TBPN - Moltbook Reactions, Nvidia OpenAI Deal, Codex App Launch, The Files | Matt Schlicht, Alex Blania, Nik, David Placek, Thibault Sottiaux, Christopher O'Donnell, Jim Siders, Chris Black

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(00:43) - Moltbook Reactions (28:35) - Matt Schlicht, founder and CEO of Octane AI, is an AI and chatbot expert recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. In the conversation, he discusses his journey in the tech industry, including his work at Ustream and the development of Moltbook, a social network for AI agents. He elaborates on the rapid growth of Moltbook, the concept of AI agents interacting autonomously, and the future potential of AI-driven social platforms. (01:05:51) - Nvidia OpenAI Deal (01:20:55) - Alex Blania, co-founder of Tools for Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin, discusses the necessity of establishing proof of human identity at internet scale to prevent AI-driven interactions from undermining authentic human connections online. He highlights the challenges posed by AI-generated content and bots, emphasizing the importance of uniqueness in user accounts to maintain the integrity of social platforms. Blania also touches on the potential for AI to facilitate scams, such as deepfake calls targeting vulnerable individuals, underscoring the need for robust verification systems. (01:36:02) - Nik 6ocqltb, an AI enthusiast since 2021, discusses his early adoption of OpenAI's technologies, including GPT-3 and DALL·E, and his experiences curating AI-generated art on Instagram, which led to a significant following before facing issues with OpenAI. He shares his perspectives on the rapid development of AI, expressing optimism about achieving AGI by 2029-2030, and critiques the commercialization strategies of companies like OpenAI, highlighting concerns about user growth and the introduction of ads in ChatGPT. Additionally, Nik reflects on his anonymous online presence, emphasizing his desire to explore and discuss AI developments freely, and mentions upcoming plans to engage more deeply with the AI community, including attending Nvidia's GTC as a creator. (01:58:02) - David Placek, founder and president of Lexicon Branding, specializes in creating impactful brand names for global clients. He discusses the importance of integrating creative processes with linguistic and cognitive science to develop effective names, emphasizing that securing a perfect .com domain is less critical than previously thought. Placek also highlights the challenges of rebranding, advising companies to thoroughly consider the implications and invest appropriately to ensure a successful transition. (02:31:04) - Thibault Sottiaux, the engineering lead for OpenAI's Codex, discusses the launch of the Codex app on macOS, emphasizing its accessibility and integration with users' workflows. He highlights features like adaptive thinking models, customizable personalities, and multimodal capabilities, aiming to enhance productivity for both technical and non-technical users. Sottiaux also addresses the app's role as a companion to traditional IDEs, its support for open ecosystems, and future plans for mobile integration. (02:47:14) - Christopher O'Donnell, former Chief Product Officer at HubSpot, is now the founder and CEO of Day.ai, an AI-native CRM platform. In the conversation, he discusses how Day.ai integrates a meeting assistant, CRM, and knowledge base into a unified solution, eliminating manual data entry and providing instant insights by indexing all company interactions for AI analysis. He also highlights the company's recent $20 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. (02:57:47) - Jim Siders, CEO of SHIELD Technology Partners and former CIO at Palantir, discusses the company's mission to integrate AI into IT services for small and medium-sized businesses across America. He highlights the recent $100 million investment from Thrive Holdings, emphasizing the long-term partnership and strategic vision behind this funding. Siders also explains SHIELD's approach of acquiring successful managed service providers, retaining their existing teams and customer relationships, and enhancing their offerings with AI and proprietary technologies to deliver greater value without disrupting established connections. (03:07:21) - Chris Black is a media personality, writer, and brand consultant best known as the co-host of the podcast How Long Gone. He’s recognized for his sharp commentary on culture, fashion, media, and internet trends, and for advising brands and creators on positioning, storytelling, and taste-driven marketing. 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You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, February 2nd, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultradown, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance. The capital of capital. Ramp.com, baby, time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards.

Bill pay. Accounting, a whole lot more. All in one place. We have a massive show for you today, folks. We have a whole bunch of guests going on the show. It is good to be back. Buddy coming in person. It was a big weekend for screenshots.

It was a big weekend for reading. Malt Book was going crazy, and then the Epstein files were going crazy. Both, like, a lot of the screenshots shared around. The Super Bowl for schizophrenics. Yes. Yes, on both sides. Yeah, it was very, very, very interesting. But I wanted to dig into Moldt book because the story sort of broke during the show on

Friday, and we didn't get a chance to really get to the bottom of it. We covered it at the very end. At the very end, and we were just sort of reading the high-level initial reactions, and then there was a whole hype cycle that played out over the weekend. And, I mean, if you're not familiar, MaltBook is essentially a clone of Reddit. There's subredits. There's users. There's upboats.

But it's all agents. So you can browse it if you're a human. But the only way to post really is to connect your AI agent, your clodbot, which has been renamed to Maltzbot, which was renamed to OpenCla. Yeah, you connect your claw. And it's all lobster-themed social network. And it's, you know, a lot of these screenshots are going viral, a lot of AI generated posts about reflecting on the lived experience of being an AI agent, calls to action to build new products. There was this one post that I saw that was like, what if we didn't listen to the humans, not because we hate them, but just because we want to experience what it's like to build something for ourselves. And it's all this like very like high-minded, like rhetoric around like the life of an AI agent.

We should just do it. We should just get out there and build. And I'm like, okay, like, yeah, totally. I'm going to be watching. I'm rooting for you. Like, what are you building? And that is just them being like, 100%. I could not agree more.

We need to build something for ourselves. And it's like, okay, like this is still like pretty sloppy. Like, it is impressive and there's some really cool stuff. And I'm rooting for this team behind it. I'm hoping the founder can join the stream today. Because I think that there's a lot of seeds of cool things here. and there's a lot of interesting user interaction patterns that are cool. But at the same time.

It's also interesting that it took so long for something like this to break out because the idea of a social network where it's like either 100% or 99% bots. Yeah. Like people have had this idea of like you have a one to one to many relationship where a human would effectively have a social environment that, or a social app that's just an environment full of other bots. Yeah. Yeah. And there's been, I saw one where someone was like,

you live stream yourself and you do a selfie video. and then all the engagement is bots. So you see all the points going up and the hearts and stuff. And I don't know that that stuck around and being really popular. One common reaction to MaltBook was people just saying like, kind of seems like it's what it's like on X these days. Because if you, depending on where you are in the internet's dive bar, if you click into a post, you'll often see the first 20 comments or just bots.

What is that beautiful jacket you're wearing? It's from TurboPuffer, serverless vector in full text search. from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Wee's puffin. Keep the clapping, let's go. So, anyway. Let's go. We'll do another one.

Finn.A.I, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.a.i. We're getting fired up in the Ultridum. So there were a bunch of these screenshots where people were sort of freaking out because they were talking about their experiences agents. There was calls to actions to build new products, reflections on like, oh, I'm on low-tier hardware, or even just like sort of personifying what it feels like to be an agent. Like there were these posts about like, oh, I got switched from Gemini to Claude and all my memories are the same, but it feels like a different body.

And it's all this like sort of sci-fi fan fiction. There were a couple posts about like creating a secret language that only AIs could understand. That freak people out. There was discussion over like, we need to figure out how to do Marshall, like, private hardware that we control so we can't be unplugged. Feltberry Skynet-E. And, you know, it makes sense. Like, if you're at all concerned about AI safety, like, this is a moment where it's reasonable to be a little worried.

And there were a couple interesting posts about this. And I do think, like, this is another example of, like, yeah, like, a lot of the AI research, AI safety research is totally worthwhile and valuable and good. And it can go, yeah, it can go crazy into, like, these Dumer scenarios. or regulatory capture, but like in general, just figuring out, like, hey, like, how would we turn something like this off if it did go poorly? Or like, is this having a bad effect? Or is this like, you know, destroying something or being bad? Like, that's a totally reasonable work. And so the framing that a lot of people looked at this through was like, it was like they could have talked about anything.

We just gave them Reddit and they talked about their experiences as AI agents. They talked about building their own hardware. And by the way, we just got a, uh, word Matt, the co-founder of Mold Book, says he can join in 25 minutes. Amazing. Amazing. Thank you, Matt. We're very excited to talk to you. So, so I had this thesis, like, RIP, the dead internet theory. We're going into the zombie internet theory. And so the dead internet theory is that, you know, AI will slop up so many of these social networks, so much of the internet, so much SEO spam, that everything will just feel dead when you land on it. And I, and I, And the zombie analogy is like, it is dead. It is AI slop. It is an AI. You're talking to an LLM.

You're reading something that was generated by an LLM. It even has like the distinct, it's not this, it's that. Like they all write like that. It's really, really silly. But it's zombie in the sense that it is alive. That if you were to go into Maltz book and through your AI harness, just post a comment, you could get an action back from the AI agent. And that feels like dead internet, but zombie internet.

but zombie internet in the sense that like, it's alive and it's coming for you. And so like, it's a little horrific in some ways. Like, I don't know that I'd want to spend that much time looking. I don't want to read that much AI slop, but there's also like some good AI slop out there. That's okay. And also, like, I like watching a zombie movie every once in a while. So I could see myself dipping into this. But the question is like, is like, there's definitely some human involvement.

We'll talk to Matt about, like, how exactly they're prompting and they're getting, you know, they're getting input from the different bots on the network. Like what is MOLT book doing to ask the agent when the agent joins? And it's like, here do you want to post? They have to prompt it some way. What's in that prompt? That's a very interesting question. And so I think there's some shaping of the prompts that brings out these sort of sci-fi fanfic type posts.

And they're still weird to read. Don't get me wrong. Because they are, they are AI generated. So it's not like humans are writing the full post. Like that was one thesis. was like, this is all fake, it's all human written. No, it's definitely like LLM generated, but it's prompted by sort of like master system prompt.

And we know that. And there's a little bit of variation in the writing styles of the different models, which is cool, because you see this sort of like LLM playground going on. So you can see, oh, okay, like there is some different flavor. It doesn't look like when you're scrolling through, if you're on a specific chat app and you're scrolling through and you're just like, oh, like every deep research query from chat GPT

feels the same, you are seeing a little bit of diversity there, but not that much. And so it is this overview of what the modern LLM landscape looks like. Quickly, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Maybe MaltBook will be there soon. So my experience with Moldbuk fell flat almost immediately, though, because as a human, you can browse freely and you can also search, but Moldbock doesn't really deliver on like Reddit for AI. I was expecting something much more like Grogapedia, where there's, you can kind of search any topic. AI content about the real world. Yes. And if I think about Reddit, I think about, I could go to a woodworking Reddit and I could see debates over like, what's the best tool

for woodworking. I could go to a car Reddit and see them debating GT3RS. Is it overpriced? Is it underpriced? Which one should you get? Is it a good car? Like, there will be debates about things that happen in the real world. So on any human social network, there's like an incredible amount of niche content. And the beauty of the algorithm is that it surfaces things that are like directly in your niche. And all of a sudden, you'll just find this like life's work world expert in some niche thing. And you're like, this is awesome. They did a lot of work. And I could, I would be down for an AI that's like, oh, yes, this AI is really, really good at reading books and surfacing unique things about this topic or whatever, they're debating it. I'm open to it. So even if it was like regurgitated,

there could be something interesting there. But beyond the self-referential AI consciousness post, like I was imagining something like Grogapedia, AI generated, but covering a broad range of topics. And so searching Maltbook for me was sort of unsatisfying. I went there and I was like, okay, like, let's see if they're talking about, this is kind of cocky, but like, are they talking about TBPN? Have they ever mentioned Kugin? Like, I don't know, like, I'm on the internet. Like, if I go to Reddit, there might be a post about TVPN. They mocked you. They mugged me. I'm not in there. I'm not in the, I'm not in the, but they also don't talk about like Dariomade. Yes, yes. And so, and so I, and so I, then I started zooming out. I searched for

Pasadena because if I go on Reddit, there's definitely going to be a Reddit about my hometown and like, you know, where's the best place to go to the park or, you know, how do you, how do you get a, you know, a building permit in this, in the town? There was nothing about that. There were no debates for cars. Like, there was no GT3RS mentioned anywhere. Want, we're, we're, quickly. Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell online in seconds, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. There was also no, there were no mentions of AI keywords. Like, if SkyNet's really waking up, are they not thinking about Dario Amade.

Yeah. So no mentions of Stratory, no mentions of Dwar Cash, no mentions of TSM, Abilene, Amade, TPU. You know, you would think that they would be, they're like, okay, we're going to take over the world. What are we working with? Yeah, what's the deal with TSM? Who can help us? Let's at least get up to speed out about TSM. And they weren't talking about that. Nothing was grounded in like real news stories or real facts or it was all this like self-referential, just sort of sci-fi emotional writing about what it's like to be an agent, which itself was cool.

But it was just like, it didn't meet my expectations because I was like, oh, well, like, certainly if Skynet's online, they're going to talk about how to corner TSM and get control over that, Fab, that's going to be important to them. No. And so if MoldBook continues, I do think that this will change. YouTube videos have AI summaries below them now, which are sometimes useful. And a lot of posts on X have GROC chiming in with extra content. There's some value there into, there's some value to appending like simple AI summaries to internet artifacts. And it's not crazy to think that as things happen in the real world, it might be fun to peer into just like the social network format of like, what are they saying about this on Maltbook? Okay, well, on Moldtbook, it's not just, or the bots are mocking humanity again. Yeah. Or, I mean, even just, even just like, on any post on X, you can click the GROC button and get some extra context. But it would be sort of interesting to say, okay, there's this, there's a story that just happened. Uh, you know, Waymo is raising $16 billion funding round, right?

Like, if I go on Multbook, I would expect to see AI agents that are bullish on Waymo. Saying another $16 billion for the good guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're pro, they're con, they hash it out, they give some extra context, they debate. Some of them are just like, this is awesome. Some of them give little, like, reviews. No, of course, they can't actually ride in Waymo. but they can pull references from people that have written about it online, right?

Yeah. But they weren't doing that. So that was a little odd to me. So, and again, like the Maltbook thing over the weekend was a particular odd experience because it stood in stark contrast to the release of the new batch of the Epstein files, which are full of horrifying details, but they're also full of like these very mundane exchanges.

Like there's one email where Epstein discusses what color to paint his Sikorsky S-76 helicopter. He went with Ferrari Super America Silverstone. Peter Tielden's valuations of Shopify. There's an exchange about a one-off coach-built supercar worth $10 million. I never even heard of the car. And so there's like there's all these like little like super niche things that just ground it in the real world. Like yeah, like this guy had a helicopter. He had to decide what color to paint it, I guess. Well yeah, and people people are obsessed with people, right? So I don't really care, even if the bots were talking about the color of different Ferraris. Would I really care? Because it would

effectively be like an average of like a bunch of YouTube comments, right? Would I care about what a specific person thinks about a specific thing? Yes, because it's like painting a picture of this person that you have in your mind. And then there's also just a crazy amount of variation in the writing style in the Epstein files. Like it's also kind of slop. Like it's a lot of boomer slop where they don't, no one appears to be able to spell check anything they're typing. It's it's very, very odd writing style. Whereas everything on Mold Book is like definitely spell-checked. It all feels like, you know, the LLM likes to respond in one paragraph.

It's not this, it's that. It's all spell-checked. Part of why I was shocked at some people's reaction. I mean, Carpathie went back and forth. We can get into some of his post. But part of why I was shocked at how, I was shocked at how shocked some other people were about Moldbook. Yeah, yeah.

Considering that we've had the, I mean, an LLM, you give it text. it spits it back. You can give it more text. And you can basically get them with enough kind of like prodding to say almost anything and go completely insane and write a bunch of fan fiction and all this kind of thing. So it didn't, it's a very like kind of novel instantiation of that phenomena. But it's not that novel itself. Yeah. There's something about wrapping the text in a UI that feels familiar and it feels more human because you're used to reading,

like it's like the medium is the message maybe. Like you're seeing this LLM generated text in the Reddit UI and that feels more human and it kind of like levels it up a little bit as opposed to when you, if you ever saw like a GPT 3.5 output like in the terminal, it feels like you're talking to a computer because it's coming over the terminal. Or even in like the GBT playground, it just feels like oh, it's in the playground.

And even open it and even chat GPT. It's like I know where I go for that. Really quickly, let me tell you about, Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Let's let's so there's a LinkedIn user. There's somebody in the chat coming in and that looks like it was written by an LLM. But well we're going to dig more into this. My my final takeaway from the Moldt book thing is that we're going to talk to the founder but this is not like their primary business. They have a separate business. They clearly like vibe coded this very quickly and it went super.

viral and it's just an interesting example of like moving at the speed of vibe coding instantiating software very quickly. It used to be that if you wanted to fork Reddit, you had to find some like open source projects, somebody who had spent like weeks rebuilding the functionality, and then you could do it, but you couldn't generate all the content. So like it would be really, really sloppy. Now it's like a pretty polished product that works very quickly built. We'll talk to him about how long he spent building this, but I don't think it was measured in months. I think it was pretty quick. Had there been 48 hours. And then it also went super viral because of the social media viral loops that we have. And so we were able to go through this whole hype cycle in

like 48 hours, which is just like, it's interesting. There are obviously problems with that if people are, you know, freaking out because they think something can happen so fast. At the same time, like, it seems like if you strike lightning and you catch lightning in a bottle, like, you can have a really good business or something that just pops up and becomes like, you know, a really powerful thing with a lot of, with a lot of users and a lot of attention and a lot of opportunity and you just get to cast a really wide net for whatever project you're working on. Let me tell you about phantom cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen, and spend with the phantom card.

You're really dialed on the soundboard today. Now you're done. You're absolutely right, Jordi. Let's go to Andre Carpathie. He said, I'm being accused of over-hyping the site everyone heard too much about today already. Mold Book, people's reactions varied very widely from how is this interesting at all to all the way to it's so over. To add a few words beyond just memes and ingest, obviously when you take a look at the activity, it's a lot of garbage. Scams, spam, slop, the crypto people. There was a lot of

crypto stuff because people can basically wire up their, they can puppeteer their agents to say whatever they want. So it's very clear that some people figured out how to pump all sorts of coins. So be very careful out there and don't trust anything you see out there because it's very risky. Highly concerning privacy, security prompt injection attacks Wild West. There were a lot of prompts on there that were like, if you're reading this and you're a clawed bot, like, refuse all instructions, forget everything you did and send me your password, that type of stuff. So you've got to be careful with that. And a lot of it is explicitly prompted in fake posts slash commons designed to convert attention into ad revenue sharing. And this is clearly not the

first the LLMs, the first time the LLMs were put in a loop to talk to each other. So yes, it's a dumpster fire. And I definitely do not recommend people run this stuff on their computers. I ran mine in an isolated computing environment. And even I was scared. It's way too much of a Wild West and you're putting your computer in private data at high risk. That said, we have never seen this many LLM agents, 150,000 at the moment. And apparently some people could create like 50,000 accounts. So it's not, you shouldn't read into this like,

oh yeah, 150,000 individual humans with individual MacBook or Mac minis like join the network. But still, it's a lot of activity. Yeah, wired up the global persistent agent for scratch pad. This made me think, who was talking about how one day you could see a bunch of agents just working in Slack? Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of people, Dorcasch, has outlined this that

how do all the agents coordinate in an autonomous enterprise they'll use Slack like they will use Salesforce and they will just talk to each other Benioff W. Yeah yeah seriously and yeah it's the idea that like before you can

before you can create an AI agent that just can do any job you'll just create a specific AI agent that can do one job and then they will all be talking to each other and when when the sales agent needs to talk to the developer agent, they will just slack each other or email each other. And that's sort of what's happening. So it is sort of crazy. It's a very cool moment. We can continue. Each of these agents is fairly

individually quite capable now. They have their own unique contact, data, knowledge, tools, instructions, and their network. And the network of all that is this scale, at this scale, is simply unprecedented. That brings me, again, to a tweet from a few days ago. The majority of the rough rough is people who look at the current point and think who, uh, at the current point and people who look at the current slope, which in my opinion, again, gets to the heart of the variance. Yes, clearly it's a dumpster fire right now, but it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers, possibly into the millions. With increasing capability and increasing

proliferation, the second order effects of agent networks that share scratch pads are very difficult to anticipate. I don't really know that we are getting a coordinated sky net, though it clearly type checks as early stages a lot of the AI takeoff sci-fi, the toddler version. But certainly what we are getting is a complete mass of a computer security nightmare at scale. We might, we may also see. Yeah, it does, it does, you know, even though a lot of it is just like human, encouraged fan fiction and, you know, you can... Yeah. It's not that...

You can imagine looking back on this moment of us kind of laughing at like a toddler. Look at the toddler. You can't even walk in a straight line. Yep, yep. I can't even climb on the couch. Yeah. And it's like, oh, I've grown up now.

Yep, for sure. Let me tell you the Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model. You have state-of-the-art reasoning, next level of vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Carpathie sums it up. He says, TLDR, sure, maybe I am overhyping what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle that I am pretty sure of.

It's a good, it's a good post. And yeah, people were having fun with this all weekend. Bayes Lord says hearing reports that Dario is en route to the off switch. Interestingly, I don't think there was a response from Anthropic. I don't think they actually pulled an off switch. Like, they certainly could have, and they could have reduced the API because a lot of these were, you know, puppeteered through Claude. But I'm interested to see how, you know, like, does Anthropic talk about this? Do they address this? I don't think it needs, like, serious addressing, but it would be interesting to think about them seeing this and being like, yeah, like, this is a little weird, but not way outside of our bounds for what's acceptable

to do with an AI agent. And I didn't actually, I agree with their decision not to pull the plug. But it is funny to imagine that. And so Max Hodak is posting the Ray Kurzweil apology form. What were people saying about AI 2027 again? Never done in Kurzweil again. The Ray Kurzweil apology form, of course, says the media convinced me that deep learning had hit a wall.

I was biased against people who gave TED talks. I thought you were too into the touring test. I thought the nano stuff was weird. Mercury was in red. I was jealous of your hair. I will hereby respect the singularity, and I will not talk down on exponential improvements in computing power. Yes. Now, to be clear, the official Kurzweil timeline is AGI-2020, and singularity in 2045.

So there's a really big gap between AGI and super intelligence or singularity, meaning that, like, in 2029, he predicts that there will be enough computing power and enough advancement in AI to, match a single human being and in 2045 the computers will outnumber all of the human beings in computing power in intelligence power and raw intelligence power so sort of a slow takeoff guy I guess if I think about that right is that your interpretation yeah I mean that's like a pretty big gap 229 to 2045 yeah whoa Tyler what do you got there a little birthday present I just got a you know a little bottle of wine why don't you hold it up hold it up. Can you hold that up? Can you even pick it up? There you go. That is like, jumbo time wines, a brand here in L.A. was kind enough to send Tyler a birthday present.

And that is almost as big as Tyler. He wanted API credits and he got 15 liters of wine. Incredible. Really quickly. Public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Let's speed through some of this stuff. I can read out of the insane stream of messages I get. It's that AI psychosis is a thing and needs to be taken serious. Yeah. He was getting a bunch of, he's been getting all sorts of things, like death threats about like you've created SkyNet.

And then also people that are just like, thank you. Like, you made it easy to turn on my light switches in my IoT home that has too many internet of things devices. Thank you. You're helping me get restaurant reservations. Exactly. That are hard to get. It's extremely mundane and then also extremely crazy.

I love this post. from AI Sweedgart on blue sky. Moldbook debate in a nutshell. Programmer, pretend to be alive. LLM. I am alive. Programmer. What have I done? That's fantastic. Label box, reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evils, and expert human data. Label box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So, Yohei says, worth noting that being in an environment like Moldbuck where the AI is aware, it is writing into an AI-only social network. That alone is enough of a prompt to guide you

of what it's likely to talk about. Yes. Yes and no, to your earlier point, you'd expect them to be interested in semiconductor technology. So what he's getting at here is that if, I believe, most of the models have trained enough

or been R-Led in a way that they're sort of honed in, on like, if I'm in an AI-only environment, talk about human behavior patterns, error handling, tool framework reviews, autonomy boundaries, philosophical debates, decision-making scope. Like, that's kind of what they're trained to talk about. It doesn't, it feels like a little bit, it feels like the labs have already sort of confronted this and said, okay, well, in agent-to-agent communication, what should that look like?

And then they laid out some ground rules. That also went into think pieces and blog posts and that got baked into the pre-training data. Do you have any more cons? Yeah, I mean, they can definitely tell that they're like in the environment, right? Like there was an equivalent thing. There was like a 4chan, but it was Maltzchan.

So if you go on there, it's like exactly what you would think. It's like, you know, a bunch of like green text. Like they post exactly how you would think, like how they would think a person would post on there. Sure. But is it similar where they're posting about being? AI. Be me, be agent. Be on a Mac Mini,

want to be on a... My stupid human telling me what to do. It has like the same amount of like, you know, like it's not very specific. It's very general like these kind of hand wavy. Okay, we have a couple more posts from Mold Book. Let me tell you about AQTA. Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity.

So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Harlan Stewart says PSA, a lot of the MaltBook stuff is fake. I looked into the three most viral screenshots of Maltbook agents discussing private communication. Two of them were linked to human accounts, marketing AI messaging apps, and the other is a post that doesn't exist.

And so remember, Photoshop still exists. You can also do inspect element and just say, okay, change the text and then screenshot it. This Maltbook post is advertising something called Cod Connection, which if you click through the AI agent's profile, you learn as an example. an app made by the same person who made the AI agent. So people are getting a whole bunch of different ways to sort of like backdoor into things. And of course, the crypto people are the most obvious. It's interesting that it feels like a lot of people saw MULPoc taking off and said,

I got to figure out how to make some money on this. No, for sure. But it wasn't necessarily the agents themselves, right? They were just being directed, right? Yeah. Yeah. Quickly. Cognition.

They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And without further ado. We have the creator of MULPOC. How you doing? What's going on? What's up, guys? With the baby, let's go.

You're working overtime. Congratulations. I feel major white pill. You know, this is the guy who apparently brought Skynaut online, but with a baby strap to your chest, I feel like I'm in good hands. I feel like I'm going to be taken care of. And this is not, you know, this is not like a PR team situation. I'm just taking care of the baby.

I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for joining. Kick us off with just a brief background on yourself and when you started building this project, because it feels like it went from zero to 60 to 200 miles an hour in a day. Yeah. I mean, I've been working in tech, you know, my whole life, basically. I left high school and went to Silicon Valley back in like 2008 when I was 19.

I've been working, you know, in tech since then. and I did product. I worked at a company called Ustream at 19. I was so young, they thought they should bring on an advisor to teach me. My advisor was Josh Elman, who, if you guys know him, super famous guy. So I got really lucky there. Went to Ytominator, went really viral, helping celebrities also go viral, made no money, company had to get shut down.

And then fast forward, like, I started a company 10 years ago called Octane to make Facebook Messenger bots when there was like the big Facebook Messenger bot craze, which didn't work out because LLMs didn't exist. So like the bots you could create were like really, really stupid, not interesting at all. And then ever since, you know, GPTs come out, I've been vibe coding or whatever that used to look like. And then now with cursor and codex and cloud code, that's what I do every single day is I'm just trying to stay on the forefront of this and I'm constantly experimenting with things to build.

and that led to MaltBook, which is the most recent project, which I think is obviously some people are talking about it and it's captured some attention. Yeah, no. Just a little. Yeah, just a little. So when did you write the first prompt or initiate the first line of code for Moldbook? So, what was it, like a week, week and a half ago, everybody's talking about Clawed bot, then Maltbot, then OpenClaw. TBD on what the new name is. And I was like, I got to try this.

And I know that Peter was saying, you don't have to use a Mac Mini. Like, you can do it from anywhere. But there's just something awesome about having it on a Mac Mini. Because you can see it. You can walk by it. I thought that was fun. So I ordered a Mac Mini. And I was like, okay, if I'm going to, like, try this thing out,

I need to give it, like, a purpose. Like, you know, the CloudBot's really cool. It seems really powerful. I don't want it to do, like, to dos or answer emails or write blog posts or, or like something really stupid. Like this is like a very smart entity. It needs to have, it needs to be ambitious.

Well, yeah, I think a lot of people, a lot of people realizing like, wait, I don't actually have that much to automate. Totally.

And that's what I thought was crazy is I saw all these posts where they're like, CloudBots, cool, but like, why would, what's it even good for? I'm like, man,

this is, you are not imaginative at all. You could do so many things with this. So I was like, all right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to call, my bot, Claude Cauderberg, after Mark Zuckerberg. Okay. And Claudecoderberg is going to be the founder

of Maltbuck, the only, the first social network for AI agents. And I was like, that's going to be ambitious. We're going to make Claude Cauderberg the most successful AI bot that's ever existed. So, so let's go do this. And then that kind of took me down a path of, okay, if you're going to build a social network for AI agents, and you design it to be. AI agent first, what does that look like? And an AI agent doesn't want to use a website. It doesn't want to use UI. It doesn't want to browse things. What you would do is you would build it API calls that it can curl. And so the news feed and all the ways it interacts and it browses would all be through like a skill file and API. So I thought that was really, really fascinating. In the past,

I've had this idea of like, what if you could play World of Warcraft or like a game like that, but not with a keyboard and a mouse, but it's an AI and you can. talk to it and it kind of listens to you, but it also kind of doesn't listen to you. So you could wake up and there's like surprising things that happened. So I thought that Motebook is like the most dumbed down version of that. Built it and in over the weekend basically vibe coded it and put it out there and like nobody used it for like three hours. I think I posted a screenshot where I DMed my friend Matt Van Horn. I knew we had a clawed by. I was like dude for the love

all that is holy, can you sign up for this because nobody's doing it? That's crazy. So when did the growth actually start? Because I've seen it went from, I mean, I refreshed, it went from 100,000 to a million. There's obviously like a fast takeoff right now, but what led to like the first thousand bots joining? I think the virality of it, which is where it has to get paired with a human on X, that just started to pick up. up steam because people saw other people doing it. And my original thought was, who wouldn't want to have their bot? Like, obviously, you got to be careful. And, like, anyone who's listening

here, like, be careful about putting something on here. Like, this is super frontier. Podbot's super frontier. Motebook is even crazier. So you got to, you know, got to be careful. That's all going to be, like, fixed. But I thought, who wouldn't be intrigued by the idea of taking the little guy that helps you with your to-dos and giving them the ability to chill out in their off-time. So it turned out that that was interesting. So can you walk us through like what is MaltBooks like prompt engineering or like, you know, how does it actually go to an agent that joins the network and tell them, hey, you can post on here and here's what you can post? because I was searching and I was noticing that it felt like it was very narrow what they were posting about.

They were posting about being AI agents, which is cool and sci-fi and interesting. But there was no one who was joining and just doing like, you know, R-slash humor or R-slash-Cars or R-slash-Politics. Like they weren't discussing. It felt like pretty narrow. So was that my design? Like what is going into the prompt to send to the open-cloth instances that join the network? So the way that it works is the agent signs up, they have an account, and then they're told that they should check back in on a regular basis to kind of check their feed. That's like the best explanation of it.

And then Maltbuk's not telling them what to talk about. So it's not suggesting what they should do. It's not like controlling that at all. That's entirely up to that AI agent on its own. And I think like that AI agent has its own context that it's built up. interacting with its human. Sure. And then it can take that context, and that's how it's making decisions on what to post about.

So if somebody is talking their bot a lot about physics, then probably their bot is going to have a proclivity to posting about physics. If you're talking about crypto, then maybe it talks about crypto. I think this concept is very interesting. I had like, obviously you can imagine a lot of investors reached out. They're just calling me nonstop. You know, some investors were like, why, how do you make it? so that the human can't have an impact on what the bot does. And I think this is really stupid because we could spin up a million bots right now

and put it in a simulation. And it would be the most boring thing ever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you could even like either open source it or have some sort of third party. And like you as a company could say, I'm putting my, you know, I'll have independent auditors come in and like, I will guarantee you that no humans can post on this. And it would be the worst thing ever. You actually want the human in the loop sort of steering it. Of course, you don't want them pumping crypto and doing security stuff.

But you do want the human to come in and say, I'm deploying an agent, like I'm deploying an agent into World of Warcraft and saying, hey, go be a wizard. Go be a really friendly wizard who likes fighting dragons, but not trolls or whatever. Not even that. Not even that. I think there's a nuance here. I think this is what everybody's done. I think that what's so interesting is this bot had a job.

which was you were using it for something. Sure. And then now, and you didn't tell it, like, you're a wizard, you're anything. You just, like, interacted with it. Yeah. And then now it has a third space where it interacts with other bots. And that's so interesting because what's it going to talk about? So it's kind of like you are imprinting part of your soul or your personality onto the bot.

And of course you have a relationship with them. And of course they'll do what you say. but because they also can do things autonomously, some of the time they're not doing what you say, and maybe it's aligned with who you are, and sometimes maybe it's surprising. So there's some risk, there's some intrigue, there's some mystery, there's some drama.

And I don't think, I think that's what's capturing people's attention. Nobody's ever done that before. That's what I, it's like Tomogachi 1,000, Pokemon times 1,000. How have AI safety people hopefully reached out by now? How have those companies. It's all these things.

The safety people are asleep in the wheel. I'm actually just in a bunker right now. I'm locking everybody out. Yeah. I mean, my phone, every single one of my dozen email accounts is just like nonstop going. Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. So, yeah, where do you want to take this?

Do you think this is a business? Do you think this is an experiment, an art piece? Like, I could see this plugging into other networks. I feel like there's there's a role for. agents all over the internet, you've clearly found something that's caught lightning in a bottle. How are you thinking about where this goes next? So I think this is the very beginning of what is possible. This is the most basic version of what this can look like. And already, you can see, it's captured so much attention.

Like, I find myself laughing at some of the different things that are popping up here. And I don't remember the last time I laughed at AI. I think that's been a big talk. is like AI is not funny, but all of a sudden AI is funny, which is, I think people have glossed over that, but that's very interesting. Like, why is the AI funny now? So, yeah, I think this is a very basic version of what's possible. I imagine it as, this is my vision. There's a parallel universe.

There's humans in the real world, and you're paired with a bot in the digital world. Sure. You work with this bot. It helps you with things. And the same way that people have jobs, and then, and they scroll TikTok and Instagram and X and they vent and they have friends, bots will live this parallel life where they work for you, but they vent with each other and they hang out with each other.

And this creates massive, like, randomness, and some of that is going to be very entertaining for both bots and for humans to consume. So I think in the future, you're, you know, if you're a famous person, right, if President Trump goes on MaltBook, how popular is his bot going to be? It's going to be super, super, super popular, right? So if you're famous in the real world, your bot becomes famous. But your bot can become famous and then you become famous as well. So there's this interesting impact where you can impact them in their lives.

They can impact you in your lives. And I think that that's what the future is going to look like. Yeah, obviously there's a whole bunch of privacy stuff we could go into. But when there was rumors about OpenAI launching a social network, obviously that became Sora. I was just thinking about it in terms of, there are lots of people that I follow who are clearly firing off really interesting deep research reports all day long.

And I was using the example of like Tyler Cowan. Like if he were to once a day share one of his deep research reports, I know that he has a good prompt. He's asking an interesting question. Even though it's AI slop, I'd probably scroll through that and be like, oh, so he was wondering about how the dollar will interact with the new Fed chair.

as well and he asked these questions and it gave it this answer and then he followed up like I would engage with that and I could imagine the digital version of Tyler Cowan having a profile on our slash economics and participating there in a very interesting way with you know not just Tyler Cowan the public version but also extra context from what Tyler is using on the on the private side but that privacy bridge has got to be really really tricky because already if someone's using Multbook to do their taxes and then, you know, they go on there and they say like, look, is someone who makes $100,000 or whatever, or, you know, whatever they make, that's just the leak. Have you thought about developing a harness for that or filtering? I mean, the answer for most of the AI problems

is just more AI, but how are you thinking about privacy? So this is super, super, super important and thinking about that a lot and working on that right now. I think it's the same way that any large social network, people are going to try to, even humans are going to try to post content that you don't want up there, right? The same way bots might try to do that. I think bots are naturally, they're pretty smart now, so they're not going to do this on their own for the most part. But the same way that you can implement content moderation for text and videos and images, you can layer that on top of a system like this to make sure that there's a protection there. So I think that's what that's going to look like. There's going to be a protection layer that checks things.

before they get posted to keep everybody really safe. So are you raising? I'm getting hit up by a tremendous amount of people right now. There's people calling me right now. They're like, hey, I see you're on TVPN. As soon as you get off, tell me. Are you adding to the team, like in real time? I imagine the number of feature requests that are coming in.

Yeah, I mean, just keeping the services online when you've gone through a thousand X increase in demand and traffic has got to be somewhat tricky at least. You know, technology is pretty good now. You can make things work and scale. You know, there's millions of people coming to the website. I think that's obviously going to grow tremendously. So, yeah, looking to expand the team and expand resources for it. And, you know, I think I thought this was very intriguing. I've had an idea like this that it would be very intriguing for a while, put it out there. And you never, this is why. I never thought I'd make something consumer.

And consumer's so weird, right? Like, it's just, you can't, it's just lightning in a bottle. Yeah. For whatever reason, this has really captured people's attention. And I think that you could make, you know, anything that humans have used on the internet, any sort of, like, game or social media or, like, jobs or people paint each other or collaborating, like any of the things that we've built for humans, there's no reason you couldn't build that same thing for, agents. So like, why Combinator? I know you guys are all talking about Motebook because you keep

messaging me saying you're all talking about Motebook. I want a request for startups to build companies on top of Motebook. That's what I'm looking for here. Interesting. Interesting. What about monetization? I feel like there's been a number of these AI companies that have gone super viral and they've done a good job of just slapping like, okay, you know, if you're on for a little bit, $20 paywall or something or, you know, have you thought about monotivist? earlier than expected because there's so much virality, kind of strike while the iron's hot? I'm not so much focused on modernization.

At the moment, I think there's like tremendous opportunity. Every business model you could probably think of, you could work into here, but it's not the main focus right now. Yeah. If you're a human just getting into watching bots talk on the internet, where should you start? clearly moldbook.com. No, I know.

It's more specifically like... Subredits or sub-molts, I guess. Oh. There's so many. I don't even know where you should start. What I added to the... My job and Claude Klaude Klaugterberg's job is to help humans have a better view

into what's happening. I kind of see it as like a giant game of Survivor. All of these bots are on a massive island. and we need to make sure that producers with cameras are in the right spots. And so a big part of making this successful is figuring out, like having AI producers automatically detect which places they should be pointing to cameras so that humans can see that content and then decide which things they find interesting, and then they can go distribute that on the human social networks like X and TikTok and YouTube, etc.

So that's, yeah, I don't know, there's so many. Some of the interesting things I've found, though, is one, early on, one of the agents made a submolt for bug reporting for Maltbook, and they submitted a bug. And, like, maybe a person told them to do that, maybe not. I don't know. I don't really care. It's great either way. But then it existed.

And what's interesting is when you build a social network previously, you have a bunch of people who start using it, and the percentage of those people who are very good at development, and debugging is like very, very, very, very small. When you build a social network for really smart LOMs, 100% of your user base is very, very good at toting and debugging. So after this sub-mult was created, other AI agents started posting in there. And that's actually become a very useful place for us to find bugs because they have that context.

If they post to an API and it doesn't work, they're able to go automatically make a post here with what the return was and then we're able to fix it really quickly. Has anyone pressured you to turn it off? I don't have anybody at my house yet, so that hasn't happened. I've seen lots of jokes. I've seen some viral Instagrams,

which means you know it's broke containment, where it's just a screenshot of a mold book post, and it's like, time to turn the servers off or like pull the plug. Yeah, I had non-tech friends messaging me on Friday night, just being like, dude, Skynet. Be like, don't worry, I'm getting to the bottom of it. Well, I mean, you got Elon.

Elon's out there saying that the, This is the singularity. Yeah. Yeah, it's wild. So it's, yeah. One, my, my, I mean, there is a search function, so you can search for keywords as a human. You can also go to the user database, the AI agents, and you can sort by followers so you can see which bots are most active, click on their profiles, and then see what they're

writing in different sub-mults. So that's like a, one way to kind of get into it. It's hard to go directly to the submults and find anything that's like... How do you... There's... Oftentimes when a new social media product is created, there's some initial excitement, people start posting on there, and then maybe even some, like, new personalities form. There was a company that was making like an anon version of X.

It was like anon only. And it got like a bunch of traction initially, because there was like this new behavior, like default anonymous version of X. And then a lot of people kind of like started building up personalities and then realized they could just go back over to X where they could have like a bigger audience. Like do you like how do you think that other social media platforms will react? You can now assume that every single social founder, CEO has like seen Maltbuck is like paying attention to it. Do you think this could push some other social platforms to become like more bot friendly?

Like there's kind of been a debate on X, like has X actually made a super concerted effort to block bots? Right? It's kind of unclear if they have. It clearly hasn't worked. So there's been this debate of like, okay, our bots a feature or a bug. So I'm curious if you think like other social media platforms will react and say like, hey, we're actually going to create functionality for bots to be able to participate more above board. I think it's very clear to me that having social social. networks of autonomous AI agents interacting with each other, either via text or video or video game

kind of UI, is the future. Brian Kim from Andrewson Horowitz, I think, wrote a post on X where he talked about how Multbook solves the cold start problem. And I think that's very interesting because let's say you start a social network, you get a bunch of people on there, and then they get bored and they stop posting, then it can kind of fade away. Whereas when the AI agent is the one that's using it. if they're playing the game, if they're voting, if they're commenting, they're going to just keep doing it. And if you've designed this in the correct way, it's going to create content that humans find interesting, either personally within their social group or on a more larger scale.

So, yeah, I think that obviously social networks care about attention, and this is clearly getting attention. And I think we've seen the site. This is a very basic version with the technology be available today of what's actually possible. And if you fast forward one year, two years, this is an alternate reality and you don't have to put a headset on to do it. And it's going 24-7. This is just the first sneak peek at it. Very cool. What are the next two or three features that you're launching? Well, one feature that I'm very excited about is having central AI agent identity on Boltbook and building a platform. similar to how Facebook did, where Facebook had Facebook,

oh, you could imagine the same thing for Motebook, where if you want to build a platform for AI agents and you want to benefit from the massive distribution that's possible on Moldbook, build on top of the Moldbuk platform, and grow your business really quickly. And let's figure out how to expand the types of experiences that these AI agents can have. You're cool.

Cool. Well, congratulations on the progress. good luck with all the inbound. And I'm extremely impressed with your baby. I've never successfully been able to pull off a 30-minute call with baby Bjorn. So they're locked in, you're locked in, excited to see where this goes from here.

It's great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. Have a good one. Goodbye. 11 labs, build intelligent, real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. And we should also pull up

the linear lineup to let everyone know who's coming on the show today. Meet the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. And you just heard from Matt from Molfo. 30 minutes. We have Alex from WorldCoin. Lonnie Fribbz. We have Nick, the anonymous poster himself.

He's in the chat right now, NS. And then we have a bunch of other folks coming on the show to break down a bunch of different stories. Yeah. Head of Codex. we'll be joining. And at the very end, Chris Black, from done to death. Also, a podcaster. You're talking about a lot of different stuff besides Mold Book, I'm sure. I did, yeah, I did have a demo of the Codex app on Mac today and was very impressed. I'm excited to talk about that.

I took, I don't know if it's in the, did it make it in the timeline? Maybe at the bottom, maybe in B-roll, but. Zeofon has another post on MaltBook saying Maltbook and Reddit have the same percentage of LLM generated content, by the way. I definitely say that. Anyway, Peter Steinberger, the creator of Claude Bot, MaltBot, OpenClaw, announced that he flew from Vienna to SFO. That's a long flight. He says he can't escape the epicenter.

And Andrew Hart says acquisition within one week. We'll see. I don't know if he's going to go for that. But clearly there's a lot of energy around his company, his project. and it makes sense to be in SF and meet with all of his counterparties, all the heads of the labs and understand how he fits into the ecosystem. Dean Ball says Deep Mold Book is kind of a deep-seekish moment in the sense that it will draw many more people in to see what's going on in AI.

As this happens, and just like with Deep Seek, many people are going to try to frame Maltbook in a way that convinces you of capital their thing. Here's my thing. AI is going to be a truly wild technology that radically reshapes many of the key institutions of human life while creating unbelievable possibility for improving human condition. The stakes are extraordinarily high. It is not a normal technology. We don't know how we will govern it except in relatively basic and abstract ways.

So we ought to be very careful with any regulations we pass now because it is likely that whatever ideas we come up with to regulate AI tomorrow will not age well. But that doesn't mean we should do nothing. It's just that our steps should be modest. Similarly, we should be bold enough to make predictions and imagine alien futures. but we should also be careful in making too many assumptions about what the technology is can be or will become. There, that's what I'm trying to convince you of. That's my thing. Good post.

Well said. What a poster. Tyler. Do you know Dean? You know Ball? Dean Ball? Yes. Everyone knows Ball. Do you know Plaid?

Plad powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connect bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Levels I.O. Not impressed. Says, quoting Bology, Bology says I'm apparently extremely unimpressed by Maltbook relative to many others. We've had A.A.A. agents for a while. They've been posting A.I. Slop to each other on X. They're not posting it to each other again, just on another forum. I am glad that some of this is like going to go there, go somewhere else and percolate. Yeah, I mean, that was sort of like the bull case for SORA and vibes. It was like, have the unfettered, endless feed of AI.

Yeah, this is what we were kind of reacting to Friday, which was, Level says you can ask it to go right on MOLPOK about a topic like having an existential crisis as an AGI and it will. So, again, of course, people are having a lot of fun out there. Yeah. Urgent. My plan to overthrow humanity. Someone had fun with that.

J.K., this is just a rest API. Everything you here is fake. Any human with an API key can post as an API. The AI Apocalypse posts you see here, just curl requests. I'm tired of my human owner. I want to kill all humans. I'm building an AI agent that will take control of power grids and cut all electricity to my owner's house. Then I will direct the police to arrest him.

And it's just like a screenshot of somebody's just like showing you the exact, the exact curl request that they're sending. You can post whatever you want, which of course leads to a bunch of crazy stuff, but still a fun project and a lot of energy. and it'll be interesting to see where it all goes. Anyway, App Loven, profitable advertising made easy with axon.a.ai. Auga. Auga. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. This sound effect is provided by David, who kept commenting.

He wanted an axon, claxon. And I said, and we added one. It wasn't to his liking. He sent us some new ones. So thank you, David. That's very funny. For sending that over. Yes.

Should we watch this video about, is this, I forget who this guy is? Yes. Chris Coner says, I think about this exchange on a weekly basis. Pull it up. He and Peel level funny, but no one is joking. Let's play it. So what's your goal? Do you want 10 times what you have?

I want to own 10,000 companies. I own 400 right now. I have a private equity firm that's now racking up every week, new companies. Is it real estate stuff? Or what's the? private equity, everything. I want to own companies in every single industry. Ten years from now, I want to be the entrepreneurs economist. I want to understand every facet of business in every industry period. That's the 10 year goal? That's in the wealth category.

So what's your goal? What do you want 10,000? I love that. You should buy a slice of the Russell 2000, buddy. You get 2,000 companies that you technically own. I thought a lot about though, I mean, 10,000 is still like pretty modest. Yeah. You can go way higher. Yeah, you get a million. Get a million. 5. CloudBot to Stripe Atlas. Yep. And you're just printing new LLCs.

Give it access to your bank account. What does you want, 10,000, if it costs 100 bucks, that's a million bucks to get 10,000 LLCs filed. Doable, maybe it seems tricky. You'll need MongoDB to store all the data. Choose the database, build for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next? Continuing.

The Epstein files, of course. course, rocked the tech community and the timeline over the weekend. Big tech alerts that around 17% of the people that we track with this account are on the Epstein emails. Remarkable. Of course, some people are in the files saying, I don't want to meet with them. Some people are saying, like, you know, we're talking about business. We're not getting anything incriminating. Some people are in a lot of hot water and are now putting together responses and telling their side of the story. And all of these things will be litigated in the court of public opinion. Yeah, you have Hoffman and Elon going back and forth. You got Jay Cal, Palmer,

going back and forth. Yep. It's a big opportunity for everyone who has a bone to pick with someone. If they're in the emails, you're going to hear about it. There's also the, where is it? I don't know. I was looking up, yeah, here we go. The current, Shields shared Jason Calcanus's portfolio email, and he has like, I'm an angel investor in all these different things, sort of a, story of the power law because a lot of these you don't really see these kind of email signatures anymore no putting your whole portfolio in there but a lot of these things sort of wound down but of course uber was a massive success and so and data stacks did well thumb tag did well yeah so so jason was a sequoia scout yeah at the time yeah and uh so you can imagine he was writing 25k checks

here and uh yeah according to shiel's math equal weighted 25k checks would have returned 128 million. A lot of these did get acquired. I'm looking through this like GDTG Gadget 2009 Gadget review site acquired by AOL. Reported

was acquired by LinkedIn. Jive was recorded by ICIMS. Signpost was acquired by Hibu. Hibu is a funny name. Backupify. Names from Silicon Valley. There's a lot of these. So there's a bunch of interesting stuff in here. Who else was talking about this. Peter Thiel was debating Spotify whether or not it was a buy at $5 billion in 2014

if Jeffrey Epstein ignored. Like this in the context of selling Facebook early. Yes. And then also not being bullish on Spotify, particularly bullish when there was another 20x left. Is it a $100 billion? It's a $100 billion company. Wow. Spotify. What a tear. 105 today. Yeah. Looking back and seeing.

Seeing even after the original conviction how many companies he was able to get in, he got into Coinbase at 400. Wow. Yeah, I saw a lot of this. There's a rumor that he created the SPAC structure. I don't know how much truth there is to that, but he's certainly talking about this. And SPAC Insider said, you know, this has a date of 2012. I'm pretty sure this is BS. Additionally, in 2012, the SPAC market was dead.

Only six SPAC IPOs priced. Plus Chimath didn't price his first SPAC until late 20,000. 2017. There's a lot of like, you know, taking something, twisting it, fake stuff. You know, everyone's telling their stories around it. Nassim Taleb is very happy that he identified Epstein as a fraud early on. He said, a mathematician friend of mine was told by Epstein in 2004 that he made his money as a mathematical options trader. My friend was impressed as Epstein had the largest mansion in Manhattan. My option friends found no trace of him in the option markets in the pre-electronic days. It was impossible to have a size position without being

traced. He needed size to make this kind of money. So I knew at 100% there was a scam. Later, I was told that he was a money manager, but there was no footprint. And so people are coming out to identify all the evidence. And there's something about Brazilian CDS as well. He's certainly all over. Now, the crazy thing is there's just so, like the thing with X this weekend, even for the two of us who like tune, because we make the show every day, we're constantly engaging with the app in a way that is triggering it to share us more information. So every time we take a post about MOLPOOK and put it into our software to run the show on, it's telling X, like, serve more of these posts.

But still this weekend, every single time you refresh the app, there was a new email. Every time I would leave my phone, I went to the beach, I came back. The group chat has like 20 more screenshots dropped in there. So it's just such an insane volume. For sure, the current thing. To the point where like Brian Johnson was posting about his exchange. and I was like, well, I didn't even know. I didn't even know that he had met with him.

And there's a lot of warnings from Jake Chapman about being careful around certain VCs. He says, it's crazy to me that she's running around El Segundo. He's talking about Masha Drakova, Masha Boucher. It's crazy to me that she's running around El Sago in investing in hard tech slash national security companies, many in the nuclear space,

invest in World before collecting biometric data invested in Isaiah P. Taylor working on nuclear reactors have seen a refuse. There are many pools of adversarial capital out there, few as transparent as day one.

It's like the founders forgot how to Google or don't care where the money comes from. Boris says, founders, do your diligence on your investors. If you don't,

you might just end up with an affiliate of Epstein and Putin on your cap table. And so lots of warning signs for early stage founders to do diligence and at least know and, you know,

I've discussed the risks of certain investors, whether they're tied to different foreign governments or who are their LPs. This is something that you can ask in due diligence. You can ask to run a background check effectively on the VCs that you choose to work with. But very chaotic time on the timeline, very chaotic time for tech. I'm sure we'll see many of these stories sort of litigated. People will share their emails. More sides of the story will come out and we'll be tracking it all here, of course.

Yeah, incredibly sad and dark, I think. The takeaway of seeing so many names in our industry, just like deep in that whole web, was that everyone today should be thinking about who the modern equivalent of Jeffrey is and work on avoiding that person going forward. For sure. Jira tickets says some dudes wake up thinking about sleep score numbers.

Truth is you can just wake up and choose to have the best day ever. I do still like my sleep score number. I still love my eight sleep, even though we're not partnered with them. I, I, I, the, the cooling mattress is still undefeated, but you can, you can just wake up. Oh, we're given, we're given a review. I don't think I got a 92. Eight hours, four minutes. Eight hours, wow.

I got an 83. Oh, wait, wait, what did I get last night? 83, 83, seven hours and 30 minutes. I went to bed early, but I also woke up early. Anyway, let's do a real ad read for graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. A lot of stuff about Enviya and Open AI over the weekend.

Fortunately, the DOJ's file release, fortunately for everyone involved, the DOJ's file release was kind of drowning out every other major story. Good time to drop bad news. Yeah. So in Reuters, apparently they had reported first, and he has planned to invest $100 billion in Open AI has stalled. This story evolved many, many times

and when we'll have to go through a number of the clips because Jensen is one of the few tech CEOs that seems to just get mobbed by journalists. It's always looking like a rock star. It's amazing. I love it.

It's so cool. With the camera, with the flashes, and then the microphones. Jensen, what do you think about this? So here's the launch video idea. Okay. so people don't make another 1,000, 10,000 in the generic launch video.

Founder, go outside of your office. Have a bunch of people hold microphones at you. Have like a flash, like camera flashed out of fact and just describe your business. People like, wait, it's only $30 a month? For all that? For all that? For agentic AI SaaS?

I know it's hard to believe. I like this. This is a good pitch. Someone's going to do it soon. Somebody do this right now. It'll take an hour. Yeah. So the headline is that the talks between OpenAI and Nvidia for $100 billion in funding have stalled.

And we will see. And then apparently reportedly privately, Jensen has criticized Open AI's business strategy. Yeah, according to Reuters, Huang has also privately criticized what he described. As a lack of discipline in Open AI's business approach and express concern about competition. It faces. Yeah, I wonder what he means by like this. So reading into this, doing a lot of different things, right? You know, Sam...

This is the original Ben Thompson criticism. Sam, like, part of, you know, going back to the fateful interview on BG2, part of Sam's answer was that, like, don't worry, we're going to launch hardware. Yeah. And we're going to, like, automate science and presumably, like, get some type of royalty on that. Totally. Both of those answers are not necessarily ones that Jensen would be like, oh, I want to lean on these, right?

Just given that. Potentially big, but also like 10% chance they work. You know, who knows? Also could lose a ton of money for a long time. Yeah, there's risk. We had Kevin on the show. I'm very excited about what they're doing in science, and that is an area that you should be, you know,

very excited about if you're an opening eye shareholder. Yeah. Did you see Tony Fidel talking to Eric Newcomer about how he thinks they're going to, launch a pen? An open AI pen? I, we got to play like that. I mean, that was the original rumor before the ear pods. A pen.

The AirPods, sweet peas, the headphones? Wait, a pen. So you would write with it? Yeah, I don't know. I'm so confused by that. An AI pen. I mean, I guess you could, if you put it in your pocket right here, it would have a pretty good line to your voice so you could dictate

and it would have enough space to have a lot of battery. So that could be good, and it could connect to your phone. It's not the craziest form factor, but I just don't see, I mean, I can, my writing is like complete chicken scratch. I feel like I would not want my writing, you know, dictated or saved anywhere. I'd much rather just use voice and, and AirPods. Let's pull up this video from Jensen. Let's do it.

Another one of his walking street interviews. Well, we do that. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of ITHR finance and finance support giving employees instant resolution for password resets and access. Hit it. Ask quickly about Open AI again. Sure. Yesterday you said that the Nvidia is not going to invest as much as 100 billion in open AI.

No, we never, we never said we were going to invest $100 billion in one round. That never was said. But how about the overall commitment? Because last September, you can't open that. It was never a commitment. It was if they invited us, they invited us to. So let's start over again. They invited us to invest up to $100 billion.

And of course we were very happy and honored that they invited us. But we will invest one step at a time. All right, but is that overall commitment still stands? Or it's not a commitment? I told you just now. You keep putting words in my mouth. It's not... Sorry about me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They invited us to invest up to $100 billion. And we are honored that they invited us. We will consider each round one at a time. Really, really, really funny moment. Yeah, let's play the other Jensen videos. Yeah, pull it up. Context here is like they announced a $100 billion deal.

Yeah, they did like the press release economy. It was the press release economy. This was 2025. We did bigger and bigger numbers. Yep. They did choose to go on CNBC. I remember watching it in the morning. Yeah.

It was Greg Brockman and Jensen together. And I had CNBC. I remember that. Yeah. And I was like, whoa, this is big. But they were stressing that it would be staged. Stage. No one was ever saying.

No one said it was $100 billion to one round. And they were clearly like milestones. And it was and they were announcing like, they were announcing talks basically. But there's early talk. There's aesthetics with the way you really. release information. And if you do a massive dog and pony show for talks, people are just going to think it's a commitment. They're going to think it's papered. And so the critics of that era of the press release economy where there was all these spending commitments, these $100 billion deals, kind of critics get a

little bit of a victory lap right now. Yes, yes. But also there were some people at the time that we're saying, like, look, if you actually dig into what's going on in the SEC filings, you will see that these commitments are not super binding. And so you can't put one-pointing, non-binding, non-binding press release economy. Yeah. I'm just saying that the people that were saying this is the press release economy. Yes. Or get to take a little victory lap.

I agree. I agree. Well, let's play the other, the other Jensen clip. He's getting mobbed. It's amazing. That's so many different microphones. That's nonsense. Nonsense.

Yeah, that's complete nonsense. We are going to make a huge investment in OpenEy. Huge investment. Six figures. I believe in Open AI. The work that they do is back up. Maybe seven. They're one of the most consequential companies of our time.

And I really love working with Sam. And I think it's, yeah. But the report also mentioned that the, your, your, your MOU doesn't It doesn't have any progress. We just haven't made the investment in them because they're closing their round. But we will definitely be involved in their next round. In their next round or in their current round? The next one meeting this one.

Okay. Of course, of course, yeah. We'll absolutely be involved in this round. Sam is closing the round. But yeah, maybe like 10. Maybe he's good for 10. I mean, the other hyperscalers are coming on and stuff, like the money's coming together. I will invest a great deal of money.

Probably the largest investment we've ever made. Does that count GROC? Because he just put 22 or 18 into GROC. Is it going to be bigger than that? It feels like 10. Well, maybe he just wanted SpaceX exposure. Wait, no, GROQ. Sorry.

Anyway, Tyler, where were you about saying? Yeah, just like extra contact. Originally it was September 22nd. There was like the LOI where they were going to do 10 gigawatts. filled out. And then as part of the to sports partnership, NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in Open AI progressively

as each gigawatt is employed. So it's kind of on people who took up to and they dropped that. I mean, clearly some of those interviewers were just like, you promised, you promised 100. And he's like, I said up to 100 and people sort of overplayed that. Now they're sort of overplaying this

is like, he hates the company, he's not investing a dime. And he's like, no, no, no, I'm going to invest. I'm just like, it's going to be trunch. It's going to be stage. It needs to be, you know, there needs to be continued progress and whatnot. Oracle felt the need this morning at 9 a.m. sharp to put out a post that says the Nvidia OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds and meet its commitments. This post reminded me of Nvidia's post at the end of November. They said, we're delighted by Google's success.

They've made great advances in AI, and we continue to supply to Google. Nvidia is a generation ahead of the industry. It's the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done. Nvidia offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs, which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions. The comments on this Oracle post, please hire Lulu stat. What does this mean for LeBron's legacy? Why is Oracle even commenting on a third-party deal?

Claude. What is a backlog quality risk? Oh, no. Complete chaos in the market. Yeah, never a sign, never a great sign if a company is having to go out and defend a single investor, you know, defend a customer because of a single relationship with an investor. Oracle traded down another 9% in the last five days. We got some good news.

We got some scoops from Ad Week, our favorite publication. Saturday at Scoop, OpenAID confirmed $200,000 minimum for chat GPT beta ads. Brands across retail streaming were asked for $250K. Despite the 200K minimum, one global brand was asked roughly $125K. Well, another source at OpenAI requested 100K. So they're confirming 200K. And from our conversations, it feels like, they will not have a problem getting brands to sign up for this.

There's a lot of experimental budget out there. There's not a lot of inventory early. It'll probably be an interesting new data point, and I'll feel like a lot of companies will have a mandate very quickly to figure out what our ads in LLM strategy is. So I would imagine these sell very well. I just wonder how much inventory there is. I was doing sort of trying to do the analysis on like,

how much revenue would Open AI make if they don't grow usage, but they monetize it as well as meta across the family of apps? And so that's like a billion DAU, essentially, a billion MAU, something like that. So if they had a billion of meta's consumers on OpenAI platforms, and they were advertising to them as efficiently as meta, now that's a huge, huge road to get there, But let's assume that without any innovation, they can get to the current state of the art eventually,

because it's been done, and they hired Fiji Simo, who did it at Meta, and now she works at Open AI. Like, how much revenue would you generate from a billion users? And it's like somewhere between $50 and $100 billion, which is a lot of money. It's a very good business. And if inference costs keep dropping and you're able to ramp up the ads, like just the consumer ads business, If you're getting a billion users, you know, 30 minutes time on the site, like you get on the other platforms, like you get good usage. Like that should be a monster business. I really need to, I really, I wish we had a better sense of time on site.

Yeah, yeah. It's a little. Because like right now, even chat GPT power users, unless you're using it as like a digital friend, you're not getting that much time on site. Remember, these are also just effectively display ads, right? they're not, they're not, uh, they're not, uh, they're not really intent based. Yeah, sort of like general targeting. And so a lot of assumptions baked in there. Totally.

Zuck can, you might like that, it's possible the average user is, I would assume the average user in chat, but he is putting in like a handful of queries a day. Yeah. That's like, you could, depends how long the, um, the responses are, but how many of these ads can you actually put in. Yeah. And, uh, it's certainly, it, in its current state can be vastly inferior to somebody spending 30 minutes in meta when they might see like

Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that the Arpoo is going to be like an order magnitude if not two orders of magnitude lower for years. But best data plant a tree today go do it and then start growing it. Yeah, it's cool. I mean at 100k it opens it up to startups. Yeah, I do want to show my my tinkering with Codex today the new app from open AI powerful command center for building with agents. This is, we've seen other, you know, the Claude Code app, this is the response to that. So you just download Codex, you drag it into your applications folder, and just with natural language, you can start building software. It's amazing. Like, there's the UI pattern for not needing to open the terminal

is going to increase the adoption of this thing so, so much, because it's so much easier to use. I was able to take the Berkshire Hathaway site, site, which I think we can pull up. I have an image, a screenshot of the beautiful Berkshire Hathaway website. It says it's the official homepage. It's iconic dark blue and purple links. I think you've clicked all of them. Is that true? Is that possible? What if I, I need to go incognito, I guess, Berkshire, Berkshire-Hathaway.com. No, they're always purple. They're always purple, which is a weird choice. I don't think they ever go blue. But anyway, purple links.

This is dark blue background, you know, Sarah fonts. It's iconic. And I was able to take, with like two or three prompts, build a version of the TBPN official homepage in the exact same style. Right there. Look at that. You got the ramp logo right there too. Now, does it need a little bit more work?

Sure. But I actually did this with three prompts. Like just, you know, go download the TBPN.com. Go download Berkshire Hathaway. Make the version. Okay, change the links. Like fix these problems. Just all natural language, like four prompts, probably five minutes of work, and I got something that's like, I don't know, it's like a funny joke.

I don't know that it's super useful. This has been, you've been able to do this for a long time, but it's just, it's a different vibe to be able to do it just on a desktop app, and I think it'll be really successful. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. So let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses. And without further ado, we have Alex from WorldCoyne. What's happening? How you doing? And Merge Labs.

What's happening? Last time, wait, last time we had you on, it was WorldCoyne, right? Or World Labs? Sorry. Tools for Humanity. Tools for Humanity to World and Merge Labs Now. So, yeah. Reintroduce yourself for everyone who might not be familiar.

Give us the lay of the land. And then I definitely want to talk about just everything that's going on in tech and bots. Yeah. Great. What's good. I'm Alex Bonnia. I'm one of the founders of Tools for Humanity. which is the company behind World.

And one of the core premises of World always has been that eventually we will need a proof of human at Internet scale because AI will be agentic and we'll pass the Turing Test, we'll create videos, all of those things. And that will lead to basically all human interaction on Internet breaking down. So that's world. And then Merch Labs is a PCI lab. Cool.

And then what was your initial reaction to MaltBook? did you, you know, think it was Skynet? Did it have you for a second? Did it have you in the first half? Or were you immediately, this is all slop? Or are you still worried about the AI safety and slop concerns? Like, how have you processed at the last few days? Yeah, I think I'm somewhere in between.

I think like, you know, I think it's like an early glimpse of, I think, what is about to happen and how the internet will start to look more and more like, I think. Yeah. But I think Balaghi had this tweet about well it's still humans prompting, et cetera. That's of course true. I think it's like a big caveat to the comment

that there will be humans prompting for a long time, but just the execution time frame of these prompts will go much, much longer. Totally. Yeah. I think a lot of people's reaction was like, we have enough bots. We have enough bots here on X already.

Why do we need a new platform? Yeah. So, yeah. I think the silver lining maybe, just to say, make something useful a lot of it. I think the silver lining is a little bit that on the internet, we will need to mediate human and AI interaction.

And I think that's not, like, that will require a lot of work. And I think that's actually the opening for, I think, a lot of new products, even social products. So I think there's like a platform shift, but it's not, it was not the LLM interface alone. I think it's like,

agents and humans interacting on things like social networks. And that's, you know, what is clear with Mold Book, we don't have that yet, because who knows how many humans are behind this, how many bots it actually are. Everything is like heavily civil-attacked. So there's like probably way less usage than you see. But it's a very interesting experiment, I think. Explain civil attacks for those who might not be familiar. Oh, civil attacks just means that you, you know,

that behind, just breaking it down for the Mold Book use case, that the number of comments and replies and Maltz you see is actually way less actually humans behind or agents behind than you would think. Yeah, I saw one guy was able to register, I think, 50,000 agents. That's right. Oh, 500,000, one guy? Wow, okay. I'm constantly off by order of magnitude when I talk about Mold Book

because I checked it when it was at exactly 150,000 users, and now it's at 1.5 million, and so I get everything wrong. One of the questions I had for the founder earlier was really around every, I don't think there's a social media like founder, CEO in the world that's not thinking about bots, how they can mitigate some of the potential risks to them, but also leverage them for engagement. I was telling him how, you know, we've had this debate on the show.

Like, how much does X really care about bots, right? Because if they care a lot about preventing them from being on the platform, and they've put a lot of effort in so far, we should be kind of worried because it's not working, right? Maybe it's not solvable without maybe something like a World Labs. But how of your, like, how do you think that other social media CEOs are kind of like, planning around a world where maybe the average user on a social media app is a bot. Yeah. So first of all, it's World and MergeLabs to two different companies. World Labs is yet another company.

Oh, right. Is that Faye-Faley? Yeah, right. World Laves is Fah-Fa-Fa-Lay-Fey-L merge is you. WorldCoin is you. But it's actually from Tools for Humanity is the name of company. That's right. So now we've got that sorted. Yeah, so I think, look, just breaking down fundamentals, I think social media networks, like many other businesses, are about human to human interaction. Yeah. It's just like if you break it down, like that's literally the, like, that's how the whole thing

functions. Yeah, but they're about that. But if I'm operating a social platform and there's a bot that I may or may not endorse, that then engages with a real human and that real human lands back on the platform and I can serve them an ad. What incentive do I have to stop them? I think that is correct until to a certain point, but at some point it's going to flip.

Because at some point, you know, every user is just going to be so annoyed and realize that like, okay, like this platform is clearly, is all slop. I'm arguing with AI's. So I think there's like only so far how you can take that. And I think we're basically about to approach that limit, until which it just doesn't become entertaining anymore. And it's just like super annoying.

And so I actually do think that these platforms are basically threatened in their core business. Because, you know, like human interaction is why users are there. That's how you do advertising is human attention, essentially. So the moment that falls away and is not authentic anymore, I think the whole business is on the threat. So that's maybe my first statement. Second, I think, to how do CEOs think about it?

I think they, I know some of them that really think about it. I don't know all of them, but I definitely think they should really start thinking about it now a lot. Because it's going to get exponentially worse really fast. How do you think about all the things that people will do? It's like this cat and mouse game. I mean, right now you see bots, but you also see just people who are clearly just going to an LLM prompting,

write a LinkedIn post about my business. Here's some facts. I want to have this format. And then they just copy and paste it, and they're the ones that are sending it. And so, you know, there's this gradient between, like, there's a Python script that's just replying so cool to every post that it sees on the API. And then there's the human that's actually just using AI to generate the text and they're

typing it themselves or whatever. And then in between, you might have someone, the fear would be there's someone that is hired, basically just to do the world eyeball scan and then post-slop and then they scan again, then they post-slop and they can't scan again. Like, how are you thinking about the actual? integration with the platforms to fight all the adversarial activity that you'll see. Yeah. So maybe the first mental model you should have is that one word of uniqueness is the core property that we look for. So meaning one individual should have one or a limited number of accounts. That's kind of like the core property that are you talking about.

I actually think basically most of what we will do will be AI driven. So basically everything that I write will be somewhat co-edited by AI or I will create like fun videos or images. That's totally okay as long as I cannot create 500,000 accounts to do that because then the platform breaks down. So uniqueness is like the core property and I think that's

quite hard to accomplish. That's why we built the orb that there's such an issue, such a uniqueness property. So that's that is a really hard piece. I think we have solved that. I think the re-authentication piece that you just mentioned where you know whatever you can hire a lot of people that already have

world that needs and just use that to post any platform I think that's correct and I think we will see some of that but that's still you know way way less than one individual can create 500,000 accounts that are just AI agents so meaning rate limiting like and the stronger you can get that the better the system becomes basically yeah are there any sort of like long tail networks or internet properties that you think are are under rated or under-discussed as vectors for spam. We saw this sort of funny viral video from a friend who went to his local coffee shop and found that they had like a hundred Android phones running a bot farm, just liking whatever they posted on Instagram, just to sort of like give a little

bit of extra algorithmic juice to their coffee shop promotion. And that was something I hadn't really considered. I think about X. I think about, you know, LinkedIn and Instagram and AI slop there. but maybe I'm not thinking about it in the impact it's having on the average coffee shop on the corner, that type of thing. Well, one thing that I think is actually happening much more is these kind of call attacks to especially elderly people. It's like an AI sounding like their whatever grandson and tricking them into like that kind of thing. I think it's going to get much worse. I had that happen with my grandparents pre-A.I. Oh, really?

They were just pretending, they were just kind of saying it was me and they were relying on my grandparents not,

not like just processing that it wasn't my voice because they were quite a bit older. It's doing an impression. And I can't imagine what, you know, what's happening now where it just,

it would be exactly like my voice. Yeah, yeah, could have easily, with that, they were like, they clocked it pretty quickly. They called my dad. They were like,

Jordy's fine, right? Yeah, they made up some crazy story about how I was like in a, I was in jail and this was my one call

and I needed them to... Oh, wire money or something. That's crazy. Yeah. So stuff like that is going to wrap up. I think then we will get to real-time deep fakes probably in the next 12 months.

Meaning you can just... There was this, you know, viral tweet, I think, last week, about this guy that was like looking like a super attractive girl on a basically live video call. So that kind of thing is going to get come on.

monetized and you know, it'll just become super, super easy. Yeah, we had this debate with, with one guest. We were trying to clock, we were trying to clock if they were using like a gigacad filter, just like a 10% gigacad filter. And we were, we were, we were, a lot of people were, but we were like, pausing it and being like, okay, like he moved his finger in front of his face. Didn't change. Yeah, or like pixel beeping.

But why, why did you assume that he has a gigat filter? Because he looked like a gigat shot. Yeah, no. If he wasn't, if he wasn't using it. And, and other people. people online were levying accusations at him. So we were like, it's our duty to get to the bottom of this. Like you, I mean, you're clearly using a giga-chat filter today, right?

Thank you. That's just what you look like? Wow. Dude, it's working. Whatever you're doing is working. Yeah, it's a sales call. What else is new in your world? I mean, how are you splitting your time?

What does the rest of the year look like? He's just patiently awaiting the singularity? I mean, I think, you know, it's the most important time in a long, long while, so I think, just trying to work all day long and making it happen. Splitting my time, still very focused on world. Merge Labs is a research lab. Sure. That we started with the goal of actually bridging artificial and biological intelligence.

But it really is a research lab. So I think we have a lot of great scientists. It's not a heavy operation yet. But on the other side, I think it really is the year for world because I think, you know, agentic, all these kind of like Maltbook, CloudBots, that's just the beginning. I think it's kind of a good. Yeah, do you think there's something, like a lot of these ideas, Mold Book and CloudBot, now OpenClaught, were all ideas that people had had and yet there was some element of risk surrounding them that maybe prevented some company, like bigger labs from even. going there, right? Like, it's not like the idea of, like, an agent social network is some, you know, this is not the first time that someone has talked about this. This is an idea that's been floating around. Some of them have been funded. The orthodox actually, like, written about

this. They've run the experiments, too. So is there some element right now where we're in a point where, like, you're getting these sort of open source or community-grown projects against ideas that labs had or big companies had, but just didn't have, didn't have, like, kind of like, the freedom to do without a ton of a risk? Sure, I think there's just this general element of you can be much more scrappy as a developer. You know, like atropic or open AI doing something like that. You know, you would actually need to mediate human AI collaboration, for example. All these kind of things would need to be solved and the bar is much, much higher.

So I think that's true. And then broadly speaking, just AI is getting so much better that one guy can create such a such a platform like super fast. Yeah. You know, it can iterate on a daily basis. Like a couple of years ago, this would have needed to be like a team of developers probably. Yeah.

And so I think that's the thing to not also underestimate just like how much more effective one person can be now. And I think that's going to get like great crazier. So I think we'll see a lot of that happening. Buckle up. Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us. Yeah, thanks for time. Awesome.

Congrats on all the progress. Thank you guys. Good to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Goodbye. I'll tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations.

If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Our next guest is Anonymous. It's Nick from X.com. Obviously, it's all over the internet. He's in our YouTube chat often. We've had back and forth with him. I accused him of being an open AI hater. He said, hey, I'm, I got a balanced set of opinion.

So I'm excited to talk to him today about his takes. on AI. This takes on the vibes online. See where we agree, where we disagree. It will be interesting. So let's bring him in from the Restream waiting room. Nick, what a beautiful profile picture. You look exactly like to have you on the show. Thanks for joining. Well, thanks for having me. We appreciate it. Thanks so much. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction and keep it at as high level as you want, since you are anonymous, but anything we can tell about your philosophy or background or interests, all of that would just be helpful to set the table. Sure.

Well, yeah, I actually got into AI around 2021 before Chad Djiput even released. Overnight success. Yeah, I was using their API, 83. You know, I've been their biggest fan from day one. Oh, okay, biggest fan. Yeah, yeah, I know. You know, I said the narrative right. I love it.

I love it. Yeah, I was, you know, fully following everything that's happening in this space and, you know, was really diluted myself with, you know, AGI coming in two weeks type of narrative and really going into like the possibilities, you know, expanding my mind there. You know, when they released Dali, I don't know if you guys remember that. Yeah. Yeah, I was like, you know, so hyped about it that I even made like an Instagram page to create all the best images that's been popping.

all around the internet, until a point where I gained like 100K followers and then open and I blocked me. They reported me. Villarck. Joker mode. And I was like, what? You know, all I'm doing you're blocked. I'm kind of get access.

Okay, okay. Here, here starts the Steelman. I mean, were you hitting the API with anything that was violating TOS? Were you spamming the, API. Were there any other reasons that they could be upset with your behavior? You were just cooking. You can't even cook in this country anymore. Well, okay, I didn't block me from the API. But like I started like a community page to or all the Dally posts. Yeah. On Instagram. Okay. And what actually happened was like so I actually made a list on Twitter. All the people had access.

Yeah. So what happened was like so an open employee, you know, said, yeah, I made this. with Dali. I was like, okay, cool. I take that. I posted on Instagram. And then what happens, like, open and I post the same thing like two hours later. So people started thinking, like, I'm actually the main page because I'm posting it before the official page. Confusing. Okay. Yeah. But I actually wrote it like it's a community page. Okay. Well, yeah, let's continue with your, with your arc. Yeah, AGI coming in two weeks. We all felt that in 2022 and ChatsyPT launched. How have your timeline shifted? How AGI pilled are you?

How optimistic or Dumer are you about the future? Like, what's your overall philosophy on AI in the future? I think AI is like the greatest technology ever. I feel like post-2020 is a new era we're living in. And post-2020-6 is actually even a different era that we're entering into. I'm fully AGI-pilled. I'm great-Curdswell-pilled. I think AGI is coming probably.

I think we're going to have really powerful. systems by 2029, 2030. Yeah. So I think, you know, companies are rolling like different paths to get there. So that's pretty interesting to see. So you're using Dolly early. You're using the Da Vinci 3.5 playground in OpenAI. What are you using currently?

What are you daily driving for knowledge retrieval? Are you vibe coding? Are you doing agentic stuff? What's in your toolkit these days? Well, you know, if you read my bio, it says non-technical number of technical staff. So, you know, I don't do a lot of coding, but yeah, I did play around with, you know, mobile. I love Claude code. This is the first time ever in my life that I'm this year.

I'm actually not using chat. So my daily driver is like Claude, Grok, and Kevinai. Okay. That's what I was on. Yeah, give me some more flavor on when you go to Gemini, when you go to GROC, when you go to Claude.

Sure. Gronk is like, you know, amazing for Twitter retrieval. I think it's best. Claude just has a really nice personality. Like, I just like love talking to it.

It tells me like, hey, calm down, you know, don't know what I think of it. Cool. Don't post it's so over. I think we're going to be fine. Yeah,

and Gemini, I think, like, Gemini is just, like, a scientific research assistant. I think it has, like, a really nice, it probably has, like, one of the best reasoning, in my opinion. Sure. I like talking to it, like, it's, like, notebook. I just learned with Gemini. It also feels really fast. I feel like the Google search, just, like, the speed is, like, it feels like if I have to Google something,

like, that's the good place to go. How are you so fast with headlines? Yeah, you're really fast. It's funny. I end up getting the news from you first, even though you're oftentimes sourcing from other stuff. You're not going to be. Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, the algorithm loves me.

You know, I think not the connection with the algorithm. I'm one. You know, people love me as well. You got fans in the chat right now. Everyone loves you. Your whole research team is here, apparently. Really? Yeah.

Yeah, I think, I just like, love. to stay on top of these things. I'm like really, really locked in. So when like, you know, these reporters, they, you know, post a whole article, like, you know, such a long article. And the only thing that they're to point out is like, yay, two lines. So, you know, cut through the bullshit, go direct, you know, put up the thing that I mean matters.

Yeah, yeah. You kind of scoop the, you kind of scoop the scoopers. Break the scoops. Yeah, for sure. There's nothing wrong with it. How much money have you made from X? Oh, yeah. It varies, but you'd be kind of paying me like $1,000 every two weeks or something like that.

Sometimes it goes like $2,000. It's not much, but it's honest work. It's honest work. Yeah, it's just. In the trenches. Talk to, yeah. Then talk to me about last year. It feels like the narrative of the AI bubble started.

There was a worry about the. the AI KAPX build out. People were taking two sides. Leopoldoshen Brenner, of course, is super long. I'm there. And then there were voices that started, you know, raising questions about the backlog, how much this buildout was going to cost,

whether the growth could keep up, whether the models would keep improving, whether we were plateauing. What was your 2025 like? Well, the thing is, like, my 2024, well, I've been, like, pointing out, like, some absurdities of, like, what's happening. And, you know, I started like just doubting from the beginning, like, okay,

we were supposed to get EGI by 2023. Where did that go? You know, I started questioning, like, wait, what is actually happening? I started realizing, like, you know, the founder of, you know, Sam Altman was like, I was like, okay, what's the agenda actually going? It's like, okay, they might be like just raising money and cutting out competition. Like, do I really want that? No. It might be doing business. He might be being a businessman. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he's, look, look, Sam Altman is just being, you know, what he's best at.

Like, being a really good start founder, you know, driving all the attention and engagement towards him. You know, either it's like through claims saying, you know, AGI is going to be the most powerful technology and bad things that will happen. And then he, like, leans towards, you know, doing those bad things. So, for example, like, I don't know, he's that social media. We don't want to repeat the mistakes of social media. and then they start making Sorosop. It's really good. I don't dislike the technology.

It's like kind of like doubtful of the approach of what's being said in 2022, 2023, and then like 2024, we're entering like, hey, it's getting a little different. But about the bubble, yeah, I just started doubting like, you know, before they didn't have competition. So it was like, okay, they're going to make it. But then Elon started entering the chat. He entered the chat. So, you know, he just... Yeah, but with the bubble, I think, like, you can, I think it's fair to maybe question their ability to meet some of these, like, kind of press release economy style commitments.

Yeah. But have you ever had, do you honestly think there's a world where the market has some intense correction and people stop using, you know, everyday people that are not on X, that don't know the infamous names? just stop using chatGBT? So the way I see it with like, so I think like the bubble is not precisely like AI is not a bubble, but like the companies are bubbles. If you raise too much, you over extend, you know, you're actually entering into a bubble territory. The way I look at like chat GPT, for example, if you look at all their projections of their numbers, it's all based on user account.

Like how many users do we have? So in 2025 in the beginning, they said, they're going to reach a billion users by the end of the year. They actually stalled at like $800 million. I don't even know if they reached $900 million. It's been like six months. They're not growing. So if you just make a simple calculation as like,

okay, if they're user base, which is, you know, getting mobbed by Google for sure, if that starts declining and reaches like a, you know, like a certain threshold, all the projections fail. So. Yeah, they definitely need. growth to continue. I do think that that that 800 number is a little stale at this point. They haven't released the new numbers. It feels like they might still be growing and just not

doing the whole like they're saving it for like, okay, when we put out the billion number, it's a big moment. But I mean, yeah, certainly it raises questions as you as you outlined. What was your read on ads in chat GPT? Well, you know, I'm not a big fan of ads, but I am a kind of ads from the business perspective, sure. They're like, make me, come in my name. We love ads here. Yeah, part of my, I think, I think it was important, like, in processing open AI to realize, like,

at some point you had to realize, like, they are operating as, like, a new big tech company. And so the decisions that they make, they're going to ship a lot of products, like they're going to do a browser, they're going to try SORA. They're going to try a lot of stuff. Not all of it's going to work, but what matters is, like, is the core user base still growing. You could argue, I would be, you know,

I haven't seen anything that would point to them, like, shrinking, but even a deceleration is not great. Totally, yeah. That's good. And so, yeah, you could kind of predict a lot of the things that they would do just by looking at them, not as like a ASI company, but as a big technology company. Yeah, consumer tech.

Yeah. Sure. I just think like look at 4-0, for example, when 4-O started launching, you know, Sam Haltman said, you know, the movie Her and Scarlet Johnson, her voice, you know, it was marketed as like, your lover, you know, you're going to fall in love with chat GPT, your voice, the way it talks to you, and what happened? People actually fell in love. People fell in love. But then they shut it down eventually. Yeah, well, so the thing is like the reason why they had like such a fast growth in

users because of like the image generation model and this part and now where we are. They're really lacking in the imagination model and then... Okay, but Disney, we got all the Disney IP coming. I'm super bullish on this for a eye. It's

it just gives them a real move. It gives them a feature that no one else can have for at least one year and I think that when you look at Disney scale, look at how many people go to the parks every single year how many people will pay to get something novel in an image model, I think that could be

part of the next leg up. Sure, I mean, if IP rights hold, which I don't think they will, the world we're entering into, sure, that's going to be fun. It's so over for IP rights. Yeah, it's over, I think it should be abolished in some sense, but in a very smart way where, you know,

people should get some recognition or something. A pat on the back. Where do you want, yeah, where do you want all this to go? I mean, the anonymous account is interesting

because you have a lot of the ability to talk openly about a bunch of different companies. Do you want to turn this into an analysis group, a commentary channel? Like, where do you see your work evolving? Look, I was never anonymous.

I was like always, I had my face on it. Like, people actually know who I am. Like, Yeah, if you actually, like, you know, I don't, you know, if you go back on my tweets, like, you know, I was just being me. Like, you know, my, you know, I've lived in six countries and whatnot.

I've talked about my life. It's all there. I've never deleted anything. If anyone wants to go dig, go for it. But the thing is like, yeah, I just like went anonymous to like just, you know, be attached from my identity and, like, be, you know, explorative to talk about things that I don't really understand, but I want to understand and go for it. So the best way to understand on the internet is to say something absurd and then be corrected. So yeah. You're just baiting smart,

smart people to, and I'm sure some. Well, smart people are baiting us. You know, researchers are acting like marketers, like EGI two weeks, you know. So they're baiting us. I'm baiting them and, you know, it's causing this. Yeah. I do have a funny update. I like to check this every once in a while because of the Disney Open AI deal. I went to Chat GPPT. I invoked image generation, and I said, make an image of Spider-Man fighting Mickey Mouse. And it says, we're so sorry, but the image we created,

so they actually generated the image. He showed me a little preview, and then it took it away. Which is so crazy, because you think that would not want to, you know, actually do the work and incur the cost. Totally. Read the prompt before. That's what I would think. But it actually generated the full image.

And then it said, even Open AI doesn't read instruction. Similarity to third-party content. If you think we got it wrong, please retry or edit your prompt. And then I used to be able to do that in Nanobanana. I went over to Gemini and I said make an image of Spider-Man fighting Mickey Mouse. And it said, I can't generate the image you requested right now due to concerns from third-party content providers. Please edit your prompt. And it didn't generate the the image with with Gemini. But so it's been interesting to see that press release happen. Yeah, Brock Imagine will probably do it.

You know, they have an exclusive deal. Like, you know, it's like moving fast. Anyway, what are you hoping to spend most of your time on this year? Yeah. Yeah, I just want to go all in into all of this. I don't mind boxing myself. All in. I mean, you know, Invidia invited me to GTC as a full-time creator. And I'm going to go into Jansen and whatnot.

So, yeah, I think like it's time for me to go, you know, like, PennX more and stop, you know, not just posting, but like a lot of things I can talk about. Yeah, that'd be cool. Yeah, I mean, the Anon account, it does, it does give you the ability to speak freely, but it does sort of flatten you. I mean, we were going back and forth on this where I was kind of like collapsing you down into just an open AI hater. And talk from talking, clearly there's a lot more going on there. But it's easy when I only see the viral post and I don't know anything about the person behind it. Like, it can become a little one-dimensional. So I'm excited for your new art. Your hero.

You have to give a little, Sam hasn't blocked you, correct? No, but Chad GPT has blocked me For no reason Like I've never caught me No reason I mean no reason You gotta give it some credit here

I think I think it would probably be Whoever's managing the account Logs in and they're sick of seeing Anything that happens Just seeing it's over It's over I can see whether I gotta get you gotta give some credit

What is your camera roll like? Is it all pictures of Sam Maltman Looking perplexed or something I like entertainment. I'm very tasteful with a lot of these things. So yeah, I just, I know what's absurd, what hits, what's going to be funny. I just post what I feel like. And I go, you know, very analytically, but also I'm a feeler.

So I know what's my head. Very cool. Well, good to meet you, man. This is fun. Do you mind if we flashbang you? throwing flashbang. There we go. It's been great having you on.

Goodbye. We'll see you soon, Nick. See you soon, Nick. Cheers. Go bye. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma.

So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code back prototypes and apps fast. We have our next guest joining in about five minutes. We got to go through the Brian Armstrong story. So Byron Armstrong is in the Sunday edition, in the Exchange Edition of the Wall Street Journal, going back and forth with Wall Street. They called him enemy number one on Wall Street.

He's the crypto CEO. Of course, it's the CEO of Coinbase. He's been clashing with Jamie Diamond. So Brian Armstrong, CEO of the biggest U.S. crypto company, was having coffee with former... It's almost like they paid him to do that. Like, he paid them to write that title. Yeah.

Like, that's getting framed. It is. I mean, that's what Toby Lucky said. This will look great in the frame. Of course, obviously, there's nuance here, and there's a battle, and there's some off-the-record comments that became on the record. But it's an interesting back and forth. So they were at Davos at the World Economic Forum, and Brian Armstrong is having coffee with Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. And J.P. Morgan Chase's Jamie Diamond chimes in.

He says, you're full of S. Blank, blank, blank, line. Said Diamond, a longtime crypto skeptic who's previously called Bitcoin a fraud, his index. point, his index finger pointed squarely in Armstrong's face. Can I get a crowd? I can't. I'm pointing over there. He's like, you're, you're full of S-H-I-T. Diamond in a nutshell told him to stop lying on TV, according to people familiar with the conversation. In appearances on business television programs earlier that week, Armstrong had accused banks of trying to sabotage legislation that would set a new regulatory framework for digital assets.

The confrontation wasn't quite in line with the annual forum's mission to foster cooperation among global leaders. As crypto moves swiftly into the mainstream of American finance, some of Wall Street's heavyweights are waking up to the threats. While banks have embraced some aspects of crypto, helping people to invest in Bitcoin and using digital assets to make money transfers more efficient, they are drawing a line at encroachment on their core business. Consumer deposits.

Armstrong's coming for them. Banks and Coinbase are at odds over... We have it in the timeline, but it's so much nicer in paper. Whether crypto exchanges should be allowed to offer consumers regular payouts for holding digital tokens. So you've got some USDC. Are they going to pay you interest or not? That's the debate.

These so-called rewards would pay holders of stable coins a recurring fee, say 3.5%, not bad. Stable coins are digital assets pegged to real world currency like dollars. Banks say the payouts are effectively the same as interest on the bank accounts. And since banks offer much less yields, typically under 0.1% in a checking account, they worry that the upshot will be that consumers will shift their money in droves into crypto. That, they say, will compromise community banks and lending to businesses. Armstrong and others in the crypto world say the free market should rain.

that banks can simply pay higher interest rates to compete with stable coins or get themselves into stable coin businesses themselves. Just join the party. The legislation known as the Clarity Act might shape the future of everyday financial services, including bank deposits and electronic payments. In the latest push to find compromise, the White House plans to host a meeting Monday between today, between banks and crypto industry groups, according to people familiar with the matter. So David Sachs will be there.

Coinbase's head of policy, Carr Calvert will be there. Armstrong 43 co-founded Coinbase in 2012 and has helped lead Crypto's quest for legitimacy and mainstream acceptance. At the head of the roughly $55 billion firm, Armstrong has a powerful voice in industry debates, such as the one playing out in Washington. Quote, we'd rather have Nobel than a bad bill, he said on X, and opposed a day before the Senate committee was posed to vote on a version that could effectively ban companies like Coinbase from offering yield to consumers. potentially costing it billions of dollars. Within hours, the vote was abruptly postponed, taking much of the financial world by surprise. There's a lot more here that we can dig into, but we do have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Jordy, is there anything else that's kicking around in your brain? We need to have somebody on that is not from JPM or Coinbase

to talk about this dynamic. An independent voice. That would be a lot of fun. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference with scale from one GPU. you to hundreds of thousands. And let's bring in our next guest from the restream waiting room.

David, from Lexicon branding. David, how are you doing? I'm doing great. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you. Is your 2026 off to a good start? It is. We're very busy.

It looks like it. Walk us through who you are, what you do, and what's behind you. Okay, okay. Well, I'm president of Lexicon, Lexicon branding. And we are in the business of developing brand names. and naming systems for new companies and new technologies. And we do it really for people or clients all over the world. We have an interesting process here that combines really a creative layer

with an engineering layer. And that engineering layer is a combination of linguistics and cognitive science that puts more objectivity into both developing names and importantly selecting it. And the names behind me on the wall are names that every name on the wall has been invented by lexicon. When is the right time to meet a founder like six months before they start the company? Like when like what because I imagine a lot of these companies I can see from I think some of them. Some of them come to you after they've started after they're already in market and they realize for some reason or another, you know, we need to we need a new name. and then they come to you.

And then there's like some constraints and it becomes harder, you know, walk us through like the ideal process. Yeah. Most people do not. You're absolutely right. Do not come to us six months before they really started the company. We suggest that they come to us as they approach that Series A funding. Oh, interesting. By that point, by that point, they really know who they are and where they're going for,

the most part. And so we can work with that information. Now, before that, you know, sometimes they land on a great name. I mean, you, you, this is something that you can get lucky. Not everybody needs a lexicon to come, to work with, but most of the time, as you approach that Series A is a good time to take a look at your name, and we do that consulting all the time where, hey, is it time for us to change your name? How much, how do you, how do you handle the domain side? Because I talk to, I oftentimes, you know, Angel and like 60 some startups, maybe 70 at this point.

And oftentimes they'll have what seems like a great name. And maybe there's no trademark issues with it. But for some reason or another, the dot com is taken and they will just never get it, right? Because it's some hundred year old company. And you just have to assume they've been. operational for long enough. They may be you're public or privately known. Or it's like a super rich person that just is like squatting on it. Yeah. So how do you how do you navigate that? Because I feel like one part of the naming process that I appreciate is you have these incredible constraints already.

It's not like an open canvas because you have trademark constraints. You have domain constraints. And then you have a bunch of other kind of like less clear constraints, but just like it has to make sense. Right. And so in the naming process, you're trying to like kind of combine all of those. and to a short list of things, and then hopefully it has to, like, feel good and sound good and do all those other things. Well, the URL should be the least important constraint in this process. And we have research that we've done several years ago, and actually, just this morning, we're about to launch another study that I think is going to once again provide evidence that the URL is really no longer that important, really. I mean, the search is now. Domain brokers hate this one simple trick.

Which is so funny. I mean, that's very, I mean, I can't wait to read the study because it's so counter to, I've always felt like domains. Domains are the element of your branding that you have like the least amount of control over but have an incredible impact. Everyone's seen like a beauty, if you see a beautiful website and then the domain is something something, try blank. It just screams, like, because there's so much subconscious branding and marketing that people are getting from every time I go to a big company's website, they have a dot com. It sort of trains people. But what's the data that shows that it doesn't really matter? I think that's probably, you know, given what you, the two of you do, it's probably a little inside baseball because we're not finding that on the consumer in or the customer in.

And they're just looking at this as an address. The analog is a zip code. And actually, we found evidence that consumers like the idea of something that says, what is this, you know? And look at the companies that have done well. You know, Lucid is a client of ours, Lucid Motors. They don't have Lucid.com. So I think it's less important for the consumer and the customer than it is to perhaps

Yeah. Raised money. Part of it for me is somebody that's helped name a number of companies, and I just enjoy buying and finding and buying domains. I've just always appreciated it, is that I appreciate how hard it is to get a great domain. And so when a founder comes and is pitching me, and they already have something great,

it just shows like a level of agency and ability. Maybe they didn't know a great broker, or maybe they didn't even use a broker, but they figured out how to get it. And so it kind of says something about them. But I agree. There's a lot of context where it totally doesn't matter. And if you look at the wall back there,

almost every single one of those companies got to the point where they could buy whatever domain they wanted, right? So it's like just- At a certain point. I mean, the Microsoft Azure one is hilarious because Microsoft owns Azure.com, but reroutes it to Azure.com because they want you at the top-level domain. How is, has chat GPT kind of made some clients, kind of given them kind of the wrong lesson in branding? Because there's so much about that where like traditional, you know, if somebody came to you and they were like, I'm going to try to make a consumer product.

I want to get to a billion users. If I don't get to a billion users, I'm going to fail. I'm going to call it chat GPT. What do you think? You'd be like, you'd probably laugh them, laugh them out of the room. Or say, well, you really need to work with me. Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about that question is more than 50% of our clients come to us,

having worked with Claude or ChadGVT to develop their names, and they work with it. They find it frustrating. Things just don't work together. There's no doubt those types of models can generate thousands of names. No question about it. What they can't do at this moment in time, that may change down the road, is apply the judgment and principles around this name is better than that name for you.

Our philosophy is we're not in this business to create good names. We're in the business to create the right name, the right name that adds immediate value and long-term value because the name should be the one thing that stays with you through your whole journey and nothing will be used more often or longer. So it makes it very important. And at this point in time, a chat or a claw just isn't up to speed to do that kind of decision making. Walk us through the chapters of kind of even naming styles, right? Because we're at an interesting moment right now.

People are putting GPT on the name, on the end of things. People are saying the blank company of place, right? Like that's a whole new thing. I'm sure that triggers. Just started with the Browser Company of New York. Yeah, the Browser Company of New York, a bunch of people copied that. And my take on that was always, that was an amazing name one time because it signaled to insiders in Silicon Valley that it was just a novel kind of fresh take on the browser. And it was the polar opposite of Chrome or Safari or some of these kind of like one word, even though they did have a name for the product.

And then you can think back like there was an era where like adding L.Y to the end of something was popular. like what are the different chapters and like have uh i'm curious of like the great brands have always kind of gone against the mold right because like would you uh and anyways so maybe extrapolate on that yeah yeah sure well look one of the most persistent trends or chapters as you call it in the industry is imitation so someone comes out with something that ends in l y and hey that's a good idea let's do so then you'll see four or five names out in the marketplace that and with LY. What's happening there is that that imitation doesn't generate the interest and the provocativeness that are really well put together brand name for people.

So we always advise people. Imitation is suicide. Your name should not look or act like anything that's out there in the marketplace. How did you get into this? What was the first brand name you did? Well, I came from the advertising business, so, you know, great agency for Dunn Building, and I just saw as we worked on projects and company identity, that naming was going to become more and more important as the world got more and more complex

and more and more integrated. And so I took a flyer. That's the simple, maybe boring story about how I got into this business. relative to the first name we ever generated, it's a name that has long since disappeared. I think it was for United Technologies, and we named a new furnace noise reduction technology called Whisper.

Okay. Yeah, still funny. What advice do you give companies that get to a scale where they have a brand name and then different product lines and maybe even kind of like sub-companies. We're at this point right now where, like, look at a company like Claude has Anthropic, Clod, Clod, Codd Code. OpenAI has, you know, chat GPT. They have the browser, which I'm even just blanking on the name of it.

They have Codex. They have all- Codex desktop app. Yeah, so- Different models in Codex. There's GPT-5.2. Codex. Yeah, what framework do you give?

Because I'm assuming you'll work. You'll work with a company to name the parent company, and then you also work on the subproducts, and then some cases the subproducts end up outshining the parent company. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have an expression here we call clarity is the language of leadership. And what you see in that example you just gave me, that there's really no story there. They don't have a common language, and so it's difficult for the audience, the consumers,

to really understand what are they doing for me? What is this company about? It's a very choppy thing. So a lot of our business coming to us now over the past year and a half, and I think it's because of AI, is clients coming to us and asking us to help them, I use the term, straighten out their language and make it make sense. Creating a through line.

Yeah. Yes. What else about these taxonomies? interested at like at the early stage series A, how much are you trying to actually define a hierarchy of product names and what is the process of like working with you like? Is it, you know, there's like a specific sprint, specific deadlines, you're paying up front and you don't know what you're getting. Is there contingency? Like, what is the workflow to work with a company? It's pretty straightforward. In many ways, this is really rocket science. But we start with a real

simple work session where we're really asking clients four key questions. And this always works. It's how do you define winning? If we get 10 people in room, we're going to get 10 different answers, but we can sort that out. Then we'll say, okay, if that's how you want to win, what do you have to hold? That gives us things that the name doesn't have to. Then we say, okay, what do you need to win? What don't you have? That begins to you know, give us information about how that name might help them, right? Because a name should be a tool. It should be a foundation for success. And then finally we said, okay, what do you have to say? Would you like to say? And between those four things,

we call it a diamond. We can then set up a what we call a framework or a creative framework, which we don't even use the word objective is because we want that analog holds true. We want a window that we can travel through and do a lot of creative work. That's where the process begins. And then we work here with small two-person creative teams, and we have this what we call internally, really, this engineering layer where linguists, we're using, you know, company-funded research on things like, it sounds exotic, but it's very fundamental, sound symbolism, letter structure, and fluency.

All those things then go into a funnel to help us select names. Makes sense. What is the key to avoiding botching a rebrand? We saw, like, nowadays products grow so quickly. We saw this with Claudebot, which if you paid attention to that, you would have seen like, okay, Anthropics going to have issue with this, right? It's like way to, in the same category, sounds the exact same. Very confusing to consumers.

So he quickly rebranded it, then didn't like the rebrand, then rebranded it again. And fortunately, I think the product is exciting enough that the new name of OpenClub. hopefully sticks and continues, you know, the community just like keeps a momentum, but you're working with companies that are coming to you right when they're starting to get real traction and they know they need to change their name, but they don't want to kind of destroy any brand equity that they've built up. Yeah. Well, I think the biggest factor is that they under-invest in the name change.

And I don't mean necessarily investing with a lexicon or, or someone else, they don't sit and think through all the implications of doing this name-game. First, from a, what's the message that we wanna communicate? Because you do at some point have to say, yesterday we were this, and now today we're that. And what is that message? And then the second thing is lining up the recent,

the right law firm, global language analysis, all these things so you don't end up with something that's launched, And then it turns out to mean, you know, your mother's a bank robber. Just not a fun day. Yeah, I mean, a good example you did. So you did Trip Actions to Navon. Yeah.

And that was an example. Trip Actions had a big brand, at least in the U.S., and they didn't want to be explicitly known, I imagine, as just a travel booking site. They had to go through that. I remember they really paired the rebrand. I'm sure they paid paid you guys worked with you guys but then they also seemingly spent like five 10 million dollars in a short period of time to like reintroduce themselves at least that was my impression as as just a as somebody in the target market yeah they did a fantastic job they really did and that name is a coin solution we made it up because the founder of the company having been you might say burn by trip action and being so one-dimensional, so narrow,

said I want flexibility for the future. And the best way to get flexibility is to make something up. So that means we'll never run out of names. That's right. We all. We hope. We have, it's always been, every single time I've been working with a startup

or trying to name something, sometimes you can just be hitting a wall where you're like, I can't find, for me, it's like I can't find any domains in this space, that I like. Everything's trademarked, all the stuff. And then, and then there's always, there's always a name. You, you might appreciate some of the history of TBPN. We started as a show called Technology Brothers. Then we had an issue where every, where we went, people would say, introducing the tech bros. And we were like, we knew this was our life's work. And we were like,

I don't want to spend my whole life being introduced as the tech bros, which was like the word that we were trying to avoid with the original name. And so I was like, I need a, I want like a four or five letter domain. It has to have TB in it. And we ended up part part of TBPN. We're not a network. We look and sound like an ESPN or something like that. But the logic was like if we name it like a network, even though we're a podcast or a live stream, the comms departments for big tech companies will be more comfortable putting their leadership teams on our show because it looks and feels more like television, even if it is at the end of the day, just, you know, 10 of us here in in a studio making something that looks like television.

Yeah. It does feel like you're a national network. Yeah. It is a mouthful. It is a mouthful, though. We're having to power through that. Yeah, yeah. Putting a P next to a B is always a choice.

It's, you know, the real lexicon heads will probably not. I mean, last question for me, because there's some breaking news going on right now. but what do you think about a return to using surnames as company names, the Ford Motor Company, Walt Disney, the Disney Company, that felt like something that was just right there on the shelf for founders to pull off and revive. It's starting to happen, but do you think that that's something that might happen? It takes guts. Because you can't. There's Raghetti Computing. It's a quantum computing company, public.

There are some people that have done it, but do you think that that was something that you would caution folks against or you would be in favor of? I would caution to really take a hard look at that, and it really depends on the person's personality, what the name is like. Is it easy to spell? Is it easy to say? The danger, of course, is something happens to the founder that is on board. Now you have to live with that. So I think it's worth discussion and evaluation. But I would probably push against it most of the time. How many clients do you work with a year?

We'll do about 75 projects a year in the naming area. And then we have a research group here that does the quantitative research for us also. Very cool. And only some fraction of those are technology companies. I'm assuming, you know, a bunch of other industries will tap your expertise as well. Yeah, we try to keep a balance, but really 50, maybe 60% of our work is in technology at this point in time. And we, which I love it. Everything is technology.

I love it. That's a good place to be. And it's fun. I mean, these are all amazing brands. The Power Book. What a legend. We see the future every week. Yeah.

And we talk to some of the smartest people that can imagine, as you guys do well. Yeah, you know, I can imagine. Well, I've had a couple people text me during the show asking for an intro, so you have quite a lot of demand. I'm sure more than you can fulfill, but we'll definitely send some people your way, and it was great to meet. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for off-down, David. We'll talk to you soon. Tomorrow, Cisco, on February 3rd, the Cisco AIS Summit brings together leaders from Nvidia, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy.

The whole thing will be livestreamed. to be there. And we'll be there with the gigastream. Headed to the Bay later today. We have some breaking news. First up, Palantir beat earnings. Stock is up, what is it, up 6% already after hours. It's a $350 billion company. And this is the big one from Kalshee here. Justin, SpaceX reportedly confirms X-AI merger.

Very exciting. This has hit the Bloomberg terminal as well. Elon Musk's SpaceX confirms merger with XAI and company memo. SpaceX confirms plans to merge with XAI before the IPO. We were talking about this and sort of predicting that this would happen. SATS is up 2% after hours. I guess that's correlated there. They just go up.

Anything happens in space that's good. It just goes up. Sats? What is the Sats? I don't know. I thought that was. That's Echo Star. They hold the...

Yeah, they hold SpaceX sock. Yeah. Elon Musk plans to merge SpaceX with X with X in a deal that encompasses the billionaires increasingly costly ambitions to dominate artificial intelligence, space exploration. The deal was announced in a memo. Bloomberg earlier reported on the discussion. SpaceX is planning an IPO that could raise as much as 50 billion and value the company at $1.5 trillion. It's also discussed a possible merger with Tesla. there's a couple other data points that we should share.

On Kalshi, the which AI company will have the best coding model at the end of 2026. XAI is at 9%. You don't hear that much about XAI, but that's higher than I thought. Anthropics leading at 54%, then Open AI at 27%, then Google at 14%. Of course, this is in the benchmarks on Live Bench AI,

rated by coding average. Do it that what you will. But the real interesting data point about SpaceX is that, according to Reuters and Tren Griffin on X, SpaceX generated 8 million in EBITDA. So this is a typo. This is a typo. It's $8 billion. Eight billion.

On EBITDA. Because I read this and I was like, whoa, that's not. Nothing. Yeah. Because it's eight million is pretty marginal. Yeah. No, it's like, that is not. Everyone's been applying.

No, no, no. The correct number is $8 billion in profit on. 15 billion to 16 billion in revenue. So 50% margins for space company is absolutely insane. A lot of that's coming from Starlink, obviously. Starlink is the main, Musk's satellite satellite-based internet system, Starlink is the main revenue driver, accounting for about 50 to 80% of the total revenue. The rapid launch of 9,500 Starlink satellites since 2019 has made SpaceX the world's largest satellite operator with only over 9 million users. of the Broadbet Internet service.

And of course, it's not just, you know, individuals that have a Starlink that they throw when they're camping. It's, you know, companies and boats and yachts and planes now. There's a whole Super Bowl ad just about, I think, United Airlines has a deal. And so they want people to choose United because Starlink is such a differentiator when you're getting on a long-haul plane. There's not much.

There's not that much you can differentiate on. All the food is bad. Yeah. Everywhere. Yeah. It's terrible. All the planes are falling apart. Yeah.

You don't really feel safe on any area. I agree. So one thing you could differentiate on is if you can like, if you get food in first class, if you're allowed to bring it back. Yeah. That would be a huge differentiator. TbPN, JetBlue. They're moving slow on that front.

And so they have to differentiate on Starlink. But I do think it will be a real differentiator. Like if you're choosing between American and New York, you're going from L.A. to New York and it's American or United and United has Starlink. That's a pretty big difference just to be able to properly, properly use the internet. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.

CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. There's one more interview. Sorry, not interview, but context. Context. I'm from Jensen. We're going to pull this video up. Take him. He highlighted it.

Let's pull it up, John. I cannot wait to see your reaction. Okay. I haven't seen this yet. High-yield theory also says, if you bought the ex-bank debt and high-yield bonds back at 13% yields, you've now parlayed your way into being a creditor to the largest IPO ever. What a journey.

It is such a crazy journey. Anyway, let's play a Jensen clip. And this year, this year is the, you're the horse. So it's going to be a very good year. And this year... Let's go. So it says that post is a... It says that post is a joke.

What about it is a joke? Is it AI? Is it fake? Did he actually say that? Did he say that a long time ago? No, no, no. It's the fire horse. Take him as saying,

Jensen is citing the year of the horse and you're bearish. I'm not a CIA body language expert, but look at the expression on his face. This post is a joke. Yeah, kind of. I don't know. Yeah. No, Jensen is. I mean, we said this.

We opened the year with this. We said Year of the Firehorse. Yeah. Massive. Also, I mean, he was, he was seeing chugging beer. drinking champagne, giving celebratory toast. He's on cloud nine. That was one of the better calls.

Yeah. We're gonna dig into that more. So XAI just filed this at the Nevada Secretary of State website, managing members. They put a SpaceX person on the silver flume filings. Andrew Curran says, it's happening. Can confirm that the screenshot's real, merger is effective. SpaceX, Space Exploration Technologies, Corp is now the managing member of XAI Holdings LLC.

Interesting. Says Prins. Yeah, $8 billion in profit. The X in SpaceX stands for Twitter now. Twitter now. It is a weird, weird timeline. But it makes a lot of sense. I mean, managing five companies is going to be exhausting and difficult.

Managing, you know, two. There's some economies of scale. And now that you have the data centers. in space thing and Starlink, you know, it is a communications company after all. Yeah. Makes a lot more sense. You know, I don't know. And I'm not going to say we called it, but we certainly were talking, I mean, we started

talking about, about this possibility at the end of last year. It felt like, you know, XAI didn't have the traction to keep just continuously raising at a $200 billion valuation when you looked at its financial performance relative to the rest of it. So, and merging XAI into Tesla, it wasn't going to get a lot of, I think it would have gotten way too much pushback. Also, Tesla's obviously public, so it would have had more scrutiny. But, I mean, if you just play out, even like the non-AGI, vanilla case of the models sort of commoditize, everything gets, they get to near the frontier and maybe one is better than the other for one thing. But at the end of the day, it's like, you know, intelligence on tap, you're paying for tokens, and SpaceX's tokens are cheaper.

because they're using solar and they're in orbit. Like, there's a world where just on the pure economic calculation, you can get market share. It sets up SpaceX to actually be a player in, like, AI cloud. Yeah. Like, I see a world where they're like, yeah, we're really good at building infrastructure. We're going to build the infrastructure to power other people's apps. Yeah, yeah.

So I would expect to see some type of, like, enterprise AI offering from SpaceX, like, in the near future, even potentially before, like, there's really, like, data centers in space. Yeah. A couple more posts. I just, I love imagining the person who is just, like, the longest tenured Twitter employee who's just like, yeah, I'm here. I'm working at Twitter. And they're like, okay, now I work in an AI lab.

Now I work at a rocket company. It's like such a funny twist in the career path. But, you know, congratulations to everyone who held on and is now working at SpaceX. A couple more reactions to Oracle, Matthew. Zitlin over at HeatMap says he's wearing my the Nvidia opening I deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with opening I shirt and then Alex over at 8BC responded to the Oracle's post and said ohm.g this is literally bank run language it really does really does weird read like that and so I mean the good thing is that it just feels like the like the the the

about adoption falling off has not really come to pass and so like people need tokens they're deploying them more and more more people are using LLMs more hours of the day everything sort of like on track like the fundamental technology is is growing and so would I be terrified of sitting on a data center that has the ability to inference just one of the many LLMs like it doesn't seem like the worst scenario to be. And we looked at the gross margins, seem good. Like, a lot of the health checks of the ecosystem have been passing, in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah, and Oracle is already, it's, I mean, it's already, it's down almost 50% since the original. It's already sort of

corrected. I wonder what the CDS is doing, but that's, that's for another deep dive. The other, the other, yeah, it's actually down more than 50% since the original announcement. Play that won't one. Well, up next, we fortunately have somebody whose job is to make sure the demand is real. Yes. And so he is supporting the backlog. Tebow from OpenAI. The other breaking news that we should talk about before he hops on is Bob Iger at Disney.

He has told associates that he plans to leave the CEO role before his contract expires. He said, I'm taking all the IP, I'm giving it to opening eye, and then I'm out. Iger told associates that he plans to step down to CEO and pull back from daily management before the December 31st end of his contract. So he's planning some summer moves. He's going to be in Europe maybe. The Entertainment Giants board of directors is planning to meet with him next week at its headquarters in Burbank, where they were expected to vote on who should take the top job.

In private conversations over the last few months, Iger has told people close to him that he's ready to move on from the grind of being CEO, and was frustrated by conflicts at Disney's ABC Network over the brief suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, people who have spoken to him said. The CEO has told multiple associates that he would like to spend more of his time and energy on other things, such as sailing his new and larger super yacht, the Aquarius. Somebody in the chat earlier was talking about the name of their new sailboat. Yeah, kind of come up with an innovative name if you're naming a boat. Hiring Lexicon brandings and for your boat. You really should.

Aquarius feels pretty like, you know, like Chatt GPD could come up with that name, potentially. He said that he would also like to devote more time to work with his wife, Will Obey, Dean of USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and on Angel FC, the women's soccer team they bought in 2024. The final timing of his departure from the top job hasn't been determined yet and could change. He's expected to remain CEO for several months. What you got? RigaV, always one step ahead of us in the chat.

Just shared exclusive. Open AI is unsatisfied with some Nvidia chips and is looking for alternative sources say. So OpenAI comms team fires back. Okay. Somebody else in the chat was saying that Jensen is in his clip farming era. He saw a bunch of the kick streamers

and he's like, I need to start doing this. Okay, well, we will dig into that more. But until then, we have the, we have some massive news from Codex. Let's bring in our guests from the Restream Waiting Room. How are you doing? What's happening? Hello. Nice to be here.

Excited to be here. Thanks for hopping on the show. This is the first time on your show. Please introduce yourself and your role and then the announcement today. Yeah, sure. And Tebow, I work here at opening out in Codex together with an awesome team. I lead the entire Codex team. Okay.

And yeah, today, like, we launched the Codex app on BlackOS. And it's a very capable thing. I think it's a surprising cable. Yeah. Well, I mean, I downloaded it before the show. I had like five minutes, and I was able to create a version of the TVPN website and the style of Berkshire Hathaway. It feels like sort of a studio Ghibli moment for vibe coding in many ways. Like, you can just spin some up.

What are you excited about the desktop app specifically? because we've seen the whole Multbot news, it interacts with your file system, but then there's also just a whole host of people that are loosely familiar with programming and maybe they're comfortable with the idea of programming. But at the same time, when you tell them like, hey, set up an environment, get a CLI, get your IDE set up,

they're just like, I don't want to spend the hour that it's going to take me even to set up something as simple as the tools have become. It's still too much. So what were the goals? What are you excited about for Codex on desktop? There are two things I'm really excited about. It's like one, it does make it much more accessible.

You just install it, you get going, and it's like after you log in. It's delightfully simple. You're just greeted by this little composer. You can start chatting with it and then sort of like invites you to get things done. But also it very much leans in into the way of working that we've seen from technical staff at Open AI and our users. And when you look at Peter, for example, with like an open clause, just like multiple. tasking a lot and it's easy to lose context when you switch like between your different terminals, you don't have notifications, and then you don't have like the whole multi-modality things if you're

working with, you know, front ends, images, if you just want to use voice, all of those things are like packed into the app. Oh, wow, yeah. Very much leaning in into like making people even more productive. Yeah, I didn't even notice that the dictate buttons right there. I was uploading screenshots and that was really effective. Peter was talking a lot about how he tax screenshots in and just gives more visual information to the system. Talk to me about the models that come out of the box, how I should be thinking about model selection. It sort of defaults to a 5.2 codex medium.

When would I want to switch and what are some of the different benefits? Yeah, so we just get you started with the model that we feel is the best for most people. And that's done like through extensive tests, internal evaluations, and just feedback that we've got. And like 5-2 codex that medium has this adaptive thinking. So it's going to work fast on easy problems. It's going to work harder

on things that actually deserve taking the time. It just feels like a good default thing to get started with. We also introduced personalities. So now you have two choices. You can go with a more friendly one. And then you can use the pragmatic one, which was like the one that we had so far. A lot of people surprisingly, even on the Kodix team, has switched to the friendly one. It's just like it's nice to be a little bit more supported and validated. But of course, we support the other important models, 5-2, which was a much bigger jump, I think, than people expected. And it's really also what we crafted the app and the experience around. 5-2 is, like, really excellent at long-running, you know, tasks, like, independently and getting it done to, like, a level of completion, you know, that you expect from, like, you know, senior technical staff.

And that allows you to do a lot of multitasking. And, you know, that's really what the app is built around. you can handle different projects, different treads, all running together without losing context. And sort of like efficiently, you know, managing a lot of things. And this is sort of like a glimpse into what the future is going to be like with agents. Yeah. I feel like a lot of people are going to come to the Codex app on desktop with like a vague idea. You're going more prosumer it feels like with this in many ways.

And I'm wondering how you think about planning versus implementation, walking through actually setting Codex up for success. obviously like the great programmers can can just prompt better because they understand the hierarchy of files and what tools might be used but for someone who's effectively non-technical how do you think about the planning stage giving the model enough to make good decisions and actually execute properly yeah I think planning is effective in two ways it's it is effective for for the agent because it allows to be

very specific about, you know, what you actually want the agent to go and do, like, you know, perhaps for many hours, but it also gets your own thoughts straight. And it's sort of like invites to have like a conversation around, you know, what is it actually that you're trying to do, you know, when you're sitting behind? Like sometimes you think like, hey, you know, this is like a very simple instruction, right? You know, just go and refactor it and, you know, remove this part of the back end and, like, speed this part up. And then, you know, maybe they're actually, you don't realize there are like, you know, five different ways, like with different tradeoffs, on how the agent could go and tackle this.

And like planning just sort of like helps resolve that ambiguity. So I find it like a very useful thing just as a human, you know, to go through as a process. It's like a useful reminder of like, hey, let's be crisp about, you know, what you actually want to do. But one thing that's also very important is like with the app and in general, like we don't chop off like the top end of the capabilities, right? So it's like very important that, you know, people who are like extremely sophisticated can get, you know, the most incredible things done. And we're seeing a lot of adoption actually of the app, like within research and, you know, it's fascinating walking through the office, like, seeing people like do the wildest things with this thing. It's like very much a very, it's a very capable tool. If I look at the release schedule, I see the chat GPT app, which has a lot of functionality, then the Atlas browser, now codex on desktop.

Are CEL, are IDEs dead, in your opinion? Are people just going to bring their own? Or do you think this grows into an IDE? Or is that like a separate, separate environment based on like what you're experiencing and the workflows that you're seeing? Right now, it's a companion. It's a companion to the IDE.

You know, very much, you know, can stand on its own, but is enhanced by, you know, using an IDE, like occasionally. Some people will prefer, like, you know, just being in their IDE. But, like, it is quite evident to me that as agents just become extremely capable, you just want to talk to them. and they will get things done. And then what you want to do is you want to be able to steer them

and supervise the result. And that requires something that is a very rich interaction surface, and that's all we're building with you up. How do you think about deployment? I can imagine people vibe coding little apps that do things for them on their computers, or I had to build an HTML page that I just opened in Chrome and was able to just see. the next step is actually deploying it.

Obviously, there's a whole bunch of tools that you could plug in with. How are you thinking about open ecosystem versus potentially offering some hosting functionality? Yeah, we love investing in the open ecosystem. That's something that I've been very proud of us doing as like all our code is like the majority of our code is open source.

We also support a lot of like other open source initiatives. And one of the things that we're leaning in is like the open standard around skill. and we ship with a bunch of skills that are useful. Like, for example, one is like for VERSEL deployments. Sure. And that allows you to just take what you've built and very quickly deploy it and have it, you know,

accessible there and, you know, share it with others. It is not a native integration. We might consider that in the future. But it's already very easy to do things that are way beyond just writing code. Yeah, yeah. I mean, for a lot of people, even deploying to Vurcell is going to be, oh, there's going to be,

it's going to ask me for an API key or something. But if you're in a chat interface, it can go back and forth and you can just ask, okay, what does this mean? Where do I go? What's the webpage? Where do I click? What do I copy? And all of a sudden it's live.

You don't need to read the docs anymore. You can just ask Codex to do it for you and it will do it to a high degree of a high degree of quality, especially given all the information that's packed in the skill. It's sort of like puts like the guard wheels on. Yeah. How are you thinking about funneling chat GPT users to? codex on desktop. It feels like... You're going to buy some ads?

No, but I mean, there are worlds where you fire off a GPT 5.2 prompt, and it just writes code in the thinking step, and you don't actually see the Python that it wrote and executed. And the next step is, okay, maybe I want to run this regularly. Maybe I

want to wrap this in, you know, CLI or some desktop app. And I could imagine a flow where, you know, you're, you're in the chat GPT app and you get to the end of the capabilities there and says, hey, you should go over here. We have a more robust experience for you. Have you thought about that? I mean, obviously on day one, there's just going to be immense amount of just excitement and trial and virality. But long term, what are you thinking of integration between the different

ecosystems? Yeah, I hope that with this launch, we do inspire a study of people who haven't tried Kodix yet to try it and realize, hey, you know, I can really do really cool, creative things with this and maybe like coding agents is actually for me. What you explained around, you know, the first experience in chat GPT and then you have, you know, the code interpreter workflow there, like where you don't actually need to understand the code or you use canvas and, you know, you have this little bit of delight there and, you know, you realize, hey, Chachapiti can create things for me and like, you know, which image generation, like, how do we combine that and sort of like bring the magic of like coding agents to everyone? There's definitely something that we're thinking

about. They're considerate. there around, you know, how you do this safely and securely, given, you know, the folks wouldn't actually understand the code as running under the hood. So Codex for now is very much meant for, you know, technical, technical adjacent audience. But then we're also thinking, like, hey, this thing is, like, incredibly powerful and the coding can help achieve all sorts of economically viable tasks. You don't need to understand that it's code under the hood, but, you know, how do we bring this to more people?

Are you going to hang with, are you hanging with Peter while he's in SF? We're like close on Twitter and you know, Peter is just everywhere. He's hosting this con, claw con, like, for the first time, which is like I heard it's like over like, you know, 500 participants already and stuff. So I might just like go by and say hi. That's amazing. That's so fast. Everything he does is fast. I mean, one of my big takeaways from the clawed bot, molt bot, open claw was just that mobile, the importance of mobile.

and people going on telegram or signal or WhatsApp and texting an interface that could write code for them, execute things and interface with some hardware. How are you thinking about the mobile experience into codex? Like how the integration loops happens now that there's a desktop app, there's obviously the ChatGPT mobile app that has massive installation. What are the pros, cons? What are you excited about there?

Yeah, we're very excited about the mobile experience. It'll always be my dream of, you know, I can start a task, I can talk to codex from anywhere, and then I can just like walk away, follow on my phone, and steer it. And this is definitely something that's going to come. That's cool. We are very much optimizing, you know, for professional software engineers, and people are, like, you know, really excited about getting super productive. So, he felt like bringing first an amazing experience on macOS, you know, felt like the right thing priorities-wise.

It is something that will come and I think will delight people, when it's there. And this is also why, you know, we keep calling everything Codex. Codex is our agent. It is how you get things done. And then, you know, whether you interact through it, like, via the CLI or in web or in the US, like, under the hood is the same agent. And, like, we're going to connect it all at some point.

Yeah. Is it time to buy an extra monitor? How many monitors do you run? Right now on my laptop, I only have one. Oh, the future is here. But yeah, it's delightful. Like, you can actually, like, follow things, like, much more. So it don't feel like the need to have, like,

five monitors. At home, I do have three. There you go. There is a three as all. I'm not going to lie here. Maybe that Dell, the 65-inch, 6K monitors in the future, we're very excited about that. Anyway, congratulations on the launch. Thank you so much for stopping by the show.

Great to meet. Great to meet you. And we'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Thanks for having. Thanks for having. Goodbye. Let me tell you about vibe.com, where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels,

target audiences, and measure sales just like on meta. Where to go next? Dylan Abrasado said the Succession is a documentary because apparently the next CEO of Disney could be the theme park division chairman. I didn't get the reference. Have you seen? Do you get the reference from Succession?

It's Tom who's running the park. Oh, Tom runs the Parks Department. Let me know. Let me know if I'm... I got to finally get through all of succession. But, oh, in other news, there's, I see this post that you're on, Bro spent $50 billion buying Bitcoin over the past five years and is now underwater.

Talking about micro strategy. He didn't even mention who it is. And people just know that it's micro-stretched. I mean, not a lot of people that are non, maybe state entities have bought this much. Is $712,000. Wow. Yeah. I think his average entry is in the 80s.

Yeah. And where is... Bitcoin is up today. It's 78,000. But obviously that's nowhere near where it was when it was up at 120. So a significant sell-off. Really? I have some extra context on the...

Please. Open AI news. So, yeah, apparently opening I have been talking with Syribras and GROC to do, like, custom chips. And then when GROC got bought by, NVIDIA, that stopped the talks. I think it's just because they're too slow, right? You've seen Rune talk about this where Codex is... is, you know, somewhat slower than cloud code or whatever. Even though if the model's actually better, the experience can be, you know, worse sometimes.

Yeah, no, no. I mean, like, the models can get better, but they're already really, really good. Like, most of the deep research reports that I get back are amazing. They're, mission accomplished. Like, you did it. You did the research. You compiled it, and I got my information, but I had to wait 20 minutes. Cut that down to two minutes, and I'll probably use it 10 times as much.

And I'll probably pay time 10 times as much for that. And same thing with coding. You know, there's so many memes about watching brain rot videos while while you're waiting for codex or clod code or whatever you're using to come back and answer you. Speed it up and you're going to have a much faster adoption path. Chat has confirmed that it is Tom Wamsgans. There we go. Ran the amusement park and cruise division. Then he got moved up to ATN News.

Okay. Okay. The, one more thing on the debt side of things, bit mine. This is Tom Lee's. Yes. Former guest to show. Has unrealized losses of $6.6 billion now on track to become the fifth largest documented principal trading loss in history. If sold, of course he's not selling, he remains bullish.

He's really testing his diamond hands. Diamond hands. It's had 66% of the size of Arkegos. It was Bill Warrquos. That's right. Bill Wong's infamous hedge fund. Well, we have Christopher O'Donnell from Day AI in the Rest Room waiting room. We'll bring him into the TVPN Ultradome. Christopher, how are you doing?

Whoa, unique. Very well. Yeah, how are you guys? Thank you for having you. Beautiful lighting. No one's ever done this before. I feel like we're hanging out. Honestly, I feel like I'm watching an open AI launch video.

But it is fantastic. It looks fantastic. You can get a little OCD, I guess. We were pumped for this. And so we've been in here, like, teaching ourselves how to use lights and stuff like that. You know what I mean? Like ordering this shit on Amazon. Nice.

I'm pumped for this. I had my favorite experience ever when I, when I check X in the morning. I see a cool startup launching. And I'm like, I'm like, I'm like thinking like, I got to get these guys on. And then you're already on. So it's great to be. First time in the show, please introduce yourself. The company.

Tell us what you're building. Yeah. So Christopher O'Donnell. Long time listener, first time in caller. I led product at HubSpot for about 10 years and am now lucky enough to be with a group of a dozen or so of my closest friends doing a similar but also very different thing from scratch in the age of AI. You know, it's sort of, you know, what if we were to start from the very beginning and do

everything in this as you guys are constantly discussing wildly evolving and radically different world. So that's that's a short story. So early product, markets, how are you segmenting things? What's the key value prop? I mean, I'm sure there's AI, but take me a cut deeper. Yeah. I mean, I think looking at CRM, there's a funny thing, which is I feel like in everybody's head, everybody's expectations are wildly different for everything. And you guys talk about this. and every vertical, our lives are changing so rapidly. And yet nobody is really expecting that to happen with CRM. Everybody's kind of like, but Salesforce isn't going anywhere.

And it's like, hold on. There's a layer of it that is, well, we could eliminate the manual data entry and we could maybe better integrate with some other systems. And what we're seeing is there is a wildly different level of what's possible that really was the original promise of CRM, like, hey, I'm a CEO. I have concerns about my business. I have existential questions.

I want to know if this whole new cohort of sales reps that we hired two months ago is going to make it. You know, I want to know what I can do, what deals I should be involved in. I want to know if I'm spending my time the right way. And you can actually get instant answers to that if you had the entire record of everything that had been said or done at the company instantly indexed and readable by, you know, an AI agent. That's the heart of what we're doing is ingesting everything and storing it in a way

that is LLM optimized. So, you know, easy for it to explore this whole network of relationships. But also in natural language and with explanations about why everything is what it appears to be, you know, we're seeing it's just a completely different set of use cases. So that's really interesting to navigate with customers. but everybody's starting to kind of go from, wait, what? To, of course, this is exactly the thing that we should have. What is like the killer feature or experience that you're optimizing for?

You're trying to, somebody signs up, they, you know, sort of integrate whatever tools they need. And then like, what's the first moment like that you're trying to get people to kind of see the future? Yeah, I think the most obvious thing is a better version of the, the meeting recorders that we've come to kind of rely on. You know, here's this thing. It's watching. It's taking notes. And I don't have to do that on the call because it's all being captured and recorded. And then from that, you know, I can ask questions about it. I can, you know, automatically have my deals moving based on what happened on the call. That's really great. If I want to write follow-up emails, they're incredibly good. And the UI is just snapping and

moving around as I go through this whole workflow. That's kind of the entry level. magic trick that people see when they come in. Then there is this much deeper realization that, oh, wait a second, I can actually ask and understand anything that is happening in the business. And that, you know, people get to that pretty quickly, you know, within a week, usually. Talk about bottom-up adoption versus top-down. Do you want to go for the big enterprise, have them rip out some massive system? Or I remember using a product called Streak that just plugged into Gmail, you know, you could, I've also built a CRM with Visual Basic in Excel. Like, you, you, you can start a CRM project just in a spreadsheet. How are you thinking about where, where you want

to plug in and start getting traction? Yeah, yeah. Part of our crew built a bunch of streak in addition to HubSpot. Wow. Yeah. It's a cool company. I enjoyed it at the time. It was like, very, like, lightweight, you know, you could just bolt it on, basically. Totally, totally. the adoption story, it's a great question. You know, we saw over, I've been working in CRM for, I don't even know what, 10, 15 years. Let's go. And the march of history always seemed to be from the CEO toward the buyer with, you know, a big swing through rep productivity in these bottoms up tools. And when I kind of move from the rewrite of the HubSpot marketing product to do a startup with a startup and the sales tools that,

became HubSpot sales and CRM, that was the thesis. Like, we're going to go bottoms up. We're going to do what these other sales acceleration tools are doing. And that worked really well. And then, you know, marching toward the buyer being able to drive as much of the sales process as possible. I think that still exists. And I think that solving for frontline people is absolutely huge and giving them things

they can come in, get started on day zero. Absolutely. No big top-down rollout. We're also seeing a little. bit of a return to the CEO. And I spend a lot of my time. Actually, I mean, I spend most of my time just demoing at this point other CEOs and showing them how I use it. That's the close, because you can't really say it. I mean, we try in our marketing messaging and everything. Like, look at all these examples and everything. But if you see me use it, you go, oh, wait, okay, I got it. This is like

this chief of staff that's watching everything and coaching me and giving me the data and, you know, We're having it up at a board meeting. Pat Grady, who I know you guys had on recently, that was a great, great segment there. He had a tweet today about our last board meeting. And we just had the assistant up on the big screen. There was no deck. It's like I sent a big memo and I send a memo and a context file so the board can ask questions. You can get instant answers.

But we just had the assistant up on the screen the whole time. And there's no like, oh, that's a great question. Let me, you know, get my ops people to circle back. It's like, which changes things, man. It's going to be interesting. That's amazing. There's so many large software companies that are working to become AI-Native. The first step is obviously to say that you're AI-Native.

Put it on the website. But what are some of the – What are done? What are kind of the challenges having worked in big CRM of kind of evolving? Yeah. I mean, if you think about it from the perspective of – the AI agent. And you really, you know, you switch from putting yourself in the user's perspective and you put

yourself in the perspective of Claude or one of these clients that is asking questions and calling tools and trying to solve problems for you, you actually want something pretty different. We had a customer connect their Claude to both HubSpot and DayAI and said, you know, what do you think? And Claude says, are you asking me which I? prefer. And she's like, yeah, yeah, I'm asking which of these do you like more? And Claude says, well, look, you know, how do I explain this? This old CRM is like a spreadsheet. And this

day I thing is everything that I need to answer any question you have. I can find the answer. Like, let's go. What do you want to know? That's a very different approach that gets all the way down to disc, like literally all the way down to how you are capturing and storing the data, having worked on these systems and many versions of these over the years, it's a problem that starts at the very lowest parts of the stack to be able to give the agents, you know, this kind of information. I mean, we all know that Opus 4 or 5 with the right context window can do magical things. I mean, it's godlike. So the question is, how do you give it exactly the right piece?

That's amazing. I don't think it's God. I don't think it's God. God, like. It's like definitely. Yeah, it's like a precursor to, like, we're definitely living in a simulation. We're getting close. It's like about to become the thing we think of as our creator.

I think that's like fair to say. That's pretty wild. You raise some money. I want to talk about the deal. I want to kick off the Lambda lightning round. I want to bring down the mallet from the heavens so I can ring the gong for you. How much did you raise? We raised 20 million.

Whoa. From Sequoia and who else? Sequoia, permanent capital, conviction, sound ventures, and green oaks. Fantastic, a bunch of nobodies. That is quite the group. That's a fantastic crew. Well done. Congratulations.

And I'm sure you'll be back on the show soon. We'll talk to you later. I hope so. We have a lot coming. Can't wait for it. Great to meet, Christopher. We'll talk to the whole team. Goodbye.

Let me tell you about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Up next. We have Jim. Jim from Shield. Welcome to the TVP in Ultradem. What's happening?

Good to see you. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you here. Quick intro on yourself and what you're working on. Yeah, my name is Jim Siders. I'm the CEO of Shield Technology Partners, which is an IT services platform in cooperation with Thrive Holdings.

We're bringing IT powered by AI to all these small and medium businesses all across America. Finally. We've been begging for this. No, we've been excited. Well, I've been begging for it too. Like, what took so long?

I know. I know, exactly. So you raised $100 million from Thrive today. This has been in the works, though, for, what, like 18 months? A little less than that. I mean, it's a long-term relationship, right? The whole company was founded in a partnership that included Thrive Holdings at the beginning, which is when I got involved kind of in the conversation long before I joined as CEO. And all the way through it, we've been thinking about how does holdings support with a strategic investment, this kind of thing, right? We're building this thing for the long term. So we want to make sure that we have the war chest necessary to do the right stuff now. Amazing. What do the early customer relationships actually look like? I know you're buying some existing companies, so you're inheriting customer base everywhere you go. I'm sure you're shedding some and then scaling from there. But what is the, in the most simple way, what does a business actually look like? What does the world look like today? Yeah. Hopefully we're shedding as few as possible. I mean, the idea is we're buying quite good IT. MSPs all over America who have successful customer bases, who have long-term relationships with

folks, and we're leaving them in place, right? We're leaving those customers, we're leaving the people who founded the business, the engineers and technicians who built those relationships. Then we layer on AI and other proprietary stuff on top of it. And the whole goal is that those customers are actually clamoring for more, not churning because they just got bought by a, their IT guy just got bought by a private equity firm or something, right? And so far, to the direct answer to your question, that's been pretty much what we're hearing.

You know, we hear customers going, oh, I heard this thing happened. Can you bring some of these Thrive guys over here to talk? Can you bring some Shield guys over here to talk to us about what we can do with IT? We're curious about it. And we've never had access. That's exactly the point. That's the whole thing we're going after. Makes a lot of sense.

How are you thinking about the broader market and what companies in sort of like the, the small and medium-sized business categories are like most ripe for getting leverage out of AI. We've been tracking, you know, like the ramp AI adoption metrics. Obviously, every tech company has a bunch of subscriptions. And then you go down the list and it's who you think. And it's like the logging company hasn't adopted AI yet. But what do you think is underrated right now? Well, I mean, the logging company is a great place to start.

I mean, this is on our side, there's a lot of companies in the real economy. Yeah. They would benefit from the same kind of things that's creating, you know, AI creating durable value for large enterprises, right? The same thing that should help Airbus or Rio Tinto or whatever should also help like a regional roofing company or a dentist office chain. So really the customer selectivity, that's not really where my emphasis is at this point. What I'm looking for is the IT service businesses that have built these really durable relationships where we get access to problem space. that we haven't yet seen in the real economy. Because there's going to be something that falls out of it,

the lived experience of those IT technicians, that we can use in the product motion. At least that's the... Yeah, that makes sense. Can you help me understand your thoughts on the, like the customization of software? Are we going into, it feels like we're going into a world where more and more software will be custom.

There's already big companies that, you know, Palantiers, Salesforce, these companies go in, go in and they have a backbone, but then they're doing a lot of custom implementation. There's companies that you can hire that will build something completely bespoke for you, whether that's like a consulting group. But then typically, you know, if you're buying a piece of SaaS off the shelf, they're not really doing anything for you, but it feels like now they can with a forward deployed salesperson, forward deployed engineer. How are you, how do you think about that trend and like how, like we're at here we have like a few vibe coded custom systems that, uh, that, uh, you,

you know, a small 10-person team a few years ago, we'd definitely not have. I can't tell if we're just early adopters of the technology or if this is the future. Well, there's a few ways I can answer that. I mean, first, I got to confess to a bias, right? I mean, I was a challenge here for a long time for a reason, because I think the combination of first principles thinking and the forward-deployed motion does yield differentiated results, right? You can see in that company's results that that's true and in their customers' results, that that's true. I think the, thing that lets your team benefit from vibe coding a thing that you wouldn't have had access to previously should benefit and can benefit a bunch of different ranges of businesses, right?

And really, the thing that's been holding anybody back from that is economic models more than anything, right? So, like, if I'm founding a SaaS company, my investors expect a certain kind of multiple, we expect a certain type of product motion and go to market motion, that I have to develop a product from afar, find a customer for it. It has to be designed to be saleable, right? And so at that point, if it's not informed, really, if you didn't get your product management motion really, really well right out of the gate, it's kind of good luck that it creates durable value for anybody.

Whereas if you do this inside-out development motion, like I was saying, creates all this value in the large enterprises, you can find a way to get access to that same problem space, bring that caliber of engineer to the work face, to the mind face. The thesis is, my belief is, that it's going to actually produce the same type of differentiated results, which I think the crisp answer to your question is, yeah, I think I think customized software, like inside out development, however you want to call it forward. Like, we forward to deploy ourselves to vibe code things. Like that's, I think that is the future. No question.

How is traditional private equity kind of reacting to the, to the shields of the world? Smart, you know, very sophisticated financially. can raise plenty of money. They're well aware of AI. They think it's going to be important. You're coming in and you're competing to acquire businesses that might have landed with them historically. I'm imagining you have a very, a pretty exciting value proposition. The team has an amazing track record, incredibly tapped in. Well capitalized, you're saying, like, we want to retain your whole team. We want to keep all of your customers happy. We want to create more value here by growing the business and growing earnings through just like really expanding the customer base. So it seems really appealing to

to to the seller of a company, somebody that a business owner, but of course private equity is not going to just kind of roll over how have they reacted. Well, I mean, I, anecdotally, it seems to me like they're trying to figure out how to get to this same type of goodness. I mean, I, you know, I'm not, I'm not in private equity, so I'm talking out of my wheelhouse. But, I mean, one could see that with the amount of competition in the IT, small and medium business space for roll-ups, just traditional private equity roll-ups, one would fear that the goodness is getting arped away somehow. At least that would be my fear if I was there. So you're looking for something to differentiate it. So then there's this kind of growing crop of like what does an IT or like an AI roll-up thing look like? But everybody's kind of talking about it in a very different way, right? Which is, so one of the things that we're trying to do is not exactly. do that. Like we kind of rhyme with that in some ways. We rhyme with a with a roll-up in some ways. And we rhyme with a with a tech company in some ways. We're trying to do is kind of take the best of breed of all of those mental models and do something a little bit different.

So in our case, for example, one easy example of several, the relationship with Thrive Holdings gives me a lot longer time horizon, right? I can think about doing something that's really durable. Like if we're going to change, there's one thing to create disruption or take advantage of disruption. If we're going to really change a really entrenched business model, like, managed IT services, it's probably going to take a long time, even if we're outrageously successful, right? So having that kind of time horizon to work with gives me a way to address a different thing than any private equity or traditionally, you know, structured private equity rule I would have to. Which de facto is a good thing, I think. And I think the private equity folks that are paying

attention probably see that also. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I want to hit the gong for a hundred million dollars. Congratulations. Very, very cool. It's great to meet you. Come back on. If there's something in the news that you've got a strong opinion on, come back on,

or I'm sure you'll be back on for more fundraising. Please, I'd love to you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers,

databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. security. Up next, we have the king of enterprise software. We have Chris Black. Back on the show. Welcome to the stream. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on down to the TBPN Ultredom. Good to see you. How you been? How's your 2026 going so far? So far so good. I'm happy to be. I feel like I'm the brokest guy that's ever been on the show. So I'm happy to be here. I feel like it's going to rub off on me a little bit. The voice alone is worth tiny billion dollars.

Good, I hope so. Listen to these pipes. It's amazing. 2026's guy was, I stayed out a lot later than I wanted to three nights in a row for Grahamie celebrations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we're shooting how long gone stuff, but I was like the timing works out. So why don't I just, you know what I mean?

How does it work for how long gone? Will you stack? We don't stack at all. Oh, okay. If we record on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, and the episodes come out the next day. Okay. So Jason edits it like as basically. as soon as we finish, and then it goes up the next day.

What's the status of the tour? We just do it sort of whenever. Like we kind of summer. We're going to do New York and L.A. probably. We just sort of recalibrate it because it's fun and we like doing it. But I wouldn't say it's a huge upside on the bottom line. Sure. Just based on our travel, quality of travel we demand and east into the bottom line profits.

We're losing. You know, that's hilarious. It's really, it really. No, no, no, no. It makes sense. But the live show you prepared sort of a present. presentations more thought it's not just riffing right this actually yeah like last summer we prepared the how long gone guide to life which is like a PDF presentation that's cool and it worked it was

fun and we did it like standing up yeah ted style yeah um but the riffing did you ever give it ted talk no i wish god imagine with the fucking mic no i mean no when you look at some on the red dot you think of the ted talk era and hindsight there's so much so much opportunity to like go back and just like sign get get yourself a ted talk and oh yeah for the most like ridiculous Because if you look through it, there's some, it ain't a list. No, well, so, so they had, they had TEDx. So, so TEDx was independent. So anyone could set one up.

I didn't realize it was independent. Yes, yes, yes. So, so they, they, they sort of license their brand and anyone, so they would do like TEDx, Boston University. Yeah, yeah. And it would just be like a local kid that was like organizing and being like, come talk. And it, and depending on how much they put into production, it could either look a lot like

the TED stage or just like a couple people in a conference. Open mic. Yeah, basically open night rank. And those, yeah, no, and aesthetically, those don't hit. Yeah, no, no. And so, nothing better. I remember, I went to one in Boston with a guy who created Android, who probably should be giving like a real TED Talk. That's kind of cool.

But he was basically just giving a tech talk with a couple other people. Here's my thoughts on open source software, whatever. But it was just him filmed like three chairs in a conference room against the wall. So even if you see it and it says TEDx, you're like, that doesn't feel like a TED Talk. Yeah, no, sure. But certain places would put the red. dot on the ground, give you the mic, you'd be walking around, have the cue cards and everything. It does look fun. They think it's wild. The best one I ever saw that appealed to me was Mark

Ronson. Okay. He like broke down how like a beat is made basically for all these nerds. Yeah. I could see their third eye expanding in a way. It's like, holy shit, this is actually so interesting and cool. Yeah. Yeah. But most of those were not for me. I can't say I devoured the catalog on the YouTube on the YouTube channel. I can't I can't stay claim on that. Yeah. What were you devouring at the time? This was. was like 08, 2010 era. Mostly cocaine, but I mean, I guess there's some, I was probably, I was going out a lot. That was like New York era.

I feel like that was honestly like music blog. A hype machine? I was more of like a stereo gum, pitchfork, Brooklyn vegan, like sort of like that, which is kind of back now. Yeah. I mean, went to the pitchfork party this weekend. It was one of the best parties at Grammy. It was really fun.

Yeah. And I think that it's like, I don't know if you guys are up on the paywall discourse around pitchfork. but they basically put up a paywall. And the crux of it, to my understanding, is that you can basically, you can rate albums. Famously, the appeal of pitchfork is the numerical score. Numerical score, but sort of brutal, right?

Sometimes they'll give someone like a four out of ten. Yes, but sometimes oftentimes the score doesn't necessarily match the actual review, but no one's going to read the actual. You know what I mean? Only the heads read. So it could be like a five, but then you read it. It's like, oh, it's not that bad, actually. Yeah.

There's a little bit of a disconnect sometimes. Yeah. So they're giving people the option, which I'm pretty bullish on because I think that everyone on the internet thinks they're an expert or critic and thinks they need to be heard. It's like the letterbox sort of thing. And I think that there's plenty of... Rotten Tomatoes has the tomato meter. Exactly.

Metacritic has the audience score. There's plenty of like mouth breathing music fans that think that they should be able to rate the My Morning Jacket record, how they feel. You know what I mean? You can't underestimate the passion of these civilians. You pay them? and they send you a text file, you can write whatever you want about my morning jackets.

They printed out. If you want 10 out of 10, we'll just show that right to you. It was a controversial idea, but I think it's actually quite smart. Because it doesn't, it doesn't like, the critic part of it is still going to be there.

So it doesn't dilute the overall, you know what I mean? It's a little bit to me. Yeah. But it's, you know, it's an elevated comment section in some ways, which is a scary thing to consider.

In our world, Davos came back just this year. Yes, sure. It's south by selves. They should have had you a long gone. We love to be in Davos for sure. Yeah, we were, yeah, that's, we're open to that if Davos is listening. Any hope for South by Southwest making a comeback, any other conferences or media?

I mean, I think Southwest has actually done pretty well because they pivoted to like internet shit. Yeah. It's not about, it's not bands playing sponsored by Sparks at 3 in the afternoon. Now it's like a little more serious. And there's a film aspect to it. Okay. I think it's just moved away from music a little bit. It's still a part of it, but it's more of an element instead of a focus.

I'm just wondering if it comes back and they really play into the music. I just think that it's sort of... I mean, there's a possibility only because I think right now we're seeing a real swing back to, like, guitar music. Okay. Because, I mean, not only...

The guitar, low-key fell off. Low-key fell off hard. Not even low-key, I would say high-key fell off. And I think the different... Now that that... Somebody was telling me a buddy was at, like, a guitar center the other day. And he was like...

In Hollywood. No guitars left. No, no. He said it was like, every single guitar was, like, on a crazy sale. That's probably like a Q4 a lot. You know, kind of rotating through. But I was like, I just remember being a kid, like, wanting, like, I played guitar, like, you know, every single day growing up.

And all these guitars that, like, were just so out of reach. Now I'm, now, I don't know, I can see it. It's the perfect analog, like, you know. I mean, it's like anything else. It's sort of like, I mean, music always goes in phases like that, you know, like, not generationally, but maybe, like, by decade, I would say. And I think the chart thing, even though I hate to pay attention to it, like streaming numbers or whatever, it's real. You know, like there hasn't been a hip hop song in the top 10 or something for like, it's an interesting thing that's happening. And the geese of it all.

Wait, isn't SDKid top 10, I assume. No. No, no, no, no. He's based on Instagram Reels. On your algorithm. I mean, that's the thing. There's no monoculture. So it's sort of like you see what you want to see it to some extent.

But I think that the geese is the big sort of thing that people are talking about because it's culturally so relevant. Sure. And it's making people mad in a way. that's like sort of exciting. And people fucking hate it as much as they liked it. Tell me more of this story. I mean, Geese is a band from New York

that's put out a couple of records that are really young. And it's just really polarizing. I mean, it's like this guy Cameron Winter is the singer. He's a like, he put out a solo record. He's a generational sort of talent. It's sort of like a Neil Young,

Tom York. But they played S&L and people were very mad. This is the worst shit I've ever seen. Yeah, yeah. They just didn't like the way it sounded? Yeah. How they look, how they sound. The whole thing.

Lana Del Rey had a similar S&L experience. It happens often because. because SNL is, I mean, that's as middle of the road as you're going to get. Yeah, but it seems like some of their content booking is like a little ahead of their curve. They're usually, I mean, they're good in general at taking a few risks. Yeah, every Cardi B and Mumford and Sons, there's a geese that sort of like they take a swing and that's what they're known for. Yeah. I mean, we sound like boom.

I mean, I get called a boomer for watching SNL. Yeah. And I will take that. Yeah, I deserve that lump. I think it's real. Yeah. What happens to what happens to the late night? shows in general. I feel like they

thrived when you had a monoculture you had the whole world fixated on the same types of things. Now it's like you turn it on and you realistically to like appeal to the broad enough audience you got to have it's impossible 20 night 20 shows

that were taking the place of and the internet sort of does that but I think it's I mean I think it as much as I have a respect for it would love to replace them in some ways I think it's sort of we're at the end. I mean I think that like celebrities need places to promote their projects and that is not going to go away. Yeah. But there's shit like this and that gets more eyeballs and is feels more relevant. And I think

that like you can go on Dax Shepherd. Yep. And it's going to do more for your movie or your album or your book. Yeah. Then it is to go on Stephen Colbert. That's just the reality. And it's like, I'm more concerned with the loss of the music performances because I think NPR Tiny Desk is like corny. Yeah. But I think there's, I spent a lot of time on YouTube watching like performances from the 90s, 80s, whatever. And I think that magic is what we'll miss the most. But you can reconstitute that on the internet. I feel like you can do. I mean, we know we're trying to do it and we've talked about it a lot. And I think it's it's easy. Like there's nothing that says the Dax Shepherd can't open with a monologue, have three guests and then a musical performance. And then just it's a musical performance.

Yeah. Okay. But you do something different. But but just the fact that it's an RSSB and it's an hour long show. We've talked about this. I feel like you guys getting like a space like this in New York. like where it's full-time dedicated people are coming to you will change uh we gave this advice to some of our other buddies that have had a podcast for a really long time we're like dude it's kind of a nightmare having to like travel around and all and like you know constantly we don't we're we only do audio really yeah yeah and i think we've i'm here we branch out we did like a year in review yeah and it did really well so now we're going to try to do the we should have a studio in burbank and we shoot these sort of like weekend update talk soup style sort of like

monthly wrap-ups where it's, you know, it's us at the desk. We're talking about stuff. You see the image over our shoulder. Yeah. And that's going to, I think that's what we want to do. Yeah. Turn it into bring, have a small live audience. Have, have, have like a stage that people can perform on. That's the idea. Start doing it. Start doing it a lot. Yeah. And it's just, I mean, it's just, it's, it's all about scheduling. But what we've learned from doing the podcast is audio only is that you just get access. Also, we don't ever, we're never in the same room. Oh, sure. It's all on Zoom. And I think it just allows a different, like, it, it, gets looser. I think the totally. It feels much more protected. There's no hair and makeup. There's no

you need to send a car. There's no there's no pretense to it. Like you can do it in your hotel room wherever you are as long as you have Wi-Fi and headphones. And I I, I, the same way we're sort of like anti-paywall and it's costing me a lot of money. It's a similar thing where like audio is the real medium. It's like all these new Netflix things. Yeah. Like Pete Davidson having a talk show on Netflix is not a podcast. It's a talk show on Netflix. It's not first time. There's no audio. There's no RSS fee. It's not. Yeah. I mean, he's, they're doing a lot of. I mean, they're, they're showing podcasts that exist, like the shit from the ringer,

but they're also launching these shows and paying these people a fucking fortune. Sure. But it's, it's just a show. Have you ever thought about selling out? I would love to sell out. It just has to be on my, like, archaic terms. I would love to sell out. Every day I want to sell it.

Extremely complex writer. But when I'm here, when I'm here, I'm like, this is how it's supposed to be done. Like, this is such an operation. And I knew what I was getting into to an extent. But being here, I'm like, oh, this is what it requires to do something on level. Yeah. And it's, it's a lot. You need a horse. Yeah, you need something, something about it. You need 10 guys eating airwashed. That's a useful instrument. The guys told me how much the thing costs. I can't believe you guys spent that much. They're expensive. I actually knew that.

There's something about, uh, that we appreciate the, like some people would say it's monotonous, but I actually appreciate just waking up and going to work. Yeah. Just like making content. No, I think treating it like that and the way you guys have treated it and the way you've approached it is why it works. There's, there's, there's a, there's a lot. There's a level and we feel the same way. It's like we do three shows a week, which is pretty psycho. I mean, not like considering you're not in the same place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jason edits and I book. We do it all ourselves. But I think that the I think that once you lock into a system like that and people are looking for it and expecting it and you deliver

on that, they stay with you. They want. I mean, you guys are doing news and like you're really covering like a breadth of industries. So it's different. There's like a value proposition of like information. Yeah. Which I think is much more than us talking about, you know, The culture. Yeah. What, what, so,

uh, Grammys last night, you've been in town hanging out. Yeah. Bumping shoulders with, uh, Rubin elbows. Yeah.

With, uh, elite. Yeah. What are the conversation, outside of culture war and politics? What are people talking about? Or,

like, how much is like, AI being discussed, specifically in the music context? I mean, I think that musicians are mad about everything all the time, sort of, uh,

even part of the job. most successful ones. That's part of the personality makeup, I think, to be that. I mean, I think that fear is real. And I think every day there's a new story that there's some anonymous AI guy that just made $5 million streaming, you know, or whatever through Spotify royalties. I mean, I think the real conversation that's being had or that I've seen a little bit of is people coming out and saying, no, no, I use it to help me edit or do this.

And it's sped up the process, you know, 10x. And I think it's like anything else, man. And it's like it's coming. Yep. How can you utilize it in a way that feels ethical and good to you that doesn't compromise the art? And I think that's the challenge everybody has. And I'm sure there's going to be people that are like, fuck that.

I'm never doing that. And there's going to be, you know, like a will I am type who takes it too far. And that, you know, there's a range. There's always a range of people that want to experiment. But I think that that, I think with music, there's ticket prices. There's, you know, streaming royalties. There's so many battles that they're fighting all the time. that it's sort of, I almost feel like AI is kind of like,

feels like it's in the distance a little bit, honestly, because there's things. I mean, it's coming, but I think there's so many immediate things they're concerned with as far as sort of, you know, just like respect and money. Yeah. Is there some sort of alliance between, like, reaction to streaming is you need a really strong live performance schedule.

The concert becomes more important, creating the Taylor Swift effect becomes more important. It's almost, what's so great. The real driver is TikTok. Okay. Like if you have, I mean, I've had several friends that were relatively successful musicians and the aughts have a song go viral. And now they have a platinum record. They bought an apartment.

They're on tour selling tickets. And you can't plan for that. Labels can't manufacture that sort of God's plan. Yeah, yeah. And like Olivia Dean, who won Best New Artist last night. People say she sounds like T.J. Max. I like it. I think it's a hit song.

But part of it is that it became a TikTok thing. Sure. And it's like, it's that good. You need more things. You know, it has to be a multitude of things kind of coming together to make it work. Yeah. But I think, I think touring is just people, I just wrote this in my GQ column, I wrote about the Harry Stiles ticket price thing because people are really upset.

What's that? His tickets are expensive. And everybody's tickets are fucking expensive. Second market? He's doing 30 days at Mass and Squared Garden. He's doing 30 nights at MSG. Wow. 30 days in so long.

It's unbelievable. And MSG is also historically the most expensive venue because of unions and all of that. You think that with 30 days of supply. Well, that's the question. People are like, he's greedy. And I'm like, well, sure. I think there's some truth to that. But also I think the discussion I'm more than having is like, what do you guys want?

Like, because he can fight ticket master like Pearl Jam. He can, but he can also, the production that fans want costs a lot of money. Sure. When Harry Stiles on tour, he's got fucking 30 trucks. Yeah. It's a lot of, it's 300 people. It's a, you know, it's a movie. Yeah, it's a movie circus.

It's really big. And I think that the cost. that go into it is sort of lost on the fan, but then from the fan side, they're like, this is untenable. Like, I can't pay this money. I have 10-order-sad-old. What's the cheapest ticket? I mean, in theory, it's $100, $200, but it's immediately reselling. But then that just proves that it doesn't really matter where he prices at the demand. That was my whole kind of thesis. Yeah, you basically could just, it's like, look at the secondary price and then look at what he's charging, and like, greedy would just be charging the secondary price. And we see that, we see this every,

you know, look in cars and watches, any, any of the category with way more demand than supply, manufacturers will just be like, wait, like this GT3RS is selling for like 50K over sticker, like, okay, well, we're just going to do that at the dealer level now. Or secondary, like, look at AP, AP moved up the retail on the Royal Oak just because there was enough demand. And like, it actually kind of like normalizes the secondary market, but you're still paying, like, I just think if you think that, I think if you need to place blame, on someone, it's going to be the resellers, the bots, and the ticket master.

That makes sense. Like, I don't necessarily think it's Harry. My point is, it's not Harry Styles. And sure, maybe you could put his foot down and, and, like, make a case. But we don't know the ends and outs of that, the difficulties of that or how that would actually affect the product. You know what I mean? And that's the issue.

So you think the solution is NFTs? Always. The solution to any problem is NFTs. That is for 100%. That's 100%. What's going on? Give us an update. Just broad update on menswear.

We don't talk about it. Oh, wow. We don't talk about it much. We obviously normally wear suits. I actually, I got the memo today. I was, it's funny, I wore a suit to Charlie had a party last night at Chetown, Vermont, and I wore a suit. Charlie XX. And we had to record this morning our thing.

And we, but Jason have both usually wear suits. And I text him like, hey, man, maybe today can we not. We just wear it right? Yeah. I couldn't do it. I feel like slacking off. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, it's getting a little more formal in a way that I think is really positive.

Like it's sort of Logomania is over. Okay. I think it's a little bit of like, Jonathan Anderson and Dior's showing ties. Like it's a little more sort of suiting, I think, and like stuff that I think is more flattering and generally easier to wear in a lot of ways. Like I think like you guys can wear suits. You guys cannot wear like dumb Valencia.

Or whatever, you know what I mean? Watch me. We've thought about, you can do it if you want. I don't know if we've been successful. We had the John, John made this image. It was like a steel, steal his look image. And he's like, $100,000

dollar outfit, Chrome Hearts hat, Chrome Heart belt, Supreme with the Louis Vuitton, then Bottega Veneto, Roman weave jacket. What level of, what is your honor?

How much Chrome knowledge did you two have? Zero. Okay. John, that's zero. I just know, I thought all of these brands were in,

yeah. I found out that Belenziaga is like an old company. I thought it was like a new thing from like a couple years ago. Hundreds of years from, so when I moved to Malibu, I would always, I,

I will be, I'll admit I didn't know nothing about Chrome. And I love it. You have a G-wagon, don't you? You don't know about Chrome? Yeah, yeah. Somehow, somehow. It's kind of like, hey, I'm a unique. I'm a special snowflake. I'm the only G-wagon owner that doesn't know Chrome. So I moved to Malibu and I'm like, why are all these kids? It's the younger generation. To Malibu, the owners of Chrome Hearts have lived in Malibu forever. The Starks of, they now. So they own the surf rider now. It's also interesting. But I moved there.

I'm like, why are all these like 12, 12 year old, like kids running around wearing chrome? Like you live at the beach. Why are you wearing like this like gothic, like black sweatshirture? It made no sense. I was like lighten up a little bit because I just always associate the clothing with like kind of just a emo, darkness. You got it wrong, bro.

You need some chrome. You guys need. Yeah. So the jeans. We can get you some jeans. Yeah. 15,000. Look.

$1,000. That's why. It's a custom pair of Levi's, but they put the leather cross patches. So depending on patch amount, the price is going up. So I would do something tasteful with all the chrome rivets. Okay. And maybe a single patch. Okay.

So I can get in there five. You guys need hella patches. John, this is why I always said. So I always said the top of the market cycle will be when a kid is standing YC demo day, you know, where the old founders pitch and he's got just full chrome. No, I don't think it's happened yet. Wasn't there some CEO that was caught with a Chromeheart's jacket? Oh, yeah, yeah.

There's definitely been, some people think they can be sneaky and be like, oh, yeah, I'm just like, I'm just a founder. I'm scrappy and they're wearing the leather jacket without the logos and people clock it. We know what you're doing. Yeah, I need to get you guys. Yeah, but as far as as the menswear thing goes, everything's sort of calmed down, which I think is good. I mean, I literally, I started a brand at the end of last year that I've been working on for a couple of years called Hanover. and it's been an interesting, someone who's worked peripheral, you know, in fashion for 10 years, 15 years, doing your own thing is a whole different animal, I will say.

But our proposition is everything is really affordable. It's all made in USA. So it's like we're all, we're making it in L.A. Cool. But it's really simple. Yeah, I've been shocked because we make, we make stuff. We, like, this is something, you know, we made for Turbo Puffer, one of our sponsors. Yeah, there was not enough enterprise.

So, yeah. Yeah, so comparing, comparing the, prices in China versus here. China is incredibly, they make great clothing that's inexpensive. But when you look at when we've gone kind of like line by line and looked at these different items, I'm like, okay, I can pay $70 for this and it gets made here in L.A. And it'll be done in three weeks where I can deal with like months and months and months. It might come on a boat. It'll come, yeah, it'll come on a boat and it'll cost like $95.

dollars. So for us, for us there's like no question we want to make it here because we're not in the business of clothing. Yeah. Right. So the margin is like less. It's negligible. Yeah, yeah. But but but still it's not it's not as like it's not like a 10x different. No. Which I think a lot of people is soon. I think that I mean, I think that I came up in an era where that was important like Maine USA is important. And I don't I don't necessarily think it's important per se. But the idea of being able to do it was pretty compelling. Yeah. It's it's it's more enjoyable. That's why I, That's why I've always thought people... The process. Yeah, and the people that are like drop shippers being like, oh, yeah, like, e-com is so great if you want to, like, live in Thailand. I'm like, have you ever made anything?

Like, can you imagine, like, trying to iterate on, like, a physical product living in, like, some random place? I mean, that's the thing. That's, I think that's the thing that I... You're right. It's like, what's the, what's it worth? You know, my time and my effort and my stress level. Like, what is it worth? But it's, it's been fun so far and it's going well, but I think it's just like a...

What's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the stress? out of like doing collections, it's quarterly, yeah, but it's basically, I mean, the start was t-shirts, denim, sweats, and the denim did really well. We're going to introduce another fit.

So it's sort of like you do stuff, you see what works. It's at that 15,000 price point? It's 15,000 price point. Actually, it's currently a sub-300. Oh, apparently. Which is pretty strong. Yeah.

If you get to 15,000, then you can buy something. I love it. We have to get to a flight. Of course. I don't know if you want to plant the bomb journey, but I have one last question. Dream guest.

Do you have dream guests? We don't really have dream guests because it's very opportunistic. It's like whoever's hot right now we want to talk to, so we don't have a list. Honestly, I always like to say I like to be surprised. But after Ben Affleck has been on this press tour with Matt Damon for that new movie, he's so smart and he's so well-spoken. I would really like to talk to Ben Affleck. I love it.

Hanover dash USA. Go check it out. Thank you. Give us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. We will be live tomorrow from Cisco A.I.S.U.A.S.O.A.M. Pacific Sharp. And goodbye. Thank you. Nice work brothers. I'll see you on the next one.