Apple Unveils iPhone Duo, Muse AI Agent, Keith Rabois Joins | David Cahn, Mikey Shulman, David Perell, Jim Reilly, Fletcher Richman

31:41Or if it's like it's going to try and steer you towards things that are linked, right? Because some websites do it. It's really nice when they do. But certainly getting closer to this. I can respond to emails. And so do you have to link it to your Gmail, I guess, to get that working? And complete other tasks users authorize it to do for them. The agent called Muse is accessible via a dedicated app. Users operate the agent by conversing with it like a typical chatbot and can choose their own names for it. I saw some really funny ones. Tyler called his Mark. I saw someone else that's, someone gave it a really funny name.

32:26Like they said, like, you can pick one. And then the name of the agent was just, you can pick one or something like that. A bunch of funny hallucinations. Always happens with these products. Everyone's gonna have fun with them. The new tool is Meta's latest attempt to monetize its massive AI investments, which are expected to top 130 billion this year. The AI agent is free to access for most of what people need and has two tiers of subscription plans for power users,$100 a month and$20 a month. Anthropic and OpenAI have quickly built multi-billion dollar businesses around agents capable of performing complex computer tasks, but most of that usage is driven by software coding or other business applications.

33:08Consumer adoption of technology lags behind, offering meta, Apple, and other companies potential for catching up. The fact that we've given such a powerful technology in a package that is going to be really digestible for the product is one of the things that will set us apart from lots of other agentic products, Meta's AI chief Alex Wang said in an interview. Ben Thompson was raving about the fact that it gives you a pretty powerful VM, 8 gigs of memory and 8 gigs of storage that is yours sequestered. And they're also implementing a lot of the security features that they have done with WhatsApp, where there's end-to-end encryption.

33:46Yeah, they got Moxie pulled into it, apparently. That's really cool. Moxie's a legend. So great on the recruiting front. Everyone loves Signal. And great team there. Yeah, the question is how it sounds like if they're actually giving every user a computer. VM, but yeah. It's like virtualized. But yes, serious computing resources. Yeah, yeah. But the cost is going to probably be pretty significant. So the VM most likely spins up when you use it and then gets taken down when you're not using it. So the actual compute hours that are associated to anyone but a power user. And of course, very quickly, you can wind up spending$20 or$100.

34:32And that's enough to just pay for a virtual machine. You can go and rent a true virtual machine to host your website on DigitalOcean for like$20. So Kaz, the CEO of Opendoor, went to X and posted a screenshot of him asking Meta AI in WhatsApp. And he said, please make WhatsApp the main interface for these things, Alex Wang, please. And he just says, how do I use Muse? And Meta AI responds, Muse is a free AI assistant from Anthropic. You can use it on the web, on mobile, or through their API. Go to clod.ai, create an account, log in. So I'm looking at this post. I'm trying to find why is nobody talking about how Meta AI thinks that Muse is a product from Anthropic and is telling people to go log in there?

35:18That is weird that it would hallucinate that Muse is from Anthropic because there's not even any connection between those. It's not like Anthropic ever had a product called Muse that I know of. Very odd. But Meta AI, of course, is running an older LLM. And then I believe you still get thrown into a LLM model, I think, when you're on Instagram, if you wind up in an LLM chat. And so there's going to need to be unification around all of these different products, and they're going to need to eventually talk to all the same models. But, of course, there's, like, scaling and all sorts of different issues that you need.

35:53because some of these products that they've gotten to scale are pretty significant, even if they're not the most talked about. When you are a hyperscaler with billions of users and you vend an LLM into something, you've deployed that at scale. It's doing a lot. And it's like the new Gemini 3.7 Flash, bunch of great reviews, great benchmarks on things. But they can't just stuff that in Google search on day one. Like they have to actually scale it up. Yeah. The question I have is, do you think they, does it seem like this was something they were working on prior to instinct gaining traction? Or is this an instinct clone?

36:35I saw one post that was saying, you know, that, that rumor that they tried to buy it, which makes sense. Or for rock says there's a rumor going around that meta and others made a 10 figure offer for instinct. that's a crazy valuation for a one-year-old company, something like that. Instinct turned it down. Now Meta has launched Muse. It's 10, 15, something like that. And that's literally what the post is. Meta has launched Muse, and now the timeline is reacting. It'll be a big deal. Sounds familiar. Yeah, I saw some people saying, like, now the people with distribution are coming in. It'll be interesting to see how much, what distribution looks like in the meta ecosystem because yes, like meta was able to win stories.

37:23How did they do that? They didn't win by launching a Snapchat clone as a separate app. They won by putting it in Instagram, which already had the install base. And so if Muse works its way into Instagram, which a lot of people do use, it'll probably get a lot of adoption. If it's a separate app, it's a little bit trickier. Now, the Threads playbook worked. They routed a lot of people to there. Threads shows up on Instagram. It has an advertising surface area. It's pulled over. What are they at? A couple hundred million MAUs? Hundreds of millions of MAUs. And again, it's hard to fully understand the value of that because they're counting somebody who clicked through clickbait on Instagram.

38:04Yeah, there's that. And then also there's a political question. There's a robust real community of pure Threads users. The other thing that I think about is like Meta has the advantage of being able to, when you open all their apps, just put a huge billboard. They make ad inventory just for themselves. Yeah, with the red ads. With the specs where you open around Christmas. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry. That's a little slip there. But when you opened Instagram in Q4, it's like buy some of our classes, right? And so I would expect, I don't think they're going to do that until Muse has significantly more traction.

38:44Yeah, they'll get the early adopters on and figure out all the kinks and stuff. Growing Daniel came in with... John Hsu says Meta has been working on Muse for almost a year now. You have to believe that that's true. The Manus acquisition ties into that. The Zuck messaging around personal superintelligence. I mean, when we interviewed him a year ago, we were asking about, oh, am I going to be able to use your AI to actually buy, if I see a pair of shoes, will I be able to just buy it? and he was kind of like, I'm not ready to announce that yet. But it was very clear that that's where this was going.

39:11So I don't think it's an Instinct clone. I think it will compete with Instinct. And I think it's tricky because Instinct is pretty early and they are going up against a big company that's been investing and has a lot of resources to go after this very, very hard. At the same time, consumers come to Meta to be entertained. Muse feels like a product for productivity. and I'm not sure that people will put them in the same buckets. It's very unclear. At the same time, people do a lot of shopping on Instagram, basically, just scrolling. Really? Oh, for sure. Not actually checking. Are you joking? Go ahead.

39:55I'm just messing with you. No, no, no. It's like the most dominant shopping app of all time. Yeah, but particularly people will like go there and not just search things, but just like casually scroll and like linger over things so that they get retargeted, visit websites and then have the have the ads come to them. And so you can imagine that that on the shopping side that there's a lot of traction there. Yeah, a lot of excitement around this climbing the chart is currently Muse is number three on the charts app store after ESPN, Fantasy Sports and more in chat GPT. ESPN Fantasy Sports? Growing Daniel came in with an absolutely brutal ratio.

40:36What do you say? He quoted Zuck's announcement with a screenshot of the exchange that Zuck had with somebody during the early days of Facebook where he said, Yeah, so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4 ,000 emails, pictures, addresses, and student numbers. What? How do you manage that one? People just submitted it. I don't know why. they quote unquote trust me dumb f's um anyway um growing Daniel never forgets obviously suck has grown up a lot since then who punched him in the nose that's the that is the big question is asking uh let me find the you send me the image is this true so yeah so so here's the thing his nose is starting to look like this guy marab who's a ufc champion and marab has one of the most busted up noses in the ufc and marab was the ufc fighter that zuck was training with on that on that uh deck that's a lot of people are asking so pull up this picture of marab and you can see their noses are starting to look quite similar that's a really that's a really good sign look at this zoom in there zoom in there he's pushing look their noses zuck was like give me one of them right now give me a nose like that right now i like it um do you think and i would expect i i you know who knows rob could go and get probably surgery to correct this one it's a very cool battle scar aura.

42:13And two, you know, this, this tells me that Zuck is going way harder in training. And he lets on in the video. Totally. Totally. Which I, which I love to see. He's like, he's ready for that Elon fight. He's like, there's a chance I might catch Elon on a good day. He opts in. Yeah. I gotta be ready. He's also going extremely hard on the Irish countryside, buying castles. We call them Lord Zuck. We got a video now breaking down his latest real estate purchase, Strancali Castle in Ireland. Let's play a little bit of this because there's some good voiceover, some good context. Strancali Castle, and it can be found on the banks of the River Blackwater in County Waterford.

42:59This Gothic Revival mansion was designed by the famous Payne Brothers for John Kiley, a local landlord, former Tory MP for Clonmel, and High Sheriff of County Waterford. The house was complete in 1830, and its scale was a max. I think he's got a bunkie under there. According to records, it took a brisk four and a half minute walk just to get from the kitchen to the dining room. Within the grounds, there was a folly, a Chinese pagoda, and an aviary. The folly, which is known as Strand-Calley Tower, was built in 1826. We're having David Perel on the show later to talk about architectural revival.

43:41It's a mock medieval structure, and it served as a fishing lodge. He's going to have the resources to actually restore this and do this. Some of these castles are cheap relative to how epic they are, But the carrying cost of actually renovating or living in, even visiting any of these places, just like cleaning out the cobwebs is probably six figures a year. And the landscaping has got to be extremely expensive. But I think this is the answer to like, where's the tech wealth going? Like at some point, he's either going to get bored of this or donate it or pass it on or it's going to fall out of the family because seven generations later, the family's like, yeah, we don't really want this castle anymore.

44:26And boom, you got a beautiful museum that was properly renovated and brought up to modern standards in 2026 and is prepared to actually house a bunch of prints of AI. We'll have this on a video. We're going to watch this quick video, and then we're going to talk about absolute doom and despair. Okay. Let's doom it up. But first, this little palate cleanser. What are we doing? Emperor, dude. Does that feel like that ever? No. I wish that people did what I wanted them to do. It's like, that would be fun. But in the meantime, you can have some fun. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I would have a chopper. I don't even know what I would have.

45:03I would have an underground tunnel. I do have an underground tunnel. Do you really? Yeah. It's like more of underground storage type situation. But yeah, no, it's a... Oh, wow. Like a damn emperor, dude. Does that feel good? I love that the Theo Vaughn arc happened where for some reason all the tech CEOs were like, it's right at passage now. We got to go. I'm disappointed we didn't get Sacha on Theo. And I'm really disappointed we didn't get C.C. Webb. Zucky got a bunkie. Zucky got a bunkie. Zucky got a bunkie. All right. Let's talk about Doom. Doom. An anthropic researcher is quitting the artificial intelligence industry.

45:47Whoa. He didn't just quit the company, quit the industry over fears that the lab and its competitors are racing to build systems that could spiral out of control and destroy humanity. this was not received well a bunch of back and forth with another researcher chiming in saying that they they have a p doom of 10 which is something that's come up years ago and we kind of went back and forth on this all started with jason jacob coxson who said i resigned from anthropic today i spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both open ai and metanthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly.

46:29They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. He is not happy with where things go. And it got 100 million views and 600 ,000 likes. It's going straight on a Bernie Sanders billboard for sure. I worked on an actual thermonuclear weapons project, Martin Casado from A16Z says, and the dissonance was less bizarre. And so he's comparing it to what it was like working on very scary technology, very different than what's going on today. And Evan Hubinger, who works on alignment science at Anthropic, previously Miri, OpenAI, Google, Ripple, Yelp. I guess he works with it.

47:15Ripple was the cryptocurrency. Is that right? Isn't Ripple XRP? Yeah. he says Jacob is correct here we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans I personally think it's above 10 within the next decade I believe Anthropic is trying its best but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for super intelligence and are clearly not on track to so everyone's sort of pushing for a slowdown now but then you go into the regulatory capture thing. I've been seeing what? Jess Buckingham says, bro, got that pip. Yeah. A lot of people were like, are you giving back your equity? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

47:52Yeah. Odd. Nick Carter says, if you actually believe this, you'd be committing acts of violent sabotage and terrorism against your employer. You clearly do not. So stop it with this self-aggrandizing twaddle. Eliezer on the other side says, thank you for saying plainly what you believe. I do appreciate it. And the world could be even grimmer than it is otherwise. We have Eliezer Yudkowsky's co-author coming on the show tomorrow, Nate Saurez, to talk about if anyone builds it, everyone dies. We'll continue the doom debate. It seems like it's in the news. Lots of people were just going back and forth on everything.

48:30Ryan Peterson sees it as a bull case. He says, I need to buy more stock in this company. I've never seen such a commitment to making money regardless of the consequences. Yeah, it is. Adair says if you publicly assign a greater than 10 % probability to human extinction within a decade, you owe people a clear explanation of how you reach that number plus what would change your mind. Yes. Yes. So, yeah, a lot of people were upset that this felt like a vibe prediction, very, like, you know, unresearched. And he did link, Evan did link to the Anthropic Risk Report, which you can read in full. They have a reasonable scaling policy.

49:12And they're talking about pacing the frontier, collaborating with other labs. And I'm oddly optimistic that this will happen. Obviously, you know, there's the Sam and Dario can't even hold hands on stage in that India conference. But AI has made strange bedfellows out of people. Like, if you had said, oh, yeah, in six months, Elon Musk, the guy who's calling anthropic misanthropic, will be doing a deal and bring in Sholto to watch rockets take off at Starbase, I would have been like, no way. No way can Elon Musk and Dario become friends. Like that just seems like impossible. But the funniest outcome is the most likely to quote you on again.

50:05And yeah, maybe there's this weird, you know, oh, people wind up working together. There are other consequences of that. There are some very serious. Just thinking that, you know, believing in your whole heart that things are that serious and then just rage quitting. and not leaning in and trying. Like, do you really think that the rage quit method is? I don't know. I mean, some of these organizations are really big, and if you're at a certain level, it can be very hard to actually get things done in a large organization. So you can be there and say, like, yeah, I've been sending a Slack message and emailing the whole executive team every day that this is the thing that I want to have happen, and it's not happening, and, like, I don't have the authority within this particular role to actually have the change.

50:57People sort of tend to think, oh, if you work for the company, you can exact your will, but that's not true. Like you can work in the marketing organization and think you want to run billboards in, you know, Tallahassee, Florida and not be able to get that done because someone higher up than you said, no, we're not doing billboards in Florida, right? Like things get vetoed for a variety of reasons. So it's not like, you know, you just take a job at a 5 ,000 person company and then you can just do whatever you want. That's not the way companies work. um it's uh yeah it's weird weird time we'll see but there are serious there are serious uh like regulatory frameworks for not allowing collusion between big companies and so we might wind up in this other weird scenario where uh if if all the big labs are like yes okay the government's not stepping into regulating we're going to self-regulate we're going to work together uh then that could actually be a legal problem because uh you're not allowed to price fix You're not allowed to collude with your, that is like textbook antitrust, right?

51:56And then the other thing is that there's this weird dynamic I've seen playing out where people, the AI leaders make a prediction, and then the outsiders criticize that prediction as like, they're only saying that to raise the next round. Or they're only saying that, and this is the same thing with like all the labs were saying like, we want regulation. and then they're only saying that for regulatory capture. And it's like regulatory capture might be a side effect of regulation, but the labs can still want it. And now I'm seeing people online look at what's happening and say, we do need regulation, and I'm willing to put up with that regulatory capture that may happen under that scenario.

52:38And so there's all these weird predictions that happen way too early for everyone to digest because the people inside the lab see things much earlier and understand, oh, yeah, okay, the next leg up is going to work. The agentic era is going to arrive. Swarms are going to be a thing. Like, we're on track to solve this. Anyway, Jordi, one last thing and then we'll bring in. One last thing. A friend of the show, Bucco Capital, quoted Evan with his, you know, 10 % prediction and It said, quote, hey, Dario, congrats again on the great quarter. Nice to see enterprise reacceleration. Hoping you could provide a little color on that 10 % extinction number and some of the puts and takes that might have on further enterprise adoption.

53:23And then just a quick follow-up after. Yeah, what are entropic earnings calls going to be like? It's just going to be CFO and Dario? Or are there Daniela going to be on? I don't know. It's like that's not that crazy to imagine that that happens. That's like a thing that happens on the call. Very, very odd. I mean, I guess you do have defense tech companies that have earnings calls or defense crimes, and they might get asked about geopolitical things that are pretty heady. I don't know. Anyway, we'll figure it out. In the meantime, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market?

54:02Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Up next, we have David Kahn from Sequoia Capital to talk about the state of AI. Good news. There's lots happening. There's plenty to talk about. Anything going on? Welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for hopping on. Hey, guys. How are you doing? Good to see you guys again. You guys have got a lot of range from Zuck's castle to P. Doom. There's a lot of range. There's a lot of range. You think he's got a bunkie in the castle? Or do you think he has no bunkies? It seems likely. I think he's got a doomsday dungeon.

54:36Dungeon? Okay. The Doom dungeon to go with Zuck's Bunky. Yeah. Bunky's Bunky. Anyway, what is on the top of your mind? Because there's so many different things happening in the application layer. We had Cognition on. Harvey just raised a bunch of money. Things are going really well with Diffusion and the actual application of the technology. There's value. Jobs apocalypse is delayed. And should P-Doom be factored into financial models for Series A investments? Yeah. Well, I think broadly in AI right now, I mean, the thing that seems really interesting to me is just the concentration of capital going into these big companies.

55:13It does seem like the thing top of mind for me is just like the way the venture landscape has changed. Yeah. When you think about doing this job five, six years ago, you had 100 interesting companies that everybody was looking at and you're trying to find the next one. And that's still happening. And yet so much of the conversation today is about the top 10 companies. Yeah. And then. On that point, is the concentration of capital into OpenAi, Anthropic, maybe XAI, SpaceX 2, is that the biggest driver? Or is, when you're talking about reshaping venture, I've been much more keyed in on the fact that you get Hugging Face and OpenRouter.

55:48And there are now many decacorn liquidity events that I would think changes the underwriting if you're a VC and you're like, yeah, it's an early round. It's a billion-dollar valuation, but there are plenty of examples of 10x returns at this scale. Well, I think, I mean, to me, that's always been the case. We were early investors in Hugging Face, and I think there's always been this thesis on you have a big community, and you have a lot of bottom-up adoption, and that there's a lot of option value in those type of companies. I think you'll see that get reflected back into the market where there's always these companies where investors ask 100 questions about what has this become, And yet you just have so much sucking sound from the market that those are going to become interesting companies.

56:27And it's so hard to be relevant and build something important. And I think HuggingFace did that and OpenRouter did that. And so I think they'll continue to be examples of that. The thing that's interesting to me just in this moment, and it's like the fall of 2026, we're about to see these IPOs, is this precipice of moving from so much capital. And honestly, this is not even like a tech market, VC market thing. Like the entire universe of capital has concentrated on this one sliver of the market, which is kind of pre-IPO, late stage AI companies. And we're about to see that transition into the public market.

56:59And so I don't think anybody knows how exactly that's going to play out. But it does feel like we're on the precipice of something pretty interesting. It is wrong to think that it will play out as a binary one-day liquidity wave, correct? because there will be lockups and then many LPs will receive their stakes and want to hold some venture capital firms, registered investment advisors will hold as well. So we're looking at like, how exactly does that change the market? Because there will be the optionality of liquidity, but not necessarily actual cash on balance sheets ready to go into the next generation of startups.

57:38Yeah. I mean, one thing I've been thinking about it, you guys remember like 2021, you had like CrowdStrike and Datadog were public. And then you're investing in private CrowdStrike and Datadog, right? And there was Databricks, right? And you could go invest in Databricks. And it was the same business model. You sort of understood how this thing was going to trade when it was liquid. And I think that's what's interesting about AI right now. There's no real public comps for any of these private companies. But as soon as one of these companies, let's say Anthropic is the first to get out. As soon as one of these companies gets out, then I think you actually have a better valuation framework for the rest of the market.

58:09And so I think it is a healthy thing for the market when you kind of can look at the liquid, you can look at the illiquid, you see how these things trade and it will provide a lot of clarity, I think, to the private market. Why is SpaceX not a good comp for Anthropic, OpenAI, and then even the smaller firms? I think it is. I think SpaceX was the beginning of this. Obviously, it's held up really well for all the volatility. My brother and I always joke of like, you know, every day you see a news headline that's like stock was up 2 % and it's like stocks go up 2 % every day. nothing happened there's always like some reason why it happened by the way you know it's like oh and i've been done i mean spacex has done has held up well you know there have been liquidity unlocks everyone was super worried going into the liquidity unlocks in the media and nothing it was like a non-event you know i remember the day of the big unlock somehow traded up like seven percent if you remember correctly like a short squeeze where all these guys are shorter than they got squeezed out but yeah um so i do think spacex is the bellwether and it's not to your point it's going to be a one-day event, but I think it's an exciting time that these companies are growing so fast.

59:11I think there's a lot of demand for these companies and it's going to be interesting to see that play out. I think the second thing that we're paying attention to and I think a lot of investors are focused on is just the full stack of the data center build out that's happening. I wrote this blog post maybe a year and a half ago, server, steel, and power are the three pillars. Obviously, everyone's paying attention to the server side, which is chips. Steel side is the industrial side, you know, you have Elon now making his own gas turbines. So there's a lot of emphasis on the industrial revolution component of this, where, you know, we're out of, we can't make more of the components that go into data centers.

59:44And then, of course, the power piece where everyone's looking at, hey, we know how to get power for the next, there's no more power for the next, you know, 24 months. And what are the timelines? And with these CapEx, these big CapEx projects, you have to plan two, three, four years out, who even knows what the world's going to look like two, three, four years from now. So I think, you know, deeper below the, you know, cusp of open IANTHROPIC, the frontier models, just all the things that make them possible. And I think the market is pretty well educated on the compute market now and investors are familiar with all parts of the stack, but I think there's going to be a lot of innovation all across that.

1:00:17Do you think that the opportunity in the grid, opportunity in power plays out more like the neocloud market than the rocket launch market. Like I've always said like, ah, it'd be amazing if we had an Elon of solar or even an Elon of nuclear. And there's some nuclear companies that are doing really well. Some of those founders could go on to build like the trillion dollar energy company. But it feels like everyone's focused on it. There's so much capital flowing in energy. Default would be very oligopolistic. Bunch of great outcomes, but not this winner take all behemoth. But what's your model for where energy and grid build out goes?

1:00:57Yeah, my mental model is probably closer to the Elon case than the Neocloud case. And I can explain why. I think on the Neocloud side, the primary innovation was financing. That's sort of how I look at it. Yeah, it's like a real estate private equity deal. Yeah, exactly. Like we're buying a bunch of chips from Jensen. And Jensen, to his credit, was an amazing player in the ecosystem and has helped really build the ecosystem. He made Corey what Corey is today. there was sort of this moment where Corey realized we can buy these chips, we can finance them with Blackstone. Somebody's going to finance the GPUs.

1:01:25So there's a lot of financing innovation. Now there's a lot of companies that have followed suit. Obviously you need to be a good deal maker, but in some ways, you know, you could start a NeoCloud tomorrow. You know how to do it. Getting access to power is hard. It's not easy, but there's 15 NeoClouds. There's going to be more. I think my contrast and my partner, Sean McGuire, always has a great framework around this on the hardware side. He wrote this hardware manifesto long before hardware was cool. And he had this concept of, you know, in hardware, there's potential energy. And these hardware companies spend five, six, seven, eight years building this potential energy.

1:01:57And it's because they're doing real, very difficult R &D work. And at some point, that potential energy converts into kinetic energy. And that's when, you know, stock prices move. And you see that with SpaceX, which took 24 years to bake. And you see that with some of these hardware companies. And so, you know, at Sequoia, as we're looking at the energy ecosystem, we've sort of chosen a few places to make investments. Sean was on the show talking about Valor, which is our nuclear investment. Last week, we announced our investment in a company called Form Energy, which is doing grid-scale batteries.

1:02:26That's a company. It was founded by the guy who ran the energy business. He actually started the energy business at Tesla. A guy named Yetmin Chang, who is probably one of the top three battery experts alive today. So just a very, very strong team. And they're nine years in. They spent nine years building these billion-dollar batteries. They just signed up a big project with Google earlier this year. And then you ask yourself, okay, well, we're going to have a lot of solar and wind or we're going to have a lot of batteries on the grid. I think the answer is yes. And then you have a company that spent nine years building IP to go put those batteries on the grid and then this unique moment to go scale that up for AI.

1:03:00So anyways, I think there's going to be, to your question, I think there's going to be three, four, five interesting kind of companies with deep, deep IP that you can go invest in. But I think it's different from the NeoCloud space where what you really need is capital and access to GPUs. Whereas on the grid side, you actually need, you ideally want some real fundamental IP that is difficult to replicate. And then, of course, you need access to capital, right? So I think on the nuclear stuff, what's interesting in a lot of these companies, you need to raise billions of dollars before you get to the promised land.

1:03:28And so that alone, one thing I say to founders, I meet a lot of seed stage founders in hardware. And I'm like, even if I think your IP is amazing, I can't invest if I don't think you can raise a billion dollars. Because you just won't get there, right? And you'll end up getting consolidated. And so access to capital and consulting capital obviously is an important part of building these companies as well. So what are you looking for? Like what are the tells of a founder who can raise a billion dollars? Is it a great storyteller? Is it just actual? I mean, Isaiah is like a great example because even early on at the seed stage, like honestly, I look at the Gundot crew and I look at Augustus and Isaiah and their ability to sell you their vision was just on another level even before they had raised like 10 million bucks.

1:04:19Like when they were raising their first round, they were just different. Like they had a natural talent and then they've refined that and you have to be in a category that allows you to sell this vision of a trillion dollar opportunity, a hundred billion dollar opportunity, what that is. But I think you have that like natural talent and selling ability that. That is somehow inherent to some people. Like there are people that are just way less compelling naturally and they get more compelling over time because they get more confident in their business and round after round and hundreds of pitch meetings and meetings with candidates and they just get better and better and better.

1:04:55But then some people just start on, you know, at the 10 yard line and they just refine it a little bit and then they can go from raising the$5 million round to raising a billion dollars. in our partner meeting we actually talk about this a lot i mean actually this is probably the most important question that you have to get right in early stage investing and the framework we often use is would you go work for this person because i think everything is sort of subsumed in that like if other people have to be willing to go work for this person the decision of whether to go work for person is effectively putting 100 of your equity in this one company right so would you put 100 of your equity in this company and um and often you know we had mateo the form energy ceo come in you have people kind of come and say wow like this person seems really serious this person seems like they're you know they have an incredible track record in his case he had built the energy business at tesla um they've sort of done something that's really impressive early on in life um and i believe and then there's a clarity of thought component which is so sometimes pictures are coherent and sometimes they're not coherent right like there's sort of a coherent story which is like okay you know we're form energy is building an iron air battery uh iron's really cheap air's really cheap.

1:06:03That is why they're building an iron air battery, right? It's so simple. And yet kind of makes sense. And then it's like, well, why do we need batteries? Well, you know, there's, there's no sun out at night, you know, it's really simple things. And I think something we look for in a lot of these conversations with founders is clarity of thought. If you can articulate to an investor, who's not the most sophisticated, the investors are never the most sophisticated people around the table. You articulate to an investor, a very clear articulation of why this vision makes sense, why your plan makes sense, then you're gonna be able to articulate that to an employee.

1:06:32And then we have people like Sean who have PhDs in physics and can go incredibly deep on the science and technology behind it. And you sort of marry those two things. And I think that's kind of how we make these decisions. And we spend a lot of time with people. We spend a lot of time getting to know the founders as well. So Mateo I had known for six years before he invested. Sean knew Isaiah for a long time before he invested. You're not making the decision in a single pitch. How are you thinking about trying to time the acceleration of the real world? Right now it feels like it's much faster to do things on your computer.

1:07:02and it's creating efficiencies for a bunch of people and companies and all these things, but we're not seeing the kind of GDP growth that has at least been predicted, and it feels like in order to have that, we're going to need to see, one, a general advancements of models and AI models that can actually be a drop-in sort of addition to your team or replacement or whatever that ends up being. But it feels like we're going to need to do a lot of things in the real world to feel that acceleration. And even with the launch of Astra, we haven't actually played this video on the show yet today, but somebody had basically hooked up Astra, and it can just drive your car now, right?

1:07:55And it's not designed to, you know, it wasn't something that the model was designed to do, but the models are getting sufficiently advanced at understanding the world. And it feels like we're on the cusp of this, like, acceleration of the real world, which I think is going to be way, it's very magical experience to, like, say, generate me an image of this scene in my head and be able to see it on your screen. It's going to be a hundred times more magical to be like, make this thing in the world. And then it just makes it, right? And that can be applied to real estate, to building widgets. You know, the list goes on and on.

1:08:33But robots building other robots and building things, I feel like will be the greatest investment cycle ever and much more exciting for normal people than just, hey, we made this software feature, you know, in two weeks versus, you know, 20 weeks. Two thoughts on that. I mean, one is I think it's so important to synchronize the timeline of your investment with the timeline. It's your point on like you need you need to understand when the market opportunity is going to convert. And ideally, you're synchronizing the timeline of the company with the timeline of the market. So, for example, if you're trying to solve AI power and you're starting today, it's kind of late.

1:09:08We need more power like literally in a year. So it's like hopefully you've been working on that problem already for a few years. If you're trying to solve nuclear and that's a 2040s problem, great. You can synchronize the timeline of being an early stage company chasing opportunity is really going to hit its inflection in the 2040s. So I think that synchronization matters. And then I think the second thing, you know, it is interesting that VCs have really shifted toward hardware investing, right? Like there's this broader trend. I think Andrew came on the show and talked about send cut send. Like we've been doing a lot of stuff in the hardware re-industrialization space.

1:09:36Part of that is because of this feeling that the timelines are so fast in the digital world that it's hard to create moats and it's hard to create value. So I think there's a reason why in hardware, there's a feeling that you can create moats over many, many years. And eventually, obviously, the ultimate moat, to your point, is going to be the machine that makes the machine, right? It's the re-industrialization of this country. And I hope we're going to get there. I think we're going to get there. I do think sci-fi kind of preempts reality. And so Isaac Asimov obviously imagined the most – in iRobot, the most valuable company in the world is a company that makes all the robots.

1:10:07And there's a reason I think a lot of investors own Tesla for that reason, because they think that he's going to win on Optimus. So anyways, I think there's a lot of companies that should benefit from acceleration in the physical world. And there's a lot of investment going in there. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, working it down for us. Excited to have you back soon. Always a good time. Great to see you. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks, guys. Appreciate the takes. We'll talk to you soon. 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.

1:10:38We have Mikey Shulman, co-founder, CEO of Suno, here with us in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. I go. I go. I go. Yeah, since, I think since you came on the show last, we have all been completely one-shotted by Suno. It's time to talk about Suno safety. Every time we come into the studio, we're blasting Suno songs. We have a lot of fun with them. Make a Suno song for our friends, whatever the news is of the day. We're having a great time. But how are things going with you? uh much better now that i know that you guys are enjoying the product uh yeah i will say okay i'm gonna give you i'm gonna give you like i'm gonna give you uh i'm gonna tell you one thing i'm gonna tell you one thing and then i'm gonna tell you another thing okay i'm gonna tell you one compliment sandwich yeah okay compliment sandwich you don't need to compliment sandwich that's fine no no no so one the product is like the the ai you know is probably the ai product that has brought me the most belly laughs, period.

1:11:37It's just a joy to use daily user. We have so much fun with it on the team. I've pulled it up in situations in my own home that I think are hilarious to me, less funny to members of my family. Anyways, the product is just amazing. It's wonderful. I get so much joy out of it. I think the software quality is bad in the app. Like I think that it's not on the model side, not on the model side. Like the model is amazing. Like the things that matter are like so good. Like it's so unbelievably fast and I haven't even tried the new model yet. Yes. But, but the actual software, I think you've been hard to navigate or no, no, no.

1:12:20It just feels like it's kind of buggy and it feels like you guys feels like you've been vibe coding too hard. I want you guys to like, you know, you know, basically do some cycles on just cleaning it up a little bit. Okay. Okay. More optimized. Compliment sandwich. What do you think? That's a good compliment sandwich. Let me say, actually, we should probably... I only got bread on one half. The final bread. It's amazing. No, no, no. We should probably... The actual quality of the output is at the level of listenable. The real product is the model. Whereas, like, video generators, you're looking at it, and, like, no matter how much ever you put in, it's still, like, not quite there.

1:12:56This is, like, it passes the Turing test of, like, listenable, so you can have fun with it. Anyway, continue. I appreciate that. We should probably stop releasing models while you guys are on air so you can actually have some time to test them out. But yeah, well, I'll just take the opportunity to talk about what we're doing today, which is releasing a new model. Okay. And so way better than the last one. Okay. It's actually way faster. And so you'll see the way that you can use it when the songs come back so fast. It's just very different, much more fun, way more expressive. Wait, it's faster?

1:13:26I don't know why it needs to be faster. like it was already fast enough because i would type the prompt and i would click the button and it'd be available immediately and i think it's because you stream it in right like it's still rendering in the background is that right no that we're still streaming it okay but no when i when i feel like it's slow is when i'm when i'm in one of these you know when i'm one shot by a song but i want to change like a certain word lyrics and i'm like change this to that okay well then you get on the b6 has you covered yeah that was the thing when i first when when we first started using, when we first got one shot by Suno, we would fire off a prompt and put your phone down and be like, I'll come back to it in like, you know, five minutes, see where it's at.

1:14:04But then it'd be back in like 20 seconds. I think the thing that people don't realize is that when you're building things in entertainment, actually the loop speed, how quickly you give something to your users ends up mattering a lot. We can actually measure that pretty directly and we know how much it matters. But just going back to the model, so V6 is better, it's faster, the songs are way better, it's more expressive. We have V6 Wild, which is a model that makes just some of the most interesting stuff, even though the songs themselves may not be quite as good. I'm having a ton of fun with that one.

1:14:40and it's actually like a big day for Suno and actually for the whole music industry where this is done in concert in partnership with some of the best music companies in the world. It's really kind of laying out a blueprint for how we think AI can really grow the entire music ecosystem. So we're super, super excited. Yeah, we were talking to Johnny. Say more on that. Yeah, we can go there, sure. On the partnership. Yeah, the partnership. Everyone's waiting for a partnership. everyone's been been interested in how the economics will flow what happens to uh songs that are used in training obviously there's a fair use argument there's obviously the the spotify i want a royalty on everything forever uh and it feels like this is the start of uh moving the conversation forward at least one click this is definitely an amazing start yeah um The way I think about this is, yes, these are now not only new business lines and new revenue streams for rights holders, for artists, for all kinds of creatives.

1:15:44Most importantly, these are really long-term partnerships that let us build products together with the greatest music companies, with the best creatives. And the thing that's so exciting is that for the first time in a long time, there's actually product differentiation. There's the ability to build things that are just different. and I think we've been so ingrained in the last 20 years just to think about digital music as one thing and so we'll be releasing more products in the near future that let you play with the content from your favorite artists when those artists opt in, when users play with their content the revenues that are attributable to those users a portion of that will flow to those artists and then again just building more from that in the future of what should the future of music look like?

1:16:28What are the most engaging fan experiences? is how do we pull people deeper into music and change the place that music has in their lives to change the place that music has in culture? And the thing that's so amazing is that there's kind of acknowledgement from all sides here. Like, we have a very good start. We don't know what all of the products should look like, and we're excited to build them together. How does AI video play into this? I noticed that when I opened Suno, I often get served a vertical video feed of other Suno creations that are often AI video animated in a pretty convincing way.

1:17:04Like you get a full music video, basically. Is that something that you're planning to, is it already available for everyone? Is there just a button that can make these? Or are there sort of like more pro creators that are using outside models, bringing a music video to the platform? It's a great question. Right now, that is mostly creators bringing outside technologies to bear. I would just back up, though, and think the purpose of Suno is actually to inspire you to do things that you haven't done and not just to do the old thing of scrolling again. And so what you may have noticed is those videos are actually really tailored to get you to lean in, to take a piece of content.

1:17:41You can actually remix it right off of that video. I think we're not used to thinking of ourselves as creators, us mere mortals. Maybe you guys are. You guys are on TV every day. But it feels amazing to be creative. And just getting people over the hurdle of actually I am a creator and I will find it really enjoyable to be creative. That's kind of the magical spark that we're trying to bring to people. Yeah, and I have that all the time. John will send me a Suno song and I'll be thinking to myself, even though all I know, I know that John just wrote like a handful of sentences and he put the words and the letters in the right orders and it got that output.

1:18:20I'm still thinking there's a spark of like, John is a genius for putting this set of ideas together. And I know that he was like thinking about the lyrics and how to arrange it and, and, and things like that. And, and so that joy of creation and, and compacting it into something that, and again, I just, I've always seen this as like net new, right? Like John, like the, the, the idea of like a gag song, you know, like a joke has, has been around forever, but, but the, friction to do that. I thought we were enjoying it specifically because it allowed us to go after music that was basically low tan.

1:18:57So we could make a song about most feared lawyer, about John Quinn, a corporate lawyer that would never exist in any timeline other than when you drop the cost of creation to effectively zero, then you can actually get this. And I thought that was just us. But when I was scrolling, so, you know, I saw similar, similar experiences happening in other pockets. Like someone made a song about the revolutionary war and they took a bunch of history and it's like George Washington. Have you seen this video? I don't know, but it's all, it's all animated with AI. And I was like, Oh, like this sounds like a fourth of July banger, but it's historical, but no one is really going to sit there and arrange that.

1:19:39And all of a sudden you have this very niche overlap of you want a July 4th hard-hitting song, but you also want to learn history and it puts it together in this really weird niche way, which I think is happening all over the place. Yeah, look, let me say two things to that. One is, I'll plug, you can go all the way down to a TAM of one or two people. You guys, I'm sure, have iMessages with one another. You can actually access SunoWrite from iMessage if you have the latest version of the app and so it'll just be easier to interact there. Let's go. But the other thing I would say is I think maybe the best example is, I don't know if you guys saw this so-called Oreo gate.

1:20:16No. Of, oh, this is a lady who took the text messages from her mom's chat about her kids eating Oreos or sending Oreos to school. And just using music as a platform to express, I don't know, what is special and absurd and banal about everyday life. And when I think about what was the alternative for her to be expressive like that, to use her vantage point, she basically would have had to become a stand-up comic to bring this to life. And now you can use something like music, do this in an entirely new way. And it's something that I think like tons and tons of people really can relate to on a fundamental level.

1:20:55How do you think about all the ways other than speed and overall feeling of music or musical quality going from model generation to model generation? One thing I noticed with the last generation was that it would just constantly be referencing glass in different ways. like in a bunch of different songs it would come back to this like you know the glass shattering you know yeah i was talking to john and it was like to me to me it was like a tell that like like suno developed its own it's turns of phrases yeah it's not this it's that or you're absolutely right like the suno version of that was different but it seemed to exist how much are you hunting for those tells?

1:21:45You know, it's a really tricky thing. In music, unlike, let's say, the big labs, LLMs, intelligence, there are no benchmarks. And so these questions of taste end up mattering a lot, lot more. And even just measuring these things is really hard. So we are always on the hunt for kind of that telltale sign. And then, yeah, there's a good amount of judgment that goes into how do we fine-tune, how do we post-train these models? Actually, what we're releasing today, having both a V6 and a V6 Wild, V6 Wild being very differently post-trained to be way more interesting and basically a little less good at making full songs, is kind of a start at bridging that of how do we make sure that people actually have the most creative experience that they can.

1:22:32Back on the deal with Warner Music Group, BMG Believe, I'm interested to understand how you're talking to investors, how you see the market evolving over the long term. Because the most extreme economic share might be something like what we see with Spotify. I think they give maybe 30 % of top line to artists across everything. There's a huge stake of revenue that goes to creators. Still a$100 billion company, fantastic business. We love Spotify. and I'm interested to think about as the industry outside of Suno but just AI generated tools what type of economic structure would you see landing in equilibrium?

1:23:19I think about this in a couple of ways. There are things where we can think about how do we take the existing technology and really lower the cost and give it to way more people and that's what you said before and you would never be savoring these moments if it weren't so easy to make music. And then there's the whole other side of things of how do we actually now apply this to markets that people couldn't even fathom before? And this is actually something that I, you know, kind of live and breathe every day. If you rewind a couple of years ago and people think music is really small, I don't want to invest in it.

1:23:50And then you realize that it's not just that old TAM. Actually, what we're doing is fundamentally changing how people interact with media, how people entertain themselves and realizing that that actually is much bigger. And so to answer the question more directly, this is actually evolving. This is like we have some economic models now. We have a lot of alignment to build products together and figure out the economic models that go with those products instead of having to figure everything out all at once. The crazy time that we live in about AI progressing so quickly, we kind of don't have the luxury of trying to get it right in this very moment because things change so fast.

1:24:29What is the demand side from consumers on editability, the pro workflow? Obviously, the model is outputting basically a complete waveform, but you can also use AI to deconstruct that into stems, into notes, into sheet music. and then a more experienced musician can go in and make fine-grained tweaks and just like you can generate an image and bring it into Photoshop if you want. What is demand like? What are you building there? Where do you see that side of the business going? We have a pretty broad product suite here from you can type in a few words or access it from iMessage all the way down to Suno Studio, which is our digital audio workstation, which is really professional workflows.

1:25:16what we've seen is actually by making those workflows not only different and powerful but actually much more fun more of the professional tooling ends up just appealing to average people who fall in love with making music i think this is a lot like i might buy the signature guitar of my favorite guitarist i don't think i'm going to be a famous guitarist but it actually makes me feel really good knowing that i use the same tools that the greats use and it makes me feel better about my creativity. And I think that it's only for lack or it's a failure of imagination to think I can't actually fall in love with digital tools in the same way.

1:25:51Like I know I'm using the same tool set, at least in part, that makes some of the best music. I feel more creative as a result. I fall in love with making music and there are virtual cycles there. What are you learning from the early sparks of progress in AI video? I was trying to think about the biggest AI video, the most viral AI video from last year. And I couldn't put my finger on it easily. I can think about the previous year because that was Harry Potter Balenciaga. That was the moment we were like, wow, this really worked. And I think for this year, music like Rubbers by Phoenix Flexing, it's now out that it was AI generated.

1:26:35I don't know if he used you know or not, but it sparked the conversation. And then I'm wondering what next year looks like if we're trying to pattern match against the ebbs and flows of progress in AI video. It's a great question. I almost think video is having a super interesting moment right now as there's a lot of new models and they're getting more convincing. They're getting easier to use. And so we look at that very closely. I think the one maybe easy thing for me to say here is that actually speed ends up mattering a lot. And as it becomes more affordable to really iterate a lot on video, because if you rewind, let's say six months, it's actually kind of prohibitive to make a full-length video.

1:27:24I would imagine that we're going to see some very interesting cultural moment. And I think of these less as technology per se. It's actually, you gave the technology to somebody who has an interesting point of view, who's able to express that point of view to the world with these tools. And so I think it's very hard to predict exactly which point of view that will be. It's like a very cultural, zeitgeisty moment. Yeah, I remember I talked to Ahmad Moustak. There are going to be, there's going to be at least one very big cultural moment. I will tell you that. That's all I can say right now, but there's going to be a big cultural moment involving music and technology.

1:27:59I was talking to Ahmad Moustak after Stable Diffusion launched years ago. This was maybe 2023, 2022. And he was predicting that by 2024, 2025, there would be full movies that were AI generated. And we kind of got there, but they didn't really break through. But AI video is actually really successful. it's just taken a very different approach and it's diffused in an interesting way where it's making its way into VFX workflows all over the place and it's become very useful but there hasn't been like the fully AI generated you know movie that is so good it gets over the hill of like oh I don't want to like it but I have to like it because it's good and I'm wondering if that will be what next year in AI music looks like.

1:28:55It's a tool that's in every studio, every production, and it's something that certain artists take off the shelf occasionally, but it's not fully AI-created albums that are out, but it's also not fallen by the wayside. Is that a reasonable prediction, or do you think that's too conservative? No, I think that's actually not too conservative. for the reason that an album is a, or even a song is a point of view. And it's very hard to just one-shot the point of view that is going to really resonate with the whole world. It does happen. But I think of this as, it is a process of refining your own point of view over and over again.

1:29:42And you may use an AI tool set, you may not use an AI tool set. And so I think that a year from now, it's actually quite mundane that there's a lot of AI in music. It's like used in every single part of the production chain. Some of it will be Suno, some of it will not be Suno. But the idea that like, there's just going to be charts full of one shot at AI bangers, to me actually kind of misses the point of, it doesn't express the point of view of the artist. And I think that this is kind of a, this is kind of a faulty comparison to, let's say, you know, we just saw OpenAI maybe prove a huge math theorem.

1:30:19And like this is something that is long running, that is verifiable. Music is just not that way. And so I'm not sure we expect to see the same types of things. Wait until I'm spinning up one million agents, command one million, 10 billion instances of Suno to create the gigabanger chart topper that sits at Billboard Hot 100 number one for 100 years straight. Yes, yes. The final song. I'm sure you can do it. um yeah what was your what was your takeaway from like the astro launch over the weekend because uh the lots of like blender models lots of video games created and i feel like uh the the answer isn't going like like a million one-shotted web games were spawned this weekend and i could not be more optimistic about GTA 6 blowing out the predictions.

1:31:13At the same time, I feel like as soon as I stop playing GTA 6, I'm going to get a text from a friend with a really hilarious micro game that they vibe coded that's GTA 6 but for TBPN or for tech or something. And I'm going to be, oh, this is cool. This is a special thing that only makes sense to me and you. And so is that how you process that or is there anything new on the overall AI capabilities side that's exciting to you these days? Maybe I'm too dumb to predict the future. So I would just look at, let's say, the last revolution there, which would be Roblox letting people really start to make their own games.

1:31:51And at the beginning, it starts really small and people are really just playing their own games. And eventually the technology progresses where you get more of that power law, you get people playing other people's games, et cetera. And then you make an ecosystem there. It's not crazy that we'll see something similar there. But again, I think a game is a very, it's a game's purpose is to be played by people. And it is very different from the general intelligence model of things. And so I think it's hard to really apply logic from one into the other. Yeah. Do you think that, how much should we read into the iPhone duo launch?

1:32:25Do you think Apple's so sunopilled that they want, you know, every person to have more real estate to be able to make music? What's your read? I really hope Apple's so soon-opilled. Humbly, I don't think we're the reason that they're making that phone, but if you want to suggest that, I'm very happy to take it. I'm suggesting that. As somebody who makes mobile apps, are you guys already looking into the implications of this and how you're going to need to change your application to be able to adapt to this kind of new... Might just be one prompt. Make it work on the Duo. For a lot of developers, that might be the answer.

1:33:10Yeah, absolutely. I think about this as opportunity of if there is different interaction with your phone, we actually are able to now inspire you at different times. You can take out your phone and do something without unlocking it. You can use one camera versus the other camera. I don't know what the plans are for the Provision Pro, But when I think about a final form of Suno, it's actually, how do I get a Vision Pro app that I can put on and conduct an orchestra? And so I think when we think about interfaces, this is where in the creativity game, we will just work on forever. You know, there's no end to working on how we delight people by letting them interact with technology in new ways.

1:33:49Last question. Have you guys ever run any billboards or wheat pasting campaigns? not that i know of why you if you uh because i just feel like billboards well i just feel like you should read running a billboard that says make a song with a sentence and you should just go go hard on that because it's just like people people need to experience the magic of this product it's just like we got to not get people to pick up their phones while they're driving that would be that would be bad but we got to place those billboards in the right everybody's in Waymos now. Tesla Cybercabs, maybe. Old case for billboards.

1:34:29Waymos, you can... No, no, no. It's actually a bear case because... Oh, you're looking down on your phone. Everyone's going to be on their phone. Yeah, maybe. It's going to be rough. Anyway, thank you so much for coming. The future is bright. You're going to be sitting in your Waymo. You're going to have a lot more time to be creative. Way better than driving. Way safer than driving. Yeah. Yeah, you say nothing for my end, thanks, and then you go back to making Suno songs. Great to see you, Mikey. Thank you. Congrats on the launch. Great to see you soon. I'm excited to try the new model. A little high this time.

1:34:59Have a good one. Go buy. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Thieves raided the Renoir Museum in the latest French art heist. We'll get to that story after we chat with Keith Raboy, Managing Director at Coastal Ventures, returning to the show for the fourth, fifth, sixth time. It's always a great chat. Keith, how are you doing? Great. It's great to be back. Have you been following this French art heist?

1:35:38Is this bearish for France? I have not been following it. I don't know how I missed it. I was just in France last week. Oh, you were in France last week? Are you guilty? Let's figure it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You never know. Maybe I was stealing, purloining some artworks. Okay, okay. Well, you're back in America. The private markets are too frothy. I'd rather swipe some fine art. Yeah. Are they too frothy? It feels like there's a lot of value. A lot of the companies, they're growing revenue. The products work. They're magical sometimes. Is it too frothy right now? Well, I think the revenue traction is real, as you pointed out.

1:36:20And then there's a variety of different categories of companies. Some are producing meaningful margin on that revenue and others are not. And so I don't think you can paint with one broad brush and say, hey, all these companies are worth X or Y or not worth X or Y. You have to kind of understand the fundamental drivers. But many of these companies have significant traction. I'm not worried about that. And I don't think multiples are the right way to evaluate private companies typically anyway. But if you work backwards from 2030 and say, which of these companies are going to be sustained, which ones have durable advantages, as I like to talk about it or communicate it through accumulating advantages, that's less clear.

1:36:57The traction is off the charts by any historical norms. The ability to go to$100 million in revenue from two years or so or hundreds of millions in four years, basically unprecedented. But you still do have to ask questions about what's the sustainability of that revenue, not just because customers may or may not change their mind or there may be new competitors, but the way the ecosystem evolves around AI is not at all easy to forecast. So we struggle with this and debate this in our partner meetings constantly. The founders are impressive. The teams are impressive. The revenue and the adoption is impressive.

1:37:35And even the usage often is impressive. But if you still say, is this going to be an iconic company that's around for 20, 30 years? In many cases, the question is not – the answer is not so obvious. Now, if you play your cards correctly, you may be able to get acquired. And that can be fine. No, and it feels like the powers that be in AI – I'm thinking of one guy. I won't name him – is almost not willing to let any AI companies fail at this moment in time. At the moment. he is playing an interesting so that company means money yeah they're growing really fast and they have lots of profits if you're in those shoes you know and your revenue depends upon people buying what you sell that are mostly ai companies the strategy is incredibly coherent now they are starting to move from being a platform company to a product company you can see it with the recent acquisition yeah as they start shipping products maybe they ship products in other areas, they will compete with more people than they ever have before.

1:38:40Right now, any AI growth is great for NVIDIA. But as they start having their own products, that may change how people perceive them and how they perceive others. And I think to continue and sustain their growth for whatever sort of reasons, they believe they need to have their own products. Yeah. And there's one thing that's interesting is there's so many companies that are marked up into the tens of billions of dollars that are actually insignificant to the overall AI trade, but their valuations are such that if one were to fail, you would have all over the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, all the newspapers,$30 billion company.

1:39:19It would be like a WeWork or Theranos level failure, which it would be for a very different reason, but it would be that big. Yeah, and I think that the market would be able to process it generally. But like you said, when the cash is flowing, there's an incentive to make sure that, hey, let's buy this company an extra two years, right? Even when there's no other investors lining up to back the company. Yeah, I mean, it's in self-interest. The longer the AI wave continues, the better it is for NVIDIA, without a doubt. And the bigger the amplitude, almost surely, is better for NVIDIA, unless and until there's a better version of NVIDIA or somebody obviates their competitive advantages, which could happen.

1:40:07It always happens in technology at some point. We're seeing this play out now that what's the future of Google? Who knows? But that was even five years ago. Even formulating that question kind of felt silly. But now it feels very realistic that a chat or a similar interface may displace all of searches. The advertising revenue will lag. And so the business itself will show signs of life for a while. But people I know and not all my friends and colleagues in different fields are tech forward have substituted huge fractions of what used to be searches. with things they do with ChatGPT. Yeah. No, the last three things.

1:40:57Yeah, the last, you know, obviously I'm, you know, quite biased here at least like, but I went from last year not making any real like commercial decisions with AI to suddenly everything I buy, all that research is happening within ChatGPT. And I feel like I'm buying better products and I'm having a better experience, right? I don't need to. I have like very specific, you know, I have very specific things like my frustration with Amazon was always I just want to buy products that where the company has been around for 50 years. Right. I don't want to buy the the drop ship thing with a with a name that doesn't make any sense that that's going to fail within the first year or whatever.

1:41:42I want to buy the thing that I'm willing to pay 30 percent more to buy the thing where the company has been around for 50 years. And so now I can now you can afford it. It's great. yeah but i'm talking yeah the example he uses like paper towels or like the paper towel holder but that's very funny um uh any anyways i i wanted to get right into how you are like what what is your in like what do you how much are you pricing in a like a data center freeze or or real friction to bringing in uh and like what is your mental model for what happens Because on one hand, existing compute that's in a powered shell becomes potentially a lot more valuable and starts to trade hands as certain companies are able to monetize it much better than others.

1:42:32But then there's potentially millions of GPUs that aren't plugged in that the world is figuring out how do we shuffle these around the world to get them to places that they can be plugged in. And the capital flows that happen there and the impacts to the labor market. Like there's so many downstream implications of that. And when you have both sides of the political aisle that are realizing, hey, I can get points for pushing back here, then it's hard to imagine that there isn't like very real friction ahead. So let me simplify sort of the AI exposure first and then come back to that. The most devastating thing to the frothy hype and the traction that we're seeing with AI and the funding of it from VCs would be if Anthropik and our OpenAI have a blip in their public exits, their IPOs.

1:43:28do they have to show metrics over the next month to first few quarters that cause people to value either company less than the current belief that they will trade in the trillions is? So they could have a miss on revenue traction, a miss on margin, something like that. That would be catastrophic and immediately reset virtually all valuations in the AI world. and probably deprive half the companies that are raising money from access to capital. Well, yeah, and I've been asking that. I'm not saying that's going to happen or is likely. And I think if they miss, it would be more on the margin side than on the revenue side right now.

1:44:10But if they do, everybody is predicating their valuations and new investments in dollars on the idea that you can build a trillion dollar company within the life cycle of a venture fund. There's two examples currently, and there's several companies that people believe have the potential to get there. If that changes and you cannot sort of predict that more trillion dollars companies can be created, then the valuations that people are investing in and the dollars that are being invested do not make that much sense. Let me backtrack one second. Like basically in the history of venture, a very successful company was$10 to$50 billion, maybe$100 billion at the max.

1:44:52That's like a home run. That's like we all dreamed about sort of thing. It is possible now that at least one order of magnitude, possibly two orders of magnitude, have been added to the upside potential of a startup, which does adjust the prudence and rationality of a VC investing$50 million at$500 million or whatever the case is compared to when I invested in Airbnb, it was at$1.7 million pre or post. $1.7 million. Yeah. So like that role may or may not be coming back, but certainly by adding a zero or two zeros to the upside potential, you can rationally look yourself in the mirror and say, OK, sure, I'll take a shot on goal here.

1:45:36But how do some of these investors, and I'm seeing these rounds, let's call them like series B and C stage rounds, where a company has a much richer revenue multiple than, let's say, the labs, leading labs. And they're growing often, not even necessarily as well. And you know they're not as talent dense. And all these rounds are getting funded. And that's like the place of frothiness that I don't understand. That makes no sense. But I don't understand how you look at the business and say like, oh, yeah, this has a path to a trillion when it's like, okay, every single person working at this company tried to get a job at like four other companies, couldn't, and then is now here.

1:46:22And that doesn't mean they're not great. And they could very well build a billion-dollar company. but I just, I don't know how you, you underwrite these things to that, to that trillion dollar mark. That's crazy. In order to get a very estate observation, nor do I, which is hopefully on your list of companies that are getting funded that have those three criteria. None of them are my investments. But like, if you told me like, Hey, a company is growing less at a less rapid clip than the frontier labs with less density of talent. At lower scale. At like a hundred X lower scale. And what's a higher multiple?

1:46:58My answer would be no. I have some competitors I'll introduce you to if you want. I'll be in France. I'll go find a startup in France. There's one or two, apparently, that are quite good. But the fundamental driver, though, you identified, which is key, and a lot of people lose sight of, so it's worth double-clicking on. The critical density of talent does matter. And so if a company is in the short term at low scale growing at X clip, that's not that critical. If they have the right team assembled against the right challenges, that is investable up to some dollars about. And whether you're like multiplying, using Meta's multiple or OpenAI's implied multiple or NVIDIA's multiple, doesn't matter in the earlier stages if the team is stellar.

1:47:49But your point is the team is often not stellar. It doesn't have to mean the same people that would work at Anthropic or OpenAI, but they have to be world-class at what they do at their craft, and you have to be able to assemble a density of them. In some ways, you want to find people who are mispriced and that the labs don't necessarily value you as much as they should, and there's an archetype you can scale a company on. But you still have to believe you're scaling with incredible talent, like top one basis point, 10 basis point on some dimensions to really believe that you're going to create a trillion dollar business from scratch in less than a decade.

1:48:22Do you think that differences in philosophy, whether it's P-Doom or AGI-pilledness, can create sub pockets of talent density? We just had Scott Wu on the show, brilliant mathematician, cognitions on a tear. I don't know if this is just because he's at the application layer but not a lot of doom, a lot of optimism because he's interfacing with the real world and I love that energy and you see with Ramp too where incredible talent density but not of the crazy doom scenario weird like that pocket is a different group those folks are really talented but they have different beliefs and so I'm wondering if there's if there's like the hyper talent actually scatters across different pockets of philosophical alignment.

1:49:14Absolutely. You know, it drives back from Peter's old expression of, you know, building a cult. Yeah. Well, think about it. Cults have tenants. Yeah. And so some of that is a philosophy of life. And I think that's right. Like Ramp, we're optimistic about the future. We use technology to improve society. We're optimistic about our ability historically to do that and our ability in the future to do it. That's why people come to work at ramp and that's what they do every day. And all of them are thinking like the world's going to be better than it was a decade ago. And it's going to be better than it was 20 years ago.

1:49:44And we're going to, we're going to wave our magic wand to make it better if we have to. Yep. Yep. Uh, yeah, I'm a firm devotee of the cult of saving time and money. That is for sure. But, um, uh, what, what do you make of the conversation around doom? There's been this back and forth around regulatory capture and the evolution of this. And I've watched some people from the outside, friends who are not in tech, but critique tech from a political angle. And they were upset about the rhetoric leading to potential regulatory capture. But now they are worried about some of the developments in AI and they're calling for regulation.

1:50:25And so they're sort of begrudgingly giving the labs their due on the calls for regulation. But how have you been processing just this year? Has it updated you at all on how we should think about the probability of the bad outcome and doom and all of that? Well, I think people start off in a life of orientation optimism or doom. And maybe from the time they're like seven years old. I'm an optimist. I'm a tech optimist. That's what I do. If I wasn't a tech office, I wouldn't be investing in tech companies. And there's a question of whether these people should be building or working there or forfeiting their equity if they really believe they're doing something that's bad or evil.

1:51:06In my opinion, like the world is getting a little tired of some of this because, you know, we had the gloom and doom about jobs. All jobs are going away. There's no human jobs. It could still happen, but all of the evidence as of today is to the contrary. Every single piece of evidence. You can look through – you can be in Sherlock Holmes with your magnifying glass. You can't find any evidence that AI is constantly creating job loss. If anything, it's creating jobs. So, OK, so they're 0 for 1, let's say, as of now. Then they're like, oh, my God, the world is going to end. OK, well, hard to falsify that.

1:51:40AI jobs, at least you can falsify. You're like, no, that's not happening. False. This one is a little hard to falsify. But then I think as a couple of people push back today online is, well, articulate how the world ends because then at least the precepts or the predicates, we can start trying to falsify it and then prove or try to disprove that there's some risk there. And I do think that the reality is the world is always going to be subject to some risk. People like to compare to the advent of the nuclear bomb. And there's a very strong argument. I mean, it's not QED proven, but the nuclear bomb in many ways probably made the world more peaceful.

1:52:21If you went through the arc of history and how many citizens died as a fraction of the population of the globe in conflict before and after the advent of the nuclear bomb, you have a pretty strong case. It certainly wasn't negative. But was that known that it would play out that way on day one when we dropped a nuclear bomb or two in Japan? No. Even, you know, there's a scene in Oppenheimer where they don't even really know what it would do to the atmosphere. And they go to consult with Einstein to make sure it's not going to blow up the world. And he's like, it doesn't give him a very compelling, like, definite answer.

1:52:58So, you know, like the world is free, is not risk free. And I think, you know, all of us make decisions every single day. We drive a car, we find a helicopter, blah, blah, blah, blah, that, you know, take that into account. So I don't think a zero defect approach to life really works either for humans. But I think the burden is on the people arguing for regulation or slowing progress down of articulating, well, what goes wrong, why and how. And so that people can probe and push back and try to evaluate and quantify that risk. and I have yet to see a compelling answer to that. That's not just like, oh, I know it because I was working on this and it's really dangerous.

1:53:45How many of these ideas do you think - Wait, wait, hold on. Later on, on their political point, even if that was 100 % true, the idea that politicians are going to make it better is also subject to historical debate. Yes. Like if you said we have a world-class problem on our hands, would you entrust it to the federal government or to a bunch of private citizens? Not obvious. Yep. Yeah. do you think that that basically these ideas around PDU end up in the S1 because I would expect them I would expect Anthropic to actually put this in the S1 as a real risk factor people are saying like oh you know they gotta stop the employees from posting this stuff but if it's coming top down yeah it might be just proper SEC disclosure It could very well end up in there and it would be – I used to be a securities litigator, so I can argue a couple kind of fun points on this.

1:54:44You could say, hey, like if the real risk is the world is going to blow up, buying anthropic shares is no more dangerous or risky than buying anything else. That's a good point. So it's not a particularly – it's not a risk factor associated with anthropic. Sure. A more nuanced view might be, hey, if the political environment were to appreciate that we can – Couldn't you make the argument that the company could, with a runaway AI, incur such massive liability that it is a risk to the actual investment? That's probably fair, and there probably will be language like that, but it'll be so toned down that most people won't even understand it.

1:55:23There's an old Peter Thielian lesson here, too, which is if you have risk factors, you want the most possible risk factors so no one can really tell which one's really important. So you might see an anthropic prospectus that has hundreds of pages of risks. You can't like isolate. Oh, this is the one I should actually care about. But the most acute risk probably would be something like, hey, we scare enough politicians that, you know, they implement policy that's particularly in, you know, that's certainly imprudent. But it could constrain our growth. And that is a real risk if they can't control their employee blog post or ex-post sooner or later.

1:56:05I think people are seeing through some of this. There has been significant exposure of the fact that many of these anti-data center crusades are being funded by China intentionally by our adversary. there is, you know, real proof that these data centers certainly do not...

1:56:28It's almost like a walking IQ test. That doesn't mean that the political class doesn't have to rebut it, but it is kind of a walking IQ test for someone if they really believe that data centers are going to make the world run out of water somehow. Yeah, it's very ridiculous that the origin of that is just a simple calculation error that was off by a couple orders of magnitude and it just ran away before the horse. Unfortunately, you can use chat GPT now to solve math problems. I know. But it reveals like a different problem, which is that like people don't do the calculations. They don't even need to.

1:57:04They just go off of whatever. Tell me about your read on the dynamic between effective altruism and venture capital. because I think there's a lot of VCs out there that are just sort of have generally pretty down-the-middle beliefs about the future, and maybe they're generally optimistic, and then you get the pitch from a budding, young, effective altruist. And part of it is you know this person is just going to be extremely, generally, at least we've seen points, extremely risk-on. It does qualify as a pretty good venture investment. but there's I feel like now there's been enough of a pattern of blow-ups that you need to be like kind of wary right where there's like extreme upside you know potentially you know your downsides capped as a VC so you're kind of like if you blow up like it's more your problem than my problem but but but there's so much upside and so I I just think that like that specific dynamic there will be like a book written about it um you know fast forward 10 years but I'm curious your view on it well i think venture when it's practiced as a craft at its best is a match making exercise between founders and a team and a vision and your sort of views about the world so i think that some types of founders with some beliefs about the world whether you label them you know effective altruism or something else could be a good match for a vc who sits around all day and worries about that stuff it would be a bad match for someone at founders firm let's say So I think that the best relationships between a founder and their investors and a consigliere or board member are when you have alignment, kind of double entendre, between how you think about the world and what's good for society and how the founder does.

1:58:58I do not, for example, I do watch and am friendly with many people who work at prediction markets, but I personally don't believe prediction markets are good for society. I believe in the Trump quote, and actually I actually used the line before he did, but it's just another casino for Americans at the moment. And I don't think we need more forms of speculation in the United States for normal people. And the evidence is that 99 % of the people who engage in prediction markets are going to lose money. And I don't think that's necessarily a positive thing either. I don't really love sports betting, even though I love sports.

1:59:34But that's why I would probably be a bad match for someone who wants to build Polymarket, even though I like Shane or Kelsey, even though I hang out with Derek too. But it's just not what I believe that the future of the world makes the world a better place. Yeah. And I would just say that I think there's a lot of investors that have their beliefs about the way the world should be and then are willing to completely discard their values and beliefs to back companies because they're just like, well, the return is just going to probably be so good. And I would say the percentage of investors that will discard their beliefs in order to get returns is like, it feels like it's like 80, 90, 95%.

2:00:16I agree. I agree with that assessment. It's just why do you do what you do is, you know, in your professional career. And at least at KB, and this is true at Founders Fund too, we wake up and say, is this going to have a positive impact in society? We have more money than we need. We have more money to deploy and invest than we need. We could be doing lots of things with our time and we want to apply our energies to solving problems that we think would move the world forward. You know, Peter and Trey have pretty strong filters on this stuff and Vinod and I do. And I think all my colleagues at KB do, but not that's not for everybody i mean some people you know work at hedge funds i don't want to work at a hedge fund either yeah well thank you so much for coming on the show this is always great to catch up it's been too long too long yeah enjoy that enjoy that art let's make it i missed the first i missed the first month of you guys when i was like on every day yeah yeah hey you're always you're always welcome this came up because i was like we haven't talked to keith it's been way too long it's always a good hang so we'll talk to you have a great rest of your week Cheers.

2:01:20Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We have David Perel here with us live in the TVP on Ultradone. David, good to see you, man. What's up, man? Not much. Hanging out, doing the news, talking about new iPhone, talking about AI. You were excited for another screen. Two screens in one. Yeah. Yeah, you just go to the news and Uber over. Yeah? Yeah. You getting one? Of course. Really? Of course. Okay, the fold. He's going to be writing by hand on the screen more. It does have a bookish look to it.

2:02:01Yeah, you don't need an iPad mini anymore, you know? Yeah. Do you do the iPad for the notes when you do an interview? Have you toyed with that? You know how Chris Williamson, a lot of people have the iPad there. I do the full computer, but it's the key to a good interview. I've actually gone full smartphone. Okay. I've gone full smartphone. So what I do is if you watch the interviews, on the right side, I just kind of keep the phone. And then what I can do is I can just do quick pulls of like, hey, check this thing, check that thing. I feel like if I go on my computer right now, it's like, oh, he's doing something serious.

2:02:35But if I pull out my phone right now, you're like, this guy's really distracted. He's scrolling reels. It feels a little disrespectful, but you've gotten over that hump. Well, the other thing is I don't do it live. So I do a bunch of editing. So I think So you might say hey I'm going to look this up and then I'll hit you with the next question I say hey if I'm looking something up just keep talking Prep them on this And then what I do is I watch every interview back Which I've now done 130 So that's my game film Yeah What's been the biggest one? Dark room Screen on, just locked in Just locked in, sitting there What's been the most recent interview That you came away from I'm being like, this is what I want the show to be.

2:03:18There's an interview I did with Dana Gioia. He's Ted Gioia's brother. You might know the substacker. And Dana is just so, so well read. He lost a son when he lost his first son, I want to say, to sudden infant death syndrome when he was four to six months old. And you can just feel, you know, our friend Jeremy Giffon has the line where there's pre-fall and post-fall. And you can feel when somebody is post-fall, they've sort of wrestled with grief. And then you combine that with these really well-read. And so I flew out to Sonoma. We recorded for seven hours, chopped into a three-hour interview.

2:03:52And it was phenomenal. And it was funny because you're asking about recent interview. And this is what I love about YouTube is that interview did okay. And then the algorithm found how to distribute it like 15 months in. And now it's written. So like last month, that interview was our most watched interview in terms of watch time. And it's two years old. Wow. That's fascinating. How much are you thinking about booking guests that can go viral in the YouTube algorithm? Are you sitting down with Clav anytime soon? You know, there's always like these people who come up on the cusp. I don't care about that.

2:04:25And it's like, if you get this person this time, you got one of the first interviews, you know, playing that game. No, the game I'm trying to play is I think Patrick O'Shaughnessy has crushed it. It's like, you know, you have these people who are coming on. You don't hear a lot of, who's the guy who he did, the hedge fund guy with that? Like John Paul speaks slowly. Paul Tudor Jones? Paul Tudor Jones, exactly. Like I want to do interviews like that. Totally. Right? Like Paul Tudor Jones hasn't done a bunch of podcasts. Get him on. I don't really care about having something that crushes right away.

2:04:57I want it to be like the Paris Review interview series where you look back and I want in 50, 60 years people to be like, this was – snapshot. Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. But, uh, to give, uh, to give Patrick even more of his due, uh, I feel like he has a couple of products in one in the sense that yes, he does those interviews where it's like, wow, I haven't heard from this person in a long time. I'm so glad I did. This is amazing. But then he'll also do like the, a super timely interview with like Sam Altman about the news and the expectations for that company right then at the turning point.

2:05:29And And then he'll also do a catch-up with Gavin Baker regularly, just getting up to speed. And so it feels like he has a couple series, a couple like, okay, this person's coming out of stealth, and it's Gavin Huberti at Etched, and it's the first time you're hearing from this person. He's almost breaking the news. And I'm wondering how calcified you think about different products. If you want to add – we have a few. We have like a lightning round interview. Founder, young, hasn't done hours and hours of interviews. Comes on for 10 minutes. Tell us about it. We hit the gong. Another person we might yap with for 30 minutes.

2:06:01We might have somebody in studio for an hour. We have different products. I'm wondering if you're thinking about where How I Write goes and whether you want to have different skews within the main feed. Dude, 100%. OK. So here's how I think about it. I want to get the best writers in the world. That was my first goal. And so like this month is Andy Weir did Project Hail Mary, Jillian Flynn, Gone Girl, Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell. It's so good. We're like, let's get the best writer. Yeah, yeah. You nailed it. that's nailed. Wait, are you the reason that you're in LA? J.K. Rowling's yacht is in LA.

2:06:34Is it happening? You saw this, right? I wish I was here for the big review. Is that why the mystery yacht? The mystery yacht has been unveiled to be J.K. Rowling. I love it. But I mean, you're going to get, like, I'm just so excited for that level of interview to happen soon. And so then the game is, it's like a T. So then you go up, you kind of reach the top here and then break into, I want to do music. Oh, music. I want to do music. I want to have screenwriters. and then just trying to break into that. But the thing is we're kind of in a local maxima with the YouTube algorithm. Sure. So this is sort of the grand irony of the whole thing.

2:07:07I got into this because I love posting. Yeah. I love posting. That is my thing. Wait, wait, wait. Isn't posting on YouTube a form of posting? It kind of is. But the people who I really feel a kindred spirit with, it's like you guys. You had the YouTube channel. You were kind of going there. But then what happened was the novelists, the poets, they were the best interviews, and they were the ones that crushed. And so now I'm in this weird situation where that's what I do. But I don't know. But it's just being a nim cell in a particular community. It's niche, but that's valuable. What's a nim cell?

2:07:39Nim cell is niche internet micro celebrity. It's like if we go to YCW day, we'll get recognized. We'll get a sound effect for that. We'll get a sound effect for that. But we can walk around anywhere else and you don't get recognized. There are certain areas where there will be some cooking influencer. where like every chef knows them or like an auto influencer. Like every car guy, cars and coffee, everyone will stop. Doug Jumuro. But like he doesn't get stopped if he just goes to like a Costco, right? It's just the modern incantation of the celebrity as we've created these pockets. But interesting.

2:08:12What are you excited about in terms of actual growth? You're growing on YouTube. You're also growing on Instagram. You have some stats for us. I want to hit the gong. What you got? You got some stats? I got some stats, yeah. Give me some stats. How is the product doing? It's been a crazy year. So we're going to do 6 million views on Instagram this month. What about YouTube? 3 million on YouTube. Whoa.

2:08:41No, that's been good. That's been good. But the big thing, I think this one deserves the big gong. So we started a YouTube channel. I found this guy named Shein Quirk. Crazy story. And we made this pilot episode with him. His last name is Quirk? Quirk. Quirky Quirk. That's what I call him. Quirky Quirk. He's the cultural tutor. The cultural tutor. Yes. And so I found this Twitter account, 2022. Yeah. And I was like, this account rips. Like, this is so good. And so it was an on. And I was like, hey, we got to talk on the phone. So I get on with him. And I expect like 65 years old. He's writing about culture and like ball arts and like buildings.

2:09:18And he's like 24 years old. And I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, you know, I live in the north of England. My parents just got divorced. I have no money. I'm like, cool. Like, what do you do for work? He goes, I just quit my job at McDonald's. And I'm like, okay, that's a little bit weird. He's like, yeah, that's why I started this cultural tutor thing because I'm going to tutor people in culture to make some money. Terrible way to make money. And then he goes, yeah, I'm going to go join the British military if it doesn't work. It's been my dream to die for my country. And I'm just like, I've known him for 10 minutes, like about as long as I've been on the show right here for today.

2:09:49And I'm like, dude, that is a bad idea. So I just raised some money for my writing business at the time, and I made him a writer in residence. He had 100 ,000 followers at the time. Three years later, 1.6 mil on Twitter. We're in London last year walking around. He's giving me a tour every day. I'm like, dude, you can write well, but you are an amazing speaker. You are the next Bourdain. Sure. So I said, hey, let's make a pilot episode, put in 150 grand of my own money. I really believe in this guy. And we went to Hollywood. They said, no, we're not interested. Go make a pilot episode. So we had a pilot, Tommy Lee, the director, in the back right there.

2:10:23There we go. And we published it from an account with zero subs. It was our goal to get 100 ,000 views and then go pitch Hollywood. And we did 100 ,000 views in 18 hours and then 5.6 million views now. And just from that one video, almost a quarter million subs. Are you optimistic about being able to break into Hollywood? This year has been like the crossover year with Markiplier, Obsession, Backrooms, right? Like Hollywood is seeing that they can print on adaptations of internet. Do you need Hollywood? Do you need Hollywood? Now you walk in with your pilot. It's like I shot your, your freaking pilot.

2:11:01Yeah. There you go. But then it's like, do you actually need them? Can you figure out a way to, this is the driving question of my life right now? Yeah. This is, we're trying to figure it out. I mean, we went to, we went to one of the major studios here yesterday. We had a meeting with them. this is what hollywood tells us they want exclusivity of person or exclusivity of place sure so if you can go film in the sistine chapel and other people can't they love that and then if you're you're like hey brad pitt's really interested in architecture let's have brad pitt be the host they also love that yeah they're like we'll give you money for that brad pitt and the sistine chapel and they're like one more change it needs to be a low budget horror film.

2:11:39Low budget horror. We're just going to have a one note. No. But I don't think I don't think we're going to go that route. No. No. I mean I don't think we're going to go. Their pitch isn't compelling. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean the thing is that What is the actual pitch? It's capital and then we'll get you Yeah. Well, I would say even more like in what way is a streaming service exciting? I think that streaming service is exciting in two ways. One, you have Amazon, HBO, Apple, whatever. They can give you budget to make something awesome. That's the first thing, budget. The second thing is prestige.

2:12:15And I think the root of prestige translates to illusion. And I just always try to remind myself of that. Because YouTube is, you can really get views now. Yeah. They are not in the business right now of talent development. They will attach Brad Pitt, but they are not going to allow you to spend their money building the cultural tutor into the next Anthony Bourdain. You're going to have to do that on your own platform. And then when you're ready and you're ready to rest on your laurels, they'll be like, welcome. The door is finally open. So this was funny about that. So Sunday I was at Sundance in Utah, not at the festival but just at the hotel.

2:12:51And that's where Robert Redford started the film festival. And so as you walk through the main room, they just got all these photos of old Hollywood. And it was so cool. It was like a bunch of risk-taking and all that. And what happened, the reason why Hollywood is boring and the reason why a lot of the modern world is boring, and I credit Derek Thompson with making this observation, is the money-ballification of our world. What happened is things are boring now because we've gotten smart. Yes. And they've gotten good at pricing risk and all that sort of stuff. But the problem is then you end up getting Spider-Man 74, Lord of the Rings 7 rather than some new show.

2:13:28And that's just the state of our world. The funny thing is that I feel that. I feel the stagnation. We're also, the internet will strike back. And also the latest Spider-Man made a billion dollars. So the irony is I feel the same Marvel fatigue that everyone does, and yet the latest Spider-Man was a fantastic success. But here's a counterexample. So the models still work for them. Nathan Fielder is on an incredible run. and I feel like that is a set of new ideas and forms of content, right, that are meaningfully novel, that are rooted in this talent. So I would almost argue there's not a shortage.

2:14:20Anybody can make media now. It's cheaper than it's ever been, production and distribution. And as much as you can argue all the capital is flowing into these big bets, Spider-Man 12, at the same time, for talented people, it's the best time in the world to do anything. I agree, in a lot of ways. And in some ways, Nathan Fielder is the best modern instantiation of being yourself in Hollywood. And finding that mix of commercial appeal and new ideas. Where for me, I'm more excited to see the new Elizabeth Holmes movie than anything. If I could only watch The Odyssey or the new Nathan... Did you see The Odyssey?

2:15:11Yeah, I did. What did you think? I thought it was a good movie. It was a good movie? Have you seen it? Yeah, I liked it. It was good. It was a lot. I don't think it's like a rewatch it every year like The Dark Knight. Yeah. That was my take. So I got to see it at the Chinese Theater. Yeah, we went there. Amazing place to watch a movie. Holy cow. Nah. You don't like it. Absolutely not. I came out of that and I was like, you got to be kidding me, guys. How did we end up? Universal is you're much closer to the screen. Same size IMAX screen, but you're closer. No, but you have to walk out of the theater.

2:15:43The theater is fine. I didn't personally like that it was grungy and dirty feeling, but that was okay. I did feel like I was going to get worked on my way. But the second that you get out of it, it's like you're watching this beautiful film, work of art, and then you come out and it's like the worst place on earth, you know. Sunset Boulevard. So rough. It's like completely, completely brutal. Hollywood is so seedy. That's been my biggest takeaway being here. What is going on? It kind of always has been. I didn't realize that. It's crazy, right? Because you're just like, wow, it's my dream to go to Hollywood.

2:16:19And then you get here, you're like, this is what it's like? I'd like to go to West Hollywood instead. I'd like to go to Beverly Hills. What's on your wrist? Oh, good question. I just went to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Yeah. So this museum opens September 22nd. Okay. So it's just kind of like these preview tours. Dude, so good. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. What's good about it? Okay, so the reason I have this. Is the whole project not like a massive white pill that we can still make? Honestly, it is such a massive white pill. The only thing that bums me out is San Francisco and Chicago said no, but then L.A.

2:16:55got it. Let's go. Well, is that not the victory for Los Angeles? Were they saying no? Like this needs to be in L.A.? I don't think so. It would just be wrong for us to take this. Or they were just like, yeah, the idea is kind of mid. Like it would suck to have a billion-dollar museum. it's like 44 ,000 pieces of art in George Lucas's collection 13 ,000 at the exit or at the museum only six of them on loan yeah and so I thought that what I was going to walk into was like Star Wars yeah yeah that's actually not what it is at all dress up as Chewbacca so this is what the narrative art museum gets which is modern art most of what you see kind of stinks because it's super abstract and you're like, what is going on?

2:17:37This is the best non-canonical collection of modern art museum I've seen. And what I mean by that is I think the MoMA has a better collection. But at the MoMA, you see the canon pieces of modern art. You see everything from Van Gogh's Starry Night to cubism to then stuff that comes out of World War II. This is very different. This is a lot of paintings that I did not know. And almost every painting feels like a freeze frame in a movie and you almost feel like somebody stopped it so the lighting is super dramatic there's like these dramatic scenes then there's a whole range of styles and then the other thing for people like norman rockwell it's must be one of the largest collections of norman rockwell paintings oh that's great yeah love it and then also the way that they organize the museum is super different so usually it's all around jargon or time period this is different this is around family school like friendship stuff like that or specific artists so because of that it doesn't feel like heady as a museum it feels like the kind of art that'll be both good and super mass mass market that's cool almost like star wars itself is there at least one chewbacca do you see any star wars i only saw so this is why i have this okay i just went and i went up to the front desk yeah and i was like this is so good can i leave go on tv and then come back And she was like, fine, we'll make an exception.

2:18:59So we're booking it back to Dowdow to see the Chewbacca for you. And I will send you a selfie. I will send you one Chewbacca selfie. I want that. I see this modern art. I love Star Wars. What do you think of Mark Zuckerberg's new castle? The critique is that tech wealth is not going into beautiful things. Which is true. And he just bought a beautiful castle in Ireland. And it feels like the beginning, I think the Stripe founders bought a castle in Ireland. Yeah. There's the seeds. And I think that I understand the critique of tech wealth is not going into beautiful things. We're not getting the museums, the libraries.

2:19:34But I think that there is a world where wait until they're 45. They'll buy the castles. They'll get sick of them at 65. The kids won't want to live there. And then there'll be museums and libraries because that's what happens when you renovate an 18th century castle. And you stop wanting to pay the$5 million a year to maintain it. The museum of Zucky's Bunky is going to go so hard. All these what will then be antique firearms that are like Halo style. He's got a needler. He really had that on. He really had that in 2026. He's got a needler. He had the good supply. If he has a needler and we don't know about it, that's a major issue.

2:20:22It's interesting in those two examples. Both of them bought existing places. They did not build them. Okay, so building is important. They did not build them. Okay. Like you look at Hearst Castle, you know, William Randolph Hearst. I'm actually staying. I love the story of Hearst Castle. And I both aspire to personally embark on such a crusade that I die with it unfinished like he did. And also I encourage other people to take on projects that are so unwieldy that they will ultimately never be – never see the fruits of their labor and only the next generation will. Yeah. I mean beyond that, it's really easy to talk about castles and palaces and stuff like that.

2:21:01What about just like the tech initiative to make the panhandle, like one of the most beautiful parks in America? Sure. You know what I mean? Or like let's restore Fillmore Street. I heard of a project that's exactly that. It's like four or five blocks of Fillmore. Like we – I think that the beauty conversation is way too much about these giant big buildings. You got to start small. Corgi Cafe. Corgi Cafe. They're starting with a cafe. You scale that up. Corgi Library, Corgi Museum, Corgi Central Park. We'll save the world. Could happen. You never know. They're a reinsurer now. Well, this is what's so great about New York.

2:21:32Like I think it was – is John Paulson the investor? I think so. Who made a lot of money in the financial crisis? He's the one. The one. Yeah, exactly. One guy. But he donated$100 million to Central Park. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's cool. It's good. Okay. The simple stuff for the people. Yeah. What about on the overall architectural malaise and just this – is there a linkage from housing prices, we can't build anything, stagnation, and the critiques from you and the cultural tutor on – Oh, that's interesting. So I think that the way that people see it is something like this. We can't build, and because of that, we need to make it cheaper and uglier, and it's like a cost problem.

2:22:21Actually, there's a new article in Works in Progress that basically makes this point, that one of the reasons why it's hard to build is that things aren't beautiful enough. So if I look at – Yeah, why go through the hassle? Yeah, and also for the neighbors, they're like, I don't want something new being built. It's going to be butt ugly. It's going to make my neighborhood less nice. Yeah, it's going to be a square box. And so it's this weird kind of compounding loop where things are ugly, so then there's more regulation. Then there's more regulation, so it's more expensive. Then we need to save money, so things get ugly.

2:22:47And maybe there's a way to reverse that where you have nice buildings and people are excited about building a little bit more and you begin to change that. Yeah, I've been – there's some – there's things coming down the pipeline. I was hanging out with a friend of a friend who's an architect based in Europe, and he was just showing me, like, all the stuff that he has in the works. And to me, I got incredibly excited because I was like, every single one of these things, you know, he's a rising star. Every single one of these things will end up being in every mood board. Like, they are, like, net new creations that are inspired by the past, but also just new ways for buildings to exist.

2:23:28And I have another friend who does real estate development in the American Southwest. And he is showing me things that he's actively building right now. And I'm like, that entryway to the home is going to be iconic. And so a lot of these are like, I still, in some ways, I think you're going to see, like, the world is so Instagram driven now that there are beautiful things being built purely for the feed. to basically stop people and to get attention. And I think that I'm excited to see what you're pulling up. Oh, you got it. I'm trying to get them to pull it up. I got to show you this. Yes. So I think that the side-by-side format will change the world.

2:24:16It already is. And all the side-by-side format is super common on Twitter, super common on Instagram. All it is is you show one old thing versus one new thing, and you just say, what happened? And this is one of those formats that we've all seen that no one has taken seriously. So this is – oh, hold on. Okay, we've got to cut that for the clip. We're going to pull it up on the big board. This is the old Home Alone house. Here we go. Here we got both of them. This is the old Home Alone house. Scroll up. Scroll up. This is 1990. 1990. This is the old Home Alone house that we all love. Iconic. Yes.

2:24:50Okay. Wallpaper, carpets on the stairs. Character vibe. Lots of warmth. Yep. What happened? Now scroll down. This is what they did to it. Stunning. Stunning and brave. Okay, so. The white, the different shades of white. It's so much white. It's so much white. So this sells better. I mean, look at the rug. I mean, who would be bold enough? Is that why they did this? Well, so here is what happened. So there's a few things that changed. One is that housing went from something that people would build for themselves to something that was done by real estate agents. and real estate companies. And so housing became a market that you thought of as something liquid.

2:25:32And then you basically need to increase how generic something is so that it basically is a more liquid asset. Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. And then the other thing is a lot of these projects are built by people who won't live in them. Yeah. And so they sort of see the world through a spreadsheet. Yeah. A spreadsheet. That's exactly what it's called. It's called a spreadsheet. It's called a spreadsheet. So they see the world through a spreadsheet. and uh yes but i when i look at this i think buying opportunity buy this and and remodel it to look like the home it can't be that hard to put carpet down on the staircase right uh i like this style i think it's called pre-modern this is generally the the like what this is referred to yeah yeah you're saying something that's very real i a friend of mine um bought a place years ago invested a bunch of money into it.

2:26:23And I think legitimately for 99 % of people made it way worse. Oh, I know what you're talking about. For him, he's like, yeah, it's so much character. I'm like, a little too much character there, buddy. Some of the rooms, I'm just like, this is horrific. And even though he invested a lot of money into the property, you actually have to deduct that basically an equal amount from the new purchase price, which is going to be lower than what they paid because you have to rip all this stuff. You liked blue. You made your house blue. But I do think that maximalism is 100 % coming back. And you're seeing this in...

2:27:05You think of loud opulence? Like even look at cars. Like cars are a wonderful way to express yourself and just enjoy the road. And it's this like symbol of freedom. and all these things and cars got very boring to the point where if somebody was like spicing it up they're like i got a green car yeah and a tan seats and then it's like well now there's a whole for years there's been instagram accounts dedicated to this combination which i think is beautiful i have a green car with brown seats but it's almost to the point where it's no longer even a way to express yourself it's just like it's as basic to me as like a black car right um and so i've been I've been intentionally going the other direction.

2:27:49I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm in the process of specking a car that is, is like a rose metallic and, and it's like completely insane. I've shown it to some people and they're like, Oh, that's interesting. You know, like it's going to be, it's going to be a car that looks like a NASCAR that you guys can drive around with all the sponsor logos. Yeah. We've thought of it right there. Um, and, and I, and I think that you're not just naturally seeing a shift. people are rejecting minimalism and i i actually already as much as as much as this is happening again i don't think you're gonna ever get back to spec house like the spec house is naturally designed to appeal to it's like i view a spec house like the one you're showing here basically as like a canvas on which someone else can come on and paint and it allows you to have that liquid the thing is i'm not pro maximalism or anti-minimalism i'm just pro quality and anti-crap And I think that what has happened is we're like, okay, here's minimalism.

2:28:48And we're like, okay, minimalism is cool. Like Johnny Ive really understands minimalism well. The Japanese really understand minimalism well. But then what happened is – I got a house to sell you. If you don't really understand the form, you end up with that meme of the guy who just has his mattress in the room and nothing else with like the little video game. You're like, that's minimalism. Yeah, the ultimate male living situation. I love it. Hey, you know, you got to invest in that guy. Would you like the glass or the cup for whatever you're drinking? Wash these sheets in six months. Do you know the architect John Lautner?

2:29:26No. Oh, you're talking about a place in Alaska? You blew the punchline. Oh, I'm sorry. You blew the punchline. But yeah, John Lautner is the protege of Frank Lloyd Wright. Okay. has created some of the most, to me, the most beautiful homes in the U.S. There's even like this weird sort of like roadside motel out in Palm Desert area that you can go stay in that's a Lautner. I recommend you check it out. I think you would enjoy it. But I track John Lautner homes that are for sale, and there's two right now that stand out. One is in Pasadena, which is like seemingly like an extremely, at the time it would have just been like, I'll take one home, please.

2:30:12You know, it's like a two bedroom, two bath. But then there's this other one that's only 1.37 million, potentially a great starter home candidate. And this is the one in Alaska. One issue, it's in Alaska. That's not an issue. That's a plus. And so this is two acres. You got a John Lautner, an architecturally significant home in nature. And I think you got to go for it. I think you've got to take some of your own medicine here. You're trying to get him to the best? Is this Airbnb? No, no, no. This is Redfish. This is for sale. This is for sale. 1.3. I've been extremely tempted just because I'm like.

2:30:53Yeah. Let's start a group chat. See if we can pull 1.3. It's for a Bunky, too. Yeah, yeah. It's Bunkyville. This would be good for like a TBPN. Satellite. Satellite. Look at this. It's just a wood paneled interior. It's like every material in this home was actually designed to last for. There's room for the Christmas tree there. Indoor waterfall-ish thing. It's awesome. So anyways, what I'm hoping to see is the young John Lautner that just build a couple, just dedicate your life to building a couple hundred homes like this. But I think that the truth is that we look back and we look throughout history and we see things that were built like this.

2:31:42And people are like, we've got to return to that era of design. But the truth is that for every one of these homes, there was 100, 1 ,000 that were just cookie cutter. The thing is, I don't want to return to any era of design. I want us in 2026 to have a sweet era that reflects who we are, what we value, that like projects a bold vision for the future that's like let's go. And we should have all these awesome visions of what tomorrow can look like. And what I love about talking about homes and like making nice streets is like that is a way for every single human being to like put their footprint, their stamp of optimism and like promise for a better future into the world.

2:32:22And that's why I think this is important. uh we have about 10 minutes no i want to go through the rest of the show and tell what else do you have for us in the stack the team has the pdf you shared so are there any other images that you'd like to share with us by the way we definitely don't we do we're we're rearranging the schedule okay fletcher richmond from type will be joining us at 150 after jim o'reilly from charleston ai have you seen uh the new obama library i have yes new obama presidential People are going back and forth about it. Yeah, let's get it up on the screen here. I'm a fan. You're a fan.

2:32:58You're a fan. Because it's clearly a data source. A data center. A data center. It's a data center. It's a data center for aliens. It does seem like it has a resource inside. I'm generally in faith. I love brutalism, which is a period. I think it's beautiful when contrasted right with nature. Here's the thing with brutalism. Good brutalism rocks. But a good style works when average people do it. And so the problem with brutalism is the variance is so big. Most brutalism absolutely is awful and tyrannical. But like you're saying, you get some Brazilian brutalism, some D.C. brutalism. And when it works, it is absolutely awesome.

2:33:39Every time I think brutalism, I go to Abbottabad and Osama Bin Laden's compound. You know what I'm talking about? The Osama Bin Laden house is very brutalist. I lived in a house that looked exactly like it for a while. It was crazy. Would you practice in there in case you got the call? No, no. Keep it in counters. So the new Obama Library, this is where – this was built in 1893. So the Obama Library, this is for the Chicago World's Fair. There's three photos here. And these were in 1893. And basically these were temporary houses. so they were made out of plaster they were not made to laugh the center one was a temporary the chicago winners it was for the world's fair so like it was a big deal don't get me wrong um but i think it says so much about who we are like first of all i'm not sure that we could build this now yeah and there's no way that we would do something temporary like this now yeah okay uh yeah what what what else is going on how many other photos do you have we don't need to go through all of them.

2:34:46Oh, I want to know the story of the humble telephone. Well, so what we did in the... Yeah, so I think this is another... Actually, here's one that has a personal story. So this is San Francisco. When I was a kid, I don't know if you guys have walked here. When I was a kid, this is... Beautiful photo. Where I would walk, and I used to marvel at these chains. I think these chains are sick. And also, this is the kind of world I want to be in. Where, you know, it's by the bay there's always the big cargo ships coming by yeah and i'd always used to you know check out these chains my mom would say you touch those you're gonna get tetanus you know whatever and uh you know it's time to replace the chains which is fine and they replaced them with this and like this is the thing you know each one of these is not a big deal but if you have 10 or 100 000 decisions like this in a country and a culture you really stamp out the soul and vitality the spirit of who we are.

2:35:44And that's what I want to fight against, you know? It's rough. What's going on in the world of high fashion? What's wrong with stainless steel? Is that stainless steel? Well, it just lacks character. Well, I think it's because it's new. Yeah, what happens when that gets patina and starts giving you tetanus? Will you be satisfied then? Will you be satisfied then? I think we could have done better. It's the biggest tetanus risk. We could have done something with, like, little Golden Gate bridges in it. Something that would... to the aesthetic of the space. Or like a Louis Vuitton monogram. Yeah.

2:36:15We talk about cost. There's an artist somewhere that would happily do this at cost. Sure, sure, sure. To make something else. No, you're right. You know? Might be a safety thing. You trip over the chain, but you don't do this. But again, yeah, you're getting into... The R word. Regulation. I think they want to keep people from surfing. They don't want you to discover the thrill. No, they want you to lock in and continue building your startup because as we know, if you go surfing, you'll be less productive. So you've got to stop people from surfing in San Francisco. They've got to get the share price up.

2:36:47Patagonia founder, his book is called Let My People Go Surfing. Oh, really? It's like the whole premise. They're like, ah, we're going to build a company. And that's why you never hit one trillion.

2:36:59Yeah, Patagonia would have been the first trillion-dollar company. It could have been. It could have been. A little less surfing. Lock in, by the way. Yeah. And then we've got the same thing happening in Logos. Yeah. Just see. It's the same pattern everywhere. And this is what's so – This has to change soon though. This is insane. This is an opportunity. You have to imagine that there are plenty of brands that see this. I don't want to be a part of the meme. I'm going to go a different direction. The reason why I'm just utterly astonished by this and think about it every day is I think that aesthetics, people think of like little icing on the cake.

2:37:31Like you put on a tie. Now you'll look good or something like that. But the thing is like society's aesthetics represent the spirit of a time. Like it's the outer reflection of the inner spirit of an age. And all this is how we see who we are, what we value. And the thing is when I look at these designer logos, it's easy to say, oh, there's no style there. Really what you see is a culture that values efficiency and conformity above all else. And I just – I don't want that to be who we are. And also kind of global sameness. Like I want a world where there's like radical diversity. You go to different places.

2:38:09They feel completely different. And that the things that are made have the unique character of the people making them. That's the world I want to live in. That's the world that inspires me. How do you get into a museum if it's closed? There's actually a hack for this. Tell me. Okay. So if you go to Paris or something. Spend a decade developing a personal reputation. Spend a decade building a reputation of someone who cherishes the art. Get millions and millions of views on YouTube and Instagram. Just one simple hack. So there is a hack for this. So if you go to Paris, I was in Paris like a month and a half ago.

2:38:45Buy a flight to Paris. Any city, any city, New York, L.A., Chicago. Any city. And you show up, often they'll say, hey, you can't get into the museum. You needed tickets in advance. A ticket at most museums costs like$30. So if you're going with a friend, it's like$60. And you'll say, can I get in? They'll be like, there's no way. You'll say, can members get in today? They'll be like, no problem. You say, how much is a membership? $120. So if you just pay$60 more,$30 per person, you can basically get into any museum in the world, no lines. Your answer is just pay? Just pay for it. It's one simple trick.

2:39:20But here's the thing. It's just about the membership, which is not advertised. No, no, no. That's a good point. It's a good hack. But the new Lucas. I thought it was going to be some like go in the back door, dress up. The new Lucas Museum is also, I don't think if you're a member, they're not, if I walk up there and say I'll take one membership, please, they'll be like come back when we're open. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you got to get a job. That's the real hack. You got to get the job. You got to get the job there. Or build a great brand, build a great product. I feel like my first you can do anything moment was sneaking down at Warrior Games.

2:39:56I had season tickets. I convinced my dad to get season tickets as a kid. We were all the way up in the third deck. Again, you paid to get in. Trick to sneak in. Buy season tickets. We got the cheapest tickets. I sat outside of the first deck for six games. Went to every game for the season. I just snuck through. So good. Okay, this is a good one. Turn around. This is a good one. Got really good at getting the free pizzas and the t-shirts. I knew where the T-shirts were most likely to go. Okay. Where thunder, warriors. Coming out of the T-shirt gun or no? Yeah. Okay. Actually, my ultimate hack for sports was when I was a kid, I was obsessed with catching baseballs at games.

2:40:34So, you know, you can get the baseballs off the bat. Yep. But what I would do is I'd go to the stadium. I'd get the away team hat, the away team shirt, then sit by the opposing team dugout. Less competitive. to Wrigley Field, Darren Oliver, starting pitcher. I knew the name of Darren Oliver, the bullpen catcher, walked away with six baseball. Six baseball? I was like a fifth grade kid. I was like, let's go. Oh, that's fantastic. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. All right, boys. Thank you. Great to see you. Have fun at the museum. Great to see you. Good to see you. Chewbacca picture.

2:41:06Have a great rest. Please. Today, I will tell everyone about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with cisco and i'll also tell you about the new york stock exchange want to change the world raise capital at the new york stock up next we have jim riley from charleston ai you've seen him on the internet we've discussed him multiple times with his partnership with san blanche monaco and now we are pleased to be joined by Jim Riley from Charleston AI. Jim, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. I'm doing really well. Thank you. Thank you very much.

2:41:46I appreciate it. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. I would love to know a little bit of the backstory. I'm sure a lot of people have seen the viral video, but what is your career story? How did you get into this particular business? And then, of course, we can talk about where it's going from here. Okay. Well, I've been doing different things for many, many years. You know, the only boss I ever had was my father, other than when I was a busboy and worked in a movie theater. Wow. So it was a family business I grew up in, and I did many things. Yeah. And where do I go from there?

2:42:23Recently, during the pandemic. Yeah, what got you at least interested in AI? Yeah. Okay. Well, my partner, we started this produce delivery business during the pandemic because the farmers couldn't sell produce. There were no farmers markets and people were kind of locked down. So we saw a need. We saw something that we could do together. And he's the geek. I'm not. And so we put together, you know, delivering produce directly to people's houses. We put it right on on their front porch by their door. Our model is that we deliver it. They don't come pick it up. We deliver. Seven days a week, 365 days a year.

2:43:07And so then he's... Did this business grow out of that? Yes. Well, we're partners in Rainbow Packaging, and he's always been into AI. You know, he was an engineer from IBM. So he's, like I said, he's a geek. And this is one of his, like, pet projects. He's really into AI. So he got, he infected me a little bit with it. And we saw the opportunity. We thought it was time. Let's open up a storefront. That's what we have here is basically a storefront, even though it's a nice office to just introduce people to AI, help them where they need it. And that's what we've been doing. We started January 1st.

2:43:48Amazing. Jordy? So January 1st, who were your first customers, clients that were coming in? And when we originally saw the viral video, you know, it made so much sense to me to actually put something like a storefront because everyone in Charleston is, I'm sure, reading about AI, watching videos online. Some of them are excited. Some of them are scared. And to give people the opportunity to come in and just talk to somebody who's actually in their local community and learn about it actually makes a ton of sense. Right. In the beginning, it was slow. I have to admit it's taken a while. But what I've come to realize, this is the FUD period, which is fear, uncertainty and doubt when it comes to AI.

2:44:36And people are gradually getting over it. So my partner, he can do the elaborate stuff. He can do the systems integration. I'm the one that can talk to people and tell them how it's benefiting me. And that's what I do. Do you see more people coming in with sort of a consumer lens on? They want to know how to use AI products in their personal lives? Or is it mostly other businesses in the Charleston area? It's a combination of both. Okay. Okay. So, like, I'm pretty good at talking to people, and I'm asking you using AI. So, you know, I don't want to plug it, but my favorite is open AI work right now.

2:45:17It's fantastic. So I'll tell people about my little experiences, how I saved time by using it. And they said, really? So I'll say, here, load ChatGPT, you know, play with it for a week or two, and I'll come back, and I'll show you how it can benefit you. And mostly, you know, they're small business owners, so it's easy for them to, you know, adapt to it. I mean, a lot of people would like to do it, in my opinion, but they don't have time. and they're so used to doing what they do that this is just not natural to them. And then the other side of the coin are the people that have larger-sized businesses who are really into AI.

2:45:55So they spend two or three hours a day doing it, and then they realize they're falling behind on their work. And so that's why they need us to come in and help them put it together and make it work for them. What is your business model? Do you charge people hourly for training sessions or do you work on affiliate commission if you refer someone to a particular product? No, we're just, we're like vendor neutral. We'll work with anybody's AI. You know, my partner will learn it and he'll install it. And our customers choose the AI they want. Sure. And we just help them make it work. So training, implementation.

2:46:40Correct. And, you know, we charge. The first visit's free. You know, you come in, sit down, let's talk about it, see what you want, what you need. And, you know, we'll come up with a plan for them. Do you think the model will be scalable? Do you think you'll be able to hire technicians and educators in other markets and set up similar franchises? Absolutely. Yes. That's exciting. I think it has appeal. The time is, you know, the time is now. We have a few years. and uh ai is changing so drastically so quickly in my opinion you know and um people can use it and the other thing i noticed like with individuals we take this uh open ai work which i refer to it as uh i i went away on vacation for a few days and um i'd get up at five i normally get up at four So I slept in late.

2:47:34And then for two hours, I would do my work. And in five days, I did more than I would do in six months previous. So that sold me. You know, so I have an agent that works for me every day. And if I don't have her working on something, then that's my fault. That's my, you know, my bad. And it's just, I find it fabulous. I think it's tremendous. And with that, too, that I noticed personally is that I'd be uptight with I got to do this, I got to do that. I'm short on time. I'm thinking about it. But now this AI companion, she does it, and I'm free to think about other things during the course of the day.

2:48:16I'm freed up. And I think a lot of people, once they adapt it and start using it, they're going to be the same way. They won't be so uptight and so, you know, bothered with what they think they have to do because it's already done or it's being worked on. What's business been like since the video that broke the Internet? A lot of attention. People stopping by, you know, Sunday. You know, I work seven days a week. So Sunday and we're still continuing our produce business. So, you know, we have customers there. We got to satisfy. So I come in early, pack, pick, pack, go deliver. Then I start working, you know, contacting people, responding to emails.

2:48:56And, you know, people stop by randomly. We're in Charleston and we're going back to Florida. We're in Charleston. We're going back to Charlotte. Well, come on in. Let me give you a little tour. Let me talk to you. Tell me about your story. What is it? That's great. I like to talk to people myself. Yeah. What are the most common concerns that people cite when they're talking to you? What are they worried about? What are they nervous about in terms of AI? mostly unknown fears sure you know and they you know they they read something they hear something that somebody said and they're not they're not real so until they get to know it hold it see it and use it they'll have that but i'm trying to break that barrier down you know and kind of infect them with uh you know the benefits of it yeah that's good how much do you wish you had today's AI when you were starting your career in your family business?

2:49:50I can't do that. It's not realistic. I like this. Super grounded. So grounded. I mean, because did I have it? I wouldn't be here now talking to you. That's true. You'd be retired. You know, I had to experience everything I experienced to get to this moment. Yeah. All my mistakes, all my, you know, my failures, my victories, things I did right, things I did wrong. But, you know, I needed all to do all that. And I know I can save a lot of time and be more efficient by using my agent in the morning. Yeah. My AI agent. Yeah. When's the second location opening up? How aggressive do you guys want to get around expansion?

2:50:30Are you still kind of dialing in the curriculum? Well, everything has to be done in its proper time and place. This has to be up and running, functioning and then we can devote a little time to the next one i i believe there's going to be demand for it i believe there is demand for it and now that it's arriving at the point where ai is being more accepted by people and being used they're still confused and ai is changing so much with all these different applications they have they're going to need some help so uh i want to We get a firm foundation and then we talk about expanding. Yeah. Do you pay much attention to the conversation around AI, fear and doom and safety that's happening primarily in San Francisco?

2:51:17Or do you kind of ignore all that mumbo jumbo? No, it's noise, in my opinion. I'm looking at the benefit. If I spend an hour, two hours and it takes care of six or seven hours worth of work, I don't have to worry about that. I'm not, I can enjoy life. I could spend more time in a moment and weren't having my head filled with things that are not going to happen, that may happen. But now it's done. So next. Yeah. That's a good, good mindset. Great mindset. Well, congratulations on the progress. Yeah, this has been amazing. You're welcome on the show anytime. Let us know however we can help. If there's any AI founders that you want to meet, there's a good chance that we've spoken to them at some sort.

2:52:00We'd love to support. and hopefully we can stop by the store at some point. Please do. You're always welcome. Thank you so much. And Charleston's a nice city to visit. Yeah. I've heard. The restaurants are really good. Fantastic. Amazing. And the people are friendly. I love it. I can see that. It's great to meet you, Jim. Thanks so much for coming on and congrats on all the success. Have a great rest of your week. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Have a wonderful day. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing.

2:52:31it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Amazing story. Amazing mindset. Yeah. And I've seen enough. Give him 200 on a billion. There are some wild posts in the chat, which I really enjoy. So thanks everyone who's tuning in and chiming in with some fantastic takes about what's going on. We have Fletcher Richman from Type, the co-founder and CEO here building a shared AI workspace welcome to the show what's going on sorry for the mix up we got caught up with david perel he brought whole show and tell for us we had to go through with it but we then we had to of course talk with with jim riley who i would already suggest you should pursue some type of partnership with anyways uh introduce yourself and the company yeah nice to meet you guys thanks for having me um funny enough i actually go to the same gym as david so that's a small world moment of the day.

2:53:27Yeah. That's great. Who lifts heavier? I can't disclose that. Oh, that's, I got a pod for sure. Anyway, tell us about the business. What are you building? Yeah. So type is a, you mentioned it, shared workspace for teams to build with AI. A lot of work right now in AI is still happening, very single player mode. People are working with Cloud or ChatGPT on their individual computer. And that's not really how businesses work. And so we make it really easy to take that work, starting in Clotter, in ChatGPT, and push it up into a shared workspace where you're all actually building together. Crazy as it seems, multiplayer AI still isn't really solved.

2:54:04Yeah. Are you trying to narrow in on a particular type of work, whether it's code that's generated, the Blender 3D models that we saw, spreadsheets? Like there are collaborative environments that are point solutions for each of these to some degree. GitHub sort of collaborates with code. But how do you see finding a beachhead or is it important to be sort of omnipresent across the organization? Yeah, so we're focusing more on non-technical teams. We think that the engineering teams have a lot of this pretty figured out. Like you mentioned, they've been doing these workflows for a very long time.

2:54:44But the non-technical teams that are suddenly all now writing code, that were used to be writing code, they don't know what GitHub is. They don't know how to deploy to Vercel. They don't know how to do a lot of this stuff. And so we've just given them these magical agents that can do it all, but they need tooling to actually make that work. Mm-hmm. What are you targeting in terms of early adopter? Do you want to go into new companies that don't have anything to rip out, faster-moving startups for early adoption, or are you going to go duke it out in the Fortune 500 and try and get someone to, you know, either add this on to all the other tools they're paying for or maybe rip something out?

2:55:23Yeah. So what we found at the very beginning, you got a couple of people, You can just use cloud. It's not a big deal. So that's not really a pain point. We've been targeting, I'd say, more in the 25 to a couple hundred employee range has been our sweet spot so far. I know you know a lot about this space. Interestingly, the direct-to-consumer e-com space, those teams have just been loving it. It is, I think, one of the best use cases for agents if you kind of think about the business and what it is. It's a series of pretty structured inputs. Hey, I have this landing page. I run these ads. I have this Amazon listing.

2:55:57It runs this stuff. And then that comes out. I need to order more inventory because this ad is doing really well. And the whole loop just kind of runs. And so agents are – it's crazy what you do in some of these e-com businesses. Totally. Yeah, yeah. I mean we talked to Sean Frank at The Ridge. And, yeah, every e-com business is like, okay, there's the churn spreadsheet. And there's the script for conversion. And there's something that synthesizes all of our performance marketing. And then we have all of our influencer ads over here and how much we're spending. And the opportunity to bring it all together is huge.

2:56:28When did you actually start the company? We started a year ago. So we were just obsessed with this multiplayer AI concept. I've been, crazily enough, it's weird to say now, but spending about a decade building in that space of collaboration and chat. Exactly. And I built a company before this that was acquired by Slack. Sorry, that Slack was an investor in and it was acquired by Atlassian. Open AI was a user of it. It was called Help. So I've been thinking about how do people collaborate in this chat environment for a really long time. And this just felt like the next generation of tools was necessary because we've got these agents now.

2:57:07And it's just a totally different way to work. Very cool. Give us the funding news. Tell us about the news. Yeah. How much did you raise? Yeah, we raised$4 million. New York City. And Haystack as well out of the West Coast. and my buddy's matchstick. I'm from Colorado. So Colorado is in there as well. Love those guys. Very cool. Well, we're going to, we'll get the team on it. Give it a spin. Yeah, you guys should play around. I think you'd like it. That'd be awesome. Awesome. Have a great rest. Yeah, great to meet you. And we'll see you in the next round. Nice to meet you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Shopify.

2:57:44Speaking of D2C e-commerce, Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Jordy, do we have time to tell the story of the heist, the thieves? They raided the men who are museum. We'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Stay tuned. It's been an honor and a privilege. A little teaser. I mean, today, this is TBPN at its best. This is TBPN? Yeah. In my opinion, you've got Jim O 'Reilly. Jim O 'Reilly. Mikey. You got the hot AI found. You got some new rounds coming in. You got the VC.

2:58:24You got everything. A little bit of everything. Living the dream here. Yap about the current thing, the doom, the new iPhone, all of this. Let us know what you think. Are you picking one up? Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. And we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific Sharp. That will be Thursday. It will be 105 days until... King in the castle, king in the castle. Goodbye. I love you.