TBPN - OpenAI's New CEO of Applications Shares Optimistic Memo, Stargate Hits Early Struggles, P&G Pays Unilever $10M in Spying Case | Anatoly Yakovenko, Aaron Levie, Neil Parikh & Daniel Cahn, Jan Sramek, Nathaniel Manning, Chris Andrew

Episode Date: July 22, 2025

(00:26) - OpenAI Product Roadmap (35:47) - OpenAI to Pay Oracle $30B Per Year (39:41) - Stargate Hits Early Struggles (46:53) - Musk Allies to Raise $12B for xAI (56:23) - Intern Cam Live from Tesla Diner (01:05:50) - Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana Labs, discusses the inception and evolution of Solana, emphasizing its design for high-performance and scalability to support global financial systems. He highlights the network's ability to process more transactions than all major blockchains combined, attributing this to its unique architecture and focus on speed. Yakovenko also addresses the challenges of decentralization, the importance of real-world asset tokenization, and the role of AI in enhancing blockchain development. (01:35:28) - Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, discusses how AI agents are revolutionizing enterprise software by automating tasks and enhancing productivity. He emphasizes that AI adoption in enterprises is accelerating rapidly, with organizations integrating AI to transform workflows and unlock new opportunities. Levie also highlights the importance of leveraging proprietary data assets, as AI agents can extract unique insights, providing companies with a competitive edge. (02:06:13) - Neil Parikh & Daniel Cahn discuss the launch of Ash, an AI-powered therapy platform designed to address the global mental health crisis by providing scalable, accessible support. They highlight the platform's development process, including training on clinical data and reinforcement learning, to ensure safety and efficacy. Parikh emphasizes that Ash is not intended to replace human therapists but to augment mental health services, offering continuous support and helping users build stronger real-world connections. (02:16:25) - Jan Sramek, founder and CEO of California Forever, discusses the Solano Foundry, a 2,100-acre advanced manufacturing park planned as part of a new city in Solano County, California. He emphasizes the importance of co-locating research and development with manufacturing to accelerate innovation and compete globally, drawing lessons from historical U.S. manufacturing hubs and China's integrated hardware ecosystems. Sramek highlights the project's potential to create a vibrant, walkable community offering quality of life improvements, such as short commutes and accessible amenities, to attract and retain a skilled workforce. (02:28:12) - Nathaniel Manning, CEO of Legend AI, discusses the company's mission to make Earth searchable by training large models on satellite and drone imagery, enabling users to query geospatial data over space and time. He explains that while much of this imagery is freely available from sources like the European Space Agency's Sentinel program and NASA, higher-resolution or more recent data can be purchased as needed. Manning also outlines Legend AI's three-tiered product stack: an API level for developers, an enterprise product, and a consumer application, all designed to harness the vast potential of geospatial data. (02:43:49) - Chris Andrew, co-founder and CEO of Scrunch AI, discusses the company's recent $15 million Series A funding led by Decibel and their development of a customer experience platform tailored for the AI buyer journey. He highlights the shift from traditional browsing to AI-driven search, emphasizing the need for businesses to optimize their online presence for AI agents. Andrew also introduces Scrunch AI's agent experience platform, designed to enhance website compatibility with AI models by simplifying content and improving accessibility. (02:50:32) - Timeline TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultrodome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, El Capital de Capitale de Capitale. Massive posts from Fiji Simo, the CEO of Applications at OpenAI. She is outlining what her plan is basically, and it's very, very interesting post. So in, so Fiji-Simo is an absolute boardroom general. Give me the Ashton Hall.

She still has the, she still has the Instacart. Yes. Fiji-CMO. Open AI and Spotify Board of Directors positions, huge runs at eBay, Facebook, and Instacart. Now she's the CEO of applications at OpenAI. Today she outlined how she sees OpenAI's products having the biggest impacts. High level, six things. Knowledge retrieval, health, creative expression, economic freedom, time, and support.

And those are kind of getting, I think, more abstract, more vague as they go along. But it's interesting, they map pretty closely to my experience. Knowledge retrieval, I use it as Google replacement for a lot of things. I use deep research as a knowledge retrieval product. I also use it a little bit as WebMD replacement, not a ton, but I've seen a lot of people use that. but I do ask it for advice around health, fitness, recommendations for supplements, all sorts of different stuff. Often I'll just go there and say, what is, what type of creatine does Andrew Huberman recommend? It'll just launch it.

Or complex medical. Fortunately, I haven't been in one of the situations recently, but if I did run it one of the situations, I would definitely go to it. It is interesting because previously when people were trying to understand maybe a small health issue, they're having, they would go do a Google search, add Reddit to it, and then they would look through the comments. And the comments would provide kind of like context on the symptoms or whatever they were dealing with. But you, and you could technically leave a comment. But I think the majority of people wouldn't want to post about that. So the fact that Open AI has all that Reddit data, you can get that same type of data, but then you can kind of ask a number of follow-up questions,

which is very cool, very powerful. I'm certain. that people are probably misusing it, maybe reading too much into the results. But again, the idea, I think for a long time, doctors that would say, don't look on Google, you're just going to stress yourself out, and then you go into the appointment room

and they're over there on the equivalent of Dr. Google. Totally. It's nothing new. People used to go to WebMD, and the meme was like you go to WebMD, and no matter what you type in, it says, like, could be cancer. Like could be like the worst possible thing, but it might just be a cold and maybe you should just take some Advil.

But like for whatever reason WebMD felt the need to like kind of give you the full picture and all the possibilities. And then they, of course, they like go consult an expert or talk to your doctor. So but yes, I definitely see it replacing that type of health experience. Also, I'm using it as a Photoshop replacement of fair amount of time. If I need to just quickly generate an image, quickly generate something that. I would have normally gone to a 3D rendering program or Photoshop and kind of created a collage to kind of...

Huge tailwind for the meme industrial complex. Huge tailwind. Still a lot to work out there. I do find that sometimes when I go to Images in ChatGPT, I'm going back and forth on the prompt for 10 minutes. And I'm like, I could have just done this with traditional tools. So it's not perfect, but when it gets it, it's so amazing. And the final product often looks a lot more cohesive

than what I would get, I was like collaging and like the shadows didn't match and they were like rough edges and stuff. So certainly great there. The last three are a bit more vague. We'll have to read into those. But Open AI is set up to win pretty big in all of these categories. So semi-analysis, clocks, chat GPTs, share of queries.

It's 71%. Meta is in second at 12%. And that's with billions of users on meta products. And so OpenAI is certainly running away with consumer. So there's this question of like, it feels like the rest of consumer AI plays will be, I would say, like, horizontal in the sense that it won't be a new app on your home screen. Meta won't have meta AI as a home screen app.

Loses their lead and becomes the Yahoo of AI, but that doesn't feel likely. Yeah, it feels tough. Like, why did Yahoo lose to Google? It's because there was an entirely new. paradigm in page rank, like a new algorithm emerged. Sure, if that, if that happens from SSI or super intelligence, meta super intelligence, like there could be a leapfrog moment, but so far, they've been pretty good at staying near the frontier to the point where it's like, okay, Google got them on this one or Grock got them on this one today. But there hasn't been a time when I've

been like, okay, like there is a dramatic difference in the results such that it's worth it for me to go over. There was that moment for Claude for a little bit. Everyone was like, Claude's way better. I went over and used Claude for a bit. And then I went back to Open AI just because the product was better and had more of an ecosystem. Product lead is very real. Yeah, I was thinking about this. Like if you played out a hypothetical scenario and you went and you had, you know, the keys to Open AI HQ, you went and you exfiltreated all the code, everything, got an app into the app store, Jordi GPT, you have the exact same model, the exact same inference, the exact same UI, everything. Could you win? Because people would say, well, it's not better, so I'm not going to switch.

We live on a part of the internet where people are constantly debating the merits of the leadership teams and the approaches and the philosophies. But then downstream, you have approaching a billion users that are just like, yeah, I like the product. I use it a lot. Yeah. And so even if you ran a Super Bowl ad saying, like, we have a product that's exactly as good as chat GPT. It is feature for feature.

Feature parity. People would be like, but I already have it installed. You're asking me for two minutes to uninstall this and reinstall the new one. And then I don't get any benefit. I wouldn't do it. Even if you match my, even if you match my capabilities, you got a leapfrope. It's funny. So Jason Freed had a great post relevant yesterday.

He said, feature parity is just another way to say, we don't need to exist. So if you come out and you're so good at what you do that you can create as good of a product as if an AI models that are as good, you still don't need to exist. And so that is the challenge for anyone competing. If you, let me tell you about ramp.com,

time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill, payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com. Really quickly. So it feels like the rest of consumer AI plays will be horizontal. There won't be a new AI app for meta that really takes off.

Instead, AI will improve everything meta does across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Quest, et cetera. And I was thinking about the initial takeoff of Facebook. The other tech companies, they didn't really seriously get to compete in social networking. Like Google Plus never really took off. I guess Microsoft bought LinkedIn and that's kind of a niche social network, very profitable business, great business. But it is like its own thing. It doesn't directly compete.

But graph databases and the idea of storing efficiently connections in graph networks like Facebook kind of pioneered, that became really widespread and was used all over the place. And the same thing with Google search, like this page rank just better search algorithms, those wound up manifesting in better search in all sorts of products. And so when a new company comes

out and builds, you know, a whole paradigm or they break through in terms of a front-end development or database development or some sort of structure. Like it winds up, it winds up improving everyone. And so I think I think AI will have these like horizontal benefits all over the ecosystem. And I think it makes a ton of sense that that Meta's investing so much in superintelligence. But it's not, I don't really think the narrative should be like they need to play catch up to chat GPT. I think it's more like they just need to. They just need to to implement LLMs in every single crack in all of their different systems like they do with great databases, great infrastructure.

I'm not sure. I still think there's, I still think there's, I mean, remember, META made some early experiments of making digital clones of big celebrities on Instagram. I still think they'll take more shots on goal around companionship. Will they go grok, wifu mode? No. I don't think they want that revenue line. But there's a bunch of other ways in which they could kind of go after that market that I don't even think, I mean, Chad GPT is such an interesting product because it's designed to be a functional tool around knowledge retrieval, creative expression, just unlocking consumer surplus, giving people access to expertise, et cetera.

And the way in which people are using it as a companion is sort of not the sort of default. it's not like you name your chat chbtee right people will give it a name yeah but doesn't really stick yeah it's not it's certainly not baked into the ui yeah in the way that it could be yeah um i know people do talk to and so again i've said it before but as as chad gptt user hours are just uh or sort of user minutes still but as they're ticking up i do think zuck will look at that and say i want i want some of that yeah yeah and and maybe some of that but i still i still think some of that happens inside of the platforms. I don't know.

Yeah, not necessarily in that new app. It would be very difficult. And meta has yet to really do it. WhatsApp and acquisition, Instagram and acquisition, but stories massively successful within Instagram. And so I would expect, I agree with your take that I think

there's an opportunity for a lot of AI stuff to live within those apps. And then also just on the monetization side, like they're in a very unique space where they can give great, products away for free, but they can't be charged an inference cost to another company. And so if they have their own open source model, they can inference very cheaply, they can give it away for free and then they leverage their massive ad network.

So let's go through what Fiji-Simo over at OpenAI is building. So in a few weeks I'll be joining Open AI's CEO of applications. We've all been waiting for this moment. Helping to get open AIS technology into the hands of more people around the world, I've always consider myself a pragmatic technologist, someone who loves technology, not just for its own sake, but for the direct impact it can have on people's lives. That's what makes this job exciting,

since I believe AI will unlock more opportunities for more people than any other technology in history, if we get this right, AI can give everyone more power. And so she has a fantastic career, eBay, Facebook, then Instacart, and is now at OpenAI. And she was heavily involved in building the ads engine, at Instacart, correct? Yeah.

Yeah. And obviously at Facebook as well. So on knowledge, she says, empowerment starts with understanding the world around us and our place in it. When we have the right knowledge at the right time, we can make better decisions, advocate for ourselves, and change our path. But for most of history, access to expert level knowledge

has been limited to those with more resources. I mean, even after the invention of the printing press, like you still had to be in a big city that had a library to go check out a book for free, still had to have the time to do it. and certainly buying every book and being able to index it was very expensive and difficult. Now it's even easier. It's already working. People who use AI tutors learn twice as much as they do from human ones,

and the gains are even bigger compared to learning in a traditional classroom. In a 2024, open AI study, 90% of users said chat GPT help them understand complex ideas more easily. I agree with that. On health, she says, personally, I'm most excited about the breakthroughs that AI will generate in health care. A few years ago, I faced a complex and poorly understood chronic illness. Oh, that's sad. And it became painfully clear just how fragmented and inaccessible the health care system can be. Even with access from some of the best doctors in the world, I found myself acting as a connector,

piecing together insights from multiple specialists who weren't speaking to each other. I actually had a friend who got a very, very rare form of cancer and did all of the research, pre-chat GPT, actually downloaded all the frontier science and all the different papers, figured out that it was this one very rare condition, found the expert, went to that expert. He was like, yep, you have this thing. I'm the only one that studies this thing. I'm going to help you.

Did the surgery, saved your life? Crazy. I had an issue. I was 18 traveling. I was surfing in South America. There was flash flooding. I was in this tiny town. I got a antibiotic resistant staff infection from that.

Oh, that's bad. And then was getting repeated infections over the next year. and the doctor kept prescribing antibiotics that were so, I mean, such an intense antibiotic that doctors won't, it's like a soap, they won't touch it without gloves on. And they use it before surgeries. And they just said use this twice a day over your entire body. And I kept having, I kept having issues and eventually found an erratic community that was like just like obsessed over this issue.

and the thing that fixed it was avoiding gluten. They actually just fixed everything. That's so crazy. And I just imagine if I was like, even now, if I was dealing with that issue, I would have been able to, I would have just been able to talk with chat GPT about it. They would be able to surface all that kind of thing, build a picture of it. Very interesting. Well, let me tell you about restream.

One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream, and reach your audience wherever they are. We use restream. bone of this show. So she closes out health saying AI can explain lab results, decode medical jargon, offer second opinions, and help patients understand their options in plain language. It won't replace doctors, but it can finally level the playing field for patients, putting them in the driver's seat of their own care. Very excited for that.

And also, that feels like something, I don't know, like, yeah, just, like, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see if that manifests itself. and like all of this is like will there be any fracturing in the actual product because right now all the fracturing that's happening in the chat GPT product is in like what model you're using you're using agent or deep research but so far all the different products yeah they're all chats and and none of them say this one's for health this one and I'm in like a health a safe health territory it's like that's all driven by the prompt I would imagine that over the long term everything's driven by the prompt I would love to be able to go

to chat chitpd and just say hey quickly what's the population of canada and it knows to use four oh for that and then if i say hey i want you to give me a full report on the history of canada give me a deep research report i wouldn't need to select it it would just know from the prompt and you go to chat jpd agent help me annex canada and then it just goes mistakes you don't mistake and then it just keeps working um so the third one she says creative expression i believe we're all born creators and that the ability to imagine something and make it real is a big part of what makes us human. The problem is that our ability to express that creativity

is often limited by our skill sets. Completely agree. I can't draw at all. Not everyone has the resources time or training to paint, write, compose, or build. When I imagine the future, it often comes to me in images. I paint in my spare time, but the, ooh, you've got to find some Fiji Simo originals. But I don't hang them on the wall. This is interesting.

Full market. It's the lore. But the images in my head are much more realistic and complex than what I am able to paint today. Now AI is collapsing the distance between a imagination and execution with AI and image generation I can prompt and iterate until the output matches the complexity and realism of the vision in my head unless it's a where's Waldo we got to solve the where's Waldo challenge we do it's coming for sure the where the where's Waldo e Val for image generation today nearly one in three Gen Z users say

AI tools have helped them express themselves in ways they never could so this is another fun viral obvious valuable like we know it we love it everyone's using chat GPT for creative expression. Well, yeah, and this presents a massive challenge. If you are a chat GPT wrapper that's trying to go compete in the creative expression space, because you have to, it's not enough to generate a cool image or generate a meme. It used to be that if you could do text well, that was maybe an advantage that people would use your product.

But chat GPT image generation has just gotten better and better and better. It's fantastic. If you haven't played around with it much, drop your group chat, the profile pictures of your most popular group chat. Put them in there and say, make them all giga chats. And then you can share that back.

Yeah. For sure. Well, you start with generating an image in chat, GPT. Then when you're ready to go pro, you move over to Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams, build great products together.

You can get started for free at figma.com. Fourth, she says, economic freedom. When people can independently create and capture value, they gain power over their own economic destiny, but starting a company isn't easy. The average cost to start a small business in the US is around $30,000, an impossible threshold for most aspiring entrepreneurs. And until recently, building a product or launching a service required technical knowledge, especially coding.

That was a problem for hundreds of millions of people who had ideas for tools, apps, platforms, etc. That could have made an impact, but they didn't have the technical skills to bring them to life. The classic ideas guy, I just need a programmer to build it for me. Well, now you can vibe code it. AI now gives the people the power to turn ideas into income no matter their age, credentials, or zip code. A single person can now brainstorm prototype, market, and launch a product with tools they control themselves. A 2024 Shopify report showed AI enabled solopreneurs launched businesses 70% faster than peers without a tool without AI tools. I've seen it with my

nine-year-old daughter who decided one day she wanted to be be a party planner for kids birthdays. Let's give it up for it's amazing. What a great story. In one weekend using AI tools, she created a fully functional website showcasing her party ideas, shared it with her peers, and started taking on clients. Amazingly, my husband and I didn't have to help her, but we did have to intervene before the confetti cannons were ordered. Ben, good reminder, we should get some confetti cannons. We do need confetti cans. Except last. time when we had confetti canons at YC Demo Day, my eyes were in pain for days and days and days. We need goggles next time.

Yeah, there was so much dust in the confetti cannon. We left it all in the field. We did. We did. In the future, people will be able to build new things without waiting for permission, capital, or credentials. This, of course, will mean a meaningful shift in the workforce. Companies will hire fewer people. So you get more smaller companies.

That seems pretty cool. Yeah, my first real company skateboard. company J-Man Designs. Probably, I don't know if I would have done it if my lovely mother wasn't a graphic designer. And I needed a logo to print on the decks that I was getting made.

And I just would sit with her and tell her, you know, do this, do that, do this, do that. And yeah, it's pretty cool that you can now just talk through that process in natural language and how many more people can do that. It was pretty crazy you ran a skateboard company without

doing proper SOC2 compliance. I know. I know. I really should have got Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vantta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process. Huge alpha just starting an extreme sports company and saying, look, none of our competitors are serious enough about this to really take compliance and security as seriously as you should. Yeah, I mean, I do think for kids especially, I mean, the ability to just use AI, tools fully to go and solve problems and it's almost like your your town's

McKinsey consultant I remember I had a early job of just like scanning photos for someone they needed a whole bunch of photos scan there's like pretty manual labor but like I actually wasn't that good at it kind of messed it up there was like the the scanner wasn't configured properly so a lot of the side to redo a lot of them it was a learning process but it's probably the first one of the I feel like the only thing that that's maybe boring and repetitive that you, that I can imagine you doing is the bench press. Oh, yeah.

It should basically the same every time. Yes. But, but yeah, those type of tasks I've always struggled with. But I don't know that we're at a point. I still think if you were using, I don't think that, I think that job still exists. I think it does. I think there are bigger companies where you can just like send in a ton of stuff and they'll just professionally scan it for you.

But they're pretty expensive, I think so. I think the kids still have some alpha if your opportunity cost is low enough as many kids are. Fifth, she says time. Regaining control over your time is one of the most liberating, empowering ships a person can experience. The ability to control how you spend your time is often what separates people who feel in charge of their lives from people who feel overwhelmed by them. Wealthy people who have always bought back their time by hiring personal assistance, household staff, private tutors, chefs, and more. building full infrastructures to reduce friction in their lives. Meanwhile, the average household spends nearly 20 hours a week on domestic work, logistics, and errands.

While leading Instacart, I saw firsthand how technology can shift perceptions and behaviors around time. In 2012, the idea of paying someone to shop for your groceries felt like a luxury, something reserved for the ultra-wealthy. But with the right product design, logistics, and pricing, we made it accessible and indispensable for everyday families. Today, the Instacart user base mirrors the U.S. population with millions of families getting hours back. each week to spend on higher value activities. The question is, will OpenAI build a gig worker network where when your agent runs into a wall and needs somebody in the real world to accomplish a task, will you be able to delegate tasks like that?

It feels like a stretch, but I don't know, they could plug into the Uber network or any of these other networks. Yeah, maybe they'll, I mean, they already have like an Instacart integration, so maybe they will rely on other games. work platforms to solve those problems and actually handle that side and they will stay in the full software like the package package delivery where you can get a new bird or just pick something up and take it across town yep you could imagine that that being integrated yeah I mean there's there's a host of of you know services and companies and APIs for shipping

mailing moving things around hiring someone I mean in theory you could you could hire a personal chef and be communicate your agent could be emailing with them and say, hey, you know, be here at this time. There's this party here's, and it's kind of, you know, it doesn't need to be, it doesn't even, you don't even maybe need a gig work platform because the agent can go out and scroll Instagram in theory and find someone who's advertising that service

or Google it and find a listing of local people providing that job and go and retain their services directly. Interesting, I believe AI will allow for a similar shift in many areas of lifetime consuming activity. like researching decisions, planning vacations, scheduling a tutor, and more can be done by an AI agent than anyone that anyone can access as we build new products. We have a chance to make these time-saving capabilities feel not only useful but routine. In doing so, we can empower people to regain control of their time and attention.

And I certainly feel that something that I would need to sit down 15 minutes looking for a new studio space or something, fire off agent and come back with some interesting results. Anyway, let me tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster, get started for free. Graphite. Last one, support. For many people, the biggest barriers to progress aren't lack of access or opportunity, but self-doubt, isolation, and burnout.

Sometimes what's most empowering is support someone or something that can help thus reflect, feel seen, or simply move forward with clarity and confidence. My business coach Katia has been transformative in my career. joked with her over the years that everyone needs a Katia in their pocket. Personalized coaching has obviously been a privilege, reserved for a few, but now with Chatt GPT, it can be available to many. This is something I have not used. This feels like we're getting further out on the curve of like, you know, defining what

the product is, like knowledge retrieval is like so concrete, generating an image, very concrete. Now support is much more, it's much more of an amorphous product, and there's some companies out there that are doing it right now. It's not a drop-in replacement. And there's much more to define about what this product looks like or how people actually use this. Yeah, it's very general. There's going to be vertical-specific companionship products, right? We've seen this.

What's the founder that we had on? The replica was one of the original ones started like a decade ago. GROC Heavy 4 has their own specific iteration. But then this is also, to be clear, the area of greatest concern, right? it's very clear. If you have a business coach, he's telling you, John, you got this. You're incredible.

You're built different. That's great. But then when you tell them that you've discovered, you know, how to break the, you know, space time continuum. They tell you to go race money. You're actually right. Hit Sandhill Road right now.

You're right. You're good. You're absolutely right. You did figure this out. And so I think they need to figure out the guard rails for this category. And I'm sure that's top of my mind. for everybody at the company right now. Yeah, for sure.

AI coaches, on the other hand, can be available throughout every day. She says, this isn't about replacing human connection, but filling a gap that often goes unfilled. Many people don't feel comfortable opening up to friendly or friends, and most people don't have access to a therapist or coach that can call regularly.

Even people who do have access often spend an hour a week or less with these professionals. At the core of philosophy and religion is the idea of self-knowledge to become who we want to be. We have to understand who we are. So very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about linear.

Linear. linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. It is what OpenAI uses to build their products. That's true. So yeah, I think it's interesting to see

like it's like how useful is it to have these six ideas in mind because in many ways like chat GPT, the magic of it is that it's just a blank text. Xbox and you can do anything with it and then these properties emerge. Like the, yeah, I mean like Google over time had to figure out, okay, there are people that are searching for products. Let's surface them the Google shopping experience. And that is a specific UI that is triggered when you search for a certain product.

If you ask for, you know, like best headphones over the ear, under, $200, like it will just put you in a different product more or less instead of just the 10 blue links. Same thing for if you're asking for a movie. It will pull up the pictures of this cast and the year and show you the Wikipedia page or news. It'll take you to the news portal. And I'm wondering how much of this will actually bifurcate into different trees with different rules and different features because for something like support, I don't know that if I'm having a with a coach about a strategy that I want it to wait 15 minutes to get back to me. That might be something I wanted to do separately, but then if it's health and I'm

uploading my health records or some documents, I'm like really, really, really don't hallucinate. So like take as much time as possible. Again, that's something that right now I would decide as the user, but I'm wondering if this buy for kids at all. Well, yeah, obviously opening eye, chat, GBT as a business, when anybody wants to do anything, they want people to go there. Right? When you want companionship, you want to talk with somebody about something, you go there.

When you want to, they do the book of flight demo that's overplayed, but they want to own that. When somebody's shopping, they want to own that. When somebody's trying to diagnose a medical issue, they're trying to own that. So I just look at this article, this essay, whatever you want to call it, as a way for people internally at Open AI to sort themselves into what area. These are all different verticals that I can imagine people working on. Like I want to go to ChatGBT and work on health, right? For giving people their time back. I was listening to Ben Thompson talk about the flight booking agent demo,

and he was like, I have a personal assistant. I book my own flights. And I think that's very, very common where it's like, he's so specific about what he wants that he's fine to just do it. And it doesn't take that much time. And so I do wonder, I have a flight booking AGI. Yeah, in your brain? First name, Ramp, last name Travel.

That's true. Yeah. I mean, still, it's when I use that, it's like I'm in control. It just does all, it harnesses everything to bring all the data together. Yeah, the interesting thing. I've had EAs over the years. I've had remote EAs. I've had EAs that are embodied, real people that are absolutely killers.

And I find that the most, the internet already makes it so easy to do so many things. that the greatest, some of the greatest value that you can get from an EA is just having somebody in your city that can help you with a variety of different things. And so I think no matter how good chat GPT agent gets, there's still, I mean, there's just still so much that I think people expect out of, of an EA. So. Yeah, yeah, it's very, it's very particular. Like, people have all sorts of preferences. And I don't know, it might be, it might be more sticky. Who knows? We'll see. It'll certainly continue to be a good eval. Well, I want to just look at what is, you know, it feels like OpenAI has a really strong lead in consumer, the product. They're thinking about the applications and actually like the manifestation of like these six different categories. Polymarket has Open AI climbing now in which company has the best AI model. at the end of 2025, the December 31st rankings.

Open AI is up to 29% just a week ago or so. July 18%? 12th XAI was crossing about to beat them. But Google's still in the lead. 48% chance that Google winds up with the best model. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I mean this is based on LM Arena. It's not necessarily the most valuable model to users

It's who's dominating benchmarks. Yeah, I actually pulled up some interesting, so do you know how there are movies that are loved by critics but disliked by audiences? So the classic example is Star Wars, The Last Jedi, 91% on the tomato meter, but audiences gave it a 41% score. And then Dave Chappelle's comedy special had the opposite where the critics hated it,

but the fans loved it and so these things are like controversial and I was wondering if the same thing exists in in foundation models and it does so Gemini 2.5 Pro has which one is this is Gemini 2.5 Pro has an MMLU score of 86% and it's the top rank model on on chat on LM Chappot Arena oh 3 so if you summarize these let's see Kimi K2 illustrates how a model can excel on benchmarks and still be less preferred by users. Possible reasons include limited availability. Similarly, Claude Opus 4 and GPT 4.5 have high MMLU scores yet rank lower in human preference because they may focus on careful reasoning rather than conversational ease.

So you can think about it like you don't necessarily always want to be talking to someone who's like the most rigorous or like it's almost like they're too smart maybe. And then Gemini 2.5 Pro, O3, and Gemini 2.5 Flash show the opposite pattern. Users love them despite modest MMLU scores. So these models have long context. We need to get Tyler to go to a random place in America and do a man on the street interviews and just ask people about different models. I bet you 99% of respondents, probably probably like 990 out of 1,000. are going to tell you, I just go to chat.com.

Chatt, chat.com, and I just open a new chat. Yeah. What is, there's multiple models? Yeah, totally. But it's interesting that like if you want to win with people, Gemini 2.5 Pro, 03, these models have long context windows. So they're staying focused a little bit longer if you're having a conversation. Multimodal features, the images and audio, kind of just a better user experience.

You can talk to it in different ways. faster latency, more personal style, makes them more enjoyable. Even if they don't top academic tests, people are happy with it. So I thought that was interesting. Little anecdote. So anyway, let me tell you about numeralhq.com.

Sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. You had a post today from the Wall Street Journal. This was wild. This stood out to me. We were commuting into the studio this morning. and this stood out. So Open AI has committed, the journal reported that OpenAI is committed to paying Oracle

$30 billion per year within three years for four and a half gigawatts of data center capacity, which will be the equivalent of two Hoover dams worth of energy. So good time to be, if you happen to build a Hoover Dam megap project years and years ago. This would be a good time. If you're squatting on a Hoover Dam, you could get $15 billion a year from that potentially. Well, that's obviously not the entirety of the cost. But yeah, it's wild to think opening eyes latest run rate, right?

They're reporting somewhere around $10 billion run rate or they want to end there by the end of the year. And so they're expecting to be able to have $30 billion worth of, and that's just with this partnership. with Oracle. Yeah, there was a Sotane who's been on the show, says, Chachyp-T is a truly iconic product. Consumer engagement at scale, over 500 million weekly active users,

an estimated 7 billion ARR. And it looks like an annual chart and it's a monthly chart. So August 2024, they're at a 2.6 billion estimated consumer ARR. Then in September, they're at a 3.3. December, they're at a 4 billion ARR. Then they're accelerating. February, they're at 5.6 billion. March, they're at 7.2 billion.

And, of course, we're all the way in July now. So they could potentially already be at 10 billion ARR. And so if you just chart this out, 30 billion in a few years doesn't seem that crazy. And we were talking about like how bad is that? How painful is that to pay a $30 billion bill? But it is kind of the only cost is like to serve the models. And so I don't know. It feels like it could work out.

I don't know. I mean, it's certainly not the only costs. They, I mean, especially if you look at stock-based comp. Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. And that won't stop. 190% of revenue on stock-based comp over the last year. So very, very significant. But this is what betting on yourself looks like.

commit, you know, if you want to level up in life, commit to, you know, $30 billion of fixed costs three years from now. You've got to make it work. For sure. So this all comes from a Wall Street Journal report saying that Open AI's Project Stargate is struggling, which is an interesting term. We can kind of debate what constitutes a struggle. So for some context here, all the hyperscalers are generally in the high tens of

billions in terms of CAPEX. So Google, Microsoft, Amazon, AWS, they're all in like the $60, 70, $80 billion range. But the majority of that is on core AI or core data center build out. So traditional data center build out, because they still need to serve just relational databases. Not everything is cutting edge Nvidia chips serving

transformer-based language models. Ghiblies. Ghibli's. Ghibli's. Not all of it's Ghibli's. But a lot of it is. And Mark Zuckerberg recently said that, you know, about half of the spend maybe going forward, something like that is going towards Gen.

A.I. versus Core AI. So he builds out a big AI data center. A lot of that's going to just serving reels, picking what ads to show you all of that as AI as well. But it's not in this generative AI, not training these large models. So the majority of that spend is not on generative AI focused data center. So, but there's still big, big numbers.

You can think about all the hyper-scales. Doc has his own Manhattan project. Yes. That's basically what, what, what, uh, if you, if you show that your new data center is going to be the size of Manhattan. Yes. That's one way of saying, I am doing a Manhattan project for AI. And that and that, uh, that like, you know, the size of Manhattan, that particular data

center, he's targeting five gigawatts. Yeah. Which is right here at four and a half gigawatts in three years. And, and when, and when, you know, that's like, you know, that's in one. Mark Zuckerberg was talking about that five gigawatt data center, he was saying this will be in a couple years. Right now, they're focused on the one gigawatt data center. And when we talked to the co-founder of Corweave, he was saying, like, you don't understand

how big five gigawatts is. Like, that's insane. It's such a big data center. Like, this is a huge project. These are mega projects. And so when I hear something like, oh, it's struggling like a couple months in, I'm kind of like, you know, we're building something so big. Like, did we ever expect there not to be a hiccup?

I'm not ready to say like, oh, this is all doom and gloom. It seems like, you know, they shot so big with 500 billion. So, yeah. So one got to give, regardless of what someone thinks about Sam, right? He's got plenty of critics. But the fact that he was able to finesse his way to getting the president to announce this project with Masa, with a number so large that people immediately. immediately just started looking at SoftBanks balance sheet and saying, okay, cool.

How is this happening? Elon quickly fired in the comments saying they don't have the money. I do, it was always unclear where the money was going to come from. But one of those things, you shoot for $500 billion. You land at $100 billion. You're still doing pretty well. Yeah. And it's more, it feels like it's more about like the corporate.

structure and the timing because if you go to Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, and you say, we're going to, we're so in on AI, we're going to invest $500 billion over the next 10 years. Like all of a sudden it's like, okay, yeah, well, you're on track to do that. That totally maths out. So the question was always in my mind, okay, $500 billion is the goal, but what is the time frame? And that's the one that people are pulling on right now because the immediate number was $100 billion. They said, we're going to do $100 billion right now. That was in January when Trump, Mossa, Sam Altman, and Larry Ellison were at the White House.

They announced Stargate. They say we're targeting $500 billion, but we're doing $100 billion immediately. Now that's maybe been scaled back, but it's still so huge. SoftBanks putting $30 billion in Open AI, and then Open AI is paying Oracle $30 billion per year starting within three years. So Struggles is a little odd of a characterization. Oracle's projecting over 25 billion for 2026 CAPEX. Everybody's just throwing money in the pot. Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, it makes sense because all the reporting is that inferences. The definition of Stargate is just being expanded. Sure, sure, sure. So they're counting the Oracle, this sort of commitment that they're making an Oracle as part of it. Yep. So. And so I think the, there, There are two questions. One is like the super intelligence AGI piled, like we got to build the next greatest thing. And whoever builds that at 10x the scale, whoever gets to the $50 billion, $500 billion data center, they just train. And then they win because they'll have a product that's so much better than everything else that everyone will shift over and chat GPT will be obsolete. The flip side is that if we're in a little bit of an S curve, if we're in a little bit of a plateau, well then in order to hold on to that.

71% market share, chat ChitpT just needs to keep, just keep delivering inference tokens reliably at a level that doesn't cause churn. And so when, if I go to Chachypte and I'm getting a ton of errors and I just cannot get my prompts done and like my Ghibli's aren't working, I'm going to open up the Gemini app and I'm going to go over there and see if they have any inference tokens. And we're hearing this from the model routing companies that a lot of businesses that rely on LLMs and AI inference are seeing brownouts, intelligent brownouts in different models at different times.

And so they need to be able to reroute from... Yeah, somebody was looking at Anthropics up time. Yeah. And it's just constantly down. Like there's so much demand. And they're obviously doing everything in their power to deliver against it. Yeah. But they don't have enough GPUs yet.

And so that feels like everyone's got to build bigger data centers. Maybe there is a point where we built too big, but everything looks like, okay, it's at least worth building the one gigawatt data centers, probably worth building the five gigawatt data centers. We might need some more research breakthroughs to justify the bigger data centers, the 10 gigawatt, the, I don't know, 20, 50 gigawatts, something crazy.

But in general, I think the main goal for OpenAI right now is just to continue serving inference at a level that avoids churn. So when someone shows up, get them the answer. I think new products like Agent are cool, but it takes months for people to really adopt these new tools in mass and seriously change inference demand. We saw this, like, Agent went out Thursday. We talked to the team, and then over the weekend I was talking to people, and smart people in tech were not using it yet. And I kind of had to like step up and be like, it's my job to test this thing. And now I'm using it.

And now I would say I'm probably a weekly active user of Agent. I'm definitely a DAU of 4-0. I'm a DAU of O3 Pro. I'm probably even a DAU of deep research, but I'm not a DAU of agent yet, but that will come, but I'm clearly on the early adopter side. It will be a while until they're doing so much agent,

so many agent workloads that they're really- Right now, it just default takes 15 minutes? So deep research takes 15 minutes almost every single time. I thought chat, GPT agent always. No. It can be shorter, it can be longer. That's part of the beauty of it, is that it sizes the inference,

relative to the task. And so it can spend a really long time. It can come back to you. It can interact with you. Although I haven't actually gotten a push notification. Maybe that's just because of the nature of my prompts, but I haven't had to step in, which has been surprising because when we talked to Dan Shipper from Every,

he said that he did have to interact, but I think what he was prompting was a little bit more robust than what I was asking for. Yeah. Yeah, what he's doing that I think will get a lot of adoption, but a bit slower is these sort of like batched tasks that I think are really interesting, but that is expert mode for now. So that's the story in the Wall Street Journal.

Should we flip over maybe cover this XAI? The number one AI agent for customer service, number one performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one in ranking on G2. What do you want to flip over to? I was going to say maybe we cover this XAI story quickly. Yeah, yeah, totally. And then we have actually Tyler, our very own Tyler over and Michael are at the Tesla diners. Oh, cool.

So we'll flip over to them and get a review. Yeah. So Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Trump in some ways, Massa are all working to build Stargate simultaneously. Elon Musk is trying to ramp up things at XAI. He's aiming to raise up to $12 billion for XAI chips as the startup burns through Kassai. And so just weeks after Musk's XAI raised 10 billion through sales of stock and debt, the startup is working with a trusted financier to secure up to 12 billion more for its ambitious expansion plans.

Valor Equity Partners, Antonio Gracios, is in talks with lenders to raise the capital. The money would be used to buy a massive supply of advanced Nvidia chips. And so the number was kind of all over the place. I saw a million chips floated. that would be much bigger. So Elon shared this morning, 230,000 GPUs including 30,000 GB200s,

are operational for training GROC XAI in a single supercluster called Colossus 1. And at Colossus 2, the first batch of 550,000 GB200s and GB300s also for training start going online in a few weeks. Yeah. So if you compare that to what the other clusters

are Prometheus from meta is around 500,000 chips. Stargate's supposed to be around 400,000, and I believe Anthropics in that range too. And so it's a knockout, drag out fight. Everyone's trying to build a massive cluster, do the next big training run. And XAI has been moving extremely quickly, 122 days for XAI to build its first giant data center

in Memphis, Tennessee, Colossus. It originally housed 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. It was among the world's largest clusters. Just 92 days later, X-AI doubled Colossus's size to 200,000 GPUs. And now he's going even bigger. So good luck to everyone. Pulling in capital from everywhere, SpaceX had to get into the round. It's quite the party round.

Yep. It's all over the place. $5 billion in corporate debt, included bonds in loans secured by data centers, which makes sense if you're building something KAPX intensive, you would use debt for that. that. Anyway, in other news, I wanted to talk about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company the next level. Get started for free. No, I wanted to talk about Procter & Gamble and the idea of this Michelin Tires question that we

have been toying with. Been toying with, to be clear, since the original deal and rippling debacle. Yes. Yes. Since the timeline was in turmoil, our reaction was that on a long enough time horizon, people will not care that a payroll provider may have gotten a little too competitive in the past. And the comp that we discussed was if you went to your mother or a family member and said, hey, I saw your driving using Bridgestone tires, did you know that? the CEO of Bridgestone was actually, you know, spying on Michelin. She would say, that's very sweet, honey. I'll keep that in mind when I, when I replace my tires in two years and then probably

forget about it immediately. And it also relates to the astronomer story where the CEO was caught having an affair at a Coldplay concert. That is something that people were saying he has to go. It reflects poorly on the company. but if you look at you know Apache Airflow management are you going to rip out astronomer over this especially when they replace the CEO so quickly and so this question of like what is existential what puts you in the FTX category or

the Theranos category versus a company that can come back and rebuild from what is controversial so there's this old story from 2001 this is in the New York Times and I think fortune broke the story So I'll kind of give you the high level. So late on a spring afternoon in April of 2001, a red flag memo landed on the desk of Procter and Gamble chairman John Pepper in Cincinnati. Internal security investigators had discovered that a handful of employees working with an outside outfit of ex-U.S. intelligence officers, I guess like CIA guys, had been rifling

through rubbish bins outside Unilever's offices and posing as much. market analysts to extract secrets about forthcoming shampoo launches. The covert snooping, management learned, have been going on for months under the radar of P&G's famously buttoned down compliance system. The operation, codenamed the ranch by the company's competitive intelligence unit, first took shape in late 2000 when P&G hired Alabama-based Phoenix Consulting Group, a firm led by Vietnam-era clandestined veterans. So like CIA guys in Vietnam come back from the war. They're probably like 50 at this point. And they're like, yeah, let's do some corporate espionage as a service. So by the time the plot was exposed, the operatives had spirited away roughly 80 internal

unilever documents. So the rival consumer package goods company, marketing calendars, packaging mockups, even margin analyses along with samples lifted straight from the trash dock. So they're literally digging through the trash. And if you think about it. It's so funny to think why this was necessary. Oh, it's incredibly valuable. So if you know someone's marketing calendar,

you know that they're going to launch this product on Tuesday. You can launch a competitive product on Monday. Steal all the wind from that. You can launch a counter position product. There's so much that you can do. Yeah, I know. And margin analysis is really key because if I know that you're selling a product at low margin and I can undercut you, then you're backed in.

into a corner, you can't lower your margin without losing money on that, as opposed to if you have a high margin product, I might not want to attack that. There's a whole bunch of different things that you can do if you have good competitive intelligence. And even packaging mockups, like understanding that, okay, they're going with a bigger size, they're going to be on this shelf in Walmart. We should go and try and lock up Walmart, overpay to block them out of that slot. There's a lot that you can do with this stuff. So Pepper's, Pepper, who is the chairman of Procter & Gamble at the time, his immediate instinct was containment by candor, he dismissed three staffers, seized the files, and telephoned the Unilever co-chairman

Neil Fitzgerald to confess. Within days, P&G couriers arrived at Unilever Chicago headquarters with bankers' boxes of paperwork and a pledge that no one who had seen the material would touch hair care strategy again. This was an unfortunate incident, Pepper would later say, and we are ensuring the information has not been and will never be used. That might have been the end of it until Fortune Magazine landed the scoop on August 30th, 2001, under the headline, P&G's Dirty Little Secret, the story which read like a corporate John La Caree novel, who, of course, does, Tigger-Taylor-Solder Spy

and a bunch of other great spy novels, you should definitely read, detailed dumpster dives, safe houses, and fake business cards, and triggered a global media pile on within a week, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian and newspapers from Dublin to Delhi were splashing shampoo spy puns across their business pages. facing a reputational firestorm on the eve of the crucial back-to-school selling season. I didn't know that that was that big for P&G, but I guess it is. Going back to school, you need some soap.

I guess you need new soap. The two consumer goods giants struck a confidential settlement announced September 7, 2001. Published reports put the payment at about $10 million. More painful for P&G, Unilever secured an independent monitor empowered to audit new product timetables and the reassignment of any P&G employee tainted by the files. This agreement ensures our confidential information is protected. Unilever's U.S. Chief Charles Strauss told reporters pointedly. Regulators never filed criminal charges.

Dumpster diving on public property skirts U.S. theft statutes, but the incident singed PNG's carefully cultivated Midwestern morals brand. The company rolled out mandatory ethics and competitive intelligence training worldwide, while industry groups tighten codes now that flat out, now that flat out ban clandestine trash raids and pretext phone calls. Competitive intelligence textbooks and MBA ethics courses still open their corporate espionage chapters with the P&G Unilever Saga as the moment when lawful information gathering fell headfirst into the dumpster of public opinion. I mean, this probably created a bull market in paper shredding. For sure. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you don't want people diving into your dumpster. We got to shred all of our materials when we're done. All of our bankers. All of our printed posts. Can't find these anywhere on the internet. More than two decades later, both Pantene and Swave remained grocery aisle staples. Proof that the scandal left no lasting dent in shampoo sales.

What endured is the cautionary tale. The world's dullest products can tempt even the bluest chip companies into spy novel theatrics. And that in the age old war for market share, the most corrosive thing you can pour over a brand. is an arrivals conditioner, but the acid of public embarrassment. Very fun. Wild story. Well, we should jump over to Tyler, who is at the Tesla diner. Here he is, looking sharp on the ground.

Hear me? How you doing? Yeah, we can hear you. Okay, sweet. Yeah, I'm here at the Tesla diner. I'm on the roof. We couldn't get food. The line was, like, extremely long.

But up here on the roof, you can see. It's kind of like a retro-futurist, like very Americana-style diner. you know they have burgers fries I think there's apple pie but here I can walk around yeah yeah sure we heard it's we heard it's farm to table too is is that is that true they're they're partnering with local farms it's unclear I would have to ask some of the some of the cooks here but you can see there's these two massive screens they have see if you guys see this um they're playing what looks like uh I don't know a reality show or something there's like these massive I think there's

80 super chargers. Can you guys see this? Okay. Yeah. Are they full? People are charging their cars? I think they're almost all full. Yeah. Okay. So I think the way it works is you can order from your car if you have a Tesla. If you don't have Tesla, then you got to wait in the line. It's like 35 minutes long probably. Okay. You can see, let's see if I can find a box. The burger comes in these little cyber truck boxes and see if I can pick it up. Oh wow. Very cute. Guys, yeah. And then if I walk over here, there's a- Did you just pick up a random stranger's box?

No. Do you know that person? Julia. Oh, that's Julia. Oh, that's Julia. How you doing? If I walk over here, there's actually an optimist robot serving popcorn. Okay.

Let's see it. Let's see here. If I can walk over. Can you guys see this? Oh, wow. Yeah, there you go. Any indication then if this is teleoperated or end-to-end? It's unclear, but there is someone standing right next to it.

Okay. I think it puts a charity. Yeah. But yeah, overall, it's very cool with right on Sunset Boulevard. Yeah. Okay, Tyler, we're going to give you. We're going to give you a ramp bump on your card. We're going to make it so that you guys can start going offering 10x the retail price of the burger.

You got to get, you guys have to try a burger. You can't leave without a burger. So go around and just offer, start offering people. start bidding on people's burgers right at their table. It's just say, you got that for $10. I'll give you $100 right now. And figure out a way to get a burger. You can't leave without a taste test.

No, you should, yeah, you should wait in line and talk to people and actually try the food. Give us your review at the end of the show. Okay. Yeah. That'll be great. I'll try to find someone. Awesome. Thanks for checking in.

Very cool. Do you think this is a meaningful business line or a marketing stunt? Great marketing activation. I think that I can see them putting these in Tier 1 cities. I mean, the charging stations are interesting, right? Gas station convenience stores are great businesses because you have this captive audience. And people that are charging their cars typically have to hang out for quite a bit longer than somebody that's filling up gas for a few minutes.

Yeah. So I can see them having a handful of these or even developing their own kind of convenience store concept over time. Yeah, it kind of harkens back to like when the soap companies, the Unilever P&G going back started like the soap operas to like promote soap. And it's kind of like this adjacent business that actually could grow into something. But there's a big question about like should this also be on the Tesla team plate to manage and grow a chain of restaurants. It's like a lot of stuff to do. But it is a very,

very cool like view into the future. It's a, it's a showcase. It feels like the world's fair. That's what it feels like. Yeah. It feels like going to a world's fair. Very cool. Well, well, we have totally in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in. Very excited for this conversation. There he is. How you doing? Welcome. Good to meet you. You are live. How are you doing? Can you hear us? No sound yet. Let's ping him, hopefully bring him in from the re-stream waiting room.

In the meantime, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising, make easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only ad-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And if we are ready, we will go back to Anatoli from Solana. Get the full story. I'm obsessed with the story of Salon. I made a whole YouTube video about it.

Fantastic founder story, really deeply technical. I don't know. It's just a fascinating story. And he's been in it for a very long time. So very excited to talk to him about. And he made the careers of a lot of different venture investors. For sure. For sure.

Yeah. And just fascinating tradeoffs and how you design. I mean, pretty, I don't know, it just feels like like such a massive challenge to start in L1 after Bitcoin, Ethereum are out there, and you're like, I'm going to do the hardest thing in the world probably. And then I'm going to make it through some of the most tumultuous markets ever and kind of be at peak awareness right during the interest rate rise and massive sell-off in crypto, stuck with it, kept building, and is here today to tell us more about the story of Solana.

So hopefully we can bring him in. We'll see. Okay. In the meantime, we should talk to you about MKBHD. Did you hear this story? MKBHD. In 2020, he had a video that he put on YouTube exposing this fake phone, Escobar Fold. You saw this?

I saw this video when it went out. So it turned out some guy was scamming people by sending phones to influencers, but not to buyers. So basically what he would do is he would buy a Samsung phone, give it a wrap, basically, rebrand it. and then he would sell it and send it to influencers. So if you bought on the website, he would look you up and say, okay, you're an influencer, you're going to review. I'm going to send you the actual product. But then anyone else, he would just be like, oh, you're on the backlog.

You're delayed. So in February or in June of 2020, just three months after Marquez Brownlee launched that video, the FBI came to his studio and collected his phone as evidence. So MKBHD keeps all the phones that he reviews. And they say, hey, we'll give it back to you. And then five years later, that guy who was scamming people pleaded guilty to fraud. He faces millions of dollars in fines and 20 years in federal prison. So what a crazy story.

I wonder how many of these citizen journalism. Did they figure out how many of these fake phones you actually sold? I don't know. I mean, I imagine if it's millions and fines, he probably sold millions of dollars worth of phones. It was a very expensive phone because it was wrapped in gold foil. And so it was marked up, I believe, pretty heavily, or maybe the strategy was to underprice it or something. The CEO said they sold over 50,000 telphones.

Hmm. Anyway, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Go to public.com. So just to put this into context, that means they did potentially over 17 million in sales of a phone that was never delivered.

Yes. Yeah, pretty crazy. And this was Pablo Escobar's brother. I believe he was like riding on the Escobar name and kind of a distant relative, which is a funny brand to align with. Because it's like, trust me, I'm related to a criminal. And he wound up being a criminal as well. Objectively is one of the greatest CPG entrepreneurs of all time, right, bootstrapped to tens

of billions of revenue. Yeah. global empire just chose a product that happened to not be very legal. Yeah, very rough. Mert from Helius, friend of the show, says, in eight hours, Salana blocks will become 20% bigger. Put differently, you can now do more transactions per second on the Salana blockchain. Very exciting news. And hopefully we'll be talking to.

Anatoly, in just a few minutes, he is waiting to come into the show. We are sorting out some audio stuff. In other news, Bucco Capital Bloke says the people who create HR slash security slash compliance training videos and platforms without an option to 2X video speed should be sent to Buckelos and Dungeons in El Salvador. I think that's a legal thing, right? Like you can't, you should be able to do 2X speed though. Yeah.

What's funny is Aaron Eccerson, Erikson here says startup idea, AI agent that watches this stuff you controversial post because people have done that and gotten a lot of trouble. You're if you have to legally watch a security compliance video and you don't watch it and you have a computer do that for you you can be in a lot of trouble. We got, uh, we got them ready. Oh, we got Anteoli. Welcome to the stream. Sorry for the technical difficulties.

Great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining. How are you? Great. Thanks for having me. Fantastic. Great to have you. I would love to kick off with just a little bit of the State of the Union.

I know a little bit of the history, but, um, what is, you know, what is, you know, What is, how do you tell the story of Solana and what you built and then I want to go into the state of the union of all the different projects and all the different applications and then we can kind of weave through some of those. But could you kick us off with just a little bit of an introduction? So I'm an Atollean. I'm a co-founder of Salana Labs COs and I'm the brain child of the Salana protocol. It's my baby. I started around 2017, 2018, with the dream of building a high-performance blockchain network. So it took us about two years to launch it. I don't know if folks remember 2020, but we launched right after the double black swan, COVID, was just effectively became a thing.

S&P dropped 70%, Bitcoin dropped 70%, and our launch date was announced to be three days later. We launched into the abyss, but I think it was like a lucky timing, I would say, because we were the only next generation network out. And we're still, I think, processing more transactions than every other major blockchain combined. So not just more than every other one, but more than all of them combined, which is a pretty fun step to have. Yeah.

What gave you confidence that you needed to build a new L1? And there was a narrative at the time of just like, hey, we have existing networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Let's just speed up those. And that feels like, I mean, you can even abstract that all the way to, hey, like the Fiat transfer rails, the SWIFE system is slow. Let's just speed it up. We don't need an entirely new network. Like what gave you confidence that you would have like an enduring advantage in speed and the other platforms, whether in Fiat or crypto, wouldn't just catch up? Why do founders do things?

I think that's the question I'm asking, sorry. The real reason is because I could. I spent most of my career doing high performance, like optimizations at Qualcomm. So I kind of knew how silicon moves data, like that's my expertise. And I knew the five to 10 people that I needed to hire, most of them came out of Qualcomm. We were just laser focused on building something that is optimized to its full potential. I don't know if it's going to, like how it's going to revolutionize finance or anything like that. We did have the idea that these systems are useful for trading because if you kind of take a step back and try to look at like what does it mean to synchronize the state and agree in a ledger globally.

it's a similar problem to like how NASDAQ or Noges do price discovery. They're trying to figure out what's the price of an asset given all of this crazy information that's happening around the world that all the market makers and traders are trying to send to their machines through their trades to this exchange that's running in New York or whatever. But with a blockchain and this kind of unique technology that was developed, you know, really like over the last two decades on the city of Byzantine fault tolerance and agreeing in a piece of state globally without a trusted third party, you can do the same thing, but you don't need to trust Nizier NASDAQ to do it.

So I kind of had the sense that the purpose of these systems is to do price discovery. I'm not an exchange person. I've never built a financial product before, but I knew how to move data through these systems, how to synchronize them. So we looked at it as a physics problem and this is how we tackled it. And, you know, we thought the things that are going to take advantage of this would be like real financial applications, stocks, all these things. But what happened was NFTs and meme coins were like the first big booms. But it's the same technology and the same infrastructure is used for those that you can now leverage for real equities and real global price discovery without a third party in the middle.

Yeah. Do you think that the, that like the, I see like this tech tree developing with all these different applications. And every few years, I check in with crypto. And there's different narratives, whether it's NFTs and meme coins. Now it's prediction markets and stable coins. And for a while, there was gaming and metaverse. And it feels like the detractors of crypto point to that as like a failure. But I'm not sure that it's any different than what's happening in enterprise.

with ideas that get tried and fail or space exploration with ideas that get tried and failed. Do you think there's something like fundamentally different about the way the crypto community explores the possibilities and the applications in the tech tree? Or do you think it's just done more transparently because everyone can see it or there's more tension on it because of the financial element? Like what do you think is going on? I think, you know, I grew up in the 90s. So it was there like in AOL chat rooms and I see chat rooms.

And the same kind of like almost religious ideas about what the internet can accomplish for around then. You know, people were arguing about what file system they pick in their Linux kernel configuration. Religious zeal on forums like to the death. Right. So I think when you have a technology that has this unforeseen changes that people can imagine could be unlocked by this. You can almost have this like faith-based argument to it. The difference now, I think, from the 90s is that we have the internet. Everything is global.

So we're seeing the iteration cycles just to be insanely fast. And while a bunch of people tried up on ideas two cycles ago, that was 2020. And now we're starting to see those ideas get traction. I think the fact that there's 250 billion in stable coins that have been issued before Congress took up legislation is insane. Like there's no way I would have predicted this in 2020. Like it's just incomprehensible to me. And it seems like very realistic they were going to see over a trillion dollars in stable coins by the end of, you know, like in the next four years.

And people telling me that I'm bearish when they say only one trillion. Is that stablecoin rollout? I feel like for a long time the whole idea of like Bitcoin was actually in some ways a threat to the U.S. dollar. And now it feels like with the latest White House announcement, like it's, crypto is actually strengthening the dollar in America. Yeah. It's like, what's actually going on? It's like saying of gold is a threat to US dollar. I actually think that's kind of the wrong way to think about it.

I'm not a finance person, but I learned through osmosis. So Bitcoin can't function as a US dollar because for you to use something for trades, like trading oil or whatever you need futures, you need a stable denominator. to price those futures in. And if you're using Bitcoin, you have to pay for shorting Bitcoin for the duration of that contract. Imagine taking out a mortgage in Bitcoin and having to pay for 30-year short position on that Bitcoin.

This just doesn't work. And two, like banks can, you know, when I have like an oil field and I want to buy, you know, whatever a farm with it, I can use the oil field as collateral. The bank will create dollars. up to the value of my collateral to facilitate that transaction. You can't do that with Bitcoin.

You can't do that with gold, which is why these things don't function as like real-world trading currencies. But they were great as a store of value, as a hedge against, you know, sovereign events, a whole bunch of other stuff. You know, Biat is managed by people, which is the great part and also the scary part. And gold is not managed by people as managed by physics. Bitcoin is managed by the rules that create enshrine in this protocol, which are bounded by physics, which is what gives it these really nice properties. But I don't see a world where Bitcoin weakens the US dollar. If anything, the growth in stable coins has been as a spot, the vast majority of the growth in stable coins has been used to support spot markets for Bitcoin.

So when those grow, do you have more stable coins demand? more treasuries are bought. It's actually, if anything, has been working to benefit the U.S. dollar. Do you think we, do you think there's, do you see any potential needs for new stable coins? Obviously with the new legislation, a lot of people, big institutions, seeing dollar signs, thinking, well, look how much, you know, look how much tether's printing, look how much circles making. We should get in the game.

They should. Competition is the best way to grow products. to iterate quickly, they 100% should, right? Like, why wouldn't you? This is, I think, a lot of the US finance was built after World War II. But when you look at India and China that has been built after the internet,

their financial infrastructure in rails are just much, much faster and more robust. Which is crazy to say that what we consider to be the West, the advanced economies are actually sitting on rails that were built before the internet. not. So on that note, what about, you know, the other side of this is is institutions saying, we want to, you know, let's say somebody wants to tokenize securities and they think, okay, well, if we want to do this, we should make our own L2 or we should make our own chain. That feels like

potentially a distraction from delivering the end value, which is, you know, trustless, fast transactions globally. So, you know, I have my own horse that I picked, obviously. Yeah, I have the goal is to. Yeah. So I guess what I'm pushing on is, what I'm pushing on a little bit is like, you know, competition for you, you know, or competition. But not for me.

But at the same time, you guys have faced so many competitors over years. You launched into a competitive market. Yeah. I would not. You know, the worst thing would be for the government to stop innovation. Totally. Like that. So, like, if the.

those folks think that they can out compete us by launching an L2, let them try. My goal is to them to show that like, hey, everything that you want to express in those smart tront tracks running in your L2, you can do it much cheaper and faster on Salana and you'll actually grow revenues faster without needing all this info. This is what my pitch to those companies, but let them innovate and try, like happy to help. Yeah, it's also, if you choose to build on Solana, you just don't have to worry about onboarding developers, you don't have to worry about liquidity, all these things that you would have to really be, would have to be top of mind if you want to go compete. And potentially that's just a huge

distraction from delivering the end product experience that you want. That's the dream. We want to, you know, we want to convince people there's no point to build their own private intranets. Just use the one public giant internet that can host everything. What about, what about developer activity? There was, I remember during 2021 and 2022, there was billions of value creation, billions of, you know, at least in USD terms on chain. And there was still at some point, I remember, there was like single digit thousands, like true blockchain engineers. How are you sort of tracking developer growth internally?

I think if you look at the reports that have been published online and developer growth, Solana is the second largest at this point and the fastest growing network. Ethereum is the largest, but I think we've been outpacing in terms of growth, the number of developers onboarded. So like everything else, we saw in the early days, there was a lot of demand for smart contract developers, because there was a lot of innovation to be had in the smart contract, But I think of them more as drivers, like Windows has excellent drivers, but you don't see innovation or that being a differentiator anymore because there's only so many smart contracts that actually get built.

A stable coin is a token. So all the innovation to launch a stable coin is happening, not in the smart contract space, but the integration with the bank with how you handle the mint and withdraws and that stuff. So a lot of the work has shifted away from L1 smart contract development to the higher levels. And this is where I think Solana has really excelled because a lot of the, our focus has been on building reusable contracts that actually get deployed once and reused everywhere. There's really only two token standards on Solana. It's not an interface. There's one implementation called SPL token, one implementation called T-BL-22, and everyone uses them.

So they've been effectively, through Lindy, verified to be correct and bug free. And you as a organization don't have to take smart contract risks when you deploy these. Is there any hope that I don't know if there'll be a new bull market and new smart contract development, but it felt like developing a secure smart contract with super high stakes. You needed an insanely good engineering team, insanely good engineers, hold all this crazy context in their head to understand all the different risk factors. You needed to reject 50 North Korean engineers. Yeah, it was not something that you just wanted to like, you know, like hack

together a weekend. Yeah. But, but I was wondering if like the AI code tools would be an accelerant there. But at the same time, I've heard a lot of stuff about AI code gen tools being like, kind of falling short when you need a huge context window. You need a hold a bunch of things. So like is a smart contract development like the last thing that AI will be able to do in terms of code gen?

or is it actually an accelerant, but we don't really need it because we have all the smart contracts we need? I think the way that I've seen AI used effectively is augmenting an expert. So you have somebody that has deep expertise, they can just do more work. And where smart contracts could excel is like, you write, where AI can accelerate smart contract development is you built a complicated smart contract. You need to formally verify it. The formal verification step is a huge pain for, and you need a lot of expertise, but you can automate a lot of the boilerplate generation. You have an expert guiding at AI to go do that work.

But you still need, I think, your core five or six, super really great smart contracts, engineers, they can just accomplish more with that small team using AI tools. Did you read anything into the OpenAI and Google news about the IMO gold medal and the use of Lean to do complex math, that feels somewhat adjacent. Yeah, is that relevant at all? Yeah. This has been like, you know, I'm, you know, I've had 15 plus years of experience as an engineer. You know, I love being an ICA.

I love churning out code. But now my workflow is using Claude and O3 and super heavy to go validate each other. I'm up with like a robust plan, robust testing plan. And the jump and reasoning abilities just year over year, just from last year has been astronomical. Like it went from being kind of a, I'm going to try this as a gimmick to now, it's really an embedded part of my workflow.

I can't imagine myself building software without having these tools now. Do you think those tools are, yeah. Yeah, I still don't trust the code that it generates. I think this is where an expert that can have this big context in their expertise can quickly scan stuff over and guide the tools to go do more testing and target more things.

We still need those people. But the reasoning capabilities are getting stronger. It's scary. I don't know what happens in five years. Yeah, it feels like there's kind of two failure modes in crypto projects. One is technical. There's a bug and someone just drains the wallet or whatever

and hacks it. And then there's another which is like economics and people didn't realize that there was no real solid foundation. They kind of wound up with like a Ponzi and it just kind of fails that way. Well, then there's the other, I mean, social engineering is the other big one.

Sure, sure. And I'm wondering, do you think that these reasoning models are getting close to superhuman, close to, you know, amazing at economic reasoning? Yeah, you're right to point at that as being a really hard problem because this is where an ex, you really need to have that expert can understand the economic attacks to guide these tools to go build a simulation and actually

test it. And I wouldn't trust myself to be able to go find those, given all these tools, even if I'm aware of the problems, me just asking, oh, 3, give me all the top 10 economic attacks and then simulate them, that's the best I can do and it's going to suck. Like, I can already tell you it's going to do maybe as good of a job as like a new grad. right but like I think you really need to have an economic expert guide they'll still similarly like that economic expert if they asked all three to go generate a bunch of bug free code I'm going to go look at it and find a bunch of bucks so I think you still need people in the loop there I don't know what happens in five years given the pace of progress of AI but it's remarkable of how good it is but you still need people yeah for now

Jordy. You guys have been really good at kind of building brand through short strings of words. So internet capital markets, you know, the team has really rallied around that. You hear it. It makes sense. And you can think about all the ways that that evolves. With that phrase, internet capital markets, what are you excited about on a one-year timeline? And maybe what are you excited about on like a five-year timeline?

I think getting fully approved, regulated, boring trad-fights stuff on chain that has plans on future cash flows, like all that stuff that you read in the intelligent investor. Having those things be tokens, I think, is really, really important. And this is kind of my dream for internet capital markets, getting all the, you know, jumping through all the regulatory hoops, crossing out all the T's and dotting the eyes, making sure this is as compliant as the government wants it to be and minimize the fraud. Because I think once you have those assets on chain, you can then use the best of defy, which is the purpose of it is to create transparency, right, and to run the risk engine every 400 milliseconds instead of once a week or whatever happens in a bank. Always know exactly what

are the positions at risk, what collateral that particular contract is managing. So everyone can see that they actually risks involved and you don't end up with the kind of tail end failures that you see in traditional finance. That's the beauty of it. But we need real assets to do that because if you do that with just meme coins, they don't have any value. It's at price and eventually that just doesn't work. All the risks are correlated and you end up with the tail amounts. That's to me the short term. The five-year kind of like dream for me is I would want like a startup founder, that wants to do this on their own to be able to take all this open source software and to run their own IPO, which means do all the disclosures, do the price discovery on chain,

to use everything in an immutable open source smart contract and kind of do the Linux from scratch IPO and have the SEC approve it. And that doesn't mean that every founder is going to do that. You're going to have a bunch of services spring up on top of it that can take advantage of all this technology. but you should see the fees of doing that basically compressed down to the actual value that they provide and no longer kind of be based on their ability to control the markets or the regulatory capture and stuff like that makes no sense last question from my side how how did you were you uh conscious of trying to make salana lindy in the early days because i know it was like you know like any crypto project it was the price you know massive amount of volatility and then you'd go through these

periods of insane activity and and I think we've seen this with various companies at the product level you know open AI pump pump fun axiom is the other one that's like done what like 170 million of revenue in the lot in like six months or something something crazy like that and anytime you see these like massive spikes in activity or revenue the question is like how sustainable is it and you guys were able to kind of like navigate through the volatility and get to a point where i think everybody would have real conviction that salana will have more activity a year from today five five years 10 years etc but i feel like that's the number uh for for crypto founders out there it's like how do you go from you know massive activity to being uh durable and sort of

Lindy. I don't know. It's a great answer. It's somewhat like fundamental to the technology that when you reduce friction, when you make finance frictionless, that reduces moats, right? It makes it so that things can

leave as fast as they come. I can rationally give you all those arguments, but the reality is that like you're just worried about surviving the next eight weeks. This is how we operated from that launch because we simply didn't have any other option. We had limited runway up until for the first three, four years,

and trying to get as many developers onboard it, trying to increase the bandwidth of the network, reliability, all this stuff. You're just thinking in eight-week terms. And you read every book on startups and stuff, that's actually what you're supposed to do. You're incrementally fighting for life. And hopefully, all that's, you know,

all those sprints, all those efforts, all those impulses, accumulate into something sustainable. And I think we're starting to see that sustainability actually play out through, you know, the last cycle. But it's really hard to predict. Like, if I knew what was going to be really important in 12 months, you know, I don't think I'd need to work. Can you can be update on just the progress of decentralization?

important to decentralize how you increase decentralization. I remember when in maybe 2022 there was this critique Salana's not as decentralized as the other platforms. Just judging by the performance of the company feels like that was not a bare case that stuck around. But what's actually happened with the company? What plans did you put in place and what do you feel like you've executed on properly to like kind of satisfy the level of market demand for decentralization because I know that there's tradeoffs here. I mean, I look at it as a kind of key product like feature of the network. I grew up in the 90s.

I loved Linux. This is how I learned how to code is hacking through Linux code. Huge believer of open source. Every part of the network, you can participate permissionously. This is kind of the key part. And to me, that's really important because when you think about disrupting finance, you If you disrupt settlement, you've disrupted DTCCC. Like I don't, you know, the number of people that can even know what the company does, you can fit them all in one elevator.

But everyone can name the exchanges, the brokerages that they use, and this is where all the money is made in finance. So if you cannot permissionally participate in the formation of order and price discovery, I think you haven't really just decentralized the important part of finance. So Salon has always been about decentralizing how blocks are made, how transactions are ordered, the sequencer, which is in contrast to, I think, a lot of the direction that Ethereum went, where they have done an amazing job decentralizing settlement. But they've offloaded all the work of actually running the financial applications to layer twos, where you now have like a single sequencer that runs the vast majority of layer twos. And that sequencer has the same functionality that Robin Hood does. So to me, you have a really decentralized the important, interesting part where money is made or revenues are made. So from my perspective, Solana has been more decentralized than a lot of the networks where it counts over the last three years. Where we have taken a tradeoff is that the cost to run Solana validators higher.

because we are focusing on increasing throughput, making sure that anyone can participate in being a block producer and ordering transactions and all this stuff, the cost of those validators is higher. But over the last four years, we haven't had to increase the cost around the boxes because of the software performance improvements. So if you actually look at the network,

how it's run, how it's operated. I can't fire anyone that actually works on it. Like Labs doesn't actually employ any one that builds the protocol anymore. We're primarily focused on building a phone. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I wish we had time to talk about the phone, but we'll have to have you back on again very soon. This is great. Thank you so much for joining. Really enjoyed this. Yeah, appreciate it. For sure. Thank you guys. Have a good luck. Bye. And let me tell you about 8Sleep.com, five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping, get a pod five over at 8Sleep.com.

Well, we have Tyler and Michael have secured burgers. Oh, let's go back to Tyler. How we doing? How's it going, guys? How are you doing? Yeah. So they're playing Star Trek behind me.

It's really loud. Okay. But yeah, we got the burgers here. Okay. Overall, it's pretty good. So I think there's a couple ways you can rate burgers, right? So there's price point. So it's sitting at, I think it was like 1450 around.

Okay, that's pretty high. It's a little pricey. So that means like you've got to rate burgers. against five guys shake jack right sure it's kind of a nut tier yeah so I think it's solid it's very similar to shake jack I would say okay um security am I gonna be going here is this my go-to burger probably not okay you know I'm more of it and I'm not kind of guy I'm not very you know wealthy so I got to go cheaper sometimes not yet but you know there's some cool stuff so apparently the fries and the hashgrounds are beef tallow okay wow let's

give it up for tallow generational run so yeah definitely appeal there. Apparently they're really good. I think I showed you guys this earlier, but there's like the little boxes, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are there any protests going on? Is this a controversial space? I have not seen any protests, actually, surprisingly.

Seems like getting any grot integrations. Oh, yeah, any any grok integration. The only air I've seen here is the optimist. Talk to me about the actual ordering experience. Did you order from a tablet? Did you order from a human? So, yeah, I think we ordered from a human.

It was like totally normal. There was no fiask or anything. But you can order from your Tesla. We didn't try that because I think we, you know, we had to kind of expedite the process. But apparently you can do that. But yeah, honestly, I would have a tour of a cybertruck. The more optimist is here.

Just doing the popcorn, you know, it's not super hard to do. But I mean, there's like a nice bar over here. Hey, got to start somewhere. Yeah. Popcorn's serving. overall pretty good though I'm not sure I would come back like specifically for the burger

but it's definitely a cool place for a charge for a charge though if you need to charge I wonder the charging is free if you get the if you get the burger I think the charging is free okay that makes sense there'll be a big draw

yeah that's very exciting but yeah there's like 80 cars here but yeah overall solid experience very cool very cool all right well enjoy your burgers and we'll see you back in the studio see you back in the studio Tyler thanks for doing on the ground

reporting awesome well next up I believe we have Aaron from Box in the restream waiting room so we can bring him in when he's ready and in the meantime I'll tell you about Aaron leave you from box welcome to the stream I was getting near a had to read but you are here live thanks for hopping on how are you doing hey good how are you guys doing it's good your office always looks so cool or something you know you were one of our first guest couple months wow I mean, I'll take all the credit for your guys' success. There you go.

Take it. Take it. Take it. I want to talk about, I want to talk about AI, obviously. I want to talk about quickly. I mean, let's start with the consumer side and then I want to go into enterprise. Did you have a chance to read Fiji Simo's outline of where Open AI is going in consumer, kind of six categories, health, knowledge retrieval, creativity? what are you using personally? What's your daily driver? Are you using with your family? Have you used it for health? What's just been your general experience of consumer AI? I think I've hit every one of those use cases. It's I mean it's yeah, therapist, doctor branding assistants. What about executive coach? I thought that was an interesting one. She says that she has a coach. Obviously you're at a level where you can afford a full-time human coach. But what what goes into a good coaching?

experience at the executive level. Yeah, I mean, that's a fantastic use case. Probably actually I should be using it for that. I'm sure anybody that works with me wishes I did. But, you know, often you're bringing a coach a set of problems that you're running into. I've got this org design issue. I've got these people that aren't collaborating well. And oftentimes it's most actually just helpful, just the purpose of talking about the issue and then laying it out that gets you thinking about it. And then seeing a set of options. So I think Chatsbyte would obviously make a fantastic coach for that because just the very active of just getting you to be able to describe the issue

and then seeing a set of options would be helpful in like 90% of situations. So I think those use cases are great. I mean, the healthcare stuff alone has been extremely powerful. I seem to like run into like one new ailment per week. And so like I used to just I used to go into. urgent care like way too frequently like like oh I have some like sensitivity in my finger and then I'd like go to urgent care and so now just chat Chachabuti just solves all those uses you are a hypochondrake anyway on the on the org structure issue like what you would go to an executive

coach about do you feel like AI should be more of like a product team or more of like a service team Like, do you see it like it's my infrastructure organization or it's my front-end engineering packages versus it is a new product that will sit alongside other products and maybe be sold as a different skew by the sales team? Because I've been going back and forth on this, but I'd love your take before I kind of wrestle with it. Is this in a B2B context? Yeah, yeah, in your business. I imagine that you're thinking right now there are LLMs, there are tools. there are APIs, there's a whole bunch of stuff. There's, you know, coding agents and IDs and stuff.

And you want to get this stuff into the hands of everyone in your organization. The question is, is do you, I bet a lot of companies, I imagine are thinking about like, do we need an AI organization? Do we need an AI product? And you can think about, like Salesforce is launching, like, and co-pilot is like a separate skew almost. It sits alongside. Gemini is a separate subscription, it's a separate product, separate app, versus just, hey, we do X, Y, and Z, and all of that is made better by AI in the same way that, you know, memory caching, like Redis, the database made things better across everything, but it was not its own product. Yeah, I think in our case, and I think so much depends on the type of product that you're, you were in before AI happened.

Yeah, totally. In our case, what we did was our chat chbt moment was, you know, same time as everybody else, but we did, you know, fortunately step back and we said, okay, if we were to found our company in a post-AI world, how would we treat the very kind of business model, the product experience, the actual value proposition? And we started kind of laying that foundation. Now, it took at least a year and a half to, like, execute in the way that even looked like what, what you could do from a blank sheet of paper. But the idea was, if we were to start Box in 2025,

let's say we ran this exercise now, we wouldn't think about the AI version and the not AI version. We wouldn't be like, you go over here to do AI and everything else is sort of like dumb. And so we decided to bake AI into the core value proposition of the product. And that shows up in the kind of obvious ways you'd expect. So let you talk to your data, ask questions of documents,

take a collection of content, and be able to query it and ask questions of it. And then now, with the, in a world of agents that's also showing up as, you know, agents being able to kind of run around and execute automated tasks for you. So a very natural one for us is a lot of customers have all of this unstructured data. It could be contracts or invoices or marketing assets and they want to be able to read what's in that data and then basically apply structure to unstructured content. So take all of the variables from a contractor, from an invoice or from a digital

asset and then let me have effectively intelligence around that. I can ask any question of that data now. I can automate any workflow around it. I could have a dashboard that shows me exactly when the different contracts are up for renewal or which ones have risky clauses in them. And so this is fundamentally changing the entire value proposition of our product. It gets us more in line with what our holy grail was to begin with, which is like let you tap into all of this information that you have in the enterprise. But yeah, so this is built directly into the core fabric of the platform and most product managers at Box at this point are working on something AI related there's there's sort of nobody that is is unaffected by by

AI at this point how do you think about AI surfacing itself in the product in a I don't know like above the UI or below the UI I don't know front end or back and basically like like I feel like I love when a company I use is saying hey we're going all in on AI, but I don't necessarily want a chat box with every product. What I want is, hey, you guys did the hard work. You guys did the prompting. And all of a sudden, search just got better. Or, you know, if I want to just click a button and see it as a CSV, boom, it's there. Or it's already, or, you know, it's already been transformed. It's already in a database. It's already built for me instead of me having to actually say that. But it's really hard to define those things.

So how do you think about, like, is this going to be the prompt is in the hands of the user or the prompt lives within the box engineering team? Yep. You know, it's entirely case by case probably across all of software. Even in our product, we have variants of both of those. So we have a product experience where you can chat with your documents, which means it's another, you know, chat box. Yep. We have a product that is, for all intents and purposes, you never have to even think about it as AI. It's data extraction from a document.

You press, you know, extract data. You don't chat with it. And then the agent is, you know, a set of context, a set of tools that we've effectively tuned to that workflow. But you don't have to think about it as being AI or not. And it's not obvious which one wins out. I think there's a variety of ways that people will expect to use, you know, these use cases. The thing I'm probably most fascinated with and the thing that will have the most, you know,

GDP impact is effectively. these background agent use cases. You know, when AI first started, you know, emerging, you know, really just due to chat CBT, we thought about AI as, okay, I go into a prompt window and ask a question, I get an answer back. Or maybe, you know, a year prior to that, you had GitHub co-pilot, which was really kind of type ahead prediction functionality. In both of those cases, the AI can only work as fast as you can.

And so that means our productivity gain was still capped by like how fast we could work. With background agents, you're now, like, there's no, there's no. you're untethered in terms of the ultimate upside of the amount of productivity gain because it's just, you know, if you have a well-described prompt that could, you know, basically translate, you know, days or weeks worth of work into a couple minutes for the agent, then that's, you know, obviously like that could be 100x productivity gain. And so we have a number of features we're working on that more relate to background agent type use cases. And that's, I think, where what's most exciting.

So when you think about cursors background agent or you think about codex or what Replit does with its agent, that's way more of the future. And that's probably more of what we're putting our efforts into. Yeah, I feel like it's like it's less flashy and it doesn't get as much attention for some reason. But and it's harder. It's harder to make AI just a button and it works. But when it when somebody can boil that down to click button get result, like it's just that's the original magic of software and and and I think. Well, but I think it's still probably click button, but give some instructions to get what you want. But it's not as open-ended as it was before, which is just here's an empty chat box, do anything in the world. Yeah.

This will be an interesting, you know, tension between the, let's say, the most horizontal frontier players versus the applied more vertical-specific use cases. The vertical players, and it could be industry vertical or some other kind of vertically integrated product, the vertical or domain-specific players will be able to pre-periodic. pack in the use case. And that will actually be in for many enterprises the easier to adopt capability. Instead of like the super horizontal, we can do everything, super intelligence, understanding the use case in the domain will likely improve the efficacy and ability to drive the, the rollout within the enterprise. How are you thinking about Box as a, is it a garden that you welcome people to? Is it a walled garden? You guys are building. Is it my data? Would you be okay with me taking my data and share with us?

Well, yeah, it's just like you guys are building a bunch of workflows on top of your data, but then I imagine you have, you're happy to, in some cases, let other companies come and make the data more valuable. What's your stance on letting the fox in the henhouse? We've been going back and forth on that. Sometimes people say, it's a friendly fox. Let it in the henhouse. Let it in the henhouse.

Yeah, we're a public park. Yeah, anybody can build their garden here. That's great. No, I mean, I don't want to read between the lines too much, but I assume this is about some of the closed off data access, you know, data walls. Yeah, yeah. Tricky topic.

So for us, I'll just say our general biases, well, so first of all, to be unbelievably clear, any data within boxes are customers' data. So just, you know, get that out of the way early. And in general, we bias toward a very very. heavy degree of API access into that data. There's a couple kind of complicated issues that are the emerging topics in the agent world and this is obviously you know probably germane to the origin of the question. There are some systems that do these kind of heavy indexing of data

tasks and in those areas you have a couple issues. One you just have a cost that the that the kind of originating vendor then incurs based on that indexing but then also you have so these open questions around on security and permissions and data governance because you're trying to keep permission models in sync between multiple systems. And so all of a sudden, the brand promise of one platform can possibly be sort of mutated by another platform

if there's a data leak event or whatnot because your data was indexed by that other system. So these are gonna be more, I'd consider them more open questions that need to be figured out by the industry. I'm more a fan of this idea that you'll have, any system that today sort of wants to index all of the information from another platform. A sort of more ideal architecture would be that that system just talks to the system with all

the data and says, hey, I'm looking for this particular piece of information. You know, can your agent go run off and find that for me and then pull that into that other agent? So the problem is that everybody's agents today operate differently. We all rank the information differently. There's different latency. So that's why you kind of need indexing right now. But I think in five years from now, I think it would be a little bit of an architectural anomaly if you had to index all information like 20 times across the internet.

That seems like that would be very inefficient. And then it would lead to lots of security vulnerabilities because let's say I share a set of documents or a communication channel with you and then that gets indexed by some AI agent system. But then I unshare that with you. How quickly does that propagate to the agent system that was indexing that? data. And now we have a security risk that that that first system has no control over. So these are the very real kind of issues that you run into an enterprise software, which is why I also think that you're going to continue to see so much power in the systems of record, even in a world of AI agents. I have two questions. When you, speaking of AI agents specifically,

there's billions of dollars being poured into roll-ups to acquire maybe more kind of main street style businesses, let's say an accounting firm. And the promise there is basically that we're going to, that the investor group is going to be able to, an operator is going to be able to dramatically reduce headcount and increase the earnings potential of the business. Do you think that there's enough excitement around agents and agentic workflows that these companies have been able to raise billions of dollars? Do you think that agents are already at a point where they are going to be able to kind of deliver on that, on that thesis or will companies, like, there's two paths, like companies can leverage off the shelf agents, maybe coding agents, for example, or they can

build their own agents or workflows. But how, how ready are these businesses to be able to strip out, let's say, like 50% of headcount? I think that depends on, on do you want to grow revenue or you find with the existing install base of that company and then, you know, likely some kind of terminal value that you can extract out of that. There's no question you could cost, you could cut costs with AI agents in a number of spaces. But, you know, if you had a very competitive industry where the product roadmap really mattered, you know, I think you'd probably be more in the camp of using AI agents to accelerate the work that you're doing as opposed to cutting headcount. So I think all depends on the space.

I haven't picked up on which industry people are most attracted to. Is it like health care office, you know, back office firms? Is it law firms? Is it accounting firms? I think it'd be hard. You'd have to be really running a business very inefficiently if you could cut 50% of the cost with AI and then keep the business sort of maintaining its customer base. But, you know, private equity has found those opportunities in the past.

So I think it's just a more, it's the evolutionary kind of, of update to probably how private equity will think about some of these efficiency gains. But but but it and it has a place in in the economy. It's not something that is sort of to me the most exciting part of AI, but but it could work and it could produce you know some degree of profit. Yeah. Makes sense. I we have a friend who is running a startup and recently a hyper-scaler launched a competitor. What advice would you give him for? for competing with someone that basically has unlimited resources. And how do you think about getting through that as an entrepreneur?

It must be an emotional roller coaster. We've talked to him a little bit. And I've been thinking about different case studies and mental models and companies that have made it through and it's fascinating. But what would you say to a founder in that space? Well capitalized, products loved, but now facing fierce competition from hyperscaler.

I think there's a therapist mode in chat to BT apparently that you can trigger. So, sorry, is this like a known company, can you say the company or not? Yeah, browser base. We've been talking about on the show for a while. Okay, okay. It's a computer use agent, or it helps you,

if you have an agent that needs to go browse the web. It's an API that lets you harness the computer and actually go click on things and AWS launch something. And obviously that's, you know, competitive, and you know it's it's something that you know we had them on the show a couple times we asked hey this feels like something that aWS might launch they wound up doing it you know like what what would your advice be to him I guess yeah so so I think actually the the first of all the if you somebody maybe you guys could do I do have like an analyst team yet is that does that exist it's coming it's coming

together we have some interns I think you should deep research yeah if you could run some analysis I bet you in the history of hypers launching a competing capability and then you look at that market, I bet in all cases, sorry, not in all cases, but on average, the market size kind of grows

for even the independent players. I mean, think about how many times snowflake or data bricks probably shouldn't exist based on, you know, some of the data system, you know, services of the hypers or, you know, cloud flare for Matthew, you know, probably like 10 years running

would show the market share graph of Cloudflare versus all of the other CDNs. And you would have been like, why would Amazon or Google not wipe out Cloudflare? It's like they already have the network. It's not that hard. In fact, in many cases, Cloudflare probably runs on their networks.

And yet, it turns out that like hyper-focused teams and platforms in big markets, you know, are usually able to carve out enough of the space because you're just going to be just more wired into the customer base, the use cases, the better APIs. You're going to, you know, jump up. on the next, you know, trend more quickly. In the case of Amazon, you know,

I'm guessing that Amazon won't work as well with Open AI where browser base can work with with all of the model providers. So there tends to be, you know, with very few exceptions, plenty of sort of moves that you can make in these kinds of competitive situations. And in a lot of cases, it just actually, you know, again, lifts up the awareness of the market,

makes it more exciting. You tend to not want to be a market in a market by yourself unless you're like in video or something. Like for the most part, having, you know, being in a dynamic market where people are comparing options and looking at SDKs and choosing things and talking about stuff, that usually actually grows the market as opposed to, you know, makes it make makes it more zero-sum. So I would be, I would be bullish in that in that scenario more than anything. So do you think like 10, 15 years ago, you or the, or, you know,

the chattering class was saying that about cloud storage broadly? Oh, saying that we would be crushed? Yeah, saying that you would be crushed or did anyone clock it correctly? Because what actually happened was not, you know, oh, one wins, one doesn't, one. Like, there's multiple independent companies that are doing well. There's also hyperscalers that have grown. That like it's been this weird like oligopolistic positive sum market. It's been fantastic for all parties involved, basically.

Yeah, no, nobody, nobody got it right. I mean, our first, our, our, our, our, our. Our first funding round was, I think our valuation was $240,000. So, so. Let's hit the gone for that. Congratulations. So, I mean, basically the idea was like storage was a commodity, but what people didn't realize was, no, it's the software above the storage that matters. And so, so assuming that you're in a market that is going to grow, again, zero-sum markets are very different, but there's, it's hard to find zero-sum markets and software,

right now, at least you're like deeply legacy. If you're in a fast growing market, there's usually a move. There's, there's usually some, some range of motion you have to differentiate, to specialize, to go into a vertical, to build more software on top of the commodity infrastructure. So I think we're in a period right now where you can kind of be generically bullish on, on just like categories broadly. Now, maybe we don't need the 20th, you know, kind of language model, you know, that is, there's some asterisk to this. But if you're, if you're one or two in a category right now and a big player enters, I think you just ride it out because because it's just too early at the moment on what's happening. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like a wildly different

market dynamic in the enterprise in B to B than in B to C where it's very much winner take all. And if you gave me $100 million to start a competitor, direct competitor to chat GPT, no, yeah, it just doesn't matter at this point because there's so much energy and aggregation and network effects and all sorts of different things. Anyway, sorry. And yet at the same time, I'd say every vertical in the enterprise is up for grabs. Yeah, I think there's, I think there's no vertical where you can just completely call a winner. I think there's some cases, maybe these like healthcare providers that do transcription

and like maybe you can call a winner in that space. Yeah. But for the most part, you know, when I talk to CIOs, they're in the very earliest phases of picking their first set of platforms for these major use cases. And so we have a window right now where you'll have many, many, many, names that emerge that will be, you know, a hundred times bigger in five years from now. Totally. Yeah. And to the earlier point, we were talking about where like AI can be not just a new product for a company that's existing, but just little improvements to everything that exists.

And that winds up being a bunch of different vendors, a bunch of different internal projects, a bunch of different APIs, a bunch of different code revisions. There's so many different areas to just squeeze out percentages of improvements. So exciting stuff. Last question I have. seen a number of different cycles. You started the company in 2005, so you've, you've, I do look, I do look that tired, yes. But, but, but I'm curious, we were joking about a week ago that there's a lot, I mean, there's so many different like signals blaring that, that, that, obviously there's a lot of excitement, a lot of new capability coming online, new intelligence being birthed. At the same time,

we have Ethereum treasuries and spacks for companies that maybe shouldn't be spacked. NFT profile pictures coming back. How do you, do, do, do, uh, I'm not asking you to like call the top or call the bottom or anything, but, but, uh, do you have, do you have any type of outlook? Do you have any kind of concerns about, about how overheated things could be right now? Um, weirdly, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, am. pretty, I tend to be pretty much on the conservative side in general, and it's lost me lots of money by just, you know, not believing in like 80% of things that have worked out. But for AI,

and then maybe this is a counter signal, actually, so maybe this is like the Jim Kramer effect, but in AI, I don't think we have reached anything close to, close to any peak of anything. Now, sure, you might be able to point to specific categories that are that are a little inflated. But when you look at, I mean, this is an economy-altering technology. And if you just look at it as any percentage of labor, you know, as one way to model the potential size of these markets, we're in still the very earliest phase of what this looks like. Yeah. In 1999, if you were like, you know, these Internet companies are really potentially overvalued,

you maybe looked smart for a little bit, but over a decade, you looked pretty, pretty dumb. But if you even took 99 business, if you did a 99, you know, kind of like, extrapolation from any of these valuations, open I would probably be worth $5 trillion. Like, like these are not, I mean, if you look at like, like, these, those companies were valued on, you know, 100, 200, 300, 300 X revenue. Yep. For the mature companies. So that, like, we are not even in 99 territory. on the amount of kind of hype and excitement that there is. So I'm pretty bullish on where things go from here.

You know, if you look at something like the enterprise software market, it's a few hundred billion dollar market in just like, let's say the US and total spend on enterprise software. There's no reason why this isn't a doubling or a tripling, even in the conservative scenarios, when you can have AI agents go and do real work that is tied to the software, because you just have so many more categories that,

that the enterprise software can sell into. And there's just examples everywhere. Like the enterprise software size, the category size of enterprise software for the legal industry like five years ago was about a couple billion dollars max. Like that is all that the legal industry spent on enterprise software. And in a world of AI agents,

I think you could easily underwrite 10, 20, 30 billion dollars being spent on just AI agent automated work in the legal space. So you could have a lot of these spaces that become five or 10 times large. than they were in the pre-AI era. And I think you could do that across every category of knowledge work for the most part. Makes total sense.

Last question I have is how tolerant do you think CIOs and executives broadly are going to be of the, like, you know, if you're thinking about, you know, Apple, for example, thinking about implementing an LLL it's not an apple's nature to have imperfection, right? Like they're not looking for something that even one out of a thousand times is going to say something that's offensive or anything like that. And we were thinking, you know, we were talking about GROC. GROC obviously is on a wild trajectory. They're closing, you know, they closed a massive partnership with the DOD last week. And that's partly, I imagine, like the Elon effect.

but how tolerant do you think CIOs will be of just the kind of inconsistent nature of AI agents, you know, saying, we're going to make a big bet on a lab, even though one out of, yeah, one out of 10,000 times it's going to say something. Yeah, probabilistic computing is here. And one out of every 10,000 times use the product. It might say something that 10 years ago you would have been fired for if you had to know of that software. Yeah, you can't like make Hitler jokes in like a company setting. So, so the, you know, I would say increasingly the tolerance is going up because because the understanding and the shared understanding of what these models are doing is going up.

And so what's happening is companies are putting in sort of, you know, kind of informal or formal guardrails on the fact that these models are probabilistic. and that will sometimes take the form of just an internal policy that says, okay, you know, the AI agent is going to give you your first draft, but your job and your responsibility and your liability is to ensure that what you're putting into production or the legal brief that you're writing or the marketing asset that you're creating is fully reviewed by a human. And that is this switch from, you know, maybe two years ago. We would have looked at a model's kind of inaccuracy as a flaw in the AI. And now we have sort of accepted that it's just a part. of the workflow. I walked by, you know, an engineer's desk a couple weeks ago and I've just said, hey, what's your now, you know, new common practice of doing work? And, you know, he kicks off an agent to go write a bunch of code. And then his job is to go review the code and fix its errors and, you know, clean up syntax and whatnot that might be different. And that's just an accepted reality. Whereas maybe two years ago, you would say, hey, this, this model's producing a bunch of,

you know, kind of garbage code. It probably was garbage because they're just where the models were at, but you would have seen that as a flaw as opposed to that is just an accepted, that's an accepted reality of how these systems work now. And so with that, I think evolution of the understanding, then you start to flip the mindset, which is, okay, I can now use AI to give me the first draft of the thing that I'm doing. It can make the first, you know, draft of the blog post. It can it can auto transcribe the doctor note. It can, you know, generate the first, you know, first draft of your board deck.

Yes. And then we can go through it and review it and clean it up. And that still saves you 10 hours. And so that that recognition is now kind of rippling through most organizations. This is why this idea of going AI first is kind of picking up steam. I talk to a lot of CEOs and CIOs in the Fortune 500 kind of universe. And this is the most easily the most exciting and animated kind of topic that has existed in 20 years in technology. Yeah, they know they're much more likely to be fired for not, like being at the forefront of this wave than like having a model that goes off the rails and offends a user one out of every 100,000 times. There is absolutely more room for ask for permission in this phase of the kind of excitement, you know, kind of adoption curve that we're seeing. Totally, totally. Well, we've kept you too long. Thank you so much for joining. Great hang in, as always. Ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Yeah, yeah. Ask for forgiveness. That makes sense. And thank you for catalyzing our early success. Yes, thank you. We appreciate it. He's very helpful. You're the man. We'll talk to you, see, today. Bye. Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezell. Getbezzled.com.

Your Bezell of Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet, seriously any watch. And we will bring in Neil Perich from Slinghot AI announcing Ash. Let's bring him into the studio from the Restream Waiting Room. How you guys doing? What's going on, guys? Good to meet you both. Kick us off with an introduction.

Hey, I'm Neil, one of the co-founder of Slingshot. And I'm Daniel. Good to meet you guys. Introduce the company, introduce the product. Absolutely, yeah. So Neil and I met about 18 months ago. We were both chasing the same vision, AI for mental health. We're finally coming out of stealth.

We built the first AI designed for therapy. You probably know this mental health crisis. Product launch. I got to do it. Wait, wait, wait, wait, also did you raise some money? we're announcing our fundraise we've raised 93 million to date let's go congratulations there we almost jumped the gun there that's a big number fantastic

I was just going to share I mean you probably know this mental health crisis you might not know that for every for every 10,000 people out there who need help there's one person to offer it wow there's kind of no way that we can get past that except for AI. So that's why we've worked quietly, carefully with clinicians in the loop to build the first foundation model for psychology and decide it to actually help people with their mental health. Yeah, what does that mean first foundation model? Fine tuning, pre-training? What's the actual tech stack that you're building? Yeah, we train in three steps. So we do continued pre-training, not from a scrap from a checkpoint. Order of magnitude, it's about 1% in the size of a data set that a

foundation model lab would use. So not going to cost. 10 billion dollars, but enough to substantially change the behavior of the model and introduce completely new knowledge. Interesting. We then do alignment, which is where our clinical team adapts from the modality of human therapy to AI therapy and learns how this completely new kind of app works. And then finally, we do reinforcement learning, learning from what works at scale. That makes sense.

What concerns you about people using traditional LLM's models for therapy today, you know, just basically going into their favorite app. And you know, you can't, you effectively can't stop somebody from starting to use an LLM for therapy. But we've seen over the last two weeks specifically, it seems to be some very real concerns around some of the behaviors in different models. It feels like they're almost accidentally jailbreaking the model, winding up in sci-fi territory, role-playing.

Like, what are the best case scenarios? It sounds like those three, those three strategy that you outlined are part of it, but what else is going on that can make sure that there's always a good outcome? I think the first thing with your knowledge is like chat QPT and Cloud are not made for therapy, right? Like they're not trained on clinical data. People can end up down these very weird rabbit holes like we've seen, right, where people end up in essentially a mode collapse or somewhere that's in a very weird part of the distribution where, you know, it's bringing out psychosis and other issues and stuff. You know, they'll say that it's useful for support, but at the end of the day, what we're

building is something that's very different, right? The first way to think about is we're not trying to build an instruction following model. Like if you go to chat GPT, it's an assistant. So if you ask it like, hey, give me a recipe for a piece of cake and chat GPT were to ask you like, so are you hungry? You're like, what the, that's so annoying. Yeah. It's the alignment by default question, right? Sorry. Yeah, alignment by default. Like the model is supposed to always help you answer the question. So if you ask it, you know, like prove that I'm a genius, it will just say, okay, of course, let's let's do that. No problem. And that's not what a therapist does. Exactly. If you're going to a therapist and you're like, hey, I feel angry. Help me.

You know, they're going to say, so why is anger a bad thing? You know, and you're going to be like, why is anger a bad thing? Like, I don't know. And then you get into some interesting deep territory and that's where change happens. Sure. But yeah, Chad Shoebt is not therapy. They're not. I actually just saw that Sam Altman posted about this and had said, yeah, Chachubit. A lot of people are using it for therapy, but it's not what it's built for. and we're looking forward to seeing a startup emerge in the space. Interesting. How excited are you guys to just, like, I mean, effectively you're going to be running, just by getting this out to more people, you're going to be running a massive trial.

I think the debate, the debate among, you know, high functioning people, a lot of people that listen to the show, people in Silicon Valley in general, is that like, there's almost like this question of like does therapy even work is it is it good does it put you in these um kind of doom doom loops um how how are you guys like looking to measure results right you're actually wanting to change lives but what does that look like yeah uh super uh true by the way on the controversy it's funny uh on on x uh if you neal posted today for our launch and like if you read through it is fascinating uh how how much people find this controversial and you know it's interesting to see what's what's going on there, what people are really feeling when they're thinking about.

Yeah, and it's, I feel like it's super common where I, my parents, when I was an angry teenager in high school, they were like, you should see a therapist. And they would ask me, how was the therapist? And I would say, well, I don't know how the therapist was, but it was helpful to kind of just talk through the things that were top of mind for me. So I feel like there's this question of like, can you make something that's valuable and helps people better understand themselves? the decisions they're making. But then there's all like, how do you actually be more beneficial than just having them sort of talk through a problem and actually implement change?

100%. So we are, we built with a beta group of 50,000 people to make sure that we were building this right that we were able to show efficacy, safety. We are, we've not yet published our results. It hasn't gone through peer review, but very exciting results so far. we've been able to show clinically effective results for symptoms of anxiety, depression, loneliness, increasing a sense of hope, achieving your goals. And I think one that was coolest for us was actually increasing the number of people

that you have in your support system in the real world. Are all those metrics like self-reported? Like I fill out a survey and say, I'm feeling anxious. And then at the end of my therapy session, I say, okay, I'm feeling less anxious on like a scale of one to ten. Is that basically the official metric? So PHQ 9 and GAD 7 are the main ones. Those are the official ones for depression and anxiety. But we use a number of others.

There's like the UCLA metric. But essentially we track people over time from before they start using the app through using the app. And we measure how these symptoms change over time to see whether or not it sustains. The interesting thing is, I mean, these are used widely across every area of psychology. It has been shown, I think interestingly, that with normal chat bots, on average after using it for a while, you actually reduce your connection to people in the real world, not too surprising. It was amazing for us to see that with Ash people actually did build stronger connections in the real world. And that just has to do with building something that's purpose built to help people with their mental health.

Yeah. How excited are you guys around frequency? I think one of the challenges with therapy and actually driving change is if somebody's seeing a therapist once a week or every couple weeks, it's like very easy to kind of revert back into old patterns or for, get what you had just talked about and we're trying to change. Uh, is part of the potential here is like somebody can effectively have this like constant contact with a therapist or do you think, uh, or the equivalent of a therapist? Yeah.

So, um, one thing is important to know is that I think we're inventing a whole new modality of therapy, right? It is something like this hasn't really existed before. Um, which means that with that comes, you know, we can basically throw out, you know, the whole nature of like, we have to. have a 45-minute session. It happens once a week, right? Price is or like getting into a tough situation might happen at 2 o'clock in the morning, right? Your therapist is going to answer the phone at that time. Now that said, we also don't want people talking for six hours on one day.

Like, we feel about Google for you and it's like important for you to like work on something, probably sleep it out, right? Think about it, process it, continue to work on it over some amount of time because like growth takes some amount of time. Like very few people just snap and then overnight, you know, are completely different. Though I would say this has been like a design evolution for us as we've been with building. Like early on we noticed people wanted to use it, you know, until they solve their problem, even if that takes 10 hours. And that really doesn't work.

You need to at minimum like sleep. Like most change happens when you sleep when you engage in the world. So like one thing that R.A.I. does that's unique compared to others is at some point it does gently push you out. It will say things like, you know, okay, you know, let me just ask you one more question and then maybe this would be a good time to end for its day. And what that does is it builds a more health. healthy habit where you're able to use this as something that you turn to and people do usually engage a lot more frequently than they would with therapy, but they'll engage so that

they can actually get through their problem and not create some sense of dependency. Instead, it's something that you come back to, something that you're working on in a style that makes sense and a frequency that makes sense for you and not just for your insurance company. Very cool. I have a bunch more questions about business model and stuff, but we were out of time. Thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations on the launch. Last question, why Slingshot?

Ah, it's a great question. Our product is called Ash. Ash AI Therapy, highly recommend. Check me it out. Slingshot, I think makes sense. Great as a tech company communicate the idea of like the massive change that you go through. Ash was a much more gentle, friendly. You know, not too human sounding, not human sounding.

And so it's been. If you're still depressed tomorrow, I will take a slingshot and hit you in the head. Hit me in the head with it. All right. Well, try ask. We love your feedback. Thanks so much for hopping on. We'll talk to you soon.

Have a good one. Talk soon. Up next, we have Jan Srimack from California Forever. He has some exciting news. He shared it reindustrialized last week. We were slammed. We got him on the show today to break it down for us. Sorry for keeping you waiting.

Jan, good to see you. How are you beautiful backdrop? Is that a real photo? Are we looking at a virtual background? He's on a hot air balloon right now. Exactly. No, that's a virtual background. Okay, it looks good.

Here will hopefully be a real photo. What is it? What is it describing or what is it showing? It's showing the Solano Foundry. It's showing this advanced manufacturing park that we announced last week. Very cool. Which is at the edge of the new city. Very cool.

Yeah, announced it reindustrialized. We were confused because we were like, wait, California or forever is building in Detroit, but you're building in California. We're Californians. We love to see this. Take us through a little bit more. of the announcement. What exactly is coming together? I imagine there's a piece of public support, some government stuff, some financial capital. There's a lot of different moving pieces to this.

What is in the announcement specifically? Yeah, a few different components. So the Solano Foundry is in the new city. And it has been in the plan. We've had a big area for basically industry and technology in the plan since the beginning. It hasn't changed. What's changed with the announcement is we've put a lot more details behind it. And so we've put forward specific master plans, the industries we would focus on. We've worked with JLL, which is probably the leader in this domain. I mean, JLL works for majority of the companies in the valley when they decide that they need to go from 50 employees to 500.

They call JLL and they say, hey, where we should go. And JLL has spent, as they've told us, they've spent the last 10 years moving companies out of California and they're kind of sick of doing that. And you're going to give them another option to do it closer to home. So we're passing up JL. They wrote a whole 40-page white paper about why they felt that actually you could do manufacturing in California if you had a scale that we have and if you are an hour outside of Silicon Valley. And so they've published the white paper.

They've joined us as the exclusive leasing agent for the 2100 acres. It's about 40 million square feet of space. So it would be the biggest advanced manufacturing park in California. And then it would work as an integrated ecosystem with both the new city that we're building and with the Solano shipyard, which is about seven miles south of there. Okay. Tell me some historical examples that you're learning from. I want to hear about Apple's Fremont factory. That was an example of California manufacturing in advanced computing. Didn't go so well. then we're seeing a bunch of promising stuff happen in Arizona with TSM. What are the various lessons that you're pulling from?

What are the anecdotes that you're sharing? Real quick. I just wanted to get. So the foundry and the shipyard, I imagine we'll share, like have, be heavily connected in terms of a company that's at the shipyard might also have a facility at the foundry. And they would obviously have talent living in the city. like how do the how do the three kind of core areas it's a great question um so city provides a place for all of these people to live whether they work at the shipyard or whether they work at the foundry

obviously employee housing huge issue in california particularly if your people have to commute from far away right that's one of the biggest drivers that makes people quit their job is they just got fed up with doing it to our commute and so we can basically provide a 10 minute commute next to the foundry, 15 minutes from the shipyard, people can walk to work. People could bike to work. I mean, there's very few places, very few places in America where you could work in a factory and bike to work. Everyone keeps talking about, we're going to re-industrialize the country, but nobody's talking about the reality that nobody wants to work of some random freeway exit in the middle of Texas. Two hours in the desert. Exactly. You drive to the factory an hour and a half from your house,

and then you work off a freeway exit next to a Burger King and a McDonald's, right? And somehow there's still traffic even though these places are in the middle of the moment. Yeah, exactly, exactly, right. And so I think if we're going to actually try to get people to work in manufacturing again, you have to provide a quality of life that I think our generation has come to expect, right, which means you need to be able to go work in a factory and then you want to have lunch. So you meet up your friends and you sit at an outdoor plaza and you hang out and you can do the same thing after work. and there's basically nowhere in America where you can get that other than this place.

And so that's a component of it. And then, yes, the shipyard and the foundry are very similar. The shipyard is basically the foundry on the water. I mean, the foundry is an advanced manufacturing park. And the shipyard, if you really think about what that is, that's a manufacturing park on the water that just happens to have really large parcels. And so you would have companies that build ships in the shipyard, and then their suppliers are in the foundry. And then we actually have a rail connection between the two. And so you can ship the components from the foundry to the shipyard.

And so the whole thing is basically this integrated advanced manufacturing ecosystem where in particular we've learned a ton from how China does it. I mean, you look at the evolution of this whole thing and we started it. I mean, we perfected it in America during the Second World War. We built the global manufacturing industrial superpower. We discovered that it made a lot of sense to create these ecosystems. Detroit was powerful not because we made cars in Detroit, but because we made mufflers and brakes and tires

and all of the components that go in the car, right? It's the whole supply chain. And then we did the same thing in Silicon Valley. One of the things that I learned in the course of working on this, in 1965, Lockheed Martin employed 28,000 people in Sunnyvale. in Sunnyvale. 28,000 people, can you imagine? And so you have to have the whole ecosystem.

And then what happened in the 90s is China and the lesson. They basically took all of the best lessons from America, and they perfected them, and they built these tightly integrated hardware ecosystems in China where you have whole cities that focus on drones or robotics or shipbuilding or whatever it is. And that's how they've been able to outcompete us to the point where, what is it, China built 10 million

drones a year and we built about 100,000 in the US. China built more ships in one shipyard last year than we have in the entire country since the end of the Second World War. We have these entire cities that specialize in production. And our view is that if we are going to compete, particularly in the high-tech areas, we're going to have to replicate it. What was the number of Lockheed employees in Sunnyvale? 28,000. Today it's at 3,500. Wow. Huge. fall off incredible should we do a little bit of the history question I had yeah yeah I mean he covered a little bit yeah I'm just interested here your take on you know what SpaceX is doing in in Texas what TSMC is doing in Arizona there's a

bunch of interesting projects that you're probably pulling lessons from what does it take to get this right yeah I mean I think we are so far behind that it's gonna require kind of an all of the above approach it's not here or Arizona or Texas, it's all of the above. I think there's an interesting question about specialization. And one of the other things that I noticed is if you look at all of the breakthrough products that we've built in America, you can go look at Boeing 747 in the 60s. You can look at Tesla Model 3 10 years ago.

Or you could even look at some of the stuff that Andruill is doing in Southern California. Basically, all of the breakthrough products that we've built, they scaled between 10 and 20 miles away from where they were invented, right? The Boeing factory at Everett Field was about 20 miles from R&D. Tesla-Fremont was, what, 25 miles from the HQ in Palo Alto where they designed it. I think you could make a, I mean, imagine Tesla rumping up Model 3 production if the factory was in Texas. You could argue they would have gone very differently, right?

They would never have been able to figure it out if you didn't have that tight integration, integration between the engineers and the production line. You can actually drive there and be there in an hour. And so the way that we think about the foundry is it's probably not the place where you put your factory that has 10,000 employees. It's probably not the place where you put your gigafactory. But it is the place where you go from having 50 people in Menlo Park to having 200 people in your factory number one to having 1,000 people in your factory number 2, maybe 4,000 people in your factory number three. And then if you really, really hit it big and you're operating at Tesla scale and you're a factory that employs 10,000 people, then yeah, go put it in Texas or Reno

or somewhere else. But it's basically a place for all of these companies to scale from prototype to a multi-billion dollar company. And then also keep some of the cutting edge development close to the R&D talent. I mean, even if you look at a lot of what Tesla and SpaceX are doing, a lot of the stuff remained in California. I mean, the engines that go on Starship are still made in California. Yeah. What's the timeline for the foundry? Are you guys already working on, you know, are you imagining you're talking with a bunch of tenants already about potential leases? How quickly do you want to see people with actual their employees, boots on the ground, standing up these factories, facilities, etc.? Yeah, I mean, the current timeline,

is to break around in 28, and that's basically on track. So there's a local city called Suon that basically came forward and said, hey, we want to look at approving the entirety of the new city by annexing it into our city. That happened a few months ago. And so we are now going through the environmental work. I think they're expecting to publish the draft environmental report in Q1 of 26. But since we've announced the foundry and actually same for the shipyard, But we've heard a bunch of companies come to us and say, hey, we would love to build here, but we really would like to break ground in 26 or 27. We have lots of orders.

We need to make a decision. And so we're going to look at can we work with the stakeholders around the table to accelerate it? Because it would be a shame to send another 20,000 jobs to Texas. By the way, very topical here. California just put out the numbers for unemployment last month. We just lost another 7,000 jobs in the business. area. California now has the highest unemployment rate in the whole country. So you have this crazy juxtaposition of all of the greatest economy, one of the greatest economies in world history, period.

World history. It's bigger than most countries. And still this unemployment crisis. Wild, wild. Well, thank you for everything you do. Good luck. It is a huge challenge, but it's been fun following along and exciting to see the latest development. We're going to have to set up our own studio. I was looking at, I'm looking in the background. I'm seeing TdPN Studios north right there. Right behind me. Right there. Right in the center.

Exactly. Good looking to you guys. Yeah. Congratulations and all the progress. We'll talk to you soon. And if you're looking to visit California, find your happy place at wander.com. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Book of Wander with inspiring news, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better folks. And we are ready to bring in our next guest. Nathaniel Manning let's bring him into the studio from the Restream waiting room if we can do that Nathaniel how you doing I'm doing well can you hear me yeah yeah can hear you fine good to meet you why don't you kick us off with the introduction on yourself and the company yeah hey I'm a Nat Manning and everyone

calls me Nat and the CEO of legend legend AI what we do is essentially make earth searchable we want to be able to query Earth over space and time so How do you do that? You have all these large language models out there. They're trained on language. And so if you were to want to find all the firebreaks in the Pacific Palisades, for instance, you can't really ask ChatsyPT that because it's not in language today. It's not been marked, right? But the answer to that does exist.

It exists in pixels that have been collected over the last 20 years in satellite imagery or drone imagery or low earth flying air. And you can train a model, a large Earth observation model on that data set and be able to begin to query the pixels themselves. So that's what we do. Yeah, what are the data sources? I imagine Planet Labs and some other stuff. Are you buying data? Are you just using stuff that's out there on the open web and fine-tuning or kind of putting it all in a database? Like what is the market for satellite imagery look like these days?

The special part about this industry is a lot of it's made free and available. It depends on how recent you want it or how high resolution. Then you have to go private. But you can train it. We train on Sentinel, which is from the European space. And then there's a bunch of NASA out there as well. And we can train on all that. So we get to train on open data.

And then when someone wants something that's either more, high resolution or more recent, we can run our models and easily on top of those, that purchase data as well. Who's the ideal customer for this? I mean, I can imagine it being something I'm using personally like every once in a while, but I imagine like it's more of a B2B use case. So walk me through the customer workflow. Yeah, there's three products in a stack that we're building. So the first is at the API level. And I would imagine the kind of similarity there is is like LiveKit, right? If you want to put audio into your work today

and you're building an AI product, you can work with a live kit or another one like that. It's similar that way. If you want to be able to bring the intelligence that's in this data, which is arguably also one of the largest data sets ever collected, right? So language is under one petabyte of data

that's all these models are trained on. There's almost 200 petabytes now of Earth imagery. Now, the amount of imagery doesn't necessarily equal value, but it does kind of create complexity and possibility, I think. And so, you know, typical Earth observation market has been mostly government and defense and intelligence with agriculture and all sorts of kind of environmental climate, supply chain, logistics, finance and insurance. Insurance is a world I come from. So those are those are some of the key ones and then as I said on the stack it's kind of API level which would be thinking like Google Maps map box kind of tools or live get in the old strategy here. It feels like they have a lot of data in Google Earth and Google Maps and there's a search box there but it's certainly not powered by Gemini yet but do you think it's on the roadmap for them or do you think that they're just focused more on like the consumer use case here? Yeah I mean Google's the big. 800 pound gorilla in the room yeah big big bear in the room yeah they look they have they have

you know they have all the ingredients to make this stew they also have like a lot of competition a lot of focus um it's one of the reasons some of the investors we took on or were the founding team of keyhole which became google earth and google maps you know people who really arguably have made more uh from this in this space than like anybody else um one of my favorite stats actually was that and talking to them learning that of the 200 billion in search revenue that Google makes one third of it triages their location geospatial database so that's arguably like the most successful you know tool in this space now that's location as well and and not just what's called geospatial but

yeah that does so API level and then we're building an enterprise product as well and then we'll put out kind of a fun consumer application as well kind of draw people's attention to what is now really possible that everyone's kind of dreamed about for years, this idea of being able to kind of query the earth over space and time, but the technology wasn't there until a few years ago. Do you have anything? I got another question. Yeah, no, I was curious, like, where you expect the most pull from, on the enterprise side,

is this, like, on the site, you have a bunch of different use cases that feel really tied to insurance underwriting? Is that an area that you're excited about? Yeah, that's where I came from. I started a company called Kettle that focused on, this is kind of how I came about to this, which was building, we trained CNNs on all sorts of imagery and weather data and build our own risk models and ended up going fully verticalized

and sold insurance in California. We built kind of our own models around wildfire risk and arguably, I think, built some of the best prediction models for wildfire and then wrote insurance. But the art part of the insurance, you need a giant balance sheet to be able to write it. And so it was hard to be in a position where you have product market fit so clearly. So clearly saw that like there was going to be a breakage in the California market that you could do a better job using AI to predict this risk. And then and then just be kind of hampered by conservative mindsets. And so. Well, wasn't there also, what wasn't we, John

and I live in two areas that were impacted. by the LA fire. Fortunately, our homes were okay. But I had read that California had effectively had price controls by not allowing you to price based on risk, but only price based on historical loss rate. And then that changed in December. I don't want to go on a tangent, but I'm, I'm, no, I can, I can talk about insurance all day long. And yes, it's definitely one of the main, the main, uh, the main, the main verticals we're focused on because, It's one of the most kind of important data sets for underwriting, property underwriting. But in short, yes, the admitted market in California using Prop 103, because of Prop 103 basically says you cannot, yeah, you have to kind of use historical risk, which in the world of climate change or any other kind of the how fast everything's moving right now, the last, you know, 100 years does not predict the next five years nearly as well as it used to.

And so, but there is this thing called the excess and surplus market. So once you have three denials from the admitted market, you can go to the excess and surplus market and those rules don't apply. And so that market has grown at, I think, a 17% cagger year over year for the last eight years in California. Wow. Because essentially the admitted market's on strike, saying like, hey, and fairly so. They're like, I need to be able to raise my rates. I need to be able to use models that actually work. and they struggle to do so.

So I got a lot of sympathy for them. It's hard to be in that business. How much demand are you seeing from people that just want to use AI tools to get cleaner and more data into a traditional geospatial database versus more of like an end-to-end AI solution where you're training on like the raw satellite images and then trying to kind of query that directly? Yeah, a fair number. I mean, what were the first customers, the people kind of doing this today, what you're essentially offering, what we offer is the ability to create, Aaron actually is kind of talking about this earlier on your show, the ability to create information out of structured data out of unstructured data.

So imagery is unstructured data. And kind of historically, you'd have a stage one is you have an analyst look at it. And, you know, looking, human eyes are pretty good at looking at this picture and saying, ah, that's a fire break and this is a neighborhood and that's a fire on the other side of, etc. Or a forest on the other side. And then you would train a kind of stage two is you'd train a specific model, a convolutional norm net. Detect all the trees. Detect all the roads.

And then that's how Google Maps. And you give it hundreds and thousands of images and teach it how to do that specific thing. And we spent millions of dollars a kettle doing that. And that's kind of the norm today. There are tons of teams and multiple data scientists and an ML ops person and a quarter or two to do one of these. So you're spending like half a million bucks kind of per query.

And because again, it's just like convoluted data. And it's across all those kind of industries we talked about. But what happened when you have the attention is all you need, you know, a paper that came out, the transformer model, When you apply transformer model architecture to data, the output is embeddings, right? So you have these vector embeddings for language. And what happened over the last 25 years, for 25 years, keywords were the first order data object for making sense of language. And in the last two and a half years, we've seen the process of it changing from that to language embeddings.

And it's one of the biggest stories sort of in the world. And our take is the same thing is going to happen in geospatial data. For 25 years, it was map tiles or the pure raster data, the pixels. themselves and that we're in the process of that changing to geo embeddings and so our whole thesis what legend really is is the the stack for managing embeddings uh creating tuning and storing them which is the output of these models on uh the raw data itself um and just that's the wave we think is is going to happen um for the same reason that because it's happening in language very exciting thank you so much for stopping by quick hit happy to be here do you have any news for us

You raised money that? Yeah, we raised a $9 million round. There we go. Thank you. Very excited. We have some great guys on it. You know, Kareem, your buddy, Ryan Delk was kind of our first check-in. Fantastic.

No way. A lot of friends, yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Thanks guys. Congratulations to you and the team. Appreciate it. Thanks for having you back on soon.

And we'll see you soon. Have a good one. Cheers. We have to pull a video up and react to it. Apparently some guys. Some guys were... What's this? Made a video this morning that I will drop into...

For the production team to pull up. Here we go. They made a launch video. I think they're a company called Composio. And apparently we were featured in it. Oh, really? That's got it. Well, they violated the derivative works clause.

So they, anyways, so let's watch it. This is the first time I'm seeing this. We're reacting to this. Oh, there we go. Hello. My name is Jonathan Liu. Today I'm launching Cupidly, the cursor for dating. Let me show you how it works.

So when you visit the site, you first enter your type. So let's enter my type. Oh, this is Hingebench. We've been talking about this. This is not the video that I pulled up. And connect your Fitch profile. This is a, this is AI agent for HINCH. dates. Okay. It scrapes your hinge profile and it tries to do metapenter matches. Not the video,

not the video that I was referencing. So can you guys look in the in the tab getting some audio. Some weird sound effects in that video. Yeah, here it is, here it is. No, not this one, not this one. The second, the first one, there, there's two videos. Okay. So first they violate the derivative works clause and then I guess they drank. Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. Let's pull up the first one. I, we're going to have to find out what that other video Oh yeah, that's a big viral launch. So someone launched AI agents for, yes, we should definitely talk. We're not getting video guys. I mean, how could it go wrong? We got into fucking YC. Right here we go. Yeah, that was useful and eventually becoming nothing just like the agents we built. Fuck, Lully! I wish our agents just worked.

Beautiful cinematography. I sometimes wonder what it would we like if we had agents that actually were useful? You are watching TVPS! There we go! There's some crazy phone does on us. The crazy founders on our show, they literally went from almost going homeless to an AI agent tunicom. Over the past three months, our customer recent said.

No fucking way. Our agents keep breaking. How did you fix that? We started using this new tool. I saw this agent AI thing on Facebook, but it made no sense to me. Your new agents are amazing. They just woke. So how did you grow so fast?

Honestly, our agents sort of sucked before. We tried to build everything ourselves. Then we started using the friend of the show Composio. They're fucking great. They allowed us to build these incredible agents. Last year we got reliable agents, ones you could trust to code, test, and shift. This year the shift is bigger. Agents!

Agents! Agents! They're managing swarms. Yes. Loz. Loans. Lending. Off context.

Self-Corps. Agents! Tougher! There's all. This is amazing. Very drawn out. Okay. Fix your agents before it's too late.

Posio. Very cool. I'm pulling it up the skill layer of AI. There was so much in that video. Yeah, there was a lot going on in there. So much going on. Pull up the second video now because it sounds like they've respected our terms of use. They respected it in the video.

I saw a tap water in the video. They didn't even need to do a second video, but they did. So thank you to them for respecting the derivative works clause and paying homage. I love how the team is able to deliver 20 hours. of cinematic content a week, but if you get them, try to get them to pull up the video. Here we go. Let's see this. Look at this cinematography. So many cuts. Wow. This is fantastic editing. Congratulations. I can't fucking believe it. You already tapped up. There we go. You love it.

Great job, guys. Fantastic. That's a fantastic. Full golden retriever mouth. Congratulations to that. Love it. We have to have a show. Yeah, we got a month. They raised $29 million to build skills that evolve with your agents.

Okay. Tomorrow we're having them on. We have slots. We will reach out. We'll make it happen. We have one more guest. I think Chris is still in the re-stream waiting room. Is that correct?

Is that right? Sorry to keep you waiting. There was a viral video. We had to react to it. No worries. Thanks so much for hopping on. Thanks so much for the patience. Kick us off with the introduction.

How do you know T. T.J. Parker. Yeah. Yeah, T.J. Parker, man, we went to Sunday school together. I think so. 25, 30 years ago, that's a good start. That's great. But no, T.J. is a dear friend.

That's great. We're both based out in Park City, Utah. Oh, amazing, amazing. And, yeah, give us the introduction on the company, the news. What else is going on in your world? Yeah, so I'm Chris Andrew, co-founder and CEO for Scrunch AI. We've built a customer experience platform for the AI buyer journey. Today, we're announcing a $15 million series A.

Congratulations. Led by decibel. Thanks. I had to hit the gun. And I mean, very simply, our belief 18 months ago was that all of search was moving to be AI search. Really, like, we outsourced browsing without talking about the fact that we never wanted to browse the internet. It was inefficient. We outsourced it.

AI does it for us. And it means that AI visits websites instead of humans. So we're building a company around that shift. Okay. Talk to me about the AI shift. shopping journey recently. We're looking for gear for our studio, basically always. I wanted to build a mobile camera rig. I needed certain features. There's HTML ports, this much battery light, this much, all the camera. Kind of describe what I want. It puts together a little shopping list. I send it to

the production team. We kind of go back and forth. There are some links there. I don't think those are affiliate links yet. I feel like in the future there will be ads. But what else is important in terms of actually positioning if you're selling a particular camera, how do you make sure that you show up and you beat it out? Because I kind of knew I wanted a Sony camera, but they could have sold me on Black Magic there. Black Magic should have been hammering me. They should have been paying Open AI to be like, hey, have you considered this Black Magic one? And, you know, the team likes Black Magic too. So talk to me about all the different nuances that go into AI shopping. Yeah, I think really ultimately all that top of funnel discovery, kind of the 90% of the buyer

journey, which used to be you curating research from Reddit, reviews, sites based on pricing. We've trusted OpenAI and perplexity to do that for us. So, you know, they're basically running a search over a search index, which is increasingly GPT's own search index. Prior that was based on Bing or Google or Brave, but they're looking at a list of websites, identifying title, description, snippet, visiting the website, deciding if it's relevant based on the prompt that you ask. It's basically trying to match the intent of a human prompt

to content on websites, to cite the sources that it deems relevance. What we're seeing in the end is buyer journeys that are massively reduced. People are arriving on a website and buying the first time they're there. A lot of our customers are seeing two to four X conversion from AI search visitors

compared to organic search visitors. And I think search and shopping will keep changing. I just heard that GPT is embedding Shopify, checkout in their feed. They're taking a cut of that checkout. I think it's 4% or something in terms of like another cut off the top. But today what's happening is AI's doing the research, citing sources, and we as humans are clicking out to purchase and engage. So how important is it if you run an e-commerce website to go into Cloudflare and turn off that AI default? Because that seemed like Matthew Prince came on the show, a great entrepreneur. He's certainly working in

favor of content producers who might not want to be scraped and have their, their, you know, the hard work blogs that they've developed automatically generated in, uh, in AI search results. But if I'm just selling a product, I definitely want to be in search. So how is that landscape shaping up these days? Yeah. Matthew Prince, another great park city local. We've all, fingers crossed. He can buy the mountain. We're pulling for him and also pulling for him that, you know, content creators can get paid in, in AI. crawling. I think that model makes a lot of sense for Cloudflare. Our customers, on the other hand, I think the 50 to 60 percent of the internet that has a product or service to sell is desperate to

bring content online to help AI understand their products and services. So we still come across Fortune 500 brands who have their site blocked. And so when I ask a question about that brand, what's the price, what's the product description, compare it to XYZ. It's going out to the open web to represent your products. So our customers are like, my product and service is no longer what I say it is. It's what chat GPT says it is. And if GPT can't access or can't effectively utilize your content on your website, it's going to pull from every other source that it can find on the internet. So that's part of why we've launched what we call our agent experience platform today, which is essentially an optimized version of your website. So we take your website, we scrunch it,

called our brand scrunch because we literally want to strip away everything on a site that is confusing the AI. These models don't read JavaScript. They struggle with carousels. They're not converting your multimedia into text. Large language models want language. So it's critical for businesses to be enabling the crawling on their site and making that content rich and accurate for the crawlers to access and pull through. How is that actually different from just generic SEO? I feel like if I had a video, I'd want subtitles and text and like an HTML tag or something that just Google search could pull up anyway. There was kind of like that keyword stuffing era,

dump a bunch of words in white text on a white background at the bottom at one point font or whatever. Like, is that, are we going back to that? No, I mean, I think we're actually moving more towards human language and intent. I mean, the keyword stuffing is a great example. If you pull up a recipe site, Google Chicken Noodle Soup, you're going to find the word chicken 60 times on that page. It's absolutely manic.

Like, AI wants the intent of the query. So like if you ask GPT for a recipe, it gives you the answer, right? It kind of strips everything away and reduces it to what you want. So I do think we're actually returning to a lot of core SEO principles. You need language. Large language models want language. They're struggling with carousels and multimedia. They need that text.

And so I think best practices in SEO, ultimately my hope is we just call this search. We get rid of GEO, AEO, AIO. I ultimately think all of search is going to be AI search. and it's agents retrieving content for us. Anything else, Jordy? No, this is great. Thank you for joining. Congratulations on the race.

We will talk to us soon. Have fun out there in Park City. Give our best to TJ. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Bye. Let's rip through some timeline. Did you see the medieval night raising a seed round of 500 gold Ducats at 3,000

Dukats post? And they already have their first LOI signed with the Holy Role Woman Empire. Women Empire. Hard not to be bullish. We must beat the Ming Dynasty in the gunpowder race. What is this? What is this video, by the way? We got to pull up this video.

Pull up the video. I don't know if we can't. That's going to be hard. There's going to be a big challenge. It's an image right now, but it is in the tabs. You might have to scroll way back. Loosely modified up to the Tannenberg Castle gun. Mine is loaded with around 50 to 60 grains of 2F black powder and fires a 0.75 caliber lead ball.

Heavy. Do we have the video? Can we pull it up? One second. This is an OG 2A enthusiast right here. Yeah, indeed. And I love that some founders alt, Edward is just like completely transposing this to the defense tech meme of like, we must beat the Ming dynasty in the gunpowder race. Like, you know, I've invented defense tech. And this guy is firing some sort of a castle gun.

I've never heard of this before. Apparently from 1400. We should get one in the studio. They had guns 600 years ago? Wow. I thought that was more modern. I thought that was like maybe 300 years ago. When was the first gun created?

Let's figure it out. Appeared in China. The earliest firearms known as fire lances appeared in China around the 10th century. They were essentially tubes, often bamboo, filled with gunpowder and shrapnel mounted on spears. So they would just make a lot of sense. You got a spear. You want to point it. You want some range.

throw on some gunpowder. Fantastic. More news. Nudge raised a $100 million. Oh, here we go. We got the video. I think we got it. What are these guys doing, by the way?

What is this operation? Who are these guys? Legends. That is so crazy. It is bamboo. It looks like it's bamboo. I don't know if it is. Insane.

What a crazy. Ben, get one of these for the studio. I need one. Yeah, yeah. For our next confetti canon, we'll load up. Yeah, with real, it's a confetti cannon. with which real gun battery.

Boom. I'm like shaking the whole building every time someone announces a closed seat round. Yes, Nudge, the brain computer interface company co-founded by Fred Ersum, the co-founder of Coinbase, says half the world will experience a brain disorder in their lifetime. At Nudge, we're building brain interfaces that are safe, precise, and non-invasive to solve that problem. They raised $100 million in Series A, led by Thrive Capital and Green Oaks to go faster, we're hiring, join us.

Very exciting. Nudge, kind of the non-invasive neuralink. There's other news in here in the deck. Neurrelink just did two implantations in the same day. So they're scaling the actual implantation of the neuralink device. That, of course, requires invasive surgery. Nudge does not. It's a kind of a helmet that you put on, but then can stimulate the brain in different ways

and solve a whole bunch of different brain disorders. Very exciting. This is very likely could be the key to scaling from three to, to, six hours a day. I think so. Live. Put one of these on. I mean, you can actually turn off sleepiness, basically.

I mean, like, once you get the, the different, it's literally like a tinfoil hat. Put it on and it can just be like, turn off fear, upreculate risk taking, go turbo long. Yeah, mitigate. You want, you want capital alligators to be super risk on, but still get the weight loss benefits of GOP. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Something there. This is a wild leak memo from Anthropics CEO Dario.

Dario is basically justifying to the team why they're going to go directly to the Gulf to raise capital. And this is not something that probably should have ever been in a memo. He says, unfortunately, I think no bad person should ever benefit from our success is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on. Just blanket putting the Gulf states in the bad. So it's such a weird thing because you'd think you'd just be like, I met them, I dug in. I don't think they're bad people. And so I'm doing business with them. And let's debate that.

And I think it's a Pareto improvement. Everyone is made it better off by Anthropic working with the Gulf. That's the argument he should be making, but he's not, I guess. And so Dylan Patel says Anthropic has been a series of ideological decisions later defeated by business realities. We've talked about this before where, you know, it was like all the idealistic AI scientists were like, let's try doing this without capitalism and then and then the AI god was just like I actually enjoy capitalism it's thrilling to me thrilling and I and I'd like 500 billion you're exactly right the right way to do something like this is say I went we visited we spent a few

days together we have a shared vision for how AI can increase human prosperity totally whatever the critiques are I don't even know what the critiques are the UAE I I'm sure there's a bunch of both the UAE and Qatar, like there are all governments and every company and every person ever. But you dig in. You figure out like, oh, yeah, how can we work together to resolve any lingering problems? Should we have a different perception? You don't just be like I'm going into business with someone I think is bad.

Wild, wild choice. Anyway. Choice of words. In better news. Blake Scholl says at Mach 1.7, Overture out flies Earth's rotation. That's cool. So you can have breakfast in London, flight in New York for breakfast. and then to San Francisco, just in time for breakfast.

This is going to be huge for the breakfast for dinner. Folks, you ever been breakfast for dinner guy? Pancake dinner. Yeah. Pancake dinners. Kind of insane. As a kid, that was mind-blowing. We'd do that maybe once a month.

Cereal for breakfast. Four-year-old is dying laughing at the concept of eating cereal for breakfast. It really is. Oh, it was the funniest thing you could possibly imagine. Breakfast is so good, too. It is. It's not my favorite. Really? Yeah, I'm not a big breakfast guy.

I think it's my, even my default breakfast is like a breakfast burrito, which is really like lunch or dinner masquerading as breakfast. You know? Yeah. It's kind of like, they've just kind of like swapped out some of my friends to make a breakfastee. My dad making waffles with dinner was so awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it was amazing. Do we have the Tyler Cam working?

Can we check in with the final review of the Tesla cafe? How was the experience? How far away? How long did you take you together from here? It's like five minutes away. Oh, it's really close. It's super close. Oh, wow.

Okay. Like, we could probably walk there. Okay. Yeah. Did they? I wonder if they did that on purpose. We didn't get the invite to the opening. There's some other influences there yesterday.

We were behind the ball. They had to go to go to. They know we're always live. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely cool. Like the building is super cool. There's a ton of stuff on the menu.

It's just like a diner. So that's cool. I mean, there was like, I don't know. There's like hundreds of, not hundreds of, there's a lot of things on the menu. Yeah. Like every kind of meal. Yeah. I think it's open 24 hours.

four hours. That's cool. So maybe, you know, we go back later. Do they have steak? Do they have steak? Do they have dinner? I don't know if they have steak. I guess you just get a burger whenever.

We didn't look. Yeah, but so we took a Tesla to get there and then so when we parked, you could see on the menu. How did you take a Tesla to get there? Adam, Adam is a Tesla. Oh, okay, he just owns one. Yeah. Got it.

Okay. It wasn't a, it wasn't like a robot taxi because the robot taxi is rolling out really aggressively, but it's not an LA yet, but this feels like kind of tied. They're teasing. They're testing the waters. Anyway, yeah, I think the burger was solid. How's the food sitting? Are you feeling still good or any upset Tommy? I feel pretty good right now.

Yeah, it was cool. I wouldn't go back just for the burger, but maybe I would go back for the audience. Would you go back and do a muck bang and eat every item on the menu in exchange for an iPhone? Yeah, I would do that. You would eat every item. You would try and eat every item on the menu during Hester three hours, every item. Every item. You have to eat them all. Yeah. It's like 7,000.

What do you get by every item? Like, is it a burger and a burger with bacon? What, what, what, I saw, I saw a graphic that had like 12 different items on it. And so it would be, it would be 12 different meals, basically. Yeah, I could. Three hours. He's a growing, he's a growing boy. He's a growing boy.

I've never been in the competitive eating. That's a good challenge. I think it's a little, I think we'll come up with a better, better challenge for you. You will win the iPhone within the next few weeks, but we got to come up with something. It's going to happen. I wouldn't want to put you through the muck bang. I think it's probably. a little bit too aggressive, too hardcore on your body to try and eat all that food.

Yeah. But three hours, though? Three hours? Three hours show. Maybe you can do it. You do the muck bag. I got to be here. Yeah, exactly.

Anyways, we have a post here from Jira Tickets. He's been an absolute regular recently. Yes, yes. It feels like he's on every other day. Love Jir Tickets. He says, ah, yes, good morning. Let's open up the Infinite Information River for a nice 20 minutes before getting out of bed or thinking any original thoughts at all.

I love it. So real. I, because I wake up so early and I race over to your place and then get in the car, I haven't been opening the Infinite Information River first thing in the morning. I haven't been doing anything other than just get. Actually, I go outside. I go outside and I get sun. Who were we talking about that with?

Maybe Huberman or something. Rob. So I've been doing that. And I don't know if it's really been that much better. Sometimes the light that blasts your eyes from your phone is the best. alarm clock and and when you open up your phone and you're greeted with a post like this just kicks you off to like a great start of the day yeah just laughing if you're enjoying you can pin this to the top of the feed that's great time you're having a great time um what else is in here oh yeah i mean

we do have the post about somebody built cursiver dating we got to talk to this this fellow spent his life we pull up the video now i was super confused earlier but we spent my life savings on this cinematic video because i have no VC money to burn uh did one shot Very funny. And then digs into AI agents for Hinge. The AI agent goes and scrolls your Hinge profile, does all the swiping, all the talking, and then surfaces matches that it thinks you're actually interested in matching with. So kind of like a layer on top of Hinge, I suppose.

Yeah, let's pull it up. Let's see it. I mean, the cinematography, fantastic for the first couple seconds. And then it gets a little silly. Hello. My name is Johannes and Liu. It's a cool shot. Cool shot.

He says he ran out of money. There's a Lume demo. The cursor for dating. Let me show you how it works. So when you visit the site, you first enter your type. So let's enter my type. What does he say? I can't read that.

Then you would go ahead and connect your profile. It's funny that he's censoring Hinge because it's obviously. After doing that, you click this big black button that starts searching for people your type. And this launches an AI agent that swipes for you on Hinge,

filtering for people. Why is he censoring it? knows and then also it seems like he's harnessing Hinge in some weird way because I don't think Hinge has an API Tyler do you know if Hinge has an API not that I've looked but I don't think there is okay because I imagine that they would not want this to happen they don't want bots on their network whatsoever and oh this picture is pretty cute the L-Y is really coming back is either send a message using AI yeah it was a real throwback yeah and then you send a message using AI that's wild I don't know what this is

done for. I don't know how seriously is about this, but I mean AI dating clearly going to be something there. This is an interesting go-to-market, maybe it's controversial. I mean, you got 10,000 likes, a million views. Yeah, I think it's very clear the dating apps don't want people building experiences on top of them. Yeah. And they will try to own this type of experience. But we're talking about it. We're talking about it. Sounds like a successful launch. Well, we got to jump. We got to film an ad. I'll close it out with Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, Anthropic. He says, today I'm excited to share that I'm joining Figma's board of directors, having known Dillon for years and watched him build the platform that's become essential for design teams.

I'm looking forward to partnering with him and the Figma team on what's next. Fantastic pickup. He's heading into the IPO. Couldn't have found a better person to join the board. So congratulations to everyone involved in that. Last one, close so investments. says not calling a top here because of AI, yada, yada, yada. But White House eliminates day trading regulation, polymarket, returns to the U.S.

Robin Hood enables 24-7 EU gambling. The architects of the 2022 SPAC bubble are posting. CNBC guys have a crypto treasury play. Wall Street bets. Meme crashes 40% and almost closes negative. I don't understand that one. If we blow up later this summer, can't say there weren't signs. I mean, the benefit of like, you know.

And what he says is all I'm saying is what is going on is pretty crazy. Yes. I mean, the benefit is that if no one's saying this, then you need to be really worried. Because at least people are saying this and then they're thinking it. And then hopefully people are pulling back before you get to a true precipice. I feel like in 2021, 2020, people were saying this is crazy. Yeah. I see saying all insane is what's going on.

Pretty crazy. Pretty crazy. Hyper-capitalism. We'll see. We'll see. Got to love it. Anyway. Thank you so much for watching.

Last one. What you got? Hope, Hope, Hoping one of the top posters in the world. Hope's revenge. Topping the power ranking. Originally said my GF is upset because her favorite albino alligator was bought by Anthropic and ruined. And then he actually has a picture here. And it says, the care of Claude the Alligator is generously supported by Anthropic.

I think this is great. I don't see why it's ruined. I love to see big AI supporting alligators. Yes. And I actually want to get, I'm really excited. for BCI's brain computer interfaces to get into the alligator category. So you can talk to them. They're pretty wild.

You ever, I mean, just pull up a picture of an alligator. These things are insane. The fact that they're just cruising around. No one's working on humanoid alligators, like robotic alligators. We've seen, maybe that's the killer form factor. Everybody's saying, oh, you guys could do incubations. I feel like a, I feel like a robotic alligator

would be a good defense tech play too. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of investment in bears. Robotic bears. Yeah, you let the robotic alligator can sneak under stuff and jump up, run. Attack the terrorists. Yeah. Attack the enemy.

Seems like an alligator, a robotic alligator with drone-based wings. So it could actually fly while snapping. Could reshape the modern battlefield. Could be looking at billion dollars. Home defense play too. If you had some robo alligators on the roof and you had somebody breaking. I'm big in emotes. I'm big in emotes.

What am I going to put in the moats? That's right. That's right. Yeah. And there's going to be some upkeep costs with maintaining a fleet of robotic alligators, but probably less than how many chickens or cows you got to throw in the moat. Exactly. If they're real alligators.

So yeah, I think more single family home should have moats. Yep. Right? We're always talking about businesses, talking to founders. What's your moat? What's your moat? Yeah. Meanwhile, we're sitting in houses that don't have moats.

Yeah. And I think that should change. So lots of, lots of operations. opportunity in alpha here at the end of the show. Fantastic. Have a great day. We will see you tomorrow. Cannot wait.

Have a great evening. Bye.