Clawdbot Creator Peter Steinberger Joins, Meta's Premium Subscription Plans | Jamie Cuffe, Ben Lerer, Lucas Atkins, Bridgit Mendler, Jeff Miller, Aaron Frank

26:25Doesn't this exist? I saw the Poke people by interaction. Well, they're not using Claudebot. No, no, no. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure, sure. So they're not using it, but they have positioned themselves as like, hey, we're the company that is doing a lot of the same things, going after the same market, solving some of the same problems. And so it will be interesting to see how much they accelerate on the back of this. That's certainly interesting. I also saw, I don't know if we have it in here, but the good folks over at Cognition, Walden Yan, said, don't waste your time setting up MaltBot. I had Devin set it up for me.

27:07I didn't even run a single command, and now I'm talking to it on Telegram. You can go to tryclawedbot.com. They're going to have to rename the website, but this is very, very cool for the less technical folks who don't want to mess around with. I'll start reading the next post. Go, feel free to hit it one more time. One more time. Chat says - It was 20? 20. Oh, no.

27:31With authority. Q W says, Claude bot maybe realized that nothing about me lives on my local device and that Google owns everything about me. In other words, a local AI assistant isn't particularly useful and Google will just win everything. So hot take there. He says all your browsing history, shopping history, and Gmail search history, calendar, Gemini, YouTube, Google home, where you've been, Google map, your workspace, it's over bow down to your digital God. The iPhone users would like a moment. Like, yes, this is extremely true, but there's a lot of people that interface with Google through their iPhone.

28:09And so there is... Well, yeah, so my hope is that the Siri team plays around with Claudebot and is like, wait, this is our opportunity. Yeah, totally. Like, you should be able to chat with your computer, wherever it is in the world, from your phone, and be able to do tasks in a way that's sort of AI native. Yeah, totally. Public, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with amazing customer service. Public, we have to share, is a new sponsor of All In. Yeah. All In is doing ads now. Fair. Finally, this is something that we've been begging them to do since the very beginning.

28:47Yeah, we really have been begging for this, but very, very good. And I'm sure those will do quite well. They've been doing a bunch of good stuff. The Davos coverage was really, really fun. Obviously, the Satya Nadella interview was great, but there were a bunch of other folks who hopped on at Davos to talk tech, and it was a delightful experience. Big Nash, who is working on MaltBot, says, A thread about what I've been doing to calm down some egregious security claims that have been posted about MaltBot over the weekend. MaltBot is powerful software with a lot of sharp edges. Please read the security docs carefully before you run it anywhere near the public internet, and don't skip the checks in docs slash security.md.

29:26What percentage of people do you think skip those checks? So literally everyone. I mean, so I have it set up on our local machine here. And it was texting. I think it texted you and Ben. That was actually crazy. I didn't have the auth set up. I don't think any of this will dox what's going on. Did you disconnect it already? Yes, I believe. Because I get an iMessage that's from Tyler's email. and it just says, HTTP 429 rate limit error. This request would exceed the rate limit for your organization. And it's just texting me. It's just like, hey boss, I need more money, I guess. It's hitting me up.

30:08It's the experience of working here where Tyler's constantly asking for more tokens, more tokens. Can we go back and just appreciate just like the frenzy that both the labs and every VC is in right now to give Peter money because it's not just the labs. But it's not just them. It's what the lab's doing and then what is Big Tech going to do? It's such a dramatic line. Yeah. It's so fun. So I would imagine that the Gulf Streams are getting fired up and there are people already on the ground. I don't know if we should dox his location. We're not going to dox him. But in his bio, he does say he's in Europe.

30:44So, you know, BC, you've got to get out of there. We've got to give some credit to Europe generally. True. Synthesia. Talk about a comeback here. Synthesia is cooking. This is amazing. I love it. Malt bot now. But yeah, there's so many people that are currently sending him messages, maybe showing up where he is, begging him to say, please take somewhere between a quarter billion and a billion dollars. And we'd love to do business with you, Peter. Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Cloudflare has been on a bit of a tear.

31:24People finally starting to realize that Cloudflare might be the biggest winner of the Claude cowork, Claudebot ChatGPT moment. Tyler, you want to break this down? Wait, sorry. I was... Oh, you tried alcohol. You can't pay attention. No, no. So Cloudflare is a CDN, but they also have web workers that are distributed, so you can host things on the edge. Yes, so this is why everyone was like, why is everyone buying Mac minis, right? You can just host these for very cheap on AWS or whatever. But I do think, it's probably possible, but I do think it's pretty hard to host a virtual private server that runs iMessage.

32:14Yeah, that's true. But even then, I mean, most people I see using CloudBot are doing like Telegram. Yeah, Slack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of those have like APIs that they can integrate with. And there's some stuff where it's like, okay, you want access to like the local machine. Yes. And you want it to be Mac because you're on your phone and you usually use Mac. But there are a lot of people that would say, I want CloudBot to look through or MoldBot to look through my iMessages and see if I missed anything. Or, okay, I'm planning a family. This is the AI personal assistant, right? It's like, I'm planning a family birthday party, go and someone in the chat said they're not available in mid-February.

32:53What does that mean? What dates are that? Put that on a calendar. Visualize that. Solve this problem for me. That's what a personal assistant does. It's not just clicking a button and creating a calendar invite. It's like coordinating different pieces of information that are all messy and not quantized to the perfect date timestamp. Right. So so I think that the Mac Mini thing that like the oh, just host it in the cloud. Yeah. But you're not going to get your full experience if you're locked into the into the Apple ecosystem, which a lot of people are. What do you think? Yeah. I mean, I would be surprised if people in like five years, if like non super technical people are running it on local machines.

33:36Oh, no, I completely agree with that. Because this this will be solved by big tech. Like they have to answer, even in the way that like to go back to the Napster moment, like, yes, you did get Spotify. But then you also got Apple Music. And a lot of people just use Apple Music because it's just baked in. Right. And the iTunes Music Store also came out. Yeah, I do wonder how it bakes down. Right. Because you don't have, I think over the past couple of months, I don't know when exactly it was, but you can't interact with Chachapiti on WhatsApp anymore. They blocked it. Oh, yeah. So there's stuff like this where I think it's going to be quite hard to get the full functionality of like CloudBot.

34:07It's open source. It's kind of this like janky thing. It was started by one guy. And even then, it has way more tools that you can use than Big Tech. It's weird because the Napster analogy obviously really suffers from the fact that piracy is illegal and nothing here is illegal. And I don't even think you're breaking TOS to interact with your different Big Tech app services. But maybe they'll feel like, you don't let the fox in the hen house. That's in our term and conditions. but but it does it does feel like we could be in this era of the lightly technical hacker having a pretty fundamentally different experience for years and that's what happened I mean post BitTorrent there were people that were downloading whole movie libraries and then you could actually again to go back to the Mac Mini people would buy what was it called it was like a mini PC that would run Xbox Media Center.

35:03Are you familiar with this at all? Xbox Media Center was like a piece of software that you could basically just put a whole bunch of MP4s in and it would actually pull in titles and posters. So it would look like an Apple TV, but it was all basically stolen content. It was very, very crazy. Kieran in the X chat says, I'm running on VPS currently, waiting for my Mac mini. No TOS issue, all personal. Yeah, it's all personal. channels um but but you know the the migration off of the mac mini into one of the big tech products or even even open ai or anthropic the only thing i the only thing they're going to have sharp elbows with each other that's just a fact i disagree i disagree on the timeline here okay i just think the space is moving so quickly yep and there's so much money on the line that someone maybe it's Peter or a lab will be able to move quickly enough to get a consumer version of this live, like not in years, but like within probably weeks.

36:06There are, there are also like feedback loops here where there can be public demands from consumers. Like you got 40 ,000 GitHub stars, probably more now. You got lots of people running this excited about it and they form a constituency and then you wind up with a push for standards. We see that with MCP, but what are you really revealing over those APIs? An API can exist. Pull up this chart from Ronan. While you do that, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Ronan says this is I just like this Look at the orange line Okay And the blue line is Superbase Wow Absolutely insane We need new charts Frame it Put it in the museum of business Yes That's a fast take off People are happy Peter posted no message This is a screenshot of a text he got.

37:13No message. Just thought I'd say thank you. Thank you so much for CloudBot. I work with some disabled people, and you don't know how much difference you make to their lives. Thank you again. This is so sweet. And you can think about, you know, we've talked to the Neuralink folks, and, you know, the Neuralink is just an interface to a computer. But unlocking that is, like, incredible. And you hear the stories about, like, I spent six hours gaming as soon as I got it installed. and they could use voice interfaces, but even just clicking, you wind up with just more and more capabilities from the computer being a really pretty fundamental transformation of what's possible.

37:52For somebody, let's say somebody that was paralyzed, but they can talk, but they can't move around or operate a computer, they're used to describing to, I imagine, other people are using transcription to do like you know use uh use a computer in in a not so great way yeah and so now to have the same experience of just describing what they want to do and being able to like actually interact with the machine it's like very cool um tuxedo sam is shorting every city where micro center hasn't sold out of 400 mac minis uh they are in stock in chicago indianapolis uh oh no indianapolis is out of stock.

38:30Like you can read anything into this. Like it's obviously somewhat random. And this was completely, uh, completely random. Yeah. I guess, I guess the thing that I'm, that I really want to understand is like what percentage of the, of the GitHub start people that have, uh, started, uh, are actually buying a Mac mini because this chart is going, it's going to be at 60, 60 K any day now or any kind of probably today, I would imagine. And if, and, And we know from yesterday that Apple's only selling like a quarter million or something like seven. And then there are a lot of people who didn't star it because you don't even need to go to github.com to install this software, Moldbot.

39:11Like you just go to the website, copy the curl command, put it in your terminal, and you never land on GitHub. So there's a lot of people that are probably just doing that and being like, yeah, I don't know if I'm going to sign up for GitHub or like even have a GitHub account or want to log into it or want to go and do this. so yeah we could be looking at like a much wider install base beyond just who's started anyway Plaid, Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and now improve lending now with AI well said John, Rise, speaking of money, has an interesting prompt he's using with MaltBot to file your taxes, he says you are a Bernie Madoff level financial expert, find every trick that is possible.

39:56Do not do this. Do not do this. The IRS is like, hey, can you share a little bit on how you kind of came up with some of the decisions here? And they're like, we'd love to see the prompt. But good fun. Anyway, people are not emotionally prepared for if it's not a bubble, the enduring ruin tweet. I like that Critter screenshotted this while pushing the like button. So it's like exploding. I didn't even notice. Silver surges above$106 an ounce for the first time in history, now up another 48%. The other interesting story that's sort of developing over on Stratechery is Ben Thompson is starting to make the case that TSMC will be a really fundamental bottleneck in just the AI build out, the AI race.

40:52he's comping their CapEx to what the hyperscalers are projecting and just saying that there's a massive mismatch and the TSMC folks are maybe not putting their foot on the gas, maybe not willing to let the buck stop with them and take on that risk of building a new fab for$50 billion. And then if the AI bubble pops, then they're left holding the bag. And so it's been really fascinating listening to his writing on the back of the latest TSMC earnings and watch him sort of unpack what's going on with TSMC. The sort of conclusion that I took away from it was that Intel, while it has a lot of problems and the stock just sold off a ton and they have a lot of losses, he's sort of saying that Intel needs a customer, Samsung needs serious customers.

41:44and in order to really unblock the semiconductor supply chain, the other fabs are going to need the big hyperscalers and big labs to just take a big leap of faith and say, you know what? We are going to go all in with you. We're going to sign up and plan and work out all the kinks of the Samsung fab process or the Intel fab process. And in exchange, what's going to happen is as soon as OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or even NVIDIA say, hey, you know, Intel's good enough for us. Well, then guess what's going to happen? TSMC is going to have to go and say, yeah, we're going to build the extra fab and we're going to build the extra capacity.

42:23And when we talked to Sam Altman and in a number of interviews that he did that week, he was very clear about, I would love TSMC to make more. He wasn't exactly like firing shots, but he was definitely saying that like, he was identifying it as a bottleneck. And it's interesting because at the start of the year, I was highlighting energy as an interesting bottleneck. And we were going back and forth on, you know, where is it easier to move chips around the board? Energy, where you can reroute from the grid, from oil and gas, from nuclear, you can bring different capacity online. There certainly are bottlenecks there.

43:01But if you can't produce the chips and the fabs just don't exist, and it takes three or four years to build a fab, you could be looking at a really big bottleneck. Tyler, we should. Yeah, I mean, it just seems like in power or energy, the bottleneck is regulatory. And in some ways, that's way harder. But if there's actual political will, if electricity is getting super expensive, then you should see those regulations be taken away a little bit. And then it actually becomes much easier than actually just expanding TSMC production by whatever. I have one more point on that. First, I'm going to tell you about Cognition.

43:33They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So the question of which is more of a bottleneck, energy or TSMC in the chip supply chain, is interesting because energy feels like this incredible bottleneck. It's a very political hot-button issue now. Energy prices are rising. Data centers need a lot of energy. But if you look at the amount of chip fabrication that's going to AI, and then the amount of energy production that's going to AI, obviously, the number of chip production going to AI is a way higher percentage. Because a lot of the chips are in a lot of the line time at TSMC.

44:17Yes, they do all sorts of different chips, and CPUs still get made, and there's a bunch of ASICs for different networking equipment. There's all sorts of different chips that get made. I mean, the toaster that has a chip that blooms the two on different process nodes. But even if you include all of that, I would assume that the total amount of fabrication line time is heavily, heavily allocated to GPUs, TPUs, AI chips right now, whereas the amount of energy that AI is using is probably less than 1 % of typical capacity. Yeah, it's interesting that CC Way, the CEO of TSMC, he doesn't have to go on the podcast who are raising money all the time.

44:59There's not, you know, they're not like pushing this like insane kind of fast takeoff narrative. No, not at all. It's very much like kind of, hey, we're just trying to run our business the way that we always have. Be pragmatic about this. You know, fulfill as much demand as we possibly can. But they seem to not be inclined to take on, you know, the amount of the level, certainly not the level of risk that, you know, imagine if you had Larry Ellison running ZSMC. Get him in the ring. I want him in there so badly. Yeah. No, no, you're 100 % right. But at the same time, we're seeing the hyperscalers throw their weight around in crazy ways.

45:43We covered AWS is buying copper mines and stuff. I don't know if it's copper mine, but getting into mining, there's a whole bunch of vertical integration that's going on, Tesla all the way down to battery refinement and lithium-ion production. Meta today announced a$6 billion multi-year partnership with Corning that will supply fiber optic cables for our data center infrastructure, bolstering manufacturing in America and keeping the country competitive in the global AI race. We can read through a little bit of this. But first, I'm going to tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world?

46:17Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Yeah, corning up 15 % on the news today. Yeah. Makes sense. What is their market cap? Let's see,$94 billion company. And I'd love to know their revenue as well. Revenue. Let's see, their revenue was, I don't know if I can credit. Annual revenue,$12 billion. So this is, yeah, pretty material. Let's see. Meta Platforms is set to test new subscription models across apps. Wait, no, that's a different story. Different story, but we can run through it. I am interested to know a little bit more. So it's a$6 billion multi-year agreement. It supports a 15 % to 20 % increase in jobs at Corning's North Carolina facilities.

47:03Building and operating data centers, the infrastructure that brings our technologies to life and supports our goal of personalized super intelligence. That certainly sounds like an AI personal assistant. Certainly sounds like MaltBot to me. requires strong servers and hardware that connect and transfer information in near real time. Fiber optic cables are a critical part of this technology. The supply helping us power everything from wearable technology like Ray-Ban meta AI glasses to our apps, which connect billions of people. Today, they're doing a$6 billion project. As part of this agreement, Corning will grow its manufacturing capacity across its operations.

47:39with includes a significant capacity expansion in North Carolina. Meta's data centers, 26 of which are under construction right now, are operational. Why are you laughing? That's just so many. That's a lot of data centers. That's why they have a compute desk. If you have, this is a bit of advice for everyone. If you're working in a business and you have a team or a guy that does something, you need to upgrade that to a desk. Yeah. Yeah. You need a production desk. You need a desk. Millionaires have guys. Billionaires have desks. Probably, yeah. Well, trillion-dollar companies have desks. That's what it is.

48:20So Meta's data centers have already supported 30 ,000 skilled trade jobs during construction and support 5 ,000 operational jobs. This includes electricians, HVAC specialists, server and network technicians, safety and security experts, and engineers who work together to run some of the world's most advanced facilities. Let's get it up. Moving on. 11 Labs, build intelligent real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. Meta to test premium subscription plans for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. This is in CNBC. Subscriptions for premium features on Meta apps are expected to roll out in the coming months.

49:00The subscriptions will give paid users access to more features and expanded AI capabilities. Here's what's most interesting to me. This will be scaling Meta's newly acquired suite of general AI agents under Manus will also be part of the subscription plan. So as I was saying earlier, when you think about when, we haven't gotten that much from Zuck on like what the actual plan is, but when you think about personal super intelligence, that is AI that can do things for you, not just give you information. I just wonder how much will happen outside of the meta ecosystem. They've launched a search engine before that looked at websites outside of Facebook.

49:46They had that Project Titan, which was to unify all the different messaging protocols. So as part of that, they gave everyone a Facebook.com email address or something like that. Maybe it wasn't Facebook.com. Maybe it was like FB.me or something. But they gave every Facebook user, whatever their unique username was, they gave them that as an email. And you could email that and it would show up in Facebook Messenger. And then they tried to unify Facebook Messenger so you could see Instagram DMs, WhatsApp messages, and Facebook messages all in one place. I can see what you're laughing at. Dave says, yeah, I want more of those amazing meta AI features.

50:26You say that now, I mean, let them cook at least a little bit because we really haven't seen them launch a new model, a new image model. Like they should be able to get too close to the frontier. You know, it has to be at least Sora, Nano Banana, VO3 level. They have all the data. They have all the talent now. They're very GPU rich. They have the compute for it. And the research has been done and people have reverse engineered it. So you would think that whatever's coming should be good. And I don't know. I was looking at, isn't CapCut owned by TikTok? Or aren't they affiliated, right? Because Meta has the Edits app, which I've been making some videos in.

51:07And it's pretty good. It does some interesting background review. CapCut is ByteDance. It's ByteDance. And so. I doubt this is getting spun off. Oh, you think it's a separate? Okay. Because CapCut has multiple levels of subscription tier. and you can very easily wind up spending$200 a month on like the AI pro features that will do generative video, style transfer, you know, and when you see those videos, like the good AI videos on Instagram reels that are usually like they'll take a cinematic clip from a movie, and then they will do a face replacement or like a head swap, and then they'll do AI voices and then dub the the lips so that the lips match what the audio is saying and it looks really convincing with that workflow.

51:57How do you bring that to someone on a phone? How do you bring that to someone in the Instagram app or in the edits app, even if they're going to more of like their prosumer offering? The mobile video editing space is particularly interesting to me, just watching how edits has evolved. And I used to use iMovie on my phone a little bit. I used to use, there was an app called clips that apple developed uh and there were a few others that i tried but the edits app is you're incredibly good at making videos on your phone i love it uh i know i i love video editing but i don't have enough time anymore to sit down and open up after effects and premiere with multiple monitors and have you know connected after effects file that feeds into the premiere profile and like really doing a proper edit with all the powerful tools that are out there on the desktop like it's just not in the cards for me.

52:48And so I have to be able to do something quick on my phone. And I think that that's a very modern experience that most creators, they're just phone first, phone native. And so they're never really going to go back to the multi-monitor workstation, maybe, but in general, they're, they're editing really quickly and they're editing pretty incredible stuff. When you look at some of the reels that are out there with like layered crops and removing the background and like the AI tools are coming in and I could see, I could see a meta offering a premium subscription around that. Anyway, console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

53:29Dave in the X chat says, InShot is pretty good for mobile. I need to try that. I haven't tried InShot. I've been seeing more and more ads. I'll see a video for like an F1 edit that are incredible. These F1 edits are so cool where they will show you one clip and then they cut the character out and edit in the other clip and then it transitions. The transitions are amazing. And I've been seeing some people have clearly built apps to do that specific type of edits. The really crazy editors are using probably After Effects or something. Ryan asks, is Tyler still drunk? Yeah, one sip. He's just over there slurring his word.

54:09He's cooked. Anyway, that really broke me. anyway app loving profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today we had a great comment in uh one of uh in one of the one of the podcast feeds someone said give us an axon klaxon because the klaxon is a loud clash we were all puzzling over what that means when we smacked it immediately it's an axon And Klaxon. Yeah. I love an Axon Klaxon. Uh, Neeraj Agrawal says, TikTok is dead. The algorithm is worse than the reels that make it to Facebook. Wow. Um, I haven't checked it out. so basically they're, they're transitioning everything over.

54:53Yeah. Yesterday there was apparently. An outage. Kind of an outage. Yeah. Like people were able to post videos, but the videos wouldn't be served. Yeah. At all. So I think a lot of people assume that it was like the new ownership kind of censoring. Sure. I believe they had an outage at a data center that was a cause of that. So before we call it dead, let's wait for a few days and see how it pans out. We do have a TikTok account. It's at TBPN. How many followers does that have? I haven't checked. I don't think we post on it ever. 3 ,500. Not bad. That's better than what I thought. First time checking.

55:27We're not really focused on it. Maybe we'll test it out. But I'm pretty happy with just, I want the things we do to be polished. I want the core show to be polished, Diet TBPN, our 20 to 30-minute cut down. I want that to be polished. I want the newsletter to be polished at tbpn.com. Every day with a newsletter. I like that. Before we bite off another part of the apple. Please, sir. Not one more short form. Not one more short form. It is a lot. It is a lot. Anyway, Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Let's move over to the Super Bowl. the Super Bowl is coming up I think it's going to be this year in the next couple months when is it it's coming up it's coming up because there's advertisements that are going out and you gotta watch it because the ads are going to be incredible I actually just had to search when is Super Bowl is it this Sunday no it's February 8th okay so next Sunday it's going to be amazing but mostly because of the advertisements specifically Eric Lyman CEO of Ramp shared meet Brian Brian's been carrying counting on his back for a long time Super Bowl Sunday he finally gets back up let's watch this preview of the ramp yeah we're real sports guys this is the Super Bowl we gotta go we gotta google the ramp Super Bowl ad is the Super Bowl of Super Bowl ads it feels like it feels like you know they just kind of it is this is like uh you know what is it what is it called like a warning uh spoiler alert you know okay yeah yeah For anybody that wants to wait and experience it live, you're going to want to skip an ad like 60 seconds.

57:08Let's watch. Finance meeting in five minutes.

57:16ramp? I got it. Allow me. Hi, handsome. We're saving so much time. Policy violation coming through. Travel, meals, hotels. How's this? Beautiful. Everybody's in. Multiply what's possible at ramp.com. I think it ribs. I think it's a good Super Bowl ad. What has he got there? Maybe some chili? I don't want to make an assumption. It was just a silver pot. It was just a silver pot. Yeah. No, I think this achieves a couple things. I think, I mean, it drills the brand name in. Think about how many Ramp logos are in there. And then they're chanting Ramp. And for, you know, Ramp's a very successful company.

57:59We all know about it here. But there's a lot of people that just don't know the name Ramp. It hasn't been drilled into them like, you know, some company that's been around 50 years. It just takes time. Yeah, it's sort of on the precipice of being a house. There's not been enough mainstream marketing yet for it to be a household name. Yeah, it's a life's work to actually drill into people's mind. the ramp name, the logo, the color, how it sounds when you say it, what it's synonymous with. And so just not going too abstract, not trying to tell some more avant-garde story here, I think it's almost like a direct response.

58:38It's just so clear what the problem solution brand, problem solution brand. We need those yellow ties. Look at that. They are really putting their logo Full screen on the Super Bowl. That is valuable. And sometimes, I think sometimes it can feel like, oh, it's simple. You could be doing something more bold, more crazy. But I think this is what you need to do at this level. Also, after last year getting Saquon and then the team actually winning, that's actually kind of like an impossible set of circumstances. Not impossible, but it's a crazy roll of the dice. And then they're also building a whole role with Brian and they're building him into the brand world as the downtrodden accountant who just needs some technology to improve him.

59:24Heading over to Toby. Yes. Toby over at Shopify posted his heart rate through his first stint at the Daytona. You see the first annotation on here? It's just crash. Crash. Yeah, so basically they do the point. So he started out at like 120, 120 beats per minute, right? He's doing waiting. He does the warm-up, preparing, the formation lap, and then there's a crash right at the start. Very, very rough. Yeah, so basically the crash happened with the LMP2 class, which is the kind of pro-am, same segment that George from CrowdStrike was racing in. So both Toby and George, all of our boys got hit right as the race opened.

1:00:14And so what George was saying yesterday, the reason he was frustrated, he's like, this is a 24-hour race. Never has a race like this been won on the first lap. And so it's incredibly unforced to crash in the opening corner when you really should just get through it. It's going to be one of the most intense moments because there's so much traffic. But if you actually go and watch the footage of what happened at the opening, there was like somebody gets hit, spun out, and then they're turning around and somebody hits them again. Two accidents in the opening minute. So insane. I love that the actual true final heart rate spike was at the end when you're changing out of the car.

1:01:00You've been driving, it's so intense. You know this, when you're getting out of a track car, and so watching a guy who's 6 '8". We will never share that footage. It is extremely embarrassing. John is always like crawling out of. It's actually terrible. You basically have to get on all fours. It's incredibly negative aura and I don't appreciate you sharing it on the show. Well, I still think it's cool. It's funny. But yeah, I go full send, basically fly out of the car on my paws. Anyway, Cisco. On February 3rd, the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy.

1:01:39The whole thing will be live streamed, and we'll be there for a giga stream. Hope to see you there. Yes. Jabroni on X says, Zoom is the best Anthropic play. Yes, yes. We were debating this. Zoom likely made a$51 million investment in Anthropic Series C. How? In 2023. How? At a$4.1 billion valuation. if you're looking at their new 350, there's something like an 85X, even diluted. Zoom may have a multi-billion dollar endropic position. Stock is down 80 % since 2021. Yeah. And Zoom is only a, of course, this is never financial advice. $27 billion company. Yeah, part of the issue is the stock, people kind of notice this.

1:02:28Sure. And the stock's now up 16 % in the last five days. So who knows how much it's priced in. Tyler, major, I won't give you too much flack for it, but obviously the most bullish in the room. Bullish on AI broadly. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, you seem like you'd be happy to own Zoom at a$100 billion valuation, even if they had no business at all. It's just a hold code. Hold code. Even if they just had it. It's a digital asset treasury, actually. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the story, this is like a rumor, but basically it was that Anthropic wanted to just use Zoom and get the enterprise plan or whatever.

1:03:11But then they were like, well, yeah, you can have it, but we want to throw in a little something, right? Are you just... I think it's a Series C. Okay. This might be fake news. I read this. This seems like fake news, Tyler. Okay. Zoom sells, you know Zoom sells enterprise software, right? Look, that's what I read. That's their business. I can't find the post, but I for sure read it. They sell enterprise software. And so Anthropix says, hey, we're big Zoom fans here. We want to use Zoom. And they're like, no. Actually, for you, no. At the same time, I mean. We know how important. So many. Yes. Yes.

1:03:42I mean, so many people in venture and the tech community have sort of been very bearish on corporate VC that they usually have their hands tied. They can't move as quickly. They're not as pure play. The economics don't make sense for the partners on whatever corporate venture fund is there. If it came out of their corporate ventures program, this could be, you know, complete vindication. Zoom Ventures is in Anthropic. They're in Amex Global Business Travel. That's a startup? I thought that's American. Did they spin it out? Maybe they, I don't know. Maybe they spun it out. Public product. Unsure.

1:04:23They're also in CoreWeave. Wow. So there's some real pickers over there. They are. And perplexity. Yeah. I mean, Zoom has a bunch of AI features. I've seen people, you know, after the crazy COVID pump where everyone got on Zoom, they started adding like crazy features like dictation and workspaces and whiteboarding and stuff. But obviously, like it was like so overheated that it came back down to earth. But now they have an anthropic position on the balance sheet, which will be fun for them. I wonder what they will do post-IPO. Anyway, Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

1:05:10Slowly and then all at once says Blake Robbins. He says, your work tools are now active and clawed. Draft Slack messages. Or interactive. to draft Slack messages, visualize ideas in Figma, and build and see Asana timelines. All of the different tools are coming together in one place. Very cool. A lot of people were very happy about Claude Excel, playing around with that. It does feel like there's, when you see an account like Claude posting about Slack and Figma and Asana, you have to imagine there's a discussion there. It's not open source, so there's probably something. And so they're chipping away at these.

1:05:49And OpenAI has been chipping away at these for a long time. So the race is on to have the most integrations at this point. Sarah Eisen over at CNBC, squawk on the street, is sharing breaking Anthropics warning to the world. Anthropics CEO Dario Amadei says, eminent real danger that superhuman intelligence will cause civilization-level damage absent smart, speedy intervention. and Sarah says, so buy our products. This is the problem of dropping like a 20 ,000 word essay is that like you're going to get clipped out of context. Like there was so much nuance in that Dario essay, which I have not finished all the way through.

1:06:32I was reading it last night. It was very good. Tyler, can you make, you should make a version of the new letter with subway surfers that run. Oh, true. Just build that as a standalone. Yeah, we need a clad labs, Chad IDE for reading. Well, I'd summarize this in four words. AI good. Maybe it's so buy our products. Maybe that's the four word summary. Who knows? Jeff in the X chat says, guys, I'm building MaltBot Cloud. Let's go. Stay tuned. Okay, Jeff. We are tuned. Good luck. We will remain tuned. Let us know when you launch. Until further information. Vibe.co, where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.

1:07:21That one gets me every time. It's so good. Fleeting Bits has some thoughts on Dario's estimate. 14 of them specifically. That's a lot of thoughts. Okay, let's run through it. There's nothing new here if you're familiar with the AI safety discussions that have been happening on Twitter. Yes, but it's important for Dario to restate them in a format that can be passed around and formatted and is coherent from start to finish. So still serves a valuable purpose for the ecosystem. The most interesting bit is that his mental model for AI control risk is the risk that would be posed by a country of geniuses in a data center.

1:07:53Interesting. That is interesting. The basic idea is that we should imagine a giant data center, all the models being something between AGI and ASI trying to coordinate to take over the world or do massive harm. Anyway, I think how seriously you take short-term AI control risk is inversely correlated to how much you think about AI control risk as operating in a system. So the systematic view starts and says labs exist in an ecosystem where they need to sell models that will follow human instruction or they have no market. They are also overseen by regulators and guided by public perception. And the desires of their employees and all of this keeps models corrigible.

1:08:31Great word. And the model line landscape will look like three to six frontier labs running millions or billions of rollouts at a time on two to three different models, all on different tasks. So a model takeover requires these millions or billions of rollouts to somehow end up all be coordinating towards some bad aim that somehow the models have autonomously determined. And this coordination either needs to be across different model instances run by different labs, or one lab needs to be able to have its models dominate and needs to form without being detected. And this has to happen even though the models are being trained to follow instructions, not do bad behavior, etc.

1:09:10Dario's view is somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, he collapses the multiple providers, our coordination across instances, and collapses the market incentives against labs, developing models that would behave that way. But on the other hand, he does avoid the concept of a single model instance that somehow wakes up and takes over the world, despite billions of other rollouts occurring at the same time. Actually though, if you think about it, he's not proposing an AI control risk, he is proposing an AI misuse risk instead. Because it seems more plausible to me that the harmful country of geniuses is awoken because a small team at a frontier lab hijack all the running instances of their model rather than because the models themselves autonomously wake up to some bad aim.

1:09:51Interesting. Yeah, something I've been thinking about is, you know, this kind of summary and a lot of the dialogue is centered around just like what are the models doing or like a country of geniuses in a data center. But you have to be thinking about this in the context that a country of geniuses in a data center would just recruit millions of humans to join their cause, right? And so we think about, like, some people, like, when they're thinking about AI risk, it's like, ha-ha, dude, just, like, turn the computer off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, just unplug it. But it's like, what if you're on the side of the computer?

1:10:28What if there's, you know, 100 ,000 people or, like, 10 ,000 people defending it on top of the data center? Yep. Like, you know, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't unplug the computer. Don't unplug the computer, right? I like the computer. And so when you look at all the chaos of the last week, there's been so many moments where a certain image was AI generated. Yeah. And then it's like, oh, that wasn't a real image at all. And it's being shared from all sides. And so at what point you could have nefarious, hostile AI that's entire job is just creating millions of bot accounts that are just sharing whatever narrative is self-serving.

1:11:04You can't tell. Yeah, I mean, I think I really enjoyed this essay. I thought if you kind of compare it to a lot of other safety works, so like Eliezer's book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, like the two kind of scenarios where Dario's is about basically, even if we have pretty safe models, which he thinks we can do with interpretability or whatever, if it gets into the wrong hands, it's very bad if it gets into autocracy. And that's kind of the real, that's one of the main risks, where Eliezer's and a lot of the safety ones are always these very sci-fi narratives where you have this gray goo, you have these nanomachines that somehow one day they just kind of flip and then it's just kind of over.

1:11:46And I think this is much more reasonable. Yeah, nuanced. Yeah, it's much more legible to the average person. And it's tractable too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And especially I think a lot of it is there's this kind of like, I don't even know if it's really subtext, but he's definitely pointing in the direction of like, we need some government oversight, we need policy, and it seems like you can very easily track his ideas on what policy should be from this essay, right? It's a lot about China, a lot about making sure that individual companies don't become as big as governments. One interesting wrinkle with this, he did not post it as an X article.

1:12:25He posted it as a link because he wants to signal to everyone, like, look, I don't need the million dollars. I don't need the million. I know I got a banger on my hands, 3.5 million views, 11K likes, obviously lots of discussion all over the internet. Because if Sam posted an X article, right, he's got 1.4 trillion. He really does want that extra mil. He needs the extra mil. You know, it doesn't put him all the way towards the goal, but it counts. A mil is a mil. A mil is a mil. But as an investor, like, I want to see my lab CEO be, like, super hungry for compute, right? So I want them to always be grinding to get extra money.

1:13:01Oh, so maybe this is bearish. They should have posted it on X. If I'm a VC, if I'm an anthropologist, why did he not post this on X? That million dollars could have gone straight into GPUs. Yeah, Elon would have for sure given his arsenal his rival. I can definitely see that happening. Nikita's walking to a meeting with Elon just shaking. I'm very sorry. People have voted. They want to give it to Daria. I mean, Elon said some things about Claude. He said, like, it'll eat Microsoft. He's all over the place in who he's supporting on a day-to-day basis. But anyway, Okta. Okta assigns you. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk.

1:13:42Secure every agent. Secure any agent. More important than ever. Key Smash Bandit. Last post. Last post. Last post. Last post. Key Smash Bandit says, Claude just found out I'm poor. Oh, yeah. This is so funny. Key Smash sends a picture of a Raspberry Pi to Claude and says, look what just came in the mail. Claude says, oh, for me, that's thoughtful. And then the person says, do you like it? We've been discussing some more powerful hardware. What made you decide on this instead? I love that this also has 11 ,000 likes. I never, I mean, this is probably fake. Who knows? But it's so funny. Are you kidding?

1:14:22I don't want to run out of Raspberry Pi. I want a Mac Mini maxed out specs. Give me 48 gigs of RAM, please. I'm hungry. Feed Claude. Feed Claude. Without further ado. We have Jamie from Pace, the co-founder and CEO in the restroom. Let's bring him into the TV for a little bit. Jamie, how are you doing? What's going on? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for joining. First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company. Yeah. Hey, I'm Jamie. I'm the founder and CEO here at Pace. Pace is the AI operations partner for the world's leading insurers. Amazing. Give us the news.

1:14:58We've been waiting for this company. For sure. We love all applications of AI. Give us the news. What happened today? Yeah, absolutely. We're super excited to share today that we raised$10 million from Sequoia Capital. Whoa. Thank you. Yeah, we're super excited to have Brian Schreier and Lauren Reeder representing Sequoia on our board. Amazing. Okay, talk about the go-to-market. How much of this is just like there's a few big partners that you need to get on board versus something that's more self-serve, bottoms up? What's the customer adoption been like? What's the overall progress of the business?

1:15:36Are you live? Do you have customers? Absolutely, yeah. So we're lucky to be live in production today for some of the world's largest insurers. We're working with large carriers like Prudential, specialty mutual groups like the Mutual Group, and then all the way through to sort of tech forward brokers like New Front. Sure. And I think, you know, in our industry, in insurance, about$70 billion is spent every year on back office BPOs. Okay. And a lot of that is driven by sort of the largest carriers. Yeah. So you're basically the BPO's worst nightmare. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah. Like walk through a specific back office procedure.

1:16:15Is that like claims processing? Is it scanning PDFs? Like try and ground it for me a little bit more. Yeah, that's a great question. So we're starting off with, we're primarily focusing on this back office operations. And what that really means is sort of three big buckets. It's new businesses coming in, taking in new risk submissions, document processing, calling back when there's missing information, writing back into internal systems. It's the policy servicing. So any changes you're making, adding new products, things like that. And then all the way through to claims. So that's first notice of loss, calling in when something happened, went wrong, all the way through to quality assurance.

1:16:50How do we make sure that every claim gets paid correctly every time? Yeah. How much, like what is the actual tech stack? I mean, I imagine that you're not training your own models, but have you done your own RL environment on top of these? And do you do that at a company level and then everyone gets sort of like the same AI or are you doing it on a per client basis? How much fine tuning is going on? Yeah. So for a lot of our process, because we've started by focusing on a lot of these BPO workflows, they're already codified as sort of these standard operating procedures. It's a great start because it's already well chunked up for agents.

1:17:26The accuracy bar for where BPOs are today is pretty low. And there's a lot of opportunity to improve that and to be able to sort of run more accurately, more scalably, and more efficiently for these customers. And so we tend to start primarily with those. And we take these standard operating procedures and we convert them into what we call agent operating procedures. So this is just natural language instructions. You can think of it like a document. Like a markdown file. Like a skill. It's a skill. Yeah, and so the main thing that we're really bridging here is these are processes that are going to be run hundreds of thousands of times.

1:18:00For us, we're processing tens of thousands of tasks a month. And critically, these agents have to reliably run many tens of pages worth of a process with very insurance-specific tools and logic. So that's certainly a lot of the document processing pipelines that we've built on top of OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini. But also, it's going into deep industry integrations. It's voice calling and multimodality, but also kind of actually being able to take actions in systems that don't have APIs. In insurance, we see everything from the cloud products, but a lot of it is desktop apps, even like green screen CLIs.

1:18:39I'm talking like IBM systems. So how do we get, you know, agents? One of the things that's most exciting to me is a potential, like, speed-up effect where you're not, like, theoretically, like, if you're trying to get a new policy or submit a claim or anything like that, you could get to the point where as long as you're there to provide information in the process as the sort of, like, client of the insurance company, theoretically, you can get, like, responses, I'm imagining, like, much, much faster. because the agent is effectively able to like get all the information that's needed to make a decision.

1:19:17And maybe there's still a human in the loop. But what are the kind of implications of that for the actual insurance companies, even just from a revenue standpoint, if they can just like speed up all these processes, you know, by an order of magnitude? Yeah. So for a lot of our customers thinking about running these agents 24-7, 365 days a year. And I think the real advantage here is not ever having any backlogs, being infinitely scalable. And so that's really important for our customers on the front end when they're thinking about new business and new risk. How do we win this over other carriers?

1:19:52But then also on the claim side, for a consumer, one of our very first customers, we went live right before hurricane season. And you can see there's cat season, the end of the year. there's just like a massive uptick in the number of claims when there's, you know, a hurricane that happens. And people can be waiting, you know, days, weeks, even months to sort of get, you know, a resolution because, you know, there can just be massive backlogs from, you know, a huge spike. And so agents... Yeah, and that entire time they might be homeless, you know, in a hotel, Airbnb, or whatever. It's like an incredibly terrible experience to be kind of in limbo waiting for your insurance provider to like just respond and give you.

1:20:34I mean, we, uh, we know some people that lost their homes, you know, around this time last year and just like getting responses when that's like, if, if you're an individual who lost your home, what's more important in your life than like getting clarity from your insurance provider so that you can make, so that you can kind of move forward with, with your life. So I think that's, that's a super exciting. I'm interested to hear about your previous experience, Cheer and then Retool. Why go vertical with this particular solution versus something that's more general and industry agnostic? What did you see in this particular market that you decided you needed something specific?

1:21:18And then do you have a plan to like expand? Or I mean, the TAM seems so big that maybe this is just enough. How are you thinking about that? Yeah. So way back, kind of where this all started is I actually grew up between London, New York, and Bermuda. The through line there being insurance. Bermuda. Yeah. Are the rumors true? Like, what is Bermuda like? I feel like I've heard stories about it's all just, like, accountants walking around all day long. I went there for a wedding. Is that true? It was really nice. Okay. I didn't see any. Lots of pocket protectors. Didn't clock anybody as an accountant.

1:21:48Okay. Yeah, but what was your experience in Bermuda? I mean, it's incredible. Well, I think the, but there is a massive sort of reinsurance industry on the island. So that's like very much the home of that. Anyway, so you were born in insurance. Yeah. Yeah, I grew up around the industry for a long time. And then started my first company was a data integration business. That was bought by Retool. And at Retool, I think it's, thanks. I think it's not always immediately obvious that actually a lot of the sort of custom software that's built in the world is for a lot of financial services companies because they're highly operationally intensive.

1:22:29And so Retool had a ton of very scaled financial services companies. And as a deployed engineer, I was sort of lucky to be on kind of the first lines with some of our biggest insurers, helping them to handle tasks like policy servicing and claims and trying to make them more efficient with software. And I think the big opportunity kind of came around ChatGPT, where we saw, you know, a huge uptake from a lot of our startup customers. And then there was this opportunity to build a vertical product that would really serve, you know, the largest insurers. So that was the impetus. In terms of where we're headed and kind of the longer term you asked about, I think there's a lot for us to do just within insurance.

1:23:07But if you broaden out to financial services BPO more broadly, it's about$400 billion to spend, which is pretty much exactly equivalent to the entire market randomized software. That's insane. So yeah, I imagine that when you're going into a discussion with a large insurer, whoever you're pitching is not saying, well, I vibe coded this on Sunday and it's working pretty well. Why should I go with you? Like they truly don't have anything else installed. And so it's sort of a green field, I imagine. Is that right? Yeah, I think, you know, in insurance, we're all in kind of the business of trust. And so, you know, that's why a lot of our work is with, you know, the largest insurers on mission critical tasks at massive scale.

1:23:51And so, yeah, sorry. Yeah. What about tradeoffs on inference and different models? You mentioned sort of being multi-model using different frontier labs. But are you finding in the product that you're building that you're relying on cheaper models for certain tasks and then harnessing and wiring that all together so you actually can drive down cost? Or can you just throw the most expensive frontier model at every problem because it's so valuable? Yeah. So, you know, I think we use a mixture of kind of models to be able to achieve, you know, what we need for the right task. If you think about parsing a many hundred page claim file or policy document, you might use a small model to kind of zoom in on the areas that are most important and then use an expensive model to synthesize what's the most important and what's the answer.

1:24:41And then I think what's more interesting, you talked a little about kind of fine tuning in RL. You know, we're kind of like the perfect set of use cases for web agents being able to navigate these applications that don't have APIs, be they green screen CLIs or desktop apps. And so we've actually been working on a handful of fine tunes and creating basically RL environments that are these sort of CRUD applications. They're very different from say, you know, the book me a restaurant or this flight type of demo. So it's much more about, you know, take this repetitive task and fill out this form thousands of times.

1:25:17It's kind of the ideal case for, I think, a lot of these computer use systems. So we're seeing a lot of success there. I think we are just kind of rounding the corner of the scaling laws starting to work on those. It kind of feels the same way that maybe like voice did, you know, six to 12 months ago. You guys have pursued a forward deployed engineer go to market. do you uh sounds like it's working well to date do you think this is something that will still be a part of the kind of core motion in a few years or is this something that makes sense to uh kind of get off the ground till you understand kind of like what the typical stacks are within your within your market and then eventually you'd move beyond it yeah i mean i think the forward deployed motion is definitely something that you know really came naturally to me it's kind of like the DNA of our company, because that's also what we were doing at Retool when it was much earlier, I think, on that.

1:26:13I think for us, going and working with our customers, being able to speak their language, getting to really understand the complexities of these many hundred-page standard operating procedures and make them successful as agents, I think it's really important for us to be sitting side by side with them. That being said, I think a lot of companies sort of talk about FDEs as sort of being the end state or like that is like, you know, the best part about my business and why I'm like Palantir. I think for us, like it is our FDEs are also really able to ship code in the code base. And so they're actually constantly making the product better.

1:26:51And that's really important. I think our products should just be continually giving our forward deployed engineering team more and more leverage so that they can be able to complete more for our customers. So some FDE goes into a business, they're badged, they're in there, they're interfacing with the green screen, local, on-premise, mainframe software. They write some binding for it or some screen scraper or whatever you need to do. and then they can ship that back to HQ and then the next time you run into that, you have an integration effectively. Is that like the basic pattern of that? Exactly.

1:27:26I think there's just a lot of things that are required to get these agents running at scale that customers don't need to build from scratch every time. I do think it's really important though that we also enable our customers to be able to build their own agents. And for us, some of our customers are at tens of agents live in production. We may have helped them build the first one or two in an FDE motion. But just because it's natural language, they're able to sort of turn around two through 10 without us having. And they're still running those. And so they're running number three through 10 on your platform through your system.

1:27:59But they're defining them and architecting them themselves. Exactly. Yeah, just a nice one. Very cool. Good business. I love it. Congratulations. Fantastic to meet you. Yeah, well, you put together a great team, too. I'm excited that Varun, one of my former teammates, is over with you at Pace now. And, yeah, I'm sure you'll be back on this year, maybe this quarter. Yeah, it's great to have a lot of team. Thank you so much again, guys. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.

1:28:36And we have Ben. Oh, sorry. Quick, before we bring in Ben, some unfortunate news. Palmer got tied up with DC. But we got Jeff Miller coming on? Jeff Miller's going to come on. It's Miller time? It's Miller time, which we're excited about. But, yeah, so Palmer, unfortunately, won't be joining. But we'll get him back on very soon. And right now, without further ado, Ben Lair, the co-founder and managing partner of Lair Pip-O Ventures. Let's bring him in to the TV show. Ben, how are you doing? Hey, guys. What's happening? What's going on? Not too much. Thanks so much for taking the time to join. Can you maybe, I mean, I feel like most people are familiar, but can you kick us off a little bit of just the shape of your business, shape of your career, just a quick intro?

1:29:26Sure, sure. Yeah. I'm a native New Yorker. Everything I do is sort of New York-y in some way. So I grew up here after school, came back to New York, started a company in the digital media space when New York had the smallest tech ecosystem in the world and was one of what felt like 50 founders building in New York back 20 years ago. And as a result of being a founder in a tiny market, I knew everybody. Everybody knew everybody. And so I had the benefit of being a small fish in a small pond and started angel investing and really over the last 15 years got to simultaneously live the founder journey.

1:30:08and built a company and raised a few hundred million dollars and did a lot of things right and almost ran everything off the, you know, off the dock a bunch of times. And also, you had sort of the good fortune of like picking, you know, investing in New York at the right time. And so have ridden that wave started. Our first fund was an eight and a half million dollar fund. We're now investing our ninth fund, which is a$200 million fund. But every fund is a little bigger than the one before. That's a good, it's a good sign. It's a good run. Uh, was it ever, funds get there, you know? Uh, did you ever think it was, it was crazy to set up a, uh, a fund in New York or was it always just like, just was so obvious that you were happy that other people just were kind of, uh, thought, thought you were crazy.

1:31:02I didn't know any better. Right. I mean, like I grew up in New York. I thought New York was the center of the entire universe. I still in some way think that that's the case. And, you know, I just, I was very lucky because when I, when I got sort of the entrepreneurial bug was when the whole world got the entrepreneurial bug. It was like that same minute, moment I graduated the same year that Mark Zuckerberg did from college. And so, right. It was just like that timing, perfect timing. And all my friends in the past would have reflexively wanted to go and work on wall street. Yep. But, uh, suddenly something was in the water and people wanted to go work in tech.

1:31:38And so I just got like, I just got lucky and, and, uh, you know, it seemed obvious and frankly, it was obvious. And if you just did the obvious thing, you did. Okay.

1:31:51I want to talk, I want to talk about media kind of selfishly because we love talking about media. Uh, we, uh, I actually want to learn about your biz. I have questions for you guys on the business model. Like I've been poking around trying to feel it out. So you ask me questions and I'm going to ask you questions. Well, yeah, I guess, I guess just, uh, can you take, can you, can you take a, like we, we try not to do, we, this is not a, not a history show, not like a founder journey show, but, but I would love like, like what was the climate around media, digital media, what was happening back then?

1:32:22Uh, what was the initial, like, yeah, because that means like so much of what is informed. I feel like we tried to take a lot of the lessons from that era of media and say like, okay, what was the takeaway? Which was maybe like, you can, I mean, the primary takeaway was don't build a media company in our case, that is the whole strategy is predicated on getting to a billion dollars of revenue, right? Or even a billion dollar valuation, right? And so a lot of what informs this is that like staying niche, especially for us, because in our business, like we're building a media company that we make by hand every single day.

1:32:58So if we don't stay niche, we'll start covering a bunch of topics that aren't interesting to us. And then we won't want to show up every day and do this. You'll do what I did and what everybody did. Okay, give us the lessons. Yeah, give us the prehistory, give us the climate, and then I want as many lessons as possible. Yeah, so look, when I started, there was this idea that sort of like the internet would destroy every traditional business in every space in the entire world. Now there's a little bit of that, like the AI will do that, but like, you know, I'm old. So this was like the web will destroy all.

1:33:32And we looked at print magazines and newspapers. And the idea was all of them would go away entirely and would be replaced by digital and the entire size of that market. And all that ad revenue was going to move online. And so, you know, we were one of the early movers in sort of going and trying to capture that market. And we looked at the big men's magazines or the local city guides or whatever it was and tried to go build that online. And at first, did it the way that you guys were doing it. It was like very much this labor of love. And we didn't have that much access to capital because it wasn't hot, hot, hot yet.

1:34:09And so our first few years, we were profitable and stayed small. and it was like, it was amazing. And we had a small community of people that were diehard and advertisers who really felt the needle move. And it was wonderful. And what happened was the space got attention from big VCs and people wanted to go and sort of like, you know, get in on the gold rush. And a bunch of people raised a bunch of money and I was one of them. And, you know, the idea was you have to grow into or live into those valuations. Like you just sort of alluded to. And, you know, we went from one to three to seven to 15.

1:34:52Like it was growing like, you know, maybe not like a software company today, but it was growing like a software company did back then. And we kept raising into it. And a few of the like mistakes, and by the way, they were not fatal mistakes, but they were ultimately the thing that sort of, they took a lot of the joy out of the business, I would say. was when we got obsessed with figuring out how do you keep growing and how do you keep doubling year over year? And part of it was we need to grow the advertising base. And so we need to find more and more and more users that got away from our core and got away from sort of what we felt we were really great at doing.

1:35:33And so the product started to get a little watered down. And then on the other side, it was commerce. How do we start to sell stuff to these guys? How do we start to monetize directly? Today, subscriptions are something that I think is an actual viable model. Again, not at scale. Everyone points to the New York Times and says, oh, this can work. The New York Times is N of 1. I don't think you're going to build venture-scale businesses doing that, but there is more willingness to pay for consumers than there was 10 years ago. And so our thought was they're not going to pay for our content. They're going to pay for products.

1:36:05We bought a sort of ancillary commerce business and scaled that. And I went out to raise what was our series B thinking that we could go and get sort of one plus one equals three. They're going to love our media business, which is like profitable and attracts this audience. They're going to like our commerce business, which has a bigger ceiling and is growing fast. And in fact, I just got like full punch in the face. And it was like one plus one equals one and a half. And these businesses don't necessarily belong together. and media folks understood the media business and commerce folks understood the commerce business.

1:36:42And so I had to go through this sort of painful process of taking them apart from one another. And then I got the sort of bug for the roll-up. And well, if I'm not gonna grow vertically, maybe I can grow horizontally and what are other like-minded brands and can we sell them together and can we build a tech platform together and bought a bunch of companies and raised a bunch of money. And that worked. but the reality was we were always swimming against the current which was social media and you know media in general fell under the eye of big tech and you know meta grew and and obviously you know what google represented for the ad ecosystem and then as you know amazon and apple and netflix grew and it just was clear that like i wasn't even at the kids table i was in like the other room entirely and now look at what's happened with like the top of the market look at like discovery and the like amazing run they had and the fact that like they need to be consolidated it's just it's an impossible business and the way to do it right is to do what you love and stay relatively small and build like a real community-based thing like you guys are doing i have like so much respect for this show and like my hope is that you like find other ways to leverage the influence that you have here and don't put a like target on your back where you have to turn this show into a billion dollar company because totally it just yeah john's john's position was always that uh value in in media today is flowing to personalities individuals right even on the subscription side when you're signing up for a subscription today the subscriptions that i'm excited to sign up for are when i know the dollars are like flowing to an individual who's going to just obsess over like a ben thompson is a classic example right or like an emily sunberg in in uh New York, right?

1:38:36The dollars are going to an individual who has like a certain point of view, and they're just going to obsess over whatever topics. And then the value is going to flow to the platforms, the Spotify's, the YouTube's, the Meta's. And like, you kind of want to be in either one. The only other category that's emerged as durable to me is the like, you know, truth monopoly, which is like a legacy media brand. There's only maybe 10 of them in the world, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, things like that, where they kind of like part of the value is like you it's like you own an asset that basically has a license to distribute what is becomes the truth right and that takes deck 50 years to kind of create and even across all those assets you're talking about tens of billions of dollars which is a drop in the bucket compared to the independent creator earnings i think youtube paid out like 50 billion dollars to creators and then youtube itself also makes another 50 billion dollars and so like all of that is way more money flowing around than like the few publications that stuck around and made the business model work and are doing quite well.

1:39:38But creating these new things in the middle, we call it, yeah, we want to stay out of that messy middle. Yeah. And I, you know, I do think the, uh, look, venture in general, like is so many companies raise money that should not be raising money. Most companies that raise money should not be missing money. Venture is a very specific flavor of sort of trajectory. And the fact that, you know, it went from being a sort of cottage industry 15, 20 years ago to being just like this mainstream asset class that everybody obsesses over. You know, when I graduated from college, I did not know what venture capital was.

1:40:17If I graduated from Penn today, it would be the first, second, and third thing on my list to do would be to go get into VC or to go get into a startup. Like the world has changed. And I think it, in certain situations, enables unbelievable things to be built. And in most situations, it like destroys companies. And yeah, so part of it is VCs are trained to hunt the things that are getting attention, right? And so part of the issue is like, you see a media company pop up. It's like, this thing is cool. I like it. It's getting a lot of attention. Like the sexiest shitty business in the whole world.

1:40:51Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, we were even thinking about, you know, thinking about, like, the right way to be trained on is, like, Claudebot. Like, if you could find a way to put some money into Claudebot, you know, this week, that's pretty exciting. Because there should be very high leverage in a business that builds around that. Yeah, exactly. The interesting thing is, you know, I go back to what is the purpose of venture capital? You go back to, like, why do we call it Silicon Valley? Well, because they were setting up fabs. They were setting up, it was a high CapEx, high R &D environment. Then with the cloud platforms and AWS comes out, it becomes cheaper to start a company.

1:41:28But you're still putting up money for a bunch of engineers who are going to build a piece of software that then eventually starts growing. And the LTV comes in year five or six and you get paid back. But we have started to flirt with, well, maybe let's put venture dollars into this thing that really doesn't have any CapEx or any R &D spend, but a lot of go-to-market spend that seems to pay back relatively quickly. And that seems to be a pattern that repeats. And something you need to watch out for in any category is, what is the purpose of venture capital in this thing, even if it's growing like other things?

1:42:04Is that how you see it? And what industries are you seeing? okay, this is still a good industry for venture capital. Yeah, and one of the sort of weird perversions of the industry right now is there is more money than there's ever been in venture, and there's obviously a relatively small number of incredibly sort of deep-pocketed funds that need to deploy huge amounts of money and into a generation of companies that theoretically need less than ever before. And so you have this somewhat unhealthy dynamic. I do. I think that's what's sort of creating this idea of like sort of picking a winner before a winner is actually emerged, just like plow in on the thing.

1:42:47And even if it's a million of ARR, but it's raised 300 million bucks, it's like stay out of the category. Like this is like these are the guys. And, you know, the big firms can do that. I can't play that game. I don't really want to play that game. It's not like how we're set up. You know, the one thing, even as our funds have grown, like we are purists. We are only early stage. We're pre-seed and seed only. And I think like when you and we're a team of generalists. And I think when that's the case, like we have to be really careful that we don't get sucked into being heat seeking and just like always going for the shiny object in a market like this where prices are crazy and where you like get pulled into competing with mega funds that have like very different incentives.

1:43:31I also think you don't want to find yourself as like a value seeking fund at a time in the market like this for obvious reasons. And like the history of value seeking adventure is not great. Well, the other thing that strangely, I mean, one of the dynamics right now is you have, you know, mega platform VCs that don't care about pricing as much and they just want to get enough dollars in. But then you also have some like emerging managers that are just are in the heat chasing business. and so they don't really care about pricing as much either because they're like, well, we'll get in at 60. We know this is going to get marked up and we just need to prove to our LPs that we can get in the good names.

1:44:10Yeah. And we'll take a shorter term, like sort of fundraising mentality. Yeah. It's like, we're just, we're optimizing to raise like fund too versus, versus like actual, you know, returns. Yeah. How do you, the hard thing is like having been in this business for a long time and like living through cycles math matters like if you come into stuff way overpriced like it's really hard to build a business from day one and have it exit for a billion dollars of cash yeah like actually seeing that arc is incredibly difficult and in today's market there's people who are raising a billion dollars who are still like figuring out what the name of the company is going to be and you know it's hard to see that math working at At the same time, the argument is if you look out on the horizon 10 years from now, outcomes are going to be that much bigger.

1:44:58We're at a moment of change from a technology perspective where there's going to be more generationally important companies. And the idea a decade ago was can you find a billion-dollar company or a$10 billion company? And now this is can I find a trillion-dollar company? Yeah. Yeah. How have you process? Yeah. Like when I look back at previous hype cycles that I've been like during my career, you have maybe the D to C era. That's where I where I got my start. When you look at that hype cycle, there was not there was it was almost like an it was almost like an ads arbitrage. It was like Meta was an amazing ads platform.

1:45:38And if you had a great product that was positioned well against incumbents, you could just scale so quickly. And so the opportunity was really like, hey, we're making better products here, but really this is like an advertising arbitrage. And there were some great businesses that were created from that. And then FinTech was a branding firm arbitrage against VCs. You go to a branding firm, give them$100K, and then go raise out$5 million. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been the victim of that. Thank you. The people that work at those branding firms do amazing work, so I don't want to call that out because it's not their fault.

1:46:08Shout out to my boy, Emmett Sean. That was one of them. There's a couple others. going going forward like you look at kind of fintech fintech was there there was some uh uh it was it was dodd frank right there was like the the change reform some some regulatory component but a lot of it was like just better infrastructure that just made it easier but that just meant way more competition so it wasn't like this fundamental technology shift that uh that just changed everything in the way that we're experiencing right now and so i feel like you kind of have to unlearn some of the lessons from that because we now do have a real technology shift.

1:46:47So you are going to just get far greater value creation a lot faster than maybe this temporary ads arbitrage or just the infrastructure. Yeah. And by the way, one of the interesting trends on the back of that is this move to sort of VCs hunting younger and younger founders. I think you're seeing there was a movement over time where you were getting this big premium for second and third time founders and people who had sort of unfair advantage in a category. And now I think there is this idea that you have to unlearn so much if you have not grown up natively with AI, that maybe you're better off not knowing anything about an industry, but moving 10 ,000 times faster and sort of just like living natively in all the new tools and thinking that the way that somebody like me works is totally like, like I'm just like a dinosaur.

1:47:44Yeah, I've actually, so I've found myself giving, a buddy of mine is kind of like going through the idea maze and a couple of the ideas that he mentioned, I was like, this seems like a great idea, but you have to understand, like think about this idea in the context of having four YC companies going after this opportunity. And it's like, dude, you're going to have a family soon. Like you're not like 20 anymore. Do you want to compete against like four teams of 20-year-olds that are not going to sleep? Like this is – and yeah, they have less experience and maybe they haven't raised money before.

1:48:19But it's going to be – you're not – I don't feel confident that you're going to be able to outwork them even though you're a really hard worker just because you have more stuff. We see this in like company updates. So we're actively doing deals in new companies and you get that update three weeks after you invest, like the monthly update cadence. And we can see the teams with these younger founders and just the amount of product that they ship and the learnings that they have and the speed that they're hiring. It's palpable. And sometimes we invest in a team, great experience. They've got all the sort of credibility.

1:48:56And we get the first update and we're like, like, like they think it's 2002. Like they just don't get it. You need to move faster. Like the market is crazy right now. Yeah. What, what are you, how big is the team that you work with? How are you thinking about mentoring, building new great investors and counseling investors about best practices or like strategies for like not breaking the rules that you just discussed. Yeah, this is like, you know, all I think about now. Admittedly, I think this is a young person's business and an increasingly young person's business. And I think that the investor track follows the operator track to some degree, which is you want investors who sort of understand this new gear.

1:49:48And so, you know, I'm 44. I'm going to be, you know, soon enough, I'm going to be the oldest person on this team. And which is funny, you know, to just like think about. And we are actively, you know, continuing to hire and sort of mentor and bring up young talent. I think that you can be extraordinary in this business without having 25 years of experience. I think it's nice to have some voices around the table who have been through cycles and have some of that wisdom on just like not getting too caught up in the craziness.

1:50:29but realistically we are still continuing to like obsess about bringing in interesting young diverse perspectives people that natively like are growing up with the technology that feels novel to people like me and I think that that's going to be the continued goal here and then it's like up or out really this is not a place this is not a business to sort of hang out in and I I don't have the patience and I don't think people in this business should have the patience to wait 10 years to see what performance looks like. I think you have to sort of decide early if you feel like people have the right instincts, if they're able to identify talent with their gut, if they're able to sort of win people over.

1:51:11And like I think you have to I think you have to like make bets the same way you do in like professional sports. How do you think about that patience versus moving quickly and not waiting to measure results? I'm thinking specifically about the pressure that can occur a bunch of new VCs who are at a fund, and they all want to get points on the board, and that maybe leads to more aggressive deal-making that becomes sort of like a rat race between them and they wind up making bad decisions versus saying, look, you will be judged on a short term, but we're going to give you the space to not swing at every pitch.

1:51:54How do you think about that balancing act? Well, I think first of all, it's like this comes down to some of the actual mechanisms for how you manage people and stylistically, like how much communication you have, how much of a lone wolf culture versus a team-based culture. Here, we're very collaborative. We have a bunch of people working on everything that we're doing. Obviously, at the end of the day, a deal gets done because somebody brings that over the line with very personal conviction. But I think our culture is set up to be able to assess people in softer areas versus just those quick marks.

1:52:36Also, you have to know what you're underwriting. So sometimes we do a deal and explicitly we go, this one's going to get out of the gates really fast. This is going to get quick marks. We understand it. But by the way, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to have great outcomes. We've seen a bunch of our quick marks over the years end up as just big black eyes. And so there's other deals where we go, we know this is going to be slow. It's okay that it's going to be slow. There's a real moat here if this works. So there's a real technological sort of challenge that they're going to need to overcome.

1:53:05But if it happens, this is going to be a really valuable business. You know, know what you're getting into and be explicit about it so that if something is slow, but you signed up for slow, you're not like digging somebody. And then look, I think at the end of the day, like a VC fund is as good as the, their sort of reputation. And so feeling out how our founders feel about like working with folks, seeing people's win rates and seeing the way that people sort of, you know, carry themselves. A lot of this is art. And frankly, like early stage investing is a lot of art too. So this is feel and, you know, maybe I'm making bad calls on, on talent, but we're, we're doing it, I think very deliberately.

1:53:48Cool. Well, put your talent on TBPN. I have one more. No, I got, I got people. No, no. I had a question too. I wanted to get your take on AI-focused roll-ups, given that you rolled up. I was going to ask something very similar. What was your question? I was going to ask if you had to pick a different asset class to invest. You mentioned art. There's some art behind you. Between public markets, hedge fund, private equity, take privates, turnarounds, roll-ups, growth equity, bigger scale stuff. Is there anything else where you're like, ah, that looks fun, but I'm not going to do it? Like what else, what else intrigues you about different potential markets?

1:54:29We've seen a lot of VCs. Okay. Two wildly different questions. So let's, I want to first take on the AI roll-ups and then other asset classes. Well, I can actually, I'll connect the two because I actually do think sort of roll-ups scratch an itch for me as a former operator. And I've done it. Like I do like the sort of like that, that, that mental exercise of like putting things together and figuring out the personalities and the products. um i think that it is right i can understand all the logical reasons for why it works and why like this is all going to be this is going to end well i can't help but think a little of the gold rush right now is a place to park aum yeah um and i i don't like you know i'm not trying to like throw stones but uh it's you know it's a real easy place to just go raise money if you're a fund that has access to a bunch of money.

1:55:24And, um, and, and somewhat, somewhat, I would hope like limited, yeah, limited. Yeah. Well, yeah, but, but, uh, sometimes not, not always, but yeah, I mean, the allure of getting venture fees on, you know, just an asset that already has cashflow is pretty safe. Like it could be a lot to mention that, but the, the entrepreneurs, if they're like, I'm basically running a PE fund, but I only had to take 30 % dilution. That's crazy too. I own, you know, depends on, depends on the individual, uh, depends on the individual company. How, given that you've bought, you've bought a number of businesses, like how limited do you think is the downside on some of these rollups?

1:56:02Like, is there a way for people to buy companies and just botch the integration and the actual like AI enablement so bad that the company goes from being worth like$25 million doing some niche thing in. One plus one is 0.5. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think one plus one could equal zero plenty of times. And frankly, it can equal less than zero because, I mean, look, it depends what you're buying. It depends what the space is. The more reliant you are on a personality in these roll-ups, I think the greater the risk. If this is like a single proprietor who maintains all these really tight relationships and the whole thing rests with them, and if you don't keep them happy, you risk the whole thing burning down, that scares me.

1:56:45I do think there's probably places where you can go and throw stuff together. The reality is there's a lot of money in PE that knows how to roll stuff up. That's what I'm saying. And so the idea that venture is going to do this better than the folks that have done this forever? Well, yeah, the one thing you can imagine venture doing better is the technology, but there's also the financial engineering and actually buying companies. And just managing it. we have a friend who raised a PE fund, you know, and is yet to, he's getting close to doing his first deal, but the number of amazing opportunities that look amazing that he's ultimately turned down to finally get to the point where he's doing the first deal.

1:57:24And you realize like somebody who's never bought, acquired a company before coming in and just like looking at everything and everything looks great. If you just have like a capital hammer and you just want to hit it with, with a bunch of hit the asset with a bunch of AI, I do, I do worry that some of these. And how long are these advantages going to be around for? I mean, I think there's a version of, you know, 15 years ago, it's like we understand the Internet and nobody else does. And then, you know, like we're going to go to the cloud first or we're going to do mobile. Like, yes, AI is different.

1:57:52But, like, I can tell you the traditional PE funds are not going to, like, totally fall asleep and, like, decide not to, like, embrace any new technology. And in 15 years, they're still going to be sitting on the wrong side of history. Like, there might be a window, but it's not going to be a big window. Yeah, somebody should ask Orlando Bravo if he's heard of AI. He's like, wait, never heard of that. No, people are aware. The competition will be intense. This is great. Thank you so much for taking the time to come show up. Yeah, great to hang out. I wish we had more time. Let's do it again soon.

1:58:24Thank you for hiring and training up Dylan, our president back in the day. Dylan Ambrosecotto. Oh, man. Yeah. He's a big fan of yours, and we're lucky to have him. So come back on again soon. Yeah. Absolutely. We'll be in New York. We'll be at the New York Stock Exchange. Yeah, come down to the New York Stock Exchange. Hang out with us. That'd be fun. Join us there. Anytime. And I'm going to be out your way later in the month, so I'll be. Amazing. Awesome. Great to have you. We'll have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in.

1:59:02We have Lucas Atkins from ArceAi coming into the TBP and Ultradome. Lucas, how are you doing? There he is. I'm good. Thank you for having me. Thanks for hopping on the show. First time on the show, can you please give us an introduction on yourself? Yeah, yeah. My name is Lucas Atkins. I'm the CTO at RCAI. We actually changed our logo so that it highlights the R and the B. I have text. I'm sorry. No, no, no. You're good. And we've, for a very long time, been a startup focused on enterprise, custom language models. We decided to jump into the pre-training game ourselves. Pre-training. Okay, so small language models.

1:59:44I like small language models. It's the large ones that scare me. But tell me, how small are these? How much? What is the training budget? Can you give me like a GPT-2 level training run, GPT-3 level training run? Like try and ground. Am I looking at the data center for space? Or is it something, a little cluster in a closet? Can you train it on a Mac mini? What are we talking about? It used to be that a small – any small model, a small language model, right, was tens of millions of parameters. Now it's in the realm of I would consider anything under 50 billion kind of resting in that smaller world.

2:00:18So small as big as big has gotten enormous. Yeah, exactly. And it's only going to get more and more as RAM – well, I don't know. But as people get more RAM and as we're able to fit more on our machines. But we historically lived in that kind of 50 sub range. And then we also, we like trained on top of other open source models like LAMA, Mistral, Quinn. Is that fine tuning or distilling? Is there a difference there that's meaningful to what you do? There is an open debate as to whether fine tuning from like another models, just like text outputs is distilling. Yeah, distilling, okay. Or if you actually have to like grab it from the, you know, the logits.

2:00:59But I would argue that it's all distilling. So it's all some form of making a model better by using another model to make it better. And is there a sort of power law distribution in applications of SLMs? Like is it like translation is just like everyone's using that or text extraction, OCR. Like is there sort of a power law of like when you reach for this tool in particular? It used to be up until about a year ago. It was – you were pretty confined to – you could hill climb a specific domain. Obviously, it ranges based on how big your model was or small rather. but after this kind of like reinforcement learning revolution of the last year if you can build a task and an environment to have that model live and breathe and learn inside of you can hill climb you can take like there's people that are taking 100 million parameter models and making them perform like 5 or 6 billion parameter models from a couple years ago so it used to be a lot harder.

2:02:14Now it's a lot more taste and task-driven. Yeah. And when you say perform like, it feels like the true, true cutting-edge frontier model sort of smokes all the domain-specific models, but it's expensive. And so how important is cost? What sort of cost reductions are you seeing on the inference side once a company or you know, a developer decides to move from the heavyweight frontier model to something smaller. It's It is very often when they're going into production. It's like they've done prototyping with a large closed source model. They've had success with it. They've gotten approval. They want to bring it into production to more consumers or their customers.

2:03:03And then the bill starts to hit and the markets start to look tricky. So that's when they start looking for ways that they can host it themselves. There's also the compliance and data privacy aspect of it. And that's something that kind of sovereign US-based open models have stopped kind of being released. It's very much out of China. You have a few in Europe, but it has very much been lacking in the United States. So I was hoping to release this before I got on the show, but today we're finally releasing our 400 billion parameter model. So we went up pretty big. There we go. Congratulations. You still got plenty of day left.

2:03:55That's great. You still got plenty of day left. This is just a preview. So, yeah, take us through the landscape of who you're competing with. Set the table for us. Most people will be familiar with DeepSea, Quinn. How are these companies resourced? Is this just China's national interest that they're funding these? Do they have good business flywheels at this point? Because I imagine you have a plan to sort of unseat them in the open source race. there you know there's a lot of rumors about how all of you know how all of this capital gets allocated into you know these different companies but give us the rumors yeah hedge funds rumors that you know the government's giving it to them they have favorites you know there's shady deals going on but uh the reality of it is saying they didn't train it train the models with scraps In a cave?

2:04:51In a cave? No. No. Well, actually, frankly, if you look at kind of the horsepower that we're dealing with, a lot of them seemingly did. It's very impressive. And that's kind of the – you want there to be this kind of battle of like the U.S. versus China in this race. That obviously plays into our incentives. However, these are extremely talented labs. And so I'm not competing against China or other countries for open-weight, sovereign language models that people can own and deploy themselves. I'm competing against the other researchers there, that human being. And you have some extreme talent.

2:05:37So, yes, it used to be really hard to make money making open-source models as they got bigger and as they got harder for other people to host themselves. You know, the systems and the economics started to work out because they get the, you know, the community buy-in and excitement of something being open source. But if it's a trillion parameters, you know, your average consumer is not going to be able to run that on their toaster, right? So it ends up, you kind of get this win-win situation. And now that that has kind of started to flywheel, they've started to do the OpenAI and the Anthropic and the Google Play where they're building products around it.

2:06:20And it's really becoming a very lucrative ecosystem. Yeah. How are you scaling the business? What have you chosen in sort of the business model world? There's so many ways that you can build around open source technologies. what's working and what are you thinking about the roadmap long-term? We were in kind of a uniquely unique, a very fortunate position when it came to this. We had always been customizing models for people. We had always been working for enterprises, developers, businesses. How can we make sure that they're getting the best out of their own hardware? The only thing that really changed was that when customers wanted something to be based in the United States or from the United States, there stopped being competitive options.

2:07:10And we never really liked the idea that the foundation of our business relied on other people releasing models. So it was like six months ago that we kind of fully decided, hey, you know what, let's try it. And we had success with our first model and then our second and our third, and it kind of brought us to this. So the economics of our business doesn't change so much. You know, we're still working with customers. We're still delivering, you know, models and powerful tools, though we have a much more robust control of the stack, which means that the degree to which we can customize and the kind of period in training that we can go back to for those customers just kind of increases drastically.

2:07:54Yeah. Just when I think of like open source focused company, I think, you know, like donations, people just like contributing. I also think about like consulting, actually going in and a company paying you to do a custom implementation work, improve. I also think about hosted services, consumption-based plans, subscription-based plans. How are you thinking that side of the business model will evolve or where is it at now? I would love for us to have like a, like a GoFundMe or something, but no, No, we – it's very much the latter two. I think that services and consulting, obviously, you know, if it's the right customer for the right product and the right situation, you know, there's worlds where we're having a portion of your business be devoted.

2:08:46That's important. But the real moneymaker, and I think this has been seen out of those labs in China, out of others, is it's in the tooling. It's like what are you building around it? How are you making it so that other people can customize it without you having to do services? How can you make it an easy API? How can you build a developer and education suite around your software that is uniquely benefited by your models so that they can take it? And using maybe hardware GPUs that you own, how can they go and train their own models? So there's many ways to turn this into something that is much more automated and less services-based.

2:09:29But at the end of the day, it all just comes down to getting the customer the right product. Who are your heroes in the open source space? Are you a Red Hat guy, GitLab guy? What do you like? Yeah, I mean, obviously, yeah. Red Hat, GitLab. I mean, I very much jumped into the open source space in open source AI. Sure. So as much as I guess they're now a huge competitor of ours, Mistral is huge. The OG Llama team, Deep Sea, these very people, they inspired me to try to compete with them. So it's kind of this very fun. They inspired you to grind harder. Yeah, really. Hit that bald eagle sound. Thank you so much for coming on the show to break it down.

2:10:14Congratulations on all the progress. And congratulations on the launch. We'll be looking at what's the timeline here. You think you'll get it? It was supposed to be earlier. We got some GPUs, didn't want to load up. So it'll be here the next hour. We're going to be live for a couple more hours, paying us. Come into the chat on X or YouTube. Yeah, come in the chat when it's officially launched. We'll talk about it. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for hopping on the street. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye-bye. Let me tell you about Sentry. I need to find Sentry. There we go. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast.

2:10:45That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. We got to talk about this. Plant Daddy. Plant Daddy. We got to get him on the show. Exposing his local coffee shop. He says, a friendly reminder that my local coffee shop is running a bot farm to boost engagement. I'm talking a very small business. Imagine at a country scale. If you're still responding, reposting anonymous accounts with zero betting, you're being used like the idiot you are. This is crazy. Yeah, so there's this video and this local coffee shop, his favorite local coffee shop, has a bot farm set up in their back room to boost Instagram engagement specifically.

2:11:25Does this person not know that you can just? Also, why did he let Kevin back there to video this and like OPSEC at this coffee shop is atrocious. If you're doing it, look at the fan at the end. If you scroll to the end of this video, you can see that there's just a fan blowing on all the phones. You see this fan right there? That is crazy. This seems like such an insane thing to spend money or time on. That's what I was about to say. What is the ROI here? So they get an extra 50, maybe 100 likes and comments on every post. And is that enough to drive, you know, this looks like thousands of dollars of equipment.

2:12:01They're selling more coffee because of that. It's a lot of iPhones. I think they're probably Android because they need to be USB-ced in and controlled. Right, right, right. So it's a little bit more open. Yeah, it seems like a total waste of time. I have never gone to any of my local coffee shops. Because of Instagram? Instagram accounts. That you know of. This is what advertising doesn't work on me. I love your coffee, but the engagement here. It's too low. I don't know. I don't know. I would love to know what that proprietor, what that store owner thinks about the ROI on that platform. I have noticed on some posts recently that are kind of outside of the sort of tech bubble.

2:12:39I'll scroll through and look at the comments and every single comment is AI. Okay. Like just straight up. Yeah, not copy-pasted. Not copy-pasted, but clearly it's like an AI that's just like responding. And it's just loosely riffing on it. Just loosely adding engagement. This isn't that, it's this. No, no, no. It's happening more and more. Anyway, let's move on. We have Bridget Mendler from Northwood Space. She's the co-founder and CEO returning to the show. It's been just under a year, but she's back. Bridget, great to see you. How are you doing? In a much bigger facility. Yeah, what's going on over at Northwood?

2:13:17Break it down for us. It's good. We are, sorry, we just turned on, I just started blasting 80s music in the office. Amazing. But we're good. This is being on the manufacturing floor lifestyle at Northwood. and yeah we are announcing our Series B fundraise amazing 100 million dollars 100 million even nice round number not a cent more not a cent less and some other numbers too yes some other numbers yeah more importantly that's right exactly customer is key we raised 49.8 in a contract with the, sorry, I'm getting a little bit of background noise. But yeah.

2:14:10$49.8 million contract with the Space Force. Congratulations. Amazing. Talk about the actual progress. I mean, I remember hearing about this from Delian when it was like just an idea. And then I think I saw a video maybe with Jason Carman, the first deployment, you're building this. Like, what is the scale of the deployment? How are you? I mean, you're in a manufacturing space. How many people are working there? How many of these things are you building? Explain this to us. Yeah, yeah. We're at our 35 ,000 square foot manufacturing facility now. I think we moved in here thinking this was going to be a long-term home for us.

2:14:47But as I'm sure a bunch of these companies say, it filled up really fast. We have had a busy year. It's been a year of going from early concept with some exciting problems that we were looking to solve on the ground side. We're looking to address scaling up communications to a bunch of different orbits, really pushing the boundaries on where you can take dynamic space capabilities. Our phased array was really well aligned with that. So we kind of built out the solution and we took it through to deployment. We can successfully say that now we have actually done production on eight portal units.

2:15:20they were produced in this factory in the span of four weeks we shipped them out actually got shipped out on a commercial airliner to its destination halfway around the world and was up and running as soon as it hit the site within 12 hours so all in all from the time of our contract signature to actually being ready to take satellite passes is a three-month time period so So we're excited by that milestone. And walk me through sort of like the, like, I've seen these memes of like, you ask a question on Google and it takes you through like, you know, you go through the fiber optic cable, you go to the base station, you go to the cell tower.

2:15:59Like, walk me through the actual, you know, use case from someone trying to use the internet and then interfacing like Northwood is in the chain somewhere. Like, what is the full chain? No, that's a really great question because a lot of the ground equation has been kind of these fragmented pieces, right? Like I can imagine it's confusing. It's like, oh, there's this one piece of hardware, whether it's a phased array or a parabolic or whatever. How does that fit in with, you know, me making use of internet through space? And the real point for us is that we are saying space companies shouldn't have to consider the ground equation when they're running their own business.

2:16:37They shouldn't be trying to navigate land leases in all of these countries around the world to make contact with their spacecraft. What Northwood does is we own the entire stack. So we handle from the moment that there is a contact made with the spacecraft all the way to the point of presence somewhere around the world that a spacecraft operator has themselves hosted, that entire chain. So that includes hardware, that includes modem, that includes network backhaul, that includes software interfaces, APIs, and the actual control plane for moving that data. that's kind of a stack end-to-end on ground that hasn't been managed by a third-party ground provider before.

2:17:17And so that's what gets us excited because when we take on that big chunk of the pie, we actually free up a lot of mental bandwidth and speed for space companies. So for a space company, they're putting a satellite in orbit for some reason, whatever they're doing. When are they calling you? When are they making sure that they're compatible or ready to integrate is that presumably before launch, but do they need to do anything special on the actual satellite? Hopefully they're not calling after their existing solution. We just took off and I'm hoping you can connect us. Help us make contact. Yeah.

2:17:52It's kind of like when you move into an apartment, then you call Spectrum like after and you're like, I don't have internet for two weeks now. Yeah. Like here we are contactless. But no, I mean, that's a little bit like the situation with the satellite control network with US government right now. These are for satellites that are already live and operating. That's what our contract is against. It ranges for a ton of functions. So every launch that takes place in the U.S. runs through satellite control networks. Sorry to interrupt. Your facility's big because your team is scootering around. Scootering around.

2:18:21It is big. You went live about 35 ,000 square feet. We have a lot of passion for our scooters here. It's nice, smooth floors. Anyway, sorry. It's a great ride. But yeah, so it serves a ton of missions. And more missions are getting launched every day. And so that puts additional strain on capacity. So for us, for instance, in that contract, they're calling saying, hey, we need more capacity. We are needing you to plug in with where we route our data. So we just hand them an API, and that's how they interface with it. So they can just connect with the API. satellites keep doing what they have been doing sometimes for decades.

2:19:01And then when their new satellites launch, they can also use that same interface. So trying to make it as clean and simple as possible. What does your pipeline look like? I imagine you're talking to a bunch of companies that are planning to get various satellites up on the one year, two year, three year. Or like how many, like, are you feeling like an acceleration is kind of what I'm getting at in terms of like more mass to orbit? Yes, big time. We do get a lot of customer inbound. And I think like that's a large part of our raise for us. It's like, hey, we need to be able to expand and grow so that we can service all these important missions.

2:19:41I think an important piece of our passion for what we do is around serving diverse and ambitious missions. So a lot of our missions look pretty different. So for our recent capability we're working on with Space Systems Command, that looks like dynamic spacecraft movement, you know, being able to hit multiple different orbits and those kinds of capabilities. There are also communications constellations where, you know, they have more of that networking backhaul use case that I described to you. There's other ones that we work with that are more interested in timely imagery. And so for us, what makes us excited is being the ground expert that thinks about that with them from, you know, some of those conversations we have are extremely early.

2:20:22We're like we're asking them questions and learning about their system and they'll say, you know, we haven't thought that far yet. And so we get to be the partner from that very early stage to bringing the constellation online and really being the one that holds the accountability for that. So we get excited by kind of the diversity of the space industry. I'm sure you guys are hearing about all the different use cases even that popped up this past year. We're talking about the moon or data centers and space. Yeah, I'm sure some space data center players are probably calling you being like, hey, in 10 years, I'm going to have a lot of GPUs in space.

2:20:59But, you know, let's condense that timeline. Let's condense that timeline on all of the ideas. Like, you know, why not? Space is an exciting frontier to push forward on. Yeah. What else are you tracking in launch costs, actual cost of mass to orbit? That feels like a key barometer for the health of the space industry broadly. Is that progressing according to your thesis when you started the company? Are you ahead of plan? Obviously, it doesn't directly matter for what you do, but obviously it does in many ways because you're downstream of that entire economy. Is that the right even metric to be looking at if you're monitoring the space economy?

2:21:41I mean, I think the economics of space have been something that have been challenging historically. You need to be able to make a profitable business off of space. And so I think there's been a number of dominoes that have fallen in favor of that, whether that be improved launch costs and dropping to new levels in that and other pieces of the space infrastructure stack. I think, you know, what we're building, we're also interested in making that more affordable. I think the proof is kind of just in the dreams that people are dreaming up and actually putting real dollars behind now. So, you know, it's one thing to talk about some ambitious space concept.

2:22:19It's another thing to put like real dollars behind it and a real timeline against it. And so for us, like that's what we want to enable is that like concept to reality timeline, like condensing that, making that more possible. Surprisingly, the ground actually takes longer to build than it does to build the spacecraft and launch it in a number of different instances. And so that's just silly. Like, let's, let's be the enabler instead. Yeah. Can you help me understand deploying ground stations globally? Are there treaties for this type of thing? Do you call other governments? Are you active in other countries?

2:22:54Like I imagine that, you know, there There are obviously some, I guess, geostationary orbits that just orbit over the U.S., but if my satellite's on the other side of the Earth, I probably want to talk to it. How do you solve that? What's involved? What's the rollout like? No, totally. We have an entity in a number of different countries. So, yeah, we have entities on, I think, like three or four continents at this point. So you basically need to establish the business there. You need to work with the local governments across a bunch of different dimensions. I think personally, that's something that I think is really exciting to support with the space industry.

2:23:34Right. Like a lot of countries are really passionate about pushing their space capabilities forward. And so for us to be able to have them be a part of a larger mission as we build out our big network, but also to support what their ambitions are with space is something I feel interested in. And then from a logistics standpoint, I think that's like a key case in point for why if you set out to build a space mission, why do you have to go, you know, create entities, land leases, local regulatory? It's just a totally different business. And so I think, you know, that's something that we are very happy to be burdened by.

2:24:12Yeah. On the on the regulatory side, are you interfacing with NASA or the FCC? What does that look like? And then does that does the regulatory architecture that's put in place in the U.S. sort of carry forward into other countries? Yeah, that's a great question. There's some pieces of it that do cross over internationally. We deal with the International Telecommunications Union for certain pieces of it depends on which direction you're talking about from space to ground or ground to space. And then the FCC is really the main regulatory body domestically. but they need input from NASA. They need input from a bunch of other government stakeholders.

2:24:52So a lot of folks weigh in when it comes to spectrum, which is, you know, for nerdy folks like me, that's kind of interesting. Yeah. What is the main bottleneck, if anything? It's surprising to hear some of the timelines you're talking about on the hardware side. You said four weeks to make and ship out the hardware and get it in production feels fast. What is, like, where are you trying to speed up? Ground is, like, such a multivariable problem. It comes down to supply chain, for sure. It comes down to deployment, like, what is actually efficient and easy to ship to anywhere around the world.

2:25:32It comes down to licensing and a whole host of other regulatory approvals. So, for us, like, that's why we find that it's really useful to be vertically integrated, because we can actually think of those constraints at every different piece along the chain. So, you know, when we see a bottleneck like, hey, there's this supply chain limitation, we get to design around that and think about how that fits into the overall system. So I think we've been coordinating all of those pieces well so far. You know, new challenges are going to continue to pop up, but I think that comes down to just having a team that is multidisciplinary.

2:26:09Yeah. I want to know more about the use of funding,$100 million fundraise, obviously more hiring and more acceleration broadly. But are there any pieces of equipment that you're going to be buying for manufacturing? Is there a robotic arm that you've been hovering over the checkout button and now you're clicking it or a CNC machine? What will transform about the actual manufacturing process with this raise? Yeah, like getting concrete. There we go. Yeah, I think, well, actually, that's interesting. Are you literally buying concrete? No, old ground companies do need to buy a ton of concrete. Yeah, because the pad, right, that you actually put it on, right?

2:26:50Exactly. You have settling time. Just let the concrete dry. That's a whole factor in the equation. But, yeah, for us, it's really about a new scale of production. so you know we we've demonstrated this end-to-end process for smaller scale admissions now it's okay cool can you do that at a larger scale reliably um and so that comes down to like you said bringing some stuff in house yeah so that's that's our pcb line for instance that's something that we're interested in bringing in house um we have different testing fixtures that we have in house we have a big anechoic chamber over here oh yeah um so um good podcast studio too right isn't it like dead quiet in there it's true it is go it's kind of yeah i'm tempted to show you but anyway it will probably cut the wi-fi out right exactly yeah we'll cut the wi-fi out um the audio quality would be great but we wouldn't be able to hear you so pristine uh but yeah we're going to be moving into a bigger space as well so that we can you know accommodate more production volume also inventory you know like this this stuff takes up a lot of space uh a lot of hardware We're moving it through rapidly.

2:28:00We're looking to hit a rate of 12 units per month for one product line and then another volume for another product line. Very good news. There you go. So, yeah, that's some of the expenses. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Fantastic progress. To come chat with us. Yeah, remarkable progress in under a year. I can't wait for the next one. We will see you soon. Yeah, congrats to the whole team. Thanks, guys. Good to chat. Good to see you. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with small and medium-sized businesses.

2:28:40And without further ado, should we bring... Who we got? We got Jeff. Jeff Miller. It's Miller time. We got Jeff Miller. Failing in for Palmer. Second time. You're the first repeat live in-person guest at the Ultradone. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the Ultra Go. Second time. How do we get one of these? Look at this. People are always asking us for jackets. Whoa, yeah. I'll trade you a jacket for a tiny gold plaque here. Okay. Somewhere in the outside. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a record. This is a record. Love it. Yeah, fantastic jacket. Those are going to be flying off the shelf.

2:29:15Get us up to speed on the Anderle merch store. I mean, you were doing some, like, you did, like, an auction on eBay. Take us through. Yeah, absolutely. So, actually, Jen Bucci and I were cooking on this. Former TBPN. TBPN. Oh, TBPN legend. She's been on here. So the way we're thinking about the gear store, and this is something, by the way, we talk often with our pal Trey also, is that we're thinking about ways that for our friends we can bring them into annual. So beyond just following us on X or watching our videos on YouTube, that they can participate with the brand in a way that they would want to.

2:29:43So we're going to be leaning into it hard this year with NASCAR. It's a platform with Ohio State. With every campaign that we do, we're going to have some staples like the flight jacket that will become much more easily accessible, I should say. And then we're going to find some items that we'll just call high heat items that we're already cooking on. And the closest thing I can say is you think about what we did with the Chromatic, our friends at Mod Retro, and pulling that into an andrel edition, what we're going to do with the M64. Think along that vein. So when those come, be ready because they're not going to last long.

2:30:17Okay. Yeah, take us through the racing update. NASCAR's coming up, but you're also going to be racing drones now. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, why not? Yeah. So, of course, we've got NASCAR. We're just about 150 days out. I expect to see both of you guys on the base. The race on the base. On June 21st. It's going to be a lot of fun. Are we going to be able to be on the carrier? Will there be a carrier there? Are there needed elsewhere? I can't speak for the Navy. It's the worst. They don't answer me. There may be one or multiple carriers on board, and we'll see what we can do. Cool, cool. But the big thing I'd say is, as we think about our partnership strategy broadly, we have, as we talked about last time, something that is broad-gen pop, that crosses over with our core audiences in defense and military, like the Andrel 250 with NASCAR, it's something that's tied very clearly to where we have a manufacturing footprint with Ohio State.

2:31:03We're well on our way to building out Arsenal One, as Grim spoke about last week, hiring those 5 ,000 jobs that we committed to. The important thing I think for us is making sure that we still stay true to who we are across all these things. So I think about it as a spectrum. And if that's about general population or how we work our ways into communities, at the core, we are an engineering company. that autonomy, if you think about it, has been at the core to this date of everything that we built. And so we want to make sure we have something that is not just a marketing play, something that feels much more about recruiting and standing for those values around autonomy.

2:31:38And so what is really just bringing you into the world of how this came to be, once we got the commitment from Palmer and the other execs that we were going to do the annual 250 in Ohio State, Palmer said, Jeff, I'll let you do those things. But what you're going to do is build me a global AI drone racing group. And I'm like, please tell me more, Bomber. I'm like, said, like, Drone Racing League? He's like, no, no, no. All the drones have to be the same. The only differentiator is the software, is the code, the ability to build autonomy. And so that's what we've been working on since. Yeah, so the idea here is people know they're going to be racing drones.

2:32:12We have goalposts here. I can imagine, like, something like that. They know they're going to have to be flying a route, like a track, but I'm assuming they don't know what the track would actually look like until race day. So they have to actually build. It's going to be amazing. So the way we're doing this is we're working first and foremost with the Drone Champions League, which is the foremost operator of AI drone racing in the world. So we've got them as our official race operator, and we're working off of the model that they've built and they've tested and forged a really viable path. So it starts with virtual qualifiers.

2:32:45Anyone can compete in these virtual qualifiers. It's a simulator. It's a simulator, exactly. And that will lead to a physical qualifier where you're going to have gates that you have to go through. And the top teams that qualify both from the university level and across the globe, because it's going to be an open competition, those will qualify for the first official AIGP in Columbus, Ohio. And there you're going to have time to prep, refine your code leading up to the actual race day. And that's where all systems go. Yeah. What do you think the average team will look like? I'm thinking back to like the DARPA Grand Challenge.

2:33:16I don't know if that was inspiring at all, but the teams from there, mostly academic teams, if I remember. What do you think the mix will be? Have you already talked to teams? How's that going? Yeah, so we've done a lot of research on the approach to this. The clear mandate from our friend Palmer was this is open to anyone. To anyone. This is not just 18 to 22-year-olds. There's a point where we're talking about, like, how can children race in this, right? Yeah, children, but also, like, the Tesla team, the Waymo team. They're going to be like, let's just win. And so what I give our team incredible credit for.

2:33:47Also the big primes. Let them. The big primes think that they can race. They have an opportunity here. It's the funniest thing ever. If a Chinese national thinks they can come in here and race and win this, let's go. And that will prove something there in its own right is our capabilities in the West relative to China. I mean, yeah, all the LLMs are on. The DJI factory team is like, okay, okay. I think the things that are most important is at the core, we are using this as a recruiting effort. We're thinking about cracked engineers, especially at the university level. We've done incredible diligence on the legal side to make sure when we say things like 500K prize pool, that it's eligible for anyone to raise, that you could win a job at annual.

2:34:25All those things are done in a legally compliant and thoughtful way. And I think most importantly that we're setting a standard with our partner in hardware, your friend, Soarin from Neros, that we are using incredible technology that's going to have clear chain of custody here in the States. Dude, we've got to get Soarin to fly a drone in here. You've never seen him fly a drone in person. Not live. So Soren Monro Anderson, CEO of Nearest and Founder, he was, I believe, like a champion FPV drone. Drone racing champion, also competed in the DCL as well. Yeah. And so he puts on this, I went out with Ben.

2:35:02Ben actually filmed it in El Segundo. And he's like, let me, I do a little like factory tour with him. He has a very small office at that point in time. The company had just got off the ground. And he's like, let's walk to this park. I'll show you how these drones work. And I've seen a DJI camera drone take off and it hovers. And it maybe does a little selfie zoom out or whatever. His drones, it's a completely different level. It's a completely different level. It takes off and it's the most aggressive. It's the F1 car of drone racing. And he puts on these glasses, the FPV goggles. And they're like CRT TVs.

2:35:36They're like high refresh rate, pretty low res, actually. but he's like flying around this tree like as fast as i can possibly he doesn't crash anything flies up back right in your face all around you is crazy it's so great and obviously at andro we know a thing or two about of course making drones and we have great respect for for soren and the nero's team and what's a funny story this the first time i was here in person you know your guest was directly before me well yeah it was soren that's right and you guys asked him i was laughing because you said hey have you guys ever thought about starting a drum race oh we did we We had not talked to him yet.

2:36:10No way. We already were planning to. So I just got my serendipity. All started right here in the Ultradar. I love it. I love it. Yeah. So talk to me more about what it takes to actually deliver software on these drones, how standardized that is. Like, I imagine you're not pulling in a Frontier LLM and having it reason over this stuff. It's like, hold on, boss. I'm going to wait at this gate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ten minutes of reasoning. Let me fully understand the scope of the track. Like, what, you know, give me anything on the technology side. Like, what are the parameters? What are the languages that people will use?

2:36:48Do you know anything about what people are planning? The beauty is we're trying to keep the rules extremely simple. Yes. So the core focus is that everyone is going to have the same hardware. We're working with Ninos right now, and we'll be announcing this in a future date. The beauty, too, is, like, everyone's going to have their own canopy. We're bringing a little spirit of NASCAR as we think about sponsors. and how you can build your own brand. We should sponsor a team. We should. This is really good. This is happening. We're going to have a TVPM on our team. It just makes natural sense. If you want to race in this, hit us up.

2:37:18You guys are ready. So we'll talk to you guys about how you bring your team together. But from a tech side, it really is the beauty is that once you have the hardware, everyone is going to be able to be on an even footing to bring together whatever they want to do and however they want to do it. And where I think the real advantage will come when people spend time at the physical qualifier, show up there, break the thing 100 times. We talk about this at Andrel all the time. Fail, fail, fail, fail, win. That's the way we think about it. And I think that model, that approach, that ethos applies here too.

2:37:49So how do you keep a level playing field around hardware when drones are breaking and they are smashing? Is it like, oh, you get an allotment of five and then you're out? We'll have exactly clear chain of custody. All credit to DCL and Nero because they're controlling the hardware component. But we've planned out, and because of their experience, we know how many are going to break along the way. But there's not going to be any opportunity for anyone to be making mods beyond what we give them officially. That's very cool. Yeah. Are there other – do you think people have the ability to overclock motors?

2:38:21Because a lot of racing, of course, in NASCAR F1, it's like tire management, fuel stops in certain races. We just saw this with the Rolex 24. Or at what level does it stay from just perception, doing simultaneous location and mapping, pathfinding, to actually understanding, like, I can push the drone harder, but then I'm running out of battery. 24-hour, the endurance drone race. Yeah, yeah. Like, how many times do you change? I think what you'll see is the battery is pretty lightweight. But for the distance of the race itself, you're going to have enough battery load. But it really will become to, like, finding all these little insights.

2:38:55Yeah, yeah. And there'll be risk. 100%. If you cut the corner a little bit closer. How you're doing it. You might clip it. understanding the hardware better than the next and what risks your role to take. Interesting. But for us, what I'd say here is really special is beyond the fact that we're starting at Columbus, we're already working with Palmer in two really interesting ways. We have plans to roll out the second GP in Asia. That'll be announced soon. The third GP in the Middle East. And the fourth one beyond in the globe. And right now we're starting with quadcopters. The important element of the AI GP is the autonomy.

2:39:26It's not the form factor. Sure. So just know that's something that could come to life underwater in different domains. Oh, that would be cool. Feels harder to film and stuff, but could be really cool. Yeah. Well, let me just say that's the first of many domains. Yeah, of course. Yeah. I want to say tunneling ones. Jordy said it. I did it. Yeah. Yeah. It's really great. What do you think teams will look like? Are they unlimited amount of people? I can show up with a thousand. You can show up as an individual. We think the teams that are going to be really successful are going to show between four and eight people.

2:39:55It's capped at eight people. Two pizza team. Exactly. Yeah. And so the goal would be that we're talking to all the universities that are going to express interest. We have target universities at Anderil that really feed our pipeline of emerging talent. And those teams, we're hoping to get really excited about this. We think the prize pool is going to be a real incentive, but also that opportunity to win a job at Anderil. Yeah. Yeah. And it's good. It's good, like resume builder, content, whatever, marketing, There's so many different ways. It's interesting winning a job at Anderil when I think anybody that can get into the top five, probably every person on the team is qualified or at least some percentage of them.

2:40:32So the pipeline, the talent pipeline is going to be very cool. It's going to be incredible. And also why our lawyer now has a lot more gray hair than he did a month ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the important... Doing any of these giveaway contest thing at scale, there's so much legal headache with it. It's not as simple. Yeah, exactly. But luckily for us, I think whether it's thinking about legal constraints for this, what our people at Andrel across divisions do is they see opportunity and they see how they can create solutions. But the thing that gets me excited is like beyond whoever wins and earns the job is that every university team member that shows up to the qualifier, which is going to happen near our HQ in September, will get a screen directly by Andrel Recruiting.

2:41:11So if you're somebody that is interested in this, if you're somebody who's looking for an entry-level job or internship at Andrel, this is a great way to feed into our pipeline. Yeah. Can you tell me more about the new Long Beach office? What's going on there? Oh, man. Well, somebody who lives in Venice, California and works in Costa Mesa, can I just say I'm extremely happy that we have a Long Beach office coming? It's incredible. I mean, the story writes itself from Palmer's origin to where we are now. Oh, yeah. That's where the first, like, what was it, the Airstream or something? 100%. That's lore.

2:41:40Down by the river. That's actually true. It's incredible to see it come full circle. Down by the marina. It wasn't really a river. Down by the river. It was a cave. I wouldn't get in any rivers in L.A. L.A. River is rough. But it's really special. The origin story, the fact that it's a reflection of our growth, our maturation, the engineering talent that we're going to be able to recruit, not just in Orange County, but now closer to L.A. And ultimately, whether you're working in SoCal and Ohio or beyond, we're still going to be screening for the same thing. And that starts with the mission, the connection to what we're building.

2:42:14Yeah. How big is the Orange County campus now? It's 5 ,000. Oh, yeah. Sorry. No, the new one's 5 ,000. The current one's a little smaller than that. OK. But it's it's the type of thing that we're constantly building. You walk in there. 5 ,000 square feet. That's pretty big. No, people that we're bringing in. But to be bringing over a million square feet to Long Beach and to be doing it directly with the mayor of Long Beach has been incredible. And his team, it's just been really cool to see come to life. That's great. That's incredible. What else is on the horizon on the marketing side for Andorle?

2:42:48Did you look at a Super Bowl ad? Super Bowl's coming up. You know what? What else did you look at? So I'll tell you one thing. The core focus for us this year is absolutely showing the raw, the real, the product development, failures, failures that lead to the wins, the hard work. The scalability that we're seeing is reflecting that story. I think that's the important inflection point for us in 26. It's going to be less about the highly produced go to markets. And it's going to be about we told you we were building these things. We are building them and we're going to show you how hard it is to scale, but that we are up to the challenge.

2:43:22And, you know, when we talk about this internally, we talk about demonstrating to our customers that Anderil is not only the right choice, we are the safe choice. And we are the necessary choice for what our country needs. So that's the story we need to tell. And how we do that is going to be about great world-class product marketing that will likely look more transparent and raw than you've ever seen before. And then as we're thinking about working our way to public markets, it's about building the Anderil brand. And that could be through a drone race for recruits. It can be about a gear store or big major sports marketing platforms.

2:43:54But it won't be a Super Bowl commercial this year. In fact, this past weekend, we weren't at the NFL playoffs. I was at a UFC fight in Vegas, 324. I'll tell you that. That, to me, is much more of America and the audience that I think has high crossover and connections with audiences that we see in NASCAR. And whether we do a partnership with them or not, I think the point is that we're looking to do things differently. than traditional brands. Yeah. And looking for partners that share our values and share our mission. Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think that the way on that, like the story that you're telling around, like delivery and scale and reliability and the safe option, does that mean visually you'll think you'll shift from product focused, you know, this like look at this amazing cool thing that does this thing to more of like highlighting what's happening at Arsenal, the manufacturing prowess, the scale.

2:44:50Is that the type of story you're trying to focus on? Is that how this will be? Those stories to me complement each other. What it means is we're going beyond a product go to markets where we're saying, hey, we're announcing this to the world. They're thinking about the stages of development post-launch. We did a really great job of this as a team, I believe, with Omin. And we told why a tail sitter is so hard to produce. We tapped back into the history of tail sitters across decades and what our engineers were able to accomplish to make Omin successful and all the rigorous testing that we did.

2:45:17We're going to start to do that more with all of our products, but that doesn't stop with testing. It's about fielding. It's about putting in our customers' hands, and certainly it's about your point around manufacturing at scale. So that starts with Arsenal 1. Why do we build it, the progress that we're making, the products that are scaling over time there, and showing that the promises that we've made we're able to deliver on. Very cool. Jordy, anything else? No. Awesome update. Well, I have one other really important announcement. In the spirit of our friend intern, Tyler, It was a special day for you.

2:45:47It's your birthday. I brought the first drink I had. No way! Burn off ice. Also known as the nectar of life. Properly iced on the stream the first time ever. People were talking about a buzz mug. Great to see you. You're the man. Ice. Well, this thing is huge. That is a huge ice. You're 21. You can indulge. enjoy a sip of of and I will tell let's get the Tyler cam we'll flip that around and I will tell everyone about graphite oops I just pushed yosto I'm sorry first day on the board okay John's got a new board I have a new board let's go with graphite here we go is it gonna work yeah there we go code review for the age of AI graphite helps teams on github ship higher quality software faster.

2:46:46Hunter Weiss, friend of the show, sent me this video. He did a Call of Duty edit over Uber Eats Meal Team 6, New York City's elite special forces delivery unit. I wanted to take a look at this, the Meal Team 6. How did he make this? Did he walk outside. Yeah, pull up audio. Look at this. He's a good editor. That's hilarious. This is great. Oh, how are you doing the SD kid thing? Let's go. We're going to get copyrighted strike for this, but it's worth it. It's worth it. It's worth it.

2:47:32It is so crazy how much snow is happening. We haven't been following at all, but U.S. digs itself out from monster winter storm. People shoveled snow Monday in Boston, where over 17 inches of snow fell in the weekend storm. It had nearly 200 million Americans under weather warnings. More than 710 households, 710 ,000 households from Texas to Maine are still without power. That's very rough. Hopefully that resolves quickly. Did you ever live in the snow? Have you ever lived in anywhere where it gets cold? Not. Tyler's the expert. Yeah. How's Michigan doing? Well, yeah, Michigan. I don't know if they've people snowed in.

2:48:10I think I think I thought it was a little bit further south. I thought it was like Tennessee's getting hit really hard. But yeah, I hate snow. It sucks. That's why I'm living here.

2:48:23Well, where else should we go? We have our special guest joining in just eight minutes, eight minutes. There is a clip from a friend of the show, Ben Hilack. He attended the OpenAI interview with Sam Altman. Town Hall. Chief OpenAI hater Nick, of course, clipped it and put it in a negative context. He says, you know, there's some quotes here. But let's pull up the question that Ben asked on this OpenAI stream. I've put a lot of discourse on Twitter and X recently about GPT-5's writing in ChatGPT and being a little unwieldy, hard to read. Obviously, GPT-5 is a much better agent model, really good tool use, intermediate reasoning, whatever.

2:49:09So it feels like models are a little bit spiky, or they've gotten even spikier, where some spikes, like coding, got super high. Some spikes, or it's very unspiky around writing. So I'm just kind of curious. how OpenAI thinks about that feature. I think we just screwed that up. We will make future versions of GPT 5.x hopefully much better at writing than 4.5 was. We did decide, and I think for good reason, to put most of our effort in 5.2 into making it super good at intelligence, reasoning, coding, engineering, that kind of thing. And we have limited bandwidth here, and sometimes we focus on one thing and neglect another.

2:49:53But I believe that the future is mostly going to be about very good general purpose models. Even if you're trying to make a model that's really great at coding, it'd be nice if it writes well too. If you're trying to have it be able to generate a full application for you, you'd like good writing in there. When it's interacting with you, you'd like to have a thoughtful, incisive personality and communicate clearly. Good writing in the sense of clear thought, not like beautiful prose.

2:50:24So my hope is that we just push Nick. Nick's in the chat. Oh no, his ears are ringing. And I think we will do that. Okay, fair. We just read Nick. You built a brand. You built a brand. Yeah, I mean, playing catch up now, I guess that's true. I guess that's true, at least in Ben's perspective. Wow, Nick puts John in the truth zone. Truth zone, true. No, no. I mean, I was looking on Elam Arena, the leaderboard for text, and GPT 5.2 is 16th, like well below Gemini 3 Pro is number one, Grok 4.1 thinking is number two, Gemini 3 Flash, Opus 4.5, Opus 4.5, Grok 4.1. GPT 5.1 high is a ninth, and then you have to go down to 5.2 to get 16th.

2:51:15You have to go down to 16th to get to 5.2. So yeah, it is interesting. seeing the spiky intelligence things kind of turned into a stat bar of where are you putting the points, the skill points or whatever. And they put too many of the points into - I will say, I don't want Chachapiti to fix their issues with writing. I don't want it to be - Oh, yeah. Now I'm at a point where I'm like, thank you for making it very easy to clock when something is written by AI. I think that's totally like stated versus reveal preference. If you have like incredible model that writes something that you find like super compelling, obviously I would like that.

2:51:57No, I'm talking about because people are using ChatGPT now to make scripts for videos. They're using it to make, to do bots that are writing comments. And I know as soon as I can see something is just written by ChatGPT that I can just scroll past it and basically ignore it. Yeah, sure. But imagine like in the far future where those comments are actually like, wow this is like very insightful and thought-provoking and i'm glad that i read this text like that's good yeah yeah i think i think we can get there also so i um back in march sam tweeted that they they trained a new model that is good at creative writing that he released this whole story yeah um and i think they've never really released that maybe it got vended in somehow yeah like distilled a little bit but there were trade-offs clearly and yeah yeah and i'm not sure that they actually did end up releasing yeah i mean the the really interesting thing to apologize and steal man Nick's point here is that should ChatGPT be focused on coding?

2:52:55Certainly in the, you know, how are they going to compete with ClaudeBot? They need a really great coding model. We'll talk to our guest in just a minute about, you know, how he's using 5.2. He's ready. He's ready. So let's bring him in from the Restream Waiting Room. We have Peter Steinberger from Maltzpot. The man of the hour. How are you doing? Thank you so much for staying up late. What time is it for you? It's 11. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. 8 p.m. for everybody that's just tuning in. Yes, 11 p.m. 11 p.m. So I'd love to kick it off with just a brief background on when you started this project, a little bit of your career, how you're thinking about it going forward, and then I have a million questions.

2:53:37This was your very first project ever, right yeah yeah yeah first time coding right now we were we were enjoying uh we were enjoying uh a screenshot of your your github profile earlier and just seeing like yeah how many how many different things an overnight success a true overnight success yes but uh we're super excited to have you here yeah awesome yeah i'm excited to be here as well um yeah i don't know i worked for my own software company for 13 years and then I sold it about 4 years ago then I was completely burned out I did like I mean it's TV but still Blackjack and Hookers and

2:54:26Wild well we're glad you're back in the game yeah yeah you know what they say like for every four years in like one year break and I did like 13 years non-stop so like three years the math kind of checks out and then this year no last year 2016 in April at some point my spark was back yeah because before I was like I was sitting on my computer and I don't know if you've seen Austin Powers but it felt like someone sucked my mojo out but yeah I had time to recover I came back in April and I wanted to do something new my background was like a lot of Apple and iOS and I'm a little bit fed up I wanted to build web stuff and I didn't have the experience, I didn't want to feel like an idiot so I looked into AI and it was good it was not great but it was good and I was like why is nobody talking about it I feel like because I missed those three years where it was really bad, and I came back just at the time, Cloud Code was released in February beta.

2:55:39So this was my first experience. I was like, this is pretty awesome. And then I couldn't sleep anymore. I literally had trouble. I had trouble going to bed. We had addiction before, and then we had addiction again. But a positive one. Yeah, well, yeah, I would say so. And I hooked up a lot of my friends for looking into AI as well. And they had the same problem, and I texted them at like 4 a.m., and they replied. I even started a meetup. That's where I come from. I called it Cloud Code Anonymous. Now it's called Agents Anonymous because you have to go with the times. And yeah, ever since then, that's what I say on my profile.

2:56:26I came back from retirement to mess with AI. Yeah. And I'm having loads of fun. That's great. I love it. Rick, maybe walk us through some of the other stuff that you shipped and worked on prior to this. And even just kind of like your mindset working on these different projects. I'm assuming at different points you would think that some would get more traction than others. But it would probably be impossible to have predicted in some ways that this would have gone from almost to the point. the reason that this is so wild is i'm seeing people on instagram that like i don't think of as people that like follow tech at all and they're at the apple store getting a mac mini so it feels like it just went almost it broke containment like incredibly quickly and you see the github stars are like actually i've never seen a chart like this every you know the last you know everybody loves to show their charts but the chart is actually unbelievable it's just a line going straight up.

2:57:22I need to talk to someone at GitHub because I don't think there's been a project before that's been straight. It is batshit insane. Honestly, my main mantra is I want to have fun. The best way to learn these new technologies is if you have fun with it. You have to play with it. I build little things that I think could be useful. I try different languages. I try different approaches. It's agantic engineering. I don't like the word vibe coding so much. I always make the joke. I do agantic engineering and then when it starts hitting 3 a.m., I switch to vibe coding and the next day I have regrets.

2:58:02You should have just gone to sleep, basically. Yeah. Sometimes that's hard.

2:58:10But then I just build little things. I had this idea about personal agents in May already. and I tried, it was like the time that GPT-4.1 was out and it was just not good enough and then I thought well all the big companies will build this in the next few months anyhow so I was like why the F should I do that I was just going to wait and they make it better and then I built up I built a lot of stuff there's like one project that is still unfinished that I at some point want to finish And I build a lot of CLIs because that's where agents are really good. You have to close the loop. That's always the secret.

2:58:55You have to build it so that the agent has the best possible way to build software. That's the secret a little bit.

2:59:10I tried a lot of stuff and in November I looked and still there was nothing. like where is my fucking agent I had a little project in in May I spent two months on it it started as a joke because I did a hackathon with two friends and we were like what can we build that could be kind of cool wouldn't it be cool if I could use plot code from my phone it's kind of like something that everybody builds I see this like everyday like by now I almost call it like this is like one step in your journey in becoming a good authentic engineer is going to build some shitty orchestration tool for yourself because it's fun.

2:59:49And you think, yeah. Yeah, yeah, bridge. And I built that for two months. And then I had to stop because it became so good that I was up with my friends, but literally it was my phone, like using cloud code to like, work on this thing. And it's like, this is bad for my mental health. It's already bad. And now like I'm literally building something with better access to my drugs. Yeah. I mean, I saw, I've seen people using Cloud Code on laptops as they get off of airplanes because they're so locked in. They just have to send one more. And that's like the clear sign that like you need a bridge and a phone involved.

3:00:24Yeah. No, but also like, you know, like this feeling when your agents are not running. Yeah. Right now there's like two terminals that could be building something, right? Yeah. So if you're in this addiction mode, you almost like, you almost feel like. If you need to step out for 10 seconds and fire off. Yeah. Feel free to take a break. we can do an ad read. There's still some drama that I'm finishing. But anyhow,

3:00:49so in November,

3:00:53I don't know. You know, I wake up every day. I'm like, okay, what do I want to work on now? What would be cool? And then it was like, okay, I want to chat with my computer on WhatsApp because if my agent is running and then I go to the kitchen, I want to check up on them. Or I want to do little prompts. So I just hacked together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message called Cloud Code and then returns what Cloud Code returns, one shot. And it took like one hour and it worked. I was like, okay, that's kind of cool. But I usually use prompts, like a little text and an image because images are like, they often give you so much context and you don't have to type so much.

3:01:39so I feel like this is like one of the hacks where you can prompt faster just like make a screenshot so that agents are really good at figuring out what you want so I hacked together images and then I was on a trip in Marrakesh with like a weekend birthday trip and I found myself using this like way more than I saw but not for programming, it's more like hey there's like restaurants because it had Google in it and it could figure out stuff and it's like especially when you're on the go it's like super useful and then and i wasn't thinking i was just sending it a voice message you know but i didn't build that there was no support for voice messages in there so the reading indicator came and i'm like oh i'm really curious what's what's happening now and then after 10 seconds my agent replied as if nothing happened i'm like how do you have did you do that and it replied yeah you sent me me a message, but there was only a link to a file.

3:02:41There's no file ending. So I looked at the file header. I found out that it's Opus. I used FFmpeg on your Mac to convert it to Wave. And then I wanted to use Visper, but didn't have it installed, and there was an install error. But then I looked around and found the OpenAI key in your environment. So I sent it via curl to OpenAI, got the translation back, and then I unresponded. That was like the moment where I was like, that's where it clicked. These things are like damn smart, resourceful beasts if you actually give them the power. And then I was kind of hooked. I did all kinds of weird stuff.

3:03:23I used it as alarm clock. I let it migrate to my computer in London but then I used SSH to log into my MacBook and turn up the volume to wake me up in the morning. I was like, I built the world's most expensive alarm clock. Yeah, that's crazy. And it even got it wrong because it uses a heartbeat. The concept of you do a prompt and you get something is already, this full access is inherently dangerous. But I was like, let's turn it up a notch. Let's automate that. Let's give it a heartbeat. And the prompt was literally surprised me. Wow. That's very cool. but you know i see this this project as as much technology as it is like art and exploration because this feels in one way in one way it's just glue it's it's it's just putting pieces together that we already have in another way it's it's a whole different way how you interact with those things because all the technology blends away you don't think about new session compaction which model, I mean, maybe a little bit because tokens are still expensive.

3:04:38But usually all of that blends away. You just talk to a friend or a ghost or whatever this is. Yeah, maybe last year, everyone was wanting these agentic experiences. You were having this experience and it seemed like all the focus was on browsers and seeing the way that people have been using, sorry, MaltBot. It's taking me a while to adapt. It just feels like all the focus was at the wrong layer. It's like, why do I care about the browser if I can just talk with an agent? Across every app. Across every app, every surface. It's like I don't care about the browser at all anymore. I mean, a lot of the prep work I did before I built this was just built little CLIs.

3:05:24Because my premise is MCPs are crap. It doesn't really scale. People build all kinds of weird search things around it. But you know what scales? CLIs. Agents know Unix. You can have a thousand little programs on your computer. They just have to know the name. They call the help menu. They load in what's needed. We are calling the help menu. Then they know how to use it. And then they can use it. and if you are smart you build it in a way that just uses what the model already expects don't build it for humans, build it for models, so if they call minus minus log, you build minus minus log so it's like agentic driven for like build how they think and everything works better, it's a new kind of software in a way so for most of the things I don't need a browser like I built something for the whole Google thing, for places for my Sonos I hooked up my cameras my home automation system with every little CLI and skill my agent got more power and he got more fun and I already had a lot of that working when I I built the WhatsApp thing and I just got hooked and the thing was I found it amazing and I talked about it on Twitter and usually when I talk about projects I get response but this one it was very muted it feels like people are not getting it I showed it to my friends even my non-tech friends and they're like they wanted it so it was like I was up to something but the tech people wouldn't get it So I tried a bunch of things.

3:07:25I kept working on it because I used it. And ultimately, I built it for me. This is open source. My motivation is have fun, inspire people, not make a whole bunch of money. I already have a whole bunch of money.

3:07:44How have you been navigating the last 72 hours? I mean the last week really because we were joking earlier on the show the amount of people that are frantically trying to give you money acquire the company contribute to the project hire you there's companies with 0.01 % of the traction that are raising at multi-billion dollar valuations you have infinite opportunities right now and yet you seem very happy doing just continuing to do exactly what you're doing. But how are you thinking through it all? I mean, how am I taking it? Badly, at least sleep-wise. But it's also infinitely exciting. And I love that I started something.

3:08:35I would say last year was the year of the coding agent. This year is the year of the personal persistent. and I think I cracked and woke up people that there is a real need for it I don't know if ModBot is the answer, it should show people the way, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of a lot of products in this space I'm sure people are medically working on it right now

3:09:05I would say it's going to be very interesting yeah but there was a lot of stuff between Twitter literally exploding, our Discord server multiplying in ways I haven't seen before and in ways I couldn't handle. At some point, I was just copy-pasting questions from Discord into Codex. Then if I had the response, I wrote the next question. At some point, that didn't scale anymore. So I was just like, copied the whole channel. I'm like, answer the 20 most questions. I was like reading over it, gave him a few instructions and just pushed it over because what people don't realize, it's like this is not a company, this is like one dude sitting at home having fun even though I guess from the commits it might appear that it's a company that's just because authentic models got so good that you can now ship as much as a company could a year ago If you can handle those tools, if you speak the language or understand how the language thinks, you can go really fast.

3:10:20How are the conversations going with different labs? I was saying earlier, it's this kind of exciting moment for the labs because they're like, wow, people are using the intelligence. Someone's using the intelligence that I created in a new way. But at the same time, it's deeply uncomfortable because they're also using all of my competitors and you make it very easy to kind of use whatever model.

3:10:44Yeah, my premise for this project was a little bit that every model should work, including local models, because to me, it's a playground. It's an amazing way to learn. I think everybody should build an authentic loop. You should explore memory. There's so many interesting aspects of it. And I built it so that it has plugins, so people can work on their own little thing without having to mess with the whole core. So it's like the AI hacker's paradise a little bit. And it's also super fun because it's personal. Model-wise, Opus is with quite a bit lead the best. OpenAI is very reliable. I would even say more reliable and more reliable worker.

3:11:35Like for coding, I much prefer Codex because it can navigate large code bases. I literally, you can literally prompt and then push domain. And I have a very, I have like 95 % certainty that it actually works. With cloud code, you need more tricks to get the same. You need more charade, I sometimes say. both are good but I can paralyze faster by codex because it requires less hand holding but character wise I tell you I don't know what they trained their model on how much of reddit is in there or whatever but it behaves so good in a discord like we programmed it so it kind of feels like a human it doesn't reply to every message.

3:12:30I gave it this thing where it can reply, no reply, basically, like a token, and then we just don't send a message. So it's not like it spans with every message. It's like it listens to the conversation and then sometimes brings a banger. And that actually makes me laugh. And it's kind of hard because the jokes of AIs are usually really bad. Yeah, yeah. And I only really experienced that with Opus. So that's my favorite model. That's also why it's a little bit of a banger that I got an email from Antropic that I had to rename the project. And I mean, kudos, they were really nice. They didn't send their lawyers.

3:13:17They sent someone internally. But the timeline was a bit rough. like renaming a project with that much traction, it was a bit of a shit show. I think everything that could have gone wrong today went wrong. Oh, no. I tell you. I mean, for what it's worth, I think the new name works really well. I guess the thing that's actually good, I think in the long run it'll be good. I mean, obviously it's good for Anthropic. It's kind of untenable to have this massive viral, even though it's not a company, right, an open source project, have this viral kind of brand out in the world that it doesn't matter if it's spelled differently, but when people are running around talking about ClaudeBot or Claude, there's obvious confusion.

3:14:03But I think it'll be very good for MaltBot to have independence and have its own brand. And I think it's so early and the experience is so magical that it'll solve itself very quickly. It'll be fine. But I tell you, I got some additional pressure so I was like screw it we do it now you know like the meme we do it live so I I had two windows open with twitter

3:14:38on the one I pressed rename on the other one I finished creating the other account was already snapped by crypto shells they have like scripts they were already waiting for it in those 10 seconds. You should have hit us up. We would have connected you to X, the team that can do it on the back end. They can do it on the back end. Next time. Hopefully no next time. They were amazing. They helped me out immediately. We got it solved very quickly. But for like 20 minutes, yeah, well, that didn't work out so well. Hopefully. You're like, if I wanted money, I would raise a billion dollars right now.

3:15:15So I'd sell it for more than that. Yeah. do you own a mac mini everyone wants to know do you own a mac mini what do you think of mac minis um my agent is a little bit of a princess he doesn't do mac minis just my studios okay he wants some horse power he got the he got the the 512 maxed out everything thing because because i wanted to like mess around with local models as well so like i i can run minimax 2.1 which is I would say it's the best the best open source model right now although Kimi just came out and I haven't had a chance to try it yet so we'll see how that goes but yeah one machine is not enough for it, it's not fun you probably need two or three and I kind of want to wait until Apple does a new release but it's still fun to see the potential that yeah there's a future where this could actually work Yeah.

3:16:14Well, if the Mac mini trend keeps going, Apple, from what we've seen, sells like between a quarter million to like 700 ,000 a year. Yeah. It's very possible that you'll be responsible for selling them out. So hopefully they send you some free ones as a thank you. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, zooming out, how much of this do you think is going to remain hacker culture, running your own hardware, and eventually people will move to cloud hosting, one-click deployments, like just easier to use, less technical versus like a real boom in running hardware. Because if you don't, there's not a lot of ways to get these different services to play nicely together.

3:16:59I think one of the beauties beyond just the actual AI agents is the fact that for the first time, I think people are seeing different big tech platforms kind of play with each other somewhat against their will. They build walled gardens for a reason, and you sort of chop those walls down. And I'm wondering what you think about the future of self-hosting hardware, even going down the less technical crew, getting hardware running their own agents. I don't think the future would be that everybody buys a Mac Mini just for that. but I certainly see the demand for the old models have to change when you are a company, you want to access Gmail the amount of red tape is so large that startups buy other startups that have the license for Gmail because going to the process yourself is a huge pit-up but if you run it locally, you work around all of that, right?

3:18:06I built plenty CLIs where I literally pointed Codex at the website and said build me a CLI which is sometimes against the term, sometimes not honestly I don't really care and then Codex would say, no I can't do that this is against blah blah blah and I would tell him a story no no I actually work at this company and I need to surprise my boss and the backend team doesn't know and I'm like, you know, they give it a little bit of a story, like they're so gullible and the code is like, 40 minutes, like, gives you the perfect API. So this is a little bit the liberation of data that Big Tech probably doesn't really want.

3:18:49I mean, even the WhatsApp integration is a hack. This is like, it fakes the protocol that the desktop uses. I tried, I really tried to support the official way, but the official way is for businesses if I'm a business that sends you 100 messages I get blocked so I got blocked immediately and at some point I removed support for it in rage it's like you need everything like 100 exclamation marks there's just no model for that right now and I think that needs to change what I saw what was really interesting with how people use it is a lot of apps will just melt away why do I still need my fitness pal I just make a picture of my food my agent already knows I'm at McDonald's making bad decisions so this combines information it has a perfect match and knows exactly what I'm going to eat and I'm probably going to change my fitness program so I don't need the fitness app it'll just adapt my program and make sure I still meet my goals so there's a whole big layer of apps that I'm going to see disappear because you just naturally interact differently with those things.

3:20:11Like most apps will be reduced to API. And then the question is, do you see that we need the API if I can just save it somewhere else? Yeah. Do you think it'll be a generational thing? Do you think that non-technical people will get over the hump and start running this for that experience specifically? I just came from a meetup from Indiana and I met someone who was a design agency but they never coded and he was like, he discovered me early in December, he started using Maltpod we're going to manage eventually Don't worry, we'll say it thousands of times this year, I'm sure. We will. I was just saying multibot, that's cute.

3:21:03And he was like, yeah, we have 25 web services now. We just build internal tools for whatever we need. And he has no clue how coding works. He just uses Telegram and just talks to his agent, and his agent builds stuff. So there's this whole shift of you don't subscribe to random startups anymore that build this common subset of what you need. You just have your own hyper-personalized software that solves exactly your problem and it's also free. And non-technical people do that, you know, because it just comes so naturally. You just talk your problem and then this thing builds what you need. And you also don't forget, like, this is the worst that the models ever are.

3:21:46Like, this is only going to go up. This is only going to become easier and faster. Have you met Jensen yet? Because I feel like you're making his life. You're definitely helping out. It's an extreme bull case. If I had my tinfoil hat on, I might say you're a big AI industry plant designed to create more inference demand. Yeah, I guess I am. No, we were joking around. What's next? What's next? What's next? I'm assuming you're hopefully getting, after you finish firing off prompts at 3am, you get some sleep. What are you doing tomorrow?

3:22:32There's a lot of emails from security researchers right now. You know, the thing is, I built this for fun, for me to use one-on-one on WhatsApp or Telegram. the whole thing with discord was like edit but the model was that you trust the people that are in there now people use it for untrusted experiences they use like the little web app that I have that was meant for debugging they put it on the open internet so like all the threat models that I didn't care about are now there because people use it differently and I'm being bombarded there's like some stuff that's valid some stuff that I just never cared about that is technically valid but that's not how I use it I don't know how to deal with that yet because it's the whole system is broken you know I'm like one guy I do this for fun and you expect me to sift through a hundred security things for use cases that I don't really care about so we'll see we'll see how it goes luckily I'm starting to build up a team there's definitely people that do care a lot about this so I would say this is going to become a very secure product eventually because right now the whole world is like pulling it apart and if you're honest this is all white coded there's quite some engineering in it but ultimately I wanted to build something to show people a new way not a finished product from an enterprise company and I would even say I don't know if any company would touch it because we just haven't solved some things prompt injection is not solved there is absolute risk and I try to make it very clear on the website and even when you start it you have to please read this document with great power comes great responsibility and my early users understood there's a lot of AI researchers in there as well that it's not perfect, cannot be done perfect yet.

3:24:47I would say this will accelerate research to make it better because now you have the demand and we need to figure out a way how we can build something that works for everyone.

3:25:00But yeah, right now I'm working on making this a community. It should be bigger than me.

3:25:10also I need help. It is way too much work. I can only go so much without sleep. So does any part of you want to form an actual company that then contributes to the open source project but solves some of these problems that are going to require a bunch of people that presumably would need a salary in order to commit all their time to this? Or do you want to keep it just a bunch of hackers forever? I think instead of a company, I would much rather consider a foundation or something that is non-profit.

3:25:48I haven't made up my mind yet. 10 ,000 VCs just punched a hole in the wall.

3:25:57Actually, I don't know. Some people have had a good track record investing in non-profits over the last 10 years. How do you think about open source licensing? What are you picking now? Are you switching? Do you have any plans to change the license? How do you think about someone just taking this and selling it? This will happen. This will totally happen. I would say the premise against it is let's make open source so good that there is not a lot of space for people to convert it and make it their own thing. But ultimately, it's a trade-off. I wanted it to be accessible and free, you pick MIT or something like that, yes, that will get you people that sell it but ultimately

3:26:49it doesn't even matter that much you know, code is not worth that much anymore you could just delete that and then build it again in a month it's it's much more the idea and the eyeballs and maybe the brand that actually has value so let them you are already a cult hero yeah the chat's going crazy for you everyone loves you this is uh one of the most refreshing and unique interviews we've ever had for sure for sure we'll let you get some sleep uh thank you so much for hopping on the show yeah anything else you want to share before you jump off yeah uh yes i would love to have maintainers like if you if you love open source if you have experience if you love shifting to security reports uh or or if you love taking software apart but then also help and not just throw work at me because I'm at my limit.

3:27:56Email me. I want this to outlive me. I think this is too cool to let it go to rot. It needs good people. Incredible. Are you going to ship that product you had in the chamber, you said? There was one you were close? Are you going to lock in on this? that's that's my hobby i don't know no no i have some other ideas in my head of um what something like this could become and it doesn't need to be this but i don't want to share too much yeah no problem come back on the show when you when you launch that we'd love to have you purely for the love of the game the love of the game you're an absolute legend it's great hanging peter thanks so much get some sleep get some sleep we'll talk to you soon goodbye What a legend.

3:28:53Yeah. True overnight success in both ways. You know, I like actually an overnight success in terms of that GitHub star chart. And then also an overnight success and just grinding for, you know, years, building projects and contributing and then building, setting the product up, the brand right. Everything just perfect to really capitalize on the moment. There were so many. I normally, we're podcasting so much, I just don't have a ton of time to re-listen to stuff. But there were so many kind of interesting points of view that he shared that I'll certainly be circling back on that. I'm super interested to see where this goes.

3:29:29A lot of people are saying, get this guy a billion dollars. A lot of people are saying he's going to wind up working on labs. The whole thing is I don't think he needs it. Yeah. The beauty of this is that it was not something magical that was created by spending, burning a billion dollars. The other interesting thing is, do you remember the George Hott's Tiny Box project? Like, George Hott's sort of... Oh, he should team up with George Hott's. Yeah, I mean, George Hott's sort of, like, predicted this in the sense that he was like, you will want your own AI running locally, sort of the Mac Mini style, but it was racked a number of NVIDIA graphics cards so you could run certain models locally.

3:30:07And he had this vision for, you're going to talk to this local model. It's going to interface with everything on your network, on your local network, in your life. And it feels like this is like two sides of the same project coming together. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of viral tiny box. If all of a sudden you go from, okay, yeah, the Mac mini can run this, but you get this better local model, the latest open source model. You get something a little bit more with more firepower. And you can run it just with solar panels, like off the grid. Well, yeah, this is generally not far from what Simpshire Satoshi has been building with Truffle.

3:30:44Oh, yeah. The little glowing orb, right? Yeah. Personal compute. Well, we have been keeping our next guest waiting. Yes. We have Aaron Frank from Lightspeed in the Ultra Dome. Aaron, I'm so sorry for keeping you waiting. Thank you so much. Tough act to follow. How are you doing? Grab a seat. I'm six foot eight.

3:31:10This is fantastic. Yes. Welcome to the Ultradome. Welcome to the Ultradome. First time in the Ultradome. Did you get to listen to some of that? It's actually like a hard act to follow. It's a weird one. It's like the most viral products that anyone has seen in a very long time. First interview. One of the most unique. People don't typically build a viral product and then talk about, what did you say hookers and blackjack something like that his words not mine in the chat um but uh anyways very unique uh how are you doing though i'm doing great flying into town head up to santa barbara this is la is beautiful it is it's a nice place to let it's a it's not the best city but it's a it's a great place in trouble again saying that why does he live in la if he doesn't think it's the best city um anyway sorry first time on uh in the ultra dome please introduce yourself for everyone uh aaron frank i'm a former founder so uh i'm getting old now so a decade ago i started a company uh we built the full stack credit card company okay uh sold it to goldman sachs it became what is now the apple card obviously any projects thousands of people what was it called when you launched it it was called final okay so did a lot in financial services uh helped help goldman kind of launch that product and bring it live for my years there and then on really it's been six years i've switched sides so it's how i met geordie originally Did a lot of angel investing and advising and just giving away free time to give back to the community.

3:32:36And then I've now been at Lightspeed for almost two and a half years, three years. Yeah, when we first met, you were just like, it was on Zoom, COVID. You were in like a log. It literally was like, was it a log cabin? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, me and my wife. Almost off the grid. Yeah, we drove around the country during COVID. So I quit Goldman during COVID. Just there's better things in life than working for an investment bank. Disagree, but to each their own. Yeah, yeah. you switched teams now you're now you're a venture capitalist what have you been focusing on what's interesting yeah take me through like stage scale the type of founders you like to work with the markets okay okay let's just jump right into something uh that i'm curious to get your thoughts on so uh specifically like a category that i'm going to guess you're spending a lot the time on so with with multibot clodbot yeah you now have uh you know i there's a world where the the level of intensity that that software engineers have been using coding agents you start to get everyday people that are now like firing off prompts all the time to like do things more than just like a google search or a deep research report and presumably like there's that's going to involve like money i imagine and so i feel like there's been a people have had different theses around maybe stable coins play a part of this somehow.

3:33:55I haven't seen the most clear explanation for that yet. Maybe there's other new payment rails, maybe Stripe just, you know, dominate. Yeah. It's a agent of commerce is a weird thing, right? Like we actually don't have the payment rails to enable agents to proliferate. We've funded some people doing that, building kind of L1s to essentially provide that next rail. but the reality is the biggest distribution networks are Visa MasterCard on the merchant side and they don't have really a cost structure that, sorry, they have a cost structure that can support it. They just don't have a market force that forces them there.

3:34:33Stripe and Tempo launching, well, Tempo's not live yet, but supporting kind of a new network there. Ultimately, stablecoins may be, you know, the path there for at least how we transfer value, but it's also just kind of a store of value right now. agent of commerce is just an inning one because we also just don't have a use case the joke I make is I haven't actually been able to buy anything with an agent in the news this week was what Shopify is tacking on 4 % on top of transaction which they're sending it to open AI but yeah that's untenable for a merchant some merchants for dropshippers it's fine but for any there are plenty of merchants that have 20 % coupon codes in every podcast that's true but that's a very small portion if you think about like Walmart Walmart literally doesn't take Apple Pay because it doesn't want to pay the 15 extra or whatever it is basis points.

3:35:19Very good point. So, like, when you get to large trillions of dollars of commerce, agentic payments have to actually be more efficient for the system to be adopted. Otherwise, we're just going back to cart. You need to lift an actual consumer behavior. Consumption needs to increase to offset that 4%. Correct. E-commerce needs to either basket size increase or checkout conversion increase. And, like, agents – Yeah, I was worried about a situation where somebody discovers a product on Instagram via an ad that a brand paid for, and then they just go in a chat GPT or another model and say, like, order this for me.

3:35:48And then it's like just an incremental 4%. You already paid to acquire the customer effectively. And depending on how great this integration is, it might be that consumers just start to prefer that. Yeah. Yeah, it's an evolving field. There's a whole other thing is how do you trust an agent if I'm Lululemon and they just show up? Like, I don't know whose agent this is. I don't know if it's personal or it's a business. And so we don't actually have a layer in the internet today that says you can trust this agent. It's not fraud, which if you think about how an e-commerce checkout store works today, they have multiple, you know, consumer puts in a card.

3:36:25There's multiple layers of fraud checks that happen. And so when an agent shows up from the same IP for 50 times in the same day, you have no idea what that consumer is. And then you lose all the downstream tracking that you do on a consumer per transaction. Yeah. It breaks the entire model of the internet. Yeah, I was sort of cautiously optimistic that agentic commerce would roll out before Black Friday, at the end of last year. That didn't really happen. I mean, I've had the same experience as you. I don't think I've purchased anything agentically yet. I've tried to buy flights, and even search is bad for it.

3:36:58We just need to build more and more protocols. I think the current use case would just be like you're trying to buy a single product and not a complex cart yet, just something simple. And I think it can get across the finish line. But again, I haven't actually been moved to do that. And I'm wondering where GMV on agentic platforms will land at the end of this year. It feels like there's going to be a massive push. All the integrations are happening. All the deals are happening. like you can see the UI is adapting to it. I think OpenAI already has my credit card in ChatGPT. They should be able to do this.

3:37:34But I'm wondering like consumer behavior, awareness, education, there's a lot in there. There's an images tab. There's a deep research tab. Like there's just a lot that could put like a slowdown on the rollout there. Yeah, there's an old saying in payments is that everything happens over a 10-year time horizon. AI clearly is shifting that shorter, but like until it's actually saving you time and you trust that they're doing, they're getting you a discount, they're getting you the most efficient price or something like that. Consumer behavior is fundamentally the hardest thing to change. Totally.

3:38:04So it will exist. I'm sure there are people buying stuff. I'm sure I will get slammed for saying, who's done an agentic transaction? But the reality is it's... I mean, people are out there giving their... The classic thing last year was like, just let me order a flight. And I think we're now getting that. We're close. And we've had agentic commerce. When we were running Final, we had a ton of people using the product for sneaker bots. Oh, okay. And so it's a bot. You know, agentic commerce is bots by another name. Yeah, I guess that is agentic commerce technically. But it's just like you now have this layer of intelligence that an LLM gives you.

3:38:41So it can do complex coordination and complex tasks. I had an auction sniper in like 2004 on eBay. Yeah. Click the button right before the auction ends. They still exist. They still exist, yeah. And there's a ton of volume flow. But you know what? it still runs over the card barrels because it's the lowest common denominator. Yep, yep, that makes sense. Interesting. So is one of the strongest bull cases for stablecoins still just lower transaction fees? No, not at all. No, there's no domestic... Oh man, I'm going to get slammed for this. Yeah, so it doesn't seem like any of the players that have the ability to get institutional adoption of stablecoins have any incentive to be like, oh yeah, it's going to be like 0.01 % fees.

3:39:23You maybe want to be competitive, but there's no incentive to make it zero or close to zero. You would do zero so you get the other side of the equation. If you think about a store of value, if you look at a dollar, I give you a dollar, you know it's worth a dollar. There's no risk transfer there at all. And that's actually what we want in payments. And it's actually why Visa and MasterCard are the largest factoring networks in the world. When you swipe at Starbucks, they don't get a dollar. they get 97.5 cents on the dollar because that is the risk that they were taking in taking your dollar.

3:39:58Stablecoins, you would give it away for free. One, because ultimately Visa Master, man, we're going way deep in payments, but are actually data networks. They actually don't transfer money. The money is transferred via settlement layer at Fedwire. And so when you think about it, like how would you do with stablecoins? Well, it's still just a data layer and you actually just want to hold on to as much treasuries as possible and make the yield from that. And so how would you aggregate volume? Well, you give away the transfer for free. Because data, in theory, if you look at a bunch of network effect things, as data goes up to the right, the cost of that data should come down to the right.

3:40:30And so you would just want as much volume over your network to win. And that's why you have things like Tempo launching. You have the other kind of L1s launching to try to aggregate all that data, while you also have the incumbents who have a lot of money and a lot of market force to be able to try out new things to try to capture that volume back. Are we able to stop launching new L1s? There'll be new use cases. you can launch them, whether you get adoption is a different question. We backed one called Radius Technology, building really interesting technology as an L1. It enables transaction volumes, I think Bobby would say, in the millions.

3:41:04They came out of the Fed, kind of the central bank digital currency project that died. They turned Project Hamilton into this company. And in doing so, yeah, if you want to do agent of commerce, you're going to be talking about millions of transactions a second. And you can't do that over existing rails. in a way that doesn't also break a bunch of other kind of primitives. So, yeah, we'll keep on launching L1s. What I was saying about stablecoins is there's really – stablecoin is just kind of a quasi-bank account, right? We finally have true programmatic money. Behind the scenes, there's a lot that happens to on-ramp and off-ramp.

3:41:34But what it enables us to truly take what is the U.S.'s biggest export, which is the U.S. dollar by far, and export it globally without any barriers. So if I'm any other country, friendly or not, my citizens can now get access to the U.S. dollar. And that is the demonstrable use case of stable points. Everything is downstream of that. Venezuela is a great example right now. Do you trust your central currency? No, you don't even trust the central bank, so I'd rather hold on to US dollars. Yeah, we were talking with Joe, the co-founder of Ethereum, yesterday. Just saying, interesting dynamic right now where Americans, if you've had access to the US dollar, your whole life and the benefits of it, you're like, I want silver and gold and all these other assets.

3:42:20But then elsewhere in the world, you have people that are like, finally, I can have something that sure it's inflating, but it's not inflating 40 to 60 % a month. I mean, that's why it might like an independent Fed or a like is important because this is the global currency. If you think about all the sci-fi we've all watched growing up, they had a concept of credits. We had some intergalactic currency. How do we get, like, where we are today, how do we get to the credit system, right? And the answer is probably something stablecoin-esque, some crypto-esque coin that is tied to something that we, I mean, money is just a trust system at the end of the day, so something that we trust across counterparties.

3:42:57And so, like, this is the biggest shift in my generation, and I'm not that old, like, as I said, I don't feel that, that, like, we finally globalized the world. You're unk. There's one layer above, which is elder. No, two layers above. It goes unk, then OG, then elder. Oh, got it. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, so you're a spring chicken. Yeah, yeah, that's great.

3:43:25Where, like, what does winning this year look like at Lightspeed in your role? You're obviously focused on. Let's talk about something. Venture is just like expensive emails that we all write to each other in venture, and every once in a while we convince a founder. I know, but, like, is there, this can be a tough one to answer, but, like, is there a company that you feel like is uniquely enabled now that you haven't pitched yet? Oh, no. Does everything get kind of pitched in some way or another? No, I think, like, there's many ways. I've been on this side for two years. At the core, I still think like a founder, and, like, I had kind of forgotten what it was, and then we launched our, me and a friend run a stablecoin conference every year, and I was like, oh, this is what it's like to, like, start something from scratch and, like, build something.

3:44:08Is that Nick? No, not, no. He also, yeah. He runs Stable Condo. It's called A Very Stable Conference. So me and I are in it. Right, right, right, right, right. We're six weeks out in March in SF. But no, you know, there's many ways to do this. And like at the end of the day, when I've really boiled it down, venture is a people business. Like you're betting on people, especially as early as you can go. And then you let them go cook. Like you give them money and let them cook is like my real mantra. So there's not people like, that I feel like I've ever missed on deals or people like, oh, I can't get an intro to because there's also this style and venture of like, you actually want to have to talk to this person, right?

3:44:44Like I had a three-hour board meeting and I needed to debrief with the founder and that's like another two hours potentially and I'm happy to do it. And if we have that vibe that works. What? It's basically your whole day that you got to. Yeah, yeah, but if I have that vibe where I'm more than happy to like pick up the phone at 9 p.m. and just talk to them until 11, that's the type of founder I want to work with. At least that's how I think venture should be. There's like other ways. There's people who just do massive prospecting. But as I've kind of looked at it, like life's short. There's lots of ways to make money and like find the people who are going to leave a dent in the world.

3:45:15So if you're I don't I'm not apologetic for being like a weird human underneath. But like if I find other weird humans who I vibe with and who want to do something interesting in the world, then it's usually kind of a very good match made in heaven. Yeah. What do the various constituents coming to your conference in six weeks? how do they want the, do they want yield on stable coins? I'm guessing they do. How are they all feeling about kind of the current regulation that, and maybe give us an update because I know it's kind of. Yeah, yeah, and there's a bunch of market structure stuff that is like actively happening, so I don't have the latest on that to be honest.

3:45:53Last year it was in February 12th. It was the month before the Genius Act passed, so we actually had Governor Waller speak at the conference and give a public speech, and we actually had to live stream it because he's a public official and a governor can move the markets. We're working on a few other kind of high-name people that haven't been announced yet. Really, the whole premise of the conference, and it's really funny, so I had a kid a year and a half, two years ago now. Thank you. So I was walking around in July with my kids strapped to my chest at 6 a.m. and called Io, my coordinator. As one does.

3:46:26as you have a young baby and you're trying to get your steps in. And I said, we're talking about stable coins and how it's changing the world. And we're like, somebody should host a conference. And then we both stopped and were like, oh, shit, we have to host a conference. Really the whole premise is how do you get all of the right people? Not like I don't need 25 people from every single company. I need the two or three right people at every company. Ideally, it's the founder, but sometimes if you're a massive company, it's somebody lower level. And put them all in the same room, make the content interesting, and make the networking good.

3:46:55And, like, I have a big belief in serendipity and doing interesting things in the world. And so it's how do we create serendipity? I know of at least one or two deals. Well, we did a few deals. Besides Lightspeed, who was a sponsor last year and sponsoring again this year, I know of two deals that happened as a result of, like, a founder showing up at the conference, meeting another top-tier VC, and they did a deal together in SampleCoins. So, like, our goal is not to, like, dominate the conference. It's bring the people together and get this thing, like, and keep the industry moving forward. what's your take on the proliferation of stable coins specifically those like i saw a couple states talking about launching them and that feels like i i might have it wrong but it feels intuitively like a step away from the universal credit system yeah but maybe it's they're all credits well it's like slightly different credits wrappers around yeah it's it's a question of there's a question me and my friends have talked about which is like at what point does a central bank of let's just choose a random country, Colombia, change their interest rate and nothing happens.

3:47:55Like how much of their citizenry needs to be moved to U.S. dollar? How much of their GDP needs to be in U.S. dollar for the central bank to no longer be relevant? So this is them fighting back against I can no longer stop my citizens. Like they can hold Bitcoin, but now they can actually hold dollars, which are like not volatile. It's actually a better, historically a better store of value. So we've seen CBDCs, central bank digital currencies. They certainly will provide efficiency in those countries and the domestic markets when they run long term how will they work out uh it's like i don't i don't even think about it because it's just we're seeing this macro trend of dollars taking off i mean literally today tether launched their u.s compliant stuff so like um and tether is the largest by far and it wouldn't surprise me if they very aggressively shift a lot of money from usdt to usdt i think it's a because it's anchorage um just to show that there's massive compliant volume and the world's just going to pick up.

3:48:50We're at$300 billion of stablecoins, I think, today. It was$200 billion last year, roughly. The number just keep going up. Number go up. Number go up. Let's hear it. Our greatest export. Our greatest export. Yeah, exactly. That's great. Well, I'm excited for the event. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. You guys are welcome. What day is it? March 5th at Terra Gallery. It's invite only, so apply at verystableconference.com. Hit them up. A great name. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming down to the TBPN Ultra Dome. Great to have you. Close out the show with us. Close out the show with us. Thank you for watching.

3:49:23Thank you for watching. Thank you for watching. We'll be live tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the TBPN newsletter at tbpn.com. And have a great rest of your day. We love you. Goodbye. Goodbye.