Let me tell you about Applovin.
Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai.
Get access to over one.
billion daily active users and grow your business today. Tyler, what's it going to cost me to put a
Colossus-sized data center in the Brera district in Milan, the neighborhood in Milan that costs
$1,800 per square foot? Okay, so apparently Colossus 1 is only 785,000 square feet. Okay.
So it's only going to be like 1.4 or 1.5 billion. Yeah. Doable. So not right at all. Easy.
I mean, putting a, you know, to build a gigawatt of a data center is like 50 billion, right?
Yeah.
That's like in that range.
So, I mean, this is like kind of a no-brainer.
It's a no-brainer.
It's a no-brainer.
As is interviewing Doug O'Loughlin after earnings when he's suffering from Claude Psychosis.
Welcome to the stream, Doug.
How are you doing?
I'm doing wonderful.
How are you guys doing?
Great to see you.
Can we pull up the video that you, that John Payne's stage?
made this morning that completely that completely flop. I'm very excited to have you on the show. It feels like
that's seen in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which I saw where Sonic and Shadow team up and join forces
to talk about CapEx and agentic coding. What's new in your world? Is Claude code still the top of
mind or are you still churning through the CapEx numbers from earnings? Are you somewhat of an
agent for Claude now? Like you work for Claude? I do actually. I think I most
just move my information back and forth, you know.
I have pretty much, like, I think of it as my manager, you know,
like it tells me what to do, and then I go bring the information,
and I bring it to my coworkers, I bring it back.
All day, I'm just on CloudCode.
How many, how many prompts are you running right now?
Do you have any friends going?
Okay, so, I have seven.
I have seven threads.
Seven that are running right now or waiting for your input.
I'm waiting waiting for my input.
We'll let you get back to it.
Why don't you just have an eight that just managed it?
Let's talk about orchestration.
Have you played with Gastown?
Are you thinking about abstracting yourself to a higher level?
Okay, so Gastown is, it's pretty intense.
I don't think gas and it's going to work out.
I think it's going to be agent swarms.
Okay.
Okay, explain the difference between Gastown and Agent Swarms.
Okay, so Gastown is probably of the most forward-looking thing I've read in a lot of second.
It talks about how you, like, created this, like, self-healing tool process to essentially
to, like, pass all these beads across and have, like, all these workers and, like, ways to self-repair the agent workbook process.
And I read it, and now I was like, dude, this is brilliant and also fucking crazy.
It's like, it feels like the ravings of a madman.
And then I proceeded, well, I was also in my badman era.
Like before the New Year's, when you had two X times usage, I pretty much was like literally railing cloud code constantly.
I think I had four 14 hour days.
Wow.
Yeah, it was beautiful.
It was beautiful.
Okay, so talk to us about what you're actually building because, you know, we're talking about SaaSpocalypse.
It feels like there's a debate ever build, rebuild all your tools from scratch to save whatever your SaaS fees.
are versus building tools.
OpenAI comes out with Frontier,
which is you look at like
that you got to look at this like graphic
which feels like it was made for
you know a Fortune 500 CEO
to kind of or management team
to kind of understand it and it's like
here's more SaaS to replace your other SaaS
right? It's like you know you've got the system
of record down here you have a bunch of agents in between
and then you've got different applications that you're using
and meanwhile Anthropics just like
we're making a really smart digital
guy that can do whatever you want.
Yeah, so I think the two, there's like two really interesting ways.
I think opening eyes like the Fortune 500 selling it from the top if it makes sense.
And then Anthropic is like here's my, here's your quad code agent, sell 20,000 them.
Did you see the, the Ascensurer partnership?
I think that's really interesting.
So like if you're, if you go back, there's, they're doing 30,000 people at Ascensure.
What do you mean?
To like 30,000 people at Accenture are going to learn how to Claude code.
Oh.
And then they'll be deployed into different companies.
Yeah.
Who knows?
Who knows?
What else would they do?
Maybe they just replace the Century.
I mean, that's what they're going to be doing, I think.
Okay.
Wait, so, yeah.
So what do you mean if Accenture folks are using Cloud Code,
wouldn't they be using it on consulting projects internally to companies?
Yes.
I think they're going to be using it internally as my...
So they're going to be using internally
and then they're going to be doing all these consulting things.
Because if you think about it, one of the issues is like...
You know when you had SaaS,
one of the biggest issues of, like,
changing from one CRM to another
was effectively being like,
hey, everyone, you're going to have to quit your jobs
for like 10 months to figure this out.
The implementation, the implementation,
like, you'd have tons and tons of, like, consultants do that.
And I think that that's what the essential partnership is.
So essentially, like,
people are going to be implementing Claude Code, and there's 30,000 people at a century who's
going to do it.
And then on the other side, you have Frontier, which is like the Fortune 500 way of being like,
here's your plan, come to us, and we'll build this whole thing, blah, blah, blah, so yeah.
But is re-implementing your CRM really the lowest hanging fruit for America's greatest
companies?
It can't possibly, there must be new ideas, new problems to solve, new tools to build.
Like, why are we just going to shuffle the chips around the board instead of like doing something productive?
Okay, so I think the system of record refresh is going to be really awesome because, you know, like the big lit.
I mean, it honestly does feel kind of boomer.
If you think about it, it's like the biggest data now.
Everyone can have the big data now.
But I think the automation that you've always dreamed of is actually going to happen.
And the system of record is just going to essentially it hooks out to all these other things that are going to build on top of it, which is mostly like, you know, the frontier thing.
And essentially, like, all the information work is just going to be, like, all on the agent.
And everything else is going to be, like, place where it lives and is stored for funcies.
So instead of me having someone, let me use my personal stack at Semianilysis.
Wee's HubSpot, for example.
So, hey, the sales is this quarter.
We need this, like, quota or who did what or what products are selling better or, like, you know, what's the weekly conversion rate?
How many more podcasts should Dylan do this month if we want to hit our goal?
that's totally different we don't actually have like our like you know the big yeah sure how many more
podcasts shit like that yeah right um i could just vibe code it i was just like hey can you run this
analysis for me and in a perfect futuristic world it'll go into the CRM pull all the information of
the all of our in balance yeah make it be like hey uh the day after dylan goes on a podcast
there's like 25 people who who come in the conversion rate is x you could price it at this um Dylan
quit your you know stop work
and effectively just like hit the podcast.
There we go.
You know, like, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So, so you could do this with anything, though.
Like, just information, man.
Like, it's, it's going to be pretty sick.
But I think all the SaaS companies are going to essentially just become hooks
for all the crap they've built on top of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Did you see Jensen yesterday was, was kind of defending some companies like SAP in service now
and saying, hey, if I was a really smart humanoid out,
doing work in the world and I needed a screwdriver, would I just invent a new screwdriver,
or would I just take one off the shelf? And so that was like his defense. Tyler here was,
took the other side of it and just said there's going to be a lot of situations where,
especially in a software-only environment, it's easier to just build a very specific workflow
that you need, that you would have gotten from a SaaS provider versus, you know,
you don't need to actually rebuild the entire platform.
Yeah, I think we're going to be building a lot of screwdrivers.
Like the thing that's important is like, okay, you're not going to rent a truck, right?
Like you're not going to build your own truck, but your own screwdriver 100%.
Like you're doing this big, ginormous job.
You need a hammer.
You're like, okay, pull it out of my belt, okay?
But you're not going to be like, I'm not to move 700 tons of like here to here.
I need to rent a truck.
You're not going to build the truck.
And so that's what I think the system of records are going to look like.
like, they're going to look like places where like actual data that cannot be like,
cannot be vibed effectively.
Like what's your inventory, cannot have any fucking hallucinations, right?
Like your ERP, but all of that will just be hooks for everything else.
Because like all the information is just like pulling, retrieving, making the correlation,
running the charts.
Okay, but even.
But then, but then how do you square the fact that a system of record is way less
sticky if you have agents that can work around the clock to switch you over to a different
system of record. Like that still ends up putting massive pricing pressure. So to be clear,
I don't think it's good for everyone. Like I think my favorite analogy of this is like there
actually is a very old school type of software that's like existed for a long time. All the shit on
mainframes. It's all out there. Yeah. And you know like funny enough, mainframe still grew like 6% a
year or whatever. Someone has the real number for like 2002.
to 2020.
So, like, they're going to grow,
but it's just going to be, like, a very different vision of the world
that I don't think people are ready for.
Yeah.
And the adjustment period is the big problem,
because all the stocks are priced like they're not going to be mainframes.
And also, just for context, mainframes, there's like,
hey, there's one of each company now.
Yeah.
There's not, there's not, like, 10.
Yep.
There's one each.
Yeah, so I think with all these, all these,
whether you're a system of record or your,
you know, some vertical software, you're going to need to show insane revenue growth in a truly
AI-native product. Otherwise, investors, I think, are going to continue to not be able to create a
super compelling narrative why you should own it during this period of uncertainty. Yeah. I mean,
pretty much what happens, and we're going to go like investor brain, when anything goes X growth,
the multiple goes massively down. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. A times earnings. Can you talk a little bit
more about what you're actually coding, what you're building, like what the software is.
Because from the demos that I've seen that you've posted, it feels much more like you have
an agent that can do knowledge retrieval, data transformation, build dashboards, charts, and
like knowledge work as opposed to truly replacing software tools at this point.
But have you built anything that's like long lived and runs like daily or is like,
something that you keep revisiting because it's now a piece of software that does the job
reliable. So the cod code commits, the cod code commits is now software that lives and
runs every single day. That's like a scraper, right? And then like that, that like lives in a
database and that will run forever. There's like a lot of other tracking price data tool stuff.
Like a lot of the scraping that were like that is not like publicly available. Like we do like a lot
of that. Like we had a data team just do that. And now effectively we can like really
accelerate that so everyone can do that. Sure, sure, sure. There are other, like, little things that I think
are, like, heuristics, like, little skills of, like, I have blind spots that I consistently make
over and over. And I'm like, hey, I know this blind spot's an issue, but, blah, you should, like,
consider this in this case. I don't think it's, like, the galaxy brain software, and we're very far
from there, because if you actually play with these tools a lot, context rod is real. Yeah. So.
But how fast is it getting better?
Because it feels like we're seeing the meter graph.
Scary fast.
Scary fast, right?
Scary, scary, scary.
So I started vibe coding with Claude 4.
And it just wasn't, or sorry, Opus 4 on Cloud Code.
And it just could not one-shot websites in the way that 4.5 and 4.6 can.
And if it just marginally improves from here, it feels like why would I pay for like any
kind of UI, UX, if it just could be generous?
rated at a good enough quality.
Yeah.
How did you process the new models this week,
4-6, 5-3?
What's the review?
If you can't immediately notice
the difference between 4-5 and 4-6,
start polishing your resume.
You are cooked.
Yeah.
You just got automated by an agent.
I think
4-6 was a little disappointing,
if we were honest with you.
I think it might have been Sonnet 5.
Oh, that's what people are saying.
That's the conspiracy theory, right?
But what does that mean?
The original Sonat 5 leaks were that it's like as good as Opus 4.5, but with one million context window.
Yep.
And specifically trained for Asian swarms.
Sure.
So yeah, but practically does it just mean like same quality but faster, cheaper, at least for an topic?
Yeah.
And then they make more money.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, better margins.
How are the margins looking for the labs right now?
There was a bunch of like FUD around it,
but it seems like from all the leaks,
it's been like 50, 60, 70%, pretty good.
Yeah, if you X all the free users,
it's always really good, right?
Honestly, Anthropic has no free users
or like on a relative basis,
so their margins are ironically like,
like kind of on a like to like basis
kind of not as good as you think.
Yeah.
Can you break down a little bit more of the thesis
of the Claude Code,
is an inflection point article,
what the key takeaway, who you're speaking to,
what update you wanted to share,
and then I want to go into some of the pushback
and your response to that.
Yeah, sure.
So first, I think the thing that makes me really excited
is the first time since Shane of thought,
I feel like we have a new scaling
that feels very, very different and hardcore,
and I can actually see my entire life day-to-day change.
I think I can expect some version of a cloud code harness to be effectively all my information work from now till the future.
I am a daily user.
I was not a daily use before, and I expect to continue to be one.
And that's kind of what happened with the reasoning models.
It went from like, you could ask it stuff, but it might hallucinate to like the answers are good.
Like you can pretty much rely.
And there's going to be citations and like it's going to be 99.999 percent.
like percent like usable for things.
So you just have a question, you get that.
It may be not great at certain things,
but in general, like it delivered on the initial, like,
chat experience that I think a lot of people were looking for.
And then they became DAS.
Yeah.
How much, do you think Anthropic cares more about winning in consumer
than they've let on to date?
No, I don't think so.
Everyone, everyone who works there is exactly like,
like what you think it is.
They're exactly who they say they are.
Yeah.
Their software singularity pilled.
Yeah.
And then I think co-work is what they're really excited about.
Sure.
Makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they're not even, they're not even,
they're not even thinking about a scenario
where a bunch of people are using Claude in a work,
in a work setting and say,
hey, this is pretty great.
And yeah, Chad TripD has ads.
I'm happy to pay 20 bucks a month.
I'll use it personally.
Because I just think there's like an iPhone,
like I think the game,
to get to like three billion users is like over when you just look at the traction of like
Gemini and chat chitb and the fact that norm normal people aren't caring that much about the
nuance maybe that don't have that much to automate in their life but there's like an iPhone size
market like the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone to launch and it's possible like when I see this
like when I see this like the the Super Bowl ad the sort of like trust nuke I was calling it right
just like hey like it's really funny they're like you know uh uh
rage-vading Open AI, but at the same time, they're just destroying, like, trust around ads and
LMs, potentially, like, permanently, right? Because people, even when they start seeing ads that
are more like display ads, they'll start thinking, well, like, was the result influence too? You know,
it just, like, it hurts the trust. And so I think there, I think, my, my theory is that any product
that, like, really catches on in the workplace could very well trickle over into, into life. And
Anthropic could someday have a pretty big
they could have like a Netflix
size subscriber base for people that just
want an ad free AI experience
Yeah that sounds completely right to me
But you're saying for your point is like
It's just secondary to them they're like it's a nice to have
But like we don't that's not that's not our intention
I think okay so singularity pill
But I also I think you have to pay for the singularity
And I think it's going to be enterprise that does it
Yeah I mean the other the other take on like
you could wind up being like the Apple and like the premium, you know,
was privacy focused or you could wind up being like the duck,
duck go, which was like, yeah, yeah, it was a counter to Google,
but it never got to any meaningful scale.
Yeah, but I still think, I still think opening eyes the Apple.
Like Apple was synonymous with smartphones when it really took off.
Like, like, what is the other smartphone?
Nokia.
Maybe you can argue this is like a Blackberry.
Yeah, I can't name it, yeah.
Well, like BlackBerry.
right? It was known for work. Yeah. And then obviously like I swapped over. So I still think open AI is like
the cognitive reference. And honestly, 5.3 cooks. Yeah. Faster or just better or both?
Faster and better. Faster and better. Okay. Talk about 5.2 token efficiency. Rune was pushing back on the
article saying you make it you're making you assertion that 5.2 token efficiency ruins long horizon planning. And yet,
5.2 tops the meter chart for long horizon planning, half baked.
What's the explanation there?
Didn't someone completely mock that argument, but he's kind of a, he's like, sorry,
I got to find the guy.
But it's like, I don't know what task is being done here.
Like, is art, are they the same hardness?
Yes.
Did you just spam it to infinity and like you finish like a sufficiently long task to
completion versus like, um,
like, okay, let's just say we have two kids taking the SAT,
and one does a better job and finishes first,
and one does, like, almost as good of a job
and took seven times as long,
and you're like, wow, that one's a smart kid.
Yeah.
No, dude, that doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, an elegant solution delivered faster
is uniformly better.
Yeah, 100%.
That makes sense.
Yeah, and so if you spam more tokens,
and you win and you're like, oh, look, I mobbed them.
And it's like, dude,
What if you just use less tokens?
I think the benchmark is supposed to be for,
they have a reference class of projects that are supposed to take X amount of time.
They would take a human developer six hours,
and then they have all the models compete.
And if you can compete the six hour task,
then you get put at the six hour mark.
It's not, did you run for six hours?
So it could be like implement a CRM product or, you know, write,
a very complicated, you know, database or something.
It would take, you know, a talented software developer,
six hours, two hours, one hour,
and they have different tasks,
and then you're trying to climb that hurdle.
Oh, yeah, and then it's, okay, it climbs higher and higher.
I think that's loosely.
It's, because obviously you could just say,
okay, just reasoning count to one billion
and just go as slow as, and it works for days,
and that's not impressive.
But that's not how it works.
Yeah, I mean, it's, okay, so yeah, yeah,
you're right, the different, the scaling thing,
but like, okay, so one, the other thing I was doing, like, now that we have vibe coding available to everyone, you can just have it do the same task and do like ABC.
Like, I've been doing like a lot of internal benchmarking.
Like, everyone could benchmark guys.
Like, dude, codex 5.2 took so long and just never built for me.
Oh, interesting.
And it's like all the codex hype during, like, it just never worked for me, man.
Like, it never one shot projects like Opus 4.5 did.
And I'm just like, this feels like complete foot.
But that being said, Codex 5.3 cooks.
Like, I think I take everything back off about 5.2 for 5.3.
Nice.
Total reversal.
Classic AI narrative, just day by day, complete switching of the narrative.
Talk about the NPM downloads, because you said that you're now scraping them every day,
trying to understand how many commits on GitHub are related to Claude Code.
And the pushback from Roon was that this counts NPM downloads as authoritative when ClaudeCode
numbers are hugely inflated because GitHub actions does automatic cloud code download every time
continuous integration CI runs versus Codex compute cloud. So maybe it's not apples to apples.
What's more nuance on the fast takeoff of cloud code? Because honestly, when you said 20% of
commits by the end of the year, I was like, that feels extremely low. I would expect like 70%
and I would expect codex to be at 30% and no more human commits because it's working.
So I wanted to make sure we have like a high standard, like a high 95% plus.
Sure.
I don't think, like, sure, if it continues to grow on a week-on-week basis, like, yeah,
it's like, you know, 100% by June or something like that.
Well, there's also the fact that, like, you could be writing code and still just like
almost be using clog code as like your linter or like your interface to GitHub.
And if there's an abstraction layer there that people adopt, you're going to see the commits go
through the roof, even if there's still a human in the loop meaningfully.
Look, look, look.
I'm not going to pretend like the cloud code commits thing is like the cleanest way ever.
There's a lot of ways to fuck the data.
For example, people who use who you can just say don't do this and won't do it.
Number two, like private on a ratio is like five times bigger.
Sure.
That matters way more.
And then like I also think that like the way you consume it, like this doesn't count for cursor.
People have been clearly using AI for like a long while and it doesn't show up.
This is just the example I can say it.
Hey, chart goes up really quickly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's still cool.
It's not perfect.
It's a data set that I create in a relatively short amount of time.
Yeah, I'm like, well, I don't know, seems pretty cool.
Yeah, yeah, no, it is.
We talk about Amazon?
Yeah, yeah, let's move over to hyperscalers.
Reaction was the number too low.
Dude.
Yeah, they're not taking it seriously.
Yeah, what?
200 billion was crazy.
Yeah, that was crazy to me.
Okay, why?
Yeah, that was really shocking.
You know, we do a lot of data center tracking and we do a lot of accelerated tracking and we were too well.
Okay.
Are they trying to play some sort of hype game where they're throwing out the biggest number and they're not actually even going to be able to buy enough equipment to spend it?
Even if they are signaling to the market, we're going to be hearing like, well, we wanted to buy this many NVIDIA chips, but we couldn't get them.
Or we have a delay at this data center because of regulation.
And so they're just trying to project strength.
because they're sort of behind on the AI narrative a little bit.
They don't have the big position that Microsoft does in OpenAI.
They don't have a deep mind level team.
And so they're saying, we're going to go biggest on the dollar front,
but then maybe they don't deliver on it?
Or do you think at the end of the year we'll be like, yeah, they spent 200 billion?
I think at the end of the year they're going to be like, yeah, they spent 200 billion.
Let's go.
They are the single biggest provider of power.
in the entire world, I think.
Like the incremental, and the AWS, like, supply chain can ramp a lot quicker than anyone
else.
And every example that we track in the data center, like the data center team, they are on time
and can scale to, like, levels that are crazy.
Yeah.
Like, Reneers ramp is just, like, out of this world fast compared to everyone else.
Every other gigawatt project is essentially delayed, and they're going to be, like, ish on time.
Wow.
So isn't that extremely just, like, good for Amazon?
on, like, they're properly positioned, they're properly transitioning.
Like, they, yeah, like, who knows what happens to the rest of this?
But eventually this thing is just, like, part of the...
We were talking earlier.
Like, Jassy didn't exactly paint this, like, incredibly exciting vision and share, like,
hey, you guys are actually underestimating demand.
Still, even if you're bullish on AI, you're underestimating demand.
And we're in a position to actually try to get a more accurate read here.
And that's why we're investing.
Yeah, and it's funny because they could have said one thing that would have made the ATABus call better, and they'd be like, yeah, we see high 20s, and like the stock would have ripped.
But they're like, we continue to project to see this level of growth.
What percentage of the 200 billion do you think will actually flow to Nvidia?
Because Nvidia's rallying today.
That's why we're wearing white suits, but it didn't rally immediately in after hours.
I think a meaningful amount.
I definitely cannot disclose what semi-analysis thinks, but I think they're going to run out of Traneum.
And the answer is, like, what's the biggest amount of supply chain that's, like, locked up?
It's, it's infidium.
Yeah, that makes a time of sense.
Can you get Macron a free semi-analysis plan?
Because he came out this week with his big new initiative, 30 million euros for AI research.
France is going to be the home of research.
How do you think all the hyper scales will respond?
You know what's crazy is people have been trying to do a lot of work in France for a long time
because they have this giant nuclear power plant.
Yeah, it's kind of stranded.
And no one uses it.
And like everyone wants to be like, dude, I can get a gigaw out here.
And then they try to start building.
And they're just like, yeah, this is never going to happen.
I'm just going to go back to United States.
Even though United States is all fucked up, it's like, I can start there.
And they're like, no, no, no, no, we'll start in like five years.
And I can think of two specific projects that essentially did the same thing.
It was like, oh, my God, all this France status center power.
And then like they started and like, never mind.
Yeah.
That's funny.
No.
Why do you think GROC is climbing the charts right now?
Any insight?
It's like number three after get free cash and after chat GPT in the overall app store.
The iOS App Store.
Dude, actually, one, this tells you how locked in I've been with Cloud code.
I had no idea.
You're so locked in with Claude researching the AI race that you...
It's just, yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, you know, the App Store is based on, like, acceleration, but, you know, the GROC hype cycle of, like, you know, let's push all the Twitter users or the X users there.
Like, that sort of already happened.
Like, I don't know how this is happening because there isn't much hype about the model.
Yeah, it's happening off X.
Yeah, and a lot of people were like, yeah, like, you can talk to Ani and Valentine, but like, is that really popular?
Might be.
Ani, singularity.
The real singular is lonely people.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Maybe.
I did see a video of, like, the Stormlight Archive thing, and that I feel like, like, hit a broader audience in terms of video generation.
And I think video generation, like, that always kind of wins.
Yeah.
We actually did an analysis of this a while ago.
You need to be bullish on the Disney Open AI deal.
I think so.
Yeah, you have to be.
We've seen the nanobanana bump with Gemini.
Yep.
And this feels like it could be on an entirely different level.
Yeah.
You know my favorite thing is Gemini wasn't what actually made it rip.
It was Xanobanana.
Yeah.
Like the ratio really improved in terms of open AI to Gemini.
Totally.
like way before.
And then like Gemini like slightly helped,
but I would say it's like 90% is banana banana.
No, no, no, no.
You can, yeah, you can just share an image
and it's immediately apparent what is going on.
It's a unique capability that you can't get anywhere else.
They've cornered the market,
specifically on like the image editing,
not just the diffusion,
but the like being able to take a photo,
change the background and have it actually look like your face
or have the text look great.
Like it was a unique, unique product, really,
beyond a model.
Yeah.
Oh, oh, this is, by the way, this is my final steaming hot take and cod code.
The reason why you should actually pay attention so much is because this is the first time, like, image models essentially always gain share, video models always gain share, like, studio gibbley moment.
And then obviously chat chit.
This is the first, like, new moment.
Yeah.
It's a new modality being the agent, and it's like actually kicking off.
Yeah, I mean, how important do you think the co-work, like the desktop app,
mobile functionality is to that because like the you can have one one you can have truly magic chat has
some insight a lot of people using grok video to compete for a one million dollar content oh that's right
it's free money you have free money okay yeah so it's free cash and then free money the top two apps
and the top three give you cash uh that is a good fact check thank you chat um but uh yeah my my question
about like like can you have a studio gibley like moment if you have to open up a turn
just because there are so many normies that just will never open the terminal, no matter how
magical the AI god is behind the terminal. It's just too much to go type one line of command.
That's why cowork and Codex are going to probably be what actually happens. I think it's really
fun to play around in the like whatever 1% adopter. And I'm really enjoying it. But I just don't
think like, yeah, it's going to be coworker codex. And Codex is actually pretty good.
Codex is, I think, a slightly more polished experience than coworker.
Yeah.
Last question for me.
Take me on the journey of what's going on with Microsoft, what you predicted, how that's changed, how their tragedy has changed.
Like, give me the proper way to understand Microsoft these days.
Yeah, Microsoft's not in the race, bro.
Why?
Where are they?
I know, but they're getting owned.
They have all of the IP.
I agree with you.
I don't understand why it's not like, oh, fine.
5.3 launches, Microsoft's announcing it the same day, and it's actually integrated and people
are using it on day one. It takes time. It's a skill issue. Yeah. It's clearly something's going on.
And honestly, the thing that makes me most bearish that is the fact that Satya's like,
I'm not the CEO. I'm the product manager of co-pilot because I'm so boned if I don't
get this figured out. You can argue it is the most, it is now existential. He's decided like,
hey, my CEO job is getting this one thing right.
Otherwise, we're screwed.
And that is kind of worrying.
It does feel like they could potentially.
Also, the pullback at the beginning of last year,
kind of the quick pause, is now looking silly
in the context of Amazon coming in now and saying,
yeah, everybody's on board now.
Yeah.
We'll see.
Yeah, we'll see.
I think they have the most to lose.
What about GPU utilization?
Brad Gersner was hosting CNBC today, which was very cool,
talking about how in the dot-com build out the dark fiber
with something only like 7% of fiber that was being laid
was actually being used.
It was like obvious even at the time that,
and yet now we're seeing GPU utilization rates, you know, maxed out.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a pretty,
pretty good counterpoint, anyone who's like, ah, whatever.
Like, at this point, H-100 pricing has massively firmed up.
B-200 pricing definitely has super firmed up.
And, like, hey, there's clearly demand.
I mean, you know, whatever they're doing on the other side of it,
that's like, that's the customer's issues.
But, like, I mean, I still think, like, honestly, man, the codex, or sorry,
my brain's all messed up.
Claude Code has been the most magical moment in technology for me in like my entire time, I think.
Yeah.
It just feels awesome, man.
Since the Game Boy.
Dude, this is better than Game Boy's for me.
I'm an information addict, though.
Yeah, makes sense.
I am.
So.
Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us and writing about it and everything that you do.
If you're listening, go hop on semi-analysis.
Sign up for the 10.
million a year plan.
You get Doug's phone number.
You can text him.
You actually can actually.
Yeah.
I know, I know.
You should just do it, though.
I mean, and it's under price.
You're giving it away.
It's taken away your time from all your different agents.
So you've got to price it.
Yeah, you're right.
That's right.
You know, my manager will hate that.
Have a good rest of your day.
Have a good weekend.
We'll talk to you soon.
Cheers.
Goodbye.
Finn.com.
AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support,
go to fin.a.i. And without further ado, we have Max Levchen, the CEO of the firm. Coffee King,
back. Welcome to the show. Max, what's going on? Great to see you.
See you guys. How's it going? Doing great. Catch us up on the last quarter.
Pretty damn great, if I do say so myself. 36% year and year growth of sales volume of our merchants.
First billion dollars in revenue quarter, 1.1-ish.
Insane.
What's driving that?
Obviously, there's some seasonality, but what are the inputs?
End of the year quarter.
Some important sales sometimes happen then.
Black Friday comes to mind.
The outlier grower is a firm card.
That thing is still absolutely on fire growing for 100% a year every year,
both active users, transactions, like every metric you can imagine.
I think it's wearing triple digits.
We did a thing in October.
We decided we're going to invent our own shopping holiday.
I'd call it the big nothing because basically everyone got a 0% APR deal.
I draw you attention to the fact that when we say it's 0% APR, it's 0% APR,
and it doesn't change and it doesn't flip.
We don't cheat.
No fine print.
No fine print.
One of our core values.
literally somewhere on the wall here.
Yeah, right there in a corner.
It says, oh, I'm current, and stick to it.
And so the, you know, it really, it really blew up.
We expected it to be big, but it was really, really big.
And we had a load of merchants basically subsidize APRs down to zero for just about
everyone.
It had a huge impact on numbers.
Okay, so it was actually, so it was enabled by the individual merchants.
Yeah, so the merchants basically said, hey, you know what, we will pay your interest.
that's good
true.
Cool.
I want to get right,
talk about fintech broadly.
What,
it's been an absolutely wild week in the markets.
I think everybody's been looking at a PayPal,
just wondering how,
how can a business with,
you know,
this kind of user base,
this much,
you know,
you have,
you know,
licenses,
heavily regulated,
all these different things.
It doesn't,
obviously,
there's management components.
into it. Last thing you'd vibe code and yet it feels like it's part of that software,
SaaSpocalypse, but how have you been processing sort of like the AI craziness narrative?
It feels like we were saying like maybe people are giving a little bit too much credit to the AI
labs as disruptors, but how have you been processing it?
I don't know if I would throw the pale baby with the AI bathwater.
Yeah.
If you will.
I think the,
it is always very dangerous to comment
on what the market's really saying.
Markets not human.
All sorts of things,
but short term,
it's a coding machine.
So I think the PayPal thing
is really not a commentary
on software's cheap,
software is free.
Like if you look at the strategy
of the outgoing CEO,
who I know pretty well
in respect greatly,
he's a real bona fide product guy
and I should know one since I make myself one of those.
His strategy was very much build more software,
expand the footprint of PayPal and all kinds of really interesting directions.
And so, obviously, I was not even a little bit privy to any decisions taking place
or why did they choose to change management,
but if the company believed that software is better, cheaper, easier to build,
they wouldn't have changed courses because the previous guy was absolutely beating the drama
of let's build software.
I don't know why and what they'll do next, but I do agree with you as it is my first child.
I'm a little bit sad.
But I do compete with it with my second child.
It's so bad.
Yeah, I guess what are you, so there's a lot of AI opportunity with a firm, the opportunity.
One, people just understanding more about the financial products that they use in their everyday life and start to choose products that don't have,
all the fine print, obviously efficiency in the business is a whole other one.
I'm sure that you're getting a lot out of that.
But when people ask you about the AI risk to affirm anything on the risk side,
and then payments companies as well, what is your answer?
So I think I'm a fairly basic framework.
How I think about sort of AI changes everything.
It doesn't change that much.
very broad categorization here.
If you're in the business of owning cash flow producing assets
or better yet manufacturing cash flow producing assets,
you're probably going to be okay.
Today, if you're making things that create cash flow,
you're probably using software.
If you're not doing it right,
and so if you are and you're using software or making software
to create cash flow and assets,
it's about to get really, really cheap
much faster and a lot more efficient.
And we're certainly taking full advantage of that idea at the firm.
And that's what we do.
We make cash flow producing assets.
They're known as affirmed loads.
There are about 40-odd million of them made every quarter and growing pretty quickly.
It is difficult to roll out of bed and say, let's vibe code that.
Because you can vibe code some of the code.
But before you get to our scale or our revenue,
you have to convince the enormous number of out-marked partners you need to process on the
order, you know, tens of billions of dollars of loans. We're not a bank. We're not lending from
our own deposits. That means someone downstream is financing these loans. And so those
relationships are not vibe-coded and they can't happen overnight.
You can't vibe-code a relationship, a real one. You cannot.
And so with payments, you have, you know, the whole regulatory side, too, if you're going and you're
like in your dorm room and you're like, hey, I built PayPal and you go to say like,
okay, now I should probably get some money transmitter licenses. Like, you know, I expect at
some point regulators to say like, okay, like what is what is your operation look like? Do you
have any compliance experience? And all these things. And so at some point, and then what you're
saying is the capital markets is probably even a bigger challenge. Let's say you can somehow
get the licenses. Then are people going to trust you with.
billions of dollars.
Exactly.
Both,
another sort of way of cutting
the whole AI accelerates everything.
Some things are still taking about as long
as they always did.
So regulators are not going
to be like, oh, cool, you're in your dorm room,
you vibe coded a global payment network,
right on, here's some license.
It takes 18 months to get a full complement of MTLs.
And by the way, you have to like prove that you're
legitimate business and you're not going to be used for money laundering.
And it's very expensive.
It's not like a driver's license where you get it and there's no kind of like ongoing.
It's like you need to be able to like carry the weight of the licensees.
Yeah.
So licensing regulatory acceptance, regulatory relationships and capital markets is a lot.
And it takes a long time to prove that as you put someone else's money at risk, you're going to bring it back with interest.
So that's a big part of what we do.
Another sort of relationships you can't vibe code is we have last quarter four-ish-hundred thousand active merchants where these transactions took place.
Each one of those is a sales conversation, contract negotiation, going live, et cetera.
The going live part is going to get a lot faster.
So we could now go to a merchant and say, hey, good news.
We're going to vibe code the launch together.
It'll be a lot quicker.
So instead of going live next quarter, we'll go live next week.
But until we get there, someone still has to decide that this.
a good contract and prove that this will be a creative to the merchant.
And finally, maybe the most important sort of relationships is the consumer one.
So we have 26 million active consumers in the last 12 months.
These are people that trusted us that the no-fine print thing is real.
It took us 15 years to convince people that when we say 0% loan,
like the original conversations I had literally with people,
both in the industry and the man in the street,
like, we're going to lend money at no interest so long as the merchants will
you subsidize the transaction.
Like, yeah, sure, no interest.
There's going to be a fine brand.
It's going to go to 39% APR.
Like, no, it really never does.
Never had, never will.
That's part of the core value of this company.
It takes a little while to convince people that you're not just, you know,
nomadic fruit, I think.
So I'm fairly confident in our ability to defend our.
Yeah.
Last question for me.
I'm interested in to know, we're very excited about ads in ChatchipT and Agenda Commerce.
do you have a feeling, not to hold you to something,
but just like how fast the ramp in a gentic commerce
and people actually making the decision to purchase in a chat app might be.
We talk to the folks at Shopify a lot.
We're trying to triangulate this.
I thought last Black Friday might be a little glimmer of it.
It feels like they're still implementing a lot of things.
Obviously there's details to iron out,
but it feels like certainly this year could be the same.
at the time when we're seeing 0.1%, 1%, I don't know, 10% seems sort of high and crazy.
But it's where the future is going, but how do you think about agentic commerce numbers this year?
Don't hold me to it.
Yeah, I won't.
The curves are all turning vertical.
Okay.
And so it's hard to say if it's one, if it's one, that it's 10, and if it's 10, it's a lot.
Yeah.
But I think some shopping is going to turn very agentic as an I will.
tell my, you know, consumer co-worker equivalent or, you know,
you're filling your favorite brand, go buy me some milk.
Yeah.
Like the rest of just happen, which will be awesome.
I will also do that today with Instagram.
So, yeah.
The, I want to buy a cool new espresso machine.
I'm currently shopping for obsessively.
Of course.
I want that experience to be much more interactive because I'm obsessed with espresso.
And so entertainment is like nerding out.
I'm like, ooh, they have a rotary pump.
it's not as loud as the vibration one.
So I think it's going to become augmented by agents,
but it's still going to be, like,
I'm very much part of this.
And that becomes to blend into like,
well, research with Google versus research
for Gemini did the same thing.
Yeah.
Which sort of brings me to,
I think there's quite a bit of industry
pro-clutching around ads and chatbots.
Oh my God.
I think that's the best thing that's going to happen to this industry.
Like everyone is holding in their breath around,
on one-hand-able AI,
kill software or software eats off or whatever.
They say, like, well, we'll be able to afford this giant build-out
so these models can get smarter.
Guess what? We make most of the money on the internet, not us,
but most of the rest of the internet makes money with ads.
And so ads in the single-fastly-growing piece of the internet
wouldn't be such a bad thing for people that need a lot of capital.
So I, for one, welcome the ads and bots.
So long as clearly delineated, there's ethical conclusions, all that stuff.
But I think it's coming fast, and, you know,
I think so far most people have underpillard.
predicted the pace of these changes.
So I'm not going to claim that it's going to be 10% by the end of the year.
But I don't shock me if it's.
Yeah, that would be sort of my high, my high bound.
And it'll be hard to measure because with that espresso machine, people will clearly do a ton of, I could imagine firing off a deep research report.
Tell me everything.
Understand the landscape.
How long are the companies?
I want to know the company's history.
Who's the founder?
Tell me everything.
But then also I want to go to the website and also I want to go to the showroom and also, you know, and then maybe I make,
make the purchase after talking to somebody, I walk out of the store and I say,
hey, buy that thing, ship it here. Or maybe I do all the research and then I, you know,
tell someone else to just purchase it and they go buy it in person because I want it the same day.
There's like a million different edge cases. So the number will be hard, but my vibes based analysis
is right, right in the same target slot as yours. So, fantastic. Last question for me.
How, what's your buy versus build framework in the context of a firm? There's, uh,
You guys are clearly able to take products zero to one internally quite well with the card,
but at the same time it feels like there's so much in the world that's on sale right now.
True.
You know, M&A-wise, we've done a couple of things well and a bunch of things less well,
and so we're very, very cautious.
So, you know, as the world goes on sale, it's tempting to look at, you know,
things that are maybe undervalued, maybe could plug right into the,
puzzle we're kind of bill here. Generally speaking, we're super cautious. So for the number of people
that run in with like, hey, cool, we can buy this thing now. My answer typically is like, why would
we benefit from this? Like, is this better owned by us? Maybe a different version of the same
question is... Well, yeah, yeah, just because you might make a fantastic CEO of a company that's on
sale doesn't mean that it wouldn't be massively distracting if you were to try to integrate it and
make it a part of the ecosystem.
Yeah, and back to sort of like some things are super accelerating and some things are exactly as slow or as fast as they've always been.
The human relationship part where a new team comes in and you know, like I just bought you.
How exactly do we get along now?
That's not going to get any easier.
And if anything, it's going to get, there's a lot of CEOs I know who are thinking it would be a great time to sell my company.
Not because I want to sell my company, but because there's so much opportunity in this AI enabled world.
I want to start another one.
I want to start something new.
That's actually a terrible thing for the inquirer.
Yeah, that's bad.
The other one thing you want is that the typical value of the asset is the team.
The team is like, I'm just trying to dump this thing.
Like, I'm not sure what I want.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Good luck with the search for the ultimate espresso machine.
Let us know what you decide.
We'll announce it.
You should have the max's list, the top rated different machines.
Anyways, great to catch up.
I'll leave you without. I owe two identical
linear minis.
Okay. There you go. One breaks.
Yes.
This is commitment. This is serious.
I like that. That's peak performance.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
We'll talk to you soon. Have a great weekend.
Cheers. Goodbye.
Let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent, real-time, conversational agents.
Reimagined human technology interaction with 11 labs.
And we know there was some roughness on the audio there.
That is why we're making the TBPN.
We're working on them.
The pit lane headset.
Yes.
We're not going to send mics to people.
We are going to send people headsets with the boom mic.
It's going to look like you're in the paddock.
It's going to look like you're...
Not in the paddock.
No?
In the pit lane.
In the pit lane.
Yeah, in the pit lane.
Sorry.
Well, without further ado, I guess we don't have our guests yet.
Let me tell you about cognition.
They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer.
Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
and I was looking at...
And crushing it in the enterprise.
Crushing it in the enterprise, yes.
The company's doing fantastically.
But Jordan Schneider did an interesting side-by-side of Devin v. Claude-building RTS, a
real-time strategy game.
And said, congrats to Scott Wu and Russell Kaplan on the decisive win.
And he's vibe-coding games, which I'm excited for these to release.
I feel like things are happening so fast.
I want to play Shulto's game.
I want to play more vibe-coded games.
All of those Instagram real ads that show you the fake games that are all clickbait to get you to buy some game that's ultimately candy crush.
I want the actual game that looks fun where you're fighting the zombies or something.
Okay, some quick context before TJ joins.
So he's coming on to talk to us about Trump RX, which launched, I believe, yesterday.
And then also this new Wagovi, GLP1 pill.
that was launched and then immediately cloned by Hymns and HERS.
Novo Nordis put out a press release on the illegal mass compounding and deceptive advertising by Hems and HERS.
QCAP said Novo is basically calling Hems a corner store drug dealer.
Wait, does Novo not believe that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?
Novo Nortes issued the following statement.
Yes.
Regarding the announcement by Hems and HERS that they will unlawfully mass market.
an unapproved, inauthentic, and untested knockoff, some of glutide pill.
The action by Hymns and Hers is a legal mass compounding that poses a significant risk to patient safety.
That's a harsh words.
Novo Nordisk will take legal and regulatory action to protect patients,
RIP and the integrity of the U.S. Gold Standard Drug Approval Framework.
And Dr. Marty McCar, Macari, the commissioner of the FDA, said the FDA will take swift action
against companies mass marketing illegal copycat drugs, claiming they are similar to FDA-approved
products.
The FDA cannot verify the quality, safety, or effectiveness of non-approved drugs.
Marty has a great book, by the way.
You should read it if you want to know more about the FDA strategy.
It's a very fascinating.
Contrary intake on health care, he identifies a bunch of interesting places where, for some
psychological reason or some sort of structural reason, scientists that had discovered
some truth about health care or medicine were unable to sort of propagate their finding,
and he identifies a number of these sort of bizarre scenarios.
So we'll dig into it quickly.
Let me tell you about Century.
Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast.
That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.
And without further ado, let's bring in T.J. Parker,
to the TVP and Healthcare Zard.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I am great. How are you?
I'm good.
Complicated day in the news.
Where should we start first?
What's storage?
Air-cooled Porsches.
Air-cooled Porsches.
Are they still cool in the age of AI, or am I going to be able to vibe code one?
I think they're going to be cooler in the age of AI.
There we go.
I like it.
Tracking.
Yeah.
What about in health care?
Yeah, big week.
Want to talk about, let's just jump straight into the Wagovi Novenordas.
hymns drama. What's been your reaction? How have you been tracking the story up until this week?
All that good stuff. Yeah, I think maybe to jump back to how we got here, and I think folks are probably
pretty familiar with this, but the hymns of the world were obviously compounding the injectable
for quite a long time. But the origination of that was that those injectables were in short order.
They were on back order, and so they were allowed to compound them as a lot of.
stop gap for the manufacturers to get sufficient supply. And that was basically real in the early,
early phases of this, right? And important because if someone's overweight and they want to lose
weight quickly, being overweight is unhealthy, not good for your lifespan. And so that's why the FDA
is set up in that way. But the question is like, how long does that go on? Basically, Hymns got addicted
to compounding. Yeah, and that was maybe call it 18 months ago or so where that was kind of that
peaked and then the FDA did issue a warning letter to Hymns back in the fall when the
shortage ended telling them to stop mass compounding. So they have commented on this before,
but their level of enforcement has been lacking. I think the stark difference with what happened
yesterday is that the Wagovi pill has a specific technology called SNAC, that they actually
paid $2 billion for the IP specifically for that technology to allow for,
for you to be able to actually absorb the peptide
and have the drug be effective.
And Hymns explicitly, I say that they didn't use that technology
instead they're using liposomal absorption,
which maybe it works, maybe it doesn't,
but there's certainly no clue-
Well, then it's just like insane,
it's you're insane, you're selling a drug
that you claim works that has no, like, approval?
Approval testing, right?
Is this, is like-
Zero studies, zero approval?
So this is where it's super different
from the injectables where they weren't changing the formulation, right?
It was very similar to the branded drug.
We can talk about the challenges of IP and a bunch of things,
but it's different in the sense that here there's no evidence of this drug works at all.
And so the most likely scenario is they're selling a, you know, a $50 drug that doesn't work,
that still has a bunch of side effects because it still has the drug that just doesn't get absorbed through your GI.
So it's very different.
It's not an IP issue.
It's really an efficacy and safety issue, which is why I think you saw.
the FDA come out much faster in a much more explicit way, pretty immediately after the launch yesterday.
Why would Hymns do something that seems completely nonsensical and bad for patients and bad for...
I have a quote here from them.
Compounding is a safe, legal, and long-recognized practice within the American healthcare system.
So that's their stance.
Okay, but ignoring the fact that they're inventing a new delivery mechanism.
via liposomal and are selling it as a product claiming.
That's why they're getting pushback, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think the situation is you have a $5 billion market cap company
where half of their revenues, these compounded gLP ones,
where that market is quickly contracting on them.
They're doing a bunch of buybacks.
They've invested a ton in incremental cap-ex.
It's like a recipe for disaster if that revenue starts to fall away.
And it feels to me like a hail.
The pill is just going to do that is the expectation that the pill is going to effectively eat the injectable market?
Because a lot of people would rather take a pill than, you know, have to do an injection even if it's once a week.
Yeah, I think if you look at the archetype of who I believe to be the Hymns customer, they're buying the injectable because it was the cheapest place to get it.
Now you have a branded drug that's half the price of their injectable.
Like I think it's partially the route of administration.
I think partially that it's just half the price.
and so it's hard to imagine that they're not going to have a significant issue with churn
and people switching from the injectable partially yeah because of the ease of use but also it's just
literally half the price which was their entire value prop prior to the pillow is not expecting
are they able to mass produce this already like are they yeah they have no shortage issues they've
been ramping up production for quite some time yeah um i think they were quite prepared for the launch
and so you have none of the shortage dynamics and frankly like pills are
exponentially easier to manufacture than their injectable pens specifically, which is where the
shortages came from.
So there's no similar rationale.
I think it's also comparatively reasonable that you don't want to force a bunch of patients
off the injectable product.
So there is like a reasonable safety argument that that has to be like a very thoughtful
and calculated wind down.
I think they're onboarding new customers so that doesn't totally hold water compared to
the behavior.
But in this instance, it feels more.
more like a financial hailmary given, I think, what the market dynamics are going to do to them over the next 12 months.
What about the alternative scenario or a playbook?
Like, I remember Hymns as being sort of like a front end to drugs that they didn't compound.
And it was a place to get hair loss medication and sort of name brand drugs that I felt like just it was online pharmacy.
Like, why doesn't that model work in the age of peptides and GLP-1s?
why can't you just be the, you know, the digital doctor that prescribes, then you go pick it up at your local pharmacy?
A couple of reasons.
And I think if you look at their competitive set, you know, the biggest one being row, obviously, that's how they've managed through this, right?
They have not remained reliant on compounded drugs as the shortage has gone away.
They've ramped up their access points to branded therapies.
That's exactly what they're doing and executing.
I think when you're in the position of HEMS, it's hard to not get addicted to a,
$250 product with 90% gross margins when
if you're selling access to the branded drug
at most you're going to make $10 to $15 on $150
product. And so I think they, to some degree,
don't realize the business they're in.
Like in a traditional retailer and distribution business,
which is really the business that they're in,
they're not a manufacturer.
That's a scale, low margin business
where price, convenience, like all the things that
make Amazon successful make you successful,
they have sort of morphed into a manufacturing business without any of the IP, any of the R&D costs,
like any of the things that come along with being a manufacturer.
And I think it's an addictive, addicting place to be because the margins are quite a bit better than being a retailer.
Yeah.
Can you explain more about this, the warning letter that the FDA shared addressed to Hems and Her Health?
September 9th, 2025, you can find this on FDA.gov.
They're saying, it says, the FDA has observed that your website offers various compounded drugs, including simiglutide, as described alone, that your claims are concerning your compounded simiglutide products are false or misleading.
How would a company normally respond to a warning letter from the FDA?
It's not fully shut down.
It's not a lawsuit.
It's more of a corrective by the FDA.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I think historically in combating specifically, the FDA has lacked material enforcement.
And so in many ways, I think what you're seeing here is that there's a skepticism that they'll actually enforce.
And so it's business as usual.
Don't take the warning letter seriously.
I think with that overlay, I think the reason the FDA still sends letters like that is if they do have a material safety issue, which is what has happened with compounding in the past.
you had 60 people die of meningitis in 2012 from a compounding pharmacy doing scale compounding.
They have a paper trail of telling them that you were out of compliance.
And so, you know, I think this will probably be a different situation.
I think one important point is the FDA does not enforce IP.
So they're not going to get involved in actual quote unquote IP theft.
That's for the courts.
Got it.
But they do enforce safety and efficacy, which is why I think they address this so much faster
because they believe it's an efficacy issue, not solely an IP infringement issue, which would, again, be left to the courts.
Yeah. What about Walmart? Are they a potential way out of this? You need scale. I don't know how advanced they are, but, you know, you have experience with Amazon. Walmart just hit a trillion dollar market cap. It seems like the business is doing well. They were not disrupted. They need more technology. Is there something where a partnership could allow him,
to sort of go get out of the compounding business and go more to the scaled low margin business,
but still be growing?
Yeah, it feels like just given the reputation that that would be hard to imagine happening,
I think they have built obviously a lot of compelling customer experiences.
They build really good tech.
But I think just given the overhang from these regulatory challenges,
it's hard to imagine a large acquires going to get comfortable with that kind of retrospective
and presumably ongoing liability.
Yeah.
Switching gears, Trump RX.
What's up at that?
Yeah, I feel like I should take a victory lap here.
I think the first time I was on here was to talk about the executive order for Trump RX.
And I think my point at that moment in time was that the real thrust of that EO, which was not super clear then, but is how I interpreted it, is that it was an effort to eliminate this discrepancy between.
super high list prices and the net prices that insurers and PBMs actually pay, right?
So for these GLP ones, they have these $1, $1,200 or $1,000 list prices,
but in reality, if you're a PBM, you're paying $200, 300 bucks,
and then that's exactly what you saw here,
where there's a number of branded drugs,
which before, if you were a consumer paying out of pocket,
you had to pay that high list price.
They've gotten the manufacturers to come to the table
and offer a consumer-directed net price.
So really, if you are paying out of pocket for a bunch of these drugs, you're saving 60, 70% compared to what was available to you a year ago.
Now, some of that could just be the GOPO market forces, but that wouldn't have touched a number of the products that have moved on to Trump RX.
I think given the selection, it's maybe like 25 actual brands that haven't gone generic that have low net prices that are on there right now.
It's not the most exciting thing in the world, but I do think you're going to see manufacturers just start to launch new products at net.
and that will completely unwind the value of the current supply chain, middlemen, PBMs, all those things.
So I think it's not good.
But I think it's like the early days of what could materially change how these things go to market and the pricing that's associated with that.
So it's not just good marketing for the midterms?
No, I think it is good marketing.
I think everyone has quoted these ridiculous list prices as the actual price.
It's been like a pet peeve of mind forever.
and they are now quoting much lower kind of list prices.
So I think that is going to be perceived as a win for the midterms.
But the drugs aren't actually cheaper than like a payer would have paid a year ago,
but they are cheaper than a consumer could have gotten access to a year ago.
So I think it's not good.
And I think hopefully a trend that will accelerate and change the pricing dynamics more dramatically.
Did I ask about AI doctors?
That's what I was going to ask about, John.
Red my mind.
We've talked to a couple companies that have come on and,
talked about consumer-level AI doctor. Doctor in your pocket, you know, you got a mole,
you take a picture of it, it tells you what, you know, you say, I feel sick. It'll tell you
go get some blood work done or something. Some of them have partnered with certain states to get
real doctors involved. There's a whole bunch of different models. At the same time, they're
facing pressure from Open AI and, you know, they're launching a health product. How do you think
that market plays out? What are you optimistic about? How much can it actually improve
American health care. There's always a lot of talk about, like, if you just talk, you know,
primary care doctor was available more frequently. We'd be way healthier. And I don't know that
there's that many people that are like, well, I never thought to Google, I should sleep diet and
exercise. So now that I can chat GPT it, I'm healthy. But walk me through your whole philosophy on
like AI chatbots in consumer health care. Yeah. I mean, I think, first of all, it's obviously
goodness, right? I think people are really going to GPT.
to get advice on their health.
And I think it's something like 7 or 8% of chat GPT's volume
is health-related health-specific.
So clearly that's net good.
I think in many ways it replaces people going to Google
to do the same thing.
It's much more efficient.
It's definitely more effective.
So that's all good.
I think my thesis on the end state of that
and where it really unlocks a bunch of value
is when it is fully aware of all your medical history.
And so that's pretty critical.
and ChatGBTBT has launched a version of that,
though it's pretty light on the actual data integration.
But they acquired some company, I think, to help with that.
Wasn't it the, there was a company, it wasn't called?
It was a company that was like trying to, yeah, Torch.
It was the, what was the name of the company they had before?
It was not future.
Forward.
Forward health, yeah.
So clearly they're thinking about all this stuff.
Yeah, there's a,
fundamental regulatory framework where if you're a provider, you can access a much broader set of
data to deliver care to the consumer. If you're a technology company, they're accessing via this
thing called TEFCA, or very few providers are contributing data to that. And so there's a lot of
nuance to this. But the punchline is that if you are purely a technology company, your access to
the breadth of data necessary to be useful is much more limited. So you basically need to be a provider
that employs actual medical doctors.
You need to be a provider actually providing care to that customer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so we had one of these companies Lotus on the other day.
And if he's an investor pitch and people are like, hey, like AI doctor is cool,
but Chatsy B.
He's doing this.
Claude's doing this.
There's other companies that are, or Claude might, you know, do something like this.
There's other companies that are super competitive space.
They're saying, okay, but Open AI is not going to have.
doctors on staff and it's not going to actually be licensed and able to actually do it.
Yeah, it doesn't prohibit them from doing interesting things with partners or via MCP or some other
approach that can mimic, you know, some of the things that we built at general medicine and some
other folks are building. But in and of themselves, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT or Apple Health,
any of these guys, their ability to provide similar levels of care is just going to be constrained.
I also think that probably the more salient point is I think where this becomes really magic
is where all of these conversations get actually distilled to your provider before your appointment.
So instead of having to repeat all the things you've already said and go back through your medical history,
like, you sort of show up to the appointment, your provider's been prepped based on everything you've already chatted about,
and can actually start to deal with what they might want to do in that appointment.
So that's where we've seen it be the most interesting and useful,
and I'm sure other folks will end up in a similar spot.
But I'd think like the combination of GPT all the way through to the visit, informing the visit and then informing the care is super powerful.
What's the textbook example of like medical history being valuable?
Because maybe I'm just like in a weird spot, but I usually just say like, no, I haven't done anything.
But like I don't know.
Like if you like, I don't know, I actually haven't broken any bones.
But like assuming like I was like I broke my arm when I was five, like does that really like increase cancer risk?
Like how are these things actually flowing through?
Like what's the textbook example?
I think the average American is on prescription medication.
Okay, so they show up and they're like, oh, you're already on this medication.
Why did you go on that?
Yeah, I mean, I'll give you like a tangible example that like Elliot experienced in our GPT,
which is he's been having this plentrophasticitis issue on one foot.
I hope he doesn't mind that I'm sharing his pHI.
And the GPT was able to.
Yeah, the GPT was able to decipher that at the same thing on the other foot in like 2006
or something, like from like 20 years ago.
Okay.
which is where, like, you just, he didn't even remember having the issue.
It was not relevant to him.
Okay.
And I think there's more, like, substantive examples where you might have had a series of lab tests over the last five years.
Any one of them is not problematic, but the trends that are being exposed when you can see that trend is pretty, you know, compelling.
Okay.
There's also just like, you can recommend all sorts of screenings based on when you've actually done those screenings and what hasn't been done, that kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense.
George, anything else?
Is it dangerous that Open AI hooked a bio lab up to GDT5?
We're going to have the founder of Ginko, who they,
they partnered with on the AI BioLab.
But what are your thoughts?
Do you want a vibe code, some drugs?
Yeah, it seems like a fun experiment.
You know, but what could possibly go wrong?
We'll clip it when it happens.
And the world ends, the one final clip.
We're like, TJ called it.
Tj. called it.
Anyway,
there will be victory laps if the apocalypse happens.
Last, last question.
How have you been processing all the EV manufacturers
having to basically take these massive impairments?
Sorry, just car manufacturers in general taking these massive hits.
It was Stalantis is down something like 20%
after the company announced it's taking a 12%.
$26 billion hit and writing down their electric vehicle business.
Did you predict this as well?
You know, I'm still loving my Raptor R, which gets about 11 miles per gallon,
so I think you know how I feel about the situation.
That's great.
I'm trying to get Georgia to get one.
You're buying your carbon offsets, though, right?
Yeah, for sure.
Thank you.
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Great to catch up.
Great to catch up as always.
I'm sure there'll be a lot more here, so we'll have you back on soon.
Pleasure as always.
Have a good weekend.
Let me tell you about CrowdStrike.
Your business is AI, their business is securing it.
CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
And without further ado, we're going over to the co-founder and SVP of field engineering from Data Bricks.
Arcelon, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
It's happening.
Hey, guys.
Thanks for having me.
Good to see you.
Great to meet.
First time on the show.
I believe. Please introduce yourself. Tell us what you do. This is when we say first time,
first time tuning in, long time watcher or lurker or something like that. I appreciate it.
We enjoy talking to your co-founder. Awesome. Well, yeah, guys, Arcelon Tavichol, one of the co-founders
to your Databricks. Yeah. You know, run what's known as field engineering. So think about
anything technical, not in core R&D. So it's about a third of the company, roughly give or take.
and then before that, like all the other founders, came out of Berkeley.
And as my advisor, like to say, I joined the dark side in between.
And I went to a consulting company.
McKinsey spent about four years there before we started about 12.
There we go.
We love, you know we love to hear that.
Put in your time.
We were on a flight the other day, and John and I were asking this guy to switch seats with us,
because we like to, we, some people are surprised, but even after three hours of recording,
We still want to keep talking.
And the guy had a UBS shirt on, and John was like, do you work at UBS?
And he's like, yeah.
And John goes, thank you for your service.
And the guy just started laughing.
You thought it was making fun of them.
Thank you.
Thank you for your service at McKinsey.
You're going to thank your bankers, your Swiss bankers, specifically.
I want your reaction to this Tyler Cowan Post.
Today we'll go down as some kind of turning point, somewhat arbitrarily, but it's okay
if journalists and historians have to present things in that manner.
He posted this at 11 a.m. on February 5th. That, of course, was the day that both Codex 5.3 and Opus 4.6 launched. It feels like he's talking about software engineering, automated software engineering, AI agents, sort of everything coming to a head. How have you been processing this week? Does it feel like there's a turning point? This is all part of some smooth curve. What's been your view on the ground?
Look, I think I've lost track now based on those definitions. I think we've had.
like 3,000 watershed moments in the past year that everybody said is like the turn of time.
Yeah, more than one of the day.
Way more than one of day.
That's why we have three hours of content every day. It works perfectly for us.
I feel like every day I tune into X and somebody's like, this is the day.
This is it.
The singularity is here.
It's over.
We're back.
Look, I mean, I think it's more of a smoother curve right as we go through.
And clearly every day, I think it's a combination of the technology is getting better.
But I think a lot of it right now, what holds people back, what they
can do is less the technology, but it's more people learning how to use it, how to deploy it,
all the things around it to put value. Like that's going to be the long tail. I think we're not even
close to harnessing the technology that we have today, much less saying, hey, it got a little bit
better now everything's going to change, at least from what we're seeing. Yeah, so talk about your
forward deployed engineers, whatever you call them, like implementation, how you like to work with
companies. And then I want to compare and understand what it might look like at the labs as they sort
of dip their toe into the FDE model.
Yeah, look, I think, so I think that there's two things.
A lot of places when they talk about forward deployed engineers, so this is the cool term
right now, I guess, is this concept that says, go to ask people, what is it that you want?
What's the outcome that you want to drive?
You want to do, you know, revenue forecast optimization.
You want to do demand forecasting.
And then I'll build something for you.
The problem is many of the organizations just can't leave the talk about that are kind of like,
okay, I'll build something custom for you.
I'll get it fast, but then the hard part is, is that scalable?
Is it open?
How does that work?
So Databricks is probably a little bit different than the rest of them because we've got
an actual platform and product that's used by over 20,000 people.
But I think right now when you look at it in the AI world, what works for us, at least,
is we go in and some organizations right now are saying, help me with a specific problem.
Like, I want to do, you know, let me get my data in order, which is important for AI,
or let me kind of do a migration.
or let me set this up.
And then we have the same set of somebody says,
come help me transform.
Like Fox News, if you know Fox,
Cletus, the sports app that they have,
that you can ask questions.
Like that one,
they were like,
call at Fox is a good buddy.
I don't know if you.
So he's like,
come build it soup to nuts for that.
And that was one that we did everything end to end
and deliver something that works that they want.
So we span the gamut from helping you work with products
to kind of actually delivering outcomes.
We do both.
Okay.
And then best practice.
pretend I'm a CEO of AI Lab who will remain a nameless and I'm trying to hire 700,
a couple thousand consulting type for deployed sales engineering roles. What are best practices?
How fast can you actually spin someone up to become an effective forward deployed engineer?
What are the pitfalls? Yeah, lots of questions embedded in there.
So look, I think first and foremost, what you're looking at,
forward today for people is they need to do two things. One, they actually have to be able to build
hands on. I think you end up in the solution engineer space getting a lot of what I call like the
slideware demos like, hey, I can, I'm a walking dictionary, I can tell you about things, I can build
a deck. It just doesn't really cut it anymore. So one, there's much more that what people say is come
show me rapidly prototype. So they have to be able to build and they have to be able to use AI
tools to build. Otherwise, they're going to be slow. The second thing is you can't just go get
engineers, they have to be able to talk to customers because, like, the most important thing is,
if I go walk to your basically CEO or CIO, I have to be able to say, what's your business problem,
understand why it matters, and decompose that to technical pieces. So you need people who have both
of those. So you have to screen from it. And it's different than what the, what I would call the
traditional solution engineering interviews are. In terms of how fast to get somebody ramped up,
look, you're hiring smart people. Generally, to get familiar with all the tools, we'd say three
months is fast, six months is when they're operating at full steam. It doesn't mean that you can't
drop them in front of customers in the first couple of weeks. But that's the amount of time that
they get said like, one of the most common problems, what's the most efficient way, how do I
navigate an organization? And you can hire a lot, but absorbing too many people too fast just means
you're also going to candidly degrade culture and skill set. Yeah. We were just talking to Doug
Loflin about how he's using Claude code, he's vibe coding all these things, and a lot of what he was
describing were sort of like one-off data analyses or smaller projects that could sort of run locally,
be compressed, like spreadsheet level, certainly not, you know, big data cross, you know, like
data bricks level infrastructure required, but I'm wondering if you see a world where
an individual would vibe code something that's so big and processing so much data that the agent
or the individual vibe coder is actually pulling data bricks off the shelf.
Like, do we go to a world like that?
I've had ideas for vibe coding projects that have been like, yeah, sure, I'd love a personal
assistant that read the entire internet every day.
But that seems like not on the table right now.
But are we moving to a future where that's possible?
Yes, so two things.
I think one, we are, but second, like I sometimes say from a Databricks perspective,
I wish I could walk in, you know, in like men in black where they have that button that causes
people to forget.
Sure, sure, sure.
Yeah.
I think that there is this vision of data bricks of, hey, it's really, really good if you have a bunch of data and stuff like that.
But actually, like, a bunch of our users today, what's really valuable for your use cases,
even if you say work for a spreadsheet, you're like, I don't keep that.
Who keeps anything on their local laptop anymore, right?
It's like, I work in an organization.
I just want a place where I can access all the data.
data, big or small, but it's governed, it's high quality.
So actually, a lot of the people inside of data bricks use, I mean, called Jeannie, right?
Because you can be asked for it?
It's mainly like, can I get a world where I can do exactly what you said.
I can quickly buy code what I need.
Small amounts of data, but it's governed.
I can visualize it.
I can iterate on it.
So that's the first thing I put.
I think what you start seeing is everything that you start with for like any project.
It starts small.
Great.
I want my data.
Then your next thing is, oh, but it would be really cool.
if I could merge it with this.
And it would be really cool if it could do.
So as you get it to work, it naturally balloons into something that both leverages more data
is much more computational and much more comprehensive.
So you very quickly end up in a world where you've outstripped the, can I just do it
on my laptop, even for the average user.
Yeah.
We were talking to Sam Allman yesterday.
We were about different bottlenecks.
And he was saying that data was a bottleneck for a while, at least like a rumored, perceived
bottleneck.
It really hasn't seemed to bottleneck progress in any meaningful way.
But I'm wondering if you see, if you look at the growth of the data market or data is the new oil,
just is there a boom in the scale or importance of data with the neolab boom?
There's more and more companies that are training different models.
It feels like there's both more data being collected than ever, but then also more data being generated than ever.
So can you just talk about zooming out?
Like, what does the growth of just data look like in the U.S. economy these days?
Look, I think the growth of data is significant, right?
I mean, there's no question about that.
And look, you said data is the new oil.
I think, one, you've got to define, you've got to separate out the world of the consumer
world, which I think about where many people's familiarity with AI is, right?
I want to ask a question, help me understand, you know, is this a cold or an allergy or
plan my travel vacation?
and that's the, I need the whole corpus of the web.
And that people, that amount of data is kind of finite, if that makes sense.
And people are generating new ones through AI, but that's one.
I think that there's a separate question of why you said most people focus on data.
In the enterprise world, it usually goes to fall.
I need AI.
I have to pick a model.
Let me pick which model.
Is it Opus 4.6?
Is it the new basically GPT model?
Is it Gemini?
Et cetera.
Great.
I started crap.
Now I have to figure out how to deploy this.
And that's a lot about security, evaluations, governance.
Great.
Now I did this.
And my accuracy is 60%.
60% is kind of crappy accuracy.
How do I get to 100%?
The answer is you need to have much better data.
So almost everything comes back to, you know, especially in enterprise, lots of data spread out in a bunch of places.
How do you actually get it together, know what you have, make sure it's high quality and relevant and recent?
Because that's the other thing that's happening.
Data that you had from six months ago may know.
longer be valid right now. So how do you tell the system what's valid, what's recent? That's where we
spend a lot of time on. And I think enterprises spend a lot of time on and figuring out, like,
how do we actually make these agents work? And it's a different problem than it is for like general
consumer search. Yeah. What is, what's your software buying framework these days?
What do you mean? Like, what do you decide, like what, when you're evaluating, hey, we,
there's a job to be done or should we go and find a vendor that can do this? Should we do it
ourselves. What's what's your line? Yeah, look, I know that the cool thing is to say this
following, it's like, guys, why would we buy software anymore? Like, you can just vibe code everything.
I think anybody who says that generally is not in the business of actually using software
and production. Like, it's like build is easy, maintaining and sustaining it. It's hard.
I think the short answer is, in a world, if I can, I much rather buy than build, right? Like,
that's just the reality of it.
The problem, though, is you have such unique needs right now.
And so if I look at it and see that the gap between what I can get off the shelf and what I need is really huge, then I have to look at do I really want to depend on another vendor for kind of being able to go.
Like how business critical is it for me?
So as an example, much of the things that we're doing to overhaul field engineering at data bricks to say, how do we use AI to accelerate it?
There's nothing off the shelf that gives us what we need there, right?
If there's a piece, I'll use it as a component, but we have to go build it.
Because for me, it's like I'm iterating really, really fast to figure out what the job to be done is how to deliver it.
So we have our own development team.
But on other things like my CRM or something like that, that is not something that if I can help it, I'm looking to build internally.
Like, I'm happy to use something externally.
Given that I imagine my needs are similar to many other ones and there should be things that could meet that needs pretty quickly.
Yeah.
How big is AI agent adoption broadly?
I want to know the details or the high level of the 2026 state of AI agents.
And specifically, like, how much of this is like, yes, they check the box.
We're using agents, but it's just a test or it's very narrow or it's the one vibe coding intern
that built some fun workflow that's like, yeah, it's a bot.
It's agentic, but it's not the core business.
Talk to me about the rollout and adoption of AI agents and real enterprises, real businesses.
Yeah.
And I know I'm supposed to give like the party line and the popular thing.
I think you can look at that report that you cited talks about something like 95% people still have a hard time getting it in production or at least getting value out of it the way that they wanted.
I think you have still an element of people who are like beating their chest.
You go like, I have a thousand agents out.
And I'm like, okay, how much, how many people use them?
And they're like, why does that matter?
I was like, why does anything else matter, right?
Yeah, same thing as like bragging, you know, CEO bragging about headcount.
And it's like, wait, what's your revenue per employee?
they're like 30 grand.
They're like, okay, maybe you're focusing on the wrong thing.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, look, I look, so I think that there is everybody we talk to is trying to.
And there's some statistics you saw it there that makes sense.
Like most people are no longer doing like, hey, let me get a chat bot.
It's like multi-agent orchestration, right?
Like they're using multiple things.
Second, nobody is wedded to models anymore.
I think like 77% of our customers use multiple models as well to put together.
And I think that the most popular use case is, you know,
beyond internal use case, something called like market intelligence. So like, how do I figure out
what my customers are doing? What's the next best action? I should take into the like.
I do think it's still early. Like most people, like, it's rare to see somebody say I have a lot
of agents in production really effectively. As I mentioned, the place where we spend a lot of
time on is how do you govern it and get security? How do you get really, really high quality out of it?
How do you balance cost and quality? And that's where like our whole offering around agent
Bricks is mainly around how do you actually get this thing in production. And so early days,
we're seeing, we're seeing at least people turn from, I spun up a chat GPT interface. I have
AI to like, what's the ROI I can drive from it and realizing what are the blocking factors,
data or some of the things I talked about to get there. Given your experience at McKinsey,
there's been some news recently that Anthropics working with, I believe, Accenture,
Open AIs hiring consultants internally.
Obviously, the big consulting firms want to get in on the action.
They've been doing a good job making money on generative AI,
maybe making more profit than a lot of companies.
But when you think about swarms of consultants going out into the world
to unlock the power of agents, like what are you going to be looking for to see
just their success?
Look, one, I think we've gone through these iterations before.
And in general, one, I'm hard pressed to believe that every enterprise is going to all of a sudden have an army of their own really, really effective vibe coders, right, that are going to build everything themselves.
I think that there's still going to be the dependence on external parties to help make something real.
I do think that there is a element that the SI firms right now are trying to figure out how do they reinvent themselves.
a non-trivial number of what it was before was,
how do I do some more, let's say a little bit more of a commoditized task.
Sorry, quickly, SI is software integrated?
Oh, sorry.
System integrator.
Sorry.
Like, when you think about the ascensures, the TCS, the cognizance instance, and the stuff.
Sure.
You know, so it's like, how do I throw a lot of people to do it?
I think the expectation from people now is going to be great.
I'm going to hire you.
But in the element of AI, I expect you to be able to do things faster.
and I also expect to be able to get out of more out of each of the individuals.
So one, go build applications for me.
Two, do it faster.
And three, your costs, your economics should be better.
So I think that there's going to be a push on doing things like that.
But otherwise, we're still going to need worlds of folks.
They're also trying to figure out how do they expand their like teams with like many, many
more agents that can work faster.
So it's more of a shift in the model in economics, but you will still need consulting
organizations to help.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
Jordy, you have anything else?
Great to meet you.
Come back on more this year.
Really helpful contact.
Yeah, you guys have such insane visibility into how into the real diffusion.
That's awesome.
Well, we can just wait a week.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
It's going to change in a week.
Watershed moment.
Every hour of every day.
We'll try with you about it.
Have a great rest of you.
Have a great week.
Thanks for coming on.
We'll talk to you soon.
Let me tell you about.
label box, RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the
data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. We got a bunch of breaking news to post a show out
with. Breaking news. Hobbit-inspired startup becomes first new bank. Greenlighted.
Hobbit is one of the most insane headlines.
One is for Trevor Palmer and the whole team.
Airbor founder Palmer. Lucky was one of the tech industries early Trump supporters. He's
known for pension for Hawaiian shirts.
They're really focusing on Palmer's, like, non-banking relationships here.
Palmer is a banker now, everyone.
Aribor will cater to startups and high net worth individuals on Friday.
It became the first newly created bank to receive a national charter under the second Trump
administration, launching with $635 million in capital.
It says it will occupy a hole in the market left by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
The bank is the brainchild of Palmer.
Lucky, one of the tech industry's early supporters of Donald Trump. Its founders include,
its funders include Lux Capital, and Dresa and Horowitz, 8VC. Allod Gill in Founders Fund. It's
lined up a handful of potential defense and industrial tech-focused clients, including
ones with ties to teal and other investors who say they are eager to do business with a bank that
understands their needs. You can think of us like a farmer's bank for tech, said Lucky,
who will serve on AirBOR's board but will not have an operating role. I think most
farmers' banks won't claim they're the best bankers in the world, but they do understand farmers.
Chris Powers in here. He said, is a local bank going to lend against you? No, he said, if you have
less than $10 million in revenue and you're struggling to secure a loan from a traditional bank,
investor expectations are high. Airborne was valued at about $2 billion in the funding round last
year over seven times its book value, according to investor pitch deck, a subsequent round.
valued Airborne $4 billion.
So off to the races.
The timeline, the pace from the team,
getting this done, obviously there's, you know,
the regulatory side, but there's actually the execution to get here.
I remember talking to Trevor last year,
Trevor over at Airborne,
and he was telling me the timeline, and I was like, yeah, that sounds great.
Like, let's see how it actually turns out in that, you know, incredible pace.
Yeah, we'll have to have Palmer on the show to talk more about it.
Real bank or real businesses.
We have another gong hit for Jennifer Garner's Once Upon a Farm.
They're out.
They're out.
They're out.
Shares popped 17% in public market debut.
It's on the New York Stock Exchange, baby.
There we go.
Interesting.
I wonder how they priced it.
Yes.
So they raised almost $200 million, $197.9, at a valuation of $724 million.
And the company's IPO comes as shoppers and policymakers alike have pushed back on ultra-processed foods, particularly when consumed by children.
So it's on the New York Stock Exchange now under the ticker OFRM.
Kavu Venture Partners, Consumer Partners, Kavu Consumer Partners was a big backer of this company and probably has done quite well in this IPO.
And also, Techno Chief had a little bit of an update here, super random, but Kavu Consumer Partners just raised.
a new $325 million fund for better.
Good timing.
Hit it again.
Rohano's over there.
He's been investing in the category that worked in vitamin water.
He's an absolute dog in an industry legend, and we're happy to see success in this industry.
Certainly AI resistant.
It feels like something Tyler won't get out of bed for.
He's knocking it.
but, you know, certainly opportunity.
No, I mean, in a post-scarcity world, every child in the world could be enjoying once a farm a farm.
So, fun day at the New York Stock Exchange for everyone.
Do we have anything else?
Not too much.
There's a bunch of stuff.
I think we went through most of this stuff.
There's new data from R. Karazian shares the fastest growing companies on ramp.
infrastructure means open source is likely ticking up.
AI dev tools are not going away.
And AEO is the future of marketing.
He calls that try profound.
So RAMP's top software vendors, the fastest growing.
We're anthropic, lovable cursor, 11 labs, super base replete.
Interesting.
Cursor has been seeing like some, there's a bunch of fun on the timeline.
People are saying, I don't need it anymore, but it's still growing according to Ramp.
A little bit of a narrative violation there.
And then trending breakout growth relative to size.
paper for software design, cerebrus for AI infrastructure, juicebox for recruiting AI,
runware for AI infrastructure, Clarify for AI infrastructure, Novita, AI for AI for AI infrastructure,
Crusoe for AI infrastructure, modal for AI infrastructure, and then peak AI for SEO and AEO
intelligence and also profound. So this is from the Ramp Economics Lab, Ramp.com slash data.
You can go check it out for yourself. We love chatting with ARA about what you see.
Well, it was a brutal week for tech, but at least we had an opportunity to put on the white suits.
Yes.
I can't wait for Sunday to see the ads.
Yes.
It's going to be a great one.
The Super Bowl is on Sunday.
John and I will be there with Ramp and some other friends, and we will be glued to our phones.
Yes.
In the back of the box, just watching the ads.
Yes, for sure.
We hope you guys.
Plant the bomb in other news.
After 12 years at the Wall Street Journal,
Joanne Stern is launching her own consumer tech media company.
Congratulations to Joanna Stern.
She hasn't shared exactly what it is yet.
But there is a link.
You can go sign up.
This is My Next Thing.com.
Good name.
I like it.
She has been writing for the Wall Street Journal for quite a long time.
I've always enjoyed her consumer tech coverage.
And, of course, we'll have her on the show when she launches.
Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Sign up for our newsletter at tbpfn.com.
We love you.
Goodbye.
Nice work, brothers.
I'll see you on the next one.
