Davos Prints Cash, Private Credit Exits, Capital One Acquires Brex | Cathie Wood, Keller Cliffton, Jake Cooper, Joe Weisenthal, Coldhealing, Pedro Franceschi, Delian Asparouhov

27:07Anyway, so Dylan messaged John. And we figure out that John accidentally purchased fake TBPN merch online. Be careful. But at least he's still looking great. Yeah. So. Yeah, it works. Silver lining. But yeah, I mean, our saga to battle the fraudulent merch, the knockoff merch has been incredible. This site popped up and we assumed, okay, they're not going to take payments, certainly. they're definitely not going to print and ship anything and we'll be able to get this taken down in two seconds and we i actually sent them an email saying like hey uh hey like i assume you're a fan like just so you know like we don't want this out there like i'd be happy to talk to you about maybe working together or something but uh can you please uh just not use our brand and our trademarks and all this stuff uh out there on the internet without without talking to us first like let's have a conversation about this.

28:07Did not get a response. Not a fan. And I think some other people on the team were like, yeah, John, that was never going to work. And they were right. You tried to go golden retriever mode. I did. I did. I was like, I'm just going to assume the best. I'm just going to assume this an over eager fan or someone who just is entrepreneurial, a kid who's just trying to just make something happen. No, this is a Canadian. We know it's a Canadian. We know it's a Canadian. This is a Canadian. Yeah. Anything could happen up there. Dodd in the chat says, you guys have a good line of Shopify. I assume most of them are hosted there.

28:37No, it's not hosted on Shopify. It's not. And at one point, we've already gotten them taken down from a number of platforms where we know the CEOs and we'll say, hey, we have this fake site. Can you take this down? They will. And they'll pop up on a different site. And so it's been a true game of whack-a-mole. We've sent a number of demand letters at this point. We've really pushed it a lot, but they keep finding a way. And at this point, they are, in fact, taking people's money and shipping fake product now and fooling people that are discerning. And apparently it smells kind of funny. Uh-oh.

29:08Which is a big issue. The real merch is coming. The real merch is coming. We do have a partnership with Shopify. We've been sampling a bunch of different stuff. Of course, of course, Shopify. We need to put out like a Maduro-style bounty. Oh, no. Put a stack on there. Shopify, of course, 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. Trey says, Mark Carney is selling fake TVPN merch. Crazy. He heard, he saw your post about him. His cortisol spiking. Yeah, his cortisol spiking. And he was like, you know what?

29:45I'm not doing anything about this. Canadians, it's really concerning the number of people that didn't understand that my post was a joke. You're very online and you're very early to a lot of these things. You were trying to make aura happen back like over a year one of last year didn't happen it was flopping a long time then you try to make motion happen i still think people are just waking up to motion uh this is this will happen but you gotta you gotta let it simmer i mean i've seen this i've seen this multiple times but i just the the idea of like processing davos as though it's like a bunch of kick streamers it is it is very funny to you know look at the aesthetics and the whole kick like clipping economy is crazy i i found one of those clips and then i went and looked at the account and it's like like dozens of posts that are the same format where it's like they have a word in all caps and then they have an emoji and then they have this and it's like very sensationalist it feels like paparazzi on top of a kick stream or something very very odd phenomenon the the thing that is real is like the drama that's going on at davos is not that different it's not see you know, Besant taking shots at Gavin Newsom.

30:55There might be some cortisol spikes. They're definitely spiking each other's cortisol, getting each other to crash out. I still don't even know what cortisol spiking means. Is it just like getting angry? What does it actually mean? If you get into any type of, you know, verbal, physical altercation. It's like a fight or flight mechanic? Yeah, the cortisol floods your brain. It just makes you, okay. Yeah. Well, yeah. Gets your, gets the people going. Private credit investors' cortisol has been spiking because they are cashing out in droves. Redemptions by individual investors in funds soared at the end of 2025 after performance declined, reviving questions about suitability.

31:33This is from Matt Wurz in The Wall Street Journal. He says, for the first time since the start of the private credit boom, large numbers of individual investors are trying to get their money out. Several of the big funds eligible to wealthy individuals receive requests from about 5 % of shareholders to cash out at the end of last year, well above the normal volume. according to the SEC. One managed by Blue Owl got redemptions for about 15 % of its shares. This was something where people were nervous about the data center build out, private credit, the expansion here. Apparently what's driving it primarily was Asian clients asking for redemptions from Blue Owl specifically.

32:11The rising redemptions come at an awkward time for private credit fund managers and for the Trump administration as they push for new rules that would democratize private markets by encouraging their inclusion in 401k retirement plans for all Americans. Private fund managers, including Apollo Global and Blue Owl, blame fear-mongering about a recent spate of corporate bankruptcies. This is the whole cockroaches back and forth with Jamie Dimon and some of the folks in the private credit world, Blackstone, Apollo, Blue Owl. Because there was an automotive supplier that went bankrupt, first brands we talked about, and there was a surge of withdrawals.

32:47analysts say there could be a simpler explanation. Individual investors are falling into a similar pattern, a familiar pattern of selling out when an asset class underperforms expectations. These investors got really surprised when their dividends went down, said Robert Dodd, an analyst at Raymond James. BDCs, the business development companies, they typically make high interest loans to mid-sized corporations with junk credit ratings using the interest income from those loans to pay dividends. A handful of these funds have cut dividends because the yield on their loans are falling in lockstep with benchmark interest rates.

33:25For more dividend reductions will follow, Dodd said, likely prompting more redemptions. Total returns from five of the largest private credit funds aimed at individual investors declined to an average of about 6.22 % in the first nine months of 2025, compared with 8.76 % in the same period, 2024. And back in 2020, If you were in these funds, you were making 11.4%, not bad. Money managed by BDCs has tripled since 2020 to about$450 billion. So there's been a big growth. And the funds still took in more new money from new investors than they paid out in their most recent quarter, a sign that they are still popular among investors and advisors.

34:07Let's move on. But first, let me tell you about phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a phantom card. The Kobe SE letter. Breaking. SpaceX is set to hire Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley to lead its IPO. That's a whole host, a murderous row. The IPO is expected to be valued as much as$1.5 trillion, making it the largest IPO in history. But the community knows put it in the truth zone because Saudi Aramco's IPO in 2019 sported a valuation of$1.7 trillion. Interesting. Very different. They raised$25 billion,$25.6 billion. Oh, yeah. Okay.

34:49So anyways, obviously Elon targeting more than that on an actual dollar basis. Well, there's other news about Anthropic. The revenue run rate for the end of 2025 was$9 billion, up from$4 billion in July 2025. What an incredible growth. Iconic, Lightspeed, and Menlo are set to join the new funding round from TechMeme here and Bloomberg reporting. This is maybe a deceleration. I was debating this with Tyler. I mean, they went from$100 million to$1 billion. They 10xed. Then they were going to 10x it again. so everyone was expecting 10 billion and 10 exit again and they landed at nine on run rate yeah i was trying to find i'm seeing deceleration did they uh did they predict 10 billion i don't know i i actually don't know the exact quote i think dario like was pretty loose about it he was just saying that like we've seen he was saying yeah he was saying he was saying we went a full order of magnitude from 100 to a billion we're going to do a full order magnitude again is it of full order of magnitude to go from one to nine?

35:54And he said he only expects like three or four more 10Xs. He said that? No. No, no. I specifically remember him saying like, we cannot keep that level of growth going. He said it would be pretty crazy if that... Yeah. I don't think he said we can't. Oh, okay. He said it would be pretty crazy. Yeah. Okay. Well, obviously... He said if that continues, then like you're really in the, you know, the biggest companies in the world are on that scale. Yeah. I mean, at a certain point, like there's no company that's doing a trillion dollars a year in revenue, and you're only two orders a magnitude away from that.

36:27So we'll see, we'll see. But obviously Anthropics has been on a tear, and the new round seems to be coming together nicely. There is other news from the information. Amir says that Anthropics' inference costs on Google and Amazon servers were 23 % higher than the company projected. Of course, when you're growing so fast, you're probably willing to pay more for inference just to make sure that everything stays online. Better to service the demand and not get that frustration, people hitting rate limits, etc. Yeah, I think later in the summer, there was a lot of news about how the Anthropoc API is always down for issues.

37:07Yeah, there was that. And then there were also some FUD-type articles about negative gross margins, about margins being really, really bad at these labs. Where's the value accruing? Is it all going to accrue to NVIDIA? Last month, Anthropic projected it would generate around 40 % gross margins from selling AI to businesses and application developers. But I think that gross margin came in a little bit lower. But there is so much more that they can do to optimize. They're buying TPUs now. They're going to build new data centers. And also, it does feel like we're going to enter a world where inference is load balanced across a variety of semiconductor stacks.

37:49And so for really fast things, you might be going to a Grok or a Cerebrus. Or for more basic stuff, you might be going to a legacy model that's cheaper to inference. And all of that might be blended together into something that's more profitable. And then also the dynamic of the equilibrium in the ecosystem could just be higher prices if it's delivering a lot of value. People are really happy with the value that they're getting from you. And Beth Jezos posted a real picture of Dario yesterday. Fact check true. That you can pull up here. Dario AmogDA. The jawline is crazy on this photo. AI is good.

38:30Claude's going to be able to do this to people one shot. No, Claude will not. They're not launching an image model. No, no, I'm just saying you're going to be able to just talk to Claude and say, like, turn me into a, uh, into a mogger. In real life. It will, you know, orchestrate the jaw. Okay. Got it. Got the double jaw surgery. Leg lengthening. Yeah. Surgery. They'll purchase it all for you and just create a schedule for you. Yeah. Call the Waymo to take you to the, you know, uh, to the dentist or whatever to do the surgery. Well, if in, if you're in San Francisco on February 3rd, you need to call the Waymo and head over to the Cisco AI Summit.

39:05It's bringing together leaders from NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy. The whole thing will be live streamed and will be there for a big stream. We'll be there. Hope to see you there. Very exciting. Apparently, Google DeepMind is signing a licensing deal. It really is a licensing deal economy that we're in. Last year was the press release economy. This year, very much the licensing deal economy. Hume AI, which builds emotionally intelligent voice interfaces. And they're going to hire CEO Alan Cohen and seven of their engineers. Is this the same ghost ship story that we've seen so many times before?

39:45It's essentially an acquisition? Is that what we're reading this? Yeah, that's major licensing. I mean, yeah, the CEO is joining DeepMind. I never thought of Google as particularly behind in voice interfaces. I'm wondering what else is going on here. I mean, certainly it's an important part of the stack if you have an app that people are chatting with and talking to. Obviously, Notebook LM was sort of a viral success, but I do really wonder about the longevity and the retention. It feels like they were maybe like, I don't know, 80 or 90 % there in terms of people. Maybe it's just a speed thing.

40:31Maybe it's the actual cadence. I've talked to some people that have been. Didn't that team leave and start their own thing? They did. They did. But I mean, you've got to be able to backfill that if you're Googling DeepMind. You have a great product with a lot of people talking about Notebook LM very positively. I think a lot of the notebook column functionality eventually got baked into the Gemini app. And so, but there still is just, it feels like when you have a latency step where you ask a question, okay, prepare a deep research report and turn it into a podcast and read it to me on the Roman Empire.

41:06And you have the option to just go to YouTube and just find a video of, or pull up hardcore history or something and just listen to it. And as soon as you click, it just starts playing. Versus you have to wait. That's going to induce churn. That's going to increase. I always thought Notebook LM was the product that I wanted to cram for college exams. Yes. Yeah, I did that. I remember like - My history final. Yeah. There's so many moments in college where I was like riding my bike to an exam. Yes, yes, yes. I could really use these 15 minutes to learn about - No, no, 100%. I didn't write a paper on it or whatever.

41:40But at the same time, for probably 99 % of high school exams, the topic is well studied. And there's already like SparkNotes, when I went to high school, like SparkNotes existed. And if you were doing a book report on the Odyssey, there was already a pre-written summary of it. You didn't need an LLM. Like LLMs are particularly good. Notebook LLMs are particularly good when you need to generate a report or an essay or a deep dive or a podcast about something that no one has ever made a podcast about before. Yeah. But if you're just looking for an hour of really thoughtful content on, you know, peptides, like the Huberman Lab podcast exists and has created a very polished product around that.

42:28Opinionated. Opinionated as well, which I think people want. But even just in terms of just facts, like the facts are already polished. And the most important thing is that it's there, just one click to start that video. So I'm sure that a lot of high school students are pulling up YouTube videos that summarize the topics that are going into their calculus exam or whatever they're about to walk into. There's plenty of extra - Yeah, you didn't have streaming video on the internet when you were going through college, right? That didn't exist? A little bit. I'm kidding. I think it was, YouTube was there, but the library, YouTube videos, it was truly like, hey, come in this dorm room.

43:06Let me show you the three YouTube videos that I know about. It's a great sign of my culture and respect to show you the greatest YouTube videos that are viral in my world. Anyway, MongoDB, choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Rumor. News from Sam Altman. Oh, yeah. He shared today, we have added more than 1 billion of ARR in the last month just from our API business. People think of us mostly as ChatGPT, but the API team is doing amazing work. That's fantastic. Yeah. I mean, we saw they just did this huge deal with ServiceNow.

43:45They're definitely cooking. They've been cooking for a long time. They have an enterprise go-to-market motion that's definitely working and somewhat disconnected from whatever the hot story of the week is. People are pretty funny in the comments going, brother,$1 billion of ARR at a$5 billion valuation, you're going to need to make that MRR. Obviously, this person misread Pose, which is they added$1 billion in the last month. Okay, yeah. That's pretty good. So, of course, I would imagine their plan is to continue doing that and actually scale that. Bubble Boy is sharing. I love Bubble Boy, but I do not believe his rumors.

44:25I don't go to him for rumors necessarily. But I don't know. A lot of likes on this. Maybe it's real. There's no community note. What's the rumor from Bubble Boy? The rumor. Google is spinning out the TPU team into a separate entity under Alphabet umbrella to sell hardware to third parties directly. It could happen. Someone calls it a cross-chain atomic swap. That's funny. Anyway, would they even need to do that? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, you can see Waymo. It's like, did they need to raise money? At the Waymo level, right? Sometimes it's helpful for a company to have its own. Alphabet structuring and how they report out earnings and whatnot.

45:04Anyway, staying in the big tech world, let's head over to Mark Gurman's latest report. The Gurmanator. Apple is revamping Siri as a built-in iPhone, Mac, and chatbot to fend off OpenAI. And there's an image here. What is this? the Google Gemini AI chatbot on a Galaxy S25 Ultra smartphone. So Apple plans to revamp Siri later this year by turning the digital assistant into the company's first artificial intelligence chatbot, thrusting the iPhone maker into a generative AI race dominated by OpenAI on Google. The chatbot, codenamed Kempos, will be embedded deeply into the iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems and replace the current Siri interface, according to people familiar with the plan.

45:48Users will be able to summon the new service the same way they open Siri now by speaking the Siri command or holding down the side button of their iPhone or iPad. The new approach will go well beyond the capabilities of current Siri for even a long-promised update that's coming earlier in 2026. John, say Siri again really loudly and clearly for anybody that's watching on their TV at home or in their office. The feature is a central piece of Apple's turnaround plan for the AI market where it has lagged behind Silicon Valley peers. The Apple intelligence platform had a rocky rollout in 2024 with features that were underwhelming or slow to arrive.

46:26Shares of Apple gained on the chatbot news, climbing as much as 1.7%. The previously promised non-chatbot update to Siri, retaining the current interfaces planned for iOS 26.4 due in the coming months. The idea behind that upgrade is to add features unveiled in 2024, including the ability to analyze on-screen content and tap into personal data. It will also be better at searching the web. Chatbot's capabilities will come later in the year, according to people who ask not to be identified. The company plans to unveil that technology in June at WWDC Campus, which will have both voice and typing-based models.

47:05Tyler, what's that sound like? typing, you're going to be able to type to Siri back and forth. An app? An app, let's go. Wait, can't you type to Siri? No. Right now, you can't? Maybe, but you don't have an app. You don't have a place to store all your conversations, which was my take. Okay, cool. But I still care about the model being implemented way more than I care about it. Yeah, of course. Where are... The model's going to be good. They're using Gemini. We know that. But what specifically are you looking for on the implementation side? Yeah, Jemmy boys. Jemmy boys. Tim Cook's a Jemmy boy. But where are you, like, what are you worried about them not implementing correctly?

47:49Like, you want, like, an agentic harness so it can do, like, cloud code style work, like, for a long time on your phone directly? Yeah, I don't know. There's just, like, the current Apple intelligence is so bad. Yeah. I just like have very low, like, I think there's a real possibility that they just like make it so every time you have to talk to Siri, you have to like press an extra button or something. There's just like random stuff like that. Yeah. But what if it's just you press and hold the button and then you're just submitting a Gemini prompt and then it just returns exactly what Gemini would have returned?

48:25That's like not implementation. That's just like normal. Yeah, but like why? I mean, they could have already done that. You think they might have done that? Like an open source model. Like they could have done that. No, they didn't get a deal. They can't just, Apple can't just go and implement anything. I think it's going to be tricky for them. Like specifically, Llama. Yeah, that would be good. So specifically, Llama has in the terms of service, like you cannot use this. It's open source unless you have more than like 800 million users or something like that. Like there's some specific car about for other big tech.

48:54Opening, I trained their open source model for like$5 million. Like Apple could do it for$100 million. You think so? Yeah, people always talk about how amazing the open source model is. Okay, it's way better than the current Apple IntelliJ. That's true, that's true. Okay. Open source models are pretty solid. So you're saying you want Apple to make the phone with Foxconn and run DeepSeq. Yeah, come on. They're not doing that. They're not putting DeepSeq on there. Other than the chatbot interface, the operating systems aren't getting big changes this year. Of course, we got Liquid Glass. So Apple is more focused on perform on improving performance and fixing bugs last year It rolled out a major design overhaul unifying the look and feel of its operating systems Internally Apple is testing the chat bot technology as a standalone Siri app.

49:40Let's go Similar to the chat GPT and Gemini options available in the App Store The company doesn't plan to offer that version to customers though, so we might not get an app. I'm on a roller coaster here Instead it will integrate the software across its operating systems like the Siri of today I still think they need an app because I'm going to hit it. I'm going to ask it a question. I'm going to want to come back to it. How am I going to do that? So I don't know. Hey, Siri, go back to the recent question. Yeah, maybe. But it's got to be good. Then it is. Then the implementation has to be good.

50:06Because even in Gemini and ChatTPT, there are often times when I will fire off a query. It will come back with like thousands of words. And if I search a keyword in the search box of previous chats, I have so many previous chats that I can't necessarily find the exact one that I'm thinking of. Okay, so one implementation thing that I think is important is, like, if it's super long, if the response is super long and it reads it out to you, like, you should be able to pause or something like that. Like, in Claude, you can't do that right now. Yeah. No, you can't even fast-forward five or six. That is an important thing that materially affects how good it is to you.

50:40Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. Embracing the chatbot approach represents a strategic shift for Apple, which has long downplayed the conversational AI tools popularized by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. Executives have argued that users prefer having AI woven directly into features, something Apple has done with its writing tools, Genmoji, Emoji Generator, and notification summaries, rather than standalone chat experiences. That's not an unreasonable take. I do see why they landed there. And in the long term, I wouldn't be surprised if the AI woven in the features, like the AI that's in the Photos app is better than, okay, I got to open up the chat app and ask it to edit this photo and import the photo from my photo.

51:25Like, no, you just want to be able to go into the Photos app, have the, you know, change the color temperature, change the brightness, draw on it, add text, and then also have AI features in there, I would imagine. So I am bullish on Apple diffusing AI into all the other apps, but it's taking a while. What do you think? Yeah, I just hope the team specifically that designed the new version of the Photos app from the ground up takes the lead on Apple Intelligence. You're not a fan. It's been getting better. It's not perfect, but it has been getting better. I've been learning how to do it. I know the quirks.

51:58Is it getting better or are you getting better? I'm getting better. I'm getting better. It can't hold me back. It was just a skillet. They should have just come out and said, hey, we hear that you guys don't like the Photos app. Skill issue. Billboard campaign. Skill issue. Skill issue. Let's do it. Yeah, just the Apple Photos icon and then just the text skill issue. Skill issue. Stop complaining. Anyway, Graphite. It's code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Germinator had more news. He says just now Apple quietly gave hardware chief John Turner's oversight over the company's hardware and software design teams at the end of last year, marking the first evidence he is being groomed for the eventual apple ceo role i like turnus i'm a turnus fan turnus head and i think i'm bullish i hope he gets it i don't know it feels like it's still very up in the air very rumor based but uh he's been putting out good vibes he's been delivering i don't know i i'm i whoever that whoever that source that was we should make a hard decision we should make uh we should start making edits of him talking doing apple keynotes Yes, we need to get a Ternus vibreel up for sure.

53:08Prime the pump. Prime the pump. If he doesn't get it and we've been pumping Ternus and becoming Ternus heads, it would be a big L for us. We'd see. We'll see. Let's see. We already talked enough about the Thinking Machines drama. The New York Times is reporting on the internal drama Thinking Machines now. Who wrote this? Was this from? Mike Isaac. From Mike Isaac? Ooh, seven-minute article. Okay, defection, secret conversations, deal talks that fizzled, and a battle for control. And the quote from Andrew Kern that he pulls out says, but in less than a year, Mr. Zoff, Mr. Metz, and Mr. Schoenholtz had become deeply unhappy with the startup's direction.

53:50I wish they'd unpacked that more. These pieces have not gone deep enough into the nature of the dispute around the technical direction. I would really like more answers there because, like, what specifically are they unhappy about? Because just, you know, the, like, B2B fine-tuning that seems like a good business, like, opening eyes, having a lot of success with it. Has Thinking Machines, is it a go-to-market problem? Has it been an implementation problem? Has it been training? Yeah, overall, there's nothing that kills motivation like having to show up to work every day and believing that the company is moving in the wrong direction.

54:27Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, but what specific? Yeah, I'm sure the team at OpenAI has maybe a rough idea. And that was, again, part of what Mira, it sounds like, was frustrated with. Thinking machines lagged OpenAI and other rivals in releasing products and was struggling to raise new funding at an eye-popping$50 billion valuation. The men had urged Maradi to strike a deal with Meta. The owner of Facebook and Instagram had discussed buying thinking machines. And Ms. Maradi had developed closer ties with the chief executive of Anthropic, a leading AI company, but no traction had resulted. At the meeting, the men lobbied for Mr.

55:01Zoff, Thinking Machine's chief technology officer, to oversee decisions about the company's technical direction. And this is just a strange, this has been one of the most strange parts of it. It's a very, very weird line. Which is like, why would the CTO not be overseeing decisions about the company's technical direction? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe job title inflation or something. It happens sometimes. People give funny joke jobs. You give some random intern the chief CIO officer. CIO title and then what are you trying to say around I don't know I'm just saying that you know many people might see your title and think that you're the chief information officer or the chief investment officer and and then you might come around and say hey why am I not in charge of investments why am I not in charge of all the information here anyway cognition they are the makers of Devin the AI software engineer crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering Elon Musk has essentially confirmed SpaceX is going public this year and will use the funds to build solar panel AI satellites scaling to 100s, hundreds of terawatts in three years.

56:04And Elon Musk replies to Nick. He says, no, the probable case 50th percentile guess is reaching an annualized rate of 100 gigawatts a year of space AI satellites launched from Earth in three to four years. 100 terawatts a year requires manufacturing satellites on the moon at massive scale that are shot into deep space with a mass driver, which is 10 years away. Worth noting that average US electricity consumption is only half a terawatt. So that would mean launching 200 times the current electricity output of Earth. Nick's response here. Yeah, for sure. I love that Nick is... Eli's just like, Nick, Nick, you're too bullish on me.

56:46You're too bullish. Relax. Let's dial it back. I am going to deliver something incredible very quickly, but it's going to take longer to get to the truly unfathomable scale. Anyway, OpenAI CFO, we could take a cut of customer revenue from AI-aided inventions. Is it a fantasy? Asks Amir from the information. Maybe, but scientists have been going gaga for LLMs as idea synthesizers and research collaborators and OpenAI is actively trying to license proprietary biology slash pharma and data for training. AI discoveries. So you would think that this would happen in sort of like a joint venture or some sort of investment.

57:29Obviously OpenAI has the OpenAI startup fund and so and they have made investments so there's a world where if they're particularly bullish on a biotech company they could participate in an early round and then participate it in the upside this is sort of framed as more of like they will uh they will just randomly be taking revenue if you sign an enterprise contract that feels like yeah really rough headline uh but i'm sure they'll like work on clarifying this uh obviously i saw some people uh getting really upset about it immediately of course uh i don't i think it's too early for that you know they they definitely need to clarify, right?

58:10It's like, you know, if you were working on a startup and you use Google search to do some research and then, you know, Google said, Hey, Hey, we see your search history. We know, we know that you've looked up restream, John. We know that you wanted to live stream. Yes. And we played a pretty big part in that. That's true. That's true. Um, I'll tell you about restream one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, Go to Restream.com. They should implement tipping. They added a billion dollars in enterprise revenue. You get your enterprise API bill. Turn the iPad around, 15%, 20%, 25%.

58:48Throw a little tip in. Why not? Hey, if you cure cancer. Adding tipping to your consumer SaaS product is a great way. Enterprise SaaS product. And enterprise is a great way to test product market fit. I completely agree. I completely agree. Staying in OpenAI world, Shirin has a scoop here in Bloomberg. Sam Altman met with investors in the United Arab Emirates recently to discuss a new funding round targeting around$50 billion at a$750 to$830 billion valuation. I think the$750 was pre, $830 was maybe post. Talks are early. Let's give it up for early talks. Early talks. Well, fortunately, our next guest is beyond the early talks phase.

59:33He has some amazing news announcing here today. We have Keller from Zipline in the Restream Waiting Room. We'll bring him in as soon as I tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we will bring in Keller from Zipline out of the Restream Waiting Room and into the TBP and Ultradump. Keller, how are you doing? There he is. Hey, guys. How are you? Fantastic, but not as good as you. Give us the news. What happened? So yesterday, yeah, yesterday we had some big announcements.

1:00:07I mean, first of all, you know, the company just raised more than$600 million to fund U.S. and global expansion.

1:00:16Got to go with the gong. But even cooler, I mean, you guys know, like, on X, ZipLine is constantly, you know, kind of celebrating how fast the system has been growing. It's been growing about 15 % week over week over the last year. But we are finally announcing new metros. So we announced Houston and Phoenix as the metros that we're going to be launching over the next couple months. And then every quarter that passes now, we'll be announcing new major metros that we're bringing autonomous delivery to. Talk to me about what it takes to launch your metro. Is that the mayor's calling you? You're calling the mayor?

1:00:47Is there a form that you're filling out? Like, what's the process? Do you have sales reps going? Do you set up an office? Like, do you do tests? What's involved? And the main thing, you know, this is different. People think of hyperscalers and people adding metros with some of the rideshare companies, for example, where you were just hiring people who already lived there. I mean, Zipline is building infrastructure in these cities. It looks a little bit more maybe like how Tesla was building superchargers. We are actually building superchargers, but for airplanes rather than for cars. And so we're going in, we're building maintenance depots.

1:01:21We're creating a lot of high-paying jobs for both maintenance as well as all the people who are doing community engagement, government affairs, permitting. There's a lot of complexity for each metro that we launch. But the reality is that we're trying to scale. I mean, 15 % week-over-week growth is really hard to keep up with. And so we're trying to add – we'll add multiple metros every quarter as we go here as we accelerate. So what makes for a metro area that's exciting to zipline? Both of those don't seem very snowy. Is that important? Well, yeah. And I know you're going to be announcing a lot more in the future, but for people listening that are excited to have zipline in their area, I feel like if you kind of describe the sort of ideal metro, maybe people can kind of start figuring it out.

1:02:17Yeah, I mean, ultimately, we're going to be in every metro in the U.S. in the next couple of years. One thing that we just did that, you know, I was posting some cool stuff on X. We just launched a brand new test site in the Cascades, which is in Oregon. We have a team that is operating there in insane snow, insane ice, insane sleeting conditions day in and day out. All of Zipline's test sites operate 24-7, by the way. So why are we doing that? We're doing that so that we can be ready by the end of this year to start launching cities in a wide variety of climates across the U.S. and then eventually across the world.

1:02:52So it just takes time to basically validate all the different technology, aircraft, ground infrastructure across these different conditions. And you really want to do it comprehensively and test before you then operate over tens of millions of people's heads. Yeah. What's the hardware lifecycle like? Is there like a V2, V3 that comes and gets rolled out to all the metros? Is there testing? Are there new innovations that are happening deeper in the supply chain that you're excited about implementing? What needs to happen or what are you excited about on the development of the actual platform? Well, funny you should ask.

1:03:35So basically right behind me. So I'm standing in a new part of the manufacturing facility. Zipline's manufacturing facility tripled in size in the last two months. Two months? This was all nothing. That's amazing. Actually, I don't know if you realize, but like 15%, people don't put it together. We just had a board meeting last week where we started the board meeting by being like, oh yeah, flight volumes and revenue tripled since the last board meeting three months ago. So the manufacturing growth is pretty much in line with the business growth. But this space was all empty a month ago. And it is now the new line for next generation aircraft.

1:04:11It's called EV3. The advantages of this next generation, I mean, right now, ZipLine is rapidly cycling through hardware, software, plus all the operational improvements we need to make to continue to advance the technology. But EV3 has a huge number of performance improvements relative to the system that we've been operating over the last year, and it's half the cost. So there's giant steps being made, improvements possible because the technology is so early. It's 12.01 a.m. when it comes to automated logistics. This facility where I'm standing will be capable of building 20 ,000 aircraft a year.

1:04:48It's the largest autonomous aircraft factory in the United States. How do you get something like a 50 % cost reduction? Is that automation or buying bigger purchase orders deeper in your supply chain? or is there just like a cost curve that's coming down and the price of motors is just dropping and you're just a beneficiary of that? Like what's driving cost savings on the vehicle? And there are a lot of things. I mean, first of all, the best part is no part, the part that you delete. And we were able to delete a lot of parts on this aircraft relative to the previous version. We've been able to, yeah, deleting things is the best way to, you know, the most reliable part, The part that never breaks is the one that isn't on the aircraft at all.

1:05:32We've also been able to redesign a lot of parts and fundamental sub-assemblies on the aircraft to make them easier to manufacture or just less expensive from a component perspective. And then finally, Zipline now has enough scale with a lot of these suppliers that, as you said, you can get much better deals on a lot of these key components. And so all of those things add up to just a vehicle that's significantly less expensive. Are they also getting quieter over time? I've seen some incredible demos of drone rotors and propellers that they're shaped in a certain way and they're way quieter. Is there progress there?

1:06:08Is that happening in like physics labs and then it gets implemented? Are you doing the research? What's going on acoustically? So, yeah, Zipline. I mean, we've always had this attitude that like this technology can only scale if it is quieter, more serene for neighborhoods than the traditional delivery mechanisms of cars. And so, you know, Zipline has a big team of aerodynamics engineers and aeroacoustics engineers who have been focusing on this question of, like, how do you design something that's really, really quiet for the last five years? And by the way, you can't, planes aren't like cars where you can just put a muffler on the back of it and make it quieter.

1:06:44Like, the design of the aircraft has to be from the ground up made with aeroacoustics in mind. Zipline is, despite the fact that we operate bigger, more complex vehicles, Zipline is six times quieter than the next closest competitor when we're making a delivery to someone's home. And we'll actually make significant improvements to the AeroAcoustic profile of the vehicle this year. We actually think we're going to get about another eight decibels of improvement this year, which for non-engineers, think of eight decibels as being about half as loud to the human ear. So having, again... Yeah, that's awesome.

1:07:23What about congestion as you scale? How much of the routing is proprietary software, maybe on your network, sort of your own flight control, interfacing with more national level flight control, or even just like on the actual drone, just cameras saying, oh, there's some random object over there that I need to steer away from? I mean, all of these, you know, Zipline has a huge autonomy team that is responsible for not just how these vehicles route themselves to go and make deliveries, how they navigate the physical world, because we're flying at about 400 feet, but also how we detect and avoid other air traffic.

1:08:08And there are many different layers of Zipline's air traffic control, well, detect and avoid system. We work closely with air traffic control. We build, we're essentially building in partnership with the FAA a new version. It's called Unmanned Traffic Management, or how you manage thousands, soon to be tens of thousands of vehicles. But in the long run, we're already used to our cities being full of these loud, dangerous, polluting vehicles, creating tons of traffic, driving around in our neighborhoods. Small 50-pound vehicles that are silent and electric are going to be way better for neighborhoods.

1:08:41They're way less, you know, they're less like obtrusive. People generally don't notice them. I mean, we do a lot of deliveries to people's homes where they didn't even realize the delivery happened. Do you have a timeline for me or you actually getting into an eVTOL and the true flying car vision? Maybe it's not like, let's say Waymo level adoption of a human in a vertical takeoff and landing, not a helicopter, not a single rotor, not a plane, but something like that. Are we five years away from that? Longer? Is there something fundamental? Because this has been something that's been promised, and I've been excited about my entire life, and it feels like there's a lot of serious companies working on it, but we're not quite there yet.

1:09:28How are you thinking about that market generally? I'm also really excited, and it's a question that I'm very interested in. I think that a lot of the technology has made probably faster progress than people realize. You can build vehicles that are electric, vertical, takeoff, and landing fixed-wing hybrids that achieve a lot of the core performance characteristics. I think two challenges that I would point out, one is on the autonomy side. Those companies are still putting human pilots in the cockpit. and it's not going to be like Uber if you have to hire an FAA certified pilot to come do your Uber ride to get you to work in the morning.

1:10:10Like that doesn't scale. It's a little too expensive. So I think from an autonomy perspective, who is going to design that autonomy layer? It's always seemed kind of obvious to me that the company that does that is going to do billions of autonomous deliveries delivering non-human things before you want to carry humans. I think humans will be more comfortable with that. The other thing I would kind of point out is a huge part of this actually has to do with like integration, which is like you can totally do the flight. There are vehicles, again, flying those kinds of mission profiles today. But where are you landing?

1:10:42I mean, there are no heliports in cities. They are getting shut down rather than built. And I think that it's all about integration. You know, if you want to design a vehicle that is more than just like an electric version of a helicopter that can do like 20 % of missions that a normal helicopter can do, I think if you're really talking about flying car, the key is to solve the integration problem. Like, can you actually get picked up directly from your home and delivered directly to your office for your daily commute? That's the core question. Yeah. At what point do you think having a courier feature will make sense?

1:11:18This is top of mind. I left my laptop at home Monday, and I felt that it was super silly that I ended up having to use Uber Courier. Yeah, and you're using a huge car for just one tiny laptop. Just one little laptop. Made no sense. I was thinking about you guys. It feels like an edge case. It's not really. It's not a big market. It's not a big market. Yeah, what's the thinking around it? Well, I think you might be surprised. I mean, similar for what I just said with flying cars, integration is the thing that Zipline is most focused on. We're launching all these amazing new partners. I mean, a lot of the statistics that we're seeing in the cities, if you look at Dallas, I mean, there are municipalities in Dallas where more than 50 % of homes are ordering from Zipline.

1:12:02We had an all-time new record on Sunday. We blew away the previous record by 25%, which had been set a week previously. And we had 10 % of all homes in a municipality place an order with Zipline on Sunday. Was that football? Does that spike with football? I mean, it was a holiday weekend. But these are shocking statistics. I mean, we have a lot of the restaurants that we serve. Zipline is a huge percentage, a majority of deliveries happening from those restaurants today. And so I think that the usage is way different than what we were originally expecting. And the key is integration. We want to be able to add so many different, and this is why we announced Zipping Points.

1:12:49This is a really simple, new kind of grounded infrastructure that we can install for free next to any partner, whether it's a hospital, health facility, retailer, restaurant, or even eventually someone's home. You can almost just think of it like a new kind of mailbox for autonomous logistics. Do you think you'll be able to put a camera on them such that you can scan an ID so that you can deliver alcohol? We will do that. You don't need a camera on the vehicle. What you actually need is you just need a camera on the person's phone. That's the way that a lot of this delivery works today. Got it.

1:13:21They'll basically be able to place an order. They'll be able to use their phone to upload a picture of their ID, and we can deliver. And then you can basically require signature on the phone itself. Okay. In the exact same way that it works for UPS or FedEx, we can deliver, you know, I mean, today from a lot of our partners, you know, we deliver over 100 ,000 SKUs. I mean, people are ordering Legos and like weird little nozzles for a gardening hose and birthday cakes and rotisserie chickens and prescriptions. That's a crazy one. It's everything. I don't trust a normal delivery, a human delivery driver with a birthday cake.

1:13:52That could go disastrously wrong. So, yeah, the flight stability is key. Yeah, exactly. Like, look, automated systems aren't going to eat significant percentages of the food, you know, before it's delivered. There's also way less safety risk. I think it's very similar to Waymo where a young woman who, like, suddenly looks up from her phone in a, you know, in a ride share and is like, where the heck did my driver just drive me to? You know, people have similar experiences with delivery where it's like someone's looking over your shoulder like, are you home alone tonight? A lot of these kinds of services, it is much safer to have automated systems that are supervised by humans serving people.

1:14:35And by the way, what we are observing is it's like there really is no comparable. Like when we look at the frequency of customer ordering right now, there are lots of people who are ordering from Zipline every single day. And so I think this is not something that you see with traditional instant logistics. You see it once you make it 10 times faster, half the cost, and zero emission. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for helping on the show. Every time you come on, I can't wait for more people to experience it because given how focused you are in places like Dallas, I think it's one of those things like Waymo where you have to experience it until you can really realize that the future is here.

1:15:15So congrats. All right, but you guys, I have a surprise for you. Please. Someone's here auditing. One of your guys' sponsors is here auditing. Hey, no way. Some of the impacts. A year-long sponsorship for TBPN. I'm telling them about the oral farming benefits. Let's go. A little TBPN top-tier sponsorship. Lambda Loud is here. Oh, he's there. Cut to the Lambda lightning round. Wrong angle. Wrong angle. Oh, no. The Lambda Cloud. And he's really, we're just been grinding it out in the hardware founders complex coordination business. And we just punch people in the face. Are you delivering? He was so pleased with this interview that he's going to be quadrupling down on the partnership.

1:16:05There we go. There we go. It's getting the impact of their advertising. Good to see you guys. Great to see you guys. Teleportation is a service. Yes. Hopefully you're getting, if those GPUs need to get to the data centers faster, hopefully they're flying in Ziplines. That's right. And we'll eventually turn them into distributed. It's a pretty compute. Yes. That's what Tesla's doing. Maybe a Zipline will do this with Lambda. We have GPUs in all the aircraft. That's amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations again. Have fun. Wish we were there. The awesome performance.

1:16:38Overnight success. You got to hit him with the overnight success. Because every time he comes on, this man spent a decade, 10 years in the making, and now he's growing every day and doubling the business with incredible speed. Great stuff, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Cheers. Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. and without further ado we will continue our lambda lightning round and bring in jake cooper from railway he's the co-founder and ceo also a tvpn sponsor there he is jake good to see you how you doing get that going ready we're doing fantastically so stoked it's a great day on the show yeah great to have you here give us the update what happened cool uh yeah i mean we raised a A bunch of money.

1:17:30So raise$100 million around to build data centers and make software just way easier to use because the definition of a developer is melting before our very eyes. It's melting. It's melting. So anybody can ship code, which is crazy. We're making it trivially easy for anybody to go and do that. So it's a really exciting time to be in the business and also just on the planet. Yeah. How is that actually playing out? We've talked to some folks about how there are designers that there's one idea that AI will create, will take a one X engineer and turn them into a 10 X engineer. And that's probably true.

1:18:06But there's also this idea. It's going to be like a 10 ,000 X engineer. 10 ,000 X engineer. Like we have people internally moving so, so quickly. I've like rebuilt a bunch of the internal organization so we can move it. What I'm calling, it's super cringe, but I'm calling it agent speed. Okay, sure. Because people are just moving way, way faster. Yeah, yeah. So like you're in a 10 ,000 X engineer. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, sorry. But then there's also the zero to one X engineer where you take a designer and then they're able to actually ship production code or a manager or a sales development representative.

1:18:35Anyone can build a tool. Which one is more central to the current railway pitch when you're talking to customers? I think there's like resonance across the entire space. So we have like larger companies who are spending six figures. They're building something of deep consequence, like critical, critical, critical for their business. And then you have teams of 1 ,000, essentially, all vibe coding, and they're building really, really smaller things. But they're really, really important either for client infrastructure or internal tools or anything else like that. And we've got everybody internally now on a Cloud Code subscription, including our recruiting, our operations, et cetera.

1:19:17um there's just the boundary of your ambitions needs to be deeply deeply kind of re-evaluated just with how good these tools are getting um and we're excited what's your what's your personal framework internally and kind of like guidance or how are you and the team thinking about like when it makes like uh because right now i feel like there's this obviously so much excitement you can build you know an internal tool in an hour or something like that but every time you build a tool, you're creating like some type of like ongoing maintenance burden or something like that. Tech debt. But yeah, so what's your framework of like, hey, this should be something that we just should build versus, you know, finding a point solution or even using something as like a Google sheet or at the kind of low end?

1:20:05Yeah. So we use Notion a lot internally. And I think lots of like deeply flexible tools are going to be really, really key because now that like the agent can kind of go in almost like orchestrate these things in general, you can kind of compartmentalize very, very flexible tools together, right? And so I think that when you're thinking about kind of the build versus buy boundary, right, it's a lot on kind of pushing the context into the tool so that you can access a lot of the context and take advantage of it, right? So I think the burden for almost buy goes up a lot because the ambitions and the capability of you being able to build something that's purpose-built internally is actually so trivial now, right?

1:20:44Historically, I've built a lot of internal tooling to allow us to do project management releases, et cetera. And now I can actually just kind of push the boundary on a lot of those things. One of my hot takes is that, like, you know, ERP software, right? Yeah, of course. Are you familiar with it? We love ERP software. I was born ERP software. Yeah, right, so ERP software, right? Only useful at scale to build an organization to manage resources or whatever, right? Now you can kind of build those, like, organizational structures way, way earlier. So the way that railway runs has historically been different than organizations.

1:21:15And so I think what you're going to see is almost this Cambrian explosion of various different ways that you can run your organization, which I think is super, super cool. So unfortunately, I'm an engineer, so I have engineering brain damage. I think everybody should be building kind of their own stuff. How has your thinking on product management evolved over the last year? Oh, man. Yeah, I had this tweet that I was like, oh, yeah, engineers are going to turn into PMs. faster than PMs can turn into engineers. And I think a week ago, I was like, that's completely wrong. I like that you were willing to just be like, yep, bad take.

1:21:51Oh, yeah. I mean, you got to take your lumps too, right? I don't mind. Your take can be awful. But if you're going to stand behind it, just almost go down with the ship and be like, all right, the take was awful. We're going down. Don't delete the tweet. So yeah. But yeah, I think there's only three things essentially left if you assume that the agents are going to kind of be able to do pretty much anything, right? It's taste, agency, and structure, right? So when you think about almost anything that you can go and build, those PMs have a lot of that context, right? And so you don't need to be a Rust engineer to write Rust anymore.

1:22:26You don't need to be a JavaScript engineer. You don't even have to be an engineer, right? Like we're almost doing this like double shift write where you have like knowledge workers, programmers, engineers, architects, and scientists, right? based on how nebulous your work is, right? And I think that if you're a knowledge worker, you should probably actually just be like, yeah, I can just engineer things now, right? What it takes is kind of a bit of critical thinking, a bit of kind of like, okay, how will this system kind of roughly fail? And now you can do it in kind of a lower stakes environment.

1:22:56What we hope to provide with Railway is actually those kind of like bleeding edge industry best practices, like really annoying stuff like VPC peering, like, you know, versioned infrastructure structure so that you can move quickly, but also safely and build these kind of bigger and bigger structures over time. So I think the role of the PM evolves a lot. And you're going to see a lot of these kind of almost like merging or melting of these kind of roles together, right? Like software engineers will have to become PMs because now it is completely trivial to just go in and write code, right? Like I wrote like 5 ,000 lines of code yesterday, right?

1:23:31And I spent most of my, yeah, I mean, and this is like between meetings, right? And I spent most of the time not actually like auditing the code itself, but auditing a lot of the logic, going in, working, talking about the architecture, all of those other things, right? So I think, again, the burdens or the boundary of your ambitions needs to be deeply, deeply pushed. And so if we at Railway can kind of almost unburden the developer so that they can think about those bigger and bigger things, our hope is that you can build those kind of almost like massive, massive structures, right? Like if you look at the Golden Gate Bridge in this current day and age, my first kind of response is like, How do we build that thing?

1:24:09It's so big and so impressive, right? And so now you actually have these wonderful tools that push the boundary of that. So you can build these massive things, right? And it's super exciting to just, you know, I was telling this to an investor, which is probably the wrong thing to tell the investor, but I was like, even if we get schmucked here, like what a time to be alive. And they were like, cool, dude. All right, sick. We're going to pass. That's wild. How are you thinking about it? No, I do think that, like, I mean, obviously, play to win. It's just refreshing. But it's very refreshing versus the, I know exactly how the next five to ten years will unfold day by day.

1:24:47It's like, no one knows. The space is moving so quickly, you need to really deeply understand who's signing up for your product, who loves your product, why do they love your product, how do you expand your product and continue to be critical infrastructure for those customers. We have some questions from the chat. Yeah, sorry. Sorry, what were you about to say? I was just going to say, yeah, like, I think, like, during this period, you should kind of take those risks, right? Like, it's almost a deeply, almost, like, risk by default period, right? And I think that, you know, there's, like, what does Elon know that probably other people don't know, right?

1:25:21And I think you've heard, like, Peter Thiel talk about this, too. And it's almost the calculus of risk is not just purely there, right? Risk is less risky than you actually think, right? So I think people should kind of push those boundaries. and if we can kind of create those safety nets for people in general, I think we can build wonderful, wonderful things. And as a side note, I think we've made risk and failure a bit too expensive in our current society. And if we can rewind that essentially, we can open people up to sweet success and a bit of bitter failure because when you take risks, sometimes things don't work out.

1:25:51But that forms a baseline experience that allows you to kind of drive these unique kind of tastes forward. So to the chat. To the chat, we have to ask you about your bike. Like you're in the coon says, uh, your motorcycle liability clause on your term sheet. Yeah. We have key man insurance. Um, yeah, I, I'm kind of like, you know, I'm counting the days until somebody really asked me to like go up and give up the bike. And it's funny because people, people ask me like, Oh my God, you ride a motorcycle. Like I feel like I should get into that. And I was like, my answer is like, absolutely not. Like I've been riding dirt bikes since I was like 13 basically.

1:26:23And so, and so like I've had, I've had a bike for a while and I've kind of worked my way up, right? You know, yeah, just don't be stupid. No, no, no. You've got to play the game. You're going to say the riskiest thing you can do is not take any risk. Get on the motorcycle. What's your Sunday ride? My Sunday ride is basically I live near the end of Richmond, so I basically just, like, go up and drive through the Presidio, maybe in the marina. There's that, like, nice coffee, like, truck, basically. I go to the gym in the marina. They've got a sauna. It's wonderful. So I just kind of go to the gym.

1:26:52Do you ever try to find, like, a super steep, you know, classic SF Hill and go a little too fast on the way up. No, those days are like behind me because, yeah, I promised the investors that like I wouldn't do anything stupid. So the unfortunate thing about the bike is like it's a nice bike. It's like the bike I wanted growing up, but I don't ride it like it should be. What bike? It's a Ducati, like the Pentagon. There we go. There we go. We have another question from the chat. Everyone's loving the bookshelf behind you. Give us some book recommendations. What's on the shelf? What's the most underrated book on the shelf?

1:27:25What's the most underrated? What's the favorite book? What's the one with the most highlights and notes in it? Well, this is actually my wife's side of the bookshelf. Oh, okay. So I'll go off things that are maybe not on there. I know I do see that. I think the Steve Jobs book is somewhere up there, which I don't know. It's pretty good. One of my favorite books actually is Getting to Yes. I don't know if y 'all have kind of read it. I think so. It's about like sales negotiation? It's a book essentially on compromise, right? And so essentially it allows you to break down problems in a way that is not kind of me versus you, but it's me versus the problem, right?

1:27:54And so one of my favorite analogies in there is like, you know, we're splitting an orange, right? We could split it down the middle essentially. And, you know, I could, like you could have half and I could have half in general, or we can figure out what we care about in general, right? And maybe I'm making mixed drinks and maybe you're taking your kid to the soccer game, right? Or anything else like that. And so in essence, I want the peel and you want the whole orange, right? We can both come out on top roughly, right? And I think that figuring out ways that you can almost like have a solid compromise with people is deeply, deeply important on that one.

1:28:24So I like that book. Love it. Back to AI and how it's changing software development, database selection, database migration, switching something is ingrained in an organization as a database has historically been very difficult. Are AI agents making it easier? Are you actually seeing companies move around from one database to another, maybe based on cost, maybe based on features? Is the fact that a particular LLM is in love with a Redis or a MongoDB, is that going to be relevant in the future? So I'm unfortunately a little bit too Dario-pilled in terms of the fundamental laws of physics. And so I think it's actually probably the hardest thing to change about your system is the database, roughly.

1:29:11Because you have that storage, you have all of those other things. This is fundamentally also why we build data centers. one, you need more production roughly in the world, and we can start with data centers, and that's wonderful. But two, it's actually a really, really solid mode in terms of, you know, you can't just will into existence a data center, right? And at some point, potentially down the line, like those things will get more and more expensive just because of the cost of labor, but like the cost of capital is decreasing, right? And so I think the similar thing kind of applies roughly with data centers if you kind of move roughly up the stack.

1:29:41And so we actually started building, or sorry, databases. We actually started building databases. Like we were originally just a, you know, click a button, get a Postgres instance or Redis instance or anything else like that. And we've slowly worked our way back up, right, up to building, you know, web apps, you know, launch a CDN at some point in the future, stuff like that. So I think that when you look at that lens of like fundamental law of physics, I think the database is like a very, very important part of your kind of rough calculus. And I think the agents are making it easier to go and almost manage those migrations.

1:30:10But, you know, when I was talking about those 5 ,000 lines of code, you have to think about kind of what you are roughly building, right? And so you're still going to need to audit it. And that's sort of why I say, you know, moving from engineers to, like, architects, right? Where you're thinking about that kind of bigger, bigger vision. And so, you know, as Jordi said earlier, like, I don't think anybody can roughly predict the future for a lot of these things. but I do still think that fundamentally there are going to be requirements for how do you integrate the things that exist in the physical realm, so roughly around those databases to storage to data centers, and with kind of your expected reality, basically.

1:30:50And the hope over time is that Railway can actually help you do that. So we do this on a software level, and we've built tooling internally to help build data centers. And so we've actually virtualized a bunch of those racks. So now you can almost drag and drop those servers into them. And at some point we can get to a point where we're working directly with the Supermicro API. You can drag and say, hey, I want this data center of this size in general. You'll create POs for that and say, okay, cool. Hit a button. It'll cost you 25 mil or something like that. One-click checkout for data centers.

1:31:20One-click checkout for data centers and stuff like that. And moving towards a world where you can almost, because it's easier to build things on the internet. It's a fundamental fact. If you can simulate it and simulate that small section of it and you can create almost APIs to reconcile, this is what Terraform did really, really well. Like expected state versus desired state. And if we can do that with your intention as you kind of move through time and give you those safe kind of primitives to say, okay, cool. Like I want to make this change. Let me fork my entire environment, you know, get copy on right storage for everything, make some small change.

1:31:51I make it in production. It merges and you deploy it instantly. Then you're kind of moving at agent speed, right? And that's what we think a lot about in terms of building the next fundamental layer of software development and then physical production beyond that. You were at Bloomberg. Did you get to work directly on the terminal? Yeah, a little bit. I bounced around a bit at Bloomberg. I was only there for about six months. But it was a really, really cool time to kind of work on stuff like that. I was working on a bit of the internal tooling. So I got a couple of commits that I think are probably still inside.

1:32:24Let's go. Powering the Odd Lots podcast, making Joe Weisenthal's job easier. We love to see it. Putting Joe Weisenthal in agent mode. Yes. Hopefully. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations to the whole team. The chat loves you. Come back on again soon. Yeah, love to. And thanks for having us as sponsors. We're big proponents of rich taste, and we believe that TBPN has a rich taste that y 'all are sharing with the world, and we're just happy to be here. So have me on anytime. Love to join and hang out. Thank you for making this possible. Awesome. We'll see you on for the C very soon, I'm sure.

1:32:59Goodbye. Cheers, Jake. And in case you've been living under a data center, Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. We're very happy to be partnered with Railway. We have Joe Weisenthal coming into the... He said he was running five minutes behind so we can get back to the timeline. Quickly, let me tell you about 11 Labs. Oh, we got him. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And we do have Joe Weisenthal in the Restream waiting room.

1:33:34We'll bring him into the TVP and Ultradone. Joe Weisenthal. Brother Joe, soon it up. It has been eons. It's been far too long. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you so much for taking the time. I missed you guys too. It has been far too long. It probably hasn't even been that much time, but probably like there's just been so much that's happened since the last time we connected. It feels like years. It really does. So do you have Davos FOMO right now? I feel like it's been a good year for Davos. You're normally our foreign correspondent. You're on the ground at all these big hoity-toity events. I go to you, but it appears you're in New York.

1:34:09I've been to New York studio. You know, I was in Davos in January 2015. Whoa, we get it, dude. We get it. We get it. We get it, Joe. You've been to Davos. 2015? 2015? They said 10 years and he wouldn't lose touch. Apparently, he's completely lost touch. This is a real story. This is a real story, though. I got, like, first of all, it's very cold there. It's not that nice. I got a flu or I got sick there. I was so miserable that when I got back, I told the people inside Bloomberg, I said, never invite me to Davos again lest I feel tempted to say yes. Because it's like, oh, do you want to be part of our Davos team?

1:34:46Of course. Oh, yeah. Okay, maybe. so I didn't even want the temptation to say yes. I thought you were going to say you got back and you immediately switched up on your day one. You never looked back. You forgot where you came from. No, I do not want the temptation to go back. But I've always been the same as everyone else. Like, oh, Davos, boring, blah, blah, blah. And then finally, there's a good Davos. Ten years or however many years it's been since I went. There's finally a good Davos where there's like a bunch of news and action. And I guess, did I have a little FOMO? Maybe I did. I don't know.

1:35:18It seemed like a fun one this year. Yeah, it's been 55 years, something like that, going strong. What headlines have stuck out to you that have come out? We've been tracking most of the AI and tech stuff. Has anything popped up on your radar that's sort of updated you? Did anything spike your cortisol? Without question, the Mark Carney speech, the Canadian prime minister, it was pretty out there in terms of the old world is dead. There's no point in nostalgia. Everybody for themselves, sovereignty, power politics is back. And this is like, you know, it's one of these things where like you, the three of us could have had this conversation a couple of years ago.

1:35:56But to hear it from someone like a Mark Carney, who's like, he's such an institutional man, right? So he used to be the head of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada for that matter. Like a true internationalist Davos man. I mean, I think if you thought of who is Davos man, you would think someone like Mark Carney. So to hear him basically say like we shouldn't be – that world is dead and there's no point in spending time being nostalgic for it, I would say it's sort of a – it was a mark-to-market moment I would say. And so without question, I think like that was from a sort of geopolitical standpoint the highlight of the whole event.

1:36:32The other one – the other speech that I thought was really remarkable or very important was the Chinese vice premier. They're talking about how China doesn't want to just be the factory to the world. It also wants to buy your stuff because for all the anxiety that we have here in the U.S., every other country is feeling that stress as well. Their manufacturing sector is getting hollowed out by Chinese competition. So it's clearly a source of, I would say, an anxiety for China that every country around the world looks at them and thinks, wait, are you going to kill my domestic champions as well as you've done to European chemical companies, automakers, and so forth?

1:37:08Yeah, it's great that they're saying that, but does anybody actually believe it? I mean, ask Elon, do you think, do the Chinese really want to buy Teslas? No, I mean, so I wrote about this, and my take is that, like, they have been saying this for years. This is not the first time, and they're like, oh, we're going to lift domestic consumption, and that's going to create imports, and that'll benefit the rest of the world, and so forth. They've been saying this for years, and I think there is this view that's like, well, this is just lip service. It's just they just say it every year, and then they say it again the next year.

1:37:44I think, however, in their defense, what I would say is the structure of the sort of domestic Chinese political economy makes it very hard. And if I just get technical for a second, they have this very decentralized approach to fiscal policy, which is all of the different provinces basically run their own economies. and the provincial leaders, they try to achieve goals that are set by Beijing. And basically, this is how you get this crazy race to the bottom, which is every province wants to have their BYD, their battery maker, et cetera. And so the issue isn't so much whether Chinese leaders in Beijing are serious about wanting to boost imports.

1:38:26The question is whether their system will ever allow them to get out of the sort of game theory equilibrium where all of the provincial leaders feel incentivized to just export as much as possible. And it is probably a tricky thing to turn around that political system in the same way that we have difficulties that are very difficult to turn around, even if someone in Washington, D.C. says otherwise. What's the sweet spot for Chinese imports? Because it feels like they are exporting a ton, cars and phones and all sorts of stuff, rare earth elements. The sweet spot is luxury goods. Is it? That's the one thing.

1:39:03But they want to import chips, but we're really putting the kibosh on that, going back and forth. Well, the companies do. The companies do. But, you know, China seems to want to be a buyer of semiconductors in silicon. But is there a sweet spot product that you think that they'd actually be well suited to scale their imports of? I think this is the real serious question. So, I mean, even on the chips thing, they want to be an importer of chips now, but they don't want to be an importer of chips in five years, right? They want to be an importer of chips only for so long as it takes for them to have domestic capacity to produce the world's most advanced chips.

1:39:39They certainly – I mean they clearly do not want to like have this permanently be importing NVIDIA chips or whatever. They would like Huawei to supersede them. But then on the other things, the intuitive answer is like, oh, you're going to import luxury goods and fine wines and all that stuff. But even there, there was a great FT story in December talking about how China is becoming a booming producer of caviar and sparkling wine. These things that we don't associate with China at all or really nice like organic cherries and stuff like that. And so even there, there's this sort of effectiveness of their domestic productivity, their ability to sort of identify a sector and get really good at producing it really fast, which you can't knock them for it.

1:40:25That's progress. But it does create these very intense strains. And so you ask, OK, you want to import more from the rest of the world. What do you imagine that's going to be in 2035? What is the rest of the world making that you can't make domestically? You can't really knock the country for it, right? Being good at building things is awesome. And everyone would like to do it. But what is that thing? And I don't think anyone really has that sweet spot answer. I think it's really a weird situation. Yeah, on the luxury good side, they're so good at making stuff. They can make you a watch that looks exactly like a Richard Bell.

1:40:58And they're really good. It looks like a one-to-one. The only difference in the kind of saving grace for RM is you can't just snap your fingers and have that quality of the brand and the story. But you definitely can't sort of establish the backstory and the brand, the legend. That's going to take a long time. But I think even in – I bought a very cheap Chinese watch last year. But I sort of looked into the Chinese watch industry and the sort of like the watch nerds online. You know, people would talk about luxury watches on Reddit, et cetera. They're full of praise at the quality of the mechanical gearing or whatever.

1:41:38The horology. In a lot of the sort of, so they are catching up, you know, they are catching up fast to what they can do in Switzerland and elsewhere, even in that category. Interesting. What's going on with Japan? What's going on over there? So, you know, we did it. We actually, we have a great episode that came out today. So we talked to the CEO of PIMCO, which, you know, owns the world's largest bond fund. That's on the Odd Lots podcast, which is available in your podcast players? It's on the Odd Lots podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts. Fantastic. She's been making it handmade for over 10 years.

1:42:10Over a decade. That's right. Yeah, handmade in New York City for over a decade. Sort of the Patek Philippe of podcasts. That's right. That's right. Yeah, many people say that. Yeah. I haven't said that, but this is what everyone always says. Oh, Adla, yes, that's the Patek Philippe of podcasts. That's right. But you know what? So everyone is looking at these bond yields in Japan, and they're surging, and people are saying, you know, Japan has a lot of government debt. That's very true. and they're saying, is this the big one, right? Is this the moment where the bill comes due and they're going to have to print a ton of yen and the yen is worth as much as confetti or whatever?

1:42:46His argument is like, no, he had just gotten back from Japan. He said, no, that's not what's going on at all. What's happening is that Japanese economic growth, et cetera, has been stagnant for 30 years about. And there is actually a reinvigorated domestic investment And that has an inflationary impulse, and that does push up rates, you know, just in the way that rates have come up in the U.S. since the Zerp era of the 2010s. And his argument, which I find compelling, is that if you look at the Nikkei, their main stock index, and you look at it in U.S. dollar terms, that is surging to new all-time highs.

1:43:26So we're not seeing a collapse of the yen at all. And you would not expect, you know, if this country is like, oh, this is the prelude to hyperinflation, you would not expect to see such robustness in the stock market. And I find that compelling. So for now, I'm going to take it as this is a sign of a country. Expand that a little bit more because hyperinflation, you can have asset prices going up even if there's not necessarily the fundamentals. But you would not expect. Yes, but you would not expect to see that happening in other currency terms. So it's like, yes, if you look at the Venezuelan stock market in the 2010s, I mean, you just look at a line and it looks like it's going through the moon because it to the moon existed.

1:44:10And then you just like on the Bloomberg, you just toggle that. And now I want to look at the same stock market in U.S. dollar terms, not in bolivars. And then you see the stock market is basically gone to zero. And so it's like a simple test. Yeah, like in a period of like broad scale devaluation of the currency, you get the phenomenon that you describe where everything goes up. But when you see it going up in dollar terms, there has been some dollar weakness. But when you see it going up so much in terms of a foreign currency, then it's no longer a story about debasement. What did you think about some of Ken Griffin's comments?

1:44:44I appreciated his perspective on the AI boom and job loss, specifically because this is somebody who's been heavily focused on automating trading, specifically for a very long time, working with some of the best. What did he say? Now I feel bad. He was just basically saying that this sort of job loss concept is overblown in the short term. His example was that he had a... He said it was hype. Yeah, he had a commodities trader come to him with a report that was AI generated. And he said he was amazed with the title, amazed with the intro paragraph. And then as he dug in, he basically called it slop.

1:45:25And it's a classic debate on, well, are we about to turn the corner? And Ken Griffin's the next person to be impressed? Because Andre Carpathie was not impressed with the code that these models were writing a year ago. Now he's like, I'm falling behind. It's amazing. And so is Ken Griffin the next domino to fall or is he a canary in the coal mine for some true plateau? It would be really interesting. I would love to, if I could, the jury, what I would really love is not to hear Ken Griffin's take on AI. But what I'd like to hear is a pod manager within Citadel. Because so many of those jobs of like running the pods or, you know, I've talked to a bunch of them now.

1:46:04And they're coding jobs. So someone gets hired as a junior analyst within a pod, right? And they're going to study, you know, they're going to track industrial stocks. So they're going to track, they're going to trade chemical stocks. But those jobs are like basically coding jobs or a large part. And they're running back tests and so forth. And they're trying to see, okay, what information corresponds to useful signal? What sort of economic data and so forth? And these are all just, you know, they're computer jobs. They're engineering jobs. They're in many cases competing at some of these firms for some of the same talent as in many cases as big tech.

1:46:39So I agree. Like, I think it's many people would agree with Ken Griffin that you are not going to get some gem of insight about what stock to trade or anything like that or any commodity from a sort of AI generated report. report. But, you know, like it's also, we know at every engineer, every software engineer we talk to talks about how much, how impressed they are right now with like Opus 4.5 and so forth. And so, you know, I would be curious because we've talked to, we have an episode of the podcast coming out next week with the head of a major bank. They are seeing, you know, I'll say the tenor of the conversation has changed from last year to this year.

1:47:24Last year, when you ask executives, well, what are you actually getting value out of from AI right now? They would say, well, we have tests everywhere, right? We're testing a bunch of stuff. We're really excited about it. Now they come back with clear examples of this is a workflow process that was more costly or time intensive last year than it is right now. And so I think from my perspective, of clearly just talking to people, people are finding productivity gains that are real from it. That's so funny because I remember more of the Ken Griffin quote. And one of the lines he said was that he specifically asked a bunch of business leaders to give examples of how AI is improving their business.

1:48:03And he was taken aback by the fact that none of them were citing generative AI as the core driver. That's interesting. But I agree with you generally. There was an interesting report in the Wall Street Journal about how the C-suite is reporting much more time saving from AI tools than workers in the non-suite C-suite category. And it wasn't sure what to make of that, whether it's just like stuff fills the gaps more, there's some sort of incentive. I don't know. I do. Look, I still think by and large at this point, probably it's modest what people in terms of, oh, this is like really moving the dial or this is a dramatic change in how productive our employees can be at any level.

1:48:51And I'm sort of, you know, even in the C-suite, I'm like, I'd be curious to know what exactly they're doing that, okay, this is saving them time. I mean, maybe in some cases it might just be they're having an AI draft an email for them. That's a lot quicker. And there's probably some. Yeah. When I think about the C-suite job, I think about a lot of deep research reports for every business decision that they're making. And they're probably, they're not working less. They're just saying that, well, to make this one decision, I needed to get a survey together of all the companies in this category that I could potentially do business with before I walk into this meeting with this one company that I might do business with.

1:49:29And yes, that would take an hour on Google and a spreadsheet to pull together. Deep research just does it in 10 minutes in the background on your phone. And so I feel like there are real speedups there. And maybe workers just haven't been diffused in that way or it's less relevant in like a non-knowledge work, non-executive functioning task. It's just a different diffusion level. Anyway, I want to talk to you about the future of the New York Times homepage. Oh, great. I love this topic. I love this topic. Yeah, you were blackpilling a little bit saying that it's not going to be maintained in a future where, you know, the news is collected.

1:50:02And my point was maybe if the cost to maintain the New York Times homepage goes down because AI tools are more available and more diffuse and cheaper, that you might actually see a continuation of the greatness that is, you know, beautiful homepages. What do you think? Yeah, I think that's a great take, actually. And I guess my concern isn't like, okay, we're not going to have websites anymore per se. I mean, we still have newspapers, right? Yeah, we still have newspapers, right? But it's more that, you know, if in a world in which we are communicating, you know, I buy my auto insurance through an AI agent of some source, like why does that auto insurance company really need to have a web presence as we know it?

1:50:52Or why is the web presence optimized for human consumers as the sort of human consumer becomes less and less a factor, less and less relevant for them? So, you know, I wasn't even like when I wrote that, like I wasn't even like dooming or blackpilling or any of that per se. And actually, you know, even going back to The New York Times example, you know, the post homepage era is actually, you know, it's been there for years. Right. So if you think if you think like the digital digital media at the New York Times, Times, what are they probably really excited about? Well, it's probably getting many of their reporters to get comfortable doing reels or doing TikToks where they talk about that story.

1:51:31So in a sense, the post-webpage era has been around for a long time, but it feels like with the efficacy and the clear usefulness of agents and scraping, et cetera, it's just not obvious why it's going to be much of a priority. The Times is a really nice homepage. And so to your point, it would be easy to maintain and so forth. It's probably very easy to maintain as it is or a lot certainly a lot easier than it used to be. It's not clear that this is going to be the sort of dominant way that we sort of trade digital information. Yeah, they might they have a big, obviously, games division. We could see them continue to invest or maybe get into gaming, open a casino in Vegas.

1:52:13Oh, yeah. The New York Times casino. Would you imagine how great that would be? I went to Vegas hanging out by the pool at the New York Times casino. I want high stakes Wordle. I'm putting 100 G's down on Wordle. Let's go. People would love that. People probably would love that. The thing about the New York Times is, you know, other than there's a handful of others, perhaps, and I would like Bloomberg is one of them. But, you know, it is a brand. It is a lifestyle brand, right? In a way that very few news outlets of any sort have ever been able to achieve. So, you know, they go into cooking and they have cooking shows.

1:52:52They go into, you know, simple games on the phone. There are not many news entities of any sort that could pull that off. And I've always been for years, sort of, not literally, but a New York Times bull, because it's just been so obvious to me that there's this one news brand that is also this big lifestyle brand and their core subscribers will follow them into all of these new ventures. And it's just something, you know, like, I don't want to name names, but like other like big publications, similar national general news publications do not have that same cachet where if they get into some totally new line of business that they'll have subscribers who will pay up all that money.

1:53:35So the New York Times is sort of a sort of a special entity. Totally, totally. You know, I completely agree. It's also interesting that the New York Times has managed this like sort of influencer transition remarkably well. When I go on YouTube, I'll see the Ezra Klein show or Ross Daffet or Hard Fork and Ezra and Ross have like their own brands, but they still like has the aesthetics of the New York Times. And they brought that into YouTube and they do these collabs, like just watching how they've actually mechanically positioned as the talent is more forward, but it's still under the umbrella.

1:54:09Very, very smart. And again, every publication would love to pull that off, but it's really tough because then you get this situation in which the talent says like, oh wait, why am I still here? Et cetera. I think it actually speaks to just like how powerful that New York Times brand is that someone, you know, Ross Douthat, Ezra, et cetera. No, this is a very good fit, but it's tricky. Every publication is going to try to do some version, have their own, you know, equivalent of their sub stack roster, right? Or have their equivalent of that. And I think very few are really going to be able to pull it off at scale.

1:54:44Are you one shotted by vibe coding? Yeah. You know what? I have like full on AI psychosis and I'll tell you, here's, here's the, evidence that I realized. Complete victory for Tack. Yeah. So, here's a, I'm going to admit this here, but here was the moment that I knew I had full-on one-shotted psychosis, which was whatever term you want to use. So, I was like vibe coding. I was using Claude Code. And I was very impressed. And then I opened up a second Claude Code window, because I wanted to be able to work on a couple aspects of the project in parallel. And then the second window, it made a suggestion for what I worked on that was actually a very bad suggestion.

1:55:28It was the first. Had I actually said yes to the suggestion, it would have really set me back quite a bit. And I'm glad I paid attention, overwrote it. And my first thought in that moment was like, the original window would have never made that mistake. You know, it's like the original window, that window really got me. This window doesn't get me at all. And I was like, I'm sticking with the window on the right side. And in that moment, when I like had that thought that, oh, this window doesn't get me the way the other window, I was like, Joe, okay, I got to step away from the computer a little bit.

1:55:59That is, those are early signs. I think I'm like, you know, I'm very proud of myself. I think I avoid psychosis of all sorts. I've been on Twitter for 15 years and I haven't gone crazy. And so I was like, okay, I saw that in myself. It's like, step away from the computer. It's just a computer. There's no personality. There's not one screen that gets me better. But when I noticed that, it was like, okay, I'm more at risk perhaps than I thought. What have you been building? Yeah, so I'm very obsessed for years with this idea that people write and speak fundamentally differently. And when we give speeches, we use various things.

1:56:33We rhyme and we speak in rhythm and we use mnemonic aids and we say first and you and all these different linguistic things. And it's just been a personal interest of mine. And I sort of think that as digital media has saturated our lives over the last 15, 20 years, even our written text comes to resemble more spoken text. And so I thought, well, it would be fun if you could like build a piece of software that actually empirically tested this question. Like does a piece of writing in a newspaper today resemble more written word than say that same column or whatever 20 years ago? I'd like to be able to test this out.

1:57:09And there are various lexical markers that linguists and others have used to work on these things. So I thought, okay, it would be fun to see if I could build this. And so I've actually been able to build it. People go check it out, havelock.ai. And you just drop a piece of text in. And then it says, this sentence looks literate. This sentence looks like the spoken word and so forth. And it almost works. Like I'm actually astonished. It's not perfect by any stretch. I still have a lot of work to do. But basically, I sort of was able to vibe code this sort of machine learning model where I trained a model to detect this is rhyme, this is not, etc.

1:57:47And then it breaks out every sentence and then sort of scores the whole piece. And it works. And I'm sort of astonished. And you've been testing it on Davos. Yeah. So, you know, I tested on the Mark Carney speech and the Trump speech. And the difference is remarkable. It's every sentence. It sort of classifies one as this resembles the spoken word. This resembles the written word. And the difference, you know, we hear this, right? You hear the two speeches. It's like, okay, they're speaking at a very different register. This feels very different. And it's cool that, like, I've been, you know, with two weeks of hobby coding, been able to build this model.

1:58:21And I actually, I trained, you know, I learned how to, I don't know what I learned. But I was able to build this little machine learning model that identifies each sentence and categorize in one. And I'm like, this is crazy. It actually kind of works. and I don't know anything about code. And this is something that I've wanted to exist for a long time and I was able to just build it. Yeah, and it's cool because it's something that I'm sure you could find a way to turn it into a business, but it's actually a tool that just should exist. There were so many tools that didn't exist because there was no business justification to devote hundreds of hours.

1:58:58Exactly that, right? So this is an interesting thing, But who's actually going to take the many, many sort of hours that it would take to actually code this? Because I don't think there's like some obvious path to riches here. But it was a, you know, I did like an hour or two a day for a few days at five in the morning before my kids got up. And it is a properly working piece of software that I can use. I still need to fine tune it a lot. There's still mistakes and so forth. But it actually works. You need to turn into a vibe coding slash mindset influencer every morning. It's like, it's 5 a.m.

1:59:35I'm tired. I'm up at my desk. Everyone else is sleeping. Jocko Willink gets the photo of the watch every day. It's 2 a.m. on the West Coast. All my enemies are sleeping. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I'm going to... That's great. I just ran my most recent essay through HaveLock.ai. I got a 76 % orality score. That's great. I write very, very loosely, strongly oral. Part of that is that we do. I started the essay, Trump, Greenland, Elon, blah, blah, blah. Let's focus on the important thing. Because I deliberately write exactly like I talk. Yeah. But I don't know if that's stupid. I'm pretty happy about that.

2:00:14It sounds like it scored it pretty well. Oh, 100%. That also means that you are writing in a way that connects with the modern audience. And so I think that's great. And you can test that. And now you can know. and is this in the contemporary register? And I don't know, like, high score, low score, better or worse. I just think it's cool that this thing can actually sort of figure it out. I love it. I love it. Anything else, Jordy? No, super fun. Thank you so much for taking the time, Joe. Thanks for having me. Always great. Can't wait to talk to you soon. Great to hang. Have a good one. Talk to you, Joe.

2:00:45Have fun out there. Goodbye. Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. That is right. So up next, we have an anonymous guest. An anonymous poster. An anonymous poster joining us. An internet anthropologist. The TikTok anthropologist, cold healing, Midwesterner in exile, loneliness epidemic super spreader, and a dark statistician. I'm going to tell you about CrowdStrike before we bring him in from the Restream waiting room. CrowdStrike, your business is AI, Their business is securing it.

2:01:25CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So without further ado. Chat is saying that Microsoft is down. Microsoft is down. What happened? People are not getting emails. Oh, I thought the stock was down. Wyatt is in the chat hanging out with us because Microsoft is down. So a little silver lining there. Well, without further ado, let's bring in cold healing. into the TV. Whoa. This is his profile picture. How are you doing? What is your profile picture of? That is a photo of me. it's in my apartment in Peoria, Illinois that I lived in when I was posting a lot on Twitter I took it I'm holding a sword in it it's like a self timer photo that I set up for some reason I thought it was an RPG yeah people always say this I really don't get this RPG thing I mean it is kind of sharp like an RPG is I did I initially I now see the sword outlined I did think RPG too many hours in COD it does have a very small hilts but yeah thanks for having me on guys Thanks for joining.

2:02:33Anyway, give us a little background on how you see your work, what you post, how you select content, how you curate. What are you trying to achieve with everything you do? Yeah, and I'll start by saying I think that something that I like, one thing about your account that I think is really important is like algorithms like make us view the world and the Internet in a specific way. Yes. Right? Like, even with Davos this week, I've been thinking, like, wow, Davos was, like, all AI. All tech. And obviously it was not, right? There was, like, tech was a part of it. And that's just my algorithm serving me content that it knows I'm going to be excited about.

2:03:18And you're taking content from all over the internet. I don't even – I'm sure you have, like, a bunch of different instances and accounts that have different interests. But I feel like the work that you're doing is a new science. Yeah. Yeah, anthropologist is the correct term. And it's very important. Yeah, that's very nice to say. I mean, I think my goal is to just try to be like on the crest of what's happening on the internet. I mean, there's so much happening. I think that in a lot of ways, institutions are not fully chronicling what's happening, if that makes sense. Like a lot of the cutting edge culture on TikTok, especially, I thought was not just also being unnoticed by other people on the internet, I think.

2:03:58I mean, I sort of accidentally came into this role, quite honestly. I mean, I've been on TikTok since 2018. I was like, you know, viscerally loved the platform. Like first time I got on it, you know, the algorithm of it is just so good. And I was just, you know, instantly like, you know, just pulled in of like, wow, I can just, you know, see so many different parts of the world really quickly. And so, you know, I was doing YouTube anthropology and before that of just, you know, getting into different niche subcultures online then. um but yeah i mean basically it's just you know i think this is all like worthy of studying um and worthy of just further thought and so i try to share the things that i think are um you know worth commentary um to my audience yeah what uh what videos are most memorable you were uh you surfaced the the product manager poolside pm yes yeah yeah i think that's of all the ones that's like number one most memorable that's like for sure because i was like you know it really like blew up my account in a lot of ways.

2:04:56And also just, you know, the downstream impacts of, you know, it, it kind of causing the, you kind of destroyed product management. Yes. You set the product management field back. No, they were early. They were early. They understood that there would be a lot of downtime while you're waiting for the agents to respond after you fire off a big, long prompt. And so best to spend it at the pool. They were just early. The futures here is not, not evenly distributed. Yeah. But what was the response to the poolside PMs thing? Because when you surf, when you recontextualize some of these videos, sometimes there can be pylons, there can be, you know, like positive things that come out of it.

2:05:34Like how were you processing that moment of like mega virality? I mean, yeah, for sure. I was definitely like me reposting it changed the context of it a time, right? It was initially posted by like, you know, a girl on TikTok excited to share, you know, her, like, you know, her somewhat comfortable life. And she's posting it in a tongue in cheek way too, right? She's aware this is not her normal way of feeling about her day. She's posting it because it's like, oh, this is a funny afternoon that I spent. But then it gets into Twitter discourse, and especially in tech Twitter discourse, becomes kind of like a representation of the excesses of the 2020s tech hiring boom.

2:06:14And yeah, I don't know. I think that recontextualization definitely brought a whole new audience from it. It was very interesting. I mean, like she like had like multiple responses to my reposting of it, which was not really just me reposting it. I mean, I think it was also all the other, you know, external commentary because I didn't really say that much. I mean, for me, I reposted it because it felt like my own life. You know, that's what I was doing back then. You know, I was working a work from home job and, you know, I felt represented by the fact, you know, like I wasn't in the pool, you know, but I would go outside and sit on my patio, you know, and it's really not that dissimilar.

2:06:43And it's, you know, it's great. It's great to sit in the sun with your laptop and, you know, you can go inside when something important happens. I really don't think that that's like, you know, an end of the world way to work. Yeah. Talk to me about day in the life videos. Generally, every time I see one surfaced, the comments are always like, there's so little work getting done. But if you personally, I've made enough videos that I can imagine if I tried to make a day in the life, there would be a lot of downtime that I would cut out because taking one phone call isn't as engaging as watching me assemble a meal from six different things.

2:07:19Just visually, it makes more sense to take a video of the commute, the coffee that you get, the meal that you have. Then yes, there's one frame of you doing Excel for six hours, but that doesn't take up 45 seconds of the one minute clip. But have you thought about what the medium is that is the message of these videos? No, 100%. It's initially shot, or these earlier videos, like 2022 Day in the Life videos that I was posting of, you know, like the product manager pool girls, those are sort of shots in this way that's aspirational, that shows all the fun parts of their life. One thing that I've been talking a little bit on my account recently is how it's kind of flipped the other way.

2:07:58Recently, you actually see kind of people shooting these day in the life videos in an intentionally mundane looking way. Oh yeah. These people like day in the life of a middle manager at an accounting firm and they just show like, it just looks like, they make it look like, grinding they're like wake up protein yes i want to go on a one mile jog drive to work oh yeah it's like it it's like the least aspirational in the background yeah wow yeah and and yeah it's it's such an interesting uh interesting view something about the day in the life is just so triggering to people too like whatever life is being lived people just develop an opinion because everyone Everyone has a life, everyone has a day in their life, and they immediately compare it, I suppose.

2:08:43Yeah. What do you think about this? If I remember correctly, the original poolside day in the life video, at the end, she sort of remarks that she's been making personal social media content because everyone might post a photo of an engagement or a wedding or a kid announcement. But then at a certain point, if your account gets big, it felt like she felt pressure from her colleagues to actually make content about work. And this was her expression of that. And I'm wondering if you've reflected on like what the role of the lower level employee in brand building around a corporation's work-life balance and what it's like to work there that could go either way.

2:09:25Is that an interesting new trend? Are there pitfalls there? How do you reflect on that? I think that's already over, to be honest. I mean, this was three years ago that that video was posted. I think that now people would not represent that. You know what I mean? Like if you were a, you especially would not say what company you work for. Like if you are representing, like if you're a Palancey employee, you're not going to make a day in the life of a Palancey employee with the fun little lunch that you get. You know, like that's not, like it's very discouraged by HR departments. You know, it's also just socially discouraged.

2:09:56So I think that people have become like aware of the context of it. And yeah, I mean, in that video, she does say at the very end, she's, you know, like, hey, my friends were encouraging me to share about, you know, my life. If you look at my post, it looks like I didn't have a job. And, you know, it's definitely just like a playful post that she was making. How have you processed generative AI content on these platforms? It feels like, you know, from our point of view over the last few weeks, we don't use TikTok, but our point of view over the last few weeks is that it's getting really good. And there's like entirely new genre of creators that are just leaning in.

2:10:32And this is the only thing that they're doing. But what's it been like on TikTok? Yeah, it's definitely there. I see it more on Instagram Reels than do on TikTok personally. But there definitely is generative AI content on it yet. I still don't think it's at the level where it like viscerally wins over human-made content. Like we have, you know, all these, you know, like viscerally. I just mean like, you know, every person sits and they watch it. And they see like which one they spend more time on. Which one they're compulsively drawn to. I don't think generative AI content is at the point where it's winning at scale yet, but there are some niches it's really good at.

2:11:04It's honestly really good for, like, lower-budget creators. I see it, like, a lot from content that feels like it's from not, like, not in America. Like, it's someone that's maybe not in as pretty of a place, you know, they're in, like, a country that's not as good, and they, you know, make content that ends up, you know, with generative AI that kind of can, whatever, represent certain things. And, yeah, I feel like that's where it's doing well. I have one more on the generative AI question. I've noticed that it does feel like we're at a tipping point. On Instagram Rails, I'll notice that oftentimes there's AI content, and if I can clock it, I usually go to the comments and there's other people that are clocking it.

2:11:44And then there's usually a secondary discussion about AI being bad, artist displacement, water usage, electricity, blah, blah, blah. But I recently saw a cinematic AI movie trailer all about the Beckham drama. Have you been following this at all? Are you familiar with this Beckham drama? What is the Beckham drama here? I'm not going to explain it well, but Victoria Beckham and David Beckham are having some sort of inter-familial feud of some sort, where the sun is posting content. We end up in the Hollywood Reporter once, and suddenly John is our new culture expert. No, but basically there's a traditional like big Hollywood celebrity drama story that has bubbled up and people are making front-facing videos explaining it.

2:12:30The Beckhams themselves are posting about it. There's PR stories about it. But some creator used generative AI to create like a dramatic movie trailer about it. And what was interesting is that it's obviously clockable as AI, but everyone in the comments, including the actual tagline on the video, when they upload the title of the video, is like, okay, AI, this is a good use of AI. And everyone in the comments was like, I approve of this use of AI, which is very interesting because truthfully, there's no one that's getting displaced from that because you're not going to go and do a$100 million budget video shoot just to make a joke about the Beckham drama.

2:13:13Maybe that will be made in a few years or something, or Netflix will do something, but you're not displacing anyone. And so it does feel like we're at this turning point, but it requires a lot of context, a lot of human element, a lot of creativity to really break through in a way that reaches universal acclaim. I don't know if you have a comment on that. No, it's a great point. Yeah, trying to phrase my thoughts exactly here.

2:13:40like generative AI content is widely disliked by people, I think is the starting point. You know, there are lots of people, if you post anything that is generative AI content, you will get comments about, you know, water usage, you know, get comments about, you know, comments about taking away jobs from artists. And those comments do, you know, tend to go away if people like it more, if it's, you know, high quality AI content. To be honest, I think a lot of the comments about art and water usage come out of a place of fear from people of not understanding what the future holds. And it does make me optimistic, honestly, when I hear people say things like, oh, I like this particular AI usage.

2:14:17Even if I think that that's not the right way to think about it, I think that it's a good sign of at least the culture starting to adopt these things. I do think it's going to inevitably happen that people adopt it. I'm not really worried about the long term, honestly. I'm not like a hyper AI optimist. I think that the technology does a lot of positive things. There's also going to be some negatives as a result of it, you know, but I really want to do what I'm trying to be after. Yeah, there's a new kind of content, which is content that could be made by paid actors, but no paid actor would ever agree to, which is like an Epstein reenactment.

2:14:50Oh, sure, sure. You've seen some of these memes of them on like, yeah, FaceTime videos, things like that, where if you ask an actor like, okay, you're going to play, you know, this like billionaire financier, he's based in New York and they'd be like, okay, I'm out. Right. Um, what about, what about other platforms? Uh, I feel like content has been flowing from, uh, these like IRL streamers pretty heavily to acts, you know, there seems to be this whole culture over on kick. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those are like clips and highlights, if that makes sense. Like there are people who sit and watch IRL streamers all day, but then a lot of those are kind of second order.

2:15:31Like a lot of those spend, a lot of those are really kind of content farms to make clips for TikTok, which are then the primary form of consumption. Like there's this guy who I followed for years, World of T-shirts. He's kind of one of my like favorite personal internet creators. He like started as a guy who wandered around New York City and like filmed content, but it's gradually become like a live street. He does like crazy stuff in his real life, like will kind of like scream at people on the streets. And so he now has like crews of people that follow him around and live stream him. I don't know.

2:15:57Very interesting man. But, you know, kind of the ecosystem is, yes, you can watch the live stream, but most people kind of watch the highlights of the live stream, which I think is an interesting kind of concept farm angle where at the end of the day still the sensory of it is these like short from vertical video apps that can kind of be like the end of the sea for any form of concept. Like it all flows into the scroll of these platforms. The endless scroll. Feed the trough, as they say. The pig sound. Talk about publishing in GQ. I want to know both about the process. Have you written for prestige publications before?

2:16:36Do you enjoy the written form? And then I want to know the thesis of the essay as well. Yeah. So I wrote, I guess for audience knowledge, I wrote a piece about Target for GQ. I didn't go to Target for like seven years. And then I went again and so i read a piece about that for gq and why'd you stop going um i stopped going just like i just i didn't like the brand was essentially a you know like i um it's like it's so red and over the top i preferred it felt like dishonest to me basically like when i was i was going inside walmart and walmart felt more honest and so um yeah but then i kind of you know i that that kind of stopped being true for me like i was you know i was getting more back into brands in america And I was like, I'm ready to go back to Target.

2:17:18Also, it's inconvenient. I live in New York City now. I used to live in Peoria, Illinois, which is about equal distribution of Walmarts and Targets. Now, in New York City, there are no Walmarts at all. And so if I wanted to go to like a large, you know, convenience store, Target was the only option. And so I was like actually making my life more inconvenient for the first year I lived in New York as a result of following this rule. And so I thought it's just an interesting thing. I mean, the essay is about that, but also kind of about the larger concepts of like purity rules that you follow in life.

2:17:47You know, I think that there's so many rules like that. I mean, people love setting purity rules around their phones right now. Really common, you know, thing that people do of like, oh, I need to have X amount of non-phone time or I need to set down my, you know. I can't sleep more than five feet from my phone. I got to keep it closed, you know, or I can't sleep well. The inverse. Yeah. So I just wrote kind of about like that concept of like purity rules in general because I I thought this was like, it's such a silly one. Like the idea of not going to Target is, you know, obviously there's no ethical impact on that and very little even moral impact on that, right?

2:18:22It's even aesthetically, yeah. Like it's very low impact on almost all parts of life, but it's a rule that I followed for a really long time. And so I kind of wrote about that. Yeah, I mean, it kind of just came into being like one of the GQ editors. I have like a long form blog that I post on every once in a while. And he just liked the long form blog and reached out to me and asked if I wanted to write for GQ. Yeah, it was a really cool experience to do. I do really believe in working with editors. It helped a lot to work with high-quality editors. I studied writing in school, but was never to get to a professional level.

2:18:55I don't work as a full-time professional writer, and so it was really cool to work with editors who could help me refine my voice. I think it was a good experience. Yeah, it's a great publication. We'll find an old profile in GQ every once in a while that just breaks down something in a very interesting way. We read a whole deep dive on the history of Richard Mill and stuff in GQ. It's a fascinating publication that I think has been maybe discounted because it's not putting up breaking scoops and news every day. It's not in your face, but there's a lot of really timeless stuff that goes on there.

2:19:30There's more to breathe, more breathing room. It's an interesting canvas to have the opportunity to paint on. That's exciting. Sorry, Jordy. Yeah, please. I don't have anything. Oh, I wanted to ask on the question of purity rules, do you think we're still in a bull market for purity rules? I don't know that I saw a ton more activity in 2026 around New Year's resolutions, people stepping back. There was obviously the big anti-alcohol move, which I see as part of that. I don't know if you'd put that in the same category, but are we becoming more puritanical as a society, less puritanical? Where do you think culture is moving?

2:20:10I think culture moves. I mean, I don't know. I don't think there's like a hard direction. I think where culture is setting purity rules more and more is around like phones. Like I was saying at the beginning, I think that's kind of the big trend that I would clock for increasing of that. I think we're clearly getting to a point at which just maximal pure enjoyment on your phone is not the most pleasant way to live your life. You know what I mean? Like just letting yourself get pulled into your phone at all times is not the most pleasant way to live. And I think that we're going to gradually come up with a set of rules that works for everyone on what the best etiquette on phone usage is.

2:20:47But I don't know what that looks like, but I would expect a lot of experimentation over the next five years or so to try to figure that out. So, yeah, that's my purity rule bet for the next few years is that we'll see a lot more of phone purity rule usage. Yeah, that makes sense. Last question from me on New York City. We talked to Adam Faze about how New York is experiencing a boom in content creation. And his analysis was that a lot of it was around TikTok creators and those man on the street style videos. What do you do for a living? If you need a lot of random extras, effectively, there's no place better to do it than specific parks in New York City.

2:21:27Are you experiencing that? Is it annoying? Have you ever been asked, what do you do for a living? um i've had one time where someone approached me for a man on the street video um i kind of just walked away from it i didn't want to be in it um it's not super common i do think what i i love the concept of all these kids coming to new york city because of um tiktok or whatever other reason that they're pulled there on the internet um i i kind of i think it's really magical that i don't know it's it's really cool that they're all kind of pulled to one location i think if you compare the the migration arcs of other generations right like the the gen x people who went to portland they're trying to like get away from something the millennials were kind of going to these like mid-sized cities i think it's really beautiful that you know yeah like austin and nashville denver yeah um but i think it's really like it really seems like gen's i mean i am one of the gen z people i guess i'm like i'm very old gen z i'm 28 um but that you know that i think it's really cool that gen z in general it seems to me my read on the ground is that they're coming to new york city like the biggest city they can it's already established they just like want to be around other people and participate in these systems um i think i think it's really special and cool.

2:22:31Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I like some of that, that content. It's interesting when you see a video of someone just like playing music and they're a musician and they could just play it in their apartment, but if they go out in the street, they'll get a stronger reaction and sure, you could go to Hollywood, but there's just more random people on the street in New York. So a lot of creators have just kind of coalesced around that. Anyway, Jordy. Yeah. Thank you for coming on. As these cultural moments pop up, We'd love to have you back on for some hard-hitting analysis in real time from the source, from the anthropologists.

2:23:06But it's great to hang in. Thank you for doing the work. Yeah, we appreciate everything you do. Thanks for having me on. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Fin.ai. It's the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin.ai. We have some breaking news. Yes. Breaking news is, without further ado. What is it? Brex has been acquired by Capital One. Hit that gong. $5 billion. Boom.

2:23:39Wrong header there, boys. But let's pull this up. So, yeah, Hunter in the chat was asking if we already discussed OpenAI planning to take a cut of customers' discoveries. There was some back and forth. We did discuss that a little bit, Hunter. But thanks for showing up in the chat. Always good to see you, as always. Yeah, so Capital One strikes$5.15 billion deal for FinTech. Brex's deal would give credit card issuer access to technology used by thousands of companies for corporate credit cards. Brex, of course, was valued at$12.3 billion in 2022. They hadn't raised in a while outside of, I believe, a debt facility.

2:24:18Yeah. But anyways, I think this deal makes a lot of sense. Yeah. When we had Pedro on, the CEO of Brex, we talked to him about how they were doing more enterprise offerings. They were starting to explore some of this powering businesses behind the scenes, right? Wasn't that? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they had that deal with first, third, what's? Fifth third bank. Fifth third. Fifth third. It's a real mouthful. Fifth third bank. They were the fifth third bank. Yes, yes. So, wow. Anyway, so a little more details. 5.15 billion in cash in stock in a deal that give the card issue more firepower with corporate clients.

2:25:00Brax, founded nearly a decade ago, offers corporate credit cards, expenses, and rewards. It also oversees nearly$13 billion in deposits held at partner banks and money market funds. Acquisition comes at a key moment in the payment world as fintech and crypto firms threaten to siphon business away from banks. Some established players have looked to team up with these firms to stay competitive. Capital One with roughly$670 billion in assets. Not bad. Obviously, acquired Discover last year for$35 billion. They also acquired Peribus. No way. That's crazy. Yeah. Capital One bought Eric Gleiman and Karim Mattia's previous company.

2:25:40Yeah. Yeah. I knew that, but I didn't put that together. We've stayed at Capital One. Capital One is, yeah, they want Silicon Valley founders, and they want the companies that they built. This is so funny because I was with Art, the chief business officer at Brex, hanging out. He was hanging out with my neighbor, Ben. I saw him like less than probably a week ago. He was hanging out at the beach, and I'm sure he was. He's like, I got something cooking. I've been doing business. Excited for this news to hit the timeline. How much did they actually raise? I don't know. But, yeah, it's a big number, and it's a big business.

2:26:18And so congrats to everyone over there. Let me tell you about LabelBox, reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. LabelBox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. We have Kathy Wood joining in just a few minutes. We can play this video about AI industry news every two weeks. We saw this on Instagram Reels, and I was cracking up because it feels like this comedian on Instagram. And just to close the loop, Brexit raised a total of$1.67 billion in combined equity and debt financing. So anyways, certainly going well beyond the press stack and solid outcome.

2:27:00Fantastic. Great outcome. Congratulations to all of them. So, Advit Mohunta says, can these AI products stop going against each other? And he plays a video called AI Industry News every two weeks. Let's see if we can play it. Is it available? We might need to come back to that. In the meantime, let me tell you about Applovin, profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And without further ado, we have Kathy Wood in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring her in to the TUP and UltraDom. She is the CEO of ARC Investor.

2:27:39Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. How are you doing? Oh, thrilled. I'm so happy to meet you. I've heard so much about you. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you. Thank you. How is your 2026 going so far? Ah, it's great. It really is. I wrote a New Year's letter, and then we put out big ideas yesterday, and it's been a whirlwind, a whirlwind. I feel this is a very important year for us. And is AI the only thing that you're tracking? Is it as all-encompassing in your world as it has been in ours? It is by far the biggest catalyst to innovation out there today.

2:28:24but we're very focused on our five major platforms and AI is involved in every one of them. So robotics, energy storage, AI itself, blockchain technology and multi-omic sequencing in the life science space. And so we're really focused on the convergence among those platforms. They involve 15 different technologies and so AI is part and parcel of all the convergences taking place today. Yes, and how are you setting up the firm to actually cover those five trends? What does the team look like? Who do you like to work with and what are the keys to success to growing a career at ARC? That's a great question.

2:29:16We have set ourselves up very differently from traditional asset management research. In that world, the research responsibilities are organized by sector or industry or sub-industry. And in fact, many firms are very proud that they have five different healthcare analysts following very narrow silos of companies. or five consumer analysts. We have set up arc around this idea that these technologies are converging and are going to impact every sector, every industry. So our analyst research responsibilities are broken down by technologies. So the 15 different technologies involved in those five innovation platforms.

2:30:15So, and what they are looking for is, okay, how is this technology going to scale across sectors? How big is this opportunity going to be? I don't think traditional research is set up to do that. I think to really understand how big the opportunities are going to be out there, you almost have to set up research this way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're famous for taking very large positions, very concentrated positions in really important companies. What does it look like to get comfortable with a new management team, a new CEO? Is it just endless phone calls, meeting in person? Do you have any rules for how you grow a relationship over time with a new business leader who you think is working on a breakout technology?

2:31:09Well, I think very important is understanding the background of the new business leaders. You know, I've been in the business for a very long time. I actually started in college in the late 70s. And while most of my career had... Overnight success. It's a true overnight success. We love it. No, but we know, I know a lot of people out there. Of course. And I've always loved the part of our business where I get to meet the people making these companies happen. So I'm a devout follower of talent, where it's going, where it has come from. I usually have some frame of reference that I can use as a line of questioning just to see, you know, is this the kind of leader and the right leader for this company at this time?

2:32:11How do you, what's your framework for understanding if a management team or a CEO is really set up for this AI transition that every company is going through? Because every CEO wants to say that they're getting the most out of AI, they're getting the most efficiency, they're running the most pilots, etc. But clearly many companies are just kind of doing the demos but not actually evolving their businesses. so now are you speaking about uh more in the startup world are you talking about enterprises both both really it's everything from a from a company uh you know like an enterprise software company maybe a system of record that that is looking to evolve yeah all the way through like manufacturing company who uh you know maybe has been using robotics for years and so they're like I don't really see why people are so...

2:33:08Yeah, we've seen a number of founder CEOs that have been completely reinvigorated by the AI boom. They've built a great business, but you can tell that they are completely in a new gear, working harder than ever. There's also legacy players that just place the right bets at the right time, and they're just paying off and reaping the reward. And then there are some big company CEOs who it does feel like they got caught a little flat-footed and have to adjust their business models. Yes. And the way we do our research, and again, a lot of people know us for our top-down research, so the big ideas that came out last night.

2:33:46We are as bottom-up stock research-driven or equity research-driven as any other team you'll find out there. That's where I came from. so we took from a top-down point of view two years ago in big ideas we took the position that because we were seeing it play out in the numbers that the the tech stack would change that the the you have the infrastructure layer which of course very strong you have the platform as a service layer, poster child for that, Palantir, was gaining share, significant share. And then you had application layers, software as a service, growing but losing share of incremental growth.

2:34:41We put that chart in. And we had no idea how quickly this was all going to happen. You know, software stocks, more traditional software stocks last year were terrible. And even this year, they're still suffering. So, AI is happening faster, I think, than anyone could have imagined. Anyone who thought they had time to adapt, I think, has been mistaken. and I even see it with large enterprises. When we go in there and ask them, okay, what's your AI strategy?

2:35:19They treated it in the beginning like, yeah, we'll let our teams experiment with all these new tools coming up, Chachi GPT. No, no, no, no, no. That's not the way this is going to work. Like, there's going to have to be complete restructuring around AI, or else you're probably going to fail. Maybe not outright, but you'll become irrelevant. So I think even ARK, for example, we have brought in Palantir. We're only 70 people, but we've brought in Palantir, and I can see, we brought it into research first. I wanted to see how could we transform our research process. And we're already seeing incredible results in terms of productivity gains by the research team.

2:36:14But I can see that in the rest of the firm, it is going to take, well, first of all, you have to have someone other than the CTO. And that's true even in our case, saying we're doing this. We're doing this. Our research is telling us this is the way the world's going. We cannot be caught flat-footed. And so I really think you need the CEO, not the CTO, CEO, CFO, to drive this change. And I think many people think, oh, the results are so immediate. And they are with our writing and editing, perhaps. But when you're trying to transform an enterprise, it's hard work. You have to collect all the data, even data that you didn't know existed.

2:37:08So you have to figure that out. You have to clean it up. You have to integrate it. You have to map out workflows in excruciating detail. And that all takes time. And a lot of people in this world are impatient. They don't see results right away. But I think the results are going to pay off. I think the way Palantir is doing it, just put its software on top of legacy, no rip and replace. And over time, it will usurp the role of all of that inefficient legacy software. So I think it's going to take time in the enterprise. And I know there was the MIT study that said, hey, this isn't happening. This is a figment of Silicon Valley's imagination.

2:37:53and we disagree mightily on that. How are you hoping to see the private markets evolve in the next five years or so? We've seen this tremendous growth of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera, these sort of XAI, leading labs that are happening all in the private markets. And if people really, really work hard, they can probably figure out how to get exposure to them, but certainly it's been cut off. And I know you guys have the private side of the business as well, but any sort of wishes or hopes in terms of how the interaction between the private market and the public market can evolve?

2:38:40Well, I think the lines are going to start blurring a bit, Hopefully, because the SEC, under Paul Atkins, is going to get rid of all of the regulations and bureaucracy, and I do think his aim is in that direction. In terms of the private markets, I think we're starting to see venture capital firms move into crossover funds because, well, first of all, there was a big arbitrage opportunity. You know, when innovation in the public markets was getting crucified, and believe me, we were the poster child for that, I think a lot of these funds were looking at the valuations in the private markets so much higher than in the public markets that that kind of started the conversation going.

2:39:39And then, of course, this administration is talking more and more about the democratization of opportunities and venture, of course, being a big one. And, you know, this idea that you have to be accredited in order to have access to companies that, you know, are investors, the younger investors in particular, you know, they don't have the net worth or even the annual income. But they know more about these technologies than many of the institutions investing in ventures. So, you know, we felt it was important to open it up and to be very complementary to what's going on out there. We're not taking board seats.

2:40:31We're not leading. But we are putting out research and we are willing to bring visibility to companies in our venture fund. And we're bringing a new kind of investor who really has been yearning for this opportunity for years. I want to talk about Bitcoin. And specifically, there was news yesterday. Coinbase is rolling out an advisory firm on quantum computing and blockchain. There's obviously been kind of FUD, people talking about the potential implications for quantum and Bitcoin. and crypto broadly. How are you thinking about the asset today? I know this is certainly a topic that you've talked about many, many times on CNBC and other shows, but we'd love to hear the latest.

2:41:30Sure. First, I'll start with quantum. So in our Big Ideas report, and it's in the first section called The Great Acceleration. There is a page in there. I think it's titled, Some Interesting Technologies Will Not Be Disruptive for 20 to 40 Years. And Brett Winton, our chief futurist, and, you know, with that title, chief futurist, you've got to be thinking about these things and coming up with analyses that either support or refute the conventional wisdom out there. So if you go in, you'll see a very interesting chart. Google has doubled its number of qubits. It's taken four years for them to do that.

2:42:20So it's even slower than Moore's Law in the semiconductor space. And so what Brett did was illustrate, okay, let's assume they accelerate progress here, if they can, to a Moore's law pace. Okay, then in 2044, let's talk about quantum computing and the risks that are in sort of the whole blockchain technology infrastructure, particularly Bitcoin. So we are not worried. We are seeing whales, so the original, the OGs, they are shifting Bitcoin from wallet to wallet because of quantum fears. So that's happening. But it's also created some FUD for the markets. Are they selling because they know something we don't know?

2:43:27Are they selling simply because they don't want to go through the downside of another four-year cycle? Have we hit the low at down only 35 % this time instead of 85 %? So we're in that kind of a market, and I do think we're in a basing period, which really started on 10.10, the flash crash. It was the software glitch at Binance caused a lot of auto-deleveraging. It was kind of crazy to learn about that kind of deleveraging, meaning firms who thought they were hedged if they were on two different exchanges and Binance was one of them, they were auto-deleveraged on one side of the trade. And so they were totally exposed in a way they never expected.

2:44:21That caused, we think,$28 billion of carnage. And we think that is washing through the system. We are very positive on Bitcoin for the three reasons I always say. You know, it's a new technology, really important. It is a new and a first rules-based global private, meaning no government oversight, monetary system. That's huge. That is huge. That is its calling card. A big hedge against inflation and a hedge against deflation if we end up in a banking crisis like 08-09. and it is the first, the leader of a new asset class. Many people are looking at gold and they're saying, well, wait a minute, gold has doubled in the last year or so.

2:45:20Bitcoin's way behind. Well, if you start the clock at the end of the bear market in 22, gold is up, I think, 170%, and these are maybe dated by a couple of weeks. and Bitcoin by 360%. So we think that Bitcoin... Oh, what happened? That was just a little air horn we used. You said 360%. That was a nice number. Sound effects over here. Not to be jarring. They didn't prepare me for this. Anyway, okay. Did they brief you about our flashback? We will save that one for another time. But yeah, sorry, continue, please. Yeah, so I'll just say it's very interesting over the full market cycle from 20 to now.

2:46:13Gold and Bitcoin's correlation, hardly, it's almost non-existent. Hardly anything. But we think Bitcoin is, especially as intergenerational wealth transfer takes place in the next five to 10 years, years. Yep. It is the digital gold and its supply growth is lower than gold's will be. And especially now that the gold price is up, miners can go out there. They're being paid to find even more. So that can't happen with Bitcoin. So I think in a big ideas, you'll see, we expect Bitcoin to scale to$16 trillion in market cap by 2030, and it's below two now. Yeah. Can you talk about the name of the fund?

2:47:02Where did the name come from? What does it mean? The name of the company? ARC, yeah. ARC, yeah, yeah. So there are two ways to talk about this. I can talk about this from a regulatory point of view or the personal point of view, and I'm happy to share both. Please. I would love that. Okay. So the regular, ARC was the name I chose for a personal reason. I'll get into that. But I was, or we were told by the, I think it was SEC, that we could not have all caps. Okay. We had to have lowercase r and k, unless it was an acronym. Oh. And so as soon as we got that word, immediately I thought, okay, active, research, knowledge.

2:47:54Active means more in the public world because there's passive in the public world. It doesn't mean as much in the venture world. So that's why we have it in all caps. The personal reason was in 2006, I decided I needed to figure a way out of the traditional asset management world because it was going passive. It was going benchmark sensitive, which means you take the QQQ, so the NASDAQ 100. If that's your benchmark, then you pretty much invest in all of those companies and tweak a little bit here, a little bit there. That's what benchmark sensitive is. To me, that's not investing. And in fact, so back then, you know, I would just, I was trying to figure out how to do this.

2:48:49Because if I quit my prior position, I would have lost all of my deferred comp, which was sizable. And so I worked. It took me seven years. You know, should I say seven lean years, but whatever. Seven years. And I just used to open the Bible. And this started in 06. Open the Bible. Okay, God, just tell me. This seems like an impossible situation. what do I do? Just help me, help me. And how many times did I hit Ark of the Covenant? Ark of the Covenant, which is what the Israelites took into battle before them, believing it was the presence of God and that they would be protected because they were going into battle.

2:49:41And so it kind of was appropriate. I was going counter the pendulum swing to passive and benchmark sensitive. And, you know, especially after COVID, a lot of people, you know, they just thought we were going to fail because this was not the way to do things. How do you think about the relationship between religion and markets? I've always been fascinating. We've had Pat Gelsinger on the show and there's been a number of times when he was either quoting scripture or Bible verses and people were sort of reading into that, how he was processing what's going on at Intel at the time. I would love to know more about the interaction between religion and investing because it's so rarely discussed, but it's a fascinating topic and crossover.

2:50:35It is interesting. I can say I was moved in the way I think about what happened there And what I just described is many people would use the universe. They're responding to the universe or the force or the Holy Spirit. Right. So we're all moved by something. Sometimes it's unhappiness, you know, whatever. You know, I just I use prayer as other people would use meditation, let's say. and I certainly don't go in there you know day to day and say okay God what should I do buy or sell this stock no not at all I would say it's those moments of meditation that bring mental clarity you clean the brain waves out or whatever and that's more And it's also, you know, I would say it's a way of living just generally.

2:51:45Yeah. Sorry, not to completely change gears, but back to AI productivity. I want your reaction to this Wall Street Journal report yesterday that it showed that CEOs reported that, you know, 20 % of the C-suite executives at the Journal interviewed said that they were saving 12 hours a day or 12 hours a week, some massive number. And then they polled workers and workers, 40 % of workers said they're saving no time with AI. And I'm wondering if what you read on that is, is it that one thing that we were kind of kicking around as an idea was potentially that the work of the C-suite executive is more ready to be transformed by AI because like in your role, you are a CEO, you do a lot of research.

2:52:33every question that you're faced with over the course of a day in your life. You probably want more information. You want it neatly organized and delivered to you. And AI is uniquely good at that, whereas many workers might not be in that level of information processing role. But how do you, do you think that this is going to be a report from the journal that we look back on, like that MIT study where it was just sort of an anomaly in the data and everything continues unabated? Well, this is a survey, of course, right? It's not quantitatively measured. And so what could be going on is the C-suite is really trying to lead the charge into the AI world.

2:53:18Yeah, yeah. And we're all in the knowledge industry. It's going to change everyone's job dramatically. So those who are saying it's not saving me any time, I don't believe, or they're not harnessing any tools. What I do believe is they are saving time. And if they're saying they're not, then it might be going to a longer lunch hour or, you know, an earlier end of the day. The history of technology is that it increases productivity, and the number of work hours goes down over time. During the Industrial Revolution, big decline in number of work hours. Farmers used to have to work six and a half days a week or whatever.

2:54:10And their families, the children, they got room and board. There wasn't much more. But then they went out into the working world. So the farmers and these unpaid family members, their work week got shorter. And I think that's part of what's going on. Yeah. We've been tracking the optimism around AI and progress sort of loosely along two axes. There's a view that GDP will start growing as AI diffuses and we go into a new technical revolution. We're already seeing some green shoots on the GDP figures, but it's still early. We're not at 10 % GDP growth, but that's what some AI leaders are predicting.

2:54:53But then you also have the employment question, and there's some leaders of AI labs that say the future will be high GDP growth, high unemployment, which seems like it will have significant social consequences, and we will have to grapple with that as a society and deal with those problems. But I'm wondering if you have a view between what we should expect in a decade from AI as it rolls out. Do you fall into that camp of high GDP growth, high unemployment? Or are you more, you know, the jobs, we'll find new jobs. And so maybe we will see an economic boom. But we will also still all find ways to, you know, fill our time during the day with employment.

2:55:32Yeah, I think that one of the reasons this question is popping up more and more, well, first of all, is our imaginations, but also because the unemployment rate of unemployment rate, is now up to 12, 12, percent. The average duration of unemployment, the average, is about 24 weeks. And so that's kind of scary. A lot of entry-level jobs are going unfilled. In other words, maybe the people answering that survey are now being faced with the reality that, wait a minute, they're not going to hire someone to come in and handle this grunt work, I have to do that too. Maybe that's what's happening at the low end to give them some credibility or at the lower end there.

2:56:36We're in the camp, and you'll find this in Big Ideas as well. We've been saying this for a while, and at first when we said it, we probably said it three years ago for the first time, We think there's going to be a step function change here in real GDP growth, just as there is with every technology super cycle. So just to illustrate that, in the 400 years between 1500 and 1900, Brett Winton, working with academia, found out or learned that real GDP growth was 0.6%. Then we had railroads, internal combustion engine, telephone electricity, and it went to 3 % for the next 125 years. Here we are. We think it's going north of 7%.

2:57:26And that's conservative. That's conservative. I think it's conservative. Really productivity driven. Yes. And we think that this is one of the greatest times to start a business. When I started ARC, there was no chat GVT to say, okay, do a deck for my startup because this is what I want to do. There wasn't anything like that. I had to create everything. Now you can look at an unmet need out there and say, hey, ChatGPT, or hey, Grok, come help me build this business, right? So we think that fears of unemployment, sure, there's displacement short term, but think about what's also happening. 1.3 million baby boomers are retiring every year, right?

2:58:21And we've just had, or we're in the midst of an exodus of immigrants and, you know, little in migration. So that, I think, is helping keep the unemployment rate low. But entry-level jobs can be done by AI. And so that's what we're seeing at the younger level. And so what I say to young people is you all in your mind have thought of a new business that would really fulfill an unmet need, something that frustrates you. Why don't you do it and use AI to do it, to plan it, and just get going while you also look for a job if you're unemployed. Floyd, I think we're going to see the biggest entrepreneurial explosion in history.

2:59:21I love it. I love it. Thank you. We got to hit the gong for 7 % GDP growth. We have a gong around here. I love the sound of that. We have real sound effects in addition to the soundboard. Thank you so much for joining. Yes, please. Can I just give you one more stat? Yes, please, please. We think inflation will go negative. Whoa. I love that. Yes, and that's technology. This is amazing. This is a very optimistic picture of the future, and I'd love to hear it. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and explain all of that very wide-ranging conversation. I love the history and the personal story and everything that you're doing.

3:00:03So thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to come chat with a bunch of people with a funny soundboard. We will see you later. Hopefully we made a good impression, and you will be back soon. You did. Now I know why you're famous. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Goodbye. Have a great day. Enjoy. Oh, that was amazing. Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending. Now with AI. Go and check it out. I couldn't keep it together, the chat, the whole time. I know. The chat was going insane.

3:00:47Literally, I was fighting for my life. Oh, my God. The chat was going insane. Every time I look up at the screen, I was just trying to enjoy a conversation. I know. I know. It was just wall-to-wall flashbang, and I'm just trying to hold it together. I love you guys, the chat. I love you. But also, you make the job a little difficult sometimes. That was the hardest battle of my life. That was insane. And there's nowhere to look because I look at the chat. I look at Tyler. I look at my phone, I have 100 notifications. I assume it's people texting me to pull the flashbang. And also, by the way, I can't trigger the flashbang.

3:01:20That's Jordi exclusive. We need a smoke to clear the air. We need to tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, next level vibe coding, state-of-the-art reasoning, and deep multimodal understanding. Okay, so some news. So we're going to have Pedro from Brex. Let's go. We're working on getting him on. Amazing. uh, Dallian's also going to join separately. Okay. Of course. Yeah. So I don't know who's coming on first show. Um, we can, uh, but we have, it's in the waiting room, but we have another guest jumping on right now. We have John. Yeah. We're going to push, uh, we're going to push John just because the stories.

3:01:57And he's okay. He has some time. So we'll, so we'll help on with him later in the show. Fantastic. Well, before we bring in our next guest, let's tell you about public.com. I saw someone in the chat asking for public.com read. Here it is. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with amazing customer service. I've never cried on air before. This is a unique experience. The chat is a wild, wild, wild experience. But thank you to everyone who's been supporting. She was a great support. Had a bunch of interesting things to share. And I truly do love the optimistic view.

3:02:36because we had actually written a chart for high growth, high GDP growth, high employment, low employment, low GDP growth. And we were trying to track where the other AI leaders were because Dario, of course, came out and said, I think we'll have high GDP growth and I think we'll have high unemployment. I think there's going to be a lot of labor displacement. And me and Jordi and Tyler were going back and forth on where we all sit. Where does the US sit right now? Where do different leaders feel like the world is going if they're charted on this two-axis chart. And I kind of jokingly put myself all the way in the most optimistic camp.

3:03:12I said 10 % GDP growth and less than 5 % unemployment. I don't know if I have it in myself to truly believe that. I do think that there might be some gyrations in the employment market, but it was great to hear from her and we appreciate her taking the time to come hang out with us while we throw soundboards and flashbangs around. Anyway, it sounds like we have someone in the restream waiting room. Who do we got? Oh, well, John, we got John. Let's bring John in. Let's bring John in to the TV. John, thank you so much for taking the time. Been a bit of a crazy show. Look at this setup. Look at this.

3:03:45What do you have behind you? The home library. What else would it be? Incredible. Give us some recommendations. What's the best thing on that? There's an incredible history of Houston rap music that I highly recommend on this book. What era? This is a screw era. Like screw into Paul Long, Mike Jones. Yeah, okay. Everything that led up to that moment. Oh, interesting. Okay, very cool. Anyway, thank you so much. Quick introduction. This was the last 15 minutes or so have been one of the more chaotic that we've ever had. We had Kathy Wood on talking about a variety of theses she has on markets. Our chat, we have some sound effects.

3:04:25Our chat just kept telling us to spam the sound effects, and I couldn't keep it together. But we're super excited to have you on here. Thank you so much for taking the time. Yesterday was kind of a funny experience. Somebody sent me the video that you posted with the rugby, and we only made like 100 of those. We gave them out to friends. We would have happily sent you one if we knew you were in the market. But of course— I was tapped in. I was tapped in. You were tapped in. You found it. You were tapped in. You found it online. So I'm glad Even though it was bootleg I'm glad that it looked great It looked great There it is Well we have sent out an official TBPN I'm in the mail It should be writing any day And what did it smell like when it arrived from Canada Okay so can I be candid Can I be candid with you guys I feel like we can be candid When this package arrived in my package room In my building It looked like it had been assembled by a small child She was it was packed into like a mailer like a like a regular mailer.

3:05:29Okay, that was tattered at the edges No, it had a label from Canada. Yeah, and there was a full retinue of packing tape layers like Layers on top of the mailing label. I opened the package. I had ordered one. Yeah, I got to Okay, I got to so there's a bonus one of you guys Thank you It smelled like cigarettes. Wait, so you think a child was smoking cigarettes? A cigarette smoking child is selling bootleg TV and merch. Non fumar. Yeah. But I will say, as a clothing connoisseur, when I saw the images that you guys had posted of your polo, I was like incredibly high quality material. I could see it in the photos.

3:06:16I knew that the embroidery would be like robust to the touch. I knew. I get this. Yeah. this looks like it was made from you know you get like a 10 pack of terrycloths no not good yeah see this was the issue a lot of people when I posted that we had that there was bootleg merch floating around and a lot of people were like oh what's the issue you guys are a podcast it's not your core business we don't make merch to make money right but the issue was like I knew people would buy it and they'd get it and they'd be like this is low quality and we care a lot about quality But on the flip side, you guys are popping and you're getting bootlegged.

3:06:55So, Mavutov, congratulations. Yeah, it's a good interview. Thank you. Anyway, sorry. First time on the show, please introduce yourself for everyone who might not be familiar. Sure. My name is John Caramonica. I am a pop music critic at the New York Times. I am the co-host of Popcast, which is our pop culture talk show. Check us out, youtube.com slash popcast. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. And then the reel that started this whole thing on Instagram, break down the thesis. And then just to clarify, none of the footage in that is AI generated, correct? No. Okay. I just look like that. I mean, no, no, no.

3:07:37Something about like the camera movement and your dancing was like a little bit of like, whoa, there's a lot going on. Okay. Movie magic, baby. Movie magic. But what was the thesis? Yeah, so every week we do a song of the week. It's not necessarily pure endorsement. It's usually a song that's reflective of a bigger idea in pop music. Obviously, we've been talking a lot about AI and pop in recent months. We had a big episode on that before the holidays. I listened to the Bruno Mars song that just came out, and I was like, if you had told me that this is just some guy trained on the pop charts of 1972 and made this, I would have totally believed it.

3:08:12So typically we film in my car. My car, unfortunately, is in the shop, so we went up to the South Bronx and filmed a dance video in my mechanic's garage. That's awesome. I mean, it's a beautiful set. I don't know what you shot that on, but it's a beautiful piece of media. Did you go to the Bruno Mars concert in the Steal a Brain Rot game in Roblox? What? Did you not hear about this? No. What are you talking about? I know about this, but I don't know. Bruno Mars played a concert in the game, steal a brain rot in Roblox, which by itself, just reading that sentence, it kind of feels like it would give you brain rot.

3:08:49So I guess you, it is stealing a brain rot. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Well, let's zoom out and talk about AI music. We were talking about it earlier and I've always been on this train where the AI tools are incredible. It's hard to tell the difference. But whenever I see a viral piece of AI media like Harry Potter Balenciaga, I return to the fact that AI didn't come up with the concept. AI was used to instantiate the idea that was created from a human. And in fact, after Harry Potter Balenciaga, I went to, I think, ChatGPT and I said, here's this thing that's going viral. They're mashing up a kid's classic with an iconic fashion brand.

3:09:31It's this high-low, create a new viral video concept that will absolutely take over the internet. And it just was like, you know, like Star Wars, Louis Vuitton. And it was like, that's not actually going to break through in the way that Harry Potter Balenciaga did, because it's not innovative. It's not the first time it's had something happen. And I'm wondering, like, how much do you think we're, you know, you're seeing music that's like purely just the AI did it, or it's more of a tool? How are you processing the AI music boom right now? Sure. One note on the Harry Potter Balenciaga thing, you know that there is an actual Balenciaga Fortnite collaboration.

3:10:10Really? Are you aware of that? No, I'm not. Wow. So when Demna, who until recently was the creative director of Balenciaga, had a really, I would say, a robust sense of humor and irony about the types of clothing that he made. Sure. And a lot of times he did some unlikely garment collaborations and he there's a sanctioned Balenciaga Fortnite hoodie, maybe a shirt, two or three pieces. So they were the troll outro the A.I. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Yeah. As far as A.I. as a music tool, you know, one of the things I think is causing a lot of people anxiety right now is you look at some of these artists who are cut from whole cloth.

3:10:53Right. Right. Solomon Ray purports to be a soul musician. But really, it's just a guy running a bunch of Anthony Hamilton songs through a program and coming out with a new one, probably. Allegedly. Now, that doesn't scare me because eventually Spotify, Apple are going to say there's going to be some banner, some badge. It's like this is not a real person to the extent that that matters. Here's what I think is interesting. Or it's not fair use and we need to shuffle the revenue over there. And so you're effectively just –

3:11:51melody person, a name producer who you probably maybe would have heard of, one or two songwriters, and then one or two kind of studio hands who are sort of like moving the knobs. I would bet anything that in every single one of those sessions, one of those low level folks is already deploying AI in unexpected ways. There's an interview with Teddy Swims, who's like a moderately successful pop star a couple of months ago. And he said, oh yeah, AI. Yeah, I use that to multitrack my vocals. I use that to try out what if I change the key? What's it going to sound like? I would bet anything that in the same way that auto-tune was quite quietly used for a long time and then became completely accepted, these AI tools are going to get used and deployed in these not totally discernible to the earways.

3:12:38But in terms of workflow and process, I bet they're already there in everything we're listening to, especially on pop radio. I heard an interesting story from a friend about a friend of theirs who was a backup studio singer whose work went to basically zero because they were working on tracks that were just meant to be demos so that a songwriter could share it with different labels or artists or whatever. And then suddenly it's like, you don't need somebody to go into the studio to sing your song. You just prompt it. And so, yeah, I think. You're obviously a student of history. We talked about the books behind you.

3:13:18I've read them all. What anecdotes can you share about previous technologies rolling out in music, backlash to electronic drum machines, backlash to electronic music? Give me some more. What are you drawing on for its core? Okay. So, I mean, the story that I think becomes really, it looms large in a lot of people's mind, Dylan going electric, right? This is an era of folk music where everybody's like, you know what's authentic is me. I don't smell great. I'm strumming on an acoustic guitar. I perform at four cafes a night in the village. We all hang out and write together and have sex with each other.

3:13:56And that's the scene. And then Dylan sees what's happening with technology and sees what's happening, especially with the guitar. And the electric guitar has become a creative tool for an entire legion of rock musicians. And Dylan brings it to the Newport Folk Festival and says, I'm plugging in. I don't care what you guys think. And, of course, people call him Judas and say that he's doing heresy. And the fact is he's just following. He was a follower at that point. I also mentioned Auto-Tune earlier. You may remember Jay-Z put out a song called DOA, Death of Auto-Tune. This is at the peak of T-Pain.

3:14:34T-Pain is dominating radio with essentially computer music that sounds a lot like Zapp and Roger from the late 70s into the early 80s. That kind of like synthetic funk music that was really popular after like the Earth, Wind and Fires of the World. T-Pain comes along, formalizes it, becomes a go-to songwriter, producer and collaborator. And all of a sudden, everything on the radio sounds like a computer. Jay-Z comes along with Death of Autotune and says, actually, stop all that. And then people are like, that's a nice old man. Like, let's keep it pushing. And auto-tune is now widely accepted in every genre.

3:15:09You hear it in country music. You hear it in pop. You hear it in reggaeton. You hear it in hip-hop. These questions that were sort of like anxious, critical discourses when they emerged, nobody really gives two thoughts to anymore. I think that's probably what's going to happen 12 to 24 months from now with AI. Yeah. I want to go so much deeper and have you back to spend way more time with all this. I'm interested in your thoughts. on the downstream implications of AI music, because I could imagine that if you're a particular artist that can create one of those like shelling points where there's a specific tour that everyone's talking about, you gotta go see the ERAs tour, or this particular tour at the Sphere was something that so many people took Instagram reels of and posted that everyone just knows it's real, it creates this proof of authenticity.

3:16:02I'm wondering what other downstream effects are you thinking about as artists react to competition from some anonymous person with AI that can create music that's maybe indistinguishable so they got to specialize. Here's the thing. Here's the anxiety that it brings up for me. And I think it's an anxiety that I've long felt before AI posed itself as a problem. I'm a very intense listener. It's my job, but also just even before it was my job. I was always an intense listener. You guys may or may not be intense. I don't know. Sure. What I can tell you is that for every person like me, there's 50 people who are casual listeners, which is to say they press play on a Spotify playlist and walk away.

3:16:47And don't think too hard about what the second song is or the fifth song is. They're not studying. They're listening. They're not studying. And they're not preoccupied. They're not every song that comes on. They don't do a gut check with themselves and say, do I like this? Am I curious about this? Is this an artist I respect? They just kind of let it go in the background. Everything is dentist office music. It's moving in that direction. There are plenty of real life artists who are making music like that. And those are the people who have been shutting out some of the bigger and more creative people.

3:17:19AI accelerates that process, but AI didn't start that process. And I think what is also going to accelerate is more and more people as consumers are going to get trained to try to not pay too close attention to the specifics of what they're listening to. Okay. I have 50 more questions, but we do have to move on. But thank you so much for hopping on on short notice. Do you want me to burn this? No, no. Keep it. It has lore now. It's good lore. We've discussed it on the show. It lives on forever in the Instagram reel. It's great. I love it. One thing I'll say before I go is that many of my favorite rap shirts from the 90s are all bootlegs.

3:17:56This may turn out to be the$1 ,000 shirt 20 years from now. I can see it. It has lore now. It's been discussed on the show. Well, thank you so much. Let's actually schedule your next appearance today. We'd love to have you back on. Yeah, there's so much. Let's get out of it. You guys are killing it. Congratulations. Thank you so much. You too. We'll talk to you soon. Great to hang. Goodbye. Talk to you. The New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And Pedro is in the waiting room. We have Pedro. We're going to bring him on in. From Brex. And we got the gong ready.

3:18:32Wow, what a day. Pedro, how are you doing? How are you feeling? Congratulations. How are you guys? Good to see you. We're super fives. Good to see you as well. Give us the news. How'd this come together? What happened? I want to ring the gong. Yeah. So today we're announcing the largest bank fintech merger in history. between Brax and Capital One. I'll let you go for it. Go for it. 5.155.

3:18:59Congratulations. Thank you. We're really excited about this. And as we thought about this, Capital One is the first fintech ever. They invented this concept of bringing technology into financial services. That's right. And as we got to know them, what we realized was there was a really obvious one plus one equals five scenario here. And really, when you look at the world that they operated, it was completely different than anywhere else compared to Brex. They had hundreds of millions of consumers, millions of businesses, $150 billion of market cap,$900 billion in car GMB. And really the way that we thought about this is when we combine the product that we built at Brex, We created this new category of company that brings financial services and software under one platform to help customers make better financial decisions.

3:19:54And we combine this with the product and the platform with Capital One's unprecedented scale brand distribution and balance sheet. We have this unique opportunity to accelerate our go to market and product with a level of investment that we would never be able to match as a standalone company. So it's really about how do we build the most important financial platform for businesses in the U.S. And this is such a unique combination of being two founder-like companies that fundamentally believe in growth and be here to win. They always say, what's the phrase? Like you meet your acquirer, you know, years before it actually happens.

3:20:32Yeah, when did you meet Capital One? Like first, how did the conversations first start? so uh so i've i've heard of rich uh and the capital and team uh for many many years actually even when i was back in brazil uh they were already an inspiration that these guys have been building in fintech for for a long time they invented this idea of bringing data into underwriting which of course is one of the big things that we pioneered back in 2017 as you know so so a lot of this has been you know deep admiration and respect and then as we started to spend time with them i think the biggest thing to me was uh the deep respect they had for technology.

3:21:06And the fact that when you think of a bank, M &A, people really think about, okay, we're going to go and integrate all these teams and spend all this time and make super slow. And really the main idea is keeping Brax independently and just accelerate, like accelerate the growth. And we're going to integrate a few parts of the business, but the majority of it will run independently. And when you're putting it behind the$6 billion R &D budget of Capital One, the$6 billion marketing budget, that gets a very special combination. And I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe that this was the easiest and fastest path for Brex to be the number one player in our space operating with this unprecedented skill and ambition with them.

3:21:52I want to talk about other exciting areas of bringing a Silicon Valley ethos to a larger company. How much of what you see over the next few years is like deploying AI transformation and bringing like that high energy early adoption of AI throughout the organization or any other areas, like even just marketing. There's so many different areas that you have a unique view from the founder seat. Oh, 100%. 100%. And look, I think the thing about capital on this special is being a founder of a company is just this ability to make, you know, quote unquote, bold decisions much more aggressively than others, right?

3:22:35And when you look into, for example, the engine that they've built on the go-to-market side for a small business, I think it's nowhere in the world matched to the scale in which they operate. When you look into the technology and data and what they do on the credit side and underwriting, it's really sort of an end of one thing. So I think there's a lot for us to learn from them. And I think the things that we're really excited to bring to the table is, especially when you think about this space, right, and bringing financial services and software into one, is really just AI and the direction of the roadmap that we're building as a standalone company.

3:23:11and now that we can, you know, double, triple our level of investment over the next few years together, it's going to be a really unique thing to do. And just bring this capability to the millions of businesses that are already on their platform will also be huge, right? So, you know, super, super. And maybe the biggest thing to say is, you know, we're not going anywhere. I'm saying this, I think this is going to be the most exciting years of my career. Yes, we're making history here. Super great. Yeah, I was going to ask, are you coming for Rich's job? Are you going for the top spot? Some people want to sell, you know, they want to, you know, just rest.

3:23:49But I know you're at business. I can see you going straight, going straight for the top. We advocate for this for every acquisition. We want the founders to get inside, take over. I have immense respect for Rich. He is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of this generation. And he's incredibly private and doesn't talk a lot about the, he says that the, you know, the story of Capital One is the book that will never be written. And, and, and there are some, there are some amazing stories there, but, but just the way in which he runs the company is founder mode to, to the extreme. And, and, and there's a lot there that, that, that inspires us.

3:24:24But look, the reality is for now, there's so much to build in the space that we're in, right? We're still Brexit 1 % of the market. When we bring it together, if the existing, you know, commercial card, there's a lot more room to go. We're going to be the third largest corporate card issuer in the U.S. And there's a very clear path to build the most important financial platform for businesses in the country. So really excited. What about location? I think of you as a San Francisco company. I'm sure you've expanded. I think of them as a New York company. Do I have that right? Are they going to be like mingling?

3:24:57Just lots of flights or? Yeah. Yeah. They're mostly based in Virginia. So yeah. So in D.C. So the biggest thing for us is we're actually keeping BRAX mostly standalone. Okay. And, you know, operating largely independent. So the idea is I remain in San Francisco, our leadership team remains in San Francisco and, you know, spread over the U.S. Yeah. We continue to hire in Brazil. We continue to hire in Seattle. We continue to hire in New York. And really, it's like how do we add fuel to the fire? That's really the mindset. That's amazing. And we're going to integrate a few parts of the business that are important, like some risk and financial functions over time, of finance reporting and all that.

3:25:34But fundamentally, the cool thing of this is, you know, how do you play this game at a completely different level of scale and just get ahead like five, seven, 10 years of what we would as a standalone company? And we're really excited about it. Yeah. Lessons for entrepreneurs, you know, looking back since 2017, I mean, crazy ride, one of the fastest growing companies of its era, then through COVID and Zerp, like it's been an insane roller coaster and, and, you know, the last few years, uh, you know, focusing on, um, on, you know, you just navigating through that whole processes, uh, and getting to this outcome is, uh, uh, super inspiring, but, uh, any, any lessons that you're taking from it?

3:26:18Learnings? I mean, so many, right. Uh, I, I think, you know, it's, it's, I started this company. I was 21. I didn't know a lot about things in the world. And I think a lot of the journey of the company is also a reflection of the founder journey. And over the years, we've made a lot of mistakes. We've learned a lot. And I think the last two years, honestly, were the most challenging, but also the most rewarding years of my career. Because I ran this company as sole CEO. I have an amazing leadership team and I have a fantastic team across all of Brex, but it was a very different game to play. And then when you see what we did on growth, what we did on the enterprise side and the level of deals that we're winning across every single player, the majority of AI companies are operating on Brex.

3:27:11When you look at the momentum and the revenue growth, as well as profitability, it's really remarkable what the team did here over the past few years. and I think the biggest lesson is continue to believe in the things that made you start and the things that keep you going because there are roadblocks. Brex wasn't in a great place in 2023 but I just had this belief that we were not living to our fullest potential and we could be much more as a company. And I think what we got today is first a really exciting milestone that this was all worth it. But the most important part is what the company gets to become and just cementing Brex as a part of the U.S.

3:27:59financial system forever. And the fact that a company would be around, this product that we created, that we have so much conviction and belief, will be around for 10, 20, 30 years at a massive scale. So really sort of unique and emotional moment for me. I really have so much gratitude for the team with Bill de Brex. some of the most talented, hardworking, smart, and kind people that I know. And that without them, none of this would be possible. So just immensely grateful for everyone that contributed to the journey and getting us here today. And again, we're just getting started in this new space.

3:28:36What a moment. We were joking earlier. It is interesting that you now have more common ground with Kareem and Eric over at Ramp and that you've both sold the company to Capital One. But great stuff. Super, super inspiring. And congratulations to the whole team and the whole cap table on the milestone. And it's great to catch up. Amazing. Thanks for having me. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. See you guys. See ya. Up next, who we got? Do we have anyone in the rest room waiting? We've got Delian. I think we've got Delian. Coming through. from Founders Fund. Is he available in the Restream Waiting Room?

3:29:19Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultra Dome. Welcome to the show, Dalian. How are you doing? Yeah, just great day. Great day. Yes. What are you hitting with? No, not the flashbang. Did this hit you like a flashbang or were you expecting this? No, I mean, how was I supposed to know this after you? They did a good job of, you know, sort of keeping it down low. And I want to start where it ended. Common ground with Eric and Kareem, right? There is some common ground. They both have now sold the company to Capital One. There's a lot of distance between the two of them. Kareem and Eric realized it is impossible to have a significant influence on the world by being within the structure of Capital One.

3:29:58The only way to save customers time and money was to go out and build an independent generational company. Pedro somehow believes the exact opposite. He believes the only way for him to accomplish anything is to go into an old stodgy bank, convince them to overpay for his company by 50 % and probably accomplish nothing with the rest of his life. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, so we're not going to do any grave dancing here. But who knows? I mean, what if he does his earn out? He leaves, he starts a new company. Are you going to sign up? You say, hey, I've backed people that have sold to Capital One before.

3:30:34I've seen this story before. His next company might be backed by you. What if you end up inspiring him to go do the earn out, come back, start a ramp competitor? What if he starts a move base with a mass driver? Oh, no, he couldn't possibly catch up there. And you're just like, wow, he actually cracked it. You know, this could happen. I don't know. Look, as Josh Wolf likes to say, chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. And you're putting a chip on his pocket. You are. Exactly. Exactly. The thing that I'll also point out, and this is more of like a sort of general company building, sort of macro point, but it's an analogy that I learned from Keith back in the day, which is building companies is a lot like laying cement.

3:31:06in the early days, you have the ability to like, you know, manipulate it, shape it, et cetera, right? It is, you know, sort of soft and malleable. The moment that it starts to harden though, trying to change company culture requires like a jackhammer. It's loud, it's painful, it's disruptive, it breaks your structural, you know, sort of integrity. And so I think the thing, you know, I was kind of listening into, you know, sort of Pedro's interview and it's a little bit of a, you know, sort of joke or quip, but it's still funny to me that throughout the entire interview, there was never a time where he really deeply was focused on how this is impacting his customers in particular, is it going to save them time and money, right?

3:31:36And I think that just comes down to what the early days of the two companies were like in terms of focus areas. The early days of Brex were focused on celebrating go-to-market, celebrating basically like signing up logos, celebrating wins. I'm not saying that's like necessarily a bad thing. I'm just saying that is what the culture was. They celebrated the champagne campaign. They set up the, you know, sort of South Park Cafe. And those types of micro decisions feed into what employees want to work on because they see what the, you know, sort of founder celebrates versus, as you guys know, What Ramp celebrates from the get-go has always been saving customers time and money through better product, better automation, better savings.

3:32:09And that's what ultimately the individual employee on the line celebrates and thinks about every single day because they see that that's what the founder is celebrating. And so I think as you see this, like, you know, the two sides of the story basically play out, I actually think it comes down to those early, early cultural micro decisions. And I think companies and founders should be thinking about that a lot, even in completely unrelated, you know, sort of categories of like what is going to be that penultimate, you know, sort of winning culture. You know, when I think about the space industry, are you relativity space and you're celebrating like renders and capital raising?

3:32:34Or are you SpaceX and you're celebrating like technical accomplishments and actually like landing rockets? And ultimately, that's going to be what sort of plays out. Relativity goes and raises$3.5 billion, never launches a rocket. SpaceX obviously launches their first rocket on like, you know, I think$60 million total raised. On the question of like ramp strategy, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on like the actual structure. If you think about Brex and Capital One, that combined entity has a consumer business. I've pushed Glyman, get me a personal Ramp card that I can pull out for my personal finances.

3:33:09I actually talked to some people who set up whole LLCs just to run their personal finances through Ramp. It's very cumbersome because Ramp does not have a consumer business. Is that in the cards? Do you think that there's a world where Ramp grows into a bank or is focus like the actual correct strategy for now, forever? How do you see it progressing? I think focus really matters, right? Like we have a like, you know, sort of core ICP, which is just like, you know, all basically enterprises of America. And I think like there's so much more that we can do to serve our customers even better. You know, sort of seeing us, you know, basically spin up, you know, sort of Ramp Labs.

3:33:46And today they launched a new version of Ramp budget. And I think any additional energy spent on just continuing to develop next generation products, especially ones that obviously utilize AI that is focused on the core ICP for Ramp, is a far better utilization of our time. And to take it back to the Peter Thiel philosophy, we believe in building monopolies, right? And ultimately anything that isn't serving that core ICP is a distraction from the potential to build a monopoly. I think what I find particularly exciting about today and about the news about Brex is that it is probably the strongest monopoly thesis for Ramp that has existed since the company's basically start.

3:34:21If you remember when we funded it, you know, and it like, you know, came out and launched in 2019 and 20, Amex still had like a really big, you know, sort of enterprise business. Brex was a multi-billion dollar company. Divi was still super, you know, sort of fast growing. Build.com was still super, you know, sort of fast growing. Expensify was fast growing. Like there were so many players in the market. You fast forward today, Divi basically got acquired, is barely around anymore. Brex obviously sort of got acquired. Amex has almost entirely shifted their focus to their consumer business, right?

3:34:47If you look at how much of their gross profit basically comes from consumer business and how rapidly that's growing relative to enterprise, it's all the CEO is basically talking about on quarterly earnings calls. Their entire, basically like, you know, FMV basically growth over the past three years is entirely based on the consumer business. And so enterprise, corporate spend, card, spend management, budgeting, just the like smart - CFO suite. CFO suite that smart CFOs use, dude, the field is somehow more open today than it was five years ago. There's less funding going into it, less super competent teams that are sort of focused on it.

3:35:18And so why would you ever give up focus on just continue to maximize that when we're still only 1 % of the way there? There's so much more basically to do. And so, yeah, would I as a consumer love to have that level of power in my hands? Sure. But as a ramp shareholder, why would we not give up the fact that we literally have the best monopoly opportunity since the company got started that we need to continue to go capitalize on. Jordy, anything else? No, I'm happy for the Brex team. And I think it's a great outcome. And I can also see why you are excited about this moment, simply because a lot of people probably mocked you for, you know, investing in a corporate card company when you, you know, initially led the round into Ramp.

3:36:02even with the quality of the team, it seemed, you know, like you were saying, it seemed like the cards had already been, you know, fully dealt and there wasn't, you know, some type of greenfield opportunity. So I guess congratulations to you too. Congratulations to everyone. But, yeah, congratulations to everyone. Honestly, like I hope the industry can just move past this, like, kind of, like, rivalry. It's like we're all like serving, we're all building tools to grow the economy. And that's something I can appreciate. Delian's got to say something nice. Aren't you a YC founder, Delian? You know, September 2014, but, you know.

3:36:45So you're a YC founder. This is a good outcome for the YC community. Let's give it up for the YC community. Deliver your own returns. Jordy and Coogan, you guys are much better people than I am. I think that's why you have much better hair than I do. I unfortunately am incapable of not being anything but a vengeful paranoid. That's all I've got in me. I'll say the ramp story, as you guys may know, started on Fortnite. Kareem and I playing together, seeing his brilliance. I'm happy to end the Breck story in the rivalry on my favorite saying in gaming, which is GG, WP, EZ, no RE, which stands for good game, well played, easy game, no rematch.

3:37:28No rematch. Savage. You knows. There might be a rematch. We'll see what the next company is. Anyway, have a good rest of your day. We'll see you later, Dahlia. Cheers. See you later, boys. And that concludes probably the most chaotic stream of our show. Definitely the most chaotic. We had technical difficulties. We had flashbangs. We had a$5 billion deal get announced live. We had bootleg merch. Bootleg merch. We had a good time. But no, this is a fantastic moment for Capital One and Brex, and we are excited for them. I think that's it. Yeah, that's it. I think that's it. Let's plant our ball.

3:38:10The concerning thing is the chat knows that now they can just say, start spamming Flashbang into the chat, and I'm not going to be able to keep it together. Nope. It's going to have to happen every once in a while. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. And leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to the TBPN newsletter at tbpn.com. We have a great show for you tomorrow. I think we're a little bit lighter on the guests, as we've been doing on our Friday shows. We'll be hanging out, bringing you the news. The mansion section. Doing the mansion section. Of course. And we hope you have a wonderful evening.

3:38:45We will see you tomorrow, 11 a.m. Pacific, sharp. We love you. Goodbye. Goodbye. Bye.

3:38:55Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.