TBPN - AI Buildout Meets Capex Wall, The Browser Company Effect | Drew Houston, Jacob Andreou, Adam Fry, Ian Rogers, Molly Cantillon, Jonny Dyer, Mike Shebat

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

(01:35) - The Browser Company Effect (13:54) - AI Buildout Hits Fab Capex Overhang (40:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:11:56) - Jacob Andreou, leading product and growth at Microsoft AI with a focus on Copilot, previously held a similar role at Snap from 2015 to 2023. In the conversation, he discusses Microsoft's integration of various AI models into Copilot, including OpenAI's GPT-5 and their own first-party models, to enhance user experience. He also highlights new features like the AI browser in Edge, which offers agentic capabilities and proactive assistance, and introduces 'Mico,' a new AI persona designed for safe, work-appropriate interactions. (01:30:18) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:58:06) - Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, discusses the evolution of Dropbox from a file-syncing service to an AI-powered platform with the introduction of Dropbox Dash, an AI-driven universal search and knowledge management tool. He highlights how Dash connects various work applications, enabling users to efficiently locate and manage their content across multiple platforms. Houston emphasizes the importance of integrating AI to enhance productivity and streamline workflows in the modern work environment. (02:20:09) - Adam Fry, the product lead for ChatGPT Search and ChatGPT Pulse, discusses the enthusiastic reception of ChatGPT Atlas, highlighting its availability to all users and the integration of AI features into daily workflows. He explains that while the browser is accessible to everyone, advanced features like agent mode are more compute-intensive and thus prioritized for paid users. Fry also emphasizes the long-term vision for Atlas, focusing on user retention and continuous improvement to enhance the browsing experience. (02:31:48) - Ian Rogers, Chief Experience Officer at Ledger, discusses the company's mission to provide secure self-custody solutions for digital assets, emphasizing the importance of protecting private keys using secure element chips. He highlights Ledger's evolution from securing Bitcoin to supporting a wide range of cryptocurrencies and digital assets, including passkeys and identities, underscoring the growing need for security in our increasingly digital lives. Rogers also introduces Ledger's latest product, the Nano Gen 5, a secure touchscreen device priced at $179, designed to enhance user experience without compromising security. (02:45:34) - Molly Cantillon, founder of NOX, a proactive personal assistant company, discusses the challenges of integrating iMessage and WhatsApp to enable seamless communication across both platforms. She explains that by layering onto users' computers and avoiding distribution through the App Store, NOX can facilitate this integration without direct cooperation from Apple or Meta. Cantillon also highlights the importance of message interoperability and the potential for regulatory and market forces to encourage platform cooperation in the future. (02:55:14) - Jonny Dyer, CEO and co-founder of Muon Space, discusses the inevitability of large-scale IT infrastructure in space, emphasizing that the timeline—whether one, ten, or twenty years—is uncertain, but the shift is certain. He highlights Muon Space's partnership with SpaceX's Starlink, aiming to modernize space connectivity by replacing outdated systems with high-speed, always-on broadband connections, which will enable transformative capabilities like a 50-satellite constellation for rapid wildfire detection and tracking. Dyer also mentions Muon Space's recent $140 million Series B funding, plans to significantly scale up production capabilities, and the development of new technologies to enhance their satellite operations. (03:03:30) - Mike Shebat, CEO and co-founder of Traba, discusses how his company leverages AI to streamline industrial staffing by replacing manual processes with technology, resulting in higher fill rates and faster worker placements. He highlights Traba's growth to 150 employees over four years and emphasizes the importance of a strong in-person work culture, drawing parallels to the commitment of aspiring Olympians. Shebat also addresses the challenges of scaling in the physical world, noting the necessity of market-specific strategies and the potential for future expansion into new markets. 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You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, October 23rd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Did you see this graphic in the Wall Street Journal, the Business and Finance section, talking about the circularity of AI deals? And I thought it was just a beautiful image that reflected nature. It looks like a conch shell. Looks like a conch.

It looks like a conch, max. Right? It looks fantastic. I was laughing to myself about Satchinadella just being like, yeah, I was into circular deals with Open AI like six years ago, actually. So Larry Ellison, you're not, yeah, you're not as cool. Like, don't take a victory lap. I was doing crazy complicated deals with Open AI back in 2019.

But, you know, we've talked enough about Open AI. in this show. It's quickly turning into the Open AI show. We have someone from Open AI coming on the show later today actually to talk about the browser. I am excited for that. But we got to go a different direction. We got to talk about some other stuff. And so I want to talk about how we name companies, how we build brands in Silicon Valley. And I want Jordi to take the lead on breaking down his thesis for the uninspired company of Silicon Valley. But first, I want to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy-use corporate cards, bill pay. County, a whole lot more. All in one place.

Jory Hayes. You have the floor, sir. Thank you. This is an idea or an essay I've been thinking about for a while. Finally got around to writing it. And, yeah, generally, I felt like the timing was right. The browser company's acquisition closed this week. Six years ago, they started the company. So I'll just read through what I wrote, and then we can chat about it. So six years ago, the browser company of New York was born.

This week, it's acquisition by Atlassian closed. Regardless of how you feel about the product or the ultimate acquisition price, it's undeniable that Josh Hirsch and the team brought an incredibly fresh perspective to what a startup brand could look and feel like. Six years is kind of crazy. I feel like I've found out about the browser company like two years ago, maybe three years ago. What a grind. Congratulations to the team over there.

Overnight success. Seriously. The name, the brand design, et cetera, were all incredibly thoughtful, they weren't new. Roughly 150 years ago, it was standard practice to name a company like they did. The Prudential Insurance Company of America found an 80s. Standard practice sounds like a good name for a company. That sounds like a real name. Standard oil company of New York founded in 1911. That was a spin out. The Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York founded in 1880. And there was a bunch of others over history. Again, this was just like the way that you named a company.

You weren't trying to think of back then. You weren't trying to think of like a cute. dot com. It was, why don't we just name it what it is? And so what I'd like about. Name it what it is or name it who we are? Goldman Sachs. Oregon Stanley. So what was amazing about this naming convention,

this isn't an essay, is just like how explicitly clear it is what the company does. The Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York. Yep. I can imagine what they do. It's good marketing. Pretty simple. So the browser company of New York was a perfect name for a specific reason. Juxtaposing a 150-year-old naming convention with a modern tool such as the web

browser was an incredible way to stand out and signal to the world exactly what their mission was and that they would be bringing inspired thinking to the category. The browser companies name, brand, and marketing materials were so effective that they catalyzed a wave of companies to adopt the same naming convention. Between the browser company's emergence and their eventual exit, I'd estimate that somewhere between 50 to 100 companies adopted this type of legacy naming convention. So naming a web browser company, the browser company of New York, signaled this sort of original thinking. And the problem is that the second, third, fourth, fifth, six, you know, et cetera, a company to use this sort of convention basically does the exact opposite,

right? It signals like, okay, I saw somebody do something cool in my industry. I'm going to do, I'm going to do the cool thing as well. Yeah, the generic, the generic, like I was not tapped in. Clearly, I did not know that the browser company in New York was six years old. I found out about it a couple of years ago. are people that probably found out about it after they found out about five copycats. And so in their mind, they're just like, oh, the browser company in New York, that's one of those copycats that all are all. It quickly became an anti-signal. Totally. Totally. I completely agree. So personally, I'm not automatically bearish on the companies that are kind of like, you know, a little too inspired on this

front. Yeah. But I think a lot of the people are kind of missing what made it great. Right? And so at least one of these companies, the Interaction Company of California, managed to break through the noise and deliver a truly novel consumer AI product experience. But ironically, they did this under the pokey.com brand name. So Pokey came out. They had an incredible launch, very cool, you know, sort of novel consumer AI experience. And so my point here is they should probably just abandon that original name and just run with Pokea because it's super, memorable and and I think is what Instagram did.

Instagram was Bourbon originally. Yep. And then once Instagram hit, they were like, we have a new brand. Yeah. We have a cool thing. And then, of course, everyone copied Instagram. Interestingly, Instacart copied Instagram's name and it worked. Yep.

So yeah, not always a total anti-signal, even if it's, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so in defense of copycat branding, naming startups is really hard. Every founder's gone through this. There's only so many domain names. There's only so many. English words that mean something, and there's just so many companies being created. It's quite challenging.

Another defense and kind of like a misinterpretation, you know, people misinterpret this quote that's attributed to Picasso, which is good artist steel, great, great artist, good artist copy, great artist steel. Picasso said that originally? I know that there's a book. There's a variety of people that have like, you know, said it throughout history, stolen, you know, re-made it. It'd be so funny. He'd like legitimately copied it word from,

word for his direct rival, like another painter. So, yes, taken literally, if somebody just says, okay, they're going to see like, okay, this is good, I'm going to do the good thing that someone else is doing. But a better interpretation of it, and my interpretation of it is that you're better off like stealing from the past, but like recombining inspiration from a variety of sources to create your own unique style and approach. Yeah. Before you continue, you know, great, good streamers stream, great streamers, restream with

Restream.com. One live stream 30 plus destinations. Continue, Jordi. So, yes, the browser company hit so hard because there was this crazy juxtaposition and I don't think anyone had done it before. So it got this amazing response, right? It felt like fresh and new.

But after they executed against it so perfectly and so loudly, right? You can debate, like, you know, was the product truly a hit? You know, that's up for debate, but the brand was... The brand punched through. the brand went through. So if you just go after,

if you just sort of like clone, to me it signals that you're in a rush, which I think is fair. A lot of companies are in a rush. You don't value naming, which is concerning. I think names matter a lot. Didn't want to spend the time to find a great domain,

which is like fine. Again, a lot of founders, like don't have a broker like our buddy Rob. It's tagged. But it also could signal you aren't seeking out inspiration from outside of the tech bubble. which I think is concerning.

The world's a big place. You should go outside of our little bubble. And then you didn't seek out influence or advice from people that understand the value of naming know how to acquire great domains because you can go to founders that have been in the game for 10 years and they will have a domain guy.

They'll give you like the playbook. They might even have a domain name lying around that's great or you could talk to a VC and they're like, oh, this portfolio company who's using this name 10 years ago, you should pick it up and use it. They might even have a billboard for you. I've been on adquick.com,

out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Couldn't have said it better myself. Yeah. So in this case, like browsers were all modern, right? You had Netscape, Edge, Chrome. And so it was juxtaposed, but it was also counterposition, right? And of course, the browser company naming saga,

it's not isolated incident. I brought it back to linear, linear launch in 2019. The product design, the website was so good that people were just like, I'll take one, please. One linear brand, please. One linear dashboard, please. I even talked to a founder earlier this year, and he was like, yeah, our website and products is going to look exactly like linear. Is that admittedly?

I was just like, you know, there's so many, I mean, it's great, but like, you know, there's probably something better if you just really thought hard and, like, like spent the time to think through like what what could this be and so uh so anyways i think like copying great design signals that you don't value design in my view yep uh and so uh what this comes down to is that i believe the tech industry needs to learn how to copy or steal from outside the industry even today every AI company wants to be the apple of AI I think you see this in some of the campaigns that that they're doing which are good campaigns but sometimes they feel like, okay, you guys went to an ad agency and said, give me one 90s Apple ad, please.

Give me one 80s Apple ad, please. And so I said, it's counterintuitive, but I bet the Apple of AI will probably not build an iconic generational brand by trying to emulate Apple advertisements from the 80s and 90s. They'll do it by being themselves or said differently, stealing from the past, a variety of sources and a variety of categories to create their own unique style and approach. It's perfectly respectable and even fair to take inspiration from obvious sources and industries. We at TVPN have been vocal about being inspired by ESPN, SportsCenter, Complex, and others.

But the key is that we took that inspiration and applied it to an area, tack, that none of those groups had ever played in, right? So we weren't copying Sports Center to build a sports podcast, right? So I said, if you're starting a company today, I urge you to take inspiration from the outside world and other industries and avoid the trap of becoming an uninspired company. So happy to get this out there. And again, I love, I truly love, I feel lucky to love the hunt for a great domain.

For sure. Yeah. I'm thinking about the different, like, when you say, you know, every AI company wants to be the Apple of AI, that feels like Open AI in Anthropics most recent campaigns to me. Well, yeah, and even Open AI's, open AI's Super Bowl campaign. Right. That didn't feel, that didn't feel Apple to me. I don't know.

like all the pixelated like the dots and stuff that felt a little aptly i don't know that didn't that didn't really that didn't really like spring out to me like that um but i was i was just thinking back on like uh like you know like the deep mind documentary uh on the lisa doll match the alpha go series that culminates and move 37 like that was part of the brand building and it's odd because typically, I think they paid for it themselves. Like typically paying for someone to make a documentary about you as opposed to just like waiting for someone to make the documentary about you. It looks like, it gets a lot of criticism as like,

oh, this is just marketing. But at least in that particular documentary, I think a lot of people have watched it. And I think it was very effective marketing. And I think it actually built Deep Minds brand as in that moment. And I feel like if you could turn back the clock, Open AI would have really benefited from having a bank for a documentary on the Dota match that they did.

Or some of the other initiatives that they were working on during the Open AIII gym, the original reinforcement learning stuff that they were doing. Because the AlphaGo documentary, you've seen it, right, Tyler? Yeah, yeah, many times. Many times? Well, probably like, probably like two or three times. Two or three times, yeah.

And so, like, that's how you... He didn't just watch. He studied. Yeah, you sat down and listen. Isn't that how you... Did you smoke a heater while you watch? But I feel like that was like the introduction to Demis. And it really, like, takes you through because it opens with him talking about video games,

talking about artificial intelligence. And, like, it felt like it built him up as a character in many ways, like more than just him going on podcast. Yeah, that's probably true. It was also my, it was my introduction to the game of Go. Yeah. And I've since become a big Go player. You play Go a lot?

A fair amount. I mean, none of my friends, like, no one knows how to play Go, so I always have to teach them. Yeah. But I've gotten a lot of my friends into Go. That's, but I mean, it was definitely the first time, like, Demas was really like, I think a lot of people watch that who are outside of tech. Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about getbezzled.com.

Shop over 26,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezels. team of experts. Dwar Cash Patel has dropped an essay with a friend of his. And Tyler, you had some analysis on this. Did you get a chance to read through his thoughts on the AGI buildout with Romeo Dean? Yeah. So basically the main point of the article is they're trying to address this question that, or address this thing that Sam Altman said, which is that they want, at some point they want to be doing basically a gigawatt in infrastructure, per week. Yeah.

New, you know, infra or whatever it is. So it's like, okay, how do you get there? What are the bottlenecks? Like, how does this actually work out? Yep. So there's a couple things he points out. The first thing is there's this idea of like the FAB CAPX kind of overhang. So if you compare like InVIDIA revenue to the the CAPX of FABs, you'll see that like the revenue kind of like dwarfs this.

So there's like actual specific numbers, but it's something like this past year of Nvidia revenue is more than the past like three years of TSMC's entire CAPEX. And if you go up the stack, if you're looking at like ASML or applied materials, like all of those that are kind of just like a bit kind of lower level than TSMC, you see that Invidia revenue basically accounts for like the past 25 years of R&D and CAPEX of those companies. Yeah. So basically the point is that if Invidia, like, really wanted to, they could basically fund, like, all these new fabs without, like, you know, they just, like, increase the margins for these companies by a ton, but they could just, like, spend and just have these fabs, like, grow massively. Yeah.

So this, I mean, this doesn't feel like an answer to the question that most people are asking, which is about, like, the circularity of deals, the build out of the actual data centers. I haven't heard a lot of people like nervous about the nature of the fab buildout. No one's saying like, oh, TSM is over their skis. Like it's Oracle that people are worried about, right? And so the fact that TSMC is not overbuilding

because the, you know, 6 billion in CAPEX turns into 200 billion in revenue, that feels like, wow, like congrats to TSMC. they're in a safe place. They can basically go to the market, go to OpenAI and all the hyper-scalers and say, like, oh, you guys want to put up a trillion dollars in spend or revenue? Like, we got you. You're not going to put us out of business if you don't deliver, which is great for them.

It just feels like TSMC's in a really strong position. Yes. Yeah, that's true. But I think Dorcas is saying, like, they're underbuilding if we want to be on these, like, timelines, right? Oh. So like if we want to be doing a gigawatt per week, like, how do we actually get there? I like this.

Yeah. I like this is good because it's basically like what is the shape of the overbuild? What is the shape of the build out? And where you don't want to wind up is just like some sort of like fat overbuilding like data centers. And you're building like these massive data centers, but then you haven't built any nuclear power plants. And then you also haven't built any fabs. And so you have like a bunch of data centers with nothing to put in them and nothing to power.

Yeah. And the fabs are really important because chips are something like 60, 70% of the actual like capex cost of a data center. Like they're just, there's so much like compared to power or. Yes. But I mean, I wonder, I wonder how much they're, how much they're rate limiting on the actual buildout. Like it seems like, it seems like that the, at least some of the narrative has been,

there's, there's a much longer lead time for energy infrastructure than there is for, TSM line time scale up fabs. But also, I haven't actually seen anyone break down like this what it takes to 10x production at TSM because I don't know where their capacity is. Are they close to max capacity? Is TSMC running 24-7 already? And they haven't, and they don't have any other facilities? I think probably, but what Drokich is saying is that like their Kappex generally is just very small. Sure. Compared to what it could be compared to, obviously,

Nvidia's like way higher, but like if Nvidia, you know, make some deals here, like there could be a massive increase in CAPEX. Then he says, well, maybe that won't happen with TSM, but maybe, you know, with the Intel deals, like this is kind of what is being done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, interesting. So he says, further up the supply chain, a single year of Nvidia's revenue almost

match the past 25 years of total R&D in CAPEX. from the five largest semiconductor equipment companies combined. So you take ASML, applied materials, Tokyo Electron, SK. Hynix, Micron, TSM, you add all of those together. It only takes like a year or two to actually pay for that just with what NVIDIA is actually producing because of the margins and the actual ROI on the CAPEX. The reason we're emphasizing this point is that if you were to naively speculate about what would be the first upstream component to constrain long-term AI CAP-X growth, you wouldn't talk about

copper wires or transformers. You'd start with the most complicated things that humans have ever made, which are the fabs that make semiconductors. So every time you see someone saying, oh, you know, worry about the transformers and the energy infrastructure, it is potentially more bottlenecked by the fabs. We were stunned to learn that the cost of these,

the cost to build these fabs pales in comparison to how much people are already willing to pay for AI hardware. Nvidia could literally subsidize entire new Fab Notes if they wanted to. That's interesting that we're not seeing those types of like deals. Like I like,

it says we don't think they will actually directly do this or will they wink wink intel deal but shows how much of a Fab CapEx overhang there is. For the last two decades, data center construction basically co-opted the power infrastructure left over

from US de-industrialization. That's where you get like, you know, the Memphis was like a former washing machine factory or something like that. And they had a lot of power because they need a bunch of machines to move all the different washing machine parts in there to build the washing machines. But of course that actual business has moved overseas. And so Elon was able to go in and say, give me that power.

Google's first operated data center was across a former aluminum plant. Hypersalers are used to repurposing the power equipment from old steel mills and automotive factories. This is honestly a compelling ode to capitalism. Let's hear it for compelling odes to capitalism. As soon as one sector became more relevant, America was quickly and efficiently able to co-op the previous one's carcass. But we are now in a different regime. Not only are hyperscalers building new data centers

at a much bigger scale than before, they are building them from scratch and competing for the same inputs with each other, not least of all, not least of which is skilled labor. Ryan says they should rebrand as the semiconductor company of Taiwan. to their credit still the Taiwan

semiconductor manufacturing company but yeah flip it flip it for the modern era and just copy the browser company yeah well if you're looking to invest in one of these companies go to public.com investing for those

that take it seriously multi-ass investing trusted by millions maybe you're deploying two trillion dollars in AI capex a year someone else needs to be producing two trillion worth of all other data center components, not just the chips. The people upstream

of data centers, the company is producing everything from copper wire to turbines to transformers to switch gear. We need to build more factories. The problem is that those factories have to be amortized over a many decade lifespan and at usual margins of those factories are only worth building if this AI demand lasts for 10 to 30 years. There's an interesting, so he goes into some of the gas turbine manufacturing stuff. and ARR projections. The really interesting takeaway is the final chart on AGI timelines. The distribution, where is this?

Electricity. Here we go. So not only does China generate more than twice the electricity than the U.S., but that generation has been growing more than 10 times faster than in the United States. The reason this is significant is that the power buildout can now be directed to new data center sites. state grid could collaborate with Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu to build capacity where

it is most helpful for their AI buildout and avoid the zero-sum race in the United States between different hypers to take over capacity that already exists. China will basically run the experiment of we have worse chips, but we have like an incredible amount of energy. So efficiency doesn't really matter.

Yep. And so the basically his, like he sums all this up in this chart which is the probability density. like the probability of the U.S. hitting hitting AGI over time and the probability of China hitting AGI over time and the conclusion is basically like if AGI is coming soon, America's good

because we have a head start in the race but we're running slower. China has a slow start, but they're running faster. And so if AGI comes in 2035, China has a higher probability of it emerging there. I guess the question is like, how bad is it to be a year behind? How bad is it to be, you know,

just six months behind in, if AGI emerges? If you believe in like the fast takeoff of like once it's there, you know, it's like the immediate wind condition, you better be advocating for some American electricity. But yeah, there was a reference to Tyler Cowan's post from 2023.

Do not underestimate the elasticity of supply. This was in the context of energy. So Tyler's post said, I said when I first read about the discovery of a vast new deposit of lithium in a volcanic crater along the Nevada Oregon border, I can't say that I was surprised, not because I know anything about geology, but because as an economist, I'm a strong believer in the concept of elasticity of supply. Now about elasticity of supply in which economists tend to have more faith than do most people, time and again over the centuries economists have observed that resource shortages are often remedied by discovery, innovation, and conservation, all induced by market prices. To put it simply, if a resource is scarce, there's an upward pressure on its price. New supplies will usually be found. So you can reference this with the kind of people's energy concerns around AI.

The big question is like, where is the energy going to come from? All these new data centers and planned CAPEX, but Tyler Cowan's willing to bet that we will discover new sources of energy. We'll figure out how to make more gas turbines. there was some reporting. I think there's already like an immense amount of pressure on the Colossus data center development in terms of, I saw Wired was posting a video I sent it to you yesterday. Yeah, I watched that. Like somebody using this like thermal camera or some type of camera to view how much gas was being let off.

And it was just like clearly they're just have all these gas turbines firing. That was the, there was some good stuff in, in that video, but that was the dumbest part because it was like, Elon has been publicly saying like, this is the biggest data center with the most energy. Yeah, it was. It was framed as a god. Bomb shell. Yeah, it was framed as a camera at it. And it's big. It's big. It's the big, it's bigger than everything else. It's like, yeah. It was framed as a point. Gotcha. But Elon was saying that. Elon is extremely proud of how much energy this thing uses. He actually posts the exact energy figures constantly. But I did. think that we have Sagar and Jetty from Breaking Points joining the show tomorrow. And I think that he lays out a really good case for like what public sentiment is like. And you can see in that video, there's a politician from Memphis who is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like if you guys are going to come here and build a massive data center in Memphis, like you have to make sure that the water stays clean,

that we don't wind up with really polluted skies. We don't want to be Beijing. We don't want to be, you know, some industrial capacity. Like we, some industrial hub, like we've lived through that. We've seen like, you know, Detroit was at one point dirty. The industry sort of left. But like we want like a more modern, futuristic, eco-friendly. It's not to be like a total decelerating like tree hugger. It's just like, let's not give each other cancer, people.

Like there's probably a way around this. And so I think the actual discussion is going to get super, super heated. And I think Sagar is correct, and we'll unpack this with him more tomorrow. The discussion will get extremely heated, and it will turn into these extreme ends of, like, you want to, you don't want to cure cancer with AI. And, like, you want to kill everyone with, you know, this, you know, this insane pollution that's coming out of whatever natural gas turbine. Surprise we haven't seen somebody, like, protesting on top of a data center yet. Yeah. You'd think somebody would have scaled one.

And people used to do this with trees, right? They would just climb to the top of a tree and was going to get cut down. This happened at Anthropic, right? But for doom reasons, not for environmental reasons. And so there's like a very clear alliance that should form, right? Happened briefly. He got, he was hunger striking. He got hungry.

He was there for a couple days. But I mean, no one debates that there are tons of AI doomers that, like, are actively protesting the lab in one way or another. I would put Eleazar Utikowski's new book if we build it. If anyone builds it, we all die. That's what it's called. I would put that in like the AI protest canon. And it would be interesting to see if there's like a team of rivals that emerges with

Eliezer and then just the folks on the ground who are like, look, I actually think that AI is slop. I don't think it's going to be super intelligent or kill me. I just find my electricity prices went up, and I don't like that. So we're on the same team, like strange bedfellows, basically, where they believe different things,

but they arrive at the same conclusion, so they team up. Same cause. Anyway, if you want to go visit Memphis, Book of Wander. Book of Wander with Inspiring Views, Hotel Grady Menys, greenie beds,

top tier cleaning 24-7 conced air service. You really should, if you're a true technologist, go on a trip to see a data center in person. I don't know if they have anything in Memphis, but they have pigeon forge Tennessee. Oh, okay.

It's the wander smoky woods, and they have wander smoky peaks. Truly, that's probably like an amazing wander. Forest. It's probably an amazing wonder. And you can probably see smoke rising from Colossus. Colossus. It would be incredibly, it would be incredibly, like, wild

if Colossus just started burning so much, like, dirty coal. It was just like this black, like, smoke rising. They won't go that far. Yeah, yeah. What about just a good old-fashioned wood fire data center? Tyler, can we figure out what it would take to have you over there? I want you to have a little, we'll build you a chimney in the Ultradome and we'll build you a hearth. And you can stoke the fire with wood and cedar log.

and then I want you to capture the heat, turn it into steam, turn the flywheel to generate the electricity, to run a fine tune of GPTOSS. Work through exactly how that would work. Is that possible? How much, how many logs would you need? A wood-fired data center. The wood-fired data center,

which is like, you know how good a worm. It's almost fall here. We're cozy maxing. in brown and green. As far as I'm concerned, the holidays are here. And nothing would get me more. It would really bring the Christmas spirit forward to have a wood-fired data center. Yeah. Generating tokens the old-fashioned way. Exactly. Just hanging out at the hearth, generating some tokens. Can you imagine late nights with the fellas just tossing wood in the hearth? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, that's like, I'm pretty sure that's like how a steam engine works.

I mean, I guess it was coal, not wood, but if you're on the Titanic, you're down in the boiler room and you need to boil water to turn the spring, to spin the turbine, you're taking coal and shoveling it into the fire to make heat to make boil water. And there's no reason why we can't be doing it here. There's no reason. We got to go to the chat. Except all of the environmental regulations. Adam Hoops says wife is going into labor. I'm between Jordy and John for my son's name. If Jordy or John can't decide,

I'm letting Sam Alden spin up a model and name him himself. How about Data Center? No. Data Hoops. What about Adam? What about Adam Jr.? Adam Jr.? I think Adam's a great name.

Adam Jr. will call him Jr. Or, have we talked about this? In all seriousness, Adam. Congratulations. This is incredible news. And log off. Yeah, log off. Log off.

We'll still be here. You can catch the recording, but we're excited for you and your family. I did actually talk to someone who had a baby and the new. The new mom and the husband threw on TBVN when they were like in recovery. Because like oftentimes you're hanging out and you need something to watch. And they were like, yeah, let's watch it. Why not? It's going to blow your mind when I tell you who it is too.

Because it's a very funny, very funny couple. Uh, anyway, uh, yes, naming the kid AGI would be funny. Agi for a short. Uh, that would be, that'd be great, but Tyler is also a strong name for baby boy. Yes. Um, how about, uh, 2.6 million. No, is that somebody in the chat? Yeah. 2.6m. Uh, anyway, there was a, there was a, there was a timeline was in turmoil a little bit yesterday near cyan and Rune going back and forth. Before we dig into that. Let me talk about adio. Adio is the AI Native CRM. The build scales and your company to the next level. Stick to this DRM, maybe stay away from the short form video consumption.

It would be the argument from near. Basically, people are going back and forth with Roon. Where does Roon stand on Sora? Where does Roon stand on Slop? And so it's short form video. The room deleted his post. He did. He did.

So I don't know what it said. He committed Sepaku effectively. It's a haricari on the timeline that we experienced. deleting your post is a sign of honor it's a technology yes it's a technology brother ritual effectively

but we have we have some we have some traces we have some fossils that we can dust off so we might have a screenshot what was the general what was the general idea of what he said so we can get into this comment

from near he was saying he was saying there's there's sort of a moral panic about, about short-form video. I was kind of saying that with him too. And I think there was like, there was a big, like, like, this all started with like the meta vibes thing, where everyone was like, this is brain rot. This is going to one shot everyone. Get ready to die. This is the worst thing ever. And my, like, I was like, yeah, it is kind of sloppy. It is sort of infinite jesty.

But like, there is like the possibility that this is just not popular. That like, it is possible that, the slop trough just doesn't taste good and people just actually want to do something else. Like chess, it was so obvious. It was so obvious on day one that the product was kind of cool. Yeah. But it may as well have been a playlist of video of like cool AI. Yeah.

Like people, people refuse to believe that there is at least a probability that in 50 years people are still watching humans create content. Like, I don't know. There is a probability of that. It is possible. I think most, I think many, many people in like traditional media,

just in not AGI-pilled crazy world would be like, yeah, 100%. The more people, the more people live online, the cooler will be to see a dude like wing suiting. Because it's like, totally,

okay, we're, you know, 99% of people watching this. Yeah. Inside on a screen. Yeah. And this dude is flying,

you know, 20 feet away from a mountain. Yeah. And so, and so is there, is there a possibility that, that, that,

meta vibes app becomes so addictive. You can't turn it off and it destroys your life. Like, like maybe I've read the sci-fi. I would put a probability on it. I would say it's a couple percent that that happens that it is bad. But there's also just the possibility that people just are like, man, I'm not into it. Right. But people weren't, people weren't even, no one was saying like, hey, this might just not work. Everyone was like, meta-vives will kill everyone. And that was kind of the mood on the timeline. So, so Rune was reacting to that saying that there's a moral panic about short-form video. it's not actually that bad.

He's going back and forth. Some people were pressing him on like, don't you think this is bad for kids? He was like, I don't actually know that it's that bad because I watched a couple hours of TV a day as a kid. And is watching short form for three hours a day, fundamentally different than watching TV for three hours a day. Because everyone will say, oh, the real tradeoff is like reading James Joyce versus TikTok. And it's like, that was not what was going on in the 90s. Yeah. And what is television?

do, right? They're like, they're using hooks, right? Totally. An episode of a television show starts, and it starts off maybe dramatic and it pulls you in and then right before an ad. All of a sudden, it'll slam to an ad for fall. The world's best generative image, audio and video models all in one place, develop and fine-tuned models with serverless TVs and on-demand clusters. Yes.

So we don't have a way to quantify brain rot, right? Like, is Barney with ads on it on Nickelodeon? I'm getting a lot of things right. Actually, actually, is that more brain-rottie? We do have a way. We do have twins. Yes. Oh, A-B test.

We can A-B test. I refuse, actually. Yeah, I mean, this, you could, I mean, it would, you would effectively be potentially sacrificing, you know, a son for humanity. Yes. But we get to the bottom of it. One son gets five hours a day on the iPad from a young age in the SORA app, in the MetaVibs app. Yes. Just scrolling.

Yes. The other is, gets, you know, personalized tutoring from. Yeah. You know. We also have Tyler. Let me volunteer. Maybe we can see. How much Sora have you watched?

None. I never go on Sora. You're purely like if I tell if I order you, if I, if I, if I, as your boss, I give you the task of generate a video for me, then you will do it. But you truly have not consumed like any? No, not in the last week. The first one or two. What about you? Nick, have you consumed any AI video SORA or meta vibes?

Because you were really into it on day one, right? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can we hear him at all on the stream? Sorry. I can hear him. Anyway, what about production team? Hands up if you've watched more than 10 minutes of AI video in the past week.

Zero. Philistines. Uh, well, um, yeah, so I mean, it will get better. I don't know. But anyway, this all concluded with, uh, Nier Sayan and Rune going back and forth. Rune said, I like the way Sora looks. I like the content. That was his final, he wasn't saying, I'm not, I'm not doing some 3D chess coping on like, it's not that bad for you. He was just saying like, I like it. I think it's just good content every once in a while. It's fine. And so NIR says, do you actually believe this? Like, do you realize the product is the API, not the app as entertainment isn't possible.

And that short form video consumption is on the order of several hours per day for U.S. adolescents. I didn't comment on the launch, but I'm sure. Yeah, this is what I was saying. Like on launch day, which is like if you really wanted to give SORA the chance to become a consumption platform, you wouldn't have made SORA too available via API for anybody to generate, you would have like at least tried to contain it as much as possible, right? People still could have like screen recorded and posted it elsewhere, but it was just very

obvious immediately that it was like an incredibly innovative, like, AI creative tool and like probably not going to work as a like new standalone consumption app because there's the, there's a lot of people that the tam for people that will be entertained by AI video is like the entire world in the fullness of time. Yep. Anybody that's logging on to the internet will probably at least laugh a few times a year from an AI video, right? Or they're certainly going to see them.

But the tam of people that today only want to watch AI video is like basically zero. Yeah. I'm trying to imagine the bull case for the API. Like if I'm a open AI customer as a business and I'm, I'm using GPT5 or some cash stuff, and I'm using some reasoning tokens over here. And I'm like a big API buyer. And then they come out with SORA,

and I'm like, I really would like to use that in my business. Like I have an actual business use case. I'm trying to think of what that would be. Like, I don't really know. The business use cases, I mean, think about how many platforms are trying to help people generate ads for social ads. Yeah.

Right? generate, you know, content for various videos they're making. Yeah, so if you're like Canon at ICON and you're an AI generative ad company or now like an agency and the API is not available for this new tool, you're going to be like bummed out, right? Yeah. And so it just, it just feels like, I mean, I agree with all the rationalization about like it's better for the long term, strategically to, you know, create, to actually bootstrap a real network, keep everything in the network.

work. But at the same time, it just feels like the open AI ethos is just like do everything all the time all at once. And that's just like their core thesis. anyway interrupting our timeline Palmer Lucky has hit the timeline it says it says something about society that the most controversial thing I have said in recent history is that I wish I would have married my wife sooner not that Wales

might have had better oral history than humans not that America should restart nuclear testing marrying young so obviously his comments on TVPN earlier this week became somewhat of a current thing on the timeline. And of course, people were, you know, taking,

taking, you know, one part of his statement completely out of context and sort of ignoring the fullness of his point. But it's certainly certainly been interesting to see the response. It's been very split. Yeah, it was a true, like, wedge issue, both inside and outside of, like, the core tech community. Like I saw people who like literally write for like similar outlets

on opposite sides of the issue, but I don't think of them as like left or right or pro tech or anti-tech. Like there were pro-tech people who liked the take or and hated the take and there were anti-tech people that liked the take and hated the take. It was like all over the place. It was very,

very hard to map. It was fun watching the conversation get started. And I, it surprised me. It started with him calling me a turbo normie. Hilarious. I was just laughing about it. I know. We were laughing. We were laughing about that. And then he took it even further. Yeah. I mean, it was framed in like, let's see how far we can push this envelope way.

But you can clearly understand what the core message is. He even said, easy for me to say, I met my wife when we were teenagers. Yes, yes, yes. now and and and the broader conversation of how having children in your 30s at any point is exhausting yeah yeah basically the younger you are potentially the the in some ways it will be easier yeah yeah I was I was trying to think back to like okay would like like like let's say that I actually did have kids at you know 20 or something like that um so I know so I know some people that had kids at 20, like guys that I grew up with in high school. And they're, they're, like, you know, becoming a dad experience is like framed kind of like, oh, it was like

an accident or like a, you know, surprise. And they all turned out like fine. Like it all, it didn't, it didn't detract at all. It's just like, it kind of just turned into like a funny bit of lore about them. And it's like, oh yeah, they have like a kid that's like much older than like the rest of their cohort. So they are in some ways like, you know, like they don't have a huge support group because all of their other friends and kids later. But in terms of like the mechanics of like what their life is like, it's not that much different.

And I feel like no matter what when you analyze kids, just the fact that you love them is so, it's such a wrench in the system of like, let's analyze this rationally. Because you wind up just saying, well, like, yeah, they're exhausting. They're exhausting at 35. They'd probably be extremely exhausting at 20. Yeah, you'd have more energy, but you have less experience. And also, you love them. And so it's amazing. And it would be amazing then. It'd be amazing now. Yeah, my take has always been the time always comes from somewhere. Yeah. So if you have kids in your early 20s, then by the time... Get ready to not club. Yeah, that's true. But, you know, it's going to take up a lot of your time. Maybe it'll be massively

distracting from your career, right? I think about this all the time. Yep. You know, early, you know, after my son was born, it was like, okay, there's now, I ended up just completely sacrificing my social life, right? There was work time and there was family time and there was like very little in between. Sometime there was work time that was a little bit social. But what is the social life for most people? For most. It's their work. No, no, no, no. It's like a mating ritual. That's true. Like a lot of the reason why people, People are going out. People have a social life is because they're trying to meet someone.

They're trying to meet that person. And so we've just kind of extended our lives, which is incredible, and then injected an extra 10 years of like, let's find the person and delay the process. Yeah, and in my view, if somebody that has kids in their early 20s, well, by the time they're 28 and actually have hopefully like a skill set, their kids are in school. and maybe their kids are a little bit older, and they're able to potentially, they're not hitting 30

and then having to go through this crazy experience of having kids, and then it's still going to be a distraction from their career, but even then they maybe have more responsibility, higher opportunity costs, you know, it's all these different factors. I think also people were very triggered by the fact

that he specifically said, like, you know, if he had said like 19, it would have been different than 16, because 16 is like underage, right? I think that people were probably latching on to that, that it's, like, very young? Or do you think it was mostly just, like, like, he said it in a provocative way? Yes, but, uh, I, I actually don't know about the, the history of, like, you know, like, when humans had kids, like, I feel like there was a time in, like, the castle ages, like,

the medieval ages when, like, uh, people were having kids at 16. Like, that's true, right? He wasn't, like, factually incorrect about that. Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, you should look, you should look back. through the Coogan family tax, you know? Oh, yeah. Go back a few hundred years and open it up and...

I actually did go back. And on my Swedish side, there's this, there's this like 400-year chain where the family just kept using like the same naming convention. So they would say like Olafson, son of Olaf. And then it would be like, Jacobson, Olafson. Jacob Olafson, Olafson. Jacob Obloffson, Oloffsson, it would just go back and forth

because they just kept naming themselves. My dad was the fourth in the row of the exact same name. Exact same name. And I would have been the fifth. My mom was like, no. Well, if you have another son who you give the same name as the dad, you can use the nickname Tripp for,

oh, no, no, it would be Skip. Really? Is that the origin of Skip? That's where Skip comes from. of Skip? Yes. That's where Skip comes from. And so if you have the same name as your father, you can be called Junior.

Everyone knows this. If you have the same name as your father and your grandfather, people can call you Tripp because you're the triple. And if you have the same name as your grandfather but a different name than your father, you can use the name Skip, which is very fun. Skip Hayes. Yeah. It's a good name.

Might be coming up. You might have to do it. In other news, there was some news or fake news this morning that the Trump administration is in talks to take equity stakes in quantum computing firms. Companies including Ionic, Raghetti computing, and D-Wave quantum are discussing the government, becoming a shareholder as part of agreements to get funding earmarked for promising technology companies. According to people familiar with the matter. And this is so important because like the free market just can't solve this. It's not like there's a whole bunch of multi-trillion dollar companies that are half, yeah, capital.

Hyper-scalers that are heavily invested here, venture capital firms that are happy to fund. Yeah. It's not like Google, like actually had a breakthrough like last week that people were pretty excited about. It's not like Microsoft's working on this. No, I think the admin did this specifically to torture Screlly because this this feels very personal, right? So Screlly is very loudly and proudly in shorting, you know, Regetti and Ionel.

and all these companies because, you know, I think the general sense is that, you know, there's a spectrum from like science experiments to scams, right? And people tend to kind of sit somewhere there in terms of their opinion on quantum. Josh Wolfe had some choice words earlier. Let me pull it up. He said, this is beyond stupid, absolute waste of taxpayer money. Quantum is utterly irrelevant, fraudulent BS. So strong words there.

Do you know the Rigetti lore? Do you know the Rigetti lore? But before that, Screlli had these companies had been selling off pretty aggressively. And of course, like you get an announcement like this. Let's look at Rigetti and see how they've been doing. Oh, Raghav in the chat. This is a very interesting take. My conspiracy is this was a planted story by someone in the admin to help with exit liquidity

in expiring call options. I think that's potentially what... There's something odd going on here because... Because there would just be so much blowback from generally smart people about this that are taxpayers, that are Americans that are going to say, I don't want to be a shareholder in Raghetti.

Yeah. And so there was pushback and concern about the Intel deal, but at least there was broad consensus that we don't want Intel. Maybe this is a hot take, but like I actually disagree with Josh Wolf that quantum is utterly irrelevant, fraudulent BS. I don't think it's fraudulent. I mean, I'm kind of, I'm kind of in line with the with the Scarelli take that it's,

it's just like it has a very narrow use case for very specific algorithms that, and we don't really know the business application. It's not like LLMs where we're just going to be stuffing quantum computing all over the place. It's like there might be something. that we use it for, but we're not exactly sure. And so it is very much a science project. But I personally don't believe that, like, I won't say all of the quantum computers, but I don't believe that they are all fraudulent. Like I think a lot of them are saying, look, you, the shareholder, are investing in a science project. I'm going to test some things. I'm going to run experiments. It might work. It might

not. And you're like, I'm 100% down for that risk. Yes, like, take the risk. That's what I'm signing It's worth it. Everyone's happy. Everyone's happy, even if it goes to zero. And so I don't see it as fraud at all. Google's efforts, which are probably the most advanced in the world. Sundar is not out there, like, saying, hey, you know, really alphabet should be a $10 trillion company because of our quantum efforts. It's a project that they believe has real potential. So they're investing many billions of dollars into it. But it's still even internally, like, structured as a science project. And so, yeah, Equist Global says, leave Quantum to the Googles and the Microsoft's fund with free cash flow. I think that's one good option. But to be clear, like, it's also great if VCs want to take a crack at that and say, hey, there's this really weird idea in Quantum that Google and Microsoft are not going to even take a swing at because it's so bizarre.

Everyone thinks it's a failure or, you know, not going to work. It's such a long shot. And so we are going to do it outside of the system. The analogy here would be like... Yeah, we had that quantum startup on that raised like a billion dollars. I don't remember their name. Yeah, it does not seem like it's a bare market. It doesn't seem like capital is a constraint for making progress there.

And so, yeah, hopefully this story, it's a sad, sad situation where we have to say, hopefully this story was planted by someone in the admin who's called were expiring. It happened sometimes. Well, you know who's... Not planting stories. Graphite.dev because they're reviewing your code in the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Hub Slope Capital says,

I am without speech. I like that as a funny just like line that you can quote tweet things with. I am without speech. Brother Bucho Capital says, can't believe my tax dollars are going to be invested in rigatony computing. Yeah. And the crazy thing is like this is Jaguar Analytics says this is the kind of stuff that used to happen to repeatedly during dot-com bust.

And it shows like the red, like all the different companies that are. Joby, Archer, Riggottone. And it's not Rigatoni, it's Riggottie. Founded by Chad Raghetti, and this is the lore. Do you know the lore? Chad Raghetti is married to Susan Fowler. Susan Fowler is the Uber whistleblower. Whoa.

Bombshell. Crazy. Crazy dinner table. talk at that point. It's like one's building a quantum computer. The other one is blowing the whistle, writing books about Uber, working with Mike Isaac on that. Probably, I guess they knew each other. Although they did go book for book. That's the funny, that's the other funny lore, is that she wrote the blog post that went viral, right? Mike Isaac at the New York Times was doing the, right, he's at the New York Times now. I don't know if he was there. I think he was there then.

Mike Isaac was doing like the beat reporting on the play-by-play of all the chaos inside Uber as Travis was getting ousted. And then they both came to market with books. And they went ahead and ad and I don't know who sold more copies. But it's just a funny thing of like, you know, when you blow the whistle, you got to get that book deal. You got to do, you got to turn it into a 50 episode Apple TV original series. You got to turn it into, you know what you got to turn into?

You got to turn into a one piece anime, a thousand episodes. None of this like, oh, Theranos was a great. crazy story. Let's turn it into an eight episode series. No, I want a thousand animated episodes of the story of Elizabeth Holmes as she goes on adventures and it just continues forever. That would be good. Speaking of Elizabeth Holmes, she's probably pretty excited about seeing CZ. Pardoned. The pardons are flowing. Chong Pong Jiao. Yes. Canadian businessman and former CEO of finance, pardoned by the Trump administration. So, you know, I'm sure she's thinking,

I'm up next, I'm up next. Yes, although there is a rumor. She might be getting out early. Not because of like anything special necessarily, but just the way the, like when you Google it, it's calculated one way. Basically like the auto complete is just like, when did she go to jail,

plus the maximum sentence and it adds up. There's like a best behavior. It's like best behavior plus time served while you were under investigation and stuff. And so you can count old times because it's like you were in prison while you were going through the court case. So we count that. And so I think that if things go well, she could be out in the next like three to four years maybe. But yeah, pardon certainly seems.

interesting and I think that's probably why we're seeing some posting. Seems interesting. You're not you're not you're not recommending the admin pardon. I haven't seen anything that that would lead me to recommend a pardon. At the same time I haven't I haven't seen a ton of like I think I'm not exactly sure who got who got the most burned like there were definitely people that got like bad test results and that's and that's obviously like seriously harmful. But most of the VCs who invested, like the investors were accredited. They took a flyer on a dropout from Stanford. Like, I don't know. I think it's kind of like a, you know,

buyer reware situation with the company. Yeah, but they put devices that didn't work into, into use around the country. Yeah. And so like the input, like I don't, like the investors took the risk. Yep. They knew the risk that they were taking. Yeah. But but you put the, the nature of the fraud. was that they lied about that. Yeah. And could negatively impact. It's just so crazy that you were... Bobby Cosmic, I am not a weave.

I merely studied the Antichrist lectures. And so I've never seen an episode of One Piece. I have watched one piece of anime, which is Akira, just the movie. D.D. D.D. Doss was highlighting some sections from Koto's AI report. Before you dive into this, let me tell you about profound. Get your brown mention. in chat GPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Yes, fascinating set of charts.

Shall we pull them up? D.D. says why we are not in an AI bubble in four charts. You got to summarize these and I'll hit the gong for every, for every positive bull signal out there. Break you down from... Here's why. multiples are nowhere near.com level. And we got, we got camera, we got face tracking on the camera.

new feature. Shout out to the production team. CapEx is growing but funded by cash flow. Largest tech co-valuations lower than 1999. We're selling business, baby. Concentration in the market isn't necessarily negative. What about the U.S. government is going to bail out everything from quantum? That's also quite exciting. Brian Halligan over at HubSpot, who's coming on the show soon, says, in my honest opinion, private markets are in bubble territory while public markets still seem rational. I think that's a good take. I think a lot of what's holding us back from even more craziness is just the overall state of the economy, right? You have trade wars, tariffs, you have a

weak labor market, you have an unpredictable admin, you have war in the Middle East, you have war in the Middle East war in Europe, and you have a higher rate environment than we've been used to, right? And so imagine if we didn't have those factors, I think it could be a lot crazier, right? But there's a lot of real reasons for people to be kind of... Yeah. I also wonder if... Not entirely risk on. I wonder how much different the, like, AI is...

There are some new companies, right? Open AI Anthropic. There's a bunch of startups and private markets. But AI is a, is like a growth story for the MAG7. But the MAG7 are so huge that it's just hard to like, you can't like turn it into a meme stock, you know? And I'm wondering if you go back to dot com. Like the biggest companies at the time, do you know the biggest companies during the dot com boom? Was it the, the oil companies? The oil companies were the biggest companies by market cap. Oh, by Mark. Like Exxon mobile. Not by like, you know, growth. No, no, no, not by growth at all.

So what I'm saying is like, is like, you have this like, you know, like, you have this cruise ship that's like the anchor of the economy and it's like the big companies. And at that time it wasn't big tech. It was big oil. And big oil was like something that would be really hard to push and the dot com narrative like didn't push it at all. But now we have the big tech folks who was also like a big cruise ship. And but they're so big that like it's hard for them to just like. like, oh yeah, like the Mag 7 tripled this month. Like that would be a really, really crazy movie.

It would take trillions of dollars of investment to actually drive that in the market. So I don't know. A bunch of bull cases. Tyler, what do you think? Okay, so I calculated how many, how big of a hearth I would need to mine tune. Yes.

So, okay, so if I'm using GPT OSS 120 billion parameters, and then I have, you know, like 8-100s, you can probably get a, a decent fine tune within like an hour. So that's going to be something around like 8, 8.5 kilowatts. Kilawatts. And then if you're looking at dry wooden logs, about two kilograms each, you probably need something like four to five logs.

Okay. To, for that energy. Wait, five logs of, and that's all you need to do this fine tune? It's just one hour, yeah. I was actually surprised. That's insane. I was expecting you to say, I'm going to need massive thing. all this whole. It's just one hour. I mean, it's not that crazy. That's crazy. But you can really fine-tuned

GPDOSS in one hour? The model's pretty small. Okay. How would you, would you need like a server rack or could you actually like build a computer that could house eight H-100s? Is that possible? Or do you need like a proper server rack? Yeah, I mean, eight is pretty big. I don't think you can just fit that in like a normal PC set up. But even then it's still not that big. There's a lot of people have that at their house. There's definitely the trappings of a banger YouTube video here. You know, like those primitive, like, videos were like, I built a thing from scratch. I built a toaster with no modern technology. Have you seen those videos or anything?

Yeah. Great. And I would imagine I fine-tuned an AI model using logs. It would be a ripper for sure. In other news, Charles Gasperino says, Scoop alert, people inside Paramount Skydance say David Ellison, advised by his father, Larry Ellison, are reluctant to pay more than $25 a share for Warner Brothers

as the buyout drama continues. His last offer, the third rejection from David Zazlov, was $23.50 to be exact. Company still weighing a public, aka hostile offer for Warner Brothers, which they will argue cannot be sold to other players who are interested, including Comcast because of regulatory roadblocks. Full story coming. so Warner Brothers is currently sitting at, I believe, $21 a share.

Yeah, $21.34. So David Zazlov is holding out. Did you know Andrew Ross Horkin got a genuine scoop about this deal while being on TV for three hours a day and promoting the book, 1929, and being on one of the most aggressive book tours I've seen recently? Is that the goat, nois? Yeah, that's my go. I didn't realize I never put it together that that was okay. I get it now.

Wow. That took me way too long. That's crazy. I just thought it was like you like farm animals. No. Okay. That's the goat. Yeah, that's why I played it for Jeff yesterday when he joined the show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. I like the goat noise. We're building out the full farm analogy. We need the farm map. Yeah, we're working on getting live animals. Of course, of course. So we'll go to the goat, ma'am.

The goat will make. Truthfully, like, I don't, I don't feel like I have. have a good understanding of what David Ellison is building. I'm newer to coverage of the media conglomerates because I focus more on the Mag 7, more on the tech companies, more on the AI stuff. It's a fascinating world. I think he's running the experiment of like just, you know, basically going to the world and saying one media industry, please. Basically, it feels like he's trying to build some sort of new conglomerate. I don't know how the synergies pencil out.

I don't know how everything works. We've got to get Barry Weiss on the show. I would love her first couple weeks over at CBS. We also have to tell you about turbopuffer, serverless vector and full-text search, build from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Philip Johnston is on a tear.

He says, I'm super excited to announce Star Cloud's partnership with Crusoe, builder of OpenAI's massive Stargate data center to enable enabling the first public cloud in space next year. This is the first step in a partnership that we'll see StarCloud providing energy for much larger Cruceau data centers over the coming years. There was also a post from Dallion. He was firing shots at Nvidia because they announced AI shipbuilding partnership with Serronic. He said, Nvidia has announced AI data centers in space and an AI shipbuilding. building partnership in the last two days. Words and physics just don't mean anything anymore.

Dear God, this has to be the top, please. When will it end? He said that in the post? I kind of assumed he was like, you know, top-pilled, but that was a wild place to go. Yeah, we were kind of, we were kind of dunking on this yesterday. I don't know. It seems like there's a lot of pieces that have to come together for this something to be, for this to be real.

Yeah, Delian, from my understanding, will always do a deal that he's extremely excited about, but it's notable that he was very active earlier this year, and he sort of hasn't announced a new investment in the last little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think some of this is fodder for the public markets, marketing campaigns, just general outlines of, you know, remaining futuristic. Like there is a world where if you're Nvidia and you're looking at Andre Carpathie saying like, hey, the current thing is going to be slow. You're like, well, then let's, what are we going to do in the next decade while we're waiting around for ASI? Maybe we put some data centers in space.

Maybe we build some ships. More SaaS. Maybe we do a bunch of stuff. More, more SaaS. That's what I want to see. Take some real shots. Mac Rumors is reporting that there's virtually no demand for the iPhone error. And I thought it was notable.

I have a friend who used to work at Apple. He bought the iPhone air, used it for, I think, like, 24, 48 hours and returned it. He just said it was not the thinness of the phone was not worth the battery tradeoffs. And he also said that the phone is so actively trying to conserve energy that it renders things like poorly or slowly. That's annoying because I feel like there's a little bit of skill issue with regard to the battery where it's just like just get, a car that has a battery charger in it or put one at your desk, like figure out how to

actually charge it regularly. Everyone has some point in their day where they can plug in and like if you just maybe if you just are a wild man and have no routine whatsoever, but you're also addicted to sore and TikTok you're going to have a bad time. But I feel

like if you have any sort of like yeah, around noon I'm at my desk. And so I just put it down on the charging pad like regularly. Like you're going to be But I don't know. Yeah, there's also something about phones where I think the iPhone air is a bit cheaper, right? Sure. But something about a phone is it is so valuable to your life that if you ask somebody, like if you were selling an iPhone, like an iPhone from today to somebody in 2000, like how much would somebody pay for that?

Would they have paid, would like a high powered executive pay like $100,000 a year to have the modern, the iPhone from 2025? in 2000. Like, I think it's, I think it's that valuable in terms of what it does for your life. And so I don't, I don't think a lot of people are making, at least like the average iPhone customer is saying, if I can get slightly more performance out of my phone for an extra couple hundred dollars a month, it's probably a good exchange. I'm just surprised there aren't more people that are, you know, like Tyler, were like a couple of iPhones before? What were you actually on? 13 or something? I was on, no, I was on the 11. I was like six generations behind. Is that six? years. You hadn't gotten a phone in six years. Yeah, I think that sounds right. Have you,

was this your first phone ever? No, I was like, I was probably, uh, like freshman in high school. Yeah. Okay. Okay. It's sort of adding up to me, but that's like, what was your first phone? Um, it was probably like a hand me down, but it was probably like iPhone four. Wow. Started on an iPhone. Wow. Well, no. Silver spoon. Silver spoon alert. Yeah. No, no. Wait, so you don't remember where you were when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone? Was I even born? Yeah, yeah. I was like two.

Brutal. Tyler, are you excited that the Sopranos creator, David Chase, is developing a new limited series about Project MK Ultra for HBO? Do you know MK Ultra? Do you know where you were when MKKR Ultra happened? It's from the 70s. Oh, you're giving him the tinfoil hat. This is the first tinfoil hat.

Oh, the tracking cam is phenomenal. put it on Tyler there you go why is he wearing the tin you're safe now from mk ultra right isn't that isn't that wouldn't somebody no i thought mk

was like the lSD it's lSD oh i thought it was i thought it was remote i thought this was the remote mind control one no no no no no no exposed for not being well fake skits out fakes gets out fakes gets uh doesn't know

is conspiracy theories uh no ridiculous um uh anyway co2 has a bunch of other stuff we should go deeper into their public markets update. We should just have someone from Kutu on again, because we have a couple folks on it.

They studied Bobbush. They studied Bobbush. They studied back in the 1600s. And read. And they studied 10 books. They went back 400 years, read 10 books, and it was 30 bubbles. Let's give it up for reading 10 bucks.

And their conclusion was that it's not a bubble, right? I think they think it's like 1996, which is awesome. I'm rooting for 96. Let's go. I also am rooting for the bubble already popped. It popped last Friday, and now we're re-inflating. Anyway, we have Jacob from Microsoft AI in the TBPN Ultronum. Welcome to the show.

Wow. Finally somebody that almost. Oh, we got a short guy in the studio. How tall are you? 6-7. 6-7. I'm 6-8. 6-7.

Are you getting the 6-7 thing? Do you have kids? anything? You know this whole thing? The six, seven thing? Come on. Yeah. You've got to be in youth culture. I don't know it at all. I found out about it. I literally found out about it when the Wall Street Journal published an article. Oh, shit. And it was like, here's the, here's the latest trend that's causing problems for teachers. And I read it. What are you guys even talking about? You don't know this? Okay.

So there's this meme where in middle schools, if the number six comes next to seven, six, seven. yeah, it started from this meme. All the kids will go crazy and go six, seven, and then they do this. And if you trace it back, it goes like seven layers deep into like this. There was a kid at a basketball game who was saying six, seven, which was a reference to a basketball player's height. And then one awful rap song that nobody had listened to before. It called Dude, dude, dude, dude. And that's a reference to 67th Street in Chicago, which is like a popular area to sing about, basically.

I'm impressed. That's all from the article. Yeah. Lusley. Yeah, Walshry Journal knows their stuff. Knows their stuff. Anyway, Walshry Journal didn't have your backstory, so you have to give it to us directly. Yeah.

Introduce yourself. Absolutely. Yeah, Jacob Andreae. I lead product and growth over at MAI, mostly focused on co-pilot. Before that, I was at Snap for like nine years, 2015, 2023, doing the same thing, basically. And then in the middle, venture for like a year and a half.

Still do a lot of investment. Was that Greylock? Yeah. That was here in LA? No. S.F. Cool. In the city.

But I've been based in L.A. from 2014-ish, and now just spent a lot of time in Redmond and Mountain View. My two favorite places on planet Earth. Amazing. That's great. Exactly. Co-pilot is not nearly sharp enough. You're going to even narrow that down.

That's like a million products. We're putting co-pilot and everything. It's a multi-trillion dollar company. Like, what do you focus on vertical? horizontally, how is the organization structured? Like, what are you actually doing at a day, day basis? Yeah, I mean, it's a super cool moment for Microsoft right now. We have

a bunch of folks that have come together, a bunch of people that have been there. I'm running people all the time, Microsoft, been there for 35 years. It's fucking crazy. I've never seen anyone who's been like, am I allowed to swear on this show? We don't, but you can't have any sense. But feel free, too, if you feel like that's the right. If you're fired up, that of words,

if that's what you want the Microsoft Coms team to really, like, take away from this? Is that you went wide, on a show and they maybe shouldn't have greenlit it, then yeah. All right. Let's let's let's put, we'll push the envelope. No, look, we got together in a major group people, a ton of people that are already been there forever.

And we're just trying to transform a bunch of the different things that say co-pilot across the company. So we got a group of folks. They're super talented working on on GitHub co-pilot on the VS code stuff, you know, whether that's competing with cursor or all the other folks in that agentic IDE kind of world. And then me and my team, we spent a lot of time on like the consumer co-pilot app. So the thing that's in your point.

pocket. The thing you can pull out your pocket, use voice mode, talk back and forth with web retrieval. And then we introduced a bunch of really cool stuff just in the last week. And is consumer co-pilot? Is that powered by Open AI models? Are you model agnostic? Are you training your own models? Like, how are you describing? Because with some of the foundation labs, they have to put a ton of their marketing behind like their model. And we were having this discussion about like at some point consumers are going to stop caring about the model. So how are you thinking about it? Yeah, 100%. Yeah. So Microsoft AI, when we're chipping co-pilot, we're just building the best possible product. Product. That's it. And we're super product-focused,

super customer-obsessed. And at the end of the day, like, whatever's going to give people the best thing in their pocket, like, that's the job. And so for a long time, that was opening eye models. And thanks to, you know, the amazing partnership that we have with them, we can put all their models directly into the product. 4-0 powered the mainline response for us for a really, really long time until GPT5 came out more recently. GPD-5 now is, honestly, It's an amazing set of models, and it's been really, really popular inside the product. But there are parts of the product where we're already serving other models as well. Sure.

So we introduced a couple new modes this week. One of them is not powered by an opening eye model. A few of our own first party models just started to drop. So I think six weeks ago was the first time we privately started running LM arenas on MAI fully end-to-end trained models. Okay, cool. So before that, yeah, before that we had no ability really to build our own foundation models from scratch. And in the last six weeks across both language, and text and image, we've been in either the top five or the top 10 with our own first-party

models. And that's like a first for us. And so it's been super cool. So does that reflect of you that essentially like the foundation model layer is commoditizing? It's high cap-ex, but it is something that's maybe viable to get near the frontier? Yeah. I think that a piece of it is a little bit that perceived intelligence, you know, when you try these different systems today, even when they're backed by different models, it is a little bit tough

to tell, oh, this is way smarter than that. Like things are kind of getting a little bit closer to get. We saw there with GPT 4.5. Yeah, totally. And then we went to five. A lot of people, even though it was a smarter model, we're complaining about like the tone and the personality. And so we're in the spiky intelligence era.

We're no longer in a race where just like smarter is just better every single time. And so to really start to build an amazing product, it's not good enough to just have a set of models that are marching up intelligence. You have to actually build what people want in the product. Sure. And so an ability to go kind of end to end and be able to actually look at the way people are using the product, have that feedback into like model training, especially post training, and then have that then

allow you to iterate the product. It creates this like model product user loop that is kind of the main way that you'll probably push the envelope in terms of meeting the user needs. So that's what we've really been focused on. And when you think about the user, the user of the app, are you thinking more business user, prosumer, consumer, all of the above? Like there's everyone from like the Xbox Call of Duty kit is. a Microsoft customer to like the Fortune 100 company CEO is there's a very different archetypes.

Yeah, we long term, we have to sort of that whole spectrum to start. It's the consumer. Yeah. And it's the person that is looking for this thing. You know, they're asking us for advice on health. They're trying to learn new things with co-pilot. They're asking for a lot of help making big decisions. Those are the places where we're really playing the most. And now you can't ship a product from Microsoft without being awesome at productivity. And so in the last few months, huge push in productivity, making way easier to upload, like tons of files, reason over them, create documents based on the source material you've uploaded. And this is just like rips.

Like the, as soon as we put this in the hands of users, completely, you know, we kind of expect that, okay, if we improve answer quality, generally, this is always going to be good. Improving file upload and improving the number of files that people can upload, users just were drawn to it so quickly. So, I mean, it feels like the real wheelhouse, like you're just going to knock it out of the park with the customers, if they're running their life on 365. Like they have a Microsoft email, they have one drive going. They set up their life in that way.

Maybe because they use it at work. Maybe it's also hybrid work home, but that's going to be a really great experience for them. Yeah. So the product today doesn't actually need to be rooted in M365 at all. You can just download it. You can just use it. And it's actually amazing for that use case.

Long term, the system that is the highest context on you is going to be the best in both times. Of course. It's going to be the one that knows when your meetings are. So it can schedule that dinner that you've wanted to go to. And so we actually think that the long view here is that these things ultimately have to come together. But for the next six to nine months, we're going to focus on nailing the enterprise use case in M365 inside of all the work apps. You already do all your work in.

And then at the same time, on the other end of the spectrum for consumers, nail the co-pilot app that you just download from the app store and you just love and you use. How should startups think about your guys's ambitions? Because I think that Sam had a quote was probably a few years ago at this point, maybe a couple years ago, which was like, build a company that's assuming models not getting better. And I've seen so many companies this year. We've had some of them on the show. We've talked about them that are basically, they may as well have said, like, we're building a different Microsoft co-pilot for XYZ. Or we're building Microsoft Excel and Microsoft co-pilot for Excel as a new company. And it's cool. These are big categories, right? They're extremely valuable products.

It's worth new teams, like trying to take a crack at some of this, like, timeless software. But I'm curious, I'm sure you see some of them and you're like, wait, you know that, like, we do that already. Yeah, we're on our roadmap. And we have, like, you know, hundreds of millions of people. As opposed to, like, Bloomberg has an Excel plugin. And they've had one for a long time. Yeah.

That hasn't been on Excel's roadmap because it's a separate thing. But, yeah, how are you talking to start? Yeah, look, I think if you get really specialized, like the Bloomberg example, like we're never going to change all of Excel to go compete with like a specific vertical of a way people use Excel. We can't change like the core platform that much. But if you're trying to build something and I won't use the Excel example because it's too close to home, I think, for people that are working on this problem. But if you built like a plugin for Word that does something that's like pretty horizontal, like it uses Word for you. Yep. We know, this is certainly

something we spend a lot of time thinking about. Word has had templates for years. And if you think about prompt to template that's the very obvious next step. Do you feel like there's a responsibility for the Microsoft brand to send clear messaging to startups so that you

don't steamroll them? I always wonder about that. It feels like Sam was kind of saying like I'm a former YC head, I want startups to like me, build on my platform, et cetera, and I don't want someone to accidentally get crushed. by the steamroller.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that when you're training foundation models at the scale that they are and have kind of been doing it for as long as they have, I think that the world is still adjusting to how quickly things are changing. And so I think the degree that the model builders can signpost and be like,

hey, like, this is going to change a lot really quickly. I do think that this is probably just the right thing to do for the ecosystem. Now, that being said, for us, we're just focused on building an amazing product. Yeah, and the other thing is Some startups are overtly saying, I'm going to kill Excel. They're coming for you.

It's not like you be like, hey, you know, maybe don't do that because we're doing that. It's like, no, they're trying to eat your lunch. It's totally fair to just keep expanding your product in ways that, you know, are valuable for the majority of users. But the agenting stuff happening in Excel as a specific example is really cool. And so it's one of those areas where it's like, you can win a lot of things by being focused. So who knows?

Maybe the people doing that are still going to have an amazing. a product and build a great business. But Excel's going to get pretty agented. Do you have anything to show us today? 100%. You got a lot of cool stuff. Yeah, yeah. Show us some stuff.

So just quickly, the stuff that we... Have an extra camera here so we can see your phone screen if you want to pull it up. So the stuff that we talked about, gosh, just a little bit this morning. We have a huge release of AI browser. And so I think we heard a lot about AI browsers this week. Yeah. And the biggest difference is Edge has, you know, hundreds and millions of people using it. Sure.

And now every single one of them with a flip of a switch, now have... an agenic browser in the form of co-pilot mode. Sure. I've used it to reorder stuff on Amazon, kickoff stuff for me. It's been awesome. We also... And Amazon shots fired. Yeah, get into maybe a little bit more there.

Yeah. Just while we're talking about it, but it's just like you can chat with the pages that you're on. Yeah, so sidebar is totally there. And you can reason over multi-tab context and you can talk about the different stuff that you're doing. The thing beyond, like, actions, like we've seen a bunch of people talk about, whether it was like comet or the Atlas stuff. from earlier this week. You know, actions are just going to get better and better as the model's improved. And, you know, Copilot mode and Edge is, you know, state of the art with respect to the

actions that you can do. One of the really cool differences is, once you enable it, it'll actually start to pick up, like, patterns and habits of your browsing. And it'll actually create these journeys and do things proactively for you, and you can jump back in where you left off. And so, if you're, like, planning a trip and doing flights in a few tabs and doing hotels and other tabs and trying to figure out stuff to go do, Edge will actually see what's going on with that. and the next time you come into the browser, it'll actually have taken the next step in planning that trip for you.

And with a single tap, you just jump straight back into flow where it's actually done the next thing. And so for me, when I'm interviewing candidates and just doing a bunch of research in tabs, it's perfect for this. How do you,

there was some conversation concern about prompt injection. How do you think about, like, solving that problem? It felt like people were saying, like, hey, this is a big risk, like, flow down, but it felt like something that was somewhat solvable, like pretty quickly. I think that's right, and I think that you have to look at this whole class of products right now as it sounds a little maybe two over the top, but kind of like a security preview.

Like we know there's a whole bunch of risks with allowing the browser and these models to take actions like this. You really have to supervise it. We have a ton of checks and balances. It'll ask you a ton of steps along the way to make sure everything's still on the rails. But we're learning alongside everybody else, and this area's going to evolve really, really fast. So we're ready to just keep playing whack-a-mole as these issues come up. Are there any surprises? Do you have these things that might be teed up for us?

We love hitting the gong around here. So we are now the first ever AI app to also drop groups. Okay. Are you on the most aggressive version of liquid glass, by the way? I am like liquided out. It's all glass all the way down. It looks good. H2O max.

And with Pro Max, you actually get the battery life, so it can power liquid glass. Okay, cool. There we go. Yeah, exactly. So groups is phenomenal. It's now the first place where if you're having a chat with copilot, you can just add someone to the group. Use it for my wife when she's asked me questions.

I have no idea the answer is all the time. I can just put her in the chat. She can just take the rest for me. Phenomple. Creating a group chat with an AI and other people. You're not bringing it to teams. It's like, yeah. So it's sharing this and then we're both on the phone.

So when I'm in the thread, I just hit share, invite with a link. I can drop it in, I message or whatever. And then she's just in the chat. And they don't even install the app. Yep. They can use it right from mobile Safari, which is super cool. And so this is the first time across all these apps that you can finally do this.

How? It seems like. pattern. It's such a great and somewhat obvious feature. I'm somewhat, I'm somewhat surprised that it hasn't. I was shocked when I joined MAI. I was like, no one has built anything social in any of these products. I worked on my eye at Snapchat right before I left. And so like no one had really done social. You're like, why not us? I was like, I'll do it again. Like, it's fine. We'll run it back. Okay. Okay. And then and then one of the really cool things that we did. Yes. Co-Pat knows all about you guys by the way. Oh, really? Well, we do put out 15 hours of content every day.

We introduced Miko, who's this new person that you can talk to, this new character. Okay. Really cute face. It's not going to sex with you. So it's completely different than the other AI appearance. Explicitly. It's not explicitly. It's not what it's going to do.

This is the counter positioning. Wow. Let's drink the gong for decent. That's not what's going to happen. Let's drink the gong. It's not traditional values. Bull market and traditional values. And so with traditional values at our core, as soon as we showed Miko to Satya, his favorite thing actually was like poking it, which I couldn't find a better way to describe that on air without it sounding a little bit weird.

Yeah, that sounds like. But again, it's going to be strictly platonic. It's totally safe for work. Because this is from the company that brought you Microsoft Excel. And we, and of course. Yes. Of course. And I would trust that brand. And so as you poke Miko. Yes. And. Okay. How many times do you have. You really got to hammer it. Hammer. Hey! Clippy is back. Clippy is back. Let's go. We have been asking for this. Is this breaking news?

Is this a scoop for us? This is the first time. This has been on air. Close the training card now. Clippy is back. Clippy is reborn. Yes. Incredible.

So Clippy walked so Miko could run. Yes. And so we got to pay an homage to our roots. And so Satya, when he saw this demanded. that Clippy. I'm so happy about this. Incredible. I think people have, people forget. We've been, we've been begging for this.

We've been begging for this. Obviously, Clippy had like a bad, bad rap and people were like, it didn't do what it was promised. But I feel like all of the nuance of like where it wasn't perfect has completely melted away. And it's just lore. It's just great lore. Your parents hated it. Yeah. And it was cool to love it.

Exactly. And so it's so ready to bring it back. So I just, yeah, so many good memories of being in the computer lab at school and just looking down and knowing that Clippy was there. He was riding with me. How we, what does it take to update the name of the app in the iOS app store to just Clippy? You got it. That's the next. Right now it's an Easter egg, but we're working here together. Baby steps. Baby steps. You're like, actually there's like a team of 25 people that really worked hard on Miko and there's like, there's like, there's like three CMOs. one. This is not, you know.

That is very exciting. Thank you so much for coming by. No, thanks for having me, guys. Breaking it down. Yeah, yeah. What a fascinating time in the industry. What a fascinating place to be. It must be thrilling to be in your seat.

It's an absolute treat. There's five places in the world. You can try to build Frontier AI for a billion people. And this team and this setup, it's unbelievable. So it's a real. No, as a true product guy, like going somewhere where you have that scale resources, et cetera.

And it's actually, you know, it's good that we have just this flood of talent into early stage companies and the labs and all that stuff. But it's actually incredibly important that talented people go and work at, you know, these companies that already power, you know, use cases for billions of people, millions and millions of companies. So I'm glad to do it. 100%. Yeah. Anyway, so much. Good to see you guys. It's fantastic.

Congratulations. I'm back on again soon. is Drew Houston from Dropbox hopping on at 1 p.m. We have 30 minutes to take you through more of the news. But first, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Let Numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance. I use it myself. It's the official tax partner of Lucy, the nicotine company.

They Paul Moore also got in trouble with talking about nicotine. But that is a much lower, that's a much less, you know, a controversial topic. I think everyone has hashed out the nicotine story so many times. I hope everyone knows. I can't believe. I can't believe Clippy's back. Wait, what? I just can't believe Clippy's back.

You're still rocked by this? I'm rocked. This is shaking my worldview. I love it. No, but this is super fun. The nicotine thing is funny because everyone was getting mad about Palmer for basically, you know, in his own way, teeing up the argument of like, Are there benefits to nicotine? And like, this is a topic that has been discussed by Gwern back in 2014, 2015.

Then we started Lucy. We were talking about it a little bit. Andrew Huberman did a big deep dive on nicotine, kind of laid out some of the complexities. And he actually revisited that. It's in the stack today. Do you have his post pulled up? What did he wind up actually saying fully? I'll pull it up here.

You pull that up. But the really interesting. one is from the economist, who I regard as a pretty conservative organization, they're not really doing hot takes over there. September 12th, 2025 published an article called, What Nicotine does to your brain? Their conclusion, the drug is hugely addictive, but it does boost mental performance. And so that's the formulation that I think Palmer was like grappling with, which is there's mental performance. It's highly addictive. How do you balance those? in a world where you remove the carcinogens and you don't wind up with actually smoking cigarettes.

But he was talking about it's an appetite suppressant. Exactly. There seems there's obviously benefits and not being overweight. There's tradeoffs with everything. Yeah. But anyway, what was Huberman's final? Let's trust the experts on this one. Let's go to the experts.

Huberman's final. He said with Palmer Lucky's comments about nicotine on TBPN, your reminder that yes, nicotine increases focus also is very high. habit forming, duh, is not carcinogenic. I know that it's habit forming. I've quit nicotine, you know, five or six times. Yes. I typically quit it like every night before I go to bed. Yeah. And then pick it back up. Is not carcinogenic unless smoked, vape, dipped, or snuffed. Yeah. It is an unusual stimulant because it simultaneously focuses and relax you. Also raises blood pressure. Again, do your own research.

Also, 21 plus. Don't get in the game unless you're 21 plus, Tyler. I never, why are you looking at me? Well, they went to the wrong camera. The little jump scare. Travis Kelsey is teaming up with an activist group to invest in and revive six flags. There was another. Oh, I don't know.

We have no idea. Left. Mike Isaac says genuinely appreciate how Pop Crave left out the investor part of activist investor group because all the people in the replies think that there's going to be like a BLM takeover of the roller coaster park. Someone else was saying like did Travis Kelsey like get three wishes when when he was like 11 and he's like I want to be a football player. I want to date the biggest pop star in the world and I want to take over. It's a 200 million dollar deal. He bought 9% of the theme park operator.

And we love to see big name celebrities crossing over to the private equity world. Wow, they have the ticker wet. Do you know their ticker? Fun. So good. That's a great ticker. And a little fun fact, turns out, according to Chad GBT, you cannot reserve and

barter stock tickers. I think we need to do a PSA about this. We heard some rumor that people were trying to, in the way that you buy a domain, Maybe you squat on it. Let's say that you think that, you know, after AI.com, after chat.com, after quantum computing. There's going to be a wave in time travel. So you go out and buy time travel. com and you wait and then somebody comes and buys it from you and you make a nice return on your

investment. That's totally cool in the dot com world. That doesn't work with reserving New York Stock Exchange tickers. Like you can't trade them that way, at least according to chat, TBT. and so speaking of just funny stock tickers. I can see why Travis Kelsey was interested in this. Six Flags trades at less than one X revenue. Whoa.

So, hugely, he's seeing deep value here. Are you bullish on, first, do you like theme parks? No. Never? Never been? I used to go to Legoland a lot growing up. I enjoyed Legoland.

Yeah. But I kind of grew out of theme parks at a young age, and I haven't been to one. I never had a fear of heights. I never was like, I don't like them. But I also was never like, I got to go a ton. Kids sort of changed that because kids really like them. It's fun to go with the kids. but

Six Flags is it's a different target audience it's not as there's not as much lore around every ride but are you bullish on theme parks

generally in a world where Bill Peebles is updating us on SORA and it seems like the march of generative AI is unrelenting

are we should you go long slop and then also, you know, steal on the roller coaster track. I think I'm somewhat takeless here. I don't, you know, when Chesky was on a couple days ago, his point of view was that as as slop increases, people will, I mean, these are my words, not his, but, you know, digital life becomes more intense. People will want to touch grass more.

They want to go on trips, things like that. But in some ways, I feel like the theme park. is like real world slop, right? It feels like it. I imagine going to six flags for me would, for four hours, would feel like I would come away feeling like I was using SORA for four hours, right? Yes. Like not exactly, it's not like really counterpositioned.

Yeah, it's not exactly the Metropolitan Office. It feels like the physical, you know, because I don't like to pay to be in crowds. It's physical brain rot. Yeah. It's brain rot, IRL. But maybe Travis Kelsey wants to turn it around, turn it around. tear down the roller coasters

put in a museum. Maybe he wants to increase the risk or a libel players go out there they're going head to head right it's a high risk environment, a lot of injuries. Maybe he says, hey,

Six Flags injury rate right now. This is the Nathan Fielder strategy. The sort of accident rate is so low on the roller coasters that people don't get the same rush as if they thought

that there was maybe like half a percent chance that a ride would end in disaster, right? And so then that would really bring you into the physical world and really make you feel human to be taking on that level of risk, right? Yeah. So, who knows? Well, good luck to him.

The Sora update, we already talked about Sora a little bit, but you can register cameos of specific things so your dog can become a cameo. Finally. And then you can create a... Finally. Thank you for listening to your users, Bill Peeble. finally. Finally.

I mean, you're going to, you're going to play around. I'm for sure going to do it. I think it's going to be hilarious to put my dog on a skateboard at the X games. Like, if you don't think that's fun, like you're just like humorless

and like you're, you're like a slop scold. I think it's, I think it's, let me enjoy my dog at the X games. I've been joking a little bit. I like to horse around. But I think it's smart because they had so much pushback from using IP. It's got to be personal.

It's got to be personal. And people will be excited to generate images of their dogs at the X-Games. And I'm going to take my dog and I'm going to scan his face. He's going to do a kick-flip. And he's going to do a kick-flip. And I'm going to send that to the family group chat, which is my new social network. There is social media and then there is social networking. I think this is a great take by Chesky.

And so my social network exists on iMessage. And so I will send the video there. I still very much feel like, like, axes. a social network. I feel like it's professional network. It's my LinkedIn. Okay, professional network, but my social life is almost entirely overlapped with my professional life. If I'm, if I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to be doing in my social life on this weekend, X has nothing to do with it. That is, that is orchestrated purely in IMA. Yeah, but it's the way that I catch up with the majority of my friends. Yes, yes, I agree. In terms of like keeping a pulse on what

it is more social media than like pure algo media yeah so there is something there but anyway speaking yeah it's going to be fun to play media what else not really but uh ramp data is now available in the bloomberg terminal this is cool you can track AI adoption rate business size right in your terminal the best news is um very differentiated in real-time data source it's cool a very cool move from our on the ramp team it's very good This is crazy. Before we read this, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk,

proof trust continuously. Vanta helps you get compliant fast. The unit tree G1 crawl policy has been deployed to hardware, plenty of room for improvement, but it's a start. Let's pull up this video. G1.

This is a humanoid that can turn into. Oh, wait, this is a humanoid? Oh, this is crazy. I mean, I feel like, I don't want to be too negative here, but I feel like the filmmakers are really not stepping up. Like, I feel like the creative tools right now, both with like AI stuff, but also like you could buy one of those or rent it and you could shoot a horror film right now practically. Like you wouldn't be, you wouldn't be like generating the AI. Jason Carmen.

You could make a humanoid robot horror, low budget horror, film right now. Or action movie or anything. That just feels like a character that you could immediately put into a movie and tell a whole story around. What do you think? Or a character on this show. Yeah, that's true. I think we might have to do it. We might have to do it. I mean, there's something beautifully dark about a humanoid that's walking and then it suddenly turns into this insect. Yeah. That is very spooky. Very spooky. Okay. If, if we get one of these, we also have to get a couple desert eagles. Because if it starts acting up, we have to be able to take it out.

Right? Like, we have to have, you know, it's like if we were going to actually do the hearth, I would also say, hey, guys, let's get a fire extinguisher, right? And so, because like what happens if you're training and you, the log rolls out? Yeah, and then it becomes sentient and then tries to kill us, right? So we need the fire extinguisher. Well, that's what, no, no, we just need the fire extinguis because it's good safety policy

if you're using a warm hearth to fine tune GPTOSS on a rack of eight H-100s. Because if you're going to be burning a log inside, you should have, you know, proper equipment. And I think if we get this humanoid, you've got to be ready to take this thing out. You have to be ready to take this thing out. Jordy, what do you think?

How are you taking this thing out if it rises? up. If we get one of these, I want to be prepared on day one. I think you strap charges to it. Okay. And so, and it has a vest. It doesn't tell anytime. That, that, that, that has it, yeah, it has an explosive device that. We release it at any moment, it explodes. Yeah, basically a Kevlar, it has a Kevlar suit over it. Okay. Explosives on the inside. Oh, so it explodes inward. It explodes inward. Yes. I don't know how. It's the last thing I would do. I think that might be worse. It's just charging at you and you're running away with the...

Oh, no. I know. If in one wrong move, we're all going down. We're all going down with it. Oh, this is wild. Anyway, let me tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

What is this, is this literally chat GPT? Should we play this family guy clip or is this a SORA video? I'm not familiar with this. Do you put this in here? No. Okay. Let's move on. Farid has a chart that looks so insane.

It's ChatGPT's customer retention. What do you think about this? How do you square this with the earlier data that we saw that showed that, hey, there might be some slowing adoption. This looks like a... Well, this is unrelated to growth. Yes. This is just when somebody tries ChatGPT or how many months later are they still using it.

I mean, it's directly related to growth. because if you have really great retention, you can just add 5% of new people to try it, because they'll all stick around forever. As opposed to when you have a leaky bucket, you're like, we need to be doing super roll ads every day because people are only going to come in

and they're going to leave after a week. Sure, sure, sure. But generally just looking at like these new cohorts, and I think that this chart is not nearly as impactful if you haven't worked on like a consumer mobile app, right? because this is like beyond best in class. But I think this is what you would expect, right? People try chat chit.

They love it. They stick around. It becomes a part of their life. It becomes like, you know, a kind of muscle memory quickly. It's become a let's ask chat type of thing. Look at the difference of the 10-month line for the most recent 10 months ago they joined versus two years ago they joined. from a 45% or 10-month retention to 70% retention.

That is just incredible. They're pushing up those lines. It's not just that the lines plateau at 50%. So for every person that gives it a try, there's a 50% chance that they just never leave, right? And then also it's smiling, so you get people to come back. That's a great sign.

But also they're pushing up the retention curve so much, so quickly. and yeah, I mean, this is just, yeah, product, product getting better. But congratulations to the team over there. That's fantastic news. Shane Copeland was. Wait, hold on. If you're trying to run one of these analyses on your company, you probably need to use Julius AI, the AI data data data data, joined millions who use Julius to connect their data,

ask questions, and get insights in seconds. Billions, very soon. Shane Copeland was locked in at his dad. this? I don't know what sport this is, but I can see on the jersey. It's Cleveland. Cleveland. Some sort of cross-town rivalry going on. Stadium. Very cool. Courtside. Love to see it. Yeah. He's locked in on the phone. That's very fun. Dialing in. And everyone's saying, oh, he's trading. He's front-riding. Okay, so I'm worried about getting one-shot by AI again,

but Melissa Chen has a post here. She says, actual shot, not AI, of a French detective working the case of the French crown jewels that were stolen from the Louvre in a brazen daylight robbery. Somehow he looks like he's smoking, even without a cigarette in his hand, but surely everything you know about life

is screaming at you. This case is officially screwed. To solve it, we need an unshaven, overweight, washed out detective who's in the middle of a divorce, a functioning alcoholic who the rest of the department hates, never going to crack it with a detective. who wears an actual fedora unironically. I mean, this guy really...

There are so many weird things about this photo. Okay, okay, okay, yep. I knew this was too good to be true. The community note says this is, this is, a photo is real taken outside the Louvre after the jewel theft, but the man in the fedora is a passerby, not a detective on the cave. Yeah, there you go.

Didn't stop it from getting 42,000. But look at the woman in the back all the way on the right. Her face is like perfectly lit. Like this is a remarkable photograph just from a like a dynamic range perspective. This is. Yeah. So my putting on the tinfoil hat, I think this guy with the fedora is probably one of the thieves that dressed up in an costume and is coming back to the crime scene. I like this.

You know, because obviously the thief wouldn't come back to the crime scene. So he's kind of, you know, trying to take him. take himself out of the pool of suspect. Even if you take off the tinfoil hat and just go with like the narrative that's here on the timeline, it is hilarious to be like, yeah, I'm going to dress up like this and then go be a passerby at a jewel fever. He's like, I'm going to go get a fit off. Yeah, he's like, I got to go. I got to go see what's up at the loo.

I got to be there. I have to be photographed. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Drip. He's dripped out Frenchman, for sure. Drip out. Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build.

on crypto rails securely spin up white label wallets, signed transactions, and integrate on-change infrastructure all through one simple API. Do you want to do this uncapped clip? Look at the lighting. Jack Altman, your team is on a tear. This is beautiful. Good job. I love this.

I haven't seen the clip, but let's react. What is it? Learned at CAA is star quality is real. Most people don't have it. Some do. What is it? You just know it when you see. see it in a room. Tom Cruise is, you know, maybe my favorite actor growing up. I've seen Top Gun

a zillion times. I'd left Maverick. I had the opportunity to meet him one day in a very kind of random setting. I was delivering a package to him and, you know, he shook my hand and looked me in the eye and we talked for three minutes. And, you know, for three minutes, I thought, wow, this, no one cares more about me in the world right now than Tom Cruise does, right? The way he just commands a room in his presence. But also when Colin Farrell came... You heard it here first. Command the room, no excuses.

He never been in a movie before and you spent 30 minutes in a room with him. And he just had so much magnetism about him, the way he composed himself and talked to you and looked at you and just his general kind of persona. So I do think that to me, I do look for that in Founders. It's the combination of a mind at work

and an opportunity that they're addressing, right? I remember when I first met Evan from Snap, he basically was making the argument that, look at the generation of young people coming up with the Iraq war essentially having been, you might say, a hoax, right? The WMDs were never there. Rolling into the financial crisis,

oh, you told us we had the best economic system, and then it almost collapsed, right? And then COVID, right, he built SNAP as a platform, as a reflection of those trends, right? So what was it? Well, everything disappears, right? No one kind of stores your data. You can't trust institutions to look out for you.

I think it ended up being incredibly prescient of where we are today as a world, right? Where the institutional breakdown that we've seen. So I think that magnetism, about a person in a room and an idea and a market that they're going after. Be goaded. No excuses. That's my takeaway.

That's the right takeaway. Be goaded. John, by the way, we can lightly hear you snacking those pistachios. Just a heads up. I am talking. Please no snacking ASMR on the people can find that elsewhere we have some breaking news we you've heard about you know funds that directly buy you know equity in in companies you've heard about secondaries funds that

that buy stakes in in other funds and we've got something new we've got some breaking news we've now got tertiary funds Quantinary funds next. Layla says I can't believe it's come to this, but here's a visual representation of this ridiculous structure. Bottom is actual portfolio companies purchased by PE funds 1 and 2 with respect of LPs. A secondaries fund comes along, buys LP interest in funds 1 and 2 from some LPs.

This secondary fund raises money from other LPs, but now we have a tertiary's fund. This fund will buy secondary interest in secondary funds by raising money from other LPs. Does anyone even remember how many layers back the actual value is created? P.S. not to be confused with C continuation vehicles, stay tuned for that visual.

So, this is starting to look like the collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps from the mortgage crisis. It's like very similar. Like you remember in the big short, there's like the, you know, you have their stock of champagne glasses. you pour the champagne in one glass and then it like flows down. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I have seen that one. One of the five. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very, very similar where, like, at every tranche, you, like, re-collateralize and re-aggregate and ideally, like, distribute the risk, but if there's correlation, then there can be problems. I don't really know how big this stuff is and certainly not, like, publicly traded yet, but, wow, to be a tertiary.

This is asset managers doing asset management. stuff. Should be a tertiary GP. That's a life. Yeah. A lot of big short memes going around. Yeah, we should have one on. There's probably a bull case for it that's actually pretty sound.

It actually makes sense. Yeah, I can see it making sense in some circumstances. I think the concern is like you're just no one can get liquidity. So you're just kind of like passing the buck, passing the buck. You know, GPs are harvesting fees at each level, but there's no actual returns flowing from the underlying like sort of value, right?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I believe it. What else? Yasa, owned by Mercedes, recently smashed their own record for motor weight, size, and horsepower. This production intent motor weighs 28 pounds and produces

a thousand horsepower. Kyle Coards in the comment says, I do not understand the point of this. There are already five EV brands with amply good enough motors. The motor power density is nowhere near the limiting factor on EV profitability or adoption. If they can make an adequate motor cheaper,

that would be much more valuable innovation, though still not the limiting factor. Yeah, I have no idea what their intention is for this motor. It could be they want to just use it in Formula One, right? I see, why not? It looks sick. Yeah, this is... I mean, they'll put in something. Put one on every wheel.

Why not 4,000 horsepower? Like there seems to be no limit. Like the appetite for horsepower is sort of endless. Yeah. Yeah. And somebody here says, wouldn't this also be useful for drones, copters, planes? Sure.

The original poster says absolutely yes. And also the G63 land delay. True. The G63, six by six. Like these things need. The E version. Imagine if you put one of these at each,

you know, the G wagon has gone electric. What will they do with the six by six? the six-wheeled G-wagon. It's a million dollars. What are your intentions with my motor? But, you know, imagine one of those at each wheel of the six-by-six. You get 6,000 horsepower in a thing the size of a tank.

It would be fantastic. More interesting news. Self-driving taxi company Waymo is now doing 876,000 rides per month in California. 6x increase over the past. year and a 69x increase since August of 2023. Do you think they wind up working with Uber long term or not? Ben Thompson was talking about, like, he has been writing a lot about the Uber, Waymo, the self-driving taxi stuff, mostly because he thinks like he needs more data.

Because even at Uber and Waymo, like they don't necessarily know what the consumer behavior will be. Like, will the consumers stay with Uber and they'll order an, and they'll order a Waymo when one's available, but then when they'll want one app that can get them anywhere. And so if you say, well, I need you to drive me into the snow to go to Big Bear today, like you want to do all that in one app, or will people say, I use the Waymo app for most things? And then when I want to go into the snow and use a human driver for some specific route, then I'm happy to open up the Uber app. Yeah, we should get Darra on. Because there's, they're actually sort of AB testing this, because Some markets are just Waymo app.

Some of them are Waymo in Uber, and it's very clear that they're running like an experiment. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, right now, Waymo is quite a bit more expensive on a per trip basis than Uber. And so it's possible the ride share market, you know, it used to be bifurcated a little bit.

Between Uber and Lyft, Lyft was always, you know, I remember when I was in college, I was using Lyft more because it was like slightly cheaper. Yeah. And it's possible that Waymo ends up becoming like more of a luxury good and people just have the Waymo app and and more price sensitive consumers are just sticking with Uber so we'll see yeah before our next guest joins let me tell

you about fin.com.A.I. The number one AI agent if you want your AI to handle customer support go to fin dot AI. Our next guest is Drew Housson from Dropbox. Welcome to the show. Drew, how are you doing? What's happening? How's it going, guys? Great to see you. We've been excited for this one. Yeah, very, very excited. Where should we start? Are you, are you a Waymo fan? Are you an Uber fan? We were debating, like, where does the consumer experience go? I mean, I know you're probably in the position where you might not have to choose, but it's an interesting question in my mind of like, will people want the, you know, the super app for, that can get them the robot taxi or the human long term or if folks just wind up moving over to Waymo entirely? yeah i mean i think it's going to be interesting to see how fast it diffuses i mean i think they're still like that um or that that like quality problem and they're getting that like third nine fourth nine fifth nine yeah i mean that's really what's and carpathy talked about that on why agents are going to be a further away than people think and so but i mean i think it's i mean s f that's like

pretty well established so i think that's probably a sign of what's to come yeah uh did the do the Carpathie, did the Carpathie podcast, like, update you on Dropbox's strategy at all? Or was it something that you were already hearing, like, rumbles of? And you were like, okay, now I have, like, permission to fully write that to long-term memory. Or how were you processing it? You know, because I think they were like, there was nothing there that was like completely, oh, no one has ever given this take before. It was more like, no one has ever said it in this context with this authority.

It was somebody whose opinion holds a lot of weight that isn't like waiting, didn't feel like he's waiting out for the next big tender offer. Oh, totally. So it felt like less conflicted than some of the other opinions that get shared. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. No, I'm very aligned with it. I don't think there was, to your point, I don't think it was like a lot of new, or, you know, I agree with a lot of these themes that the industry is been thinking about for a while.

but yeah, sort of like a splash of sobriety on the space. And I think self-driving is a good comp in some ways for like why this, why AI or AGI or this like fast takeoff might, you know, not be as quick or on the kind of timelines that people are thinking about because, you know, Carpeti talks about this March of Nines. Like it's the same amount of work to go from like 90% reliability. That's like one unit of work. Then to get to 99 is like the same amount of work. Then 99.9.

I mean, we've certainly seen that in our. as we've worked with AI and as we just work on reliability in general, I think that's very consistent. And I think, yeah, the self-driving car took the world or captured the world's imagination like 15 years ago. And yet it's these like more intermediate forms of automation that come way before autonomy that create a lot of the commercial value and get a lot more adoption. So for example, like there's like billions of users of Google Maps today. But, you know, maybe thousands of people are going to get in a Waymo today. And then same thing for like, you know, Highway Assist or what Tesla's done or some of these intermediate forms of self-driving that have maybe millions of users. And so we think about that a lot as we deploy AI. And, you know, you don't want to be either too early or too late, both with tech in general, but also with automation for sure. Yeah, it feels like if you watch the Carpathie episode on Friday and you walked into the office on Monday and, like, ripped up your whole plan. Like something's maybe going wrong with your leadership style. But it is an interesting frame to think about it in the decade of agents, framing and I'm wondering like you've been at this for two decades now, correct? Like roughly.

Yeah. And so you're like fully equipped to think in decades because you have literally thought in decades multiple times, right? And so I'm wondering how you're thinking about the next decade. Like in 10 years, what if things play out kind of to the mid case and we get a lot of really powerful AI systems, but they don't come next quarter. How do you set your company up? to actually capitalize fully over like a nice long decade of just solid execution. Yeah. Well, I think when AI first came along, people's imaginations immediately went to like, you know, sci-fi movies and so the one omniscient, omnipotent AI assistant. But for a while, yeah, I think like looking at, I was surprised when I was, you know, 30 when self-driving first came out. I was like, oh, yeah, maybe millions of people will be off the road.

Maybe we'll never see another human behind the wheel when we go to work. And it just, like, took a lot longer. And then I've been working with, like, even when you're just designing, like, systems of engineering, and certainly as you start to apply machine intelligence, you see these dynamics where, like, the demos look super good and sort of convince you that it's, like, right around the corner. But then when you actually scale these things up, it's a lot harder than it looks. And so we saw that even before AI with, like,

Dropbox to begin with, like we could make a very good demo or a video like in the first couple of months, but then to roll it out at like mission critical and massive scale, to roll out such a mission critical product at massive scale, you know, you can't have a bad day and that just takes a lot more engineering. And we see that with our AI products today. So I mean, we're and along the, you know, we want to build the omniscient, you know, omnipotent AI agent too. But when we actually look at you, like look at customers, and look on their screens, the more basic problem that people have that AI can help with today is just that, like, your screen's a mess. Like, work is a mess. You know, like 100 tabs open.

You know, you're working across Google and Slack and your email and Dropbox and a, you know, a dozen other things. And, you know, the question I started with is, like, how much is AI helping with that? Yeah. And the answer is, like, zero or negative. Yeah, the other thing is, I'm sure reliability was like a core focus for Dropbox during the early days because if you're like a online file storage and then like one percent of the time like a file just like disappears into the ether. It's not saved and then the user might have lost it forever and that's like going to stick in their brain forever. And so like reliability at Dropbox means like 99.999999. And it feels like the industry in, you know, spending a decade building SaaS and building SaaS, it was pretty

reliable and having like a bunch of infrastructure that makes it easier to deliver reliability, maybe forgot how, like, how important it is. And if you have an AI agent that, that does an amazing job 90% of the time and just totally botches, botches it, 10% of the time, it's not ready for production. And so you can have these magical. And I think in the context of like customer support is a big one is like is your agent ready for production if it if like 95% of the time it it it solves the consumer's problem but five percent of the time it makes them like pissed off and they're just like talk to a human talk to a human you know and they're just running down that that that conversation but yeah well i mean even if once you get up to a million users even if you have a 95 or 99%

success rate that's still like thousands or 10 thousands of thousands of people having like a really terrible experience, like, every day. And this was actually part of the motivation-wise started Dropbox. Step one was not, like, create Dropbox. Step one was, like, use all these other services and, like, have all these near misses or things were like, wait, what happened to my, like, tax return? It was just here. Is that going to go? Where did it go? And going into the support forums of these other competitive, like, well, these other companies, these other products that claim to do this on paper. But then you go in the support forums, and it's like a battlefield medical tent. People are like, oh, my God, what happened to my wedding?

photos and where's this and where's and I was like I like can't believe that you know these things are so brittle um I'm going to be putting my most important stuff in here even just as a customer of one like me like I need something that I can trust um and and then that took a lot more like engineering rigor and discipline um than we'd seen in the space we've been getting into barnyard analogies around here I want to take you through one and uh I'd love your feedback so uh we we think about a lot of the dynamics between the various players in enterprise software and foundation models is potentially mimicking the experience of a fox and a henhouse. And it might be the job of the CEO of the henhouse not to let the fox in the henhouse. And I'm wondering if that resonates

with you at all in terms of if I'm a foundation model company and I say, hey, I'd love to provide a bunch of great AI tooling to my customers, your customers, both. I will need all of your data forever, and I will need to significantly erode your mode or your customer retention. Like, is the job of the CEO right now to protect the henhouse or go on the attack and be more Fox-like? Like, help me walk through this from your perspective. Well, I mean, I think when it comes to using AI, it depends.

I mean, the first is, and it depends what your business is doing and how to using it and so on. I think, I mean, certainly the CEO's responsibility to, like, strategically position their company and mitigate risk and things like that. But certainly every CEO is thinking about how do I, like, usefully deploy AI. And so I think it helps to have an understanding of the technology. I think it's important to, like, know who you're working with and what their incentives are, to your point, you know, hand houses. Like, you know, I think a lot of people have apprehension about using some of these, or about working with a foundation model company

whose whole business revolves around like taking data and sort of grinding it up into pellets for training the next one. And you know, you watch SORA videos or whatever and you're like, that comes from somewhere. Probably not. They're artists. So

I think and you know, it's certainly in our business that trust and privacy and not having incentive conflicts of like not advertising, not training foundation models is super important as all of our customers think about, you know, who should we partner with? So is there a little bit of a tension there where you need to keep customer trust high and let them know that we're going to get you these AI features, but in the Dropbox way,

that is actually fully integrated. And we're not just going to take your customer record or your data and sell it off the back of the truck. just to pull something forward. And that actually layers into like the customer experience. Like you might be a couple months behind on a certain thing, but it's going to wind up with a better experience over time. Is that accurate? Yeah.

And I think it's all the above. I think it starts with just like your business and your incentives. Like you have to design some of the same from the beginning. Like, you know, we could probably be, make more money or be more profitable if we did advertising, for example. And so, and a lot of scaled, you know, The predominant scaled business model on the internet,

certainly for consumers, as advertising, and we're like, you know, we're just going to draw a hard line. We're just not going to do that because of this trust conflict, you know, this incentive conflict we would have. And even if we're, even if our intentions are good, it's like customers just have to wonder, right? And so, and then that becomes a big advantage because then we've been like living up to that for the last 18 years

and we have a track record. What is the specific concern if, if you were running effectively display ads? Is it privacy of like, I don't want you to use my data to target me with more ads? Yeah, and really this is up to our customers, not us. It doesn't really matter what we think. It really matters what they think.

And I think, yeah, everybody feels a little weird when it's like the equivalent of like, even just like the TV in your living room, if it starts showing you, if it's like a smart TV, that starts showing you ads you didn't ask for, you know, it's like, whoa, there's an invasion of privacy.

here. And so you have to be super sensitive to the psychology of your users. But I think at a more fundamental level, yeah, the other thing is like non-targeted at. I imagine the worst possible scenario that you were 100% not doing where the file storage company edits ads into my files. So I'm like, wait a minute, I saved my high school transcript. And now on page six of this PDF, they edited an ad. Well, the other thing is like non-targeted ads were really frustrating because I remember in college, I bought a Kindle. There was an option. It was like, do you want the ad supported Kindle?

Yeah, I went with the ads supported one. This is a very Amazon move is to be like, okay, for $100, you can get the ads supported Kindle. Or for $120, you can buy it. And I'm a college student. I got the bougie one. I got the no ads. But then I was getting like the ads that were, that when I had this, that were popular

were like the most, it was like romantic novels and stuff like that. Like books that I wasn't reading. is there my, you know, it would be sitting there and it'd be like, Just absorb my entire life so you can target me with something cool for once. And the other thing is, I think you have to focus. Like, it to really be selective about the problems you solve and, like, figure about, okay, how do we take what we do today and build on that in a way that makes sense for, like, today's context? So for us, I mean, we always took care of your files.

These are already, like, your most important information. But as we all know, like, well, used to be 100 files on our desktops, now 100 tabs in our browser. And then a lot of the pain points we have are like, you know, instead of one search box or at home, I can Google anything from one place, search all of human knowledge. I go to work. I've got like 10 different search boxes. My experience is totally fragmented. And that's what I was living personally. That's what my company is living. That's what all of us are living. I mean, look under my Zoom window. It's all, you know, we're all dealing with the same thing. And so we're like, all right, let's extend AI into that new world in like a valuable way. Let's give people that one search box. And then another problem with AI,

is that our industry is training these, is spending trillions of dollars to train these models that can do like quantum physics, but don't know about, you can't find your Q2 board tech. And the missing link there is like AI, these models can only be as smart as the context that you provide them.

And that's really the bottleneck. And like no one's focusing on that. And that's how like we have this new product, Dropbox Dash, which really aims to close that context gap and finally connect your, AI to everything at work. And so on the surface, it's

an AI assistant, it's a search engine, it connects, it knows about you, it knows about your work, knows about your company, it connects to all of your work apps. And unlike with a consumer AI tool or, you know, where there's a lot of questions, it can answer a lot of questions, but a lot of questions it can't answer.

So if you ask, like, when does our office lease expire? Where is that slide from last year's product launch? ChatchipT can't tell you because it's not connected to your stuff. And, you know, and then co-pilot doesn't know your Slack and Gemini doesn't know about your Salesforce and so that's where a dash comes in to build this like universal context layer and the front end is really around search and in an AI assistant because that's what people understand but here's but we're like this is a natural evolution for us

Dropbox has always been about organizing and sharing your information or like organizing sharing your most important information connecting to every ecosystem um being trusted having this track record of reliability and security okay how can we what what is the manifestation of AI in our world that actually makes sense and whereas there a new problem that hasn't been solved. I think that's just like the perfect strategy for you right now because I we had this like search was great and then we wound up generating so much data that search I personally not a judgment on you particularly but across all of my services whether it's i message Gmail we talk about all the time it's not to hate on you this is a Nate this is a technology wide thing search got really slow and and not

is accurate and it would there were so many cookies that it was picking up like it would just get confused and then we got like gpg5 deep research like the thing that can go work for 20 minutes to get you exactly what you need and it's like okay now we need to actually bring these two things together and get really performance something in the middle and then size them and you see this with the model router in the in the consumer product but to actually bring something like this in the in the business context makes so much so much sense so i love that the pitch is not is not as i s i for your your documents. You know, it's like, hey. I mean, we're excited

about that too eventually. But eventually if that's, you know, in self-driving, they have like level five full autonomy, like totally self-driving, human out of the loop. But a lot of the commercial value gets created at like the level one, level two. Like, all right, let's give people a working search box. Let's actually give them AI that actually knows about their work.

These are going to be the big businesses that get built along the way to that, you know, super intelligence. Yep. Zuming out and kind of going away from what's happening at the product level, like what is your updated kind of strategy around running

the business and capital allocation? I know you're the single largest shareholder somewhere around 20%. You've been buying pack a bunch of shares, but like what is your, what is like the strategy and kind of pitch on that front? Well, mainly investing for growth.

I mean, Jobbox has always been a pretty profitable business and we took a lot of the consumer internet playbook in the beginning and built these like self-serve, viral product-led motion that was able to scale to millions of, or hundreds of millions of people, millions of businesses. We have half a million paying businesses on Dropbox, two and a half billion in revenue. But, you know, the new, yeah, there we go. Hit that gong, gone. Yeah, we got to hit the actual. Yeah. For two and a half billion of revenue. Creating product-led growth. We get excited about big numbers. The godfather. Are you the godfather of product-led growth? Is that

fair to say? I don't think I'm allowed to call myself. Okay, well, I'm allowed to call. I'm calling you the godfather of product-led growth. No, no. I mean, if you, if anyone listening is not familiar with the Dropbox playbook, like, please go study it. It is a clinic for value creation. It's a fantastic story. Yeah, and you know, we're doing that again. We're running a lot of the same playbook with Dash. And I talk a little about search and, um, and AI, the sort of AI chat piece. But we're also just thinking very fundamentally about like all the things we've kind of lost as We went from kind of the file and PC world into the browser and the cloud. And it's not just search or AI.

There's even just the concept of organizing things as you were talking about. People are like somehow we all got convinced that searching for things is like a substitute for organizing things. And it's just not really true in that, you know, all along the way we had files have folders, songs have playlist, but you think like links have, right? There's no like container, like a collection of, there's no way to like have a collection of mixed format stuff. If you have like a Google doc and a 10 gig 4K video and an air table, there's no way to so organize. So we're, we have something called stacks probably about to show up on this video.

That does that. But yeah, I mean, just looking at these very basic problems hidden in plain sight and, you know, you give people a search box that works, let people that talk to all their stuff in natural language, organize their stuff for them. you know, go beyond documents to organize your images and videos. And so a lot of ways that where I'm putting our capital is just building the version of Dropbox that I would want to have today, which is, and Dash's step one in that direction. Yeah, and there's, I mean, we've covered a number of companies that have been going after Enterprise Search, and it feels like you were, and many of them

have been able to achieve pretty wild valuations in a short period of time. But of course, you're not asleep at the wheel thinking, I don't want to dominate that market too. So it's awesome. Yeah. And then I think the big thing our customers really want, or where Dash fits in there versus Glean or some other companies, is like you don't have to spend six months and 50 grand to get started. And so one of the things we're launching today is like a truly self-served version of Dash

where you can just download it, get your team up on running, link your apps and just go. And that's something I think that's really been. because there's a lot of, you know, there's a bit of a knife fight in the enterprise around a lot of different things. But then we look at any, most of our customers in the S&B segment or lower mid market, it's a huge swath of the market has no options. And so we think it took a lot longer because it's like hard to make these things totally self-serve. But that's what we've done with Dash. And again, it's sort of like, it's the version of Dropbox I would build for today's context. Fantastic. Very cool. We won't keep you

any longer, obviously you're very busy. We really appreciate you. Yeah, congrats to the whole team on the launch. Yeah, I appreciate it. And we're super proud of it. And next time, come on in person, come hang out in the Ultram. And put on a growth clinic. I'm sure a lot of people would benefit from learning some of the story because... From the godfather himself. Yeah, it's a fantastic one. The godfather. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Great hangager. Have a great for you. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Adam Fry from Open A.I. That rhymes. I like that. The product lead for ChatchapT Atlas. We're diving into the browser wars. The new web browser from OpenAI had a phenomenal response. I don't know if you saw how many folks who saw the YouTube video. I think it has over a million views now. But we will talk to Adam Frye about it. Welcome to the stream Adam. How are you doing? Welcome. Doing very well. Nice to meet you. Busy, busy couple days for you. Yeah, it's been a bit of a whirlwind. I think just like you said, there's been such a big outpour of a reaction.

We're so excited to see the reaction and so excited that people get to use Chat Chapti Atlas now. This is not GPU constrained at all, right? Like, I mean, obviously it's like it interfaces with your core pool of GPUs, but it's not like a new, an entirely new provision of GPUs, right? Yeah, that's right. So, you know, it's available to everyone. Yeah. So chat GPT Atlas, you can go to the download link.

You can download it. It's available free, plus, pro, everyone. You know, the agent part of it, which I know you guys were savvy about, and we've talked to our colleagues before, you know, that is more compute intensive. And so if you use some of the more advanced features of ChatGPT Atlas, where you ask Chat ChatsypT to go do things, that can be more GPU intensive for our paid users, for sure.

Is there an incentive to set people? I saw a screenshot, but you never know what's real anymore, that if you set Atlas as your default, you can increase your chat chitpt subscription limits. Is there some sort of incentive? We were just talking to Drew from Dropbox about, you know, product-led growth, how you actually, you know, increase customer adoption. Is there something going on there that you can tell us about? For sure.

So, you know, chat chattchapit Atlas is, you know, it's a browser. And that's sort of at the core of what you do every day. It's sort of your operating system for your life, whether it's personal or at work. And so, you know, part of that is. is we wanted to really, we felt like the more people use it, you sort of discover these AI features. I think you guys have talked about this a lot in your show,

but this new generation of browsers, there's a lot to discover. You have to learn how to use Chat Chabit in your normal workflow. And so we've really wanted to incentivize to people to really give it a shot. And the best part of these new browsers is using Chat Chabit, everywhere you go across the web.

And so one of the things that we did to start this off was, if you give it a shot for a week as a default browser, you can sort of extend your limits. It really allow you to test out all those AI features. That's cool. What was, was it always obvious that ChatGPT would build a standalone browser, or was there somewhat of a debate internally?

I always felt like ChatGPT was a web browser, right? It felt like it was browsing the web on my behalf and serving it up in an interface, and so it feels like, it almost feels like this is the second browser that you guys are doing, but you're going and building something that looks more like a traditional browser. Yeah. It's such a good point. There's that great stat of, you know, if you ask people off the street, you know, what browser do you use? Most people actually don't even know what browser that they use because the concept doesn't always make sense.

Yep. And so, you know, it wasn't obvious, but what it really started from was a very specific user insight. You know, we were seeing, you know, you guys probably felt this when you use chatchipt, but you're on chatchapit.com. You're in a million tabs. You're doing a whole bunch of other stuff. You're in your docs. You're planning for your next show. And you're like copying and pasting back and forth

between ChatGBT and all the things you're doing. And so we just sort of sat back and said, you know, if Chat Chapti is going to be more and more helpful for you over time and people are going to rely on it more for the work that they do, for their personal life, it has to be able to coexist where you're doing that work. And that's what the browser is, is where you're doing your work. And so we said, how can we actually bring Chat Chats.

Chachapit into that when you invite it in to actually have the context of what you're working on. And I think that that spark of an insight was really, once you believe that, we were like, oh yeah, building Chachapitia Atlas is, of course we've got to do that. How are you guys thinking about what success looks like with the product over the next few months? I think you have an immense amount of pressure, obviously, that the Chatsuptu retention data was flowing around the internet over the last time. It's kind of hard to fast follow that because if you, You set the bar here.

But how are you thinking about it? And then I kind of have a follow-up question around. You have hundreds of millions of happy active users that you can be porting over to Atlas over time. But maybe first, like, yeah, what does success look like in the first weeks and months? Yeah, great question. So the start is, we think of it as a multi-year journey, right? People have been using browsers forever. and probably your existing one you've been using for 10, 20 years.

And so it's, you know, building a browser is sort of like we joke. It's like you're moving around the furniture in someone's home. You know, you know exactly where this is, you know exactly where that is. And so change is going to take time. So we measure success over the long run. We want to be as helpful to our users as possible. But in the short term, you know, we're focused on retention. You know, we're focused on for the people who are giving it a shot,

which is a lot of people, because people are really excited about this. you know, are they sticking with it and, you know, are they loving it? Are they sort of diving in deeper to using chat throughout, you know, as they browse the web to get advice on whatever they're working on as they go? And if we see those signals, which we're starting to see, that's when we sort of, you know, pour on the fire and sort of grow it and grow it. So short-term retention, but we also understand this is a long-term game for browsers and, you know, we're investing heavily for a long time in it. Are you thinking about a mobile version? We are bringing experiences Atlas to mobile and to Windows. And so the team is furiously working on it. We want to bring it to as many people as we possibly can. That's why we brought it to all of our free users, all of our paid, all of our pro right away globally. We think we've got a great browser.

We're really excited for people to keep using it. Very fun. Yeah, it's going to be big shoes to fill since Sora rocketed straight to the top of the app store when you go live on there. I'm sure it will be. I think Adam can take it to the top again. I love it. I'm a believer. Yeah.

I love the framing of it being like a longer journey. Like it just does seem like there's not going to be like the Sam Altman stealing GPUs moment for the browser where it just goes viral and everyone's like, I got to check this out, right? It's very hard to like accelerate something that's a productivity tool. And so having that mindset makes a ton of sense. I'm wondering about new. new patterns, new language, new archetypes of features that we might be talking about in a few years after this all rolls out. If you see any glimpses of this, the thing that I'm thinking

about is I was talking to someone on our team about Chrome extensions. And I was thinking about what the extension looks like in the future. And if there's some sort of like, I've prompted an agent to do a certain workflow so many times that then it kind of collapsed. it into some UI and it places it somewhere in the browser and it's like it's almost writing like the custom software like there's you see I'm kind of like painting a bunch of splatter on the canvas but there's something there how do you think about like these new patterns how much will your thumb be on the scale or do you want the community to customize things like where does the line drawn how are you thinking about yeah so there's probably three three big things when I look forward

a couple years that I'm really excited about so the first is you know part of this atlas launch was the agent in your browser where it can take action. It brings up a cursor. It does things for you. I'm really excited for that as it gets better. So it's still early research preview, but it's starting to do tasks where we've seen it actually be helpful in a short amount of time. And I'm really excited for proactivity around that.

Eventually, you can actually suggest, hey, I've already drafted five emails for you. What do you think? You don't even have to task it. And so there's a sort of proactive world of the agents that I think is going to be really, really interesting and valuable for folks. The second is working with developers. I think as it's more computer-to-computer interaction, if you have an agent that you're delegating to to go write a documents or go to a website, those websites will evolve to work

better with a software that is actually going and clicking around. And we just are sort of scratching the surface. We're teaching these computers to click around the way that we have. But I think eventually the internet and website will evolve to co-work with agents to make things more productive for everyone. And then the third is, you know, I think eventually models will be really good to create their own sort of applications within the browser. And so I think there's so many amazing places that this is going to go. And this is just sort of the beginning of this journey.

And I think to Jordy's point earlier, chatubit is already so retentive. If you can bring ChatGBTGBT into the browser like we have with Atlas today, it's already going to be so helpful to your life. And then it's just going to get better from there. Yeah, you guys need to figure out. share any numbers with us? Well, you got to, I was going to say, like, maybe just the number of YouTube videos. I think the, you know, the most recent comp that we have to like a scaled consumer tech

company launching an ambitious product in a super competitive market was, it was meta launching threads. And when there's this early excitement around a product, you can see, you know, massive amount of like downloads. And then people were ready to call threads, you know, basically say like, okay, it's over. like good, nice, good effort, basically. And then meta figured out kind of the right flow to get people to, you know, cultivate like a unique community there, get people moving over there consistently.

And so I would expect to see something similar out of Atlas and that I think a lot of downloads and excitement and usage early. Some people will churn. But you have that massive base of users that you can continue to, you know, show them. Like if they do the right prompt in chat GPT, it's like, you know, I can, do this on your behalf over here if you like, so excited to see how this plays out. Yeah, and I think the key thing there is focus to an investment. And I get to speak on behalf of the team that's working on this, but they're over there

working on it right now, just making it better and better. So if you stick with it and you look at the small signals, the small paper cuts that people are telling you about, we just keep filling them, keep getting better. That's when your retention goes up. That's when people really enjoy your product. So the launch is one thing. We couldn't be more excited. the reception to your question has been immense, lots of downloads, but not sharing any numbers

today. But, you know, it's really about do people stick around, and we have to keep working on that to earn that from people. Yeah, totally. Makes it sense. Well, we'll hit the gong once you're charting. Okay. I was ready to go. He was ready to go. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for breaking it down. And congratulations on the launch. Yeah, this is great. Thank you guys for having me on. It's such a blast. Appreciate it. Awesome. It's a great time. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Our next guest is Ian Rogers from Ledger. He believes he's already in the Restream waiting room.

Ryan in the chat, I have to address it. Well, Taylor says he laughs and says, it's a good chromium wrapper, sir. I think, I think big things have small beginnings. The chromium rapper company of California. No, I think that they have the incredible advantage of being able to have a massive user base and get people over there, continue to iterate.

You know what else is crazy? I mean the VS code story. Like, like, the browser wars look a lot less crazy when you think about what happened to VS code, open source code editor. You get Winsurf, you get cursor. Like, people really did build serious businesses off of those. Anyway, we can talk about that more later. For now, we have Ian Rogers from Ledger in the Restream wedding room. Let's bring him into the TBPN Ultradrome.

How are you doing? Welcome. I'm good. How are you guys? We're fantastic. We're fantastic. We're fantastic. night here in it in Paris.

Oh, thank you so much for staying up for us. You're looking quite sharp in that jacket too. You look great. You know, I was thinking, I was like, wow, well, I just came from, we've had a big day today when there's a party happening at the ledger offices, and I just came from that. So this is what I was wearing. And I'm like, wait, I'm in my living room. Should I put my pajamas on?

What's appropriate here? But, you know, you guys are always dressed sharp, so I thought, you know what, I'll just keep the jacket on. You know, even though it feels a little out of place in my living room, I got to be honest. I did not think that this week we'd be talking to someone. in Paris about security. Tell us what Ledger does. How are you going to say,

are you going to store my valuables reliably? Not focus on Royal Jewel, unfortunately. Otherwise, they may not have had an issue. By the way, by the way, I had coffee at Ledger with a number two from the Louvre last Tuesday morning.

I was asking him like, you know, what's it like to tell me about the job? And it's, you know, pretty, pretty mellow, long term. We think long term horizons, these sort of thing. Wow. That job got a lot more interesting over the weekend.

But anyway, yeah. How do you introduce the company now? Give us the general update. So Ledger's been around for 11 years, which is a very long time in the world of crypto, but really always doing the same thing. You know, it started with this simple idea that we have these amazing devices, phones and computers, but they were meant to share information, not protect value, you know, fundamentally. And if we're going to have digital value in our lives,

and especially if kind of the main invention of this new digital value, Bitcoin, et cetera, is permissionless money, well, then you have self-custody. And if self-custody, then security is paramount. So let's use secure element chips to protect private keys. And that started with really one-purpose Bitcoin. But then we've had much more cryptocurrency. But actually the fact is you can use that same. device to secure anything. So pass keys, identity. We live increasingly digital lives and proof is

increasingly important and therefore security. So the other interesting thing about the way, if you think about it, the technology and where it comes from, it's this smart card technology. So it's the same chip that's in your credit card or your passport, but where your credit card protects the secrets of the bank and your passport protects the secrets of the government, right, from you because you have it in your possession. and you're not supposed to hack it. This is using that same technology to protect the secrets of the user

or of the consumer, which is pretty powerful. Especially, I mean, I was listening to your interview about OpenAI, going into a world of agentic AI. We will need to prove our humanness. It would be nice if we could own our own preferences and then federate them to the apps that we use. And I'm not sure I want to shove my credit card into that agent.

I'd rather it asked me before it booked the flight. You know, like, here's the info. Would you like to verify this transaction on a secure screen? Yes, I would. Thank you. You know, so it's that. And today we announced a new product, but that's what we've been doing for a few years now. Yeah, what's different about the new product?

I feel like Ledgers, like, it feels like something in the way it's like great idea, solved. And so I'm interested to know what's happening with like the iteration cycle. Yeah. So we have this product that people are very familiar with, the ledger nano, which is it's just like the swivel. It folds out. You've seen it. Which, you know, and if it's kind of the Air Jordan of crypto, like if somebody needs a physical representation of crypto, they include a picture of the ledger in it. But with Tony Fidel, who is, you know, the founder of the podfather.

He created the iPod and co-invented the iPhone and founded Nest. I mean, you guys will appreciate this. When I started this job, I told Tony, I said, yeah, I'm going to run the consumer business for Ledger. And he said, there is no consumer business. That business is business to geek. Your job is to make a consumer business, right? And so we started making these secure touchscreen devices.

So he designed one that's beautiful. It's called Ledger Stacks. It's the world's first curved e-ink display. So where a Kindle screen is silicon on glass, this is an organic substrate on plastic, and you get this like five-millimeter curve. And, you know, it's Tony. He can envision the circuit board and the billboard at the same time. But that screen first ever, and first product to have an organic TFT took longer than we thought,

and the screen ended up costing more than we thought. And then the product is in market for a higher price than we had hoped for. So we built a, that retail is at $3.99. And then we built another one. It's a beautiful device called Ledger Flex. steel case, really nice e-ink screen, but that clocked in it 249. And what we really wanted to do was to do this secure touchscreen, but at the price of a nano-X, which is, which is, you know, one of our most popular models of all time. So this is the one that we introduced today. This is, this is the

ledger. This is the nanogen 5. And this is on sale today for 179. So here you can see what the you know what the box looks like and that's what we that's what we did today the other thing we did today is announced a bunch of features in the software because really i mean you know the point kind to the point you were making earlier it's not about hardware it's about what can you do with it you know and and you know this these these devices they started as one thing this long-term investment asset you know bitcoin that was what it was for but now you it's all assets because it's you know tokenized, you know, RWA's, tokenized stocks. It's also, you know, a yield-bearing savings account with stable coins these days.

And it's a spending account as well because we have a credit card that's a, well, it's actually a debit card, a crypto debit card that pays Bitcoin rewards. So it's so much more, you know, you can do, we support 10,000 tokens, you know, 100% of the top 100 tokens. So it's really, you know, it's a, it's a financial tool in your, in your, in your, your pocket and a secure one, which is what your phone is not. Talk a little bit more. I love how many different, like, really thinking about the full suite and just building

these like purpose-built devices for different use cases. Talk about, I guess, more you mentioned earlier if you have agents operating in the world on your behalf, specifically online, like how you guys are thinking and kind of even timeline there, because I think this is top of mind for a lot of people. that are realizing, like, okay, I'm going to have a browser that's not just like a window into the web and a way for me to enter into forms, but it'll be acting on my behalf. And if it's going to be like moving money or doing anything else or submitting my information somewhere, like I want to have more, you know, real control over that. So I guess wanted to kind of hear more about how you guys

are thinking about that opportunity in the context of Ledger's business. Yeah, I mean, I guess the way I think about it all in context, right? What was the, internet really two computers could talk to each other we get this revolution of information what is blockchain well blockchain is the ability to um to issue and trade really right so i can and i can i can we talk about scarcity but it's really about issuance and and trading you know the kind of what's the the core building block and then you know with with AI we have you know super intelligence and ultimately things that we can delegate tasks to that will act on our behalf but if they're going to act on our half, then they have to represent us out there, right? And also, when we're interacting with

other people, we need to know who it is we're interacting with. And, you know, so also, I think those things need to be, you know, machine readable. So interestingly, in both cases, you're talking about tokens, right? We talk about eating tokens in the case of AI, and we talk about issuing tokens in the case of crypto. But what we're really talking, what we mean when we say those things is we're talking about things that are machine readable and machine. translatable. So I think that, you know, I think proof is actually a really important word to consider here. You know, how do you know this is me talking? How do you know these are the words that are coming out of this microphone? I think proof is going to become increasingly important.

We already have it and a lot of companies are like trying to take this challenge head on. You know, Reddit is trying to know that someone's not a bot on the other side. You know, dating sites, Match.com has a big effort to try to know that someone's. So how, how? exactly are you doing that and who are you trusting so I think trust brokers will become pretty important in the future you know like if I had I could if I said like oh yeah here's a here's a war hall print and you'd be like okay well maybe it is you know but if Christie said it's a warhol you'd be like yeah it probably is they probably did the work and that that's the same thing that we have in our lives with things like driver's licenses

you know it's it's difficult to get a driver's license it's easy to read one you know And I think we'll have a lot of those kinds of things where there's a trust broker. That trust broker will issue a token that says, you know, not only am I a human, but I'm a unique human. This token matches, you know, matches a passport, one passport,

not multiple passports. And then, you know, and then a machine readable way, in a machine readable way, you know, we'll be able to kind of do a handshake where it's like, oh, yeah, that's a real person. And you could use that in, you know, any context, Twitter, YouTube,

or X YouTube, et cetera, right? And so I think that these kinds of, kinds of, you know, this is like the super basic version. You know, the more, the only slightly more complex version is that agent that they were talking about earlier in my browser, you know, it's going to go book me a flight to Miami. Well, how? Have I given it my Delta login? Did I give it my credit card information? Like, you know, right now we live in this world where kind of our identity is locked behind all of these login password combinations across thousands of websites. there's no need for that.

All of that data could be owned by the individual, just like we own our passport and our driver's license and other things. And then it's federated to those applications as needed. It's really a much, it's more scalable, it's more secure, it's a much better, and it's less trust. I think we're already, you know,

I mean, I haven't installed the opening eye browser yet, and I'm like, wow, do I really? They've already got so much. I have an idea. I have an idea. bring a giant gong that you can store bitcoin what about that what about that the massive gong that you keep in your vault in your basement and you can store

bitcoin on it you can smash it every time you want it you could actually probably just sneak a little ledger nano up in the gong and that would work fine but i want the full gong i was holding back i was ready to tell you guys i was ready to tell you guys yeah give us some numbers I was going to say approximately 20% of all crypto is protected by ledger devices. Yes. I was like, what can I give you that's worthy of a gong? That's insane. That's insane.

You guys probably, yeah, you got two hits. We're running over. The last thing I wanted to ask, what's the Parisian crypto scene like? It sounds cool and you seem really cool, but what's it like on the ground? Thanks. I have to say the ledger party tonight was crazy. I barely escaped from there because there were just people in the street, you know, going, can I get in? No, it's, it really, it's interesting here. I moved here 10 years ago. I moved here 10 years ago to work for LVMH.

And a lot, I mean, I really, you know, I moved to L.A. in 95, and it felt, you know, like it was a million miles away from Silicon Valley at that time. You know what I mean? But then over time, it kind of grew into something that, you know, we had a MySpace. We had a Snapchat. We had a, you know, like, L.A. kind of came into its own. And you feel the same thing here. Over 10 years, you know, like, it's still France.

And France is not America. when it comes to startups, that's for sure. But they've really, I mean, there's so much going on here. It's really fun. Get over here. Let's do this. We'll give you the proper tool. I refuse. I refuse. I'm not leaving America. I'm sorry. Won't leave our borders, but I will. I'll take you up on that. Okay, cool. Come on over anytime.

John have a passport? He does. Unfortunately, yes. Yeah, he does, but he doesn't like to use it. Otherwise, I can say no to every international invitation. You go, John, come over here. we got seas and lakes and mountains. He's like, we got seas and lakes and mountains over here.

Yeah. Do they got the Indianapolis 500 over there? Do they got the Kentucky Derby over there? No, I am, by the way, I am from Indiana. No way. And you can, and this, I'll give you a fun fact. Kid Rock is on record saying the only reason I would go to France is to visit Ian. So maybe, John, you'd come.

Wow. Oh, that's lore. That's deep lore. That's deep lore. Amazing. Ian, great to meet you. Congrats to the whole team on the launch. And thank you for securing.

you're having a song. I'm really 20% of all digital assets. Yes, thank you for your service. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. I will see again. Our next guest, Molly from Knox,

is already in the Restream waiting room. We're going to bring her in and ask her how she's going to let you interface with both iMessage and WhatsApp at the same time. Do I have that correct? Yes. So this is like a total moonshot company.

This is harder than colonizing Mars. This is trying to get Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg. To play nice. How are you possibly going to pull this off? Yeah. Message interoperability has been one of the problems that just people have talked about for a while. I think the way that we do it is we have this insight where if you layer onto people's computers and you don't distribute within the app store, we have more interesting things

that you could do. And so it's actually possible to do exactly what we want to do here, which is connect IMessage and WhatsApp together. Yeah. So I imagine that like if I was super, super hardcore, I could have like a Mac mini. that's running with literally iMessage and WhatsApp open and an agent that's clicking and screen scraping and uploading to a database

and then surfacing that in an app. And it's gonna be very hard for WhatsApp and IMessage to shut me down if I'm doing that. But that's a very prosumer. You need your own computer. How far are you from there to the actual product? What's interesting is the first version of the product was effectively a cloud server,

that we would ask people to log in, so give us their iCloud details to log into, which, you know, Trey has a funny story about this. But at a certain point, I think you realize that it's just not the most effective and the right way to do it. It's not the perfect answer.

And so because it feels inelegant, there's a better way, which is what you described, essentially, if you can insert mouse clicks and be indistinguishable from a human from the OS level, so Apple can't tell that you're a human

versus you're automating your computer, it's over. It's like, okay, great. That's where you want to be. So we've thought a lot about that question. And yeah, certainly some of the features sort of play with that aspect. I mean, do you have to like message the prosumer nature? Do you think that there's a world where you can get big enough that then you exert enough leverage over the platforms that they have to play nice with you? Like, is that the long term goal to be able to walk into Cooperino and Menlo? low park and say like, look, like, there are going to be millions of people that are upset if you shut off my API access. So let's make this easier for everyone. Yeah. I think we already see it moving in one direction with RCS. It's probably going to continue moving that way. So that would be amazing. On the pro semer thing, I think it just comes down to regulation and rights and what you can lobby for. So. Yeah. How solid, how important do you think IMS is to Apple's like position?

Because recently, we've just come to this, like, weird realization that it's like my, it's my number one social network. It's like how I plan my social life, my family life, my friends, I'm sure you're the same way. I have group chats with business friends. And all the social platforms are like where I consume news and content and, like, people that are like friendly acquaintances, but mostly, like, my social network is I message. And that feels like they're going to be able to charge whatever they want for me to keep this. that every year when they release a new iPhone. So do you, do you buy that thesis as well that it's very important to Apple's position in the market? I think it's hands down the most important factor as to why people are buying iPhones because no one wants to be the icky green bubble in the

group chat where all of a sudden nothing works in the group chat and things are delayed and just disgustingly, you know, design. So at a certain point, you don't want to be that guy. So you just heard mentality and sheep into buying an iPhone. But I think a larger point here is like, I think a larger point here is it's just like when you receive a blue bubble from someone, there's already this. But it's preemptive. Okay. Another farm. This is, wait, sorry, we're trying to build out the ultimate farm analogy for attack because you have, you have the trough, the slop trough.

You have people who are goaded. But then you have people who are sheep. And so, you just helped us create a new link in the chain and the diagram. But anyway, sorry. Goats. Goats need sheep, you know. Yes. What is a goat without a sheep to contrast with?

Sorry. How is the actual product launch going? The rollout, are you in beta? Is it hand-holding customers on? Are you general availability? It's really good, yeah. So it's general availability. Anyone can download it right now, at least on Mac.

And then if they want iOS, they can request access through me. So we have been getting a lot of people today, just going on. The onboarding experience is mind-blowing. It just tells you your life recounted through you through, you know, all the conversations and top people that you've met. And what's funny is I was texting Ben before this, trying to coordinate, like, logistics. And I found out that my messages suddenly turned green. And it was because I hit a quota limit, because this morning I sent out, I think, 3,000 messages to people all in my one-on-one group chats like, hey guys, can you help me, you know, post about this and and help me support here.

And yeah, so I guess I realized what the ceiling is on the rate limit. Oh, that's always a good sign. I'm wondering if I'm going to get rate rate limited on my inbox. I have 5,004 unread text right now. Well, one of our friends, one of our friends, Wilmanianitis has been hosting up that desire for Bloomberg for private markets. And he kind of outlined it as, uh, I'm message plus signal and Axe and Twitter as the main one. So have you thought about that and what are the nuances of like how hostile each API is basically is what I'm looking for, like a state of the state of affairs? Yeah, I saw, I think it was Will's tweet. I saw it and I thought it was interesting. On our roadmap, we have Slack and Discord, maybe email or a few other messaging

platforms, but I think the big thing is actually 80% of your messages come through. It's not an equivalent, right, like 2020, it's like mostly people are on one thing. And then they'll text this secondary platform for a specific group of people in a niche. And then another maybe 5% of the time. And so I get the sense that it's mostly okay to just focus on IMessage and WhatsApp right now. And then you can add integrations later or even have the community help you build these integrations. But there are private API. and I mean, Telegram API is easy and some other ways that you can, yeah.

Yeah, I really do wonder about that because it feels like... Yeah, to me, to me it feels like the more platforms you add, obviously, the more valuable it is. Yeah. Because at two, like I probably get 80% of my text on I message, 10% or maybe 5% on WhatsApp, 5% signal.

No, it's definitely a power law. Like, I message is the most important. I wouldn't even put WhatsApp, I would put WhatsApp like 4%. or fifth for me personally. It would go, I message, then probably X DMs, then maybe Instagram DMs, then I would even put signal above WhatsApp. But the point is that like a one app to rule them all, like if it's going to be a standard

in my life, that's like the one unifying interface, like I want it to be across everything, I think, the control plane. But I don't know. There's a lot of, with all these like unified personal assistance stuff, there's a lot of, you know, expressed preferences versus revealed preferences. Like, people might actually use it a different way than they say they want to use it. But I don't know. It's going to be a fun, fun building process for you. So I'm very excited. Yeah, it'll be cool to see the longitudinal access come into, right? Because like our thread on X will be different from our thread on email will

be different from our thread. I message. You can just solve that problem of context coming in from all these different places. That would be huge for both people and companies. So that's going to be really exciting. Have you learned anything from the previous attempts at this, like the beepers of the world? Yeah, you definitely don't want to poke the bear and do the thing that feels not right and ineligent for too long. I think the first launch we had, which was sort of a semi-private beta launch in February, we had a lot of people come on and tell us, hey, Apple's watching and, you know, maybe have issues with iMessage. I think the main thing is just be nimble and agile and when APIs change that we know that have changed,

we just automatically update, right, day of four hours later, a new build is out. And so nothing really breaks as long as you are on the system all the time. Keep shipping. I mean, four hours in text message land is a long time for some people. If they're like, I didn't get the message from my wife that I need to pick up the kids or something like that does seem like a tall order. But that's why they invented 996 or 002 as the one.

Street Journal put it more recently, which is basically no time. I think everyone, everyone has this problem. It's very hard to create an elegant solution. But if you do, it will be incredibly valuable. Yeah. Well, good luck to you. I don't know if we lost the video. But thank you so much for stopping by. We will talk to you soon and have a great rest of your day. Congratulations. Sorry, that was kind of a crazy ending. But we have Johnny Dwyer from Moulon Space, his second time on the show. And we had a great, we actually played a clip from our previous interview yesterday. And we're very excited to talk to him both about what's going on in his world. But I'll welcome him to the show.

Now, how are you doing, Johnny? Good to see you. Good to see you guys again. Welcome back. Thanks so much. We enjoyed the previous guest segment immensely. We played a clip from that segment yesterday. And we were trying to, yeah, we were trying to contextualize space data centers.

We're actually having the founder of the space data center company come back on the show to defend what's going on, since a lot of people are skeptical. Where do you sit on it now? This all feels like I'm not ready to call it even a binary. I think we should be discussing timelines more than will it ever happen. But how are you thinking about space data center? Yeah. I mean, I think it's like many things, it's a win, not if. You know, is it a year from now?

Is it 10 years from now? Is it 20 years from now? I don't know, but I think as you think about generally the future of the planet and where we're going on it, more and more stuff is going to move to space. And so I think it's inevitable at some level that we will have large-scale IT infrastructure in space. I mean, you know, we're probably going to talk about our deal with Starlink in a minute. And that's an example of a place where I think we're starting to really see what I would call truly modern IT infrastructure, starting to show up in space.

And I think it's inevitable that data centers will go there as well. A lot depends, I think, obviously, on the fundamentals of what is going to drive the need for future data center capacity, right? And how some of those needs are met on Earth and how that would compare to deploying things in space. I think if you ask anybody even what a terrestrial data center will look like in five years, they're probably not going to give you a real confident answer. So I think trying to predict exactly what that's going to look like in space is hard to do right now. Absolutely. What more can you say about this new partnership? Well, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the things we like to think we're doing it,

you know, is really pulling a lot of the aerospace industry kicking and screaming out of the Stone Age. And, you know, you think about a lot of the stuff that's circling the Earth right now. And it's still connected with things that look like dial-up modems, frankly. I mean, I think we're kind of in an era where a lot of the space technology is a few generations behind what we take for granted on Earth. And this partnership with SpaceX is now going to give our satellites, things that look a lot more like an always-on-fiber or broadband connection rather than a dial-up connection.

And so that's going to completely unlock, you know, a tremendous set of things that have been very difficult or impossible to do in space historically, much as, you know, Starlink has demonstrated with terrestrial use cases. You know, an example that I'm, you know, we're all very excited about at Neon is we've been working on this global wildfire. constellation for the last several years. This will eventually be a 50-plus satellite constellation that will get 20-minute global revisit latency to detect and track wildfires from the earliest

stages of their life cycle all the way through to help decision makers on the ground make better decisions. And a really critical piece of making that system work well is getting that data back to people that are making decisions at very low latency. These satellites produce enormous amounts of data. There's going to be 50 of them. So having this kind of fiber connection in the sky is absolutely transformative in terms of being able to deliver a capability that's crucially needed around the world and it has not been possible to date. So I think it's a really good example of what this technology can unlock. Is fiber a metaphor or are you physically putting fiber in the sky somehow? I mean, people are putting data. We have big glass spools and we're

kind of unwinding him behind the family. I mean, we're going to put data massive one gigabyte data centers in space. Like, I wouldn't be that, it doesn't sound that crazy to put a wire up there with a spool and just let it out. Yeah, exactly. So you're not, you're not literally putting fiber in the sky. It's more about connectivity between Starlink satellites, or are you putting up your own satellites that are acting as kind of backhaul between the Starlink satellites? We're basically using Starlink as our backhaul.

So you can think about them as sort of our network in the sky. And then we'll be connecting with SpaceX lasers or laser terminals, they call lasers, into their network and using that network as kind of the backhaul system. So it's not literally unwinding glass fiber guy, but actually the technology is very similar to fiber optic, you know, technology on Earth. And a lot of the same componentry is used. We're just fending the light over these kind of free space optical beams, not over glass fiber. And then who's your customer? Is it someone who has a satellite or a constellation in space that needs to move internet data around while in space?

Or is it more for speed up terrestrial uses in some way or just a... through the Starlink network? So we're building satellites for customers. So our satellites, you know, sort of broad range of customers. You know, one of the customers I mentioned is this, there's a global nonprofit that's funding the work on the fire mission. So ultimately, we're building satellites for them. They're muon satellites that we deploy and operate.

And this will now provide sort of a much faster, lower latency network layer for us to operate those satellites on. Other examples of customers we're working with, you know, we have a customer called Hubble that's doing Bluetooth low energy tracking from space. You can kind of think about like IoT device tracking from space. We have... The company is called Hubble? Yeah, it's called Hubble.

What a confusing name. I know that there was a contact lens company named Hubble, and that kind of made sense because it's like a wildly different market, but if you're up there in space. So I can imagine the commercial use cases for that, right? if you have a lot of hardware out around the world and you want to track it in real time. Is that have like defense applications as well?

Like what are kind of like what's the actual focus there? Yeah. So I don't want to speak for how well. You know, they would better for themselves than I will. They're our customer. But I mean, I think their primary focus is on sort of enterprise and commercial use cases. So, you know, there's millions of asset tracking devices

in the world today that are out tracking, you know, shipping containers and remote facility equipment, things like that. And a lot of those are running on kind of these bespoke and, frankly, very old school satellite networks. That's how they get the data back. And I think Hubble's vision is that, you know, we should be doing the same thing we're doing with consumer devices, which is strapping a nine-cent Bluetooth transponder on anything that's out in the world and then being able to track that thing from space. And so we think there's a lot, you know, I think they believe there are many, many commercial and enterprise applications of that.

There probably are also, you know, government applications of that. I don't want to speak specifically to them, but I think that's, you know, it's a, it's a type, all of these types of technologies, especially with spacecraft in some way are inherently dual use. So there's always going to be use cases in both the commercial and the government sector. Give us the fundraising update. I feel like we missed you around a series B potentially. Do you have news?

What's up? We don't have news. I mean, we raised kind of a two-part series B last year. this year, it's a big round for us. I think it totaled about $140 million. Oh, we got the gone coming. So yeah, we're doing well on the fundraising size. We're well funded. We've got a lot of business coming in. It's been very exciting days around the company. So it's a pretty, pretty exciting path forward right now. We're really just trying to scale the company up a lot. We have a big facility. We're in the Bay Area. We signed a large facility earlier this year. So we'll be

kind of 10xing our production capability, our hardware production capability in the South Bay before the end of the year and then building out a lot of other new technology pieces that we're really excited to talk about as we start to hit space with them. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the progress. And yeah, thanks for breaking all that down for us. Now we know there's not literally fiber cables up in the sky. That's why we asked the dumb questions. We figured it out.

Awesome. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, John. And up next, we have Mike Shabbitt from Traba. We have a video update from him. Let's play that and welcome him to the... Come on. Over. Can we play the little bit of the video that he shared? Let's pull that up and get the update. What's going on? Welcome to the Ultrata. Trauma qualifies thousands of workers for the best methods. Is this your key hero marketing video right now? Describe proper form for lifting heavy packages.

Quick reel just to show all the products that we've built. Sure, sure, sure. Because in staffing, there's so many different manual workflows. This video just basically breaks it down with how it all comes together. Okay. Very cool. How old is the company now? We're four years old.

Four years old. Are you still in New York? We're still in New York. Manhattan? Yep, all 150 of us. 150 now. Wow, okay. So I, I toured the, when did I come by and do an interview with you?

That was maybe like two years ago or so? Across the street. You were across the street to a big of a big. across the street. Okay. So yeah, take us through the basics of like the, the problem, the market. It's a highly fragmented market. But what's the, what's the high level like 140 characters that you describe trauma? Yeah. So basically millions of workers across the country work in industrial staffing and then hundreds of billions of dollars get spent on staffing. But if you break it apart, it's really just like a highly fragmented industry with like tons of manual OPEX and things like that. So we basically

replace the whole suite with tech, and we provide double the fill rate, better quality workers, and workers within a couple hours versus weeks. Yeah. And the staffing industry in general, I think of it as highly lucrative, but highly fragmented. Is that just generally your experience? Like, I guess to just jump straight forward is like, why build tech startup instead of private equity roll up? Like, you're in a dress shirt. You could go do a P.E. roll up, right? Like, I don't know. ready for it. It's not like you have to do it, the Silicon Valley way. Why are you doing it the Silicon Valley way?

Well, basically, because of the advancements in AI, this never really was able to happen before. But on the staffing end, there's just so much manual work and tons of OPEX. We basically just like from a top to bottom end to end, just have completely redone it with tech. Sure. And that's why building it as a technology company has been so much better. And so that's like when you say AI or tech, you mean like lead scoring basically, understanding who's right for what job, placing them, screening.

Well, it's like a ton of things. So we do the vetting. We actually guide the worker to the shift. There's fraud detection and like essentially follow-ups with the workers. And then as the workers perform shifts, we actually, that feeds into our model. But it's not the AI doing the job. It's always, you're sticking it out for the next decade. Yeah, yeah.

On the back end, the customer doesn't really sit AI on the back end. We're doing all that work. So with a customer sees it just like, an incredible group of people showing up for work every day and helping them out. Did you see the Uber news that Uber drivers are going to be able to do one-off AI tasks? I saw that, yeah. What is your take on that? Do you, have any AI companies approached you where you're like, just, I don't know if I'm

describing the company correctly, but I remember a couple case studies is like, there's a big Taylor Swift concert in town and the organizer might go on Trauma to pull in a bunch of folks really quickly or if it's the rush holiday season and then e-commerce warehouse. I don't want to put you in a box, but those are two examples. Yeah, yeah. Basically like manufacturing, fulfillment, food processing, all those industries just have like crazy volatility in their workforce needs. So we help like smooth that out for that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so my question is, have any AI companies, like reached out to you and said like, hey, you have a big pool of labor. We have a unique use case that we could like actually partner. Yeah, we actually have gotten a few inbound.

companies. We're just like, hey, we need these workers to do all the other things. But right now, we're laser focused on just industrial supply. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So focusing on that, and then we may expand out in the future. Have any humanoid companies come to you and said, like, we'll give you robots, like put them out into the field? Or are they not quite at a level where they actually would be willing to let them do unsupervised activity? Yeah. So I actually, like, see this, how I talk to our customers about this all the time. Right now in, like, when it comes to humanoid robots, they're not quite there yet. But we're going to going to be well positioned to essentially lead that charge when the tech gets a lot better in

about five years or so. Yeah, because you're still going to have the kind of variability in workforce needs, right, where you might need even if you have a hundred robots like in a facility and then suddenly it's rush season and you need to deploy like a hundred more on top of that. It's like where do you get that? Yeah, and then all these workers are going to essentially have to get connected to new earning opportunities. So we'll be able to help them with that. Yeah, it's a little bit of like the narrative violation behind, like, AI taking every job or AI being useless. It's like, I'm pretty sure Amazon is the largest robot operator, but also one of, if not the largest employer as well. And so they're really doing the both robots and humans at scale.

Yeah. Within the facility, it's a lot more dynamic. And a lot of these companies, they have to change things really quickly. So just commit to a certain robotics workflow doesn't work today. which is actually why, if you actually go back to Elon Musk's tweets in like five, six years ago, he actually said he's like, we try to make the Gigafactory all robotics. And then we went back to humans because we couldn't necessarily like get there yet. Yeah, and they had to do a hybrid. Yeah. Talk a little bit about where the structure of the market is going in terms of staffing agencies broadly.

I imagine that like AI and technology generally are like an accelerant to growth, right? You can just onboard people faster, just using all the tools in the mobile toolkit allow you to understand where people are going, placing them, GPS, all this stuff is useful. How does that play out? I mean, I imagine that competitors are going to try and catch up. Are you planning to just out-compete them? Are you looking to eventually get into doing acquisitions? Like, how do you think the long-term plan plays out?

So I was in a staffing conference in Dallas, and it was pretty crazy. Electric. That's why we do it. Literally this year everyone is like, we are getting disrupted, and it's coming for us, and they were just talking about how they can't organizationally roll it out. There's just like thousands of people at these organizations that have all these different tasks.

So they actually approached myself and my chief of staff, and they're like, we really want you to help us move into this new age. So when it comes to roll-ups, we're potentially looking at a few acquisitions. And in that case, it would basically be like companies that have really good retention on the business side. so they have customers to spend. But then they're just like, we have terrible OPEX

and just so many manual expenses and we want you to essentially improve these margins and carry it forward. How do you operate the business? You're obviously incredibly aggressive, I'm sure, around growth, but at the same time, like, you also feel like somebody who you're planning to run this business forever, I imagine.

And part of putting yourself in a position to do that is like maintaining good unit economics and just running a great business. How do you balance growth and burn and those factors? We're very thoughtful about capital efficiency with growth. So fortunately in staffing, the margins are actually pretty good to play with. So yeah, we're just like, we're operating in the physical world, so there's so much that's going on,

which is why our team just like works so hard to kind of get in there. There's not like one specific tool that can essentially get cloned. It's like hundreds of thousands of workers that use our app. and like thousands of businesses, so you get those real network effects as you scale up. But yeah, it's basically growth, unit economics, 10x customer experience. That's what we always talk about internally. Yeah. Take a victory lap on the 996 thing.

It is hilarious. I mean, you didn't obviously invent the 996. Yeah, it's not an invented 996. You invented China. Yeah, yeah. You stole it from them or something. But no, I mean, I think you were the first to like really go out there. You were willing to say it when it was.

was like going to essentially get you a little canceled. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you get a little bit canceled. And I think it was an interesting framing for the brand of Traba to say, look, we're not trying to create super intelligence. We're not trying to cure cancer. We've just found a great business that delivers value to customers, delivers value to our clients.

You know, everyone, all the parties are happy with this. What's going on here? And so we're going to work really, really hard. What was the actual journey of the, you know, get a little canceled? Did that ever really manifest? Were people ever actually mad at you? And then now, what are you seeing out there? Has everyone else adopted this?

Are they taking it further? Or can they take it too far? Just walk me through your thing. Yeah, I think it really has to go into what the goal of the company is. So we are a very ambitious company. We want to be a massive publicly traded company. And if you work backwards from any very successful company, the early team was just like all in.

It was their number one priority. Always. So we basically were like, we did this thing called anti-selling. We're like, look, we're going to get people working in person with us. We're going to go build some awesome stuff. And if you're not interested in making this your number one thing, then that's all good. But it created something really great internally because every single person is just like, it's like a team sport. Everyone's in it together.

Yeah. And we're all trying to create leverage on the time that we've done. So make a lot of time. Yeah, I think there's something underrated about this where people have been mapping like the missionary versus mercenary thing onto just how sci-fi the project is. And they assume, like, if you're working on something sci-fi, everyone's a missionary. And if you're working on something that's maybe just a little bit more tractable of a business problem, everyone's a mercenary.

And I think that that's just not true at all. It's not true. Like, we see it here. Like, we're building like a media company. But I feel like everyone, we have a really great culture. Everyone's really bought in. everyone is thinking creatively and working really hard and getting a ton of reward. And at the end of the tunnel is not time travel machine that takes us to Mars or Cures Cancer.

It's just a show, but we're all happy and aligned on that. And so what has the road been? Where have the difficult moments been in the journey where you've had to kind of re-ignite the flame of missionary? Yeah. So yeah, shout out to your team. awesome they're awesome they agreed to me here and everyone's like so locked in and love what you guys do and I think a big part of that is just you guys being authentic to who you are and look like we're TPPN we're gonna make this it's a show it's a show and everyone gets gets involved in that

with us you know there's like challenges every single week it's just part of building a company and I think some people really they opt into that they're like I'm going to go learn a lot I'm going to work with a great group of people around me the likelihood of success goes up if everyone's equally committed and really bought in on making something awesome. And then people just have a great time. Like they look back and they're like, you remember the war stories in the days where you're like in the Airbnb trying to get the customer. Like this crazy request comes in. You're like, how are we going to do it? And you're really only going to create that if everyone that opts in and joins the company is like that sounds exactly like what I want to do with my life.

Yeah. So we get a lot of ex-athletes because they remember that in sports and college and things like that. Yeah. So it's great. Tell me the story of Uber, your experience there. and then I want the update on how you think about opening markets now, because this is something that not every software company has to do. Like Open AI launches a browser. They don't need to send a team to Dallas. But at Uber you did and at Traba, you have been doing this. So walk me through the best practice for when you're going hand-to-hand combat.

In the software business, it's a tech company, but you still have to deploy a team. Yeah. So operating in the physical world, it's quite different. At Uber, I was a launcher where you essentially drop into a city. You hit a bunch of restaurants on the platform off on the Uber Eats product, and then you have to essentially get the couriers, and then you run a-working-in. Sky-dive in, right? Sky-dive in, sell the restaurants, say we can make you some more money.

What's different with Trava and Uber Eats is that selection, like, people aren't like, okay, I want to work at, like, five different warehouses this week. They actually are fine with working in this, like, middle ground. We're like, I'm going to work for three to six months of this one warehouse. Okay, so let's stay. And then maybe I'll switch again. Sure. So our sales cycle is a little bit different where we do have market-specific leaders where people do own a market.

But we go for these big accounts that they want hundreds of workers versus, you know, like three to four people. Yeah. And then the workers kind of like it goes viral because they get their friends. And it's like a very social job and things like that. Yeah, that makes sense. Has the playbook changed all? Are you in every market now? Are you still on the warpath?

Yeah. We're in most markets in the country. We're not in California yet. So I was in Vegas before being here. customers then came over. Yeah. And that's not a capital constraint, right? No, it's actually more just the employment laws in California.

Right now. Making sure you're set up. Yeah, we offer two different ways to work on travel. One is 1099 in which workers can get paid within 30 minutes. And the other is W-2. Sure. But we're very intentional about every market we... Yeah, you want to make sure you check all the boxes.

Yeah. In the U.S. Oh, we forgot to file this form and then it comes back. You don't want any of that. That makes sense. But we're coming. We're coming soon. Let's go.

There we go. Let's go. Yeah, I'm thinking about all the different uses for a flash mob of human labor that we could put to work. How do you, any learnings around like the causes of burnout that you see within your organization, if you're pushing people super hard, that means you want to avoid burnout. I don't get burned out when I'm working on something that I love and I feel like I'm making real progress on it. I feel like burnout can come from not maybe finding meaning in the work or not making progress and running into a dead end over and over. But what's your framework?

And I'm sure CEOs have asked you this of like, okay, if you're pushing your team super hard and you're pushing yourself hard, how do you avoid that? Yeah. So the number one thing is people don't get burned out if they feel like they're winning. Yeah. We try to get people in an environment. They're just winning. So you've got to get the right role, get them some wins into their belt.

It's kind of like in school. If you're like studying nonstop seven days a week and you're getting straight days, you're not really burning out from that. So you're putting them in an environment to actually be successful. And then everyone's got something that they do to kind of like take care of themselves. Like a lot of people, they work out. Like usually at Traba people will work until like seven-ish, hit the gym, come back. Like it's a very healthy culture.

But it's very much like happy, healthy, wealthy is kind of like what people are aiming for. So they're all there together and like, yeah. That's great. How do you think about the, like, how rigid is the 996 thing? Obviously, some people shift that forward backwards. Now there's this article in the Wall Street Journal about zero zero two. What is that? Do you work from midnight to midnight?

You're working 24 hours. You take two hours off a day. I don't know. Is this real? I mean, I can pull up the article because it would be good to get your reaction, but it says AI workers are putting in 100-hour work weeks to win the new techs armor. race. And there's like a 50% chance that this is like, you know, someone trying to get a PR piece to be like, we work even harder than this guy. Yeah. Josh Batson no longer has time

for social media. The AI researchers only comparable dopamine hit this year is on anthropic, Slack, work-paced messaging channels where he explores chatter about colleagues' theories and experiments on large language models and architecture. So he's on a social work platform, socializing, somewhat of a network. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're trying to 996, don't catch your slack time. That's fun. Yeah. Yeah. So the way it plays out actually is like when we first started the company, we were actually like, let's make this a little bit more structural. Now with 150 people, we have all these different types of roles. Yeah. It's more just like you got to be locked in and like make work your number one thing. Totally, totally. But what I will say is you go, we are an in

person company if you're being by Trava at like 830 in the morning or 9.30 p.m. literally any day the week, there will be like people there building really cool stuff. Yeah. And that's pretty awesome because then you can just like show up and build with your friends. Yeah. And people feed off of each other's energy. Yeah, you can't be too dogmatic about it. I feel like, I mean, we both have kids. We're also on the West Coast.

And so we run more of like a 6 a.m. start time. And so we, yeah, we just stack like some extra hours there because then you have. Yeah, that's cute that it really picks up around 830 at Trauma. Oh, yeah. That's why I'm like, wait, oh my gosh. I thought we were intense and then you guys talked about this two, zero zero two. you and I'm like, I'm like calculating the hours. I'm like, man, we like, we have the burnout question and then we're like, yeah.

The zero zero two, it's like, is that in here? I think if you sleep for two hours. Okay. So, so, uh, working zero zero two, the most intense periods for many come while working on models or new products when time working extends beyond the 996 schedule. That stands for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. One startup executive jokingly referred to the schedule as zero zero. or two, meaning midnight to midnight with a two-hour break on weekends.

Yeah, yeah, we don't jump around. I don't think anyone can actually do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're just going to burn out. And like, you need sleep. You actually do need sleep. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

It's more about just like, look, like, are you all in on this? Especially in New York, there's infinite things you could be doing. You just want people to, like, think twice before filling out their social calendars during the week. It's like, look, we're trying to build something epic here. Yeah. And it's awesome to just know that you're going to be around your colleagues. Also, I just feel like there's something about New York City, Manhattan,

where if I would, you would, you know, was at the office late until nine and I get off. Like there's still all the restaurants around. Yeah. Like stuff's going to happen. Whereas in LA or in Pasadena, like older with kids, like I want to be home with the kids, five, six, like, you know, doing dinner. There's something super comfort.

Yeah, that have kind of shifted. But they still probably give it their office. Oh, yeah. Parents look like if you got kids at home, like we definitely have a group of parents at Trobo and they make it work. Shout out to them for sure. Yep. But there's definitely a huge cohort of, you know, people that don't have the kids and

they're like, you know, out the office a little bit more than the parents. Yeah. There's something super comforting building a business if you're working as hard as you possibly can, knowing that lack of hard work is not going to be the reason that you don't, you don't achieve the level of success that you want because if you're people out there, a bunch of people are not pushing themselves as hard as they know they could. And then it's always going to be in the back of their mind of like the whole time building the company.

Yeah. Maybe I worked a little bit harder I would have achieved like, you know, whatever. And then success in a startup, it isn't just. this binary thing where you either get the gold medal or not, there's like different revenue targets you can hit, there's different valuations, different like ways to please customers and things like that. So yeah, it's great to like live a life where you look back and you're like, I gave it absolutely everything I got. There's nothing else I could have done better and like keep pushing forward. Well, that's a good. That's a great place to end it.

Place to end the show. Yeah. Gave it all we got. We gave it all we got. Thanks for hanging out. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We will be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. Sharp Pacific. Have a great evening. Goodbye. Love you. Bye.