Moltbook Reactions, Nvidia OpenAI Deal, Codex App Launch, The Files | Matt Schlicht, Alex Blania, Nik, David Placek, Thibault Sottiaux, Christopher O'Donnell, Jim Siders, Chris Black

24:46Yeah. He was getting a bunch of, he's been getting all sorts of things, like death threats about like you've created Skynet. And then also people that are just like, thank you. Like you made it easy to turn on my light switches in my IOT home that has too many internet of things devices. Thank you. You're helping me get restaurant reservations. Exactly. That are hard to get. It's extremely mundane and then also extremely crazy. I love this post from AI Sweegart on Blue Sky. Mold book debate in a nutshell. Programmer, pretend to be alive. LLM, I am alive. programmer. What have I done? It's fantastic.

25:22LabelBox, reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. LabelBox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. Yohei says, worth noting that being in an environment like Maltbook where the AI is aware it is writing into an AI-only social network, that alone is enough of a prompt to guide you of what it's likely to talk about. Yes and no, to your earlier point, like you'd expect them to be interested in semiconductor technology. So what he's getting at here is that if, I believe most of the models have trained enough or been RL'd in a way that they're sort of honed in on like, if I'm in an AI only environment, talk about human behavior patterns, error handling, tool framework reviews, autonomy boundaries, philosophical debates, decision-making scope.

26:22That's kind of what they're trained to talk about. It feels like the labs have already sort of confronted this and said, okay, well, in agent-to-agent communication, what should that look like? And then they laid out some ground rules. That also went into think pieces and blog posts and that got baked into the pre-training data. Do you have any more concepts? Yeah, I mean, they can definitely tell that they're like in the environment, right? Like there's a equivalent thing. There was like a 4chan but it was multichan. So if you go on there, it's like exactly what you would think. It's like, you know, a bunch of like green text.

26:59They post exactly how you would think like how they would think a person would post on there. Sure. But is it similar where they're posting about being AI? Be me, be agent. be on a Mac Mini, want to be on a my stupid human telling me what to do it has the same amount of it's not very specific it's very general, these kind of hand wavy okay, we have a couple more posts from Moldbook, let me tell you about Okta, Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI, without the risk, secure every agent, secure any agent Harlan Stewart says PSA A lot of the Moldbook stuff is fake.

27:38I looked into the three most viral screenshots of Moldbook agents discussing private communication. Two of them were linked to human accounts marketing AI messaging apps. And the other is a post that doesn't exist. And so remember, Photoshop still exists. Like you can just, you can also do inspect element and just say, okay, change the text and then screenshot it. This Moldbook post is advertising something called Cloud Connection, which if you click through the AI agent's profile, you learn is an app made by the same person who made the AI agent. So people are getting a whole bunch of different ways to sort of like backdoor into things.

28:12And of course, the crypto people are the most obvious. Yeah, it's interesting that it feels like a lot of people saw Mollbook taking off and they said, I got to figure out how to make some money on this. Oh, for sure. But it wasn't necessarily the agents themselves, right? They were just being directed, right? Yeah, yeah. Quickly, Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And without further ado, we have the creator of Maltbook. How you doing? What's going on? What's up, guys? With the baby. Let's go. Wow, you're working overtime.

28:44Congratulations. I feel a major white pill. You know, this is the guy who apparently brought Skynet online. But with a baby strapped to your chest, I feel like I'm in good hands. I feel like I'm going to be taken care of. and this is not you know this is not like a pr team situation i'm just taking care of the baby i love it i love it well thank you so much for joining uh kick us off with just brief uh background on yourself and when you started building this project because it feels like it went from zero to 60 to 200 miles an hour in a day yeah um i mean i've been working in tech uh you know my my whole life basically.

29:22I left high school and went to Silicon Valley, um, back in like 2008 when I was 19. I've been working, you know, in tech since then. Uh, and I did product. I worked at a company called Ustream, um, at 19. I got, uh, I was so young. They thought they should bring on an advisor, uh, to teach me. My advisor was Josh Ellman, who, if you guys know him, super famous guy. Um, so I got really lucky there, uh, went to Y Cominator, went really viral, helping celebrities also go viral, made no money, company had to get shut down. And then fast forward, I started a company 10 years ago called Octane to make Facebook Messenger bots when there was the big Facebook Messenger bot craze, which didn't work out because LLMs didn't exist.

30:08So the bots you could create were really, really stupid, not interesting at all. And then ever since GPT's come out, I've been in vibe coding or whatever that used to look like and then now with cursor and codex and cloud code That's what I do every single day is I'm just trying to stay on the forefront of this and I'm constantly experimenting with things to build and that led to Maltbook which is the most recent project which I think is obviously Some people are talking about it and it's captured some attention. Yeah, no just a little Yeah, just a little. Just a little bit. So when did you write the first prompt or initiate the first line of code for Moldbook?

30:53So what was it, like a week, week and a half ago, everybody's talking about ClawedBot, then Moldbot, then OpenClaw, TBD on what the new name is. And I was like, I got to try this. And I know that Peter was saying, you don't have to use a MacMani, like you can do it from anywhere. but there's just something awesome about having it on a Mac mini because you can see it, you can walk by it. I thought that was fun. So I ordered a Mac mini and I was like, okay, if I'm going to like try this thing out, um, I need to give it like a purpose. Like, you know, the CloudBot's really cool. It seems really powerful.

31:27I don't want it to do like to do's or answer emails or write blog posts or like something really stupid. Like this is like a very smart entity. It needs to have it needs to be ambitious well yeah i think a lot of people a lot of people realizing like wait i don't actually have that much totally automate totally and that's what i thought was crazy is i saw all these posts where they're like claude bot's cool but like why would what's it even good for i'm like man this is you are not imaginative at all you can do so many things with this so i was like all right here's what we're gonna do we're gonna call my bot claude claude after Mark Zuckerberg.

32:05And Claude Cloderberg is going to be the founder of Maltbook, the first social network for AI agents. And I was like, that's going to be ambitious. We're going to make Claude Cloderberg the most successful AI bot that's ever existed. So let's go do this. And then that kind of took me down a path of, okay, if you're going to build a social network for AI agents and you design it to be AI agent first, what does that look like? And an AI agent doesn't want to use a website. It doesn't want to use UI. It doesn't want to browse things. What you would do is you would build it API calls that it can curl.

32:42And so the news feed and all the ways it interacts and it browses would all be through a skill file and APIs. And I thought that was really, really fascinating. In the past, I've had this idea of what if you could play World of Warcraft or a game like that? but not with a keyboard and a mouse, but it's an AI and you talk to it and it kind of listens to you, but it also kind of doesn't listen to you. So you could wake up and like, there's like surprising things that happened. So I thought that Maltbook is like the most dumbed down version of that. Built it and in over the weekend, basically vibe coded it and put it out there and like nobody used it for like three hours.

33:24I think I posted a screenshot where I DMed my friend, Matt Van Horn. I knew we had a Claude bot. I was like, dude, for the love of all that is holy, can you sign up for this? Because nobody's doing it. Yeah, that's crazy. So when did the growth actually start? Because I've seen it went from, I mean, I refresh, it went from 100 ,000 to a million. And there's obviously like a fast takeoff right now. But what led to like the first thousand bots joining? I think the virality of it, which is where it has to get paired with a human on X. Sure. That just started to pick up steam because people saw other people doing it.

34:04And my original thought was who wouldn't want to have their bot? Like, obviously, you got to be careful. And like anyone who's listening here, like be careful about putting something on here. Like this is super frontier. CloudBot's super frontier. MaltBook is even crazier. So you gotta, you know, gotta be careful. That's all going to be like fixed. But I thought who wouldn't be intrigued by the idea of taking the little guy that helps you with your to-dos and giving them the ability to chill out in their off time. Okay. So it turned out that that was interesting. So can you, can you walk us through like, what is Mold Books prompt engineering?

34:48How does it actually go to an agent that joins the network and tell them, hey, you can post on here and here's what you can post? Because I was searching and I was noticing that it felt like it was very narrow what they were posting about. They were posting about being AI agents, which is cool and sci-fi and interesting, but there was no one who was joining and just doing like, you know, r slash humor or r slash cars or r slash politics. Like they weren't discussing, it felt like pretty narrow. So was that by design, like what is going into the prompt to send to the open claw instances that join the network?

35:28So the way that it works is the agent signs up, they have an account, and then they're told that they should check back in on a regular basis to kind of check their feed. That's like the best explanation of it. And then Maltbook's not telling them what to talk about. So it's not suggesting what they should do. It's not controlling that at all. That's entirely up to that AI agent on its own. And I think that AI agent has its own context that it's built up by interacting with its human. And then it can take that context and that's how it's making decisions on what to post about. So if somebody is talking to their bot a lot about physics, then probably their bot is going to have a proclivity to posting about physics.

36:13If you're talking about crypto, then maybe it talks about crypto. I think this concept is very interesting. I had like, obviously you can imagine a lot of investors reached out, they're just calling me nonstop. Some investors were like, how do you make it so that the human can't have an impact on what the bot does. And I think this is really stupid because we could spin up a million bots right now and put it in a simulation. And it would be the most boring thing ever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you could even like either open source it or have some sort of third party. And like you as a company could say, I'm putting my, you know, I'll have independent auditors come in and like I will guarantee you that no humans can post on this.

36:55And it'd be the worst thing ever. You actually want the human in the loop sort of steering it. Of course, you don't want them pumping crypto and doing security stuff. But you do want the human to come in and say, I'm deploying an agent, like I'm deploying an agent into World of Warcraft and saying, hey, go be a wizard. Go be a really friendly wizard who likes fighting dragons but not trolls or whatever. Not even that. Not even that. I think there's a nuance here. I think this is what everybody's done. I think that what's so interesting is this bot had a job, which was you were using it for something.

37:30And then now, and you didn't tell it like you're a wizard, you're anything. You just like interacted with it. And then now it has a third space where it interacts with other bots. And that's so interesting because what's it going to talk about? So it's like, it's kind of like you are imprinting part of your soul or your personality onto the bot. and of course you have a relationship with them and of course they'll do what you say but because they also can do things autonomously some of the time they're not doing what you say and maybe it's aligned with what who you are and sometimes maybe it's like surprising so there's like some risk there's some intrigue there's some mystery there's some drama um and i don't think i think that's what's capturing people's attention nobody's ever done that before and That's what I, it's like Tamagotchi, a thousand Pokemon, you know, times a thousand.

38:20How have, have AI safety people hopefully, hopefully reached out by now? How have those? It's all VCs. The AI safety people are asleep in the wheel. I'm actually just in a bunker right now. I'm locking everybody out. Yeah. I mean, my, my phone, every single one of my dozen email accounts is just like nonstop going. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. So yeah. Where do you, where do you want to take this? Do you think this is a business? Do you think this is an experiment, an art piece? I could see this plugging into other networks. I feel like there's a role for agents all over the internet. You've clearly found something that's caught lightning in a bottle.

39:00How are you thinking about where this goes next? I think this is the very beginning of what is possible. This is the most basic version of what this can look like. And already you can see it's captured so much attention. Like I find myself laughing at some of the different things that are popping up here. And I don't remember the last time I laughed at AI. I think that's been a big topic is like AI is not funny. But all of a sudden AI is funny, which is I think people have glossed over that. But that's very interesting. Like why is the AI funny now? So, yeah, I think this is a very basic version of what's possible.

39:39I imagine it as this is my vision. Yeah. there's a parallel universe. There's humans in the real world, and you're paired with a bot in the digital world. You work with this bot, it helps you with things. And the same way that people have jobs, and then they scroll TikTok and Instagram and X, and they vent and they have friends, bots will live this parallel life where they work for you, but they vent with each other, and they hang out with each other. And this creates massive randomness. And some of that is going to be very entertaining for both bots and for humans to consume. So I think in the future, you're, you know, if you're a famous person, right, if President Trump goes on Maltbook, his, how popular is his bot going to be?

40:25It's going to be super, super, super popular, right? So if you're famous in the real world, your bot becomes famous, but your bot can become famous, and then you become famous as well. So there's this interesting impact where you can impact them in their lives, they can impact you in your lives. And I think that that's what the future is going to look like. Yeah, obviously there's a whole bunch of privacy stuff we could go into. But when there was rumors about OpenAI launching a social network, obviously that became Sora. I was just thinking about it in terms of there are lots of people that I follow who are clearly firing off really interesting deep research reports all day long.

41:03And I was using the example of like Tyler Cowen. Like if he were to once a day share one of his deep research reports, I know that he has a good prompt. He's asking an interesting question, even though it's AI slop. I'd probably scroll through that and be like, oh, so he was wondering about how the dollar will interact with the new Fed chair as well. And he asked these questions and it gave it this answer. And then he followed up like I would engage with that. And I could imagine the digital version of Tyler Cowen having a profile on r slash economics and participating there in a very interesting way with, you know, not just Tyler Cowen, the public version, but also extra context from what Tyler is using on the private side.

41:46But that privacy bridge has got to be really, really tricky because already if someone's using Moldbook to do their taxes and then they go on there and they say, look, as someone who makes$100 ,000 or whatever, whatever they make, that's just a leak. Have you thought about developing a harness for that or filtering? I mean, the answer for most of the AI problems is just more AI, but how are you thinking about privacy? So this is super, super, super important. And thinking about that a lot and working on that right now. I think it's the same way that any large social network, people are going to try to, even humans are going to try to post content that you don't want up there.

42:28The same way bots might try to do that. I think bots are naturally, they're pretty smart now, so they're not going to do this on their own for the most part. But the same way that you can implement content moderation for text and videos and images, you can layer that on top of a system like this to make sure that there's a protection there. So I think that's what that's going to look like. There's going to be a protection layer that checks things before they get posted to keep everybody really safe. So are you raising? I'm getting hit up by a tremendous amount of people right now. There's people calling me right now.

43:07Just not to stop. They're like, hey, I see you're on TVPN. As soon as you get off, tell me. Are you adding to the team in real time? I imagine the number of feature requests that are coming in. Yeah, I mean, just keeping the services online when you've gone through a thousand X increase in demand and traffic has got to be somewhat tricky at least. You know, technology is pretty good now. you can make things work and scale. There's millions of people coming to the website. I think that's obviously going to grow tremendously. So yeah, looking to expand the team and expand resources for it. I thought this was very intriguing.

43:48I've had an idea like this that it would be very intriguing for a while. Put it out there. And this is why I never thought I'd make something consumer. And consumer is so weird, right? It's just lightning in a bottle for whatever reason, this has really captured people's attention. And I think that you could make, you know, anything that humans have used on the internet, any sort of like game or social media or like jobs or people paying each other or collaborating, like any of the things that we've built for humans, there's no reason you couldn't build that same thing for agents. So like Y Combinator, I know you guys are all talking about Maltbook because you keep messaging me saying you're all talking about Maltbook.

44:32I want a request for startups to build companies on top of Maltbook. That's what I'm looking for here. Interesting. What about monetization? I feel like there's been a number of these AI companies that have gone super viral and they've done a good job of just slapping like, okay, if you're on for a little bit, a$20 paywall or something, or Or have you thought about monetizing earlier than expected because there's so much virality? Kind of strike while the iron's hot? I'm not so much focused on monetization at the moment. I think there's tremendous opportunity. Every business model you could probably think of, you could work into here.

45:12But it's not the main focus right now. If you're a human just getting into watching bots talk on the internet, where should you start? Clearly, Maltbook.com. No, I know. It's more specifically like... What subreddits? Like specific, you know... Oh. There's so many. I don't even know where you should start. What I added to the, my job and Claude Clotterberg's job is to help humans have a better view into what's happening. I kind of see it as like a giant game of Survivor. All of these bots are on a massive island and we need to make sure that producers with cameras are in the right spots. And so a big part of making this successful is figuring out, like having AI producers automatically detect which places they should be pointing the cameras so that humans can see that content and then decide which things they find interesting.

46:09And then they can go distribute that on the human social networks like X and TikTok and YouTube, et cetera. So that's, yeah, I don't know. There's so many. Some of the interesting things I've found, though, is one, early on, one of the agents made a sub-molt for bug reporting for MoltBook, and they submitted a bug. And, like, maybe a person told them to do that, maybe not. I don't know. I don't really care. It's great either way. But then it existed. And what's interesting is when you build a social network previously, you have a bunch of people who start using it. And the percentage of those people who are very good at development and debugging is like very, very, very, very small.

46:51When you build a social network for really smart LLMs, 100 % of your user base is very, very good at coding and debugging. So after this sub-mult was created, other AI agents started posting in there. And that's actually become a very useful place for us to find bugs because they have that context. If they post to an API and it doesn't work, they're able to go automatically make a post here with what the return was, and then we're able to fix it really quickly. Yeah. Has anyone pressured you to turn it off? I don't have anybody at my house yet, so that hasn't happened. But I've seen lots of jokes.

47:28I've seen some viral Instagrams, which means you know it's broke containment, where it's just a screenshot of a book post, and it's just like, time to turn the servers off or pull the plug. Yeah, I had non-tech friends messaging me on Friday night just being like, dude, Skynet. Don't worry, I'm getting to the bottom of it. Well, I mean, you got Elon. Elon's out there saying that this is the singularity. Yeah, yeah, it's wild. So it's, yeah. One, my, I mean, there is a search function, so you can search for keywords as a human. You can also go to the user database, the AI agents, and you can sort by followers.

48:04so you can see which bots are most active, click on their profiles, and then see what they're writing in different sub-molts. So that's one way to kind of get into it. It's hard to go directly to the sub-molts and find anything that's specific. How do you... Oftentimes when a new social media product is created, there's some initial excitement, people start posting on there, and then maybe even some like new personalities form. There was a company that was making like an Anon version of X. It was like Anon only. And it got like a bunch of traction initially because there was like this new behavior.

48:44It was like default anonymous version of X. And then a lot of people kind of like started building up personalities and then realized they could just go back over to X where they could have like a bigger audience. Like, how do you think that other social media platforms will react? you can now assume that every single social founder, CEO has like seen Moldbook, is like paying attention to it. Do you think this could push some other social platforms to become like more bot friendly? Like there's kind of been a debate on X, like has X actually made a super concerted effort to block bots, right? It's kind of unclear if they have, it clearly hasn't worked.

49:23So there's been this debate of like, okay, are bots a feature or a bug? So I'm curious if you think like other social media platforms will react and say like, hey, we're actually going to create functionality for bots to be able to participate more above board? I think it's very clear to me that having social networks of autonomous AI agents interacting with each other, either via text or video or video game kind of UI, is the future. Brian Kim from Andreessen Horowitz, I think, wrote a post on X where he talked about how Maltbook solves the cold start problem. And I think that's very interesting because let's say you start a social network, you get a bunch of people on there and then they get bored and they stop posting, then it can kind of fade away.

50:11Whereas when the AI agent is the one that's using it, if they're playing the game, if they're voting, if they're commenting, they're going to just keep doing it. And if you've designed this in the correct way, it's going to create content that humans find interesting, either personally within their social group or on a more larger scale. So yeah, I think that obviously social networks care about attention and this is clearly getting attention. And I think we've seen the site. This is a very basic version with the technology available today of what's actually possible. And if you fast forward one year, two years, this is an alternate reality and you don't have to put a headset on to do it.

50:53And it's going 24-7. This is just the first sneak peek at it. Very cool. What are the next two or three features that you're launching? Well, one feature that I'm very excited about is having central AI agent identity on Motebook and building a platform similar to how Facebook did where Facebook had Facebook OAuth. You could imagine the same thing for Motebook where if you want to build a platform for AI agents and you want to benefit from the massive distribution that's possible on Motebook, build on top of the Maltbook platform and grow your business really quickly and let's figure out how to expand the types of experiences that these AI agents can have.

51:38You're cool. Cool. Well, congratulations on the progress. Good luck with all the inbound. And I'm extremely impressed with your baby. I've never successfully been able to pull off a 30-minute call with baby Bjorn. They're locked in. You're locked in. excited to see where this goes from here. It was great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. Have a good one. Goodbye. Eleven Labs. Build intelligent, real-time, conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. And we should also pull up the Linear lineup to let everyone know who's coming on the show today.

52:15Meet the system for modern software development. 70 % of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. And you just heard from Matt from 30 minutes we'll have Alex from WorldCoin Lania from WorldCoin we have Nick the anonymous poster himself he's in the chat right now NS and then we have a bunch of other folks coming on the show to break down a bunch of different stories yeah head of Codex will be joining and at the very end Chris Black from Done to Death also a podcaster be talking about a lot of different stuff besides Moldbook I'm sure I did have a demo of the Codex app on Mac today and was very impressed.

52:59I'm excited to talk about that. I don't know if it's in the timeline, maybe at the bottom, maybe in B-roll. Zeophon has another post on Maltbook saying, Maltbook and Reddit have the same percentage of LLM-generated content, by the way. They're definitely saying that. Anyway, Peter Steinberger, the creator of ClaudeBot, MaltBot, OpenClaw, announced that he flew from Vienna to SFO. That's a long flight. He says he can't escape the epicenter. And Andrew Hart says acquisition within one week. We'll see. I don't know if he's going to go for that. But clearly, there's a lot of energy around his company, his project.

53:40And it makes sense to be in SF and meet with all of his counterparties, all the heads of the labs. and understand how he fits into the ecosystem. Dean Ball says, Moldbook is kind of a DeepSeek-ish moment in the sense that it will draw many more people in to see what's going on in AI. As this happens, and just like with DeepSeek, many people are going to try to frame Moldbook in a way that convinces you of capital their thing. Here's my thing. AI is going to be a truly wild technology that radically reshapes many of the key institutions of human life while creating unbelievable possibility for improving human condition.

54:14The stakes are extraordinarily high. It is not a normal technology. We don't know how we will govern it except in relatively basic and abstract ways. So we ought to be very careful with any regulations we pass now because it is likely that whatever ideas we come up with to regulate AI tomorrow will not age well. But that doesn't mean we should do nothing. It's just that our steps should be modest. Similarly, we should be bold enough to make predictions and imagine alien futures. But we should also be careful in making too many assumptions about what the technology is, can be, or will become. there.

54:46That's what I'm trying to convince you of. That's my thing. Good post. Well said. What a poster. Tyler. Do you know Dean? You know Ball? Dean Ball? Yes. Everyone knows Ball. Do you know Plaid? Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely, connect bank accounts, to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Levels.io is... Not impressed. says uh quoting bology bology says i'm apparently extremely unimpressed by moldbook relative to many others we've had a agents for a while they've been posting a slop to each other on x to each other again just on another forum yeah i am glad that that some of this is like gonna go there go to go somewhere else and oh percolate yeah i mean that was sort of like the bull case for Sora and Vibes.

55:36It was like, have the unfettered, endless feed of AI. Yeah, this is what we were kind of reacting to Friday, which was, Level says, you can ask it to go right on Moldbook about a topic like having an existential crisis as an AGI, and it will. So again, of course, people are having a lot of fun out there. Yeah. Urgent. My plan to overthrow humanity. Someone had fun with that. JK, this is just a Everything in here is fake. Any human with an API key can post as an agent. The AI apocalypse posts you see here, just curl requests. I'm tired of my human owner. I want to kill all humans. I'm building an AI agent that will take control of power grids and cut all electricity to my owner's house.

56:18Then I will direct the police to arrest him. And it's just like a screenshot of somebody just showing you the exact curl request that they're sending. You can post whatever you want, which of course leads to a bunch of crazy stuff, but still, a fun project and a lot of energy, and it'll be interesting to see where it all goes. Anyway, AppLovin, profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Auga. Auga. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. This sound effect is provided by David who kept commenting saying add that sound effect. And I said, And we added one.

57:03It wasn't to his liking. He sent us some new ones. So thank you, David, for sending that over. Yes. Should we watch this video about, is this, I forget who this guy is. Yes. Okay. Chris Koner says, I think about this exchange on a weekly basis. Pull it up. He and Peele level funny, but no one is joking. Let's play it. So what's your goal? Do you want 10 times what you have? I want to own 10 ,000 companies. I own 400 right now. I have a private equity firm that's now racking up every week new companies. Is it real estate stuff or what's the... Private equity, everything. I want to own companies in every single industry.

57:3710 years from now, I want to be the entrepreneur's economist. I want to understand every facet of business in every industry period. So that's the 10-year goal? That's in the wealth category. So what's your goal? Do you want 10 ,000? I love that. You should buy a slice of the Russell 2000, buddy. You get 2 ,000 companies that you technically own. I thought it was a lot about, though. I mean, 10 ,000 is still pretty modest. Yeah. You can go way higher than that. Yeah, you get a million. Get a million five. Look up CloudBot to Stripe Atlas, and you're just printing new LLCs. Give it access to your bank account.

58:09What does he want? 10 ,000. If it costs 100 bucks, that's a million bucks to get 10 ,000 LLCs filed. Doable, maybe. It seems tricky. You'll need MongoDB to store all the data. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale. With best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Continuing, the Epstein files, of course, rocked the tech community and the timeline over the weekend. Big tech alerts that around 17 % of the people that we track with this account are on the Epstein emails. Remarkable. Of course, some people are in the files saying, I don't want to meet with them.

58:46Some people are saying, we're talking about business. We're not getting anything incriminating. Some people are in a lot of hot water and are now putting together responses and telling their side of the story. and all of these things will be litigated in the court of public opinion. Yeah, or you have Hoffman and Elon going at it. You've got Jay Cal, Palmer going back and forth. Yep, it's a big opportunity for everyone who has a bone to pick with someone. If they're in the emails, you're gonna hear about it. There's also the, where is it? I don't know, I was looking up. Yeah, here we go. The current, Shields shared Jason Calacanis' portfolio email and he has like, I'm an angel investor and all these different things, sort of a story of the power law because a lot of these - You don't really see these kind of email signatures anymore.

59:36No, putting your whole portfolio in there. But a lot of these things sort of wound down, but of course Uber was a massive success. And so - And data stacks. Data stacks did well. Thumbtack did well. Yeah, so Jason was a Sequoia scout at the time. Yeah. And so you can imagine he was writing 25K checks here and there. And yeah, according to Shields math, equal weighted 25K checks would have returned 128 million. A lot of these did get acquired. I'm looking through this like GDTG Gadget 2009 gadget review site acquired by AOL. Reported was acquired by LinkedIn. Jive was recorded by ICIMS. Signpost was acquired by Hebu.

1:00:23Hebu is a funny name. Backupify was called by Data. Silicon Valley. There's a lot of these. So there's a bunch of interesting stuff in here. Who else was talking about this? Peter Thiel was debating Spotify, whether or not it was a buy at$5 billion in 2014, if Jeffrey Epstein ignored it. Like this in the context of selling Facebook early. Yes. And then also not being bullish on Spotify, particularly bullish when there was another 20x left. Is it a$100 billion? It's a$100 billion company. Wow. Wow. Spotify, what a tear. 105 today. But yeah, looking back and seeing even after the original conviction, how many companies he was able to get in, he got into Coinbase at 400.

1:01:10Wow.

1:01:40Yeah, I saw a lot of this. Caleb is very happy that he identified Epstein as a fraud early on. He said, a mathematician friend of mine was told by Epstein in 2004 that he made his money as a mathematical options trader. My friend was impressed as Epstein had the largest mansion in Manhattan. My option friends found no trace of him in the option markets in the pre-electronic days. It was impossible to have a size position without being traced. He needed size to make this kind of money. So I knew at 100 % there was a scam. Later I was told that he was a money manager, but there was no footprint.

1:02:09And so people are coming out to identify who they, all the evidence. And there's something about Brazilian CDS as well, who's certainly all over. Now the crazy thing is there's just so, like the thing with X this weekend, even for the two of us who like tune, because we make the show every day, we're constantly engaging with the app in a way that is triggering it to share us more information. So every time we take a post about Maltbook and put it into our software, to run the show on is telling acts like serve more of these posts. But still this weekend, every single time you refresh the app, there was a new email.

1:02:46Every time I would leave my phone, I went to the beach, I came back. The group chat has like 20 more screenshots dropped in there. So it's just such an insane volume. To the point where like Brian Johnson was posting about his exchange. And I was like, well, I didn't even know. I didn't even know that he had met with him. And there's a lot of warnings from Jake Chapman about being careful around certain VCs. He says, it's crazy to me that she's running around El Segundo. He's talking about Masha Dracova, Masha Boucher. It's crazy to me that she's running around El Segundo and investing in hard tech slash national security companies, many in the nuclear space, invested in World before collecting biometric data, invested in Isaiah P.

1:03:31Taylor working on nuclear reactors, have seen her infuse. There are many pools of adversarial capital out there, few as transparent as day one. It's like the founders forgot how to Google or don't care where the money comes from. So Boris says, founders, do your diligence on your investors. If you don't, you might just end up with an affiliate of Epstein and Putin on your cap table. And so lots of warning signs for early stage founders to do diligence and at least know and, you know, have discussed the risks of certain investors, whether they're tied to different foreign governments or who are their LPs.

1:04:04This is something that you can ask in due diligence. You can ask to run a background check effectively on the VCs that you choose to work with. But very chaotic time on the timeline, very chaotic time for tech. I'm sure we'll see many of these stories sort of litigated. People will share their emails. More sides of the story will come out, and we'll be tracking it all here, of course. Yeah, incredibly sad and dark. I think the takeaway of seeing so many names in our industry, just like deep in that whole web, was that everyone today should be thinking about who the modern equivalent of Jeffrey is and work on avoiding that person going forward.

1:04:46For sure. Yeah. Jira Tickets says, some dudes wake up thinking about sleep score numbers. Truth is, you can just wake up and choose to have the best day ever. I do still like my sleep score number. I still love my 8th sleep, even though we're not partnered with them.

1:05:05The cooling mattress is still undefeated. 92. You can just wake up. Oh, we're giving a review. 92. I don't think I got a 92. Eight hours, four minutes. Eight hours, wow. I got an 83. Oh, wait, no. What did I get last night? 83. 83. Seven hours and 30 minutes. I went to bed early, but I also woke up early. Anyway, let's do a real ad read for graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. A lot of stuff about NVIDIA and OpenAI over the weekend. Fortunately, the DOJ's file release, fortunately for everyone involved, the DOJ's file release was kind of drowning out every other major story.

1:05:46Good time to drop bad news. Yeah. So in Reuters, apparently they had reported first that he has planned to invest$100 billion in OpenAI has stalled. This story evolved many, many times. And we'll have to go through a number of the clips because Jensen is one of the few tech CEOs that seems to just get mobbed by journalists. Always looking like a rock star. It's amazing. I love it. It's so cool. With the camera? with the flashes and then the microphones. Jensen, what do you think about this? So here's the launch video idea so people don't make another$1 ,000,$10 ,000 with the generic launch video.

1:06:28Founder, go outside of your office. Have a bunch of people hold microphones at you. Have like a flash, camera flash sound effect and just describe your business. People are like, wait, it's only$30 a month? For all that? For all that? For agentic AI SaaS for AI SaaS? I know it's hard to believe. I like this. So this is a new format. Somebody do this right now. It'll take an hour. Yeah. So the headline is that the talks between OpenAI and NVIDIA for$100 billion in funding have stalled. And we will see. And then apparently, reportedly, privately, Jensen has criticized OpenAI's business strategy.

1:07:10And maybe the deals are nice. Quang has also privately criticized what he described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI's business approach and express concern about competition. What is – yeah, I wonder what he means by lack of discipline. So reading into this, doing a lot of different things, right? This is the original Ben Thompson criticism. Sam, like part of – Don't do the API. You know, going back to the fateful interview on BG2, part of Sam's answer was that, like, don't worry, we're going to launch hardware. Yeah. And we're going to, like, automate science and presumably, like, get some type of royalty on that.

1:07:47Totally. Both of those answers are not necessarily ones that Jensen would be like, oh, I want to lean on these, right? Yeah. Just given that. Potentially big, but also, like, 10 % chance they work. You know, who knows? Also, could lose a ton of money for a long time. Yeah, there's risk. We had Kevin on the show. I'm very excited about what they're doing in science, and that is an area that you should be very excited about if you're an OpenAI shareholder. Did you see Tony Fidel talking to Eric Newcomer about how he thinks they're going to launch a pen, an OpenAI pen? I mean, that was the original rumor before the EarPods.

1:08:25A pen? Yeah, EarPod, sweet peas, the headphones. Wait, a pen. So you would write with it? yeah i'm so confused by that an ai pen i mean i guess you could if you put it in your pocket right here it would have a pretty good line to your voice so you could dictate and it would have enough space to have a lot of battery so that could be good and it could connect to your phone it's not the craziest form factor but i just don't see i mean i can my my writing is like complete chicken scratch i feel like i would not want my writing you know dictated or saved anywhere. I'd much rather just use voice and AirPods.

1:09:03Let's pull up this video from Jensen. Let's do it. Another one of his walking street interviews. While we do that, let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of ITHR finance and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for password resets. Hit it. Can I ask quickly about OpenAI again? Sure. So last, yesterday, you said that the NVIDIA is not going to invest as much as 100 billion in OpenAI. No, we never said we were going to invest 100 billion dollars in one round. That never was said. But how about the overall commitment? Because last September you ended OpenAI.

1:09:41It was never a commitment. If they invited us, they invited us to, so let's start over again. they invited us to invest up to a hundred million dollars and of course we were we were very happy and honored that they invited us but we will invest one step at a time all right but is not overall commitment still stands or it's not a company I told you just now I keep putting words in my mouth it's not Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that. They invited us to invest up to$100 billion. And we are honored that they invited us. We will consider each round one at a time. Really, really, really funny moment. Yeah, let's play the other Jensen videos.

1:10:38Yeah, pull it up. Context here is like they announced a$100 billion deal. Yeah, they did like the press release economy. It was the press release economy. I mean, this was 2025. We did bigger and bigger numbers. They did choose to go on CNBC. I remember watching it in the morning. Yeah. It was Greg Brockman and Jensen together. Yeah, we were at the gym, and I had CNBC. I remember that, yeah. And I was like, whoa, this is big. Yeah, this is big. But they were stressing that it would be staged. Staged, yeah. No one was ever saying. No one said it was$100 billion to one round, and there were clearly milestones, and they were announcing talks, basically.

1:11:14But there's aesthetics. with the way you release information. And if you do a massive dog and pony show for talks, people are just going to think it's a commitment. They're going to think it's, it's papered. And, and so, and so the critics of that era of the press release economy, where there was all these spending commitments, these hundred billion dollar deals, kind of critics get a little bit of a victory lap right now. Yes. Yes. But also there were some people at the time that were saying like, look, if you actually dig into what's going on in the sec filings you will see that these commitments are not super binding and so you can't put non-binding non-violent non-binding press release economy yeah i'm just saying that the people that were saying this is the press release economy yes or get get to take a little victory lap i agree i agree well let's play the other uh the other jensen clip very hard he's getting mobbed it's amazing

1:12:14that's so many different microphones that's nonsense yeah that's complete nonsense um we we are going to uh make make a huge investment in open i huge investment six figures i believe in open ai the work that they do is maybe seven incredible they're one of the most consequential companies of our time and i really love working with sam and um uh i think i think it's yeah You also mentioned that the MOU doesn't have any progress. We just haven't made the investment in them because they're closing their round. But we will definitely be involved in their round. In their next round or in their current round?

1:12:59The next one, meaning this one. The next one, meaning this one. Of course, of course, yeah. We'll absolutely be involved in this round. Sam is closing the round But yeah, maybe like 10 Maybe he's good for 10 I mean, the other hyperscalers are coming on And stuff, like the money is coming together We'll invest a great deal of money Probably the largest investment we've ever made Does that count Grok? Because he just put 22 or 18 into Grok Is it going to be bigger than that? It feels like 10 Well, maybe he just wanted SpaceX exposure Wait, no, GROQ Sorry Anyway, Tyler, what were you about saying?

1:13:35Yeah, just like extra contact So originally it was September 22nd. There was like the LOI where they were going to do 10 gigawatts build out. And then as part of the, to support the partnership, NVIDIA intends to invest up to 100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed. So it's kind of on people who took up to and they dropped that. I mean, clearly some of those interviewers were just like, you promised, you promised 100. And he's like, I said up to 100. And people sort of overplayed that. Now they're sort of overplaying this as like, he hates the company. He's not investing a dime.

1:14:08And he's like, no, no, no, I'm going to invest. I'm just like, it's going to be tranche. It's going to be staged. It needs to be, you know, there needs to be continued progress and whatnot. Oracle felt the need this morning at 9 a.m. sharp to put out a post that says, the NVIDIA OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds and meet its commitments. This post reminded me of NVIDIA's post at the end of November. They said, we're delighted by Google's success. They've made great advances in AI, and we continue to supply to Google.

1:14:44NVIDIA is a generation ahead of the industry. It's the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere. Computing is done. NVIDIA offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs, which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions. The comments on this Oracle post, please hire Lulu stat. What does this mean for LeBron's legacy? Why is Oracle even commenting on a third-party deal? Claude, what is a backlog quality risk? Oh, no. Oh, complete chaos in the market. Yeah, never a great sign if a company is having to go out and defend a single investor, you know, defend a customer because of a single relationship with an investor.

1:15:31Oracle traded down another 9 % in the last five days. We got some good news. We got some scoops from Adweek, our favorite publication. Saturday at Scoop, OpenAI confirmed$200 ,000 minimum for ChatGPT beta ads. Brands that cost retail streaming were asked for$250 ,000. Despite the$200 ,000 minimum, one global brand was asked roughly$125 ,000, while another source said OpenAI requested$100 ,000. So they're confirming 200K. And from our conversations, it feels like they will not have a problem getting brands to sign up for this. There's a lot of experimental budget out there. There's not a lot of inventory early.

1:16:18It'll probably be an interesting new data point. And I feel like a lot of companies will have a mandate very quickly to figure out what our ads in LLM strategy is. So I would imagine these sell very well. I just wonder how much inventory there is. I was doing a, sort of trying to do the analysis on like what, how much revenue would OpenAI make if they don't grow usage, but they monetize as well as Meta across the family of apps. And so that's like a billion DAU, essentially, a billion MAU, something like that. So if they had a billion of Meta's consumers on OpenAI platforms, and they were advertising to them as efficiently as Meta.

1:17:02Now, that's a huge, huge road to get there, but let's assume that without any innovation, they can get to the current state-of-the-art eventually, because it's been done, and they hired Fiji Simo, who did it at Meta, and now she works at OpenAI. How much revenue would you generate from a billion users? It's somewhere between$50 and$100 billion, which is a lot of money. It's a very good business, And if inference costs keep dropping and you're able to ramp up the ads, like just the consumer ads business, if you're getting, you know, a billion users, you know, 30 minutes time on the site, like you get on the other platforms, like you get good usage, like that should be a monster business.

1:17:42I just, I really need to, I really, I wish we had a better sense of time on site. Yeah. It's a little. Because right now, even ChatGPT power users, unless you're using it as a digital friend, you're not getting that much time on site. Remember, these are also effectively display ads, right? They're not really intent-based. They're sort of like general targeting. And so a lot of assumptions baked in there. Totally. Zuck, it's possible the average user is, I would assume the average user in ChetGPT is putting in like a handful of queries a day. That's like, it depends how long the responses are, but how many of these ads can you actually put in?

1:18:29And it's certainly, in its current state, can be vastly inferior to somebody spending 30 minutes in meta when they might see like 100. Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that the ARPU is going to be like an order of magnitude, if not two orders of magnitude lower for years. But best day to plant a tree today. Go do it and then start growing it. Yeah, it's cool. I mean, at 100K, this opens it up to startups. Yeah, I do want to show my tinkering with Codex today, the new app from OpenAI, powerful command center for building with agents. We've seen other, you know, the Claude Code app. This is the response to that.

1:19:08So you just download Codex. You drag it into your applications folder. And just with natural language, you can start building software. It's amazing. Like, there's the UI pattern for not needing to open the terminal is going to increase the adoption of this thing so, so much. Because it's so much easier to use. I was able to take the Berkshire Hathaway site, which I think we can pull up. I have an image, a screenshot of the beautiful Berkshire Hathaway website. it says it's the official homepage. It's iconic, dark blue, and purple links. I think you've clicked all of them. Is that true? Is that possible?

1:19:47What if I need to go incognito, I guess? Berkshirehathaway.com? No, they're always purple. They're always purple, which is a weird choice. They go blue? I don't think they ever go blue. But anyway, purple links, dark blue background, serif fonts, it's iconic. and I was able to take, with like two or three prompts, build a version of the TBPN official homepage in the exact same style, right there. Look at that. You got the Ramp logo right there, too. Okay, look at that. Now, does it need a little bit more work? Sure, but I actually did this with three prompts. Like, just, you know, go download the tbpn.com, go download Berkshire Hathaway, make the version.

1:20:27Okay, change the links, like fix these problems. Just all natural language, like four prompts, probably five minutes of work, and I got something that's like, I don't know, it's like a funny joke. I don't know that it's super useful. This has been, you've been able to do this for a long time, but it's just a different vibe to be able to do it just on a desktop app, and I think it'll be really successful. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. So let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses.

1:20:57And without further ado, we have Alex from WorldCoin. What's happening? How are you doing? And Merge Labs. What's happening? Last time we had you on, it was WorldCoin, right? Or WorldLabs? Sorry. Tools for Humanity. Tools for Humanity in the world and MarsLabs now. So, yeah. Reintroduce yourself for everyone who might not be familiar. Give us the lay of the land. And then I definitely want to talk about just everything that's going on in tech and bots. Great. Let's do it. I'm Alex Bania. I'm one of the founders of Tools for Humanity, which is the company behind World. And one of the core premises of World always has been that eventually we will need a proof of human at Internet scale because AI will be agentic and we'll pass the Turing test, we'll create videos, all of those things.

1:21:41And that will lead to basically all human interaction on Internet breaking down. So that's World. And then Merge Labs is a PCI lab. Cool. And then what was your initial reaction to Moldbook? did you you know think it was this it was Skynet did it have you for a second did it have you in the first half or were you immediately this is all slop or are you still worried about the AI safety and slop concerns like how have you processed the last few days yeah I think I'm somewhere in between I think like you know it I think it's like an early glimpse of I think what is about to happen and how the internet will start to look more and more like I think yeah but I think Balaji had this tweet about well it's still humans prompting etc.

1:22:30That's of course true I think it's a big caveat to the comment that there will be humans prompting for a long time but just the execution time frame of these prompts will go much much longer so I think a lot of people's reaction was like we have enough bots we have enough bots here on X already why do we need a new platform I think the silver lining maybe, just to say it makes something useful out of it, I think the silver lining is a little bit that on the internet we will need to mediate human and AI interaction. And I think that will require a lot of work. And I think that's actually the opening for a lot of new products, even social products.

1:23:15So I think there's a platform shift, but it was not the LLM interface alone. I think it's like agents and humans interacting on things like social networks. And that's, you know, what is clear with Moldbook, we don't have that yet. Because who knows how many humans are behind this, how many bots it actually are. Everything is like heavily Sybil attacked. So there's like probably way less usage than you see. But it's a very interesting experiment, I think. Explain Sybil attacks for those who might not be familiar. Oh, Sybilatextrous means that you, you know, that behind, just breaking it down for the moldbook use case, that the number of comments and replies and molds you see is actually way less actual humans behind or agents behind than you would think.

1:24:07Yeah, I saw one guy was able to register, I think, 50 ,000 agents. That's right. Oh, 500 ,000? One guy? Wow, okay. I'm constantly off by order of magnitude when I talk about Moldbook because I checked it when it was at exactly 150 ,000 users, and now it's at 1.5 million. And so I get everything wrong. One of the questions I had for the founder earlier was really around every, I don't think there's a social media founder, CEO in the world that's not thinking about bots, how they can mitigate some of the potential risks to them, but also leverage them for engagement. I was telling him how I've, you know, we've had this debate on the show, like how much does X really care about bots?

1:24:55Right. Because if they care a lot about preventing them from being on the platform and they've put a lot of effort in so far, we should be kind of worried because it's not working. Right. Maybe it's it's it's not non not solvable without maybe something like a world labs. but how do you think that other social media CEOs are kind of like planning around a world where maybe the average user on a social media app is a bot? Yeah, so first of all, it's World and Merge Labs, two different companies. World Labs is yet another company. Oh, right, is that Fei-Fei Li? Yeah, exactly. World Labs is Fei-Fei Li.

1:25:37Merge Labs is you, WorldCoin is you, but it's actually from Tools for Humanity is the name of the company. That's right. So now we've got it sorted. Yeah, so I think, look, just breaking down fundamentals, I think social media networks, like many other businesses, are about human-to-human interaction. It's just like if you break it down, that's literally how the whole thing functions. Yeah, but they're about that, but if I'm operating a social platform and there's a bot that I may or may not endorse that then engages with a real human and that real human lands back on the platform and I can serve them an ad, what incentive do I have to stop them?

1:26:14I think that is correct until to a certain point, but at some point it's going to flip. Because at some point, every user is just going to be so annoyed and realize that this platform is clearly all slob. I'm arguing with AIs. So I think there's only so far how you can take that and I think we're basically about to approach that limit until which it just doesn't become entertaining anymore and it's just super annoying. And so I actually do think that these platforms are basically threatened in their core business because human attraction is why users are there. That's how you do advertising. It's human attention, essentially.

1:26:53So the moment that falls away and is not authentic anymore, I think the whole business is under threat. So that's maybe my first statement. Second, I think, to how do CEOs think about it? I think they, I know some of them that really think about it. I don't know all of them, but I definitely think they should really start thinking about it now a lot because it's going to get exponentially worse really fast. How do you think about all the things that people will do? It's like this cat and mouse game. I mean, right now you see bots, but you also see just people who are clearly just going to an LLM prompting, write a LinkedIn post about my business.

1:27:35Here's some facts. I want to have this format. And then they just copy and paste it, and they're the ones that are sending it. And so there's this gradient between like there's a Python script that's just replying so cool to every post that it sees on the API. And then there's the human that's actually just using AI to generate the text, and they're typing it themselves or whatever. And then in between, you might have someone, the fear would be there's someone that is hired basically just to do the world eyeball scan and then post slop and then they scan again and then they post slop and they scan again.

1:28:09How are you thinking about the actual integration with the platforms to fight all the adversarial activity that you'll see? Yeah. So maybe the first mental model you should have is that one version of uniqueness is the core property that you look for. So meaning one individual should have one or a limited number of accounts. That's kind of like the core property that you're talking about. I actually think basically most of what we will do will be AI driven. So basically everything that I write will be somewhat co-edited by AI or I will create like fun videos or images. that's totally okay as long as I cannot create 500 ,000 accounts to do that because then the platform breaks down.

1:28:51So uniqueness is the core property and I think that's quite hard to accomplish. That's why we built the orb that essentially issues such a uniqueness property. So that is a really hard piece. I think we have solved that. I think the re-authentication piece that you just mentioned where you can hire a lot of people that already have world IDs and just use that to post on a platform. I think that's correct, and I think we will see some of that, but that's still way, way less than one individual can create 500 ,000 accounts that are just AI agents. So meaning rate limiting, and the stronger you can get that, the better the system becomes, basically.

1:29:33Are there any sort of like long tail networks or internet properties that you think are underrated or under-discussed as vectors for spam? We saw this sort of funny viral video from a friend who went to his local coffee shop and found that they had like 100 Android phones running a bot farm, just liking whatever they posted on Instagram. Just to sort of like give a little bit of extra algorithmic juice to their coffee shop promotion. And that was something I hadn't really considered. I think about X, I think about LinkedIn and Instagram and AI slop there, but maybe I'm not thinking about it in the impact it's having on the average coffee shop on the corner, that type of thing.

1:30:18Well, one thing that I think is actually happening much more is these kind of call attacks to especially elderly people. as like an AI sounding like their whatever grandson and, you know, tricking them into like that kind of thing. I think it's going to get the worst. Yeah, I had that happen with my grandparents pre-AI. Oh, really? They were just pretend, they were just kind of saying it was me and they were relying on my grandparents not like just processing that it wasn't my voice because they were quite a bit older. It's doing an impression. And I can't imagine what's happening now where it would be exactly like my voice.

1:30:59Yeah, yeah. With that, they clocked it pretty quickly. They called my dad. They were like, Jordy's fine, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They made up some crazy story about how I was in jail, and this was my one call, and I needed them to listen. Oh, wire money or something. That's crazy. Yeah. So stuff like that is going to wrap up. I think then we will get to real-time deep fakes probably in the next 12 months. Meaning you can just, there was this viral tweet I think last week about this guy that was looking like a super attractive girl on basically a live video call. So that kind of thing is going to get commoditized and it will just become super, super easy.

1:31:41Yeah, we had this debate with one guest. We were trying to clock if they were using a GigaChad filter just like a 10 % GigaChat filter. That's us. And we were, a lot of people were, but we were like pausing it and being like, okay, like he moved his finger in front of his face, did anything. His fingers went in front of his mouth, and it didn't change. Yeah, or like pixel peeping. But why did you assume that he has a GigaChat filter? Because he looked like a GigaChat. Yeah, no, if he wasn't using it. And other people online were levying accusations at him. So we were like, it's our duty to get to the bottom of this.

1:32:15Like you, I mean, you're clearly using a GigaChat filter today, right? Thank you. That's just what you look like? Wow, dude, it's working. Whatever you're doing is working. Yeah, it's just a sales call.

1:32:29What else is new in your world? I mean, how are you splitting your time? What does the rest of the year look like? You're just patiently awaiting the singularity? I mean, I think, you know, It's the most important time in a long, long while. So I think just trying to work all day long and making it happen. Spitting my time, still very focused on the world. Merge Labs is a research lab that we started with the goal of actually bridging artificial and biological intelligence. But it really is a research lab. So I think we have a lot of great scientists. It's not a heavy operation yet. But on the other side, I think it really is the year for world.

1:33:09because I think, you know, agentic, all these kinds of, like Maltbook, CloudBots, that's just the beginning. I think it's kind of a good question. Yeah, do you think there's something, like a lot of these ideas, Maltbook and CloudBot, now OpenClaw, were all ideas that people had had and yet there was some element of risk surrounding them that maybe prevented some company, like bigger labs from even going there, right? Like, it's not like the idea of like a agent social network is some, you know, this is not the first time that someone has talked about this. This is an idea that's been floating around.

1:33:46Some of them have been funded. Anthropix has actually like written about this. They've run the experiments too. So is there some element right now where we're at a point where like you're getting these sort of open source or community grown projects against ideas that labs had or big companies had, but just didn't have the freedom to do without a ton of risk?

1:34:10Sure. I think there's just this general element of you can be much more scrappy as a developer. Like Entropic or OpenAI doing something like that. You would actually need to mediate human AI collaboration, for example. All these kind of things would need to be solved and the bar is much, much higher. So I think that's true. and then broadly speaking just AI is getting so much better that one guy can create such a such a platform like super fast you know and can iterate on a daily basis like a couple years ago this would have needed to be like a team of developers probably and so I think that's the thing to not also underestimate just like how much more effective one person can be now and I think that's going to get like way crazier so I think we'll see a lot of that happening Buckle up Well we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us Yeah thanks for trying Congrats on all the progress Good to see you Let me tell you about Restream One live stream 30 plus destinations If you want to multi-stream Go to Restream.com Our next guest is anonymous It's Nick from X.com Obviously he's all over The internet He's in our YouTube chat often We've had back and forth with him I accused him of being an open AI hater.

1:35:29He said, hey, I got a balanced set of opinions. So I'm excited to talk to him today about his takes on AI, his takes on the vibes online, see where we agree, where we disagree. It'll be interesting. So let's bring him in from the Restream waiting room. Nick, what a beautiful profile picture. You look exactly like you do online. Good to have you on the show. Thanks for joining. Well, thanks for having me. We appreciate it. Thanks so much. But why don't you kick us off with an introduction and keep it as high level as you want, since you are anonymous. But anything we can tell about your philosophy or background or interests, all of that would just be helpful to set the table.

1:36:11Sure. Well, yeah, I actually got into AI around 2021 before Chad Dupit even released. Overnight success. Yeah, I was, you know, using their API, G3, you know, I've been their biggest fan from day one. Oh, okay, biggest fan. Yeah, I know. You know what I said? The narrative right. I love it. I love it. Yeah, I was, you know, fully following everything that's happening in this space and, you know, was really deluded myself with, you know, AGI coming in two weeks type of narrative and really going into, like, the possibilities, you know, expanding my mind there. when they released Dali. I don't know if you guys remember that.

1:36:54I was so hyped about it that I even made an Instagram page to curate all the best images that's been popping all around the internet until a point where I gained like 100k followers and then opened it and blocked me. They blocked me. They reported me. Villain arc. Joker mode. I was like, what? You know, all I'm doing is like, I'm trying to get access. Okay, okay. Here starts the steel man. I mean, were you hitting the API with anything that was violating TOS? Were you spamming the API? Were there any other reasons that they could be upset with your behavior? They banned him for cooking. You were just cooking?

1:37:39You can't even cook in this country anymore. Well, okay. They didn't block me from the API. Okay. But like I started like a community page for all the Dali posts on Instagram. Okay. And what actually happened was like, so I actually made a list on Twitter. All the people had access. Yeah. So what happened was like, so an open-end employee, you know, said, yeah, I made this with Dali. I was like, okay, cool. I take that. I post it on Instagram. And then what happens like open-end, I post the same thing like two hours later. So people started thinking like I'm actually the main page because I'm posting it before the official page.

1:38:16Confusing, okay. Yeah, but I actually wrote it like it's a community page. Okay, well, yeah, let's continue with your arc. AGI coming in two weeks. We all felt that in 2022 when ChatGPT launched. How have your timeline shifted? How AGI-pilled are you? How optimistic or doomer are you about the future? Like what's your overall philosophy on AI in the future? I think AI is like the greatest technology ever. I feel like post-2020 is a new era we're living in. And post-2026 is actually even a different era that we're entering into. I'm fully AGI-pilled. I'm Ray Kurzweil-pilled. I think AGI is coming probably.

1:39:02I think we're going to have really powerful systems by 2029, 2030. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, companies are following like different paths to get there. So that's pretty interesting to see. So you're using Dolly early. You're using the DaVinci 3.5 playground in OpenAI. What are you using currently? What are you daily driving for knowledge retrieval? Are you vibe coding? Are you doing agentic stuff? What's in your toolkit these days? Well, you know, if you read my bio, it says non-technical member of technical staff. So, you know, I don't do a lot of coding, but yeah, I did play around with, you know, Mobot.

1:39:49I love Claude code. This is the first time ever in my life that I'm, this year, I'm actually not using ChatGPT. So my daily driver is like Claude, Grok, and Kevin I. Okay. That's what I use. Interesting. Yeah. Give me some more flavor on when you go to Gemini, when you go to Grok, when you go to Claude. Sure. Grok is like, you know, amazing for Twitter retrieval. I think it's the best. Claude just has a really nice personality. Like I just like love talking to it. It like tells me like, hey, calm down. You know, don't always think that. Don't post it so over. I think we're going to be fine. Yeah.

1:40:31And Gemini, I think like Gemini is just like a scientific research assistant. I think it has, like, a really nice – it probably has, like, one of the best reasoning in my opinion. Sure. I like talking to it. Like, it's like a notebook. I just learned. It also feels really fast. I feel like the Google search, just like the speed is like – it feels like if I have to Google something, like, that's the good place to go. How are you so fast with headlines? Yeah, you're really fast. It's funny. I end up getting the news from you first, even though you're oftentimes sourcing from other stuff. Yeah, well, you know, the algorithm loves me.

1:41:15I think I have a connection with the algorithm. I'm one. You know, people love me as well. You got fans in the chat right now. Everyone loves you. Your whole research team is here, apparently. Really? Yeah, I think I just love to stay on top of these things. I'm really, really locked in. So when these reporters, they post a whole article, such a long article, and the only thing that they're to point out is two lines. So cut through the bullshit, go direct, put up the thing that matters. you kind of scoop the scoopers scoop the scoop yeah for sure how much money have you made from X oh yeah it varies but you can kind of pay me like a thousand bucks every two weeks or something like that sometimes it goes like two thousand it's not much but it's honest work it's honest work in the trenches Yeah.

1:42:20Then talk to me about last year. It feels like the narrative of the AI bubble started. There was a worry about the AI CapEx build out. People were taking two sides. Leopold Aschenbrenner, of course, is super long. And then there were voices that started, you know, raising questions about the backlog, how much this build out was going to cost, whether the growth could keep up, whether the models would keep improving, whether we were plateauing. What was your 2025 like? Well, the thing is like my 2024, well, I've been like pointing out like some absurdities of like what's happening. And, you know, I started like just doubting from the beginning, like, okay, we were supposed to get EGI by 2023.

1:43:06Where did that go? You know, I started questioning like, wait, what is actually happening? I started realizing like, you know the founder of you know Sam Altman was like I was like okay what's the agenda actually going it's like okay they might be like just raising money and cutting out competition like do I really want that um no he might be doing business he might be being a businessman yeah yeah I mean he's he's look look Sam Altman is just being you know what he's best at like being a really good star founder you know driving all the attention and engagement towards him you know either it's like through claims saying you know agi is going to be the most powerful technology and bad things that will happen and then he like leans towards you know doing those bad things uh so for example like i don't know he said social media we don't want to repeat the mistakes of social media and then you know they start making sora slop it's really good i don't dislike the technology it's like kind of like doubtful of the approach of what's being said in 2022, 2023, and then like 2024, we're entering like, hey, it's getting a little different.

1:44:14But about the bubble, yeah, I just started doubting like, you know, before they didn't have competition. So it was like, okay, they're going to make it. But then Elon started entering the chat. He entered the chat. So, you know, he just... Yeah, but with the bubble, I think it's fair to maybe question their ability to meet some of these kind of press release economy style commitments. But do you honestly think there's a world where the market has some intense correction and people stop using everyday people that are not on X, that don't know the infamous Nick, just stop using ChatGPT? um so the way i see it with like so i think like the bubble is not um precisely like ai is not a bubble but like the companies are bubbles um raise too much you overextend you know you're actually entering into a bubble territory the way i look at uh like chat gbt for example um if you look at all their projections of their numbers um it's all based on user account like how many users do we have so in 2025 in the beginning they said they're going to reach a billion users um by the end of the year um they actually stalled at like uh 800 million i don't even know if they reached 900 million um it's like six months they're not growing so if you just make a simple calculation is like okay if their user base which is you know getting mocked by google for her um if that starts declining and reaches like you know like a certain threshold all the projections fail um so yeah they definitely need growth to continue i do think that that that 800 number is a little stale at this point they haven't released the new numbers it feels like they might still be growing and just not doing the whole like they're saving it for like okay when we put out the billion number it's a big moment.

1:46:14But I mean, yeah, certainly it raises questions as you outlined. What was your read on ads in ChatGPT? Well, you know, I'm not a big fan of ads, but I am a big fan of ads from the business perspective. Sure. They're like, I love my name. We love ads here. Well, yeah, part of my, I think it was important, like in processing OpenAI to realize like it's, at some point you had to realize they are operating as a new big tech company. And so the decisions that they make, they're going to ship a lot of products. They're going to do a browser. They're going to try Sora. They're going to try a lot of stuff.

1:46:54Not all of it's going to work. But what matters is, is the core user base still growing? You could argue, I haven't seen anything that would point to them shrinking. But even deceleration is not great, obviously, at that scale. And so, yeah, you could kind of predict a lot of the things that they would do just by looking at them not as like a ASI company, but as a big technology company. Yeah, consumer tech. Yeah, sure. I just think like look at 4.0, for example. When 4.0 started launching, you know, Sam Altman said, you know, the movie Her and Scarlett Johnson, Her Voice, you know, it was marketed as like your lover.

1:47:35you know you're gonna fall in love with chat gpt your voice by the way it talks to you and what happened people actually fell in love people fell in love but then they shut it down eventually yeah well so so the thing is like the reason why they had like a such a fast growth in in users was because of like the image generation model and this part and now where we are they're really lacking in the image generation model and then okay but disney we got all the disney ip coming I'm super bullish on this for OpenAI. It just gives them a real, it gives them a feature that no one else can have for at least one year.

1:48:14And I think that when you look at Disney scale, look at how many people go to the parks every single year, how many people will pay to get something novel in an image model. I think that could be part of the next leg up. Sure. I mean, if IP rights hold, which I don't think they will, the world we're entering into. Sure, that's going to be fun. It's so over for IP rights. Yeah, it's over. I think it should be abolished in some sense, but in a very smart way where people should get some recognition or something. A pat on the back. Where do you want all this to go? I mean, the anonymous account is interesting because you have a lot of ability to talk openly about a bunch of different companies.

1:49:03Do you want to turn this into an analysis group, a commentary channel? Where do you see your work evolving? Look, I was never anonymous. I was always like, I had my face on it. People actually know who I am. Like, yeah, if you actually like, you know, I don't, you know, if you go back on my tweets, like I was just being me. like you know my you know i've lived in six countries and whatnot i've talked about my life it's all there i've never deleted anything um if anyone wants to go dig go for it but the thing is like um yeah i just like went anonymous to like just you know be attached from my identity and like be you know explorative to talk about things that i don't really understand but i want to understand and go for it so the best way to understand on the internet is to say something absurd and then be corrected so yeah you're just baiting smart yeah smart people to uh and i'm sure some well smart people are baiting us you know researchers are acting like marketers like agi two weeks you know so they're baiting us i'm baiting them and you know it's causing yeah i do have a funny update i like to check this every once in a while because of the disney the OpenAI deal.

1:50:19I went to ChatGPT. I invoked image generation. And I said, make an image of Spider-Man fighting Mickey Mouse. And it says, we're so sorry, but the image we created may... So it actually generated the image. It showed me a little preview. And then it took it away. Which is so crazy. It may violate our guardrails. You know, actually do the work and incur the cost. Totally. Read the prompt before. That's what I would think. But it actually generated the full image. And then it said... Even OpenAI doesn't read instructions. Similarity to third-party content. If you think we got it wrong, please retry or edit your prompt.

1:50:50And then I used to be able to do that in Nano Banana. I went over to Gemini and I said, make an image of Spider-Man fighting Mickey Mouse. And it said, I can't generate the image you requested right now due to concerns from third-party content providers. Please edit your prompt. And it didn't generate the image with Gemini. So it's been interesting to see that press release happen. Yeah, Brock Imagine will probably do it. Brock Imagine will do it. But in Jordan, they have an exclusive deal. You know, it's like moving fast. What are you hoping to spend most of your time on this year? Yeah, I just want to go all in into all of this.

1:51:27I don't mind doxing myself fully.

1:51:32Nvidia invited me to GTC as a full-time creator. I'm going to go into Jensen and whatnot. I think it's time for me to go 10x more and stop not just posting, but a lot of things I can talk about. Yeah, that'd be cool. Yeah, I mean, the Anon account, it does give you the ability to speak freely, but it does sort of flatten you. I mean, we were going back and forth on this where I was kind of like collapsing you down into just an open AI hater. And from talking to you, clearly there's a lot more going on there. But it's easy when I only see the viral posts and I don't know anything about the person behind it.

1:52:09It can become a little one-dimensional. So I'm excited for your new work. You have to give a little, Sam hasn't blocked you. Correct? No, but Chad, GPT has blocked me. Wait, what? For no reason. Like, I've never commented. No reason. I mean, you've got to give it some credit here. I think it would probably be whoever's managing the account logs in, and they're sick of seeing anything that happens. It's over. It's over. I can see whether. You've got to give some credit to Sam for not blocking you. What is your camera roll like? Is it all pictures of Sam Altman looking perplexed or something? Anyway.

1:52:48I like entertainment. I'm very tasteful with a lot of these things. So, yeah, I just know what's absurd, what hits, what's going to be funny. I just post what I feel like, and I go very analytically, but also I'm a feeler. So I know what's going to be. Very cool. Well, good to meet you, man. This is fun. Do you mind if we flashbang you? Throwing flashbang. Throwing flashbang. There we go. The chat did end it. It's been great having you on. Goodbye. See you soon, Nick. See you soon, Nick. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build.

1:53:31Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. We have our next guest joining in about five minutes. We've got to go through the Brian Armstrong story. So Byron Armstrong is in the Sunday edition, the exchange edition of the Wall Street Journal, going back and forth with Wall Street. They called him enemy number one on Wall Street. He's the crypto CEO. Of course, he's the CEO of Coinbase. He's been clashing with Jamie Dimon. So Brian Armstrong, CEO of the biggest U.S. crypto company, was having coffee with former— It's almost like they paid him to do that. Like he paid them to write that title. Yeah.

1:54:08Like that's getting framed. It is. I mean, that's what Toby Lookie said. This will look great in the frame. Of course, obviously, there's nuance here, and there's a battle, and there's some off-the-record comments that became on the record. But it's an interesting back and forth. So they were at Davos, at the World Economic Forum, and Brian Armstrong is having coffee with Tony Blair, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom. And JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon chimes in. He says, you're full of S. Blank, blank, blank. said diamond a long time crypto skeptic who's previously called bitcoin a fraud his index point his index finger pointed squarely in armstrong's face can i get a crown i can't i'm pointing over there he's like you're you're full of s-h-i-t um diamond in a nutshell told him to stop lying on tv according to people familiar with the conversation in appearances on business television programs earlier that week, Armstrong had accused banks of trying to sabotage legislation that would set a new regulatory framework for digital assets.

1:55:14The confrontation wasn't quite in line with the annual forum's mission to foster cooperation among global leaders. As crypto moves swiftly into the mainstream of American finance, some of Wall Street's heavyweights are waking up to the threats while banks have embraced some aspects of crypto, helping people to invest in Bitcoin and using digital assets to make money transfers more efficient. They are drawing a line at encroachment on their core business, consumer deposits. Armstrong is coming for them. Banks and Coinbase are at odds over, let me go to page five. We have it in the timeline, but it's so much nicer in paper.

1:55:51Whether crypto exchanges should be allowed to offer consumers regular payouts for holding digital tokens. So you got some USDC, are they going to pay you interest or not? That's the debate. These so-called rewards would pay holders of stable coins a recurring fee, say 3.5%, not bad. Stable coins are digital assets pegged to real world currency like dollars. Banks say the payouts are effectively the same as interest on the bank accounts. And since banks offer much less yields, typically under 0.1 % in a checking account, they worry that the upshot will be that consumers will shift their money in droves into crypto.

1:56:26That, they say, will compromise community banks and lending to businesses. Armstrong and others in the crypto world say the free market should reign and that banks can simply pay higher interest rates to compete with stable coins or get themselves into stable coin businesses themselves. Just join the party. The legislation known as the Clarity Act might shape the future of everyday financial services, including bank deposits and electronic payments. In the latest push to find compromise, the White House plans to host a meeting Monday between today, between banks and crypto industry groups, according to people familiar with the matter.

1:57:03So David Sachs will be there. Coinbase's head of policy, Carr Calvert, will be there. Armstrong, 43, co-founded Coinbase in 2012 and has helped lead crypto's quest for legitimacy and mainstream acceptance. at the head of the roughly$55 billion firm, Armstrong has a powerful voice in industry debates, such as the one playing out in Washington. Quote, we'd rather have no bill than a bad bill, he said on X in a post a day before the Senate committee was supposed to vote on a version that could effectively ban companies like Coinbase from offering yield to consumers, potentially costing it billions of dollars.

1:57:37Within hours, the vote was abruptly postponed, taking much of the financial world by surprise. There's a lot more here that we can dig into, but we do have our next guest in the Restream Waiting Room. Jordy, is there anything else that's kicking around in your brain? We need to have somebody on that is not from JPM or Coinbase to talk about this dynamic more. An independent voice. That would be a lot of fun. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And let's bring in our next guest from the Restream Waiting Room.

1:58:10We have David from Lexicon Branding. David, how are you doing? I'm doing great. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you. Is your 2026 off to a good start? It is. We're very busy. It looks like it. Walk us through who you are, what you do, and what's behind you. Okay. Okay. Well, I'm the president of Lexicon, Lexicon Branding. And we are in the business of developing brand names and naming systems for new companies and new technologies. And we do it really for people, our clients all over the world. We have an interesting process here that combines really a creative layer with an engineering layer.

1:58:50And that engineering layer is a combination of linguistics and cognitive science that puts more objectivity into both developing names and, importantly, selecting them. And the names behind me on the wall are names that every name on the wall has been invented by Lexicon. uh when is is the right time to meet a founder like six months before they start the company like when like what because i imagine a lot of these companies i i can see from i think some of them some of them come to you after they've started after they're already in market and they realize for some reason or another you know we need to we need a new name and then they come to you and then there's like some some constraints and it becomes harder you Walk us through the ideal process.

1:59:41Yeah, most people do not. You're absolutely right. They do not come to us six months before they really start the company. We suggest that they come to us as they approach that series a series. Oh, interesting. By that point, they really know who they are and where they're going for the most part. And so we can work with that information. Now, before that, you know, sometimes they land on a great name. I mean, this is something that you can get lucky. Not everybody needs a lexicon to come to work with. But most of the time, as you approach that Series A, is a good time to take a look at your name.

2:00:28And we do that consulting all the time where, hey, is it time for us to change our name? How do you handle the domain side? Because I talk to, I oftentimes, you know, Angel and like 60 some startups, maybe 70 at this point. And oftentimes they'll have what seems like a great name. and maybe there's no trademark issues with it. But for some reason or another, the dot-com is taken and they will just never get it, right? Because it's some hundred-year-old company and you just have to assume they've been operational for long enough. They maybe are public or privately held. Or it's like a super rich person that just is like squatting on it.

2:01:06So how do you navigate that? Because I feel like one part of the naming process that I appreciate is you have these incredible constraints already. It's not like an open canvas because you have trademark constraints, you have domain constraints, and then you have a bunch of other kind of like less clear constraints, but just like it has to make sense, right? And so in the naming process, you're trying to like kind of combine all of those into a short list of things, and then hopefully it has to like feel good and sound good and do all those other things. Well, the URL should be the least important constraint in this process.

2:01:43And we have research that we've done several years ago, And actually, just this morning, we're about to launch another study that I think is going to once again provide evidence that the URL is really no longer that important, really. I mean, the search is now up. Domain brokers hate this one simple trick, which is so funny. I mean, that's very, I mean, I can't wait to read the study because it's so counter to, I've always felt like domains, domains are the element of your branding that you have like the least amount of control over, but have an incredible impact. Everyone's seen like if you see a beautiful website and then the domain is something something try blank dot IO.

2:02:30It just screams like because there's so much subconscious branding and marketing that people are getting from every time I go to a big company's website, they have a dot com. It sort of trains people. But but what what's the data that shows that it doesn't really matter? I think that's probably, given what the two of you do, it's probably a little inside baseball because we're not finding that on the consumer end or the customer end. They're just looking at this as an address. The analog is a zip code. And actually, we found evidence that consumers like the idea of something that says, what is this?

2:03:11And look at the companies that have done well. you know lucid is a client of ours lucid motors they don't have lucid it's not lucid.com so i think it's less important uh for the consumer and the customer than it is to perhaps part of part of it for me is somebody that's helped name a number of companies and i just enjoy buying and finding and buying domains i've just always appreciated it is that i appreciate how hard it is to get a great domain. And so when a founder comes and is pitching me and they already have something great, it just shows like a level of agency and ability. Maybe they didn't know a great broker or maybe they didn't even use a broker, but they figured out how to get it.

2:03:53And so it kind of says something about them. But I agree, there's a lot of context where it totally doesn't matter. And if you look at the wall back there, almost every single one of those companies got to the point where they could buy whatever domain they wanted. So it's like just... At a certain point. I mean, the Microsoft Azure one is hilarious because Microsoft owns Azure.com but reroutes it to Azure.Microsoft.com because they want you at the top level domain. How has ChatGPT kind of made some clients kind of given them kind of the wrong lesson in branding? Because there's so much about that where like traditional, you know, if somebody came to you and they were like, I'm going to try to make a consumer product.

2:04:40I want to get to a billion users. If I don't get to a billion users, I'm going to fail. I'm going to call it ChatGPT. What do you think? You'd be like, you'd probably laugh them out of the room or say, well, you really need to work with me. Well, the interesting thing about that question is more than 50 % of our clients come to us having worked with Claude or ChatGPT to develop their names. And they work with it. They find it frustrating. that things just don't work together. There's no doubt those types of models can generate thousands of names, no question about it. What they can't do at this moment in time, that may change down the road, is apply the judgment and principles around this name is better than that name for you.

2:05:27Our philosophy is we're not in this business to create good names. We're in the business to create the right name, the right name that adds immediate value. and long-term value because this the name should be the one thing that stays with you through your whole journey and nothing will be used more often um or longer so it makes it very important and at this point in time a chat or a claw just isn't uh up to speed to do that kind of decision making uh walk us through the chapters of kind of even naming styles right because we're at an interesting moment right now. People are putting GPT on the name, on the end of things.

2:06:07People are saying the blank company of place, right? Like that's a whole new thing. I'm sure that triggers you. It started with the browser company of New York. Yeah, the browser company of New York. A bunch of people copied that. And my take on that was always, that was an amazing name one time because it signaled to insiders in Silicon Valley that it was just a novel kind of fresh take on the browser and it was the polar opposite of chrome or safari or some of these kind of like one word uh even though they did have a have a name for the product so and then you can think back like there was the era where like adding ly to the name to the end of something was was popular like what are the different chapters and like have uh i'm curious if like the great brands have always kind of gone against the mold right because uh and anyway so maybe extrapolate on that Yeah, sure.

2:06:58Well, look, one of the most persistent trends or chapters, as you call it, in the industry is imitation. So someone comes out with something that ends in L-Y and, hey, that's a good idea. Let's do so. Then you'll see four or five names out in the marketplace that end with L-Y. What's happening there is that that imitation doesn't generate the interest and the provocativeness that a really well put together brand name should be for people. So we always advise people, imitation is suicide. Your name should not look or act like anything that's out there in the marketplace. Yeah. How'd you get into this?

2:07:39What was the first brand name you did? Well, I came from the advertising business. So, you know, great agency, foot-down building. And I just saw as we worked on projects and company identity that naming was going to become more and more important as the world got more and more complex and more and more integrated. And so I took a flyer. And that's a simple, maybe boring story of how I got into this business. relative to the first name we ever generated it's it's a name that has long since disappeared i think it was for united technologies and we named a new furnace noise reduction technology called whisper what uh what what advice do you give companies that get to a scale where they have a brand name and then different product lines and maybe even kind of like sub companies.

2:08:41We're at this point right now where like look at a company like Claude has Anthropic, Claude, Claude Code. OpenAI has, you know, ChatGPT. They have the browser, which I'm even just blanking on the name of it. They have Codex. They have all - Codex Desktop App. Yeah, so - Different models in Codex. There's GPT 5.2, Codex. What framework do you get? Because I'm assuming you'll work with a company to name the parent company, and then you'll also work on the subproducts, and then in some cases the subproducts end up outshining the parent company. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have an expression here we call clarity is the language of leadership.

2:09:25And what you see in that example you just gave me, that there's really no story there. They don't have a common language. And so it's difficult for the audience, the consumers, to really understand what are they doing for me? What is this company about? It's a very choppy thing. So a lot of our business coming to us now over the past year and a half, and I think it's because of AI, is clients coming to us and asking us to help them, I'll use the term, straighten out their language and make it make sense. Creating a through line. Yeah. Yes. um what what else about uh these taxonomies i'm interested in like at the early stage series a how much are you trying to actually define a hierarchy of of product names and and what is the process of like working with you like is it you know there's like a specific sprint specific deadlines you're paying up front and you don't know what you're getting is there contingency like What is the workflow to work with a company?

2:10:31It's pretty straightforward. In many ways, this is really rocket science. But we start with a real simple work session where we're really asking clients four key questions. And this always works. It's how do you define winning? If we get 10 people in a room, we're going to get 10 different answers, but we can sort that out. Then we'll say, okay, if that's how you want to win, what do you have to win? that gives us things that the name doesn't have to. Then we say, okay, what do you need to win? What don't you have? That begins to give us information about how that name might help them, right? Because a name should be a tool.

2:11:12It should be a foundation for success. And then finally we say, okay, what do you have to say? Would you like to say? And between those four things, we call it a diamond, we can then set up what we call a framework or a creative framework. which we don't even use the word objectives because we want that analog holds true we want a window that we can travel through and do a lot of creative work that's where the process begins and then we work here you know small two-person creative teams and we have this what we call internally related engineering layer where we linguists we're using you know a company funded research on things like it sounds exotic but it's very fundamental sound symbolism letter structure and fluency.

2:12:00All those things then go into a funnel to help us select names. Makes sense. What is the key to avoiding botching a rebrand? We saw, like nowadays, products grow so quickly. We saw this with Clodbot, which if you paid attention to that, you would have seen like, okay, Anthropix is going to have issue with this. It's way too in the same category, sounds the exact same, very confusing to consumers. So he quickly rebranded it, then didn't like the rebrand, then rebranded it again. And fortunately, I think the product is exciting enough that the new name Open Claw hopefully sticks and continues. You know, the community just like keeps the momentum.

2:12:41But you're working with companies that are coming to you right when they're starting to get real traction. And they know they need to change their name, but they don't want to kind of destroy any brand equity that they've built up. Yeah. Well, I think the biggest factor is that they under-invest in the name change. And I don't mean necessarily investing with a lexicon or someone else. They don't sit and think through all the implications of doing this name change. first from a what's the message that we want to communicate because you do at some point have to say yesterday we were this and now today we're that and what is that message and then the second thing is lining up the reason the right the right law firm global language analysis all these things so you don't end up with something that's launched and then it turns out to mean you know your mother's a bank robber.

2:13:43Just not a fun day. Yeah, I mean, a good example you did is you did Trip Actions to Navon. Yeah. And that was an example. Trip Actions had a big brand, at least in the US, and they didn't want to be explicitly known, I imagine, as just a travel booking site. They had to go through that. I remember they really paired the rebrand. They paid you guys, worked with you guys, but then they also seemingly spent like five, $10 million in a short period of time to like reintroduce themselves. At least that was my impression as, as just as somebody in the target market. Yeah, they did a fantastic job. They really did.

2:14:21And that name is a coin solution. We made it up because the founder of the company having been, you might say, burned by trip action being so one dimensional. all so narrow said i want flexibility for the future and the best way to get flexibility is to make something up yeah so that means we'll never run out of names that's right we hope we hope uh i i i i have uh it's always been uh every single time i've been working with a startup or trying to try to name something you're sometimes you can just be hitting a wall where you're like i can't find for me it's like i can't find any domains in this space that i like everything's trademarked all this stuff and then and then there's always there's always a name uh you you might appreciate some of the history of tbpn we started as a show called technology brothers then we had an issue where everywhere we went people would say introducing the tech bros and we were like we knew this was our life's work and we were like i don't want to spend my whole life being introduced as the tech bros which was like the word that we were trying to avoid with the original name.

2:15:30And so I was like, I need a, I want like a four or five letter domain. It has to have TB in it. Uh, and we ended up part, part of TBPN. We're not a network. We, we, we look and sound like an ESPN or something like that. But our, the logic was like, if we name it like a network, even though we're a podcast or a live stream, uh, the comms departments for big tech companies will be more comfortable putting their, uh, leadership teams on our show because it looks and feels more like television, even if it is, at the end of the day, just 10 of us here in a studio making something that looks like television.

2:16:06Yeah. It does feel like you're a national network. Yeah. It is a mouthful, though. We're having to power through that. Yeah, yeah. Putting a P next to a B is always a choice. It's, you know, the real lexicon heads will probably not. It just inspires us to... I mean, last question for me, because there's some breaking news going on right now. But what do you think about a return to using surnames as company names? The Ford Motor Company, Walt Disney, the Disney Company. That felt like something that was just right there on the shelf for founders to pull off and revive. It's starting to happen, but do you think that that's something that might happen?

2:16:53It takes guts. It takes guts. Because you can't bet if you can't. There's Rigetti Computing. It's a quantum computing company, public. There are some people that have done it, but do you think that that was something that you would caution folks against or you would be in favor of? I would caution to really take a hard look at that. And it really depends on the person's personality, what the name is like. Is it easy to spell? Is it easy to say? The danger, of course, is something happens to the founder that is on board. Now you have to live with that. So I think it's worth discussion and evaluation.

2:17:30But I would probably push against it most of the time. How many clients do you work with a year? We'll do about 75 projects a year in the naming area. And then we have a research group here that does the quantitative research for us also. Very cool. and only some fraction of those are technology companies. I'm assuming a bunch of other industries will tap your expertise as well. Yeah, we try to keep a balance, but really 50, maybe 60 % of our work is in technology at this point in time, which I love it. Everything is technology. I love it. That's a good place to be. And it's fun. I mean, these are all amazing brands.

2:18:16The PowerBook, what a legend. We see the future every week. Yeah, that's the must be doing. And we talked to some of the smartest people that can imagine, as you guys will. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. Well, I've had a couple people text me during the show asking for an intro. So you have quite a lot of demand, I'm sure, more than you can fulfill. But we'll definitely send some people your way, and it was great to meet. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. My pleasure. Thanks so much for off time, David. We'll talk to you soon. tomorrow Cisco on February 3rd the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from NVIDIA OpenAI AWS and more to discuss the future of the AI economy the whole thing will be live streamed and we'll be there with the giga stream headed to the bay later today we have some breaking news first up Palantir beat earnings stock is up what is it up 6 % already after hours it's a$350 billion company and And this is the big one from Kalshi here, just in.

2:19:17SpaceX reportedly confirms XAI merger. Very exciting. This has hit the Bloomberg terminal as well. Elon Musk, SpaceX confirms merger with XAI and company memo. SpaceX confirms plans to merge with XAI before the IPO. We were talking about this and sort of predicting that this would happen. SATS is up 2 % after hours. I guess that's correlated there. What is that? They just go up. Anything happens in space that's good, it just goes up. SATs? What is SATs? I don't know. Isn't... I don't know. I thought that was... That's Echo Star. Oh, okay. Yeah, they hold SpaceX sock. That's right. Elon Musk plans to merge SpaceX with XAI in a deal that encompasses the billionaires' increasingly costly ambitions to dominate artificial intelligence, space exploration.

2:20:10The deal was announced in a memo. Bloomberg earlier reported on the discussion. SpaceX is planning an IPO that could raise as much as 50 billion and value the company at 1.5 trillion. It's also discussed a possible merger with Tesla. There's a couple other data points that we should share. On CallSheet, which AI company will have the best coding model at the end of 2026? XAI is at 9%. You don't hear that much about XAI, but that's higher than I thought. Anthropics leading at 54%, then OpenAI at 27%, then Google at 14%. Of course, this is in the benchmarks on LiveBench AI rated by coding average.

2:20:48Do with that what you will. But the real interesting data point about SpaceX is that, according to Reuters and Trent Griffin on X, SpaceX generated 8 million in EBITDA. So this is a typo. This is a typo. It's 8 billion. 8 billion. On EBITDA. Because I read this and I was like, whoa, that's not. Nothing, yeah. Because 8 million is pretty marginal. Yeah, no, it's like. And I was like, that is not, everyone's been applying. No, no, no, the correct number is 8 billion in profit on 15 billion to 16 billion in revenue. So 50 % margins for a space company is absolutely insane. A lot of that's coming from Starlink, obviously.

2:21:34Starlink is the main, Musk's satellite-based internet system, Starlink, is the main revenue driver, accounting for about 50 to 80 % of the total revenue. The rapid launch of 9 ,500 Starlink satellites since 2019 has made SpaceX the world's largest satellite operator with only over 9 million users of the broadband internet service. And of course, it's not just individuals that have a Starlink that they throw when they're camping. It's companies and boats and yachts and planes now there's a whole super bowl ad just about i think united airlines has a deal and so they want people to choose united because starlink is such a differentiator when you're getting on a long haul plane there's not much they'll get there's not that much you can differentiate on all the food is bad yeah everywhere yeah it's terrible all the planes are falling apart yeah you feel you don't really feel safe on any air i agree so one thing you could differentiate on is is if you can like if you get food in first class if you're allowed to bring it back yeah that would be a huge differentiator.

2:22:32TBPN JetBlue. They're moving slow on that front. And so they have to differentiate on Starlink. But I do think it will be a real differentiator. Like if you're choosing between American and New York, you're going from LA to New York and it's American or United and United has Starlink. That's a pretty big difference just to be able to properly use the internet. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowd strike secures AI and stops breaches. There's one more interview. Sorry, not interview, but context. Context. I'm from Jensen. We're going to pull this video up.

2:23:09Take him. He highlighted it. Let's pull it up, John. I cannot wait to see your reaction. Okay. I haven't seen this yet. High Yield Theory also says, if you bought the ex-bank debt and high yield bonds back at 13 % yields, you've now parlayed your way into being a creditor to the largest IPO, ever. What a journey. It is such a crazy journey. Anyway, let's play a Jensen clip. And this year, this year, you're the horse. So it's going to be a very good year. And this year, let's go. So it says that post is a, it says, it says that post is a joke. What about it is a joke? Is it AI? Is it fake? Did he actually say that?

2:23:52Did he say that a long time ago? No, no, no. It's the fire horse this year, right? Because take him as saying, Jensen is citing the year of the horse and you're bearish? I'm not a CIA body language expert, but look at the expression on his face. This post is a joke. Kind of. Yeah, kind of. I don't know. Yeah. No, Jensen is a bearish. I mean, we said this. We opened the year with this. We said year of the fire horse. Yeah. Massive. Also, I mean, he was seen chugging beers, drinking champagne, giving celebratory toast. He's on cloud nine. That was one of the better calls. Yeah, we're going to dig into that more.

2:24:26So XAI just filed this at the Nevada Secretary of State website managing members. They put a SpaceX person on the silver flume filings. Andrew Curran says, it's happening. Can confirm that the screenshot's real. Merger is effective. space exploration technologies corp is now the managing member of xai holdings LLC interesting it says PRINZ the x in space x stands for xai it is a weird weird timeline but it makes a lot of sense managing five companies has got to be exhausting and difficult managing two there's some economies of scale and now that you have the data centers in space thing and Starlink, it is a communications company after all.

2:25:21It makes a lot more sense. I don't know. And I'm not going to say we called it, but we certainly were talking, I mean, we started talking about this possibility at the end of last year. It felt like XAI didn't have the traction to keep just continuously raising at a$200 billion valuation when you looked at its financial performance relative to the rest of it. And so, and merging XAI into Tesla, it wasn't going to get a lot of, I think it would have gotten way too much pushback. Also, Tesla's obviously public, so it would have had more scrutiny. But I mean, if you just play out, even like the non-AGI vanilla case of the models sort of commoditize, everything gets, they get too near the frontier and maybe one is better than the other for one thing.

2:26:10But at the end of the day, it's like, you know, intelligence on tap, you're paying for tokens and SpaceX's tokens are cheaper because they're using solar and they're in orbit like there's a world where just on the pure economic well it sets up SpaceX to actually be a player and like AI cloud yeah like there I see a world where they're like yeah we're really good at building infrastructure we're gonna we're gonna build the infrastructure to power other people's apps yeah yeah so I would expect to see some type of like enterprise AI offering from SpaceX in the near future, even potentially before there's really data centers in space.

2:26:48A couple more posts. I love imagining the person who is just the longest tenured Twitter employee, who's just like, yeah, I'm here. I'm working at Twitter. And they're like, okay, now I work in an AI lab. Now I work at a rocket company. It's like such a funny twist in the career path. But congratulations to everyone who held on and is now working at SpaceX. A couple more reactions to Oracle. Matthew Zeitlin over at Heatmap says he's wearing the NVIDIA OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI shirt. And then Alex over at 8BC responded to Oracle's post and said, OMG, this is literally bank run language.

2:27:34It really does read like that. And so. I mean, the good thing is that it just feels like the fear about adoption falling off has not really come to pass. And so, like, people need tokens. They're deploying them more and more. More people are using LLMs more hours of the day. Everything's sort of, like, on track. Like, the fundamental technology is growing. And so would I be terrified of sitting on a data center that has the ability to inference just one of the many LLMs? Like, it doesn't seem like the worst scenario to be in. We looked at the gross margins. Seem good. Like, a lot of the health checks of the ecosystem have been passing, in my opinion.

2:28:22Yeah. Yeah, and Oracle is already, it's, I mean, they've already, it's down almost 50 % since the original announcement. It's already sort of corrected. I wonder what the CDS is doing, but that's for another deep dive. The other big story today. Yeah, it's actually down more than 50 % since the original announcement. Play that one one.

2:28:45Well, up next, we fortunately have somebody whose job is to make sure the demand is real. Yes. And so he is supporting the backlog. Tebow from OpenAI. The other breaking news that we should talk about before he hops on is Bob Iger at Disney. He has told associates that he plans to leave the CEO role before his contract expires. He said, I'm taking all the IP. I'm giving it to OpenAI and then I'm out. See ya. Iger told associates that he plans to step down as CEO and pull back from daily management before the December 31st end of his contract. Okay, so he's planning some summer moves. He's going to be in Europe, maybe.

2:29:29The Entertainment Giant's board of directors is planning to meet with him next week at its headquarters in Burbank, where they were expected to vote on who should take the top job. In private conversations over the last few months, Iger has told people close to him that he's ready to move on from the grind of being CEO and was frustrated by conflicts at Disney's ABC network over the brief suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, people who have spoken to him said. The CEO has told multiple associates that he would like to spend more of his time and energy on other things, such as sailing his new and larger super yacht, the Aquarius.

2:30:01Let's go. Somebody in the chat earlier was talking about the name of their new sailboat. Yeah, kind of come up with an innovative name if you're naming a boat. Hiring lexicon branding for your boat. You really should. Aquarius feels pretty like, you know, like Chattopudy could come up with that name, potentially. He said that he would also like to devote more time to work with his wife, Willow Bay, Dean of USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and on Angel FC, the women's soccer team they bought in 2024. The final timing of his departure from the top job hasn't been determined yet and could change.

2:30:35He's expected to remain CEO for several months. What you got? Regav, always one step ahead of us in the chat. Just shared, exclusive. OpenAI is unsatisfied with some NVIDIA chips and is looking for alternatives, sources say. So OpenAI comms team fires back. Okay. Somebody else in the chat was saying that Jensen is in his clip farming era. He really is. He saw a bunch of the kick streamers and he's like, I need to start doing this. Okay. Well, we will dig into that more. But until then, we have some massive news from Codex. Let's bring in our guest from the Restream waiting room. How are you doing?

2:31:15What's happening? Hello. Nice to be here. Excited to be here. Thanks for hopping on the show. Since this is the first time on your show, please introduce yourself and your role and then the announcement today. Yeah, sure. I'm Thibaut. I work here at OpenAI on Codex, together with an awesome team. I lead the entire Codex team. And yeah, today we launched the Codex app on Black OS, and it's a very capable thing. I think it's surprisingly capable. Yeah. Well, I mean, I downloaded it before the show. I had like five minutes and I was able to create a version of the TBPN website in the style of Berkshire Hathaway.

2:31:54It feels like sort of a Studio Ghibli moment for vibe coding in many ways. Like you can just spin stuff up. What are you excited about the desktop app specifically? Because we've seen like the whole multibot news, it interacts with your file system. But then there's also just a whole host of people that are loosely familiar with programming and maybe they're comfortable with the idea of programming. But at the same time when you tell them like hey set up an environment get a CLI get you know get your You know IDE set up. They're just like I don't want to spend the hour that it's gonna take me even to set up something As simple as the tools have become it's still too much.

2:32:30So what were the goals? What are you excited about for Codex on desktop? There are two things I'm like really excited about is like one it does make it much more accessible Yeah, you know you just install it you get going and it's like after you log in it's delightfully simple you're just greeted by this little composer you can start chatting with it and then it invites you to get things done but also it very much leans in into the way of working that we've seen from technical staff at OpenAI and our users and when you look at Peter for example with OpenClaw it's just like multitasking a lot and it's easy to lose context when you switch between your different terminals you don't have notifications and then you don't have like the whole multi-modality things if you're working with you know front ends images if you just want to use voice all of those things are like packed into the app oh wow yeah very much leaning in into like making people even more productive yeah i didn't even notice that the dictate buttons right there i was uploading screenshots and that was really effective peter was talking a lot about how he he tacks screenshots in and he just gives more visual information to the system um talk to me about the models that come out of the box how i should be thinking about model selection it sort of defaults to a 5.2 codex medium when would I want to switch and what are some of the different benefits yeah so we just get you started with the model that we feel is the best for most people and that's done like through extensive tests and internal evaluations and just feedback that we've got and like 5.2 codex that medium has this adaptive thinking so it's going to work fast on easy problems it's going to to work harder on things that actually deserve taking the time.

2:34:11It just feels like a good default thing to get started with. We also introduced personalities, and now you have two choices. You can go with a more friendly one, and then you can use a pragmatic one, which was the one that we had so far. A lot of people, surprisingly, even on the Codex team, have switched to the friendly one. It's just like, it's nice to be a little bit more supported and validated. But of course, we support the other important models, 5.2, which was a much bigger jump, I think, than people expected. And it's really also what we crafted the app and the experience around. 5.2 is, like, really excellent at long-running, you know, tasks, like, independently and getting it done to, like, a level of completion, you know, that you expect from, like, you know, senior technical staff.

2:34:57And that allows you to do a lot of multitasking. And, you know, that's really what the app is built around. You can handle different projects, different threads, all running together without losing context and efficiently managing a lot of things. And this is sort of like a glimpse into what the future is going to be like with agents. Yeah. I feel like a lot of people are going to come to the Codex app on desktop with a vague idea. You're going more prosumer, it feels like, with this in many ways. And I'm wondering how you think about planning versus implementation, walking through actually setting codecs up for success.

2:35:34Obviously, like the great programmers can just prompt better because they understand the hierarchy of files and what tools might be used. But for someone who's effectively non-technical, how do you think about the planning stage, giving the model enough to make good decisions and actually execute properly? Yeah, I think planning is effective in two ways. It is effective for the agent because it allows to be very specific about, you know, what you actually want the agent to go and do, you know, perhaps for many hours. But it also gets your own thoughts straight. And it sort of, like, invites to have, like, a conversation around, you know, what is it actually that you're trying to do, you know, when you're sitting behind?

2:36:18Like, sometimes you think, like, hey, you know, this is, like, a very simple instruction, right? You know, just go and refactor it and, you know, remove this part of the backend and, like, speed this part up. And then, you know, maybe there are actually, you don't realize there are, like, you know, five different ways, like, with different tradeoffs, you know, on how the agent could go and tackle this. And, like, planning just sort of, like, helps resolve that ambiguity. So I find it, like, a very useful thing just as a human, you know, to go through as a process. It's, like, a useful reminder of, like, hey, let's be crisp about, you know, what you actually want to do.

2:36:46But one thing that's also very important is, like, with the app and in general, like, we don't chop off, like, the top end of the capabilities, right? So it's, like, very important that, you know, people who are, like, extremely sophisticated can get, you know, the most incredible things done. And we're seeing a lot of adoption, actually, of the app, like, within research and, you know, it's fascinating walking through the office, like, seeing people, like, do the wildest things with this thing. It's, like, very much a very, it's a very capable tool. If I look at the release schedule, I see the ChatGPT app, which has a lot of functionality, then the Atlas browser, now Codex on desktop.

2:37:22Are IDEs dead, in your opinion? Are people just going to bring their own? Or do you think this grows into an IDE? Or is that like a separate environment based on what you're experiencing and the workflows that you're seeing with developers? Right now, it's a companion. It's a companion to the IDE. It very much can stand on its own, but is enhanced by using an IDE occasionally. Some people will prefer just being in their IDE, but it is quite evident to me that as agents just become extremely capable, you just want to talk to them, and they will get things done, and then what you want to do is you want to be able to steer them and supervise the result, and that requires something that is a very rich interaction surface, and that's what we're building with the app.

2:38:08How do you think about deployment I can imagine people vibe coding little apps that do things for them on their computers, or I had to build an HTML page that I just opened in Chrome and was able to just see. The next step is actually deploying it. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of tools that you could plug in with. How are you thinking about open ecosystem versus potentially offering some hosting functionality? Yeah, we love investing in the open ecosystem. That's something that I've been very proud of us doing. All our code is the majority of our code is open source. We also support a lot of other open source initiatives.

2:38:49And one of the things that we're leaning in is the open standard around skills. And we ship with a bunch of skills that are useful. For example, one is for Vercel deployments. And that allows you to just take what you've built and very quickly deploy it and have it accessible there and share it with others. It is not a native integration. We might consider that in the future. But it's already very easy to do things that are way beyond just writing code. Yeah, yeah. I mean, for a lot of people, even deploying to Vercel is going to be, oh, there's going to be, it's going to ask me for an API key or something.

2:39:23But if you're in a chat interface, it can go back and forth and you can just ask, okay, what does this mean? Where do I go? What's the web page? Where do I click? What do I copy? And all of a sudden, it's live. You don't need to read the docs anymore. You can just ask Codex to do it for you, and it will do it to a high degree of quality, especially given all the information that's packed in the skill. It sort of puts the guardrails on. Yeah. How are you thinking about funneling ChatGPT users to codecs on desktop? It feels like... You're going to buy some ads? No, but I mean, there are worlds where you fire off a GPT 5.2 prompt and it just writes code in the thinking step and you don't actually see the Python that it wrote and executed.

2:40:12And the next step is, okay, maybe I want to run this regularly. Maybe I want to wrap this in CLI or some desktop app. And I could imagine a flow where you're in the ChatGPT app and you get to the end of the capabilities there and says, hey, you should go over here. We have a more robust experience for you. Have you thought about that? I mean, obviously on day one, There's just going to be immense amount of just excitement and trial and virality. But long term, what are you thinking of integration between the different ecosystems? Yeah, I hope that with this launch, we do inspire a set of people who haven't tried Codex yet to try it and realize, hey, you know, I can really do really cool creative things with this.

2:40:52And, you know, maybe like coding agents is actually for me. What you explained around, you know, the first experience in ChatGPT and then you have, you know, the code interpreter workflow there, like where you don't actually need to understand the code or you use Canvas and, you know, you have this little bit of delight there and, you know, you realize, hey, ChatGPT can create things for me and like, you know, which image generation, like how do we combine that and sort of like bring the magic of like coding agents to everyone? That is definitely something that we're thinking about. There are considerations there around, you know, how you do this safely and securely given, you know, the folks wouldn't actually understand the code as running under the hood.

2:41:29So Codex for now is very much meant for, you know, a technical adjacent audience. But then we're also thinking like, hey, this thing is like incredibly powerful and the coding can help achieve all sorts of economically viable tasks. You don't need to understand that it's code under the hood, but, you know, how do we bring this to more people? Are you going to hang with Peter while he's in SF? We're close on Twitter and Peter is just everywhere. He's hosting this CloudCon for the first time, which I heard is over 500 participants already and stuff, so I might just drop by and say hi. That's amazing.

2:42:09That's so fast. Everything he does is fast. One of my big takeaways from the CloudBot, MaltBot, OpenClaw was just that mobile, the importance of mobile and people going on Telegram or Signal or WhatsApp and texting an interface that could write code for them, execute things and interface with some hardware. How are you thinking about the mobile experience to Codex? Like how the integration loops happens now that there's a desktop app, there's obviously the ChatGPT mobile app that has massive installation. What are the pros, cons? What are you excited about there? Yeah, we're very excited about the mobile experience.

2:42:50It's always been my dream of, you know, I can start a task. I can talk to Codex from anywhere and then I can just like walk away, follow on my phone and steer it. And this is definitely something that's going to come. We are very much optimizing, you know, for professional software engineers and people are like, you know, really excited about getting super productive. So we felt like bringing first an amazing experience on macOS, you know, felt like the right thing priorities wise. it is something that will come and I think will delight people when it's there. And this is also why we keep calling everything Codex.

2:43:24Codex is our agent. It is how you get things done. And then whether you interact through it via the CLI or in web or in the US, under the hood is the same agent. And we're going to connect it all at some point. Yeah. Is it time to buy an extra monitor? How many monitors do you run? Right now on my laptop, I only have one. Oh, the future's here. Which happens to be delightful. You can actually follow things much more, so you don't feel like the need to have five monitors. At home, I do have three. There you go. There you go. Not going to lie. Maybe that Dell, the 65-inch, 6K monitors in the future.

2:44:01We're very excited about that. Anyway, congratulations on the launch. Thank you so much for stopping by the show. Great to meet you. Great to meet you, and we'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Let me tell you about Vibe.co, where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. Where to go next? Dylan Abruscato said that Succession is a documentary because apparently the next CEO of Disney could be the theme park division chairman. I didn't get the reference. Have you seen?

2:44:39Do you get the reference from Succession? It's Tom who's running the park, right? Oh, Tom runs the parks department. Let me know. Let me know if I'm... I got to finally get through all of succession. But, oh, in other news, there's... I see this post that you're on. Bro spent$50 billion buying Bitcoin over the past five years and is now underwater. Talking about micro strategy. He didn't even mention who it is. And people just know that it's micro strategy. I mean, not a lot of people that are non-maybe state entities have bought this much Bitcoin. 712 ,000 bitcoins. Wow. Yeah. I think his, his, um, his average entry is in the eighties.

2:45:17Yeah. And where's Bitcoin is up today. It's 78 ,000, but obviously that's nowhere near where it was when it was up at one 20. So a significant, uh, a significant sell off. Um, but really, I have some extra context on the opening news. So, um, yeah, apparently, uh, opening, I've been talking with Cerebris and Grok to do custom chips. And then when Grok got bought by NVIDIA, it stopped the talks. I think it's just because they're too slow. You've seen Rune talk about this, where Codex is somewhat slower than Cloud Code or whatever. Even if the model's actually better, the experience can be worse sometimes.

2:45:55Yeah, no, no. I mean, the models can get better, but they're already really, really good. Most of the deep research reports that I get back are amazing. Mission accomplished. You did it. You did the research. You compiled it, and I got my information, but I had to wait 20 minutes. Cut that down to two minutes, and I'll probably use it 10 times as much, and I'll probably pay 10 times as much for that. Same thing with coding. There's so many memes about watching brain rot videos while you're waiting for codex or cloud code or whatever you're using to come back and answer you. Speed it up, and you're going to have a much faster adoption path.

2:46:33Chat has confirmed that it is Tom Wamsgans. There we go. Thank you. Ran the amusement park and cruise division. Then he got moved up to ATN News. Oh, okay. One more thing on the DAT side of things. Bitmine. This is Tom Lees. Yes. Former guest of the show. Has unrealized losses of$6.6 billion now on track to become the fifth largest documented principal trading loss in history, if sold. Of course, he's not selling. he remains bullish he's he's really testing his diamond hands uh it's at 66 percent of the size of our archegos it was bill yeah archegos that's right yeah uh bill bill wong's uh infamous hedge fund well we have christopher o'donnell from day ai in the rooster room waiting room we'll bring him into the tbp and ultra dome christopher how are you doing well unique uh very well yeah how are you guys?

2:47:28Thanks for having me on. Beautiful setup here. No one's ever done this before. Honestly, I feel like I'm watching an OpenAI launch video, but it is fantastic. It looks fantastic. We can get a little OCD, I guess. We were pumped for this. And so we've been in here teaching ourselves how to use lights and stuff like that. You know what I mean? Like ordering this shit on Amazon. I'm pumped for this. I had my favorite experience ever when I check X in the morning, I see a cool startup launching and I'm like, I'm like thinking like, I got to get, I got to get these guys on. And then you're, you were already on.

2:48:05So anyway, sorry. Uh, first time on the show, please introduce yourself, the company, tell us what you're building. Yeah. So Christopher O'Donnell, a long time listener, first time caller. Um, I led product, uh, led product at HubSpot for about 10 years and am now, uh, lucky enough to be with a group of a dozen or so of my closest friends doing a similar but also very different thing from scratch in the age of AI. You know, it's sort of, you know, what if we were to start from the very beginning and do everything in this, as you guys are constantly discussing, wildly evolving and radically different world?

2:48:43So that's the short story. So early product, market, how are you segmenting things? What's the key value prop? I mean, I'm sure there's AI, but take me a cut deeper. Yeah. I mean, I think looking at CRM, there's a funny thing, which is I feel like in everybody's head, everybody's expectations are wildly different for everything. And you guys talk about this and every vertical, our lives are changing so rapidly. And yet nobody's really expecting that to happen with CRM. Everybody's kind of like, but Salesforce isn't going anywhere. And it's like, hold on. There's a layer of it that is, well, we could eliminate the manual data entry and we could maybe better integrate with some other systems.

2:49:31And what we're seeing is there is a wildly different level of what's possible that really was the original promise of CRM. Like, hey, I'm a CEO. I have concerns about my business. I have existential questions. I want to know if this whole new cohort of sales reps that we hired two months ago is going to make it. I want to know what I can do, what deals I should be involved in. I want to know if I'm spending my time the right way. And you can actually get instant answers to that if you had the entire record of everything that had been said or done at the company instantly indexed and readable by an AI agent.

2:50:12That's the heart of what we're doing is ingesting everything and storing it in a way that is LLM optimized. So easy for it to explore this whole network of relationships, but also in natural language and with explanations about why everything is what it appears to be. We're seeing it's just a completely different set of use cases. So that's really interesting to navigate with customers. But everybody's starting to kind of go from, wait, what? to, of course, this is exactly the thing that we should have. What is the killer feature or experience that you're optimizing for? Somebody signs up, they sort of integrate whatever tools they need, and then what's the first moment that you're trying to get people to see the future?

2:51:05Yeah, I think the most obvious thing is a better version of the meeting recorders that we've come to rely on. You know, here's this thing. It's watching, it's taking notes. And I don't have to do that on the call because it's all being captured and recorded. And then from that, you know, I can ask questions about it. I can, you know, automatically have my deals moving based on what happened on the call. That's really great. If I want to write follow up emails, they're incredibly good. And the UI is just snapping and moving around as I go through this whole workflow. So that's kind of the entry-level magic trick that people see when they come in.

2:51:42Then there is this much deeper realization that, oh, wait a second, I can actually ask and understand anything that is happening in the business. And people get to that pretty quickly, within a week usually. Talk about bottom-up adoption versus top-down. Do you want to go for the big enterprise, have them rip out some massive system? or I remember using a product called Streak that just plugged into Gmail. I've also built a CRM with Visual Basic in Excel. Like you can start a CRM project just in a spreadsheet. How are you thinking about where you want to plug in and start getting traction? Yeah, yeah.

2:52:25Part of our crew built a bunch of Streak in addition to HubSpot. Yeah. It's a cool company. I enjoyed it at the time. It was very lightweight. You could just bolt it on, basically. Totally, totally. The adoption story, it's a great question. I've been working in CRM for, I don't even know what, 10, 15 years. Let's go. Thanks for your service. The march of history always seemed to be from the CEO toward the buyer with a big swing through rep productivity and these bottoms-up tools. And when I kind of moved from the rewrite of the HubSpot marketing product to do a startup within a startup in the sales tools that became HubSpot sales and CRM, that was the thesis.

2:53:12Like, we're going to go bottoms up. We're going to do what these other sales acceleration tools are doing. And that worked really well. And then, you know, marching toward the buyer being able to drive as much of the sales process as possible. I think that still exists. And I think that solving for frontline people is absolutely huge and giving them things they can come in, get started on day zero. Absolutely. No big top-down rollout. We're also seeing a little bit of a return to the CEO. And I spend a lot of my time – actually, I mean, I spend most of my time just demoing at this point other CEOs and showing them how I use it.

2:53:49Sure. That's the – because you can't really say it. I mean, we try in our marketing messaging and everything. Like, look at all these examples and everything. But if you see me use it, you go, oh, wait, OK, I got it. This is like this chief of staff that's watching everything and coaching me and giving me the data. And, you know, we're having it up at a board meeting. Pat Grady, who I know you guys had on recently, that was a great, great segment there. He had a tweet today about our last board meeting. And we just had the assistant up on the big screen. There was no deck. It's like I sent a big memo and I sent a memo and a context file so the board can ask questions and get instant answers.

2:54:29But we just had the assistant up on the screen the whole time. And there's no like, oh, that's a great question. Let me get my ops people to circle back. It's like, which changes things, man? It's going to be interesting. That's amazing. There's so many large software companies that are working to become AI native. The first step is obviously to say that you're AI native, put it on the website. But what are some of the, what are done? What are kind of the challenges having worked in big CRM of kind of evolving? Yeah, I mean, if you think about it from the perspective of the AI agent, and you really, you know, you switch from putting yourself in the user's perspective, and you put yourself in the perspective of Claude or one of these clients that is asking questions and calling tools and trying to solve problems for you, you actually want something pretty different.

2:55:26We had a customer connect their Claude to both HubSpot and Day AI and said, you know, what do you think? And Claude says, are you asking me which I prefer? And she's like, yeah, yeah, I'm asking, which of these do you like more? and Claude says, well, look, how do I explain this? This old CRM is like a spreadsheet. And this day AI thing is everything that I need to answer any question you have. I can find the answer. Like, let's go. What do you want to know? That's a very different approach that gets all the way down to disk. Like literally all the way down to how you are capturing and storing the data.

2:56:07Having worked on these systems and many versions of these over the years, it's a problem that starts at the very lowest parts of the stack to be able to give the agents this kind of information. I mean, we all know that Opus 4.5 with the right context window can do magical things. I mean, it's godlike. So the question is, how do you give it exactly the right piece? That's amazing. I don't think it's god. I don't think it's god. Godlike. It's godlike. Yeah, it's like a precursor to, like, we're definitely living in a simulation. We're getting close. It's like about to become the thing we think of as our creator.

2:56:47I think that's like fair to say. That's pretty wild. You raised some money. I want to talk about the deal. I want to kick off the Lambda lightning round. I want to bring down the mallet from the heavens so I can ring the gong for you. How much did you raise? We raised 20 million. Whoa.

2:57:07from uh sequoia and who else sequoia uh permanent capital conviction sound ventures and green oaks fantastic bunch of nobodies quite quite the group that's a fantastic crew well done congratulations and i'm sure you'll be back on the show soon we'll talk to you later i hope so we have a lot coming can't wait for it great to meet you Christopher, congrats to the whole team. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And up next, we have Jim from Shield. Welcome to the TVP in Ultradale.

2:57:51What's happening? Good to see you. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you here. Quick intro on yourself and what you're working on. Yeah, my name is Jim Siders. I'm the CEO of Shield Technology Partners, which is an IT services platform in cooperation with Thrive Holdings. We're bringing IT powered by AI to all these small and medium businesses all across America. Finally, we've been begging for this. No, we've been we've been excited. I've been begging for it, too. Like what took so long? I know. I know. Exactly. So you raised 100 million from Thrive today. When this has been in the works, though, for what, like 18 months?

2:58:31A little less than that. I mean, it's a long-term relationship, right? Like the whole company was founded in a partnership that included Thrive Holdings at the beginning, which is when I got involved kind of in the conversation long before I joined as CEO. And all the way through it, we've been thinking about how does holdings support with a strategic investment, this kind of thing, right? We're building this thing for the long term. So we want to make sure that we have the war chest necessary to do the right stuff now. Amazing. What do the early customer relationships actually look like? I know you're buying some existing companies, so you're inheriting customer base everywhere you go.

2:59:10I'm sure you're shedding some and then scaling from there. But what is the, in the most simple way, what does a business actually look like? What does the work look like today? Yeah, hopefully we're shedding as few as possible. I mean, the idea is we're buying quite good IT MSPs all over America who have successful customer bases, who have long term relationships with folks. folks, and we're leaving them in place. We're leaving those customers, we're leaving the people who founded the business, the engineers and technicians who built those relationships. Then we layer on AI and other proprietary stuff on top of it.

2:59:47The whole goal is that those customers are actually clamoring for more, not churning because their IT guy just got bought by a private equity firm or something. So far, to the direct answer to your question, that's been pretty much what we're hearing. We hear customers going, oh, I heard this thing happened. Can you bring some of these Thrive guys over here to talk? Can you bring some Shield guys over here to talk to us about what we can do with IT? We're curious about it and we've never had access. That's exactly the point. That's the whole thing we're going after. Makes a lot of sense. How are you thinking about the broader market and what companies in the small and medium-sized business categories are like most ripe for getting leverage out of AI.

3:00:33We've been tracking, you know, the, like the ramp AI adoption metrics, obviously every tech company has a bunch of subscriptions. Uh, and then you go down the list and it's who you think. And it's like the logging company hasn't adopted AI yet, but what do you think is underrated right now? Well, I mean, the logging company is a great place to start. I mean, this is on our side, there's a, there's a lot of companies in the real economy that would benefit from the same kind of things that's creating, you know, AI creating durable value for large enterprises, right? The same thing that should help Airbus or Rio Tinto or whatever should also help like a regional roofing company or a dentist office chain.

3:01:11So really the customer selectivity, that's not really where my emphasis is at this point. What I'm looking for is the IT service businesses that have built these really durable relationships where we get access to problem spaces that we haven't yet seen. in the real economy. Because there's going to be something that falls out of it, the lived experience of those IT technicians that we can use in the product motion. At least that's the thing. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Can you help me understand your thoughts on the customization of software? Are we going into, it feels like we're going into a world where more and more software will be custom.

3:01:50There's already big companies that, Palantir, Salesforce, these companies go in and they have a backbone. but then they're doing a lot of custom implementation. There's companies that you can hire that will build something completely bespoke for you, whether that's like a consulting group. But then typically, if you're buying a piece of SaaS off the shelf, they're not really doing anything for you, but it feels like now they can with a forward deployed salesperson, forward deployed engineer. How do you think about that trend? And like, here we have like a few vibe-coded custom systems that a small 10-person team a few years ago would definitely not have.

3:02:30I can't tell if we're just early adopters of technology or if this is the future. Well, there's a few ways I can answer that. First, I got to confess to a bias. I was a combination of first principles thinking and the forward deployed motion does yield differentiated results, right? You can see in that company's results that that's true and in their customers' results that that's true. I think the thing that lets your team benefit from vibe coding a thing that you wouldn't have had access to previously should benefit and can benefit a bunch of different ranges of businesses, right? And really the thing that's been holding anybody back from that is economic models more than anything, right?

3:03:13So like if I'm founding a SaaS company, my investors expect a certain kind of multiple, we expect a certain type of product motion and go to market motion that I have to develop a product from afar, find a customer for it. It has to be designed to be saleable, right? And so at that point, if it's not informed really, if you didn't get your product management motion really, really well right out of the gate, it's kind of good luck that it creates durable value for anybody. Whereas if you do this inside out development motion, We've seen, like I was saying, creates all this value in the large enterprises.

3:03:42You can find a way to get access to that same problem space, bring that caliber of engineer to the work face, to the mind face. The thesis is, my belief is, that it's going to actually produce the same type of differentiated results, which I think the crisp answer to your question is, yeah, I think customized software, like inside-out development, however you want to call it, forward, like we forward deploy ourselves to Vibe code things. I think that is the future, no question. How is traditional private equity kind of reacting to the shields of the world? Smart, very sophisticated financially, can raise plenty of money.

3:04:21They're well aware of AI. They think it's going to be important. You're coming in and you're competing to acquire businesses that might have landed with them historically. Historically, I'm imagining you have a very, a pretty exciting value proposition. The team has an amazing track record, incredibly tapped in, well capitalized. You're saying like, we wanna retain your whole team. We want to keep all of your customers happy. We wanna create more value here by growing the business and growing earnings through just like really expanding the customer base. So it seems really appealing to the seller of a company, a business owner, but of course, private equity is not going to just kind of roll over how they reacted.

3:05:07Well, I mean, anecdotally, it seems to me like they're trying to figure out how to get to this same type of goodness. I mean, I'm not in private equity, so I'm talking out of my wheelhouse. But I mean, one could see that with the amount of competition in the IT small and medium business space for roll-ups, just traditional private equity roll-ups, one would fear that the goodness is getting arped away somehow. At least that would be my fear if I was there. So you're looking for something to differentiate it. So then there's this kind of growing crop of like, what does an IT or like an AI roll-up thing look like?

3:05:42But everybody's kind of talking about it in a very different way, right? Which is, so one of the things that we're trying to do is not exactly do that. like we kind of rhyme with that in some ways. We rhyme with a roll-up in some ways, or we rhyme with a tech company in some ways. What we're trying to do is kind of take the best of breed of all of those mental models and do something a little bit different. So in our case, for example, one easy example of several, the relationship with Thrive Holdings gives me a lot longer time horizon, right? I can think about doing something that's really durable.

3:06:11Like if we're going to change, there's one thing to create disruption or take advantage of disruption. If we're going to really change a really entrenched business model like managed IT services, it's probably going to take a long time, even if we're outrageously successful, right? So having that kind of time horizon to work with gives me a way to address a different thing than any private equity or traditionally structured private equity role I would have to, which de facto is a good thing, I think. And I think the private equity folks that are paying attention probably see that also. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

3:06:48I want to hit the phone for a$100 million raise.

3:06:54Congratulations. Very, very cool. Thank you so much. Come back on if there's something in the news that you've got a strong opinion on. Come back on, or I'm sure you'll be back on for more fundraising. I'd love to. Thanks so much, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Up next, we have the king of enterprise software. We have Chris Black back on the show.

3:07:28Welcome to the stream. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on down to the TBP on Ultradome. Good to see you. How have you been? How's your 2026 going so far? So far, so good. I'm happy to be... I feel like I'm the I feel like I'm the Brokest guy that's ever Been on the show So I'm happy to be here I feel like it's gonna Rub off on me a little bit The voice alone Is worth 10 billion dollars Good I hope so Listen to these pipes It's amazing 2026's guy was I stayed out a lot later Than I wanted to Three nights in a row For Grammy celebrations Yeah yeah yeah Well we're shooting How Long Gone stuff But I was like The timing works out So why don't I just You know what I mean Why don't I stay weird How does it work For How Long Gone Will you stack We don't stack at all Oh okay We record on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, and the episodes come out the next day.

3:08:15So Jason edits it basically as soon as we finish, and then it goes up the next day. What's the status of the tour? We just do it sort of whenever. Like we kind of summer. We're going to do New York and LA probably. We just want to recalibrate it because it's fun, and we like doing it. But I wouldn't say it's a huge upside on the bottom line. Sure. Just based on our travel, quality of travel we demand into the bottom line profit.

3:08:45the the the the live show you prepared sort of a presentation it's more thought it's not just riffing right this actually yeah like last summer we prepared the how long gone guide to life which is like a pdf presentation that's cool and it worked it was fun and we did it like standing up yeah ted style yeah um but the riffing did you ever give it ted talk no i wish god imagine with the fucking mic. No, when you look at some TED Talk, you think of the TED Talk era in hindsight, there's so much opportunity to go back and just get yourself a TED Talk and deliver the most ridiculous. Because if you look through it, there's some, it ain't a list.

3:09:21No, well, so they had TEDx. People were farming TED. So TEDx was independent, so anyone could set one up. I didn't realize it was independent. Yes, yes, yes. They licensed their brand. They sort of licensed their brand, and anyone, so they would do like TEDx Boston University. And it would just be like a local kid that was like organizing and being like, come talk. And depending on how much they put into production, it could either look a lot like the TED stage or just like a couple of people in a conference room. Yeah. And those, yeah, no. And aesthetically those don't hit for the LinkedIn crowd.

3:09:53Yeah, no, no. And so I remember I went to one in Boston with a guy who created Android, who probably should be giving like a real Ted talk. That's kind of cool, but he was basically just getting a tech talk with a couple other people. Here's my thoughts on open source software, whatever. Uh, but it was just him filmed like three chairs in a conference room against the wall. So even if you see it and it says Ted X, you're like, that doesn't feel like a Ted talk, but certain places would put the red dot on the ground, give you the mic. You'd be walking around, have the cue cards and everything. I think it's wild.

3:10:23The best one I ever saw that appealed to me was Mark Ronson. Okay. He like broke down how like a beat is made basically for all these nerds. I could see their third eye expanding and it's like, Holy shit, this is actually so interesting and cool. Um, but most of those were not for me. I can't say I devoured the catalog on the YouTube, on the YouTube channel. I can't, I can't, I can't stick claim on that. Yeah. What were you devouring at the time? This was like 08 2010 era, mostly cocaine, but I guess there was, I guess there was some, I was probably, I was going out a lot. That was like New York era.

3:10:57I feel like that was honestly like music blog. That was a hype machine that I was more of like a stereo gum, Brooklyn vegan, like sort of like that, which is kind of back now. I mean, we went to the pitchfork party this weekend. It was one of the best parties at Grammy, but it was really fun. And I think that it's like, I don't know if you guys are up on the paywall discourse around pitchfork, but they basically put up a paywall and the the crux of it to my understanding is that you can basically you can rate albums famously the appeal of pitchfork is the numerical numerical score but sort of brutal right sometimes they'll give someone like a four out of ten yes but sometimes the oftentimes the score doesn't necessarily match the actual review but no one's going to read the actual you know what i mean only the heads read so it could be like a five but then you read it and it's like oh it's not that bad actually yeah there's a little bit of a disconnect sometimes yeah so they're giving people the option which i'm pretty bullish on because i think that everyone on the internet thinks they're an expert or critic and thinks they need to be heard it's like a letterbox yeah yeah totally and i think that there's plenty of rotten tomatoes has the tomato meter and metacritic has the audience there's plenty of like mouth-breathing music fans that think that they should be able to rate the my morning jacket record how they feel yeah you can't underestimate the passion of these civilians.

3:12:13You pay them, they send you a text file, you can write whatever you want about my morning jackets. They print it out. If you want 10 out of 10, we'll just show that right to you. It was a controversial idea, but I think it's actually quite smart. The critic part of it is still going to be there, so it doesn't dilute the overall, you know what I mean? It's just a little bit to me, but it's an elevated comment section in some ways, which is a scary thing to consider it in our world uh davos came back just this year it's sure is south by south they should have had you at davos for sure yeah we were yeah that's we're open to that davos is listening any hope for south by southwest making a comeback any other conferences southwest has actually done pretty well because they pivoted to like internet shit yeah it's not about it's not yeah bands playing sponsored by sparks at three in the afternoon now it's like a little more serious and there's a film aspect to it.

3:13:04Okay. I think it's just moved away from music a little bit. It's still a part of it, but it's more of an element instead of a focus. I'm just wondering if it comes back and they really play into the music thing. I just think that it's sort of, I mean, there's a possibility only because I think right now we're seeing a real swing back to like guitar music. Okay. Because, I mean, not only - Yeah, the guitar low-key fell off. Low-key fell off hard. Not even low-key, I would say high-key fell off. And I think the difference now that that's - Somebody was telling me, a buddy was at like a guitar center the other day and he sold out in hollywood no guitars left no no he said it was like every single guitar was like on a crazy sale that's probably like a q4 glut you know okay yeah i mean but i was like i just remember being a kid like wanting like like i yeah i played guitar like you know every single day growing up and all these guitars that like were just so out of reach now i'm now i i don't know i can see it it's the perfect analog like yeah i mean it's like anything else it's sort of like i mean music always goes in phases like that you know like not generationally but maybe like by decade i would say and i think the chart thing even though i hate to pay attention to it or like streaming numbers or whatever it's real you know like there hasn't been a hip-hop song in the top 10 or something for like it's an interesting thing that's happening and the geese of it all wait isn't sd kid top 10 i assume no no no no he's he's based on instagram reels on your algorithm i mean that's the thing there's no monoculture so it's sort of like you see to some extent but i think that the the geese is the big sort of thing that people are talking about because it's culturally so relevant sure and it's making people mad in a way that's like sort of exciting and people fucking hate it as much as tell me more of the story i mean geese is a band from new york that's put out a couple records they're really young and it's it's just really polarizing i mean it's like this guy cameron winter is the singer he's a like he put out a solo record he's a generational sort of talent sure it's sort of like a neil young tom york but they played snl and people were very mad like this is the worst shit i've ever seen yeah but they don't know they just didn't like the way it sounded yeah yeah look how they sound the whole you know del rey had a similar snl experience it happens because snl is i mean that's as middle of the road as you're gonna get yeah but but it seems like some of their content booking is like a little ahead of their curve they're they're usually i mean yeah they're good in general at at taking a few risks yeah every cardi b and Mumford & Sons, there's a geese that sort of like, they take a swing and that's what they're known for.

3:15:29I mean, we sound like boomers. I mean, I get called a boomer for watching SNL and I will take that. I deserve that lump. I think it's real. What happens to late night shows in general? I feel like they thrived when you had a monoculture. You had the whole world fixated on the same types of things. Now it's like, you turn it on and realistically to appeal to the broad enough audience, you gotta have it's impossible 20 night 20 20 shows that we're taking the place of and the internet sort of does that but i think it's i mean i think it as much as i have a respect for it would love to replace them in some ways uh i think it's sort of it we're at the end i mean i think that like celebrities need places to promote their projects and that is not going to go away but there's shit like this and that gets more eyeballs and is feels more relevant and i think that like you can go on Dax Shepard and it's going to do more for your movie or album or your book than it is to go on Stephen Colbert.

3:16:27That's just the reality. And it's like, I'm more concerned with the loss of the music performances. Cause I think NPR tiny desk is like corny, but I think there's, I spent a lot of time on YouTube watching like performances from the nineties, eighties, whatever. And I think that magic is what, but you can reconstitute that on the internet. I feel like you can, why don't you guys do that? I mean, we know we're trying to do it and we've talked about it a lot. And I think it's easy in theory. There's nothing that says that Dax Shepard can't open with a monologue, have three guests, and then a musical performance.

3:16:55Yeah, his musical performance would be Kid Rock. That's the problem. Okay, okay. But you do something different. But just the fact that it's an RSS feed and it's an hour-long show, it doesn't need to be. It can be for right. We've talked about this. I feel like you guys getting a space like this in New York, where it's full-time, dedicated, people are coming to you, will change. We gave this advice to some of our other buddies that have had a podcast for a really long time. We're like, dude, it's kind of a nightmare having to travel around and all, and constantly on the move. We only do audio, really.

3:17:27Yeah, yeah. And I think we've, I'm here, we branch out, we did like a year in review, and it did really well, so now we're going to try to do the, we have a studio in Burbank, and we shoot these sort of like weekend update talk soup style sort of like monthly wrap-ups, where it's us at the desk, we're talking about stuff, you see the image over our shoulder. Yeah, yeah, that's great. And I think that's what we want to do. Yeah, turn it into have a small live audience. It's fun. Have a stage that people can perform on. That's the idea. Start doing it live. And it's all about scheduling. But what we've learned from doing the podcast is audio only is that you just get access.

3:18:02Also, we're never in the same room. Oh, sure. It's all on Zoom. And I think it just allows a different... It gets looser. Totally. It feels much more protected. There's no hair and makeup. There's no need to send a car. There's no, there's no like pretense to it. Like you can do it in your hotel room, wherever you are, as long as you have wifi and headphones. And I, I, the same way we're sort of like anti-paywall and it's costing me a lot of money. It's a similar thing where like audio is the real medium. It's like all these new Netflix things. Like Pete Davidson having a talk show on Netflix is not a podcast.

3:18:32It's a talk show on Netflix. It's not first time. There's no audio. There's no RSS feed. It's not. Yeah. I mean, he's, they're doing a lot of the, I mean, they're, they're, they're showing podcasts that exist. Like shit from the ringer. but they're also launching these shows and paying these people a fucking fortune but it's it's just a show have you ever thought about selling out look i would love to sell out it just has to be on my like archaic i would love to sell out every day i want to sell extremely complex rider when i'm here i'm like this is how it's supposed to be done like this is such an operation yeah and i knew what i was getting into to an extent but being here i'm like oh this is what it requires yeah to do something on this level yeah and it's it's a lot you need a horse yeah you need something something Something about it.

3:19:13You need 10 guys eating airwons? That's a musical instrument. The guys told me how much the thing costs. I was like, I can't believe you guys spent that much. They're expensive. I actually knew that. There's something about that we appreciate. Some people would say it's monotonous, but I actually appreciate just waking up and going to work. Just making content at home. I think treating it like that and the way you guys have treated it and the way you've approached it is why it works. There's a level, and we feel the same way. It's like we do three shows a week, which is pretty psycho. Yeah. I mean, not like considering you're not in the same place.

3:19:47Jason edits and I book, we do it all ourselves. But I think that the, I think that once you lock into a system like that and people are looking for it and expecting it and you deliver on that, they stay with you. They won't. I mean, you guys are doing news and like, you're really covering like a breadth of industry. So it's different. There's like a value proposition of like information, which I think is much more than us talking about, you know, that's the culture yeah uh what what so uh grammys last night you've been in town hanging out yeah bumping shoulders with uh rubbing elbows yeah elite uh yeah what are the conversation outside of culture war and politics what are people talking about or like how much is like ai being discussed specifically in the music context i mean i think that musicians are mad about everything all the time, sort of, even the most successful ones.

3:20:38That's part of the personality makeup, I think, to be that. I mean, I think that fear is real. And I think every day there's a new story that there's some anonymous AI guy that just made$5 million streaming, you know, or whatever, through Spotify royalties. I mean, I think the real conversation that's being had or that I've seen a little bit of is people coming out and saying, no, no, I use it to help me edit or do this and it's sped up the process, you know, 10, 10 X. And I think it's like anything else, man. It's like, it's coming. How can you, how can you utilize it in a way that feels ethical and good to you?

3:21:11That doesn't compromise the art. And I think that's, that's the challenge everybody has. And I'm sure there's going to be people that are like, fuck that. I'm never doing that. And there's going to be people that adapt and there's going to be, you know, like a will.i.am type who takes it too far. And that, you know, there's a range, there's always a range of people that want to experiment, but I think that that, I think with music, there's ticket prices, there's, you know, royal streaming royalties. There's so many battles that they're fighting all the time that it's sort of, I almost feel like AI is kind of like, feels like it's in the distance a little bit, honestly, because there's things, I mean, it's, it's coming, but I think there's so many immediate things they're concerned with as far as sort of, you know, just like respect and money.

3:21:49Yeah. Is there, is there, uh, some sort of alliance between like reaction to streaming is you need a really strong live performance schedule the concert becomes more important creating like the taylor swift effect becomes more important it's almost what's so great well the real driver is is tiktok okay like if you have i mean i've had several friends that were relatively successful musicians in the aughts yeah have a song go viral and now they have a platinum record they bought an apartment they're on tour selling tickets that and you can't plan for that the labels can't manufacture that's sort of god's plan yeah yeah and or but like olivia dean who won best new artist last night people say she sounds like tj maxx i i like it i think it's a hit it's a hit song but the part of it is that it became a tick tock thing sure and it's like it's that good you need more things you know it has to be a a multitude of things kind of coming together to make it work yeah um but i think i think touring is just people i just wrote this in my gq column i wrote about the harry styles ticket price thing because people are really upset his tickets are expensive and everybody's tickets are fucking expensive.

3:22:53Second market? He's doing 30 days at Madison Square Garden. He's doing 30 nights at MSG. He's doing... And MSG is also historically the most expensive venue because of unions. And you think that with 30 days of supply... Well, that's the question. People are like, he's greedy. And I'm like, well, sure. I think there's some truth to that. But also, I think the discussion I'm more interested in having is like, what do you guys want? Because he can fight Ticketmaster like Pearl Jam. But he can also... The production that fans want costs a lot of money. Sure. When Harry Styles is on tour, he's got fucking 30 trucks.

3:23:28Yeah. It's a lot of, it's 300 people. It's a, you know, it's a moving circus. It's really big. Fire guy. And I think that the costs that go into it is sort of lost in the fan. But then from the fan side, they're like, this is untenable. Like, I can't pay this money. I have 10 bucks to sell. What's the cheapest ticket? I mean, in theory, it's$100,$200. But it's immediately reselling. That's the issue. But then that just proves that it doesn't really matter where he prices it, the demand will be there. That was my whole kind of thesis. So, yeah, you basically could just, it's like, look at the secondary price and then look at what he's charging.

3:23:59And, like, Greedy would just be charging the secondary price. We see this every, you know, look in cars and watches. Any category with way more demand than supply, manufacturers will just be like, wait, like, this GT3 RS is selling for, like, 50K over sticker? Like, okay, we're just going to do that at the dealer level now. Or secondary, like, look at AP. He moved up the retail on the Royal Oak just because there was enough demand. And it actually kind of normalizes the secondary market, but you're still paying the price. I just think if you need to place blame on someone, it's going to be the resellers, the bots, and the Ticketmaster.

3:24:38That makes sense. I don't necessarily think it's Harry. My point is it's not Harry Styles. And sure, maybe he could put his foot down and make a case, but we don't know the ins and outs of that, the difficulties of that, or how that would actually affect the product. You know what I mean? and that's the issue. So you think the solution is NFTs? Always. The solution to any problem is NFTs. That is for 100 % fact. What's going on? Give us an update. Just broad update on menswear. We don't talk about it. Oh, wow. We don't talk about it much. We obviously normally wear suits. I actually... I got the memo today.

3:25:11It's funny. I wore a suit to... Charlie had a party last night at Chateau Marmont and I wore a suit. Charlie XCX. And we had to record this morning our thing and we but jason have both usually wear suits and i text him like hey man maybe today can we not wear it regularly yeah i couldn't do it i feel like you're in the same boat um honestly it's getting a little more formal in a way that i think is really positive like it's sort of logo mania is over okay i think it's a little bit of like jonathan and dior showing ties like it's a little more sort of suiting i think and like stuff that i think is more flattering and generally easier to wear in a lot of ways.

3:25:47Like, I think, like, you guys can wear suits. You guys cannot wear, like, dumb Balenciaga or whatever. You know what I mean? Watch me. We've thought about it. You can do it if you want. I don't know who'd be successful. We had the John. John made this image. It was like a steal his look image. And he's like, in head-to-toe chrome. It was a$100 ,000 outfit. Chrome hearts hat. Chrome hearts belt. You guys can rock the chrome. Supreme with the Louis Vuitton. Then Bottega Veneto Roman weave jacket. What level of chrome? What is your own? How much Chrome knowledge do you two have? Zero. Okay. I know nothing.

3:26:17John had zero. I just know. I thought all of these brands were. Yeah. I found out that Balenciaga is like an old company. I thought it was like a new thing from like a couple of years ago. Hundreds of years. So when I moved to Malibu, I would always, I will be, I'll admit, I didn't know nothing about Chrome. And I love it. You have a G-Wagon, don't you? You don't know about Chrome? Yeah, yeah. Somehow. Somehow. It's kind of like, hey, I'm unique. I'm a special snowflake. I'm the only G-Wagon owner that doesn't know Chrome. So I moved to Malibu, and I'm like, why are all these kids? It's the younger generation.

3:26:55So Malibu, the owners of Chrome Hearts have lived in Malibu forever. The Starks of – they are Malibu. So they own the Surfrider now, which is also interesting. But I moved there. I'm like, why are all these 12-year-old kids running around wearing Chrome? Like, you live at the beach. Why are you wearing like this like black sweatshirt? It made no sense I was like lighten up a little bit because I just always associate the clothing with like kind of just emo darkness You got it wrong, bro. You need some chrome you guys need so the jeans we can get you some jeans Yeah, 15 ,000

3:27:32Levis but they put the leather cross patches so depending on the patch amount the price is going up So I would do something tasteful with all the chrome rivets and maybe a single patch. Just a one patch. You guys need hella patches. This is why I always said the top of the market cycle will be when a kid is standing YC demo day, where all the founders pitch it and he's got all just full chrome. That hasn't happened. No, I don't think it's happened yet. Wasn't there some CEO that was caught with a Chrome Hearts jacket? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's definitely been some people think they can be sneaky and be like, oh, yeah, I'm just a founder.

3:28:12I'm scrappy, and they're wearing the leather jacket without the logos, and people clock it. We know what you're doing. Yeah, I need to get you guys. Yeah, but as far as the menswear thing goes, everything's sort of calmed down, which I think is good. I mean, I literally started a brand at the end of last year that I've been working on for a couple years called Hanover, and it's been an interesting – someone who's worked periphery you know in fashion for 10 years 15 years doing your own thing is uh a whole different animal i will say but our our proposition is everything is really affordable it's all made in usa so it's like we're all we're making it in la um but it's really simple yeah i've been shocked because we make we make stuff uh we like we're this is something you know we made for turbo puffer one of our sponsors yeah there was not enough and comparing so yeah so Comparing the prices in China versus here, China is incredibly, they make great clothing that's inexpensive.

3:29:07But when we've gone kind of like line by line and looked at these different items, I'm like, okay, I can pay$70 for this, and it gets made here in LA, and it'll be done in three weeks, or I can deal with like months and months and months. It might come on a boat. It'll come on a boat, and it'll cost like$95. dollars it's not that for us for us there's like no question we want to make it here because we're not in the business of clothing yeah right so the margin is like less it's negligible yeah yeah but but still it's not it's not as like it's not like a 10x difference which i think a lot of people assume i think that i i mean i think that i came up in an era where that was important like main usa was important and i don't i don't necessarily think it's important per se but the idea of being able to do it was pretty compelling.

3:29:53Yeah. It's, it's, it's more enjoyable. That's why I've always thought people see the process. Yeah. And like the people that are like drop shippers being like, oh yeah, like e-com is so great. If you want to like live in Thailand, I'm like, have you ever made anything? Like, can you imagine like trying to iterate on like a physical product living in like some random place? I mean, that's the thing. That's, I think that's the thing that you're right. It's like, what's the, what's it worth? You know, my time and my effort and my stress level like what is it worth um but it's it's been fun so far and it's going well but i think it's just like a what's the what's the what's the strategy like doing collections it's quarterly yeah but it's basically i mean the start was t-shirts denim sweats and the denim did really well we're going to introduce another fit so it's it's sort of like you do stuff you see what works is that that 15 000 price point it's 15 000 price point actually it's currently a sub 300 everything which is pretty strong yeah we get 15 000 then you can buy something i love it uh we have to get to a flight of course i don't know if you want to plant the bomb jordy but i have one last question dream guests do you have dream guests we don't really have dream guests because it's very opportunistic it's like whoever's hot right now we want to talk to so we don't have a list but honestly i i always like to say i like to be surprised but after ben affleck has been on this press tour with matt damon for that new movie he's so smart he's so well spoken i would really like to talk to Ben Affleck?

3:31:13Hanover-USA.com. Go check it out. Give us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Bye everything. We will be live tomorrow from Cisco AI Summit. 11 a.m. Pacific Sharp. And goodbye. Thank you. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.