TBPN Live - Davos Prints Cash, Private Credit Exits, Capital One Acquires Brex | Cathie Wood, Keller Cliffton, Jake Cooper, Joe Weisenthal, Coldhealing, Pedro Franceschi, Delian Asparouhov

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(02:40) - How Davos Makes Half a Billion in Revenue (10:42) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (31:18) - Private-Credit Investors Cash Out (34:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (45:08) - Apple to Rebuild Siri (59:51) - Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, CEO and co-founder of Zipline, announced the company's recent $600 million funding round, elevating its valuation to $7.6 billion, and plans to expand autonomous delivery services to Houston and Phoenix in early 2026. He highlighted Zipline's rapid growth, with U.S. deliveries increasing approximately 15% week over week for the past seven months, and the company's milestone of surpassing two million commercial deliveries. Cliffton also discussed the development of Zipline's next-generation aircraft, EV3, which offers significant performance improvements at half the cost, and emphasized the company's commitment to integrating autonomous logistics into everyday life across diverse climates and urban environments. (01:17:10) - Jake Cooper, CEO of Railway, a software deployment platform, discusses the company's recent $100 million funding round aimed at building data centers and simplifying software development. He highlights the evolving role of developers, emphasizing that advancements are enabling a broader range of individuals, including designers and managers, to ship code efficiently. Cooper also shares insights on internal organizational changes, noting that enhanced tools have significantly accelerated project development, leading to what he terms "Agent Speed" within the company. (01:33:31) - Joe Weisenthal is an American journalist and podcaster, serving as the executive editor of news for Bloomberg's digital brands and co-hosting the "Odd Lots" podcast. In the conversation, he discusses Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where Carney declared the old world order is "not coming back" and emphasized that "middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu." Weisenthal also explores China's economic strategies, noting their ambition to move beyond being the world's factory by increasing domestic consumption and addressing global concerns about their manufacturing dominance. (02:01:47) - Coldhealing is a TikTok anthropologist and self-described "dark statistician" based in New York City. In the conversation, he discusses his approach to curating and sharing emerging internet culture, particularly on TikTok, emphasizing the importance of documenting online trends that traditional institutions may overlook. He also reflects on the evolution of "Day in the Life" videos, noting a shift from aspirational portrayals to more mundane representations, and shares his experiences with generative AI content, observing its growing presence on platforms like Instagram Reels and its varying reception among audiences. (02:23:37) - Capital One Goes Big on Brex (02:27:30) - Cathie Wood, founder and CEO of ARK Invest, is renowned for her focus on disruptive innovation in sectors like AI, robotics, and blockchain. In the conversation, she emphasizes AI as a major catalyst for innovation, discusses ARK's unique research approach centered on converging technologies, and highlights the importance of proactive AI integration for enterprises to remain competitive. (03:03:29) - Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic at The New York Times and co-host of the "Popcast" podcast, discusses the integration of AI in music production, noting its increasing use in songwriting and vocal processing. He draws parallels to historical technological shifts in music, such as Bob Dylan's transition to electric guitar and the adoption of Auto-Tune, suggesting that initial resistance to AI may diminish over time. Caramanica also expresses concern that AI-generated music could lead to more passive listening habits, as audiences might become less attentive to the authenticity and creativity of the music they consume. (03:18:21) - Pedro Franceschi, co-founder and CEO of Brex, announced a historic $5.15 billion merger between Brex and Capital One, highlighting the synergy between Brex's innovative financial services platform and Capital One's extensive scale and resources. He emphasized that the partnership aims to accelerate growth and product development, while maintaining Brex's operational independence to continue delivering cutting-edge solutions to businesses. Franceschi also expressed his commitment to leading Brex through this new phase, underscoring the shared vision and ambition of both founder-led companies. (03:29:09) - Delian Asparouhov, a Partner at Founders Fund and Co-Founder of Varda Space Industries, discusses the cultural differences between Ramp and Brex, emphasizing how early company decisions shape long-term focus and success. He highlights Ramp's commitment to saving customers time and money through product innovation, contrasting it with Brex's initial emphasis on rapid market expansion. Asparouhov also underscores the importance of maintaining focus to build a monopoly, noting that the current market conditions present Ramp with a unique opportunity to dominate the enterprise corporate spend sector. 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You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, January 22nd, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Trough, the Temple of Technology, the Trough of Technology, the Fortures of Finance, the capital of capital. Ramp.com. Time is money, save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. Thank you again to R. Krasi. I'm coming on the show yesterday, breaking it down for us. That was a lot of fun. And thank you to Mark Benioff. We have acquired a one of one. truly he says aloha one of one master puppets uh record signed signed by hawaii resident he was keeping us guessing when we had him on the show we were like can you send that to us and he was like no way it's

incredible look at this thing look at this thing we got it this is going in the business uh hall of fame yeah here museum of business museum of tv p and ultradome that's right let's pull up the linear run of show uh meet the system for modern software development 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents and you should be too. We're going to take you through the story, talk about Davos, talk about a whole bunch of news in the timeline. Then we have Keller from Zipline coming on. Jake from

Railway. Joe Wisenthal is returning. That's right. We're very excited to get a whole bunch of updates. I mean, look at the range here today. We're going with cold healing. The Exxononon is coming on. Kathy Wood. Kathy Woods. John Caramaca. John is coming on. Brother Joe.

Jake announcing a big round. First, Davos is winding down. We're finally getting like the final, you know, surprise guess. Elon is the big one. Elon had to come in. He had to come in. The last buzzer-beater, Jester Mac. How do you think that works? Like, how do you think that

Elon? Do you think he just has like an open invite and then he makes the call like a few hours before and just says, oh, it's going well, I'll be there. And then they just throw him on. Or do you think he said, he said yes a week ago and then he said, but don't announce it. I think Elon calls up J-Cal.

Yeah. It says, hey, save me a seat. Save me a seat. And then they figured out from there. Okay. I think when you're tracking to be the world's first teen air, you got an opening by. They just have a stage set up. Yeah.

Apparently the events go really, really long. Some of the interviews go at 10 p.m. Some start. It's like a full, full tilt across multiple event spaces. There's different houses. All In was doing something at the Freedom House. They had a really cool interview with Satchinadella that I watched. Tech was out.

out in full force, and that's what I wrote about today in the TBPN newsletter. Before we go through a little bit of this, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. So, fun fact, Davos makes half a billion dollars a year in revenue. You think of, yes, Tyler's clapping. It's good news. It's a non-profit, an NGO, a think tank, but you're thinking what I'm thinking, Jordy, for-profit conversion. That's right. Let's make it happen. Let's make it happen. But, you know, it's an old, old organization.

Claude Schwab, who you probably know as the face of it. He was the founder. He started Davos in 1971, the world economic form. He was pushed out last year. Yeah. So it's been on the ropes. My thesis is that Davos is back. It was a really good year.

I think tech is going to double down on this. But the first decade, it just sounded like it was an amazing party. One person in 1981 told Time magazine that the forum offers a delightful vacation on the expense account. What a great line. Time was really doing great reporting. Also, Time owned by Mark Beniof, friend of the show. So it's been a rough decade for Davos. Liz Hoffman teased the concept of an inverse Davos index in semaphore, which I thought was sort of funny.

And she sort of wrapped up a few times when the consensus at Davos wound up being like, woefully wrong. And so she went through a few things. First was that everyone got together at Davos. There was an economist who went on stage in 2008 and said, it is inconceivable, repeat, inconceivable, to get a world recession. It's like the one thing, like not mincing words, not hedging at all, just like my prediction is that we will never see a world recession. And then of course we did. The Davos crew, they also missed Brexit and the rise of MAGA. And then in 2020, they had a forum that the Davos in 2020, it's always in January in 2020. It was January 21st to 24th.

And there was really no talk of a global pandemic or being worried about that. There was one panel about sort of risks from antibiotics or something. But they certainly weren't talking about the. coronavirus. And just a week later, Bologi posted that famous going viral post on January 30th saying, like, hey, I'm tracking this. I've been tracking this for a while. And this seems really serious. And a lot of people in tech were already tracking it. So there was this disconnect between like, like, you go to Davos and you hear like the number one thing this year is the metaverse. Apparently they did a big metaverse push. And then the year plays out and it's a wildly

different story. I personally stand behind the idea of Davos in the metaverse. I would love all of the global elites coming together to create the ultimate VR skill ski simulator. Has anybody built the world economic form in Roblox or Minecraft, something like that, you know, one-to-one replica? Yeah, it would be good. There's been a bunch of interesting like behind-the-scenes videos because obviously the big tentpole media groups, Bloomberg is there, CNBC is there, but then there's also a few just folks I follow on Instagram who went and are doing sort of walk-and-talk vlogs.

And that honestly gives you more of like the lay of the land, like what it's like getting around. Pretty interesting. But before I continue, let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So. Yeah. And it seems like there may be moving the internet. I certainly wouldn't see the internet has forgotten about the iconic line.

You'll own nothing and be happy. Yeah. But I haven't seen it so much over the last. week. A lot more focus on... Yeah, it's interesting. That line was all about just financialization and was really... I like to think it was about enterprise software. Yes, yes. We're moving away from box software. Exactly. To SaaS. You're going to own nothing, but you're going to be happy. This particular version of turbo puffer. You pay for consumption.

Exactly. That's what it was about. Anyway, turbo puffer of serverless vector in full tech search built from first principles and object storage, fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. So this year feels like a big turnaround. Dario Amadeh, Damis Hasavis, Satchin Adela, all their interviews have been going viral on the timeline. In California, there's been a bunch of articles written about what they've said at Davos. And there isn't, there hasn't necessarily been a huge reversal

in the positions of these tech leaders. They're saying things that they've been saying for a year or two, sometimes more. But there's some feeling, like when you say a line, like we could have 20% unemployment in two years, it just sounds different when you say it directly to a bunch of world leaders, a bunch of global elites, a bunch of international executives, than when you say it on a tech podcast that's a little more insidery, a little more inside baseball. So it just hits different.

And then it's also an interesting reflection to hear, like, the Sachinadella All-In interview, had an interesting, almost like high, low aspect to it, where Satcha was talking about very specific details of co-pilot implementation, what the future of the workstation could look like, whether people will be running, you know, sidecarriage use. He's a product guy. Yeah, so he's going in a lot of detail there.

And then he's also zooming out and reiterating what he told other business leaders just about the general wave of AI adoption that's still pretty early on the global stage. And so it's felt like there's two different conferences going on. We've read this take from a couple different people, where tech leaders are talking about research progress, employment impacts, sovereign AI, data center buildouts. And then the politicians are talking about Greenland, Venezuela, and trade deals. But even though there's like this two, this bifurcated vibe going on, it still feels like a win-win because the tech industry is getting their messages into the global stage now. where in an audience that will ultimately determine how quickly this technology rolls out and how it will be regulated.

And I imagine that the tech industry is driving a lot of growth for the World Economic Forum because every company, you've seen the Palantir House, there's a lot of different tech companies that have really gone big on sponsorship, gone big on their presence. And I imagine this will get bigger. Open AI was sort of notably absent or not absent, but didn't take over the stage. And you would imagine that next year, given the vibes around this one, that there will be more of a presence from basically all the big tech companies. Yeah, we had an opportunity to have a presence there. And we didn't think that it fully made sense for this year, just given historical. Yeah, travel was a big factor. But, yeah. I did like the fact that Demis and Dario presented this, like, friendly and cooperative, united front for what American AI progress looks like. it was particularly in stark contrast to last week when there was this incredibly messy AI drama,

the opposite of cooperation between Elon and Sam Altman. And so last week, we're like, oh, no one can work together. Or between thinking machines and talent mix up. That's been a big drama story. And then you see, you see Demis and Dario sort of hanging out, talking about how friendly they are and how much they want to work together. And it feels a little bit like faith in humanity store, It's very it really captures the spirit of this like global cooperation, which I think is good

And and and so I I think Davas is back. I think it's time to ski and Congratulations to everyone that's been having fun and making waves in Davas. There's a whole bunch of videos that we should go through First let me tell you about a Octa. 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 Did you want to watch this clip from Midnight Capital? Jensen Wong is, Midnight Capital has given us some instructions. He says, or they say, listen to this, then watch the second video. And this host over at Fox Business has given us a run for our money in the costume department.

Maria Bartaromo knows how to dress. This is a fantastic outfit. Let's play Jensen Wong in Gondon. We are doing and trying to compete. Is the space getting more competitive for you today? Our space is incredibly competitive. I've got a lot of competitors. It's hard to imagine.

Google came out of nowhere. Google has been here for a while, and they're excellent AI company for a very long time. And they're an incredible company. But we have competition from all sides. And? Well, we just have to run fast, you know. Envidio's the only you're doing in trying to compete. And then Midnight Capital says, watch the second.

You know a company has an insane monopoly if they're trying to convince you that. I think that's where we're going with this. You're giving away, you're giving away. the punchline. Play the TL clip at the London School of Economics. Oh, I didn't even know we had scroll down. It's right here. This is the whole one-two punch that Midnight Capital is serving up for us. Here we go. The people who have monopolies pretend not to have them, and the people who don't have monopolies pretend to have them. And so it gets kind of confusing. If you're Google, you will never say that you're a search engine. You will say you're a technology company, which in

technology is a vast, incredibly competitive space. If you're in a completely competitive business, let's say you're trying to open a restaurant in London, and you will say, well, this is totally different from any other restaurant. It will be the only British, Nepalese fusion cuisine within a five-block radius of the LSC. The people who have monopolies pretend not to have them. And the people who don't have monopolies...

I studied. I studied. I studied. Yeah, Jensen studied. And so, you know what? It's incredibly competitive. Of course, he's also going through an acquisition with Kroc. and it seems like the grok deal will go through. Like I have so much competition, I had to spend $20 billion on a team.

Yeah, yeah. And yeah, please define my market as also including CPU and also including A6 and also including like everything else that could possibly compete with NVIDIA. Yeah. The journal had a good summary of kind of some of Jensen's points of view. Yeah, what he said? Davos. NVIDIA CEO says AI needs more investment in defiance of bubble fears.

Jensen called for higher investments to further spread the technology across developed and emerging economies. Speaking at the, in Davos, Wong described AI as a five-layer cake, consisting of energy chips, cloud infrastructure, models, and application. He said AI's applications, how the technology is used in a specific industry, is the most critical layer of that cake as it is where the economic benefits lie. Sectors like energy or semi is both key to developing and harnessing the technology

are already growing thanks to AI. But he said more investments are needed to ensure the benefits of the technology spread to more industries across both developed and emerging economies. The AI bubble comes about because the investments are large and the investments are large because we have to build the infrastructure necessary for all of the AI layers. I think the opportunity is really quite extraordinary and everybody ought to get involved. It's open for business, folks. Yeah.

On the topic of just do we need more investment, There was an interesting detail in the TSM earnings this week that Ben Thompson highlighted. Basically, TSM, they had this earnings call, and they announced the planned capital expenditure of $52 billion to $56 billion, up 27 to 37% from last year. And there was some pushback from an analyst. So I'm not sure that coming in at the top of, the predicted range qualifies as, quote, higher level of CAPEX spending, an analyst pushed CEO CCWA on this point,

noting that TSM's revenue has grown 50% since 2022, but CAPEX has only grown 10%. There weren't many answers, there weren't too many answers from TSM about this, which is understandable, given that they won't announce next year's CAPEX numbers until next quarter. And so Ben is sort of pointing out that TSMC is potentially, the biggest bottleneck. TSM has reiterated to this, that we're not bottlenecked on energy, we're bottlenecked on chip production, we're going to scale up, but at the same time, they don't want to be caught holding the bag. So Ben Thompson says, the implication of cloud service providers showing huge financial gains from AI now, combined with the admission

that there is an insufficient supply of silicon is that foregone revenue isn't a theoretical risk. It's being foregone right now. And you've heard this from all the labs. If we had more chips, we could actually deliver more services, charge more, make more money. We are bottlenecked on compute. And yet at the same time, notice that Wei led his answer admitting to his fear. TSM doesn't want to get stuck holding the bag,

spending billions of dollars for demand that might disappear. This is a legitimate concern for TSM, but it's a big problem for TSM's customers. The only way they're going to overcome that fear is by helping bring competition to bear such that TSM worries more about losing business than they do about investing too much. And so who will be the competition?

Maybe it's Intel, maybe Samsung. There's a number of other foundries that could potentially ramp up and put the screws to TSM. But the Nvidia, TPU, not GROC, but Cerebrus, and a few other of the chipmakers are all sort of still constrained by TSM. And so there's still some worry that if we don't expand just raw fab capacity, that that will be a bottleneck for. But anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits in HR, built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses. Let's go to, who is this? We have a clip here from, well, Philip Johnson's having fun at Davos. But before we do that, let's head over to David Phillips.

Me defending my vibe-coded CRM, I made in one shot with GPT-40. Sometimes it's too slow. For sure. And it's to be reformed, for sure. But which is predictable, loyal. Sometimes... That's a great... That's a great...

He is on one right now. What was the story behind the glasses? Somebody... I saw some meme that... I think he suffered an injury or something, and some people would say, I'll do an eye patch, but he went with the sunglasses. It's a fantastic.

Like a rock star. Yeah, he looks like a rock star. Elon Musk has hit the timeline on Davos. I love how Philip is just like... In the front row. With his phone camera. It's incredible. Incredible citizen journalism here.

Let's play this clip from Elon Musk at Davos. What's he saying? Why did he go to Davos? What is his message? What is he going to talk about? Is that the lowest cost place to put AI will be space. And that'll be true within two years. Maybe three.

Three at the latest. So looking 10 or 20 years out, how would you describe success? three at the latest. Three at the latest. That's an aggressive time. Yeah. For that.

Blue Origin launched satellite internet to rival SpaceX and specifically to rival Starlink. Bezos-backed Blue Origin is launching a satellite network for enterprise data center and government customers, TerraWave. The company aims to begin deploying the first of 5,408 satellites in the fourth quarter of 27. so little under two years. The service will compete with Starlink. And it will also compete with Amazon-operated Leo, which is interesting. I guess they'll maybe work together at some point.

The network called TerraWave is targeted for enterprise data center and government users. The company said it will provide speeds of up to six terabytes per second from satellite position in Leo and medium Earth orbit, regions of space that are between 100 miles and 21,000 miles from Earth's surface. Blue Origin says, as expects to deploying the constellation in the fourth quarter of 2027.

Bezos is entering an increasingly crowded satellite internet market that's currently dominated by Starlink. Starlink has more than 9,000 satellites in orbit and roughly 9 million customers. Amazon, which Bezos founded in 1994, is also ramped up its own offering. That service recently rebranded from Project Cupier to Leo. The company has set up 180 satellites since last April

through a series of rocket launches handled by partners, such as ULA and actually SpaceX. Several future deployments are expected to be handled by Blue Origin. Amazon aims to build a constellation of 3,236 low-earth satellites that will serve business, governments, and consumers. Last November, the company opened up an enterprise preview to select users ahead of a broader commercial launch. Bezos predicted in 2024 that Blue Origin would one day be a bigger company than Amazon.

That's a wild prediction. He founded Blue Origin in 2000, and Dave Limp, Amazon's, former device boss serves as its CEO. Quote, I think it's going to be the best business I've ever been involved in, but it's going to take a while. You said a deal buck in 2024. Blue Origin is primarily a rocket launch company flying tourists and research to the edge of space on short trips. Last January, the startup notched a major milestone when it successfully launched its towering New Glen rocket for the first time, though it was unable to return the rocket booster back to a barge for reuse. They nailed the landing of the New Glenn rocket last November, following a

successful launch of a pair of NASA spacecraft. So good progress over there at Blue Origin. We got to do some more research on the Chinese Starlink equivalents. They have Guo Wang, which is their like state-led effort, trying to get to 13,000 satellites by 2030. Currently, they have around 150. And then there's Chi-Chanfan, which currently has around 100. also trying to get, they're trying to get to 15,000 by 2030, and they're more commercial

focused. So it'd be interesting to track. And you would think that the Blue Origin news, the news that Starlink has a second competitor, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos, major players, well, what does that do for AST Space Mobile? The stock is up 14% today. It's up 24% over the last five days, 35% over the last month, and 100%... AST space mobile can't keep going, there's no way. Over the last six months, it's at all-time highs. It is at all-time highs. And the market cap is now $42 billion.

I have some friends who are obsessed with AST space mobile. And fascinating run. They keep running. Anyway, moving on. Elon also gave some timelines for optimist, humanoid robots at the World Economic Forum. forum. He said, by the end of next year, we will be selling humanoid robots to the public, to the public, not just enterprises. You're going to be able to just buy one of these the way you buy

a cyber truck or a Model S plaid or anything else. That is a very, very aggressive timeline. But he does, he has been buying the parts to actually manufacture them. And, you know, what is selling to the public mean? Does it mean a thousand deliveries, 10,000 deliveries? I don't know. But he's definitely pushing that project forward. Having an optimist that is just on staff here that can just go hit, like if I can hit a button and have the optimist hit the gong physically, that would be fantastic. Yeah, priceless, really.

Yeah, priceless. There's really no amount of money that we wouldn't pay to be able to get that kind of experience here in the Ultradown. Yeah, I'm excited. I mean, we've seen like Boston Dynamics, we've seen with the Chinese humanoid companies, there's like you can do cool things with these with one X and whatnot even if it's teleoperated even if it's prescripted like there there are the technology does work it's more just like

how impactful will it be how expensive is it how reliable is it is the battery one hour or more has he has he spoken about teleoperation no seems like he'd just be generally against it yeah I mean on principle I know that don't the Tesla robotaxies do some teleoperation I think think in the test zones, there was like the ability to take over on that early demo. So I don't think he's dogmatic about it, but he certainly is, you know, if you're against LIDAR, you've got to be against, uh, tragically sane says robots replacing humans hitting the gong. Okay, never mind, shut it down. I'm full Luddite now. Don't, don't worry. That will be the last job. That will be. In the studio, it's hitting the gone. Let's move on to this clip from Sotan

at the all-in AI summit in Davos. First, let me tell you about Vibe.co, where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on meta. So let's play this clip from Satcha Nadella explaining how he was thinking about a job.

The best line, I would say, for PCs or computers was to say, if it's a bicycle for the mine. Bill had a line which I liked as well, which was it's information at your fingertips. We kind of need now a new concept metaphor for how we use computers in the AI age. You have one? And the one I like actually came from the CEO of Notion,

which I like, you know, that manager of incredible product. Yeah. You haven't bought it yet. But it's both management, you know, basically a manager of infinite minds. That's a nice way to think about it, right? If you remember, you know, Jobs had the best line, I would say, C, soul.

The manager of Infinite Minds. That is a good framing. I like that. It's nice to... How many minds are you managing, Tyler? Right now. Right now, it's probably like four. Because I have every LLM.

Okay. Actively running. You've got to get those numbers up. I'm not... I've never really used multiple clodd instances yet. Okay. But, yeah, good framing and good to see. Yeah, it's interesting.

Like, the manager of infinite minds concept, obviously. that essay from Ivan, the CEO of Notion, it went viral over the holidays. I think a lot of people in tech read it, but it did not necessarily break through to like the Davos community. And so having Satina della there,

just further popularize that concept, bake it down into a repeatable phrase that can prepare people for what's coming, adapt. That is valuable, and that's what we're seeing here. Anyway. Every, it'll feel like you're, playing Starcraft now.

I like the StarCraft analogy. The StarCraft analogy is real. Zerg Army. Let's pull up this video that was posted by the New York Times popcast, John Caramica, posted this video yesterday. Somebody sent it to me. Actually, Leif at Public sent it to me.

And I was so confused because there's only about 100 of these rugby's out in the world. And we kind of knew exactly, we kind of, like everybody on the team like kind of sent them out. So I first thought this video, was AI generated.

It did. And it's about AI, so let's play the video. And I think we maybe don't want to do sound. Okay, so yeah, it's about Bruno Mars. And, and if we, I don't know if we can scroll back

to the beginning. Is that possible on Instagram Reels? If you re-host, but yeah, if you zoom in here, he's dancing. And the dancing, this part,

I was like, maybe this part's AI, but then when he sits down, you can see that he has a, a microphone, a lav mic, clip to his call, And so everything about this says this is not AI generated.

This is real. And the hand motions are so accurate. And they're occluding the logos. And he just looks extremely cool. Yeah, it's great. And so he goes on to talk. And we're going to have him on the show later. Anyway, so Dylan messaged John.

And we figure out that John accidentally purchased fake TBPN merch online. Be careful. But at least he's still looking great. Yeah. Yeah, it works. Silver lining. But yeah, I mean, our saga to battle the fraudulent merch, the knockoff merch, has been incredible. This site popped up, and we assumed, okay, they're not going to take payments, certainly.

They're definitely not going to print and ship anything, and we'll be able to get this taken down in two seconds. And I actually sent them an email saying, like, hey, hey, like, I assume you're a fan, like, just so you're you know, like, we don't want this out there. Like, I'd be happy to talk to you about maybe working together or something, but can you please just not use our brand and our trademarks and all this stuff out there on the internet without talking to us first? Like, let's have a conversation about this. Did not get a response.

Not a fan. And I think some other people on the team were like, yeah, John, that was never going to work. And they were right. You tried to go golden retriever mode. I did. I did. I was like, I'm just going to assume the best. I'm just going to assume this is an over-eager fan or someone who just is entrepreneurial, a kid who's just trying to just make this happen.

This is a Canadian. We know it's a Canadian. We know it's a Canadian. Yeah. Anything could happen up there. We need a doubt in the chat says, you guys have a good line of Shopify. I assume most of them are hosted there. No, it's not hosted on Shopify.

It's not. And at one point, we've already gotten them taken down from different services. From a number of platforms that where we know the CEOs and we'll say, hey, we have this fake site. Can you take this down? They will. And they'll pop up on a different site. And so it's been a true game of whack-a-mo. We've sent a number of like, you know, sort of, you know, demand letters at this point.

We've really pushed it a lot, but they keep finding away. And at this point, they are, in fact, taking people's money and shipping fake product now and fooling people that are discerning. And apparently it smells kind of funny. Oh. This is a big issue. The real merch is coming. The real merch is coming. We do have partnership with Shopify.

We've been sampling a bunch of different stuff. Of course, Shopify. We need to put out like a. a Maduro-style bounty. Oh, no. Put a stack on there. Shopify, of course, 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. Trey says Mark Carney is selling fake TVPN merch. Crazy. He heard, he saw your post about him. His cortisol spiking. His cortisol spiking.

And he was like, you know what? I'm not doing anything about this. Canadians, it's really concerning the number of people. that didn't understand that my post was a joke. You're very online and you're very early to a lot of these things. You were trying to make aura happen back over a year ago. Q1 of last year.

Didn't happen. It was flopping. A long time. Then you try to make motion happen. I still think people are just waking up to motion. This will happen, but you got to let it simmer. I mean, I've seen this, I've seen this multiple times. But I just the idea of like processing Davos

as though it's like a bunch of kick streamers. It is very funny to look at the aesthetics. And the whole kick, like, clipping economy is crazy. I found one of those clips, and then I went and looked at the account, and it's like dozens of posts that are the same format, where it's like they have a word in all caps, and then they have an emoji, and then they have this. And it's like very sensationalist.

It feels like paparazzi on top of a kickstream or something. Very, very odd phenomenon. The thing that is real is the drama that's going on. at Davos is not that different. You see, you know, Besson taking shots at Gavin Newsom. They're definitely spiking each other's cortisol, getting each other to crash out. I still don't even, I just don't even know what cortisol spiking means. Is it just like getting angry?

What does it actually mean? If you get into any type of, you know, verbal, physical altercation. It's like a fighter flight. Yeah. The cortisol floods your brain. It just makes you, okay. Yeah. Well, yeah.

Gets your, it gets your people going. Anyway, private credit investors cortisol has been spiking because they are cashing out in droves, redemptions by individual investors in funds soared at the end of 2025

after performance declined, reviving questions about suitability. This is from Matt Wurrs. In the Wall Street Journal, he says, for the first time since the start of the private credit boom, large numbers of individual investors

are trying to get their money out. Several of the big funds eligible to wealthy individuals receive requests from about 5% of shareholders to cash out at the end the last year, well above the normal volume, according to the SEC. One, managed by Blue Al, got redemptions for about 15% of its shares.

This was something where people were nervous about the data center build out, private credit, the expansion here. Apparently what's driving it primarily was Asian clients asking for redemptions from Blue Al specifically. The rising redemptions come in an awkward time for private credit fund managers and for the Trump administration as they push for new rules. that would democratize private markets by encouraging their inclusion in 401k

retirement plans for all Americans. Private fund managers, including Apollo Global and Blue Owl, blame fear-mongering about a recent spate of corporate bankruptcies. This is the whole cockroaches back and forth with Jamie Diamond and some of the folks in the private credit world, Blackstone, Apollo, Blue Al,

because there was an automotive supplier that went bankrupt, first brands we talked about, and there was a surge of withdrawals. analysts say there could be a simpler explanation. Individual investors are falling into a similar pattern, a familiar pattern of selling out when an asset class underperforms expectations. These investors got really surprised when their dividends went down, said Robert Dodd, an analyst at Raymond James. BDCs, the business development companies, they typically make high interest loans to mid-sized corporations with junk credit ratings using the interest income from those

loans to pay dividends. A handful of these funds have cut dividends because the yield on their loans are falling in lockstep with benchmark interest rates. For more dividend reductions will follow, Dodd said, likely prompting more redemptions. Total returns from five of the largest private credit funds aimed at individual investors declined to an average of about 6.22% in the first nine months of 2025 compared with 8.76% in the same period, 2024. And back in 2023, if you were in these funds, you were making 11.4% not bad. Money managed by BDCs has tripled since 2020 to about 450 billion. So there's been a big growth. And the funds still took in more new money from new investors than they paid out in their most recent quarter, a sign that they are still popular

among investors, investors and advisors. Let's move on. But first, let me tell you about phantom cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen, and spend with the phantom. card. The COBSC letter breaking. SpaceX is set to hire Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley to lead its IPO. That's a whole host, a murderous row. The IPO is expected to be valued as much as 1.5 trillion, making it the largest IPO in history. But the community knows put it in the truth zone because Saudi Ramco's IPO in 2019 sported a valuation of 1.7 trillion. Interesting. Very different. They raised 25 billion. 25.6 billion. Oh, yeah. Okay. So anyways, obviously Elon targeting more than that on a actual

dollar basis. Well, there's other news about Anthropic. The revenue run rate for the end of 2025 was 9 billion, up from 4 billion in July 2025. What incredible growth. Iconic Lightspeed and Menlo are set to join the new funding round from TechMeme here and Bloomberg reporting. this is maybe a deceleration. I was debating this with Tyler. I mean, they went from 100 million to 1 billion. They 10xed. Then they were going to 10x it again. So everyone was expecting 10 billion. And 10x it again. And they landed at 9 on run rate. Yeah, I was trying to find... I'm seeing deceleration. Did they, uh, did they predict 10 billion? I don't know. I actually don't know the exact quote. I think Dario, like, was pretty loose about it.

He was just saying that, like, we've seen incredible. Yeah, he was saying, he was saying we went a full order of magnitude from 100 to a billion. We're going to do a full order magnitude again. Is it a full order magnitude to go from one to nine? And he said he only expects, like, you get around. Three or four more, you know, 10 X's. He said that? No.

No, no. I specifically remember him saying, like, like, we cannot keep that level of growth going. He said it's like, he said it would be pretty crazy if that. Yeah. I don't think he said we can't. Oh, okay. He said it would be pretty crazy. Yeah.

Okay, well, obviously. You said if that continues then, like, you're really in the, you know, the biggest companies in the world are on that scale. Yeah. I mean, at a certain point, like, there's no company that's doing a trillion dollars a year in revenue, and you're only two orders magnitude away from that. So we'll see, we'll see. But obviously, Anthropics been on a tear, and the new round,

it seems to be coming together nicely. There is other news from the information. Amir says that Anthropics inference costs on Google and Amazon servers were 23% higher than the company projected. Of course, when you're growing so fast, you're probably willing to pay more for inference just to make sure that everything stays online. Better to service the demand

and not get that frustration, people hitting rate limits, et cetera. Yeah, I think later in the summer, there's a lot of news about how the Anthropic API is like always down. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was that. And then there were also some like FUDs-type

articles about negative gross margins, about margins being really, really bad at these labs, where's the value accruing? Is it all going to accrue to Nvidia? Last month, Anthropic projected, it would generate around 40% gross margins from selling AI to businesses and application developers, but I think that gross margin came in a little bit lower. But there's so much more that they can do to optimize. They're buying TPUs now. They're going to build new data centers. And also, So it does feel like we're going to enter a world where inference is load balanced across a variety of semiconductor stacks. And so for really fast things, you might be going to a grok or a cerebrus or, you know, for more basic stuff, you might be going to a legacy model that's cheaper to inference. And all of that might be blended together into something that's more profitable.

And then also, you know, the dynamic of the equilibrium in the ecosystem could just be higher prices if it's. delivering a lot of value. People are really happy with the value that they're getting from you. And Beth Jayzos posted a real picture of Dario. Backchecked true. That you can pull up here. Dario Amog DA. The jawline is crazy on this matter. AI is good.

Claude's going to be able to do this to people. No. No, Claude will not. They're not launching an image model. Claude will have to go over the... No, no. I'm just saying you're going to be able to just talk to Claude and say like turn me into a monger. In real life.

It will, you know, orchestrate the jaw in my eyes. Okay, got it. Yeah, the double jaw surgery. Leg lengthening. Yeah, yeah. They'll purchase it all for you and just create a schedule for you. Yeah, call the Waymo to take you to the, you know, to the dentist or whatever to do the surgery. Well, if you're in San Francisco

on February 3rd, you need to call Waymo and head over to the Cisco AI Summit. It's bringing together leaders from NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future. of the AI economy. The whole thing will be live streamed and we'll be there for a video stream.

We'll be there. Hope to see you there. Very exciting. Apparently, Google DeepMind is signing a licensing deal. It really is a licensing deal economy that we're in. Last year was the press release economy.

This year, very, very much the licensing deal economy. Hume AI, which builds emotionally intelligent voice interfaces. And they're going to hire CEO Alan Cohen and seven of their engineers. years. Is this the same ghost ship story that we've seen

so many times before? It's essentially an acquisition. Is that what we're reading this? Yeah, that's... Major licensing. I mean, that's, yeah, the CEO's joining Deep Mind. I never thought of Google is particularly behind in voice interfaces. I'm wondering

what else is going on here. I mean, certainly it's an important part of the stack if you have an app that people are chatting with and talking to. Obviously, Notebook L.M was sort of a viral success, but I do really wonder about the longevity and the retention. It feels like they were maybe like, I don't know, 80 or 90 percent there in terms of people. Maybe it's just a speed thing. Maybe it's the actual cadence. I've talked to some people that have been. I mean, didn't that team leave and start their

own thing? They did. They did. But I mean, you've got to be able to backfill that if you're Google and deep mind. You have a great product with a lot of people talking about notebook LM very positively. I think a lot of the notebook LM functionality eventually got baked into the Gemini app. And so, but this, but there still is just, it feels like when you have a latency step where you ask a question, okay, prepare a deep research report and turn it into a podcast and read it to me on the Roman Empire. And you have the option to just go to YouTube and, you have the and just find a video of or pull up hardcore history or something and just listen to it.

And as soon as you click, it just starts playing versus you have to wait. That's going to induce churn. That's going to read. I always thought NopexLM was the product that I wanted to cram for college exams. Yes. Yeah, I did that. I remember like,

like, there's so many moments in college where I was like riding my bike to an exam. Yes, yes, yes. I could really use these 15 minutes to learn about something I didn't write a paper on or whatever. But at the same time, for probably 99% of high school exams, the topic is well studied. And there's already like Spark Notes when I went to high school. Like Spark Notes existed. And if you were doing a book report on The Odyssey, there was already a pre-written summary of it.

You didn't need an LLM. Like LLMs are particularly good. Notebook LLLM is particularly good. when you need to generate a report or an essay or a deep dive or a podcast about something that no one has ever made a podcast about before. But if you're just looking for an hour of really thoughtful content on peptides, like the Huberman Lab podcast exists and has created a very polished product around that. Opinionated. Opinionated as well, which I think people want. But even just in terms of just facts, the facts are already polished and the most important thing is that it's there, just one.

click to start that video. So I'm sure that, you know, a lot of high school students are pulling up YouTube videos that summarize the topics that are going into their calculus exam or whatever they're about to walk into. There's plenty of extra. Yeah, you didn't have streaming video on the internet when you were going through college, right? A little bit. I think it was, it was, YouTube was there, but the library of YouTube videos, it was truly, it was truly like, hey, come in this dorm room. Let me show you the three, YouTube videos that I know about.

It's a great sign of my culture and respect to show you like the greatest YouTube videos that are like viral in my world. Anyway, MongoDB choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Rumor. More news from Sam Altman. Oh, yeah.

He shared today we have added more than one billion of ARR in the last month just from our API business. People think of us mostly as chat. But the API team is doing amazing work. That's fantastic. Yeah. I mean, we saw they just did a huge deal with service now.

Like, they're definitely cooking. They've been cooking for a long time. They have an enterprise go to market motion. That's definitely working and somewhat disconnected from like whatever the hot story of the week is. People are pretty funny in the comments going, brother, one billion of RR at a five billion valuation.

You're going to need to make that MRR. Obviously, this person missed. red pose, which is a added $1 billion in the last month. Okay. Yeah. That's pretty good. So, of course, I would imagine their plan is to continue doing that and actually scale that. Yeah. Well, uh, bubble boy is sharing. I love bubble boy, but I, I do not believe his rumors. I don't, I don't go to him for rumors necessarily. But I don't know, a lot of likes on this. Maybe it's real. There's no, there's no community note. What's the rumor from bubble boy?

The rumor. Google is spinning out the TPU team into a separate entity under alphabet. I'm it to sell hardware to third parties directly. It could happen. Someone calls it a cross-chain atomic swap. That's funny. Anyway, would they even need to do that? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, you can see the Waymo.

It's like did they need to raise money at the Waymo level, right? Sometimes it's helpful for a company to have its own. Alphabet structuring and how they report out earnings and whatnot. Anyway, staying in the big tech world. Let's head over to Mark German's latest report. The Germanator. Apple is revamping Siri as a built-in iPhone, Mac, and chatbot to fend off OpenAI. And there's an image here.

What is this? The Gemini-Gy-Gyemini AI chatbot on a Galaxy S-25 Ultra smartphone. So Apple plans to revamp Siri later this year by turning the digital assistant into the company's first artificial intelligence chatbot thrusting the iPhone maker into a generative AI race dominated by. OpenAI and Google. The chatbot codenamed Kempos will be embedded deeply into the iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems and replace the current Siri interface, according to people familiar with the plan. Users will be able to summon the new service the same way they open Siri now by speaking the Siri command or holding down the side button of their iPhone or iPad.

The new approach will go well beyond the capabilities of current Siri for even a long-promised update that's coming earlier in 26. Today... John, say Siri again really loudly and clearly for anybody that's watching on their TV at home or in their office. The feature is a central piece of Apple's turnaround plan for the AI market where it has lagged behind Silicon Valley piers. The Apple intelligence platform had a rocky rollout in 2024 with features that were

underwhelming or slow to arrive. Shares of Apple gained on the chatbot news climbing as much as 1.7%. The previously promised non-chatbot update to Siri, retaining the current interfaces planned for iOS 26.4 due in the coming months. The idea behind that upgrade is to add features unveiled in 2024, including the ability to analyze on-screen content and tap into personal data. It will also be better at searching the web. The chatbot's capabilities will come later in the year, according to people who ask not to be identified. The company plans to unveil that technology in June at WWUC. Campos, which will have both voice and typing-based models.

Tyler, what's that sound like? Typing? You're going to be able to type to Siri. An app? On app, let's go. Can you type to Siri? No. Right now, you can't?

I don't. Maybe, but you don't have an app. You don't have a place to store all your conversations, which was my take. Okay, cool. But I still care about the model being implemented way more than I care about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Like, where are, I mean, like, the model is going to be. good. Like, they're using Gemini. We know that. But, like, what specifically are you looking for on

the... Gemmy boys. Jimmy boys. Tim Cook's a Gemmy boy. But where are you, like, what are you worried about them not implementing correctly? Like, you want, like, an agentic harness so it can do, like, Claude-style work, like, for a long time on your phone directly? Yeah, I don't know. There's just, like, like, the current Apple Intelligent... is so bad. Yeah. I just like have very low, like, I think there's a real possibility

that they just like make it so every time you have to talk to Syria, you have to like press an extra button or something. There's just like random stuff like that. Yeah. But what if it's just you press and hold the button and then you're just submitting a Gemini prompt and then it just returns exactly what Gemini would have returned?

That's like not implementation. That's just like normal. Yeah, but like why? they could have already done that. You think they might have that? Like an open source model. Like, they could have done that. No, they needed a deal.

They, they, they, they can't just, Apple can't just go and implement anything. I think it's, I think it's gonna be tricky for them. Like, specifically, Lama, so specifically Lama has, in the terms of service, like, you cannot use this.

It's open source unless you have more than like 800 million users or something like that. Like, there's some specific card for other big tech. Opening I trained their open source model for like $5 million. Like Apple could do it for $100 million. You think so? Yeah, people, always talk about how amazing the open source model is. Okay, it's way better than the current Apple intelligence.

That's true. That's true. Yeah. Okay. Like, open source models are pretty solid. So you're saying you want Apple to make the phone with Foxcon and run deep seek. Yeah, come on. They're not doing that. They're not putting deep seek on there. Other than the chatbot interface, the operating systems aren't getting big changes this year. Of course, we got liquid glass. So Apple is more focused on improving performance and fixing bugs last year. It rolled out a major design overhaul, unifying the look and feel of its operating systems. Internally, Apple is testing the chatbot technology as a standalone Siri app. Let's go.

Similar to the chat GPD and Gemini options available in the app store, the company doesn't plan to offer that version to customers, though, so we might not get an app. I'm on a roller coaster here. Instead, it will integrate the software across its operating systems like the Siri of today. I still think they need an app because I'm going to hit it. I'm going to ask it a question. I want to come back to it. How am I going to do that? So I don't know.

Hey, Siri, go back to the recent. Yeah, maybe. But it's got to be good. Then it is, then the implementation has to be good. Because even in Gemini and ChatTPT, there are oftentimes when I will fire off a query. It will come back with like thousands of words. And if I search a keyword in the search box of previous chats, I have so many previous chats that I can't necessarily find the exact one that I'm thinking of. Okay.

So one implementation thing that I think is important is like, if it's super long, if the response, response is super long and it reads it out to you, like, you should be able to pause or something like that. Like in Claude, you can't do that right now. Yeah. Yeah. You can't even fast forward. Like that is an important thing that's all these implementations. That materially affects like how good to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's good. Embracing the chatbot approach represents a strategic shift for Apple, which has long downplayed the conversational AI tools popularized by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. Executives have argued that users prefer having AI woven directly into features something Apple has done with its writing tools, gen moji,

emoji generator, and notification summaries, rather than standalone chat experiences. That's not an unreasonable take. I do see why they landed there. And in the long term, I wouldn't be surprised if that's, if the AI woven in the features, like the AI that's in the photos app is better than, okay, I got to open up the chat app and ask it to edit this photo and import the photo from my photo. No, you just want to be able to go into the Photos app, have the, you know, change the color temperature,

change the brightness, draw on it, add text, and then also have AI features in there, I would imagine. So I am bullish on Apple diffusing AI into all the other apps, but it's taking a while. Yeah. What do you think? Yeah, I just hope the team, specifically that design the new version of the Photos app from the ground app

takes the lead on Apple intelligence. You know what I'm saying? It's been getting better. It's not perfect, but it has been getting better. I've been learning how to do it. I know there, I know the quirks to get it better or are you getting better. I'm getting better. It can't hold me back. It was just a skillet. They should have just come out and said, hey, we hear that you guys don't like the photo app. Massive. Yeah. Skill issue. Billboard campaign. Skill issue. Skill issue. Let's do it. Yeah, just the Apple photos icon and then just

the text skill issue. Skill issue. Stop complaining. Anyway, graphite. It's code review for the age of AI. graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So the... Germinator had more news. He says just now Apple quietly gave hardware chief John Turner's oversight over the company's hardware and software design teams at the end of last year, marking the first evidence he is being groomed for the eventual Apple CEO role. I like Ternus. I'm a Ternus fan.

Ternus head. And I think... I'm bullish. I hope he gets it. I don't know. It feels like it's still very up in the air. very rumor-based, but he's been putting out good vibes. He's been delivering, I don't know.

Whoever that source that was, he never made a hard decision. We should start making edits of him talking doing Apple keynotes. Yes, we need to get a Ternus vibe reel up for sure. Start the prime the pump. Prime the pump. If he doesn't get it and we've been pumping Ternus and becoming Ternus heads, it would be a big L for us. We'd see.

We'll see. Let's see. We already talked enough about the thinking machines drama. The New York Times is reporting on the internal drama Thinking Machines Now. Who wrote this? Was this from Mike Isaac? From Mike Isaac? Ooh, seven-minute article.

Okay, defection, secret conversations, deal talks that fizzled, and a battle for control. And the quote from Andrew Kern that he pulls out says, But in less than a year, Mr. Zof, Mr. Metz, and Mr. Schoenholz had become deeply unhappy with the startup's direction. I wish they'd unpack that more. These pieces have not gone deep enough into the nature of the dispute around the technical direction. I would really like more answers there because, like, what specifically are they unhappy about? Because just, you know, the like B2B fine-tuning that seems like a good business, like opening eyes, having a lot of success with it, has the thinking machines, is it big go-to-market problem?

Has it been implementation problem? Has it been training? Yeah, overall, there's nothing that kills motivation, like having to show up to work every day and believing that the company is moving in the wrong direction. Sure, sure. Yeah, but what specifically? Yeah. I'm sure the team at OpenAI has maybe a rough idea, and that was, again, part of what Mira, it sounds like, was frustrated with. Thinking machines lagged Open AI and other rivals in releasing products and was struggling to raise new funding

at an eye-popping $50 billion evaluation. The men had urged Maradi to strike a deal with Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, had discussed buying thinking machines, and Ms. Moradi had developed closer ties with the chief executive anthropic, a leading AI company, but no traction had resulted. At the meeting, the men lobbied for Mr. Zof, thinking machines chief technology officer, to oversee decisions. And this is just a strange, this has been one of the most strange part. It's a very, very weird part of it, which is like, why would the CTO not be overseeing

decisions about the company's technical direction? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe job title. inflation or something. It happens sometimes. People give funny, funny joke jobs. You give some random intern the chief CIO officer, CIO title, and then what are you trying to say? I don't know. I'm just saying that, you know, many people might see your title and think that you're the chief information officer or the chief investment officer. And then you might come around and say,

hey, why am I not in charge of investments? Why am I not in charge of all the information here? Anyway, cognition. They are the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Elon Musk has essentially confirmed SpaceX is going public this year and will use the funds to build solar panel AI satellite scaling to 100s, hundreds of terawatts in three years. And Elon Musk replies to Nick. He says, no, the probable case, 50th percentile gas, is reaching an annualized rate of 100 gigawatts a year, a year, of space AI satellites launch from Earth in three to four years. 100 terawatts a year requires manufacturing satellites on the moon

at massive scale that are shot into deep space with a mass driver, which is 10 years away. Worth noting that average U.S. electricity consumption is only half a terawatt, so that would mean launching 200 times the current electricity output of Earth. Nick's response here, you scroll down. I love that Nick.

Eli's just like, Nick, Nick, you're too bullish on me. You're too bullish. Relax. Let's dial it back. I am going to deliver something incredible very quickly, but it's going to take longer to get to the truly unfathomable scale. Anyway, OpenAI CFO, we could take a cut of customer revenue from AI-aided inventions. Is it a fantasy?

Asked Amir from the information. Maybe, but scientists have been going Gaga for LLMs as idea synthesizers and research collaborators. and OpenAI is actively trying to license proprietary biology slash pharma and data for training. AI discoveries. So you would think that this would happen in sort of like a joint venture or some sort of investment. Obviously, Open AI has the Open AI startup fund, and they have made investments. So there's a world where if they're particularly bullish on a biotech company, they could participate in it early around and then participate in the upside.

This is sort of framed as more of like they will just randomly be taking revenue if you sign an enterprise contract. That feels like. Yeah, really rough headline. But I'm sure they'll like work on clarifying this. Obviously, I saw some people getting really upset about it immediately. Of course, I don't, I think it's too early for that. You know, they definitely need to clarify right. It's like, you know, if you were working on a startup.

and you use Google search to do some research, and then, you know, Google said, hey, hey, we see your search history. We know that you've looked up Restream, John. We know that you wanted to live stream. Yes. And we played a pretty big part in that. That's true.

That's true. I'll tell you about Restream. One live stream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. They should implement tipping. They added a billion dollars in enterprise revenue. You get your enterprise API bill. Why don't throw a little, turn the iPad around, 15, 20, 25%.

Throw a little tip in. Why not? You know, hey, if you cure cancer, adding tipping to your consumer SaaS product is a great way. Enterprise SaaS product. And Enterprise is a great way to test product market fit. I completely agree. I completely agree. Staying in Open AI World, Shiren has a scoop here in Bloomberg.

Sam Allman met with investors in the United Arab Emirates recently to discuss a new funding round. targeting around $50 billion at a $750 to $830 billion valuation. I think the $750 was pre-830 was maybe post. Talks are early. Let's give it up for early talks. Early talks. Well, fortunately, our next guest is beyond the early talks phase. He has some amazing news announcing here today.

We have Keller from Zipline in the Restream Waiting Room. We'll bring him in as soon as I 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, we will bring in Keller from Zipline out of the restroom waiting room and into the TBP and Ultradem. Keller, how are you doing? There he is. Hey, you guys.

How are you? Fantastic, but not as good as you. Give us the news. What happened? So yesterday, yeah, yesterday we had some big announcements. I mean, first of all, you know, the company just raised more than $600 million dollars to fund. US and global expansion. Got to go at the gong.

But even cooler, I mean, you guys know, like on X, Ziplin is constantly, you know, kind of celebrating how fast the system has been growing. It's been growing about 15% week over week over the last year. But we are finally announcing new metros. So we announced Houston and Phoenix as the metros that we're going to be launching over the next couple months. And then every quarter that passes now, we'll be announcing new major metros that we're bringing autonomous delivery to.

Talk to me about what it takes to launch your metro. Is that the mayor's calling you? You're calling the mayor. Is there a form that you're filling out? Like, what's the process? Do you have sales reps going? Do you set up an office? Like, do you do tests?

What's involved? In the main thing, you know, this is different. People think of hypers and people adding metrosros, you know, with some of, you know, the ride share companies, for example, where you were just hiring people who already live there. I mean, Ziplin is building infrastructure in these cities. It looks a little bit more. or maybe like how Tesla was building superchargers.

And we are actually building superchargers but for airplanes rather than for cars. Yeah. And so we're going in, we're building maintenance depots. We're creating a lot of high-paying jobs for both maintenance, as well as all the people who are doing, you know, community engagement, government affairs, permitting. There's a lot of complexity for each metro that we launch.

But, you know, the reality is that we're trying to see, scale. I mean, 15% week over week growth is really hard to keep up with. And so we're trying to add, you know, we'll add multiple metros every quarter as we go here as we accelerate. What makes, what, what makes for a metro area that's exciting to Zipline? Both of those don't seem very snowy. Is that important? Well, yeah, and I know you're going to be announcing a lot more in the future, but for people listening that are excited to have Zipline in their area, I feel like if you kind of describe. the sort of ideal metro, maybe people can kind of start figuring it out.

Yeah, I mean, ultimately we're going to be in every metro in the U.S. in the next couple of years. One thing that we just did that, you know, I was posting some cool stuff on X. We just launched a brand new test site in the Cascades, which is in Oregon. We have a team that is operating there in insane snow, insane ice, insane sleeting conditions, day in and day out. All of Ziplines and test sites operate 24-7, by the way. So why are we doing that? We're doing that so that we can be ready by the end of this year to start launching cities in a wide variety of climates across the U.S.

and then eventually across the world. So it just takes time to basically validate all the different technology, aircraft, ground infrastructure across these different conditions. And you really want to do it comprehensively in test before you then operate over tens of millions of people's heads. Yeah. What's the hardware life cycle like? Is there a, like a V2, V3 that comes and gets rolled out to all the metros? Is there testing? Like, are there new innovations that are happening deeper in the supply chain that you're excited about implementing? What needs to happen or what are you excited about on the development of the actual platform?

Well, you know, funny you should ask. So basically right behind me. So I'm standing in a new part of the manufacturing facility. Ziplines Manufacturing Facility tripled in size in the last two months. Two months? This was all nothing. Actually, I don't know if you realize, but like 15% people don't put it together. We just had a board meeting last week where we started the board meeting by being like, oh yeah, you know, flight volumes and revenue tripled since the last board meeting three months ago.

So the manufacturing growth is pretty much in line with the business growth. But, you know, this space was all empty a month ago. And it is now the new line for our next generation aircraft. It's called EV3. The advantages of this next generation, right now, Zipline is rapidly cycling through hardware, software, plus all the operational improvements we need to make to continue to advance the technology.

But, you know, EV3 has a huge number of performance improvements relative to the system that we've been operating over the last year, and it's half the cost. So, you know, there's giant, steps being made, improvements possible because the technology is so early. It's 12.01 a.m. when it comes to automated logistics, this facility where I'm standing will be capable of building 20,000 aircraft a year. It's the largest autonomous aircraft factory in the United States. How do you get something like a 50% cost reduction? Is that automation or buying bigger purchase orders deeper in your supply chain?

Or is there just like a cost curve that's coming down and the price of motors is just dropping and you're just a beneficiary of that? Like, what's driving cost savings on the vehicle? And there are a lot of things. I mean, first of all, the best part is no part, the part that you delete. And we were able to delete a lot of parts on this aircraft relative to the previous version. We've been able to, yeah, deleting things is the best way to, you know, the most reliable part, the part that never breaks is the one that isn't on the aircraft at all.

We've also been able to redesign a lot of parts and fundamental sub-assemblies on the aircraft. to make them easier to manufacture or just less expensive for a big component perspective. And then finally, Zipline now has enough scale with a lot of these suppliers that, as you said, you can get much better deals on a lot of these key components. And so all of those things add up to just a vehicle that's significantly less expensive. Are they also getting quieter over time? I've seen some incredible demos of drone rotors and propellers that they're shaped in a certain way and they're way quieter.

Is there progress there? Is that happening in, like, physics labs, and then it gets implemented? Are you doing the research? What's going on acoustically? So, yeah, Zipline. I mean, we've always had this attitude that, like, this technology can only scale

if it is quieter, more serene for neighborhoods than the traditional delivery mechanisms of cars. And so, you know, Zipline has a big team of aerodynamics engineers and aerodynamics acoustics engineers who have been focusing on this question of like how do you design something that's really really quiet for the last five years and by the way you can't planes aren't like cars you can just put a muffler on the back of it and make

it quieter like the design of the aircraft has to be from the ground up made with arrow acoustics in mind zip line is despite the fact that we operate bigger more complex vehicles zip line is six times quieter than the next closest competitor when we're making a delivery to someone's home And we'll actually make significant improvements to the aerodam aerobacoustic profile of the vehicle this year. We actually think we're going to get about another 8 decibels of improvement this year, which for non-engineers, you know, think of 8 decibels as being like about half as loud to the human ear. So having, again, yeah. That's awesome. What about congestion as you scale?

How much of the routing is proprietary software, maybe. on your network, sort of your own flight control, interfacing with more national level flight control, or even just like on the actual drone, just cameras saying, oh, there's some random object over there that I need to steer away from. I mean, all of these, you know, Zipline has a huge autonomy team that is responsible for not just how these vehicles route themselves to go and make deliveries, how they navigate the physical world, because we're flying. at about 400 feet, but also how we detect and avoid other air traffic.

And there are many different layers of ziplines, air traffic control. Well, detect and avoid system. We work closely with air traffic control. We're essentially building in partnership with the FAA a new version. It's called unmanned traffic management or how you manage thousands, soon to be tens of thousands of vehicles. But in the long run, you know, we're already used to our cities being full of these like loud, dangerous, polluting vehicles, creating tons of traffic, driving around in our neighborhoods.

Small, 50-pound vehicles that are silent and electric are going to be way better for neighborhoods. They're way less, you know, they're less like obtrusive. People generally don't notice them. I mean, we do a lot of delivery to people's homes where they didn't even realize the delivery happened. Do you have a timeline for me or you actually getting into an EV-Tol? and the true flying car vision. Maybe it's not, like, let's say, Waymo-level adoption of a human in a vertical takeoff and landing,

not a helicopter, not a single rotor, not a plane, but something like that. Are we five years away from that, longer? Is there something fundamental? Because this has been something that's been promised, and I've been excited about my entire life. And it feels like there's a lot of serious companies working on it, but we're not quite there yet.

How are you thinking about that market? generally. I'm also really excited, and it's a question that I'm very interested in. I think that a lot of the technology has made probably faster progress than people realize. You can build vehicles that achieve, that are electric, vertical, take-up and landing fixed-wing hybrids, that, like, achieve a lot of the core performance characteristics. I think two challenges that I would point out, one is on the autonomy side.

Like those companies are still putting human pilots in the cockpit. And it's not going to be like Uber if you have to hire an FAA certified pilot to come do your Uber ride to get you to work in the morning. Like that doesn't scale. It's a little too expensive. So I think from an autonomy perspective, who is going to design that autonomy layer? It's always seemed kind of obvious to me that the company that does that is going to do billions of autonomous deliveries delivering non-human things before. you want to carry humans, I think humans will be more comfortable with that.

The other thing I would kind of point out is a huge part of this actually has to do with like integration, which is like you can totally do the flight. There are vehicles, again, flying those kinds of mission profiles today, but where are you landing? I mean, there are no heliports in cities they are getting shut down rather than built. And I think that it's all about integration.

You know, if you want to design a vehicle that is more than just like an electric version of a helicopter that can do like 20% of missions that a normal helicopter can do. I think if you're really talking about flying car, the key is to solve the integration problem. Like, can you actually get picked up directly from your home and delivered directly to your office for your daily commute? That's the core question. Yeah. At what point do you think, like having a courier feature will make sense?

This is top of mind. I left my laptop at home Monday. And I felt that it was super silly that I ended up having to like use. Uber courier. Yeah, and you're using like a huge car for just one tiny laptop. Made no sense. I was thinking about you guys. It feels like an edge case. It's like not really.

It's not a big market. It's not a big market. Yeah, what's the thinking around it? Well, I think you might be surprised. I mean, you know, similar for what I just said, you know, with flying cars, integration is the thing that Zipline is most focused on. You know, we're launching all these amazing new partners. I mean, you know, a lot of the statistics that we're seeing in the city is,

If you look at Dallas, I mean, their municipalities in Dallas were more than 50% of homes are ordering from Zipline. We had an all-time new record on Sunday. We blew away the previous record by 25%, which had been said a week previously. And we had 10% of all homes in a municipality place and order with Zipline on Sunday. Was that football? Is that like, does that spike with like football? I mean, it was a holiday weekend. But, you know, these are like shocking statistics.

I mean, we have, you know, a lot of the restaurants that we serve, Zipline is a huge percentage, a majority of deliveries happening from those restaurants today. And so I think that, you know, the usage is way different than what we were originally expecting. And the key is integration. You know, we want to be able to add so many different, and this is why we announce zipping points.

This is a really simple, new kind of grounded infrastructure that we can install for free next to any partner, whether it's a hospital, health facility, retailer, restaurant, or even eventually someone's home. You know, you can almost just think of it like a new kind of mailbox for autonomous logistics. Do you think you'll be able to put a camera on them such that you can scan an ID so that you can deliver alcohol? We will do that. You don't need a camera on the vehicle. What you actually need is you just need a camera on the person's phone. Okay.

That's the way that a lot of this delivery works today. Got it. They'll basically be able to place an order. they'll be able to use their phone to upload a picture of their ID, and we can deliver, and then you can basically require signature on the phone itself. In the exact same way that it works for UPS or FedEx, we can deliver, you know, I mean, today from a lot of our partners, you know, we deliver over 100,000 skews. Many people are ordering Legos and, like, weird little nozzles for a gardening hose,

and birthday cakes and rotisserie chickens and prescriptions. That's a crazy one. It's everything. I don't trust a normal delivery, a human delivery driver, whether a birthday cake. that could go disastrously wrong. So, yeah, the flight stability is key. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Like, look, automated systems aren't going to eat significant percentage of the food, you know, before it's delivered too. There's also way less safety risk. Yeah, I think it's very similar to Waymo where, you know, a young woman who, like, suddenly looks up from her phone in a, you know, in a ride chair and is like, where the heck did my driver just drive me to? Yeah. You know, people have similar, similar experiences with delivery, where it's like someone's

looking over your shoulder like, are you home alone tonight? A lot of these like service, a lot of these kinds of services, it is much safer to have automated systems that are supervised by humans, you know, serving people. And, you know, by the way, what we are observing is it's like there really is no comparable. Like when we look at the frequency of customer ordering right now, you know, there are lots of people who are ordering from Zipline every single day. Yeah. And so I think this is not something that you see with traditional instant logistics. You see it once you make it 10 times faster, half the cost, and zero emission. Well, congratulations.

Thank you so much for helping on. Every time you come on, I can't wait for more people to experience it. Because given how focus you are in places like Dallas, I think it's one of those things like Waymo, where you have to experience it until you can really realize that the future is here. So congrats. All right. But you guys, I have a surprise for you. Please. Someone's here auditing.

What other guys is sponsors is here. Hey, no way. Some of impacts. You're taking a year-long sponsorship for TBPN. I'm telling him about the oral farming benefits. Let's go. TbPN top tier sponsorship. He's there.

Cut to the Lambda lightning round. Wrong angle. The Lambda cloud. The shoulder slides there. Esther and Lambda and he's, and he's, He's really, we've just been grinding it out in the hardware founders, complex coordination business, and we just punch people in the face really are.

Are you delivering? He was so pleased with this interview that he's going to be quadrupling down on the partnership. There we go. There we go. It's seen the impact of their advertising. Good to see you guys. Good to see you guys. Teleportation is a service.

Yes. Yeah, hopefully you're getting, if those GPUs need to get to the data centers faster, hopefully they're flying in Ziplines. That's right. And we'll eventually turn them into distributed. It'll be compute. Yes. That's what Tesla is doing.

Maybe a Zipline will do this with Lambda. We have GPUs and all the aircraft. That's amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations again. Have fun. Wish we were there.

The awesome performance. Overnight success. You've got to hit him with the overnight success. Every time he comes on. This man spent a decade. 10 years in the making. And now he's growing every day. and doubling the business with incredible speed.

Great stuff, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Cheers. Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And without further ado, we will continue our Lambda lightning round and bring in Jake Cooper from Railway.

He's the co-founder and CEO. Also a TEPPN sponsor. There he is. Jake, good to see you. How you doing? Get that gong ready. We're doing fantasticly. So stoked to finally have you on the show.

Yeah, great to have you here. Give us the update. What happened? Cool. Yeah, I mean, we raised a bunch of money. So we raised a $100 million round to build data centers and make software just way easier to use because the definition of a developer is melting before our very eyes. It's melting.

It's melting, you know? So anybody can ship code, which is crazy. We're making it trivially easy for anybody to get. go and do that. So it's a really exciting time to be, you know, in the business and also just, you know, on the planet. Yeah, what, uh, how is that actually playing out? We've talked to some folks about how there are designers that there's one idea that AI will create, will take a one X engineer and turn them into a 10x engineer. And that's probably true. But there's also this idea. Oh, it's going to be like a 10,000 X engineer. 10,000 X engineer. Like we have people internally moving

so, so quickly. I've like rebuilt a bunch of the internal organization. Yeah. We can move it. when I'm calling, it's super cringe, but I'm calling it agent speed. Okay. Sure. Because people are just moving way, way faster. Yeah, yeah. So, like, you get a 10,000 X engineer. Yeah, yeah.

But then, but then there's also the zero to one X engineer where you take a designer and then they're able to actually ship production code or a manager or sales development representative. Anyone can build a tool. Which one is more of, more central to the current railway pitch when you're talking to customers? I think there's like resonance across the entire space. So we have like larger companies who are, you know, they're spending six figures. They're building something like of deep consequence, like critical, critical, critical for their business. And then you have like teams of, you know, a thousand essentially all kind of like vibe coding.

And they're building like really, really kind of smaller things. But they're really, really important either for client infrastructure or internal tools or anything else like that. And, you know, we've got everybody internally now on like a Claude Cod Cod Cod subscription. Sure. You know, including our recruiting or our operations. et cetera. There's just the boundary of your ambitions needs to be deeply, deeply kind of re-evaluated just with how good these tools are getting. And we're excited to what's your what's your personal framework internally and kind of like guidance or how are you in the team thinking about like when

it makes like because right now I feel like there's this obviously so much excitement you can build you know an internal tool in an hour or something like that. But every time you build a tool you're creating like some type of like ongoing maintenance burden or something like that tech debt tech yeah so what's your framework of like hey this should be something that that we just should build versus you know finding a point solution or even using something as like a google sheet or at the kind of low end yeah so so we use notion a lot internally and i think lots of like deeply flexible tools are going to be really really key because now that the agent can kind of go and almost like orchestrate these things in general,

you can kind of compartmentalize very, very flexible tools together, right? And so I think that when you're thinking about kind of the build versus buy boundary, right, it's a lot on kind of pushing the context into the tool so that you can access a lot of the context and take advantage of it, right? So I think the burden for almost buy goes up a lot because the ambitions and the capability of you being able to build something that's purpose built internally is actually so trivial now, right? Like, historically, I've built a lot of internal tooling to allow us to do project management, releases, et cetera.

And now I can actually just kind of push the boundary on a lot of those things. One of my hot takes is that, like, you know, ERP software, right? Yeah, of course. Are you familiar with it? We love ERP software. I was born ERP software, right? So, ERP software, right? Only useful at scale to build an organization to manage resources or whatever, right?

Now you can kind of build those, like, organizational structures way way earlier, right? So the way that railway runs has historically been different than organizations. And so I think what you're going to see is almost this Cambrian explosion of various different ways that you can run your organization, which I think is super, super cool. So unfortunately, like I'm an engineer. So I have engineering brain damage. I think everybody should be building kind of their own stuff. You know, so, yeah. How is your thinking on product management evolved over the last year?

Oh, man. Yeah, I had this tweet that I was like, oh, yeah, engineers are going to turn into PMs, like, fast. than, you know, PMs can turn into engineers. And I think, like, a week ago, I was like, that's completely wrong. You know, like, I like, I like, I like, I like that you were willing to just be like, yep, bad take. Oh, yeah. I mean, you got to take your lumps too, right?

Like, I don't mind, like, your take can be awful. But if you're going to stand behind it, just like, almost like, go down with the ship and be like, all right, the tape is awful. You know, we're going down. You know, don't delete the tweet. So, yeah. But, yeah, I think the, there's only three things essentially left if you assume that the agents are going to kind of be able to do pretty much anything, right? It's taste,

agency, and structure, right? So when you think about almost anything that you can go and build, those PMs have a lot of that context, right? And so you don't need to be a Rust engineer to write Rust anymore. You don't need to be a JavaScript engineer. You don't even have to be an engineer, right? Like, we're almost doing this like double shift right, where you have like knowledge workers, programmers, engineers, architects, and scientists, right, based on how nebulous your work is, right? And I think that if you're a knowledge worker, you should probably actually just be like, yeah, I can just engineer things now. What it takes is kind of a bit of critical thinking, a bit of kind of like, okay, how will this system kind of roughly fail? And now you can do it

in kind of a lower stakes environment. What we hope to provide with railway is actually those kind of like bleeding edge industry best practices, like really annoying stuff like VPC peering, like, versioned infrastructure so that you can move quickly, but also safely, and build these kind of bigger and bigger structures over time. So I think the role of the PM evolves a lot, and you're going to see a lot of these kind of almost like merging or melting of these kind of roles together, right? Like software engineers will have to become PMs because now it is completely trivial to just go and write code, right? I wrote like 5,000 lines of code yesterday, right? And I spent most of my, yeah, I mean, and this is like between meetings, right? And I spent most of the time not actually like auditing the code itself, but auditing a lot of the logic, going in, working, talking about the architecture, all of those other things, right?

So I think, again, the burdens or the boundary of your ambitions needs to be deeply, deeply pushed. And so if we at Railway can kind of almost unburden the developer so that they can think about those bigger and bigger things, our hope is that you can build those kind of almost like massive massive structures, right? Like if you look at the Golden Gate Bridge in this current day and age, my first kind of response is like how do we build that thing? It's so big and so impressive, right? And so now you actually have these wonderful tools that push the boundary of that. So you can build these massive things, right?

And it's super exciting to just, you know, I was telling this to an investor, which is probably the wrong thing to tell the investor. But I was like, even if we get schmucked here, like, what a time to be alive. And they were like, cool, dude. All right, sick. We're going to pass. That's wild. How are you thinking about...

No, I do think that, like, I mean, obviously, you know, play to win and, you know. It's just refreshing. But it's very refreshing versus the... I know exactly how the next five to ten years will unfold day by day. It's like, no one knows. Like, the space is moving so quickly. You need to really deeply understand, like, who's signing up for your product, who loves your product. Why do they love your product?

how do you expand your product and continue to be, you know, critical infrastructure for those customers. We have some questions from the chat. Yeah, yeah, sorry, what were you about to say? I was just going to say, yeah, like, I think, like, during this period, you should kind of take those risks, right? Like, it's almost a deeply, almost like risk by default period, right? And I think that, you know, there's like, like, what does Elon know that probably

other people don't know, right? And I think you've heard, like, Peter Thiel talk about this, too. And it's almost the calculus of risk is not. it's not just purely there, right? Risk is less risky than you actually think, right? So I think people should kind of push those boundaries. And if we can kind of create those safety nets for people in general, I think we can build wonderful, wonderful things.

And as a side note, I think we've made risk and failure a bit too expensive in our current society. And if we can rewind that, essentially, we can open people up to like sweet success and a bit of bitter failure because when you take risks, sometimes things don't work out. But that forms a baseline experience that allows you to kind of drive these unique kind of taste forward. So to the chat. To the chat. We have to ask you about your bike. And Nakunj says your motorcycle liability clause on your term.

Yeah, we have key man insurance. Yeah, I'm kind of like, you know, I'm counting the days until somebody really asked me to like go up and give up the bike. And it's funny because people ask me like, oh my God, you ride a motorcycle. Like I feel like I should get into that. And I was like, absolutely not. I do not do that. Like I've been riding dirt bikes since I was like 13 basically. And so like I've had a.

bike for a while and I've kind of worked my way up, right? You know, yeah, don't just don't be stupid. No, no, no, you got to say the riskiest thing you can do is not take any risk. Get on the motorcycle. What's your Sunday ride? My Sunday ride is basically, I live near the inner Richmond, so I basically just like go up and drive through the Presidio, maybe in the marina. There's that like nice coffee like truck, basically. I go to the gym in the marina. They've got a sonnet. It's wonderful. So I just kind of do you ever try to find like a super steep, you know, classic S. hill and go a little too fast on the way up. Those days are like behind me because, yeah, I promise the investors that like I wouldn't do

anything stupid. So the unfortunate thing about the bike is like it's a nice bike. It's like the bike I want it growing up, but I don't ride it like it should be. What bike? What bike? It's a Ducati, like the Pentagon. There we go. We have another question from the chat. Everyone's loving the bookshelf behind you. Give us some book recommendations. What's on the shelf? Yeah, what's the most underrated book on the shelf? What's the most underrated?

What's the favorite book? What's the one with the most highlights and notes? Well, this is actually my wife's side of the bookshelf. So I'll go off things that are maybe not on there. I know, I do see that. I think the Steve Jobs book is somewhere up there, which I don't know. It's pretty good. One of my favorite books actually is getting to yes.

I don't know if you y'all have kind of read it. I think so. It's like a book on, it's a book on essentially on compromise, right? And so essentially it allows you to break down problems in a way that is not kind of me versus you, but it's me versus the problem, right? And so one of my favorite analogies in there is like, you know, we're splitting an orange, right? We could split it down the middle, essentially, and, you know, I could, like, you could have half and I could have half in general. Or we can figure out what we care about in general, right?

And maybe I'm making mixed drinks. And maybe you're taking your kid to the soccer game, right, or anything else like that. And so in essence, I want the peel and you want the whole orange, right? We can both come out on top, roughly, right? And I think that figuring out ways that you can almost, like, have a solid compromise with people is deeply, deeply important, you know, on that one. So I like that book. Love it. Back to AI and how it's changing software development.

Database selection. Database migration switching something is ingrained in an organization as a database. It's historically been very difficult. Are AI agents making it easier? Are you actually seeing companies move around from one database to another, maybe based on cost, maybe based on features? Is the fact that a particular LLM is in love with a, Redis or MongoDB? Like, is that going to be relevant in the future?

So I'm unfortunately a little bit like to Dario-Pilled in terms of like the fundamental laws of physics, right? And so I think it's actually probably the hardest thing to change about your system is the database roughly, right? Because you have that storage, you have all of those other things, right? Like this is fundamentally also why we build data centers, right? One, you need more production roughly in the world than we can start with data centers and that's wonderful. But two, it's actually a really, really solid mode in terms of, you know, you can't just will into existence a data center, right? And at some point, potentially down the line, like, those things will get more and more expensive just because of the cost of labor, but like the cost of capital is decreasing, right?

And so I think the similar thing kind of applies roughly with data centers if you kind of move roughly up the stack. And so we actually started building, or sorry, databases, we actually started building databases. Like, we were originally just to, you know, click a button, get a postgres instance or retus instance or anything else like that. And we've slowly worked a way backup, right, up to building, you know, web apps, you know, we'll launch a CDN at some point in the future, stuff like that. So I think that when you look at that lens of like fund bent a lot of physics, I think the database is like a very, very important part of your kind of rough calculus. And I think the agents are making it easier to go and almost manage those

migrations. But, you know, when I was talking about those 5,000 lines of code, you have to think about kind of what you are roughly building, right? And so you're still going to need to audit it. And that's sort of why I say, you know, moving from engineers, to like architects, right? Where you're thinking about that kind of bigger, bigger vision. And so, you know, as Jordy said it earlier, like, I don't think anybody can roughly predict the future for a lot of these things, but I do still think that fundamentally there are going to be requirements for

how do you integrate the things that exist in the physical realm, so roughly around those databases to storage to data centers, and with kind of your expected reality, basically. And the hope over time is that railway can actually help you do that. So we do this on a software level, and we've built tooling internally to help build data centers. And so we've actually virtualized a bunch of those racks. So now you can almost drag and drop those servers into them. And at some point, we can get to a point where we're working directly with the super micro API.

You can drag and say, hey, I want this data center of this size in general. You'll create POs for that and say, okay, cool, hit a button. It'll cost you 25 mil or something like that. And that's the goal for. One click checkout for data centers and stuff like that. And moving towards a world where you can almost, because it's easier to build things on the internet, right? It's a fundamental fact, right?

If you can simulate it and simulate that small section of it and you can create almost APIs to reconcile, like this is what Terraform did really, really well. Like, expected state versus desired state. And if we can do that with your intention as you kind of move through time and give you those safe kind of primitives to say, okay, cool, like I want to make this change,

let me fork my entire environment, you know, get copy on right storage for everything, make some small change, I make it in production, it merges and you deploy it instantly. Then you're kind of moving at agent speed, right? And that's what we think a lot about in terms of building the next fundamental layer

of software development and then physical production beyond that. You were at Bloomberg. Did you get to work directly on the terminal? Yeah, a little bit. I bounced around a bit at Bloomberg. I was only there for about six months, but it was a really, really cool, cool time to kind of work on stuff like that.

I was working on a bit of the internal tooling. So I got a couple of commits that I think are probably still inside of the video. Powering the odd lots podcast, making Joe Wisenthall's job easier. We love to see it. Putting Joe Wisenthall in agent mode. Yes. Hopefully. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Congratulations to the whole team. The chat loves you. Come back on again soon. Yeah, love to go waiting. And thanks for having us as sponsors. We're big proponents of rich taste, and we believe that TBPN has a rich taste that y'all are sharing with the world, and we're just happy to be here. So have me on any time. I'd love to join and hang out.

Yeah, thank you for making this possible. Awesome. We'll see you on for the sea very soon, I'm sure. Goodbye. Cheers, Jake. And in case you've been living under a data center, railway, railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. We're very happy to be partnered with Railway. We have Joe Wisenthal coming in to the TV.

He said he was running five minutes behind so we can get back to the timeline. Quickly, let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. And we do have Joe Wisenthall in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him into the TVP and Ultronome. Joe Widesothal. How are you doing?

It has been eons. It's been far too long. I'm so glad you're here. We miss you. for taking the time. I missed you guys, too. It has been far too long. It probably hasn't even been that much time,

but probably like there's just been so much that's happened since the last time we connected. It feels years. It feels like years. It really does. So do you have Davos FOMO right now? I feel like it's been a good year for Davos. You're normally our foreign correspondent.

You're on the ground at all these big hoity-toity events. I go to you, but it appears you're in New York. I'm in a New York studio. You know, I was in Davos in January. Whoa, we get it, dude. We get it. We get it. We get it, Joe.

You've been to Davvo. 2015. Wow. They said 10 years and he wouldn't lose touch. Apparently, he's just completely lost touch. No, this is a real story. This is a real story. I got like, I got like, first of all, it's like very cold there.

It's not that nice. I got a flu or I got sick there. I was so miserable that when I got back, I told the people inside Bloomberg. I said, never invite me to Davos again, lest I feel tempted to say yes. Because it's like, oh, do you want to be part of our Davos team? Of course. Oh, yeah, okay, maybe. So I didn't even want the temptation to say,

I thought you were going to say you got back and you immediately switched up on your day one. You never, you never looked back. You forgot where you came from. No, no, no. No, it's like, I do not want the temptation to go back. But I've always been the same as everyone else. I was like, oh, Davos, boring, blah, blah, blah. And then finally, there's a good Davos.

Ten years or however many years it's been since I went, There's finally a good Davos where there's like a bunch of news and action. And I guess, did I have a little funmo? Maybe I did. I don't know. It seemed like a fun one this year. Yeah, it's been 55 years, something like that, going strong. What headlines have stuck out to you that have come out?

We've been tracking most of the AI and tech stuff. Has anything popped up on your radar that's sort of updated you? Did anything spike your cortisol? Without question, the Mark Carney speech, the Canadian Prime Minister, it was like pretty out there in terms of like, like the old world is dead. There's no point in nostalgia. Everybody for themselves, sovereignty, power politics is back.

And this is like, you know, it's one of these things where like you, the three of us could have had this conversation a couple years ago. But to hear it from someone like a Mark Carney who's like, he's such an institutional man, right? So he used to be the head of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada for that matter. Like a true internationalist Davos man. I mean, I think if you thought of who is Davos man, you would think, someone like Mark Carney. So to hear him basically say, like, we shouldn't be, that world is dead. And there's no point in spending time being nostalgic for it. I would say it's sort of a, it's a mark to market moment, I would say. And so without question, I think, like, that was from a sort

geopolitical standpoint, the highlight of the whole event. The other one, the other speech that I thought was really remarkable, or very important, was the Chinese vice premier. They're talking about how China doesn't want to just be the factory to the world. also wants to buy your stuff because for all the anxiety that we have here in the U.S., every other country is feeling that stress as well. Their manufacturing sector is getting hollowed out by Chinese competition. So it's clearly a source of, I would say, a different kind of anxiety for China that every country around the world looks at them and thinks, wait, are you going to kill my domestic champions as well as you've done to, you know, European chemical compilers, automakers and so forth.

Yeah, it's great that they're saying that, but does anyone actually, believe it? I mean, ask, like, Elon, do you think, do you think, do the Chinese really want to buy Teslas? No, I mean, so I wrote about this. And my take is that, like, they have been saying this for years. This is not the first time. And they're like, oh, we're going to lift domestic consumption and that's going to create imports. Then that'll benefit the rest of the world and so forth. They've been saying this for years. And I think there is this view that's like, well, this is just lip service. It's just, they just say it every year. and then they say it again the next year.

I think, however, in their defense, what I would say is the structure of the sort of domestic Chinese political economy makes it very hard. And if I can just get technical for a second, they have this very decentralized approach to fiscal policy, which is, you know, all of the different provinces basically run their own economies, and the provincial leaders, they try to achieve goals that are set by Beijing. And basically, this is how you get this crazy race to the bottom, which is ever. Every province wants to have their BID, their battery maker, et cetera. And so the issue isn't so much whether Chinese leaders in Beijing are serious about wanting to boost imports.

The question is whether their system will ever allow them to get out of the sort of game theory equilibrium where all of the provincial leaders feel incentivized to just export as much as possible. And it is probably a tricky thing to turn around that political system in the same way. way that we have difficulties that are very difficult to turn around, even if someone in Washington, D.C. says otherwise. What's the sweet spot for Chinese imports? Because it feels like they're, they are exporting a ton, cars and phones and all sorts of stuff, rare with elements. The sweet spot is luxury goods. Is it? But they want to import chips, but we've, you know, we're really putting the kbash and going back and forth or whatever. Well, the companies do. The companies do, but, you know, China seems to want to be a buyer of semiconductors in silicon.

But is there a sweet spot product that you think that they'd actually be well suited to scale their imports of? I think this is the real serious question. So, I mean, even on the chips thing, they want to be an importer of chips now, but they don't want to be an importer of chips in five years, right? They want to be an importer of chips only so long, only for so long as it takes for them to have domestic capacity to produce the world's most advanced chips. They certainly, I mean, they clearly do not want to, like, have this permanently be importing Nvidia chips or whatever. They would like Huawei to supersede them. But then on the other things, you know, the intuitive answer is like, oh, you're like going to import luxury goods and fine wines and all that stuff. But even there, like, there was a great FT story in December talking about how China is becoming a booming producer of caviar and sparkling wine.

And these things that we don't associate with China at all or really nice, like organic cherries and stuff like that. And so even there's the sort of effectiveness of their domestic productivity, their ability to sort of identify a sector and get really good at producing it really fast, which you can't knock them for it. That's progress. But it does create this very intense strains. And so you ask, OK, you want to import more from the rest of the world. Well, what do you imagine that's going to be in 2035? what is the rest of the world making that you can't make domestically? You can't really knock the country for it, right?

Being good at building things is awesome. And everyone would like to do it. But what is that thing? And I don't think anyone really has that sweet spot answer. I think it's really a weird situation. Yeah, the luxury good side, they're so good at making stuff. They can make you a watch that looks exactly like Richard Mel. It looks at one.

It looks like one to one. The only difference in that, well, the kind of saving grace for RM is, is like you can't just like snap your fingers and have, you know, back quality of the story. The story. But like the, but if you can, you definitely can't sort of establish the backstory and the brand, the legend, that's going to take a long time. But I think like even in, I bought a Chinese, a very cheap Chinese watch last year. But I sort of looked into the Chinese watch industry and the sort of like the watch nerds online, you know, people would talk about luxury watches on Reddit, etc. they're full of praise at the quality of the mechanical gearing or whatever

in a lot of the sort of so they're catching up you know they're catching up fast to what they can do in Switzerland and elsewhere even in that category interesting what's going on with Japan what's going on over there so you know we did it we actually we have we have a great episode that came out today so we talked to the CEO of Pimpco which you know owns the world's largest bond fund that's on the odd lots podcast which is available in your podcast buyers? It's not the Adlaughts podcast. Wherever you get your podcast.

Fantastic. You're making it handmade for over 10 years. Over a decade. Yeah. Handmade in New York City for over a decade. Sort of the Patek Philippe of podcasts. That's right. That's right.

Yeah. Many people say that. Yeah. I haven't said that. It has a lot of history. This is what everyone always says. Oh, Adlaughts, yes, that's the Patek Philippe of podcast. That's right.

But you know what? So everyone is looking at these bond yields in Japan and they're surging and, and people are saying, you know, Japan has a lot of government debt. That's very true. They're saying, is this the big one, right? Is this the moment where the bill comes due and they're going to have to print a ton of yen,

and the yen, you know, is worth as much as confetti or whatever? His argument is like, no, that's, he had just gotten back from Japan. He said, no, that's not what's going on at all. What's happening is that Japanese economic growth, et cetera, has been stagnant for 30 years about. And there is actually a reinvigorate. reinvigorated domestic investment, and that has an inflationary impulse, and that does push up rates, you know, just in the way that rates have come up in the U.S. since the Zerpier of the 2010s.

And his argument, which I find compelling, is that if you look at the Niki, their main stock index, and you look at it in U.S. dollar terms, that is surging to new all-time highs. So we're not seeing a collapse of the yen at all, and you would not expect, you know, this country is like, oh, this is the prelude to hyperinflation, you would not expect to see such robustness in the stock market. And I find that, I find that compelling. So for now, I'm going to take it as, this is the sign of a country. Expand that a little bit more because hyperinflation, you can have asset prices going up, even if there's not necessarily the fundamentals. But you would not expect.

Yes, but you would not expect to see that happening in other currency terms. So it's like, yes, if you look at the Venezuelan stock market in the 2010s, I mean, you just look at a line and it looks like it's going through the moon because to the moon existed. And then you just like, on the Bloomberg, you just toggle that. And now I want to look at the same stock market in U.S. dollar terms, not in Bolivars. And then you see the stock market's basically gone to zero. And so it's like a simple test. Yeah, like in a period of like broad-scale devaluation of the currency, you get the phenomenon that you describe where everything goes up. But when you see it going up in dollar terms, there has been some dollar weakness.

But when you see it going up so much in terms of a foreign currency, then it's no longer a story about debasement. What did you think about some of Ken Griffin's comments? I appreciate his perspective on the AI boom and job loss, specifically because this is somebody who's, like, been heavily focused on automating trading, specifically for a very long time, working with some of the best. What did he say? No, I feel bad. What was the... Well, I missed the... Oh, he was just basically saying that, like, this sort of job loss concept is overblown in the short... His example was that he had a...

He said it was hype. Yeah, he had a commodities trader come to him with a report that was AI generated, and he said he was, you know, amazed with the title, amazed with the intro paragraph. And then as he dug in, he basically called it slop. And it's a classic debate on, well, are we about to turn the corner? and Ken Griffin's the next person to be impressed because Andre Carpathie was not impressed with the code that these models were writing a year ago. Now he's like, I'm falling behind. It's amazing. And so is Ken Griffin the next domino to fall or is he a canary in the coal mine for some true plateau?

It would be really interesting. I would love to, if I could, the jury, what I would really love is not to hear Ken Griffin's take on AI, but what I'd like to hear is a pod manager within Citadel. because so many of those jobs of like running the pods or that, you know, I've talked to a bunch of them now. And they're coding jobs. So there's someone gets hired as a junior analyst within a pod, right? And they're going to study, you know, they're going to track industrial stocks. So they're going to track, they're going to trade chemical stocks.

But those jobs are like basically coding jobs or a large part. And they're running back tests and so forth. And they're trying to see, okay, what information corresponds to useful signal, what sort of economic data? and so forth, these are all just, you know, their computer jobs, their engineering jobs. And they're, in many cases, competing at some of these firms for some of the same talent as many cases as big tech. Yeah, that's. So I agree, like, I think it's many people would agree with Ken Griffin that you're not going to get some gem of insight about what stock to trade or anything like that or any commodity from a sort of AI generated report. But, you know, like, it's also, we know at every, every engineer, every software engineer we talk to talks about how much, how impressed they are right now with like Opus 4.5 and so forth.

And so, you know, I would be curious because we've talked to, we have an episode of the podcast coming out next week with the head of a major bank. They are seeing, you know, I'll say the tenor of the conversation has changed from last year to this year. Last year, when you ask executives, well, what are you actually getting value out of from AI right now? They would say, well, we have tests everywhere, right? We're testing a bunch of stuff. We're really excited about it. Now they come back with clear examples of this is a workflow process that was more costly or time intensive last year than it is right now. And so I think from my perspective, clearly just talking to people, people are finding productivity gains that are real from it.

That's so funny because I remember more of the Ken Griffin quote. And one of the lines he said was that he specifically asked a bunch of business leaders to give examples of how AI is improving their business. And he was taken aback by the fact that none of them were citing generative AI as the core driver. That's interesting. But I agree with you generally. There was an interesting report in the Wall Street Journal about how the C-suite is reporting much more time-saving from AI tools than workers in the non-sword. C-suite category. And it wasn't sure what to make of that,

whether it's just like stuff fills the gaps more, there's some sort of incentive, I don't know. I do, look, I still think by and large at this point, probably it's modest what people, in terms of, oh, this is like really moving the dial or this is a dramatic change in how productive our employees can be at any level. And I'm sort of, you know, even at the C-Suite. suite, I'm like, I'd be curious to know what exactly they're doing that, okay, this is saving them

time. I mean, maybe in some cases it might just be they're having an AI draft and email for them that's a lot quicker. And there's probably some. Yeah, when I think about the C suite job, I think about a lot of deep research reports for every business decision that they're making. And they're probably, they're not working less. They're just saying that, you know, well, to make this one decision, I needed to, I needed to get a survey together of all the companies in this category that I could potentially do business with before I walk into this meeting with this one company that I might do business with. And yes, that would take an hour on Google and a spreadsheet to pull together. Deep research just does it in 10 minutes in the background on your phone.

And so I feel like there are real speedups there. And maybe workers just haven't been diffused in that way or it's less relevant in like a non-knowledge work, non-executive functioning task. It's just a different diffusion level. Anyway, I want to talk to you about the future of the New York Times homepage. Oh, great. I love this topic. I love this topic. Yeah, you were blackpilling a little bit saying that it's not going to be maintained

in a future where, you know, the news is collected. And my point was maybe if the cost to maintain the New York Times homepage goes down because AI tools are more available and more diffuse and cheaper, that you might actually see a continuation of the greatness that is, you know, beautiful homepages. What do you think? Yeah, I think that's a great take, actually. And I guess my concern isn't like, okay, we're not going to have websites anymore per se. I mean, we still have newspapers, right?

Yeah, we still have newspapers, right. But it's more that, you know, if in a world in which we are communicating, you know, I buy my auto insurance through an AI agent of some source, like, why did that, why does that auto insurance company really need to have? a web presence as we know it? Or why is the web presence optimized for human consumers as the sort of human consumer becomes less and less a factor, less and less relevant for them? So, you know, I wasn't even, like when I wrote that, like I wasn't even like, dooming or black pilling or any of that per se. And actually, you know, even going back to the New York Times example, you know, the post homepage era is actually, you know, it's been there for years, right?

So if you think like the digital media at the New York Times, what are they probably really excited about? Well, it's probably like getting many of their reporters to get comfortable doing reels or doing TikToks where they talk about that story. So like in a sense, the sort of post-web page era has been around for a long time. But it feels like with like the sort of efficacy and the clear usefulness of agents and scraping, et cetera, it's just not obvious why it's going to be much of a priority. maybe for, you know, the Times is a really nice homepage. And so to your point, it would be easy to maintain and so forth. It's probably very easy to maintain as it is, or certainly a lot easier than it used to be. She's not clear that this is going to be the sort of dominant way that we sort of trade digital information.

Yeah, they might, they have a big, obviously, games division. Yeah, that's right. We could see them continue an investor, maybe get into gaming, open a casino in Vegas. Oh, yeah. The New York Times casino. You know, did you imagine how great that would be? It was a great way to Vegas, hanging out by the pool at the New York Times casino. I want high-stakes, Whartle.

I'm putting 100 Gs down on Whartle. Let's go. People would love that. People probably would love that. The thing about the New York Times is, you know, other than there's a handful of others, perhaps, and I'd like Bloomberg is one of them. But, you know, it is a brand. It is a lifestyle brand, right?

in a way that very few news outlets of any sort have ever been able to achieve. So, you know, they go into cooking and they have cooking shows. They go into, you know, simple games on the phone. There are not many news entities of any sort that could pull that off. And I've always been for years sort of not literally, but a New York Times bull, because it's just been so obvious to me that there's this one news brand that is also this big lifestyle. brand and their core subscribers will follow them into

all of these new ventures. And it's just something, you know, like, I don't want to name names, but like other like big publications, similar national general news publications do not have that same cachet where if they get into some totally new line of business, that they'll have subscribers

who will pay up all that money. So the New York Times is sort of a special entity. Totally, totally. I completely agree. It's also interesting that the New York Times has managed this like sort of influence transitioned remarkably well. When I go on YouTube, I'll see the Ezra Klein show or Ross Daffet or Hard Fork. And Ezra and Ross have like their own brands, but it still like has the aesthetics

of the New York Times and they brought that into YouTube and they do these collabs. Like just watching how they've actually mechanically positioned as the talent is more forward, but it's still under the umbrella. Very, very smart. And every, again, every publication would, love to pull that off, but it's really tough because then you get this situation, which the talent says, like, oh, wait, why am I still here, et cetera? I think it actually speaks to just like how powerful that New York Times brand is that someone, you know, Ross Outfit, Ezra, et cetera. No, this is a

very good fit. But it's tricky. Every publication is going to try to do some version, have their own, you know, equivalent of their substack roster, right? Or have their equivalent of that. And I think very few are really going to be able to pull it off at scale. Are you one-shotted by vibe-coding? Yeah. You know what? I have like full-on AI psychosis, and I'll tell you, here's the evidence that I realize. Complete victory of attack.

Yeah. So here's a, I'm going to admit this here, but here was the moment that I knew I had full-on, one-shotted psychosis, which was whatever, whatever term we want to use. So I was like vibe coding, I was using Claude Code. And I was, like, very impressed. And then I opened up a second Claude Code window. So, because I wanted to be able to work on a couple, like, aspects of the project in parallel. And then the second window, it made a suggestion for what I work out.

That was actually a very bad suggestion. It was the first. Had I actually said yes to the suggestion, it would have really set me back quite a bit. It was, and I'm glad I paid attention overwrote it. And my first thought in that moment was, like, the original window would have never made that mistake. You know, it's like the original window, that window really got me. This window doesn't get me at all. And I was like, I'm sticking with the window on the right side.

And in that moment when I like had that thought that, oh, this window doesn't get me the way the other window, I was like, Joe, okay, I got to step away from the computer a little bit. That is, those are early signs. I think I'm like, you know, I'm very proud of myself. I think I avoid psychoses of all sorts. I've been on Twitter for 15 years and I haven't gone crazy. And so I was like, okay, I saw that in myself. It's like step away from the computer. It's just a computer.

There's no personality. There's not one screen that gets me better. But when I noticed that is like, okay, I'm more at risk perhaps than I thought. What have you been building? Yeah, so I'm very obsessed for years with this idea that people write and speak fundamentally differently. And when we give speeches, we use various things. We rhyme and we speak in rhythm and we use mnemonic aids and we say first and you and all these different linguistic things. And I've just been a personal interest of mine.

And I sort of think that as digital media has saturated our lives with the last 15, 20 years, even our written text comes to resemble more spoken text. And so I thought, well, it would be fun if you could, like, build a piece of software that actually empirically tested this question. Like, does a piece of writing in a newspaper today resemble more written word than, say, that same column or whatever 20 years ago? I'd like to be able to test this out. And they're various lexical markers that linguists and others have used to work on these things. So I thought, okay, it would be fun to see if I could build this. And so I've actually been able to build it.

People go check it out, havelock.a.i. And you just drop a piece of text in. And then it says, this sentence looks literate. This sentence looks like the spoken word and so forth. And it's almost works. Like, I'm actually astonished. It's not perfect by any stretch. I still have a lot of work to do.

But basically I sort of was able to vibe code this sort of machine learning model where I trained a model to detect this is rhyme, this is not, et cetera. And then it breaks out every sentence and then sort of scores the whole piece. And it works. And I'm sort of astonished. And you've been testing it on Davos. Yeah. Like, so, you know, I tested on the Mark Carney speech and the Trump speech. And the difference is remarkable.

It's every sentence it sort of classifies one as this resembles the spoken word. This resembles the written word. And the difference, you know, we hear this, right? You hear the two speeches. You're like, okay, they're speaking in a very different register. This feels very different. And it's cool that, like, I've been, you know, with two weeks of hobby coding, been able to build this model.

And I actually, I trained, you know, I learned how to, I don't know what I learned. But I was able to build this little machine learning model that identifies each sentence and categorize in one. And I'm like, this is crazy. It actually kind of works. and I don't know anything about code. And this is something that I've wanted to exist for a long time. And I was able to just build it. Yeah, and it's cool because it's something.

It's something that, like, I'm sure you could find a way to turn it into a business, but it's actually a tool that just should exist. Like, there were so many tools that didn't exist because there was no business justification to devote hundreds of hours. Exactly that, right? So this is an interesting thing, but who's actually going to take the many, many sort of hours that it would take to actually code this because I don't think there's like some obvious path to riches here. But it was a, you know, I did like an hour or two a day for a few days

at five in the morning before my kids got up. And it is a properly working piece of software that I can use. I still need to find tune on a lot. There's still mistakes and so forth. But it actually works. You have to turn it. You need to turn into like a vibe coding slash mindset influencer every morning. It's like it's 5 a.m. I'm tired. I'm up at my desk. Everyone else is sleeping. The Jacco Willink.

It's the photo of the watch every day. It's 2 a.m. on the West Coast. All my enemies are sleeping. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I'm going to... I just ran my most recent... I just ran my most recent essay through havelock.

I got a 76% orality score. I write very, very loosely strongly or... Part of that is that we do. I started the essay. I started the essay. Trump, Greenland, Elon. Blah, blah, blah. blah, blah, let's focus on the important thing.

Because I deliberately write exactly like I talk. Yeah. And so that's like, I'm pretty happy about that. It sounds like it scored it pretty well. 100%. That also means that you are writing in a way that connects with the modern audience. Sure. You know, the modern audience.

And so I think that's great. And you could test that. And now you can know. And is this in the contemporary register? And I don't know, like high score, low score, better or worse. I just think it's cool that this thing can actually sort of figure. it out. I love it. I love it. Anything else, Jordy? No, super fun. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks for having me. Always great. Can't wait to talk too soon. Great to hang. Have a good one.

Talk soon, Joe. Have fun out there. Goodbye. Figma. Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast. That is right. So up next, we have an anonymous guest. We have an anonymous poster. An anonymous poster joins us. An internet anthropologist. The TikTok anthropologist, cold healing, Midwestner in exile,

loneliness epidemic super spreader and a dark statistician. I'm going to tell you about CrowdStrike before we bring him in from the Restream waiting room. Crowdstrike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So without further ado... Chat is saying that Microsoft is down.

Microsoft is down. What happened? People are not getting emails. Oh, I thought the stock was done. Wyatt is in the chat hanging out with us because Microsoft is down. So a little silver lining there. Well, without further ado, let's bring in cold healing. Whoa.

This is his profile picture. What's your profile picture? How are you doing? What is your profile picture of? That is a photo of me. It's in my apartment in Peoria, Illinois that I lived in when I was posting a lot on Twitter. I'm holding a sword in it.

It's like a self-timer photo that I set up. For some reason, I thought it was an RPG. Yeah, people are saying this. I really don't get this RPG thing. I mean, it is kind of sharp like an RPG is, but... I did... I initially, I now see the sword outlined. You thought RPG?

I did think RPG. Too many hours in cod. Too many hours in COD. It does have a very small hilts, but, yeah, thanks for having me on, guys. Thanks for joining. Anyway, give us a little background on how you see your work, what you post, how you select content, how you curate. What are you trying to achieve with everything you do?

Yeah, and I'll start by saying, I'll start by saying I think that something that I, like, one thing about your account that I think is really important is like algorithms like make us view the world and the internet in a specific way. Right? Like, even with Davos this week, I've been thinking like, wow, Davos was like all AI, all tech. And obviously it was not, right? There was like tech was a part of it. And that's just my algorithm, you know, serving me content that it knows I'm going to be excited about. And you're taking content from all over the internet. I don't even, I'm sure you have like a bunch of different instances and accounts that have different interests.

But I feel like the work that you're doing is a new science. Yeah. Anthropologist is the correct term. And it's very important. Yeah. Yeah, that's very nice to say. I mean, I think my goal is to just try to be like on the crest of what's happening on the internet. I mean, there's so much happening.

I think that in a lot of ways, institutions are not fully chronicling what's happening, if that makes sense. Like a lot of the cutting edge culture on TikTok especially, I thought it was not, I'm just also being unnoticed by other people on the internet, I think. I mean, I sort of accidentally came into this role, quite honestly. I mean, I've been on TikTok since 2018. I was like, you know, this really loved the platform. Like, first time I got on it, you know, just the algorithm of it is just so good. And I was just, you know, instantly like, you know, just pulled in of like, wow, I can just, you know, see so many different parts of the world really quickly.

And so, you know, I was doing YouTube anthropology even before that of just, you know, getting into different niche shut subcultures online then. But yeah, I mean, basically it's just, you know, I think this is all like worthy of studying and worthy of just further thought. And so I try to share the things that I think are, you know, worth commentary to my audience. Yeah. What videos are most memorable? You were, you surfaced the product manager.

Poolside PM. Yes, yeah. I think that's of all the ones that's like number one most memorable, that's like for sure. Because I was like, you know, it really like blew up my account in a lot of ways and also just, you know, the downstream impacts. you know, it kind of causing the end of the product management. Yes. You set the product management feel back. No, they were early.

They were early. They understood that there would be a lot of downtime while you're waiting for the agents to respond after you fire off a big long prompt. And so best to spend it at the pool. They were just early. The futures here are not evenly distributed. Yeah. But what was the response to the pool side PM's thing?

Because when you surf, when you re-contextualize some of these videos, Sometimes there can be pile-ons. There can be positive things that come out of it. How were you processing that moment of like mega-violity? I mean, yeah, for sure, I was definitely, like me reposting it changed the context of it at a tongue. It was initially posted by like, you know, a girl on TikTok excited to share, you know, her, like, you know, her somewhat comfortable life. And she's posting it in a tongue-in-cheek way too, right? She's aware this is like, you know, not her normal way going about her day.

She's posting it, you know, because it's like, oh, this is a funny afternoon that I spent. But then, you know, it gets into, you know, Twitter discourse, and especially in, like, tech Twitter discourse, you know, becomes kind of like a representation of the excesses of the 2010-2020s, like, tech hiring, boom. And, yeah, I don't know. I think that, you know, that recontextualization definitely brought, like, a whole new audience from it.

It was very interesting. I mean, like, she, like, had, like, multiple responses to my reposting of it, which was not really just me reposting it. You know, I mean, I think it was also all the other, you know, external commentary because I didn't really say that much. I mean for me I reposted it because it felt like my own life. You know, that's what I was doing back then. You know, I was working a work from home job and you know, I felt represented by the fact, you know, like I wasn't in the pool, you know, but I would go outside and sit on my patio, you know, and it's, it's really not that dissimilar.

And it's, you know, it's great to sit in the sun with your laptop and, you know, you can go inside when something important happens. I really don't think that that's like, you know, an end of the world way to work. Yeah. Talk to me about day in the life videos generally. Every time time I see one surfaced, the comments are always like, there's so little work getting done. But if you've, personally, I've made enough videos that I can imagine if I tried to make a day in the life, there would be a lot of downtime that I would cut out because taking one phone call isn't as engaging as watching me assemble a meal from six different things. Just visually, it makes more sense to take a video of the commute, the coffee that you get, the meal that you have.

then yes, there's one frame of you at doing Excel for six hours, but you don't put, you don't put, that doesn't take up 45 seconds of the one minute clip. But have you thought about like what the, what the medium is that is the message of these videos? No, 100% you know, it's like initially shot, or these earlier videos like 2022 Day and the Life videos that I was posting of, you know, like the product manager pool girls, those are sort of shots in this way that's aspirational that shows all the fun parts of their life. One thing I've been talking a little bit on my account recently is how, it's kind of flipped the other way recently.

You actually see kind of people shooting these day in the light videos in an intentionally mundane looking way. Oh, yeah. These people like day in the life of a middle manager at an accounting firm. And they just show like, it just looks like, they make it look like grinding. They're like, wake up, protein shake.

Go on a one mile jog, drive to work. Oh, yeah. It's like the least aspirational. They have like some somber music in the background. Yeah. Yeah, and yeah, it's such an interesting, interesting view. Something about the day in the life is just so triggering to people, too. Like, whatever life is being lived, people just develop an opinion.

Because everyone has a life, everyone has a day in their life, and they immediately compare it, I suppose. What do you think about this, if I remember correctly, the original Poolside Day in the Life video. At the end, she sort of remarks that, you know, she's been making personal social media of content because everyone might post a photo of an engagement or a wedding or a kid announcement. But then at a certain point, if your account gets big, it felt like she felt pressure from her colleagues to actually make content about work. And this was her expression of that. And I'm wondering if you've reflected on like what the role of the lower level employee in brand building around a corporation's work life balance and what it's like to work there that could go either.

way? Is that an interesting new trend? Are there pitfalls there? How do you reflect on that? I think that's already over, to be honest. I mean, this was, you know, three years ago that that video was posted. I think that now people would not represent that. You know what I mean? Like, if you were a, you especially would not say what company you work for. Like, if you are representing, like, if you're a palliom to your employee, you're not going to make a day in the life of a palimsy your employee with, you know, the fun little lunch that you get, you know? Like, that's not, like, it's very discouraged by HR departments. You know, it's also just socially discouraged.

So I think that people of that become, like, aware of the context of it. And, yeah, I mean, in that video, she does say at the very end, she's, you know, like, hey, my friends were encouraging me to share about, you know, my life. If you look at my posts, it looks like I didn't have a job. And, you know, it's definitely just like a playful post that she was making. But how are you, how have you processed generative AI content on these platforms? It feels like, you know, from our point of view over the last few weeks, we don't, we don't use TikTok, but our point of view of you the last few weeks is that it's getting really good

and there's like entirely new genre of creators that are just leaning in and this is the only thing that they're doing but what's it been like on TikTok? Yeah. It's definitely there. I see it more on Instagram Reels than you on TikTok personally but there definitely is generative AI content on it yet.

I still don't think it's at the level where it like this really wins over human-made content. Like we have all these, you know, all these, you know, repitimate, like this really, I just mean like, you know, every person sits and they watch it and they see like, which one they spend more time on, which one they're compulsively drawn to. I don't think generative AI content is at the point where it's winning at scale yet,

but there are some niches it's really good at. It's honestly really good for, like, lower budget creators. I see it like a lot from content that feels like it's from not in America. Like it's someone that's maybe not in as pretty of a place. You know, they're in like a country that's not as good and they, you know, make content that ends up, you know, with generative and AI that kind of can whatever represent certain things. And yeah, I feel like that's where it's doing well. I have one more on the generative AI question.

I've noticed that it does feel like we're at a tipping point on Instagram Rails. I'll notice that oftentimes there's AI content and if I can clock it, I usually go to the comments and there's other people that are clocking it. And then there's usually a secondary discussion about AI being bad, artist displacement, water usage, electricity, blah, blah, blah. But I recently saw a cinematic AI. movie trailer all about the Beckham drama. Have you been following this at all? Are you familiar with this Beckham drama here? I'm not going to explain it well, but Victoria Beckham and David

Beckham are having some sort of inter-familial feud of some sort where the Sun is posting We end up in the Hollywood Reporter once and suddenly John is our new culture expert. No, but but basically But basically, like, there's a traditional, like, big Hollywood celebrity drama story that has bubbled up and people are making front-facing videos explaining it. The Beckams themselves are posting about it. There's PR stories about it. But some creator used generative AI to create, like, a dramatic, like, movie trailer about it. And what was interesting is that it's obviously clockable as AI. But everyone in the comments, including the actual, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. the tagline on the video, would they upload the title of the video, is like, okay, AI, this is a good use of AI. And everyone in the comments was like, I approve of this use of AI, which is very interesting, because truthfully, like, there's no one that's getting displaced from that, because if you're, like, you're not going to go and do a $100 million budget video shoot just to make a joke about the Beckham drama. Like, maybe that will be made in, you know, a few years or something,

or Netflix will do something. But you're not displacing anyone. And so, uh, it does feel like we're at this turning point, but it requires a lot of context, a lot of human element, a lot of creativity to really break through in a way that reaches like universal acclaim. I don't know if you have a comment on that. No, it's a great point. Like there's, yeah, trying to phrase my thoughts exactly here. Like generative AI content is widely disliked by people. I think is this the starting point.

You know, there are lots of people. If you post anything that is generative AI content, you will get comments about, you know, water usage, you know, get contents about, you know, take, comments about taking away jobs from artists. And those comments do tend to go away if people like it more. If it's eye quality, AI content. To be honest, I mean, I think a lot of the comments about, you know, art and water usage come out of like a place of fear from people

of kind of not understanding what the future holds. And it does make me optimistic, honestly, when I hear people say things like, oh, like, I like this particular AI usage. Even if I think that that's not the right way to think about it, I think that it's a good kind of sign of at least the culture starting to adopt these things. I do think it's going to inevitably happen that people adopt it. Like I'm not really worried about the long term, honestly.

I mean, I'm not like a hyper-AI optimist. I think that the technology does a lot of positive things. There's also going to be some negatives as a result of it, you know. But I really want to. There's a new kind of content, which is content that could be made by paid actors, but no paid actor would ever agree to, which is like an abstinent. reenact. Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah. You've seen some of these, like, you know, memes of like them on, like, yeah, face swap videos, things like that, where if you ask an actor, like, okay, you're going to play,

you know, this like billionaire financier. He's based in New York. And they'd be like, okay, like, I'm out. Right. Um, anyway. What about, what about other platforms? Uh, I feel like content has been flowing from, uh, these like IRL streamers pretty heavily into acts. You know, there seems to be this whole culture over on kick. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those are like clips and highlights, if that makes sense. Like there are people who sit and watch IRL streamers all day, but then a lot of those are kind of second order.

Like a lot of those spend, a lot of those are really kind of content farms to make clips for TikTok, which are then the primary form of consumption. Like there's this guy who I followed for years, World of T-shirts. He's kind of one of my like favorite personal internet creators. He like started as a guy who wandered around New York City and like filmed content, but has gradually become like a live stream. He does, like, crazy stuff in his real life. Like, we'll kind of, like, scream at people on the streets.

And so he now has, like, crews of people that follow him around and live stream. I don't know. Very interesting man. But, you know, kind of the ecosystem is, yes, you can watch the live stream, but most people kind of watch the highlights of the live stream, which I think is an interesting kind of concept farm angle, where at the end of the day, still the sensory bit is these, like, short-from-burntiful video apps that can kind of be, like,

the end of the sea for any form of content. Like, it all flows into the scroll of these platforms. Endless screble. Feed the trough, as they say. The pig sound. Talk about publishing in GQ. I want to know both about the process. Have you written for prestige publications before?

Do you enjoy the written form? And then I want to know the thesis of the essay as well. Yeah, so I wrote, I just for a guest for audience, I wrote a piece about Target for GQ. I didn't go to Target for like seven years and then I went again and so I wrote a piece about that for GQ and why did you stop going?

I stopped going just like I didn't like the brand was essentially it you know like I it's like it's so red and over the top I preferred it felt like dishonest to me basically like when I was I was going inside Walmarts and Walmart felt more honest and so

yeah but then I kind of you know that that kind of stopped being true for me like I was you know I was getting more back into brands in America, and I was like, I'm ready to go back to Target. Also, it's inconvenient. I live in New York City now. I used to live in Peoria, Illinois, which is about equal distribution of Walmarts and targets. Now, in New York City, there are no Walmarts at all. And so if I wanted to go to, like, a large, you know, convenience store, Target was the only option. And so I was, like, actually making my life more inconvenient for the first year. I lived in New York as a result

of following this rule. And so I thought it's just an interesting thing. I mean, the essay is about that, but also kind of about the larger concepts of, like, purity rules that you follow in life, you know, I think that there's so many rules like that. I mean, people love setting purity rules here on their phones right now, really common, you know, thing that people do of like, oh, I need to have X amount of non-phone time or I need to set down my, you know, I can't sleep more than five feet from my phone. I got to, I got to keep it closed, you know, or I can't sleep well. The inverse. Yeah. So I just wrote kind of about like that, that concept of like purity rules in general because I thought this was like, it's such a silly one,

like the idea of not going to target is, you know, obviously there's no ethical impact on that and very little, even moral impact on that, right? It's even aesthetically, yeah, like, it's very low impact on almost all parts of life, but it's a rule that I followed for really long time. And so I kind of wrote about that. Yeah, I mean, it kind of just came into being, like, one of the GQ editors. I have, like, a long-form blog that I posted every once in a while,

and he just liked the long-form blog and reached out to me and asked if I wanted to write for GQ. Yeah, it was really cool experience to do. You know, I do really believe in working with editors. It helped a lot to work with, you know, like high quality editors. You know, I studied writing in school, but was never like to get to a professional level. I don't work as a full-time professional writer. And so it was really cool to work with like editors who could help me, you know, refine my voice.

I think it was a good experience. Yeah, it's a great publication. We will find like an old profile in GQ every once in a while that just breaks down something in a very interesting way. We read a whole deep dive on the history of Richard Mill. stuff in GQ. It's a fascinating publication that I think has been maybe discounted because it's not putting up breaking scoops and news every day. It's not in your face, but there's a lot of really timeless stuff that goes on there. There's more to breathe, more breathing room. It's an interesting canvas to have the opportunity to paint on. That's exciting. Yeah. Sorry, Jordy. Yeah,

please. I don't have anything. Oh, I wanted to ask, on the question of purity rules. Do you think we're still in a bull market for purity rules? I don't know that I saw a ton more activity in 2026 around New Year's resolutions, people stepping back. There was obviously the big anti-alcohol move, which I see as part of that. I don't know if you put that in the same category, but are we becoming more puritanical as society, less puritanical? Like where do you think culture's moving? I think culture moves. I mean, I don't know. I don't think there's like a hard direction. I think where culture is setting purity rules more and more is around like phones, like I was saying at the beginning,

I think that's kind of the big trend that I would clock for increasing of that. I think that I think we're clearly getting to a point at which, you know, just maximal pure enjoyment on your phone is not the most pleasant way to live your life. You know what I mean? Like just letting yourself get pulled into your phone at all times is not the most pleasant way to live. And I think that we're going to gradually like come up with a set of rules that works for everyone on what the most, you know, the best etiquette on phone usage is. But I don't know what that looks like, but I would expect a lot of like experimentation

over the next like five years or so to try to figure that out. So yeah, that's my purity rule like that for the next few years is that we'll see a lot more of like phone purity rule usage. Yeah, that makes sense. Last question for me on New York City. We talked to Adam Faze about how New York is experiencing a boom in content creation. And his analysis was that a lot of it was. around TikTok creators and those man on the street style videos, what do you do for a living?

If you need a lot of random extras effectively, there's no place better to do it than specific parks in New York City. Are you experiencing that? Is it annoying? Have you ever been asked, what do you do for a living? I've had one time or someone approached me for a man on the street video. I kind of just walked away from it. I didn't want to be in it. It's not super common. I do think what I love the concept of all these kids coming to New York City because of TikTok or whatever other reason that they're pulled there on the internet. I kind of, I think it's really magical that, I don't know, it's really cool that they're all kind of pulled to one location.

I think if you compare the migration arcs of other generations, right, like the Gen X, people who went to Portland, they're trying to get away from something. The millennials were kind of going to these like mid-sized cities. I think it's really beautiful that, you know, yeah, like Austin and Nashville, Denver. But I think it's really, like, it really seems like Gen Z. I mean, I am one of the Gen Z people. I guess I'm like, I'm very old Gen Z. I'm 28.

But that, you know, that, I think it's really cool that Gen Z in general, it seems to me, my read on the ground is that they're coming to New York City, like the biggest city they can. It's already established. They just like want to be around other people and participate in these systems. I think I think it's really special and cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I like some of that content. It's interesting when you see a video of someone just like playing music and they're musicians. and they could just play it in their apartment, but if they go out in the street, they'll get a stronger reaction. And sure, you could go to Hollywood, but there's just more random people on the street in New York.

So a lot of creators have just kind of coalesced around that. Anyway, Jordan. Yeah, thank you for coming on. Yeah, this is great. As these cultural moments pop up, we'd love to have you back on for some hard-hitting analysis in real time from the source, from the anthropologist.

But it's great to hang, and thank you for doing the work. Yeah, we appreciate everything you do. Thanks for having me on. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about fin.com.

It's the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.a.i. We have some breaking news. Yes. Breaking news is, without further ado, Brex has been acquired by Capital One. Hit that gong $5 billion. Boom.

Up. Wrong header there, boys. But let's pull this up. So, yeah, Hunter in the chat was asking if we already discussed Open AI planning to take a cut of customers' discoveries. There was some back and forth. We did discuss that a little bit, Hunter. But thanks for showing up in the chat. Always good to see you as always.

Yeah, so Capital One strikes $5.15 billion deal for FinTech. Brex. Deal would give credit card issuer access to technology used by thousands of companies for corporate credit cards. Interesting. BREX, of course, was valued at 12.3 billion in 2022. They hadn't raised in a while outside of, I believe, a debt facility. Yeah. But anyways, I think this deal makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. When we had Pedro on, the CEO of Brex, we talked to him about how they were doing more enterprise offerings. They were starting to explore some of this powering businesses behind the scenes, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they had that deal with first third, what's, what's the third? Fifth third. Fifth third.

Fifth third bank. It's the, they were the fifth third bank. Yes, yes. So, wow. Anyway, so a little more details, $5.15 billion in cash in stock in a deal with that, give the card issue more firepower with corporate clients. Brax founded nearly a decade ago,

offers corporate credit cards, expenses, and rewards. It also oversees nearly 13 billion in deposits held at partner banks and money market funds. Acquisition comes at a key moment in the payment world as fintech and crypto firms threatened to siphon business away from banks. Some established players have looked to team up with these firms to stay competitive. Capital One with roughly $670 billion in assets. Not bad. Obviously acquired Discover last year for $35 billion. It also disbribus.

No way. Yeah, Capital One bought. Eric Glyman and Kareematea's previous company. Yeah, yeah, I knew that, but I didn't put that together. And they spent briefs in at Capital One. Capital One is, yeah, they want Silicon Valley founders, and they want the companies that they built. This is so funny because I was with Art,

the chief business officer at Brex hanging out. He was hanging out with my neighbor, Ben. I saw him like less than probably a week ago. He was hanging out of the beach, and I'm sure he was. I got something. again. I've been doing business. Excited for this news to hit the timeline. How much did they actually raise? No. But yeah, it's a big number and it's big business. And so congrats to everyone over there. Let me tell you about Label Box. Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics,

evals, and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. We have Kathy Wood joining in just a few minutes. We can play this. video about AI industry news every two weeks. We saw this on Instagram Reels, and I was cracking up because it feels like this comedian on Instagram. And just to close the loop, Brexit raised a total of $1.67 billion in combined equity and debt financing. So anyways, certainly going well beyond the press stack and solid outcome. Fantastic. Great outcome.

Congratulations to all of them. So Advit Mohunta says, can these AI products stop going? against each other, and he plays a video called AI Industry News every two weeks. Let's see if we can play it. Is it available? We might need to come back to that. In the meantime, let me tell you about App Lovin, profitable advertising made easy with axon. com.

I get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. And without further ado, we have Kathy Wood in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring her in to the TUPN UltraDoll. She is the CEO of Arc Investing. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. How are you doing?

Oh, thrilled. I'm so happy to meet you. I've heard so much about you. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you. Thank you. How is your 2026 going so far? Ah, it's great.

It really is. I wrote a New Year's letter. Yes. And then we put out big ideas yesterday. And it's been a whirlwind, a whirlwind. I feel this is a very important year for us. And is AI the only thing that you're tracking? Is it as all-encompassing in your world as it has been in ours?

It is by far the biggest catalyst to innovation out there today. But we're very focused on our five major platforms, and AI is involved in every one of them. So robotics, energy storage, AI itself. blockchain technology and multi-oemic sequencing in the life science base. And so we're really focused on the convergence among those platforms. They involve 15 different technologies. And so AI is part and parcel of all the convergence is taking place today. And how are you setting up the firm to actually cover those five trends? What does the team look like?

like, who do you like to work with, and what are the keys to success to growing a career at ARC? That's a great question. We have set ourselves up very differently from traditional asset management research. In that world, the research responsibilities are organized by sector or industry or sub-industry, and in fact, many firms are very proud that they have five different health care analysts following very narrow silos of companies, or five consumer analysts. We have set up ARC around this idea that these technologies are converging and are going to impact every sector, every industry. So our analysts' research research responsibilities are broken down by technologies.

So the 15 different technologies involved in those five innovation platforms. And what they are looking for is, okay, how is this technology going to scale across sectors? How big is this opportunity going to be? I don't think traditional research is set up to do that. I think to really understand how big the opportunities are going to be out there, you almost have to set up research this way.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you're famous for taking very large positions, very concentrated positions in really important companies. What does it look like to get comfortable with a new management team, a new CEO? Is it just endless phone calls, meeting in person? Do you have any rules for how you grow a relationship over time? with a new business leader who you think is working on a breakout technology? Well, I think very important is understanding the background of the new business leaders.

You know, I've been in the business for a very long time. I actually started in college in the late 70s, and while most of my career had... Overnight success. It's a true overnight success. We love it. No, but we know, I know a lot of people. out there. And I've always loved the part of our business where I get to meet the people making these companies happen. So I'm a devout follower of talent, where it's going, where it has

come from. I usually have some frame of reference that I can use as a line of questioning, just to see, you know, is this the kind of leader and the right leader for this company at this time? How do you, what's your framework for understanding if a management team or CEO is really set up for this AI transition that every company is going through? Because every CEO wants to say that they're getting the most out of AI, they're getting the most efficiency, they're running the most pilots, etc. But clearly many companies are just kind of, you know, doing the demos but not actually evolving their businesses. So now are you speaking about more in the startup world? Are you talking about enterprises? Both, both really. It's everything from a company, you know, like an enterprise software company, maybe a system of record that is looking to evolve all the way through like a manufacturing company who, maybe has been using robotics for years.

And so they're like, I don't really see why people are so. Yeah, we've seen a number of founder CEOs that have been completely reinvigorated by the AI boom. They've built a great business, but you can tell that they are completely in a new gear working harder than ever. There's also legacy players that just place the right bets at the right time and they're just paying off and reaping the reward. And then there are some big company CEOs who, it does feel like, they got caught a little flat-footed and have to adjust their business models. Yes. And the way we do our research, and again, a lot of people know us for our top-down research,

so the big ideas that came out last night, we are as bottom-up stock research-driven or equity research-driven as any other team you'll find out there. That's where I came from. So we took, from a top-down point of view, two years ago in Big Ideas, we took the position that, because we were seeing it, play out in the numbers, that the tech stack would change. That you have the infrastructure layer, which of course, very strong. You have the platform as a service layer, poster child for that. Pallentier, was gaining share, significant share.

And then you had application layers, software as a service, growing, but losing share of incremental growth. We put that chart in. And we had no idea how quickly this was all going to happen. Software stocks, more traditional software stocks last year, were terrible. And even this year, they're still suffering. So AI is happening.

faster, I think, than anyone could have imagined. Anyone who thought they had time to adapt, I think has been mistaken. And, you know, I even see it with large enterprises, when we go in there and ask them, okay, what's your AI strategy? You know, they treated it in the beginning like, yeah, we'll let our teams experiment with all these new tools coming up, Chatchy GPD. No, no, no, no. That's not the way this is going to work. There's going to have to be complete restructuring around AI, or else you're probably going to fail,

maybe not outright, but you'll become irrelevant. So I think even ARC, for example, we have brought in Palantir. We're only 70 people, but we've brought in Palantir. But we've brought in Palantier, and I can see, we brought it into research first. Sure. I wanted to see how could we transform our research process. And we're already seeing incredible results in terms of productivity gains by the research team. But I can see that in the rest of the firm, it is going to take, well, first of all, you have to have someone,

other than the CTO, and that's true even in our case, saying, we're doing this. We're doing this. Our research is telling us, this is the way the world's going. We cannot be caught flat-footed. And so I really think you need the CEO, not the CTO, CEO, CFO, to drive this change. And I think, you know, many people think, oh, the results are so immediate. and they are with our writing and editing perhaps. But when you're trying to transform an enterprise,

it's hard work. You have to collect all the data, even data that you didn't know existed, so you have to figure that out. You have to clean it up. You have to integrate it. You have to map out workflows in excruciating detail. And that all takes time. A lot of people in this world are impatient.

They don't see results right away. But I think the results are going to pay off. I think the way Palantir is doing it, just put its software on top of legacy, no rip-and-replace. And over time, it will usurp the role of all of that inefficient legacy software. So I think it's going to take time in the enterprise. And I know there was the MIT study that said, hey, this isn't happening. this is a figment of Silicon Valley's imagination. And we disagree mightily on that.

How are you hoping to see that private markets evolve in the next five years or so? We've seen this tremendous growth of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., these sort of leading XAI leading labs that are happening all in the private markets. And if people really, really work hard, they can probably figure out how to get exposure to them, but certainly it's been cut off. And I know you guys have the private side of the business as well. But any sort of wishes or hopes in terms of how the interaction between the private market and the public market can evolve? Well, I think the lines are going to start blurring a bit.

Hopefully, because the SEC, under Paul Atkins, is going to get rid of all of the regulations and bureaucracy. And I do think his aim is in that direction. In terms of the private markets, I think we're starting to see venture capital firms move into crossover funds, because, well, first of all, there was a big arbitrage opportunity. You know, when innovation in the public markets was getting crucified, and believe me, we were the poster child for that. I think a lot of these funds were looking at the valuations in the private markets so much higher than in the public markets that that kind of started the conversation going.

And then, of course, this administration is, is talking more and more about the democratization of opportunities. And a venture, of course, being a big one. And, you know, this idea that you have to be accredited in order to have access to companies that, you know, are investors, the younger investors in particular, you know, they don't have the net worth or even the annual income. but they know more about these technologies than many of the institutions investing in venture.

So, you know, we felt it was important to open it up and to be very complementary to what's going on out there. We're not taking board seats, we're not leading, but we are putting out research, and we are willing to bring visibility to companies in our, venture fund. And we're bringing, you know, a new kind of investor who really has been yearning for this opportunity for years. I want to talk about Bitcoin. And specifically, there was news yesterday. Coinbase is rolling out an advisory firm on quantum computing and blockchain. There's obviously been kind of fud, people talking about the potential implications for quantum. and Bitcoin and crypto broadly.

How are you thinking about the asset today? I know this is certainly a topic that you've talked about many, many times on CNBC and other shows, but we'd love to hear the latest. Sure. First, I'll start with quantum. So in our Big Ideas report, and it's in the first section called The Great Acceleration, there is a page in there.

I think it's titled, Some Interesting Technologies Will Not Be Disruptive for 20 to 40 years. And Brett Winton, our chief futurist, and with that title, Chief Futurist, you've got to be thinking about these things, and coming up with analyses that either support or refute

the conventional wisdom out there. So if you go in, you'll see a very interesting chart. Google has doubled its number of cubits. It's taken four years for them to do that. So it's even slower than Moore's law in the semiconductor space. And so what Brett did was illustrate, okay, let's assume they accelerate they accelerate progress here, if they can, to a Moore's law pace. Okay, then in 2044, let's talk about.

about quantum computing and the risks that are in sort of the whole blockchain technology infrastructure, particularly Bitcoin. So we are not worried. We are seeing whales, so the original, the OGs, they are shifting Bitcoin from wallet to wallet because of quantum field. So that's happening, but it's also created some fud for the markets. Are they selling because they know something we don't know? Are they selling simply because they don't want to go through the downside of another four-year cycle? Have we hit the low down only 35% this time instead of 85%? So we're in that kind of a market.

And I do think we're in a basing period, which really started on 1010, the flash crash. It was the software glitch at Binance caused a lot of auto-de-leveraging. It was kind of crazy to learn about that kind of de-leveraging, meaning firms who thought they were hedged, if they were on two different exchanges, and Binance was one of them, they were auto-de-leveraged on one side of a trade, and so they were totally exposed in a way they never expected. That caused, we think, $28 billion of carnage, and we think that is washing through the system. We are very positive on Bitcoin for the three reasons I always say.

It's a new technology, really important. It is a new and a first rules-based, global, private, meaning no government oversight, monetary system. That's huge. That is huge. That is its calling card. A big hedge against inflation and a hedge against deflation if we end up in a banking crisis like 0809. And it is the first, the leader of a new asset. class. Many people are looking at gold and they're saying, well, wait a minute, gold is

doubled in the last year or so. Bitcoin's way behind. Well, if you start the clock at the end of the bare market in 22, gold is up, I think, 170 percent, and these are maybe dated by a couple of weeks, and Bitcoin by 360 percent. So, We think that Bitcoin, oh, what happened? That was just a little error we used. You said 360 percent. It was a nice number. Sound effects over here.

Not to be jarring. They didn't prepare me for this. Anyway, okay. Do they brief you about our flashbang? We will save that one for another time. But yes, sorry, continue, please. Yeah, so I'll just say it's very interesting over the, full market cycle from 20 to now.

Gold and Bitcoin's correlation, hardly, it's almost non-existent. Hardly anything. But we think Bitcoin is, especially as intergenerational wealth transfer takes place in the next five to ten years. Yep. It is the digital gold. And its supply growth is lower than gold's will be. And especially now that the gold price is up, miners can go out there. They're being paid to find even more.

So that can't happen with Bitcoin. I think in a big idea as you'll see, we expect Bitcoin to scale to $16 trillion in market cap by 2030. And it's below two now. Can you talk about the name of the fund? Where did the name come from? What does it mean? The name of the company? ARC, yeah.

ARC, yeah. So there are two ways to talk about this. I can talk about this from a regulatory point of view or the personal point of view. And I'm happy to share both. Please. I would love that. Okay, so the regular.

Arc was the name I chose for a personal reason. I'll get into that. But we were told by the, I think it was SEC, that we could not have all caps. Okay. We had to have lowercase R&K, unless it was an acronym. Oh. And so, as soon as we got that word, immediately I thought, okay, active, research, knowledge.

Okay. Active means more in the public world, because there's passive in the public world. It doesn't mean as much in the venture world. Yeah. So that's why we have it in all caps. The personal reason was in 2006, I decided I needed to figure a way out of the traditional asset management world because it was going passive, it was going benchmark sensitive, which means you take the QQQ, so the NASDAQ 100. If that's your benchmark, then you pretty much invest in all of those companies and tweak a little bit

here a little bit there. That's what benchmark sensitive is. To me, that's not investing. And in fact, so back then, you know, I would just, I was trying to figure out how to do this, because if I quit my prior position, I would have lost all of my deferred comp, which was sizable. And so I worked, took me seven years, you know, should I say seven, lean years, but whatever. Seven years. And I just used to open the Bible. And this started in 06. Open the Bible. Okay, God, just tell me this seems like an impossible situation. What do I do? Just help me, help me. And how many times did I hit Ark of the Covenant? Yeah. Ark of the covenant, which is what the Israelites took into battle before them, believing it was the presence of God and that they would be protected because they were going into battle.

And so it kind of was appropriate. I was going counter the pendulum swing to passive and benchmark sensitive. And, you know, especially after COVID, a lot of people, you know, they just thought we were going to fail. because this was not the way to do things. How do you think about the relationship between religion and markets? I've always been fascinating. We've had Pat Gelsinger on the show, and there's been a number of times when he was either quoting scripture or Bible verses, and people were sort of reading into that, how he was processing what's going on at Intel at the time.

I would love to know more about the interaction between religion and investing, because it's, It's so rarely discussed, but it's a fascinating topic and crossover. Yeah. It is interesting. So, you know, I can say I was moved in the way, I mean, you could, the way I think about what happened there and what I just described is many people would use the universe. They're responding to the universe or the force. Yeah. Or the Holy Spirit. Right? So we're all moved by something. Sometimes it's unhappiness, you know, whatever. You know, I just, I use prayer as other people would use meditation, let's say. And I certainly don't go in there, you know, day to day and say, okay, God, what should I do? Buy or sell this stock? No, not at all. Not at all. It's, I would say it's those most.

moments of meditation that bring mental clarity. You know, you clean the brain waves out or whatever. And that's more, and it's also, you know, I would say it's a way of living just generally. Yeah. Sorry, not to completely change gears, but back to AI productivity. I want your reaction to this Wall Street Journal report yesterday yesterday that it showed that CEOs reported that, you know, 20% of the C-suite executives

that the journal interviewed said that they were saving 12 hours a day or 12 hours a week, some massive number. And then they pulled workers and workers, 40% of workers said they're saving no time with AI. And I'm wondering if what you read on that is, is it that one thing that we were kind of kicking around as an idea was potentially that the work of the C-suite executive? is more ready to be transformed by AI because, like, in your role, you are a CEO, you do a lot of research. Every question that you're faced with over the course of a day in your life, you probably want more information, you want it neatly organized and delivered to you, and AI is uniquely good at that,

whereas many workers might not be in that level of information processing role. But how do you, do you think that this is going to be a report from the journal that we look back on like that, MIT study where it was just sort of an anomaly in the data and everything continues unabated. Well, this is a survey, of course, right? It's not quantitatively measured. And so what could be going on is, you know, the C-suite is really trying to lead the charge into the AI world. Yeah, yeah. And we're all in the knowledge industry. It's going to change every. everyone's job dramatically. So those who are saying it's not saving me any time,

I don't believe, or they're not harnessing any tools. What I do believe is they are saving time, and if they're saying they're not, then it might be going to a longer lunch hour or an earlier end of the day. The history of technology is that it increases productivity, and the number of work hours goes down over time during the Industrial Revolution. Big decline in number of work hours.

Farmers used to have to work six and a half days a week or whatever. And, you know, their families, the children, they got room and board. There wasn't much more. But then they went out into the working world. So the farmers and these unpaid family members, you know, their work we got shorter, and I think that's part of what's going on. Yeah. We've been tracking the optimism around AI and progress, sort of loosely along two axes. There's a view that GDP will start growing as AI diffuses and we go into a new technical revolution.

We're already seeing some green shoots on the GDP figures, but it's still early. We're not at 10% GDP growth, but that's what some AI leaders are predicting. But then you also have the employment question, and there's some leaders of AI labs that say, the future will be high GDP growth, high unemployment, which seems like it will have, you know, significant social consequences, and we will have to grapple with that as a society and deal with those problems. But I'm wondering if you have a view between what we should expect in a decade from AI as it rolls out. Do you fall into that camp of high GDP growth, high unemployment?

or are you more, you know, the jobs, we'll find new jobs. And so maybe we will see an economic boom, but we will also still all find ways to, you know, fill our time during the day with employment. Yeah, I think that one of the reasons this question is popping up more and more, well, first of all, is our imaginations. But also because the unemployment rate for 16 to 24-year-olds has increased much more than the overall unemployment rate.

It's now up to double digits, 12%. The average duration of unemployment, the average, is about 24 weeks. And so that's kind of scary. A lot of entry-level jobs are going unfilled. In other words, maybe the people answering that survey are now being faced with, with the reality that, wait a minute, they're not going to hire someone to come in and handle this grunt work, I have to do that too.

Maybe that's what's happening at the low end to give them some credibility or at the lower end there. We're in the camp, and you'll find this in big ideas as well. And we've been saying this for a while, and at first when we said it, we probably said it three years ago for the first time, We think there's going to be a step function change here in real GDP growth,

just as there is with every technology super cycles. Just to illustrate that, in the 400 years between 1,500 and 1900, Brett went in working with academia, found out or learned that real GDP growth was 0.6%. Then we had railroads, internal combustion engine, telephlets, electricity and it went to 3% for the next 125 years. Here we are. We think it's going north of 7%. And that's conservative. That's conservative. I think it's conservative. Really productivity driven. Yes. And we think that this is one of the greatest times to start a business. When I started Arc, there was no chat GVT to say, okay, do a deck for my startup because this is what I want to do.

There wasn't anything like that. I had to create everything. Now you can look at an unmet need out there and say, hey, chat GVT, or hey, GROC, come help me build this business, right? So we think that fears of unemployment, sure, there's displacement short term, but think about what's also happening. 1.3 million baby boomers are retiring every year, right? And we've just had, we're in the midst of an exodus of immigrants and, and, you know, little in migration. So that, I think, is helping keep the unemployment rate low. But, entry-level jobs can be done by AI.

And so that's what we're seeing at the younger level. And so what I say to young people is you all, in your mind, have thought of a new business that would really fulfill an unmet need, something that frustrates you. Why don't you do it and use AI to do it, to plan it, and just get going while you also look for a job if you're unemployed. I think we're going to see the biggest entrepreneurial explosion in history. I love it.

I love it. Thank you. We got to hit the gong for 7% GDP growth. We have a gong around here. I love the sound of... We have real sound effects in addition to the soundboard. Thank you so much for joining. Yes, please.

Can I just give you one more stat? Yes, please, please. We think inflation will go negative. Whoa. I love that. Yes, and that's technology. This is amazing. This is a very optimistic picture of the future, and I'd love to hear.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. And explain all of that very wide-ranging conversation. I love the history and the personal story and everything that you're doing. So thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day. Thank you, John and Jordan. We will chat with a bunch of people with a funny soundboard. We will see you later. Hopefully we made a good impression, and you will be back soon.

You did. Now I know why you're famous. Thank you so much. Bye. Goodbye. Have a great day. Enjoy. Oh, that was amazing.

Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you used to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending. Now with AI. Go and check it out. I couldn't keep it together the chat the whole time. I know. The chat was going insane.

I literally, I was fighting for my life. Oh my God, the shit was going insane. Every time I look up at the screen, I was just trying to enjoy a conversation. It was just wall-to-wall flashbang. And I'm just trying to hold it together. I love you guys in the chat. I love you. But also, you make the job a little difficult sometimes.

That was the hardest battle of my life. That was insane. And there's nowhere to look because I look at the chat. I look at Tyler. I look at my phone. I have 100 notification. I assume as people texted me to pull the flashbang. And also, by the way, I can't, I can't trigger the flashbang. That's Jordan exclusive. We need to smoke to clear the air. We need to

tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. Google's most intelligent model yet. Next level vibe coding, state-of-the-art reasoning and deep multimodal understanding. Okay, so some news. So we're going to have Pedro from Brex is going to join. We're working on getting him on. Amazing. Dallion's also going to join separately, of course. So I don't know who's coming on first. We can, whoever's in the waiting room. But we have another guest jumping on right now. We have John.

Yeah, we're going to push John just because of the stories. And he's okay. He has some time, so we'll help on with him later in the show. Fantastic. Well, before we bring in our next guest, let's tell you about public.com. I saw someone in the chat asking for public.com. Read, here it is, investing for those to take it seriously. stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with amazing customer service.

I've never cried on there before. This is a unique experience. The chat is a wild, wild, wild experience. But thank you to everyone who's been supporting. She was a great sport. I had a bunch of interesting things to share. And I truly do love the optimistic view because we, so we had actually written a chart for high growth, GDP growth, high employment, low employment, low GDP growth. And we were trying to track where

the other AI leaders were because Dario, of course, came out and said, I think we'll have high GDP growth and I think we'll have high unemployment. I think there's going to be a lot of labor displacement. And me and Jordy and Tyler were going back and forth on where we all sit, where does the U.S. sit right now? Where do different leaders feel like the world is going if they're charted on this two-axis chart? And I kind of jokingly put myself all the way in the most, optimistic camp. I said 10% GDP growth and less than 5% unemployment. I don't know if I have my, I don't know if I have it in myself to truly believe that. I do think that there might be some gyrations in the employment market, but it was great to hear from her, and we appreciate her

taking the time to come hang out with us while we throw soundboards and flashbangs around. Anyway, it sounds like we have someone in the restream waiting. Who do we got? John. We got John. Let's bring John in. Let's bring John in to the TB in Ultram. John's here. John, thank you so much for taking the time. Been a bit of a crazy show. Look at this. What do you have behind you? The home library.

What else would have been? Incredible. Give us some recommendations. What's the best thing on that? There's an incredible history of Houston rap music that I highly recommend on this book. What era?

This is a screw era. Like screw into Paul Wall and Mike Jones. Yeah, okay. That's what I learned. Everything that led up to that moment. Oh, interesting. Okay. Very cool.

Anyway, thank you so much. Quick, quick introduction. This was the last 15 minutes or so been one of the more chaotic that we've ever had. We had Kathy Wood on talking about a variety of theses she has on markets. Our chat, we have some sound effects. Our chat just kept telling us to spam the sound effects and I couldn't keep it together.

But we're super excited to have you on here. Thank you so much for taking it. Yesterday was kind of a funny experience. Somebody sent me the video that you post. with the rugby. And we only made like a hundred of those. We gave him out to friends. We would have happily sent you one if we knew you were in the market. But of course, I was tapped in. I was tapped in. Yeah. You were tapped in. You were tapped in. You were tapped in online. So I'm glad, even though it was bootleg, I'm glad that it looked great. It looked great. It looked

great. It looked great. Yeah. There it is. There it is. Well, we have sent out an official TBPN in the mail. It should be running any day. And what did it smell like when it arrived from Canada. Okay, so can I be candid? Can I be candid with you? Yes, of course. I feel like we can be candid. Yeah, of course. When this package arrived in my package room in my building, it looked like it had been assembled by a small child. It was packed into like a mailer, like a like a regular mailer. Okay. That was tattered at the edges. No. It had a label from Canada. Yeah. And there was a full retinue of packing tape layers, like four or five layers on top of the mailing label. I opened the package. I had ordered one. I got two. You got two. Okay. I got two. So there's a

bonus one of you guys. Let's go. I'll send it over. Thank you. Um, there was swamled like cigarettes. No. Wait, so you think a child was smoking cigarette. A cigarette smoking child is selling food like to be in merch. Noun Fumar. Um, Yeah, but I will say, as a clothing connoisseur, when I saw the images that you guys had posted of your polo, I was like incredibly high quality material. Yes. I could see it in the photos. I knew that the embroidery would be like robust to the touch.

I knew. I get this. Yeah. This looks like it was made from, you know, you get like a 10-pack of terrycloths. No. No. No, not good. Yeah, see, this was an issue.

A lot of people, when I first, I posted that we had, that, that, that, that there was bootleg merch floating around. And a lot of people were like, oh, what's the issue? Like, you guys are a podcast. It's not your core business. We don't make merch to make money, right? But the issue was like, I knew people would buy it and they'd get it, and they'd be like, this is low quality.

Of course. And we care a lot about quality. But on the flip side, you guys are popping and you're getting bootlegged. So, Mom's off. Yeah, it's a good interview. Thank you. Anyway, sorry. First time in the show, please introduce yourself for everyone who might not be familiar.

Sure. My name is John Caramonica. I am a pop music critic at the New York Times. I am the co-host of Popcast, which is our pop culture talk show. Check us out. YouTube.com slash podcast. Yeah. Fantastic.

Yeah. And then the reel that started this whole thing on Instagram, break down the thesis. And then just to clarify, none of the footage in that is AI generated, correct? No. Okay. It's just, I just look like that. I mean, no, no, no.

It's something about like the camera movement and your dancing was like a little bit of like, whoa, there's a lot of thing going on. Okay. Movie magic, baby. Movie magic. But what was the things? Yeah, so every week we do a song of the week.

It's not necessarily pure endorsement. It's usually a song that's reflective of a bigger idea in pop music. Obviously, we've been talking a lot about AI and pop in recent months. We had a big episode on that before the holidays. I listened to the Bruno Mars song that just came out. And I was like, if you had told me that this is just some guy trained on the pop charts of 1972 and made this, I would have totally believed it. So typically we film in my car. My car, unfortunately, is in the shop.

So we went up to the South Bronx and filmed a dance video in my mechanics garage. That's awesome. I mean, it's a beautiful set. I don't know what you shot that on, but it is like, it's a beautiful, like, piece of media. Did you go to the Bruno Marjor? concert in the steal of brain rot game in Roblox? What? Do you not hear about this?

No, what are you talking about? I know about this, but I don't know. Bruno Mars played a concert in the game, steal a brain rot in Roblox, which by itself, just reading that sentence, it kind of feels like it would give you brain rot. So I guess it is not of those words are in a brain rot. Yeah, exactly.

Okay, well, let's zoom out and talk about AI music. We were talking about it earlier, and I've always been on this train where the AI, tools are incredible. It's, you know, it's hard to tell the difference. But there are always, whenever I see a viral piece of AI media like Harry Potter Balenciaga, I return to the fact that AI didn't come up with the concept. AI was used to instantiate the idea that was created from a human. And in fact, after Harry Potter Balenciaga, I went to, I think, chat GPT and I said, here's the, here's this thing that's going viral. They're mashing up a kids classic with an iconic

fashion brand. It's this high, low, create a new viral video concept that will absolutely take over the internet. And it just was like, like, you know, like Star Wars Louis Vuitton. And it was like, that's not actually going to break through in the way that Harry Potter, Balenciaga did, because it's not innovative. It's not the first time it's had something happen. And I'm wondering, like, how much do you think we're, you know, you're seeing music that's like purely just the AI did it, Or it's more of a tool. Like, how are you processing the AI music boom right now? Sure.

One note on the Harry Potter Balenciaga thing. You know that there is an actual Balenciaga Fortnite collaboration. Really? You wear that? No, I'm not. Wow. So when Demna, who until recently was the creative director of Blenciaga, had a really, I would say, a robust sense of humor and irony about the types of clothing that he made.

Sure. And a lot of times he did some unlikely garment collaboration. and there's a sanctioned Valenciaga fortnight. I think it's a hoodie, maybe a shirt, two or three pieces. So they were the troll out trolled the AI. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Yeah.

As far as AI as a music tool, you know, one of the things I think is causing a lot of people anxiety right now is you look at some of these artists who are cut from whole cloth, right? Solomon Ray purports to be a soul musician. but really it's just a guy running a bunch of Anthony Hamilton songs through a program and coming out with a new one probably, allegedly. Now, that doesn't scare me because eventually Spotify, Apple are going to say there's going to be some banner, some bad.

It's like this is not a real person to the extent that that matters. Here's what I think is interesting. Or it's not fair use and we need to shuffle the revenue over there. And so you're effectively just... In the same way that sampling had many years and matchups. and then everything kind of came into formality, that's going to happen with AI, and frankly, it's going to happen much faster.

I agree. What I think is interesting is, if you go into any songwriter, producer, studio in Los Angeles right now, which is where all the sort of hits are written, typically, the hierarchy of that room is typically famous person, famous person's guy, you know, like songwriter, helper, melody person,

a name producer, who you probably maybe would have heard of, one or two songwriters and then one or two kind of studio hands who were sort of like moving the knobs. I would bet anything that in every single one of those sessions one of those low-level folks

is already deploying AI in unexpected ways. There's an interview with Teddy Swims who's like a moderately successful pop star a couple of months ago and he said oh yeah, AI, yeah, I use that to multi-track my vocals. I use that to try out what if I change the key, what's it

kind of sound like? I would bet anything that in the same way that autotune was quite quietly used for a long time and then became completely accepted, these AI tools are going to get used and deployed in these not totally discernible to the earways, but in terms of work flow and process, I bet they're already there in everything we're listening to on, especially on pop radio. I heard an interesting story from a friend about a friend of theirs who was a like a backup studio singer. whose work went to basically zero because they were working on tracks that were just meant to be demos so that a songwriter could share it with different labels or artists or whatever.

And then suddenly it's like you don't need somebody to go into the studio to like sing your song. You just like prompt it. And so, yeah, I think. You're obviously a student of history. We talked about the book, the books behind you. I've read them all. What anecdotes can you share about previous technologies rolling out in music? backlash to electronic drum machines, backlash to electronic music.

Give me some more, like, what are you drawing on for its correlating? Okay, so, I mean, the story that I think becomes really, it looms large in a lot of people's mind, Dylan going electric, right? This is an era of folk music where everybody's like, you know what's authentic is me, I don't smell great, I'm strumming on an acoustic guitar, I perform at four cafes a night in the village, We all hang out and write together and have sex with each other. And that's the scene. And then Dylan sees what's happening with technology and sees what's happening, especially with the guitar.

And the electric guitar has become a creative tool for an entire legion of rock musicians. And Dylan brings it to the Newport Folk Festival and says, I'm plugging in. I don't care what you guys think. And of course, people call him Judas and say that he's doing heresy. and the fact is he's just following. He was a follower at that point. I also mentioned Auto Tune earlier. You may remember Jay-Z put out a song called DOA,

Death of Auto T-Tune. This is at the peak of T-Pain. Yeah. T-Pain is dominating radio with essentially computer music that sounds a lot like Zapp and Roger from the late 70s into the early 80s, that kind of like synthetic funk music that was really popular after like the Earthwind and Fires of the world.

T-Pain comes along, formalizes it, becomes a go-to songwriter, producer, and collaborator, and all of a sudden, everything on the radio sounds like a computer. Jay-Z comes along with Death of AutoTune and says, actually stop all that, and that people are like, that's nice old man.

Like, let's keep it pushing. And AutoTune is now widely accepted in every genre. You hear it in country music. You hear it in pop. You hear it in reggaeton. You hear it in hip-hop. These questions that were sort of like anxious critical discourses when they emerged,

nobody really gives two thoughts to it anymore. I think that's probably what's going to happen 12 to 24 months from now with AI. Yeah, I want to go so much deeper and have you back to spend way more time with all this. I'm interested in your thoughts on the downstream implications of AI music because I could imagine that

if you're a particular artist that can create one of those like shelling points where there's a specific tool that everyone's talking about, you gotta go see the ERAs tour. This particular tour at the sphere was something that so many people took Instagram reels of and posted that everyone just knows it's real, it creates this proof of authenticity. I'm wondering what other downstream effects are you thinking about as artists react to competition from some anonymous person with AI that can create music that's maybe indistinguishable,

so they got to specialize. Here's the thing. Here's the anxiety that it brings up for me. And I think it's an anxiety that I've long felt before AI posed itself as a problem. I'm a very intense listener. It's my job, but also just even before it was my job. I was always an intense listener. You guys may or may not be intense.

I don't know. What I can tell you is that for every person like me, there's 50 people who are casual listeners, which is to say they press play on a Spotify playlist and walk away. And don't think too hard about what the second song is or the fifth song is. They're not studying. They're not studying. And they're not preoccupied. They're not every song that comes on.

They don't do a gut check with themselves and say, do I like this? Am I curious about this? Is this an artist I respect? They just kind of let it go in the background. Everything is dentist office music. It's moving in that direction. There are plenty of real life artists who are making music like that. And those are the people who have been shutting out some of the bigger and more

creative people. AI accelerates that process, but AI didn't start that process. And I think what it's also going to accelerate is more and more people as consumers are going to get trained to try to not pay too close attention to the specifics of what they're listening to. Okay. I have 50 more questions, but we do have to move on. But thank you so much for hopping on in short notes.

Do you want me to burn this? No, no, keep it. It has lore now. It's good lore. It's good lore. show. It lives on forever in the Instagram reel. It's great. I love it. One thing I'll say before I go is that many of my favorite rap shirts from the 90s are all bootlegs. This may be, this may turn out to be the $1,000 shirt 20 years ago. Maybe. Maybe it has lower now. It's been discussed on the show.

Let's like actually schedule your next appearance today. We'd love to have you back on. Yeah. There's so much. You guys. You guys are killing it. Congratulations. Thank you so much. You too. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Talks here. The New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Pedro is in the waiting room. We have Pedro. We're going to bring him on in. Five billion dollar band. Wow, what a day. Pedro, how are you doing? How are you feeling? Congratulations. Good to see you. Good to see you as well. Give us the news. How'd this come together? What happened? I want to ring the gong. Yeah. So today we're now seeing.

the largest bank fintech merger in history between brex and capital one i'll let you go for it go for it 5.155. uh thank you congratulations thank you we were really excited about this yeah and and as we as we thought about this right capital one is the first fintech ever they invented this concept of bringing technology into the financial services that's right that's right and as we got to know them What we realized was there was a really obvious one plus one equals five scenario here. And really, when you think of the world that they operated, it was completely different than anywhere else compared to Brex. They had the, you know, hundreds of millions of consumers, millions of businesses, you know, $150 billion in market cap, $900 billion in CARG&B.

and really the way that we thought about this is when we combine the product that we do with a Bres, right, we created this new category of company that brings financial services and software under one platform to help customers make better financial decisions, right? And we combine this with, you know, the product and the platform with Capital One's unprecedented scale, brand distribution and balance sheet. We have this unique opportunity to accelerate our go-to-market and product with a level of investment that we would never be able to match as a standalone company. So it's really about how do we build the most important financial platform for businesses in the U.S.

And this is such a unique combination of being two founder-like companies that fundamentally believe in growth and be here to win. They always say, what's the phrase like you meet your acquire, you know, years before any deal happens. Yeah, when did you guys like first, how the conversations first start? So I've heard of Rich and the Capital One team for many, many years. Actually, even when I was back in Brazil, they were already in inspiration. These guys have been building in FitTech for a long time. They invented this idea of bringing data into underwriting, which of course is one of the big things that we pioneered back in 2017, as you know. So a lot of this has been deep admiration and respect.

And then as we started to spend time of them, I think the biggest thing to me was the deep respect they had for technology. And the fact that when you think of a bank, M&A, people really think about, okay, we're going to go and integrate all these teams and spend all this time and make it super slow. And really the main idea is keeping Brex independently and just accelerate, like accelerate the growth. And we're going to integrate a few parts of the business, but the majority of it will run independently. And, you know, when you put behind the $6 billion R&D budget of Capital One, the $6 billion marketing budget, that gets a very special. a very special combination. And I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe that this was the easiest

and fastest path for Brex to be the number one player in our space operating with this unprecedented scale and ambition with them. I want to talk about other exciting areas with plugging, bringing like a Silicon Valley ethos to a larger company. How much of what you see over the next few years is like deploying AI transformation and bringing like that high energy early adoption of AI

throughout the organization or any other areas, like even just marketing. There's so many different areas that you have a unique view from the founder seat in. Oh, 100%. 100%. And look, I think the thing about the capital on this special is being a founder like company is just this ability to make, you know, quote unquote, bold decisions much more aggressively than others, right? And when you look into, for example, the engine that they've built on the go-to-market side for small business, I think it's nowhere in the world matched to the

scale in which they operate. When you look into the technology and data and what they do on the credit side and underwriting, it's really sort of an end-of-one thing. So I think there's a lot for us to learn from them. And I think the things that we're really excited to bring to the table is especially when you think about this space, right, and bringing financial services and software into one, it is really just AI and the direction of the roadmap that we're building as a standalone company. And now that we can, you know, double, triple our level of investment

over the next few years together is going to be a really unique thing to do and just bring this capability to the millions of businesses that are already on their platform will also be huge, right? So, you know, super super, and maybe the biggest, thing to say is, you know, we're not going anywhere. I'm saying. I think this is going to be the most exciting years of my career. Yes, we're making history here. Super great. Yeah, I was going to ask, are you coming for Rich's job? Are you going for the top spot? Some people want to sell, you know, they want to, you know, just rest the best of coast, but I know your vision as I can see

you going straight, going straight for the top. We advocate for this for every acquisition. We want the founders to get inside, take over. I have immense respect for Rich. He is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of this generation. And he's incredibly private and doesn't talk a lot about the... He says that the story of Capital One is the book that will never be written. And there are some amazing stories there. But just the way in which he runs the company is founder mode to the extreme.

And there's a lot there that inspires us. But look, the reality is, for now, there's so much to build in the space that we're in, right? We're still Brexit, 1% of the market. When we bring it together of the existing, you know, commercial card, there's a lot more room to go. We're going to be the third largest corporate card issue in the U.S. And there's a very clear path to build the most important financial platform for businesses in the country. So really excited. What about location? I think of you as a San Francisco company, I'm sure you've expanded. I think of them as New York company. Do I have that right? Or they're going to be like minglingling.

There's just lots of flights or, yeah. Yeah, they're mostly based in Virginia. Oh, Virginia. Yeah, so in D.C., so the biggest thing for us is we're actually keeping Brex mostly standalone. Okay. And, you know, operating largely independent. So the idea is our remain in San Francisco, our leadership team remains in San Francisco,

and, you know, spread over the U.S. Yeah. We continue to hire in Brazil. We continue to hire in Seattle, we continue to hire in New York. And really, it's like how do we add fuel to the fire? That's really the mindset. And we're going to integrate a few parts of the business that are important, like some risk connection functions over time, of finance reporting and all that. But fundamentally,

the cool thing of this is, you know, how do you play this game at a completely different level of scale and just get ahead, like five, seven, ten years of what we would as a standalone company. And we're really excited about it. Yeah. Lessons for entrepreneurs, you know, looking back since 2017, I mean, crazy ride, one of the fastest growing. companies of its era, then through COVID and ZERP, like it's been an insane roller coaster and, you know, the last few years, you know, focusing on, you know, just navigating through that whole process is and getting to this outcome is super inspiring, but any lessons that you're taking from it, learnings?

I mean, so many, right? I think, you know, it's, it's, I started this company I was 21. I didn't know a lot about things in the world. And I think a lot of the journey of the company is also a reflection of the founder journey. And over the years, we've made a lot of mistakes. We learned a lot. And I think the last two years, honestly, were the most challenging but also the most rewarding years of my career. Because I ran this company, you know, as solo CEO, I have an amazing leadership team.

and I have a fantastic team across all of Brex, but it was a very different game to play. And then when you see what we did on growth, what we did on the enterprise side, and the level of deals that were winning across every single player, the majority of AI companies are operating on Brex, when you look at the momentum and the revenue growth, as well as profitability, right,

it's really remarkable what the team did here over the past few years. And I think the biggest lesson is, you know, continue to believe in the, in the things that made you start and the things that keep you going because there are roadblocks, right? Brex wasn't in a great place in 2023, but I just had this belief that we were not living to our fullest potential. And we could be much more as a company. And I think where we got today is, first, a really exciting milestone that this was all worth it. But the most important part is what the the company get to become and just cementing Brex as a part of the U.S. financial system forever.

And the fact that a company would be around, this product that we created, that we have so much conviction and belief will be around for 10, 20, 30 years at a massive scale. So really sort of unique and emotional moment for me, I really have so much gratitude for the team with the Brex, some of the most talented, hardworking, smart and kind people that I know. and that without them, like, none of this would be possible. So just immensely grateful for everyone that contributed to the journey in getting us here today. And again, we're just getting started in this new phase.

What a moment. We were joking earlier. It is interesting that you now have more common ground with Kareem and Eric over at Ramp and that you've both sold the company to Capital One. But great stuff. super, super inspiring and congratulations to the whole team and the whole cap table on the milestone

and it's great great to catch up. Amazing. Thanks for having me. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. See you guys. Up next, who we got? Do you have anyone in the Restroom Waiting Room?

I think we got Delian. Coming through. Coming from Founders Fund. Is he available in the Restream Waiting Room? Let's bring him in to the TbPN Ultradome. Welcome to the show, Daly. And how are you doing? You know, just great day, great day. Very good here. What are you thinking? No, not the flashbang. Did this hit you like a flashbang or were you expecting this? No, I mean, how was I supposed to know this? They did a good job of, you know,

sort of keep it, keeping it down low. And I want to start where it ended. Common ground with Eric and Kareem, right? There is some common ground. They both have now sold a company to Capital One. Yeah. There's a lot of distance between the two of them. them. Cream and Eric realized it is impossible to have a significant influence on the world by being within the structure of Capital One, the only way to save customers time and money was to go out and build an independent generational company. Pedro somehow believes the exact opposite. He believes the only way for him to accomplish anything is to go into an old stodgy bank, convince them to overpay for his company by 50% and probably accomplish nothing with the rest of his life.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, okay. We're not, we're not doing, we're not going to do any grave grave dancing here as much as... But who knows? I mean, you know, what if he does his earn out? He leaves. He starts a new company. You know, are you going to sign up? You say, hey, you know, I've backed people that have sold to Capital One before. I've seen this story before.

His next company might be back by you. What if you end up inspiring him to go do the earn out, come back, start a ramp competitor? What if he starts a move base with a mass driver? And you're just like, wow, he actually cracked it. You know, this could happen. Look, as Josh Wolf likes to say, chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. You're putting a chip on his pocket. You are.

Exactly. Exactly. The thing that I'll also, you know, sort of point out, and it's more of like a, you know, sort of general company building, you know, sort of macro point. But it's an analogy that I, you know, learned from Keith back in the day, which is building companies is a lot like laying cement. In the early days, you have the ability to like, you know, manipulate it, shape it, et cetera. Right. It is, you know, sort of soft and malleable. The moment that it starts to harden, though, trying to change company culture requires like a jackhammer.

It's loud, it's painful, it's disruptive. It breaks your structural, you know, sort of integrity. And so I think the thing, you know, is kind of listening into, you know, sort of Pedro's interview. And it's a little bit of a, you know, sort of joke or quip, but it's still funny to me that throughout the entire interview, there was never a time where he, like, really deeply was focused on how this is impacting his customers, in particular, is it going to save them time and money, right?

And I think that just comes down to what the early days of the two companies were like in terms of focus areas. The early days of Brex were focused on celebrating go-to-market, celebrating, basically, like, signing up logos, celebrating wins. I'm not saying that's like necessarily a bad thing. I'm just saying that is what the culture was. They celebrated the champagne campaign. They set up the, you know, sort of South Park Cafe.

And those types of micro decisions feed into what employees want to work on because they see what the, you know, sort of founder celebrates versus, as you guys know, what ramp celebrates from the get-go has always been saving customers time and money through better product, better automation, better savings. And that's what ultimately the individual employee on the line, you know, celebrates and thinks about every single day because they see that that's what the founder is celebrating. And so I think as you see this like, you know, the two sides of the story. basically play out, I actually think it comes down to those early, early cultural microdecisions.

And I think companies and founders should be thinking about that a lot, even in completely unrelated, you know, sort of categories of like what is going to be that penultimate, you know, sort of winning culture? You know, when I think about the space industry, are you relativity space and you're celebrating like renders and capital raising? Or are you SpaceX and you're celebrating like technical accomplishments and actually like landing rockets? Yeah.

And ultimately, that's going to be what, you know, sort of plays out. Relativity goes and raises $3.5 billion dollars never launches a rocket. SpaceX obviously launches their first rocket on like, you know, I think $60 million total raised. So on the question of like ramp strategy, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on like the actual structure. Like if you think about Brexon Capital One, they now have like that combined entity has a consumer business.

I've pushed Glyman. Get me a personal ramp card that I can pull out for my personal finances. I actually talked to some people who set up like whole LLCs just to run their personal finances through ramp. It's very cumbersome because Ramp does not have a consumer business. Is that in the cards, is that, do you think that there's a world where Ramp grows into a bank? Or is focus like the actual correct strategy for now, forever? How do you see it progressing?

I think focus really matters, right? Like we have a like, you know, sort of core ICP, which is just like, you know, all basically enterprises of America. And I think like there's so much more that we can do to serve our customers even better. you've, you know, sort of seeing us, you know, basically spin up, you know, sort of ramp labs. And, you know, today we just, you know, they launched, you know, a new version of, you know, sort of ramp budget. And I think any additional energy spent on just continuing to develop next generation products, especially ones that obviously utilize AI that is focused on the core ICP for ramp is a far better utilization of our time. And, you know, to take it back to like the Peter Thiel philosophy, we believe in building monopoly, right?

And ultimately, anything that isn't serving that core ICP is a distraction from the potential to build a monopoly. I think what I find particularly exciting about today and about the news about Brex is that it is probably the strongest monopoly thesis for Ramp that existed since the companies basically start. If you remember when we funded it, and it came out and launched in 2019 and 20,

Amick still had a really big, enterprise business. Brex was a multi-billion dollar company. Divi was still super, you know, sort of fast-growing. Bill.com was still super, you know, sort of fast-prowing. Expensify was fast-growing.

Like, there were so many players in the market. You fast forward today, divy basically got acquired is barely around it anymore Brex obviously EDA should have got acquired Amex has almost entirely shifted their focus

to their consumer business right? If you look at how much of their gross profit basically comes from consumer business and how rapidly that's growing relative to enterprise it's all the CEO is basically

talking about on quarter of the earnings calls their entire basically like you know FMV basically growth over the past three years is entirely based on the consumer business and so enterprise corporate spend card spend management budgeting just the like

CFO suite that smart CFOs use, dude, the field is somehow more open today than it was five years ago. There's less funding going into it, less like super competent teams that are, you know, sort of focused on it. And so why would you ever like give up focus on just continue to maximize that when like, you know, we're still only one percent of the way there. There's so much more basically to do. And so yeah, would I as a consumer like love to have that level of power like in my hands? Sure. But like as a ramp shareholder, why would we not give up the fact that we literally have the

best monopoly opportunity since the company got started that we need to continue to go. capitalize on it. Jordy, anything else? No, I'm happy I'm happy for the Brex team and I think it's great outcome and I can also see why you are

excited about this moment simply because a lot of people probably mocked you for investing in a corporate card company when you initially led the round into ramp even with the quality of the team it seemed and you know, like you were saying it seemed like the cards had already been, you know, fully dealt and there wasn't, you know,

some type of green field opportunities. So, I guess, congratulations to you, too. Congratulations to everyone. But yeah, congratulations to everyone. Honestly, like, I hope, I hope the industry can just move past this, like, kind of, like, rivalry. It's like, we're all, we're all, like, serving to, we're all building tools to grow, grow, grow the economy. economy and that's something I can. Delian's got to say something nice. Aren't you a YC founder, Delian? You know, September 2014, but you know.

So you're YC founder? This is a good outcome for the YC community. Let's give it up for the YC community. Deliveral returns. Gordian Coogan, you guys are much better people than I am. I think that's why you have much better hair than I do. I unfortunately am incapable of not being anything but like a vengeful paranoid.

So that's all I've got in me. And you know, I'll say, The ramp story, as you guys may know, started on Fortnite, you know, Kareem and I playing together, seeing his brilliance. I'm happy to, you know, should end the Breck story and the rivalry on my favorite, you know, basically saying in, you know, gaming, which is GG, WP, you know, easy, no R. Which stands for good game, well played, easy game, no rematch. No rematch. The savage. Your nose, there might be a rematch.

We'll see what the next company is. Anyway, have a good rest of your game. day. We'll see you later, Dallion. Cheers. See you later, boys. And that concludes, probably the most chaotic stream of our show. Definitely the most chaotic. We had technical difficulties. We had a lot of stuff going on. We had flashbangs. We had a $5 billion deal. Get announced live. We had bootleg merch. We had a good time. But no, this is a fantastic moment for Capital One in Brex, and we are excited for them. I think that's it.

Yeah, that's it. That's it. The concerning thing is the chat knows that now they can just say start spamming, flashbang into the chat. And I'm not going to be able to keep it together. Nope, it's going to have to happen every once in a while. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to the TVPN newsletter at TVPN.com.

We have a great show for you tomorrow. I think we're a little bit lighter on the guest. as we've been doing on our Friday shows. We'll be hanging out, bringing you the new. The mansion section. Doing the mansion section. Of course. And we will see you tomorrow.

11 a.m. Pacific, sharp. We love you. Goodbye. Goodbye. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.