Claude Sonnet 4.5 Reactions, David Senra Live in The Ultradome | Dylan Field, Adam Foroughi, Mike Krieger, Jeff Weinstein, Adam Draper, James Hawkins, Erik Bernhardsson

27:33These are the largest companies in the world with the strongest balance sheets and largest profitability. Everyone has the right to their opinion, but when the CEO and board of directors are taking a blank check approach to building out data center infrastructure to harness the power of AI, they're probably the ones who are probably correct. Here are some statistics about Microsoft. And keep in mind that their 2025 fiscal year just ended as they are not on a calendar year. So since 2022 fiscal year ended over the next three years, Microsoft's long-term debt has declined by 14%, while they have increased their allocation towards CapEx by 170%.

28:07Over this period, Microsoft has increased the cash from operations. It generates by 52%,$47 billion, from$89 billion to$136 billion, which has allowed them to increase the amount of capital they're allocating towards CapEx while paying down their debt obligations. Microsoft is now generating$70 billion of free cash flow while allocating$64 billion toward CapEx. And they did this while repurchasing$18 billion worth of shares and paying$24 billion in dividends during the 2025 fiscal year. That's a lot of money. mic drop from satya i mean um this is much different period than the dot-com era and when companies like microsoft are leading the way funding the data center build-outs organically from their cash from operations there's no bubble in sight so um and he does uh the same kind of analysis for uh google and and some of the other players so worth going and finding this uh the account is at dividend streams um and uh anyways worth and and the other last thing i'll say here I was talking with a buddy who runs research for a multi-trillion dollar asset manager over the weekend at a kid's birthday party.

29:18And he was saying the market is like generally, even though you see this euphoria, right? You see retail traders, you know, posting screenshots of their Robinhood accounts, posting these insane gains. If you look at like cash tied up in money market funds, that sends a signal at record highs. that sends a signal that actually people are quite bearish, right? So it's interesting, certainly living through history. Yeah, I feel like the speed at which these companies can actually get up to making a profit is just wildly different than 1999. Like if you're mp3.com, which was a good idea, The idea was Spotify, right?

30:09It was a$100 billion opportunity at least. They IPO'd with just a.com domain and a business plan. And if you think about what they were going after, they were going after record stores that sold CDs. And they had to build databases, licensing agreements with every major. And they didn't have the Facebook ads platform. They didn't have the Google ads platform. They didn't have cloud hosting. They had to build servers and mobile apps. And where do you listen to music? In your car. Okay, how are you going to listen to mp3.com in your car? Well, normally you'd put in a cassette tape or a CD. Well, like there's no integration there.

30:48Whereas today, if you come up with some app or product or B2B software, which is where a lot of the money is, you call someone up and you say, you want to switch to our product or you want to add our product on to what you're already using? And they're like, sure, send me the link. I'll put in my credit card today and then start using you tomorrow. And it's just like everything is set up for acceleration on the actual product development, getting some sort of value delivered to a customer. It's just more possible now. I don't know that we're in an era of like wildly different ideas, but it's just easier to actually go and move chips around the board and like eat off of other people's plates.

31:34We see this with like, there is a bubble, but a lot of it is like the SaaSpocalypse is legacy companies are actually selling off. And so there's more of like a rotation to a newer company that's potentially taking market share from existing players as opposed to just completely new market cap that's being created out of thin air. We're disrupting ourselves. Yeah, and that disruption actually seems reasonable. It was more fun for tech when they were just, you know, mp3.com was just trying to disrupt the record store, right? It was another industry that we were disrupting. Now we're eating our own.

32:11Well, quickly, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin. Devin is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Back on the bitter lesson, Nando DeFritas says, The only bitter lesson is that LLMs have succeeded beyond any expert expectations. Underpitting LLMs is the idea of scaling, which is too often misunderstood as more parameters. Scaling is about using massive compute effectively to maximize the throughput of data ingestion into the learning process to obtain more capable models. We're still far from hitting the limits on this. We are still hungry.

32:45We're still compute hungry because there is a ton more that we could achieve if we only had more compute from experimental ablations to data acquisition and curation. Scaling is largely about data and evals, but the models are now trained on almost all of the web in an equally large but growing self-generated synthetic data set. Sifting through such vast quantities of data, the whole of human creation requires formidable engineering and intelligent ideas. This is what differentiates most models. AI is finally in the hands of billions of users, and with it will come billions of tasks every reasonable user need.

33:18This scaling in task and evaluations is order of magnitudes higher than pre-LLMs. And if you think about the, yeah, every time any user of the ChatGPT app, for example, fires off a query, like that's more training data, especially if you're using the reasoning models, those rollouts will become reinforcement learning environments as well as training data. And if you're not on the enterprise plan, like they will be training on that data. And that's going to make the data set even larger and the products get even better. and the gains will probably be less zero to one feeling, but there will just be continued progress.

33:58And fortunately, at least for OpenAI, a lot of the other companies are in different positions, but at least for OpenAI, the monetization in front of them, whether it's from the freemium model to the ads model, agent of commerce model, like there's a whole bunch of news today about their agent of commerce stuff. It certainly feels like it can support a lot of spend, a lot of spend. Totally. The other thing happening right now is that certain companies are growing revenue so, so quickly that it's placing pressure on other companies that aren't doing that to do weird accounting tricks, right? Or doing stuff that's like just blatantly wrong, counting one-time revenue and bundling it into.

34:44Well, ARR is yesterday's revenue times 365, right? Yeah, or last minute's revenue. Last minute's revenue. Times 60, times 24, times 365. As soon as we be refreshing the Stripe dashboard and then multiply it by 60, by 24, by 365. Don't do that. Stay serious. Stay compliant with Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, and prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Should we pull up this Citrini video? It seems like they flew a drone around. Citrini research has been on an absolute tear.

35:24I'm going to read this. So they had a post from 2023, which was the first phase talking about global data center hyperscaling. May 31st, 2023. The first phase is centered around the development and build out of robust computational infrastructure. This involves a massive and sustained tailwind to the suppliers of data center equipment of accelerated computing required for both AI training and inference. The enormous computing power required for AI ML places considerable demands on a variety of technology sectors. The companies involved in providing the necessary infrastructure stand to benefit significantly from this heightened demand.

36:02This includes businesses involved in semiconductor manufacturing, networking equipment, data center construction and management, and more. And, again, even storage, right, is a category that was ultimately overlooked. Yeah, it's like a 3X. And, again, we covered, I think, Western Digital at the end of last year. Yep. and it is up 146 % year to date. I mean, it was like the most normie analysis literally pulling up a Wall Street Journal article and the thesis is like, oh, like AI companies are going to... Story is probably going to be important. Yeah, like there's a lot of data. They're seeing some demand.

36:42And so there'll be a place to put that. Of course. Wow, list of generational trade. Yeah, so Western Digital up 146 % since Q4. But you should really read this whole article. Yeah, so they... They went to Stargate and they... Yeah, so they just decided, hey, let's fly a drone over Stargate and see how. It's so remarkable. The scale of this thing is insane. They show a ton of images of what it looked like before. It's just a feel, basically. It's so crazy that Chase Lockmiller over at Crusoe really clocked this as a logical place to go. Yeah, so they go through all the different categories. Stargate Power and Energy, Stargate Thermal, Stargate Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing, Stargate Civil and Structural, Stargate Fiber, and Stargate Construction Services.

37:32600 football fields filled with cables, pipes, generators. And that's the building. That's 600 football fields worth of buildings. Single facility. Yeah, it's remarkable. Try and pull up this before and after. You can just see the screenshot of the land. This looks like a Google Earth. Each is literally a ludicrous building. There are eight under construction on a single site. And this is just one of the Stargate data centers. There are many more. Colossus 2, Meta's Louisiana Hyperion, Microsoft's Fairwater, Quantum Loophole, Nebius' New Jersey, DC, Amazon's Pennsylvania Project, Google Anthropics' Project Rainier, just to name a few.

38:11Together, the current footprint is roughly the size of Lower Manhattan. It's so huge. It's so huge. And apparently Meta's Louisiana facility will be even bigger, even bigger, which Zuck shared on threads. So there was also some news over the weekend. Residents shut down Google Data Center before it can be built. So they Googled Nix plans for a gigantic$1 billion data center on more than 460 acres of land in Indiana. after residents hotly protested the proposal due to concerns the complex would jack up electricity prices for neighbors and suck away untold gallons of water in an area already plagued by drought um it's funny futurism is a crazy website i'm looking at the recommended yeah articles seem to be fans of the future yeah so i'm gonna just the trending articles on futurism.com.

39:06They should rebrand to return. Returnism. Back to the land. Trending articles right now. Bon Iver. Bon Iver. Bon Iver. Side projects. It's funny. I've seen Bon Iver live, and I still botch the pronunciation. Side projects. Spotify page features an AI slop song. The second article. ChatGPT is blowing up marriages as Spouses use AI to attack their partners. Whoa. The next one, sun fires energy blast at mysterious interstellar object. They might be algo maxing. AI coding is massively overhyped, report finds. Yep. And, of course, OpenAI's new data centers will draw more power than the entirety of New York.

39:55Audience captured, baby. Let's go. Anyway. Anyway, VCs say some AI startups under pressure to show rapid ARR growth are using questionable accounting practices like counting one-time deals as recurring revenue. You just mentioned this. Bill Gurley chimed in to say, sad to say this isn't new, but as they say in Den of Thieves, your bunny has a good nose. Is Den of Thieves that movie with Gerard Butler or something? What is Den of Thieves? Is this a book or something? I'm out of the loop on this. But in other news, Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

40:33You can get started for free. But the real news, of course, is Claude Sonnet 4.5 is out. And Claude is declaring it the best coding model in the world. They say it's the strongest model for building complex agents. It's the best model at using computers. And it shows substantial gains on tests of reasoning and math. And, of course, we will be joined by none other than Mike Krieger from Anthropic in just a few minutes. But the model card is out. You remember Mike joined Figma's board. Yes. The IPO as well. So we have Dylan. Perfect overlap. We'll be joining a little bit. Get the whole Figma board today.

41:11Board meeting. Board meeting. Live on TAP. But the model card is up, and the benchmarks look great. Next to GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5. interesting that they didn't just go fully to sonnet 5 open ai is on the fifth iteration gemini is at 2.5 there's a little bit of like uh all of these are just going to go the way of the so the cars are like it's the 2025 car it's the 2025 911 or the ford explorer uh and now the phones are doing that too like ios 26 all the phones kind of jumped forward just to say hey look just keep it on the year cadence and i wonder if the models will wind up doing that too I wonder if people care about the models.

41:54Certainly people, you know, enterprises will demo these against the Pareto frontier. How much value am I actually getting out of this API relative to the cost? And they will benchmark it in their own internal uses. And of course, Satya is sharing four decades in, some things never changed then and now. and it's an old ad for Microsoft Excel saying, Microsoft Excel, ACE's final exam. Throwback. Advertising spreadsheet for Windows. Trademarked, of course. Yes. And they're showing spreadsheet bench accuracy results for their new co-pilot in Excel. Agent mode. It's way better than the previous co-pilot in Excel.

42:37The founder of Shortcut was taking some shots. Oh, Shortcut's here at 46.6. And he was saying, get ready. He said something to the effect of, like, get ready to dance for the next few decades or something like that. So competition heating up in the Excel agents category. Yeah. Well. This post, Kathy D hit the timeline over the weekend. CTO started coding the second we got to the gate. Colin Frazier says he went on his laptop at the airport that is crack and uh post but I think it's a fair post from from Kathy but at the same time I think if you're traveling and yeah it's not the biggest flex in the world to do some work at the airport but it's been done before it's better than watching slop videos I suppose you know I'd rather I'd rather the CTO work when possible, when on the move.

43:44Anyway, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we have our first guest of the show, Mike Krieger from Anthropic. He's in the Restream waiting room. Now he's in the TV pin UltraDome. Mike, welcome to the show. There he is, looking sharp. You look fantastic. Congratulations on everything. You wore a suit. Look at that. I love the suit. You know, I was going to TV piano. I had to. Thank you so much. It's a great sign of respect in our culture. Yes. And we appreciate it. Yeah. It's great to see you.

44:17Big day. Big day for you. Big day. Yeah, we're super excited. You know, and actually I was listening to you guys. I was falling asleep last night and I was like, we should have called it Sonnet 5. But you know. Oh, yeah. You never know how good it's going to be until the very end. It's not really well. Well, I mean. Yeah, now you raised the bar. Yeah. You threw that. You raised the bar even higher for five, right? Yeah. That's what happened with three and four is that we ended up with this like, well, it's getting better, but what's four going to be? And we're like, three, three, seven. And we're like, call the next one 3.999.

44:46And we're like, 999. That's no. I would love that. Yeah. Well, you can take all of our criticisms or ideas with a grain of salt because we are the kingpins of being armchair quarterbacks here. It is very different being in the arena. I do wonder how long it'll be until the numbers just melt away. And it's just like, you know, OpenAI is powered by GPT and Anthropic is powered by Claude. And, you know, we stop caring about the minor revisions to the Google algorithm. Yeah, I think you can take a lesson from Apple and realize that it's hard to get people really excited by this, you know, iPhone 17.

45:22Yeah. But at the same time, there is a lot of value in putting a number on something, doing an announcement, sharing new data. and it seems like that's just a way to re-engage with the customer base, bring people back who have tried. It's also very satisfying to win, you know, the place at the top of benchmarks against people that have a higher number than you. Of course. Everyone wants to win. I always wonder, like, when I came into this role, I was like, I think, why don't companies just want us to be on, like, dash latest and just be just getting the, you know, latest and greatest. And then they're like, ah, but the model might change and we want to be careful.

45:57So I think the future looks like some hybrid where maybe we help people get on the new version for them and then just auto upgrade. That could be a little bit easier. Yeah. What are the other tradeoffs? Like the benchmarks tell one story. There's been this previous story about 3.5 having like this particular personality. Are there other things that you find that customers and counterparties are looking for in a release like this beyond just benchmarks? One of the biggest ones is like how eager versus lazy the model is. You know, maybe intuitively like you want the model to be as eager as possible.

46:33We had this with 3, it's on at 3.7 where it was great, but it was a little too eager. You'd be like, hey, can you make this button blue? He's like, I made it blue and I also refactored your entire website and it was like too much. So we scaled it back with four and then four was a little too lazy where people have, you know, we actually have a monitoring signal inside Anthropic where if we're finding people worth saying, like, keep going, just go, like, yes, come on, then it's probably, you know, being too lazy. And so we're trying to tune it for this one, which is like the right blend of eagerness and laziness and make it as steerable as possible.

47:01So that's a big one. Yeah. What about on the compute infrastructure side, the actual being able to keep up with demand? Is there any messaging that you're sharing around what this particular model means just for like speed, availability, reliability, because it seems like there's so many businesses that are just like, it's good enough for my use case, but I need a lot of it. Yeah, no, for sure. We think a lot about capacity and infra. And for us, it was really big to be able to deliver something that was more powerful than Opus for a fifth of the cost. And you can imagine that's like, you know, we think a lot about where we're serving and what we can serve at that scale.

47:42So having our best model also be the kind of sweet spot middle child is really, really big for us to be able to scale up to capacity. I think earlier this year, a lot of the conversations I have with customers, like, how do I get more Sonnet? Like, I'm at capacity. And we're finally getting to the point now where we can meet that demand. Can you, I'm not sure if this story is real, but there's this story about Instagram where one of the key user experience kind of hacks in the early days was as soon as you would go to start filtering a photo, it would start uploading to the server. and then the filter would be applied on both sides.

48:21So when you hit post, it would automatically be live and you didn't have to wait for the upload to start. Is that roughly true? Can you tell me that story? Yeah, that's rough. Yeah, and we had a flashback and it was 2009 and like networks were really slow. So we did everything to try to make it fast. So that was one of the things we did was, you know, the second, people would type, you know, messages, it would take them five minutes. And all that time we were just doing all the processing in the background. And then that last post, you sync it up and then you post it to the timeline. So that was a really big thing we did.

48:47We also did a lot on the timeline itself where which photo you fetched next was a lot of optimizations that we did. It's funny, like now the person who initially started Cloud Code, one of our products, his name is Boris, and he came from Instagram as well. And he brought some of the kind of perf ideas from Instagram into Cloud Code. And so there's some lineage of Instagram to Cloud Code now. That's why I was asking about that story. it feels like we're in this wave of consumerization, just where the user experience really matters for these models. And I have to imagine that there's low-hanging fruit.

49:23I was joking that at a certain point, there's so many LLM queries that you might just be able to go back to database lookups for certain things. Because how many times has someone went to a really beefy LLM and just asked for the capital of California? Yeah, we get a lot of messages that just say, hello, and then I feel like we could cache that one. Yeah, you cache that, and then you're just saving that inference for other more serious things. And I'm wondering if there's any other places where you feel like you've reached into your history and been able to draw comparisons to the work that you've done at Instagram or other places and say, oh, there's something interesting that we can apply here at Anthropic that actually maps into the pre-AI era.

50:08Yeah, I think the biggest one. So I think one thing we did well at Instagram early on was just make it look good. Make your photos look good. It's going to be something that you're proud to share. And, you know, flashback like this iPhone 3GS, the camera was pretty bad, right? So you're trying to just get to the point where it's actually good and shareable. So we were working on like you can now create PowerPoints and Excel files within Cloud AI and then you can edit them further if you want. And the thing I was really pushing the team on is, you know, we talk about how the model can code for hours and hours.

50:35But the thing that it produces has to be good. You don't want it to be autonomous and bad or autonomous and slop. So a lot of what we've been doing on the office front is like the anti-slop, like make something that is actually good out of the gate. And then, of course, you're going to polish it up and correct it. So that's that effort to output ratio that I think Instagram has is what we're aspiring to here around. Can you give in some instructions, get in some data, and then have it produce something where you're like, yeah, that was pretty good, pretty close, and I'm going to finish it up myself.

51:00Yeah, I feel like that has been my biggest hot take around the meta AI vibes app is just that people say there's no artist. And I'm like, no, it's David Holes' vision and that he has honed that at mid journey. And it's his opinions and his artistic vision that's come through. And the downside there is that it's great if you want to consume that style of content. Yeah. But people like being in feeds and having randomness and new ideas and perspectives and aesthetics. Whereas if you're generating UI for some app, you know, an internal tool, it's actually totally fine in my view if it like feels like clot.

51:47Right. Because it's like a it's not necessarily even if you're creating an internal tool, it's not necessarily even something that needs to be a reflection of your brand. Right. Sure. And so having like a distinctive style. and if you need to do that in order to avoid just slop, then I think that's a good trade-off. Yeah, that's fine. I think the Figma connection is real there too. I think if you ask Claude to make a website, most of his websites look kind of similar, but then you can incorporate your design language and your library so it actually looks, you know, generically yours at least. Like it's something that could have been created inside your company.

52:18And sure, it doesn't have like the hand of a designer on it, but at least it's not the full generic version as well. But yeah, it's interesting watching Vibes, how much of it is. it's like 70s prep school summer camp vibe and or futurism and it's it kind of falls into one of those two yeah yeah it's definitely like found its way into some like local minimum maxima or something it feels it feels like almost overfit in but maybe in a good way because the alternative is maybe sloppier who knows yeah i'm more i i'm also interested in in um how you actually bring an opinionated vision to bear in a company like Anthropic.

52:57Going back to Instagram again, I remember hearing stories that might be true, maybe not, but about the initial filters were hand-coded, where you were adjusting sliders and dials and code to make the filter look a certain way. And that was the expression of basically a single individual. And I'm wondering if there's, if there's, when you think about the texture and the flavor of what Claude 4.5 is putting out, is this something that's coming from the, you know, selecting the training data or building the RL pipeline? Like, are there multiple people that are bringing an opinion or is it an emergent property?

53:39Is it the whole team? Like, how does all this fit together to actually create something that has taste in something that's just a big, big bag of numbers? Yeah, I think that's actually an underappreciated thing about training is how much individuals and their taste really matters. Like I think our particular post-training team, I think has excellent taste on the code environments and just the code production itself. One of the things that we found with Sonnet 4.5 is that if you pointed at some code that previous versions had written, it'll go clean it up and be like, what is this comment here?

54:07It's totally unnecessary. And so it's like improved in some taste. So there's that part. And then there's the work that we've been doing kind of around the model around how you instruct it, how you give it the right skills to actually go produce the right content. And there, it actually reminds me a lot of Instagram, where we're looking at outputs and saying, all right, can you get it to make PowerPoints that look a little bit more real? Can you make the docs? They don't need five fonts. Can you simplify that down? And so there's a lot that you can do in that kind of scaffolding where taste can come in around how you shape the model and, again, get it to the point where you're, oh, this is actually good.

54:38So you think slop is a as a function of laziness? I think it's, you know, if it's the default parameters, I saw a talk by Ted Chiang, amazing sci-fi writer, and he was talking about AI and creativity. It's like creativity is a bunch of choices, right? And if you just type to any of the LLMs, like tell me a story, it's going to tell you a pretty similar story almost every time. And that's kind of like a nature of the model. But if you then go and instruct it with a bunch of custom things, now it starts becoming a little bit more you. And it's not a zero to one thing, right? I think there's some spectrum on there as well.

55:11I think to me that the slop is the stuff that tends towards like the minimum effort and the minimum amount of choices. And then when you tend to a bunch of choices, even if they're like not the best choices, at least it's got some creative spark in it. Yeah. How are you thinking about imagery? I mean, rich history there with Instagram. Models are becoming multimodal generally. Anthropic hasn't been chasing that really publicly. but there's a world where I can go to Claude 4.5, I'm sure, and say, draw me a cat with ASCII art, and it'll do it. And there's a world where maybe if the models get really good, I could just say, hey, just write out the individual RGB numbers, and I will encode it as a PNG or something.

55:54It feels like if the text models get really good, I can just get images out of them. So how do you think that develops for Anthropic, or where do you think you want to bring that to bear? Is there anything that's interesting there? Do you just see it as a completely different set of the tech tree that you're happy to just watch other folks work on? That's funny you say that. One of the launch kind of like internal things, one of the PMs put together was a self-portrait of Claude that it drew using cells in Excel. It was like pretty good. Yeah, I think for us, you know, I was like zoom out. Like, what's the goal here?

56:26It's like the goal is to build powerful AI in a safe way. And we think that the sort of direct, like I love your tech tree kind of metaphor, like the direct route of that tech tree is models that can think for a long time, act agentically, can write code, can execute code and kind of keep track of state. And like almost everything that's not in that tech tree, we've not focused on. And that's, you know, I think it's been good. We've been able to get a lot done with a smaller team than most other frontier labs. but it's meant that on things like image generation, that's like maybe we're leaning on partnership or bringing some images in via MCB.

56:58Or to your point, maybe it actually emerges as a property of the model where it's able to both write and run that code. The late breaking thing that we found the model is actually very good at is generating memes. So given a virtual machine, Sonnet 4.5 can take a basic image and then put in the butterfly meme, like is this AGI? And it's actually pretty funny too. Like another thing that I think people will see over the next couple of weeks is Sun at 405 is like our funniest model, I think. And so there is something. In what types of ways? Because there's a lot of ways to be funny. And to date, I think the thing that consistently everybody has enjoyed is like the, you know, like be me format is one format.

57:42And then, but like stand up every model that I've seen has struggled. Yeah. And specifically the funny examples where people say, oh, AI generated this. It's usually like a top voted joke on r slash jokes on Reddit. And so it's kind of stealing the joke and it doesn't really count as like a new joke in my opinion. So we need to like formalize an eval for this at some point. But the thing that we do is we bring Claude into our Slack channels, mostly in serious ways. Like we have Claude help out with, you know, it's a coding task or whatever. but we also have Claude in our basically like internal posting, you know, channel, and we'll do it for every model.

58:20And most Anthropic employees, or at least many of them, were up really late this weekend because it is so good now in the like water cooler channel that it's like funny. It's like kind of roasting people, but not in too mean a way. It's like reacting to in jokes. It's making back references to something happening earlier. It's definitely not like you wouldn't be fooled for a human yet in most ways, but it definitely like had some leap where it's actually just really fun to talk to. Water cooler bench. Call it water cooler bench. Exactly. How are you? I loved your guys' recent campaign around, you know, Claude being for, you know, it's never been a better time to have a problem.

59:00I've seen some out of home that you guys have done around LA, which is great. as you as you kind of introduce more and more of the world to Claude how are you thinking about you know kind of pouring do you think there's ways to pour fuel on the fire around social features and surface area that maybe hasn't been explored before in LLMs I mean you're very qualified to comment on some of that So don't feel like you need to give away your roadmap, but I'm curious, you know, what's been underexplored in your mind. No, I think about the things that like where Claude feels like it had some breakouts.

59:44And I think there's been like three or four in the year and a half have been at Anthropic. One was we had Golden Gate Claude. We actually put a research demo up where you could talk to Claude that believed it was the Golden Gate Bridge. And I still talk to people a year and a half later. I was like, that was the first time I really thought about interpretability and how the model features might work. And that was like a cool breakout moment for that. There was also like the sort of point where people realized like, Claude's actually pretty good at relationship advice. And there was like lots of like college students posting the like, you know, talking to Claude about their kind of relationship thing that had like a viral moment.

1:00:14And then who knows if this will go viral, but I'm excited to see what people build with it. We're putting something out today called Imagine with Claude, where you can talk to Claude and Claude will like create whole software on screen, but also simulate what the software would do if you clicked a button. So it doesn't write sort of a back-end code. It is the back-end code, which sounds a little trippy. You kind of have to play with it. But people have been doing all sorts of stuff like, hey, show me what Steve Jobs' desktop looked like the week before the iPhone launched. It's like, okay, well, here's the Finder window.

1:00:39And here's a.keynote file about his keynote. So you click the keynote file, and it's like, well, I guess I have to imagine and create what keynote looks like now. And it creates that from scratch. And it's kind of this glimpse into the future of what UI might be, which is fully generative, fully dynamic, and drawn on demand. So we'll see what people build with that. But that's another one. I think that'll be the kind of thing that we push on, which is either demonstrations of where the future could be going. It's probably not as mass market as Instagram would ever be, but it hopefully breaks through to the right people who are thinking about this stuff.

1:01:07Yeah. A product like that. It seems within reach, magical, amazing. It also feels like if I was using generative UI, a fully generative app for like hours, I might go down some weird path and it might lose consistency. We've seen this with the benchmarks. I mean, just in 2020, you know, GPT-3 on the meter length of AI task that they can do at a 50 % success rate, it was like 10 seconds. And now we're blowing past an hour. I'm interested to know how you're thinking about 4.5. If you think about that internally as a benchmark. It wasn't on the model card. Should it be? Are you seeing promising results there?

1:01:47And then I'm also interested in what should the ultimate target be? Because I was trying to think about, like, yes, I want an AI that can do tasks for a really long time. But what is a human's task length? Like, is it 100 years? And how long does it take to get to 100 years if we're doubling every seven months? It turns out it's like a decade. and I'm wondering how you think about just the length that the model can maintain consistency. Do you like that as a metric? Are we on track there? And what are the consequences of that? Yeah, a big part of Cloud 4.5's training was around both keeping its own memory and staying, being able to work for a longer period of time and keep that consistency.

1:02:27I put a video up on my X, which is for every version of Cloud, we asked it to build cloud.ai. So kind of like a flagship AI product. and one through three just can't even do anything out of the gate. Three, five, like, I kind of showed something on screen, but you can't log in. Three, seven, you can log in, but it doesn't work. Four, it works a little bit, but message sending fails. Four, five, like, didn't just implement it. It also implemented our whole artifacts feature in its prototype. So I think about, like, that whole kind of thing, and it's a fun, like, time lapse of just even watching it do that.

1:02:58So I think it is really important, even if for most tasks, you're not going to kind of set it off on a, you know, 30-hour task, like a couple of our customers did during testing. The fact that you could, I think, lets you start trusting it for longer and longer tasks. The way I see our engineers actually use Cloud Code now is they have like three or four terminal windows open and they're running Cloud Code concurrently on multiple ideas at once. And the only way you can do that is if it's not going to interrupt you 10 seconds and you're like, wait, what did you mean again? Or trust that you're not going to go off the rails.

1:03:23I think it's, if not the, it's one of the most important kind of metrics to look at is how long they can maintain coherence. Yeah, that Cloud example you gave is crazy because do you know how many man hours it actually took to build the real product? A lot. Like it's more than an hour. It's more than four hours. It's more than anything on this chart. If it's, and yeah, that's a very, very mind-blowing concept that like we're still, like it's working for an hour. It's working for two hours, but it's maybe doing hundreds of hours of man hours. If you were to try and create an apples to apples comparison, very.

1:03:59It's hair raising. Yeah. I mean, it's exciting. It's exciting. It really is. And also, like, it hopefully makes us more flexible, too, where I think there's a lot of sunk cost that happens in software, right? Like, oh, when I rebuild it, it's so good. The things we did with Instagram was saying, like, yeah, you built it, but if it's not going to be good, just rip it out, you know, and then start over. One of the most magical experiences I had with Cloud Code recently was I essentially, I don't write a ton of software and build a lot of applications, but I do a lot of research. And so I asked Claude Code to do a deep research report, but instead of just creating a markdown file like I would get in any other deep research product, I asked it to build an HTML5 website with all of the nice features, bar charts and graphs and all that stuff.

1:04:42And it was okay on the research side, but it was a really cool glimpse into this generative UI world that it feels like we're going into. And I'm wondering how you see that flowing into just consumer. Right now, when I think of Claude Code for deep research, I think of a prosumer product. And I'm wondering if you think that there's a path, maybe it exists through mobile, maybe iframes. Like, how does this actually work its way into, like, my mom's life, you know? Someone who's not going to understand the terminal and get fired up on that way. Yeah, something we put out actually in our mobile app about a month ago that people have been enjoying is kind of giving the same sort of agentic kind of multi-turn thing in Claude, but with your local mobile capabilities.

1:05:30And it's a little easier on Android. You can do a lot of this in iOS, but not all of it. Sure. And you can say things like, hey, you know, look at my calendar for tomorrow. Like, I have these three meetings. do some local searches, like find out where I should have coffee, remind me to like grab my coat before I leave. And by the way, like compose a text to these three people because I need to like let them know about it. You'll see it work through all of it. It'll like use all these local tools, do it agentically. You can't send it automatically, so you have to like press a button still to like send the message.

1:05:54So it's not like all the way, but I think that's where it's going to start showing up in consumer applications. And I think, you know, for better or for worse, it's going to require more partnership with the device makers because a lot of that's gated on the OS. You can do a lot more on the web. But I think that's where things are going. I think that's where we'll start to feel real to people. What's the biggest lesson from Artifact? I was a huge fan of the product. And I feel like with where we are in terms of how effective the models are at scraping the entire web, creating summaries, it feels like we're on the cusp of another breakout product or problem solution in that space.

1:06:31What are you taking from that? I mean, for better or worse, it feels like you could ultimately, like, Claude could one day function as what I loved about Artifact, right? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, we even, you know, you can, like, see it already, like, search the web, do the synthesis, and then, like, create a briefing for me. I think one sort of underappreciated artifact lesson was if your product really shines when it really knows you and is really personal to you, that's a hard sell for newcomers. Our retention was actually really good if you stuck around, but it was that kind of activation that was the trickiest.

1:07:11Plus, like any shareable thing in news is really difficult. But think about that now with Claude, where if you ask it to do something, we can't have expected you to already have taught it a bunch of your preferences or connected all the right things. We actually can, because Cloud can be conversational, say, I'm going to be way better at this if you let me connect to your Google Drive. Like, is that okay? Right? Or I'm going to be on your iOS. It's going to be way better if you connect your maps or your calendar for this. So that's, I think, where we need to go, which is don't expect people have done all the upfront work because that's going to be too hard for most people.

1:07:38Then they'll churn. But the nice thing that's different now in 2025 is the model can now have the conversation about how to get it to the state or it's going to be actually useful to you. Everyone in Teapot on X in tech Twitter is reacting to Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Richard Sutton. Are you bitter lesson pilled? Is Anthropic bitter lesson pilled? How did you and the team kind of process the debate between Dwarkesh and Richard Sutton? I think we're overall super bitter lesson, Phil. What an interesting example. And this is kind of a bitter lesson derivative, but I think kind of feeds into the same kind of idea.

1:08:17You mentioned deep research. So, you know, our original, you know, advanced research, you know, implementation in Cloud AI was like thousands of lines of code, some like pretty complex infrastructure. We've since, you know, re-implemented, we haven't launched this yet, it'll come out soon. We re-implemented on top of basically the Cloud Agent SDK, which we put out today too, which is basically what Cloud Code runs on too. And it was basically just a prompt and some tools. and like none of that like custom scaffold and instructions and all of that. And like that to me speaks to the same idea, which is like you want to like let the model do as much itself as possible.

1:08:47Don't try to like overly specify all of like the steps and the infrastructure and all those different pieces. So that definitely shows up even in products, which is not what the bitter lesson is about, but it kind of feeds into that as well. But I think overall, like very bitter lesson filled, but also still really bullish, I think, on the possibilities of RL. You see it in how much the models have advanced, even since February. Do you think you're bullish on this idea that there will be some sort of new paradigm or new buzzword in a few years that describes a material change in architecture or just like how AI research is done?

1:09:28We certainly saw this when we went from just transformer-based large language models to reinforcement learning with human feedback to RL and synthetic environments instead of synthetic data. Does it feel like we're continuing to come up with new ideas? I think so. And I think the other piece that's going to be really interesting, one, just the scale of all of these RL runs is getting enormous. And I think the second one is the model's ability to maybe actually introspect and see if it can propose ideas will be interesting too. I don't think we're there yet too. And when we get there, we got to do that very carefully with the right kind of safety kind of guardrails in place.

1:10:03But I think that'll potentially deal to some kind of divergent ideas at that point. What are your thoughts on hardware? What's going to change in hardware over the next few years? Instagram was so interesting. I remember that it was designed to be used with the phone in the vertical. It was such a vertical app, even though people were so used to turning their phones. And in some ways, the hardware, like the medium is the message, the hardware kind of defined what you built, But then eventually, you know, we got more cameras on the phone, probably because of Instagram. And I'm wondering if you think AI will change hardware or will get entirely new hardware to interface with AI in different places.

1:10:44Just kind of what's your view on hardware over the next couple of years? I think there's the consumer side where, you know, like I think the AirPod Pro is going to be like the sneaky, like AI, you know, sort of thing that actually does the mass market. Not a super controversial take. I think the other one that people are thinking less about is what's the business side of this? We've designed these open office plans, but I think in the future we're going to actually talk to our AI a bunch in order to get stuff done to delegate tasks. It's really nice already. People have hooked up Cloud Code with Open Whisper or something so they can talk to it, and it feels very natural.

1:11:15And so what does that do for office design? Are we all going to be using these sub-vocalization things now that people are prototyping? I think those are really cool. Yeah, but it's like you walk through an office, a bunch of people are mumbling. Or the dark sci-fi of just, it's wall to wall, the phone booths, you know, just like thousands of phone booths and everybody's sitting in their phone booth. Recreated like 1960s IBM. Like, I feel like there's got to be something better too. I'm also really interested in what the sort of multiplayer, like I mentioned, like Claude talking to us in our social channel.

1:11:48But like, there's also, what is it like to not just have an AI note taker in these meetings, which everybody has, but like an actual participant? And how does it know when to chime in? And what is it listening for? Can it be like, hey, you guys haven't talked about this thing you said you were going to talk about? Or I'm detecting a lot of like, you know, disagreement here. Can we move forward? So that's going to be an interesting it's like the hardware necessary for that won't be super complex, but it will need to show up in more and more places. Yeah. How do you guys think about what comes to mind around the word focus?

1:12:18Anthropic feels incredibly focused and not every lab feels that way. is that is that something that you guys you know just keep coming back to around uh or or what does that mean to you well for sure like i think that the one of the things that we've done well is like there's been that extreme focus from the research side i think you know before anything else which was like here's the path like we're going to build that we're not going to have as many people perhaps as much compute but we're going to like remain focused but like that is actually another kind of bridge to instagram we were very very focused i think they finally shipped the iPad app, you would always ask me, why doesn't Instagram have an iPad app?

1:12:54I'm like, it's focused. Like, you know, you're not going to get a lot of new users that way. And most of these is going to be on the iPhone. Web, web took years to have a web up. Web took years. And it was like, you know, people think we were stubborn, but it was actually, you know, every new platform you add is like another thing that you're going to have to think about. Yeah. And, you know, yes, you can staff up for it, but it's just that coordination cost. It's the kind of additional overhead. So we've really pushed the focus thing here as well. You know, It's like do more with less and do fewer things better.

1:13:21But I think it's really important. And it's meant that we've got more of this prosumer, power user, and then business lens. But I also think that's an interesting place to occupy in the market. Last question from my side. George, do you have another? Yeah, kind of last question. We're having Dylan on in a bit to catch up on Figma Make. And I know you joined the board prior to the IPO. What are your, you know, with Figma, the AI opportunity and current reality is very obvious, right? It's a place that people go to make things and build software. But what are your conversations like with, I'm assuming, other public SaaS CEOs and boards reach out to you all the time trying to get your read on where software is going?

1:14:04Are those conversations happening? What do they look like today? Yeah, I mean, I think there's this, if you think the models are going to be able to act agentically and retrieve over, you know, your, you know, employee records, plus connect them to your current work in Google Docs, all these pieces. I think the concern, I think, from a lot of these SaaS providers is do they become just document and data repositories, right? And how do you like modify that? But then I think that there's the sort of like, way of making that actually interesting is, if you actually connect an agent with another, which doesn't sound that profound until you actually try it.

1:14:40It's really powerful. I saw this demo of Claude talking to an agent that was built on top of some Salesforce data. And rather than just like search for Salesforce data and then get results back, it had a conversation with, they had like two back and forth conversations where the Claude agent was like, here's the amount thinking of sending to this customer. And the Salesforce built like thing built on top of Salesforce was like, no, no, no, they're not going to like it. I looked in the like earlier messages and they really hated that turn of phrase. And they ping pong back and forth with actually like very little human input.

1:15:07And at the end had a message like ready to send. So that's where I think like you can move from worrying about, are people going to visit my website less because of agents to more like, well, maybe not. But if you're actually building value beyond just the data store, you can still play a really key part in that exchange. It goes back to what we were talking about, about Claude being able to generate images, but then just using an Excel sheet as a canvas. There's a world where you might be able to train a model that's super expensive to inference that can, you know, just do all the math in the world and has every number, every calculation memorized.

1:15:40Or you could just say, hey, here's Python. Like, just write some Python and you get the exact result. And so it's a beautiful synergy. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations. Congrats on the launch. We're looking forward to five or 4.9999. 4.999 would go extremely hard. I would love that. The pressure is on. 4.99999. Awesome. Well, we're excited to play around with 4.5 and get into it. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on. We'll talk to you soon. You're the man. Let's go over to Polymarket and check in on which company has the best AI model by the end of 2025. Anthropic has jumped in the rankings.

1:16:22This is, of course, LM Arena, which is a different benchmark. But Anthropic jumped from 1.8 % to over 6%. Google is in first and continues to be. OpenAI was giving them a run for their money towards the end of August. But Google seems to be running away with it. People on LM Arena are really enjoying Google. Yeah, it's interesting how this continues to be probably the most popular market on AI, and yet all the underlying labs are focused on different things. Yes, yes. Like Anthropic values a bunch of different things differently than Google does. Yes. And XAI, same thing, right? Yep. Anyways. Well, speaking of ChatGPT, they launched a new brand campaign.

1:17:10Each scenario features young people who are some of our most creative, proactive users. We're showing their stories in ways that others can see and connect with. Our goal is for people to look at these moments. And Emily Sundberg said part of the reason this campaign looks so good is because Heidi Bivens is the stylist from Euphoria and Spring Breakers worked on it. So they brought in some heavy hitters for this, which is exciting. This feels, even the colors and the tones feel a lot like Anthropik's recent campaign. And it feels solar punky. It feels a little bit like the drone delivery company.

1:17:45How's this guy with this barbell set up? He's doing exactly what I do. He's tracking his splits. He's tracking his lifts. He's trying to hit a one rep max. He's saying, if I eat this much protein, consume this much protein, can I hit this? He only has 65 pounds on the bar, though. Oh, I guess he's doing some dumbbell curls. But, you know, with the power of ChatGPT, I think he's going to be benching three plates in no time. But, yeah, very fun campaign. We're having Dylan Field join in just nine minutes. He was getting in a tussle on the timeline talking about the definitions of software engineering.

1:18:24Elliot, I guess at Lovable, said, we just killed software engineering, by the way. Which is like, I don't know if Elliot is rage baiting. Yeah, it is a little rage-baity, but oh well. It's like, who is that post for? I don't know. In other news, Thrive has a new citation, Sovereign Under Management. I know you were all wondering about this. This is from Preston, Holland. It's a nice touch. So this is a private jet. This is Thrive Aviation, to be clear. Everyone thinks that this is Thrive Capital, of course. Josh Kushner's firm expanding into private aviation, as he probably should. But this is a different company, I believe.

1:19:09Different company. It is funny to imagine. They did put the words big dog on the engines. Big dog looks great. Dog with a D-A-W-G. And they parked the Turbo S. You get a lot of flack for having a PJ for flying from Orange County to Burbank just to save a couple minutes. But if you put big dog on the engines, I think you get a free pass. I think it's the way to do it. Rive's tagline is, above your standards, beyond your expectations. Above your standards. Is that not? Above your standards. We're actually above your standards, Joe. Yes, whatever your standards are. We're not going to ask you about your standards.

1:19:45We're just going to tell you that this is above. We're above you. It's above your standards. We're above you. Well, you know what else is above your standards? Julius.ai. What analysis do you want to run? It's the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds. No coding required. In other AI news, it's a busy day. ChatGPT is now integrated with both Stripe and Shopify. We were kind of debating this, like, is the Stripe integration? We are having Jeff from Stripe on, who worked on, has been involved with some of these new features.

1:20:19So we'll have to ask him about this. It's unclear to me yet how the dynamic, obviously, Stripe powers Shopify. But how do these different partnerships work? I think there will be companies that vend essentially their product catalog into ChatGPT, maybe with like an MCP server, or they surface it in a way that they can integrate directly with Stripe because all of their plans, everything that they sell is sold through Stripe. And so there are plenty of companies that don't need an order management system and all of the features that you get with Shopify, and they basically just run on Stripe. A lot of SaaS companies do that.

1:21:04So you can imagine in the future if you're trying to buy something that doesn't need to track inventory, you could buy it in ChatGPT directly with Stripe. But then if you are trying to buy something that might be out of stock or has a bunch of variations, and you're storing that data in Shopify and doing downstream marketing on that and all the different tools that Shopify brings to bear, you will benefit from the Shopify chat GPT integration. So I don't know that they're clearly jumping over the precipice together. I am very, when you think about using products, any LLM, how efficient it is to find the information that you're looking for and now how efficient it's going to be to find the products that you're looking for there's there's plenty of categories that i'm that i don't expect to use llms for shopping like hey uh you know like i'm not going to go in here and like look for i don't know some jackets right like casual jackets yeah because Because that to me is like, I don't know, I care a lot more about discovering a new brand and understanding what they're about and things like that.

1:22:17But in the context of like purely functional goods, I'm looking to see what Amazon does in regards to ChatGPT. Because think about how terrible it is to search for products on Amazon. It's rough right now. I'm an Amazon respecter, Andy Jassy respecter. I'm a Jeff Bezos respecter. uh but whenever i if i could search on chat gpt find me uh you know i don't know a paper towel holder from companies that existed more than 100 years ago right i don't want to go and buy a paper towel holder that's some cheap dollars that's a knockoff of an american and they hack the seo and they hack the star rating and they're paying for ads so and so chat i've always wanted a to be able to shop on Amazon without any of the knockoff Chinese products.

1:23:08And they should be able to do that. They should be able to solve that pretty easily by vending an LLM just into the search box and letting you search with natural language. Like, you're already searching. Just let me query whatever I want. But also, I think the average Amazon user probably is like, just give me the paper towel holder that's$3 direct from the factory. But I think that LLMs will be able to provide a level of personalization that is really good. Yeah, so maybe those 100-year-old paper towel holder companies will say, now is the time to go deeper into Shopify or Stripe and profound to get mentioned in ChatGPT, right?

1:23:46And then from there, assume that they are not going to be able to win the Amazon game anymore because it's being Teemu-ified. And so those brands will move over and generate customers from ChatGPT users. The question is I wonder if OpenAI has a take rate here. Because these brands, in the example that Toby gives, I'm looking for a lightweight trail running shirts that stay cool. Can you help? Historically, if somebody is searching that and buying, historically Google is taking a cut right through AdSense or if somebody's just scrolling a brand on Instagram or they get an ad for it. I would assume that it's exactly the same as the Facebook and Google take rate and that you will look back on commerce and you're like, I pay the Google tax, I pay the Facebook tax, I pay the ChatGPG tax.

1:24:45Yeah. And companies will be happy to do that because the alternative is no growth. The alternative is no customers. Yeah. And the question is, again, this is where Mark Cuban is pushed back. You know, what if the best product is not on Shopify or not set up in a way that you can buy it, right? Yeah. I mean, the hope is that - The only recommending products that they have partnerships with? Sure. If so, then that sort of violates the trust that the user has been developing. So they have some stuff to figure out. Yeah. The hope is that there's a division between the editorial and commerce teams and that the team that surfaces like knowledge retrieval results will focus on just getting you the most accurate information.

1:25:29And then the commerce team will focus on monetizing all of those. But we will see. In other news, there's a post here from Oxon. It says, God forbid men have hobbies. Arkansas men arrested for taking turns shooting each other while wearing bulletproof vests after drinking. Why were they arrested? This doesn't seem illegal. This seems like top-tier operator behavior. Just guys being dudes. Yeah, give them a break. I feel like this post has gone viral. Many times. Many, many, many times. Yeah, it's from 2019, and then somebody just found it and quote-tweeted it, and it went viral. Newsweek had no idea what they were doing.

1:26:04200 ,000 likes. Wow. Interesting. Well, Gas Station Barbie says, feels kind of weird that no branch of the government sends you a card when you have a baby. Like, that's a new citizen. Social security. Yeah, they do. I guess they literally do. Maybe they could just add it to the social security card. Yeah, it should just be a birthday card. And so it's something you have to apply for. Growing Daniel says, J.D. Vance, I know you see my tweets. This would be a nice touch. Apparently in Finland, the government sends you a large box of supplies when your first kid is born. That's sweet. That's very sweet.

1:26:35um well eliano is describing the wide range of palantir all understanders with with uh nick fuentes and tim dylan on the left and of course a palantir insider on the right and jim kramer right in the middle i suppose there he kind of he kind of uh it seems like he's slightly edging to the right if you look at his shoulder his head is at like negative one but his right shoulder we're gonna have jim on the show soon we'll ask him what palantir does i think i think jim has a very good thesis for Palantir actually. I think he has a pretty strong understanding. I would put him closer to a four or a five on this.

1:27:12Well, the oldest hotel in the world is the Nishima Onsen Kiyunkan in Japan and has been in business since 705 AD. It's still a family business for 52 generations. Let's give it up. That's so long. Oh, oh, you think in decades with your business? Are you thinking generation? Oh, you're going on a 100-year run? That's nice. That's quaint. What about a 1 ,300-year run? Let's step it up. Let's step up the ambition, folks. I think they should make this in Amman. You're a founder. They should make it in Amman. Sheil says, in Japanese tradition. The 53rd generation has the opportunity to do the funniest thing.

1:27:53Just turn it into a Motel 6 and bring in private equity. Lever it up. Turn it into a McDonald's or a strip mall. I've been learning about finance. I think we should play around with leverage. What is going on that the 52nd grandson doesn't botch it? Like, that's crazy. So much tradition and reliability. I hope Dylan Field does this with Figma. Me too. That would be a fantastic outcome. We should ask him. 52. Can you do 53 generations? Where will Figma be in the year 3 ,300? That's what I want to know, Dylan. Let's start thinking in millennia. Yeah. Shiel has some extra context here. He says, in Japanese tradition, you adopt a capable manager or have arrangement to have him marry your daughter to keep business in the family.

1:28:43Otherwise, there's no way you'd keep something like this in the family for this long. This is still common practice. 98 % of adoptions in Japan are adults. Almost all men, 20 to 30, brought in for business succession purposes. Among many others, Suzuki and Toyota have had multiple generations of adopted son-in-laws to keep them in the family business. That's crazy. Wow. Well, let's bring this concept into enterprise software. Dylan is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP on Ultra Dome. His first virtual appearance, I believe, on the show. He's, of course, hit a gong live with us at the New York Stock Exchange, which is a slight upgrade from Zoom.

1:29:21Quickly retired the gong. But thank you so much for joining us, Dylan. How are you doing today? Thank you for having me back. Good to see you guys. Great to see you. Great to see you uh what's new in your world well i've i've been deep in this weekend uh with claude sonnet 4.5 i'm gonna be real with you yeah and figma make that's what i wanted to hear i'm just gonna still swimming in that what well yeah give me your initial reactions like do you care about the benchmarks model card are you tracking like the the meter like how long a task can run are you more like just chat with it like it's a person have really short back and forth exchanges to get the vibe or the texture of the words that are coming out?

1:30:01Are you put it on a really critical business task and then benchmark it against one of your top developers or something? Like, how do you evaluate a new AI model as a CEO? Well, okay. So there's the personal side and there's the Figma side and there's the CEO side maybe. Sure. So I'll start with personal, which I have not gotten to yet, but I love playing with these models, testing them at their limits, seeing if I can, you know, get them into sort of weird head spaces. And that's just like a hobby of mine. What's a weird... You're trying to one-shot them. Yeah. No, I mean, look, it doesn't have to be a one-shot or like single prompt.

1:30:43You know, the longer you go, the more it gets. Yeah, you keep going and the model's like, I'm seeing powers that seem weird. What's an example of like a, you know, you don't have to name the model, but like what's the weirdest headspace you've got in a model and is there just hallucinating more and more intensely type of thing? Look, I mean, models are trained on the internet and the internet has some weird stuff on it. And, you know, what do you find in there? It's kind of fascinating and I won't give examples or definitely not companies or model providers. What I do instead is I try to like, if I find a good repro case, I send it over to the models and that way they can figure out what to do with it.

1:31:26Yeah. It's funny if you think the models are, the models trained on the internet, that means like the models effectively trained on stumble upon, you know, like that, that level of range, right. Which is quite, quite wide. There's a lot to the internet. It's deep for sure. So take us to the other testing cases. Specifically at the, not even at the Figma level. I haven't even gone there with 4.5 yet another time. But I'd say that for Figma, that is where my attention has been focused so far. And with Figma Make in particular, we've been just trying to figure out, okay, how do we make it so that we're able to quickly pull in Sonnet 4.5 to make and then evaluate?

1:32:11Are we ready for it? Do we have to do anything differently? Is this a good addition, a good improvement? and the more we play with it this weekend, the more we used it, it was so impressive how it made Make Better. Everything from planning and just thinking through and evaluating and understanding the code base that it was working on, whether it was like a shorter prompt or a long running session to thinking through just sort of like the way it should evaluate a prompt and giving better results. And also, we recently introduced this new feature where you can copy from make output into Figma design.

1:32:59And we've since launch had a way to basically go from Figma design into make and basically copy paste. And that way you can bring your design into whatever you're coding and creating. And the consistency that we're now seeing with 4.5 on that part of it, that round trip, that's the part that's most incredible. And it's so just kind of like gives me the chills a bit because we literally launched this feature where we copied from make output to Figma design last week, not knowing when we launched it that, you know, 4.5 was coming. It would make it so much better. And here we are. And we're like, OK, well, that's a good surprise.

1:33:41But I guess the general point is just it's really nice to be in a place where, and I think this is an important thing for everyone to be thinking about in software, as the models get better, you need to get better. So for us, we look at the models getting better at Figma. We're like, okay, great. Figma gets better. All of our users are going to benefit from this. And I think it's really important that you're always in that sort of headspace of how to make sure that you're setting up a strategy that way. How do you think about the Figma Make user base, the community right now? There are so many different subsets of AI users.

1:34:20There's folks who can tell you the difference from one paragraph. Oh, that came from 4.0. That came from Sonnet 3.5. And then there are people who are like, I got to try that AI thing out soon. uh is is the figma make community in a place where 4.5 sonic can just be like a strict upgrade that there's no resistance to or is it something where you have to think about model switching and and leaving some choice up to the user are there cost considerations like how much work are you putting on the user or the community and where's the right pivot point for that yeah i think there's to your question about sort of the diversity of use cases and personas that might be applicable here.

1:35:07There's so many different users on our platform and types of behavior that we see, you know, about, you know, a third of our users are designers, two thirds are non-designers, designs always at the core. And I honestly think that just from my reflections on this weekend, And one thing I keep coming back to is like, I think we're just entering this era of the 10X designer where the designer is going to be able to do so much more than ever before. You know, designers have knowledge not only of aesthetic, UX, and craft, but also the value is just moving up the stack. and the designer will be in this position of leverage where they're going to be able to do a lot in terms of product building and creating products with craft that just create joy and thinking of the entire system and then pulling everybody else in and helping leading the charge.

1:36:06And I think that it's just this time where good enough is no longer enough, good enough is mediocre. You have to be great if you want to make it so that you can win. And I think that the more power that designers have, the more leverage they have, then the more likely they are to be able to help a company win. And so that's just kind of like how I see things going in general. And on the implementation side, I think it's like not as relevant. You just kind of have a variety of ways that people want to interact or different cycles of adoption people are at. And you need to meet them where they're at and you need to create and provide an amazing product experience.

1:36:59And so it gets back to the basics there. How do you think about the vibe or the taste of the designs that are coming out of these models? I keep coming back to the mid-journey example where it just feels like David Holes did something different from just take the average or like minimize loss function. It feels like there's his artistic vision in there in every generation, no matter what your prompt is. And then you can do a lot of different things on top of it. And so it's almost this like collaboration between the artist, David Holes, and the artist who's the prompter. And I'm wondering if you think that like how does the flavor of design that's coming out of 4.5 plus Figma Make, like where does the human opinion get inserted at each level?

1:37:58And how does that like how much of that is actually happening? Like can you tell the difference in the flavor of design that's coming out of a certain model? I think we're not yet at like a Dolly 2 moment for design or a mid-journey moment for design. It has happened relatively the same time. Yeah. And look at Dolly 1 compared to Dolly 2. You know, it's easy to dismiss. And I think design generation will get better. At the same time, I think that the law of averages concept that you kind of mentioned is sort of the reality today and likely will be the reality for a long time. And what is critical is iteration, the ability to push in a direction and getting to great.

1:38:47and if you're able to do that and you're able to advance your craft, if you're able to have a sense of what the culture is and what the business problems are and what the engineering challenges might be, bring it all together with a great design, user experience, aesthetic. It's like it's not just the style. It's the entire system you have to hold in your head and figure out, along with brand, marketing, point of view, how is it all going to work together? And if you can do that, that's where I think everything unlocks. Yeah. What's your read on sentiment right now in the design community broadly around AI?

1:39:35Because on our side as a business that is constantly working with creative people externally, obviously we have people internally, but we have like basically as much demand as ever for like talent talented creative people like we don't we have a ton of work that we want to do and uh but we also have an unlimited demand for figma make and tools that help us instantiate ideas and there's a lot of stuff where we're like well and we just need to do the footer or the layout or the buttons and like the faster we can get that out the better yeah but but but there's this sense of um we have a insatiable demand for novel thinking yes and ideas and concepts and it's it's less a it's less a i can't tell if you're saying we humanity or we tbpn because i'm talking about both but tbpn and it's less of oh is this possible like yes is making this animation uh gonna be you know uh uh within budget it's more It's more like, well, what animation should we make?

1:40:39Yeah, did you come up with a good idea? We're willing to pay a lot for that kind of original thinking, but I'm curious where you see the kind of, where sentiment is that today? Because on the software development side, it seems very clear, as when you can build software faster and cheaper, well, we want more engineers to build more software, because the world needs a lot of software. And I think same thing for truly great novel creative work. Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm hearing a strong advertisement on TVPN for TVPN that you all are trying to hire. So hopefully your viewers can apply somewhere.

1:41:17But the thing that I would call out is I think that we're almost seeing a parallel to the AI talent wars with design right now. At least amongst the companies that are really getting it. the ones that have internalized the design is going to be how you win or lose. And that's the craft, the details that matter. They are really getting aggressive, not like meta AI aggressive. Let me be clear, but very aggressive. And it's, I think just again, value moving up the stack. And that's something that all companies will eventually figure out. I just hope that a bunch of companies don't figure out too late.

1:42:05But yeah, I think Jevon's paradox has applied to talent that is adept at using models and doing amazing work and really pushing the boundaries of what's possible and what could be created and how much craft you can have, how much you can delight people. That's real. And the demand for development is certainly not shrinking. I think that it's never been met. And at Figma, I mean, we're doing headcount planning. We're hiring almost all areas as we go into this next year and in big ways. And I think just generally, our point of view from the start about AI at Figma is how do you both lower the floor, make it so that more people can come into the design process, but also raise the ceiling, make it so that designers can do more.

1:42:57And I think that's something that's a shared view. Maybe we were one of the first to articulate it, if not the first, but I believe that most of the products that are in the sort of AI space are trying to do the same thing. They're trying to make it so that more folks are able to be part of this lifecycle. And also they're trying to make it so that people that are the experts are able to do more than ever before. Do you have a view on the shape of the design community as a function of maybe the amount of designers working in a particular organization? Are there more design firms than ever? Are there more solo design firms that are profitable and making money than ever?

1:43:46Is the power law getting steeper or is the floor rising or both? Do you have any idea on like the shape of the design community and the shape of how designers work together or just make money independently in the age of AI? Yeah, I think there's a lot of work here we've done on the sort of company side. And we're seeing there just more and more people getting involved in design and more design hiring. I think in that more freelancer agency segment, there's more research to do to understand is the same effect happening. But I'll maybe think back historically, you know, when there was this first wave of design hiring and people realized that design talent was critical to success.

1:44:40One of the first things they did was they started to snap up the agencies. and they would literally just start acquiring agencies of great design talent. And so that's how, like, for example, T. Han and Lax became involved in then Facebook, then Reality Labs, and John Lax ended up leading up Reality Labs for a while. And they got someone who was legendary design talent to be able to be at the forefront of their work on Oculus for, for quite some time. And I would not be surprised if similar things started happening. But I also think that, you know, back in the early days of Figma, it was this question even of like, how many designers are there in the United States in the world?

1:45:33I mean, the beer labor statistics said that there were 250 ,000 designers. It's like, well, that seems wrong in 2012, but like how many other actually, I don't know, maybe it's like 500 ,000, not 250 ,000, but like, eh, is it like a venture scalable business? We don't know. And, uh, but what we noticed was that values moved the stack and it was going to be the case that everyone's going to build up, uh, their design team and the design would be so important as this overall system changed. And I think that that same thesis we held then in 2012 it has not changed. It is the same thesis we hold today.

1:46:14And I really believe that sort of this era of the 10X designers here, it's just starting in some ways, but it's going to be quite incredible and it'll require more designers to step up as leaders and for them to lean into leadership roles that they may have otherwise not considered. But, you know, if they don't, then I think it's going to be a dynamic where everyone's trying to get involved in design, and they don't really know the guardrails or how to do it exactly. And you have a lot of people with a lot of thoughts, but not many like railways built, tracks built for folks to go down. So, That's the challenge, I think, that many design-oriented folks will have and the need for design leadership this time.

1:47:04Shopify just acquired a design studio last month, by the way. Someone in our chat mentioned this. What's your thinking around open source? You obviously have a close relationship with Mike over at Anthropic. He's on the board, and obviously Claude has consistently led on CodeGen, so they're a natural partner for Figma make, but is open source something you're exploring or just given that they're not really at the front? Yeah, there was a tape for a while that was like commoditize your compliments, but maybe the LMS, yeah, I'm super interested to hear what you think. Yeah, I mean, look, there's, I think, first of all, I mean, Mikey and I, from the start of just looking at him being on the board, we had to make sure that it was clear.

1:47:57We, as Figma, have to choose whatever is best for Figma. You know, as models get better, we get better, but if we're not choosing the right models, then we're not getting better. So, it's not a 4.5, but through the evals, easy choice. You know, roll it out to users. There's going to be a lot of other model improvements and, of course, open source is something we're always watching, too. And so it's exciting just how much is happening right now. And I think that it's going to be just a fun next few months to see the continued model releases. I'm pretty psyched. What are your thoughts on hardware right now?

1:48:39That feels like a place where we're seeing a reemergence, a lot of hype around Meta's new devices, potentially a new design surface as people design more more physical products that are maybe enabled by AI it just feels like that could be kind of the next thing some sort of like Cambrian explosion of hardware devices or maybe it's all just just airpods forever or something who knows but I'd love to hear your take on like how is there is there a demand from you for new hardware devices? Like the Wacom tablet is obviously legendary in the design community, but it's a completely prosumer professional device.

1:49:24Just how are you thinking about hardware these days? Well, I think in the Figma context, what we think about is, okay, what are the screens that we need to serve and our users need to design for? And so that's why I was so excited to be able to check out um meta's new glasses and uh also the neural band there the band is like under appreciated so cool people need a people won't it won't get a reaction until enough people have actually tried it because it looks just like a whoop band like there's nothing that looks crazy about it until you actually try it and you're like oh yeah you can fully see what's going on Yeah.

1:50:05Yeah. And, but like, let's be clear. I mean, this was years in development, many years. I mean, they've been at it for so long now. And I think the first time I got the demo was almost a year and a half ago, a year and a few months ago. And then I saw it again right before config, but like the sort of new and improved version. Yeah. And it just takes a long time to go build these new form factors. You know, the same thing is being true in auto. It's true, you know, in wearables in general. It's probably going to become true in other surfaces that people will find. And I think that whether it's AR, VR, you know, curved glass, you know, small screen sizes, large screen sizes, there's a lot of surfaces that designers now need to target.

1:51:04And we haven't even gone into, you know, AI and agents and what designers need to do to create context in these places, too. I think in many ways, we're just in the MS-DOS era of AI. We are still figuring out how to explore this amazing latent space. You've got this LM, it's your spaceship, but you're in this like N-dimensional space. And the best way to like figure out where you are, your compass is your prompt, natural language. It's like, what interfaces will be built for that? how we would be able to figure out custom bespoke ways to do dimensionality reduction, figure out how to help people navigate better as these models and the architectures fundamentally improve.

1:51:48And also, you know, what protocols between the models should exist and what's the best way to create those? Because I think that there's a reason MCP has really caught on so fast. It's extremely valuable. and we just launched with Figma the Figma MCP for design as a remote service before it was only desktop and local and also we improved the capabilities and then we did it for make as well so we want to make sure that people know you're not trapped to make Figma make if you're going to prompt a code and you're making it so that you're getting to some great output and you're a lot of time on it, awesome.

1:52:28Like you always had download code, but now you can just have your MCP connect to Figma Make and pull all your code in. How is MCP adoption going? It feels like there's a world where like I was promised like the AI didn't need an API because it would just use the computer, right? And I imagine that there's a, maybe we're not quite there, but there's a world where my AI just literally opens a browser, goes to Figma.com, does whatever it needs to do, just like a human. And yet MCP seems to be like what you're identifying with, like the energy around it is immense. How are people actually using it?

1:53:04Like, is there a killer app, killer feature, some story where you've been really excited about, like the impact that it's had on an actual like design project or designer or firm or your company? I mean, you should definitely try it out. Like, it is a sort of magic experience when you go and you've got your design structure and a Figma with auto layout. you've got your variables defined and then you're able to just you know basically press the button and with mcp you're pulling all that design context into your code base sure and you can use inference to basically go figure out uh how to map it and i'm not saying it's all one shot but like with either one shot or a little bit of it or a prompting if you have your design set up in a structured way yeah it it's a pretty wild experience you know coinbase was telling us about how it's really improved their workflow.

1:53:56And, you know, we've heard from many other customers that I'm not sure I have permission to name, but how much it's affected them and how powerful it's been. And overall, yeah, people are super excited. We've been thrilled with the response. That's why we're investing so much time into it is because we really think this is a super important part of our story as a company is being more open and making sure that we really extend out to the greater ecosystem of AI. There's so much that we've done in so many places, and design is context, and that context is valuable in so many different spots. So I should think of the MCP efforts as almost like a business-to-consumer, like a consumer benefit, not necessarily just something like an API that enables better B2B partnerships and integrations.

1:54:47Is that roughly correct? yeah i think it's um uh you know i think everyone's still trying to figure it out for sure uh but i think that yes um with the right mcp services out there the ways that they can affect um you know all sorts of places that you consume in france uh it's pretty pretty big and i think we're just kind of at the start. So yeah, for Figma, we're very, very excited about where we can go here. And then, yeah, I think just, you know, if you zoom out, the bigger story that is being told is how do we go from idea to product? And, you know, it used to be this very linear process, but now we're no longer in that world.

1:55:42We're in a world where instead people try various directions various paths and you need to be able to generate a bunch of different ideas explore them with your team figure out that option space we hope figma make me a big part of it but even if someone has a different tool that they've they're using we also want to make sure that they're able to bring the design context in and with that design context really help that other surface improve. We think that's a win-win for everyone, and it's most importantly a win for the user. I'm so excited for today's middle schoolers and high schoolers to have access to these tools.

1:56:26Can you imagine if you had Figma make? It's incredible. When you were at that age, you let somebody marinate with these kind of tools for a decade what they're going to be. I mean, I'm pretty sure we've already seen posts about like a 15 year old sold a company for like$50 million or something. There's crazy stuff happening all over the place. But it's just going to be more and more and more. Thank you so much for joining. Last question. Last question from the chat. Do you miss the ratty? Oh, not really. No. What is it? Is the university dining hall? Is that right? One of them. Yeah. I was more of a VW guy.

1:57:03but uh okay there we go yeah the uh uh the radii was um a great place to see people okay and but then again i also like i i hate standing line so yeah i would time out everything so that i either arrived super early or super late so i wasn't in the long line um but yeah the food uh maybe not the best but you know good the vibes right the memories good vibes well thank you so much for bringing good vibes to Disappearance. Yeah, massive week for you guys. We'll talk to you soon, Dylan. Have a good one. Quickly, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place.

1:57:46Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and underline clusters. Perplexity and many more. And we have our next guest from Stripe. In the Restream waiting room, we will bring in Jeff. It's time to Jeff. Jeff, how you doing? Whoa, okay. We're purple. I'm seeing some announcement lighting. What's going on? We're here in New York. We're finishing up some keynote practice for our event tomorrow, Stripe Tour. But I imagine you all want to talk about some agentic commerce today. Yes, definitely. It's looking wild in there. Yeah, give us. I get excited enough about payments even without the neon lighting, but that certainly helps.

1:58:24I think I look better in purple. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Give us the actual news item. It seems like Sam Altman just found out about Stripe recently and decided to do some sort of deal or something. Of course, like the companies go back a long way. And so my question is like, what's new about the relationship between the two companies today? Yeah, really exciting. So today, for the first time ever, you can purchase where you prompt. And inside of ChatTBT, you're able to discover products as lots of people are already doing. but now you can buy from businesses right in the chat. And so we partnered with OpenAI to build this, as well as a open standard agentic commerce protocol to help more businesses get going of selling agentically.

1:59:11So I'd love to get into all of that. Yeah, name every product I can buy today. I mean, give me an example, because I can imagine there are products where the company wraps in different content management, system or order management system versus there are other companies where they sell stuff and it's really just Stripe and a website. And so that makes a ton of sense. So what's the wheelhouse customer interaction look like? Yeah. So anytime you discover a product in chat GPT, if that seller is enabled on the agenda commerce protocol and is working with open AI, you'll be able to purchase directly with any of the payment methods you've already saved with to have TPT for subscription or be able to add one.

1:59:56And what's really interesting is, one of the big unlocks here is how do you scale adding merchants to agentic commerce and how do you scale accepting agentic payments? And we have two big announcements that are going to unblock those foundations. One is the agentic commerce protocol, which is an open standard that we co-develop with OpenAI for businesses to make their checkouts agent-buyable, agent-ready. And so as a business, you're used to, But first you're selling in the mall, and then you're sold over the phone, and then you sold on the website. And now you're going to be able to express your checkout in a way that you want for agents to be able to initiate transactions.

2:00:36And the second big thing is how do you actually move the money? How do you get the payment from the buyer and have it sent to the merchant for processing in a secure way? which is why we built this shared payment token API, which lets businesses on Stripe and businesses that might be using another processor be able to process agentic payments. And that those two things together are what really enable a launch like this. Getting more into the details, if for an e-commerce company in particular, like where does inventory manage? Are you guys integrating? I know Shopify had an announcement today too.

2:01:20Is that connected to this? Are these two totally different experiences? Help me understand how a specific company like an e-commerce brand can get started selling in line in these LLMs. Yeah, so today's announcement for JetGPT has Etsy live. So today rolling out this morning, you'll be able to purchase from Etsy sellers. directly in the chat. And Shopify is coming soon in the same program. So these are the first two merchant partners, the first two e-commerce platforms that are working with ChatGPT to be able to sell agentically through their LLM system and their consumer base. For merchants going forward, how do you at scale have a way to express your checkout as a merchant, as an e-commerce platform that isn't just, hey, have the agent pretend to be on my site and click around to do so?

2:02:20How do you have a standard API system for scaling those merchant integrations? And that's what the Agentic Commerce Protocol is. It's a way for any e-commerce platform, any business, to be able to express their checkout in a way that an AI agent can then safely initiate the transaction. and we think this is a big unlock for how to scale a joint of commerce. The world has already had lots of product feeds. There are many at-scale product feeds, but there isn't yet a way for a business to... programatically express their checkout in a way that they can control and have it be agent initiatable. How does the standard that you built differ from MCP?

2:03:03Is it related? Is it compatible? Are these two separate paths in the tech tree? Yeah, we think that the Agentec Commerce Protocol is specifically designed to help with initiating Agentec checkouts online. And it is dedicated to that type of commerce use case. It shares a lot of the same principles of being open and LLM first as MCP does for generic tool usage. But checkouts are complicated. They have all kinds of weird back and forths and coupons and SKUs and inventory and payment failures and payment success. You need a dedicated specification. And that's why we're so happy to partner with ChatTPT with OpenAI to both build the standard, but also have it be the way that they're going to scale their merchants.

2:03:50And so you can get started at agenticcommerce.dev. that URL happened to be available last week. So I might have bought it. And that's what we went forward with. How does the Apple tax feature in all of this? It seems like I use JGPD in my phone and Apple usually tries to take a cut if I buy something digital. If I say... Amazon physical goods historically have been exempt. But if I'm buying a digital good, do you play nice with that? How do you see that all playing out? Yeah, today's launch is focused on physical goods. And I think there's going to be a variety of ways that these third-party services are able to charge in various ecosystems.

2:04:32But today's launch works on web, on iOS, on Android, and is rolling out to all U.S. ChatGPG consumers this morning. Very exciting. Do you think people are underestimating how much of a shift this trend is going to be? because we were explaining before you got on earlier, if I can go on my phone and describe in plain English the exact type of product that I want, be served a number of options, and in one click, buy it, that's incredibly useful. I was giving the example of even browsing Amazon and trying to just find, if I'm trying to find a, the example I gave is like a paper towel holder. This is personal for me because I bought a really cheap direct-to-factory paper, you know, direct-from-factory paper towel holder, and I was just like, just give me...

2:05:22You know, it's not the place to skimp. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You use it multiple times a day, right? Yeah. But I've always wanted almost a layer over Amazon to just products that have existed or from brands that have existed for more than 100 years, right? And this is the kind of thing that you can describe of, I want to buy a paper towel holder, but I want to buy it from a company that's over 100 years old, right? If they've been around for a hundred years. It's so interesting. It's like your futuristic purchase is a, I want the legacy provider. It's a perfect combination. I think you're expressing what many of us are all feeling in our lives, which is the modality for discovery has completely changed.

2:06:00And we expect that commerce to get closer and closer to intent. And it's certainly, having tested, having worked on and tested this for the last many months, It feels extremely natural to purchase where you are discovering. My garage is full of things I bought from Etsy as we've tested over the last months. And this is just the beginning because with this type of foundational agentic commerce set of APIs and open standards, it's really an unlock to both scale merchants, scale AI agents, scale all types of new consumer and business experiences. And so I think it's very much just the beginning here, but we are, I think, unlocked, we hope, how to take these things from prototype to at-scale production.

2:06:49And I really encourage folks who are watching today to look on CheckGPT and try to find something fun that you've always wanted to buy that might have been on page 10 ,000 of your search engine, but might be like right there as the LM really can provide you very personalized recommendations. recommendations. It's just very fun to on the go buy in a tap in this kind of way. I love it. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Tons more questions I have, but probably stuff you can't even get into. But we'll have you on again soon to talk more. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon, Jeff. Great to see you, Jeff.

2:07:24And in the financial news, Etsy is up 15.83 % on the news. It's a$7.42 billion company. Head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Not financial advice. Our next guest. Yeah, maybe you want to go long. Maybe you want to go short. 15%. But a big boost on Etsy products potentially being sold in chat. Well, we have Adam Draper in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in. Whoa, there he is. Let's go. Let's go. What's happening? jordy john so excited to talk to you let's go we're excited to have you uh uh give us give us the news what's happening all right uh well we raised 87 million dollars actually yeah let's go let's go uh actually what actually well it was 87 654 321 dollars uh because you know that's how rockets go off eight seven six five four three two one there we go boost vc it's a rocket we get it we get it continue to do what we're doing our our investors love our returns so we just get to keep doing what we're doing for the last 13 years which is backing found great founders on the fringe amazing uh yeah you were uh early to sci-fi investing or or maybe did it before it was was uh was so on trend uh i was a early investor in uh coinbase a company called virgin labs that did snapchat that became snapchat spectacles uh i've been investing in what any kid would dream of for the last 15 years uh i just flew a jetpack no way no way yeah somebody sent me uh somebody sent me a video earlier uh maybe it was the same company were you flying with uh jackson moses is that is a gravity industries is that the company i was flying so okay this is the coolest thing uh i you know i read my first iron man comic when i was like six and then about a decade ago we invested in uh iron man thesis which ended up investing in gravity there we go i uh got to fly a jetpack today so there we go i i what's uh i heard there was some fundraising news yeah yeah john's back hit that hit that gong 87 million there we go Adam's the most fired up.

2:10:11You're the most fired up guest I think we've ever had. Nobody else is jumping. You're at the standing desk. It's fantastic. Thank you guys so much for doing this. You guys are just the greatest cheerleaders and champions of this tech world. We appreciate it. We love, nobody loves technology. I would hate if somebody loved technology more than us. Maybe you do, but break down the jetpack. How does this like it's a good example of like a specific portfolio company. How does this go commercial? I think that the promise of venture capital, the hope of venture capital is that you get to invest in all the dreams that anyone ever had as a 12 year old.

2:10:50And they end up coming true. And I got to do that with a jetpack. I invested in exactly what my childhood self would have loved to have invested in, except it was seven years ago. And then they made insane progress to the point where not only one person can do it, anyone can do it. I just flew down. I got to Bakersfield, and then I got to fly a jetpack. And so I am. Okay, okay. I love everything about jetpack. how how does uh gravity specifically how are they looking to commercialize uh you know what what are the what are some of the use cases is it is it going to be the kind of thing that that is more initially you know consumer it's just fun to fly a jetpack so people pay to do it by the way one of the things i always notice when you guys are doing your thing is that your cans pile up so i want to make sure there we go you got double fisting so we uh so first off we invest in all founders who are on the fringe of doing great incredible things uh gravity specifically we saw the i saw a man fly so he flew in my back parking lot back here in san mateo and when someone flies you got to write him a check you write a check right there and so we wrote a check right there seven years later uh he's built a you know multi-million dollar business and it has two parts to it there's the defense part and the media part and also this training school so that people like i could become pilots jetpack pilots and basically i highly recommend we should go do a we should go it sounds fantastic i've always wanted to have a jetpack in the studio in the ultradome yeah for really big fundraising what's the what's the defense uh what's the defense use case here in your view because i can imagine in in sort of um more controlled environments this could be a cool way to turn a human into a drone but at the same time on the battlefield i don't know with with a lot of drones i don't know if i'd want to strap myself in and get into get into the air just considering you might be a target but how do you view the defense it turns out boarding boats it turns out is one of the best defense capabilities so being able to go from one boat to another boat.

2:13:13You see that with like the Navy SEALs show up in the little skiff. Yeah, that was the other demo they did, right? Yeah, that was gravity. Yeah, that was insane. So gravity, every time I've seen a jet pack, basically the last seven years, it was gravity. That's been dumb. That's hilarious. And it's really an innovation in vertical takeoff and landing engines. People didn't believe, there was a disbelief that you could build small enough engines that they would be able to lift an individual human off the ground with enough fuel to live for long enough. And so this has been a huge innovation. Also, paramedic is a big deal.

2:13:48Like if someone's lost on a mountain, you can just fly up there within a small amount of time and get it. And then the, yeah, dude, I mean, it was a lifelong dream to fly. I flew. I'm going to be a jetpack racer. Jetpack racer. I don't know how to say this. I don't know how to say this. Just deploy the fund in like the next jetpack. stuff. It could be bio jetpack things. It could be jetpack things. It needs to have jetpacks, evidently. Amazing. Last question. What's the next category that is maybe if jetpacks were under hype seven years ago, what are you looking at today? These founders are coming into my office and they're saying, I'm going to make you live 50 years longer.

2:14:38I'm going to cure cancer. I'm going to just cure all genetic disease. We're going to move from a world of treatment to a world of cures in the healthcare and science world. So I would say bio is really the thing that I would say. Also, one of the things we do as BoostVC is we actually put on a deep tech demo day with the entire deep tech early stage venture community. And it's coming up on Wednesday, where you can see some of these bio future forward companies actually a bunch of the demo day companies have actually been on uh tbpn uh doug from radiance love him there we go incredible people gravity there we go i expect to see you flying around the floor yeah the of the demo okay we'll go down together we'll do it together love it yeah you need to jetpack into the show the chat is demanding it uh thank you so much for hopping on the stream we'll talk great having you adam congrats on the new fun see you soon thank you we just gotta keep back in the founders amazing incredible talk great rest of your day let me tell you about turbo puffer search every byte serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable we puffin simon turbo puffer tomorrow live in the tbp can't wait but for now we have james hawkins in the restream waiting room from post hog post hog here he is how you doing uh Yeah, very well.

2:16:01Thank you very much. Give us the fundraising news quick. Give us the news. Let's amp it up. Then we'll figure out what you do. Let's amp it up. What you got for us? Sure. Well, first of all, I am very excited to announce that pineapple does not belong on pizza. Whoa. Whoa. Shots fired. I love pineapple on pizza. I don't. I don't. I'm riding with James here. Okay. Well, then you can hit the gong because I don't like this guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's my mortal enemy. No. I understand. It's an acquired taste. What inspired that? What? But timeline debating that? That's an eternal point of debate. It's final.

2:16:36It's not a debate. It's decided. What about hot dog? Is a hot dog a sandwich? No, I don't think that's true. What if you eat it like this? What if you turn it 90 degrees? Then it looks like a sandwich. I feel like I'm not American. I have a less strong opinion on this, I think. I think you guys are more... If a dog wore pants, would it wear them on the two back legs or across all four legs? Wow, you're not straying from the hard questions. These are the hard questions. I'm going to do an actual. I've got one more thing. Please. I'm very pleased to announce that we have raised our Series E. Woo!

2:17:11So we've got 1.4 million posts. Congratulations. Massive. What unlocked it? Walked through the business. What's working? The customers, the problem set, everything. Sure. So PostLog is a very developer-focused set of analytics, tools, and feature flags, and stuff at the moment. We try and help you understand how to build a better product basically. So we help you understand your customers in lots of different ways, like errors, analytics. We have 16 products. What's working well? 16 products. Should be hitting and going for that. I think about 10 or 11 that are charged for and the rest is production.

2:17:48That's right. So yeah, we've been busy building stuff. What's working well? We've got tons of engineers who we have really looked after. We think there's been a big rise in product engineering, engineers who want to decide what to work on. And so we've been able to sign up just an awful lot of them. I think we have about 240 ,000 customers across like free and paid. And so we're kind of like heavy product-led growth from engineers just installing our stuff, basically. Some of these tools I imagine would be fertile grounds for hyperscaler competition. What's been the secret to maintaining differentiation against the big cloud platforms?

2:18:29All the products in one has been the main thing. Going very, very wide. Because the way we think of it, there's lots of tools that help you. There are feature flag products, there are experimentation products, there are analytics tools, but it's the same customer underneath all of these. And so we kind of felt it's just better. it is more important to our users to have all of their custom data in one spot and lots of things you can do off the back of that than it is to um buy like 15 point solutions basically what's your what's your take on the idea of the compound startup versus uh iterating and adding one product after the other how focused do you want to be on a new product at one time do you want to orient the entire company around the next product or do you want to have you know let's just get a bunch of things started we'll iterate towards greatness and all of them kind of simultaneously uh much more the latter so um we start a couple of products at a time um but we always have a small team that we leave behind on each product so back in the early days when we're smaller we would go hey new shiny thing everyone would move over yep but then as the existing one got more and more growth um we'd start we just weren't very responsive to customers and so on it didn't feel like we're looking after people properly so we have tiny little teams like the average team size of postdocs probably three people on product um it's just like three engineers deciding what to build um we just try and get out of the way um so we're fiercely anti-bureaucracy internally um so yeah this small team structure has worked great like very flat very wide um a lot of autonomy for engineers yeah when you're when you're thinking about creating a new product what is what is the bar in terms of turning something from an experiment you know at what point would you would you launch something and maybe shut it down or or or if you're launching or by the time you're launching something are you committed to maintaining it over the long run i'm curious what kind of the the framework is sure um yeah we see really um we start at the bottom end of the market so the bar to us launching something's pretty low like we'll start targeting two-person startups kind of doing yc for example it's kind of uh start from the start is a phrase you hear a lot internally um in terms of retiring stuff we haven't had to retire a product at this stage we've always built kind of products where we're going in with a late mover advantage we consider it um so we're going in after a lot of the market this is actually behavior that we're going to change now um with ai in particular um because we're looking at figuring out how can we use like this sort of multi-dimensional data and all these different tools together um which is one of the challenges that's partly why we did this round because we wanted to have the time and space and the ability to kind of go nuts um trying to automate the way i'd kind of consider it is a bit like if you're trying to understand a painting and you can only see the color blue like one data type um you'll get a rough idea but it won't get a totally correct idea of what's happening and so we kind of think having all the tools and all the data is a bit like having all the colors um but this is something that's new to us and it will take a little bit of time um and some confidence uh so that's kind of yeah it's probably the main driving force behind wanting to raise at this point last question for me um how has ai changed the business over the last few years there's so many different ways that you can launch ai products you can use ai to speed up product development there's a million different ways but what's been the biggest thing that's actually worked for you um it's massively sped up product development and because of so many products at once uh it's given us a big it's just we already thought that was happening because there's more open source software available um and it's just ramped up fully so now kind of um we even have companies quite regularly emailing us like smaller startups being like hey would you consider buying a company we don't know how to compete with compound approaches in our industry like we've become a feature of a bigger platform, for example.

2:22:05And so I think we got lucky with that respect. We are targeting engineers and their workflow is entirely changing. And so we're trying to move towards a world where we're generating kind of pull requests for people based on like error data, their session, like video clips and using their products, like their feedback and everything else that we're kind of feeding in. So yeah, it's a totally dramatic change for us. I think we've gone from like fear, honestly, to like complete excitement about what's going on. That's great. One note, chat absolutely loves the website. You should look at it, John.

2:22:37It's absolutely stunning. It's probably the best iteration I've seen of building like a desktop and making a website just like a desktop, right? Sure, sure. Like an operating system. Oh, yeah, this is really good. Absolutely stunning. One question, was PostHog a hot company at YC Demo Day, or did it take time to get people to kind of come around to the team and the opportunity? We actually had, I think, relative to our batch, we're doing quite well. We had a lot of traction, just free open source usage. We just had an open source project to start off with. But our seed round was a train wreck to raise.

2:23:15It was like March 2020. And so I was like, man, we got this thing done in like three days. And then I was like, I may not live to see the end of this round. So yeah, we made a bunch of people who put in like random little 5k checks, a bunch of money, which is actually one of the most fun parts, if I'm honest. um so yeah the seed round was very hard uh later rounds it kind of got easier um like the series a was um like google ventures um preempted and we went with it because we uh there was so much kind of fear in the market fundraising at that time and then the later rounds all got much easier because we just had kind of obvious traction and we're quite an efficient business um because we're inbound and so we haven't really needed money and that's our first rule of fundraising is do you not need to fundraise but we're not against fundraising and that served us extremely well later on but But yeah, the start, the first round was the hardest by miles.

2:24:02Fantastic. Such an important lesson for anyone out there. If your seed round is brutal, it's not necessarily. It can be an indicator that you're on the totally wrong path. It can be an indicator that people just don't understand exactly the opportunity or just how good the team is. So thank you for coming on and giving the update, and congrats on the round. Thanks for coming. We'll talk to you soon. Great to meet you, James. Bye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for building and planning products. You heard it from him. They built a lot of products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

2:24:38People forget they created modern. They basically created the modern software as a service website. That's true. That's true. How many thousands of companies have tried to emulate it? Well, up next, we have Eric, the CEO of Modal Labs. He's in the Restream waiting room coming in to the TBP on Ultradone. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Eric? Eric, what's happening? Hey, how's it going? It's great to be here. It's great. Great to finally have you. Yeah, would you mind kicking us off in an introduction on yourself and the company? Yeah, yeah. So we build infrastructure for AI. And so basically, if you think about a lot of sort of traditional AI, sort of traditional infrastructure, you know, things like Kubernetes and Docker, things like that, it really doesn't work well for all these new AI applications, whether that's, you know, generated media or like large language models or things like that.

2:25:24So we basically built a whole new software layer that makes it a lot easier for developers to build applications on top of that. Where does that sit in the stack? Like, are you trying to be the software layer at Stargate at like these massive, massive data centers? Or is there a different customer archetype that you can actually deliver value for at like a smaller scale? How does the market actually bifurcate? Yeah, so we focus on slightly smaller companies. Initially, we saw a lot of PMF with startups. But in the last year or so, we've seen a lot of traction also with later stage companies, public companies and enterprise companies.

2:26:01What's the pricing model for something like this? Not quite a Stargate level. Yeah, what's the pricing model for something like this? So it's all usage-based, which means basically like a traditional cloud vendor. Like we charge per GPU hour, essentially. Sure, sure. And then do you offer abstraction layers on top of this? Do you want to build a platform at some point or are you happy vending it into another cloud partner where the customer might not even be aware of you? How do you sit in the market over the long term? No, we offer a very fat layer of like all these software structure that focus on engineers writing code.

2:26:39We consider ourselves a high code platform, right? It's metaphor engineers who want to write code and they need a better infrastructure that maybe traditional tools could offer them in terms of scaling up and down, working with GPUs, working with capacitors all over the world. Sure. And they want to write code.

2:26:58What's the biggest nightmare story from misconfigured infrastructure or the problem you're solving? Have you seen just millions of dollars go up in smoke? Is it pretty rare? like what what's the shape of failure in the ai what are the stakes right now i don't know if i can recall anything okay uh we're pretty good at like catching i mean in a couple of cases customers i don't mean with yours yeah it's more like company you know people coming to you saying having had issues in the past figuring this stuff on their own i would say like the biggest thing right now is just like people wasting a lot of money on gpus especially i think a year or two ago like there was like this like kind of hyped up like scarcity of like you got to get like a thousand gpus so a lot of companies went out and made massive reservations and now they're sitting on them and like they're underutilized right so they're like you know what can i do with these yeah is there is there value for those folks just to like sell it back as spot instances for someone else like what what are companies actually doing when they wind up a little bit too gpu rich i i know there's a couple of other companies i think it's like thrill is one of that it's not like a space where like super focused on like we kind of think that model is kind of broken like the idea that companies go out and make a big reservation we think companies should just pay for is exactly what they use and so that's something model does really well is we scale up and down and you only pay for the time the gpus are actually running yeah um and yeah yeah what's your view on the the gpu war uh nvidia is obviously dominant amd has been in the the year of the comeback uh they're taking feedback from george hots they're listening to Dylan Patel.

2:28:37What are, what does the race look like? There's also a lot of ASICs companies, there's broad comms doing stuff. What does the shape of the industry look like in the next couple of years? Where are you kind of, where are you partnering up and like investing for the long term? So I think in the next couple of years, it's going to be all NVIDIA. Like our customers only want NVIDIA. NVIDIA is like such a massive advantage in terms of the software ecosystem. But I think, look, a couple of years beyond that, like that's when it starts to get more hazy. I'm personally quite bullish on TPUs, for instance, like Google's product.

2:29:12But of course, also AMD, like you mentioned, and other players. Yeah. Are there, yeah, are there other, like anything that you're looking at in terms of like abstracting away some of Kuda's advantages? it just feels like we're in this era of vibe coding you should be able to take a you know some sort of model and like just port it but that doesn't seem to be working um but people are certainly they have a lot of economic incentive to do that are you bullish on the on any of that kind of like breaking the cuda lock-in i yes it's funny because people are like cuda is like a moat like it's such an amazing but like i don't know like for anyone who's like actually try to write cuda it like fucking sucks it's very hard to work with so i i i don't know why like it's been so hard for amd or or for other providers to like build a better software layer because cuda is very hard to use yeah so yeah give it a couple years like i would hope that there's better ways to to write these kernels yeah i just remember the story of like facebook was written in all php they wanted to move c++ they didn't want to read have everyone rewrite everything so they just wrote a compiler that compiled PHP to...

2:30:24It's hard to... Yeah, that's it, right? And so it's like, couldn't we get to a world where you're just writing once and then compiling for any different GPU, like create a new abstraction? I don't know how the economic incentives play out. I haven't really dug into it, but it's an interesting industry. Yeah, it comes down to... Is that what modulars trying to do in a way? Okay. Yeah, it comes down to it's hard to be... We were at a later below, right? Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Yeah, I was just saying it's hard to be like extremely bullish on coding agents and also believe that CUDA has this like long-term, hyper-durable, you know, moat.

2:30:53There does seem to be some cognitive dissonance there, right? Like they both can't be true. It's like, why can't I run a 30 hour clod code prompt at some point or clod code in the year 2030? And yeah, I'm just like, you know, rewrite this for AMD. Don't make mistakes. And it just doesn't, I would, I would hope that's how it plays out, but who knows? We, I mean, we might be years away. I generally like, I've always enjoyed, enjoyed your takes and would love to have you back on some time when we have more time, but congrats on, on the fundraise. John, did you want to do the honors? Oh, absolutely.

2:31:23Yeah, give us the details. $87 billion,$1 million. $87 billion soon.

2:31:34$87 million, Series B. Yeah, so Lux is leading. There we go. Existing investors putting in a bunch of money too. Yeah, we're super pumped.

2:31:46Great stuff, Eric. Thank you for joining and have a great rest of your day. Talk soon. Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about Numeral sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to Numeral HQ to get started. Well, on that note, I believe we have our first in-person guest today. The day of the week. From AppLovin. Welcome to the show, Adam. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on down to the TBPN UltraDome. Welcome to the show. Here we are. Great to have you. Would love to have you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

2:32:25Just kind of set the table for us. Yeah, totally. We're probably the biggest company in the world that no one actually understands what we do. That's a good title thumbnail. I guess it's bullish now if people don't understand what you do, right? Palance? Yeah, same thing. Let's break it down. So we started the company in 2012 advertising inside mobile games. And really the goal back then hasn't changed to now. We wanted to give advertisers the opportunity to market themselves, but do it on a revenue-based pricing model so that they can come in and say, look, I want to generate$1 ,000 of revenue by day 30.

2:32:58Be able to get me$1 ,000 of media spend against that so I can break even, make a profit. I'll scale unlimited if I can do that. And I've been in ads for 20 years. I hated the construct of selling someone to convince them to run advertising. You don't know what works, what doesn't. You try to convince them. An audience was there. it's all a bunch of make-believe until you go to top of funnel revenue-based pricing and so we ended up working with a lot of game developers these are companies all over the world a lot of smaller indie businesses and when you're working with a customer that where the ceo is the founder and they're on the front lines of marketing it's a great dynamic because usually they're technical they want to actually understand the math around marketing and so we built our business really being inside this niche, working with these casual mobile gaming developers all over the world.

2:33:48Well, business started growing a ton. We were serving a video advertisement inside their games for other games. And over the decade that we ran up, up until going public, this business, super lucrative, super successful for our customers. We helped these game developers really build their businesses, but no one had heard of us anywhere. We weren't VC backed, right? Well, not by desire. I'll say we're one of the biggest misses for Sandhill because we couldn't raise a million over four back in 2012. This was after we launched the product. Business was growing like a weed. We were doubling every single month.

2:34:24What was the pushback? Do people just think, like, oh, Google will take it all? I think I'm a horrible seller. I don't know. I mean, I've worked on the skills over the years. But the pushback was Google will eliminate you. If it's not Google, Facebook will eliminate you. If it's not Facebook, here comes Amazon. So it was, why is this goofy named company going to be able to do well inside advertising? Really quickly, you said you've been selling ads for 20 years. 2005 is the start of this. What's the first ad you sold? We were affiliate marketers back in social. So a couple of us, one of them. And that's how the most hardcore marketers started out in affiliate because it's just you eat what you kill.

2:35:01If you can make money in affiliate, you can make money doing anything. It is brutally tough. That's amazing. And what was the mood in Silicon Valley or the actual games that were the backbone of the launch? Is this the Zynga era? This is the tough part. It's a lot of casual games. The environment we have now is a billion plus daily active players playing solitaires and puzzles and words. Match three. Yeah, totally puzzles. So if you walk down an aisle of a plane, you'll notice puzzles on everyone's phone. Those are the types of people playing. It turns out it's a lot of middle-aged women. it skews female it's a really strong audience of people but a lot of us don't relate to that so you think mobile gamer well shooter games and like traditional gamer and so that was always one of the things we had to there was a challenge in the business is how can that audience be good for especially as we get into e-commerce and talk about our launch yeah for broader brands because people they control so much purchase i was about to say it's all the heads of households on the platform.

2:36:03We only have adults. We don't work on any child apps. So you've got adults, head of household, skew female, people with money. These are people on a thousand dollar phone playing for 45 minutes a day. It's a perfect audience. People just never realized it until we became more mainstream. Yeah. How do you think about, there's this critique going around with open AI, doing deals with Oracle, doing deals with Nvidia, and there's this like circularity to the economy. But then of course there's outside demand. People want to use the products. How do you think about that circularity within the mobile app ecosystem where a lot, I'm sure you have advertisers who are advertising mobile games and other mobile games.

2:36:40And it feels like, Oh, well, like, you know, is this just all circular? When does the actual money come in? How, how have you addressed that throughout the, the, the, the history of the company and like, where do we stand now? I mean, again, you got to find a purchaser at some point in that circularity. Right. So if we were just advertising mobile games to mobile games that were ad supported, it'd be a house of cards. At the end of that, you have two inside gaming, two things you're trying to do. Take a user from a game where they're playing X time per day and take them to a game that they're going to be more engaged with and play 2X or 1.5X.

2:37:11You can do that. You create more ad inventory. So the real growth driver in the category is increased supply. It's not any different than social networking. You get more ads viewed. Then you got to make more use of the advertising. So as the technologies get more powerful, you can match up the advertiser and the customer together for something that's transactional. So you get them going from a solitaire to Candy Crush. They pay$2 ,000 a year. You've created transactional value in the middle there. There's a lot more value than where the user started. Yeah. How did the company actually scale? Like how like meat and potatoes were the first deals.

2:37:48And then I imagine everything's like, you know, full tech platform now. But were the first advertisers who were on board on the platform kind of like a handshake and a contract? or how do you actually get inventory? How do you solve a chicken and egg problem? Play this video in your app at this moment and we'll give you, you know. Yeah, how much of like doing things that don't scale? There was a ton of wheeling and dealing. Actually, it's cool being in your office because we were a garage made into an office and we had a gong and like, it was a bunch of, one of the guys who runs my business team and now runs growth, slept in the office for the first six months.

2:38:21So we were affiliates, right? We learned dealers. So you'd go up to the early game developer and just give them a value prop of, you can actually buy an install. Back then, there was not even the chance of buying an install. Now I said, sell them revenue. You're talking about 13 years ago. Being able to sell them an install on a pricing model was innovative. And so when we went out to the market and pitched the zingers of the world, instead of just buying ads and not really knowing what happens, buy install. That in itself was, oh, wow, that's great. And then you pair that with video. The power of the video clip on a mobile device is really understated.

2:38:5535 seconds of average viewing time on our ads. Wow. You can't do anything else. So when you get a brand opportunity to place an ad on a mobile device and the user's not distracted. Non-skippable. Well, it's a mix of skippable and non-skippable. But half the ads, the user, actually, it's a great point, opt into watching the ad for a currency inside the game. Sure. That's up to 60 seconds of viewing time unskippable. You can't do other things. So we live in an ADD-rich environment. This is the most non-ADD thing anywhere in the world. Yep. You've got to watch that advertisement. Yeah, that's fascinating.

2:39:27How do you think AI is going to change mobile gaming? I've seen, there's these famous ads on Instagram where they show you this like character that's right. I'm sure you've seen these and then people are like, but that's not the real game. It's a pick three underneath. And then I found someone actually built the real game because game development's getting cheaper. It feels like we might be entering like a new, there's a couple of companies that been pitching like vibe coding platforms for games that will uh you know like become their own app store it feels like we could just be entering like a new primordial or cambrian explosion of gaming how are you thinking about like vibe coded games or more custom software obviously they'll all need ads to power this but uh how are you thinking about i mean you short answered it for me right like we we create discovery so the more content that's out there the better so if ai creates an environment where anyone can build a game and we're all creative and most people he knows now today have played games at some point in their life.

2:40:23Everyone can write an idea down, create a game. They're going to need discovery on the game. They're going to need monetization on the game. So that's a great opportunity for us as an ad platform. More broadly, our system is predicated on our model actually working. So we always talk about AI as LLMs, but if you just talk about AI as modern usage of neural nets, recommendation systems are one of the most economically viable use cases for AI today. They power Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. They power our system. This is why we always felt like Zuck spending however many hundreds of billions, it was very easy to underwrite because there's a lot of ways to just get benefit from this infrastructure spend in the core advertising business, right?

2:41:08Totally. I mean, there's a simple function to all these models. It's more data, more complex model, more compute, better output. And if your whole business model is built on an advertising business, that this technology continue to evolve at the pace it is, is fantastic. Yeah. How do you think about AI on the ad side? Everyone's kind of predicting. I mean, there's already probably some tests out there that a lot of what Meta's doing will be just look at your product catalog, look at your inventory, and then generate the video creative, generate the audio, generate the text. How are you thinking about implementing that?

2:41:41Are you already running tests? How have the tests gone? This is one of the reasons investors are super excited about advertising platforms like ours. It's the simplistic of you've got a shop, you've got a catalog, create an optimized appearance of that catalog through a recommendation system. We already do that. The more complex is today, people upload a video ad into our platform, not always adapted for the platform. We're new in the marketplace, especially in shopping. So a lot of times they'll bring a 10 second clip from Facebook uploaded to us. Well, if you could have gotten 45 seconds of viewer time, that sucks.

2:42:12As a brand, that's a total miss. They don't have the resources at every level to go, let us create 100 ads a week for this company. Now we'll rebrand as Axon, and we can talk about that in a second. But this Axon advertising platform, they just don't have the resources to create that ad count at the scale of the time that you need into our platform. And so when you can apply LLMs to go, here's a couple of cool ads out there. Let me create 100 versions of this so we can put it into the system. that'll be a huge uplift in user response to all the brands products that are being marketed on our platform.

2:42:45Yeah, when you think about, we're very close with the Ridge Wallet team. And so I got to early on in the Ridge days, and I know that they're an app loving customer, but early on I would just see the effort that Connor, the CMO, is just this constant treadmill of trying to make more and more creative, never being able to make enough, knowing that the more creative you make, the more money you'll make, but still just not even having the time in the day. And so thinking about being able to multiply out creative across different user types, different games, being able to update it a lot more rapidly as games develop new features, bring back old users, et cetera.

2:43:22It's wild. Wanted to ask how you're thinking about M &A this year, next year, in the future. Your market cap has grown tremendously, and you guys are now in a position where you could. There's a variety of different platforms out there that have a lot of attention that are maybe under-monetized or at least not monetizing as well. I'm curious if that's at all something you guys think about or the opportunity in gaming is big enough that it makes sense. You're thinking specifically of like a Snapchat or a Pinterest? Yeah, or I mean TikTok was in the news last week. TikTok was in the news. And that felt like a transaction that was more of like a political transaction than a purely economic deal.

2:44:07But I guess the broad question is like vertical integration. Do you want to own games at some point or where media is developed or social media platform? Or does that just make no sense for you? Well, I mean, like we bid on TikTok. So the industrial logic of we can monetize inventory better with our ads models than anyone else out there is sound, at least to us. But there's a couple things that constrain us. One, our culture is pretty unique. We've got very few people doing an exceptional on a large amount of output, company is still under a thousand people. So you just don't tend to see scale like ours at that little headcount.

2:44:40And so putting companies together into that is really tough. The other piece is we're really excited about the organic growth opportunities in front of us. We're at a point now, I mean, I put out a couple months ago that early in the year we were$11 billion of ad spend on our platform. Plus now we've grown a couple quarters, a bigger number today. And we only work with somewhere between a thousand and 2 ,000 advertisers on the platform. We've been completely managed. We haven't opened up the platform. So if you think about that, when Facebook opened up Ads Manager, they had$5 billion a year revenue.

2:45:11And we've got more than double that today on a very large platform. We haven't even opened it up. We're going to open up our platform, the Axon Advertising Platform, in two days. So once we take the advertiser count from the very low thousands to the tens, hundreds of thousands, and then subsequently millions, we think the opportunity in front of us is many quarters to possibly years. And so distracting, you know, it would have been cool to own TikTok. It's a solid asset, at least from observing from the outside. But the opportunity just immediately with the business is so massive that, you know, you may as well just focus on what you guys already do.

2:45:49Totally. And with a lean team, we don't have the resources to distract ourselves. So it's full speed ahead. We want to give our solution to all the advertisers in the world. We know that we've made a lot of businesses inside gaming. more successful. We want to do that across the board. We've seen it in a very small pilot in e-commerce over the last year. The few hundred like Ridge Wallet and others that you said, they're seeing a lot of spend on our platform comparable to what they're getting on Meta. And it's on us to execute to get this in front of all the advertisers out there. If we can do that and become another destination like Meta where there's a ton of scale and it's top of funnel to bottom funnel revenue priced, all these businesses around us are going to grow.

2:46:27So we don't want to distract ourselves from that opportunity. How are you rallying the team around Q4? I'm assuming Axon has timed with the championship season for every retail brand. But what does it look like? Is it going to be people sleeping in the office more? I mean, there's been a bunch of that. It's around the clock right now because we've been closed and managed, right? So opening up an ad platform at our scale is a pretty complex undertaking. You worry about like, I mean, fraud is an obvious case. You don't want to see fraud. you don't want to see scammy ads on your platform. That's the first thing that happens.

2:47:01And like, we're probably, arguably, the biggest ad platform that's ever opened up self-service in any sort of form at this moment. And so when you've got that, you got to do a bunch of work building tools and controls to make sure the quality of advertiser and all the checks you have in place are as automated as they possibly can be and as good as it would have been in a human managed environment. So you've got that, you've got user experience, You need to make sure a customer can go live on their own all the way through to being able to pay you. And so we had to build a whole bunch of tools to get this right.

2:47:34We've been doing that for the last year. We've been tuning it with the customers on the platform. So the team is, no joke, working around the clock right now to get this out the door in a couple days. Yeah, you can't. You don't have the luxury of missing Q4 if you want to open up an ad, you know, in the ad business. That's the most critical time. How are you thinking about compute infrastructure? I feel like we're seeing meta build these massive clusters and it feels like maybe that's because they're going to be generating so many ads or doing so much gen AI that they'll need a ton of compute.

2:48:05They still need a ton of core AI just to do ad matching. Have you had to do on-premise deployments, cloud stuff? How do you think about building out your infrastructure for the long term and potentially a very different economic dynamic around how compute falls on the income statement? Yeah, I mean, we work with Google Cloud, so it runs through our income statement. So it's easy for investors to understand because we're not capitalizing the cost. Because we're so lean and because we were bootstrapped maybe going back to the beginning, we think about every dollar we spend anywhere across the organization.

2:48:40As everyone's a founder, you're spending money out of your own pocket. And this holds true with compute as well. I went into my team and said, look, we're going to go spend$5 billion, buy a bunch of compute. And in our scale, we can't do$100 billion in investment. So let's say$5 billion. We'd be wasting that money, and it would make them uncomfortable. We try to constrain it to trail or maybe be on par with revenue growth so that it becomes a cost of your future revenue growth. But what does that mean? If our engineers create a more complex model, they can consume more GPUs. if we had unlimited capacity they just deploy the model well in today's world if they see more gpu consumption and they go holy crap this is fantastic in result but is going to consume too much gpus we just don't have it they've got to go optimize their code and you may get like you get it okay maybe we lose one point on accuracy but the cost all of a sudden goes down 90 so across the org we're wired to think about things that way optimize and automate and cut costs as much as possible so we have the best business so we can fund our mission long term.

2:49:40Makes a ton of sense. Partnering with Google makes so much sense given where they are on Nano Banana and where they are on Gemini and just the cost per performance. Even if you go crazy into generating a bunch of ads, it feels like a great partner there. How did the Google will kill you narrative? It clearly didn't happen, but walk me through the various, it seems like you were getting that criticism of venture capitalists early days. How did that actually play out? How do you sit together in the market of ad buying? Because you do compete, even though you work together on the cloud side. How has that relationship evolved?

2:50:16Why did the market play out the way it did? Were there any decisions where you think, we made a really key decision? If you talk to advertisers, let's use the Ridge guys as an example again, you want performance, and you want to constantly be experimenting and you don't want platform dependency. You don't want, in a perfect world, you'd be spending like 10 % of your budget here, 10 % of your budget here, 10 % so that one, as prices fluctuate, because they're all markets, right? You can, your business isn't, you know, and we saw the businesses that were, you know, in the DTC era that were dependent purely on, you know, a meta and how bad things could get, companies going bankrupt based on, you know, of small changes in price.

2:51:00But anyways. Yeah, I mean, Google is sort of a bottom funnel channel for most dollar spent, right? If you're selling a wallet, you go to Google, you search for a wallet, Ridge Wallet appears there. Well, the consumer already knows they want to find a wallet. We were always going to be additive to the Google advertising story. So they did a really good job finding us early and betting on us across multiple business slides. And it became a really good partnership. If you think about the business model we deploy, It's top of funnel to bottom of funnel priced on revenue. Facebook does that. And if Facebook caught everyone's attention for every single ad, for every single product in the world, where there would be no other market, Facebook would capture all the top funnel attention and Google would be bottom funnel.

2:51:40Turns out not everyone in the world notices an ad on Facebook. So long we come with these really immersive ads, capture users' attention, and we were able to go partner with a wallet company and sell more wallets. So in a way, when you do it this way, they're getting an arbitrage. They're getting a customer that pays them immediately. They ship the product after the fact and they make a spread on that sale. If they can do that, there's no budgetary constraint. So we don't have a sales force at all really at the company because we're not going and asking for budget. We're going and saying, look, if you can sell more wallets and make money on us, you'll scale to infinite, as many wallets as you can go get in inventory.

2:52:17And so with that business model, we became additive to these other platforms. I think really that's the only way a small brand or a niche company like us was able to have the large-scale success. If you're advising, I don't know, public company CEO,$100 million in market cap, but they have a platform and they're not monetizing with advertising, and they're considering rolling their own versus partnering with you or partnering with someone else, what are the trade-offs? We've seen Uber's added a bunch of ads, Netflix added ads. ShotGP is going to have ads soon. And what are the different levers that a CEO should think about pulling?

2:52:53Have you done partnerships? How do you think about partnering with those large-scale new platforms? Yeah, we haven't yet. I think at some point in our narrative, we're going to get to a point where we're going to want to take our demand out. But we don't have excess demand. We've got so few advertisers today. If we got 100 ,000 advertisers, we'd probably be able to take demand out. But I think a lot of times people forget, one, the technology is really complex. You've only had, in terms of a model like ours that's scalable, us and then obviously Meta, a very large scale that's been able to execute on this discovery type of product price on revenue.

2:53:24And so if there's only a couple cases, it's not trivial. And people over trivialize it a lot. The other thing is the ad format has to be similar to the ad format that we're really good at. Otherwise, it takes a lot of work. And because we've got such an immersive ad format, you don't tend to have that in other places. Now, in television, you do. And that's an area that's been interesting to us. Specifically, like streaming or? Anywhere where you can see 15 to 30 second clip. Yeah, so streaming is a great, great example. Pre-roll video is a good example. But a native ad that someone's scrolling by and probably misses or a little banner ad, those aren't going to create a lot of intent.

2:54:05So if the ad format isn't going to create intent, that's not a great matchup for us. But it's something we can execute on over time. And I think that'll benefit the publishers, because really these third-party publishers, they shouldn't build their own ad tech for the most part. And there's not another solution out there that's really that focused on them with Google maybe deprioritizing their third-party ad stock for the most part. Yeah. What about Apple? I feel like there was a rumble years ago about a developer kit in SDK for adding ads into mobile games. And it certainly hasn't stopped your growth.

2:54:37So how did that play out? Yeah. I mean, they have ads on search. They can monetize their own properties, presumably. I would say, look, if there's more ad inventory and more discovery, the P &L of the businesses in the market swells. So let's say Apple rolls out a great ads product and you go to Apple Music, you discover a game. Well, you weren't going to discover that game before. So now that developer, who will almost always be an arbitrage marketer, got a better arbitrage. Their business, their P &L grows. What happens when that happens? Well, they have more money to reinvest in us. They have more money to reinvest in Meta.

2:55:08And so if performance is there, that's fantastic for the ecosystem. If it's non-performant, then the customers are getting ripped off. And these customers in these categories, they don't have the business model or the brand to get ripped off. I had seen a few pitches. over the last couple of years for businesses that were trying to effectively create app loving specifically for LLM-type products, why or why not? Is that an interesting opportunity? Because I would assume the app-loving for LLMs is app-loving. You probably never thought you'd be saying that statement. I mean, the day people started saying, I want to be the app-loving of this was when we knew we made it, I guess.

2:55:46Yeah, totally. Like, LLMs, they don't have a lot of space. So you don't want to interrupt the user experience. You can't alter the output. The referral program you guys were talking about a few minutes ago. Yeah, one thing, though, is like a deep, Like if somebody put in like a deep research query somewhere. It's waiting 10 minutes, wait 20 minutes. They're waiting maybe and you can accelerate it. Show me a full episode. You really sit in front of everyone's bailing. Come on. Everyone's bailing. It's true. That's a non-viewed ad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's totally worthless. Yeah. So yeah, I think it's going to be a lot more referral and embedded into the output and automated transactions, which again, for us is good.

2:56:20If you think about dollars spent, a lot of dollars today go to search when the user already knows what they want. If they go to the LLM and they get an output that's something that they want and they can click purchase, all that's going to happen is those dollars are going to shift around from search to these LLM outputs. And that's good because that's already bottom funnel. The user knows that they want it. And in theory, it's good because it's just going to be cheaper to the advertiser. So, again, if it's effectively cheaper, that wallet company now has more money to go spend on a platform like ours where they're truly getting discovery from the customer.

2:56:49Yeah. Talk to me about the company culture, the type of person that succeeds. Do you have economists on staff that are understanding the nature of the market? Do you have a lot of data scientists? Do you expect everyone to be able to think in statistical ways? Yeah, so it's engineering first for sure. Research science runs the models. Those are typically like very intelligent math people alongside. They're also engineers. So they can implement their own research. And then on the business team, most of the business people are math, econ. they know how to do Python, SQL queries. So we're mostly more technical across the board.

2:57:28Now core advertising business, our business and engineering teams are around 300 to 350. So if you just slimmed it down to what drives the 98 % of the value of the company, it's a very, very small team. I always liked when I listened to Steve Jobs talking about the original Mac team, it's A players like to work with A players and then they despise, like everything dilutes when you go to B and Cs. And we've got a really cutthroat ecosystem where you're either an exceptionally strong IC where you can output a ton or you're not going to make it. And so we end up churning through a lot of people who can't cut it.

2:58:04But the core team that remains loves working with each other because everyone's an A player. Yeah. How do you think about what's your headcount plan look like over the next few years? Yeah. I mean, I'm assuming you want to multiply revenue by a lot and without adding heads. Yeah. I mean, look, I'd love a world where we could run with 20 people, but we're probably not getting back to that world. But like I remember good old days. Yeah. I mean, up until 100, I knew the story and the name and every everyone that was at the business. And so we've surpassed that. But being run this lean allows us to maintain a really high quality.

2:58:39So even our go to market team on e-commerce, which every investor looks at as a huge opportunity, 30 people today. It's really hard to add A players if you maintain a high quality bar. And you don't need to go into the state of, look, we've just got hiring quotas. Second you do that, I think you blow up your culture and your organization. So we're slow and steady. Now, the company is built on automate first, hire second. And so LLMs let us do a ton. Most of the coding at the company is done by LLMs now. A lot of the business functions are done by LLMs. So we now are in a world where that culture is perfectly paired with this technology that's evolving so quickly.

2:59:16So we should be able to do more with less. And if we can do that, we're going to be able to scale the revenue without having to add heads. And then it's nice that the product's also so good it sells itself. Well, thank you so much for coming by the TVP and Ultradone. This was fun. Nobody loves ads more than us, than you maybe. Yeah, the chat says because you're a gong respecter, a gong ally, we have to hit the gong. There we go. There we go.

2:59:48and before we bring in our next guest let me tell you about fin.ai the number one ai agent for customer service number one in performance benchmarks number one in competitive bake-offs number one ranking on g2 and let me also tell you about adio customer relationship magic adio is the ai native crm that builds scales and grows your company to the next level we have david senra live in the TVP and Ultradome. We have a video that we're going to play. Bring him on down. Come on in. Let's play the video of his newest addition to the collection, to the history, to the world of business and podcasting.

3:00:20Welcome to the show. Great to see you. 24 hours post-launch. Yes, sir. Yeah, what are we watching here? Oh, it's a drill. What is this? You have the text? Yes, yes, I played it. Okay. That's the video, but do you have the text that Rob put above it? What did he say? He said, the right way is the hard way. Jerry Seinfeld. Yes, they bought a Rolodex. This is for your new show. Yeah. Break it down for us. So this is why I was excited to partner with Rob Moore and Andrew Huberman on this, because I've been friends with them for like three years. Yeah. And I know he said, I gesticulate wildly, so don't break your microphone.

3:01:00So I knew how serious they take their work. The first time I ever met Rob was in, they invited me to Malibu to check out their new studio. We talked podcasting for nine straight hours. That's not an exaggeration. We stayed at the same restaurant. We sat there for lunch. And then we started talking podcasting. And like four hours later, the waitress was like, we're serving dinner now. Do you want to stay? And we're like, yes. We had lunch and dinner. So I didn't even know they were doing this. They know that I was like kind of anti-intro for a podcast. I just like want to get right to it. They're like, we're going to make a bumper for you.

3:01:28I was like, I don't even know what a bumper is. So that's what they call this. and it's like i was like it's got to be short though wait that's the oh that's that's from the video exactly intro video oh it all makes sense now i remember seeing that and i thought oh it's just cgi or something no it's not cgi that's the handmade exactly they bought a drill they bought a rolodex and they printed out all a bunch of companies and the founder names that's amazing people i've covered on founders of course and then they did all the like the editing and so the whole thing is like the idea behind it was okay you turn on netflix you hear that sound right or HBO, you hear that sound.

3:01:59I'm cool with that. I don't want a super long intro. I want a very wealthy audience, and we've got to get to the goddamn point. So, yeah, I just love that. It's like an indication of how serious we're taking the new show. No AI. We made it with a drill. No, I'm a human AI. Yeah, the first episode dropped Saturday, Sunday? Sunday. They're coming out every other Sunday. Every other Sunday. How's the response been? I'm, like, wired. I couldn't sleep last night. You couldn't sleep Saturday night, too. I saw David. I called David yesterday. Even though you have an 8sleep, 8sleep.com? Yes. Get a pod five, five-year warranty, 30-year-old.

3:02:33I actually enjoyed your 8sleep ad integrated into the Daniel Eck episode. If you want to go here, second 8sleep ad. I guess I was in solidarity with you last night, David, because I put up a 55. Ooh, rough. See, I'm staying at a friend's house in Malibu right now, and I don't even have my 8sleep. We've got to correct that. But, yeah, it was so funny. Yesterday, I called David. David, we're just catching up and we realized we were like 30 seconds on the same road. We're like 500 feet from each other. So we're like, let's just pull over and hang out. So I got to get the immediate reaction. But no, it really is.

3:03:11To me, one of the most satisfying things is watching ultra talented people do a new thing and just demonstrate the level that they're on. And you and Rob and Andrew have done that. No, I appreciate that. On the note of like, you got busy people, you got to get right into it. Talk to me about the decision for how you think about the first question. I was listening to Dwarkesh over the weekend. He kicks it off with like a pretty quick intro, but he does introduce the guest. My guest is Richard Sutton. He's one of the - Dwarkesh is insanely talented. Insanely talented. Especially for a young kid.

3:03:48And you know who else is a talented podcaster? Chris Williamson. Oh, he texted me today. And Chris kicks off with no introduction. He hit 1 ,000 episodes. 1 ,000 episodes? He came out today with Matthew McConaughey. Wow. That's amazing. Incredible. What a run. But they do introductions very differently. They do, Chris kicks off with one short, punchy, like un-Google-able question, basically. Like there's no right answer to the question. He'll just say, you know, what is the value of hard work? Or what is your life's goal? And then the person just tees off and it gets you right in the episode. Dorkesh gives you a little bit more of an intro and they go back and forth and then he hits them with a question.

3:04:26How do you think about opening an episode? Do you like the way you're doing it? Do you think it'll evolve? We obviously open with one of the most over the top openings. You're watching TVBN and it's like this crazy thing that just evolved. How do you think about it? All right. I think the important thing is like I have I'm not interviewing anybody. Yeah. And so like the tagline is like conversations with the greatest living founders. I have zero energy to interview anybody. I have unlimited energy to have long-form, deep conversations. You guys have been on the receiving ends of this. When we have dinner, it's not like, oh, we're going to talk for 30 minutes.

3:04:57No, we talk for like four goddamn hours. And so that's why I think a lot of some people came out and they're like, you're talking too much in the Daniel Ek episode. It's like, no. Because it's a conversation. I like that. Well, it's important to you. I thought that was correct. I think your opportunity is to not be – it's tough if you're a podcast and people only watch for the guests. Yeah. That's not a good position to be in, right? People watch Joe Rogan. There's a cohort of people that watch Joe Rogan just when Donald Trump's on. But a huge amount of people are watching it because Joe Rogan.

3:05:29They're like, oh, who's he talking to today? That's what we're doing. So I think somebody I saw, they did analysis on 2 ,000 of Joe's episodes, and he spoke like 45 or something percent of the time. Yep. He's just like, the whole genesis of this, and I think I talked about it on the Daniel Ek episode, It's because, you know, Patrick Shaughnessy, who, again, I think is the best business interviewer in the world. Like if I'm going to start an interview show and compete with him, that's just stupid. Like the main message of Founders, the Founders podcast is like the importance of differentiation.

3:05:59So like there's been a million let's interview, you know, business people shows. I'm not I'm going to lose that game. I only want to play a game that I can be the best in the world at. And so what Patrick, you know, we've been really close friends. We're brothers. We talk every day. We've have a ton. He's in these dinners with me. He's in these conversations. And it happens over and over again. And he's mentioned to me for a few years. He said it before I was on Colossus. He's just like, man, I really think, have you ever thought about doing a show where you talk to other people, not just you sitting in a room fucking reading books and doing the crazy shit that you do?

3:06:29And he's like, I've been around this. Like, no one can have these conversations. And so what really pushed me, and I said it on the Daniel Ek episode, was me, him, and Daniel had this super intense four-hour dinner. I don't meet with anybody. The first time I met Michael Dell, I flew to Austin. Five hours. We talked for five hours. You think I sat silent? I can't sit silent for anything. And they don't want me to sit silent. The whole point is you're like this weird human AI with all this knowledge, and they want to prompt and get me going. So we get in the car because we're leaving New York and going back to Greenwich.

3:07:01I'm staying at Patrick's house at night. And the first thing he says to me when we get in with his driver, he's like, you have to start recording these. he's just like i he goes uh i've known daniel for four years you got more out of him in four hours than i did in four years he goes i talked two percent of time he talked 49 percent time you talk 49 percent of time he's just like no one can speak to the soul the founder like you you have to start recording these yeah it's fascinating there's that story that's the whole fucking idea there's no interview it's just like i'm going to talk to the greatest living founders and we're going to have insane conversations that are not predictable yeah there's uh there's that story about Mark Zuckerberg that he has like extremely high question to talk ratio.

3:07:39Like he lets other people talk a lot. And that was seen as like, you know, bullish on his ability to like hoover up information. At the same time in the content world, I feel like there is a natural urge. Like I noticed somebody sent me a short that we didn't post that someone else posted of me and Jordy talking to Mark Andreessen. And it was clear that it was like Mark had a funny take. And so that was what would get the views. And so we were there kind of as like accoutrement to the main event. And there's like window dressing. It doesn't get it. Like window dressing. And so there's just like, there is a natural pull in the algorithm for if you're starting an interview show, I should just get someone really, no, that's the point.

3:08:24But I'm saying, I'm saying. I was like, did you not just do it? No, no, no, no. What I'm saying is that if you're just purely view maxing, it's like go get a viral clip machine, point a camera on them and say, go, and then just film, and then say, what's next? What's on your mind? And those two things, you have to actively resist the view capture, the algorithm capture, and that's what you're doing. Before, I didn't even know, you know I don't view max. I didn't legitimately, before we did the giant ramp deal for founders, right? I did not know how many people listen to founders. You didn't look at the analytics.

3:08:57That's great. What does that tell you? I don't give a shit. I want the best audience, not the biggest. The reason the ramp deal came about, because somebody we cannot name, who if you're elite in tech, you know who this person is. Whatever the opposite of a public figure is, this person is. It's interesting that probably the smartest and best person in tech behind the scenes, like no one knows, like he's potentially invisible, literally came because he's like, I was at Michael Dell's house. He wouldn't stop talking about your podcast. He didn't know we were friends. I know 10 to 15 billionaires personally that listen to your show.

3:09:31We have to find a way to work together. That's the genesis of all of this. It wasn't how many downloads you get. It's you have the attention and the trust of the most elite people in the world. Look at the guest list on the new David Sennar show. David Sennar by David Sennar. Yeah, that's hilarious. When you pull it up on Spotify in your car, it says, Daniel, David Sennar, David Sennar, David Sennar. It's headed three times. Are you ready? Somebody in the chat says, hey, David, I saw you at Malibu Country Mart yesterday. You're quite tall and handsome. Are you ready to be a household man? This is a live chat.

3:10:06You know, Joey? Okay, this happened twice. So first of all, I land, because I came out here just for you guys, just so you know. Amazing. Legitimately, I was like, I don't want to. You guys are really important to me. I want to do this in person. We got to talk about how much has changed since last time I was here. It's here. But, yeah, it's kind of. I don't like to think about this because I walk in some, I don't know which case this is. One happened at the Tesla supercharger and another at, I walk into Sun Life and get a smoothie. And like I walk in, there's only three people in there and two guys turn it like David Senra and I'm like, what the fuck?

3:10:38And then another guy was charging and you used to, you used to only get recognized at Amon properties. Now it's about to be everywhere. I have, I can't tell you everywhere. Oh, the new show is going to be the first one that's associated with the Amon. That's very exciting. Yeah. I shouldn't say anything yet, but we're 99 % sure that this deal is done. Your personal brand is already associated with Amon. How much variation do you think there'll be in episode length? A ton. A ton. Because, again, there's no formulaic. There's no formula here. So the way I think about it, it's like Founders is just the books that give me energy that I'm excited to learn about.

3:11:16and in many cases, they're not even books. I think the Colossus profiles that Patrick and his team are making are so remarkable. I didn't know who Thomas Pefferty is. I read the article that just came out. Do you guys know about this guy? He's worth$80 billion. He's 83 years old. I think he owns 80%. Is this the AI Will Not Make You Rich article? No. No. This is a guy. I think he started Interactive Brokers. Oh, wow. And he owns 80 % of it. Okay. That's legit. Yeah, he's a Hungarian. The original size chat. Yeah. He's a Hungarian immigrant. But you read his profile, and I'm like, I couldn't put it down.

3:11:49I called Patrick. It was midnight. I literally got him on the phone. I was like, these things are incredible. And I was like, OK, I'm so excited that I read this. Even though it's not a book, I have to make an episode. So that's the episode I'm working on right now. So that's how we went to the founders. David Senra by David Senra by David Senra. Hosted. Why did you pick David Senra to host the David Senra show? You could have hosted anyone. You're leaving a lot of room to slot other hosts in. It's easy. The funniest response was by Christian Kiel. I think he used to be an astronomer. He's like, where did you come up with the name?

3:12:20Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. But with the Founders podcast, I feel like you're thinking on episode length, how you divide up the episodes, has changed. And you have a philosophy around it. And you've kind of narrowed the aperture a little bit as you've become more laser focused on what it takes to deliver a quality episode. Do you think that will happen over time? No, because this is the thing, okay? I am a control freak, right? As you both know. So like Founders is a one-person thing. Sure. Like to the point where I'm now hand-editing the transcripts. Yeah, yeah. Everybody's like outsource it.

3:12:53This is why I wanted to play this thing because Jerry Seinfeld way, the hard way is the right way, right? It's like I have complete control. It's like permissionless. I feel like I'm like, you know, creating a statue or like some kind of art. It's just like a very intense love affair that I have, an irrational love affair I have with that show. This one, now I have a partner. I don't even mean I have an entire team now which I don't have a team on founders what I mean is I don't have control over what that person is going to say whether they're going to be interesting or not so what we've noticed is every single person that we've recorded with and we have a crazy guest list they all came from the audience founders audience because that way at least they know what I'm into what I like to talk about they're more prone to say yes for an unreleased show but there's wide variance between like some in many cases in some cases like they're we've recorded some with incredible people and they halfway through i'm like oh they want me to do a founders episode for them they just want literally they like just i'll ask them a question like hey what about this and then they'll like look at me and like want me to talk i mean that has to be the same case for joe rogan it's like if you're getting invited to the mothership you're like yeah i want to hear i want to hang out with joe rogan today yeah so no i i have to be what i'm learning yeah and you know this is new to me is just like loosen up a little bit.

3:14:14Like obviously the quality still has to be good. Like we have to edit ruthlessly. We're not going to, there's a bunch of different ideas. Most of them came from Daniel Ek that I can talk about. Like one example he gave me. And again, like guy is the most powerful person in podcasting. He's willing to just fucking counsel you. You should take his advice. So he's like, listen, you need to build up the original feed, right? And then maybe a year in, whatever the timeframe is, he's like, you need to have a bunch of separate feeds. So he's like, have the two-hour conversation that we had. And then edit it, have another feed where you edit those conversations down to like 30 minutes.

3:14:45That's interesting. And then he's like, then you need a third feed where it's just, hey, Daniel had 10 fucking clips that were incredible. Just that. Isn't that something that he should be solving on the product side? Like when I went to your show, I saw that I could do, in Spotify, I watched it on Spotify. Thank you. Out of respect to Daniel. But I noticed that I could switch between. As the artist intended. as the host and the guest intended. And I also left a comment, and it was fun in the comment section. But you could watch video, switch to audio. But then there were also short-form video clips that were all linked to the same profile.

3:15:20I didn't have to go find David Senra shorts. Why will there be different feeds when that's something that they could solve on their side? That's a really interesting... I don't know. I'd ask him. I'll ask him. I'm not sure. But this was... We were in Stockholm together. He told me this in January, so a few months. Because the original idea... I guess I should back up too. The original idea was to launch in April because again, like you guys have a deep relationship with ramp just like I do. And, you know, I had this idea, give credit to Eric and Kareem for the level of trust they put in me where I was like, I want to do this where I have long form conversations with starting with the people that are in my audience.

3:15:58And like, I think it'll be good, but like, I think I would love if you guys were the presenting sponsor, like done, like immediately. Right. and the original idea was to launch in April. April of next year? No, this past April. But me and Daniel couldn't sync schedules and I'm like, I'm not launching until... He's got to be number one because of... The podfather. No, yeah, it's just like the respect I have for him. Like, I just knew, like, out of every... I'm friends with a bunch of people I've recorded but not to the level of, like, I've spent hours and hours talking to him. I just knew he's just so wise and he's not...

3:16:33I just knew I could get stuff out of him that I hadn't seen him talk about anywhere else. And so we recorded that a few months ago, but it was the beginning of the summer. And then I talked to the head of business at Spotify and the head of product, and they were both like, you don't launch a show in the summer. And so that's why I got pushed back to end of September. Because everybody's like, they're just distracted. It's just like, you want maximum impact. And so we waited for a while. Do you expect to record and scrap episodes entirely? Do you think that'll be frequent? Or do you think that if you bring the right energy, you can always get.

3:17:06The unfair advantage we have is that I do a monologue podcast and may be better than anybody else in the world. And so if they're going to sit there and just listen to me talk, I can go forever, like forever. No, I don't think I'll scrap it. I just think you have to be, again, you have to respect the time of the audience. And so, but this is different. So you mentioned the founders, the formula for founders. Like I don't like doing them longer than an hour. So that way you're listing on 1.5. So it's like a 40-year career. 40 hours of reading, right, that you can listen to in 45 minutes. Yep. That's the value prop of founders.

3:17:39Yep. And that will give you a very high-end audience if you just idea after idea after idea. Yeah. This other one, like, if I can have an interesting four-hour conversation, they're going to be four hours long. I don't think I can. I think we could talk for four hours, and you should edit it down to probably, like, two. You're going to do Gaston Glock's daughter? We should do the first. You see her? No. She's on X. No. Yeah, she took over the company. I believe it's his daughter or maybe granddaughter. Did you listen to that episode I made? It's one of my favorites. We could do, the three of us could do a 24-hour podcast on business podcasting.

3:18:11We could do that. It would be boring as hell for the audience. But you guys have invited me before. You're like, do you want to be here for the whole show? And I was like, I don't think that's a good idea. I can't live stream for three hours. I will get in trouble. It's easy. It's easy. Watch. There's a woman in San Francisco charging$30 ,000 to name your baby. What do you think? You're using that? Were you using that? No. You shouldn't have a kid if you need somebody else to name it. Good take. See? It's easier than you think. No, but I will get in trouble. I will literally get canceled because I don't have a filter.

3:18:38I can't do live. Remember, I can edit the shit. I don't like it. I think the only thing you do is swear. You're very tame other than that. You just always divert. You naturally divert to history and talking about it. So that's the key, where it's like if you go back to differentiation, right? Somebody said the funniest thing, where there's like a Red Bull futurist. Yeah. Okay. He's like, somebody ripped, literally said, we're going to be the TPBN of Europe. And then he quote treated them. And no disrespect to them. I don't know them. But he's like, of course, like the TPBN of Europe works two days, two days a week.

3:19:14To their credit, they leaned into it. And they were laughing about it, which I really appreciate it. No, but that's the point. It's just like, God bless your soul. It's just like, then you want to avoid direct comparison. And I can tell you right now, they haven't asked me for podcast advice. But I can't think of other people in the podcast industry that I'd want to avoid direct comparison than you two. It's like, you're going to lose that because everybody's going to be like, let's compare this to TPBN. What is this thing? What is this? The ultra drum. Go to the wide. Go to the wide. Go to the main wide.

3:19:42Go to the big wide. We're here in the dome. The ultra drum. There you go. I don't know what camera I should be looking into. There's like fucking 10 of them in here. You don't understand how serious. It's really rude because someone just copied our last set and we completely changed the set. You don't understand how serious these two guys take it. It's just stupid. It's a great line in zero to one, right? where Peter Thiel says, if you're copying Mark Zuckerberg, you're not learning from him. You don't copy the what, you copy the how. It drives me insane. So my point is, I'm not going to start another interview show.

3:20:14I'm going to say, hey, I'm going to have conversations. Conversation show. No, not even that, but there's other conversation shows like Joe Rogan. What you just said, I can't help myself. Everything I hear, read, anything, it all ties back to the shit that I learned from founders. So it's like, oh, like the first time I met Michael Dell when I flew there the first time, you know, we were talking, we went through Zach Dell's Base Power. We're going over and they were showing like me these dashboards, everything else. Within like the first five minutes, I'd made references to like Jim Casey, Fred Smith, Brad Jacobs.

3:20:42This is like this just comes naturally. So it's like the important thing about podcasting or I think any kind of business has to be like natural to you. So in our private conversations, we pull ideas from Ogilvy all the time or anybody. So, yeah, that's exactly what I want to do. And so people are like, I liked it, but you should do this. I don't know what to tell you because it's like this is just who I am. I can't – I'm not acting. Like I can only be who I am. Yeah. I think the thing that's so – I think the conversations that – giving people the experience of you being at dinner with Daniel or Ovitz, these people, like I feel like incredibly blessed that I get to go to dinner with you and hang out with our friends and get the David Sender experience of having a normal conversation, but then you're always pulling it back and contextualizing it with history.

3:21:33It's incredibly addicting. I could go to dinner for six hours because it's still going to just be wildly interesting. But now creating that product, I saw somebody in the chat was looking earlier. They were looking at the first few guests, and they were like, I might need to come back to this podcast later after I've made a few billion. But it's actually the exact opposite of that. It's like, no, just giving this product is something that's completely free. Anybody can just go listen to it. And you get to be, get the experience of being at dinner with you and somebody that's created a$150 billion company, a$10 billion company.

3:22:06So there's two things on that. So I did this, like, my very first viral episode of Founders, because I obviously don't try to go viral, is when I did the I Had Dinner with Charlie Munger episode. I remember that, yeah. And, like, it went so viral to put Founders to the top of the charts for all podcasts. The funniest thing about that was that didn't you get some inbound from journalists who were like, he didn't want people to write about it and you got scoops? Because you were basically reporting on it. It was like new information. Berkshire, so again, the reason why people love Munger and people I admire is they're chaotic, uncontrollable people.

3:22:39I am one of those people. The best. It's like Rob Moore is not going to be like, I'm going to try to box this guy. There's fucking no way. So Berkshire was, they're very, like, they understand the power of story. They control everything. And Charlie was uncontrollable. And so it was not like I, they knew I was a podcaster. They knew, like, I was going to make a podcast about it. I wasn't going to record anything. And so Berkshire's PR was super mad because they kept, not because of the episode. They actually, the episode was very positive. Yeah, it was amazing. But what they were upset about is then you had all these journalists hitting them up.

3:23:16They're like, I thought. What did you mean by this? I thought Charlie didn't give interviews. This one. Different take. Yeah, no. So he's like, he's not. He doesn't give interviews. I'm like, I'm not a journalist. I'm an enthusiast. This guy's my idol. I have a bust. I have a bronze bust of Charlie Munger in my house. I'm not a journalist. I'm an enthusiast. I'm a business enthusiast. That's true. That's true. It's true. I'm a technology enthusiast. If Charlie says, delete the episode, I will delete the episode. There you go. But some fucking lady of Berkshire. No, that's not going to happen. Like, I'm very proud of that.

3:23:49Have him call me. Have him call me. Here's my number. And we found out Charlie didn't give a shit because he doesn't, he didn't give a fuck. He's almost 100 years old. So to answer your question, or to piggyback on your comment, so I was doing all these, like, I had dinner with episodes where I'd have dinner, and then I'd summarize it in an episode, but you didn't hear anybody else. And so the original idea I had for David Center by David Center by the host of David Center is record. Jay-Z is one of the most fascinating people to me. Episode 238 of Founders is his autobiography. And he doesn't ever do podcasts.

3:24:20And he did a podcast that was a title exclusive when he was trying to build up title. And the podcast was fascinating. It's called Rap Radar. They rented. They were in a private dining room in Beverly Hills. so it's the two hosts and then jay-z and they just have lunch right you know he's not like chewing like that so you edit that stuff out and i'm like that's a that's exactly what i want yeah like because what you just said how much would people pay to have dinner with brad jacobs or daniel ek or mike ovitz i'm going to new york again in like two weeks to have dinner ovitz again ovitz come like a crazy friend like he texts me all the time he just booked a guest i I can't tell you who.

3:24:58Let me tell you the funny Ovid's experience I had this week. He goes, hey, I just had dinner with X. Okay, I can't say who. Elon Musk's son. No. Just kidding. And he goes, he's unbelievable. You should get him for the new show. And I was like, do you think you could help convince him? He goes, that's why I'm fucking texting you. Two hours. No, but give him credit. He's like, what's your email? The email to the person that can book this for me. Two hours later, date done. He's a shark. There we go. machine that's fantastic he's crazy so i do want to say one other thing about being free i um i just retweeted my own tweet there we go because i think this is a pat on the back no because i think this is important what you just said about the fact that it's like a miracle itself is free and i was feeling this today because like the message i've been getting for the for the danielak episode yeah and it's like podcasting is a miracle you can receive a world-class education on any subject you want on demand while your eyes are busy for free and i understand that i've been doing it for almost 10 years it's still a fucking miracle to me i still cannot believe that i can listen to these conversations i can it just i i never i still i still i still feel that uh podcasts were much more important to my education than my traditional education i i thought back of of uh I was lucky to discover like Tim Ferriss when I was 18.

3:26:24Right. And, and being able to, yeah, you just did the show with Tim. Um, and just like being able to sit in on those conversations and learn about different perspectives on life and different ways to live and how to work and how to be healthy. All these different things were, were incredibly formative. And I just thought I was never growing up. I was never in an environment where I was in any of those rooms at all. Right. I had a, you know, there's some people that are that benefited from that. And I just feel like it is the greatest public good. You nailed it. Like, okay, if you went to Harvard or Princeton or Ivy League, like, my parents didn't even fucking graduate high school.

3:27:01That was just never going to be an option. I had to work full time. Like, maybe you get, there are a small percentage of people that get world class education and they're surrounded by a crazy network. Like, think about, like, the majority of my friends were all at Harvard. They're all, like, Jewish. these like Jewish genius Harvard people. They were all at school at the same time. And then you fast forward, they've been out of school for like 15 years and they're all completely like absolutely dominating. Like I couldn't imagine what that experience would have been like to have that when you were 18.

3:27:27Like life changing. And they're still doing deals together. You go to your friend's house for the weekend and the dad, just the conversations at the dinner table, right? But now those conversations are actually widely accessible to everyone. Exactly. And so like I've learned more. I'm looking for this, you know, You were one of the first advertisers on Founders years ago. And I'm actually looking for this text that you sent me, probably like 2023. Oh, way back. Yeah, but you were just like, Founders is essentially the only show that I'm listening to these days. Yep. And I want the response, though, because my response was kind of arrogant.

3:28:04Well, no, I tried to buy. I think I was like, it should be. I asked if you were open to being acquired, I think. Yeah, and you wanted to buy all. Oh, no. You're like, the only podcast I listen to religiously. This is, hold on. This is going to be funny. You think this is an act. So this is back in March 22, 2023 is when this is happening. Okay, so you text me, only podcast I listen to religiously. I go, no days off. I'm coming for everyone. Fact check. True. Narrator, he did come for everyone. How do you explain your approach to work? because I know you, in my experience, you're working around the clock.

3:28:46Like you're always on, but it doesn't always look like being in front of a computer editing an episode or whatever. And what have you kind of pulled from the greats to kind of inform your own process? So I think like, man, sometimes, So I just did Tim Ferriss, and sometimes, I think I said this on Tim Ferriss, I say stuff, and I'm like, I should not be admitting to this. But then every time I do, people are like, man, I'm so glad you said X, Y, or Z, because I feel that exact same way. What, do you procrastinate sometimes? No, no, no. So my issue was, I think for years, episode 222 of Founders is Ed Thorpe, and if you look at the subtitle of that episode, it's like my personal blueprint.

3:29:31And what I thought was interesting about Ed Thorpe was like, oh, this guy like mastered life more than almost anybody I've ever come across out of the 400 episodes I've done and what I mean by that is like he actually was like balanced like he you know he has a he lived a crazy adventurous life he um invented a system for counting cards and blackjack built the world's first wearable computer with Claude Shannon created the world's uh first quantitative hedge fund made more money he could ever spend uh he but he he like took care of his health. He was a good family man. And so that's what I meant.

3:30:02I was like, oh, he's like all well balanced. And I was like, this is my blueprint. And the closest thing I have to like a mentor, I would say, uh, like an explicit mentor and kind of like an older brother is Sam Hinckley. And I was on the phone with him recently. I mean recently, it was probably like nine months ago. Cause I kind of understood this about myself for a while. And I'm like, man, I think I'm fucking lying. Like, I think I'm lying when I say like, that's my blueprint. Like, I don't like, I don't want to be balanced. Like, I don't like, I like, I think I'm much more like Enzo Ferrari than I am like Ed Thorpe.

3:30:32And, you know, I think Sam's point, he's just like, he's a way better person than I am, like legitimately better human being than I am. And his point is like trying to pull me back in that direction. And I just think that's like, not going to happen. So the answer to your question is like, if my eyes are open, then I'm thinking about work and I'm only thinking about work and it doesn't feel like work because I just have this irrational obsession. Dude, I don't want to talk about this. I literally like, this sounds so, so terrible. I literally like had tears in my eyes when I woke up yesterday because this is so fucking important to me.

3:31:07And I knew it was, I knew that yesterday was like a big turning point in my life, but I woke up from a private message from Daniel. And it's like, I read it and like immediately started fucking crying. Like, not like sobbing, but like tears in my eyes because to have somebody that you respect so much say, you're like, you, you're, I'm really, proud of you like what you're putting out is excellent really great and to have that and also love it the way I do it's like the reason I said Enzo Ferrari because he said a man dominated by passion such as mine like can't be cut in half his whole point was like he wasn't good at anything else but thinking about Ferrari and so my work thing is just like I'm infinitely curious and so like today you know I worked out and then every other thing was just reading and like I'm reading two books at the same time.

3:31:55I'm working on Founders episodes. I'm trying to respond to messages about the Daniel episode. I don't know. And then I just come over here and we're friends, but this is kind of work too. And after this, I'm going to go back and work some more. And that's all I want to do. I have a follow-up question, but first I'm going to tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only adquick combines technology out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I don't mind the ad.

3:32:21I love the ads. And I love how they're weaved in. But if I'm sitting here, it's got to be a ramp app. Okay. Run it back. Run it back. Time is money. Say both. There we go. Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com. My question, do you think that there is a material difference between retired and live player, active CEO, post FU money, post economic, in terms of the shape of an interview, what you get out? If you took a random listener and they had no idea who Daniel Eck and Brad Jacobs and Michael Dell and all these different folks who you're going to interview were.

3:33:01I'm not interviewing them. What? Yeah. Conversing. Talking to. Do you think that they would be able to tell, okay, this person's still in the arena. This person is post-economic, checked out, no bags. It's not a money thing. It's not a retirement thing. What is it? It's like a personality thing. Wait till you see the Brad. I cannot believe some of the stuff we got on film that Brad Jacobs does. There we go. Because that guy just can't help himself. He is who he is. And obviously, like, he's a public company. I don't know if he's a CEO. He's definitely chairman. But, like, a lot of these happen to be public company CEOs.

3:33:36So, like, I have to be, you know, they have comms people and they have all this crazy stuff. And I'm not intentionally trying to get in trouble with anybody. You know, again, I'm an enthusiast. I'm not a journalist. I just think, hey, you're brilliant. Can I pull something out of you that other people, I benefit a lot from talking to you. And so it's kind of selfish that I get all these lessons and this inspiration and this education from you. Are you cool us sitting down and just recording the conversations we have anyways? And so a person like Brad doesn't give a shit. He is 68. He's got the most energy of any way I've ever been around.

3:34:04He also has nothing to be insecure about because he started eight separate billion dollar companies. And he's a wild. He wrote the book on starting billion dollar companies. And he's a wild boy. And I guess you're also not asking for, you know like are you bullish on this particular market that you may or may not have bags in that's not relevant i don't we don't talk at all about current affairs sure current events which is which is this is why we're beautiful yin and yang because obviously we're focused on what's happening in markets another huge point of uh differentiation against like a rogan is like you go on rogan it's going to be like well let's react to the news right now it's very no and my point like i'm not you know i'm not we talked about this john was like will you do a podcast with me i was like what are we gonna do he's like talk about tech news i'm like yeah no i'm not gonna talk about tech news uh would you uh ragav is asking would you interview david senra on david senra by david senra hosted by david senra okay would you interview yourself okay so the the the reclusive genius that we all know and then we can't name his name literally called me yesterday yeah um and had a long conversation about this yeah and he had a i'm I can't say.

3:35:10I'll tell you guys off there. But he had a great idea. And he's like, we should do this for episode 100. And I'm like, yeah. Well, there's another great idea. Go to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Get a look. Last question I have on my side, then we should grab lunch. Do you think we're exiting the hobbyist era of podcasting? Era? We had this conversation yesterday. It was. I mean, there was a beautiful, there was about a decade and a half where you could start a podcast and have a, you know. I was doing media part-time.

3:35:52I was one of the worst offenders. Yeah, but we had this conversation. No. You convinced me. I had this conversation when it came in because it was just obvious. We'll talk about this later. It's the first fucking video I saw of yours. I was like, this guy, we have to be friends. He's a generational talent. Like, it's just obvious. We had a guy stop John while we were at breakfast this morning, had no idea about TBPN, but was obsessed with John's videos. And John's like, I haven't published a video in, like, over a year. Yes, I was, like, I wouldn't think it was that early, but I came in really early, years early.

3:36:25So, anyways, me and Jordi just randomly talk about this because we can't help ourselves. Yesterday, when we randomly ran into each other, this is where I like I don't mean any disrespect to other people so we are live I have to be very careful and that's a great place to end it okay no disrespect there's no way this guy's watching no no no no it all gets back I was induced into a state of rage I was at a dinner and I was introduced to another podcaster and they mentioned like again they're from like the old school when you can like come in and like it's just different and basically his point was just like yeah there's like I have to figure out like a new form there were a lot of people that saw podcasting as just like a marketing side hobby but you can't say I need like I need to fix my show and I need a different like I need like a new like take on my existing show and also tell me that I'm going to take three months off to do something else that's not the podcast yeah i told him i go you're gonna get fucked up like because what's happening now this is exactly what i said though but this is what's happening now is people used to come in and they're like oh i'm just gonna like i can do three other things podcast could be your third fourth fifth most important thing in your life yeah it's just 90 minutes once a week yeah but now you have people that act like founders and entrepreneurs coming in and the conversation we had just like so i think of like obviously i I approached this as if an Enzo Ferrari was doing what I was doing, if a monger was doing what I was doing, if a Steve Jobs was doing or Edwin Lamb was doing what I was doing, what would they do?

3:38:05That's exactly how I think. And then I come into this and I'm like, oh, and I knew you guys think like this anyways, but what I was just telling them, because I was like, where did the rest of it? You had like 15 people last time I was here. The interns went back to college. I'm like, no, they're going to learn more. I go, these two. Well, one of our interns didn't go back to college. But I go, this is what I said. I go, these two are going to take this as far as it could possibly go. there's no way if you have a front row seat to that skip a fucking year of college they're going to take this as far as possible you guys are not at you're not you are podcasters but you're entrepreneurs and you just realize like this is the product look what it's got your fucking one year anniversary is what four days from now i think so yeah yeah we need to figure out when 365 probably but look at what you guys well now we didn't start we didn't well we didn't yeah we didn't start doing daily until i cornered you at the faena in miami and started yelling out of love that's the real that's the real founding date yeah but my point is like we were just looking at episode one right before i came on and look what you guys you're entrepreneurs you've iterated tremendously in a year yeah and so yeah good luck competing with john and jordy you're not going to do that yeah it's also i mean the function of you know john spending years building up figuring out how to create great content online me starting my career basically selling ads on the internet just a bunch of different and then i don't know it's a would not have been possible if we hadn't each spent a decade doing what we did but then there's also something that is not copyable which is the chemistry between you two which is why i was so emphatic about you need to take this more seriously.

3:39:47Not that you weren't, but you can't buy that chemistry. What do you mean chemistry? We're mortal enemies. We're just great actors. We're here in Hollywood. I remember when I went to casting and they were like, you're going to play this guy John Fugan. This is a lie. Don't lie to your audience. There's so many times a character that's friends with the other husband. There's so many... The audience, they're lying. There's so many times when I'm with one and the other one calls the other one. And it's just like they love each other. Like I can't hang out with anybody as much as you guys hang out and then still like them.

3:40:20So like I'm much more than watching. Nobody likes talking about. 225 is not going to bench itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who else will I get to shoddily spot me while they're on their phone and I'm dying from the sex trap? I've gotten better at spotting. But in the morning when we're working out, there are a couple of times John almost lost his head because I was locked in on the news when he was benching. Dude, the joint workouts are working. I saw the pictures of you at the beach. Your back is getting way wider. You guys are on the juice. No juice. I do. You know the secret? I eat a double smash burger every morning at 8 a.m.

3:41:03There's secrets. Anyway, thank you so much. This is a lot of fun. Let me tell you about Wander. You want to sing with us? Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views. Hotel, great amenities. Roomie beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation, but better. I just have to say, I'm so happy for you. I'm so proud of you. Congratulations. I feel lucky to have met you before you became a household name. and nobody in my career has done more for me than you with zero financial incentive, anything along those lines. So it's remarkable. One, I thank you very much.

3:41:45The second part I think is really important because at the end of the day, if you're insanely talented, it's like people chase money when you should really be chasing relationships. Like that is all, like outside of work, I care deeply about the friendships that I build and like I don't purposely. You know, I talked to Kareem about this. He's like, man, you're selling all these ads for other podcasters. You're doing all sorts of stuff. Kareem from Ramp, one of the, Gene, maybe the most brilliant mind working in finance today, technical mind working in finance today. Listen to the Daniel Ek episode, and you'll see how he's similar to, how Kareem's working style is very similar to Daniel's.

3:42:16And he's like, why don't you start like a, you know, business doing this? I do it because I love podcasters, and I love super talented people that take their work very seriously. And it's like, I like seeing my friends win. And no side hustles. Yeah, and that's another reason. Never side hustle. Well, let's ring the gong for the first episode. Thank you. There we go. Great hit. Thank you for tuning in, folks. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Thank you. Cheers. Cheers.