TBPN Live - SpaceX Launch: Deep Dive & Reactions | Josh Reeves, Keller Cliffton, Will Brown, Julia Steinberg, Olivia Moore, Flo Crivello

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

(00:11) - SpaceX Launch Reactions (16:35) - History of SpaceX (29:53) - Mature Startups Get Venture-Debt Boost (41:38) - Timeline Reactions (01:28:52) - Josh Reeves, CEO of Gusto, discusses the company's acquisition of Guideline, a retirement benefits provider, to enhance services for small businesses. He highlights the long-standing partnership between the two companies and emphasizes the potential for deeper integration to simplify retirement benefits and ensure compliance with state mandates. Reeves also touches on the role of AI in improving user experience and operational efficiency within Gusto's platform. (01:45:26) - Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, co-founder and CEO of Zipline, discusses the company's rapid growth in autonomous drone deliveries, highlighting a 25-30% week-over-week increase in flight volumes and a net promoter score of 94. He emphasizes the transformative impact of their services, noting that customers are ordering multiple times per week, with some placing orders several times a day, leading to significant time savings and changes in daily routines. Cliffton also underscores Zipline's commitment to safety, reporting over 120 million commercial autonomous miles flown without any safety incidents, achieving a safety level ten times higher than that of cars. (01:57:54) - Will Brown, a researcher at Prime Intellect, discusses the recent launch of their Environment Hub, designed for reinforcement learning (RL) environments and evaluations. He explains that RL environments function as evaluations where models interact with tasks to receive performance scores, facilitating both training and assessment. Brown also highlights the challenges in scaling RL environments, emphasizing the need for efficient infrastructure and the importance of developing automated evaluation processes to enhance model performance across various applications. (02:25:15) - Julia Steinberg is the GM of Books at Arena Magazine. In this conversation, Steinberg discusses her recent experiences, including a car accident that necessitated a drive to San Francisco, and reflects on infrastructure challenges in California compared to China's rapid development, referencing Dan Wang's book "Breakneck" (02:39:53) - Olivia Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz specializing in AI investments, discusses the firm's release of the "Consumer AI Top 100," a data-driven ranking of the top AI-native web and mobile applications based on user traffic. She highlights the prominence of single-purpose AI tools like Remove.bg and the rise of AI-powered coding assistants such as Replit and Cursor. Moore also notes the increasing involvement of major tech companies in AI, with Google's Gemini ranking second on the list, while Meta's AI initiatives have yet to gain significant traction. (02:52:09) - Flo Crivello, founder and CEO of Lindy, an AI assistant company, discusses the launch of Vibe, a new feature enabling AI-generated code to test its own work autonomously. He highlights the limitations of existing no-code tools, which often require manual testing, and emphasizes Vibe's ability to build complex applications, such as a functional Airbnb clone, by integrating testing capabilities. Crivello expresses optimism about the future of AI-driven development, suggesting that the industry is progressing up the "slope of enlightenment" in the technology adoption lifecycle. (03:00:28) - Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN! Today is Wednesday, August 27th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress to finance the capital of capital. Massive news from SpaceX last night. They did it. They did it. Flight 10 made it back, took off from Star Base, South Texas.

The booster landed in the ocean and I think the Gulf of America. technically. That's absolutely right. And the actual starship executed a successful flip maneuver, deployed a mock payload of a bunch of non-functional Starlink satellites, survived re-entry, just barely, as we'll see. It was a really dramatic video. It was amazing. And then splash down on target in the Indian Ocean. It was a full send. It was a full send. It was a crazy, crazy video to watch. Yeah, let's watch the recap video that the Wall Street Journal put together. This is pretty interesting. Star Base, Texas.

This is yesterday. They scrapped two attempts on Monday and Tuesday because of some problems with the vehicle. But they got it off the ground. Look at that. They lit the candle. Stunning. Going to space. I wish we could get a better sense for just how massive it is from those angles.

And so those are the dummy Starlink satellites. You can see that little motor conveyor belt on the left. Yeah, just the number of things that have to go right to actually release something from this rocket is insane. And then this is the crazy part. There's just a bunch of debris. That's not what we want to see. Where did the stuff come from?

We clearly didn't need it. You would think that as soon as I saw it, I was like, okay, it's over. The whole thing's going to blow for sure. It definitely doesn't make it back because if it's like losing parts, like every part should be important, right? Like, what's going on here? And so, and they're also, the whole time they were, like, testing the flaps, like, really pushing them to the limits, going farther. There it is splashing down in the ocean.

You were mentioning earlier, there's a soundbite of them saying they were actually testing the flap. So they were doing things like, like, okay, let's stress it. And then, boom. And then the one. Convenient cut, you would have thought the journal and the legacy media would have let that a little bit longer of the massive explosion. Yeah, I mean, the vibes going into this were rough, honestly. Lots of people with the Elon's been distracted by politics take. Lots of people with the Elon too focused on AI romantic companions take.

You can imagine the conversation between Elon and Anni yesterday, right before the launch. You got this, babe. I mean, you know that, you know that Ani, apparently, allegedly, the original Ani romantic companion model runs on the non-reasoning model, just GROC 3, I guess. Just pure love. Pure love. And if there's any evidence out there in the just market of AI chatting and companions is that you don't need a reasoning model when you are chatting with a romantic companion.

So a lot of like the backlash to the GPT5 launch was something like, you know, people were using it, not just as a romantic companion, but just as like a life coach, somebody to talk to. It was very conversational. and that quick back and forth was what people actually enjoyed. They liked the tone. They didn't care that it wasn't incredibly good at solving hard math problems or like the IMO or whatever. What you got for me, Tyler? I think there's also something to be said for like reasoning models kind of mess with the vibes.

Yeah, totally. It's like the music thing where sometimes you want a friend that's not going to think too hard. They're just going to. Yeah, yeah, 100%. In the musical taste thing, all the reasoning models gave like these weird answers because they would like subtly prefer, you know, artist names with numbers, stuff like that. Yep, yep, yep. Although, I mean, I think the reasoning models actually had the best taste of all, but that's a bit of a hot take.

Well, we've got to pull up this post from Red Bull Futurists. It's very important. He says super heavy, the effing go, wow. And I just needed to highlight this because obviously Red Bull, some of Red Bull futurist work actually has went into this. Yeah, it's amazing. So absolute legend. A win for Red Bull, really. For sure.

sure um yeah i'm super it's actually surprising that that uh red bull in space x haven't tried to collab yet you think that red bull would just be like we'll give you millions of dollars if you just put red bull branding over this yeah yeah that'd be why not it'd be good it'd be good for both parties even the even the even the explosions or feel like on brand for red bull total red bull's down for the crazy risk taking i could see elon going with white monster no go that'd be really good Something here. You really should do that. But I mean, the basics brand is special, and maybe you don't want to delete that.

Would you go so far to say the white monster brand isn't special? Would you say that Red Bull? It would be added. It would be added. It would be added. The reason I was bringing up the reasoning models was because apparently Elon wanted Ani to use the reasoning model. The AI companion has to be able to do the hard math problems, which is funny.

So maybe she really was. use making, doing rocket science and calculating the last final decisions before this, this rocket went out. But it was a huge success. The Walser Journal has kind of the play-by-play here. SpaceX pulled off a smoother test of its Starship rocket managing a more complete mission after setbacks earlier this year. The Starship spacecraft flew through space after launching from the company South Texas Complex Tuesday around 7.30 p.m. ET. The vehicle successfully deployed a batch of dummy Starlink satellites and reentered Earth's orbit, facing intense heat and forces before splashing down in the Indian Ocean. This was the 10th launch of Starship. I believe

this was the, this was ship like 37 or something. They built a lot of these. Not all of them have launched. Some of them have been scrapped. Some of them blew up in the test stand. Like, they really pushed these things super hard. So it's a 403 foot tall rocket. They started testing this in 2023. There's been a series of explosions, mishaps, previous test flight. that have been cut short. Elon Musk has much riding on the rocket envisioned to one day carry satellite, scientific devices, and eventually astronauts.

Just to put this into context, the White House is 70 feet tall. Wow. So this is... Yeah, it's like the size of the... Isn't it closer to the Statue of Liberty? I think it's like around that tall, 403 feet.

I'll have to look that up. The Statue of Liberty is 305 feet. Oh, mocked. Absolutely, mocked. A extra 50 feet on that. For now, the country. company is pushing to show it can consistently fly Starship and experiment with its design, SpaceX set up Tuesday's mission to stress test parts of the Starship Spacecraft. We certainly saw that

on display with the parts flying all over the place, seeking to give engineers information to continue developing the vehicle. Basically, the calculus here is like, how cheap can you make this thing? If you use duct tape, will that work? Will you use tinfoil? They really are pushing these things like crazy, crazy hard. I think the other way to put this in a context, not everybody is fortunate to be able to launch, build and launch rockets for a living, but anybody that's built software knows that even if you're launching a relatively simple feature, it'll oftentimes break and have issues and bugs and things like that. And it's a little bit, you have a little bit more leeway to ship stuff and make changes on the

fly. In this case, they're doing it in this incredibly public setting where the internet is going to have a very strong reaction one way or another, so the pressure is just insane. So Musk wants both the starship booster and spacecraft to be fully and rapidly reusable, more akin to an airplane

than a traditional rocket. SpaceX has made major strides with reusability with its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets, which are powered by boosters. It can be used many times. SpaceX faces self-imposed and external deadlines with the much larger starship. Musk wants to launch an uncrewed version of the vehicle to Mars

next year, but has said meeting that goal will be tough. Of course, there's a March transfer window that only comes up, I think, every 18 months or so. So it's really critical to hit it in 26, or else you've got to wait until 2028, I believe. In 27, a lander variant of starship is supposed to be ready to carry astronauts on a NASA moon mission through the agency's Artemis Exploration Program. That's going to be really hard because I think they have to refuel in orbit and then also make it safe enough that restaurants can fly on it. Like, they have a lot to do there. This is why we need to get ony to be. able to solve complex physics.

For sure, for sure. And so, you know, Elon's obsessed with saving costs, saving time and money. You should go to ramp.com. Save time and money. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill, payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.

Speaking of, Ramp, Ramp, of course, sponsors the Founders podcast, which David Senra had a fantastic episode that just dropped called How Elon Works, and it really contextualized how insane it must be to work on the Starship Project. And there's three quotes that I want to run through here that I absolutely love. So first, when an engineer told Elon the air cooling system for the Falcon 9 would cost $3 million, he shouted over to Gwen Shotwell to ask her what an air conditioning system for a house cost. About $6,000, she said. So the SpaceX team bought some commercial air conditioning units and modified their pumps so they could work atop the rocket.

And my take is like, like, yeah, obviously like three millions a lot, six thousand is like nothing. But like if you're spending $3 million on the air cooling system, like it probably has been tested in aerospace environment. It probably comes to the team to help you get it working reliably. There's probably lots of nice to haves that go into that. Yeah, this is, I mean, you know, you wouldn't, a lot of companies that have this much access to capital would not be fixated on things like this. They would just say what's the best solution for. our problem. Let's use that. Yes. And so to have, again, to have that much access to capital and be that fixated on cost, like most billionaires with a space company are just going to say, well,

let's use the best of the best. Exactly. Let's use the best and let's just do one. Let's do the first rocket and then let's worry about cost control later. Later. And that's very different. So you can probably, like spending the $3 million probably speeds up the time to get a single rocket to space. But that's not the goal here. Elon's obsessed with building a system that will get to space over and over and over again. And so there's another quote here that's wild. Elon's just consistently questioning things. This is David Senra talking.

I'm trying to find the limit. And then he's quoting Elon. Why do we have to have four bolts there? Who set that specification? Can we do it with two? They would say no. He said, we'll try it. See if it fails.

And then on and on and on. And he just moves down the line. You need to be decisive or you're going to be dead. Elon calculated that he made a hundred command decisions a day as he walked to the floor, At least 20% are going to be wrong, he said, but we're going to alter them later. But if I don't make decisions, we die. And so, like, it's very clear that looking back at the Starship tests, like, there are so many

gambles going on and so many design decisions that are basically irrational if you're just trying to get one to space, but you're really building up like... It's playing the game on hard mode. Minimum, just a bare minimum, the cheapest possible rocket to get there. And he's probably just adding cost, just dollar by dollar. or like, okay, it completely blew up. Let's add one more thing that might stop it from blowing up, as opposed to the opposite, which is like,

that can never happen again, do whatever it takes. Everything that stops it from, any system or feature or function or part that stops it from blowing up, start there, and then maybe we'll pull one of those out if we're really sure that it can not blow up without it. Instead, it's like, it's gonna blow up, let's add the minimum amount of parts to make it not blow up.

up. And so everyone in the space community always quotes this Latin phrase, ad astra per aspera to the stars through hardship. I always thought it was just ad astra to the stars, but ad Astra per aspera is to the stars through hardship, through hardship specifically. And I thought that hit really hard. This this founder's podcast is fantastic. There's a bunch of potentially one of the greatest episodes of all that. It really is like there's this great story in here. Well, it says Elon saved money by questioning the requirements when he asked his team why it would cost $2 million to build a pair of cranes. These are cranes.

They're supposed to lift rockets. He was shown all the safety regulations imposed by the Air Force. Most were obsolete. So SpaceX then goes to the Air Force and they start questioning them. And it says that SpaceX was able to convince the military to revise them. The cranes ended up costing $300,000. That's like 85% savings. It's crazy.

He does this over and over and over again. But the way he does it is just really, really smart. He's consistently comparing costs for parts, materials, to other industries and other cases. Here's an example. Elon consistently pressed his team to source components from non-airospace companies. The latches used by NASA cost $1,500 each. A SpaceX engineer was able to modify a latch used in a bathroom stall and create a locking mechanism that only cost $30. And so, again, it's like a 98% savings on...

on the latch and you just do that for every single thing and it adds up to something that when the economics change it's not just a cheap rocket it's like it's the type of rocket that you can launch every single hour whereas it's just impossible to underwrite that if you're if you're going to the taxpayer and saying you know we need and convert an entirely new industry exactly there was another line in here I'm going to but but you guys should go listen to the episode yeah you David highlights how Elon has this interesting problem where his employees like become so wealthy that they lose like the work ethic that like made the company what it is and so this frustration of like okay I'm you know we're making all this progress but then eventually you

know early employees end up with you know a nice house a vacation house and they don't want to spend quite as much time totally at the factory grinding so a good problem to have well hopefully you enjoyed the SpaceX stream yesterday I think they used Restream if you want a stream you should use Restream. We are powered by Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience, wherever they are. You can sign up for free. There's one last funny story in here. The day before a launch, a final inspection revealed two small cracks in the engine skirt of the rocket's second stage. That's the piece of the bottom. Everyone at NASA assumed we'd be

standing down from the launch for a few weeks. The usual plan would be then to replace the entire engine. What if we just cut the skirt, Elon said? Like literally cut around it. Why not just trim a tiny bit off the bottom that had the two cracks? Using a big pair of shears, the skirt was trimmed and the rocket launched the next day. It's wild because another way to just, if you had somebody working on your house and they were applying this approach, you'd be like, what are you doing? This is so janky. Are you insane?

But it works when it's part of this system. It took less than an hour to make the decision. Three more principles combined that repeat over and over again. Elon's anti-outourcing, pro-control and pro-daily iteration. David has an interesting context here about offshoring. By sending factories abroad, American companies saved labor costs, but they lost the daily feel for ways to improve their products. Elon Bucks this trend.

He wants to have tight control of the manufacturing process. That's why he puts tents up in the parking lot. Yeah. He believed that designing the factory to build the car, the machine that builds the machine was as important as designing the car itself. It's a fantastic episode. You should go check it out. Do we want to run through the history of SpaceX, the history of these launches? We have Tyler Cosgrove with some beautiful work

on the TBPN, yet to be sponsored Whiteboard. There could easily be a sponsor on there. Maybe Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams, build great products together, get started for free. For now, Tyler, take us through the history of SpaceX, the history of these various projects. Professor, yeah.

Okay, so I think we should, intern becomes the professor. Passes in session. A lot of people, I think when they hear these about these launches, they aren't even really sure what rocket is even going on. So I think you can kind of classify SpaceX rockets into three distinct types. These are like the active ones that are still going on.

So there's Falcon 9. So this was like the first really like commercial, not just tests, 2010. This is like the ninth iteration after. They were doing Falcon 1 before, which is one engine, right? But those were like mostly tests. They weren't really reusable. It wasn't really a business.

Yeah. At that point. Yes. That was 2010. Oh, perfect. All right. Can you still hear me? Yeah, yeah.

Sounds great. So, okay, so we have, that's Falcon 9. Then Falcon Heavy comes out in 2018. This is essentially just three Falcon 9 boosters just like strapped together. Yep. But it's kind of a separate thing, right? You can, these are also always built to be like reusable, at least some parts of it. And that's a big piece of like the Falcon 9 has literally just nine engines.

kind of strapped together. It's all the same engine, so they get the reusability there, right? So they're doing like one thing. Yeah. And then we go down to Starship. I mean, this is what's currently being tested. This is not like doing commercial missions yet, obviously.

But this is kind of the next iteration. So this one, they're all kind of two parts, right? But this one has 33 engines on the bottom. That's like called Super Heavy. And then Starship is technically just like the second stage. Sure. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, okay. So then let's go. through, let's first go through just like kind of general SpaceX launches. Yep. So here 2006, this is the first Falcon 1 launch. This is what we were talking about earlier. Okay. Kind of none of these like really do a lot until they get to. Didn't they have like three failures. It took them and they were almost out of business. That's one of those pictures. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, where he's kind of sitting down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And quaduline eight hole out of the Pacific. Yeah. Yep, yep. And then we go to 2010. This is Falcon 9 first launch.

2012 this is the grasshopper landing test okay so these are when um the first test of like propulsion landing right which we kind of have seen later with the starship where it catches it right lands down yep um 2012 this is the first i ss cargo mission yep so this was um on and the the story of the grasshopper legs that's uh dug over at radiant nuclear now he worked on that project uh it was like no one had done that before crazy decision. And then Starship is unique in that Elon's basically factoring out the legs because if you take the legs off the rocket, that reduces weight so you can get more payload to space. And then instead of legs, you have, you basically have a pair of chopsticks that

catch the rocket. Yeah. And so the legs never leave the Earth, right? That's the strategy. Yeah. So then... ISS cargo. Yeah, ISS cargo. This was the, on the drone ship landing. I didn't realize that it took four years to get the drone ship right. Yeah. We have that crazy video we should pull up after this of like all the landing failures on the drone ship with, I think it's like in the hall of the Mountain King and it's just like crashes after crashes after crashes. Yeah.

Okay. And then we go to, this is the first 2017, the first reflight of a booster. Okay. This is the first time I actually like, kind of reused it. Fully reusable at that point. Yeah. Got it. And then 2018, this is Falcon Heavy.

This is the three Falcon 9s put together essentially. Yep. Then this is where they basically just start to get the cadence record of launches per year. Yep. Yeah, you see those like, there's like time lapse videos if it goes from like one Falcon 9 launching to like one launching like every second. Yeah. Like this is when they really ran back. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty incredible.

I think the record before this was the USSR in, I think it was like 1979 or something. No way. Okay. Yeah, it's pretty insane that they had that record. Yep. But then, yeah, we get Starship. So then let's go through Starship launches. Let's go through Starship launches.

Okay. So first one, April 20th, 2023. Yep. So it was fully stacked and it took off. but it blew up after four minutes. Yeah, basically immediately. RUD, rapid, unscheduled. Not all of the engines started.

There's 33. They didn't all start. OK. But that was the first, like, kind of everything is put together, it goes up. Got it. Then the next test, 2023 November, this is all 33 engines started.

That was the big, big upgrade. Then we see it reached orbital velocity. So another big step. Yep. June 6, we see both stages kind of go up, and then they both re-enter. Yeah, so they both hit their max altitude. Yeah.

So they weren't trying to go any farther, but coming back is rough because you're going through the atmosphere, and then they blow up on the way back. Yeah. Okay, but they're making progress. Yeah. Cool. Then we go to October 13th. This is like kind of the famous tower catch.

Yeah. I remember that. This really blew up the... The chopsticks. Yeah. Chopsticks. Yeah. Okay.

Then we see November 19th. This is the Raptor relates. So the Raptor... And the tower catch. Did it blow up in the tower? No. They caught it. right they caught it yeah yeah that was that cool crazy yeah they probably have to like tear it down

and like rebuild it because it's not like fully reusable yet but it proves that they can actually that one was wild because it was so sci-fi yeah but it had been almost programmed into people's brains that that was like a thing yeah through sci-fi yeah yeah yeah the reaction broadly like people yeah tech were you know pretty blown away but at the same time it just it felt like something that yeah space company and the really crazy thing about the tower catch was that it emphasized how high cadence the actual process of reusability can be because I believe that the lower stage, the booster, goes up and is only in the air for like a couple minutes. It's not actually that long. Like the upper stage was in space for like a full hour. Yeah, yeah. The mission yesterday

was over full. But super heavy just goes up and is back in like four minutes or 10 minutes or something like that yeah and so you see it go up and then come right back and get and and get caught in the tower and then they can just rotate it over start refueling it and it can just bring the next thing up yeah so like the pace of iteration is is the system is designed to be like not launch every day it's like launch every five minutes it's like truly like airport level yeah so then spaceport let's go to first block two launch okay so block two that's like when you look at the starship like basically the top section um there's been a couple it's kind of like this part there's been a couple iterations of this so

this was kind of the next big like upgrade yeah and then we see March 6 we see a payload attempt so so this is what you're talking about earlier where they try to open the doors open the doors put out they're not real Starlink yeah satellites but they're like you know mock ones yep then we see super heavy reflight so so this was super heavy again is this booster that's first time they like actually reuse the same one caught it and then put it back up yeah like it didn't actually go back up, but they like re-ignited it basically and it worked. Wow.

And then this one just yesterday was a payload deployment and then we talked both earlier, but both stages had controlled splash down in the ocean. That's amazing. Yeah. What a journey. Well, congrats to everyone. At a small note, it explodes. But next time.

Next time, next time. All that matters, there was a controlled touchdown. Thank you for the breakdown, Tyler. Thank you. Feel free to keep the helmet on for the rest of that. Yes. And feel free to sign up for Vanta. Automate Compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vantta's trust management platform takes the manual work and security out of your security and compliance process and replaces with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing

your first framework or managing a complex program. Philip Johnston was clearly inspired by what's going on, but a little bit frustrated. I wanted to highlight this. Nothing pisses me off more than VCs proclaiming they don't invest in deep tech companies outside of L.A. and S.F. Starlink is quietly building one of the biggest cash generators of our time in Redmond, Washington. It's also where Coupier, AWS, and Azure are 80% plus of all satellites launched globally and last year were designed, built and tested in Redmond. There's a reason we put StarCloud Inc. in Redmond, and we're on the lookout for more amazing talent. So good luck to Philip Johnston.

Hopefully, the VCs come around to the good work that folks are doing in Redmond, Washington. What if we moved Redmond to the gundo? We could. We could. I think there's probably, for all these companies, there's assets in all the different places. I haven't heard of a company really going deep into South Texas because a lot of the Gundo companies are beneficiaries of the work that SpaceX did in Hawthorne and El Segundo. And in fact, I think that there's a space company that's in the, maybe it's Rivian is currently not a space company, But Rivian is currently owns the original SpaceX factory in El Segundo because they've moved out because they obviously scaled up. But a lot of the Gundu companies are beneficiaries of the work that SpaceX did in El Segundo to kind of bring back that industrial capacity.

Of course, before SpaceX, there was Lockheed and Northrop and a few other primes that were in the area and still are. But the Gundos been like a great home for defense tech broadly. maybe Redmond's the next one. Maybe you've got to do some, if you're doing satellite R&D, got to get a Redmond, an office. If you're doing launch stuff, you want to head out to South Texas. Because they do seem pretty friendly out there.

At the end of the SpaceX stream, the announcer kind of, like, thanked all the different parties. I was like, thank you to the county where Starbase is because Starbase is like this chartered city within the county. And thank you to the people of Texas and the people of this and that. Well, they got a stock exchange now. They do. It's yesterday.

Got NICC. Texas. Nicey Texas. Something down, something happening in the Lone Star State. Yeah. I haven't been to Texas in years. Last time I actually went was for David Center's thing. Really? Yeah.

Of them that, I don't find a lot of random time to go there. It's been a lot of New York, a lot of SF, a little Miami. I have been a bunch. When was the last time you went? Last year, I think I went three or four times for different portfolio companies. Yeah. Great place. Great place.

Do we have the video of the SpaceX explosions over time? They have this montage reel. I'd love to play that. If you can find that, as I tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. All right, I'm throwing it in the timeline. This is the best video that I can find.

We will be talking about venture debt and what's going on in that market. But in the meantime, I believe we have a video of SpaceX's launches and crashes. This is from SpaceX themselves, how not to land an orbital rocket. Yes, this is the video I want to watch. Can we go full screen on this? This is great. And just immense confidence to release something like this that on the face of it makes the company look bad, but actually demonstrates what makes the company look great,

which is not being afraid of failure. The top comment is this is this is. 100% the most expensive YouTube video ever made. It just comes down so fast. It comes down so fast. The first one is just like you didn't stop at all. Here we go. Uh-oh.

Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Oh, no. Wow. There we go. Beautiful. But this is great. Unfortunately.

Look at all this equipment. The smoke's still coming off. Yeah, how is that not just going to blow? That seems dangerous. to be around there. Yeah, that's a lot of confidence in your product for Elon. Especially for something that, like, it actually blows up.

Yeah, here it is on the drone ship, I believe, just smashing down constantly. This one, trying so hard, lands, and then it's definitely going to blow. There we go. You know it's going to blow up. Boom. Every time.

The music? Yeah, the music's great. I thought they had a different one with Hall of the Mountain King. Wait, what is coming off of that? Why didn't they use the chopsticks? Yeah, Tyler, do you know why they didn't go for chopsticks on this one? Instead, did the... Like originally?

Yeah, yesterday. Can you look up why they didn't go for chopsticks grabbing? Because it seemed like they were able to do that a few flights ago. I'd be curious to know why they didn't do it. This is brilliant marketing. Yeah. It's the yes and. This is so good.

The yes and approach. Yes, we blow up. Just tilting all over the place. Why is it tilting? It's not even going. Is it just like... Well, it's a ship on the sea. It's just about to fall.

This is great. Oh, it actually made it. It seems like this one's coming down. Oh, that was a tough land. Is it solid? Okay. You call it solid? It's going to explode.

You know it's going to explode. This is insane. So good. I could watch these all day. Not bad. do do do do to do to do um anyway uh on to venture debt yeah let's get into the journal the really no you know what's really burning up the timeline what is the the audience is clearly celebrating uh gulf stream aerospace is join us in officially welcoming the world's first the world's longest

range aircraft to the skies the first 8200 nautical mile g 800 has officially been delivered biggest range business aircraft. To a customer at our Appleton, Wisconsin completions facility. Look at that plane. So let's give it up for Gulfstream Aerospace. They don't have the luxury of having quite the number of explosions that...

They said to join us in welcoming the world's longest range aircraft to the skies. We are happy to join Gulfstream in welcoming the world's longest range aircraft to the skies. Anyway, let's go to Venture Debt. There are some changes in the market. Yeah, the journal has a story.

The asset class has shifted to late-stage lending as companies remain private for longer. Venture debt firms are shifting their focus to larger deals with mature private companies as more startups stay private. For longer, venture debt value hit a record $53 billion in 2024, up from $27 billion in the prior year, and more than a previous high of $42 billion in 2021.

Of course, SVB would have been a big player. So it's actually still, you know, given, given, Given how significant SVB was in that market, it's pretty incredible to see the growth. As the value of deals rose, however, venture debt deal count fell to 1,300 transactions in 2024, the lowest level since 2016. The trend continued during the first half of 2025 with a little more than 19 billion of venture debt deal volume, according to a separate report by Capital Advisors Group. Great name. Very, very generic, but if you can own it, it's probably... powerful. Yes. Debt must react to equity, said Stefan Spasik, director of debt placement at Capital

Advisors Group. Venture debt providers have to target stable companies with solid revenue. If there's a lack of equity or sponsors, decide to pull back on equity commitments to their portfolio companies, he added. I didn't fully understand this because it feels like there is very much not a lack of equity right now. But is, like, what is he? Well, I mean, he's saying, I mean, he's saying there's That's the big risk, right? If a company running in the red and they can raise their next round, that's when you can get in the tough spot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If the current backers aren't doubling down at Series C, D, D, E, F, which is the vast majority of companies.

We focus on the companies that successfully raise every single round. Anyway. Startups and growth companies are turning to venture debt as an alternative to raising what is often more expensive equity capital that stands to dilute existing shareholders in an environment where traditional exit opportunities remain heavily constrained. Venture debt provider say credit also allows venture investors benefits such as retention of company board seats, which would have to be given away in an equity financing. The quote, liquidity constraints on the part of venture equity are still a big driver in the market, said David Sprung, the founder and chief executive of runway growth capital,

adding that he expects the venture industry's liquidity constraints to continue into next year. Runway typically writes checks of roughly 30 million and it lends to tech, health care, consumer. Earlier this year, for example, data and AI company, Databrooks announced a 5.2 billion. You never know what Databricks. They might be raising 52 billion. Announced a 5.2 billion credit facility shortly after the closing, final close. We want to be 50% debt to equity on this company, on this high growth tech company. After data bricks. It's like a 150 billion dollar company now or something. It's over 100. It's a huge. Yeah, they just use the greater than in the last announcement, which is like, yeah, who's counting it?

The last deal was a $10 billion series J. Well, that wasn't in the last one. They did the K. They did the K. They did the K. The company said it plans to use the debt for general corporate purposes. The debt financing was provided by a consortium of investment banks, including J.P. Morgan, Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. Let's give it up. And Blue Al's in and Apollo Global's in and Blackstone's in. Just a couple names.

They really got the murderers up. looking to diversify their capital sources and debt is increasingly attractive as a non-dilutive way to fund growth and lower the overall cost of capital. As company scale and stay private longer, we see significant opportunities to support high-quality businesses with flexible credit solutions. Earlier this month on the smaller side, Runway committed 20 million to swing education, an online marketplace that connects schools with substitute teachers, which is backed by firms, including Apex Partners and Reach Capital. Runway's commitment consisted of a first lean term loan and revolving.

credit line. What's interesting is like we hear a lot about the venture debt boom in the context of like the hadrians of the world or like you know hard tech industrials like makes a lot of sense to have relationships with debt providers because you're buying a lot of land or you're buying a lot of equipment and like that has terrible value. Yeah yeah even if you're buying you know when you when you read about crusoe building a massive data center it's like well of course there's going to be some credit involved because a piece of that business looks like a traditional mortgage and it looks like a real estate deal almost. And so you want a certain tranche of capital to be focused on earning real estate like returns as opposed to paying for everything

with venture capital. So since the 2023 collapse of SVB, one of the most active venture debt providers, more lenders have entered the marketers stepped up their existing lending, creating a more competitive landscape. Barrowers not only have more appetite for debt, but they now have more choices as well. One firm that is capitalized on the opportunities created by SVB's collapse is longtime venture debt lender, Hercules Capital, a great name, which typically invests around 40 million in debt deals. The firm's deals generally have a 15% loan-to-value ratio, meaning the borrower's loan volume represents 15% of its total value. Hercules is focused on tech and life sciences. Earlier this year, Hercules entered into an agreement with publicly

traded biotech company Moon Lake immunotherapics to provide up to 500 million in non-dilutive capital. At the close, there was a $75 million drawdown with additional tranches becoming available upon achievement of certain specified milestones. Our biggest competition is the equity market. Again, this should be obvious to everyone listening, but founders are kind of going out and saying, I need, say, I need $100 million. Do I want to take the potential risk that comes with equity financing, even if I'm going to be, or sorry, potential risk that comes with leveraging debt, even if I'm benefiting from the lack of dilution, or do I just want to go and raise a fresh primary round?

Anyways, good to see the market recover. The thing that stuck out to me about this was the fact that the deals are getting bigger, So venture debt value hit a record of $53 billion last year. The prior year was garbage. $27 billion in 2023. Obviously, high interest rates, a major pullback in the startup and venture community, kind of healing from the turmoil of like the SVB crisis. It was March 10th, 2023.

Was when SVV went bankrupt. So it's like, yeah, of course, 2023 was going to be a bad year. 2021, two years prior, was up at $42 billion. So we went from $42 billion down to $27 billion, but are now at a new high watermark of $53 billion. But what's changed is the fact that the deal count fell to 1,341,341 transactions in 2024, which is the lowest since 2016. More lenders doing less deals. Exactly. Bigger deals, fewer deals, you know, more embracement, more concentration, more focus on the power law winners.

And that makes sense when you see all the capital that's flowing into the really, really big companies, Open AI, Anthropic, the crusoe's of the world that are able to marshal, like, a lot more capital. There used to be a time in the SVB era where you could go do a $10 million series A and get $2 million in venture debt. And you would just add that on top to kind of build the relationship, build the credit, stretch the balance sheet a little bit more, extend the runway. Maybe you pay, it was always like kind of, it all goes into one.

cash bucket and you kind of spend it however you want. But it kind of set you up to stretch your financings a little bit further. And a lot of companies just by default got on that train pretty early. And I think that SVB leaving the market, obviously, really led to consolidation. And so we're seeing venture debt go way, way up the stack to, you know, a $5 billion venture, you know, credit facility for Databricks. Even the $20 million series like Venture Debt round, that's pretty big for swing education.

Bench, if you remember, got in a rough spot with venture debt and ended up being acquired by that company employer.com. I guess they were a decent business but had tripped some debt covenants and were forced to

abruptly shut down. And then they were ultimately acquired up. And that's the thing is like, you say like, oh, well, I don't give the venture debt lender a board seat, but, you know, they do have debt covenants. They do have the, they're at the top of the cap table, even above the preferred. If there's liquidation, they're going to get their money out first. And so even though they don't have a board seat, they do have incredible leverage over the company, and they actually have a sort of control that should be definitely considered.

It's very, one could call it senior. Senior, it is senior. The other interesting thing is Hercules is targeting 15% loan to value ratio. That feels higher than what I've seen in the past. So loan to value means if your company is worth $100 million, they would loan you up to $15 million in venture debt. In the previous era where I was more familiar with this, it was like you would raise $20 million series A at $100 million post. The VC takes 20% of the company in a board seat. Back on low single digits.

Two million in venture debt, three million in venture debt, like loan to value of like 3%, 4%. But I think this reflects them being more selective about going into companies. They're not just post-product market fit and have some like VC hype behind them. Like they have a real revenue, real fly wheels. We don't know what the terms are on these 15% loan to value deals. It could be that you need to keep a multiple of the loan on your balance sheet. Yep, totally.

Otherwise, we're going to, you know, require. And also they probably have done some sort of, like, private equity breakup valuation to say that, you know, even if this doesn't, even if the company completely plateaus and all the VCs bail, there's still base case, you know, we can get 15% of the value out here, as opposed to the previous era, which was maybe more risk on in the sense that they were backing earlier companies, but in another way, more risk off because they were. were writing so much lower. Jason, Jason O'Connor says,

this show is like a Buddhist statue I have in the background to hopefully bring in good luck and fortune. Thank you, Jason. That's exactly what we're going. We're praying for you and your capitalist endeavors, always. I want to pull up this chart on Polymarket of SpaceX, Starship, fully reusable in 2025. Of course, yesterday was a major market mover.

It does not look like anyone had any insight. information because the market spiked right as the launch was successful. It jumped from 11% chance that Starship is fully reusable in 2025 to 71%. Now the market's hovering at 40%. And the rules here are on February 28th, Elon Musk posted that it was likely Starship would become fully reusable in 2025. The market will resolve to yes, if SpaceX or Elon Musk announces that Starship is fully reusable by December 31st, 2025. Otherwise, the market will resolve no. So you are, you are, you know, riding on, you know, SpaceX and Elon's comms,

which of course would be hotly debated. And obviously there's not a pure binary in terms of what reusability means. Like, clearly this rocket came down and exploded. They need to rebuild it. But even when it comes down, they still need to swap out parts and fix things. Like, they were saying that during this last SpaceX flight, they deliberately took off a bunch of tiles just to kind of like see if they could do it.

What would happen? And so, like, you can tell as the rocket comes down, like a lot of those tiles got roasted. And so they might have to, you know, swap those out. There are elements that aren't reusable. But you're definitely going to swap out the stuff that was flying around. All the insulation or something. That was one of the wildest bits that I've seen.

Anyway. Well, we have this chart. Yeah, we have a chart on, we love to trust the experts on this show. We are specifically trusting the experts on the White House Intel deal. If you haven't been paying attention, living under a data center. The U.S. government is now the proud owner of 10% of Intel shares. You. You. The U.S. taxpayer now have a small slice of Intel, which also means you have a smaller slice of figure robotics because apparently Intel Capital invested in figure robotics. So, If you were worried that you didn't have exposure, you can send the layered SPV emails that you've been getting to the archive and just be riding with Uncle Sam on that one.

But we did a little whirlwind tour of who is saying what about the White House Intel deal. Semi-analysis seems pretty bullish, gave the latest, it gives the last U.S. chip maker an actual chance to catch up. spur the domestic sector. The bid here is that the Intel story with the government is not going to stop here and that there will be some sort of pressure or incentive applied to other American tech companies to buy from Intel. Jordan Snyder, a friend of the show over at China Talk, is also bullish. He says it's Intel's only chance is government support.

The U.S. needs domestic chip fabrication capabilities, and this is a good path. Ben Thompson has a slightly positive bias. He pulled out the steelman term and kind of steel manned it. He said national security and the economy concerns are too accurate, too acute to not keep Intel foundry viable, although he does cite Scott Lindscombe, who's extremely bearish, and this says this will lead to widespread inefficient capital allocation in the chip sector. That, of course, is the fear. The Wall Street Journal is also somewhat bearish, pitting essential U.S. partner, Samsung,

and TSM against a government-owned competitor is a bad idea. I was talking to a few other folks that both, they predicted this, but they didn't think it's necessarily the good outcome. Yeah, and it has ripple effects if other companies are getting the, they're getting strongly encouraged to use Intel's services. Yeah, could make those companies less competitive, potentially. The Asianometry was constructive on the deal, said could make the deal work by using Intel as an Nvidia second source.

And of course, this could potentially hurt NVIDIA's margins because the CPUs that NVIDIA makes, I believe that TSM are probably high margin if they have to pay Intel, their margin will fall. But this is a small piece of NVIDIA's overall business, and so it shouldn't completely upend the amazing business that they built. Of course, NVIDIA is reporting earnings today,

and we are looking forward to tracking that monitoring situation. I have a post here from Bucco Capital Bloch, the third technology brother. Yes. He says, the fate of the world is in Jensen's hands. Good thing, he's a psycho, and he has an excerpt from an article here. That constant kind of relentless improvement, looking down at himself, he never rests on his laurels. One guy told me that after a blowout quarter, Jensen came into the room and said,

This morning, I looked into a mirror, and I said, you suck. He does these mental tricks to make sure he doesn't get over because he's so scared. He's a student of history that the big thing for technology companies to start thinking, your hot stuff and then start becoming complacent. He is so scared of that, so he tricks himself to not do that. That's amazing. Yeah. So closing out our trust, the experts infographic, Bill Bishop is slightly barish.

He says Intel Fabs haven't proven they can deliver U.S. government ownership and private companies. That's a slippery slope. So we will be monitoring the slope to see how slippery it is. Hopefully it's the slope of illusionment. What is the Gartner hype cycle again? The slope of enlightenment. The slope of enlightenment.

And then the plateau of productivity. The trough. So let us know where you are on the Gartner hype cycle. We are working on some more fun stuff there. Maybe we'll throw it in, Julius. Of course we will. What analysis do you want to run, chat with your data and get expert level insights?

I want to know how people are tracking on the Gartner hype cycle. Yep. Alex Heath just shared a link. He said TikTok's parent company. is making more revenue than meta and is worth less than 20% of its market cap. So there's some reporting here from Reuters. ByteDance, the owner of Short Video App,

TikTok, is set to launch a new employee share buyback that will value the Chinese technology giant at more than $330 billion, driven by continued revenue growth. The company plans to offer current employees $200 per share in the repurchase program. The people said up $5.5% from $189. It each, it offered them about six months ago.

The buyback is expected to be launched in autumn. And the latest buyback at a higher valuation will come as Bight Dance consolidates its position as the world's largest social media company by revenue with its second quarter revenue up 25% year on year. The jump resulted in the company's second quarter revenue hitting about $48 billion, most of which is from the Chinese market as it continues to face political pressure to divest its U.S. arm. And apparently TikTok's U.S. operation remains unprofitable.

The U.S. operation? Yes. How is that possible? Good question. They have so many ads and stuff. And I thought they were taking a big cut of them. I think TikTok shop is wildly unprofitable. That's right.

They were subsidizing a bunch of stuff there. Wow. Well, maybe it's got to go to Jensen. Maybe it's got to go to Oracle. Let's give it to Larry. I'm in favor of giving it to Larry. Anyway, if you're going beyond getting your brand mentioned on TikTok, you're trying to get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT,

head over to profound, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. AJ over at Semi Analysis says, feels like the fact that Zuck poached only a small amount of researchers for Anthropic is really under-discussed. They have something that really works with respect to culture, mission, and values. remember cursor poached the cloud two people on the cloud code team they went over a cursor for a couple weeks yeah and they were back at anthropic yeah i think it was only one week one week yeah that is a crazy short stint um uh droid says the market implied mandate of heaven i mean yeah they like the the the culture at anthropic is extremely unique like they really do uh believe that they are on an exponential curve they believe in straight lines on log linear graphs as they say i was i was thinking to about that quote the other day, because if you look at the data center capacity and how pre-training

is scaling, like, it is a straight line on a log linear graph. We're getting orders of magnitude improvements every few years, and it does seem extremely predictable, except the last time I was looking at straight lines on a log linear graph. It was COVID, and that, of course, like, completely flatlined at a certain point because there are only so many people that can get a disease. And so I'm not, I believe in the straight lines on log linear graphs, but I also believe that straight lines can become flat lines on log linear graphs. And we'll have to keep seeing, what do you think? Then the question is, like, where are we on the, on the S curve?

Yeah, where are we on the S curve? I don't know. I think we're pretty early. Pretty early? Yeah, I do think we're early, but I think that there's, I don't know, there's just a, like, there's a number of, like, small percentage chance. things that could result in in like that S-curve hitting like everything from like bottlenecks in the supply chain that are somewhat intractable we run out of a

certain like bottleneck product that causes a delay in the next oom of data center built out we could also see some regulation we could see the business models not quite like like the the business community could just panic and it could just become a meme that's like oh that actually like, you know, we over-invested, we need to pull back for a few years. This is what happened during the dot-com boom. Like a lot of those fiber investments made sense over a 10-year, 20-year period, but they were overheated in the short-term. And so that just created like a freeze. And all of a sudden we didn't get a continuous build-out, or we did, but we didn't get

continuous capabilities. I don't know. We'll see. What do you think? I mean, I'm bullish, yeah. What do you think about the fact that it feels like model capability is is like very discontinuous? Like it feels like how do you mean discontinuous? Like it feels like it feels like we get we like like we are on a we are on a smooth path of like bigger models chopping wood training things. But like only this is the run take like like as technology rolls out it rolls out in this like smooth curve. But then you experience like a few discontinuities with like new capability comes on comes online. We're like the chatchy. Like there wasn't really that much like if you were just if you were to just look at the the straight line on a log linear graph like it would be very hard to say like that's the chat GPT moment because it was really like in between GPT 3 and in between GPT 5 and in between like you know like medium size models big models and then even bigger models and and like you couldn't you couldn't see there's no kink in the graph at at at the chat GPT moment there is on the user side there is on the revenue side but there's not on the actual like scale of data center side. It's not like we went from like nothing to something on the actual data center build outside. And that caused the, like, so it's hard to predict where there will be new breakout successes along the curve. Maybe that doesn't matter. I don't know. Yeah. I mean,

I don't think it matters that like, you're probably going to see another kink in user usage when school starts again and everyone's like, wow, GPT5 is so good because no one's ever used a reasoning model before. Yeah. Did you see this, did you see this post about someone says, that GPT5 caused like a major drop-off. This is from Marie Martins. The model giveeth and the model taketh away. User registrations

coming from AI search. ChatGPT was like this huge boom. Can you see this dream? And then GPT5 launched. And this is like way deeper in the slides. Yeah, I saw I mean, there was another

like somewhat similar chart that was like going around a couple weeks ago where it was like basically you could like tie it to when like schools it was like in may or something then usage completely dropped off do you remember this chart but then it was actually like oh this is just some like weird yeah this is like for one organization it was only like 100,000 tokens like it was obviously not the actual usage yeah I would be very surprised if we're if we're at a phase of chat GPT adoption where like the school usage is still like a major factor yeah just because like

the install base is so big it can't just be students right yeah and then so I mean I'm a little hesitant to, like, pull a lot of stuff from that graph. Sure. But it seems, it seems very weird. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway. This is a super interesting chart from, for Mary Martin.

She is the founder of Talley forms. Yeah. And, yeah, basically calling out they were getting a ton of registrations from people just in chat, GPT. And then all of a sudden dropped off a cliff. So, we'll see. There's some debate in the comments. around how GPD-5 stopped adding UTM parameters to request. Oh, interesting.

There could be an attribution issue there, but they're saying... Yeah, I mean, we definitely want her to zoom out and look at overall registrations and see if there's a fall-off in those, because was this purely additive or was it just like an attribution thing? And then I'd love to know, like, is this actually, like, affecting her business or is tally still growing at the same rate. And it feels like it's coming from a different source, but in fact, it's all the same.

It's not impacting Pop Mart CEO and founder Wang Ning. It's now the 79th richest person in the world. According to Morning Brewer, his net worth has grown by $20 billion this year. It makes him richer than names like Peter Thiel, David Teper, and Steve Cohen. Steve Cohen, wow. Laboo billionaire. Labu Billionaire.

We helped, we contributed to this by buying a Laboubu for Bill Bishops. So it's on the way, Bill. Tashi. Yep, very excited for that one. Anyway, back to Anthropic. Dario was talking to John Collison on sneaky, cheeky pipe about how he approaches LLM economics and interview with John Collison. I thought this was interesting.

So Dario says, get kind of burned. There's two ways you could describe what's happening right now in the business model. So let's say in 2023, you train a model that costs $100 million, and then you deploy it in 2024, and it makes $200 million in revenue. Meanwhile, because of scaling laws in 2024, you also train a model that costs $1 billion. And then in 2025, you get $2 billion of revenue from that $1 billion. And you've spent $10 billion to train the model that year. So if you look at it in a conventional way, the profit and loss of the company, you've lost $100 million the first year. you've lost $800 million the second year

and you've lost $8 billion in the third year. So it looks like you're getting worse and worse. If you consider each model to be a company, the model that was trained in 2023 was profitable. You paid $100 million, and then it made $200 million in revenue. There's some cost to inference the model, but let's just assume in this current Tunis example that even if you add those two up, you're kind of in a good state.

So if every model was a company, the model in this example is actually profitable. And I thought about this in the context of GPT4, That was obviously, I think that was like around $100 million training run, something like that. And they've clearly made a ton of money back from that because GPT4 is the backbone of something that generates like billions of dollars in revenue. Of course, they've also trained other models that have been used less and maybe were less additive. But this was framed as like, oh, no, this is like a nightmare. Like he's exposing the truth that like these will never make money because they're just going to continually invest endlessly.

I didn't see it that way at all. This makes perfect sense to me. At some point, you could just stop training. The question is, can you just stop training new models and just reap profits of old models? Yeah, well, it's more just like, at a certain point, you run out of, you run out of, you kind of tap the capital markets because maybe you can't raise $10 trillion to fund the next model on debt or equity or whatever.

But there's no reason that you can't, like in each of these models, if you wait 10 years, you can afford the next run, right? Because you train the model for $100 million. Let's say you were like, I'm bootstrapping a foundation model company. Crazy. But you could do it. Here's how you do it. You invest, you know, $1 in a model that makes you a dollar next year, $2 next year.

Then you take, when you wait 10 years, you save up $10, then you do the $10 run. And you expand until you do the $100 million training run that makes you $200 million of the next year and $200 million the next year. and you know what you have after five years? You have a billion dollars in profit. What do you do with that billion dollars? You train the next model. Then you wait five years.

And then you save $10 billion. Then you train the $10 billion market. This assumes, of course, that you would have a competitive offering in the market and you wouldn't be getting. Well, yes, yes. But that is a broader market dynamic of whether the market is willing to put up.

Like currently, the market's 100% cool putting up $100 million into a foundation model company. there were like 20 companies that raised $100 million to train foundation models. There's only few of them left. Then those few, a bunch of them put up, you know, a billion to train the billion dollar model. Now you have who's going to put up $10 billion to do the really big training run. It's going to be a few laps. It's going to be Open AI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, right?

As we get to the $100 billion, yeah, we might have to wait a little bit. We might have to kind of accrue savings and pay that down over time. And this is another thing that might cause a kink in like the line. log linear graph if you have to if you can't immediately marshal ten trillion dollars a hundred trillion dollars yeah like right now we are in the phase of like snap your fingers and the capital marshals because we're we're in this we're in this era where the games are clear yeah if you remember apropics round was so oversubscribed they ended up i think doubling the allocation yeah and so this could continue for a while i mean the concern i mean yeah the concern

is that you can't can't it seems difficult for even the big labs to do another 10x on on uh these pending training runs. Yeah, I mean, that's what Stargate is, right? It's a $500 billion project. And so that's probably like a $100 billion commitment in the mediums term or getting into the trillion territory. Maybe it continues forever. Maybe everyone on Earth kind of just says, like, yes, we're willing to, like, everyone

sell all your gold and convert that. But I think if you're on Wall Street, if you're on Wall Street, traditional finance guy or girl, and you're looking at this. and in biotech, you might have something where it's like, hey, we need to spend $5 billion developing this drug, but then it's going to be good and we're going to be able to sell it for a really long time. So it's like having massively uncertain future capital requirements

is going to just be a concern and an asterisk on the business. I think that's like FinHub IQ is really the concern. Here you have exponentially increasing costs and just wildly uncertain future capital requirements. Yeah. And so the way to deal with that uncertainty, those jitters and like the later stage investors who are you have to talk to to Marshall, once you run out of mosses who are willing to take wild swings, the way to allay their concerns is show them that, yeah, we spent 10 billion and we're making $2 billion in profit. And five years will be able to pay that. So you can, you know, give us the money now to pull forward what's obviously going to pay off again. And we're confident that the next 10x is going to get us another 10x in profit. And so you can underwrite these at any level. Right now we're underwriting them every single year. We might stretch out a little bit. We might compress. We might go faster. We'll see. Well, Dan Ratliff in the chat says Elizabeth Holmes

has hit the timeline. She has been posting. She's ripping posts. She quoted, quote, quoted Brian, A quote tweeted Brian Johnson earlier. Brian said, defeating death would be humanity's greatest achievement. Elizabeth says, amen. She gives another quote here. There comes a point where we just need to stop pulling people out of the river.

We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in Archbishop Desmond Tutu. And yeah, she's ripping some comments. She's getting active on the timeline. Now this is mostly my words. This is probably not her, right? This is her husband. She said mostly my words, hosted by

others. Yeah, Willie Adams or husband. Paper printouts of... Probably over the phone. She just said, she was responding to Brian and said, first they think you're crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world. And somebody quoted and said,

she's going to launch cash tag Theranos meme coin, isn't she? And Elizabeth says, never. So, anyways, having fun on the timeline. Yeah, imagine the thrill of having posts read to you over the prison phone and then replying, okay, yes, like that one. She said last time, Signal said, dreams do come true if you put your mind to it. And Elizabeth Holmes followed him. And VC Bragg said, never deleting this app.

And Elizabeth Holmes said, last time I deleted the app, it looked different. Where did the little blue bird go? What happened? This is funny lore. This is like an odd. It would be weird to be offline for so long. She's responding to an Elon Musk quote, saying, for my part, I never, I will never give up. And I mean never.

And Elizabeth says, this is one reason Elizabeth, I'm sorry, this is one reason Elon Musk wins. He never gives up. That's what it takes. It doesn't sound like Elizabeth Holmes is giving up either. But she seems to be a big Elon Musk fan. I have been shocked by the out-of-home campaign. Have you seen this? Which is not the blood.

Someone is working on a redemption arc for Elizabeth Holmes and justice for Theranos. I think it's a promotion for the new company of some sort, but it's all over... Yeah, there's a new company. I think they're outraising. But the billboards are all over L.A., and they've been up for a long time, like months and months and months. It's been crazy. anyway Ben Gilbert says if you think your app needs more polish always remember Google Maps Shift Maps without Europe that is a crazy screenshot it's crazy that they're crazy mug yeah they didn't

even think to put like the rough outline of Europe you know and be like we don't have details on it but instead it's just like you can zoom out and you only see America the states and in England and we got Ireland in there of course got to keep island in there well if you're building the next Google Maps. Get on Linear. Linear.com. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. So, Travis Kelsey, right after the announcement, lunches American Eagle Collection. Yes. And Michael Mirre Flore says, nothing is sacred, monetize everything. Let's see. Let's check in on the American Eagle stock. It is up another 9% today. So they're just on

An absolute terror. Yes. Everyone in tech has been focused on the Taylor Swift wedding, particularly what it means for NVIDIA earnings. I have a little thesis here. So obviously Taylor Swift getting engaged, that's going to draw a ton of attention towards the NFL. We've already seen the NFL had a measurable swift effect from 2023 to 2024.

They saw 9% gain in female viewership year over year. game level spikes, like a 63% jump among women, 18 to 49 for a Chiefs game. So imagine this. NFL and streamers, they lean in broadcasters. If they escalate moment capture, more shoulder programming, alternate feeds, multi-language clips, real-time highlight reels, what do you need? You need real-time media. It's an AI problem.

You need clipping, scene detection, player ID, small object tracking. All of this is going to run on NVIDIA GPUs. Globalization, you need translation at the edge. classic speech AI text to speech translation that's an NVIDIA product right there they have a product Riva that does that creators pile in UGC explodes

reaction videos podcast shorts consumer AI effects noise removal eye contact correction studio voice increasingly GPU intensive workloads people are going to be running RtXPCs with NVIDIA broadcast software to get this stuff ad dollars also follows attention

incremental audience special for the new female demos, this is going to pull premium dollars to sports ads budgets. This pushes ad tech recommender systems, ranking, creative optimization, frequency control. These are among the most compute-hungry inference workloads and an NVIDIA sweet spot. They have Merlin for recommendations of ads and Triton for serving ads. Stream quality is going to be an arms race. The women, the swifties, they're going to demand 4K feeds. platforms are going to race to improve video. They're going to need to accelerate this with CUDA.

This means more GPU accelerated pre- and post-processing in cloud workflows. Sports production is going to modernize autonomous cameras, analytics, are a blueprint for low-tier games. These techniques climb the stack for tent pole events. More AI in the truck, more GPUs at the edge in cloud transcode farms, Hyperscale KAPX is the real lever here. AWS, Google, Microsoft Meta, they fund the compute behind all of this. Imagine 2026 KAPX guides are going through the roof.

We're going to be in hundreds of billions of dollars, just supporting the Swifty demand for NFL content. Yeah, powered by NVIDIA. Exactly. And so all this is going to translate into earnings, of course. Showcases durable, broad-based, inference, demand, and media and ads. Exactly the vector analysts want to see as the AI. cycle tilts from training only to training plus always on inference so that's what the taylor swift engagement means for invidious earnings today groundbreaking gabriel says this is the music that

keithra boy listened to in 2019 while doing a thousand burpees and right before logging on to reply it wrong to a political scientist posting about uh pete hootage's south carolina polling results can we play this video this video is hilarious uh in the meantime whether pulling it up I'll tell you about Numeral. Sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance, numeralh HQ.com. And you know who's going to need to use Numeral? Travis Kelsey's new American Eagle line, if you buy some American Eagle, they said inside Travis Kelsey's new American Eagle line, an ad with athletes, including Sunni Lee and Kiann Anthony. The day after it was revealed that Travis Kelsey put an eight-carat engagement ring on Taylor Swift's finger, American Eagle had announced it had a limited edition. clothing line with its sportswear brand. True Colors. A.E. X. True Colors by Travis Kelsey will launch

you two drops today and on September 24th. So get ready and make sure that you're paying your sales tax on TrueCU.com. Michael Mayerfler says nothing is sacred. Monetize everything. Let's pull up the DJ. The video is going to be bad. Almost impossible to find. Okay. It's deep in the, oh, they got it. They did it. The team got it. the impossible. Let's pull it up. Let's play the... Get the audio. Get the audio. The audio's key. Let's go full screen on this. This is like so annoyingly...

I don't know. I was not a fan of this. Did you listen to this? I think it's good. Very Reddit coded. Yeah. But this... I can't believe there's so many people at this putting up with this Mario song. What event is this? It does inspire me. You know what we need?

Like great credit drop. We need this, you see the, the, it's like they blow this fog around. Look at this. Me, Mario. So great. Yeah, though there's like CO2 canons for sure, like that to blow the smoke everywhere. We got something good out of this. Ben, we need the CO2 canons.

You want CO2? Whatever those, yeah, whatever those DJ equipment are, yeah, during the lightning round when we're interviewing a CEO. And Nick, can you look into the health impact of being in a studio space with CO2 cannons? Regardless, this is very David Solomon coded. Yes, you have to be a Mario fan to understand.

Yeah, I get it. I don't know if this would be for me in a big crowd, but who knows? Maybe it's fun. It seems like they had fun, and I'm happy for them. These days, not big into paying to be in a crowd. Yeah, that's... pay to avoid one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's rough. Anyway, let's go to Wilmanitis. He says, hard to think of a piece of writing that's had a greater impact on my life than John Ludig's index mindset in 2021. This pro-index tendency, writes John Ludig, pervades the private tech market, startups, and even our culture through what I call the index mindset,

a focus on preservation over creation, optionality over decisiveness, general over specific. Public companies are an obvious thing to index, but the index mindset manifests in many domains. In wealth, you, instead of risk-seeking expansion, you focus on steady compounding preservation. In venture capital, instead of concentrated bets, you focus on deployment pace and IRA.

In public markets, instead of active funds, like hedge funds, which we'll talk about later in the show, you focus on passive funds and diversification. In employment, instead of four to five years, and being focused, you focus on one to two years, 10 years portfolio building, lots of logos on your resume. In research and development, instead of being radically, radical and innovative, you focus on being incremental and defensive, and in your personal life, instead of spiky and committed, you focus on being well-rounded and

committal. Internet software companies are far less risky than they used to be. Even at the early stages, there hasn't been a venture vintage since 2002 with negative median returns. Big tech is now huge tech, so the VCs are not taking nearly enough risk, because they're not losing money. They should. Like, it is an indictment of the venture community. If there's not a single fund out there that has a negative or a single vintage that has negative returns because they weren't taking enough risk.

Well, it's median. Yeah, median. But, yeah, it's vintage, so it's broadly. Of course, there are funds that don't you move bad. But it's like as an asset class. Well, we might be turning it around. Anything's possible. Risk of first people and money have flooded in when people have something to lose.

they protect their downside, think of wealth managers, encouraging a safe mix of stocks and bonds. The tech industry has too much to lose. And I love Wilmanitis has the most chaotic way to highlight I've ever seen. You can just use boxes in iOS if that's where he's editing this, but he's just drawing crazy. Drawing all over it. And then he switches colors at some point.

I have no idea why. But Ben Gilbert says he's so good, and I agree. Shout out to John Ludig. Uh, Satrini says, time to bust out the no sequel Negrini, Negronis again. So I think this was a picture from 2021. I think so. There was a Tiger Global, uh, meetup. This is when, I think it was roughly 30% of all dollars in the venture industry were going to founder dinners and little, uh, events like this.

Essentially, essentially. It felt like that at the time. They had the no SQL Negroni. Yep. The Tiger Tonic, the machine learning, margarita, the AI artificial inebriation special. Which is a non-alcoholic beverage. Interesting. Interesting.

I say bring it back, Tiger. Yeah. I think you could go further. Further. We got to come up with our own little menu of funny things. We didn't have a menu at our event in New York. This was an interesting screenshot. This one from fiend.

The number one AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. That's right. Number one in performance bansmarks. Number one in competitive bakeoffs. number one ranking on G2, Finn.A.I. I will never apologize for cutting you off. For an advertiser. For an advertiser. Continue, Jordie Haynes. Fewer people can bench 225 than are worth 10 million. In the U.S., about 0.4% of the population,

around 1.3 million people can bench 225 pounds. Globally, the percentage is likely below 0.1%. Wow. With some estimates as low as 0.07%, 2.13 U.S. households. have a net worth of 10 million or more constituting approximately 1.6% of all households. If you can bench two plates, you're already stronger than 99% of people on the planet, just maybe not richer. And Zach Vol says what everyone is thinking, the only job is to do both. And we firmly agree. Both are a grind, but well worth it. The grind of 225 was serious for many on the team. And I think,

almost all of us have gotten there and are now beyond. It's well, well worth it. Bucco Capital says, your stock trades at $59, but we can make it trade at 62 if we manufacture a crisis by changing the logo and immediately change it back to the original logo. This strategy,

I don't think this was their strategy, but feels like something out of Nathan for you episode. And I would, it's hard to, it's hard to properly manufacture a reaction like that. Of course, this is no Cracker Barrel. Oh, did you, so the Cracker Barrel stories in the journal today. Logo change spawns firestorm. It's, oh, is that something about it? Cracker Barrow planned to celebrate a fall menu and logo makeover with a festive country music concert in New York City.

I had no idea that's what they were planning. But its new logo stole the show. And not in the way the company intended. On Monday, the company apologized for how it communicated the changes, but didn't pivot from plans to keep updating the brand. The chain replaced its longtime logo featuring a man in overalls leaning against a bar, a barrel, with a streamlined version featuring just the chain's name. The move engulfed the restaurant in a culture war firestorm with some commentators online

and some customers accusing Cracker Barrel of eschewing its country charm and heritage for a sanitized image. Critics have lobbied, have lobbed personal attacks on social media against Julie Fels Messino, chief executive of the nearly 56-year-old chain. She scrapped a beloved American aesthetic and replaced it with sterile soulless branding, wrote the woke war room on X in a message shared by Donald Trump Jr. She should resign and be replaced with leadership that will restore Cracker Barrel's tradition. The Fallout has shaved tens of millions of dollars from the company's market cap. spawned calls for boycotts and risks the casual dining chain's turnaround plan.

Cracker Barrel has defended its changes saying the All the More campaign was meant to honor its legacy while bringing new energy to the brand. Our values haven't changed. And the heart and soul of Cracker Barrel haven't changed, the company said. The new logo, the fifth iteration in its history is a call back to the original one with its barrel shape and word design. On Monday, Cracker Barrel said the dust up over the past several days had shown how deeply people care about the chain. Trump said on truth social yesterday, Cracker Barrel should go back

to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response, parentheses the ultimate poll, and manage the company better than ever before. Make Cracker Barrel a winner again. And they immediately responded reverting it back to the old logo. Wow. And if you had

invested in Cracker Barrel and NVIDIA exactly a year ago, you have outperformed buying Cracker Barrel. They're up 52% in the last year. In the last year. No way. And NVIDIA is up 41.5%. Well, if you're looking for exposure to Cracker Barrel, either long or short, go over to

public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. This weekend, says Jeff Morris Jr. Martin Casado dropped a tweet that took over VC Twitter. I wrote about it in what being considered. consensus versus non-consensus actually means into today's market. Every weekend, there's a new hero, says JMJ, that takes over a venture capital group chat. This past weekend was clearly

slow on the news front because what I initially read as a fairly standard take ended up dominating my timeline. This is, we talked about this. Martin Casado said the idea that non-consensus investing is where the alpha is is actually quite dangerous in the early stage. Follow on capital tends to be more and more consensus aligned. For whatever reason, this concept triggered a bunch of investors. We're living in an era where consensus categories like AI, crypto, robotics, bio-defense, autonomous systems, manufacturing are big enough to carry entire generations of startups. You don't need to invent a new category to generate massive outcomes. And that is an interesting, that is an interesting take because, like, these are supposed to be like tech

investors, internet investors, and yet, like, consensus categories include crypto, bio, defense, manufacturing, AI. It's like everything is now, is now like back There was an interesting quote in here that I wanted to highlight something about you can still, yes, you can still find non-consensus companies within consensus categories, but at some point calling ourselves non-consensus investors is just glamorizing the job. Take American dynamism as an example, a venture category branded just a few years ago by A16Z that now feels like its industry in itself. Palantir in 2003 was truly contrarian. Nobody else was building forward deployed CIA software. Palantir. was one of one company that probably only Alex Carp, Joe Lonsdale, and Peter Thiel could have created. Two decades later, it's more relevant than ever with a $370 billion market cap. Anderil was equally contrarian, but for different reasons. In 2025, he says, fast forward, American dynamism is a full-blown investment category, hundreds of startups, and dozens of funds are chasing defense, aerospace, and manufacturing. I live 15 minutes from El Segundo,

which has famously become a dense hub of these companies. There was another one in here about, D to C and saying something about like that category being even even even even that category one one note here I was talking with I was talking with a buddy over the weekend and he was like what's going on with El Segundo or is it is it legit are these kind are all these companies are they actually going to build big companies and something something Jeff says here oh my my reaction was some a small number of them will be massive and most will have middling outcomes or will shut down. But that is what our entire industry is based on and it's okay. But it's still good that we have this excitement and

energy and momentum and a center of gravity in El Segundo. Yeah. There was something in here. I can't exactly find it, but it was basically saying that like consumer is is contrarian right now. It's not very hot. Very few people invest in consumer D to C companies, but that's just in like Silicon Valley venture. There are still plenty of funds, both on the private equity side and on the venture side that are doing deals in consumer all day long. Some brands have kind of expanded and shifted away from it, but there still are lots of funds out there that are doing that. So it's a, it's just an interesting noodling on what, what stands for consensus or contrarian right now. Anyway, let me tell you about Adio.

Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Can get started for a new 52 million dollar. Do you want to do this John Wu post? Series B. Yeah, this John Wu post is great. We should run through this. So John Wu says, do not trust millennials to run your brand.

Their vision of the way the internet works was informed by the web 2.0 Facebook 2011 Instagram vintage filters era. And their priors have not been updated since. The internet is no longer deterministic. It's algorithm driven and not even among your own followers. Your posts are constantly being shown to a panel of users. If they like it, the panel is expanded. If they don't, you don't get reach. That means putting out a high volume of post isn't noise, spam, or, quote, low signal.

Volume is necessary so the algorithm can pick up your winners and make them viral. You have to experiment with high volume, learn quickly, and double down in your winning formats. The cost of failure is zero. The tree falls in the forest and no one sees it. This is huge for content creation, just the idea that no one sees, no one sees the flopped posts. Yep. The cost of experimenting, but the cost of not experimenting is astronomical. Sure signs of incompetence in the attention age.

We don't want to put out noise. We need to protect our brand. We need more followers. That's ignorant. Low quality posts are no longer distributed. Follower count doesn't matter. The news cycle is shorter than ever. People will only remember your winners pump up the volume.

Totally agree. I think if you look, you know, on X specifically, if you look at your favorite poster, if you actually scroll their feed, they'll have a bunch of just like flops. Yeah, you'll think of a person as like, oh, every time I see one of their posts, it has thousands of likes. And then you go to their account and you see so many flops and the real secret is that they're trying a lot of experiments. When the current thing happens, they're putting out every possible variation of the current thing. It's a good strategy. I like this reply by Holin. She says, millennials are still good brand builders, but the execution should be left to them.

terminally online and so there is something about like it's probably not enough just to have like pure slop it's more like you need a seed of something good some sort of north star and then and then the execution in the modern era does require a lot of aggression uh anyway um we have our first guest of the show joining in just a few minutes in the restream waiting room uh we will get to uh the numerize story in just a little bit. Should we talk about the app mafia quickly? If you haven't been following this, some folks that we're familiar with, one of them who did PMF or die, have put out a course on how to build an app that makes money, don't raise venture capital, they sort of took over the timeline with a viral

video showing them driving Lamborghinis, kind of all the all the classic hallmarks of the guru that you previously found on YouTube with here in my garage, that guy, and folks on Instagram, it's sort of the first time we really saw it on Twitter or on X, and it caused a lot of, you know, people going back and forth. Harry Gistentner, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but Harry says, apparently I mentioned in the first few minutes of the app mafia course, so here are my thoughts. I went to college with Blake Anderson and No Zach and Hunter, Two, there are a lot of threads going around about profit, margin, et cetera. It's not that relevant, given these kids are clearly netting a minimum six to seven figures,

probably for the first time in history for anyone that age. This represents a major shift in the education system that platforms like WAP have pioneered. People are talking about audience IQ. This course is clearly targeted at kids slash younger founders, and certainly something I would have loved 10 years ago. It also represents a shift away from venture-back consumer apps, dying from overraising, hundreds of apps like. Headspace Calm, raised eight to nine figures and were stuck with companies that couldn't

quite IPO, but also couldn't cash flow for the founders. There's an entitled socialist mentality of, quote, why do I have to pay? The reality is if it's free, it's not very valuable. I haven't watched the course, but these guys are extremely sharp and can provide value to young founders. So they deserve to be compensated for their time. Now there's a wrinkle where the course is now free. Is that right? The court is now free. Okay. So, you know, I think they, the, the original video was in their words designed to elicit

a dramatic reaction designed to bring out hate right they're sitting there in a mansion Blake loves poking the bear of the algorithm yeah he's very good at that and very deliberate about that

but yeah it is fascinating I mean and then immediately people piled on and were saying like oh the apps must not be making a lot of money otherwise why would they do this which I didn't it seemed obvious to me why they wanted to do it.

They want to build their personal brands and this is like a business model for building a personal brand. What's interesting is I don't think I've ever paid for a course on specifically on like entrepreneurship or something broad like that, but I have paid for courses on like very specific technologies.

Like I went to a like a boot camp for iOS development where they taught us Objective C for two days straight that had like a real cost and I was able to expense against the business. I also paid for like a course to learn Houdini, a particular visual effects software. And that kind of had, I thought it wasn't like a get rich quick scam at all. They didn't make any promises. They just said, hey, we're going to teach you this software.

We're going to teach you this thing. And so buying books is great. Buying courses on specific topics is great. Lots of what you can learn about entrepreneurship is just available out there for free. You can read Paul Graham's blog. You can listen to founders podcast. There are plenty of resources. Maybe this is useful. You'd have to try it out. Now it's free so you can make your own decision. Anyway, we have our first guest of the stream in the TV. I'm an in. Welcome to the stream. Josh, good to meet you. How you doing? What's happening? Hello. Good to see you both. Hi, John. Hi, Jordi. Hi, J joining the group. You sound fantastic today. Whatever microphone you have hooked up is working flawlessly. Similar to what we have here. Congrats on the news. Break it down for us. Yeah. So I'm Josh, head of gusto. We love.

serving small business. We've worked with a company called Guideline for a number of years, close to 10 years at this point. And the news is that we are joining forces. Guideline's going to be joining Gusto. Amazing. Amazing. I think I've actually used Gusto and Guideline together for my entire career. I've used Gusto at four different companies. I started in college. And we have an employee sitting over there that wants a 401k. This is huge. You have no excuses anymore. Time to set up. Yeah. Talk about the pre-history here. The company's been, what, was it YC 2013, 2012 or something?

2012, yeah. I remember implementing it at my YC company in 2012 back when it had a different name. And I remember that for a number of different HR functionalities, I would have to kind of go to a different platform, and then the data would be fed back. What informed the strategy back then, and then why are you shifting it? Like, it seemed like it was working for a long time. Yeah.

So why kind of, what is it, horizontally integrate, I suppose, is the term? I don't know what other business is. We just try to make the life of a small business owner easier. But yeah, first off, I mean, thrilled to serve you and your companies, and we're always trying to get better. So send me feedback on how we can get better, by the way. But yeah, no, I'd say we didn't go way back. We launched Gusto back in 2012, and our first product was paid.

payroll. If you don't pay someone, they quit. So it's the least optional part of the stack. And so we've made progress there. You know, we've served over 400,000 businesses. We love helping tech companies, but I love... There we go. That's a lot of businesses. But I also love reminding folks, there's more dentist offices in the U.S. than tech startups. So, like, very focused on that mainstream small business owner. And yeah, to your point, you know, we listen to customers more than anything and they guide us. And so they told us, hey, there's all these these other pain points who want your help with. Our second product was health benefits,

but we're not going to build everything ourselves. And so when retirement came up and generally speaking, what we like to do is take stuff big companies have and bring it to small companies. So from almost a fairness lens, it's like we need to bring great retirement benefits to these small businesses, they deserve it. And that was basically KB, one of the co-founder's a guideline.

It's kind of a funny story. He was previously the co-founder of TaskRabbit. And so back in like 2015, we were in the same building. They were on the second floor. We were on the sixth floor. And there's a slow, slow elevator. Like the slowest elevator you've ever seen.

And so we would sometimes just be on these long elevator rides. And that's how we got to know each other. Yeah, I was going to ask, when did the conversation first start? Yeah, people say you meet your, you meet your acquirer like years before. But in this case, what they don't say is in a very slow elevator. You're going to hang out for minutes at a time. But, yeah, to answer the heart of your question, we started partnering with them right when they launched in 2016. And, yeah, there's an integration.

You can kind of connect the two systems. Like, we have tens of thousands of shared customers. You know, KB, I can say this stat, very proudly on his behalf, like over $10, around $10 billion of retirement savings in the accounts of our shared customers. Let's hit the size gong for that. I mean. Yeah, Jordy, you hit the gong. We like to hit the gong around here for big numbers.

Congratulations. I like it. I like hitting the gong for retirement funds. Yeah, yeah. That feels good. But that's, again, that's their people's money. That's their retirement, peace of minds. But yeah, what we realized is there's a couple of things happening.

One, we can do even more together. So we're going to continue to partner with third parties on other products, but especially with 401K in retirement, like, we're going to really go deep. And that's what guideline has done. They're a broker-dealer. So there's all these different parts of the stack. You cut out the money, you can create better cost savings. I'm sure you had investors along the way that said you're sending so many customers.

to guideline, why don't you just build this, you know, if you need more capital, we'll provide it. What, why did that not make sense? And why, why, why, why, uh, why buy versus build in this situation? So I think all options are always on the table when you're building a company, buy, partner, build. Uh, and like for what we're doing, it's going to be a lot of connected problems. So, you know, how do we bring it together as one simple, easy to use product is the key. Um, but I'd say, Yeah, the catalyst for shifting from partner to being one company is, like, there's just products that we can do that we can't do unless we're combined.

I can give you a couple examples if that's helpful. Yeah, please. Yeah, so, like, the journey of building a company or the employee journey, we think a lot about kind of the person by person, what happens in their life, but let's say someone gets promoted, right, and they get a pay increase. So that's obviously coming through our system because it's going to affect their salary. And in that moment, right, whether it's in the app or in an email, The, hey, like, you now have more money coming into your pocket.

You know, your choice, but do you want to set aside a bit more in your 401K? Or someone has a kid, you know, in our system that's a dependent, but that's a human being. Someone just had a kid, right? Like maybe you want to go do something there in the context of retirement planning or something related to health benefits. So kind of thinking through the person-by-person journey piece of it, there's just things we can do that we think will drive more folks offering retirement benefits. There's also a compliance reason, too, which I can get into. Let's get into it. Yeah.

We love this. Yeah. So, like, government, right, we're here to, like, abstract government. And sometimes there's carrot stick that government does. So 401K is a good example of a carrot. Like, it's pre-tax dollars. So literally, the government is making it hopefully a no-brainer to, like, put aside money for retirement with meaningful amplification of that money than just, you know, putting it post-tax.

But they also have compliance requirements. I think over now, close to 25 states have rolled out what's basically a mandate that businesses have to provide some type of retirement benefit for their teams. And so that's good intent, but it's still stressful because there can be penalties or fines. And so we're also excited that basically we can give peace of mind to more small businesses. So they're not stressed out, definitely not getting fined or penalized. And if they want to or need to set up a retirement benefit, we can make it brand done simple through Gusto Plus Guy. What's the anatomy of a partnership look like in this category pre-acquisition merger? We were talking a few days ago about the relationship between Apple and Open AI.

And we were kind of like, wait, like, should Apple be paying for the right to have good AI on their phones or should ChatGPT be paying because they get all these extra queries? And we were kind of, and I think like the rumors they netted out to be like, there's no money transferred. And I could imagine that sometimes that comes up. Sometimes it's like, hey, I'm getting you customers. You've got to give me a fee. Like, what are the structures? Do you have companies that are in one camp and the other?

Can you share anything about the relationship beforehand? I'd be interested to know just like channel sales is something I'm like learning about now. So the first thing to start with is Gusto's entire engine of growth. You know, here's another metric. We can tee it up. But we're going to, we're on track to add about 150,000 customers this year. Wow, that's a lot of small businesses? That's small businesses.

Wow, that's a lot of businesses. Yeah, yeah, okay. You're talking to some guys that absolutely love business. So this is fantastic news. The best news I've heard all day. We can get into our whole, like, what is AI going to do in the world's tangent if you want to? But yeah, we'll come back to that. Yeah, so basically, like we are an engine to go bring in more and more small businesses,

especially new employers, folks starting out, right? If you don't pay someone, they quit. So it's right off the bat, like an important key thing for you to do if you're building a team or adding even your first employee. And so there's a lot of folks, as you can imagine, that would love to distribute through gusto because of the scale that we're at. And so what that looks like first is not us starting with the partner,

but starting with the small businesses and finding out, like, what are their pain points, who are the products, what are the products they like or want to use already? They're voting with their actions that come in through our integrations. And then we do a lot of vetting. So I think more Apple approach than Android. We want to make sure quality experience, accuracy, reliability. And then just this obsession with user experience comes through of whoever we're working with.

And then, yeah, we'll do partnership deals across multiple product areas. Time tracking is another example. Sometimes we'll have first party. Like we'll do our own product and still have best-to-breed third party. And then that's a negotiation. There's usually, if we're going to drive a lot of customers to someone, there's some type of rev split. Because we're creating value for them. There should obviously be value for us.

Yeah, that makes sense. What is your guidance for a ton of startups sign up for Gusto today when they're one or two people? It's just the founders. And what is your kind of framework for the right companies to use Gusto? Because, you know, again, companies today, they might start with a couple founders. today and be 30 people in six months, right? These things happen. We got a vibe coder on. But how do you look at this out and vibe code around? What should go wrong? Are you counting the, are you counting the AI agents as people or not? Is my question. Yeah, yeah, that's a good question.

But yeah, how are you thinking of serving startups as of today? It's obviously from my understanding a lot of where you guys started, but it's always evolving. Yeah, I mean, as a quick backdrop, you're alluding to it. Three founders, we all started here in Silicon Valley. We went through YC. I was born and raised here. My parents aren't from tech, though. They came from, like, my dad was a teacher, my mom was a teacher. And so...

Same here. But we are physically here. Oh, yeah? Where did we teach? In high school that I went to. High school? My dad's not high school. Very cool.

But yeah, it was funny. I think, I don't know if I asked my dad this. I don't think he would have had a great answer, but I do remember asking somebody back in the day, how do I pay myself? I was had a company who was starting to make money. I was like, how do I pay myself? And they're like, oh, you just set up like gusto,

and you just onboard yourself. And I was like, oh, that's cool. Well, we love serving small business. Obviously, tech, startups are a part of what we do. We love serving them, too. I guess from a, like, target customer lens, you know, broadly speaking, like one to one hundred person companies is our sweet spot.

That's 98% of the employers in America. But I always love, like, also kind of blows people in mind, usually there's six million employers in America, give or take. two-thirds are less than five employees. Wow. Right? Two-thirds are less than five employees. So whenever I meet a small business owner and there are three people and they say, I'm

small, I'm like, no, no, you're not small. You're like the common business owner in America. You are the average, yeah. Well. Quick thoughts on AI, because you alluded to it earlier. Yeah, I'm interested in specifically in how you think about surfacing AI. Like, do you want to put a chat box in front of someone? And then that's an interface to all the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the

deterministic workflows you've built, or do you want to just turn AI loose within your, you know, behind the scenes development team and have flows that are working just to improve things, reality check things? Like you're probably using machine learning for fraud detection for years. Is it an evolution of that? There's a product manager inside of you. I would say yes to both and more. So like we do a lot of complex kind of backend processing of either money movement, filings, documents. There's a lot of ways to use AI tooling for productivity there. So that's great and we've always used technology for how we scale, right? Like we serve over 400,000 customers today. That's only possible through using a lot of software. But from a

customer experience lens, actually, again, both, I really think there's this massive, I mean, understatement here, but paradigm shift around how we use software and how software helps us. You know, when I got into software in high school, like what I loved about it is it felt like it gave you superpowers. And then every time I saw like books on how to use a tool or I learned like someone with bragging on LinkedIn, I can use this tool. It like really, really annoyed me because software is not something you should have to learn how to use. It should just work. It should just make sense. It should be intuitive. It should give you superpowers. So conversational interface I think is going to be a pretty, I mean, again, understatement, but like much more

accessible way for a lot of folks to use software. And it'll work in combination with web workflows and stuff like that. And so we have a conversational interface for Gusto called Gus. And to your point, like, it can take actions, right? You get it. You get it. But, like, you can, like, shut up a shift schedule. You can go run payroll. Like, you can leverage all of our APIs that we've spent 14 years building, and Gus can do stuff for you, not just give you information. Funny story. My dog's name is Gus, Gustavo. And I have a friend who could never, he was so into B2B software. He works in the B2B software industry that he didn't understand that my dog's name was Gustavo. And for a long time, he would

call him Gusto. I was like, I didn't name my dog after the software platform. Well, I have one. Speaking of dogs, Bill Bishop is in the, is in the, uh, a substack stream from cynicism, cynicism. And he says he's a happy Gusto client. So you have another fan listening right now. I have one, I have one question, uh, and I'm curious when, when I got on to Gusto back in the day, it was close to a decade ago at this point. Oh, gee. I was, I was, I was confused that I had to hit the button to run payroll. I was like, this is not a payroll platform? Yes, yes, yes.

Why do I have to? And I remember there was a couple times that I would get an email and it'd be like, I'd be like, you're like, you need to run payroll now. And I was like, why? I think you do, you can't automate it now. But is there, is there kind of a generational divide there in some ways where there's like a generation that understands like payroll is something that you hit a button and you run it versus payroll is just something that is just something that is just. humming. At the first startup I ever interned at, the CFO hated me because I would always turn in my time sheets late and he's like, I need to run payroll. And I'm like, just pay me the same every month. I'm fine. You can just put it on autopilot. And they're like,

autopilot doesn't exist. This is 2006 or something like that. So we've rolled out autopilot for payroll back in like 2013. I remember using it. It was fantastic. Yeah. So the key, the difference here between both of your use cases was if you have nothing to input, so if it's like, let's say all salary versus some hourly and or like no one took PTO but again there's there's inputs that go into payroll now assuming that's all there like it should just work and that's the way it does work way back when this is now 2013-ish like we have a penny the pig is kind of our like kind of a part of our company kind of brand culture mascot I could see Penny and Gus potentially beefing over

who's the most important I mean they're they're friendly with each other there's There's a friendly competition. But we had to have the GIF. It was a GIF for running payroll when you clicked run. And it went too fast. And we had customers back then go, like, it can't be that fast. Something is broken.

So we had the GIF just run longer for the sake of it. Just to make people be like, hey, there's actually hard processing happening behind the scenes here. And the world's come a long way since then. So people expect stuff to be fast, simple. We want to automate. I mean, a good example is 41K. So if you want to go change the contribution that's being made,

that can now be done easier by us being one company. me. But yeah, we think eventually payroll becomes something like flowing water. It just works and you don't have to do much direct action yourself. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations. The acquisition makes a kind of sense and congrats to both teams. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, and make sure you give that teammate a 401k. We will. It's happening. It's happening. Have a good one. Thanks, Josh. Good to see you. Bye. And we have Keller from Zipline in the Restream waiting room. Big news. Zipotle. is now live. Chippole Partners with Zipline for aerial delivery. Let's go.

Keller. Welcome back, Keller. We missed you. Welcome back to the stream. How you doing? Even more dramatic background this time. Every time you deliver, thank you so much for hopping on. That's our job, right? Yeah. That was unintentional. Anyway, how did this come together? It seems like the perfect partner. Walk us through the evolution. Actually, what went into the announcement. it. Yeah, I mean, we've been talking to Chipotle for a while. We obviously have announced a few other restaurant partners. I mean, you know, for reference, like there was a time in my life where I lived on Chipotle. Like that was my primary. Every entrepreneur has like a Chipotle era. Raise your hand in the studio if you've lived on Chipotle. I think everyone's raised in the hand. Yeah, you're getting more. It's just a period of your life where you're getting more calories from Chipotle than anywhere else. Oh, yes, absolutely. I can distinctly remember those moments. It's the base of the pyramid. I also remember, I feel like you guys would appreciate this. There was a time when I was living out of my car action, like eating Chipotle and, you know, $10, you could get like two full meals out of it.

And then you could get like the tortillas too. That was a hack. There's a lot of optimization that you can do. And I remember thinking that like one day, like, how will I know if I'm rich? I will be able to get the guacamole every time. without feeling guilty about it. I have the exact same story. When I went through YC in 2012, my business partner, my co-founder would always get double

meat. And I was like, we're trying to save money. We can't afford double meat. Get double beans. Double beans are free. It was tearing us apart. And then I finally just defaulted to like, look, if you're going to get it, I'm going to get it too.

And we will both fall on the sword of higher burn. And to this day, if I... That's called moral hazard. Yeah, moral hazard. But to this day, if I eat out with him and we're at a restaurant, I'll just be like, get whatever he gets. Because I know he's going to get something ridiculous and he's getting the most expensive thing on the menu. And at least then I get stuck with the half of the bill and I'm happy. And I'm not like, ah, I got stuck with paying for his expensive thing.

Anyway, congratulations. We love Chipotle. What else can you share about the progress of the business? It felt like, you know, classic overnight success, as we love to talk about on the show. Also, how did you get them to actually name it Sepotla? That was their idea, not ours. That's amazing. I think, you know, look, I think that what we're, you know,

obviously there's this, like, big transformation coming in AI and robotics, and there are a lot of, you know, very fancy hyper-scalers that get talked about all the time, but the reality is that, like, all the basic businesses and brands that we use and love also want to be able to take advantage of this kind of technology. And so I think a lot of, you know, some of the biggest brands like Chipotle are asking themselves, like, hey, how can we use robots? robotics, automation, to like accelerate or dramatically transform our own brand and the kinds of experiences we can provide to customers. So, yeah, them choosing Zipotle, us starting to deliver

for them. I mean, I think that we did a delivery in five minutes yesterday from like order made to the thing arriving at a customer's house. That's not possible every time just to be clear. It does take time to make the food. But like, you know, I think that something's showing up super, super fast like that. In fact, we've found it has been necessary because we've, you know, We've only started really rapidly scaling these food deliveries in the last couple of months. It's actually necessary to tell customers to slow down and make sure to blow on the food. We've had people accidentally burn themselves. Good problem to have.

It's like a weird, yeah, weird thing, people are just used to it being cold or smush. Yeah, just not that great. So, you know, really cool to see that starting to scale, especially for a brand that's like very near and dear to my entrepreneurial journey and heart. I mean, yeah, you know, other things that we're seeing. Even since we were last talking, which I think was like, I don't know, 10 weeks ago or something, yeah, a couple, couple months ago. We have seen, you know, a problem that we were having in July was that the service was growing extremely fast between 25 and 30 percent week over week in terms of flight volumes. And in fact, yeah, like, so, you know, Saturday, new record high flight volume Sunday, we actually beat Saturday by 20 percent. This is just two days ago.

Yes, you know, Monday was a record day. Tuesday was a record day. It's amazing. Really cool. If you keep giving us records, I'm going to keep in the air once. Cooler with the records. No, but even cooler is that right now the service has a net promoter score of 94. Wow.

So, you know, very few services in the United States are close to that today, let alone delivery services. A lot of customers were ordering, a lot of customers were ordering like three to four. times per week. In fact, we have many customers who are ordering a couple times a day via the service. I think that when you realize you can get stuff in five minutes, it actually starts to change the way that you kind of live your lives. It's giving people back like three or four hours a week when they can just be focusing on their kids or on their family rather than like stressing out with traffic and trying to get somewhere. At this rate in a couple months, our deliveries in the U.S. are going to exceed all of our global flight volume across eight other countries. So, yeah,

U.S. is growing super, super fast now. We're launching a new Walmart super center every week at this pace. It's just, yeah, it's, I think, you know, I think the moment for automation and autonomous delivery has arrived. So is Walmart? It's a 10-year overnight success. Should I think about the expansion as driven by go where the Walmarts are and then talk to the city officials to get support and Walmart's kind of like the backbone? Or is it more like find other cities like Dallas? whether they're in Texas or not,

and then partner with companies and businesses that are in those kind of friendly cities that understand the value that this can bring and the demand, and then kind of roll out that way. Is there a particular path that you're taking? How should I imagine the map of Zipline growing, the coverage map growing over the next few years?

Yeah, that's a really prescient question. I mean, Walmart has been a key partner. We're building a lot of charging infrastructure across these metros with them. We're also building independent charging infrastructure that's just designed to serve a lot of different customers at once. So, for example, we just opened a big charging site in Rowlett. It's a small city inside, a small town inside Dallas, where, like, that one site is going to be able to serve, I think, upwards of 40 or 50 restaurants that are all within range. And then from there, we can deliver out to customer homes as long as they're within 10 miles.

So, like, one key thing to think about here is it's kind of a network optimization problem. But we go a lot farther than normal delivery, you know, where you have a human driving a car wants to go any, from any given restaurant, you can typically reach 10 times as many people via instant delivery as via traditional delivery. So, and again, you know, 10 times as fast. So we're really focused on going metro by metro right now. A lot of our costs, you know, maintenance kind of happens on a metro basis. So we're going to go tall. Like the goal is to go very tall on each metro. We have a lot of metros now that are like soon. super, super excited and basically on the roadmap for us to launch. And we're trying to build the capacity and launch them as quickly as possible. But, you know, building this kind of infrastructure across the U.S., it's like it's a big undertaking. And, you know, the other cool thing to mention, which is really quick is that, like, you know, one thing I'm very, very proud of, more proud of every day. I mean, Zipline now has 120 million commercial autonomous miles is the largest commercial

autonomous system on Earth. Zero safety incident. That's great. That's the main point. Zero safety incidents. Actually, if you just look at the basic safety of cars globally, the system is already provably about 10 times as safe as cars in terms of fatalities or injuries. And from that safety perspective, I mean, like, you know, the Zipline is actually right

now about, we have already achieved a level of safety that is 2x are the goal that we had set by the end of this year. So like, again, safety and reliability is kind of everything. It's like the core of what we do. And it's a big part of like why I think cities are starting to understand like, this is an incontrovertibly good thing. Is this a problem for Pizza Hut? Pizza Hut, famously, the buildings are huts.

You can't land on the roof. How are we going to get pizzas from Pizza Hut in? The important questions. The important questions. But seriously, is there a... I thought you were going to ask about the size of the pizza. Oh, no, no, no, no. Because actually, we are working with it.

You are working on a pizza compatible. We just cut it in half. Oh, great, Calzones. They come back to the Calzone. We already have the box designed for a couple of different pizza partners. it works great. Should franchisees be thinking about a flat roof? Is that relevant? What does the actual infrastructure look like as? And like should, should restaurants and businesses be thinking about zipline compatibility as they roll out the next like version of their of their retail

infrastructure or their residential plan or the real estate plan? Yeah. So it's pretty cool. I mean, first of all, one of the things we announced just in the last couple months is something we call zipping points. And zipping points are really simple infrastructure. We pay for it. We can drop it in two hours. It does not have to be permitted. There's no construction. As long as we drop a zipping point with a restaurant or a retailer or a hospital or primary care facility, they're instantly enabled with zipline delivery. No power, no permitting, nothing. Do not have to do anything for the building. Interestingly, we are talking to like a lot of hotels, a lot of apartment buildings and a lot of even these restaurants as they, because for example, a lot of these

big restaurant brands, they'll only have like two or three or four total designs of buildings that they'll build. And they are in fact now starting to take into account zip line and they're starting to design specifically for autonomous delivery. You don't have to do that, but you can. One big point I would make here is that like the thing that blows my mind, I mean, starting to see this like exponential take off from a demand perspective. I would emphasize, by the way, we freaked out enough about demand four weeks ago that we turned off all marketing, all demand generation marketing in the company. We turned off all the in-app notifications. We turned off all the field marketing that we were doing. And it basically made no difference. We continued to grow 25 or 30

percent, you know, week over week. I think that the reason this is happening in retrospect is kind of obvious, which is, you know, we're now starting to deliver to a lot of offices. We're delivering to a lot of apartment buildings. We're delivering to universities. Like, I think the product is more viral. Yeah, when you think about the virality of the product, I mean, I'm sure this is already happening or will happen, which is a... How can you not make your Instagram story about this? Yeah, my brain goes to some guys at a fraternity, order a 30 rack.

It's dropped into the backyard. And I don't know if you're doing that. You're probably not doing that yet, but that is a very viral moment that people will be taking videos of for a long time. You can see, I mean, tons of people are doing TikToks, and a lot of those TikToks are getting seen like seven, eight million times.

We were actually initially asking customers to not like you know put stuff on social just because like we wanted a chance to do an early access program and kind of like you know iron out the kinks but yeah even even people who aren't customers are sometimes like videoing their neighbor getting a delivery and then putting it on TikTok and having it gets seen millions of times so it is cool it's incredible amazing stuff always always great to chat with you shout out to Danielle your whoever's running your your comms program because your remote call your your remote call and setup I think is the best of any Fantastic.

This is the manufacturing line. So this line is ultimately capable of producing about 55,000 aircraft a year. And that's, yeah, scaling to that as fast as we possibly can. That's so many. We have to learn how to build drones in the U.S. Yeah. Yeah, I'm very excited. Doing it.

Thank you. We will talk to you soon. Always welcome here. Anytime. Talk soon, Kelly. Awesome, you guys. All right. Cheers.

Talk soon. Thanks. Up next, we have AIDSleep. com. I get a pot 5 Ultra. I put on a clinic last. night. Jordie Pelle, my favorite soundboard cue. I got a 90.

Oh, good for you. I got an 84-7. Roasted. 100% quality, 88% consistency, six hours and 31 minutes. Slept. I'm on a run. We got a five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. Head over to eight sleep. TPP. I'll be right back.

And I will talk to Will. How you doing? Hey, how's it going? Great to be back. Jordie just plays a sound cue and steps away. What's new in your world? Just, yeah, what's the latest? Yeah, so about half an hour ago, we did a big launch of something we've been building for quite a while at Prime Inelect. So for those who are not met me, I'm Will Brown. I work at Prime Inelect for an open source research company as well as a compute platform.

And we've released something today called an Environment Hub, which is for RL environments as well as Eval's. and it's something we've been kind of working towards for quite a while, but I think it's also something that, like, a lot of people are talking about, but also, like, wondering, like, what does this even mean? Like, I saw, like, over the weekend, like, Google Trends for R.L. environments, like, shot up. And you guys had made some joke tweets about this recently that I thought were great about, like. Ender, that's not an RL environment if you were in.

You place real Amazon orders. It perfectly encapsulates my level of understanding here. I'd love to go deeper. It feels like a bull case for distributed infrastructure generally because we're maybe, like, it's, maybe it's additive, maybe it's replacing, but certainly less of the focus is on like get 100,000 H-100s in one single cluster. There's more to be done in different places. But try and concretize it for me a little bit more.

Like, what is an oral environment? How are they being used? what are the what are the what are the what are the tradeoffs in terms of compute and design of the infrastructure that that actually delivers some sort of valuable product at the end of the day sure yeah so I think we can get to the distributed aspect of it just like first I think like an environment is essentially it's an eval like a lot of the things people make as like popular e-vals like sweep bench or like arc a GI like these are environments yep they're a thing where you have some input tasks you have some kind of harness and then you have a thing

at the end that looks at what your model or agent in the harness does and then says a score at the end. And so this is like the exact setup we use for e-vals, but it's also what you use for RL training. And so when people are talking about, oh, we're like going to make a bunch of RL environments, what they really mean is they're making evals that are designed for like agents to do some tasks interactively. Yeah. Is the Amazon order, like we saw that report that some folks are building like full digital replicas. I mean, I guess it's already digital, but like a simulated environment of Amazon.com

or DoorDap. Yeah, totally. Are those kind of the power law opportunities that people are really focused on? What are some other examples? Are people building these environments for like, you know, old enterprise software systems that people want agents to interact with? Like, how wide is the scale of RL environments right now?

Yeah, it's pretty huge, actually. So I think there is like these kind of like flagship website sorts of things, but I think there's also like a long tail of like increasingly niche applications that go down towards like these very fine, very narrow things all the way up towards like broad domains where models really struggle because we don't have a good like interface for them. Like I'd say Excel is one of it's like everyone uses Excel, but like no one is really like an LM power user in Excel because it doesn't integrate very well. No, we don't have the cursor for Excel yet as a broadly deployed. I think it's easier to have an environment for a terminal or for a coding agent because the harness is a little simpler and so that's one sort of thing you'd want as like an environment and that's one of the sort of things that like the mechanizes of the world and imagine are like building these sorts of things. Yeah. I'm sure that like the labs all have their idea of like what tasks their customers want models to be better at.

They're currently not being used for as well as just like what sorts of products are people trying to build. So like you can build the greatest agent harness in the world but like if your model hasn't been trained for it like some models might just like not very good because it's not very ergonomic for them. And so you can think of environments as like a way of taking a model, like having a interface that you really want your model to be great in, like a harness and then just like a feedback loop that lets it get better at being a model or agent in that harness. Yeah.

Help me understand the Excel case more specifically. Co-pilot exists there. We're hoping that Microsoft rebrands it is Clippy eventually. But there are also like seven different startups that are building, you know, cursor for Excel. help me understand the context of verifiable rewards and what that would look like in Excel because if I if I'm trying to do an analysis I'm trying to understand a company's financials build a DCF like there are templates but then to actually get the correct valuation that's

something that like even if I have the perfect DCF and it tells me that Nvidia is worth $5 trillion like I can't verify that against the market I could wait a year but the DCF could still be right and the market could be wrong. So, like, what does verifiable reward look like? What are people actually building towards in that environment you think? Right. Yeah. So the easiest recipe, which, like, we've done work on as well as I've seen

lot of papers about this. And it also is just kind of like the obvious only real thing you can do is have a correct answer where it's like there is a gold standard, like someone made the CCF. Yep. And we, the agent doesn't see the finish one. Sure. And it's like new enough that it's out of the training distribution from pre-training. yeah um like past six months is perfect and then you want to train your model to like be in

the harness where it could make the DCF and then look at what it produces and then you have all these different things you can check of like did it get all these fields right yeah um and this those evaluations are a combination of like uh like vibe checks spot checks when humans are looking at it for like this is how kind of people have been doing historically you just like you build a thing you try it out you look at it you try to make a list of what's wrong and that doesn't really scale and so to scale, you need to automate this evaluation trunk where you want to have a thing that comes out like a DCF, a spreadsheet or a paper or a piece of code and have a way of programmatically checking this.

And this checking usually is going to involve LLMs in the loop, maybe fine-tuned L-L-Ms or customized L-LMs for grading whether the thing has been done correctly. And then this like, you got a iterate on this meta process a bit to have a good grader and see, like, does the result of your grader match your human vibe check, your spot check based on having some kind of experts in the loop. But what you then want to do is take that kind of evaluation process and freeze it as a kind of piece of code. And now you can plug this into your harness.

So the harness plus some like input task of like do this for every company. And you're like gold standards for every company of like whatever work should look like made by some analyst. You're grading against like the golden answer. And now you scale this up. What was the industry standard before you rolled this out? would like the actual AI researchers or AI engineers who were going to do reinforcement learning on a model in a particular domain actually design and implement the environment with the reward

all internally and it didn't exist as an external function whatsoever? Was that the status quo? In terms of like open source infrastructure or like the, in terms of like methods, very few people have been doing this. The amount of people who have successfully trained a large-scale agent model with reinforcement learning is very small. Yeah, I imagine. It is not broadly deployed. Like, the companies that are, like, on the periphery of maybe doing it are, like, cursory and perplexity.

Yeah. So, when I hear a thing that, like, yeah, yeah, when I hear a lot of, like, we're an AI agent startup, what that really means is, like, maybe you're leveraging another agent or some sort of agentic API in that particular case. And then maybe they're using, yeah, you might be, you might train your own. own. And maybe that's the, is there a significant cost to this? Like, does this affect, if I, if I just take the landscape of, like, everyone who's building cursor for X right now, that implies that at some point they, like, if we see this bifurcation and the market for cursor for X really is, you know, highly fragmented, and there's not just one foundation model company that just eats everything, are you going to see small RL reinforcement learning environments

with verifiable rewards in every single sub-niche of SaaS that these companies are going after? And would they have like material costs to that? Is it expensive? Like, I think you have to build the harness anyways. I think one of the hardest things to scale is building good evaluations and corporate criteria. If you can do the evaluation bit, depending on like how, so one thing is like the infrastructure problem of like doing this for like a frontier scale model. Yeah. Is not broadly accessible.

It's not the thing that you can just like put in money and it comes. happen. That's what we're working on building. But you can do it with like these like tiny models like the non mix. So kind of technical thing is like to serve models at scale, you really want them to be like large mixture of experts models that are efficient for inference. The current ecosystem for tooling for doing that yourself is not great. Most people are doing like Lama and Klan experiments and these models are like they're good models kind of but like they're not really what

you want to deploy for a serious application. Okay. So, um, Yeah, is that, can you give me like a rough order magnitude for the, for the level of cost that it would, it would, if I have a problem, a specific domain where I think I need to train an agent in an RL environment, I have the verifiable reward, my AI researcher has, you know, defined the harness and the reward, and I go to you to actually do the RL on top of maybe an open source model. Am I talking about tens of millions of dollars of GPU costs? Like, try and ground it for me a little bit more. Like, I would say this is like napkin math. Yeah. Like if you want to do like a serious run that would like meaningfully improve a model of like the Deep Seek or Kimmy scale, we're talking like hundreds of thousands

for like a so big boy serious one. You can do a lot for thousands actually. So it's kind of like, yeah, like those old like. In terms of raw compute. Yeah, like when people were like, oh, I fine-tuned Lama on this thing and now it, now it does this funny thing, or I fine-tune this image model on my face, like, those used to be like kind of like prosumer level projects. Now we're getting into the, okay, this is like a enterprise level effort, but it's probably not going to, you don't need to call up soft bank to get it done. right i mean there's like there's a whole spectrum of these things yeah of course that's why it's hard to like say like yeah yeah yeah you can like you can fine tune lama on your laptop sure but you also you can't fine tune like kimmie or deep seek the big ones on your laptop yep um and also it's like

how long running is the task yep how many samples do you need how much do you really want to crank it like it's one of those things where you can kind of just like get more as you dump in more compute yep um but currently people are spending a very large fraction of their total compute costs on experimentation and rebuilding the same shit. Like there's not, it's not easy to do this stuff. Like getting your GPUs to work correctly, getting your libraries to work correctly, deciding what hyper parameters do you is,

like people spend, and this is one of the reasons that like the labs have needed so much to compute and why the expenses are so high is that like, they have all these researchers, and researchers are all doing experiments, and each of these experiments is like thousands of dollars of compute. And you multiply this over a year and 100

researchers, that's a lot. Okay. I want you, sorry, you can finish. Sorry. Oh, sure. Yeah, just that, like, I think there's some of these pieces that, like, once you can get the hard questions answered once, you don't need to keep redoing them for every new environment.

You can kind of have some very cheap spot checks. Like, a kind of one shot, eval, like, how to good as a model at the start is kind of be a bellwether for, like, is the running going to work? Okay, loosely related to somewhat of the concept of generalizability. I want your reaction to this ruin, too, this. Roon Post, Roon said, my bar for AGI is an AI that can learn to run a gas station for a year without a team of scientists collecting the gas station data set. What do you think about that as a bar for AGI?

We don't need these oral environments for specific tasks. What are your thoughts? I mean, one thing you might have that look like is the, like, I think that could be answered by an agent who realized it's not good at gas station stuff. and figures out how to kind of create its own training environment. It's like, okay, I need to practice. The same way that, like, if you want to learn how to code, you've got to go find stuff to practice on.

Maybe that's one way of thinking about what that level of AI means of, like, truly self-learning, like build your own tasks and curate your own tasks in a way that allows you to check whether you've been doing them correctly or not. Yeah. Yeah, it does feel like we're in this era where there are a few really obvious things that we want to RL on and get really good at. And you see that with the IMO and the math and the deep research. reports and they're very reliable but then once you come up with some random task then you need

the gas station data set and so yeah maybe the future is is uh go and find those autonomously and and set up the reward function train and then iterate and bake that in um yeah but but i think sorry yeah sorry go ahead oh yeah just because i think one way to do this is just like the environment can be the thing you're going to serve it's like cursor is an environment yeah um lovable is an environment. All these things, people are already kind of building things that could be environments if they connect the, like the wiring correctly. But like I think we're not quite there yet in terms of having this be a thing that people are scaling. And now like every company wants to like hire like environment builders and RL people. And it's like you're not, they're not all going

to hire people for this. We need to kind of better ways of like scaling this out to more people and like infrastructure as a service kind of. Yeah, that makes sense. I wanted to ask about Dario's comments in his interview with John Collison talking about. Basically, I'll read the quote. He says there's two different ways you could describe what's happening in the model business right now. So let's say in 2023, you train a model that costs $100 million, and then you deploy it in 2024, and it makes $200 million of revenue. Meanwhile, because of the scaling laws in 2024, you also train a model that costs $1 billion. And then in 2025, you get $2 billion of revenue from that $1 billion, and you've spent $10 billion to train the model. So if you look

in a conventional way at the profit and loss of the company, you've lost $100 million in the first year, $800 in the second, and $8 billion in the third year. So it looks like it's getting worse and worse. If you consider each model to be a company, the model that was trained in 2023 was profitable. You paid $100 million, then it made $200 million of revenue. There's some cost to inference with the model, but let's just assume in this cartoonish example. And so Fintuit has just been like freaking out about this, like being incredibly bearish. It's obviously a bubble, you know, and just kind of worried you have exponential increases in cost. and then unpredictable kind of like capital needs in the future, why do you think they should

stop freaking out, given that you were just over at Goldman? More thanly, but, yeah. So, like, there's an element to the freaking out that's, like, kind of a good point, which is, like, you can't keep doubling every year. At some point, there's a plateau. And you can grow every year. You can still have, like, exponential growth, but the percentages are not going to, there's only so many people to adopt AI products.

And once they adopt it, if they were going to be spending more and more, it has to be delivering a very large multiplier of new value per year. And there's some laws of physics of how good models are going to get, how fast we can possibly make the chip. The chips are only going to scale so quickly. We can only build so many GPUs year after year with the current rate of growth. And so I do think there will be kind of the space we end up in where, like, stuff broadly works quite well.

There are a few big labs who have very good models that are like, you can deploy them. And then there's also like this kind of Pareto curve of like, how much can you spend, how fast does it need to be, how hands-on do you want to be for it, like how narrow is your thing you want it to do. So if your thing is like, oh, I want to build

a great browser agent, this is super broad. There's so many things you can do on a browser. Your thing is, I want to build an agent for writing Rust, this is much more narrow. And so if you only, if you're making like the product for Rust developers, like the cursor, for example, you can make a model that's just as good as Quad4 Opus that's much smaller and much cheaper, most likely, because the focus is like more narrow.

And so this is kind of how I think about generalizability is like you can spend more on compute, you can make the model bigger. These are all different axes to spend. And you can also make it like more narrow and go deeper on one thing. And so we're going to have a lot of knobs to turn, I think. Yeah. Are you broadly long RL environments, short, normal pre-training data? Do you have any, like, extra color on the relative value or, like, where the low-hanging fruit is across those two?

I'm long both, but I think they're going to kind of turn into the same thing. Like, like, one thing, for example, that people have been doing for, like, pre-training recently is that people are just using a deep cigar one and generating tons of, like, and then mixing those in at the end of pre-training and calling it mid-training. And it's like, is in some sense this is RL because it's just taking the juice from doing RL on like deep seek B3, but it's also pre-training. And so I think one thing that we're excited about with environments and scaling these is like, you can get a lot of good data out of these by you have a like a task set, you have the ability to generate agent data inside of this task set, you have a filter,

for throwing out the bad stuff and keeping the good stuff. And so can you just like do trillions of tokens this and put it into pre-training? Why not? Do you have insight into what's happening in the video or image world equivalent of RL environments, verifiable rewards, et cetera? Like I was just shocked by the level of quality of text

in images in chat GPT. We're seeing the same thing with nano banana from Gemini, and it felt like images in Chachapiti particularly was uniquely good at Studio Ghibli and uniquely good at text and that felt like I was almost like putting on my tinfoil hat

and saying like they're using Photoshop here and they're doing two different layers or something or like there's something else going on here that's just like one really good model like it feels spiky it feels particularly good at text and particularly good at cartoons but it hadn't gotten like way way better

are at, you know, super photo reel imagery or whatever. Sure. So do you have any view on how you translate all the stuff that's happening in the, in the agents and text-based LLM world into sort of the diffusion and an image or video world? Sure, yeah. So, like, I am not a diffusion next thing, but, like, I imagine it's a mix of essentially these kind of environments where you have some grader, as well as, like, good old

fashion RLHF, like the stuff people were doing for, like, instruct GPT, chat dbt, era where it's like you have like a upboat downboat and then you're training a reward model to like check these and I think the image domain is easier to kind of spot errors whether it's a human or an automatic grader like if text is wrong you can like do OCR on the image get the text back out and see is it the right image from the prompt and so you it's this is like pretty easy to verify versus like if a chat GPT answer is like slop how do you verify that it's slop like what's the algorithm that checks if it's slop or not like that's pretty hard. And so in some sense, like the image models were just like for a while, they were bad at things that we could very easily measure. And it's getting, it's gotten harder to measure the things that LMs are bad at much faster. And so I think some of this is like the old fashioned tricks that made Chats VT original version as good as it was being applied to the image domain for kind of hatching up the obvious fixes.

Give me your hot take. How much, how much do you think meta is paying mid journey? with that new deal they announced. That's a good question. Do you think it's nine figures a year? Hopefully. I mean, like it feels like it would be more maybe. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're spending crazy amounts and everything. That's what I was saying. And it makes sense for mid-journey to want to have like a low-key announcement about it. But there's like another team that would have been like, we just signed a $500 million a year's 10-year deal or something, something obscene.

obscene that that looks more like an acquisition even though clearly from it from a dollar value standpoint even though clearly they're going to continue to operate independently yeah i would kind of think of it as like mid journey's version of doing an API business so like it could just be based on usage to tool i'm sure there's a big picture of it but like think of like what you can kind of do the napkin math by saying like okay what are other image providers like charging for API usage um like foul or like uh replicate or like all these other services like you can kind of nap and map out the cost or of an image or back it out from the majority restriction prices and how much they give you and then say like okay how many of these are people going to be doing if they're doing like generative ads for Instagram that's a lot if they're doing like every person has the ability to apply it to their Instagram posts or their stories that's a lot and so you can the numbers can get crazy pretty quickly and I think it does kind of depend on like like if it's just ads or if it's just too. like certain customers or it's not like deeply integrated then it like the scale is not as crazy as

it it's like no you're really getting like mid journey stuff everywhere for everyone instantly at volume yeah i was uh i was thinking when uh studio gibbley moment happened uh that the response from meta should be to pre render or pre generate a studio gibbley of every single person on Instagram's profile photo as a Ghibli, because that's basically what people were doing in ChatGPT, like pre-generate that, and then just when you open Instagram, it just says, hey, we did this for you. Do you want to share it? And that would probably be like the biggest day of usage on Instagram, but it would also probably bankrupt the company because it'd probably be like $50 billion worth of inference or something like that. I don't know.

It's a lot. It's a lot. And those images are expensive. Got some breaking news, Invidia beat on revenue and earnings per share, but is down 5%. Wait, why? They didn't beat hard enough. They didn't beat hard enough. Can we ring the gong for the beat? I mean, let's bring it. Yeah, four and one percent in perspective.

Invidia's, like, both a competitor and a supplier partner, right, to you? Yeah, I mean, we resell the GBA. So, like, we're big Nvidia fans. See, root and fun. That's great. Yeah. And I think Nvidia's been very friendly to, like, the ecosystem of players. Like, Nvidia is not trying to be the, like, single...

You can even, like, buy GPUs on their website. Like, they don't sell GPUs to people. Yeah. They sell them to, like, data centers and, like, big companies. Yeah, and I know that there was that news that they were coming for the neoclouds with DJX Lepton, and it felt like they were dipping their toe in that area, but it didn't feel like this was existential for anyone else in the, in the ecosystem. system. It felt somewhat additive. I don't know if you have a take. Oh, yeah. So, I mean,

I think it's also like a different, like they're going to kind of offer that as like a very premium like white glove sort of thing to certain enterprises. Sure. I think we are much more on the end of like get all the data centers we can find, like partner with every NeoCloud and have like really cheap pricing and then like build features on top. Yeah. Um, where part of this is like doing like core research. So like we like have friends in video. We like we talked with them about like they release a lot of cool like open source um like research stuff and so like that is like very in spirit of like the sorts of things we are like and we do and i think we're friendly yeah uh are there any rl tasks that you think are like truly intractable something that

like is is fundamental to humans creativity or comedy or something like what what what's the mount everest of of developing an rl environment around i think the hardest is stuff that a friend of mine was tweeting about this early today, actually, one of our collaborators who, from probably devils, who's doing some cool open source e-vals work for computer use. But things that need a human in the loop to have a fine-grained accurate simulation,

like stuff that if a human, if models are not good enough at replicating human behavior yet, and that human behavior is key to the environment, then you're not going to have an environment that faithfully captures the task, because there's a kind of chicken or egg problem. And so like Twitch streamer was one example of like um like having a model that can like be good in twitch chat kind of requires like an

accurate sim of twitch chat um and it's like how do you build that or like a physical streamer like there's a this real time interaction problem you need to kind of solve before you can get started because the the scale at which these things move you can do it if an lm is simulating the user yeah you can't do it if you need a real human yeah i feel like the uh the the the time horizon is really it feels really really tricky to simulate when you think about, like, the impact on a life of a certain behavior. I mean, we struggle with this with, like, drug development, understanding, like, does something in childhood affect you as a retired person?

It's like, okay, now you have to create a simulation of the entire human body to understand that if you did this thing, 18, it's going to cause you to, you know, have your, like, knee blow out when you're 65 or something. Like, that feels much harder to simulate one shot. But maybe we'll get there. Who knows? yeah at some point you just got to let the error of time run forward and see what happens exactly well thank you for hopping on always great to see you congratulations congratulations yeah we'll check out the prime intellect environments hub we are live now uh we're on twitter x see around

send it chat see you see you guys talk to you later bye and yes we have the nVIDia uh market chart here down uh 2.75% is that what i'm seeing here correct um let's see fluctuating it is doing as well. But high expectations. But, you know, after hours, it's down 1.42%. It's bouncing back right now. The company's trading at $179 a share. Was it $181 a share? Something tells me, Jensen's going to shrug this off. If you look at the six months, the stock has just been smoothly climbing upwards. Anyway, we have our next guest, Julius Steinberg, in the studio. Welcome to What's happening? How are you doing?

Welcome back. Hello. I am doing well. I was thinking about wearing like a little hat that said Chinese Communist Party on it to, you know, establish what I was talking about. But unfortunately, it came up with this idea 20 minutes ago and because I am dealing with California infrastructure and not China infrastructure. I could not get it delivered from the house in time. Yeah.

Are you driving from L.A. to S.F. or vice versa? Where are you going? Yeah. So this may be a bit TMI. for the good listeners of TBPN, but I was rear-ended a few weeks ago. So my car has since been fixed, but I must drive it up to San Francisco. And it's actually sort of thinking about the drive north. It's a lot of what Dan Wayne talks about and breakneck is sort of like, look, China's

able to build these good things. And I was thinking about it. I'm like, why do we not have a functioning highway for Highway 1? Why, like PCH, Pacific Coast Highway, it's one of the most iconic American landmarks. One of my favorites, personally, it's ridiculous that it shouldn't work. And I tweeted, I just sort of had a frustration. Like, I'm really frustrated that I have to, you know, do this ugly, annoying drive where my car is going to smell like cow shit for six hours rather than see the beauty of the Pacific Ocean.

Favorite thing as a kid, my parents, we'd be on a road trip. My parents would say like, okay, we're going through the cow zone. We're that big cattle rants. Yeah, you have to turn on the research. Yeah, recirculated, and I would just be like, I'm hitting the window down. If you were my child, then you would have been booted out of the car window at that point. I was surprised, so PCH between Malibu and L.A. was shut down after the fires for a while, and then it was open to specific people based on your address,

and then it got actually open pretty quickly. and I think that was probably Newsom knowing that like this stretch of PCH is like critical to my popularity in the state because there's just a lot I mean for for no reason other than celebrities drive on that route and if they're and if he doesn't get it open so it was open ahead of schedule he was taking a victory lap of like but the one is not really critical to many people's commutes it's more of Especially up by, it's Big Sur that's shut down, right? Yeah, Big Sur. So I can drive from San Francisco or however for North on the one to Big Sur, but I can't, the sort of Cambria region is cut off that sort of bit fell into the ocean. And a lot of people on Twitter were sort of, I wasn't expecting the tweet to blow up, but people on Twitter were like, how can this like girl expect mother nature to want this freeway here?

I was like, this is absurd. Like, we've sent men to the moon. We can't have a bridge. Like, I'm not a structural engineer, but Dan Wang in his book Breakneck, he was like, oh, yeah, the Chinese government has built X amount of, like, the bridges, like the top 10, some of the biggest bridges in the world in this, like, record short amount in time. And it's frustrating to me that we can't do that. We somehow is admitting that, like, as a civilization, we're just going to let the mud slides win.

Yeah. Here's the solution. If you want one, the highway one, to open, you got to put a Harris range. ranch out there because that's the highlight of i5 you stop for the a5 wagyu rib eye you get a big steak at harris ranch this is the highlight of my trips up and down harris ranch is the really smelly rant that's the really smelly one it's i didn't realize you could pull over and get a meal oh yeah i didn't realize that either oh well you're not doing the five correctly then yeah when you're driving from l.a to san francisco you run out of gas halfway because you're driving a terrible car

this is my experience in like 2012 um and you always stop at harris ranch you get a big steak and it's fantastic. Yeah, I think most people are flying by. The other alternative that is actually scenic and nice is there, even though we don't have a high speed train, we do have a train that goes from... It takes 24 hours. Like, it just takes an... Skill issue. Get a book. I thought you were, I thought you were into books. You're the GM of books. I do like books, but I like being able to read books while I'm not in a moving vehicle. Oh, it's so nice. This is one of my more controversial book takes is I like being, sitting still. Okay. When I'm reading a book. Plains are fine. I can read many books on planes. I've read many books on planes.

Okay. Well, speaking of books, take us through your review of Dan Wang's book. Yeah. So I sort of was introduced to Dan Wang about a year ago. I was actually on the five listening to one of his articles put through some voice reader technology, how technology grows, which is how I first got acquainted with the ideas of process knowledge, which is basically that engineering requires a great deal of verbal transnational. mission from one person to another or sort of one like elder mentor to a mentee. And the United States, we've lost a good deal of that process knowledge in how to make things because we've offshored it to China.

And Dan Wang really, and Breakneck does a really fantastic job of describing how these communities of engineering have maintained this process knowledge, this ability to build things, which in the United States, we've just voluntarily shrugged off. lost. I would say like the big idea, if you're going into the Atlantic, this is the excerpt they chose, was that rather than thinking of the United States and China as a capital society versus a communist one or a socialist one, we should think of the United States as a lawyerly society and China as an engineering society. So in the United States, a lot of our elites go to top law schools, you know, Supreme Court clerkship, one of the most prestigious things you can get.

But maybe even Supreme Court is one of those prestigious positions you can get. Whereas in China, the Politburo is made out of engineers, first and foremost. I think Xi Jinping doesn't have that big of an engineering background, but pretty much most people in the Pollock Borough do. And in the United States, when we focus around rules and regulations, what's getting us from point A and point B is like, well, what is this going to look like? Is this going to violate people's rights? Can we do this? In China, it's get from point A to point B. It's like, okay, how do we do this?

building something from the ground up. Yeah. I was listening to Casey Hanmer on Dorcas and he was talking about how he's trying to install solar panels in the desert and he needs to get some like environmental report that says that like if he puts the solar panel over it, it'll kill this tuft of grass that like a bird might come and eat. Meanwhile, like if he was building like a chemical plant, it would be like fine because like like the chemical lobbies have like lobby to like get it make it easy. And so it's just like nonsense. But my question is, um, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, The engineering, what's the phrase he uses, engineer. Engineering society.

Engineering society and lawyerly society, right? Engineering empire or something. So I understand that and it's very alluring. Like I like engineering more than I like lawyers, I suppose. But my prior is that America is number one and America is the best. So should we really try and change horses in the middle of a stream here? maybe the beauty of America is that we have so many lawyers keeping us great. What do you think?

Well, my dad, who's probably watching right now, is a lawyer. So shout out to the Jewish Lawyers keeping America great. I guess the bigger question is, like, is there a world where we say, okay, let's try and pivot from lawyerly society to more engineering focused. We get halfway there. And we actually are worse off because you want to just like lawyer max or engineer max and if you're if you're halfway in between it's just a nightmare i don't know well how i view it is that the united states is very good at engineering maxing in the private market whereas china it's

very good at engineering maxing just having the state do it you know chinese communist party well both both but the state capacity for engineering the state capacity is a lot bigger but it's also like this is my biggest issue with breakneck is that it was just like way too kinsian it was like oh it's so great that the government is you know basically getting these people in the middle of nowhere in China to dig holes. And by dig holes, I'm sort of exaggerating a bit, but it's digging these bridges that no one is going to use, or these airports in the middle of nowhere that have fewer than half a dozen flights a week. Like, I just don't think that's a good use of market resources. It's a sort of interesting question that Wang raises, though, I don't think he says

it straight up. Is capitalism even a useful sort of metric in the 21st century? And I would say absolutely, but we need to prove that in the United States by doubling down on free markets. Free markets could bring us great things like a beautiful bridge that would make PCH work. I'm a huge believer in market incentives. I think the issue that Wang sort of highlights, though, when he talks about Xi Jinping not wanting like a services economy is just that in the United States, maybe the culture is a bit broken where our best minds want to do, I don't know, like B to B to B.2. sass rather than building bridges or building nuclear power plants or other infrastructure.

I do think this sort of culture is changing a bit. We're returning a bit to wanting physical manifestations of American excellence. That's not just my app is like 0.02% more productive than your app in delivering an AI girlfriend. But I think that overall, what Wang talks about in China's sort of engineering society, it mixes two, it conflates two things. It conflates two things. it conflicts engineering and it conflates culture. And when the government is in charge of culture and they can say everyone from this district should want to be a guitar manufacturer, which is true in one of the districts in the book that he talks about, which makes guitars, which is pretty random, considering that there's

not really a historic guitar industry in this city, in Guizhou, it's just something that they sort of, it's like, we're just going to make guitars here and it happened and they got very good at it. But with the United States, culture is a lot more organic. It's harder for the United States to say, we're going to make this value really well adopted. And this is something that's sort of bad about China, too. Dan Wang talked a lot about the one child policy in China. He talked a lot about zero COVID in China where people... John presented the multiple children policy. Have three kids, policy. And Dan rejected that roundly. got destroyed. I like the three kids policy. I think it's a good policy. I think they have the

money. There's incentives. And if you if you really, really tilt the field, the playing field in the favor of having more kids, like people will have more kids. I agree. And it's like talking. Of course, you know, I have to bring up Tavis, the engagement that happened yesterday. I was talking to my boyfriend at the end of the day. And I was like, Jake, like, I have to tell you something, but you're not going to be interested in this at all. And he was like, oh my God. Like, what? she do this time? Like, did she get another car accident? I was like, Travis and Taylor got engaged. He's like, I don't know who those people are. And also, like, I'm really not interested in that. He doesn't read the Wall Street Journal because Taylor-

Come, you guys need to write something about a 2014 op-ed about Spotify. Well, yeah. Also, I want to know the, I want to know what this engagement means for America. It's good question. From arena, from you guys. But it's like this, it's one of the weird things is it's like a Taylor Swift baby boom. like how China is it's not who's a Chinese pop star who's going to get pregnant from a football player and have kids I don't know that's a good question I do think there should be a Taylor Swift orchid collab you know she's on the older side I hope she has many kids or could be a sponsor you know there and having D1 athlete that's also world famous superstar kids that's true I mean they're they're certainly they

don't shy away from the economic opportunities associated with their with their announcements, that's for sure. No. But I do really think that the Tavis sort of engagement announcement, the royal wedding that will happen in a few years. Like I unironically do think that this will cause a baby boom. Because people are very memetic, women are very memetic. And if number one pop star has kids.

They found the answer. Jackie Chan, born in Hong Kong, has two children. That's the answer. We just need to promote Jackie Chan's children. in China that will cause the boom well maybe the thing with nepo babies like nepo the sort of like weird take on nepo babies is that we need to have more nepo babies and just shit out of them so it's like your kids if you are successful your kids will be successful too yeah because the line about kids now is like oh if you have kids especially if you have kids young they'll draw away from your

success yeah but if i'm like oh my child is heritably going to be like a kung fu superstar because I am a kung fu superstar. I totally have kids. I mean, that certainly happens in Hollywood. There's a ton of celebrities that have kids. I mean, John David Washington is Danzel's son, played football, and then was in ballers, I believe, and a tenant. I have a sort of funny story about that.

I grew up in L.A. and I was on the debate team at my high school, and there's a lot of sort of overlap between girls who wanted to do the debate team and girls who wanted to do the school play. and this one girl whose parents were both very, very famous, like super A-plus list actors was deciding between doing the debate team and doing the school play. And our debate coach, he said to me, he's like, well, it's usually pretty easy to convince them that they're not going to have a famous career as an actor and they're a lot more likely to become a successful lawyer, but if both of your parents have stars in the Hollywood Walk of Fame,

then that's a lot less likely. Makes sense. Sorry, I'm prepping a chart. George, do you have anything else? Chart for what? Our next guest. Who's in the stream waiting room? Julia, it's always great to see you.

We've got to come on more often. Yes, we should have scheduled more time, but we have someone else in the waiting room, so I'm dealing with that. Well, next time I expect a custom chart to be pulled up. Next time you're in L.A., come do the show in person. I said, I'm here. Okay, fantastic.

Let's do it. Fix the car, drive over to the TV and alter them. Thank you. Appreciate it. Always great to catch up. California to fix the one so we can drive scenically in the future. Thank you so much for hopping on. Our next guest is in the re-stream waiting room. Olivia Moore. From Andrewson Horowitz. How are you doing? What's happening?

It's great to see you guys. Thanks for having you. Great to see you. I was just sharing with the team the news today, but you break it down for us first. What are you announcing today? Yeah, so we're announcing what we call the Consumer AI Top 100, which is where we literally thank you. I appreciate when other people are this excited about data as I am. Love, David. We live for market maps. Yes. Yes. This one has, I would say it's market map adjacent in that we, every single website and every single mobile app around the world in descending order of traffic. And then we pick out the top 50 in each that are AI native companies to just get a look at what consumers are actually using. I consider myself a bit of a list

connoisseur myself. Yes. I enjoy me. I'm sure you're going to get yourself in hot water with this list. People are going to say, take me off this list. I want to be under the radar. Put me on this list. I want. I'm doing better than that other company on here. Talk about the methodology. How confident are you? Is there an element of like vibe and curation? Is this like the New York Times bestseller list? No, there's no elements of vibes. It's all data. All data. So we literally, for the web list, we go, we have a provider called similar web, and we literally just look at a month number of visits. We put the first 50 that are AI. And then on the mobile list, we do censor tower, and we pick the top 50 by monthly active users. But we do get

lots of fun, text, emails, inquiries, and people either wondering about their rankings or wanting to be on the list. So I'm happy to inform everyone that it is completely unbiased. There are some things on here that stand out to me as completely unsurprising. Chat GPT, number one, Gemini number two, deep seat, grok up there. That seems obvious to me. Stuff that's standing out are specifically like tool like hyper specific tools like remove background remove bg i've actually used that too what janitor ai is number eight yeah what else stuck out to you is surprising what did you learn yeah every time there's um apps that are kind of like literally single purpose remove dot bg is a great example it was a company that was acquired by canva but grew

to like 32 monthly active users literally by being the best products to upload a a photo and get the background removed from it. And it's a catchy URL that people remember, so it keeps getting usage. The janitor one is a good call out too because one of the surprises for me list after list is how many companion products make the list.

It's always a dozen or so each time. Janitor is one of them and one of the highest ranking ones behind character. So it doesn't seem to be fairly... It looks very grok, X-A-I. I would have thought Janitor would be like back off this.

B-to-B, like, I thought that would be something to clean up my data warehouse, but you're telling me that it is, in fact, a companion of some sort. It is. I also see spicychat.a.i-i-i, that sounds like something we shouldn't pull up on this stream. Cushion.A.I. has a heart there that seems a little suspicious, juicy chat. There are a lot of these use cases there. Is this a new thing? Is this the first time you've done the top 100? Like, what are the biggest movers that you're noticing or that you're you're noticing? you expect. Yeah. This is the fifth list. We do it every six months. So we've done it for about

two years now. We started it like six months after Chat ChbT came out. Interestingly, there's 14 companies that have made every single list. Most of them are in kind of creative tools. So think like Mid Journey and 11 labs. Quite a few of them are general LLM players like Chat ChbT perplexity, Poe. Yep. One of the big, I say surprise, but probably not a surprise anyone who's been on Twitter is like vibe coding completely exploded on the list this time. So lovable. Sure. Wasn't been on the last list. And now they're like number 23. Replits also on there. It's just below the cutoff. Curser is on there as well. And it's interesting because like you

would think that the developer market is much smaller than the consumer market. So for developer facing products to make an app like this is pretty impressive. And it shows that like a significant majority of developers are using them well I think the way that I look at that market is there's so many people in the world that have had an idea for an application without the engineering co-founder like a CTO and so that's just like decade-decade plus now like pent-up demand for people that had an idea for an app and then all these companies whether it's lovable or rep or things like that have people on TikTok saying like

you can make an app now, or they're running ads that say, like, you can make an app, right? And so that's just like a flood of demand for people, yeah, non-developers becoming developers for the first time. How are you thinking about meta's strategy? I noticed meta-AI ranked 46 that feels pretty low compared to the amount of effort. Mark Zuckerberg is putting into that project, although it's early days. Also, the meta-AI app, I went to go test it. I realized I had it downloaded because I had a pair of meta-ray bands.

And they kind of, you know, iterated on that product to turn into meta-AI. But, you know, LLMs are vended into Instagram, and yet Instagram's not on here. Do you think that you'll see more companies that are in the AI bolt-on narrative era of their business kind of jump on here? Do you want to keep them separate? What is you're thinking about all of that? Yeah, meta is really interesting. It's funny, the larger tech companies, I think, have really stepped. up in the past year or so on the AI front.

Like Google is probably the best example of this. I was number two on the list. Huge. They also had the AI studio on the list, notebook L.M on the list, Google Labs, which is where you get VO. Oh, wow. They have four companies on the list. Yes, four separate entities on the list, which were all ranked separately with their

own traffic. Grock had a big debut on the list from X, formerly Twitter. Meta, I think, has struggled a little bit. both on web and then on mobile, I don't know if you guys remember the big scandal where they realized that a bunch of the users were accidentally posting their very private posts of the public feed.

Yes. And so usage fell off a little bit. Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah. So they didn't even make the mobile list. But to me, it's like if you guys have tried the meta-AI products, they're a little bit overwhelming,

like quality of the images generated. They did the weird celebrity companion thing. So now that they're working with Mid-Journey, I would expect to see them make some improvements here, but it might take a little while. Yeah, even the Mid Journey thing, it just feels so natural in the other apps. And if you have a billion people opening one app every day, like where Met has been successful, has been put stories into Instagram, put videos into Instagram. They used to launch sidecar apps, like Facebook had an app called Facebook Camera that was supposed

to compete with Instagram. And then they were like, we got to shell out for Instagram. Do you think Mid Journey's ranking gets hurt because people still use? use it in Discord? Or does they shift? Because it feels low at 28. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just recently kind of rolled out the web. I think that's true for both Mid Journey and Suno and a couple of other creative tool apps that also have discords. It's funny because in the first iteration of this list, like no one had a website, everyone had a Discord. And now a lot of those companies are really trying to shift their traffic over. That's interesting. Yeah, I bet you could do a different list of just like the top

discords because all of that's very quantitative and available and um even relying relies on even uh further data um jordy do you have anything else you want to take through this i'm wondering i can continue go for it um i'm just interested in understanding uh your predictions for what the next version might look like what are you tracking on the earlier stage side that isn't quite ready for breakout adoption as measured by unique monthly visits, but we might see an uptick of in the next year or two on the consumer AI top 100. Yeah. I'm definitely expected to see more in prosumer and productivity.

I feel like both the models are just now reliable enough to actually do work for you or getting there. And they're also agentic enough to like perplexity comic and draft an email and put it in your Gmail drafts folder, which is amazing. So we saw a couple of companies like Manus make the list this time around that thesis, but I'd expect to see things like Fixer or Seraph and others in that category. Jen Spark is another big one that I would not be surprised to see on the next list. What's been happening to all the companies that actually were GPT wrappers,

where they were, for a while you could build a business to a few million of ARR, probably more just basically I remember one just advertising against chat chat TV Talk to PDF Well yeah there's those But I'm saying there's other ones that would be called like open chat Oh sure yeah yeah when you would search chat

And they would have in-apps subscriptions And literal rappers Yeah that's it That was a loophole that was open on mobile So we've only done the mobile list I think four times now And it was complete chaos the first three times because the app store was not policing what we call fleecewear, which was like all of the developers, mostly abroad, that were just kind of ripping off the free version of

chat CBT, putting it in an app and acting like it was the same thing you got if you paid for chatubt premium. And they were called things like chat and ask AI or chat GBT or chat GTP or something. But they finally cracked down on that over the last six months. So now we have a mobile list that's like maybe more representative of true products. it's all like beauty cam filters now and scare your homework and get answers. Oh, really? What's your read on how Apple's done from a curation standpoint?

There's like a lawsuit happening right now between XAI and opening eye and Apple. I mean, this is probably going to get printed out and blown up on a big chart in court soon because Grok looks great here. But yeah, I mean, I'd love to know your thoughts on how Apple's curating the app store. Apple is a little bit struggling overall with AI. Like we've even seen this with Siri and the fact that they're now potentially going to turn to Gemini and Google to fix it for them, which would be kind of unheard of. I think they do an okay, but not a fantastic job with curation.

It's definitely not like a pay to play situation from what I've, you know, what I've heard. But I also don't think that they're necessarily kind of at the cutting edge of what's truly the best products that are coming out next that people should be spending time on. Yeah, they also. They should hire you. They should. They also obviously prioritized, they editorialize in what they recommend. So I would be surprised if they're pushing companionship any time soon since the lineage going back to Steve Jobs was this is a very clean, productivity, creativity.

Soon I would imagine gets promoted, mid-jurney, I would imagine gets a promotion. Apple comms is going to be every day there's an article in the New York Times about how somebody had something tragic happened while getting advice from a model. and so Applecoms doesn't want to be like we recommended you recommended companions and the companions went haywire just very anyway we got to hop on with our next guest thank you so much for thank you for having me this was so fun thank you for list maxing thank you for list maxing it doesn't thank you for reading it let's hit the gong for the big list for we hear we hear the gong is too loud too loud yeah we're getting some microphones sorry for your ears everyone but great great to catch up thanks for hopping on we'll talk to soon we'll talk soon

Bye. Up next, we have Flo from lindy.aI. A big announcement today. We will bring him in from the Restream waiting room while we are waiting for him to join. Let me tell you about adquick.com, out-of-home advertising, made easy and measurable.

Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only ad-quick combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Flo, how you doing? Sorry for keeping you waiting. What's new in your world? Yeah, good.

Don't worry. I'm doing great. You know, it's a good day to build B2Bissass. Yes, let's go. Let's hear it for beating me, Saz. Finishing out the show with some just amazing news. Tell me more. Yeah. We just announced a vibe coder today. I just saw Olivia's appearance here. She mentioned, Loveable and Riquet and a few of those. They've been blowing up what we announced today is a vibe coder that can test its own work.

Okay. And it's kind of insane to say it because you would assume, like, of course you can. But actually, none of those products check their work. Like, imagine a software engineer that's just like, here. It's like, it doesn't work. Do you even test it? And it's like, oh, no, I didn't do that. So basically, these vibe coders rely on you to test the work yourself and that, like, work with them to debug it. And it's like, it ends up being a lot of back and fools and painful work. Are you talking about generating a test suite in code or spinning up a web browser

interacting with the vibe coded product? It's the latter. Thanks for asking. Is it okay for sure my screen? Is it okay for sure? I feel like it'd be better. You can share your screen, but we are live, so anything you share will be shared with the internet forever. Burned into the training data of GVT12, manager. Please, yeah, vibe code of something right now. Let's see.

Live demos, they never go around. Well, I'm not going to do like a live, live, live demo, because it does take like three minutes or something, so it'd be a bit boring. Wow. Singularity delayed. Built a Scrabble Checker. Okay.

And this is when we realized, it's actually an emergent behavior that comes out of this agent that we gave a computer to. It was like, all right, I built this Scrabble Wheel Checkup for you. I'm going to open it, okay? I'm going to type a wheel that exists like Thunder. And yeah, it tells me it's valid. Now I'm going to type a wheel that doesn't exist,

like ZZQXW and oops, it tells me it's valid as well. I know this is there might be an issue. It's showing ZZQXW as valid even though it should be valid. Let me fix the API to improve the validation. Fix the API, try again. It doesn't work. Okay. So that's, it does have its own

computer, its own browser, and it sees the work and can click around and actually test its work. Yeah, very cool. What do you think the landing, not landing page, but like, what do they call it? Like the landing market, the first product market fit moment. Do you have any glimmers of hope? Like, is this going to be used by restaurants who want to spin up a landing page? That was kind of like the previous boom of it wasn't vibe coding, but when you saw folks stand up landing pages with, you know, Squarespace or any of those, Weebly, like, there was a whole boom in that. It feels like there's another boom in vibe coding right now. Do you have expectations about where the sweet spot is?

Because I would imagine that people aren't going to build, like, you know, they're not going to go out and raise $100 million for a company that's built on the back of a vibe-coded solution. It's more of like a prototyping tool right now. But then for small businesses, this could be something that they really rely on for a long time. Like, talk to me about the shape of the early customer. I think that's actually the perception of trying to fight. I think the reason why Vive coding so far has been limited to these landing pages is because the tools have been so limited.

And landing pages are just like the fastest, dumbest thing you can build. Same for like this perception. They're like, oh, it's like a cute prototyping tool but you're not actually going to build your company on this. You know, the thing that is unlocked by this new paradigm of something as simple as like testing your work. If you can't test your work, you can only build very, very simple stuff. If you test your work, we're seeing instances of like this running for hours and building,

like one of the craziest examples we've built it like Lindy B&B. So it's like an Airbnb clone. And it's functional. Like you can select things, you can book them, you can put your place up for rent. It's functional. You can sign in, you can sign up. It's got Google Us. It's got all of that stuff.

So, you know, we're actually seeing a lot of, so yes, we're seeing the landing pages. But now we're also seeing a lot of like internal tools. you're almost getting into like retool territory. Sure. Because people are like, I'm just going to hook it up to my API. And I'm going to build like, OroI calculators and like various internal tools for the team in like a couple of minutes. Yeah. Do you think of this as like a separate product or does this like kind of sit on top of everything that you've already built?

And can you, is there a way to like hook in the traditional like Lindys into what you're vibe coding? No, it's super integrated with the rest of the product that we built, which is like agents. obviously. And so that's the whole value prop. It's like, hey, building your website is step one. Like once you've done that, you actually have to build the rest of your business. Like, I joke, like, building your website is sort of the equivalent of getting your, your business cards. Like, okay, you did that. Now you need to like build a business. So like, now that you built your website, Lindy can like market it for you, find customers, do the entire customer support for you fully autonomously. I have want to actually

launch Lindy B&B and have it fully, because I've got enough of one business. I don't want to run like mini bimbi, but have it fully managed by agents, you know, and see how we can go. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, keep sharing demos. I'm excited to check them out. Anything else, Jordy? Yeah, I'm interested, you know, clearly, I think it's almost contrarian at this point to launch another prompts to app builder, right?

And you're insanely intentional about everything that you do. Do you think that the category actually needs a bunch more people to try to be experimenting here, right? You see some of these revenue ramps. I think a lot of entrepreneurs would assume that the market is run away. I should focus on something else, but you've clearly made a different decision. From the traction we're saying there is plenty of room in this market. I think it's like the very, very, very beginnings of this market, as crazy as that sounds. Also, and we've not told that story yet to anyone.

The way this came about was, like, we actually built the V1 of this by accident. So, you know, we had this released that like I went on the show a couple of weeks ago where we were like, hey, we gave a computer to Lindy. And then we realized after we gave it the computer, it's like, oh, fact, it can build websites and you can cue them because that's what happens once you have a computer, you can do everything. So then we basically packaged it up and released it as a Lindy build and improved it obviously. But I think it's basically an emergent capability of the platform. And the reason why we've decided to release it is like, well, one, we're like,

fuck, it's all they're working. And two, we then started to look into the other products. And we were like, I can't believe none of them checks their own work. Like this is actually turns out it's like a massive deal. And when we AB tested like, okay, same prompt on like lovable replete Lindy, this Scrabble example, for example, every vibe coder are there. It's a simple example. It's like a very mini app.

Every single vibe coder got it wrong, every single one, including Lindy. Like it got it wrong first shot as you saw. And then the difference is like, this and tried it on work, saw that it got it wrong and fixed it. So I think it's day one for this product. That's very cool. Well, congratulations on the launch. Keep us post.

Last very quick question. Where are we on the Gartner hype cycle? Peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of an enlightenment, or plateau of productivity? I have this conversation every day with a different friend. I forgot the different labels here, but like, look, you know. It's basically are we coming down from the peak towards the trough or are we headed up the slope of enlightenment?

I think we're heading up the slope of enlightenment. Wow. Bullish. Bull market continues. Very bullish. Very bullish. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

Thanks, everyone. Cheers. Well, if you... Shout out to Ilhan Volani. Yes, shout out. In the chat. Yes. He is in a dorm...

At Boston University. Let's hear it. for being across the coast from the window in Silicon Valley. Fulish. Well, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with Inspiring Reviews, Hotel Grated Manus, Dreamy Beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service.

It's a vacation home, but better folks. I'm not going to find a Wander on Lindy's vibe-coated Airbnb. He's got to solve getting good inventory. That's what Wander's done. Jeff Dean is, I don't want to say he was inspired by us, but he posted a beautiful one-of-one AI-generated trading card of him playing soccer. He's the chief scientist at Google. Of course, he says, our latest Gemini image generation and an editing model is quite good.

See the examples in the thread below. It lets you indulge in a bit of creative fun, helps you make new business cards, etc. Try it out at gemini.com. Jeff Deen, of course, one of the greatest to ever do it. Very, very cool. We got to, I mean, this. So Logan, Logan, one. Unshotted a card generator.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Can we play with it? Maybe we should play with it after the show and we'll bring it up tomorrow. It's looking good. He sent me a preview. Yeah. Love it. Also, Packy said, I've mostly had X deleted for my phone for the past month or so,

but every now and then I redownload it briefly. It's been funny seeing the slow Nikitification of the onboarding flow, like this new pulsing blue orb on the allow notifications button. I didn't even know Nikita could pull this off. There's levels to the game. There are levels to this. Very, very smart. That's obviously going to increase the amount of people that turn on notifications because

draws your eye right to it. Also, just nicely designed, too, that little subtle gradient there to highlight allow. Brian Halligan. This is interesting. Sangri. So knows I have two ideas offers. One, it has a bigish brand, tons of customers, no real competitor. And absolutely a horrible product.

I'd love to help a PE firm who would want to take it private, fix it, and take it public again for a big gain. Two, if you're a very sharp, qualified entrepreneur that wants to disrupt them, I'd like to hear your pitch. This is the curse of being Sonos. You know, so many capital allocators, private equity guys probably have thousands of dollars of Sonos products that they are dis, you know, unhappy with. And they're all, every time they go and turn on their TV or their sound system, they're like,

I should take this company over, should go do it. Keithra Boy in the comments. You know if you want to work together on this. Yeah, Keith Roy is getting in the game. Neval is also there. Naval's talking about another company that has an amazing product that needs to be distilled to a lower mass market price point. Kenneth Castle has a fantastic post here.

He says, I guess his wife says, T.S. and TK. are engaged. He says, question mark. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey. He says, oh, I thought you were talking about TK from Uber slash Cloud Kitchens. What? Locked in. Absolute banger. Well, did you notice what?

Taylor was wearing in her engagement photo? Absolutely not, but I did see it. Cardier Pantheir. Oh, the watch. I did see that, that, um... Eight-carat diamond ring. But more importantly, she was wearing a Cartier. Where could you get a Cartier.

Bezell. Getbezzle.com. Your bezel concierge is available now. Source to any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. You're going to be proposing to a pop star. NASCAR. NASCAR has joined substack.

I don't think anybody would have called that for you. years ago. We got to do a collab with them. This is the whole thing on substack. We're going to do collabs with other people. So we've got to get a live video going with them. We've already talked to folks at NASCAR.

This would be the second time we're collaborating with NASCAR. An absolute tear. Well, folks, thank you for tuning in today. Thank you for tuning in. We've had a fantastic time. We hope you have two. We hope you have an amazing afternoon. Follow our substack, TBPN.substack.com.

We're going very hard over there. And we will see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Have a good day. Cheers.