China's Acquisition Spree, TikTok's Survival Deal, Intel Slips | Tuhin Srivastava, Bryce Strauss, Max Spero, Russ d'Sa

27:32It's going to be the next Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg needs to acquire it. He puts in an offer, gets declined and it looks like it's over but then the Instagram team moved really quickly. They launched stories and that effectively, you can see in the chart, stories launches on Instagram and people stop moving on to Snapchat. And so a lot of people went back who were on Snapchat, they went back to Instagram and Instagram continued to grow and Snapchat, but it didn't flatline, but it definitely put a dent in their growth. And I think the same thing is true for TikTok. Like TikTok, a lot of people who just want that format, vertical video, endless scrolling slop, they can get that down.

28:09We got American-made troughs all over the place, everywhere the eyes can see. So the investors are paying the US government a multi-billion dollar fee for arranging the deal, a concept Trump previously called a tremendous fee plus. interesting. TikTok said it had 200 million users in the U.S. up from its 2024 estimate of about 170 million users. So decent growth. But I don't know. I mean, 200 million in the U.S. is a lot. Like that's pretty much everyone. Yeah, I guess the question is, will they ever get the rest of the U.S. in the way that YouTube, you could assume, has like effective. You think they have like 300 mil?

28:50Yeah, I would assume that. I don't know. There's a lot of Philistines out there. There's a A lot of the Luddites are just like, no, I want DVDs. I want VHS tapes. Anyway, Trump touted his popularity on TikTok earlier Thursday, posting on Truth Social that his posts on the platform TikTok get more engagement than posts on TikTok competitor Instagram, which is owned by Meta Platforms. TikTok, Trump said that TikTok helped him win the second term. For what it's worth, that's always been the case, right? like tiktok has always had allegations that they were botting yes like as a platform effectively people would go on there and they'd be like getting a tremendous amount of followers tremendous amount of just engagement broadly far more than uh than they would have on instagram with the same content and you know some people would say oh that's because the tiktok algorithm is so good but uh and there certainly are a bunch of very real people on tiktok i don't i don't mean to say that it's all about it, but the experience of using TikTok, a lot of creators will just naturally have six times as many TikTok followers as they do Instagram followers.

29:59Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like the algorithm is set up to serve you more content in a 10-minute session because you're more quickly scrolling. And then there's also accounting issues. On some platforms, if you just scroll past something for even one second, that counts as a view. on other platforms, it might take three seconds. On other platforms, it might take 10 seconds, a minute. You might need to watch the full thing. So there's always accounting abnormalities there. Anyway, if you want to stream on TikTok, because it's American-owned now, you want to bring some Oracle-focused content to TikTok?

30:32Some SaaS-focused content? Get on Restream, one live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. This might hit you like a sack of bricks, But breaking news, J.D. Vance is younger than Future. That's a crazy stat. 22 ,000 likes. Future is straight up an elder now. He's an unk. No, he's beyond. Oh, yeah, he's an elder, I suppose. Yeah, you're right. Not quite an OG. Oh, no, it goes, then OG, then elder. Right. Yeah. Gen Z are arriving to college unable to even read a sentence, says Fortune. reposted by unusual whales. See if you can read this. See if you can read this.

31:19See if you can read this. Try and read this. Wow, he can't. He can't. He can't do it. Slopped. Slopped. I need like some subway surfers or something. Yeah, for sure. I'm going to need some subway surfers to read this next sentence. Anyway. Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses. Get on Gusto. We have some drama that's continuing to unfold in the payroll space. The Justice Department opens a criminal probe into Silicon Valley spy allegations. Subpoenas seek information on allegations. The deal valued around$17 billion recruited a spy inside a rival company.

32:01This is a huge story last year. And then it's been pretty quiet. And both companies have just kind of been chugging along. Spending a lot on legal. Yeah. So the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation. Grand jury subpoenas were sent out in recent weeks by Craig Massakian, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California. The documents show they seek information related to a spying operation that Deal allegedly ran inside a rival company, Rippling, an Ireland-based Rippling employee, in case you've forgotten. Keith O 'Brien alleged in an affidavit filed in April that Deal CEO Alex recruited him and gave him instructions for what information to take from Rippling.

32:43O 'Brien alleged that other executives were involved in the spying plot, including his father, who is Deal's executive chairman and chief strategy officer. A spokeswoman for Deal said the company isn't aware of a criminal investigation, but is willing to cooperate with authorities. That's an interesting statement. The Wall Street Journal is reporting this and you find it out from a Wall Street Journal reporter. That's wild. So the company has previously said, we deny any legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaim. So Deal says we didn't do anything wrong. Of course, the affidavit from Keith O 'Brien is extremely dramatic.

33:17There's that whole, like, you know, oh, send that watch to London. We're going to be like James Bond. Like, it's a really dramatic read. And you can go back and watch some old TVPN episodes if you want to hear a full take on that. Yeah, it's interesting. They're not, they're, yeah, I wonder what information is actually available. kind of publicly on this because like obviously in a situation like this you have both sides that are kind of like feeding the media uh their side of the story uh but what we do know the facts of the facts here like the justice department did open this uh because because the the wall street journal confirmed that the justice department opened the investigation so yeah um anyway anyway yeah i think a lot of people weren't expecting this to last october actually uh have any type of criminal component.

34:05Yeah, I think a lot of people were just expecting a lot of drama, a lot of hot takes on the timeline. And they would eventually just settle. Exactly, settle. And the worst case was like, okay, maybe it's like a Series D size payment for Rippling, but they're both gonna just keep grinding. But it seems like it's going to the court, so we will see. Maybe there will be courtroom sketches of these folks. Anyway, Nick, the chief opening eye hater, has some breaking news from CNBC. OpenAI chair, Brett Taylor says AI is quote, probably a bubble, expects a corruption in the coming years. Nick is, his camera roll is truly just filled to the brim with images of Sam Altman in various like, you know, the guy has probably the largest collection of Sam Altman.

34:57He has every photo that's ever been taken of Sam. And Nick just is LMAO. yeah but uh anyways this could be true like you know who knows i wonder what what more of the context was that yeah i mean a brett taylor quote taken out of context turned into a headline and then and then and then it's like nowhere of course would brett taylor be like oh yeah i think i think lm usage is going to fall off a cliff yeah it's like yeah yeah there's a variety of different companies and kind of subcategories that could be overheated. But yeah, you could take, you could, you could easily dig into that. And he's like, there's a bubble in like seed stage valuations.

35:41Like I can't get an angel check in at less than 50 pre. Like, you know, like the bubble can take a lot of different shapes and stuff. Who knows what he was actually commenting on. Anyway, CrowdStrike, your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Another clip from Demis from the Big Technology Podcast. He's taking shots at open air, according to Yuchen Jin. I think actions speak louder than words, going back to the original conversation we were having with, you know, Sam and others claiming AGI's around the corner. Why would you bother with ads then?

36:15So that is, I think, a reasonable question to ask. But I think, look, from our point of view, we have no plans at the moment to do ads if you're talking about the Gemini app, right? specifically. I think we are going, obviously, we're going to watch very carefully what the outcome of what ChatGPT is saying they're going to do. I think it has to be handled very carefully. I think actions speak louder than... There's a reason, post-AGI, the clankers need to advertise to each other. You've got to do ads for the clankers. Ads are fun. The thing here is OpenAI has to not only figure out how to actually implement ads within the product, but they have to build out all the advertising infrastructure, the platform infrastructure, in order for people to run campaigns successfully and at scale.

37:07So Google already has all of that. It is far easier. Do you think it's like 100 times easier for Google to turn on ads in Gemini? They already have all the customer relationship. Literally, any company that advertises online is already working with Google. And so it's really just like you can just flip the switch. And so I could easily, you know, don't have any inside knowledge, but I could easily see Google just like having it all basically ready to go. Yeah. And it literally just being like, okay, we can launch this whenever we want. There is an interesting steel man here. Let me try and do it.

37:38So Sam. Do you need the helmet? I might need the helmet, but I think I'm good for now. So Sam and others. Well, first let me tell you about advertising. And Vibe.co, where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on Meta. So the steel man on Sam Altman claiming that AGI is around the corner, but we still got to do ads. Well, around the corner, even if that means six months, like if you have an incredible capital expenditure to get over that hump to create AGI, it's only six months away, but you got to do that last data center, And you've got to raise that last$50 billion, and all of the investors are like, I need some It's easy to say, like, we don't want to do ads when you have hundreds of billions of dollars in existing ad revenue coming in funding everything that you're doing.

38:28So anyways, I think this is, you know. I mean, we can also debate whether or not ads will exist post-AGI. I would argue that they would, but what do you think, Tyler? I mean, there was that headline about how OpenAI, maybe they're thinking about, like, taking a percentage of the share of, like, the discoveries. I don't know how they would actually do that or if it's like they're being serious at all. But that's like much more AGI-peeled than ads. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's a good point. So they're doing both. They're doing both. Anyway, New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

39:00Just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Apparently, Vimeo, almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off, including the entire video team. I would assume that most of them. What else did they do? most of their team. So unfortunate. I have some fond memories of being a teenager when Vimeo was like really... Vimeo was so differentiated. Yeah. It was where you, there was like a level of quality that it wasn't just like some random person. I would go there to watch short films. In my case, it was like surf. Yes, yes, yes, yes. It was like, if somebody was putting a ton of effort into making like a surf movie or, you know, some snowboarding movie, it would be on Vimeo.

39:39Yeah. And they wanted higher quality footage. You could get higher bit rates, 4K, HD. Like they were really on the frontier of that. Yeah, I remember watching a lot of ski videos there. There were some great ones. And also just like it was a place where people would put their short films. They had the Vimeo like, you know, awards with the little wreath laurels that you could rest on. But eventually YouTube just went everywhere, all places. The ads went away for the people that care about that because they had premium subscriptions. and ultimately the quality on YouTube just got better and better and better and now you can get 4K, really high bit rate on YouTube and it's indistinguishable from Vimeo.

40:19So fewer and fewer ways to make a case for consumer adoption, essentially. I certainly would not recommend anyone who's making video content distribute on Vimeo. I put everything on YouTube because YouTube has a massive audience and it's an aggregator. Yeah, discoverability is just so important. High Yield Harry has the meme for the moment. He says, but now we shall both surely drown, said the frog. LOL, said the scorpion. I don't think this is exactly right. If you're a private equity firm and you buy an asset like this and you lay off the team, there are still people that are going to be trying to extract the value from that asset.

41:05It just might be a team in a different section of the firm or an outsourcing agency or something else. I would be surprised if this means that Vimeo is shutting down. I would imagine that they're trying to continue whatever business relationships they have and whatever subscriber base they have. Banjo says, Vimeo was cool, but if you know about Vimeo, it probably means you're old. That's true. That's certainly true. You know about Vimeo? Yeah, I know what Vimeo is. What's the last thing you watched on Vimeo? I have no idea. No, but I remember, yeah, it was like artsy films would be on there or something.

41:42Yeah, it was good. Anyway, Applovin, profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. What is all this? So Matthew Zeitlin says, my basic model of modern artificial intelligence labs is that they are like emotionally intense graduate school programs, but with unlimited money. This is Matt Levine. Matt Levine is writing about this. And Mary says, my friend is dating a guy who works at one of the frontier research labs in SF, and his sole job is to think and come up with a big idea every six months. Capital B, capital I.

42:19So his workday consists primarily of long walks spent pondering. That's a good job. Very Wilmanitis coded. That's amazing. I mean, that seems like, honestly, in the age of research, in the Iliasetskiver world, like, this is probably a good use of time as opposed to, there are plenty of people that will lock in and, you know, improve, make minor improvements to the consumer application or the consumer side of the business. Yeah, in a world where you have, you know, infinite minds, when you're a manager of infinite minds, what did Satya was quoting, Notion co-founder. Yeah, you're probably just walking, pondering, thinking about what the next set of tasks to assign to your infinite minds.

43:04Well, Epic Games and Google apparently have a secret$800 million Unreal Engine and services deal. And the quote in their scoop, quote, sorry, I'm blowing this confidentiality. What a crazy quote to give to a Verge reporter. But we're going to dig in. And Addie Robertson and Sean Hollister have the story. A judge is questioning whether Epic Games and Google are settling their long-running antitrust fight, partly because of a previously unannounced partnership involving the Unreal Engine, Fortnite, and Android. In a hearing in San Francisco today, the court revealed that Epic and Google have struck a new deal that apparently includes joint product development, joint marketing commitment, and joint partnerships.

43:46California Judge James Donato expressed concerns that the agreement, which he indicated would involve Epic, quote, helping Google market Android and Google, quote, Google's newly, quote, using Epic's core technology, could have led Epic to soften its demands for changes to the overall Android ecosystem. it. Donato allowed Epic and Google to keep most of the details of the plan under wraps, but during the hearing, he quizzed witnesses, including Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and economics expert Doug Bernheim on how it might impact settlement talks, revealing some hints in the process. Quote, you're going to be helping Google market Android, and they're going to be helping you market Fortnite.

44:29That deal doesn't exist today, right? Donato asked Bernheim, who answered in the affirmative. He also described it as, quote, a new business between Epic and Google. Sweeney's testimony cracked the mystery a little further. He referred to the agreement as relating to the metaverse, a term Sweeney has used to refer to Epic's game Fortnite. Epic's technology is used by many companies in the space Google is operating in to train their products. So the ability for Google to use the Unreal Engine more fulsome, sorry, I'm blowing this confidentiality, Sweeney said. Oh, that's a great line. Yeah, I mean, we've seen a number.

45:07What was it? What is the DeepMind model that plays the games for you that I'm in the market for? Because I don't have any time to play video games, so I need an AI agent to do it for me. They have a number. So they have Genie 3, which generates basically a 3D world that you can walk around in. I think it's SEMA 2. SEMA 2 will play the game for you, and both of those should, in theory, benefit from using Unreal as the backbone of the training game. Elon's probably pretty excited about that as well, right? Why? Because he likes to play on accounts that are... Oh, yes, yes. ...runs of family ranks, but he doesn't have a lot of time.

45:43Yeah, so instead of needing to hire someone, you could bot your account. People already do that with aimbots and stuff. Usually you get banned, but it makes a lot of sense in terms of training Google's generative AI models, use Unreal, create a bunch of virtual worlds, walk around in those, interact in those, use them as reinforcement learning environments for agents, and then bake that out into a bunch of different models that can be used for a bunch of different things. I'm super excited for all of this, but it's just funny the way it's coming out. Anyway, if you need a reinforcement learning environment, you've got to go to LabelBox.

46:16Reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, evals, and expert human data. LabelBox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So Coinbase established an independent advisory board on quantum computing and blockchain. Quantum computing, if built at scale, have the potential to reshape entire industries. We were talking to Kathy Wood about this a little bit yesterday. From finance to healthcare to material science and national security. For blockchain, the stakes are especially high. The cryptographic foundation that secures digital assets today could be challenged by the advances of the coming years.

46:47at Coinbase, security is our highest priority, and preparing for future threats, even those many years away, is crucial for our industry. Most people, I think, handicap the quantum thing at like 2030, 2032, 2040. I think Cathie Wood's estimate was 2040 for serious quantum adoption, even if you get on a Moore's Law-type adoption curve. But - Yeah, Nick Carter's been super vocal on X about quantum just being like the biggest headwind to further Bitcoin price appreciation. Yeah, I mean, there's also this question, maybe I'm just like very, I'm like super out of the loop, but like, if you can crack, like whatever the Bitcoin or any like blockchain with quantum, like surely you can also just get into like, you know, banks or like, tons of like, things that are like, probably way more important than crypto.

47:37Yeah. It's like if we have a world where you have like these incredibly powerful quantum computers, like is crypto actually the most important thing that you need to be worrying about? Or is it like the nuclear codes that are, surely those that are stored. Yeah, you're probably right with the nuclear codes. But in terms of just like fiat stored in a bank, there are a series of backups that are offline. There's even paper backups at certain points. And so like the financial system, although they probably don't want to talk about it, does have the ability to like effectively roll back. So if there was like some massive quantum hack and like all the Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan accounts or Goldman Sachs accounts were like drained They would just be like let's revert, but you can't do that on a blockchain necessarily So but there is still the dynamic of like what happens if you crack Bitcoin like how much are you stealing?

48:24How many new bitcoins? Yeah, I mean if you like steal any Bitcoin Bitcoin just goes to zero So probably the point but that's obviously still a threat even if you just have some malicious actor who's just like, I'm going to take out a short position on Bitcoin, tank it, and profit from that, that could potentially be disruptive, certainly disruptive to Coinbase's business. So good to see them taking it seriously. Anyway, MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Let's go to Scott Besant.

48:57He was complaining about the food in Davos, and he did an interview on Real America's Voice, I guess, with Jack. So again, if you're looking at Davos as though it's a bunch of kick streamers. Yes. That is the correct. That is the correct. Besson has effectively been just clip farming this whole time. Okay, let's watch the Scott Besson clip. Certainly they don't like carnivores here in Davos with the food. You're not a huge fan of the food here, I heard, by the way. You know, I know. No. And no, I know if you remember a couple of years ago, one of the recommendations from the Davos elite was we could all be eating bugs and insects.

49:39Yeah, the insect food. Yeah, right. And I tell you, after a couple of days of the food here, I may switch to bugs and insects. You'll take the insect food. Unless that's what it is. Cricket snacks fell off. They did. You remember? They were really, people were really pushing this. They were saying, oh, the protein content is so high. And I think humanity rejected it. Well, you know, you know, the story of Magic Spoon. Were they going to put cricket? No. Originally, they did a previous company called Exo. That's right. It was an American insect food company. They made some protein bars using cricket flour from pulverized house crickets.

50:23House crickets? House crickets. It sounds like you're taking the pets. They did a Kickstarter in 2016. They raised$55 ,000, which was more than their$20 ,000 target. They raised$5.6 million in Series A funding. I wonder from who. There's an article in the Journal. There's an article in Business Insider. Nas invested. No way. Legendary rapper Nas invested in a company that makes protein bars out of crickets. Okay, so on the ExoProtein site. Is it still live? All their bars are sold out. No, a couple. You can still get banana bread cricket. The company was acquired in 2018. Okay. Aspire Food Group.

51:02You can get salted caramel cricket bars. Okay. And you can just get one pound of cricket powder. You can get a quarter pound. They should just get into selling live crickets. Just deliver them. Get your enemy's addresses and just deliver them. No, but so I think they. 1-800-CRICKETS. I think they would. Fresh crickets. The team certainly found a niche, a weird breakthrough. You're going to get a lot of earned media with a bizarre ingredient like that. But the ultimate traction, I think people just have an aversion to bugs. And it just conjures images of bugs crawling around. Blood memories. You don't like it.

51:38Yeah. And so they sold the company. But then they started Magic Spoon, the not cricket-based. Which just immediately ripped. It ripped. Fantastic business. And I'm sure you've seen a ton of podcast ads about Magic Spoon. and everyone's familiar with that company. So, you know, if you're in crickets, if you're in bugs, pivot to cereal, I guess. And that's what Besson's saying. He's saying he wants Pop-Tarts. Pop-Tarts, basically, Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon might even make Pop-Tarts. I don't know. Anthropic published a new constitution for Claude. The constitution is a detailed description of our vision for Claude's behavior and values.

52:13It is primarily written for Claude and used directly in our training process. Was it written by Claude? Did Claude write its own constitution? Yeah, that's a good question. Rahul over at Ramp said, basically TLDR is, I love you, you love me. We're a happy family with a great big hug and a kiss for me to you. Won't you say you love me too? You really know the Barney song. It's amazing. I didn't just sing it as a kid. I studied it, John. You studied it, yeah. More importantly. Yes. Buzzballs. Incredibly important. Thank you. is selling a$35 ,000 diamond engagement ring shaped like it's drinks. The ring will be auctioned on eBay starting February 3rd.

52:59So I don't know. How is it actually going to be? Is$35 ,000 like the opening bid? Or maybe it's$35 ,000 worth of diamonds. It costs them$35 ,000 to make it, and they're going to put it on eBay starting price$100 ,000, and then it will get bid up, I guess. I don't know. Proceeds from the sale will benefit a heart-related charitable cause. it's kind of odd for an alcohol brand to be like we're we're i don't know that's cool i mean if you're if if anyone out in the audience is wanting to propose and like doesn't really know how to is struggling to figure out like the right kind of like moment or way to propose this is like toss a buzz ball out of the box that's a woman in your life toss a buzz ball if she catches it she has to marry you yeah she has to say yes yeah uh is this rage bait is this good marketing?

53:49Do you think this is good for BuzzBall strategically? What do you think? I don't know if it's, I mean, I find plenty of moments to talk about BuzzBall already. Unnecessary. I mean, it is gimmicky, but the whole brand is sort of gimmicky to begin with. And so it doesn't feel out of context. It doesn't feel like they're trying to be a serious company and then they did something wacky on the side and I'm confused. This feels within the BuzzBall's lineage within the BuzzBalls brand world, very much so. Anyway. Whoa. If you're heading to Cisco AI Summit, be sure to bring some BuzzBalls, because on February 3rd, Cisco is bringing together leaders from NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy.

54:35We will be there. The whole thing will be live streamed. We'll be there for a good stream. Did you know? What? Do you know who came up with the idea for BuzzBalls? Absolutely not. I have no idea. A public high school teacher. What? Marilee Kick, a former public high school teacher Has become one of America's richest self-made women After selling her ready-to-drink cocktail business Buzzballs for at least 500 million 500 million? What started as a side hustle Has now transformed into one of the biggest brands Of the entire ready-to-drink cocktail industry Kick founded Buzzballs in 2009 Inspired by a simple idea While grading papers by her pool I thought, I shouldn't have this glass container out here I should have a plastic pool safe type of cocktail.

55:17From this spark of inspiration, Buzz Balls was born. Fun, high proof cocktails served in colorful, plastic, spherical containers. Buzz Balls quickly gained popularity as an asshole at supermarkets, liquor stores, and convenience stores. She says, I've been living the American dream. We've built a legacy. We've become a contender in a space where women never went. Kick says. The brand has grown intentionally distributing 29 countries with an estimated annual revenue of$500 million. this is an incredible story monster company in April of 2024 the drinks firm Sazerac acquired Buzz Balls in an all cash deal estimated at 500 million though Kix suggests the figure is much higher no way Kix is an absolute dog it has also cemented her place among America's richest self-made women with Forbes estimating her net worth at 400 million after taxes so yeah of course she's gonna 10x that just get it in the market I'm sure she's cooking on her neck on her next idea.

56:15Run it up. Kick's journey is remarkable because she never raised money from investors. She bootstrapped her business. Gotta get her on the show. She used a small inheritance, maxed out her credit cards. Where is the Founders Podcast episode about her? And took out a loan from a local community bank to get started. I scraped and scrambled, she says. I took every bit of every penny I could find and poured it into the business. That's incredible. What an amazing story. Her unique company started making a profit in the second year with$1 million in sales and$100K in profit. Not bad. By 2014, the brand was expanding quickly, and the drinks were sold at major retailers.

56:47By 2019, annual sales were over$100 million. Get her on the Davidson. I mean, she's elite. A key to BuzzBall's success was owning its supply chain. What? She vertically integrated on K1? Most DTC founders in California can't figure out how to get off a co-packer. She moved production of the patented plastic spheres and the spirits used in BuzzBalls in-house to ensure the brand's quality and reliability. Wow. Despite many investor offers over the years, Kik held onto her company until she found the right partner. I wanted somebody that was going to come in and have big guns. Big guns. She explained, Sazrock, which owns over 400 brands, brought the resources and expertise to scale buzz balls.

57:28Wow. Kik and her family are still part of the business. I didn't sell because I didn't like what I was doing or wanted to leave, she explained. I sold for the exponential growth and because it's selfish to hold it back. It really has legs. From a teacher grading paper by the pool to a multimillionaire, centimillionaire, Merrilee Kick's story shows the power of a good idea and the determination to make it happen. That is an incredible story. You've got to get her on the show. I love it. 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.

58:06And before we move on to our lightning round, let's debate Kylie Robison's latest post. She says, do you think if the AI company's IPO this year will get, insert Frontera Lab, arenas like the Crypto.com arena, what do you think? Should there be a Gemini arena, an Anthropic arena, an OpenAI arena? Should they do this? Is this good for their brand? they're already buying Super Bowl ads, so it doesn't seem out of the question. What do you think the probability is? Yeah, I feel like these type of... advertising on like a an arena like that you typically see this with like somewhat commodity like products that are sure that are in large markets but are uh you know in the case of like crypto.com they're just like the the products crypto.com is very interchangeable with coinbase right it's a place you can go give them usd and you can buy bitcoin or whatever digital assets you want and so they're really just competing on like brand entirely and like currently the way that you're seeing the market evolve like i don't i don't know yeah they're competing on technology Like, how does the model actually answer?

59:21What are the benchmarks that are competing on product? Like, how does the app work? What are the mechanics? What can you do? Can you generate images in there or not? Can you generate video? How good is the video? Does it do deep research quickly? Like, there's a million different things. How's the voice mode? Like, they're definitely playing like a product race right now. There is a marketing race. Yeah, I guess the question is, was there any of like the OG search companies? Did they ever get out? Oh. Did Yahoo ever have a... I don't know. It's interesting, but I do know that it's interesting that she mentions the crypto.com arena here in Los Angeles The former Staples Center because crypto.com is not a public company So there's nothing that says that you can't buy an arena before you go public Who knows maybe we will have a Vanta arena by the end of the day Automate compliance and security Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform And I'd love to head to the Vanta arena no matter where it lands Anyway, we have our Lambda lightning round starting now with Base 10.

1:00:24We have Turin, the co-founder and CEO of Base 10 in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBP and Ultra. How are you doing? Hey, man. How are you guys doing? Good to see you. Welcome back. Welcome back. Thanks for having me again. You've been busy. You've been busy. Give us the news. Yeah. Look, we've had a crazy year. 10x of last year. 10x alert hit the gong for the 10x sorry to interrupt

1:00:55alright back to you back to business last time I was on here I was telling you about a series D we've raised a series D now we've raised$300 million $5 million valuation led by IVP and Capital G with participation from NVIDIA and a few others look it's just been I mean, just to remind you guys about what we do. Yeah, please. AI infrastructure platform, we focus on production-grade inference serving the fastest-growing companies in the world. So Abridge, Open Evidence, Cursor, Notion, Clay Gamma, you look at that crop of companies and how they're growing, and we're playing a supporting role in making sure that they can run their models as fast and reliable as possible.

1:01:36And just on the back of that, we've realized how big this could potentially be. Yeah, go ahead. Take us through how quickly enterprises are ramping up running their own models. If we go back to 2022, Google had Palm internally. They hadn't really launched Gemini. OpenAI had GPT-3, and then they launched ChatGPT. But Microsoft had, you know, they were vending GPT-4 through Bing and stuff. But big companies were not really running their own large language models. Is that roughly correct? But now it feels like we're in the hundreds of companies. But out of the Fortune 500, how many companies are actually running their own models at this point in time?

1:02:24Yeah. Look, I think it's still relatively small, but growing rapidly. I think if you go and look at – when we go and speak to enterprise customers, it's still incredibly early. But I think what they are doing is that they're looking at, you know, these other companies that, you know, they, you know, you and I would probably agree that the future Fortune 500 kind of eating their lunch. And if they don't, like, figure out how to move at that pace, I think they'll just be left behind. And so what we focus really, really heavily on are those really fast-growing companies because we think not only are they going to be the future Fortune 500, but the Fortune 500 are going to look at them as like, how do we bring these models up to speed as quickly as possible?

1:03:07Yeah, and so, I mean, that makes perfect sense in the case of a company like Cursor. Obviously, they have a ton of training data. They have a need for a custom model. Are we years away from someone like a Coca-Cola? or developing their own? How does that play out? I think, look, there's two things that are happening, right? Which is, if you go look at OpenAI and Anthropoc adoption at these companies, it is there. It is definitely there. Once you've proven out these use cases internally, then you start to think about better, faster, more specialized, more secure, running on-prem, all these sets of problems.

1:03:45And so that is coming. Is it six months away? Is it 12 months away? Is it 18 months away? Who knows? I think the other trend that is pushing the enterprises online is RL, which is like, how do you take these open source based models and RL them and get them to be as good, if not better than these frontier models for very specific tasks? And that's a big focus for us as well. We recently made an acquisition around that. But we do think that'll be a big driver of enterprise adoption. Okay. Walk me through the pushback from a large enterprise that says, yeah, it's great. I can train a custom model on my business.

1:04:26But I've looked at the smaller models for a variety of benchmarks. And it feels like the big models just sort of are better at the small models tasks as well. I should just use the latest and greatest big model for everything because the frontier is better at the specialized tasks as well. It just one-shots things. Yeah, totally. Well, I think a lot of the times they'll be valid then. I don't disagree with you. I think what you will see, though, is that as the frontier is getting better, open source is already. you know if you go look at the open source models that are out there today like the GLM's the Quen's and and the DeepSeek it's not like they are 18 months behind yeah you know some would argue that they're you know within a quarter and for certain tasks are better the complexity actually comes around honestly from enterprises not so much like can I get a better outcome yeah it's hey you know these largest lab companies have massive inference teams sure do I have the skills set to be able to run the service at scale within my premise with all my enterprise requirements.

1:05:36That's ideally where we can help in and be that partner to them to bring them online. Okay. So walk me through what it looks like when a fortune 500 company says, okay, we're getting off of just a generic model. We want to do something that we have control over the inference. We're working with base 10. We're doing, you know, we're doing some custom RL. There's going to be some proprietary data in there who's involved are they hiring you or consultant to set up the rl environment who's doing the training no no no yeah i think just engineers and infrastructure okay i think that that is like one of the realities right now is that i don't think engineers who don't know how to grapple with ai just you know they don't i don't know if they exist in the future to be honest um but um that being said like for a lot of these engineers it's like hey how can we make it as easy as possible for you to take this custom model, deploy it, scale it up, either in our cloud or within your own cloud.

1:06:31And so that is the job of the software. We have a really amazing forward deploy team that is very happy to help if necessary. But our goal is also just to enable them to do these things. And that is happening. I think it's early, though, especially in the enterprise. From your view, do you think we need more Neo Labs, based on the conversations that you have with customers? Okay. More models are great. I think more people developing models are amazing. I'm making a bet with my career with this company on the long tail of models and that they're existing models outside of two amazing companies.

1:07:13And so I think more people developing models just gives consumers and developers more choices down the line. And look, do we need more of the same? Probably not. but like, you know, all these companies have their own takes on the problem. Help me understand your current thinking around model routers, routing inference across big, heavy duty models that might be very expensive, like using all parts of the Parade of Frontier. What are you seeing on the inside? Are companies trying to handle parceling out the workloads themselves or do they want that to be something that's off the shelf that you sort of provide what are some of the trade-offs that people are considering these days yeah look i think it's a spectrum i think you know the the most advanced companies are 100 doing that they are breaking they're breaking up their their tasks almost like model by model yeah and then figuring out how to route i think less sophisticated folks um or people earlier in their journey yeah probably better way to put it, are relying on other people to do that.

1:08:21The model companies are doing this themselves. I think the place where I struggle a bit is some of these routing things are just routing for failover, which is hey, model just stopped working. We believe that reliability should be table stakes for serving models. Ideally, you don't have to build across what happens when X model provider falls over, Y model provider falls over, and have that 10 and that is a different routing problem yeah routing based on capability is happening it is happening outside the model is happening inside the model and as the long tail model comes on come online for specific model tasks i think there's more and more going to be the case that that is being handled by an inference company or an inference platform like base 10 yeah yeah i mean that certainly happened in the database market like you have a big postgres installation you don't have a my sequel installation there it's like a backup but you might have a redis casting layer in front of it, right?

1:09:17So help me understand that at the hardware layer. I know you have some insight into NVIDIA's strategy here. I'm very interested in how you or other partners, other folks in inference might be thinking about the future of NVIDIA's big, powerful racks versus their more legacy chips that might be depreciating, but you could still run a great model on it versus some of the more exciting stuff that's happening with Grok in the future. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I don't have a ton of the strategy. They're very good. I can hypothesize. Okay. Look, they're amazing partners to us. I think we are chip agnostic, and we think, look, every task and you will have different requirements from a latency perspective, from a cost perspective, even what type of model runs on it.

1:10:10Sure. And so, yeah, so we use H100, we use A100, but we also use B200 and GB200. And as we get these new types of chips across the bytes, we'll be working on them as well. So if you think about the NVIDIA and Grock stuff, what are they solving for? It's kind of breaking out pre-fill and decode, using GPUs for pre-fill. There's a compute-bound problem. You can saturate the GPU. You can do batching and have really good throughput. But then you have the LPUs or the Grock chips for the decode, which are memory-bound. and you're not doing a lot of new math for token. Why this is hard is that that's a pretty complex orchestration problem of handling workloads that are doing stuff on GPUs and on LPUs.

1:10:54And I think NVIDIA's obviously built amazing software around this to break out, refill, and decode Dynamo as the name of the software that we work pretty heavily with. But I think that would just be a new type of chip that the chip providers provide. And, you know, I think one thing I don't think you can understate is how much how powerful NVIDIA supply chain is, CUDA is, CUDA is and their ability to, you know, be dynamic with architectures changing. And I think, you know, we have very, very much bought into that ecosystem and what that enables, especially for inference and customers. Can you give us your take or any insight on how companies at the application layer are kind of wrestling with the late like laziness specifically?

1:11:44Like everyone at this point is experienced, you know, product like asking, you know, basically, you know, wanting a product to be able to do something that you know it can do. And then and then, you know, running into this like laziness element. What do you mean by laziness? I don't quite get that. I would say like, you know, thinking about, let's pick the biggest, not to pick on anyone, but like the biggest consumer AI app, ChatGPT, right? Like everyone has experienced asking ChatGPT to do something that you know it can do. And like sometimes it will just kind of like circle around or like not really get to the thing that you want it to do, even if you're paying for it on like the max plan or something like that.

1:12:29And so I would assume that every company at the application layer that gets to the point where they're caring about margins is starting to get to the point where they're like, okay, you don't always – because sometimes the model can be lazy and you're like, great. Yeah, you got a quick answer. You got me what I needed and I can just move on. Yeah. Other times it's like wildly frustrating because it's like asking an employee to do something at 5 o 'clock and they're like, oh, like, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To me, that's what defines a great application-layered company. Oh, sure. The ones that aren't good are just wrapping around GPT or whatever model, and you as a user are left to deal with that laziness.

1:13:14I think the best application-layered company is... It's like serving the right amount of intelligence for the task. Exactly, and setting up the harness and how to use it for the problem that your user is asking you to solve for them or you were trying to solve. Like, you know, if a company like Open Evidence was just, you know, doing something the lazy way, that would not only be really, really expensive, but they wouldn't do a really good job of solving that problem for their users. And it wouldn't be a great business in the long term. But, like, you know, what makes these companies so good at how they use the models, how do they use multiple models, and how they architect that to, you know, the thing the user is asking them.

1:13:49And then layering in how do we do this efficiently so we can make a business out of it. To me, there is going to be a great divide in solving that laziness problem. I think that's a good way to put it, actually. You said two things that I'm sort of having trouble reconciling. You said that you're chip agnostic, but then you also praised the dominance of the CUDA ecosystem. Is it getting easier to implement LLMs in a way that run on multiple chipsets? We've obviously seen really strong performance from DeepMind on the TPU stack and Anthropics talking about TPU now. But for a long time, the narrative was like, oh, it's going to be really cumbersome to replatform off of the Kuda ecosystem.

1:14:31How are you thinking about just multi-chip architectures these days? Yeah, I mean, look, I think it is getting easier, but it is not easy. Welcome to entrepreneurship. But, you know, it's like, you know, it's a, and like, look, just sitting on top of like, you know, that's why like NVIDIA is such a great partner for us. It's like sitting on them doing this stuff. You know, we were, I mean, did you guys play FIFA or anything like that when you were growing up with Madden? I was more of Counter-Strike, Call of Duty. For sure. But did you? Starcraft. Yeah. It's pretty amazing that when we are doing stuff for GPUs today, we're downloading from this, a website looks exactly the same as the NVIDIA driver page.

1:15:11Oh, yeah. That's crazy. From the early 2000s. That is also the amazingness of it. It was like how rich that is and how powerful it is. And I think that is, you know, yes, it was getting easier. And like, hey, diversification is great everywhere downstream. But also like NVIDIA is just amazing at what they do. And being able to run a model on AMD does not necessarily mean that it will inference at a lower total cost per token or vice versa. It might be a little higher on certain models, blah, blah, blah. and so yeah there's all these different trade-offs but that's why companies come to base 10 correct totally and that's why the open source ecosystem is so important right that's why you know like you know you mentioned databases earlier like i think similar to databases at the in the fullness of time open source has the fastest run times and so i think that will like with nvidia you will see that which is like you know you know who's gonna be really good at running stuff on nvidia chips is gonna be nvidia who's gonna be really good at running stuff on AMD chips is going to be AMD.

1:16:12And so working with these providers of chips, I think, to get the best runtimes from them is very important. And I think this cross-compilation stuff, while important, I'm a little skeptical, I'd say. It's fanciful for me to think that we would be better at running software on NVIDIA chips than NVIDIA, or better at the lowest level. Obviously, there's all the orchestration and software stuff that we are building that we think is very important, but we also very, very invested in those ecosystems. Well, I believe in you. I think you can do it. But no, I take your point, of course. Well, congratulations on all the progress.

1:16:47Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the stream. And have a great rest of your day. Have a great weekend. I'm sure you'll be back on every day now. Hopefully not. Yeah. Thanks for having me and appreciate you guys. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. Up next, we have Bryce from Nominal. I believe Bryce is the brother of the previous guest from Nominal, Cameron McCord. Technology Brothers. No, not brother. Sorry. Co-founder. Co-founder. Got it. Okay. Well, you know, you build a business with someone for a while.

1:17:29People just assume you're brothers. But anyway. Second spouse is what I like to say. Yes. Real. Exactly. Thank you so much for taking the time. Where are you calling in from? Guys, hello from Daytona, Florida. No way. You are in. You're in the garage. You're in the pits at the Rolex 24. So we are here. So nominal company, Cameron, Jason, and I co-founded. We announced our partnership this week with Pratt Miller Motorsports. That's amazing. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Great timing. Oh, come on! Come on! Come on! That's fantastic. Yeah, if you don't know who Pratt Miller Motorsports is, you know, they are the heart and soul of the Corvette racing team in the IMSA Race Series.

1:18:23So, you know, this is full-on heavy metal sports car racing. This is American dynamism right here. Amen. I'm about 30 feet from a McLaren. And, you know, this entire garage is full of probably every famous sports car you know. But I don't know if you know, but the most dominant of them all for the last 30 years has been this yellow Corvette right here. Very nice. And that yellow Corvette. Incredible. Look at that. Wow. I have a nominal sticker. There we go. Incredible. So, it's good stuff. Have you caught any of qualifying yet? Or have you just been too locked in? yeah this is the epitome of uh forward deployed because we just sent a founder to make sure this went perfect um but it's been it's been really fun yeah i've been here for a couple days um we are so i think like last night we were running our late night practice sessions uh so daytona itself is a like brutal race to start the season it's a 24-hour race um i'm not sure if you like me have now seen a best picture nominee, but, uh, in the F one movie, Brad Pitt's F one movie, the first seven or eight minutes is actually Sonny Hayes, Brad Pitt racing here at the Rolex 24.

1:19:39Um, and it's him racing the night shift. So, um, amen. Um, but yeah, him racing night shift. So, you know, last night's practice session, every team gets one night to go out and actually like see the race conditions at night. Um, you know, different temperature profiles, is totally different, you know, race profile. You have like, I found out like at turn five right here, you have headlights from the parking lot that you have to deal with. Like, yeah, it's been a wildly interesting journey. But, you know, on the, you know, on the nominal partnership side, it's also been just really fun to see like, you know, we've had a lot of wonderful meetings and things about strategy and race strategy and this and that.

1:20:18But like, you know, we are watching it come alive here. So a lot of the practice and qualifying and everything else has come back to, you know, how do we help them use a lot of data to win? And the pressure's on, right? They're going for the fifth win this weekend. Is that right? Impressive. We've been following a little bit. Mostly the Shopify team. The Shopify team we've been following a lot. For Toby and the community. That was actually really funny. There's a lot of tech people out there. It's great. There is, yeah. The tech community here is like small but strong. it is like the epitome of motorheads.

1:20:54It's people that late in life found thermodynamics in their life and are like, this is the coolest thing ever. This is way cooler than Kubernetes. It's the best. Yeah. And for us, the timing's great. We were at the track with a friend of the show, Paul on Sunday, and we were just doing like really quick laps. We'd go out for like five, you know, five, 10 laps and then take a quick break and kind of like settle down. And we'd be spinning out on like the fifth, on like the fifth lap. And like realizing like actually, like when you're going like these endurance races, it's, it's also just like from an engineering perspective, you know, you take the car out for a couple laps and you let it cool down and check the tire pressure.

1:21:37Like 24 hours is endurance, not just for the humans, but for the actual vehicle. So can you talk a little bit about what goes into bringing that level of performance to the vehicle, what your role is, who the key players are in your world? Who are you interfacing with? Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Okay. So, yeah, 24 hours is brutal. You are right. You know, the rest of the season, there is a 12-hour race in the season. I think that's in Sebring. But, you know, the rest of the season is one, two, three, four, five, six hours. And, you know, you rip the car as hard as possible. So I think 24-hour race, the strategy you're bringing in is much more around, you know, of all the things you have to care about more than anything, the cars get beat to hell.

1:22:17But it's fuel. You know, it's like this bad boy will burn a full tank of fuel about once an hour. And so a lot of the pitch strategy, a lot of like the totality of the race comes down to really like managing all 24 hours well. and so our role in this we come alongside this absolutely elite engineering team and help them make those calls sometimes it's the highest level do we need to switch drivers earlier do we need to do something else let me think of another I got a fun one last night one of the things we were looking at I can't give away all the secrets but I know everyone says they do this but Pratt Miller actually does this and does it better than anyone else But last night they were talking about, you know, managing fuel from a like consumption standpoint.

1:23:06So think like, you know, we're watching how throttling is happening, much of other things. Think when this comes into play is the car is, you know, you're behind someone else. And your goal ends up being how can I get them to stay on the throttle as much as possible? Because if they burn more fuel than I burn and we both go into the pits together, the long pole in the tent of a pit stop is refilling the tank. so they refill for five seconds we refill for one second and we run right past them um and that's the type of stuff like that is not a like trivial thing to do like that is complex math happening that's tons of different telemetry you know like nominal and to be clear like pratt Miller has building been building elite software here for 25 years i was in like this third the second grade when they started building race software you know like um this is much more around like teams like are amazing because they just are obsessed with winning.

1:24:01And so this whole partnership has really blossomed out of that openness. We have plenty of wonderful, elite, amazing customers that have interesting things that they've built. And there's a journey with getting them to really adopt the way that we think engineers should work in nominal, where Pratt Miller's like, okay, cool, I have all of this. Well, it's an engineering sport. It's an engineering sport. I imagine a lot of those engineers could go in a second and walk down to El Segundo and be hired on the spot. Amen. And the amount of people that have left the Pratt-Millard team to go to, like, the Andurals of the world, there's a lot.

1:24:39Pratt-Millard is like, please stop. Please stop poaching. But zoom out for me and try and make a little bit clearer the involvement of Nominal in this, how the product's being used, where the endpoints are. Are you working on manufacturing new parts for the car, managing supply chain, testing? Like, what else goes in and then maybe contextualize it with the work that you do with other defense contractors and other businesses? Yeah, totally. So, I think, like, Pratt Miller selected us and brought us into the thing. Like, how can we transform engineers and all of their partners so they don't just build these two cars, but they also build three more Corvettes in the field for other teams?

1:25:21You know, how can they come in and like rethink fundamentally testing, telemetry, decision making across race operations? So these are producing terabytes and terabytes of data this weekend. You know, we have to do a whole lot with that during the weekend to make really good calls. And way more importantly, we need to like catalog and index and manage like all of this volume of data. And then like, you know, what we do for the team is like, it's not just about these 10 races a season. Like you win when you have the same system integrated into your driver sim. Pratt Miller's also been way far ahead in the way that they think about driver sims in the sports car racing league.

1:25:58So all of the data from the driver sim is making it back into nominal. You know, we're helping them do like actually like rethink the like procedural operations of that and automating a lot of pieces of that. And this is like almost verbatim, you know, how companies in aerospace and defense, how companies in energy, you know, how our customers go get this work done across the board. It's just they have like win or lose on the line. So they just rip it out of our hands. What about the other simulations that go on during a race series? I'm thinking back to the F1 movie. Most people are familiar with the scene where the F1 car is in the wind tunnel.

1:26:34Everyone can visualize the wind, the smoke flowing over a vehicle. Is that the type of data that someone could pull into nominal and then analyze? Or are you acting more as just like a data layer and then there's another visualization software that would pull for that specific task? I imagine that there's a lot of point solutions still in place. But how do you fit into that? Totally. Okay, I'll tell you about the old world and we'll go to the new world. So they have a team here that manages like all of the Corvettes on the field. So not the Pratt Miller race team. It's like the Corvette racing team.

1:27:06You know, I last night was sitting with them and watching them click through somewhere between six to eight different pieces of software to like root cause a problem. Yeah. A little bit of analysis here, a little bit of data management here, go find the thing over here. Like Nominal has been built on the principle of like clarity really, really fast comes with an end to end stack. It is how you manage the data. It is how you monitor the data and it's how you analyze the data. So, you know, these engineers hop in to nominal and they're doing everything from figuring out, you know, yes, wind tunnels and other things are important.

1:27:36That's, you know, it's ultimately like small, small, small parts of the team thinking about something like aerodynamics. You know, like way more of the team is thinking about, you know, how are these settings affecting, you know, this particular force? So it's pressures, temperatures, voltages, vibration, video data, log data, you know, all the different work people use in engineers. multimodal, you know, like all the different types of angles that you need as an engineer to make a judgment call. But at the end of the day, it's like, you know, we want to help them make really good judgment calls and then have a really good record of why.

1:28:09And if they can do that really fast, like we've kind of succeeded in the partnership. You mentioned like terabytes of data coming off the car. What's the telemetry like? Like, how is that actually, is it like, are they connected to Wi-Fi? Like, how do you get the data off the car while it's on the track? Oh, man. That is a fun, complex thing. Yeah. Okay, so, you know, every race league actually just has a lot of regulation here. So, like, NASCAR, you can't pull any data off the track. Interesting. F1 has, like, a mesh network. No way. They're just ripping streams all day long. Yeah. Huge, really high data rates, like, all the things.

1:28:46Sports car racing is actually, like, a really interesting middle ground here where they do have telemetry coming off the car that, you know, race engineers are sitting in double-decker. you know, fold out pit stations. ETs and stuff. Oh yeah. With everything around them. It's like, they're monitoring the situation. The situation monitors. We love it. It's the epitome. Yeah. And yeah, so they'll have data come off the car, but then the really interesting part is like, it can't be that high rate of data. They are only allowed to bring very specific sources. Yeah. And then every time it comes in for a pit stop, they'll do things like they put an umbilical into the car.

1:29:19And that is like actually how they have a secure communications line with the driver. Okay. The rest of the race, everyone can listen to everyone else. Oh, no way. But if you want to give your driver a little edge, you plug it in. Why are your headphones? Amen. And then if you want to get the high-volume data off, there's a technician that goes in and pulls out a data stick and puts in a new data stick. Sure. And all that starts go getting processed in nominal and in other tools. So that's the fun. That's amazing. Well, good luck to everyone. Thank you so much for taking some time out of a busy day to come chat with us.

1:29:53Yeah, so many more questions. This was awesome. Well, that's great. My only ask is, please, I need you to, if you don't have a team in IMSA, I need you to pledge allegiance to the yellow Corvette. I'm down. That's the only thing. Make your plans for the weekend. Rolex 24. We'll watch it. I love an American manufacturer. He loves, he's got his eye on the ZR1X already. It's a good car. Anyway. Great stuff. Great hanging, Bryce. Good luck out there this weekend. Have a good rest of your day. fin.ai the number one ai agent for customer service if you want ai to hustle to handle your customer support go to fin.ai and up next goes you in the chat our forward deployed ceos that's the new meta i like it our lambda lightning round continues with max sparrow the what do we call the slop janitor pangrum labs yeah slop janitor pangrum labs max how are you doing thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show how are you doing i'm great i'm Great.

1:30:49Yeah. Just cleaning up slop on X. It seems like it. When did this project start? I feel like I've seen most of the viral stuff in the last few weeks, but have you been building this company for a while? Give us a little bit of the prehistory. Yeah. So the company has been around for about two years. We've been building models to detect AI generated content and just doing a lot of the research and trying to be the most accurate in the market. But it wasn't until like end of 2025, December 29th actually was the first day where I launched the Twitter bot. And it's really just blown up since then.

1:31:24People are using it on articles, on basically all these long form posts that people are just posting slop. Yep. So are you already monetizing it? Because I imagine you have a ton of attention, a ton of people that wind up on the tool. I interact with it mostly through, I see the screenshots that people post or I see your post. But are there businesses who have an incentive to partner with you? Are you talking to big platforms, small companies? Like, have you started, like, what does the business look like today? Yeah, yeah. So individuals can either sign up for a free account on Pangram. They can get a Chrome extension and check things in the browser.

1:32:01Or you can pay$20 a month to get access to a lot more checks. but we also work with internet platforms. So one of our biggest customers is Quora. So they send most of their content through Pangram just to understand like, is it AI generated or not? Because that's against their policy and they want to keep the platform high quality. And so, yeah, we've had a number of API users, a bunch of different internet platforms, large and small. Are you worried about people basically either like officially RLing on you or like basically DIY reinforcement learning by just generate me an essay, go into Pangram, it's at 100%, make some changes and remove the M dashes.

1:32:43Okay, I went down to 70%, rewrite a couple sentences and just keep iterating until I get it down to 0%. People are trying. I think that's part of the fun is like that this is such an adversarial space. And so like part of keeping up with it is just making sure, yeah, we're robust to these GRPO attacks accent is like RL on the model. Yeah. Does it make you mad when people are sharing an article on X and it's obviously written by AI, but they're just like, this is the best, this is the most well-written essay I've ever read on this topic. Changed my life. This changed my life. Infuriating. And the person probably spent like 15 seconds just typing in chat GPT, make it really deep, make it really good.

1:33:26Yeah. The worst one that I read was this, like, the one that went viral about the, like, supposed Uber Eats or DoorDash whistleblower. That's right. Like, they wrote on Reddit, their entire post was AI generated. They're talking about how, like, you know, the company's so evil. And I think it went viral just because people wanted to believe that it's true, even though it was, like, obvious slop. Wait, were you able to clock that as AI just personally or with Pangrom? Because when I read it, it didn't jump out to me as AI generated, but there were other flags that just seemed like factually inaccurate or just inconsistencies and like logical inconsistencies.

1:34:09To me, it immediately read like fan fiction. It was like, I'm in a public library burner laptop. It's like, who does that? Like you can just post on Reddit anonymously. Like Reddit is not going to come and like arrest you. I don't know. Anyway. Yeah. How did you clock it? personally with the tool, both? What were you thinking? Yeah. Yeah. I was reading it. I'm like, this reads like a story. It reads like a story and not like real life, somebody writing this. And then I checked it with Pangram said a hundred percent AI. I went to the comments and there already other people were saying that, you know, this is obviously AI.

1:34:43Okay. Yeah. And, and then, yeah. Talk about the, the, the impact, like, are you, is this an AI safety project? Do you think that there's like a societal, you know, disaster that comes from AI slop? Is it something we'll adjust to? Is there a white pill good outcome here? How do you like process the like philosophical part of your work? Yeah. So, I mean, I think a lot of the big labs are already doing a great job on the internal AI safety side, which is making sure Claude doesn't go out and like autonomously decide to kill everybody. But I think there's this application layer, the external AI safety of can people use AI for harm?

1:35:24And I think this is a great harm that people just aren't really thinking or even trying to tackle. I think this threatens the internet as we know it today. If you're aware of dead internet theory, just the idea that the internet is just going to become bots talking to bots and it's like a ghost town where people can't participate anymore because their voices are drowned out by bots. And I think we're very much at risk of this if we don't have any technology to solve it. What do you think about the inverse? I posted that you could probably drive someone insane by just quote tweeting everything that they say with the 100 % AI pangram screenshot.

1:36:02Because, so I write a daily newsletter and I write about 500 words and I always, I never use AI to write it or even proofread it. There's typos in there. It's so brutal, too. People will still accuse me of using AI. And so we're like, maybe we need to live stream me typing it or something. And I don't know. It just doesn't matter. But it is sort of infuriating when you take half an hour, you write out some thoughts, and then someone's like, oh, this is AI. Share the prompt. Even if they're joking, it kind of gets under your skin. What do you think about that? Yeah. No, it's annoying. And I mean, I think that's another reason why we're building this technology.

1:36:35There are other AI detectors out there that have 1 % or 5 % false positive rate. And so they'll like incorrectly flag a lot of things, even like the Declaration of Independence. And so we, so Pangram has a one in 10 ,000 false positive rate. So the goal is we are almost never flagging something incorrectly. If we say it's human, like we're, we know it's human. Yeah. Are you working with any of the big dating apps yet? I can imagine that this is something they'd want in kind of like actual, like on the user side as you're uploading. because they want to not have AI-generated content because that would create a bad experience for users broadly?

1:37:14I cannot say. I've heard about some issues from people who work in dating apps, and I think the issue is growing. I heard an interesting story from a former dating app engineer who said that they had bot problems 10 years ago. People would just go and write a Python script to just swipe on everyone and just send basic messages. And he said that when they detected bot activity, if they banned them, the botter would just create another account. So what they did was they put them in bot hell, basically, where they would only talk to other bots, which is a funny solution because then their system says, hey, I'm still on the app.

1:37:51It's still working. I'm still seeing all the API requests. Everything's working. But they're just only interacting with other bots. But you can imagine getting false positive in that and just it being the worst experience. You're like, I didn't meet anyone. Everyone on this app's a bot. So there's a whole bunch of funny, funny new things. I do want to ask about image generation, image detection that somewhat relates to. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. What I was trying to get at is like where I assume over time, like most written content will have been run through some type of model before it's published, almost like a spell check even.

1:38:25So I'm trying to think about like where do you really not want AI content, right? I don't care if somebody uses Gen.AI to make a headshot, right? Because if they just want a headshot that looks somewhat like them, it's not that big. They might go into Photoshop anyway and add some color correction, increase the contrast. Yeah, it's just not that big of a deal. But where I do think is probably the most pressing issue right now, it's just anything news related. So if you're sharing things that are news or any content that people are using to understand the world, are we moving to a world where you'll have to add a pangram watermark to the post?

1:39:10Is that the kind of behavior that we want? because if an AI-generated image goes up, two million people see it, and then six hours later it gets community noted and says, okay, this was generated by AI. It's too late. Two million people may have thought it was real. That's a huge problem. And actually, this is happening today. So if you know all the Russian troll farms where they're posting comments and news articles, they've basically Russia has expanded this to basically just use LLMs that they have fine-tuned themselves. And we've seen news websites come out of Russia that just have 50 ,000 articles that are completely AI generated.

1:39:54Most of them are like normal news. And then some of them are really pushing the like pro-Russia anti-Ukraine stance. And they're just posing as like random like Oregon local news. And yeah, and these are crazy. And they're popping up faster than we can take them. Yeah. We can identify them. Didn't the White House share an AI-generated image? AI-modified image, yeah. AI-modified, but... Got community noted on X, got quote-tweeted. But yeah, I mean, it's an increasing, increasing issue. What is the state of potential bots on other platforms? It's great that you've got the bot working on X, but it seems like we really need it on Facebook.

1:40:37If there's a couch the size of a room that is in the shape of a gorilla, there should be Pangram in the comments saying this is AI generated. So the elderly generation perhaps is protected from slop. So next up for us is Reddit and LinkedIn. Okay. So I think Reddit, there's a bunch of viral posts that are AI generated. I know people know that they can karma farm an account and then sell it to a bot farm or something. And on LinkedIn, I think it's just funny because like people are like genuinely posting slop. Like they're not bots. They're just like posting AI slop every day. Yeah. What is the state of wiring up a bot on a modern social network these days?

1:41:25I feel like a lot of the APIs have closed down a fair amount. Is it something where you need to have a relationship with the business to actually run a useful bot that I would say, as a user, I want this. It's not malicious activity, but you're still getting API access. You could slop yourself if you wanted to. You have the access. So what's involved in actually spinning up a bot and keeping it online and keeping it posting regularly without hitting rate limits? So for Twitter, it's actually pretty easy. I mean, besides having to pay$200 a month, and then if we pass some limit, well, now they have usage-based API.

1:42:02But otherwise, before this, the next tier up was$5 ,000 a month, which is absurd. But I spoke with some of the X people. It's still doable for a startup that has funding if you're growing. It's not completely prohibitively. But you can't do that as a hobbyist. Sure. But yeah, it was not too bad with X. And then the other platforms seem to be a lot more locked down. So LinkedIn, I've been waiting for API approval for two weeks now. And Reddit, kind of same thing. But I mean, Reddit seems to be pretty bot friendly. So I think we'll get there eventually. I've never seen a reply bot on LinkedIn, but I really want to know that.

1:42:38Have you been surprised by conversations with any of the platforms? Because in some ways they just want more content that's engaging. And so there's kind of like this dilemma where they might say like, yeah, we're looking to crack down on fake imagery. But in reality, they're like, okay, this is driving engagement. This is not like, you know, it's like even with X, people have always said like, do they really want to crack down on bots? or do they just say they want to crack down on bots because in some ways it's just driving notifications for people that might not otherwise be having a lot of activity?

1:43:13One man's slop is another man's filet mignon. The LinkedIn trust and safety folks seem so resigned. It seems like they're having such a bad time because in every single text box, there's a little write with AI button. So in I want to compose a post, I write 20 words and then have it expand it out into like a long essay. Or same with like in-mails. They'll AI generate in-mails that are customized for the person's profile. And so like they can't actually do anything around like AI slop or using AI as a signal because it's so integrated into the platform at this point. And I think to the detriment of the platform, like the quality of content there is so low now.

1:43:53How many words of text do you actually need to detect if something's AI? Yeah, I've seen some people tag Pangram with like someone will post like one sentence. It's just like, I don't know. I don't know if it's a hallucination or something, but it's a funny meme. So our official line is 75 words, but I made it smaller for Twitter because obviously there's so many short posts. And typically what is going to happen is just going to say it's human. Unless it's like really obviously AI or like as an AI language model, comma. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, it almost doesn't really matter because I really want to know if something's AI if it's really long.

1:44:35Yeah, totally. I only want to read this for the most part if I know that somebody put in a lot of effort to actually say something. And there is the flip side, which is like if someone does a really cool deep research report in one of the LLMs and they just shared a link to it, and they're just like, hey, I was interested in this particular research report. I generated it. You can just click here and read exactly what the prompt result was. I might be down because I like reading deep research reports sometimes if I prompt them, and I might be interested in what you prompted. The funniest short Pangram request is always someone will say, you know, is this article AI?

1:45:15And then Pangram will come back and say, yeah, it's 100 % AI. And then someone will say, is the request to call Pangram AI? And Pangram will say, no, it's not. No. But anyway, so what's next with the business? What's the state of the company? How large is the company? Where do you see this all going? So far, I mean, we're pretty small. We're still seed stage, nine people. But since July, we've grown 25x in terms of users and number of queries.

1:45:50There we go. Nothing like 20. I've seen a lot of interest basically in this consumer level interest. Just like, I want to know what's slop or not. I'm not like a teacher. I'm not a writer. I just want to know that what I'm reading is authentic. And so what's next for us? My opinion, look forward to a Chrome extension that's like ad block, but for slop. Ooh, I like that. It's going to automatically slop, block everything that's slop on the internet. Do you own slop or not.com? I do not. You should. It's not for sale. Somebody else beat you to it. Somebody has it. Oh, well. Well, congratulations on all the progress, the virality.

1:46:33I love seeing it, and thanks for all the hard work. It's really doing good for the world. For sure. In the slop era. Yeah. Thanks so much. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Bye. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Next up. Next up. Actually, quick pause. We'll be in the restream waiting room. Still waiting on Russ from LiveKit. In the meantime, we have some massive news. Johnny Carson's former LA estate just listed for$40 million.

1:47:14Whoa. Little teaser of the mansion section. We will be getting to it later in the show. But the Los Angeles estate that late-night TV legend Johnny Carson once called home has hit the market for a dash under 40 mil. All proceeds from the sale have been earmarked for three charities, Cedars-Sinai's Medical Center, the David Geffen Foundation, and SHARE, which supports disabled, abused, and neglected children. Compass is sharing a listing. He's a longtime host of The Tonight Show, and he died in 2005 at age 79, an absolutely legendary talk show host. Big inspiration for me. If you haven't listened to the Johnny Carson episode of Founders, you absolutely should.

1:47:54It's fantastic. Also, we previously reviewed his other house, the Malibu Compound, that recently hit the market for$110 million. Still sitting on the market. So originally built in 1950 for Mervyn Leroy, the late film producer and director, best known for his work on The Wizard of Oz. Have you seen The Wizard of Oz? Yes. Wow. But I think I was like forced to watch that in school at some point. Yeah. The yellow brick road. Dorothy. It's Toto. It's good. The estate rests, this particular estate rests on 1.5 acres in the prime Eastgate enclave, a gated driveway bolstered by a security booth empties at an expansive motor court with two garages with room for four vehicles with sprawling stucco and stone accented structure at its center offering six bedrooms and 11 bathrooms.

1:48:47It's 9 ,000 square feet across a single level. It's introduced via a marble-clad foyer with access to an elegant wet bar-equipped living room that wraps around to a cozy wood-paneled den. I like that wood-paneled den. You love a wood-paneled den. I love wood-paneling generally. Ideally, mahogany, the official wood of business. We need a mahogany sponsor. It's a truly huge missed opportunity. You've been mahogany's strongest soldiers. We love mahogany. From there, a spacious living room sports a fireplace and pocketing doors spilling out to a pillared loggia. Logia? I'm not familiar with that word.

1:49:24Well, a formal dining room connects to a kitchen with an eat-in island and a breakfast nook. A soaring rotunda flows to a posh primary estate, which has a fireside sitting area and dual walk-in closets and baths. It has a tennis court. Of course. A basement with a wine cellar, detached two-story guest house that once housed Carson's office. The amenities continue outdoors. The manicured grounds host a sun deck encased pool and spa flanked by an open air cabana with a fireplace, as well as a lighted tennis court and a viewing pavilion holding a kitchenette and powder room. So you can view the tennis that's played.

1:50:01Per the Wall Street Journal, Carson had to convince Joanna to relocate from the East Coast to the West Coast. She was truly a New Yorker at her core, so it was hard to move her out to California, the nephew said. How about one and a half acres in Bel Air? Will that do it? Not a bad option. Well, there are some other stories in the mansion section, which we should go through. First, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. I loved hanging with Jake yesterday. He is potentially a Joe Rogan CEO.

1:50:39Yeah, fantastic conversationalist, fantastic. The way he breaks things down, tells stories. I really enjoy that conversation. He'll be back. He's on a generational run. And congratulations to him again on the good news. So the Call of Duty creator, Dave Anthony, has a custom Bel Air mansion. It just sold for$22 million. And we will tell you more about this property after our next guest joins. Because we have Russ from LiveKit in the TBP in Ultradam. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Russ? Yo, Jordan. How are you doing? Good to see you. Great to be back. Yeah, thanks so much. First, kick us off.

1:51:17Give us the news. What happened? Dude, the news. LifeKit is a unicorn. Woo! Whoa!

1:51:30A$100 million series. It's back. A$1 billion valuation led by Index Ventures, Salesforce, Altimeters Inn, red points in and you're now a billion dollar company how does it feel feels amazing is the job is the job yeah yeah overnight true overnight success no definitely not it's a day's zero but yeah it took 20 years um it's pretty incredible what were the key growth unlocks the creek key kpis what was the first slide in the deck that got the deal done uh is there a break in the graph or has it just been continual growth and you're ready to take the next step yeah i think it's really been I think voice AI has really just started to grow and explode.

1:52:13I sometimes refer to us as the accidental AI company because we never meant to be an AI company. We were video conferencing, live streaming infrastructure, and then we started to work with OpenAI on ChatGPT voice mode, and everything changed at that moment. The rest is history. um yeah what uh what do you see as the key uh like user experience ui features to a great voice mode experience i i i deliberately daily drive all of the major llm platforms now and i'm starting to notice little subtleties about does this one have uh the ability to go back 15 seconds forward 15 seconds make it like a podcast player more familiar ui what do you think is the most important for a potential customer to, if they're implementing a voice experience, how much should they make it feel like a podcast versus, you know, an avatar that they're interfacing with?

1:53:09What's your feeling on that? I think it depends on the use case. So I think if you were to separate it into two broad buckets, I think that there's like the personal assistants, right, that you kind of talk to as a friend or a companion. For those kinds of use cases, I think feeling feeling very human-like. So latency, I think, is an important factor across both B2B use cases and B2C use cases. But I think especially true in the B2C use cases, you kind of expect that an assistant you talk to is going to feel like talking to a human being and have a level of empathy that is not always necessary in a B2B use case.

1:53:46So for a B2B use case, I'll give you an example, like if you're trying to do patient intake at a hospital using an AI, call it on the phone, like really the goal, the job to be done there is to get on my doctor's calendar, right? It's, do you need it to sound like a human or to respond with the absolute lowest latency possible? No, you need it to be reliable. So you need to make sure that it's going to actually, you know, qualify the user calling in, make sure they have insurance, figure out what's their affliction, and then get them onto the doctor's calendar 99.999 % of the time or 100 % of the time.

1:54:25And so the reliability of the voice agent is most important for the B2B use cases. And then maybe the empathy and realism is more critical for these B2C use cases. what are your predictions or keys to success with the new Siri? There's been a bunch of news about Apple did a deal with Google. They got the best model. They got a great model powering it, but there's a lot of work that they need to do on the actual voice experience side. What would your best practices be for Siri V2? CRB too, I think like the two most important things. I think the realism aspect is going to be there. I mean if they're using a model from Google like Gemini live.

1:55:11their kind of voice-to-voice model is quite good. Feels quite realistic. Maybe one area where it could use a bit more empathy in some places, I think. And they just acquired a company called Hume in the space, which has a pretty strong licensing deal. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the licensing deal. So that model has a lot of emotion and does sentiment analysis in real time. And so I think that'll be an important unlock for Apple as they're using the Google model for this new Siri. I think the other thing is just like having access to, you know, the right knowledge and reliability. Like the thing that just kills you with the original version of Siri is it's not reliable.

1:55:59It like can't do half the things. And sometimes it does like a web search when you actually just want an answer. And it's so I think like the reliability of it and making sure it has access to the right tools and can invoke those tools at the right time. I think that's going to be another critical thing. But, you know, Apple's pretty incredible when they when they focus and try to nail an experience. So I think I think they'll I think they'll get it done. One one interesting thing about Siri is there there is a woman who voiced Siri. There's like a singular voice. and I think everyone, no matter how much they use Siri, if they hear the voice, they're familiar with that identity.

1:56:35How do you think about companies that offer either one singular voice and they just build a brand around it and that is really an embodiment of this particular AI system? They give it a name and a personality and it has one voice versus giving the consumer the option to have multiple voices or even steer the voice over time with real-time sentiment analysis. Yeah, I think it depends, again, on the use case. So I'm glad you brought this up. So for Apple, for like Siri 2.0, right, we're talking about a digital assistant or a voice assistant that is running at like the scale of the entire world, right?

1:57:13Like Apple devices are everywhere. And so when you think about delivering a great experience at scale like that or at that level of scale, you have to think about kind of how do you meet the user where they are. So to speak on voices in particular can't just be one voice. I mean, like it has to speak different languages well. Right. That's one thing. culturally, you have to think about accents and some of the paralinguistic cues. If I say, um, or the way that I speak also varies, or the way someone speaks varies across cultures as well, varies across languages. There's different customs. And so if you're trying to build a voice assistant that can meet the needs or feel like the right experience at the scale of the entire world.

1:58:02You have to go really deep on kind of all of these different aspects, conversational dynamics, what are the right voices? Do they have the right accents? Do they speak the right languages reliably? All of that stuff matters. And so that's something that at Apple scale and scope, they have to solve that for something that's a bit more contained, like at a hospital in a particular part of the US, you may not have the same kind of constraints or requirements. What's your opportunity in robotics? It's the next big wave. I think that robotics has kind of this 80 % overlap with voice AI in that you can think of a humanoid robot, which are a lot of the robots that are getting built now by companies.

1:58:52You're not going to interact with that robot with a keyboard you're going to talk to it and it's going to have this additional capability where it's going to have eyes and be able to see you and move in response to what you do and your actions and so you're going to talk to that thing and that's the overlap but then there's a lot of other new stuff that you have to do in the robotics use case because it has vision and because it has limited connectivity so that robot may be out there in the field it may not always be able to connect to the network You may need to be able to do things kind of locally or on a local network if connectivity is compromised.

1:59:31So there's like a lot of opportunity to build in the robotics space. It's still a bit earlier than I would say voice AI is now in terms of like how it's scaling up and being adopted. But it's a wave behind voice AI that I think is going to be even bigger than voice AI. Are you tracking benchmarks around latency? I'm interested to know what you think about the progress to reduce latency in voice interfaces, and particularly what the bottlenecks are. Do we need to just distill models down further? Do we need custom silicon? Are there going to be dedicated chips, ASICs for inferencing voice models?

2:00:10Because I'm not sure if you've seen those Instagram reels where people are doing, like, the human impression of ChatGPT voice mode, and they sort of, like, pause. And it's funny. I thought you were going to talk about the guy who's like, I'm lying in front of the train tracks. Oh, no, no, no. You've probably seen these. You're seeing your product in action. Honestly, it's a great ad for voice mode. But it feels very much like we're almost in the dial-up internet era of these voice interfaces where there's this little delay, and that's clearly going away. But I'm interested to know, technically, what needs to happen to remove the delay from voice interfaces?

2:00:48Yeah, so the way to think about it is that there's kind of a bunch of different components to this end-to-end experience of like, I speak, model thinks, model speaks back, right? And along that kind of path, you have the network latency. I'm speaking only to the primary components. There's a bunch of little things, too, in the middle as well. But there's network latency, so getting the voice from me to the machine, wherever it's located. Then there's like the process of understanding when am I done speaking? That's called turn detection. Like when have I done, am I done sharing my thoughts? And then the model can now speak back to me or think and then speak back to me.

2:01:28So there's the step of figuring out when is the user done speaking? That introduces some latency. Then there's the actual inference part of it. And it depends on whether you're using a full voice-to-voice model. So a model that takes in voice directly and spits out voice. or whether you're doing a cascade approach where it's the first model converts it into text, the next model is the LLM, and then the next model is taking the tokens coming out of the LLM and turning it back into speech. If it's the kind of the cascaded approach, then you have like three different spots where additional latency can come in, right?

2:02:03Like there's three models here, they all have to run, and then they have to pass information between each of those models. So there's another latency or place where latency creeps in. And then when the model finally spits out voice, whether that's from a TTS model or from the voice-to-voice MLM itself, then you have latency of the network where the AI's voice travels over the network and then is played out on my phone. And so it turns out you can actually shrink the latency in each of these different components. Where are you going to get the biggest bang for the buck? I would say there's two places where you get the biggest bang for the buck.

2:02:39the first one three places the first one is uh that kind of three models are one model so is it voice going straight into the model and then being processed and then spit out or are you actually doing this kind of like handoff uh between three different models that's the first spot where you're going to get a big reduction in latency the second place where you'll get a big reduction in latency is um on the turn detection piece so figuring out like when is the user done speaking and having the delay be as short as possible between, okay, the user's done speaking, let me pipe the data straight into the model or maybe I'm already streaming it into the model and then it's deciding when the user's done speaking and has its response ready to go.

2:03:21And then the third place is on queuing. So you have many, many people that are trying to hit these models at once. They're all using voice mode or et cetera at the same time. How do you figure out how to load balance that workload, that demand that users have, that speech data that the users are sending to the model? How do you figure out how to make sure that there's a model already waiting and consuming that speech versus making a queue up and wait? And then this person goes and gets a response and this person goes. So doing the load balancing across those GPU workloads is another. And then as you mentioned, I think you can get a speed up on the model side from hosting it on better hardware or chips that are dedicated to a particular type of architecture.

2:04:05Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. That's exciting. Are you focused, like you're raising a lot of money right now, is this focused on OPEX, CAPEX? Are you going to build your own data centers? Have you confronted like the build versus buy debate internally? Yeah, I think for data centers, I mean, we have really healthy margins now. So there's no pressure to go and build our own metal yet, but we'll get there over time. That's something that we've always talked about eventually, kind of fully vertically integrating the stack. But I think that the capital for us is going to be used in two primary ways.

2:04:43I think the first one is that we started our life as network infrastructure. And that used to be the product that we sold even for voice AI companies. But it turns out that when we were selling voice network infrastructure, someone would say, well, how do I test this model? I built it with your software and now I'm running it on your network, but how do I test it? We're like, well, go over here, use this vendor and figure it out, glue this stuff together. And then they were like, well, how do I deploy it? And we're like, well, use this vendor. And then they're like, well, how do I observe it? And all the data generated, which I use Datadog, what do I do here?

2:05:21And we're like, well, you can kind of piece it together this way. And we kept hearing this over and over and over. And then we said, okay, well, we're just going to start building out all the pieces. Because right now, building a web application is very familiar, very easy. And you usually have one single platform that allows you to build out the entire thing, right? Like Next.js has kind of become this default. Next.js and Vercel have become like the default platform for building out a web application. But a voice AI application, a robotics application, these things are actually very different.

2:05:50from a web application. It's a completely different architecture. At the top of the iceberg, it looks like, oh, well, instead of typing and clicking a mouse, now I'm talking and the AI can see me. But just that kind of change at the input layer underneath changes everything about the underlying architecture of how that application is built and all the infrastructure you need to get that thing built. And so what we're doing is we're really building every single piece of that across the entire development lifecycle so that you can start with LiveKit from zero, just a dream, scale to the moon in production in reality with LiveKit.

2:06:30And you don't really need to go anywhere else. You can do everything within the platform. And so the first part is just building out this product, right? The surface area of it is much wider than where we started. So that's the first thing for the capital. And then the second thing is really investing in DevRel and some go-to-market around education, like helping developers understand how can they leverage this platform to accelerate what they're trying to build. It's like lots of sample apps and workshops and things like that, events to make sure that people know that there's this tool that's kind of magical and can accelerate their roadmap and their kind of progress towards the vision of what they're trying to do.

2:07:14Yeah, makes sense. Well, congratulations again. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Thanks, guys. To the whole team. Yeah, have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. You too. You too. Appreciate it. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. Back to the Rob report. Call of Duty creator Dave Anthony's custom Bel Air mansion just sold for$22 million. It was down in price. They first listed it 18 months ago for$27 million.

2:07:53And subsequently, it underwent a number of price drops. He was the pioneering video game writer, director, and producer. He offloaded the residents in the posh Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles he acquired 15 years ago in 2010. He paid$3.5 million for it. did some renovations. Now he has sold it for$22 million. The sprawling brick and limestone home sold to an unidentified buyer repped by F. Ron Smith and David Berg of Compass for$22 million, which is a lot less than the creator of the blockbuster Call of Duty Black Ops franchise originally wanted. However, it's still a whopping$18.5 million more than he and his wife paid for an existing 1940s house on the hillside property before raising it and embarking upon a custom rebuild in 2018.

2:08:40So they bought it in, when did they buy it? They bought it 15 years ago, and then 18 years go by, then they do the custom rebuild. Wow. Completed in 2022. Fantastic. You're a fan. It's set on a gated and hedged hillside parcel spanning almost three quarters of an acre. The Oren Dothan designed abode now offers seven bedrooms, eight full baths, and two powder rooms in roughly 9 ,000 square feet of H-shaped living space across three levels. English country-inspired interiors by Marie Carson and ML Designs. Sport plastered brick walls and floors clad in wood imported from Germany's Black Forest, plus smart home and security systems.

2:09:25Standing out on the main level is a fireside living room with a vaulted oak beam ceiling. John, if you've seen Star Wars, you'll love this room. Have you seen Star Wars? I have seen Star Wars, Geordie. I've seen all of them multiple times. I am a fan. The kitchen is outfitted with a fossilized stone eat-in island decor and sub-zero appliances and a windowed breakfast nook with built-in banquet seating, while the primary suite has a projector and a retractable 100-foot screen. Wow, that is a big TV or projector. A seating area that opens to a balcony and a marble bath anchored by a nickel soaking tub.

2:10:02Lower level features a soundproof movie theater. So they have a hundred inch projector in the master. And then you go downstairs and there's a soundproof movie theater. This guy liked media. Makes science. Film enjoyer. Maybe he was playing Call of Duty on these, on the movie theater screen. It has cashmere recliners and an entertainment lounge with a bar and a climatized wine cellar. And upstairs a mirrored gym in a dark hued study. We love the dark hued studies here. This is the second one we've found so far. It's also soundproof. It has a wet bar and bookshelves concealing a server area that doubles as a panic room.

2:10:38Interesting. Outdoors, the grounds host a tiled zero-edge pool with a Baja shelf and spa, grilling station, fire pit, conversation area, and a fountain with lights and jets choreographed to music. Interesting. There's also a cobblestone motor court flanking a two-car garage. Born in Liverpool, England, Anthony relocated in 2004 to Los Angeles, where he worked on Call of Duty, one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time, with more than half a billion copies sold to date. His breakout came in 2010 with Black Ops, which he directed and wrote. He also wrote and directed the sequel. He went on to launch the gaming studio Deviation Games, which recently closed up shop.

2:11:19As of now, he's reportedly pursuing a new challenge professionally. Well, we'll have to have him on the show and get the update of what he's doing next. Have you played Black Ops? or were you strictly modern warfare? I have. I enjoyed Black Ops as well. Tyler, were you a Black Ops kid? Yeah, Black Ops 2. Black Ops 2 was the one? Yeah. I guess Black Ops 3 maybe. Sort of underrated. I've always been a fan of the single player experiences, I think more than the average. The multiplayer is still fun. You mean like zombies or campaign? No, campaign. Campaign. I feel like there was actually one Call of Duty recently.

2:11:51You would be just a campaign guy. I like campaign. It's very cinematic. It's like a James Bond movie. You know that meme of what Greenland's going to look like? I think it's from Black Ops 2, where they're on the snowmobiles and they're shooting people while they're going through the forest. That's an iconic scene. I like the big set pieces. I like the stories. Yeah, it might not be the heaviest. That's probably the most memorable campaign moment in any. No, it's definitely no Russian. Yeah, no Russian. Yeah. Did you ever play that, Jordy? Wow. No. Fake gamer over here. Which version was it? Fake gamer.

2:12:23It's in Modern Warfare, right? I actually don't know. I don't know. I think it's more worth it. Was that the... No Russian is, they go, it was a very controversial scene. That one was super dark. Because you play, you go behind the scenes and you're embedded as a Russian, you're doing like a false flag attack, basically, and your job is to like shoot a bunch of people in an airport, which is very aggressive, very controversial. Super dark. Super dark, but certainly memorable. As is Shopify. Shopify, the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

2:13:00Let's head over to Montana. Okay, we're going to Montana. The booming mountain town with Montana's most expensive real estate. Once a remote ski outpost, Big Sky has transformed into a destination of wealthy homebuyers. In southwestern Montana, near Yellowstone National Park, is Big Sky, a mountain community that emerged around 1973 with the opening of remote ski area Big Sky Resort. Over time, Big Sky has transformed from a scattering of residences and businesses into a true town. Lately, the 10-year Big Sky 2025 plan added new world-class ski infrastructure, a modern luxury residential resort, to reshaping the property landscape.

2:13:39This is helping push Big Sky to the top of the state's price charts with a median listing of$3.05 million in December. despite this growth the community keeps an authentic montana feel dressing up still means putting on cowboy boots jeans and maybe just maybe a cowboy hat town center is a new newer commercial and housing hub with a mix of dining shopping hotels and recreation nearby the established meadow village has a small business area let's give it up for small business areas

2:14:14And a residential feel. Together, these two districts have merged into Big Sky's growing downtown. Lone Mountain Ranch, this historic guest ranch with a western vibe, dates back to 1915, so before, I guess, the town actually formed. It's known for antler-adorned horn and cantle restaurant. We've got to give some tips to folks who are heading out to Big Sky. There are memberships that you must obtain. Big Sky has three exclusive ski-in, ski-out private residential clubs. You've got the Yellowstone Club, founded in the 1990s, offers classic timber aesthetics, private ski terrain, and a Tom Westcorp-designed golf course.

2:14:54In addition to a variety of housing options, Montage Big Sky Resort opened in 2021 and is within Big Sky's Spanish Peaks community, which you mentioned. It has 139 room hotel and private residences. Ownership provides an opportunity to join Spanish Peaks Mountain Club. And then there is the one and only Moonlight Basin Resort on the grounds of the Moonlight Basin Club. Yeah, this just opened. I have two friends there right now. It looks incredible. And they have homes. Montage is set up where I think it's only fractional for their residences, whereas Moonlight Basin, the one and only, you can actually buy entire homes.

2:15:35The business model of just buying a bunch of land for cheap and then building a bunch of homes and selling them. It really is sort of like a Montana forever environment. Silicon Valley talks a big game about building new cities. California forever. You head out to Montana and they're like, yeah, we built three of these just recently. We built whole cities. Ski season is obviously the big headliner. Big Sky's calendar is actually a tale of two high-energy peaks. Winter at the ski resort, spanning 5 ,850 acres, and one of the largest in the U.S., is the Undisputed King. But in the summer, the Big Sky PBR claims the throne as the premier event.

2:16:12It brings together the world's elite bull riders to an outdoor arena in town center, pairing the raw grit of professional bull riding with pyrotechnics and mountaintop sunsets. We've got some advice for the buyer. The majority of the full-time residents typically live in the vicinity of Meadow Village or Town Center where there are more condominiums, a real estate broker says. Within a quarter mile outside downtown, there are single-family homes, part-time and second-home residents, and on the other hand, often buy in the mountains where there is ski access. Bullis suggests keeping an open mind.

2:16:47Some prospective buyers initially want a single-family residence, she says, but even those who thought they needed a four - or five-bedroom house may be swayed by a well-designed condo aesthetic or the convenience of being able to easily lock up and rent out the unit. Alex Waters, who we were with on Sunday with Paul, he is running the racing program out at Willow Springs. he's setting up a new members club in Bozeman that allows you to buy garages, which means that you will have a primary, or not necessarily a primary, but you will have a residence on Montana, which means you can get away with not, there was a loophole with, you could set up an LLC in Montana, buy a car, and then avoid the 10 % sales tax or whatever it is here in California.

2:17:39The old Whistling Diesel. But that's been getting cracked down on. It never really was obvious that it was legal at all. I think it wasn't. It also aesthetically was a little offensive to some people. They said there was sort of a carve out if it was like, oh, you had to do it because of certain regulations. Like a certain car couldn't get approved. But there were a lot of people that were like, hey, you bought an$800 ,000 car. Why can't you just afford to pay the taxes, the sales tax or whatever? Why are you nickel and diming? Can you really afford that Lambo if you can't just put a California license plate on it?

2:18:16It always had a little bit of an aesthetic. Like, you're skipping. Well, some people were doing that specifically because their cars wouldn't pass smog in California. If they're old or retro, you sort of get a pass. Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Did you see Amon is headed to sea? No way. Got a video here. Okay, let's play it. Pull up this video. Amon at sea. They're calling it a philosophy. Is it a boat? It's a cruise ship? Let's play this. Looks nice. Got a nice big bedroom. Is this on a boat? Is this AI slop? Is this AI or CGI or is this real?

2:19:04Now we need to know. Let's go to the comments. Oh, the goat. I honestly thought that goat was in the video. That did fool me.

2:19:17The horse. That is a big boat, wow. That's a big boat. It does look like they actually built this thing.

2:19:26Will this get you to go on cruise? They're gentrifying cruises, John. They're gentrifying cruises. Incredibly, absolutely incredible. You truly nailed it, wow. Wow. The comments? Adoring. People love it. Amangati is the embodiment of space and seclusion, comprising just 47 spacious suites. The yacht is imbued with the same quiet elegance as Amon's sanctuaries on land, with unparalleled surface from the onboard team attuned to destruction. So it's a big yacht, John, but it's a lot of people. Yeah. You're looking at hanging out with, like, it's over 100 people with the staff, I would assume. You've got 47 suites, a couple people per suite, and then staff.

2:20:06That's a lot of people to be on a boat. I'm sure it'll be an amazing experience. Are you signing up? I would. I've been anti-cruise for a very long time. I think that there might be an over-rotation against cruise culture. It's been degraded in many ways where many cruise ships, the aesthetics are very like, okay, you're just basically drinking and gambling the whole time, and it's sort of like boring and bland. And it's certainly not the correct cultural way to visit a country. Like if you're just like, yeah, I've been to France. No, I didn't go on land. I was just on this boat drinking and gambling the whole time.

2:20:50It's a little bit, it feels uncultured sometimes. But I think that certain cruise ships might offer specific things that people might enjoy depends on depends on uh what what you're what you're going for and what the community will be like on the boat what the goals are who knows it's all slot machines on the amon i stayed in montenegro for a couple weeks once and it was so funny because you'd just be in like the most quaint little village yeah like by the sea there's tiny little boats out it's totally idyllic and then just like this massive cruise ship would just like roll into the port of this tiny town and it would kind of it would kind of kill the vibe i like the smaller boats i like a catamaran something you can scuba dive on i guess like my i guess like my big question with the amman cruise is like if you're staying at amman it's probably think like 50k for the week for a room especially during peak season and and so assume and like renting like a pretty nice yacht with a full staff that's private yep is like probably it's around the same yeah potentially like slightly more but i i'm not sold that this is going to be that creative a trait uh well so the thing especially if you're going with friends you're just like do you want to go on the amman do you want to go on the amman boat and you've got you're sharing it with a hundred other people or do you and like friends want to get your own boat you might like hanging out with other random people that are there on the Amman boat there might be serendipity that comes from the community that might be an act I've met some cool people what if you get like a hundred of your boys you just load the whole thing maybe like two hundred pack them four in each suite you know you take the mattress off the bed and then half the dudes sleep on the box spring and then half the dude sleep that would be that would be such a funny bit to run on the amon yes is basically pick the most like figure out like what is like the least desirable dates like yes yes for cruising in general and then all of your friends book it at the same time it's like a turn of the offsite yeah that would be good uh but yeah i mean there's nothing but even then at that point you could get sweet how it would be cooler to rent like crew in there it would be cooler to rent 10 yachts with your friends all at the same time yeah and then just like park them and hang out.

2:23:15I like the idea of just smuggling as many of your boys into one room as possible. Just be like, sir, uh, you, you selected just two guests. Why are there 14 dudes in your room? Why do you have 30 sets of luggage? Why do you ask for a seventh cot to add to your, to your, to your room, sir? What's going on? Like, don't worry about it. The other, the other thing with, with the Mon is the most like first world problem ever. but like some of the menus are just like so, you know, it makes sense, but like so focused on like sushi, like so raw fish heavy, that at some point you're like, I need to venture out.

2:23:54By like day five, you're like, I don't want sushi. I think that is the actual value prop with the Amon, is that you're potentially reducing the standard deviation or like the variable experience. Because if you're chartering something privately and you're getting a private boat, like you might have an amazing captain or you might have a mediocre captain. You kind of got to figure out the reviews and process that. And then, oh, the chef, how are they doing? And then all the crew, are they all good? Whereas Amon, you kind of know that there's like a standard that's being held within that group and that everyone will be trained to the same standard, that there will be an organization that's maintaining some sort of base level of experience.

2:24:33And so, I don't know. Anyway, 11 labs, build intelligent real-time conversational Agents Reimagine Human Technology Interaction with 11 Labs. We had some breaking news yesterday. Caroline Ellison has been released from federal custody. She, of course, was involved in the FTX drama that erupted a few years ago. She's out. And Martin Shkreli, quote, tweeted us into the oblivion. Ratio. Ratioed us by changing our – he didn't even use Nano Banana Pro. Well, he just scribbled all over our trading card and said snitched. Honestly, it worked. Yeah, I did. I was thinking, like, that felt very fast. It does feel fast.

2:25:15It does feel fast. But I'm excited to see what she does next. Will she build something? You know, we've seen some other folks get out and go on to redemption. And we will see. Hopefully, at some point, she tells her story. It'll be interesting to see her side of it. Maybe she has convincing arguments. I heard she wrote a book. Really? I think there were some leaks. I don't know how true it is, but currently she was writing. Okay. Well, Jay Yarrow is sharing. Joe was highlighting Intel sold off after earnings yesterday. And Jay is particularly disappointed because he says, I'm a U.S. citizen, and our sovereign wealth fund owns this one.

2:25:58Yeah, bad day. Bad day. We all lost something today. Yeah, bad day to be a U.S. citizen. Should we talk about... The news on Intel really quickly. Intel posts loss after spending increase. Swung to a loss for the fourth quarter on Thursday and forecast further losses in the first quarter as the company spends heavily to ramp up production of its latest chips. The company reported a net loss of$333 million for the last three months of the year. And analysts were expecting them only to lose$294 million, so they lost more than expected. Revenue was$13.7 billion. And a year ago, it was$14.3 billion.

2:26:39So revenue is declining. Losses are expanding. It's a bunch of bad news. Shares fell 6.7 % in after-hours trading. The CEO, Lip Bhutan, said, Our priorities are clear, sharpen execution, reinvigorate engineering excellence, and fully capitalize on the vast opportunity AI presents across all of our businesses. the CFO said industry-wide supply shortages were a factor weighing on results and said the problem would worsen in the first quarter of 2026 before starting to ease in the spring well I'm rooting for Liputan, I'm rooting for folks over at Intel I'm rooting for the American taxpayer who owns a little bit of Intel so good luck to all of them let me tell you about Okta Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk.

2:27:34Secure every agent, secure any agent with Octa. Well said, John. We should talk about this out-of-home campaign. OpenAI has purchased a ton of billboards. They have hit San Francisco. We got a whole bunch of folks at Clay, Valfos, Decagon, Unified GTM, and Christina, of course, from Vanta, is sitting there on the billboard. I like the aesthetic, the black and white, the big, there's a lot of white space in the design. It's not too cropped in. I think they executed these billboards very well. And it's fun. OpenAI is such a, it's easy to collapse it into. It's just an app on your phone. It's a singular business.

2:28:18But they do have a lot of partners all over the startup ecosystem. And they are paying tribute to them with this out-of-home campaign. I like to think about the 10 people left in San Francisco that have never heard of AI or OpenAI or CatGPT. And they're just very confused, walking around, looking at these nice pictures. It really is for the builders. It is another example of San Francisco billboards being very insular, insider jokes. There aren't that many people in many cities that would be able to identify all these founders by name or know these companies even. And especially at the size they put there, they didn't even put taglines.

2:28:57They just put this person's name building this company. You have to know. It's an if you know, you know campaign. But I think there's a lot of people in San Francisco that do, in fact, know. So congratulations to everyone that is sporting their fits on a billboard in San Francisco now on Penny Eyes Dime. Let's head over to Faye Lee. Yes. According to Natasha at Bloomberg, she's in the fundraising market with talks. early talks, advanced talks, we're not sure, but their talks to raise $500 million at$5 billion. When you think about the leverage that founders like Fei-Fei Li have to be going out and raising this much money this early and just still being like, sorry, the most I can give up is 10%.

2:29:40It's like they all want to do these 10 % or less. She deserves the goat sound effect. She deserves the goat on the screen. Goat on the screen. We got a goat on the screen. Former TVPN guest. Very happy to have chatted with her. Her company, World Labs, has been posting some very interesting demos. Obviously, there was that box that you could see a virtual 3D world inside. That was very cool. And the way she talks about it is funny because it makes me feel like she's a gamer. And now I just want to get on Rust with her and experience whatever game she plays. because she's sort of becoming an important player in the future of video games, potentially, the future of gaming, the future of the metaverse.

2:30:29And I wonder if she has any favorites or has dabbled on COD late at night, on voice chat, screaming at people. What's going on with... So Green Oaks, Altimeter... Yes. ...have initiated a trade dispute with the government of South Korea. They're suing South Korea. of unlawfully attacking e-commerce giant. Coupang. Coupang. Yeah. I think Neil went into detail on their investment in Coupang on Invest Like the Best. Yes, yes. It's a great episode. It feels rare to have the venture firms be doing the lawsuit or to initiate the trade dispute. It's interesting where this lawsuit is sitting because typically if you back some company and then they get in a dispute with the local government.

2:31:21The company is the one that's sending their lawyers. But in this case, it is Green Oaks and Altimeter. But people are coming out in force supporting Neil Mehta. Gary Tan said, Neil Mehta is who you want by your side when it gets real. Not a lot of investors would go up against a sovereign to defend a founder. South Korea's government is about to find out that Americans don't take well to being bullied. And Brad Gerstner gets in the replies with the American flag and the salute. Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

2:31:56For sure. Substack. What's going on with Substack? They're going into television. They're going into television. They're taking on big TV. Big TV. They say, according to Max, they're launching Substack TV app on Apple TV and Google TV. Users will be able to watch video posts and Substack live streams. I think this is a so much of Substack's opportunity right now is just that X is rolled into XAI and is like not operating as like a pure play standalone company and so yeah Substack has been definitely ramping up the video functionality we've done some live streams there there's a lot of opportunity and it's a very interesting community I think that's the strongest thing about Substack is just that it's a very high signal place.

2:32:44Like if you were, the Substack experience is not scrolling random posts, random creators, but I feel very confident about if Substack were to serve me a random piece of content that was doing well across the Substack network, I would enjoy it because the creators that choose to be on Substack, there are just so few. Yeah, you could see a new kind of like, we were talking about Vimeo earlier, the dynamic that you used to have between Vimeo and YouTube where Vimeo was like a super intentional place you can see something emerging again where like Vimeo is like maybe or sorry uh Substack TV is like a somewhat more intent intentional version of of YouTube yeah just because it is like based on like your actual audience less around just like raw discoverability now yeah logging onto the Substack TV app and like seeing exactly content just from the people yeah yeah and also with Substack, if you're trying to create a signal on a piece of content, the fact that people pay is really, really high signal.

2:33:50It's hard to clickbait someone all the way to putting their credit card down and being like, I support this creator and I'm willing to pay$5 or$10 a month for who knows how long. And so that just feels like a really, really strong signal to pull across the network if you're surfacing things. It's like, yes, this person isn't just good at clickbait. They're not just good at driving traffic. They're not just good at thumbnails and titles and hooks. They are good at creating such a response from their community that the community puts down their credit cards. In the case of like Emily Sundberg at Feed Me, maybe they pay more than they have to because people really do enjoy the relationship they're having with the creator.

2:34:29And so Subtech has been very, very unique in that um anyway um there are always more posts did you see these people uh clearly have not read rocco's basilisk yes what do they say they're tearing up the waymos in sf that's not good news uh we can pull up this video here they're really jumping on this this is a new one because waymos have been getting stomped out this is a new two words i haven't said put together before they're really breaking the windshield wow what is this did the waymo drive through a particular protest did these people just um do these people just descend upon a random waymo and also like this is a crime this is property what would your mother say yeah also i'm just thinking about like the waymos aren't cheap like you're gonna be hit with like a 500 000 bill even if you just have to pay for repairing the waymo um very very odd but of course people are calling to give the waymos weapons and people.

2:35:28That is the rallying cry of tech. I don't think Google will be doing that anytime soon. I think there were other ways to solve this, but it is terrifying. The Bird and Lime, the Bird CEO, if he was looking at this, would be having a little bit of PTSD. You remember Bird Graveyard, that account? Yes, yes, yes. The autonomous technology really needs to get put through the ringer. Although a lot of, I mean, the New York City bikes seem to have been, you know, made it through the whole destruction phase and seem to be continuing to exist at least. Anyway, what else? Sam Sheffer had a post here that I wanted to read through.

2:36:12He said, I'm waiting for bangers to post. The at bangers account on X apparently has not been posting very often. He's waiting for the Tesla Roadster. He wants another Starship launch from SpaceX. He wants Apple's folding iPhone and he wants Daft Punk to be resurrected. I thought it was a good list. I think the another Starship launch from SpaceX, that's like for sure gonna happen. Apple's folding phone, maybe next year. I don't know. We'll have to talk to Mark Gurman about it, but it seems like it's coming. Certainly working on it. The Tesla Roadster, that might be a ways away that feels like that project has been fully mothballed in favor of other things like Optimus and data centers in space and whatnot but I would still love a Tesla Roadster there's still something it is remarkable how few electric sports cars there have been obviously there's the hyper cars like the remotes or nevera and the there's a few other like hyper cars in the electric world that are like a million Ferrari has like is really weird it's a pinning forina Batista.

2:37:15The Batista is, oh, I think over a million dollars in fully electric and has not been met with positive reviews from the car community. But if you put that level of performance in something that costs$200 ,000, it is a different equation. And I mean, you take the Cybertruck's aesthetics and you take those type of design risks. And if it's low volume, you could at least create It's something that's curious to see on the street. And a halo car would be fun. I'm excited for that. Anyway. Funny story from Semaphore. Liz Hoffman writes, An entrepreneur's 13 hours in Davos jail. The food was phenomenal.

2:37:59Says, Sebastian Heinemann's stint as a suspected terrorist started in the most Davos way possible, hunting for something to eat. The 31-year-old entrepreneur and first-time World Economic Forum attendee was scouting for a salmon roll at a party hosted by Digital Life Design Tuesday night at the Grand Hotel. He set the prototype of the machine he hopes to sell, a verification device to fraud-proof money transfers on a pillar. When he came back, it was gone. Hotel security was waiting to tell him the police had some questions. I'm the idiot in this, Heinemann, founder of startup Vertico, readily admits.

2:38:33It's a black cube with hot glue blobs and wires coming out the side. He left it unattended in a small town police state. What followed was 13 hours in the custody of the fatigue clad, but unfailingly polite Swiss belief. We spent all week thanking in broken German. Semaphore reviewed his release ticket from the police, which said that Heinemann was noticed within WEF 2026 security zone with a tech device. It seems suspicious and its use for illegal purposes could not be excluded. and anyways, the view from a Davos jail so, at the Belvedere Hotel security, there's this detective, mid-40 Swiss, who searches me, extremely thorough they handcuffed me and put me in the back of a BMW nice, nice Swiss police writing in style, I meet another officer who has the best English, the jail is right next to the train station they bring out a fingerprint scanner and the guy tells me I want to see if you're an international spy I ask for my Lunesta pills because I have insomnia and he said, I can't give it to you because I don't know if it's cyanide.

2:39:36Whoa. It's an insane story. You walk into the office and there are two cells. Everything is all painted white, very antiseptic and Swiss. There's a metal bed drilled into the concrete and a toilet sink combination. I love this. Founders, like, they're just, like, hustling, trying to get some customer interest and just goes to Davos jail and is like, well, I may as well make the most of it and try to get a story out of this. anyways there's a metal bed drilled into the concrete and toilet sink combination they said it was spring water so the water was good to drink the food was phenomenal better better review than

2:40:12they brought it from the hospital apparently chicken lasagna amazing the only complaint i have was the smell the next morning they bring this guy named chris a technical expert he says come out here explain your tech i do my pitch i say look i'm not a very good hardware engineer but I'm a great user of AI. I was one of the top users of Cursor last year. I did 43 ,000 agent runs and generated 25 billion tokens. We opened my machine. Chris and I go line by line through the code. I don't know the language the code was written in because it was written with AI. So Chris actually explained the code to me.

2:40:44They come back and they say, you're free to go. You can take all your stuff with you, but you're banned from Davos between now and 6 p.m. on Friday. I'm going to apply for another hotel badge next year. So anyways, insane story. Don't bring your hardware device that you don't fully understand with a bunch of hot glue in a plastic box. Very, very, very sketchy. But got a good story out of it. The other interesting takeaway from Davos, Alex Heath summed it up in the sources.news newsletter. He says, after my conversations with AI leaders this week in Davos, I came away with the impression that the industry has collectively decided to gang up on open AI.

2:41:29And so you saw Demis and Dario hanging out, talking about how much they are open to collaboration, open to pausing, if that makes sense, open to working together, and Elon on stage, but not a lot of open AI love from all the other lab leaders. Sort of an interesting dynamic, the anti-open AI alliance. I was also following the Calci market on will Elon win his case against OpenAI. The volume's gone up. It's now a 58 % chance that Elon wins his case against OpenAI. So, like, we're getting close to 50-50. The market's pretty stable. Nothing's really moved it significantly one way or another. But I'm sure it'll be moving a ton later once we have more news that comes out, more back and forth, more people sharing facts and figures.

2:42:20There was some reporting from the New York Times on Kash Patel's demands for a work trip to the UK. A lot of people were getting very angry about this. But I want your reaction, John. So every May, there's a Five Eyes conference with the head of every intelligence agency. This year, it was in the UK. Kash Patel is going. In the lead up to that, his D's tale starts making crazy requests. You can tell me if these are crazy. He's got special requirements on everything. And the Brits are getting pissed. Before the conference, his staff says he's unhappy because he doesn't like meetings in office settings.

2:42:53What he wants is social events. He wants Premier League soccer games. Now, that's deeply un-American. He wants to go jet skiing. He'd like a helicopter tour. That's fun. So, yeah, I wanted to ask, is this fair? He wants to go and develop relationships with the— I think you need to go much further. You don't want to ask to go to some soccer match, do some European nonsense. sense you want to ask for american football match bring the nfl over there yeah the super bowl is happening i want the all-star game played here while i'm in town yeah bring the patriot i also think you're you're excited about helicopters you're excited about jet skiing why not combine the two combine the two what's that like bring them out at the same time oh head down to the lake yeah down to the lake that'd be good the river right and just be zooming around together yeah jumping off you know trading trading places kind of thing what about wingsuiting let's get some wingsuiting going.

2:43:45Some bungee jumping. I want to do, you know, that Red Bull jump from space. That's what I want to do on my trip. We're going up to the edge of space. Felix Baumgartner. Yeah, I'm jumping out of the weather balloon into the central London. Yeah, that's a good bit. You're going to tour another country and meet with people and say, like, actually, I want to go to space. Very high up. I want to go to space. I want to go to space. In other news, Eric Jorgensen has announced pre-orders for the book of Elon Musk. It's 61 days until the launch. David Sentra, who got an early copy and he says it's awesome.

2:44:22He highly recommends pre-ordering. If you're not familiar with Eric's previous books, he wrote the Almanac of Naval Ravikant, which did fantastically well, sold a ton. Jack Butcher is involved in the book of Elon. That should be very fun. And Naval wrote the foreword, which is very cool. equipment share we're in public today YC Winter 15 they say from Missouri to 373 locations nationwide 7 ,700 team members and 8 billion of fleet under management they built the operating system construction has been missing our friend Mitchell from Lead Edge is a big investor in equipment share working on getting the CEO on any day now.

2:45:09But congratulations to the entire team and cap table at Equipment Shares. That'll be fun. Well, it's time to plant the bomb and wind down the show. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in today. It's been a lot of fun. We hope you have an incredible weekend ahead. Only three more sleeps until we're back here. We'll be counting them down. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the TBPN newsletter, at tppn.com. Visit some of our sponsors. Look in the description. Go browse around on their websites. There's a lot of good stuff. A lot of good stuff. And thank you to our whole team.

2:45:47Yeah, thank you to the team. Tyler. A bunch of legends. Ben. A bunch of legends. The whole crew. And thank you to everyone in the chat. We will see you on Monday. Cheers, folks. We love you. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.