TBPN Live - Netflix & AI Slop, Saudi Liquidity Crunch, Clawdbot Reactions | Mark Gurman, Miles Brundage, Aidan Smith & Asher Spector, Alex Dhillon, Mitchell Angove, Gabriel Stengel, Sierra Peterson

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(00:20) - Netflix & AI Slop (18:10) - Saudi Liquidity Crunch (30:36) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (33:55) - Clawdbot Timeline Reactions (01:02:13) - Mark Gurman is a technology journalist and Apple analyst best known for his reporting on Apple’s products, strategy, and internal decision-making. He is the author of Bloomberg’s Power On newsletter, where he consistently breaks news on iPhone, Mac, Vision Pro, and Apple’s executive and product roadmap—often months or years ahead of official announcements. (01:55:41) - Miles Brundage, Executive Director of the AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute (AVERI), discusses the critical need for independent auditing of AI systems to ensure their safety and security, drawing parallels to established practices in other industries. He outlines four key risk categories: unintended system behaviors, misuse of AI systems, emergent social phenomena, and traditional security issues, emphasizing the importance of rigorous third-party evaluations to address these challenges. Brundage also highlights AVERI's role as a nonprofit think tank dedicated to developing standards and fostering collaboration among stakeholders to build a robust AI auditing industry. (02:12:19) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:31:08) - Aidan Smith & Asher Spector, co-founders of Flapping Airplanes, an AI lab focused on data efficiency, discusses their goal of training human-level intelligent models without consuming vast amounts of data. They emphasize the importance of creating data-efficient AI systems to facilitate easier integration into the economy and to address challenges in data-constrained fields like robotics and scientific discovery. Smith also highlights the lab's commitment to foundational research before commercialization, aiming to solve significant problems in AI data efficiency. (02:42:48) - Alex Dhillon, founder and CEO of Outtake, a cybersecurity startup, discusses the company's recent $40 million Series B funding led by ICONIQ, with participation from notable investors like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora. He highlights Outtake's mission to combat the surge in AI-driven impersonation and fraud by providing a unified platform that enables enterprises and government agencies to detect, investigate, and disrupt identity-based threats across digital channels. Dhillon emphasizes the importance of reducing the return on investment for digital criminals by swiftly removing fake content, thereby maintaining high digital trust for institutions. (02:55:24) - Mitchell Angove, founder of Feanix, discusses how his company utilizes whole-genome sequencing and AI to help dairy farmers manage their cows more efficiently. By analyzing genetic and phenotypic data, Feanix's AI models predict a cow's life outcomes with about 90% accuracy, enabling farmers to make informed decisions on breeding and health management. Angove also mentions that Feanix has raised over $5 million in seed funding and is rapidly scaling, currently managing close to half a million cows. (03:01:26) - Gabriel Stengel, CEO and co-founder of Rogo, a generative AI platform for finance professionals, discusses the company's recent $75 million Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital. He explains how Rogo enhances productivity for investment bankers by automating tasks like building PowerPoints and benchmarking comps, allowing them to focus on interpersonal aspects such as negotiation and client relationships. Stengel also highlights the evolution of Rogo's capabilities over the past two years, noting significant improvements in model quality and integration into various financial workflows, including back-office operations. (03:12:26) - Sierra Peterson, co-founder of Voyager Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, discusses her extensive 21-year career in energy, including roles at the International Energy Agency and the Obama White House. She highlights Voyager's focus on investing in foundational technologies such as energy, transportation, materials production, and AI, emphasizing the firm's recent $275 million Fund II aimed at advancing these sectors. Peterson also addresses the rapid advancements in electrification and solar energy, underscoring their potential to drive global economic growth and resilience. (03:25:43) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRestream - https://restream.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coSentry - https://sentry.ioCisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.htmlOkta - https://www.okta.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. We're bigger today. And it's Wednesday. January 28th, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultradem, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital, Capital. Ramp.com, baby.

Time is money, save both. These use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. That's right. Will? I am wearing a sample today of this new ramp quarter zip. And you'll notice here, I included a little pocket here for your ramp card.

It's just right here. Always close. Right over your heart. Right over your heart. Excited to get this one out in the world very soon. Yeah, this will be fun. I wrote about Netflix. There was a funny, very brief interaction between Ben Thompson of Straterey and Netflix co-CEO

CEO Greg Peters on last Thursday's Tritechory interview. and they go back, the only mention of AI in like an hour-long interview or something, it's just two little exchanges. Ben Thompson says, is AI slop going to save you if it overwhelms the UGC platforms? And basically it's like you're a refuge. So this is actual, this is real. And Greg Peters says, I think it's credible. I don't know if that's the reality.

So I can't say with certainty that's where we're going to land, but it's a credible possibility. It's like, maybe that's a bold case for me. Maybe that's a bull case. It is interesting. I mean, Netflix has been trading down over the last couple months, but in general, it's up, I think it's 4X up since the launch of ChatGPT and is generally like near all-time highs. Like, the business is doing very well. But every CEO needs to contend with the AI question, the AI issue, how will AI change their platform? And AI has already been changing Hollywood. I mean, I was reflecting on the Avengers. When did the, when did Infinity War come out? Infinity War? That was, what, 2018? I just remember seeing, maybe he was even in one of the first ones, but the whole CGI process for Thanos.

He has this, like, very distinct large chin. So Josh Brolin is the actor that plays Thanos. Is he a mager? He is this huge chin. It's actually like... He's kind of like the OG. I don't know. It looks like chin implants.

It's kind of crazy, but it has these, like, cracks in it, and it has this, like, very distinct look, Thanos. And normally the way the VFX pipeline works is that you go and you put these black dots all over your face, and then you wear a helmet that has a camera pointing at your face. I think it's a, I don't know what type of camera, but it tracks all the points. So when you smile, like it sees that the actor that's driving the performance capture is smiling, and then that facial movement is transferred.

So they're recording the lines, they're acting it out, they're giving their facial performance, and then that's transferred, all the little subtleties of how their eyebrows move, all of that is transferred to the CGI character. It can look a little flat, though. So what they did with this is they still have all the points on the face, but then they interpolate from the small points that are on the face into a higher-res model. Yes, don't read that.

Don't read that. Don't read that. But it is a good point. I wasn't even reading the chat. I didn't even see that until you said that. I was just looking at this absurd picture. Oh, yeah, it is an absurd. So all of those are tracking markers.

And then the question is, like, you have a much higher resolution, CGI model. If you just transfer with 50 points or 20 points, you're not getting all the detail of what a human face actually looks like in the way it moves. And so digital domain, which was one of the many VFX studios that worked on the Marvel series, they built a straight-up machine learning pipeline. Like they used AI. It wasn't a diffusion model. It wasn't, you know, an L-LM, but they used a machine learning model to basically translate from the low resolution just a few dots to a much higher resolution mesh that then became the performance of Thanos on the screen. And I don't know if you remember 2018 the movies.

Obviously you didn't see any of these movies, but I don't remember like AI backlash. My prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed. But truly, like, I mean, people did make the, oh, it's a bit. two CGI, the explosions are too crazy, it's too over the top. But in general, people weren't up in arms about like a use of AI or use of two. Everyone was just like, this is a CGI epic, this is a crazy, you know, Marvel movie. Like, we're fine with all this. And there wasn't backlash to that. And I don't think that there would be backlash to this type of like AI tool. Now obviously, Marvel's Avengers, that's Disney property. But the same VFX pipeline is being used all over

the industry. And it will continue to be used. Interestingly, I talked to Jason. I talked to Jason in Carmen about... The Carminator. The Carminator. About using AI tools and filmmaking, because he's obviously making movies and doing VFX and stuff. And I was like,

certainly, if you need to rotoscope out a background. So, rotoscoping is where you are basically using like, you're cutting out like a subject from the background and then just doing like a background replacement. That's an example of rotoscoping. But it's over motion, so it's moving. So you need to track the hand here.

move it over here, track it again, track it again, and it can be very, very time-consuming. Typically, this is offshore to like a BPO, and then they have a whole team of people that are all aiming it, and they have some software that's used. But I was like, this feels like something AI could just one shot. He said that AI was not there at the level that he wanted to deliver. He wanted to deliver in 4K.

And so he went to a team. I think he paid him a fortune. They did it. And when they rotoscope ahead, they actually, like, draw new hairs on to like kind of create this. It's very like artisanal still. But obviously AI can rotoscope. You see it in the cap cut edits. Where's the rotoscoping NeoLab? It's actually runway. We've had Christobal on the show. And pre-ChatGTPT runway had a fantastic AI rotoscoping tool where you could basically load up a video, put a couple dots on what you wanted to keep,

and then flip over to the red dots and put those in the background and be like, cancel all this out. And it would sort of use that as like an intuition for the model to drop out the background. And you could do a really, really clear, like cut this person out of this video just in runway. And now that's available in Cap Cut and edits. And that's where you're seeing all those crazy hype reels where, you know, you'll see the F1 driver like standing up. And then it'll like, it'll drop out the background and cut in a different. background and then the F1 driver drops out and it's like this very like skitsail edit it's a really cool

technique yeah you can see is this runway is edit editing tool so it basically draws a mask around it you just highlight like what do you want to actually rotoscope this is an example of like motion adding motion to video but like you're you're putting in a little bit of your own aesthetic taste quickly let me tell you about restream one live stream 30 plus destinations if you want to multi-stream go to restream.com So, goate. So, like, I don't think Netflix should take a hardline stance on AI broadly because they want to use AI tools. Obviously, they've been using AI for recommendations forever.

The original collaborative filtering algorithms were machine learning models. And that's how you open up Netflix and says, we think this would be good for you based on what you watched. And it is much more nuanced than just if you like, you know, K-pop demon hunters, we're going to recommend Squid Game next. It is machine learning. And so many of these wrote tasks will be AI enabled, and they already are. And there's not going to be, I don't think there will be a crazy pushback here, although it's possible that there's some sort of, you know, comms mishap, especially if a

director comes out and is like, we didn't use any AI in this film because they don't think they used any AI, but there's a VFX house that when the motion capture stage did use AI to up res, motion capture data. Like, you could see AI being used in mat painting for the background, and the director doesn't even know because they just said, like, yeah, the background, just make the forest a little bit bushyer. And they think that they're hand-painting it. After that, they were using CGI and 3D modeling it.

Now they're using AI, and that sneaks in, and then all of a sudden they face some backlash. But I don't think that's, I think that's manageable. I don't think that's that big of a deal. The bigger question is, like, how does Netflix position itself against YouTube and the UGC platforms? This is what we're talking about. So Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, has taken a very open stance on AI. And I liked his stance. He was like, we're not going to throw an AI tag on everything.

We're going to let you use AI tools right in the Shorts Creator. We have V-O-3. We're great at this. We're going to lean into this. And the algorithm will sort out if you like it. If you think it's slop and you don't want to see slop, the algorithm will learn that and not show you that stuff. But for the people that like that, they will be served it.

But it's a, it is sort of a balancing act. And there's definitely this like stated preference for like, I don't want any AI on my platform. Now, how real is that? We'll see. Yeah. And what we were getting into earlier before the show started is Netflix's decision, the bigger, like, the decision that's bigger than just like,

are we going to in sort of, lean into AI or not will just really be, do we have, does Netflix ever lean into UGC, right? They've been signing some bigger podcasts and they obviously work with independent media companies, but there's a very big difference between just allowing people to, like, will they ever have an upload button? It feels like no. And I feel like that could end up being their advantage where there is part of what has made YouTube magical since the very beginning was that anybody could go and put YouTube, you know,

upload a video, anybody could be a creator. And I think, like, as the amount of content that gets created, 10, 100, X's, 1,000 Xs because of AI, it's going to be, yeah, Netflix could be this, like, refuge where you're like, okay, at least if I go here, I know that there was some filtering process. I know that this isn't just a total free-for-all. Yeah, yeah. The upload button is probably a bigger deal than, like, AI on Netflix. Exactly.

I think that's a very good thesis. Quickly, let me tell you about console. console builds AI agents that automates 70% of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And someone was asking in the chat about the linear lineup, of course. It's pull it up. The system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents, and we have a great show.

Mark German's coming in person. Miles is coming in person. And then we have an amazing lightning round coming up. And I think we got a surprise guest. era from a new fund. Yeah. We've got Voyager. And then.

Mitch Mitchell and Gabriel. Gabe from Rogo. Super excited for that one. That's fun. So back to Netflix and YouTube. So YouTube has been on an absolute tear. In terms of watchtime on TVs, according to Nielsen, YouTube has been number one in streaming watchtime in the U.S. for nearly three years.

And so this has been the backbone of the case for like let Netflix buy Warner Brothers, even though they'll get HBO Max. like you're merging two seemingly big streaming platforms, but the combined watch time will still be lower than YouTube. So should be fine from a regulatory perspective. Oh, but the bigger question is like, there's the gap between Netflix and YouTube. And at the start, back in,

Netflix is almost 30 years old, YouTube's over 20 at this point. Back in 2005, like these were seen as like wildly different platforms. One was DVDs in the mail, and the other one was like a video of a guy going to the zoo on his on his like VHS camera. They felt extremely separate, and they felt extremely separate for years and years and years. Now they are starting to converge, especially around video podcasts, I feel like.

I feel like YouTube really drove a big boom in video podcasting, because the podcast was, I think, invented by Apple or core. Yeah, when I started doing any work with YouTube channels and podcasts back in the day, there wasn't a lot of overlap. It was very clearly like these were just different types of creators. Totally.

And then there was a big shift. Yeah. It was like, wait, I'm leaving a ton of attention on the table. Yeah. I'm not uploading to YouTube. And that forced a lot of creators to actually get into video. Totally, totally. Yeah, there was the pivot to video.

And then Spotify went really big into video podcasting. They went on it. I didn't realize how big of a push Daniel Eck really did around podcasting. So seven years ago in 2019, they acquired three companies, Gimlet Media, Anchor and Parcast. Anchors, Mike, from Lightsfeet's company. Yeah, I mean, all three, very interesting. Anchors more of like a product, Parcast had a bunch of...

Yeah, Anchor was like, we'll make it easy for you to create a podcast. Because it's still, like, a lot of people were... It wasn't like it was impossible to figure out, but there was quite a bit of friction. Yeah, and they knew that everyone who wanted to distribute a podcast wanted to distribute it everywhere. but they could sort of default you to getting into Spotify as well. So that did very well. And then they signed exclusive deals with Joe Rogan and a bunch of other people, even some of the royals also signed a deal.

I forget who they are. But they really spent a ton of money trying to get into podcasting. I think they were successful. I mean, we see a ton of audience on Spotify. Interesting, the timing. Apparently there was somebody sending me a chart. There was over a million podcasts launched in 2020. Oh yeah, you saw that chart.

Jeremy shared this with us. That is a crazy chart. It actually fully retraced to now there's like sub-50,000 a year. That feels like you would really have to, maybe they're being extremely explicit about defining what a podcast is. But either way, there was, if you look at the chart, it looks like there was like an insane bull market in podcasts and then a huge correction. Yeah, it does feel like there was a 2020 boom during COVID.

I mean, we talked to the folks that acquired about that. and they said that during COVID, they saw a huge spike in people, like, just going for walks, throwing on AirPods. All of that sort of hit around the same time. AirPods were getting to, like, mass adoption. So we were just throwing on podcasts constantly, and it really, really grew. Anyway, graphite. Code review for the age of AI.

Graphite helps tunes on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So there is this chance that with YouTube, with the trough of YouTube, getting sloppier by the day, that Netflix carves out more of a unique value prop, and you wind up seeing more space between the two. So I think of Netflix and YouTube is starting out extremely separate, then sort of like coalescing with like Joe Rogan experience. And I mean, Portnoy and Bill Simmons both are YouTube dominant and now have Netflix deals, right? Yeah, isn't there deal set up so that the video can only be on Netflix? Exactly. The audio is still elsewhere, Why do you remember that?

Because Portnoy drilled it into your head. He said, if you want video, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix, video, Netflix. Barstool video, Netflix. And it's true. Like that, and so I would think of Barstool, like if I'm trying to watch a barstool YouTube video or a podcast, I would just go to YouTube, right? Now Netflix is getting into that. So the gap between Netflix and YouTube is getting like pretty narrow, like they're becoming competitors.

But there's this question on the AI issue. Do they diverge more? and is that valuable. The pure AI feeds, like SOAR and meta, they haven't really been able to hang on to the top spots in the charts. I think SOAR is around 60, 70 point ranking. But like, it's still too early to call that because the quality will get better and better.

The audio is still very, like, clockable when you hear it. And there's a lot to be done there. But the struggle will be to create, like, unifying conversations around particular pieces of content that are AI generated, I still feel like the K-pop Demon Hunters moment, the Squid Game moment, the Alex Honnold, Taipei 101 moment, these live events, these like key things that everyone talks about are really, really valuable. And that's a lot of what's driving the Warner Brothers acquisition is, you know, people still dress up as Batman around Halloween. And if you can be the place there, that's way easier than, well, I did,

I've been getting AI-generated content about a superhero, but my superhero is different than your superhero. And so if I wear a T-shirt with that superhero on it, you're like, what is that? It's AI Slop Man? I'm not a fan of that. I like Batman. There are some things that will remain true.

So, yeah, I mean, about the upload button, it's almost better to think about Netflix, less as being AI-free and more about being UGC-free. they're paying for curation and a quality bar that's backed up by a brand that's going on 30 years in the business. The AI tools will come. Some fully AI generated content will come, but true slop will be filtered out by the Netflix team. And I think that that's important for a lot of viewers. Anyway, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Serverless vector in full tech search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

Should we talk about Saudi Arabia? Yes, let's talk about Saudi Arabia. What's going on in the Middle East? According to Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia is widening its search for capital, turning to some of the kingdom's wealthiest families as the government looks to ease pressure on public finances and fund the next phase of the Crown Prince's economic overhaul. I saw this headline and was deeply concerned.

I was like, why aren't you guys supposed to be funding the whole? build out, like, we were kind of counting on you guys to be, you know, quite liquid while the rest of us are over here in America are levering up. So some seemingly somewhat of a liquidity squeeze. This had been reported since back in October, and we can get into it a little bit. They're also raising from, they've been raising, tried to raise money from the Qataris. They apparently asked for something like $10 billion. From the Qataris in the UAE, Qataris threw in 10B.

Okay. Allegedly the UAE did not, and there was frustration around that. I thought you were going to say, the Qataris threw in 10B, and Saudi Arabia was like, and we deployed it. Time to re-up. So, as part of these efforts, the PIF gathered about a dozen prominent families on the Red Sea last month

to assess their appetite for participating in future opportunities. At the summit, which also included others from the private sector, the $1 trillion wealth fund called for more collaboration on deals. People said asking not to be identified. Government entities, including the Ministry of Investment, have also stepped up outreach to family offices, wealth managers, domestic businesses, according to some of the people.

Local families are being sought after to play a bigger role in partnering with global investors to draw more money to the kingdom, they added. Years of excess expenditure and subdued oil revenues alongside a tighter lending environment have challenged the Gulf Nations ability to bankroll expansive projects planned under the $2 trillion dollar Vision 2030 agenda. Officials this week said they would postpone the 29 Asian winter games and the government had previously pared back spending on other elements of Saudi Arabia's

economic rejig. It seems hard to host a winter game. That seems extremely expensive to host a winter games in Saudi Arabia if that's what's going on. They have, don't they have some mountains? They have mountains there? I don't know. Against that backdrop, Riyadh has been stepping up efforts to, yeah, I know that they have some stuff indoors. And I guess you can just do everything indoors.

But again, that feels expensive. Yeah, so just go to Russia and walk anywhere and you can ski. Yeah, so they have been developing something with Neum. Oh, yeah. They're pivoting, right? Which is also, I guess, in the process of pivoting. Before we move on, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to Change the World, raise capital,

at the New York Stock Exchange. Against that backdrop, Riyadh has been stepping up efforts to look for alternative sources of financing, including a rare loan deal. Now, a range of local entities have begun to sharpen their focus on Saudi Arabia's family offices and businesses, which collectively control assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. So the number of family offices in the Middle East in 2019, 250, 2024, 290. Now we're up to 310, and the projection for 2030 is 350 family offices. There are big portfolios. The wealth is sizable, so the chief executive officer of the National Center for Family Business in Riyadh. These entities have long dominated the Saudi economy and close to 95% of private businesses in the kingdom are family owned.

Interesting. They're not doing a lot of IPOs over there. Of these, many groups are only just starting to form family offices as they grow in size and look to formalize strategies to help spread the wealth across multiple generations, that makes both established a new family offices a prime target for more investment. They're naturally looking to diversify and want to contribute in areas where we've just scratched the surface. In addition, more complex areas of finance are also beginning to emerge, drawing the attention of family offices.

That includes private credit and industry in its infancy in the kingdom as overstretched banks struggle to meet more explosive needs for financing. I like that the financing needs are getting explosive at this moment. expansive, not expanding, exploding. Lenders for years have been the primary financiers for individuals, businesses, and government entities looking to drive investment into Saudi diversification agenda, but they are starting to pull back as liquidity tightens, leaving many local firms scrambling to find new sources of financing. Well, we got to bring somebody on to learn more about this. And I will tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously.

Stocks, options, bonds, cryptos, treasuries, and more with damn great customer service. Shaco says, you're bearish on the U.S. dollar, the token used to buy AI products, bold. That's really good. Yes. The U.S. dollars is all over the place. Tether is shaking up the gold market with massive metal hoard. I did not see this. This is interesting.

There are roughly 370,000 nuclear bunkers in Switzerland. That's so many. I've seen a video about one of them, but I didn't realize there were so many. The legacy of the Cold War that are now rarely used. One of them, though, is a hive of activity. Every week, more than a ton of gold is hauled into the high security vault owned by Crypto Giant Tether Holdings S.A., which is now the world's largest known hoard of bullion outside of banks and nation states. Over the past year, Tether has quietly become one of the biggest players in the global global gold. market, the embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds who shared distrust in government debt is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never before seen highs above 5,200 now. It was 5,000 yesterday on the cover of the journal.

Gold is on an absolute tear. And yet relatively little is known about its inner workings or its gold strategy when two of the most senior gold traders quit leading Boolean bank, HSP, DC Holdings last year, the industry was a buzz about gossip, whether, about where they would head next. Few guests, few guessed that the answer was tether. In an interview with Bloomberg, chief executive Paulo Adorno, described the company's role in the gold markets as similar to that of a central bank and predicted that Washington's geopolitical rivals would launch a gold-backed alternative to the dollar.

Interesting. He revealed that it plans to keep plowing its enormous profits into gold, while also beginning to compete with banks in charge. trading the metal. We are soon becoming basically one of the biggest, let's say, gold central banks in the world. Interesting. This is like the original crypto narrative, right? E-Gold, even before Bitcoin. Well, was E-Gold actually gold backed? I think that was the whole pitch. It was, yeah, it was trying to be digital gold. And I don't think it ever really got adoption. It was very early. Late 90-year-old 2000s. Tether has a scale now. They also launched their U.S. focused stable coin this

week to compete with USC. The new token is known by its ticker, USAT, is being issued by Anchorage. I think we had the CEO of Anchorage on at one point. Maybe it was really quick. Cantor Fitzgerald, which already manages the reserves of Tethers' mainstay, 186 billion USDT stable coin will do the same for the new coin

as its designated reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer. So USAT is already available for trading as of yesterday. So we'll see. We'll see. It would be interesting if like at what point does USDT depag upward if gold keeps ripping, right? Does I mean, does USDT have a claim on the overall assets of tether? I think that's not what the product is.

I think the tether stock would own the treasury. Sure. But historically, when you saw a stable coin like DPEG, it was based on concerns around the reserve. Yeah, but I think that the contract is that they'll never give you more than a dollar. No, I know, I know. But I'm just saying, like, stranger things have happened in crypto where. No, it's always been a very profitable company. So certainly bullish for them.

Banta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. There's one funny quote in here. So Tether makes his money from its dollar stable coin that is the giant of the sector with 186 billion in circulation. The company takes in real dollars

in exchange for that USDT token and invest them in treasuries or other assets such as gold, raking in billions in interest in trading profits. Processing the physical metal is crucial, Adorno said, so much so that the company has taken the unusual step of storing the bullion itself in the former nuclear bunker in Switzerland, guarded by multiple layers of thick steel doors. And he says, it's a James Bond kind of place.

It's crazy. That's a great quote to give Bloomberg. It's just like James Bond. The secret of nature of another CEO. This is a positive reference. It's okay. If you're building a secret bunker to hold all of your gold, I think you can safely use the James Bond analogy. The secretive nature of the The gold market means that while it's easy to describe broad drivers of investment, it can be hard to pinpoint who exactly is behind the buying. China, for example, officially disclosed just 27 tons of purchases last year, but many traders believe it bought much more. Such is the scale of Tethers disclosed purchases that some market watchers have pointed to their

role in shifting global prices. The purchases likely contributed to gold's 65% rally last year, Jeffries said, describing Tether as a significant new buyer which could drive sustained gold demand. Still, Tether is only a small part of a much larger rush from investors into gold with central banks and ETF investors collectively buying more than 150, 1,500 tons of metal. I wonder if this is moving the gold watch market. Do you think the Texas Timex is booming on the back of gold spiking? We'll see.

I think a lot of prices are still down pretty dramatically. Because of the tariffs. the 2020, 2021 era. But I definitely, I mean, you've got to be a little bit scared right now if you're in the business of manufacturing

cold watches and other precious metals just given that your input costs are going. You know, I'm sure they have like one or, you could imagine one or two years worth of supply. Yeah. So they're not, they can be somewhat insulated.

But prices will go up, or at least costs will go up. Yeah. Well, fin.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.org. I heard a very funny, very funny interview with an actor who was talking about why he always wears a gold Rolex. And he was calling it a helicopter watch. Did I send this to you?

Yeah. And he's saying that like... This is Army Hammer. I think it's Army Hammer. And he's saying... It's such a funny situation. Such a funny situation. But he's like, if you're ever in a crisis, you're on the top.

of the building, the zombie apocalypse is upon you. Someone shows up with a helicopter and they're going to save a few people. Everyone knows what a gold Rolex is and they know that that's valuable. But if you're not going to have time to be like, no, it's an FP. It's a Patec. Like, let me explain high horology. Here's the term beyond. Here's the aftermarket prices. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like gold Rolex is a store of value. It's always going to trade. And now it's probably going to trade even higher. Yeah. Anyway, Cisco. On February 3rd, the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of AI and the economy. See you there.

The whole thing will be live streamed and will be there for a gig. Paula says SF escape room called the Permanent Underclass and it's just a room with a laptop and Claude Code installed. How do you get? There's something here. That's funny. So good. Have you ever done an escape room? No. I have never once in my life thought that that would be fun,

nor thought that I would, this is how I want to kill time. Yeah, it's like an hour. Well, if you're good, you get out faster, right? Yeah. Have you? Are you in it? I'm not into them, but I've done them and they're fun.

Sometimes it depends on like if it's a well-structured one. But I like puzzles. It's fun. It's like a fun puzzle to figure out. But you can very quickly get caught in like just like overthinking what's going on and being like, oh, it must be some like complex math thing. And it's like, no, you actually just needed to like press this lever instead of like analyze the situation or something.

Are some people in there using their phones to try to figure stuff out? Because I imagine you could just say, I imagine there's only take a picture. There's probably only is it like a series of rooms? Yeah. Well, usually you start in one room. They're all different. oftentimes you'll start in one room and then you'll there'll be a series of puzzles locks and keys and whatnot and then oftentimes like you'll unlock something and then you'll progress to another room and then you'll progress to a third room and then you'll finally get out of like a series room because it's a lot of like they're pretty easy to set up in sort of like a defunct office space or like you know storefront that's just kind of like you know going in between it's like the spirit Halloween of commercial real estate like you just you like anyone can come in and you know and just say like, oh, we'll be in there for like a couple months.

It's not super permanent. The build out's pretty simple. It's mostly just like some walls and decorations and like some creativity on the on the, on the puzzle side. Trey says can you guys put Tyler in an escape room and see if he gets out before the show ends? I mean, it'd be very hard to find a three hour long escape room. I think most of them aim for like 45 minutes. Well, maybe we need to make one.

One of our guests had to leave the Ultradome and go straight to an escape room. So, you know, there's, there are escape room fans among the TVPN army all over the place. Have you done one, Tyler? I've not. Are you interested in it? You're a speed cuber, so, you know. Yeah, I mean, it could be fun. I don't know.

I'm kind of in the Jorda camp, though. I've just, like, never been super. It's very, like, I don't know, maybe it's great with, it's probably great with, like, kids who are maybe, like, eight to ten, who can do the puzzles, like, family event would be fun. and then it was a common thing. When they came out, there was definitely like a boom in like, in the escape. Bobby in the chat says escape room would be a good benchmark for AI. Certainly a humanoid.

No, I mean, you could go in there, take pictures and be like, help me solve this. Help me solve this. Help me solve this. I know, but I want to see a humanoid run through it. Let's call one X. See what they can do. Call any of them. Hit him up.

Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast. Moving on. Lots of reaction to Claudebot. Very much enjoyed our interview with the creator of Claudebot, now Maltbot, yesterday. One of, yeah. Yeah, incredibly, he had some wild lines, but incredibly refreshing kind of conversation and viewpoint.

Totally. Just totally counter. to the entire philosophy that I feel like a lot of people, at least on the West Coast, in the way that they're approaching AI right now in the way that America is approaching AI. He's like, we ask, you know, you think somebody will like, you know,

fork what you're doing or clone it. And he's like, yeah, I'm sure they will. Like, I don't care. Yeah, I'm building this for myself. Yeah, and he's like, I have enough, I have enough money. Yeah. And yeah, I'm super, it's gonna be really fun to follow along. I have a feeling that he's just going to keep launching a bunch of random projects because he clearly is just in it for the love of the game.

But I do hope that I do hope that he can get a lot more resources and really scale up the operation. I don't know that he needs more resources. He has more agents and whatnot. Like the interesting thing about Claudebot as a product is you download it from GitHub. It installs. And it has all these different integrations and it does something that's very complex. has, you know, all this safety text and different, there's a website and there's a community page. And all of that feels like, okay, yeah, this is like a 10-person startup.

They probably worked on this for a year. But it's like, no, it's one person. And it's like three months because the guy is, you know, using agents. Yeah, you would think that he would build, his big complaint was the security inbound, security researchers asking him stuff. Yeah. It's like, okay. Bought. Bought it.

I think he will. He should. Yeah, he posted December 26th, he had his like Codex, like, Dashboard Up. So he said he's done 250 billion tokens, which is like probably top 10 index users, apparently from that. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know that he needs way more resources. I mean, he should be able to get donations if he needs them, get credits or something.

I don't know. Like the financial strain on that business does not seem, it seems, like it's more constrained by his ideas, you know, how he's thinking about designing the system, integrating things, rolling it out. Buddy and Mikel watched the interview and he said that he's had Claudebot set up. He set it up right at the beginning of January and was initially like just kind of got a little frustrated using it, but has now got it set up so that it's able to make phone calls on his behalf specifically wants to get a Hillstone reservations.

Yeah. So he can just like basically. Wait, what's Philstone? The restaurant. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's just like going to use it to start getting like reservations at different restaurants. It's so funny.

Google has a product for that that does an AI phone call, but for some reason it just hasn't really rolled out that or it just hasn't gotten to like adoption. I don't know. There's some sort of like memetic like I think people seeing the clip where he's like explaining how he's feeling the AGI really, really hit people. Obviously the security thing is. He's, has it make him a daily brief that feeds into an RSS like on a podcast. So in the morning he can just listen to like a five minute podcast on like what his days like, things that he should be responding to.

Kind of like, it seems like you could have a more. Your enemy texted you or something. And you will be, you'll be deeply upset when you see what happened. Everyone's praying on your downfall. No, no. Security is important with Claudebot, now MoldBot. CrowdStrike is also important. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. A random 10-person team in Paris just dropped what looks like. It looks like something superior to Claudebot, according to Chubby on X.

It's called Twin, the AI company builder. Hugo. Mercer. Yeah, they raised a $10 million seat round. Yeah. They have over 100,000 agents deployed. Okay. So, Tyler, give it a spin.

Check it out. Twin Live. There's a community note on here. This is an undisclosed advertisement. But Doug over at semi-analysis, fabricated knowledge, says, I think that Claudebot is going to be a moment, and yes, someone's going to do this. And I'm still wondering about, like, how quickly a business,

can actually scale when you're getting constantly hammered with TOS violations from every mag seven legal department constantly like hey yeah we noticed that you built a cly for the web interface on WhatsApp and we don't want you to do that and it's one thing if it's like an open source repo that people are running themselves and can change and can edit and fix and tweak versus like hey you're a corporation that we could potentially sue or tie up in litigation or go on a press tour around. It's just a very different dynamic. Yeah, and the prompt injection risk as well. Yeah, totally.

It's like does that liability fall back on the company that, you know, and I'm excited to talk to Mark German about how he's processing this with the, with what will happen with Siri, the timelines there, what will be integrated because Apple and the iOS ecosystem should have a lot of the same functional hooks into these products. Yeah, remember we talked about this Monday. There was a team that built a product, which sold to Apple and became shortcuts. And then they built software applications incorporated in a product called Sky. And they were pre-launched and Open AI acquired it.

It was focused on integrating AI into the operating system. And so you can imagine Open AI behind the scenes has been cooking on a lot of stuff like this. But this isn't the kind of thing that you can just, at Open AI scale, just say, hey, we're going to just ship this and see what happens. whereas a startup or an open source project. Yeah. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud,

building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. There are a lot of people building stuff on MoltBot around MoldBot around the concept. There's actually someone in the chat that's working on a Claudebot for the cloud. He says he has a name. I'm very excited to learn more. about his project. I think his name is Jeff in the chat. Brexton says, yes, that was fast. Yp, software is cooked because Kalin Y says introducing Moldbot for teams, one-click connections to all the apps, client-side encrypted and builds your team's memory. Get your Mo-mo is the product.

I wonder, like this feels like almost something where if you've been building a product that's like this, you should potentially reintroduce it on the back. of all the Maltbot hype. And, you know, if you're a, if you're like a, you know, multi-tentacled agent that can touch a lot of different systems, well, we'll put it in terms that people understand and say, hey, like, this is, you know, this is Claudebot or MoldBot for the enterprise, and it has these, you know, functions and these benefits and this security approach. But clearly a lot of people will be focused on this.

Let's click over to rewatching the interview with, the Claudebot creator, Peter Steinberger, because I want to hear about his AGI moment, the AGI achieved moment. First, I'm going to tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses,

and then we will play the video from Claudebot creator. I want to see... So in November, I... I don't know. You know, I wake up every day, I'm like, okay, what do I want to work on now? It would be cool. And then it was like, okay,

I want to check with my computer on WhatsApp because if my agents are not running, if I go to the kitchen, I want to check up on them. I want to like do little prompts. So I just hack together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message, calls cloud code and then returns what cloud code returns, one shot. And it took like one hour and it worked. I'm like, well, okay, that's kind of cool. But I usually use prompts, like a little text and an image.

Because images are like, they often give you so much context and you don't have to type so much. So I feel like this is like one of the hacks where you can prompt faster. Just like make a screenshot. So the agents are really good at figuring out what you want. So I hacked together images. And then I was on a trip in Marrakesh with like a weekend birthday trip. I found myself using this way more than I saw it, but not for programming. It's more like, hey, well, like, there's like restaurants because it had Google in it

and it could figure out stuff. And it's like, especially when you're on the go, it's like super useful. And then I wasn't thinking. I was just sending it a voice message, you know, but I didn't build that. There was no support for voice messages in there. So the reading in the kid that came and I'm like, oh, I'm really curious what's happening now. And then after 10 seconds, my agent replied as if nothing happened. I'm like, how do you do that? And it replied, yeah, you sent me, you sent me a message, but there was only a link to a file

with no file ending. So I looked at the file header. I found out that it's opus. So I used FFMberg on your Mac to convert it to Wave. And then I wanted to use VISPA, but didn't have it installed and there was an install error. But then I looked around and found the OpenEI key in your environment, so I sent it via curl to open the eye, got the translation back, and then I don't respond it. That was like the moment where like, wow. Yeah. You know, it's like, that's where it clicked. These things are like, damn smart, resourceful beasts if you actually give them the power. Beasts. App love it. Yeah, at the end. I love it. Yeah, people were reacting to this. People are not, are genuinely not ready, says Vitorio.

lots of people calling this EGI. One way, the reason that I feel like that is such a powerful moment, and I'm glad that he shared it, is if you give somebody, if you're talking with a model and you give it a task, and then it just hits a dead end, it's just incredibly, like, that's sort of like people are very used to that right now. Yeah. And it's not that it needs to be that way,

but it's just kind of like the steady state. Yeah, people are used to like, okay, I know what the models can do. That's effectively the agent having real agency. That makes it an agent. Yeah. It's saying like, well, I didn't know how to do this or I was confused. And I tried a number of things until I did what you want it. Right.

And that's like what you want out of, it's what you want out of a team member, right? If you're working with somebody on a project and they have a task, you don't, they don't just try one thing and come back and or just say like, I actually can't handle this because of file type's wrong. So they convert it, figure it out. Yeah. What was your reaction to her? Yeah, I mean, it's like pretty insane. Definitely, definitely raised my, you know,

chance of permanent underclass. Oh, no. You know, it's making me a little worried. Yeah, Will says it's over. It's over. We need to move, and there are a lot of people quoting this. G. Fodor has the L.Azer-Yutkowski meme,

and lots of people here. They, lots of people were, you know, interesting that he uses Codex here. Roon said Codex 5.2 is really amazing, but using it from my personal and not work account over the weekend taught me some user empathy, lull, it's a bit slow. And Yuchinjin says, every time I ask my open AI friend, when will you beat Claude at coding? They say, we already beat them. I think Sam is realizing speed, not intelligence, is Codex's blocker to a ClaudeCode

moment, cerebrous chips might unlock a codex moment. Yeah, that would be very interesting. And that's one of the, like the models are so powerful now that there's, there's, there's so many moments where you know it's going to deliver, it can deliver, because it can work around all these problems. But if you're like, I need this done in five minutes, I'll just do it myself. Yeah, like, 5.2 Pro is like an incredible model, but it just takes like, five, six, ten minutes every time you prompt it. Totally. Because it's kind of like thinking or a deep research type model.

Yeah. Well, let me tell you about label box. Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. I like the fireworks. I'd do some fireworks for the fireworks. What else is in here? So you already mentioned this, Tyler, but Peter's probably in the top 10 users of codex at the moment.

over 250 billion tokens in a few months is a lot. So how much does that actually cost? That feels like you're up in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. No, it says it here. Yeah? How much does it spend? $51,000. That's not much.

Wow, yeah. Usage cost, and he has a streak going of 74 days. No days off. Yeah, so $51,000 for this type of result, pretty remarkable. So where do we move the goalposts now? Yeah, I'm so, I'm so, what are you on happy? I know you're on, I know there's going to be something that you're unhappy with about AI. Like you can't be satisfied.

Me? Yeah. Me? Yeah. Perminantly dissatisfied. Well, part of it's a bit. Oh, yeah, I know. Obviously.

But, but I have to, I have to provide, I have to provide like an alternate. Of course, of course. But of course, we have been sitting in one place. Yes. I guess what I'd be interested in is Peter and his team built a hit product, this novel experience that has taken the world by storm. And how much did we know they only spent a few months on it? How many people actually worked on it? And what was their total?

How much did they spend in total on tokens? Because they're spending some with code. You can sort of see that from the GitHub commits, right? Probably for some sort of average. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you can do that. I mean, just based off that it's like, okay, $51,000 on $250 billion tokens. And a lot of those tokens are probably using CloudBot to do things, right? Not just building it, right?

Yeah, I mean, that was over how many months. Like, those tokens were not just on CloudBot. Yeah, yeah. That was just all of his, like, hundreds of... And he says he talks to Opus 4.5 all the time, too, so I wonder what numbers he's putting up there. But still, it's interesting that it's not in the millions. It's pretty accessible. I don't know.

We need to find a new AGI benchmark. Okay, so I think maybe it's something like this, right? So I think one of the main takeaways I have from this is just that, like, big model companies can't really release an equivalent product just because of the integration thing, right? Max 7 companies are not going to, like, talk to each other. You're not going to get Open AI in WhatsApp, stuff like this. So it really reinforces the idea.

But do you think they would go so far as to say? we are not going to allow you to navigate our applications using something like... I mean, that's literally happening with, like, the New York Times does not allow OpenAI to browse it with a bomb. Like, you can go to... Yeah, but it's different having your local device being effectively used by... Yeah. No, it is. But at the same time...

using itself. At the same time, if OpenAI has the chat GPT app, right now if you go to the chat GPT website and you say, hey, I found this, I'm a subscriber to the New York Times and there's an article in the business section that I want you to summarize for me. Here's a link. Can you open the link and turn into some bullet points for me? It'll just say like, no, no, no, I can't go over there. Like they said, don't go. I'm not going. Right. Now, if I download the chat GPT app and it's able to run that and maybe the New York Times can't block it. The New York Times still has the ability to sue open AI and like be a headache. So then they can just say, hey, enforce the same thing.

But I'm talking about a situation where the user, let's say they have a Mac Mini, they're running MaltBot. Yeah. They on the computer, they've given MaltBot their New York Times login. So it's fully logged in. Yes. And they're paying New York Times subscriber. I would be, I think users would be upset.

that you're saying if the New York Times says, we're not going to allow, we're going to figure out a way to try to, I don't even know how you would go about trying to actually stop that activity. But I'm just saying, even, even I can imagine, users are going to, users are basically going to demand,

I agree. If my data, I don't care if my data is stored in the cloud, I want to be able to access it on any device that I'm logged into, even if I'm not physically present with the device, right? I agree. I agree. I just think it's going to be a really, really, really tough argument for some of these larger companies to say you can't, you can only access your data if you are physically moving the mouse yourself. Yes. I want to get Tyler's response, but first I'm going to tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Tyler, what do you think?

Okay, yeah. So I agree. I think basically where you're describing is that all these companies need incredible deal. guys, right? This is the whole thesis. Like the deal guy error. With open source, with this like hacker culture, you can kind of always get around these rules. Is it like maybe breaking term service like deaf? Yes, definitely.

These big companies can't do it. They need more deal guys, right? But it's like hard to find these deal guys. You need the AI to become the deal guy. So you need a Claudebot deal guy. That's the new benchmark. That's the new benchmark. You're going to be going to make in deals.

OK, CloudBod AI that can do a deal between two mag seven companies. There we go. There we go. There we go. Move it to the other side. See ya. See ya. Tyler, why do you...

I kind of want to take this a little bit further, just because... I don't know. Like, how do you actually enforce this? Is Google Drive going to say, you need to have your camera on and we need to see that you're sitting in front of your computer actually using it?

I mean, you can always do these, like, bot detection stuff with, like, whatever, it's coming from the same IP, these things. I think it's like kind of a constant race. But like I think the open source stuff will, if you like really grind it out, you can kind of always get around this stuff. And so like the only real solution is to have like actual, I think deals between these like different companies.

Yeah. I think that if you, if you have an app from a big company that enables you to do something, like like if, if, if, Chrome started shipping with a torrent browser, something that would allow you to manage torrents, which are not illegal. That's just software. You can just download torrents that are not piracy.

I can just be like, hey, I put up a torrent of TBPN content. Anyone can download it. But just by virtue of the fact that it's so prevalently used to pirate media, they would face pressure from media owners, Warner Brothers and Disney. and they would get angry letters, and they would strike a deal and say, okay, yes, like, we're not going to enable this. And so even though,

so if any of the big tech companies launch an app that enables behavior that other apps don't like, they will have leverage. And they all have deals together, and they all have legal teams, and there's a bunch of different pressures that they can apply.

And it's this, like, constant negotiation, oh, well, you know, maybe we won't renew this deal or this contract, maybe we'll go with someone else. If you're the bad actor, you'll get pushed out, right? So I don't know. I think it's going to be a big debate. I don't, I would be surprised if any of the big labs just launch something that can actually just go and do anywhere and do anything because the pushback.

But do you think, do you think this is something that will, like, why would this just not happen at the OS layer? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, then you need Apple to, like, actually lock in. You do. Which is like... Yeah, or Satya. Yeah.

And that's why we're having Mark German on the show to break down Apple's strategy and what they're doing. Anyway, interesting. MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Kimmy 2.5 is out. And Alex Chima is running it on his desk. It runs at 24 tokens per second.

with two M3 Ultra Mac Studios connected via Thunderbolt. He went much bigger than the Mac Mini. And Joe Wes... By the way, apparently Kimmy likes to be... refers to itself as Claude. Yeah, what happened here? Tyler, can you break down what's going on with Kimmy? Yeah, I mean, it's always kind of unclear

with the Chinese open source models, like what they're actually doing to train the models. So there's like... When you ask the model, it's like, introduce yourself, it's like, hello, I'm Claude. Yeah. So there's probably like two... scenarios. One is that they trained on the outputs of like opus or in tropic model, right?

You'd think that they would just find and replace in the training data, though. You know, like, that would be pretty easy to just be like, okay, we're going to scrape a ton of, a ton of responses from Claude. Let's make sure we do a find and replace on Claude so that if it says, hi, I'm Claude, I'm a helpful assistant. It just changes that. That's just like a... Yeah, I mean, you would expect that Kimmy knows that it's going to call itself Claude. Yeah. So it's like, why would they have? allow that. Maybe they're just basically like magging, anthropic, like, oh yeah, we have

Claude. What are you going to do about it? Yeah, like, what are you going to do? We stole Claude. Yeah, and then there are also some rumors, like, very unclear if this is just like completely fake headlines, but like maybe there was some leaked checkpoint that somehow got out to China and then they did a fine tune on it or something.

Yeah. That would be pretty, pretty crazy. Yeah, people have said it before for other models. I'm not really sure how reliable they are. Yeah. But it seems like fairly very likely that they just trained on opus outputs. Yeah, yeah. Because you kind of, people said,

DeepSik did that originally with Chatschabit. Yeah. Yeah. I talked to one technologist about what it takes to reverse engineer, like the GPD4 API, and it's a surprisingly low amount of outputs to sort of interpolate all the weights or something that approximates it.

So it's clearly sort of a game back and forth. Yeah, yeah, just like a constant. war. There's somebody... I think it is quite... Yeah. I think it's probably a good sign for US AI labs that the Chinese models are essentially just like completely based off the US ones. Like they're not actually training these models from scratch. Yeah. They're not doing these incredible, you know, training runs for much cheaper like people say. They're actually just, they're basically just like copying off off the US. Do you think that's because of just chip restrictions or actual like architectural

hurdles? Yeah, it's probably all of them. It's just faster. It's hard to figure out the architecture. You don't have the chips to try these different science projects, training runs. Wow, the Chinese models lagged by exactly how long it takes to scrape the API, basically,

and do a fine-tune. What a coincidence. Dean Ball has been on a tear the last 24 hours. He said, people significantly underrate the current margin. of AI Labs, yet another way in which pattern matching to the technology and business trends of the 2010s has become a key ingredient in the manufacturing of AI copium.

Copium. And he says... This Derek Mueller post was very informative here. Just look at the market clearing prices on inference from open source models, and you can tell the big labs pricing has plenty of margin. Deep Infra has GLM 4.7 at 43 cents in $1.75 out. Sonnet is at $3 in $15. out. How could anyone think Anthropic isn't printing money per marginal token? And Dean Ball says,

the reason they think labs lose money is because 10 years ago, some companies in an entirely unrelated part of the economy, lost money on office rentals, we work, and taxis, Uber. And everyone thought they would go bankrupt because at that time another company that made overhyped blood tests, there are knows, did go bankrupt. That is literally the level of ape-like pattern matching going on here. the machines must look at our chattering classes and feel great appetite. Yeah. You could also have seen the margins from the whole open code thing with Anthropic. Oh, yeah?

Right? Where there was open code. So Anthropic, they have clod code, right? You can get the cloud subscription and you get like free cloud code tokens. And then you could use those to off for open code and they removed that. Yeah. And the whole reason you would want to do that is because they're like cloud code tokens versus like, actual cloud API is like 10x difference. So there's like a massive markup to the actual API.

So you'd assume that like unless Anthropic is losing just insane amounts of money on cloud code, which maybe they're losing some amounts of money. It's like, well, well, you look back at the, I forget which interview Dario was doing where he was trying to get people to think about like, you think of each model as a company where you spend all this money on training, which is KAPX. And then when you're actually running the model, it's very profitable. But if you look at the business as a whole, you have massive, massive losses from training. and stock-based comp and hiring 1,400 of the best engineers in the world. So if you actually look at it on a company-wide,

you have continued scaling massive losses. But the important thing is that effectively at the product level, when they're selling the product, they actually are making money. So in the S-1, good to you and to me looks like training clearly broken out as CAP-X, solid gross margins above 60%, something like that on inference. And then, you know, all of the AI copium can probably subside if OpenAI or Anthropic go out with an S1 that shows really solid inference margins.

And if it comes out that it's like, oh, their inference margins like 10% or something, then people are going to be panicking. To be clear, I think these will be some of the most special S-1s that have ever graced. the capital markets. It'll be great. Let me tell you about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast.

That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we have Mark German. The Germanator. Managing editor of Bloomberg in the Ultradome. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for taking a time to come on down. Yeah, right here. We'll have this microphone for you. You have a Diet Coke, so you're locked in. We're ready to go. How have you been? How's your new year going so far? Oh, it's freaking great.

Yeah? Yeah, had a, my wife and I had a baby at the end of the last year. Gong, gong, gong. Things that you guys make on the Twitter and just me. The card. Baby. Baby. Baby.

Yeah, yeah, we're happy to do that. We were happy to do it. We never, we never, yeah, we never, we never, we never know. Some people, some people want to be, you know, more low-key about it. Oh, I am low-key about it. I just figured, you know, I'm friends here. But how do you, how do you rate parenthood? How does it, how does it, how does it,

feel being in it versus, you know, all the expectations that people have. It's just taking care of this individual and they're being so reliant on us and getting to teach them. But shout out to my wife for being the one really pulling the strings there and taking care. So it's great. I feel like reporting in parenthood are especially hard to balance. in some ways. Still early. Well, I would, yeah, no, I would, I would just, like, obviously it's completely possible,

and you're clearly doing fine, but the nature of the work means that, like, a story is happening, and you want to be the first to provide the best coverage, and sometimes, you know, babies crying. Yeah, and you might not be able to pick up the phone. But you get through. You know what? People have been hearing crying babies over the phone for, uh, for, for forever. They'll have to deal with it.

I just can't wait until we go on an airplane. Oh, yeah. I already told my wife, like, yeah, you know, we're going to get, like, banned from American Airlines. No, I've said this on the show before. Like, the funniest thing is growing up, I assume that when a baby was crying on the airplane, it means that the parents were bad parents. Like, they were doing something wrong. Totally, totally.

And in reality, babies just cry for a million reasons. And it's totally possible that there's no solution sometimes. I just need to all sleep. Yeah, I saw, like, an Instagram reel of a mother talking. about her kid and the kid was crying in the background. I was like, why would you take advice from her? Like, that's such a bad bomb. Yeah, it has nothing to do with that.

And that's not even at all. It's like, maybe he's always crying. It's crazy. Hungry. They have gas. They don't like the sweater they're wearing. There's a million reasons. You know, they didn't like my article.

Who knows? But anyways, let's talk about Apple. Let's talk about Apple. I mean, we've been talking about new Siri, expectations there. The big news yesterday was Claude Bot. have you been do you think there's anything about

how have you been processing the Claudebot now MaltBot story what's possible there expectations around AI assistance feel sky high in the open source community what do you do you think like anyone at Apple's like updating on Claudebot and MoldBot and what's possible?

Well let me just take a step please yeah yeah with Apple and AI so in 20, what is it 2018 they hired John Gene andrea He was this high flyer at Google. He ran AI in search. And Apple thought they had a coup here. Apple thought they would hire this guy

and really just hit the ground running and be at the forefront of artificial intelligence. Just seven years earlier, they announced Siri. In 2011, there was absolutely nothing like it. It was breakthrough. But then it just became utter junk. Google Assistant lapped it. Alexa lapped it.

So they thought they were going to bring this guy in and it'd be a game changer. turns out, and maybe this will be Tim Cook's fade accompli, but this was the biggest mistake is higher of Tim Cook's tenure. I think it's easy to say. Apple is so behind an AI. There's been so much ink spilled on this and so many conversations on this, and I've written about it and talked about it half a million times.

I think you haven't even scratched the surface about how big of a problem this is for Apple, right? They've completely screwed up AI in every which way, and it comes down to just hiring the wrong people and entrusting the wrong people. But is it a do-nothing win scenario? Because I think we're seeing a situation now where the Mac Mini might end up selling out everywhere. Stock seems fine. Are you seeing like financial? Well, the stock will see.

That's the problem, right? When you've had no real negative hit, it's hard to go wartime. Go wartime. And acknowledge that there is a failure because all the numbers are holding. But it is, it is wartime, right? Yeah. The numbers are great. Tomorrow, they might report their first $135 billion to $140 billion quarter, right?

Let's go. Like, I don't, you know, the problem is, how can you put $140 billion and Tim Cook needs to go retire in the same sentence? You can't, yeah, exactly. It doesn't make sense. But when you think about the long term, you think about the future, these things are going to need to get rectified. And I guess the good news is they are on a path to rectifying it to some extent. This Google Gemini deal is a breakthrough for Apple.

It's embarrassing. I mean, it's absolutely crazy that... You poached their guy, and then years later, you're paying them billions. He screws you up, okay? You pay him $25 million a year for eight years, right? And then now you're paying basically 4x that, 8x that, maybe a little bit more, in order to get the new good stuff. And so they'll announce a new Siri next month.

The thing with this new series is basically a replay of everything they announced in June 2024. So it's basically everything they announced two years ago coming very late. Things like using what's on your screen to fulfill Siri queries, being able to control your apps. And then in June is when the good stuff launches. That's when Apple launches its first chat bot. It's interesting because they've spent the last two years saying nobody likes chatbots.

Everyone hates chat GPT. It's terrible. It's during the world. Then you have chat chit nearly a billion, right, active users. They're like, okay, we kind of got to do this or we're screwed. So they're doing it. And it's actually going to run on Google servers, Google Cloud Platform, Google TPUs. This is great for Google too.

And I think some people at Apple think this is going to be like a short-term thing. You know, we're going to partner with Google until we get our act together. No. I definitely think that this is more of a long-term play unless these models continue to get commoditized, which they will eventually, but this is not a 12, 24, 36-month thing. This is this is longer term, I think, than people expect. And Apple can't just go wrap Lama because of the terms of service that META's put that around. They said you can't use Lama. Well, I don't think they want to use Lama. I don't think they want to work with META. So there aren't that many games in town. Well, let's take a step back here. So they're using Google in the U.S., right?

But they're going to have to do something in China. Okay. And so you'll see them use a combination of Alibaba and I think it's Waybo or Tencent or one of those, different AIs for different features. So they'll use them. And just because they're partnering with Google Gemini on Siri in this chatbot doesn't mean they're not using other players. There's a lot of open AI and a lot of applications.

They launched their creative cloud competitor today, and a lot of those AI features are powered by chat GPT, like some image generation stuff. I still think on an image generation side, you're getting a little bit better on OpenAI than you're getting from Google. And then a lot of stuff internally. Like Apple runs on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple's doing internally in terms of product development, a lot of their internal tools. so that's a big one to watch. They have custom versions of Claude running on their own servers internally too because this Google deal, this just came together a few months ago.

They were not going to use Google. Apple actually was going to rebuild Siri around Claude. But Anthropic, they were holding them over a barrel. They wanted a crap ton of money from them, several billion dollars a year, and at a price that doubled on an annual basis as well for the next three years or so, from what I understand. At the time, Google was really an afterthought because they were in the middle of the trial

with the Department of Justice. And then for some reason, the judge ruled that Apple and Google's deal was kosher, even though everyone knows it's a huge issue and our monopoly and all that. I'm not here to be a judge. I write. I don't make judgments for legal proceedings,

but anyways, Apple and Google get off scot-free. They can do whatever they want now, and, you know, they're not being, held back at all. And then obviously OpenAI, that is a real firestorm for Apple right now. Like Open AI, obviously, they're working on these AirPods competitors, the Chad

GPT built-in. Sweet-Pee. Johnny Ive is, you know, running the show and design there. That's a big freaking deal. He rated the whole design team, all of the Apple designers that were there under Johnny Ive, not all of them. 95% of them are gone. You know, a ton of them are now working

at Love From and Open AI and other company, some of them have retired. But the crux of it is, like, how do you partner with a company that's trying to put you out of business, right? So there's no way that they were going to work with OpenAI, no matter how good the... What do you think about some of the projections that you've seen or kind of estimates around, I forget, was it Foxcon was saying, like, preparing to be able to produce something like that in the first year. It feels like, it feels like, like a massive number, but at the same time, you have a billion users. Talking about the open AI earbuds.

Yeah, sweet. You know, it's so interesting. And one more thing there. Yeah. The earbuds, the benefit of them versus some of these other AI hardware is like, if you can just take calls and listen to music, like already you have some functionality that people are using all day long. Sure, sure.

So it's not the same as like wearing a pendant or having some other little gadget that actually serves no real use case or at least not a powerful use case. If I can just listen to calls or take calls, listen to music, at least there's some like base level functionality and then you layer on the AI and maybe it turns into this amazing, you know, super differentiated experience. I just don't see it. I just don't see them selling 45 million units. I just don't see it being a success. The barrier to entry for a new hardware company, as you know, is extremely high. Like, can you even think of one hardware company that just came into being? and became an immediate success, like, I just don't see it.

And I also think the reason they're doing earbuds is because it's more low-hanging fruit, to your point, and it's easier to accomplish. Isn't not what they wanted to do. What Open AI wanted to do is they wanted to create an iPhone killer. Instead, now they're trying to create an AirPods killer, and I don't think they're going to be able to accomplish that. Will they look nicer than the AirPods?

Probably. Will they have better AI than the AirPods? That's an open question, right? What stops Apple from expanding this Gemini deal to its AirPods, and just basically adding a bunch of AI functionality to the AirPods. They have very fast processors, very tight iPhone integration. Apple can replicate whatever OpenAI is going to do pretty quickly by relying on Google and Gemini and whatever they can cook up functionality-wise there.

Do you think that AI specifically products, you know, that we had the creator of Maltbot on yesterday, and he was saying, like, there's so many applications, and he was referencing, like, My Fitness Pal, Do I really need my fitness pal if I can just take a picture and just send it into my agent and it'll track it? And so what I was thinking there is like, does that make the app store broadly, potentially less of a hurdle with OpenAI as launching, eventually launches a new phone and they have a new OS and they don't have an app store. They don't have an app store at day one. It just the equivalence of apps on the fly.

Well, if you ask me, you know, we're already in the territory where iOS and the app store are legacy. features, right? Like the App Store is a legacy world. The iOS user experience, the MacOS user experience where you're jumping between applications, where you're going into something to get information, where you're going back to your home screen and launch another app. Apps are the past. AI agents are already here and that's the move forward. And whenever OpenAI comes out with a phone, and I do eventually anticipate them coming out with a phone. And when I say phone, I'm not talking necessarily about something you put to your ear, like a classic phone, like an iPhone.

I'm talking about I feel like people are always going to have some sort of slab in their pocket, right? Because it's convenient. You get the display, you get the sensors, you get the battery, get the cameras. It's not a replicable experience, no matter how many different gadgets we want to put on your body. Like a banana.

Like a plastic banana. Smart banana. That would be fun. Yeah. So, yeah, AI agents are where the world is going. and I totally expect Apple to move in this direction. This new Siri, Campo, that they're launching at the end of this year, that is a huge step towards the AI agentification of different features on the phone.

And being able to, for instance, tell your phone, pull up this photo that I took at the studio, find photos where I have bottles of water and remove the bottle of water from the photo, and email or to text it to Mark, right? Like the AI agentification of iOS is happening. Sure. Yeah, and theoretically, Siri should have killed, like, the weather app a long time ago. Yeah. Because I don't, like, when you think about, like, if you're just going to navigate to the weather app

and you're traveling somewhere and you're like, oh, where is this city? Oh, I don't have it saved. I'm going to search and add it. And then you're, like, finally looking at it, and it should just be a prompt that you're firing. But then when you try and click a level deeper, when the, in the, current Siri experience, you just can't get that. That is the big problem with Siri and the big difference from chat GPT and Gemini is it has

the going a level deeper problem. There's no back and forth. It forgets context very easily. It has no memory. It doesn't have that tight integration with applications because the app developers they know Siri is so terrible. Here's a question.

So what if I told you that you could call an Uber with Siri, right? Like you guys probably know that, but like does anyone use it? I don't have the data. but I can tell you that they announced support for that and they actually rolled out support for that. No, 10 years ago. 10 years ago. Okay?

It doesn't work because nobody uses it because it's too cumbersome. Totally. Okay? Like, I'm very tech forward. As anyone watching this probably knows, you know, it's right up my alley to have Siri call my Uber for me. But like, I've never done it because you know what? I don't freaking trust it.

Yep. It's not, I don't think it's going to work. And it's just going to be a time suck. And people didn't trust chat GPT. with 3.5, but now on 5.2 pro, they trust it. I would trust C.GPT with ordering an Uber. Me too. I would trust Catt GPD with my life. But Siri? Okay. So on the Siri rollout, it seems like there's a couple milestones that we're going to be tracking throughout this year. When will, when do you think I'll be able to go to Siri and just say a general,

Googleable question, you know, give me the history of the Roman Empire? The type of thing that, Any LLM can just pull up a couple paragraphs on, but current Siri does not have that ability. Okay. I can't tell you that you're going to be able to do it. I can tell you that you're supposed to be able to do it. How's that? I'll speak. I'll speak.

I just mean, is that, is, like, what's the goal? No, no, I just mean, like, there's knowledge retrieval. End of March. And then there's, and then there's, like, agentification, like making, interacting with the apps, doing all the things, like pulling what's in your camera roll together with your I message and all of that. of March. And that feels harder for both of those end of March. They're supposed to be end of March.

Okay. But the latter in terms of the app manipulation and the AI agent, that's going to be split probably between March. Because that seems harder than just integrate Gemini and just give people the Gemini answers when they ask Siri for a question. You know, it's so funny. I look back to WWC 2024 and obviously I made a big deal about all the delays because, of course, I did.

But then you think about it, it's like, was anyone going to use any of these features anyways. Like, we're talking about a few features that were delayed. And you look back at the announcement of these features at WWDC 2024. It's like Apple totally downplayed them too. Like, they gave a few cool demos, but it's like, this is some game-changing stuff if it's marketed correctly. Yeah.

So not only did they pre-announce it, not only did they delay it, but like they didn't even market what they had in the hand correctly, which I guess in hindsight, like, you should have realized that it wasn't that compelling or ready to go if they weren't going to market it. Because I'm telling you, they can market anything. How do you see search fitting into Siri? Because so much of what people are using LLMs for is search now, and you're seeing more commerce integrations. And I've always thought the labs, like, obsession with the browser was interesting

because in many ways, like, I feel like using LLMs, it already feels like you're using a browser. It's just kind of a new experience. And a big question is like, okay, so Google, Google's powering the new Siri, what happens when people start doing searches with high intent in Siri? Do you Google search anymore? I do. I don't.

I specifically still Google search when doing like product research, shopping, et cetera. I don't. I still go to Google if it's something that I know is fastest in Google. So today I wanted to know what year the Avengers movie came out. And I know that that's half a millisecond in Google. And I know that that's five seconds in any LLM. And so I'll Control T to go there. But for any level deeper, I also wanted to know about the VFX house that worked on it and what technology they used and when that happened.

That was an LM query. Yeah. Yeah, I don't really use Google anymore. I have my action button on my phone sent to Chad GBT, and I'm just like living in Chad GPD. Sure, sure, sure. You can't ask it the weather. You can't ask it to do anything on your phone. Sure, sure.

That's, I guess, the differentiator for what the new series is going to. to be. They've built a feature called World Knowledge Answers, the internal name, and it's basically a perplexity rip-off or a web search rip-off in JetGPT, which is to bullet out summaries and information and give you citations and context. Is it using Google directly for that, or is it some other? It's an Apple solution. Okay. It's an Apple solution. But what they've been trying to do now is, under the hood, change that to the Gemini model. Again, all. All this stuff was supposed to come out. Because Gemini is very good at Google Search.

Gemini is very good at Google Search, but there's no Google services in this new Siri. It's literally a model. It's basically like they hired the Google DeepMind team to develop the model to power its AI in Siri. Yeah, so I guess what I'm getting at is will I ever get, if I'm doing using Siri to research a product, will I ever get an ad powered by like an Apple ad network? work because it is a high-intense search. Like ever? I think the end game for all these guys is to put ads in this stuff.

You know, one thing that I haven't talked about in a while now. And I just feel like that's been somewhat under-discussed because people are so obsessed with just make Siri work that if it does end up working really well, then you would have effectively a search engine. Well, yeah, if it works. They have all the tools to do a search engine. And if it does work well, yeah, they'll probably. probably eventually put ads in it.

A couple things haven't discussed in a while. One is they're working on a new Safari web browser, and you're going to see AI search at the forefront of that. The other thing is the adsification, the advertisingification of the Apple operating systems, that starts this year. You're going to see them up the ad slots in the app store in search in particular.

You're, Give it up for more ads. Yeah, any sponsors? We want to give a shout out to you over here. And then. Don't tempt, John. I love it. And then you're going to see ads and Apple Maps.

Oh, interesting. You know? That's been one of the main differentiators in the Well, you know, it'll be all AI and it'll be targeted to based on things that you're searching. Like if you see a sushi restaurant, search for sushi, whatever, you make a, you may see some search results get elevated. It's kind of like what Yelp does.

Yeah. Right. By the way, it's so funny on Siri. Like, there's this Japanese restaurant in the valley I like, and it's named after a city in Japan or province of Japan. And it's like, take me to Chiba. Yeah. Right?

And I've been, that's the name of the place. Shout out to Chiba. Okay, boss, you're going to need to get in a boat. Oh, my God. It's like, all immediately pops up 7,652 miles away. I'm like, I've been to this place 50 damn times. You should know by now. Talking about the restaurant 20 miles away.

Yep. Not the city, 8,000 miles away. That's crazy. It's really amazing. Hiring, chartering an aircraft, sir. Yeah. I got a bunch of other stuff in the Apple ecosystem. First, Starlink is reportedly planning to integrate,

Apple's reportedly planning to integrate Starlink connectivity into the iPhone 18 Pro. How do you think about this? You saw this stuff going on Twitter the last couple of days? There's been no reporting on this recently, by the way. This is another, see, this is one of the downsides, the AI. People just spew BS on Twitter or not. Okay, so Apple already does work with Starlink. Yeah.

You can hook in, if you have a T-Mobile iPhone, you can get on to Starlink. So that already exists. Yeah. Yeah, I have, I've experienced, I experienced, I think, during the fires last year. So, no, all the cell service was down. I'm on Verizon. If you want satellite. But I have satellite on the 17th.

But it's not, what? You don't want to be on Verizon. I should get off of it. But it's not Starlink. It's the old network. On which? On the Verizon one? Yeah.

You're talking about on the Apple network. Yeah, yeah. Like, if I'm in an emergency situation, I can get out like one text message. It's really, really slow. And it's clearly going with like, I think, Viasat. The Apple network is just super legacy. Yeah. It's just older.

Yeah. They've got to strip that down and partner and rebuild or something. Anyways, the iPhone 18 is going to have enhanced satellite connectivity. Sure. And they'll, you know, obviously, work with Starlink. and whoever, whomever. So that's coming. What else are we got on our plate?

You want to talk about John Turnus? Absolutely. Talk about Turner. Turn us around, John. Yes. John. Okay. Yes.

So I have a bunch of questions. Let's start with, like, how, what is going on behind the scenes of this campaign? It feels like there's potential, it feels like, it feels like internally politics. There could be like people like pushing for him, pushing against him. There's this weird quote that keeps going out that people say he's never made a decision in his life. Everybody keeps making the most. underhanded compliments that I've ever seen. Yeah?

It's like, it's like, yeah, he's shipped a lot of products, but... He's never had to make a hard decision. That's the one. Just wait for my profile in Bloomberg. Okay. You'll get the real story soon. I'm not going to give it all the way today. Of course.

But I'm here for the company. I appreciate it. Got to give the shout out. Stay tuned for the article. Of course. Subscribe to Power On. Yes. In our tech bundle.

Yeah. It's great value. Okay. Turnus. He's 50. everyone else in the Apple executive team late 50s through their mid-60s turning 66 this year in the case of Tim Cook your Apple's bored you like continuity you like an insider you like people who know what they're doing have been there for a while they know where the bodies are buried okay these guys are all have hundreds of millions of dollars if not more yeah at 50 he's the only one who is if let's say Tim Cook hangs out another three to five years

you're not going to point another CEO who's 65, 70 years old. He's the only guy. Apple, they get vast majority of the revenue from hardware. He's the hardware guy. Have they screwed up any hardware since he's been in charge? No. He's a steady hand. He knows what he's doing.

He's really the only choice. There was this New York Times report a few weeks ago, basically saying that it could be Greg Joswiak, could be Eddie Q, could be Girdreau-Bryon, could be Craig Federici. It's for sure not going to be Craig. It's not going to be Deirdre. It's not going to be Eddie.

It's not going to be Jaws. The only category that makes sense is an operations person because you look at the current CEO, Tim, obviously, comes out of the ops world. You look at the guy who would have been CEO if Tim Cook didn't stay so long. I'm not saying he shouldn't have stayed so long he's done, obviously a fantastic job for shareholders and employees and what have you.

Would have been Jeff Williams. He was the CEO. So Sabby Khan, he was named CEO. you know, a few months ago, but he's really been in that job for the last half a decade, I would say. So anyways, it'll be Ternus or Sabi or someone completely out of left field. I don't think this is imminent. So we'll see what ultimately happens, but all signs are turning towards Ternus. Everyone has an opinion that Ternus is going to be the next CEO, fine.

I've been shouting this from rooftops the last two years, but no one has given evidence. Like, what is this based on, right? Has there ever been a baton handoff? Is he getting more responsibility? Do they have a big baton? They've got one of these. You know what? You have white smoke coming out of... Sure.

Well, actually, no, there's no, there's no smoke. Very environmentally friendly. Environment-friendly, yeah. So, you know, maybe out of the parking garage. White reflection out of the solar panels. Yeah. Glint off the solar panel. Exactly.

So what? You want evidence? Yes. You want to hear that he's been getting more responsibility? Okay. One, a few months ago, took full control of the Apple Watch engineering team that was co-run with the old COO until he retired. Okay, there's something for you. When they started soft firing the head of AI, the guy we were talking about

earlier, they took the robotic stuff away from him. They gave that to Ternus. And then the real news, as I broke last week, is that even though on paper Tim Cook is running the Apple design teams, it's not, it's Ternus. He took over at the end of last year for a variety of reasons, but you look at who's run design at Apple over the course of history. Well, like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook himself between 15 and 17, Jeff Williams, who was the number two in heir apparent for a long time, and then obviously all heard of Johnny Ive. Now you had John Ternis to that list. It's a big sign. It's a big indicator because you look at what Apple is known for as a company and its design, right, that design function. And it's not just a

hardware, it's hardware and software that he's, you know, overseeing as the manager of both of those teams. So I would say that is your first piece of evidence that he's getting some more material. What does he have to do since he's the hardware guy to communicate that he has a steady hand on the tiller as Apple transitions into the AI age? Like the narrative is that they have delivered on hardware. They have not delivered on AI. No, they haven't. And so how is he going to communicate that he's forward thinking and can be the one to keep them on the cutting edge. Taking a step back, you think about, like,

succession at all of these big tech companies, right? Like, who's going to take over Google one day? Who's going to take over Microsoft one day? Who's going to take over Amazon one day, right? Like, it's probably going to be the AI guys at all of these companies. Yeah. Right? Apple doesn't really have an AI guy.

Sure. They're trying to make Craig Federigi the AI guy, but he's not CEO material. He's voiced this himself, so don't get mad at me, Craig. but yeah Turnus can he become the AI guy at Apple? I think it's too early to tell

and I think that is a big question there like do you put a hardware person in charge of the AI era? People have been speculating that Apple would do some big M&A deal to bring some AI native talent in house. They wanted to buy perplexity. So the origin story

they were really talking about it like Eddie Q was seriously considering Adrian Preeke, other head of Corp Development, M&A reports to Tim Cook. They were looking at this pretty closely. Then they pulled out, why were they going to buy perplexity to power the search stuff we were talking about earlier

became less important after the Google deal was about to live. And do you think they would have done it if perplexity hadn't been marked up to oblivion? I think they would have done perplexity at a reasonable price. Apple doesn't overpay. Yeah, that's the thing.

Low single-digit. I think they would have done it up to $5 or $6 billion. Yeah. Yeah, but like at this $1520, and then perplexity started, you know, trying to say they're going to buy Google Chrome if it got divested and all that. And I think they would have done it

if the Google search deal was torn apart. Yeah. In order to bring a search product to market faster. They like to buy companies to, I'm not trying to do Apple corporate speak here, but this is like legit. They buy companies to accelerate their roadmap. You'll hear Tim Cook use those exact words tomorrow, okay, by the way, but literally.

Tomorrow? Apple earnings. This guy. My God. Come on. Hey, head in the game. But is there specifically a deal that he'll be talking about tomorrow? No, no, no, no, no.

Like, he will be asked about it. I bet he'll mention the gem and I think. Because he was asked that in the last earnings and everyone was like, why haven't you done a mega deal? He says this every. It's just going to be more of the same. You know, what is fair to say is, is there. pace of dealmaking has decelerated significantly. Interesting.

Significantly. And so he will be, I mean, in the last earnings, he was sort of like managing that and saying like, oh, we're still doing deals, but we're selective and we only do it to He's like, well, they also don't care to announce like 95% of the deal. Well, they're big enough. They have to. You know, like, Golden State Warriors, they want Yonis, but they don't want to make a big trade.

They don't want to give them all their draft picks, right? They're like, yeah, the same with the Lakers. This is like my existential crisis. The Lakers, like, yeah, we'll trade the picks if the right guy. becomes available. Yeah, and they know the right guy's not going to become available, right? Just like Apple knows these companies are always going to be out of the price range they want to pay. Sure, sure. The thing with Apple is, like, they're very frugal, money-wise, extremely frugal. The other thing is, is they've been burned countless times of the acquisitions. Like that Beats deal,

terrible process for integrating that company. Sure. Well, and even then, I think it was like a three-x revenue multiple. Weren't they doing? It wasn't Beets doing like a billion dollars a year. Oh, from a financial standpoint, it was just like a home run. People criticized that deal, but they made it back in months. Oh, interesting. Oh, Beets? They made the money, but it was a nightmare from a... No, but it's worth, it's worth noting because, like, even paying for perplexity at $5,6 billion, it's going to be years until you monetize that, probably. Yeah, I mean, beats was monetized from day one. Obviously, you're selling the headphones, which are terrible, by the way, but everyone loves them. And then Apple Music, they, you know, beats started the whole. subscription services business at Apple. And so if you look at it, Beats is one of the most wildly

successful technology acquisitions of all time. And then you compare it to how much criticism it got because it's, oh, Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iving, whatever, whatever, and the headphones are crap. You know what, from a financial standpoint, home run. Home run. You know, but integrating into Apple's culture is not easy. Yeah. Speaking of hardware, what's going on with the robotic arm that will live in your kitchen. Yeah, the Pixar lamp. It's the Pixar lamp. It's the Pixar lamp. He said it's you got this nine inch display. It's like an iPad display on a robotic arm. It can float around your desk. It can twirl and turn around. Like, you know what we'll do? A few years when this thing comes out, you'll have me back on. And instead of me actually being here, you'll have this on here.

Yeah, you know, you'll leave my head floating around. Yeah. I mean, Meta tried to do something like that with the... Meta tried to do something like that. You know, these things are big in China. They are. It's a big thing in China right now. No one really talks about them, but it's a category that has some potential. Okay. Yeah. But it's years away, just because it's slow. I think it's, stay tuned.

Yeah. What about the foldable phone? That's not years away. That's closer? Yeah. No, that's decades away. No. That's coming out in the fall.

Okay. That'll be fun. I can't wait for that. Yeah. Are you going to be a high? $2,200 on it. Oh, it's that can be? It'll be at least.

It has to be at least. Is it going to be the highest tier, the biggest, the most powerful? For Apple? Yeah, that's going to, it's going to say. at the top of the line. Okay. New status symbol. Sorry, what were you? I like that. We had Ben Thompson on maybe before the end of the year. Feel bad for Ben. You know, he's a big Milwaukee Bucks fan and they're about to ditch you on us. The Milwaukee Bucks, that's sports team? Really? I don't know. Yeah. I do know it's a basketball team.

I do know that it's Ben Thompson's favorite team. He was talking about the Applevision Pro. Yesterday we didn't know when the Super Bowl was. He was talking about the Applevision Pro. I wanted to demo, you know, you can watch the NBA live. Yeah, basically Ben's pitch was like screw the, screw the Apple highly produced, you know, they're cutting around all the time and he's like, just invest the money to set up like the actual hardware in every single stadium. The cameras. The cameras so that anybody can just drop in.

So you can just sit there, watch the game like your court side. You don't need the, you don't need the Apple announcer because you can just look at the scoreboard. you can listen to what's going on. So he's saying strip the guys out of it. Yeah. Look, I watched it. It was great. You watched the whole thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Trust me, people at home are not happy that night. Oh, yeah. You put that thing on. Crying baby. Crying baby.

And then you're completely isolated. I mean, I'm telling you, VR does not work for families. It's true. Yeah. It just doesn't. It's really, yeah, it is one of the major. Because then, I mean, the family people have the disposable income more likely. So then they buy it, but they can't use it.

It doesn't work. Okay, here's the problem. It's like once a month. They've got like five games on the calendar. And that was Ben's point is like just set up the infrastructure and sell me a pass so that I can drop into any game and sit courtside. Because right now they have to pull up with a production truck. They need editors.

They need voiceovers. They need pregame posting show. He's saying like there's basically one time fixed cost of like he did the math. Put them in all the NBA. Yeah. He said it's like 40 grand. It's like not like a huge amount of money. And you have no incremental cost per.

show. You're not dealing with producers and running a live, you know, program. But they need to decide if this hardware is going to continue to exist before they keep investing in the content strategy, right? It's a chicken and the egg problem, right? How do you sell this thing if there's no content? But why invest millions in the content if you're not playing and sell this thing anyways, and you're pivoting to smart classes? Don't forget, they were supposed to come out with the Vision Air in 27, product called N-100. I forgot when my article came out. I forgot when my article came out. It's times a blur. A few months ago, six months ago.

Anyways, they killed that thing. We killed it entirely. Killed it. They shocked the vision team on that, by the way. The smart glasses, was that just completely reactionary to meta? Oh, yeah. They started toying with the smart glasses

in terms of like this non-AR smart glasses, right? First of all, AR smart glasses, that has been the vision from day one for a decade plus. But in terms of like this non-display smart glasses, that is a concept that meta has really popularized. And, you know, when these things started to gain a little bit of steam in 22, 23 is when they started taking a very hard look at it. And they're going to do it. And I think they're going to destroy meta with them, I'll be honest.

Yeah. Is it the styling, the pricing, the features, the integration? The integration, to me, to me, the challenge is if you can't deliver me, I message. Yeah. Apple has the ingredients because of their log. to destroy any company in any hardware. It's just about them figuring out how to do it and get it done and not waiting too long.

You know, the biggest problem with them is they just take too long and over-engineer everything. Like the Vision Pro is the most over-engineered device ever, right? They could have got that out three years earlier with a little bit less fit and finish, and maybe it would be more successful today. Yeah, yeah. It does feel like there was a cycle where the iPhone

was ahead of the curve on so many things, touchscreen, and then you, then in the, like, that middle decade period, you had the Android folks being like, oh, we've had this Apple feature for a year. We've had this for two years. Now it's like five years. You know how many people wouldn't be caught dead with a non-Iphone? You know, like, it doesn't matter. But AI changes that equation.

Sure. That changes the equation. Especially if it's a Johnny Ive product and it's expensive. Well, you know, Johnny Ive, obviously, he's done amazing things. And the new headphones or whatever they come out with are going to, look amazing and probably work amazing. It's just the barrier to entry on hardware is so high. There's so

much risk there. Yeah. I just, I still wonder if the Claudebot, these open source agents, I don't know that everyone's going to adopt those, but something like that that sort of opens up the ecosystem just by brute forcing it. We were debating this earlier. Like, you can't get iMessage notifications

on the meta rate ban displays. I have them. Do you guys have them? I think we do have a pair. We have some pairs around. I've got one at home. We've used the, the, the non-display is a bunch, and then we demoed the displays and used them a fair amount.

And it's just a hard sell if you're an IMessage user. The hard sell if you're an IMessage user, but the potential is just oozing with potential. Yeah. Like they've got a solid product there. And like a couple iterations on that, make them a little lighter,

get the display resolution up, work better outdoors. Yeah. It's compelling. And in a world where you have some sort of agent running on your Mac Mini, scraping all your eye messages and then putting them into WhatsApp or something. You know, maybe I'll do that.

Maybe you guys will do that. It's rare. It's rare. Nobody wants to deal with that. Yeah. You know, nobody wants to deal with that. Even if it's just an app that you download like Napster, you don't think so. People don't have time for that.

Yeah. People don't care. Probably not. Probably not. What? I feel like nobody cares about anything anymore. You know? I just feel like, back in my day, we used to care.

We used to care. The world has changed. Yeah. All of those changed. They just want everything in front of them. They want everything in their. their eyeballs. They all want it set up from the get-go. They don't want to put any work in. They just want it to start working, right? And I think that's been the Apple ethos from the

beginning, which is just like give people what they need, let it get up and running, and not deal with any of the BS. What's going on in China? A lot's going on in China. With Apple. Are they shutting down more stores? Shutting down more stores? No, not that I know of. I don't see Apple just shutting stores at this point. I think the retail arm still is extremely profitable and successful. All the shutdowns But in China, there's less of the, you're not, somebody's not embarrassed to not be using an iPhone. Problem, yes. The problem is, is that Apple hasn't done anything bespoke for the Chinese market.

The competitiveness there is just unbelievably, just, it's amazing. It's like no other part of the world. Are there compelling AI hardware integration? Yes, yes. I mean, I mentioned the robotic thing. I mentioned, well, like the follables are taking over the universe there, right? And so, you know, Apple's an American company launching American devices, European devices, and they're trying to shoehorned into the Chinese market,

and they've never really done anything just for the Chinese market or built around the Chinese market. What about the sock? Okay, maybe that was, I mean, I don't know. But why, why? It's such a massive market. Why not? Because they're a global company. But I think the foldable is going to do extremely well in China.

You know, it might do better in China than it does here. I don't know. I'll be having one. I'll tell you that much right now. What's the future of the iPhone Air? It's like the price difference. Sam Altman's got one. Great.

But he doesn't care about money. The price difference. He just breaks it and buys a new one. He doesn't get paid by Open AI. He's probably got both. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he doesn't get paid.

Yeah. The iPhone Air and the iPhone Pro, it's like negligible pricing-wise. It's the same price if you get the battery pack. Oh, yeah. Right? It's like 99, 99 plus 100. Sure. Right.

You're going to get the battery pack. Yeah. So, I don't know. Like, you look at the features comparison. You look at the cameras. I mean, most people are going to always pick the pro over the air. There needs to be more of a price gap between the two. And eventually, you know, those two lines are going to.

emerge. It can take five years, but eventually you're going to be able to get a pro as thin as an air or an air with the same bells and whistles as a pro. I mean, you look at the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air today from a perform. These are different laptops and they're exactly the same. Yeah, so what? You've got the air. The air, he's got the pro, and there I don't. It's the same thing because the chips, right? The big differences between the two are, it's a little lighter, okay? The display is terrible on that thing compared to that thing. Like if you, if You use, like, I tried out the 15-inch MacBook Air, okay? Yeah.

The thing is sleek and slick and awesome. Yeah. But, like, I've been ruined visually by how amazing the display is on the MacBook Pro. Okay. Maybe I've got an upgrade. Okay. And so, you know, you have to think about the different changes. Yeah, yeah.

You want to talk about big things happening at Apple this year. It's that new MacBook Pro. Yeah. Right? You got the O-led. You got the thinner. You got the touch. Okay.

Cannot wait to drop $4,000 on that thing. It's going to be a touchscreen. Yeah. I cannot wait to get my fingerprints. all over. If somebody's looking at my computer and they touch the screen, I'm just like...

Isn't it the worst thing ever? Like, I... You got to be carrying a polishing cloth. You got to be carrying the Apple official polishing cloth. 20 bucks. You know, just 20? I thought it was like 75 or something. Well, Apple makes a Pixar lamp

that just kind of polishes your touchscreen. That'd be great in AI for screen cleaning. Yeah. Yeah, you know, the Apple polishing cloth, they got so much, you know, flack for that thing. you would think that it was $75, but it was $20. Come to think of it, like, it's really not that big of a deal.

Also, I know someone who is OCD and is obsessed with keeping their screen perfectly clean. And I was like, what's the secret? Like, you must have some secret formula, like Windex or something that you're using. And he was like, no, just the apple polishing cloth. It's the one that works. You know what, I need to get one of those. I was like, that's glowing. You know, one did come with my Vision Pro.

Yeah. There you go. They threw one in as a bonus. Isn't that nice of them? That's so nice of them. You know, $3499 you get a free polishing cloth. That's $20 off. Yeah, maybe the Ternus narrative can center around, like, as the models commoditize,

like the hardware becomes more important. You want to be able to run different models locally. And so pushing that, like the hardware's great, the chips are great. Yeah. The software, I'll even tell you is maybe not, it's between good and great. Sure. Okay, I'm not going to say it's only good. Sure.

I'm not going to say it's as great as the hardware. Yeah. But it's good enough. Yeah. How's that? The AI is like the worst in the industry. Yeah, but I mean, right now you're seeing people go out and buy Mac minis to run AI. Okay, let's think about it.

You see these people on Twitter doing that, right? How many extra Mac minis do you think were sold because of all this jazz? I would guess, I would put the over under on 500 units. 500? Nah. I thought it was 10,000. You see it on Instagram. There's 40,000 GitHub stars.

Okay, if it's on Instagram, maybe I'm wrong. Yeah. So there's 40,000 GitHub stars. It's clearly a big meat. 60. Maybe it's in the 1,000. But yes, I mean, it's a quarter million a quarter or something like that. And I think so much of it is just performative.

Go on the Apple online store. No, people go to the Mac Mini. They're in stock. Are they all in stock? They're in stock. Look at the ship dates. Funny thing, two weeks ago, I go to the Pasadena, I go to the Pasadena Mac store.

You know what's out of stock? Apple Vision pros. What? To me, a lot of the buying, I think, is purely status-oriented and just signaling. On the AVP? No, no, selling the Mac Mini. and people just saying, I want a signal that I'm AI native

and I'm at the... They're going to use it for two weeks. Yeah, yeah. And then forget about it. I think that's going to be a real thing. I mean, how many people actually need to live in these type of workflows? Not many, just the hackers.

Which is a niche community. It's a niche community. It's a great community. But it has made me think maybe I should start using Apple's native file system and actually bring my data out of the cloud, out of drive, and store it locally. You don't need to because Cloudbot will go and access your cloud.

So what's the deal with the Mac Mini? It's shipping. Order now, pick up in store today. It's available. Order by 3pm delivers two hours from the store. They haven't been all the stores. It has, yeah, it's everywhere. They're widely available.

They're widely available. So maybe I am right. Available tomorrow at the Americana brand. Today, it's the Apple, Glendale. It's literally available at every. Apple store. Yeah, yeah. I think that's it?

Yeah. Yeah. And so it doesn't take that many if they're projecting out, hey, we're going to sell. It's not like they, I would imagine they don't have all of them that they're going to sell this year sitting in stock already. I'm curious how the Mac quarter is going to go tomorrow, right? Like, there might be a little bit of a drag on that. Yeah, what should people pay attention to? Well, the China number, to your point.

the iPhone number is basically everything tomorrow, right? Either they grow 10% as they say they will or they won't. Either Tim Cook gets to keep his job or he doesn't. But you think about the product, right? Like, they didn't do much iPad or Mac last year, right? This year is going to be the biggest year for the Mac in a long time. New MacBook Pro is about to launch. same design as those ones with the faster chips.

You've got the iPhone chip-powered, low-cost MacBook, which is going to destroy PCs and Chromebooks and be like just an utter game changer. You've got the touchscreen MacBook Pro end of year. You've got a refresh Mac Mini. You've got a refresh Mac Studio. You've got the M6 chip. You've got the first new monitors from Apple in four years.

Where will those sit? The monitors? Yeah. In terms of... They'll sit on my desk. I'll take it. Yeah, sure. But is it going to displace the studio or the pro-XDR?

The one I know about is going to replace the studio. But there's a new XDR also. Oh, okay. Yeah. Because the XDR remarkably long-term. Like, I cannot believe how. Why is there no camera on that thing? Because it was created 15 years ago.

Like, it was so old. And you go and you look at like, you could YouTube, search for the pro pro display xDR right now and there's guarantee a new video why you should buy one in 2026 it's still good in 2026 like it's still the best option i mean the display is just remarkable it's just amazing that it didn't commoditize fast what do you guys using here i see oh the we're mostly studios we don't have a lot of xDRs and it but we have been eyeing that new dell monitor that michael dell has been rapaciously pumping i saw on twitter yeah it's amazing why uh so enthusiast about that thing you i'm sure you've answered this a hundred times and i'm sorry

but why would they never do a TV? Is it just commodity space? Commodity, margin, differentiator. You don't think people would happily spend... They're going to buy a Pixar lamp before they buy a TV. You walk in. Oh, you got the Apple TV? I've heard that's good.

As somebody who's like, you know, been an Apple... I can't describe myself as an Apple fanboy anymore, but as a teenager and a kid, I was, right? What the hell happened? The photos. The photos. It just like, you know, a 20-year relationship just over. But I do think there's enough people out in the world that if you made it, if you made the $10,000 TV, that they would buy it.

You know, the... Because when I'm buying a computer, a TV, sure, it's different, but when I'm buying a computer, it's not... The upgrade cycle. Look at the premium on the Samsung frame TVs. That was amazing. line off the shelves and they're not better than an LG. So my TV in my living room, I bought in 18.

Yeah. What are we in 26 now? Eight years. Yeah, but Apple would figure out a way to deprecate the hardware. It's what they do. They're the best in the world out. If they did, they would do it. Yeah.

They were, they were. They're like, Tim's like, where's my TV? He's like, sir, we haven't found a way to deprecate the hardware in 18 months. They got pretty down the road on TV about 10 years ago. And then they killed that thing. They had teams working on it. It was a big deal. Yeah.

But then they went off and did a car and went off and did a Vision Pro. Like, if you think about, like, their two big moonshots over the last decade, they were both utter failures. The car, obviously, is just like your quintessential failure. Yeah, pretty much. But, you know, they did get some good stuff out of it, right? Like, I would say the saving grace for Apple's AI, and you've said this a few times now,

has been the AI chip and the AI hardware. The only reason they have an AI chip, the neural engine they launched in 2017, was because of the Apple car. That was designed to power the AI. needed for a self-driving car and they shrunk it down for the phone. So if the Apple Car project didn't get ignited, you know, back in 2014-15, they would be even further behind an AI than they are today. And so give a shout out to the Apple Car team.

Legend. Let's go. And you know, I'm still pulling for an Apple car with a naturally aspirated V-12. Can you imagine? It would be crazy. Real-wheel drive. Gated manual.

Gated manual. I think they would have just destroyed Tesla if they just didn't set their bar so high when we talk about over-engineering. Can you imagine like a model Y or a model three or even an S, whatever, just like with that Apple interior and the Apple ecosystem and the Apple interface? Like why did they have to go bananas, remove the steering wheel, remove the pedals, and everyone facing each other, like, why'd they have to go toll? They overshot it.

Why'd they have to go like all Apple on us? Yep. Right? Like, why couldn't they just do, just do a car? Yeah. Just be a luxury brand. Just be a luxury brand. Would have been amazing.

Yeah. And we got a sock instead. You got a sock instead. Those were the two choices. The sock project shipped, okay? So you got to give it up a sock. And you know what? That was a success.

Yes. Sold out. Got people talking. Yeah. You know, we did a review of the sock on Bloomberg. Yeah. And people ate that thing up. People love it.

They love it. That's great. Where's your song? Smash it down the table. I've got socks. I've got, you know what I have? I've got sushi socks on right now. Oh, no way.

He's a sushi fan. No, not from Apple. No, no, your favorite restaurant in the valley. No, no. These are from my mother-in-law. That's fantastic. We kept you much longer. But thank you so much.

This is so much fun. I'm so glad you're in L.A. Do I get to do the gong? Of course. Hit the gong. Give us a number. How long you've been writing? How long you've been following Apple?

Writing since 2009. 09. O'9. There we go. Hit the gong. There you go. With authority. The germinator.

Live on TV. Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Let's see this. Yeah. We'll be following your coverage tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. Lock in, everyone.

And let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. I was so close to hitting an ad read during that. I held myself back, so I'm giving myself too. I'm going to tell you about vibe.com, where D2C brands, B2B, startups, and AI companies, advertise and streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on meta. And we have another guest in person live in the TVP and Ultra.

We are my best. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Please grab a seat. I think Mark German took his Diet Coke, but you're welcome to one of mine if you get thirsty. But please introduce yourself for everyone who might be watching. Yeah. So thanks so much for having me.

My name is Miles Brundage. I lead a new organization called Avery. It's called, it stands for AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute. And the basic idea is that AI is becoming critical infrastructure, and, you know, everyone is depending on it. But we don't really, like, make sure that it's safe and secure the way that we, you know, audit critical infrastructure. And, you know, we need something analogous to the cybersecurity industry, which popped up to kind of make the Internet secure. We need that for AI systems. How many emails have you sent to Peter from Multibot in the last 48 hours?

I haven't, actually. Because you were on the show yesterday, he was like, his number one thing was like, he's like, I need some. somebody to just handle the inbound from security researchers. I just can't. Not even multi-bot can handle processing all the inbound. Yeah, yeah, security researchers are quite interested in that. But yeah, so the basic ideas, you know, we're kind of like a think tank. They're just trying to figure out how to build that new industry.

We think that, you know, it's good for improving safety and security outcomes if you have this rigorous auditing, specifically frontier AI systems. We're not so much focused on kind of the downstream. How do we make sure that this is infrastructure, the whole society can rely on? and not have to rely on companies doing their own kind of testing or kind of like, oh, do I trust the CEO's vibe? Like, that's not a good basis for trust in a technology. And so, you know, we just kind of launched recently and we're, you know, kind of excited to talk about our work. So it's a nonprofit. Yep. For now. Are we thinking for a profit? I've been through, you know, enough, you know,

what one kind of controversial nonprofit to for a for profit transition was enough for my life. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Talk to us about how your breaking down. I mean, the issue of just AI security, a safety, you can go so many different directions from, you know, the GPT-40 psychosis to fake news to paper clips and gray goo and, you know, a thousand years in the future. What is, what's most interesting to talk about, what's the most important to talk about? There's also just like security issues, as we see in the moldbop thing. Yeah, so we kind of break it up in a four category.

So there's kind of unintended system behaviors, and so that includes. things like hallucinations, you know, on the, you know, on the kind of more extreme ends, like big misalignment, deception type, type things where the, where the AI system is kind of taking actions that are unaligned with the user's intent. And then there's misuse of the AI systems themselves. So kind of, you know, someone trying to carry out a cyber attack with Claude, which, you know, has been confirmed to occur, you know, Anthropics was like, hey, like, you know, people connected to the Chinese government are doing this. So very real issue. The third category is what we call emergent social phenomena. So that's kind of like kind of emergent interactions between,

you know, the human and the AI that lead to these like psychosis, psychosis, addiction, you know, kind of like, you know, degraded and kind of like learning, those kinds of things. And, you know, these are all kind of different categories, but ultimately, you know, you should look at all of them. And then the fourth category is kind of, you know, normal security issues. And so that includes tampering with AI systems theft of AIIP, which, you know, there have been a couple confirmed cases of that, like, you know. Kimmy's introducing. Let's talk about Kimmy.

What's going on there? Are you about today on the story? So people are saying that, that, you know, there was some kind of like theft of, like, the model. It seems to me, like, the more likely explanation would be kind of one of two things. One is distillation. Like, they're kind of, you know, they sampled from the, you know, the Cloud API. And the other is just that there's a lot of samples already on the Internet. And so they did kind of general scraping.

And then, you know, the way that these systems often work is they've read a bunch of stuff from the Internet. and they're kind of selecting a persona of like, okay, what kind of thing am I? And like they see a bunch of stuff on the internet where like AI type things are saying, I'm Claude, I'm chat GPT, and it'll just like default into that persona. Yeah, the feedback loop of the pre-training, now that we have an internet that is aware of AI and LLMs is fascinating. I keep thinking about that New York Times interaction between, who was it? It was a New York Times reporter who wrote about interacting with GPT4 in. Microsoft and he was like mean to it. And then that that article obviously was very well shared. And so it got

baked in the pre-training. He says that now if I go to a new LLM and it finds out who I am, it's like sort of adversarial. So this is weird. And I've noticed, I've noticed, you know, it's really a, what is it, the Rocco's basilisk a little bit? Like I've noticed that I'll go to LLMs and because I write a lot on the internet and I'm obviously live stream and there's transcripts all over the place, that they pick up on who I am and what I do much quicker than I think most people. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to be anonymous. You say thank you?

I do not. But I'm also not mean either. I'm kind of like a neutral actor when it comes to, like I don't say thank you, but I'm also not like braiding them. So when I did that thing the other day when everyone's like, oh, like ask chat GPT, like, you know, what is like, you know, like, oh, make an image of what your experience is, like being my, like assistant or whatever. It was like a, it was like a, it was like a cozy, like sitting in a chair, like reading a book

or whatever. So it was not like, oh, I'm abused or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Talk about where you want to take the output of the work. Obviously, think tank, I think Washington policymakers, but also there's a feedback loop of if you put out a really insightful statement or analysis, the labs might absorb that directly. Who's the main audience? Yeah, so we're trying to be kind of a hub for various stakeholders, so not just policymakers. You know, some other key ones are, as you mentioned, AI companies themselves.

both upstream, the frontier AI developers, also downstream, like enterprise customers might want to know that, you know, they might be like, oh, well, I had meetings with, you know, Sam and Dario and so forth. But like I want, you know, I'm about to make a $10 billion kind of contract. Like I want something more substantive, investors, insurers. And so that's one of the things that, you know, we just put out a big analysis with various folks on, you know, how do you drive demand for this auditing, you know, make sure that it's high quality. And, you know, I think some of the, the, like, most honest signals, so to speak, come from the private sector more so than regulation. Like I'm pro some kinds of regulation, but like in some sense, insurers are a great case where their incentives are very aligned to not kind of misprice the risk, and they might, you know, be supporters of high quality audits. And in fact, like one of our donors is the AI underwriting company, which is like one of the other players. I know you had Testudo recently. They're like one of the other players. Sure, sure, sure, yeah. So the, even though a big tech company might come to you to read an analysis, they're not the ones that are actually funding the nonprofit.

It's from a more display. So we're trying to avoid like depending on, you know, depending on industry too much. Although like, you know, very pro, they're being kind of like companies that are making money off of this and kind of selling their services to industry as long as they're good disclosures of conflicts of interest and so forth. But we, we, you know, since we're a think tank, since we're doing a lot of policy analysis, we want to be kind of as, as pure as possible. So we don't have any majority donors. So far we haven't taken any cash from frontier AI companies. We do take API credits so that we can kind of like, you know, audit.

Their systems also kind of like, you know, use, you know, opening eyes models to assess anthropics and vice versa, that kind of thing. So we have like, you know, six frontieri developers who've provided credits. Cool. What about, I've been grappling with this fact that when the AI safety question came up, it was driven. And Dario touched on this on his essay, how it was driven a lot by these, like, sci-fi doom scenarios.

And I think a lot of people in tech sort of looked at AI as a tool, sort of incremental, okay, yeah, it's auto-complete, it's knowledge retrieval, it's Google search, whatever. And then we wound up getting AI safety issues, but they manifested in very different ways than what was actually predicted. No one was predicting the GPT psychosis necessarily or some of the other things. People were predicting, oh, this will, like, swing the election and drive. Like, everyone will be falling for fake news. Videos that are fake, they do go out, but they get debunked pretty quickly.

Like, I feel like we've responded pretty well to that. But then there's been a whole other host. So how do you think about the timeline of risk and how you want to, how far you want to look into the future? Yeah. So, you know, the way that we think about it is that, you know, on the one hand, like, you know, people at my organization, Avery have various perspectives on these things. Like, I personally am on the, like, AI is going very quickly. and we could see some crazy stuff very soon.

Sure. End of the spectrum, but I don't think you need to believe that in order to be pro, you know, AI auditing. I think, you know, if you just kind of compare AI to, you know, other normal technologies and people sometimes say, like, well, AI is not this supernatural thing. It's a normal technology.

Well, a lot of those normal technologies are audited for safety. Like if you buy a power bank, it probably has been, you know, audited against, like, you know, underwriters' laboratory standards for electrical safety. So, you know, it doesn't catch on fire and stuff like that. And so I think, like, even just getting to the, normal technology, you know, level would be an improvement. And then, you know, the case for auditing is, like, even more crazy if you're like, okay, someone could take over the world with

this. Yeah, that makes sense. What were the biggest points that you agreed with in the Dario essay? Was there anything you wanted to push back on? I mean, I would love to hear more about auditing as one of, you know, anthropics policy platforms. But I, you know, but, you know, more seriously, I'm directionally broadly agree. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm maybe not the target audience as someone who, you know, has written and read a zillion kind of like, these are the three, five big issues and AI risks and here's what to do about them. So like broadly I agree with, this is very serious stuff and, you know, we should take this seriously. Jordy? How are you, how do you, yesterday we were talking about the risk of, I think people talk about sort of agentic AI systems

and sort of getting on some runaway path where it's taking out. actions out of the world. And I don't know if there's enough discussion around maybe how an AI system like that could actually recruit everyday humans, potentially millions of people to kind of like join their cause. How are you looking at that risk in the context of overall AI psychosis, right? Do you already have a good point about like the just turn it off doesn't work if there's like 10,000 people that are like camped out on top of the data center? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I haven't thought so much about the kind of like recruiting angle, but what I will say is that it is important to audit not just like the models themselves, but also like how are they used? Do these platforms have good

practices for like detecting if there's some crazy shenanigans like that going on? And I mean, just, you know, an example, you know, this, this Claude code thing where it was being used by these Chinese hackers, that's like not, like the individual interactions were okay, you know, because they were basically like decomposing the prompt in like various subcomponents that are benign. And this was kind of like a known issue in the research was like, well, you know, if the model is just refusing stuff that looks like it's obviously malware or whatever, then, you know, that's one thing. But if the user kind of breaks it down into small chunks, then that's a big problem. And so you kind of... And the risk is, if you say, like, it's going to be easy to make it refuse to say, build me a bioweapon.

But if I ask just like, how do I learn about pipette? And then how do I, how do I learn about this particular step? And it doesn't know. Yeah. And potentially, like, across multiple accounts. And so, like, how do you kind of stop that in a way that is kind of, like, you know, preserves privacy, obviously? Not even just multiple accounts, but multiple models. Models.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, it's like, it's a super hard problem. And, yeah, I mean, I would say, like, I'm interested. And again, like, you know, I think it might be that we need to kind of just accept that, like, models, you know, more than, like, a year old or so, like, given how fast kind of things get cheaper and get open source, like, we should just assume they will be, like, maximally misuse in the worst. possible way and just focus on like the very newest ones. But you know, for the very newest ones, I think, you know, we need to get better at detecting those sorts of things. Because right now, some of the companies will say, we found this stuff. Other companies, it's not so clear that they are actually like trying to. So politicians have focused in on the sort of risk or reality

of rising energy costs. Are you frustrated that so much of their attention is on that versus some of these other issues? I mean, I think the, I think the, I think the energy costs. I think the, energy costing is more of a real thing than the water kind of issue. And so, like, I don't think it's crazy to worry about that. But, but, yeah, it's certainly taking up mental bandwidth and, and just, like, dominating the narrative when maybe there's kind of bigger, bigger risk. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, my, you know, the things that I personally focus on are like, you know,

there should be some kind of, you know, articulation of what, what counts as safe enough or secure enough. Like, and, you know, there's starting to be things like this in, you know, California and New York that say, okay, you know, you know, they don't say exactly how safe, but at least you should share, you know, whether you've measured catastrophic risks and share that you have a safety and, you know, a security policy. Like eventually we should kind of ratchet up the standard there, but, you know, some set of standards, then you need some evidence that people are actually following those standards, and that's where auditing comes in. That's where kind of, you know,

kind of transparency and publishing system cards, those kind of things come in, and you need some set of incentives. So to like make sure that people actually, you know, face some penalty. And so doing all that in a way that doesn't crush, you know, small businesses and focuses on, you know, the very frontier of the AIS systems. That's kind of what my focus is, more so than the energy stuff. What is an actual good audit or benchmark look like? You can't just do like bad stuff per million tokens, I assume. How do you actually get to some sort of quantitative metric that's tractable, understandable, but still valuable and not gamable? Yeah, so we're kind of going through this transition right now from the earlier period

where, like, the strongest safety case you can make was, you know, what people call an inability argument. It's like the model's too dumb to be worth worrying about in cybersecurity or bio. And so, like, kind of just, like, show that it's too dumb. That was kind of, like, the early wave of safety analysis. And, like, we're starting to move into the world where actually, like, have you taught it to behave well? And, like, let's just assume that it's capable because they're getting very capable,

are the mitigations good? And then it's mitigations at the model level, like refusing stuff. There's mitigations at the system level. Like you have a classifier outside the model that kind of like block certain outputs and so forth. There's kind of at the platform level like detecting, you know, multiple fraudulent accounts

that are, you know, coordinated and kind of like trying to steal the, you know, kind of like trying to distill the model and so forth. So those are the kinds of things that, you know, they're starting to be work. Like, for example, there are organizations like Meter and Apollo research. secure bio, translucent, et cetera,

that are kind of looking at different aspects of that. But right now it's like largely voluntary. And, you know, they're, they often only look at a very small subset of those risks. They're not really looking at the full, the full gamut. Very cool. Well, congratulations on the launch.

I want to ring the gong. Right here, right here. Right here. We love an AI nonprofit. Thank you so much. We're coming on down to the TV pit Ultrona. Let me tell you about, Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest,

securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. That's right. We have some slight changes to the linear lineup. We're shifting some folks around. There's some breaking news. We're going to bring on different guests. We're starting our lightning round at 1.30.

But in the meantime, we can continue through the timeline. Does that sound good, Jordy? Sounds great. Bubble Boy is talking about Claudebot in the race for Mac minis a bit over the last few days. I think it's become a very scary phenomenon, very scary realization that explains this crazy phenomenon. Put simply, building a gaming PC will be nearly impossible in the next five years. In fact, it already is for the vast majority of consumers, but I will go one step further. In the next 10 years, having any type of personal computing device will be unattainable.

Fab capacity will be allocated to its most productive and profitable use, which is cloud and AI data centers. Even today, most of the software you run already won't work without an internet connection, but now with the opportunity cost being so high, consumers will be shafted, and the only option will be moving to the cloud. It's looking increasingly like the only hardware you will have is some terminal that connects to the cloud with no workloads running directly on your own hardware. Your device will just have the most basic single-core processor and four gigs of RAM at most. That probably sounds like the specs on the sweet pea, AirPods, or whatever the...

Open AI AirPods are. What's interesting is I was digging into the the amount of leading edge capacity at FABs like TSMC that are currently dedicated to AI workloads or creating GPUs that can run AI workloads and it's about 50% right now. It's about 5050. So TSM obviously FABs and video chips and TPC, obviously FABs Nvidia chips and TPUs, I believe, but also they do Apple Silicon, which is not really used for, you know, frontier LLMs in the cloud. The question is like, how much more can the frontier AI labs eat into that? Is it just a bidding process? And if Nvidia goes to TSM and says, hey, we want to buy 80% of your capacity and you've got to tell Apple to take a hike,

would they actually do that? TSM has been a little more conservative, Ben Thompson's been writing about this a lot, that TSM has been a little bit slower to invest the CAPEX to build the next AI fab, or the next frontier fab, because it's something like $50 billion in CAPX. And if the AI trend sort of slows down, they could be caught holding the bag since this is a multi-year buildout. But it's interesting that the energy narrative, we are constrained on energy, but we're only using like 1% of energy in the West on, AI and data centers that can power AI. We're using like 50% of our FAB capacity on AI.

Crank up both, but one requires actual building of new capacity if you want to see an order of magnitude increase. The other requires, if you want to see an order of magnitude increase in energy, going from 1% to 10% of energy used for AI, you can just slide chips around the board. Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with the bubble voice. Like even stuff like gaming. Yeah. Like on the MetaQuest, Xbox Edition,

like, there's no actual, like, you're not playing the game on the device. It's, like, streaming. Yeah. So I think this is, like, very, I think this is, like, definitely true. Yeah. It goes into cloud.

Yeah. And so, like, it's, the interesting thing is that it's sort of, like, the you will own nothing and be happy thing. Like, the average consumer might just be happy with that because they're like, yeah, it works. I don't care where the workload happens. Of course, like the George Hots of the world

want the tiny box. They want to be able to run it permissionlessly. They want to be able to run their own model. And there's always been different as well. Yeah, yeah, not your keys, not your coins, that whole movement. There's always been a lot of debate around, you know, the sovereignty of your individuality. And I think that will continue. And I think that the, I don't think the Mac Mini is going to go out of stock.

I think that many of the trends in Apple hardware availability will continue. And I think Apple has a lot of leverage. at the USMC to continue manufacturing their devices. While we were talking with the Germanator and Miles, the Fed announced they voted to keep rates steady for the first meeting of 2026. This was predicted by Kalshi. So no real surprises here.

Yeah, we were tracking the Kalshi market on this because there was that big back and forth with Jerome Powell. We were playing the We Are Jerome Powell song. and it seemed like there was an incredible amount of pressure to to pressure Jerome Powell into potentially cutting rates. It seems like the guidance is that there will not be a rate cut. And there was another piece in the journal about some of the forerunners

for the next chair of the Fed. There's four people that were in the running that I saw, but none of them were completely like the chainsaw. Trump has basically said there's a bit some problems with each of them. Yeah. And he also says, I'm worried that when I'm interviewing them, they're going to say one thing and then be a little bit more independent once they take the job. And also it's a balancing act because if you install someone who is not, who doesn't bring credibility to the market, you don't get the desired outcome.

So you can't just have someone that cuts rates to negative 50%, as some people might like. 11 labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. Meta also reported earnings. Yes. The beat on bottom line and top line. Stock is up 4% after hours, expanding 2026 KAPX, what I'm seeing. I'm trying to get up to speed here.

Tesla had reported earnings as well. What's Tesla doing? Tesla saw negative revenue growth, I believe, for the first time. but the stock is up 3.7% after hours. And Microsoft also beat consensus on top and bottom lines. And the conference call starts at 2.30 in just about an hour. Shares fell 4% extended trading Wednesday after the software maker posted slowing cloud growth. They did beat...

But a nice little markup on OpenAI. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Exclude impacts. Okay. We'll try to put together some more information here in the near future. We did need to give a shout out to Colin and Samir. We went on their podcast at the end of the year.

We sat down, talked about... They posted the full two hours. They ripped the full two hours on X. I wasn't sure. So Colin Samir have a number of very interesting formats. They have a podcast feed. I watched a recent video that they put out. It was like, you know, 10 lessons.

It was almost like a YouTube video trailer for a full episode. And I was wondering, like, we talked a lot about a lot of things. How, yeah, what will this actually land? How will they edit it? What will they be thinking? Grid to see the full hour and 50 minutes up on the timeline. I love it. Oh, they got Max Sparrow in there.

This is a nice little intro. I like this edit. Yeah, it's quite nice. So go check it out. Super fun conversation. We love those guys. Yeah, us talking about our business, the business of media,

the next chapter. Our anti-scale strategy. Yeah. Some stuff we've mentioned here. And we have a surprise guest today. We do. The new NeoLab Flappy Airplanes. It's going to be joining the founder,

Aiden, has been on the show before. Yeah, during the Teal fellowship. So excited to have him back on and get the update there. Yeah. Emily. Before we move on to Emily Sundberg, I got to tell you about Ockon. Octa, Ocda helps you assign every AI agent, a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent.

Yes. Very Weiss. Everything she says internally, immediately becomes external messaging. A tough, tough job. But she put in, she was talking with the team and saying she wants to put a huge emphasis on scoops. This is about CBS. CBS, yes, not. So she's the editor.

at CBS, but she was acquired in through the free press. So the free press is operating, the CBS is operating, and there's an effort to sort of merge the two. Free press, obviously, very fast-moving startup culture, CBS has been around for decades. So the quote that has hit the timeline is, Barry Weiss also said that the network CBS will now put a huge emphasis on scoops, but not scoops

that expire minutes later, but in the very investigative scoops and crucially, and crucially, scoops of ideas, scoops of explanation. This is where we can soar and where we'll be investing. She continued. People are roasting this, but I think one fires me up. Yeah. Also, you just look at the modern media landscape. There are a lot of scoops of ideas that are, they create these, like, everyone watch that

podcast. Everyone is repeating that idea from that person. set the tone. They introduced this concept, this philosophy, this thesis. They unpacked it for two hours exclusively in this one place. You got to go there to get it. Yeah, and it starts a conversation that wasn't happening. It's not just like, here's some fact that then immediately get copy and paste it everywhere. Totally. That's what you talk about, scoops that are expiring. It's not about you have to start a conversation that wasn't. Yeah, I mean, I go to Dwarcash Patel, the Leopold Dachanbrenner, you know, it wasn't a scoop, I guess, but situational awareness was

posted as a PDF, but also, you know, made available in a multi-hour sit-down podcast where he unpacked those ideas that flew around. That started a conversation about where AI is going, its impact on the financial markets. Andre Carpathie, same thing, on Dorcas. There's been a number of things where certain ideas, certain scoops, certain explanations have recontextualized things. And I think that CBS has the production horsepower to bring a really polished product together. But if there's something that's been already revealed, the facts are out,

and then you just do, you're reinstantiating on CBS. That's not like must watch necessarily for the modern media consumer. So I don't know. I think it's a reasonable thing to say, even if it's sort of a funny phrase. Keep running through the timeline. I'll be right back. Okay, so Miles says that when Google hit a $500 billion valuation, they had $90 billion in revenue and $20 billion in profit. Open AI is raising at $800 billion with $30 billion in estimated revenue in $20,000, and negative $30 billion in free cash flow.

Anthropic is raising at $500 billion with $20 billion in $206 revenue and negative $15 billion in free cash flow. Was Google just free money? Why did these price so differently? mainly growth rate, let's see. Miles says Google is growing at 20% at 90 billion in revenue with significantly better quality of revenue and had profits. Yeah, but I mean, Anthropic and Open AI are growing at 1,000% or 500% or 300%. The growth rate really does matter. And I don't know, maybe there's some sort of, you know, excitement just around the AI bubble. But Tyler, what do you think?

Anthropic at 500 with 20 billion in 2026 revenue and negative $15 billion in free cash flow. They've 10xed it like three times. I could see a few more 10xes. I agree. I can see Open AI. Yeah. A couple more 10xes. I agree.

Deep mind. Yeah. I want to see Demison in the hot seat. Yes. You know, like two or three more 10xes. He's CEO. Oh, yeah. For sure.

I want him up there. Yeah. Get him up there. I still think it's so funny that he was like, we're not doing ads. It's like, that's the easiest lay up to be like, we'll do. it when we're going to do it. I don't know. Yeah. Also, like, he is actively being funded by ads. Yeah, and they did put out that, they did put out that note that Google's AI-powered search is now powered by Gemini 3 Pro, right? And then they've also monetized those. So maybe there's

not ads in Gemini, but there's a Gemini-powered product that has ads in it. And so I feel like I think it was just kind of a free dunk. It was a free dunk. No one's really going to fact check them. But the more nuanced dunk, and we're going to have Eric Suford on the show to discuss the rollout of Open AI's ads product is that, I mean, Ben Thompson earlier today said that expectations were low and it did not meet them, just in terms of the robustness of the AI product, how they're pricing it. He compared it to Netflix's early rollout of ads. The ad product, specifically saying, like, you're going to pay CPMs for impressions based on, like, you know, these categories. Like, it's not just going to be this robust Facebook level,

black box that just gives you, you put dollars in, you get dollars out. Like, everyone wants, like, the ATM machine when it comes to ad products. Truly, I mean, like, it sounds silly, but advertisers really want this, like, massive-scale, self-serve platform that they can just go and partner

with, and it feels a little bit more bespoke, a little bit more incremental, and truthfully, a lot of people are saying, like, they should have started working on this earlier. We should have, they should have, you know, been building along this line earlier, but, of course, they had a lot of other stuff to work on. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

Moving on, back to DeepMind. Google bought DeepMind 12 years ago yesterday. It was such an insane steel. Roon said they bought it for a buck 50, lull, insane steel. The numbers were so much smaller back then. In the opening episode of HBO's Silicon Valley, have you seen HBO? Silicon Valley. We talked about this, right? Stressful, so you never watch the full thing? Yeah, I've never actually watched it. A show like that would be like before bed. Yeah. It just reminds me of work. Yeah.

There were some hilarious, hilarious moments in that show, though. In the opening episode of HBO Silicon Valley, the protagonist has offered a $4 million dollar valuation for an insane new technology, which is so absurdly large to him that he throws up. It's like $4 million dollar valuation really does feel low nowadays. That is like pre-pre-pre-seed. Like, there's nothing that. YouTube, DeepMind, and Android were acquired for less than $2.5 billion combined.

What a time. That is wild. Insane pickups. Insane, insane pickups. I don't actually think we covered this, but the update on the SpaceX IPO, they're timing it. They're looking at a June IPO, so not too far away. And Elon is apparently trying to time it to planetary alignment and Elon Musk's birthday. So the financial time says celestial calendar meets high finance as billionaire's personal impulses shape plans to raise $50 billion in record listing.

I think he's allowed to plan his IPO around his personal impulses. Yeah. This is his baby. Some numerology, some good vibes. He's just managing the vibes. Before we move on, let me tell you about Phantom Cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Yeah, I don't think there's many other Musk's birthday is June 28th. Okay.

And on June 8th and 9th, Juniper and Venus will be, quote, within a little more than one degree of each other in the sky. Sorry, you said his birthday is June 28th? Yes. With Sunday, Markets closed. So he's not going to be able to do it? He's got to delay it a year. He's got to wait a full year. Until...

Hopefully not. But, yeah, a few days later, Mercury will also align diagonally with the two planets. The unusual demand highlights Musk's personal imprint on SpaceX, of course, where major corporate decisions have often reflected the billionaire's beliefs

and priorities. What corporation has a CEO a founder's CEO where the founder's beliefs and priorities don't shape the corporate decisions. Yeah. They're trying to spin this. It's not really hitting. Yeah, that's odd.

There's a massive scoop in the Wall Street Journal from Kate Clark. She says SoftBank is in talks to invest a lot more money in Open AI. This is surprising. Tons of people because everyone said, Moss is tapped out. He can't possibly marshal the capital. He'll have to sell everything. He's like David Gaghanes.

He's David Gagins of buying Open AI shares. Well, he's not going to, it doesn't seem like he's going to get it from Saudi. Oh, yeah. So where is he? I don't know. I mean, he has other stuff. He can move around.

He can sell other positions. Like, something's a massive organization. And, uh, and, and, it's going all in. Yeah. So soft banks and talks to invest up to 30 billion more in open AI,

Japanese Camerate. So pull up this video from Bucco Capital because I think there's a chance that there's a small chance that Masa saw this

and said, I need to own more Are these actually SORA videos? Are these just like random cling like nonsense? Bucco says $2 trillion in CAPEX for this

by the way. Get this off the screen. I'm not a fan of this at all. This is bad. SoftBank Group shares close 3.7% higher in Tokyo trading Wednesday after the journals report and the latest talks over Open AI. So the Tokyo markets are

bullish on getting more Open AI shares. This is, of course, the $100 billion round that will have a post-money valuation of $830 billion if it succeeds in raising the full amount. Deal talks are ongoing. Soap Bank's already one of Open AI's largest shareholders at the stake that grew to 11% in December when it invested $22.5 billion in a statement at the time. SoftBank Chairman Masayu Shusone said the firm was deeply aligned with OpenAI's vision. You'd love to see it. On the other side of things, Jim Kramer. He's now a jemmy boy.

Saying, I still pay for Chad GPD and Gemini, but I have been favoring Gemini of late. My two neighbors at the office are canceling chat GPD. I like how much Gemini knows about me and is friendly, but not cloying. And it's not a suckup. Well, you know, 5.3 is coming soon. and I think that the conversational element, the textual flavor might be coming back. And they might be, who knows,

maybe they fine-tune right on Jim Kramer's tweets to let him know that, hey, we're not afraid of pushing back on you, Jim, if we need to. Open AI, we'll do whatever it takes. Anyway, we have our next guest available. Here we go. Who do we have? We have Asher.

There we go. And Aiden from flapping airplanes. Amazing. In the restroom waiting room. Let's bring them in to the TBPN Ultraladown. Hello. Welcome. Welcome back, Aiden. Good to see you.

How are you guys doing? Hey, guys. We are doing awesome. It's good to be here. Fantastic. Welcome back. Big day. Big day.

Please take us through it. Let's take a moment. While you guys do the update. Tell us about the name first. Let's all do the flap for flapping airplanes. What a name. Well, so, you know, we are, we're a new AI lab. We're focused on the efficiency problem.

We're trying to train models that can be roughly as intelligent as humans without adjusting half the internet. Okay. In order to do that, we want to think at least a little bit, and in a way that's a little bit biologically inspired. We don't want to build a bird, right? Obviously, airplanes are fantastic. But to maybe help them flap their wings is the right metaphor for what we're doing.

Yeah, exactly right. That's hilarious. Where does the milk fit in? I'm not here to comment on the milk. It's a big part of our third culture, but I can't say more than that. I love it. It's probably the most underrated drink out there. Not enough people are taking advantage of all the benefits.

You know, we got so many milk ads throughout my whole life that got milk campaign was fantastic. And then it sort of just disappeared. They haven't been done in ads. Yeah, I went through a phase where it was like borderline a gallon a day. Go mad. Yeah, there's a phrase for it. Anyway. Let's get to the race.

I would be buying Gary's securities. A lot of milk coming to the... Unlimited milk. New perk. That's fantastic. Okay. So, yeah, take us through the status of the company. Like, how far along are you?

How big is the team? What are you thinking in terms of, like, release time? Are you planning on sort of going heads down, age of research mode, SSI mode, and releasing something when you've hit some major milestone? Or do you want to be more iterative with it? So, okay, so we're about two months old. The team is now 11. We're super excited.

We've got people we really love who are both brilliant, but also just wonderful people. we're really excited about it. I think we are sort of in the middle. We're definitely age of research mode. Like I think the goal is not to commercialize, not because we're not commercial people. Like my background, even agent's background,

Ben's background, all reasonably commercial in substance in addition to deep research. It's just that when you get revenue, you have to focus on it. Like you have to focus on providing equality for customers, and that makes it harder to build deep technology. Yeah. So, you know, our goal is to try to find the biggest market we can

to solve the most important problem we think we can solve, which is the data efficiency problem before doing anything of that. At the same time, our approach is probably to be a build, building a little bit more in public. We'll release some research artifacts at least that I think will be cool, reasonably soon, but who knows exactly what the runs will finish or how many times they'll crash before they work. Our biggest training run today.

So, you know, bad time. Next launch for our maintenance. There we go. Walk me through why data efficiency and why the data efficiency a problem is important. It sounds all good. oh, you gets a really smart model and you don't have to ingest the whole internet, but everyone can just ingest the whole internet. You can download it.

You can scrape it. There's plenty of models that are trained on it. So break it down. So exactly. I think the goal is not necessarily in the long term to not train on the entire internet. I mean, it's research. I don't exactly know. I think the idea is that like this is not needed, right?

And the fact that it's not needed suggests that we're actually missing something because currently for the existing technology that we have it is necessary. So why do I think it's an important problem? To the extent that AI has been hard to integrate into the economy, and we always see these Bloomberg articles that are like, oh, like chat and search are working and coding is working, but what else is AI really doing for me? To the extent that's true, I really think it's because models are much less data efficient than humans.

But if you want it to learn a new task or put it in a new vertical, it takes thousands of times more effort than it does to just tell human what to do. So I think if you can make a model a million times more data efficient, it's like a million times easier to put into the economy. I also think there's just like tons of cool stuff that you can do in really data-constrained regimes if you can learn to learn with less data. For example, whether it's robotics or scientific discovery or even something like trading, which we have to acknowledge

is like the most valuable next token prediction problem in the world from a pure economic perspective. These problems have very limited data and existing AI systems aren't quite as good as them as they are at other things. I think that learning to learn with less data is just tremendously valuable in all these things. Talk to me about like fragmentation and steerability if you achieve sample efficiency like you're planning to. Do you envision a world where you're sort of creating some sort of base model that is so sample efficient that just with like a basic prompt or a few examples,

it becomes incredibly effective at a specific task and sort of replaces like the heavy duty training data runs and the RL environments and these massive data collection. efforts to do some sort of fine-grained task at a very, very high level to sort of like five-nines of efficiency. Is that what it looks like, or is it more like you will wind up vending a sample-infficient model that's for specific use cases? Yeah, so when we think about this, it seems like the reinforcement paradigms of today are actually just shockingly inefficient. You don't really get much generalization across tasks.

You teach a model to do one kind of learning, and then you teach the next one. It's kind of like whackamol or something. And we look at this, we think, this is kind of crazy. I mean, the first time I really saw RL scale, what it brought me back to was actually good old-fashioned AI, back in the dawn, you know, this primordial age of AI. When people were kind of hand-designing these convolutional filters for eyes and noses and things. And then they were like, wait, just throw data at it, just throw scale at it.

What are you doing? And in this really weird way, we're kind of looping back onto that where it's like, oh, just make another environment, bro. Just make another environment. Just one more. Just one more. The next grade on the AI will not be just, you know, environment. I mean, I think it is a piece of it. Like, I do think that there's a long tail of tasks in the world, right? And like, there will always be a place for people to produce custom data. It's just like a question of how much operational difficulty it takes. And like, one route is just to log through the operational difficulty constantly. You incur a variable cost. Another route is to do a bunch of fixed cost investment into trying to make that variable cost lower. So the last thing I'll just say to answer your question. I don't really think we know what the end goal looks like entirely. Like, you know, AI is a big space. Like, you know, human level intelligence is not the ceiling.

it is merely the floor on what is possible. If you can train models with vastly less data and possibly more compute in very different ways, what is going to happen? We actually don't know. I think it's actually unlikely that they will uniformly dominate frontier models, even in the very best case scenario for us.

They're going to know less facts. They're going to be different. They're not going to have memorized all Harry Potter. That's actually a useful skill in some ways. But I do think they'll be different and weird and they'll have interesting capabilities that we'll find really valuable ways to use. So yeah, I think it's a good.

experiment, we're really excited to run. Yeah, what do you expect the economics to look like in a more sample-infiant environment? It feels like obviously you're not paying for a bunch of reinforcement learning environments and a lot of data, but it also feels like the training cost might be lower. Is that the correct assumption? And then what does inference look like? Does it get cheaper? Is it a smaller model? Can it run locally? Are there any other downstream economic impacts that you think might come from a new architecture? I mean, there's just a this is a whole smorgasbord of companies right now that are basically doing reinforce and learning for you.

Yeah. Or are taking your big pile of corporate data and making useful in your model. Yep. And this is great, but it's actually a huge pain. And both sides of the deal are upset. You know, the companies that are doing it are like, please give us more data. And their clients go to them and say, this is all we have. Like, how can we possibly give you more here?

And these results are not meeting what we want. And the demand for better data efficiency a year is just huge. And we really believe that even winning here will have massive impact on the economy. I also, I don't claim to know exactly what the economics are going to look like. You know, for example, if this is going to be accomplished with models that are smaller or bigger, like, I don't know. I actually, I slightly suspect bigger. Like, I'm not sure it's actually going to make inference costs easier. I mean, if you look at the brain as a comparison, you know, the brain spends a lot of flops per token relative to what a current model does.

So, you know, we don't have to use the brain as a model, but it's like an interesting data point. So I think it's a little bit for us to say anything definitive about economics, but I'm certainly intellectually interested in these questions. And haven't they going to have been able to know for a while. how are you approach, like, are you guys going to be spending all your time locked into the office, just doing your own research, or is this, or do you have opportunities to go out in the world, find companies and organizations that have been disappointed by existing solutions and say, like, how do we kind of re-approach this problem, right? Because you're saying, like, maybe it's not just more data. I think we're going to start with research. I think the main thing is, like, when we work with companies, we want to make sure that we are, like, fully devoted to actually providing genuine value for them. Like, and, and not just using them as like a stuffstone to do interesting research. So I think for now, until we feel like we have some technological edge, we'll be very, very focused on research. I do think over time, to your point, though,

like it is helpful to research to actually be able to go out into the world and see what the problems people are facing are. And we actually do plan to do that, but just not like in January. Yeah. Talk about fundraising, uses of funds, GPU poor, GPU rich, like, you know, the AI talent wars. Like what are the constraints on your progress here? Well, so, I mean, first, I just want to say we're really grateful to our partners.

I mean, they've shown a lot of trust and faith in us, and we're going to do everything in our power to reward that faith. So it's humbling. It's really exciting. We're really grateful to work with that. Thanks, a good for the milk. Yes, like what I bought us. It was a nod. So on what the computer is for, I mean, the good thing about doing foundational research is, like, the stuff we're doing is often so weird that, like,

It doesn't need to be done at gigantic scale first, because with very high probability, it's going to fail at smaller scale. And, like, if it starts to work at smaller scale, like, if it's really working, if it works so well that, you should see pretty strong signs of success. So you actually, you need much less compute to, like, get a 10x win, at least to get it off the ground, then you need to get, like, a 10% win. So, you know, that's good. I mean, the raise is primarily for compute is to answer your question.

Fantastic. On the talent wars, you know, I think the way we think about it is, And this is very much informed by my experience as a member of this organization prod and my brother's experience as a co-founder. We're really not completely caught up in the same talent war as everyone else. We're trying to find the next generation. We're also hiring experienced people. And I think that has resonated with experienced people. But, like, you know, we're trying to reimagine new ways of doing things.

Like I, like, don't really think that having trained a trillion parameter model before is, like, the thing that's going to make someone successful at that. Like, obviously being a good engineer, being smart, being excited and curious about the problem, these are things that are tremendously valuable. And, like, lots of people, you know, have that. But I don't know if, like, you know, five years of experience is really the thing that's most important. Love it. Well, congratulations. $180 million raise, $1.5 billion valuation. I want to ring the gong for you.

Do it. Super excited for you guys and the whole team. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon and enjoy the research. Yeah. Have a very rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Great to see you. Goodbye.

Up next, we have Alex Dillon from Outtake.com. He's in the Restream Waiting Room, and we'll bring him in. Let's do it. The TVPN Ultradome. Made it. Alex, what's going on? How are we doing, guys? Great to see you.

Great to see you. It's been a minute. It's been a minute since we caught up. It's almost the year, guys. I know, I know. Give us the latest. Oh, man. we're excited to be here because we're announcing our $40 million series B, so let's fucking go.

Let's go. Let's go. Yeah, it's been a crazy 12 months for us. I mean, we, frankly, if you just look at what's happening in our space, the number of impersonations, scams, fraud, has frankly exploded. The number of people that are tackling that in an effective way has not exploded. And so outtake is increasingly like the one-stop shop for, I'm proud to to say not just enterprise, but government as well at this point. Amazing. Yeah, reintroduce the company. Like, what are, because there's, there's, there's so many different problems that you're

tackling. And I'd love to help people understand, like, how you guys are approaching it at different verticals and for different customer types. Yeah, 100%. I think the one-line, abstract version of outtake is our job is to make fake things on the internet very expensive and make the real things very obvious. And so what that means for enterprises or governments that we work with, all these institutions have public surface areas where they represent themselves, right?

If you're a commercial bank, you have a website, an app, ads you run an ad libraries, employees in public directories. All of these are surface areas that you use to communicate with the world. Bad actors know that. They try to man in the middle and effectively try to take over those communications, attack you, attack your employees, attack your customers. Our job is to go find that fake content, remove it as fast as possible, and make sure that you remain sort of a high digital trust institution. Yeah, we had Peter on from Multibot yesterday, and he's had so many issues in the last part

of it. He was like doing a really haphazard rebrand with not a lot of planning and had issues with, I think, his GitHub account getting taken over as well as an X account. Yeah, like as soon as he stepped off the account hand-hast. Someone else sniped it. Using a bot. Yeah. It was superhuman speed.

I think that's, you guys are touching on exactly the right thing there where it's like, you know, cyber used to be this thing where you're like prepping for the attack and you're like, okay, I know like as an institution, I'm going to get popped, you know, once a year, once a quarter. It's my job to sort of reduce the blast radius. And so it was really about building these like insanely powerful walls, right? That's not, that's no longer the attacker slash defense. paradigm anymore. Like, you're just under attack at all times. Like, you are constantly under siege. Like, you should pattern match more with a virtual drone swarm where, yes, the bot will snipe your

handle the minute that you let it go. It's not that someone's going to think about it three quarters later. And so that's kind of the fundamental shift in cyber right now, where the economics of attack have sort of gone to zero. Obviously, defenders need to adapt. talk about how you guys are because you guys have customers and you're kind of you're basically monitoring the situation for them on the internet it's it's monitoring as a service but also the like takedown element talk about the kind of partnerships that you're needing to do your work with individual platforms let's say somebody sets up a fake account for for joe rogan and they're selling like supplements through that account, trying to make it look real, using AI Joe Rogan.

You can report these things. Sometimes there's a lag. Talk about speeding up that process. Because part of what will make this, what you said, expensive to be fake on the internet, is if things get taken down far, far faster, which means, like, machine on one side coordinating with machine from the platform to make it so that you're not running an AI ad of Joe Rogan for like 10 days before it gets taken down. Yeah. You hit the nail on the head. The KPI that I think about as a North Star

for Outtake is how do I reduce the ROI for a digital criminal, right? And you kind of hit the nail on the head of the way you reduce that ROI is how long can their attack be active? If it's fleeting, then they put in a lot of effort to put something together or maybe not too much effort with GenAI. But if it's taken down before they get any reward, then Outtake is doing your job. And you touched on another really important thing, especially in a world of vibe coding. Something that I like to say a lot is outtake as a company that you cannot vibe code. Sure, you can start to put together the capabilities to try to search a little bit. But to be able to search in depth with high quality classification across all these platforms, whether it's social media, clear web,

dark web, forums, telegram groups, areas that are really hard to get into and actually extract what you need at scale and detect what you need at scale, incredibly difficult. But even more important, and certainly not even, frankly, a thing that software fully solves on its own is the capability to be a high trust partner to all these sort of counterparties, right, where you just mentioned, when we go and report something, it's really important that whether that's a social media platform or a domain registrar, they know that outtake as a high trust institution has vetted that report. Is high confidence, by the way, the way we provide that confidence is we use our agents to basically go do cybersecurity investigations on an absolute. every single thing we report. We did, by the way, 20 million last year. 20 million investigations, you mean? Yeah, that's like, try to, try to comprehend, you know, how many humans that would have taken.

By the way, and also to show you a sense for sort of scale and speed, of that 20 million, about 80 to 90% of them happened in just Q4 for us, right? Which, you know, for us ends this month. And so that's like 18 million, 17 million of those investigations are, happening sort of just in the last three to four months. So maybe that gives a sense for like how much we're investigating, how much more we're investigating sort of as a company at the moment. Yeah. And somebody might ask why, why is this not happening at the platform level? Like, why would meta do this or Google do this or X or TikTok? And maybe break down why you

need a third party because of kind of the, I can imagine there's a really big like incentive misalignment where like if you're, if you're Joe Rogan, you don't want somebody popping up an AI account selling supplements using your name and likeness, but meta is sitting there being like, well, we want more account growth and we want more ad spend on the platform. Like, yes, this is a problem we're trying to handle, but it's not even top of the list, I imagine, because it's like driving usage, it's driving new content, it's driving revenue. Yes, I think you're pushing at a really important point here. You know, now working with a lot of these platforms, I think I have a lot more sympathy for them

than I might have at the beginning. I might have said, yeah, you know, like there's not enough people that care about this. I would actually tell you, having worked with a lot of these teams, they care deeply. I think their problem is the scale at which they work, right? So these platforms are trying to ensure, and by the way, I think rightly so, ensure that they don't infringe on free speech, and they don't unfairly punish people. They don't put too many guardrails on the one hand. On the other hand, of course, they want to prevent all these problems that we're discussing.

And so Outtake has this unfair advantage, frankly, where we're not trying to do this at the scale of 3 billion, 6 billion people, at least not today yet, right? What we're able to do is say, hey, we're working with the best in class sort of Fortune 2,000 institutions, the federal government, state and local agencies, which is a much, much smaller set of institutions. And so our models are actually quite fine-tuned to say, okay, for this specific institution, like what is real, what is not. By the way, risk is different for all these institutions, not only between the institutions, but within the institution, let's say you're talking about, again, a commercial bank. The way that it assesses risk on social platforms is quite different than the way it assesses it on websites. And so you almost want distinct models that are fine-tuned for different surface areas. All that to say, you want to be hyper-specific on how you classify risk. That's a very, very hard thing to do at the scale of these massive platforms.

I think that's actually the fundamental issue. It's really just a tech scale question for them. What do you think might change on the consumer side? I saw an Instagram reel of someone highlighting just an AI video, and he was sort of pushing for a digital ID or some integration with his social security number. There's obviously the WorldCoyne, World Labs project, eyeball scanning. There's different things that you can build trust. Jordi likes to, if he finds an Instagram profile, just scroll back and make sure that they were posting in 2017.

before AI existed so that they could... There you go. So you can see, okay, well, it looks like the same person. Probably real person. What do you think is going to change on the consumer side of, like, proving your identity online? You touched on a few really interesting things there. So one, Jordy, that's great.

That's actually one of the signals we use for our agents to sort of check, like, you know, what is the history of this profile? You mentioned World. So, you know, we actually have a direct partnership with World ID. We actually had launched, I would say, a research experiment project with them called Verify, where we took what they sort of built, where, as you pointed out, scan the iris,

give you a unique way to prove that you are a singular and unique human. And what we were really curious about is like what does that mean for, obviously, consumer, which, by the way, I think it means a lot of things. They're doing a lot of incredible work with platforms like Tinder, for example, where it's like, hey, I want to make sure I date real humans. Though, frankly, you know, side note, it seems like AI dating is also doing quite well. So maybe there's a genuine market for that as well.

Our chat, Ryan and our chat just said TBPN wasn't posting before AI. Not true. Look at my YouTube channel. I started in 2020. My Twitter account goes really bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that to say, those kinds of consumer credentials actually can and will bubble into enterprise workflows.

Something that Outtake did was say, okay, wouldn't it be powerful if you could project your security? And I'll define what that means. Right now, when we interact with other institutions, you actually don't know if that institution has a great security protocol. One way they could prove that to you

is every email they send, they would cryptographically sign. And so they would literally be in the header a signature that says, like, hey, at the moment of send, I literally swiped my pass key that we all have on our computers. And it was physically me. And I can show you with a badge that this was therefore definitively me, the human, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm projecting to you that I'm a high trust person to email with. And so something that outtake is very actively exploring when I talk about making real things obvious as part of our mission is exactly that layer.

It's like, okay, how do you go beyond just finding and removing things, but how do you help authenticate and prove to the world what is real? I think frankly that's like when we think about our $40 million series B and like why I think we're on this trajectory to be a public market company is it's the real prize. The real prize for us is like how do you become a trust layer for the internet? Like how do you say, hey, we've spent so much time mapping the landscape, removing what's fake that actually we are the best source of truth on what's real, right? That's really what we think about. Amazing. Who did the round? iconic

a lot more serious who did the round very very iconic group to get in the mix and I'm sure you'll be back I don't know if I was a bet if I was a betting man I'd say a couple more times this year with the momentum that

you guys are on so congrats on the milestone and and yeah thanks thanks for fighting the bad guys we'll see you soon Thanks for having us. Goodbye. App Lovin.

Profitable advertising, Made Easy with Axon.com. You heard the Axon Claxton. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. That's right. Up next.

We have Mitchell. Mitchell from Phoenix. We're going back to milk. Do you know what this company does? Let's bring in Mitchell. I'll have him explain it. How is this company? You're the second milk-related company of the day,

the flapping airplanes guy. Loosely, loosely. But please, I'll let you and Explain, introduce yourself in the company, please. Yeah, of course. Second milk related. I don't even know what that is. There was just an AI lab guest who was drinking milk.

And so I made to go. Anyway, sorry. Continue. One of our products. No, but awesome. One of the nice to be on here. So, yeah, of course. Mitch, one of the founders of Phoenix, were kind of using AI, like you said, to help milk,

but mainly to help dairy farmers manage their cows. So at the end of where else make milk that that other gentleman gets to drink. Yeah. Incredible. Is the dairy farm market extremely concentrated at this point? Like, are you, like, almost prosumer, or is it, like, pure enterprise you get in, like, the three biggest dairy farm aggregators and then you're done? Maybe not three, but it's absolutely much more consolidated. Since, you know, back when it used to be guys, the couple of cows in the back yard, no.

Our average dairy farm has 3,000 cows and doing tens of millions. Wow. It's really big business. How do you actually plug in, get data, drive outcomes? Like what, what are you tracking? Do they have ERPs? How, what's the actual deal for? Yeah, no, it's really interesting.

As we've scaled dairy farms over the past like 30 years, data collection has become a big part. Like you walk on to one of these dairies, there's computer vision happening there. There's collard, like all of the cows wear Fitbits. I mean, they're not made by Fitbit, that's the same thing. Yeah. You know, all that sort of. So there's a hell of a lot of data collection being there. Kind of up to date, most of which just goes to nothing.

So that's where we really come in using a lot of that data there to actually help with insights. Yeah. Yeah. to break down, like, I would love to just, like, the specifics of like what the actual product does, how it's driving results for the farmers. Yeah, absolutely. So when we go on to a dairy farm, we collect genetic information on every single cow. So we literally whole genome sequence, all 3,000-something cows on a dairy or wherever many there are.

We then combine that with what I call phenotypic data, but that's the physical data, the computer vision, the fit bits, the weather, how much milk every cow is making, how much she's eating. all of that data. So we feed that into a big AI model, which then makes predictions on the life of a cow. So when she's a day old, I can predict with about 90% accuracy what her life is going to look like, you know, whether she's going to get sick, when, how much milk she's going to make, is she going to get pregnant, when how, that sort of stuff. And we use those to just make the farms a lot more efficient as far as their day-to-day management. And then what's the pricing model? Are you doing per cows? It's like per cow per cow per year. Per cow per year, okay. And then

And then... In terms of a seat, we got a cow. Yeah. And then what interventions are farmers taking? Do cows, like, trade hands in the secondary market? If a cow is particularly valuable, will produce a lot of milk? They do, actually. Cows sell for millions of dollars.

Millions of dollars for cow? I don't know. Yeah. I think the highest is now over tens of millions is the best cows out there. Yeah. And is that for, like, breeding purposes, somebody, like a cow. Elite line. It's particularly only elite.

Yeah, it really just makes seem in their whole life. It's pretty much it. That's crazy. What we really look like is actually kind of how it works. When we go onto a dairy, there are farm workers show up and ask the computer, what should I do today? And our computer will tell them. So we are really managing the day-to-day on the entire farm, just so much more, I mean, nothing against our existing farmers, but, you know, much more efficiently when you're able to look at both predict everything out with 90% accuracy and you're looking at every single piece of information. Dairy super intelligence.

It really is. It's here. How big is it? How many farms are you guys active on today? Is the primary like bottleneck now, just like having enough people to sell the product? Well, actually, I'm the person who sells. So I'm literally every single farm we close.

I'm the person who spoke to them. But supporting them is quite a lot. So obviously that doesn't scale forever either. But yeah, so we're on close to half a million cows now. So, I mean, that's about 5%. Yeah. We only launched in August. So we have scaled to like, I mean, last year we did about two and a half million.

I did two and a half million last week. Wow. So, yeah, we're going pretty fast as far as scaling. And really what I need now is just people to join. I mean, at the end of the day, it does still, even though it's an AI doing it, it requires. How many dairy cows are there on Earth? Hold on Earth. There's like 100 million. In the U.S. there's like 10 million.

Okay. Okay. Jobs not finished. Jobs not finished. But you raise some new money. money. Tell us about the round. Yeah. So we did our, you know, my seed round raised, you know, over $5 million. We got some great wrestles that came in. So, you know, led by initialized overwater, these sort of people who are really helping us scale up this mission and really just making the

public of agriculture much more efficient. Amazing. That's amazing. I, like, yeah, being able to walk up to the computer on a farm and just say, how do I tell me what to do. Computer. increase this cow's milk yield. Computer, milk this cow. It's basically what's happening. Yeah, let's kill this cow, move this cow, milk this cow, feed this cow. That's great. Yeah, I can imagine the farmer of the future walking around with a headset on,

just like seeing, you know, little, little AR pop-ups. Very cyberpunk. Very, very cyberpunk farming is here. It is, it is. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thanks so much for stopping. Great to meet you. And we will talk to you later.

Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about. Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web app servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. And we have Gabe from Rogo. Up next. Coming through. This is the first time on the show with some amazing news. What's happening?

What's up, Gabe? Welcome to the show. What's up? It's good. We've been looking forward to this one for, I feel like a year at this point. Yeah, I'm shocked. It's your first time. Thank you so much for taking the time. Since it is your first time, please introduce yourself the company. and the news. Sounds great. I'm Gabe Sengel.

I'm the CEO and co-founder of Rogo. Rogo is the Gen. A.I. Tool for front office investment bankers, investors, private equity professionals, you name it. The kind of mental comp folks have is Harvey for finance. We just raised a $75 million series C led by a sequelaide capital. Incredible. What? I want to get right into it.

Do you agree with Pat? Is AGI here? More or less, you know, AI is smarter than a lot of people I know. So it depends on your definition of AGI. Okay. Well, then in the investment banking context, a lot of the value that an investment banker brings is interpersonal negotiation, contacts, a rolodex, understanding subtext,

what the motivations of a certain CEO are. stuff that might not just be scrappable off the internet. Where does Rogo actually plug in? What's left for the human being? What's the future of investment banking look like? Look, we want the best deal makers to be more productive. And there are guys right now who are slinging phone calls all day long, five minute, five minute, five minute, five minute,

someone like a Blair Ephron at Center View. You know, that guy is so productive because he is a team of junior bankers underneath him that know what they're doing. Yeah. There should be a lot more dealmakers. There should be folks who are able to go out, advise companies, help with M&A, restructuring, et cetera, and focus on the human part of the work, the connectivity, the reading folks, the negotiation, rather than, you know, spending time building PowerPoints, spending time, you know, benchmarking comps, all that kind of stuff. How is how is the product evolved over the last year, specifically with new model advancements, reasoning, et cetera? I have a lawyer buddy and just like the difference in how he perceived Harvey 12 months ago versus today is like just totally night and day.

Like back then he was like, yeah, like it's cool. And now he's like totally one shot by it. And I'm imagining that something similar has probably transpired with you guys as well. Yeah, I think especially in the enterprise, there was a little bit of that first mover's disadvantage early on, where you were kind of bottlenecked by just the model quality. And everyone had ideas for how they wanted these tools to transform legal work, finance work, health care, et cetera. But if the models were incapable of doing it, or it wasn't quite at the threshold where you could do serious work,

I think people felt a little spurned by those products. And I mean, if I look at Rogo today compared to two years ago, it's like two years ago, we were the most incompetent intern you would ever hire. And if you had hired a human intern like that, you would have fired them. The benefit is Rogo gets a lot better, a lot faster, and then it stays that way, and then it's going to be a lot cheaper than that human intern. But the products changed enormously, both in actual capabilities and ability to move across what a banker's doing, PowerPoint, Excel, file drives, sharepoints, data rooms, etc. But also integrations into the back office, right? Like, people don't realize, but to be an investment bank, you not just have to be creating Excel models, calling people, but who's thinking about the conflict checks?

Who's thinking about all of these kind of back and middle office tasks that help an investment bank run? And over the past two years, we've really embedded across a lot of those workflows too. Can you share a little bit about how your customers are actually using Rogo? Specifically, like, we saw this massive boom with Claudebot, now MoldBot. And it felt like a lot of people were just excited about Claude Code over WhatsApp or Telegram. And it's like these models existed. We didn't get a new frontier model. We got a new way for a lot of people just to interpret.

interact with these models. And I'm wondering if you're seeing a shift from the laptop crew maybe doing more of those compliance checks, more of those, hey, let's pull some comps or pull some data together over their phones specifically. Yeah, so we are about to roll out our mobile app, which we've been kind of long in the tooth doing. But I hope that that, you know, we start to see more of the phone crew. The reality is the most important folks in our ICP. They're just on their iPads and phones all day anyway. You know, when I was a banker, I didn't even realize my MDs had computers. They were, you know, never had them, never in Excel, that kind of thing. Yeah. I think you'll see the UXs of these agent tools start to evolve into like some sort

of ability to manage, you know, your agents and tasks and the kind of UX around like your army of bankers or lawyers or whatever it is. Yeah, I'm, I'm pretty excited about that. What about other integrations, are you seeing folks, like, is there, you know, demand for like the Slack type of integration? We're in a war room on a particular deal, and we're adding Rogo to pull stuff in into that context. Except it's got to be teams if we're talking about investment bank. Sure, sure, sure. But yeah, all of those things, right? Like, you should have a data room that is being populated by an agent and a data room that's being diligence by an agent. It should be completely integrated in all the places where your data already lives. I think the complexity for

our business is, you know, when you have a kind of a Claudebot or Claude code running around on a desktop unconstrained, there's security risks. You know, I was using Claude code to create a fake data room that we would then demo in the Rogo product. And as part of that, I gathered every prior fundraising deck we had, all of our financials cap table, and I asked Claude to organize it, and it deleted all the files. And I was like, can you, can you please undo that? And it was like, no, Sorry, that was irrecoverable. If I did that with one of my clients, we would not be raising this round.

And so there's a lot of nuance at figuring out how to take these agents, which are most powerful when they are unconstrained and do have access to your files and your desktops and your systems and making sure they can be deployed in a way that's thoughtful and secure and so on. Yeah, that makes sense. How are you thinking about integrating Rogo

with like legal workflows? and just like, at what point does a lot of this stuff really converge? It feels like, you know, there's kind of an old paradigm around these, the way, you know, a company gets bought or sold that will evolve. Yeah, I mean, especially in places like private credit, there's a, there's a blurry overlap between what is, you know, legal work and due diligence versus investment work and due diligence. I would say when I look at some of the like prior generation comps for me in this space, Thompson Reuters, Fax at Bloomberg, et cetera, they actually really subdivided the legal verticals and products from the finance. I mean, Thompson Reuters actually

sold off all their finance assets to refinative and into LSEG. I think it was partly because it was actually, you know, there's less synergies often than people expect. I think if we're just talking about private equity, private credit, yes, a lot of synergies. between those types of workflows, but like, you know, a lot of what investment bankers are doing, or, you know, the top private equity folks, top public markets investors, they're kind of outsourcing all the legal work to someone else. Like, that's not even under their umbrella. What about headcount planning? How is the industry kind of thinking? It's probably one of the more awkward conversations for a lot of people involved. But, I mean, it's not, it's not, it's,

It's not taking teachers jobs, right? Like we're talking about investment bankers, and investment bankers are going to get more productive. And so firms are excited, people are excited, bankers are excited. If you're a junior banker, you will be generating fees yourself earlier in your career rather than later. If you are a bank, you're going to expect higher fees out of your existing bankers with fewer resources, but it's going to change the trajectory of what it means to work in finance. And you'll go from being the automation piece of the bank where you're just turning out materials

to having to think about, yeah, how do you go out and do deals on your app? Yeah, makes it sense. Do you think we'll see an acceleration and overall deal making? Like, are there deals, how many deals don't get done just because it's going to be such a huge headache? There's a lot of deals that don't get done because it's such a headache. I mean, especially in the private markets. Think about all those mom-and-shop businesses throughout the U.S. or even businesses in emerging markets that can't pay Goldman Sachs $10 million to run a process,

can't pay JPM $10 million to restructure, especially in the U.S., where all of these assets have been getting picked up by private equity firms that just have sourcing arms that call, you know, your local roofing business in Minnesota. You know, now those businesses should be able to get banking services themselves actually run a fair auction and get a better price, and it should result in a more liquid, more transparent, more efficient private market. go to deal sleds, what you got for us, recommendations for up-and-coming bankers, the next generation. What are they putting on their feet?

You know, I have one pair of deal sleds, and it's the ones my parents got me when I got my job as an investment banker at Lazzard, and they're Farragamo loafers. Those are the ones I wear to this day when I have to go into, you know, whatever investment bank were. Somebody should make some shoes that are just like Mac minis. You're just walking around the office. Silicon Valley Banking. Really signaling, signaling, like, you know, I'm with it. That's a lot of fun. Yeah.

Meaningful. What are you, what's the biggest bottleneck right now? I'm assuming you're going to hire a bunch of people from this round. What's, what, talk about the use of funds, all that? We're 100 people today, primarily in New York. We're opening a London office and then probably 8-pack later in the year, trying to get to around 200, 250 people, equally split across, you know, product and engineering. and go to market.

And most of our go-to-market post-sales, what we call kind of like forward-deployed banking is ex-finance, ex-bankers, ex-investors. Very cool. Where's the name come from, Rogo? Our lawyers, our initial name was Athena, and our lawyers were like, you can't do that. There's probably a thousand products called Athena.

So John, my co-founder, and I spent months trying to come up with a name. And at some point, we're just looking up old Latin words, and Rogo means I, Ask in Latin. And so we thought that was a good one. I love that. That's great. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, great. Great to finally meet and congrass to the whole team. Congratulations. Have a great rest of you guys. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. And our last guest of the lightning round, Sierra Peterson from Voyager Ventures.

She's an energy stream waiting room. What's happening? How are you doing? Hey, guys. Delighted to be here. How are you? We're great. Great to have you. First time on the show. Would love introduction on yourself and the firm, and then we can get into the news. You've got. So I'm Sierra Peterson.

I'm one of the two founders of Voyager Ventures. We are an early stage of venture capital firm investing in the foundational technologies that power civilization, services, energy, amputation, materials, production, advanced compute, physical AI. These are the biggest markets in the world, and the ones that are foundational to ongoing growth in the long term and competitive advantage in the near term. I have been working in energy for my entire career.

Got me start 21 years ago at the International Energy Agency. Overnight success. Exactly. Long time coming. And I mean, that's really the story of our background, myself and my co-founder at Voyager, Sarah. I've been working in energy industrial modernization and climate stabilization now for decades. between us. We've built five climate tech and energy companies.

We've been active in policymaking at the International Energy Agency, as I mentioned, and also in the Obama Office of of Energy and Climate Change back when we had one. Yeah, exactly. We built companies that are responsible for financing

more than $3 billion worth of distributed energy assets. So a lot of solar. We've been active in the research programs at Harvard and MIT, advancing everything from energy market research, which was my graduate focus, and Sarah's at MIT in industrial biotech. And we've been investing now for 10 years plus. Actually, I got started as an angel investor in 2015 in energy tech.

Those companies did well. And so we teamed up to launch forager in 2021 and raised a $100 million debut fund. We've recently- John's going for the gong. How much did you raise recently? Hey, no, that's not the big news. We got a bigger number. It was a big number.

It was announced a 275 on two. There we go. We were waiting for that. Very cool. I want to talk about energy because I feel like your timing here is great. I feel like people are spending way more, you know, it's gone mainstream,

both at the national level and politics. Just in the last few weeks, we've had Scott Nolan on to talk about, nuclear fuel production and then a separate company that turns that actually into fuel palace trisofuel. And like there's a there's a company in every part of the stack. Are there any particular subcategories that you're tracking that you're particularly interested in? And then I want to talk about the financing of all this as well. But what do you think is the most like breakout success in energy these days? Oh yeah. I mean we're energy maximalists. I have been working

in energy for my entire career. Yeah. And when you think about what's true, foundational to power and civilization, it's energy. That is the foundation of all of it. And so, you know, it's actually a really exciting time to be investing. Given advances, particularly in electrification, we're seeing the cost of solar drops so fast, you have to look at a log scale. It's amazing. And what that means in terms of, you know, distribution of energy at a worldwide scale is

incredible and for creating a truly global and resilient energy system that enables near-term stability for users of electricity and long-term prosperity at a global scale. This is a technology that will power the next area of progress and beyond. So electricity, massive. Advances electricity, massive right now. Are you optimistic about American solar? It feels like in terms of solar panel construction and manufacturing. China is doing so well that it's been really hard to get a foothold.

We've talked to some teams that have, you know, taken Chinese-built assets and... T-1 Energy. T-1 Energy is interesting, but I haven't seen as much excitement from the startup world around really scaling solar. But then you have, you know, huge voices like Elon is a solar maxi. There's lots of people that are very, very, you know, just beating the drum on like the, fundamental physics of the sun is so much energy. We're going to capture it at some point. So it feels inevitable, but it doesn't feel like there's as much of a boom or narrative

being driven. But what are you seeing? Oh, it's totally inevitable. You can't argue with the numbers. I mean, 90% of installed energy generation for the last year that we have record is 2024 is renewables. That is at a global scale. That is certainly true in the United States as well.

I think it's just under 90%. And I mean, that's regardless of political whim. That's regardless of, you know, overall organizing policy approach. That's just simply because solar is better. It's cheaper. It's better performing. It enables true distribution of electricity. Like we've never seen before.

And coupled with advances in batteries, that's the unlock. You can really create a transactive energy system, which we've never seen before. And we really will be fundamental to power and growth for decades ahead. So huge, yeah, huge believer in solar potential. now. And in combination with electrification, both of energy generation, also in end-use applications, I mean, electricity now is the most frequent way in which anybody around the world accesses power. That's exciting. It means that power is programmable, and it enables a new era of machines to be made, which is extraordinary in terms of extending human capabilities into ways that we've

never had before. When you couple of that with automation and artificial intelligence, like we're just seeing the foundations of so much innovation right now to really, one, boost systemic stability in a rising vulnerability and volatility market. We have framed trade relationships, geopolitical tensions, physical risks that are intensively in different climate change, and when you can control your inputs in terms of electricity, in terms of the means of production, and you can take advantage of advances in advanced manufacturing to create better products. You can really control your own destiny. That's exciting.

Yeah. How are you thinking about financing hard tech companies, energy companies, these like capital-intensive companies at the earlier stage, it feels like more and more founders are going to need to get familiar with venture debt. It's been sort of a cautionary tale from the software startup era, oh, venture debt, that's what will burn you. That's what will really put you in danger if you're, if you miss plan and then you get over your skis. But how do you think about the role of venture debt or debt instruments or more, more complicated financing schemes for some of these companies? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think one of the things that we're quite excited about is the sophistication of the financing instruments that are

available to old-stage startups. I mean, it used to be that you had to burn super high cost. a capital venture or private equity on assets. And that didn't make sense for anybody. Now we're seeing really tailored and interested bespoke non-delusive financing, all types. And I think it's a recognition of the scale of these markets and the durability that they have in this long-lived and reliable yield. I think we're also seeing, though, and this is something that's been a recent development ongoing sovereign interests and recognition in these technologies as being tools of the national interest.

44% of our own portfolio is either in partnership or an active conversation to sign a deal with the U.S. government. That's extraordinary. I mean, you see in QTal last year, I think became one of our second most frequent co-investor. It used to be completely unthinkable. It was like you'd never go to the government. They'll never buy anything. like Palantir was this weird company that was like off in the dark just doing one deal and they were the only ones and then Anderall sort of did it again. And then all of a sudden it was like every company has some sort of deal with the government. Yeah.

Because when you think about what are the inputs and tools of sovereign advantage of competitive advantage? It's controlling your destiny in terms of energy, controlling your destiny in terms of supply chains for inputs to manufacturing, industrial capacity and then increasingly compute capacity. It's a national asset and all of that hyperscalor staff that all relies on electricity. What about like what are the prospects for making bringing the solar supply chain to the United States? We have like earlier we mentioned T1 Energy, which was kind of a weird setup in the way that it was created and now operated by a new company. but can we, I think one of the reasons that maybe Americans and the tech industry isn't so excited about solar at this moment, or at least broadly, is that we're not making the panels here. It doesn't feel like something that is that we really own. Yeah. I mean, I think, I don't know that we're not excited about solar. When you look at the solar deployment. Well, I'm just saying, like, the attention is almost entirely on nuclear. Like nuclear. It feels like that now.

Like I'm just saying from when you, when you think about, Casey Hammer would like a word, but. Yeah, sure, but think about, I would just say the number of entrepreneurs that have come on the show this year that are talking about nuclear, the nuclear deals are, and I'm not saying it's like warranted, but I'm just saying like nuclear is certainly. Well, it feels like, at least to me, and you can give your feedback on this take,

but it feels like nuclear was potentially economically valid, viable, the technology worked, but there was a regulatory blocker in place that made it very, very difficult to actually just stand up the technology. With solar, there's no, that, that regulatory blocker doesn't exist. It's more of a market force of China manufactures them really, really cheaply. And like, it's the DJI drone question versus GoPro. Like where, like, we just need a ton of people, a ton of manufacturing capacity, a ton of CNC machines. We need like a massive facility and that's more of a capital formation. And then are you willing to go up against the Chinese manufacturing engine that's so critical? My point is just that energy is critical. Solar energy.

It still feels locked. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So I would imagine we want to make as many of these as we can in the West. Yeah, yeah. So I was curious. Yeah, yeah, please. Update on the on the effort there. I know you've invested in it and curious. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're seeing a real of reexamination of global supply chains for critical aspects of ongoing sovereign advantage and industrial competitiveness. Solar is being, you know, one, critical minerals, another, access to novel battery technologies. These are all aspects of an overall industrial policy that's increasingly favoring domestic production and control of energy-producing assets and manufacturing inputs. I think, to your earlier point, any technology is going to need to clear the global clearing price and the massive production and cost.

It's been extraordinary for solar production, for panel production. You can't get much cheaper. It's going to know where to go. That's exciting. I mean, you think about that as an input to other industrial processes. that's truly extraordinary opportunity to have abundant energy that doesn't rely on fossil fuel supply chains that's truly distributed and can be programmable. I mean, a couple of energy storage. I mean, you just have a whole new paradigm in abundance for electricity. Be exciting. Very exciting.

Yeah. What you guys, stage agnostic, pre-season? No, we're early stage. All early. Yep. Yeah. Awesome. So we raised for $275 million. It's more seed Series A. It's $275 million for seed and series A. We went out to market with a $2.50 target. We were oversubscribed on that. I had a 90% first close. There was a lot of exciting.

Yeah, thanks, guys. Amazing. Well, congratulations. Well, excited. I'm sure a bunch of your companies will be on. And congrats to the whole team. Yeah, good to meet you. Lifewise.

Always happy to talk energy. Thanks, love. Bye. Talk soon. Cheers. Did the Klein team just join Codex, OpenAI? Jason Liu asked the question. Yeah, so I think a lot of the team members did.

Pasha, remember there was a whole controversy about, you know, the smell, imagine the smell. Oh, yeah. Oh, he was declined. Yeah, yeah, so he moved over, I think a number of the, like, lead engineers that I moved over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Will Brown says it's a very rare reverse windsurf. And Trades said, well, they certainly didn't decline. decline the ask. Yeah, interesting to see these, you know, the really, the really headline grabbing, the, the really headline grabbing AI trade war narrative has sort of calmed down, but everyone's hiring, everyone's poaching, everyone's trying to build their teams.

It's a war. Working through. Anyway, there are, there's a post here. Somebody is calling out Augustus to Rico. They said, he has no cuss-coos. Greed. To be fair, I've never seen the man eat cuss-coos. He might not have any cuss-coos. I think they were trying to say conscience. But yes, Augustus has stumbled into such a funny life.

I'm really, he's, yeah, he's grinding through it. Picked something more controversial than pretty much anything else. Yeah, but he's managed really well. It's somehow more controversial than defense. Yeah. Yeah, it's just odd. It just triggers all sorts of people. I wonder, I feel like the fact that he's able to go on podcasts and communicate so clearly,

he's one of the Joe Rogan CEOs in your parlance. Like, that's allowed him to get through it. It feels like if he were on his back foot and not able to just say, hey, I'll talk to anyone for an hour. I will just talk, talk, talk, that if there was a negative. news cycle about him. It would be a much, much harder situation. But I don't know. Last post for the day, Emily Sundberg went mega viral, 62,000. I did not see the likes on this. I didn't realize he says the logo for Sidney's Sweeney's lingerie line looks like it's for a salad dressing company that launched in 2019. This is for Siren. Oh, it's Siren. Siren. That's wild. It does give off a little bit

Sweet Green. Sweet Green launch way before 2019. Wait, wait. So, oh, wait, wait, is that the company that she's referring to? What is she actually referring to? Because I saw Dirt quote tweeted it. And that's a media and technology company with a similar logo. And Dirt says, just says, hey, and got 66,000 likes as well.

And Emily says, bro. But, oh, I guess it's sweet green that she's actually referring to. Salad dressing company? sweet green like a salad company? Yeah, I mean, she's just, she's just posting. Alex Conrad says someone blended Kava and Graza branding in Chatsbyte. Does have a little Gras in there.

But I think this company will be very well. Yeah. I think Sydney's like one of the most commercial people in Hollywood, right? She's like just leaning in. She's got a, you know, somewhat short moment in time to create a lot of value. and certainly a lot of the brand activations that she's done at broken through. So I'm bullish. I'm bullish.

To go back to the Claudebot thing, like this siren clearly exists in a very different part of the economy as Sweet Green. Like Sweet Green, I think it was like you walk down the street, you see it. Maybe if they start opening a ton of retail stores, but like in terms of- Are you flashbanging me? Why are you flashbanging me? Because the chat earlier was going crazy. They were trying to throw me off. It was insane.

I was barely hanging on. It was brutal. Everyone loves the flashbang. Fun fact, Sidney is launching her lingerie brand on. You guessed it. Shopify, Harley. That's right.

That's the story. Fantastic news. Well, the last thing, before you plant the bomb, we have a new ad read for Railway. I already did it. I'm going to do another one. Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider.

Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Well, said, John, we'll close it out. Nathan is highlighting Bloomberg article, the title of the article, NVIDIA lacks clear successor for superstar CEO

who built company, and Nathan, of course, says, man is barely getting started. I agree. Who's asking, who's even asking this question? This is like, this is like... It's driven the stock of 10x, and it's the biggest company in the world,

and they haven't, like, they have massive margins of the cash flow. Like, there's been no mistakes. Like, literally, like, nothing. 62 years old, he's got another 30. He's got another 30. He's going to be riding Nvidia straight in the singularity. And we will be, too, here on TBPN.

Last post, last post. Okay, one more post. Plant the bomb. Eric, uh, uh, Sufort says, uh, Pinterest dropped nearly 10% yesterday on news that the company has cutting roughly 15% of its workforce to focus on AI.

Eric, I believe, is coming on the show tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really like talking with him about all things. We're going to dive into different platforms. AtGPT ads. Pretty remarkable. I wonder where Pinterest will land. There's been rumors or, you know, pitches for an acquisition.

Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow. We'll see you. We'll see you on the newsletter. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one. Thank you.