TBPN Live - Deel–Rippling Update, Microsoft Bets on Agents | Shawn “swyx” Wang, Augustus Doricko, Brad Porter, Kian Sadeghi, Kathleen McMahon, Chungin “Roy” Lee

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

(03:02) - Deel-Rippling Drama (09:58) - Microsoft Bets on Agents to Fuel AI Growth (30:43) - Snowflake Buying Crunchy Data for $250M (45:57) - Augustus Doricko. Augustus is the founder and CEO of Rainmaker, a California-based startup using drones and advanced modeling to modernize cloud seeding and address water scarcity in the American West. A former UC Berkeley physics student and Thiel Fellow, he previously co-founded Terra Seco, a company that automates groundwater compliance. Doricko integrates his Christian faith with a mission to "terraform" arid regions, aiming to revitalize agriculture and infrastructure through scalable weather modification. (01:00:46) - Brad Porter. Brad is the founder and CEO of Collaborative Robotics (Cobot), a startup building AI-powered collaborative robots designed to work safely and intuitively alongside humans in sectors like logistics, healthcare, and manufacturing. Before founding Cobot in 2022, Porter served as VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Robotics, where he led the deployment of over 500,000 robots across global fulfillment centers. Cobot's first robot, Proxie, launched in late 2024 and is already in use by companies like Maersk, Mayo Clinic, and Moderna. (01:18:04) - Kian Sadeghi. Kian is the founder and CEO of Nucleus Genomics, a consumer health platform offering whole-genome sequencing and polygenic risk scores for over 800 conditions, aiming to make personalized medicine accessible to all. Motivated by a cousin's sudden death from a suspected genetic disorder, he left the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 to start Nucleus from his bedroom, later securing $32 million in funding from investors like Founders Fund and Seven Seven Six. In 2025, Nucleus launched a service analyzing embryos for disease and longevity risk, sparking ethical debates about the future of reproductive genetics. (01:32:03) - Kathleen McMahon. Kathleen is the Head of Life Sciences at Palantir Technologies, where she leads product strategy, customer operations, and business development for the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors. Under her leadership, Palantir's Foundry platform has been instrumental in supporting organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the UK's National Health Service in areas including clinical research, vaccine distribution, and biomanufacturing. McMahon has also co-founded a stealth startup focused on AI and platform technologies. (01:48:06) - Chungin “Roy” Lee. Roy is the co-founder and CEO of Cluely, a San Francisco-based startup that offers an AI tool designed to assist users during tasks like job interviews, exams, and sales calls. Originally developed as "Interview Coder" while Lee was a student at Columbia University, the tool led to his suspension and eventual departure from the university. Despite the controversy, Cluely has raised $5.3 million in seed funding and reports over $3 million in annual recurring revenue. (02:09:59) - Shawn “swyx” Wang. Shawn is the founder of Smol.ai and editor of Latent Space, a newsletter and podcast exploring the rise of the AI engineer. After transitioning from a finance career, he led developer experience at AWS, Netlify, Temporal, and Airbyte, and authored The Coding Career Handbook to guide developers in career growth. Wang is known for his “Learn in Public” philosophy and for organizing the AI Engineer Summit, fostering a global community of applied AI practitioners. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

You're watching TBPN! Today is Wednesday June 4 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have a great show for you today folks. A story that we've been covering for months now is continuing to develop and is now in the pink pages of the Financial Times. This is the rippling deal drama. It continues and in their briefing section it says Silicon Valley spy drama a feud between two startups over alleged corporate espionage

rare case where the drama does not involve the media actually A feud between two startups over alleged corporate espionage has taken a new twist after a $12 billion HR software group deal claimed that rival Rippling has had directed one of its staff to pilfer its assets. So they're going back and forth and today deals firing back. Now I heard a little bit about this story. We kind of, the rumor mill was churning over this idea

that, you know, Deal had something up their sleeve and they were gonna fire back. Of course, that's the way these things go as these battles evolve. The interesting thing, there's a couple of interesting things in here, is that the rippling allegations resulted in a lawsuit and ultimately, I think, criminal charges.

So Rippling alleged earlier this year that a staff member at Deal had been spying on behalf of Deal. This is a course that send that watch to London moment. Send that watch to London. The employee watches themselves. I'm actually disappointed, John, that is such an incredible line in Silicon Valley history. It really is. I'm sad that people don't use it more in different areas of their lives.

It really failed to break through. Yeah. It's, you know, we were discussing this earlier about this is like the most dramatic story of the year in Silicon Valley, and yet I've talked to multiple people in Silicon Valley who have just completely missed it because it's just it's it still is just HR I asked her enterprise sass drama those people simply do not care. They just They're gonna have to really pay them to care Yeah, they get some sort of like payout system going like acts to be like yeah every time you pay attention to this You know you're gonna get a micro payment

Yeah, I mean they're just it just doesn't have kind of the the weight of like Elon Doge Tesla humanoid robots AI AGI AI doom right it's just It's just payroll after all Forget it Jake. It's just payroll after all. Forget it Jake, it's just payroll. Well anyway, in new legal filings seen by the Financial Times, Deal has countered that Rippling has been actively engaged in a carefully coordinated espionage campaign through which it infiltrated Deal's customer platform by fraudulent means and pilfered the company's most valuable proprietary assets. What's interesting is that they're stopping short of naming like a spy, right? And so the actual approach here,

Deal has sought to dismiss Ripley's initial claims of direct corporate espionage and has filed a lawsuit in Delaware alleging that its rival is trying to impugn Deal's reputation and his latest filings were lodged yesterday as an amendment to that case. It alleges that Brett Alexander Johnson, someone I have not met, Rippling's competitive intelligence manager posed as a customer in Access Details of Deal's products

and business practices over the course of six months. Now, what's interesting is that like access details of deals, products and businesses. So this sounds like they were asking customers for what deal was doing maybe instead of say going inside of deal slack. Like there's no allegations that they were inside of deals's corporate systems, which is a very distinct line to cross. And so obviously, this story is evolving and we've invited Alex, the founder of Deal on the show, would love to get his side of it, would love to get Parker on as well. But of course, our worst and the legal compliance teams at enterprise startups are getting in our way.

I just hope they can figure out some type of settlement agreement that involves sort of MMA style pay per view on TVPN. I was gonna say cage match. It's like at a certain point they'll reach some sort of end to the story but I'm sure there will still be bad blood. Totally, it has to be ended in the I'm sure there will still be bad blood. So why not solve that through MMA? Yeah, in the Octagon.

Yeah, I mean, we've been teased so many times with, oh, is Trey gonna box Jason Calacanis, or is Zuck gonna fight Elon? Like this could be maybe third time's the charm here. Maybe this is the one that gets it done. It's gonna happen. It'd be fantastic. In Dubai.

Yeah, we'll bring it out to the Gulf, of course. To the Gulf, of course. For some reason, it'll happen in the Gulf. I think just the purses haven't gotten quite big enough. You see some of these boxing pay-per-views easily into the nine figures. If we can position this as non-dilutive funding for these startups

Maybe there's something to be done. Maybe that would get them over the line of saying yep I'll put on the gloves. I'll get in the cage. Yeah Yeah, I mean it's been a fascinating story obviously these things move like extremely slowly as they go through the courts So it feels like you know With FTX or Theranos, we got the bombshell accusations, then it took like a year or two to get any sort of, to move past like alleged wrongdoing to actually understanding the scope of what happened. But I'm sure that the courts are working through it

and we will be following it the entire time. The lawsuit, this is from TechCrunch, which is turning 20 years old next week. The lawsuit is also full of insults hurled at Rippling's CEO Parker Conrad and mentions his troubles at his previous company, Zenefits, irrelevant in my opinion. At times, there's nothing wrong with having a couple, throwing a couple back in the office.

Wait, he had some unfortunate things happen at Zenefits? Yeah. Really? Really? I'm hearing this for the first time. He had some unfortunate things happen at Zenefits. Really? Really? I'm hearing this for the first time. Woo! You got the sound effect now. I missed it on the first attempt.

At times the complaint ventures into psychoanalysis territory to understand Conrad is to understand Rippling, the suit claims. Man, everyone's chirping. But, you know, I think this show, we want to be independent. So we're taking the side of CO2, because CO2 is invested in both.

Yes, yes. Let's give it up for late stage. Let's give it up for diversification in enterprise. Crossover allocators. Yes, just heads I win. Heads I win tells you. Exactly. That is the real game.

Yeah, we've talked about this before. Ultimately, there's hundreds of billions of dollars of payroll market cap. And they can both be big businesses. And hopefully, they get over the drama. And maybe this is all a sideshow for what's really going on. ADP. I mean, this all comes down to both companies racing

to develop quantum payroll. Quantum payroll. For sure payroll and that's kind of the real story and it's just the drama floating up to the surface. And so yeah, they're fighting back. Interesting timing too because wasn't it just yesterday that Deal said it had been profitable for years and is generating over one billion in annual revenue? And so I wonder if there's a sequence of events here where it's like, OK, take a breather,

be really silent for a while, then come out with some promising news about the financial health of the company, then fire back in the media and in the courts with a countersuit. But unclear. And it doesn't seem like it's quite as aggressive as what Zenith found or Rippling found. It's certainly not as, it doesn't take you

on as much of a journey. Not a smoking gun. Yeah, yeah. I mean the TechCrunch article here actually says when Y Combinator grad Kotool launched an agentic security platform last month, among other things, sets up honey pots it Its ad was a spoof on how rippling's corporate spies said he was caught and so

Clearly it's become a a small meme within within Silicon Valley anyway If you want to save time and money and not have any headaches in your back office You notice by the way that when I point at you, it pops up on both cameras? So I can actually get two hands at one point. Oh, you can, that's good. There we go. That's good.

Anyways. Go to ramp.com, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp, ramp, ramp. Ramp, ramp. Ramp, ramp, ramp. Anyway. Easy use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place Anyway using ramp is a joy Yes, it is people have said that that you know corporate cards and spend management platforms are boring Yeah, but anybody that says that clearly has not used ramp. We were to we were just pitching ramp to it we did a photo shoot yesterday and

We were pitching ramp to our. We did a photo shoot yesterday and we were pitching ramp to the photographer telling him, hey, stop. We never miss a moment. We never miss a moment. We never miss a moment. Yeah. Hey, those receipts, they could be tagged automatically. He was by the end, I mean he was convinced by the end.

I think so. He was ready to switch. Yeah. And you should be too. Thank you to ramp. Anyway. We have a story here. Microsoft bets on agents to fuel next chapter of AI growth

Yeah, so we heard that that quote from such an Adela that The amount of inference that's happening on Azure has five axed and they're generating I think hundreds of billions of tokens at this point trillion trillions of tokens. It's absolutely massive So the question is Microsoft's in a perfect place to deploy agents. They have the distribution, but who's actually behind this team? And we said yesterday, they already

have 70% of the Fortune 500 using CoPilot. Yes. Which, again, is hard to really evaluate what that usage actually looks like. But how would we even do that? I mean, because they were obviously very successful with Teams, right? They got Teams into everyone, and they really

did switch over and spike the growth of that company in that product. At the same time, Google's been quoting, saying that they're using generative AI search results. And it kind of counts, but it kind of half counts and you have to like discount it a little bit because it's not, it's not a consumer choice to move over to that product. It just kind of happens naturally.

And so it's interesting to dig into Microsoft strategy because they seem to be the way I heard it described was that Satya Nadella has obviously done a fantastic job as CEO of Microsoft, and he's carved out a ton of territory in artificial intelligence. The question is, how much can he hold on to, right? And this isn't to say that seeding ground is a loss necessarily, it could be the strategic move, but there's this question of,

even just to the point of, I wanna be a leaser, how much CapEx do I actually wanna be spending? Do I wanna own the land? You could vertically integrate all the way down in the AI factory, but they're partnering with people, they're leasing, they also own data centers, and there's a question of, Microsoft has an AI research team that,

at one point was training models, now they seem to be much more model agnostic, and you saw that with Microsoft Build, where Satya highlighted the importance of being able to choose your own model, which is something you can do on GCP and AWS as well. But Microsoft has really leaned into that, even with intelligent model routing within different,

different OpenAI and LAMA instances. And there's lots of different ways that they've plugged in. So let's dig into how they're betting on agents. This is from the information. In March at a Microsoft All Hands meeting, one of the company's newest executives, Jay Parikh, laid out a rough vision of Microsoft's path forward in artificial intelligence.

AI models made by OpenAI and others were quickly becoming commoditized by more efficient models from DeepSeq and Microsoft's path forward in artificial intelligence. AI models made by OpenAI and others were quickly becoming commoditized by more efficient models from DeepSeek and Microsoft's own research arm that performed nearly as well for a fraction of the cost, Parikh said. Sitting alongside Chief Executive Officer, Sachin Nadella, and Chief Technology Officer, Kevin Scott,

that meant it would soon become easier for companies to build their own AI applications and that Microsoft could cash in on that growing market by redoubling its efforts to sell them tools for doing so," said Parikh. In recent months, Nadella has made similar comments in staff meetings telling employees that Microsoft needs to focus on platform, platform, platform. A refrain harking back to a speech by Nadella's predecessor, former Steve Ballmer, from the late 1990s

in which he uttered the memorable chant, developers, developers, developers. And if you haven't had a chance to go listen to Steve Ballmer's interview on Acquired, it is fantastic. They've been posting a bunch of clips. I've listened to most of it. It is, he really opens up

and it's just an incredible piece of history. And it's really fun. There's a clip going up right now where Balmer talks about when he took over as CEO from Bill Gates and essentially him and Gates didn't talk for a full year. Wow. Even though Gates said, hey, I want you not just

to be a figurehead, I want you to actually be the CEO. That means I will report to you, you're the boss. But they didn't really, the way he described it was like they just didn't really know how to deal with each other anymore, how to work together. It was very interesting, like somewhat emotional even. Anyway, Nadella's clearly paying homage to Steve Ballmer,

but also focusing on this idea of platform, platform, platform, which is similar to developers. Like he wants developers on top of the platform, but you need to put a little twist on it. You can't just- I'm actually excited next week at Demo Day with YC. I want to get a sense of how many companies are building on the broader Microsoft platform, Azure, et cetera.

We talked to someone at last Demo Day who was there handing out tons of credits. Yeah, yeah, Azure, et cetera. We talked to someone at last demo day who was there handing out tons of credits. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Britain. Yeah, it was kind of a- I'm sure he'll be back there. He runs their startup team. And so yeah, I mean, I can imagine if the platform is offering a lot of flexibility

around these tools, like building on top of that platform lets you switch in and out of different models very quickly, means you don't have to shift as soon as like a new model is going viral here just like okay I just swap it into my Azure stack I don't even need to set a billing on a new platform. The comments from Nadella and Parikh reflect a subtle but important shift in AI strategy at Microsoft. No big tech company has benefited more from the frenzy around AI than Microsoft whose 3.44 trillion market capitalization makes it the world's first or second most valuable company, depending on the week.

Nvidia took the crown on Tuesday. Wow, let's hear it for Nvidia. So, so far the bulk of the company's AI revenue has come through its relationship with OpenAI, and there's this really interesting WCN chart. That chart is just unbelievable. It's crazy. He's doing so well.

Unbelievable. Yeah. So there's a good chart here from the AI bonanza. Most of Microsoft's estimated AI revenue so far has come from its relationship with OpenAI, which includes revenue sharing and leasing Azure servers. So they're making about an estimated $10 billion this year from OpenAI and then a three billion from other AI sales

to bring their total AI revenue to 13 billion, which seems significant given how nascent this industry is. So what are the actual, is that revenue that OpenAI is passing back to them? Yes, yeah, yes. So they get a revenue share from OpenAI. From selling Yeah. Yes. So they get, so they get a, they get a revenue share from, uh, from opening up from selling open AI products from, from vending, uh, GPT four as an API, opening at also is paying Microsoft to lease Azure servers for training and

inference. And then I believe that they're entitled to a cut of revenue or profits up to that $100 million cap. Which I don't think, I wouldn't assume has kicked in at all. Yeah, me either. I thought it was like net earnings. Yeah, yeah. But clearly.

Still, that's crazy. 10 billion, yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Open AI is training and the GPUs are on fire and they need to scale. And so, even if they had no relationship with Open AI, you would imagine that they'd be load balancing across the different hyperscalers and and and yeah trying to soak up GPU Capacity wherever they could and so, you know if you look at which is crazy

So the number of soft invested a billion in 2019 2 billion in 2021 10 billion in 2023 and then 750 million late last year. So then they're 10 billion and they're they're generating, you know, obviously, it's not necessarily profit. It's margin, but it's a lot. It's a lot. I mean, the margin of Azure is not low. It's you know, over 30% right? So they still own half of 49% of opening global LLC. It's amazing.

Sacha, it's the best. But again, it's like, he doesn't own it all. And so as OpenAI kind of goes more independent, how much can Sacha hold on to in terms of the consumer AI market if the narrative around OpenAI is the, what did Ben Thompson call it? if the narrative around OpenAI as the, what did Ben Thompson call it? Like the unwilling consumer tech company

or like the unexpected consumer tech company. Like if OpenAI becomes the next Google, what will that relationship with Microsoft look like? Because they could, I mean, they're building their own servers with Stargate. And so that revenue could go away over the long term, even though it seems like they will be partnered for a very long time.

Anyway, we'll have to dig into it more. We wanna have some Microsoft folks on the show. And I would love to know how Azure is tracking against inference versus training loads, because we didn't get that from Jensen in the Nvidia earnings call. But that seems to be an important question that is on everyone's mind As we hit the GPT 4.5 and and this in the pre training scaling kind of wall

obviously the the The hope is that we shift to inference very smoothly and GPU demand continues to grow and the overall industry grows very quickly But it's still like an open question. We don't have a lot of hard data on what's happening there. Anyway, Microsoft is particularly bullish. This is from the information, of course. Microsoft is particularly bullish on a new category of AI applications called agents,

which will be able to carry out tasks. This is maintaining a spreadsheet to keep track of unpaid bills or patching websites after outages with minimal human oversights. Agents are all the rage throughout the tech industry, not just at Microsoft, with other enterprise giants like Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, rushing similar products to market.

The growth of agents could take off with cheaper AI costs, leading to the rise of what some executives call the agentic web, in which most of the world's computing power is taken up by autonomous AI software. We need to figure out and understand agent force, which is Salesforce's digital labor platform, what adoption actually looks like over there. From my sense is like they're force feeding people it,

where it's like, hey, you like our CRM? You will also enjoy our digital labor platform. And if you don't buy it, you will, we're just gonna to charge you more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of these products that are seeing rocketed adoption based on, I mean, it's almost like the bull case for some of Google's

tools that like VO3, we were joking about that post yesterday that some of the products are amazing but hard to find. But at least you know that if a Google model is going viral, it's authentic. People really love it, versus it's rarely just, oh, they just stuffed it in everywhere and it doesn't really count.

The numbers don't really count, because it's pretty hard to go and find these models, versus if Microsoft chooses to roll out, co-pilot in every installation of teams by default, that could trigger a lot of like daily active users, but are they really getting those tools or are those tools just kind of sitting in the background and then companies are going to other more focused,

more dedicated startups or businesses for those agentic workflows. Anyway, for Microsoft, taking advantage of the shift toward agents means making new, inexpensive models available on Azure and as an alternative to larger models, embracing open source protocols that make it easy possible to build agents

and launching new products that let customers set up their own custom built agents. Perique said at an event connected to Microsoft's Build Conference, our goal is to build a new stack that allows anyone to build AI driven applications and agents and orchestrate them. At the center of the shift is Perique, a former meta executive who joined the company in October

in an unnamed role. Very cool, just like, hey, we just want you. Off the org chart. Off the org chart. Just the playbook. Yeah. In January, he became head of a newly formed unit called Core AI that unified groups from across the company,

including the company's developer platform, GitHub, its internal developer division known as DevDiv, and several teams that previously ported to Azure head Scott Guthrie, and were focused on running AI models on cloud servers. Parikh now oversees more than 10,000 staffers at Microsoft. Let's hear it for massive org. He's got almost 5% of the org chart reporting to him. He's definitely on the org chart now.

Good luck getting him in the same room. Yeah, you're gonna have to rent a basketball stadium to have your staff meeting. I'm sure Satya could arrange that. After this story was published in Nadella on Wednesday, announced another reorganization to staff focused on agents, consolidating executives running LinkedIn, Office 365, and business applications

under executive vice president Rajesh Jha, whose groups will, those groups will aim to sell out of the box agent applications to customers while Parikh's unit focuses on getting companies to build their own agents on Azure. So a little bit of a divide between what's being vended into the office customers and what is more on the Azure side and enablementment of developer workflows in on top of Azure Surprised Microsoft hasn't slapped some agents in LinkedIn yet, you know

I got you should be able to have a link an agent that just replies. That's where he needs to come Yeah, bring us Clippy. We got to bring back Clippy. I think we can make it happen It's it's we're soasi on the show and the entire time we'll just be like the bulk case for Clippy. I really think it could make. Like actually we don't have any questions. Like we really just. We're just pitching you. We're just gonna be pitching you on.

I mean, yeah, Microsoft is one of those brands that's like, it's still cool, but it's not fun. You know, it's a little bit like serious business and just having a little. Clippy used to be's not fun. It's a little bit serious business, and just having a little... Clippy used to be so much fun. It's cool because it's such a behemoth. It's so efficient, behemoth. It's just a monster.

And reliable, and button-dopped, and clean. And it's reinvented itself multiple times. But they also have Xbox. They like to have some fun. They like to play some Call of Duty. They literally own Call of Duty. We need to get a racing simulator here at the new studio Speaking of speaking of games and a golf simulator in the green room to just let yeah like guests

You know start to get warm up flights in my flight simulator. That's been like a 30 year project Anyway, if you're if you're designing For anything really get on figma figma comm think bill your build faster figma helps design and development teams build great products together Go to figma comm to get started is the backbone of the show. I want to see if they even put Customer low. Okay, so they do. Hmm. You're really into the customer logos. I am I just think you want to understand like the range Coinbase dribble dropbox, GitHub, Herman Miller, Microsoft, New York Times, One Medical, Rakuten, Slack, they got them all.

They got them all. And you should be on Figma too, go check them out. Try some of their new products, they are fantastic. Yeah. They are going to be, so this is another quote from Danny Fish, a Janice Henderson investor portfolio manager who oversees two funds that hold a total of $800 million in Microsoft stock.

He says, there are going to be software companies that are able to embrace and adopt that, and there are going to be software companies that are going to find highly, that are going to find it highly disruptive to their models. Microsoft ability to embrace that will be really important. So you want to offer enough tools to empower the companies, but you also need to allow the flexibility so you don't lose companies who migrate off platform because they're just like, I'm going to build everything myself with new, you know,

I'm going to vibe code a bunch of agents and I don't need you for anything. You want to have like the full continuum and seems like Microsoft's in a position to kind of index the market. It will be interesting to see, we should start pressing more of the founders that come on that are building kind of like agentic enterprise workflows

and see how they're positioned against Microsoft. Are they seeing Microsoft deal cards go up against them when they're pitching? Or is it like purely additive? Because I feel like probably for the Fortune 500, you get a very white glove experience with Microsoft, and they tell you every product they're working out. But in more like the SMB self-serve market, it might just be a situation where you see a viral video

or get an intro from an investor, and then you start spinning up whatever. Yeah, I really want to get a better sense of what B2B agents are getting, have sticky usage. I can imagine the, obviously you see it in developer tooling. Seems like it's getting there in legal. Sales, I think, is happening. But at the points

that I notice it are when the person you know that the agents are sort of messing up and saying you know hey I enjoyed hearing you on X podcast talking about Y subject with Z person like actually saying that. I got an email today of somebody that said, oh, interesting. Jordy, it was great hearing you on X podcast talking about why this. Wait, wait, but it hadn't populated it? It didn't populate it.

Oh, it made a mistake. X podcast, why? That doesn't even feel like an LLM here, hallucination. It's probably not. That feels more like a if statement gone wrong. If statement gone wrong. Wow, well, I mean maybe maybe For for the one person that went on a podcast That's just named acts to talk about to talk about why I person named Z

Because there's why Combinator to talk about there's probably somebody who goes by the name Z out there, right? It's actually surprising that nobody said drop the Combinator Just why? Just why. I mean, that's what happened with the YMCA. They call it just the Y. Yeah. Just the Y.

Go vertical with the Y combinator. Parikh was impressed by the team of Microsoft employees who developed AutoGen, an open-source framework for building AI agents and aimed to move more of those employees into his unit, including researchers that were previously within Microsoft's research unit led by Peter Lee, but a Microsoft Research Vice President who oversees generative AI research pushed back on Parikh's attempt to move the researchers to his organization, according to someone who spoke to her. So the information is kind of digging into like all the internal politics of the 220,000 person organization as you're trying to build a different team, kind of build

a green field AI agent strategy. There's obviously a lot of chips moving around the board, a lot of internal resources changing hands, and you want to hold on to your best people. The internal politics at Microsoft must be staggering, given the scale. I mean, it's like Washington, D.C. in size, so it makes sense.

A nation state. Yeah, I mean, 220,000 people is like a small city, like a medium-sized city, actually. Yeah, it's basically the size of Qatar, I think. Wow. Like the actual residence. Does Microsoft have a 747 yet? They probably should get one.

Yeah, they should. I heard a funny thing that apparently the Qatar jet was up for sale for like three years. Maybe no one wanted to buy it because it had been like so overly retrofitted to be like opulent. We were like, there's too much gold. There's too much gold. It's hurting the It's hurting the gas mileage. Like this plane is now too heavy. So there's 380,000. Okay. So it's a very citizen close to quite a bit more, but, uh, not that Microsoft could look to acquire a small nation. So you rebrand it as Microsoft, Microsoft land. I mean, it's the ultimate, it's the ultimate out-home ad just to be on the map. Yeah

Yeah, well speaking of out-of-home ads go to ad quick comm out of home advertising made easy and measurable say goodbye the headaches of out-of-home Advertising only ad quick combines technology out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe We did a photo shoot yesterday. We're gonna be going up on a billboard, baby. I can't wait for this. I need to ask our photographer. I need to get these ASAP, I'm so excited. We'll be dropping on the timeline.

Stay tuned and please subscribe to us on Axe. Follow the at TVPN on Axe. I don't know why you would see this and not be subscribed. There are plenty of people. But there might be people in the RSS feed or something. Maybe you've been, maybe it's like, oh, that's too much content.

A, let the algorithm sort it out. But B, just give us a follow, just for a little bit. We're so close to 64,000, which is another doubling. We'll be doing something to celebrate, so thank you. And in other news, Snowflake is buying crunchy data for $250 million. This is from the Wall Street Journal.

The cloud data company aims to attract customers who want to build their own artificial intelligence agents. Let's give it up for a base hit for these investors. Yes, 250. It probably didn't return the investors' fund entirely, but it's still a fantastic outcome, hopefully for the team. Yeah.

And so we got it. We have to do like a database day or get a bunch, start talking to some of these database folks, because Snowflake, Databricks, Palantir, they're all making serious moves in this space. And they're all kind of moving to different layers of the stack. Like Databricks is now more of this like data lake, like data unification layer,

and then Palantir sits on top as like the ontology layer, actually understanding how all of the different data interacts, and so they're kind of playing nice, and a snowflake and Palantir used to be kind of comped directly to each other, but they've diverged in the public markets but still You know

It's in snowflakes like a fantastic and like an incredible story of an incubation It's our hill ventures that went Massive and IPO and went into the tens of billions of dollars data bricks is also up there in the tens of billions of dollars A lot of people are waiting for them to IPO and so it's a a very interesting dynamic. Now, Databricks bought Neon, a similar database startup, in a deal valued for about a billion. Now Snowflake is buying Crunchy Data. Great name. Yeah, Crunchy Data.

The naming schemes in like enterprise SaaS, like deep down in the, are just wild and entertaining. Like Datadog remains one of my favorite startup names of all time. I mean, yeah. It's so funny. Datadog, I mean, you have, last YC demo day, we met the founder building Pig.

Pig was great too. We gotta check in on Pig. We gotta check in on Pig. I don't exactly remember what they do, but I remember the name. Yeah, yeah. It'll only be a matter of time until we see like the now searching pig AI Luckily, I was able to find it pig.dev there we go an API to launch and automate Windows desktop for pig Let's hear for pig. It's a great name. I think you know if pig is successful

Yeah, inspire a generation of companies named after animals Yeah, monkey goose. Yeah horse Yeah, horse.ai. We don't actually some we don't have any animal name companies Although we do want we do want animals to start sleeping on eight sleeps. Yeah, that's something We're pushing for we think animal testing is gonna make a big comeback in the mattress market Eight sleeps are so comfortable. We're gonna have your dog should be sleeping on eight sleep. How'd you sleep last night? I think I had a rough night. I was up at five on the grind Let's see. I actually didn't I didn't get the hours in you didn't get the hours in six hours and fifty minutes

I got an 84 Got six and a half, but then. So close but so far Yeah, it happens. It happens to the best of us. Anyway, it's pretty funny. My My son like came in our room at probably like 2 a.m. I was I was half asleep Yeah, but then he just slept like 2 a.m. I was I was half asleep. Yeah, but then he just slept like Perpendicular perpendicular to us. Yeah, so exactly was getting two different temperatures like half his body was getting you know My wife said yeah, yeah, half the other Which had to been a funny Weird experience, but he's he was sleeping well. He was sound asleep when I left.

Yeah, yeah, I remember showing my son the eight sleep app. And I just had- You know how you can see the left side and the right side and what the temperatures are? Yeah. And he was like, and me for the center. And we're like, no. They don't make that yet.

They don't make that yet. And also- Go back in your room. Go back in your room. I had to pull up startups named after animals, okay because there are actually a few male chimp Mmm, host gator male chimp mule soft post hog post hog post hog is like pig It's the same thing hog and a pig post hogs Yeah, I mean it's it's an iconic it's like postmodern like post hog like we are post hog

We are now in domesticated hogs, which are pigs So pig in many ways is the post post hog. Yeah, I don't even know if this is a hog Task rabbit survey monkey hippo insurance is a big no zebra. Yeah Tractive, okay. Okay. Now we're going now. We're hallucinating Hallucinating fat llama a pure hat llama peer-to-peer rental platform Lunch badger a cloud Hallucinated this is not real no it's real It's in a crunch base. Let's go. I mean if it's in crunch base

It's well is it in crunchy, but the thing that stands out about pig is that it doesn't add anything before or after no No, it's like ramp Yeah We're like Vanta automate compliance manage risk prove trust continuously Vanta's trust management platform Takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program Back to crunchy data crunchy has roughly a hundred employees scaled pretty quickly They'll join the company once the deal closes which which is expected to close in the next couple weeks.

Crunchy Data will be part of an offering called Snowflake Postgres. The vision here is that Snowflake Postgres will simplify how developers build, deploy, and scale agents and apps, very relevant to that Microsoft story we were talking about earlier. With that in mind, it was important to acquire a company

that was not just engineering and quick experimentation. Crunchy Data is a cloud-based database provider that helps large businesses and government agencies use Postgres without needing to manage infrastructure themselves. I've used Postgres before. There are some offerings. It's crazy, I didn't realize Crunchy Data

was founded in 2012. Wow, overnight success. Overnight success. Overnight success. You love to see it. Congrats on the $250 million sale. How much did they raise, I wonder? I'll find out. There's a couple other deals.

Snowflakes offers a platform for storing, organizing, and analyzing data across multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The company, which went public in 2020, grew rapidly during the pandemic as more companies migrated their data to cloud storage from on-premise data warehouses, which is, it's crazy that we're still in the cloud migration era

from on-prem data warehouses. This is, like, cloud data has existed for a decade and still happening, and if the AI rollout is any similar, or if it tracks similarly, it's like, we could be talking about agents for the next decade and just continually rolling these products out in a very, very slow takeoff scenario. Crunchy data only raised 14 million.

Wow, there we go. Very efficient. Very efficient. Well, speaking of other efficient businesses, there's a story from our friend Chris Best in the information. He says Apple's App Store changes, quote, have been fantastic.

And this is why I wanted to highlight the efficiency. He said, Substack was accidentally cash flow positive in the first quarter of this year fantastic growth has been translated as revenue best said the company which was founded in 2017 was accidentally cash flow positive during the first quarter of 2025 that said sub stack is not focused on profitability right now he said as it hopes to continue investing in growth said that substack apps users are heavily in the US

where Apple has been ordered by federal court in Northern California to allow app owners to offer users alternative payment mechanisms, allowing apps to bypass Apple's 15 to 30% fee for in-app purses. So, had Apple been taking... Yes, if you went in the app and then you subscribe to a Substack and you use the in-app payments flow they would take 30% of that on an ongoing basis

I didn't even know that was possible. I've never signed up for a sub stack in Yep, yep, and so it's crazy because this this Yeah, I mean, it's a digital product, right? And so it is- Well, it's interesting because Audible has found a way to get around this by- Credits and stuff.

The credit system, which is just so annoying. Yeah, I think that that's a bigger negotiation because it's Amazon. Yeah. And I think Apple had more leverage over Substack, but we should have Chris back on the show and ask about how it actually works. But yeah, I mean, I feel leverage over Substack, but we should have Chris back on the show and ask about how it actually works. But yeah, I mean, I feel like most Substack users

would be actually fine going through a web flow. It's not as much of like an impulse purchase. You really, you know, you have a relationship with the Substacker that you're subscribing to, you kind of understand. And it's pretty easy to message. I feel like the average Subst-stack user probably understands a little bit more about the Apple App Store tax.

There are also desktop respectors. Exactly. There's a lot of corporate athletes. Email, corporate athletes. You know, people that are sitting in front of their computer all day long. And what better place to buy things than the computer? Buying things on the computer is really historically

and still today just a fantastic experience. It's fantastic, especially when you have your sales tax automated with Numeral. That's right. Numeral HQ, put your sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. You may be able to avoid the Apple tax,

but you will not be able to. Not this one. Avoid state sales tax on software and consumer goods sales tax CGI yes anyway subsack isn't now has more than 50 creators who are making millions of dollars per year on the platform best said the platform overall has more than 50 million five million paid subscribers so yes such a dollars I didn't realize they read so they raised so much but that's great that they're profitable yes I mean I I think this is

such a great story where they this is a business that that raised ahead of where they were sure and then a lot of people wrote them off yep because they were like wait this is just a media business with a take rate and all this stuff and what Chris has been able to do over the past year. When we had him on the show, I was kind of asking, has it felt like Substack has broken through really into culture, becoming a real brand itself outside of Twitter, right?

Because they basically got, like like Elon came for them hard. And that was like somewhat warranted because they launched like a competitive product. I thought the competitive product happened like as a response to the link ban. I thought that was the sequence of events. It was links being getting deprioritized somewhat and then Substack launching a post competitor,

which I don't even know if I agree that that was the right move. I haven't really played with that product. But there was kind of a focus. It seems obvious that X was gonna ban Lynx either way. That hurt Substack, it hurt the writers on Substack, and was the right decision for X. Yeah.

So there was a link suppression. And then, Hamish, one of the co-founders, called Elon Musk a propagandist with more conflicts of interest than El Chapo. Spicy. But ultimately, interesting. I had never, I never, I never picked this up. What?

Apparently Musk had made some type of proposal to buy Substack in 2023. Yep, but probably. After that they restricted links. Yep. And. And Twitter formerly had bought another publishing platform. I don't remember the name, but they rolled that in. And then I think they closed it down.

And now you just have the ability to write pretty long posts. You can post articles, X articles, directly on X. And I think that it's weird because we have yet to see, like we are an example of a media business or a show that just said we will play the game by Elon's rules on X. So we don't think about links at all. We think about what are the products that X loves text posts?

memes images Video uploads live streams and we do those very very well and that's what we focus on and we don't so we're not intention We're like leaning into what the platform loves. Yeah, we should actually consider doing articles on X the question is what would it look like if you tried to build a articles on X. The question is, what would it look like if you tried to build a sub stack like business? Like you're just a writer and your output is articles. And you use X's subscription tools and the articles feed

to have that experience of one free article a week and then one paid a week and you try and build up the book of subscription business on your X account. I've seen some people that have subscriptions turn on I think I actually technically have subscriptions turned on. I think only Gary Tan is like the one who subscribes me shout out Gary Tan, thank you Yeah, ultimately the thing what's interesting about substack is they were you know, effectively benefited from Zerp Yeah in terms of accessing capital. People started to write them off

because I don't think, I think at times, their growth was not best in class. They were just sort of chugging along. And if he had originally had this idea of, hey, we're gonna build this publishing platform that's gonna allow independent sort of citizen journalism and writing to flourish, and then we're you know, sort of citizen journalism and writing to flourish. And then we're going to launch this sort of social network with streaming and all this stuff.

That, at certain times, would have been hard to believe, but they actually have executed that to a T. And now when you go on Substack, it does feel like a social network, you know, based on, you know, email as a sort of backbone. So I'm excited to follow their progress more and eventually get really set up on Substack ourselves. Yeah, so next up we have Augustus DeRico coming in. There's an article in Semaphore today. China boosts use of cloud seeding to combat droughts and we wanted to have him come in and break it down for us. The headline is China stepped up cloud seeding to combat droughts. And we wanted to have him come in and break it down for us. The headline is, China stepped up cloud seeding

in the face of severe drought. The country's grain growing regions in the North have been parched for months, leading to concerns over the harvest. Though some scientists are skeptical over cloud seeding's effectiveness and environmental impact, several countries have begun deploying it.

China is already the world's leading user of weather modification, firing chemical compounds into clouds to spark precipitation and has conducted 20% more than by this time last year, apparently causing a one third increase in rainfall. That seems pretty significant. So let's bring in Augustus Dorico and have him break it down for us.

How you doing Augustus? Good to hear from you. I don't know, that sounds like a cruise ship or something. Yeah, yeah, welcome. That's the sound that's in Augustus' wake, you know? Yeah, I think so. Or wherever he goes anywhere. It's great to have you.

Yeah, thanks man. That and size gongs, that and size gongs. Update soon. Wait, you gotta listen to this one. On the thank you man. That and size gongs, that and size gongs. Update soon. Okay. You got to listen to this one. ... journalists on the horizon. Stand by. Great. Who was the guy that was responsible for posting the state, try to stay focused on the mission GIF a while back when I got that text, I got like a hard-eyes text about like, oh, I liked your appearance on TVPN. I'm a social media intern there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the team's growing over here. We got a good crew coming together

There's vibe coding happening over in this in that part of the studio. There's a lot of production stuff going on. It's been a fun time Sweet, so, uh, bring it down. I'm I'm here to ring the alarm bell Totally transparently there are really big problems on the horizon both with China's domestic weather modification program and then their international one. The article that you read or that you're referencing talks about how China is actively retrofitting their Wing Long 2s, right? Talk about like nominative determinism, cool name for a drone, but it is the essentially Chinese equivalent of the MQ-9 Reaper. They're using it for cloud seeding and weather modification operations all across the country.

A lot of that is to fill up the snowpack in Tibet and then use that as a natural water tower for runoff for all of their urban, industrial, agricultural and environmental assets in China. So that's that unto itself is insane. To recontextualize people, the Chinese Meteorological Administration has about a $300 million budget for weather modification. They have 38,000 employees exclusively working on weather modification. And they have two universities that offer bachelor's degrees

in weather engineering, not meteorology, not atmospheric science, specifically engineering the weather. So they are driving extraordinarily hard on this, domestically, just for their own water supply, just to green deserts, just to keep their cities and industry humming. The problem is the international implications of this.

We are in a, and like I critique people all the time for saber rattling with China needlessly, but the Wing Wong 2 has been sold and is being operated in countries across the world, namely Saudi Arabia and Egypt for defense applications, right? So that has its problems for defense, but also for weather modification. The CMA has explicitly said they want to export cloud seeding as a means of soft power to control water supply and weather across the world. They already collaborate very closely with the Thai Royal Rain Making Department.

And they can easily retrofit these drones that they've sold for defense applications. The Royal Rain Making Department. Wow. Great name. Great name. But they can easily retrofit these drones for weather mod as well across the world.

And then not only control the shipping and receiving and the ports, not just the energy infrastructure, nice, but also the water supply and weather. And President Lyndon B. Johnson said, whoever controls the weather controls the world. And right now we're trending towards a world where China controls the weather and subsequently the world. And it's really Rainmaker Technology Corporation representing the United States against the CMA. So President Donald Trump, if you can hear us, Secretary Rubio, if you can hear us,

the State Department should be involved in this soft power conflict on weather modification internationally. How are you thinking about the current pitch for weather modification? Because it feels like this news out of China has a few different hooks, as well as agriculture and drinking water much of China is reliant on hydro power for

electricity Sichuan in the southwest gets 80% of its power from dams meaning that droughts can lead to electricity shortages I mean I know we have the Hoover Dam but is hydroelectric power important in America obviously Obviously power is top of mind for everyone, but in America it feels like the narrative has shifted to nuclear and solar, but is there a world where we could be getting more out of our existing hydroelectric assets and there's maybe a narrative there or not?

A hundred percent, right? Nuclear is awesome and I'm super excited for Ballertomics to turn a thousand reactors online in their giga sites and produce the world's energy. But it's going to take at least a year for that to start and it'll probably take years longer still until that's our main form of stable base load. Solar is great but we have nighttime still and Reflect Orbital hasn't solved for that problem. So we need stable base load and we need clean base load. And hydroelectric power across hundreds of dams in the American West produces hundreds of gigaweload and we need clean baseload. And hydroelectric power across hundreds of dams

in the American West produces hundreds of gigawatt hours. And we can refill our own dams to increase more stable, clean baseload with cloud seating. Where these dams are drying up right now, we can increase supply. You know, 80% of, you mentioned Sichuan, 80% of Columbia's power comes from hydroelectric as well. And they're going through a drought right now. And so they have rolling blackouts because there's not enough power there. Both

domestically for our own energy production, we could use cloud seeding to produce more hydroelectric. And then internationally, again, as a means of collaborating with other countries, let's call it, and ensuring that they have American interests in mind, we can produce more water and hydro for them. Can you talk about the Chinese approach to cloud seeding versus what you're doing in the American approach? I feel like a lot of times when we see a competitive dynamic emerge between China and America,

there's only a small tweak between the way Instagram reels are served versus TikTok or DJI drones versus GoPros. It's usually just the scale and efficiency and reliability of Chinese technology, but there isn't usually that much of a shift in the underlying strategy. Are they using the same chemicals? Do you think we should be using different chemicals from their mix? Are they using different drones or are they shelling this stuff into the into the into the atmosphere with howitzers? Like are there is there anything that we can learn that might not be IP protected that we could safely port back?

Is there anything that we should change based on what we're hearing from over there? Um China's throwing the kitchen sink at weather modification research. So they're doing drone based aerial cloud seating They're doing ground generator based cloud seating. they're doing drone based aerial cloud seeding, they're doing ground generator based cloud seeding, they're doing acoustic cloud seeding research, meaning they have these huge 130 decibel speaker systems where they just blast it at clouds, they put them all into bed. So even though it's like destroying the ears of Tibetan villagers, they're trying to shake water out of the clouds. So that they have a bunch of other photonic stuff. They're doing a ton of research, but really the big and important aspect of this is their sophisticated military retrofit of drones for long endurance missions, their radar research

for detecting phase change in cloud. And then lastly, I think the thing that they have like the most serious edge on the United States than anybody else in the world in is their ice nucleation agent and their particulate. They're doing a bunch of nanoparticle design. So super, super small scale particle coating is titanium dioxide on top of these salt crystals among other things that are way more efficient

at nucleating ice and subsequently creating snow or condensing stuff in cloud. Rainmaker's doing research into that right now, but that's where China far and away has the biggest lead on the nanoparticles that they're using. How about your challenges at home with various states and regulators? What's the update there?

So 31 states proposed legislation to ban all forms of weather modification this year. Almost all of them dropped that legislation because one. Because of you, because I was it. Did you mean it? Me and the Rainmaker team did a lot of work

around state capitals. I've got like a regular barbershop in Tallahassee and a few other state capitals to tune the mullet mullet up before I testify. But the one state that did ban it was Florida. Florida made weather modification a class two felony. So if I were to work there, I'd go to prison for five years. And that, I think, unto prison for five years. And that I think unto itself is not the huge problem. Fine. Sure. You're depriving Floridian cattle ranchers and orchards from having as much water as they want. And they do have wildfires and

droughts. So it hurts the state of Florida. But the real problem is the canary in the coal mine in terms of American political sentiment, particularly Republican political sentiment, right? There's this whole conversation around the tech right and who is pro innovation and who is not. Is the Trump administration pro innovation? Seems so for the most part, but unless we have clear federal regulation on weather modification and a public stance

in favor of this, then we're gonna lose control of the weather to China. Yeah. What about desalination? So it's something that we were doing in America. We kind of fell off. It feels like the nuclear story. And it just feels like I'm going to hear a story

in the next few years of like, oh, yeah, China just figured it out. And now they have a bunch of desalination plants. And we're behind on that too. Mm-hmm. Been tracking it at all? So desalination is largely held up by the California Coastal Commission and then like HOA is basically that block the construction of desal.

An interesting stat that I... Is it because it smells bad? No, just because it looks ugly. Desalination smells fine. It's just like a bit... Well, it looks, I should say... It looks industrial, right? It looks it looks like a big, beautiful oil refinery, which I personally, but you know,

folks in Newport Beach less so. Yeah, these are great. And if we come up with some really sophisticated new reverse osmosis membranes or catalytic desalination methods with good electrical engineering, we can make it more efficient. But the problem with desal still is that we have to move that water from the coasts. Like it's a non-starter for Nevada or Colorado or Utah to get desalinated water.

What you can do though is cloud seed obviously, right? You can produce water anywhere where there are clouds with our tech. Yeah, I remember Blake Masters was saying when he was running in Arizona, he was saying like the future of California is nuclear-powered diesel and then we need to reroute the Colorado River to hydrate the inner states. Is there a world where you could build, I mean you mentioned it looks like an oil and gas refinery, could you build a like an offshore oil rig essentially, or is

that just like, it's not economically dense enough, water is not the same as oil. So you're not going to be able to pay to put it on a truck and then bring it in. It just doesn't make sense to do it that way. Yeah, exactly. It must flow. I was, I was talking to some commodities traders the other day and I was trying to like come up with some crazy derivatives for water water But like there yet, you know, it's it's it's it's sense for a barrel, right?

And yeah, it's almost as heavy as oil so you you can't convey this You know 13% of all of the electricity in California is used just moving water around what that's good Wow, yeah, like the Central Valley exists just because we pump all of that stuff from the Sacramento Delta and American River down into the valley and elsewhere. There's this huge, huge unknown problem, which is like, because we don't have enough water, we have to dedicate so much of our energy resources

just to moving it around, where we could just be producing it in the Sierras. That's what Rainmaker's doing. Interesting, anything else you're tracking from China? So I guess one thing that I will say in terms of like this soft conflict is we had a customer meeting in the Middle East and a day before we had the scheduled meeting,

they said, hey, sorry, we have to go to a last minute trip to China to go talk about the Wing Long 2. So we're trying to qualify Rainmaker's vehicles in the Middle East right now so that we are clearly at parity with their system capabilities and then can be selected for the Chinese. But yeah, the challenge if, if you look at the precedent for state-backed companies out of China, they're willing to sell at a loss for years.

And so I have no insight into whether they would try to attempt that in cloud seeding, but it wouldn't exactly be surprising, which I'm sure is a competitive dynamic that you're thinking about. Every single international office that we go into to talk about our work, we see a stack this high of purchase orders from China,

and then one that's like two pages thin that's from American companies. So yeah, it's absolutely a problem. Wow. Part of this article highlights this idea that grain growing regions in China have been parched this month, or four months. Are we in a particular global drought?

Is this unique to China? Are we experiencing drought in America? What is the state of drought generally? You mentioned that there are different pockets around the globe, but is this, is this particularly bad year? Are the trend lines bad overall? Or, I mean, we saw the fires and that felt, you know, it felt very visceral in California and Los Angeles,

but you never really know when you zoom out where we are on the trend line. So we, we had, we had out of distribution, high amounts of precipitation this past year in California and in America. Yeah, and even still we had the wildfires, right? Yeah. You know, the thing that I think is a good reference point is the California Department of Natural Resources

water supply strategy. They explicitly plan for half a million to a million acres of farmland in the Central Valley to turn into desert in the next five years just because there's not enough water. So even when we have boom years and the reservoirs are all full and there's tons of snowpack and everybody gets to go skiing in Tahoe, there's not enough water for current demand and that's in part just because population is growing, right? Like we built the Central Valley Water Project to turn the Central Valley from a desert and swamp into the most productive agricultural

region in the world. And we wouldn't have the US population that we do now if it weren't for that water project. And so we just need to produce more if we want to maintain agricultural and economic growth. Makes a ton of sense. Well, good luck out there. We hope you can strike some big deals

in the back of this news. You know, we gotta be competitive. Thank you for fighting on America's behalf You know we got to be competitive. Thank you for Fighting on America's behalf. We'll talk to soon come back soon later. Cheers. See ya bye next up We have Brad from cobot coming in the studio talking about collaborative robots I'm very interested to talk about the the sim to real gap which we covered yesterday We will welcome Brad to the studio. How are you doing? Welcome to the show Thank you for joining.

What's new? Oh, fantastic outfit. There we go. Welcome to the show. Wow. Amazing, looking great. What's the occasion? First, introduce yourself, please,

but explain why the fantastic outfit today. Are you doing real work? Yeah. That's right. Yeah, yeah, hi, I'm Brad Porter. explain why the fantastic outfit today. our deployment with Maersk yesterday and so had this handy and thought there we go. I'd bring it out for you guys. Yeah so I mean to the degree that you can talk about it what exactly are you doing for Maersk? That sounds like important work. Yeah we're helping them in in transload operations in moving and unloading ocean freight containers and loading out onto tractor trailers, they load carts, industrial carts,

full of kind of up to 1,500 pounds worth of, generally boxes of product for retailers. And then we help with moving the carts, because moving those heavy carts around all day long is pretty taxing work. You said 1500 pounds, how big is one of those boxes? I'm familiar with a 55 gallon drum, I'm familiar with a pallet of goods that you might see

on an Amazon warehouse, how big are we talking? Yeah, so think of this as the types of boxes that would flow to a retailer, right? To a big box retailer. And so they're unloading those from ocean containers onto carts that are about three and a half foot wide by about six and a half foot long. And so they just load up as many as they can on the cart and then take it to, you know, usually these are getting dispatched out to big box stores. And so, you know, there might be six tractor trailers that are getting loaded up to go to six different stores in a, in a region. So we're working in the, in the Sumner Washington area. So out of Seattle port and helping basically get distribution out to Pacific Northwest.

Can you talk about some of the differences about unloading at a port versus what Amazon's Kiva systems does within the warehouse and some of the different challenges that you face versus what Kiva is doing? I imagine that some of the there's some learnings that cross over, right? Yeah. So the way you can think about logistics is there's, there's inbound flow, you know, products coming from manufacturers around the world, a lot of it coming from China. And then that ends up in some distribution warehouse ready for people to buy. So it might end up in your,

in your local big box retail, you can just go and, you know, buy a fan off the shelf or it ends up in an Amazon warehouse, an Amazon fulfillment center. So the inbound side of that is to unload the ocean containers and then bring it to, you know, some place where it's being stored or bring it, you know, to a retail store or to an Amazon fulfillment center. And then an Amazon fulfillment center, yeah, that Kiva network or now Amazon Robotics, what they call kind of the Hercules drives, is their storage array. So Amazon will have multiple mezzanine decks of those Kiva pods full of all kinds of things that you might buy from Amazon. Literally can have a million different SKUs in a building.

And then when you order it, almost immediately the system knows where, has lots of those and they're stowed across Amazon's network. It quickly calculates where's the most optimal place to deliver this to you. And then a robot goes and gets that shelf and brings it to a picker, brings it to someone who pulls it out of those shelves, puts it into a tote, and then those totes get routed to a pack station, gets packed, thrown thrown and then it gets sorted to a truck and then usually You know either to FedEx or UPS or Amazon's delivery network or to USPS Amazon could kind of deliver into any of those outbound delivery networks

And so so yeah three phases coming in from the manufacturers stored and ready to be bought and then shipped to you. Where are we at in the kind of AI journey of these collaborative robots? I imagine that there's tons of work that can be done with just hard-coded business logic, drive two feet forward, take a left, and it kind of just is almost like a conveyor belt on independent wheels versus the far future where the robot has a brain and is just making completely independent decisions and decides where it goes and problem solves and reasons and we're on the cusp of that.

But I imagine that there's a journey that we're going through. And so walk me through where we are in terms of that, but I imagine that there's a, there's a journey that we're going through. Um, and so walk me through where we are in terms of that journey. Yeah. So we've made a lot of progress from the days where you just like follow the tape line on the floor. Right. Um, now robots can, can generally sense and perceive and navigate, um, commercial environments autonomously quite well. Usually, you know, at human walking speeds,

maybe a little faster, but the kind of self-driving problem is reasonably well solved in commercial spaces at those types of speeds. And that's generally done with a LIDAR. Oh really? And maybe, you know maybe stereo depth cameras. And so LIDAR based SLAM is how it localizes and then navigation and planning. And that can be done in a way where it can detect humans, obstacles, navigate around things. And that's

the capability our robot has. And it can do that in hospitals, in ultimately airport stadiums, in and around people quite safely. That technology works. What's coming now is you can talk to robots, and the robots will make the high-level plan and instruct that where we need to get to is what we can do with our hands, right?

Where, you know, like open up your AirPod case and pull out a very complicated set of notions that we do without thinking about it. We don't quite have that capability yet. Got it. Talk to me about the LIDAR supply chain and cost structure in your business. It's been a controversial debate point for a long time in autonomous vehicles, but if the economic model works, it feels like it's just pure value add. Is the cost of lidar getting lower?

Are you thinking about solid state lidar coming down the pipe or is it already available? Are you banking on a reduction in LIDAR costs over the long term or does your business model just by nature of how much value you're adding, you're fine paying 50K or something like that, if that's the number, I don't know. Yeah, LIDARs are in the kind of, they used to be 50K,

they're in the kind of three to $6,000 range right now. Yeah. And so you're right, you do have to add enough value. You're not gonna put that on your Roomba, right? But you can put that on an industrial robot and get a payback. Obviously, we'll wanna keep seeing those costs continue to come down,

but it's not a prohibitive Element for a lot of work that needs to get done on can you can you talk about? Form factors broadly and and what guided you you're thinking towards the proxy the initial Product and other products in the suite feels like you guys distinctly chose not to do humanoids even though I'm sure Various VCS thought hey, why don't you have you guys thought about doing not to do humanoids, even though I'm sure various VCs thought, hey, have you guys thought about doing humanoids? Have you seen this demo? Have you seen this viral video from Boston Dynamics?

Yeah. So I'm curious, kind of the decision making that went into the current and pending form factors. Yeah, so I mean, as much as like the humanoid hype seems to have been peaked in the last, you know, 12, 18 months, I think Elon did a lot to kind of fan that. Humanoid robots have been around for quite a while. Agility systems have been at tronic. These guys have been at it for a while. And so, so when I was

leading robotics for Amazon, the, we, we studied deeply humanoids. In 2018, I went through my hype phase on humanoids in 2018. I got really excited about them, what agility was showing at the time and legged mobility looked like it could actually work and it does. And so I had my team at Amazon do a full analysis of everything we weren't going to automate in another way where a humanoid could help. And I remember reviewing this paper, there were 40 different use cases where a humanoid could be great, right? And then we looked at all 40 use cases and we said, actually, to solve these problems,

we don't need a humanoid. And in fact, a humanoid is kind of too complicated. You really want wheels. You kind of want to move more than 3 and 1 1 miles an hour. And is the number of motors a potential issue, too, from a degradation standpoint? It's like we've talked to other robotics founders that say, I'm using robotic arms in my facility,

and we already have to replace those motors all the time, and then a humanoid might have an order of magnitude more and actually be less productive than some type of robotic arm. So the number of motors really does drive the overall cost. It also drives the complexity of the controls, right? And so you get into a world where you need AI-driven controls.

But the problem, the real problem that people don't talk about very much with humanoids is getting strength out of rotational motion is very hard. Right? You you're effectively you because you're just doing a short throw. You don't have the kind of momentum flywheel effect as you get the torques rolling on your electric vehicle, right? You're moving through very short distances. So all the power is basically your electric magnet and then your rare earth magnets. And so you end up needing bigger and bigger motors to get that kind of power. And so, and then you want to wind them with the absolute highest density you can. And so they end up, and then you

want to run them at almost the peak current that you can to get the most strength. So the problem is humanoid robots either have to put this way big motor that doesn't look right in the shoulder. But what they're typically doing is they're hand winding the motors, they're pushing the current to the max, and even then they're getting maybe 60%

of the strength of humans. And they burn those motors out out so the motors are very expensive and they burn them out very quickly and they're still not as strong as a human and so it just it We need some breakthrough, you know the pneumatic like, you know Boston Dynamics had that Atlas robot that like could do back flips and everything pneumatic is 10x the the power of an electric, right? But you can't really make that system reliable in production.

So do you think there are more consumer use cases for the humanoid form factor, maybe around the home? How do you think about applications outside of industrials? You know, I have struggled to find, someone mentioned one to me the other day that seemed great, which is like, is walking your dog. I think humanoid's walking the dog would be quite interesting, quite cool. I suppose you could have a quadruple,

you could have a quadruple dog walk your dog to. Man's best friend's best friend, yeah. But otherwise, I am not bullish I do think there's some some cool robots recently that are more kind of friendly Look like they're kind of playing a game with a kid Like I I think kind of the emotional companion idea is quite interesting. Um But yeah getting the strength is tough I mean even just thinking about the human arm like the force that's generated from the human arm is from like the bicep

Muscle which is much bigger than the actual joint and so if you put a motor on that joint you you're not using You know it was just absolute can there is there is a humanoid company That's trying to create the muscle fibers and yeah that and that sounds like some of the pneumatic project projects And maybe it'll be a hybrid. In terms of training and AI development, there's been this talk about the SIM to real gap. I don't know how closely you've been tracking this, but obviously generating data for robotics

has been very difficult. But now there's this new paper that Semi Analysis was talking about yesterday all about training and simulation, basically Unreal Engine, you build the robot virtually, you have it walk around, learn as much as it can in thousands of years of artificial data, then there's gonna be a gap between what it experiences in simulation and reality.

And so what you do is you take what it's learned in simulation and you run that on a robot in a cage, basically wired up with a power cable so that it can run forever. And it tries to do the moves that it learned in simulation. It messes it up, but then that generates more data that feeds back in. Does that seem like, you know, power generation, all the mechanical issues aside, does that seem like an interesting path to go down for actually solving the algorithmic

and the AI piece of understanding how these robots will actually choose what motors to move at what times? And do you have any experience generating data? Just kidding, I'm just kidding. Former CTO of Scale AI, if anyone's listening that's not familiar. Thank'm just kidding. Former CTO of Scale AI, if anyone's listening, that's not familiar. Thank you. Yeah.

No, that's so the challenge in robotics first is, how do you get, I mean, it's the same in large language. Well, what's the pre-training phase, right? How do we get some base level in pre-training large language models that's to kind of understand how words are likely to follow each other, right? Just statistically. So motor actions, what's likely to cause the arm to move forward and things like that.

But the hard part in any AI system are the edge cases at the end when you're interfacing with the real world, right? And, you know, fortunately, we have all this large language model data, we have all this data from the internet to give us reference examples of what the real world of language looks like, right? And so we refine on that, and then we use human preference to refine even further,

and that's how we get, you know, chat GPT, And so we refine on that. And then we use human preference to refine even further. And that's how we get, you know, chat GBT. In the robotics world, data from simulation, data from multiple robots, data from teleoperation, all of these are kind of techniques people are using to feed some data into, you know, what's kind of the pre-trained base model that gets some statistical correlation. But when it comes to learning the edge cases, right, when it comes to, hey, that doorknob is higher than this other doorknob or the doorknob doesn't, you know, turns upward instead of downward, you and I actually self- play to figure that out.

We come up with a door knob that doesn't, it's funny, we have a door at Cobot that you can either push the handle bar or there's a handle. Well, everyone tries to push the handle and then the door doesn't open and you have to push the, and so humans get confused too. And we do this kind of refined self play. And I think right now we're very much focused

on the pre-training phase, just how do we get enough data to have something that like Roughly moves its hand toward the door sure to really solve this problem though We've got to learn how to self play in the real world like you or I do because There's all kinds of novel stuff. We're gonna run into Solving real problems. Well, good luck with that. It sounds like an easy task, but I'm sure you're up

to the task, and it's been fantastic talking to you. Yeah, this has been super insightful. Yeah, I mean, it's such an exciting industry because it's really just, like, we're still just on the early part of the S-curve, and there's gonna be fantastic advancements so good luck. The future is gonna be amazing. Awesome. Thank you. Appreciate you coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks Brad. Thanks so much. Talk to you soon. Next up we have Kian from Nucleus coming on with a big announcement.

Something like 10 years in the making. Close to it. Maybe 7 years. We'll bring Kian in. Let's play some soundboard. How you doing? Welcome to the show Yeah, you see this There's nothing like a launch day Is this is the data car is it there knows because people? Because people can't make up their mind. Oh yeah, we're going to find out. What's going on? Let's give some context to the audience. Nucleus has launched Nucleus Embryo, the world's first genetic optimization software. Basically, parents can give their children the best start in life. They can pick their embryo based off of physical characteristics

like eye color, IQ, they can go to disease risk like cancers or heart disease. Basically, really believe parents can get all the information that exists about their embryos and they can pick however they want. For me personally, you know, it's been 10 years in the making. The journalists actually covered it today in the Wall Street Journal was a journalist that covered my gene editing in a warehouse in Brooklyn 10 years ago. Yes. Let's see. Wow. Overnight success. house in Brooklyn ten years ago. Yes, let's see. Wow. Overnight success. You know, it's a long time in genetics. Yeah, so break down the state of the art because like embryo screening exists. I think most parents in America, at least if they have the means, do some sort of screening while the embryo is growing.

Is this purely for IVF? Is this just going a layer deeper? And then I want to talk about the regulatory and FDA component as well. Yeah, let's talk about it. So basically, if you go to an IVF clinic today, you're a couple. The vast, vast, vast majority of clinics. The first thing I actually understand is that the IVF process is potentially controlled today by clinicians or doctors. Honestly, couples don't have as much liberty in our perspective as they should. It's their baby, it's their embryos. They should have the right to our perspective as they should. It's their baby, it's their embryos. They should have the right to that information

and they should be able to pick off any vertical. However, today in the clinic, what generally happens is people test embryos for very rare and severe genetic conditions. For example, like chromosomal abnormality, like Down syndrome, for example, or even a condition like cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs or PKU, right?

These are conditions that are very rare that maybe someone might have a carrier for cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs or PKU. These are conditions that are very rare that maybe someone might have a carrier for cystic fibrosis, but again, it's pretty rare. Then there are conditions that we've all heard about, things like breast cancer, things like corneal artery disease, the things that actually kill the vast majority of people today, right? Pronic conditions kill the vast majority of people today. Those conditions are just not tested for in the clinic, even though we have very good science actually that can make those predictions. How do we know this as a DNA company? Well, that's what we do, right?

We build models that predict disease and the way you test those models in adults. So we go from adults to embryos is actually because we can basically well validate these models to show that they work in both the embryonic context and in the adult context. And so what we're really doing is we're going from, okay, instead of just looking for really severe like down syndrome cystic fibrosis, why not do breast cancer? Why not do heart disease? Why not do colorectal cancer? Why not do schizophrenia? Why do Parkinson's? But then why stop there? And this is really the important thing because ultimately, if you think about diseases and traits, the extreme version of any trait is actually a disease. Height is a great example of this. One extreme

end is like John, for example, he's like Marking Syndrome on the push. Then the other end is like me, dwarfism, right? It's like diseases on both ends, okay? So, you know, IQ is another example of this. One end is like, you know, autism. The other end, it can actually be some sort of, you know, a cognitive basically challenge that people have. And so when you think about it, when you start realizing that people have drawn a line

in the sand saying, you can't get, you know, rare diseases, you can't get common diseases, but then they really say you can't get any traits like height. Even though the best predictor we have today actually in the world, the best polygenic predictor is for height. So as a company, we've kind of completely reimagined this and said, wait a second, what's going on here? You should have access to the entire stack. Rare diseases, we do.

Cystic fibrosis, common diseases like breast cancer, and also traits all the way up to something entire stack. Rare diseases, we do. Cystic fibrosis, common diseases like breast cancer, and also traits all the way up to something like IQ. Yeah, so I mean, that test, are you just giving people the data? Because I imagine that once you get into particular recommendations, that's more of what I would expect a licensed doctor to need to do.

Well, yeah, my sense is that you can allow people to get the data from their doctor and then feed it into nucleus. Is that correct? So that is correct. And actually, we have a couple. There was like 10 announcements today. You know how we do it.

We like to do 10 announcements in one day. We are actually very, very excited to announce a huge partnership with Genomic Predictions. Genomic Predictions is actually the oldest embryo testing company that exists. They've done genome-wide testing of embryos for almost a decade at this point, and I think they've done over 120,000 couples for a PGTA, which is a specific kind of test. And so we're actually partnering with them, so we make it very easy for genomic prediction

customers to request their files and actually forward it over to Nucleus. But really, this isn't just for genomic prediction customers. Anyone who's undergoing IVF can go to their clinic and say, I want my embryos, data. You can take that data, you can upload it to nucleus. And then all of a sudden, you know, the application of DNA of DNA makes this technology universally, basically universally accessible. Now how much of how much of the benefit is, is actual, uh, algorithmic analysis,

bringing in other data points to contextualize the data versus just better UI and better hydration of existing text. Because we had a friend on the show who was talking about getting some medical results from a doctor. The doctor's office was closed. It took two days until the doctor was gonna be able to interpret the results.

He was able to just take a photo, upload it to chat GPT and say, Hey, is this, is this, you know, is this really, really bad? Should I be panicking? Because it seems somewhat out of the range and chat GPT was able to say, Hey, you still got to talk to the doctor, but this isn't, this isn't the craziest thing I've ever seen. This is way out of distribution. And so that's almost like a pure UI layer, but extremely valuable. I know it might not be like the right narrative for some people

that it's like not as innovative. But I think that like all that matters at the end of the day is giving people benefits. It's always both. It's always both. Fundamentally, technology, just for technology's sake, it's not siliconized. Siliconized by making something that people want, OK?

And people can actually use. Exactly. So if you think about the nucleus innovation, it's two-pronged, okay? One is in the informatics, right? You know, I've been doing this for five years. I almost, I would argue to myself that I probably spend too much time developing the science, right, because science in a nutshell

isn't actually very useful. You need to expand it, access to it. So on that point, we do multiple different kinds of analyses. They make it such that we can actually provide the most comprehensive analyses that exists today. But moreover, and this is really the, I think a key point to your point, John, is people understand them.

People can see them. I mean, you can pull up the platform, I'm not sure if you guys have shown it already, but it's very easy to sort, compare your embryos. You can actually name your embryos, you can stack rank your embryos, you can understand what the score means. We lead with overall risk, or we tell you, for example,

instead of saying you're in the 99% top for genetic risk for a condition, which, you know, what does it actually mean? We say, hey, you have a 5% chance or the like of, let's say schizophrenia or some other condition. In other words, by leaving overall risk, people have much greater intuitive understanding of the results we're communicating to them. We have genetic counselors on hand. So this really is a, what are we showing here? Are we showing something? Are we showing the- Yeah, yeah, yeah. We pulled up here. Pulled up your website. That's another thing. That's a fun one. That's an Easter egg.

That's an Easter egg. That's the, that's the kind of approach that we're taking here. And I think consumers are responding to it, right? People want to have access to their data. The clinician, the doctor shouldn't decide what embryo implant you should. Okay. So talk to me about what requires FDA approval, obviously, new medical devices. Like if you were developing a machine to take in an embryo

and sequence the DNA, I would expect that the FDA would want an approval for that medical device. But if you are taking data and just showing it to a customer in a different UI, that feels like probably a very light FDA process. And then there's probably a continuum in the middle where once you're making a recommendation They they have rules around that right? We as a company do not tell you which embryo to implant

Sure, you know basically parents the couple has complete agency decide how they want to use the information to plant their embryo moreover Let's be clear height right? I mean, can a height analysis be a medical device? It doesn't even make sense, right? IQ, height, there's traits, for example. Traits are something that I don't think actually belongs in even the kind of infrastructure thing about medical care, right? These are things that go beyond medical care.

These are things that people just kind of intuitively know and that there are DNA tests done every single day for you to see for these analyses because they're not disease analyses, right? So we do both diseases and traits to be clear. My point is many of these innovations, you have to wonder, should the government say if someone can or cannot pick their embryo based off height? That doesn't seem right to me. I think it should be in the complete liberty of the individual to decide that. Yeah, but we're a democratic country. And so if, if you know, a huge swath of the population says that the

FDA should review that type of test or that type of analysis analysis, it could happen. I mean, the FDA reviews all sorts of different stuff. And so I guess the question shifts to like, do you expect a change from FDA on the way these these analysis tools are regulated? I think right now the most important thing is just putting these high quality, rigorous scientific results in people's hands and then helping them basically have healthier children, helping them give their child the best start in life.

I think that generally speaking that people should know, people should have more liberty, more choice in medicine. I think the broader longevity trend actually touches on that point as well. So that's what we're excited to do at Nucleus. Yeah, I mean, the fact that you're partnering with a company on the actual medical device side, like they are doing the sequencing of the embryos, that really takes it out of the Theranos question entirely in my mind. I think you feel like you should be beating the drum there a little bit more

It's like like we didn't say we created some new device, but we have to push it. That's the difference I love the visual of John and his wife selecting between embryos and it's like Tough choice well if we go at the 610 He has you know, it's actually fly commercial once in his life actually we can actually play this game right now Yeah, yeah, we're gonna play a game right now. I'm gonna put in the chat. Okay, your embryo calm game right now I'm gonna put in the chat okay your embryo calm I'm gonna go to it oh my god here we go little Easter egg here okay let's see what's more important to John intelligence or muscle strain come on well absolutely muscle strength let's go where the body go John would John would take a he would you

would happily have a five to Sun if if he had, you know, top 0.01% bodybuilding genetics. Exactly, yeah. Okay, so we're going here, lifespan or height? Come on, lifespan. Lifespan, let's go. Let's go, let's go, let's go. Maybe low depression, you got to be golden retriever mode. You got to be...

You need low depression. You need low depression. Let's go low OCD. I don't mind bouncing around a bunch. Low OCD? Okay, what's more? Let's go... Wrist taking anxiety. Let's go low OCD. I don't mind bouncing around a bunch. Okay, what's more? Let's go. Wrist taking anxiety.

Let's go high wrist taking. There we go, okay. Let's see what you've got. Okay, we're analyzing. Is this some generated bad stuff going on? This is great. Nadia. I got Nadia too.

The enduring athlete, oh. The enduring athlete, let's go. Physically strong, cautious, built to last. Yeah, this is great. Is this driving a lot of attention, a lot of downloads, is this going viral yet? This seems like something that's designed to be shareable. I think we just dropped it right now.

Technology brothers, we got you the exclusive. Let's go, let's go. There you go. Let's put it out there. You can pick your embryo, people say, what's it like? Maybe you're not doing IVF yet. No problem. Funny, only 9% of people choose Nadia.

OK, well, we're contrarian. We like that here. Yeah. That's fun. It's great. Oh, well we're contrarian. We like that here. Yeah, that's fun. It's great. Oh well, well congratulations on the news. Congratulations on the launch. Yeah, the pace is wild. Last thing, what's going on with, have you seen these Just Blood billboards? Oh yeah. They're all over LA. So there is someone who's running a campaign right now, Justice for Elizabeth

Holmes, claiming that Theranos was not the scam people think it was. Why? And there's a documentary coming out and there's billboards all over LA for just blood. Like it's just blood, it's not that big of a deal. And John, just to be clear, there's an exclusive on Technology Brothers next week from this person, right? They're going to tell their story next week just to make sure.

You invited them already, I hope. I want to tell their story next week just to make sure you invite them already, I hope. I wanna hear their story. We are toying with the idea that someone reached out to kind of connect us. We're thinking about doing it, but we're not 100% sure that it would be appropriate for the show. Based on the website, I don't know if it's appropriate.

Yeah, it doesn't look like it was designed with Figma, so I don't know. Yeah, probably not. We can't quite do it. It's a little bit, it's a little bit. The team definitely doesn't use linear. Yeah, but they claim that Elizabeth Holmes has been proven innocent.

And so it's a bold claim. We like to see people making bold claims. By what jury, is my question. Yeah, the jury of someone who knows HTML. Kian, the energy is off the charts. Fantastic. Electric. Electric. Thank you for coming on, firing. The energy is off the charts. Fantastic. Electric. Electric.

Thank you for coming on, firing us up. Congratulations on the launch. We will talk to you soon. Talk to you. I'll see you on Twitter for sure, OK? See y'all. Yeah, we'll see you there. Bye, guys.

Bye. He's going through launch day right now, which is just like, you know, 40 notifications every minute forever. I love it. Well, next up, we have Kathleen from Valthos coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Kathleen? Nice to meet you. Good. Thanks for having me on, guys. Yeah, it. Well, next up we have Kathleen from Valthos coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream.

How are you doing Kathleen? Nice to meet you. Good, thanks for having me on guys. Yeah, it's great to have you. Nice to meet you. Would you mind kicking it off with just a little bit of an intro for those who might not know?

Yeah, absolutely. So I have been at Palantir for the last seven years. I built our life science practice there. So taking some of the same platforms that Palantir uses in defense and intelligence and a bunch of industries and then bringing those primitives over to pharma and biotech and researchers who need to study biomedical data in a secure and collaborative way. So really building out end to end drug development workflows all the way from early

discovery. But then I left a couple months ago and now I'm working on something new. Very cool. So yeah, happy to chat with you guys. Yeah. Awesome. I wanted to get your immediate reaction and help us kind of contextualize the news that came out yesterday or the day before, which was that two Chinese nationals have been charged by US federal authorities with conspiracy and smuggling

after attempting to bring a dangerous biological pathogen, which I'm going to botchch the name into the United States. This fungus is classified in scientific literature as a potential agro-terrorism weapon due to its ability to devastate key crops such as wheat, barley, corn, and rice, causing a number of issues there. So I wanted to kind of get a, you know,

you don't have to go into too much detail, but kind of a high level background on bioterrorism broadly, kind of maybe some like prominent examples, and then even just get your immediate reaction to the news. You know, is this kind of thing surprising to you or are you surprised that we're not hearing more headlines about it all the time? Yeah, totally. So I think the to the second question first, it's like a bad surprise, obviously, but we are absolutely entering this era of an elevated risk of biothreats.

So sadly, I don't think it's something that we should be that surprised about. I think this story in particular, and we don't know that many details on the stories, I won't speak too much to it, but the one that highlights how easy it is really to have any biological material pass across borders, that's obviously both natural or unnatural. And then the second is that any kind of agricultural pathogen is also an enormous threat. So I think when people think biodefense and bioterrorism, they think anthrax or smallpox, which is obviously horrible. But the idea that you can introduce a pathogen that would devastate one of our like primary crops, that would have massive health impact, but it would also completely destabilize our economy and send us into something far worse than what we would see with COVID.

So I do think when when we and governments think about biodefense, it's very much both in terms of human health and agricultural health. But to your other question on what's the primer on biodefense, what are we worried about, I think there's always been this... So we've always had the problem that people study the most pathogenic organisms in the world. They usually do it in a biosafety lab, a BSL lab. These are all over the world. Some regions are obviously more secure than others. So there's always this threat of something natural leaking or being used maliciously. But basically two things changed recently. They made that a lot worse. One is that our ability to edit genomes and actually start changing those pathogens, there's a bunch of new tools to

do that. So like things like CRISPR, which you hear about usually in the medical sense of editing a genome are available on pathogens. Synthesizing new nucleotides and new DNA to do that with, also now commercially available, like we could order nucleotides or you could print them out in some cases in a desktop printer. So that made it, now we're dealing with things

that nature has never seen. And then in the last couple of years with large language models or biospecific language models, we have this idea of AI uplift. So it means that someone like us, not to underestimate your biological skills, but could actually be coached into how do we use these tools guided all the way into making something that is actually way worse than anything nature has ever seen. And this isn't like science fiction. Like Anthropic talked last week, I think, about Cloud4.

They did internal safety trials. They noticed an uplift that goes way beyond just, oh, it's easier to Google a paper about how to do this. And really into that, allowing a novice to access something dangerous. So they released Cloud4 with new security standards to try to combat that. But a lot of models aren't like that. Not everyone has those security standards. Yeah, this has happened.

Was it Timothy McVeigh looked up how to build the bomb with fertilizer and basically blew up a massive government building. And the wreckage from that was insane. If you think about what it would take a terrorist to work in a bio safety lab, it's obviously very complex, but getting easier as you can have an LLM coach you through the process essentially, right? Is that, is that roughly the, the, the nature of the threat?

Yeah, both in terms of the actual steps to take and then what to change about a virus that would make it either evade some kind of countermeasure, which is like some kind of medicine that we have for it, or be more infectious. And I think the real, like, what has a lot of attention in ways in people's minds is that we're not talking about like a state-sponsored nuclear program, that you need these like massive budgets and facilities to make something like that. It's a laboratory and a computer. So it's a really different dynamic of threat than what we've been dealing with in the past. And it kind of self-replicates by itself.

It's like the whole goal. It's an interesting story to me, because obviously over the weekend, there was the Ukraine story around Operation Spiderweb. And that was relatively asymmetric in that whatever the cost of the operation, the trucks and the drones, even if it was $100 million,

which seems really, really high, right? Even if it was taking huge teams, it destroyed a billion dollars plus of assets on the other side. And then when you talk about bio warfare and bioterrorism, it's like, okay, one or two people with access to a lab could potentially do billions and billions of dollars of damage.

Do you think this is a wake up call or this will be a wake up call for the government broadly? How do you expect? What are the different ways in which the United States can defend itself from these types of, you know, obviously this wasn't whatever's being reported isn't a direct tack, but a potential threat in the future. Yeah, the good news is, DOD here, MOD in the UK, there's a lot of defense organizations

already thinking about this and really trying to get ahead of it. It means that we have way more to do, but at least it's on the agenda. And I think it comes down to, so you're like the best defense would be to prevent this from happening. So putting better safeguards on models, putting really strong regulation on synthesis. So who can synthesize what, how do we track that? That's great. There's actually some legislation in the works on both of those things, but that works domestically and it works to contain an accident.

But if we're actually talking about international collaboration, like those kinds of regulations are not really enough. So the way, then we get into thinking, how do you deter something like this to your point? Like, what is the defense against us? And there's really like three pillars that go into it. The first is how quickly can you detect

that something happened? So in this case or in future cases, do we immediately know that something new is circulating? That it's a high risk to us, that it maybe will evade any kind of countermeasure that we have and can we know that before it's an outbreak? And we're sampling from a hospital. And then that leads into the second one, which is how fast can we design or update a countermeasure, so like an antibody or some kind of biologic, to combat

that. And that is really like if we can diagnose and develop as fast as possible, then these weapons are much less powerful, because you're not talking about billions of damages, you're talking about a couple cases that are quickly contained. And the last part, of course, is attribution. So if you can actually say, where did this come from? Did it come from nature? Did it come from engineering? Did it come from a nation state?

That lets you bring the rest of the DOD and the State Department and our allies towards preventing something in the future. And if you can get that cycle down to hours really in terms of detecting, stopping, and then attributing, then you actually have a really robust profile for defense. And there's a bunch of new tech that's going to help make that better. So this is scary, but it also is, there's good news on the horizon too. Can you talk a little bit about the bio practice at Palantir? I mean there's been a lot of potentially like misunderstanding or misinformation about how Palantir works. You know I think most people who understand the company at this point understand that it is a it is an

ontology platform that sits on top of a large database but I think what I'm struggling with is I understand if you're using like the Airbus case study you have a database with all the different parts of the airplane and then Palantir understands helps you understand how the different pieces and lead times for you know this screw and this seat belt and this engine part fits all together so if you're demand planning or figuring out how to manufacture airplanes that's a very helpful tool to understand your supply chain that makes sense to me in the very concrete widgets business That is airplane manufacturing although it is obviously very complex in the bio or pharmaceutical space

I don't really understand the nature of how large these data sets are are we talking about trial data or Manufacturing is it all of these above like how does how does all that fit together? when you're thinking about applications of of data or manufacturing? Is it all of these above? Like how does, how does all of that fit together? Um, when you're thinking about applications of, of understanding large data sets in just the bio world broadly. Yeah, definitely. Um, so the, some of it is more similar to what you're, you described with Airbus, where we're talking about manufacturing or talking about something that's like, it's a process with a lot of moving parts, how do you make these all synchronous and

update when you need to? There's also obviously biologics manufacturing. Some of it is more in the logistics end, which Palantir also talks about quite a bit. So when you're running a trial, making sure that patients and the medicine that they need are in the right place at the right time with the right support staff. That actually looks pretty similar to coordinating flight routes or staffing a hospital. The part that, so those parts are super similar to the rest of Palantir. The part that's probably most unique is when we're actually talking about that trial data or talking about patient level information. And there it really gets back to some of the core concepts of Palantir is how do you work

with multimodal data and see patterns across it. So if we're looking back historically on all trials that we've run and we want to start trying to identify what kind of patients have the best response to this or what are potential side effects, can you start linking together data that's from like a medical record with samples from a lab with sequencing data if you have it? And can you do that in a way that is completely secure, completely auditable, and complies with all the regulation in the space? And that's really the niche that Palantir maybe is not always well understood to fit

into, but that is what that platform was built for. Can you talk a little bit more about the, I don't know, like the long-term future of what you're building. I know that you can't go into it too much, but like there are a bunch of different vectors and opportunities around what we're building in bio and what we're trying to prevent. There's almost like a, like there's a little bit of game theory going on here.

So what would you like to see the United States really, really dominate going forward and where are the biggest opportunities, to both increase biosecurity and then also help accelerate the developments that we need, the good stuff. And that is what I'm most excited about. All of these technologies that are really scary when we're talking about them like this actually do have the potential to give us this enormous global advantage in our bioeconomy and how we respond to these threats and make medicine to its two sides of the same coin. I think the two areas that we're most excited about. One is on that detection pillar. So right now a lot of the ways that we understand what's going on around us is super analog. We have like a list of pathogens we're looking for, we test and we get a yes or no if those exist, and not much more than that. We've already seen a shift in this space

towards sequencing. So actually getting the DNA sequence from anything that's in the environment or any sample. So that both broadens the scope of what we're looking at rather than just having tunnel vision on the pathogens we know about, which means that we can start detecting unknown unknowns and things that we've never seen and make a risk assessment. Also using sequence data lets you have this much deeper level of insight into what the risk is

rather than just there's a virus here, you could say these mutations make it more adapted to this type of host or make it more dangerous or make it evade a certain type of medicine that we already have. And then you can take all that information that you get on this more robust detection layer and use it to drive countermeasure design. So we now have like every biotech that you guys talk to probably talks about programmable therapeutics where we're moving to this era where you can update based on how the targets update.

And if we have this deep level of intelligence, we can also start thinking about rather than have a stale stockpile of medicines that were made 10 years ago, can we actually see a threat immediately change the countermeasure and then start deploying that immediately. So I think getting that cycle down really tight. That's what the future is. Hopefully. Are we testing enough? I know when I go through TSA at LAX, someone who was doing a research, uh, maybe for the CDC I talked to, uh, was saying that like they basically just focus on LAX because that's like the

biggest hub of fire It's gonna freak everyone out who flies It's like if you're gonna get sick like if you go to lax, that's where it all starts. It's like a Petri dish I know that they swab my hands for I think it's like bomb making Materials, but should they be swabbing my hands for new pathogens? Should we be doing more in the in the detection should be sequencing random farmland to see if there's new invasive pathogens that could be targeting our crops? Like, and then like, how do we even pay for that? Is that something that the government should foot the bill or or corporations

should be incentivized to pay for? What is the actual like upping the amount of data that we're ingesting look like? Yeah. I mean, I'm always going to say more data is better. Yeah. But the question is like, yeah, how do we get more data? How do we incentivize more data, buy more data, test for more data? Yeah, absolutely. So I think, Vier, of course we should collect more. The type of sequencing actually helps drive down the cost because you can target a wider range of things you might worry about rather than setting up individualized programs for specific pathogens when maybe that's not the threat.

But I actually think with the caveat of more data is always better, we actually do collect a lot of this data today. You don't necessarily see it because some of it is in wastewater or environmental samples, like you're saying. We don't always extract that much intelligence from the data that we do collect. So we know that a sequence exists. We might not necessarily know what that means

in terms of health or the impact of that variant or that mutation. So I do think there is benefit and there's like cost-effective benefit for collecting more. But a big piece is just of the data that does come in. How do we build the right models and the right software to interpret that? Makes sense.

Makes a lot of sense. I think that covers it for now. I would love to have you come back on when you're ready to talk more about specifics on what you're building. And I feel grateful that you and the team are doing what you're doing. Thank you.

And just work a little bit faster, please. If you feel like it. Awesome. Thank you for coming on and giving us some insight here, and congrats on starting the founder path. Thanks very much, guys. Great chatting, and hope to chat soon. Cheers.

Thank you. Next up, we have Roy from Cluely coming back for an update. He's hired 50 interns, I think, or something close to it. He said they're bringing every intern on. They're bringing every intern on. We got every intern coming in. Well, welcome to the studio, Roy. How are you doing?

Oh my god. Boom. Let's go. There they are. I think we're overpowering you. Can you hear us? Yeah, yeah, we can hear you. Yeah, make sure we're zoomed out all the way

so we can see everybody. We got a small army here. This is incredible. How big is the team? Kick us off. How many you got at this point? The team is 11 full time plus the interns. How many interns you got so far?

Interns, bro, we're closing in on 50, brother. You're closing in on 50. 10 there. That's amazing. Congratulations. What are they all doing? How do you manage everything? Is it just, is it purely social media?

Is that what you want them to focus on, growth? Yeah, yeah, growth marketing. Like the only goal of the company is get one billion eyeballs onto Clueless. So we have unrestricted creative freedom and permission to do anything and everything. Uh, just, just make the company go viral. Every single person you see behind you has over a hundred thousand followers on some social media platform. Wow. Wow.

1000 plus that's remarkable. Uh, me too now. Yeah, there we go. Oh yeah, you probably popped you go. What's working? What platforms have actually been driving the most growth? I mean, I'm sure you've run a lot of tests. What have you learned that you can share? Ben, take it away, bro. UGC has been really good. We just

hit 10 million views today. 10 million views. 8 days. There we go. Hoping to get 100 million views today. 10 million views. Eight days. Wow. There we go. Hoping to get 100 million views in the next month. What platforms specifically are the most fertile ground for targeting your specific customer? Because you can imagine that there's a lot of folks who are AI curious on X,

but then there's much broader, more viral audience, more general audience on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, what's working and what is, uh, is the next, next platform that you're going to be focused on? Yeah. Well, we're trying to go viral on every platform regardless. Um, but the main thing right now is Instagram reels. Oh, Instagram reels. Interesting. And what is the main value prop that you're hitting people with?

Is it still the cheat on tests thing or have you evolved at all? What still? Like the interviews. Yeah. Interview? Yeah interviews. Okay, and Has there been it this was controversial when you launched it. Is it still controversial in the comments? Are you getting flamed has anyone big dunked on you and has that driven virality? Is that actually a net positive? Instagram is not like Twitter like you could post the craziest shit on Instagram and they will still not think it's controversial. So how to make it controversial. Like we have to engage in bait some other way.

Like it's hitting tool is controversial on Twitter, but on Instagram, you could, you could have like a white guy say the N word 10 times and it's still not controversial. No lag. Like you need crazy shit on Instagram. That's what we crack. Every single person here has like very great viral sense. And watch the reels that do go viral. You see there's like ways that we've engaged in beta the videos and this is what we'll keep doing to a probably a billion views a month is how long does it take to figure out if an intern is cracked? Is it like an hour or two hours? How much time do you need for me personally? Me personally probably like

10 minutes. But for anybody watching probably would take like one or two weeks. There we go. There we go. There we go How do you guys think about how do you guys think about product marketing? Obviously, you're just going viral everywhere getting all this attention How do you make sure that it that it? Doesn't think about it's not about the product it's about the attention Yeah, but but but how do you about the attention. Attention is all you need. You guys can make anything go viral. Yeah. Yeah, but how do you? The side of the street, you know, you make some UGC videos,

make some Twitter posts, you know, you can sell anything. You know, in 2025, product doesn't matter. You know, I could jack off off the side of a building, sell some videos of it for 20 bucks each, make $2 trillion. It's crazy. $2 trillion, that's intense.

How do you guys think about burn? Is it on your mind at all? I don't know if you saw the last tweet, but as of literally like two days ago We're still pot. We're still cash flow positive. We're still fucking We're still well, let's give it up for the property. Let's hear it. It sounds So you're charging for the product and people are paying are they at all satisfied or do they feel like they got? for the product and people are paying, are they at all satisfied or do they feel like they got scammed? I'm also satisfied, bro. Like the product works.

You're either using this as a consumer and it's working because you're passing your interviews and or if it doesn't work, you're not going to complain to me because I'm going to go right to your employer and tell them, yo, guess who's complaining about using the product? Like, I'll get you blacklisted if you complain really strong. How are you guys thinking about product evolutions? What do you want to add to the product?

Obviously you want to help people cheat on everything. Where are you going to help people cheat next? We don't care about like the product is going to be led by the virality of the content. We have video ideas right now that we're going to try to push for different use cases. We're going to see which ones go consistently the most viral. If you can make something go more viral, then you can just build the technology after you have all the attention.

So we'll figure out the exact use cases and exact niches we're gonna quintuple down on once these guys get to work. What formats on Instagram Reels are the most modern in terms of consistently viral? You mentioned like man on the street interviews, what do you do for a living? That's always been a fertile ground.

What about, uh, I see a lot of those like mobile game ads that look like, you know, you're fighting down some sort of bridge and then you go into the game. It's actually just a match three. Um, what, what, what are the different formats that you like to pull from every week? There's two new ones. And at any point there's probably 10 to 20 viral trends that is happening.

And these cycles so quick, you need to keep your finger on the pulse. These things will like expire immediately. You need to be on the ball. And like, if I told you right now, by the time people watch this on YouTube, like it would have all been expired. Well, we're live.

So give us the latest and greatest. Like what's going viral today? Well, right now we got 10 million views using a Snapchat format. So give us the latest and greatest. Like what's going viral today? Well, right now we got 10 million views using a Snapchat format. Okay. Viral for like the last three years to be honest. Okay.

And I think that like we just have to get people who continuously scroll TikTok like six hours a day. Yeah, but what's the actual format that you use? Like describe the video. What is the hook? Like break it down for me like you're explaining the art behind the viral format. There's a caption, it starts with a face,

usually a handsome dude or a pretty girl, they're saying, damn, this interview's starting with the interviewer's starting with the hard questions. I should have been a CS major, not a business major. That's in game debate because people are saying like, bro, like CS is way harder than business. it turns interview ass like like hey, how are you doing? Why should we hire you and then this guy uses clue to generate a response? But he can't fucking read the spots so he reads it hella autistically like oh I

revel in detail and then that's that is like another conversation point like people are cooking on the guy cuz yeah, he can't read properly The guy's like a doing a really dumb interview using. That's great. How are you guys using AI generated content internally? I know a lot of these videos that you guys are creating are just typical social media, vertical video. Do you have an intern that's just generating basically copy and pasting, making video three or any of these tools relevant?

Anything clicking? Not yet. I think there's still like a 10% left before they cross the uncanny valley. And the biggest thing is that people need to think your video is real. That is the difference between 100K views and 10 million views if people think it is real.

Yeah, what about- Clearly AI CEOs bearish on AI. What about, uh, yeah. Google needs like 10 more Chinese researchers to like figure it out. And once, once they push out the latest update, then, then, then VO three will be there. But right now we need real people. Yeah. Uh, well, I mean, what, what about just using AI as like stock footage replacement?

Not, not as the lead in for the video, not the entire video, but just like sprinkled into illustrate a point, you know, an establishing shot of like a building, a helicopter pulling into a building, like that, that historically has been kind of something that you would reach to, uh, you know, Adobe stock video for VO three feels like it's there, but are you not drawing on that at all yet? If there's a viral format when we need it maybe we'll use it right now like it's it's really brain dead to go viral on Instagram yeah formats are not hard you don't need a helicopter you need a guy a camera a really shitty camera I mean yeah I mean what about like

those those kind of like AI mashups like Harry Potter Balenciaga or the the kangaroo with the plane ticket getting on the plane. Like AI content can go viral when it's really, when it's like inspired almost by a human. It's not entirely AI generated, but it's using the tools effectively to create something that's like still catchy. Do you think you'll be using any of that anytime soon?

Probably very soon. We're scaling up. Like what you see right now is probably about less than 1% of what the size will be by the end of this year. Like we are profitable. We're not trying to be profitable. We just keep making so much money we can't help it. So we're really scaling this shit up. I'm not even trolling you Why do they even have to be employees? Couldn't you turn this into like a multi-level marketing scheme or something? A pyramid scheme? We're gonna do this. Oh, that's what you're gonna do. Okay. MLM.

AI, AI, AI, AI. Are you guys worried that you could be infiltrated by journalists? I'm sure they're circling the house right now. The hit pieces are gonna come. We're doing a softball interview right now. I mean, the person that's brave enough to try to do a hit piece on the Cluely army is going to be. I bet they're dying, too. Look, more eyeballs is better.

There's no company that ever died from a founder being too controversial. You got Deal fucking infiltrating with genuine spies, and they're still doing fine, bro. Worker 17 guys, they're still kicking like no company ever dies from being too controversial. You die because you don't make enough fucking money. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of making money, what's the pricing model right now? Are you doing anything on price discrimination? Is there a super high tier if you get a whale?

What does a Cluely whale look like? Can I spend $2,000 a month on this service? Yeah, you should add a tipping feature too. Yeah, people should be able to tip you guys if they have a good experience Get the job really financialization pay as you go high interest rate loans. Just really push it make it sports gambling in there Maybe just throw it all in. Yeah, I mean it's 20 dollars a month for okay 100 a year and and our top line revenue is really being driven up by enterprise. And we're going to talk to sales team to get a custom quote. But you know, like, there's a lot of you.

Are you serious? Whatever. Is that more on the sales side? What? Who are the enterprise? So you sell the SDRs? You guys laugh because you think I can't sell enterprise because I'm no, I don't believe it.

I trust like these 20, these Fortune 500 500 CEOs like these are like 35 year old dudes who sit there people are laughing at my post. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It seems it seems legit. It makes sense. No, I believe it. But I mean, you're not going even higher tier like what's the $2,000 a month clearly visioned for a consumer. Yeah. More we can do with more compute. But right now we're like, to be honest, I didn't expect to grow this fast. The Edge team is quite small.

I'm going to spend a lot of time trying to hire more competent engineers. We have a lot of backlog tasks that we need to fill out, especially for this last contract that we signed. So we're full-time focusing on the one big guy that we got right now. And after that, then we'll try and scale this up. But right now we're focused on the one big client that we signed. Yeah. Talk about your compensation strategy

that people wanna know. You said you can raise infinite capital and you're so confident, I believe you. But I'm curious to get some more insight there. Bro, I feel like it's so retarded to be a company. Sorry, am I allowed to say that? No, you're not allowed. No, this is a family friendly show. It's very stupid to be a company. There, I'm not allowed to say that. No, you're not allowed. No, this is a family friendly show.

It's very stupid to be a company. I try to race to the bottom to see how little you can pay your employees. Well, if I'm making hella money, we're all making hella money. Like, like it's I'm trying to pay them more to see if, man, like maybe tomorrow we'll start being like cash flow negative. But I would like to pay these guys what they're worth. And the output is fucking insane. We did 10 million UGC views in what like eight days like like you don't see this sort of traction in any company and you don't

see killers like this in any company unless you paying these motherfuckers like what they're worth bro like maxed out contracts maxed out contracts yeah what about devices I mean seem like this would be a natural fit for some sort of AI wearable or other platform. Um, is there an app coming or are you interested in what's happening with Johnny Ive and open AI? What's, what's your take on the device world? Very interested in the hardware space. We've got like a million things cooking on hardware.

We got people in the garage right now working on, you don't even know about, bro. Like, we're bringing manufacturing back to America and it all starts at the Cluely Garage. Cluely Garage. Let's go, I'd love to see it. Nobody, you know, they doubted, but you guys are re-industrializing America.

You guys really are the... There's a hard time coming. There's brain chips down there. They're working on brain chips down there. Yeah, brain chips, brain chips. That's the future. There we go, there we go. The new Neuralink.

Yeah, I mean, there's a world in the future where you guys actually just roll up Neuralink and OpenAI. For sure. Bring them over to the Flulie umbrella, right? Yep, definitely. It's possible. I'm excited to offer acquisitions for both of those companies.

Yeah. It's in the roadmap. It's on the roadmap. All right, this has been a lot of fun. I'm excited for you guys. It is, and I have no doubt that you'll go from on the road. All right, this has been a lot of fun. I'm excited for you guys. And I have no doubt that you'll go from 10 million views a week to 100.

And I'm excited to see you guys hit that billion view mark very soon. So keep it up. We are all very entertained and rooting for you. Shishit, shishit. Shishit. I love the energy. Thanks, man.

We appreciate you joining. Better guys. Keep having fun. Bye. You know what he needs? He needs linear. He needs linear to manage all his interns. Sounds chaotic in there.

He needs to use the platform purpose built to design and build the best products on Earth. Oh, you nailed that. I bet they already use linear, to be honest. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Go to Linear and get started today. I wanted to go through the Sarah Guo piece

because we are having Sean on because he is throwing the AI engineer world's fair and he's gonna be joining with some other folks breaking down what's going there. We can kind of revisit this Sarah Guo post, which we talked about later, possible topics for her keynote. Apparently she completely revised everything,

but I really liked it. She wanted to talk about AI native UX, not just chat skins, vertical AI surge. That was something we were discussing earlier. Multimodal frontier video, 3D audio, retrieval plus long-term memory, synthetic data flywheels, obviously super important, the SIM to real robotics push, closing the autonomy gap, robust agentic workflows,

cell scale, digital twins and programmable biology, compute geopolitics, world models for zero-shot planning and RL environments that actually generalize. She has mapped out the true surface area, but more recently she authored a post, an article on X, directly on X, you can read the full thing at her X page, Sarah Normas, on Taste.

And I thought this was an interesting post, Lulu quote tweeted it, and she says, "'Stripe returns errors in plain English. Quote, that card number doesn't look right, not error underscore invalid parameter because developers debug it to AM. Spotify's shuffle isn't random, it avoids playing the same artist twice in five songs.

True random fields feels broken, engineered random feels right. Notions drag handle appears only on hover Six dots arranged in two columns not three lines not always visible because permanence is clutter and six dots whisper Grab me while three lines shout. I'm a menu This is taste the relentless almost painful ability to know what should exist what shouldn't and where quality matters It's the difference between shipping a product and shipping a point of view.

The best founders understand that taste is a competitive advantage that compounds. It runs deeper than pixels. It's in your code base, your culture, your cap table, and I'm just thinking about the Cluelid taste, which is just like the most maximal possible. Just maxing everything. He's max-maxing.

He's max-maxing. It's true. He's such a character. He's max maxing. He's such a character. I love that we can have him on and then have someone you know like a you know public company CEO on. We got range. We got range. It's fun. Yeah that was absolutely wild. He we should probably text the families and say you know don't play this in front of the kids. Yes. Seriously. But he knows the level. You know, even in every word, he's thinking of how do I get the max amount of attention out

of each incremental word. Totally. It's not just each incremental post. He knows what he's doing, even in the show. I am like systemically offending people in multiple ways in a single sentence. But at the same time, like he's entitled to be his own personality.

And I do think, not to get completely sidetracked now that we're onto the next topic, but I do think an enterprising young journalist might want to take a crack at Roy just because it will turn into a feud. It will probably be good for both of them. It will be very future official. It's WWE.

It's WWE. Paywall the article. He's become a little bit of a heel of tech. He's somebody that people love to hate. It's like, how do you take the YC playbook and just run the opposite of it? It is the inverse of the YC playbook, which is be loud before you're confident in your business model

and confident in your product. The question is just like, at some point, yeah, it can't all be style. There needs to be some substance. You have to actually build a product that people will love. You have to make something people want. And so we're not seeing that side right now, obviously,

at least not in public interviews. But I hope that he can turn it off incrementally and eventually probably need to turn it off 90% of the time because yes attention is really really important right now but at a certain point you have to just deliver on the on the core metrics and the value prop or else someone else will come along and and offer something with with yeah they won't have all the all the style, but they will have yes I I I think there's a venture capital firm out there that even now would give him an increment Just so totally that interview yeah see that and be like I'll give this I'll give this team another 10 mil Yeah, just figure it out to go keep figuring it out, right?

I mean attention is incredibly valuable, but he's also but he's also being smart and that he's figured out He basically has the world almost convinced that he's gonna burn through every dollar He has in the next two months. Oh, totally, which is pretty but behind the scenes. Yeah, well, I'm actually making money Yeah, I mean obvious shipment at friend was going through a similar thing where there was that big story about oh He raised like a two million dollar seed round and he bought a one million dollar domain and everyone was like, oh he's so wasteful But then of course he would like finance the domain so it was really just adding like an incremental like 30k of burn per month and It wasn't really like he didn't take that whole hit up front and then he was able to kind of build the business

Yeah, he's making a category bet on AI companionship. And having friend.com is a great, will lead to increased marketing efficiency over time as he starts to scale. Well, anyways, we should go back to this completely. You know what he should do? He should get a watch on Bezel. He should get a getbezel.com.

Bezel is how you express your taste. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. So go to getbezel.com. So Sarah goes on to say, think of it like running a restaurant. It's so funny comparing the taste thing to this.

It's like the most serious post. There's the most silly, just silly hype train over there. Think of it like running a restaurant. Anyone can follow recipes, source ingredients, and serve food, but the difference between a forgettable meal and a Michelin star isn't just technique, it's the chef's palette. Their ability to know when something needs more acid,

when a dish has one element too many, when to stop plating. Software is the same, but products aren't just feature complete, they're composed. And we see this with a lot of the best software products, the software is more like art than science in terms of like the design and how you're interacting with the user.

So Sarah says, it's easy to say, hard to do. Everyone claims to have taste now, it becomes the new product market fit, a term so overused it's lost meeting. Founders drop, we're taste driven in pitch meetings. VCs nod knowingly. Nobody defines it. Most companies confuse taste with aesthetics. They hire a design agency, pick a nice font

and call it done. But real taste runs deeper in the error message, the loading states, the features you killed because they were merely good, not essential. Real taste hurts It's saying no to features that would triple your tam It's spending a week per of it's spending a week perfecting an interaction that users will barely notice consciously It's choosing the harder technical path because the UX is 10 at 10 10 10 percent better if your taste doesn't cost you something

It's not taste its preference the preference. The pain compounds daily. A Fortune 500 prospect wants a demo tomorrow. Do you ship a half-baked feature? Or the half-assed collateral? Or lose the deal? The entire AI landscape reshuffles every three weeks. Do you chase every new model or trust your vision? Your competitor just shipped something flashy.

Do you match it or hold your ground? Anyway, we'll have to have Sarah on the on the show to recap her talk But right now I believe we have Sean coming in to the studio to tell us about the AI engineering World's Fair We're very excited to have him join the show. Thanks so much for hopping on. I wish I could be there I have the biggest FOMO I've ever had with any tech conference because the lineup seemed absolutely fantastic with any tech conference because the lineup seemed absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately, I have a large family and a studio that is covered in junk and we're moving in so I appreciate you taking this remotely and we'll have to do the next one in person but thanks so much for joining today. How are you doing?

Hey guys, glad to be back. It's funny because like your setup looks so great on camera. I'm just imagining the mess that it's off camera. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's definitely a work in progress. But part of the brand is of course just showing the nice parts. But, but, but congratulations. This is many years in the making. Can you give us a little bit of the, the history, the plan, and then I want to go into some of the hot topics that you've been discussing today. Yeah. I guess this is the fourth conference we've done.

And I started this basically right after the sort of chat GPT moment and talking with enough developers and understanding that the people who can wield LM APIs are going to be way more powerful than people who just chat with products. And this is actually going to widen a lot because they can basically wield serverless intelligence. And so I coined, I sort of popularized the term AI engineer, Andrej Karpathy sort of endorsed it. He said that he does believe that you can get very far without ever training anything, which is a big thing for him to say, because I think that is cool at the time was,

it's high status to trade models. Totally. They're scientists, but now it's actually consensus now that you want to work on rappers rather than models. And there are many, many multi-billion dollar companies that have spoken at AI engineer that reflect that fact. Yeah. And yeah, so like, I guess, and there was a big shift there where, where there was,

there was a moment where, uh, fun, like the vibe had shifted a little bit to the application layer, but there was still the idea that if you were going to build an AI legal startup, you were going to train an AI legal foundation model. And now it's moved all to post-training, all to RL and how you're prompting and how you're integrating and ultimately the user interface. And so yeah, it makes a ton of sense and I'm sure there's a ton of companies that are beneficiaries of that boom. Yeah. And it's not even companies, it's more just like customers. Sure. Because the foundation

model labs are never going to work directly with like your healthcare system. Like it's going to be like a bridge that comes up and does that. The foundation model labs are not going to work directly with lawyers. It's going to be Harvey. I think so that that directly led into the rise of vertical AI enabled SaaS. And I mean, that's in census now.

Yeah, I'm sorry. That's a slack thing that has to be out. By the way, the conference is still going on. We just had the morning keynotes. I have my chat with Greg Brockman later today. Fantastic. And he doesn't know this, but I might as well just share this. But we have a nice little cameo from Jensen Huang coming by.

No way. That's great. That's fantastic. We're trying to level up. He knows this morning were fantastic. The Microsoft, they really went on. They're going so hard after the AI audience. We were just reading about that in the information.

Platform, platform, platform, platform, platform, says Satya. Yeah, yeah. I think they see this as their chance to overtake AWS. That's great. But AWS is also, you know, also sponsored, they've been like having a very strong presence with us. So like, we just want to be the vendor neutral place, right?

Like all the big clouds, all the big labs work with us. We have the MCP team here with the entire steering committee presenting as well. And we just want to be for developers. Like this is where you, this like kind of the trade show, you come to hire people, learn about what's new and upscale. I have a couple more questions.

How long do you have exactly? Five minutes or? Oh, I can go till like 1 1 30. So, okay, great. Yeah. So we had a guest and we, I moved into a different day. Okay, first. Perfect.

So I want to know about the mix of attendees. How many folks are trying to start venture backable application layer AI companies versus is there a new trend of someone who's building more of a vibe-coded almost lifestyle type AI driven business? Are there folks from either companies that have established themselves and are now trying to bolt on AI or are there lots of folks that are working for large companies and just want to stay ahead and become AI engineers? What's kind of the shape of the audience,

if you can characterize it at all? Yeah, so we do surveys, but we don't know specifics to that high level granularity. I would say about 50% are people working at medium to large size companies and trying to upskill. And then the others are smaller companies and our most popular title is like founder or CXO of like a smaller startup.

And those are venture backable. And I think mostly that's just a function of us being in San Francisco. Because obviously we will have that startup bias. I do think that one thing I kind of don't really care about this whole lifestyle versus venture-backed thing, because for example, I have a tiny teams track that is speaking this year.

Tiny teams is something that I'm trying to push as an idea of companies that have more millions in ARR than employees, right? So your revenue efficiency is so high because obviously if you pay each employee less than a million dollars, you're probably profitable and therefore you don't actually need the venture money except to point to marketing. And that's your choice. You can be profitable. I have a six person team making more than $40 million. And yeah, I mean, it's

absurd. The amount of leverage you can get with with agents and also building AI products for other people to use your where you're just kind of passing through or slapping a margin on top of the tokens that you resell from the big model labs. I think that really makes a lot of sense. Totally. Has the narrative of like, Oh, if you're building an AI, like you're going to become obsolete by Google or, or, or, or open AI is going to steamroll you in their next dev day keynote. Has that narrative dissipated and what, if so, what's driving it? Is it kind of the pre-training scaling law,

wall that we're kind of seeing with GPT 4.5? Are you guys still, I don't know if he was still talking about that. I mean, everyone, you know, everyone's moved on. Yeah, we've moved on to a different time, right? Yeah, I think most people have agreed. There are still new pre-trains happening, especially with the open source model that OpenAI is working on.

Sure. But yeah, I mean, I think we've just like, we've seen it come and go enough times. So for example, we have OpenAI launching Chat2PT Codecs, which is just head on a direct Devin competitor. Devin is not worried because they have been doing this for two years and they are much more polished in terms of the integrations and they have different things that their customers already like. And so I think it's just like everyone

is going to need their version of a thing. And so this is the sort of house store-brand version of what ChaiGP Codecs could be. And it's not competitive just because the ocean is so huge for software engineering. And Devin has at least established the category by being first there. And I think you can see similar versions of that across the domain.

Yeah, I haven't really seen anything there yet. Although it's not to say that it doesn't happen. It does happen, for example, with the first wave with GPT-3 startups like Jasper. But I mean, yeah, so far there's no fear that, in fact, that people are very excited to meet the foundation model labs. This is where the engineers meet the lab people. And lab people train them on how to use LLMs.

And I think that's a perfectly harmonious relationship, to be honest. I haven't seen it yet. What was your reaction to the news around Anthropic and Windsurf yesterday? Oh my god. Yeah. A little bit of awkwardness there.

There was a little bit of drama on the timeline. Yeah. Give us a walkthrough for those who might not be familiar. What happened? And then I'd love your analysis. Yeah. So the history of this is that Windsurf is an independent company

that basically kind of followed Cursor's footsteps and launched an AI agentic. They've done very, very well for themselves in a very short amount of time. I think they launched, we're the first podcast that they launched with in October or November last year. And then there's rumors that they got acquired by OpenAI for $3 billion.

Those are rumors that are unconfirmed by both sides. I've talked to both sides. Yeah, I've been fascinated how everybody just takes it as fact. I take it as fact. But he wore two polos. Yeah, he wore two polos. But again, at no point, every news outlet, legacy news outlets have been reporting it as fact,

even though no side has verified it and nobody's said it closed or anything along those lines. Yeah, the only thing I can say is, Windsurf is speaking tonight right before Greg Brockman goes on and there's a reason. Exciting. We're not dropping a ton of alpha, but I'm just saying that's all'm not, I, that's all I can say. I'm, that's what I'm allowed to say. Yes, of course. And I think that, so there's, there's a, there's a relationship there as there is a fact that both cursor and windsurf had

benefited a lot from their relationship with entropic because about 3.5 and 3.7 have for whatever it's worth been regarded as the best coding models. Yep. Open, they all disagree. Jim and I will disagree, but whatever, like the community has voted. Yeah. So overnight, I think like two days ago, one day ago,

Anthropic cut off the first party access to Cloud for Cloud to Windsurf. This is their top model. And now they just don't have access as a first party tool. You can, for example, still bring your API key and use your accounts on Windsurf. But it's right, you can't just like, like Windsurf and gonna pay you 20 bucks, use your account, whatever, you know, I just don't want to worry about the the rate limits and

stuff. That's gone Windsurf, they just woke up overnight. And that's gone. So a lot of people are very upset. This is a very big no no, if you're like like aiming to be any sort of like credible LLM API provider, to just cut off access. Google hasn't done that, even though, you know, if you take the sort of rumors of the acquisition on face value, I think this does leak credence that I think Anthropic at least thinks that

Windsurf is just a competitive product now. So I think like in so far as you're putting odds on whether the acquisition actually closes, the odds have moved up. Interesting. Yeah, the other factor that's interesting is how much does this benefit Cursor if you're a developer who loves various cloud models and now maybe you have a reason to go spin up.

You know market share of cursor versus Windsurf? Have you seen like estimations? What is that? I think the numbers I've seen, I saw it on my timeline on Twitter, I didn't save it in the past, but someone please look this up. It's something like Windsurf is 5% of cursor.

Wow, because based on the market caps, I would assume that Windsurf is 30%. I know. Of course. So the thing that you don't see there is cursor has entirely developed as a business on the IDE where Windsurf used to be Codium, which used to be like this GPU service, GPU company that has significant LLM inference for enterprises, like they, they spent the last four years doing that. Yeah.

Yeah. So they're buying that team, that revenue, that product, as well as Windsurf. Oh, interesting, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How do you think that the agentic coding market is shaping up? We've been kind of talking about, maybe it's three different markets, like I can go to GPT, like I can go to 03,

and I can ask it for a question, and it will just write code and write Python and execute it, And I don't even have to tell it to write code. It's just, if I ask a question that requires code, it will write some code. Then of course they open AI now has codex and then they also potentially have windsurf or, or, you know, you can think about the IDEs as a different, um, as a different, uh, entry point into that market. Uh, are we seeing like a true permanent bifurcation between synchronous and asynchronous AI coding usage?

Or do you think these all blend together at some point? Yeah, I think that actually you're just catching up on something that has already been a thing. That was the divergence and actually the converging. It already started that you had the synchronous ones like cursor windsurf and any asynchronous ones like devin and factory AI, for example. And they were all sort of like what we call the developer inner loop, which is hands on keyboard coding

and developer outer loop, which is PR review and all that kind of stuff. Or like file an issue, make a PR, that kind of stuff. So those are merging. The explicit goal of Codex Suite is something I'm going to talk to Greg about later today, is that they will merge those paradigms just as they're merging the reasoning models

and the sort of instant thinking models with GPT-5. And that totally makes sense. It's technically really hard to do, because one's on your machine, one's cloud. And also, there's just a different set of user experience paradigms. Is my video freezing, by the way? It is.

It is. You look great. You look great. I see you guys. How seriously do you take Google's coding agent, Jools? Do you think it's just an experiment that they're putting out there? Or do you think they'll actually invest in it and try to get real adoption?

You're trying to get me in trouble. You're conflicted. You're conflicted. I'm sure Google is a part of that. Google's great. Products wise, they have had hits like Nobook LM that then have failed to continue the momentum for whatever that is. And I think that is, I think that most people are extremely unfair to Notebook LM. I think they have shit really well. It's just that you will never repeat

the initial wave of excitement that they had. You just never will. Yeah, and I mean, Notebook LM seems interesting because that feels like a case study in If you're a startup and you're fast following an innovation that actually came out of a hyperscaler That's where you turn into a bullet point on the next dev day or something that because the notebook LM It felt like there was this amazing tremendous momentum online Everyone was excited and then it was kind of faltering and it was like oh, there's no app

So maybe I'll build the app and I'm sure some people built notebook, LM apps or notebook, um, spin-offs. And then it just took, it just took six months. And then there, now there's an app and now, and I'm sure they will not iterate on this. And so, yeah, yeah, I know to some degree. Uh, but, but, but I, I think the lesson is probably like, yeah, there's probably some narrow window where you can cash grab as kind of like a cynical, like ripoff startup. But like realistically, if you, I think the lesson is probably like, yeah, there's probably some narrow window where you can cash grab as kind of like a cynical like ripoff startup, but like realistically,

if you found out about the concept of turning a deep research report into an audio product from Notebook LM, like you might be just behind the ball. And so like, you don't have the right to own that market long-term, as opposed to, you know, I think Devon, Cognition, like they have more of a right, and in factory, they have more right to continue to fight

with Google's Jules product, because they were really there earlier, they issued the original hype, and brokered a whole bunch of enterprise contracts, and like kind of got a couple years down the road before. So they're not like a fast follower to big tech. Big tech is maybe fast following them. Yes. I think it just boils down to execution and everything, right?

Yeah, of course. And I think that's one of the reasons why we've actually somewhat broadened out from just engineering to we've added AI product management and AI design. Okay. And I think that really good this is this is product management. This is a straight up Can you keep up the momentum? Can you listen to your users? Can you come up with creative new stuff that keeps the momentum going? And some teams can and some teams cannot. The only thing I can say with regards to Google and the fate

of jewels is the initial, the founding PM of Nobica LM left and she's speaking here with her own startup. It's really hard to keep employees of people who like start interesting products for Epic Lab because they will get any number, any amount of money thrown at them. 20 million dollar seed round round 10 million of secondary if you quit your job right now Probably not that extreme. I wanted to ask you about Want to ask you about github How much do you think Satya cares about you know github?

Do you think he's you know really pushing? Yeah, is that an important wedge into the AI coding market? Because obviously they were first with GitHub Copilot, and you can imagine that it's just a phenomenal distribution channel. And when you look at the value of, and the way Microsoft executed around Teams rolling into, you're already using Outlook,

now you're using Teams instead of Slack. You could imagine really great adoption, maybe not at the most cutting edge companies that are hyper online, but we could see one of those charts where we're like, oh wow, like Microsoft's really crushing it in developer tooling. I mean, absolutely, I think it's extremely core. What would you put GitHub co-pilot revenue at right now?

If you want to if you had to hazard a guess 500 million. Yeah, yeah And alone that is a publicly listed company Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah Here's the challenge is that no one is talking about GitHub Copilot. Is that a challenge? It's inside of Microsoft. So yeah, I mean, no one's talking about

Oh, I know. But you know, nobody's saying like, look what, you know, they're nobody's sitting there being like, I'm blown away by Copilot, right? Yeah, I think I think, I think that people who live in the Microsoft stack are, because that is what they have access to and their company agreements are. I think on Twitter, there's a novelty bias.

People always want the new thing, they want to support the little guy. I support the current thing. You want to support the current thing. Okay, here's the mental framework I want to leave you guys with on that stuff. Data gravity is a thing. Data attracts the compute, attracts the money, attracts the stickiness.

Once my data is in one place, everything else moves towards that data. And if my code is the most valuable form of data I have, that's the most expensive data to acquire. So if my code already lives with you, then it's much easier for my coding agents to also live with you. And so they have a home turf advantage. I think the GitHub acquisition back in the day was one of the smartest and most underpriced decisions

in developer tools history. So I think you should take that point of view. So that moat is so strong. Try to be a no-name random dev tool startup that comes up and says, hey, give me access to your code base. I need to run agents on it. They're like, no. I'm already doing it.

What happened with Codex yesterday? There was one user that was reporting that their code base. Private repo information was leaking from one to another or something? Was that user error? days there was one user that was reporting that their private information was leaking from one to another user error did you did you track that at all now you're probably getting no I was running the conference and individual things are going to happen. Yeah, of course happen. I think GitHub's reputation is going to last it through that I think totally it

has to be really egregious for that kind of stuff to slip through. Yeah, I mean, I think like more broadly, I think that there's a standard stack of what we are calling, what Andre Karpathy is calling the LMOS, right? That I think you guys are kind of going and learning about, but I think it's pretty well established by anyone who works in software agents, coding agents,

which is want a sandbox, you want a browsing environment, you want branching, you want fine tuning on your code base. Like there's just a standard stack of things that cloud code, codex, jewels, cognition, factory and anyone else in this field, they're all converging on the same thing. And it's just who does it best and who reaches who solves it for their customers best. I think that's, that's going to be the name of the game for now. Makes a ton of sense. Do we have to roll over to the next person? No, because I, I, I, okay. You're good. Yeah. I mean,

I guess my question on data gravity is it, it seems like, if we compare the evolution of video generation models, Google has a really amazing cornered resource in YouTube because that data is so big, it's so many tokens, it hasn't been, it's growing and it also hasn't been like exfiltrated to the public web, but it feels like GitHub, although it is a massive data set, it's not nearly as big.

I think somebody collected like 100 million tokens or something, it's just not, it's just. No. No, how big is it? Way bigger? Well, public repos, because I don't think that they can train on private repos, right? Or can they?

Who, GitHub? GitHub, GitHub, native. I don't think they would let themselves. Yeah, they wouldn't. Yeah. I don't know, 100 million just sounds way too low, and that's my gut reaction. Sure, sure, sure. Keep going, GitHub native. I don't think they would let themselves. Yeah, they wouldn't. Yeah. I don't know. 100 million just sounds way too low. And that's my gut reaction. Sure, sure, sure.

Anyway, keep going, keep going. So the question is, how durable is the data moat at encoding versus in video generation? Purely, I'm just thinking about the raw data set size of YouTube has to be orders of magnitude larger than GitHub. And so I would imagine that it's, Microsoft probably has a less durable advantage versus Google's like kind of march down

the video generation pathway if it's truly restricted by data. Not all data is comparable like that. So you're comparing verifiable data to unverifiable data So code can compile and if you runs it if it runs you can do more code like that And that creates the RL loop that let's generate synthetic data for more code with videos you have what you have and you can train on that and You're technically not even allowed supposed to train on that but who knows what Google is doing behind the scenes

Well, I think Google can train on public YouTube videos, right? I don't know. I imagine that like I've posted videos on YouTube I imagine that I've opted in at some point I think it was there was like a big fuss with MK PhD and all the other guys Yeah, it came up a fuss about this. You remember sure. Yeah, so I'm just I don't know I'm not a lawyer, but I'm sure it is a completely untested clause that just has to go to court. Yeah. I just want to say to Google, if you remove John's rate limits

on VO3, you can train on our back catalog. Full permission. Yeah, I think there is that diversity of opinion, right? Do you want to just give yourself to the machine, or do you want to just like give yourself to the machine? Or do you want to keep your data to yourself? And it's like, there's no in between. Like you're either one or the other. It's a very strange dichotomy.

Like it's not a spectrum. Like many things in life are a spectrum. This one is not. Like you run into someone, they're either privacy maxi or they're like an AI maxi. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. What else is on the cutting edge of Debates that are kind of raging at the conference This year versus prior years. We've we've lived through like the P doom debate. We've we've

We live through like the Leopold Aschenbrenner Era we've we've shifted to the geopolitics debates But what's kind of on the frontier of like hottest topics to discuss? first of all, Leopold was right and I don't know if people know that he was on Ilya's team when the sort of board drama happened and he was like directly connected to it anyway. We haven't lived through it, we are living through it, it is happening, it is directly leading to the geopolitics because he was foreseeing that and he was exactly right.

Yeah, but the way I would kind of characterize, at least my takeaway was that his piece was a little bit of a pivot from the paper clipping doom and a shift to geopolitical competition in AI. Is that a mischaracterization? No, nailed it. Okay. But like he was right. Yeah, No, no, I I completely agree I completely agree. I'm just wondering if if it's like if the consensus is that he was right, then the book is closed We're not debating that anymore. What are we debating? What's more modern are the debates? Yes Yeah, how to do great AI PMing sure on a tiny team

Yep, have a robotics track for the first time that is Tesla optimus is speaking physical intelligence. Waymo just overtook Lyft. I saw that already. Voice is the hottest thing in terms of multiple modalities. Like everyone sort of building with voice because I think it's like finally good enough. And I think maybe the last thing I'll highlight to you is we are also emphasizing security for the first time. Security is kind of a boring topic.

It's nobody really wants to talk about how to secure your system, but they actually do now because they have real money running through their product. So there's all that. And then that is roughly equal in size to the excitement about MCP. And so we have an entire MCP track with the Anth team here because it's a, cause they're nice enough to come by. And that fills up the whole ballroom that we have. So are we going to get payments and MCP? Is there a sub track for putting stable coins in there or something like that?

Uh, there, there's nothing in the official spec, but we have a number of people and we have a speaker talking about the sort of MCP economy that's being enabled. Um, I do think that remote MCPs and authorization give you the foundation for basically just remote agents that you can buy and hire. That's effectively what it is. It's just that we're still in that stage where there's still, these things are still trivial enough that you can actually just write your own. So you have to overcome that build versus buy for this to actually kick off. Okay. And I would

just say like, I'm not at all a crypto person, but I would say that the crypto people have been ahead of us here and they haven't found that much yet. You know, no, no sense there, but they're actively hunting and if anyone finds it first, it will be them. It's it's a circles presenting here. Solana presented in my previous conference and they're all on it. Stripe is also on it with their stable coin thing. Something's gonna happen here. Bridge, yeah.

In robotics, are we getting to a point where we're starting to see an ecosystem of companies pop up like we've seen? No, it's just- Sorry, what are you like? Yeah, so they're all vertically integrated. Sure. They're all building their stack.. They all building everything. They're stack. I don't see like any horizontalness. That's what you're going for.

That's exactly what I was asking. Yeah. Yeah. It's so weird. I think, um, you know, there's just so much custom needs that you have to sort of reinvent the universe every time. The one thing that, that does reuse bots is a cloud chef, uh, which is, which is, you know, a very young company, but I ran across them when I tried their food. So they're a kitchen robot. They do demonstration learning from a single shot from, let's say, a Michelin chef, and you just give them the ingredients and you will just flawlessly just kind of repeat that cooking for you. And you can hire

it for $12 an hour. So it's meant to directly replace human labor, which is very expensive and very labor intensive and unreliable, let's put it that way. And they can live on top of any other robot arm or Tesla Optimus substrate. Because it's more about the robotics sort of framework than it is about the individual hardware. And I think like that is the first time I've seen that happen. I'm like relatively new to this, but like this is the first

time I'm like, oh, okay, like he's actually pretty confident he transfers across any system as long as they have the minimum required set of device drivers basically. And I'm like, yeah, that's cool. Like, yeah, yeah. So he's speaking tomorrow. What about other pieces of the robotics data stack? Are we thinking about like data brokerage or kind of like a scale AI or maybe scale AI actually working to generate more robotics data? Anything on like the SIM to real gap? I saw some semi-analysis data,

some of it on a paper that was pretty cool. So I would say that as an industry practical conference, those are just in the domain of research right now. In research, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of papers out there. Jim Fan had a fantastic talk at Sequoia since I recommend everyone watch if you haven't seen it about the physical Turing test.

Yeah. How you need to just do a lot more simulation. And there's a lot of work being done on this. I think Google Genie is the other one that I would recommend people to. There's a really interesting tie-in between the generative video world and the robotics world that you wouldn't necessarily expect them to spend

some time in that. But we just haven't focused on it because people cannot get jobs in it. I want people to get jobs at my conference. That's almost the whole reason. That's the whole point. I bring the companies, I bring the engineers. They meet.

They fall in love with each other. To me, that's the most fulfilling thing. Can you give a high level update on the hiring market today? What is fact? What's fact? What's fiction? It's one of those things people love to talk about how bad things are.

And yet every company that I know can't find people. Maybe there's a talent gap there. But what's your read? Yeah, I mean, I think both are right, which is weird. This is actually the topic of my conversation with Greg Brockman later today. Because half the people I meet at my own conference are worried for their own jobs, right?

They do ask about this. It's not like they're blind to it, but they're just like, I'm here to see what else I need to do or how does my skillset need to change for the future? And nobody knows, you know. Everyone says the trite thing, which is like, oh, I'm going from, I write the code

to I manage things that write the code. So I become an engineering manager, but like, what does that mean in practice? How much knowledge do you need to supervise an agent? You actually kind of need a lot, uh, when it goes, when it goes off track. So like it, that's super unknown. Um, I do think that the juniors that they're like fresh out of college students, they're a little bit cooked. Unless they're good. So it really amplifies skill issue.

It really, really amplifies skill issue. Yeah. Yeah. It's a hard thing to try to tell somebody, you just need to be five times smarter than you are. And then you'll have have a bunch of offers. But I also think that the solution here, and we just hired an intern who already shipped a new product.

He started Monday. He just shipped something relatively simple, but it's cool. It's a guest directory. He just sent us a V1 of that product that he built last Thursday. We saw it, and we were like, this is's cool. It's a guest directory. He just sent us a V1 of that product that he built last Thursday. We saw it, and we were like, this is super cool. Why don't you start on Monday?

And it's that one kind of interaction that can get your foot in the door that allows you to develop skills and build relationships that hopefully we work with him for a long time. But even I'm sure people are already seeing him at TBPN and will probably try to poach him before the end of the summer. So all you need is that one. It is like a changing shape of the software engineering employment because I feel like

the Vibe coders can come into organizations that might not have a full engineering department and then have an impact because of the way the tools work. But it's certainly a lot of change very, very quickly. I would say that's not the consensus yet that hire a chief code officer because humans are still very much needed to patch the gaps that the models are not good at. And it's really painful when they do go wrong and they do go wrong. I think all the hypes that you see on Twitter fail to omit what happens one month, two months, three months after.

That's honestly what you get paid to do as a software engineer, make maintainable software not greenfield all the time. I've even seen people repurpose old projects and say, I vibe coded this in 24 hours and everyone's like, wait, now this was published in 2019 like you spent months on this And you're just typing this up, but this information Pay attention what people say there, right? You care what people report for themselves that they've done at serious companies So one thing I would highlight there is booking.com did about 10 company years worth of migrations

in three months with their sort of automated code migration that they did with Sourcegraph. So we did a talk with them at my conference in New York in February, which if you want to look that up. So like that company has been around for like 14, 15 years. Um, that's, that's a serious code base, right? They're just reporting their success. They got nothing to gain from selling you on it. They're just, they're just happy about it and they want to teach others. Um,

so you want to look for those. They're not trying to sell you anything. They're just like recording like their progress at a real company. Um, and it's, that's really what I try to optimize for, for the, for the conference. It's, it's hard because not everyone's incentivized to do it You just have to create an environment where they get something out of it by meeting their peers at a thing like this Well, give us the plug. Where can people watch your talk with Greg Brockman later today? Yeah, it's on YouTube YouTube at AI dot engineer a lot of DLT and

Yeah, what would you ask him? I mean, you're having him on eventually. So you know, what's like the way that you would open the conversation? Oh, that's a good question. For Greg, there's a lot. But I mean, the question that I feel like is at the top of mind in like Ben Thompson world this week is the shift from training to inference and how and how workloads are are shifting. This was in the context of Nvidia earnings, but Greg obviously has intimate knowledge. And so opening is obviously going to do larger and larger training runs but they're also doing tons and tons of inference.

How is that shifting? And then what I want to know and I don't know how much he can speak to this is like where, how will if we get to a world where we're in 80% inference, 99% inference, something really extreme, does that change the type of data centers we're in 80% inference, 99% inference, something really extreme, does that change the type of data centers we're building? Does that change the chips that we're demanding? Are we moving to ASICs? Are we moving to FPGAs?

Something like that to speed up the actual inference workloads. At what point do we actually bake these models down if they're deemed good enough and then we're orchestrating them? If we hit a plateau, that might make sense at the same time if there's a lot of promise on algorithmic progress and we're expecting like oh yeah we're gonna leave the transformer behind eventually well then

yeah you don't want to bake all that down so I think that that's like it's a little bit more of like a semi's question but it is an interesting question for him as well as he's like seeing the workloads it is very relevant he does have a role to play in Stargate that I'm not super clear about. I'm going to ask him about. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I would say that nobody's betting

on the endo-transformers, except for a very small number of people that are just experimental. And it's really about just scaling the RL. Yeah, I mean, there is this interesting thing that's happening. I believe images in ChachiPT seems to be using a number of different algorithms combined. So there's a little bit of diffusion in there potentially.

There's some transformer-based stuff. I don't know if you're pushing back on that. I'm not. There's a strong hypothesis based on the hints that they have dropped from the people that worked on it. Yeah, that there's multiple algorithms at work, right? It's a diffusion head, but the transformer backbone, the rest of it is just regular for all.

And that's so good at Chad and has decent world knowledge. There's not like a ton of complexity there beyond that that we'd know of. Yeah. And so what I'm interested in is like, we saw the demo from Google on diffusion, text-based diffusion, 900 tokens a second. I've heard good reviews about that. I've heard kind of mixed reviews on that. Maybe it's not a path, but what does the future

of an LLM look like if we're applying the same path that we've seen in images, where we're seeing an ensemble of models come together to create a better, like even more multimodal, multi-architectures, because it feels like we're moving further and further away from the single big transformer being the answer to everything.

And so what does that mean? Are we going closer or farther away from the single big transformer that is like the, the God in the weights? Yeah. This is where I can offer a little bit of coaching for, uh, for your audience and maybe you, you guys have talked to a lot of people, so I don't know. This is where people usually say the term mixture of experts and they're wrong to use that. Um, but just, and sometimes they say, make sure of agents, make sure of experts.

Sure. They're incorrect. Anyway, we have talked with a lot of the Frontier Lab researchers. Yeah. None of them believe that that is the way forward. That is an optimization for the current thing, which is- Which one? A mixture of experts?

Like a- Or multiple. A mixture of architectures. A mixture of architectures. Okay. Yeah. So experiments, for example, with Jamba with from 821 in Israel, where they mix, for example, like a Mamba layered with, with transformers. That seems to be promising, but even though it's your correct character was just use the scaling of transformers. I asked a variant of the question you just stated to known Brown in an upcoming podcast that we did we recorded They haven't released it. He's the same way. He's like anything you're trying to do fancy around Mixing a weird architectures is just not going to scale just scale the basic thing

Yeah, and he's pretty strongly convicted in that I know people I can't name a Gemini who is also pretty strongly convicted in that I know people I can name a Gemini who is also pretty strongly convicted in that I was in his suspect suspect otherwise obviously like you can't shut this shut down anything because like it might be true I'm just telling you what the people working on this would say because they I would want to get a sense of, you know, prediction markets are pricing in that Google continues to dominate on benchmarks. How much is OpenAI even gonna, how much do they even care about being at the top of benchmarks?

Is it purely an ego thing or is it just about, you know, usability and value for users and code quality and things like that? It's usability and value for users and code quality and things like that. It's usability and value. I think you need to notice that the benchmarks that Google talks about at Google I.O. are no longer the benchmarks that OpenAI measures itself on.

And I wanna stay friends with them, but there are some that are more sus than others. Sure. And I think at the end of the day, the customer will win. The only one that has clearly been caught out kind of lying, kind of being underperforming, I got to say it, it's Apple. When they launched Apple Intelligence,

we were all very excited about the Apple Intelligence paper, which is beautiful documents that had no evals apart from their own internal evals. So they were not accountable to the standard set of evals that everyone else has. Step one is you should try to hold yourself to some public benchmark. I know you're flawed, just do it. So Apple did not do that. And then now there's a question of like, are you holding yourself to a benchmark that can be gamed?

And there's been accusations of Alamarina being gamed. And unfortunately, that's what Google has put all its chips on. They may do that for Gemini 3, but for 2.5, that's what they did. And probably because they spent the last year doing it. It's all revenue from here on out. Like that is the benchmark.

Revenue is the benchmark. GitHub Copilot, 500 million, size gone for GitHub. Revenue is also tricky. Yeah? You guys know how, like Gemini, I don't know if you know, Gemini gives a billion tokens a day per human. What? Wait, your personal API token.

Okay. I'm shitting you. You can set up a camera right now, run Gemini 2.5 flash on it, run like a frame a second, and ask you to do whatever you want for free. Oh wow. It's absurd.

So they are a good market. Thank you. Intelligence is too cheap to meter. We love to hear it. Okay, like that chart that you saw at Google IO where their tokens went like this, now you know why why it's free. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, they also have a very, very good model, don't get me wrong. But revenue is a short-term play. Like you're trying to maximize revenue. Now you might cut off yourself from getting the largest data set in the world, which is the sort of early adopter humans that are going to give you their data because they're like, train on me, daddy. You're giving to me for free. Like whatever, train on me. And that's a deal that lots of people, I think the theme that we talked about is lots of people are going to make. Yeah. It's free. Why? They can eat your data. Codex is free. Why?

So I talked about this in one of my recent posts. The marginal cost of software has gone down to zero. And can it go negative? Will I start paying you for you to use me? Absolutely, because then you'd become my labeler. You're a labeler I can never pay for. Usually I have to hire someone like the Philippines or something. We've maxed them out. So now I got to pay someone like the Philippines or something, we've maxed them out.

So now I gotta pay someone in Silicon Valley to label my software. So I might as well just give you my coding agent for free or like even honestly just pay you for good feedback on my coding agents. And why should it stop at like $20 a month when like there are people in New York who I've heard by the way,

they hire former bankers, the higher form of hedge fund guys, paying them 500k a year to label. It's wild. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. Good luck with the rest of the conference. Let's make this a regular thing. This is a fantastic conversation. Thank you for taking the time away from your event.

And we'll be there next year, whether you like it or not. You're invited, for sure. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks, Sean. Bye. Cheers. Fantastic. Well, we got to tell you about Wander.

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This is an interesting one Oscar has joined the fortune 500 for the first time I know what you're thinking and I agree what only now and Josh Kushner says I'm deeply proud of the tenacity and persistence of the Oscar team. We've been humbled many times, from down 95% from our IPO to now entering the Fortune 500. I am excited for all that is ahead of us. Wow, congratulations to Josh Kushner.

That is a phenomenal run. Amazing. And somebody else was quote tweeting this saying that, there's only two people who have incubated a Fortune 500 company who are actively investing and it's Palantir with Peter Thiel and Founders Fund and Josh Kushner with Thrive and Oscar. So what a phenomenal run.

It is rare that the incubations are starting to work and the incubations will continue until morale improves. Will continue. Until the global economy is worth, is growing at 10% a year. Anyway, every person who works in tech needs at least five non-tech friends to interact with closely on a weekly basis

so they can understand how the general public actually thinks. Says Kit Volta. You posted this from a different account. It was a copy pasta. Somebody copied the whole thing. So I found the the shared I shared it shared the fake one the rip off I shared a rip off yeah you sure rip off and it got community noted and I found the original one ready so somebody stole it yeah yeah didn't even screenshot it and put it in Bangor that is they actually but wrong 20k on this

post the repost has 15k likes and so it got but it got community noted This is a copy paste You feel like that could be that could be like automated in acts where it's like this is the exact same text as has been Posted elsewhere. You should just know that you should maybe go to the source on this if somebody's posting the exact same thing except You know Josh Steinman would get that every day because he's constantly boasting. Good morning. We are gonna win And so he would have the note every single day JT Gero tickets as web design you mean does digital physiognomy? Very funny. Oh you put another one in here from JT guy who is burnt out from six figures five hours a week big tech job you gotta just hit the hit the

hit the roof and just get some sun you know anyway. Pavel has a good one I don't think Waymo can work in New York City because during rush hour, you need to break the law to get anywhere and I'm not sure how you could get away with embedding that in software. And IB says, Travis would have gotten it done. Never too late.

Somebody says full self-driving, gladly speeds for me. I thought this was good from Will. Two thick scoops. OK, sounds good. Thank you. And it's Jersey Mike's order pickup at 1248. Dutch government collapses over migration dispute. Why is this? This is a Gmail.

Oh, it's just rolling up multiple emails or something. This is Apple AI summary. Oh, yeah. It's an Apple AI. Apple Intelligence is the summaries are so good. It's genius. 75,000 likes, that's a lot of attention on that. You got to upgrade folks. You're missing out on entertainment. I would pay Apple to help me produce Apple intelligent viral bangers. Yeah. I want to wrap up, but we gotta say congratulations to Jesse Michaels. He got on Joe Rogan. He said it was the honor of a lifetime to sit down with a goat himself,

Joe Rogan. Many people have called him a young Rogan. I've called himan. He said it was the honor of a lifetime to sit down with a goat himself, Joe Rogan. Many people have called him a young Rogan. I've called him that. He is fantastic. He's been on a fantastic run with American Alchemy, his podcast. He's climbing the charts. If you're into aliens, AI apocalypses,

Bob Lazar nuclear weapons, secret anti-gravity research, go check out the Jesse Michaels, Joe Rogan Experience episode. It's episode 2,331. Rogan's putting up big numbers. He's giving us a run, but we're catching up. We're catching up. It's wild.

In other news, lastly, just wanted to cover this quickly. AMD has acquired Briam. Oh, okay. It's been reported today to help reduce Nvidia's market dominance when it comes to AI hardware. Talking to George Hotz, and we're going to have him on the show, but he's been back in AMD,

we got Dylan Patel coming on the show Friday, we'll ask him more about AMD and their plan to unseat CUDA as the dominant AI platform. And we have other news, we are officially, we have doubled the size of the show. Once again, Jordy hit that gong, hit the real gong for me. Grab this, we're going to gong cam. We got 64,000 followers on X. Thank you for

everyone who's been around. That's great. Thank you for watching. Thank you for supporting us. It's been a fantastic journey. It is a pleasure doing business. We got the whole crew in the studio. We got a whole bunch more cameras here. We're growing every day. Damn, we got the studio cam too. The studio cam's going.

The boys are cooking. Thank you for watching. Thanks for all the support. Leave us a five star review. Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Especially on an Apple Podcast. Yeah, I feel like we're doing low there. I guess we're doing video heavy.

Yeah, it doesn't really make sense. But if you're on Apple and you're listening and Especially on Apple Podcasts. I guess we're doing low there. I feel like we're doing low there. Video heavy podcast. Yeah, it doesn't really make sense. But if you're on Apple and you're listening and you haven't left us a review, we'd love a review. So thank you so much. And we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you folks. We have an awesome day.

We have a bit of an AI day coming together with folks from OpenAI and Anthropic coming on. It should be a great show. So stay tuned. Absolutely stacked. We'll see you tomorrow and have a great rest of your Wednesday. Goodbye. Cheers.