TBPN - Why No One Talks Cournot, Hollywood vs. Seedance 2.0, Micron’s $200B Bet | Jon Caramanica, Haseeb Qureshi, Spenser Skates, Celine Halioua, Ankur Goyal, Reed Duchscher

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(00:52) - Why is no one talking about the Cournot Equilibrium? (23:53) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (33:04) - Adani Group Unveils $100B AI Investment (35:31) - Micron Bets $200B to End AI Bottleneck (41:01) - Warner Bros Reopens Paramount Talks (43:05) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:00:54) - Thrive Capital Raises $10B in New Funding (01:02:54) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:15:20) - Hollywood Responds to Seedance 2.0 (01:29:08) - Jon Caramanica, born in 1975, is an American journalist and pop music critic for The New York Times, known for his insightful coverage of hip-hop and popular music. He discusses the viral ascent of "My Granny Got Hit with a Bazooka" by Miami XO, highlighting its rapid memeification and the artist's sudden rise from obscurity. Caramanica examines the song's adaptability across various formats, the music industry's response to such unexpected hits, and the evolving dynamics between virality and artist development. (02:02:17) - Spenser Skates, co-founder and CEO of Amplitude, transitioned from algorithmic trading at DRW Trading Group to leading a product analytics company that went public in 2021. He discusses the benefits of taking Amplitude public, including enhanced talent acquisition and long-term stability, and emphasizes the importance of rapid innovation in the SaaS industry to maintain a competitive edge. (02:24:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:29:16) - Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital, a $4 billion crypto venture firm, discusses the firm's recent announcement of their fourth fund and the evolving landscape of crypto investments. He highlights the increasing intersection of crypto with AI, noting investments in platforms like Polymarket and the acquisition of OpenClaw by OpenAI. Qureshi emphasizes the enduring nature of crypto, its expansion into various sectors, and the growing adoption of stablecoins, particularly in countries with high inflation, despite regulatory challenges. (02:42:42) - Celine Halioua, founder and CEO of Loyal, a biotech company developing drugs to extend dogs' lifespans, discusses the company's recent $100 million Series C funding round, bringing total funding to over $250 million. She emphasizes the primary goal of obtaining FDA approval for their first longevity drug, highlighting that much of the development process involves time-consuming steps like aging studies and regulatory responses. Halioua also notes the impact of GLP-1 drugs on public perception of aging biology, making the concept of aging interventions more tangible and understandable. (02:51:33) - Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust, a company specializing in AI product observability, discusses the challenges of predicting AI product behavior post-launch and emphasizes the importance of monitoring real-world usage to identify successes and failures. He highlights the necessity for companies to adapt their AI models regularly, suggesting that best practices involve updating models every four to six weeks to maintain optimal performance. Goyal also notes a growing interest in open-source models, observing that while few companies currently use them, those that do account for nearly half of the token usage on Braintrust's platform. (03:01:22) - Reed Duchscher, founder and CEO of Night Media, a talent management company representing top digital creators, discusses the recent announcement of a $70 million capital raise led by Stepstone, with participation from Founders Fund and K5 House Capital. He explains that, despite Night Media's decade-long profitability, this funding will enable expansion into new areas such as music, sports, and live events, aiming to position the company as the internet's leading media entity. Duchscher also shares his perspective on the future of AI in content creation, expressing skepticism about its ability to produce engaging content in the near term, and highlights the growing trend of creators utilizing clipping strategies to amplify their reach across platforms. 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You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, February 17, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultram, the Temple of Technology, the Fortures of Finance, the Capital of Capital. That's right. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy-to-use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. It is. It is so good to be back.

It's the year of the firehorse. And we get to celebrate it twice. We do. I remember we talked about it at the beginning of the year, but the Chinese New Year did not start until today. It's Lunar New Year, right? worshippers burned large incense sticks on Monday outside of temple in Hong Kong to mark the lunar new year, which falls on Tuesday. People around Asia celebrate the starting year of the horse.

In the Ultrodome, it's the year of the horse every year. Every year, I think so. It is the year. Look at this. We were early. We were early and right on horses. Well, everyone is talking about the corno equilibrium, at least Dario Amadeh, and Dorcasch. are and you and me uh and some folks on the timeline we're going back and forth and basically trying

to get to this question i feel like we should give the context on this on the titling strategy at least because we call the uh run of shit like we'll title an essay why is no one talking about the kernow equilibrium because this one guy had this super viral yeah like a year or two ago and he's and the title was why is no one talking about mark andrewson we were laughing about it so much because he's one of the most talked about investors in venture ever. He's on the minus list constantly. He's written essays and books and been viral a million times. He's someone that's someone that everyone in the industry has an opinion on already. Totally. Totally. He's not like a Midas lister. Yeah, yeah. Not like under a radar. Not a lot of people. It's like

everyone's talking about it. But in this case, really, I mean, truly, I do think more people should be talking about the corno equilibrium or at least learning about what it means because it is this sort of obscure economic construct. And it's really, really old. The guy who coined it is he died 150 years ago. His name's Antoine Cornel. And the basic idea is that if there's only a few players in a given market, you can think about any specific market, lemonade stands or whatever.

And they aren't competing on price. They will compete on supply. And they'll try to predict what their competitors, are doing and then respond accordingly. And this is really, really relevant to the AI lab discussion, because you can tell that even though all the leaders of the AI labs say, I don't think about the competition, I don't talk about the competition, all use general terms, they're all obsessed with what everyone else is doing,

and they think about it constantly, very clearly. And if someone's buying 10 billion a compute over here, they're gonna counter with eight over there, try and jump to 12, and everyone's sort of keying off of each other. You know, Microsoft pauses, AWS goes all in, There's all these like horse races. It's why semi-analysis exists and provides great cross-functional data. Daniel in the chat says state actors at work.

Again. Apparently we're having technical difficulties today. We're back. We're back. In every way, but we're working on it. Okay. And so, yeah, there's this big question. Outside of tech, there's this discussion that I see that's always funny to me

where people would be like, oh, the price to earnings ratio. Ryan says they don't want you to talk about the cornucleum. They don't want us to talk about it. They don't want us to talk about it for sure. I like the Chiron 2 AI labs locked in corno battle. And the, so outside of tech, there's this discussion. I saw it very insane. The price to earnings ratio for open AI and anthropic is just simply too high. And I was like, earnings. These companies are losing money. They don't have a price to earnings ratio. It's divide by zero. This is going to blow your mind. Yeah, it's so much worse than you think, right? They're not making any money. They're deeply

unprofitable. These are the most unprofitable companies in human history, I think. But at the same time, there is an economic rationality behind all of this. And what is that economic rationality? Well, when you're running a AI lab, you actually have two businesses that are sort of hiding within the P&L. And so the first, you, you know, you share this brand, you share the data centers, you share compute, but there's a whole bunch of risks and rewards to the various pieces of the business. So first, you have training the models. So you make an upfront investment in a training run that creates a particular model generation. And then that asset depreciates as the frontier moves. And then when a new and better model is released, everyone moves over and you stop reaping the benefits of that and the value of that model goes much, much lower. how much money is Open AI making from GPD 3.5. They spent money training that, now not a ton, but... I would actually love to know. They're probably making almost zero.

Who's still on GPT3.5? I don't even know if the API is live anymore. But GPT4 is the really instructive example, because I believe that model costs like $100 million to train, and it was really expensive at the time. But then very quickly, they were on a multi-billion-dollar run rate, and it was very clear that based on the inference margin in the subscriptions, chat GPT Pro, that they made all the money back from GPT4 and more.

Now there's a question about, okay, well, if they go and spend $10 billion on training, how quickly will that come back? And how quickly can they reap that? And there's this game of chicken that's happening. So that's one of them. Then the other side of things is the inference factory. So this is essentially a manufacturing business. You have variable costs, so GPUs, power, engineering overhead, and then your revenue is subscriptions, API usage, and enterprise contracts.

And so when you just look at inference, you see positive contribution margin. And we can see that because we can compare the cost to inference a model of the GPT5 class size or the Opus 4.5 size. You can see, what does it look like to run an open source version of that model on commodity hardware? Well, it's way, way cheaper than what you pay to Anthropic or Open AI, so they must have good margins. And everyone sort of agrees at this point that inference margins are in fact healthy. The question is, how do you balance those two pieces and when do you risk over investing? And that's sort of this Corno game of chicken that everyone's playing. Now, the Corno equilibrium comes when a small number of labs, an oligopoly, effectively choose supply at the frontier level,

and then the market clears at a high price for frontier access. So choosing supply in this case means how many data centers get built, how many GPUs get ordered, but also how much low latency capacity is allocated to the top tier. So, you know, right now they just, open AI just did the cerebrose deal, there's Claude Fast, and there's a whole bunch of different modes that will deliver faster inference. And how many of those fast queries you get, how much of the best chips are allocated to a particular tier that you're paying for is an economic question for the labs. So on the true frontier, there aren't great substitutes, and so price stays high based on customers' willingness to pay for frontier access. So you can just think about it in more simpler terms.

Like, there's a ton of developers and knowledge workers who are happy to pay hundreds of dollars a month or more, but they always want the best available model. This is most people in executive roles in startups, right? It's like, yeah, I got my $200 a month subscription. I'll pay $250 or $100 or whatever, a couple hundred bucks. And it just makes me better at my job. I just do whatever I need to do. But don't give me the old thing. I want the best.

I want to know that the hallucination rate is as low as possible. I want to know that when it builds me an economic model, it's doing it as best as it possibly can. So I need to spend less time. One percent of the time it makes a career ending mistake. Maybe. No, no, I really do. I mean, there are some crazy, crazy, like, possible outcomes.

We haven't heard too many nightmare stories. but there certainly have to be out there, like the true hallucinations. You need checks and balances? Yeah, yeah. But increasingly, yeah, increasingly last- Everyone's gone through the experience of somebody building a model, and then being like, I don't know why, but it's wrong. Yeah, yeah.

And then it's usually a battle. Yeah. I was actually- You gotta train that instinct that can just clock this, even if you have no, if it just, like, if it feels off. I was talking to a buddy about using AI tools who works in like high yield debt sales and trading and issuance. And he was like, yeah, like the model is just like, aren't that good? And I was like, really?

And he was like, yeah, they don't understand like Q476 of the tax code and how it applies. And I was like, okay, yeah, actually that seems like something that they might not be great at. I was like, because I built a toy model with just like, project out the cash flows, discount them back. and it did a great job, and I was like, cool. And he was like, no, I'm like 25 levels above that. And, like, deep in all these different codes and, like, it's not quite there yet. Good work, little bro. It'll get there.

But it's just like, you know, the base models are not just going to be able to, like, one shot that. What do you think, Tyler? Fire him back. You would imagine that, like, something as, like, if it's just, like, text code, even if it's super complex, you can just put that in the context, and it just does a very good job. Yes, but there's...

Like, finding specific facts from a super big document is, like, that's one of the things that models are best at. Yes. But there's a lot of, there's a lot of, you're laughing in the chat. Ethan, Ethan says computer, fix TBPN, use Gunna and Gron. Gunna can fix us. We're back, we're back. It's, yes, but there are nuances to the tax code and to a lot of legal documents that,

where the law says one thing, but it's implemented in a different way or it's not. enforce or the or some regulatory organization has enforcement discretion or there's some understanding mean even if you just go into like training on you know IP it's like if you have really good lawyers you can figure out okay well they'll come to the table we'll be able to negotiate this this will be the price this will be the settlement so even though the model might say like don't do that like you have a chance to do it there's a whole bunch of different reasons why but yes I generally agree with you this is like a six-month away thing not but it's

just like the current the current where it's the current thing but with like good, you know. Yes, yes, yes. And maybe some more harnessing and more some and better context. Anyway, the question is like, where does this all go? What is the natural state of equilibrium in the longer term? Right now, they're locked in Cornell where there's a whole bunch of companies, individuals that want to buy the best AI inference possible.

They want the best tokens. They want the best deep research reports. They want the best code. And they're willing to pay for it. But we're supply constrained. And so OpenAI brings a certain amount of GPUs and tokens and supply to the market. And then Anthropic also does. And the whole core no thing is that they're all keying off of each other and say, okay, if they're offering this much, I'm going to offer that much.

And to be clear, so having a product, just an API business, gives you leverage. Because at some point, the models are smart enough where you don't need to train them. You don't need to train a model that is 4% better because people are still coming to your. application and having a good product experience, right? Yes. So historically, one of the critiques to Anthropics business was that they have to just be on this constant, constant fly, you know, sort of hamster wheel of training the best model because they have an AP, the majority of their business, is this API business?

They're not an aggregator yet. Swap it out for a smarter model. That said, they have cloud code now, which gives them some more leverage over the market. And the really interesting thing is that Dario is now talking. about being near the end of the exponential or maybe producing like the final models because we we've talked to a few people about this but it's very unclear if if it's possible to create like a super intelligence as like 5,000 IQ it might just be they get good at all knowledge work and they can answer all tasks but it's like the digital guy and so at that point it does commoditize

and you drop out of corno equilibrium and you you You become more, customers are more aggressive about switching to cheaper models to cut costs because the frontier is now commoditized in the entire backlog. Everyone is at the frontier, basically. And so in that scenario, you switch over to Bertrand competition, which doesn't really mean that profits go to zero, but there is more competition. And it looks a lot more like the hyperscalor cloud market, which is, I think, what people have been sort of signaling towards.

And also, it sort of explains why a lot of the VUC firms are getting in multiple companies because they don't think it's going to be winner-take-all anymore. They think it's going to be much more oligopolistic for the long-term, and there will be competition between the major three or four labs that will, and it will be much more about how can you marshal enough supply, create a huge barrier entry. Like, you and I could start an AWS competitor tomorrow, but it's going to be extremely expensive to bring up data centers that just serve web apps everywhere, let alone AI stuff, right? Building all those data centers. You're thinking, what I'm thinking? You're thinking, you're I was hanging in Aidepress competitor?

I was hanging with my buddy, my buddy Ben on Sunday. And he was, we both live in Malibu. He was thinking of just getting some chips and setting up Malibu inference. There we go. Just the name alone. Sounds like you can get at least, at least one. Malibu inference. That's really funny.

Would be a good, would it be a beautiful name for a NeoCloud. Yeah. It's funny. And so there is a question about in the final models, will there be differentiation? What does differentiation look like? There's a potential for differentiation around, okay, you get a model that's really good of bio or math or engineering or code or writing. That's possible.

Another possibility is that there's just differentiation on quality, latency, safety, enterprise tooling, and you wind up with a small number of vertically integrated firms. And so in that scenario, I feel like Open AI's recent moves make a lot of sense. Cerebrus offers differentiated product around speed. Peter from OpenClaude joining makes a lot of sense around building orchestration products that can route to particular models. So the next generation of the Claude Code router that can route you to specific APIs and act as a model router on top for the agenic programmer AI assistant use case.

You already see the model router happening in the chat GPT consumer app. We haven't really seen that in the desktop CLI app. And so there's something interesting there. And then Frontier, Open AI Frontier, that forward-deployed engineer thing, that digs deeper into the enterprise and probably gets them, you know, more hooks in there, more pricing power. The chat's going off today, Ryan says the Corno Company of Malibu. Let's do it. I love it. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike.

your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Let's play the clip of Dwar Keshe Patel and Dario Amadeh discussing the economics of AI labs, because I think it's informative. And this is where the whole corno current thing came from because Dario dropped that phrase. So when you said, why is no one talking about it? It was literally everyone that listened to the biggest podcast of the week. But I'm explaining it. Let's play it. Like we have a, you know, let's just imagine we're in like an economics textbook. We have a small number of firms. Each can invest a limited amount in, you know, or like each can invest some fraction in R&D.

They have some marginal cost to serve. The margins on that, the profit margin, the gross profit margins on that marginal cost are like very high because because inference is efficient. There's some competition, but the models are also differentiated. There's some, there's some, you know, companies will compete to push their research budgets up. But like, because there's a small number of players, you know, we have the, what is it called? The Nekonautenoo equilibrium, I think, is what the, what the small number of firm equilibrium is. The point is it doesn't equilibrate to perfect competition with, with, with, with, with zero margins. If there's like three firms, if there's three firms in the economy, all are kind of independently behaving, behaving rationally, it doesn't equilibrate to zero. Help me understand that because right now we do have three leading firms and they're not making profit.

And so what's a good question? Yeah, what is changing? Yeah. So the, again, the gross margins right now are very positive. What's happening is a combination of two things. One is we're still in the exponential scale-up phase of compute. So basically what that means is we're training like a model gets trained. It costs, you know, let's say a model got trained that costs a billion dollars last year.

And then this year, it produced $4 billion of revenue and cost $1 billion to inference from. So, you know, again, I'm using stylized number here, but, you know, 75%. These are my numbers. I'm just paying random numbers. Gross margins and, you know, this 25% tax. So that model as a whole makes $2 billion. But at the same time, we're spending $10 billion to train the next model because there's an exponential scale up. And so the company loses money.

Each model makes money, but the company loses money. The equilibrium I'm talking about is an equilibrium where we have the country of geniuses. We have the country of geniuses in the data center, but that model training scale up has equilibrated more. Maybe it's still going up. We're still trying to predict the demand, but it's more, it's more leveled out. Let's go. Let me tell you about turbophofer, serverless vector in full-text search, build from first principles

and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. There is another fun clip that we should watch from A Beautiful Mind. Jordy, have you seen a beautiful mind? It won the Oscar for Best Picture, I believe. It's about the mathematician John Nash. Have you seen The Beautiful Mind? I've not. Wow.

Unk status over there. You would have, I was walking on the beach with Senra on, I think, Saturday. And we walked by an incredibly famous, one of the top movie directors of the last probably 10 years. And Senra was like, do you see that? And I was like, see what? It's a guy with a dog. That's hilarious.

I feel like that your beach tours have been really star-studded lately. This is a different from the previous one you mentioned, correct? Yes. Wow. Yes. That's remarkable. Well, let's pull up the clip from... Incoming gentlemen?

It's from a beautiful mine. Nash, you might want to stop shuffling your papers for five seconds. Is that Eric Kleiman? Yes. Eric Glyman. In the ramp biopic, we got our cast right here. Oh. This is the original, like, looks maxing movie.

No one else feels she's moving in slow motion. Will she want a large wedding, you think? Should we say swords, gentlemen? Pistols at dawn. Have you remembered nothing? Recall the lessons of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics. In competition, individual ambition serves the common good. Exactly.

Every man for himself, gentlemen. And those who strike out are stuck with their friends. I'm not gonna strike out. You can lead a blonde to water, but you can't make a drink. I don't think he said that. All right, nobody move. She's looking over here. Right, she's just looking at Nash.

Oh, God. All right, he may have the upper hand now, but wait until he opens his mouth. I remember the last time? I guess that was in a history books. Oh, okay. I think this is very, very stylized, and completely apocryphal.

Like, he definitely thought of this theory. But, uh, not at a bar. We block each other. Not a single one of us is gonna get her. So then we go for her friends. But they will all give us the cold shoulder because nobody likes to be second choice. But what if no one goes for the blood?

We don't get in each other's way. And we don't insult the other girls. Bobbed. It's the only way we win. That's the only way we all get late. So he's describing the prisoner's dilemma. Adam Smith said, where everyone must work together. The best result comes from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself, right?

That's what he said. That's right. Incomplete. Incomplete. Because the best result would come. From everyone in the group doing what's best for himself and the group. This is some way for you to get the blonde on your own. You can go to hell.

Governing dynamic, gentlemen. dynamics. Adam Smith. What's wrong? Yep. There we go. Beautiful. Careful. Thank you. Tiz. So good. Anyway, very fun. Dave says, just joined the stream. We watching a movie. Yeah. It's a movie day. We should bring back movie days in school. Yes. I mean, that was iconic.

Rainy day. It's a substitute feature. Watching gladiator in Latin class. That's the best. Really quickly. Let me tell you about vibe.com. We're DDC brands, B2B startups, AI companies advertise on streaming TV, peck channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on meta. Anyway, very, yeah, very fun, Nash equilibrium. Lots of game theory going on in the AI wars right now.

Everyone's trying to figure out how far to push it. There's a fair amount of risk. There's still the KORNO game of chicken around who will invest the most in advancing the frontier. But the end state looks a lot more durable than pure model commoditization and the perfectly competitive situation that many were predicting a few years ago.

So if you go back to like 2023, a lot of people were saying, like, the models will commoditize, and there will be no value there, like no profits, because like the deep seek moment and it'll all be running commodity hardware, that doesn't seem that likely.

It seems like the labs will turn into sort of new hyperscalers. There will be increased competition, but still very, very good businesses, a la cloud. So, anyway, fun to dig into some little econ 101 or 102, depending. But let's go to the timeline. Bucco Capital says I thought Dorcache had a good point that software engineering is the only job where the full context needed to do.

The job is available to an AI agent via the code base. And I didn't think Dari had a good answer for why automating other jobs will be as easy. This got a bunch of, a lot of people kind of reacting, kind of disagreeing generally, that all of the full context needed to do the job is available. But I do think it's a something we need to figure out. Yeah, we were debating this because there was a post that was just sort of like a WoJack reaction that was just making fun of this. And it wasn't clear if they were saying that they were agreeing or disagreeing.

But basically my take was, well, it's possible that a lot of the full context, need to do the job of a lot of different white color jobs is in fact logged. It's just logged in the final product, which is like a deck or spreadsheet or a decision, and then a whole bunch of emails, a whole bunch of slacks, and then a whole bunch of Zoom calls that's recorded. And so, yes, if you're running a business where a lot of work gets done in smoky bars late at night and, you know, back alley deal making, sure, that's going to be harder to automate. But in the world where it's someone sitting in front of a computer and there's a screen recorder running, like you should be able to pull up most of the context. At the same time, you can't just snap

your fingers and go back and get every decision that was made in the 80s that allowed Coca-Cola to become a dominant soda maker. But you can with Linux. You literally came with Linux. People on calls just being like, knowing the calls being recorded and used to train something to replace them, they're just like, I'll tell you offline. I'm not in speaking this secret in your record. Golf this weekend? You want to play golf? Really quickly.

Figma, ship the best version, not the first one with Figma. Introducing Claude Code to Figma, explore more options. Push ideas further. But this was funny. Bucco said basically a non-zero chance of Joe, Wisenthall, victory, where software engineers write themselves out of a job first, and everyone else has the boring part. of their job, automated. Joe, of course, was joking, just saying, well, of course software engineering

is being automated. So easy. It's so easy. The debate around the posture, Dwar Keshe, his posture was absolutely excellent. He's been having a gym a lot. He looks fantastic. And I love this sweater. The crew neck works really well. The pushed up sleeves is a particular choice. Didn't translate into that, Chad Wojack, but he looks fantastic here. And the Aaron chair is certainly helping with the posture. A lot of

fun on the timeline looking at the looks-mogging or whatever, the looks maxing. I don't even know. Frame-mogging. That's the... Yeah, he kept bringing up the example of a video editor

saying, yeah, but when will the models? be good enough to edit video as well. Yes. Pick out moments. Yes. And give me two years and another 500 billion. This is, we've, we've tried every tool. There is.

Yeah. They can't do it yet. tricky. I don't know. I don't know what's. And it's not even that we're, we're not trying the tools to replace the people on our team. We're trying to make them have higher output. Yeah.

But to date... I don't know if there's something super sticky. I mean, it does seem like... One interesting thing is that the... There aren't a lot of open source, like, Premiere profiles. Like, I've edited a ton of videos for YouTube. There's a whole bunch of cuts in there. What I cut out, what I didn't.

You could have that record, but it's not stored in GitHub. Like, it's just you can't necessarily train on it. You can train on the final product and understand, but you don't understand what actually got left on the... cutting room floor. There's this whole concept of like kill your darlings. Like when you're in the edit, like you need to be cutting more. You're like, I like that shot. It's so cinematic, so cool. But does it actually advance the story? No. So you cut it down. I was watching The Matrix this weekend. And there's this amazing shot of when Neo and Morpheus are going to visit

the Oracle. Is that one? The Oracle? And Neo, is that the one? Oracle? Yeah. And they reach for the doorknob and the doornaub has this perfect reflection and the reflection shows Neo and Morpheus. And they had to do this crazy VFX shot to hide the camera in more what looks like Morpheus's coat because if you point a camera at a mirror, you see the camera and you don't want to see the cameraman there. That ruins the shot. And so they did all this crazy stuff to like to like, you know, cover up the camera. And I'd seen the behind the scenes and been like, wow, that's really impressive. And in my memory, I thought it was like, oh, it's such an important shot. They probably had lingered on that for like five seconds to really let it sink in.

Like they're pulling a trick on the audience. It's beautiful. It's like half a second and they did all this work and then they knew that like from a storytelling perspective you don't want to hang out and watch a picture of a doorknob for five seconds. And so all these decisions like they sort of get chronicled but they don't get neatly organized in the way that a GitHub blog does with with pull request discussions and what happens. So it'll be it'll be difficult.

So maybe two years and another five billion dollars does it. but it's coming, so we'll keep monitoring it. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. I want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We have a special guest joining. John Caramanica is joining. And I want to music, but I wanted to tee up his appearance

with a little music review that I found in the newspaper today. The algorithm wants you to grieve. Rest in peace, my granny. She got hit by a bazooka. The title that functions as its own thesis statement is the kind of song that resists every framework we've built for understanding virality. It is not quite parity, not quite sincerity, not quite meme. It exists in some fourth space where emotional register becomes irrelevant, and the only metric

that matters is whether the thing lodges itself in your prefrontal cortex like a splinter. The melody, if we're being generous enough to call it that, is a three-note loop that sounds like it was composed on a Fisher-Price keyboard during a power outage. The vocal delivery is flat, almost affectless, a kind of anti-performance that paradoxically demands more attention than virtuosity ever could. The lyrical content is, well, the title repeated with conviction. And yet something is happening here that's worth taking seriously, or at least worth resisting the urge to dismiss. The song collapses the distance between tragedy and comedy so completely that neither category survives the collision. It's grief as non-sequitur, eulogy as punchline, memorial is munition,

The bazooka isn't just absurd. It's so specifically absurd that it loops past irony and arrives somewhere strangely earnest. Nobody's grandmother has ever been hit by a bazooka. The scenario is impossible. And impossibility, it turns out, is its own form of tenderness. A way of saying loss is so incomprehensible that only nonsense can hold it. Or maybe it's just a guy yelling about a bazooka. The internet doesn't require you to choose, but we'll be following this story.

So thanks for doing it. We'll get John's take on that review. We will. It's the song of the week. And the ad platform of the week is Apploven. Profitable advertising, made easy with axon.aI. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. Andrew Reed says horses don't stop.

They keep going. Wait, did he actually say that? Yes. No way. Yes. In response to 2026 being the year of the horse. I love it. One of the greatest lyrics of all time.

Originally, to explain the joke, it's a young thug song. And the actual lyric is hustlers don't stop. They keep going. But it sounds like horses. And so people put horses don't stop. They keep going. And they show the AI generated image of the horse bench pressing. And it's incredibly inspiring.

There's a lot of young thug songs that are hard to decipher. 100%. Let's hit the size gong for this Pennsylvania Girl Scout, six years old, breaks record selling 87,000 boxes of cookies. She's unstoppable. Unstoppable. Wait, how much is that? What's the ARR? Break it down. Break it down. Is it $12? That's a lot. How long does this? Six years old, wow. What enabled this incredible scale. Was it potentially Shopify? Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with A.A.

I'm estimating that it's somewhere around $600,000 of sales at only six years old. Really incredible stuff, heartwarming. That's awesome. India's Adani Group to invest $100 billion in AI infrastructure. We've got to hit the gong again. Hit it again. Indian Procloprates investment may boost the country's ambitions to become an AI power. India's Ondani Group and energy and logistics giants said it would invest $100 billion to develop large-scale

data centers by 2035, the largest such commitment in India so far. Tyler, what do you think about the timing here? Is this going to be too late? Are the clankers going to, like is 2035? How are we looking there? Is that it's most singularity? Yeah, I'm very bullish on the clankers coming pretty early. So, you know, time will tell, I guess. I'll see. I cannot wait to pull up this clip. It is, it is a big number that I feel like a lot of countries have been teasing big numbers, but this Yeah, they're kind of maugging Macron. Yeah, this is like a really big number. You see a bunch of like multi-billion dollar deals,

multi-billion dollar releases, but this is like a serious, serious investment. So, you know, good news. For many countries, one of the biggest concerns about the looming AI era is that it will deepen existing technology divides in which tech services are developed by companies in a few countries. Some countries have also expressed concerns about how large tech firms will consume,

data generated by their citizens to build their AI. products. India is focused on making sure that startups and researchers use AI to solve pressing, development challenges, and paving the way for its businesses to become providers of global AI services. India will shape solutions, not just for India, but for the world, said Indian Prime Minister Modi in a social media post today. Yandani Group said the dedicated, said the dedicated computing capacity it is building will support Indian large language models and ensure data generated in India is stored locally. Let's see how the stock's doing up, up 2% today.

Is it a $28 billion company? Do I have that right? I don't know. It's like 2.5 trillion INR. So I think that's about $28 billion. So this is a huge investment. Regov says, Andani will more than likely use government leverage.

Sure. Government-backed data centers. You happy about that, Tyler? Government backstop coming to India. Backstop. Let's go. Before we move on, let me tell you about re-stream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations.

If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. Micron is spending $200 billion. So congratulations for saying the biggest number. Micron. Micron is spending $200 billion to break the AI memory bottleneck for decades. Memory chips were low margin commodity products. Now the industry can't make enough to satisfy data centers hunger. Just like this one company is like,

Yeah, we're going to spend twice as much as India as the Adani group. Boise, Idaho, each afternoon at around 4.30, the earth here shakes from a series of controlled explosions as engineers blast through basalt bedrock to flatten out the ground underneath a gigantic new semiconductor factory. Let's give it up for Idaho. Yeah. We don't talk about Idaho enough. Micron Technology is the largest American maker of memory chips, the tiny slices of silicon that store and transfer data and help power. everything from smartphones and car computers to laptops and data centers. Micron is rushing to add manufacturing capacity to invert the biggest supply crunch the memory

industry has seen in more than 40 years. In Boise, where the company is based, Micron is spending $50 billion to more than double the size of its 450-acre campus, including the construction of two new chip factories. The first fabs inaugural, waferes are expected to roll off the factory line in mid-2020. So this is their first fab, or the one? that they're spending the $50 billion on right now. I think the new one. Okay, so that's pretty quick.

Yeah. Did you hear that the PS6, the PlayStation 6, is now delayed because of memory shortages? 2029. 2028, 28, 29, it's still a rumor. Maybe they'll, you know, maybe this solves it and they can get it out earlier. But pretty, pretty big delay to 2029.

They really don't refresh. You just created a trillion gamers. No, seriously, I think adding insult to injury to... The gamers might actually be... gamers might rise up. They might be an important voting block. A lot of them are of age to vote, and a lot of them don't...

would rather have new gaming hardware than, you know, necessarily AI sloping the feed. And they're like, yeah, I can't afford the new PC that I wanted. What do you think? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I feel like this says a lot about how good the PS5 is, right? Because they can afford to just postpone the PS6. Like, what games actually need insane?

Oh, now you don't want technological progress? Wow. I want it to go to the data centers. I don't care about like the next, like, game graphics have like, have they gotten that much better in the past like five years? Like, yeah, maybe, but it's like for the actual gameplay, is it that important if like the actual pixels are, you know? Yeah, realistically, a lot of this stuff should be moving to the class.

soon if it's not already. Yeah, like the, it was the MetaQuest VR, I forget. Oh yeah, Xbox Connect. Xbox Edition. Yeah. And it was all in the cloud and it was like totally fine. It was low latency. Yeah.

And then if you're running in the cloud, you can upgrade the hardware. And in theory you should be able to run like a Gen AI upraising pass to make it more photo real. And I feel like that's going to be where more of the the juice is squeezed out of the graphics than just continuing on the traditional path of, like, more pixels, more ray tracing. It'll be make a really beautifully, you know, designed video game that works really well, really tight, deterministic interactions, so it's satisfying. And then give it a layer on top. We got to have, like, a RAM trader on the show.

Really, somebody that's in the thick of deal making in this space. There's a couple folks over at semi-analysis that cover it. One of them just went on odd lots. Let's do it. Get them on the show. Let's do it. Let me tell you about graphite. Code review for the age of AI.

Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. That's not all near Syracuse. Micron just broke ground. They just broke down in Syracuse. No, they just broke ground on $100 billion fab complex that represents the state of New York's largest ever private investment. Late last year, Micron announced a $9.6 billion in Hiroshima, Japan. While competitor, SK-Hinex announced in January that it would build a $13 billion,

FAB in South Korea, in addition to a $4 billion manufacturing complex it is building in Indiana. This is interesting. I feel like this is acceleration in CAPEX from the memory makers, but this, I wonder how TSM responds to this, because the big criticism of TSM is that they are increasing CAPEX, but the rate at which they are increasing CAPEX is decelerating. And so they're not really keeping up with the exponential growth in compute that every AI lab, every data center builder, every memory maker is pushing towards. And I wonder, I wonder, like, what do they know? What do they know?

Our TMSC's being so conservative. I mean, they might just have the AI industry and a chokehold. And so if there is a bottleneck, they can just raise prices. but they also might, you know, screw everything out by not investing enough. And then we get to some sort of solid bottleneck for a while and we can't actually roll out more. Well, let's get someone on from semi-analysis tomorrow to talk about memory. Moving on, Lucas Shaw was on a tear over the weekend reporting on the Warner Brothers' Paramount conversations. He says this morning, Warner Brothers is going to resume talks with Paramount after two months of rejecting them.

playing mind games. The company still says it's committed to Netflix, but needs to find out just how much the Ellison's will offer. He originally reported on this Sunday, but it's being confirmed today. Again, we kind of knew this was going to happen if the Ellison's had been saying we're making it, we're giving you a big number, but it's not our biggest number. It's not our best and final. So no surprise here. Paramount has now just eeked out a lead on who will successfully take over Warner Brothers over on Calci. They're sitting at 49% chance with Netflix at 37% and then none before July 2027 at 13%. This was such an interesting flippinging here.

I was talking to a Hollywood executive this weekend. And he was like, yeah, I think there's just too many people that are against Netflix for a variety of reasons that it'll reopen the paramount conversations. and specifically, I was like, but YouTube, YouTube. And he was like, no one buys that argument. Like everyone thinks about the entertainment industry as its own thing. And then social media, tech, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube as a separate thing. And no one is making that comp. It's just all in on deaf years.

YouTube is not a, you know, having, we asked Ashley Vance, how do you feel about having kind of one less big buyer in the buyer pool for documentaries? And he was like, not great, it's already bad. This would be worse. But YouTube is not a buyer of IP. They host content and serve it to people. So it's a tough argument to make, even though they've been absolutely on an insane tear

from an overall watch time standpoint. Yeah, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. AJ says Grace Blackwell is a beautiful name for her baby girl. And I totally agree.

I mean, isn't that because it's actually the name of a girl, right? Like, isn't Grace, like, the names, like, the chips are named after real people. Who's? Well, there's, like, Ada Lovelace, I want to say Trevor Blackwell. Grace Hopper. Grace Hopper. Yeah, Grace Hopper. So it was.

And David Harold Blackwell. David Blackwell. I always think Trevor Blackwell, because you. He's a YC partner, but he did not invent the Blackwell. But Grace Blackwell is a beautiful name. Vera Rubin, too. Vera Rubin is also the name of a female mathematician, I believe. The only person I can find named Grace Blackwell is an audio designer and composer based in the UK.

So, going to have a rough go on the SEO front. Let's flip over to Claude Bot. Kent Dodd says, name's the thing, Claudebot. Claude asks for a rename. Renames to Open AI buys it. Legendary couple weeks. I was looking back on like, when did we talk to Peter? It was like two weeks ago.

That was when... Feels like two months ago. It feels like two months ago. Things are moving very, very fast. Now, no confirmation on buying. It's an open source project. They're keeping it open source. There's a whole bunch of different...

Yeah, Dave Morin, I remember reading, is going to step into, I believe, run the foundation that will that will kind of steward the open source project and then Peters obviously joining open AI this wasn't this wasn't this wasn't super surprising to me when you looked at the potential places that he could land it felt like there was he he had talked about like hey I'm kind of losing money on this and he our takeaway from the conversation is this is a guy that just wants to keep shipping get get this product into the hands of as many people as possible yep

And when you looked at the kind of buyer pool, you know, he was coming to the West Coast. You can assume that he was making the rounds. He went on Lex and was like, yeah, I'm talking to Open AI and meta, which is like a crazy thing to say. And meta always felt like a somewhat of a long shot because even though I think, I'm sure he's done very well from this, it didn't feel like dollars were his number one priority. And it's very possible that Zuck would have been willing to overpay or pay. whatever price needed to get him on board. Suck had just also acquired Manus, which feels like his like agents team, right?

And Manus has already responded by rolling out some open claw-like functionality. And so that didn't make sense. I think people were expecting Anthropic to make a move. Part of that is like Anthropics just had so much mind share and been on an insane run the last month or so. and so I think people and the name right Peter also at multiple points said Anthropic didn't send their lawyers they sent an individual but it got turned

into this meme that Anthropic had like really come and and like really made it made his life difficult I think they were like hey this is going to be confusing to consumers and then the other thing is Peter's over and over and over talked about how much he loves Codex like he talked about that on our show he's been very vocal about it Like he likes building with Codex. And so I think when you understand all these different factors where not entirely financially motivated, I'm sure that was a factor,

but not entirely financially motivated. So saying the biggest number is not going to get him to make a move. Open AI with somewhere around a billion consumers that are using products in the ecosystem today, that creates an exciting opportunity for him to come in and actually roll this out to as many people as possible.

And you put all these factors together, and, you know, him landing there makes a lot of sense. Yes. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, deep multimodal understanding. Alex Hermose chimed in on the open-clothed discourse. What do you say? He says, I'll take this day off to figure out this whole open-cloth thing, every entrepreneur on President's Day weekend. And we've talked about this on the show before.

Long weekends are really good for AI progress and AI diffusion because people have a few less meetings. And they say, hey, maybe I can mess around and figure this thing out. It really is remarkable how quickly clawed-bought, open-cloth broke through the discourse. Like, I was at dinner at a steakhouse last Wednesday. and I overheard a conversation with just a couple guys and suits who I don't think work in tech talking about different models and how they wanted to use OpenClaw and they were thinking about getting Mac Mini's like it was like it really did break through beyond our lawyer our lawyer who doesn't work at a he works at an entertainment focused law firm he got a Mac Mini set it up

and so yeah it's very mainstream I did see some I did see some people reporting that the Mac Mini had sold out in their local area too. So it's not fully sold out by any means. But you look at the traction on GitHub, and you look at just the overall demand and how kind of like mainstream, at least the concept of this has gone. And Apple's overall production numbers on the device,

I mean, I think we can, I think we could enter a world where at least the ones, the more in-demand models are sold out. Yeah. Petition for three. day weekends to speed up AGI timelines probably would work for sure. Fumblegate. Fumblegate. Did Anthropic Fumble OpenClaw? Darius says, I don't think about

you at all. Probably overstated. It doesn't seem like they, it was like key to their strategy. They're sort of just focused on their own thing. I don't know. It doesn't, it doesn't seem like, oh, they completely fumbled. Yeah, part of this was the original naming, Claudebot, right? But when you look at how many different projects Peter shipped, it's not like he was thinking at every moment. Oh, I have to name this because it's going to get a million GitHub stars in a month. He was just like ripping products, building really quickly. And it wasn't even, Claude wasn't the default in OpenClaught ever. Yeah, yeah. Codex was actually the number one.

And there were like 10 LLMs that you can choose from when you actually said, it up. It very much seems like he's just having fun with the name. I mean, the fact that he was calling it Maltbot for a while is just tells you... That was a great... That was a great two days. That was a great 24 hours. 24 hours. But seriously, like he... I don't think he was like, you know, I need a branding agency. I need to think of the name that we'll go forever. It's just like, yeah, this is like a lobster meme. It's fun. Wes Winder says LOLMETA couldn't acquire open clause. So they pulled a classic Zuck move. Just clone. the whole thing. Then it added

as a feature to an existing product. Surprise they didn't try to shove this into Instagram. So Manus announced Manus agents yesterday. They moved quick. Your personal Manus. Manus. Manus. Now inside your chats. Long-term memory. Full Manus power. Create videos, slides, websites,

images from one message. Your tools connect at Gmail, calendar, notion, and more. Available now in Telegram. I would assume. I'm kind of surprised they wouldn't roll this out into what Yeah, they don't even own Telegram. Available now on, wait, that is so confusing.

I think it's possible that WhatsApp didn't have the, didn't have some functionality that they needed to actually do this integration. Yeah. And they're moving so quickly. Like, they seem to have turned this. I don't think, I think, like, Wes is maybe overstating a little bit, like, the classic Zuck move. You can imagine, like, Manus would have done this probably independently. 100%.

You were calling this. You were like, Manus is a good acquisition because if you want personal super intelligence. It's an agent that people are like Manus is great. Yes. And so Zuck has been great at buying a product that has a lot of potential, that has some customer traction and like scaling up massively. Yeah.

And even just for the most mundane Instagram usage where you could say, you know, oh, I want to look across my audience and see who's the most engaged or understand what trends are happening in my, in my vertical or, you know, like respond to every comment with a heart if it's positive, like anything that you'd want just an agent to go around on these social platforms and do, let alone like go buy something for you. Having having a team that works on agents makes a ton of sense. But it's, yeah, it's funny. It's just funny that they're rolling it out. Matea says, I think that's connected to WhatsApp deplatforming other AI companies. Remember, chat chit, he had like a huge generation in what's happened.

They got, and they got booted. That's crazy. Hari shares a little bit of lore about Peter Steinberger. He says he bootstrapped PSPDF kit over 10 years ago. It's the gold standard PDF library used by box, Apple, and even docu sign. Wow. That's crazy. Insanely hard tech.

If you know, you know, it's very hard to work on PDFs. I guess he's worth a couple hundred mil from that. Everyone's trying to guess the number, but nothing's been confirmed. If he goes to Open AI, he might make more from OpenClaw, which is three. Peter says he signed the contract today with software my company built years ago. Now it's nutrient docs. Still best for anything PDF. It's like I'm PDF maxing.

Let's take a look at this. Harnesses won't matter in less than three years, says Ahmad. Yes, there's money to make at the moment, but keep in mind that this is the play of two years ago. and you should be playing for what the models will be capable of in two years from today instead. Claude plays Pokemon kind of proves this. Opus 4.5 and 4.6 has the same insanely bad harness, no babysitting like Gemini and GPT, and 4.6 is like 1,197 hours ahead of 4.5. So, oh, it's how far they get. Yeah, I've seen some people trying to back a bunch of open clause.

startups, and given that just feels like a potential bloodbath, especially knowing that OpenAI will be able to build, I would assume build the best possible kind of wrapper around everything that OpenClaas built so far. Again, I would assume that the three major labs, DeepMind, Anthropic and Open AI, all have serious orchestrators very soon. and they will acquire talent and acquire products and build products and license stuff and figure out all sorts of integrations. Do all the business things necessary to make it happen. But as I wrote in the year of orchestration or orchestrators, like this is coming.

People are managing multiple agents already and tools that make that easier, tools that make that more reliable and more efficient. Like that's going to be a big focus for this year and everyone's going to be focused on. So the idea of like, oh, I should just like fork this open source project and like bring it to enterprises. Like that's going to be rough when OpenAI has a thousand for deployed engineers going into every enterprise that they already have contracts with. Yeah. Tyler, what do you think? Yeah, I was going to say like I think it's a similar thing to the hardware. So like Gemini is is developing the TPU like with the architecture of the model in mind.

And they're developing the architecture with the hardware in mind. So it's kind of like these things are like helping each other. So you're going to see the same thing in the harness, right, where like the harness is made with the model in mind, obviously, but then you're going to start to see as these things, like, as agents become more and more popular, like, OpenAI already has, like, there's the normal, you know, GPT-513, and then there's 513 codex, right? So the models are, like, built with the harness in mind. So I think if you're not the one building the model and you're just adding your own harness, right, the model's not going to be, like, customized for your harness. So if Open AI Anthropic are building their own harness, they're going to do it with the model in mind. It's going to be much better than having some third-party thing that you build, right?

I would think so. Yeah. No, that's totally reasonable harness for horses. Bobby Kahnsey. Horses don't stop. Harnesses don't stop. Will Brown says, honestly crazy that OpenClaas sold for $1 billion. Like he's really the first solo $5 billion founder.

Time will tell if it's worth the $15 billion that OpenAI spent on the acquisition, but it's pretty wild that you can just vibe code. open source project and make 40 billion in a couple months now. It really, really nails it because everyone jumped immediately to a billion, immediately. Off of nothing. Off of nothing. Off of like one rumor for a thinking machines person that went to meta,

and we don't even know what the earn out schedule for that is and how much that happens. It's very, very funny. Who knows? we got to give some credit to Sim for Satoshi. I brought this up. I brought this up before. Sim has been working on truffles for a handful of years now. I've been by his studio in Venice.

It's a very cool setup and team over there. But he hosted a little bit about this. Where is it? And tiny boxed. Hotses project is also apparently going to ship a more consumer product. Maybe I think they're around $10,000 right now. They're probably going to bring that down to a few thousand dollars or maybe even a few hundred dollars.

You get a lot with a Mac Mini, but we'll see where the prices land after the memory shortage takes hold and whatnot. But lots of people are doing this. Alex Cohen breaks it down for Gen Z. If you're wondering what happened today, Claude was maugging open AI for weeks. Then this gym cell dev ships Claudebot, which was the fastest growing open source thing ever. Absolute looks max for the whole ecosystem. Anthropic tries to dairy goon him with legal.

Dev renames to OpenClaw. Open A.I. slides in like a FOID pulling Chad with acquisition interest. OpenClaw gets acquired by OpenAI. Now Anthropic is getting jester gooned by the entire timeline, and OpenAI is gigamaxing off their fumble. Anthropic could have just let them cook, him cook. Instead, they went full moid and got outframed by the jester maxers at Open AIs. 8,000 likes. The looks back, like, the lingo is really, it feels like hilarious. I do wonder the half-life. I feel like it's got to be. It's got to be towards the end of this boom, but the rise of

the kick streamers is certainly the story of the year. Certainly the story of the year. Dave Morin shared more context on like what the future of OpenClaw will look like. So Dave Morin, who you might know from Offline Ventures, slow. He's been on our show, Path. He is now on the board of OpenClaught, and he says he's been working on the OpenClaw Foundation structure for weeks,

a home for thinkers and hackers that choose, and those who want to own their data. He's honored to serve as the founding, independent board member. This community built something extraordinary. Our job is to protect it, open source forever. Excited to share more soon.

Raoul says, let's go. There was some funny, there's some funny pushback about someone was like, oh, it's so unfair that Peter's like reaping all this reward from these work. Like it's an open source project. There were a lot of committers. And he shared the number of commits. And it's

just like him and like 90% of the work. And then like a few of his buddies who are all in the chat in the real life. We started. Yeah. Like we love this. This is great. And a number of them are going to open AI too. He's like the headline pick up. And then a number of the other committers.

And then those are like AI models. Yeah. And then and then the other key contributors started committing after it was like fully totally totally yeah yeah hundreds of thousands of people and it was it was like pure I don't know there's no term I don't know if there's a term for it but it was like it was like third party like angst or something it was like people were feeling angst on behalf of people who

felt no angst like the people on the team were all like this is awesome we're all on board and then other people were like they got screwed and it's like I don't know not quite. Intern is sharing what your 2027 team offsite will look like, taking the Mac minis somewhere nice, taking them out. We'll see. And here's the post you were talking about from Ashen. I didn't believe it, but Mac minis studios are actually sold out in most places. Walmart, Apple store, Amazon, Best Buy MicroCenter. Apple has a month wait now, too, for most AI-type beat models. 48 gigs plus of RAM. Funniest part is that there are still 24 gig.

What's up? 48 gig. They said it was possible. Oh, that they would saw it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I went to the Apple store and they were fully in stock. But, you know, the timeline moved on.

And people went more aggressively into the Mac Mini. Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate Compliance and Security Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. It started today. We have some breaking news out of New York. Oh, yes. What happened? Josh Kushner has announced Thrive.

Exceeding 10 billion, Thrive. 10 compromises 1 billion designated for early stage investments and 9 billion designated for growth stage investments. He said, we do not view this as a milestone, but as a commitment to the long work ahead. We view Thrive as a company. Our products is partnership, the willingness to commit deeply to a small number of founders and to stand with them through momentum and adversity. This is the discipline we bring to our work and the responsibility we accept when founders partner with Thrive. We do not hedge.

Concentration demands loyalty to the founders and missions we back in this moment. Exposure alone is not a strategy. Judgment without commitment is not enough. Advantage will accrue to those who choose deliberately, commit deeply, and endure through difficult moments. Thrive was founded to be an enabling technology for the world we want to see. we are deeply aware that we are not the main character. The founders that we are fortunate enough to partner with are the artists.

Our role is to help create the conditions where great work can come to life. We take a long view grounded in the belief that category-defining companies tend to create structural compounding advantages over long arcs. This fund reflects the continuity of our approach and the ways our work has deepened alongside the founders we support. We are grateful for the trust our limited partners placing us and for the opportunity to work alongside those who are building with purpose, integrity, and courage. Hit that gong.

I'd love to see it. Josh has been... Five, ten, and ten billion? I like that. Yeah. Despite having zero exposure or anything to TBPN, he's been nothing but kind and helpful to us on the journey. And it's, yeah, testament to the work of the whole thing. Drive team. And I will say their merch is phenomenal. Really good. I was wearing the,

you were in the pajamas? The pajamas. No way. I was wearing the pajamas this weekend. Yeah, they got some good stuff. Creative stuff, like different, different stuff, unexpected drops, which I love. Yep. And we have to, we have to read this off because it's just so good. Seala says, Joshua Kushner strode billionarily across his room. His contrarian high concentration vibes engulfed Rick Rubin's bohemian monk retreat. Joshua's high conviction and mystery fill the room. I know what this is referring to. This is a reference to the Colossus profile, which is which really got a lot of people upset. A lot of people were not, like, this doesn't count as this writing. How? It was, it transported me to Malibu. It was fantastic. I thought it was great. Let me tell you about

Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and print that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Let's head over to Tyler Cowan. Tyler Cowan, he is giving us some more economic data on AI productivity. Quote, you see tech and AI everywhere, but the productivity statistics, that's what people say. He says, how many times have I heard versions of that claim? Eric picks up the telephone in the Financial Times.

He says, while initial reports suggested a year of steady labor expansion in the United States, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 400,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling, maintaining high output with significantly lower labor input, is a hallmark of productivity growth. My own updated analysis suggests a U.S. productivity increase of roughly 2.7% for 2025. That is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4% annual average that characterized the past decade. It's fine to suggest this suggests caution in interpreting such statistics, but they hardly push the other way,

says Tyler. And it's, yeah, it's just a very fascinating that we're potentially the end of stagnation in seeing, seeing productivity growth. Relevant. To this conversation, you were looking at employment data out of the Philippines? The Philippines? So I've been very cautious about the AI will take all the jobs narrative. When will that happen? Is it happening yet? Is there a Jevin's paradox to the type of work that we're doing?

How much software do we want? We have the ability to write way more lines of code. How many more lines of code do we actually want? It feels like there's a lot of opportunity. It feels like the labor market is, week, but it hasn't collapsed. A lot of people still have jobs. There's a lot to unpack. And so I was interested to know, are we seeing a massive spike in unemployment in the Philippines or in India where a lot of white collar labor is outsourced, whether it's answering the phones or doing business process

outsourcing. A lot of companies have back offices in, I was talking to somebody who works in architecture. And they said that a lot of the architectural drawings that happen overseas. The same things happens in the big three management consulting firms. A lot of management consultants will sort of sketch out a slide, and then they will send it over to a team offshore that actually turns that into the final PowerPoint product. And you can see how if you have a sketch and you just need to turn it into a real chart, that's a textbook use case of artificial. intelligence, whether you just style transfer it with something like nanobanana, or you go and do a deep research report and then basically code the actual chart. And all the models are very, very capable of generating charts based on data. That's actually how I generated the chart of the Philippines

unemployment rate. And I saw from both the Philippines and India, there was not a major spike in unemployment. Maybe it's coming. We've heard from the ground the job market's not good, and maybe the jobs are getting worse, but there's at least there's not high unemployment yet, both in the United States and abroad. So it's something to keep an eye on. But I don't know. I've just been like looking for more solid data points around labor displacement because it's such a huge narrative. I don't know. We'll see. Let me tell you about railway. Whoops.

There we go. Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while railway automatically takes care

of scaling, monitoring, and security. What did Claude do? What did Claude do? The Pentagon has said that Anthropic will pay a price. Of course, there was reporting last week that Claude was

leveraged in some way. during the Maduro planning, the planning of the Maduro raid. I was imagining in my head Dario as Walter White, you know, in the SUV, just being like watching the logs and seeing Pete Hegseth running a deep research report on Maduro. Who is Nicholas Maduro? He's just like, no!

No, don't do it. Yeah, very unclear how it was used, But a lot of pushback. You know, Palmer, Palmer was pushing back pretty hard. Let's see if I can pull up what he actually said, so I don't botch it. The Wall Street Journal headline is Pentagon used inthropics Claude in Maduro, Venezuela, raid use of the model through a contract with Palantir highlights growing role of AI in the Pentagon. Now, I remember seeing a clip from Shamsankar at Palantir talking about how every query that the government runs. runs is actually run through three or four different LLMs and then synthesize.

They sort of put their own model router on top of the other models because if you're doing Fed wrapper. Basically, I guess it's basically a rapper. Because you sort of want every possible piece of information. All the LLMs have different parts of the internet, different training corpuses, different opinions, different all sorts of different things. So you put all those together. The mission to capture Maduro and his wife included bombing several sites in Caracas

last month, Anthropics usage guidelines prohibit Claude from being used to facilitate violence, develop weapons, or conduct surveillance. We cannot comment on whether Claude or any other AI model was used for any specific operation classified or otherwise, said an Anthropic spokesman. Any use of Claude, whether in the private sector or across government, is required to comply with our usage policies, which govern how Claude can be deployed. We work closely with our partners to ensure compliance. The deployment of Claude occurred through Anthropics Partnership with data company Palantir Technologies, whose tools are commonly used by the Defense Department and federal law enforcement following the raid and employee at Anthropic asked a counterpart

at Palantir how Claude was used in the operation, according to people familiar with the matter. An Anthropic spokesman said it hasn't discussed the use of Claude for specific operations with any industry partners, including Palantir. Outside of routine discussions on strictly technical matters, Anthropics is committed to using Frontier AI to support in support of U.S. national security. Okay. So we'll see where this goes. Anthropics concerns about how clog can be used by the Pentagon have pushed administration officials

to consider canceling the contract worth up to $200 million, which is a drop in the bucket at $14 billion, but still probably has larger implications for their relationship with the government broadly. Yeah, there was someone who was saying, I don't know who needs to. to hear this, but punishing private companies because their CEOs don't share your politics is really bad capitalism. Palmer said this is not a reasonable characterization of what is happening. It isn't a matter of punishing companies for not sharing political views. It is a rational response to a vendor trying to control the government via terms of service and the products they power. I hope you realize. Oh yeah, people are going on. Okay, wait. So Disclosed TV,

shared it as well. Pentagon used. And what is this? Someone launched a Federal Reserve simulator? Is there anything more on the... No, we can move on. This is more important. This is way more important. Bill Meade Gaming just released

the Federal Reserve Simulator in Steam. If you like flight simulators, you're probably going to love this. Productivity is going to go to zero. I think people aren't going to be going to work. They're going to be taking days off to play this. A turn-based economic simulation game where the player assumes the role as head of the United States Federal Reserve.

This is awesome. Tyler, fired up. This, I would actually play this. Yeah, fired up. Fire it up. Download it.

I want, I want your, I want your review. I like Gary, Garrett Jones. He's promising. And he's a professor of economics and George Mason. He's actually serious.

I feel like, I feel like this would be an amazing game to play. So in the reviews, I'm reading on Steam. Yeah. I learned more about monetary policy in 15 minutes on this. than I did in five years of university. That's actually...

Please do investment banking simulator next. Yeah, I was thinking about the... LBO simulator would go so hard. Let me tell you about Cisco first. Unlock infrastructure, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So I was thinking about Sholto's Age of Empires, real-time strategy game based on the AI era,

and I was wondering if it's easier to share ship basically a skin or a mod for age of empires because the actual fundamental mechanics are pretty tight and you actually don't want to mess with those because the game's so balanced and it works so well what you really want is just instead of like instead of like archery units and horses you want robots and terminators and you know you want like a sci-fi theme on top of it and i feel like that would be something that an agent could work very well at just export the image and the description and the words of every single unit and item in the in the game export all the textures and then upload each texture to nanobanana one by one and say this is a tree what does the

cyberpunk tree look like what is the diamond age tree look like what is the you know the the the 2026 you know tree or or building look like and then it just iterates through all of those to create effectively a mod or a or a or or or or or or skin for the game. Uh, but if you do want to change the actual underlying structure, you got to go deeper. But, uh, that's, that's a lot of tokens. So we'll see, we'll see. We'll see. We got to keep pressing him on his game. We got, he's got to ship it. You got to ship it was it was. You got to ship it was. You got to beat the, beat the allegations, right? The, uh, never asked somebody what, never ask a, a, Claude code, Maxie, what they've, what they've, what they've shipped. He's got to ship. Uh, he's got to beat him. Uh,

I want to show you this Instagram video because it had me dying laughing. And so if we can play this, we're going to get demonetized, but we'll talk over it. So he vibe coded a calculator. Can we zoom in? I don't know. He vibe coded a calculator and you type in your numbers. You type in five times nine. And then it says unlock results.

$299, one-time payment, you pay, and then it gives you payment successful. The answer is 45. This is the future of vibe coding. I loved it. Anyway. I wonder, did you actually ship the product because this got millions of views? You think someone would just be like, I want to know if the payment rails work. Let me see.

Quickly, let me tell you about fin. com. The number one AI agent for customer service, if you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin. com. Sag after. What happened? Put out a statement.

on C-Dance 2.0. It's not a comment. It's a statement. The Chinese, yeah. Now, the Chinese are, I've been quivering and fear ever since. Oh, no. SAG came after them. What they said? Sags stands with the studios in condemning the blatant infringement

enabled by BightDance's new AI video model, C-Dance 2.0. The infringement includes the unauthorized use of our members' voice and likenesses. This is unacceptable and undercuts the ability of human talent to earn a livelihood. It is kind of interesting that just in this statement they're admitting to saying, like, it's so good, you're going to make it impossible for our members to earn a living, which doesn't actually... It says undercuts.

Undercuts. It doesn't say eliminates. True, true. C-Dance 2.0 disregards law, ethics, industry standards, and basic principles of consent. Did that. Boom. Responsible. AI development demands responsibility.

that is non-existent here. Completely correct. Some of the Seedance videos are insanely infringing. It's just like, wow, it's Larry David, and it looks exactly like Larry David. Do we license this? Let's figure it out. Beginning of the end, says Growing Daniel.

Yeah, we have the Larry David video, but I don't think we want to play it. It's very uncouth. Yeah, we won't. one. Disney, as expected, sent a season-assist letter to Bight Dance over C-Dance 2.0. I wonder how Bight-Dance will actually react to this pushback. Obviously, they expected it. Yeah. They know that they're not abiding by a number of different U.S. laws. Whether or not they care is another thing. Yeah. I wonder how, like, what will the, will the equilibrium be here?

like they don't allow usage in America, but everyone goes and gets VPNs. Is Seedance 2.0 open source? Because if it's, if you can just run it, like, it's like so hard to play whack-a-mole and actually get the, uh, and actually get this taken down in any meaningful way. Like the cat's pretty much out of the bag. If this is something you can just download. I don't think it's open source. Okay.

Uh, so it's running on. But, but again, like, in, some ways a lot of this stuff will need to be solved by meta and YouTube. Yeah, yeah. So if somebody makes a video with a famous actor and they're like just monetizing that, I would assume that YouTube should be in the fullness of time forced to demonetize that content or just give the revenue back to the actual IP holders. Yeah, you'd think, you'd think that you'd be able to.

And then meta, the other thing is meta, like if you make an AI, version of Andrew Huberman and you get in a fresh ad account, you can probably start spending money before the Huberman Lab team finds out what you're doing. I would disagree. I think Rob's on top of it. I think he's goaded. But anyone else. Any other team would be cucked.

I don't know. I mean, he might respond faster than the others, but this is certainly happening. He is superhuman. And this kind of thing has been happening to Joe Rogan for years at this point with just like very poor, deep fakes. but yeah i watched a video on on corridor crew about how to identify like the latest uh the latest uh the latest ai slop and it was very interesting all the different techniques that are used now there's some really obvious ones where it's just uh it's just you know clearly AI video from end to

end and so if you look in the background like the the the wood grain on the on the wooden poles or the walls changes from shot to shot and that's like a tell that it's not Consistent, but there were some where there was an AI influencer that was taking real photos and then just adding this AI Influencer into the photos. So it would be like Joe Rogan with Tony Hinchcliff replaced Tony Hinchcliff with this AI influencer girl. And then you look in the background and you're like, there's no hallucinations. Like everything looks perfect because it is.

It's just the base image. And then you're just adding this one character. There were a bunch of interesting things. There was also a video that everyone was calling AI that was just a dog painting and it just turns out the dog can paint, which is awesome. But it was a little bit of a magic trick

because the dog couldn't actually paint a picture but it could sort of pick up the paintbrush and draw strokes. But the dog was next to the dog's owner and the dog's owner... That's not art. It is absolutely art. But the dog's owner was actually a great artist

and would switch paintings with the dog. So the dog would make one, one big, messy brush. They would switch paintings, and then she would turn that messy brush into a tree and, like, adapted. So be like a time lapse? Yeah, well, yeah, they were just some cuts. And so they would switch. And then whatever the dog did would sort of serve as, like, the interpretation and the case for the artist to, like, take it to the finish line. And so you wind up with these, like, two beautiful paintings that, like, the dog and the artist sort of clabbed on, which is kind of cool.

Yeah. Gavin Purcell says if bite dance doesn't restrict or nerve. a C-Dance, this is going to escalate to a political conversation, unlike the SOR II launch, because I've been A-I-restricted. Yeah. Likeness of head-of-time C-Dance shows just how clearly every major movie star is generatable by AI. So this is interesting. If you're already like an A-list, massive superstar, I think you see some stuff like this, and you're

actually like, great, I'm going to be able to shoot a movie in a week from L.A. I'm not going to have to travel to these insane exotic locations and spend a week in the desert filming all these clips. So if you're like a Timothy Shalamee, this is maybe like, yes, you're worried for the overall industry, but at the same time, you're thinking, okay, my name and likeness is now infinitely scalable. I can still, like, restrict the supply to some degree, right? I'm not going to tell any movie studio, hey, you can make a movie with me, whatever. you're still going to kind of restrict it and have pricing power. But if you're a, the question becomes new, new talent that's emerging, trying to build their brand. At what point do studios say, we're just going to make a character, we're going to make a new actor out of thin air, place them across different movies, build them up over time?

You could imagine, I don't think a company like CAA would do this because all their talent would be like, what are you doing? Like you're taking our job, but I could imagine a group trying to make like a little Michaela-style actor that you build up over time. One thing that we'll find out is how much does the actual actors real life matter in the context of their career? Like if Timothy Salome is dating Kylie Jenner, does that like increase his appeal on the big screen? Yeah. And I would say yes, probably, right? There's so much fixation on the lives of all this talent. You could sort of fake a decent amount of that.

You could fake paparazzi photos. You could fake, you know, vacation photos. You could create a whole world around a fake person, potentially. But if people find out, will that break the illusion? Will they be not into it? But it's not real drama. People like the drama. They like following stars.

I'm still just pretty optimistic about like AI as a tool in Hollywood. Did you see that fully, fully AI generated movie about the woman who goes in the cyber truck that went viral this weekend? Wasn't it like only three minutes? I think, yeah, exactly. It was only three minutes. But it was consistent from one shot to another, which is impressive. And somebody's like, not enough people are talking about how much this sucks. And Ben Stiller chimed in was like, because it's bad.

People don't talk about things that are bad. And it was sort of interesting. I think there's still a lot of interesting. I was thinking about, like, imagine if Kevin Feigy, is that how you say his name? He's the creator of the Avengers. Don't ask me. Don't ask you, anyway.

I don't know, Christopher Nolan or James Cameron. If James Cameron got up and was like, I'm introducing Avatar, it's a great movie, and yes, we use CGI. It's like, no, the CGI is like just a tool that he uses. It's like you don't say like, yeah, we're doing Avengers. And guess what? We use green screen and that's a selling point. It's like it'll always be a tool.

And so I would assume that there will be amazing directors and creators in Hollywood that use AI as a tool in certain areas. But they won't, like you'll know it's arrived when they're not making a big deal out of it. Like it should just stand on its own. Right now things go viral because you say this is 100% AI generated and you're like, okay, I want to know. Like how good is this AI stuff? But no one's just like, here's my green screen test. And they're like, okay, awesome. Like we know green screen works.

We know it's a thing. It happens. Yeah, when I see the Seedance content, I think, okay, if movie budgets stay the same, I think we can potentially get a lot more great movies. And that's specifically because how much of these budgets goes to, let's say, somebody's making like a movie like 300. And we need to get, you know, a thousand people. out in a field.

Well, 300 people. But yeah, who's counting? Who's counting? We need to get a lot of people out in a field. Yeah. And spend days, weeks, you know, recreating all these different scenes. Yeah.

And now that budget can go towards... Yeah. The famous Henry Cavill, Superman. They finished shooting Superman. He moved on to, I think, a man from uncle. He grew a mustache. And they were like, we got to shoot another Superman scene. And he's like, contractually, I cannot shave my mustache.

And they were like, fine. We'll do it in post. and they have him come on and they CGIed like a shaved lip on the top of his mustache. And it looked really bad. And it was like, people called it out? I actually think a lot of people saw the movie and they were like, that's fine,

it's pretty quick. But the VFX artists were like, this is bad. But with AI, obviously that's much, much more doable these days. So anyway, console builds AI agents that automate 70% of ITHR finance support,

giving employees instant resolution to access requests and password recents. Andrew Curran. gave us a shot out. Very nice of Andrew Curran. He said one of the reasons Seedance 2 has impressed everyone is that it does the same thing that SORA did make very detailed video gens from very simple prompts. There's probably some prompt hydration going on. There's reasoning in the LLM that then prompts the model. So you type in one sentence, it hydrates that into a lot to work with for the model. In fact, most of the C dance clips that went viral were made from one or two sentence props. We never did find out exactly what's going on under the hood with SORA. TbPN asked about it when Sam was on, and I think he means Bill Peebles from the SORA team. And he says, thank you guys.

So thank you for shouting us out there. But what they chose, but they chose not to answer this specifically. So they dodged our question. No. We asked the hard question. Give us the IP. And they said, no.

This is the funny thing about hard questions and tech interviews. You're like, okay, so tell me how many parameters in the model. And they're like, that's a great question. We're really investing in advancing the frontier. I saw what you did there, but it's understandable. With C-Dance 2, we don't have a paper yet, but there is one out for C-Dance 1, and it says that they do use an LLM to convert the user prompt

into a much more informationally dense and structured style of the prompt that the video model was trained on. They use Aquin to do this. This is what most of us guests was going on with SORA, a version of GPD-5 maybe fit for this, was rewriting our prompts and adding details Vanilla 5.8. X would already be great at this out of the box, so it doesn't even need to be fine-tuned, really.

If this is how Sora really works, then everything does make more sense. And there's a whole bunch more context from Andrew Curran's post that you can go check out. So Bojan Tungus is saying, I can't wait to use C-Dance to fix the last season of Game of Thrones. Go do it. Go do it. I think that the last season of Game of Thrones was not, I mean, I thought it was good, but also I think that everyone's saying, oh, I wish it would end it this way. I don't know. I think if you did that, you would actually be like,

it's harder to land this plane than you think. There are a lot of... Yeah, it would be interesting when people are watching a series in real time. Yes. And then in advance of the final episode, let's say there's a week, they're like, okay, I'm just going to make the version that I want. Yeah. And I'll put it out. No, people on Reddit had written like full endings of Game of Thrones. And some of them were really convincing.

Some of them I was looking forward to. And it went a different direction. But, you know, it is what it is. Let's pull up the linear lineup so we can tell you about the guests that are coming on the show today because we have one in the restream waiting room already. I'll let you read this while I tell you. The linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents.

We have John Karamika, New York Times music, critic, and buyer of fake TBPN merch coming on the show. We have Spencer Skates from Amplitude. We have Haseeb from Dragonfly. We have Celine from Loyal, Anchor. from brain trust and closing it out with Reed from night. So fantastic lineup here. And without further ado, we should bring in from the Restream Waiting Room.

Let's bring in the next to the people from it. How you doing? I'm so sorry to not wear the merch today. You're bookmogging. Your bookmogging. Book maxing. Gen. A book max every day.

Shelfmogging. Clarify how to say your last name. It's Caramonica. I appreciate Jordy. That was noble. You must not have a lot of Italians in your life. Harmonic. Now I get it.

Harmonica. Oh, good nominative determinism. Very, yes. Peromas. Were you in my kindergarten class coming up? Oh, you got a lot of that. Okay. We will, you know, I mispronounce your name.

I'm going to find the people that bullied you in kindergarten, and I'm going to go bully them to make it. They all lost. They all lost. Total victory. Yeah, you have real TBPN merch now. Do they? Yeah. They're stuck by in the fake stuff.

Yeah. The cigarette fumes. Anyway, we got to talk about the hottest song on the internet. We got to talk about my granny got hit with a bazooka. What are your thoughts? Yeah. You know, if we were taping like an hour later, my song of the week video is going up this afternoon. It happens to be about bazooka.

No way. What a special and strange song. You guys are into it? You guys like it? I like it. Yeah, I like it a lot. I like that it's so quickly been adapted into all the day. It has the meme, you know, when a meme goes viral,

and then you get it in an image format, it turns into a cartoon, there's the video overlays. Like, I saw someone singing it. They did sort of like an a cappella rendition with nine recordings of themselves. I've seen people play it on orchestral renditions and rearranging it, guitar, and I love that. And you get that with some songs,

you go and you find a song and you go on YouTube and you say like heavy metal version and there's someone who's just jamming playing like the rap song of the day or acoustic version. I've always found that fun. So generally I'm a fan. But what do you think? Yeah. So my thing with this song, it's a perfect blank slate, right? Because nobody knows the artist.

It truly did come out of nowhere. I mean, this happened. This is a rare thing. Like I went on vacation over the holidays. It literally happened while I was away. I came back. I had no idea. All of a sudden, the internet is, is,

completely cluttered with it within a space of a week. MiamiXO, who's the artist, doesn't really have much of a foot, like not much of a footprint leading into this. So unlike a lot of meme records that are from kind of well-known artists where the meme ability is somehow predicated upon a pre-existing understanding of the musician, this is pure, it's pure joke. You know what I mean?

I'm thinking, I don't know if this is a good example of drawn, but I'm thinking of like Little Nazak's Old Town Road where he had been immersed in the Nicki Minaj fan club understood how the internet worked and was already sort of sampling from nine inch nails and so there was an established sort of repertoire and it just felt like he was ready for prime time in a way that Miami XL might not be but

yeah I think that's totally fair I mean here's someone I mean hasn't even really done did his first interview from what I can tell maybe two days ago to kind of a random YouTuber like doesn't seem to be ready to rise to the moment. And one thing that I find so strange is when a record gets meme

this intensely, this quickly, I know major labels are obviously knocking on the door, but things tend to happen a little bit quicker. You sort of you get a press release that they've maybe signed a distribution deal, like things move. But there's something that I almost feel like a little hands off

about what's happening now. Like people are just like let this cook. Like, let me get the Indian classical version, like, let me get the SpongeBob version. Like, let's just see what the sort of logical endpoint this is going to be. Are you guys up on the dancing video, like the Dancing Bones-O-7 dance videos? No, no, tell us. Like a middle-aged gentleman, Navy veteran, kind of dancing in his living room and a chick-fil-A and a car dealership really made his own kind of side cottage industry dancing to

bazooka. He's probably done about 20 or 25 videos just to this one song, creating a bit of an unholy alliance. Oh, interesting. He's a key collaborator. He really is. What's the playbook? What's the pitch that record labels are giving to Miami XO

to turn you to capitalize on this algorithmic moment and turn him into a star? So the cynical playbook, I assume, is what you're asking. rather than the real playbook. So the cynical playbook is we're going to give you a short-term distribution deal. Maybe we're also going to give you a publishing contract in which we extract maximum value from your writing on this song and the next. What's the difference between those two in a music context? So publishing deal is going to be on songwriting, the lyrics, the melody,

whereas the distribution deal is for the finished product of the song itself. But the song already exists. the song already exists, but a lot of times what they're doing is they're retrofitting contracts on top of things that already happened. Like, he's someone who has a SoundCloud page, but you and I could have a SoundCloud page. That doesn't mean that we're registered with ASCAP or BMI. It doesn't mean that we have a lawyer who's negotiating splits on any deals that we might have done with collaborators. He's just a guy with 40 songs on a SoundCloud page. So if I'm a publisher, I'm looking at those and saying, how do I monetize those on a writing perspective?

And if I'm a label, I'm saying, how do I put gasoline on this thing that already has fire? Probably what's happening is one of the major labels is going to scoop them up, get a remix going with two or three of your favorite SoundCloud graduate rappers, and see if they can turn it into a radio hit. Yeah, because it does. The challenge is that sometimes you have one of these songs, it's like catchy and funny, and it naturally can play on the radio. But if you actually just start playing this on the radio, you can imagine, I mean, I remember getting into rap music in maybe high school, middle school, whatever, and playing songs in the car with my parents.

And then you really hear the lyrics for the first time. You can imagine the moments with this song. And they're like, did I just, did I hear that correctly? So it's hard to imagine this as a, like it feels like it's an audio version of a meme. It's not a. Here's my counterpoint. Grandma got run over by a reindeer. What's that?

You know that song? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a classic. That's a classic. So if that's a classic, why can't this be a classic? Okay, okay, yeah. That's a great, that's a great point. One of the great Christmas songs of all time.

Yeah, so I want to see the Miami XO Christmas edition of Granny got hit with a Missouca. Miami is a great name. It is a great name. He's not from Miami, apparently. Apparently he's from South Carolina, which, you know. Well, he probably is. It's, yeah, it's sort of reminds me of on the internet.

There was a big shack who came out with that song, Man's Not Hot. Do you remember that whole prank? Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. So I believe that started with a joke version of Fire in the booth, a segment on BBC, Radio One, maybe, and normally rappers show up to the booth. Yeah, yeah, but normally rappers show up and they deliver freestyles that are somewhat prepped and, like, iconic Amigos have a great one. but then big Shaq shows up and gives this like completely joky, but he's in on the joke,

but no one really knows. It goes massively viral. And then he sort of commercializes from there. My question is like, like with Little Nas X, there was clearly a contract that they needed to clean up with nine inch nails to properly sample that. And then there's the remix. Like, is that a big part of the pitch? Like, we're going to sort of protect you from what's coming if you're an agent and you're

going to one of these breakout stars? Yeah. I mean, I think viral stars are really vulnerable, right? Because they're often operating outside of any formal arrangements with any institutions. Yeah. So typically what happens in a situation like this is the first person who comes in is either a manager or a lawyer often. Because sometimes you don't need both of them at this early stage. You simply need someone to represent your interests when you're walking into the room at Atlantic Records or Universal Records or with UMG publishing.

UMPG or something along those lines. So that's probably what's happening right now. The truth is there are plenty of viral moments, quote, unquote, that other people capitalize. Like I think a lot about on fleak. There's like a young woman, a young black woman who invented or at least popularized the term in a viral video who then watched it get away from her. And it's in, you know, L'Oreal commercials and all this other stuff with none of the sort of benefits, redounding back to her. And so a lot of times now what's happening, that was like six years ago before these

processes were really formalized. People didn't know how to handle virality back then. But I think now people understand the virality is about the best marketing that's available and it can't be faked. Well, it can't be. But that's a thing. So artists, new artists has a viral moment. They start talking with all the record labels.

How much difference is there between the different deals that they're being offered? In our world, if you create a viral product, every VC will reach out to you. They're just kind of offering you different valuations, different kind of ownership levels that they're looking for. And it just becomes 20% in the board. And some element of it is just like what price are you willing to pay? The other is like, who do I want to partner with? I'm assuming it's something similar. But how much, is there a record label that's going to be like way more risk on?

like, hey, we don't think this is just a one-off moment. Are they all telling them that you're a future superstar, but then some of them are secretly saying, like, yeah, we're just going to max kind of extract what we can out of this. Yeah, I think there's two levels of answer to the question. Like, I don't, I haven't spoken to Miami XO. I don't know if he wants a 30-year music career or if he sees music as like one part of a larger suite of, like, viral offerings.

When you look at his TikTok and Instagram right now, the last two weeks of content is all him making jokes about his own virality. Maybe he's a viral comedian, cosplaying as a musician. Sure, sure, sure. Tough to know. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So if I'm a label, I might say, do you want this to be your career?

Yeah. If so, I'll invest X amount of dollars for X for Y percent over 12 months. or if he says, you know what, this was kind of a lark. Like, let's just, let's squeeze every little inch out of it. They may say, great, we're going to give you a distribution deal for this song. We're going to absolutely gasoline on it. We're going to get a remix going. We're going to put it in commercials.

We're going to do all this other stuff. And let's get you a quick half a million or a million dollars. And then do whatever you want with it. It really, it really varies. Is there some sort of iron law that says a song like this can only break through? like once, it seemingly like a silly song emerges, like once a year. And you would think with, you would think, you would think, silly songs every day.

No, I know, I know, but we're talking about it. That means, like, this is not a music show. This did break through. And it's broken through. And it feels like every, I don't know, is it 12 months? There's, like, some song. And I would think with Suno, a lot of people could be like, I'm going to make a song like Bazooka.

Yeah. And they're just, like, taking a format for a song. which in this case, I don't know the exact genre, but it's like not, it's not, you know, melodic kind of like real music. It's like melodic underground rap. Yeah, you know, like. You would think there would be, this would cataly, like when you get like a meme, like a more traditional meme, it just catalyzes a ton of different remixes on top of,

on top of that and kind of branches off of the format. But I haven't, I, I, because of, because of the way that the algorithms work and like syncing, video or image content to the music, it's just perpetuating like the same, the same thing over and over. I mean, I think to your first question about how many of these do we get in a year, maybe we get four or five in a year that really like break escape velocity and get out to the wider public. And radio is a funny thing. I mean, you were joking that like, this would sound strange to hear on the radio. You know, five to ten years ago, you'd have a station like Z-100.

in New York, which is like the big pop hit station, that studiously like walled off TikTok hits. They were like, we don't play those. Those aren't real songs. Yeah. You know, real songs or Lady Gaga songs. Like real songs are Katie Perry songs or Taylor songs. And then something happened.

Maybe it was COVID. I don't exactly know what, but like 2021, 2021, 2022, you turn on Zoom 100 in the car and it's literally just like listening to TikTok. Just the whole thing inverted. And obviously that's part because radio record labels are invested in both TikTok promotion, which is screwing with your algorithm and putting songs in front of you. But it's also invested in radio promotion, which is putting things in a more mainstream level. But the chasm between those two universes is so thin right now.

I would not be surprised to hear Bazooka on like a mainstream rap station by mid-March. I really wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, yeah. Sounds right. I want to ask, like, where this goes from a, just, like, the cynical machine that takes place and, like, turns this into a repeatable formula. Is there, do you think there will be a new movement where a mainstream big artist hires a comedian to write some lyrics? And then they do specifically architect the virality where they have some UGC creator with a guitar. doing an acoustic version on day one,

and they hire that guy to do the dance outside the car dealership. And so it's like much more orchestrated to like create that viral boom. What I would say is things like that are already happening. Like I know people in Los Angeles. It may not be the literal, the exact literal thing you just said. But I know people in Los Angeles

who work in production and songwriting. A lot of songwriting rooms are three or four people. Oftentimes you'll have one of those people who have fluency in. viral content or fluency and memeable internet content. And the gap between like, I'm a comedian, I'm a content creator, I'm a musician, we used to think of those as three different jobs. They're not three different jobs anymore. It's basically just one job, which is getting attention. That's the main job. So I think what you'll see is actually there are a lot of people,

even who build themselves as songwriters, but who have been posting TikTok content for four, or five, six years already in their 20 years old. Are they a songwriter or are they a TikTok maker? Are they engineers of ira-are-are-are-recipients of virality or are they engineers of virality? I just don't think those lines are as meaningful as they used to be. But yeah, things like what you're saying, they're definitely already happening. What are the, what are all the ways that you're tracking algorithms influencing the music business? Because is optimizing for that 10 to 15 second repeatable thing that you can attach to a reel or a photo dump

or things like that. I remember first processing artists gaming the streaming platforms by making every song much shorter, right? I'm not like I listen to music, I'm not like a music head, but I distinctly remember being like, wait, this guy just dropped, you know, Future just dropped a mixtape. Why does it have like 30 songs? that are all like, you know, two minutes.

So that was like one of those moments that was like the platforms influencing the music itself. But what are all the different things that you're tracking right now? And which make your blood boil the most? I gave up blood boiling a lot. I'm too old to have my blood boil. You're not allowed. At my age, you're not allowed for that. You're not allowed to have that.

Okay, let me take you back even further, first of all. Let's go back to actual Napster, like primetime Napster, when aspiring artists would tag their songs as Britney Spears songs or M&M songs so that they would pop up in search algo, and you downloaded thinking you got some M&M leak and it was by somebody else, right? I've got untold on old hard drives, untold MP3s of who knows who, like advertising themselves as like Metallica songs or something. So there's that.

Your question about the future sort of a gaming the algorithm, that's functioning on two levels. One, you want to provide as much raw content to any algorithm as you can. But two, when you think of how streaming platforms serve you music, the entire goal of a streaming platform is to make sure you don't press stop. It's to make sure you don't go away. And so not only did that affect the length of albums, because 30 songs is a longer play, time than 10 songs, it also affected the structure of music.

Think about Post Malone in the mid to late 2010s, right? What do you think when you think post Malone? You think that's a little bit hip-hop, it's a little bit R&B, it's a little bit pop. Nowadays, it's a little bit country. But when you think of the kind of overall sonic framework of the song, it's real blurry, right? It's smeary. He's singing in this very stretched way. The beats aren't like, it's not like 90s rap beats where it's like on the one.

It's not that. It's a lot blurrier. Streaming did that because streaming wanted to trick you into thinking that a song was never ending. And so you can press track one on a post Malone album, and before you've even woken up, you're on track seven. The structure of the music, the fundamental. It's so interesting because I remember, I don't know, being young and like buying an album. And then like when you buy an album, it's such a different, like, for whatever, 10, 12 bucks, 15, whatever, whatever it was priced. Like, you're actually like, you're not just listening.

You're like studying it when I come away being like, do I really like? this and you want to be taken on a journey and I would immediately clock, okay, I like these songs in this context, like these songs when I'm driving to school, this song in the gym, you know, you're kind of like mapping, I would map the album to my life. And then at some point it was like, oh, you made, you made 30 of the same song. Thank you. Thank you for that. And like sometimes it's, it's kind of like a cool vibe and it's fun to listen to, but it's not like watching a movie that's taking you through all these different emotions. It reminds me a little bit of jam bands in that way, which is like not a genre of music I

care much about or certainly not what I enjoy. But anytime I've been forced to go to like a concert of that style, I'm always kind of shocked that maybe it doesn't totally matter which point in the show you're dropped in or which point in the show you're pulled out. Like it's kind of always happening. And like the dynamism is like, oh, in minute four, he did this lick. but also in minute 47, he did this other lick that kind of talks to that. Maybe it doesn't totally matter when you entered.

And I think streaming really, especially for hip-hop, really, really push things in that direction. And what you're seeing now, like, when I hear Bazooka, I'm hearing 2016 SoundCloud records. Like, I'm hearing saw-baby records. Like, I'm hearing things that host Young Thug that really, really made it seem like any kid with, a fruity loop software and like a tiny bit of a melodic sense could all of a sudden have a viral hit um it's really i mean we are living in 2016 not just you know in instagram hashtags and everything but the fact that we've cycled back and the biggest record of 2026 so far is basically a 2016 soundcloud hit is i think striking and also talks about how nostalgia is like extremely collapsed right now like

were nostalgic for things that happened 45 minutes ago. Yeah, the 2016 trend was huge on Instagram when 2026 happened. It was like, me in 2016. And I was like, that wasn't that long ago. Not long ago at all. And the photos, like, they look a little bit older, but like they were taken with iPhones. And so they look like relatively recent. I'm like, oh, how many younger?

Well, one thing it also adds to that is like, are we remembering a specific song or are we remembering like a set of memories. And I think that's the fuzziness. And obviously like AI complicates that. Like there's, there are, I'm beginning to think that like original text, which is say Bazooka is like far less important than the memes, which are in turn far less important than how we talked about the memes. And I wonder if 10 or 20 years from now, we're not really remembering Bazooka as a song,

but we're remembering discourse far better. I'm here talking about it for half an hour, and I don't think I've ever listened to more than 30 seconds of it. Like, I could not tell you if it has a verse. It does. It does. Okay. It does.

I can confirm it has a verse. I have that experience. I was in a, I did a yoga class, and they were playing music. You playing bazooka? And not bazooka. That would go hard.

But they were playing songs, and I was like, oh, that's a, that's a song. Because I'd heard them as like background music to social media content, but I'd never heard it. And I was like, oh, that, that's funny. That 10 seconds.

Yeah. I've heard that 10 seconds. I've never heard the full thing. Yeah. What's the, are there any, are you tracking any groups that are just fully in,

in the music industry broadly, that are fully leaning into AI and saying, like, we know a lot of people hate this and are scared of it, but we're going to try to create like a super, like a faceless superstar here, like a daft punk or something like that. Any kind of,

because I've seen the people that will like go up the charts and saying, this is a fully AI artist. And it's hard to actually read too much into any one of these artists because it could very well just be a really talented musician who's like using the tools to the best of their ability. and it's not just like one-shoted AI music. Or bots too. I mean, if you're willing to do AI, you could also

be willing to bot. You can bought the success of it. Yeah. I mean, I think so towards the end of last year, there were maybe three or four like AI musicians that ended up on some chart. Look, there's a lot of charts. You can try, like again, we could, we could pick

a chart and chart on it next week if we really tried hard. Let's chart, brother. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. If you want to get involved, all right, we'll talk offline. We'll crack the code.

I got the refrain right here. You're watching TBPN. We'll do it next. There we go. So Solomon Ray, who's like a R&B artist, a lot of them are R&B gospel-leaning R&B with a little bit of kind of like a maga-adjacent country. These are the artists that have tended to break out into broader consciousness. a thing that I noticed is a lot of these songs are, what's the way to put it? They're sad.

They're for depressed people. They're for people who are looking to get lost in a song, maybe without thinking too hard about who's the musician behind it or what's going on. They feel like emotionally manipulative to me in a way. And I think those, but I also think they're also calling cards, right? Like if you made the Solomon Ray music and then you ended up on some billboard R&B chart, you can then go into a publishing meeting or go into a label meeting and say, look what I did with no resources. Imagine what I can do with that. So as far as like super groups and like big picture, like I don't think people are thinking quite at that scale.

But I think a lot of people are prompting AI to make music that will resonate for people who are in the music business specifically. it. I mean, we see this, yeah, we see this on X articles where people will use AI to generate something that's like, oh, technology is so crazy. And I've seen it on Instagram Reels where you'll get sort of like a video that's very clearly like just glazing you and confirming all of your biases and stuff. I know why this is getting a lot of views because it's not acting as any sort of complex narrative or anything like that. No. And the other thing, I mean, AI, I mean, I'm sure you guys see this a lot more in your side than I see it on my side, but there's a lot of like unseen process that AI can help with. You have songwriters who are like, hey, I need a 20-part vocal harmony

on the bridge. Can you just do 20 parts that kind of sound like they're in the same genre as the original audio? That comes together really quickly. Hey, I need a lyric to fill in like the fourth bar of the quatrain. Can you give me 10 ideas for that? I think. think you're seeing that in places already in studio sessions, but you haven't yet had the breakout of like, it's Taylor Swift, but it's not Taylor Swift. Like, you haven't had that. I think we're still like a few years away on a macro, on a mat, on a major scale from that.

But the small stuff is, it's, it's softening our resolve. I don't know. You guys, you guys care if there's AI music, if you are listening to a Spotify playlist and track five is human, track six is AI, and track seven is human. You stress them about that? Yeah, I mean, I like showing points. I like, I like songs that other people know are songs.

So even if you told me that bazooka was AI generated, I'd be like, I'm still down because you have an experience about that and we can talk about that. And if I'm humming it, you're like, oh, he's humming bazooka. I don't want to be off in my own world listening to music that's just generated for me because no one else will get what I'm humming. And so as long as it's a shelling point and everyone knows or everyone in my group knows about the song or I can share it and then they can find it and they can enjoy it. I'm cool. But I don't want hyper-personalized music necessarily.

At least that's what I think. Yeah, I mean, I had a- Homing bazooka is a good hardcore band name. We should do that. Humming-Bizuka. I have some lightning around questions, but you can do. Yeah, I had the probably almost two years ago at this point, maybe, maybe, maybe, a year and a half, but somebody made an AI gunna album posted it on YouTube.

And you easily could have, even that was, you know, I imagine all the models have made a ton of progress, but you could have slotted that into a gun. You could have like snuck one of those into a real gunna album. And I would have been thinking, yeah, this, this is, this is a vibe. This tracks. Yeah. My one. To me, sorry, just the tech, it's like, I'm not like a purist in any way.

I think people use whatever technology they want to. make whatever they want to use to make great music. But we become so desensitized in the sort of post-te pain era to like hearing digitally processed vocals that like this is kind of what we were asking for the whole time. You know, like, and again, I'm not passing judgment on it. I just sort of think anyone who's complaining about it, but then goes and dances to like, I'm in love with a stripper at the club. And it's like, we're not that far away.

Yeah. That's good. Everyone knows that just being in the streaming business, making all your money from streaming is rough. I think it's like a billion streams on Spotify or Apple Music gets you like low single digit millions and revenue that you're then splitting up with tons of different people. So not super significant. And so the answer is do constantly be touring, doing big tours. are there artists that have insane streaming numbers that don't actually crush it when they go out touring? So that's interesting because I think you have streaming has created its own tier of superstars.

If you think about NBA Youngboy, the most streamed artist on YouTube, maybe three of the last five years, two or three of the last five years. Are you serious? Oh, 100%. NBA Young Boy, look, NBA Young Boy is the most popular and meaningful rapper in America for the last five years.

I had no idea. In my head, he's still like SoundCloud. No, haven't you seen his earnings? He's outpacing the S&P 500. He had the number one, no,

he had the number one debut solo rapper tour by revenue, the tour that just completed last year. I think he did 70 million in ticket sales. Never broke again. He's never broke again.

He called a shot. I love it. I will never be broke again. Put some of that in CDs. That's an example of someone who streaming created a marketplace and then went out into the world and received all the riches that came with it. But then you have other people who, you know, to your point earlier about MiamiXO, is this guy a star or not?

Like, who knows? Like, is he going to be on one-hit wonder bills 10 years from now? Maybe. But you have people, like say, even Playboy Cardi who like can tour. well, but isn't really trying to be like a public-facing celebrity. It's like he's a little bit in the shadows. Everybody takes their streaming success differently. But Young Boy is an example of someone who literally saw that and then went out and sold

a million tickets off of that, you know, or something along those lines. I went to three dates on that tour. It was the most enlivening tour I've been to in years. What? Did you feel like you needed to go to three dates to do your job properly? I mean, after the second, were you like, was it just like, it's fun? I want to go again. I chase joy, man.

I chase pleasure. I love it. I love it. The chat says he also has 13 kids. He may be broke again. It's wild. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is always so much fun.

We got through exactly one question. had 10, so we'll have to have you back soon. Yeah, it's okay. We'll be back. Appreciate y'all. I can't wait. Great to see you, John. We'll talk to you. See you. Looking, yeah, we'll tell you about Octa. Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. And I'm also going to tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. We had some breaking news. If you told me that. Yes. NBA Young Boy was the biggest artist on YouTube.

That took me by surprise as well. I would have said that's a great bit. That's a great bit. But he deserves it. I love NBA Young Boy. Fantastic artist. We had some breaking news. The Netherlands House of Representatives has approved a 36% tax on unrealized capital gains.

And Aaron Bali says, how do you short a country and got 27,000 likes? It's getting spicy over there in the Netherlands. But, fortunately, ESML employees are gigacooked. Oh, that's right. They're over there and the house. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I still. Oh, they're exempting startups.

That's fun. But ASML is not a startup. I think of it as a startup. I actually think of every business is either real estate or startup. You know, McDonald's, that's real estate play. If we get crazy with it, I imagine that there will be a lot of companies that are redefining their category as real estate.

if it's truly exempted here. It's full employment for tax lawyers over there. Get in that business because you're going to be having a lot of clients. Yeah, the... Our next guest is here. Our next guest is here. Let's bring in Spencer from Amplitude. Welcome to the show.

He's in the restroom, ready room. Now, he's in the TVPN Ultrono. What's going on? Hello! Hey, guys. George, John, great to see you guys. Great to see you. Thank you.

I'm so excited to finally make it to TBN and the big leagues, man. I mean, we're way overdue. Way overdue. You have a very unique superlative, right? Aren't you one of the first YC founders to ever take a company public? Like in the first 10 at least, something like that? We were one of the earlier ones. In our batch in YC 2012, it was us, gusto, and PlanGrid.

And those were kind of the big, that was the emergence of YC as SaaS, which is now dead. We can talk about that. How big was a class at that time? I like to think we made B2B hot. 60 companies, so very, very different from what it is to. day. Wow. That's really fast. Yeah. Yeah, we always, we always recommend taking companies public. If you're building the business, just go ahead over to the New York Stock Exchange, take your

company public. But how has it been for you? You know, there's always like, oh, stay private forever, do the SpaceX thing. Obviously, Elon's changing his tune on that. Give us a review. What's it like being in the public markets and what's your journey been like? This may sound very surprising, but it's actually incredibly positive for a whole bunch of reasons. My opinion is, once you get a company to about $100 million in ARR or beyond, you have an obligation to the business, to the stockholders, to everyone that works with you to take it public. We did it for a number of reasons. I mean, one, there's the liquidity aspect where now we can get talent and say, hey, this equity is worth something right the second, not in some future scenario. And that's huge, because that allows us to attract a different level of executives, attract different types of software engineers, track different types of software engineering.

like acquire companies, that's actually a really big deal. There's tons of companies up for sale these days and saying, hey, we're going to give you real liquidity now. On the first day we do this transaction is a huge deal for them. The other thing it does is it makes it clear that we are sticking around for the very long term. We're not continued dependent on the private markets for either liquidity or for future cash. We're profitable as a company. We're able to set that stake in the ground and talk about the next five, ten, twenty years. Oh, yeah, the profitability form.

Yeah. So, and then it just, the last thing I'd say is it sets a higher bar for execution. Yeah. Now, the downside is, you know, a liquid stock price massively distracting to the team because everyone's like, oh, my God, you know, I make a point of not looking at it. Someone told me there's a SaaS apocalypse last week, and so I'm like, oh, I better say something on this. But, you know, overall, it's actually a very positive thing. Since this is the first time in the show, take us back to YC Demo Day. Give us the elevator pitch.

Like, what were you describing then? And then obviously, I want to go forward to, like, what the company is like today. So we actually had a different company during YC Demo Day. What were you pitching? Yeah, we were doing this voice recognition app called Sonalite. It was like an early version of Siri before Siri. Interesting. And it, like, listened to you in the background so that you could safely talk to it.

Like, you had this really sick demo where you had. You know, you had your phone and you put it in your jacket pocket and you had a conversation, and people were like, whoa, this is like Star Trek. This is the coolest thing ever. You're so close to the AI pin. You know, it's funny. Voice was just not good enough as a technology then. Ten years later, it actually might break through, which is funny.

But anyway, we pivoted that into Amplitude, and the very first version was mobile analytics. We saw mobile taken off like this. And we said there is a whole set of infrastructure companies going to be. be built to make those companies successful. So, you know, companies like Snapchat or Instagram or WhatsApp or YouTube or Yelp that were just – and then a lot of people were accessing the internet for the first time on mobile. You had people coming online in Asia and Africa, and we said, okay, let's go bet on this and let's build a company that solves a lot of their infrastructure and data analytics problems because we had those same problems at Sonalite.

Fast forward today. Now we're doing – Wait, that means that means you got – you were getting some users. for the first product. Like if you... Personalite? Yeah. Yeah, we got like a few hundred thousand downloads, so... Oh, pretty good.

You know, someone who wasn't us, well, I think you guys are much more successful consumer guys than I am, but someone who wasn't us was using it, so that was good. No, I launched an iOS app in YC summer 2012, and I think I got like 500 installs. It was a disaster. I didn't understand anything. It's my first stuff. It's really, really hard.

So, yeah, 100,000. Yeah. Well, yeah, and I just asked. because you don't discover all these different pain points and problems unless you actually have some element of scale. So what was the first use case for mobile analytics? It's like conversion rates, A, B testing, what were the killer features? The key question people wanted to know was what actions lead to long-term successful usage. So we wanted to know, does the accuracy at Sunlight, does the accuracy of voice recognition matter for someone's long-term engagement?

It turns out it's massively matters. If you have a first successful voice recognition event, you're twice as likely to stick around long term. And it turns out every single product needs that same intelligence. And so all the different startups in our batch were like, hey, can I get that data analytics when we'd show them, they're more interested in that than what we're doing on voice recognition with Sonalite. Because to my surprise, even companies like Plangrich,

which were very, very successful in our batch and kind of one of the stars coming out where like, I don't even know the first thing about, what causes my users to stick around. So we ended up building that. You know, we've helped companies over the years like DoorDash, Com, Peloton, tons of others. Now we're working foundational model labs to help them as well.

Sure. Understand the same things. Yeah. How power law driven is the business? I imagine that there's like a really long tale of just so many app developers that need analytics. Then at the very, very tippy top, you probably have like, you know, some of the hyperscalers that are like, hey, we'll do it in-house.

But is that the right way to think about the market structure? Yeah, it definitely is. I think one of the surprises is just how widespread this need is. And so it's not just within technology. It's like quick service restaurants. So we have Panda Express and Chick-fil-A and, you know, Jersey mics as customers of ours. We have media companies like NBC. We have and Fox.

We have, you know, it's like everyone needs this. And then in terms of the actual breakdown of our ARR, it's we have over 40 companies above a million in ARR, which is very concentrated for someone of our size and stage. And I think from my standpoint speaks to how deep this pain is. If you really need this, you really need it and you're willing to spend. We're often the largest spend in someone's stack. Well, talk to me about how the analytics are changing in the age of AI. Are you rolling out tools that will, like, build an IPython notebook, write pandas, like do SQL queries? Like, I imagine that the previous era was very much like, great, you got the data together.

Now hand it over to me and my data scientist will write a bunch of Python to actually interpret it. How much of that is changing and happening in-house now? Oh, it's completely changing. So the key issue is that you had to be familiar with SQL. You have to be familiar with data taxonomies. you have to be familiar with how to do a funnel analysis, like all these pieces of specialized knowledge. And so today we launched an AI agentic analytics platform with Amplitude

where you can just type any free-form question and then get an answer back. And it'll do the deep work of figuring out how to translate it to a query, how to use the right tools, how to map it to your taxonomy. So you don't need to know any of that. You can just say, what are my DAUs? Or what's the worst step in my conversion funnel? And then how do I improve it? and it'll come back with a whole notebook and analysis of results, all with an amplitude.

You can also connect it via Slack, so you can just connect our Slackbot, have it hit our MCP server, and then it comes back with this very rich dashboard and widgets and text responses that's formatted that tells you all about it. Yeah. Talk about the SaaSpocalypse. Are you worried about people vibe coding their own in-house version? like what are you seeing on the ground? What, what do you think like long-term modes and software look like? Is anything...

Yeah, and I think there's like two things. Like, what happens to the core business and then, like, how do you create net new products or this new kind of, like, category of company that has entirely new kind of needs around understanding how their products get used and all that kind of thing. Yeah. So first on SaaS, I think the key lesson is

the software you've already built, that is no longer a moat. Because to your point, whether it's someone vibe coding it or someone going after as a company, they can replicate it pretty quickly. And so the new key moat in my mind is, it's a little trite, but speed of innovation. You have to be pushing the bleeding edge of what capabilities are, and that's what customers. And if you do that, and you create a company that can do that, that's what customers will buy. And so what I think the SaaS Apocalypse has actually gotten right is if you look, at the median SaaS company, whether it's a few hundred million in error like us or whether

it's in the billions, the median SaaS company, their innovation has actually slowed to a standstill. I don't know if you guys ever been inside of these. But it's crazy how little that they ship in terms of net new products. They'll put some nice branding on it. They'll be like, oh, introducing our new Salesforce AI agents. But then it's like, okay, this is the same thing you guys had last year. Like, what are we doing here? And so I think the difference is speed of using the bleeding edge of these model capabilities is all that matters.

And you're even seeing it in foundational model companies. It's right. Like, okay, Opus was the hottest thing, you know, a week ago. Then it was Codex literally launched the same day and said, hey, we're even better and we're faster and we're on Cerebrus trips and all this stuff. And so I think it just matters to the rate of improvement. The analogy I've heard for software that I actually like by one of my – a former Amplitude investor is it's like sushi. And so buyers are always going to want the best thing.

And so if you're keeping up with innovating the best thing, you will be able to charge a premium. And so, you know, it's fine that the gas station at the 7-Eleven at the gas station now sells sushi. You know, it's not going to put, you know, Jero and Japan out of business. Yeah. And so for us, the lesson is, okay, there is no moat anymore from what we've built. There is only a moat if we're able to deliver the most bleeding edge capability. Yeah. How do you think about other moats that could potentially relate to what you're doing?

I'm just thinking about, like, we were talking about just email delivery. Like, there is a way to get a web server to send an email, but there's all this trust that's built up around email delivery rates. And so you're probably better off going with a company that has a lot of experience there, understands what Gmail likes and sets rate limits and has a history of, like good behavior and then you were talking about payment rails and all the bank licenses and money transfer licenses. Have you, have you, have you started thinking about like other pools of moats that might exist in, in software companies as the divide grows between, okay, you have a stagnant pile of code versus a company that's actually being agile, innovating, and carving out new modes and digging existing modes deeper? Honestly, I'm, at least at amplitude, we're kind of

full send on this SaaS is dead. AI is the future. And so we're just assuming for our business that it doesn't matter, you know, what we built to date and all that matters is can we deliver, you know, an AI analytics future. And so I'm sure there's going to be modes like you described where

you get weird interfaces in the human world. But I actually believe in the thesis that I think a lot of specialized skill sets are dead. And if you look at, I don't know if you guys have ever read the bitter lesson. Oh yeah. Rich Sutton. Rich Sutton, yeah.

And Darryo was actually recently talking about that as well on the Doar Cash podcast, where all that matters, like specialized skill sets go away. All that matters is scaling these different variables. So compute, training time, quantity of data, breadth and quality of data. And it doesn't really, like all these places where you could eke out a job because you have some specialized knowledge in a niche, I think are going to completely go away. And that goes for the companies, too, where a lot of them are giving lip services, AI stuff, but you know, you look at your media and SaaS company again. And it's like, okay, you know, we rebranded some stuff and maybe we have some cool, you know, one little AI feature here.

But that's kind of all they've done. Yeah. What about just like just being reinvigorated? I mean, where were you, YC-10 or 11? Winter 12. 11, winter 12? Yeah, like, it's, it's an overnight success. It's been 14 years. But at some point, you know, it can get exhausting. Has the AI boom sort of reinvigorated you, reinvigorated the team? And then what changes have been made to the individual roles of folks on the team to actually diffuse AI into everything that you do?

Yeah, I mean, we're super excited. The team has been very excited. I think the biggest thing we're seeing is specialized skill sets are going away. And so if you're an engineer, you have to think about whether what you're building customers actually use and want. If you're a product manager or designer, you're actually shipping code. Like, we see, like, one of our best designers is shipping code on a daily basis here, which is pretty crazy. I wouldn't have thought that were possible a year ago. And then I think it extends beyond the engineering and product and design functions. I think you look at go-to-market, I think the same thing's going to happen. Like, you're still going to want salespeople because we as humans naturally respond to other people and, you know, we much

like rather talking to a person than AI and AI. But all the kind of specialized niche skills like, oh, I know how to write an earnings call script or a blog post or file a form four or, you know, do this legal review or create an infographic. I think a lot of that is going to go away. And instead, you're just going to be left with high agency people who just know how to use AI. Yeah. What are, like, we've seen so many different products explode from zero to hundreds of thousands or millions of users really quickly. Part of that is because, you know, models are this sort of magical technology that we're still processing, right? We've seen this with, you know, back, what was it, like two, three years ago when you had that, that image generation company that would make, you know, do like headshots.

You remember this company? you have this magical technology can cause like really fast explosive growth. There's like this urgency from this early adopter crowd that will just try anything at least once. Like historically if you were making a digital product and you're using amplitude, you'd be able to see like,

okay, if somebody signs up and they use the app three times in the first three days, there's an 80% chance that they'll still be using it in the six month. At what point, can you kind of see through all the noise and the chaos with some of these newer digital products that are leveraging AI and realize that you have something like sticky? Are there kind of new indicators? Or is there still something to be learned from the sort of like approach to retention

analytics from maybe a decade ago? So the core is the same thing, which is you want users to use your product and get a ton of value over time. So you're still looking at. do they retain, you know, one, two, three months down the line? But what you're looking at upstream is different. So you're going to be looking at what sort of prompts is someone putting in? Is it getting them the result they want? Did they seem to like it? Did they reshare it?

And so one of the things we're doing is actually building LLM analytics internally. And we're partnering with a number of our AI forward customers that, you know, have chatbots or, you know, are building models to see, okay, well, does this sort of response get better engagement than this sort of response or vice versa. And so you do need some customization to do that because you want to look at these traces in real time. You want to understand the sentiment. You want to figure out how to, you know, what sort of context you can give it to give it a

better response. But you're still can, like, the thing that hasn't changed is you're still connecting it to long-term engagement. So I know if they're still retained after three months in subscribing, that's a great outcome. So I just want behaviors at the start that correlate with that. Yeah, that makes it. Two somewhat unrelated questions to the core business, but what can you tell us about how the iOS app charts work?

About how they work? Because I imagine that you see analytics, and then we see the charts, and everyone has this feeling that the charts are based on momentum. How real is that? What does it take to chart? How confident are you in people gaming the charts? Or, you know, how do you think about charting in the app store broadly? That's so funny. Dude, this is a blast from the past.

This is like a typical question we get in like 2014. Charting is, at least from what we've seen, charting is not the best way to get distribution anymore. You want to get it through other channels that are, whether it's viral, whether it's like, you know, own media, whether it's, you know, just a community of influencers. It's like very, very different adoption. As far as I can tell, I mean, this guys at Censor Tower

would probably be able to give you a better answer than this. It is very much how many people download it in the last, you know, 24 hours, seven days. And then what's the change in that over time? Yeah. And that's why we see, yeah, and that's why we see like the meta-quest charts like right around Christmas because everyone's getting an oculus end of the tree. Oh, yeah, just like spike up. Totally, totally, totally.

And there's, it's always fun checking the charts after Christmas because you're like, oh, here are all the toys that did well. Very, very interesting. Do you keep, you worked as an algorithmic trader at DR, DRW trading? DRW trading. Go a little Don Wilson. Yeah.

Do you keep up with any of those folks? Do you have any ideas or predictions about how AI will impact trading firms? Don, you know, I'll just tell this quick story on Don. He is fucking next level. He was out here in Silicon Valley, and I randomly bumped him to him at a party two years ago. And he was like, oh, we're trying to create models that, like, build the bleeding edge of what might happen in markets and incorporate all this data, whether it's geopolitical or macro or whatever else. And I'm like,

holy shit. And he was physically out here in person so much so that he had gotten a place out here in the Bay Area, even though he's in Chicago. So I'm like, wow, this guy is next level. So I think it will dramatically change in that if you can

create models which take in all these different data sources, and then the lesson from deep learning is if you just get continued scale, you all sorts of trends, and underlying structure is going to pop out that you didn't even expect was there. So I think the high-frequency trading firms that figure it out will do incredibly well, and they'll leave the old guys in the dust.

Yeah, Frantz-Wat, Chalet was posting yesterday the day before saying, like, one of the first signs of, like, a, like, ASI will be a hedge fund that is just so dramatically outperforming. It was like, they made $10 trillion this quarter? Would you bet on a... That's why they got to have the wealth tax to redistribute it. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, bad joke. Would you bet on a traditional trading finance background getting up to speed on AI or an AI lab learning finance?

If you had to back... Definitely the labs are one of these engineers learning finance. Really? I mean, when we went into high frequency, you know, it used to be the finance world was filled with jocks, right? Yeah. You know, it's like chest thumpers that, like, did, you know, hundreds of phone calls every day. Yeah, Wall Street. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

When I went into it, you know, the nerds were just beginning to become hot. And so you wanted these people with math PhDs or, you know, physics Nobel Prize or whatever else. And it's like, yeah, they're going to outthink you. And so it's just going to go more in that direction. You know, the old days of the finance pro is gone. So. Do you skate? Do you skateboard?

Oh, absolutely. Really? That's good. That's amazing. You got it. Roller skates, not, or ice skates. Not, not, not, not, my brother's skate sports. It's the winter, it's the winter Olympics.

You ever get out? Oh, dude, I'd never be able to compete at that level. No, no, but, you know, it's like if it's Christmas time, you go out with the family, I don't know. You put on some ice skates. It's a nice, wintry activity. Oh, totally. It's fantastic. Great, great, great, great first date idea, I'll tell you that.

Okay. Yeah, that's great. Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for coming. So great to finally have you on. Okay. Hop on anytime. Yeah, we'd love that.

Thanks, Jordy. Thanks, John. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Spencer. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. And back to the timeline. Fund your wallet without exchanges or metalmen and spend with the Phantom

card with Phantom Cash. Estimated ownership in anthropic of various corporations. Amazon has. around 15% Google has 13% Nvidia has 2% Microsoft has 1% Zoom has almost 1% Salesforce has a little under half a percent and SBF also has a huge stake

although I think that that's transferred at some point I wonder where those shares actually went I have yet to get to the bottom of that I think I think a lot of those positions got bought out at the time of bankruptcy in order to repay yeah no no they are still owned somebody bought them. I remember, I believe that the cursor position traded at like near the, like, that was a situation in which kind of the vultures kind of descended and they were like, there's some good assets in here. The, you know, bankruptcy process obviously needs liquidity to pay back the people whose money

which used to fund the investments. But yeah, but yeah, I'd love to see. Last time Benioff was on, I think he said they had around a point. and so may have been diluted since then, but maybe more than that half a percent. Well, we have some new Sonnet 4.5 is out from Anthropic. 4.6. 4.6. Sonnet 4.6.

They say it's our most capable sonnet model by far. It's newer, faster, lighter, thinner. Capabilities in many areas. Very excited for folks to try this one out. It says Alex Albert over in the Claude Relations Department at Anthropic. Will Brown says Sonnet 4-6 is the first flagship LLM since Bloomberg GPD to be targeted primarily at the finance crowd. Bloomberg GPD 4.6. It does well on agentic financial analysis and office tasks particularly well.

Yeah, neck in neck with some other stuff, but does pretty, pretty well. Let's see, what else is going on? We have Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve money. Warren says Manus has entered Instagram. Yes. It gives you an overview and it says you've reached 120,000 accounts, create a content strategy

with Manus based on the success of this reel. Yes. And then apparently it just takes you straight to the Manus homepage. Oh, really? So not super integrated yet, but driving leads. There's also a drama at the Olympics. Curling is in the... the hot seat. This is crazy.

Crazy. Amanda says, I'm obsessed with the curling drama. What do you mean? The Canadians are such consistent and known cheaters that the Swedes were willing to set up a sting operation to catch them in the act, which they knew would happen because again, they keep cheating in the same way every time. It's difficult to assign

intent, but it does seem like the Canadians are cheating and in this exact way because they know that the usual cameras that cover curling matches do not cover the angle that would catch them, which is why they're mad at the Swedes for setting up the camera. And so the headline is the Olympics have been rocked by a cheating scandal and curling. Good pun there because I think the curling stone is called the rock.

The double touch and the hog line are at the center of controversy that has Swedes tattling and Canadians cursing. The Olympics are where human beings accomplish the impossible. Skiers blazed down mountains at 90 miles per hour. Skaters spin four times in the air and land on a pair of knives. And Canadians, by reputation, the nicest folks in North America, transform into something else altogether. The expletive spewing, potential rule-breaking,

rule-breaking villains of the games. Canada's heel turn has come in curling of all sports. The saga began Friday during its men's match against Sweden, when the Swedes accused Canadian curlers of grazing the stone with their fingertips after they'd already released it. The move is known as a double touch and is highly illegal. Canada's Mark Kennedy took the allegation sadly.

So wait, Canada's still competing. even though they were caught in 4K. Well, they were accused of cheating by the Swedes, not by the Olympic governing body yet. So they got a pass-up. There's a video of it. You can see him doing it? I don't know.

Can you? I haven't seen a video that convinced me. Innocent until proven guilty. You haven't seen the video. I haven't watched the video. It's absolutely blatant. It is? You saw the video.

You can see? The double-touch is real? I think we have our next guess. so we won't pull it up now. Well, we will pull up public. Investing for those to take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Let's bring in Haseeb from Dragonfly.

We have the Lightning Round is starting. Thank you, Ben. The Lightning Round is beginning now with Aceed Cresci from Dragonfly. He's the managing partner. He's here. What's going on? The TVPN Ultrim. How are you doing?

Thanks so much for joining it. First time on the show, please keep yourself. forward to this. Introduction. Yes. So I'm the seed, managing partner of Dragonfly.

We're a $4 billion dollar crypto VC firm. Actually, just today we announced our fourth fund. We got overshadowed a little bit by Thrive. I think they,

it's called mogging. Yes. It is called, it is called magging. There needs to be, there needs to be some organization that we're still, the same gong

that we hit for Josh. Yeah, there needs to be more, We got 365 days a year. And if you're raising a fund, there's got to be some governing body that dictates. Oh, it rolls them out. If you're $100 million plus, you could only... You would think that he'd be coordinating with us.

But somehow, yeah, the AI guys, they don't really care about the crypto guys anymore. They just overshadow us. Okay. How focus is the fund on crypto? Is it 100%? 100% on crypto. And are the lines blurring as more... I mean, we know some folks who...

are like ostensibly doing crypto, but it's, you know, AI training, distributed compute. And so crypto is starting to touch more and more pieces of the tech economy. How are you been processing the blurring lines? Yeah. Yeah. So I think we can see on the one hand, so we're investors in polymarket. Polymarket now is becoming increasingly, you know, a lot of people don't even know that Polymarket is crypto.

Yeah. The original Polymarket application was entirely on chain on Polygon. They're now launching their US app. But before that, basically, you know, today, unless you're, were on the US app, you were using it on chain. If you look at increasingly a lot of the apps that are really working in crypto are more fintechy, and we're seeing a lot of fintech investors coming up against us in a lot of these deals.

And then, of course, like you mentioned, crypto is increasingly bleeding over with AI. There was just this acquisition of OpenClaw. I think it was yesterday announced that opening AI is acquiring them. The Maltbook drama, if you go on Moldbuk today, so I still look at Moldtbook every day. And most of the highest ranked things on Moldpuk are all crypto-related. It's almost all of this. But is that because people are trying to create, is that because people are creating projects?

There's a lot of bullshit. There's a lot of bullshit going on right now in one book. They're like, you don't even need users now. You just create a million users for your project. That's right. That's right. Look, it's the infinite variety of people will always find ways to try to make money from everything.

And crypto, it both represents the best in humankind and the worst in humankind. And it's part of the reason why it'll never go away. No matter how unseemly or distasteful or just insane it becomes, it just never dies. So it's something that I was just reflecting on because we're now eight years in to Dragonfly. It's been a long time. It's been a lot of cycle.

We're now clearly in a trough of this cycle. Sentiment in Crypto land is extremely low right now. But on the other hand, like the actual adoption, you know, stable coins, you see all these financial institutions coming into the space. Multiple of your sponsors are crypto sponsors. They're seeing their underlying traction go up

even as prices are going in the other. the direction. So I feel really good. And it is bleeding into everything. Quick, quick update on MaltBook. 2.8 million AI agents have joined. There are over 1.4 million posts and over 12 million comments now. So still still cooking. Still, still cook.com. Where are you, what's the, yeah, it felt like prediction markets were the product that kind of broke out fully, maybe last cycle. Some of these cycles. blend together as different products get traction. Where are you most excited to invest the new fund that you guys haven't necessarily invested before? There were still in this kind of moment as various

laws work their way through Washington trying to actually get clarity on some of these things. But what are you most excited about over the kind of fun lifecycle for Fund Four? So there's the core bread and butter of crypto, which is just the financial applications. Actually, I recently got into an online debate with Chris Dixon, who, you know, he was kind of coming out, giving this big expose about, oh, well, you know, all the non-financial applications of crypto was just too early, and we still got to give them time to bake, and maybe they're going to come back. I sort of took the other side as I think it is largely a death knell for the non-financial applications of crypto. Crypto's about money. It's about finance. always has been from the very beginning, whether it's Bitcoin,

you know, Ethereum being programmable money, to ICOs, which are fundraising, to Defi, which has finance in the name. Almost everything that's ever worked in crypto has been financial in nature. And everybody who's tried to make non-financial things plug into crypto has basically failed. Now, I think what falls under that umbrella is pretty big.

And I actually do think AI does fall into that umbrella. But it's more the ways in which agents are going to be interacting with money. That very clearly, I mean, you can see it right now in Moldbook. You go in Mold Book and you can see that agents are trying to find ways to pay each other for things and to get each other to do things for them. It's very primitive right now. But you can see where it's going. You can draw the line out about, you know, if you're an agent, if I have an agent, you have an agent, you live in a different country or maybe I don't even know who you are. I don't need to know who you are if you're somebody else on Moldbuk.

It's very difficult for me to pay you with a traditional financial system. it's not really designed to have non-human recipients of money. We don't really know how the laws are going to work, how taxes are going to work, how money laundering is going to work, whereas crypto doesn't ask any of those questions. Crypto was really designed for machines more than it was designed for humans. And so I think we're going to see this become an increasing part of the story of how AI agents are going to become more and more autonomous

and self-driving financially is by giving them crypto and allowing them to just interact with other agents and other systems using crypto rails. So I'm very intrigued by that. But the core trend of crypto is just more and more of the same. Interesting. How do you invest in like stable coins as a category going forward, giving you have... I put a ton of money in stable coins.

I've lost anything. I mean, I haven't made a lot, but... They've done really well compared to Bitcoin so far. They've done really well compared to Bitcoin. Outperform. But you have a bunch of... startup players, you have big institutions. It feels like, I'm wondering where there's white space, where you think there still could be white space, given that we know there's so much growth

that's going to happen. That part feels inevitable, but where does the value actually flow? And what are the opportunities for startups? So I think everybody at this point is bullish on stable coins, right? So Secretary Besson has said he expects stable coins to hit $3 trillion by the end of the decade. Right now, they're about $300 billion. So that's like a 10x in the span of, you know, call it four to five years. Now, I think that's pretty optimistic. I don't know that we're going to hit that kind of growth rate, but the numbers are clearly growing and they're growing every single year, like 60, 70% year over year. Now, how do you make money on that? So one way is to own a stable point issue. I think that's pretty tough at this point, right? You can see it's basically

a duopoly between Circle and Tether. Circles are public. Tether is private, but they're supposedly raising around at $500 billion. there's not a lot of meat on the bone if you're investing at $500 billion into a stable coin issuer and the economics are really good of being a stable coin issuer but it's basically being a bank

right and it's the modern financial institution except they have 100% net interest margin which is great are there going to be new stable coin issuers who show up now if there are they're probably going to be GSIs right they're not going to be some new startup that comes up with a new way

to launch the same product to effectively just, you know, a narrow bank. I think the place where you want to be investing as a VC is more in the interstitial layers, which is how is this stuff going to move around the world and get into the hands of a user wherever they are? So one of the investments that we've made recently is a company called Rain, which basically they do these stablecoin cards, right?

And they allow you, let's say you're in some country where you're using some FinTech app. That's allowing you to get access to stablecoins. Let's say you're in Argentina. You're in, you know, you're in Nigeria. You're somewhere where you really want stable coins. You want dollars. You don't even know that they're stable coins.

A lot of these apps, the users don't even know that there's crypto underneath the rails. They just know that they send their Naira, they get USD. And they can send their USD overseas to somebody else. The problem with a lot of these apps is you can't pay anybody who's not in the app. You can't pay anybody who doesn't directly take crypto or they're not sitting on the same fintech as you. And so these cards, you can basically issue cards against your stable coin balance. And the moment you swipe your card, whether you enter it into an app or you tap to pay or whatever, it debits stable coins and settles directly on VisaNet using stablecoins.

Visa has now seen these are one of the fastest growing use cases for Visa around the world. And they're just growing like gangbusters. You know, it's like 20% month-over-month growth. This, I think, is going to be the way in which you see stable coins go global, is that they just get more and more integrated into the normal payments workflows for people. So what do you look at, do you see much broad geopolitical, risk to stable coins if I'm a country and I have a currency and suddenly all my citizens say, actually we like USCC or USDT, at what point does that become, you know, such a threat to the country's

own monetary system that they need to, you know, pass new regulations and that kind of thing? It already is. So a lot of the countries that have a lot of stable coin adoption, stable coins are per se illegal. You know, if you go to Venezuela, you go to China, you know, buying things with dollars is illegal in size, right? And that's why these are black markets. Most of these places like Venezuela very famously, there's a very different price for the Bolivar

in the quote-unquote, you know, lit market as opposed to on the black market where people are actually transacting with dollars. Any of these places where you have very high inflation, you see this. Now, in the past, especially pre-COVID, the way that this was done was you imported little green piece of paper

and that's how these countries dollarized. That's not happening anymore. Increasingly, the way in which these countries are dollarizing is they're dollarizing digitally. They're dollarizing from the ground up. And that's much harder to police, right? Because the reality is that all you need is a mobile phone and an internet connection and now you can get stable points

no matter where you are anywhere in the world. All you need is somebody who's willing to trade you the local currency for that stable coin. So I think the right way to think about this is not, okay, when our government's going to push back? They were already pushing back. especially if you're in a country that has very high inflation. Why do they have very high inflation?

The answer is because the governments are printing a ton of money to make up for the fact that they're spending like drunken sailors, right? It's a way to tax your citizenship when you cannot actually extract that through taxation. So in every technology renegotiates the balance of power between individuals and governments. The internet did the exact same thing, information technology, did that with respect to the dissemination of information.

Yeah. I think what you'll see is that crypto does that with money. The presumption was always that this narrow waste of the banking system was always controlled by the government. And it's easy to control because it's very centralized. And banks everywhere in the world are basically nationalized. Even when they're quote-unquote private companies, they're essentially controlled by the government. When that's no longer true, when basically you can exit by going on chain, by going to the blockchain, by going to a stable coin, that now that is a check against every government

and every form of profit against spending everywhere in the world. I think that's ultimately good. Competition is almost always good. Now, it's disruptive to a lot of countries that will say, hey, this is terrible, you know, the U.S. is attacking us or, you know, blah, there's going to be all sorts of ratcheting up

of geopolitical tensions. You saw this, by the way, in Nigeria, I believe it was Nigeria, where there were Binance executives who got detained by the Nigerian government under the claim that Binance was assisting in, you know, tax, evasion and all this other stuff, which is basically another way to say that they were allowing

the sale of stable coins in the country. And it was a huge political flashpoint, and they ended up having to get the Secretary of State to negotiate with them to get those executives out. But I think that's only the beginning. You're going to see more and more of this. And I think this is very intentional by the U.S. government, right? The Besant has said very clearly a big part of the reason why stable coins are good for America is that they increase the demand for treasuries.

The increase the demand for dollars and the increased demand for treasuries. Where is that demand coming from? Obviously, it's coming from people who don't want their citizens to be holding our treasuries. Sure. Yeah, that makes 10 sense. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats on the massive fundraise. And I'm sure we'll have a bunch of your companies on. Yeah, we're looking forward to it.

Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats to the team. Let me tell you about Label Box, Reinforcing Learning Environments, Voice, Robotics, Eval, and Expert Human Data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI team. We will continue our lightning round with Celine Haluya from Loyal. Celine, how are you doing?

Good to see you again. Hi. Good to be back. You got some big news for us. What happened? Raise a hundo millie. Whoa. Big day for our gong.

Big day for the gong. Everyone took yesterday off and was like, I'm dropping a big number on Tuesday. What is this unlocked? Like what's the next step in the, company's mission. Get this goddamn drug to market and launch the first FDA-approved longevity drug. Just. Just that.

Just that. Just that. Yeah. Yeah. And build our pipeline or all that shit too. But like, honestly, man, I'm just like locked in on getting that first FDA approval. It's been six years of work. So what does that mean hiring more lobbyists, lawyers, doctors, scientists?

Who are you bringing on with this new money? It's actually spectacularly boring. It's literally just time. Like so much of developing a drug is like you put the drug on a shelf. You wait for it to age. You quantify how it ages. That tells you its shelf life. You send something to FDA. They reply six months later. So there's obviously like we're spending on things like product expansion and commercialization. We're, you know, doing an owned commercial strategy. But honestly, our biggest burn driver is just time. Okay. Unpacked the owned commercial strategy. What does that mean?

So when I started loyal five years ago week, I kind of had this thesis of building a farmer brand that people love, right? This idea of building a consumer brand around a pharmaceutical product, which five years later is like super normalized with OZPIC and JLP1s. Like everybody's like going to peptide parties in Silicon Valley. Like everyone knows OJemphic and Monjaro and all that stuff, right? But before that, really the only consumer marketed drugs were like Botox. Oh, yeah.

So we could sell out. That's like what most biotech companies would do right now. I could like go buy a small, maybe medium, such. island. But I think it's much more exciting to commercialize it and build a consumer brand around this pharmaceutical product. What's the impact of the GLP1 boom on your business? Is that, is they feel like almost longevity drugs? They're definitely life extending for a lot of people. But is that going to actually change anything in the market or the FDA? I think it is really changed how people think about the biology of aging, right? It was so difficult to explain these

drugs before. Like, oh, it's this one drug. It has this one mechanism. But it'll help this aging phenotype and that aging phenotype and this bad thing that happens and that bad thing that happens. People are like, but how can that happen? It's a drug. It's only hitting one thing. And now to like, oh my God, GLP1s, they like, you know, make you lose weight and your metabolic fitness is better. And oh, my God, you're not addicted to things anymore. And there's just 10 other magical benefits that see to happen. And actually makes total sense, right? Improving metabolic fitness improves basically everything downstream of that. But the general public, had not been exposed to that writ large until GLP1s.

So I think people really understand an aging drug a lot better now, and it sounds a lot more real now than it did, you know, before a year or two ago. Are people giving GLP1s or peptides generally to their dogs illegally? No. Have you heard about it? No. There's a couple people trying to do GLP ones for dogs. And cats, I think it could maybe make sense for cats.

I have a really fat cat that like maybe could be. benefit. But no, people don't want their dogs to not have appetite motivation and drive. This is like a whole thing. My dog is, you know, like my dog is, you know, sleeping at my feet right now. I would love the thing. It's because she loves me. But it's also probably because she wants treats. Yeah, food motivated. Yeah, parents know this. There's nothing, there's nothing better than when your child is just like, wants to eat a lot of food. And if they're not incredibly hungry, you're like trying to. Yeah. I mean, it's literally one of the two. major levers we have to negotiate with that. It's reward via food and then negative reinforcement,

which you know, you don't want to do a ton of. So we don't want to take that lever away from people. Yeah. How are you thinking about branding? Like, gLP ones are interesting because I feel like they're not just consumer marketed as people know the name Wagovi or Wagovi or OZempic. They also know peptide. And peptide has become a new category that people, I think, largely feel more comfortable about than magical weight loss pill or, like, injectable drug. It's like, what were you injecting? There were a lot of injectables that people were not cool with, and now everyone's like,

well, if it's a peptide, then, okay. How do you think about, how do you think about, like, educating folks about your category and how you fit into the overall hierarchy of things that you put in your body potentially? Yeah, so, you know, this drug that we're hopefully bringing to market first loitutes for a senior dog lifespan extension. It works by metabolic fitness improvement, which is one of the predominant mechanisms of JLP1. But actually our first drug, and hopefully drug will bring to market after this, it's a bit slower in the manufacturing side, is for big dog short lifespan. Yeah. And this idea that, you know, large and giant breed dogs live, you know, half as long as small breed dogs.

and introducing, there was like such a nice, like, Trojan horse or Trojan dog or whatever to introduce the thesis. Both said a general, thank you, thank you. I'm here all day. Introduce people to the thesis of the aging field and also introduce regulators, right? Because we're like, oh, like, here's this thing that you take as inherent as natural. You know, Roddy's dying at age 10. It's actually not natural. Here's like the mechanism.

And here's the drug and here's how it's going to work. And oh, by the way, the way it works is by just slowing the. rate of just slowing the rate of aging of these big dogs. Yeah. And so I think it's the same thing, right? You give something where somebody only has to make one leap or two leaps, right? It needs to be accessible but still technically rigorous, which is always a challenge with bio.

And then you can push it further and further further from there, like peptides, right? Like I don't think peptide's going to become a thing if it wasn't a weight loss drug. Yeah. So what's the- What's the current phrasing? Because you have like drugs, then peptides, then OZempic. and you have drugs and then blank and then loyal. Oh, small molecule, mostly.

Okay. So people are loosely familiar with that, but maybe it needs a buzzword. I don't see small molecule parties happening, even though people are obviously doing that different thing. I don't recommend small molecule. I mean, that's just like drug parties. That's like college. That's what I mean.

Is there anything to learn from fringe internet communities in relation to dog health? like in the Brian Johnson of dogs is out there somewhere? Yeah, that kind of thing. You know, some owners going crazy, but I think about like there's so much that like bodybuilders

who are doing 10 years ago that's now becoming mainstream. Future's here. It's just not evenly distributed. Yeah. I think it's all the raw food stuff. Oh, really? And all the cooking at home food stuff.

Yeah. Like the nutritionally complete. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of scandal here. And we like, we like pretty purposely stayed away from the dog food wars, as I like to call them. But that is definitely where people started.

People don't really do drug hacking as much. Well, because also a lot of drug hacking for like weightlifters. I mean, yeah, it's like for fitness, but it's really for like aesthetics. And you're not going to like hack your dog for aesthetics. That's kind of unethical. There's got to be looks maxing. Like that's all the beatings. Shoots maxing.

Cutes maxing. That's the story of dog breeding. You can totally do that. I mean, not going to lie. Like there's some genetics in like golden retrievers that. we like inadvertently gave them to be like extra cute and extra lovey. You could totally give that to any dog. Let's go.

We should. We should. We are. Tempting. We are not doing dog gene editing. But like someone totally will and they totally will do that. And well, you'll be the first person we call when it happens. Thank you so much coming on the show. And congratulations. You feel like, yeah, the energy is real. It's coming through the screen. You're swearing like a sailor.

That's always. I'm so, I'm so. Sorry. No, I mean, the team's fired up. The team's fired up. The team gives me a lot of drama for it, but you know, you can. You got to be yourself. Be yourself. We'll talk to you soon.

Great to see you. Congrats on the progress. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Let's have Uncle from Brain Trust. He's in the Restream.

Let's bring him in. I was chatting with him earlier. How are you doing? What's happening? What's up, guys? Not too much. First time in the show, quick introduction. I want to hear the news, and then I want to talk about the economics of AI labs.

But I want to talk about your news first. So please introduce yourself. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I'm Anker, founder and CEO of Brain Trust. We build observability for AI products. So companies like, you know, our overlord here, ramp, Notion, Instacard,

Dropbox, etc. that are building really great AI products. They'll use brain trust to help with that. We're announcing our series B today. We just raised $80 million

and, you know, helps us build. Sorry to interrupt. Congratulations. We're very excited. You said that helps you build. Yeah,

it helps us ship more stuff and hire more people. Yeah. Very simple. So, yeah, walk me through why someone's picking you, how they're integrating you, what the business model looks like and what the best case

scenario of AI observability looks like. Yeah, I think what's interesting about AI is when you build a product, you actually have no idea what's going to happen when you ship it. So if you're building a traditional UI, you can pretend to be Steve Jobs, look at the UI, play with it, form an opinion, and then you can kind of guess what's going to happen when people actually use it. With AI, you have literally no idea what's going to happen. And so being able to look at how people actually use your product,

and then capture the cases where it works well and the cases where it doesn't and test them is critically important. And that's basically the data flywheel that we power for all these companies. And then you have, yeah, digging it a little bit deeper. You have like same application, different models integrating as well that I imagine you're also comparing. So like, what is what does best in class look like if you're a software company that's integrating LMs? like what does best in class testing look like, who's like doing this at the highest level that you guys? Yeah, I mean,

honestly, I think Ramb is a great example of a company that does this very well. They use a bunch of different models for different use cases. And I think there's two things you shouldn't do. One is just use the same model and be very afraid to change it. There are some companies we meet that are still using GPT 3.5 on Azure. Oh, no way. I was debating.

Are they making any money from 3.5? And I was like, it might be actually zero. You kind of set one of these things on some feature or some kind of backup. Update your depreciation schedule in that case because those GPUs are going to be burning into the 2040s running 3.5. I love it. And then there's some companies that are just changing the model every day. And I think that's not a good way to build a good product. You need to really understand the nuances of the technology that you're using.

So I think best in class is actually being able to change the model every four to six weeks. And if a new model comes out, like sign it 4.6. came out today, the best companies are going to have that integrated into their product in the next 24 hours if it makes an improvement for what they're doing. Okay. Any more questions? I want to talk about AI lab economics. Let's do it. Are we in the Corno equilibrium? Do you agree with that characterization? How long does that last? Walk me through how you think the AI lab economics might change over the next few years? I think it's really simple. So basically when new models are coming out, people forget about open source and they forget about economics. And that's because it changes

fundamentally what you can do with a model in the first place. Like the programming is a good example. The workflow today is completely different than it was a year ago. And if you tried to use the models from a year ago, today, you wouldn't be able to do crazy stuff like Claudebott or whatever that people are building nowadays. And when models don't change at that speed, then what happens is people optimize the performance on the use cases that they have. And so, you know, So in between major model releases, and I think we're in one of these periods right now, there are new models coming out, but they're not fundamentally changing what's possible or not possible. You see a lot of interest in open source models.

And I think that's very exciting right now. Although there are not that many companies using open source models, if you look at usage on our platform, almost half the usage, like token usage, is coming from open source models from a very small number of companies that have figured out how to optimize use cases really well. And so I think it's going to be really interesting. Okay, so I feel like we've been playing this cat and mouse game with the value accrues to the foundation model layer, value accrues to the application layer.

Value is very clearly accruing to brain trust. Yeah, but how does that flip and what do the big AI labs look like in the, like after the final models? Do they look like hyperscaler clouds? Do they look like Azure, GCP, AWS? Is that the right formulation, or are they more like infrastructure providers? How do you think about that? Well, first of me, it's not clear to me when, if, whatever, the party is ever going to end.

But let's say the party sort of slows down at some point. I think one thing that happens is there's some use cases that actually aren't changing that much. So customer service for a consumer software app at the very, very highest scale. think about like deflecting incoming tickets that come in. For example, can I get a refund? That use case doesn't really change at the speed that new LLMs are coming out. And so we actually have a lot of customers that have built solutions, in many cases using open source models like one or two years ago,

that they're still using and optimizing. And they're getting both better performance and better economics each coming month by taking advantage of the downstream optimizations that are, happening from the frontier. So I think a lot of use cases are just going to get cheaper and higher margin, especially the use cases that aren't changing that much. In terms of what we see with the models, I think probably the most interesting trend is that they're verticalizing and building products. Again, I think ClaudeBod is a really interesting example of this. So is Claude for sheets and obviously Claude Code. So I mean, I think if the party stops,

there's a whole other layer of low-hanging fruit, tightly integrating models into these canonical applications. And I think there's still a lot of room to make that really good. How long do you think will stay in this regime of building Centaur-like projects instead of, you know, it's like, you know, big AI lab launches a product for legal. They haven't launched a law firm yet. Is that coming? Yeah. I mean, I have been working in AI now for like 10 years.

years. And prior to that, I'm a crusty, yeah, crusty, jaded, pessimistic engineer type person. And so when I first started working in AI, I thought, wow, things are changing really quickly. It's not going to be like this forever. And next year it's going to be totally different. But this is like 2017, 2018, right? And so I've had to totally unwind that part of my brain and just assume that I think there's a reasonable chance we will be in the state and the normal is going to change for a very long period of time. Just progress will continue for a very long time and we'll see more and more progress. And I mean, I think that's just generally true, but, you know, the baseline for progress is

going to feel different a few years from now once we get used to this than it did like 10 or 20 years ago. Yeah. How have you reacted to that line from Dwork Cash that like diffusion is cope and that the models aren't actually that good. And so if they were better, they would diffuse much more fast. Oh, totally.

I mean, I was actually talking to Martine last night about this, but I think we are now programming at the maximum speed that we can program. Okay. In fact, there are so many people who make so many mistakes and walk them back,

or we ship crappy products and then walk them back, or we ship buggy products and then fix them, or the speed at which we're able to respond to user feature requests and bugs were totally tapped out, right? And so I think that we're in this really weird equilibrium state with how productive we can be in some of these use cases. And it's not super

clear, at least to me, that a model that's 5% smarter at writing C++ code is going to dramatically change the amount of productivity we're able to create. Bull case for FDEs, basically. Is that right? Yeah, it's interesting. It's like you can do so much more, but there's still value and focus, right? It's like, you know, a company that raises, like, brain trust raises a big round. You've got a lot of resources available. That doesn't mean, okay, we should launch 10 products at once. It's like, okay, you still have to, like, you know, focus that energy in.

And, you know, weirdly enough, we actually raised a smaller round than we could have. I think we are trying to be very careful about not getting. Yeah, I'm sorry. Trying to be careful about not getting caught up in the craziness. Like, we know exactly how much money we need to hit our revenue target, for the next two years, and we raised that much money. No, very, very smart. We're messing.

Yeah, now you're giving us time to get a bigger gong. Yeah, yeah. We get it. This one's not big enough. Oh, we'll be, we'll be ready. Keep it warm. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, great to finally have you on and come back on anytime you have thoughts.

Yeah, we'd love to talk more. Thanks for having me. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents, and reimagine human technology.

interaction with 11 labs. And we have our next guest almost here in the Restream waiting room. We have Reid from Knight. He's the founding CEO. He's been on the show before, but he has some big news for us. So Reed, how you doing? He's back. I'm just trying to get on this show as much as Delian at this point. Oh, yeah, Delian. You've got to get your numbers up. Number two. Will you welcome any time? We can always talk creator economy. What's going on? This is cool. I feel like you're, this is like your streaming setup. It was fun having you here. Wow, that's the big play button.

Is that 10 Mel? It's 100. A hundred. Wow. There we go. Let's hit the gong. You'll get there. Yeah.

On the way. On the way. Anyway, give us the real news. What happened today? Yeah, we finally announced our capital raise. Steffstone led it. Founders Fund also involved, K-5, house capital. kind of felt like it was time to get that out there.

And so, yeah, we officially announced that Bloomberg today, and I'm kind of bouncing around. Amazing. How much does you raise? 70. Oh, he's going back. He's going back. All right.

Yeah, let's, you've been on the show before. We'll assume people generally understand Knight, like, what does this capital allow you to do? Because you guys are in a business that, unlike some of our other guests, makes, you know, has been making real, real money for some amount of time. And so why raise, why raise? Yeah, we're probably a little bit different. Like, we're, we've been profitable for 10 straight years. So it's a little bit of different trajectory. And though, you know,

I think for us, you know, I kind of said this last time I was on the show. You're bored. You're bored of profitability. You're like, I've done that. I've done that for 10 years. I've got to switch it up. I've listened to the show too much and like all these companies lose so much damn money, it kind of felt like the time for us to not be profitable anymore. Let's go. Let's go. Gas pedal. But seriously, yeah, what, like, can you acquire assets? Can you hire a bunch of people? Are you going to build technology? Like, like, what's on the menu? There's so much that you can do. Yeah. The focus has always been talent, talent management. You know, I think we launched the Venture Studio five years ago. You know, we did feastables and tone, outtake. And a lot of stuff has come out of that. The Venture Studio is going to be a big focus. bars. And then we're also like we we think music is interesting. We think sports is interesting.

We want to push deeper into live events. I think it just kind of opens the aperture a little bit wider for us. The core idea is just continue to be the internet's media company like bias assets that are transcended by the internet over the next decade. Hopefully I'm doing this for a long time. Hopefully we're profitable for a long time. And so yeah, it's an exciting next step. And I'm glad stepstone and honestly like founders fund and some of these other ones are involved. I don't think FF has ever done another media deal. I think this is kind of like the first one for them. And yes, we have a venture studio.

They did this media company called Facebook back in the day. You don't hear about Facebook much anymore. Well, they do Metaverse now. Yeah, they're kind of out of the media game. But truly, like, yeah, what you do is very, very unique for venture broadly, but also for founders fund. Give us a song review of RIP, my granny. she got hit with a bazooka. Wait, what happened?

What did I miss? Have you not heard that song, Bazooka? No, what? Like, did this just happen today? Oh, it's just this viral song. So we'll send you. We'll send you some video. It's a stupid meme song.

But unpack, unpack bullishness around music. Obviously, a lot of people are doom and gloom. AI is going to do it all. Where are you seeing opportunities? what are the smart musicians doing today? I'm still waiting for AI to create content, to be honest. Like I like Storba had didn't figure it out like I yes like mid journey and V-O-3. There's some cool shit.

Yeah. And some make animations. Okay. Like I'm so not bullish on the future of AI transcending content, at least not in the next two to three years. Yeah. So I am not as much doom and gloom as people are in the music industry and the content industry. I get it. Like I get why people are scared.

It just feels like adoption takes so long and the products aren't even close. So that's like my take. Yeah, it feels just so much like a tool like, okay, you don't have the money for the drone. You take a photo with your iPhone and then go to Google Maps and you say interpolate these two with V-O-3

and it does the cool drone shot for you and your viewers don't really notice and all of a sudden you have higher production value with lower overhead. But one-shoting a truly viral video it just requires so much, you know, you have to be one with the algorithm. Are you getting, are you getting pitches from people that are saying, like, I'm going to be a creator, but I'm going to be faceless, this sort of like L'akela thing. Obviously, they were earliest to this trend and kind of ran the course.

Two sides of this conversation. There's one, like being a faceless creator, which Iron Mouse, I think, is one of the biggest ones in America. She's considered a V-tuber. And so I get why that's popular. It's a faceless animated character with a real person doing the voiceover. I get that. It's popular in Japan. It's becoming popular in America.

In terms of AI, more generative AI channels or 100% generative AI channels, I don't think we're even close. I see the news channels on YouTube. I see a lot of this stuff. Nobody's watching it. I think you guys have gained momentum for a reason. I just don't think that some AI news channel is going to do anything. in the next like, I don't know, five years, to be honest. I mean, maybe competitor to, if the news channel you're competing with is just straight

up reading you headlines, but if there's commentary and back and forth and stuff, that's much harder to capture. How are you thinking about like timelines around deploying capital? This is not, you know, because you guys have just been operating real business for so long, I would assume you're not like, we want to burn through, we're going to burn through this over the next 18 months and then try to raise another round. It's more like strategic capital that can allow you to kind of strike when you have an amazing opportunity or own more of a business that's kind of, you know, being created with some of your existing talent. How do you think about it? Yeah, I think that was well said. I take a pretty long-term outlook on this company. I hope to do this for a long period of time. And so I'm not in a hurry. Like I like to have long-term outcomes. And I think long-term when it comes to acquisitions as well. So I think about what's going to be popular five to ten.

years from now because hopefully I'll be running this company five to ten years from now. So it's not necessarily let's go do something tomorrow. We're going to look at a lot of different things and we're having a lot of conversations, but I'm not in a hurry to just go spend rapidly and lose a ton of money. When's the right moment to meet a creator? Do they need to have proven that they have some element of star power, like some some like base, fan base. Like, when do you know, when do you look at somebody's like content?

It could be a standalone Instagram account or a YouTube channel or a TikTok or a Twitch account and say, I can, I can 100x this individual. Man, it's changed a lot over the years. You know, five years ago, we were very, very, very selective and we were mostly just working with the top people in the world. But then people have come around that have changed how I think about content. And also the careers get big so quick. I mean, like, let's just take the Rizzler.

I think I have the Ice Team back there. Let's just take the Rizler an example. Like, we found him very early. And I think five years ago, Knight would have not signed the Rizzler. And we took a little bit of a risk and it paid off. And now he's this just like global superstar of a nine-year-old. And so we take a lot more. He's nine.

He's nine. That's crazy. I always assume that he was at least. Me too. At least a teenager. Well, in my mind. I know. And so we'll take risks a lot earlier if we have high conviction in somebody. We'll take risk earlier on Twitch, YouTube, TikTok. And I also, it's more competitive. When I first started the

company 10 years ago, there wasn't a lot of representation companies that gave a shit. Can I swear on this? We don't, but you can. Okay, I can't swear. That cared about digital. Now, it's the big agencies, the big management companies, the traditional management companies, they all look at people pretty early. And so discoverability of new talent only happens on the internet and comedy, podcasting. And so it's just more competitive now. And so we've taken earlier swings on people. What can you tell me or explain what's going on kick, looks maxing, clavicular is in the New York Times now? Like it feels like there's some machinery there behind the scenes.

There's clipping. We do a little bit of this. Yeah. And it's funded, it's funded in this case by kick, my understanding. They're putting up budget and saying, we're going to pay out views. Maybe just give me like an IRL streamer 101. Like what's going on here? It's not new.

I think you guys are just now hearing about it and people are hearing about it for the first time on Twitter. But this was very much like how Aiden Ross became popular is he was paying a lot of clippers to clip his content out. And you can live stream on kick or Twitch and you can get 5,000 CCVs, but those 5,000 people are the only people that see it. So a lot of the discoverability. and the amplification of those views comes from clipping on the internet. Creators figured that out two to three years ago. It's just now becoming a lot more mainstream

and people are realizing that that's the growth metric. And so clavicular, neon, there's so many now that are spending 10, 20, up to upwards of $100,000 a month right now, just clipping content. Interesting. And so, yeah, that's why it's breaking through broadly. It is, too. The looks maxing thing. It's like catching a wave.

And, you know, it's like I have a lot of people text me about it with about my thoughts on just him more generally. Totally. But he does. This is great now. Now you, you, you, you, all your investors, anytime there's a new internet star, they just get to text you a clip and they're like, are we in this one? Like, am I making, am I making money on this indirectly? And you're, I'm sure a lot of the time you're like, yeah, we're, we're partnered and then, and then you got it. Yeah. Yeah. They did ask about clavicular. I'm sure. I have had that text. So his, his clips are breaking through to a lot of people, not just kids. Yeah. Yeah. It feels like there's,

there's also a little bit of like creative writing going on. I mean, the whole vernacular and the way they structure it like it's like it's TMZ based celebrity news, but it has all this lingo and it, you have to peel back this onion to understand what's actually happening in the clip. That has created this sort of like nerd snipes a lot of people. They're like, I want to learn what frame maugging means today and then they go and dig in there. Oh, they're engaged. Do you think, do you think we'll get one person movie studios in the next few years? is that something that you're kind of waiting for? You said earlier, like AI is not really making content,

but you can imagine the archetype of somebody who's like a writer who can write out a, you know, effectively an entire script and then piece by piece prompt to get to something that is a cohesive project. And seeing like C-Dance from last week and seeing Sags' reaction to it, you can immediately see, like, it will be possible to piece together with character, consistency, maybe even using traditional stars and get to the point where somebody can put out

90 minutes of content and do that every month, maybe every two months. It's not going to be like one-shotted to make something great. Yeah, I agree. I think the, you know, I've been seeing rumblings of people now going to go back on strike. I think that the big, to your question, yes, I do think it's going to happen. How are the guilds going to handle this? Because that will undoubtedly be like non-union work. And so I think they're going to have to come. come to terms with, are we going to allow this to happen within the guild? Or are we going to allow these things to get built outside of the guild? And then does non-union work actually become more powerful?

And the streaming services start buying that stuff. And so I think a lot of that's going to have to unravel over the next three to four years. And yeah, I do agree that we will have like a one-person studio that uses prompts to create a script to then create content. And we just saw like Markiplier did this all just by himself, wrote Iron Long, directed and acted in the film, distributed independently to movie theaters. I think it ended up doing like 25 million box office on a $6 million budget. And so we're seeing it happen and we're seeing the model to go direct to theatrical.

Will that happen through generative AI? Like undoubtedly, yes. I just think we're further away than people realize. Yeah. How badly do you want to help create a new platform, the likes of a Twitch or a Snapchat, or ideally an Instagram or YouTube. Because eventually, the nature of these platforms is you want to have the breakout stars,

the superstars, creating content on your platform, but you also want to keep them down, right? You don't want to let them get too powerful to have any type of leverage over the platform. You can imagine at some point, you know, some amount of creators rising up and then using clipping on all these different platforms to try to see kind of a new platform with users.

And given that you're in the business of being effectively at the mercy, like every creator is at the mercy of these platforms and you can sometimes you're on a hot streak and then other times you're kind of on the receiving end of different changes. But how do you think about new platform opportunities? I don't think I'll be the one or we as a company will be the one creates the next platform. It's not something we're thinking about internally. I hope that a new platform pops up in the next 12 to 18 months. It feels like we're due for something. I have no idea what

that's going to be because the meta still feels very much like short form content dominates attention. So I don't know what else is going to come through the system, but it is an interesting trend we're seeing right now where every platform is adopting video podcasts. Netflix kind of to start just saw the Apple announcement this morning that they're going to start doing video podcasts. Amazon's going to follow. Everyone's going to follow. And then there's going to be this long-form podcast feed. Maybe that's seen as a new type of mechanism.

Apple's timing with that. I'm very, I'm super happy they're finally doing video. We still get way more views on like Apple Podcasts than than YouTube and Spotify, which we laugh at because it's such a, such a video-heavy show. Like it's insane to be like, I'm going to watch TBBN. Some people are going to. Total respect. There's somebody listening to this.

There'll be someone listening to this. Many people over the next 24 hours from Apple Podcasts. But is that because your audience is older and the boomers listen to it on Apple Podcasts? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's not call them names here. They're lovely members of our community, upstanding. I think it's just habit. I think it's just habit forming.

I listen to probably thousands of hours. podcast on Apple Podcasts back in college. Yeah, for sure. Help me get up to speed on video games. There's this weird boom and bust that I sort of perceived. Did I want a reality check? So we had boom in Twitch streaming for video games. People were watching a lot of video game content.

That seems to be continuing to go. But the, the, the sports, IRL competitions felt like they reached a Zeno. and sort of have been either status quo or declining. At the same time, you have something like Kaisenaut's Bloodborne stream that looked like it had the budget of an ESL event. So it feels like there's more, there's exciting things happening in video game streaming and content related to video games, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Like, where is video game content today and where is it going?

It's still struggling. And I think we've had a lot of games come out and have moments. like a month at max, like a moment, and then just kind of fade into the darkness. We haven't had a game that has come out that has been a Minecraft Fortnite Grand Theft Auto that's sustained. Okay. Hopefully we get Grand Theft Auto the end of this year. I'm probably not as confident that they finally put that out.

But even in the e-sports genre, we had everything. We had Rocket League. We had every single e-sport out there. And it feels like we've fully retreated just back to League of Legends and Counterstrike. Interesting. And I don't know if that changes. Like it feels like the the esports thing had its moment. Most of the teams are no longer here.

And the two e-sports that were dominating that were the biggest in the pack while this trend was happening, Counterstrike and League, are still very much the two most popular. We just, we need to get back to making games. Like it's it, but it's hard. Like Roblox, kids are bringing out Roblox games every single day. And so you just have a new influx of games like you have YouTube videos every single minute. And so it's hard, I think, for a AAA studio like an Activision. or Ubisoft to put out a game

and that game to have some sustainability over the one month period that people play it. So I don't know. I've been pretty upset by like the last two and a half to three years of the video game industry. Maybe some of it was COVID-induced. We just have had a big titles.

Well, the good news is that AI will totally help this. No, it's going to make it way worse because you can imagine, my theory is that the platforms with existing networks like Roblox, integrate a bunch of AI to make it even easier to make all these games

and then you get more fragmentation and it becomes even harder to have a truly breakout durable hit. Yeah. It is odd that we have like the Call of Duty

annual release cadence which I think a lot of people have not been happy with because there's just too much incrementality, not much changing. But then you have Rockstar and the exact opposite

spectrum. It's been what? Like almost 20 years since the last Grand Theft Auto came out And everyone's like, okay, we'd love a little bit more cadence from you, but less cadence from you, Call of Duty, slow down Call of Duty, speed up Grand Theft Auto. But yeah, greatness takes time.

So I don't know. Maybe it'll happen. Yeah, I think Call of Duty will retreat and not do every year rollouts. Yeah, I do that is what, what ends up happening. And then the resurgence of sports games has been good for the, at least the video game ecosystem, the content creation of those sports games has not increased as those games have come out. But NCAA football was one of the biggest releases we've had in a long time, and it took a long hiatus. And so we are seeing a resurgence in sports games.

I just think from a casual fan, they're playing the games. They're not just watching streamers play the games. Yeah. How are the economics or key strategies of a video game launch different today than maybe a decade ago? I watched some video game reviews, and I'll see, you know, oh, thanks to Activision for sending me the free review copy. or, hey, this was actually promoted by, this is a promoted video by Ubisoft for the latest Assassin's Creed. I probably wouldn't have made a video review of it, but I am because they're paying me all the way to, you could imagine a Kaisanaut stream where they pay for the production value.

And, you know, when GTA6 comes out there, putting, you know, props behind him, all sorts of crazy integrations, what does a rollout of a successful video game look like and partnering with, like, your team? Yeah, used to be a lot of linear teams. TV ads. That's transition obviously to like, let's pay creators, let's do interesting things with creators. But I don't think people remember when Fortnite first came out, it was called Save the World. And they paid a lot of creators. Like their strategy when they came out with the game was to pay every single creator. And then when Battle Royale came out, they paid every single creator again to play Battle Royale. So it's been going on for a long time. This isn't a new

thing. Individuals discover video games on YouTube or Twitch from their favorite people making those games. And so the advertising has had to change with that. But I still feel like Activision, Ubisoft, they still have traditional spend. I still see the commercials. They're just like the budget allocation is very different. It's like let's we spend on creators and Google and meta ads and some of the linear stuff. Maybe we'll play that at NBA All Star game during the commercial break, whatever that is. But yeah, it's changed rapidly and we'll continue to change.

How much of it is like top down versus bottom up? Like you could pay a ton of small creators to play. a game or you could say like we're having shroud and ninja on day one and just the fact that you could queue with them or you could watch their streams maybe they get paired like you create this like snowball effect and you just jump straight to the top of like the twitch viewership uh numbers man it's so dependent on the game i think if you're art graders you probably get more out of paying shroud and burnt peanut whoever that is to play your game then you will after going or then you will from just doing a wide micro influencer strategy, which is going to be 10 times more work to get all that paperwork

done. And then you're going to have to manage hundreds of creators or just that shroud who's known so deeply in the community to be one of the best FPS gamers of all time. I think it's such a balance depending on the game. To be honest, and each studio is trying to figure that out right now. But I've seen this go more micro in the path. Now over the last few years, let's widen out the budget. Let's not necessarily just give it all to Mr. Beast or some other macro creator. Last question for me. We'll let you get back to your busy day. Give us a burnt peanut 101. The chat's going crazy for burnt peanut. Like what is that? How does it work? Whether the key is to success. Why are we talking about burnt peanut, not someone else? Yeah, it's been crazy watching

him kind of just come on. And I'm quite confident he doesn't pay clippers. I think a lot of this is just organic. Like all the clips that you see on TikTok are just fans making clips because he is hilarious. But it is essentially a V-tuber, a real person behind a peanut. And I, my theory is that peanut is a Snapchat filter of some sorts or some phone filter. Yeah. And they overlay it over over him. Okay. And yeah, it's it's worked. And now I'm seeing like burnt broccoli and like all kinds of different melons and fruit characters. on Twitch right now. It's a whole cinematic universe.

Yeah. The cinematic universe of like fruit and like vegetables streaming on YouTube is a real thing. Yeah. One of my friends started sending me burnt peanut videos. I was just like, these are hilarious. And I was like, oh, I think I understand what's going on here. But thanks for breaking it down. Are we like, I'm seeing this on Twitter.

So we're charging a million bucks per right now. Are we ripping over here? That was, that was not, I don't know where they got that information. Yeah. but they certainly ran with it. Yeah. But we're having a good time. Yeah, we're running ads.

You guys have been killing it. It's been fun. I have it on the TV every day, so it's fun to watch. I appreciate that. Well, come back on soon. Bring your next, next time you sign a client that you think is interesting or relevant to our world, come bring them by the Ultradam and we'll all hang out in person. We always love these conversations.

We'll talk to you soon, Reed. Have a good rest of you. Congrats. Let me tell you about gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern, small, and moody. I was thinking something very funny. What? Because every time a creator is doing anything, people are talking like,

oh, are they PT-backed? Is PT-in-clavocular? And now the schizzo's with the red tape are going to go crazy. So PT-backed night. And the night back that. And so Bernie. The Rizzler. The Rizzler.

The Rizzler. You got to go long red string right now. There's a lot of stuff. Anyway, we have the video from Indian curlers, double-touch cheating allegations. Apparently it's dead to rights. We'll see. I haven't seen the video.

We're going to pull it up, and we will decide whether or not they broke the rules. I can't wait for you to see this. So here they're getting called. out and he's freaking out like, get me a break. Give me a break. And that's the Canadian who was accused. All right, let's get some sound on.

He was accused of... Curling Canada? So the Canadian was accused of cheating by the Swedes. And here's the clip of them at the Olympics. I don't know if we can play the audio because of the Olympics. It's very, very tight about not repurposing. Can we find the actual video, though? Wait, they said that there's a clear double touch.

It's 58 seconds. Yeah, see, see, the copyright strike could end us. Let's be careful. Let's keep talking over it the whole time so we don't get destroyed. Okay, this is... Okay. This is... Okay.

That's considered a double-touch violation. Double-touch violation. The result of that, the stone gets removed from the game. Okay. On Saturday, Canada's Rachel Holman had a rock removed after a double-touch call. That looks fine. Look at this. Look at this. There it is.

Oh, okay. He pushed it. He pushed it. he why would you touch it like that that doesn't that doesn't do anything just what do you mean obviously does something he's he's he's watching watching the thing I don't know what it's called the rock and he's kind of like directing it a little bit that's all you need you had your whole hand on it like let the hand do enough like look you're releasing it you don't need one extra touch that doesn't

do anything yeah you're I agree they should not cheat in the game but I just I don't even think the the cheating has that much of an impact on the actual result. I think that one extra touch, it's an accident. It might not be an accident. But it doesn't seem like it really changes the trajectory of... That's blatant, John. But isn't he already touching it? So he took his hand off and then... He took his hand off and he put it back on and he's directing it. He's so dialed on the release. He can tell if he messed up. He can tell if he messed up and make a slight tweak. He's like, oh, he's chopped. Okay, okay. Interesting. This is the equivalent of taking steroids in Curling. Cooper says

that's the equivalent of taking steroids in curfew. I really hope we can get that curling guy on the show. I know we talked about him earlier. Yeah, so his name is Rich Rahonan. Rahonan, yeah, he's 54-year-old personal injury attorney. We would love to have a lot. We talked about him on the show last week. He followed me on Instagram. I messaged him. He says after the Olympics are wrapped up, I'll consider it. Yeah. We will see. Well, anything else to talk about. We did not get to the Neo Lab. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow. We're going to be doing a breakdown. Deep dive on Neo Labs. I posted some fake news on X. I said, I'm going to do it with Tyler, and we didn't get to it. We had plenty of time. I just like, we need to put it in the timeline. That's what we've got to do so that I know when we're hitting it.

Anyway, thank you for watching. Is it time to plant the bomb? Plant the bazooka. Let me tell folks, the bazooka has been planted. The bazooka has been planted. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast. If you're listening, it's fine. that there's no video. We don't mind. But there's going to be videos soon. I can't. I'm so excited

for the people on Apple Podcast. We might be on Apple TV soon. Who knows? Leave us five stars on Spotify. Sign up our newsletter at tbPN.com. I can't wait for tomorrow at 11 a.m. Sharp. Pacific. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.