Something Mini is Coming, Anthropic's $20B Round, Ackman’s Meta Move | Bryan Johnson, Andrew Huberman, Matthew Zeitlin, Joon Sung Park, David Risher, Todd McKinnon, Alexander Ksendzovsky

26:48If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. Will OpenAI or Anthropic IPO first? As of late last year, it was sitting at 75 % of people on call. She thought that it would be OpenAI. Now it's flipped. It's flipped. Almost 70 % of people think that Anthropic will get out the door. It is narrowing. It is narrowing. But I expect these to kind of fluctuate just with the headlines. It's all red meat for Michael Grimes. I got so many text messages about his move back and being like it is the most bullish thing for late stage growth technologies that he's back at Morgan Stanley if you had any doubt that there will be major, major blockbuster IPOs it's Michael Grimes being back at Morgan Stanley very excited for that, really quickly Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses Teha over on X says I turned on Meta AI's auto reply for Facebook marketplace.

27:48I listed an item for$75. And when someone asked if it was available, the AI replied asking if they wanted it for free. It's elite. It's all just a bait tactic. So hold on. There's a community note. We got to dig in. It says meta AI only suggest one reply. So this is a typo in here. Only suggest one reply for every message of the listing. Then And you can edit or save it. This one is manually written by the user. So some fake news, but still funny. Yeah, I mean, Tejas responding. Te, I learned, do not trust community notes. This happened to me. No idea why the community note appeared. Meta AI only sends one message.

28:26I cannot edit it, but I can unsend it. Oh, Mars catalog. Stop talking trash about it publicly, and it might stop giving away your stuff. That's on you, buddy. That's on you. Rocco's Basilisk. This is Rocco's Basilisk. What's up with Warner Brothers? Where do we stand? Console.com first. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests. The situation intensified this week as Paramount CEO David Ellison and a vocal investor made new moves to thwart rival Netflix's planned takeover. The storied Hollywood asset in the home of Batman, Harry Potter, and the White Lotus.

29:07Paramount, the long-rebuffed suitor for Warner Brothers Discovery, enhanced its$77.9 billion all-cash offer for the entire company Tuesday in an effort to bring Warner to the negotiating table and ultimately abandon its deal with Netflix, also an all-cash transaction valued at$75 billion. Cleveland investor Ancora Holdings entered the fray by acquiring a small stake in Warner with an eye toward increasing its holdings and pressuring the company to negotiate with Paramount. I wonder if they're friends with the Ellisons. Paramount's gamble. Paramount is hoping its latest pitch can persuade Warner to ditch its agreement and sell its movie and TV studios and HBO Max streaming service to Netflix.

29:47Unlike Netflix, Paramount also intends to buy Warner Discovery's cable networks, which includes CNN, TVS, and Food Network. But Warner has so far shown little interest in engaging with Paramount, telling investors that Ellison's previous offer was not even comparable to the Netflix agreement. On Tuesday, Warner said its board will review Paramount's new offer, but isn't modifying its recommendation regarding its agreement with Netflix. The company advised shareholders to not take any action now regarding Paramount's amended tender offer. The bar for Warner to reopen talks with Paramount is very high, given its contract with Netflix.

30:22A massive termination fee. Paramount said it would pay the$2.8 billion. Let's give it up for the multi-billion dollar termination fees. I love those. Warner would owe Netflix should the agreed-to deal collapse and pay a ticking fee of 25 cents a share to Warner shareholders for each quarter its deal hasn't closed. Whoa. We got ticking fees. Ticking time bomb. Some stakeholders are holding out for Paramount to further boost its bid. I'm not surprised given that they've repeatedly said with their offers, this is not our best and final offer. Analysts from Raymond James wrote in a note to clients that many Warner Discovery shareholders still expect Paramount and its backers to raise its$30 a share bid by$2 to$3 a share.

31:04So everyone is waiting around saying, let's get those numbers up. And remind me of how Paramount is doing right now. They have UFC, correct? And the experience watching UFC was a downgrade from pay-per-view, but cheaper? What was the takeaway? way? Well, I mean, I don't think we can like give an analysis of Paramount as an entire business based on the experience was not as good as paying for the pay-per-view. And was that because you had to go through all the, you had to jump through all the hoops to sign up for Paramount Plus and you weren't already a member? No, the viewing experience was different because it's now subscription and ad supported, whereas previously pay-per-views had ads, but not nearly as much.

31:54So the thing you're missing now watching is like in-round commentary, walkouts, things that like hardcore fans really like. Is there less Joe Rogan commentary? Basically. Brutal. Brutal. That's extremely bad. Well, the market's reacting. Paramount's down 7 % today. That might be a good day. Of course, not just reacting to this analysis of the UFC viewing experience. Yes. but no, the stock dip was apparently in reaction to the breakup fee people being like, oh great, you're going to pay even more let me tell you about AppLove profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today so for now, Paramount's move Tuesday to Sweden's offer could push Netflix to increase its bid for Warner Paramount needs to test Netflix's pain threshold without having to bid too high The revised offer does exactly that without further constraining its balance sheet.

32:53For now, the ball is now with Netflix. Warner and Netflix are focusing on getting their deal approved by the Justice Department, as well as regulatory authorities in Europe. As part of its investigation, the DOJ is looking into whether Netflix has engaged in anti-competitive practices. Last week, President Trump reversed course and said in an interview with NBC News that he didn't think he should weigh in on the deal and would instead leave it to the Justice Department. I've decided I shouldn't be involved. The Justice Department will handle it, Trump said in the interview. He previously expressed concerns about the size and scale of a Netflix-Warner combination, saying the combined company would command significant market share, but he's clearly been watching YouTube.

33:32And he just says YouTube's too dominant, too many watch hours on YouTube. It's fine, let it rip. That talking point probably worked on him, we'll see. Paramount said Tuesday - That said we did, in talking to Ashley, what was it, on Tuesday? Ashley wasn't super excited about having basically one fewer buyer on the documentary side. But he said it was already so cooked that... Yeah, he was like, sorry. He was blackpilling hard. If you want some white pills, our newsletter, tbpn.com, has a list of AI white pills you may have missed. There's a number of them, so go check them out. Digging through the archive, finding...

34:09Basically, the vibes on the timeline have been miserable. Everyone's like, you know, fast takeoff, permanent underclass. Tyler Cosgrove is not blackpilling. He thinks that we're in the fast takeoff. There's been a lot of white pills. A lot of white pills. Recursive bio labs. That's a white pill. They hooked an AI agent up to a bio lab. That is a white pill. Yes. No, I agree. I agree. But I understand that a lot of people might see it as a black pill. Erica over on X posted that Eileen Gu to join Benchmark as a senior associate when she returns from the Olympics. She Photoshopped this. Of course, we did not put this out, but it's a good bit.

34:52Eileen competes for China in the Olympics, even though she's a U.S. citizen. And an American student. And an American student. Bill Gurley responded. I know a lot of Americans do this. I have a buddy who was able to go play ping pong in the Olympics because he had dual citizenship. He wasn't even a dual citizen. He just, like, his parents were from another country, so he was able to go be on that team. Because a lot of the other teams are way less competitive. So it's like, you wouldn't make the US team, but you want to play anyway, so you go with the other country. I think with Eileen, it's because the sponsorship dollars she can make by being a Chinese star.

35:29There's all these Chinese brands. I thought you couldn't get paid. She's a global star. You can just get paid? You can get a bunch of it. Not to compete in the Olympics, but broader endorsement deals. Yeah, you're on the Wheaties box. Getting a gold medal is like UBI, because you'll be able to do... You'll be turned into a LeBoo. potentially. Well, yeah, in this case, yeah, but Bill Gurley actually responded and said, I can't believe you actually found out about this. We were planning to keep it a secret, but he wrote it in Chinese. He's leaning in. He's leaning into the meme. Interesting. Turn post notifications on for when Delian responds.

36:03Gurley will be coming on the show. Yes, we're very excited to talk to you. When his new book drops, we've got copies. I have it over there. I don't know how embargoed it is, so I haven't been talking about it. So we're not going to share it with you yet. We're very excited. But moving on. We should talk about... Public. We should talk about Public. Public is investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. We got to talk about... Amazing ad that Leaf over at Public put together all about teaching kids the power of compound interest.

36:32A very different positioning from many other platforms. And it was all AI generated. He made it in like two seconds, I guess. but it was like still emotional because the idea hit me because I'm a father. But it was good stuff. Anyway. We've got to talk about Higgs field. Yes. We've had the founder of Higgs field on the show a couple of times. They've been accused of rage bait basically. Yes. I think that's what's more than, more than rage bait. But Rashi in Forbes has the daily cover story. Oh wow. All the racist videos and payment problems, the dark side of this AI startup's super fast growth.

37:12Influencer marketing has helped AI company Higgsfield hit$300 million in annual revenue run rate in just 11 months, but misleading marketing tactics and a social media strategy based on shock has led to backlash among creators. In late January, Tim Soret, a London-based video game director, received a message on a social media site from the marketing team at Higgsfield, a fast-growing AI generation startup. This is the biggest moment in Higgsfield history, and we want you to be a part of it, Red. The$1.3 billion startup whose tools are used by some 15 million creators and ad agencies to churn out 4.5 million video clips every day was about to launch a new tool called Vibe Motion, which uses AI models to convert text prompts into motion graphics.

37:54You like good vibes? You have motion? Use Vibe Motion. The offer of Sorit shared the startup's social media posts along with a video clip from pre-assembled marketing materials. The company would pay him$200. but Zorat who has spent years designing graphics both manually and with AI tools could tell something was off videos Higgsfield had shared with him lacked the visual quirks of AI he's like this is simply too good and he quickly realized that some clips in the media kit weren't generated with AI at all I said this was a huge alpha in just taking a cinema camera filming yourself and being like this is AI generated and I'm raising it's fraud but alpha that's not alpha don't do it But there was a moment.

38:34I mean, this happens a lot with open AI stuff where people will see a video and they'll be like, wow, they definitely have a new model. And it's like they also have a production budget. They can't just hire actors. Well, so when Sam Blonde launched Monaco yesterday, was his video AI? Because it looked – it was 50-50 for me. Yeah. Like there's definitely – I think you would just rip a direct camera. Oh, I know. You obviously could. Yeah. But clearly the models are good enough where you could, and it's kind of a funny thing if you're launching an AI company to show, I made this with AI. It's that good.

39:09It's good enough. Anyways, so this guy gets a media kit, says, hey, can you share some of these AI outputs? But he found out and said there were video templates that appear to have been lifted from a stock site in Vato in which the startup had pasted its own logos. While Sora didn't share the videos, others did circulating the stock video templates on X to promote Higgs field. Wow. All this hype is fake and it's bought. So it told Forbes Higgs field's co-founder and chief strategy officer Mahi told Forbes media kit was created by an employee in the startup's marketing team for ideation purposes and was inadvertently shared with creators saying the company's processes went haywire with its library of 400 presets of camera motions and visual effects.

39:53SF based Higgs field offers an easy way for creators and advertisers, to produce cinematic short videos through text-based prompts. You guys already know this. Mahi says, we fully admit that we push the envelope. We learn from what works on platforms like X, and very explicitly, it's more controversial content that gets attention. So that's translated into hockey stick revenue growth. Last month, the startup claimed it doubled its annualized revenue to$200 million in just two weeks, driven largely by subscriptions from its 300 ,000 paying users. Wow. By early February, its annual run rate crossed$300 million.

40:28CEO Alex told Forbes that he hopes to reach$1 billion by the end of the year. After raising$80 million from firms like Excel and Menlo in mid-January, the startup is now in talks to raise funding again. But that rapid growth appears to be driven by aggressive, shocking, and sometimes misleading marketing tactics. Anyways, they're moving very quickly. It was interesting when we asked Alex about his margins. He gave kind of a concerning response. He immediately was like... Yeah, well, when you're reselling a model, you are at risk there. At the same time, with a different business model, with a different customer acquisition flow, it's possible to have good margins on top of models if it's deeply embedded.

41:17but I've actually been getting served a whole bunch of Higgs Field SpawnCon or like how-to videos that are amazing. A lot of them are testaments to the power of the underlying models, like Nano Banana. I saw there's this cool video where this creator was talking about how hard it is to film yourself. Like, let's say you want to do one of those like cool, like I'm locked in videos, which I really enjoy. and you want the camera to be here, getting a profile shot of you, and then flip around, go behind you, over your shoulder, then spin around, show your face, then go inside the keyboard. That can be a really, really hard shot to get.

41:56You might need an automated camera or robot. You need a KUKA robot arm to do that move. MKBHD has one, but they're very, very expensive, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not every creator can afford one. And so he was basically showing this workflow where he will film himself on a tripod here, move the tripod, move the tripod, move the tripod, and then put in the start and end frames into Nano Banana Pro. And then it interpolates those and does the sweeping move. And because it's all in motion, there's motion blur, and it has two reference frames of like Geordi's side and then Geordi's back, it actually looks perfect.

42:33And it doesn't need to come up with as much imagination. So it delivers really well. And a lot of those have been sort of those like little like fun, like tools or like workflows have been promoted by influencers. And they'll say like, comment, and I'll send you the prompts, or I'll send you the workflow, or I'll break it down, or I have a course or something like that info products on top of these things. And I haven't really jumped in, but I've seen those and been like, I would love to make that video of me or my dog or whatever my car. It's It's a fun thing. And for the right person, that's going to actually work as a marketing ad or work as content for them.

43:11Really quickly, let me tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. Also, I've got to tell you about Eleven Reader because I used it this morning in the car to read or dictate the Wilmanitis essay. And I really enjoyed it. So shout out Eleven Reader. Can it do Will's voice yet? No. We should get Will to license his voice. We really should. Will, the author. I had the option to pick a few different voices. You can clone your own voice, but you can't clone someone else's yet because it makes you read certain text.

43:44So the iconic voice collection, it serves to you and says, do you want to do Michael Caine, who's a British icon, Burt Reynolds, the masculine iconic storyteller, Richard Feynman, Raw Genius, Sir Lawrence Olivier, and Dr. Maya Angelou. And I picked Burt Reynolds. the masculine iconic storyteller. So he led me. Here's maybe where Higsfield kind of crossed the line. Apparently they shared, they were sharing a Google drive folder with the creators that had popular children's characters like Shrek, Moana and Mickey Mouse saying, saying things that are on the show, but sound a little, a little racist.

44:27And then non-consensual deep fakes of public figures like Sidney Sweeney and Zendaya. and President Trump. So yeah, the challenge here is like companies like Higgs field are competing with these Chinese open source models that have no rules. They'll generate whatever you want. And clearly there's an insane amount of demand for video models that have no rules. Of course. And so this isn't surprising even though it's wrong. Yeah, it's, I mean, it goes back to the BitTorrent Napster analogy where like the demand for things that just can't be done legally is really, really high. And you can't view that as a business opportunity because, of course, you'll see really, really high demand for completely free music if you're not paying anything, right?

45:15You'll see really high demand for generate a Mickey Mouse character. The question is, the business question is, can you actually do the deal, license it, make sure all the stakeholders and all the legal parties are represented and happy with the deal and everyone's paying. if you're just throwing out free IP violation you're going to see huge demand but it's probably unsustainable so they did launch a program called Higgsfield Earn which was basically like a clipping thing you could make stuff, share it depending on how much engagement it got you'd earn some money that led to them getting banned from X where their account shut down I didn't realize that so yeah we'll see how this nets out Alex I'm sure will I would hope would adjust course he is they're clearly very talented at a lot of things but it sounds like they've been blurring the line I mean for what it's worth I still think I don't know how fast you would get steamrolled by the labs but I do think that there's an interesting opportunity right now for like a little bit of what CapCut's doing plus Nano Banana Sora stuff where you have a lot of video generation, but then you also have the ability to lay over just actual text, actual motion graphics.

46:35And if you pair up some of the more deterministic tools, like basically tool use, like how ChatGPT can also do a math problem in Python and be 100 % accurate, you could imagine if you want to just draw a rectangle on top of the video that you've generated or make it black and white. That's something that doesn't require a generative AI model. You can just call a tool that has the same functionality as Premiere Pro, and then it'll just do that. But you have to actually wire all that up, make it all work together, and maybe that's where this goes, and then I don't really know how defensible that is, but we'll see.

47:15Yeah, I was just going to say, you're kind of just describing a wrapper, right? Yeah, exactly. At least in the text field, it seems like rappers, at least of late, have not been... Yeah. People are much less bullish on rappers now than they were a year and a half ago. Yeah. Especially the huge problem... I don't know. SD kid. Pretty good. Yeah. I like that. 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. The other really hard thing about the video wrapper, the video app, is that many, many video producers, they start fresh every day.

47:57Like, when we edit DietTBPN, our 30-minute cut down of the show, the project is started from basically a clean slate. And so actually shifting from one software to another is really, really easy. I mean, you still have to learn the new tool. It has to be better. It has to have all the features. but it's not like, okay, well, there's all these networks of documents. There's a system of record. It's different if you're editing a movie over two years, you're probably not going to switch tools mid movie. But if you're a shorts editor, you can switch from CapCut to Instagram edits, like their video editing tool really quickly.

48:33You can go over to After Effects or Premiere and you can just be like, for this video, we're using this. Like this happens to us all the time. Like we'll have a video editor on the team who's like, oh yeah they use da vinci resolve and it's like it doesn't even matter to us because it's like it's like oh yeah they just use that and then they plug in and then they deliver a video file at the end they render it out anyway uh one more thing on hicksfield i would expect that disney comes after them too they're generating disney characters right now disney invested a billion dollars into open ai as part of this licensing deal one year exclusive there's they i would expect that pressure to come soon.

49:11Let's move over to Bill Ackman. But first, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Bill Ackman makes a big bet on Meta. Pershing Square disclosed a roughly$2 billion position in Meta. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman likes Mark Zuckerberg's chances in AI. Pershing Square revealed the stake at an annual meeting of one of its funds on Wednesday. The position amounted to 10 % of the firm's capital at the end of 2025, or roughly$2 billion based on past disclosures.

49:49Meta shares are down about 13 % over the past six months, a decline that Pershing Square attributes to investor concerns about the sums the company is spending on AI. Got backs. Pershing's thesis revolves in part around AI boosting Meta's content recommendation and personalized ads and potentially unlocking new opportunities and wearables or AI digital assistance for businesses. Keep reading. I'm going to pull up. Meta's business model is one of the clearest beneficiaries of AI integration, Pershing Square said in its presentation. Ackman tends to concentrate his stock portfolio in a small number of high conviction bets.

50:27He only had 13 different positions at the end of 2025, including other big tech companies, Alphabet and Amazon. What did you say? He just liked me for real. You co-tweeted this, right? Yeah. I mean, I didn't really add anything. I just posted a Jeremy Giffon. You created this post and you Photoshopped Jeremy's name on there because it was your idea. It came from you. What did Jeremy say? Yeah, I just want to give him credit. He said, the idea that it's hard to beat the market is mostly trotted out by money managers. What they really mean is that it's hard to do when you manage other people's money because it's difficult to get paid for doing the obvious thing.

51:03I think it's substantially easier than most people think for the person solely running their own cache. So Ackman is charging$2.20 to own the Mag7. You love to see it. But a lot of people don't have diamond hands. He will diamond hands for you by holding Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, apparently. 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. Speaking of meta, Ray-Ban maker Luxottica says it more than tripled meta AI glasses sales in 2025.

51:41Takeoff. The French-Italian iWear brand said it sold over 7 million AI glasses last year, up from 2 million that the company sold in 2023 and 2024 combined. Wait, so, sorry, say that number again. How many did they sell last year? 7 million devices last year. I think I'm starting to see them I mean Ashley Vance came on the show and was wearing them for fun but also for good content and he's going to actually include that content in the stuff that he makes it's a video maker's tool so it's a prosumer tool he of course had a whole bunch of other nice cameras here but that is another tool that you can't really replace he doesn't want a GoPro strapped to his head that doesn't make any sense then you have the extreme sports I'm going skiing in a couple weeks with a bunch of friends I'm sure I'll see a pair of the vanguards out there on the slopes.

52:28And then you just have the funny people on Instagram reels saying, computer, give this guy a great day. Like that comedy is great. Did you see that that guy ran into another creator that was doing this? Yelling at him? Yeah, yeah. Computer, computer, give this guy a bust-down AP, something like that. It was just like very, very funny. And every time I see one on a truly viral Instagram reel, I'm like, okay, there's something here that's unlocking a different form of video, not unlike when we saw the first GoPro go out and we started seeing truly crazy first-person video of surfing, which was just impossible.

53:07I would go scuba diving. Speaking of surfing, I went surfing with Rocco Basilisco, Rocco's Basilis, yes. The Luxottica exec and air who led the project with Meta. Yeah. He took out a new pair of the Oakleys. Yeah. And we did lose them briefly, but we recovered them. They need Meta croquis, right? Isn't that what they're called? Yeah. Didn't have croquis. Yeah, you need the Meta croquis. Let's get on that, Zuck. But anyways, Bloomberg reported that Meta and Luxottica were discussing doubling production to at least$20 million by the end of this year to meet current demand. I think they're going to be popular.

53:44They're selling. They're selling. Yeah. Give them credit. Give Zuck some credit. And again, I saw somebody had effectively jailbroken their Meta Ray-Bans, and they hooked it up to a Mac Mini, and they were buying stuff. I've talked about this at least once on the show. But again, it's funny to watch somebody jailbreak a device to do something that the device will obviously do in the relative near term. That's part of the entire thesis behind the device. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know. Will it actually tell you when you get an iMessage in the next three years? Is that coming? I don't know. It might not.

54:23Those wild gardens might hold for a while. Do you think the meta Ray-Bans will outsell sunglasses broadly? Or is the TAM sunglass buyers? Everyone has one pair of sunglasses, so you sell one pair of these to all the people? And some people just don't like sunglasses, so they don't wear them? Or are they TAM expanding in some way?

54:49they've got to be, that's a good question. Yeah, and I will give you, assume the next version, the version beyond that is like truly indistinguishable. Yeah, so my framework has been that. the immediate market of people, over a billion people that just wear glasses daily so that they can read feels extremely in reach, right? Because you're wearing this all day long. Why not add some functionality to it? Certainly there'll be some Luddites that just want the analog magic of just a pair of plastic with some glasses in it. But then, yeah, I don't know. I've never, it's funny, I love the way sunglasses look, but I've never been a sunglasses guy.

55:32I just don't. Really? I don't, I rarely, rarely wear them. I still once or twice a year will buy a pair because they look cool, and then I don't actually end up wearing them. I like sunglasses when it's bright out. I just like the functionality of them, but I do lose them constantly. Oh, you're one of those guys. Yeah, I'm a sunglass loser. But the question is, like, if you comp to the Apple Watch, like it feels like more people are wearing watches than before the Apple Watch because watches were sort of like a niche. You had to be into watches to wear one because everyone had the phone in their pocket and they were like, why do I need a watch?

56:11And then once the Apple Watch came out, a lot of people were like, well, I want a Super Watch on my wrist. I want a computer on my wrist. I want the iPhone 5. Bust down Apple Watch. I think we're onto something. They're doing orange. They're doing Hermes orange. They're selling very well in China. The bust down, they did the gold. It was$10 ,000. Do you remember this? And it flops, right? The Apple Watch Edition. It was$10 ,000. Gold plated, solid gold, something like that. I don't know if it flopped. They did discontinue it. But it... Getting roasted in the cat. I like sunglasses when it's bright out.

56:49Jordan doesn't like sunglasses when it's bright out. That's the hot tape. That's the bold statement. Heavy hitting analysis. But I like the idea of the bust-down Apple Watch. Get it at$100 ,000. The problem with the gold Apple Watch was that you buy this thing for$10 ,000, and it immediately loses all its value because it doesn't even run the latest software, and it just stops working after like five years, which is ridiculous. If you're spending$10 ,000 on a watch, you want it to be useful in 100 years. You want it to be around for a long time. Should we read through Jeremy's actual response?

57:24Oh, did he post again? Because I read his... Oh, okay, so he did talk about this. Really quickly, label box. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And yes, Jeremy says, responding to Ackman, charging$2.20 to own the Mag7. He owns Google, Amazon, and Meta. He says, this is good capital allocation, but it requires permanent capital. People don't actually want the best returns. They want to feel clever and do some weird little thing that makes them feel interesting or different or something. But sometimes you just got to do the obvious thing and just be really strong on it.

57:59I always admired those managers who have been paid$2 and$20 for like 40 years to just own Berkshire. It's awesome because they were right, and they were providing a service. The service is that the LP does not have the personal confidence to own Berkshire on their own. So they actually need to pay a huge premium for someone else to give them the confidence to own Berkshire. It's just a tax that they pay for not having the conviction to do it themselves. And I think that that's great and solves a real problem for a lot of people. I love it. Well said. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI.

58:30Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We got one more post before we bring in our first guest. What you got? We can pull this up. People are reacting to the men's luge doubles. They're saying it's one of the most baffling things I've ever watched. National champion speaker says, how do you find out you're good at this? What's the conversation look like? I really want to know. I didn't know this. Doubles is funny. I guess I may have seen this before. I remember as a kid watching singles. Yeah, yeah. But this is baffling. There's also something called skeleton.

59:09Like, what are you, what are you, I guess. I think it's an evolution. I think it starts with, like, a toboggan, and you have, like, a bunch of people, essentially in, like, a rowboat, you know, in, like, a long, like, if you're doing crew, you have, like, four or five people, and then you're just like, let's do one less. Let's do one less. Let's optimize and reduce weight. And then they're finally down to just two people. And they're basically just on this like sled together. And yeah, I guess you get here. But very, very funny. What else is going on in the Olympics? Personal injury attorney in his 50s is on the cusp of becoming the oldest American winter Olympian in history.

59:45All he needs is for one of his teammates to slip and fall. This guy is elite. Remember the last Olympics where there was that great meme that came out where it was like the one person with like all the gear and all this other stuff. And then the random guy, I think from Turkey who just showed up and was just like, and just like was, I think he won the gold or something. I don't know. That might've been too poetic, but modest proposals. It's incredible. I feel like being a personal injury attorney is probably a great gig if you're in one of these kind of fringe Olympic sports, you know, you want to have some flexibility in your schedule.

1:00:17You want to be able to make enough to reinvest into the sport. This guy is clearly This guy is amazing. Okay, so Rich Ruhonen is a 54-year-old personal injury attorney who plays an indispensable role for the U.S. curling team. He cooks the players' omelets before important matches and grills steaks after huge wins. He handles the early morning grocery shopping so they can sleep in. What a team player. He chauffeurs them around in a rental minivan. He even pays for some of their flights and hotel rooms. But those aren't his only jobs. He is also the most unlikely curler at the Milan Cortina Games, where he could become the oldest American athlete in Winter Olympics history.

1:00:57And just in case people don't believe that someone nearing retirement age could possibly be an Olympic athlete, Rahonen answers the question on a homemade t-shirt. I'm not the dad and I'm not the coach, he says. But he is an American curling legend. Ruhonen first appeared in the national champion tournament in 1998. He's been doing it for over 20 years, maybe. Won it a decade later and has been a fixture in the sport since long before any of his teammates were born. What he had never done was curl under the sport's brightest lights. Ruhonen just missed qualifying for the Olympics several times.

1:01:35His most recent heartbreak came before the 2020 Olympic Games when the US trials mixed in doubles. 2022. 2022, sorry. When the US trials mixed in mixed doubles came down to the last shot, Rahonen decided to focus on his law practice in the senior circuit. At 50, he finally gave up on his Olympic aspirations. I honestly thought it was over four years ago, he said. Well, I probably thought it was over eight years before that. Then he got an unexpected call. He's back. The captain for one of the nation's up-and-coming teams was battling a rare autoimmune disease and needed a substitute. On paper, the Gen Xer wasn't the most natural fit.

1:02:14The other curlers were all in their mid-20s, roughly the same age as Rahonen's children. He even has a few decades on Team USA's coach. A few decades. But on ice, he blended right in. So when Skip Danny Casper recovered from his illness and returned, Rahonen stuck around as the alternate. Team Casper then qualified for the Olympics and became Team USA. Ronan says throwing the rock at the Olympics would be the single greatest moment of his entire life. My kids know it and my wife knows it. I'm going to start using, I'm going to put on curling at home and just start using some of the hardcore terminology.

1:02:52Just be like, ah, I can't. You know that happened a couple decades ago because on CNBC, which all the hedge funds watch, after the market closed, they would just roll over to NBC coverage when the two companies were together. And they would show curling just because of the time change. That's what was on. And so all these Wall Street guys became obsessed with curling and got really into it and started playing some bets and stuff. It's a fun story. Yeah, I wonder how big is the gambling and sports betting around the Olympics? I don't know. I saw some numbers for the Super Bowl. It was really, really big.

1:03:24But you have to imagine that the Olympics is also huge. While you look that up, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector in full-text search, built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And our next guest is here, so we can come back to Olympics coverage after. But let's bring in Brian Johnson to the TBPN Ultradome. I will tell you about Vibe.co while he walks in. Where DTC companies, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. and you might be doing some advertising soon because there's a huge launch.

1:03:57How are you doing? Hey, I brought you guys a gift. Thank you. What'd you bring? Are we doing shots? We're doing shots. Amazing. Here we go. Amazing. Yeah. Have you done a shot of olive oil? I haven't. Take out our... I've never done a shot of olive oil. What are the benefits? Break it down. Why would I do this? I like olive oil on a steak. Yeah. Is olive oil a part of your life? Only in the cooking context. Yeah. But I should just be drinking it? I'm not doing shots yet. No? Yeah, what are the benefits? And what is this? Did you grow the olives? Is it cold-pressed? Wait, just this much? Should we not do a little bit more?

1:04:30No, no, no. No, no, no. This is live TV. 15 ml. This is live TV. Yeah, this is the precise still. 15 ml. 15 ml. One tablespoon. Okay. What is this going to do for you? I think it's the superfood of superfoods. Okay. Just like you look down the list of things it does. Okay. It's just good for almost everything. Okay. Is it high calorie? How many calories? 130 calories. Calories don't scare you, though. No, I mean, it's 15 % of my daily caloric intake. I consume more olive oil than any food. Yeah, how many shots is that roughly? So three tablespoons a day, 45 ml, three shots a day. Okay, wow. So one with every meal.

1:05:10One with every meal. Okay, well, cheers. Cheers. To Brian Johnson, the blueprint. Cheers. Down the hatch. Delicious. That is good. Smooth. Very smooth. No problem. I could do that. No bite. A little bit of bite. And so I just drank 15 milliliters of olive oil and I'm going to live forever now, right? Basically. So now I can go back to diet and nicotine steaks, right? Do you feel the sting now? A little bit. I do. Like a little cough bubbling up? Yeah. Yeah, perfect for broadcasting. Yeah. It's a good sign of a good olive oil. So we source this in both hemispheres. It's always fresh. So it comes off.

1:05:53Where more specifically? This is from Chili. And the brand is called Snake Oil. That's right. Very funny. How does this fit into the overall Blueprint empire at this point? The whole thing on Blueprint is we are trying to basically say what does the evidence say for what you can do to be healthy? And we just went after the best foods, the best therapies. and what I've found is basically most things don't work. Most things are bullshit. And so we've tried to narrow in to focus on the most narrow number of set of things to do and olive oil just stacks. It's like one of the very best things you can do in life.

1:06:31Is part of why this isn't pushed more aggressively by the sort of health industry is that it's just kind of hard to deliver. A lot of people don't want to just be consuming oil and that's kind of like the bit is that some people are selling pushing snake oil. Yeah, that's yeah. I mean, yes. I mean, people, I think, have a natural aversion to fat still. There was a long period of time where fat was bad. And you saw marketing 30 % less fat, 40 % less fat. So people think olive oil, fat, therefore bad. So there's like a hangover. Yeah, I had a buddy that had internalized that so much that he was on an almost entirely fat-free diet.

1:07:10He got his labs done. He had like low, his test was in the low hundreds. All he did was add like an extra avocado a day. That was the only thing he changed. And his tests like went up like by a pretty meaningful multiple. So walk me through, you know, average American might spend, I don't know,$10 ,000 a year on food. What does it look like to get in the blueprint ecosystem at that order of magnitude? Then what can people do at$100 ,000 a year? And then I want to hear about the million dollar a year all in plan. Well, we announced that today. So it's called Immortals. Immortals. A million dollars a year.

1:07:46Okay. And it's my exact protocol. It's your exact protocol. So my doctors, my concierge team, all the testing infrastructure. So blood work too. Everything. Every test, every therapy. And so it's, I mean, this has been really hard to build because it hasn't existed. So we just had to scour the evidence, build out the infrastructure globally. And this is basically when someone says. Getting no feedback. Let's turn that speaker off. Sorry. We're working on bringing the soundboard to life in the TBP and Ultradump. Sorry. Continue. Yeah. So the, I guess like if you look at it through different frames, like one is we measure probably around 250 to 300 things that kill me.

1:08:26That will kill you. That's a lot. Or actively kill you. That actively kill you. Everything in the gas station. Yes, basically. I mean, everything in the modern world. Yes. And so if you look at it from like don't die, okay, so what things actually cause you to die, and then if you look at it from the positive things of what makes you live, that list is probably like 250 things that kill you and 250 things that make you live well. And if you take on that burden as an individual to say, I want to do all of these things that make me, avoid things that make me die and do the things that do make me live well, that's like a Herculean task.

1:08:57So this program basically takes all of those things, makes it easy. So you just show up. It's like, what do I do? And the system tells you what to do. Yeah. What does the program look like more specifically? Like how is it? Does it start with blood work? So you're doing three people, right? Yeah, three thoughts. Three to start. What do their weeks, months, year look like? So we'll do first. It depends on who the person is. We have an interview process because the person needs to be willing to work. You can't just like show up and like give me a pill. You have to put in probably around like. I was promised immortality with a single shot.

1:09:34Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're telling me. That's why it's called snake oil. Yeah, you got the best. So we have an interview process. We'll make sure the person's willing to put in the work, that they've got a pain tolerance. They can like – they have to be willing to do stuff. Sometimes therapies hurt. Sometimes it hurts to be hungry. Sometimes like – so there's some discomfort. And then they – we'll choose the three people, and then we'll do a comprehensive baseline. So for me over the past five years, we are counting yesterday. We have a few billion data points on me over the past five years.

1:10:09And so then if you say, what of those few billion data points are usable? Probably a few hundred million. But still, we have a few hundred million data points. And so what we've done is, to date, I guess like years ago, that existed in spreadsheets and files. We've now set up an AI system where we take this, we take all the context, and now we have this inference engine to say like, what relationships can you find in all this data? And so what we're building is an AI, a Brian AI, that basically watches after you 24-7. So you start, you do a whole bunch of comprehensive baselines, where are you at in the world?

1:10:41And then we start doing targeted protocols, like how do you isolate cardiovascular health? And how do you look at, you know, so on and so forth? Then you're going to find issues as well where the person may have a surprise finding. How do you address that? They'll have some, you know, anomaly. So then we just get after it. We just say, like, how do you basically take the baseline measurements and make all of them better? Yeah. Do you want these people to be local? Can they be anywhere? Anywhere. Cool. Are they all over the world or U.S.-based? Is there advances? We're open. Open to everything.

1:11:08Okay, interesting. How are you thinking about AI? When I think about a product like snake oil, I think not a lot of AI disruption risk should not be sold off in this SaaSpocalypse. You're not going to vibe code an olive tree. The land exists. The tree exists. You have to select it, press it. There's probably a lot of people involved that there might be some automated ERP system at some point. But how are you thinking about the impacts of AI on your business, your life? I know that that's a big piece of the don't die philosophy is that we are going to go through a change. But how are you processing the most up-to-date advances in AI?

1:11:49Yeah, you're exactly right. This olive oil, we source from farmers all around the world that go through extensive screening. We test every single molecule that we manufacture. We third-party test. So they're all very manual processes. And then on the other side, we have AI where you take all the data, you do the inference engine, you try to find new insights that's never been found before. But we're this really weird mixture of like leading edge AI and like duct taped together of all the manual things. Like we'll go into someone's house, you measure for mold and toxins and water toxins and air toxins.

1:12:24And you look at materials in the house. So it's still very manual and automated. So it's kind of a cool world where we're insulated to some extent in terms of software. you just stand it up, you're very vulnerable to speed. Where this one, you're dealing the physical world constraints. You have to bring together all these different disciplines. Yeah. And there's also this interesting break in that if you want to measure the change in someone over a year and you want to do a year-long study, even if you have a million Einsteins in a data center, you have to wait a year to get those results. I'm sure there's more things that you can do, digging up historical data, all the data that you have.

1:12:56But there is just this natural break on progress when you have to wait for results and then feed that back in. 100%. Makes sense. You talked about testing. What are you finding in organic products? If something's organic, do you just automatically assume that it's not going to kill you? I assume it's worse than not organic. No, I'm serious. This is a junkyard dog theory. I'm vindicated. It's true. Honestly, organic only looks at a certain subset of toxins. It's not all toxins. And then it's a very limited screening protocol. So it's really a marketing tactic When we test organic, it typically performs worse than non-organic on many variables.

1:13:37So, no, I think it's worthless really as a marketing protocol. And I would say more broadly, I don't trust anyone. Literally, I don't trust marketing. I don't trust brands. Trust no one. I don't trust technicians. I don't trust practitioners. When we go out there, honestly, that's why this protocol is we've built it in such a meticulous fashion. We don't trust ourselves. Just trust the data. Do our protocol. See what it produces. But when I go out in the world, I'm just like, this is scary. Where do you get things like produce, things that aren't necessary? You're not going to add apples to the Blueprint website, right?

1:14:11If you want to eat an apple, what do you do? So there's no safe place. Brian Johnson, no safe place to eat an apple. No apple is safe. People identify like plant-based proteins have high toxins because they isolate that because you can test it. But if you eat a carrot, it can have the same, if not more, toxins. And so it's just that this fresh produce is not measured. So people freak out over what they can measure. But we've been testing fresh foods and packaged foods, and toxins are throughout. And so it's just a very skewed perception of where toxins are at. But I typically buy, we go a farmer's market, we'll do airwound, we'll do whole foods.

1:14:52When we test these fresh foods, so we do want to start growing our own. But even then, it's hard because you're in those foods. In L.A., it's a little rough. And even those systems themselves, like someone will try to get an escape route and say, like, well, I've got, you know, I have a cow and a pasture-fread, irrigated, whatever. Like, they can't escape the toxins within the environment. So it's just very, very hard to create an isolated non-toxic. So there's lots of toxins at risk out in the real world. Talk about other risks in the real world. Have you ever been frame-mogged?

1:15:25Sure people have tried. You know what? That is so good. We should put that on the list. That escaped our risk. For a million bucks, you've got to protect me from frame boggings. That's like the first thing that I want from a protocol. Yeah, what a blind spot we had. We should have picked that one up. Yes. How are you processing the Luxmaxing virality that's going on? It feels like very tangential in some ways. There's some overlap. I've seen the Luxmaxers say, don't worry about the macros or the micronutrients or the toxins. is that all that matters is how much protein you're getting because they have a very live fast, die young, but there's still some overlap in that they're trying to look good.

1:16:06We've talked about this before. Well, yeah, in many ways, I feel like you've been looks maxing. You wouldn't necessarily call it that, but you can just see every now and then a photo will go viral where it's like you every six months and people are like, wait, it's working. So in some ways, it's kind of marketing. There's a lot of work kind of under the surface that's contributing to that. But at the same time, it's very clear, like people want you to look better every month or they're going to say like, hey, can I really trust this guy? I mean, there's two things. One is I'm like you guys, your disposition towards advertising, you know, it's like yes and.

1:16:39Like if someone's out there doing their thing, you know, like more power to them. And like whatever their jam is, if they're doing looks macking, like, you know, do your art and be beautiful. That's great. And so, yeah, I'm very much a proponent of like, let humans be beautiful in their manifestation. Sure. Like we're basically, we're saying that, But we all realize something's happening in the world right now. It's big with AI. In some form or fashion, it's evolving the world. And our primary hypothesis is as this evolves, the major shift is humans are going to want life. If AI takes our jobs, if they take what we do, and we want to find new identity, there's going to be a major shift towards don't die.

1:17:18And it's going to become probably the most dominant ideology in the world very quickly because we're going to be pointing ourselves towards vibrancy. That is an interesting encapsulation because it does feel a little bit like the two paths meme with the dark castle and the bright palace in the sense that a lot of the looks maxers are saying they're black-pilled. They don't believe that there will be a future. So health actually takes a back seat to looks because that's what helps you get ahead this year, this month. And it's very short-termism, very short-term thinking. you've always framed it from day one around very long-term thinking so even though i think people might say oh well like he's trying to look good that guy's trying to look good they're similar there's actually a huge divergence in the philosophy at least it feels like that i don't know jordy what do you think uh i had another question please take it down so you have this you're starting with the ultra premium product the million dollars a year and i can see all the justification for that.

1:18:22I imagine you want to go more and more kind of like down market over time so that somebody, if they have a million dollars or a hundred thousand dollars or$10 ,000 or a thousand or a hundred can kind of benefit with the program. It feels like there would be an insane amount of demand for something like right today, a thousand dollar program, something that's effectively a PDF that somebody could pay for, download. And because they paid for it, we talked about this yesterday because Tai Lopez was in the news because of his whole like Radio Shack debacle. And I was saying I when I was probably 18 or 19, I paid for a PDF of a workout plan.

1:19:01And because I paid for it, I followed it really closely. And I got a lot more value for my money. Whereas I feel like for you, the second that you launch like a traditional info product, you will be attacked, even though even though I think that at$1 ,000, you could put something together that would provide somebody potentially tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, right? Just because in the health game, if you just buy a PDF and then that gets you to sleep an extra hour a night for the rest of your life, like the economic value creation or the money that you're not spending on hospital bills or things like that would be tremendous.

1:19:41Like, how are you thinking about that? Because I, again, like I think that there would be value there for me under paying, paying again for that thousand dollar product that I could just kind of follow and learn something from, uh, the value would be there, but how are you thinking about it? Yeah, that, that's exactly what we're doing. And so the, the target audience we're after is those who want to say yes to health and we say, do this. So we're not, if the, if you, if you want to go out and source your own peptides, inject yourself, you know, and like do your own protocol, like do that. We are going to deliver autonomous health.

1:20:18And so like there's self-driving cars, there's self-writing software, this is autonomous health. So we're building AI that just says, do this. And so do you remember early on when Facebook did that study where they said 300 likes on the platform and they could predict you better than your partner could? This was like the first time social media showed the power of prediction. And so there's an equivalent question for us is, well, how much data do we need on your body, like of blood, of wearables, of whatever, to predict you better than you can? And how do we stitch this together? So I think the free version is like some minimal viable amount of data that goes into our AI inference machine.

1:20:59And we then say, do this. And we can get higher yield than anything they could ever do themselves. and once that happens once you take away more you're like I'm never getting in with a human driver again it's a very clear so this would be the same thing where once you deal with the immortals the product you'd be like I'm in like definitely this is a better control system than anything I can produce. How are you thinking about wearables? Most of the people that come on the show will be rocking an Apple watch or maybe a whoop or an aura it's very very common at the same time it's missing visual it's not like pulling in And it's not like the health decisions that somebody makes every day can't always be picked up here.

1:21:40It'd be great to be like, okay, what did this person eat? What time did they actually go to bed? All these different things. What do you think the future of health wearables is? Yeah. So that's exactly, again, what we're building with these first three people and more immortals. Like if you say, so my life over the past five years has generated a few billion data points. A few hundred million are useful. that has created a dimensional representation of a human that has higher fidelity than anything ever produced in history. And so we've taken that model, we're going to replicate it with others, and so we're going to try to basically cast this gigantic net of data capture.

1:22:16We'll bring it all in and say, where's the highest signal inputs? And then we'll scale those things. And so, like you're saying, we may find that lighting at bedtime is an incredibly important factor. and right now people don't really think about that or the lighting environment in the room and you can't do specific photon counts. And so we're going to try to tease out where are the little teeny tiny things that have this gigantic yield but it's all about data collection, it's about the inference engine and it's about people who are willing to say yes, I'll follow the protocol because it's inherently better than what I would do myself where they're just guessing and then we'll have everything.

1:22:51Did you ever think about a program where an actual live human just follows around the person in the program and it's effectively there 24-7, kind of like effectively a nanny for the human because it's like, hey, you say you're doing everything right, but right before bed, you had a phone just blasting light in your face. It feels like that's kind of what you can get to with wearables over time. And you can probably get there today. But I think a lot of people, even if they do a program, will still be kind of sneaking little things in throughout the day that are working against them. And they even forget.

1:23:26They're like, I do everything you say. Like I, you know, I finished my fondom middle of the day, four hours before bed and blah, blah, blah. And I can't sleep. You're hiding bright lights before bedtime. Yeah, exactly. I can't sleep. Like, what do you do before bed? I'm in my bed, like, you know, scrolling TikTok. Okay, well, that could be the source. What's the current thinking on peptides? There's a variety of them. Simaglutide all the way down to RETA. What's the most up-to-date, like, evidence or benefits, costs that you've seen? I mean, generally, peptides are fantastic. They are drugs, drug equivalents.

1:23:59They're drug-like effect sizes. And some peptides have done the clinical work, like there's epitide and others. But then there's a whole bunch of other class of peptides that we have no human data on. Really? Yes. So the thing - That people are taking a lot of, right? A lot of, yeah. So we're going to get some human data. Is that currently RETA? Is that the one that's like not that true? I don't know about RETA, but - Or there's like even different ones that I'm not even thinking of. There's a lot, yeah. Okay, there's a lot. There's like a long tail of like all sorts of slightly different, and it's like one molecule change or something.

1:24:28And it's currently, I mean, it's all the rage. The Chinese peptide thing is a whole meme in San Francisco. It's a whole thing. Yeah. And so my take on this is if you do it, be cautious because we do not have them characterized. When you hear about a drug that does blood pressure control, you hear all the benefits, and then you hear, like in the commercial, you hear like this may cause death, or kidney damage, or you hear all the side effects. because it's been well characterized. So it's gone through clinical trials. You understand the pros and the cons, and you make that trade-off. With peptides, you don't know.

1:25:04It's like your bro buddy's like, it does this amazing thing, and it fits the plane. Yeah, but you're not getting the statement after the fact of like, hey, by the way, this could do this terrible thing. Yeah, so if you're doing it, proceed with caution because they're not characterized. We don't know. It's not to say they couldn't have benefits. It's that you don't know, and that's the worst thing in health is the blind spots. People want to chase the positives, but rarely adhere to like, you know, there could be some downsides to keep costly. Yeah. Wasn't that the name of Marty Mokery's book, Blind Spots, the new FDA commissioner?

1:25:34I'm pretty sure that's what he called it. Do you have confidence in the FDA right now? Do you have confidence in the FDA's ability to actually collect all the data and make good recommendations? Because there's some things where I totally agree with you. I'd much rather take the one that's gone through FDA trials, been approved. It tells me the downsides. But at the same time, people are like, but I also got all this sugar in my cereal for years. Did they sleep at the wheel back then? What's going on? Yeah, I'm guessing that we – like the FDA has a very valuable purpose in society. They do good work.

1:26:06I'm guessing – They stopped the literal snake oil, famously. Exactly. Yes, they did. Yeah. They've had a positive role. I think that we will exceed them in value in many core areas. Okay. Because they can take well-structured, well-funded clinical trials. But then other things like peptides that are very promising, they're not going to have the clinical work. So what do you do? So if we could get a certain number of people on the platform who are doing peptides, great. And if they can start adding dimensionality to their bio collection, we could have the most valuable data set. So it's Immortals is the product.

1:26:38That's the high end right now, but then also the free version we're building. And our goal is to create the world's largest data set across all these sectors. And then you basically can create an ecosystem where the person could be paid for their data. So they collect the data. They're starting through the experimentation. Companies come in and buy the data they give out. So we're trying to create this financially incentivized ecosystem where, like, in the world right now, you can't go anywhere without somebody or something trying to take advantage of you. Like, it's just everywhere. Like, try to think of a company that genuinely acts in your best interest.

1:27:12like unequivocally always shows up to act in your best interest. Diet Coke. It's always there when John needs it, except when the flight attendant says, how about Pepsi? Yeah, that's true. We're going to try to stand in that role where we're all so jaded because everyone's trying to take advantage of us. So we're going to try to stand in that role that you can unequivocally trust us. We will always act in your best interest. And if we do that, then I'm willing to share my data. I'm willing to engage in the platform and do the exploration. It's a high bar. I want to run through kind of a lightning round of questions.

1:27:45What have you learned from Ray Pete? There's a lot of Ray Peters on X. Yeah. And they really want you to follow their... Yeah, they do. They want you to Pete out? They do, yeah. So they're definitely evangelists. Ray Pete has a lot of evangelists. Carrots, underrated, overrated. Carrots are a great food. They're not benign. Like no food is benign. It has pros and cons. Thanks, Alex. What else have you got, Jordy? Where would you live if you weren't a public figure and you could just optimize for health? Yeah. Kate's here. Hey, Kate. Hey, Kate. Yeah. We were just having this conversation. She's from Australia.

1:28:27We were just having this conversation trying to figure that out. It's really an interesting question. Yeah. Yeah. LA is certainly not the place if you're purely optimizing for health. Yeah. That's very true. So it has been top of mind for us. And we are trying to figure out, if we did something next level, where would we go and how would we do it? I wouldn't have an answer yet. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's an important question. There's data on golf courses. I don't know if you've seen this. I have. If you live near a golf course, it reduces your life expectancy because they use such heavy pesticides on the golf course.

1:29:00How close to a golf course? There's one in my town. That's probably not great. These studies were done on people that live in a golf community. Oh, right. So like you're living on the golf course and they're basically, you know, golfers just want it to look pretty. They're not asking like, hey, what did you do to make it look so pretty? Yeah. How are you? What are your long-term kind of concerns around the health of us being in this studio? Rubber smell. Yeah, you smell it? Yes. So that is. I think it's these things. Honestly, I love that question so much. I would love it. And I've thought about it a lot.

1:29:36And I would love to work on this because I have an LED light right here. It's so bad. It's flashing in our head. I don't know about these lights. Maybe you can consult on our next video. We're moving soon. I would love to come in here and do a comprehensive analysis. Oh, my God. It would be so good. No, the air quality. I mean, we spend a lot of time in here. Yeah. And we plan to spend a lot of time. Brian's going to come back and say, you guys have 10. We're going to be like, 10 years? You're going to be like, 9, 8, 7. I mean, first of all, your CO2 levels for sure are too high. Sure. I can feel the CO2, right?

1:30:05Kate, do you fill the CO2? Yeah. It's a CO2 meter for sure. Yeah. So the space is too small. I have those in my, yeah, I have the meter in my house. I'll move around to the different rooms to kind of track it. And I've got a whole, like I've done a bunch of work to the HVAC system. And see, over a thousand is going to impair your thinking. Totally. Yes. So by the end of the stream. That's obvious from the stream. You watch it. You're like, these guys take some. I like sunglasses right out. what do you think how are you thinking about parasites there's tons of health influencers that will make parasites their whole thing and that like every the solution to every problem is like got to fix the parasites how are you thinking about them I've not done a deep dive into that I don't know these are people who have parasites and they're trying to get rid of them the argument is everyone has them some amount are probably helpful because they'll like eat heavy metals and then you'll eventually kind of release them, things like that.

1:31:05But you should do a deep dive on that. Do you think, how do you cycle supplements? Right now I'm taking L-theanine, glycine, and a number of other things before bed. It's been super effective at getting REM and deep sleep up for me. But I'm curious when you find a supplement that is working and it's like measured in my case, how should you cycle it? how do you think about cycling it to make sure that you continue to get the benefit? Yeah, this is one of the questions we're asking the inference engine is because we've done a whole bunch of these different cycles. And it's difficult because it's never truly a non-confounded experiment, right?

1:31:47There's always some confound. And so when you're trying to tease out little tiny signal, you do need to be robust about the analysis. So we don't know. We have some short-term data on that, but it's not strong enough that I think I'd express an opinion. So we're hopeful that the bigger data sets will give us insight. Same kind of question on fasting. I've started, I inverted the fasting schedule because we do the show. We'll have like a big breakfast at 8 a.m. We'll have, I'll have a second meal at around 2.30, and then I won't eat until the next day at 8 a.m. So typically somebody might start eating at 12, have another meal around dinner, and then wait until the next day.

1:32:25so I flipped it. Any learnings from that personally? The marker I would look for that probably is... And to be clear, part of the reason is I actually... There's a functional reason, which is the way that we do the show. I need to be like... Powered up. Fueled up to then podcast for three hours. Yeah. But then I also don't like having a big dinner and going to bed. Yeah. You guys work out in the morning together, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. 6.30. Yeah, 6.30, huge meal. A huge meal at 8. 8. 8 to 9. Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is fantastic. Lots more to talk about.

1:33:04Yeah, we can go all day. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Chooseability is built for flexibility and scale. With best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. And without further ado, we have Matthew Zeitlin, the correspondent from Heatmap News, in the Restream Waiting Room. Let's give it up for correspondence. I'll tell you about Figma while we wait for him. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. Apparently, Tyler tested the CO2.

1:33:38We're at 790. We're at 810 right now. 810. And rising. He caught us on a low day. It's going up. He said 1 ,000. He said it was good if it's under 1 ,000. I was told to see what it was at the end of the show. Okay, okay. because we will add more CO2 as the show goes on. Edge in the chat says, Jordy has three days in one. He's figured out how to manipulate time. You are manipulating time. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream Writing Room. Let's bring him into the TBP in Ultradome. How are you doing? Sorry to keep you waiting. What's happening? I'm doing great, guys. Any opportunity to follow up Brian Johnson is one I will take.

1:34:12It is a fun story. He was your opener. I mean, you've clearly been doing a lot of looks, Maxing. What's working for you? You know, I do have friends. Actually, John and I play a poker game with a Ray Peet acolyte. No way. I've been at least hearing about Peeting forever. I immediately resonated with the work of Ray Peet. I have followed a lot of it myself. I think it would absolutely astonish and scare Brian Johnson how much sugar I have. that that's kind of one of the main takeaways from ray pete's work is that sugar is is uh not nearly as bad as many people would say and may may be actually great in a lot of ways so i've been running that experiment we'll find out but it's great i have a two-year-old at home so i can't eat cookies around him you know i can't it's a it's you know then he starts asking for them and yeah it's getting in the way of my peating actually i had a friend who had had a He wound up just obsessed with dark chocolate because it was the only thing that was at all sweet that he could eat that the kids wouldn't immediately go for and consume all of.

1:35:20The explaining to my four-year-old why I can have cookies before bed, but he can't, is not going well. That's a tough one. Yeah, I'm still waiting for that level of cognitive development from my son. We're not really at the explaining stage yet. Yeah. Well, anyways, it's great. It's great to have you on the show. We've covered a bunch of your posts over the last six or 12 months and always enjoyed them. Why don't you give a quick intro on yourself and then we can talk about all the stuff that you talk about. Yeah, my name's Matt Zitlin. I'm a reporter at Heatmap. We're a climate and energy focused newsroom.

1:35:58We report on climate and energy every day. And I mostly write about energy policy, generation, a lot of data centers. We've kind of really reoriented what we're doing around data centers. That's where all the demand is coming from. When did that reorientation actually kick off? Because it felt like it became a story sort of mid last year. But have you been tracking it longer? Like when was the inflection point? So I think around like summer of 2023, I wrote a story about how just load growth was coming. That we essentially had flat electricity demand in the 21st century. And when I wrote the story, it was more about electrification of cars and home heating, heat pumps, stuff like that, stuff that climate people are really interested in.

1:36:46And data centers to some extent, also factories were something I was really looking into as a big electricity demand. And then, yeah, it was since the launch of GPT-3, it became pretty clear that data centers was where it was at as far as the load growth story was. Yeah. And then how widespread is the focus of AI data center energy consumption? Because it feels like if it's going up next to your house, you're going to be calling your representative. But for a lot of people, it's abstract. They maybe see an Instagram reel, some slop, and they're like, I don't like it, and I don't want my rates to go up.

1:37:23We've been kind of wrestling with this because in general, I think AI is very good. There's a lot to be excited about. I think that more intelligence, having people globally, being able to access intelligence, even if they're accessing a little bit of slop, is genuinely good. But at the same time, I understand the people that are just like, what's the benefit of having a data center in your backyard? It's like actually probably close to zero because or negative because it doesn't I don't need the data center in my backyard. It's not exactly pretty. We're not making them look like cathedrals yet.

1:37:59Maybe we should. And I can just if it's out somewhere that I've never even been to, I can still get all the benefit of it. And so. So, yeah, I think these are things that the whole industry is wrestling with. Politicians are wrestling with and for good reason. Yeah, I mean, so the way we kind of, I like to look at electricity prices. That's kind of a nice, solid thing to focus on. And obviously, they've been up in a lot of parts of the country. You know, you guys are in California. I grew up there. I hope you don't have a pool at home. You know, anything around heating or something like that, a pool or something like that, a disaster as far as prices go.

1:38:34But no, where we've seen electricity prices. So we need, you're saying we've got to replace the pools with data centers. Exactly, exactly. Exactly. You need a Blackwell rack. Or just a stack of Mac Minis. Of course. John can send you over a Mac Mini. But no, where we've seen electricity price increases, California has been a big one, and the Northeast have been big. Those are not areas with lots of data center development. I think it's in part because the prices are so high. Where we have seen both data center development and price increases has been kind of in the mid-Atlantic, Midwest areas.

1:39:08This is Virginia. This is Ohio. This is Indiana. This is areas where they're all in one electricity market called the PJM interconnection. And the way this market works is that these utilities have to procure capacity in advance. And that market, that capacity market and the ability to get new generation online there has been completely messed up. And so we're seeing these auctions generate billions of dollars of revenue for the existing generators. And that is translating pretty directly into higher prices. New Jersey has probably seen their residential prices increase, say, 20%. And that's because they're in a system that is not incorporating the data center demand that well.

1:39:51But there are other parts of the country where electricity prices haven't gone up as much. How have you been reacting to some of the big AI companies, some of the hyperscalers, start to put out statements saying that they will pay above market rates, subsidize energy? do you think that that's going to be effective? Can you just do that and then keep the prices stable? Also, a little bit of grid history here would be helpful because it feels very intuitive, but I believe like we sort of have a common carrier rule where even if I'm doing research and you're watching Netflix, like we still pay the same price.

1:40:27We don't put like a moral weight that I'm aware of, but any of that would be helpful. Yeah. So typically, you know, residential users pay the same kind of per kilowatt hour rate. Sometimes there's time of use differences, especially in a state like California. But to get to this point about, and then industrial users often pay as well. Those would be the data centers. What they mean when data centers say they're going to pay for their own electricity, it's not just like the literal electricity, the electrons they use, but when you bring on a gigawatt-sized data center, and that's like putting a whole city on.

1:41:01A gigawatt can power 800 ,000 homes. That's like putting a whole city on the grid. This requires a lot of upgrades to the whole system, a lot of new equipment you have to buy. And those typically system costs are spread out to everyone on the system. And this is how electricity, utility regulation, and pricing has worked for about 100 years. This guy, Samuel Insel, who worked for Thomas Edison in Chicago in, I think, the 20s, basically came up with a version of this idea. And so in theory, having new sources of demand over time should lower prices for everyone because you have a big electricity buyer that can deal with those kind of distributed system costs.

1:41:43But in the short run, they're incurring lots of new costs and new infrastructure development to the system as a whole. And so I think what the Microsoft has made a commitment to this and Anthropic yesterday did, And you can't do a utility rate case in a press release. But what they are committing to, I think, is that in their electricity rate that they pay, they want to get all of those extra system costs that they're incurring to just be onto them. What about the other stories and pushback to data center build out? How did you process the whole water risk hype cycle? It feels like there was a lot of fear and then there were some more statements from Google, some studies.

1:42:31How has your community and you personally processed that narrative? Yeah, so this water issue is, I think, kind of a surprise for a journalist covering this space. It is definitely something that people, especially people online, are really interested in. you know it's actually pretty easy to track how data centers can affect electricity prices how data centers can affect water usage in any kind of systemic sense it doesn't really show up that much the water usage isn't that great but it's definitely something but the numbers sound great the numbers sound great we're using a hundred million gallons less than a local golf course well golf courses are extreme but you know household usage of water is huge And if people, individual households use their water over a year sounds really, really big.

1:43:23I think there's some issues around construction and water usage, but those are obviously more temporary. Sure. Yeah, but it's definitely something that people are concerned about. And so I think these hyperscalers are really going out of their way to kind of talk about being water positive. They're really kind of leaning in on the water aspect. But I think the electricity aspect is much more where the rubber meets the road. Totally. And they have to make some commitment. But, you know, one gigawatt data center, people think it costs about$50 billion,$50 billion-ish. Obviously, the vast, vast majority of that is the chips.

1:43:52But, you know, 10 % to 15 % of the lifetime cost of that is electricity. And you're paying all these extra grid costs. That means with, like, one of these really, really big data centers that all these companies are rolling out now, they're volunteering to incur what could be hundreds of millions, if not billions, of quote-unquote extra costs. But that just might be the price they have to pay to get approval from the state governments to build these facilities. Who have been some of the craziest beneficiaries of the general energy, the boom in sort of energy demand due to AI? Anybody that was just kind of like sitting around a few years ago and then, you know, just kind of like tripped into making like$100 million or a billion dollars due to having proof.

1:44:38Yeah, I mean, there's two great examples of this that are kind of on the opposite ends of kind of technological sophistication. One is Caterpillar, which we obviously associate with mining and construction. You know, anyone, I think, with boys at home probably has some Caterpillar toys. They probably identify all the equipment they use. But they also have a business called Solar, which builds these kind of small turbines, small gas turbines. You know, a big gas turbine in a power plant is, you know, hundreds of megawatts of capacity. These are a few dozen maybe at the biggest. And they're kind of used for like remote power start, often in the oil and gas industry or like, you know, compress on a turbine pipeline or something.

1:45:18This business has gone huge. And they're now a huge supplier to data centers because they're so desperate for power. I mean, Elon Musk, XAI is a big innovator here of realizing that grid connection studies can last for years. But if you just kind of pile up these small, inefficient turbines, you can get the power going really, really quickly. Caterpillar is a big supplier to Meta in Ohio. The Socrates project, I think, is a few hundred megawatts. And Williams, which is actually a pipeline company, is kind of assembling all these kind of turbines and reciprocating engines. They're essentially like giant car engines to power these data centers.

1:45:58And so that business has been doing incredibly well. Car engines, they run on gasoline? Diesel? Natural gas. Natural gas. Yes. What kind of environmental studies have been done? If a data center sets up in your backyard and they've got a bunch of these gas turbines and they're running, is that like if you can, you move away? Or does it dissipate quickly? Has there been any kind of significant studies there? these turbines are less efficient and dirtier than you know a very large-scale turbine system you would buy from a ge vernova or a siemens i know with with xai they were kind of really monkeying around with these rules about how you could only have it up for 364 days there by the time the epa certified it they were already moving to mississippi i mean these systems are not really designed to kind of be, to function as power plants in the same way that like a power plant is, but people are so desperate for power that they are going to be using them.

1:47:00Yeah. I mean, it feels like there's going to be a variety of backlashes, a variety of pendulum swinging. The hyperscalers were very focused on net zero clean energy. Now it feels like they're trying to go as fast as possible. So there's a lot of natural gas, but then they're also still firing up nuclear projects, more wind, more solar? How do you see the mix shifting over the next couple of years? Do you think there's any sort of white bill here? The biggest hyperscalers, your Googles and your Microsofts especially, and Meta and Amazon, do have these sustainability commitments, these 100 % renewable power commitments.

1:47:35They still are procuring lots of clean energy. Google bought a clean energy developer pattern for$4.5 billion at the end of last year. And what they do is that, in some cases, They get the natural gas turbines and they also buy, say, solar projects in a similar area. That's what Meta is doing right now in Ohio. But yeah, I mean, they do these reports and say Microsoft's emissions have gone up a lot because they're just consuming a lot more power. And they've gotten way more adventurous in the stuff they're willing to invest in because the scale of their power needs have really changed. So I think all four of the biggest hyperscalers have nuclear projects going on.

1:48:16Google's a big investor in enhanced geothermal. We just talked to Jeff Lawson yesterday. He raised, what,$450 million to do not nuclear fission, traditional nuclear, but fusion, which is… Yeah, he's doing the lasers. Yeah, lasers, which is, you know, he said there's no science risk, and I hope that there's not. But it feels like, you know, it hasn't really produced energy on the grid just yet. So it is, you know, very forward-looking. But Google Ventures is one of the investors because they're… And they also have a deal with Commonwealth Fusion Systems and a bunch of nuclear projects as well. Yeah, that's fascinating.

1:48:49What can you tell me about the nature of the pushback politically against data centers? I was looking at this data center watch stat, 55 % Republican, 45 % Democrats in affected districts. So it feels like I don't want a data center in my backyard is not a left or right wing issue. No, it's a fusion. It's one of these kind of fusion issues. We've done a lot of great reporting out of this. We have a pro service called Heatmap Pro that really focuses on this stuff. And what we found is that, yeah, it's like it's anyone who's kind of distrustful of institutions in general will tend to really not like a data center in their community.

1:49:36It also brings together Democrats and Republicans because people who oppose renewable energy projects, which at Heatmap is what we were kind of born to start tracking, was local opposition to renewables. The same people are opposing the data centers, and they're using the same techniques. They're opposing, say, rezoning agricultural land into industrial land. Something really common with solar panels, same things going on with data centers, same type of people are opposing it. And it's interesting because at the highest levels of politics, the administration right now is very pro the data center AI build out.

1:50:12They have Sam Altman at the White House announcing multi-billion dollar investments in this stuff. And yet a lot of data centers are built in Republican areas. That's typically where there's enough space. They tend to kind of be in exurban areas. And yeah, they get a lot of local opposition. There's been a lot of local opposition in Indiana. There's been a lot of local opposition in Kentucky. At Virginia, this is really kind of transforming the politics around there as well. So OpenAI has a pack now. Anthropic has a pack now. I think for the drama heads in the chat, we hope that they're just going to fight with each other endlessly and make content for us.

1:50:48But assuming that they want to bring about support, broad support for their data center build-out efforts, what would you recommend? what's the playbook for an AI lab that wants to build a gigawatt data center somewhere in America? Where are they going? What promises are they making? What promises can they keep? What would you recommend? Yeah, I mean, we see this in the kind of renewable and nuclear space a lot is essentially you do a lot of kind of expensive, extensive, long-lasting local engagement with the community. And like, look, if you're a data center developer, you're going to end up, you know, building a lot of high school gyms.

1:51:28You're going to really have to get the local people there on board with your project. Because typically at the state level, you actually, governors like data centers, you know, they provide tax revenue. Unions like data centers. The IBEW, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, very pro-data center. And they're pro-data center for us in the Democratic Party. But oftentimes these decisions are made at these kind of community board meetings, zoning meetings. And for them, you really have to convince that you're providing something on the ground because what Jordy was saying at the very, very beginning, there's no benefit in terms of what the data center produces to having it near you.

1:52:05Yeah, there's no local AI movement. I want low latency inference. I want it in my backyard. I'm a Yimby. Give me a massive data center. I was hearing bad stuff about living next to a golf course. Tee up one gigawatt data center right there. I'm good to go. I want my locally grown inference. I like the idea of showing up to the local T-ball league and being like, why is the team called the Core Weavers or something like that? So nuclear power plants famously do this. Yeah? Yeah. No way. I mean, the Simpsons parodied it for the isotopes or whatever. Yeah, the isotopes. And you do see this in communities of nuclear power plants.

1:52:41But the thing about data centers, they don't provide very many jobs after they're constructed. Yeah. So that part is very difficult to get over. Wait, I have the solution. Sorry to interrupt. The solution is you get, they have the data center, and then there's just a big room with a bunch of Pelotons, and you can just go in there and just generate energy for the data center, and you get paid that way. So we get a gym, jobs, and a data center in one space. I mean, I think Brian Johnson, for one, might support that, although, you know, as we know with the 49ers, they don't like being by an electrical substation when they practice because they're worried about the injuries from the EMF.

1:53:22So that might be a tough sell. Yikes. Demystify New York for me. What's it like living there? Oh, I love it. I've been here for over a decade. It's back. It's too cold right now. There's too much snow, which is quite weird. I cover climate change. Where is this so-called global warming right now? Who knows? But no, it's great. People are on the subway again. really nothing to complain about. Apparently bonuses on Wall Street were great in the last year. Our projected budget deficit almost got cut in half magically in a few weeks. So what could you complain about? There you go. What was your review of Davos from an energy perspective?

1:54:04From a tech perspective, it felt like, oh, Davos is a real place that needs to be taken seriously. Every company should be figuring out their Davos strategy for next year, whereas previous years were sort of quiet. Yeah, I mean, Davos used to be the place where you would hear the most bogus sustainability commitments, you know. And for better or worse, they kind of stopped doing that. I think as it's gotten more serious, they've stopped, you know, not hearing that you're going to own nothing and be happy anymore. So it just seems more serious. And, you know, as obviously as a newsroom and a reporter that's focused on climate change, like I have a point of view on this, but also like I just like seeing people deal in reality.

1:54:51Sure. And I think Davos is more of a reality based place now, which I as a reporter sounds is great. That's good. Yeah. How you said something which is funny because you cover you cover climate change like professionally. but you said there's snow out, which is like, we're supposed to have climate change. Doesn't feel like we have climate change. But like, how, how is kind of the broader clean energy industry even processing? Like, how are they processing that? Because that, that is kind of like more like the average viewpoint of Americans. Like it's cold this winter, no climate change here. And that's obviously like, you know, you can have, you know different spikes and and your kind of like lived experience is not necessarily entirely representative of kind of but it might inform who you vote for what you vote for yeah yeah i mean one of the great ironies of climate policy in the united states is that some of the strictest uh decarbonization standards and rules and restrictions uh are in the northeast um maine massachusetts new hampshire vermont okay they're really into decarbonization they're really into preventing climate change yeah uh and then in florida they don't really seem to care that much at all.

1:56:04And obviously that's the place that's most at risk in the United States from high temperatures and rising sea levels. So yeah, I mean, just an issue where, I mean, this is something that people in the industry complain about a lot. Well, now they're complaining about it. This stuff is super politicized. And, you know, I think a lot of people in the industry are, when a Republican is president, really want to say like, oh, this is not about politics. It's not about climate change. This is about clean, fast, cheap energy. You know, solar is the thing we can get on the grid the quickest. solar and storage, what we can get on the grid the quickest.

1:56:34But yeah, I mean, it's funny. The biggest, the most successful green tech entrepreneur and the biggest solar maxi in human history is Elon Musk. He's also the second or third biggest Republican donor of all time. The Republican Party has tried to dismantle a lot of tax benefits and programs that benefit Tesla, and he doesn't seem to care that much. So yeah, I mean, people's politics are really kind of often override everything else. And that's not obviously, that's not something unique to climate change, but it's a huge challenge for these businesses. Yeah. What are you tracking on the solar panel manufacturing supply chain?

1:57:11We talked to the CEO of T1 Energy. Seems like there's some green shoots, but even his optimistic case was, oh, maybe we get to like 1 % production relative to China. I mean, yeah. China has solar and batteries. the amount of time, energy, and money that has been devoted to that has been immense and it's a big balloon squeezing effort too, I'm sure T1 and First Solar is the other big American solar manufacturer can talk about this we try to put tariffs on Chinese made solar, these factories start popping up everywhere, they pop up in Malaysia, Cambodia Thailand, Indonesia and then we start putting tariffs on those factories because they're owned by China, but it's tough they're the cheapest panels They get done the fastest.

1:57:57And yeah, these domestic solar manufacturers are really similar to the car companies, ex-Tesla. They're very dependent on government policy. You know, the developers, if they could, would just buy Chinese solar panels. But, you know, there's a lot of political reasons why they're being encouraged. And now because of these tariffs to buy American ones. We have a friend, Casey Hanmer, who says like, hey, look, if they're going to be subsidizing them, we need to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy every solar panel. we can. That's one choice. I know. I talked to Casey for stories, too, and he is a mind-expanding person to talk to.

1:58:35I mean, yeah, but it's true because it's just tough. You know, if you're trying to get everything onto solar and batteries, you don't want to then disemploy an American supply chain, especially because with energy right now, American energy is largely domestically produced, which is a huge change from, you know, 15 or so years ago. And so if you're trying to have a climate policy that encourages solar, you don't want to then also disemploy lots of people. Zoom out a little bit for me and tell me your prediction or feeling around like long-term energy production capacity in America. It's been flat, growing very low rates, nowhere near the rollout of phones or electric cars or compute.

1:59:25like everything else is growing exponentially, feels like you're going to watch a sharply exponential line crash into a linear line. What is your feeling around this idea that we might actually start seeing 10 % growth rates in energy production nationally? I mean, just look at how hard it is to build a data center, which is just a warehouse with computers in it. And then think about building power plants on that same scale. I mean, people have a lot of trouble building solar power, which is zero emissions and it's fine. It just looks weird. Imagine trying to do that with gas power plants. But what if I have a billion AI lawyers in my pocket just suing everyone left and right?

2:00:09I show up into town, I sue everyone, make friends. Well, I mean, this is a serious concern. You know, litigation risk is a huge issue with energy projects. And one can only imagine what Harvey could do with filing, with, you know, gumming up the NEPA process for infrastructure. Yeah, so I think it's more like we're kind of growing at half a percent a year, maybe two, maybe 5 % some years. Ten would be tough. Okay, well, that's the next bottleneck after the chip bottle. Well, I have something. So your friend, John Palmer, is also our friend. We read his fantastic piece. To me, it was more impactful than something big is coming, something little is going.

2:00:52It hit me like a ton of bricks. It really hit us hard, but he just announced that Stripe is acquiring his company. Oh, no way. I wanted to ask him, we hit the gong with you for our friend John. Oh, this would be an honor.

2:01:07Congratulations. Congratulations, John. This means you have to start buying in bigger, more frequently. You have to call my worst vets. No more excuse in this. So about a poker game? All in. You play Texas Hold 'em? No Limit Texas Hold 'em, yeah. No Limit Texas Hold 'em. We were actually thinking that maybe the guys, we could get together and start a podcast. I think we would call it All In. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, kind of like a poker-themed, talk about a little business, a little politics, a little tech, energy, geopolitics. I think you guys would have something there. Yeah, I know. We'd wear expensive sweaters, and yeah, it'd be great.

2:01:46I would be the first one to subscribe. Well, it's so great to finally have you on. Come back on when you're going to publish your next story. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the app to use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Is there any other breaking news, Jordy? Anything we need to talk about before we enter? I'm super excited for John Palmer and the PartyDAO team. It's funny. John and I didn't meet until last year. But we used to kind of have this tension.

2:02:24Because I had a company called Party Round. He had Party Dow. We were both in that 2021 era. I was doing crypto kind of stunts with Party Round. He was getting quite a lot of attention. We both raised from Andreessen. Oh, OK. But now we're buddies. And very happy for the whole team. Turned business partners. And very bullish for Stripe Crypto. For sure. And that's why he's probably on cloud nine writing long form jokes, which is great. Oh, yeah. Shocking the internet. Shocking the internet. Well, you know what time it is. It's time for the lightning round, the Lambda lightning round. That's right.

2:03:04Bring down the second gong mallet. Fire up the Lambda lightning round. Let's bring in. I'm going to tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. and we will bring in June Park, the co-founder and CEO of Simile. Welcome to the show. June, how are you doing? What up? Hi, everyone. Great to be here. Welcome to the show. Dude, you know you mean serious business. Look at this behind you. I love the whiteboard. We are a big band. That is incredibly detailed. Please, first time on the show, introduce yourself, introduce the company. Yeah. So, really excited to be here.

2:03:39I'm June. I'm the CEO of Simile. Simile is a company that is building foundational order of human behavior. They can simulate our society from ground up at the level of individuals and populations and predict its outcomes. We use that technology to create products that enable people to talk to millions of similes, we call agents, that represent real people. I'm super excited about this. When we were working to get you on the show, I was thinking about it. there's been so many times in my career where I was doing something like launching a product or launching a campaign or talking with a founder that was doing one of those things.

2:04:18And oftentimes you have a really strong sense of how something will do after you've built up some intuition. But I've always thought it was crazy that for some, think of a physical product company, you have to spend a year and all this time and money and then just launch it and be like, well, I hope people like it. And it feels like with enough data and maybe a model, like you're building at Simile, you could get to the point where you can get a much more accurate read on how society or a niche will respond to something without having to actually make the thing. Yeah. What was the first thing you built for the company?

2:04:55So for the company, we work with vendors that actually connect us with real human subjects. So we actually partner with people and get their data. And what we found was if we have rich data about individuals in our community, we can actually create really high fidelity simulation of these people. This was on the basis of the research that we've done at Stanford, where we led agents and simulations based research. And what we are now finding is that this technology can actually create insights for our decision makers. So our core product basically is one that allows our Fortune 500 customers to actually interact with and talk to these agents that represent these real people that we collected and basically provide insights.

2:05:35So that's the platform that we're creating. What's your thought on game engines as a piece of simulation? I've seen some economic research that maybe used Unreal Engine, but is there a role for simulated worlds or deterministic worlds that are then puppeteered by agents? in any of this? Or is that just like a different fork of research entirely? No, I think it's all connected. In fact, we actually started our research when we published the gender of agents paper, which introduced the idea of creating simulations and agents. We actually demoed this in a game town. One, because we thought it was so visceral and so fun.

2:06:11But also at the same time, if you want to create a simulation of our entire world and how our society might get shaped in the coming decades, then you really ought to be modeling not just people, but also the environment and the model as a whole. So there's absolutely a place for these kind of game simulation-like characteristics to this field. Basically, the idea here is down the line, can we actually create simulations of the entire market, entire nation? That's where we're headed. So yeah, what are some of the case studies that you've seen with large companies? Is it something as granular as should they charge$2 or$2.50 for a particular product?

2:06:48Or is it more broad? Like if we do a Super Bowl ad, will it convert? Yeah, Super Bowl ads are such a good example where you're spending maybe$8 million on the buy, half a million on creative, all this stuff. And then it'll either get people to hate you or love you. But we should be able to predict these things better. And obviously, historically, there's focus groups. You could try to get a reaction, but we're still at this point where sometimes you just need to do something to see. Indeed. In fact, as somebody who's running this company, I actually simulated how today's conversation might go.

2:07:30Really? Because a few of you are so well known online that we could actually get in a bit to actually see how conversations like this one actually might pan out. So I could be better prepared to talk about some of the topics that we wanted to cover. So core use cases today actually does cover things like, so we work with Fortune 500 companies that have earnings call. Many of them have come to us and said, can you actually create simulations of, let's say, earnings call that's going to happen? And there, basically the idea here is, can we simulate each analyst who might actually ask questions during these earnings call?

2:08:03All the way to how CEO and CFO might be able to respond to these questions. That's a common ask. So these are the kind of simulations that we create for that particular use case. And what we find is we can actually predict eight out of 10 questions on average for these earnings calls, like the extra questions that will be asked. And we can actually simulate how the conversation might flow from that point on. So you can test out different strategies. But beyond that, one of our sort of customers right now is CVS. CVS, of course, a large retailer. And there, CVS has been working with Simility to create simulations of hundreds of thousands of their customers.

2:08:37What they want to know is, let's say CVS has new product. They have new store layout. They have new concepts they want to test. These are the kind of things that CVS today might go to a large human panels, but instead they can now work with Simile to get insights that's much more granular and that's much faster to gain. Now, another example here, Gallup, sort of a long-standing polling company, has been working with Simile to create digital panels of their human panel members. So if they want to ask questions to that panel, but for whatever reason, they are not reachable, then you can actually come to simulate to create simulations of that panel.

2:09:13What's the moat? How do you think about, like in the earnings call example, a lot of earnings health transcripts are already in pre-training corpuses and you could dump them in and sort of do a quick fine tune or even just throw it in the context window. And if you're a public company CEO, you could probably just ask any of the frontier models? What do you think the analysts are going to ask? And is it that that strategy only yields two accurate questions and you're at a higher benchmark rate? Or do you think that there's a different piece of your business that the big labs won't go after? So fundamentally, the model that we're trying to create is different than what big labs might be interested in today.

2:09:53That we are less interested in creating intelligence, that's superhuman, that's super rational. But instead, what we're interested in creating are models that actually model people's irrational half of their brain. These are people's values, preferences, taste. And the way we go about doing this is a true combination of modeling and product frontier. So Simile is unique in that we as a team actually is composed of both of those talents. So myself and my co-founders, Michael Bernstein and Percy Leung are all researchers who have been making contributions at the frontier of AI ranging from generative agents to generative AI and foundation models.

2:10:32And there, the core mode here is what are the best kind of data that we can collect? And then using the data to create the most high fidelity agents that represent the people we have interviewed, collected data from. And then we overlay that on top of amazing product. So here, one of the amazing parts about the models that actually map people's values and preferences is the better model immediately means better insights for customers like CVS and Gallup so that there's an amazing alignment between the modeling frontier and product frontier, which is not something that we see every day. So it's a true combination of those two things coming together that makes Simile special.

2:11:13Yeah. What do you see progress scale with more? Are you compute constrained or is it much more about data constraints? So we are charting the frontier on both fronts. So down the line, so today we model hundreds of thousands of people who signed up to participate in these studies. And then our customers, of course, they have an appetite to down the line simulate millions. Our goal eventually is to ask ourselves, what would it mean if we can create simulations of 8 billion people, the entire earth? That's the future that we're headed. So there, certainly there's a question around what is the data, but also how do we compute these kind of simulations efficiently?

2:11:57Are you worried about getting too accurate that life just becomes boring? Is free will real? Do we have free will? Are we living in a simulation? It's like you went to the end of the book and you read the last page and you're just like, ah. Yeah, there's something fun about actually this discussion. so I don't know if you all have watched The Matrix or I don't know how many of the audience actually have watched The Matrix I love The Matrix I have seen that one Jordy hasn't seen a lot of movies but he's seen The Matrix there's actually a quote that I actually like quite a bit that I think is actually quite profound it's something that the Oracle says which basically is you're not necessarily here to make a decision you've already made that decision you're here to understand the decision and why you made that And that sort of captures essence of simulation, right?

2:12:50The models that we're creating isn't merely trying to predict the future, although we are good at that and that is one of the core capability. But what to me is more important is understanding why we made the decision that we created. And creating these kind of bottom-up simulation where we can actually go back and actually trace through the audit logs of how society might unfold is actually an amazing way to gain that interpretability layer of our reality. So that is, to me, the best way to shape the future. If you want to shape new policies, new product that would actually serve the people that is in our society, the best way is actually to understand those people.

2:13:31and then actually communicating with them at a scalable way to basically create those policies. So that's how we view things. How much did you raise? Before that, the chat wants to know, do you think if you worked with Clavicular, the live streamer, you would be able to predict whether or not he would get frame-mogged if he went to different locations or maybe universities? Like maybe you could have said, don't go to ASU, just don't. Just don't. How much did you raise? So we raised$100 million from Index and other participants.

2:14:09We're also really excited to invite angels such as Andre Carthy, Befe Elite. They're very excited. Befe, that's great. Big dogs. But ultimately what we're excited about is that there is a vision that I think is extremely compelling. That this is a vision that this particular team has been working towards for the past five years. that we can create with the technology that we have today, really high-fidelity simulation that can actually provide insights to create better society. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the massive round and all the progress.

2:14:43Great to meet you. Very exciting. Keep tearing through the Fortune 500. Don't be afraid to send us some alpha if you're predicting anything about us. Let us know. I like this. I think you're starting a new meta. Somebody in the chat said it's kind of the Jensen-Steve Jobs combo effect with the outfit. I like it. Looks good. It's great. Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats to the team. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.

2:15:16Up next, we have David Risher. He's the CEO of Lyft. And we're going to ask him about the Ferrari Luce. Ferrari Luce, yes or no? Is it the ideal Lyftmobile? Yes. Yes. You like the Johnny Drive, the Johnny Ive-inspired interior? You're down? I am down. I mean, look, I like innovation. I like cool new stuff, so why not? Give it a try. I've not been in one, though, to be clear. Yeah, I don't think anyone has. I mean, they did a PR, you know, a day. They didn't show the exterior of the car, but they did let some journalists come and twist the knobs and hear the click clocks. Yeah, I'm with you. I like that there's some fresh ideas in there, and I hope the other manufacturers adapt as well.

2:15:59What's the freshest idea you have for 2026 for Lyft? What's happening? What's happening in your world? Oh, dude, a lot. Well, so we just announced earnings, which is always kind of an interesting time. So record bookings, which is great and accelerating. Record profits, which is nice as a business. Over a billion dollars in cash generated, which, again, is nice as a business. this. And the only reason I start there is because to me, it says like, this is customer obsession driving profitable growth, right? Like I took this job maybe almost three years ago now. Actually, fun fact, I was sort of convinced to do it on Valentine's day three years ago.

2:16:35So it's coming up right on that magic moment. My wife and I had such a romantic evening talking about Lyft that night. But anyway, so the point is - That's amazing. It was a thing of beauty. But anyway, so yeah. And so here we are super well positioned, for 2026. Why? Because international expansion, that's a fresh thing. That's a big deal for us. Autonomous vehicles, self-driving vehicles, that's a super, super big deal for us. So, we've got a couple of big, what we call growth vectors in the business. Yeah. What's the market internationally that's still ripe for ride-sharing to come? Yeah. So, it's really interesting.

2:17:13Europe is an established ride-share market, of course, But there's still a huge, huge taxi market in Europe. And it's really interesting. Like if you look at the total mobility, like outside of people driving their own cars in Europe, still a ton of people every day pick up the phone and super old school, you know, call the phone number and get a taxi to their house and stuff like that. So that's actually a big transition thing that's happening that we're really kind of helping powers that kind of moving from offline to online. And then just like all over the world, I mean, self-driving cars are going to be a big deal for all of us.

2:17:43And I look, you know, three, five, 10 years, you know, it'll be 5 % and then 10 % and then 20 % and then 50%. Then that's going to be huge. Oh, and bikes are always big in Europe too, even bigger than the U.S. How are your conversations like with other public company CEOs right now? We're in this period of insane volatility. And it seems like no matter what management team says on an earnings call, you're going to have some massive volatility. But yeah, what are those conversations like? I'm curious. Do you guys have a little group chat where you're like, I'm going in. I'm going in. I'm going in.

2:18:22Wish me luck. What's going to happen here? You know what? We don't actually have those conversations that much just because they're kind of boring. You know what I mean? It's sort of like everyone has the same level of frustration, of course, where it's sort of like, oh, my God, you know, everything seems so volatile. And it's so weird. I was actually just thinking about this yesterday. I mean, what happens right now, I don't know if you guys know this, but what happens is you come out with earnings. And then, like, for example, again, we had some record bookings, record rides, record profits, you know, good, good, good, good, good.

2:18:52Okay. So for like the first 30 seconds, headlines say, you know, whatever, lift beats on profits or, you know, lift, you know, highest rides ever, something like this. And then there's some market reaction. Now, the market reaction might have something to do with some totally different thing, some weird or cruel thing that some bot, remember it happens after hours, so some bot picks up some weird or cruel thing that doesn't fit in the model and then all of a sudden starts selling shares. And then the sentiment turns. And this is all after-hour stuff, super thinly traded. Okay, so then the headlines get rewritten in real time by other bots who are not reacting to the news of the earnings.

2:19:27They're reacting to the reaction of the news. And then they're creating, so they see the stock price move and then they're creating a written narrative of why it's happening that then gets turned into an article that then other people are reading. A hundred percent. And remember, a lot of people don't read much beyond the first paragraph. And so they'll just see this headline, which used to say, you know, lift beats on profit or lift beats on whatever. And now, you know, lift shares down, you know, 10 % or whatever it is. And so it's such an interesting thing. Anyway, it's a little bit of a meta point, but like right now as a society, it's like we're almost reacting to the reaction more than to the thing itself, which is a little bit mind-bending.

2:20:02Yeah, that's super fascinating. We're reacting. We're letting the bots react and then deciding how we feel based on that. That's exactly right. And the funny thing is the bots are reacting for their own algorithmic reasons that might not particularly be well plugged into any reality. Anyway, you can go on in this for hours, but it's a little, like, at the sort of super, like, species level, we're kind of like letting the machines take over a little bit. We're not forming our own opinions. We're letting them tell us what our opinions should be and then reinforcing that, which is a little bit, a little counterintuitive.

2:20:38But anyway, like, of course, some version of this has been going on for a long time. It's just sort of exaggerated now. I remember this is something I worked for, as you guys know, Jeff Bezos for a long time. And, you know, Amazon, for example, back in the 2000s was, you know, a$6 stock or something like this. And people would ask him, like, how do you stay, you know, sort of focused? And he's like, the good news is, like, I know the data. And this is how I feel, too. Like, I was in a meeting yesterday about our self-driving car initiative. It's amazing. And I was in another meeting yesterday about our Super Bowl performance.

2:21:08It was amazing. We were up 13 % year on year. We picked people up faster, and we took – we were down 20 % in surge pricing. In other words, our prices were 20 % better than they would have been if we'd had our surge pricing algorithm from last year, which is great because it means that we're all able to do this at a lower cost to customers. So I see the data, and I see how well positioned we are right now. So my last thought on this is this is now my new favorite CEO tool. Back to your point. You know what these are? Noise-canceling headphones. Always canceling them. Can you unpack a little bit more of the Waymo partnership, talk about how that's progressing, and just broad rollout, your plans, how fast do you see that becoming meaningful and growing?

2:21:51For sure. So I'm going to zoom out one click just to sort of remind everyone. So I'm super bullish on AVs, autonomous vehicles, entering the rideshare space. And the reason I'm so bullish is because they're market expanding. And we see this in market after market. When AVs come in, people take more rides overall because it's cool. It's a cool new product. It's kind of fun. It's sort of futuristic. It's reliable. So it expands beyond the current population of people who take rideshare today. And then the cost over time will become lower. For example, insurance costs are lower. That'll be pretty obvious.

2:22:26So it's nice when the market expands and when your cost of doing business goes lower. Okay, so then you ask about Waymo. Waymo, of course, is the leader here in the United States, no question. And we have a very specific partnership with them announced in Nashville. That was literally one of the meetings I was in yesterday where we're talking about all these different ways where we're integrating across the two platforms. Everything from fleet management to demand generation. And, you know, if we get a ride, are we going to, you know, ask Waymo to take it? Or is a human driver going to give it?

2:22:55Like all these different, you know, sort of details that you have to work out when you're doing a deep partnership, which we expect to go live later this year. The expectation of that partnership, certainly that we have, and I believe that Waymo has as well, is that this will scale, you know, beyond just Nashville. But Nashville is very much our focus right now. I'll tell you one last thing. to Kedra, who's the CEO of Waymo, was just on a show yesterday. And she was asked about this partnership too. And it was nice to see her also being very enthusiastic about it and saying, you know, the thing that I think should be obvious to many people, which is even if Waymo wants to go it alone in some markets like they're doing here in San Francisco, it's really helpful for them to have a demand gen fleet management partner like us in a place like Nashville and hopefully elsewhere as well, because it allows them to really focus on what they want to do well, which is create the world's safest driver.

2:23:43That's the way they call it. And not have to worry about all the other details of a ride chart network. So anyway, stay tuned. We've actually broken ground on the big depot. I mean, we're doing all this sort of work. And in the next couple of months, we'll start to roll rides out in Nashville. I'm super curious to actually understand what does the depot look like? What is the process? What are all the things that goes into it? What are the jobs? That kind of thing. Yeah. So the first thing is, it's big. It takes some space because you have to think. I mean, you're talking about hundreds. It's something that has to be able to clean, maintain, charge, you know, tune up, all these different things, repair in some cases.

2:24:27You know, hundreds of cars, hundreds of hundreds of cars. And, you know, like at 2 o 'clock in the morning, you know, these cars are not necessarily going to be out on the road. So you've got to have a place for, you know, hundreds of cars to sort of go through this cycle when the demand is low. So there'll be real jobs there. And actually, we're hoping—and we have something called FlexDrive there, which is our own fleet management subsidiary. And that kind of is the basis of this thing that we're kind of building it around, let's say. And so some of the folks working at FlexDrive, you know, will transition into doing this A-B stuff.

2:24:55We'll also, frankly, end up hiring some drivers in the community who kind of want extra money and know a lot about cars and so forth. But, yeah, I mean, think of it as sort of a big, very kind of modern, you know, kind of, let's say— There are also some pit stops around the town that just do charging. But think of it as sort of charging and maintenance, but done for kind of 2026 and beyond instead of – Yeah, so that was going to be my next question is do you have – for a city like Nashville, you have one major depot. You have some charging stations. Would you ever break out the depot, basically having like multiple spaces for storage?

2:25:30Or is like one – for a Nashville-sized city, is like one facility going to be enough to kind of like – I know what you mean. I think one big central and then a couple of satellites is probably right. It's sort of tricky to cite these things because if you put them too far outside of town, the good news is it's cheap, but the bad news is they've got what we call deadhead miles, so just miles going back and forth with probably no rider in them. So you have to find a place that's kind of the right. Ours is kind of near the airport, all this sort of stuff. And then you want a couple. And it's got to have a lot of power too, literally electricity.

2:26:06Like we work with a utility to figure out what's the place that can support a fairly big power load. And then, so anyway, that becomes your central thing. And then you have a couple of satellites around that. How do you think about the scaling and rollout of self-driving vehicles just broadly in America? I think a lot of people lean back on what the AI systems can do, incidents per mile. And there's a lot of smooth curves there. But we, in a lot of AI world, we're running into the real world. Is there enough energy for this data center? Are there enough chips for this new model or this new training run?

2:26:42At a certain point, how are you feeling about the ability of the OEM market, the car production supply chain, even things like regulation? How do you see all of that playing together? What's the most important thing to focus on? I mean, you're literally laying it out. Like, think of this whole thing. First of all, you've got to have great tech. that works at scale without a driver in it that can go, you know, for a long time with no instance. So that's a very, very important thing. Then you have to have an OEM, right? And that OEM has to be willing to make an investment, right? Because it's not just like, cool, let's just take the same lines and just, you know, throw some AV stuff on at the end.

2:27:22It's like you want to design production lines that build that AV. And think about what, you know, you can see this with Waymo, right? Like Waymo literally is receiving, and I'm talking about the Jaguar platform that they used mostly so far. they're literally receiving these kind of half-built cars and then kind of disassembling them and reassembling them. It's very complex. So you want to be able to build that in a very cost-efficient way. So OEMs have to be willing to make a big investment there. Then you've got to have the regulations line up, and that's a city-by-city, state-by-state thing, right?

2:27:48So we just signed an agreement. This is outside the US. We just signed an agreement with Hamburg, Germany. That'll be the first city in Germany and one of the first in Europe to say, yeah, we welcome ABs onto our roads. Here's the kind of framework we have to use. Anyway, so that's got a lot. Then someone's got to buy these things and finance these things. So it's got to be financing. By the way, these things might last 300 ,000 or 400 ,000 miles, but unlike a normal used car, they'll have zero value at the end. Right. Zero value. No one's going to buy a used AV that's been on the road for 400 ,000 miles and use this old tech.

2:28:16So, okay, that's a whole financing model that people have to figure out. Then there's got to be all the stuff that we were just talking about, all the fleet management stuff. And that's physical world stuff, right? That's like who's going to charge these things? Who's going to reboot them when they need rebooting? Who's going to clean them when someone throws up in the car? All these things. And then who's going to maintain them? And then you have to have all the demand management and so forth that we're pretty good at. So I think your analogy is a good one, which is that – and it's why you see so many tiny pilots, which are all kind of hand-built and artisanally done.

2:28:47But when you think about scale, it really is going to be years and years and years until all of these things line up in market after market after market. Yeah, I don't know if that exactly answers your question. Do you track the AV rollout in China? What's the timeline for manufacturers to just be a BYD that can just plug into a platform, a Chinese equivalent platform like Lyft, and just start earning autonomously? I mean, I will say this is an area where it's just flat out China is ahead. Flat out China is ahead. It's maybe slightly different from the question you're asking. But when I talk to AV – so if you're in the business of producing AV technology, you know, it could be a Mobileye.

2:29:33It could be a Wave. It could be any number of people who are producing this technology independent of the OEM. When you talk to them, their biggest frustration – I'm actually going to quote one of them right now – is saying we talk to, quote, Western manufacturers. And it really doesn't matter whether you're talking about VW or Stellantis or Ford or whatever, just Western manufacturers. and then you talk to Chinese manufacturers. And in China, they're talking one to two years. And then that same conversation with a Western manufacturer is a five-year conversation. You know, it's a 2032 conversation instead of like a 2027, 2028 conversation.

2:30:10So the short answer is, you know, there's good AV tech from a lot of places. But frankly, the OEMs are in very, very different positions in terms of their ability to spin up quickly and get a platform out that actually works. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. And fantastic shirt, by the way. We love the shirt. Coming in strong. Well, thank you, gentlemen. It means a lot coming from two passionate guys. Yeah, in the plain white shirt, I'm really taking a risk today. I mean, you're bold. It's on brand for you. You're bold. Yes.

2:30:46In a world of plain black t-shirts of tech. White collared shirt. White-colored shirt does kind of stand out, so thank you. I appreciate it. Hey, congrats to you guys on all your progress and your Super Bowl ad. That was amazing. Thank you. That was a lot of fun. It was a good time. A lot of fun. Slightly smaller ad than yours, but we're working our way up. No, dude, you've got to start step by step by step by step. I will tell you I did zoom in on all the logos there. I was looking for the Lyft logo. It must have been hidden. I don't think I saw it. But anyway, it was a small oversight. Somebody's getting fired.

2:31:14Tyler is looking into it right now. We're going to send you evidence if it's in there, but we might have made a mistake. It's possible. Also, there were a few that were behind certain letters, and so they got to the glenched. And that was it. I looked very closely. I'm pretty sure it was hidden. It's no problem at all. I'm not holding it against you. We'll figure it out. We're taking it personally. Good thing the Super Bowl happens every year. Yeah. There we go. At 61, it's just around the corner. There you go. Great to see you, David. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.

2:31:38Thank you. Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. and without further ado, Todd McKinnon from Okta is in the Restream waiting room. Welcome to the TV of Neltro. Todd, how are you doing? What's happening? I'm excellent today. Thank you so much for having me on. Thanks for joining. First time on the show. Please kick us off with an introduction. I'm Todd McKinnon. I'm the founder and CEO of Okta. Yeah. And yeah, I'm excited to be here coming from the office in San Francisco and I feel like my hair is not nearly good enough to be on the show.

2:32:12It looks fantastic. What are you talking about? I mean, since it's the first time, would you mind going back and telling us a little bit of the history, the story? I love these founder journeys. So you can take as long as you want or as short as you want, but whatever you haven't gotten sick of talking to people about. Yeah, it's interesting. There's a lot of echoes in what's going on today with AI. But 17 years ago, I started Okta the same year Steph Curry was drafted. No way. I don't know if that makes it seem like a long time ago or not that much time ago, but 17 years ago. Okta really is the Steph Curry of the enterprise.

2:32:48It is. I've always said that. Yeah, I've always said that. Lots of people. He needs a better supporting cast around him maybe, but I'll take it. But yeah, I mean, how did you even come up with the idea? I think a lot of people start a company. They think like, I'm going to build something for myself. I'll go consumer because that's hot and trendy. Like what was the inciting element, like the problem that you identified? Well, I was running engineering at Salesforce, and I was working with all these customers that were adopting Salesforce. And then I looked around, and I said, hey, AWS is launching Google Apps for Domains, which is what it was called back at the time, is launching.

2:33:22I said, hey, you know, there's really going to be a cloud version of everything in IT, and it's probably a great time to go out and start something new and build something that would be needed in that world. And we settled on this platform for identity management, which seems maybe pedestrian or incremental. But at the time, people had these applications like Box and Salesforce and didn't really work well with their Windows login and Windows PC. And that was our wedge to get started to what now is a$3 billion a year company, 6 ,000 people, and a really important part of the world. Was this in the sweet spot of venture capitalists during that time?

2:33:56I mean, Salesforce pedigree, it feels obvious in hindsight, but what was the pitching process like? Well, it was a very different world because we were in the aftermath of the financial crash. And venture capitalists, are our capital calls going to be returned? Are we going to have any money? So people were very reticent. We actually were the first company to raise money from Andreessen Horowitz. No way. You were the very first company? The very first, yeah. Wow. On the first investment, it's Okta? That's insane. I mean, congrats to you, but also to Andreessen. A lot of people are like, yeah, the first investment I made was not great.

2:34:36Public company, wow. I mean, I'm sure they've made plenty of personal. The first fund has Slack. It's a great fund, yeah. Nicera's in there. And then Skype. Wasn't Skype in the first one? Yeah, but Skype's a weird one because it was like a take private and then an IPO or something or sell. Yeah, I remember talking to my friends. They're like, oh, yeah, you raised Andreessen Horowitz. That sounds great. The other company did that weird Skype thing where they bought it from eBay and took it and worked out okay. Yeah, yeah. out. But at the time, you know, it was, it was, um, people thought, Oh, it's not, maybe it's not big enough.

2:35:08They said, Oh, you're, you're providing a single sign on for cloud apps to your, you know, windows domain. Is it big enough? And it's like, for the last 17 years, it's like, you know, is it a big enough market is in every four or five years, more cloud and then mobile. And then what happened with the really focus on security and how important identity management and passwords are to security. And now what's happening with COVID, remote work, identity just becomes more and more and more important. And now with AI, we're on this precipice of a huge catalyst for identity. That's why we're so pumped up and excited about what's going on.

2:35:41Yeah, so let's get right into it. You, Okta Power's identity for biggest companies in the world. And we're at this inflection point right now where people are adding effectively, adding agents to their workforce. and oftentimes those agents are playing the role of humans in some way, functioning with different applications, working across the company. How are all those conversations going? How are organizations adapting? And how are you guys fitting into it all? Well, on a personal level, I've never seen anything like it, the level of interest. The uniformity of the interest from customers in every vertical industry, in every size company, they want to do something with AI and they want to invest in agents.

2:36:28And it's quite a tidal wave of interest. I think now what really gets exciting is how we continue to turn that interest into actual revenue and actual usage of the new products. But the precondition is there. People are definitely interested. I think what's happening is it's not a huge shock. Boards of directors and CEOs, they all read X. They know how excited everyone is about this. And they're like, oh, give me some of that, right? Come on, come on. I'll take 1 million agents, please. Exactly, yeah. And then the poor people put together these prototypes and these demos and were kind of like hacked together and they had access to every piece of data in the whole company.

2:37:05And they're like, that's awesome. Put it in production. And the developers are like, wait a minute. I don't care. Put it in production. I told my board I was going to have an agent and this is an agent. Go, go, go. And so what we're trying to do is trying to help them manage that and help them, hey, track these things. Make sure whatever these agents are connecting to, you know how it's connecting and lock it down. Make it secure. So when they go into production, it'll actually work. What kind of general horror stories have you heard at companies? Is it an agent that can effectively go and pull data somewhere that they shouldn't be able to?

2:37:38Prompt injection, like give me a refund. There's so many different risk vectors that are, you know, most of the time when this happens at a company, hopefully it's just internal and like you can correct it quickly. But it doesn't feel like we're that far off from a company not being ahead on this kind of stuff and having an agent that can just query their own internal data and having some type of bigger leak. But obviously, you're working to prevent that. It's very simple. The agent was hooked up to multiple data sources. And to get access to more data than you wanted, you just need to ask the agent.

2:38:18prompt injection sounds something cyber people say to convince software engineers it's maybe a hard thing to prevent but we're talking about simple cases where the agent has too much access and by a couple prompts you can get it to tell you the customer information of a different customer and luckily I think sometimes in Silicon Valley we're so obsessed with the latest and greatest we think that everyone has fully agentic customer support and fully agentic everything. But the reality is most companies are very early. So it's a good time to layer in some maybe controls and some visibility into what these agents can connect to and the data they can access so we can avoid some of the really bad mess ups going forward.

2:39:00Do you think the clawed bot now open claw sort of Mac mini agent personal open source story is useful in concretizing what is going to happen in the enterprise over the next 12 months for you? Has it been a reference point in discussions with leaders that you work with? I think it is. It's another catalyzing event because I think in some cases, people are a little bit behind on the power and the business value that could be delivered from these agentic systems. and I think when they can, I was just at my kid's soccer game the other day and they were talking about Clawbot. They were talking about these weren't tech people, they were on the sideline and I think they were talking about how powerful it was and how they're going to get restaurant reservations and I think that catalyzes the side of the equation which is go, go, go and I think unfortunately you're also going to see more security issues and more connections that were exposed and Mac Mini with personal data.

2:40:05It wasn't a new Mac Mini, it was like your family Mac mini and now your family Mac mini is, is, you know, the details are all over the web. You're going to see some of that. And, uh, so we have to get both right. We have to get the business value and get people headed in the right direction and then also put the right controls in place. How do you think, uh, business models evolve in a world of, you know, potentially millions of agents, uh, companies aren't really used to running payroll for millions of people, identity for millions of people. Some people are, but how do you think all of that change going forward?

2:40:35Well, I have a bunch of super strong thoughts on this. Some of them, which are maybe counter intuitive. I think, first of all, I think in five years, there's going to be way more software engineers than there are today. And it's a little bit of a trick answer because I, mainly because I think there's going to be way more software and they'll be more productive, but you'll have more software engineers. I guarantee you all these companies, Yeah. Meta, Amazon, Google, Anthropic, they'll have more software engineers in five years. And double-clicking on that, do you think it's that we're going to see more computer science degrees become software engineers in the traditional sense?

2:41:14Or that designer that you have, that PM, that business leader, maybe even your CFO, all of a sudden is a software engineer or is creating software? I think what a software engineer does, but I'm not trying to cop out and say, all people are going to be vibe coding and that's my software engineer account. I mean people building and architecting software and knowing in terms of how it works. They're not going to be writing as much code, but I'll give you a secret. For the last 30 years, we've had integrated development environments that are helping us write code more efficiently. This is a whole other level, but it's not a new thing to get better tools to help us make software.

2:41:50So there's going to be more software engineers, but there's going to be even more than the increase in software engineers. There's going to be way more software, which is super exciting and super daunting. Now, if you layer on, are people going to build all their own software or buy software for vendors? I think that is unequivocally they're going to buy more software from vendors for sure. Yeah, people that are just bearish on enterprise software have to remember that there's been open source equivalents of like every major platform forever. It's like you could just pick it off the shelf and run it and maintain it.

2:42:29It's easy, right? Yeah, and I think kind of like there's going to be – this kind of goes back with my first thing I said about more software engineers. There's going to be more software. So there's going to be more packet software. There's going to be more custom-built software. For example, there'll be a lot of companies using these software development tools to build the applications that have to span the multiple silos and the multiple systems. Right now, these companies have a very hard time of building something that goes from SAP to content management to Salesforce in an end-to-end process.

2:43:01And maybe there'll be more customization and more vibe coding and more people doing cloud coding to build that. But the core vendors and all of the core data sources and the core business logic and processes, that's going to get bigger and bigger. And I'm 100 % convinced of that, which is dangerous. You should never be 100 % convinced of anything. I'm trying to make a point here dramatically. No, I love it. Last year and continuing into this year was all about coding agents. Do you have, based on the conversations you have with, you know, Fortune 500 companies and things like that that are maybe slightly outside of just like San Francisco tech, like what other forms of agents are you most kind of bullish on for this year?

2:43:46Orchestrators or orchestration? I think it's, so back to what I was talking about before. Now, by the way, I don't think that the vendor lineup of established software companies is not going to change. Just because I think there's going to be more and more vended software sold, it doesn't mean that the people that are leading all the categories right now are going to be leading. I think one of the most exciting things about what's – I mean, this is an amazing time in our industry. And personally, it's super motivating for me and for our team. But the most amazing thing is every leadership category is kind of up for grabs.

2:44:18You have – I mean, how crazy is this? five, ten years ago thinking, oh, AWS might not be the number one infrastructure provider. I mean, that's crazy. You thought that was locked in, but you see Google and Oracle and these companies, that's up for grabs. And I think the same thing is true for all of the categories. So it's not like there's no potential for disruption. I mean, in our world, it's very possible that if you look in cyber, that in five or ten years, the biggest category in cyber is identity. I mean, that's pretty exciting. Right now, it's firewalls and SOC and endpoint, but it could be identity.

2:44:52And everyone sees this. PileWall2Network sees this, and ServiceNow sees this. They're doing acquisitions, and that's exciting. But anyways, back to my point was that it's exciting. Things could change. And the real exciting agentic or the new type of software, I think, is the type of software that crosses all these silos. If you think about it, that's what people were uniquely good at doing. They were uniquely good at doing, okay, I'm going to look in this system and I know about this little corner case and this other content management system and I can apply some intelligence on that and go back to update.

2:45:24That was very hard to do for packaged application vendors because they're inherently in their own silo and they have to make things comply to their own business rules and database. And it's very hard. I mean, I worked in enterprise software for all the years before I started Okta. It's very hard for an HR company to think about end-to-end or a Salesforce automation company to think about end-to-end. So I think this agentic systems that can cross these silos is a very, very exciting opportunity. Last question for me. Is 2026 the best year to move to San Francisco in history? Oh, now you've got me.

2:45:58You're getting me really worked up now. My strong conviction. I love San Francisco. And I think all of these people that said San Francisco is dead and it's a mess was totally overblown. San Francisco is an amazing, beautiful place. And no matter, you know, is the government perfect? No. Is any government perfect? No. But it's an amazing place. And all the people still want to come here. I mean, how many people moved to Miami are now coming back? I mean, where are the great new companies being started? So I love San Francisco. Do I have a sign behind me that says San Francisco? Yeah, you got a bridge.

2:46:31You got a bridge. Hey, we think somebody should. It's literally gold. Everyone should know that the Golden Gate is not really gold. It's red, but whatever. But your gate is gold. Well, we think you should sponsor. You should pitch the city to sponsor the Golden Gate Bridge. Yeah. Let's put a huge Octa sign. Let's put an Octa sign. It is. It's a big metaphor. Hanging under it. Octa connects. For your identity as you go into the city. This is great. We can connect Marin to Fort Point, yeah. Yes, this is integration. This is fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time on a busy day to come hang out.

2:47:03We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Love it. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And without further ado, we have Dr. Alex Zandowski from the Biological Computing Company finishing out our Lambda Lightning round. What's going on? How you doing, doctor? Hey, guys. What's going on? It's good. Good to see you. A lot of whiteboards today. Yes, I'll ask you to explain that shortly. First, give us an introduction on yourself since this is the first time on the show. Yeah, absolutely. So my background, I'm a neurosurgeon, a neuroscientist.

2:47:44I've been growing neurons on electrodes for about 20 years. I spent the bulk of my career studying how neurons in brains process information. first in humans by implanting electrodes in the laboratory by growing neurons, as I mentioned, on electrodes. Really quickly, when you say growing neurons on electrodes, does that look like a Petri dish? Is that organic? Is that meat space? Or is this a digital representation of the neuron? So there's no neurons on this, but this is the dish that we grow them on. You can see it here. Yeah. That little box in the middle has about 5 ,000 electrodes. Wow. And yeah, and we grow them on there.

2:48:26They're alive and we use them to process information as computers. They're biological. These are cells that are all connected to create the neuron. Fantastic. What can you do with it? I feel like a lot of people are pretty happy with their NVIDIA GPUs. What do I need a biological computer for? Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, neurons and brains are extremely more energy efficient than silicon. It's well known. And our first application is to help solve this energy, this looming energy crisis that's happening. Second of all, neurons can change the way they're connected to each other. So as you all know, current hardware is rigid.

2:49:04It doesn't change. Whereas as you're learning about our products and our company today, your brain is changing the way they're connected to each other. So we're leveraging all of that for compute. How much of this is a science project? How long will you be in R &D? What is your timeline? I mean, we're not afraid of science projects here. We talk to folks all the time that give us timelines like, we're going to be live in 2035. And we love that. But it feels like you're making some pretty advanced progress. So talk to us about how the business shapes up when you see this going into production, what the milestones are.

2:49:44Yeah. So, uh, I have like a big note here, sticky note on my monitor. Uh, this is not science fiction. This is not research. You know, if, if I was going to get anything across, that would be the thing, right? We're doing this now we're, we're deploying it. Yeah. Um, so far products are twofold run. We're using the biological network to create a software layer that plugs directly into the ANNs, artificial neural networks now to make them better, better, faster, cheaper. So that's currently happening. In addition, and you asked about what this thing is, this is what we call our algorithm discovery platform.

2:50:20So we're using real brain cells to identify what's coming after the transformers. So what we do that is we build state-of-the-art models in-house. We parameterize them. We ultimately use the biological network to understand neuroscience principles and define the neuroscience principles that can be plugged into these state-of-the-art models and we do this in a loop. And in the end, these plugins improve them and make them better, faster, cheaper. Do you have any reflections on the shortcomings of current AI models, why they differ? There's that sort of famous quote of like, you don't need, like a teenager can just learn to drive a car in like a month of, you know, a couple hours in the seat.

2:51:06And And yes, we're able to train Waymos, but on an energy and time perspective, like on an apples to apples basis, you're effectively doing like a million hours of training. And you don't have to give a human a million hours of training to drive a car. So what is different about the current structure of AI systems versus the way humans actually learn? Yeah, absolutely. So that's a bit of a history lesson. So, you know, going back to the 1950s, where we had the first perceptron, McCulloch-Pitts' neuron, that was actually based on how we understood, at least at the time, how neurons function. Fast forward to the 1980s, backpropagation won the Nobel Prize a couple years ago.

2:51:48That's when a divergence happened. At that point, backpropagation is not a real neuroscience principle. And that's when this divergence happened. And ultimately, since then, software and hardware became very unbiological in the sense that, again, it's rigid in the way it processes information. At the same time, though, interestingly, around the 1980s, neuroscience flourished. We started to be able to grow brain cells in a dish. We started to understand what the neural signals coming from a brain actually means. This is the basis for a lot of the brain-computer interface companies that are currently out there.

2:52:23and so three years ago when we started the company we said okay well you know now we're going to take a 2026 approach and understanding of how neurons process information we're going to apply it towards novel ai systems how do you uh keep the neurons alive what do you feed them yeah so um they live in a media that's got proteins um it's got sugar in it it's it's actually relatively simple it's pete it's ray beat it's on the pete diet it's got sugar jordy you're gonna prove this this is great super food yeah yeah these these these techniques have been kind of perfected over the years again this is one of the things that allows us to do this we can blive for over a year yeah um yeah sugar protein any any olive oil any fats we got we got some brian johnson snake oil right here you could put that in there definitely some olive oil we'll try it out uh what uh yeah coming like fast forward to the end of this year what what are you what have you done that uh allows you to feel comfortable taking like you know christmas off or new year's eve something like that yeah that's a great question um so customers collaborations design partnerships you know right now um the adapter product that we have plugs into video generation models.

2:53:47And so, you know, we are open to working with any foundational model lab that's compute constrained. And so we can make the models more efficient. Which is every lab. That's right. I mean, you know, similarly, as I mentioned earlier, with our algorithm discovery platform, we're looking for partnerships with the hyperscalers. I mean, you know, they have research arms that are interested in what's coming after transformers, right? And so we'll take the holidays off once we're working with them as well. Well, you raised some money. How much did you raise? I'm very happy to say. So we raised a$25 million seed.

2:54:29Seed. I'm back. There we go. What's after a mango seed? What's bigger than a mango seed? Because I think of a mango seed as like eight. This is like a watermelon. Yeah. Watermelon. No, watermelon has small seeds. Watermelon, big fruit, small seeds doesn't apply. Mango is the biggest seed. It's the end of the road. After that, you just go giant AI seed round. Well, congratulations, and thank you so much for coming on the show and breaking it down for us. Yeah, come back. As you guys have breakthroughs and things like that, come back on. You don't need to have fundraising news to come on and talk about biological computing.

2:55:04You guys come to the lab. Yeah, that'd be awesome. We're in San Francisco and Mission Bay. You guys are always welcome to come. Amazing. See some brains. Thank you so much. We'll see you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about Graphite. It's code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, Andrew Huberman is the founder of Huberman Lab. He's here in the TBP in Ultradome. Welcome to the show. Here we are. Cheers, guys. Podcast in a can. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you loud and clear. Give us the latest on Mateina Yerba Mate.

2:55:40Yeah. Zero sugar cold brew yerba mate. I'm half Argentine, so I've been drinking mate since I was a kid. It's got caffeine and it's a super smooth arc of caffeine. That's why I love it. But the zero sugar cold brew, we made five different flavors. It's organic, BPA, BPS, PFAS free cans because a lot of people worry about that stuff. Nobody wants the credit cards worth of microplastics in their brains, testicle and ovaries. and it's free of all that. And it's awesome. I have very high caffeine tolerance. So I drink, no joke, like four to six of them a day. But most people do just fine with one or two.

2:56:15I'm right with you. I don't know. It's crazy. So we have like such a regimented schedule that my caffeine intake during the week as I wake up, I don't follow your protocol around waiting. I get right into the Yerba Mate. I actually have AB tested it. I noticed, I personally noticed no difference whether I get started. So you have one in the car before the gym? I have one in the car on the way to the gym. Caffeine before the gym is such a hack, and I don't do it, and I need to get back into it. I don't know. Sometimes it's tough. How underrated is caffeine as a performance-enhancing drug in the gym?

2:56:47I feel like that's good. Well, look, if you have anxiety issues, you should be careful with caffeine. But if you don't, caffeine is great. It's definitely a performance enhancer, so much so that the people that regulate this stuff in sport set an upper limit on the milligrams of caffeine that you can ingest. but um what i cut off the caffeine intake at about 2 p.m but i listen i also drink caffeine first thing in the morning if i'm going to work out in the first two hours of the day and that's about three four days a week i do that other times i you know i wait a little while um so it's really an option but i love yerba i also drink coffee i'll have a couple double espresso and um i love it i mean but like you guys i'm get up hydrate electrolytes caffeine family, work, work, work, work out, work, work, work.

2:57:36And then by eight o 'clock or nine o 'clock, if you cut the caffeine out earlier, you're going to crash on a steep cliff and it feels great as you fall asleep easily. Yeah. I always, I always stop it. Uh, I always stop basically when the show ends, that's when I'm having my last caffeine for the day. I sleep amazing and then get it started again. Yeah. The, the challenges on the weekend, because in the week, our, our schedule is so regimented. And then on the weekend, it's a little more flexible and I'll start feeling if I haven't had my fourth Yerba by like 1 p.m. My fridge at home is filled with matto.

2:58:06Because if I don't, I'm like not a good dad. I'm like sleeping. I mean, in South America, you'll see people drinking Yerba after meals because it helps with digestion. It's a mild appetite suppressant. So if you – like I like to work out fasted. It's not going to kill your appetite, which is good because, you know, we still need to eat. Everyone's like trying to eat less these days it seems. But you still need to get the nutrients. And then it's high in antioxidants. It's got a lot of positive benefits. And it's not necessarily an alternative to coffee. You could do both. But it's not an energy drink, quote unquote, in the sense it doesn't have alpha GPC, taurine, all those things that a lot of energy drinks have.

2:58:42Not to knock on those things, but I think yerba, coffee, it's great. Yeah, the challenge is making traditional energy drinks a habit. You're like supplementing a bunch of things that you don't necessarily – like you're, you have to understand you're signing yourself up to be like constantly dosing supplements that a lot of people just aren't fully aware of because they, they just look at it. They're looking, how much caffeine does this have? And not, not really paying attention to the other stuff. How is the business? Oh, sorry. No, go ahead. I was just curious about the state of the business distribution.

2:59:17The, the, I mean, you have a massive audience. So the logical place to start is direct to consumer, but the final boss of almost every consumer product is retail. How are you thinking about the rollout of the product? Yeah, it's going great. I mean, we partnered with Matina, so I'm a partial owner with SciComm. You guys know Rob and the rest of the guys at SciComm, Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny. Oh, yeah. And we are available online through Matina, through Amazon. We launched in Whole Foods, in Costco, Canada, and in Sprouts markets just recently. And pretty soon, it will likely be everywhere you look.

2:59:52So, and people love it. You know, I'm very happy when people say they love it. it's delicious. You know, 90 % of the world's adults drink caffeine every single day. It's the most popular drug in the world. And most people need it to function pretty, pretty well. But recent studies showed they looked at coffee, but a couple of cups of caffeinated coffee per day, it seems like it can offset some of the dementia risk. Now there are, I mean, it was with a study like that, there, there are a bunch of, you know, issues. It's not necessarily causal, right? People drinking caffeine, probably working more, focusing more, more cognitively engaged, et cetera, et cetera.

3:00:26But as long as it doesn't send you into a, um, a spiral of anxiety, you know, caffeine is, um, is quite good for you. That's very clear. Uh, sort of random, but, uh, do you have any insight into what, uh, what, uh, different groups of Olympic athletes are, are doing? Uh, there's when, when I, I've seen some, I've heard some stories like there, there's such a range with these athletes where you might have like a an olympic snowboarder who's like you know hard hardly sleeping and just like having some energy drinks and heading out there and then you have like the guy that's doing like curling is like you know the most regimented or whatever obviously everybody's different but uh what do you think the what do you think the best athletes in the world are are doing this olympics like what's what's cutting edge that maybe normal people aren't thinking about up.

3:01:16Yeah, so I mean, this also showed up in the NFL a little while ago, but people are taking vasodilators. Viagra and tadalafil commonly goes by Cialis. You know, Tadalafil is a vasodilator, lowers blood pressure. And, you know, people know of it as Cialis for erectile dysfunction, right? But it was originally developed as a drug to improve prostate health because when you vasodilate, when you dilate the vasculature, you get more perfusion of the prostate. And you need perfusion of the prostate to avoid infections, but other things as well. So the basic takeaway is that most every male, 40 and older, should probably be taking somewhere between 2.5 and 5 milligrams of Tadalafil, not necessarily for erectile function, although it will augment that as well, but to lower blood pressure and to improve vasodilation for the brain, for the prostate.

3:02:10And I'm not saying this as a biohacker or a podcaster. We had our head of male sexual health from Stanford. His name is Mike Eisenberg. He's an MD, PhD. He is best in class in terms of male sexual health, endocrinology, et cetera. And that's his recommendation. And it's one that most every male, maybe 35, at least 40 and older, should take just as a preventative. But, you know, strokes. So you don't think that people are taking it, athletes are taking it as effectively some type of performance? Yeah, to lower anxiety pregame because it lowers your blood pressure a little bit. They think it might be a performance enhancer by delivering more blood to the muscles.

3:02:52You know, you have to look at what's on the banned list. And there's obviously lots of things on the banned list. And then there are going to be the things that people are going to use because they're not on the banned list. And they'll be banned in the next Olympics. That's often how it goes. So I pay a lot of attention to this over the years. If you looked in the 90s, you saw things like bromocryptine, apomorphine, things that people who know those names will augment acetylcholine, dopamine, in order to improve fast transmission of neurons and alertness and focus for getting quickest out the blocks in sprinting, for instance.

3:03:23Those drugs are now banned. You'll see in sports where staying calm is an advantage. any shooting sport, for instance. Most of the banned drugs are things that lower heart rate. Imagine skiing up to a target, picking up your gun and shooting. The less you're shaking, the better. So there's a bunch of banned drugs. And then there are all the things that people will take to lower their blood pressure. And some of those are not banned. And this is kind of how the cycle goes. We heard about the skiers injecting their penises in order to expand their bulge size, I guess it were, in order to get a little more air resistance in order to perhaps capture a little more air time.

3:03:59I hit the press mostly because it's kind of humorous when we think about it. That was real. If you look at any sport, you're going to see this. You're going to see peptides like BPC-157, I believe is banned, but that's a naturally occurring gut peptide, very hard to test for because you have tons of it circulating and the synthetic versions may or may not differ from that version so much that you can detect it. Yeah. Interesting. Do you have a question about peptides? broadly? Yeah, I would love an update. Since we last talked, probably tens of millions of Americans have jumped into the fray. It's taken over San Francisco.

3:04:39Chinese peptides is like a whole meme in tech. And I think everyone's wondering, Faustian bargain, at what level should they be experimenting with these things? What type of research they should be doing? What is the current thinking around peptides broadly? Okay, I'll hit the key bullet points here for the novices and for the aficionados. So a peptide is a short chain of amino acids. So insulin is a peptide. So when people say peptides, they're generally referring to things that people take by injection or orally in order to augment some effect, healing, growth hormone release, et cetera. Just as when we hear the word steroids, I mean, estrogen is a steroid hormone.

3:05:20But when we hear about steroids, we're typically thinking about androgenic steroids. right testosterone etc okay so when it comes to peptides some are fda approved right some are made by drug companies have passed through their patent um many of the so-called growth hormone secretagogues tesamorelin ipamorelin these are things that cause the pituitary to release more growth hormone these are been tested fda approved most people are not getting them from uh drug companies they're getting them from either compounding pharmacies which are our lower cost alternative that there isn't as much stringency in terms of purity.

3:05:57So it varies by compounding pharmacy or from what we call gray or black market sources. So when you say Chinese peptides, what you're talking about is you can go online and buy peptides that are listed or labeled as for research purposes only. And that's what a lot of people are injecting. And that is a concern. And I, you know, I'm not saying this because of my relationship to Stanford or anything like that, but I'll just say, I do not think anyone should inject peptides that are labeled as for research purposes only because even if it says 99 % purity, the 1 % is likely to be something called LPS, lipopolysaccharide, which can cause inflammation.

3:06:33It's not a good thing to be injecting. Maybe one injection doesn't do anything, but when you're injecting every day for five, you know, five days a week and for a month that you can start running into some issues, autoimmune effects and so, and so on. That said, let's just acknowledge what people are doing. And there's some peptides that have very impressive results for which there's essentially no good human data, lots of animal data, and lots of ANIC data out there. For instance, people will claim, although there's no really good clinical trial, that BPC-157, which is a synthetic version of a gut peptide, can accelerate their wound healing.

3:07:07What's the problem? We don't have a control experiment. It acts systemically, so I can't inject it in one elbow, not the other. If I have two elbow injuries and say, okay, it worked better for this one, not the other. People claim it could be placebo, but people claim that it helps them - There's a study where they break both of your arms. That's not as well. But the issue is that it goes through your whole body. Yeah. You know, and it increases vascular growth. It increases nerve growth. It increases cartilage regrowth. From the animal studies, we know that. So the logical backbone is there. People are using it like crazy.

3:07:37The lethal dose is very, very high. I don't even know if anyone's achieved a lethal dose. The one study that was done in humans looked at, believe it or not, BPC enemas at very, very high doses for a gut, like a colitis issue, I believe it was. Listen, I think you have to just decide what your margin for risk is. The other one that's very interesting that not a lot of people are talking about is pinealine, which I've tried it. I don't take it any longer. I tried it for a little while and it doubled my REM sleep. I was getting close to three hours of REM sleep per night. It's thought to increase regeneration or the health of pinealocytes, the pinealine, which make melatonin and so on and so forth.

3:08:13But the big one, the peptides that's going to change everything. I think I tried that, the one you just mentioned last week. I was hanging out with David Senra and a friend of ours had it. And I think it was in a capsule form. I expected it not to work very well. Friend said it works fine. I tried it. No effect on my data. How do you think about different form factors? Injectable only and on an empty stomach, meaning not having eaten in the previous two hours, 30 minutes before bed. Because that's an issue because it's a gray market right now. People will just be like, yeah, I'll sell you a peptide in this capsule.

3:08:55Technically, it's what I'm saying it is, but I'm giving you it in a form factor that doesn't actually work. And so it's all placebo. But I just looked at the data and I was like, I tried this two nights in a row. It had zero effect. And I don't think a lot of people. I doubt it was pineal. And sometimes they'll throw some melatonin in there So you feel, quote unquote, an effect for some people. You got to get it from a compounding pharmacy or a reliable source. I'm not suggesting people do it. I actually stopped taking it because, and this is not a promotional, but I take AGZ, which is their sleep formula.

3:09:26I helped design it. My sleep on AGZ is amazing. Amazing. I'm getting two and a half hours of REM sleep per night. I get tons of deep sleep. I feel great. So I don't need pinealine. But the peptide that's going to change everything, and this is more up your guys' alley because this gets right into the business sphere. is Lily has a patent, Eli Lilly has a patent on a peptide called retatrutide. Retatrutide is sometimes referred to as GLP-3. It's a triple agonist of the GLP-1, which we're all familiar with, glucagon, and something called GIP, I believe. If I'm wrong, someone will correct me, of course.

3:10:02The interesting thing here is that in a phase three clinical trial in humans, it caused up to one-third loss of body weight. So a loss of one third of body weight in about six months time. And it seems like there's some degree of muscle sparing. It works phenomenally well for weight loss. The bodybuilding community has been onto this for a long time, right? Bodybuilders always get there first. Then what happens is in Florida and the United States, doctors who work out in gyms with people who know how to gain muscle and lose fat quickly start experimenting. Then it goes into their high-level clients.

3:10:40Then it shows up in Hollywood. Everyone lies or avoids answering the question of how they got so jacked. They talk about eating chicken breasts, and they're actually taking growth hormone and sipionate and windstrawl and retrutitide, retrutitide, excuse me. And then everyone hears about it, and they start, you know, whatever, looks maxing it. And then it's a big, giant mess out there. Here's the deal. We are looking at a potential change in the laws around peptides such that buying peptides would become illegal. I actually think this is a terrible idea, but the motivation behind this is largely because Lilly owns the patent.

3:11:15People are already injecting red or true tie. They can buy it out there. They're taking it at maybe a third of the dose that's recommended in the trial, and they are seeing phenomenal results at fat loss. Not a week goes by where I don't get a hundred questions about red or true tie to my phone, my personal phone, let alone email and et cetera. So the reason why peptides might soon become illegal to purchase through even compounding pharmacies, let alone gray market, is because Lily would like to protect the domain over that patent. This is going to be a trillion dollar drug, trillion dollar, but people are already taking it.

3:11:50I've never tried it, but people I know who have taken it said it works phenomenally well at a fraction of the dose. So today I looked at - What are some benefits that outside of weight loss? Are there secondary? Reduced alcohol appetite, reduced impulsivity, perhaps. Remember that the receptors for these things are all over the brain and body. And the other GLP agonists have been looked at for alcohol use disorder, for binge eating disorder, and for a lot of behavioral and impulse control disorders, because a lot of the receptors are rooted in the hypothalamus, which controls a lot of impulsivity type behaviors and anxiety related behaviors.

3:12:27So my stance on things is, do as you wish, but know what you're doing. But with the important caveat that if you are an adult and your body is fully formed, you are in a completely different landscape than if you're 14, 18, 20. I worry very much. We're hearing more and more about young people, especially women in the past, but now also young guys who are thinking, oh, they've got to take TRT. That's crazy. I've talked about the fact that at 45, I'm 50 now, at 45 years old, I started taking a microdose of cipionate. Microdose, but micro, so I maintain fertility. I've checked that. I take HCG, et cetera.

3:13:05Never in a million years would I suggest anyone else do that in their 20s or 30s, unless they have a serious issue. With peptides, there's the risk of where you're getting it from, purity, right? But there's also the risk that if you're augmenting growth hormone in your teens, your 20s, you can really mess up your hypothalamic pituitary body axis, all the organs of your body, in major ways. You know, shut down fertility. If you come off these things, you may revert to a state of, you know, a depression, et cetera. I just think the whole looks maxing phenomenon is really, really dangerous and foolish, especially in people younger than 40, right?

3:13:44Well, especially because there's a way to looks max without hitting your face with a hammer. Sleep diet exercise. And or, you know, taking steroids. Get you 99 % of the way there. Also, see, you need to evaluate kind of where you are at the very end of puberty. Puberty is a very protracted thing. You know, I hit puberty when I was 14. I didn't shave until I was 20. I swear my head and face changed shape, you know, over time. You got to let your people develop over a long period of time. If you introduce exogenous hormones or you start blunting estrogen or you start, you know, because guys will say, oh, they have too much estrogen or something where they start taking peptides.

3:14:21I mean, you can really throw off the trajectory of your physiology. And then you're the person in your 40s and 50s, often who looks much older. This is the thing that people don't realize, that there's always a dynamic tension between the things that give you vitality and the things that extend your life. For instance, if you take growth hormone, you'll feel more vital. You'll gain muscle more easily, recover from injury more easily. You'll lose visceral and body fat. Guess what? You'll also age more quickly. The reason bigger dogs die earlier than smaller dogs is they have higher dosing of growth hormone and IGF-1.

3:14:53it's it's well established so you get vitality but you lose time with testosterone you have to ask yourself what are you gaining what are you losing if you can go from you know having no energy whatsoever to the ability to work and exercise increase libido etc well then you're probably gaining years if you're doing those things but i'm very concerned about people just you know trying to get a whatever an angle jawline um you know abs etc i mean it's it's because of phones, right? People taking photos themselves. I mean, I'm old school. So I feel like if you're a guy taking pictures of your abs and posting it online, um, like, like you need to invest the money in a, in a, in a psychologist, not in a, in a peptide, but that's just, you know, that's a, that's a generational thing, right?

3:15:37I think I'm more impressed by what people can do with their physicality, trying to hit it, some numbers, some lifts, some running, some hiking, some rucking. And then, but this overemphasis on appearance on social media, I think is going to cause a lot of destruction for people that try and chase that. Do you get questions from parents who have teenagers that are, and they're considering giving their teenagers HGH? All the time. So people who have kids that are much shorter than their peers nowadays, often, I'm not suggesting doing this, will delay puberty in their kids. They'll sometimes give them growth hormone.

3:16:23We know that some of the drugs, the prescription drugs that help with ADHD can blunt growth at high dosages. There's actually a very interesting drug that went through phase three or is at the end of phase three now, which was designed, excuse me, designed for excessive daytime sleepiness called Tsunose, which is kind of a dirtier hit of the dopamine and epinephrine and a little bit serotonin receptors that is promising for ADHD. That's a non-amphetamine ADHD drug that's very interesting that might be a good alternative to some of the Adderall, Vyvanse, et cetera. Of course, you need a doctor's prescription for these things.

3:17:01I'll just throw out a name. I have no formal affiliation to him, but there's a YouTube channel, a guy. We had him on the podcast, Dr. John Cruz, K-R-U-S-E, who has covered every aspect of adult and child ADHD from behavioral tools to the different drugs, the amphetamine-based drugs, Sunosi, and all of those. Modafinil, very, very high information content, short videos, 10 to 15 minutes, nothing like mine. you know, mine will cure insomnia. So I send parents there. And look, I can say, what are you doing giving your kids growth hormone? But like, I don't know, I was never the tallest in my class.

3:17:39I was never the shortest. I'm, you know, six, one, if I stand up straight, you know, five, 11, if I, if I slouch. And so I, I do understand why people feel like they need to do this for their kids based on what you hear out there. But when you start playing at home endocrinologist and now it's very easy to find a physician that'll work with you on these things you are you're you know you're you're playing a dice game and you're playing it so you have to think real carefully about when when and if to do these things but ultimately you know parents decide and kids decide switching gears i want to talk about cannabis i was about to ask yeah are you guys fans be honest no i'm not a fan no yeah me either it used to be i mean i grew up and i grew in Northern California.

3:18:24So it was, uh, always, uh, it's funny. Wine country is like cannabis country, you know, it's less visible than, you know, the vineyards and things like that. It used to be expensive, difficult to obtain, laced with oregano. Now it's like industrialized, available at the push of a button. And, and I mean, the New York times is writing that you see these charts, like the number of hospitalizations that was never a thing in the nineties that I I remember. And it feels like we're on the cusp of really just rediscussing this as a society on, are we in an epidemic? Do we need to have a more national conversation?

3:19:01But what are you seeing in the research and in your world about how big the problem is? Yeah. Well, as a personal stance, I'm largely for legal but regulated. That just has my personal stance. I want to just throw that out. That's just me personally. I've hosted two guests, one clinician, one scientist about this. And I did a solo episode. I did the solo episode. And in addition to making some small errors in there about receptor affinities and things like that, I made a statement, which was based on the literature I was seeing, which is that there is a population of people, especially young males who have a predisposition to schizophrenia or bipolar, meaning they have a first relative with those conditions that are very high risk for cannabis-induced psychosis, some of which doesn't reverse, which is really scary.

3:19:50I got accused of misinformation by traditional media. Not like being off, misinformation. And I'm going to keep my hands under the table because my response to that, I think they can understand. Yeah. So misinformation. Those are the data. Journal of American Medical Center. Yeah. I witnessed a close friend experience. And at this point, everyone has the anecdotes there too. Experiences as a kid. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Well, now the pendulum has swung back and those same publications are saying it can cause psychosis. Okay, look, so there's more data now. I get it. Right. And the media game is a whole discussion into itself.

3:20:23So I had one guest come on, very thoughtful guest, a researcher from Canada who explained that the psychosis is often caused by an overingestion of too much THC. and in his words, just to be fair to him, because he's a serious researcher, serious scientist, said that when people smoke, so if they inhale it by vapor smoking, they tend to hit a plane of high that's not excessive and the risk for psychotic episode is lower. Then the clinician I brought on said that he's not observing that. He's a clinician, Keith Humphries from Stanford. He's not observing that. He's an expert in addiction of all kinds.

3:20:58And so what we do know for sure is that THC concentrations are very high. It's very easy to over-ingest through an edible. versus through inhalation. Look, I think that the issue is how often and how much and on what genetic background is somebody doing this. Now, the problem is you don't want to be part of the experiment. You don't want to be the person that discovers that you have a predisposition to psychosis by smoking high THC weed. We see the same thing with Kratom. So with Kratom, you've got Kratom products that people will say, oh, you know, Kratom helped them get off opioids. And I don't deny that, right?

3:21:33You've got activist groups that are pro-cratom. You also have people who will say they took so-called kratom products, which are isolates of the molecule. This is what we tend to do in this country. We find an interesting plant that has some psychoactive properties. And then, I don't know, maybe pull the nicotine out of tobacco, concentrate it. Next thing you know, they're making money and you're putting in, you know, five pouches a day. They'll take kratom the plant, which is chewed. The leaves are chewed. People say, oh, it's kind of a balance between alertness and calm. Great. They'll isolate Kratom.

3:22:04Then they'll do Kratom isolates. And now you're getting people who are having opioid-like addiction to Kratom isolates to synthetics. Likewise with THC, you had a balance between THC and CBD in the plant, different strains, et cetera, et cetera. It was a kind of a community for a long time. This has, you know, it even has religious uses, et cetera, and cultural, you know, relationships. And then all of a sudden, it's like, no, we've got really high THC concentrates that you can buy at the convenience store. And then people with a predisposition are having psychotic episodes. Here are a couple of things.

3:22:36I'll say one thing facetious and then a couple of things serious. One, I really love to compete with people who like cannabis because unless they're a martial artist or a creative, like a musician, you're going to blast past them. So, you know, it's kind of like recommending, um, great Netflix series to your competitors, right? Yeah. Or remote work. I I recommend you. You're going to win. Okay. Now that's the facetious side. The serious side is, you know, a couple of guys or friends, gals too, getting together and smoking some weed. And one person is like, oh, this really calms my anxiety, makes them feel as if they can engage socially.

3:23:13And the next thing you know, they're losing motivation for a bunch of other things layered on top of social media, the challenges of life as they always existed, but also nowadays. And the next thing you know, you've got somebody with some serious mental health issues and a full-blown addiction. I do know that my colleagues that work on addiction, Dr. Anna Lemke, who's an MD, who wrote Dopamine Nation, Keith Humphreys at Stanford, they'll tell you that many, many more people are coming to them of all ages saying they struggle with cannabis. I will also say that you're not going to get REM sleep if you are ingesting cannabis, certainly within a few hours of sleep.

3:23:46Anyone that quits cannabis will tell you that their REM sleep, their dreams just comes back like crazy for many months, if not years. and you need REM sleep to offload the emotional load of prior day experiences. So I get it. And then the last thing is that there's always the comparison to alcohol. I actually did a post about this on X, but it's crazy, right? I mean, I've talked about alcohol before. Zero is better than any. Two per week, you're probably fine. If you're going to drink more, do more things for it to, you know, support your lifestyle. I'm not a teetotaler. Do as you want, but know what you're doing.

3:24:16But people always say it's better than alcohol as if you had to pick one. And maybe you do. Maybe in order to socialize, people feel like they have to pick one. I don't know. I've always been able to say whatever the heck is on my mind without any alcohol or drugs. So you don't want to be around me if I were drunk because I'll tell everyone everything, you know, but I do it anyway. And I think it's just an issue of, I get it. In your teens and 20s, late teens and 20s, college, 30s, when you go to a bar, you don't want to sit around and necessarily sober. I get it. So what are you going to do? You can have a couple of drinks or weed.

3:24:50which one is better. It really depends on who you are. And the comparison is just a kind of a fool's errand. You're never going to solve what's better. But there are many, many more people smoking or ingesting high THC cannabis. And you have examples of people who are extremely successful, extremely ambitious who use cannabis. But those people probably need it to not go over the peak of anxiety from their ambition. They're using it to stay in a healthy zone. Whereas people that have more apathy, they're less motivated, they should stay away from cannabis, in my opinion, if they want to make something of their life.

3:25:27I completely agree. That's great. Yeah. Hard to fit into a close to an X. So there's been a lot of studies on the impact of social media on people's mental health, young people, teenagers. And then right now, one of the most popular words in the world is or phrases brain rot, right? Are there any large scale studies being done on the impact of consuming an hour or two hours a day of short form video? Like, what are you tracking? Because if you just look at the data, YouTube has, I forget the exact number, but the average person in the world is watching like a meaningful amount of shorts every day.

3:26:11So some people are watching hundreds and hundreds, others are watching zero or maybe a few, but there's a range. Yeah. Well, I'll just offer a tool that I think is very useful. I mean, I don't have problems with behavioral restraint, but I, but I do have a lockbox for my social media phone. So I took my, an old phone. I put social media on that phone so that if people text me social media links, I can't open them. It also means that when I take out that phone, I'm posting or commenting or doing that. And I keep it in this lockbox, which is like a super max prison. You can't even code out of it.

3:26:42It has a no code out setting. And I'll leave it in there about 20 plus hours a day. And it's just great. It's just great. I mean, your productivity will go through the roof. I mean, it's getting very easy to blow past your peers now just by avoiding being on social media a little bit more. I mean, David Goggin said this. It's like, it's easier than ever now to be successful if you just don't do certain things. Whereas in the past, it was like, what do I have to do to be successful? Like the shortest productivity self-help book will we lock your social media phone in a box for 23 hours a day. And then I do think that, so I'm not aware of any studies looking at one to two hours per day.

3:27:17I do think that when you approach social media or you're getting online, I think it's important to realize that the brain has an absolutely insatiable appetite for short form video. But it's appetite for long form audio is also very high. This is why podcasts continue to grow in their reach. People don't want to hear audio turning over quickly unless there's video associated with it. So I try to get on social media at least once a day, maybe half hour, 45 minutes at the most. But I'm posting and commenting. I think at the moment where you forget time and you're just like, and it's sucking you in is the time where it needs to go back in the lockbox.

3:28:00But listen, I listen to you guys. I listen to news on social media. And I think that's the world we're in. I think that some people also can be on social media and experience some distance from it. Other people are more kind of pulled in emotionally to what's going on. It depends if you're a creator and people are, you know, commenting about you or you're actively engaged in the conversations or if you're simply an observer. But I think an hour and a half a day should be the upper limit for anyone that actually wants to accomplish something in life and probably more like 45 minutes to an hour, unless you're watching news, if you're learning.

3:28:34How do you know if you're learning? What we know from neuroplasticity studies is that if you reflect on something the next day, you're likely to not forget it. It sounds sort of trivial, but most of learning is anti-forgetting. In fact, there was a beautiful study done where they have people read a passage once, twice, three times, or four times versus reading it just once and then self-testing on it in their mind at some point later. And the self-testing in your mind, what do I remember? What don't I remember? Ah, I forget that part. Extended the memory of what was in that passage out six months to a year in some cases.

3:29:07So the reflection on what you saw is the key. So if you think, okay, what did you see yesterday that was of interest where you actually learned something of value? then you're actually learning from social media or a podcast but if you're just getting inundated with sensory information forget it that's called entertainment you're just you're just numbing out or they're rage baiting you and you know i mean between what happened between like the minnesota stuff right then the epstein thing and then you know the next political whatever you know the The amygdala is just getting hammered. And we know when the amygdala is activated, you're getting many more sort of bits of memory stored.

3:29:48So, but you're just getting the peak of that information. You're kind of getting a summary. So look, your brain real estate is your most valuable real estate. What are you going to put in there? What are you learning? And so I would say, take a walk and ask yourself, what did I learn on social media today or yesterday? And there's actually some learning to be had. Like I've reflected on what I've seen in this Epstein thing. There were a lot of scientists there. There were a lot of people that buried his offenses so that he could come out as this kind of science, finance liaison. I mean, it was wild how this could happen after a conviction.

3:30:21And so there's some consideration to be had, but you need to get away from the content in order to think about that and then return to it in a way that's more, I think, nuanced and that can serve you as opposed to just getting rage-baited into it all. Yeah. Never get rage-baited. what excites you about AI? Anything? Yeah. I'll tell you where I'm using AI. I've wrapped my book. I'm doing edits on it right now. And I didn't use AI to write my book. But what I think AI is great for is for designing little exams for yourself for exactly what I just described. So I will have, I like Claude. So I'll just ask Claude to say, to test me on, give me a 20 question multiple choice test on the microbiome as it relates to the solo episode that I did, plus, you know, some recent work from my colleague, Justin Sonnenberg, for instance, at Stanford, perhaps the best researcher on the human microbiome in the world.

3:31:19And Claude will give me questions and I'll go, oh, that's cool. I remember that. Oh, wait, that's where my knowledge falls off. What percentage of the vagus nerve is motor descending? Okay, those things like are important to me, maybe not you. And so I'm trying to, I'm using it to consolidate information that I've learned prior that I might otherwise forget and update my knowledge. And then I'll go to the papers, make sure the papers are actually what's linked there because, you know, as we know, AI can hallucinate. I think that's fantastic. So it's a teacher. I'm using it to self-test, which I know based on a lot of literature can help stamp down memories.

3:31:52So that's one way that I'm using it. I think I love the AI that's woven into eight sleep. That is now I'm no longer adjusting the temperatures. It's doing it for me. Love that. Awesome. I'm giving it my blood tests and it's helping me navigate that. I mean, I had a blood lipid issue that was very slight, but I wanted to keep it in range. And so I started taking natto kinase. I have no relationship to any company that sells it. Boom, right back into ring. And AI helped me understand what natto kinase, what sort of shifts can occur. I mean, I love Claude and I don't, you know, I mean, I'd love to work with them, but I don't, I don't have any relationship to them now.

3:32:29So love, love, love what they're doing. And, and, um, I just think it's super exciting. I'm not afraid of AI, but listen, I'm born and raised in Palo Alto. So like, uh, heretical to say, you don't, you know, I'm excited about the most recent tech. Last question for me, and we'll let you get out of here. Uh, tell us about the fish behind you. Oh, yeah. So those are my discus fish. They're freshwater discus. Okay. And next to me on either side, it was octopus on this side, and there'll be another octopus on that side. Very cool. Octopus died after two years. They lay eggs. They die. That's just what they do.

3:33:01It's very dramatic. Cannibalized her tentacles, everything. They're a big drama. That is drama. Yeah, yeah. They remind me of some online influencers who are always trying to call attention to themselves. But in the end, it self-destructs. It self-destructs. Is it just relaxing to you? is there yeah so why fish and yeah so i've long been a fan of aquaria since i was a kid um and it's just the goal of setting up an ecosystem that's really in balance and it's it's made me very tranquil i've always had them in my office in my lab um and then some years ago i discovered a guy named takashi amano who unfortunately passed away some years ago but he developed this thing of aquascaping where it's really emphasizing the plants and the fish and the lighting so we built these black box rooms.

3:33:43I'm living. So I moved into an art gallery. I converted a three-story art gallery into a living space. So I have a gym, my fish tanks, octopuses, a loft upstairs. And then in my basement is a no phone, no electronics zone where I draw, do illustrations and I prepare for podcasts. And I have it set up with these warm incandescent red lights. My girlfriend and I like to go down there and listen to music and just hang, like get totally away from the world. and I just love the feeling of kind of being underwater a little bit and it relaxes me and I've got a bulldog puppy that was born a week ago and he's going to be here soon.

3:34:17No way. More flora, more fauna is always good. Let's bring the gong for the bulldog puppy. Gong for the bulldog. Bulldog to the message. Name? Got a name yet? Yeah, Strummer after the great Joe Strummer from The Clash. I went to New York last weekend. My girlfriend and I went to go see Meet the Breeds, 140 purebred dogs, everything from the little teacup ones to the bull mastiffs that look like Bert Kreischer and everything in between. And after we left, we just looked at each other and we're like, mudded bulldog, which is what I had before. I love all the different breeds. They teach you a lot about nervous systems and temperaments.

3:34:55And bull mastiff is the perfect dog for Bert. I think he's got a couple of them. But for me, it's always going to be the mudded bulldogs. I don't think I'll ever deviate very cool thank you so much for taking the time great to see you, great to catch up congrats on the Super Bowl I hope to see you in the Olympics we will be we are and so Matahina's logo will be in there awesome maybe we gotta get Matahina into the Olympics, I gotta talk to Rob I have an idea a minute the whole team has it Look, the whole team has it. Here we go. There we go. Love it. Yeah, yeah, we opened the show. You're watching TBPN with these every day.

3:35:37Thank you so much. Thanks, guys. Appreciate you today. We'll talk soon. Take care. Goodbye. And with that, we do have to jump on with Tokyo. So are there any posts? Any other news, Tyler? Did we miss anything? Andrew Reid said, Literally everyone's capitulated on the AI trade. There's definitely no bubble. Surely now is the perfect time to declare victory. Cloud Code is growing 100 % month over month. Wow. 2.5 billion run rate. A hundred percent month over. Is that good? Yeah. There's also the Codex Spark came out today. That's like the first opening eye model running on Cerebris. Yeah. I tried it out.

3:36:16It's extremely fast. You got it working? So you're on the Pro account? Is that the$200 month? So you need Pro, yeah. $200 month. It's 5.3 Spark. Okay. I was on X High, which is like the highest. You know, they have all the reasoning tiers. Okay. I think I need to hit the update button. Yeah. It's super fast. It's like so much better than, really like I, I tried codex spark. Here it is. Yeah. I think I tried 5.3 and, and codex like maybe a week ago. That was the last time I used it. It's like unbelievably, it's so much faster. That's amazing. Okay. So this is apparently what they had internally.

3:36:46I think Rune posted about this a couple weeks ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, he was really baiting it. Cause he was like, it's slow. It's slow. Like, you know, this could take us years to figure out. Then it ships a week later. Classic. I love it. Well, Tyler, build me an app, an amazing app. The best app ever. Right now. One that will win awards and make me a legend in Silicon Valley. That's my prompt. And I'm waiting for Codex 5.3 Spark extra high to one-shot it for me. We'll check in with that tomorrow. Anyway, thanks for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the TVPN newsletter at TVPN.com.

3:37:26and we'll be back tomorrow for a Friday show. I've got to press it twice. The bomb's still going. We love you guys. Thanks for hanging out with us. Can't wait for tomorrow. Great show. It's been an honor. It has. Have the best evening of your entire life. Yes, and we'll see you tomorrow, Friday. Goodbye.

3:37:50Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.

3:37:55Thank you.