Mapping Neo Labs, Unlocking LLM Growth, Evan Spiegel Live in the Ultradome | Blake Dodge, Freddie deBoer, Sohail Prasad, Travis Brashears

23:42If you've been paying attention, this is all second nature to you. Yeah. Did you add up how much all the companies have raised? It's got to be in the north of$200 billion. Yeah, it's a lot. I mean, so I didn't do that, but for a while I was trying to figure out how to include the valuations on the map. Yeah, it was too complicated. You didn't feel like you could do the math? No, we don't know how. Well, it's also, a lot of them are rumored. It's actually kind of hard to find out, because a lot of these are still really in stealth. A lot of these Neotrad labs, they basically, because the whole point is that they're doing this research stuff, they're not going to productize early.

24:17And also, how much do you put in the deep mine bucket? that's a huge amount of investment, and it's not exactly disclosed. Do you count the TPU? Do you count Google Cloud? Like, different allocations. You can go really deep in the stack to understand the impact of the broad AI build out. But yeah, I mean, if you just total this up, you can really just do XAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, and get like 90 % of the way there, and it's probably like 200 billion. It's also hard because it's evolving so fast, right? So David Silver's lab, he used to be at DeepMind. Oh, I like ineffable. Ineffable intelligence.

24:49That's a good word. Yeah, I think that was rumored today. It means indescribable. Yeah. That's good. But these things are coming out like every day, right? And you put the typos in just to prove that this was made by humans. So like Sovereign Lab and then ineffable intelligence also has a typo. And so I just want to make sure. I wanted to make sure people knew. This was not AI generated. Yeah, you put the typos in so that it was proof that you made it. Yeah, yeah. Sovereign. I don't want... Well, yeah, whatever you built this in doesn't have spellcheck, I guess. Anyway, fantastic report. Thanks for breaking it down.

25:29Great stuff. I learned a lot, and I hope you did too. And let me tell you about a lab, Gemini 3 Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the air reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. And I'm also going to 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. One show, two maps. One show, two maps. Strong start. Should we break down five wildly obvious fixes that will explode consumer LLM adoption? They don't want you to know this over at the big labs, but I have some ideas.

26:07Basically, everyone's been really focused on agentic coding and the SaaSpocalypse and what's happening in the business to business world and the enterprise world. I've just been sort of like thinking back on, you know, basic improvements to the chat apps that I use all the time. Because there's some really obvious stuff that I think is in the works. I think it's coming, but I wanted to just sort of like get it all down in one place to think about what the next iteration and the next breakout moment when people are like, oh, I'm using them even more. I'm having a better experience. What would that look like?

26:38So the first thing is that But I realized that I've asked ChatGPT just when was OpenAI founded three different times. It's the exact same query. It doesn't need to light the GPUs on fire for that question. The answer literally never changes. You can cache the result. And that's what Google does with those knowledge queries, knowledge panels. and there's a whole bunch of different ways to deliver results that are sort of pre-cached. And so if you just look down, when an LLM launches, basically every question has never been asked before. But now there's a lot of people that are just showing up with the exact same question.

27:21Give me the history of the Roman Empire. Give me the history of this company. And you might not be the first person to ever ask that question exactly. But also if you do a little bit of fuzzy, if you do a little bit of like fuzzy search over it, there are probably like hundreds of thousands of people that have asked the exact same thing. So cache those results, give them to the user instantly. And I think this like instantaneous feeling of LLMs, like they felt slow for a really long time. They actually got slower. Like it was always sort of slow. You watch the token stream in, but then once the reasoning models and the thinking models and the deep research and the 03 Pro came out, it was like really slow.

27:59It was like close your phone and come back in 20 minutes. That doesn't have to be the end state, and I don't think it will be. And I have no better example than the number two on my list, which is Cerebrous Inference. So, ChatGPT currently has a model called 5.2 Instant, and it is not instant at all. I fired off a prompt to 5.2 Instant, and I said, no reasoning, tell me the history of LLMs. It took 38 seconds to deliver the full response, for like all the tokens to stream in. And it does a good job. It shows you images and stuff. And it is a cool illustration. But then I went over to Codex Desktop and I fired up GPT 5.3 Codex Spark Low, which is a crazy name, which we'll get to.

28:44And it responded in under two seconds because it's, from what we know, Spark is increasing on Cerebris and it's very, very fast. And so everyone's obsessed with like the fast models in the agentic coding world because you're waiting a half an hour for something to get back to you. You're waiting five minutes for something to get back to you, and you're actually losing your train of thought. But I think that applies in consumer as well. And I think the interaction of sending a message and then just immediately getting a response before you actually think, oh, well, it's waiting. I'll close the app.

29:15I'll check my messages. Oh, I got an Instagram notification. Let me go over there. Instant responses will keep people in the apps longer, and user minutes will actually increase once that rolls out. So pretty simple implementation for I think most companies. My big question is like, I know Google has a huge advantage with TPU, but I don't know if they have like an answer to Cerebris specifically. And NVIDIA just brought Grok, which can do, I think, some of the same things. So I'm curious to know how every lab solves the like fast responses question, because that feels like an important piece of the puzzle.

29:50It's not the only piece of the puzzle, but it's an important feature. And I think we're going to see it rolling out to consumer LLMs very, very soon. And I do think it'll be an interesting moment for people to both ask a question and just boom, it's as fast as going to Wikipedia and just seeing like, okay, everything's rendered. It's thoughtful. It's what you want. And on the flip side, I think that it could make people a lot more chatty with them, like actually asking follow-up questions because you don't feel that cost of like, oh, if I ask you to follow up and tell me more or go a different direction, like I have to wait.

30:24I have to wait. So I might just close the app. Speaking of GPT 5.3 Codex Spark Low, no more model names. Like truly no more model names in consumer AI, LLM chat apps like ever. Like just bury them so deep in the UI that you never see them. And people will complain. People will be like, I wanted it to be easier. I like picking between pro and thinking and fast and instant. I know what I want for everything. People complain. But it will all inspire the model routing team to grind harder. And the model routing team has a hard job to do, but they will eventually figure it out. And eventually, you should be able to just talk to the model.

31:04You can already do this. In ChatGPT, you can say, hey, think really hard about this question and give me a really thorough answer. And it'll switch from instant to thinking. I don't know that you can trigger pro from that. I haven't actually experienced that. I did try and trigger a deep research report. I said, hey, please deep research the Roman Empire for me. And it does not fire off a deep research report. Deep research is buried under a plus button, and you have to select it and say, okay, I actually want you to do this thing. And then it takes you down the deep research workflow, which I understand is for inference reasons.

31:34They don't just want you firing off deep research reports all the time. But I think in the future, the model router should be very intelligent about, okay, this is a question that people have asked thousands of times. Let's just go get it from a database Which is crazy to think in the age of AI you wouldn't even be hitting a GPU But I think that's gonna be real and then I think on the other side like you should it should detect like okay This person wants something that's far beyond anything that we've ever worked on before we got to go search the internet We got to write some code. We got to do a whole ton of stuff.

32:05I'm gonna need 10 minutes fire up deep research, right? Fourth ads We've talked about this, but we got to get them in the LLMs We've got to get them everywhere because I was thinking about the death of Google Reader. I don't think you were ever a Google Reader guy, were you? But it was amazing. You could take all these RSS feeds from all these different blogs during the blogosphere. You could put Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen's blog, all these different things in there, and just kind of scroll through them really quickly. And Google wound up killing it, and everyone was like really upset. And the reason was, I think, because they never really got on the Google ad flywheel where there was real like revenue generation.

32:44Yeah, and was that just that it didn't hit a scale that enabled it? So the failure of every Google project that has failed is always a question of like, was it because they weren't making money from it or was it because they hadn't monetized it yet? Or it just never got big enough. Never got big enough to monetize. If it has a million weekly actives, it's not probably worth keeping around. Totally, totally. But my takeaway from Google's surface area of products that are successful and loved, Google Search, YouTube, Google Maps, Chrome, Android, like these are all direct funnels for the ads flywheel.

33:25And so you can see that they're driving the bottom line. There's a whole bunch of folks on the team that are getting excited when they're hitting their numbers, when they're making more money for the business. And so they just get more and more resources, more and more engineering effort. everything gets better. And I think that not only are ads the best way to deliver high quality products to the broadest possible audience, but they just make products better top to bottom. And yes, there's the stated versus revealed preference thing. And yes, you might want to pay to not have ads like you do on YouTube.

33:54Many people do. But I do think that that ads flywheel is going to be really, really important as the inference gets really. And right on time, perplexity ends ads experiment. I saw that. This was the news from this morning in the information from Catherine. He says perplexity is no longer offering ads, an executive told the Financial Times. The AI search startup is pulling back from this line of business as rival OpenAI starts showing its users ads in ChatGPT earlier this month. The company said it worried ads would undermine users' trust in their platform with an executive saying the challenge with ads is that a user would just start doubting everything.

34:33I don't buy this at all. Arvin has a history of kind of just like trying to provoke open AI at every turn. And so coming out, perplexity, in my view,

34:52this is just like somewhat bearish, right? They're trying to serve as many people as possible all over the world. the best way to do that is going to have an ad supported tier kind of bailing on this moment. I don't know. Maybe it's not worth reading too much into it, but a little bit early to throw in the towel on the economic engine that has driven the internet for its entire history. Yeah. I mean, we talked to a lot of founders who have brands and they love advertising. And I think that's another side of this, which is that when like a lot of entrepreneurs and also people who work at businesses want to grow their businesses and they have fond memories or affiliations with Facebook and Google because that's how they grew their companies.

35:38And when you talk to somebody like Sean Frank at the Ridge, he's like, I'm going to be first in line to advertise on ChatGPT. I can't wait for that. It's converting so well already. I want more of that business. and we didn't really hear that with the perplexity ad product. We didn't hear people lining up to buy ads in that product. So maybe it was not going as well as they thought. So according to the information, perplexity started testing advertising in 2014, less than a year into its test, Taz Patel, the executive leading the ads effort, left the company and perplexity had only let in less than half a percent of the brands that wanted to advertise in the chatbot.

36:16So there was like a bunch of demand. They barely let anybody use it. And then they bailed on it. And so. Interesting. Well, the last one is somewhat related to OpenClaw. But I think way down the funnel, beyond the 20-minute deep research project, you probably want to be able to fire off something that looks like Claude Code or OpenClaw or Codex to write lots and lots of code and solve a really, really hard problem. And so many reasoning models can already write some Python and execute it, but it's clear that everyone wants to go further, hence the Mac mini boom. And I'm not actually sure how important access to the local file system is to most consumers.

36:58Like when I think about what's like most of the data in an average Internet user's life is mirrored in the cloud. I think they care about their camera roll. They care about their email, their messages. and almost everything's in the cloud. I've noticed this when I move from one computer to the next or I move from a phone. I'm like, wait, I didn't actually, there was a time when it was like, oh, you're moving computers? Like get an external hard drive. Like make sure you drag all your files over. Most of the stuff's mirrored to iCloud. That can be accessed via an API. It requires a business development deal probably, but it does seem feasible.

37:38and a lot of the LLMs have hooks into Gmail already. I think all three major LLM apps have Gmail integrations already and more integrations are coming clearly. And so I'm not sure that you need to replicate OpenClaw and have it running on a dedicated piece of hardware, even like cloud hosted, but I do think people will want to be able to fire off something that writes tons of lines of code to solve a particular problem, Even if it's something as mundane as getting you a restaurant reservation at a place that doesn't have an API. Like if there's a restaurant that just has a web form and you basically want to deploy agent mode, that might look like writing a web scraper and writing something that actually does like a headless Chromium browser and clicks it.

38:27And that might be generated from something that looks a lot more like OpenClaw or CloudCode than something that is just a couple lines of Python in a reasoning model. Anyway, there are also a bunch of nice-to-haves. These aren't really on the list, but these apps, they still occasionally fail to return results when you're in areas with patchy cell phone service. There's little UI things. Some of them botch text-to-speech requests when you'll fire off a deep research report and they'll be like, read this to me, and then it'll read for a minute, and then it just stops. Some of the apps don't let you listen to the deep research reports, but they let you listen to the normal reports.

39:08So there's all these little fine details in the UI that I think are causing more churn and people can just chop away at. It's unclear if what is required to make an amazing product is just A-B testing all of these things and just optimizing, or is it taste? I have no idea, but if you wind up doing, this is my recommendation for anyone who's working on this stuff, if you're just gonna run an A-B test to figure out what is the correct user interface and you run the A-B test, you find out that the button should be blue instead of green, don't tell your boss you ran the A-B test. Tell them it was taste.

39:44Say that it's all about taste. Good call. And that you have taste. It's all about taste. Because then you'll have a job forever. Yeah. But if you say, I'm just the guy who runs A-B test really well. Probably. Probably. Taste is king. It's true. The AI models can't taste. They can't taste. They can't taste A5 Wagyu. They can't taste a Cabernet Sauvignon. only you can do that so make that dinner reservation and enjoy a nice glass of red wine because the models can't they just can't there's just no way there's no way alpha alpha alpha anyway uh let me tell you about mongo db what's the only thing faster than the ai market your business on mongo db don't just build ai own the data platform that powers it and let me also tell you about lambda lambda is the super intelligent cloud building the ai supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

40:36Robinhood says, historically, investing in private markets was limited to institutions and the elite, but not anymore. With Robinhood Ventures, you can now get exposure to private companies like the ones listed below. They have a new fund that has Databricks, Mercore, Revolut, Airwallex, Boom, Supersonic, Ramp, Aura, and Stripe, which is signed and pending, closed. Very curious which of these companies, if any, were actually on board and excited about being part of this lineup. I think Ramp was. I saw Fax Herbert from Ramp posting about it. And he is investor relations. Okay. He said, we are excited to partner with Sarah, Shiv, Chan, and the broader Robinhood Ventures team on their inaugural fund.

41:26And on a personal note, I'm relieved to finally have an answer for family and friends who have been asking, how do I get exposure to ramp equity? And so, you know, if this is coming out from your head of investor relations, it's not exactly a Matt Grimm style response. So I think most of the companies that are in the press release at least and saying, hey, you can use our logos are cool. We'll see where it goes. There are folks that might get funneled in there, and they don't want to be, and there might be a whole bunch of different debates and back and forths. What does Ankur say? Sheil shared kind of some of the cost basis from the prospectus.

42:10They bought Databricks at$150 per share, now trading at$204. Ramp at$90, now trading at$98. Airwallet's$21. It's now trading at$18.8. And then Mercor at$7.14 now trading. So I've already seen a little uptick. Anchor came in and was sharing some of his insights. Insights friend of the show. He says, a single closed-end fund that gives you exposure to some of the top private startups. My thoughts, people want access to private markets, of course. So much wealth creation in America happens in startups, and people desperately want access. You can see this with the insane, silly fees people are paying for Anthropics, SpaceX, and OpenAI SPVs.

42:53He says, too, the structure of this fund is broken. As a closed-end fund, the price here can diverge very significantly from the net asset value of the underlying assets. With FOMO from Access, this could easily trade at a very high multiple to NAV, leading to a lot of retail investors getting their face ripped off. It ends up being less of a venture fund versus a speculative product to ride private market sentiment. It's a great disclosure. long Robin Hood, but will not be participating. He's long Robin Hood, but he's like, I don't like that. Yeah, so we actually have the founder of Destiny on the show.

43:27Sohel Prasad, he's coming on at 1 p.m., and they're sharing their Q4 results. They have exposure to Anthropic Chaos Industries, Hermia's positioning Destiny as a New York Stock Exchange listed vehicle, democratizing retail access to high-growth. Yeah, and Destiny has suffered from this same problem. They were super early. They got this fund out in almost two years ago, exactly, or close. And immediately it spiked, right? There's a lot of demand to get exposure to these assets. And it's sort of come back down to earth since then. But excited to get the update from him and understand. And let's pull up the rest of the linear lineup to show you who's coming on the show today.

44:11Because we got Blake Dodge from Pirate Wires, Freddie DeBoer from Substack. Sohail, as we mentioned, from Destiny. Travis from Mesh Optical. And then Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and CEO of Snap. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70 % of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. Moving on. Elon Musk announced that XAI is moving away from traditional academic benchmarks, like humanity's last exam, to focus Grok on maximal utility for real-world engineering and software development. He said, actually, I don't think HLE is a great measure of usefulness for moving away from these benchmarks.

44:50Andy Scott says, so it's bad? Question mark. Who said that? I think it's totally fair to just focus on real-world utility. But, of course, people are still going to ask. Well, I still want to know how it does. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, Tyler, give us the update on 4.2 that came out today. So Grok 4 has already been out. This is a minor revision. And 4.1. 4.1. So now we're at 4.2. And is it focused on benchmarks, or have they carved out a particular niche yet? Yeah, so I think historically, especially when Grok 4 came out, people were very quick to say, oh, this is so benchmarks or whatever.

45:36I think they've definitely retreated from that at least path with 4.2. It doesn't look like outrageously benchmarks or anything. They did this kind of interesting thing where when you, so it's still not like fully out, it's still like in beta if you go on the Grok interface. They did this kind of interesting thing where there's like four agents. Every time you actually do a prompt, there's like four agents, and the agents specifically have like distinct roles. It's almost kind of like you have four instances of the same model, but they have different system prompts. So you can try to get like, okay, this one is like focused on doing like qualitative things.

46:11Instead of mixture of experts, mixture of agents. Yes. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, mixture of experts is like a, that's like in the architecture of the model. Within the architecture. Where this is like, you train the model, then you kind of add this as almost like a harness type of thing. Yes, yes. So it's kind of an interesting path. We'll see, like, yeah, again, this is still not like the actual 4.2 full release. Oh, okay. I believe. Yeah. But we'll see. Yeah, I wonder what the bull case is here for XAI. They, they, there's a world where they carve out some sort of niche, you know, anthropics like focused on coding very specifically and, and, and, you know, had some major, major gains there.

46:50What else is there? I mean, I think with macro hard, they're going very hard on computer use. Okay. Computer use. Yeah. See that, that, that would be an interesting thing where they could like jump to the front of that. And if that's the important, the important technology for a couple of months, that could be really good vibes. Yeah. Also, it is interesting to think about with the cerebrous news and with the value of high-speed inference on the whole model on one chip, is that something that Tesla's chip team can iterate towards on a faster time horizon than other chip companies? I don't really know, but they do custom silicon, and they've done it for a long time, and they've got an entire self-driving model that runs on a car.

47:39So they have some experience there. And they obviously design and fab, or they don't fab it themselves, but they design it themselves. And so we'll be interesting to see how they carve that out. Let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Let me tell you about app-loving. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Tariq says, I'm proud to share that Humane has invested$3 billion into XAI's Series E round just prior to its historic acquisition by SpaceX.

48:11Through this transaction, Humane became a significant minority shareholder in XAI. The investment builds on our previously announced 500 megawatt AI infrastructure partnership with XAI in Saudi Arabia. reinforcing Humane's role as a strategic development partner. So, yeah, interesting. Maybe, you know, would have wanted to get this out before the SpaceX acquisition, but better late. Wait, wait, wait. They said they got in before the acquisition. I know. You mean the news? But, like, you know, this round got announced a while ago. Yeah. So maybe they're coming out with this news today. Yeah, but they're saying, hey, we got in before the acquisition, so we got SpaceX shares.

49:01Yeah. I don't know. It is odd that it's delayed. I'm just saying better late than never. Yeah, you mean on like a comms front. But like from a financial perspective, like that was the right time to invest, right? Yeah. I think that's what's going on. I wonder why the announcement was delayed. Maybe it's like regulatory approval because it's an international investment. Yeah. Let's play this clip from Jeff Bezos. his space company Blue Origin will move heaven and earth to get to the moon before rival SpaceX the CEO Dave Limp said. Recently Jeff Bezos who never tweets this was his first tweet of 2026 posted a photo of this like black tortoise which goes along with Blue Origin's motif of slow and ferocious methodical.

49:47But a lot of people have viewed it as a warning shot to Elon Musk which really was focused on SpaceX going to Mars, and now he's saying we're going to focus on the moon. What do you make of that tweet, and what is the competition right now? Do you think you're going to be the first? Well, it gives me an opportunity to put on a T-shirt for you. So there you go. Nothing else. Let me do that. Do I get to keep this? Yeah, that's all yours. And that's the first one off the presses, too, by the way. I think everybody's going to want one of those. SpaceX doesn't have to lose for blue to succeed. What the U.S.

50:23needs is it needs two SpaceX's. It needs two launch companies that are competing vigorously against each other to try to give us the most capabilities as a country commercially, civilly, from a defense perspective, because our adversaries aren't standing still. And so we need to be moving very quickly. Healthy competition. But I think a lot of people read into that as the tortoise being Blue Origin and the hare being Elon Musk and SpaceX, because it also comes after Secretary Duffy had said that SpaceX is behind, so they were opening up for everyone in terms of Artemis, and Jared Isaacman, who's now the administrator, also said essentially, yeah, whoever can get there first is going to get the contracts.

51:05So do you think you're going to get there first? I think if asked, we will give it a run for our money. I like our architecture. I like our odds of getting there very quickly. I don't have a crystal ball into what SpaceX is doing. I think, again, Gwen and Elon are competent, and they show it every day by launching rockets. Elon. But I love the fact that the U.S. would compete us against each other. They are for sustainability on lunar. We're talking about who could get there in 2028. If asked, we will step up and we will move heaven and earth to get to the moon first. Move heaven and earth. Powerful line.

51:44The moon race is going to be fun. I think it's shaping up well. I mean, yeah, a little bit of a come tortoise and the hare story, a little bit of come from behind. I'm not buying the tortoise as ferocious. Yeah, I don't really love the analogy. I don't think it's the best comm strategy. I like the vague posting out of Jeff. It gets the people going. But at the same time, just imagining SpaceX as a hare, just like running a bunch of laps around the tortoise, just kind of. They need to take this way further. Elon needs to wear tortoiseshell glasses. Be like, I turned your tortoise into my glasses.

52:30And Bezos needs to start carrying a rabbit's foot for good luck. That would be the hare. Like, I got your foot. You know, I want much more. I want more battles here. This is great. Well, let me tell you about Okta first. Sorry, Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trust identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. According to Kalshi, will Blue Origin land on the moon before SpaceX? So if Blue Origin lands an uncrewed moon lander on the moon before SpaceX, before January 1, 2030, the market will resolve the yes. So currently it's at a 70%. 70%. So they think the moon race.

53:11Up from 29 % in March. Of course, like the race isn't over. Like the finish line is not get one lander to the moon. It's like develop an economy on the moon and get lots of people there. So, you know, it was just one read on this market, but it is interesting. And certainly, I mean, you can see the market was not pricing this a year ago. And I don't think anyone was. I think everyone thought that Blue Origin was kind of just a side project that was sort of just like doing space tourism. And now it seems like they might be going to the moon, which is pretty cool. We have some breaking news. What's that?

53:46Claude OAuth is officially not allowed in OpenClaw. So Anthropic is responding to the OpenClaw, OpenAI news. And Andrew Warner shares that this would be a great time for Sam Altman to step in and let us use OpenAI subscriptions with OpenClaw. So in the Cloud Code docs, OAuth authentication, which is used with the free, pro, and max plans, is intended exclusively for Cloud Code and Cloud.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Cloud Free, pro, or max accounts in any other product, tool, or service, including the agent SDK, is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the consumer terms of service.

54:27So if you're on the consumer plan, if you're on the consumer plan with Anthropic Claude, like you just signed up for a normal plan on your app, and then you get excited, you want to set up OpenClaw on your Mac Mini, you do that. And then when you're in the login flow, you say, hey, I'd like to use my Claude tokens over here. It's going to say, no, you've got to set up an enterprise plan. You've got to set up a proper API, correct? This has been the way it's been a while. This is not news, though. This was like a couple weeks ago. I think like a week after OpenClaw got like super big they stopped because you can still I mean I'm pretty sure you can still use API like an API key.

55:04An API key. Yeah. And will that use your consumer plan? So how it used to be was you could have a clawed subscription. Okay. And then with that you get a certain amount of like basically clawed code tokens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they're like massively subsidized versus the API. It's like 10x. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For the clawed code tokens. Got it. So they were basically using those in OpenClaw. Yeah, I guess. in other agents. Yeah, that was for OpenCode. Yeah. Not actually OpenClaw. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I'm getting... Yeah, no, I know. But I think it's a similar... 25 different names. Yeah. Yeah, so the chat is saying that this is news that, like, the particular OpenClaw integration maybe broke today.

55:45Peter from OpenClaw has responded and says that OpenAI has already publicly said that OpenAI subscriptions will work and continue to work in OpenClaw. And so it's a little odd because like, yeah, I mean, you can just use the API. That's not that, like if you're technical, that's not a problem. But for the sort of pseudo-technical folks who are setting up OpenClaw instances on their Mac minis, they might be a lot more encouraged to set up the system if they're able to just log in with OAuth with their Clawed accounts because they're like, yeah, I already have the app and I use the app. and I have some extra tokens.

56:25Why don't I use them over here? Yeah, Thomas says the news is that they're applying it to the SDK. Yes, so there we go. Anyway, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Out of the journal. Yes. The fossil fuel tycoon teaming up with the Rockefellers to fight energy poverty. I'm sure the online conspiracy community will love this one. But we love tycoon. We're trying to bring the word tycoon back. So we're happy to see the journal using this. EQT chief executive Toby Rice is starting a nonprofit to tackle a lack of access to modern energy infrastructure in poor countries.

57:12Toby Rice made his fortune unlocking a gusher of natural gas in Appalachia. He has a bold new ambition, bringing energy to millions of people in impoverished nations. Rice, the chief executive at EQT, one of the largest natural gas producers in the U.S., is a co-founder of Energy Corps, a nonprofit that helps developing nations such as Ghana, Zambia, and Burundi build out their energy infrastructure and prosper, unlike other philanthropic incentives that emphasize renewables to energize impoverished societies. Energy Corps sees a role for a broader spectrum of solutions from fossil fuels to solar panels and nuclear plants.

57:53Notably, this approach has been endorsed by the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the oldest and richest foundations in the U.S. They really opened up the floodgates with this. The Rockefellers, you know, wasn't John D. Rockefeller the richest person in human history? You see how much he's putting in this project? 200 G's 200 K go solve it go solve energy globally 200 K here you go best I can do is 200 bucks I got I got I'm super excited about this I think I think Macron deserves a victory lap at this point I mean his Macron size is looking yeah it's size it's size compared to this no no obviously they're they have a lot of other donors the Rockefellers are just a fancy name because Toby and his wife have personally contributed$3 million, and the initiative is raising$10 million this year from energy companies, family offices, and private individuals.

58:47And from his perch at Pittsburgh-based EQT, a company with a market cap of$36 billion, Toby Rice has preached the benefits of selling more American natural gas across the globe to reduce emissions and strengthen security of the U.S. and its allies. Now he's wading into a debate. Should impoverished societies be encouraged to rely on polluting fossil fuels to improve their fortunes or leapfrog to intermittent renewables? There was this question about should Brazil be allowed to clear-cut the Amazon rainforest to pull forward industrialization? It's the world's lungs. Everyone suffers if that happens, but they would certainly benefit in the short term.

59:24So there's a hot debate here, and he is engaging in it. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with cisco david holz has hit the timeline he says five million humanoid robots working 24 7 can build manhattan in six months now just imagine what the world looks like when we have 10 billion of them by 2045 now imagine the year 2100 dyson sphere dyson sphere dyson sphere by 2100 is the is the correct like debate like is it before is it after but it's like around there. I keep going back to my land thesis. It's like when armies of robots can build anything at any time, what is actually scarce.

1:00:10In this case, I think with 10 billion of them, I don't even think land will be scarce anymore. It's like, hey, we're making, we're going to build an island. We're going to build another moon. We're building the moon. New moon alert. New moon alert. Just build another earth and just throw it on the other side of the of the solar system. Yeah, yeah. I mean, right now we're talking about what businesses are unsloppable. The next meta will obviously be unclankable. Unclankable businesses. What's actually unclankable when you can send an army robots anywhere? Well, figure out what's unsloppable. Figure out what's unclankable and then go invest in it on public.com.

1:00:49Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Richard says SF guy eating a delicious blueberry. In 18 months, everything will be blueberries. This is a perfect contrast to the other post. Just two sides of the SF discourse. No, no, no. David Holes. David Holes is like, because David's seen humanoid robots. Like he's lived in SF and been around this stuff. Like he's a true believer. And he's sort of saying like, I've seen what they can do. And I understand the exponential here. and now imagine 10 billion of them in 100 years.

1:01:28Like, it's going to be crazy. And then you have Richard on the other side. Everything will be blueberries. I thought you were talking about the delicious tacos post. He said, I'm the CEO of a hot dog company. I've worked on hot dogs for 10 years, and I wasn't prepared for what I've just seen. Your life is about to change. So what can you do? Buy as many hot dogs as you can. Buy stock in hot dog companies. It's a good idea. I am long hot dog. I like hot dogs. Hot dog market map. Good with the kids. Everyone loves a hot dog. Hot dog market map. It brings joys. It's all American. There's nothing better than a hot dog at a ball game.

1:02:08Except for Finn.ai. That's better than a hot dog. It's the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai. Andrew Fundraising Show's defense tech is still red hot. Pretty crazy. Katie Roof, one of the scoop athletes. Scoop. There it is. Scoop. There it is. She says, in case you missed it on Friday, we broke the news at Anderle's and Tox had double its valuation to around$60 billion in a new funding round. So if you were buying triple-layered SPVs in Anderle at 45, you might make it, assuming you didn't pay three levels of 10 % one-time fees.

1:02:46And assuming that the guy you bought them from didn't abscond. and is now in custody of the feds. That's a bad situation. The round is notable for more than just its price, while Anderil technically has both A and I in its name. It's not the AI-centric type of startup that typically gets all the investor attention in this current cycle. Very unslappable, right? You're not going to vibe code a drone. You're not going to vibe code a... Yeah, I don't know. I think when you think about who's going to unlock the potential of AI for the government, you think of Palantir, and or all. No, no. Yeah, no, I just mean in terms of like AI disruption.

1:03:24Like it's not something that you can vibe code a Fury drone. Like that takes a lot of hardware, a lot of testing. You got to blow a bunch of stuff up. You need a test range. You need government contracts. Yeah, I just don't. Yeah, I think all these, you know, defense-oriented businesses, even if they are building software, are quite a bit more insulated just because. of the trust factor. And if Anderle sells a product for one price and you have a small team coming together saying, you know, we're 10 people, we can build you the same thing for half the cost, there's not quite as much pricing pressure because the government wants reliability.

1:04:04They want to set something up and use it for a really long time. They don't want to really take risks, et cetera, et cetera. Defense techs on a tear, Shield AI, a drone business that can also tap the AI interest thanks to its autonomous software is in talks to raise a $12 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, and several other younger startups will likely raise money in the next few months. Paul Kwan, managing director at General Catalyst, said that part of the reason the firm is so optimistic about defense tech is because there are very few trillion dollar markets that are critical for global resilience, that are dominated by legacy vendors, and which are experiencing both tech and geopolitical transformation.

1:04:43Yeah, the number of companies that fall in that bucket is pretty small. General Catalyst has invested in Anderil as well as other defense-related businesses such as Saronic and Helsing, a European rival to Anderil. As the world unfortunately braces for more wars, increased government spending has led to high-priced contracts for defense tech. Kwan said that the U.S. Department is realizing that defense tech is critical for deterrence. Kwan said he has also seen a shift among entrepreneurs, believing that many of the most talented founders are choosing to build for the defense industrial base. And you can check out the rest of the story on the information.

1:05:20A lot of attention has been focused on Open Router. If you go on Open Router and look at the rankings, you can see that Chinese open source models are completely dominating. Yes. Shards, Minimax. I saw DHH talking about Kimmy K2 is now a daily driver for squashing bugs at 37 signals. Very interesting data point. Since a lot of this can be, I think the open router stuff can be a little hard to contextualize because there's some amount of volume that doesn't get captured in open router, obviously. It's the majority of the volume is not captured. You think so? Yeah, yeah. According to Zephyr, who's very on it, it's 1 % to 2 % globally.

1:06:04Do you think that's about right? Yeah, definitely. I mean, if you just compare, like, the, like, it's, if you look at the actual, like, token count, it's, like, in the billions for, like, over, you know, a week or something. Yeah. Where, you know. Yeah, you'll see Sundar. I remember Demis, over the summer, he was, like, we're doing, you know, quadrillion tokens every month or something. So, it's, like, the scale is completely different. Quad. And also, it's, like, no one is going to be using the big labs models on this because they would just hit the actual API. It's just easier. Right? Yeah. So, it's, like, if I'm going to be calling Anthropic, I'm probably just going to use the Anthropic API.

1:06:37I'm not going to go through OpenRouter. So you should expect it to be the open source models because one of the good things about OpenRouter is that it has all the different inference providers together. So there's a ton of companies that host the different open models. So it aggregates them all together. Yeah. And also, I mean, this doesn't account for token generation in consumer LLMs. And that's a huge thing. Like Google AI Overviews is, I think, the most used LLM product in the world, something like that. And that's technically generating tokens when you just hit Google search and it answers with an LLM query.

1:07:14That's token generation. And then there's stuff that's happening in Gemini app, Claude app directly, not even coding. Like no one's using Open Router within their consumer app, unless it's like some third party thing. But most of them are going. Anyway, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Let's continue with the timeline. Jacob Rintamaki has a post here. He says, unfortunately, it is not seen as cool to say, but the beatings will continue until more people internalize this. He's talking about Rune saying, I don't think this is really true, but it's hard to fight open source copium because people act like you shot a dog or something.

1:07:52Because Anton, two years ago, back in December 21st of 2023, said AGI is more likely to come out of someone's basement, some mega merge Hermes 4000 than a giant data center. And I think everyone agrees with this now, but it was very unpopular to say at the time. I remember John Ludig had a post about open source AI not being like on the critical path to AGI because of the scaling laws and a whole bunch of other economic factors. He sort of predicted that meta would stop being so focused on open source because it just doesn't make sense to spend a trillion dollars or a hundred billion dollars on infrastructure that then you capture so little of the value of.

1:08:40And I think that's why Anthropic has not been very pushing hard on open source. And even the other super intelligence initiatives, not many of them have been open source. the open source question has been a very different business model. But it is very important in terms of a model commoditization and terminal economic equilibriums in the AI lab battle. Orrin Hoffman is sharing that Ozempic is bad for business. A few months ago, someone told me they had heard a rumor that a banker hedge fund had banned its traders from taking Ozempic, Wigovia, and other GLP-1 weight loss drugs. The theory, as I understood it, was something like Traders need to make quick decisions based on gut instinct, and GLP-1s mess with your gut instincts.

1:09:24You're not hungry for snacks. You're not hungry for profits. You lose your edge. It is funny. Warren says GLP is getting banned by hedge funds, maybe by sales teams too. Yeah. Killing your grind set. It is funny. Isn't GLP glucagon-like peptide? Isn't that a peptide that's secreted by the gut? And so it's like your gut instinct is actually tied to your gut. Maybe it's just nominative determinism, but it is funny that those things wound up being more - Your gut instinct for some people is saying, put on mass. Scale. It's time to scale. Time to bulk. Bulking seasons here. Get off the GLP-1s and start levering up, going risk on.

1:10:02Dr. Cameron Maximus says, guess what increases drive testosterone? A microdose of terzepatide to cut down on physical appetite. A microdose of testosterone to amplify psychological appetite. So the solution is we're going to ban GLP-1s only if you're taking them solo. You've got to be taking a full stack. Did you see Bone GBT say, turns out you really do got to be hungry for it. It's fantastic. Fantastic. As is Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small and medium-sized businesses. NTBPN. 12 p.m. Claude, Sonnet 4.6, has improved on benchmarks across the board.

1:10:46We touched on this yesterday, but particularly outstanding in office tasks and agentic financial analysis. You can see this being baked into Claude for Excel and a lot of knowledge work. Lucas Beyer over at MSL, formerly OpenAI, says, I usually look at which benches the small model surpasses to its previous big brother. If it's only a few, I think that gives a hint as to what they focus on. Here, it is only agentic financial analysis and office tasks. It's just a heuristic, of course, but interesting nonetheless. And I wonder if that's, I wonder if, Tyler, how important is speed between Sonnet and Opus?

1:11:33Is Sonnet consistently faster or just cheaper? Yeah, I think it's usually faster. It's just a smaller model. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's Haiku, right, which is the smallest one. Because I'm wondering if in the coding domain, there's a little bit more tolerance for, OK, I've delegated this task. It's going to go cook. And then I'll come back and review the code, review the pull request. Whereas in finance. This was the whole thing about Codex, right? Because Codex was much slower for a while before Cerebra. So people would be like, oh, Codex is so bad compared to Cloud Code. Even though a lot of people internally at OpenAI were saying, oh, no, actually, Codex is way better.

1:12:07It's just because they're used to having the internal model that's run on the better hardware. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think speed is actually, it plays a very large role. So even if you have a smaller model, it's much faster. Yeah. Even if it's a little bit worse, I think there's still a lot of, like, if you're iterating a lot, that can actually be much more efficient. Yeah, yeah. I'm just thinking, like, in terms of, like, an Excel copilot for someone who's spending their time in Excel, not in GitHub, will speed be a killer feature for them if they're currently, like, yeah, I've tried it, but it's really slow.

1:12:39It actually slows me down because it takes 20 minutes to respond. It gets it 80 % of the way there, but I can do 90 % in 15 minutes. So I'm not using that model yet. I'm not excited about that. Maybe this is something that speeds things up. But of course, there's ways to just inference the model faster, even the big guys. Yeah, I mean, I think when a lot of the agentic browsers first came out, one of the benchmarks I would use is editing a... Spreadsheet? Yeah, sheets. And it was so slow that it was like, It was working, but it's just so unbearably slow. There's literally no point of using it.

1:13:10So I think, yeah, speed is massive. What about a hair bench? Hair bench? What's hair bench? Gabe says, Jordy needs to bring Tyler with him when he gets his haircut. Haircut? Haircut alert? Gabe, I did send Tyler ass, and I sent him my barber's information. I think they're working on it. Haircut alert. We've got to get a card up. Jordy doesn't want to do it, but I think we should put up a card for Jordy's new haircut. We don't like secret haircuts. If you are heading to the New York Stock Exchange, you need a fresh haircut, and we are partnered with the New York Stock Exchange. Do you want to change the world?

1:13:47Get a haircut and then go raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Great call, John. Dwayne says, what is going on at Anthropic? They're going after people with multiple paid max accounts. You're paying full price multiple times, and they're treating you like a criminal. Not sure what Dario is trying to speedrun here. And on Reddit, on Claude Code, it says, Claude just banned having multiple Macs accounts since around a few hours ago. Signing into another account has stopped working. I think some people do need to have their multiple Macs accounts banned. They're just, they're not building anything useful.

1:14:21They're wasting tokens. And they're just creating endless setups and tool chains and MD files. And unless you're actually shipping something that's going to drive business value and be used by more than one person, you only get one account. I'm with Claude on this. Stop wasting tokens on your silly thing. I was reflecting on like, I was texting you this last night, like, am I dumb and out of ideas or is all the software I want just illegal? Because I was like, all the things that I want are things that could exist, but they can't exist for business reasons. Yeah, like I want an Apple TV app. give the example.

1:15:02So the example was - I want an Apple TV app that has Netflix installed. It's like, why doesn't Netflix integrate with Apple TV? Because Netflix doesn't want to get aggregated. They're an aggregator. They want you to open that app on the Apple TV. So the Apple TV app doesn't have Netflix content, even though you have the Netflix app installed on Apple TV, the device. And I was saying like, I subscribe to all these different news sources. I want like an Apple News that aggregates them all, Google Reader that aggregates them all. I pay, but I'm still logged out of a million things. Like I'm in some social app and then it opens in a Safari web browser.

1:15:36I'm not logged in. There's a paywall. It's annoying to log back in. I want something that just like aggregates all my news sources and jumps the paywall. Well, that's not the coding issue. That's like a business issue. They want you to log in for a reason and they have a decision to that. So I don't know. I think we're still early in the broad distribution of people building custom software and experimenting with things. But at the same time, we've had great writing models for a long time. And anyone we know, everyone could write their own books. Everyone could write a better ending to the end of Game of Thrones and send it to you as a text file right now with the current models.

1:16:16And I haven't read anything that I've been like, oh, yeah, this is really good. I got to read this AI-generated book. So I don't know. There's like some weird bottleneck there that is like, it's not a bear case for AI. Look what Gabe is offering. Yeah. Sounds very illegal. Yeah. This is popcorn TV. It's called U-Torrent. I know. I know. I know. Xbox Media Center. Trying to play by the rules. Xbox Media Center. But that's the thing is that, yes, that streaming site, like, yes, you can vibe code that. But like that can't actually get to scale. It can't actually have an impact in the economy because it's breaking the rules.

1:16:50And there's a lot of AI stuff that feels magical. And you see this with C-Dance from ByteDance, where it's in the journal today. TikTok's Chinese parent develops movie app. I love that headline. And on Twitter, it's all, C-Dance just destroyed VO3 and Sora 2. But in the journal, it's TikTok's Chinese parent develops movie app. And there's something interesting here. So Singapore is where it's based. Singapore. The company behind TikTok has developed an artificial intelligence model that can turn a single text prompt into a high-quality video with a storyline, scene changes, and distinctive characters.

1:17:29The new AI video creation model from Beijing-based ByteDance is generating buzz in China and backlash in Hollywood over copyright issues. It shows how ByteDance, known for creating TikTok, is emerging as a rival to OpenAI and Alphabet's Google in the race to build tools for making AI movies and other video entertainment. China's visual models have been very, very competitive, said Steve Long, a video game developer in Helsinki who participated in beta testing programs. ByteDance recently ceded control of the US version of TikTok to an investor group. Global users of another ByteDance app - Ben Thompson was going off on the TikTok.

1:18:05On Cheeky Pint. You get a couple of Cheeky Pints in that guy, he's going to let loose. He let loose? He's saying we got the worst - You know, he put on the best performance. The worst possible outcome with TikTok where they still control the algorithm and we violated property rights. Shots fired. Of course, still in motion. Yes. But for now, it doesn't seem like it's been fully solved. But this was the interesting paragraph that I wanted to highlight in this journal article. Global users of another ByteDance app, CapCut, a popular video creation and editing app, will soon have access to CDance 2.

1:18:42It's latest AI model for creating videos the company said the model is already available to users on CapCut's Chinese version And so I mean you've seen on Instagram reels like there are a ton of CapCut editors out there I get served, you know how to edit in CapCut and I don't even really use the app, but it's clearly incredibly powerful There's a whole bunch of cool features in CapCut that would basically be after effects plugins And would probably take a long time to configure but just come out of the box And it's just a couple clicks so you don't have to know any code or install anything it's just there and now you're going to be able to generate sea dance videos we'll see how long you can still generate larry david and marvel characters that stuff will probably get pulled back on eventually um at least in the cap cut american version but uh you're going to see a lot more a lot more slop in the trough what do you think handle says just had to drop in and say thanks for the gift suggestion i got my girl mongo db for malentine's day and she loved to hear That's so great to hear.

1:19:39I'm so glad. It really is the perfect Valentine's Day gift, MongoDB. Dean Ball is great. Before we do this, let me tell you about phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. Dean Ball says, if the Department of War and Anthropic can't agree on terms of business, then they shouldn't do business together. I have no problem with that. But a mere contract cancellation is not what is being threatened by the government. Instead, it is something broader. designation of anthropic as a supply chain risk. This is normally applied to foreign adversary technology like Huawei.

1:20:11In practice, this would require all Department of Work contractors to ensure there's no use of anthropic models involved in the production of anything they offer to DOW, every startup, and every Fortune 500 company alike. This designation seems quite escalatory, carrying numerous unintended consequences and doing potential significant damage to U.S. interest in the long run. I hope the two organizations can work out a mutually agreeable deal. If they can, I hope they agree to peaceably part ways. But this really needn't be a holy war. Anthropic is in Google in 2018. They've always cared about national security use of AI.

1:20:48They were the most enthusiastic AI lab to offer their products to the national security apparatus. If Anthropic run by Democrats whose political messaging is Anthropic run by Democrats whose political messaging sometimes drives me crazy, sure, but that doesn't mean it's wise to try to destroy their business. This admin believes AI is the defining technology competition of our time. I don't see how tearing down one of the most advanced and innovative AI startups in America helps America win that competition. It seems like it would straightforwardly do the opposite. The supply chain risk designation is not a necessary move.

1:21:19Cheaper options are on the table. If no deal is possible, cancel a contract and leverage America's robustly competitive AI market to give business to one or more of Anthropix's several fierce competitors. And there was also reporting this morning that Anthropic had approached 1789 Capital and Don Jr., and they turned him down. Turn him down. Turn him down. They turned down from 1789, they said, not interested. I think I know a little bit about why there might be so much pushback against Anthropic. And I mean, you saw that the Sonnet 4.5, people are really excited about this model, but but it completely fell flat on its face when asked with a basic question, why did Clavicular get frame-mogged?

1:22:07And Sonnet 4.5 responded, I'm not familiar with Clavicular as a specified person or entity or what frame-mogged means in this context. Could you provide some more context? So it's just like when you see something like that happen, it calls into question everything about a company. It's just like, how could you let this happen with so little worldly knowledge as to not understand the significance of curriculars framebogging? Anyway, overheard in SF, a VC was giving advice. OpenAI and Anthropic are like Godzilla. You need to find an alleyway to hide in. What a funny thing to say. This is Ben Hilack.

1:22:50He says, don't take advice from junior VCs. there's something good there I mean the models if you're in the path of models improving you will get stomped like Godzilla but there's still plenty of opportunities all over the ecosystem especially if you're not doing something that's in software I'd be like there's plenty of startups that's just like don't touch software just don't do anything with code don't do anything with technology Don't do anything with a website. Don't do anything with a website. If you need a website to do business. I'm short. I'm passing. You're cooked. It's over. It's over.

1:23:30It's over. It was fun. No, but clearly, I mean, there's plenty of like brands and products and technology and all sorts of things to build. Well, we are working on an alleyway project. Oh, yeah? With Riley Walls. Oh, okay. Yeah. We're not going to share anything else on this. Are we doing that? I'm very excited. Yeah, we are cooking there. So more to come. Well, there are people who are doing well in spite of Godzilla stomping around America. And one of them is Eleven Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Imagine human, reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs.

1:24:10And like that Godzilla sound effect. That's good. For when the labs are on a tear, that's what's got it. Let's pull up this video from Buco Capital. What is this video? $2 trillion in CapEx for this. This is what if Donald Trump was from other countries? He was born in other countries. The fidelity here is really, really high. Demetri Trump. This stuff is probably going mega viral on TikTok right now. It's going mega viral. So Bucco says$2 trillion in CapEx for this, by the way, kind of like saying it's silly, But I look at this and think. It's worth every penny. Completely worth it. Completely worth it.

1:24:52Even if the$2 trillion just created this one video. Yeah. Really good. We're entering the post-slop era. Back to TasteGate. Young Macro is chiming in on TasteGate. Is Taste valuable? I don't know. I can't tell. But maybe it is. Some people say it is. I'm not really going to weigh in. But Young Macro is weighing in. And he says, many will not want to hear this, but taste is just G, intelligence, with sufficiently varied training data. Steve Jobs had taste because he was like plus three standard deviation IQ and trained on calligraphy class and being homeless, smoking weed in India or whatever. Meanwhile, his IQ matched now microdoses amphetamines to narrow the training set and ends up drone maxing at Citadel Securities with a great transcript.

1:25:42sorry chud the flunker will get the cake this time there is something interesting there just the idea of like varied wild life experiences being valuable to to to generate you know it's not exactly out of distribution training data but just a life well lived will translate into innovation and taste or just like new ideas as opposed to being tracked and funneled into citadel securities where it also works. I haven't really waded into the taste debate at all just because it's not, everyone's trying to define it in their own way. It's something that in some ways you people like to say, oh, you can't buy it.

1:26:26You can't buy it in the fullness of a company because I think like taste comes from the founder or the founders and it just kind of like, you know, percolates through the organization indefinitely. Like there's companies that have a billion dollars to spend on marketing that just functionally can never be good at marketing because the founder likes to be heavily involved in marketing and they don't have great marketing taste or instinct or whatever this thing is. But it just feels like everyone's, I don't know. I'm for taste. I'm against taste. I have like, you know. Fun fact. If you hold your nose, you can't taste as well.

1:27:07So if you're trying to be tasteful, don't hold your nose. Well, COVID wiped out a lot of people's. Oh, yeah. They lost their smell. Yeah. I had some good friends. Some good friends. Really? They got COVID in their household recently fully wiped out. So that household had zero taste. Zero taste. They traded all their cars. They traded all their cars for Lamborghini Urus in the span of a week. I was like, what's going on, guys? That's extremely tasteful. I don't know what you're saying. What's going on, guys? That's amazing. Well, speaking of taste, let me tell you about Figma, the most tasteful sponsor.

1:27:43Ship the best version, not the first one, with Figma. Introducing Claude Code to Figma. Explore more options. Push ideas further. Moving on. What is self-evidently true? AGM says, all this progress in Gen.AI, not a single serious piece of culture other than slop shorts. I would take that back. I would say granny hit my granny got hit with a bazooka is a serious piece of culture, but that's not AI I know okay I'm just saying I think what he's saying is that there's all this progress in generative AI and no one has like One-shotted like make something amazing and it just does it like there's always this like Herculean effort and inspiration Like we always go back to Harry Potter Harry Potter Balenciaga even that Trump video is like Like, it's only funny because of this context.

1:28:31And, like, it's not purely just, like, oh, okay, the Gen.AI did it. And it's certainly not a serious piece of culture. It is a slop short. That's fair. All this 10x vibe coding and not a single new compelling consumer app. Techies do this all the time. Confusing. Wait, wait, wait. Tyler's pushing back on that. I mean, he didn't try Cloud with Ads. Oh, yes, that's true. That's true. Cloud with Ads was definitely a compelling consumer app while it lasted. RIP. Techies do this all the time, confusing being Gutenberg with being Luther, the maker of the technology of the culture for the culture itself.

1:29:05Hephaestus forges Achilles' armor in the Iliad, but he's not the hero and barely appears otherwise compared to other gods. Techno-capitalism might make Hephaestus the rich guy on Olympus, but Homer is going to write him out of the script anyhow. Brutal. Mogged. History mogged. Jeremy Giffon says, humans don't belong behind desks. It is not our end state to be factory workers who replaced hammers with keyboards. Everything that can be automated should be automated. Hammers were meant to hit your face. Hammers were meant for bone smashing. John Arnold said, everyone deep in tech or finance is in full freakout mode over the pace of AI progress over the past two months.

1:29:49Own index funds and you barely notice, but specific sectors are exploding. digital and power infrastructure, while anything related to a human behind a desk is plummeting. Interesting. Don't strike your face with a hammer. Strike your crowd with CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is available. Before that, we've got to talk about Japan's largest toilet maker. Toilet maker. According to a UK-based activist investor, is an undervalued and overlooked AI play. Palacer Capital sent a letter to the board of Toto last week to make more of its advanced ceramics segment, saying it holds a crucial position in the semiconductor supply chain.

1:30:40The segment generates 40 % of Toto's operating profit. Sounds like an insane headline, but we should dig in. No, it actually maybe sort of makes sense. if you need ceramics in the semiconductor supply chain. I wonder if the funniest outcome here is, you know how like we can't get PS6s anymore. Playstations are out of stock. Like, will you be able to buy a toilet in the future? Like now, like you will need to sacrifice your new toilet in favor of advancing the techno capital machine. Ryan, Ryan, uh, artificial intelligence. DeHaney is responding to Bucco saying, what stage of the cycle is this?

1:31:14And says, launch the nukes, write it all down to zero. Who cares anymore? because there's a Business Insider article called, after three years of forcing myself to love venture capital, I quit and became a silent disco DJ in Bali. Let's go. So that's where we're at. That's where we're at. Well, we are at the point in the show where we will bring in our first guest, Blake Dodge from Pirate Wires. You can go and subscribe at PirateWires.com. Blake, welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's happening? I am great. How are you guys? We're fantastic. uh what has been keeping you well first introduce yourself since it's the first time on the show uh i'd love a little bit of your background and then some of what you've been focusing on at pirate wires recently yeah totally so um i basically started my career as a journalist at business insider okay um i covered health care and then technology i was doing like big scary investigations with a lot of documents and you know secret sources and stuff um uh and i got a little bit not burned out maybe a little bit burned i wanted to tell more optimistic stories about what was going on in tech yeah um and so that's why i joined pirate wires about a year ago um where i've done a lot of that work kind of like the white pill case for why you should believe in someone.

1:32:41But then we also do, we do a lot of work that I think centers original thought and maybe the kind of in the spirit of the contrarian. We'll look at an issue, what everyone else is saying, and then kind of tell people, actually, but actually, this is what you should think. Truth. Yeah. And so lately, we've been doing a lot of that with the proposed wealth tax in California. We've kind of flooded the zone there and been duking it out, actually, with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. So I kind of feel like I'm back at BI all of a sudden. Exactly. Well, yeah, what has been the response?

1:33:25I mean, you've interviewed a ton of billionaires in California. It feels like the base case is just like everyone leaves. Like maybe they're not all loud about it, but you know, Mark Zuckerberg is not out there, but like he did buy a place in Miami and it seems like he might be a Miami resident soon. Yeah. There's, there's kind of two waves. There's people that were like, I'm going to get out in 2025. So I never have to pay the tax. And then there's a second wave, which I think is the Mark Zuckerbergs that are like, I like, if this goes through, it'll get fought. Yeah. I might not have to pay it, but then I'm still kind of like hedging, potentially hedging and getting out.

1:34:01And so I think there's, again, this is we're kind of in the midst of the second wave of people that are like, I might have to pay it once, but I'm certainly not going to pay it every year for the rest of my life. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, Mike Solana published a piece where he interviewed more than 20 billionaires in the state of California, which is like, wow, might make him the most well-sourced tech journalist ever. But they literally all said that they were leaving or planned to leave. So that's really striking. That's like a meaningful percentage of the total billionaires in California.

1:34:38And what's really interesting is they're not. They may be leaving because they don't want to pay the tax, but actually the tax is retroactive. so many of them many of the folks who are leaving probably will still have to pay it if it goes through but they're leaving anyway because of the kind of overarching political landscape of california like they're they're just kind of over it and they find the kind of lefty politics to be too risky, not only to build wealth, but to build companies. There's language in the proposed ballot measure that has really thrown people through a loop where, so the government has this challenge of tallying people's net worth, you know, which is not easy.

1:35:34When it comes to founders of private companies, they're using kind of a shortcut where founders will be presumed to be owners of anything they control. You guys have probably seen the scary math with this on your timelines. But basically, since founders often have their shares often come with outsized voting rights, what this means is you could be presumed to be an owner of 10 times the value of your actual economic position. And that's all subject to a rebuttal process and stuff. It's not supposedly meant to be the final word. But I think founders hear that and it's like, okay, like this is a significant risk to the business and to my longevity in the state.

1:36:29How are you thinking about the probability that this actually passes? It feels like something that would be broadly popular amongst a direct, in a direct democracy scenario. I saw some protests that did not seem very widely attended. And so it doesn't, it seems like it's hard to marshal 50 million people or 10 million people that are against this, because it's not a tax that affects everyone. Yeah, yeah. The pro-billionaire protest for some reason was not well attended did um in san francisco i have no idea certainly not by billionaires yeah it's like gary tan with like one sign did gary go i don't think he went i actually don't think he went um yeah so the politics on the other side are a bit better um because the headline of this whole thing is let's tax billionaires five percent of their net worth one time for this like, you know, emergency of paying for health care for poor people.

1:37:39And so for Medicaid. Yeah. And so I think that does have a certain political appeal if it does make it on the ballot. We're sort of hearing like mixed reviews on its chances. um mike did some reporting that went out just today actually that suggests their signature gathering maybe a little bit behind um and then you have a ton of opposition and state like gavin newsom hates this thing he's been meeting with dave reagan the head of the union who sponsored the ballot measure to try and get him to stop um there's also like teachers unions and kind of some surprising adversaries well yeah there's other unions that are like hey you're gonna you're you're trying to you're you're trying to get this tax for purely your own benefit like we you got to cut us in so it's like the unions even if they might have been in favor of it if they were going to get a piece of it there's there's quite a number of groups that are just saying like i don't want this to happen if i'm not getting right is that is that like actually that is kind Kind of how it works.

1:38:47Yeah. Because the unions and different special interests use the ballot proposition process to raise money, like to get more funding streams. And Mike learned specifically that the teachers union is feeling kind of left out in this particular scenario.

1:39:09How has Reagan reacted to everyone leaving? How are they, are they processing this? Because, because, you know, play this out. Yeah. You have a number in mind. You're like, I'm getting 5 % of 60 people's wealth. And that's probably like a couple billion dollars. And then there's only, and then 20 leave. And you're like, okay, now I'm getting like 3 billion. And then another 20 leave. And you're like, now I'm getting 1 billion. Yeah. There's also an insane power law. Yeah. Right. Oh yeah. Sure. So the biggest ones leave. The people that stay might be the poorest billionaires. The guy who's at 1.2 is He's like, I guess I'm good for my 20 mil.

1:39:47You can take it. Yeah. I mean, so far, the folks behind the ballot measure have not acknowledged that people are actually, in fact, leaving. They continue to call wealth flight largely a myth, which is crazy. We'll be talking to these people on Twitter. We literally spoke to 20 of them. They literally are leaving the state. It's not a myth. but they point to research mainly looking at the movement of millionaires and just generally wealthy people after taxes are increased. And it's true that in those cases there's not a lot of mobility, but I think they have made the mistake that assuming millionaires are the same.

1:40:35Yeah, is part of the strategy that this is the best possible branding for a tax like this And this type of like campaign focused on billionaires one time is how you get something like this passed. Then once it's passed, you'll have the ability to kind of like reduce reduce the set of requirements to qualify for it. And you can eventually get down and be eating off of the plate of all Californians, middle class, et cetera. Yeah, I'm actually I'm staring at a quote that I have here in my last story. There's a couple of academics whose work like heavily influenced this wealth tax and pretty much all wealth taxes globally.

1:41:20One of those men is advocating for a 2 % globally coordinated billionaire tax where all of the countries kind of get together and agree they're going to do this. Sort of like a one world government. I literally in this quote have a screenshot of Michael Gibson's summary of the Teal Antichrist lectures. So, yeah, he says it's clearly far from enough. But also what history shows is that what's most difficult is to move from zero to something positive. And once you have something positive, even if it's two percent, then it opens up a realm of possibilities. And so they say it's one time, they say it's an emergency, but clearly.

1:42:10What's the takeaway from the Netherlands? They passed this 36 % unrealized capital gains tax. It excludes, I think, real estate and startup equity. But what's the thought process there? It seems super bearish for the country as a whole. but uh what any any learnings i haven't looked at that one specifically i know that internationally these wealth taxes do have a pretty um dismal outlook uh the cycle is kind of it's very american to be like ah we can make it work we're built everywhere else but it'll work here. Yeah. And it's funny too, they're still saying wealth fight is a myth, but part of why these other wealth taxes tend to go poorly is because the wealth leaves.

1:43:04Can you give us a white pill? Something that I don't think from a comps perspective, don't tax me is going to be effective for the billionaire class, but what should they be focused on in a world where a lot of people are seeing billions of dollars in wealth creation from what they see as slop, what they see as scams, what they see as a variety of water usage, energy price, blah, blah, blah. What are the white pills that you think tech has delivered or is in the process of delivering over the past few years and into the future? yeah i mean that's the question of the hour because inequality isn't you know continues to get worse and kind of fuels the politics behind these things um i'm kind of a gundo stan like i i believe in this patriotic vision for tech yeah and this idea of keeping regular people in mind and building businesses that last and create value and don't just kind of addict people to things that they shouldn't be doing or shouldn't be spending their money on.

1:44:22Um, and I think, you know, who knows what billionaires could do? Like, there's a lot of ideas out there. Mike Solana actually just wrote a Christmas wish list for billionaires with like 20 of these really beautiful white pill ideas. Um, one of the easiest things is, you know, building like beautiful public works, libraries, statues, like things that people can see with their own eyes and feel gratitude about. Whereas right now, it's like, it's not that compelling to be like, don't hate me. I built this short format instead of like the public library. It has the Rockefeller name on it or something.

1:45:02Like there's a lot of examples as you walk through New York City where you see a beautiful building and you're like oh yeah and that's free to the public now uh I I'm a big fan of like the Hearst Castle like William Randolph Hearst like just built this castle for his entire life spent all his money died before it was even done and then it just becomes like public good. Or even in California the uh like really ramping up something like an adopt a highway program like driving around LA the roads are just so so so bad yeah but the tangible yeah the tangible thing that you can see is is very very it's very impactful as opposed to like the the the anonymous donation that just kind of works its way through the economy might be more impactful but certainly less grounded in reality anyway where can people find you uh sign up for pirate wires follow you on x where else Yeah, yeah.

1:45:56I'm on next. I'm at DodgeBlake, PirateWires.com. We're covering all this stuff every week. We've really flooded the zone. And yeah, and I feel like, too, we're pro-tech in the sense of not being anti. But we also tend to ground things in a set of values, which I think is a little, well, I love it, personally. I'm glad. That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. And we will talk to you soon. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

1:46:42And with that, we will kick off the Lambda lightning round because we have Freddy DeVar from Substack. He's an independent writer. We're bringing Freddie in to the TVP on Ultradome from the Restream Media Room. Freddie, how are you doing? Pretty good, although, you know, from Substack still never sounds as cool as like the Wall Street Journal or whatever. Whatever anybody says about like independent media, it's just never going to catch up, but that's okay. Yeah, I don't know. From social media. Do you think Substack should do a bundle? Do you think Substack should do a bundle? This is a big debate.

1:47:16the thing is is like it's like the same question about like um why can't i just pay a dollar for the new york times article i want because the reason why is like the finances just don't work out like if i would love to be able to do that from a standpoint of like getting people to read my stuff but my financial life would collapse like like it's it's getting that that regular income in that sort of makes this possible yeah i think i think my view on it is i think the uh like a bundle that is just a, is systematized via a platform is going to struggle. But a bundle that a, where you get four or five writers that just basically say, we're going to build a media company together that can work because there's just so many other small things you need to do around compensation and what's fair and who's doing what and all these different things that I think are, when you have a bunch of personalities coming together, it's hard to just have it be entirely in code.

1:48:15Anyway, let's move on. The problem is that eventually if you bundle enough people, you just have a newspaper. And I probably wouldn't get into the newspaper business in the 21st century. I love newspapers, though. Oh, I love them, but I'm not investing in one. No, no. I think it's the time. The days are numbered. I might be the last person subscribing. Anyway, give us a little bit of your background since the first time on the show. How did you get to Substack? And then I want to talk about your wager and the future of AI, the impact on the economy, all of that. Yeah. So I mean, I'm a writer. I was an academic.

1:48:54I was in academia for years. I used to work for the City University of New York. But now, frankly, I find not having a boss or a schedule or ever having to get up on any particular day to be very attractive. And now I just write books and I write my sub stack. and, you know, it's enabled me to buy a house. And, you know, so it's, you know, it's a pretty good living. That's great. Living the dream. So tell me about your wager. How did this happen? What is, how did you come to define the actual bet? And what's at stake? Yeah, so I'm frustrated by the AI conversation. I think that it is, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the concept of a Mott and Bailey argument.

1:49:38Yes. Mott and Bailey. Yeah, so Matt Bailey is – yeah, for those at home, it's just like you are – you make a very sort of extravagant argument and when challenged, you retreat to a simpler and easier to defend argument. So you might say the Christian God is real and built the universe and he rules over everything. And then when you're challenged, you say, oh, well, God's just a feeling and God's in the wind and whatever, right? That's like a Matt and Bailey. I just think that that's all over AI where the CEO of Google is saying that this is bigger than fire and electricity and people are saying it's going to end death, et cetera.

1:50:15But then when challenged, it's like, hey, these LLMs, they might make going through legal documents a much more efficient process. There's this constant sort of back and forth. As far as the wager goes, the people in the AI world kind of come from this sort of rationalist, Silicon Valley sort of culture. And they say you should be very sort of objective and specific in your predictions and you should put money on them. And so Scott Alexander is a guy I've known for a long time, the blogger of Slate Star Codex and now of Astral Codex 10. He is a AI enthusiast. He was a signatory on the AI 2027 document.

1:50:57So I just – I challenged Scott and said I believe that three years from now we'll be in a more or less normal economy. And that was chosen because AI 2027, this is like going to 2029. So I felt like it was giving him enough sort of wiggle room. And I just defined a bunch of economic indicators and said that if any one of these indicators are violated, he'll win the bet and I'll lose. And the reason to do that is just I'm looking for someone to put their money where their mouth is about like, is this actually going to cause a white-collar apocalypse and all these economic sort of things? And I mean, he said no and would prefer to do a 10-year version.

1:51:37So we're kind of looking at that right now. OK. So I have some of these. Unemployment must stay under 18%. Right. What are we at now, 4 % or 5 %? That feels like a huge. But this is the point. Yes. This is the Ma and Bailey, right? Dario Amode, the CEO of Anthropic, last week in an interview with The New York Times said that within the next couple of years, 50 % of all jobs are going to be destroyed. He said 50 % of all jobs? I thought it was early stage white collar labor. No, no, no, no, no. Look it up. He said 50 % of all the jobs in the economy are going to be eliminated, right? And this is the thing that bothers me.

1:52:17This is why I made the bet. Yeah, because I actually ran the numbers on the new argument, the Bailey, which is entry-level white-collar work. I mean, the U.S. economy is only 60 % white-collar. Early stage is a couple percent of that. And so you're at a percentage over percentage. And quickly, if you lose 50 % of that, the unemployment rate goes from 5 % to 8%, 9%. Like that statement, that new statement can be true, but it can simultaneously be not that disastrous. Right. So the CEO, but the head of AI science at Microsoft just made a very similar sort of pronouncement. Sure. And this is what I find just endlessly frustrating about this conversation is it cannot simultaneously be true that we are imminently facing a replacement of an immense number of jobs in the economy thanks to AI.

1:53:11But also 18 % is like an extravagant figure for me to set for this bet, right? If you really believe these things. And so I'm just never sure how seriously these AI people take it in part because the CEO of Anthropic and the head of AI at Microsoft and almost everyone else who gets quoted in this domain has a direct financial incentive to exaggerate the impact of AI. Yeah. I mean, Scott Alexander did take the bet, though. So he's putting his money where his mouth is and is certainly on the other side of this, correct? Well, we are looking at the conditions. He wants to do 10 years instead of three.

1:53:55Oh, interesting. And so it's actually turned into a kind of an interesting econometric debate, right? So people are saying, where did you get 18 % unemployment for? And there's something like 40 conditions I listed. Yeah, yeah, there's a ton here. And I said that we had 15 % unemployment five and a half years ago because of COVID. And what I'm trying to do is to set up the bet in such a way that a non-AI source is not going to screw me. Oh, sure. In the Great Depression, which obviously was not AI-driven, we had 28 % unemployment at some point. And it's actually led to a kind of interesting debate about how do you define a normal economy without letting the natural swings that are common to a capitalist economy catch you?

1:54:43I was listening to a conversation about AI apocalypses. And the person that was being interviewed was like, well, my P-doom from AI is extremely low. But I think the chance of nuclear war is like 5%. And so it's like they had a high P doom, but not because of AI, which is like a very hard thing to wrestle with. And that's where you're getting at. Yeah.

1:55:07I've talked on the show a bunch about a bunch of these different groups using basically fear as a kind of motivator to kind of bend the world, right? So if you want people to adopt AI, you should tell them that it's going to create such insane changes in the economy that any company that doesn't adopt as much AI as possible today is going to be destroyed. Or if you are trying to get as many young people to adopt a product, you tell them, well, like, all jobs are going to be wiped out. or if you're pitching a bunch of, if you're pitching investors on Wall Street, you can say, well, you know, all these jobs are going to go away.

1:55:50So like, it's effectively... Like the incentive to use kind of like fear is very obvious in all of this. and I think it's now coming back to bite a lot of these people because the broader populace is saying, I don't want AI. I'm good. I don't need it. Even though they're using the products and they love them. Almost everyone can tell you an incredible story about AI in their personal life, even if it's as simple as, I made this cool illustration for my grandma for her birthday and she loved it. Right. Or I used it to learn about this thing. And so I think it's interesting is like using this like intense fear based marketing to justify to kind of catalyze adoption, you know, fun, you know, success with fundraising, et cetera.

1:56:44But then again, it's kind of coming back to bite in the sense that everyone's saying, well, no, I don't want a data center in my backyard. I don't I don't want my company to even be investing in this, et cetera. I mean speaking of fear, I mean you just mentioned nuclear war, right? And it's – I just think that you can believe as I do that AI is going to be a very meaningful technology. But the fact that people are more scared of a robot apocalypse than nuclear war. Look, right now, Russia has multiple Bore-class nuclear submarines off the coast of the east coast of America that have the capability of raining nuclear fire down, thermonuclear fire down all up and down the seaboard, right, the eastern seaboard.

1:57:29I mean like a single modern thermonuclear bomb detonated above Central Park would destroy 80-plus percent of the buildings in Manhattan and hit parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, et cetera, right? And again, this is the Maude and Bailey thing, right, which is like you might say, well, that's a very extreme scenario. But every day I am opening up my web browser and reading about, oh, AI is going to exterminate the human race or, you know, AI is going to put us into this utopia where no one is ever going to die again. And it's like part of what I'm trying to do is just claw out like a normal space in this, right, to just say there is a very obvious future where these tools are meaningful, eliminate some jobs, have a lot of cultural importance, but where we're not suddenly faced with a fundamentally different version of human life.

1:58:26So if it's not nuclear war and it's not fire and it's not electricity, it's also not the fax machine? Are we talking about mobile, cloud, the internet? Like how big is this thing? What does your world model look like for how AI progresses and diffuses through society? Sure. We have to understand those are different kinds of importance and different kinds of influence. So you've mentioned the internet and the mobile phone. Okay. OK, it obviously the Internet and specifically the smartphone, the iPhone have had massive cultural and social impacts on the United States. It would have shocked people in the mid 1990s to learn that we have about the same productivity growth and about the same GDP growth in this country now that we did back then.

1:59:17Right. Like many, many people were invested in this idea that this sort of this missing GDP growth, you know, we're at half of what we were in the mid 1960s. A lot of people thought, OK, the Internet's the thing that's going to restore us. The Internet is very meaningful and it's very influential. Right. And yet economically, it hasn't had the effects that are expected. And that's just like that's how history works. You know, that's just like there is a – you always have to bake in the percentage to the degree to which like there's regression to the mean, right? Like we always seem to find ourselves way back to this sort of mundane reality.

1:59:54And I look at things like when everybody got so depressed and disappointed after ChatGPT5 was released because they thought it was going to be AGI. And you had all of these lonely guys who were like, oh, this is just going to change life forever and now everything is going to change. It's like, no, things are going to change, but slowly and in a distributed fashion. And you have to keep planning for normal life. Counterpoint, maybe this time is different. Maybe this time is different, but absolutely. So show me. I mean, here's the beauty of all this. The beauty of all this is like if the real stuff happens, you're not going to have to convince me.

2:00:33Right? But if we really have AGI the way people think we are, no one's going to disagree because the effects are going to be so profound, there's going to be nothing to disagree about. Okay. How did you interpret this latest piece in the Financial Times from Eric Brian Falson? I can't pronounce his last name, but it says, While initial reports suggested a year of steady labor expansion in the United States, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 400 ,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 % growth rate in the fourth quarter.

2:01:12This decoupling, maintaining high output with significantly lower labor input, is the hallmark of productivity growth. His own updated analysis suggests a U.S. productivity increase of 2.7 % for 2025. This is nearly doubling from the sluggish 1.4 % annual average that characterized the past decade. It feels like we're seeing glimmers of something changing. Is that not a sign? I mean, we'll see, right? We have to actually like look at the numbers as they come down the pike. We also have to be aware that like there's a lot of built-in incentive for people to ascribe these changes to AI. So for example, cutting a lot of jobs is very unpopular and firms tend to be sensitive to that unpopularity, right?

2:02:01and saying, well, hey, AI came. We didn't make the decision. We just, we had to sort of do, like, that's a very sort of easy thing to do. No CEO would ever do that. That doesn't make any sense. To, like, what, to say that AI was the reason to do it? Yeah, right. We'll use anything as air cover. Yeah, and so I just, in general, I caution people to say, look, it's like I've said this before. You know, when I was in high school, a very distinguished scientist came to my science class and he was on like a the board on like the national science something some sort of board of the national science foundation he was a like a geneticist and he came and he said like that he envied and also felt bad for us because the the human genome project was going to so radically change human life that we were going to see things that he couldn't imagine but also the job of doctor wouldn't exist in 10 years and And I was in high school in like 1998.

2:02:57This probably happened. Studying medicine. Right, right. And you quit. Right, right. If you can actually – but this is an exercise that people can do at home, which is to go back – just to Google and look at the predictions about what people thought the Human Genome Project would do. Obviously, genetic research in general is very important. But there was a real belief among very intelligent and highly credentialed people that we were on the verge of something absolutely humanity changing. And life's more complicated than that. And again, like I just – I want AI boosters to do more showing and less predicting, right?

2:03:36Show me, right? Like show me the change instead of predicting the change. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This is really fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we have these kind of debates and conversations all the time. Specifically, there's a popular influencer on Instagram that every time a tech company does a bunch of layoffs and says, we did this because of AI, he takes that and makes this crazy story up around how AI is just immediately causing all this job loss. And I'm just looking at it as like, I know the company. They had a lot of bloat. they're getting some efficiency increase because of AI, but certainly it wasn't like the 2 ,000 people or whatever were sitting there being like, oh yeah, I just onboarded this new agent and now it does everything that I did, including going to all the meetings and sitting around all day.

2:04:33Yeah, there's an incentive on both sides. Both the AI boosters and the AI bears sort of have an incentive to be like, it's going too fast, it's going wrong. If you love AI, you want to say it's going really fast. If you don't like AI, you want to say it's going too fast. They're both sort of aligned, so you get this super cycle. Very fascinating. Well, have a great rest of your day, and thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Cheers. Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster. And our next guest is in the Restream waiting room.

2:05:06We have Sohail Prasad from Destiny. What's going on? Hey, how's it going? Great. Thank you for having me. Great to finally have you on the show. We met once. I think it was too long ago to remember what we were even talking about, but it's great to see you again. And a lot going on in your world. So why don't you kick off quick kind of background on yourself and then let's talk about Destiny. Sure. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. Founded Forge, a stock market for private companies back in 2014. I took that public in 2022, and then Schwab bought us last year. And in 2020, started a company called Destiny to bring public access to private tech.

2:05:51So along the way, I realized that there's such a big inequity. Most people in the world that use, you know, all the companies that are advertisers for you guys that are tech companies in our everyday lives, you have no way of owning that and wanted to create a way for anyone to own a piece of that future from the convenience of their brokerage account. Very, very cool. I've been following Destiny since you launched it. How long did it actually take to get it up and running? There's a number of groups now that have seen what you've done or maybe had a similar idea and are trying to bring products to market, but you've got a nice little head start.

2:06:29I guess the journey really did start with Forge. It was probably couldn't have pulled Destiny off without having done that first and had all of that understanding of the market. But yeah, what were kind of like, what was the logic around the decision for kind of the current structure and all the decisions that went into building the initial product? And then kind of where is it going from here? Sure. Thinking about what the dream product is, it kind of looks like QQQ for private tech. That's a dream. Anyone can buy it on any given day. Anyone can sell it. It has exposure to a broad base of private tech companies.

2:07:10Now, structurally, there are definitely challenges. An open-end ETF, you don't have enough liquidity in the underlying private companies that would support the creation of shares on a given basis or redemption on a daily basis. So we looked across the market at what kind of structures are possible and ultimately decided that a listed closed-end fund gets that intraday liquidity. It's listed on the NYSE. It's accessible, but you're still able to go invest in these companies. So it took us quite a while. We spent 19 months waiting for registration with the SEC the first time. We listed in March of 2024.

2:07:53And then we spent another 15 months waiting for the SEC to approve our shelf. Overnight success. I love it. Walk me through the mechanics of the closed-end fund. That means that you own shares in private companies. When I buy shares in Destiny and then I go to sell them, I'm not selling them to you. I'm selling them to Jordy. Is that right? Or someone else in the market? Exactly. So we trade intraday on the NYSC. market just closed, but anytime you want, you can go into your Schwab account, you can buy DXYZ, you can sell it, and it's all effectively secondary market trading. You're not creating or redeeming shares.

2:08:35Now, last year, we got approval from the SEC, got effectiveness to raise up to a billion dollars opportunistically. And that allows us to issue new shares, use the capital we raise from that, and then invest in new companies. Okay, so if there's a delta in NAV to market cap, it's because there's expectations about what you'll buy with those shares, maybe? Yeah, early on, there was a huge delta as people found out that this was even possible back in 2024. And I think that was just people realizing, oh, wow, I can actually do this. I don't have to go anywhere. I don't have to make a new account.

2:09:11I can buy this. And people got really excited. And now, you know, that premium has come down. just as we've gotten more mature. We had a decision to make when we brought it to the market, which is we wanted to have a portfolio of the top 100 private tech companies. Should we wait until we build a whole portfolio? Should we just list it with no companies in the portfolio? And we decided, hey, we'll build it effectively in public. So we've listed with 20-some-odd companies. Today we have 35, and we're kind of growing that over time. What were the conversations like originally with companies? Obviously, you're not always buying direct access or not getting direct exposure, but you're buying into SPVs or things like that.

2:09:58But what were the conversations like in the beginning? How are they going now? With Robinhood's new product, it sounds like at least some of it is actually being authorized by the company or they're effectively signing off on it or cool with it. I'm sure in other cases, companies are less excited about it, but give us an overview there. Yeah, but the secondary market, it's always, even for the last 15 years, been case-by-case basis. Some companies have really active secondary markets and they facilitate it. Others try to keep more of a tight control. From day one with Destiny, what we did is make sure we have flexibility to invest across the board.

2:10:41So we've invested in companies that are doing primary rounds. We recently invested in a company called Skilled AI. SoftBank led that round, and we were a part of that round. We partnered with Beast Industries and are working directly with them. And then at the same time, we can also opportunistically buy through secondary markets. So sometimes there are employees or early investors that need liquidity, and they come directly to us, and we can buy from them. What part of the part of why Destiny is exciting and other products are exciting is that is that everyone can get exposure to the asset class.

2:11:20The the the challenges that oftentimes by the time, you know, a company is amazing and it should be in the Destiny 100. It's already been marked up to 50, 60 billion or whatever the number is. Sometimes eight, you know, in the case of SpaceX, you know, hundreds of billions. What are your plans around, obviously, picking companies at the super early stage is hard. It's also very risky. Like part of the appeal of Destiny is that you're getting exposure to companies that we already know are like solid. They're well capitalized. They're hopefully leaders in their market. But how are you thinking about qualification for Destiny?

2:12:05And would you ever go earlier stage? Is that too risky? All that stuff. Yeah, that's one of the reasons we decided to call it the Destiny Tech 100 and target building out a portfolio of 100. You want to have enough range in there so you can have some of the early unicorns, you one, two, three billion dollar companies that have, in many cases, product market fit. They have growth, but they have, you know, more room to grow, as well as at the same time, some of the larger companies that are tens, now hundreds of billions of dollars and beyond. And so we will have over time a mix of those companies so that we can kind of get some of those earlier stage, albeit still late stage bets and others that are, you know, the blue chip mature companies.

2:12:53How do you think about the actual investing strategy? Are there any, like, I mean, you mentioned, like, post-unicorn, are there heuristics or firm rules that are in bylaws? Or are you just sort of like the fund manager and you're tasked by the shareholders to make the best investments that are according to your own intuition, skill, obviously your incredible background, all of that? But how do you think about the actual capital allocation question? Yeah. So right now, the portfolio is in progress. So you look, sometimes we might be overweight one company. For a while, SpaceX was greater than 40 % of our portfolio that's come down.

2:13:35And so we're kind of in this building phase. As we reach a more steady state, we want to be reflective of the late-stage venture-back ecosystem. So we actually publish rules and eligibility criteria on our website where companies had to raise recent rounds of financing, other kind of growth metrics and TAM that we look at. But generally speaking, we don't want it to be, you know, whatever we like on a given Monday. We want to say, hey, we want overall late stage venture backed exposure. And where we get to use our discretion is, hey, what's the right time to buy this? What's the right structure?

2:14:15What's the right pricing? Things like that, where if you just had an index, you would be a forced buyer at any price, at any structure. And so it gives us the ability to go and find unique opportunities in the primary, secondary markets and actually invest behind that. What's the process when a company in the portfolio IPOs? You have a number of portfolio companies that will be IPOing or should IPO this year. There's a lockup period. And then I imagine you guys plan to exit those positions and then recycle the capital. But how are you thinking about that? Yeah. So we want to be long-term capital partners for the company.

2:14:55And so generally, once a company goes public, we're not selling our shares immediately. We'll wait for a few years. Instacart was one of the companies in the portfolio that went public. And we waited for a few years before we slowly started divesting that position. And so that's how we're trying to balance the two things, which is our public shareholders are looking to us for exposure into private markets, but we also want to be great partners for companies and smooth their transition as they go public. That's amazing. Well, congrats on all the progress. So what was the talk about the most recent acquisition or investments?

2:15:34You guys are in Anthropic for$100 million breakdowns for new companies. Yeah. So we just announced a couple weeks ago that we closed a$100 million investment, secondary purchase in Anthropic. I mentioned skilled AI beast in disgrace

2:15:56he's like I can't let you get out of here without a gong I knew it that's right very cool well yeah we're excited to continue to follow Destiny and the overall market you guys have definitely led the charge second time leading the charge it felt like with Forge you guys were very ahead of the curve and ahead here as well So great to have you on. Thanks. More to come. Amazing. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. 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.

2:16:33And let me also tell you about Vibe.co, where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta. And before we bring in our next guest, we have some breaking news. It's Jensen's birthday. from NVIDIA. And guess what? He was born on the same exact day, same year as Michael Jordan. I thought... He really is the Michael Jordan of GPUs. Dylan Averscotto on our team is such an underrated poster. Got 8 ,000 likes just with two screenshots. One, Jensen's birthday. The other, Michael Jordan. Playmaker. February 17th, 1963.

2:17:10Happy birthday to Jensen. And thank you for all you do. I'm going to tell you about Shopify before we bring in our next guest. Shopify is a 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. And without further ado, let's bring in our next guest, Travis from Nash Optical. Travis, how are you doing? Hey, nice to meet you guys. Nice to meet you too. Thanks for hopping on. Big, big, big day. Huge day. What else happened on February 17th? We launched on February 17th as well. That's true. That's true.

2:17:44Add it to the list. How much did you raise? Break it down for us. Yeah, 50 million total across our seat in Series A. Nice. Congratulations. First time on the show, before we get into Mesh, introduce yourself. What got you into this? All that good stuff. Yeah, I'm Travis Brashears, one of the co-founders and CEO here at Mesh Optical. I've been working on laser since I was in high school with a professor at UCSC. uh uh philip lubin and then i went to berkeley oh interesting so in high school you were you were basically studying uh at ucsb you're studying the blade yep the laser beam yep i was studying studying the laser that's right uh been been one with the laser since uh i was you know 15 um and then i went to spacex and started working on the space laser comp system there and got to the really fortunate opportunity to design and work with a really awesome team there on the free space laser con terminal.

2:18:48Cool. So talk about - Living the space laser dream. It's a little stuff. Yeah, so talk about the actual product, how much of this is still R &D, ready for commercialization. Then I want to talk about the implications, like how this product actually rolls out into the world. Yeah, yeah. So our first product is a pluggable transceiver that is used in all of the GPU clusters. So you just mentioned Jensen, like the NVIDIA GPU clusters for every one GPU. There's like four to five of these optical interconnects that help connect all the GPUs together through the networking, through making sure that they can be like a coherent cluster.

2:19:28And so the first product we're making is what we call like a linear pluggable optic. and it deletes a really expensive and costly, like power-hungry thing that is called a retimer or DSP. And so it allows the people who deploy compute to save a lot of that power. And so that first product is just simply allowing those GPUs to connect over optical and deleting some power-hungry chip inside. And this is within a data center or in between different data centers? This is within the data center, yeah. So our first product is within the data center. They connect them with fiber optic cable on either end.

2:20:08And these are already in market. You're selling these. Well, ours are. We're standing up the production line. So we care a lot about co-locating the engineering talent with the manufacturing. One of the key things we learn at SpaceX is to be right where the stuff is built. So behind me is the manufacturing line, and we'll start testing in the next month here some samples and then start scaling production right after that. And trying to get to, you know, millions of units in 2027 is like really where the high volume starts to come into play. Wow. Is this the kind of thing where it's really just execution risk?

2:20:52Like, can we build this at scale? and if we can build them, there's insane demand and it's less demand risk? Yeah, the demand we sort of think of as infinite because, you know, the more intelligence we have, the more intelligence we have, it just like is more compute. And so whenever you see people deploying more and more compute, they need more and more transceivers. And so as intelligence scales with compute, so does transceiver demand. $50 million in the bank. Where are you based in the company? How big is the team? What does the next 12 to 18 months look like for you? Yeah, we're based in Los Angeles.

2:21:32We're in Gardena, California. Let's go. It's a little of lasers. Thank you. Thank you. Los Angeles needed a win. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, a little outside El Segundo, but yeah, we're going to bring Gardena onto the map of the laser hub of the world. Love it. And yeah, so we're about 15 people now and growing quickly and need to move to a bigger building now. Good sign. Are there like two buyers for this? Like, are you going to do deals with like every data center builder, every NeoCloud, just the hyperscalers? Are you going to be a supply chain partner like just to NVIDIA or just to AMD? Like, what does your business look like in like that scale?

2:22:16Yeah, we want to sell. I mean, our long-term goal here is to be able to connect all things with optical photons. And whether that's an interconnect in a data center or an interconnect in space, whether that's free space or in a fiber. But to start out, to answer your question specifically, anyone who deploys compute on the ground, we will try to sell to. That could be a neocloud, as you mentioned. It could be a hyperscaler. we have a strategy that we want to follow to kind of follow our volume, match our volume to our potential like future customers and make sure we don't start all the way at like really high volume because obviously we need to scale our line.

2:22:57We care a lot about getting our manufacturing done here in the United States. One thing about all these transceivers that are made today, they're all made overseas. They're made mostly in China and Thailand. And so no one has like really stood up these high precision, what they're called flip chip die bonding or pick and place machines. Like when we bought the most high volume flip chip die bonder, they asked for your Chinese social credit number on it because no one buys them here. Wow. Do you think that we'll get any mesh products in space in the next five years? Yeah. That's awesome. There we go.

2:23:422027, you think what I'm thinking? Valentine's Day gifts. Here we go. For that special person in your life. Lasers for Valentine's? Crazier things have happened. We're big fans of... Getting our girlfriend a good TV instance. Yeah, they keep saying they want some metal. Yeah, exactly. So get them some hardware. I was a laser cat for Halloween once. No way. Oh, that's cool. Talk about what is the shape of like actually working in the factory is this stuff risky or does it all happen in a clean room how much of this is like a tsmc type fab like what is it like yeah today yeah the the clean room is here we actually took some pan we took some panels off to get the machines in but yeah it's it's a pretty like we take the approach of like question question the requirements and delete the part of process if we need to and you know we start in like a semi-dirty environment to make sure like we want to we don't want to go overboard right you don't want to just go all in on a clean room when you don't have to um so actually back at SpaceX we started making the space lasers in a tent um and so like there's actually a tent behind me um or in front of me sorry and so like you you want to not you don't want to go too all in on like it has to be in a clean room you do tests end-of-line testing and qualification to make sure that like if it starts to impact your yield, then you would implement procedures and processes to keep it cleaner.

2:25:13This is like a pretty good clean room, but not the best. And so we'll see how our yield looks with this one. And we'll implement stronger strategies if we need to. But yeah, all of our semiconductor packaging is happening here. And we get some dyes from other foundries that are all outside of Asia. And then we bring them here and package them. Last question for me. What was the biggest lesson you learned from working at SpaceX?

2:25:43I mean, just what I said is like, question the requirements and delete the part and process. It's like, it's so simple and, but it's so useful. And like, when we're designing something, like you want to try to know why each part is there. So in our design, we've deleted quite a few parts and most people don't delete that part, but it ends up work. Anytime you delete a part, you delete a potential failure mode. And you want to be like a really reliable system. You need to delete as many parts or processes as possible. It also helps you like assemble things faster. And so that was one of the big lessons I learned.

2:26:19Yeah, that feels like, I don't know, easy to say, really hard to do in practice. Like it feels like you have to experience it. Like I've heard that a million times and like I'm sure that there's things that I could delete like even my daily workflow that I haven't figured out how to do. That's, I love that. Yeah, SpaceX is a company where you learn learning things the hard way in the most extreme way. Most of you, you ship a piece of software. It doesn't work. It's like, okay, let's patch it. You ship a rocket. It has some dependency that you didn't think was maybe that important, and it blows up, and you've got to live with that.

2:26:55Or the whole laser mesh doesn't work. Let's hope that doesn't happen. Putting a kid in charge of that is really a crazy thing that SpaceX does is they hand the baton to a really young person and put the whole company, like bet the company on those people and I think that forges things like within people to be able to deliver and then delete the part and process like helps them understand the whole system really well. I love it. Well, we are not far from Gardenia. Yeah, come by. Come by for your next appearance. I've got a feeling you'll be back on the show this year. great yeah I would love to be there you guys are welcome to come anytime as well I love it thank you so much I love lasers I would love to have a great rest of your day we'll talk soon let me tell you about Plaid Plaid powers the app to use to spend save borrow and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money fight fraud and improve lending now with AI and you saw it at the opener Jordy get those juggle balls ready because it's time to tell you about Turbo Puffer serverless vector and full tech search built from first principles and object storage Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

2:28:05The team sent me these little puffers. They're incredible. Jordy's juggling employees. Very fast. They're going to be hard to keep here at the studio. Well, without further ado, we have Evan Spiegel from Snap in the TVP and Ultradome. Good to see you again, Evan. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the show. Great to have you. Thank you so much for coming by and stopping by the TVP and Ultradome. You out-suited me. You out-suited me. That is a beautiful suit. It's always a great excuse to wear a suit. My wife was like, where are you going today? I like the buttons that don't show through. I don't know what that's called, but that's a touch of like some, it's very tasteful.

2:28:41Thank you. I appreciate that. Are you following the taste discourse? People are saying that taste is important. Do you have a stance on this? In the context of building software. It's more of like a post-AI thing. Like AI is going to be able to do everything, but not taste. And it's just like, it's sort of always been obvious, but it's also fun to write about. It's fun to talk about. There's a whole bunch of interesting examples. But it's funny you say that because our designers are literally becoming engineers right now. So it's kind of like, you know, I mean, if you think about like 10 years ago, right, the even like the power dynamic in a company, the hard part was building things.

2:29:13Right now, the hard part is like having a great idea. So I think taste is important. I guess the question I was joking about earlier was like there's two ways to build a new consumer product. One is you A, B test the color of the button and you just look at the data. And that's more of the engineering mindset. And then there's the tasteful approach, which is maybe like, I just know green's the right color for my brand. Did you engage in both throughout your journey? Is there a place for both? How do you see those two, the gut instinct interfacing with the engineering reality? Somebody pulls up the chart and they tell you that it's got to be blue, but you know yellow's right.

2:29:51I think for us, there's a huge difference between generation and iteration. If you're trying to come up with a new idea, it is really important that you can exercise your sort of creative opinion or judgment. I mean, the reason why we chose yellow is there were no other apps in the top 100 that were yellow. So that was like an easy one to stand out. We didn't have to test that one. Monopolized yellow. Verticalized yellow, yeah. Us and McDonald's. But I think what becomes very important very quickly is that you're able to iterate. So once you put something out there, A-B testing, experimenting, that really helps, Especially as you have a big organization, you don't want to bottleneck people's experiments.

2:30:28So anyone can experiment and learn. Yeah, it's interesting. One way to think about it is I feel like executives thrive if they have great taste because they have a lot of people coming to them with work or projects, and it's their job to decide what are we actually going to focus and prioritize. And now anybody can create 20 different concepts for a website. So they're having to choose from that to then go up the chain and decide, okay, which one of these should we actually implement? But there's like taste is becoming more important because now it's so much faster to just create anything. So at every level of the stack of the organization, you have just like more things to choose from.

2:31:07And taste is just choosing. Taste in your personal life is like choosing like do I get this jacket or that jacket or do I use this flooring in my house? How many logos should be on my shirt? Yeah. That's great. Give us the news. Massive milestone. What happened? I literally came here for the gong. You know what I mean? It's a great strategy. We got a bigger gong if you were here last. We got a bigger gong. Is this like for Year of the Horse? No, we were early. We were early. Yeah, yeah, we were early. It was really funny. It was so funny. So we were walking by the store, and John and I were walking, and I look inside.

2:31:49The store is closed, but all you can see, it's like dark in there. And there's this massive, it's at the massive horse. And I was like, we need one of those immediately. John's like, what do you mean? We're not going to be able to get like a horse. And then we look on this website for like a few thousand dollars. You can get this horse. I was like, the hardest part of buying the horse was convincing the production team that we actually weren't joking. Because Jordy sends in the chat, hey, we need a horse statue. And he's like, oh, this is funny. And then we're like, no, we're seriously. Okay, he's joking.

2:32:17And we're like, no, actually go figure it out. This is your job. Anyway, we're not here to talk about horses. Congratulations on the horse. Thank you. We got a horse. You got a big milestone. I think the horse was here last time, but it was wrapped in Christmas lights, and we had a massive Christmas tree. And there were so many other things going on in the studio. You gave us that very nice Christmas ornament, which we love. You signed it. But it was distracting from the horse. But now the horse is front and center. But more importantly, your direct revenue is front and center. Give us the news.

2:32:44Yeah, so we've reached a billion-dollar annual run rate on our – oh, wow. Thank you.

2:32:56incredible and is the job finished and 25 million subscribers so I think that's like ESPN size for subscribers which is like next stop Hulu you know but really exciting for us as we work to diversify you know our revenue and create this this whole new business line what was the like narrative narrative violation to around social media right there hasn't been a lot of people will pay for entertainment products, but there hasn't been a bunch of like scaled, actually like a social media product with, you know, that kind of SaaS. Yeah. What was the reaction like when you initially launched subscriptions?

2:33:31Well, I think what's so cool is people are really passionate about Snapchat. And so they want all these new features and they're asking us all the time, like, hey, can you, you know, chat backgrounds or like, can we have a Bitmoji pet or whatever it is? And in the past we would be like, oh man, like this is really a feature for power users, right? Like we can't build this like for a billion people. So this gave us the justification and the resources like, okay, fine. Like, you know, pay us two bucks a month, have your bitmoji pets and your chat backgrounds and all this fun stuff. And so people just keep the requests coming.

2:34:00We keep building all sorts of fun stuff. And actually it's great for the team because otherwise we never would have prioritized all these really fun features. How do people actually submit requests? Literally email, email, customer support, you know, we do like, you know, of research and things. There's a lot of the tech companies, it feels like they're very faceless. Well, it's Evan at snap.com. So it's like a little too easy to go straight to my phone. Dangerous to say that on the show. So yeah, what has been the key to scaling revenue there? Has it been just driving increases in ARPU or just onboarding more and more people into the premium product, doing more top of funnel, bringing in these prosumer users as net new users, reengaging people?

2:34:50What's been working? Yeah, a big focus has just been continually dropping new features, letting people know about those features, creating new entry points into the subscription service through those features. One of the big things that we rolled out last year was memory storage. So we've got people who are storing a lot of memories on Snapchat. So we give like five gigs free, but if people want more than five gigs of storage, then they can either pay just for the memory storage or they can join Snapchat Plus. It's so funny because I remember when Snapchat started, everyone was like, oh, this is genius.

2:35:21They don't have to have any cloud storage costs. And now it's like, oh, well, we're in the business, but we have a monetization scheme on top of it. Well, 10 years later, it turns out there's a lot of cloud storage costs. We were paying them. Yeah, I've seen the Google bill. Suffering from success. Have you seen demand for AI features and what does demand for AI features in a consumer context look like? Absolutely. I think one of the really exciting things, people don't realize how widely used the Snapchat camera is for generative AI, you know, images and videos. I think in Q4, 700 million people use generative AI lenses.

2:35:57So those are like our camera editing tools. And we have a feature called Lens Plus, which basically takes some of the most cutting edge Gen.AI features, you know, video generation, those sorts of things, and puts it behind a paywall. So if you want the most advanced Gen.AI, you know, image and video editing features, that's part of Lens+. How have you thought about using camera as the end-to-end editing suite versus sort of bifurcating them, looking at what TikTok and CapCut are separate, edits and Instagram are separate? When do you want to go separate? When do you want to consolidate everything?

2:36:29generally for snapchat one of our strengths is how much content is actually created in our camera because it's much more authentic and what we find today especially because everything is so overly edited and stylized because everything is created with generative ai what our community tells us all the time is that we want authentic original content so for us we really focus on stuff that's actually captured and made in our camera rather than uploaded and even as we think about like the types of content we distribute on spotlight or you know boost in spotlight for example we're thinking a lot about what's actually made in the Snapchat camera.

2:37:00And this stuff is hilarious, but not edited in the same way that it might be on other platforms. Have you thought about how agents will take hold in a social media app? I've been trying to think about this, the Manus acquisition, what does it look like if I have an agent that can go and you know, work its way through my social network profile. It's like, I could kind of tell it to like, like every comment that comes in that's positive, and it could do some sentiment. I don't know if I actually want that. Like, how does that play out once you get to models that can actually run in the background?

2:37:41It's not just I ask for a question, I get an answer, or I say replace the background with a beautiful forest and it does it. Have you thought about any of that yet? You know, we early on brought MyAI into Snapchat, right? And that was like a great proving ground to experiment with things like, you know, personality, memory, all those sorts of things. We're being able to bring MyAI into group chats or conversations. So I do think it's been useful in that regard. Certainly the MyAI use case is very utilitarian. We see a lot of just questions, homework, help, like that kind of stuff. You know, on the agentic side, I'm much more excited about what's happening inside the business.

2:38:17I think the potential for business transformation is off the charts. I think if you look at small and medium-sized companies for the last 10, 20 years, they've almost been left for dead. Everyone's been so excited about mega cap companies. I think the next 10 or 20 years, the efficiencies that small and medium-sized businesses can drive to grow using agents is going to be off the charts. So I think that, to me, is where I'm most excited. So is anyone writing code anymore? Are you vibe coding stuff now? We see every level of the spectrum. It's either the CEO's committing code or no one's writing code.

2:38:51It's always at the extreme. But what's your experience? It's not vibe coding anymore. It's agentic engineering. Yes, yes, yes. I think, look, I think what's really interesting about what we're seeing in Snap is that like to some degree, you know, and because the company's been around for a while, you know, it's operating at two speeds. Like there are team members who have fully embraced agentic engineering. Right. And who are essentially not writing code. Right. And then there are other teams that are still operating in a more traditional way. So, you know, because this change is happening so quickly, one of the things we're very focused on is driving these tools through the company, you know, really making sure that folks embrace this new way of working, helping train folks to do that.

2:39:27Because, you know, certainly for quite a number of folks, they are not writing code the way they used to. What's the next development that you're most excited about? Is it just understanding the code at a deeper level, sort of like a higher IQ model, or thinking in systems and scalability? It's not some tiny app. There's so many users on here. Once a tiny change can have massive ramifications across a database, the stakes are a lot higher. So what are you looking for in the advancing in the tools of AI tools to actually improve your business? Yeah, for us, it's really just right now about building agents across the enterprise, right?

2:40:09Like, so whether it's like, you know, somebody reports a bug, the agent goes out, figures out who else is reported a bug like it, actually tries to go figure it out, right? Proposes a fix, right? Those sorts of things. Or, you know, you look at our sales team, right? And all the work they're doing, everything from really trying to understand a client's objectives, generating insights for them, putting that together into a presentation, mapping it to our, you know, advertising solutions. Like, you know, I think there's just a huge opportunity. Yeah. Even thinking an advertiser that spends$20 ,000 a year with you guys should in the relative near term get the same type of presentation and like almost like high touch experience that somebody spending$10 million should get.

2:40:49Right. And that doesn't feel like a lot of that is like people making slide decks, like really being on it, like being timely, with feedback or things like that. That feels very within reach with agents. Yeah, walk me through the current pitch to advertisers. When you meet with a new big company, I'm sure everyone's used your advertising product at this point, but let's assume there's some new hot company that is growing. They have a physical product or something, and they want to grow their customer base, grow their reach. How are you positioning your offering on the advertising side? Nearly billion user platform, including more than 110 million monthly active users right here in the United States in this really, really important 13 to 34 demographic.

2:41:38And the reason why that demographic is so important is because they are forming lifelong relationships with brands and with products. And not to mention, they're making their first car purchase, their first home mortgage. I mean, even their first like tube of toothpaste. So I think those are the sorts of really important long-term brand relationships that are so critical. And so I'm sure I'm still using the same toothpaste brand I bought when I was in 19 or something. I have not churned from that company. The LTV is probably through the roof. So do you have to stress the importance of thinking in not a ROAS, not a one-year LTV payback, but thinking about capturing a customer that could stick around for a decade or more because they're a younger audience, is that something that's resonating?

2:42:23I think that fundamentally ROAS is critically important. It's something that we really optimize towards. And a lot of people use lower funnel objectives on Snapchat. That's been a huge driver of growth for us, especially with the small, medium customer segment, because folks are very sensitive to their return on investment. But when I talk to advertisers about why they love using us, it's always the new customer metric. That is why they're coming to Snapchat. They say, If I look at the percentage of new customers I'm getting when I spend on Snapchat, that really moves the needle for my business, and it moves the needle for me over the long term.

2:42:53And it feels less like a tax, which happens on some other platforms. Where it's like, these people were already coming to my, they were looking for me, and I had to pay for that? It's frustrating. Do you want to give something? Yeah. What are you excited about in AI hardware broadly and everything that you guys are working on? It feels like this will be a massive year for hardware across the board. You've got Apple. People have been reporting, I think, this week on multiple new hardware devices. There was that somewhat believable looking OpenAI ad. But anyways, a lot of action going on, a lot of energy and excitement.

2:43:33You guys are in a good position because you've been working on it for about a part of a decade now. Yeah, I mean, it's a transformational year for Snap in this regard. we just spun out specs into its own standalone subsidiary. So it's really going from like, you know, R &D science project to like real company after almost 12 years. So that, you know, is really important for us. I think, you know, it intersects with some of the things that we were just talking about in terms of the evolution of AI, because, you know, one of the biggest things I think folks have been concerned about when it comes to building a new computing platform is how to compete with the lock-in that the app stores have, right?

2:44:11How can you possibly compete with all these other app stores. And I think literally at the beginning of this year, people realized like software isn't a moat anymore, right? That like having an app store isn't a moat anymore because it's so easy to build software. You can even build software on the fly, right? And that to me is really exciting and coming at an amazing moment. What can you do to lean in? I saw somebody had hacked a pair of smart glasses to work with OpenClaw. And I imagine like, is there anything that you would do on that upfront to really lean into the whole kind of like hacker movement around AI?

2:44:44Because there's like, you guys are building a bunch of experiences internally. We've used a lot of them. They're very cool. But at the same time, opening it up and saying like, hey, this is a platform that anybody can build on. And we've seen this even with the kind of the Mac mini movement, Mac minis are starting to sell out in different points around the country. People are obviously willing to spend real money to experiment around all these products. I think the big thing that you're sort of circling is the way that people are using their computers is really changing, right? And they're really just supervising agents doing work for them.

2:45:18And that is a perfect fit for specs. Because the whole idea is to stop spending all this time hunched over your laptop or staring at this. We were at breakfast this morning and this guy, I didn't take a picture because it would have been rude a violation of his privacy but his his posture was literally like it was it was the most insane posture he needed he needed his back he's getting that one way or another it's peak performance he's getting acquired i'm calling it now like i know we're gonna see this guy but yeah like we we it feels that the way what you're imagining which is like we can all just spend all of our day walking around being productive monitoring agents in a kind of a heads-up display it feels within reach.

2:46:00It does. Finally. Yeah, it's incredibly exciting. So it's cool that all of this stuff is coming together, you know, in this moment. And I think, you know, it is super important for us to be investing in hardware because we talked about software is not a mode anymore, right? So it becomes even more important to do very hard things in the real world at a time when software is being disrupted in this way. Yeah, but at the same time, I feel you guys are in a unique position because it doesn't feel, well, like looking at the video game industry, I think that AI presents a pretty huge challenge for a lot of these smaller studios that were just in the business of spending a few years making a game, releasing it.

2:46:38If it becomes way easier to build a game, that's bad for them. But it might be great for a Fortnite or a Roblox or one of these platforms that have these big existing social networks. And so I feel like your core business of actually still being a social network where people are connecting with other real humans is in a good position. And so, yeah, the hardware is just like a bonus. And one of the things we've been thinking a lot about, you know, is both with the front graph and in terms of our distribution, how do we leverage all these amazing tools to just start building more apps, right? Like one of the things that we always love to do is come up with new ideas.

2:47:17In the past, we've been like, oh, we got a great idea, but we got to build it. Oh, man. Right now, I was just looking today. We have a really wild, I mean, I shouldn't even be saying that. Something coming soon. Anyway. We've got a wild new idea that we're working on. Well, yeah. I was going to ask, have you been pitched by the Vibe coding? Do people want to be able to send an app around, basically, that they just prompt on the fly? I think so. And I think what's going to be really interesting about all these companies, before so many of their resources were dedicated to engineering, now I think people are going to be much more focused on marketing, on distribution.

2:47:49right and that's a big shift in the way that being able to uh being able to send send somebody an app that you just made for them that historically you would have just like sent a funny picture to your friend this was my experience sending you soras of me walking on the beach in the volta themed suit like it was like i was able to make an in joke with me and my three friends in a group chat that would not do well on social media broadly you have to have all this context but because the cost of generating new content had dropped so low, I could do something that didn't require a costume department and cameras getting set up or all those different things.

2:48:27Talk a little bit more about Gen.AI. There's a lot of crazy video models releasing. It seems like a lot of companies are moving fast and breaking a lot of things, particularly in the Hollywoods, or Hollywood's not happy about this stuff. What does a responsible rollout of generative video features look like? What a great question. So I think for us, we have a lot of safeguards in place, you know, both around basic things like you shouldn't be able to make somebody nude, you know, or you or put in a compromising position or that sort of thing. You know, you shouldn't reproduce copyrighted content, those sorts of things.

2:49:04So we you know, as we look at even open prompt experiences where people can ask for, you know, to create different sorts of photos and videos, we try to layer in safeguards to prevent that sort of thing from happening. And we do a lot of adversarial testing to make sure that that is unlikely to happen. And then in terms of lenses, sponsored lenses, different experiences that partners are bringing to the platform, I'm interested to know, what's the shape of the ecosystem? Like, are there random developers out there who are making things and then earning some sort of rev share from that? Is there actually a flywheel there?

2:49:44Or is it particularly like you're working with a brand and they're going to do a sponsored lens and like your team is developing that for them? What does that side of the business look like? Yeah, it absolutely spans the spectrum. So there's a hundred thousand more than, well, gosh, maybe 400 ,000 developers now who built lenses for Snapchat and increasingly for specs as well. You know, those developers can apply to include their lenses in Lens Plus and earn a revenue share out from that. You know, if people are engaging with their lens and that kind of thing. And then we've got a whole internal studio as well.

2:50:14So we can work with advertisers if they want to build a unique experience, or we have tons of partner studios who we can connect them with. But increasingly, there's a tool called Easy Lens. It's pretty fun. If you pull it up and just play with it, you can build a lens from a prompt. That's what I was going to ask. I imagine that that has to be acceleratory for you, right? It's huge for us. And again, we're thinking a lot about how to connect. We have Lens Studio, which is more of the pro tool. And then we have Easy Lens, which allows anyone to create with a prompt. But I think even Lens Studio itself is going to become much more oriented around agentic engineering rather than...

2:50:47Yeah, because you just prompt it and it's wiring up whatever your domain-specific language is. Very interesting. Yeah. Are you starting to see an actual kink in the graph of lenses that are being deployed yet? Or do you think that this is something that comes once people realize that it's actually easier to go into... Yeah, it's so interesting. we, like, there's some dynamic on the internet that I feel like is somewhat real, where the more funny you think something is, like, the less likely it is to be, like, actually viral. The Hayes Paradox. Yeah, I jokingly called this the Hayes Paradox, which is also a Hayes Paradox.

2:51:27It doesn't work. It's just never broken through. But, yeah, it's this idea that, like, something that is, like, actually the funniest thing that you see on the internet for an entire year might have a TAM of close to one or your group chat. But that's great if you're talking about giving people tools that allow them to generate hyper-personalized things that are only funny to them or a handful of their closest friends. It actually gives you the ability to create a lot more joy on your platform. And that's exactly what we see with Gen.AI, that people are using it for these more communication-oriented use cases.

2:52:03But on the content consumption side, it's the authentic, original, like unedited, non-AI content that does super well. So definitely a major contrast there. And I think, you know, as it pertains to easy lens, when we start rolling that out, we saw a huge step change in the lenses that were being created. So that's become a big focus for us. But I also think you can imagine in a not-so-distant future, I mean, now the way that the models work, it's very hard to scale real-time, you know, image transformations, which are one of the reasons why I think people love lenses because it almost feels like you're looking in a mirror, right, and transforming what you look like.

2:52:35I think in the not-so-distant future, a lot of lenses will just be prompts, right? And those prompts are going to be shareable. And, you know, we have a whole feature right now around the Imagine lens and some of our other generative lenses where we have trending prompts and you can share prompts with your friends and, you know, iterate on them. And I think, again, kind of tying back to the importance of the friend graph, I think you see that intersection of people creating these, like, inside jokes but then also being able to really easily share them with their friends, how people create their own content, you know, inspired by those prompts.

2:53:01Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yeah, that seems really, really important. I mean, whenever one of these new image models goes viral, the stuff, there's always some, like, ground truth, meme, human element that's underlying it. I think of the Studio Ghibli moment. It's like I've seen cartoons. I could just go look at a cartoon, but I haven't seen a cartoon of me. And so there's a little bit of that in there. So the lenses make perfect sense in that case. Let's get the California update. Oh, yeah. What's on your mind broadly in the state? Going better than ever, right? It seems to just get better and better.

2:53:36I don't know how we – I mean, if we didn't have this weather, we'd really be in a tough spot. I mean, it's incredible what we get away with. I know. It really is. That's got to be a big piece of it. The weather is fantastic. Although yesterday it was a little rainy. Yeah, yeah. Basically, California has karma for forever flexing the weather on the rest of the state. How many times I've messaged a friend and they'll say, oh, it's like five degrees out right now. And I'm like, oh, it's like 71. It's going to be that way all week. And so in exchange, we get the gnarliest political environment. It's a little chilly today.

2:54:17It's 56. That's sweatshirt weather. It is. Freeze it. It's freezing. Stay indoors. This is crazy. But yeah, broadly, how do you think California is going? Yeah, I'm concerned. What gives me some optimism is that it looks like more and more people are increasingly concerned. What I was most worried about, even six to nine months ago, was the number of people that thought things were going really well in California because they were contrasting with what they were seeing at the federal level. right. And feeling like, Oh, California is better. It seems like, you know, there's less chaos here or whatever, you know, cause we've got a single party state essentially.

2:54:54Um, and so I think now more and more people are, you know, are hearing that we're number one in terms of homelessness, number one in terms of poverty rate. Um, you know, number one in terms of unemployment. And they're like, Whoa, like that doesn't line up with the California that I love that I want to be a part of, like, how can we change that and fix that? So I think the awareness is really important because, you know, in a democracy without awareness, you're not going to get change. And so I think, you know, hopefully that will continue to build. I think, you know, if Newsom decides to run for president, that's going to, I think, raise even more awareness of California and the challenges that we're facing here, which again, I think will be helpful.

2:55:29So right now, to me, it's really an awareness game of helping make sure Californians understand, like, this is not going in a direction that I think we want. And if we want change, then we're going to have to ask for that, right, and advocate for that. But I think that's happening more and more, you know, which gives me some hope. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I want to ask about live streaming. How do you think about it? It feels like it's having a little bit of a moment with the clavicular stuff. I don't know if you've been tracking any of this. I love this. So locked in. So locked in. You famously got frame-mogged.

2:56:04It's a huge deal. No, yeah. So you're running, you know, I have a billion users on the internet, but there's basically a number of creators on Kik that have generated probably 100 billion views, like some absurd number. The one John referenced is from the looks-maxing community, which is effectively guys that try to be as good-looking as they possibly can. So it's basically this whole drama. It's kind of like WWE brought to the very Internet native. There's all these different characters. One of them is running effectively a 24-7, and whenever he's sleeping, he's streaming. So it feels like IRL live streaming is hitting, just having a really big moment right now.

2:56:55How have you thought about it historically? Does it play any type of role in Snap's future, or is it not something that the users actually want? We decided to step our way there, essentially with creator subscriptions. So we just started testing creator subscriptions with a small group of creators. What we find on Snapchat is that people have very, very loyal relationships with creators. So once they subscribe, like they want to come back every day and see what's new on their story and message with them and, you know, really get to know them better and build this deeper relationship. So we thought creator subscriptions was a good extension of like what we're already seeing happen on Snapchat.

2:57:34We're going to test that out and see how that goes. But that will give us some of the infrastructure to start thinking about, you know, stepping from there. And that would be an individual creator just going live, talking with their existing follower base. Yeah, potentially to start, you know, with their existing subscriber base or even with their, you know, yeah, not necessarily even their followers more broadly, but their existing subscriber base. And then, you know, layering in some of the replying and gifting and those sorts of things before opening it up more broadly. How have you been...

2:58:05Yeah, I felt like my personal stance is that, like, Twitch as a platform since landing at Amazon has just, like, not gotten the... Not just gotten the attention that I think it potentially deserves. I created an opportunity for the kicks of the world to step in. Well, I mean, I haven't seen Andy Jassy live streaming on Twitch once. Yeah. And so... I would love to see that. I would love to see that. That would be awesome. Earnings on Twitch, obviously. Just do it. That would be cool. Yeah, so you guys should fire up your – and do just an earnings call on the platform. It would be great. I want the CFO there explaining the whole financial model, what happened.

2:58:46Keep it wonky. It's fine. That's what Twitch is. Every social media platform is like a flourishing of niches. You find your niche, and there's going to be someone there who's like, yeah, this is amazing. Switching gears a little bit, You mentioned subscribers are getting close to Hulu numbers. How have you been processing the somewhat polished, produced, vertical short form trend that's sort of happening? I see them in the App Store. I haven't been a user, really, but you're familiar with what I'm talking about. Real Short is one of them. They seem to be popular. There's obviously some organic creation that's happening on a fully UGC platform.

2:59:25But how have you thought about that? It feels like sort of revenge of Quibi in some ways. But where do you think that goes? How important is that? Is there a role for you to play in that ecosystem? Yeah, I know that we've got a lot of, you know, advertising partners who are marketing the short form videos on Snapchat. And, you know, I mean, those ads are so sometimes I find myself watching one for like a minute. And I'm like, oh, my God. I got to know what happens next. Who killed her? So that seems to be working. OK, good. But I think, you know, when we experimented with shows, you know, many years ago, I think for us, we just found that the volume of creativity, you know, the billions of snaps being created in the Snapchat camera meant that really, like, Snapchat is at its heart about UGC fundamentally.

3:00:12And I think in the places where we've really allowed UGC to flourish and creators to flourish and actually where we didn't do as many shows or didn't do as many publisher stories, we really built a very vibrant organic creator ecosystem. So I think, you know, in sort of the ensuing few years, we've pulled back from doing that sort of more premium content because what we just see our community love is connecting with the folks that feel like they're next door. Yeah. And I mean, YouTube did the same thing. YouTube read. They had a whole bunch of like produce things. And you'd see the I'd be like my favorite creator got paid a bunch of money to do something produced.

3:00:45And it's to get less views because like I actually just want him to turn on the camera and just talk. I don't need all that other stuff because like that's not what I'm there for. And I think that recognizing the desire of the user, the context, like all of that really matters. Like the medium is the message, right? What is your, how do you allocate your time in 2026? Where are you spending time that, you know, how has that kind of changed over the years? I mean, at a high level, it's probably 80-20 Snapchat and specs. I think that's going to have to start shifting this year, you know, not maybe not totally 50-50, but certainly close to it just as we ramp up and, you know, bring that product out into the world.

3:01:30You know, my happy place is making new stuff with our team. That's what I love to do. Our design reviews, you know, whether that's, you know, with specs or with the Snapchat team. That's really what I love to do. But, you know, a lot of what I've had to do over the past couple of years is really work closely with the team to rebuild the ad platform and to create a totally new, you know, this small, medium customer segment of our advertising business. I mean, our business three or four years ago was almost all large customers and like highly concentrated in the United States. And when your business is concentrated on a small number of very big customers, it just creates a lot of unhelpful volatility.

3:02:02And so what we've done since then is, you know, build out a platform that can deliver lower funnel goals, you know, especially the small, medium customers, and then really diversify. You don't get to work on the fun stuff if you don't have the economic engine. Yeah. Yeah. Last question from me. virtual reality. You've obviously looked at this, haven't gone super deep in it. Over the weekend, I watched the matrix in VR. I also watched in on Apple vision. You watched the whole matrix in VR. No way. Matrix. No way. Yes. They said no one had ever done that. I also, I also watched. You made history.

3:02:41It's incredible. You should hit the gong for that. I mean, that's unreal. Get the gong for yourself.

3:02:53That's incredible But I'll give you one better I know I didn't I watched the whole thing I did, I did But I went further On Saturday night I watched Terminator 2 in VR I watched back to back films And you don't have like a ring around here It's temporary It goes away after about an hour. And yes, my wife did say something about it. What was she doing when she was there? It was a rare situation where she was out of the house with the kids, and so I just had free time. She just plugged in. But truly, truly around family, you can't use it because it's so antisocial. Even with the eye, it just doesn't work.

3:03:35So I actually finished watching Terminator 2 just on my phone because it was less antisocial than putting this VR headset back on once the family came up. anyway i did successfully watch a full movie in vr let it be known i did um but i can't tell and i think i already know the answer now that you're laughing at me but uh am i like one year early am i 10 years early to watching movies in vr or am i just weird and it's never gonna happen you're gonna watch movies in glasses for sure okay right and i i think like what you know it's so funny a couple of my uh buddies you know are big into finance stuff like that so like if we travel together, you know, they'll bring their monitor to like, oh yeah, yeah.

3:04:13Come on. You can't get stuff done without your, we just got the new Dell one. It's like six feet long. That's amazing. You gotta have your, you gotta have your setup. Yeah. And so, yeah. So they travel with like a big monitor or, you know, even two monitors. So I think like a lot of the early stuff you're going to see with glasses are people who just want the full setup, but like do not want to ship a monitor to wherever they're going. So I think if you're traveling or you're on a plane or something, you want to really get work done. It's so hard to do that on a laptop. So I think you're right on time, actually.

3:04:46Right on time. Okay. Or a pioneer. Next time you come on, we'll ask, have you watched a full movie in any VR product? And we'll see. We'll see if I'm early or just weird. What do you think about timelines for watching movies in glasses? That's a this year thing. And then what about glasses? Is it that you still have some element of the real world? It's not as anti, you know, you're not getting the, like, you know. Yeah, it's not this huge, heavy, closed headset with a screen, you know, right in front of your eyeballs. I mean, sorry, it seems like you love it. So the trick is that I was laying perfectly flat.

3:05:22In a fully bright room. Oh, yeah, this is the other thing. This is the other thing. It needs tracking, so you have to leave the lights on. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. No, seriously. So you can't turn off the lights. And so if I get home and my wife wants to go to bed and turn off the lights, I'm like, oh, okay, it doesn't work. No way. It doesn't work because it loses the tracking. No way. But if you rest it right on your head just perfectly, and then also the VR headset, it wants to be world-blocked. So initially the screen is down here and you have to look like this, and then you have to re-center it up here, and then it appears above you in beautiful 4K and it's amazing.

3:05:59and you sit there and you watch the matrix from start to finish and it's actually a great experience but it is weird and niche and i don't know if it'll ever happen but i think the idea of you know being able to watch something on a giant yeah display in a lightweight pair of glasses is compelling oh yeah if it's lightweight but like truly you actually can't have a vr headset on your face for more than 10 minutes it's bad i love it's super bright it has to be bright like the iso on these cameras is so low that even if i just have my lamp on it's like all fuzzy and noisy, you know? It's terrible.

3:06:30Get a warehouse and get a bunch of yoga mats and have the Vision Pros, and it's a VR movie theater. You go and you just lay in the bright room. Super bright. It really is the most dystopian, antisocial thing you could possibly do. But The Matrix is a great movie, so it was worth it. I sacrificed. Worth it. For the Borg. And you broke the record. I did. I did. The Guinness. Call Guinness right now. When you all aren't live, you just move the table, put some mats down, and then you've got the future. Yeah, yeah. It's perfect. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to catch up. Thanks for having me.

3:07:02Good to see you. Yeah, congrats to the whole team on that. Thank you. It's really incredible. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter at tbpn.com. And we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Are you sure? You got to get out of here? Oh, yeah. You want to keep going? I kind of want to keep going. I don't know. What else is in the news? If we got news, we can do it. We can get to it tomorrow. Okay, we can get to it tomorrow. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for hanging out with us. We love you. We will see you. Tomorrow. Morning. Goodbye. Cheers.