TBPN Live - Elon Doubles Down, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Andrew Yang, Ishan Mukherjee, Tony Holdstock, Tomer London, Andrei Serban, Tim Higgins

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

(00:30) - TBPN in the WSJ (01:29:33) - Ishan Mukherjee, co-founder of Pixie Labs and former Senior Vice President of Growth at New Relic, discusses the launch of Rocks2GA, achieving $25 million in revenue, and securing major clients like Saudi Aramco. He highlights their focus on delivering ROI within 90 days through agent-based pricing and full-service deployment, differentiating from competitors like Salesforce. Mukherjee also emphasizes their lean team structure, with 25 engineers and 10 field and sales personnel, enabling rapid product development and customer integration. (01:37:00) - Tony Holdstock, co-founder and CEO of Ingest, discusses the company's recent $21 million Series A funding round led by Altimeter Capital, with continued investment from Andreessen Horowitz. He explains that Ingest offers an asynchronous execution platform enabling developers to build durable workflows as step functions, simplifying infrastructure management. Holdstock highlights the platform's applications in AI and AI agents, emphasizing its role in accelerating product iteration by abstracting complex infrastructure tasks. (01:47:20) - Tomer London, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Gusto, leads the development and execution of the company's product vision, focusing on modernizing payroll, benefits, and compliance for small businesses. In the conversation, he discusses Gusto's new features aimed at improving cash flow for small businesses, including faster payroll processing options like next-day, same-day, and instant payroll, as well as a partnership with Paraffin to offer Payroll Bridge, a solution to help businesses meet payroll even when funds are short. He emphasizes the importance of addressing cash flow challenges to alleviate the stress small business owners face when they can't meet payroll obligations. (02:05:05) - Andrei Serban is the Founder and CEO of Console, a company that automates IT support using AI agents. In the conversation, he discusses Console's recent $23 million Series A funding led by DST Global and Thrive Capital, and explains how their AI agents integrate with organizational systems to handle tasks like password resets and access requests directly within Slack, aiming to reduce the support. (02:17:40) - Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, is known for advocating Universal Basic Income (UBI) to address job displacement due to automation. In the conversation, he discusses his new venture, Noble Mobile, a mobile service provider aiming to reduce costs for consumers by offering unlimited data plans with potential cash-back incentives for lower usage, and highlights the ease of switching carriers using eSIM technology. (02:36:30) - Tim Higgins, a business columnist at The Wall Street Journal and former Apple beat reporter, discusses his new book, "I Wore," which explores Apple's dominance in the digital world and the challenges posed by rivals like Epic Games and Spotify. He highlights the ongoing debates over Apple's App Store policies, including the 15-30% commission, and the broader implications of antitrust scrutiny on the company's future innovations, particularly in AI. Higgins also notes the potential distractions these legal battles pose for Apple, drawing parallels to Microsoft's past antitrust issues. (02:52:40) - Alexander Embiricos, the product lead for OpenAI's Codex, discusses the recent launch of a new Codex model, highlighting its integration across various coding environments and its evolution into an AI teammate capable of independent task execution. He emphasizes the model's adaptability in dynamically adjusting response times based on query complexity and notes a significant increase in usage due to continuous improvements. Embiricos also addresses the importance of prompt engineering and the challenges in steering AI agents effectively. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.ai/Privy - privy.ioFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN! Today is Tuesday, September 16th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital, Capital. Good morning to everyone who's watching. We see you, we appreciate you. Welcome to the Tuesday stream. We have a ton of news to go through.

First up, ramp.com, time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Second, we made it to the past. print edition of the Wall Street Journal. We made it to the print edition. This is really, really huge. If you're not familiar, not every article that goes out on

WSJ.com makes it to the print edition. You've got to pass the second hurdle, the second test. You've got to be newsworthy. Thank you to everyone who clicked on the link. That probably helped. I don't know. Send a signal. I mean, we got a lot of views on the screenshots that we shared, which was

crazy. People were excited about Dylan joining. Yeah, people were excited. It's a fun time it's a big it's a big moment and we're happy to make it into the journal since uh the journal has very much it's the backbone it's the backbone of the show as much as the timeline is the back the timeline might be the femur of the show but uh the wall street journal is the is the backbone and and our sponsors are the or the tibias of the show anyway we we made it to the actual print edition of the wall street journal this is really really big um we're very happy about this

We've been waiting for this moment since we started the show. Another bit of Wall Street Journal lore you might not be familiar with. The headline that they use online is often different than what they print in the paper because it's a slightly different audience. I liked the print edition. So in the online version, they said this podcast is 11 months old. It just hired a president to manage ad revenue. Fact check, true.

but then in the print edition they needed to kind of tighten it up they didn't have as much ink to work with so they shortened it to young tech podcast hires president which i like a lot i think they could have shortened it even more to just young tech young technology yeah young technology so so we've been very very happy with this anyway you can go check it out if you're if you're interested and people have been really really supportive of the show thank you to Everyone in the chat, thank you to everyone who's been engaging with posts on X. Of course, tomorrow we are interviewing Mark Zuckerberg live. And who else are we interviewed?

We're interviewing Alexander Wang. There we go. I've interviewed him twice. He's a phenomenon. He is probably the greatest entrepreneur of Generation Z, and he's the chief AI officer at Meta. It doesn't. But it's surprising because he looks so good. He looks fantastic.

He looks fantastic. He's been lifting the weights and training the weights. That's right. He's all over the place. That's great. So we're very excited to sit down with Alexander Wang tomorrow. He really put New Mexico tech on the map. Yes, yes.

Not much going on there before. Until he showed up. But he's been on a generational run and is continuing to build a whole team at Meta as their chief AI officer. We're going to have him break down the structure of the team, how he's thinking about hiring folks. Obviously, he's been on a talent acquisition spree. He got something like 20 to 30 percent of the medist list together in one room and said start cooking. Also, Cryptox has been posting about us. I have a printed post. A little throwback to Cryptox. Cryptox says, never stopped printing. Cryptox says, the rise of TBPN has to be studied. How did it happen? They were printing my posts,

And now they're hosting the Zuckerberg. Not Zuckerberg, not the Zuckerberg. Well, it's... Little Laura, we still love to print. We still love to print so much that we've been running through... We've been pushing printer and technology to its limits. Familiarity with the Hewlett-Packard or brother printing system is a prerequisite for employment at TBPN, incorporated. Yeah, underrated.

that we ran the show on Brother Printers. Brother Printers did, they took us a long way. The first 10,000 subscribers were probably built on the back of the Brother Printer, which served as well. A real brand. We're not joking. Yeah, this is a real brand. It's called Brother Printers, and they're pretty reliable.

We got the black and white version, so we'd print faster. They have a great domain. Yeah, some folks in the chat, say, bring printing back. We're going to, there was a, we got to a point. where we had so many posts that were in, you know, color and black and white. And like, this is a lot of ink. And we would hit print, and it would take like 25 minutes to actually print the full run of show. And then we'd want to look things up and we want to play videos.

And so I think there's a world for printing posts. We want some printed posts. We want to keep the lo-fi vibes. But then also every once in a while it makes sense to pull up a video for everyone or pull up some audio and play it. And of course, share it all and re-stream. One live stream. 30-plus destinations, multi-stream. Reach your audience wherever they are. If you're streaming, got to get on restream. Anyway, tomorrow, obviously everyone has seen the leaks at this point. Meta's announcing some new glasses. We're going to be hands-on with them, take you through reactions to

the keynote, and then interview a bunch of folks from Meta's leadership team, which we've shared, we shared Boz, we shared Zuck, we shared Alex Wang, of course. But I wanted to get a state of the union on what's actually going on in the VR AR market. I tried the Apple Vision Pro. One of our first shows was talking about the Apple Vision Pro. I had it for two weeks. I watched Citizen Kane in it. I experienced some of the demos,

wasn't able to really stick with it, and so wound up returning it. At any point, did you say, this is the future, this is it? There were pieces of the future that I liked. like the external battery pack. Some of the other people that came out and said, this is it, and then retracted it.

I remember, because we had, I don't think we'd started the show yet, but you called me and you were like, do I need to get one of these things? Like my timeline is just flooded with like insane, like the future is here, like you're missing the boat. It was like FOMO around Apple Vision Pro for a couple weeks and then it sort of died off. But I thought that there were a few things that they did really well.

The screen was fantastic. It really was a step above anything else in the category. And the external battery pack was smart. Of course, the overall headset was still really heavy. And I liked it, even though I liked Oculus for gaming. I played all of Robo Recall, the shooting game. I have a funny story about this too. Did I ever tell you about the first time I went skeet shooting with shotguns?

No. So I go to my friend's ranch in California, avocado farmer. That's actually impressive because eventually we're going to run out of stories that... I know. Yeah, you'd think I'd run out of them by now. But so I go to the ranch, my buddy's ranch. And so at some point, we had to explain this. Yeah, yeah, we will be taking you through the...

A simple, we made a simple explanation. We cracked the code on Open AI, by the way. Get a wide angle, please. So we will be sharing the full breakdown. Tyler will be breaking it down for us. It's quite simple if you actually do. just, you know, look at all the, and, and we will be calling, we will, thank you for the Zoom, and we will be calling Dylan Field to help us create a red string mod for Fig Jam.

Of course, if you want to take this level of design to a little bit more professional level, head over to figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. So, anyway, I was going out to my buddies ranch, and as one of the activities on the ranch, they had ski shooting. So shotguns, the over under, two shots. shells, and I'd never, this was the first time I'd ever shot a shotgun. Never really shot a gun.

And they were playing this game where it's kind of like knockout and everyone goes. And if you miss one, you lose. But if you, if you miss and then someone else hits it, they get you out. And it's a competition and the best shooter wins. And I don't know if there was a prize. But I'd never shot, completely new. But I'd been playing like four hours a day of virtual reality shooting in Robo Recall. This is a fantastic game.

How old are you at this time? Oh, this was like 25 years old, 26 or something like that. I don't know. I was a man. I was an adult. I wasn't a kid. Four hours a day of Robo Recall. Something like that.

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, exactly. Well, no, you can still put in 9-96 and play Rubbo Recall and. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we know this. We know this. We know this.

Yes. And then so. But I, so I believe I had one of the highest scores in the world at the time. I was going up against, like, a friend of mine who was, like, actually a developer at META. And we were, like, setting different scores. And they were, like, little tricks that you could do to get better scores. But basically, the whole conceit of the game is that there's a whole bunch of robots that are, like, running at you, and you have to, like, shoot them. So, so you're, I'm practicing in virtual reality, and I'm shooting all these robots.

And I get out to the real world, and I'm phenomenal. And I win, and I beat everyone in this shotgun shooting competition. And it actually transferred. It was sim racing. It was sim racing. It was. It transfers. It transferred.

Robo Recall. It transferred. It was fantastic. It was like a remarkable moment. And I think that Quest, even though some of the hype has died down, everything's moved over to AI, there's still a massive opportunity to win gaming. There's also a massive opportunity, I think, to win just replacement for your TV. We were talking about this.

Like the TV is maybe goaded, maybe going to be around forever. But when I watched Susan Payne in Applevision Pro, I was like, this is cool. I could see doing this if it was lighter and cheaper and a little bit cooler. And I think we can wait to talk about the implications of Meta's new releases until tomorrow because there's been some leaks. Yep. But we've also been able to demo the products a couple times now. And can't share, can't share.

But what we can share is the X-Real One Pro, which is a augmented reality. I don't even know how we would... I had never heard of this until this morning. Okay. So this has been pumped very heavily online. They do a lot of sponsored content. They do a lot of ads. And it's an augmented reality glasses.

We got them. They're on Tyler's face over there. He's looking... Give us a little review. Jordy, how do you think the styles, the style looks? I mean, Tyler's just a cool dude. He looks pretty cool. It looks like just as a pair of sunglasses on.

You do look kind of... like an old man, kind of old man coated. They're very far away from my face. Like the lens, it's very, like, offset. Yeah, it is. It is a little bit farther. So describe what you're seeing. Yeah, so it feels basically like I'm wearing sunglasses.

I don't know if you'd be able to see if I turn them around, but there's like the main lens, which you can see from, like, looking at me. And on the inside, there's like a smaller lens that doesn't cover the entire thing. So I'm looking through that. So the field of view of the actual screen area is not actually that big. But it's basically just like I'm wearing pretty dark sunglasses. And then I can just like see. I have like a screen pulled up.

It's just mirroring from my laptop right now. Okay. So it's over here. So basically if you unplug these, there's no battery on board that I can tell. You have to plug it. You have to plug in the end of the, the end of the, what's the arm on the on the sunglasses arm I don't know

the side little bar you plug a USBC cable into that and you plug that in your phone and it mirrors your phone or he's plugging into his laptop is it a second screen or it's mirroring right now it's like extended so it's extended screen okay oh because you have two screens yeah well well there we go yeah yeah you don't need to rub it in I mean so that's pretty that's pretty so how much can you see

can you see how many fingers I'm holding up yeah three okay I mean I can see pretty well you can see pretty well there's three um like levels of darkness. Okay. So I'm on the lightest one right now. You're in the lightest one. It's still pretty dark. It's basically like I'm wearing dark sunglasses. I think I had it on the darkest setting and I was using it at night last night and I couldn't see it. Tyler Gould really. Yeah, in the chat says. Looks like he belongs in the blues brother. I think it's pretty good look. I watched a full YouTube video on it about 50 minutes last night and it truly was full

HD. Like I was not seeing pixels. I thought I thought the visual resolution was quite high. What's your What's your review? I just turned on, like, the darkest setting, and I cannot see you guys at all. You can't see us all in that. I can see the lights we have. Okay, that's it. Like, very faintly, but I can't see you guys at all.

So it's really, oh, it's actually changing the darkness of the glasses, too. That's pretty cool. I can see the change when you change those. That's pretty cool, yeah. Wow. There we go. Yeah, it goes dark. I don't know if you'll be able to see that on the video,

but I can certainly see it from here. Anyway, so what have you, what have you demo? What do you think about the user experience of having the screen on your face have to connect to the screen in front of you? I don't think it's that crazy. I always thought that, like, I want a very concrete, like, first, like, killer app. And so for the iPhone, you know, I was debating this with Mark Andreessen. I think the killer app for the iPhone was just the phone.

And then, yeah, it had some problems later, but most people bought it just to be able to make phone calls. Chad's asking for a wrist check. That's a Seiko, right? Yeah, Seiko. KX. There we go. Not really a hitter. Oh, you're getting there. It's a college hitter. It's a college hitter. It's a tasteful choice. And so I thought that there could be a future where this is a $650 product.

It's in the range of an external monitor. And so I think that maybe it's not going to be today, but if you have a college student who has a laptop and they want a second monitor and they're judging between these glasses that are portable, they can bring to, the library if they're going there and have a nice big second monitor or a physical second monitor from Apple or Samsung or anyone else, they might be able to compete on that, even if you just have to plug it in. But what do you think, Tyler? How close are you? How much cheaper than a true external monitor would these have to be for you to choose this over an external monitor? I think they'd have to be a lot cheaper than $750. They're not close. Yeah, they're also like, I don't think I would wear these not sitting down.

Like if I was moving around. Yep. They're like a little too clunky. When you have it, so there's like two modes. You can have it on like the world tracking or just like face tracking where it moves with your face. Yep. And it's like pretty clunky. So it's like a little bit, I could see someone getting like motion sick.

In VR, I don't really get motion sick ever, but like my dad does a lot. So I could see him like not using this. Comp the visual fidelity to the, to the Quest 3S that you tested? I would say it's very close. It's close. Yeah. So it's definitely worse than the Applevision Pro.

Like I can still see kind of, like I can like do essentially like pixel peeking. Yeah. And if I move my head like this, it gets blurry. Yeah. But overall like I could, I mean, you know. The field of view is a little narrow. Like it's pretty easy to cut off the edges. Yeah.

It's a little narrow, but like text is totally readable. like you could easily read or um so far i'm on the i'm on the train of if i'm if i was on a plane and i was leaning back i would watch a movie on this over just holding my phone like this and watching it there but outside of that there aren't that many occasions that i would select this and even though it is a r and it is pass-through it's still i would just say i would just say this seems much worse than having your laptop on the tray table oh yeah yeah it's like when are you on a plane and you don't have your laptop yeah so would you really use so I I give these uh what's your review two thumbs down two thumbs down that's my official brutal I mean I think it's pretty

cool I've never used AR glasses before I've only ever used VR that has pass through sure and I mean it's like you know infinitely better because in pass through you can't really like you can obviously walk around yeah but it's like you it's a little jarring still you have to walk a little slowly like with this you can actually use your laptop you can you can move your your hands around and it doesn't it's real time because it's just actually you're seeing the real light rays yeah yeah i would say i would say one thumbs up one thumbs one thumb up one thumb up one thumb down are you being honest with us tyler are you being too no i think this is really cool yeah yeah okay really cool really cool doesn't mean you're going to use it it it's a cool

DEMO, I would not buy these. Okay, one thumb up on the demo. I would not buy these for $700. I would buy them for like $150, maybe. Okay, the question, the, the, the age-old question here is we're always trying to get to a churn rate. I think, I think, Goldman in the chat says, ripping analog bogeys, glad the youth are keeping it going. I don't think, I think he missed the part where they're, like, there's cigarettes. Oh, there's cigarettes in his body.

Oh, oh. Oh, I thought about that. I thought you're spelling the sunglasses. No, no, no. Yeah. Tyler's got some heaters in the pocket. Yancey here, so I didn't wish I had a third thumb to give it three thumbs down. But, so let's assume that they're free.

Let's assume that you have won them in a TBPN gap semester challenge. You're not even, you're not using these. Do you think you'll be a DAU in a month? Because we've tried to make you a DAU of Cluelly. We failed. We tried to make you a DAU of the Quest 3S. We failed. On the quest, I actually have used it.

Oh, you did? I've used it in the past month. I've used it maybe like three times. Okay. What did you use it for? I was playing, I think I was playing Call of Duty. Okay. Back in the trenches.

The new Call of Duty? The new Call of Duty is dropping soon. Maybe. I don't know what one it was. Maybe the last one was. Like I'm 6 or something. Oh, well. I would.

I don't. I mean, Call of Duty needs to do the same thing as Apple at this point Black Ops 2025. Oh yeah, yeah, they really should. There actually was Modern Warfare 2020, I think. Oh, yeah, they did that, right?

Yeah, well, no, it was because they reset the whole counter. So it was Modern Warfare one, two, three, four, and then they just were like, let's start over, let's do modern warfare again. And so anytime that you would need to confuse the old modern warfare

and the new modern warfare, people would be like, modern warfare, but the 2020 edition. It wasn't modern warfare quarreling. Dan Ratliff in the chat has a good idea. He says, get the chat ripping an inch from Tyler's face. Ooh, I like that. Yeah, can you pull up chat? Plug the chat.

You can just see the chat. So I'm looking at myself right now. They're really dark. It looks like I'm like blind. Yeah, it does. Well, I mean, that's mostly because you're indoors. Like, if you were, if we were outside and you were on sunny beach or something, I feel like you would look a lot more normal. To be clear, that is incredibly sub-like, that's not what you want.

You want glasses that look like normal glasses. Yes, yes, yes. I agree. And so, like, the meta-ray bands, just the current ones that are already out, if someone is sitting at their office with those and they have them in their clear frames, you would just be like, it's as weird as having headphones in. Like, it's just like, oh, yeah, they're wearing glasses. Yeah, like, you can immediately clock these as like something is going on.

Totally. The wire coming out of your, coming down your chest, really is a nice accent. You might have to thread that through the tie or something. You're like, yeah, something's going on here. You look like an intelligence asset, you know. You're just like, if you're in an SF party and a, you know, and someone's wearing these. Yeah, that's great. Anyway, Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust, continuously.

Vantta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Okay, the current thing. Elon, he posted, Daddy is very much home. He's burning the midnight oil with Optimus Engineering on Friday night.

Then Red Eye overnight to Austin, arriving 5 a.m. Wake up to have lunch with my kids and then spend all day Saturday afternoon in deep technical reviews for Tesla's AI-5 chip design. Then he flies to Colossus 2 on Monday, walks the whole data center floor. Reviews Transformer and Power Production, excellent progress there, he says,

departs midnight, then up to 12 hours of back-to-back meetings across all Tesla departments. But particular focus on AI autopilot, optimist production plans, and vehicle production slash delivery. 16,000 likes. He is back in it. He's in wartime mode. It's a, no, it's great to see. Like, clearly you add politics into his current responsibilities and it's too much. It's too much.

It's too much. So it's great to see that he's out of that, focused on what he does best. Yeah. Like the context switching between SpaceX and Tesla always seemed like, wow, how does you do SpaceX and Tesla? But like at the end of the day, you are talking to an engineer in one place and then an engineer in the other place. And it's fundamentally the same conversation. Like how can we design the parts, get them made, put them together, and then do the thing with the parts that at least it's that instead of politics is like completely different. It's crazy to be an entrepreneur and think to yourself. I got to focus more.

then still have like six companies. It is crazy. It means like I have to work harder and I have to focus more. Yep. And normally if you're running one company, you can say like, all right, we're going to like deprioritize this product. Totally. Like shut this down.

We're not going to do that acquisition. Totally. Do this or that. But he doesn't have that luxury. He just has to. This was the, this was the odd take. Daddy is very much home. You got a lot of houses, brother.

You got a lot of houses. But at the same time, house Elon, as I'm calling it, does, does, does, have some synergies between it and a lot more now that you take politics out of the mix like you mentioned. So I was thinking, and I don't know if I want to docks them, but I was visiting two friends of mine who ran a design consultancy together. I pulled into their Los Angeles office space, which they had designed from the ground up. These guys are super into design. They have custom furniture, custom tables, everything is custom. And I noticed they had two identical Tesla model-wise parked in front of the building. And I was like, that's kind of a funny choice for guys

who pride themselves on finding, like, unique and creative design ideas all day long. Like, everything they do is considered unique. I would have expected some bespoke car, like the bespoke office building. And when I talked to them, they had a good rationale behind their decision. They said, what true luxuries are left in the automotive world? It's just self-driving. And nothing comes close to a Tesla. That was their take.

You can disagree. But for a lot of people. We've had self-driving. It's called having a driver. That's the truth. That's the truth. That's the last. Clearly, you can make the argument that that is the final.

Yes. Because we drove with them to dinner and both cars made it. I wasn't in there, but yeah, you were. I drove with them to dinner and both cars made an extremely illegal left turn. Oh, so a human driver would never do anything illegal in a car? Is that what you're saying? I would fire a human driver that made that turn. Oh.

Okay. It was a breach. It was a greacher. But, of course, I agree with the point, broadly. Yes. Sure. Maybe it's not superhuman level. Maybe it's not the best self-driving better than an actual professional driver, but it's

on the path. And it's clearly a notch above the rest of the OEMs. And so Tesla's always been a bit of a wild ride. Company wasn't founded by Elon Musk. He sort of refounded the business. He joined the company seven months after two other co-founders started the initial corporation. It's been a wild ride in the public markets. There's a barrage of skepticism the whole time pressure from short sellers. The stock's never traded like a traditional

carmaker, but it's also never operated like one. So on November 6th, Tesla shareholders in just what, two months or so, Tesla shareholders will vote on a very non-traditional pay package. It's $1 trillion for Elon. And Elon's already restating his commitment to the company with this post. Daddy is very much home. He wrote on X this morning. I was debating whether or not the post was ghost written. And where do you sit on it, Jordy? You've read the post.

Do you think this was written by Elon? The original one we covered. The Daddy, not the Tesla. So the Tesla's secret plan V4, that felt like it was not written by Elon. It wasn't really in Elon's voice from what I know about him. It seemed like it was sort of written by a team

or a committee or there were like multiple people at the table there were a lot of m dashes so maybe there was like a chat chp t pass or a grok pass at some point l l lm pass on top of the ideas just talking into his phone sure and then it instantiated it into a into a multi-paragraph essay um but this this post i am burning the midnight oil with optimist engineering on friday night then red eye overnight to austin arriving at 5am does this feel like elon's voice to you i mean his voice to me is reposting on timeline reposting Crying emoji. Wow.

Crying emoji. It's so true. Yeah. I don't know. I thought this, this did feel like him. It felt like he just fired it off. But I don't know. There's people debating it.

I don't know. I think the more interesting thing is just like, just like, does this reflect rational prioritization at Tesla generally? And so. It looks up 20% in the last. Yeah. And so he's prioritizing Optimus, which Optimus feels like this sci-fi project that's far off. It feels like the demo.

that we've seen have been very teleoperated, it's not, there aren't these crazy demos, it's certainly not shipping, but if you just think about like what is technically possible right now, and we've seen these videos out of China with companies like Unitry, it doesn't seem that far off, right? Like, even if, even if you assume that, like, he hasn't, Tesla hasn't done any, like, quantum leap, done something that no one else can do, just catching up to Unitary with great execution and engineering should be possible, right? Like, they already make tons and tons of cars. It's a somewhat similar project.

And there's also certainly investor demand for an American humanoid robot play. Today, figure robotics raised a billion dollars and a $39 billion post-money valuation. When was that announced? That was announced. Months ago, right? Or leaked. Leaked, what, six months ago? It felt like something that was designed to generate interest.

Sure. And there were screenshots of emails and stuff. I was like, I was pretty blown away because that round was being, what it was rumored to be getting done at was greater than the market cap of Ford Motor. That's right. Where's Ford today? Ford is at $45 billion today. Oh.

And so I was, I saw the new today. Age like milk, George. Yeah, I said to John, I said, you might not like this, John. This might trigger you, but Brett Adcock has created more enterprise value than Henry Ford. That actually proved to be true. Henry Ford, as of current Marx, is generated about a billion dollars more. Okay, okay, yeah.

We don't need to get into revenue or really try to get too into the math. Yeah, let's skip all that. But yeah, the question... I mean, my read on this is just like, is just like, figure is nowhere near as, like, in the zeitgeist as Tesla. And there are clearly investors

who want to bet on humanoid robots in America. They can't even buy unitary stock. I don't know how you would. And so if you just, if you just believe that robots are going to be a thing, like investing in Tesla doesn't seem like that crazy of an idea, right? But, I mean, he's not just focused on that. He's also focused on the next

Tesla chip design called AI. Well, one thing, too, Unitree is planning their IPO around the $7 billion mark. Sure. Oh, that's low. Wow. That's low. Where are they in Hong Kong, maybe? It's going to be the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. I wonder what it will do. And given that they are working. You're shipping a lot of those robots. They're selling a lot of pups. Oh, yeah, they're selling a lot of pups. Robopups. Anyway, uh, would you, worth a big deep. I want, I, I, I, I think a Tesla robo pup would crush. That would be good. I would you use it for though? Would you not churn for that? Just a, well, so, so I pitched you on an office dog and you said, that's insane. And, and, and, uh, I thought about it. It's a tragedy of the common situation. Um, but a, but a Tesla pup that, uh, that, uh,

that Elon would just be able to zoom into at any time and kind of bark at us if he had announcements, I would be pretty interested in that. What about a Tesla pufferfish, a turbo puffer fish? A turbo puffer. You'd search every byte, serverless vector and full-tech search, build from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

Check out a turbo puffer. He's also prioritizing AI-5, the new chip. He's partnering with Samsung on that, makes sense. You need edge computing in a self-driving context. You can't do all the inference in the data center. Colossus, you can do inference in the data center. You're probably training a big model. Regardless of what

XAI is doing with GROC, having a bunch of being GPU rich seems valuable to Tesla, right? And there's rumors that maybe those companies merge at some point. But the plan overall, like how he's actually spending his time, it seems in line with the opportunity

in front of Tesla. It doesn't seem like wild wildly, wildly, like, off-based. He's managed to almost 2X the stock to do since April. He certainly, like, got the flow back. And I remember, I distinctly remember mid-curving it around April, thinking just looking at the,

looking at Tesla earnings, look at them losing market share globally, look at the quarters that they had had, just in the core business of selling cars. And it was just looking, really, really, really abysmal. Yeah, cyber truck was rough. The Roadster 2 was delayed.

Model 3 is not selling well. None of the cars have been reading that. And then there was all this political stuff where were conservatives going to pick up and start buying Tesla's? Well, no, you think about it. He lost the left. Yep. And then he was losing the right by fighting with Trump. Yeah. Yeah. It's very rough.

Who's the base? Yeah. Yeah. It was like losses on both sides. But I think I think that the car buyer has a shorter memory for these things and will return to... When you're leasing cars for $2.99, less than an equinox. And it does perform well on all the benchmarks, essentially. It is great value compared to any other car in that price rate. Yep, totally. And so the bear case here for Elon bringing it back and returning home is that he has multiple homes.

SpaceX, NeurLink, Boring Company, X, X, A.I. It can't be easy to juggle everything, but at least he's been able to pull back time spent in D.C. No, I said Neurlink. And it seems like there are new plans in the works to consolidate House Elon down to fewer entities, so it's easy to manage. Overall, his current Tesla plan outlined in his post is a lot clearer to me than the Tesla's secret plan V4 that felt written by a committee, or even worse, than LLM.

Even if you're seeing signs of being stretched too thin, it's very hard to root against someone who's already built such a large automotive company in America and is taking a serious run at a self-driving network and a humanoid robotics play. There's lots of froth, but I like Elon being home at Tesla and focused on making science fiction reality. So that's my take on Elon's latest paypad. John. Anyway, whatever they're building, they got to do it on graphite.

Graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. We didn't really talk about the Sam Altman Tucker Carlson episode that went out. It was a crazy newsday, of course, with the Kirk assassination. But Chrisman went viral, who's a friend of the show. He said, after spending seven minutes, very politely accusing his guest of murder, Tucker just resumes a normal conversation to round out the interview. Incredible, best to ever do it.

And so it goes straight from suspicious death to thoughts on Elon Musk. What jobs will be lost to AI? What are the downsides of AI? Is AI a religion? The dangers of deepakes. I love it. Yeah, do you think this was a net a win for Sam? Kind of went to...

I think every PR person thinks it's a own goal or it's like a mistake to do. I don't know. It was so bold. It was just, it was so unexpected. Like, it was... Remember, Tucker had Sucheer's parent. No, you know that that's what's going to happen.

So you're going into the arena. You're going into the lion's den. you're debating like the most critical critic possible. And there's something brave about that. I don't know. You're not afraid. Yeah, yeah. I took it as...

Where you're able to overcome your fear. As bullish. I think Luke Metro had this post where he was saying that his fear of the going direct movement was that CEOs would never do a hard interview ever again. Because there was always someone who is willing to do an easy interview with you. There was always, oh, just do. your own podcast. Open AI has their own podcast. Sam Haltman's brother has a podcast. He's friends with tons of people. He can come to us and we'll talk to him just about AI and tech and

the core business and stuff and have like a business conversation. To go to Tucker is a very, very aggressive, bold move. And I think it's good leadership. I don't know. I think it's, I think it's like it's hopefully closing the book on that very sad and tragic saga, but who knows. really dug into like the actual response were people in tucker's community swayed that's the real metric probably because you don't want to come out of that and be like Tyler wow i have more you're going to middle america you're going to interview thousands of Tucker Carlson uh super fans yeah and asked them did he do it just ask them do it no no no no explain them explain to them this explain to them the full history of open AI all the connections and see if they're bullish

on the stock. That's what I want to do. Do they think $500 billion is undervalued or overvalued in middle America? That's what I care about. So we have our chart of the open AI and all the connections. Tyler, you were late here last night. You didn't leave last night. You were here kind of an all nighter. Yeah. I was basically the goal was try to, you know, I want to explain kind of in an easy, simple way, like how to think about open AI broadly. Oh, yeah. How to to think about people who are influencing it. I think you nailed it. In as clear of a way as possible.

I think you nailed it. So who do we have here at the center? Yeah. So I think it's obviously best to start here. Yes. This is right here in the middle. Open AI. Okay.

So obviously, Sam Altman, Open AI, this is the core. Yes. And so every line of string here is a real connection, correct? Yeah. Okay. Take us through some of it. Yeah. So we can see over here, these are some of kind of the main deals.

Yes. So we have Larry Ellison, Oracle. Yes. We have Microsoft. $300 billion plan to build data centers. And then Broadcom is obviously doing chips, custom chips for Open AI now. SoftBank is bank rolling some of it with Stargate. Microsoft has the classic deal. What's the connection between Johnny Ivan growing Daniel?

Oh, yeah. Okay. So this is actually a, you know, double. So this is, most people on Twitter, they see this picture. They think growing Daniel. But, I mean, that's actually Steve Jobs. That's Steve Jobs. It's Steve Jobs.

So it's really, you know, double. Okay. So you see, yeah, this is pretty good. I want to talk about this. So we have Mark Andreessen. Yes. You know, famous kind of interplay between growing Daniel and Mark Andreessen. Okay, yes.

But also, you know, with Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive. Okay, got it. And then you're saying this goes deeper than. This goes deep. It goes really deep here. How deep does it go? Let's find out. Okay.

So then let's just keep moving. So let's go from, let's go. go to some investors. Please. So we can go from opening eye. Let's see Josh Kushner. Josh Kushner, of course. Okay, but who's Josh Kushner's brother? Jared. Where's Jared? Where's Jared? First Trump administration. Okay, yes. Okay. Now we're in, you know, politics. Let's go down PT. Okay. You can see a lot of strings coming out of here. This is a core player. Core player. So, I mean, there's so many directions we can go here, but let's go to Delian, right? Yes. Dalyan, where does Delian work founders fund? Who is, you know, it's obvious. Okay.

Yes, it's obvious. You're putting it together. Okay, Delian's first company. Yes, Varda. No. Oh, first company. His first company, Y, C company. Oh, yeah, it wasn't YC company. That's right.

What was another YC company? Alexander Wang. Oh, wait. Scala was a YC company. Where does Alex work now? Where does he work? Mark Zuckerberg. Neda.

Okay. Nat Friedman. They work together, MSL. Okay. It's so clear now. Who did Nat Friedman sponsor? Who? Luke Ferretor.

Oh, Ferretor. And where does he work? Doge, Elon. Elon. It's all connected. And who did Elon start a company with? PT, it goes back. Okay, okay, okay.

So Wilmanitis. So Wilmanitis. How is Wilmanitis connected? This is just a joke. He's not actually involved, right? Well, Wilmanitis was a what kind of fellow? Oh, a teal fellow. That's right.

This does get pretty deep. And then we can go from Wilmanitis. He's obviously, you know, very popular on X. He is. This is another kind of, well, at some point, there were too many strings. I didn't want to cover too much. Yes. But there's a lot of connections here.

obviously we can go down to Dworkesh. Okay. So he's kind of another super power. He's a super connector. He's interviewed most of these folks. So let's go to, let's go from Dworkesh to Gwern, right? Okay, yes. Gwern, obviously connected scaling hypothesis, very influential on Ilya.

Yes. This obviously goes back to Open AI. Yes. It also goes to Carpathie. Yes, one of the co-founders of Open AI. Yes. Also, Tesla autopilot. Yes.

Back to Elon. Okay. Okay, let's go to this side of the board here. Yes, who we got? So let's... How is Scarlett Johansson involved? Yeah, so there's a couple ways she's involved. So obviously the first one, she was in her, right?

Yes, yes. Famously, when opening eye voice mode was coming out, they wanted to do her voice because, you know, that's like the movie, and then she was maybe suing. And was it Sam or the official opening I account that just tweeted her, and that was seen as maybe... Yes, I believe it was Sam. Yes, and it was,

unclear if the licensing was proper at that point. So there's maybe some backlash, maybe some legal letters traded. Who else was in her? Who else was in her? Phoenix. Yes, Joaquin Phoenix. And he was also the Joker.

This is not related to other things. Yes. But, okay. We're getting joker-fied. Yeah. It will happen. So let's go back to Scarjo. In a fast takeoff, we all become jokerfied.

So she was in a movie with another actor. Yes, who? Joseph Gordon Levitt. What movie? Don John, I believe it's called. That's right. Don John. Yes.

Okay, so who is Joseph Gordon-Levett's wife? Whoa, this does go deeper than I. Whoa, this does go deeper than I thought. Joseph Gordon Levitt's wife was previously a board member of Open AI during the ousting. That's true. That took Sam Altman out. Wow, it's all connected. I can you not see this.

It's so clear now. Okay, so now we're in kind of this, you know, ousting, safety. Yes, this is all connected here. Yes. It gets really jammed up. Adam DeAngelo. Yeah. Because we can go from here to EA and then to Elie.

Eliezer. Eliezer, of course. Right, and here's, you know. Yes. Eliezer's first organization, Miri, Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Yes. That was, I believe, early on funded by PT. Okay.

How is Eliezer connected to Grimes? Is that Grimes on there? Well, okay, do you not remember this famous picture between Grimes, Eliezer, and Sam? Oh, I do remember this. Yes. Good sound cute. I completely forgot that image. That is lore.

Yeah, okay. Okay, so then Eliezer, very influential on this famous book about safety, super intelligence by Nick Bostrom. Okay, Bostrum, yes. He is kind of this online, almost part of the blogosphere a little bit. Sure, sure. And connected to Scott Alexander, right, who was on Dorcasch's podcast. Yeah, he was AI 2027, part of that crew, right? No, he was a commentator on.

Oh, I think he was actually an advisor. I don't know if he was a co-author. He was involved. He's implicated. He's a... He's implicated. It's never been clearer that there's a connection. So let's go...

Okay, let's go back to our cast from here. He was on the podcast. Yes. How did Will... How did Will catch a red string? Just from being a poster on X? Oh, he also works at Open A&A. He was just through...

Oh, Will Depew. Oh, Will Depew. Oh, well, he's obviously... Yeah, I mean, he's at XAI. He, you know... No, no. He's on X. He's at Open AI, right? Yes, yes.

Okay. Things mixed up here. Okay, but okay, we're at Dwar Cache. Yes, at Dwar Cache. Back to Dwar Cache. Yes, an early guest of Rorschachsh was Tyler Cowan. Okay. Now, Tyler Cowen runs the Progress Studies Institute.

Yes, that's correct. That's what it's called. Okay. With Patrick Calson. Whoa, this does go deep. Now, Patrick Collison, famous for being Irish. Yeah, oh, okay. And we see here, this is linked with a lot of, you know,

yes, who else is Irish? Irish cabal, some kind of. Interesting. The hibernian conspiracy. Yeah, Willowbrine. We see Jordy, John. We'll see Joe Lonsdale, I believe. Oh, he's Irish?

No, I believe that's true. I'm going to have to fact check that. I have no idea. I think that's true. But, I mean, the main connection here is Ireland to the Illuminati. The Illuminati are Irish? Why are they Irish? Well, it's just, you know, general conspiracy.

And then here we get a little off the rails. You see George Soros and Fauci connected with the Illuminati as well. Okay. Okay, so you're saying we're one degree away. Yeah, yeah. We're not beating the allegations here. But let's stick with Illuminati. Let's go up to Brian Johnson, right?

Okay. How is he connected to all this? Well, there's some sense, rumors about, you know, blood of children, maybe. Okay. Transfusion or something. But really, Brian Johnson is part of this kind of health movement. Yes. So who else is part of that?

Obviously, Andrew Huberman. Yes, Andrew Huberman, of course. And so he's a, you know, health influence. And now you're kind of in the category of just experts broadly. Yeah. So that takes you over to Joe Rogan. Yes, obviously, because, you know, he's a health influencer, but really he's a podcaster at heart.

Yes. So now we're in this kind of manister. We see Theo Vaughn, who's obviously connected in many ways to Alexander Wang, to Zuck, to Sam. Theo Von's really, I mean, he could potentially be at the center of this whole thing. Yeah, for sure. Potentially. I mean, given how many connections.

Really, in the past year, he's become kind of a tech power player. That's the point of all this red string. You have to see who has the most connections. Moss has got two. TBPN has like 12. And I see raw milk up in the left corner. You're kind of dancing around that. Are you afraid to talk about raw milk?

So we're at Joe Rogan. Let's go back to Andrew Hummerman. Okay. Another kind of person in the health, you know, area, Justin Mayer's. Yes. I believe. Former guest. He is a fan of raw milk.

He's a fan of raw milk. He certainly is. But then we see the second string here. Let's just follow this down. How does raw milk? Oh, Jordie. Oh, Jordy implicated. Not beating the raw milk allegations.

okay um but then cuban was was taking Cuban was anti yeah but he's not on the he didn't make the board he didn't make the board because he's not he's not implicated he would have made the board I think the next iteration is is three what's going on with larry up there in the center uh yeah so so larry's he connected to layer's implicating in a lot of ways so let's just say here for a second um so so so we're in this kind of uh you know podcasting space obviously david senra yes james dyson james dyson yeah latest episode look i mean this is a very pure that's the most Pure placement on the board, hanging out on his own,

just connected to Senra. He's connected to, yeah. Oh, yeah, James Dyson's just in his lane. Just hanging out in Founders podcast. Exactly. But let's go from Senra to Larry Ellison, right?

There's been, I think, three episodes. Yeah. On Larry Ellison. Yeah. Larry Ellison is also connected in a lot of ways to Sam because of the, you know, the deal, but also to Elon, right, this famous.

He wrote a billion dollar check. Yeah, yeah. I recommend $2 billion, but whatever you think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Help fund the buyout. I see Rahul's Sunwalker on there. Exactly, yeah. So Rahul is kind of an interesting person here.

So he's connected to Growing Daniel, obviously, because they did this famous stunt. Yes. His company is in YC. Yes. Which, again, I think we covered YC before, but obviously Sam. Yeah, it all adds up now. Yeah, it's pretty obvious there. Delian, YC.

YC is also, I mean, there's not a lot of strings here, but you can. And you could, you know, pull a lot of strings just from YC. Now, take me through the chessboard. What's going on over there? Yeah, yeah. So let's go, let's just start with PT again, right? So famous chess player. It all comes back.

Famous chess player. Yes. So obviously connection there. David Sachs also. Oh, yeah, they play chess together. Yeah, there's that famous photo where Sachs is beating him. Yes. And then, yeah, we see from chess, we see two other famous chess players.

Yes. Botez sisters and Magnus Carlson. Clearly related to this. They were, I believe they were speaking at the All-on Summit. Well, they were. I don't know about this most recent one, but in the past, they certainly have. Puzzle pieces are starting to fit together. Yeah.

So chess is a board game, right? What's another board game, Go? Lisi Dole. Yes. Okay. Whoa. Famous. Let me go over here.

Also, cigarette smoker. Exactly, yeah. Lecy Dole go-to smoke. During the famous DeepMine Alpha Go. That's happened. Yeah, I remember. So then obviously. So he's connected to Dennis.

Yep. Deepmine. Then we see the rest of Google here. We see Eric Schmidt, again connected to P. and, you know, their famous debate. Yes. Is that Will Brown? Will Brown.

How is he connected? So, Will Brown is... I think you're letting him off easy here. Will Brown is teal-backed. Okay, yes. Prime intellect. Prime intellect, of course. He's also frequent, um, engageer...

Reply guy? With Ruey guy, reply guy. That'll get you on the board these days. If you're a reply guy into Rune, yeah. If you're going back and forth, Rune, you're on the board. So you see Rune, there's also a lot of strings coming out up here.

He's, he's, has his hands in a lot of places. Yes. fingers and a lot of pies. Exactly. Donald Boat. Yeah, how's Donald Boat? Yeah, so Donald Boat was also one that I could have had a lot more streams coming from. But the main one was, I mean, Donald Boat's real recent rise to fame was asking Sam for a GPU, which was sent. And he also just offered Sam some rice.

Oh, really? He looked like he got about 600 pounds of rice on some online arbitrage, and he was offering it out. Symbolism will be his downfall potentially. Let's figure it out. And then obviously, Will was also heavily located in these kind of Donald Boat sagas. Yes. I believe he sent him a CPU case or something. I mean, I would say those are mostly the broad strokes.

I think you're close to figuring it out. I think it's pretty clear now. I think I understand. So that's kind of like, if you want to think about opening eye in like an easy way, like who's kind of, who's kind of, you know, making a lot of the decisions, how are they being influenced? Because they're not making the direct decisions? a way to understand that. I would say this is kind of a good picture. This is a good place to start.

Who the players are. You didn't cover Mossa, but he's sitting sort of quietly confident, you know, not totally in his own lane, but not, you know. So he's the connection between Sam Altman and Donald Trump on Stargate because he was, he was announcing the Stargate project. Obviously, Trump has linked to a lot of these people like, you know, Sergey. David Sachs. Just because of the recent dinner.

Oh, yes. They have dinner together. That merits some string. Here's the sheik of UAE. Okay. I think there is some Stargate development going on in UAE. Yeah, they're working on it. Well, thank you for taking us through it at all.

It's pretty crystal clear to me, Jordy. What do you think? I mean, yeah, I mean, it's surprised it took people this long and kind of crack the code. Yep, yep. It's all been out there in the open. Yeah, symbolism will be there down. Pretty easy, pretty easy to figure out. Well, thank you for the hard work, Tyler.

Well, done. Well done. All it took was one intern and an all-nighter. And I guess a gap semester. We got to load up all this into Julius and analyze it, find more connections. What analysis? Do you want to run out with your data and get expert level insights? In seconds, we saw Rowl up on the board.

They're loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals of Princeton, BCG, and Zapier. Let's continue. Rune, also on the board, was on the timeline talking about. making the argument that we are currently in the fast takeoff scenario. Very fun post. He says, right now is the time where the takeoff looks the most rapid to insiders. We don't program anymore. We just yell at codex agents, but may look slow to everyone else as the general chatbot medium saturates.

And so Prins, there's a bunch of reactions to this, we'll go through it. Prins says fast takeoff does not require automation of AI research. The loop starts when AI researchers product. activity starts accelerating due to availability of better and better AI models, including coding agents. Super Dario says that the, this is a, this is a little bit of confusing post, but he says, Dario was wrong about 90% of coding being done by AI boys in shambles. So if you were, if you were thinking that 90% of coding would not be done by AI, you are in shambles because 90% of coding is being done by AI. There's also, we have Alex who's running

Codex at OpenAI coming on later today. We will press them on. Are we just writing 10 times as much code? Or are we writing the same amount of code, just 90% more efficiently, what's actually going on? There's a lot of... Are we replacing engineers yet? Or are we just now that engineers can make do 10 times...

Is it just more leverage? Yes. And what abstraction layer are we operating? And then also just how much is just raw coding a... a gate to better and better super intelligence. Is that the critical path? Is it just an engineering problem where you need to write a lot of code? Or is there something where we need, you know, a vast amount of, I was listening to Mark Zuckerberg

on Dorcasch this morning and he was saying that he's not a believer in fast takeoff because he thinks that a certain point, it just takes time to marshal the resources to build all the chips and a certain amount of time to build all the infrastructure to generate all the electricity and that that will act as a natural slowing function. But there's some good economic news. There's a variety of different data points that we've been looking at to track how fast of a takeoff are we in? Are we going exponential or are we on our sigmoid grind set?

And will we be plateauing at some? That'd be a good name for somebody's alt-to-count. Sigmoid grind-set. I mean, progress historically has been a series of sigmoid functions. and overall progress looks smooth when you zoom out. But if you go inside of a chip company, inside of Intel, like the creators of Moore's Law, Moore's Law looks very smooth,

but if you actually interview the people inside of Intel, they'll tell you that there were tons of little gains that then plateaued, and they added all those up to get incremental gains. And when you zoom out, you see the density of the transistors and the cost per performance. increasing exponentially, but it was a lot of hard-fought wins along the way. And we're probably seeing something similar in AI.

Well, if you need a generative media platform, if you're a developer, go to Fall. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Look at those logos, John. Adobe, Shopify, Kamba, Kamba, Kora, Perplexity. Love it. GenSpark, and many more. Dean Ball is replying to Roon.

He says, if this mirrors anything like the experience of other frontier lab employees and anecdotally it does, it would suggest that Dario's much mocked prediction about AI writing 90% of code was indeed correct, at least for those among whom AI diffusion is happening quickest. And Mark Zuckerberg's been on the record saying that he thinks that METO will write 90% of code with AI as well. And Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has also said that the amount of code that's being written by AI is growing exponentially and is probably on the path to being 90%. AI written certainly haven't laid off 90% of the engineers,

and so there's some interesting dynamic going on there, but we'll continue to monitor it. On Jenae at Andresen. He's been on tear. He's posting. Yeah, he's been posting it up. He says AI models with consumption usage-based pricing are decimating seat-based pricing in ways most teams don't understand yet. SaaS Apocalypse in full swing.

He had some good supporting charts on that yesterday, showing a bunch of seat-based SaaS companies down and to the right. Yep. Yeah, very tricky. We've seen some of them reposition. I mean, Salesforce, I think, like, over a year ago, Mark Mannyoff was saying, like, we're going to outcomes-based pricing on AI agents.

We're going to charge per resolution, per value. It feels like some of these models are really sticky, and a lot of the clients are like, we like our current setup or we're going to go somewhere else. And it certainly allowed other people to kind of eat off their point. Outcomes-based pricing when you're providing software to manage a process is difficult. Yep. Because if somebody's selling, for example, like coding agents and the agent can do something,

and there's a certain economic value to that, and somebody's saying, well, if I had an engineer do this, so it had taken them this much time. It has like a clear value. But if somebody's using Salesforce to close a $20 million deal, are they going to want to pay Salesforce some percentage of that just because they had that when it could have been, you know, one sales rep just like grinding to get that deal done?

Yeah. Yeah, lots of questions for the public company, SaaS CEOs. A lot of them will have to set up new narratives for how their pricing works. going forward, they should be able to bring their products in line with consumption-based models, but I wonder how difficult it will be for them to actually convince their customers to switch over to something that's more companies. Yeah, which the alternative is, I mean, you know, Palantir specifically has said, you know, we're doing value-based pricing, right?

We're going to, you're going to get this much value from what we're doing for you. and we're going to charge you this much. And you can run the calculus. Prices are high. So prices are high, but the example, I think we were covering yesterday, said somebody's willing to pay $10 million to do something that's going to make or save them $100 million. That's a trade that people will take.

Yeah, it does seem highly aligned when it can work. And so, I mean, it makes sense that so many of these companies that have the new business model are kind of ramping so quickly. And that's certainly the result of the, Like those crazy revenue ramps that we would say. Anyway, get your brand mentioned in Chattebt with profound, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. You can get a demo. David Senra has some sage advice from David Oglevy.

Investor in profound. Yes. He rarely invests. Rarely. David Senra says, quoting David Ogilvy, I admire people who work with gusto. If you don't enjoy what you are doing, I beg you to find another job. Remember the Scottish proverb. Be happy while you're living for you're a long time dead.

It's a good message. Find something that you love doing and stick with it. Work with gusto. And he's not talking about here with World Labs. Yeah. We can pull this video up. So this is one of the latest persistent generative 3D world. So World Labs is Faye-Lee's project.

She's hiring Generative AI model. optimization engineers, biz-offs folks, research engineers, lots of different folks. But they have a new world model that we can play the video for and see this. This is generated in real time. I think they upload a single image and then you can move around it. And all of this is, you like the music. It's pretty remarkable. Yeah, I mean, it does feel like a video game.

It's very pleasant. I have a big question about how this productizes still. I was noodling on it months ago, or maybe it was a few weeks ago when Google came out with their model. Tyler, do you remember that? Yeah, I mean, so this is, were you talking about like the video model that you can control around? Yep, yeah.

This is the same thing, right? No, so this is different. So this is, you can actually go on, if you go to marble. worldlabs.AI. Yeah, I'm on here right now. It's pretty... You can play with it?

Yes. So if you move it around, it's basically a Gaussian splat. Okay. So it looks really good. And then if you keep going, you'll start to notice the little artifacts and stuff.

And then if you go far enough away from like kind of the center spot where the world was originally generated, you'll notice it's like, you know, completely like random. Okay. Yes. This is a different

completely different architecture than the Google one. Yeah, because that was basically just a video model. Sure. But it would have the overlay of the keyboard. And then when you would interact with the keyboard, it would overlay the keystrokes onto the video, and then it would continually be like rendering new frames. So this is just like, this one, it generates the world,

the Gassian Splat once, and you can just like move around in it. But it's not like a video that's constantly being, rendered name. Yeah, yeah. Oh, it looks really weird once you leave. This is bizarre. Yeah, I remember Gaussian Splats being popular like a year or two ago. Yeah. And then they sort of fell out of favor. It felt like they were very compute intense just to generate a single one. And we never got to like the one-click app that people can just download and then play with. There was no like game mechanic built around it. It was very much like tech preview mode. Yeah. So I, um, the big thing that

came out with Gaussian splats like yeah probably a year ago was that it became very easy to render your own so like I made one I think it's on my website but it's basically like my room that I made and you make if you have like a if you can shoot on raw you basically take a ton of pictures of your room yeah from all different or whatever it is yep from a bunch of different angles then you can like load those up yeah you load those up you basically train a model to figure out where the images were taken sure and then from there you you can train a model from that which you can do on like yeah I trained it locally on my PC okay okay So it's not that computer improves.

Do you remember, like, roughly how long the training run took on the? So I have a 40-90. It took, like, 45 minutes. So that's not that bad. Yeah, not bad at all. Yeah. But this- So you imagine with some optimization, you could wind up, and if you're running it on

server-quality hardware, you could imagine an iPhone app where you take some pictures, upload it, and then it's like push notification in five minutes or 10 minutes. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But this is the first kind of thing. at least I've seen of where it's like totally like generated like I mean usually when you see a gas can splat it's of like a real physical location that someone's taken like drone shots up or something but like I mean these are very clearly like AI generate in some way like

maybe they trained on video games or something like that but yeah usually when you see a gas and splat it's of like a physical location yeah can you think of any like practical application for these? Everyone always says like, oh, you'll use it to train robots or robotic models or something. Like, this is like synthetic data for training robotic systems. But I feel like there's a consumer app in here somewhere, whether it's like generating video game levels or something or like using this as some sort of pipeline for creation of some video game. I keep wondering, and this is a question we'll have to talk to the meta team about tomorrow. keep wondering about the like we're we're getting close to a point where someone should be able to

make a game as easy as they make a meme and post it on Instagram but there isn't really a place where that lives right now we've talked to a couple YC companies that are like we will vibe code an app for you that you can put in the in straight to test flight but I feel like they're like we're going to do deep dive on Roblox at some point, but I feel like there's like something that's going to happen in like AI enabled Roblox world where you can you can kind of like describe and be leveraging a lot of AI tools to describe a world.

Do you think Roblox for AI will be Roblox? Maybe. They're definitely not asleep of the wheel here. You've got to get some of their updated numbers. I think they were pulling. Yeah. Brandon sent me the data. We're going to do a whole deep dive on it.

Uh, it's, we should probably, it's in, it's in the deck at some point, but, uh, probably set up an ultradome in Roblox that people can watch the show to get the next generation, you know, hooked on. So Dextero has a post here so that says, steal a brain rot game has broken all time high concurrent player records. Roblox topped out at 23.4 million while Fortnite reached 542,000. Are these similar products? So the platform-wide record, I guess, was August 23rd, Roblox hit a record of 47.4 million players simultaneously across the platform. Wow. That is a ton.

Roblox by itself has more monthly concurrent users than all of Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation combined. And Jeremiah Johnson says, even the most chronically online people have no idea how staggeringly, unfathomably big Roblox is. right now. Is Roblox a public company? Yes. Yeah, right? They got out. They had a Hindenberg research. Whoa. Hindenberg got blown out then because Roblox is way

up. It's a $94 billion company now. There's isn't there, I think there's a VC that David Senora did an episode about, or at least like met and kind of did a deep dive on,

who invested very early did very well. Fantastic. Do you have any more context to add? I mean, not about Robox specifically, but I think broadly, like for gaming, I think there's kind of like two ways to think about like how we can have AI gaming. So one is like the Google kind of strategy of what they've been doing where it's like the frames are literally like rendered real time where everything is like all the mechanics, all the, you know, the person, the setting, it's all completely, like, generated on the fly. Yep.

And then there's, like, this kind of strategy, which is where, like, the world is generated, but you're still going to have, like, the mechanics of the game are still going to be, like, written normally. Yeah. So, like, if you play around with this, you'll notice, like, there's no mechanics at all.

You just, you can move around, but there's no interaction or anything. I assume they're working on, like... Inventory, health bar. Yeah, or even just, like, you can't go through the wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I guess we'll see. but yeah i i wonder it feels like it'll be really slow like i haven't even heard about a

gave because ikea has a robox store that they pay employees a real wage to work out oh yeah that's hilarious so you can go shop in in robox you can buy stuff in the in the metaverse i wonder what kind of sales that drives or it's just 75% of roblox's revenue or something we just printing for ikea it's probably roblox has got to be bigger than ikea what's ikea's market A IKEA market cap. Oh, it's, wait, not, it's private, interesting. Okay, private company. Anyway, I, I don't know,

IKEA's revenue, I think, is well beyond Roblox. Way, way, way beyond. Oh, yeah, how big is it? For 24 was 45 billion euros. Okay. But, you know, it's not SaaS margins here. Like, there is a marginal cost to making a table and shipping it.

but yeah I mean it seems like fantastic business order magnitude more yeah I do wonder like it feels like even the basic

LLMs like we pass the Turing test we have the ability to just like talk to an NPC in a way that's more convincing than the prescripted chats

that go into most video games and yet I still haven't at least heard like a successful story of just a game that broke through that's really leveraging like GPT4 level

technology. So interesting. And even the generated images, like just being able to use a, you know, older mid-journey model to generate textures on the fly. There's this game called No Man Sky. Are you familiar with this? Probably not. Are you familiar with No Man Sky?

I've never played it, but I know it is. So it's a space exploration game. You move around from planet to planet, and all the planets are procedurally generated. So they're generated somewhat randomly, but then they are like baked down into a database. And so there's a whole bunch of different variables that are randomly like different sliders for like the size of the creatures on this particular planet, the color of the plants on this planet. How much was. Yeah, exactly. And all of that's generated and then saved into the database.

But it creates this like kind of unlimited canvas to explore. You could do that in a much more aggressive way with generative A. but I haven't seen anyone break through. I think it just takes time to actually implement this stuff. Yeah, I mean that's kind of what like Jeannie 3 is. Yeah. I remember what it was called. Yeah, Jeannie 3. But it's just so compute intensive.

I mean, they still are like, it's very much a research preview that they can't run because it's so expensive. Yeah, you would just think that there would be a like if you go two versions back, you get a model that can actually be baked down

to the point where it can run on an Xbox or run on a PC and can generate. All right, gamers, I got some breaking news for you. Give us the breaking news. TikTok's U.S. business. Details are starting to emerge. One, the deadline for the ban has been pushed back. And details are coming out.

The journal has some reporting. What's the polymarket at? Let's pull that up. Polymarket is... It must be crashing, right? Yeah, so right now there is a 24% chance that a sale will be announced by September 30th, 60% chance that it'll be announced by the end of the year. But the journal is reporting that TikTok's U.S. business may be controlled by a consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake,

and guess the last one? Larry Ellison, personally. Andresen Horowitz. Under a framework, the U.S. and China are finalizing as talk shift into high gear. Let's go. The arrangement discussed by U.S. and Chinese negotiators in Madrid this week, remember we talked to Bill Bishop yesterday about the meeting in Madrid, would create a new U.S. entity to operate the app with U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake in Chinese shareholders owning the rest. The people said this new company would also have an American-dominated board with one member designated by the U.S. government. Existing users, and I wonder if Trump ends up with a stake for Uncle Sam.

Existing users in the U.S. would be asked to shift to a new app which TikTok has built and is testing. People familiar with the matter said. TikTok engineers will recreate a set of content recommendation algorithms for the app using technology license from TikTok's parent bite dance. Okay. Uffy. U.S. Software Giant Oracle, a longtime TikTok partner would handle user data at its facilities in Texas.

Both sides are still working out the final details of what proposed deal in terms could change. Negotiations over TikTok came as both Washington and Beijing lay the groundwork for potential meeting between President Trump and Xi with Beijing pushing for a Trump visit to China. That would be crazy. They said thank you for, they want to be, they want that meeting to happen somewhere where Trump can't fly. The Alaska got those wild. TikTok plan to comply with U.S. law tech industry executive argue its algorithms must be created and maintained by an American engineering team insulated from Chinese influence beyond the financial terms.

Deciding how to handle TikTok's algorithm has been a tricky part of the deal because it is seen as arguably the most lucrative part of the company. We've got a deal on TikTok. I've reached a deal with China. I'm going to speak with President Xi on Friday to confirm. Trump said out of the White House Tuesday morning before leaving for a trip to the UK.

These are very big companies that want to buy it. The framework of the arrangement came together. Anyway, it's starting to just repeat itself here But this is big Well, if they want to manage their software development process In the new American TikTok They gotta get on linear Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products

Meet the system for modern software development Streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps I think if Andreessen's buying it It's got to be all Mark and Ben show The whole feed 100% of TikTok content Should be the market of Ben show Elon, the attention he gets on. A16Z, it's a media company

that monetize through venture. Put the Andreessen content. Put your thumb on the scale. Brent, Eric Torrenberg, we want your thumb on the scale. Every other post. Give TEPN a little bit of a snack in the new TikTok, but I want mostly Andreessen Horowitz content with a couple American Dynamism vibe reels, please.

That will make America great again. This is the plan. One A16D portfolio company launch video. One Mark and Ben clip. Yes. just make the whole feed every single TikTok user they'll love it there won't be any backlash i want the thumb on the scale that truly i would i would i would that would get me to use ticot i enjoy the mark and bench yeah i enjoy and jason's content it'd be a lot of fun anyway

um our buddies over at public dot com launched a new account on x that you can use to just tag like ask groc groc is this true you can tag at underscore at gen underscore as assets. And you can tag it in any thread that mentions multiple tickers, and this bot will automatically run a back test on their performance against the S&P 500. So I went to a post that was about Tesla and Google, and I asked, how are they doing as a pair? And it immediately told me that I massively missed out because over the last 10 years, those two stocks, the tech titans, as they're called here, had 10-year returns of 7,548%. Of course, you'd have to you'd have to deal with a max drawdown of 56%.

But if you held, you did very well with a 70% annual return. And it gives you the link right there if you want to jump in to that. So if you're interested in investing, head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Very cool. Ashwin. Who is, we've featured him on the show before. Ashwin says he's opening a coffee shop in Southern California. Here's how he's going to win.

He's going to open at 5 a.m. He'll have baristas from New York so it doesn't take eight minutes to make your cortado. I don't know what a cortado is. That must be some sort of coffee beverage, but I like the idea of opening early. We were running into this earlier. We left the gym,

and there's this cool new cafe on the corner that's making a big push into breakfast. They don't start serving breakfast until 9 a.m. And we were like, they didn't get the memo about the great lock-in. Like, you can't, how can you compete in the great breakfast wars? I've always thought it's funny. Have you tried to get a coffee early in Manhattan?

No. It's terrible. It is? Wait, I thought, Ashwin is saying that it's the best in New York. I don't know. I've had a rough, I mean, if you wake up at 5.30 in New York, good luck getting a coffee. That's not, you know, something pre-made at Whole Foods or whatever. I've got to bring a case of the Matayina podcast in a can.

This post was funny that Zoolanderification of Kyle Simani should be studied. He's looking great. He's looking at ably. He's looking diced. He's called a glow-up. It's a glow-up. I think this happens. I've seen this happen to other people that make billions of dollars.

It tends to happen, but it's not always. And I love to see it. He locked in. He's clearly hitting the gym. He's looking fantastic. I think this last image is from his guest spot on our show, too. Yeah, the very much on the right. So I'm glad that we're helping people understand the zoolanderification.

He was sold a bugle fat to fund the, the treasury company. I think he's just working out. He's just getting in the gym. We'll have to get his routine. We got Alex Carp's workout routine. We'll have to get everyone's workout routine. Geiger Capital here, S&P 500, all time high, NASDAQ, all time high, gold, all time high, Bitcoin, all time high, home prices, all time high. Time to cut rates. Time to cut rates, cheers. Geiger Capital was on a tear. Another post. The Atlanta Fed is now projecting the Q3 GDP will be 3.4% of massive expansion. The U.S. economy is running hot. I mean, GDP growth is good. I wouldn't really call it running, I mean, it's running a little

hot, but you don't necessarily want to pull that back if you're going. It's so hard now. It's, it's, it's, uh, all data, all data is, all data is, uh, is either real or fake. That's all I'll say. I know what's driving the, the higher GDP growth for sure. It's businesses spending the last time on sales tax compliance. That's true. They got a numeral. Numeralhq.com. They put their sales tax on autopilot. They're spent less than five minutes a month on sales tax compliance. And now

they're growing their businesses. They're growing the U.S. economy. It's all crazy. America Empire continues. The most extraordinary Fed meeting has yet to be kicked off, or has yet has just kicked off. This is from CNN. Federal Reserve officials are convening Tuesday and Wednesday for a pivotal meeting under unprecedented circumstances on Wednesday.

At the conclusion of their two-day policy meeting, central bankers are expected to announce their first interest rate cut since December to support America's slowing labor market with hopes that President Donald Trump's expensive tariffs might only have a limited impact. The bad decision in September on Polly Market has 163 million of volume. They're currently pricing, that's total volume, but they're currently pricing 95% chance of a 25% chance of a 25. a basis point decrease. So, yeah, I mean, the markets at all-time highs, golds at all-time highs, Bitcoin's at all-time highs, but drop growth during the summer was anemic, says CNN business. Employers added an average of about 29,000 jobs in three months ending in August,

according to Labor Department data, slightly higher than July's average, which is the weakest three-month pace since 2010 outside of the pandemic. There are now more unemployed people seeking work than there are job openings. New applications for jobless benefits in the week ending September 6th rose to the highest level in early, nearly four years. If the Fed cuts, maybe that will stimulate investment in business, new, you know, take on extra debt. That works its way through the economy. You wind up levering up and then hiring. No, something crazy, Martin Scrowley shorting open door.

Oh, he is. right going into a rate cut is crazy that is bold he said i shorted open today at nine dollars 36 cents this is the first trade i've made in the stock i will be doing diligence calls with former employees customers competitors and hopefully management too i will send invites to the calls or anonymous transcripts as appropriate so he's becoming a provocateur yeah i mean he's he's taking up the mantle of uh so many short sellers before him uh not won't be making a lot of friends, but good luck to him.

We already covered TikTok. You put this post in here in Brazil, an Australian pilot, Timothy James Clark. Break this down. Yes, why did you put this in here? Well, tell us the story and then explain why you. Yes, this popped up. In Brazil, an Australian pilot,

Timothy James Clark, died in a plane crash with 180 kilograms of cocaine on board. Drugs package with SpaceX branding. Yes, why SpaceX branding? I have no idea. That's why I just thought it was totally strange.

It's a tech story. It's really, yeah, you saw SpaceX and you were like, this is business news. Well, you know, I like following the, you love the traffickers. You love the, it puts me to sleep and I can't, I can't, I can't listen to, I can't watch tech content, then my brain's going to start working. Sure, sure, sure. I have to just follow the, uh, so the drugs were packaged with SpaceX branding. They were recovered from the wreckage of a sling.

I just need to know the mindset of somebody who's like packaging, making, making drugs look like their SpaceX branding, thinking, okay, if the authorities find this, they're just going to be like, oh, this is, this is something from SpaceX. I don't need to dig in here at all. Yeah, what were they thinking? This is, this doesn't look sketchy at all. This is blatant trademark infringement. You did not license this logo. I wag my finger on this. I do not like this. And a very odd photo of the culprit, the Australian pilot Timothy James Clark. He has a very odd photo with some scantily clad women. But Dark Story, hope they prevent future drug trafficking, since we do not endorse anything of the sort on this show.

We do endorse any members of our audience trying to give tips on Nicholas Maduro. Yes, yes. on that reward that we got to stop the narco trafficking uh we also got to get on fin dot a i the number one a i agent for customer service number one performance benchmarks number one in competitive bakeoffs number one ranking on g2 uh we also endorse chess which was on the uh on the open a i board earlier joe lee has a story here my friend was a chess grandmaster at 14 by 15 government officials invited him to dinners and he was giving talks to thousands every other type nerd has gotten their pop culture recognition except researchers we're lucky to live in an era where

the weird nerd is celebrated chess gms post their moves on instagram and it's cool not weird tech founders are household names YouTubers get invited to the met gala poker players have TV shows gamers have become twitch millionaires researchers get maybe two celebrity moments winning their state fair at 10 and a nobel at 70 unless you're demis demis got a nobel what how old is demis uh he's not 70 uh he's not 70 uh Beyond that, the people working on the world's most important problems are invisible to everyone outside their niche. Demis, the founder of DeepMind and the Nobel Prize winner, is 49 years old. Wow, what a run.

He's got another 50 years in front of him, just researching, easy. Hopefully, he's on Shies timeline, 150. 150. He could be, you know, 20 years out from a midlife crisis. He could be at 75. Does that mean, how old is Xi Jinping? Because if he's going to live to 150, he's in his 72. So in three years, he'll be half, he'll be at half-life expectancy. We should expect to see him picking up some sports cars, maybe, you know, crashing out a little bit.

Crashing out as going through a midlife crisis at 75. If he's going to live to 150. Maybe he decides, I don't want to be in the party. Yeah. I want to do something else. I want to just be an entertainer or something. Maybe I want to be a musician. turns into a DJ. Or he wants to create a social network like Trump. Maybe, maybe. Beyond that,

the people working on the most important problems are invisible to everyone outside their niche. Researchers are the final boss of nerd culture that we haven't figured out how to celebrate. Time to change that. Tyler, what's your job here? What is he talking about? She, Joe Lee. Oh, yes, we are, we are celebrating. We have, we have figured out how to celebrate the final boss of. We celebrated so hard. We had researchers emailing us saying, please take me off. I don't want the attention. Yes, yes, it's true. And the traded cards, we need to continue to celebrate the final bosses of nerd culture, the researchers.

I think they are being celebrated. And I feel like in SF, if you see, like, if you see Ilya walking around. Oh, yeah. You're taking paparazzi photos of him. People go to the Open AI that cafe that Johnny and Sam were at. They're like, oh, I'm at the Open AI cafe. Give us an update on hype.tbPN.com. How's that going?

Well, the video completely flopped. It did. Maybe the vibreel meta is off. Maybe something is tricky. We also, it's very hard to draw attention to a URL in general. But if you're interested in participating in our little questionnaire, where are we in the AI hype cycle? you can go to hype.tbPN.com. And we have the full Gartner hype cycle there.

Starts with the innovation trigger. We should screen share this. Goes to the peak of inflated expectations. Then, of course, the trough of disillusionment. And finally, the plateau of productivity. And Tyler has shared some of the results. We're still collecting results. And I believe that the consensus estimates,

of where we are in the AI hype cycle. People are putting their hands up. They're putting their hands up. I think they're, so the yellow dot is where Tyler is, just past the peak of inflated expectations. You're cooling off, is that correct? Yeah, I mean, I... Justify, what...

So, I don't know if I'm exactly there. I mean, it's very rough. I would say I'm near the peak. I don't know if I'm the left or right side of the curve. I don't know if we're going down yet. Okay. What about you, Jordy? Where are you?

You're not in the trough yet? It's hard to be in the trough, given all the good news the market's an all-time high products are shipping like products are getting better i i i'm like effectively in where where the yellow dot is yeah just coming that doesn't mean things aren't hyped it's just people realize like wait it's just like better search you know yeah you don't have like there was i mean if you were if you're following the leaser eutkowski crew it was like in next year there's not going to be any jobs and you're going to be fighting for your life in a Terminator scenario, right?

And it's like, if I'm not holding a gun mowing down robots, I'm in the trough of disillusionment because that's where my expectations were. Yeah. You can see the bulk is basically where my dot is. It just has to speak. But you can see all the way in the left, there is one dot. Yes. Did you see this already?

All the way in the left. Did you see this? I don't know. Can we go full, full screen on this? Yes. So there is one person who says when it comes to AI hype, we haven't even started yet. Okay, so I made a tweet about this. Yes.

And then friend of the show, Jacob Rinnamacki. Yes. That's him. That's him. He's all the way in the left. He's all the way in the left. His rationale was basically, you know. No technology trigger yet.

Yes. We're at, you know, one 10,000th of solar, you know, usage of the sun. Okay. We're not even close. I mean, like, we're not even close to what AI could be. Sure. So he's just mega AGI pilled. Oh, he is.

We're not even close to being high. We're not even close to being, like, the height. Until we have the dice and started. I mean, how can we be going down if we don't even have a Dyson sphere? That's a great take. I love Jacob. He's so much fun. I also like that there's someone on there.

There's a few people that said, yeah, the hype cycle's done. I'm in the plateau of productivity. We went through it. They experienced the full. And I would love to know from those people. Maybe we should have some of the show or ask them to write out a little bit more of their rationale for where they are. Maybe that's in the V2. We could have put your point and then write a little free, free text response on why you

said that because for that person what is what is their hype cycle like obviously is the innovation trigger gpt1 is it gpt 3 is it chat gpt like the default assumption is probably innovation triggers chat gpt then peak of it inflated expectations no transformer yeah maybe yeah maybe you go back further it's neural nets sure sure like that like like GPTs are probably a little bit higher on the curve yeah so maybe maybe uh the trough of disillusionment was like year five of Open AI as a nonprofit. And you're like, yeah, like they, they, okay, they did okay against Dota, but they haven't really created anything.

I was so excited about this. My, my expectations were inflated a year or two ago, and now I'm really disappointed, but now chat GPT comes out, slope of enlightenment, plateau of productivity is, hey, we're, we're building in codex, we got ClaudeCode, we got different products coming together, we're actually delivering value, then they're in the plateau of productivity. I don't know. Yeah, I think in that scenario, it's like early, less wrong posts. Those were the peak of inflated expectation.

That makes sense. And then you see actual people going. Well, we'll have to ask the folks who responded. And if you want to play along, go to hype.t.tbpn.com and vote for where you are in the AI hype cycle. One thing that's underhyped, customer relationship magic from Adio. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales. and grows your company to the next level.

You get started for free. And we have our first guest of the show coming in to the TBPN Ultradone from the Restream Waiting Room. Whoa! Look at this. How you doing? Let's go.

You're shocked. We're getting the gong for all you guys. What's the news, folks? What's the news? I'll bring the hardcore team out. We launched Rocks to GA. Fantastic. We crossed 25 million.

Rocks revenue agents running in the government 2000. It's real, there's real ROI, and we're coming. So we're ready for business and we're ready to go. Amazing. Fantastic. What else, yeah, what else, give it, give us the update since, since the last time you're on? Um, we, we came on February, uh, we come back and launch. Uh, we've, we've landed, obviously we still have RAM, cognition and some of the biggest AI

companies that we've landed. the number one for kind of global 2000 in banking, construction. Also, Saudi Alamco, Maine. We've built a sales team, which is amazing. They're now kind of going head to head with some of the big incumbents. So how are you positioned the product? Shouldn't you be dog fooding? Why do you have salespeople?

Exactly. So we ran up until recently without a sales team. But now we've got to go for market share. So you have a small elite sales team. who can go basically work with boards who are rolling out kind of rocks revenue agents after the coding agent. So every customer rolled out coding agents over the last year. Now they're rolling our revenue agents and it's a game of market share and delivering ROI and we're the fastest to it. Yeah. What's the competitive dynamic like? I don't know a bunch of other companies in your guys

is kind of like category broadly. Meanwhile, because of how quickly coding agents have got to market, I know I can name a bunch. The big question is like seat base versus consumption base. This is the debate that a lot of people are having on the timeline these days, the SaaSpocalypse or something. How are you thinking about pricing as a durable advantage against incumbents? Absolutely. So our incumbents are obviously Salesforce.

I saw the carp episode. We're team carp here. We focus on time to value. We deliver our wine 90 days instead of nine months. We focus on pay for agent actions. So the agents do work, and customers only pay when the agents do work. It's not seat-based pricing. And the last is we do the Parenthood-Stile full-service forward-deployed model, right?

So you don't need consultants on professional services firms to implement the software. We do the whole lot. So competitive dynamics is boards want ROI in a quarter or two so that they can change the hiring plans for next year. And we're just trying to basically peddle downhill and deliver an ROI fast. And it's only possible because of the team. We can outship the market and have built product that works. And now is the time. How big is the team today?

I was about to ask. Yeah, so kind of obviously competing with a multi-thousand-thousand employee organization. So core applied AI is about 25 and kind of field plus sales is about 10 more, so about 35 people. Wow, that's a crazy balance. I like that. That's great. engineering as much as possible. Yeah, and then what's the feedback cycle like from the sales folks that you have that are actually using the product?

I feel like are you hiring folks from product management into sales roles or vice versa? Or are there some product management skills that are uniquely useful? It's a great question. And one of our sales leaders is actually our pseudo-PMs. So we have no PMs, no product managers, no project managers. We have engineers or ship. and then we have salespeople who ship revenue. So the feedback cycle is once we land customers,

we are pretty much embedded with these customers. We have field engineers or forward-deployed engineers. They feed it back to all engineers. And our engineers, everybody here, they're all founders. They're customer-facing. And they take all that signal, and we try to ship in days. So we ship multiple times a day. We have major release every week.

And that's going to have been the fly wheel. What is the typical forward-deployed engineer process look like for your guys' product? I imagine it's not quite as complex as some of the buildouts that Palantir is doing for different companies. So is it down to like you need to land an engineer at a company or a small team for a couple weeks, a week, a few days? What does that actually look like? Absolutely. So we try to do ROI 90 days, so the first three weeks is essentially set up. So we don't do any core engineering out in the field.

So that's all done in San Francisco. What our four-depend engineers do is deeply understand the domain. So the number one global 2000 in the construction vertical is different than health care, is different than the military. So we try to really understand the domain, how do they do customer acquisition and success, encode that into our agents, and then we actually build training content to reskill the whole org. So our core mission, if you remember, is to build agents that makes the best better and then re-skill the rest to give them a path to be kind of A.I. Native.

So that's kind of what our field is doing. So supercharging and then re-skilling. Well, I feel like the opportunity cost of having everyone on your team stand behind you for this interview is insane. We're going to hit the gong and let you get back to the important work that you do. But thank you so much. You're coming on TV at the end today. Thanks for having us on. Of course.

We're all huge fans. Thank you. Congrats on all the progress, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Let's go to this post on the timeline from Jerry Howell, quoting the Internet Hippo. This screenshot looks aged. Have you seen this screenshot?

It looks like it's been screenshotted multiple times. It has like lore to it. It's vintage. The Internet Hippo says, I stepped away from my computer for a moment. When I returned, it was building something. I did not ask it to do this. We're not ready for what's coming. Tyler, do you have any idea what this image is in reference to?

I don't know. You've never seen that. Wow, Jordy, do you know what? Do you know, like, from what machine or what era? Not a Mac. No. I believe it's like a Windows 95 screen saver, maybe Windows. I just remember this like from like computer lab.

You remember school would have class? For sure. For sure. That was one of the coolest. to just think that there used to be a class called for us it was computer lap yeah no no you learn how to type on the computer you know you get your your words permitted up uh anyway how did you sleep last night i actually i put up the best night you got me beat i got like a 54 it was a rough night but if you want to get proof of work whoa 99 let's go play some sound effects for yourself go to ad sleep

dot com get a pod five five year warranty 30 at risk retrial free returns free shipping um we also know what i did yesterday yes i reduced my caffeine intake by about 120 milligrams okay that's good dialing it back that's good uh well we have tony from ingest joining the stream he's in the restream waiting room we'll bring him in welcome the stream how you're welcome hey thank you so much having me how's it going it's going great uh kick us off with just a brief introduction on yourself and then give us the news cool yeah i'm tony one of the founders and ceo of ingest com here just to talk about our series a without submitter we uh we closed the 21 mil round with them thanks thanks yeah uh they're great people jammons a jammons a really really smart guy

and uh we also had the follow on and the continued investment from andrewson notable and and the fall which is which is great so um yeah fun times you know love it uh jordy you want to hit Let's talk about, I'll wait until the end. Okay, we'll hit the gun at the end. Let's talk about what the company does. What do you guys have to do? Yeah, yeah. So we're an insane execution platform, durable execution.

We allow you to build workflows as step functions, make it really, really easy so that you abstract all of the infrastructure, essentially write a couple different things like step brown, step brown, step brown. We make sure they execute durably. You can write any code in those step functions. And a lot of people use this for AI and AI agents because, uh, turns out that that's a that's a really big thing as you've heard all the time yeah how did you pick the level of abstraction that you're operating at there's so many other like there's

companies that they just do the inference or they just do fine tuning or they or they go an even higher level and they sell a complete SaaS solution with an agent wrapped in it you're in this kind of in-between zone how do you land there do you see yourself moving up and or down the stack it feels like such a flexible time right now in the market. Yeah, super flexible. Maybe I'll talk about the origin stories and then I'll talk about. It would be great. So I used to run engineering for a healthcare company and healthcare is like, dude, healthcare is so hard. I would not recommend it. Really nice to help people, but the engineering is crazy. Super workflow driven. And it would take months to build out what should take days. You know, when a patient does this, if they don't do

something in a certain amount of time, X, Y, and Z. And so those are workflows. So we initially built the SDK to make it really easy for your product engineer that might be full stack to build these workflows without mucking around with infrastructure so you don't want to have to create workers you don't have to create cues you don't want to terraform new new things on Kafka you just want to write some code deploy it in your existing code base and have it work basically in a minute and that like that level of abstraction is really key because i think if everyone has access to the same models and if everyone has access to the same sort of compute what really matters now is how fast you can iterate on your product,

how fast you can actually build the experiences on top of those models. And it turns out that, like, yeah, you can build agents for other people, but this particular layer that executes the AI that runs the workflows is really tough. And you have to have it done right in order to iterate fast. And so it's sort of this interesting sort of layer on top of the infrastructure that allows people to build and execute.

So that was kind of always the plan. I think like one of the things that we talked about is, you know, just infrastructure-less infrastructure so that you can just write code, deploy it and have it work, which is sort of a, I think, like, a modern version of what terraform should be. Yeah. What categories of agents are you most bullish on today and over the next year? Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, again, on the consumer agent side, felt like deep research was the first breakout killer. app consumer agent before that everyone was excited about agents but weren't necessarily daily even weekly active users of a lot of them yeah it's interesting and you were just talking about with it

with the person number four you know like the sales origins stuff right right forward deployed stuff and you see a lot of like support i think like for the day-to-day things that everyone uses internally you know like it's this kind of the the stuff that you're probably using day-to-day claude codex that sort of stuff is like killer you know i use it for tests it doesn't do distribution systems well enough for us right now but it's pretty it's pretty good and then like in the future you know I think it's really interesting see people craft experiences inside their own products you know like Decagon and whatnot have done that for support for some time which is super interesting and I'm really really curious where we go with context engineering and how people

can build their own custom agents which are essentially workflows so I'm like day to day for sure the average ones that people are using but you like you take nano banana you throw that in a workflow and you have this really sick agent experience on top of that. It's like it's pretty good. The world is changing pretty fast and it feels like everything will end up becoming this, which is craziness. How is SoundCloud using this? I think that's an interesting case study you have there. I'd love to understand more about how a company that just does, you know, I think of it as like a music player, a library of music. Like what's their strategy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So music is tough. it turns out that every industry has a lot of depth that you haven't realized when you go into it

it you know everything from like making sure that there's no um i guess piracy making sure that there's no terrorism making sure that if people want to produce their albums and send it out to spotify iTunes that and time music distribution is also kind of insane yeah um it requires a lot of workflows too so there's a lot of stuff that you have to do to operationalize music either distribution production content um and essentially they were trying to hack together this for for nine months. Their CTO at the time found us somehow. And he had a lot of stuff up and running within a week.

And their time to production was like insane from like nine months to one week. They ended up pushing us out to production relatively quickly. And within like the first few months. And I think they were live in maybe like the first six weeks. So they use this for a ton of their stuff. I think they just shipped the ability to create vinals for your own music that you upload to spot. Like physical vinals? Like physical vinyals, yeah, yeah.

I'm going to hit the gong for physical vines. Yeah. I want some. Great hit, Georgie. We've been looking to make vinyl. We want to press the show onto vinyl, of course. We've had people reach out and complain that they want to listen to the show every day, but they only listen to audio.

They've listened to the whole catalog, but they want to listen to the highest possible fidelity. Do you remember there was that striped thing? They made that physical magazine back in the day. I don't know if you actually... Like with paper? Yeah, it was like a physical magazine. This was from Stripe, the payments company. Wow, I know I somehow miss this.

I know striped, I know the books. They are print maxis. I got to get a copy of that. That probably trades at a premium. Probably in the music. It should be in the Business Hall of Fame, the Business Museum. Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, we don't want to keep you too much longer.

Thank you so much for hopping on the screen. Grats on the round. We'll see you. at the B. Say hello to all the folks in the Ultimiter. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Bye. Okay. Bye. Let me tell you about adquick.com.

Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Emmett Shear has a post, the way that chat, GPT, and Claude, et cetera, are all trying to be the portal for the entire internet reminds me a good deal of the first internet boom in Yahoo. I think the ultimate winners will wind up

specialized just like last time shopping entertainment search so he's thinking amazon netflix google and we'll have similar breakouts it's interesting i don't know that i completely like in this comment kind of puts them in the truth zone yeah to be fair google uh duane says control alt dwayne says to be fair google did become the portal for the entire internet yahoo tried but google executed better chat chpdha is already won for the moment but whether the next Google or Yahoo of AI remains to be seen. They're doing a lot of things right. Yeah.

I wonder how much consumer AI or like... Emmett fires back to just to close it out. Google's not a YouTube-Yahu-style portal. They're still way behind a shopping versus specialists, for example. They are search first and foremost. And then also have extended into portfolio of adjacencies. It's not one interface to everything. Yeah.

I don't know. I do wonder how the consumer AI, apps will fragment. We're obviously going to talk to the meta folks about personalized super intelligence. And we saw this chart that went up just recently about how people actually use chat GPT. And there are some pretty clear buckets. Like there are different people using different modes of chat GPT from practical guidance, tutoring, teaching, seeking information was 21% of searches, writing was 28%, multimedia, creating an image, that was 6%.

And so you could imagine some of those getting peeled off and kind of becoming their own apps that are highly specialized. I tend to believe in aggregation. Like Ben Thompson has this point about Google, there was a moment when everyone was saying, Google's cooked because of vertical search. So there's going to be Yelp for restaurants, the Google of restaurants. They will do it better than Google can.

Yeah. There will be travel sites. There will be mapping sites. There will be different sites for searching specific things that people will remember to go to. And Google really did change their entire model. They adapted. They improvised. They overcame.

And Google was not ultimately damaged by vertical search. The question, I mean, you have to kind of ask yourself how bullish you are in agents, right? because historically you would search something in Google, and then you'd go to a standalone, maybe you'd go to a website or an application. Yet there's a lot of websites and applications that I only maybe use once in my life, once a year. Do I actually want it?

Do I, oftentimes I'd prefer to have an agent, for example, like book me a hotel, right? These are classic examples. And so I think the paradigm is shifting. But without further ado, we have Tome. Our next guest. Gusto coming in. From the Restream waiting room.

Welcome, Tomer. How are you doing? We're great. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks so much for hopping on. I'm such a huge fan because I went through YC in 2012. I believe you were in the 2013 batch, correct? We were in winter 2012, yeah.

Oh, winter. So is that, I think winter at that point was after summer or maybe just before? It's usually after summer. It is. It was Martin. Yeah, it usually does come after summer. usually does come out just ever know anything but but i remember that i was running i we the first the first payroll we ran for our yc company was just uh literally a five thousand dollar wire like

from one account to the next and we were like yeah like uh everyone needs to figure out what to do with the taxes and then we got on gusto which was then i believe zen payroll right that's right and uh and it and it solved a ton of stuff and it was it was amazing experience and uh and uh you Yeah, Jordy and I've been using Gusto for a long time since. For since. Big, uh, big launch today. Yeah, take us through it. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, very, very excited to be here. I'm also a big fan of yours. In fact. No way. There we go. Oh, there we go.

Thank you. It's very fantastic. And sorry, I need to stop you for a second. Before we get into lunch, where are you? The office behind you is teaming. Is this just your HQ? This is the same place that Josh was calling him from. It's remarkable.

Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah, we're in Pierce 70 in San Francisco. We actually have our office here. Right next to the YC. Right in front of YC, exactly. And today, actually, we have this showcase conference.

We're doing it for the first time live. And it's really, really cool because you have hundreds of small businesses here, accountants who are all coming in and we're unveiling a bunch of new products to them. So, you know, we have showcases twice a year. We've been doing it for a while. It's kind of our big, big two product moments of the year telling the world about all the new stuff you can do with gusto. We started with payroll, expanded to benefit. We, you know, announced a couple of weeks ago about the guideline acquisition, pending approval.

Yep. And, you know, all the different things that we've been doing over the year, time tracking HR and, you know, tax credits, compliance and other things. But yeah, today we're launching a bunch of really, really important functionality around cash flow. So, you know, when I speak with small businesses, often what I hear is that, you know, in the context of gusto, is that the hardest thing, where they get frustrated the most and feel like most anxious and kind of unhappy is when they can't make payroll for their employees. They don't have enough money in their bank account, right? And when you dig into it and learn why and what's going on exactly, it's not that you don't make enough money as a business. The business is growing. They're doing really well. They're doing

better than ever. So how can that be, right? And it's all about cash flow. It's all about this tricky thing of like when does money come in and when money goes out. So often, you know, think about, like I talk with a customer who's like, you know, they do like equipment for, you know, different, you know, conferences and things like that, right? Like, you know, lighting and AV equipment and stuff like that. So guess what? They need to buy the equipment and buy the stuff before the event. And they get paid 30 to 60 days after the event, right?

So you have all this money going out, you have payroll going out, all these expenses going out, you didn't get paid yet. And this is like not a random, like one-off story. Like this happens all the freaking time for small businesses, you know, and that's true. Like for consultants that work before we get paid and many other type of businesses. So that's what this showcase is about. I'm really happy to share more about like, you know, the features functionality. No, I were one of the few shows on Earth that actually want to understand.

I'm super interested. Because, you know, we run businesses our whole lot. I've been in that position, you know, early on with my first business, which is like, oh, like, you know. Totally. It's like every two weeks, it's like, you know, public companies, they got the quarterly reporting. Maybe it's going to switch every six months soon, but with a small business, you know, it's like every couple weeks, it's like that crazy.

So, I mean, where I want to start is like this sounds like you're going to be lending money or bridging on a short-term basis with small businesses who are on the platform. Where does the money come from? I feel like when we usually hear about a fintech company or a business to business company starting to offer some sort of credit like product, we usually hear, oh, well, they have a facility on the other side. They raised money for this. They're not maybe funding it off their balance sheet.

Like, structurally, how does the money flow to the actual customer? Yeah, exactly. That's a really, really great question. So listen, there's a few kind of products here that come together in order to get people to have better cash flow so they're not late for their payroll. One is just like a set of functionality is about making faster payroll. Oh, sure. Peril, if you remember, often people need to run like the historical standard is four days. Yeah. So you run the show on Tuesday for people to get paid on Friday. Well, that's four days of cash that could be in your bank account.

And that makes a really big difference because payroll is often the biggest expense of customers that, you know, small businesses have. So, you know, we are launching next day payroll. We're launching on same-day payroll. And we're also launching instant payroll. So these are three new products all about making sure you have enough money in your bank on the last moment. How do you actually do that? Because payroll companies forever have probably loved to say, like people ask, can you make it instant? They say, ah, it's not possible. Yeah, we've heard like, oh, it's the ACH system. It's the government regulation. What's the unlock? Exactly. Okay. So for these set of products, it's all about actually our relationship with the bank. So, you know, the nice thing

about being, once we're a tech company, we're still a startup, we look at ourselves as a startup. On the other side, we've been around for 12, 13 years now. Over 400,000 small businesses use Gafso every day. And you know, I knew you'd do that. I love it, I love it. I want a gong too today. Oh, yeah.

Tell me when the gong is coming. But yeah, over 400,000 small businesses use our product every day. And, you know, with that scale, we now have the ability to work with each individual bank and kind of create partnerships. So in the end of the day, we're actually not taking credit risk on it and it just uses some of the newer rails that banks have. I can't go into all the specifics.

It's not like us. We didn't need to raise any money for this. But it's a technological solution, which is exactly what you want. You don't want just like, oh, wow, now we have this great massive liability that's rowing on the balance sheet forever. No, that's not happening. There is one thing, though, which is payroll bridge.

So payroll bridge is a different product, and that's like not about making payroll faster, but that's like even if you still don't have the money in your bank account, even on payday, and you still need somebody to finance that payroll, we can come in and help. Or maybe even just a piece of it, because it's totally possible that I have a $100,000 in payroll going out, but I'm just $10K short and I don't want to hold up everyone, and so I could maybe take a smaller amount. Exactly. Yeah, so that happens more often.

then you would pick. You know, again, it's that kind of cash coming in, cash going out. So we partnered with a company called paraffin as an embedded partner who's helping us with the loans here. So what happens here is, again, as a customer, you come in to run payroll. Let's say it's a Friday, you need to pay instant payroll on Friday.

And then, oh gosh, I'm missing 10K, I'm missing $20,000, $1,000, whatever that is. You know, with our partnership with paraffin, we take a look at all of your history and we figure out like, hey, can we help you kind of basically make that pay off on us and then we're going to pay us back later on. So that's kind of that piece.

And I think, you know, honestly, it's the biggest, biggest, biggest pain point in the world of payroll. It's funny. Like, we've been doing it for 12 years. You would think like, oh, you've already innovated in everything around payroll. There's nothing else coming in. That's not true. Even 12 years later, this is forever. Payroll stuff.

We're also doing it on the international payments, by the way. That's another fast payroll, faster international countries for payments using stable coin. as, again, now technology that he's available now, was not available when we started. What percentage of the businesses on Gusto do you think are, like, I'm sure you looked at the data, right? Yeah, was this a big COVID boom? There would have been opportunities to launch this feature.

You could have launched this a while ago. I'm sure you guys wanted to wait until there was regulatory clarity on stable coins, but was this something that customers were asking for? Because it's one of those things that is, it's helpful, I mean, it's helpful to both sides. like the freelancer benefits because like they're like okay i got when the person hit pay i got paid i don't have to wait for you know it ends up being more than four days it can be longer than that and the companies too historically would just be using these like you know random either like

dedicated international payroll platforms or um you know special freelancer payments platforms things like that yeah so totally i think you know the past couple of years again there's new technology. So we can we can use now and that's both on the banking side domestically as well as on the stable coin side. That's why we're able to do it today. It takes time until you, you know, we work with these partners and often we're the biggest kind of partner with they work with. And the reason is, you know, you may have a bunch of startups, technology fintech companies that are using stable coin payments or using, you know, kind of instant payments through banks, but they usually have small amounts. Payroll is huge amounts, right? Tens of thousands

dollars, sometimes millions of dollars per transaction. So, you know, you really, a lot of these kind of protocols, fintech protocols, when they come out, they have like a maximum limit. So we need to kind of work with the providers and get there. And then, yeah, you're right about the compliance side of it. Like, you know, we work really, really closely to figure out that. You know, one of the things that we do is, is, you know, I think that was a little buzzword before, you know, AI came in and like took away all the buzzwords. But compliance, compliance technology, you know, so there's financial like another fintech compliance technology. And in that world, you know, that's kind of what we do every single day.

We think about how do we take all the compliance worries and anxiety that small businesses have, that they don't want IRS knocking on their doors and then help them, you know, kind of figure out all the compliance for them. There's a couple more features that I wanted to talk about. So one is just gusto money. It's a new platform. It's a new area for us. You know, when you think about gusto, you always think about people, right?

Pay your people, onboard your people, benefits, all of that. that stuff. Gaston money is us entering and expanding into a new world. So that's the world, just really focus on cash flow. So, you know, one of the things when we talk with customers is like, hey, you know, I get paid so much later. Wouldn't be like, can you help me get paid faster? Or, you know, when I pay my bills, like, oh gosh, that takes, you know, that, you know, they need to be paid immediately. Can you delay that payment for me? And that's why we brought in invoice payments as well as like bill pay into Gusto. And we're going to keep investing in that area because it's all connected. You know, pay

Payroll is your largest expenses, but you have a bunch of other expenses in the business. So if you bring it all together to one platform, I think that we can really, really help people with that big anxiety around not having enough money to run payroll and kind of run their business. Does that change? A lot of these different products feel like they might have different underlying economics. Do you think that they're like the structure of the economic model of Gusto is going to change over the next few years? or is this sort of like purely additive? Like how are you going to think about actually underwriting like the core business? I don't know what your plans are for the future,

but it does feel like some of these are, you know, exchange fees or interest rate based or volume based. Others might be seat-based. There's a variety of different financial models or economic models. Is any of that changing like the overall structure of where you think the business will be driving value in a few years? Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I think for us, you know, I would say number one,

we're really, really focusing on understanding what are the biggest pain points for business, for small businesses and figure out how we can help them. Now, sometimes it means, you know, business models for different products are different, and we're okay with that. However, if you still zoom out at Gusto and you look at Gusto and you look at Gusto as a product and where we're going, by far, like really our majority of what we do is, in terms of business model is software. Software is a service, you pay for employee, you pay for services.

very high margins. This is not like a fintech sort of, you know, play. And as you notice, we're using a lot of partners on the embedded side when we do things and, you know, that are those type of kind of fintech businesses. And we really obsess and focus on the user experience to make sure that for the customer, they don't feel like they're being moved from one, you know, one system to another. It's all behind the scenes. It's all API. So for you, it's just one service. It's gusto. But, you know, that's kind of the core of what we do. We're really, really focused and are really strong on the user experience side for small businesses. What's the most exciting thing in tech to you outside of payroll? In technology at all. Let's see. You know, I know.

And it's okay to say that your eyes never stray and that payroll. Compliance. Compliance. Payroll compliance. I love compliance. Listen, I love compliance every single day. That's what I'm living and breathing. And, you know, but jokes aside, like, the truth is that when you talk with customers, this is not a cerebral sort of like analytical kind of question and, like, you know, world for them. Like, for them, it's, it's missing Friday night with their kids because of this sort of stuff, right? For them, it's like, you know, the pain of, you know, the embarrassment of, like, needed to call every single employee telling them they got they can't make payroll on time and they're on the employee on the other side sometimes you know you know needing to manage all that what that means to your family so

you know for me it's you know I love technology I live and breathe technology every day I love your show that always keeps me up to date what's going on in the world of tech but you know I think the biggest connection for me and it gets me going is that customer pain point and see what software can do to help them yeah that's great fantastic amazing well hey I want you guys to come in here next time, though. By the way, we have the showcase here. It would be really cool. In 6-1, when we do the next one, it would be cool to have like a live, live performance here from Gloucester. How many people are there? Let's ring the gong for the total attendees. How many you guys? I think there's around hundreds of small businesses.

All right. That's a lot of small businesses to show up to a lot. Amazing. You love it. Great to see you. Congratulations. Thanks so much for hopping on the show. We'll talk to you Have a good one. Thank you, guys to see you. Bye. No one loves software for small businesses more than me. I don't think so. I don't think so.

Don't go. Daniel Tenrero says the core political divide today is pickleball Americans versus letterboxed Americans. I would, I'm in neither camp. I don't really participate in neither, but I would put myself in the letterboxed American camp. Tyler over there is a pickleball American, right? I guess, but I'm also, I would say I'm more of like a cinephile than a pickleball player. Okay. But I've never used Letterbox.

You've never used Letterbox? It's just like, it's like Goodreads for movies. Yeah, it's good reads for movies. I feel like there's an underrated that Tiny snap this up. Oh, Tiny owns it? They bought a 60% steak. Whoa, I had no idea. That's fascinating.

Well, the Antichrist lecture is in full swing up in San Francisco. The Private Jets. Did they find the guy yet? Did they find him the hunt for? the Antichrist continues, and it has spawned a ton of fun posts on the timeline. Pablo Peniche says, Peter Thiel talked about this at the Antichrist lecture. No, he didn't. Did you attend the lecture?

No, did you? No. People meaming Daniel. Grung Daniel says Peter Thiel announce the name of the Antichrist, but I'm not telling. And people are having a lot of fun. Wilman, I just said that. It's crazy. I saw some of the protesters showed up, like, disguised as.

Satan. I needed to put some of the protesters in the truth zone because one of the protesters said Peter Thiel's latest acquisition, the U.S. government. If you know anything about PT, he doesn't buy whole companies. He believes in founder-led firms. He doesn't do private equity deals. So a little bit of a misunderstanding of the financial markets there, protester. Anyway, Tyler, are you bummed that you're missing out on the Antichrist lecture series? I was just going to say that protesters are like pretty hilarious. some of the signs. I sent him in the... So the protesters, it's easy

to get riled up by the images of the protesters and see the protesters as like, this like, oh, they're really over the top, they must really be aggressive. But for the most part, like, I've seen, there were protesters at just some random FAAI conference I spoke at. I actually interviewed

Alex Wang there, who were talking to tomorrow, tune in. And this is just like foundation for American innovation, like a very vanilla tech conference. and also being able to protest things is important yeah and so the protester was outside with a funny sign but people were taking photos with each other like it was very very friendly I when I first heard like oh we're being protested I was like what what does this mean is this like serious are

they going to be really I was going to be protesting outside of gusto yeah didn't roll out instant payroll for sure for sure anyway we have our next guest in the restream waiting room we have Andre from console welcome to the show How are you doing? Hey guys. Doing good. How are you? Thanks so much for joining.

Kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself. What you do, what the announcement is. Sure. Thank you for having me. Big fans here. I actually got the whole team. I don't know if you can see them. Fantastic.

Watching. I love it. Hey, turn around, guys. We can see you. There's a little bit of a time delay. Way. Hey. There's some delay, maybe.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, today we're here to kind of, you know, talking about a series A. announcement we just uh there they are a little delayed out what you got um we just raised our series a dst global and thrive capital uh how much how much you raise 23 million dollars there you go there you go congratulations uh all right all right what do you do what do you do i got to know you got to tell it i'm not going to stop burying the lead stop burying the lead

How is what you do? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we automate IT support using AI agents that understand how your organization works. Fantastic. I know. We're fired up. We're not just a Chad bot, you know, under the hood. We're basically plugged into all your systems, your apps or devices.

We understand how everything's laid out. So we know, you know, this is John. This is title department manager, the direct reports, the apps he has access to the permissions in those apps. So like all this data is flowing into console from all these different systems. And then we let you build. company policy and processes above that layer in natural language. So we call these things playbooks, but essentially you're able to say, you know, when someone needs a password reset, first ask them this question, then run this action, and then do this thing. So that's not converted to code.

It's just natural language instructions, uploads the agent, just handles that directly in Slack. How modern is the wheelhouse customer for you? Because I, when I started my first company in 2012, we were late enough in the rollout of SaaS that we had no on-premise servers whatsoever. We had no local network. We just had, you know, Google Cloud apps and Gmail accounts. And so everything was managed in various dashboards. And it was an immense hassle to deprovision and provision. But there is a whole other world of companies that have much more complex IT policies.

Where are you seeing the most value? what does the wheelhouse customer look like yeah so we we've started with the kind of more like modern tech companies to get started so a lot of our customers you rent ramps actually one of our customers there you go you know shout out to them they're a great customer scale AI flock safety web flow these real customers that are you know they're kind of like internally looking to they're starting to they're starting to think about what does it look like what does IT look like yeah in the age of AI, right? And I think kind of what happened was we got it right in the 70s, the 80s,

right, where computers started being a thing. And, you know, IT was really this department that was coming in and showing people like, look, get off your typewriters, here's how computers work, here's so you can be more efficient. And they were like kind of optimizing business process. And somewhere along the way, kind of like you mentioned, right, we started adding too many apps and too many, there are too many things that we're being kind of managed, right? And, you know, IT kind of lost focus from being this kind of driver of innovation in the organization to just like stuck in, you know, they're like on this ticket treadmill, right? You come in, you've got 10 tickets, you log out, you've got 15. So you're kind of just like always just handling tickets. And so

our kind of mission here is, you know, how do we take IT back to where it was, where, you know, take off the support load from them, hand all of those tickets for them using AI that, again, works the way they do and then get them back to you know working with other teams and finding ways to like optimize their their process essentially how does security fit into all this I feel like the the this the IT professional is very much the unsung hero the enemy of the fishermen the fishing scams I mean every place I've worked that's like professional or had a professional email you get these fishing scams and I feel like Sherlock Holmes when I clock it and send it to the IT guy. Hey, we're getting a fishing scam and he's like, I set that up. I sent that to you.

I was testing you. It was a test. But yeah, talk to me about security and how that fits in. It feels like I really don't want my IT professional to be able to be prompt injected. There needs to be a human in the loop still, maybe, but maybe you know something else. Yeah, so, yeah, I guess you hit on a couple of things. So first, we obviously spend a lot of time internally on security, making sure things work really well. This is my second company, first company we were doing application security company. We're selling to US government Fortune 100. So very familiar with building secure software.

And so that's like the first thing. I think, you know, next we think about, well, how do we actually kind of like give the LLM and the AI agent control over the process and like the order that things get done. And like kind of like this ability to flex with the user and work with the user, but then build more deterministic processes for things like API calls and actually, you know, the things that are more sensitive,

right? And so our sensitive actions are actually quite locked down and you have the ability to, you know, get approvals on them, do MFA checks, you know, honestly just lock them down. Some companies say, hey, we don't want to reset any passwords with console, right? Like we just don't have to, right? So you can kind of adopt it as you're comfortable. And then lastly, yeah, if you don't support, you know, let's say password resets your company, you decide that's too risky, we will loop in a human when those requests come through. So the way the way console works high level is we sit in Slack, instead of having to go to like a Jira ticket form or something,

and you have to fill out the subject line, and you're answering the laptop you have, and you're like, should I already know what laptop I have, and you're kind of just going through this list, and you hit it and wait for some response. You go into console, you type in your issue, just like you're messaging a coworker. That request goes in 50 to 60% of the time.

We handle it entirely with the end. user and then when we can't we actually loop a human in so on the back end we'll you know basically message them and say hey like you know john is having this issue here's everything you need to know about john and they can jump in and then the end user stays in slack right they don't have to go to a separate portal or anything like that makes sense what's the go to market do you share any numbers related to the fundraise outside of the headline number anything uh on the on the business side or we stay um i don't know that we're sharing too much yet We're doing really well.

So we are hiring. That's a sign that the company's ripping. Give it away. The number that I got kind of off the record, but I'll share, is one. And that's contract with the ramp. Yeah. That's really the headline KPI. It's more of a binary metric for success, but it's really the only metric of success that matters in Silicon Valley these days.

So congrats on passing. that binary test. Talk to me about the go-to-market. Based on the size of customer, I'm super interested to know, is this like steak dinners, hand-to-hand combat, phone calls, just direct response. Are you G2 hacking? What's going on? I mean, we are very flexible. We'll do what it takes, right? I think the standard process is actually, you know, we'll connect with some, you know, some on the IT team. Usually some, you know, head of IT, direct of IT and we'll give them a demo. Usually they have some AI initiative internally where they're looking at, again, how do we make IT more efficient or kind of like rethink how we do

this? We do a demo. Usually they're sold. We do a POC right after that. So to get into a POC, we do like a non-prem. Sorry, we do like a full product deploy into their systems. We'll do things like, you know, security review, legal, whatever. Then we'll go live about three weeks. is usually how long we do like a POC for. So usually within the first week, what we like to say is you're actually in a good enough spot to go live company-wide. Sure.

We spend the rest two weeks just kind of like dialing it in. But we go live pretty quickly. I think scale actually went live in about three weeks during the POC company-wide because they were just seeing so much success with it. Are you positioning the product as like purely additive to the existing IT systems, plug in with everything? Are you seeing folks rip out legacy systems that they maybe develop themselves or legacy competitors?

What's the what is the tradeoff that the buyer is making at the moment? Yeah, shouldn't be any tradeoff. Our goal when we started the company was like, look, you're already managing a bunch of systems. If we come in and we say, well, if you want to use console or you want to use AI, you have to replace half your systems. Like that's just going to be a non-starter for really busy teams. And so what we do instead is we actually, build really deep integrations into, you know, as much of your tool stack as possible. So we integrate very deeply into like Octa, Google, you know, Slack, you know, even your GERA, right?

Like, we don't have to replace your ITSM. So your ticketing tool, you can actually keep that. You've spent a lot of time configuring it and building it out. You can actually build, you can basically put console in front of that and act as like your first line of defense. And the reason we're able to do that, you know, I know it's kind of like a nod situation. What do you mean? You're not replacing any core system is, you know, we're actually like doing work. So we don't need to replace your ticketing pool because we actually do 50, 60% of your, you know, the request that you're getting, again, without human involvement.

And so that's often worth something. Do you just try to generally charge for the value? Obviously, if you're doing 50 to 60% of the work, that's saving. That's at least like sounds like one to many people's time. But how do you charge for it? Yeah. So we just charge per end user per month, basically. The number of employees you've got in the company, we kind of have like a base price that we use and we discount as a company gets larger.

But we try to keep pricing pretty static. I know there's this trend to look at usage-based pricing and so on. What we found is, you know, one, that can be a little confusing, you know, credits and things are hard to like estimate, especially up front. And so what we found is like IT teams actually really like the predictability of knowing, okay, for this year, I'm going to pay this much money for this tool. And, you know, we kind of think of it as if you feel like you're getting a, you know, you're getting more value out of it than you're paying, then, you know, great. That's good for you. So.

Awesome. Well, thank you for driving efficiency in the enterprise. This is something we need. I don't want to share. I don't want to docks anyone, but, you know, we definitely have some interns running wild with access to systems that I would love to be able to just fire off an agent to go clean up because you can't trust Tyler with these, the access to the root keys. to this kingdom. Anything could happen. I want to be able to snap my fingers and deprovision him turn off his ramp card before he buys more. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk to you soon. Great to hang and congrats on the round. Bye.

What else we got going on? We got a little break before. We got Bezell. We got getbezal.com. Your Bezell concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Also, we got a new news from Donald Boat. He's been traded. Big. trade deal. He's going over to substack. He says he's unless he's granted a retainer and a favorable contract from Nikita and Elon Musk, he will be taking his talents to substack. He's been having some fun. Is he really six, seven feet tall? That's very tall if that's true. Yeah, so I didn't meet him in person, but I knew, I know someone who did meet him. He's apparently super tall and very, very slim. He says, a John-sized man.

Yeah, in order to get him on the team, you've got to give him a low mileage. Use Corvette, Z-O-6, C-5, or C-6. It's funny. He's a funny, funny guy. How much is a low-mileage, Z-O? Probably $30,000, I would estimate. I mean, Z-O-6 is like the performance package. I believe we have our next guest in the Restream Waiting Room.

Do we? Are we? Are we? Are we? I believe every yang is joining. Oh, thank you, much. Welcome to this dream. Welcome to the show. Good to meet you. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Thanks so much for hopping on early. Great to meet you. Um, uh, one to have you on

the show to get an update on, uh, you and, and, and everything going on. But then also, there's so many questions about AI, AGI, UBI, UBI, so many acronyms. I'm sure we'll go through all of them. But, uh, why don't you just give us a little bit of a reintroduction for those who might not be familiar what you're up to these days? Sure thing. People remember me from my 2020 presidential campaign saying that AI was going to come. It was going to eat the jobs and that we should shift to putting money into people's hands more quickly and broadly. Imagine making that case in Iowa in 2020 at truck stops before AI had actually arrived on the scene. But now here we are five years later. And I dare say a lot of the folks are watching this. I'm not in their heads being like, oh, yeah. You know, we're going to do a number on a lot of rank and file entry-level workers. So over the last number of years, I've been trying to figure out how to get money back into people's hands.

I was inspired by my friend Mark Cuban, who started a cost plus drugs. You guys had Mark on recently, right? We did a couple weeks ago. He was great. Yeah, so I thought, can we cost plus anything else in American life? And I realized that we're spending 170 billion or so on our cell phone services and data. I was paying Verizon over $100 a month, 140 a month to be precise.

And meanwhile, Verizon and AT&T paid out 18 billion in shareholder dividends in the last 12 months. So you can kind of start doing some math and realize that Americans are paying twice as much for our data as people in other countries. So today is the kick off of Noble mobile, where we try and put money back into Americans' hands and hopefully have people dooms grow a little bit less,

live a little better. We're having a big party. in New York City on Thursday night. You guys are not in New York, right? And have you guys come as VIPs and hang out. We'll be there spiritually. But breakdown, breakdown. I know kind of the mechanics of Noble mobile,

but break it down for the audience. How does what's the, how does it actually work? Well, before I get into this, I'd actually love to put you guys on the spot and ask who you use for your wireless provider. so I said I was I used Verizon they've been fleecing me for years Verizon yeah

I'm seeing bad saying I actually have a I message here your bill is ready this is not a joke 1145 this came in your bill is ready I just pay it and I don't I don't think too much about it but I'm sure I'm getting fleece because I probably signed up on some like super

cheap contract about a decade ago and it's gone up every month and you know it's Dude, their recent ads are, like, lock in the price in parentheses because we're just going to keep on raising it. But the craziest thing is when you guys travel abroad, when I was on Verizon, I went to Europe with my family this summer, and the travel pass cost $10 a day to put yourself on the foreign carriers' towers. You know how much Verizon AT&T are spending to put you on their partners' towers? About $2.50. So why on Earth would you charge us $10 or $12 a day if it's going to cost you $2?000.

Like the entire industry, when you start digging in, there's just a lot of profiteering. Yeah. So you guys pay, you guys pay people to use their phone less. Does that mean I start out with a like, but break down the actual mechanics of how that works on a month to month basis? Sure thing. So check it out. I'll use myself.

I know I use my phone for doom scrolling and social media a little bit too much. But at the same time, I consider myself in a. effective in touch individual and kind of need my smartphone and, you know, don't want to count how much data I'm using. So the way Noble mobile works is that you pay a $50 flat fee for unlimited data. And if you use it up the wazoo, then you paid 50 and that's the end of it. But if you use less than 20 gigs per month, then we'll give you cash back in the form of an end-of-month payment data dividend, we call it, of up to 20 bucks. And then any money we give you will then grow at a 5.5% interest rate annualized so that your cell phone plan

becomes like a mini savings vehicle without you having to think about it or do anything. And so this way you guys hold on. Do you guys hold on to those funds as long as somebody's like a customer? Is that how that works? Or like you can take the money out anytime you want. It's your money. But if you leave it with us, we'll grow it at a higher rate. Then you're going to get someplace else risk free because we wanted to. to be a set it and forget it savings plan. One of our first investors was a guy named Scott Galloway, Prop G, who you guys probably know.

Has he been on the show? Not yet. Not yet. He's got to come on sometime. I'll try it. I'm seeing him later this week. That'll be amazing. Yeah, please let him now.

In your direction. But Scott's very passionate about trying to help young people in particular, young men save money in a set of forget it way. And so Noble mobile, we want to do three things at once, which is a lot, but whatever. Number one, we want to see you actually pay closer to what you should be paying true value for your data. It's about half of what you're currently paying. Number two, we want to incentivize you to doomsprote a little less and look at your family's face a little more.

And number three, you want to make it easier for you to save money without having to think about it. So those are the things that we think we can accomplish. That's a really cool flow. What's the customer acquisition strategy besides you telling as many people as possible about it if you're starting there? but what's the GTM look like? Sure thing. So one of the things we figured out was that I've got a following, Scott Galloway's got a following,

Charlene's got a lot of people that have followings. And so if you want to help them save money and live a little better, you can tell them about Noble mobile. And for every person you tell you help them, but then we also will reward you. So what you're going to see is that there's going to be something of a collective that's now helping acquire customers and let people know about this.

The model that everyone's familiar with is Ryan Reynolds mid-Mobile, Ryan Reynolds shows up on commercials and whatnot. And so one of the jokes I tell is, like I'm talking to various celebrities or influencers, is like, look, instead of one Ryan Reynolds, they're going to be like 30 of us or 50 of us or whatnot.

And then when I tell them, Ryan Reynolds made $300 million, then they're, you know, know. He did fantastic. And enlightened self-interest kicks in and people are like, okay, I'm like, yeah, I'm definitely ready to, um, to, you know, tell my people. Um, so we're in conversations right now with some very, very fun, fascinating figures with following. That's a lot of Fs. Um, but that this is like a consumer centered human based movement to try and make this industry work better for us. It's very cool. Um, what, what does it take to actually build a new, uh,

a new telecom company like this. You guys obviously aren't setting up your own towers, but are you partnered with some bigger existing players, or what did that look like? Yeah, it was a lot of work setting up our own towers. You know, I had to like get out the tool belt. So you're obviously right. We did as we licensed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of data

from one of the big carriers. And the point I want to make to your incredibly savvy audience is like, look, you chose Verizon 10 years ago. I chose Verizon 25 years ago. And we chose it based on something that we thought was like network quality. Like, I'm an important person. There's a map. And Verizon map was more red than the other maps.

Well, it was like in little towns where you were cities, it was like, well, this network's better than that one. Yeah. This one. It was just vibes based, basically. Yeah. So over the last 10 to 20 years, what happened is all three carriers bulked up their networks to the point where they're all pretty excellent. And then now you have some satellite data

that's getting piped through the network. So what happened is that we made a buying decision X years ago, and then in the time since, it kind of got leveled up and became commoditized. So what we're doing is we licensed hundreds of millions of dollars with the data from one of the carriers, T-Mobile, and then now we can make it available to people in a way that's really going to, again, accomplish multiple goals.

And the great thing is that it's in this day and age, too. Because check this out, guys. Like, you're like me, I bet. And I have approximately zero experience, actually switching carriers. Maybe you bet it zero times. I was the same way. I've been on Verizon for 25 years. Every device manufactured from 2018 on now has an e-sim where you can direct it to another network.

You keep your number, keep your phone. phone takes five minutes and you can just bingo bango switch to another network. Most consumers do not understand this. And even I knew it technically, but then when I actually switched from Verizon, even I was like, holy shit. I just ended a 25 year relationship in five minutes and now I'm saving myself, you know, $1,200 a year. This is like magic. So now in many ways, the goal is to spread the magic to as many Americans as possible. Are you guys? Is, like, how does it, what's T-Mobiles or Noble mobiles integrations with the actual hardware manufacturers? Are you guys working on deals with, like, with companies at the device level?

You know, so we think most people are happy with their device and will just bring their own phone. There are some people that are under a contract with their carrier, and obviously there was like a new iPhone launch. just last week. So there are some folks who, and by the way, this is true of you guys too. I love talking to people like you because we're on the same boat. So there was a period when every time a new iPhone came out, we were like, oh, my God, I need that.

You need to line up, camp out. Yeah, yeah, remember the lines? Yeah. And then that stopped being true like a number of months ago where we're like, what's the difference of this one? You know, the camera's a little better. Like, I'm not even really seeing it. This one's a launch.

And you can see that the device replacement cycle is just gone longer and longer. So I talked before about how the networks have become at parity and commoditized. Our devices have kind of converged around a level that we're perfectly happy with. And so most people we think don't want a new phone necessarily. This is one like, you know, to not be getting gouged every month. If you do want to get a new device and you decide to go through the carriers, by the way, I've done this. So I get a new iPhone of Verizon and like the device is free, but I'm tied up in a two-year contract where I'm paying Verizon a certain amount over this period.

And I want the folks listening to this just to think about it for a second. The carrier's contracts with us are so profitable that they can zero out and subsidize a $1,200 device or $1,000 device and be like, hey, it's free to you because we're making so much money off you were going to pay. I mean, obviously Apple's not giving them that device for free. Apple's like getting paid a lot of money. So it would be more cost efficient for someone who really wants the iPhone 17 to buy one unlocked and then sign up with Noble.

If you did the math, you'd actually save money on that versus getting it for free from a carrier. But most people are perfectly happy with their current device and might just want to try a different network. Well, congratulations on the launch. It's super exciting. I'm excited to see the different partners that you put together. And I feel like you just can hit the campaign trail again, but this time for Noble

Yeah, you know the playbook. Hang in, just go truck stop to truck stop and just like help people switch over. Yeah. You guys just read my mind, you know, I'm coming to a truck stop near you in a hot minute. It might not just be me. It might be Scott Galloway. It might be someone else in the Noble Collective. But this is going to be a really fun company to grow because, no, it's an industry that's really past due for some modernization and some humanization.

Yeah. Last question. Did you raise a bunch of money for this already? Yeah, I think you guys get to do a sound effect. Yeah, we raised 10.3 million from. Not just a sound effect and authentic. We have a real gong in the studio. I did enjoy that.

I want to bang that gong in person. You're welcome. Anytime you're in L.A. Let us know. Oh, yeah. I'll let you know. I'll be in L.A. before you know it. Fantastic.

A lot of other fun people are investors. Shout out to Corazon Capital for leading the round. That's very cool. And, you know, we're going to grow like a weed. It's going to be fun. Amazing. Well, congratulations. Great to get the update and we'll see you soon.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon, Andrew. Thanks so much. Thanks, guys. See you in L.A. Appreciate you having me, awesome. Bye. And if you're thinking about going to his event in New York, you need a place to stay. Book a Wander with inspiring views.

Hotel Great Manning's Dreamy Beds, Top Team, Cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better, folks. Find your happy place on Wander.com. Hey, there's some folks that are traveling, some folks that are going to be in L.A. some folks wondering, John Exley says Scott Galloway appearing on TBPN would be a milestone for me

the very first time I forced crap my YouTube app. So yeah, I was about to DM John Exley to know like, is he that anti-Scott? Because I feel like we have some, we have a wide breadth of guests here. We can have a conversation

with all sorts of people. But if he's, but if he's, yeah, I'm interested, we got to, we got to let John weigh in on e-de decisions like this. I think so. But yeah. Anyway, what else is in the news?

Someone's hosting a website on disposable vape. Did you see this on Hacker News? Taylor Otwell says, me stressing about how we're going to build the best back-end infrastructure for the future of agenic workflows and quantum MCP. Are they making internet-connected vapes now? Is that? They are.

I've seen these in person. Thank you. Finally. The LCD screens, the actual screens have gotten so cheap that you can run an entire computer on them, basically. And these are disposable. Can you run an AI factory or a supercomputer? I don't think you can mine Bitcoin effectively. I don't think you can inference the most cutting edge frontier AI models, but you can do a lot more on a disposable base.

We should get Tyler to build something. Bobby Cosmic, the lone soldier on our PbPN Twitch. Yes, thank you for you. But what if I want to stream TVPN for three hours a day on 5G? Would Noble Mobile be a good fit? That's the benchmark. You can't have a carrier. I have a feeling that you...

I have a few hours of live streaming a day. I think it's interesting. It's interesting to Noble Mobile. I think the messaging is like a bit, you know, they're trying to do a bunch of things at once. I think just a $50 phone plan that helps you use your phone less is like enough of messaging. and I think that they can get a bunch of people to sign up for that. Yep.

Is it going to be a competitive bloodbath? Yes. I don't know. There's something about saving money that can create these interesting flywheels. Remember acorns? Didn't that company do very well? I believe it was a consumer credit card that every time you swiped it, it would round up to the nearest dollar and put the cents in a savings account and compound.

and so it was a way to save money and I believe they got to maybe a billion dollar valuation it felt like it was... Yeah, they almost spacked it got canceled, they had 120 million of revenue. This was one of those things like early fintech company that was like winning

but then didn't, I don't think they've ever gotten out I'd be interested to see what happens with that business but yeah, just save money on your mobile plan is like a simple message. I think Andrew building a coalition of celebrities that feel good about promoting this use your phone less um but again i mean it's going to be uh like like you said you you don't

think that much there's we're not the target audience i think for noble mobile yeah um but there's a bunch people out there that yeah i think i like the savings concept um i'm worried about the revealed preference of people say they don't want to scroll people like to scroll no i think i think his argument would be even at fifty dollars a month it's still cheaper than yeah yeah that makes sense um Well, if you're scrolling X, you're going to be treated to a somewhat tweaked algorithm that Nikita's been working on. Peter Yang breaks it down. He says, he hasn't seen a, quote, it's so over, RIP product, or this changes everything, cringe tweet on here in days. The algorithm must be working.

And so, Dylan Field put it to the test. Founder Figma, of course. He said, it's so over. RIP cringe tweets. new ex-algo changes everything and as funny as that post is it didn't go viral and so i think i think that they might have uh nerfed that meta we're seeing a new meta emerge already with the be be jeff bezos be sam altman be Elon Musk spawn in like the the the the 4chan style one meta dies another's born yes there is always a new meta never lose hope actually i've been liking i've been liking

the new ones. I think it's a funny way to tell a story and I've actually been learning something. Yes, and it is more in depth. It has more to unpack. It's typically hard to get a lot of text to go viral. The viral post tend to just be like one or two sentences, but these longer stories, when they're told in this format, seem to do quite well. At the same time, they're rife with misinformation a lot of times as we've learned from actually reading them. but you've got to go to the source sometimes. Well, I think we have Tim Higgins. We have our next guest from the Wall Street Journal.

Tim Higgins, welcome to the stream. How you doing? Hey, thanks guys, for having me. I believe we were just reading some of you were reporting about Elon Musk and the pay package. I believe you authored that, correct? Yeah, I write a lot about Elon. Yeah. And it's the trillion-dollar man.

The story of the month, right? You have a trillion-dollar hair. Fantastic hair. So it's fitting that you would write. But, I mean, we don't need to wait into Elon territory. Give us the update on the book. Yeah, congratulations on the lunch. Well, thank you. Thank you.

I wore it is out today. It's a great corporate drama about Apple, about all of these rivals who want to displace Apple as the gateway to the digital world. The gateway being the iPhone, the app store that really changed the world. almost 20 years ago. Yep. The ultimate toll booth. We were feeling the power of iMessage and the lock in there

and how hard it is to build other products that want to deal with communication in your life. If you're in the iMessage world, Apple has you. I mean, there's so many different angles. Yeah, people think, you know, you just switch the phone and then you're in a different ecosystem. Like, there's a lot of threads holding on. So, yeah, walk us through the inspiration, the reporting process.

how much was FOIAed, how much was reading through, you know, leaked tech emails versus original reporting talking to sources. What is your process? Did you start writing this book, by the way, because this is a story that's been unfolding Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's, to your point, it's been a 10-year fight for Apple. I mean, people started complaining about that power almost from the get-go, but you really

started to see the seeds of what I think of as a rebellion. almost like a Boston Tea Party moment of these colonists in the new world at Apple created, kind of rising up over that Apple tax, what they call it Apple tax, the 15 to 30 percent commission that Apple takes on digital services and sales, right? And also more so the rules, right, exactly. And so I'm a business columnist with the journal, but I had been the Apple Beat reporter at the Journal. I had been the Apple beat reporter at Bloomberg,

so I've written about Apple for many years. And I followed the Tim Sweeney epic lawsuit against Apple very closely. And it paid attention every day during that lengthy trial in 2021. It just was struck by the scale of the drama. You know, in one way, Tim Sweeney is a very interesting protagonist. He's started the company from scratch, had this vision. He's a world builder beyond just being an entrepreneur. He's thinking about the future, whether it's the metaverse and how Fortnite might play in that.

And he was looking at Apple as going too far, you know, taking too much, really kind of against that idea of the open Internet, right? Then you have Apple, which is also a storied U.S. company, which had really built something very important to everyday life. The iPhone, and clearly the center of many people's digital lives, digital experience. And their kind of argument is, we built this, we keep it running, we're giving you all of these customers, you kind of owe us a little, and isn't that fair? And so you have this really great clash of what is, how should this play out? And so it just struck me as interesting. And as I started kind of thinking about it in a bigger way, it really seemed as if it wasn't just Tim Sweeney, you've got the Spotify element, you've got the regulators in Europe, got other tech companies in the U.S. and around the world really kind of rising up in this kind

of interesting moment, which I thought in a lot of ways was surprising, right? If you went back several years ago and talked about monopolies in the U.S. and Microsoft, the old Microsoft, of course, was attacked by the DOJ and fought those allegations. But in the more modern era, Google, Amazon, those were the big tech companies that were painted with that monopoly brush, fairly or not. But Apple, in a lot of ways, especially in Washington, D.C., was seen as, you know, something to aspire to. And, you know, what we've seen in the last few years, because of Epic, because of Spotify, because of others, has changed the conversation around the power of Apple, and the power it has and not just with that tax, if you will,

but about the control they have on the digital world. Yeah. How did you... Is Apple good or bad? I'm not going to make you condense it down. I did have a... So, you know, we're extremely sympathetic to the startups, businesses, building in the Apple ecosystem

and creating a value for Apple users and then obviously paying the tax. funny experience John and I the other day. I was like trying to download an app. I realized I downloaded a fake app. Yeah, that's right. And then I got to get the benefit of the Apple toll booth because I just immediately went into my subscriptions and canceled it at one click. And I was just thinking at that time, if this was just some regular app on the internet, it would have just, they would have made it way harder. They maybe would have like tried to not let me. And that's Apple's argument. They say, you know, this isn't a tax. This is your licensing our software.

Yeah. And it's a fee. It's fair. They're providing a service. They're providing security. They're providing a ecosystem that the user wants to be part of. Yeah. Were you able to uncover any special deals that Apple has brokered with big companies? Yeah. And give me like 30%. Sometimes they certainly don't want to mention that that's ever been, you know, negotiated down. But there's also like the way like the way in which Audible does their pricing. You can't just. like buy books, you've got to subscribe to that, that part of their weird, is their system like designed to like get around? Yeah. These rules. I'm curious, yeah, it's interested to know about like what are the weird edge cases.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So one of the things about Apple, and you compare it to the Android system, Google's operating system, is that Apple likes to pride itself on not doing special deals. Now, you know, its critics would point to some. edge cases that they feel are leaning towards helping others. But generally, that's kind of the deal, is that Apple has some rules and wants everybody

to kind of follow them. Now, it's confusing because sometimes there's categories and, you know, we can get into that. Sometimes Robox is perhaps treated differently compared to Epic Games in the old way, but just kind of put it under the category if they don't like to do special deals. Whereas Android does do special deals. because they feel that they have to compete against Apple to win those hot apps, right? The hot video games that drive so much of the sales in this ecosystem,

if they're seeing the games go into the App Store and Apple, they feel at a disadvantage. So they're always trying to create an Apple-like experience in the Google world, if you will. And it creates an interesting dynamic out there and kind of shows how, these kind of things play out, right? And so one of the things you see in the book is, well, why did Tim Sweeney, why did he go to war against two of the most powerful companies at the same time? And when I mean, say those companies, I mean Apple and Google, it's because he first went to Google and tried to do a,

tried to get his app so you could go outside of the app store in the Google world and the Android world and download it that way. And he didn't get a lot of success. and part of that was he would find out later was that phone companies and some of his competitors in the video game world who he was trying to partner with to create an alternative app store

that would be available on the Android system they were getting deals from Google not to do stuff like that. I know they could do that but they didn't have any incentive to do it, right? So he figures this out and then he's like, you know, he's got to go after them both at the same time because Google is accusing him of basically not complaining about Apple's deal

when he's got a lot of complaints about that. So he gambles that he can take to the courts this case that Google and Apple are out of line. And it doesn't go very well for him at the beginning. You remember, his lawsuit against Apple, he basically lost most of it. Now, he would be successful against Google later on. But Sweeney essentially loses most of the case.

And in Apple, the way they handled it, probably pushing too far, angering the judge over the one thing that she was upset about, this idea that Apple wouldn't allow developers to steer users to other websites to make payments. And she wanted them to be able to do this. And Apple made it so difficult that she really came down hard on them earlier this year. And essentially, very cleverly, these companies now are able to do that. And you see Spotify and Epic take advantage of it immediately. directing users right outside of the walled garden of Apple

to make their upgrades to the apps or pay their video game stuff that is pretty a remarkable crack in the Apple ecosystem. Have they been super effective at driving the majority of users to pay outside of the ecosystem, or is it more like half of the users are opting for these alternative payment rails and half, or are they just saying like the only way to buy is now outside of the Apple Waldgarden. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable.

What I understand is that the early data is pretty good for companies that are doing this. One of the other kind of data points that I look at is that Spotify several years ago, as it was thinking about how it could fight Apple in this regard, essentially started doing A-B testing in Europe with its Android app, just to kind of run a testing that was essentially, like, if this was Apple, this would be the Apple rules and without the rules and kind of a variation of all that to see how much that was hurting them. And the data, according to the records that I've looked at, was pretty significant that it was, A, considered a bad user experience,

and B, they were losing out a lot of upgrades. And so the early suggestion is that users like to like to do that. Like to go outside. Yeah. Interesting. Bullish. Bullish. Bullish for everybody but Apple. That's exciting. What else are you following going? I don't want to, I want people to buy and read the book.

I just bought it on Audible. I'm looking for you to listen to it. Perfect. But did you just pay the Apple tax? Yeah. How much do you get? It charged me $16. Are you going to get $15.99?

We don't need to break it all down. But what is Audible's deal? I'm actually curious. Do you have any idea? You know, it's one of those, it's interesting. Just take a step back to, Amazon and Apple and how they were some of the early fights in this kind of war you go back several years ago. And this was back when Steve Jobs was alive. And Amazon is advertising that you

can buy your books and you can read it on the iPhone and you don't have to pay for it. It doesn't go through Apple's system. And Apple was just steaming over this. And essentially they came out with these rules that if you were selling it in the digital, digital world, you had to basically use Apple's system. And so that's why you would see on the Apple, on the Amazon app, you couldn't buy through the app. You couldn't buy books through the app because they didn't want to pay the Apple tax, if you will. And one of the first companies after this rule earlier this year was changed because the court ruling was Amazon. You can go buy your digital books now through that, the app because it's directing you outside the

Apple system. Yeah, I remember. I would click and wind up in a web browser, even though I had the Amazon app installed every time. What should people be paying attention to going forward? I know a lot of these cases, Apple has an opportunity to kind of fight, you know, even after the judge decides one thing, they can come back and say, you know, continue to, continue to fight it. But what else is working its way through the courts? Apple's appealing, they feel the judge got it wrong in the U.S. They have been fined in Europe where regulators there find them over the conduct of how they treated music apps like Spotify, Spotify behind, along with other tech companies, pushing for the DMA, that kind of landmark tech bill that was passed a few years ago that aims to limit big platforms like Apple. Apple's already been fined for that, but they are working to make rules that they think are fair, but that the folks, that are against Apple would say don't kind of take the spirit of the law and really kind of an

example of how Apple fights this stuff tooth and nail. So that's to watch. The bigger issue here, perhaps, is just the way that Apple has been kind of painted as a monopolist fairly or not, it overshadows or it kind of tails them now as they go forward into new tech metals. Everything they do is looked at is Apple abusing its power as they move into new spaces. So an AI for example. I think investors would say Apple's behind an AI right now. There's a lot of frustration out there. And so even when they do a deal with Open AI to help kind of bolster their chat capabilities with Siri, you see Elon Musk come in and sue and say, wait a second, this is monopoly behavior. Apple is using its power to hurt other AI companies with this kind of deal, right?

So put aside the merits of the lawsuit. You got Apple's getting this point. position where it's having to defend basically everything it does against the idea that it is a monopoly. And that is a distraction that the company has to deal with, and that makes me remember a generation ago where Microsoft had a very similar situation as the DOJ went after it, and regulators in Europe went after it, and Bill Gates and others at Microsoft have talked about how that period was a massive distraction and contributed them falling behind as the new edge technologies took over. They missed out on mobile, if you will. and some other things.

And there's some similarities here as you look at AI and where Apple is at this moment. Yeah, that's fascinating. It is such a distraction because, yeah, with these high stakes, lawsuits, the CEO has to go. Like, you just can't delegate it fully. I mean, I'm sure there's teams and lawyers

and whole legal departments that handle 90% of it, but it's still something at the top of the list. They haven't done any big M&A, right? They're doing these little, they're doing a bunch of little deals, but nothing. It's hard to get locked in and focus on the next generation technology.

Well, congratulations. Congratulations to the book. The book is IWore. It's available everywhere. Books are sold. Please go. I'm excited to read it. And come back on any time.

Leave a review if you buy it. We have a five-star review. Five-star. We said earlier on the show, we made it into the journal for the first time ourselves yesterday. It's a full circle. I read that. Congratulations, guys. Thank you so much.

The journal is the backbone of TVPN. It really is. The reporting is fantastic. And we appreciate everything you do. Thank you so much for hop-in-hastra. Thank you both. Have a good day. Talk to you soon.

Bye. And up next, we have Alex from OpenAI coming out of the restream waiting room into the TEPP. I'm going to let you start it. I'll be ready. I will kick it off with Alex from Open AI. We are bringing in, Alex. How are you doing? Good to meet you. Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you too. Fantastic. Thanks so much for joining. Would love to get a brief introduction on yourself, your role within Open AI and then the update today. For sure. So, hey, I'm Alex. I'm the podcast.

product lead for Codex. And it's been a pretty fun morning. We spent the morning like looking for GPUs because we shipped a new model yesterday. And demand was a little bit too higher than forecasted. And so we were running the model actually a lot slower than we were hoping. And luckily we just fixed that. So the update, we just shipped a new model for Codex. Codex is our coding agent.

It's an agent you can work with everywhere you code. So like in your terminal, your IDE, GitHub, even your phone, which is actually a crowd favorite. The goal for Codex is to build it into an AI teammate. So, you know, just like a human teammate, you start out working together with it. Eventually, you start delegating tasks to it. And then eventually you just give it a laptop, some permissions at a job. And you just say, like, please prompt me with tasks that you think are worth doing. Yeah.

So go ahead. Yeah, I have so many questions. I mean, first, I'm interested, running the model slower actually helps you if you're in a GPU crunch? Is that just because you're spreading the amount of inference across like a broader user base essentially. Yeah, just think like if you, you know, on your laptop, like if you open like way too many programs, they all just kind of run a little slower. Okay. So that

the solution, you know, you could close programs on your computer, but we don't want to do that. No, of course, because you have other clients and other users and businesses and stuff. Where, like take me through some of the use cases. I mean, we were talking to Doug O'Loughlin over at Semi Analysis,

fabricated knowledge, and he was saying that he'll use what is traditionally like a coding agent to actually go and do something that looks like a deep research report. I had a sort of magical result where I used a coding agent to do a deep research report, but then instantiate it in HTML. And then I was able to just to open an HTML page locally. And it was this amazing thing because it just has a different set of UI that it can pull from

that's not native to just the chatchipT app. And so that's one world. But then I'm sure there's people that are using this in the business context, deploying it into like large code bases, where are people having the most success these days? Yeah, totally. I mean, coding agents are really flexible. The primary use cases for coding agents and, you know, in Codex as well are to write code, answer questions, and review code as well.

And that's really what's been sticking. So we've seen like well over 10x growth and usage just over the past month. Wow. And most of that has improvements in how people use it to write code and answer questions. But we're now starting to see. You said 10x growth in the last month? Yeah, over, over that. It's, yeah, it's growing like crazy.

And most of this is just because we've been improving a ton. Yeah. So, like, you know, if you go back, rewind a little bit over a month ago, we had the Codex CLI, which is a coding agent in your terminal. Yep. We've landed a ton of improvements to that. You know, some people like buttons. So, and they like using, you know, the coding agent next to the code that they're editing themselves.

Sure. So we shipped a VS code extension. Yes, because, you know, really popular ID. Of course. And, you know, that's quickly becoming a super... popular surface as well. And, you know, one of the special things about Codex is that it doesn't only run locally on your computer. Like a teammate, it can also run on its own computer. And we call that Codex Cloud Tasks. And so we've landed a bunch of improvements there as well to make it

like way faster, you know, and other things. So that's a huge unlock for mobile probably, right? Yeah, yeah. It's a huge. I mean, you basically can't really code on mobile unless you have that. And so a lot of the work we've been doing is just like making those like fundamental surfaces where you use Codex better. And, you know, that kind of started that growth curve. which we're really excited about and then yesterday sort of building on the success of gpt5 and listening to a lot of the feedback we've been seeing around how people use gpt5 specifically for coding in codex we shipped a new model which is gpt5 codex a version of codex that's like basically like further optimized specifically for the codex type use cases um and that's been

really cool uh you know what for example one of the the big areas of feedback people had was that um you know they sometimes gp5 would think a little longer than they were hoping specifically specifically when they asked the coding question codex, when they were just asking a quick question. But sometimes they wanted it to work longer. And so one of the things we did is we made it so that with GP5 codex, we can actually more dynamically change how much time we're spending solving the user's question.

And so for instance, if you ask a quick question, you just get an instant answer. But also we're seeing people using this thing, just like letting it run for over seven hours. And that's an arbitrary number. I'm sure you can get it to go longer depending on the problem. And yeah, so we're seeing a lot of feedback like that that people are really excited

about. The model is also, you know, because we had the opportunity to really go deep on software engineering and train for those use cases, the model is also a little better at things like code quality, front end, steerability via agents.md. That's some other things like that. I saw a post earlier from Theo. He said GPD5 codex is as far as I'm, as far as I know, the first time a lab has bragged about using fewer tokens, hope this becomes a trend. Do you think that's going to become a trend? I mean, I guess like tokens or not tokens, like really the thing is like fast. Speed is really important and I think we're going to brag a lot about speed.

It's kind of fun. We want to brag about being really fast for the interactive use cases. And we also want to brag about being able to do a ton of work independently. So yeah, that graph got mixed reactions on Twitter. I don't know if you guys want to pull it up, but it's a little hard to read, but I think it's the really fun graph where you basically see the skew of like, well, I don't know how mirrored here, but basically on easy queries, we're using like 90% fewer tokens to answer your query. And then on hard tasks, complex tasks, we're like basically using like double. Are you using

the term model router? Is there something that you can share on the architecture there that is actually driving that? Because that feels like a huge unlock. It was, of course, magical the first time you went to chat GPT and got it to dump out, you know, pages and pages of coherent text and you get to the bottom and it's all coherent still, and you're like, if you're coming from the GPT3 world, you're like, wow, this is a huge breakthrough. But then quickly you realize, like, I don't necessarily always need 20 pages of response.

I can have a smaller output. And so is there anything that you can share there? Yeah, I mean, the team really cooked here, and I expect us, it's like part of the exciting stuff that we're doing with Codex is like these like very bespoke interventions. Sure. But no, it doesn't have a router. But there's a little bit of secret sauce there

that we're not going to go too much into. Yeah, yeah, of course. How are you thinking about, like, model naming conventions and model numbering conventions? There was a time when model number correlated to, like, big circle. And then GPD-5 was, like, a much more almost holistic set of improvements. You've brought those to Codex with Codex 5. But is there a world where codex diverges? Are you always building on top of the same, like, release cadence now?

Is there anything about how you think about messaging, what actually changed to the actual user to know, hey, it's time to dip back in if you tested this or you want to go deeper in a certain area? Totally. I mean, so our goals with Codex are just to build an amazing coding agent. And if you think about what an agent is, it's a combination of like the model and what we call the harness, which is kind of like the set of tools that the model has and then an interface with the user around that. And so the reason we put codex in the name is because basically we wanted to just like, we're really investing in codex and like in software engineering generally. And so we wanted to have the opportunity to go like much deeper and push harder on things that like might not benefit like sort of general users of a model.

And in fact, we wanted even the ability to like make certain things worse. So not that I've gone and checked, but like GP5 codex, if you're not using it for codex is probably going to do worse at like a bunch of general tasks than 55. Sure. React to this Rune post. right now is the time where the takeoff looks the most rapid to insiders. We don't program anymore. We just yell at codex agents, says Rune on X, but may look slow to everyone else as the general chatbot medium saturates.

People have been saying, oh, this is the 90% of code being written by AI agents. And there's this debate on, are we just writing 10 times as much code? Are we doing 10 times less work? Give me a little bit more color on how you're using Codex internally to build the actual product. Yeah. I mean, we use codex internally a ton or a lot. And, you know, I can think we're at the point now where, you know, for like writing code, these coding agents are like massively adopted. And, you know, it's kind of a stylistic choice, like how much of the code it's writing, but it's like the vast majority. You know, I will say that our goal isn't to like, we don't actually

have a goal of like, yeah, let's like make sure the maximum amount of code is written by agents. it's like really what matters is like your velocity as a team right yeah um but uh sort of my like maybe slightly spicy take here is like actually one of the greatest limiting factors um on the utility of coding agents right now is not uh like the model's ability to write code but it's actually the human ability to like just prompt it and like make the use of the agent so for example um we shipped a code review feature that's like you know doing really well a few weeks ago and uh you know the model is capable of doing code review, we actually did a ton of work to make it even better at code review. So when Codex does a code review for you, it'll actually get a whole copy of the code

base. It can like go read everything, even outside of your PR. It can even execute code to validate, which like a human is probably going to be a little too lazy to do normally. But the big unlock isn't isn't even necessarily that. Like even GP5 is a great code reviewer. But the limiting factor is like, are you going to go prompt the model to code review every single PR that you get? And the answer is no. So what we did is we just like automated that, built. it a nice way, like integrated with GitHub, and now we're seeing, you know, it's just reviewing the vast majority of PRs in the bin open, opening I repos. And catching like serious bugs, it's actually kind of become a meme when, you know, so we ask people internally like, hey, react with thumbs

up if it's good, just so we can like kind of see. And whenever, and like, reply with what's wrong with this review if it catches an issue that the engineer disagrees with. And, you know, often it'll be the case that an engineer will kind of see this issue, reply and say, yeah, I disagree. and then like two days later it'll be like actually this was a mistake and we need to we need to actually follow the models catch what does it take to make it on the open AI codex team these days I mean it feels like the skill set of just someone who's a programmer is changing now you're prompting designing what is it give me some advice for young people or people entering the the workforce i think uh the thing i would say for open-air coding team and by the way we are hiring

both folks externally uh and then also you know see people can transfer internally yeah uh probably the two most important things is uh kind of that you can just do things attitude and speed um and i think those are pretty general things that i would recommend um you know if you mentioned like advice for young folks like i think it's like a a sort of crazy time now to be early career because so much is just possible to do and possible to learn quickly. But at the same time, because of that, everyone else is, like, just doing a lot of stuff and learning a lot of stuff quickly, right?

So I think to, like, really make the most of the key is to just, like, really do stuff, especially, like, if you're in a technical field, start doing stuff beyond your coursework, but actually start building things. Yeah, increasing returns to, like, high agency. It's funny, we're in the era of agents, but then also high agency people seem to be doing better than ever. It's kind of a paradox, but it's a good time. to be able to have a positive attitude and actually go and just try and build things.

It's a good time. Yeah, and I think this is true. Go ahead. No, go for it. Yeah. No, I was just going to say, I think this is true as well at work, right? Like maybe before you would have a number of like very specialized role, like, B.M, designer, front end engineer, back end engineer, like, you know, SRE.

And now because of all these coding agents, like everyone is able to just do a lot more. And so you can have people like owning like entire problems end to end. you know one one fun example actually leading up to yesterday's launch is our designer built this like really cool asky animation of a coin that's rotating and you know that's like kind of a hard thing to get right oh yeah and so over the weekend he just like vibe coded an askey animation editor that lets him like edit the that's wild yeah and like that's like such like stack compression totally and it's awesome yeah i mean there used to be a time when it was like, you're a friend engineer, you know JavaScript, but you don't know

Ruby on Rails or Python and the back end. And like the back end guy doesn't know or gal doesn't know JavaScript or whatever. And they got to talk to each other. And there's loss and translation stuff. So yeah, it's an entirely new era. Very exciting. Yeah. And it comes with problems too, right? Like if you have all these folks, like the ASCII animation viewer I mentioned, like that's throwaway code. So I guess there's not much tech debt. It's just like pure acceleration. We actually write a lot of throwaway code, like different kinds of dashboards, editors, mini tools. But then, you know, sometimes you have folks who are like, specialize the one thing now, like, able to write code for a different thing. And, you know, that actually creates a

different kind of problem, which is like code review and expertise. And so that's why, like, what we're trying to do with Codex now is, like, we're investing in making, like, the, you know, fundamental, like, code gen experience great and just writing code. But we're also starting to, like, reach out now. So we're really investing in code review because that that's like actually becoming the bottleneck, like having qualified people be confident in code. We're really investing in validation. So like before you review the code,

like can you assert functional correction, correctness? One thing the code is can do now is like take screenshots. It'll like actually write a playwright script to like manipulate the website and then take the right screenshot of it so you can actually look before you read the code. And then we're thinking about, you know, where else can we make it really easy to engage the agent

before it actually like gets to you on your computer doing work. That's amazing. Congratulations. Thank you for the update. Thank you so much for hopping on the stream. We'll talk to you soon. Good luck out there.

Have a good rest of your day. GPU is on fire. Good luck. Well, that concludes our guests for the day. Basically, we got to jump. We got to catch a flight. I got to listen to IWR, which is in my audible now by Tim Higgins. You can go find it in Audible, find it on Amazon.

We will see you tomorrow live from MetaConnect. Later show tomorrow. Later show tomorrow, 430, where I think we're starting. we'll be posting updates on X, keeping you updated, and stay tuned. Thank you so much for tuning in. Have a wonderful. Thanks to Bobby Cosmic for holding it down in the Twitch chat. Legend.

Thank you to John Exley in the YouTube chat. We'll see you guys later. The team's like unfading it out. We love you guys. We'll see you tomorrow.