AI Is Coming for Your Memes, Axios NPM Package Compromised, Claude Code Source Code Leak | Alex Pruden, Qasar Younis, Sebastian Mallaby, Forrest Heath, Dino Mavrookas, Will Ahmed, Jannick Malling, Ryan Daniels, Chris Yu

31 Mar 2026 · 3 h 9 min · 90 chapters

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In short

Episode topic: How AI is reshaping meme culture (especially via AI video), plus major software security incidents (an Axios NPM supply-chain malware attack, and a Claude Code/Anthropic source-code leak via a map-file), and a quantum-crypto risk update from Google. The show also touches on ransomware/extortion news (Mercore breach) and a DeepMind/Hassabis anecdote from an upcoming book.

Guests (backgrounds)

  • Alex Pruden (Project 11; to discuss Google’s quantum/crypto research and “Crypto Quantum Crash” implications).
  • Qasar Younis (Applied Intuition; joins for AI/engineering discussion).
  • Sebastian Mallaby (author; new book The Infinity Machine: An Insider Account of DeepMind).
  • Forrest Heath (Somos; raising a $40M round).
  • Dino Mavrookas (Saronic).
  • Will Ahmed (Whoop).
  • Jannick Malling (Public).
  • Ryan Daniels (Crosby; mentions a Rivian spinout with a $1B valuation).
  • Chris Yu (also listed as a guest; no specific background stated in transcript).

Key claims and notable examples

  • AI meme playbook: traditional static templates (e.g., “TFW” block fonts) are “stale”; AI-generated video clips are the new meme template. Example: “Snape v. Snape” AI MMA match and “School of Drip” Harry Potter-style AI videos, which allegedly shifted sentiment toward the Harry Potter reboot after initial backlash (including reported death threats to the actor).
  • Axios NPM attack: Axios (widely used HTTP client) was poisoned via a malicious dependency impersonating a trusted library (“PlainCryptoJS”), enabling remote compromise and credential theft. Recommendation: pin Axios immediately and audit lockfiles; change passwords/tokens on affected machines.
  • Claude Code leak: source code reportedly exposed through a published .map file on NPM; discussion includes whether it was accidental vs. strategic, and concerns about trust in “vibe coding.”
  • Google quantum warning: researchers estimate a 20x reduction in quantum resources needed to break elliptic-curve crypto (ECDLP-256), urging migration to post-quantum cryptography by 2029.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

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Show Lineup and Guest Introductions

0:45 to 1:46

Overview of the guests and topics to be discussed, including a focus on AI and finance.

“Then we have Kaser from Applied Intuition.”

AI's Impact on Meme Culture

1:46 to 2:56

Discussion about how AI is changing the creation and perception of memes.

“And so we'll read through this and then discuss it, debate it, and see where we can take it further.”

AI Meme Videos and Viral Trends

2:56 to 5:41

Exploration of how AI-generated meme videos are reshaping virality and audience engagement.

“Instead, AI-generated videos are the new meme template that every network and studio should be focusing their launches on.”

The Evolution of Meme Formats

5:41 to 11:18

A deep dive into the evolution of memes from images to videos and the implications for creators.

“If you're about to drop a trailer for a new movie or show, you need to be thinking about your rage bait character.”

Recent Tech News and Axios Compromise

11:47 to 14:06

Discussion on recent tech news including the Axios NPM package compromise and its implications.

“We're in a very weird week in terms of the news cycle because it's spring break, and so a lot of executives of big tech companies are like, don't launch while my kids are out of school and we're going on vacation.”

Risks of the Axios Supply Chain Attack

14:06 to 17:57

Learn about the implications of the Axios supply chain attack and how it affects software security.

“I would say, like, if you have installed this, you should just, like, freak out, basically.”

Defensive Strategies Against Supply Chain Attacks

18:19 to 19:22

Explore strategies to defend against supply chain attacks, including dependency management.

“release age constraints or containers or etc.”

Impact of AI on Cybersecurity Practices

19:22 to 22:26

Discuss how AI influences cybersecurity practices and the need for code review.

“customers before the attack was publicly known.”

Cloud Code Source Leak and Its Consequences

22:26 to 26:02

Analyze the implications of the Cloud Code source leak on development practices.

“and stop serving the contaminated package.”

Insights from the Cloud Code Leak

26:30 to 28:01

Delve into the insights and lessons learned from the Cloud Code leak incident.

“Do you understand what just happened to Dynthropic?”
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Capybaras and AI Codename Humor

28:01 to 28:40

A light-hearted discussion about the whimsical nature of AI model codenames and animal references.

“We were talking about how the Faustian bargain that is getting a Capybara as a pet seems so cute, but it can bite you.”

The Claude Code Leak Controversy

28:57 to 29:50

A discussion surrounding the implications of the leaked Claude code and its potential impact on the AI landscape.

“Arvid says, Hot Take, Anthropic leaked Claude code intentionally to get a Nerdosphere code review it would have never gotten if they had just open sourced it.”

Open Sourcing AI Models: Pros and Cons

29:51 to 30:28

Exploring the arguments for and against open-sourcing AI models in the research community.

“I feel like, isn't there some steel man there where if you open source, like, I don't know, like Opus 2 or something that's like really old, it's entirely commoditized in the research community.”

Legal Risks of Code Leaks

30:29 to 31:44

Discussion on the legal ramifications and community reactions to AI code leaks.

“If I'm a computer scientist, I'm interested in how to research.”

Comparing AI Harnesses and Performance

31:45 to 32:59

A conversation about the performance of different AI models and the building of new frameworks.

“They DMCA'd all repos that had their code.”

Google's Quantum Computing Warnings

34:07 to 36:48

An examination of Google's recent paper on quantum computing threats to cryptocurrency.

“Oh, this joke was posted before on Instagram.”

Potential Quantum Threats to Bitcoin

36:49 to 38:38

Discussing the implications of quantum computing on Bitcoin and how it could affect security.

“On Tuesday, Bitcoin shrugged off the news of the Google paper making the rounds, rising as much as 2.6 % to$68 ,300.”

The Future of Cryptocurrency and Quantum AI

38:39 to 40:46

A look at the future of cryptocurrencies amidst quantum computing developments and potential solutions.

“But they're down 12 % over the past five days.”

NASA's Artemis II Mission Insights

42:00 to 43:00

Learn about the upcoming Artemis II mission and its technological advancements.

“Ariana Simpson chimed in and said, except all or most other coins have this problem too.”

Identifying Deepfakes with a Simple Trick

43:00 to 44:34

Discover how to spot deepfakes by using an easy finger trick during video calls.

“Something like 20 cameras, 4K live streams, laser beams to make sure it's low latency.”

Mercore's Data Breach and Its Implications

44:34 to 45:58

Explore the ramifications of Mercore's significant data breach and its potential costs.

“You have three fingers in front of the face.”

Understanding the Lapsus Hacker Group

45:58 to 48:22

Gain insights into the notorious Lapsus hacker group and their methods.

“Well, we have had the Mercor folks on the show many times and are hoping that they get through this smoothly.”

The Unfolding Story of DeepMind's Secret Hedge Fund

48:22 to 51:16

Learn about the hidden hedge fund operation within DeepMind and its ambitious goals.

“with members perhaps dispersing to other groups and a conviction of two British members.”

Elon's Quest for AI Control

53:52 to 56:00

Explore Elon Musk's attempts to control AI labs and the controversies surrounding them.

“while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.”

Elon's Approach to AI and Research

56:00 to 56:50

Learn about Elon Musk's unique strategies for AI development within his companies.

“Besides, wasn't developing AI at a for-profit company like Tesla the same as creating it at a for-profit company like Google?”

The Importance of Team Building

56:50 to 58:00

Discover how continuous hiring and team building impact innovation in tech.

“They were already working on self-driving.”

Introduction of Alex from Project 11

58:10 to 59:11

Meet Alex, a former army green beret turned tech entrepreneur discussing blockchain.

“Well, according to Google, you have until 2029.”

Quantum Computing and Cryptography

59:11 to 1:00:37

Understand the risks quantum computing poses to current cryptographic standards.

“digital assets on blockchains into the post-quantum future right so uh the way i like to frame it is what quantum computers threaten is the underlying foundation of cryptography that all blockchains are built on.”

Challenges in Upgrading Cryptography

1:00:37 to 1:04:50

Explore the difficulties decentralized networks face in upgrading security protocols.

“Because it doesn't seem like the number of logical qubits or physical qubits, that seems to be growing exponentially.”

Comparing Bitcoin and Centralized Banks

1:04:50 to 1:07:37

Learn how Bitcoin differs from traditional banking systems in security and recovery.

“I mean, their greatest strength is the fact that there's no single party that says how it works or how it should work, right?”

Project 11's Role in Quantum Security

1:07:37 to 1:09:40

Discover how Project 11 aims to secure digital assets against quantum threats.

“All I need is one signature and all of Satoshi's or Coinbase's or Binance's, Bitcoin is mine.”

The Future of Post-Quantum Algorithms

1:09:40 to 1:10:01

Discuss the anticipated diffusion of post-quantum algorithms across different blockchains.

Post-Quantum Algorithm Diffusion

1:10:01 to 1:10:56

Explore how post-quantum algorithms will integrate into different blockchain systems.

“Like, how should we expect diffusion once this problem is solved to actually roll out?”

Bitcoin's Quantum Risk and Price Factors

1:10:56 to 1:12:02

Discuss the impact of quantum threats on Bitcoin valuation and market behavior.

“the way, even if you choose to implement one, you need to test it and you make sure it's secure, all this stuff.”

Global Quantum Computing Landscape

1:12:02 to 1:13:15

Analyze the advancements of quantum computing in China versus the U.S.

“And the, the, uh, it's easy to imagine as you approach that 2029 mark, more selling pressure, more concerns, if meaningful progress isn't made in the next two years.”

Preparing for Quantum Challenges

1:13:15 to 1:14:00

Understand the urgency of preparing for quantum threats to maintain trust in financial systems.

“And so I think, again, back to the fundamental problem, uncertainty, right?”

Introduction to Kayser Yunus

1:14:20 to 1:15:03

Meet Kayser Yunus, founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, discussing their business journey.

“Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.”

Allbirds' Market Collapse Analysis

1:15:03 to 1:17:15

Examine the rise and fall of Allbirds as a direct-to-consumer brand.

“I was like, wow, they are really getting big.”

Applied Intuition's Business Strategy

1:17:15 to 1:18:18

Learn about Applied Intuition's growth and vision for physical AI.

“A steel-toe Allbird would look fantastic.”

Partnership with LG

1:18:18 to 1:18:35

Discuss the new partnership between Applied Intuition and LG in self-driving technology.

“Talk about the most recent partnership, LG.”

Self-Driving Vehicles and Market Applications

1:18:35 to 1:20:22

Explore the applications of self-driving technology across various industries.

“The AI is going in the TV, and I'm going to be able to ask questions.”

Benefits of Shared Learning in AI

1:20:22 to 1:22:23

Understand how shared learning enhances AI systems across industries.

“The only way that you really make this a viable business is that you actually spread this across lots of manufacturers and lots of industries and lots of use cases.”

Radical Pragmatism in AI Development

1:22:23 to 1:24:00

Delve into the philosophy of radical pragmatism in AI and its implications.

“And it sounds crazy, but it's not that crazy to imagine some weird scenario that you see in a mine actually teaching you something that you could use just on a normal street.”

The Complexity of Automotive Manufacturing

1:24:00 to 1:25:16

Explore the intricate challenges and lessons learned in automotive factories.

“And as the name implies, it's really about automotive.”

AI's Role in Agriculture and Labor Shortages

1:25:16 to 1:26:48

Understand how AI can address labor shortages in agriculture and improve efficiency.

“You take ag, you know, with a tractor behind me, the average American farmer is 58 years old.”

Economic Impact of AI in Various Industries

1:26:48 to 1:28:56

Discover the differing economic implications of AI across industries like trucking and mining.

“So much of the economy is like moving physical things around, producing things, shipping them.”

Market Potential of Physical AI

1:28:56 to 1:31:16

Learn about the vast market opportunities and growth potential for physical AI technologies.

“But I think the market for physical AI is way, way bigger, purely because the surface area is much bigger.”

The Journey to Writing About AI

1:32:23 to 1:35:04

Learn about Sebastian Malaby's process and motivations for writing his new book on AI.

“This book goes in a different direction.”

Balancing Biography and Technology in Storytelling

1:35:04 to 1:38:00

Explore how to blend biographical elements with technological narratives in writing.

“How do you think about balancing the biographical timeline, the history, the financial impacts which you've covered in the past?”

The Evolution of AI Breakthroughs

1:38:00 to 1:39:29

Explore the breakthroughs in AI technology and their implications.

“the main CEO, Peter Brown, had done a PhD with Jeff Hinton about AI back in the day.”

Competitive Landscape in AI

1:39:30 to 1:40:56

Understand the competitive dynamics and mergers shaping AI development.

“These guys, he said, have parked the tanks in my front yard.”

Business and Research Synergy

1:40:57 to 1:42:08

Learn how business decisions impact AI research and development.

“capitalist fight over building LLMs, this is going to be, you know, most people said, this is going to fail.”

Cultural Shifts within Google

1:42:09 to 1:46:30

Examine how leadership influences the culture and direction of AI projects.

“I would say that the single most important business relationship in the world today is between Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Demis Asabes, who's running the AI brain trust.”

The Balance of Innovation and Reputation

1:46:31 to 1:48:04

Discuss the challenges of innovation at Google and the fear of reputational damage.

“How do you think that has impacted the culture of DeepMind, given that they have something very real to lose?”

Safety and AI Responsibility

1:48:05 to 1:49:38

Delve into the responsibility of AI developers toward safety and ethics.

“How does Deb Mason, he's always told a very optimistic story about AI.”

Definitions and Perspectives on AGI

1:49:39 to 1:51:44

Explore the varying definitions of AGI and the implications of those views.

“How do you control this technology when everybody is racing to jam it out the door?”

AI's Impact on Writing and Research

1:51:45 to 1:52:06

Learn how AI accelerates the writing and research processes in the field.

“I felt an acceleration in my learning process, which is sort of what I do before I go interview people.”

The Impact of Demis Hassabis on AI

1:52:06 to 1:55:34

Discussion on Demis' role in AI and the pros and cons of his leadership.

“That was a super efficient way of getting up to speed.”

Concerns About the Future of AI

1:55:34 to 1:58:53

Exploration of the potential risks and benefits of AI, particularly in defense.

“I think you have to be honest and say there's also a downside, significant downside.”

The Evolution of AI Technology

1:58:53 to 2:02:24

Insights into the advancements in AI technology and concerns about sustainability.

“And so I think OpenAI has been running two simultaneous experiments.”

Forrest's Journey in Internet Infrastructure

2:02:24 to 2:05:06

Forrest shares his unique path to building internet infrastructure in Colombia.

“Let me tell you about Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service.”

Innovations in Wi-Fi Technology

2:05:06 to 2:06:00

Forrest discusses the design and functionality of modern Wi-Fi routers.

“It's always the people that built like the railroads, the mines, the telecom infrastructure, the, the wifi, the internet, the power lines.”

Innovative Wi-Fi Solutions

2:06:00 to 2:07:20

Learn how a company is transforming Wi-Fi routers into aesthetically pleasing devices.

“We built like a nationwide backbone crisscrossing the country.”

Infrastructure Challenges and Opportunities

2:07:20 to 2:09:10

Explore the unique challenges of building internet infrastructure in the U.S. versus Colombia.

“Well, in what ways do you think it's easier to do in a place like Colombia than the United States and vice versa?”

Impact of AI on Internet Infrastructure

2:09:10 to 2:10:50

Discover how AI is changing the landscape of bandwidth and internet services.

“is Starlink is attacking lower density areas, moving stuff, mobile.”

Funding and Future Plans

2:10:50 to 2:12:50

Learn about the company's recent funding and plans for expanding operations.

“Yeah, well, we're heading to Mexico in the very near future.”

State of Cerronic and Shipbuilding Innovations

2:13:00 to 2:14:20

Get insights into Cerronic's progress and advancements in autonomous ships.

“You may have seen today we announced a$1.75 billion financing round.”

Creating Autonomous Vessels

2:14:20 to 2:19:30

Understand the complexities and innovations behind building autonomous surface vessels.

“We're going to accelerate the production, accelerate the deliveries of our vessels to the U.S.”

Job Opportunities in Defense Tech

2:19:30 to 2:20:00

Learn about job openings and growth in the defense tech sector at Cerronic.

“in the shipyards of the future, again, to produce at a scale that we haven't seen since World War II.”

Wrap Up and Transition

2:20:00 to 2:20:26

Discussion wraps up before transitioning to the next guest.

“everything we're doing is absolutely critical.”

Whoop's Recent Growth and Innovations

2:20:52 to 2:25:28

Discussion on Whoop's financing, product updates, and athlete investments.

“We announced a round of financing today, our Series G,$575 million round.”

Marketing Strategies and Health Monitoring

2:25:29 to 2:29:53

Exploration of Whoop's marketing approach and health monitoring trends.

“Is that still like a top priority or is it accurate enough at this point that there's better things you can focus the core energy of the team on?”

Cultural Shift Towards Health Awareness

2:29:54 to 2:31:23

Discussion on the increasing public interest in health and longevity.

“So, you know, but that shows that, like, it's not just telling you what you want to hear.”

Closing Conversation with Will Ahmed

2:31:24 to 2:31:46

Wrap-up discussion with Will Ahmed on Whoop's progress and future.

“The chat's going to be your strongest supporters.”

AI Innovations in Investing

2:32:14 to 2:34:01

Yannick discusses AI agents in investing and their impacts.

“I don't recognize what Jordy is wearing.”

Leveraging Financial Agents for Yield Maximization

2:34:01 to 2:35:43

Learn how financial agents can automate investment strategies for maximum yield.

“If there's a spike in those, I call it the I'm tired of seeing red due to war agent.”

The Evolution of Brokerage with AI

2:35:44 to 2:37:22

Explore how AI is transforming brokerage from simple trade execution to full-service financial advisors.

“And so I think it changes how people think about and manage their portfolios in a pretty profound way.”

Integrating External Data Sources in Trading

2:37:23 to 2:38:32

Discover how external data can be integrated into trading strategies using AI.

“And that's what we're excited about, the brokerage playing a much bigger role through essentially Agentic AI.”

User Education in Financial Instruments

2:38:33 to 2:40:36

Understand how users can leverage AI to enhance their knowledge of financial instruments.

“What are the capabilities What have you learned about users educating themselves about various financial instruments within the public ecosystem?”

Future of Retail Trading with AI Agents

2:40:37 to 2:43:10

Examine the future impact of AI-driven trading agents on retail trading behavior.

“So when you get like a new CPI print, you know, you have, you know, even, even, you know, additional trading activity off of these single events.”

Crosby's Milestone Achievements

2:43:39 to 2:45:30

Get insights into Crosby's recent fundraising success and business growth.

“You should just bundle all the fundraisers together into like a series alphabet.”

The Legal AI Landscape and Its Future

2:45:31 to 2:48:00

Discuss the evolving role of AI in legal services and competition in the market.

“I'm curious your view on how application layer legal AI companies will do compared to just the labs themselves, right?”

Trends in Legal Education and AI's Impact

2:48:00 to 2:50:36

Discussion on how AI is influencing legal education and job markets.

“How are you, how are you tracking the legal education market.”

Law Firms' Profitability and AI Integration

2:50:36 to 2:52:19

Exploration of law firms' profits and potential investment in AI tools.

“One is just doing client-facing work and being really good at talking to people and understanding what their points of view are and not being buried in the paperwork like a typical associate.”

Building Better Legal Technology

2:52:19 to 2:55:40

Discussion on hiring needs in law firms and the future of legal tech.

“Well, congratulations on the funding round.”

ALSO's Vision and Product Offerings

2:57:46 to 3:00:12

Discussion about the products and vision behind the startup ALSO.

“It's like it's just cars or it's just not cars.”

Competition in Micromobility and Future Plans

3:00:12 to 3:01:55

Conversation on competition, especially from Chinese manufacturers in micromobility.

“And so just purely from a product feature quality and technical capability standpoint, we feel like we're very, very competitive.”

Discussion on AI and Brett Adcock's Comments

3:02:10 to 3:03:58

Exploration of Brett Adcock's views on AI and tele-operation in robots.

“He had some interesting comments about the state of AI.”

The Debate on Robot Autonomy

3:03:58 to 3:05:44

Examination of the implications of tele-operation vs. autonomy in robotic technology.

“The robot knew what was going to happen because personalized super intelligence, understands that a turnaround command is coming before Brett even says it, starts turning around before.”

Mark Lanier's Court Victory and Unique Lifestyle

3:05:44 to 3:07:09

Discussion of lawyer Mark Lanier's recent court case and his intriguing way of life.

“When people get them and they start shipping and people can see, unless you buy one and it's secretly teleopter, that would be wild.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, March 31st, end of Q1, 2026. We're live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use. Corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place. I got a new sound cue I know you were pulling for me I got three now I'm not going to go too crazy I'm not going to overdo it we've been there, we learned, we changed, we evolved we became better as people as did our linear lineup we have a banger show, let's pull it up linear of course is the system for modern software development 70 % of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents Alex Pruden coming in from Project 11 going to be talking about Google's quantum news.

0:49The Crypto Quantum Crash. Say that three times fast. Crypto Quantum Crash. Then we have Kaser from Applied Intuition. Yes. Absolute dog. Very excited to catch up with him and Absolute Dog. Then we have Sebastian Maliby releasing his new book, The Infinity Machine, An Insider Account of Deep Mind. Tyler's got it pulled up right there. Super intelligence. I'm a huge fan of Sebastian Maliby. You might have read More Money Than God. You might have read The Power Law, The History of Silicon Valley. It's the definitive count of how venture capital became what it is today. Highly recommend that book.

1:22This is a very interesting departure from that because it focuses on a single person. It's a biography, not a history of an entire industry. But very excited to talk to Sebastian Alibi. And then we have Forrest from Somos, raising a$40 million round. Then Dino from Saronic, Will from Whoop, Janik from Public, Ryan from Crosby, and Chris Yu. He's working on a spin out from Rivian. Very exciting. already has a billion dollar valuation. There we go. Well, a friend of the show, our president here at TBPN, Dylan Abrascato, headed to the TBPN newsletter, which you can sign up for at tbpn.com, and wrote a fantastic essay summarizing a trend that we've been discussing with him around how AI is changing meme making.

2:08And I found it very interesting. I'm glad that he wrote this piece. And so we'll read through this and then discuss it, debate it, and see where we can take it further. And then obviously - And Dylan's from Long Island, New York. So John is going to be - I'm going to do it in a Dylan Abbrascato impression. Kind of accent. Memes are changing. That became abundantly clear during the Oscars a few weeks ago when Conan tried to create a new Leonardo DiCaprio meme. I don't know what accent that was. That's just like UFC announcer to go alongside the classic Leo memes. In doing so, especially by using TFW, that feeling when, and the blocky white font that defined early internet memes, he inadvertently demonstrated that the meme templates millennials grew up with have become increasingly stale, even cringe.

2:58That's a good point. Instead, AI-generated videos are the new meme template that every network and studio should be focusing their launches on. Look at what happened. Look at what's happening with the Harry Potter reboot. When the trailer first dropped, the reaction to the new Snape played by Ghanaian, he's from Ghana, Ghanaian, English actor Papa Isidou was predictably and unfortunately negative. According to the LA Times, he received death threats since being cast in the new role. But after a few incredibly viral and well-produced AI videos, one, an original Snape versus Black Snape MMA match, another AI generated rap video and another drip warts, the school of drip, the narrative has started to shift.

3:43Have you seen any of these? I think I've seen drip warts, but can we pull up the original, the quote unquote original Snape versus black Snape MMA match? Because I have not seen this one. And I think it is illustrative of what Dylan is talking about here. Snape v. Snape in the UFC ring. While we pull that up, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps to use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And let me also tell you about Restream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com.

4:17So let's take a look at Snape v. Snape in the UFC ring. Any luck? Here we go. I just dropped it in. Cool. And we have a few others here. The videos have amassed tens of millions of views, and on Dylan's timeline at least, sentiment around both the character and the reboot has done a complete 180. Here we go. Really photorealistic. Is this, does this, uh, are there any, uh, red flags here as a UFC enjoyer? Does this feel like a proper UFC video quality? It's so bulky. The video quality is insane.

4:58Wait, but old Snape won. Uh, in the fight? Yeah. Okay. Ah, but I think it just, I, okay. Wait, how, how, how do you know that? I think it just sort of like makes the characters more entertaining, more fun, shows you that this is just creativity at the end of the day. This is just like you should not be so up in arms about something that's a movie. Like it's entertainment and here's some more entertainment. And so you're adding entertainment to the discussion and people are enjoying that. there's another AI generated rap video about the new Snape which we can pull up a little bit of here AI meme videos are inherently viral and driving real awareness in a way traditional memes no longer can not just because they're novel and more entertaining but because a single AI clip can travel further and compound harder than traditional meme formats and social feeds that now heavily favor video this suggests yeah that's interesting on X it's still very easy for an image to go viral but if you think about you know Instagram youtube like a standalone image just can no longer actually get that escape velocity uh i mean uh what about uh dripped out pope remember that yeah a little bit but but people are just spending so much time in the in the short form feeds and they can go in there but they're certainly yeah yeah i mean i guess even some of the the dripped out pope or what was it was it valenciaga pope i I don't remember what the name was, but that Pope says, this suggests a new playbook for marketers, especially in entertainment.

6:31If you're about to drop a trailer for a new movie or show, you need to be thinking about your rage bait character. The one people will latch onto remix with AI and build around. Conan tried to force a Leo meme down our throats at the Oscars. Didn't see that because I was sleeping, but this might've worked 12 years ago. That playbook is over today and rage fans and communities will, if you're successful, take your characters or moments and turn them into something much bigger, entire cinematic universes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just very impressed by the overall quality of those outputs. The Oscar selfie.

7:07I remember this. This, I think, became the most liked image on Twitter at the time in 2014, briefly. That image, this is the canonical clout bomb. If you're a fan of Bradley Cooper, you like it. If you're a fan of Meryl Streep, you like it. You're a fan of Brad Pitt, You like it and so you're you're amplifying all of it the ultimate collab post and this has become a format That's been used time and time again. It's it's effective. We did a little bit of it at the Super Bowl It's fun. It works, but now the future is is AI. Let's pull up the the drip wart school of drip video I want to watch this one because I saw a clip of this.

7:45I didn't see the whole thing Let's see if we can play this that's Harry Potter. Are you really Harry Potter my G? type shit type shit type shit type shit none of that none of that broski we're all here on the maybach express for one reason and one reason only and that's to go to drip watch the school of drip

8:07the maybach pulling the train is pretty good

8:18and there's uh and there's the new snape character so yes very effective um I was reflecting on this and thinking about how it's not just AI videos that are unlocked as the new meme format. Like 20 years ago, video editing was extremely difficult. Like you had to do it on a desktop, you had to have a piece of software that probably cost a lot of money. It was not widely accessible. And so these image makers, image memes, I was talking to Brandon about this, like good guy Greg was one of these. or like the Insanity Wolf. And it would just be like a picture, one image of a duck and the duck would be on sort of like a solid colored background.

9:00And that would be the template. And then somebody would put white text with black, like block text, impact font on the top and the bottom. And that was like the image meme. And that was accessible in the sense that it could be like generated on MS Paint. It was free to generate it basically. Then we got video editing, you know cap cut Instagram reels as an editor called edits and all of a sudden it became easy for someone to take a vibe reel and put different text over it I send you a bunch of these where I'll find some crazy vibe reel and I'll just recontextualize it with a new yeah you know laughing new caption basically uh and so the classic one is like those four uh those four jets and the new top gun and it's like when when you and the boys all drive somewhere in separate cars or something like that.

9:47You know, this is an example. But now you can generate full AI videos that can express the joke of the meme. And I think the next version of this is like software as a meme, S-A-A-M, something like that. And we've been experimenting with the simulators. There's TBPN simulator, Jeremy Giffon simulator. There are more simulators coming. and all of a sudden we, you know, the idea of building a video game, becoming a video game studio, was like an impossible challenge. It would be months and months of time, maybe millions of dollars to get anything reasonable. So you had to be commercial about it.

10:24You could not do it as a comedy bit. But now you can, or it's getting closer. Certainly our organization is set up to where we can turn Ben or Tyler loose for a few weeks and say, yeah, like, you know, work on this vibe coding project for a few days, a few weeks. Like, it's okay. You don't have a lot of other responsibilities that are going to creep in. But increasingly, it's going to be more and more just like a few prompts on your phone to get the piece of software that is that meme. And you can think about the Jmail suite from Riley Walls as another software as a meme moment where he's making a commentary on the Jeffrey Epstein saga and all of that, but he's instantiating the humor, the commentary in a piece of software that actually works.

11:12Although, of course, the feature set is a little bit boiled down from the full Google suite, but the UI is familiar and the UI is part of the joke. And so I think that's a little bit of where this goes. Well, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And let me tell you about LabelBox. Oops, sorry. LabelBox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. LabelBox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So, there is a whole bunch of hack news going on. We're in a very weird week in terms of the news cycle because it's spring break, and so a lot of executives of big tech companies are like, don't launch while my kids are out of school and we're going on vacation.

11:57I actually think this is my real theory. So we're in a little bit of a slow news week, and you can see that the journal is covering announcements that happened last week. They're talking about Sora. They're talking about Disney. They're talking about things that are more reflective in Stratechery. Ben Thompson has sort of a 50-year retrospective on Apple. It's not driven by a news item. It's not like Apple launched a new product this week. So Ben Thompson is taking a step back and reflecting. It's a great piece. but it's not exactly news driven because there isn't that much news coming from big tech companies, coming from the labs, et cetera.

12:32But there are a ton of crazy hacks, starting with Axios. There's an active supply chain attack on Axios, one of NPM's most dependent on packages. So if you have been vibe coding, Axios is a package that helps with HTTP requests. So it gets sucked into all sorts of different projects. And if you upgrade it to the latest version, You basically got a virus with that And if that's running in the cloud It's building And that's probably maybe bad Because it could steal API keys Or SSH keys It could do a lot of things It could wreak havoc on your system Also, if you built this piece of software And you included the contaminated Axios installer Or package locally It could potentially weasel its way out of your local environment And get onto your desktop It's a virus, so be careful out there.

13:28And I'm sure people will be responding. The recommendation from Pharos, who sort of broke the news over at Socket Security, is that if you use Axios, pin your version immediately and audit your lock files. Do not upgrade. Socket Analysis confirmed that this was malware. PlainCryptoJS is an obfuscated dropper loader that deobfuscates embedded payloads and operational strings at runtime, dynamically loads fs, os, and exec sync to evade static analysis, executes decoded shell commands, stages and copies payload files into os temp, and windows program data directories, deletes and renames artifacts post-execution to destroy forensic evidence.

14:12So, very risky. I would say, like, if you have installed this, you should just, like, freak out, basically. And if you break your computer, that's, like, the first thing you should do just like try to slam yeah take the computer throw it in the lake throw it in the ocean that's how you should start um i concur i mean practical yeah uh i mean there is going to be some sort of like power law response here where of the people that that are victims of the attack they will go after the most vulnerable with the highest like ransomware potential and i think we're seeing that with uh one company i believe mercore was targeted but i don't know if that's But I don't believe, was that?

14:53Yeah, my understanding is that, yeah, the crazy thing is you have this like Claude Code leak. That was completely separate. That was separate. Even though I do believe they use Axios in Claude Code. Okay. I saw something on that. Sure, sure, sure. And you have the Mercure leak, which is. It's not a leak, it's a ransom. It's a ransomware. Someone stole some data. Yeah, they stole a bunch of data and now they're trying to, you know, get bids on it. We'll get to that in a little bit. Okay. And then there's this Axios supply chain attack. Anish had a little bit more context. He said, A tiny piece of code called Axios runs inside almost every app on your phone and every website you visit.

15:32Developers download it 100 million times a week. A few hours ago, someone poisoned it with malware that hands an attacker full control of your computer. If you've never heard of Axios, that's normal. It does one boring but important job. It lets apps talk to the Internet. When a website pulls up your feed or an online checkout processes your card, Axios is probably doing the work underneath. Over 173 ,000 other code packages plug into it. It's everywhere. The attacker stole a lead developer's login for NPM. Think of it as an app store, but for code that programmers use. Once inside, they swapped the developer's email to an autonomous ProtonMail account and uploaded the poison version by hand.

16:07That jumped past every security check the project normally runs before new code goes live. And this was not a rush job. The stackers staged the malware at least 18 hours before pulling the trigger. They built separate versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. They poisoned both the current version and an older one within 39 minutes of each other, casting the widest net possible. Once the malware ran on a machine, it deleted itself to cover its tracks. The trick was smart. They never touched a single line of code inside Axios itself. Instead, they tucked in a fake add-on called PlainCryptoJS, built to pass as a well-known trusted library.

16:40It copied the real library's description and author info, so nothing looked off at a glance. When a developer installed Axios, this fake package quietly ran the malware on its own. When a smaller package called UAParserJS got hijacked back in 2021 with about 8 million weekly downloads, the security world treated it like a four-alarm fire. Axios has 100 million over 12x the exposure with 173 ,000 packages depending on it. Socket, the security firm that flagged this, caught it in about six minutes. That's fast, but six minutes is still plenty of time for automated systems. at companies everywhere to pull and install the bad version before anyone can react.

17:18If you or your team run Axios, freak TF out. Now, lock your version to 1.14.0, change every password, API key, and access token on any machine that installed the compromised update, and check your network logs for connections to sfrclak.com or the IP address 142.11.206.73. Mm-hmm. Uh, Carpathi had some context if you want to go through this, Sean. I will, but first I'll tell everyone a very important message from CrowdStrike, which is super relevant today. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And I'll also tell everyone about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

18:05So Andre Carpathie said, new supply chain attack, this time for NPM Axios, the most popular HTTP client library with 300 million weekly downloads. That's a lot. Scanning my system, Andre Carpathie says he found a use imported from Google Workspace slash CLI from a few days ago when I was experimenting with Gmail Gcal CLI. The installed version luckily resolved to the previous version, the unaffected 1.13.5 But the project dependency is not pinned Meaning that if he did this earlier today, the code would have resolved Everything would have updated and he would have been pwned It is possible to personally defend against these to some extent with local settings E.g.

18:53release age constraints or containers or etc. But I think ultimately the defaults of package management projects, PIP, NPM, etc., have to change so that a single injection, usually luckily fairly temporary in nature due to security scanning, does not spread through users at random and at scale via unpinned dependencies. So very, very crazy, crazy story. Scott Wu said that Devon Review caught the Axios supply chain attack for multiple cognition customers before the attack was publicly known. These attacks will be 10x more frequent in the age of AI. It is critical that repo maintainers start using AI for defense as well, showing one example below where Devon Review caught the attack within an hour of its release, text minorly edited for anonymization so i was debating this with tyler earlier the question is like how does this update diffusion of of coding agents diffuting diffusion of vibe coding uh is this i was i was sort of saying is this bullish for cursor windsurf you know code readers because you would see an organization that said hey we were having a great time vibe coding but going forward we have a standard in this organization that we're going to have more humans in the loop?

20:13Does this make people be more inclined to put humans deeper into the situation? Tyler's counterpoint, I'll let you explain how you were saying that maybe this is actually bullish for just more token generation, more code gen. Yeah, I mean, clearly there just needs to be more code review, right? Okay. The package was still seen within seven minutes by an automated system, right? That's true. So, like, yeah, I think people will just, like, there's going to be much more of an emphasis, like, okay, use a coding agent to write the code. You also use a coding agent to review the code every time. Like, right now, that's kind of a thing you do maybe later.

20:49If you're in a big team, you have code review. But if you're just doing it solo, maybe you don't do as much code review, right? Yeah. But it just becomes more embedded within the agents, right? You talk to Codex. You talk to Cloud Code. Yeah. There's already, like, every single. I just think it's bullish overall for cybersecurity. like I think every cyber security company will probably do well people are on edge already yep and even even though this type of attack has happened for years long before like the popularity of vibe coding it just feels like there's a bunch of new solutions that are needed the kind of incumbent cyber security players will do well they're going to release a lot of new products I think the question that I have is like, why seven minutes, right?

21:31Like if, um, why not check it before it's merged in, in the first place? Yeah. Yeah. Or, or just like, you know, these are machines. So theoretically they can be constantly monitoring versus like, yeah, I don't know. And, and the question is, uh, I, I, we're going to be digging into this story more over the next few days, but I'm, I'm interested to know, like it's found in seven minutes. When is it actually rolled back? If you look at 300 million weekly downloads like clearly there are people that were downloading it at that moment in time At all seven of those minutes. There's probably like thousands of downloads if not, you know tens of thousands Just doing like a rough ballpark on what seven minutes means over a week of 300 million per week, but the question is Like how quickly was it rolled back?

22:20So is it only if you're in that seven minutes or was it it was discovered in seven minutes? and then it took them another 20 minutes to roll it back and stop serving the contaminated package. Understanding the scope of this, because it's very clear that, as Andre Carpathie explained, he was actively using it every single day and yet was not caught in that seven-minute window, and so he was cleaned. And understanding the scope and scale of the impact is very much determined by how many, just how broad and how many installs happened during the contamination. Anyway, Will Brown has a good take. He says, I hope someone at Axios is reporting on this, and I completely agree.

23:00It's gonna be confusing when they do. Anyway, let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses, and let me also tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. So moving on more last night more leaks. What's going on last night? Yeah, code source code Leaked via map file and the NPM registry. There's just a link to Someone just actually do not click a link if somebody ever says hey, I got some really great source code here Just click this link probably don't click it.

23:38Let other people screenshot it There's plenty of meta analysis over here seems seems messy seems unfortunate A heart goes out to the folks who are dealing with the situation. At the same time, Codex is open source. It's not the end of the world. But it did reveal a bunch of things about the roadmap and also some of the internal April Fools. That is the worst part. We love a secret surprise April Fools joke. I love a good joke. And nothing spoils a joke like hearing about it a day early. but much more importantly there are lots of uh there are lots of other critiques of the way cloud code is implemented what are the yeah i don't think this i don't think this hurts their business at all no because people are using cloud code to make other products yeah and then also having to take basically a fork of cloud code maintain that try to be shipping features against it, which is, again, I think it's not, seems to not be legal at all to just fork the code base just because it's out there.

24:42Oh, yeah. You can't just steal this of your business. People are converting it into other languages, and maybe there's some argument there. But still, I don't think this hurts their business at all. It's more like you can just read the architecture, understand some of the secrets, what's special. But at the end of the day, all of these tools, especially something like CloudCo that's so new, it's more of the process. It's more bad for the overall brand of VibeCoding. Totally, totally. Yeah, it's rough. And the irony here is that every time Anthropic has released any feature related to cybersecurity, all the big cyber companies have been selling off tens of billions of dollars.

25:23Yeah, yeah, yeah. The question of like, yeah, does this build trust in like using VibeCode? Yeah, so overall, it hurts some trust, but again, very obviously going to get through this. Yeah, so how it started, how it's going is, of course, landing like a ton of bricks. In the last 30 days, 100 % of the contributions to Cloud Code were written by Cloud Code, and how it's going is that it leaked the source code, which is not what you want to have happen. Yes, Angel says Mythos is so good at security that Cloud Code source code got leaked. Okay, let's, I don't know, should I, this is like, you know, you didn't get to watch the Super Bowl, you have it DVR'd at home, do you want spoilers?

26:06Should we review the April Fool's joke, or should we leave it unspoiled, so that we can enjoy it tomorrow? I mean, it's not, it's not, it's cool, it's very cool. You've already read it? I read through it. But it's not, it's not to my, I don't think we're getting, I don't think we're getting, I think we're getting a knee slapper out of it. But it's very cool. I think it'll be cute. Okay. Well, then we can move on. What else did we learn? Tukey summed it up here. Do you understand what just happened to Dynthropic? Someone on their team ran a production build of Cloud Code. The compiler generated a.map file, which is literally a blueprint that reverses the entire code base back to its original source.

26:49And then they published it straight to NPM for the whole world to download. And it really does show you how fast the NPM downloads, like there are people that are downloading it every single minute, and so even if it's only up there for a minute, someone's gonna get it. And then all they need to do is send it to somebody, zip it, and post a link on X, and it goes viral. It's like locking every door in your house, installing cameras, hiring armed guards, then accidentally uploading your floor plans to Google Maps. Does that matter? No, that's a bad analogy. I don't like that analogy. because floor plans are not why I lock every door in my house.

27:24I install cameras. I hire armed guards. Aren't floor plans public on like Zillow? Oftentimes. I would say we can probably skip over this. John, if you scroll down, this account just kind of posts like the same format every single time. So we can skip this. Let's go over to Lisan. If there's a red alert emoji, you got my attention. Let's go over to Lisan Alge. Yes, yes, yes. A few takeaways from the Cloud Code leak. Anthropic is actively using Mythos for development. And they are already a Capybara V8. We learned last week that Capybaras are huge, but can be deadly in the right context. Capybaras still has issues.

27:59The foreshadowing is crazy. The foreshadowing is crazy. We were talking about how the Faustian bargain that is getting a Capybara as a pet seems so cute, but it can bite you. And it seems like that might be what happened. Capybaras has 1 million token context window and fast mode. Cool. Numbat is another interesting codename tagged with at model launch remove the section when we launched numbat Fennec seems to be fit the fennec fox fennec fox is very cute, but also not a domesticated animal How about we get some golden retriever code names? How about big fluffy poodle? That's a good code name for here for your for your for your animal themed AI model anyway, let me tell you about console console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

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28:51And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Arvid says, Hot Take, Anthropic leaked Claude code intentionally to get a Nerdosphere code review it would have never gotten if they had just open sourced it. Oh, that's actually true. Way more attention. You don't leak your entire feature roadmap. And you don't do, I mean, it's funny. and I'm sure they'll make the most of this. This is 4D chess right here. But I'm not seeing the 4D chess. I'm seeing the 4D chess now.

29:24I'm convinced. This is, I mean, we're in completely uncharted territory for marketing stunts and pre-releases and sneaky footage that goes viral and maybe was planted and you don't know. And it's like some leaked account. Like, I don't know. I think everything's, I think the gloves are off. Everything's on the table. This could be an April Fool's joke. this could be a stunt to drive attention to an open source move. Although, Tyler, you said that Dario is not a fan of open source at all, right? He's like against it unilaterally. He doesn't want to do open source. I feel like, isn't there some steel man there where if you open source, like, I don't know, like Opus 2 or something that's like really old, it's entirely commoditized in the research community.

30:12So all of those secrets that went into making Opus 2 good, those have been commoditized. They've been discussed at the house parties in SF. The researchers have moved from one place to another. So everyone knows these. They're available as open source. But by open sourcing your model, you can share with more of the up-and-coming academic community. If I'm a computer scientist, I'm interested in how to research. Yeah, but if all the research is already commoditized. Yeah, I guess you could just use the other ones. doesn't really have a benefit. Maybe, I don't know. Has anyone at Anthropic commented on this at all?

30:50I haven't seen anything. I haven't seen anyone. What is undercover mode? That is a way to contribute to projects without letting people know that you're using Claudcoat. Oh, interesting. That's a hack. Gurgly over at Pragmatic Engineer says this. Gurgly, sorry. This is either brilliant or scary. Anthropic accidentally leaked the source code of Cloud Code, which is closed source. Repos sharing the source are taken down with DMCA, but this repo rewrote the code using Python, and so it violates no copyright and cannot be taken down. Okay, and there's a warning. Do not store the code. Even though it has leaked, do not store it, because you might get DMCA'd, according to Primeagen, the last time Anthropic, in their infinite PhD-level wisdom, leaked their own source code.

31:44February 25th, that happened? I miss that entirely. They DMCA'd all repos that had their code. Careful storing the code because Anthropic will have no mercy. 40 ,000 users forked it, so maybe unfork it if you did that because it sounds like you might get a legal letter. Again, a DMCA is not like an actual lawsuit. It's more just - Unfork, unfork. Unfork it. And people are of course making a joke that the codex source code has been leaked in full here. And they're linking to the GitHub because codex is open source, which is cool. I don't know. It's interesting. And more and more people are building their own harnesses.

32:23There was some interesting data that Opus performs extremely well, better than in clog code in cursor on some benchmarks. And so there is this new paradigm of like, you know, how can you add different value when you're building a harness? So what else? Yes, certainly there's other, plenty of other companies that are building harnesses and they're going to be able to dig through this and get some benefit, be able to improve their products. That's not great. But at the same time, Codex has already, the source code is already open source. Yeah. And so that's not, that hasn't been hurting Codex's progress and growth.

33:00So end of the day. Ultimately, I would say, I'm assuming very, very embarrassing for the individual that ultimately contributed to this, but they will get past it. Well, we will put the blame squarely on the AI model so they can take it. DAX is getting line of code mogged, L-O-C-mogged, because clog code source is 512 lines of code, whereas open code, his project, is only 118 lines. And so he's got to get those numbers up. And GT mogs everyone. With over 50 billion lines of code. He doesn't have 50 billion lines of code. GT, Gary Tan will be coming on the show, hopefully this week, and we will get the full scoop on how he's using G-Stack and other models, which should be fun.

33:49Before we move on, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Vibe.co, where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies pick channels, advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on Meta. Zach says, NDAs are a great way to keep your corporate secrets safe from one or two beers, but not three beers. Why is there a community note on this? Oh, this joke was posted before on Instagram. It's a little joke theft.

34:21Interesting. Interesting. But it's a good joke. And I'm glad that he brought it over to X where we could enjoy it. Along with 36. The original post was an NDA is a lock and three beers is a key. Okay. All right, well, yeah, he toned it down for the timeline. Anyway, there is news out of Google. A Google paper warns crypto on quantum risk ahead of 2029 timeline. So we've heard about the risk of quantum computing affecting the cryptocurrency industry, crypto projects broadly. There is some new research out of Google that provides some more perspective. So Google researchers have warned that future quantum computers may be able to break some of the cryptography protecting Bitcoin and other digital assets with fewer resources than previously thought, adding urgency to the debate over how the industry should prepare.

35:16The researchers did not indicate such a machine exists today, but said new work suggests the computing power needed to carry out that kind of attack may be lower than earlier estimates had suggested. In a Google research blog post, this is from Bloomberg, the researchers said that a future quantum computer could break elliptic curve cryptography, a form of public key encryption used across much of the market. Their latest estimate points to a 20-fold reduction in the quantum computing hardware needed to break what's known as ECDLP-256, a mathematical problem that helps secure crypto wallets in transactions.

35:52That does not mean Bitcoin and Ethereum are suddenly exposed, but the researchers in the white paper dated Monday said the clearest defense is a shift towards post-quantum cryptography or PQC. I'm sure this will be a hot topic over the next few months. A newer form of security designed to withstand attacks from powerful machines. They also urge the crypto industry to cut avoidable risks in the meantime. We urge all vulnerable cryptocurrency communities to join the migration to PQC without delay. Google cast the paper as a warning meant to give the industry time to act, not as a prediction of imminent collapse.

36:28Last week, the tech giant introduced a timeline to fully migrate its own security systems to post-quantum cryptography by 2029. Fears around quantum computing as a realistic threat to crypto have swirled for years. In January, Coinbase established an independent advisory board to study what quantum computing could mean for the blockchain. That same month, Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies, removed a 10 % allocation to Bitcoin from his model portfolio, citing fears that the advent of quantum computing could undermine the token. On Tuesday, Bitcoin shrugged off the news of the Google paper making the rounds, rising as much as 2.6 % to$68 ,300.

37:09I'm not sure where it is today, but Jordi, I'm sure you can pull that up. Even so, the researchers said the time left before such machines arrived still appears longer than the time needed to move public blockchains to post-quantum cryptography. BTC is currently at 67. 67. So slightly off of yesterday. A lot of this stuff has been discussed ad nauseum in the crypto community for years. I remember hearing about quantum potentially breaking Bitcoin as far back as 2016. 2016? So you're saying you were already in that kind of like post-quantum? Yes, 100%. I was locked in. No. Yeah. I was aware of it.

37:48One concern that people in the community have had that I've seen talked about is this idea that if you did have a computer powerful enough to crack these encryptions, you would, unless you were like Google and you already had, you know, billions and billions and billions of dollars of cash flow, you wouldn't exactly stand up and say like, hey, I have cracked Bitcoin because the incentive for a certain team would just be to go around and find these wallets that maybe didn't have any activity for a long time and just start cracking those individually. Because if you just stood up and said, hey, I have a quantum computer that destroys Bitcoin, the price would go down and then the hacker wouldn't get any benefit from it.

38:37Yeah, it's interesting. What are quantum stocks doing on this news? Quantum. Probably ripping. They rip on everything. Psy Quantum, is that one of them? Psy Quantum? Yeah. Rigetti's up 8%. Okay, there we go. Oh, Psy Quantum's privately held. There's another one, D-Wave, right? D-Wave, are they public? Yeah, they're up 10 % today. But they're down 12 % over the past five days. and 25 % over the last month and 42 % over the last six months. But they're up 88 % over the past year. Let's go. D-Wave is a$5 billion company. Yeah, there's apparently a bull market in Nick on our team's email inbox. Oh, yeah?

39:19Quantum companies. Really? Right now? That want to come on and talk about. Well, we do have someone coming on, right? We have Alex Pruden from Project 11 coming on to break it down for us at noon. So Nick Carter was talking about this. He said, many are wondering what Google saw that caused them to revise their post-quantum cryptography transition deadline to 2029 this week. It was this, and it's from research.google, which we will go through. Max, the VC says, Google's basically saying, we've cut the quantum resources needed to break Bitcoin's encryption by 20x. We can now break it. We can prove it.

39:55We're just not going to tell you how. We've slowed down research to give crypto a chance you have until 2029 to figure out a solution good luck Elon chimed in and said on the plus side if you forgot your password the password to your wallet It will be accessible in the future Also to everyone else. Yeah Yeah, I I don't know. I mean it How do how do property rights if somebody if somebody does have a quantum computer and they crack your? Bitcoin wallet that you forgot the password to, but you can prove that you owned and then they get busted for stealing your Bitcoin, you could potentially get it back.

40:31Do you ever really own code? I don't know. Nick also said, and the craziest thing is that the quantum AI, the Google quantum AI paper is maybe not even the most concerning quantum paper released today from Project 11, who's coming on. Shor's algorithm is possible with as few as 10 ,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits. So this will be interesting to dig into further. Within minutes, with 500 ,000 physical qubits, Google is now more confident on a 2029 post-quantum transition. Well, speaking of Google, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.

41:20And let me also tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI, more important than ever. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So there's a lot of news about this quantum story. Nick said, good morning. Now is not the time to panic. The time to panic is if Bitcoin devs read these two papers and double down on their chosen solution of hoping it goes away. Then panic. It's ridiculous. Dan Shipper says, the first thing I've seen that could make Bitcoin go to zero or allow competitive coins to catch up. So other coins clearly have at least like a very clear like marketing story to tell if they are like the quantum proof or the first to be quantum proof or the most seriously regarded in the quantum proofing race will be interesting.

42:10Ariana Simpson chimed in and said, except all or most other coins have this problem too. But that is the opportunity that someone can maybe change something. So the chance that NASA lands on the moon, we were tracking this yesterday. The missions are starting to happen. Before 2028 on Kalshi is now at 14%. Before 2027 is at 4.7%. So they are racing. Of course, this Artemis II mission is not boots on the ground on the moon. It is rocketing around the moon. We'll have more about this tomorrow. They're just going to check it out. They're going to be gone for 10 days. They're going to be in space for 10 days.

42:49And will be very interesting. Brendan Grell was doing some deep dives on the technology, the streaming technology, what we really care about here, that will be on board. Something like 20 cameras, 4K live streams, laser beams to make sure it's low latency. Super chats. Should be a lot of fun. Super chats would be good. We got to get a chat going. I'm sure there might actually be because they usually stream on YouTube. And so I wouldn't be surprised if it is. Is it going to be a 24 seven perpetual stream that's always on? Yes. Even when the astronauts are taking a sleep? Yeah. Taking a little nap.

43:25Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's going to be funny. There's so many, all the conspiracy theorists are going to be sitting there watching it very closely and then pausing. And there was a glitch there. Did you see that glitch? That was, that was VFX. That was AI. No, this is my mark. I will believe that it's real if I see an astronaut put three fingers in front of their face. Because this is the one thing that the AI can't do right now. If you're ever on a Zoom call with someone who you suspect of being fake, a scammer, who said, hey, let's get on Zoom. Let's talk about some financial investment opportunity.

44:02And it looks like someone you think is the person, but you suspect that it might not be. and they will be able to show you, look, look at the fingers. The fingers are perfect. It's fine. It's fine. That's because this part is not AI. Just the face is AI. This is the deep fake stuff that's happening. So what you have to do is you have to ask them to hold up three fingers. They'll be like, yeah, three fingers. This is fine, right? I satisfy the task. You got to say, no, put the three fingers in front of your face because if you put the three fingers in front of your face, the AI gets confused and it breaks the deep fake that's happening underneath.

44:34So you got to go like this. Show some depth of the field. You have three fingers in front of the face. This is the trick. This is the only way you'll survive in the future. Be careful out there. Mercore had a breach. This is crazy. The design language for the hacker is very hacker-coded. The hackers that are putting out a bounty created an image that looks very aesthetic to me. The design of this. I didn't realize hackers did stuff like this. This is very interesting. But, you know, it's like you think about the hackers. They're kind of like cosplaying as hackers. They are. But they have. They like adopted like the green, like the green text in the black terminal.

45:21It's like they're living the, it's like life imitates art, that type of thing. Anyway, it seems like a very rough leak, very unclear what's actually happening. There's a whole bunch of different questions in here. There's a database of candidate profiles, source code, video, all sorts of stuff, tail scale VPN data. Unclear how much of this is real. They could be faking it. I don't know where the comments are. But the risk is that if there is some sort of Equifax style payout, that could be extremely costly because if they have millions of people in their database and they've got to pay everyone 400 bucks like Equifax did, because they have sensitive information, that could be very, very expensive.

46:04Well, we have had the Mercor folks on the show many times and are hoping that they get through this smoothly. And everyone's - Yeah, absolutely brutal. I mean, it sucks. It sucks first and foremost for all the individuals whose PII is now potentially floating out there. totally uh it's probably quite bad for their customers yes paid for uh paid for the you know some amount of this data and now it's just floating out there and then uh obviously you know unfortunate for the company but uh it's still unclear i was uh looking up lapsus which is styled as lapsus with a money sign classified as by microsoft as strawberry tempest and more More recently identified as or a part of Shiny Hunters is an international extortion focused hacker group known for its various cyber attacks against companies and government agencies.

47:04The group was active in several countries and has had its members arrested in Brazil and the UK in 2022. According to City of London Police, at least two of the members were teenagers. Lapsus uses a variety of attack vectors, including social engineering, MFA fatigue, SIM swapping and targeting suppliers. once the group has gained the credentials to a privileged employee within the target organization. The group then attempts to obtain sensitive data through a variety of means, including using remote desktop tools. Attempts at extortion follow. Initially, the messaging app Telegram has been used for communications to the public, including recruitment and posting sensitive data from their victims.

47:41The first major cyber attack attributed to Lapsus was against the Brazilian Health Ministry's computer systems in 2021. Lapsus gained notoriety for a series of cyber attacks against large tech companies, including Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Samsung. Following these attacks, City of London police announced that it had made seven arrests in connection to a police investigation into lapsus. Although the group had been considered inactive by April 2022, it is believed to have reemerged in September 2022 with a series of data breaches against various large companies through a similar attack vector, including Uber and Rockstar Games, with subsequent arrests again by City of London Police and Brazilian Police.

48:20The group appears to have become inactive after September 2022, with members perhaps dispersing to other groups and a conviction of two British members. It's also interesting because they don't enforce brand intellectual property around hacker collectives. And so anyone can pick up the brand and use that, whether or not they're in the organization. It seems very fluid. But good luck to everyone who's working on the response and hopefully a good resolution that is resulting quickly. Let's move on to some good news. We will be having Sebastian Maliby join the show at 12.30 today, but Colossus Magazine published an exclusive chapter from the book, which Tyler has there, the biography of Demis Hussabas from Google DeepMind, and he secretly built a hedge fund inside of DeepMind trying to beat Jim Simons.

49:17Google shut it down. So there's this interesting screenshot that Colossus shared. Hassabis, for his part, assembled a secretive hedge fund operation within DeepMind. He recruited a team of 20 researchers to train high-frequency trading algorithms and explored a collaboration with the Wall Street behemoth BlackRock. It was not a project of which Google approved, but Hassabis, a five-time World Games champion at the International Mind Sports Olympiad, Sick. Found, hoped he'd found another game that he could win. One day, I asked about the story of this trading project. I was told that Hassabis wanted to beat Jim Simons, the mathematician who founded the wildly successful algorithmic hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies.

49:59Rentech operated in secret, which Demis loved, my acquaintance explained to me. Did the secret deep mind trading team make money, I wondered. No, came the answer. Because of Google's wariness, it was quietly disbanded. I heard about something, Maybe it wasn't this DeepMind team. Dave says, but did they rip SIGs? Oh, yeah. Could have been the missing ingredient. Jimmy Simons. He also never wears socks and always speeds and just pays the tickets because his risk-adjusted value in terms of his opportunity cost is that he should never drive the speed limit, which is sort of a wild move. True wild man.

50:34I heard about the potential of a Google hedge fund years ago. I don't know if it was related to DeepMind though, but just the amount of cash they have on the balance sheet. Like they need a trading desk basically to move that money around. Even if they're just buying treasuries, they need a strategy, Forex. There's so many different operations. And there was a pitch I heard about years ago that they were thinking about like, should we be more active? We have a lot of information. We have a bunch of great engineers. We could build a hedge fund here. But they decided that it was not compatible with like the don't be evil philosophy.

51:07It was not core to the mission. And at some point, there is risk associated with active trading. And so you could potentially blow up. There are certainly plenty of examples of hedge funds that had fantastic teams but could not stick the landing and wound up zeroed. Sofie says, Google shutting down a deep mined hedge fund quit right before they were about to hit it big. It really is this meme. they probably would have printed. Although it's not like the high frequency trading firms are not using AI or not using, I mean, Jane Street invested in a custom server company or custom silicon company, something along those lines, specifically for high frequency trading.

51:54So they have a lot of AI researchers there. And you see this with a lot of labs saying, hey, does anyone from the high frequency trading industry or Quant Finance want to come work over here, we can maybe start matching your salary, maybe give you a more interesting project that you can actually talk about and people will be potentially excited about. I don't know. Anyway. Bone GPT, the rapper Eater, shared, I don't want this part of my brain to grow, which is a quote from this. In the weeks after the presentation, the two sides finally converged on a fleshed out version of the Pichai plan. Suleiman would lead DeepMind's applied side from within Google, while Hasebis would run research as an independent global interest company.

52:36For Suleiman, this was a triumph. Google had finally signed a complex term sheet granting most of what he wanted. Hasebis was equally pleased. The plan guaranteed him an astronomical$15 billion in Google funding to sustain AGI research over the next decade, and it would put an end to the meetings on corporate structure, which he found screamingly boring. After two years of negotiations, he had hit his limits. I don't want this part of my brain to grow, he often said when asked to get his mind around another legal document. That's hilarious. That's a great saying. I don't want this part of my brain to grow.

53:13It's so funny that you're going through two years of negotiation. They're like, okay, you're going to have so much funding to build AGI. $15 billion. You're like, oh, so like a seed round for like a neo lab? Like, great. Like, oh, so like one data center from a NeoCloud or something? Like, it's like the numbers have gotten so, so big that 15 billion does not feel like anywhere near enough at this point. Colossus, hit me, John. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

53:57Tell me about the link. Elon Colossus shares, Elon has spent a decade trying to control an AI lab. He tried to absorb deep mind into Tesla in 2014 and open AI in 2018. When that failed, an intern spoke up. It did not end well. Okay, let's read through this. He also tried to control XAI to some degree. Well, doesn't he control XAI? Well, he controls it, but at what cost? Right? All seven co-founders gone. Oh, true, true, true. That's what you're referring to. Got it. Anyways, from the book, pushing back against Musk's obsession with the race against Google and DeepMind, Brockman added, it doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies.

54:33Musk responded the next morning at 3.52 a.m. He confronted Brockman with a proposal that recalled Pichai's pitch. OpenAI should spin into Tesla. Initially, OpenAI's team could accelerate Tesla's development of autonomous vehicles. Next, it could use the profits from self-driving cars to fund its AGI moonshot. Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Musk declared. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn't zero. Back in 2014, Musk had Skyped Hasebis from a closet in L.A. What a funny, what a funny answer. Proposing that Tesla or SpaceX should absorb DeepMind.

55:11Almost exactly four years later, the new version of this proposal played into Altman's hands. It proved Musk's power hunger. With little difficulty, Altman now persuaded Brockman and Sutzkever to take his side. Together, the three told Musk that OpenAI would not attach itself to Tesla. At an all-hands meeting on the top floor of a converted truck factory that housed OpenAI, Musk announced to the employees that he was quitting the lab scornfully, adding that... I need Raptors. I need a new Ford Raptor. Potentially every day, we've got to put this lab above a truck factory. Inside of a truck factory.

55:44This is amazing. Scornfully adding that OpenAI would have to sprint faster to stay relevant. No. I guess they did. I guess they did. Hoping to lure away some researchers, he declared there was a much better chance of building AGI at a strong business like Tesla. Showing courage or perhaps just youthful innocence, an intern asked Musk if speed might be reckless from a safety perspective. Besides, wasn't developing AI at a for-profit company like Tesla the same as creating it at a for-profit company like Google? Isn't this going back to what you said you didn't want to do, the intern demanded? You're a jackass, Musk retorted.

56:18Then he stormed out of the meeting. That intern? Thank you. Tyler Cosgrove. No, that intern was Steve Jobs. Just kidding. That intern was Taylor Swift. It is, it is, my interesting read on this is like, it's, it's crazy that Elon was interested in, in basically buying all of DeepMind, absorbing all of DeepMind. And then four years go by and he's like, I still want a lab. I want to absorb all of OpenAI instead of just incrementally adding to an internal lab at Tesla, just one researcher at a time. Like he was able to assemble eight. They were already working on self-driving. Yeah. And he was able to assemble eight co-founders at XAI.

57:02Of course, like they wound up leaving. But if you just think about it as like, okay, there's going to be some churn. Maybe the churn will be higher even. But if you start the process in 2014 and you're hiring researchers continuously and using cash flow from Tesla to fund that, and then, yes, researchers might leave, but then you get new ones and you're just building that capability. It's like the Supercharger Network or, you know, Starlink. Like, you have to build a team and you have to continually add. But instead, Elon's been in this world where it's always like all or nothing, which is a very odd strategy to me.

57:37Instead of just like home growing it. I don't know. It is just like an interesting, it's an interesting strategy, I suppose. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And let me also tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents now create and modify your Figma files with design system contacts in beta starting today. And without further ado, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring in Alex from Project 11 to the TV panel show. Alex, how are you doing? I'm doing great. It's good to be here, guys.

58:10Is it over or are we back? What's going on? How bad is it? Tell it to me. Give it to me straight. How long do I have? Well, according to Google, you have until 2029. Okay, that's like forever. That's forever in my mind. yeah uh although maybe not forever if you think about blockchains that take a long time to change bitcoin's last uh upgrade took four years and that's 2029's less than four years away so yeah that seems really risky uh take us through like what actually changed because i before we get into that a little context we'd love some background on on you and project 11 and then we'll get into all the papers yeah all good uh yeah so me i'm a former army green beret uh got out or i got really interested in bitcoin working in the middle east uh got out went to tech thanks uh nice nice sound effect uh got out uh went to stanford and then got a job working in venture first then uh entered the blockchain space at a company called alio where i was after five years before getting really excited about solving this quantum problem that blockchain is facing so that's what led me to found project 11 so project 11 i kind of gave it away it's all about securing digital assets on blockchains into the post-quantum future right so uh the way i like to frame it is what quantum computers threaten is the underlying foundation of cryptography that all blockchains are built on.

59:26So it's that level that we have to fix. And then ultimately, everything on top of that, as you guys know from tech, there's all kinds of dependencies at each layer of the stack, and we have to rebuild the whole stack. And that's what Project 11 is all about. Just to put it into perspective, when did you found Project 11? You said it was five years. You spent five years at the last company. When did you actually get started on this? uh october 2024 so just over i guess almost a year and a half ago and what was what was the general dialogue around quantum and the risk to crypto at that time that it wasn't real that quantum computers were always going to be 20 years away that uh you know that no one had to pay attention there were bigger things to worry about uh honestly i feel like that's slowly changed and i think today's not just so there's a paper from google there's another paper out of caltech both dropped on the same day, both effectively lowered the bar massively that a quantum computer had to clear to be considered cryptographically relevant to threaten Bitcoin.

1:00:24So that was the breakthrough. And I think this is a watershed moment where really at this point, when Google, the head of the Ethereum Foundation and a Stanford cryptography professor all pound the table and say, we cannot wait to migrate anymore, then people are going to start paying attention. Okay. What actually changed? Because it doesn't seem like the number of logical qubits or physical qubits, that seems to be growing exponentially. But even when you trace out the curve, you're five, 10 years away from what we thought we needed. So is this a new algorithm, a new stack of code, or is it new math?

1:01:03What changed that we got this 20x increase in efficiency in terms of cryptography breaking via quantum computers? Yeah, a couple things. So first off, these two papers are not necessarily about a quantum computer that's bigger or more capable, right? So they're about what it takes to break cryptography, right? And so what changed? So one of the things that changed was that interestingly, physicists and, you know, kind of quantum cryptographers that looked at this problem for a long time studied an algorithm called RSA. It's not worth defining, but it's kind of an older cryptographic algorithm.

1:01:37But that's not what really any blockchains use, right? Because, you know, RSA keys are very large, right? So it turns out, and this was kind of the key, one of the key upshots of the Google paper, it turns out that if you actually focus on the cryptography used by Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other networks, it's actually way easier to break than they thought it was compared to RSA. So that is one of the major things. The other big breakthrough, and this is from the other paper from Caltech, is that, you know, quantum computers, as you guys may or may not be aware, as your audience may or may not be aware, are kind of, you know, they're very fragile generally.

1:02:09So to be useful, they need to have what's called error correction applied. And that error correction can kind of result in a lot of overhead. You need to have tons of physical qubits to get to, you mentioned logical qubits, to get one logical qubit. Well, this Caltech paper basically showed, hey, we have some new ideas to do error correction. And it turns out if we apply those, we don't need hundreds or thousands of physical qubits. Maybe we just need a handful to make one logical qubit. So that they're the title of their paper, actually the headline is you may only need 10 ,000 physical qubits to break short, to run short algorithm.

1:02:41And by the way, they demonstrated last year, 6 ,000 qubits. Okay. So we're close. Yeah. That's, you know, no one's can put a timeline on it, but how, how fast do you think can close that gap? Yes. Is the question. Okay. Uh, is it possible? Jordy was, uh, thrown out the idea of someone having a secret quantum computer going around the blockchain, siphoning Bitcoin from cold wallets that haven't moved. I wasn't implying that it exists yet, just implying the incentive of if somebody were to create one of these. But the way you're reacting, I'm imagining it's like if somebody does it, it'll be Google first, which is maybe a good thing.

1:03:21I don't know. It's like it's really hard to know how it's going to play out. I wrote a whole blog post on our blog on Project11.com. People can check out called Quantum War Games. And it was really fun because it's exactly – it's like the what-if scenarios, right? Because why do people want quantum computers generally? Well, they're great for science. Two, like you can imagine governments that want to do espionage might want the ability to break cryptography too. They probably don't want to reveal what they have. Certainly not if it's China or Russia, right? And private companies, maybe not Google, but maybe some of these pure play quantum companies.

1:03:53Like how are they going to make money? Well, one way would be to recover Satoshi's Bitcoin as if it were buried treasure, right? Like, oh, it's a buried treasure. If Satoshi's not here, it's mine now, right? So, I mean, that could be another scenario. So, look, I think there is just a whole bunch of uncertainty about how this is going to play out, about who's going to execute the attack, about how long a quantum computer will take. And, again, because blockchains like Bitcoin fundamentally rely on this cryptography, like it's existential for them. that's one of the reasons like i founded project 11 and we and we pursue this you know solving this problem very vigorously is because everything's on the line here and we have to solve it for these chains like bitcoin have a future yeah uh is there generally low optimism right now that bitcoin developers will be able to react quickly enough uh what's the statement about like i think churchill said about democracies or the americans maybe where it's like they'll do the right thing when every option is exhausted.

1:04:48I think this is, look, I think this is true of decentralized networks like Bitcoin. I mean, their greatest strength is the fact that there's no single party that says how it works or how it should work, right? And this is encoded into how it was built by Satoshi as a reaction to the great financial crisis, right? So that's a great philosophical strength in the face of a crisis like this that demands a massive technical effort to overhaul. it's a daunting challenge because unlike say Google which you know Google has said they're going to upgrade all their systems by 2029 that's just you know someone at Google can make that decision snap right in Bitcoin because it's a distributed community everyone's kind of first has to agree there's even a problem then everyone has to agree on the solution but I think there's examples of places where blockchains like you know I'll take Ethereum have done amazing things right so one is they transition from an old system of consensus called proof of work to a new system called proof of stake.

1:05:42It took four years to be sure, but it involved thousands of people all over the world. And they did it. They did it. The blockchain has been running. Ethereum is second large blockchain by market cap. So I don't think it's impossible. But I do think, especially in light of these two papers, these two breakthroughs, you just can't stop or you just can't wait anymore before starting that process. What about the rest of the digital world? Because if Bitcoin is having problems than so many other kind of core institutions and companies, organizations, I imagine, would have issues as well. Maybe because they are centralized, there's, you know, easier to react, easier to kind of lock things down, but still need to upgrade overall encryption.

1:06:29Yeah, there's no doubt that other institutions need to upgrade. But in my mind, there's also no doubt that, you know, blockchains and digital assets are just the most vulnerable. I mean, And one reason is obvious. I mean, Satoshi's Bitcoin, so the founder of Bitcoin, who we think has gone away or died or something, you know, they have a bunch of their early Bitcoin that hasn't moved. There's a bunch of lost coins. You know, all in all, you know, it's about to maybe 15 percent of all Bitcoin supplies estimated to be lost. I mean, that's hundreds of billions of dollars potentially in market terms.

1:07:01So that's just a huge incentive that like, let's take, let's take the counter example of, you know, someone wanted to hack into a bank or something. You know, as you pointed out, banks are centralized. They can kind of react. Also, the cryptography, the way that banks implement this cryptography is just kind of one of many layers of security, right? So it's kind of this breaks, like theoretically, someone tried to wire all the money out of my account. My bank would call me. Yeah, no, they literally have tape drives where, you know, they have cold storage. They print things out and they have a ledger and they can potentially roll back, which is crazy to think about.

1:07:30But like they could, if there was like a catastrophic hack, they could be like, look, everyone's just going back to yesterday's accounts. And, you know, that's better than the chaos that we were in. That's it. And that's not true for Bitcoin. All I need is one signature and all of Satoshi's or Coinbase's or Binance's, Bitcoin is mine. There's no fallback. There's no anything. That's how it was designed. Right. That's the point. That was the point. Permissionless finance. Yeah. That was. So, yeah, that's the challenge. So what is the state of the more faster moving coins, faster moving chains? Are you consulting or do you think you'll plan on launching something yourself that is quantum secure, quantum proof?

1:08:13How do you think this plays out? Because it does feel like, I'm optimistic that I'm rooting for Bitcoin. I hope the devs figure it out quickly. Hopefully that happens. But it does just feel in terms of like the marketing of a new project, there is a bit of a white space to say we're the ones that are taking this particular feature most seriously. Yeah. Look, I mean, it's kind of hard to know how things are going to play out. But the white space that we're occupying is we want to be the bridge for digital assets to the post-quantum future. Right. Now, that doesn't necessarily rule out potentially having a platform to issue on top of at some point.

1:08:53But I think for now, our priority is more or less, you know, people have already decided that things like Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana and stable coins have value. Yeah. And I think overwhelmingly they would like to keep the things that they already value and just make them secure. So that's what we focus on. Right. And there's no shortage of things for us to do because the protocols all have to get fixed. All the smart contracts have to get fixed. All the apps have to get fixed. And then all of the user wallets have to get fixed. And so, again, going back to the fact that this is a stack and you're breaking the bottom part of it.

1:09:22So, I mean, we really focus all the way across. So we've done work with Solana, the Solana Foundation. We did the first post-quantum testnet for them. We've worked with a few other protocols as well. We designed actually a new novel post-quantum algorithm designed for blockchains with the founder of Zcash. We've done that, too. We collaborate with EF. And we're getting ready to launch our own post-quantum wallet as well. Yeah. Yeah. Talk about the information flow. How much of the work that you do, the work that will be done by the Bitcoin Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, all the different developers, how much of that is open source by default or licensable or just can be understood by other parties and implemented very quickly?

1:10:01Like, how should we expect diffusion once this problem is solved to actually roll out? Will it just be like, oh, yeah, like we're just following the Solana standard. And so we're just going to mirror that over onto, you know, whatever chain we're working on. Yeah, I think there will be diffusion. I think there will be, you know, sort of consensus, if you will, around a certain subset of post-quantum algorithms. But I don't think it's just, you know, one and done because Solana is a very different system than Bitcoin. Bitcoin's digital gold, it's sort of meant to be slow, there's no apps on it.

1:10:35Solana's meant to be fast, right? And so the cryptography that works for Bitcoin might not be this cryptography that works for Solana. And this is actually, it was kind of the results of some of the experiments we ran with Solana. And look, this is one of the challenges, right? And this is again, why we keep saying this is like time to start is now because we don't know how long it's going to take to migrate because these new algorithms, there's trade-offs that come with them. And by the way, even if you choose to implement one, you need to test it and you make sure it's secure, all this stuff.

1:10:59So have you tried to have you tried to quantify or guess, estimate what the quantum discount rate is on Bitcoin right now? Because it's an interesting thing where like, if you own a lot of Bitcoin, there's a bunch of people on the timeline today talking about this. They don't have an incentive to like really freak out and spread the narrative, but they have some incentive to say like, hey, we need to have a conversation. We need to make progress on this. But do you think that's that's factoring into price at all? totally i mean the way i would put it is uh i think if this risk didn't exist bitcoin would be priced significantly higher so i think exactly what you said is right you're like oh i'm not going to sell my bitcoin because you know i mean it's maybe not right around the corner and i'm hoping people fix it but i also think there's people that would maybe enter uh and they're like you know and chamath has said this exact thing he's like hey you know is this really digital gold uh can we without with this quantum threat hanging over everyone's head so i i think if that threat was removed, then, you know, you remove this cloud over that ecosystem and potentially, you know, you'd have a lot more people coming in and therefore price would be up.

1:12:02Yeah. And the, the, uh, it's easy to imagine as you approach that 2029 mark, more selling pressure, more concerns, if meaningful progress isn't made in the next two years. Um, uh, what, what, what countries, uh, have the most kind of advanced quantum projects outside of the U.S. I can guess, you know, China's, you know, investing heavily here. Do they have their own retail quantum companies that are trading like crazy? What's going on over there? Yeah. First off, I think it definitively the leaders, both companies and research is American. So I think we should be proud to be an American here. But look, I think one interesting thing about the way China has chosen to attack this is they've made quantum computing a priority.

1:12:49and what that means in China is, you know, it's like there used to be a lab at Tencent and at Baidu and a few other places. And at some point, a Chinese Communist Party official came in and said, guess what? You guys all work for us now. And guess what? You're all working together now. And guess what? You're not allowed to talk about it anymore. And that's the state of things. It's kind of a, I don't want to say Manhattan project, but it's like that level of secrecy in China. And there's a legitimate question around how far back they are. So the best estimates that we have from quantum fit like we have a quantum physicist who's an advisor to project 11 that you know tracks generally resource estimates across the world and their view is that china maybe six to 12 months behind at most oh and so this is yeah exactly that's not that far yeah that's you know and so can we expect you know a quantum computer in the hands of the chinese communist party that maybe is more willing to crush dissent in places like hong kong to uh care as much about the philosophical principles of bitcoin and decentralization uh if it serves their purposes to do otherwise, I don't think we can.

1:13:48And so I think, again, back to the fundamental problem, uncertainty, right? And it's better to be safe than sorry. So we need to basically prepare today to prevent the crisis tomorrow, to keep the trust in these systems. Well, thank you for everything that you're doing. Thank you for your service, both here and before. Project11.com is the website, correct? Yep. Everyone should go check it out. All spelled out. Yep. Fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon. Appreciate the breakdown. Have a good one. Great to be here, guys. Thanks. Cheers. Goodbye.

1:14:18Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And without further ado, we have Kaser Yunus in the restream waiting room from Applied Intuition. He's the founder and CEO of the company. And we'll bring him in in just a second. We need a little bit of time. A little bit ahead of schedule. A little bit ahead of schedule. We need a little bit of time. And it's hard because there's not all that much short-term news. There is one news item that we can go through quickly. Allbirds just sold for$39 million. The company was once worth over$4 billion.

1:14:58It was D2C Darling. Followed this company closely because I was building a D2C company at the same time. I was like, wow, they are really getting big. But it seemed like it did not particularly scale. It was more of a niche product potentially. And of course, margins and cost of sales creep in, and then everything collapses to private equity multiples. Did you ever wear a pair of Allbirds? Would they ever pull you away from Bottega, get you in some Allbirds? You know, it's Australian wool. You know? It's kind of like Italian leather, Australian wool. Yeah, there's something like that. No, I never own a pair of birds.

1:15:38Not even if you're visiting San Francisco. It's a great sign of respect. Did you ever have a pair? You probably did. I think I had one pair at some point. They were okay. They didn't, I don't know. They sort of like look okay and are comfortable on day one, but then they sort of deteriorate a little quickly. This would be probably two to$3 trillion company if the shoes had aura. Yeah. But they had not. They should have released a line of aura. They actually had, it seems like they potentially had negative aura. Negative aura, yeah. Yeah. And the stock suffered. They had to pay the aura tax. The aura discount.

1:16:16Massive aura loss. I mean, still a very interesting launch, very interesting go-to-market, telling the story of where the materials are from. That was certainly a playbook that was adopted by a lot of companies, putting the supply chain on display, basically. It was the right fit at the time. But people are not into it. The chat is not happy about all birds. Let's ask our dear friend, Kayser. Kayser Yunus from Applied Intuition because he's here. He's in the TVPN Ultra Dome now. Kayser, how are you doing?

1:16:49Qasar Younis:I'm doing great. How about you guys? We're doing great. We have to ask, do you own a pair of Allbirds? What's your preferred shoe when you're walking around a factory like that? I don't own any Allbirds when you're in a factory. You're going to have to wear... Yeah, exactly. You have to have steel... There's no Allbirds, unfortunately. Maybe that's the comeback story for them. So they were worth$4 billion. Now they're worth$40. Maybe the steel-toe Allbirds are what gets it done. There you go. A steel-toe Allbird would look fantastic. We seem to be having a video delay. I think the team will work it out, but we can't hear you.

1:17:24Can you hear us okay?

1:17:25Qasar Younis:Okay, great. Yeah, I can hear you and I can see you okay. Okay, fantastic. So I'm not sure exactly what's going on. Well, great to have you back on the show. I'd love for you to just reset with us for the shape of the business, where the company is today, how big are you? Give us the broad strokes, and then we'll go into the partnership today. Yeah, thank you. Thanks again for having me. The company Applied Intuition, we're a$15 billion company, still doing what we were doing before, which is taking intelligence and putting into physical machines. Today, we have our first ever physical AI day where we're bringing lots of investors together.

1:18:01Qasar Younis:bringing industry analysts, bringing everybody who's kind of relevant in the field to talk about all the things that are happening in physical AI. We're pretty strong believers that the future, the next kind of big thing is AI going out of screens and going into the real world. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Talk about the most recent partnership, LG. Yeah, LG Intertech. We just announced this a couple of days ago. I don't know how many of your viewers know, But LG provides a lot of... You're putting AI in TVs. That's what you're doing. The AI is going in the TV, and I'm going to be able to ask questions.

1:18:40Qasar Younis:It's going to be the smartest, thinnest, biggest. No, that is not what we're doing. Much more serious. I mean, what's happening in the self-driving space is there is... Now the models are basically working, and they're figuring it out. So really, there's an aggressive downward pricing pressure of how to make self-driving cheaper. The research kind of question is done, and now it's just an engineering question. And that's just another way of saying it's a cost question. So companies like LG who are doing, you know, sensors at really, really large scales and really, really cheaply, you know, they're entering the space as well.

1:19:15Qasar Younis:We're working together with them on self-driving. Yeah. So, yeah, take me through. When people think self-driving, they always think Waymo, Tesla. but the market map of like products that need autonomy and that would be defined as vehicles. Give me some examples. I mean, you're standing in front of something. I know that it's very broad. What's in this partnership and then what else are you focused on? What's adjacent and what's on the roadmap? Yeah, so I think what's different about us versus let's say vertical players like a Waymo or a Tesla is we provide this, you know, AI across all types of machines.

1:19:57Qasar Younis:So you see ag machines behind me. If you were, you guys were here for physical AI day, we do, we take the same models and we put them in defense. We put them in commercial trucks. We're running driverless trucks in Japan right now that are going into commercial operations in the next quarter. We are running in mines. So both all the way from, you know, Arizona to Australia. So our hypothesis basically is these technologies, whether it's self-driving or the underlying operating system, they're so expensive and they're so complex to build and maintain. The only way that you really make this a viable business is that you actually spread this across lots of manufacturers and lots of industries and lots of use cases.

1:20:38Qasar Younis:I mean, our kind of crazy claim to fame is, you know, our company's almost 10 years old and we've preserved basically all the capital we've ever raised. which is kind of, you know, it almost sounds like BS, right? Yeah, it's crazy. Because the whole mantra is, you know, raise a lot of capital. And we're a real AI company. We have real AI bills. And we've figured a commercial model, which is a lot of scale. We have over a thousand engineers. And so we're one of the, if not the biggest, physical AI companies on the planet. That's obviously also commercially viable. But it all goes back to that simple thing is like, You want to distribute all this cost across lots and lots of companies, lots and lots of verticals.

1:21:18Qasar Younis:What about shared learnings? Is a team that's working on mining, are they able to find a breakthrough or discover something you can apply to trucking in Japan? Bingo. Absolutely. That is the heart of the company. And so what you described is shared learning kind of broadly, but there's also technical advantages. What we've seen is taking data, which is just obviously also not obvious, but taking really, really diverse data from a mine actually makes our self-driving car system better. And taking, you know, data that we have from our self-driving car in Germany, you know, makes our defense work better.

1:21:55Qasar Younis:And so it really is, it really is core to our strategy. Yeah, I've heard so many stories about that where there will be exactly one instance of a chicken being chased by a woman on a tricycle in the training set. And so it's very hard for the machine learning system to actually understand that if you see that exact scenario, you've got to slow down. But that's the nature of big data and machine learning and these scaled systems. And it sounds crazy, but it's not that crazy to imagine some weird scenario that you see in a mine actually teaching you something that you could use just on a normal street.

1:22:34Qasar Younis:Yeah, maybe getting a level lower just so, because me being an engineer always bothers me to talk in pure generality. I tend to mix things. Just getting to a level lower, what you're really talking about is anomaly detection. And it's not necessarily like, you know, you need to see the chicken running across the road in Thailand, and that's going to make the mine better. But what's really happening is models are getting a better understanding of the physical world around them and the kind of parameters around them. If you look at, you know, kind of the last kind of generation, I'm crazy to say last generation, but really large language models.

1:23:07Qasar Younis:Large language models really improve with diversity of data. That is really like, you know, a kind of a big breakthrough. And, of course, scaling laws. All of that stuff is being brought in to the physical world. Yeah. And we're powering that. Yeah, I mean, truly no one would have predicted, or I mean, of course, some people did predict, but I would have never predicted that, like, including poetry would help a model get to, like, solving math. Like, I would just see those as different things. I'd say, put the poetry team over there, put the math team over there. But actually bringing all these things together worked really well.

1:23:36Play out the counterfactual for me. You haven't been a high burn company. You haven't been super capital intensive. If you'd done vertical integration and built the tractor behind you, that would have been extremely capital intensive, correct? Is that like impossible?

1:23:54Qasar Younis:Well, nothing is impossible. There we go. But my undergrad was at this obscure school called the General Motors Institute. And as the name implies, it's really about automotive. It's like the West Point for automotive. And when you spend a lot of years in factories, as I have, there are some deep lessons that get imparted into you. And one of those lessons is, holy crap, these factories are extremely cost-intent, capital-intent, and they're extremely complex. And the strengths of Silicon Valley actually don't quite overlap with the strengths of building a large factory. Now, in terms of the core question, we had Mark Andreessen here today.

1:24:35Qasar Younis:We talked about this. Mark was one of our first investors and has kind of been along with us with the entire ride, I mean, all the way to the presentation today. And we asked him this question about vertical, horizontal, what do you see happening in AI? What do you see happening in physical AI? And the punchline is, all of our values that apply to intuition can be reduced down to two words, radical pragmatism. And if there are verticals that we think that we should be a bit more vertical in, we'll do that. And I think it's kind of a false trade-off to say what we do in, you know, trucking is what we're going to do in construction, which is what we do in agriculture is what we're going to do in mining.

1:25:12Qasar Younis:What we're really trying to do is bring intelligence out into the real world. And each of these verticals are facing really, really different problems. You take ag, you know, with a tractor behind me, the average American farmer is 58 years old. There's nobody coming to replace that person. And so what is going to happen? Because, you know, if you take that person, their kids have left and they're often not coming and taking over the farm, like maybe in previous generations. So that farmer needs, you know, we don't need to teach them how to use Claude code. That's not what's going to change the farmer's trajectory.

1:25:44Qasar Younis:What's going to change the farmer's trajectory is the machines are intelligent and they're working harder and smarter on their behalf. And so he can run an entire farm with a swarm of machines. And that's not too far into sci-fi. One of the key components here that we're doing and we believe is you need to abstract that hardware and software away. We as technologists, you look at like your laptop and your phone and you kind of take for granted the miracle that exists. Android runs on thousands of hardware devices flawlessly. So that's also something that Applied does. We're just abstracting the hardware and software.

1:26:19Qasar Younis:Once you do that, you can make every machine intelligent. Have you tried to estimate the economic impact, assuming you guys, you know, stay at the, you know, at the current kind of improvement rate or accelerate as the technology kind of starts to diffuse. And in some of these industries like trucking and mining and agriculture, like what, what are the downstream impacts? I mean, there's such a debate right now around what, what, what impact will AI have on the economy? So much of the economy is like moving physical things around, producing things, shipping them. Let's separate a little, because economy is such a generalization.

1:26:58Qasar Younis:So when you're talking about code complete and white-collar work is very different than trucking, where there is a huge labor shortage. It's very different than in mining, where people don't want to go live in kind of remote areas doing 12-hour shifts. I mean, literally labor shortages are preventing construction companies from collecting billions and billions in revenue. So these are industries where AI can't get there fast enough. It's a very different calculus than what the normal narrative is. And we're super obviously excited about that. Let's take defense as a particular example. It's a very salient example.

1:27:36Qasar Younis:We don't need more warfighters in harm's way. We need less warfighters in harm's way. And no warfighter wants to go out into that ecosystem where autonomy is really becoming the dominant thing. I think the way to think about this impact in the physical world is it's a lot less resistance. There's a lot more pull. Now, the first question you ask is the size of impact. I don't want to sound like I'm pitching my own book here with you. I'm asking you. I'm asking you. I want I want the biggest number. I want the biggest number. The numbers are absurd and ridiculous. But I can tell you this much. If you think about, you know, the way I think about it, I used to be a Y Combinator before I was a COO and, you know, ran the firm and funded lots of interesting companies.

1:28:20Qasar Younis:And one of the analogies I used to use to help founders understand market potential, market sizes. Yeah, I grew up in Detroit. You're sitting in the Detroit Metro Airport. You're sitting in a gate. You look around. How many of those people are like really deeply using Claude Coat? I mean, frankly speaking, not many. Now, a lot will probably be using something like ChatGPT, some variants of that, maybe Gemini. But how many of those people drive? How many of those people work at construction sites? How many of those people ride in buses? how many of those people serve in our armed forces, the point is a much, much larger group.

1:28:55Qasar Younis:And I feel a little, again, the engineer in me feels a little awkward saying these kind of, you know, pitching these things. But I think the market for physical AI is way, way bigger, purely because the surface area is much bigger. And it's compounded by the way that the way technology diffuses with phones and laptops creates this like rabid, you know, competition that you're seeing in all these kind of subspaces, right? In physical AI, you've got to kind of know what's going on in the car business. And I'm not gatekeeping and saying, yeah, you've got to go to the General Motors Institute to build technology for the car business, but you bet your bottom dollar it helps.

1:29:36Qasar Younis:And we're doing that across a bunch of industries. I'm as confident about the company as ever before. The question, we always get asked this question, why the hell did you raise all this money, almost a billion dollars? He's going to keep plowing away in the bank account. We're doing it for a simple, simple reason. Because if we need to, we can invest very aggressively to take opportunities that we think we can accelerate beyond just traditional organic growth. And so far, that's worked. It's not to promise the future that we won't. But those are the kind of debates we have every single day. Yeah, that makes no sense.

1:30:08Well, thank you so much. I just want to say I can see the path to$100 and then$1 trillion in run rate. I agree.

1:30:14Qasar Younis:Well, I mean, Waymo, you know, a company that we love them. They're a local, you know, we're also in Mountain View now, Sunnyvale. That company, you know, is a great company, but is burning a lot of capital and is a smaller revenue base than us and just raised at$126 billion. I mean, I love those guys. I mean, we have so many friends of theirs. I'm not trying to talk poorly about this. No, we love Waymo, too. It's very impressive what they're doing. 15 that we're at and 120. I think you've got room to run. Massive, massive. Yeah, we have room to grow. Tell Mark you're ready. You're ready for the big one.

1:30:54Qasar Younis:Believe me. Everybody wants to share. I feel like it's faux guile where they want to keep putting money into the company. We don't need it. That is the best analogy for a venture capitalist. They are the farmers stuffing the goose. We have our own farm. me, you know, and we're making our own money. So that's really great. And frankly speaking, I mean, like I said, Waymo is great, but it's just robo-taxis. And that's a small... So much broader. Go to Warren, Michigan. And you just go to the party shop in the corner and say, hey, aren't you excited about Waymo? I don't think, you know, it's not hit the masses yet, which just shows obviously Waymo's growth potential, but also shows, I think, how big physical AI is going to be.

1:31:41Qasar Younis:Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Thanks for having me again. Have a great rest of your day. Fantastic. And we'll talk to you soon. And we'll talk to you soon. Thanks. Goodbye. See you. Let me tell you all about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. We've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And we're talking to them later today. But first, we have Sebastian Maliby. He is the author of The Infinity Machine. Sebastian, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

1:32:06Have you? This has been, you've been on John's dream guest list for a long time. We met maybe four years ago at a talk you gave around the power law. And it was very fascinating. I love that book. This book goes in a different direction. And after that conversation, I asked you, probably the worst question you could ask to an author, I asked you, what's your next book going to be about because you had selected venture capital. Venture capital had done very well. I presume that whatever you would pick would be a great investment category because you seem to be a good picker. You told me that you were thinking about biotechnology, biotech investing.

1:32:52You went a different direction with AI. Is there anything I should read into that? Well, I always kick the tires on a few ideas before I settle in one. And I think it took me from the power law coming out in February of 2022 to somewhere around the summer, maybe August, when I really settled on AI. And then it took me another, I don't know, three months to get the courage up to go and pitch Demis Asabis on the idea of giving me a ton of access so I could write this book. And then I got lucky because I pitched him. And one week later, guess what? ChatGPT came out. So what I thought was maybe a fringe subject went mainstream super fast.

1:33:33Super fast. What was the response with the team? What was the process? Obviously, he's extremely busy. He also sleeps at very random times. We can get into that. But what was your actual interaction? How much time did you spend? What was the research process like? So once he agreed to be in, he was really in. It took about six meetings, two with him, four with his team. to get them to agree. And my pitch was, hey, if you say in every speech you give that artificial intelligence is the greatest invention in history, that means you're way too important not to have a book about you, and it's going to happen.

1:34:14So you better get used to it. And also, if you're going to upend our lives, change the way we think about ourselves as humans because it's a rival form of machine intelligence, you better explain your motives to people. otherwise they're not going to accept it. So that was the pitch. He agreed. And then once he agreed, we would meet for two hours at a time. We would go to a pub near his home in North London and there was a kind of secret staircase at the back, go upstairs, kind of dusty little room with nobody else there and we would sit there for two hours usually. And he would just riff, you know, talk about philosophy, movies, computer science, neuroscience.

1:34:57I mean, he is such a range of a person, by far the most fascinating person I've ever written about. Wow, that's high praise. How do you think about balancing the biographical timeline, the history, the financial impacts which you've covered in the past? When I think about the stories that you've told in the power law about venture capitalists, there's a little bit of their philosophy, but it's a lot of how the deals came together, fly on the wall. I love that type of storytelling, but this goes a little bit of a different direction. So how did you think about balancing all the different perspectives that you could bring to his story?

1:35:41yeah I mean I always want to do the personality the figure but then the landscape behind as well so it's always a mixture of you know you need a character who drives the story but the story is boring if it doesn't mean anything so you have to link it to larger stuff that's going on in capitalism and how society is going to change and all that and I mean in this case because Demis is who he is and he would just riff in these extraordinary paragraphs of like storytelling and theoretical stuff. And, you know, it's just so fascinating that I did give him the microphone more than I have in any other book.

1:36:19I mean, I basically quote him at some length, you know, and it's broken up with me asking him questions. And so I'm kind of the reader's lens through which to see Dem is talking. And I'd never used the first person really before in my other books, but in this case, those 30 plus hours I had talking in a pub with this extraordinary man, that was the gold dust I had. So to really make the most of it, I did have these passages of us talking together, which kind of intersperse the more analytical or narrative bits of the book. After the Transformer model dropped, what was Ilya Sasukeva's reaction and why did OpenAI get ahead?

1:37:03You know, I cover all that stuff as well. But I do have these passages where you see events through Demis' eyes because I think it's worth doing because he's so unusual. What was your understanding of AI or view on AI in 2022 before you meet Demis for the first time? Are you aware of the doom arguments? Were you a believer in the technology? Did you think it was 20 years away, 100 years away, two years away? Where were you before this book? Because I feel like it probably changed you. Yeah. I had met Demis before at tech conferences. Because of the power law and writing about venture capital, I would go to tech conferences in Europe, and he would sometimes be there.

1:37:51I actually cheekily raised the issue of hedge funds, and especially the one, Renaissance Technologies, the main CEO, Peter Brown, had done a PhD with Jeff Hinton about AI back in the day. And of course, I knew that Dennis would know that. And so I said, do you know these guys who use deep learning and applied it to markets? And that got his attention. So I talked to him a bit. So I knew that he was amazing. I knew that the technology was ripe in the sense that he'd produced this string of breakthroughs, AlphaGo defeating the human Go champion, then AlphaZero, which was even stronger. Then there was AlphaFold, which won him the Nobel Prize for predicting all the shapes of protein in nature.

1:38:40So there was a series of good models. And what they all had in common was they dealt with insane amounts of data, crazy combinatorial spaces. Like in Go, there's 361 first moves you can make. okay that's way more than chess and so unscrambling go and the strategies in go was much harder than chess and i knew that these breakthroughs were not just cool in themselves but they represented the coming of a time when machines could make sense of an almost infinite amount of data and extract meaning and hence the term the infinity machine the title of the book and hence my enthusiasm for writing about it and you know so i knew it was breaking out i knew demis was amazing what i didn't know is was going to break out literally the week after i met him and pitched him on the idea what has what has surprised you about how the industry overall has evolved since you started meeting with demis because in some ways i have to imagine you kind of maybe maybe it hasn't been that surprising at all even though a lot of the the growth is is impressive but uh do you feel like you had a view into the future from those first conversations in the pub yeah i mean i think you know i was lucky that the meetings were bookended by you know going to see dem as sort of maybe the third meeting or something chachi peter by this point had gone viral and him saying to me okay this is war you know you could see his competitive side come out right This is war.

1:40:14These guys, he said, have parked the tanks in my front yard. You know, I'm fighting back. So you could see that. And then after that comes the merger between Google Brain and Mountain View and the DeepMind team in London. So the two kind of halves of Google's AI talent base are united. And then I think you get what, you know, a business school professor is in the future going to write about. as kind of like a textbook case in how you make a merger successful. Because everyone knows that mergers are hard. And when you do it with eight time zones between the two teams, one in London, one in California, and you're doing in the middle of this knockdown, drag out, you know, capitalist fight over building LLMs, this is going to be, you know, most people said, this is going to fail.

1:41:03And I would come to Silicon Valley while I was doing the book, checking with my friends at, you know, different venture capital shops. And they'd all say, game over, OpenAI has won. And the surprise is that within two and a half years, Demis Isarbus's Google DeepMind model, Gemini, was doing better on the rankings than the OpenAI model. So that was an incredibly fast comeback. Yeah. How do you think about the importance of being a business person or a deal guy in AI? it feels like Demis has this quote he doesn't want to grow that part of his brain referring to some legal negotiations that took a number of years Solomon oh was that Mustafa?

1:41:49no actually that was Demis saying I don't want part of this part of my brain to grow take away these legal briefs I completely get that and it seems incredible for him to stay in the research mode build the research organization And yet, because of scaling laws, we're in this weird regime, in this paradigm where sometimes doing a deal to marshal an extra 10 billion of compute actually does unlock a new capability and is almost in the research track. And I'm wondering how you perceive the relative importance or Demis' perception of the relative importance of these sort of like business dealings that might be more critical path to AGI than the Demis of 2021 might think.

1:42:41I would say that the single most important business relationship in the world today is between Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Demis Asabes, who's running the AI brain trust. Because Sundar has Demis' back. He deals with providing the resources, supporting the notion that you're going to spend all these tens and maybe hundreds of billions on compute. So that's Sundas. That's what he delivers. And he gives Demis the oxygen to then just go do the science. And sure, he has to build products. But I think he said to me several times, Demis, we've got to a point where building a product like Gemini is in fact advancing the progress towards AGI.

1:43:28There's no tension between the two. If you had stopped your AGI research 10 years ago and taken a sidetrack to build some widget, yeah that would have been a waste of time but now that it's so mature and you're actually to build the next llm you've got to kind of figure out you know a reasoning model then it's going to be agentic and then you're going to be scaling it even more and all this stuff that we've seen um and this is genuine scientific progress as well as product advance yeah uh do the products also help sort of shift the culture in google i'm interested in understanding uh this concept like AGI pilling, becoming a believer in the Demis worldview of the impact of AGI, what artificial intelligence will do.

1:44:16That mindset has to diffuse through Google. The chat GPT viral moment clearly had an impact. I'm sure agentic coding has had a similar impact. But what has Demis' role been in being the culture carrier of that belief in AI progress internally? Well, I think he's used all his sort of visionary communication skills to unite the Mountain View team and the London team. And I think the one sort of organizational contribution he's made, which is sort of super powerful, is that from a long time ago, DeepMind had always two different cultures going on at once. There was a kind of blue sky research for scientists.

1:45:02You get a lot of freedom. You could publish papers and all that. go find what you want to find. And then there were moments when Demis decided that if you pushed really hard on a particular product or a particular project, you could get a breakthrough achievement that would really shock the world. And so he did this repeatedly with AlphaGo and AlphaFold. And this was sort of like his judgment, scientific taste being applied to knowing when the moment was ripe to really go for it. And once he decided that, the blue sky research kind of bottoms up stuff, that went out the window and it became a top-down strike team, they called it.

1:45:45And in a strike team, there was a lot of top-down direction and everybody had to work on the same code base. You couldn't just go off and code your own experiment on the side. You had to be contributing to the main one. and that drives towards, a team is driving in a united way towards an outcome. And I don't think Google Brain had that. Google Brain had much more of the bottom-up stuff and there was no strike team component. And so Demis brought this strike team idea and it came from video game design. Earlier in his life, he'd been a builder of video games and he, in fact, started a company doing that.

1:46:24And so this was like how you ship product. And that's been a key insight for Gemini. Google and Gemini have every advantage just due to the massive cash flows that they have from their other businesses. How do you think that has impacted the culture of DeepMind, given that they have something very real to lose? It's not just about maybe Demis' personal desire to be at the forefront of this research. But if you're not successful, then you have the potential to lose or have your core business threaten. Google search? Yeah, Google search in such a big way. Yeah. And I think Google Search stands for a more general point that Google's whole reputation stands on providing reliable information.

1:47:17And so the penalty for screwing up is very high. You've got this very valuable company. You don't want to spoil its reputation. And so I think they were more worried about releasing a chatbot fast. And so they had prototypes of a chatbot in the fall of 2022, and they didn't want to release, and then OpenAI went ahead and did it. And so that kind of forced their hand. But their first instinct was, this is going to hallucinate. This is going to do bad stuff. We can't afford that hit to our reputation. And Demis was quite honest with me in saying, well, the surprise was actually the public's quite happy to play with the tool that hallucinates.

1:47:58It still went viral. So we should be less inhibited. But that was an example of how being at Google could be a kind of inhibition in moving ahead. How does Deb Mason, he's always told a very optimistic story about AI. I love him as a science communicator, as an optimist. How has he interfaced with the effective altruist community, more of the AI doom crowd? Because he doesn't talk about it that often, but does he think about it often? He does think about it. In fact, he met his co-founder, Shane Legg, at an AI safety lecture. They bonded in a safety lecture. And so right from the beginning, safety has been a big part of the agenda.

1:48:45And when Demis sold his company to Google in early 2014, part of the deal was you're not going to use this technology for weapons ever. And you're going to have a special independent oversight kind of committee, you know, which will decide on AGI deployment because we don't want that to be just up to the corporate board of Google. Now, you know, he's slipped on some of these things, particularly the military stuff. But he has been thinking about safety. and the question is, what has he got to show for it? It's all very well to think about something, but what can you deliver? And I think this is why, towards the end of my book, he's talking to me quite honestly about how it's a sort of paradoxical moment.

1:49:29He's doing great as an AI inventor. He's doing terribly badly as a sort of AI steward, as making it safe. It's just, it turns out that there's a race dynamic. The race dynamic includes China. How do you control this technology when everybody is racing to jam it out the door? Yeah, it was interesting. Last week, we were talking about how Bernie Sanders has come out with a push to pause data center development. And he quotes Demis and some other lab leads talking about how they would agree to a pause if other countries were kind of in agreement on it. And Bernie obviously left out the fact that I don't think any lab lead could see China pausing on development.

1:50:15So how is your personal definition of AGI evolved over the last few years? Because everyone has their own definition. Half the people that come on the show says it was six weeks ago. Exactly. And then and then yet we're still in so many of these kind of more high level conversations. lab leads talk about race, you know, where AGI is six months away, you know. You're completely right. Everybody has their own definition. And so my solution is not to have that discussion. I mean, who cares what, you know, this, you could say right now it's, Gemini is artificial, it's general, it's intelligent, game over.

1:50:52But, you know, just a definition thing. I think the other one, which is sort of usually fruitless is, is AI conscious? Could it become conscious? What is consciousness? Nobody has a good idea. So let's just sidestep those two things. I heard one good idea, which was something around training a model specifically that would hold back all data and all training data related to consciousness and the idea of consciousness. And so it cannot just pull from the archive and reference or simulate consciousness. And if it develops consciousness from that and can talk cogently about consciousness without having any training data ever seen the idea of consciousness, then maybe that's conscious.

1:51:35I don't know. That's interesting. It was just an interesting thought experiment. I don't know that anyone's actually run the test, and I don't know that I would even accept it if they did, but it is something to think about. Did you feel an acceleration in your personal writing process due to AI? I felt an acceleration in my learning process, which is sort of what I do before I go interview people. So because all of the computer science papers are basically on archive, and recently there's been less publication, but certainly up to about 2022, you could go see a scientist, either at DeepMind or one of the rival labs, and just have a conversation with the model about, okay, this person has done four papers, what's the connecting thread, why is this person different to the one I interviewed last week?

1:52:20That was a super efficient way of getting up to speed. And I didn't worry that it might be wrong because I was going to speak to the human and cross-check it. But that was helpful. Do you think Demis' having a home base in the UK, in what ways do you think it would have helped or hurt the company so far? like has it been beneficial from the talent war standpoint i'm sure i'm sure lab u.s uh some of the other lab leads have taken a trip out to the uk mark zuckerberg's hoping hosting nightly dinners for ai leads at his house which is just a couple blocks from all the other labs can't do that if you're in if the researchers are in the uk right yeah i mean there is movement across the atlantic But I think the deal is, if you're in London, it's a little harder to recruit people.

1:53:11But once you've got them, they're probably stickier than they would be if you're in Mountain View or somewhere. I think Demis has stayed in London because actually he is weirdly patriotic. He comes from this mixed up sort of Greek heritage father, a Singaporean Chinese mother. In a way, that makes him a typical Londoner because London is really a melting pot. but you know he stays there because he feels he wants he believes in sort of british social democratic values it's maybe ironic to an american audience but you know actually he thinks it's more egalitarian in britain than it is in the u.s you know the u.s if you go to the deep mind office in london you know you go past the sort of public spaces like it's kind of fountain with toddlers playing it and there's a kind of free movies in the summer by the canal and then you get to this green space where the kids from the local housing project are playing soccer.

1:54:07And then you get to the deep buying office and it's hard to imagine you'd find that on the way to the, you know, the, the Apple headquarters or something. And, you know, it's just a different vibe. Could you ever see Demis as CEO of Google or would he have to do too much paperwork? You know, this gets to the heart of the dichotomy about Demis. It's so difficult because he's so many different things at once. I mean, you know, he is this Nobel Prize winning scientist who would love to just do pure research. And he often would sort of fantasize to me about, hey, I want to retire to the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies and do what Einstein and Oppenheimer did before me and go there.

1:54:48And that, you know, I think he really means it when he says that. At the same time, he also wants to be in command of, you know, an AI lab. And he likes the capitalist competition. So if he had the opportunity to be chief executive of the whole of Google, I suspect he's too competitive to say no. But who knows? I mean, there is that science side. It's genuinely unpredictable. He probably doesn't know himself. Were you left personally optimistic after this process about just our AI future broadly net positive impact from AI? I mean, clearly there's a lot of upside, especially in medicine and pharmaceutical discovery.

1:55:34I think you have to be honest and say there's also a downside, significant downside. And as I continued to do the research for this project, I became more worried about the downside because people like Jeffrey Hinton, I went up and spent two hours in his kitchen in Toronto and sat there debating not necessarily whether machines would be more intelligent than humans. Obviously, they will be. But whether machines have a motivation to harm humans, and he's very persuasive in arguing that they will. I mean, my point was, look, humans evolved over centuries to survive, to pass on their DNA. We're hardwired to survive.

1:56:15That's why we fight each other. Machines aren't like that. So why would they attack us? Why are you so worried, Jeff? and Jeff is like, well, imagine you've got this super powerful AI and it's going to be attacked by the enemy AI and you have to defend it so you tell the AI if you see a cyber attack coming, you've got to fight back, you've got to defend yourself. And now all of a sudden you've given your AI a survival instinct. And so don't tell me that evolution has to happen as it happened to humans. The evolution can happen in a machine way but these systems are going to want to survive and they're going to be more intelligent than us.

1:56:50So we're in trouble. And I think you can't dismiss that. So I'm kind of both worried and excited at the same time. And I think that's how humans generally respond to all technology. And if we didn't take that trade and move forward with both the excitement and the scariness of technology, if we didn't take that, we'd be still living in caves. So in some sense, the story of Demis is like the story of all of us, but magnified 10x. There's a documentary that was just released or might be releasing right now that features an interview with Themis, the AI doc. And it spends more time talking to all the different lab leads and voices in the industry, more focused on the doom question.

1:57:36Can we be apocalyptic? Should we be optimistic? But what I found most interesting was that the creator of the documentary summed up his full takeaway and said that AI is a Ponzi scheme. And I'm wondering if you got any vibes that everything will collapse, that this is just not financially viable. No, my view is that there's no AI bubble, but there's only just an open AI bubble. in the sense that the technology clearly is getting better and better pretty fast. We had the first chatbot in 2022 and it hallucinated, then they killed the hallucination, then they had longer context windows, then they had multimodal systems that could handle video and pictures and then they went to reasoning models and now we're getting agentic models and now next there's going to be world models that will be built into these things.

1:58:32this is a lot of progress in just three and a half years. So I think it's accelerating in progress and therefore it's not a bubble. But what is true is that it's super expensive to develop and if you're not attached to a really deep pocket like Demis is attached to Sundar, you're in trouble because I don't think OpenAI can raise enough money to bridge from today when they have a very popular chatbot but almost none of those customers pay for it to some future where the product is stickier somehow and they can charge money. And so I think OpenAI has been running two simultaneous experiments. One is with a new frontier technology.

1:59:17And the second is how deep are global capital markets? And they already raised$41 billion last year, which was a record for any private fundraising, bigger than any IPO, by the way, as well. And so, you know, kudos to Sam Altman for raising that much money. But can you pull that trick, like, on a bigger scale every year until 2030 when they hope to break even? No. And that's why they're cutting products like Soro. Except for right now. Why? Because they just raised the$120. But if you look at the$100, it's kind of smoke and mirrors. You know, a lot of that is contingent on you get this money if you go public.

1:59:58You get this money in the future. You get this money in kind in terms of, you know, compute or something. The$100 wasn't really$100. Isn't there a little bit of a dynamic where you could wind up with like an anti-Google alliance? Maybe there's, you know, there's like a tension between the industry and Google. This is like the foundational like myth of the AI industry and the AI labs broadly, although they, of course, have fractured many, many times at this point. Yeah, I mean, you know, of course, there's always rivalries. You know, one might say people gang up on NVIDIA. You know, that's the occupational hazard of being the leader, right?

2:00:38I think they'll deal with it. I mean, I don't think it's a winner-takes-all market, by the way. I think that, you know, there'll be space for others. Yeah, that makes sense. Last question from my side, then we'll let you go. Did you have any takeaways or kind of ideas around the diffusion of physical AI and robotics? Did anything stand out? Do you have a strong opinion there? Right now, it feels like we've entered this sort of software singularity, but we just had Kaser from Applied Intuition on, and we're talking with him about how autonomy and AI is diffusing through the physical world. But I'm curious if you had any takeaways.

2:01:19Yeah, I mean, look, I think that, you know, one thing sometimes people don't quite understand is that large language models and the transformer architecture that underpins them is super consequential for lots of applications, not just chatbots. And so robotics is being improved by this technology. And I fully expect to see a huge breakthrough over the next two or three years with the capability of robotics. And so I think that's going to be the big story. I kind of agree with the guy from KSL you had before, that the movement of atoms is going to be affected as much as anything else. So that's part of why I don't think this is a bubble.

2:02:04I think the potential in this super powerful AI is enormous. Well, thank you so much for coming and joining the show. It was a pleasure talking to you. The book is The Infinity Machine. It's available everywhere books are sold. Thank you so much. Fantastic cover, too. Yeah, beautiful cover. Thank you for having me. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week. All right. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai. And we will kick off the Lambda Lightning Round. Let's see. Oh, look at this.

2:02:41We got everything. This is amazing. Let's bring in Forrest. Forrest from Somos. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Hello, guys. How are you doing? We're doing fantastic. First time in the show. Please introduce yourself. What a what a setup here is a great setup. It's fantastic

2:03:01Nerdy stuff from the team all the things we're building. No, I guess. Yeah, break it amazing Yeah, kick it off Let's see, where do I start? I'm Forrest. I'm a fancy plumber building infrastructure from scratch down here in Colombia to make internet way better and make compute and everything kind of work well in Latin America and beyond. So very weird journey, but making the fastest internet in the world at the lowest cost is kind of a summary in a very short nutshell. Amazing. You have a lot of fans. I got a bunch of texts from investors that were excited for you to come on. um what what were you doing before before we get into so much what were you doing before this dude i came to medellin when i was like 18 years old basically just dropped out of high school and started building stuff and ostensibly came to visit a friend for a couple weeks and that was eight years ago and here i am so i i made websites i kind of took a very non-traditional path and it's led me to doing a bunch of weird stuff here that's actually a non-traditional path normally when somebody comes on and says they had a non-traditional path.

2:04:07It's like, you know, Stanford to a meta internship, a Google internship, a VC internship. But very, very cool. What, yeah, breakdown, like, you know, Somos, you're raising a series B today. Like, how long have you been at it? What initially, I can kind of guess what the initial inspiration might have been. You're building digital products, it sounds like, and we're probably frustrated with internet at speeds, but what's the backstory? No, I came to Colombia in 2018. I got roped into helping people build this like blockchain incentivized blah, blah, blah back when everything was going to be blockchain in like urban slums here in Medellin.

2:04:47And as those blockchain projects happened, everyone got bored really quickly. So they just left me with all the equipment and I just kind of became fascinated by how do you build connectivity in slums and didn't speak any Spanish and know anything about telecom and just started tinkering and first couple of years were me like literally living in a slum here in medellin building internet stringing stuff up in the middle of the street and kind of bit by bit i just became fascinated by the concept of like internet is the most basic thing for the modern world and we just sort of assume that it's been solved and really we haven't done an engineering in the last like 30 years it's it's the same underlying architecture that like john malone was building in cable cowboy days yeah yeah every time i go travel to another country i always look up like who the biggest industrialists are and who the richest people in the world are.

2:05:33It's always the people that built like the railroads, the mines, the telecom infrastructure, the, the wifi, the internet, the power lines. It's always like the stuff that once you install it, uh, it provides value. Yeah. It sounds like, it sounds like you're doing a lot. What, what is, what is in your strike zone of, of things that you want Somos to take on versus where do you work with external partners? Like what is, what is the kind of core path? This is kind of the insanity of Somos. So We literally do everything from like we interface with the submarine cables. We built like a nationwide backbone crisscrossing the country.

2:06:04We like make the Wi-Fi routers. So like the things that go inside of the thing here is all PCBs. Oh, that's a Wi-Fi router. I thought that was just a pretty lamp. So this is literally the router that goes in customers' homes. So instead of being some like ugly blinky box, it's like a beautiful lamp. That's super cool. You're like, wait, does it have to be an ugly box? No one thought of this. This is incredible. Like the internet is like literally the most incredible machine humanity's ever built. And we're just relegated it to being this like ugly piece of infrastructure. And kind of our idea is like, what if it was dope?

2:06:35That's amazing. So yeah, like how do you, like how does the coverage map like spread out? Everyone's familiar with those like AT &T and Verizon coverage charts of like the map of America. Do you have to go city by city, block by block? Are there ways that you can, like, how do you actually scale out to reach an entire coverage area? So I literally have like a thousand plus employees cabling the streets. We have like linemen and installers and they're all at work directly for SOMOS. And this is kind of the insanity of what we're doing. And it's been a bit of a like slow flywheel to get ramping.

2:07:10But then at the end of the day, you're building this actual moat because it turns out it's really hard to build new infrastructure from scratch. So we literally are cabling the entire city from scratch with a new type of fiber to connect people to faster, cheaper Internet. Yeah. Well, in what ways do you think it's easier to do in a place like Colombia than the United States and vice versa? Yeah, I think this is one of the interesting things is like the U.S. is kind of looks archaic in comparison to some of the stuff we're building here. So like my base plan for a customer is like 12 bucks a month and is a gig.

2:07:42And we're giving people 10 gig connections and soon 100 gig connections in their home. So the kind of weird thing that has happened in the U.S. is we sort of believe Comcast is sacred. So we don't let people go build new infrastructure. And we're almost there's a world where it's like 10 years from now. We're like, shit, the U.S. has like third world Internet infrastructure. And what we thought of as the third world has infrastructure. Let's just do all these crazy things that AI is enabling that you couldn't do before. So I think there's this inversion happening kind of the same way as there were no landlines in Africa.

2:08:11we're kind of leapfrogging all the crappy old cable and just building internet as it was intended back in the ARPA days. That's amazing. How do you get people to move to Columbia to work on this? What's your pitch? Not saying anything wrong with Columbia. It's just, it's a long way away. It's a long flight. The time zone is not too bad. It's 75 degree the other year round. We have awesome engineering. It's like San Francisco without the fog and we get to just build whatever the hell you want. It's kind of like cowboy Western technology, galt scotch in the middle of the jungle. That's amazing. Last question for me.

2:08:49I'm sure you got asked this in all the VC pitches. How is Starlink rolling out? How is satellite internet fit into this? Is that a competitor? Is that a compliment? A lot of people in America sort of have both, but how does that fit into the picture? I think the big takeaway here is I would sell your Comcast or Telephonic or Telemex stock because I think what's happening is Starlink is attacking lower density areas, moving stuff, mobile. Somos is basically building, think of Starlink for city. So we're building a pure play, just the best internet for urban environments. And I think there's like a density threshold where below that, Starlink will win.

2:09:29Above that, a thing like Somos will win. But realistically, if I'm on level, if I'm on the third floor of a 15 story building in the heart of the city and like you're going to win on reliability connectivity speed cost all of that right just base physics will be cheaper and way better and more reliable like even elon will say this he's like starlink isn't really for cities it's for everywhere outside of that right okay yeah so so like like basically unaffected by everything there because of physics uh always good news uh mutual friend zach asked me to told me I should ask about how kind of AI is impacting bandwidth needs and how that factors into the opportunity for you guys.

2:10:09Yeah, I think we're going to look back and say like, damn, the infrastructure we have currently is far underbuilt for the future of applications with AI. And one of the things that we are thinking a lot about in Somos is what if you extend the data center to everyone's end home, all the crazy application lists you can build on top of that, not only just speed, but reliability, redundancy, low latency. I think there's a world where compute lives in data centers and we're streaming your OS, think of like super Chromebooks to everybody and that that's a world where you make compute way cheaper and way better in a way that historically wouldn't really be doable in traditional telecoms.

2:10:42And I think this is back to like, there's a world where LATAM has orders of magnitude better compute than parts of the US just simply because we rebuilt the telecom infrastructure from scratch. Wow. What other markets are on the roadmap? Yeah, well, we're heading to Mexico in the very near future. and I don't know, there's some interesting neighbors of Columbia that are becoming open again that might be a new place to expand to from Columbia. So I think Somos Caracas might be a thing in the future. Before we hit the gong, another mutual friend, Aaron, asked me to ask you about the high frontier.

2:11:18What's up with that? Yeah, I mean, I'm obsessed with this vision of the future as it used to be. And I think one of the things that is stoked for me right now is like, it feels like we're building awesome things like new ship factories and new infrastructure in the world that are like building a future as it used to be. Like we used to think the future was going to be awesome. And we kind of got okay with a very boring, muddling kind of version of it. And it feels like we're now turning this wave of like, let's go build orbital space stations and the Lagrange points. Let's build fleets of autonomous vehicles.

2:11:51Let's build all these amazing things from scratch. So it's like build infrastructure, rebuild the world, make awesome things happen again. It's fantastic. How much did you raise? We just raised 40 million in this round. There we go. Who came in? So Ribbit led this. We had Bracket Capital and then USV, Kazik and Y Combinator all kind of doubled down from the past. So I love it. What a great YC story too. So yeah, fascinating company, fascinating industry. Just, yeah, I love it. Did you pop up to the West Coast for the raise or did you make everybody visit you? It's a little bit of both. Like we get people to come down to Medellin and they're definitely not regretting when they come visit.

2:12:39So we have some fun adventures driving to the countryside. I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Great to meet you, Forrest. I'm sure you'll be back on soon. Have a great day. Cheers, guys. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. Our next guest is Dino from Cerronic. He's in the roostry waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBB in El Tram. Dino, how are you doing? Good, guys. How are you doing? Thanks for having me on. Thanks so much for joining. Great to finally have you on. Yeah, give us the State of the Union.

2:13:07What's going on with Cerronic? Yeah, likewise. You may have seen today we announced a$1.75 billion financing round. There we go.

2:13:21so do we need to build some ships what's going on we gotta build some ships we're super excited for this i mean it is a true true byproduct of the execution that the team has delivered on over the last not just 12 months but the last really 36 months since we started the company i mean our team is truly a plus if you look at where we were just just a year ago we came off a 600 million dollar financing round. What that let us go do is we opened our first shipyard. We launched Marauder, which is 180 foot autonomous and unmanned ship. We then announced a multi hundred million dollar project into that shipyard to scale production of Marauder.

2:14:04And then Coursera, which you see behind me right here, our small USB platforms, we've already taken production of those well into the thousands. So now as we look forward, what we're going to do over the next 12, 24, 36 months with this capital raise is we're going to accelerate that. We're going to accelerate the production, accelerate the deliveries of our vessels to the U.S. and our allies around the world. We're going to launch new products. We're going to build new ships. And then we're going to go and build new shipyards. We're going to invest in the shipbuilding industrial base in this country to the tune of billions of dollars.

2:14:39We're going to create thousands of jobs. And ultimately, we're going to unlock production rates that we haven't seen in this country since World War II. And we're going to do it in a very technology-first, software-first approach. You mentioned USV. Is that unmanned surface vehicle? Unmanned surface vessel. Vessel. Got it. And then, so walk me through the use of, you know, boats used to transport people. Now we put equipment on them. How versatile are these vehicles? What are the different use cases? Are some weapons platforms or some just ISR capabilities? Like what is the range of utilities that the armed forces will get out of these USBs?

2:15:24Extremely versatile. The whole point of the platforms we're building is actually for them to be modular by nature. And actually, we actually try to change the acronym around a little bit. that USV is like unmanned surface vessel. When you look in the past, it's really like a remote control platform, very similar to a predator drone. We use ASV, autonomous surface vessel, because what we're building at Sironic is not just one-to-one control, but it's true maritime autonomy. To then go and deliver these platforms at scale and be able to control them at scale, meaning fleets of hundreds or thousands of vessels through the most advanced software on the planet for the maritime domain.

2:16:06And then when you're looking at the missions, the use cases that you mentioned, it really all just boils down to scale, persistence, and risk reduction. How do you operate large numbers of vessels? How do you do that continuously in what's becoming an increasingly dangerous maritime environment? And then how do you offer like real capability to commanders while keeping sailors out of harm's way? Keeping people safe is very, very critical and a key point to what we're building here. I don't want to diminish the work, but I'm curious about how much of a challenge is it actually to create an autonomous surface vessel?

2:16:46Because it feels like when you're driving on the road, there's so many random conditions and the car can flip over. but boats, it's a little bit safer, I would feel like. But am I missing something there? The other issue is you have people, other boats that are trying to kill you. Okay, okay, maybe that's it. But I'm just thinking like a plane, you know, if it doesn't land perfectly, it'll crash. Like boats, you know, they just kind of rock through the water, but there's obviously more to it. So what went into making it fully autonomous? There's a lot of, yeah. So the ocean is just a completely different environment altogether.

2:17:19So we deal with a lot of different challenges. Sure. One of the challenges that's really different from self-driving cars is, yes, there's a lot of complexities on the road, but that singular car really only cares about how it gets to its end destination. It doesn't care about how the other hundred cars get to its end destination as well and how they're all working together collaboratively on a mission. Oh, and then you start throwing in six, eight, ten-foot seas, high winds, enemy environment, some of the things that we're seeing now. And like whether it's the Black Sea, the Middle East, we're anticipating in the Indo-Pacific.

2:17:58Those are very, very complex challenges that we're solving at Cerronic. Yeah. What goes into setting up a new shipyard? Do you have to kind of co-locate around existing shipyards? Can you kind of stand something up totally independently? How does that work? Yeah, I mean, when you look at shipyards and the shipbuilding industrial base in this country, it's really how do you bring on net new capacity? You're not really co-locating next to anything because a lot of that capacity has really atrophied over the last 30, 40, 50 years. So what we're focused on is building new shipyards and then building the ecosystem and the infrastructure to support that as well through partnerships and vendor relationships.

2:18:43But one of our main projects and one of the things a large part of this capital is gonna go towards is Port Alpha, right? We have a shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana, I mentioned that we're investing hundreds of millions of dollars in that yard, but we're looking at a brand new shipyard, building this from the ground up, completely greenfield, investing billions of dollars to 10x the size of our existing yard, right? To bring on new scale, new capacity and rebuild the shipbuilding industrial base from the ground up. That's what's needed because if you go around the country right now, you go to places which used to be shipyards and you'll see apartments and condominiums that are called naval yards.

2:19:25That's not just a name they came up with. It actually used to be a shipyard. So what we're doing now is we're investing in the shipyards of the future, again, to produce at a scale that we haven't seen since World War II. What's the best way to get a job at Saronic? You can apply on our website. I mean, we are hiring. We are growing. I mentioned how amazing our team is. What we're doing is absolutely critical for the country. The team comes in every single day. The work they're doing is changing the world. And so if you're a top engineer or looking to get into the defense tech space, please, please apply.

2:20:01everything we're doing is absolutely critical. We grew the team from 200 to 1 ,300 people over the last 12 months. And that's only the beginning, guys. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming and breaking it down. Have a great rest of your day. Yeah, incredible progress. The chat says just put the S1 in the SEC mailbox. We'll talk to you soon. Good to see you. Thanks, guys. Look forward to following up. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent with Okta. And our next guest is already in the restring waiting room.

2:20:40We got Will Ahmed from Whoop. Who's back. How are you doing? Good to see you again. Welcome back. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Give us the update. What happened? How are you doing? Things are good, thank you. We announced a round of financing today, our Series G,$575 million round. So, okay. Yes. There we go. Thank you. Is this the capital you finally need to make a bust-down whoop? Diamonds from the factory. That's what I'm looking for. Can you do anything for me? You know, we do have some premium offerings in the mix that are going to be just right for you, actually. Perfect. I think you're very happy with product development roadmap.

2:21:23Jordy wants a bust-down. No, seriously, give me the updates. What's changed? Where do you want the product to go? And yeah, I am interested to know, are more collaborations in the works? Do you see that as an important point? Or are you just focused on more and more channel partners, more and more distribution, more growing because the product's pretty dialed at this point? Well, look, it's been an extraordinary 12 months for the business. You know, we ended 2025 with over 100 percent year over year growth, you know, 1.1 billion in bookings run rate to end the year. Our membership is growing around the world.

2:22:03We're operating in 60 markets. We've got members in over 200 countries. We've launched medical grade technology now coming out with blood tests around the world. And so whoops really become this broad based health platform. And you can see that in the financing announcement today. You know, we've got the history of Whoop with the world-class athletes. We've added now LeBron James is a new Whoop investor. We've got Cristiano Ronaldo on the cap table, Virgil van Dijk, Matthew Vanderpool. Some of the world's very best athletes, really from every sport, are now on the Whoop cap table. And then in addition to that, we've got a bunch of great existing investors continuing to support the company, Collaborative Fund, IVP, Foundry Group, and more.

2:22:54And then we've brought in some sovereign wealth funds from the GCC, proud to have Mubadala and QIA and 2.0. So really some of the biggest funds in the world that are, I think, phenomenal long-term partners. And then lastly, to the point about health, we've added the Mayo Clinic is an investor in Whoop, one of the premier health institutions. There we go. That's a niche. That's a rare Pokemon adventure world. I haven't heard of them on a cap. We're not ripping a lot of seed checks at YC Demo Day. Yeah, they haven't done a lot of investing, but we see a ton of synergies from a research and medical capability standpoint.

2:23:35point. And we also have added Abbott as an investor and, you know, really one of the best medical device makers also in the world. So it's a phenomenal mix of investors. And I think we've been able to achieve this because of the remarkable growth that we're seeing as a company. And I think also just the tailwinds around health and longevity. How do you think your marketing mix will change over the next few years? Because I'm seeing$575 million, LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo, that has like crazy Super Bowl ad written all over it. At the same time, you're tech native. I could imagine going way further into AI generated, personalized ads, pushing the performance marketing further.

2:24:20Like what appeals to you? How do you think you'll change? What will stay the same? What will change over the next few years from a marketing perspective? Well, we never want to lose sight of the fact that we started in sports and we've built this aspirational performance lifestyle brand. And so that'll really be at the core still of a lot of what we do for Whoop. But we also now have a product that can detect whether you have AFib and tell you your blood pressure every morning and help you do blood tests. So it's just a much broader health platform than it's ever been before. And our marketing needs to reflect that.

2:24:54One of the areas I would say of maybe not weakness, but opportunity for Whoop is brand awareness. We don't have massive brand awareness around the world. And so this capital is going to give us the gunpowder to really grow broadly internationally. And so you're going to be seeing a lot of whoop wherever you consume content. Super Bowl ad incoming. Yeah. I mean, if you want to reach me specifically, maybe a partnership with an athlete like Johnny Knoxville might work. It just might make sense. we'll do a whoop live heart rate on some of the stunts I think that would do the trick uh I'm curious like how uh whoop uh like how do you guys think about improving accuracy at this point like I'm assuming like a lot of like so so much progress has been made over the last however many years but there's still always incremental progress like you can always be more accurate?

2:25:56How do you think about that? Is that still like a top priority or is it accurate enough at this point that there's better things you can focus the core energy of the team on? I mean, I think big picture, we want the product to be getting constantly smaller and smarter. We want it to be an aspirational product in the sense that it's something cool that you wear on your wrist or we want it to be something that disappears throughout your body and can essentially be invisible. And so however you can gather this data super accurately, have the data sets grow in nature, more sensing, more capabilities, more medical approvals, the better.

2:26:41And I think that's going to continue to expand our TAM. I think it's going to continue to deliver deeper insights for our members. So we're going to be leaning in pretty heavily on research and development. you're going to see a lot of very powerful sensing coming from WHOOP in the years to come. How is the peptide boom affecting WHOOP? Well, I think the underlying reason for the peptide boom is that people want to take more control of their own health. And they're sort of generally frustrated with the tools that they've had to improve their health. And so that leads in different directions, peptides being part of it, supplements being part of it, concierge doctors being part of it, AI health coaching being part of it.

2:27:28But broadly speaking, it's, I think, good for Whoop that people want to take more control of their health. And 10 years ago, I would talk about health monitoring and people would say, well, that sounds like something niche for athletes. And now, you know, everywhere I go, people want to talk about how they can improve their sleep or improve their VO2 max or what is heart rate variability. So there's just clearly been a cultural shift to care a lot about your health. And longevity has become one of the most common reasons that people use the product. Our health span score, the WHOOP age score, has become the most screenshotted page in the WHOOP app.

2:28:05So clearly you've got people who want to show off how old they are or who want some counseling for how, how, um, how old they might be. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. There's an interesting dynamic with the various health platforms where there's like kind of an incentive, there's like a weird incentive to like, you know, measure, like say somebody's, uh, uh, you know, their chronological age versus their biological age, make it like lower. People are more likely to share. It's like, I've seen, I've seen some people have, you know, come in and say like, well, my biological age is 19.

2:28:39I did one test that said I had the mind of a five-year-old. It was testing my brain health, and it said that I had the... Is that good or bad? It's not. It's extremely young. I'm way over five, so I assume it's good. I think we've built the most credible biological age metric. Because, first of all, we did it in partnership with the Leading Longevity Institute out of California and then the Buck Institute. And then we show you in great granularity, each of your biometrics and what's improving it and what's not and by how much. So here's a trivia question for you. What percentage of people on whoop do you think have a younger whoop age?

2:29:24Oh, interesting. I mean, if it was perfect, it would be 50, 50, I would think. 70 % because people that use whoop are much more likely to be healthy. Oh, true. Okay, so let's go with 70. What is it? It's 55%. 55%. But what that means is 45 % are older on woops. You know? They're early in their woop journey. You guys have done a lot, but this whole show is really dialed in. No, so 45 % are... Sorry, continue. Yes. So, you know, but that shows that, like, it's not just telling you what you want to hear. It's going to push you. Yeah, and I only brought that up originally because I've seen some of these come out, and I'm like, okay, there's zero shot.

2:30:10This person's biological age is lower than their chronological age. Based on the life we live. Not every platform, you know, platforms are just kind of, every platform is going to run their own kind of algorithm to determine that and not necessarily working with the Buck Institute. Yeah, exactly. Well, very cool. fantastic great to get the update congrats to the whole congratulations the whole team i feel like just in the last year yeah like the world has woken up to this kind of category yeah and your guys's progress is a testament and i still think it's i still think it's very early it must be fun to walk down the street for you and you know someplace like la and you know i'm sure it's like every 10th person has a whoop band on but that means uh there's nine nine or so uh yeah it It is a trip seeing Whoop in the world.

2:30:59And for people who decide to take the hard path of building hardware, it's an amazingly rewarding feeling when you see a physical product that your team's built in the world. So I will say that's a very gratifying thing. But you guys owe me a question here. You haven't asked me. What is it? What's the question? Aren't you going to ask me if the job's done? Oh, yeah. Is the job finished? Job's not done, guys. We got to keep going.

2:31:28Thank you. Thank you for that. Great stuff. Congratulations. I appreciate you guys. Keep it up. Thank you. We'll see you at Nicey soon, I'm sure. Get ready. The chat's going to be your strongest supporters. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon, Will. Have a great one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. I own the data platform that powers it. Continuing our lightning round. You know who we got? The CEO of public.com. Yannick, how are you doing? Hey, guys.

2:32:05I'm doing well. How are you? We're doing fantastic. Great to see you. Look at that stuff in the background there. I know. Do you recognize any of this stuff? Oh, yeah. Yeah, you got the whole head to toe. Head to toe. I don't recognize what Jordy is wearing. I don't think. This is new. I lost the mail from me. Oh, you got to get one. This is the new polo. You're right there. Top left. You got lead left. You got plenty of room on the walls. There's plenty of room on the walls. Anyway, enough about our merch. Let's talk about your business. Walk us through the launch today. Yeah, so today we launched AI Agents for Investing.

2:32:36Yes. The easiest, safest way to put AI agents to work directly inside your portfolio. Yeah. And the way it works is pretty simple. There's now an agents tab directly within the public app. You chat with an AI to set up agents that monitor markets, move money around, and even execute trades for you all within the app, right? So there's nothing to install from a security standpoint. Obviously, everything stays in a safe, controlled environment because it's within the brokerage. Can I install Axios? No, do not do that. That is such a niche joke. Everyone's going to think you're talking about the publication.

2:33:11Yeah, exactly. No, but I mean, it's been really fun. I have a bunch of agents running now on my account. It's been really awesome to see how it's changed my behavior as an investor, right? John, relax. I like the sound of that. I knew you were going to do that. We got a little John in the studio. No, so it makes total sense. If people are already signed up, which they should be, what's the first thing that they should try to set up or experiment with? What was your first few agents that you set up and continue to keep running? Because I'm assuming you can effectively run them, you can retire them at different points.

2:33:51Exactly. The first one I set up was one that checks the oil prices before the market open and buys protective put options every day as a hedge. If there's a spike in those, I call it the I'm tired of seeing red due to war agent. And so today that didn't fire. Thank God. You know, I have another one that just looks at my bank accounts and automatically sweeps any cash in excess of a certain amount into my bond portfolio. So I'm always yield maxing. You'll want to be yield maxing always, especially while rates are still high. Yeah, that makes sense. And then I got some more advanced stuff. Like I got one that scans the market for opportunities to write covered calls across my top position.

2:34:33So if there's a low risk opportunity to make like 20 grand a month selling options premiums, I instructed it to just go ahead and place those orders. So that just rolls every time, all the time. That exact strategy was the first thing a private wealth manager ever pitched me. in my career, like a decade ago. They were like, I, and they had like a guy that did it and you had to have a lot of money to like access that and there were minimums and stuff. You should probably check on that guy. After today's launch. No, no, no. But so, so I, I, there are obviously like incredibly advanced things that you can do with these agents in, in the market.

2:35:09I'm also interested in just driving behavior change because a lot of folks that I know are earlier in their career. They don't want to necessarily take a ton of risk. the biggest lever on their financial future will just be seamlessly funneling money from their paychecks into something as simple as VTI, and then they can do something more advanced down the road. But what does it look like in terms of the best practices or best functionality for just creating a set it and forget it, I want to make sure that every time I get paid, money's flowing into the market. How easy is that these days? um well i think with agents that becomes really really simple right i think this is sort of the whole point you know the stock market has always been about manually entering orders right like you do all this work and eventually you end up manually being like buy 200 shares of apple at this price yeah i think that user interface is now shifting to something like um increase my position if valuations compress 15 from here yeah you know and it stays within my defined risk tolerances and so forth.

2:36:13And so I think it changes how people think about and manage their portfolios in a pretty profound way. And we do see it as a user interface shift. The interesting thing about this industry is every technology kind of had their model of brokerage, right? Like we started on the horn and then the dawn of the internet gave us the discount broker with mobile came the neo broker. And I think now with AI, it's the era of the agendic brokerage. But what's uniquely interesting about this shift is every previous shift was about streamlining the process and reducing the responsibility set of the broker, you know, to basically just trade execution ultimately.

2:36:51But it actually used to be much more full service to Jordi's point. There used to be a guy who used to call you, used to pitch all these kind of ideas, risk, you know, trade ideas, et cetera. I think with the identity brokerage model, you're reversing back to that. And it's much more full service than obviously any human service could ever be because this thing can like write an algorithmic trading script for you in 10 seconds. They can do tax-less harvest. They can instantly analyze risk. And so it's a shift back to a world where the brokerage plays a much larger role than just trade execution.

2:37:22It sort of goes into the realm of maybe a quant and a financial advisor. And that's what we're excited about, the brokerage playing a much bigger role through essentially Agentic AI. Jordan? Can it pull in external data sources yet? I'm thinking like fear and greed index like should i could i said something even like unemployment if you have like max fear that you want to buy on days when when the fear index is high but that might not be an actual uh like instrument in that you can buy and sell directly yep 100 unemployment data cpi fed cards like one that people have been kicking around today is you know whenever there's a fed card move money obviously out of my high yield cash account on public put it to work it's a high growth tech.

2:38:08We like the sound of that. That makes sense.

2:38:14There's a lot of those. CPI, like the fear and greed one was requested today. I think that's coming in the next couple of days. Really, it's about getting all that into this natural language interface and just letting people instruct AI to do this on their behalf. Last question for me about AI on the platform. What are the capabilities What have you learned about users educating themselves about various financial instruments within the public ecosystem? You know, okay, I see a company. You're going to surface price-to-earnings ratio, market cap, the usual stuff. But there's so much more that you can ask an LLM these days about what does a company actually do?

2:38:57What is their strategy? What's the history of this company? What's the founder? These things are perfect for LLMs, and you can vend those in. but what are users actually using? What's adoption been like? What are the learnings been? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the core tasks in application layer AI is to sort of figure out, obviously, what do users want to achieve? Yeah. And then which model and kind of harness is best suited to achieve that purpose? Sure. But then also focus on like, what are we uniquely able to deliver, right? So we know what you own. We know what you used to own. Yeah. We know what your risk tolerance is.

2:39:34By the way, we also know the difference between what that actually is and what you said it was when you signed up. And we have real-time data feeds of everything, right? And so I think as a product builder, those are like some of the situations where you can really create a magic moment that general purpose LLMs can. And I think a lot of that comes because we just have a lot of that kind of history about how people like to invest, what questions they've asked, to your point, in the past about the P-E ratio or what the founders like, et cetera, because we've been basically running a research assistant since 2023.

2:40:08And we're only a six-year-old company. So it's already for sort of like half the time that we've been live. And so we've been able to gather a lot of data for the last three years that we can now kind of repurpose into this. What's your theory right now? It's obviously day one. But do you think in the future we'll get more volatility because you have financial institutions that are effectively using like agents or algorithms to do trading. And then you also have retail. So when you get like a new CPI print, you know, you have, you know, even, even, you know, additional trading activity off of these single events.

2:40:46Like, do you think this is something in the future that, that everyone will effectively have like a handful of agents running just naturally in the product? And then some people, you know, be like, you know, maybe prosumers, people that are more into it will have, you know, many or, or at some point is everyone, you know, at what point do, is it like, you know, old fashioned to be just like, you know, buying a stock yourself, even with a button? Totally. I actually think we will look back at like tables and buy buttons and feel that's a little antique, maybe already 12 months from now. But I think the effect is things will get priced in faster for sure.

2:41:23On the institutional side, they've, you know, they've used some version of AI for the longest time, right? But then at the same time, retail have gone from being like 5 % to 25 % of the market. And on the retail side, folks haven't been as fast to react always, right? They haven't been that disciplined. They're not necessarily glued to the screen 24-7. And so, you know, they can't always react as quickly as they want to. And agents obviously change that, right? And so I do think that there might be, I mean, it's a little bit like whether it's crypto prediction markets, there's always a little bit more of a sort of an alpha opportunity or an ARP opportunity in the early, early days.

2:42:01And then over time, it becomes more mainstream and that kind of fades away. And I would suspect that this follows something like a similar pattern. Yeah, I've just been thinking about it because the content on X is primarily user generated, at least the big accounts. It means that an event happens in the real world. It gets reported on or it pops up on a website or you get a newswire. and then a human takes that and puts it on X. And then this trade, even the majority of retail volume is like flowing off of like that human seeing the news, posting it. And then you get this sort of trading activity.

2:42:35But in a perfect world, you see news and then you go to your broker and the right trade has already been made on your behalf. Exactly. And anybody that's not adopting this will just be like, well, I missed kind of, I missed opportunity unless you want to get out entirely. Totally. Speaking of X, a fun one is, that was from the US, if DJT says bye, just bye.

2:43:02That's actually really smart. I think that's probably backtests very well. It backtests extremely well. What a crazy timeline we are in. Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Great to see you. I miss you. Let's be sure to hang out. Let's hang soon. We will. Bye-bye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we have Ryan from Crosby. How you doing, Ryan? Welcome back. Hey, guys. Good to see you again. Dude, you're on here like every week.

2:43:40It's getting ridiculous. Yeah, it's getting a bit much. Let me guess. Let's schedule the next one. You should just bundle all the fundraisers together into like a series alphabet. that. Then you just do it all at once. But then I never get to see you guys in the kitchen. It is more strategic to break them up, but tell us what happened. How much did you raise? What's going on? We have two announcements. The first announcement is we've raised$60 million led by Lux.

2:44:06And our second announcement, thank you. The second announcement is we did some math last month and we have now closed contracts worth over a billion dollars for our clients. It's a big milestone for us. Okay. A million dollars for the client. That's good. Is there a power law in there? Was there like one sneaky$950 million deal? Did you get 1 % of this new OpenAI round in there? Somebody was like, I'm going to review one clause and you're like, I'm going to, no, it sounds like there's a lot of lawyers using it. That's right. I mean, these are small deals, so it's a lot of velocity. I think definitely my corporate law friends are like, that's like one deal for me.

2:44:41So that's not interesting, but for us, that's a big number. So it's a really good milestone. Yeah. So yeah, yeah. Take us through, I mean, it sounds like the shape of the work that is being augmented by Crosby these days. Yeah. So, you know, we're about a year and a half into it. We announced our seed around 230 days ago. We do commercial agreements. These are the sales agreements, MSAs, NDAs, BPAs for like fast growing AI companies. Now we're branching out. but since the beginning we've been a law firm so we have about 30 lawyers here who i'll give a shout out to are just the last day of the quarter they're working so hard for our clients getting the deals closed and we close deals fast like in a couple hours and so this idea has just taken off with a lot of tech companies now and and now even bigger clients who just want to close faster uh how how have you been processing you're kind of uh i would say very tapped into how well the models work and different roles.

2:45:39I'm curious your view on how application layer legal AI companies will do compared to just the labs themselves, right? I feel like every other day on X, somebody says, wait, this LLM seems to be doing just as much as this application layer company. You guys are using all the models internally for your own internal tools. But how are you processing kind of what feels like, well, ultimately in the same way we saw with code gen, where you have application layer companies and foundation model companies, and then you have foundation models with their own applications. I'm assuming we'll see that in legal, but how have you been kind of processing it?

2:46:26So, I mean, that's, that is the question we have to ask ourselves every day. We think that code generation more or less is kind of like a year and a half ahead of the sort of non-self-verifiable domains. So anything that's not like math or code and law is one of those, but it's a huge service area. And our sort of like insight a couple of years ago was, let's, you know, not think about these sort of like AI co-pilots that are kind of like, you know, the equivalent of what Cursor was a year and a half ago when you kind of hit tab to autocomplete, but these long form agents with bigger contacts that could do a full job end to end.

2:46:58And if you have agents that can do entire swaths of legal work, then the best thing you should do is start a law firm because you're selling work to clients, not fractions of work or helping them along. In truth, we were ahead of the models, and so we were selling something that we weren't able to fully automate. As the models are progressing, we're seeing more and more of a compounding advantage as we have more and more contracts that we're processing. We have more and more lawyers that were able to help us tune judges and create better agents. We're able to just do end-to-end work in a way that if you're just selling a legal co-pilot, I think you're going to face a lot of competition just from the models with no customization.

2:47:36Yep. Sorry. Wild. John's back. Yeah. Wild, wild moment. What I'm assuming you'll also face competition from clients that are just like, Hey, we can, should, should we, should we have an, like, uh, should we have an in-house lawyer that we can, you know, speed up? Uh, but, but everybody's competing with everyone, but, uh, yeah. How are you, how are you tracking the legal education market. I've seen it. It seems very hard to predict for me. Like there was this weird spike. I want to say like it was maybe post chat GPT where there were like more people signing up for law school. And that was like sort of contrarian based on the model capabilities, like the AI SF discourse, but maybe it makes more sense.

2:48:21Like, are you tracking that data? And then are you tracking like how legal education is changing? I imagine that using AI tools already happening in middle school for a lot of people, high school, definitely college, definitely law school. How will that how will that all trace through and how closely are you following it? I mean, I think every industry is asking themselves, like, how do people get the entry level jobs to learn those skills and become really good and senior and get leveraged by agents? I went to law school, Stanford. I'm talking to a lot of professors there who are struggling with this question.

2:48:55I think our insight for now, like the stat we found recently, is that the top 100 law firms last year made a little under$70 billion in just profit just in 2025. That's just paid out to their partners. That's just salary. Let's give it up for lawyers. Good year. That's so good. And that was more money than Google spent on all their R &D. And so our insight was... Mog. So like if we could just put some fraction of the profits law firms are making into building better tools and experiences for lawyers and for their clients, I actually think the legal industry gets a lot bigger. And so it's like for a person in law school today, it's a good time to be thinking like, how can I just build better stuff?

2:49:36And that's just a new way of lawyers thinking. Okay, that's one way to put the profits to work. Let me pitch you another way. If I'm a partner at a law firm and I see that, yes, agents can do the work of the associates that I would be hiring. Maybe a contrarian in me wants to still hire associates just for the mentorship and building the pipeline of partners that will do more human work, more deals work, more interpersonal relationship work. But I know that if I don't start buying and paying for that service right now, even if I'm getting less margin on it loosely because I'm paying an associate a bunch of money and it's work that an AI agent sort of could do and maybe they're a little bit more free, I'm actually incentivized to figure out how to accelerate them faster in their career, have them start working on larger, stickier deals that AI can't necessarily navigate just yet.

2:50:33Yeah, I mean, I buy the argument. Okay. I think that there's two jobs for lawyers really to focus on right now. One is just doing client-facing work and being really good at talking to people and understanding what their points of view are and not being buried in the paperwork like a typical associate. And the other is being able to explain reasonably well to an engineer or a researcher what it is you're doing and what you're thinking about and all the subtleties of context. And those two things, I think, are both things that if you're not hiring enough lawyers, you can't do well and you can't build better legal technology and experiences.

2:51:03And so I think we're feeling this and every law firm is feeling like you just need people to be really thoughtful about doing both of those jobs. Yeah. Are you guys fine tuning any models, you know, based on fine tuning like open source models or is that not even, you know, I've seen like Finn and Notion have had some success with this. is that even a good use of time right now? Because I'm assuming your guys' actual inference costs are not that high relative to what you can charge clients, even if you're using the frontier models. But how are you thinking about that? I think, again, if we just look at cogeneration as the blueprint for the future, you'll see a lot of the cogen companies got a lot of lift from just the main three big models.

2:51:48And over time, you have to start fine-tuning your models as you get scale, as you get data, and as you need a more competitive edge. So we're not there yet. We have a lot of lift from just getting the right context to models, building the right agent flows, like just doing some reinforcement learning on like, basically, you know, we work with really, you know, open AI, Anthropic, and Google's models. But yeah, in a year and a half, as you get really specialized in use cases of law, I'm sure like we're going that direction. And part of the reason for this funding and doing it so quickly is to start investing in a research team that can kind of push the boundaries there.

2:52:19That's very exciting. Well, congratulations on the funding round. I'm sure we'll see you. We'll just book it now. You just tell us. Same time next month. Thanks, gentlemen. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day. Thanks, guys. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And without further ado, we have Chris Yu from Olso. How are you doing, Chris? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, thanks for having me. Welcome to the show.

2:52:51Since this is your first time, please introduce yourself. Yeah, my name is Chris Ewan. I'm the co-founder and president of ALSO. Okay, break it down for us. What is ALSO? Give us some of the corporate lineage, the strategy, the product, just sort of everything. Yeah, so actually before 2022, RJ and I met and we immediately hit it off on this one topic. And so that turned into me joining Rivian at the time with the explicit mission to create a startup within a startup. And the entire thesis that we had, and this has turned into also with a spin out last year, is that, you know, if you look at the vast majority of trips that happen for the movement of people and goods around the world, they happen in smaller than car things.

2:53:31But nearly none of them have been electrified yet. And so it's really taken the Rivian or Tesla playbook and applying it to these smaller form factors. Okay. Smaller form factors, that means everything from hoverboard to a horse and carriage. What are we thinking? We're focusing on wheels first, but yeah. Okay. But yeah, narrow down the product for me, the go-to-market, the quad and the pedal-assisted electric bike. Are there timelines, shapes, sizes, ranges? Like, how do you think about narrowing down the product set? Because it is a really wide and diverse category. Totally. Yeah, so we think of it as, in a way, two phases of the business.

2:54:15Phase one of the business is how do we create a vertically integrated software-defined EV platform, but optimized for small form factors? And we've applied that to our first products. We call them EVs that you can pedal. And we announced those back in October. So one is a consumer e-bike and the other is a pedal quad, which we partnered with Amazon to deploy soon. That's really exciting. But if you look globally again today, things move around in things like two wheelers, like scooters, Bota Bota, Tuk Tuk, micro cars, K trucks. There's just these rich, diverse set of form factors. And again, none of them have been electrified and all of them are ripe for a really kind of tech forward platform, which is what we're building.

2:54:57But importantly, today we announced a partnership with DoorDash, and that kind of underpins phase two of the business, which is – thank you. So if you look at the world becoming more and more autonomous, and even as that happens, some fundamental constraints don't change, meaning these trips are all happening in dense urban, suburban environments. Congestion is always going to be an issue. Cost per mile is always going to be a factor. And so we believe really strongly that even in a fully autonomous world, small form factors make sense for a lot of these trips. And that's really what this partnership is about.

2:55:32Talk to me about, I mean, I love RJ. Rivian is an incredible company. Obviously, a younger company in many ways than other EV makers that might be more vertically integrated. So I'm wondering like how much is it that you're taking the supply chain knowledge the expertise the best practices the connections and setting up sort of an entirely new supply chain that's distinct versus you're just going to be able to buy stuff from Rivian or license it or there's going to be more of a business relationship other than just funding. It's all of the above we RJ and I talk about us as kind of like sibling companies if you will.

2:56:10So I think I mean there's a few aspects. One is we share the latest and greatest from a technical architecture standpoint. So if you look at how also vehicles are built, they're very, very similar in terms of how a Rivian is built. There are some commodities that are shared. So battery cells, our first products actually use the same cell that are in Rivian R1s. And that helps a lot from a scale standpoint. But there are other areas where we are taking a decidedly different path because our products are different from a car, truck or SUV. So supply chain that you mentioned, that's actually one of them.

2:56:43We are fully engineered in-house, but we partner with contract manufacturers across the world to be able to do assembly. And that's right for smaller scale products. Yeah. And with cars, you almost always want to manufacture them where they're going. Like that's why even like the Japanese car makers have facilities in America or Mexico because you just would drive the car as opposed to put it. That's exactly right. I mean, if you look at a car, I mean, the size of tools necessary, how custom they are, tariffs, like they all have to like, you have to have your own factory in region. But if you look at any product south of a car, almost all of them are built with this contract manufacturing model.

2:57:18Okay, talk about the name and the brand. Rivian has those delightful headlights, a lot of different interesting brand decisions around Rivian. What are you taking? What are you thinking? And where does the name come from? That's so great. I love it. Naming something is so hard. And so RJ and I battled quite a bit with this. But when we landed on this one, we knew it was the one because if you look at transportation, it's always been so singular narrative. It's like it's just cars or it's just not cars. Yeah. And for us, the approach is like whether it's a commercial enterprise or a consumer, it's all of the above.

2:57:56Yeah. Most likely, meaning that I want to use my R1 to go on a long weekend trip. But my school drop off with my kid, it's a pain in the butt to sit in the car line and something smaller probably makes more sense. And so the transformation of electrification of transportation is also it requires all of the above in a way. And on kind of like how we present ourselves from a brand, you know, one one analogy that RJ and I really love and use often is it's kind of like we're two characters in the Marvel universe, if you will. So it's like we have the same mission, but we can have very different personalities.

2:58:31And so also has an opportunity to be maybe in a way really expressive and take a little bit more liberties, which you're starting to see in some of our products than a more grown up vehicle brand may need to be. How do you think about competition with Chinese manufacturers? Rivian's had the benefit of not having to compete with all the Chinese manufacturers in the U.S. I imagine micromobility is not going to be having the same kind of export restrictions. How do you think about that threat? Assuming that there's Chinese companies out there that for one reason or another will be able to sell at a loss for some amount of time.

2:59:15Yeah, the DJI story basically. Yep. That's a great question. I think there's a couple of ways to think about it. increasingly as you get to the larger form factors in our portfolio and certainly as we get into autonomy, I think a lot of the similar factors that we're seeing in the automotive world in terms of the natural firewalls that are happening will exist in our space to some extent as well. But just to back up, I think one of the things that gets lost is there are a tremendous number of products in this kind of like small mobility or micro mobility space that are coming out of China for sure.

2:59:50But I think it's without debate that the vast majority of these products are commodity, like relatively low quality white label type products. That being said, there are a small handful that are really, really great products and using the latest and greatest tech. And if you look at take apart one of those products and you take apart one of our products architecturally, and from a technology capability standpoint, they're actually more of the same than not. And I would say also it's probably one of the only brands outside of China that you could say that of within this space. And so just purely from a product feature quality and technical capability standpoint, we feel like we're very, very competitive.

3:00:24Okay, product pitch. The Rivian R1T has a gear tunnel. It fits a snowboard. Electric longboard with a handle that flips up like a giant Razor scooter that fits perfectly in the gear tunnel. Am I onto something? I love it. That's not the first time we've heard that one. Oh, really? Okay. The gear tunnel, it just does feel like such a unique feature, and it just demands some bespoke thing that fits in there. You know, you want like a big speaker, Bluetooth speaker that fits in there, like barbecue or something. I want an ecosystem around the gear tunnel, even if it's, who knows how viable that is.

3:01:01Anyway, very fun. Jordy, anything else? Very cool. Thank you so much. I'm on the website right now. I'm interested. You're shopping. I'm shopping. I'm shopping. We'll hook you up. Just let us know. We'll be very excited to ride these around. We've been doing some office chair racing in the studio. This is apparently a whole story. That's what I want. I want an electric office chair. Oh, there you go. We have in-house vertically integrated motors and we can soup those up. There you go. Souped up office chair. Adjust me to the left one inch. Yeah, just a little joystick. Thanks for hanging out, Chris.

3:01:35Let the production team pilot me. You know, if you're not in the right shot, you're a little bit to the left. Production team can just move you. That's actually, I love that. You will have one or two customers for this. If you don't. Autonomous chair, I love it. Autonomous office chair. Hey, you have to leave the meeting. Go back to your desk. Drive you around. I think we're onto something. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Great to meet you, Chris. Yeah, thanks for having me. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about app loving. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai.

3:02:06Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. What's up? Brett Adcock was on the show yesterday. He had some interesting comments about the state of AI. I disagreed strongly with many of them. But we have to cover this video from the Sean Ryan podcast. It's a new gate. They're calling it telegate. Adgate. Well, maybe that too. So he is hanging out with a figure robot on the Sean Ryan podcast. Oh, okay. He went outside for it. Yeah, I was wondering because like Sean Ryan normally shoots not like very cinematic Yep, whiskey bar But he's outside and there's like a two-minute video where they're hanging out with the robot.

3:02:52Yes Let's pull this up and I want to get your take. All right, turn around So this is the first time he tells it to turn around. But at the end of the video It starts turning around and then he says turn around. And Nima here says the video is the smoking gun that figures robots are tele-opped. Again, I love tele-op. Not a problem. But Brett has consistently said we never do tele-op. I don't know. He says not autonomous. Notice how the robot starts turning around before Brett says, all right, turn around. Yeah, you can skip forward a little bit. And there's pull up this other video that I'm actually on.

3:03:30There's another video quoting this that shows it on repeat. Let's see. Now.

3:03:42It's by Vic. Vic quoted it and said, yeah, okay, yeah, it's definitely not waiting for the command. This one. All right, it's very subtle, but you can see it's turning around, and then he says, all right, turn around. Yes, but the steel man here, premonition. All right, turn around. The robot knew what was going to happen because personalized super intelligence, understands that a turnaround command is coming before Brett even says it, starts turning around before. So that would be one possible solution. But yes, who knows? The moment from yesterday that stands out to me is I said, why build a separate AI lab focused on personal super intelligence outside of your company that is trying to sell some combination of intelligence in the physical world?

3:04:31and he said, I really value focus, which I thought was fascinating given that he is He's diverting his personal focus. Yeah, it's like focus within an organization, like the leaders that join that company can focus just on that problem. It was an odd comment to sort of process. Yes, I mean, I don't know. I haven't watched the full interview with Sean Ryan. I wonder if he talks about whether or not this particular robot is teleop, because it's totally reasonable that a company would have some teleopt robots, some autonomous robots, and sort of mix and match them based on the particular demo. Obviously, if you're doing some sort of prescripted stunt dance or parkour scenario, you might prescript that.

3:05:23And then ideally, you would say, hey, this one's teleopt. Here's a demo of what we're capable of when we're using teleopt. Here's a demo of what we're capable of when we're fully autonomous, miss when we're partially remote controlled or something like that, somewhere in between. I don't know. We'll see. People will continue to dig in. I mean, all of this, the rubber meets the road when the robots are out in the wild. When people get them and they start shipping and people can see, unless you buy one and it's secretly teleopter, that would be wild. You're like, wow, this is remarkable. I can give it the most complex, vague instructions.

3:06:00It just does exactly what I do. If the figure robot can simply open a Diet Coke for John, we're a buyer. That's the goalpost. We don't need it to do everything. That's the goalpost. We just need it to do one thing really well. Crack open a six-pack of Diet Coke. Tyler, what do you think about the figure gate? I mean, it's hard to say just from that video, but I think broadly, like, people are probably, like, too against teleoperation generally. I agree. Because, like, you know, the lesson from Waymo is that, like, actually. It's goaded. You know, maybe if it's totally, like, 100 % tele-op, like, okay, that's not great.

3:06:34But if it's, like, partly, like, there's someone overseeing it, and maybe they're, like, pretty involved sometimes, it can be, like, extremely valuable. Like, Waymo is a great product, whatever. Yeah. Like, even just, like, deploying robots in dangerous locations, if it's fully tele-op, that's still, like, a great thing. Hugely valuable. And, like, clearly, the way we get fully autonomous robots is by starting out with partially tele-op one, so you get the data. There's, like, a very clear loop there. so I think broadly people are too against I completely agree yeah anyway anything else we need to talk about no we talked about we'll be back oh we do have we do have one follow up to yesterday so we did a little deep dive from the Wall Street Journal on Mark Lanier the lawyer who successfully argued that Meta and YouTube are addictive in the LA court last week and we posted the clip a lot of people enjoyed learning about him and in particular the fact that he has a menagerie that contains lemurs and llamas, as well as a 120 person train.

3:07:33We love the way he's living his life. We're huge fans of Mark Lanier, although do have some disagreement around the legal findings. But a lot of people chimed in. XL Rater said, by the way, this is the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, which is open to the public for touring. Incredible guy, shares two amazing images of what an amazing contribution to the community. And Eric Sufort, quote, tweeted our post and said, this is true, I grew up down the street from his property, and he hosted a high school graduation party for one of my friends. He recently bought an adjoining horse ranch and built a seminary on it.

3:08:10So a lot of people coming out in support of Mark Lanier. And yeah, I mean, it just seems like a fantastic lifestyle. We'll get him on the show. Fantastic menagerie. and he really reset, you know, everyone's, everyone focuses on, oh, are you flying private? Are you, are you post-economic? Like menagerie is clearly just a different tier, different ladder. That's where you want to go in life if you're successful and he's done it. So congrats to him. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN today. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for a newsletter at tbpn.com. We hope you have a wonderful last few hours of your quarter.

3:08:46Yes. It's been an honor. See you tomorrow. Goodbye. Bye!

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