TBPN Live - DOJ vs. Fed Chair, Apple Repositions Vision Pro, Ben Thompson Joins | Tyler Cowen, Harley Finkelstein, Andrew Feldman, Nathan Nwachuku, Anastasios Angelopoulos

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(00:33) - We Are Jerome Powell (02:08) - DOJ Opens Criminal Probe into FED Chair (04:15) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (11:42) - Apple's Vision Pro Strategy (26:52) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (29:54) - Ben Thompson, founder of Stratechery, is a technology and media analyst known for his in-depth analysis of tech industry strategies. In the conversation, he critiques Apple's Vision Pro, emphasizing that its immersive potential is undermined by overproduced content and unnecessary production elements. Thompson advocates for a more straightforward approach, suggesting that simply placing cameras courtside at live events would provide a more authentic and engaging experience for users. (01:07:35) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:23:46) - Tyler Cowen is an American economist, author, and professor at George Mason University, known for his work in cultural economics and as co-author of the blog Marginal Revolution. In the conversation, Cowen discusses the impact of artificial intelligence on blue-collar jobs, suggesting that while AI may reduce demand for certain tasks, overall job opportunities in these sectors will increase due to new projects and developments. He also touches on the role of data centers in the U.S. economy, the potential of AI-generated music, and the importance of aesthetics in urban development. (01:56:10) - Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder of Cerebras Systems, discusses the company's pioneering efforts in AI hardware, highlighting the development of their Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) chips, which integrate memory and logic onto a single, large-scale wafer to enhance performance and efficiency. He emphasizes the significance of fast inference in AI applications, noting that the WSE-3 chip can train models ten times larger than OpenAI's GPT-4, and mentions partnerships with organizations like the Mayo Clinic and G42 in the UAE to deploy these technologies. Feldman also reflects on the challenges of innovating in the semiconductor industry, including overcoming skepticism and technical hurdles associated with wafer-scale integration. (02:29:26) - Nathan Nwachuku, a 22-year-old software engineer and co-founder of Terra Industries, is leading efforts to establish Africa's first modern defense prime by developing autonomous security systems to protect the continent's critical infrastructure. He discusses his journey from launching an edtech startup at 17 to recognizing the need for foundational security solutions to support Africa's industrial growth, leading to the creation of Terra Industries in 2024. Nwachuku highlights the company's focus on building surveillance technologies, including drones and sentry towers, powered by a unified software platform to address evolving threats across land, air, and maritime domains. (02:40:07) - Anastasios Nikolas Angelopoulos, a former PhD student at UC Berkeley, is a co-founder of LM Arena, a platform for evaluating large language models (LLMs) based on human preferences. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges of model evaluation, the importance of unbiased user feedback, and the platform's role in helping users make informed decisions about LLMs. He also highlights the platform's growth, its approach to incentivizing user participation, and future plans to expand evaluation categories and integrate speed and cost considerations. (02:53:22) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:58:30) - Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify, is a Canadian entrepreneur and lawyer who founded his first company at 17 and later earned a law degree and MBA from the University of Ottawa. In the transcript, he discusses the rapid emergence of billion-dollar brands like Skims and Gymshark, emphasizing that these companies didn't just capture existing market share but created new markets by innovating within traditional product categories. He also highlights Shopify's collaboration with Google to develop the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open-source language enabling merchants to seamlessly integrate with AI agents, thereby enhancing the shopping experience through features like loyalty programs, subscriptions, and personalized delivery options. 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You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, January 12th, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Ramp.com, time is money, save both. Easy-use corporate cards, billpan accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. A bunch of fun news out of Ramp. They built an AI agent just for internal production.

It's for the backend. Yeah, we will go into that. But first, we got to pay our espion. Backs to the big man, Jerome Powell. Pull up the anthem. The anthem. This is this week's anthem. We've been blasting it all morning here in the studio.

Yes, it is. It will make you emotional. It's a very emotional song. It's a trigger warning. I guess it's AI generated, but it hits. In a manufactured storm, power turned hostile. The rules deform. threats in the open

whispers in hall yeah we should have gotten lighters for this for sure of course this is on the back that the New York Times reports that federal prosecutors

have opened a criminal investigation of Jerome Powell he took to the he dropped a video explaining his side of the story but instead of playing that we're playing this Jerome Powell Oh Jerome Powell

I didn't want to cry at the office today But it's happening Oh What a story Powell says the Justice Department Serve the Fed with subpoenas Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell So the U.S. Central Bank has been served

Grand Jury subpoenas from the Justice Department threatening a criminal indictment related to his June congressional testimony on ongoing renovations of the Fed's headquarters in a statement released Sunday evening. Jerome Powell rejected the notion that the action was driven by his testimony or the renovation. Joe Wisenthal has a post here. He says Powell confirms the Fed has been served, subpoenas from the DOJ. Fortunately, we have Tyler Cowan coming on the show today. I'm sure we'll be able to talk to him about that and a whole bunch of other things in the world. We will be asking him, should we roll the Fed?

into truth social. That's a good, that's one possibility. Or world liberty financial, right? We have options. Might be the most entertaining outcome. Anyways, let's pull up the linear lineup and show everyone who's coming on the show today because we do have Tyler Cowan. We also have Andrew Feldman from Cerebrus coming on the show and a bunch of other folks.

Harley's joining to talk about Agent of Commerce and shopping by. Nathan Frimtera. He's building drones in Africa. Excited for that one. And of course Harley. And Ella Marina. Yeah. And linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. We also might have a surprise guest joining at 1215, just so you'll see.

Yeah, anyways, watching Sunday night. I'm all excited, right? One more sleep until Monday. And I pull up this video. I've got to watch Jerome. Give a two-minute talk. Yeah, yeah. I mean, really dark. moment. It was funny. Bucco Capital shared, like if it's illegal to run over budget

on a remodel, my wife's getting the electric chair. You didn't give me the punch line when you said that the first time. And I knew where it was gone. Anyways. Very political, very fraught, but it's created a number of entertaining means.

People have been standing up. People have been standing up for, for the Federal Reserve Chairman. And fortunately, I mean, the administration sees these. We know that they're very online. And they see the support. So we'll see where the story involves. Poser says, like if you would let Jerome Powell crash on your couch for a few months.

AI is really at its best when you need a bunch of memes and images generated around a current thing. Before we do the next one, let me tell you about Restream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. the show possible. Rachel just said, you just created a million central bankers. And Jordy said this to me. I just burst out laughing.

So hard. It is, I mean, Fed chair, probably one of the worst jobs on earth, if you care what other people think about you. Right? Because it's just like every,

you know, all the time, people just have this massive fixation on, on you and they're going to form an opinion immediately. Yeah. But in this case, I've never seen people so united. Yeah.

around, which is heartwarming. That's the only... And it is weird because the prediction is that there will not be another rate cut in January. There's a lot of people that would benefit from another rate cut. If you're long in the market, you'd probably benefit. But I think people do... Are generally still fans of Fed independence, and they want Jerome to do whatever's best based on the facts and the data and the unemployment and inflation.

Yeah, I'm surprised there's no reaction in the... from the prediction markets at all. Cal, she still has 94% that the Fed maintains the rate in January. Yeah, interesting. You would think this would move the needle a little bit because it's... But at the same time, he is posting a hostage video saying, I'm not, I'm not leaving. You're going to have to prime me out with the jaws of life. Mary says, absolute insanity. The Department of Justice just served the Federal Reserve Chair with a grand jury subpoenas threatening criminal indictment over a historic building renovation. And interestingly, I don't know the details of this building, but it's not like the White House where he lives there, right? It's like it's just a workplace, I assume.

It's not like it's his personal house. It's not like you, based on this, he would think he was using, yeah, you would think, that's what it feels like. Because the other, the other, who was a woman who, they also opened an investigation, I'm blanked on a name. Yeah, another fed chair. But in that case, they said, like,

she got a mortgage for a primary residence, but she actually ended up not living there full-time, which, again, right. But at least the claim. Lisa Cook. Hopefully she's not cooked. We'll see. Jerome Powell is appealing directly to the American people and bluntly stating that the criminal charges are not about Congress's oversight role, but rather about the Federal Reserve's

independence in setting the interest rate, American equities, traded a premium because of our respect for law, accountability, and central bank independence. Public service sometimes require standing firm in the face of threats. I will continue to do the job the Senate confirmed me to do with integrity and commitment to serving the American people on a Sunday evening before market open. What is the market doing? We should go over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. We have stocks, options, bombs, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

S&P 500 is green. Green. So anyways. Yeah, I think everybody expected last night for things to happen. Of course, nothing ever happens. But we'll see. In some ways, this will just give the DOJ and the admin more confidence in their decision. Although they did come out and say the White House had nothing to do with.

Yes, yes. Trump said, I'm not pressuring. He said something like, I wouldn't even think to pressure him on this particular angle. He's saying, I might post something on true social about where I think the interest rate should be. He's free to do with that what he will. So I'm sure the story will evolve and there will be a lot of reporting on it. Eddie Elfin Bean says, what do you in for? I gave imprecise information to Congress about the scope of renovations to the Federal Reserve's HQ.

Trey in the chat says the funniest thing is the Fed renovation is self-funded. Oh yeah, buy the actual Fed because it makes enough money. I think they make a bunch of money. Don't they make money printing coins? coinage? I think that they, or is that the mint? Is the mint part of the Fed? I don't know. But I know that, I know that there's a number of, like, there's a number of government programs that are all self-funded. Not all of them are, you know, taxpayer money pits. The CIA's Incutel, for example, is not from the CIA's budget. It makes money because they invest in companies and they put that money back to

work. Very interesting. Bubble boy says, I'm willing to die for the Federal Reserve. So he is Jerome's The strongest soldier. Bubble boys getting standing up. 2,000 likes. A lot of people are coming out in favor of Drew and Powell. Quickly. Graphite. Code review for the age of AI.

Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Go check on graphite. Geiger Capital. Powell watching stocks turn green after thinking the market would defend him. Isn't that Biden? Yeah, the tough thing is like if you assume that rates are going to come down, Like you don't exactly want to sell assets, or you want to own assets.

There's this weird dynamic where you might not like what's happening politically, but there's a big difference between what should happen and what will happen, positive and normative analysis. And so you could be like, I don't like the fact that the Fed's going to be less independent, but if it means that interest rates are going to come down, then that's bullish.

That's a bullish catalyst. And so you wind up going long. Marco Rubio is finding out he has to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. I haven't followed the Marker Rubio meme too closely. I just know that he has a lot of jobs or keeps getting tapped for things. And so I've seen him in an astronaut outfit. I've seen him in, you know, different Venezuelan memes. I don't exactly know where this all came from. But I'm familiar with the concept of Marco Rubio doing everything,

I guess. I don't really... Yeah, it's somewhat depressing because it just means like if you're in the, if you're in the inner circle, you're going to be, you're going to get a lot of responsibility. and if you're out, you will eventually get the laser beam of the admin. Well, gold is through the roof today. Silver. Well. Hosts a chart. Gold jumped from 4510 to 4585.

Not a huge move, but a huge move for gold, of course. So people are bailing on the U.S. dollar potentially. Silver's also up, says the Kobesi letter. Silver surges above $85. an ounce for the first time in history. It's already up 19% in 2026. There's been a number of hard tech founders have commented on the fact that silver

is actually more of an important material than gold in manufacturing of the semiconductor supply chain and a lot of different AI supply chains. And so there's an interesting narrative of the knock-on effects of high silver prices. But nothing ever happens. This is nothing ever happens on steroids.

I've never seen so much. Nothing ever happens, says Mike Bird, because the S&P 500 is up on the news of chaos in the financial markets, potentially. Very odd scenario. Anyway, crowd strike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So the Apple Vision Pro is in the news because, and I think we can pull up this video maybe of Trung Fan posted this.

Mark German was a big fan of this. Apple Vision Pro announced you can now watch a full NBA game in the Vision Pro, not just a little highlight reel, not just a trailer. And Mark German asked the question, is the total addressable market for watching tonight's Lakers game in the Apple Vision Pro just me? Or is anyone else tuning in? A couple of people said, I haven't booed my up for a year. They still have it. They did turn it on. He wound up loving it.

Has this? Have they ever done this before? They've never done a full game. So they've done MLS highlights. You could watch like an eight-minute summary of an MLS game that had a ton of different cuts. A lot of people were not fans of that. This release cadence needs to be studied. It's crazy.

And I mean, that's what Ben Thompson wrote about today in Stratere. He sees all this as like crazy own goals, a lot of really obvious things. Also, the reason that you see this video so grainy like this. So Mark German loved it in the headset. He said it's absolutely wild. It's like watching Corey. side. Trunk Fan has the video here. You can't record what's happening in the headset. You can't just steal an NBA game because, so you need to like put your phone up against it and you don't really

experience it here because for DRM reasons you can't just pirate it. You can't just record what you're seeing. So the actual experience is better than this. I actually went to the Apple store yesterday to try and pick up a Vision Pro to experience this and they were sold out. And I don't know if that means that they were just like not expecting to see. sell anymore so they stopped stocking them. But they didn't have one. But I played with the vision. I mean, the real, I would wait to, the real review would be getting the Apple Vision Pro, going to getting, going to the actual game, getting the ticket right next to the system that they're using, and then just having the headset on and taking it on and on. At the game? Yeah, at the game.

You want to see how real it is? What would you do? Well, so this is cool because it's like emulating like what is happening in real life. But in VR, you can do, like, things that, like, you couldn't do in real life. So, like, I want to see what is the point of view, like, if I'm the ball. You'd probably be so motion sick. I want to be the ball. That sounds terrible. You know ball.

You know ball. You know ball. Matthew Ball or who's the other ball? Dean Ball. Dean Ball. We haven't gotten Matthew Ball on the show yet. We need him. He's a great analyst.

Anyway, so Ben Thompson wrote about this because he's obviously a huge NBA fan. And also, he's a Milwaukee Bucks fan, and the game was the Lakers versus the Bucks. So this is like a royal flush of like the sweet spot for Ben Thompson analysis. He had to jump through VPN hoops to watch the broadcast because it was only available on Lakers' home market, which is California, also Hawaii and I think one other state. So it's somewhat tricky. Wait. You can't.

No, no. If you're in New York and you had a Vision Pro, you could not watch the Lakers play the Bucs, unless you had a VPN. Yeah. There's a lot of details here. That's a huge detail. I know, I know, I know. You're like, I have this, I have this $3,000 device that is just gathering dust. And then you make this big deal about this amazing experience that I can have.

And then if I'm not actually within the area that the game is actually taking place, I can't, I can't experience it. What's the point of ER? So there are a lot of reasonable critiques like that. Ben puts a lot of those in his piece. I think that there are logical reasons. I don't think Apple is dumb. I don't think they just made a mistake. I think these are all contract negotiations.

And when we look at the history of sports and transitions through various eras of broadcast and new technologies, I think their decision-making makes a little bit more sense, even though I agree from a user-experience perspective what you're saying, what Ben Thompson is saying, makes a ton of sense. So Apple clearly reads Stretoree. They've sent him multiple headsets.

He bought his own, but they keep sending him to him, and be like, hey, you should try it. Like, we're coming out with something new. So they've sent him the new one, the M5 Vision Pro, and he was ready to watch this. He was ready to love this. But he was very disappointed because it cut from one scene to another. And so that takes you out of the experience.

He says, do away with all of the pre-show, special announcer, post-show content. Just let me put on the headset. And if I put it on 30 minutes before the game starts, I'll just watch the players warm up. And then you don't need any overlays because if I want to know the score, I'll just look up at the scoreboard. Like you're in the theater. Like people pay a lot of money to sit courtside and they're not like, oh, I also need.

Oh, I'm having a bad experience. Please, please give me an iPad with the score. No, no one cares. They just look at the score. They hear the audience. If something great happens, they hear the roar of the crowd. They see everything. They can even look up at the screen and usually see a replay if they need to.

And so all of that should be possible with just one, simple Apple immersive camera rig streamed the whole game. And that's it. Instead, they did four different camera angles. They're cutting between them. And every time they cut, you get kind of like, where am I? Like, I just teleport it. It's weird. So my question was like, was like, so Ben frames this as, he calls it Apple. You still don't understand the Vision Pro. He's like taking shots of them. And I titled my piece, Apple, they actually do understand the Vision. pro. And I think they've heard his response. They've clearly read his piece. He wrote about this maybe two years ago when he got a demo before it even came out. And he said, the secret to success

with this product will just be put a camera on the field. Let me sit there front, court side. That's it. No editing, nothing else. And then every time they delivered him something that was edited, he wrote a piece about how bad the editing was and how you don't need that and just let me let me sit there. And so my question was, there's no one that really disagrees with Ben. Like, Ben comes out and says these things. Every time there's an Apple Vision Pro piece of content that comes out, he comes down and says, too many edits, too many cuts, just let us sit there. And there's not like there's a lot of people that are like, Ben's wrong. Actually, I love the edits. More edits. Like, they need to be even crack. Well, to be clear, no one's talking about. Except for Ben, basically. So, they should clearly listen to him. And no one's arguing that Ben's wrong. But my question is, like, why on Earth isn't Apple doing this? Why, or at least, why haven't they made it an option? Like, they have. the single camera there. They could just be like, do you want to watch the edited version? Or do you want to watch just the normal just sit there in the seat version? And then Ben would be happy. And he'd be writing a glowing review right now. Instead,

Apple's not giving what Sertekerey wants. And they're feeling the pain because they got an article that was not very, not very complimentary to them in the experience. So I think that this actually has less to do with the technology, less to do with the creative direction and the directorial vision within Apple and more with just straight up contract negotiations. So, and if you go back in history, Ben goes back to some other, some other history. I went back to 1947. So TV adoption, I didn't realize this. TV adoption went through a fast takeoff. In 1947, there were 16,000 TV sets installed in America. Eight years later, it was 32 and a half million. It's like completely asymptotic, completely fast takeoff. So the technology trend was clear, but there was still

financial risk to getting the timing wrong for your league. The NFL is obviously a huge beneficiary of TV today. They make a fortune from the Super Bowl ads that are extremely expensive. But in 1949, the Los Angeles Rams, because the Rams are in L.A. now, but they did, they went to St. Louis, and then they came back, but they were in Los Angeles in 1949. They sort of got wrecked because they would jump too early. So the NFL had gone to all the franchises, said all the teams were giving you the permission to sell your broadcast rights this year.

This season, if you want to put your particular teams, home games on TV, you can do that. You can go out and negotiate. You can sell those. It's an option. And the Rams said, yeah, we'll do it. We'll take the jump. They were the only one that did it,

and it sort of makes sense since they're in L.A., there's a lot of production people here. It would be a natural. They were a little too TV-pilled. They were extremely TV-pilled, and they got burned. So attendance dropped significantly. On an inflation adjusted basis, they lost $2.5 million of today's dollars. And so the Rams had to go to all the sponsors that sponsor the TV broadcast and say, like, hey, can you just make us whole because we're going to go out of business?

And they did. And the sponsors basically paid the Rams for the difference in what they had taken in ticket sales. But it was not a good, it was not a good outcome. And although the NFL eventually got through all of this and, figured it all out. That was not the case for minor league baseball. Minor league baseball attendance at minor league baseball events, minor league events, peaked in 1949 right during the TV install base fast takeoff. And so 49 people, 49 million people went to little, went to minor league events that year in 1949. By 1957, the total had dropped to 15 million. So it actually did

wreck the minor leagues in terms of like their business model and they never really recovered. And so the job of a league commissioner is to get the transition right. Like if you transition too early, you'll have a really, really bad year while everyone just says, hey, I can just do the new thing, the new technology, I don't need to buy the tickets. If you do it too late, other leagues might have figured out their contracts, their ad sales, their broadcast rights, all this other stuff. So Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, who we learned about through his connection to Josh Kushner, of course, He said, I think it's my job to incentivize our partners to be able to look out into the future.

He's not saying, hey, my job's to get everyone out of the stadiums and into VR headsets ASAP. The end result is like there is a separation between immersive rights and presence rights. So there's broadcast rights. And effectively, they're using the same framework. So when they sell a broadcast right, they're not selling the right to, they're selling the right to broadcast with an announcer, with multiple cameras. with different cuts and edits, they're not selling, you're teleported into the stadium. And that's something that they might sell, but they haven't sold yet.

And I think they're deliberate about this. And so I think when they went to Apple, they said, yes, we can do something. Because they did a deal with meta, and you can watch a number of NBA games in the meta quest. And it's the same thing. They cut around. And the reviews are bad. Everyone says it sucks. And so it's obvious that the tech companies should be.

you know, Google, how did people like this? And it's obvious. No, no, people don't like it. But I think the NBA is holding fast that they're like, no, actually, our courtside seats are really, really, really expensive. And we want to keep it that way. We don't want, we don't want it to be substitutive on day one. And Ben Thompson, when he first wrote about the Apple Vision Pro, he said, I would pay thousands of dollars a year for an NBA league pass that allowed me to in VR sit court side. And that's less money than court side seats to every single NBA game, which is effectively what you're selling. So, and then how many Ben Thompson's are there? People with Applevision. And so you, so there's, there's financial risk there. I think it can work out.

I think that there's a deal and there's a price and there's a number. The install base gets to this level and you price it at this level. And I think there are two, I think in some ways they could very easily be two wildly different consumers. Yeah. Like Ben is probably like Ben Thompson, ball. He wants to, he wants to be able to watch courtside for the love of the game. Whereas somebody that's going court side at the Lakers or the Knicks, they're going there to be seen watching courtside, right? A little bit of that. They're willing to like, it's not, you're not just paying to watch basketball, right? Because you could pay like, you know, a fraction to sit a couple rows back. Yeah. You're paying to be sitting court side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the other, the other

interesting angle is this like region lock thing. It almost feels weirder to allow someone in Los Angeles to watch the L.A. Lakers play because they really could just buy a ticket and go down to the stadium. But maybe you should actually be trying to get. That's the whole point. If you're, like a diehard Lakers fan, but you don't live in Southern California. And then somebody says, hey, with the Apple Vision Pro, you can watch it. Like your court side, that's great. Yeah. What you actually one is like Ben Thompson's in Milwaukee. He loves the Bucks, but they're playing in L.A. He's not going to buy a flight to go courtside in L.A. And so you let him experience that game. And then when they're back in Milwaukee, he can go get the courtside seats in his hometown. So you almost want to

do the inverse region lock, something like that. I don't know. What do you think, Todd? Wait, so is that deal where it's just a broadcast, not the actual like live stream? Is that basically every single league? Like, can you do the same thing in F1? So that's also like, I think that would be everyone wants that. You're in the, you're in the cockpit. So every deal is unique, and there's no, there are some laws around sports broadcasting that sort of solidified like the blackout periods and made some of that, defined some like legal language around that. But really it's up to the leagues to decide how they negotiate these contracts, whether every game's available, only home games are available, region locking blackout dates. There's all sorts of mechanics where, I don't know how true this is today, but I know that,

If you have a home stadium and it's full, then you can be much more permissive with the broadcast rights because you've sold out all your tickets. But if you're not selling out the stadiums, then often you won't broadcast as much or you can't broadcast as much. So you'll be in your hometown and you'll go to watch the game and it won't be broadcast because they want you to just go buy a ticket. And then the equilibrium, like the clearing, the market clearing prices that people that are on the fence who are like, I really wanted to watch the game, I can't watch it here, I'll just go buy a ticket. And then over the time you fill it out. Yeah. You're going to be very excited about this. Please. Ben Thompson's going to join the show right now. Really? No way. Amazing.

That's fantastic. Someone in the chat earlier said you're Ben Thompson's biggest fan. I am. And you are. I am. We are. That's amazing. Oh, fantastic. So working on getting Ben on. Fantastic. To continue the discussion.

Okay, yeah, this will be a lot more extra context because he is the expert in this. In the meantime, let me tell you about app loving. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.a.i. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Maduro, we're back in politics land, but don't worry, not for long,

because we're going into Watchland, because he was caught rocking a Chapard Ganesh, a fantastic Indian watch that is incredibly, incredibly detailed. Look at all these different Swiss made. This is a crazy. I feel like this is sort of a lost art. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg should get into this. Wear a watch that has, you know,

Sweet Baby Rays on the dial. The Sweet Baby Rays Chopard dial might go incredibly hard. I would love that. Also, it was the Golden Globes. know Jority didn't watch because you probably haven't seen any of these movies, but they did, in fact, happen yesterday. Rob Report has some images of the best watches at the Golden Globes. If the Golden Globes were any indication, subtle is officially on hiatus, says the Rob Report. This year's red carpet made a strong case for statement watches with bold dials, diamonds.

Did we kind of call this originally with the show? Did we? I mean, no, I mean, the joke early. on was like quiet luxury is over. Yes, loud opulence. Not loud opulence. A lot of these are screaming loud opulence. In fact, I need to return to my,

let's start with the beginning of the slideshow. We need to return to our original statements about, you know, the value of loud opulence because I see these and I'm like, I couldn't pull these off with my life dependent on it. But the rock was spotted watching a Chopard, much like Maduro. But this one is the actual.

Alpine Eagle Frozen Summit. Look at all those diamonds. I like it, but I'd like to see, I mean, could we get at least a couple more? A couple more diamonds. Diamonds on here? I think it's a little understated. He could have gone with, you know, the rainbow? The rainbow one, the gem set, it's the Rolex with all the dime, the different

color diamonds. Who else is wearing fine luxury watches at the Golden Globes? Adam Scott was wearing a Vashron Constance on traditionalel, perpetual calendar ultracite. This is nice. That's a very nice watch. I like that one a lot. I also like this Omega Sea Master, Aquatera, that Glenn Powell was seen wearing. Mark Andresen, notoriously, he's an omega guy.

That's right. New fund. Maybe this was a nod from Glenn saying, like, I salute you. Hat tip. Yes, he's celebrating the $15 billion. He probably read the Paki piece. And he says, you know what, it's time to put on the Omega Sea Master Aquatera. In terms of Omega Sea Masters, this one stands out to me.

Gold is a choice, but I think it's working very well here. And you know who else is wearing an Omega Seamaster? George Clooney, also an Aquatera. I would love to know the details of Omega and Rolex and the other brands, like fighting over people like Clooney, right? Because, you know, I don't think Clooney's putting on a watch without getting paid. Okay, well, we have Ben Thompson in the stream waiting room.

Let's bring him into the TVVit Ultradal. Fantastic. Ben, how are you doing? There he is. Thanks so much for hopping on the show in such short notice. I love your piece. I have takes to drop, so I am... Let's go.

Let's go. Okay, so, I mean, drop your first takes, and then I want to know, is there anything to what I was saying, that Apple actually does read your work, and they do want to do it, but they just can't because of some contract. Oh, I thought you were talking about watches. Oh, no, we're talking about watches. What's on the wrist, Ben? I have a Tudor GMT.

Very nice. Very basic. But highly recommend it. And it's covered in diamonds, I assume, like the rocks? It is not. It is very basic. With a rubber band, because rubber bands rule. Ooh, okay, rubber band.

That's good. Yeah. So I disagree with your take. Please. So my overall view, NBA was on the Vision Pro on Friday. Yeah. They had an NBA clip when they walked. the Vision Pro. So I was there when they watched it, so I got to try it that day.

They took that clip out for the demo that shipped and that was in Apple stores. So you only saw that clip if you were there the first day. And so I don't know, it was the rights issues, which maybe lends itself to your argument or whatever it might be. But that was for sure, it was like three seconds. It was the clip that sold me on the Vision Pro more than anything because you felt like you were there. It was amazing. Yeah. So they have this, finally have a live sports thing, which is a big deal. They demonstrated that they can show stuff live. And it worked.

It worked. I don't think there's any technical issues. The cameras are quite small now compared to what they used to be. You could see them on like the sideline table and underneath the baskets. So this technology works. You can watch things live in the Vision Pro. And it should be amazing and it sucked. And it sucked because you're getting jerked around all the time.

You're not, you're there. You feel like you're there. It is immersive. The unimmersive part is the Apple part, which is some producer in a truck is moving you around. There's a pregame show. I don't need a pregame show. I'm sitting courtside. I can watch the players warm up.

And the reason why I disagree with your take that Apple knows this and wants to do it is that every Vision Pro video has the same problem. Okay. The Metallica video, super cool. You walk in, the opening scene of that is amazing. Well, there's the little bit where they're in, like, the green room or whatever. But you're walking in, you're walking in on James Hathfield, and you're in the crowd. And it's like walking through and people are reaching.

And it's like, it's so amazing. And then suddenly he's going up the stairs and boom, you're jerked to somewhere else. And you're seeing him and come on the stage. You go back, they cut this MLS video, which they have the rights for. They're overpaying. You want to talk with the F-1 deal. Look how much Apple's paying MLS. Like, one of the most absurd overpays in the history of sports.

I think they can do whatever they want. They cut a, I love laugh tracks, but it's very distracted here. I'm sorry. They cut like a season and review video that had like 56 cuts in it. It's like, it's like done by. What do you think it is? Do you think it's like, do you think it's production teams that are just trying to create work for themselves?

Because they go in there and they're like, hey boss, actually the people just want to, they just want to put their goggles on and hang out. It's like, well, then what are you doing here? I feel like there's just a lack of confidence here. Like what I it feels very like it feels when you say it it's like half ass that we're going to go out. We're just going to set a camera there and you can sit there and watch the game. It's like no, there's this pressure in part because it's not popular. It has to be a big production.

We have to have a pregame show. We have to have dedicated announcers. The end result is you get six games which are physically uncomfortable to watch because you're getting jerked around. And like they could have just the very. Vision Pro there for every game, and I would pay a lot of money to watch that. They could have it at every concert. And what's amazing is it, number one, it would make it better. I'm fully convinced of this. And number two, it would solve their content problem because you could suddenly have tickets to every single concert in the world, to every single game in the world. It is a classic tech

issue where you put in the upfront cost, you buy the cameras, you install them, and you have marginal upside forever, everywhere. And it's latching onto a major trend, which is live. Which is this idea that when everything's commoditized online, everything's digital, live experiences are worth more and more and more. Like, you go back to like the ERIS tour and Taylor Swift, like, who has a big topic of discussion at that point. Because like this is something people are crazy. And sports specifically are like pretty immune to AI because nobody wants to watch like the AI box play. Right.

No one's watch AI basketball. Right. Yeah. It's the human aspect of it. And I don't think it's the thing that was the most crazy to me is that it was like geo-locked to Southern California. So I get that. I'm not going to like bag on them for that because, but part of it, the reason why it was geo-locked is because spectrum spent all the money to do all this production. Sure. And so of course, they get the benefit. It's in their catchment area. But you don't need to do all that. They're overthinking this. Like literally set a camera. on the sideline and do nothing else. I will be happy as a clam. Okay, okay. It is expensive to do immersive production.

At the same time, Black Magic has the Ursa Cini immersive. Have you seen this thing? Two fish-eye lenses on the front, 16K, it costs $30,000. And it feels like if this is the case, there has to be an opportunity for someone who's a little more agile,

maybe it's Red Bull, maybe it's some league that's not front and center to just go and do this. They have to pay 30K up front and then stream it. Yeah, 30K is nothing, okay? We're all in the tech industry. We can laugh at figures like that. But that's an upfront investment. Like the problem is they tacked on all these marginal costs to this production.

So when you logged on for the game, there was a dedicated pregame host and show for the Applevision Pro viewers. That's almost certainly not going to be as good as the main pregame. show. Where they're paying like hundreds of millions of dollars. Is sitting court side and watching NBA players warm up and make 57 threes in a row because they're incredible. Yeah.

I don't know if you guys have ever sat court side, but like it's, it's amazing. It's amazing. Speaking of watches, this is where I spend my watch money, okay? Okay, okay, okay. It's an unbelievable experience. And they have all, like, they have like, for example, they have like replays in there. Yeah. Which, okay.

Yes, you can see the bed of replays. You know where else they show replays? I'm the scoreboard. How can I see the scoreboard? I can look up because I'm wearing a Vision Pro that's immersive and has this fish-eye camera where I can see all around it. I don't need a scoreboard bug down at the bottom. I can look at the scoreboard.

Like, I actually, during the game while watching it, it was actually kind of hard to see the scoreboard bug because it was way down at the bottom. Sure. So I was looking at the scoreboard in the arena the whole time. Wow. Yeah. That's the whole thing.

That's the whole thing. You're there. And so all that stuff, the pregame show, they had dedicated play-by-play announcers and analysts for the Vision Pro. They had these multiple cameras. They had a production truck who's choosing, how can I upset Ben this time? And that'd be like,

the other cameras. You didn't need any of that. And $30,000 is a one-time cost. You spend that money once, and you put these cameras in, every arena for every game, everywhere, and then you suddenly have this exclusive selling tickets to live events in a way no one else can. I think it's a huge, like, it seems so clear to me. This is the Vision Pro use case. This is your portal to every live event in the world. What do you,

what do you think about meta, meta's efforts on, uh, live sports? NBA, uh, partnership as well. Specifically with Oculus. Division, Division pro is better. I mean, like the, the, the, like, the Oculus has advantages relative to the Vision Pro. Actually, I love Mark Zuckerberg's post when the Vision Pro came out. It's like, oh, we're not surprised. We could have done that, but we didn't. Which was valid.

I'm also not particularly interested in the use cases that are good for that. I don't care about gaming. I don't care about a lot of the other stuff. Like, this is, for me, the killer use case, for sure. It seems like... Yeah, yeah, I mean, it seems like the next, the next quest, if they stay in VR,

we'll be better. We talked to James Cameron, and it seemed like he was pretty excited that they might have gotten the same screen from the Apple Vision Pro. Like, yeah, they're two years behind, but you bring that screen into the next quest for... Which is fine, but there's tradeoffs for that as far as like number of pixels in the field of view and all those sorts of things. But, like, the whole point is that $3,500 feels overwhelming, like, for what you get. $3,500 to be able to attend any sporting event in person is one of the greatest deals of all time.

Like, that... How do you think they should... in Taiwan, I used to be in Taiwan, I would fly over for specific games. Yeah. Like, and guess what? I would spend more than $35 on my ticket. I'm not flying the back of the bus at this point. Sorry. Like, so like, like, this would, this is, it is like, it's like with the Apple Watch when they realize, oh, people, it's fitness.

Remember they watched with all these lists of different things and what you could, like, remember you could, like, draw your Apple Watch and, like, draw your, like, your, like, the heartbeat, right? The heartbeat, that never went. Who's it? Which is fine. Which is fine. Who's the Apple exec that's the most hardcore NBA fan? Because I feel like you got to.

Eddie Q. So I know how much gold state tickets costs because I sat. Well, I actually, I was poor. So I answered in the second row behind the seat that was inscribed with Eddie Q's name. Oh, okay. Yeah, he would be the guy that he's the start you for this. Okay. So do you think this is a next season they might get it right?

Are they already pre-baked? on the next, on the next, because they have like four more games. It feels like they could take this. They have the footage. Like, they could just not edit the next game, not do that broadcast and do exactly what you're prescribing. I hope so.

Look, free advice, Apple, this is your, that's why I made, I've written this. So number one, the reason I disagree with your take is because every video they make suffers from this problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They are produced in a TV style for a device that is fundamentally different than TV. That's the core problem.

Is there, Is there at least a possibility that Metallica also said, hey, we don't want a substitute of effect. We don't want people to help. Yeah, so, it's so funny to think. And I'm not to the same thing. But there's a mean behind the scenes. They've made lots of other videos.

They've made lots of other, like, every video they have suffers. Yeah, even the Alicia Keys thing, I can you imagine if the NBA actually sold a ticket where like every 30 seconds you had to stand up and go watch from a different view? It's like, they're like, it's amazing. You see every angle. You're like, please, sir, I just want to sit and watch a game. I turned it off. I watched half the game on TV because it was uncomfortable.

What do you think is the long-term like viewing, like viewing experience? Is it you have it on TV and you have your Apple Vision and you're kind of like, you know, based on how closely you're paying attention, you're either like locked in with the Vision Pro on. No, no. Or you have it on the whole time. I think that a big thing for sure, the biggest missing experience is, of course, I want to be on my phone half the time. like any person I do have the

the M5 Vision Pro it's the first time I ever took a demo unit I've always like declined to do that but I'm like there's no way on earth I'm paying for this but I do actually want to see if there's any difference my actually biggest takeaway is the pass through is much better.

This might be I didn't do a direct compare that was just sort of my perception and to be honest I haven't used a Visit Pro in a long time so who knows how good my memory is the past through was really good I had no issue using my phone at all. It did seem better than it used to be.

But maybe that might be placebo, just to be clear. Getting screen time, getting screen time through another screen. It's a luxury. It's, we got level. So your screen time app could potentially show more than like

160 hours a week. I had 26 hours. 26 hours today because I was in the Mission Pro using my phone, my laptop. Yes, right. What a world. What a world. That's funny. Well, I mean, are you optimistic about any other Apple

Vision Pro like opportunities because I was looking at this $30,000 immersive camera and I was thinking like I was actually advising some friends who they shoot a much more like evergreen podcast, like these really definitive interviews. And I was saying maybe you should start shooting. They were shooting an 8K because they were like, hey, maybe one day we'll license these to Netflix. We want the extra resolution. We're not distributing an 8K, but we have it now. And I was saying, well, you want to go further? Why not 16K? Why not immersive? Maybe you should get this thing, start recording now. Now this particular device can only record for like 45 minutes, I think, and then you have to swap the cards or whatever. But I was like, maybe you should

be doing the flow, maybe not this year, but maybe next year. Is there some opportunity where someone who's independent comes in? Yeah. There's lots of opportunities. Like, like, and I think like there's real enterprise opportunity, like for, like, especially with the pass through and things that you can do on those lines. There's productivity, sort of possibilities. But you need, like, what is the anchor thing? What is it? Everyone knows that this does. And again, I think the Apple Watch is a good example here. It took them a while to get to that. They launched with the physical fitness stuff,

but it wasn't clear that that was the thing for a few years. And now every Vision, every Apple Watch thing is fitness, fitness, fitness, it saves your wife and, you know, all those sorts of things. And to me, this is it. It is you get live in your living room. That's the Vision Pro Pitch. That's gonna be fun. We'll just have to wait another five years for them to back down from their,

their opinions. It's, but, we're gonna find, we're gonna find out that they have like, a thousand, two years ago. Like,

no, I wrote this the day, I wrote this the day at launch. I know, what's amazing about this is you don't need production. Yeah. All I want is to feel like I'm there.

And it delivers. It lets you, do you, do you, of course you don't know you're there. The resolution isn't perfect. There is a bit of tearing. If you go super fast,

like the peripheral vision's not, not, not perfect. But it is, it's amazing. It's an incredible experience that no one else can match Quest can a little bit

but the Vision Pro in part because Apple invented these cameras. Like Black Magic is making them but it's Apple's whole format it's Apple like created the whole thing. And yeah, it just feels like this is a company that

it's like a lack of confidence. You let the device do what the device can do. Stop trying to like overdo it. No, Step back. Yeah.

Just step back and let it do its thing. And I'm more convinced than ever. I, again, I've been having this take a few times. I wrote about the MLS thing. I wrote after the Metallica thing. I put it on the front page of checkery today. I'm like, look, no one in the world cares about this device other than me. I know.

But I'm desperate for someone to read this. So there's no paywall that you don't need to get afforded to you. Just read this. And they had to do the bucks, too. It's so funny. I don't. The first was, it was a loyal flush for you. I have a meta question about just being in a position to review new technology and having to deal with, like, the Pepsi Challenge.

Are you familiar with the Pepsi Challenge story? I am. Dude, I'm Gen X. I'm very old. Okay. Yeah. So the Pepsi Challenge, for those who don't know, they had people taste a little, a one-ounce cup of Coca-Cola, one-ounce cup of Pepsi, and overwhelmingly, the random people that came and tested said the Pepsi taste is better. And what the result was was that Pepsi was sweeter, so it tasted better over one ounce, but over 16 ounces a full can, it was more like 50-50, and people actually did prefer the Coca-Cola.

And I feel like with a lot of hardware devices, you put it on for 10 minutes, it's amazing, you put it on for half an hour. It's incredible. But then pretty quickly, the big tech executive said, oh, that's enough of the demo. Let's talk to you about something else. Now write your review based on 30 minutes, and it's a very different experience than two weeks a month, seeing if it collects dust, seeing if you churned. And I'm wondering just how you deal with that mentally where you have to talk about something, but at the same time, you're not getting the, you know, you haven't been able to spend a year with a product. No, it's a good point.

So my way to deal with that is I generally don't do product reviews. Sure, sure. So that makes it much easier. Yeah. I think with the Vision Pro, though, is a great example of this phenomenon. Yeah. It is like the first 30 minutes of using a Vision Pro is one of the most mind-bullying experience of your life and it continues to be.

Yeah. I actually, I remember when I first got it, I actually had, I felt perfect follow-on from the watch segment, because I found like a total duchess thing. I had my assistant, I had it shipped to his house and had him fly to Taiwan to bring it to me. Oh, yeah. Because it wasn't, it was only available in the U.S. And the, and, and I remember actually I was going, I think, this is awful. This is so amazing. I was going on a ski trip like a week later.

So I'm up there, and I remember I'm sitting in this bar. up in Naseco. And I'm like, all the ski instructors, like, because I was friends with, I had the same guy for many years, he brought all his friends over, and they're all trying this. I, like, I hone my whole demo scripts.

And, like, we still talk about this afternoon with the Vision Pro in this bar and DeSaco, try it. And it's amazing. It's absolutely incredible. But then, what do you do with it? Right? Like, that's the big question. What I will say in the Vision Pro's defense

is even now, I don't use it very often. Every time I put it on, though, I'm like, this is so cool. Like, it retains that aspect of there's something magical about this experience. It's just searching for that ongoing reason to come back, that use case. And that comeback use case needs to be something that only it can deliver. The productivity things are cool. I would, I really like that's, the other thing that's, the other thing I think is really real is like,

Maybe from Apple's side, like they have this device. It has so much potential. It's so exciting. It's so cool. And then it's almost disappointing that like, okay, the use case is just like live sports, right? Because they're like, we want to create the next computing paradigm. But the reason that it actually is an incredible niche is that like what's more mainstream than Brad and circuses, right?

What's more mainstream than sports? It's a chicken and egg problem. Like the way you get those productivity experiences and those new things that weren't possible before is you have a large install base that draws developers in to create those experiences. But to get there, it needs to be a market. So you need sort of the initial use case to create, like this is why the iPhone is the greatest platform ever. Everyone needed a phone. Yeah. Like so like, so you, you got that built in sort of advantage so that developers, like, they didn't have to do anything to earn developers. They just shipped a better phone.

Yeah, so that's what I'm saying. Like, if you create this amazing live sports experience, you get a million people that are using it multiple times a week. And then they're using it. They're watching together. It's a social thing. Then they can be asking. I don't know what's serious. Yeah.

If you see what I look like, as I grab, I'd put it on. I don't look very social. No, but I'm talking about more like maybe you have a FaceTime call open with a buddy in the headset and you're watching it together,

you're hanging out, watching the game or something like that. Well, I mean, no, I would just say, I think the Vision Pro is more of a single player experience. But what is the biggest single player market in the world?

Productivity. Like when I'm doing work, I want, I'm on my own working on it. Right now, I have four monitors. Like I'm one of those crazy people. Like a Vision Pro, I wish I would have brought up to me last summer when I back to Taiwan because I was actually doing work and I was working my laptop and it was terrible. Like, oh, I can't believe I didn't bring this. It was the perfect use case for me to use it.

But by and large, I don't need it. But if there were particular apps or use cases that were uniquely enabled by it, maybe that would be a reason. But you're only going to get those by drawing in developers. You're only getting developers by having an addressable market that is worth putting the investment into. Which means this is always been a, this is one of my big thesis on strategicry. It's always been a question on tech, chicken array. What comes first?

The device, the platform, or the developers? I was at Microsoft with Windows 8. I spent a lot of time and spent a lot of Microsoft's money getting developers. That doesn't work. What matters is demand. Demand pulls in developers. You need the users, which means you need the core use case to sell a bunch of devices, and then you can start the virtuous cycle.

To me, the core use case for the Vision Pro, if anyone remembers it exists, and I'm not sure that Apple executives do, is live. Live in your living room. You do that. You do that. You sell much of devices and then you pull people in. I have a buddy, TJ, who worked at Apple at one point. When the Vision Pro was announced, he got it, he was so excited. He was like, I'm going to spend the next three years building products for the Vision Pro. How long did he last? He lasted like.

Three months? Yeah, like, no, no, no, like less. He was like, what's the point of building for, he's super talented, but what's the point of building if there's nobody there? You know, it's not like. Are you, you mentioned the four monitors. are you going in on the 52-inch Dell 6K monitor? No. Why not?

Way too low resolution. Way too low resolution? Actually, I lied. No, I'm actually on the fifth monitor right now just for podcasts. So I have two 4K monitors on my laptop. I have another, I don't know with that LG like square screens. Oh, yeah, yeah. It is a roosting a low resolution.

But then for podcasts, I have a 55-inch TV or so. Okay, staying on Apple, Gemini. The Gemini, the Gemini, Siri News dropped this morning. It had been kind of previously reported, so in some ways it's old news. What are you expecting out of like this new version of Siri? Well, the bar is 55 feet underground. I expected to be a lot better. No, I think it makes a lot of sense.

I mean, it's now that the federal courts have approved to Google and Apple combining to rule the world, Google has the infrastructure to support the scale of Apple. They know how to work together. They've worked together for years. There are very natural partners in that respect. Google can think big picture about this. Like, I'm sure Apple, the report that Mark Grumman had last fall is Apple's going to pay like a billion dollars, which, again, we're in tech.

That's no money at all. But it's tied into the search deal. Like, they can massage it. The problem with working with an open AI or an anthropic is they need to make money. And so, like, Apple doesn't, I think there's a more sort of eye scratch your back, your scratch my back sort of thing here. Google's talking about, you know, working with Apple's chips, adapting it, whatever it might be. Apple does bespoke stuff like that.

So I think it makes a ton of sense for both sides. Do you think it ever flips? And do you think Google will be paying Apple? Because there's this news also that you're going to be able to do shopping through Gemini. And so you can imagine a world where you go to Siri. You ask for a product and there's ads and that Gemini result. And Google's the one that's monetizing that. so they're passing some of that revenue back to Apple?

It's a good question. I mean, I think when Apple talked about like the next generation Siri and Apple intelligence, I was pretty optimistic about this idea of Apple basically replaying the search. That's my whole thing. I'm like, I'm like,

in some way if I'm Apple and I'm paying for an LLM to use it to power a product that can basically do search really well, that could eventually have an ads business attached to it, that eventually could have like commerce built into it. Like it's this weird, it's this weird situation where like Gemini is effectively helping like that's that's what I don't fully understand yet because I'm going to be like the market structure was so perfect for Apple in that they need like it's just a default search engine it's there's no sort of deep

integration into the product it's just like when you type in your search bar what engine is used and so it's super easy like there there's like a concept when it comes to like figure out who's going to win in a value chain super easy substantive ability is good for whoever can plug whatever in. So they could choose over they want. So it made sense that the value flowed that direction. The difference with this AI stuff is it needs to be integrated deeply. And Apple is more on the defensive here. Like they need to have quality AI features built into the operating system. And so I think the need is more on Apple's part. And the benefit Google is getting my suspicion is less that there is less about the ad thing and more

they're getting some incremental revenue and they're probably getting a lot more I mean Apple's gonna be precious about the data we'll see how that sort of works but but they also don't need it's all incremental I would imagine internal reasoning rollouts and all of that that happens in Gemini

Apple's not gonna be able to claw all that back so you're gonna have all this like reinforcement learning training on okay maybe maybe you're obfuscating the privacy data what the person asked for but all those interim steps of I went to a website, I interacted with it, I figured out how to click this button. Like, that's going to accrue to Gemini, you would imagine. Well, and what it speaks to, I think, is what would be the red flags that would come up to

this deal from an Apple perspective? It's like, well, they're not yet, maybe they need to tough it out and build their own crappy LM so that in the future, they control their own LMs such that if you get to a world with, say, AR, right, where I'm actually lots of dispute about this, but I'm pretty optimistic on just-in-time UIs, where the idea that something pops up that is nothing but the decision you need to make in that moment for whatever it might be, and then it goes away. Like, to me, this was the best part of the Orion experience was the Facebook sort of AR glasses was when I received a call.

Because the OS I used there was kind of like Quest just sort of dumped in there. And it didn't really make sense, you have like blocky stuff. There was like an Instagram and stuff. It's like, I could just look at my phone. This is going to be better here. But you could be, we got a conversation right now. I could have a notification popping right now saying so-and-so is calling, and I could use my little wrist thingy and dismiss it.

And it's just there when I need it. It only has one option, accept or decline, and then it's gone. And I could see that being a future of UI and important for Apple to control, but by not shipping their own, by depending on Google, they might say pretty words about, oh, we're going to simultaneously develop our own. No, that, whatever. If you're, that's not going to happen. You're going to be so invest in this other one.

And that speaks to the value is accruing to Google, because they're the ones actually developing and pushing the technology and Apple is sort of trailing along. Given that, I have a hard time seeing, if Apple's going to get more and more deeper into this using Gemini, are they going to be able to credibly go to Google, say, pay up, or else we're going to switch to someone else? I think that's probably unlikely.

I don't think it's going to play out like search. But we'll see. I was obviously wrong about this once, so I could certainly be wrong again. Sure. What was your reaction to the Manus acquisition? From my point of view, it's exciting,

specifically because Zuck has just been spending all this money on talent, but if you look historically, he's been very good at like buying something, scaling it. It's sort of unclear to me so far, whether he plans to take Manus from $100 million run rate to multiple billions or just leverage the team's ability

to build great agentic, you know, effectively workclosed product. How are you thinking about it? Yeah, I have a hard time seeing the meta in the enterprise sort of angle. No, but I, but even like, but even like figure out the best product in this category and buy it for me. Like that kind of workflow, like that's what I can imagine the Manus team being. That's my sort of understanding. Yeah, it is like this is actually a really excellent product team that is doing very good work. And, is worth having on board. And does that mean growing their business

into something larger that's a material source to our business? I think that would be a mistake. But I think the idea of agentic workflows is obviously a very compelling one. Actually, one of my favorite things, Mark Zuckerberg has been all over the place on AI. I did an interview with him like nine months ago.

That was kind of bizarre. It was right when he was clearly thinking through maybe I need to reset everything. And I thought that sort of came across in the interview at the time. But one thing he did say is actually what is the largest sort of most profitable at-scale agent right now? Facebook advertising, which I think is a very, or Google advertising thing, a very astute point.

You go in, you tell Facebook, I want, I'm willing to pay $1.49 for a customer or $9.99 for a customer, go get them. And it goes out and gets them. Now, is that a full L-M-denominated probabilistic workflow? No, it's not really LMs. It is more probabilistic for really post-ATT. But the idea that you ask for a job, the focus is on the job to be done, as opposed to specifying how you do it.

And that is just by and large for most advertisers, particularly in the long tail. Probably part of the tail, too, they just don't want to give up control, the better way to do it. And I think there's going to be lots of things like this. I think Google's announcement with Shopify and this idea of, you know, ads that are perfectly targeted to user, very compelling, makes a ton of sense. That's where something like Rock, by the way, fits in, like super fast inference so you can generate. Like, you think about how advertising works, these auctions that are run and you get ads. In the time it takes a little web page, it's absolutely incredible.

Where the next step is it would be insert generative ads into there, which is going to require very high inference speeds. So I think, and this has always been the most compelling short-term AI monetization opportunity is basically Google and Facebook ads. That's why I've been super bullish on both of them. I think it's why Facebook needed to do this reset and why Google, you know, it's justifiably been sort of going to the moon recently. Well, what do you think of Eric Suford's point that you might not actually need to put the ads in the LLM responses in the sense that you could be going to an LLM and saying, tell me the history of the Roman Empire. It knows that you're shopping for shoes, for new shoes, and it shows you ads for shoes in the middle of your Roman Empire deep dive. just like on Instagram, you can be scrolling one thing and your algorithm can be recommending

you a certain type of content, maybe like dogs, showing you dog videos, but then it also knows that you need luggage for your next trip and it's showing you ads for luggage or something. No, I think it's a great point. I think Eric makes some good points about like you're running a real risk of conflict of interest, even the perception of conflict of interest. Totally. Otherwise. And so I think that's a very good point.

And the reality is that's a much larger business. like just be uh show what you're looking for is inventory the number one way to predict sort of the upside for meadow over the last several years the stock market has consistently had it totally backwards every time they're sort of uh their price per ad would plummet because the stock market would freak out this happened with stories in like 2018 2019 it happened with reels a couple years ago And the issue is that the reason why price price price price It plummets is because there's a massive increase in inventory And when there's a massive increase in inventory, it's just more places to show ads

That is a huge opportunity. You saw huge run-ups both times as they figured out how to monetize stories They figured out how to monetize Reels and this should be an opportunity of how to like it's it's gonna take a while to figure out how to monetize You know, maybe it's maybe just an aspect of when they're reasoned when they're thinking or image generation, that might be an ad opportunity. And it's a big opportunity. A big problem is these folks, I think the Open AI has hired so many meta people.

It confuses me why they haven't been on board with this. Like, it's a win, win, win. You need money to fund your operation. The best way to make money is to show ads. Why? Because you get to deliver a better product to more people. This idea that we're going to commit to a world, where if poor people get a worse product, that's not how tech works.

The reason why tech is amazing is it generates a ton of consumer surplus. You do this upfront investment. And because it's monetized by ads, everyone gets the best product. It's great. And Open AI, like having this religious devotion for so long about not doing this, if they had launched, they could have watched the world's crappiest ads in 2023. By today in 2026, they'd be good. They'd be making money and people want rebel against it.

Now they're going to have to launch ads. They're going to suck. And people would be like, this sucks. I'll just go to Gemini or whatever it might be. Just it drives me bonkers. It doesn't seem like there's a little bit of like, not to go back to chicken and egg problem, but like the first mover disadvantage. Like the first LLM that has ads,

there'll be a whole press cycle about, oh, Gemini's the ad one. Would have been a lot easier if you were the only LLM. Like that's, like it's, it's, it, it risks the entire company. Yeah. Like, like they need to get their opportunities in the consumer space first and foremost. Yeah. Because the consumer space needs to monetize via ads. Yeah.

And the fact they didn't get there or start to get there still haven't started to get there is it's a company imperiling. Yeah. Poor decision. Last question from my side at least. Predictions. Do you think there's anything to the prediction that Open AI will buy Pinterest or partner up with a social network at a more deeper level than they already have? Well, so it's really interesting. This is one of my, I was actually, I was talking to.

to, I met when I was in New York a few months ago, and I was at this office. Actually, I was being the semi-analysis guys. Great guys, but they were sharing an office with like a hedge fund. And one of the guys is like, look, you're responsible for one of our worst all-time decisions. And I'm like, what's that? He's like, we bought Twitter.

I'm like, I never said to buy Twitter. That's terrible stuff. Unless he's going to overpay for it. And he's like, but then I remembered what it was. It was, I think 2017, 2018, when Twitter bought Mopo. and my theory at the time was Twitter's just a very poor inventory for advertising. Part of it is it's text-based, especially then, there were fewer images. There's also a mindset when you're on Twitter, you're like girded up for battle.

And you're like you're trying to engage. Like, you're supposed to Instagram. Like Instagram, the ads might as well be. The content. Yeah, yeah. Axis fight or flight. Yeah. No, exactly.

Exactly. And so my theory then, but Twitter has the, potential to really understand your interest in a really sort of deep way. And so what they could do is they could harvest signal on Twitter, and they could manifest it with using Mopub and inventory sort of across a bunch of apps. And that would be sort of a very compelling model. Again, who knows if I was right? Twitter's executives or Twitter was incompetent for years and years and years at one point.

I said I'm never carrying this company again because this is pointless. That's a bit what sort of Apple of and did, who did by Mopubb from Twitter. and has made a ton of money doing that. But I think that would be the thesis there, which is because people are dumping everything to this LM, we can get all this signal and understanding what we need is inventory to monetize that signal. And could that be inventory to do so?

The theory makes sense. It feels like they have a lot more important things to spend money on. I think probably at the end of the day, particularly post-ATT, like, oh and O, like your owned and operated properties are always going to be the most value. I think figuring out how to monetize

in ChachyPD is probably the best, but it's not an insane idea for that reason. I like that. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show on short notice. We're huge fans here, and congratulations. Look, I am on a, look, no one cares about the Vision Pro, but me.

Therefore, I take it upon myself. Correct the record. The strongest soldier. Well, if you want, yeah, if you want the most, the deepest analysis, the most, you know, the hottest takes on the Vision Pro. Of course, sign up for strategic.

HECary, get on the pro plan. This one is free. You don't even look, just this. This one's free. But you know there's going to be podcasts. We should, we should hire, we should get a plane, fly over and drop the, this one. This new one has leaflets. Leiflets over Guantino.

We'll do it. We need to. We need to. Well, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your week. And I hope your 2026 is off to a great start. Yeah, great to see you, Ben. We'll talk to you soon.

Have a good one. Label box. delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box, the label box. Every time. They didn't give us that tagline, but it's just simply too good. Get in the box. Walmart partners with Alphabet's Google to allow shoppers to purchase products through Gemini.

So Walmart is jumping in with Google. We're having Harley from Shopify on the stream later to talk about agentic commerce. What's happening there? There's a lot of other news. And I have the audio on my phone. The Google is posting a video of wing. The future of retail is landing. They're taking shots at our boy Keller, launching a drone delivery service.

This one hit me pretty hard. I know. I know. We love Zipline. We love Keller here. We love Google. Obviously, they're sponsor. Can Google just leave one future of X thing for someone else?

someone else. I didn't even know about the, I didn't even know about Wing until today. Was this an acquisition? Wing.com? One of the best domains. You're going to be texting Keller like Sam Altman and Elon were texting each other about the future of AI. You're going to be like the future of drone delivery is in our hands, brother. We got to be wing. No, Google's been working on this for a long time. Obviously, this is going not to be, you know, the only, there's only going to be one company with the technology. There's going to be a variety. Tyler, what do you have for us? Just on the point of Elon and Sam, Elon, just said on the Apple and Google collaboration, he said, seems like an unreasonable,

unreasonable concentration of power for Google, given that they also have Android and Chrome. So he's still on the... He's taking shots. He doesn't like... He's not a fan. Well, we are fans of Plaid here, and so let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending.

Now with AI. We talked about Apple confirming Gemini. Very excited for that. I want them to roll this out immediately. I know that it's probably going to be some normal release cycle with very polished ads and onstage keynote and a developer preview, and there'll be a whole cycle to updating.

But we are in the age of AI Apple. Just ship it today. Just replace Siri with Gemini today. I'm sure a lot of people would be fans of that, but they operate the way they do. Eric Topol. I pulled a little history on Wing.com. Please.

So started... Wait, they only wing.com? Wing.com? Oh, wow. It's not only, not only to this is an amazing partnership, but a fantastic domain. Yeah.

So it started within X, Google X, the Moonshot factory. It really is a factor for Moonshot. The original mission was focused on emergency medical response. Okay. So they wanted to deliver defibrillators to heart attack victims. Basically, they pivoted away from emergency,

emergency services to last mile commercial delivery. They started doing their first, like, real world trials back in Queensland as early as 2014. It graduated from X in 2018. They later became the first delivery drone delivery company to receive a Part 135 air carrier certificate from the FAA. And they've just been scaling the network since then. So, yeah, I guess they're going to be able to serve 40 million people. by 2027.

Yeah, I mean, as an American, as a human, as a technologist, I want more and I want competition, but as a big fan of Keller at Ziply, I want him to dominate. No, I think, I think Google maybe did this. They knew Keller had the potential to be one of the greatest in history, but they realize if he didn't have a viable competitor, he could never live up to his. So they're inspiring him to grind harder. That's what's going on. Okay, now we understand it.

Well, Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding. It lives in Figma's up, puts look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code-back prototypes and apps fast. OpenAI launched ChatchipT Health, now Anthropic, has Claude for heart attacks or something like that. Healthcare and Life Sciences. Claude, I'm dying. Give me blood transfer. Don't make mistakes.

I used cloud code this weekend in a funny way. I was having slow Wi-Fi, which of course is a weird thing to go to Cloud Code for because it uses the Internet, so you're going to have a slow interaction. I had it, I had to diagnose my, I gave it a prompt. I said, what did I say? Somewhere here. Maybe I lost it. But I basically told it, I told it like, hey, I'm having problems in my Internet. Can you just go fix it?

It ran all these different diagnostics, pinged Google, pinged all the different DNS servers, ran through everything, ran speed tests. and it came back and told me to turn it off and turn it back on. And it actually worked. And I could have saved myself like 45 minutes of sitting there being like, yes, I'm okay with you using curl. Yes, I'm okay with you using W. GED. The entire time, super intelligence was just turning it on, turning off and then back on again. It's Lindy. It's Lindy. It should have just preempted me and just been like, look, dude, have you at least turned it off and turned it back on? Anyway, Tyler, what do you think?

If Claude was being slow by the, because of the Wi-Fi, then that's the example of, like, you know, self-improvement. Self-improve. Oh, it improved itself. Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Boom. Yeah, yeah, it was a weird issue. Really high ping, really, like the bandwidth was fine, but the ping was really bad. And so it was very annoying.

But it did resolve it. And, you know, at the end of the day, Claude Cod Code did a very thorough job of telling me some time-honored advice. So thank you to Codcode. And interesting that everyone's pushing into health care. I'm still waiting for the push into legal. I'm wondering if that'll happen or if that's more complicated. than healthcare. I'm also wondering maybe health care is more lucrative, more viable, more, I would love to be in the meetings where they have prioritization of what, who's in, whose lunch

they're trying to eat off? Who's, whose plate should we eat off of? Let's, let's decide. The lunch meeting. Well, New York Stock Exchange. If you want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We love the nice seed. Can't wait to be out there. Again, we're planning. planning our next trip. So stay tuned. Cannot wait. Meta, CEO, Zuckerberg is launching Meta-Comput, planning tens of gigawatts this decade and hundreds of gigawatts longer term. This effort will be led by Santosh, Janard Hahn, and Daniel Gross, DG, back in the mix. Santosi will continue to lead our technical architecture, software stack, silicon program,

developer productivity, and building and operating our global data center fleet and network. Daniel will lead a new group responsible for long-term capacity, strategy, supplier relationships, industry analysis. Let's give it up for industry analysis. I love it. Let's give it up for planning and business modeling as well. DG, this is not his first radio. Do you remember the Andromeda cluster, NFDG? That was really, really cool.

Early and right on that. So they were doing, was it AI Grant, was the name of the program? So they backed a bunch of companies, some crazy companies in AI Grant too, sort of an incubator, accelerator model, a bunch of early stage companies, smaller checks. Let me just read this. So in the first batch, they had perplexity, cursor, replicate, chroma. Chroma, too. I think they had, didn't they have Julius?

Julius was in maybe a second. It might have been the second one, but there's so many bangers. If you just go to the site, it'll solve them. It's amazing. And so what they did was they went and bought a whole bunch of GPUs. They built a cluster. And they had a feeling that GPUs would be important. And it was.

So basically anyone in their portfolio was sort of default GPU rich, at least for a little bit, although, of course, the resources were shared. And I have heard about another accelerator doing this recently. I need to confirm with the head of that accelerator if it's okay to share, because it's very exciting as well. But I was asking them, like, what does it mean to build a cluster at this level? Did you buy land? Did you build a data center? Or did you just go to Microsoft and say, hey, cordon off this little,

rack of GPUs. We want those to be dedicated, at least instances. And I believe it was more of the latter, but still, you know, not their first rodeo here. So I think this project's in good hands

with DG. So let's hear it for the meta. Yeah, META also brought on Dina McCormick. Oh, yeah. joined META as president and vice chairman

to work on partnering with governments and sovereigns to build, deploy, investment in finance, meta's infrastructure. This is making wave on truth social.

I saw it. Government, yeah, governments, getting involved in financing Meta's infrastructure. So he's saying, he's like, Sam, they said it. I'm going to say it now. It's not a backstop, it's the front door.

Dina was a former deputy national security advisor. Well, we have a new sponsor of the show. Century. Century shows developers, what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to get their apps, to keep their apps working. Welcome. Century.

So welcome to them. Have you. Vidia is investing a billion dollars in an AI drug lab with Eli Lilly over five years. This will be very interesting. We're excited for Eli Lilly progress. Drug lab sounds. It's AI OZembek. It's the two biggest super trends of the last five years, weight loss and AI.

Could it get any better? Well, now it will. We'll have to dig into more of this partnership. Tom Brady is now the face of the former CEO of Axis. new company, E-Med. Oh, that's right. Did you see this? I did.

So Tom Brady, if you're not familiar, he was the former face of FTX. That's a rough one. And also, was he actually the face? Because there were a lot of celebrities that partnered with FtX, Larry Daynard was in there. He was part of some of their bigger campaigns. He did a bigger campaign. He did a TV campaign. But again, you know, it's hard if you're a celebrity to know.

But this is an interesting one because, so he's joining as the Chief Wellness Office. serve e-med. Yeah. And it's interesting because this kind of just makes him the face of GLP-1s, right? Yeah. Which is kind of a beneficiary, like is beneficial to the entire industry, right? If you sell GLP-1s, you can be like, well, Tom Brady. Yeah, he's down.

Yeah. I wonder if he's in a button. That'd be interesting. Anyways. Peppard regimen is. Maybe he's just super AGI-I-pilled. Maybe he, maybe Sam said, hey, I'm an, I'm an investor in Anthropic, and he said, well, I think Anthropics is going to win. I'm partnering up with you. I don't care about

the structure of your hedge fund. I don't care if there's a backdoor out of your trading platform. I'm in on you because of your investing track record. What about that? Yeah. If Anthropic gets out at a trillion, there's going to be a debate, at least, about Sam Maghman-Fried legacy. He, of course, invested, what, $10 million for $10% of the company or something? He owned 8% of the company. So that would be maybe like an $80 billion position today, something like that, 50 billion, 10 billion with dilution. I don't know. It was a good investment. Just like getting your business on gusto is a good investment. The unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses.

Like us. Like us. Paramount Skydance has now initiated what insiders are calling Plan D. They're running out of letters as they look to upend Netflix's winning bid for Warner Brothers Discovery. Hey, maybe the D just stands for discovery. So, you know, maybe this is actually one of the earlier plans, but... Maybe they're saving the best for last. Plan W. Never take the L. Skip plan L, go straight to Plan W. Get the W. We're rooting for you, Ellison. It involves bringing home, banging home to investors, the immense amount of regulatory uncertainty of involved in the Netflix deal, and how that could spell trouble, not just for the

transaction, but for Netflix itself. And so, if never, Netflix finds itself in a quagmire trying to acquire Warner Brother Discovery. That could be bad news. And David Ellison wants to make that clear to all of the shareholders that going with a Paramount Skydance might be a little bit less bumpy of a road. We will see. From the photo shoots, seems like they're pretty happy together. But we will see what happens.

It will be a proxy fight. And I'm sure we will be following it closely. Some more news from Axios. Bessent told Trump that investigation of Fed chair creates a, quote, mess. And so basically last night, Bessent was saying, the secretary isn't happy. Or no, someone else said the secretary isn't happy, and he left the president. No, that's kind of a white pill, right?

Somebody in, you know, the admin that seems to, you know, have just kind of a steady view on things, is pushing back a little bit. Nothing ever happens. Yeah, you need a secretary of nothing. Did anything happen? No, nothing happens. But Vanta happens and compliance happens. So get on Vanta.

Automate compliance and security. The leading AI trust management platform is, of course, Vanta. There was a massive debate that raged in a Google Doc, which was published on Substack. The battle between Jack Clark, who's at Anthropic, of course, the co-founder of Anthropic, and Dwar Keshe Patel, they were going up against Michael. Burry, Cassandra Unchained.

They had a good discussion, and it's been published free to all on Substack where you can go and read it. Highlights. Very cool. Yeah, I have some highlights. I mean, I've been through it. So one thing, it's not really a debate at all in this discussion.

There's a bunch of questions and they go and they basically... They're just like AI is amazing. I agree. Yeah, no, it's funny. Like almost all the quotes I pulled were from Burry because the Dorcas and Jack Clark, I disagreed with everything they said. Yeah.

So it's like, oh, it's like not that interesting. Like, I already know this. Boo. Tyler, get your own opinions, bro. I agree with everything, you said. I have no. You're absolutely right. Yeah.

So one thing I was saying, Jack Clark, he writes, I've been doing research on the cost curves of various things recently. And the examples he gives are dollars of mass to orbit and dollars per watt from solar. Okay. So it's like, okay, Anthropic is looking at space a center. Sure. Right. Some other stuff, I thought, Burry said his one like policy proposal.

So just the fact that Jack Clark is doing that research indicates to you that they might be thinking about orbital data centers in the future. Yeah, I mean, massive orbit, massed orbit, and, yeah. Yeah, I don't know what else. Yeah, no, it makes sense. I mean, maybe he's just interested in space. He might just be interested. Yeah. You might just be like, I want to go to the moon.

I'm bringing Claude with me. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Go to the moon. The other, the other interesting, Burry take was that he thinks that white, blue-collar work might be more susceptible to AI disruption than many people think. he made this point that he's been doing his own plumbing and electrical work, apparently. I don't know if that's how true that is, but he said that, yeah, yeah, yeah, can you read it? I have the quote, yeah.

He says, given how much I can now do an electrical work in other areas around the house, just with the cloud my side, I'm not so sure about jobs going away. Yeah. If I'm middle class and am facing $800 an $800 plumber or electrical electrician call, I might just use Claude. Take a picture. I love that I can take a picture and figure everything out. I need to do it.

Yeah. So, I mean, this. That was a big moment for me. I forget who was sharing this, but somebody was like, yeah, they just took a picture of like the most insane wiring diagram or something. No, it was just a bunch of wires going everywhere and it just won't go to it. Take a picture in your car. It needs engine out service. You're like, where do I screw?

I'm doing it myself. Well, we have the perfect guest to talk about AI diffusion and its impact on the job market with economist Tyler Cowan joining in just a minute. First, let me tell you about MongoDB. choose a database build for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. And without further ado, we will bring Tyler Cowan in from the Restream waiting room.

Tyler, how are you doing? Good to see you. Welcome back. Fine, good to see you. Congratulations on the Vanity Fair piece. I loved it. Thank you so much. I'm so glad that you were able to check that out. It was a lot of fun. Very funny, getting dressed up all fancy. When are you going to be in Vanity Fair? They really have not been doing it.

their work. I think I would love to see a Vanity Fair photo shoot with you as a subject. I think it would be fantastic. We should make it happen. A style icon, right? Yes, definitely. Well, I mean, they really should do more reflecting on conversations with Tyler. The team's grown a lot. Did you just hit a recent milestone? I saw that there was an event. Can you just get me up to speed on the organization and how long you've been working on the show? Conversations with Tyler is now 10 years. It's a few hundred episodes. episodes. And last year we did almost an episode a week.

An episode a week. That is fantastic. Well, it's one of my favorite shows that always has been for, I feel like I might have been a decade-long listener. Maybe not the first year, but I got on early and I've been very pleased the whole time. But anyway, thank you so much for joining us. We first wanted to have you reflect on this point from Michael Burry that artificial intelligence might displace more blue collar jobs than people are expecting because you can now take a picture of your toilet and learn how to do plumbing or you can take a picture of an electrical panel and you can do your own electrical

work. Does that resonate with you at all? Do you think that there might be some substitutive effect in the DIY community that might have an effect on those trades jobs that previously have been know, have been, you know, rumored to be very AI resistant? Well, that's true, but there's still a net job boost coming in those areas. Because there'll be all these new projects, new data centers, new sources of electricity. And they need plumbers. They're not all going to use chat GPT to take the photo and try to figure out how to fix the thing under the water, whatever.

So the house called plumber, maybe that goes down by 20%, but so many other new things happening, terraforming the earth, whatever, other countries, Africa developing, those jobs will be doing great. Yeah. That's it. I agree with his example. Sure. Sure. How are you tracking the overall data center boom? There's been this narrative that data centers are the only thing that are propping up the U.S. economy. It feels like we hear about new data center projects every day. The numbers are getting bigger. There's a new zero every time there's a new press release. And at the same time, the overall power generation, the big, big, like U.S. national number is not yet started to move, but it feels like this might be the year where we see more.

electricity generated in America than before? How are you tracking the overall impact of AI on the broader economy? We need to do much better, but I think it's wrong to feel that without the data centers, the economy would collapse. Those resources would be used to do something else and different. It might be less risky. It might be more immediate. Actually, consumption would be higher in the short run, if not for AI in the data centers. So what we're doing is investing longer term, taking some risk, boosting medium-term productivity. I'm all for doing that. But again, without that, we'd make more toys or more hot dogs or more something else. So, no big deal. How often are you listening to AI music?

I try it reasonably often, but I don't yet listen to it because I want to. It gets closer every time. I would say within two years, I think I'll be listening to it on purpose. Right now, it's experiment in tracking the field, not for enjoyment. Sure. Do you find the act of playing the game of trying to generate a song that you like more entertaining than the actual resulting music? No, I don't find either entertaining. For me, it's the pain.

You know, I have a very large collection of albums and compact discs. I can hear literally the world's best music at my fingertips when I want to, and the other is a distraction. I do it as my own investment in seeing where things are headed. Do you think there's a particular... I had someone share an interesting anecdote recently, which is that one example, a professional singer who made...

who's sort of top of their field within country music. They made something like $400,000 last year basically going into the studio and recording sample tracks you know, basically a songwriter would make a song. They would sing it and then they go out, or this person would sing it, and then it would get pitched to other artists

to be made into like a hit, right? And actually be produced. And his work literally went to zero because of Suno this year. And he doesn't have the ability. Nobody hires like a backup singer to go on tour. Like you can be like a studio guitarist and get live jobs.

And so their work went from, because now people can just prompt with Suno and say, hey, use these lyrics, apply it to this track, and make it sound like this artist. And so that's just been kind of an interesting space. And I was talking to another friend yesterday that says basically everybody is using Suno at scale and nobody in the very few people in the industry are willing to actually talk about it. Interesting.

You know, I played some for my wife recently and she said, I hate it. I said, why did you hate it? And she said, I hated it because it was good. That's where we're at right now. That is. That is. But yeah, it's notable, too, that it's, it's maybe not, it's, it's not great for, like, the end listening stage yet, but it's totally good enough for, like, the sampling for the professional kind of workflow side of things.

Yeah, yeah. Do you think there'll be sort of a legal reckoning, figuring out how all the royalties flow through these models and saying that, okay, there's 1% Taylor Swift in this generative sample and 2% someone else and then all of the money from like sort of like a more complex rev share that might flow through these generative models. I don't know if that's practical. I mean, the Beatles took from Chuck Berry, buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, everyone. Yeah. Without paying and the world went on, even if whether or not it was fair. And I think we're going to redo that experiment. I don't think it will be all that different. Most musicians don't make from recording anyway. Yeah, no, it makes sense.

Have you tried Claude Code? No, I have not. I've been meaning to, but I've been traveling, and I'm finally back home, and I will be trying it. Everyone tells me it's amazing. Yes, yes. People are maybe one click behind you. I remember you declared 03 AGI, and now people were maybe hesitant to call the game there, but many more people have jumped in with affirmations that Claude Code is AGI because it can do so much more.

more when it actually has access to your full computer. But it is a little bit more cumbersome to get set up. How did you process Powell's video yesterday? Oh, yeah. Well, it was terrible what Trump did. Fortunately, most of the markets did not react very much, but gold and silver went crazy. To me, that's a sign that the dollar is much less of a safe haven.

And Trump is going a bit, you know, what I call the Captain Quigrout, and he's just not reliable. And that's very bad. but I don't think it's really going to change inflation or interest rates very much. Is that just because he'll, Powell, hold steady? No, because we already wrecked the independence of the Fed, which I'm not happy about.

But that's the ugly little truth behind this story. That's why it's not been worse what Trump did, because it was already wrecked. Why is Fed independence important? Sometimes the central bank needs to do things that are not politically popular, and they need that shield to do it. But the basic problem, is our debt and deficits are so high that over time we will monetize them to some extent and have

higher inflation because we prefer that over higher taxes no matter what we might say. And so the Fed independence has taken away through that mechanism apart from whatever Trump said yesterday. Oh, so just by running. Like I'm not telling you not to worry, but I'm telling you should have been worried to begin with. Black Bill. So yeah, you're saying that just by running high deficits, that reduces Fed independence. And that's an old story, but it's now closer to a tipping point. And Trump is making that much worse. So I would say his actions on the fiscal front do more to hurt the Fed's independence than his words.

But they're both bad. Can you walk me through your mental model for thinking through what the right level of debt for a nation is? Some of the numbers get so big. It's trillions of dollars. it feels very abstractly bad. But then if you look at it more like a mortgage relative to, you know, debt to income, it feels maybe more reasonable. Like, how should, you know, nations think about the level of indebtedness that's appropriate?

The United States is a special nation and we can get away with more debt, which is great for our living standards, but it's bad for our political responsibility because our leaders all know we can get away with more debt. I think what we'll need to do at some point is have half a dozen years of something like 7% inflation, get the debt down, it won't at all solve the problem. The problem will never go away, but it will give us some breathing room. Well, then lower inflation, maybe have a recession, and start all over again. And it's highly unpleasant, and a lot of people will be thrown out of work and living standards will be lower. But we've already spent that money.

We can't default. and that's facing us over the course of the next 10 to 15 years. But I don't think the world will end. Is America's position in AI the biggest counterbalance to all that, like, sort of negative view? It is. So if AI would help our economy grow one percentage point more a year, we could just afford the whole thing and we wouldn't even need to inflate.

Now, that would not be my best prediction, but it's not impossible that it could happen. and I've been predicting half a percentage point a year, which still puts us right on that border of, can we, can't we, we don't know. I wouldn't want to stake the whole house on that. But again, there's some chance we'll squeak by due to AI and assorted productivity gains. Yeah, but why not 1% growth?

Why not 2% growth? These tools, they feel amazing. It feels like... Or triple digit, as Elon alluded to. Sure, sure. But it does... You use these tools and it feels like you're more productive. And there's some studies that say,

You can generate documents that don't get read. Basically. Is that what's going on? Like, what is holding back AI from actually moving the needle on economic growth significantly? Well, first, about half of our economy right now is just totally perpetually sluggish. Look at government. Look at most of the nonprofit sector. Look at higher education.

Parts of our health care sector. Add that up. You're at 50% of GDP. To some extent, they use AI already, but in pretty trivial ways. like, oh, it saves people some time. They don't work as hard. They take more leisure. They hang out more at the water cooler.

That's fine. It's fun. But it's not going to get rid of our debt problem. And then you have some startups. You have programming. You have the dynamic parts of our biomedical sector that are already using AI a lot. But the more they use AI, the more efficient they become. And the more the inefficient parts of your economy are left over.

And it's just really hard to grow much faster, unless you're like China playing catch-up. Yeah. So the number is hard to estimate, but GDP is a huge mound of stuff, most of which is produced by people who are not, neither white nor black pilled on AI. Sure. And it will take things a long time to change. Yeah. How do you think about the legacy of Thomas Pickety and the new debate over Pickety in the 22nd century, I believe, was it 21st century, 22nd century that Dorcasch wrote about? 22nd.

21st or 20... It's in the future. Talking about economic inequality, increasing gains to capital and increasing returns to capital

in the 22nd. 22nd century. Pickety did 21st. He's too focused on the labor share. I think real wages will go up a lot. If real wages go up, workers are happy.

They might be upset that Elon or someone else is a trillionaire, but I don't think that will drive our politics. I think if real wages go up will be fine, people will feel good. So my view is very different. We, but, uh, I mean, real wages will go up, they'll feel good, but then they'll also be upset that there's now

multiple trillionaires walking around. And so won't those emotions actually drive the politics? It feels like they do today. I don't think people are that envious. They're envious about the people they went to high school with or maybe their brother in, uh, most people are not that envious about Elon or Bill Gates or whomever else. Yeah, yeah, I was, envy is local for the most part. Yeah, I was running, to envy each other, right? Yeah, maybe. If you envy, you know, the sheikh, sure.

The richest sheikh in Saudi Arabia, I bet you don't even think about him that much. He does have a great car collection. Or if you do, you think about his role in the AI world, which is fine. But you're not upset that he gets however much hummus and you have less hummus than he has. It's all about the hummus.

I was doing a thought experiment. Don't you think envy is a factor in the current wealth tax sort of discourse? I think California is a crazy. state, but I think it's just more a money grab than envy. And I think there's a very good chance they ruin the greatest engine of wealth creation, maybe in human history. So I hope it fails and soon, even the risk of it, as you know, is inducing many people to leave or get ready to leave. Yeah. What's the, what's the retrospective view on the laffer curve in light of what's happening in California today? Well, at some tax rate,

the laver curve is true. We're not usually in that range, but California is playing with fire and experimenting with that range. So I dearly hope they don't do it for their own sake. It'd be great for Austin, great for Miami, maybe good for New York.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. New York is a problem. What's your personal investing strategy? Buy and hold. Focus on other things. Investing doesn't be happy. But buy what? Because if you buy individual,

names, it can end up being wildly distracting and then you can't focus on the other things that are maybe more productive. Diversified portfolio. I've thought now of buying some more gold just as a hedge. It's not that I think it will do well, but I see higher risk. And Bitcoin's not really a hedge, so maybe gold and silver. Again, I'm not saying it will make you rich. I'm just saying if everything else falls apart, you'll have something. Yeah. Have you pushed any AI labs to develop taste or smell technology to help with the judging of food. It feels like culinary aspects are particularly AI durable or resistant, but I don't know if that's something that can be overcome with better technology. Maybe it's cheaper for now just to use humans and have the AI record

what the humans say and judge the food that way. That seems to work well. Like judging food is not hard. It's one of the easiest problems for humans to solve. And humans will do it basically for free. How many food bloggers get paid? Well, they might get some free meals, whatever. But so many people do it for free. I just wouldn't put AI money into that for a long time. I'd work on almost every other problem first.

You know, Merckor, they wanted to hire some basketball analysts to make basketball commentary better by AI. I'd rather do that than food. It's harder. Sure. Sure. That's very funny. What about this call for new aesthetics? Do you believe that we're in some sort of local minima for the development of new aesthetics? Do you attribute this to just broad stagnation? What are

the key sources that led us to this point where it feels like aesthetically we're stunted? I think poor taste is a big problem around the world, but especially in America. You look at the older parts of San Francisco, the Victorian homes, they're beautiful. You look at the new buildings. I like some of them, but a lot of them are just awful. Or you look at parking structures, or you look at a new bank branch that goes up somewhere. Awful, awful, awful. Are we really so poor a society that we cannot afford to invest in more beauty? So Patrick and I are trying to get people to think more systematically. What can we do to try to make much more of our world, just plain, flat, outright, lovely. It absolutely can be done.

Is there an element of the financialization or I don't know, like multi-party, like multi-pronged stakeholders that go into the development of a campus or a building now that maybe didn't

exist a hundred years ago where one person could just decide that they have some crazy vision for a building and they go and build Hearst Castle and it kind of destroys them over their life, but it's a singular decision. And now a company that builds a property or something, it doesn't have, there's not a single person

that can be maybe authoritarian about the decision and the taste, even if they have the taste, they get overruled by a committee of investors and stakeholders that all kind of put the kibosh on whatever they wanna do. That's one problem, and there are too many veto points. But if you go back earlier in time to the 1920s, say, You look at a neighborhood like Shaker Heights near Cleveland where the homes are being built by

different families for the most part. They're still far more beautiful than homes being built today. So I don't think that's the sole main root of the issue. I think just bad taste is. Do you think there's a technology angle where it feels like in the modern era a lot of young people lament high housing prices, but when I look at their choices, they'll often choose to to live in a small studio apartment in a very dense city to be around other people.

And when they go to their apartment, it is small. They don't have a library, but they have a Kindle. And they don't have a room to dance or something, but they have a TV where they can watch dancing. And they don't need a movie theater because they just have their phone to watch a show on or something like that. And so the number of places, you know,

if you were rich century ago, you needed a lot of space, You needed a lot of spaces to do different activities. Now every activity can happen on the couch with the TV. Do you think that there's some of the back there? A black mirror of you, John. I don't know. Well, if you do all that and you live in the West Village, you're surrounded by beautiful buildings. Sure.

I'd like there to be more places in the country where you have that choice to be surrounded by beauty, that you don't just have to be all scrunched in, that you can have reasonable living space and afford it, and what's around you looks nice. Again, people have done this in the past, even the distant past, even some of the distant past, even sometimes in medieval times. So to claim we can't do it now, it's simply a failure of will. There are laws that need to be changed, procedures that need to be changed. But I think the first step is just to wake people up and increase awareness.

Yeah, it feels like the YIMBY movement has a serious amount of energy behind it. And yet, in my lifetime, I haven't seen that much movement on it. Maybe the ADU law in California is moving a little bit, but it still feels incredibly slow to get permits. Is there a dynamic where landowners, property owners, are actually pushing back against that? My feeling is that the ADU, new support for ADUs doesn't actually really increase the housing supply, because a lot of people are like, you'll let me put another structure on my property? Great. It doesn't mean I'm going to, like, suddenly like it's a new single family home, right?

Yeah, I don't know. What do you think? I think the MB movement could go much further if it could promise it would boost housing and to make neighborhoods prettier. Right now, it's like, well, we're going to boost housing. Cost will fall. That's wonderful. But maybe your neighborhood will get uglier. Sure. So you do it in Buffalo. You replace the old with the new. The new is probably uglier. I don't like that. I think you would have a lot more successes when it can promise beauty. Yeah. Sorry, on the new aesthetics, I heard a critique or an idea that new aesthetics come from problem

solving. And so it's less about the taste and opinion and will and more of there's a specific problem in society in a particular neighborhood and then a design emerges to address that particular problem. And so the critique was that we won't get the new aesthetics until we identify particular problems or maybe the bland aesthetics are solving for a particular set of problems that are in front of us. Does that resonate with you at all? Not that much. I mean, I would say the problem is ugliness. If you look at older structures around the world, especially in Europe, but often in the U.S., they can be very ornate and have all kinds of flourishes and small details that are lovely.

Those are not solving problems. They're put there because people think it will make the thing look better. So it's not mainly about problem solving, but I'm not against solving problems, hardly. Has there been any studies on the effect, the local effect of brutalist architecture? Like, does it make people, like, stay at the office longer or anything? Because I can actually, it's funny, I can appreciate brutalist architecture when it is surrounded by nature in a big way. It stands out as contrast. Yeah, it's a nice contrast.

And it feels like, you know, a triumph of man in some way. Yeah. But it oftentimes will make a neighborhood much less warm. A shipping container home in a forest sometimes can look beautiful. You see it as a getaway. Yeah, yeah. Is there is there any, like what made brutalist architecture, you know, be such a force in the world? People don't like it once they live in it.

Personally, as a tourist, I often enjoy it. I think it's interesting or sometimes creative. But it's not the model I would want to seek to spread through the world. Because to live with it all the time, I think it wears thin on you. Why it ever got as far? as it did. Maybe England is the best example. The 60s, the 70s, it's just cheaper. They're in a hurry. Concrete is easy to manage. You have a bunch of planners who think they know better. And a lot of it was a big mistake. And, you know, I would say maybe England got the worst brutalism. Maybe parts of communist society got the best brutalism because they really needed the structures after World War II. But I don't think it should be our emphasis moving forward. We want to move away from that. Do you think there's 8 billion people on Earth?

Because there's a popular... What's the exact number of people on Earth? No, no, no. So... You can't you tell me? No, the backstory is that there's a growing conspiracy theory, specifically on X this weekend, movement of people that are just saying there's no possible way.

Google says it's $8.2 billion. Yes. But this is a contention. Many people are disagreeing with China's official data, one of the arguments is that in certain countries, China, among them, there are in... incentives to inflate your local population number. So you get more resources from the state.

You do that. You game theory that out across the entire country. And there's a homegrown effort in China from people that are trying to prove this. And they're going and they're finding these cities that are just barren. It's a city that has, you know, a thousand homes and thousands, you know, thousands of structures. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but there's like a homegrown movement to prove that China does. does not, in fact, have as many people as the official numbers claim.

What do you think? I think there's a modest inflation there. If there's a betting market on this, I'd love to get in on it. Okay, that's good. That's good. Let me to bet on, you know, $8 billion or more. That's my bet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. But if it's $8.1 billion and not $8.2, that I can believe. Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Back on the architecture question and the aesthetic question, it feels like when people are dissatisfied with the current status quo of architecture or any aesthetic, there's often some sort of emotional response to return to a previous era, to just go back in time.

And I'm wondering if you think that that is the solution. We need more art deco or mid-century or all sorts of different, I don't know, Gothic structures or go back in time to pull, to just build new buildings that look like they're hundreds of years old, or you think we actually need something that's entirely new and never before conceived. Everyone draws from the past. Mostly, I think, we need freedom to experiment. It's not that I want everyone to follow my preferred path. The city where I love what they've done with new things and somewhat older things is Helsinki Finland. So personally, that's what I want, but do I want every city to look like Helsinki? Of course not. Or the modern parts of Copenhagen, I think, are quite

striking and beautiful. So those would be my preferred directions. But most of all, it's about simply the ability to raise your hand and say, this is ugly. We don't want to do ugly things anymore. And we all look around for different ways of avoiding that outcome. Yeah. I mean, the risk is that you just have NIMBYs that say, I think everything looks ugly and I don't want anything to build, I guess. If you have the option to raise your hand and say, that's ugly, we shouldn't build it. I don't know. Earlier on the show, John was sharing how in 1947 there was a very, very, very small number of televisions in the U.S. 16,000. Eight years later, it was 32 million. So we were talking about how that was effectively a fast take-offs and hardware fast takeoff.

Do you think we can see something similar in robotics? There's a bunch of different exciting projects, a lot of which we've covered on the show. I saw a video of a robotic hand yesterday spinning a screw perfectly, and it looks like it's sped up like 10x, but it's actually in real time. So it's like spinning a, a screw, you know, 20 times faster than a human can. But yeah, so I think people, you know, see the current state of humanoid's today. They can do cool demos and other robotic form factors, but it doesn't quite feel like, you know, we could have a population of a hundred thousand, a hundred million of these in three years, but who knows?

I don't think we yet see the killer app in the home. So if I ask myself, what do I want? If I could have a fully functioning robot that would be like a maid or a butler, that would be useful to me. But most things short of that don't quite seem worth it. Do I have a Roomba? No. I don't know. What if there's a mechanical vacuum cleaner that goes around on its own when I'm at work?

Fine. It just doesn't seem that necessary. I do my own laundry. It's a welcome break sometimes. So I think we're still waiting to see the killer app. Yeah. Any other technologies that you're excited about this year? Well, everything in biomedical. I mean, even without AI, progress against cancer, I think youngish people today will die of old age and maybe live to 97 or whenever the time is.

And that's already in the cards. You don't even have to be a big AI optimist. I don't think it will be soon. To me, it seems like a 40-year process where you have some gains coming now, but it's mostly complete within 40 years, that you just won't die of most of the things that kill people. Cancer, heart attacks, there'll be accidents, and there'll be deaths by old age. Yeah, that's an extreme way, pal. I love it. And that's likely. And again, it doesn't have to rely on AGI, though. Of course, AGI can help and accelerate that. How do you think about your information diet, your information consumption? It's obviously AI,

augmented, but I imagine you don't start the day with the prompt to an LLM, and maybe the LLM prompts come in once you've explored or read some source text and want more context. Is that how you're using them? Oh, you imagine wrong. I wake up in the morning. I had questions when I was lying in bed, questions when I was falling asleep. And to ask an LLM something can easily happen in the first 10 minutes. Okay. Because I've been thinking and wondering, and I don't get up just to ask the LLAM. But once I'm up, it's like, hey, I'm here.

Why not? Yeah. And if the question takes a while to answer, then I scroll through Twitter, email, whatever. It's perfect. You want to set your queries in motion early in the day. Yeah. I actually do find that often I'll kick off a deep research report before bed because I know it's cooking for me when I wake up.

I love that. That's actually a great quote. Iran is in flux. Very hard to tell what the outcome will be there. But if you have a free Iran, how should people be thinking about how that would impact world markets? I think it's unrealistic to expect a free Iran. I would like to see a stable Iran, which has been rare in world history, though Iranians are often very successful. there are so many ethnic groups in the territory, and they have expanded or contracted so many times,

what they need is stability and some breathing space and a government that's not one of the very worst in the world. And I think the chances of getting that now are pretty high, maybe 50%. But we should set our sights a bit low and not actually reach for too much and let the Iranian people over time make it as good as they can and not have it be a question of outside influence. And so, oh, we're giving you this. We're making you do that. I think that's counterproductive. What about the looking back, the post-mortem on the tariff and the trade war from last year?

Obviously, the markets did very well, even though they were tumultuous during the process. What's the economic view on the impact of the tariffs in 2025? Not as bad as we thought, but no gain, no upside. Manufacturing in this country, manufacturing employment, they're still falling. Our allies are mad at us. People pay higher prices. When I buy my favorite rainier cherries from Chile, they're 999 a pound instead of $6.99 the year before.

What's the point of that? So I'm against it. Well, we are certainly not against your appearances here. We love having you on the show, and we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us. Thank you so much for coming out. Always a pleasure. I'm glad your 2026 is off to a great start.

I hope you have the great rest. the rest of the week. We'll talk to you soon. Take care. Great to see you. Have a great rest of your day. Finn.a.I, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.a.i. And I'm also going to tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer.

Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And up next, we have Cerebrus in the Restream waiting room. Andrew Feldman is the co-founder and CEO. and we will have him join us in the TVPN Ultradome. Andrew, how are you doing? He's back. How are you guys doing? We're doing fantastic.

And we're thrilled to not just have five minutes today. We have a last last time you came on. We completely botched our schedule. Thank you for taking a second shot. Giving us a second chance. There are many second chances in life, but we appreciate you taking one with us. But anyway, how are you doing?

How's your new year going? I'd love to just hear the state of the business. in the level of optimism going into 2026. I think it's an extraordinary time to be in. Well, first, thank you for inviting me back. I appreciate it. It's always good to talk to you guys. Thanks.

Look, it's an extraordinary time to be in AI hardware. I think we have seen exceptional interest. We've seen validation in the market. We've been telling people for years, the fast inference would be a separate category. and so important was this new category that Nvidia spent $20 billion to buy the number two player in it. And so what an exciting time to see.

I mean, you were just talking about the guys of cognition, big customer bars, and what a great product, blisteringly fast, smart as can be, great coding tools. It is what we're seeing. seeing, maybe a way to think about it is this, is that we had a GPT moment in 2023 where people first realized that AI was interesting. And in the second half of 25, people demonstrated it was useful. Yeah.

Right. And that that is exploding. They're finding different uses for it. These aren't demos. These are production use cases. and they're demanding vast amounts of AI computers underneath that. Yeah, the fast inference thing is so, it's so obvious that it's become a meme. I'm sure you've seen these where people will be, you know, joking about,

well, I'm coding, and while I wait for my coding agent to come back to me, I open TikTok and I scroll vertical videos. And so I saw one guy made a script that as soon as he sends his prompt, it automatically opens them and then it closes them as soon as it responds so that he doesn't get sucked into a rabbit hole. But it's like it's brain rot, but it exposes a real behavior, which is that there's a lot of weighting involved in programming these days. How cool is it that other people are making TikTok videos about your value proposition? Yeah, exactly. How cool is how often does that happen?

Never. An entire ecosystem is creating is being brought to bear. on how shitty the competition is to use. And what a cool thing. Yeah. Since we have more time, I'd love to go back and actually get more of your full story, more of the story of the company, and sort of take us back in time to the initial idea,

the first things that you did, all of that. So if you could sort of reintroduce yourself in the company, I think that that would be a really good level-setting experience. Great. I'm Andrew. I'm one of the founders. And with Sean and JP, Michael, and Gary, we founded Cerebrus in early 2016. What we saw on the Verizon End was the rising. There's still going to be some soundboard here.

The overnight success is real. It really has been, right? I mean, people were skeptical at various amounts of times, and I think people are finally getting it now. Yeah. I think that when you build real things, things, right? You don't get the same sort of rate of growth that you have in a viral software, right?

I mean, when you actually build physical things, there's components, there's factory, there's real manufacturing work that needs to happen. And especially when you do deep tech. And what we set out to do what we saw on the horizon was a new workload. AI wasn't the same. It presented fundamentally different challenges to the computer. And that if we were able to build a new design, we would not be a little bit faster,

not one or two or three or five times faster, that we could get to 10, 20, 30, 50x faster on this work. And the way to do it was to solve a problem that had been unsolved in the computer industry for 75 years. And that was how to build a really big chip. You know, most chips are the size of postage stamps. And our chip is the size of a dinner plate, right? So good.

And so, it took an enormous amount of work to build. Yeah, walk me through exactly like you incorporate the company, and then you're doing design and you're calling, a manufacturer and saying, I get this crazy idea. And then I imagine like a year, years go by until the first one comes off the line. You can actually test it. Like, what were those early days like? They were unbelievably challenging.

I think when you do really hard work, your first one is like that first pancake. You know, it's sort of messed up to make the pancake and the pan isn't hot enough and the pancake is all nasty. and it's like that. And we had an idea that we could solve this class of problems that had broken every other effort to build a big chip. And we spoke to backers that had vision and believed in us. And we put together one of the truly world-class chip teams in the industry. There are only about half a dozen world-class chip teams,

and we have one of them. And then we laid out a plan, and we flew out to TSM and said, we think we can do something with your process that nobody else has ever been able to do. And they listened, and to their enormous credit, they listened and said, shit, that's a good idea.

And in the meeting, they greenlit it. That's amazing. It was amazing. What was their, what risks were they identifying? What was their pushback? I mean, even, if they say, yeah, we'll take your money and we'll build this thing. What are they cautioning you about at that moment? Well, also, yeah, also, I feel like if you're a founder, you get a lot

of knows. Sometimes it's with customers. Sometimes it's with investors or talent. But if you're building a chip and TSM says no, like, do you just go back to the, do you go back to the drawing board? Like, do you got to give them, that carries, like, quite a bit more weight than just an investor saying, I'm, I'm going to pass on this. Yeah. I mean, there's, TSM is the best in the business. And so we heard knows, when you do, when you're interested in pioneering work, when you're interested in fearless engineering, you're going to hear no a lot because everybody's afraid of the problem that you're trying to attack.

And when everybody's failed at a problem, then those who are medium, lack vision, are always like, it'll never work, it can't be done, others failed. And it takes a special type of person to say, well, just because others fail doesn't mean we need to fail. The world has changed. The tools are better. We have better insight. We can use architectural techniques to avoid some of the things that broke previous efforts. And so what we did is we went out.

We studied the previous failures. And we came to believe that we could work around everything that had broken previous efforts. and we brought this back to our investors and are like, wow, this could be really big. And we tuned it, we tuned it, we flew out to TSM, and they agreed. I think even when you do pioneering work, you encounter problems that nobody thought of. Yep. Right? I like to tell the story that, I mean, imagine before Everest was summited, you get to base camp and there's a team.

team there having tea that just failed to summit. And you talk to them and you go, hey guys, and they say, there's this part about halfway up that's really, really hard. No one's ever gotten past it. Right. And you go up and you go up and you come down and you're having tea with the same guys and you lean forward and say, that wasn't the hard part. Right. And when you do things that nobody else had ever done, you encounter things that nobody else

has ever encountered. And we had to invent materials, we had to invent packaging techniques. The problem that caused, for example, the B200 to be 18 months late was a problem with the coefficient of thermal expansion that we'd solved in 2017. We saw it, we knew it was coming for them, and we'd solved it. The problem that caused the Dojo project, the Tesla, to fail, we'd predicted we'd solved it in 2018. We had already encountered these problems, we'd found ways around them,

And, you know, what fun is it to be an engineer if you're doing the same stuff everybody else is done already? I mean, it's only fun when you're doing things. What were the early kind of key customers that, because it's great if you can have a partner like TSM that says, hey, you guys are on to something. We want to be a part of this. 2016, there's no LLMs, right? So who's doing AI that might be a potential customer? That's right. So early customers included, you know, a visionary.

group at Galaxos Smith-Kline. Not who you think of as likely to bet on us. Truly visionary group and one of the, I think, truly great minds in the application of AI to Pharma, the guy named Kim Branson, who runs AI for them.

The military and the national labs, they were accustomed to understanding what could be done with blisteringly fast hardware. Interesting. And so our first, our serial number 01, went to Argonne National Labs, part of the DOE infrastructure,

and we have projects today with Argon and with Sandia and the Department of War, it's now called, that measure in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And so they were early customers, and they were willing to take early machines that were a little rough around the edges. And that was our first generation, and we delivered the second generation,

a couple years later, and they got better and better. Then we delivered the third generation, and then it took off. And we had the rise of inferences, a meaningful workload, and suddenly performance was everything. Talk about that early critique that I heard that part of what was going to be difficult about this was the fact that when you're operating on the wafer scale, if there's one defect, you throw the whole chip out, as opposed to with smaller chips. If there's a defect over here, well, I still get, you know, 80% of the chips.

Oh, that was the received wisdom. The received wisdom. Remember how this works. I mean, imagine a wafers like a big circle. Imagine it's a cookie sheet your mother rolled out into a circle. She takes a handful of M&Ms and throws it up in the air and they land throughout this. We'll call those the flaws, right?

They're randomly distributed. And say you can't have a cookie with a, Eminem's. Your mom goes like this and does a cookie cut through the entire thing. And if there's an M&M in it, she has to throw away the cookie. This is exactly how it works.

Now, historically, the bigger her cookie cutter, the higher the probability she'd hit an M&M. And the more good silicon around it, good cookie dough would need to be thrown away. This was one of the problems

everybody said could never be resolved and we solved it in 15 months with $12 million. It wasn't even a hard call. That's incredible. Everybody, to this day, everybody. And it worked like this. There is another way to solve that problem, and that's the way memory has solved it. Memory has lots of identical tiles.

They're called bit cells. And in the array of bit cells on a chip, they have, redundant rows and columns. And if there's a flaw, they map it out and use one of the redundant ones. Interesting. And that's it. They're built to withstand flaws,

not avoid them. Okay. And so we looked at memory and said, nobody's ever done this in compute, but if we built a computer architecture with a million identical tiles, and we took 5% of them, and we held them aside for redundancy,

We could withstand almost all failure patterns. And so we thought about the problem differently. And it was top of everybody's mind that's just been taught that big chips have lower yield. They don't really understand the alternatives. In the same way, when Google first built their big data centers, they said we don't want servers that are redundant. If they fail, we'll route around them.

We don't want to pay the extra cost of making them high reliability. If they fail, we'll shut them down, we'll get new ones. We'll route around it. So does that mean that from chip to chip, there might be a slight difference in the number of flops or power that can come out on chip? Is that, like a real thing? Not that it matters practically, but I'm just wondering. We have to invent a way to communicate across that little bit of cookie dough between the

two cookie cuts that your mother makes. She puts the cookie here, and she puts the cookie cutter here for her Christmas cookie, and there's a tiny little bit of dough. Yeah. Right. And usually what she does is she lifts all that bit of dough up and rolls it and makes more cookies later. But in the chip world, that's called the scribe line.

And they run a laser across it, and that's how they dice the chips. That's how they cut them. Yeah. They obliterate that tiny little bit of distance. We had to invent a technique to run communication. across those. And we had to use the tools that were already being operated at TSM. And so, you know, we benefited from the fact that we had this extraordinary chip expertise,

not just how to write logic to make the chip work, but the back-end design, what we call the physical design and timing. We knew EDA tools and we knew manufacturing of chips. And so we were able to think very differently than most companies. How does intellectual property play into this category? In so many tech startups, they say, you know, don't worry about patents, worry about your network effect. This feels very different. What's your IP strategy broadly?

Deep technology companies have to worry about technology. Yeah. The statement of the century. You've been talking to SaaS guys a lot. Right. They worry about virality and they worry about network effects. We worry about the fact that we can build things nobody else can build. And that is a combination of protecting your IP with patents, with trade secrets, with segmenting your manufacturing so your manufacturers can't see.

Oh, interesting. The interaction between steps. It's using all the tools. in all the wisdom in your sort of in your toolbox to defend your invention and sometimes patenting is not the right right when you patent you have to disclose yeah right and if you have to disclose something that is then very difficult to tell if somebody else used you might want to think about not patenting it yeah and so uh generally you want to patent things that that you can then measure if someone stole and so

We have a very aggressive patent strategy, but we also have a very aggressive trade secret strategy and a collection of other tools that we use to defend our inventions. Talk to me about space data centers. It seems like if it does work, if the heating question is solved, you probably don't want a server rack with a ton of chips in space. That seems like more to manage, more networking. Waferscale compute in space could be a logical extension of that. Are you excited about that? Have you dug into it? Has it been something that's been on your roadmap? Actually, I was digging in with this weekend with some friends. I think the following.

I think one of the real weaknesses of today's GPUs is by being little tiny chips, it has put a lot of pressure on how you tie them together. Right? And this is why Nvidia bought Melanox. Why did it make sense? Because they knew that the individual, individual chip would be far less powerful than a collection of chips. And if you're going to bring a collection of chips to a problem, you have to tie them together.

Now, that problem is made more complicated in space, right? You would like bigger blocks up in space. I think there are a lot of hard problems yet to be solved with data centers in space. I think we ought to be working on them. But I don't think it's something that you're going to see in production in the three to five year time frame. Sure. What about on the topic of cooling? We were just talking to Jeremy from some of analysis about how meta changed their data center designed from this H structure that was air cooled, very efficient.

It took them two years. They couldn't do water cooling. Now they're doing water cooling and their new data centers, the tents. what have you learned about various ways to cool, what's special about your product specifically with regard to cooling and energy management? This is not a complicated problem. I love it.

I'm sure. You want to employ me? You want me to handle it? It's not complicated, right? I got it. I can do it. In Buffalo, at a Bill's game, there are always three idiots who have their shirt off, right?

It's 10 below, and they've got their shirt off. They've been drinking hard, but they're not dead. Why aren't they dead? Because if you're in the water, and the water is 45 degrees, and you're there for eight minutes, you're dead. Why is that? It's because water's really good at sucking heat off heat sources. Right?

We say in the technology, the thermal density of water is really high. It rips heat off you. whereas the air doesn't do that. So they can stand there with their shirt off and not be dead. It's the exact same thing when you're cooling the chip. That water has an ability to pull heat off a heat source that is vastly better than air. So you have two choices.

You can blow cold air over your chip, and you don't get the same cooling effect as if you ran cold water against the back of your chip or against the back of a coal plate. And so it is more efficient by an order of magnitude to use liquid water in particular is great and low cost

to pull heat off the back of chips. And we were among the first to do it. Google started doing it with their TPUs in 2017. It had been done previously in the supercomputer world exclusively. And now, you know, the new, we do it, I've been doing it for years. And gamers, I remember you build a gaming rig. You get liquid cooling if you want that extra juice.

Yeah. That's exactly right. Gamers have been doing it forever because they want to run those GPUs hot. Yeah, totally. And we, it's, Facebook was, they learned a lesson, they jumped on it. Well, they were optimizing for one thing, which was this energy coefficient. And now they're optimizing for. speed and new scale, and so they have a different set of optimization parameters and they

adjusted their strategy. What else in the supply chain have you had to find partners for or develop in-house? I know you have experience actually building servers, but how much else changes when I'm racking your product versus an Nvidia product from the energy that's outside to the land to the building, to the, we talked about the cooling. What else is different? How did you solve those to actually? stand up, hold data centers.

Right. So we designed to fit in the exact same footprint as an NVIDIA. Yeah. Rack. There you go. Right. And so we are underneath that envelope. We will fit in any data center designed for that. You know, there are fewer little boxes to stuff in because we have a bigger box.

But we fit in the standard racks. Yeah. You just roll them in. They're exactly the same as you bought for your deliote. servers or your super micro servers or your ERISTA switches. These are, we fit in exactly the same. We use the same power. We require the same cooling that all high-end AI chips now use.

And so we were able to, we were able to sort of fit in the envelope that they carved out. to make it really easy for data center operators and owners to roll us in. And then on the demand side, are customers who want to use your chips asking, hey, we'd love for you to rack these with the hyperscalers or set up a deep relationship with a bunch of neoclouds, or they want to buy and operate themselves, or they want you to buy, to build the data center

and just offer basically like an API for them or VM? All of them. All of them. We have an API service. It's ripping right now. We have customers who buy the hardware and ask us to operate and manage it for them in their facilities. We have customers who buy the hardware and they operate it and manage it in their facilities. We have customers that the whole gamut.

You can buy our hardware. You can rent it by the week, the month, the token from various clouds. So it's the customers have sort of. of consolidated around either they have demand to buy hardware and operate it on one side, or they're sort of under 30 and have grown up in the cloud world and don't want to think about hardware. They want to think about tokens and then they pay by the token. What use cases outside of the coding agency mentioned, Cognition working with you, that

one seems super logical in the sense that people are waiting for these agents to complete their really long rollouts, really long, like tons of tokens generated to build a whole app or build a new feature. Where else are you excited about the potential of not just AI this year, but faster AI and faster inference, having an impact that might be tangible to someone like a software developer or even a consumer? I think some of the use cases we've seen in Farmers. are extraordinarily interesting.

I think. So that feels weird to me because if I'm developing a drug, it's going to take me three months to get mouse data. It doesn't feel like a couple minutes matters. What's going on in pharma? I think it is exactly because the process

is so long and painful and expensive that if you can rip a year out of an 18 process where the whole patent is only good for 27 years, you've made a huge difference. Interesting. And so you can run more experiments in less time.

Interesting. And the probability that once you run these experiments, you have to go to the wet lab, which is much slower. The probability that the one you select out of the simulation, out of the AI, is a good one, and make sense to go to the wet lab and take to the next level increases dramatically. I think the act of being a researcher, right, is really one that AI is particularly well-suited to help. You want to scan the literature. You want to make sure that whether it's in Chinese or French or English, that if there's a publication about the gene you're studying, that you're on top of it, you want to be able to scan the literature. Yeah. Basically, every question is a deep research report.

And so you want to go, if you can go from half an hour to two minutes, that's a huge speed up in your workflow. That's right. And so what you're speeding up is the researcher. Yeah, that makes sense. And you're increasing the number of questions they can ask per unit time. Yep. Yeah. And that is a very, very exciting application. Yeah, Jordy. Out of your sweet spot, but how do you expect the memory and CPU market to evolve this year?

I think, first, memory has historically been an extraordinarily cyclical market, right? I mean, it has had painful troughs and crazy high prices, both. and I think right now what you're seeing is a tremendous amount of demand for HBM which is a form of DRAM I think

those fabs aren't easy to build so additional capacity isn't easy to bring up and so you've had this steep up swing of GPUs which are heavily dependent on this HBM and as a result

all the capacity for DRAM has sort of moved towards HBM. That's made traditional DRAM and servers more expensive. When it gets more expensive, the hypersacalers panic. Panic maybe the wrong word, but their response is to place orders for the full year,

which causes the Dell and the server bills. They go, holy crap, I need to buy more. Right? And you just watch this. sort of crescendo of price exploding, right? You just see this huge movement in prices, as everybody worries that they're not going to get it, so they place all their orders for next year early,

so it looks like the year's going to be way bigger than it actually is going to be, and that's what's happening right now. How are you thinking about the financial management of the business? You raised the $1.1 billion series G last year. Are you building the company for a really long time in the private markets, taking it public? Thank you for the sound. That's perfect.

Yeah. That's what we probably hit the gong again. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. But where do you see the company going? How do you want to operate? What makes sense in 2026? Yeah, unlike some of our competitors, we sought to run a business that could be measured on traditional financial metrics.

I love just taking shots on the way into that answer. Look, I mean, I think we do. We seek to run a business that people can look at and understand. And, you know, our gross margins are better than all our startup competitors. We're growing faster and we're bigger. And so I think that's really... Give them the foghorn. You guys got to tell me, like, in a pre-briefing, what the various sounds means.

They're all possible. This is the heavy tankership. You'll know if it's the wamp-w-w-w-w-ha. The happy tankership is backing up the truck for big business. We love it. I think we raised the money because we had a ton of opportunity to continue to invest in the business to produce extraordinary growth. I mean, that's the right reason to raise money. You raise money because the opportunities in front of you are large and many and maybe have a time element to them.

So attacking them quickly is of value. And so that's why everybody, I mean, if you got and raise money from other people, that's why you should do it. Because your opportunity set is ripe for pursuit. And so that's what we did. I think we will deploy it in expanding. expanding, manufacturing, which is a real value in the acquisition of additional data center capacity, a collection of other things, expansion internationally. These are all things that the business is asking for right now.

Let's hear it for opportunities that are ripe for pursuit. I like that days. And traditional financial metrics. I see those a lot. When in the past has it been worth a clap to say that you like positive gross market? margins that you'd like to. You'd be surprised. You'd be surprised.

We've had some people. Only on TV. We have people come on. They're trying to bait people by saying, I don't care about gross margins. I don't care about gross margins. We care and we thank you for caring as well. What can people expect out of big, you know, any big announcements in the pipeline?

And how can people work with you? Yeah. I'm interesting. I think you can go to cerebris. and you can try our, you can see how fast it is yourself, right? I think the beautiful thing about the cloud is that it's a dead, dead simple to demo and to try. And we've got a free tier.

Jump on it. Play around. Ask a GLM model, which is a great coding model. Just ask it to make a video game for you. Right? And you will see in three seconds, it'll make Space Invaders for you. That would be real code. Right?

Ask it to play pool, to make a two-player pool game, or if you're a physics nut, a three-ball interaction according to laws of physics. I mean, just ask it to do interesting things. And you will see right away the joy, how fun it is, to engage with an AI that is truly interactive. That's amazing. And I think that's the best marketing. If you go there and you enjoy it, send us a note. We'll follow up, but play with the AI. It's screamingly fun.

Just use it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We hope you have a great rest of your day. And congrats on all the progress. Enough time, but really chat. And yeah, congrats on the progress. Guys, thank you for having me back. Of course.

We'll see you soon. We'll see you soon. All right, guys. Goodbye. Vib.com. We're DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on meta. Well said, John.

And I'm also going to tell you about console. You see it here on the sticker. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's go. We are now entering our lightning round. There you go. The Lambda Lightning Round.

That is real. The cloud is real. It is lightning in the Ultrodome. Nathan from Tara coming in. Nathan is in the rich room waiting room. Let's bring him into the TB pin ultrium. Nathan, how are you doing? Very good.

Thanks so much for taking the time to hop on the show. Love the shirt. Fantastic shirt. It almost looked. Oh, I thought it was a jacket for a second. Very, very cool. Looks great. Please introduce yourself.

Introduce the company. Yeah, awesome. I am Nathan, who founder and CEO of Terra Industries. I'm a 22-year-old worker engineer. And essentially, we're building Africa's first more than the first prime. Wow. And what got you into the industry? What were you doing before? How did you recognize this opportunity? Well, I began my journey in tech when I was 15. Had an accident that made me lose my sight.

And at some point during the pandemic, I was 17 at this time, I went on to launch my first startup that was solving the education crisis, especially in, major markets. And that allowed me to understand that basically, if we truly want to help industrialize the continent, if we truly want to help push Africa towards like a massive industrial growth, we have to solve much more foundational infrastructural problems. And I said to think around, you know, what is the single problem that we could solve today that could basically cut across every, every industry. And that's, you know, what that common denominator was, was security. So sometime in 2012, for I am a co-founder, Maxo O'Maduka, we decided that we want to start terror industries to essentially give Africa the technological edge needed to defend itself, its resources, and its critical infrastructure. Sure. How are you thinking about the first products? There's a lot of defense technology companies that focus on drones or maritime or ground autonomy.

There's a whole bunch of different products. I imagine you want to build them all eventually, but do you have a foothold that you want to dominate in first? Yeah. So for us, we're thinking quite multi-domain. The question for us is how can you protect these critical assets from all sorts of threats? And right now, this evolving threats are coming from the air, from land, and from sea. So in the area domain, we have our long-range and short-way grounds. In the ground domain, we have our sentry towers.

and soon in the maritime domain will be deploying some USVs that will be carrying out large-scale maritime surveillance. All these different systems are being powered by one unified software platform that carries out data intelligence in those, collecting all these data from all the different systems,

synthesizing that data and align these security agencies to identify and track threats in real time. So this is basically what we're trying to do. You could almost think of it as kind of like the same strategy that Palantir did in the West. But the major difference is we also have to build out the hardware infrastructure that is collecting this data

because there is no like previous surveillance infrastructure that allows us to basically plug in our software platform. How does the procurement process work in Nigeria? How is there a program of record concept? Are there grants for smaller projects? What's the go-to-mars? A couple million dollars in revenue. Sounds like that's growing quickly. Yeah.

How did that come together? Yeah. When we first started the company, we focused mostly on privately owned infrastructure assets, lower barrier to entry, shorter sales cycle, that allowed us to rapidly scale. So mostly owned by corporations and billionaires. But over time, we're able to build an impressive enough portfolio that allowed us to then sell to governments and the militaries. So the defense contracting model in Africa is fundamentally very different from how it's done in the West.

In the West, it's quite bureaucratic. It could take you one to two years before you get to like a program of record. In Africa, it's quite very network-based, and also very solution-first. So essentially, no one is really expecting you to write dozens of proposals and, you know, come to office and present them like PowerPoint. they're expecting you already have a solution to your problem. So in a very funny way, the Android approach of like taking R&D head-on and having the actual products to then go carry out live demos on the field works perfectly for the model of defense contracting on the continent.

And that has allowed us to scale very rapidly. And that is something that most Western companies don't understand. But Western Chinese, you know, they come here with papers. and they end up it, you know, wasting a lot of time and not really being very productive. Do you guys have a dual-use opportunity? I can imagine people that have various assets on the continent. That could be oil and gas. I can imagine maybe your century towers or applicable drones, etc. Even for non-kinetic solutions, just surveillance from a security standpoint, what kind of opportunities are you guys? pursuing there. Yeah, we don't do kinetic at all, so we are entirely focused on building surveillance.

Because, you know, essentially the Nigerian army today has enough firepower to, you know, basically destroy any terrorist group in West Africa. The problem with insecurity in Africa today is not the lack of firepower. It's the lack of intelligence, the lack of visibility, you know, understanding where these attacks are coming from, how it's being perpetrated, you know, looking at previous attacks to sort of like put out a pattern recognition that can help you predict future attacks. This is the major issue. So what Terra is trying to do is build that intelligence and surveillance layer across the continents, not necessarily, you know, building kinetics. You know, we don't ever intend to get into kinetics. I think it,

this sort of struggle and war that African governments are fighting against terror does not require us getting into kinetics, you know, what they really just need with the ability. And that kind of takes me into my second point of like data sovereignty, because today when we announced around, there was a lot of, you know, viral tweets of how Palantier is now in Africa. We are sellouts and stuff like that. So I want to just make it very clear, you know, this is an investment from, yes, a Palantir co-founder and several other vices, but this is the technology that is entirely owned by Nigerians, is built by us, is managed by us, it's operated by us. We have no direct relationship with Palantir. We don't share any data with Palantir. So that's just something to just make very clear. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point to make.

Obviously, as you scale the business, you're going to need to hire a lot of people. Where are the great talent pools in Nigeria or Africa broadly? What's the Stanford? What's the Waterloo? What's the Y Combinator? Where will you be sourcing candidates from? Yeah. First off, Nigeria's are some of the smartest people you could ever meet, you know, very underwritten talent base.

There's already a lot of software talent on the continent, mostly because of that fintech pool. of the... And Pesa. Exactly. M-Pesa. Pista, sort of way. So there's a lot of existing software talent. And in terms of hardware, you know, there was basically a hidden hardware base, you know, that

have been working mostly with the military. They have been doing a lot of side projects. They have never been able to kind of commercialize their skills at scale. And, you know, what we essentially went on day was we went to this. communities and we hired the entire communities. You know. I love it. Community acquisition.

It's great. You know, so for us, really, in scaling talent, it goes beyond Nigeria. Because part of our strategy is we want to build a decentralized manufacturing network. You know, so having a factory in each sub-region, you know, our manufacturing base right now in Nigeria would serve West Africa. In the next couple of months, we'll be opening a factory in East Africa. to serve the East Africa region. And the reason that we're doing this is, you know, first of all,

it's much easier in terms of supply chain and logistical networks. But second, you know, the threats that have been faced in each of these regions are actually quite different. You know, in West Africa, you have threats mostly in like the Saharan, you know, very hot climates, very desert climates. You're mostly deploying mostly aerial and ground systems. But when you come to East Africa, you know, you have issues for example, mostly in the maritime, you know, with the civilian pirates,

where you would mostly have to deploy, you know, maritime systems. So you can't essentially have one centralized factory building for the continent. You know, Africa is too big for that. Too big, too complex. You have to basically use this decentralized manufacturing network. So each factory we open would tap the local base of the region it is distributed at. Give us the information on the round. You raise some money.

We want to hit the gong for you. How much did you raise? 11.75 million dollars. Congratulations. There we go. And thank you for taking the time to come chat with us here. Yeah, great to meet you. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon.

And congrats to the whole team on a very cool milestone. And getting a great group of people involved, you've got 8BC. Of course, Valor Equity, Lux Capital. Wow. S.V. Angel. What a row. Silent.

Mickey Malca. Alex Moore, let's go. Let's go. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. Great hanging. Goodbye. Phantom cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom

card. You see the ticker with the crypto prices in the bottom of the stream. That's from Phantom. And before we bring in our next guest, I'll also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI super computers for training and inference that scale from one GPU. to hundreds of thousands. So up next, we're going over to L.M. Arena.

Anastasios, welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Hey, brother. How's it going? Nice to see you. It's going fantastically. It's going extremely well for you. You raised some money recently. Let's kick it off with a big gong smash. How much did you raise? $150 million. $1.7 plus. I almost love it. Pretty good stuff.

Fantastic. Great stuff. Great stuff. Great stuff. Now, okay, okay, okay, okay. So our friend was just joking around this account near. Yeah. They were saying L.M. Arena raised at a $1.7 billion valuation, and they were using the Michael Burry. Very rude. Very rude. Very rude. But they're just joking out. But it's okay because you're here to tell us why that's a deal of a lifetime. Yeah. Explain.

Listen, evaluation is a big problem. Evaluation is a big problem. People don't know how to solve it. You have all these different AIs, the space is becoming more complicated. You have different modalities, different models that are doing, all these people competing in coding, competing in, you know, software engineering competing in the general chat. You have models from China, models from the U.S. Who are you going to pick? Let's say you're a consumer. You're a developer.

Even a business, you're going to make a decision that you're going to make a decision. You're going to spend millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars on that. You've got to make sure you make the right decision. Yeah, procurement. Procurement's a big market. And, you know, all these problems are huge. I mean, and the ultimate problem is how do you help people find the best solution for them? And as a neutral platform, of course, it needs to be separate from the labs.

It needs to be a third party that does this. We're positioned well to attack it. So I imagine, I mean, independent. We were joking around that if you ever wanted to return the capital, you could get one of the labs to pay you $10 billion just to put them permanently hard-coded at the top of the rankings. You'd be out of business in 12 months, but you'd walk away with a pretty penny. Well, that's the thing. I don't think that's what's happening.

How do you make money? value if you do that. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So how do you make money then? Well, what we do is we help labs and enterprises get analytics on how well their models are doing. Help them understand the strengths and weaknesses of their models in different domains, like math, coding, instruction, following multi-turn. Think about it like a full-body scan in your model. And what distinguishes us from the standard benchmark is that it's all live, so you can't overfit it because there's constantly new data coming in. Oh, interesting. And it's on real users. So we have tens of millions of real users that are coming to Alam Arena using AF for like this huge diversity of different tasks.

And that's, of course, the data that's used as the basis for these analytics. Yeah. Talk to me about the proliferation of different L.M. Arena categories. I imagine there's a exponential curve there as different models have different capabilities. We're not just testing math and science reasoning and chatting ability. Yeah, totally. There's so many of these. So how fast is it growing?

How are you setting up your system to handle potentially tens of thousands of different benchmarks and models? How is that growing and scaling? That is a great question. And I think that we're honestly still developing what that, you know, big roadmap looks like. But that being said, here's where we're starting. We have a bunch of different categories. I mentioned a few earlier like math coding instruction following. But we've recently also dug in a little bit more to look at different types of users, basically almost like user research, expert users.

What are experts saying about all these different models? We have a leaderboard for that. Occupational categories, law, medicine, you know, business, which models are best for these different categories of usage marketing? We have that information on Allen Arena so that it's a one-stop shop for you to understand the different industry, economically valuable industry-level performance of these models. But if you really think about it, the long-term vision of this sort of thing, it's almost like every individual should have their own evaluation.

Which model is best for you? You know, the technology brothers, technology brothers e-vow. Yeah. It needs to have its own kind of thing because you're doing your own tasks and they might be very different from what I'm doing. And so eventually the future you can imagine of building a technology like this, we're building the infrastructure to do this, is to have evals for every individual person on Earth. How do you incentivize people to participate on the voting side, the ranking side,

that human elements are really important in terms of grading different LMs? What's the current incentive structure? How is that evolving? What are the challenges that come up with running a multi-sided marketplace like this? Very good question. Incentives are really, really important. If you think about incentive is almost like a little hack into the human brain that tells you how to move, how to operate. Right?

So that's why games are so powerful. Games can get you into an incentive system that's just like, hey, I'm flappy bird or I'm doing my candy crush and I'm just swiping, swiping, swiping. We do not really incentivize users on LMA arena. to vote. And that's part of the power of the platform. Is that unlike, let's say we were to pay people to vote, we don't do that. The reason we don't do that is because we want them only coming to do their real job. They come because they get value out of the platform and they vote only because they want to because they're intrinsically motivated because they got something to say.

You can imagine if you incorporate incentives that it might hurt the leaderboard. So we're very careful about the way that we go about that. However, we are exploring how can we design the incentives and sort of incentive-compatible way in order to preserve the integrity of the leaderboard while also rewarding people to vote. That's on our minds, but not yet done. How confident are you that you can encode big model smell into a, you know, the taste, the vibes into a ranking? Well, if you look at the leaderboard, it's there. It's there for you to see.

Yeah. I mean, it does reflect it. And it goes to show how powerful human preference can actually be, that people are seeing things that you wouldn't necessarily anticipate. And that's why when model developers develop their model, the big problem is when I put it onto the real world in the wild, what's going to be the performance like? I don't know unless I see it. And that's because people react in these strange ways when they see a model for the first time. That's part of the power of this platform is that it puts it in front of those. people and then we give analytics to try to understand how different individuals, you know,

what are the different usage patterns and who's voting for what? So you can code things like big model smell, identify, you know, but it's not uncommon that model providers will find out through us that their models really great at math or really great at coding and they didn't even actually ever know. What does it take to get a model on LM Arena? Is it something that the lab is giving you preview access to? Is there an application form? Do you already have relationships of these folks. Is there an open call? So we have a contact form on our website that you can use if you want to, you know, submit

a model. Of course, we have capacity constraints, but we try to be judicious and let, you know, everybody, everybody participate in the battle. And to, yeah, in terms of paying. Someone was asking Deep Seek 4 to get on the leaderboard. Deep Seek R4. What does it take to get a model like that on the platform? We'd love to get Deep Seek R4.

for on the platform. I don't know, maybe it's already in progress. Okay, yeah. How much does hardware matter here? We were just talking to Andrew from Cerebrus about the speed that comes from that. There's an element where plenty of people would rather use a dumber model if it's 10 times as fast or vice versa, right? And so you have to create an apples-to-apples situation, most likely, or at least pre-cash the results so then you're not noticing speed. But do you think that speed trade-offs will become a bigger piece of what you do? For sure. Yeah, there's no question about it. Really, the ultimate question that people have is how do I, for myself,

or my organization, or whatever, choose along the period of frontier of speed, performance, and cost. Yeah. Those are the three things. And usually it's performance and speed, number one, number two. Because everybody's spending so much money right now that it's like, you know, ring the gong again, so much money. There you go. Go to gong. Money being spent, baby. Now, the issue with that is there's gong twice, let's go. The speed, if you don't equalize it, you can get biased in the ratings. Yeah. Right. So we want to be able to disentangle speed versus performance, and that requires us equalizing. Sure. But if you go to direct chat mode, you can use the model see it just as it is. And we're planning on expanding the leaderboard to get more of the speed in there, the latency,

as well as costs so that people can make all those tradeups right in our platform. Yep. That makes sense. Would you ever do anything at the application layer, or does it just get too chaotic because, you know, UI is a new variable and there's all these other factors? I mean, this is an application, no? Yeah, sure, but I'm talking about, like, you know, two legal AI tools and trying to, I see. If you go down the procurement route and that becomes, I don't know, I don't know if that becomes a big business. Yeah, you could see like a G2 cloud type of business here as well, although I have no idea if that makes any sense for you.

Totally, understood. So the thing is that it's hard to do that for our users, right? Because then we need to build 10 different product services or 100 different product services. And that's one of the exciting things about the ecosystem right now is that it's actually the fundamental product surface where things are evolving very quickly. and also a lot of value is being aggregated. There's a reason why, you know, number one revenue stream of OpenAI is consumer, right? It's a consumer application. And, you know, other companies have different strategies,

but ours simply cannot be to replicate every application. So the value that we hope to provide again is to help people understand the different tradeoffs of different models, evaluate them for their use cases, procurement, so on and so forth. And that might mean helping enterprises link together with their feedback, understand their users better, perhaps, you know, warm starting from the large user base that we have and giving them those analytics and tools to help them make decisions. That's how I can imagine us moving into the application workflow. Yeah. Will you ever create a romance benchmark? I think it's a good idea. How quickly what models make people fall in love?

Comedy benchmark would be... Let me ask you, are you asking that for any specific... Got them. Got me. Loans. We talk about comedy. We talk about comedy. you know, comedy bench. It's something we try to test internally. Yeah. They usually end up being funny

because they're so not funny that it's, that it's pretty brutal. It's pretty brutal. Or if it is good, it's like recycling. Like clearly it went to Reddit, copied the top joke

and then just regurgitated it. Well, did it ever make you laugh? Has it made you laugh before? Yes, but accidentally. But when it's accidental, it's amazing. It's the best. I see.

Yeah. Where did the idea for this come from? Like, what was the, inciting moment to start the company? Well, so there's to start the company and there's the idea. I've been personally working on Alam Arena for almost three years now, along with Waylon and Yon.

And there was actually a big group of students at Berkeley. This came from an academic project. I was doing my PhD on like theoretical statistics, theoretical machine learning, you know, kind of abstract. I was in a basement proving theorems. I had no idea that I would be... He built in the basement scraps. He built it in a cave and scraps.

Oh, seriously. There were rats. rats in the ceiling. No way. Not kidding. I'm glad you have $150 million for a new office. Hopefully it's nice. Go bears, baby.

And so what ended up happening is that I got looped into this project that was happening at Skylab, which is, you know, Yon and Joey Gonzalez and, you know, Luca and all these people at Skylab were working on it. That's the lab where Databricks came out of and any scale array and so. And they were working on, like, how do we evaluate? Early days of chat GPT, you know, there was Model A and Model B. they were doing, one was doing better than the other on the benchmarks, then you would chat with them. And it's like, hey, these benchmarks are not reflective of how good it is it talking to me.

So how are we going to measure that? It was in the context of one of their early open source models called Vucunya that they had developed. And so the sort of pairwise preference, hey, chat with the models and see which one you like better, that strategy emerged from there, but it started with Amazon gift cards. It didn't start from organic usage. It started from passing around Amazon gift cards to people at Berkeley. And then it sort of popped, and then it went down and kind of sat at 30 users a day for a little while. And then it grew and grew and grew in large part due to Wayland's sort of consistent effort in Twitter and so on.

Awesome. Up until the point where it became this juggernaut. A true overnight success. I'd love to see it over here. And thank you so much for taking the time to come to travel. Congrats on all the progress. Hey, great to see you guys. Thanks so much.

Have a massive year. Yeah, you too. Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Turbo Puffer, serverless vector. in full-text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

Team out of Shopify. Yeah. Which is relevant to our next guest. It is, it is. We'll bring them in in a second, but DeepSeek founder is running a hedge fund as well, in addition to building Deepseek. Guess how much they're up? 57% last year.

Massive year. That's high flyer. Boasting the potential. war chest for a company that's already shaking up the global tech. Is this good for the AI? It's good for the open source community. It's good for academics. What do you think, Tyler?

Oh, I have some other breaking news. Give me some breaking news. Okay, so Anthropic, they have cloud code. They launched co-work, which is cloud code for the rest of your work. No way. So it's like everything else. That's crazy. Yeah, it's exciting.

It's basically a local app. Oh, it's a local app. Oh, you don't need to do the terminal stuff anymore. You can just use it in an app with a prompt box. Yes. And then they can interact with all, like, your local files, whatever, and then... This is going to be really, really big.

I don't know if you guys have used the Claude Chrome extension, but it's, like, super good. I have, yeah, a little bit. The computer use is super good. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, this is very exciting. Okay, yeah. Yeah, get ready for some threads, people.

People are going to be breaking it down on all the fun things they had to do. I fix my Wi-Fi in under an hour by rebooting it. But no, seriously, I was listening to Doug O'Loughlin from some of the analysis talk about how he uses Claude Code in a knowledge-work setting, and it's fascinating. So he'll kick off one deep research report about one company that he's researching, then a few more, and then he'll do a deep research report on top of that. But instead of it all living in the Claude web UI, it's just creating markdown files that then he stores an obsidian,

and then he can run these meta-deep research reports on the other deep research reports that he's put together, interact with whatever's going on in the semi-analysis, private data world, all the data that they've collected, interacted with their Slack. They have a Slack bot that interacts with it. And so he was talking, he was very, very one shot by Claude and was saying, everything is a skill issue now. Everything is a skill issue now.

Much like generating AI voices. But thankfully, we have 11 labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. Well, Star Wars has already begun in reality, ask a ski resort in China. There is a robot that's skiing. This feels like it should be AI, but I believe it's not.

I believe this is real. This is remarkable. You don't have to go skiing anymore thanks to AI. Cancel the skiing trip. I have a ski trip coming up at the end of February. Canceled. I'm sending this guy instead. Yeah, just watch the video stream.

You don't have to put on the boots. Realistically. Get cold. You don't have to sit on the lift. You don't have to be in lift lines. You've seen the, you've seen the, You've seen the drone that will follow you as you ski and takes a really cinematic video. Yeah.

How could it be more cinematic? Get the camera at waist height. And you can go way harder. Hit the double black, hit the cliffs, right? You don't even have to worry about rocks. No, no, he's just tumbling down on the skis. This is fantastic. I love the idea of having a robot follow me with a camera.

I don't know what else you would use this for. Ski Patrol, surveillance. I don't know why they built this, other than it's really cool and fun. But the obvious use case is Red Bull viral videos, probably. Yeah, so the use case here is obviously this is the new ski patrol. There's thousands of these on the mountain, and they monitor your speed in real time. And if you're going, if you're skiing recklessly, it just skis into you and explodes. And so instead of skiing, instead of getting your pass pulled,

You just get your life pulled. It's over. That makes sense. So anyways, that is a dark sci-fi future. I have a prediction from Guillermo from Versel. But first, let me tell you about railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in.

Guillermo says there's definitely a non-zero chance that we get, quote, generate your own GTA6 in a few minutes before GTA6. I think that mechanically it's possible, but the humor is what makes GTI so special, the writing and the character development. I mean, also, the mechanics are very unique. It's not just a walking simulator. I don't know. Have you played GTA?

Yeah, I mean, but Shulte's game looks pretty good. He put out a screenshot of it. I trust Shulte to make GTIP. Are you sure it's not just an image gen outfit? He's like, look at this crazy game. I mean, the GROC folks are known to put up some viral videos. espousing video game development, but clearly video game development is here. It's going to happen. But we have our next guest, and guess what ad I have to read before he comes on? Shopify.

Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, and on marketplaces and now with AI agents. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about. We have Harley from Shopify in the TV. How do we do? How do we do? Wow. That is a, was that planned? It was amazing. No, it's somewhat random, but we timed it up perfectly. But we're very excited. Speaking of random, I've never done an interview in my life.

I'm at NRF, the biggest retail show in the world. There are 40,000 people here. This is the Shopify booth behind me. There's going to be random people walking by. Amazing. I see that snowboard there. That's what all started. That's how it all started, right there.

Wow, I love it. I love it. So you're in person, but today we're talking about it. Where's NRF? Is that Vegas? Javitt Center. Javitt Center, New York City. Cool. That's fine.

Everyone, it's just, it's sort of the, the largest conference, actually on the planet for retail and commerce. It used to be more about the traditional retailers, but we've sort of hijacked it and made it about modern retail, direct-to-consumer, technology companies. You're kind of behind enemy lines there. I mean, you do have a POS system, so it makes sense. We have a POS system. Yeah. But actually, and they've given me the keynote four years in a row, which is pretty cool. Not bad. I brought up Emma from Skims, which is amazing. And Ben Francis from Jim Shark, we talked about basically this idea that there will be more billion-dollar brands built the next 10 years than the last 100 years. And both Emma, I mean, think of it.

Jim Shark and Skims, they're like 10 years old. And they're dominating. So it was, it was really fun. And we made some big announcements. Yeah. I mean, what's the key to building a billion dollar brand if you're starting in 2026? It feels like it's incredibly crowded and yet there's a new breakout brand every year. What advice are you giving to people to get started other than just hop on shopping? There's multiple new breakout. And let that take out a lot. There's a lot of, I mean, there's Almost every vertical. Yeah. And companies are growing.

The way the bar has been set with new e-commerce brands is insane. Like, best in class is like, okay, you're doing $200 million in your second year. I know exactly you're talking about. And there's so many examples of this. Wow, you guys are hard graders. It's doing $200 million and no gong for that. No, no, of course we're hitting the gong for that. So let me say something.

I brought on, my first time I was up on stage, I brought Richard from Mattel. Richard Dixon, who's now CEO of The Gap, because basically what he'd figured out was that Mattel has this treasure trove of IP in their vault, and he was like commercializing all of it. And so it was amazing that a company from 1945, I think,

was basically, you know, dominating. The next year, I brought Cat Cole from AG1. And obviously you guys know the story well, but one skew, 600 million dollars, right? Like, unbelievable. Another gong. I mean, this guy.

get a lot of gongs in this one. And then last year, I brought someone you know, Sarah Foster from Favorite Daughter, who's been on the show, who effectively, I mean, Sarah and Aaron created a hit Netflix show to sell more apparel and succeeded with it. So this idea that, so I think one major thing, if you look at all of these different incredible brands, what they've done is they didn't just take a bigger piece of an existing pie.

They effectively were Tam creators. I mean, shapeware existed. There were companies like Spanx out there. But the way that Kim and Emma built, you know, skims is totally different what Spanx is. It is like almost like a cool version of of an old school product.

And then we announced four big things, which I'm very proud of. The first is that it's fairly clear. Sorry, John. Something went down the wrong pipe. Crazy. This show is so unhinged. Also, it's at the end of the show, I think,

right? So it's more an hinge as it goes. I'm like five Diet Coke's deep at this point so anything could happen. I'm I have that chance to continue. I just, I didn't, John was doing such a good job keeping it together. You got me, you got me. That's okay. That's no problem.

Sorry. So the first thing we announced was, actually, Sundar announced it yesterday on stage, but with Google, we are making it possible for every agent to connect to every single merchant. We created this protocol called Universal Commerce Protocol, which effectively is this universal language is open sourced so that all merchants can speak directly to every single one of the agents. And the best way to explain it is up until now, It was really just about like a single transaction so I can buy something on chatGBT or Gemini or Microsoft.

It was like a single, you could only do like a single item at that time. It couldn't really build a full car. But there's no concept of loyalty or subscription or bundling or, you know, if it's furniture, for example, please don't ship it to me on Thursday. I'm out home Thursday. Sure. So this idea of creating this universal protocol that we co-developed with Google means that now merchants can actually tell these agents exactly how to show their products. on these, on these agentic tools.

And it should be as good as it is on the online store. So that's a, that was a really, really big one. The second thing we announced also with Google is that now we're actually expanding. You can sell everywhere commerce is happening from an agentic perspective. So we're going beyond the agentic storefronts of just chat GBT, which is what we said, you know, in Q3. Now it's also, we're going to be working with Gemini with AI, with AI mode in Google search, and also with co-pilot.

And maybe the last one, which I would, bring up on any other show than TVPN is that we're actually bringing agentic commerce to every brand whether or not they're on Shopify. So if you're not on Shopify, but you want to have your product syndicated and index, you can do so with our agentic plan. And that seems to be the talk of the show, which is amazing. Very, very interesting. Right. Right. Because that's, that's, that's, uh, a sea ecosystem. I like that. I like it. Yeah. I like it. I mean, if you're, if you're going to, I think if agentic is going to do what a lot of us think it's going to do from a commerce perspective, you have to give consumers all the brands.

We obviously want them all on Shopify, but there's some brands that want to participate now, but it may take some time for them to migrate over. So this idea of opening up to anyone we think is a big opportunity. Very cool. Walk me through the customer experience journey that might shift over this year. We were following the Agenda Commerce thing so closely that we were, you know,

we were chat cheering for ads in chat GPT back in, you know, June when they were kind of like, maybe we'll do it. We were hoping that Black Friday would be the day that people were purchasing things in LLMs. Didn't quite happen yet. It's still in the experimental mode. I was using the shopping feature in ChatchipT to do shopping research. That was cool. We want the Commerce fast takeoff.

But yeah, but I'm wondering, like, the early adopters, is this going to be a more techy community that's buying their next TV in an LLM? Do you think it'll jump straight to the skin? and the, you know, the Toccova's category first. Like, how do you see this actually rolling out? Oh, look at you with all your direct to consumer brands. Way to go. I got it. A couple of things.

I think it'll likely be something that, like, most people use some of the time and some people use most of the time. I don't think it's going to cross the threshold of most, most the way e-commerce does now. Yeah. It's just going to take time. It's going to take some time. I do think, though, that, you know, these are on very, very small numbers. But if you look at the velocity, I was asked.

as I was coming on stage today to do the keynote, the keynote after me was the CEO of PepsiCo. And he said, you know, last year you talked about, I asked you if, if Agenic was overhyped, and you said it's underhyped. And he said, well, you know, and he said, do you still believe it? I said, well, if you actually look January 2025,

the last NRF to this NRF, we've actually seen a 14x increase in orders to Shopify stores coming from some sort of agent. Now, that doesn't mean the transaction happened. the link. Wherever it was, they may be going to the online store. But 14X is dramatic. And again, on a very small base, we processed 90 billion, you know, last quarter.

So it's a small base still. But I think it's going to wrap up quickly. What I think is really cool is I think you're going to see companies that are going to actually have these drops. I think once you start seeing these, like, for example, last night I did an NRF event with Tom Sacks, who is the designer behind the Mars Yard 3 shoes, which I think is the coolest sneaker in the world. his Nike craft. Imagine he actually dropped something directly on one of the agentic applications. Now you obviously have people that go there specifically for it. You now may decide, okay, that experience is pretty good. I'm now going to book my entire ski trip, everything I need

for my ski trip directly in the application. So once you have a good experience, I think the actual friction reduces, you'll keep having it over and over again. But the thing that we felt was missing, and this is the reason why I think this UCP protocol is so important is it was very difficult to do merchandising inside of these applications and this protocol allows you do a lot more that you can say like back to cat coal and AG1 it's obvious that anyone who knows studies the company subscriptions play a huge role in the age you one business model well you know up until UCP happened you couldn't actually do subscriptions now you can or this idea of bundling you know for Jim Shark it's a huge part of their business is if you buy these, you'll also buy these as well. You can do that as well.

So I think all of these things are sort of in line with creating a much more delightful experience in the chat. And I think ultimately what it leads to is like this will be merit-based shopping, which will be different than I think some of the traditional retailers who are kind of leading on their balance sheets to spend money on ads. You can't really game the system in that way. You actually have to be from a context perspective the right product for the right consumer. How do you think creative assets will change or maybe stay the same? I've noticed that a lot of LLMs, when you pull a link, it'll actually hydrate that link with an image of the product that you're looking at. I imagine that a lot of people were previously thinking, well, everything is going to collapse down to text.

I just need the facts and the data. But now maybe the creative, the photography, the videos, that actually just gets pulled into the chat apps that folks are using. and it stays important? How are you thinking about that evolving? I think you're probably, you're not going to, I mean, the idea of SEO won't exist in agenic because, again, it's merit-based and it's mostly based on the context history you've had. But I do think, though, you're going to have, these brands are going to have people at their companies who are thinking a lot about like consistent updates to UCP, consistent updates to the catalog. So they may pull something off the catalog and say, we don't want to sell it anymore this way.

So I think there's going to be, I don't know if they're going to be actual jobs, but there's going to be people inside of the company potentially in the, in the merchandising. department who say actually the way that we want to sell this, the way we want to describe this to these agents is a particular way. And then because of UCP and because of Shopify catalog, it gets easily disseminated across every single one of these agenetic applications. So the experience just gets better and better. I think you have to be a little bit of a techno optimist. You guys obviously are certainly there as I am to believe that even if the experience is not incredible right now, it's likely just going to get better at this ridiculous pace.

Yeah. Are the folks that you talk about, the brands that you talk to, the leaders of those brands, excited about ads coming to chat surfaces? It feels like new unexplored territory whenever there's a new ad product. That's opportunity for fast moving brands. But what are they worried about? What are they excited about? What's the mood? Most of the excitement is actually around this idea of like, is there a potential for this to level the playing field? Meaning, you know, if I've done a bunch of research historically on, on, on the, the on a genetic application. Like about James Purse or about, you know, Tom Sacks, or about the stuff that I love, the brands that I love. And then I'm going on a hiking trip. It probably should not show me a generic pair of boots. It should probably show me on running because it knows to some extent

that I actually favor direct-to-consumer brands or more modern retail brands as well. So the excitement actually is around like, is this going to introduce more brands that otherwise are unknown to more people or, you know, true classic tea, for example, which, you know, if you're looking for a black t-shirt, I suspect, on a search engine, you're not going to see classic tea come up that much, but it's an incredible product, and ultimately it can be found on these agenic tools

in a way that it probably couldn't historically. That seems to be a lot of the excitement. The other excitement is e-commerce, as a percentage of total retail, is still sub-20%. You've heard that, literally, you hear that the show all the time, that people are like, well, you know, we're inside the Shopify booth now, and people

that are more traditional say, well, when's this going to eclipse 25%. There is a chance, there is a school the thought that says that one of the things that a Gentic might do is increase that penetration rate at a faster clip kind of a la COVID did because people that may not be big e-commerce consumers may be searching for recipes on chatGBT and through that process may end up actually starting to buy stuff there as well so that the other thing is like I think some of the time you go to a retail store you're going because you want to have a conversation about the product in a way that you just don't get with a website.

A website is like a beautiful catalog. And if you go around in the right order and you look at the FAQ and maybe you talk with support and hopefully they respond quickly and actually give you the insight, then you can get to the purchase decision. But so a lot of people will just be like, I'll just drive by the store and get it.

But I feel like LLMs can provide that. They can give people understanding on a subject or a category or a specific product that gives them the confidence to make a, purchase, right? And so... I'll go one step further. I think it's actually a better version of that because it's an unbiased discussion, an unbiased conversation. I mean, the bias is based on your context history and based on merit as opposed to being based on, you know, what spiff is that particular

salesperson getting today in a commission structure. So it does, I mean, you know, it's so cheesy, of course, but like when I describe it to like my mother, where this is going, I explain that this may very well be the greatest personal shopper in the history of retail. Who knows everything about you, knows your sizes, know in certain, you know, in European fashion, it's this size, but Americans like that, knows where you're located, knows where you travel to, and can provide this unbiased, objective recommendation. And then once you build in these applications, you build in checkout, which we're doing with our agentic storefronts, right into the chat, it becomes this really delightful experience. Yeah. Well, congratulations. I think it will be, yeah, the most transformative year for the way online

commerce happened. How can we, how can we follow the numbers here? I can, I can keep coming on and telling you the numbers. I will tell you that I did say on stage one of five thousand people, but an hour ago that I do think like this is the gold, this is a golden age. Yeah. Of retail. And, and I think you're going to see brands, there are brands right now that none of us have heard of that in six months from now, we're like, I can't believe we didn't know that brand existed. And I think that type of velocity, you know, there's going to be so many more of these skims and Jim Sharks and Allo Yogas and Vioris and Tacos and To Co. and AG1s and favorite, like, you know, we know these brands because we kind of live in

this world. It's what we're interested in. But for the most part, most consumers don't know, and I think they may end up knowing them a lot more readily through the agentic evolution. And Shopping wants to power the whole thing. Yeah, it's going to be so fascinating following this ramp relative to mobile in previous booms or, or actually social commerce be another one, because there was some, there was uncertainty around it and then ultimately, actually social is a wonderful Yeah, there were a lot of experiments where, oh, you'd be able to shop under YouTube videos or under Facebook marketplaces. Right. Right. Cochernedly as well. It turned out it was a great place. Yeah, exactly. That's right. It was a great place for discovery. But the transaction still took place on the online store. Yeah. This is different because the transaction happens in bed. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be fascinating to follow. I think we're in for a fast takeoff. It's going to be a good year.

Love it. A great time to be in business and a great time to be at Shopify. So congratulations on. Thank you very much. You guys in progress. Thank you for having me on. Thanks. It's going to be a massive broadcasts from wherever. Fantastic. It can be a massive year. Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon, highly.

Goodbye. And you know, their other partner, we've got to tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. Google is powering all of that. It's Google's most intelligent model yet Gemini 3 Pro. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. You can build right there.

We talked about this last week. California State Reservoir levels are now at 130% of normal, holding seven. Goodness. trillion gallons of water. It's remarkable. Allie Bell says God wants us to feed Claude. And every model, every

data center, there's plenty of water to go around. And Ashley had the same idea. Ashley Vance says, God is rewarding us for building AI. All the water for people. Super happy. Tyler, you have something breaking news? Yeah. So, okay, so earlier on the show, I was reading into the Jack Clark

on Cash blog. I was like, oh, maybe Jack Clark is pointing to something that Anthropics can build Space I posted that, he responded, put me in the truth zone, he said, no, you should not be reading into this, or any anthropic grand strategy, and he, he totally ratioed me. Oh, wow, got destroyed. Wow. Brutal magging. Brutal magging.

So, no, yeah, no anthropic data centers in space. Well, I mean, it's funny, I was, we were talking to Andrew from Cerebrus, and I was kind of given him the layout. Like, I'd heard from other people that, like, that Cerebrose would be a unique beneficiary of space data centers if it happens. And he was like, nah, it's not really on my roadmap in the next three to five years. But we will see, you know, everything could be pulled forward if there's, you know, new advances there. Space, you know, payload to orbit comes way down. There's a bunch of ways that that could be exciting. But.

Hadrian, raised additional capital at a $1.6 billion dollar valuation. in their series C2. This was the team. Love to see it. They got T-Rowe-Price, altimeter D-1, Stepstone.

We got to get 1789. Founders Fund Lux Capital, A16Z-137. Delling Company. All the absolute boys back in. What a run from Chris.

Power. What else we got? This post here from Horse Hater. Horse Hater. Went very viral yesterday. I didn't like this post. The whole post is horses.

Don't like them. Boo. We love horses here. Horse hater was asked why, and horse hater replies. They are evil creatures. I don't know that there, I know that there is only malice in their hearts. Completely false. Fake news.

It's exposing yourself for not spending time. Why is there no community note on this? We should community note on this. I'm going to write a community note right now. I'm going to get kicked out of the program. if I do this. Horse hater hates horses. Huge surprise.

Alexis O'Hanian says is sharing an article, luxury watch prices hit a two-year high in the secondary market, partially due to and maybe almost fully due to tariffs. Oh yeah, tariffs were a big part of the store. So if you like spending more money on watches, the show is probably doing a lot more. You like spending more money on watches,

you'll love tariffs. Yes, yes. But Alexis says a great anti-AI bet I've been making is in human craftsmanship, human excellence, collectibles will keep thriving. So if you needed a reason to buy another watch, this is it. This is it.

But it's interesting because he frames it as an anti-AI bet. It's sort of an anti-AI bet in that it's not a beneficiary of AI, but it's still, it's a very AGI-pilled bet in the sense that in a moment when AGI AI is accelerating, maybe humans craftsmanship is more valuable than ever, and that it's sort of an anti-sortmills.

slop, but it's still aligned with a bullish view on AI broadly. So he's not saying, I'm not, I don't think AI is going to work, so I'm buying watches. He's saying AI will work, and so I'm buying watches. Yeah, I mean, humanoid are going to have to be stunting. They will. They will need something on the wrist of your humanoid, and why not? And F.P. Jorne or a petech-Philippe. Well, yeah, so it's interesting, watches, Babylon goods, right, more desirable as they get more expensive. that means that if a robot can make a Swiss watch, like right now Rolex might cost $2,000 to make, right?

Some parts are automated, some is, you know, handcrafted, and suddenly Rolex can make the watch for, you know, 50 bucks just due to automation. They don't automatically, they're not automatically going to say, like, okay, let's bring the prices down, right? Because the price is part of the product. So I do think it's a, I do think it's a good piece. potential scoop here, Bobby Goodlate, replies to Alexis O'Hanian here and says, yep, I love that both Zuck, we all knew Zuck is into watches, and Sam Allman are both into watches, shows that they still value handcrafted objects. I didn't know that Sam Altman was into watches. It makes sense.

He's into cars. We know that, but we'll have to figure out what's on the risk. Does he do like a Jacob and Coe on each of us? I haven't, no, truthfully, I've not seen a photo of Sam with, with a hitter on the wrist. I've seen him in the Koenigsegg. I've seen him in the McLaren F1. I know that there's a car collection there, but I haven't seen anything hit the timeline of a wrist check.

But maybe 2026 is the year of the Sam Altman wrist check. I'm sure his PR team would love that going out on the internet. But I would support it and I will fight for you. I will be your strongest soldier, Sam, if you want to drop a little photo on the Instagram of whatever's on your wrist. Anyway, fantastic show. Great show, folks.

Thank you for hanging out with us today. Well, there's one last scoop that we should talk about is from Kylie Robeson over at Core Memory with Ashley Vance. She's got another scoop. This was just from the weekend. We didn't talk about this, but X-AI staff has been using Anthropics models internally through cursor. Until Anthropic cut off the startup's access this week, everyone's using Anthropic, apparently. So this went viral, got 7,000 likes. Yeah, I think at this point, if you are a lab and you haven't had your access to anthropic cut off, polish up your resume.

Because clearly, they're just going to do this to any company that is a meaningful threat. Yeah, there's another dynamic where you can be using the model because you think it's good, but you can also be trying to distill the model because if there's good data that can be pulled out, you might just say, okay, we want this capability that's uniquely available at this model endpoint, so let's grab that. There's a whole bunch of reasons why this could be happening, but it is dramatic. Yeah, I was just going to say that. It was like the original deep, deep sea controversy, people thought they were disilling from chat, GPT. Yeah, GVT. Before we go, I got to give a shout out to Cooper in the chat.

Every single day when the market closes, he comes in and he says, time to like the stream. I love it. Thank you so much. It's a movement. Thank you, everyone for watching. Thank you for leaving us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We can't wait. Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter at TBPN.com.

We will see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Just one more sleep. Goodbye.