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

28:27Same cause. Anyway, if you want to go visit Memphis, book a wander. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade menis, dreamy beds, Top Tier Cleaning 24-7 Cousin Service. You really should, if you're a true technologist, go on a trip to see a data center in person. I don't know if they have anything in Memphis, but they have Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Oh, okay. It's the Wander Smoky Woods, and they have Wander Smoky Peaks. Truly, that's probably an amazing wander. It's probably an amazing wander. And you can probably see smoke rising from Colossus. Colossus. it would be it would be incredibly it would be incredibly like wild if colossus just started burning so much like dirty coal yeah it was just like this black like smoke rising yeah and uh they won't go that far yeah yeah just so what about just a good old-fashioned wood fire data center.

29:27Tyler, can we figure out what it would take to have you over there? I want you to have a little, we'll build you a chimney in the ultra dome and we'll build you a hearth and you can stoke the fire with wood and cedar logs. And then I want you to capture the heat, turn it into steam, turn the flywheel to generate the electricity to run a fine tune of GPT-OSS. Work through exactly how that would work. Is that possible? How many logs would you need? A wood-fired data center. A wood-fired data center? Which is like, you know how good a worm? It's almost fall here. We're cozy maxing. We're already in brown and green.

30:18As far as I'm concerned, the holidays are here. And nothing would get me more. It would really bring the Christmas spirit forward to have a wood-fired data center. Yeah, generating tokens the old-fashioned way. Exactly. Just hanging out at the hearth, generating some tokens. Can you imagine late nights with the fellas just tossing wood into the hearth? Yeah, yeah. Just powering the super intelligent. I'm pretty sure that's how a steam engine works. I guess it was coal, not wood. But if you're on the Titanic, you're down in the boiler room and you need to boil water to spin the turbine. You're taking coal and shoveling it into the fire to make heat, to make boil water.

31:04And there's no reason why we can't be doing it here. There's no reason. We got to go to the chat. Except all of the environmental regulations. Adam Hoops says, wife is going into labor. I'm between Jordy and John for my son's name. If Jordy or John can't decide, I'm letting Sam Altman spin up a model and name him himself. How about Data Center? No. Data Center Hoops. What about Adam Jr.? Adam Jr. I think Adam's a great name. Adam Jr. We'll call him Jr. Or have we talked about this? In all seriousness, Adam. Congratulations. This is incredible news. Log off. Log off. We'll still be here. You can catch the recording, but we're, we're excited for you and your family.

31:47I did. I did actually talk to someone who, uh, who, uh, had a baby and, and, uh, the, uh, the, the, the new mom and the husband threw on TV when they were like in recovery. Cause like, oftentimes you're hanging out and you need something to watch. And they were like, yeah, let's, let's watch it. Why not? It's going to blow your mind when I tell you who it is too. Cause it's a very funny, very funny couple. Uh, anyway, uh, yes. naming the kid AGI would be funny. Aggie for short. Uh, that would be, that'd be great. But Tyler is also a strong name for baby boy. Yes. Um, how about, uh, 2.6 million?

32:27Is that somebody in the chat? 2.6 M. Uh, anyway, there was a, there was a, the timeline was in turmoil a little bit yesterday near cyan and rune going back and forth before we dig into that. Let me tell you about Adio. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. Um, Stick to this DRM. Maybe stay away from the short-form video consumption. It would be the argument from Nier. Basically, people are going back and forth with Rune. Where does Rune stand on Sora? Where does Rune stand on Slop? So it's short-form video. The Rune deleted his post. He did. He did.

33:01So I don't know what it said. He committed seppuku, effectively. It's harikari on the timeline that we experienced. uh deleting your post uh is uh it is it is a sign of honor it's a technology yes it's a technology brother ritual effectively uh but uh we we have we have some we have some traces we have some we have some fossils that we can unfollow we can dust off so we might have a screenshot what was the general what was the general idea of what he said so we can get into this comment from near He was saying there's sort of a moral panic about short-form video. I was kind of saying that with him too.

33:45And I think there was a big like, this all started with the meta vibes thing, where everyone was like, this is brain rot. This is going to one shot everyone. Get ready to die. This is the worst thing ever. And I was like, yeah, it is kind of sloppy. It is sort of infinite jesty. but like there is like the possibility that this is just not popular that like it is possible that like the slop trough just doesn't taste good and people just actually want to do something else like like chess it was so obvious it was so obvious on day one that that if the product was kind of cool yeah but it was it may as well have been yeah a play a playlist a video of like cool AI.

34:27Yeah. Like people, people refuse to believe that there is at least a probability that in 50 years, people are still watching humans create content. Like, I don't know that there is a probability of that. It is possible. I think most, I think many, many people in like traditional media, just in not AGI pilled crazy world would be like, yeah, the more, the more people, the more people live online, the cooler it will be to see a dude like wingsuiting because it's like, Totally. Okay, we're, you know, 99 % of people watching this are just inside on a screen. Yeah, okay. And this dude is flying, you know, 20 feet away from a mountain.

35:04Yeah. Like 20 miles. And so is there a possibility that the MetaVibes app becomes so addictive you can't turn it off and it destroys your life? Like maybe, I've read the sci-fi, I would put a probability on it. I would say it's a couple percent that that happens, that it is bad. But there's also just the possibility that people just are like, man, I'm not into it, right? But people weren't even, no one was saying like, hey, this might just not work. Everyone was like, meta vibes will kill everyone. And that was kind of the mood on the timeline. So Rune was reacting to that saying that there's a moral panic about short form video.

35:39It's not actually that bad. He's going back and forth. Some people were pressing him on like, don't you think this is bad for kids? He was like, I don't actually know that it's that bad because I watched a couple hours of TV a day as a kid and is short form is watching short form for three hours a day, fundamentally different than watching TV for three hours a day, because everyone will say, oh, the real trade-off is like reading James Joyce versus TikTok. And it's like, that was not what was going on in the nineties. Yeah. And what does television do, right? They're like, they're using hooks, right?

36:12Totally. An episode of a television show starts and it starts off maybe dramatic and it pulls you in and then right before an ad all of a sudden it'll slam to an ad for fall the world's best generative image audio and video models all in one place develop and fine-tune models with serverless gpus and on-demand clusters yes so we don't have a way to quantify brain rot right like is barney with ads on it on nickelodeon i'm getting a lot of things right actually actually is that more brain rotty we do have twins yes oh a b test we can a b test one. I refuse, actually. Yeah, I mean, this, this, you could, I mean, it would, it would, you would effectively be potentially sacrificing a son for humanity.

36:53Yes. But imagine one son gets five hours a day on the iPad from a young age in the Sora app, in the MetaVibes app, just scrolling. The other gets personalized tutoring from, you know. I mean, we also have Tyler. Let me volunteer. Maybe we can see. How much Sora have you watched? None. I've never gone Sora. You're purely like if I order you, if as your boss I give you the task of generate a video for me, then you will do it but you you truly have not consumed like any no not in the last week the first uh what about you nick have you consumed any ai video sora or meta vibes because you were really into it on day one right okay

37:53yeah yeah yeah can we hear him at all on the stream sorry i can hear him uh anyway the the What about production team? Hands up if you've watched more than 10 minutes of AI video in the past week. Zero. Philistines. Well, yeah, so I mean, it will get better. I don't know. But anyway, this all concluded with Nir Sian and Rune going back and forth. Rune said, I like the way Sora looks. I like the content. That was his final. He wasn't saying, I'm not doing some 3D chess coping on like, it's not that bad for you. He was just saying like, I like it. I think it's just good content every once in a while.

38:35It's fine. And so Nir says, do you actually believe this? Like, do you realize the product is the API, not the app as containment isn't possible? And that short form video consumption is on the order of several hours per day for US adolescents. I didn't comment on the launch, but I'm sure I'm not. Yeah, this is what I was saying, like on launch day, which was like, if you really wanted to give Sora the chance to become a consumption platform, you wouldn't have made Sora 2 available via API for anybody to generate. You would have like at least tried to contain it as much as possible, right? People still could have like screen recorded and posted it elsewhere, but it was just very obvious immediately that it was like an incredibly innovative like ai creative tool and like probably not going to work as a like new standalone consumption app because there's the there's a lot of people that the tam for people that are will be entertained by ai video is like the entire world in the fullness of time yep anybody that's logging on to the internet will probably at least laugh a few times a year from an ai video right or they're certainly going to see them.

39:52But the TAM of people that today only want to watch AI video is basically zero. Yeah. I'm trying to imagine the bull case for the API. If I'm an open AI customer as a business, and I'm using GPT-5 or some cash stuff, and I'm using some reasoning tokens over here, and I'm like a big API buyer. And then they come out with Sora and I'm like, I really would like to use that in my business. Like I have an actual business use case. I'm trying to think of what that would be. Like I don't really know. The business use cases, I mean, think about how many platforms are trying to help people generate ads for social ads, right?

40:41Generate content for various videos they're making. Yeah, so if you're like Kenan at Icon and you're an AI generative ad company or now like an agency and the API is not available for this new tool, you're going to be like bummed out, right? Yeah. And so it just feels like, I mean, I agree with all the rationalization about like it's better for the long term strategically to actually bootstrap a real network, keep everything in the network. But at the same time, it just feels like the open AI ethos is just like do everything all the time all at once. And that's just like their core thesis. Anyway.

41:24Interrupting our timeline, Palmer Luckey has hit the timeline and says, it says something about society that the most controversial thing I have said in recent history is that I wish I would have married my wife sooner. Not that whales might have had better oral history than humans. Not that America should restart nuclear testing marrying young. So obviously his comments on TBPN earlier this week became somewhat of a current thing on the timeline. And of course, people were taking one part of his statement completely out of context and sort of ignoring the fullness of his point. But it's certainly been interesting to see the response.

42:09It's been very split. it. Yeah, it was it was a true like wedge issue, both inside and outside of like the core tech community. Like I saw, I saw people who like literally write for like similar outlets on opposite sides of the issue. But I don't think of them as like, left or right or pro tech or anti tech, like there were pro tech people who liked the take or and hated the take. And there were anti tech people that liked the take and hated the take. It was like all over the place. It was very, very hard to map. It was fun watching the conversation get started. And it surprised me. It started with him calling me a turbo normie.

42:50Hilarious. For saying that. I was just laughing about it. I know. We were laughing. We were laughing about that. And then he took it even further. Yeah. I mean, it was framed in like, let's see how far we can push this envelope way. but you can clearly understand what the core message is. He even said, easy for me to say, I met my wife when we were teenagers. Yes, yes, yes. And the broader conversation of how having children in your 30s at any point is exhausting. Now, basically, the younger you are, potentially, in some ways, it will be easier. Yeah, yeah. I was trying to think back to like, okay, would, like, let's say that I, uh, I actually did have kids at, you know, 20 or something like that.

43:42Um, so I know some people that had kids at 20, like guys that I grew up with in high school. Um, and they're, they're like, you know, becoming a dad experience is like framed kind of like, oh, it was like an accident or like a, you know, surprise. Um, and they all turned out like fine. Like it all, it didn't, it didn't detract at all. It's just like, kind of just turned into like a funny bit of lore about them. And it's like, oh yeah, they have like a kid that's like much older than like the rest of their cohort. So they are in some ways like, you know, like they don't have a huge support group because all of their other friends had kids later.

44:22But in terms of like the mechanics of like what their life is like, it's not that much different. and I feel like no matter what when you analyze kids just the fact that you love them is so it's such a wrench in the system of like let's analyze this rationally because you wind up just saying well like yeah they're exhausting they're exhausting at 35 they'd probably be extremely exhausting at 20 yeah you'd have more energy but you have less experience and also you love them And so it's amazing. And it would be amazing then. It would be amazing now. Yeah. My take has always been the time always comes from somewhere.

45:00Yeah. So if you have kids in your early 20s, then by the time... Get ready to not club. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. But it's going to take up a lot of your time. Maybe it'll be massively distracting from your career, right? I think about this all the time. Yep. Early, after my son was born, it was like, okay, there's now... I ended up just completely sacrificing my social life. Right. I, there was work time and there was family time and there was like very little in between. Sometimes there was work time that was a little bit social. But what is the social life for most people? For most? It's, it's their work.

45:37No, no, no, no, no. It's like a mating ritual. That's true. Like a lot of the reason why people are going out, people are, have a social life is because they're trying to meet someone. Exactly. Peacock. Yes. They're trying to meet that person. Yeah. And so we've just kind of extended our lives, which is incredible, and then injected an extra 10 years of like, let's find the person and delay the process. Yeah. And in my view, if somebody that has kids in their early 20s, well, by the time they're 28 and actually have hopefully like a skill set, their kids are in school and maybe their kids are a little bit older and they're able to potentially, they're not hitting 30 and then having to go through this crazy experience of having kids.

46:21and then it's still going to be a distraction from their career. But even then they maybe have more responsibility, higher opportunity costs, you know. It's all these different factors. I think also people were very triggered by the fact that he specifically said like, you know, if he had said like 19, it would have been different than 16 because 16 is like underage, right? I think that people were probably latching onto that, that it's like very young. Or do you think it was mostly just like advocating? He said it in a provocative way. Yes, but I actually don't know about the history of when humans had kids.

46:57I feel like there was a time in the castle ages, the medieval ages, when people were having kids at 16. That's true, right? He wasn't factually incorrect about that? Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, you should look back through the Coogan family text. Oh, yeah. Go back a few hundred years and open it up. and I actually did go back. And on my, on my Swedish side, there's this, there's this like 400 year chain where the family just kept using like the same naming convention. So they would say like Olafsson, son of Olaf. And then it would be like Jacobson, Olafsson, Jacob Olafsson, Olaf Jacobson, Jacob Olafsson, Olaf Jacobson, Jacob Olafsson.

47:41It would just go back and forth because they just kept naming themselves. My dad was the fourth in the row of the exact same exact same name. Yeah, I would have been the fifth. My mom was like, nah. Well, if you have a if you have another son who you give the same name as the dad, you can use the nickname trip for Oh, no, no, it would be skip because you really generation is that that's of Skip. Yes. That's where Skip comes from. And so if you have the same name as your father, you can be called Junior. Everyone knows this. If you have the same name as your father and your grandfather, people can call you Trip because you're the triple.

48:25And if you have the same name as your grandfather, but a different name than your father, you can use the name Skip, which is very fun. Skip Hayes. Yeah. It's a good name. Might be coming up. You might have to do it. In other news, there was some news or fake news this morning that the Trump administration is in talks to take equity stakes in quantum computing firms. Companies including Ionic, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum are discussing the government becoming a shareholder as part of agreements to get funding earmarked for promising technology companies, according to people familiar with the matter.

49:02And this is so important because the free market just can't solve this. It's not like there's a whole bunch of like multi-trillion dollar companies that are, yeah, venture capital. Hyperscalers that are heavily invested here, venture capital firms that are happy to fund promising. It's not like Google like actually had a breakthrough like last week that people were pretty excited about. It's not like Microsoft's working on this. No, I think the admin did this specifically to torture Scrawley because this feels very personal, right? So Screlly is very loudly and proudly in shorting, you know, Rigetti and Ionic and all these companies because, you know, I think the general sense is that, you know, there's a spectrum from like science experiments to scams.

49:46Right. And people tend to kind of sit somewhere there in terms of their opinion on quantum. Josh Wolf had some choice words earlier. Let me pull it up. He said, this is beyond stupid, absolute waste of taxpayer money. Quantum is utterly irrelevant, fraudulent BS. So strong words there. Do you know the Rigetti lore? Do you know the Rigetti lore? But before that, Screli, these companies had been selling off pretty aggressively. And of course, you get an announcement like this. Let's look at Rigetti and see how they've been doing. Oh, Regav in the chat. This is a very interesting take. My conspiracy is this was a planted story by someone in the admin to help with exit liquidity in expiring call options.

50:35I think that's potentially what... There's something odd going on here because... Because there would just be so much blowback from generally smart people about this that are taxpayers, that are Americans, that are going to say, I don't want to be a shareholder in Rigetti. Yeah. And so there was pushback and concern about the Intel deal, but at least there was broad consensus that we don't want Intel. Maybe this is a hot take, but like, I actually disagree with Josh Wolf that quantum is utterly irrelevant, fraudulent BS. I don't think it's fraudulent. I mean, I'm kind of in line with the Screlly take that it's just like it has a very narrow use case for very specific algorithms, and we don't really know the business application.

51:25It's not like LLMs where we're just going to be stuffing quantum computing all over the place. It's like there might be something that we use it for, but we're not exactly sure. And so it is very much a science project. But I personally don't believe that, I won't say all of the quantum computers, but I don't believe that they are all fraudulent. I think a lot of them are saying, look, you, the shareholder, are investing in a science project. I'm going to test some things. I'm going to run experiments. It might work. It might not. And you're like, I'm 100 % down for that risk. Yes. Take the risk.

52:02That's what I'm signing up for. Everyone's happy. Everyone's happy, even if it goes to zero. And so I don't see it as fraud at all. And even with Google's efforts, which are probably the most advanced in the world, Sundar is not out there saying, hey, really, alphabet should be a 10 trillion dollar company because of our quantum efforts like it's a project that they believe has real potential so they're investing many billions of dollars into it but it's but it's still even internally like structured as a science project and so yeah equis global says leave quantum to the googles and the microsoft's fund with free cash flow i i think that's one good option but to be clear like it's also great if vcs want to take a crack at that and say, hey, there's this really weird idea in quantum that Google and Microsoft are not going to even take a swing at because it's so bizarre.

52:54Everyone thinks it's a failure or not going to work. It's such a long shot. And so we are going to do it outside of the system. The analogy here would be like... Yeah, we had that quantum startup on that raised like a billion dollars. I don't remember their name. Yeah, it does not seem like it's a bear market. Capital is a constraint. No, I completely agree. We're making progress there. And so, yeah, hopefully this story, it's a sad situation where we have to say, hopefully this story was planted by someone in the admin whose calls were expiring. It happens sometimes. Well, you know who's not planting stories?

53:32Graphite.dev because they're reviewing your code in the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. um upslope capital says i am without speech i like i like that as a funny just like line that you can quote tweet things with i am without speech brother buco capital says can't believe my tax dollars are going to be invested in rigatoni computing yeah and the crazy thing is like uh this is uh jaguar analytics is this is the kind of stuff that used to happen to repeatedly during dot-com bust and uh and it shows uh like the red like all the different companies that are um joe b archer well there uh and and it's not rigatoni it's rigetti iron founded by chad rigetti and this is the lord do you know the lore chad rigetti is married to susan fowler susan fowler is the uber whistleblower whoa bombshell crazy crazy dinner table talk at that point it's like one's building and the quantum computer the other one is blowing the whistle writing books about Uber, working with Mike Isaac on that?

54:39Probably. I guess they knew each other. Although they did go book for book. That's the other funny lore, is that she wrote the blog post that went viral, right? Mike Isaac at the New York Times was doing the, he's at the New York Times now. I don't know if he was there. I think he was there then. Mike Isaac was doing the beat reporting on the play-by-play of all the chaos inside Uber as Travis was getting ousted. And then they both came to market with books and they went head-to-head. And I don't know who sold more copies, but it's just a funny thing of like, you know, when you blow the whistle, you got to get that book deal.

55:09You got to do, you got to turn it into a 50 episode Apple TV original series. You got to turn it into, you know what you got to turn it into? You got to turn it into a one piece anime, a thousand episodes. None of this like, oh, Theranos was a crazy story. Let's turn it into an eight episode series. No, I want a thousand animated episodes of the story of Elizabeth Holmes as she goes on adventures and, and it just continues forever. That would be good. Speaking of Elizabeth Holmes, she's probably pretty excited about seeing CZ. Pardoned. The pardons are flowing. Chong Pong Zhao. Yes. uh canadian businessman and former ceo of binance uh pardoned by the trump administration so uh you know i'm sure she's thinking i'm up next i'm up next yes although there is a rumor she might be getting out earlier not because of like anything special necessarily but just the way the, like when you Google it, it's calculated one way, basically like the, the, the auto complete is just like, when did she go to jail plus the maximum sentence?

56:26And it adds up, but like, there's like a best behavior. It's like best behavior plus time served while you were under investigation and stuff. And so you can count old times because it's like you were in prison while you were, you know, going through the court case. So we count that. And so, uh, I think that if things go well, she could be out in the next like three to four years, maybe. Um, but yeah, uh, pardon certainly seems interesting. Um, and I think that's probably why we're seeing some posting. Seems interesting. You're not, you're not, you're not recommending the admin pardon. I haven't seen anything that would lead me to recommend a pardon.

57:12At the same time, I haven't seen a ton of, like, I think, I'm not exactly sure who got the most burned. Like there were definitely people that got like bad test results and that's, and that's obviously like seriously harmful. But most of the VCs who, who invested, like the investors were accredited. They took a flyer on a dropout from Stanford. Like, I don't know. I think it's kind of like a, you know, buyer reware situation with a company. Yeah. But they put devices that didn't work into, into use around the country. Yeah. Which, and so like the input, the, like, I don't like the investors took the risk.

57:50Yep. They knew the risks that they were taking. Yeah. But the nature of the fraud was that they lied about that. Yeah. And could negatively impact. It's just so crazy that you were. Bobby Cosmic, I am not a weave. I merely studied the Antichrist lectures. And so I've never seen an episode of One Piece. I have watched one piece of anime, which is Akira. Just the movie. uh dd dos was highlighting some sections from co2's ai report before you dive into this let me tell you about profound get your brand mentioned in chat gpt reach millions of consumers who are using ai to discover new products and brands uh yes fascinating set of charts shall we pull them up uh dd says why we are not in an ai bubble in four charts you gotta you gotta summarize these and I'll hit the gong for every for every positive bull signal out there.

58:45Break it down. Here's why. Multiples are nowhere near dot com level.

58:55And we got we got we got camera. We got face tracking on the camera. This is a new feature. Shout out to the production. CapEx is growing, but funded by cash flow.

59:07Give me something else from the LaFont. Largest tech co-valuations lower than$19.99. We're still in business, baby. Concentration in the market isn't necessarily negative. What about the U.S. government is going to bail out everything from quantum? That's also quite exciting. Brian Halligan over at HubSpot, who's coming on the show soon, says, in my honest opinion, private markets are in bubble territory while public markets still seem rational. I think that's a good take. I think a lot of what's holding us back from even more craziness is just the overall state of the economy, right? You have trade wars, tariffs.

59:51You have a weak labor market. You have an unpredictable admin. You have war in the Middle East, war in Europe. and you have a higher rate environment than we've been used to, right? And so imagine if we didn't have those factors, I think it could be a lot crazier, right? But there's a lot of real reasons for people to be kind of - Yeah. I also wonder if - Not entirely risk on. I wonder how much different the, like AI is, there are some new companies, right? OpenAI, Anthropic, There's a bunch of startups and private markets. But AI is like a growth story for the Mag 7. But the Mag 7 are so huge that it's just hard to like, you can't like turn it into a meme stock, you know?

1:00:43And I'm wondering if you go back to.com, like the biggest companies at the time, do you know the biggest companies during the.com boom? Was it the? It was the oil companies. The oil companies were the biggest companies by market cap. Oh, by market cap. Like Exxon Mobil. Not by like, you know, growth. No, no, no, not by growth at all. So what I'm saying is like, is like you have this, like, you know, like you have this cruise ship that's like the anchor of the economy and it's like the big companies. And at that time it wasn't big tech, it was big oil and big oil was like something that would be really hard to push.

1:01:15And the.com narrative like didn't push it at all. But now we have the, the, the big tech folks who was also like a big cruise ship. And, But they're so big that it's hard for them to just like, oh, yeah, the MAG-7 tripled this month. That would be a really, really crazy move. It would take trillions of dollars of investment to actually drive that in the market. So I don't know. A bunch of bull cases. Tyler, what are you thinking? Okay, so I calculated how big of a hearth I would need to fine tune. So if I'm using GPT OSS 120 billion parameters, and then I have - What do you need? like eight H100s.

1:01:55You can probably get a decent fine tune within like an hour. So that's going to be something around like 8.5 kilowatts. Kilowatt. Kilowatt hours. And then if you're looking at dry wooden logs, about two kilograms each, you'll probably need something like four to five logs for that energy. Wait, five logs? And that's all you need to do this fine tune? It's just one hour, yeah. I was actually surprised. That's insane. I was expecting you to say I'm going to need a massive thing. It's just one hour. I mean, it's not that crazy. That's crazy. You could really fine-tune GPT OSS in one hour? The model's pretty small.

1:02:35Okay. Would you need a server rack or could you actually build a computer that could house 8H100? Is that possible? Or do you need a proper server rack? Yeah. I mean, 8 is pretty big. I don't think you can just fit that in a normal PC setup. Yeah. But even then, it's still not that big. A lot of people have that at their house. There's definitely the trappings of a banger YouTube video here. You know, like those primitive videos where I built a thing from scratch. I built a toaster with no modern technology. Have you ever seen those videos or anything? Yeah. They're great. And I would imagine I fine-tuned an AI model using logs.

1:03:12It would be a ripper for sure. in other news Charles Gasparino says scoop people inside Paramount Skydance say David Ellison advised by his father Larry Ellison are reluctant to pay more than$25 a share for Warner Brothers as the buyout drama continues his last offer the third rejection from David Zaslav was$23.50 to be exact company still weighing a public aka hostile offer for Warner Brothers, which they will argue cannot be sold to other players who are interested, including Comcast because of regulatory roadblocks. Full story coming. So Warner Brothers is currently sitting at, I believe,$21 a share.

1:03:58Yeah,$21.34. So David Zaslav is holding out. Did you know Andrew Ross Sorkin got a genuine scoop about this deal while being on TV for three hours a day and promoting the book 1929 and being on one of the most aggressive book 1929 and one of the book 1929 and one of the book 1929 and one of 19 of 1929 and one of 19 of 1929 and 19 of 19 of 1929 and 19 of 19 of 1929 and 19 of 19 when you join the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. I like the goat noise. We're building out the full farm analogy. We need the farm map. Yeah, and we're working on getting live animals, of course. Of course, of course.

1:04:46We'll go to the goat ham. But truthfully, I don't feel like I have a good understanding of what David Ellison is building. I'm newer to coverage of the media conglomerates because I focus more on the Mag7, more on the tech companies, more on the AI stuff. It's a fascinating world. I think he's running the experiment of just basically going to the world and saying, one media industry, please. Basically. It feels like he's trying to build some sort of new conglomerate. I don't know how the synergies pencil out. I don't know how everything works. We've got to get Barry Weiss on the show. Talk about her first couple weeks over at CBS.

1:05:31We also have to tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full-text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Philip Johnston is on a tear. He says, I'm super excited to announce StarCloud's partnership with Crusoe, builder of OpenAI's massive Stargate data center, to enabling the first public cloud in space next year. This is the first step in a partnership that will see StarCloud providing energy for much larger Crusoe data centers over the coming years. there was also a post from dalian he was firing shots at uh at nvidia because they announced ai shipbuilding partnership with saronic he said nvidia has announced ai data centers in space and an ai shipbuilding partnership in the last two days words and physics just don't mean anything anymore dear god this has to be the top please when will it end he said that in the post i kind of assumed he was like you know top pilled but that was that was a wild place to go yeah we were kind of uh we were kind of dunking on this yesterday um i don't know it it seems like there's a lot of pieces that allian was like for this something to be for this to be real yeah you know dallian from my understanding will always do a deal that he's extremely excited about but it's notable that he was very active earlier this year and he's sort of hasn't announced a new investment in the last little bit.

1:06:59Yeah, I mean, I think some of this is fodder for the public markets, marketing campaigns, just general outlines of remaining futuristic. Like there is a world where if you're NVIDIA and you're looking at Andre Carpathi saying like, hey, the current thing is going to be slow. You're like, well, then let's, what are we going to do in the next decade while we're waiting around for ASI. Maybe we put some data centers in space. Maybe we build some ships. More SaaS. Maybe we do a bunch of stuff. More SaaS. That's what I want to see. Take some real shots. Mac Rumors is reporting that there's virtually no demand for the iPhone Air.

1:07:40And I thought it was notable. I have a friend who used to work at Apple. He bought the iPhone Air, used it for, I think, like 24, 48 hours and returned it. He just said it was not the thinness of the phone was not worth the battery trade-offs. And he also said that the phone is so actively trying to conserve energy that it renders things like poorly or slowly. That's annoying because I feel like there's a little bit of skill issue with regard to the battery where it's just like just get a car that has a battery charger in it. Yeah, and I think there's something about phones. Put one at your desk, like figure out how to actually charge it regularly.

1:08:21Everyone has some point in their day where they can plug in. And like if you just – maybe if you just are a wild man and have no routine whatsoever, but you're also addicted to sore and TikTok, you're going to have a bad time. But I feel like if you have any sort of like, yeah, around noon I'm at my desk. And so I just put it down on the charging pad like regularly. Like you're going to be fine. But I don't know. yeah there's also something about phones where i think the iphone air is a bit cheaper right sure um but something about a phone is is it is so valuable to your life yeah that if you ask somebody like if you were selling an iphone like an iphone from today to somebody in 2000 like how much would somebody pay for that would they have paid you would like a high-powered executive pay like a hundred thousand dollars a year to have the modern and the iphone from 2025 and 2000.

1:09:12Like I think it's, I think it's that valuable in terms of what it does for your life. And so I don't, I don't think a lot of people are, are making, uh, at least like the average iPhone customer is saying, if I can get slightly more performance out of my phone for an extra couple hundred dollars a month, it's probably a good exchange. I'm just surprised there aren't more people that are, you know, like Tyler were like a couple of iPhones before. What were you actually on? 13? I was on, no, I was on the 11. I was like six generations behind. Is that six years you hadn't gotten a phone in six years yeah i think that sounds right have you was this your first phone ever no i was like i was probably uh like freshman in high school yeah okay okay it's sort of adding up to me but that's like what was your first phone um it was probably like a hand-me-down but it was probably like iphone 4 iphone wow started on an iphone wow well no Silver spoon alert.

1:10:09No, no, no. Wait, so you don't remember where you were when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone? Was I even born? Yeah, yeah. I was like two. Brutal. Tyler, are you excited that the Sopranos creator, David Chase, is developing a new limited series about Project MKUltra for HBO? Do you know MKUltra? Do you know where you were when MKUltra happened? What? It's like from the 70s. Oh, you're giving him the tinfoil hat. This is the first tinfoil hat. Oh, the tracking cam is phenomenal. Put it on, Tyler. There you go. Why is he wearing the tinfoil hat? You're safe now from MKUltra. Right? Isn't that...

1:10:49Wouldn't somebody... No. I thought MKUltra was like the LSD. It's LSD. Oh, I thought it was remote. I thought this was the remote mind control one. No, no, no, no. Exposed for not being... Wow, fake schizo. Fake schizo. Doesn't know his conspiracy theories. No. No, ridiculous. Anyway, CO2 has a bunch of other stuff. We should go deeper into their public markets update. We should just have someone from CO2 on again because we have a couple folks on. I love those guys. They studied bubbles back in the 1600s. They sat down and read. They studied 10 books. They went back 400 years, read 10 books, and it was 30 bubbles.

1:11:30Let's give it up for reading 10 books. And their conclusion was that it's not a bubble, right? I think they think it's like 1996, which is awesome. I'm rooting for 96. Let's go. I also am rooting for the bubble already popped. It popped last Friday, and now we're re-inflating. Anyway, we have Jacob from Microsoft AI in the TBPN Ultradome. Welcome to the show. Sorry.

1:11:58Wow. Finally somebody that almost hyped up. Oh, we got a short guy in the studio. Yeah. How tall are you? 6 '7". 6 '7". I'm 6 '8". 6 '7". Are you getting the 6 '7 thing? Do you have kids or anything? You know this whole thing? The 6 '7 thing? Come on. Yeah? You've got to be in youth culture. I don't know. I found out about it. I literally found out about it when the Wall Street Journal published an article. Oh, shit. And it was like, here's the latest trend that's causing problems for teachers. And I read about it. What are you guys even talking about? You don't know this? Oh, no, dude. So there's this meme where in middle schools, if the number six comes next to seven, six, seven, yeah, it started from this meme.

1:12:42All the kids will go crazy and go six, seven. And then they do this because, and if you trace it back, it goes like seven layers deep into like this. There was a kid at a basketball game who was saying six, seven, which was a reference to a basketball player's height. And then one awful rap song that nobody had listened to before. It called Doot Doot. yep dude dude and that's a reference to 67th street in chicago uh which is like a popular area to sing about basically i'm impressed that's all from the article yeah loosely yeah wall street journal knows their stuff knows their stuff anyway the wall street journal didn't have uh your backstory so you have to give it to us directly yeah introduce yourself absolutely uh yeah jacob andreo uh i lead product uh and growth over at mai uh mostly focus on copilot before that I was at Snap for like nine years 2015, 2023 doing the same thing basically and then in the middle venture for like a year and a half still doing a lot of investing Greylock?

1:13:39Was that Greylock? That was here in LA No, SF in the city but I've been based in LA from 2014-ish and now just spent a lot of time in Redmond and Mountain View my two favorite places on planet Earth Amazing That's great Exactly uh co-pilot is not nearly sharp enough like you're gonna need to narrow that down uh that's like a million products we're putting co-pilot in everything yeah uh it's a multi-trillion dollar company like uh what do you focus on vertically horizontally how is the organization structured like what are you actually doing on a day-to-day basis yeah i mean it's a super super cool moment for microsoft right now we have a bunch of folks that have come together a bunch of people that have been there i'm running people all the time microsoft been there for 35 years it's fucking crazy i've never seen anyone who's been am i allowed to swear on this show we don't we don't but we don't have any sense but feel free to if you feel like that you're fired up that's the words yeah that's what you want the microsoft comms team to really like take away from this is that you went wild on a show and they maybe shouldn't have greenlit it then yeah all right we'll push the envelope um no look we got together in a major group of people uh a ton of people that have already been there forever.

1:14:49And we're just trying to transform a bunch of the different things that say Copilot across the company. So we got a group of folks, they're super talented, working on a GitHub Copilot, VS Code stuff, whether that's competing with Cursor or all the other folks in that agentic IDE kind of world. And then me and my team, we spent a lot of time on the consumer Copilot app. So the thing that's in your pocket, the thing that you can pull out of your pocket, use voice mode, talk back and forth with web retrieval. And then we introduced a bunch of really cool stuff just in the last week. And is consumer co-pilot, is that powered by open AI models?

1:15:21Are you model agnostic? Are you training your own models? Like, how are you describing? Because with some of the foundation labs, they have to put a ton of their marketing behind, like, their model. Yeah. And we were having this discussion about, like, at some point, consumers are going to stop caring about the model. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how are you thinking about it? Yeah, 100%. Yeah, so Microsoft AI, when we're chipping co-pilot, we're just building the best possible product. Product. That's it. And we're super product-focused, super customer-obsessed. Yep. And at the end of the day, whatever's going to give people the best thing in their pocket, that's the job.

1:15:51And so for a long time, that was opening eye models. And thanks to the amazing partnership that we have with them, we can put all their models directly into the product. 4.0 powered the mainline response for us for a really, really long time until GPT-5 came out more recently. GPT-5 now is honestly, it's an amazing set of models. And it's been really, really popular inside the product. But there are parts of the product where we're already serving other models as well. So we introduced a couple new modes this week. One of them is not powered by an opening eye model. a few of our own first-party models just started to drop.

1:16:19So I think six weeks ago was the first time we privately started running LM arenas on MAI fully end-to-end trained models. Okay, cool. So before that, yeah, before that, we had no ability really to build our own foundation models from scratch. And in the last six weeks across both language and text and image, we've been in either the top five or the top 10 with our own first-party models. And that's like a first for us. And so it's been super cool. So does that reflect of you that essentially like the foundation model layers It's commoditizing, it's high capex, but it is something that's maybe viable to get near the frontier.

1:16:53Yeah, I think that a piece of it is a little bit that perceived intelligence. You know, when you try these different systems today, even when they're backed by different models, it is a little bit tough to tell, oh, this is way smarter than that. Like things are kind of getting a little bit closer. We saw that with GPT 4.5. Yeah, totally. And then we went to five. A lot of people, even though it was a smarter model, were complaining about like the tone and the personality. And so we're in the spiky intelligence era. We're no longer in a race where just like smarter is just better every single time.

1:17:21And so to really start to build an amazing product, it's not good enough to just have a set of models that are marching up intelligence. You have to actually build what people want in the product. And so an ability to go kind of end to end and be able to actually look at the way people are using the product, have that feedback into like model training, especially post training, and then have that then allow you to iterate the product. It creates this model product user loop that is kind of the main way that you'll probably push the envelope in terms of meeting the user needs. So that's what we've really been focused on.

1:17:48And when you think about the user of the app, are you thinking more business user, prosumer, consumer, all of the above? Like there's everyone from like the Xbox Call of Duty kid is a Microsoft customer to like the Fortune 100 company CEO. So there's very different archetypes. Yeah, long-term, we have to serve that whole spectrum. To start, it's the consumer. And it's the person that is looking for this thing. They're asking us for advice on health. They're trying to learn new things with Copilot. They're asking for a lot of help making big decisions. Those are the places where we're really playing the most.

1:18:27And now you can't ship a product from Microsoft without being awesome at productivity. And so in the last few months, huge push in productivity, making it way easier to upload tons of files, reason over them, create documents, based on the source material you've uploaded. And this is just like ripped. Like as soon as we put this in the hands of users, completely, you know, we kind of expected, okay, if we improve answer quality generally, this is always gonna be good. Improving file upload and improving the number of files that people can upload, users just were drawn to it so quickly. So, I mean, it feels like the real wheelhouse, like you're just gonna knock it out of the park with the customers if they're running their life on 365.

1:19:03Like they have a Microsoft email, they have, you know, OneDrive going. and they set up their life in that way. Maybe because they use it at work. Maybe it's also hybrid work home, but that's going to be a really great experience for them. Yeah, so the product today doesn't actually need to be rooted in M365 at all. You can just download it, you can just use it, and it's actually amazing for that use case. Long term, the system that is the highest context on you is going to be the best in both sides. Of course. It's going to be the one that knows when your meetings are so it can schedule that dinner that you've wanted to go to.

1:19:32And so we actually think that the long view here is that these things ultimately have to come together. But for the next six to nine months, we're going to focus on nailing the enterprise use case in M365 inside of all the work apps you already do all your work in. And then at the same time, on the other end of the spectrum for consumers, nail the co-pilot app that you just download from the app store and you just love and use. How should startups think about your guys' ambitions? Because I think that Sam had a quote, it was probably a few years ago at this point, maybe a couple years ago, which was like, don't build a company that's assuming models not getting better.

1:20:06and I've seen so many companies this year. We've had some of them on the show. We've talked about them that are basically, they may as well have said, we're building a different Microsoft Copilot for XYZ or we're building Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Copilot for Excel as a new company. And it's cool. These are big categories. They're extremely valuable products. It's worth new teams trying to take a crack at some of this like timeless software. But I'm curious, I'm sure you've seen some of them and you're like, wait, you know that like we do that already. We're on our roadmap. And we have like, you know, hundreds of millions of people.

1:20:49As opposed to like Bloomberg has an Excel plugin and they've had one for a long time. That hasn't been on Excel's roadmap because it's a separate thing. But yeah, how are you talking to start? Yeah, look, I think if you get really specialized like the Bloomberg example, like we're never gonna change all of Excel to go compete with like a specific vertical of a way people use Excel. We can't change like the core platform that much. But if you're trying to build something and I won't use the Excel example because it's too close to home, I think, for people that are working on this problem. But if you built like a plugin for Word that does something that's like pretty horizontal, like it uses Word for you.

1:21:21Yep. We know, like this is certainly something we spend a lot of time thinking about. Word has had templates for years. And if you think about, you know, prompt to template, like that's the very obvious next step. Do you feel like there's a responsibility for the Microsoft brand to send clear messaging to startups so that you don't steamroll them? I always wonder about that. It feels like Sam was kind of saying, I'm a former YC head. I want startups to like me, build on my platform, et cetera. And I don't want someone to accidentally get crushed by the steamroller. Yeah. Yeah, I think that when you're training foundation models at the scale that they are, and have kind of been doing it for as long as they have, I think that the world is still adjusting to how quickly things are changing.

1:22:13And so I think the degree that the model builders can signpost and be like, hey, this is going to change a lot really quickly, I do think that this is probably just the right thing to do for the ecosystem. Now, that being said, for us, we're just focused on building an amazing product. Yeah, and the other thing is some startups are overtly saying, I'm going to kill Excel. They're coming for Excel. And so if they're coming for you, it's not like you'd be like, hey, maybe don't do that because we're doing that. It's like, no, they're trying to eat your lunch. It's totally fair to just keep expanding your product in ways that are valuable for the majority of users.

1:22:46But the agentic stuff happening in Excel, as a specific example, is really cool. And so it's one of those areas where it's like, look, you can win a lot of things by being focused. So who knows? Maybe the people doing that are still going to have an amazing product and build a great business. But Excel is going to get pretty agented. Do you have anything to show us today? 100%. We've got a lot of cool stuff. Yeah, yeah. Show us some stuff. What do you got? Just quickly. We have an extra camera here so we can see your phone screen if you want to pull it up. So the stuff that we talked about, gosh, just a little bit this morning.

1:23:16We have a huge release of the AI browser. And so I think we heard a lot about AI browsers this week. Yeah. And the biggest difference is Edge has hundreds of millions of people using it. Sure. And now every single one of them with a flip of a switch now has an agentic browser in the form of co-pilot mode. Sure. I've used it to reorder stuff on Amazon. Okay. Kick off stuff for me. It's been awesome. We also get into maybe a little bit more there just while we're talking about it. But this is like you can chat with the pages that you're on and get more context. Yeah, so sidebar is totally there.

1:23:49And you can reason over multi-tab context. And you can talk about the different stuff that you're doing. The thing beyond actions, like we've seen a bunch of people talk about, whether it was Comet or the Atlas stuff from earlier this week, actions are just going to get better and better as the models improve. And Copap Mode and Edge is state-of-the-art with respect to the actions that you can do. One of the really cool differences is once you enable it, it'll actually start to pick up patterns and habits of your browsing. And it'll actually create these journeys and do things proactively for you.

1:24:17And you can jump back in where you left off. And so if you're planning a trip and doing flights in a few tabs and doing hotels and other tabs and trying to figure out stuff to go do. Edge will actually see what's going on with that. And the next time you come into the browser, it'll actually have taken the next step in planning that trip for you. And with a single tap, you just jump straight back into Flow where it's actually done the next thing. And so for me, when I'm interviewing candidates and just doing a bunch of research in tabs, it's perfect for this. How do you – there was some conversation concern about prompt injection.

1:24:44Is that – how do you think about solving that problem? It felt like people were saying, like, hey, this is a big risk. like slow down, but it felt like something that was somewhat solvable, like pretty quickly. I think that's right. And I think that you have to look at this whole class of products right now as it sounds a little, maybe too over the top, but kind of like a security preview. Like we, we know there's a whole bunch of risks with allowing the browser and these models to take actions like this. You've really have to supervise it. We have a ton of checks and balances. It'll ask you a ton of steps along the way to make sure everything's still on the rails.

1:25:16But we're learning alongside everybody else. And this area is going to evolve really, really fast. So we're ready to just keep playing whack-a-mole as these issues come up. Are there any surprises? Do you have anything that might be teed up for us? We love hitting the gong around here. So we are now the first ever AI app to also drop groups. Okay. Are you on the most aggressive version of liquid glass, by the way? I am like liquided out. It's all glass all the way down. Okay, it looks good. H2O Max. And with Pro Max, you actually get the battery life, so it can power liquid glass. Okay, cool. There we go.

1:25:49Yeah, exactly. So groups is phenomenal. It's now the first place where if you're having a chat with Copilot, you can just add someone to the group. Use it for my wife when she's asked me questions. I have no idea the answer is all the time. I can just put her in the chat and she can just take the rest for me. Phenomenal. Creating a group chat with an AI and other people. You're not bringing it to teams. It's like, yeah, so it's sharing this and then we're both on the Copilot. So when I'm in the thread, I just hit share, invite with a link. I can drop it in an iMessage or whatever. And then she's just in the chat.

1:26:15And they don't even need to install the app. They can just use it right from mobile Safari, which is super cool. And so this is the first time across all these apps that you can finally do this. How, how, it seems like it's such a great and somewhat obvious feature. I'm somewhat, I'm somewhat surprised that it hasn't. I was shocked when I joined, I joined MAI. I was like, no one has built anything social in any of these products. I worked on my eye at Snapchat before I left. And so like no one had really done social. I was like, I'll do it again. Like, it's fine. We'll run it back. And then, and then one of the really cool things that we did, I was, Colpatt knows all about you guys, by the way.

1:26:49Oh, really? Well, we do put out 15 hours of content every day. Okay. We introduced Miko, who's this new person that you can talk to, this new character. Okay. Really cute face. It's not going to sex with you. So it's completely different than the other AI appearances. It's not going to. Oh, wow. It's explicitly non-explicit. That's not what it's going to do. This is the counter-positioning. We love counter-positioning. Let's bring the gog for decent things. That's not what's going to happen.

1:27:17Let's drink the gong. It's not traditional values. Bull market and traditional values. And so with traditional values at our core, as soon as we showed Miko to Satya, his favorite thing actually was like poking it, which I couldn't find a better way to describe that on air without it sounding a little bit weird. Yeah, that sounds awesome. But again, it's going to be strictly platonic. It's safe for work. It's totally safe for work. Because this is from the company that brought you Microsoft Excel. And of course. Yes. Of course. And I would trust that brand. And so as you poke Miko, you really got to hammer it.

1:27:54Hammer. Oh! Clippy's back! Clippy is back! Clippy is back! Let's go! We have been asking for this. Is this breaking news? Is this a scoop for us? This is the first time this has been on air. Post the training card now! Clippy is back. Clippy is reborn. Yes. Yes. Incredible. So Clippy walked so Miko could run. Yes. And so we got to pay an homage to our roots. And so Satya, when he saw this, demanded that Clippy front and center. I'm so happy about this. Incredible. I think people forget. We've been begging for this. We've been begging for this. Obviously, Clippy had a bad rap and people were like, it didn't do what it was promised.

1:28:38But I feel like all of the nuance of where it wasn't perfect has completely melted away. And it's just lore it's just great lore your parents hated it so the kids loved it exactly it was cool to love it so everybody else got on and so it's so ready to bring it back so i just yeah so many good so many good memories of being in the computer lab at school and just looking down and knowing that clippy was there he was riding with me how are we what what does it take to update the name of the app in the ios app store to just clippy you got that's the night right now it's Easter egg, but we're working here together.

1:29:12Baby steps. Baby steps. You're like, actually, there's like a team of 25 people that really worked hard on Miko. There's like three CMOs. This is not, you know. Bring that Clippy. But that is very exciting. Thank you so much for coming by. No, thanks for having me, guys. And breaking it down. Yeah, yeah. What a fascinating time in the industry. What a fascinating place to be. It must be thrilling to be in your seat. It's an absolute treat. There's five places in the world. You can try to build Frontier AI for a billion people. And this team and this setup, it's unbelievable. So it's really well.

1:29:45As a true product guy, it's like going somewhere where you have that scale, resources, et cetera. And it's actually good that we have just this flood of talent into early stage companies and the labs and all that stuff. But it's actually incredibly important that talented people go and work at these companies that already power use cases for billions of people, millions and millions of companies. So I'm glad you're there. No, you got to do it. 100%. Yeah. Anyway, good to see you guys. Thanks, Rob. Fantastic. Congratulations. Our next guest is Drew Houston from Dropbox, hopping on at 1 p.m. We have 30 minutes to take you through more of the news.

1:30:26But first, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Let Numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance. I use it myself. It's the official tax partner of Lucy, the nicotine company, who Palmer also got in trouble with, talking about nicotine. But that's a much less controversial topic. I think everyone has hashed out the nicotine story so many times. I hope everyone knows. I can't believe. The Economist published a - Wait, what? I just can't believe Clippy's back. You're still rocked by this? I'm rocked. This is shaking my worldview. I love it. No, but this is super fun. The nicotine thing is funny because everyone was getting mad about Palmer for basically, you know, in his own way, teeing up the argument of like, are there benefits to nicotine?

1:31:20And like, this is a topic that has been discussed by Guern back in 2014, 2015. Then we started Lucy, we were talking about it a little bit. Andrew Huberman did a big deep dive on nicotine, kind of laid out some of the complexities, and he actually revisited that. It's in the stack today. Do you have his post pulled up? What did he wind up actually saying fully? I'll pull it up here. Pull that up. But the really interesting one is from The Economist, who I regard as a pretty conservative organization. They're not really doing hot takes over there. September 12th, 2025, published an article called What Nicotine Does to Your Brain.

1:32:03Their conclusion, The drug is hugely addictive, but it does boost mental performance. And so that's the formulation that I think Palmer was grappling with, which is there's mental performance. It's highly addictive. How do you balance those in a world where you remove the carcinogens and you don't wind up with actually smoking cigarettes? But he was talking about that it's an appetite suppressant. Exactly. There's obviously benefits in not being overweight. There's trade-offs with everything. Yeah. But anyway, what was Huberman's final? Let's trust the experts on this one. Let's go to the experts.

1:32:40Huberman's final review. He said, with Palmer Luckey's comments about nicotine on TVPN, your reminder that, yes, nicotine increases focus, also is very habit-forming, duh, is not carcinogenic. I know that it's habit-forming. I've quit nicotine five or six times. Yes. I typically quit it every night before I go to bed. Yeah, and then pick it back up. And then pick it back up. is not carcinogenic unless smoked, vape, dipped, or snuffed and is an unusual stimulant because it simultaneously focuses and relax you. Also raises blood pressure. Again, do your own research. Also, 21+. Don't get in the game unless you're 21 +, Tyler.

1:33:25Why are you looking at me? Well, They went to the wrong camera The little jump scare Travis Kelsey is teaming up with an activist Group to invest in And revive Six Flags There was another Oh I don't know We have no idea

1:33:48Mike Isaac says genuinely appreciate How Pop Crave left out the investor Part of activist investor group Because all the people in the replies think that there's Going to be like a BLM takeover of the roller coaster park someone else was saying like did travis kelsey like get three wishes when when he was like 11 and he's like i want to be a football player i want to date the biggest pop star in the world i want to take over uh it's uh it's a 200 million dollar deal he bought nine percent of the theme park operator uh and we love to see big name celebrities crossing over in the private equity world.

1:34:24Wow, they have the ticker. Getting their beak wet. Do you know their ticker? Fun. So good. That's a great ticker. And a little fun fact, turns out, according to ChatGPT, you cannot reserve and barter stock tickers. I think we need to do a PSA about this. We heard some rumor that people were trying to, in the way that you buy a domain, maybe you squat on it. Let's say that you think that, you know, after AI.com, after chat.com, after quantumcomputing.com, there's going to be a wave in time travel. So you go out and buy timetravel.com and you wait, and then somebody comes and buys it from you, and you make a nice return on your investment.

1:35:05That's totally cool in the dot-com world. That doesn't work with reserving New York Stock Exchange tickers. Like you can't trade them that way, at least according to ChatGPT. And so speaking of just funny stock tickers, we do not believe that there's not going to be there. I can see why Travis Kelsey was interested in this. Six Flags trades at less than 1x revenue. Whoa.

1:35:33So he's seeing deep value here. Are you bullish on... First, do you like theme parks? No. Never? Never been? I used to go to Legoland a lot growing up. I enjoyed Legoland. Yeah. but I kind of grew out of theme parks at a young age and I haven't been to one and I never had a fear of heights I never I never more than a decade I never was like I don't like them uh but I also was never like I gotta go a ton uh kids sort of change that because kids really like them it's fun to go with the kids uh but Six Flags is it's a different target audience it's not as There's not as much lore around every ride.

1:36:23But are you bullish on theme parks generally in a world where Bill Peebles is updating us on Sora and it seems like the march of generative AI is unrelenting? Should you go long slop and then also steal on the roller coaster track? I think I'm somewhat take-less here I don't, you know when Chesky was on a couple days ago his point of view was that as slop increases people will, I mean these are my words not his, but you know, digital life becomes more intense, people will want to touch grass more, they'll want to go on trips things like that, but in some ways I feel like the theme park is like real world slop, right?

1:37:14It feels like it, I imagine going to Six Flags for me would for four hours would feel like I would come away feeling like I was using Sora for four hours, right? Yes. Like not exactly, it's not like really counterposition. Yeah, it's not exactly the metropolitan offer. It feels like the physical, you know, because I just, I don't like to pay to be in crowds. It's physical brain rot. Yeah. It's brain rot IRL. But maybe Travis Kelsey wants to turn it around, turn it around, tear down the, tear down the roller coasters, put in a museum. Maybe he wants to increase the risk. Football players go out there.

1:37:49They're going head-to-head, right? It's a high-risk environment, a lot of injuries. Maybe he says, hey, Six Flags injury rate right now. This is the Nathan Fielder strategy. The sort of accident rate is so low on the roller coasters that people don't get the same rush as if they thought that there was maybe like half a percent chance that a ride would end in disaster, right? And so then that would really bring you into the physical world and really make you feel human to be taking on that level of risk. So who knows? Well, good luck to them. The Sora update, we already talked about Sora a little bit, but you can register cameos of specific things so your dog can become a cameo.

1:38:32And then you can create a... Finally. Thank you for listening to your users, Bill Peeble. Finally. Finally. i mean i i you're gonna you're gonna do it you're gonna play around for sure gonna do this i like i i think it's gonna be hilarious to put my dog on a skateboard at the x games like if you don't think that's fun like you're just like humorless and like you're you're you're like a slop scold you're a scold i think it's i think it's let me enjoy my dog i've been joking a little bit i like to horse around but i think it's smart because they had so much pushback from using ip yep and it's got to be personal it's got to be like it's got to be personal and people will be excited to generate images yes of their dogs yes axe games and i'm gonna and i'm gonna take my dog and i'm gonna scan his face and he's gonna do a kickflip and i'm gonna send that to the family group chat which is the my new social network my i like there is social media and then there is social networking i think this is a great take by chesky and so my social network exists on iMessage.

1:39:36And so I will send the video there. I still very much feel like X is a social network. I feel like it's a professional network. It's my LinkedIn. Okay, professional network, but my social life is almost entirely overlapped with my professional life. If I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to be doing in my social life on this weekend, X has nothing to do with it. That is orchestrated purely in iMessage. Yeah, but it's the way that I catch up with the majority of my friends. yes yes i agree in terms of like keeping a pulse on what they're doing in the world it is more social media than like pure algo media yeah so there is something there but anyway um speaking yeah it's gonna be fun to play media what else not really but uh ramp data is now available in the bloomberg terminal this is cool you can track ai adoption rate business size right in your terminal very differentiated in real-time data source it's cool uh very cool move from ara and the ramp team it's very good uh this is crazy the unit before we read this let me tell you about vanta automate compliance manage risk proof trust continuously vanta helps you get compliant fast uh the unit tree g1 crawl policy has been deployed to hardware plenty of room for improvement but it's a start let's pull up this video this is a this is a humanoid that can turn into oh wait this is a humanoid oh this is crazy i mean i feel like i i don't want to be too too negative here but i feel like the film the filmmakers are really not stepping up like i I feel like the creative tools right now, both with like AI stuff, but also like you could buy one of those or rent it and you could shoot a horror film right now, practically.

1:41:32Like you wouldn't be like generating the AI. Jason Carmen, you could make a humanoid robot horror, low budget horror film right now. Or action movie or anything. Like that just feels like a character that you could immediately put into a movie and tell the whole story around. What do you think? Or a character on this show. Yeah, that's true. I think we might have to do it. We might have to. I mean, there's something beautifully dark about a humanoid that's walking and then it suddenly turns into this insect-like thing. Yeah, that is very spooky. Very spooky. Are we really going to get one of these?

1:42:08Okay, if we get one of these, we also have to get a couple desert eagles because if it starts acting up, we have to be able to take it out, right? Like we have to have, we have to have, you know, it's like if we were going to actually do the hearth, I would also say, hey guys, let's get a fire extinguisher, right? And so because like what happens if you're training and the log rolls out? Yeah, and then the AI becomes sentient and then tries to kill us, right? That's why we need the fire extinguisher. Well, that's what, no, no, we just need the fire extinguisher because it's good safety policy if you're using a warm hearth to fine-tune GPT-OSS on a rack of eight H100s.

1:42:52Because if you're going to be burning a log inside, you should have proper equipment. And I think if we get this humanoid, you've got to be ready to take this thing out. You have to be ready to take this thing out. Jordy, what do you think? How are you taking this thing out if it rises up? If we get one of these, I want to be prepared on day one. I think you strap charges to it it has a vest that has an explosive device at any moment it has a Kevlar suit over it explosives on the inside it explodes inward I feel like strapping a suicide vest on a robot is the last thing I would do it's charging at you and you're running away with it.

1:43:42Oh, no. I know. If it, if it, if it, if it one wrong move, we're all going down. We're all going. Oh, this is a wild. Anyway. Let me tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. What is this? Is this literally, this is literally chat GPT. Should we play this family guy clip or is this a Sora video? I'm not familiar with this. Did you put this in here? No. Okay. Let's move on. uh farid has a chart that looks so insane uh it's chat gpt's customer retention what do you think about this how do you square this with the earlier data that we saw that uh showed that hey there might be some slowing adoption this looks like well this you think this can be this is unrelated to growth yes this is just when somebody tries chat gpt or how how many months later are they still using it.

1:44:36I mean, it's directly related to growth because if you have really great retention, you can just add 5 % of new people to try it because they'll all stick around forever. As opposed to when you have a leaky bucket, you're like, we need to be doing Super Bowl ads every day because people are only going to come in and they're going to leave after a week. Sure, sure, sure. But generally just looking at these new cohorts, and I think that this chart is not nearly as impactful if you haven't worked on like a consumer mobile app right because this is like beyond best in class yeah but i think this is what you would expect right people try chat gpt they love it they stick around it becomes a part of their life it becomes like you know a a kind of muscle memory quick quickly it's become a you know let's ask chat type of thing.

1:45:25So look at the difference of the 10 month line for the, the, the most recent 10 months ago, they joined versus two years ago, they joined from a 45 % or 10 month retention to 70 % retention. Like that is just incredible. They're pushing up those lines. It's not just that the lines plateau at 50%. So for every person that gives it a try, there's a 50 % chance that they just never leave, right? And then also it's smiling, so you get people to come back. That's a great sign. But also they're pushing up the retention curve so much, so quickly. And yeah, I mean, this is just, yeah, product getting better.

1:46:08But congratulations to the team over there. That's fantastic news. Shane Copeland was. Wait, hold on. If you're trying to run one of these analyses on your company, you probably need to use Julius AI. The AI data analyst that works for you, joined millions. who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. Billions, very soon. Shane Copeland was locked in at, is this, I don't know what sport this is, but I can see on the jersey it's Cleveland. Cleveland. Some sort of crosstown rivalry going on. Some type of stadium. Very cool. Courtside. Love to see it. Yeah. He's locked in on the phone.

1:46:50That's very fun. dialing in. And everyone's saying, oh, he's trading. He's front-running. Okay, so I'm worried about getting one shot by AI again, but Melissa Chen has a post here. She says, actual shot, not AI, of a French detective working the case of the French crown jewels that were stolen from the Louvre in a brazen daylight robbery. Somehow he looks like he's smoking, even without a cigarette in his hand, but surely everything you know about life is screaming at you this case is officially screwed to solve it we need an unshaven overweight washed out detective who's in the middle of a divorce a functioning alcoholic who the rest of the department hates never going to crack it with a detective who wears an actual fedora unironically i mean this guy really there are so many weird things about this photo okay okay okay yep I knew this was too good to be too good to be true.

1:47:48The community note says this is a photo is real taken outside the Louvre after the jewel theft but the man in the fedora is a passerby not a detective on the case. Didn't stop it from getting 42 ,000 likes. Look at the woman in the back all the way on the right. Her face is like perfectly lit. Like this is a remarkable photograph just from a dynamic range perspective. uh this is yeah so so my uh putting on the tinfoil hat i think this guy with the fedora is probably one of the thieves that dressed up in an costume and is coming back to the crime scene i like this i like this you know because obviously the thief wouldn't come back to the crime scene so he's kind of you know trying to take him take himself out of the pool of suspects even if you take off the tinfoil hat and just go with like the the narrative that's here on the timeline it is hilarious to be like, yeah, I'm going to dress up like this and then go be a passerby at a jewel thievery.

1:48:44He's like, I'm going to go get a fit off. Yeah. He's like, I got to go. I got to go see what's up at the Louvre. I got to be there. I have to be photographed. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Drip. He's a dripped out Frenchman, for sure. Dripped out. Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails. Securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Do you want to do this uncapped clip? Look at the lighting. Jack Altman, your team is on a tear. This is beautiful. Good job. I love this. I haven't seen the clip, but let's react.

1:49:19What is it? Learned at CAA is star quality is real.

1:49:26Most people don't have it. Some do. What is it? You just know it when you see it in a room. Tom Cruise is maybe my favorite actor growing up I've seen Top Gun a zillion times I loved Maverick I had the opportunity to meet him one day in a very kind of random setting I was delivering a package to him and he shook my hand and looked me in the eye and we talked for three minutes and for three minutes I thought wow, no one cares more about me in the world right now than Tom Cruise does the way he just commands a room in his presence but also when Colin Farrell you heard it here first command the room no excuses you've never been in a movie before and you spent 30 minutes in a room with him and he just had so much magnetism about him the way he composed himself and talked to you and looked at you and just his general kind of persona so I do think that to me I do look for that in founders it's the combination of a mind at work and an opportunity that they're addressing, right?

1:50:31I remember when I first met Evan from Snap, he basically was making the argument that look at the generation of young people coming up with the Iraq war essentially having been, you might say, a hoax, right? The WMDs were never there. Rolling into the financial crisis, oh, you told us we had the best economic system and then it almost collapsed, right? And then COVID, right? He built Snap as a platform, as a reflection of those trends, right? So what was it? Well, everything disappears, right? No one kind of stores your data. You can't trust institutions to look out for you. I think it ended up being incredibly prescient of where we are today as a world, right?

1:51:20Where the institutional breakdown that we've seen. So I think that magnetism about a person in a room and an idea and a market that they're going after. Be goaded. No excuses. That's my takeaway. That's the right takeaway. Be goaded. John, by the way, we can lightly hear you snacking on pistachios. Just a heads up. I am snacking. please no no snacking asmr people can find that house elsewhere uh we have some breaking news uh we you've heard about you know uh funds that directly buy you know equity in in companies uh you've heard about secondaries funds that that buy stakes in in other funds and we've got something new we got some breaking news we've now got tertiary funds uh quaternary funds next uh layla says i can't believe it's come to this but here's a visual representation of this ridiculous structure bottom is actual portfolio companies purchased by pe funds one and two with respect of lps a secondary fund comes along buys lp interest and funds one and two from some lps this secondary fund raises money from other LPs, but now we have a tertiaries fund.

1:52:51This fund will buy secondary interest and secondaries funds by raising money from other LPs. Does anyone even remember how many layers back the actual value has created? P.S. not to be confused with continuation vehicles. Stay tuned for that visual. Yeah, this is starting to look like the collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps. from the mortgage crisis. It's like very similar. Like you remember in the big short, there's like the, you know, you have your stack of champagne glasses, you pour the champagne in one glass and then it like flows down. Yeah. Yeah. No, I haven't seen that one.

1:53:29Yeah. Yeah. It's very, very similar. We're like, um, at every, at every tranche you like re-collateralize and, and re-aggregate and ideally like distribute the risk. But if there's correlation, then there can be problems. I don't really know how big this stuff is and certainly not like publicly traded yet, but wow, to be a tertiary GP. This is asset managers doing asset management stuff. To be a tertiary GP, that's a life. Yeah, a lot of big short memes going around. Yeah, we should have one on. There's probably a bull case for it that's actually pretty sound. It actually makes sense. Yeah, I can see it making sense in some circumstances.

1:54:12I think the concern is like you're just no one can get liquidity so you're just kind of like passing the buck passing the buck you know gps are harvesting fees at each level but there's no actual uh like returns flowing like from the underlying like sort of value right so yeah oh yeah yeah i believe it um what else yassa owned by mercedes recently smashed their own record for motor weight size in horsepower. This production intent motor weighs 28 pounds and produces a thousand horsepower. Kyle Kords in the comment says, I do not understand the point of this. There are already five EV brands with amply good enough motors.

1:54:54The motor power density is nowhere near the limiting factor on EV profitability or adoption. If they can make an adequate motor cheaper, that would be much more valuable innovation, though still not the limiting factor. Yeah, I have no idea what their intention is for this motor. It could be they want to just use it in Formula One, right? I say, why not? It looks sick. Yeah, this is...

1:55:47I mean, they'll put it in something. you know the g-wagon has gone electric what will they do with the six by six the six-wheeled g-wagon what are your intentions with my motor um but uh you know imagine one of those at each at each wheel of the six by six you get 6 000 horsepower in a thing the size of a tank that'd be fantastic uh more interesting news uh self-driving taxi company Waymo is now doing 876 ,000 rides per month in California. 6x increase over the past year and a 69x increase since August of 2023. Do you think they wind up working with Uber long term or not? Ben Thompson was talking about like he has been writing a lot about the Uber Waymo, self-driving taxi stuff, mostly because he thinks like he needs more data because Because even at Uber and Waymo, they don't necessarily know what the consumer behavior will be.

1:56:47Will the consumer stay with Uber and they'll order a Waymo when one's available? But then they'll want one app that can get them anywhere. And so if you say, well, I need you to drive me into the snow to go to Big Bear today. You want to do all that in one app. Or will people say, I use the Waymo app for most things. And then when I want to go into the snow and use a human driver for some specific route, then I'm happy to open up the Uber app. Yeah, we should get Dara on. Because they're actually sort of A-B testing this because some markets are just Waymo app. Some of them are Waymo in Uber. And it's very clear that they're running like an experiment.

1:57:27Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, right now, Waymo is quite a bit more expensive on a per-trip basis than Uber. And so it's possible the rideshare market, you know, it used to be bifurcated a little bit between Uber and Lyft. Lyft was always, you know, I remember when I was in college, I was using Lyft more because it was like slightly cheaper. Yeah. And it's possible that Waymo ends up becoming like more of a luxury good and people just have the Waymo app and more price sensitive consumers are just sticking with Uber. So we'll see. Yeah. before our next guest joins, let me tell you about Finn.ai, the number one AI agent.

1:58:05If you want your AI to handle customer support, go to Finn.ai. Our next guest is Drew Huston from Dropbox. Welcome to the show. Drew, how are you doing? What's happening? How's it going, guys? Great to see you. We've been excited for this one. Yeah, very, very excited. Where should we start? Are you a Waymo fan? Are you an Uber fan? We were debating like where does the consumer experience go i mean i i know you're probably in the position where you might not have to choose but uh it's an interesting question in my mind of like will people want the the you know the super app for that can get them the robot taxi or the human uh long term or if uh folks just wind up moving over to waymo entirely yeah i mean i think it's gonna be interesting to see how fast it diffuses i mean i think they're still like that or that like quality problem and they're getting that like third nine, fourth nine, fifth nine.

1:59:03Yeah. I mean, that's really what's, and Carpathie talked about that on why agents are going to be a further away than people think. And so, but I mean, I think it's, I mean, SF, it's like pretty well established. So I think that's probably a sign of what's to come. Yeah. Did the Carpathie podcast like update you on Dropbox's strategy? strategy at all? Or was it something that you were already hearing like rumbles of and you were like, okay, now I have like permission to fully write that to long-term memory or how were you processing it? You know, cause I think they were like, there was nothing there that was like completely, oh, no one has ever given this take before.

1:59:45It was more like no one has ever said it in this context with this authority. It was, it was, uh, it was somebody whose opinion holds a lot of weight that isn't like waiting didn't feel like he's waiting out for the next like big tender offer you know totally so it was like it was felt like less conflicted than some of the other opinions that that get shared yeah totally yeah no i'm very aligned with it i don't think there was to your point i don't think it was like a lot of new um uh or you know i agree with a lot of these themes that the industry's been thinking about for a while but um yeah sort of like a splash of sobriety on the space.

2:00:23And I think self-driving is a good comp in some ways for like why AI or AGI or this like fast takeoff might not be as quick on the kind of timelines that people are thinking about. Because Carpetty talks about this march of nines, like it's the same amount of work to go from like 90 % reliability, that's like one unit of work, then to get to 99 is like the same amount of work, then 99.9. I mean, we've certainly seen that in our, as we've worked with AI and as we just work on reliability in general, I think that's very consistent. And I think, yeah, the self-driving car took the world or captured the world's imagination like 15 years ago.

2:01:00And yet it's these like more intermediate forms of automation that come way before autonomy that create a lot of the commercial value and get a lot more adoption. So for example, like there's like billions of users of Google Maps today. but maybe thousands of people are going to get an awaymo today. And then same thing for Highway Assist or what Tesla's done or some of these intermediate forms of self-driving that have maybe millions of users. And so we think about that a lot as we deploy AI. And you don't want to be either too early or too late, both with tech in general, but also with automation for sure.

2:01:34Yeah, it feels like if you watch the Carpathia episode on Friday and you walked into the office on Monday and ripped up your whole plan, Like something's maybe going wrong with your leadership style. But it is an interesting frame to think about it in the decade of agents framing. And I'm wondering, like, you've been at this for two decades now, correct? Like roughly? And so you're like fully equipped to think in decades because you have literally thought in decades multiple times, right? And so I'm wondering how you're thinking about the next decade. In 10 years, what if things play out kind of to the mid case and we get a lot of really powerful AI systems, but they don't come next quarter?

2:02:17How do you set your company up to actually capitalize fully over a nice long decade of just solid execution? Yeah. Well, I think when AI first came along, people's imaginations immediately went to sci-fi movies. and sort of the one omniscient, omnipotent AI assistant. But for a while, yeah, I think like looking at, I was surprised when I was 30, when self-driving first came out. I was like, oh yeah, maybe millions of people will be off the road. Maybe we'll never see another human behind the wheel when we go to work. And it just like took a lot longer. And then I've been working with like, even when you're just designing like systems with engineering and certainly as you start to apply machine intelligence, you see these dynamics where the demos look super good and sort of convince you that it's right around the corner, but then when you actually scale these things up, it's a lot harder than it looks.

2:03:13And so we saw that even before AI with Dropbox to begin with, we could make a very good demo or a video in the first couple of months, but then to roll it out at mission-critical and massive scale, or to roll out such a mission-critical product at massive scale, you can't have a bad day, and that just takes a lot more engineering. And we see that with our AI products today. So, I mean, we want to build the omnipotent AI agent too. But when we actually look at customers and look on their screens, the more basic problem that people have that AI can help with today is just that your screen's a mess.

2:03:52Work is a mess. You have 100 tabs open. You're working across Google and Slack and your email and Dropbox and a dozen other things. And the question I started with is, how much is AI helping with that? And the answer is zero or negative. Yeah, the other thing is, I'm sure reliability was a core focus for Dropbox during the early days. Because if you're an online file storage, and then 1 % of the time, a file just disappears into the ether, it's not saved, and then the user might have lost it forever, and that's going to stick in their brain forever. And so, like, reliability at Dropbox means, like, 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999.

2:04:38And it feels like the industry in, you know, spending a decade building SaaS and building SaaS, it was pretty reliable. And having, like, a bunch of infrastructure that makes it easier to deliver reliability maybe forgot how, like, how important it is. And if you have an AI agent that does an amazing job 90 % of the time and just totally botches it 10 % of the time, it's not ready for production. And so you can have these magical, and I think in the context of like customer support is a big one, is like, is your agent ready for production? If like 95 % of the time it solves the consumer's problem, but 5 % of the time it makes them like pissed off and they're just like, talk to a human, talk to a human, you know, and they're just running down.

2:05:24that conversation. Yeah. Well, I mean, once you get up to a million users, even if you have a 95 % or 99 % success rate, that's still like thousands or tens of thousands of people having a really terrible experience every day. And this was actually part of the motivation why I started Dropbox. Step one was not create Dropbox. Step one was use all these other services and have all these near misses or things were like, wait, what happened to my tax return? It was just here a second ago. Where did it go? and going into the support forums of these other companies, these other products that claim to do this on paper.

2:06:00But then you go in the support forums and it's like a battlefield medical tent. People are like, oh my God, what happened to my wedding photos? And where's this? And I was like, I can't believe that these things are so brittle. I'm going to be putting my most important stuff in here, even just as a customer of one, like me. I need something that I can trust. and then that took a lot more like engineering rigor and discipline than we'd seen in the space. We've been getting into barnyard analogies around here. I want to take you through one and I'd love your feedback. So we think about a lot of the dynamics between the various players in enterprise software and foundation models as potentially mimicking the experience of a fox in a hen house.

2:06:48and it might be the job of the CEO of the hen house not to let the fox in the hen house. And I'm wondering if that resonates with you at all in terms of if I'm a foundation model company, I say, hey, I'd love to provide a bunch of great AI tooling to my customers, your customers, both. I will need all of your data forever and I will need to significantly erode your mode or your customer retention. Is the job of the CEO right now to protect the hen house or go on the attack and be more Fox-like? Help me walk through this from your perspective. Well, I mean, I think when it comes to using AI, it depends.

2:07:30I mean, first is, and it depends what your business is doing and how you're using it and so on. I think, I mean, certainly the CEO's responsibility to strategically position their company and mitigate risk and things like that. But certainly every CEO is thinking about how do I like usefully deploy AI. And so I think it helps to have an understanding of the technology. I think it's important to like know who you're working with and what their incentives are. To your point, you know, hand houses like, you know, I think a lot of people have apprehension about using some of these or about working with the foundation model company whose whole business revolves around like taking data and sort of grinding it up into.

2:08:13pellets for training the next one. And, you know, you watch Sora videos or whatever, and you're like, that comes from somewhere, probably not their artists. So, so I think, and, you know, it's certainly in our business that trust and privacy and not having incentive conflicts of like not advertising, not training foundation models is super important as, you know, all of our customers think about, you know, who should we partner with? So, so is there a little bit of a tension there where you need to keep customer trust high and let them know that we're going to get you these AI features, but in the Dropbox way that is actually fully integrated.

2:08:56And we're not just going to take your customer record or your data and sell it off the back of the truck just to pull something forward. And that actually layers into the customer experience. You might be a couple months behind on a certain thing, but it's going to wind up with a better experience over time. Is that accurate? Yeah. And I think it's all of the above. I think it starts with just your business and your incentives. You have to design some of this in from the beginning. We could probably make more money or be more profitable if we did advertising, for example. And a lot of scaled, the predominant scaled business model on the internet, certainly for consumers as advertising.

2:09:40And we're like, we're just going to draw a hard line. We're just not going to do that. Because of this trust conflict, this incentive conflict, we would have. And even if our intentions are good, it's like customers just have to wonder. And then that becomes a big advantage because then we've been living up to that for the last 18 years and we have a track record. What is the specific concern if you were running effectively display ads? Is it privacy of like, I don't want you to use my data to target me with more ads? Yeah. And really, this is up to our customers, not us. It doesn't really matter what we think.

2:10:17It really matters what they think. And I think, yeah, everybody feels a little weird when it's like the equivalent of like, even just like the TV in your living room, if it starts showing you, if it's like a smart TV that starts showing you ads you didn't ask for, you know, it's like, whoa, there's an invasion of privacy here. and so you have to be super sensitive to the psychology of your users but I think at a more fundamental level yeah the other thing is like non-targeted I imagine the worst possible scenario that you were 100 % not doing where the file storage company edits ads into my files so I'm like wait a minute I saved my high school transcript and now on page 6 of this PDF they edited an ad well the other thing is like non-targeted ads are really frustrating because I remember in college I bought a Kindle and there was an option.

2:11:06It was like, do you want the ad-supported Kindle? Yeah, I went with the ad-supported one. It's a very Amazon move is to be like, okay, for$100, you can get the ad-supported Kindle. You can save like$10. Or for$120, you can buy it. And I'm a college student or whatever. I got the bougie one. I got the new ads. But then I was getting like the ads that were, when I had this, that were popular were like the most, it was like romantic novels and stuff like that. like books that I wasn't reading. And so my channel would be sitting there and it'd be like, just absorb my entire life. So you can target me with something cool for once.

2:11:38Yeah. Interesting. And the other thing is, I think you have to focus, like you have to really be selective about the problems you solve and like figure about, okay, how do we take what we do today and build on that in a way, in a way that makes sense for like today's context. So for us, I mean, we always took care of your files. These are already like your most important information, but as we all know, like what used to be a hundred files on our desktops, now a hundred tabs in our browser. and then a lot of the pain points we have are like instead of one search box or at home I can Google anything from one place search all of human knowledge.

2:12:08I go to work, I've got like 10 different search boxes my experience is totally fragmented and that's what I was living personally, that's what my company is living, that's what all of us are living. I mean look under my Zoom window we're all dealing with the same thing and so we're like alright let's extend AI into that new world in like a valuable way. Let's give people that one search box. And then another problem with AI is that our industry is spending trillions of dollars to train these models that can do quantum physics but can't find your Q2 board tech. And the missing link there is like AI, these models can only be as smart as the context that you provide them.

2:12:47And that's really the bottleneck. And no one's focusing on that. And that's how we have this new product, Dropbox Dash, which really aims to close that context gap and finally connect your AI to everything at work. And so on the surface, it's an AI assistant. It's a search engine. It knows about you. It knows about your work. It knows about your company. It connects to all of your work apps. And unlike with a consumer AI tool where there's a lot of questions, it can answer a lot of questions, but a lot of questions it can't answer. So if you ask, like, when does our office lease expire or where's that slide from last year's product launch?

2:13:24ChatGPT can't tell you because it's not connected to your stuff. And then Copilot doesn't know about your Slack and Gemini doesn't know about your Salesforce. And so that's where Dash comes in to build this universal context layer. And the front end is really around search and an AI assistant because that's what people understand. But we're like, this is a natural evolution for us. Dropbox has always been about organizing and sharing your information, or organizing, sharing your most important information, connecting to every ecosystem. being trusted, having this track record of reliability and security.

2:13:55Okay, what is the manifestation of AI in our world that actually makes sense and where is there a new problem that hasn't been solved? I think that's just like the perfect strategy for you right now because we had this like search was great and then we wound up generating so much data that search, I personally, not a judgment on you particularly, but across all of my services, whether it's iMessage, Gmail, We talk about it all the time. It's not to hate on you. This is a technology-wide thing. Search got really slow and not as accurate. There were so many cookies that it was picking up. It would just get confused.

2:14:34And then we got GPT-5, deep research, the thing that can go work for 20 minutes to get you exactly what you need. And it was like, okay, now we need to actually bring these two things together and get really performance, something in the middle, and then size them. And you see this with the model router in the consumer product, but to actually bring something like this in the business context makes so much sense. So I love that the pitch is not ASI for your documents. You know, it's like, hey. I mean, we're excited about that too eventually. But, you know, in self-driving, they have like level five full autonomy, like totally self-driving, human out of the loop.

2:15:11But a lot of the commercial value gets created at like the level one, level two. Like, all right, let's give people a working search box. let's actually give them AI that actually knows about their work. These are going to be the big businesses that get built along the way to that, you know, super intelligence. Yep. Zooming out and kind of going away from what's happening at the product level, like what is your updated kind of strategy around running the business and capital allocation? I know you're the single largest shareholder at somewhere around 20%. You've been buying back a bunch of shares, but what is the strategy and pitch on that front?

2:15:49Well, mainly investing for growth. Dropbox has always been a pretty profitable business. We took a lot of the consumer internet playbook in the beginning and built these self-serve viral product-led motion that was able to scale to hundreds of millions of people, millions of businesses. We have half a million paying businesses on Dropbox, two and a half billion in revenue. but you know the new yeah there we go hit that gong John for two and a half billion of revenue creating product led growth we get excited about big numbers the godfather are you the godfather of product led growth is that fair to say I don't think I'm allowed to call myself I'm calling you the godfather of product led growth no I mean if anyone listening is not familiar with the Dropbox playbook Like, please go study it.

2:16:41It is a clinic for value creation. It's a fantastic story. Yeah, and we're doing that again. We're running a lot of the same playbook with Dash. And I talked a little about search and the sort of AI chat piece. But we're also just thinking very fundamentally about all the things we kind of lost as we went from kind of the file and PC world into the browser and the cloud. And it's not just search or AI. There's even just the concept of organizing things, as you were talking about. People are like, somehow we all got convinced that searching for things is like a substitute for organizing things.

2:17:15And it's just not really true in that, you know, all along the way we had files have folders, songs have playlists, but you think like links have, right? There's no container, like a collection of mixed format stuff. If you have a Google Doc and a 10-gig 4K video and an Airtable, there's no way to still organize. So we have something called Stacks probably about to show up on this video that does that. But yeah, just looking at these very basic problems hidden in plain sight and you give people a search box that works, let people talk to all their stuff in natural language, organize their stuff for them, go beyond documents to organize your images and videos.

2:18:01And so in a lot of ways, where I'm putting our capital is just building the version of Dropbox that I would want to have today, which is, and Dash is step one in that direction. Yeah. And there's, I mean, we've covered a number of companies that have been going after enterprise search and it feels like you were, and many of them have been able to achieve pretty wild valuations in a short period of time. But of course, you're not asleep at the wheel thinking, I don't want to dominate that market too. So it's awesome. Yeah. And I think that the big thing our customers really want, or where Dash fits in there versus Glean or some other companies, is you don't have to spend six months and 50 grand to get started.

2:18:43And so one of the things we're launching today is a truly self-serve version of Dash, where you can just download it, get your team up and running, link your apps, and just go. And that's something I think that's really been missing because there's a bit of a knife fight in the enterprise around a lot of different things. But then we look at most of our customers in the S &B segment or lower bid market, there's a huge swath of the market that has no options. And so we think it took a lot longer because it's hard to make these things totally self-serve. but that's what we've done with Dash and again it's the version of Dropbox I would build for today's context Fantastic We won't keep you any longer obviously you're very busy Congrats to the whole team on the launch We're super proud of it Next time come on in person come hang out in the Ultra Dome and put on a growth clinic I'm sure a lot of people would benefit from learning some of the story From the godfather himself It's a fantastic one, the godfather brother uh thanks so much for coming on the show great hanging here have a great rest cheers we'll talk to you soon up next we have adam fry from open ai that rhymes i like that the product lead for chat gpt atlas we're diving into the browser wars uh the the uh the new web browser from uh open ai uh had a phenomenal response i don't know if you saw how many folks who saw the youtube video.

2:20:10I think it has over a million views now. But we will talk to Adam Fry about it. Welcome to the stream, Adam. How are you doing? Welcome. Doing very well. Nice to meet you. Busy, busy couple days for you. Yeah, it's been a bit of a whirlwind. I think just like you said, there's been such a big outpour of a reaction. We're so excited to see the reaction and so excited that people get to use ChatGPT Atlas now. This is not GPU constrained at all, right? I mean, obviously it interfaces with your core pool of GPUs, but it's not like a new, an entirely new provision of GPUs, right? Yeah, that's right.

2:20:49So, you know, it's available to everyone. So ChatGPT Atlas, you can go to the download link, you can download it, it's available free, plus pro everyone. You know, the agent part of it, which I know you guys are savvy about, and we've talked to our colleagues before, you know, that is more compute intensive. And so if you use some of the more advanced features of ChatGPT Atlas, where you ask ChatGPT to go do things, that can be more GPU intensive for our paid users, for sure. Is there an incentive to set people, I saw a screenshot, but you never know what's real anymore, that if you set Atlas as your default, you can increase your ChatGPT subscription limits?

2:21:27Is there some sort of incentive? We were just talking to Drew from Dropbox about product led growth, how you actually, you know, increase customer adoption? Is there something going on there that you can tell us about? For sure. So, you know, ChatGPT Atlas is, you know, it's a browser and that's sort of at the core of what you do every day. It's sort of your operating system for your life, whether it's personal or at work. And so, you know, part of that is we wanted to really, we felt like the more people use it, you sort of discover these AI features. I think you guys have talked about this a lot in your show, but, you know, this new generation of browsers, there's a lot to discover.

2:22:03You have to learn how to use ChatGPT in your normal workflow. And so we've really wanted to incentivize people to really give it a shot. And the best part of these new browsers is using ChatGPT everywhere you go across the web. And so one of the things that we did to start this off was if you give it a shot for a week as a default browser, you can sort of extend your limits and really allow you to test out all those AI features. That's cool. So was it always obvious that ChatGPT would build a standalone browser, or was there somewhat of a debate internally? I always felt like ChatGPT was a web browser, right?

2:22:40It felt like it was browsing the web on my behalf and serving it up in an interface. And so it almost feels like this is the second browser that you guys are doing, but you're going and building something that looks more like a traditional browser. It's such a good point. There's that great stat of if you ask people off the street, what browser do you use? Most people actually don't even know what browser that they use because the concept doesn't always make sense. And so it wasn't obvious, but what it really started from was a very specific user insight. We were seeing, you guys probably felt this when you used ChatGPT, but you're on chatgp.com.

2:23:16You're in a million tabs. You're doing a whole bunch of other stuff. You're in your docs. You're planning for your next show. and you're like copying and pasting back and forth between ChatGPT and all the things you're doing. And so we just sort of sat back and said, you know, if ChatGPT is going to be more and more helpful for you over time and people are going to rely on it more and more for the work that they do for their personal life, it has to be able to coexist where you're doing that work. And that's what the browser is, is, you know, where you're doing your work. And so we said, how can we actually bring ChatGPT into that when you invite it in to actually have the context of what you're working on.

2:23:52And I think that spark of an insight was really, once you believe that, we were like, oh yeah, building ChatGPT Atlas is, of course we've got to do that. How are you guys thinking about what success looks like with the product over the next few months? I think you have an immense amount of pressure, obviously, that the ChatGPT retention data was flowing around the internet over the last, and it's kind of hard to fast follow that because if you set the bar here. But how are you thinking about it? And then I kind of have a follow-up question around, like you have hundreds of millions of happy, active users that you can be porting over to Atlas over time.

2:24:34But maybe first, like, yeah, what does success look like in the first weeks and months? Great question. So the start is we think of it as a multi-year journey, right? People have been using browsers forever. and probably your existing one you've been using for 10, 20 years. And so building a browser is sort of like we joke. It's like you're moving around the furniture in someone's home. You know exactly where this is. You know exactly where that is. And so change is going to take time. So we measure success over the long run. We want to be as helpful to our users as possible. But in the short term, we're focused on retention.

2:25:09We're focused for the people who are giving it a shot, which is a lot of people because people are really excited about this. Are they sticking with it? And are they loving it? Are they sort of diving in deeper to using chat throughout as they browse the web to get advice on whatever they're working on as they go? And if we see those signals, which we're starting to see, that's when we sort of pour on the fire and sort of grow it and grow it. So short-term retention, but we also understand this is a long-term game for browsers, and we're investing heavily for a long time in it. Are you thinking about a mobile version?

2:25:43we are bringing experiences atlas to mobile and to windows and so the team is you know furiously working on it we want to bring it to as many people as we possibly can that's why we brought it to all of our free users all of our paid all of our pro right away globally yeah um we think we've got a great browser we're really excited for people to keep using it very fun yeah it's going to be a big shoes to fill since Sora rocketed straight to the top of the app store when you go live on there. I think Adam can take it to the top again. I love it. I'm a believer. Yeah. I love the framing of it being like a longer journey.

2:26:20It just does seem like there's not going to be like the Sam Altman stealing GPUs moment for the browser where it just goes viral and everyone's like, I got to check this out, right? It's very hard to accelerate something that's a productivity tool. And so having that mindset makes a ton of sense. I'm wondering about new patterns, new language, new archetypes of features that we might be talking about in a few years after this all rolls out. If you see any glimpses of this, the thing that I'm thinking about is I was talking to someone on our team about Chrome extensions. And I was thinking about what the extension looks like in the future.

2:27:01and if there's some sort of like, I've prompted an agent to do a certain workflow so many times that then it kind of collapses it into some UI and it places it somewhere in the browser. And it's like, it's almost writing like the custom software. Like there's, you see, I'm kind of like painting a bunch of splatter on the canvas, but there's something there. How do you think about like these new patterns? How much will your thumb be on the scale or do you want the community to customize? things? Where does the line draw on? How are you thinking about that? Yeah, so there's probably three big things when I look forward a couple years that I'm really excited about.

2:27:38So the first is, part of this Atlas launch was the agent in your browser, where it can take action. It brings up a cursor. It does things for you. I'm really excited for that as it gets better. So it's still early research preview, but it's starting to do tasks where we've seen it actually be helpful in a short amount of time. And I'm really excited for proactivity around that. Eventually, you can actually suggest, hey, I've already drafted five emails for you. What do you think? You don't even have to task it. And so there's this sort of proactive world of the agents that I think is going to be really, really interesting and valuable for folks.

2:28:10The second is working with developers. I think as it's more computer-to-computer interaction, if you have an agent that you're delegating to to go write a document or go to a website, those websites will evolve to work better with a software that is actually going and clicking around. And we just are sort of scratching the surface. We're teaching these computers to click around the way that we have. But I think eventually the internet and website will evolve to co-work with agents to make things more productive for everyone. And then the third is, I think eventually models will be really good to create their own sort of applications within the browser.

2:28:47And so I think there's so many amazing places that this is going to go. And this is just sort of the beginning of this journey. and I think to Jordy's point earlier ChatGPT is already so retentive if you can bring ChatGPT into the browser like we have with Atlas today it's already going to be so helpful to your life and then it's just going to get better from there yeah you guys need to figure out can you share any numbers with us? well you gotta maybe just the number of YouTube views I think the you know the most recent comp that we have to like a scaled consumer tech company launching an ambitious product in a super competitive market was meta launching threads.

2:29:27And when there's this early excitement around a product, you can see a massive amount of downloads. And then people were ready to call threads, basically say, okay, it's over. Good, nice, good effort, basically. And then meta figured out the right flow to get people to cultivate a unique community there, get people moving over there consistently. And so I would expect to see something similar out of Atlas and that I think a lot of downloads and excitement and usage early. Some people will churn, but you have that massive base of users that you can continue to, you know, show them. Like if they do the right prompt in ChatGPT, it's like, you know, I can do this on your behalf over here if you like, if you'd like.

2:30:13So excited to see how this plays out. Yeah. And I think the key thing there is focus to an investment. and I get to speak on behalf of the team that's working on this, but they're over there working on it right now, just making it better and better. So if you stick with it and you look at the small signals, the small paper cuts that people are telling you about, we just keep filling them, keep getting better. That's when your retention goes up. That's when people really enjoy your product. So the launch is one thing. We couldn't be more excited. The reception to your question has been immense.

2:30:40Lots of downloads, but not sharing any numbers today. But it's really about do people stick around and we have to keep working on that to earn that from people. Yeah, totally. Makes a ton of sense. Well, we'll hit the gong once you're charting. Okay. I was ready to go. He was ready to go. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for breaking it down and congratulations on the launch. Yeah, this is great. Thank you guys for having me on. It's such a blast. Appreciate it. Always a great time. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Our next guest is Ian Rogers from Ledger. He believes he's already in the Restream waiting room.

2:31:11Ryan in the chat, I have to address it. Well, Taylor says he laughs and says, it's a good Chromium wrapper, sir. I think, uh, I think big things have small beginnings. Chromium wrapper company of California. Um, no, I think, I, I, I think that they have the incredible advantage of being able to have, you know, a massive user base and get people over there, continue to iterate. And, um, it's just, you know what, you know what else is crazy? I mean the VS code story, like, like, like the, the browser wars look a lot, a lot less crazy when you think about what happened to VS Code, open source code editor.

2:31:44You get Windsurf. You get Cursor. People really did build serious businesses off of those. Anyway, we can talk about that more later. For now, we have Ian Rogers from Ledger in the Restream Waiting Room. Let's bring him into the TBP and Ultradome. How are you doing? What's happening? Welcome. I'm good. How are you guys? We're fantastic. We're 1030 at night here in Paris. Oh, thank you so much for staying up for us. You're looking quite sharp in that jacket, too. You look great. You know, I was thinking, I was like, Wow. Well, I just came from, we've had a big day today when there's a party happening at the Ledger offices.

2:32:15And I just came from that. So this is what I was wearing. And I'm like, wait, I'm in my living room. Should I put my pajamas on? What's appropriate here? But you guys are always dressed sharp. So I thought, you know what, I'll just keep the jacket on. Even though it feels a little out of place in my living room, I got to be honest. I did not think that this week we'd be talking to someone in Paris about security. Tell us what Ledger does. How are you going to store my valuables reliably? Not focus on Royal Jewel, unfortunately. Otherwise, you may not have had it. By the way, I had coffee at Ledger with a number two from the Louvre last Tuesday morning.

2:32:51No way. I was asking him, what's it like to tell me about the job? It's pretty mellow, long-term. We think long-term horizons, these sort of things. Wow. That job got a lot more interesting over the weekend. It did. Over the weekend. But anyway, yeah. How do you introduce the company now? Give us the general update. So Ledger's been around for 11 years, which is a very long time in the world of crypto, but really always doing the same thing. It started with this simple idea that we have these amazing devices, phones and computers, but they were meant to share information, not protect value fundamentally.

2:33:28mentally. And if we're going to have digital value in our lives, and especially if the main invention of this new digital value, Bitcoin, et cetera, is permissionless money, well, then you have self-custody. And if self-custody, then security is paramount. So let's use secure element chips to protect private keys. And that started with really one purpose Bitcoin, but then we've had much more cryptocurrency. But actually the fact is you can use that same device to secure anything. So pass keys, identity. We live increasingly digital lives and proof is increasingly important and therefore security.

2:34:11So the other interesting thing about the way, if you think about it, the technology and where it comes from, it's this smart card technology. So it's the same chip that's in your credit card or your passport but where your credit card protects the secrets of the bank and your passport protects the secrets of the government from you because you have it in your possession. You're not supposed to hack it. This is using that same technology to protect the secrets of the user or of the consumer, which is pretty powerful. Especially, I mean, I was listening to your interview about OpenAI, going into a world of agentic AI.

2:34:45We will need to prove our humanness. It would be nice if we could own our own preferences and then federate them to the apps that we use. And I'm not sure I want to shove my credit card into that agent. I'd rather it asked me before it booked the flight. Here's the info. Would you like to verify this transaction on a secure screen? Yes, I would. Thank you. So it's that. And today we announced a new product, but that's what we've been doing for a few years now. Yeah, what's different about the new product? I feel like Ledger's, like, it feels like something where it's like, great idea. data solved.

2:35:22And so I'm interested to know what's happening with the iteration cycle. Yeah. So we have this product that people are very familiar with, the Ledger Nano, which is, it's just like, it's the swivel, it folds out. You've seen it. Which, you know, and if, when it's kind of the Air Jordan of crypto, like if somebody needs a physical representation of crypto, they include a picture of the Ledger in it. But with Tony Fidel, who is the founder of the Podfather. He created the iPod and co-invented the iPhone and founded Nest. I mean, you guys will appreciate this. When I started this job, I told Tony, I said, yeah, I'm going to run the consumer business for Ledger.

2:35:59And he said, there is no consumer business. That business is business to geek. Your job is to make a consumer business. And so we started making these secure touchscreen devices. So he designed one that's beautiful. It's called Ledger Stacks. It's the world's first curved e-ink display. So where a Kindle screen is silicon on glass, this is an organic substrate on plastic, and you get this five-millimeter curve, and it's Tony. He can envision the circuit board and the billboard at the same time. But that screen, first ever, and first product to have an organic TFT, took longer than we thought, and the screen ended up costing more than we thought.

2:36:45And then the product is in market for a higher price than we had hoped for. So we built a... That retails at$399. And then we built another one. It's a beautiful device called Ledger Flex Steelcase. Really nice e-ink screen. But that clocked in at$249. And what we really wanted to do was to do this secure touchscreen, but at the price of a Nano X, which is one of our most popular models of all time. So this is the one that we introduced today. This is the Nano Gen 5. And this is on sale today for$179. So here you can see what the box looks like. And so that's what we did today. The other thing we did today is announced a bunch of features in the software.

2:37:36Because really, I mean, kind of to the point you were making earlier, It's not about hardware. It's about what can you do with it. And these devices, they started as one thing, this long-term investment asset, Bitcoin. That was what it was for. But now, it's all assets because it's tokenized RWAs, tokenized stocks. It's also a yield-bearing savings account with stable coins these days. And it's a spending account as well because we have a a credit card that's a, well, it's actually a debit card, a crypto debit card that pays Bitcoin rewards. So it's so much more, you know, you can do, we support 10 ,000 tokens, you know, a hundred percent of the top 100, um, tokens.

2:38:22So it's really, uh, you know, it's a, it's, it's a financial tool in your, in your, in your pocket and a secure one, which is what your phone is not. Talk a little bit more. Uh, yeah, I love, I love how many different like really thinking about the full suite and just building these like purpose-built devices for different use cases. Talk about, I guess, more you mentioned earlier, if you have agents operating in the world on your behalf, specifically online, like how you guys are thinking and kind of even timeline there, because I think this is top of mind for a lot of people that are realizing like, okay, I'm going to have a browser that's not just like a window into the web and a way for me to enter into forms, but it'll be acting on my behalf.

2:39:05And if it's going to be like moving money or doing anything else or, or submitting my information somewhere, like I want to have more, you know, real control over that. So I guess wanted to kind of hear more about how you guys are thinking about that opportunity in the context of Ledger's business. Yeah. I mean, I guess the way I think about this, I think about it all in context, right? What was the internet really? Two computers could talk to each other. We get this revolution of information. What is blockchain? Well, blockchain is the ability to issue and trade really, right? So I can, and I can, I can, we talk about scarcity, but it's really about issuance and trading, you know, the kind of, what's the core building block.

2:39:47And then, you know, with AI, we have, you know, super intelligence and ultimately things that we can delegate tasks to that will act on our behalf. But if they're going to act on our behalf, then they have to represent us out there, right? And also when When we're interacting with other people, we need to know who it is we're interacting with. And so also, I think those things need to be machine readable. So interestingly, in both cases, you're talking about tokens, right? We talk about eating tokens in the case of AI, and we talk about issuing tokens in the case of crypto. But what we mean when we say those things is we're talking about things that are machine readable and machine translatable.

2:40:28So I think that, you know, I think proof is actually a really important word to consider here. You know, how do you know this is me talking? How do you know these are the words that are coming out of this microphone? I think proof is going to become increasingly important. We already have it. And a lot of companies are like trying to take this challenge head on. You know, Reddit is trying to know that someone's not a bot on the other side. You know, dating sites, Match.com has a big effort to try to know that someone's... So how exactly are you doing that? And, um, you know, and who are you trusting?

2:41:00So I think trust brokers will become pretty important in the future. Um, you know, like if I had, I could, um, if I said like, ah, yeah, here's a, here's a Warhol print and you'd be like, okay, well maybe it is, you know, but if Christie's said it's a Warhol, you'd be like, yeah, it probably is. They probably did the work. And that's the same thing that we have in our lives with things like driver's licenses. You know, it's, um, it's difficult to get a driver's license. It's easy to read one. And I think we'll have a lot of those kinds of things where there's a trust broker, that trust broker will issue a token that says, not only am I a human, but I'm a unique human.

2:41:36This token matches a passport, one passport, not multiple passports. And then a machine readable way, in a machine readable way, we'll be able to kind of do a handshake where it's like, oh yeah, that's a real person. And you could use that in any context, Twitter, YouTube, or X, YouTube, et cetera, right? And so I think that these kinds of, this is like the super basic version. The only slightly more complex version is that agent that they were talking about earlier in my browser, it's going to go book me a flight to Miami. Well, how? Have I given it my Delta login? Did I give it my credit card information?

2:42:16Right now, we live in this world where kind of our identity is locked behind all of these login password combinations across thousands of websites. There's no need for that. All of that data could be owned by the individual, just like we own our passport and our driver's license and other things. And then it's federated to those applications as needed. It's more scalable. It's more secure. It's a much better, and it's less trust. I think we're already, I mean, I haven't installed the OpenAI browser yet and I'm like, wow, do I really? They've already got so much. I have an idea. I have an idea.

2:42:56Bring it. A giant gong that you can store Bitcoin. What about that? What about that? A massive gong that you keep in your vault in your basement and you can store Bitcoin on it. You can smash it every time you want it. You could actually probably just sneak a little ledger nano up in the gong and that would work fine but i want the i was holding back i was ready to tell you guys i was ready to give us some numbers what you got i was gonna say approximately 20 of all crypto is protected by ledger devices i thought that was yes i was like what can i give you that's worthy of a gong and uh that's that's insane you guys probably yeah you got two two hits uh we're we're running over two last thing i wanted to ask how what's the Parisian crypto scene like it sounds cool and you seem really cool but uh but what what's what's it like on the ground thanks I have to say the ledger party tonight was crazy I barely escaped from there because there were just people in the street you know again can I get in um no it's it really it's interesting here I moved here 10 years ago I moved here 10 years ago to work for LVMH and a lot I mean I really you know I moved to LA in 95 and it felt you know like it was a million miles away from silicon valley at that time you know what i mean but then over time it it kind of grew into something that you know we we had a myspace we had a snapchat we had a you know like it la kind of came into its own and i you feel the same thing here over 10 years you know like it's uh it's still france and france is not america when it comes to startups that's for sure um but they've they've really i mean it's it's uh there's so much going on here.

2:44:36It's really fun. Get over here. Let's do this. We'll give you the proper tour. I refuse. I refuse. I'm not leaving America. I'm sorry. John won't leave our borders, but I will. I'll take you up on that at some point. Come on over anytime. Does John have a passport? He does. Unfortunately, yes. Yeah, he does, but he doesn't like to use it. Otherwise, I could say no to every international invitation. John, come over here. We got seas and lakes and mountains. He's like, we got seas and lakes and mountains over here. Yeah. Do they got the Indianapolis 500 over there? Do they got the Kentucky Derby over there?

2:45:08By the way, I am from Indiana. No way. And I'll give you a fun fact. Kid Rock is on record saying the only reason I would go to France is to visit Ian. So maybe, John, you could come. Wow. That's deep lore. That's deep lore. That's deep lore. Amazing. Ian, great to meet you. Congrats to the whole team on the launch. And thank you for securing 20 % of all digital assets. Yes, thank you for your service. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. I will see you again. Our next guest, Molly from Knox, is already in the Restream waiting room. We're going to bring her in and ask her how she's going to let you interface with both iMessage and WhatsApp at the same time.

2:45:48Do I have that correct? Yes, you do. So this is like a total moonshot company. This is harder than colonizing Mars. This is trying to get Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg to play nice. How are you possibly going to pull this off? Yeah. Message interoperability has been one of the problems that just people have talked about for a while. I think the way that we do it is we have this insight where if you layer onto people's computers and you don't distribute within the app store, you have more interesting things that you could do. And so it's actually possible to do exactly what we want to do here, which is connect iMessage and WhatsApp together.

2:46:22Yeah. So I imagine that like, if I was super, super hardcore, I could have like a Mac mini that's running with literally iMessage and WhatsApp open and an agent that's clicking and screen scraping and uploading to a database and then surfacing that in an app. And it's going to be very hard for WhatsApp and iMessage to like shut me down if I'm doing that. But that's a very prosumer behavior. You need your own cloud computer. How far are you from there to the actual product? What's interesting is the first version of the product was effectively a cloud server that we would ask people to log in. So give us their iCloud details to log into, which, you know, Trey has a funny story about this.

2:47:06But at a certain point, I think you realize that it's just not the most effective and the right way to do it. It's not the perfect answer. And so because it feels inelegant, there's a better way, which is what you described. And essentially, if you can insert mouse clicks and be indistinguishable from a human from the OS level, so Apple can't tell that you're a human versus you're automating your computer, it's over. It's like, okay, great. That's where you want to be. So we've thought a lot about that question. And, yeah, certainly some of the features sort of play with that aspect.

2:47:41I mean, do you have to, like, message the prosumer nature? Do you think that there's a world where you can get big enough that then you exert enough leverage over the platforms that they have to play nice with you? Like, is that the long-term goal to be able to walk into Cupertino and Menlo Park and say, like, look, like there are going to be millions of people that are upset if you shut off my API access. So let's make this easier for everyone. Yeah, I think we already see it moving in one direction with RCS. It's probably going to continue moving that way. So that would be amazing. On the prosumer thing, I think it just comes down to regulation and rights and what you can lobby for.

2:48:19So there's. How solid, how important do you think iMessage is to Apple's like position? Because recently we've just come to this like weird realization that it's like my, my, it's my number one social network. It's like how I plan my social life, my family life, my friends. I'm sure you're the same way. I have group chats with business friends. and all these social platforms are like where I consume news and content and like people that are like friendly acquaintances, but mostly like my social network is iMessage. And that feels like they're going to be able to charge whatever they want for me to keep that every year when they release a new iPhone.

2:48:57So do you buy that thesis as well that it's very important to Apple's position in the market? I think it's hands down the most important factor as to why people are buying iPhones because no one wants to be the icky green bubble in the group chat where all of a sudden nothing works in the group chat and things are delayed and just disgustingly, you know, designed. So at a certain point, you don't want to be that guy. So you just herd mentality and sheep into buying an iPhone. But I think a larger point here is like, I think a larger point here is it's just like when you receive a blue bubble from someone, there's already this sort of preemptive.

2:49:34okay another farm this is wait so we're trying to build out the ultimate because you have you have the trough the slop trough you have people who are goaded uh but then you have people who are sheep and so you you just helped us create a new link in the chain and the the diagram but anyway sorry uh continue goats need sheep you know yes what is a goat without a sheep to contrast with. Sorry. How's the actual product launch going? The rollout? Are you in beta? Is it hand-holding customers on? Are you general availability? It's really good. Yeah. So it's general availability. Anyone can download it right now, at least on Mac.

2:50:16And then if they want iOS, they can request access through me. So we have been getting a lot of people today just going on. The onboarding experience is mind-blowing. It just tells you your life recounted through you through, you know, all the conversations and top people that you've met. And what's funny is I was texting Ben before this, trying to coordinate like logistics. And I found out that my messages suddenly turned green. And it was because I hit a quota limit because this morning I sent out, I think, 3000 messages to people all in my one-on-one group chats like, hey, guys, can you help me, you know, post about this and help me support here.

2:50:55And yeah, so I guess I realized what the ceiling is on the rate limit. Oh, that's always a good sign. I'm wondering if I'm going to get rate limited on my inbox. I have 5 ,004 unread texts right now. One of our friends, Will Manias, I need a reply, by the way. Bloomberg for private markets. And he kind of outlined it as iMessagePlusSignal and Axe and Twitter as the main ones. So have you thought about that? And what are the nuances of how hostile each API is, basically, is what I'm looking for, like a state of affairs? Yeah, I saw, I think it was Will's tweet. I saw it and I thought it was interesting.

2:51:39On our roadmap, we have Slack and Discord, maybe email or a few other messaging platforms. but I think the big thing is actually 80 % of your messages come through. It's not an equivalent, right, like 20, 20, 20. It's like mostly people are on one thing, and then they'll text this secondary platform for a specific group of people in a niche, and then another maybe 5 % of the time. And so I get the sense that it's mostly okay to just focus on iMessage and WhatsApp right now, and then you can add integrations later or even have the community help you build these integrations. but there are private APIs and I mean Telegram API is easy and some other ways that you can I really do wonder about that because it feels like yeah to me it feels like the more platforms you add obviously the more valuable it is because at two I probably get 80 % of my text on iMessage 10 % or maybe 5 % on WhatsApp, 5 % signal no it's definitely a power law iMessage is the most important what i wouldn't even put whatsapp i would put whatsapp like fourth or fifth for me personally it would go i message then probably x dms then maybe instagram dms then whatsapp then i would even put signal above whatsapp but the point is is that like uh like a one app to rule them all like if it's going to be a standard in my life that's like the one unifying interface like i want it to be across everything i think the the control plane but i don't know there's a lot of With all these like unified personal assistant stuff, there's a lot of, you know, expressed preferences versus revealed preferences.

2:53:17Like people might actually use it a different way than they say they want to use it. But I don't know. It's going to be a fun, fun building process for you. So I'm very excited. Yeah, it's it'll be cool to see the longitudinal access come into it. Right. Because like our thread on X will be different from our thread on email will be different from our thread on iMessage. And if you can just solve that problem of context coming in from all these different places, that would be huge for both people and companies. So that's going to be really exciting. Have you learned anything from the previous attempts at this, like the beepers of the world?

2:53:48Yeah, you definitely don't want to poke the bear and do the thing that feels not right and inelegant for too long. I think the first launch we had, which was sort of a semi-private beta launch in February, we had a lot of people come on and tell us, hey, Apple's watching and maybe have issues with iMessage. I think the main thing is just be nimble and agile. And when APIs change that we know that have changed, we just automatically update, right, day of. Four hours later, a new build is out. And so nothing really breaks as long as you are on the system all the time. Keep shipping. I mean, four hours in text message land is a long time for some people.

2:54:30If they're like, I didn't get the message from my wife that I need to pick up the kids or something like that, that does seem like a tall order. But that's why they invented 996 or 002, as the Wall Street Journal put it more recently, which is basically no time. I think everyone has this problem. It's very hard to create an elegant solution. but if you do, it will be incredibly valuable. Yeah. Well, good luck to you. I don't know if we lost the video, but thank you so much for stopping by. We will talk to you soon and have a great rest of your day. Thanks for coming on, Holly. Congratulations.

2:55:06Sorry. That was kind of a crazy ending. But we have Johnny Dwyer from Muon Space, his second time on the show. And we had a great, we actually played a clip from our previous interview yesterday. And we're very excited to talk to him both about what's going on in his world. but I'll welcome him to the show. Now, how are you doing, Johnny? Good to see you. Hey, guys. Good to see you guys again. Welcome back. Thanks so much. We enjoyed the previous guest segment immensely. We played a clip from that segment yesterday. On space data centers. And we were trying to contextualize space data centers.

2:55:43We're actually having the founder of the Space Data Center Company come back on the show to defend what's going on, since a lot of people are skeptical. where do you sit on it now this all feels like i'm not ready to call it even a binary i i think we should be discussing timelines more than will it ever happen but how are you thinking about space data yeah i mean i think it's it's it's a like many things it's a win not if um you know is it a year from now is it 10 years from now is it 20 years from now i don't know but i think as you think about generally the future of the planet and where we're going on it more and more stuff is going to move to space.

2:56:20And so I think it's inevitable at some level that we will have large scale, you know, IT infrastructure in space. I mean, you know, we're probably going to talk about our deal with Starlink in a minute. And that's an example of a place where I think we're starting to really see what I would call truly modern IT infrastructure starting to show up in space. And I think it's inevitable that data centers will go there as well. A lot depends, I think, obviously, on the fundamentals of what is going to drive the need for future data center capacity, right? And how some of those needs are met, you know, on Earth and how that would compare to deploying things in space.

2:56:56I think if you ask anybody even, you know, what a terrestrial data center will look like in five years, they're probably not going to give you a real confident answer. So I think, you know, trying to predict exactly what that's going to look like in space is hard to do right now. Absolutely. What more can you say about this new partnership? it. Well, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the things we like to think we're doing at New York is really pulling a lot of the aerospace industry kicking and screaming out of the Stone Age. And, you know, you think about a lot of the stuff that's circling the Earth right now, and it's still connected with things that look like dial-up modems, frankly.

2:57:33I mean, I think we're kind of in an era where a lot of the space technology is a few generations behind what we take for granted on Earth. And this partnership with SpaceX is now going to give our satellites It's things that look a lot more like an always-on fiber or broadband connection rather than a dial-up connection. And so that's going to completely unlock a tremendous set of things that have been very difficult or impossible to do in space historically, much as Starlink has demonstrated with terrestrial use cases. An example that we're all very excited about at Nuon is we've been working on this global wildfire constellation for the last several years.

2:58:11This will eventually be a 50-plus satellite constellation that will get 20-minute global revisit latency to detect and track wildfires from the earliest stages of their life cycle all the way through to help decision makers on the ground make better decisions. And a really critical piece of making that system work well is getting that data back to people that are making decisions at very low latency. These satellites produce enormous amounts of data. There's going to be 50 of them. And so having this kind of fiber connection in the sky is absolutely transformative in terms of being able to deliver a capability that's crucially needed around the world and has not been possible to date.

2:58:47So I think it's a really good example of what this technology can unlock. Is fiber a metaphor or are you physically putting fiber in the sky somehow? We have big glass spools and we're kind of unwinding them behind that way. I mean, we're going to put massive one gigabyte data centers in space. It doesn't sound that crazy to put a wire up there. It's a humanoid up there with a spool. It's just letting it out. Yeah, exactly. So you're not literally putting fiber in the sky. It's more about connectivity between Starlink satellites, or are you putting up your own satellites that are acting as kind of backhaul between the Starlink satellites?

2:59:23We're basically using Starlink as our backhaul. So you can think about them as sort of our network in the sky, and then we'll be connecting with SpaceX lasers or laser terminals, They call them lasers into their network and using that network as kind of the backhaul system. So it's not literally unwinding glass fiber guy, but actually the technology is very similar to fiber optic technology on Earth. And a lot of the same componentry is used. We're just thinning the light over these kind of free space optical beams, not over glass fibers. And then who's your customer? Is it someone who has a satellite or a constellation in space that needs to move internet data around while in space?

3:00:01Or is it more for speed up terrestrial uses in some way or just improve the Starlink network? So we're building satellites for customers. So our satellites, you know, sort of broad range of customers. You know, one of the customers I mentioned is this. There's a global nonprofit that's funding the work on the FIRE mission. So ultimately, we're building satellites for them. They're Muon satellites that we deploy and operate. And this will now provide sort of a much faster lower latency network layer for us to operate those satellites on. Other examples of customers we're working with, you know, we have a customer called Hubble that's doing Bluetooth low energy tracking from space.

3:00:38You can kind of think about like IoT device tracking from space. We have... The company is called Hubble? Yeah, it's called Hubble. What a confusing name. I know that there was a contact lens company named Hubble, and that kind of made sense because it's like a wildly different market. But if you're up there in space. So I can imagine the commercial use cases for that, right? If you have a lot of hardware out around the world and you want to track it in real time, does that have like defense applications as well? Like what's the actual focus there? Yeah, so I don't want to speak for Hubble. They would better put themselves than I will.

3:01:22They're our customer. But I mean, I think their primary focus is on sort of enterprise and commercial use cases. So, you know, there's millions of asset tracking devices in the world today that are out tracking, you know, shipping containers and remote facility equipment, things like that. And a lot of those are running on kind of these bespoke and, frankly, very old school satellite networks. That's how they get the data back. And I think Hubble's vision is that, you know, we should be doing the same thing we're doing with consumer devices, which is strapping a nine cent Bluetooth transponder on anything that's out in the world and then being able to track that thing from space.

3:01:56And so we think there's a lot, you know, I think they believe there are many, many commercial and enterprise applications of that. There probably are also, you know, government applications of that. I don't want to speak specifically to them, but I think that's, you know, it's a type, all of these types of technologies, especially with spacecraft, in some way are inherently dual use. So there's always going to be use cases in both the commercial and the government sector. Give us the fundraising update. I feel like we missed you around Series B potentially. Do you have news? What's up? We don't have news.

3:02:25I mean, we raised kind of a two-part Series B last year. And this year, it's a big round for us. I think it totaled about$140 million. Oh, we got the gong coming. So yeah, we're doing well in the fundraising size. We're well-funded. We've got a lot of business coming in. It's been very exciting days around the company. So it's a pretty exciting path forward right now. We're really just trying to scale the company up a lot. We have a big facility. We're in the Bay Area. We signed a large facility earlier this year. So we'll be kind of 10xing our production capability, our hardware production capability in the South Bay.

3:03:05before the end of the year and then building out a lot of other new technology pieces that we're really excited to talk about as we start to hit space with them. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, great to get that. Congratulations on the progress. And yeah, thanks for breaking all that down for us. Now we know there's not literally fiber cables up in the sky. That's why we asked the dumb questions. We figured it out. Awesome. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, John. And up next, we have Mike Shebbett from Traba. uh we have a video update from him let's play that and welcome him to come on over can we play the little bit of the video that he shared let's pull that up uh and get the update what's going on welcome to the ultra down request probably qualifies thousands of workers for the best this is uh is this your key hero marketing video right now describe proper form for lifting together a quick reel just to show all the products that we've built.

3:04:04Sure, sure, sure. Because in staffing, there's so many different manual workflows. This video just basically breaks it down with how it all comes together. Okay. Very cool. How old is the company now? We're four years old. Four years old. Are you still in New York? We're still in New York. Yep. All 150 of us. 150 now. Wow. Okay. So I toured the... When did I come by and do an interview with you? That was maybe like two years ago or so? That was across the street. You moved across the street to a major office. Okay. So yeah, take us through the basics of like the problem, the market. It's a highly fragmented market.

3:04:40But what's the high level, like 140 characters that you describe Traba? Yeah. So basically millions of workers across the country work in industrial staffing and then hundreds of billions of dollars get spent on staffing. But if you break it apart, it's really just like a highly fragmented industry with like tons of manual OPEX and things like that. So we basically replace the whole suite with tech and we provide double the fill rate, better quality workers and workers within a couple hours versus weeks. Yeah. And like the staffing industry in general, I think of it as like highly lucrative, but highly fragmented.

3:05:16Is that just generally your experience? Like I guess to just jump straight forward is like why build tech startup instead of private equity roll up? Like you're in a dress shirt, you could go do a PE roll up, right? Like, I don't know. It's not like you have to do it the Silicon Valley way. Why are you doing it the Silicon Valley way? Well, basically because of the advancements in AI, this never really was able to happen before. But on the staffing end, there's just so much manual work and tons of OPEX. We basically just like from a top to bottom, end to end, just have completely redone it with tech.

3:05:48And that's why building it as a technology company has been so much better. And so when you say AI or tech, you mean like lead scoring, basically. understanding who's right for what job, placing them, screening. Well, it's like a ton of things. So we do the vetting. We actually guide the worker to the shift. There's fraud detection and essentially follow-ups with the workers. And then as the workers perform shifts, that feeds into our model. But it's not the AI doing the job. No, no, yeah. You're sticking it out for the next decade. Yeah, yeah. On the back end, the customer doesn't really see the AI.

3:06:22On the back end, we're doing all that work. So what the customer sees is just like an incredible group of people showing up for work every day and helping them out. Did you see the Uber news that Uber drivers are going to be able to do one-off AI tasks? I saw that, yeah. What is your take on that? Have any AI companies approached you where you're like, I don't know if I'm describing the company correctly, but I remember a couple case studies is like there's a big Taylor Swift concert in town and the organizer might go on Trava to pull in a bunch of folks really quickly. or if it's the rush holiday season on an e-commerce warehouse.

3:06:57I don't want to put you in a box, but those are two examples. Yeah, yeah. Basically, manufacturing, fulfillment, food processing, all those industries have crazy volatility in their workforce needs. So we help smooth that out for them. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so my question is, have any AI companies reached out to you and said, hey, you have a big pool of labor. We have a unique use case that we could actually partner with. Yeah, we actually have gotten a few inbounds from companies. are just like, hey, we need these workers to do all the things. But right now we're laser focused on just industrial supply.

3:07:28Yeah, yeah, yeah. So focusing on that, we may expand out in the future. Have any humanoid companies come to you and said like, yeah, we'll give you robots, like put them out into the field. Or are they not quite at a level where they actually would be willing to let them do unsupervised activity? Yeah. So I actually like see this, I talk to our customers about this all the time. Right now in like when it comes to humanoid robots, they're not quite there yet, it but we're going to be well positioned to essentially like lead that charge when the tech gets a lot better in about five years or so yeah because you're still going to have the the kind of variability in in in uh workforce needs right where you might need even even if you have a 100 robots like in a facility and then suddenly it's rush season you need to deploy like 100 more on top of that it's like where do you where do you get that yeah and then all these workers are going to essentially have to get connected to new earning opportunities so yeah we'll be able to help with that.

3:08:19Yeah, it's a little bit of like, I guess the narrative violation behind like AI taking every job or AI being useless is like, I'm pretty sure Amazon is the largest robot operator, but also one of, if not the largest employer as well. And so they're really doing the both robots and humans at scale. Yeah. Within the facility, it's a lot more dynamic. And a lot of these companies, they have to change things really quickly. So just commit to a certain robotics workflow doesn't work today. Yeah. Which is actually why if you actually go back to Elon Musk's tweets in like five, six years ago, he actually said, he's like, we try to make the Gigafactory all robotics.

3:08:57And then we went back to humans because we couldn't necessarily like get there yet. Yeah. And they had to do a hybrid. Yeah. Talk a little bit about where the structure of the market is going in terms of staffing agencies broadly. I imagine that like AI and technology generally are like an accelerant to growth, right? You can just onboard people faster, just using like all the tools in the mobile toolkit, allow you to understand where people are going, placing them, GPS, all this stuff is useful. Um, how does that play out? I mean, I imagine that competitors are going to try and catch up. Um, are you planning to just outcompete them?

3:09:35Are you looking to eventually get into doing acquisitions? Like how do you think the long-term plan plays out? So I was in a staffing conference in Dallas and it was pretty crazy. Electric. That's why we do it. Literally this year, everyone is like, we are getting disrupted. AI is coming for us. And they were just talking about how they can't organizationally roll it out. There's just thousands of people at these organizations that have all these different tasks. So they actually approached myself and my chief of staff. And they're like, we really want you to help us move into this new age. So when it comes to roll-ups, we're potentially looking at a few acquisitions.

3:10:10And in that case, it would basically be like companies that have really good retention on the business side. So they have customers to continue to spend. But then they're just like, we have terrible OPEX and just so many manual expenses. And we want you to essentially improve these margins and carry it forward. How do you operate the business? You're obviously like incredibly aggressive, I'm sure, around growth. but at the same time, like, you also feel like somebody who you're planning to run this business forever, I imagine, and part of putting yourself in a position to do that is, like, maintaining good unit economics and just running a great business.

3:10:48How do you balance, like, growth and burn and those factors? We're very thoughtful about capital efficiency with growth. So, fortunately, in staffing, the margins are actually pretty good to play with. So, yeah, we're just, like, we're operating in the physical world, So there's so much that's going on, which is why our team just like works so hard to kind of get in there. There's not like one specific tool that can essentially get cloned. It's like hundreds of thousands of workers that use our app and like thousands of businesses. So you get those real network effects as you scale up. But yeah, it's basically growth, unit economics, 10x customer experience.

3:11:21That's what we always talk about internally. Yeah. Take a victory lap on the 996 thing. It is hilarious. I mean, you didn't obviously invent the 996. Yeah, it's not an invented 996. You invented China. Yeah, you stole it from them or something. But no, I mean, I think you were the first to really go out there. You were willing to say it when it was going to essentially get you a little canceled. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you get a little bit canceled. And I think it was an interesting framing for the brand of Traba to say, look, we're not trying to create super intelligence. We're not trying to cure cancer.

3:12:00We've just found a great business that delivers value to customers, delivers value to our clients. All the parties are happy with this, what's going on here. And so we're going to work really, really hard. What was the actual journey of the get a little canceled? Did that ever really manifest? Were people ever actually mad at you? And then now, what are you seeing out there? Has everyone else adopted this? Are they taking it further? Can they take it too far? Just walk me through your thing. Yeah, I think it really has to go into what the goal of companies so we are a very ambitious company we want to be a massive publicly traded company yeah and if you work backwards from any very successful company the early team was just like all in it was their number one priority always so we basically were like we did this thing called anti-selling we're like look we're gonna get people working in person with us we're gonna go build some awesome stuff and if you're not interested in making this your number one thing then that's all good but it created something really great internally because every single person is just like it's like a team sport everyone's in it together yeah and we're all trying to create leverage on the time that we've done so yeah i i think it's there's something underrated about this where people have been mapping like the missionary versus mercenary thing onto uh just how sci-fi the project is and if and they assume like if you're working on something sci-fi everyone's a missionary.

3:13:25And if you're working on something that's maybe just a little bit more tractable of a business problem, everyone's a mercenary. And I think that that's just not true at all. It's not true. Like we see it here, like we're building like a media company, but I feel like everyone, we have a really great culture. Everyone's really bought in. Everyone is thinking creatively and working really hard and getting a ton of reward. And at the end of the tunnel is not time travel machine that takes us to Mars or cures cancer. It's just a show, but we're all happy and aligned on that. And so, um, what, what has the road been?

3:13:56Where have the, uh, where have the difficult moments been in the journey where you've had to kind of re reignite the flame of, of missionary? Yeah. So yeah. Shout out to your team. They're awesome. Like they grew to be here and everyone's like so locked in and love what you guys do. And I think a big part of that is just you guys being authentic to who you are and look like we're TBPN. We're going to make this, it's a show company. It's a show. And everyone gets, gets involved in that. Um, with us, you know there's like challenges every single week it's just part of building a company and I think some people really they opt into that they're like I'm gonna go learn a lot I'm gonna work with a great group of people around me the likelihood of success goes up if everyone's equally committed and really bought in on making something awesome and then people just have a great time like they look back and they're like you you remember the war stories in the days where you're like in the Airbnb trying to get the customer like this crazy request comes in you're like how are we going to do it.

3:14:51And you're really only going to create that if everyone that opts in and joins the company is like, that sounds exactly like what I want to do with my life. So we get a lot of ex-athletes because they remember that in sports and college and things like that. So it's great. Tell me the story of Uber, your experience there. And then I want the update on how you think about opening markets now, because this is something that not every software company has to do. Like OpenAI launches a browser. They don't need to send a team to Dallas. But at Uber, you did. And at Traba, you have been doing this. So walk me through the best practice for when you're going hand-to-hand combat.

3:15:27Even though it's software business, it's a tech company, but you still have to deploy a team. Yeah, so operating in the physical world, it's quite different. At Uber, I was a launcher where you essentially drop into a city. You hit a bunch of restaurants on the platform, also on the Uber Eats product. And then you have to essentially get the couriers. And then you run the marketing. And you would skydive in, right? You just guy dive in, sell the restaurants, say we can make you some more money. What's different with Trava and Uber Eats is that selection. People aren't like, okay, I want to work at five different warehouses this week.

3:15:56They actually are fine with working in this middle ground where I'm going to work for three to six months at this one warehouse. Okay, so let's stay. And then maybe I'll switch again. Sure. So our sales cycle is a little bit different where we do have market-specific leaders where people do own a market. but we go for these big accounts that they want hundreds of workers versus, you know, like three to four people. Yeah. And then the workers kind of like it goes viral because they get their friends and it's like a very social job and things like that. Yeah. That makes sense. As the, has the playbook changed at all?

3:16:25Are you in every market now? Are you still on the war? We're in most markets in the country. We're not in California yet. So I was in Vegas before being here. Okay. Customers then came over. Yeah. And that's not a capital constraint, right? No, it's actually more just the employment laws. Yes. right now we offer two different ways to work on travel one is 1099 in which workers can get paid within 30 minutes and the other is w2 uh but we're very intentional about every market we yeah you want to make sure you check all the boxes so you have some in the u.s oh we forgot to check we forgot to file this form and then it comes back you don't want any of that that makes sense but we're coming we're coming soon let's go there we go let's go um yeah i i i'm thinking about all all the different uses for a flash mob of human labor that we could put to work.

3:17:12How do you, any, any learnings around like the causes of burnout that you see within your organization? If you're pushing people super hard, that means you, but you want to avoid burnout. Yeah. I don't get burned out when I'm working on something that I love and I feel like I'm making real progress on it. I feel like burnout can come from not maybe finding meaning in the work or not making progress and running into a dead end over and over. But what's your framework? And I'm sure CEOs have asked you this of like, okay, if you're pushing your team super hard and you're pushing yourself hard, how do you avoid that?

3:17:52Yeah. So the number one thing is people don't get burned out if they feel like they're winning. We try to get people in. They're just winning. So we got to get the right role get them some wins in their belt it's kind of like in school if you're like studying non-stop seven days a week and you're getting straight a's you're not really burning out from that so you're putting them environment to actually be successful and then everyone's got something that they do to kind of like take care of themselves like a lot of people they work out like usually at trouble people will work until like seven ish hit the gym come back like it's very healthy culture but it's very much like happy healthy wealthy is kind of like what people are aiming for.

3:18:25So, uh, they're all there together and like, yeah, that's great. How do you think about the, the, like how rigid is the nine nine six thing? Uh, obviously some people shift that forward backwards. Now there's this article in the wall street journal about zero zero two. What is that? Do you work from midnight to midnight? You're working 24 hours. You take two hours off a day. Uh, I don't know. Is this, is this real? Uh, I mean, I can pull up the article because it would be good to get your reaction, but it says AI workers are putting in 100-hour work weeks to win the new tech's arm race. And there's like a 50 % chance that this is like, you know, someone trying to get a PR piece to be like, yeah, we work even harder than this guy.

3:19:09Josh Batson no longer has time for social media. The AI researcher's only comparable dopamine hit this year is on Anthropic Slack workplace messaging channels where he explores chatter about colleagues' theories and experiments on large language models and architecture. so he's on a social work platform socializing someone of a network yeah yeah yeah yeah if you're trying to 996 don't count your slack time that's fun like yeah yeah you think so so the way it plays out actually is like when we first started the company we were actually like let's make this a little bit more structural now with 150 people we have all these different types of roles yeah it's more just like you got to be locked in and like make work your number one thing totally totally but what i will say is you go we are an in-person company if you're sitting by traba at like 8 30 in the morning or 9 30 p.m literally any day of the week there will be like people they're building really cool stuff yeah and that's pretty awesome because then you can just like show up and build with your friends yeah and people feed off of each other's energy yeah you can't be too dogmatic about it i feel like uh i mean we both have kids we're also on the west coast and so we run more of like a 6 a.m start time uh and and so we yeah we just stack like some extra hours there because then you have, yeah, that's, that's cute that, that it really picks up around eight 30 at trauma.

3:20:24That's why I'm like, wait, oh my gosh, I thought we were intense. And then you guys talk about this two zero zero two. And I'm like, I'm like calculating the hours. I'm like, man, we like, we have the burnout question. And then we're like, yeah, the zero zero two. It's like, is that in here? I think if you sleep for two hours. Okay. So, so, so, uh, Working 002, the most intense periods for many come while working on models or new products. When time working extends beyond the 996 schedule, that stands for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. One startup executive jokingly referred to the schedule as 002, meaning midnight to midnight with a two-hour break on weekends.

3:21:03Yeah, yeah. I don't think anyone can actually do that. It's just going to burn out. You need sleep. You actually do need sleep. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's more about just like, look, like, are you all in on this? Especially in New York, there's infinite things you could be doing. You just want people to like think twice before filling out their social calendars during the week. It's like, look, we're trying to build something epic here. And it's awesome to just know that you're going to be around your colleagues. Also, I just feel like there's something about New York City, Manhattan, where if I was at the office late until nine and I get off, like there's still all the restaurants around.

3:21:34Like stuff's going to happen. Whereas in LA or in Pasadena, like older with kids, like I want to be home with the kids five, six, like, you know, doing dinner. There's nothing super comforting. Yeah. That have kind of shifted, but they still probably give it their all. Yeah. Parents look like you got kids at home. Like we definitely have a group of parents at Travo and they make it work. Uh, shout out to them for sure. But there's definitely a huge cohort of, you know, people that don't have the kids and they're like, you know, at the office a little bit more than the parents. there's something super comforting building a business if you're working as hard as you possibly can knowing that lack of hard work is not going to be the reason that you don't you don't achieve the level of success that you want because if you're people out there a bunch of people are not pushing themselves as hard as they know they could and then it's always going to be in the back of their mind of like the whole time building the company yeah maybe i worked a little bit harder i would have achieved like you know whatever and then success in a startup it isn't just this binary thing where you either get the gold medal or not.

3:22:31There's like different revenue targets. There's different valuations, different like, like ways to please customers and things like that. So yeah, it's great to like live a life where you look back and you're like, I gave it absolutely everything I got. There's nothing else I could have done better and like keep pushing forward. So, well, that's a good, that's a great place to end it. Place to end the show. Yeah. Gave it all we got. We gave it all we got. Thanks for hanging out. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We will be back tomorrow. at 11 a.m. sharp. Can't wait. Have a great evening.

3:23:02Love you. Bye.