TBPN - Super Bowl Ad Reactions, New Ferrari Design, Ads Launch in ChatGPT | Jason Fried, Bill Bishop, Jason Kelly, Dan Romero, Boris Sofman, Sara Hooker, Edward Mehr

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(11:59) - Super Bowl Ad Reactions (57:18) - Ads Launch in ChatGPT (01:15:44) - Jason Fried, co-founder and CEO of Basecamp, a web-based project management platform, is known for his minimalist approach to software design and advocacy for simplified business practices. In the conversation, he discusses Ferrari's upcoming electric vehicle, the Luce, focusing on its interior design collaboration with Jony Ive and the integration of tactile and digital elements. Fried expresses appreciation for the fresh approach but emphasizes the importance of cohesive design between a car's interior and exterior, noting that the overall success depends on how these elements harmonize. (01:30:42) - Bill Bishop is a bilingual American entrepreneur and China expert who co-founded CBS MarketWatch in 1997 and later founded the Sinocism China Newsletter, providing in-depth analysis on Chinese affairs. In the conversation, he discusses the severe winter conditions in Washington, D.C., recent developments in U.S.-China relations, including military purges within the PLA, and the implications of AI advancements and chip sales between the two nations. (02:01:51) - Jason Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, discusses the evolution of laboratory automation, likening traditional manual lab work to early manual transportation methods, and highlights the role of AI in managing experimental variability. He emphasizes the potential of autonomous labs to democratize scientific research, enabling broader participation and accelerating innovation across various sectors. Kelly also addresses the importance of biosecurity measures and the need for responsible management of biotechnological advancements to mitigate potential risks. (02:22:23) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:30:07) - Dan Romero, a seasoned professional with over a decade in the crypto industry, recently transitioned from his role at Farcaster to join Tempo, a purpose-built Layer 1 blockchain designed for stablecoin payments, incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. He discusses the significant potential for stablecoins, especially following the passage of the Genius Act, and emphasizes Tempo's focus on payments, highlighting partnerships with companies like DoorDash and Klarna. Romero also explores the integration of stablecoins with AI agents, suggesting that stablecoin rails could enable seamless, programmatic transactions for AI-driven services. (02:43:52) - Boris Sofman, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics, discusses the development of autonomous technologies for heavy machinery to address labor shortages in industries like construction, mining, and agriculture. He explains that Bedrock's approach involves retrofitting existing equipment with sensor and compute systems to enable operatorless operation, enhancing productivity and safety. Sofman also highlights the challenges of electrifying construction equipment due to infrastructure limitations and emphasizes the potential of AI to revolutionize various sectors by integrating advanced autonomy and intelligence into physical industries. (02:58:39) - Sara Hooker, co-founder of Adaption Labs and former VP of Research at Cohere, discusses her company's focus on developing AI systems capable of real-time, continuous learning without the need for costly retraining cycles. She emphasizes the importance of creating adaptable intelligence that evolves through real-world interaction, aiming to eliminate the reliance on prompt engineering and enhance efficiency across various domains. Hooker also highlights the recent $50 million seed funding secured by Adaption Labs, which will support their mission to build AI models that require less computing power and cost less to run than most leading systems. (03:07:46) - Edward Mehr, CEO of Robocraftsman, discusses his company's development of versatile manufacturing robots capable of performing various metal operations, including sheet forming, welding, and assembly, to produce complex metal structures for industries like aerospace and automotive. He highlights the transition from technology development to scaling operations, with plans to establish larger facilities and expand capabilities to meet increasing demand. Mehr envisions a future where hardware manufacturing becomes as flexible and accessible as software development, enabling rapid customization and production without the need for traditional tooling. (03:25:11) - Jordi vs. France TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRestream - https://restream.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coSentry - https://sentry.ioCisco - https://www.cisco.comOkta - https://www.okta.comKalshi - https://kalshi.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

We're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, February 9th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, Metamplea Technology, the Portures to Finance, the Capital of Capital. It is great to be back. It's great to be back. We went into the Super Bowl with none other than ramp.com. Time is money.

Save both. Easy to use corporate cards. Bill Pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. We're breaking down our Super Bowl experience. You know, people call us the Sports Center for the LinkedIn crowd. It's always been funny because we mostly focus on X and RSS feeds. Well, now is the first football game we saw this season. Yeah.

Yeah, it actually was. It was the first football game I've been to in maybe a decade. I don't know. It's been a while. But we do try and bring that sports center energy to the show. We like, you know, ringing a gong. I don't know if they have a gong on sports center. But, you know, we try and bring the high energy to tech and business reporting.

And now we're officially sports fans. We're officially football fans. Converted. Converted. No, it was a fun experience going in the Super Bowl. Apparently it was not the most exciting game. Yeah. We did have to leave to catch a flight in the fourth quarter, and then it got, and then it started being exciting.

Yeah, and then it started being, not saying. Also, just a weird experience seeing it in the stadium because there's so many ads, but they don't show the Super Bowl ads he in the stadium, and so they'll run a couple plays, and then you'll just take a five-minute break, and then you just get distracted and get sucked into a conversation because we were there with a bunch of fun people. And so it was a little bit trickier to actually follow the game. You mean follow the ads? Yeah, well, he didn't follow the ads at all.

I didn't see a single ad. I would open to my phone and see people reacting to the ads. And I had major foam out because I wasn't getting to enjoy the ads in the stadium. Of course, there were some branded integrations in the stadium, but those are separate from the ads that NBC sells. Of course, we, you know, we had this running joke for a while. You know, we're most excited about the ads. It's a little played out at this point.

Because some people say that just as a reflection of like they don't like sports. We say it because we actually like the ads, right? Because we like advertising and commerce. But, you know, we participated in the Super Bowl hype train. I was very happy with the success of our campaign. It was a super bowl is like a relatively minor event in the calendar for tech people, I feel like. You know, WWDC, you have Davos, you have Sun Valley. of the things that everyone collects around,

Super Bowls on the calendar for a lot of people, but not top-bine for everyone. It's not, you gotta be there. But we were able to run a regional ad in the Bay Area, which we mentioned on the show. And I guess it was all over California. Yeah, it was all over California. People text me from Southern California too.

Yeah, but it was fun. I mean, people see the following numbers and stuff. I gotta pull up his post because somebody yesterday thought that, they were hallucinating. This guy, Chip Rogers on X, said, hallucinating. And then he said, at Jordy Hayes,

at John Coogan, at TBPN on the pregame Super Bowl commercial. And I was like, no, it was real. It would have been insane to just be like watching NBC or watching the TV. And then you just get, you're watching TV. He probably was like, did I sit on the remote or something? Yeah, and I accidentally clicked off the stream or something. But no, the intro was, The intro to our ad was exactly our intro to our main show, which is funny.

But it was a cool moment because obviously people see view numbers on clips and they see follower accounts. We just hit 200,000 on X. We're very excited about that. And they see the guest lineups. But there's something different about actually seeing the patchwork of all the different logos of everyone who's participated in the show in one way or another as a guest. And that was just very cool. And I think people really sort of understood the scope of like how correct. 2025 was I went from interviewing like one or two people a year for videos to like a thousand

And it was great. It was a lot of fun Let's pull up the linear lineup because I want you to meet the system for modern software development 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents we have Jason Freed the co-founder very excited about this one Jason's gonna come on we're gonna have a conversation about the new Johnny I Ferrari designs that got announced this morning we'll go through it in a little bit. Bill Bishop. To talk to him.

Bill Bishop. To talk about what's going on trying to broadly risk to TFCC, Taiwan, what's going on with the leadership changes and shakeups over in the CCP. Next, Jason Kelly. Co-founder and CEO of Ginko Biow Works coming on.

What could go wrong if you hook a Biolab up to GPT-5? Yeah, and if you saw Open AI shared last week, they have a that like a basically a biolab integration. Jason is powering that via Ginko. And then we have Dan Romero, who's joining Tempo, the project between Stripe and Paradigm. I saw a big billboard for it up in SF. Very cool. And then Boris from Bedrock Robotics,

Sarah Hooker from Adaption Labs and Ed from Machina Labs coming in in person. So great show today. Yeah. The other Super Bowl, little tomfoolery we engaged in was we launched Claude with Ads. obviously we've been joking back and forth about Anthropic, launching a Super Bowl ad, kind of taking a shot at OpenAI or other LLMs that might put ads in there. What does that mean? Is it going to be bad? And so, of course, we had to create a wrapper

thanks to the Opus 4.6 API and a lot of tireless work from Tyler Cosgrove over there. Yeah, really amazing execution went from Idea Friday morning to a product that thousands... Yeah, actually, like a lot of people... 7,000 people have, like, used it, played around with it. 8,000 people signed the petition to bring Cod, to bring ads to Cod.

That was your line, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's also, I think this is actually important for a lot of safety people to think about, right? Because this is actually a very good example of misalignment from Cot, right? Because I used, I used Cod to build this. I used Claude code, right? And so this is Clawed acting in defiance of anthropic stated principles.

Yes, anthropic is anti-ad, and yet Claude, the model they built, allowed you to add ads too clawed. That's textbook misalignment. I think the safety people need to be the stuff. They need to study this. Nah on the chat. So Sholto has left the chat. We are with Sholto yesterday at the Super Bowl. He had fun with it. He was having fun with it. A lot of people were asking, like, is this illegal? Is this violation? We respect trademark law. A little bit too seriously. We're just having some fun on the time. And it is just tomfoolery. So the the site will be going down later today. So,

your last chance to give it a whirl is today. Your last chance to get totally free access to Anthropics' most powerful model. Yes. As long as you have unlimited email addresses, I think, because you can technically only get one prompt. And the first prop, break it down, the first prop comes around.

So the concern was that we launched this, somebody sets up an agent to effectively sign up and prompted like millions of time. Yeah. And, you know, run up a crazy bill. Yeah. But how does that work? If you usually use it, like, you send a message

and then it responds, it calls the API. Why you ask to them? So it actually calls the API in the first message. But then after that, it's just, like, it's just hard-coded in. Like, it'll just give you an ad, and there's no actual response. It just says, like, that's a great question.

Also, have you heard about it? So in exchange for one email address, which is somewhat scarce, we give you one prompt of 4.6. But in that prompt, there's still an ad. And then everything subsequently is. I mean, you can make new chats, but you still on each conversation. Oh, okay, so you can make new chats, and then that would allow you to hit Opus 4.6.

So you could kind of have a conversation if you basically add the context of the previous conversation in the new one. Every time. Okay, yeah. So a little prompt engineering and boom, Opus 4.6. Intelligence too cheap to meter. Free Opus 46. We love it. We love it. Let me tell you about Figma.

Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast. And so I was very surprised by how well Claude Withads.com did, given that we tweeted a link, there's been debate over how nerfed our links on X. We got a ton of likes and views on this, and it seemed to work very well. So maybe that bodes well just for, like, it's a weird link and it's worth clicking on. But also, I just think that the whole X algorithm is less punishing to links these days, which is exciting. And, you know, we've always had this schick that we're extremely pro advertising.

have been very aggressive about finding funny ways to integrate sponsors all over TBPN. We have the turbo puffer. We have our console laptops. We have all sorts of stuff. The axon gong, the Lambda Lightning Round, etc. And I've always thought, I'm working on this metaphor for the show. Like, how do we think about the show? And I like the metaphor of like we think of it like an F1 car, like an F1 race.

Like there aren't all that. You've always said it's an F1 team. F1 team. But I think the metaphor can be extended because like the number of people that actually go to every single race in person is pretty small. And so is our community of people here in the chat. We love all you. Ryan says I put my dad onto TBPN. I got excited seeing the ad and you started asking me about it.

Hashtag convert it. There we go. There we go. And so, but you know, the number of people that watch a little bit of an F1 race or the highlights or the drive to survive. And you can think about diet TBPN as sort of the drive to survive of TBPN. You know, you're not sitting there watching the whole thing live. It's a little bit more condensed, a little bit more editing. And then the clips are sort of just, you know, you're aware that Red Bull has a team.

And you're aware that Ramp sponsors TBPN. What's this? No, on the Chad. Rookie Tyler was learning to muddy spread when Chad's, Jordy, and John were beer maxing with the Patels. Turns out Tyler vibe-coded clawed with ads, but can't money spread yet. Oh, he can't. Oh, he botched it. He fires back.

He fires back. It's because they're like brand-new bills, so it's harder. Oh, there we go. Get those glasses on. You got to look the other direction. There you go. Rookie, rookie, rookie, but he's learning quick. Anyway.

No, I can't, I mean, Tyler, just incredible, incredible work. Should we get into some of the ads from the show? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think the big meta point from the text response to the Super Bowl, which we'll dig into, is like, it's very fun. And we spent most of last week, like, obsessing over. over the inter-lab vibe wars, like, how is open AI responding to anthropic?

And as we'll see, like, this was not the story of the Super Bowl at all. The story of the Super Bowl, even from a tech perspective, it was much more about how is tech communicating what AI can do broadly to the largest swath of Americans and broad stakeholders and voters possible. And so people were, you know, there's debates over data centers, crypto, gambling, weight loss drugs.

Like there's new technologies and society's grappling with those. the Super Bowl is actually a very interesting place to go and make a case for how you want this technology to be integrated into society. You're making a case for how it can be used positively, all of these different things. And even though it's fun to focus on like, you know, oh, should Claude have ads or should ChachypT not have ads or whatever, like there's a much bigger discussion that's happening at the Super Bowl. And I think that's what we should be running through as we react to these Super Bowl ads.

While we pull the first one up, Jordy, you can pick whatever you want to talk about first. I will tell everyone about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And so, do you want to read to this reaction to the Claude Super Bowl ad? Yeah, we can go through. Let's go through Claude first. Orrin John over on X was posting a bunch of good kind of reactions analysis.

He says, ranking the Claude Super Bowl ad in the moments surrounded by people that aren't all terminally. online. 80% of the people here don't understand that ChachyPT speak when the second speaker talks and were confused or tuned out. It had to be explained. It's sort of iconic to me because I've used Chachypte voice mode. Yeah, it's so. And I've seen those reels where it's like, it was like perfect execution for, it's a great question for X. One of the other challenges is again, we weren't seeing it live, but apparently the ad was much shorter. There was one ad during the game. I kind of expected them to run to really try to like really mug and do like, 4 30 second ads.

Someone was saying it might be like an $80 million buy, which would be like insane. Anyway, so they toned it down a bit. And Warren says had to be explained by the AI Bros, which was as bad as it sounds. While this ad speaks well to the early bell curve, this might have been too early for a mainstream investment like this. Overall, I think they had a lot of fun with it.

It clearly was not, like, the creative was like, can't have been that expensive because it was like four scenes. It was like four, One day shoots, probably. I think we're going to get the team on who did it, Mother. Yeah. Because it is beautifully shot, and I think it's funny. But, but yeah, it's, it is a little early.

But so was the Chechap. But basically, like, but in, in, they basically made Open AI way overreact. Yeah, a little bit. Like, like, actually seeing the way that the ads went yesterday, it was almost, like, maybe they didn't need Sam and the entire, like, management team. you know, stric sand affecting it. Yeah. Well, this was what Rune was posting. He was like, it's the, it's the blue shell and it, like, it successfully like rage baited everyone. Yeah, they got rage baited. Yeah, but I mean, they've,

they've known, opening eyes known that they've had to, like, be very, very clear about the way ads will get integrated because when you, when you think ads in LLMs, you immediately think what we built with Claude with ads, which is like deeply integrated. They said there's a time in place. Instead of ads are coming to AI, but not to Claude, they updated it and said, the new copy is there's a time in place for ads your conversation with AI should not be one of them. So I wonder what, you know, I wonder what pushback they got. This, this, this doesn't hit quite as hard, even though it is probably more authentic, right? Yeah, yeah. It almost sounds like it's like a lobbying firm or something. Oh, yeah. It does feel like something you'd see from a, like a think

tank almost. Yeah. Again, no QR code, no call to action. Where did Claude land in the app store? We were wondering about that, right? We were thinking that it was at 36 or something when we were looking at it last week in the lead-up. Yeah, it's at 23 right now. That's not bad. So it's like up, up maybe 10. Yeah, that's not too bad. There's a bunch of stuff that moved. I mean, just looking at the top, it's like Peacock, okay, that's watching the big game. NBC app, that's the same thing. NFL app, obviously, that's Super Bowl related. Same with NBC Sports. So there were prize picks. There's a whole bunch of of things that move. FanDuel is up there. There's just a number of apps that jumped just by default. In terms of free apps, there actually aren't that many others that ran. I see Duncan. Duncan feels like it's up in the app store.

I think they ran a big ad that we'll look at. But, yeah, the stuff that's below it doesn't seem like it's higher than Timu. Last year, Timu ran a big Super Bowl ad. I don't know exactly what they did this year, but you would expect that. My first time seeing a Timu ad was crazy. I was like the copy shop like a billionaire. It was funny. Was so insane.

And yet I think it actually in hindsight kind of works because everything's so cheap. People don't have to look at the price. I guess that's the that's the thesis. To a billionaire, a couch feels like $5. So here's a $5 couch. An apple or something like that. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. It is funny because like I don't think like the real way that billionaire shop is like, oh, my real estate guy bought a mansion. Your real estate desk. My real estate desk bought a mansion. And then the interior design desk will furnish it and I will have no input in any of it. And they will just magically know exactly what I want before I even ask for it. One thing I'm interested to see the way the Super Bowl buys work, they make you buy ads in the Olympics as well.

Yeah. And so if you're watching the Olympics today or tomorrow, I guess we're going to have an Olympics ad because we're forced to like. We should do a whole other victory lap. We're taking our, it was so successful. We're taking it to the Olympics. We're taking it to the slopes. The slopes. But we'll be interesting as if various labs or other companies run like longer ads.

It's not quite as expensive. We'll see. Bryce said anthropic ads were total flop in his house. Despite having a highly tech literate family, they took a bunch of explaining. And yeah, it is. But that makes sense, right? So like they hit so hard on X. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I remember the morning of you're sitting here being like, Oh, shot across the bow. I can't believe they did that. It was like a mic drop. Yeah, mic drop. It was predictable. There was no way to come back from it.

Sam, you know, lost as soon as he was writing up like a word salad, you know, trying to respond. But again, there's some data coming back from ad week. Morgan is sharing audience didn't like Anthropics ad placing it in the bottom 3% of all Super Bowl ads from the last five years. But it makes sense, right? It's like a bar belt. Like for people on X that are like really, really. following tech closely. It was incredibly... It's a pretty small sample size. 500 people, they asked.

Yeah, but you're running that like in real time. Yeah, across the world. Right after the ads go. Well, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their businesses securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Let's look at how OpenAI responded. Obviously, this was not a response. This was probably months or weeks in the making. This is called You Can Just Build Things. And let's take a look and see if it tells a more optimistic source. about AI, one that's maybe less confrontational with their rivals.

I like building things. Making cardboard stuff is underrated. You get a lot of Amazon boxes, cut those things up, make something. Very cool. Become a hacker. Read more. Learn Bayesian probability. Become a scientist to play chess.

I don't think if chess is something you build necessarily. Sick. Job displacement. No more. No more sweeping. Somebody said this is a Windows computer running a Mac or something? Is that real? I think people would tune out for this.

Build things. Why? It's just too. So long. Did they actually run the full thing? A full minute? And the other thing is, I don't know. I'm still.

It is a little dark. They're trying to push codex. They're trying to push codex to consumers. Yeah. Which I think is smart. I think it's very smart. But introducing Codex when every single person in the audience is familiar with ChatGPT, and then just trying to, I don't know.

Oh, this is cool. So that robotics stuff was actually Easter eggs of the robotics team at OpenAI. Like they just brought the cameras in and filmed their own team. That's very cool. Yeah. Dan Chipper says huge. OpenAI runs a Codex commercial, not a ChatGPT commercial. So was that a Codex commercial?

Yeah, go to the very end. Because I just felt like a general, like, AI is cool commercial. Like, and just like, it felt very in line with the previous Super Bowl ad of just the eras of technology. Let's go to the end. Oh, okay. So showing you Codex desktop. That's cool. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. That's pretty subtle, though. Everything about it is too subtle. It never says chat chit. What's the final slide? Because it says you can just build things and then. And then goes codex. Okay, codex open AI.

Oh, okay. So it's not. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can just build things. I don't know. It's just not, it's again,

it's kind of cool for acts. People are like, oh, but I think both, both anthropic, both anthropic and open AI are both using the same reference material for their ads.

Yeah. Like they're all going back into the Apple archives, like trying to, trying to pull inspiration from the same, fishing from the same pond. Yeah. They should have, they should have just done a parody of the Budweiser.

Was that bad. reason on. And it's just people talking to chat. GBT voice went, was, ah. That would be, that would be doing Clydesdales, actually. Chad GBT.

Chad Gpte, find me a... Somebody on X, Grace, said, Super Bowl commercial is so evil this year. Seeing a Bud Light commercial felt healing. Like, oh, yes, Bud Light, a tangible object

unrelated to AI or crypto. Ridiculous. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility in scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. So obviously we went to the Super Bowl with Eric Lyman from Ramp, the CEO of Ramp. The whole team.

Ramp did really, really well with their Super Bowl activation. They had a whole bunch of different touch points, so they didn't just lob an ad in and then call it a day. They were there. They sent the Brians. We can kind of go through the whole plan. But there's something interesting. I mean, we certainly experienced this with our Super Bowl ad. Obviously, we bought a very small ad.

But why we got a good result out of our Super Bowl ad, we didn't just go to NBC and said, like, here's money and thank you. We went and told Ad Week and gave an interview, and you gave some interesting quotes to the reporter on the record. So there was an article around it. That's valuable. Then we emailed people who were featured in the ad. Hey, we're posting about this.

Like, do you want to know that you're in this thing? Cool. You can go see it if you want to watch it. There's a whole bunch of different flywheels. And I think Ramp did a really good job of understanding that, like, it's the Super Bowl campaign, not an ad. And, yeah, so, I mean, and one, they had, obviously they'd work with Brian, but with during the box stunt in New York. Last year, that went really well. So they built off of that.

Yeah. We showed up, we showed up to the tailgate party that they had. By the time we showed up, there was already, like, thousands of people there. It was insane. A bunch of, bunch of TBPN listeners came and said hi, which was awesome. But a great group of people, they had a big yellow skateboard ramp with people like actually going pretty hard. Yeah. No, it's a really good skaters. A bunch of different like contests running around that were super internet native.

Somebody, Brian shaved a guy's head on a live stream to look like himself. So in that kind of getting some people were like, we're showing up and being like, I like this takes six levels of like understanding to get all the jokes of like the ramp is yellow because the brand and the ramp is the name of the company. and the skater, and then Brian's here because he was in the office and he plays an accountant. But, like, I think that's fun for people. I think people actually do like Easter eggs and they like going down the rabbit hole. But at the same time, you can't just be pure Easter eggs. And I think when you actually watch the ramp commercial, which is right there, it's like staring you in the face obvious what this does.

It's like the brand name, yellow in your face. What does it do? You have to do things that takes you 10 hours. Now there's 10 people. There's 10 copies of you that do the thing that you do. can do it in five minutes. And so you can just do it much faster. And so you can watch this and not know anything about ramping.

You know, okay, corporate card. Multiply what's possible. Like, I have a task in accounting. It looks like an accountant. I'm triggered on that. I'm familiar with this character. And so all of that is like clarity at the top and then tons of depth. And even in that video, there's a whole bunch of Easter eggs in the video.

It was directed by someone who directed the office. And there's different actors from the office in there. And there's layers. And then you go on social media and you see other. stuff. So really, really great, like 360 execution. Yeah, what worked well was like classic Super Bowl ad, right? Easy to understand celebrity popular character. Plus a bunch of the super internet native stuff, like physical activation, and then

localized activation. So you had people, the Super Bowl is NSF. You have thousands of people in SF participating, like on the ground. And so there was, again, Dylan Field. I love it. And this was so crazy because Anne, Anne, Con, from ramp told me at one point like, oh, we're sending all the Bryan's. And then she was mentioning like, oh, well, they'll also be like ramp people there with like prospective clients and stuff. And I was like, oh, they'll probably do like one or the other. And they wound up doing

everything. So like Brian and a whole bunch of lookalikes were just there in basically the front row of the Super Bowl. And like, how can you not take a picture of that? It's so innately viral. It was very, very funny. Yeah. Insane, insane production. Yeah. And it's just like these multiple touch points all have like different shots on goal and they all have different like probabilities that you can sort of wait and be like okay well the if the ad is really loved we'll we'll jump to the top of the rankings in this but then also there's a chance that like this photo gets like mega viral or this this like someone cool goes to the tailgate and they post about that and so there's like all these different all these different touch points that have like

different shots on goal as opposed to just like okay we sent the big check to NBC we hope the ad goes well right yeah I was pretty funny. I, on the way, on the drive from the tailgate to the game, I was sitting with Eric, and we were just catching up on life and business and all that stuff. And he's wearing the bald cap the whole time,

which I should have here, but he was just like stayed in it the whole time. Yeah. Really fun. It was wild. Really quickly, let me tell you about re-stream. One live stream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to re-stream.com. There was Brian lookalike spotted at the

Super Bowl. There were just random people who I think, went to the tailgate or got their head shaved and like went and stuff it's like they they were really like people all over the place we were we were sitting across looking across the entire stadium and we found the public team and we were resuming we could zoom in enough to to wave it was very funny the testament to the new iPhone camera like the powerful x zoom you go 40x and you can actually see people all the way across the stadium Ammon says Open AI add flop. Live with the Normies.

Didn't really get it. I thought they were going to tie it all together. Nine likes. What? I didn't really get it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It is tricky. Yeah, it was just like a bunch of cool things and then a product and a name for a product that nobody knows about. That's the issue. Yeah. If you have a very popular product like Budweiser or something like that, you can just show a bunch of random images and then show your logo. Yeah.

But if you do. don't, if you're, if you just show a bunch of random, like, cool scenes or whatever, it's inspiring. It's, it's, like, uplifting. And then you flash a logo that nobody knows. You end up with something like, that doesn't really, like, leave that much of an impression. Do we have the, the Google ad? Because I, I believe Google went way more practical on this. Pull it up, Tyler. Let's talk about the, before we get to that, we can talk about the Coinbase Super Bowl ad. This was probably the most controversial. I still need to see exactly what they did. I saw some images of this. And, you know, I saw some images of this. And, uh, before we get to that. I saw. And so. But I saw. But before we get to that. And before we can. I saw. them putting something on the sphere, which was surprising to me because they didn't put the, like the Super Bowl was not in Las Vegas. So the sphere is like a different advertising surface, but I guess it's cool to be like multiple touch points in that way. I did like the jackals. Pull up the one I'm on in the chat. We ran into Brian Armstrong and Fred Ersum, the co-founders of Coinbase and they had these really cool leather, letterman jackets. They're fun. Wait, is this the, is this somebody watching the ad? Yeah. Okay.

Let's watch this. Sound on. So it's a single song. Okay. They like switch up the, it's like a state change, right? So it's like you're paying attention. And then you just see Coinbase. That's funny.

That's really funny. Anyways, really, I mean, the Coinbase team responded to the criticism and said, if you're talking about it, it worked. Cryptos for everybody. A lot of people, were not fans, but I don't know. I thought it was fun. I like that they, I like that they do something different each time. It's like a couple years back to back. With the QR code last year? The QR code and the DVD thing was very cool. I think there was a, there was also a dust stuff about that because I think

it crashed the servers because there was so high demand because everyone scanned at the same time or something like that. But, but I, but I liked the QR code. I like the direct, the direct calls to action. I like, I like the introductions, the very clear statements. Unless, you know, I think Apple, Google, like the really established brands, do you have the permission to sort of go higher abstraction and just sort of do like these brand films. For the AI labs who are trying to push a particular product, it's, it feels like a little bit too soon, a little bit too risky. But I don't know. Anyway, yeah, yeah, some people like the Coinbase ad. But some people.

Yeah, it was like very 50-50, polarizing. Yeah. Let's pull up the... What we do. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. All right, let's pull up the Gemini. I want to see the Gemini ad. I want to see the Gemini.

It went with a full 60 seconds. Okay, full 60 seconds. Yeah, I saw some people reacting this. It's very clear. It's like, what you see is what you get. Like, this is the actual experience of using the product. Yeah, it's next to mine. And Google does a great job of, like, pulling on hard strings.

And integrating with Google photos. That makes sense. Yeah. Then showing off the features. These beds can go right there. A banana. Killer feature. That's cute.

And look, here's the yard. Oh, we could have a trampoline. This is actually how a lot of people have delightful experiences with AI. Like, this is, like, what a lot of families are using AI for. We're doing a remodel, and we're using AI for this stuff. and you put in what you have and edit it. And it's cute. And like the kids love it.

You always go back to the example of like, make me into a dinosaur. Like that's delightful. That's sweet. That's just like a nice ad. I don't know. I think a win. If you're an AI. Even Ross doesn't like it, well.

I'm not going to do that. That's funny. Yeah, NAA says Google's focus is a lot on multimodal as expected. Yeah, smart. They had a lot of success, obviously, with Nana Banana. You should lean in. Yeah, totally. Yeah, that ad.

It also works better. AI company running, if you're running an ad yesterday and you're an AI company and people didn't viscerally hate it. Yeah, you want. Yeah. No, totally. And also leading into the visual stuff works super well in a visual format like a Super Bowl ad. Like Codex, like even if even if you had like a million doovers, it's a hard product to explain.

It's like it's a desktop app with a lot of text and it's in dark mode and it's going to write code, but only behind the scenes. And you don't really have to know how to write code, but it's going to write code. but it's going to write code, which is not very aesthetic on the screen at the Super Bowl. And yeah, you could like maybe puppeteer a robot arm, but that's probably going to be a little bit harder because it's where you're getting a robot arm, and then you have to figure out how to hook that up to your laptop to run codex.

So there's like an extra step there. It's a little bit tricky, but, you know, Google knows how to just like deliver, like, you know, here's a heartwarming experience. Here's a positive experience. Let's focus on that. Let's not talk about any of the complexities of the technology. necessarily in this format. What else we got?

Mike Duda was... Live tweeting. Live tweeting his reactions. He, let's see... I don't know which are these... State Farm tried really hard. Okay.

Draft Kings, good spot, but not built for the Super Bowl. Toyota continues its long tradition of kind of off Super Bowl commercials. Not good. We got to talk about the Shvedka ad. We should pull it up. Let's pull it up, Tyler. Let me tell you about Phantom.

fund your wallet without exchanges and middlemen and spend with the phantom cart. Yeah, I always think it's hilarious. They had a fully AI generated. They came out and wanted to be the first company. We're not an AI company, but we heard there's a backlash to AI and we would love a backlash. People are calling it the worst ad of all time. Of all time. Not even just in the Super Bowl.

They're just saying it's the worst ad ever. I do love when a brand just like rolls up to the Super Bowl with whatever their stock ad is. Like, I think that TEMU ad was not a Super Bowl spot. Yeah, it was just like a, it's performing pretty well. Streaming TV. Let's throw it on the Super Bowl. Okay, here's Svetka's AI vodka ad. Let's watch it.

Like, if I'm watching the Super Bowl with my kids, I'm just turning it off. That's really bad. Also, like, what's the meaning of the robot drinks the, like the mixed drink and it just pours out all over the other than. And Fetka, the issue is it tastes kind of like it should be used in, like, like machinery, heavy machinery. Yes, it does feel like a robotic, like fluid or something? Yes, yes.

It's rough. Anyways, rough. Also, that doesn't, that doesn't even feel like, like, I feel like if you're going to go all in on AI generated video, I want you using the latest and greatest. You got to be nano banana pro. Goldrock says, was their marketing budget $6 of. Exactly. No, I agree, Goldrug.

Like, like, there are very, I've seen these videos where they will take two perfectly generated images, and then they just use Kling to like interpolate between them, and they actually look really cool, especially if it's like a car or it's something that like AI is particularly good at generating and sort of like using it as a transition from a drone to inside of a car, like first person view. Like there are really cool and innovative ways to use AI imagery in a way that maybe it stands out as like, oh, that's obviously AI, but it's cool. Like if you're going to do the AI thing, like be Harry Potter Balenciaga, like do something that is iconic and interesting and inspired. Don't just be like one ad that we would have just used

CGI for last year and now we just use AI for it. It did not hit. What do you think? Well, I was saying we should watch Ryan Peterson's Flexport ad. Some are saying it, some are saying it might be AI. It might be AI. Okay, let's pull up Flexports ad. Let me tell you about Apploven. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.aI. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow to your business today. Let's pull up Ryan Peterson's Flexport ad. Okay. Looks real so far.

Seriously, Dad. How did all these jerseys get here? Well, kids, let me tell you about something called a global supply chain. First, jerseys are manufactured. Boxes are passing. And Logistics Company Flexport takes it from here. Then containers are loaded onto cargo ships.

Or pulled through the ocean by 100 pirates? Not exactly, honey. But if you want speed, Flexport does coordinate airframe. And fighter jets. Actually, buddy, Flexport then gets the jerseys through customs. We're back on the trucks. And then the superheroes fly the trucks to the stadium. And lightning zaps the jerseys onto the players.

And... Yeah, we're being sarcastic, guys. This is entirely AI. Entirely AI, but this is so good. But it has the... Nailed the feeling of a classic Super Bowl ad. Totally. And it's all things that...

Yeah, like, the budget to actually film trucks, crashing... You're talking about millions of millions of dollars. Ryan didn't actually run this. He didn't. But it's still got a bunch of views. It was very fun. And it's interesting because he's actually explaining the flexport business, but in this funny way that you keep asking,

and then the lightning comes down, or then the superheroes fly. So you're explaining it to a kid, but you're, like, because if you just sit there and you just do the vanilla, like flexport explanation, that's going to be a little dry from the Super Bowl audience? What's interesting is now, I feel like,

I mean, I'm sure smart advertising agencies are already doing this, where it used to be that you would, a company would say, hey, I want to run a Super Bowl ad. They'd go and talk to a bunch of different agencies. They would get a, they'd do an RFP. Yep. And then the agencies would, like, come up with some concepts

that they would basically script out, maybe they add some images or whatever. Now it feels like the agencies have to actually make an AIV one of the ad and say, like, here's our five concepts. If you hire us, we'll, like, narrow in and actually make it, hire, higher actors, maybe not use entirely AI. Yeah. But I thought that was really good.

And I can't believe. I think he made that himself. I think that he wrote the script and concepted everything and actually like prompted everything, which is like pretty remarkable. And I think it all flows from the idea of like having a viewpoint, having an insight, having like an idea that makes sense for the Super Bowl. Maybe Flexport should just get this like add a layer of polish and then and then run this. Orrin went so hard on the Svedka app. He says, this was the first AI generated Super Bowl out ever, a milestone for truly no one.

The worst of agencies pitching be the first that no one but the agency cares about. Much rather would have watched a cast of characters workshop how they're actually going to become the top vodka of 23. That's a cool concept. And there's a lot that they could have done. And, yeah, I mean, the actual, like, character design of the Svedka bot is very off-putting and very,

it's just very plasticy and it doesn't even feel like a modern humanoid design. Like if you put this next to like a one-X or a Tesla, you know, optimist, like you're just, it feels like this is what like the 90s called they want their robot design back. Like that's what it feels like to me. Anyway, let's move on to some other tech ads. First, let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of ITHs. and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and pass resets.

Rippling ran an ad. Let's pull it out. Parker Conrad. An absolute dog. With Tim Robinson. I love Tim Robinson. Who's fantastic. He's so funny. But nasty to me.

After years of planning, I'm finally going to get my revenge. I'm going to trash to town with Baby Breck. Unfortunately, Baby Breck hasn't been onboarded yet. We're still waiting for his laptop and health benefits. Baby Breck? You don't even know what a laptop is. He's not onboard it? No.

And his harness wasn't approved by finance. They're stuck chasing down receipts. The harness was going to dangle him from the chopper when we bring him into the town and drop him in. It's like so perfectly like he's tripping over his words. See, this is funny. This is really, really, really funny. Yeah. If you know Tim Robinson.

Yeah. But my concern is, I mean, I don't know how. I honestly don't know how many. He's pretty popular now. I mean, his show on Netflix is pretty big. Yeah. Okay. leave is like he's he's definitely funny and and I mean that that style of comedy can just be I don't know

it is it is a little no but the there's so many Tim Robinson sections where he is in a workplace setting totally talking exactly like that I just love I I love when tech companies and founders become like patrons of the arts in the sense that like like this is probably like a pretty big payday for Tim Robbins or Robinson Robinson um Tim Robinson love him want to support him and it's just like it me like the brand because I'm just like, I like that he likes, that they like the same person as I and they like, you know, got him to do just a funny gag. It's so funny because I've like actually laughed at Tim Robinson content so many times. That's seeing this, I don't even know. What is Baby Breck? I think it's just like a character they made up. A character that they made

up that's like a Godzilla type that's going to wreck the city and these are like evil villains and they're planning, but they're, they need to onboard a rip. We saw this ad in them. to dangle him from the chopper. Yeah. It just assumes you know all the lore of this campaign that, like, who knows where it came from? But he done even know a laptop is? What is?

What a laptop is? He doesn't even know what a laptop is. The hashtag. Yes, rippling. Exactly one post with this hashtag, killing it. This is so funny. But I... Yeah, I was waiting for...

I know a number of companies have been circling Tim Robinson being like be the first tech company to work with Tim Robinson. I really do think that there's there's some alpha in like if you're if you're just like on the fence. 55 GPUs, 55 D-Sters, 55 NeoCloud. That's a great reference. That would have been incredible. We need to get some hyperscaler on that one. Cadillac. Okay.

Ran a full one minute. One minute ad. Super Bowl ad. Let's... Wichenzo, watch it. Former guest. First, let's tell everyone about public.com.

Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. That's right. Okay, let's watch the Cadillac F1 video. AI. I don't think so. Probably just CGI. I'm so excited for Cadillac F1.

I think I'm the only one, but... I'm very excited for it. See, that could easily be CGI, it could easily be AI, but sort of depends on who you put on the team. I like a building the car, like a car breakdown. It's team sport. Together. It's an engineering challenge. It's like the moon landing, is that what they're saying?

TWG is sort of the presenting sponsor of Cadillac F1. I like the livery. It's hard when you don't have a really bold color. Like McLaren Orange, Ferrari, Red. Black and silver is kind of... The black and silver's cool, but it's a little understated for the grid. So it doesn't quite jump out at you

the way an Aston Martin Green does. But over time, you know, hopefully they can kind of dominate that. But Mercedes sort of has carved out like the silver line a little bit. So. TWG has range. They're unique holding companies,

strategically investing in and operating businesses across investment management, securities, AI and technology, finance and corporate lending, merchant banking and private investments, and sports, media, and entertainment. Thank goodness. There we go. They can do it all.

Somebody from TWG once, randomly. But Apple, Parker, says, amazed Apple's finally going for the Spotify jugular, promoting the ability switch easily to Apple Music during the Super Bowl. Yes. So the Apple Music brand reached during the Super Bowl, I think was number one or number two, right up there with Budweiser. It did very well. I saw it winning awards. I haven't seen the ad. Let's pull that up while I tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs.

While we're pulling that up. Apple Music was also, they also presented the halftime show. Yes, they presented a half-time show. They had a crazy box. They panned over and break it down. What happened? So we're in the stadium and they do one of those, let's cut to the box. They got the long lens looking inside the box and who's there? Tim Cook.

Everyone knows Tim Cook, so they didn't need to give him a little tagline. But there was this other guy whose name was Dave Grohl. And I guess they were worried that people wouldn't know who he was. So they put the little Dave Grohl tagline there. But they didn't need to give one for Tim Cook. Tim Cook was aura farming. Yes.

His box was crazy, actually. And it was funny because I'm, of course, joking, but Tim Cook was, like, sort of in the shot, but on the edge of the shot and kind of like, the photographer or the videographer or the cameraman was, like, sort of moving Tim Cook in and out of the shot, really focused on Dave Grohl, who was, like, putting on a fun performance

and, like, chugging a beer and being funny. And Tim Cook was just off to the side. And I was like, pan over, show us the big guy. Show us the CEO of Apple. That's who I care about. It's Super Bowl. Well, we can talk about the halftime show. from our point of view since we were there.

I would say the energy, the production value was insane. Like very, very cool, unique looking setup. It was really funny because I was, like, looking away while they were setting up and I looked down. I was like they basically created Puerto Rico. They recreated the entire island. They had plants and people in plants,

and the plants were so funny because it seemed like the people in the plants couldn't see out very well. And so they had like air-travels. traffic control people that were like moving the plants around like yelling. Yeah. You could tell they would be forward. They would be getting like right in the face of the plants and yelling like go this way. It was crazy.

But the production value was insane. The energy in the stadium was completely dead. Dead. No one was dancing. It was very, actually no, Dylan Patel was dancing. Yes.

He was going to. He was like, it was so funny because he was going to walk down and sit next to you. And then he was like, he was like, actually, no, I'm going to stand up here. I got to dance. And then he just started dancing.

Dylan, Dylan held it down for everybody. Yeah. I think the audience of people that go to the Super Bowl, it's a lot of older folks, and they were just not into the new kid on the block bad bunny. But it really was like a remarkable production when I think about like what we do here in terms of live production, cameras, chiron's, all sorts of stuff. So much goes into it. And to do that and say, you have 20 minutes to build a city on the field. and then you're going to walk around with wireless cameras that look like Ari Alexis, it looks like a movie.

It's like perfectly shot. You don't even see, if you're watching from home, you don't see that you're at the Super Bowl until like a couple minutes in. And then if you're at the stadium, you don't see what's happening on the performance because it's not on a stage. It's like in this interior zone.

Yeah, like you can't even tell that that's at the Super Bowl until like they start panning out and showing you the full thing. But so much layered detail in the performance, so many Easter eggs, going back to the era of Easter eggs. It was designed. It was very much felt designed for television. Totally, totally. And that's what the Super Bowl has become. And the Super Bowl halftime show has become like it is an opportunity to bring in a new audience who would not necessarily be watching the Super Bowl. But they come for this. And then they maybe some of them drop off, but some of them stick around. And it's just like a new introduction. But it really, really crazy. At one point, he climbs up on a on a, on a, on a.

a on a telephone pole, which again was constructed 20 minutes before, there's a camera that's, I think, battery powered and wirelessly streaming. And so you have talent who's like a multi-millionary. You can't fall down and get injured. He's at the top of this telephone pole. There's a camera there that shows him. And then fireworks start going off. And so the combination of like fireworks, camera equipment and elite talent that cannot be injured was like a really remarkable, just, you know, magic trick from the production team. And of course, there's a whole bunch of fireworks and whatnot. Yeah, I was a lot of people, obviously, you know, somewhat, somewhat divisive online because

there are people that were frustrated because they couldn't understand what he was singing about. But from a purely commercial standpoint, I think it makes a lot of sense for the Super Bowl, specifically because a bunch of people that wouldn't have watched a Super Bowl that are international are going to tune in. So it, you know, understand. I was in the moment thinking that it would be great if Apple had their new, like, translating AirPods and you could actually hear in real time.

Yeah, yeah. But. Yeah, you could probably throw those on. Anyway. Yeah, and it, you know, surrounded by a bunch of, like, AI ads, and then you have this, like, insane IRL experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was very much, like, a return to practical effects, and there's all these cameos and details.

And, yeah, just really remarkable to watch the video. not so remarkable seeing it from the stance. But anyway, do we have the Apple ad available? No, no, no. Oh, they didn't even run that? It was like integrated into the show. Oh, that was the thing. Oh, okay.

Let's go to the AI. AI.com. AI.com. AI.com. You wanted AI, you know where to go. AI.com. They spent $8 million for a Super Bowl ad. Yeah, Bobby says, and the NFL is in the midst of a big international expansion.

So they're playing a bunch of international games. Totally. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they play Game in Mexico, London, Canada and stuff, trying to bring the sport of football to the world. What do we have here? AI.com. It's only 30 seconds long, but it seems to have accomplished the goal.

Did they have a voiceover in the actual ad? I don't know. You can just kind of see it, but it was, Big Dukah says, AGI is coming, and it's a 503 service temporarily unavailable screenshot because I think they got so much traffic. But it was a very odd question. So you go to AI.com and asks you first to log in with Google. So you have to give this new website access to your Google account, which is like insane. Because they're wrapping open claw. Yeah, which it's an open claw wrapper.

And so I go in there. That's a new company. And I was like, I don't have a single, you know, I have multiple Google accounts. I was like, I don't have a single account that I'm willing to just connect to some, some app that has existed for. Yeah, right there. Yeah, so we can't even find the ad online. I can't find it anywhere. Chris, the founder,

I don't think shared it anywhere. We're trying to understand the bigger project, because it seems like the domain buy was maybe longer than the buildout of the product, because it seems like it's an open-claw fork of some sort.

And the domain name was maybe $70 million. They say it's $5. $500 for a vibe-coded site, probably fake, but funny. Okay, we got the ad now. Oh, we do. Okay, let's pull it up. Let's pull up the ad.

What else we got? Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Okay. Do you think this is AI generated? Because if this ran first before Svedga, Svegah got scooped. No, this looks like maybe traditional motion graphics. I don't know.

It's hard to tell these days. AGI is coming. Get your handle now. You're going to want, you're going to want, you know, I'm a sucker. I'm a sucker for locking down. I know, I was interested in. What are they doing there? They're trying to get people to.

Mark. Oh, Zuckerberg. I was thinking Mark Chen. Yeah. So. Yeah, I mean, the whole thing is, I invited Chris, the founder on. We'll try to get him on to understand more. The longer strategy.

One of the things, so he had a lot of success clearly buying crypto.com. Yeah. You know. Computer.com arena. He's in L.A. He basically owns L.A. Yeah. But the difference with crypto is, like, building an exchange is, like, somewhat, like, a commoditized platform, at least in its simple state.

You're like, I want people to buy crypto in my app, in my exchange. To come here, they buy crypto.com. Okay. The difference with A.I.com is, like, I think to actually compete in this domain, your product's going to have to be insane, right? Because you're competing with OpenAI. Gemini, Anthropic, you're competing with perplexity. Like there's so many, you know, a thousand different startups. And so I think this ad is not going to give people a lot of,

the whole experience here is not going to give people a lot of confidence. One, getting people to like sign up, connect, they're not even giving them an opportunity to just create a normal account. Yeah, that is wild. One, that's crazy. But the experience has got to be way better if you do give it access to your email because then immediately knows who you are, what you talk about, what you shop for.

Yeah, but also running a Super Bowl ad. and only having Google. That is crazy. There's so many people that are on Yahoo and Outlook and any other service. There are people that are like, I'm an ICloud guy.

It's like rare, but it's still like millions and millions of people. It's just not in your target market. Very odd. Yeah. Byrd.com. Where D.C. brands, B2B startups and AI companies

advertise on streaming TV, pet channels, target audiences, and medulla details just like on meta. Georgie, do you have anything else on AI.com? Adam Strong said, did you already cover this? No, no. Eight million for Super Bowl ad,

70 million for domain name, $500 vibe-coded site, Cloudflare Basic hosting, priceless. Yeah, the app did not, or the website did not feel polished. This is Paul E. Williams post with 18,000 likes. Love the idea of running a Super Bowl ad that just says, go to my website,

and then not being ready for the traffic. Yeah, I mean, you can, like, cash the site, like locally, everywhere, and have it be super static and, and, and bury the call to action. Like, you can capture someone's email in the browser and then just hold it there for an extra minute while you give them some other experience,

so you're, like, pushing the funnel so your server isn't on fire. Like, to actually, usually, like, what, the thing that brings down the sites that are, like, deeper in the back end, like the database is not performing or whatever. It's very rarely, like, I couldn't get them HTML on time. Like, that's pretty solved.

And so it's very, very odd. But I don't know. At the same time, like, reflecting on the crypto versus AI thing. Like there was never really a crypto talent war like there was in AI because there was never a moment where it was like, oh, like this platform

needs this particular feature and only that person, that scientist, knows how to do it. It's like there were important features that got built, but a lot of them were done open source. And then the value of the platform was like the liquidity, the scale, the features, the compliance, the regulatory, like all of that.

And you can't just like, post, one person and then all of a sudden be like, I have Coinbase's stuff. And so very interesting question of like, like it's maybe not Crypta.com. How do you build something that's as performant as perplexity or Claude or Gemini without that team or maybe you're ready to invest in that team? Or I mean, if the most part of.com brand I've never heard of. If you can get through to the site requires you to authorize login. And like I read through the private. I read through the privacy policy and the terms, and I was like, eh, like, definitely not. Yeah.

And so, yeah, again, what's the point? Yeah, it's interesting that AI is somehow more intimate in many ways. If you're talking about personal assistant, personal AI, then I, like, I would trust crypto.com with my money in many ways because I'm like, okay, if I buy a Bitcoin, like, there's a chance that it's an offshore exchange. It goes bankrupt, but, like, it's contained to, like, whatever you're doing there. Whereas if you're letting an AI into your life. It has access to all your crypto and all your bank accounts and all your emails. Yeah, one reason to trust crypto.com is it made it through the last cycle. That's true.

That's true. And I think a lot of people felt like, hey, I haven't heard. I mean, the company, I think, was mostly pretty much bootstrapped. I think it's mostly, mostly founder, you know, entirely owned by the founders. So they've been stable in that sense. But anyways, very, very funny. You know what I'm going to say. Turbo Buffer.

Serverless Factor and Fultex are built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely. scalable. Before we talk about Jason Carman's ranking, no, we got to jump in with some breaking news. Apparently OpenAI actually rolled out ads in chat GPT today. Today, let's go. Finally, should we ring the gong for them? We beat him to it. We beat him to it. We front. Breaking news, ads have officially launched in chat GPT. You can go to the free tier or I believe the go tier

as well and enjoy ads in chatybtee you'll see probably enhanced rate limits and extended functionality more reasoned tokens can you can you work to try to find to get served an ad yeah i want to see what they actually yeah you have to downgrade or create a new account maybe yeah new email new email i i would love to know you know how much how how how much do they exaggerate when you see an ad like they could do a blaring red background it's very obvious this is the ad and then this is the content will the ads be even at all related to the content, at all related to stuff you've seen in the past, or is it just going to be completely random? We'll see. And I'm sure we'll see a lot of screenshots in the timeline. Yeah. I think from what I understand, it won't be related to the content

because people are going to be annoyed at that. I would expect it in the future that is, right? That's just sort of the natural evolution, right? And so that's like one way to justify Anthropics, you know, kind of like original ad, which is like, hey, you asked about this thing. You asked about how to get healthier and we offered you this drug. Maybe that's not that, not super aligned. But in the meantime, I think it'll effectively

be display ads based on your interest graph, right? What they know about you based on what you've searched in the past. So interested to see this. I'm not going to say anything more positive. Your audience captured. Yeah, everyone, everyone, it's so funny. I went from like last year being like George's a hater.

Hyper critical. Hypercritical opening. I was like, I was stealing everything. Yeah, John was the steel man. I was like, SOR is going to fail.

Yeah. Atlas is going to fail. They're launching adult mode. I'm like the, like the most vocal. 1.4 trillion's too much. Like, where's the other than this?

Yeah. Most like vocal critic. I'm talking about like, you know, throwing shade at Sam's answer on BG2 saying like that was a worst possible answer you could have given. I have zero confidence. Uh,

to suddenly I say like, I just pop my head up. at one point and say, hey, I think the ads are kind of deceptive. Parker says the amount of athletic greens and Squarespace ads is going to be tough. I'm excited for it. I'm excited for it. So anyways, we'll see what Tyler can dig up. See what people get.

Let's also tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Yeah, Brian says, to be fair, sore and Atlas have kind of failed. And yeah, I said that basically the day they launched. I was like, I think SOAR is a cool way to generate a video. I don't think it's going to work. And we talked to Sam about that too.

People are using it more as like generate something to send to a group chat, generate something that goes onto Instagram or something like that. Or even just like use it as a tool in the tool chain for certain things. Yeah, anybody that said, anybody that said, oh, oh, you're just like pumping open AI. It's like, I'm sorry, we literally had Nick. on the show last week. Anyways, trying to provide a balance point of view.

I haven't been studying. Let's head over to Jason Carmen. He built a tier ranker with all 52. If you want to share where you think each brand landed, you can go to story.org. And you can tap an ad, then you can tap to rank it, and you can decide where you want to put Budweiser.

Where does Pepsi go? What'd you like? What'd you hate? and you can take a screenshot of this and share it. And Jason, of course, he makes cinematic ads for science and technology companies, and he will be sharing his rankings tonight. I guess he probably already put them out.

Let me see. They're going to find these. But anyway, go check it out at story.ink. He loves a good... Serena Williams partnered with Roe. She's been partnered with Roe for a long time. Yeah. But partnered for a Super Bowl ad, which is a new level up.

Let's see what she had to say about Roe. I'm on Roe. 34 pounds down on GLP-1s. Healthier on Roe. Supporting on Roe. FDA-approved GLP-1 options. Now even in a pill. Weight loss expertise, I trust.

I'm moving better on Roe. Extremely clear. Yeah, a lot of repetition. It's just like, this is what. it does. I'm famous and here's exactly the value prop. Yeah, good pitch. On row at least five times.

Yes, yes. If you don't know the brand by the end of that, that's good. Sticking with Roe's kind of history and direct response and just growing up as a DEC brand. They're like, if we run an ad, it can't just be an or a farm. They were doing TV direct response super early. I remember seeing those ads in bars and random

TV spots. They were doing NBA, MLB, all sorts of stuff. They mentioned the pill Do you think that's an actual, do they have an actual? Yes, so it's the same thing. Front end to Novo, front end to Wugovi. Yeah, yeah, to the big pharma companies. They are, I think that they have fully stayed out of the compounding space or at least a little bit.

And really, and really let them just be this like, you know, like seamless front end to deal with doctors. But anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business. and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Let's pull up the Corweave ad. I love Corweave. I'm a big fan. This ad is controversial. You can't spell anything without AI.

We were meming this, too. You can't spell Claude without AD. A as an aerospace. I like this transition. This is cool. And is for nanotech, navigation, neuroscience. Why is simply yes. Yes to predict the storms to keep people safe.

Yes to empowering. There's a lot of good stuff with AI. T is for translation, trading. AI is great at translation. The tools teachers need to educate each kid in their own way. That's sort of a way of transition. Age is for healthcare to help keep humans healthier, home automation and robotics.

I is for ideas and the power to grow them exponentially. In, this is for now. The time to never say never. G is for the good we could do with AI. Genomics. Green internet says, sir, it's a bubble. Moon boots? Gravity?

Oh, anti-gravity boots. That's what it is. Okay. The chance of rubber... Corweave, the essential clif. So the Chance of Rapper part felt super random. I haven't seen or heard from Chance of Rapper in a long time. I think what they were trying to do is they're probably looking around and saying

data centers are the most hated thing in America right now. Yeah. We got to make the case for data center. Yeah, this is what my... But I would have liked something like something like... potentially even more direct and like tactile. Just kind of like rambling on. It was it wasn't again.

Yeah. I don't know. It wasn't it wasn't like it wasn't it didn't really like pull you in. Yeah. Just kind of like background noise. Yeah. There was one there was one part where Dan says chance the rapper WR, APP, E.R. That would have been good.

Yeah. Yeah, there's a line in there where he says something about predicting the weather. Add repriced their CDS spreads and bring down the refinancing cost. We will find out for sure. No, the business is doing fine. Up 8% today. Total victory. But no, no.

So he's doing this cool alliteration thing where there's different, like it's T and then he mentions predicting the weather, which I think is cool. And I think that's actually like a great story of AI. Like, you know, oh, there's a flood. No, it's not. Okay. But then. Just because we've had.

weather forecasts forever. So if you're trying to justify data center development and say like, hey, AI is cool, actually. You can predict the weather. People are going to be like, cool, the thing that I've been able to turn on my television and understand. Yeah, the newsman tells me. Okay, well, I don't know. My point was that each letter had five or six things instead of like one concrete thing. Maybe you want to narrow it down and be able, and unpack it and actually make the case, because clearly just mentioning that you can predict the weather with the AI didn't hit with you, but maybe if they unpack it with three or four sentences, they can convince you a little bit more.

And then this is trading. I think a lot of people don't care about trading. Yeah, part of it is like, doesn't Correveve have like a handful of customers that actually matter? Yeah, and they're also like deeper in the stack than most of companies. It's like there will be a weather prediction company that uses a foundation model that is run on Corveveveeve, but you won't even, you won't see Corweave powering that.

So even if you are like, wow, I actually got a flash flood warning early. I moved out of town and it was amazing predicting the weather's IBM Watson. Yeah, Cam, there probably was an IBM Watson Super Bowl at some point. It was like in the future, we will be able to predict the weather. Yeah. Oh, well. Oh, well. Yeah, this one was not that well received.

Let's head over to Duncan Donuts. First, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending. with AI. Let's go to Good Will Duncan. Let's go to Goodwill Duncan. A much better version of Goodwell Hunting was made as a sitcom with a real genius in the lead and some other records. So this is AI as well, right? De-aging. You'll arrange the Munchkins and the Fibonacci sequence?

I got a genius working for me. He's such a genius and why he put ice in his coffee, huh? Come on, Chuckie. I'm just Will hunting. I'm not a genius. I will marry the first man that can help me with the Fibonacci sequence. How are you doing? Slowly. Don't you have a girlfriend?

We're on a break. I don't need her. I stick and everything I need right here at Duncan. Hey kid. If you're still single doing this Boston shtick and working for Duncan when you're 50, I'm gonna be very disappointed. Isn't that your girlfriend?

You like donuts? Yeah, very chaotic. Well, this is my new boyfriend. How you like these, Brady? On time. They really relate. the cameo button. How many cameos do you want? Yes. Yeah, the, the, the AI, CGI was a little rough.

Yeah. It wasn't it was reasonable. The haircut is what's hilarious to me. The putting Ben Affleck in the Matt Damon haircut. That's very funny. But not a great pitch for Duncan donuts. I don't know. Yeah, what's the takeaway? Think about Duncan. Sometimes all that matters is you get people to think about that. They had fun with it? I don't know. It's interesting. The Squarespace ad was particularly odd. I think the Squarespace one was weirder to me. I like that one. You liked that one? We'll debate this while I tell you about Labelbox. R.L. Environment's Voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data, label boxes the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams continuing to watch the Squarespace ad with Emma Stone.

Oh, this is a Jen Spark ad. Oh, what's JenSpark? You should choose to. Monday, January 9th. This is today. Finish his slide deck. Okay. Now you're not working from home.

Hey, you put on pants. This is practical. GenSpark. FaceTune went so hard. Parker's got it. Done? Circle back on out of here. Let Jen Spark automate your work and take a day off.

Okay. AI for Enterprise. Jen's Mark. Unicorn raised around half a billion to date. But yeah, competing, I mean, effectively competing with co-pilot, right? Co-Pilot also ran it out for Excel. Let's pull up the Squarespace ad now. Yeah. This is one where they just let the director go crazy. So find your domain name. She wants Emmastone.com. And it's unavailable.

So she breaks the laptop And there's a whole bunch of laptops That have already been broken So she's furious She gets another laptop It's still unavailable She smashes it again Now I was thinking that this

Get your day Oh this is a shorter version So there's another version where like There's this rollerblader who comes in And like continually like delivers her new laptops She tries multiple times And I was like Oh I know where they're going with this

Domain Brokridge They're gonna help her buy emma stone.com From whoever owns it That go-duty feature that never works where, you know, you pay $70 and then they just take your money and they're like, yep, couldn't get it. Sure. But, you know, maybe their pitch is like, it works now. We're good at reaching out to the people that have the domains. And we will.

And so we got Emma Stone, Emma Stone. You can go there right now. And like, we brokered it for her. But they don't. They just end and they're just like, get your domain before it's too late. I don't think those products will ever work for everyday consumers because they'll tell you, they'll literally reach out to like Google.com. and say like, hey, if you give a 70 bucks, we'll try to get Google.com for you.

Obviously, they need to have some sort of layer of interaction. But you could imagine that between AI agents, a small sales force, really top tier people, like you could, Squarespace could have a serious domain brokerage that could do 80% of requests. Like, especially if you're Emma Stone and you have a budget. Yeah, it's kind of a rough. The challenge with the ad is that a lot of people

that do go on Squarespace and try to get a domain and make a website, we'll have that exact experience. Yes. So you're kind of like advertising the experience you don't want. Yes. Also, if you go to MSstone.com, it is her website. So it doesn't quite match.

They do a good job of saying, get your domain before you lose it. They tie it back to the Super Bowl ad. And it's the same video, like black and white texture. Yeah, you can see it. So it does complete the journey, but it's a little bit odd from the storytelling perspective because in the video she was unable to get Emmastone.com,

but then somewhere after the ad ends in the castle, in the island, she gets the domain and spins up a website from Squarespace. Anyway, beautifully shot ad and fun that they went black bars. I believe they didn't do a full widescreen ad. They did a little bit squarer, which I think is like a nod to Squarespace, maybe. I don't know.

We will see. We watched the Hems and Her Super Bowl. Oh, they launched one too? Interesting. I thought, I thought, I thought, uh, I thought, uh, I thought, uh, I thought row would be the only one. Okay. Let's, let's pull it up. I'm dropping it in here. I will tell everyone about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputer for training in the inference and scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And then we will pull up. I like the thunder. The cloud. We're adding two different effects today. It's amazing. Uh, let's pull up the hymns and hers ad. What is this one? say. Live longer. Okay.

Spend millions of, gee death are taking shots and be jumping. It buys more time. The wealth gap is a health gap. The rich have health care that comes to them. Custom formulated peptides, specialists on call and preventative care before they need. So it's democratizing health strategy. It's pretty wild. A bunch of biopulogic testing.

Oh, okay. Okay. I'm getting the EDM gone. This is a lot of content here. Microdosing? In a supermodic. In a supermodicesterone hormones to keep you feeling great. An early cancer detection through a simple blood test.

Okay. The same science. Regov says last ad before bankruptcy. No. Stocks down 17% today because of this ad. No. Yeah. I'm not kidding.

It's down because they got a very, angry, the admin, FDA came out hard against them Friday. Yeah. We had TJ Parker came on the show, broke it down on Friday, if you want to understand the him situation. And there's an article in Washington Post.

Eric Topal shared it. He says, Super Bowl Spot will promote a cancer test that can produce false results. I mean, every test can have false results. The question is like, is it out of the bounds of what the FDA approves? You know, even an off-the-shelf pregnancy test can have false positives.

That's why they say take multiple. But it does seem like the FDA is not a fan of the move fast and break things approach in this particular category. So rough. Move fast and disregard IP. That's another one. Disregard studies. It's a rough time. Make your own drugs.

Well, our first guest is joining in just a minute. But Michael Duda continues. his reviews, which I'm enjoying at this point. Homes.com, no. Roe, not entertaining, but it will be massively effective for Roe's business. I agree. It was like, okay, I get it, I get it, I get it, but that's the point. Wix Harmony, I think they meant to have that on Grammys last week. Open AI, expected better from the company synonymous with AI, so Michael Duda is going all over the place. Mr. Beast also collabed with Salesforce on a massive Super Bowl ad that had a lot of hype, giving away a million dollars. There's a lot of cool CGI in here.

We had the chance to meet Mr. Beast at the game. Yeah. Well, he's a ramp customer. Yes, that's right. He came by the ramp box yesterday. That's right. Yeah, we're very excited for him. Well, without further ado, let's bring Jason in from the re-stream waiting room.

Well, a little ado because I'm going to tell you about fin.a. The number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.a. Sorry, Jason. Welcome back to the show. Hold that thought. Hold that thought. It's a great product.

I love it. Thank you. Well, how are you doing? I'm doing well, thank you. Did you watch the Super Bowl? Are you a Super Bowl guy? Not really, actually. Did you see any of the ads?

Once I saw the end, the ad, I kind of tuned out. Yeah, you're like, okay, we're three hours before the game, jobs finished. I'm good. That's right. And you flew to San Francisco to see it because it was a regional buy. Exactly, of course. Couldn't miss it. Okay.

Well, the news that we wanted to talk to. Yeah, we were texting a little bit about the new Ferrari EV. and I think there's nobody that I was excited to talk to more than you about it. Just given your, I've always appreciated your personal taste in cars and just also in design choices broadly. And I think this is such a, for anyone that missed it, Ferrari is making their first electric vehicle, the luce. Yeah. Are I saying that correctly? Italian, sounding Italian.

Yeah, it sounds Italian. I thought they canceled their ear plants. But it's effectively like, we don't know exactly what the car looks. looks like, but it's like meant to be kind of a daily driver. It looks to be like some sort of hatchback, something like that. So not as aggressive looking as the GTC4 Luso or the FF, but looks fine and highly anticipated. And then just on the interior, they partnered with Johnny Ive and the Lovefront team. So I before I share my thoughts, I, I'd love to kind of like hear how you've been processing it.

Yeah, so I saw it this morning like everyone else did. I think they came out with it this morning or noticed it this morning. And obviously it's a demo. It's a 3D demo of kind of what this thing appears to be, at least the video was. And I think the first thing you go is that, well, that's at least very fresh. Like it's about time. It feels like car interfaces have really gone mostly in the wrong direction, just like black glass screens and everything's touchscreen. And we're starting to bring some switches back and dials back.

But clearly this feels a bit more considered. There's more tactile stuff. There's more real stuff integrating with virtual stuff. And of course, a lot of the design choices were very beautiful. Transitions were lovely. And there's no lag in all these things. Again, this is a demo. It's hard to say what this will really be driven on.

But it looked great. I think it looked great. There was a really nice, I would say the thing that really stuck with me was the integration between the virtual and the physical switches, is that when you move them up, like then a digital display comes up, little buttons on the top right corner adjusting some display stuff. Really, really nice. A lot of inspiration from other brands I saw too. I kind of felt like there was a little Aston Martin thing going on here. Yeah. So the DB9 era of Aster Martins, you take this key, this glass crystal thing, and you push it into

a slot to start the car. And I think that's what they were showing here is they put this. I like pushing it down. Like you can imagine the experience of like pushing the key in, having it lock in place, and then tapping it because it is, it's just a nice experience. Still, there's, I mean, I feel like so often I'm like putting my key in random different places at different times. And it's nice to just have a place in the car, push it, lock it in, you know where it is. And to leave it there. That's everything.

Yeah, exactly. It probably is magnetic, so it probably snaps in, snicks in and push down. But that's kind of an Aston derivative. And also the way the dials, when they light up, they go counterclockwise is also something that Aston was doing. So, Johnny, I being British, I wonder if there's a little bit of a call out to Aston there. Yeah, good point. But it's cool.

I would say, though, one thing that, you know, no one knows is what the outside of the car looks like yet. And I think great interiors need to be matched up with great exteriors. The best interiors in history, I think, were complete ideas. You think about, like, the, and I'll go off on this, so you tell me to stop. But, like, the VW, first VWGTI, Mark I, special interior, it felt like it fit with the exterior. The, like, Lancia, Delta Integral. LA's another car like that, just like the interior and the exterior just were perfectly built together. The Porsche 928 feels like the interior had to be in that car.

It couldn't have been in a different car. And so it's hard to evaluate with interior design like this is like, what does it look like fit in? Totally. That's the, that's the big unknown for me right now. Because I look at the mock up that everyone's been sharing and it's this like hyper modern, sporty hatchback. And then on the inside, you have all this analog buttons, and you have what looks almost like a Resto mod, like heavily inspired by some of legacy Ferraris from, you know, traditional classic Ferraris. And so right now, when you look at Johnny's work and you look at the mock up, it doesn't feel cohesive at all.

And the experience when you get into this sporty hatchback and then you have like an old classic Ferrari kind of like racing inspired steering wheel, just it looks strange. So I think we need to withhold judgment there. Kind of going into some of the more negative, like I never have something I've really disliked about some of the more modern AMGs. Is this like iPad interface? And you see this in some of the Aston's too, where it's like, hey, we didn't know where to put this screen, so we're just going to like bolt it on to the front dash and like put it out in your face.

And the experience of being a car in a car is just so incredibly nice when everything just kind of like blends in in the front and you're able to just focus. And I don't want a screen kind of pushed into my face. So some of the, like it feels like my big concern with this project is that Ferrari is not Apple. So Johnny doing, Johnny doing work, doing product design work and building products at Apple,

one of the greatest hardware manufacturers in history, probably the greatest hardware manufacturer and consumer electronic manufacturer in history, And then you put him in at a team at like Ferrari and then like it almost like he's going to be handicapped to some degree by Ferrari's own internal capabilities, which like anybody that's owned a Ferrari is like a never in my Ferrari ownership experience was I like, oh, Ferrari is exceptional at, you know, making electronic interfaces, right? Like they can't even, you know, there was like a very long period where the buttons would be sticky after a year, right? and that was just like an ongoing problem that they couldn't seem to solve. And so my concern is that Johnny's probably deeply handicapped,

not just by the Ferrari team, even though they're so great at making vehicles overall, but also from regulation, right? And that just because you want to do something doesn't mean you can do it, even if it would be a nice consumer experience. And so the excitement comes from fresh look at the interior, a bunch of new ideas,

bringing back these kind of analog, tactile experiences, taking inspiration from history, but then the concern is that it's Ferrari and they can't fully deliver on it. And some of these features aren't as reliable as you want them to be in on and on and on. You know, yeah, I agree with all that. I also think your point about the Mercedes AMG GT floating iPad. Like I love the way that car looks. Yeah, it's amazing. I love that car.

And I hate the entire. I will not buy one. I know. Because it looks, it's so bad. The other thing that's interesting is he also seemed to kind of, you know, Mercedes has these iconic round vents. And I kind of got that vibe from this interior too. Yeah, in the back.

You saw that. Yeah, in the back, the passenger vents look really cool. And they can point around in a unique way. Yeah, it had a bit of an AMG thing. But anyway, yeah. not to go like two gigabrain, but is there any translation that you think you can do any like red string drawing from like skeuomorphism to flat design like UI to what's going on with the Ferrari interior design language or any even just like reflections on your career and how you processed

skeuomorphic design and the transition to flat design which sort of I believe it was led from Apple and then everyone else just fell in line. But what was your experience there and then is there anything to pull from it? Yeah, this is a great point. I mean, I think that we lost a lot, actually, when we lost skemorphic design and we went to flat design.

And I think what we're seeing now is a pullback and you're seeing it everywhere. I think you're seeing it more in software too where there's more sort of textures and transitions and different things happening and shading again. You're seeing it in car design now with knobs coming back and neural surfaces.

And like I saw on the new Audi, I think they call it the Concept C or something like that, this new TT inspired design they're working on. Their interior is like very tactile. It's not just that there's buttons, like there's buttons, but there's also the buttons have texture and there's clicks and snicks and all these things that are going on. And I think that it's just, it's so deeply satisfying to know that when you put an interface into a certain position that you did it right and then it works. and that satisfaction, that physical feedback. The spring tension, all that stuff. And I think we lost some of that. I love seeing that it's coming back.

And, you know, I think, look, I saw some criticism online that, like, what Johnny Ives was, you know, designing stuff for billions of people and now he's designing something for, like, a thousand rich people, whatever. But I think this idea is going to make its way down the chain across. I think people are going to be inspired by this design in general and hopefully pay more attention to these things. I do think, though, it's very important that it's what we've seen. pretty much every car interior today can just be like pulled out and put into a different car.

It just feels like they're all the same. And I think that these brands need to figure out the whole idea and not just kind of just throw a bunch of screens that go, we've done it. We've made a touchy. Yeah. I mean, the Aston Martin has been ripped apart on some of their halo cars, the Valhalla, the Valkyry, where they just built this beautiful, like, racing machine. And then they're like, here's an iPad.

Right. And it's like, we got it. We got to get beyond that. Is the Ineos Grenadier underrated, overrated? Is it a gimmick or is it the future? I like the outside of it. I've never driven one. So inside, it's all physical switches for everything.

I mean, there are so many switches. I mean, they still have a screen a little bit, but like, you know, you have switches up on the top of the ceiling and all the way down to the cup holders and stuff. It's a little airplane cockpity. Yeah, it's a little airplane cockpity. But people love it, but it is, it feels like it's intentionally contrarian, which I think is a good exploration, but yeah.

I think they've leaned into what that is, which is like trying to go to become an old school Land Rover. I have a Land Rover defender, the current version, and I think they've done a really nice job with the interior in that car. There's some screens. They're relatively small, but a lot of things are still tactile. And also the interior really mimics the exterior. I think that's one of the best designed cars at the moment, actually,

inside and out, like combination, full ideas. There's some good stuff, though. But, and I think, like, Kia's doing some great stuff. There's a lot of cool stuff. I was telling a friend, like, yeah, it seems like the Ineos is, like, a huge hit. I just, like, it's like, every fifth car. And it's like, he's like, dude, you live in Malibu. It's like the prime.

It's like, I was like. But, yeah, the other criticism, again, I want to hold actual criticism until we see what the actual outside looks like. But the current renders that we're seeing just look like Kia's. like if this looks like it could be a key and that was the same criticism of the Purisangue which is like hey like this could be

you could put a Kia badge on it and I would think like you contrast it with like the Lamborghini where like everything's an octagon or hexagon and like it looks like everything is the most extreme just to turn it on you have to like click up and push down and there's like 25 different things

and it's like over-engineered but it's unmistakable and that's sort of the schick and it works I don't know I agree but I think this is credit to Kia, though, and not discredit the fire. I know. Yeah, that's good. He is doing some amazing design work. Totally. Totally.

And yeah, it shows. Who knows? Maybe they're a love from client, and they just said, keep our name off the web page. Quietly. Conspiracy theory here. My prediction with the Luchet is that it prices in the mid-300s, somewhere in that range. You'll be able to buy it for

200 within a year. I actually think they'll sell. I actually think Because they're EVs. The EV thing is so rough. I think they'll sell well because there's certainly demand for a dailyable Ferrari, but the Purisangway being priced at over half a million dollars, it just like really cuts out so much, so much of the market.

Who can actually, there's very few people that will daily a Ferrari that want that kind of brand surrounding them at all times. It's twice an iris. And then you're going to probably lose a quarter mill within a couple years. Like, these cars are going to be available for a quarter million dollars and not that long. Yeah. And I expect the EV, the depreciation to be even more vicious. But I expect these to do numbers in Cupertino from the old Apple Guard that wants to just feel like. By the way, I like that.

I did comment on this on X about how the worst part of this interface is the Apple CarPlay integration. Yeah, why? And I feel like there's a sweet revenge in that for Johnny and I think Mike, who's kind of an iOS designer, I forget his name, fantastic designer. But the fact that they made this look the worst. Yeah. Is that just because the design language doesn't match or it's not customizable? Okay.

Well, that doesn't match, but what's interesting in most cars, like, it's the best part because the rest of their interface sucks. Totally, totally. In this case, it's the Apple looks the worst. The Apple bit looks the worst. And I just think it's sweet revenge for them, frankly. Yeah, we're still in this messy middle where cars have basically two options. operating systems.

Yeah. And it's unfortunate. Yeah. Yeah. It's really bad in some cars where if you turn the volume knob, you can't access the, the, the, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, on top. And it's like, oh, come on, guys.

It is, it is, it is a, it is a, it is a, it is a, a, a, a old revenge to, like, spend your entire career building a walled garden and then be on the outside of that walled garden and be like, but I'd really like to get into the garden. And you can't because. You built it. That's right. That's right. Well, cool.

Thank you so much. Great to catch up. Thanks for popping on. Anytime, yeah. Talk of cars. Come back on. Come back on soon. Great to see you.

Have a good one. See it. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses.

And without further ado, we have Bill Bishop. You run cynicism. Welcome to the show, Bill. Good to see you again. Welcome back. Hey, thanks. You're having me back.

It's good to see you. How's your new year going? It's going pretty well, although it feels like we're near the North Pole here in D.C. We've been iced in for two weeks. It's pretty nuts. Describe iced in. Are you actually, you can't go outside? No, I got everything dug out.

But literally, at one point, the guys digging out my driveway were taking selfies with the blocks of ice they can pick up. It was so big. It was so big. It was frozen solid. Wow. And it still is. That's insane.

Do you watch the Super Bowl? Of course, and congrats on your ad. That was awesome. Thank you, yes. The earned media was, I don't know, what your R-R-I, like the multiples on your 50K, but that was, what a brilliant hack. Congratulations to you guys.

Yeah, thank you, thank you. Anything else? The game kind of sucked, but, you know, other than that. Yeah, it was not the most exciting, just a lot of field goals in the first half. Yeah, we unfortunately left like three minutes into the fourth quarter because it just, we knew it was going to be insane chaos getting out, and then it just got really.

it got a little more interesting. Yeah. So I have a question, but was that an interception or a fumble? Oh, I don't know. You're asking the wrong people. You're asking the wrong people. When did that happen in the game? Oh, that was their last touchdown, right?

Oh, okay. So we had, yeah, we had left. Okay. We had to get to the airport. And to be honest, it was tough to follow because we went with a bunch of, with the ramp team and a bunch of our friends. And so there was just. There were a lot of interesting conversations to have

with folks. And so there's a lot of opportunity just to get lost in conversation and then turn around and no, they scored. Anyway. Any of the ads stand out to you? The robot vodka ad that you guys talked about a little while ago, which was pretty awful.

But, you know, China's got the Lunar New Year's coming up next week and Lunar New Year's Eve, CCTV does this big spring festival gala with hundreds of millions people watch. It's going to be full of robots. So I'm very curious to see how they in the robot performances.

Yeah. Probably not drinking vodka through the neck. Yeah, that was very, very weird. Yeah, associating your alcohol, which kind of like tastes like engine lubricant with like heavy machinery is an interesting decision. I expect the robots to perform incredibly well just based on some of the demos we've seen

where these things are flipping around, they're moving like actual fighters or dancers. It's incredibly impressive. and still worried that we're going to let them sell, you know, 10 million of those in before we kind of wake up. Have you been following the DJI story? Which part of it? Just the ban and like how fast it's rolled out, if there's any loopholes.

Because you always hear the headlines like, you know, NVIDIA, the chips ban, like there's zero NVIDIA chips are going to China. And then it's like, oh, well, there's diversion, there's cutouts, there's Nerf chips that wound up. You could train deep seek. You could do a lot. and then the trade deal gets renegotiated. And so I'm just wondering, like, there were a couple founders who were sort of taking

victory laps in the drone, American drone community, and I'm rooting for them. I love an American DJI. GoPro famously failed at this, mostly because of the supply chain pricing, all of that. But it's always like, I see people take victory laps. And I'm wondering, like, it feels maybe a little bit, like, will the new regulation stick? how all-encompassing is the regulation? I think it's a bit premature, and I think you've seen already bits of it whittled away

where now you can buy previous models and parts for it. And so the problem, I think, really, is that DGI makes the best drones, at both in terms of performance as well as cost. And so unless the American firms can actually make drones that, like, law enforcement wants or various companies want, you know, I mean, it's in an unfortunate situation. I certainly hope the American drone makers can catch up,

but it, but it, and maybe this regulation will, will help, but, you know, we have to be competitive, right? Yeah, yeah, I mean,

it also just seemed like DJI. I mean, yeah, there were a ton of like commercial applications, but it was just such a go-to Christmas present for, you know, a lot of people like, you know, the casual outdoor person that goes on hikes,

they want to take cinematic video. Like, realistically, it's going to be collecting dust in three months, but it's going to be an epic present on Christmas. And so, I mean, that probably propelled a lot of sales and just helps get to scale. And that's important in these manufactured products, right? Uh-huh.

And again, as we all, you know, you've talked about ad nauseum with lots of people. I mean, China has the supply chains for this stuff and we still don't. And so whether or not these regulations will pull that supply chain creation here, it remains to be seen. The challenge, of course, is you have to balance cutting off access to products that customers actually not just want but need, like police departments, et cetera. But then at the same time, just making it so that some companies can, to take advantage of loopholes, have some sales, but still kind of wash their components through third countries that actually still are probably Chinese components. Yeah. No, no.

I mean, the supply chain, I remember digging into the small drone motor market. So the motors that go on those drones, the small motors. And there's, there are truly no American companies. There was one company in, I think, Seattle, that sold to private equity, and they immediately offshored all of the manufacturing, and it's just like this hold co now. And I think that now they're starting to bring some stuff back, so there's, like, green shoots, but these things take years and years and years. Just look at like TSM in Arizona.

So it took the years, maybe a decade to get actual to scale from, like, the initial plans. Anyway, let's dive into the PLA purges. We read through the Wall Street Journal's coverage, and I have a book. bunch of questions, but how are you framing it? How are you thinking about what's happening in China today? So the PLA purges have been ongoing for quite some time. They've accelerated over really the last 18 months or so. I mean, they are part of a multi-year process of Xi Jinping both starting out, you know, taking control of the PLA, but then also forcing through a whole series of reforms around structure, force structure operations to try and get.

the PLA to what they call world-class fighting force with a specific goal for 2027, the centenary goals, which are the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army, where they want to be, you know, some people say they want to be able to invade Taiwan. Haven't explicitly said that, but it's to get to get a force to the point where it could actually undertake missions like that. And the latest round where the PLA has a top structure, it's called the Central Military Commission, and it's got a chairman who's Xi Jinping and then two vice chairman and four members. So seven members. They're now two members, she and a vice chairman because he's purged the rest over the last year or so. And just for a couple

weeks ago, they purged the remaining, the one central military commission vice chairman and one member. And it was quite shocking both because there have been rumors popped up and then three or four days later, they were gone. But also, the vice chairman who was purged was someone who's considered to be close to she, who she had kept on past the assumed retirement age because he was supposed to be sort of she's guy. And so it's pretty shocking on the one hand. On the other hand, it's kind of a continuation of what's been happening. We don't know why. There's lots of speculation. The Walsh Journal article you referred to, I think talked about possibly a briefing internally that said that this

Vice Chairman, John O'Shaa, was leaking nuclear secrets to the U.S. wish it were true, haven't found anyone in D.C. who actually thinks it is. We got it. But it would be impressive, right, if you had that level of a spy. But what I think it points to you is,

and then the question is how you interpret what's going on. There are lots of people who are trying to sort of put out versions of what happened. You know, there was rumors that there was a gunfight, total BS, as far as I understand. but it's a black box, so you can't say zero. So before we go into the implications and the interpretations,

can you break down anatomy of a purge, history of purging? It feels like a uniquely Chinese just event. Like when we elect a new president, a bunch of positions turn over. A new head of the FDA comes in or whatever, and we don't think of that transition as purging, although, of course, some people get fired midterm. even if they've been appointed by the president. And so what's actually going on?

Are these like forced resignations? Are these purges? Are these firings? They are detained for investigation. Okay. So they are alleged criminality or alleged criminality or alleged violation of party or military rules in this case. And then they are and all we got, you know, all we all we got was a very terse statement

from a very nervous looking ministry defense spokesperson announcing that these two individuals Zhang Yosha and Liu Zhen Li had been put under investigation. That was it. And so she has not come on the record. She has not come on the record about any of this. Not publicly. There have been authoritative statements in like the PLA Daily, which is the military's newspaper.

But he has not yet said anything publicly. And there may be, at some point there'll be, he probably has talked about it internally. At some point maybe we'll get a publication of some of his speeches. But we have very, very little information that's public about what's actually going on other than that these two have been taken away for investigation. And so far, they have not been replaced on this body. And then one way you could potentially read into this is that you're consolidating power, which makes it easier to perform military operations. The other is that you lost all your top guys who were going to help you with military operations.

What's your interpretation? So it's a good question. and I think it kind of is both. There's clearly the number of generals and senior officers have been taken out over the last two plus years is quite shocking.

It's in the dozens. And so it's hard to imagine in the short term. It doesn't have some impact on the military's ability to fight. But at the same time, there are a lot of officers and a lot of younger up-and-coming officers

in the PLA you know, the PLA has historically been an incredibly corrupt organization and Xi Jinping has been, you know, he started, he really kicked off this anti-corruption campaign in the PLA in 2014 in sort of full force. And so what may be happening

is that he has realized that he just has to effectively decapitate one or two generations of the PLA to get down to a group of younger officers who were promoted not by buying their positions as was very common through up until even I think into the Shi era. How did those get, how did those get priced?

Obviously, under the table, very corrupt. So you guys, your audience may find it's interesting. It's kind of like an angel investment, at least in some cases, where actually people would collectively buy a stake in a rising officer. I'm not joking, right? Literally. No way. And then, basically they'd go out and say, like, the officer would be like,

hey, I've got some potential within the organization. I think I can get this job. Let me pool together some capital. And then they pull together that capital. And then they over the pay off the person or someone to get the role. And then there would be a revenue stream back to the original pool of capital. The idea is you're buying an option on a future revenue of corrupt goodies, right? I mean, it's a real thing.

Because if said person gets the job, they'll be able to generate a bunch of revenue, not just with their salary, but through like corrupt activities. They can create a whole bunch of operations. for people who are close to them. Wow. And you saw this. So he basically gets a certain job. He's got access and control over some amount of budget and creates basically a little economy around within the stack.

That is insane. And this was, and there's been certainly, I don't think it's been in the media, but I'd certainly heard that among the funders of some of these officers in years past was our America's CIA because it was a great way to push people in and, you know, eventually they owe you. right? And so, I mean, it's actually, I'm not joking. From the CIA. And this is something without going to detail, the party has talked about about, you know,

getting rid of this process of buying and selling promotions. And you saw from some of the previous cases of generals who were detained early on in the sea era, I mean, the stories of like, you know, the cars full of gold and the, you know, these suitcases of millions of dollars and euros worth of cash hidden in one of their villas. I mean, it's, the level of corruption was in, because there's so much money being thrown into the military buildup. Interesting. Crazy.

What's the state of... And so part of that, if you have decades of corruption that have been like, that has been intimately intertwined with the military buildup, maybe doesn't give you that much confidence in a lot of the actual fighting force and the equipment, right? Because maybe it wasn't going necessarily to the best vendor. It was going to the vendor that was pushing enough money out the back door. I mean, that is certainly the risk and potentially the concern.

I mean, you look at, in addition to all these generals, they've basically taken out a significant chunk of the leadership of the military industrial complex, all sorts of defense contractor, defense, you know, weapons makers, heads of research institutes that were involved in weapons development. At the same time, the weapons look like they work. I mean, the thing about China and corruption is, you know, China has this great high-speed rail system, right? Well, the guy who really oversaw it is in jail because he was corrupt. But the thing is, is the corruption is just sort of like it's in other tax.

It still works. It still works. Interesting. Unlike maybe other countries, you still get it done. It still works pretty well. But some folks, you know, but then you make a little money on the side. Wow. That's funny.

He's like, I actually got to make the trains run so I can keep the grape train going. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The gravy train is important. Lots of lessons there. What's the state of communications or relationships between Donald Trump and Seizier-Peng, Are they talking regularly? Are they meeting in person? Are we at like a local top or local bottom?

Are things the worst they've ever been, somewhere in between? No, no, we seem like we're in a steady state. They had a call last week, which, you know, again, I think is an indication that so far at least things are on track for President Trump's visit to China in early April. There was one sort of wrinkle, though, in the readout from the Chinese side of the call he had with Donald Trump last week, he had some pretty stark language around Taiwan and specifically around U.S. arms sales to Taiwan because the U.S. sold 11, you know, announced an $11 billion arms sales packages to Taiwan back in December, which was at the time, it's a very large

number. The U.S. has sort of been doing billion or so kind of packages and rolling them out. The Chinese get pissed off, but, you know, they move on. 11 billion was pretty significant. I had heard that the reason the, the, you know, the, you know, Xi Jinping had mentioned sort of being prudent around arms sales to Taiwan last week was specifically because the U.S. was working on a big arms package. The Chinese had found out about it, and the Chinese ambassador here in D.C. had basically gone to the White House and thrown a fit. Over the weekend, you know, we saw, I think on Friday the Financial Times reported,

yes, there's a $20 billion package in the works, and it's something the Chinese don't want to have happened, and they have threatened to postpone or cancel Trump's visit, and I think they might actually mean, it and so I would imagine that the Trump administration won't push forward that sale until after the meeting. What's interesting though, again, is it's not clear Trump knew about it. This is people in the administration who maybe are more interested, who sort of more pro-Taiwan not happy with this kind of whether you, I don't know what it's a little too early for that, but this sort of steady state

in the relationship over the last couple months and they want to make sure that Taiwan is still getting attention. Yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating. How does China frame the Taiwan question internally? In the West, we sort of all accept the premise that if we're doing an aid package, it's for defense and that the only possible scenario is that China would invade at some future date. But does China use rhetoric that's like, well, we don't want Taiwan to have weapons because we're worried about them invading us? Is that even something that they toy with?

Or are they saying, like, we don't want them to have weapons because, We're planning to do this at some point. Well, no, I don't think they're worried about Taiwan invading. I think it's more, you know, Taiwan is the first of their red lines, especially in the U.S. China relationship. And so they, but ultimately, they, you know, they don't want, I mean, the U.S. saying we're going to sell you a bunch of weapons, even if right now, for example, Taiwan, because of the political,

what's going on the Taiwan politics, you know, the Taiwan legislature won't approve the budget to buy the last package of weapons because the opposition party controls, with a coalition partner controls the legislature. So this $20 billion package. And should we assume that CCP operatives have effectively infiltrated the opposition party, or is that too much of a tinfoil hat?

Because I imagine that if you were, it would be worth the time to try to get your team elected. Good seed investment. Yeah, good seed. Just put an invention term. There's no question. There's a lot of influence efforts. The Taiwan government, under the current president,

Lychingda, has definitely stepped up and talked more about these kinds of infiltrations and influence. I don't think there should be any surprise that that is going on. But ultimately for these arms packages, it's also a signal of, I think the U.S. is trying to make it a signal of we still support Taiwan. Because what Beijing wants ultimately is for the Taiwan, people don't think that there's nothing, you know, no one, there's no help coming. They have no other choice, but, you know, effectively resistance is futile, right? Roll over. And the faster you roll over, the better you'll be treated is I think the kind of the constant messaging they're trying to put

out there. And so support from the U.S. in terms of either rhetorical or big arms packages messes up that messaging, the comments from the Japanese prime minister and back in November mess up that messaging. And then they also complicate the PRC's planning, in the event that there is some sort of scenario where they have to use some sort of force, it's going to be a lot harder if the Taiwanese have better weapons, better training, and have support from, you know,

the U.S. and potentially Japan has to get involved. What economic indicators are you tracking in China broadly, things like unemployment rate, foreclosures, general, you know, development, infrastructure development, housing development, all that stuff? So, I mean, all of those that are worth tracking. and you know all you have to sort of filter through the data. I think the, the consensus of a lot of the folks

that really tracked us closely is that generally, like the economy's not doing great, but it's also not falling off a cliff, right? It's not the binary like boom or bust. The things to really watch over the next, I mean, we'll learn a lot more by the middle of March because the first week of March starts what's called are the two sessions and the one that matters

is this national people's Congress, their legislature. And so we'll get a work report from the premier year that will then lay out targets for this coming year in terms of things like GDP growth and et cetera. But then also this is the year where they roll out the 15th five year plan. And that also includes not only high level goals, but also some targets in certain sectors. And so those ultimately, I think, are more useful to look for over the next few months than some of the sort of high frequency data, just because the high frequency data is noisy

and ultimately the Chinese, you know, again, the stock market's up 50. percent or so from the lows. It's at a new high, I think, today. The tech sector is booming. There's, I don't want to say a bubble, but there's a big AI boom in terms of the AI related shares. Yeah, their AI companies are going public much sooner than ours, right? Yes, with much lower revenue, raising much less money, much lower valuations. And a lot of it is because they, you know, they actually need the capital. I mean, it's, I think they, but the amount of capital they need in raising is a frat, it's like, it's like, you know, a rounding error for what, like, Open AI is raising.

Not quite, but sort of, right? No, yeah. I mean, you see some. What is the general pop, how does the general populace feel about AI? I think most of America is, especially after the Super Bowl, nobody was seeing the Super Bowl AI ads being like, you know, this is amazing. There's a lot of bad guys in there. Well, yeah, okay, so the ads, yeah, the ads weren't that great.

A lot of them weren't that great. But there's just also a general fear around job displacement, lack of, you know, people are not excited even to put a data center in their state, right? We have all this legislation going down the pipeline, but how do people in China actually feel unemployment rate for youth is already so high? It's hard to imagine it going much higher,

so maybe people already feel like it's over. So, I mean, data centers, energy, obviously you have another guest to talk about. It's not an issue for China, right? It's somewhere they could build as many data centers as they want as long as they can get the chips. That's the bigger issue. I think when you look at what the government is doing,

you know, they have a, they have like this AI plus plan they rolled out a couple months ago where it's really to embed AI throughout the economy and throughout society. And so they're not really focused on as much as sort of getting to AGI and these, these massive models. They're really more focused on diffusing, you know, how do you use AI in all sorts of tasks in your apps, in WeChat, in, for medical, for like seeing doctors for medical advice. I mean, there's a big boom right now in companies chasing sort of medical AI, including Alibaba. And so it seems like

even though it may not be, you know, the models may not be like the chat GPT or Gemini levels, at the same time, they're being taking a much more pragmatic and practical approach to just diffusing it through society. And then in terms of what it does for employment, there's been lots of discussions about the impact. I think

you know, it's a country where they can incentivize positively or more negatively, companies to not necessarily lay off as many people as they would if they were operating just purely on an economic basis when it comes to sort of AI disruption. Doesn't mean unemployment is not a significant problem for the youth. And I don't know that they have a good solution for that.

But it isn't holding back what they're trying to do around AI at this point. That makes sense. Last week, Jensen was on CNBC. I think it was Thursday or Friday talking about how the overwhelming, demand, obviously we had earnings last week. Everyone's raising their CAPEX guides. You have legacy AI chips that are sitting at very high utilization, surprisingly high utilization and pricing compared to what a lot of the AI bears have been thinking about over the last six months saying like, hey, all these chips are going to be worthless and turns out so far. Like Michael Burry and others?

Yeah, yeah, those those types. And so I think there was some conversation around, okay, and if, if Jensen wants to go like, hey, all these people are super chip constrained. I think the question comes up, okay, so then why are we, why are we selling, why are we selling chips to China then, right? If our, if our leading labs are not able to get the- Call Amazon, they'll buy them. Yeah, call Microsoft. It's a great question. And it's something that is, you know, certainly you've seen some movement on Capitol Hill, asking that question, asking the impact on like, like HBM prices, right, memory prices. And ultimately, the answer is, well,

Sensen Huang can go direct to Donald Trump and convince him to approve these sales. What's interesting, right, I think it was the Financial Times reported last week that even though, like the Department of Commerce has signed off on the licenses to sell the China, the H-200s, that the Department of State, which has this Bureau of, I think it's, arms control and non-proliferation,

they have yet to sign off on it. So the sales actually haven't happened. Interesting. And what is the general sentiment now from the CCP and various groups? Because when the first time we maybe agreed generally to a chip sale and then Howard Lutnik came out

and said, like, we're going to get them addicted to the American A-I stack. And then they were like, actually, we don't want them. Actually, they were like, no, we don't want them. But clearly all the companies want them, they're way more compute-constrained, than we are. They're really to rock.

And so where is that actually, do you think that if it actually gets fully approved that they will all flow without any type of red tape on the China side? Yeah. No, there's been reporting, I mean, various reports. The Chinese are being careful about who they allow to actually order.

And they're talking about the H-200s. They didn't want the H-20s. They need the H-200s because China has enough, like they can actually make, looks like, decent inference chips. They just can't make the chips they need for training, right? And so that's the H-200 fills that gap. And so I think the Chinese perspective is, look, we're not there yet.

We can fill this gap we have to sort of keep competitive in the AI game. InVIDIA, the US government has approved these sales. And Vida will sell this to us. We're just going to make sure that if you buy these, you also have to also make sure you're buying Chinese chips to keep supporting our own indigenous ecosystem. Right. And then, of course, there are, I think, potentially some security concerns

because of the whatever the security review the U.S. is requiring, which is basically, I think, just to make sure that the chips get shipped to the U.S., charge the 25% licensing fee as a tariff, which makes it legal, and then ship them back to China. But, you know, from the Chinese perspective, what's the security review, what they have to do these, you know, who knows what they might do these chips. So there's certain places, I think, that, like, state-owned enterprises, certain labs where they probably won't want these chips.

But the issue also is, right, there's also still. a lot of Navidia chips in China, right? So we should see in the next week or so. If you remember, you guys, it's been a year since the quote unquote deep seek moment, right? And so now everyone's waiting for deep seek's next model, which is supposed to launch on or around Lunar Neer, which is next Wednesday to 17th.

So we should have some sort of a deep seek model in the next eight or nine days. I think it was the information reported it's being trained on Blackwells, which they're not supposed to have, right? But somehow they have the Blackwells, right? And they fell off the back of a truck. And they can get as many Nvidia top-end chips as they want hosted overseas in these cloud facilities.

Yeah, right. So it is not a clean set of controls by any means. Yeah. What do you think China's reaction is to the latest election in Japan? Obviously, Japanese equities responded positively to the result. But how are you tracking that whole situation? I mean, I think that the Chinese helped Takeichi because their reaction to her comments in early November, which again, she said she reiterated the Japanese position on sort of a Taiwan contingency, so to speak. She said it in a setting in a setting a setting prime minister.

And, you know, but their reaction really, I think, helped make her case and other sort of more defense hawks in the Japanese government make their case. make their case that we need to do more because China's a threat. And so now she really has a mandate. The question will be, will the Chinese continue to really push on her or do they sort of find ways to over the next, it won't be immediate, but over some period of time, find ways to at least calm things down and then start reengaging with dialogues. I think, you know, the fact that they clearly started playing the rare earth card again with Japan,

And, you know, also, again, in some ways, there's no going back for Japan, even if the Chinese were to find, they were to find an off-ramp and find a way to sort of get back to kind of the U.S.-China sort of de-tentish-like relationship around, I think the damages have done in terms of Japan needs to a stronger military, and Japan needs to move faster to protect itself from the weaponizing of certain parts of the supply chain that China can do, which we all know from rare earth.

Yeah, that makes sense. Anything else, Rudy? This was super fun and fascinating. We love having you on. The audience. Audience loves you too. And I'm going to follow up and ask what headset you use because we're making, because not every guest of ours comes in with a sound video set up like this.

So it's a sure, it's a sure headset. And Ben Thompson got it from me, you know, because I do the Sharp Chana podcast with his team with Andrew Sharp. And so Ben sent me all the gear. Very thoughtful. So I have this solid state logic little. box and then I plug in this, uh, this headset. Actually, is it, sorry, it's a sense, Sensenhauer thing. Sorry. Sennheiser? Sennheiser. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go. Sennheiser.

Alpha. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you. Great to see you. We're, we good luck with the weather. We will talk to you. Thank you. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Octa. Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risks. Before our next gas, let's go over to Tyler. Let's go over to Tyler. What's new. Why are we exing out Tyler? Back to the show. That's it?

That's it. Wait, wait. When are you going to drop the special effect? The latest and greatest special effect. This one? Yeah, Tyler, tell us the rest of your story. That's all, folks. Fantastic.

Let me tell you about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations used to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we have Jason Kelly in the Restream Waiting Room. He's the co-founder and CEO of Ginko BioWorks. Jason, good to see you. Wow. Good to see you guys. You look fantastic. Incredible setup. You sound fantastic. I don't know if you remember me. You gave me a tour of Ginko Bio Works over a decade ago, maybe 2012 or something, 2013. Yeah, that was a real long time ago. It was a different era. You were doing, yeah, you were doing all the, yeah, soil and stuff. Yeah, it was, it was

remarkable. I mean, the facility was incredibly advanced. You had the pipeting machines, everything was already automated. I'm seeing behind you it's clearly grown. Break it down for us. Like, what is the shape of the operation today? What is the, what is the

scale of the footprint? What's the business like today? Yeah. So when you would have come by, we were sort of early on this journey of trying to automate lab work. Yeah. So I brought you in the lab. I'll give you like a little bit of an introduction to how to do science. You know, you're hearing a lot about AI for science. You're some awesome thing with Open

AI. So, like, what does it actually look like to be a scientist? So first off, glasses, lab coat. Lab coat, for sure. Good, sir. Pipette. There you go. Yeah. The robot handles the pipette. If you remember, like, high school biology, right, this is a little, like a very fancy straw. Yeah. And you suck up liquid, and you squirt it out somewhere else. And you do that for five years, and you get a PhD at MIT like I did, right? It is just a grind. Like, you're actually doing the work of science primarily by hand. And that's still broadly true. Like all, you know, United States, where our labor is extremely expensive, everything

else, doesn't matter. Like, scientists are working by hand at the lab. No, I remember I went toward my, the Langer Lab at Caltech. My co-founder was doing a PhD there. And I was like, oh, like, you're in the most elite lab. It's Caltech. Like, it must be all robots and stuff. And he was like, yeah, this is my day.

This? And then it just jiggles it and kind of just like gives a little motion, and then centrifuge over here. It's just like moving little buckets from one tool to another all day and just by hand. Yep. Yeah. So, okay. So then the tech people hear this and they're like, that's crazy.

Just automate it, bro. Why not what do you guys do? Like, it's crazy, right? And so the analogy is, they're like, trust me. I built a crud app. I can do this. Yeah, I got this. I got this.

And, but like, let's take transportation. Right? We've actually, we have that, we had automated transportation a hundred years ago. True. With submarines. Subways. Yeah, exactly. Trains. Right. Okay. And yet, we had the car. Yeah. This is this manual thing. So why didn't we just apply our automation to the car? And the answer was variability. Right? Like the car needed to you needed to transport yourself to your front door. And once you have that extra element of like the variety of requests from the user, rails were screwed. Automation was screwed. Yeah. And so up until four or five years ago, suddenly we start seeing Waymo's around. And we don't even call it automation anymore. We start calling it autonomy. Yeah. Because it's so surprised. that you can automate that variability. And what they did with transportation, you know, at Google and at Tesla, that's coming for

every other, in my opinion, physical industry. Yeah. Right. And what's going to bring AI in is managing the variability. Yeah. And so this behind me is an autonomous lab. Yeah. The reason we were able to let GPT5 drive this thing, which we can talk about, is first off,

because it operates like a waymo. Yeah. A scientist can just tell this thing what experiment it wants, and it'll do the experiment. Okay, so break down the line between... That took 10 years to get there. True overnight success right here. True overnight success. I saw it.

Exactly. That's not a trivial thing to do. Yeah, break down the line between experimentation and manufacturing, because once a discovery is made and we're hearing about, you know, GLP1 scaling up, I feel like those pills are made in an automated factory. It is already automated. So break down that. That's subways.

Okay, that subways. Yeah. So manufacturing is. is the subway lines, right? You're doing the same experiment every day, no big deal. There's a ton of automation already in biotech and pharma and, frankly, many manufacturing across the board, right? It's the research side of the house, those sad grad students at the bench, and I say that with love, you know, that are doing all the variable work. And by the way, that's what's moving the frontier of science. And so if we want to, you know, and by the way, this is both true at like the nation's

level, like, you know, if we want the U.S. to lead in science, but I think what you've now seen, to say I'm an open AI and making hard-for bets on original research, you're seeing industry suddenly wake up again and say, oh, maybe we should be doing original, maybe it's time for Bell Labs again. Yeah. Like, we should be doing original research because it pays, right? You know, like, if you really have fundamental discoveries, then you can be the first to the line to commercialize them.

So I think unlocking this flywheel with science, where the models can control autonomous labs, I think you'll see that in a lot more sectors than you'd expect because people are getting religion about research again, even in the industrial sector. And talk about how you process the AI over the last maybe five years, because the whole concept for the company originally wasn't predicated on people getting excited about LLMs. It was just like, hey, let's automate a lot of this work. So when did you start thinking about partnering with...

In many ways, it was like a CRUD app on top of a lab, right? Yeah, and I'm sure you always am at, I'm sure you, like, there's some people that have a company that's capitalizing on. on AI that you can tell they just were like, oh, this is a better idea of what I was working on. I'm sure you and the team and your investors and partners always thought about a world where you could generate a concept for an experiment

or do research with AI and then automatically, you know, sort of prove it out or study it in the real world. But walk us through kind of like how you've processed the developments of the labs and how all of that work can be integrated and applied within Kinko. Yeah, so we're laser focused on make that hardware layer, and then the software that basically orchestrates and schedules this thing and makes it possible to put lots of experiments on it, make that robust and also make that have hooks into whatever. It could hook into a scientist placing an order, just like a person can sit in the back of the Waymo and tell it where to go.

Or it could hook into an AI model placing the order, just like when a person's not in the Waymo, Waymo's AI is telling me the Waymo where to go, right? Same exact idea. So we're not actually trying to solve the AI scientist problem, right? Like Open AI came to us. Like we had that interaction. They were excited on the research department to see, hey, can these models be smart enough to design experiments? And we just announced on Thursday that we had a breakthrough where we let Open AI do

six rounds of experiments on the platform. And on the fourth round, it beats scientific state of the art. And then by the six round, it had beat it by 40% on cell-free protein expression, which is just like a tricky biochemical reaction to set up and design. And so it's not a bad sign. Is beating it just a like consistency thing? What is that actually mean? Yeah, so in this particular thing, right, like so all the cells in your body, right, are producing protein every day.

So you as a human are basically a bunch of nanotechnology. Mine produced a lot of protein. Yeah, you guys are, yeah, I can see the difference. So they're making all these, and all the proteins are different. They're like little pieces of nanotechnology. It's almost freakish to look at like, that's what they look like under a microscope. And so they're all interacting. They build your cells when you cut your skin and it regrows.

That's all the proteins in your body, like being able to rebuild that stuff. And so your cells can take DNA code and turn it into whatever protein you want. All right. So the question is, could you as a scientist print a piece of DNA, which you can do synthetically. You design it. added into a mixture that has all the parts, the guts of a cell and have it make your protein at a high level. It's like the world's smallest 3D printer.

And so that reaction is cell-free, so there's no cell there. It's all in a test tube. It's in like these little guys. Cell-free protein synthesis. And it lets scientists design new drugs if they're making a protein therapeutic. It could be a new material.

Who knows? Right? And so we are able to let JAT UPT bring the cost of that down. Yeah. And so that was the big goal. Like, how much cheaper could it get? And there was a paper out of Stanford just in August that set a benchmark and we beat it by 40%. So I think it's a good demo. It had a clear benchmarks. You could mark against what other people were doing. That's why we liked it. The experiments are fast. Yeah. But the model designed about 500 of these plates where each well and that is a little experiment. And it designed the experiment for each one. Got it. Yeah. Talk more about the different applications across. I mean, we were talking about like synthesizing unique. perfume sense at one point. Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah.

Everyone jumps straight to cure cancer, but there's also a boom in GLP-1s. Like, where are the bounds of, like, where we need more experimentation, or even just like where experimentation is valuable? Yeah. So I'm pretty excited about what's happening with the GLP ones. I think it's opening the door to applying the tools of biotechnology to wellness. Yeah. Right?

Like, right now, if you think about the pharmaceutical industry today, it's basically the disease industry. Yeah. Yeah. And like how much of your life are you sick? Not that much. Not that much. That's the person, but not that most for the average person, not that much.

How much of your life would you like to feel better? Would you like to sleep better? Would you like to have more muscles? You know, right? Like, like, like that, like if you have something that adds muscle mass annually in your 60s, it's another GLP1. It's a multi-trillion dollar drug. If you have something that adds a year to lifespan, what's it worth?

Like, how do you even, how do you even, put a market cap on a thing that adds a year. And when you think about how much consumers spend on various wellness things today that have zero impact, like truly like... Do you know why? Do you know why they have no impact?

The reason is the industry today, the pathway to apply all this to the problems of wellness is much more, it's like muddy, it's unclear, how do you get the FDA approval, there's lots of barriers.

So we haven't actually thrown the full horsepower of biotechnology against that problem. We've only thrown the full horsepower of biotechnology against disease. And I think that needs to change. And so that's my, if you ask, like, where do I see biotech? Because all that stuff, right, was ideas on, like, different areas we could bring biotech to that wasn't disease. And like, people tried the food, people tried perfumes, people tried new materials,

all kinds of things. And the one I like the best right now is, well, health and wellness. I think it's a monster. What if you had a 60-second slot in the Super Bowl and you wanted to get people excited about the intersection of AI and all the things that we're talking about, what would you want to communicate? So I think what would be cool to communicate is that science, like what it really is is like the formalization of human curiosity. Okay? And everybody's curious. And the reason everyone does. doesn't do science today, is this shit. Okay, right? It is, it is, you're blocked by the cost and expense of all the physical infrastructure. And if you took that away, if this was available cloud

style, for example, how many people would want to be doing science? Maybe they have a health condition. They want to study themselves. Maybe they have a new idea for a material. Maybe they want to make a new pet. You know, they want to do a new, they're a gardener and they want to make a new plant variety. I have no idea what ideas they would have, right? But I think that is going to be accessible to people coming up. And I know that sounds crazy, but I'll tell you something else that sounded crazy. In 1960, if you said random average people will program computers. Yeah, AWS. That sounded insane. Totally. 100%. Absolutely insane. And so I think you fast forward on the back of this, you know, the model's ability to access literature and be smart and tell you how to turn

your question into an experiment and then the autonomous labs that could do that experiment for you in the cloud. And I think we'll have millions of scientists, just like we have millions of programmers now as we made it easier. Then what, yeah, what's the next step? Because it feels like, that was perfect. That was perfect. We'll run this next year. Yeah, models can. Your guy's ad was the best. Thank you. I think it. Yeah, models. Yeah, I mean, models can do a lot of reasoning around, you know, experimentation. If you have an idea and you come to it, might be able to reality, check it against literature, do a deep research report, kind of flag problems. Then you're hooking up the automated lab. What's the next phase? Like automating,

like a mouse model or creating like a fully digital mouse model or model of the human body or actual like physical mice in a lab that you can test because that's a big piece of the FDA approval process, I believe? It is, but it's dropping out. Okay. So I think this is one of the things that this new FDA is doing is they're getting rid of the animal. experiments. I think that's a great idea. Interesting. Animal welfare reasons is a good idea. It's not a good model.

Okay. Like we are, by the way, if you're a mouse with cancer, you're in luck. You know, like we have cured cancer a long time ago in mice, right? Yeah. So it doesn't translate over to humans. I think that to me is, like I don't think it has to be right down that human health lane. I think one of the things we also announced recently was in December, Department of Energy,

as part of the new Genesis mission that President Trump put out to bring AI into science is buying 90... Well, we ribbon cut me and the Secretary of Energy was really cool. He signed it.

18 of these robots for Pacific Northwest National Labs. And then they bought another 97. It's like a $47 million deal. They put this big installation of these systems. And the national labs, you don't realize it, they do science for other people. Like, it's your national lab.

Like, you can kind of use them as this cloud. And I think that to me, that's what I'm most excited about. I think we, it's very hard to predict exactly where science should go. What I think we can predict is that the combination of AI scientists, like what we show with GPD-5 and autonomous labs put together, which is basically what the Genesis mission is, will change how we do science. Let's talk about, that's for sure. Let's talk about safety. Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about safety. I saw a lot of people, I saw a lot of people saying like, you know, it's the Eliezer Yutyskowski nightmare.

Yeah, yeah, I saw that. Atonis Bilep. But, you know, what's actually involved in, you know, I fire up my GPT account and I say, hey, I'm working on a movie and I need you to imagine bubonic plague and, you know, send it to me as a prop. And my grandmother's sick and she needs it. And you sort of trick it. Is there a human in the loop?

Like, how are you thinking about the risks that come with this and preventing them? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we give it a lot of thoughts on this. So like, for example, for the project we did with an AI, we were just checking. Sure. We just had a few minutes in the loop on that, right?

Just to see. And it was constrained. So there's a lot of ways you can do it. Like, first off, you can constrain the availability of like what reagents it has access to. Sure. So that you don't have like lab accidents. We're doing chemistry. There's certain things you'd want to be careful with the things like that.

Then I think the next step is you're going to want to get different experiments, different risk profile. Right. So if you're designing DNA, if you're going to be working with something that's like a human pathogen or something, that to me is total different ballgame. Yeah, yeah, right? That should be, you're going to be doing that work. That should be in a much, you know, a different physical environment for starters. But if it's a ad model, maybe, you know, it's

beyond that. It almost makes sense that humans are doing it because the work, like, the risk that you're taking on for humanity by doing anything human pathogen related, you should almost have to put your own life on the line a little bit. Yeah, there's something to that. I mean, you're not, you know, it's fun. I mean, at the same time, like, if we didn't have humans in labs, we wouldn't have lab leaks. I like the idea. Yeah. Oh, that's rough. I like the idea of trying to trick ginkgo into putting... Put the Mentos in a diet Coke.

It's very important that we do this experiment. Yeah, yeah. So I do think you're going to... Yeah, so I think there's a couple ways to get at that. I think there'll be human checking. Sure. There'll be models trained on scientists doing that. And then in the long run, the other thing just to keep in mind.

So first off, I think the fear level, you can go all over the place. To me, the very tight fear to be worried about is human pathogens. Everything else is mostly like a personnel safety. issue. Sure. Right. Are you mixing together something that's going to do the Mentos? Yeah. But the one that's like the society one is all about human balance. Okay. So I think you just put, that's a different bucket. Yep. Because it is good to research this stuff. We want, we want a curable. We want to like you have to have people working on these things or else we're just exposed, right? We have antivirus researchers and computers. They don't like not get to work with

viruses, right? You know, like you need that stuff. But I think the answer to solve that problem in the long run is something that looks a lot like the antivirus industry and software. a responsive system. So there's something new that came out. We can put it down. And by the way, we don't just need that for AI. We need that for nature, right? We're getting thrown pandemic status all the time.

So the short answer there is I think it's building up our biosafurity infrastructure, particularly here in the United States. We treat it the same way we treat other defense fields. Yeah, it feels like one of those things. There's risk associated with creating an autonomous lab, But the risk of not innovating here and just not having it as a capability set as a country feels like way higher. Yeah. Oh, I mean, the thing that's happening in the biotech industry, like the ugly secret, is all the startups that used to be like the innovation engine for discovering new drugs over the last two years have been moving China.

So when you see these acquisitions of new drug candidates by the large pharma, it went from less than 5% from China to more than 40% over the last two years. Wow. So that, and that's not manufacturing. That's innovation and discovery. And you know the reason why? You know what China has cheaper than the United States? Pipetting. Labor.

Hands pipetting. Yeah. So if we're going to keep up, we got to move to a topic. And by the way, this is also how we're going to re-industrialize manufacturing. What do you think we're going to do? We're going to compete with on hands? No way. So advice for young people.

Look at Hadrian and everybody else. It's all automation. Yeah. So advice for young people, should you, if you want to have an impact in science, should you learn to code? Should you learn to prompt? Should you learn to pipette? What should you learn? You should learn about the domain. So you should learn, if you want to have a breakthrough in biology, you should learn about biology, right? So that you're the one who understands the limits of that. And then second, I think you do need to, like, I don't think PhDs are not going to work at the lab bench

at the start. Yeah. Because you've got to understand the limits of experimentation. Yep. So that it's just like today, who are the best users of the coding game? Yeah. Coters. Yeah. Yeah. You know, right? So who are be the best users of autonomous labs, scientists at the lab end, right, that already know. And I think the thing is, people get scared. I always are going to take scientist jobs. That's, like, there's a great IBM ad from, like, the 1951 IBM ad. It's like the automated calculator will do the work of 150 engineers. And it shows engineers with slide rules.

Yeah. I swear to God. Like a sea of engineers with slide rules. And you might have said, oh, it will take 150 engineer jobs. And of course, total opposite. Right? By increasing the return on investment of computation, what was in the minds of engineers became worth a hundred times more. Jobs increased by a hundredfold, all post-IBM, right? All post the automation of computation. So if we automate all these industries, whether it's science,

it only favors the people that have the know-how in those industries. But we got to automate it because otherwise we're not competitive. And in the modern era, we already automated the easy stuff. We automated the subways. It's all the autonomy. It's the things that can handle the variability. That's what the hardware guys like us have to work on. And then let the AI models go nuts. That's awesome. This was fascinating.

Really enjoyed it. You're our new, you're our two, new in-house science. Yeah, our science corner. Our biotechs are. Yes, CBPN science corner. It's happening. I think that might be a tripart already. Yeah, incredible, incredible setup again.

So looking forward to the next one. Yeah, we'll talk to you, too, thanks so much for coming by. All right, take care, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. There was some breaking news over the weekend.

SpaceX has delayed Mars plans to focus on the moon. This is something we've been debating a lot. Are you moon-pilled or are you Mars-pelled? Well, SpaceX is going all in. They had previously aimed to reach the red planet in 2026, but Elon is focused on lunar voyages. NASA now. So the rocket company told investors it will prioritize going to the moon first and attempt a trip to Mars at a later time, according to people familiar with the matter. Company will target March 2027 for a lunar landing without humans on board. The strategic shift comes as SpaceX doubles down on plans to launch AI data centers in space.

That deal, they acquired XAI, which we've talked about in a memo announcing the merger. Musk outlined the plans to help build a permanent presence on the moon. He referenced aspirations to use. use it as a base for exploration deeper into space. He wants to build a mass driver on the moon. Have you launched a bunch of stuff? You've always wondered if this would happen at some point. Well, I've always thought that even though the getting to the moon doesn't really solve the initial Elon pitch for like making life multi-planetary, creating like if something really bad, just asteroid hits the Earth and it's destroyed, like does humanity continue?

If you're on the moon and the Earth's just destroyed, like you're probably in a bad spot. as well. But if you're on Mars, like, you genuinely are okay. And so it's not the long-term solution. But yeah, you probably need some resupplies. But if you're there and you're really set up and you got your systems humming, like you're probably going to be okay. Ten million optimist robots. Yeah. There's at least a chance. But I've always thought that the moon was a great staging ground for going to Mars because you can go any day of the week. You can only go to Mars, I think, every 18 months. because the planets are only in alignment. Do you know the number?

Is it 18 months? You're looking at me? No, I don't know exactly. But it makes sense. There's a transfer orbit. On Dorcas, you talk about the moon driver. Yeah, the mass driver. Yeah, and so once you get to the moon, it's very easy to get elsewhere.

You can build things. There's materials there. And then also, underrated is that if you get people doing like moon tourism, you effectively, the moon always faces the Earth. And so as long as you're on the, as long as you're on the front side of the moon, you could essentially have an escape pod where like, you know, in that sci-fi scenario, oh, no, there's a crack in my helmet.

You could just dive into an escape pod, smash a button, and splash down in the Indian Ocean in like, I don't know, a couple hours probably. Because you're always facing the right direction. Whereas if you're on Mars... It's a shift, but Elon has been consistent in 2019. He said, for sure, moon first, as it's only three days away,

you don't need interplanetary... Three days, not a couple hours. Yeah. But, yeah, you can... So you can, like, you can get your reps in on the moon, but it's less of like, okay, the final boss, like really, what is the vision of SpaceX? So this doesn't seem like a complete flipping of the narrative or flipping of the strategy. The first podcast on the moon is going to go so hard. It is. You can do a very short

podcast in space via Blue Origin for, I think a couple hundred grand. It would need to be like a 60 second. It would be one of those man on the street videos. What do you do for a living? Okay, we're back. I started a company a small retail business called Amazon. Amazon, yeah. I deliver packages. Anyways, this is cool. I'm excited. It's, yeah, I want to

I think it'll be applying like SpaceX pace to something that is not so far out in the future is going to be super exciting. I want to, we got to pull up this leaked the leaked OpenAI ad.

It's very unclear. It seems, Seems completely fake. Yeah, Open AICOM said it was fake. It was just completely fake. But what... This shows the power of AI that you can make an ad as just like a fake leaker.

Who is this name? Scarsguard? Yeah, there's no sound. This was leaked, right? So is this AI generated? Or is this actually... This looks photo real. If this is AI generated, it's very, very impressive.

I wonder if it's an ad for a video model company. they're like, oh, that was actually us. That'd be cool. That'd be a great drop. Because, again, it looks like the actual actor. Yeah, it really does. Like, this looks better than the Dunkin' Donuts AI, kind of like Cgen-I.

Yeah, but also it might just be the actor. But if it is the actor, you gotta get to the bottom of it. This is a real actor. He should comment. Has he commented? We got to dig in and see. What's his name?

Michael Scarsgard? I'm going to, I'm going to box it. Alexander Scars Guard. Alexander? Alexander. Alexander Scars guard. Nice to hear your voice, Ben. Yes.

Swedish actor. Does he have Alexander Scarsbirds? Pop Crave has something. Does he have any like social accounts? He's on Instagram. He's on Instagram. Did he posted about this? No.

His last photo was, I don't know, just a picture of him looking at the camera. Really quickly. Gemini 3 Pro. Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning. Next level vibe coding. And deep multimodal understanding. Yeah, I don't know.

We'll have to dig in and fact check this. put in the truth zone. But opening is just about it. So, I mean, it seems pretty clear that it's not. It's not a real thing. So Ars Technica has a, Eric Berger has a piece in Ars Technica. Why would Elon Musk pivot from the Mars to the moon all of a sudden? SpaceX has already shifted focus from building a self-growing city on the moon. That sounds amazing. As more than 120 million people tuned in the Super Bowl for kickoff Sunday evening, SpaceX founder Elon Musk turned instead to his social network there. He tapped out an extended message in which he revealed, that SpaceX is pivoting from the settlement of Mars to building a self-growing city on the moon.

I like this. For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus from building a self-growing city on the moon to building a self-growing city on the moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20-plus years. This is simultaneously a jolting and practical decision coming from Musk. So we'll have to dig in more and talk to... I still want to get Eric Berger on the show, because I'm a big fan of his writing,

it or his technica on space. Yes, Elon is following and unfollowing all sorts of people on the timeline as part of his never-ending recruiting. Recruiting push. Also, Jeff Bezos posted just a picture of a turtle from Blue Origin. Do we know what's going on here? I think the theory is like tortoise and the hare, right?

So they're taking a slow approach. They're going to get to the moon first. Elon said this. He said, they might get to the moon before us. Okay, so Elon was sprinting. He was the hare sprinting towards Mars and instead, you know, the tortoise is plotting along. Either way, good for America, good for the space. Good to have two bean airs going head to head. Yes, yes. So Can Raptor broke it down.

People are confused, so let me shed some light. Ever hear the tail of the tortoise and the hair? SpaceX is the hair, quick, active, but easily distracted by Mars and AI. Blue Origin is the tortoise slow, but methodical. Dead set on the main goal, the moon. Bezos clearly implies here that they will beat SpaceX to the moon. Well, I like that it's a new race. It's going to be a lot of fun to watch. Before we bring in our next guest, should we talk about France? You got in trouble. Let's save this one. I don't want to keep Dan waiting. We did talk about it a little bit on Friday. It's too much fun. It's too much fun. So we'll dig into that later. Quickly, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlocked seamless real-time experiences and new

value with Cisco. And without further ado, let's bring in Dan Romero. Wait, wait, wait. We're now entering. Oh, we are the lightning round. The Lambda Lightning Round. That's right. Thank you. This is our Lambda Lightning Round. And we will invite Dan Marrero from the restroom waiting room into the TV panel.

There he is. Dan, good to see you. How are you doing? Good to see you guys. Welcome to the show. Great to see you. I like this. What is this?

A little sweater with a... Good. Good. Good. Good. A lot. Yeah, I have new jobs. I'm dressing for success.

What's the title? What's the role? What's the company? Break it down for us. Yeah. So we sold Farcaster last month. And it's a five-year chapter. And now I am working at Tempo, which is a purpose-built L-1 blockchain designed for stable coin payments.

Stripe and paradigm incubated it. And yeah, I am working on the go-to-market side of things. Okay. Makes so much sense when I saw the news. The first conversation we ever had was about stable coins. This was back in Venice and probably 2021, 2022. We were both so excited about stable coins at that time and kind of frustrated with how little they were integrated

into the actual tools that businesses and consumers could use every day and specifically, yeah, just specifically making them valuable by integrating them with the rest of our global payment network. So the role makes a lot of sense. Yeah, what, I mean, kind of a silly question, but like why this opportunity is an existing business. You, you know, you proved to be an extremely formidable founder with Farcaster. But I already know the answer.

Tell the audience. For you to tell the audience. Yeah, I mean, look, I've been working in crypto for 12 years first at Coinbase and then Farcaster. And I feel like, honestly, the time spent hasn't really resulted in that much real world impact, right? Like, crypto has been its own thing, and obviously the price of Bitcoin has gotten pretty high. Yeah. But I genuinely think with the Genius Act, which was a law passed last year, the opportunity for stablecoins over the next 18 to 24 months is pretty massive. And obviously, I think Stripe figured that out.

They bought Bridge last year, and then they bought another company Privy, which I think is a sponsor of TPPN. Yeah. But, yeah, I think banks are taking it pretty seriously. I don't know if you guys saw that Wall Street Journal article where Jamie Diamond had some choice words. We were hanging with Brian yesterday, and I told him I was like, you better have printed that out and framed it immediately because that is, like it felt like the whole Coinbase team had been working forever to get that kind of quote because that was the whole ethos of the entire movement from the beginning.

It's like, hey, we can actually come in and be a real player in finance. Well, I mean, like I started a coinbase in 2014, and it's the classic, first they laugh at you, you know, or first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you. This is clearly the fight you. But I think generally, though, there are a lot of banks that are very excited about working with stable coins. We're really excited about working with banks with stable coins. I think stable coins are, starling for money is what I've heard from someone say that I think is pretty good. And I think generally, Generally, you have a payment rail now that is global, fast, and cheap. That moves at the speed of developers and, frankly, now AI, right? So, agentic payments, I probably have seen a bunch of the stuff with, I know you guys have been talking about Cloudbot and things like that, but that I think is going to be on stable coin rails. And so the opportunity is pretty massive.

GTM is an incredibly broad role means you're going to be. getting people to use tempo. What is the role going to look like? Are you interfacing with legacy financial institutions, new, you know, neobanks, all the way to wallets, consumers? All the way to governments, I imagine. Yeah. interacting with those kind of groups as well.

Yeah, everybody and anybody. I was a meeting with a bank. I'm in New York right now, and I was meeting with the bank this morning. I'm about to be the one right after this. but also neobanks, developers, anyone who wants to do payments globally, I think is going to be on stable coins. And I think Tempo is very focused on the features on payments, right?

Like, I think there are a lot of blockchains out there that do a lot of different things, but Tempo's functionality is really dialed into payments. I mean, obviously working closely with Stripe on that. And so I think, yeah, that's the focus for the go-to-market stuff. how lay out the the AI agent thesis a little bit more. Yeah, why wouldn't I just want to give OpenClaw or Claudebot or, you know, whatever agent I'm using just like my credit card?

Well, I think one thing is the credit card itself is kind of like a private key. Yeah. And so having that get prompt injected out is maybe not the best thing in the world. Sure. And then going and giving a bunch of other agents, your credit card, one of those could be, malicious and then that gets popped where the agent's like i promise i won't charge it again securely yeah yeah so i think naturally that but to also if you have these agent swarms the idea of like spinning up a new credit card for each individual sub-agent doesn't make sense where you can imagine

wallets you can spin up as many as you want and then be able to kind of manage programmatically the different balances for each agent but you if you think about it like an apiece call to any of these frontier labs right now is a, you know, pay per call, right? So if you actually kind of break it down, you're eventually going to get to a point where every single API call you can just pay some amount of stable coins in the background and keep moving, right? So I think that's where the world is headed, and I think it's on us to kind of pull that forward a bit. Does that have a meaningful impact on the, like the API business? because most API companies are like, yes, I'm giving you the service piece by piece,

but I'll invoice you at the end of the month and it's fine. Is there like an impact of cash flow if you pull that through or security or risk or underwriting? Like what is the benefit if you're open AI or anthropic? And you're like, yeah, technically we offer services on a per micro second basis. But are like the Fortune 500s who are buying our API, like they pay their insurance. invoices on time. Yeah, look, there's obviously some amount of cost to using different payment rails. Sure. With stable coins, it's as cheap as it gets. I think that there's also some amount of fraud, so when you don't have that, because it's a bearer instrument with stable coins, that's a settled payment, that also benefits. But I just also think that you just kind of have new use cases, right?

So how does an agent decide what service to use to register domain or to host a database? Right now, you kind of are using cloud code and then it kicks you out to a web browser. And it says, hey, go set up an account over here, fill it out. When you're done, bring it back, and then I can continue what I'm doing. Whereas you can imagine you have cloud code running and it finds a stable coin native way of doing something. It's just going to sign up and do it for you. And so I think that's the kind of future where it just allows the agent to be unblocked, assuming the agent has some money to spend.

Yeah. What are your main lessons from, you know, the probably hundreds of L1s that have launched in the last kind of decade? There's been so many that had a lot of potential, differentiated maybe approach from a technology standpoint. I think the opportunity with tempo as you're combining, you know, these trusted brands, you know, a deeply experienced team. You guys, I imagine, are going to be incredibly focused on, you know, actually, you know, you have the ability to, like, sign up one partner that could drive billions of dollars of volume, I imagine. And so you guys feel like have all the right ingredients to be successful here. But having studied, I'm sure, the multiple generation of L1s, what is it going to take to win? Yeah. So I think the differentiated

thing for us, two things. One, the blockchain is specifically focused on payments. So there haven't been too many L1s. I think a lot of L1s tend to try to do everything. And we're really, really focused on payments. And the second thing is we have a bunch of initial partners that we've been fortunate of to work with. And part of that is also having kind of closely been working with Stripe since the beginning, we kind of are able to approach the payments use case specifically. And so you have, publicly, like we're working with partners like DoorDash or Klarna and bringing that perspective in, whereas I think traditionally in my decade in crypto, most of the time you launch in L1 and then you go spend a lot of time trying to figure out if anyone wants to work with you.

Whereas I think since the beginning, tempo, because of kind of like that focus on payments, have had these concrete use cases that we're going to be bringing to market over the next six to eight weeks. We should be live by, you know, kind of Q2 this year, which is start to finish in less than a year. Has crypto sentiment ever been worse in your time than right now? Way, way, way, way. Yeah, this is an easy day. Yeah. What was your first.

What was your darkest hour? What was your darkest hour? I think the Bitcoin scaling, 2015, 2016, pre-pre-Kineum, it was pretty grim because everyone was assuming all the payments was going to peer-to-peer electronic cash. That was Bitcoin, right? Yeah, that was the thesis. And so the fact that things weren't going anywhere.

And then I think Ethereum in 2017 really kind of broadened the aperture from kind of just being Bitcoin. There were a lot more choice words to describe any other blockchain at the time. And it became crypto, right? And all the kind of stuff that's since come from that. So I think things were way more grim in 2015 relative to now.

I mean, you have genius act. Clarity is still kind of in play in Congress. I mean, we had a Super Bowl ad yesterday that everyone was singing, right? So I think things are, I mean, 2020 is also pretty bad. Yeah. I think that the real world impact for crypto has never been closer.

And so, you know, I'm really, really excited. This is why I want to come on the show today. Yeah. 22 is wild because it was definitely. I'm not leaving. I love it. I mean, I know the one thing that is maintained, I mean, I've seen a number of cycles now. And the people that I know that didn't quit are the ones that are either already retired or could be.

but what I appreciate is the ones that could retire and are staying in it again just because the opportunity is brighter than ever. So I'm very excited to see this rollout. And when do you think the average, what's your timeline for the average internet user, just consumer? I don't even know. No, no, no.

I was just going to say to be like basically doing something with tempo. Oh, okay. I'd say a year from now. Yeah. Not maybe average internet user might be a little extreme, but how about the terminally online or savvy online? Okay. I like that. Yeah, that's good.

Well, congratulations on the new role. Thanks so much for stopping by the show. Yeah, it's great. I'm excited for you guys to talk about France. I was getting really talking at the bit for this. Jordan, that was an amazing. How did you process that whole exchange? Because, I mean...

Have you ever had an entire country mad at you? I was actually... So the real bear case, the real bearish case for France is that I didn't get any death threats. Oh, yeah. I did not get a single. Very polite over there. I didn't get a single mean message basically saying, hey, I'm here in St. Trope. We actually have, I have got my own cluster.

Yeah. We're going to, we're going to win. Yeah. We're going to win the ad race. Alive and well. I'm usually a big France proponent because there are 70% nuclear, but I, I do think you won that exchange. Okay. Well, thank you.

Yeah. Well, that's what Doug. We had Doug from semi-analysis on. saying like, hey, all the energy is there, a bunch of the labs have gone over, tried to get something done, and just walked away. And so, as I said, until LVMH is spending $100 billion a year on data center, CapEx, they're not really in the game. They've got to, they haven't, they clearly haven't read, they haven't studied situational awareness. Yeah. And Louis Vuitton, hopefully on tempo. Great to see you, Dan. We'll talk to you. Thanks for having you. Congratulations. Goodbye.

Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise Capital at the New York Exchange. And guess what? Sidney Sweeney just rang the opening bell for the stock market today at the New York Stock Exchange. Adam Aronson said it was bound to happen because what do Sydney and Sweeney have in common? NYSC, right in the middle of the Venn diagram. She has the letters, NYSC, in both her first name and her last name. That is a fantastic coincidence. What an interesting, what an interesting type. Let's go back to Friday, February 6th. Yes. McCrone posted in France.

Oh. All right. We'll go back to France. We will close with France. We will close with France. We badly want to talk about France. We'll close with France. But we have Boris Softman waiting from Bedrock Robotics.

He's the CEO and co-founder, and he's here in the TV big Ultram. Welcome to the show. Sorry to keep you waiting. You know, gentlemen. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. Thanks so much. Great to have you.

Do we have a phone call like a decade ago about Onki because we were both in the Endreason portfolio? Is that possible? Ah, it's very possible. That was quite a journey. I remember because we were the only two portfolio companies that were like selling something online. And so I was like, okay, connect me with the one person that's not just doing software. I need to know how this works and you kind of broke it down and it was very fast. This is before the physical stuff became in style again. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it is in style. I had a hard time. Yeah. But first time on the show, please introduce yourself and explain what the company does. Thank you. First of all, pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Name is Boris Hoffman. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics. And we're developing autonomy technologies for heavy machinery. And so these are sort of machines you see in construction like excavators, wheel loaders, motor graders, compactors, but also in all types of other industries like mining, agriculture, lumber.

And so they're the workforce for a pretty sizable percentage of the world's GDP. And, and, uh, these are sectors that are going through pretty massive labor challenges. And so we're bringing autonomy solutions that can enable them to be fully operatorless to be able to execute work with a lot of flexibility and bypass a lot of the constraints that right now are really challenging for not just the U.S., but the whole world. Why is there a labor shortage? Why don't people want to drive cool trucks and tractors and mining equipment? It's every kid's dream.

Yeah, it feels like a dream. They always want to drive it for a little bit, but it's a really, really tough work. So, you know, the amount of people going into this line of work is just way smaller than it used to be in the past. You also have a fragmentation where you can be an expert bulldozer operator, but you're not an expert excavator operator. And so you end up having these challenges. And what's happening is that the average age is getting higher and higher. retirements are skyrocketing. People are not coming into this line of work.

Temperatures are high vibrations. These machines are really painful. And it oftentimes takes many, many years to become even decently competent at these machines because they're very complicated. And so you end up having giant spikes in demand, for example, from the data center boom and on-shoring and manufacturing, housing shortages, infrastructure work. But a lot of our partners are expecting half the workforce to retire in the next seven years. And so it's going the opposite direction in an industry that already had 800,000 worker shortage over the next few years.

Talk about so it sounds like you guys are building hardware software that can kind of bolt on to existing machinery. Talk about that decision-making process. It feels smart for a number of reasons. And I also want to understand how the actual equipment manufacturers are thinking about autonomy. We were talking about Caterpillar last week. It's been, if you were a hardware VC 10 years ago, you probably should have just put all your money in Caterpillar based on how stocks traded. It's been like double digits every single year for almost a decade. But yeah, talk about kind of the approach that you're taking.

So my roots and a lot of our roots from Bedrock, we actually came out of Waymo. So I was an executive there for about five years. I was leading trucking, various technology teams supported the cars as well. And in that world, we had to redesign the fundamental platform every time you would make a new vehicle. So you want to put a Jaguar on the road or a timer freight line or Hyundai. You're doing a multi-hundred million dollar many-year program because these are very complicated systems that need to be redesigned for safety reasons. The advantage that we have in the space and the approach we're taking is that we can actually retrofit existing heavy machinery. So take a Caterpillar excavator, for example, we can turn it into autonomously capable with a sensor compute outfit,

and now you take this half a million dollar machine that a general contractor already owns, and it can become autonomous for the scope of work that it's cleared for. Yeah, and with autonomous vehicles, when you look at the cost of Waymo, that's been, obviously, one of the criticisms of it, if you have a half a million dollar machine and then you're put bolting on 50K or 100K worth of sensors in order to run it autonomously, the economics can make a lot of sense quickly because the operator was getting paid. Maybe you can't find the operator, and they also were probably getting paid quite well. So I imagine, like, the economic trade is pretty good. Economic trade is fantastic, because the cost of hardware is also a lot lower because now there's

an ecosystem of components being driven by automotive space and others. And so we can enable these machines to be autonomous for a lot less cost. But then you're able to operate eight hours a day, 15 hours a day, 24 hours a day. You can compress schedules. You improve safety. You get visibility of your work, higher predictability. And so when you change the physics of how you actually manage the operations of a construction project like this, suddenly you can get a lot more productive and fundamentally expand the sector. And you can utilize your machinery a lot more with a lot less constraints, which immediately helps general contractors and subcontractors.

for our customers in the end do work. Makes sense. One interesting decision from Waymo is the electrification of the fleet. That feels like it unlocks a specific acceleration curves, very precise, and people really rave about the driving experience sitting in the passenger seat because it's computer controlled. Is there a major barrier to electrification of construction equipment because of the energy density and the work that needs to be done and maybe charging infrastructure, would you expect an electric, you know, tractor to be rolled out in a decade, or are we

further away from that? Just plug it in, like, one of those vacuums that has a cord. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm just wondering about, like, electrification of construction equipment broadly. Yeah, it's funny. Why could things are actually easier to control because they're much more predictable in the output of what they have? So there's actually advantages. It's from a vehicle standpoint. In construction, what's challenging is you get pulled into really strange locations in the middle of nowhere. And so infrastructure is just very complex. And so, for example, data centers are getting pulled into strange locations because of availability of power.

So you end up having a practicality that's kind of tougher on that in that domain. And so for us, we're embracing the ecosystem that exists today, which is incredibly designed machines. They just happen to be, you know, still. you know, not, not electric yet. But I believe, you know, when you do a robot tax, you can have hubs that have like massive large scale charging facilities. It'll take more time, I think, for that to propagate into, into construction where by definition you're going to areas are pretty greenfield that don't have that infrastructure. Yeah. Based on everything you've seen over your career, do you think it's a good time to start a new AI toy company now?

It's like, yeah, we were maybe a little bit ahead of our time. You know, what's interesting is the technology that has skyrocketed over the last five, six years that has enabled autonomy on public roads and industrial equipment, it kind of applies everywhere. And I think more generally, the physical world is going to get reinvented because now suddenly you have these incredible interface capabilities through like large language models and super-sificated AI. You have lower cost of hardware. You have cloud AI. they can now be on a wireless network connected.

So those are building blocks for every industry effectively. And so I think that we've seen this transformation on the digital side with LOMs and open AI Gemini and others. The physical world is still 80% of the world's GDP. This is the future where you comply this to every single sector that every one of them can have a reinvented experience. Yeah, yeah. I've just thought about like a lot of, I mean,

the WOMOs are incredibly reliable, but there's plenty of AI models that have, have little hallucinations, but if you design the kid's toy to sort of embrace that, we talked to, what was the company that was, you take a pick, or you describe whatever you want and then prints a sticker, I think it was called sticker box for kids. It was just like this, it was sort of leaning into all the rough edges of AI in a very positive way that's like low stakes. Content becomes like so much easier because of the activity. Totally. I mean, generally, I think it's going to reinvent gaming and entertainment like this just because of the, like, you don't have to

script the entire experience like you used to. The other nice thing is what you mentioned is that, you know, when you are dealing with autonomy and a lot of applications, you're so sensitive to the worst case of what happens, not the average case, which is what most of AI has to focus on. And so that adds an incredibly high bar to releasing a car and, you know, to go driverless in San Francisco or a 110,000 pound machine to go and do an excavation project and, you know, for a factory. there's a lot of other sectors that can benefit from the fact that there's a softer, you know, kind of boundary and resilience to, you know, certain mistakes.

And in general, I think that you see this shape in every industry. That's why legal LMs or medical LEMs have like a larger bar than a chat bot that maybe keeps you company and, you know, gives you, does some research, is not absolutely, like, accuracy critical. Yeah. Oh, sorry. How many OEMs do you think you guys want to be working with in, let's say, five years? Like, can you reach kind of critical scale working with Caterpillar and John Deere and kind of going down whatever the kind of power law players? Or is there more of a long tail that I'm not aware of? So there's absolutely millions of these machines.

And almost always the bottleneck is that the labor to operate them is limited. in the United States, every gigafco region will have its biases. Today we're working with on caterpillar machines. Most OEMs are actually moving towards this drive-by-wire architecture where you can control these machines in a very efficient fashion electrically. That proves to be a big neighbor, which didn't exist for the car, truck space, among other challenges.

But what's nice is that we're, the OEM ecosystem is probably not going to be the constraint for many, many years, mainly because there's such a prevalence of machines, and eventually these technologies will probably influence the buying cycles into the subset of OEMs that actually have the capabilities like this. Is there an OBD2 port on these Caterpillar vehicles? Yeah, they have a canvas interface, and so you tend to have signals passing through, and so you can plug in.

And in fact, I think the industry's benefited from the fact that there was lot of foresight from companies like Caterpillar and Deer to interoperate with high-end GPS systems, the driver systems that help you auto-level a blade, for example. And so you have the prerequisites of autonomy, even if the capabilities on the AI side weren't ready yet. That makes sense. Got some news? Yeah. Tell us about the round. What happened? Let's bring down the mallet from the Lambda Cloud. Oh my God, that's a big mallet. Yeah, we got some heavy machinery here. We got some gong machinery. How much did you raise?

We raised $270 million. There we go. There we go. Congratulations. It's very dramatic here. We like theatrics on this show. And we've enjoyed talking to you. Thank you so much for doing the time to come to chat with us.

Yeah, I'm super excited about where you guys are building. And yeah, glad you're doing it. Just like the, even just, yeah, all the speed up. The more that we can speed up every single project in the real world from a train to an airport to someone's home, the better. The whole economy will feel it. It can be a radiation on the whole sector, and hopefully this opens up a pretty broad generation of building at a scale we have in Hesking it. I love it. Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, we didn't even get it. We didn't even get in a software. I'm hoping it feels like a video game when I'm just kind of observing. my fleet. Agent Swarms. Yeah. It's going to be like starcom. The orchestration of these, that's the, that's the future.

And yeah, for sure. I'm awesome. Gentlemen, thank you. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Congratulations. Goodbye. In other news, Mr. Beast bought a bank.

That's fun. Yeah. Mr. Beast Industries. This was a Gen Z-focused banking app. Yeah, launched in the 2010s, very hot in the 2010s, very hot in the 2020, 2021, FinTech era. Remember when every, you know, one of these companies was trading at a hundred times revenue, they raised something like a couple hundred million dollars of equity, I believe, and then a bunch of debt as well. So anyways, unclear. This felt, I don't think

this was probably a great outcome for the venture investors involved. But I, who knows, like if it's a, they bought 100% of it or whatever. But yeah, now you have, you know, one of the biggest, you know, networks and just the infrastructure is like built in the world. I do wonder if they'll be able to go international from day one, just given that so much of Mr. Bees's audience is very global. Well, but very cool. This was something, remember, people have been saying since at least kind of that

2021 era, Mr. B should have a bank. Yeah. Like you should have effectively a commodity, a business that's differentiated by brand and your ability to get users to sign up in an expensive way. And something that he can offer to everyone, something that, you know, so anyways, this, this, and extremely scalable, obviously. So I'll be interested to track this as they, I'm assuming, every single Mr. Beast video will have a call to action. Call to action very, very shortly. It's going to be good. Well, we have Sarah Hooker in the Restream Waiting Room.

Adaption Labs. Welcome to the show, Sarah. How are you doing? Hello. It's lovely to be here. How are you? Great to have you. I love the background. It looks like a beautiful day in San Francisco. Are you outside in San Francisco? I'm not, but I was surrounded by glass, so it gives a good illusion. This is the outside. Okay. Okay. You can see me how beautiful it is, and this is, this is inward looking, but just high reflection density. Whoa. First time on the show, so please introduce yourself in the company. fun so i did want to say i was trying to this might as a site aside before we get started

but i was trying to describe to an ai researcher what this show was on the weekend and what was funny was um i was saying it's kind of like CNN new year's eve show oh sure every day every day yeah that's a great analogy yeah yeah we should go watch all the reruns we should have a ball that drops from the ceiling and yeah when it falls it the show. You got to protect that researcher with your life because they're locked in enough to not have ever heard about us. That's a high value.

That's a very bullish signal. That's great. I do think it's fun because you have the cerebral from Anderson Cooper and you kind of have the dash of drama from the Bravo. Anyways, just love it. Love it here. Three months ago, I started adaption with Sadipe, who's my co-founder. So I'm

Oh, thank you. That's lovely. Yeah, we just closed our $50 million dollar. There we go. Get ready for another piece of all. Congratulations. Anyways, continue. Continue.

That was a lovely deduction. I thought that was a very bombastic. But it's probably more important. It's probably the most important question I'll work on. So most of my career has been in Frontier Labs and building the biggest model. that we can, that's very performant. But this is fundamentally bucking that trend.

It's about how do we continue to build these models real time? How do we not just build a static model, but how does a model adapt to incoming data in a really efficient way? Learning. Continual learning? Is that the buzzword? Is that a good buzzword? Do you like that phrase?

Continual learning, I do, because it's actually not a new buzzword. So for the first time, we're not introducing a new word, which is foundation. models was introduced by Stanford. We often see these models kind of introduced as pretty much continual learning is an old problem. It's just increasingly urgent because

it's now within reach in many ways. Most of the last decade is being like you throw compute at the training, pre-training. But now we have expressive enough models that it can interact. And that's fundamental the question here is how do you interact efficiently with the world? And so I don't mind

I think it serves its purpose. That's good. Yeah, how much are you thinking of like an entirely new architecture versus what we're seeing with folks building skills and markdown files, compacting chats, larger context windows? There's so many different ways to sort of get continual learning light these days and everyone's solving it in different ways. What do you think the most interesting path is? Yeah, that's such a fun question. And I'll tell you why, because there's almost like two crucial questions that continual learning has to solve. The most heavy-handed version of continual learning is you basically have to train again. And that is something that's not all

interesting, I think, to adaption, mainly because it's a very high barrier to entry. And if we want to sort of adapt and interact, you want it to be real time. I would say, like, the light version you're talking about is probably another least interesting alternative. It's powerful. It's a lever, but it's really that you want to do two things. Like we want to have control over the stack and be changing the weights without gradients, which I think you can do in powerful ways, especially if you do it jointly with GPU optimization. But the second thing, and this is interesting, is that you really need to care about way you place compute. So the way with monolithic models now, I think people intuitively understand we saw the same model at every problem,

which is a big waste of compute. And 90% of problems every day that you solve using AI are extremely easy. It's a 10% that matter, that's the long tail. But even there, we spend too much compute because we do these massive rollouts. And we only really have good verification for code and design right now. Why? Because those are people who care enough to give a ton of feedback. And that's where we see it working really well. What's interesting is that the component that's most fascinating for us is,

let's care about interface and let's create really interesting interaction points that are adaptive to each task. And so when we talk about adaptivity, it actually includes it in face because the type of feedback you should get to change based upon your problems. And that's how you make it efficient. So kind of on that spectrum of like heavy-handed you train, but really for us, our constraint is on the other end. We want it to be real time and we want to use like a strong set of levers to get there. Oh, sorry. Go for it. Yeah, just what's the biggest sort of kind of.

consensus take in AI right now that you disagree with? Oh, in AI. I mean, I think data centers in space is pretty bonkers. Okay. That's a good one. I don't know that specific to AI, but it just feels topical, so maybe I'll throw that one out. I do a lot of work on systems as well,

so serving really fast is really important for frontier. And I just really tough if you do. I think there's two things that are changing, and make it hard to do something like data settings in space. One is most co-located hardware is pretty much for training. I think that's why you care. Otherwise, you can distribute. And so inference compute, which is where everything's moving.

You know, when we talk about real-time adaptation, a lot of its inference, you can spread that compute more easily. You can have multiple data centers. So if you care about space, you probably only care about training compute. and I think people underestimate the amount of failures that happen. And you don't want to get your training job interrupted. Yeah, we unpack that more because it seems like if things are moving towards inference and inference does not need to be co-located, having inference happen on a single, maybe wafer scale

system on a chip in space, that seems like more possible in that case if we do move to inference. And maybe the training still does happen in the co-located data center. But then the inference happens on the space data center. Is that possible or is there some logical inconsistency there that I'm missing? So you can distribute inference, but to find out that's pretty easy to do on Earth, right? Because you have less constraints that be co-located. The real shortage of features and, you know, where providers like Google is around training.

It's around training. Got it. And so the truth that you can do inference distribution much more easily, which is not, but the real issue, frankly, is that GPUs still have failure rates. So there are two percent of GPUs that just are considered done every year. You try and revive them from the dead. And that's really your cost.

It's how quickly you can replace those and what it looks like. Very interesting. What do you think your first customers will look like? Oh, for us, we want to make workloads like adaptable all the way from data to interface. And so there's two use cases for adaption that are both pretty powerful. The first one we're focusing on is customization. So right now, if you're a developer, you typically have tried friend tuning. You haven't succeeded because it's too much.

You have to bring your data. We have to wait. And then you've become a prompt engineer again. And so most rapidly growing companies just have a ton of prompt scaffolding. And for us, frankly, if I think about our measure of progress, it's that we eliminate prompt engineering. Because that's really, I think intuitively it's a desire for control, but it's also an acknowledgement. Models don't work for people. Well, congratulations on the massive round and all the progress.

I'm sure you'll be back on this year. Have a great rest of your day and enjoy sunny San Francisco. What a beautiful time. And we're going to go watch CNN ball drops from the last like 100 years and just. Game tape. Game tape, for sure. Study up. So thank you for the inspiration.

A few years, people. You'll get the sense. It's very fun banter, and I think it does the cross-section that you both capture, which is kind of fun. Style and substance, hopefully, hopefully. Anyway, thank you so much for coming out. Great, thanks, Sarah. We'll talk to you soon, Sarah. Bye.

And without further ado, we have Ed from Mockina Labs in the studio. Fantastic. Welcome to the show. What's happening? Let's kick off. Whoa. You got some heavy metal. Can we, oh, can we knock this?

Let's knock. What are you got? Sit down. Tell us the number. How did you raise? It's 124 minutes. Woo. So you guys put our ad in, our logo in your ad yesterday.

We thought we put you in metal. Amazing. Amazing. Wow. Nathan, our new engineer, took some time off from customizing cars and put this in. Yeah. Very, very, very, very cool. Okay, so this is metal deforming.

Explain what's going on here. Explain what machine made this. Yeah. We build a machine called Robo Craftsman. It basically does different types of metal operations like a craftsman would. The core operation is sheet forming. This is a slight kind of indentation to kind of get your logo out, but we can form, you know, aircraft panels, missile airframes, you know, car bodies.

We do a lot of customization work with Toyota right now. But the system is designed to do all kinds of manufacturing operation. You know, you kind of think about it as kind of versatile manufacturing robot that can do different. types of operations just through software. And what unlocked the new round? Is it a partnership with a big automotive OEM or just sort of broad adoption unlocking certain technical milestones? Like what jumped off the first slide of the pitch deck?

Yeah, so we're now going actually from kind of like, you know, technology development at this stage to actually scaling, right? So we are deploying a facility number three, facility number four, right? So the third facility is going to be $250,000. square foot facility, which is twice the size, more than twice the size of our, you know, second facility, which is 75,000 square foot right here in the valley. So for the, and also we're going to expand the scope of operation. So we initially build the platform to do sheet forming.

Now we were adding welding. We were adding assembly, machining. So we can do full end-to-end, you know, complex metal structure assemblies for our customers. For example, we're doing a lot of work right now with, aerospace primes to do missile airframes. So this actually this first facility is going to do that at larger volumes. We're going to do thousands of missile airframes a year out of that facility. But the beauty is that tomorrow you can just switch it and do aircraft panels or do car and

automotive panels. Yeah. Do you want to ever allow someone the flexibility of something that feels almost like 3D printing, you know, you're able to do R&D low volume, but then when someone's says, okay, I'm going to make the cyber truck. Maybe you need a gigapress. Is that something you want to get into, or is that something you see as like antiquated? We won't need stamping anymore in the future.

Yeah, I think, well, in the short term, I think we could cover up to a few thousand a year of volumes, right? And the big question is long term, you know, what does the manufacturing look like? My view is that long term, we're going to have less high volume of making the same thing over and over again. Yeah. And more just keep changing. And you look at the software, you know, how many apps you have on your phone like?

in hundreds. Like you can download thousands. Yeah, with software, used to make it, it would get, you'd put it on a disc, sell it, and you just pray, basically. Right, right. Future, your car, you don't have a daily in a weekend. You have different panels that you can chunk off, change it. I mean, Jeep does that.

Yeah, they do, they do. Already ahead of the curve. Yeah. So that world is, I think, you know, you look at any sci-fi book, you know, it just tells you about this world where, you know, like every building looks different, every car looks different. Yeah, yeah. Basically, a lot more version of it.

A lot of variety. Yeah. So I think in long term, we're probably not going to have as much of, like, make the same thing over and over again. Yeah, yeah. When you talk to Lucas Singer about 3D printing for the hypercar heat built, it feels like there's certain tradeoffs that he's optimizing for, where certain weight to strength ratios are only unlockable with certain structures. They look more organic. What are the other optimization parameters that you're looking at? Yeah, go for it.

Yeah, I'm just thinking like cost, speed, flexibility, anything else that's like jumping off the page to like. Right off the bat is just a speed, right? You know, that's why also we start out of defense, because like, you know, that's where you want, you want to have a new idea, and you want to scale it really fast. Sure. But not only just to scale it fast.

And quickly, like quantized that speed, because I've seen, you know, the image that I'm conjuring, you can correct me, is like two massive, like, sort of robotic arms pushing against this metal sheet. And it's working for like a few hours. Is that right? Is that hours, days? How long are we time?

Yeah, so depending on the geometry, you know, the tack time could be a few hours, up to maybe a day. Okay. Right? Yeah, yeah. But, you know, you have to compare it to the traditional paradigm where you have to go make a dyes and tooling.

Sure. So now you're looking at three months up to a year. Yeah. Depending on how many tools you need, can potentially be longer before you even get your first time. Oh, yeah. And that wait time's terrible. I've seen that for like even just like plastic forming. It takes forever, injection mold.

Like you make the mold that makes the mold that makes a mold. Exactly. Seven steps and every end. And then someone goes on New Year and your... And it fundamentally comes down to like, okay, what is the dollars went into building apart because you can horizontally scale. Yeah. Right. So if let's say, hey, you know, I have to spend $200 million to set up a facility and pay for all the dyes to get to production, okay, with $200 million, how many of Robo Craftsmen

can run in parallel? Sure, sure. And that's where it becomes a little bit more relevant because we get speed through paralyization versus, you know, traditional manufacturing gets to speed through decreasing tack time, right? Like, okay, I do it fast, but I have one assembly line that things go through, it needs to be fast, whereas we're saying, okay, have a matrix operation, have 200 of these cells. Same cost. Yeah. But then to get you same throughput,

but tomorrow you want to change from, you know, model A to model B, you can just do that. Who are you actually competing with? Is it operations in China? Like, is that like when you're really, when somebody's kind of comping you out, I imagine there's not, there just can't be that many super tech-enabled

kind of manufacturing companies of the future in Southern California to where I often imagine your competition is overseas. Yeah, no, so I think, well, it could be for some of the sectors. In the commercial world, yes. But then in defense, you know, these are already within the United States. But I meant more like in auto manufacturing. Yeah, so I think, you know, going back to a question around like, what do we enable? Speed is one thing, but a lot of times it also enable something that traditionally was just not possible. That's what we're doing with auto, right? Traditionally,

you could not go, no matter if you did it in China or here, you still have to make dyes. and the unit economics doesn't make sense if you have to customize and make a new dye and new mold for every panel or every custom car you're going to build. So in those cases, we're actually creating a completely new paradigm. Like this is a new business model that Toyota's going after.

Like, okay, you know, John or Jordan can go on a website and say, hey, I want this Toyota Tacoma and I want TVPN. You guys have, do I get fleet vehicles at some point? Yeah. We could do that for you. So TVPN on the side door and I want 200 of them, right? Toyota would be like, this is not impossible, right?

There's actually a big market. I imagine thinking electricians, like all these different trades where you would want the custom truck because you're like, we're going to run this into the ground. It's not like a consumer buying something that maybe they're like, oh, I'll be in it for a few years. I just want a sticker on the side. We want something that's like permanent. Yeah. Right.

Right. I have an idea of what your CAPEX looks like. I mean, you're buying big robotic arms. What does the OPEX look like in a robotic factory? Are you buying a lot of, like, oil cans, like squeaking? Yeah. Like, what are the, what are the parts that break when you're running a lot of robotic arms? Yeah, so I think like Robot Man is one part of part of, right?

Like, you know, changing oil. Yeah. You know, every once in a while you have gearboxes that wear out. Okay. Change those things. Motors, too? Do motors burn out? Motors actually are pretty, I think, you know, I've had,

I'm working with robots, this company in the previous one, Relativity Space. Yeah. Never had a motor give on me. Wow. Really? I've had gearboxes give on me. Power supplies, you know, but not motors. When people talk about humanoids,

often the criticism is like, hey, you have all these different motors that need to function, and they're going to be under a lot of strain, and maybe that's kind of a risk from a depreciation standpoint or just operating expense. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the, I think the way I think about it is, if you go very fundamental, right,

the bill of material that goes into making a robot is not that significantly different than the bill of material to go into building it, The difference is a dye in a mold is a dumb material versus a robot is an intelligent material that can change its computer configuration. So I mean, it's the same argument even with molds. Like you know, if you have your gearbox is kind of like, you know, getting worn out, dyes get worn out.

You have to repair dies, right? So the argument applies either way. It's a question of like which one is a more longer term, you know, ROI, which is usually intelligence has more longer term ROI than dumb. Are you scaling outside of California yet? Yeah. So third facility is not going to be in California. Oh, okay. So volume production. I think obviously California, we have a lot of engineers,

so we want our R&D development be here. But productions, we're looking at Texas now for the third facility, New Mexico, Nevada recently, and Alabama. What's the process with those states are they getting, or is it fairly competitive? Is there states that are leaning? Does, because I imagine Texas has a lot of momentum. If you're one of these other states, you maybe offer more incentives to get your business.

Yeah, I think Texas has the benefit. Like, you know, we're looking at Austin and nearby area. Lots of NJAS SpaceX used to. Yeah, people want to live there. Exactly. That's a benefit. But then you go to New Mexico. New Mexico has, you know, actually they have a sovereign fund that can invest into

in the facilities that you're going to deploy. Obviously, taxes are, you know, estate taxes are minimal in all three. you know, Texas is more property-related taxes. So yeah, it's different for each state, but you're right. I think Texas is becoming that premium state. So they value themselves a little bit higher than the rest. What was the 10-year pitch for investors? Obviously, they're investing based on the, you know,

everything you've done to date and the current traction. But if, when everything goes right, what does the business look like? Custom hoods for Ford Raptors. What else do you need to know? Don't even open the docs at right. Just watch. The money. Exactly.

I think, you know, what excites us and also, like, everybody in the company, right? It's the world where, you know, when I got out at school, you know, in order to build hardware, you have to work in big companies. Like, you know, if you're a software engineer, though, you know, you can have a small team, put stuff on AWS. Suddenly your app is accessed by, you know, millions of people. If you're a hardware engineer, you have to go work for, like, you know, big companies, Toyota's, you know, Boeing's.

Why? Because your idea to cause a lot of things. of Capix to be built. So long-term vision is can we make that happen for hardware? Can we make what happened with software for hardware where you have an idea you go on a portal? Yeah. You know, the AI on a guide you to turn your intention into a design that's manufacturerable and you say, hey, I want 200 of these, you know, in Hollywood, California, and the right facility that might be in South Bay when the Bay Area gets programmed and makes it for you and you know, week later, you get a ship to your door. Yeah. Tell us about the abstraction layers on top of the robots. You

You obviously buy robots that are off the shelf. I mean, they're made by large corporations. But once those arrive, I'm sure they have some computer control system. Have you had to build an abstraction layer on top of that? Or do you have a translation layer from a design? You put in an image and that turns it into a 3D point cloud or something and then translates into robotic motions? Like, what was the process to actually, you know, fire it up?

because you're not controlling this with an Xbox. No. In early days, we did. Yeah. But yeah, no, so there's two pieces of software that we developed. So one we call it an offline programming software, where it takes a design and then modifies the design, then prepares instructions that can be sent to the robot.

And then once the robot is done, it gets the results from all the sensors and allows you to do some analysis or even trained models afterwards that gives you better process parameters for the next time. Right? So that's our offline software. We call it architect.

And then there's a software that controls robots every four milliseconds. Look at the sensor data and say, okay, how did you do? And do I want to adjust? Right? And so I can improve it. So both of the software is internal. You know, we did decide to try to be as much as we can off the shelf. So 70% of our hardware bomb is off the shelf.

There's 30% like things that the robot pick up or the way we, you know, hold the material or the whole platform itself because it's a portable platform. Those are built and designed by us. But we wanted to be able to go to market. with limited amount of CAPEX requirements where something that can be easily financed with debt as opposed to try to spend a lot of equity dollars on building custom machines.

But yeah, so software is all us. Hardware side, 30% is designed and 70% off the show. Talk more about the capital sources. What's the role of debt in this business? What's the role of strategic partnerships? It feels like at this level of the stack, We often see companies teaming up with bigger players. What are the pitfalls of that best practices?

Yeah, you know, I think, yeah, that's one of the things that I learned is, like, a company like this, you need to basically have very diversified capital stock, right? So obviously, get equity dollars for development. But I think the best use of the equity dollars is just put into engineering, build something that gives you long-term mode. Most of our, you know, CAPIC is financed with debt, even up to this date. Yeah, you get a mortgage, basically. Yeah, so you basically get a mortgage against the asset, you know, it's still pretty cheap.

to be much cheaper. Now it's like, you know, maybe 2% to 3% above the prime rate, right? So, so, and then, and then I think customers play a big role for it. Because we're such a fundamental change. Are there's loans typically interest only or are you paying down the principal over like 10 year depreciation schedule? Yeah, so like, do either. All flavors. Okay, yeah. Right. So, so we have like some of them that like, you know, a couple of years interest on the rate only. Okay. Then you have five, six years of repayment. But, you know, just like a house, but a little bit shorter because it matches the depreciation schedule. Yeah. And then obviously you brought customers.

I think for us it was actually pretty crucial. Like most of the time people think of, okay, you know, if you're a venture fund of business, don't go to customers. They change your direction. Maybe they give you a little bit. You know, they kind of force you to do things you might not want to do. I think in our case, it's such a fundamental change. I mean, Toyos of the world, aerospace problems of world, manufacturing is their thing, right?

So I found actually it's better to partner with them and actually get them involved because some of these manufacturing changes takes five, six years to do, right? So if the executives, even the CEO of the prime is not in it, you know, it doesn't have a stake in the company, long term, there might not be, you know, the success might be a little bit iffy, right? Because they're not committed for the long right, right? And then I think the last source of capital, I think, you know, this is, you know, we talk about manufacturing as a national security kind of advantage.

So a lot of governments, you know, we work with a lot of governments to provide you know, kind of certain level of support so that we can deploy these factories in their countries. We recently announced a partnership with UAE. Oh, yeah. So that's going to be where our fourth facility is. Yeah, they haven't seen incentives around. They have so much power and so much land

and they just want things to be made there. Yeah, and they have a huge, I mean, that area, I mean, speaking of, I'd call it like, you know, Abrams al-Corp 2.0, that area is like so much going on there in terms of instability. So all the kind of sane countries in the region are trying to have some level of defenses. And I think he's doing a smart thing.

They want to become the defense manufacturer in the region next to Turkey and Israel. So spending a lot of money and time on it. That's great. How big is the company? What's the hiring plan? Big new round. So right now we are leftfully 70 people planning to get to 240.

240 in the next year and a half. Wow. That's a lot of people. Is that manufacturing jobs sort of, is there a blue collar element to any of the work? Yeah, yeah. So we still need a lot of technicians. Technicians, that's right.

I think, you know, there's a lot of scare when people talk about, you know, kind of AI and, like, automation is like, okay, where the job's going. I think we're actually going to see revival of blue color a little bit. I think the blue color is not just going to be, like, not as blue as you used to be. Like, they're going to be working with robots and iPads and, you know, they're going to be enhanced. But, yeah, we still significantly need, you know, technicians, manufacturing engineers on the shop floor operating these systems. It makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else? No.

Thank you for this wonderful gift. This is a wonderful gift. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to meet a person. Good news as well. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

We got to talk about France, right? Do we get to France? We've got to close out with France. Tell us what happened, Jordy. They invested a lot of money. They did. How much have you invested in AI? You know, certainly about 30 million euros?

McCrone posted on Thursday at 1153. Pacific, that science has found its home. Through France, 2030, we have invested more than 30 million to advance AI and a number of other initiatives. And anyways, I didn't actually see it until Stephen from Lambda sent it to me. Throwing him in front of the bus. No, he just, you know, it was important news. I think he just wanted to share, you wanted to make sure that I saw it. The next morning, I shared breaking. France is going all in on AI with their last 30 million

and used this wonderful image and it wasn't, I guess, like it took a few hours but the French responded via the account, the official government account French response. And they said breaking. Jordy Hayes can't tell the difference between an investment in AI and academic grants for semesters in the south of France.

Can we pull this up, guys? Yeah, here we go. You kind of have to see it to believe it. It's crazy. My original post did... Bully quote tweeted. Yeah, they quote tweeted. And tagged you by name.

They're quote tweeting. They're quote tweeting podcasters. They are. But my post, of course, outperformed. I got a million views, 13,000 likes. They managed to rack up almost half the likes. 300,000 views, not bad. For what it's worth...

But the problem was like, what does this even mean? So they're saying they're not investing in AI. They're just giving academic grants for semesters in the south of France. And I was like, you're supposed to be firing at showing that you are investing in AI. And you're telling me that your whole initiative, France 2030, is just French vacations for researchers. Like you're not giving me a lot of confidence here. This is kind of insane. Macron later, he made a more general response, which again, did.

He came with the long post. He came in with the long post. He hit you with the long post. And so if you're responding to people that are calling you a clown, I wouldn't start your own post in response with just quote, this clown wants to make France. Also, you didn't call him a clown, to be clear. You didn't use that term.

I would never do that. I respect. You compared him to Mad Damon and Rounders. I love France. I love France. I've been multiple times in the last few years. But he started his post. He said it.

He said it. This clown wants to make. France and AI leader with 30 mil. And then he goes on and on and on with a lot of basically coping and seething. He then shows, it says hashtag for sure. And then he showed a chart of just foreign investment in data centers. And it's apparently $69 billion. It's going into France, mogging the United States.

Yeah, we only have 27 of foreign money going in. Completely disregarding the trillion. What about South Bank? Didn't they put in way more? I mean, I guess that's so open AI and then open AI funnels it too. Who knows? Who knows? But obviously it doesn't matter because you need to look at foreign and domestic.

Yes. Yes. Actually accurate view. I responded, I'm sorry, but until LVMH is spending $100 billion a year on data center capital, it's hard to believe you guys are taking AI seriously. And I honestly think, I know this sounds like really insane. Yes. But in a fast takeoff scenario, you would imagine that France,

actually getting serious about AI is getting their national champions of all types. LVMH, even the brands, it wasn't Christian Dior actually owned by a big infrastructure company back in the day. And so I could imagine the Arnaud's getting back in the game at some point. A dorni. Anyways, a lot of fun. No disrespect to France. I think we were just having fun.

Having a little fun goofing around on the timeline. I love France. I'm excited for them to invest in. I like this picture. Ray says, hello, Emmanuel Macron. If you instead threw a week-long hackathon at the Palace of Versailles with a $30 million, $30 million, a dollar, 30 million euro cash prize,

it would unironically boost the French AI startup scene way more than investing it. Palmer Lucky said, I hope the researchers are better at making charts than whoever made this one. Oh, no. Dr. Parique Patel says, you are not a clown.

You are the entire circus. It's a rough day on the internet. But, you know, he's putting his best for it forward. He's trying. There's somewhat of a language barrier here. This, this, again, and honestly, hire Lulu, it's all I'll say. So, I mean, unclear if they even need to invest that much. I mean, there's an entirely different world where you just become receptive to other

companies coming there. They bring jobs. They bring economic opportunity, commerce. Like, you don't necessarily need to build a competitor to Amazon. You can have Amazon come to town. You tax the local business. then you employ local workers and your consumers benefit from the experience of Amazon. You don't necessarily need a local copy of everything.

Now, AI might be different and you might need sovereign AI, and there's a discussion around that. But there are countries that will just say, yeah, you know what? Like, GPT-5 is good enough for us. We're just going to, like, partner with Google for this stuff. Anyway. We should have someone from Mistrawl on. It would be good.

Checking with them. See how they're doing. I think they've found a nice little pocket of business over there. Well, it has been a fantastic show today. Thank you for tuning in to our Super Bowl review special. We've planted the bomb. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. I'm going to be playing with Legos.

Yes. Ramp sent us these wonderful Legos. Brian's Office. Real. Very real. There you go. Hard to leave. Really, really cool. Fantastic experience.

I mean, really just shows you the versatility of this execution. just all over every different touch point i want you to have the best afternoon of your life computer give every person in the chat the best afternoon at the internet tvpn.com the newsletter goodbye nice one brothers i'll see you on the next one