Super Bowl Ad Reactions, New Ferrari Design, Ads Launch in ChatGPT | Jason Fried, Bill Bishop, Jason Kelly, Dan Romero, Boris Sofman, Sara Hooker, Edward Mehr

9:30Bill Bishop:We love all you.

9:31Jason Fried:Ryan says, I put my dad onto TBPN. I got excited seeing the ad and he started asking me about it. Hashtag converted. There we go. There we go.

9:39Bill Bishop:And so, but you know, the number of people that watch a little bit of an F1 race or the highlights or the drive to survive, and you can think about diet TBPN as sort of the drive to survive of TBPN. And, you know, you're not sitting there watching the whole thing live. It's a little bit more condensed, a little bit more editing. And then the clips are sort of just, you know, you're aware that Red Bull has a team and you're aware that Ramp sponsors TBPN. What's this?

10:04Jason Fried:Rookie Tyler was learning to money spread when Chad's Jordy and John were beer maxing with the Patels. Turns out Tyler vibe-coded clawed with ads but can't money spread yet. Oh, he can't! Oh, he bodged it! He fires back. It's because they're like brand new bills so it's harder.

10:19Bill Bishop:Oh, there we go. Get those glasses on. You gotta look the other direction.

10:26Jason Fried:There you go. Rookie, rookie, rookie, but he's learning quick. Anyway. No, I can't. I mean, Tyler, just incredible, incredible work. Should we get into some of the ads from the show?

10:38Bill Bishop:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think the big meta point from the text response to the Super Bowl, which we'll dig into, is it's very fun. And we spent most of last week obsessing over the interlab vibe wars, like how is open AI responding to Anthropic? And as we'll see, like, this was not the story of the Super Bowl at all. The story of the Super Bowl, even from a tech perspective, it was much more about how is tech communicating what AI can do broadly to, you know, the largest swath of Americans and, like, broad stakeholders and voters possible. And so people were, you know, there's debates over data centers, crypto, gambling, weight loss drugs.

11:16Bill Bishop:Like, there's new technologies and society's grappling with those. And the Super Bowl is actually, like, a very interesting place to go and make a case for how you want this technology to be integrated into society. You're making a case for how it can be used positively, all of these different things. And even though it's fun to focus on like, oh, should Claude have ads or should ChatGPT not have ads or whatever, there's a much bigger discussion that's happening at the Super Bowl. And I think that's what we should be running through as we react to these Super Bowl ads. While we pull the first one up, Jordi, you can pick whatever you want to talk about first.

11:49Bill Bishop:I will tell everyone about Vanta, automate compliance and security, Evanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And so do you want to read this reaction to the Claude Super Bowl ad? Yeah, we can go through.

12:03Jason Fried:Let's go through Claude first. Oren John over on X was posting a bunch of good kind of reactions, analysis. He says, ranking the Claude Super Bowl ad in the moment, surrounded by people that aren't all terminally online. 80 % of the people here don't understand that Chet, GPT speak when the second speaker talks and we're confused or tuned out. It had to be explained.

12:22Bill Bishop:It's sort of iconic to me because I've used Chachapiti voicemail,

12:25Jason Fried:and I've seen those reels where it's like perfect execution for X. One of the other challenges is, again, we weren't seeing it live, but apparently the ad was much shorter. There was no one ad during the game. I kind of expected them to run to really try to really mog and do like four 30-second ads. Someone was saying it might be like an$80 million buy, which would be like insane. Anyway, so they toned it down a bit. And Warren says, had to be explained by the AI bros, which was as bad as it sounds. While this ad speaks well to the early bell curve, this might have been too early for a mainstream investment like this.

13:04Jason Fried:Overall, I think they had a lot of fun with it. It clearly was not, like, the creative was, like, can't have been that expensive because it was, like, four scenes. It was, like, four one-day shoots probably.

13:16Bill Bishop:I think we're going to get the team on who did it mother because it is beautifully shot, and I think it's funny. But yeah, it is a little early. But so was the ChetGPT ad last year.

13:27Jason Fried:But basically, they basically made OpenAI way overreact. Yeah, a little bit. Like actually seeing the way that the ads went yesterday, it was almost like maybe they didn't need Sam and the entire management team, like Streisand affecting it basically.

13:47Bill Bishop:Well, this was what Rune was posting. He was like, it's the blue shell, and it successfully rage-baited everyone. Yeah, they got rage-baited. Yeah, but I mean, OpenAI has known that they've had to be very, very clear about the way ads will get integrated. Because when you think ads and LLMs, you immediately think what we built with Claude with ads, which is deeply integrated. And then they did update it.

14:08Jason Fried:They said there is a time and place, instead of ads are coming to AI but not to Claude, they updated it and said, the new copy is there's a time and place for ads your conversation with AI should not be one of them. So I wonder what pushback they got. This doesn't hit quite as hard, even though it is probably more authentic, right? It almost sounds like it's like a lobbying firm or something.

14:35Bill Bishop:Oh, yeah. It does feel like something you'd see from a think tank almost. Yeah. Again, no QR code, no call to action. Where did Claude land in the App Store? We were wondering about that, right? We were thinking that it was at 36 or something when we were looking at it last week in the lead up.

14:54Jason Fried:Yeah, it's at 23 right now. That's not bad. So it's like up maybe 10.

14:58Bill Bishop:Yeah, that's not too bad. There's a bunch of stuff that moved. I mean, just looking at the top, it's like Peacock, okay, that's watching the big game. NBC app, that's the same thing. NFL app obviously that's Super Bowl related same with NBC Sports so there were prize picks like there's a whole bunch of things that move FanDuel is up there there's just a number of apps that jumped just by default in terms of free apps there actually aren't that many others that ran I see Duncan Duncan is it feels like it's up in the app store that I think they ran a big ad that we'll look at but yeah the stuff that's below it doesn't seem I mean, like it's higher than Timu.

15:37Bill Bishop:Last year, Timu ran a big Super Bowl ad. I don't know exactly what they did this year, but you would expect that.

15:42Jason Fried:My first time seeing a Timu ad was crazy. Yeah. I was like the copy shop like a billionaire. It is funny. Was so insane. And yet I think it actually in hindsight kind of works because everything's so cheap. People don't have to look at the price.

15:55Bill Bishop:I guess that's the thesis. To a billionaire, a couch feels like$5. So here's a$5 couch. Like an apple or something like that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is funny because I don't think the real way that billionaires shop is like, oh, my real estate guy bought a mansion. Your real estate desk. My real estate desk bought a mansion. And then the interior design desk will furnish it and I will have no input in any of it. And they will just magically know exactly what I want before I even ask for it.

16:27Jason Fried:One thing I'm interested to see, the way the Super Bowl buys work, they make you buy ads in the Olympics as well. And so if you're watching the Olympics today or tomorrow, I guess we're going to have an Olympics ad because we are forced to like.

16:40Bill Bishop:We should do a whole nother victory lap. We're taking our, it was so successful. We're taking it to this, to the Olympics. We're taking it to the slopes. The slopes.

16:48Jason Fried:But we'll be interesting as if various labs or other companies run like longer ads. It's not quite as expensive. We'll see.

16:58Bill Bishop:Bryce said Anthropic ads were a total flop in his house. despite having a highly tech literate family. They took a bunch of explaining. And yeah, it is.

17:06Jason Fried:But that makes sense, right? So like they hit so hard on X. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I remember the morning of. We were like, whoa, shot across the bow. I can't believe they did that. It was like a mic drop. Yeah, mic drop. It was crazy. There was no way to come back from it. Sam lost as soon as he was writing up like a word salad, trying to respond. But again, there's some data coming back from Adweek. Morgan is sharing, audience didn't like Anthropics ad, placing it in the bottom 3 % of all Super Bowl ads from the last five years. But it makes sense, right? It's like a barbell. Like for people on X that are like really following tech closely, it was incredibly - It's a pretty small sample size, 500 people they asked.

17:48Jason Fried:Yeah, but you're running that like in real time. Yeah, across the world. Right after the ads go.

17:53Bill Bishop:Well, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. their businesses securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Let's look at how OpenAI responded. Obviously, this was not a response. This was probably months or weeks in the making. This is called You Can Just Build Things. And let's take a look and see if it tells a more optimistic story about AI, one that's maybe less confrontational with their rivals. I like building things. Making cardboard stuff is underrated. You get a lot of Amazon boxes, cut those things up, make something. Very cool. Become a hacker. Read more. Learn Bayesian probability.

18:41Bill Bishop:Become a scientist to play chess. I don't think of chess as something you build, necessarily.

18:51Bill Bishop:Sick. Job displacement. No more sweeping. Somebody said this is a Windows computer running Mac or something. Is that real?

19:05Jason Fried:I think people would tune out for this. Why?

19:08Bill Bishop:It's just too... So long. Did they actually run the full thing?

19:11Jason Fried:A full minute? That's so long. And the other thing is, I don't know. I'm still... It is a little dark. They're trying to push Codex to consumers, which I think is smart. I think it's very smart. But introducing Codex when every single person in the audience is familiar with ChatGPT. Yeah. And then just trying to, I don't know.

19:33Bill Bishop:Oh, this is cool. So that robotics stuff was actually Easter eggs of the robotics team at OpenAI. Like they just brought the cameras in and filmed their own team. That's very cool.

19:43Jason Fried:Yeah. Dan Chipper says, huge. OpenAI runs a Codex commercial, not a ChatGPT commercial. Wait, so was that a Codex commercial? Yeah, go to the very end.

19:51Bill Bishop:Because that just felt like a general AI is cool commercial. It felt very in line with the previous Super Bowl ad of just the eras of technology. Let's go to the end. Oh, okay. So showing you Codex Desktop. That's cool. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty subtle, though. Everything about it is too subtle. It never says ChatGPT. What's the final slide? Because it says you can just build things and then... And then it goes Codex. Okay, Codex OpenAI. Oh, okay. So it's not... Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can just build things. Yeah.

20:22Jason Fried:I don't know. It's just not, it's, again, it's kind of cool for X. People are like, oh, but I think both, both Anthropic, both Anthropic and OpenAI are both using the same reference material for their ads. Yeah. Like they're all going back into the Apple archives, like trying to pull inspiration from the same, fishing from the same pond.

20:45Bill Bishop:Yeah. They should have, they should have just done a parody of the Budweiser. What's up? and it's just people talking to chat gpt voice about what's up it's like doing Clydesdales actually for chat gpt chad gpt find me a somebody somebody somebody

21:03Jason Fried:on x grace said super bowl commercial is so evil this year seeing a bud light commercial felt healing like oh yes bud light a tangible object unrelated to ai or crypto ridiculous let me tell

21:17Bill Bishop:you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. So obviously we went to the Super Bowl with Eric Leiman from Ramp, the CEO of Ramp. The whole team. Ramp did really, really well with their Super Bowl activation. They had a whole bunch of different touch points, so they didn't just like lob an ad in and then call it a day. They were there. They sent the Bryans. We can kind of go through the whole plan, but there's something interesting i mean we certainly experienced this with our super bowl ad obviously we bought a very small ad but but like the why we got a good result out of our super bowl ad was we wasn't we didn't just go to nbc and said like here's money and thank you we went and told ad week and gave an interview and you gave some interesting quotes to the reporter on the record so there was an article around it that's valuable then we emailed people who were featured in the ad hey we're posting about this like do you want to know that you're in this thing cool like you can go see it if you want to watch it like there's a whole bunch of different flywheels and i think ramp did a really good job of understanding that like it's the super bowl campaign not an ad um and yeah so i mean and

22:25Jason Fried:one they had uh obviously they'd work with brian yep with during the box on in new york last year that went really well so they built off of that yeah uh they we showed up uh we showed up to the to the tailgate party that they had by the time we showed up there was already like thousands of people there yeah it was insane bunch of bunch of uh tbpn listeners came and said hi which was awesome but great group of people they had a big yellow uh skateboard ramp with people like actually going pretty hard yeah no they had a really good skaters a bunch of different like contests running around that were super internet free food somebody somebody uh brian shaved a guy's head yeah on a live stream to look like himself so and that yeah some people were like we're showing up and being

23:08Bill Bishop:like I like this takes six levels of like understanding to get all the jokes of like the ramp is yellow because the brand and the ramp is the name of the company and the skater and then like Brian's here because he was in the office and he plays an accountant but like I think that's fun for people I think people actually do like easter eggs and they like going down the rabbit hole but at the same time you got you can't just be pure easter eggs and I think when you actually watch the ramp commercial which is right there it's like staring you in the face obvious what this does it's Like the brand name, yellow in your face, what does it do?

23:41Bill Bishop:You have to do things. It takes you 10 hours. Now there's 10 people. There's 10 copies of you that do the thing that you do. You can do it in five minutes. And so you can just do it much faster. And so you can watch this and not know anything about ramping. You know, okay, corporate card, multiply what's possible. I have a task in accounting. It looks like an accountant. I'm triggered on that. I'm familiar with this character. And so all of that is like clarity at the top and then tons of depth. And even in that video, there's a whole bunch of Easter eggs in the video. It was directed by someone who directed The Office.

24:12Bill Bishop:And there's different actors from The Office in there. And there's layers. And then you go on social media and you see other stuff. So really, really great, like 360 execution.

24:21Jason Fried:Yeah, what worked well was like classic Super Bowl ad, right? Easy to understand celebrity popular character. Yeah, yeah. Plus a bunch of the super internet native stuff, like physical activation. And then localized activation. Yeah. So you had people, the Super Bowl is NSF. Yeah. you have thousands of people in SF participating like on the ground. And so there was, again, Dylan field. I love it.

24:44Bill Bishop:And this was so crazy because Ann, Ann Kong from ramp told, told me at one point, like, Oh, we're having, we're sending all the Bryans. And then she was mentioning like, Oh, well, they'll also be like a ramp people there with like, like prospective clients and stuff. And I was like, Oh, they'll probably do like one or the other. And they wound up doing everything. So like Brian and a whole bunch of lookalikes were just there. in basically the front row of the Super Bowl. And like, how can you not take a picture of that? It's so innately viral. It was very, very funny.

25:13Jason Fried:Yeah, insane, insane production.

25:15Bill Bishop:Yeah, and it's just like these multiple touch points all have like different shots on goal and they all have different like probabilities that you can sort of wait and be like, okay, well, if the ad is really loved, we'll jump to the top of the rankings in this. But then also there's a chance that like this photo gets like mega viral or this like someone cool goes to the tailgate and they post about that. And so there's like all these different touch points that have like different shots on goal as opposed to just like, okay, we sent the big check to NBC. We hope the ad goes well, right?

25:45Jason Fried:Yeah. It was pretty funny. On the way, on the drive from the tailgate to the game, I was sitting with Eric and we were just catching up on life and business and all that stuff. And he's wearing the bald cap the whole time, which I should have here. But he just stayed in it the whole time. Yeah.

26:04Bill Bishop:Really fun. It was wild. Really quickly, let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. There was a Brian lookalike spotted at the Super Bowl. They were just random people who I think went to the tailgate or got their head shaved and, like, went and stuff. It's like they were really, like, people all over the place.

26:25Jason Fried:We were sitting across, looking across the entire stadium, and we found the public team. Oh, yeah. We could zoom in enough to wave. It was very funny.

26:37Bill Bishop:Testament to the new iPhone camera. Powerful. The 8x zoom. You go 40x and you can actually see people all the way across the stadium.

26:45Jason Fried:Amon says, open AI, add flop. Live with the normies. Didn't really get it. Thought they were going to tie it all together.

26:52Bill Bishop:Nine likes. What? I didn't really get it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is tricky.

26:58Jason Fried:Yeah. It was just like a bunch of cool things. and then a product and a name for a product that nobody knows about. That's the issue. If you have a very popular product like Budweiser, something like that, you can just show a bunch of random images and then show your logo. But if you just show a bunch of random cool scenes or whatever, it's inspiring, it's uplifting, and then you flash a logo that nobody knows, you end up with something that doesn't really leave that much of an impression.

27:27Bill Bishop:Do we have the Google ad? because I believe Google went way more practical on this.

27:32Jason Fried:Pull it up, Tyler. Let's talk about the, before we get to that, we can talk about the Coinbase Super Bowl ad. This was probably the most controversial.

27:40Bill Bishop:I still need to see exactly what they did. I saw some images of them putting something on the sphere,

27:46Jason Fried:which was surprising to me

27:49Bill Bishop:because they didn't put the, like the Super Bowl is not in Las Vegas. So the sphere is like a different advertising surface, but I guess it's cool to be like multiple touch points in that way. I did like the jacket.

28:00Jason Fried:Pull up the one I'm on in the chat.

28:02Bill Bishop:We ran into Brian Armstrong and Fred Urson, the co-founders of Coinbase, and they had these really cool Letterman jackets. They're fun. Wait, is this somebody watching the ad? Yeah. Okay, let's watch this. Sound on.

28:15Boris Sofman:Secure. Yeah. Everything you need, you better rock your body now.

28:23Jason Kelly:Everybody.

28:29Jason Fried:So it's a sing-along. Okay. They, like, switch up the... It's like a state change, right? So it's like you're paying attention.

28:36Bill Bishop:And then you just see Coinbase. That's funny.

28:42Bill Bishop:That's really funny.

28:44Jason Fried:Anyways, really, I mean, the Coinbase team responded to the criticism and said, if you're talking about it, it worked. Crypto's for everybody. But a lot of people were not fans. But I don't know. I thought it was fun. I liked that they do something different each time. It's a couple years back to back. Was the QR code last year?

29:03Bill Bishop:The QR code in the DVD thing was very cool. I think there was also a dust off about that because I think it crashed the servers because there was so high demand because everyone scanned it at the same time or something like that. But I liked the QR code. I like the direct calls to action. I like the introductions, the very clear statements. Unless, you know, I think Apple, Google, like the really established brands do have the permission to sort of go higher abstraction and just sort of do like these brand films. For the AI labs who are trying to push a particular product, it feels like a little bit too soon, a little bit too risky.

29:40Bill Bishop:But I don't know. Anyway, yeah, some people like the Coinbase ad.

29:47Jason Fried:Yeah, it was like very 50-50. polarizing. Yeah. Let's pull up the...

29:51Bill Bishop: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. All right. Let's pull up the Gemini. I want to see the Gemini ad. I want to see the Gemini ad.

30:07Jason Fried:It went with the full 60 seconds.

30:09Bill Bishop:Okay. Full 60 seconds. Yeah. I saw some people reacting to this. It's very clear. It's like, what you see is what you get. This is the actual experience of using the product. And Google does a great job of like pulling on heartstrings. And integrating with Google Photos. That makes part of the demo. And showing off features.

30:31Edward Mehr:And Charlie's bed can go right there. And a banana.

30:34Bill Bishop:Killer feature. That's cute.

30:37Edward Mehr:And look, here's the yard. Oh, we could have a trampoline.

30:42Bill Bishop:This is actually how a lot of people have delightful experiences with AI. This is what a lot of families are using AI for. We're doing a remodel and we're using AI for this stuff and you put in what you have and edit it. And it's cute. And the kids love it. You always go back to the example of make me into a dinosaur. That's delightful.

31:08Bill Bishop:That's sweet. That's just like a nice sad. I don't know. I think a win if you're an AI. David Ross doesn't like it, though. I'm not going to do that. That's funny.

31:18Jason Fried:Yeah, Na says, Google's focus is a lot on multimodal as expected. Yeah, smart. They had a lot of success, obviously, with Nano Banana. You should lean in.

31:26Bill Bishop:Yeah, totally.

31:27Jason Fried:Yeah, that ad. It also works better on as a Super Bowl ad. If you're running an ad yesterday and you're an AI company and people didn't viscerally hate it, you won. Yeah, you won.

31:37Bill Bishop:Yeah. No, totally. And also leading into the visual stuff works super well in a visual format. like a super bowl ad like codex like even if even if you had like a million do-overs it's a hard product to explain it's like it's a desktop app with a lot of text and it's in dark mode and it's going to write code but only behind the scenes and you don't really have to know how to write code but it's going to write code which is not very aesthetic on the screen at the super bowl like and yeah there you could like maybe puppeteer a robot arm but that's probably going to be a little bit harder because it's where you're getting a robot arm and then you have to figure out how to hook that up to your laptop to run codex.

32:12Bill Bishop:There's like an extra step there. It's a little bit tricky, but, uh, you know, uh, Google knows how to just like deliver, like, you know, here's, here's a heartwarming experience. Here's a positive experience. Let's focus on that. Um, let's not talk about any of the, any of the complexities of the technology necessarily in this format.

32:30Jason Fried:Um, what else we got? We, uh, Mike, Mike Duda, uh, was, uh, live,

32:36Bill Bishop:live tweeting.

32:37Jason Fried:Live tweeting his reactions. He, let's see.

32:41Bill Bishop:Okay.

32:42Jason Fried:I don't know which of these.

32:42Bill Bishop:State Farm tried really hard. Okay. DraftKings, good spot, but not built for the Super Bowl. Toyota continues its long tradition of kind of off Super Bowl commercials. Not good.

32:52Jason Fried:We got to talk about the Shvedka ad. We should pull it up.

32:56Bill Bishop:Let me tell you about Phantom. Find your wallet without exchanges and middlemen and spend with the Phantom cart. Yeah, I Yeah, Svetka is the one that had a fully AI-generated ad. They had a fully AI-generated ad.

33:07Jason Fried:They came out and wanted to be the first company.

33:10Bill Bishop:We're not an AI company, but we heard there's a backlash to AI, and we would love a backlash.

33:14Jason Fried:People are calling it the worst ad of all time. Of all time. Not even just in the Super Bowl. Not even the Super Bowl. They're just saying it's the worst ad ever.

33:20Bill Bishop:I do love when a brand just rolls up to the Super Bowl with whatever their stock ad is. I think that Timu ad was not a Super Bowl spot. Yeah, it was like a streaming TV. It's performing pretty well on Facebook. Let's throw it on the Super Bowl. Okay, here's Sveka's AI vodka ever. Let's watch it.

33:42Sveka.

33:50Wow.

34:05Jason Fried:Like if I'm watching the Super Bowl with my kids, I'm just turning it off.

34:09Bill Bishop:That's really bad. Also, like what's the meaning of the robot drinks the mixed drink and it just pours out all over the place?

34:19Jason Fried:In Shvetka, the issue is it tastes kind of like it should be used in like machinery, heavy machinery.

34:24Bill Bishop:Yes, it does feel like oil. Like robotic fluid or something?

34:27Jason Fried:Yes, yes. It's rough. Anyways, rough.

34:31Bill Bishop:Also, that doesn't even feel like – I feel like if you're going to go all in on AI-generated video, I want you using the latest and greatest. You've got to be Nano Banana Pro. GoldRock does their marketing budget$6 of$1.

34:45Jason Fried:Exactly.

34:46Bill Bishop:No, I agree, GoldRock. I've seen these videos where they will take two perfectly generated images, and then they just use Kling to interpolate between them. and they actually look really cool, especially if it's like a car or it's something that like AI is particularly good at generating and sort of like using it as a transition from a drone to inside of a car, like first person view. Like there are really cool and innovative ways to use AI imagery in a way that maybe it stands out as like, oh, that's obviously AI, but it's cool. Like if you're going to do the AI thing, like be Harry Potter Balenciaga, like do something that is iconic and interesting and inspired.

35:23Bill Bishop:Don't just be like one ad that we would have just used CGI for last year and now we just use AI for it. It did not hit. What do you think?

35:32Jason Fried:Well, I was saying we should watch Ryan Peterson's Flexport ad. Some are saying it might be AI.

35:38Bill Bishop:It might be AI. Okay, let's pull up Flexport's ad. Let me tell you about app-loving. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Let's pull up Ryan Peterson's Flexport ad. Okay, looks real so far.

36:22Sara Hooker:then gets the jerseys through customs and back onto trucks.

36:25Edward Mehr:And then the superheroes fly the trucks to the stadium. And lightning zaps the jerseys onto the players.

36:34Jason Fried:Yeah, we're being sarcastic, guys. This is entirely AI. Entirely AI, but this is so good. But it has nailed the feeling of a classic Super Bowl ad.

36:44Bill Bishop:Totally, and it's all things that, yeah, like the budget to actually film trucks crashing. You're talking about millions and millions of dollars. Ryan didn't actually run that. No, he didn't. But it's still got a bunch of views. And it was very fun. And it's interesting because he's actually explaining the Flexport business, but in this funny way that you keep asking. And then the lightning comes down. Or then the superheroes fly. So you're explaining it to a kid. Because if you just sit there and you just do the vanilla Flexport explanation, that's going to be a little dry for the Super Bowl audience.

37:15Jason Fried:Yeah, what's interesting is now I feel like, I mean, I'm sure smart advertising agencies are already doing this, where it used to be that a company would say, hey, I want to run a Super Bowl ad. They'd go and talk to a bunch of different agencies. They'd do an RFP. And then the agencies would come up with some concepts that they would basically script out. Maybe they add some images or whatever. Now it feels like the agencies have to actually make an AI V1 ad and say, here's our five concepts. If you hire us, we'll narrow in and actually make it. higher actors maybe not use entirely AI.

37:51Bill Bishop:Yeah. But I thought that was really good. And I can't believe, I think he made that himself. I think that he wrote the script and concepted everything and actually prompted everything, which is pretty remarkable. And I think it all flows from the idea of having a viewpoint, having an insight, having an idea that makes sense for the Super Bowl. uh i maybe flexport should just get this like add a layer of polish and then uh and then run this

38:19Jason Fried:orin orin went so hard what do you say on the on this fed okay yeah this was the first ai generated super bowl ad ever a milestone for truly no one the worst of agencies pitching be the first that no one but the agency cares about much rather would have watched a cast of characters workshop how they're actually going to become the top vodka of 2033 yeah that's a cool concept yeah there's a lot that they could have done.

38:41Bill Bishop:And, yeah, I mean, the actual, like, character design of the Svedka bot is very off-putting and very, it's just very plasticky, and it doesn't even feel like a modern humanoid design. Like, if you put this next to, like, a 1X or a Tesla, you know, Optimus, like, you're just, it feels like this is what, like, the 90s called they want their robot design back. Like, that's what it feels like to me. Anyway, let's move on to some other tech ads. First, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

39:23Rippling ran an ad.

39:25Jason Fried:Let's pull it up. Parker Conrad. An absolute dog. With Tim Robinson. I love Tim Robinson. He's fantastic. So funny.

39:33Edward Mehr:Nothing but nasty to me. After years of planning, I'm finally going to get my revenge. I'm gonna trash the town with Baby Breck.

39:40Sara Hooker:Unfortunately, Baby Breck hasn't been onboarded yet. We're still waiting for his laptop and health benefits.

39:44Jason Kelly:Baby Breck? You don't even know what a laptop is. He's not onboarded? No. And his harness wasn't approved by finance.

39:51Edward Mehr:He's stuck chasing down receipts. The harness was gonna dangle him from the chopper when we bring him into the town and drop him in.

39:59Bill Bishop:It's like so perfectly, like he's tripping over his words. Like, it's like -

40:03Jason Fried:See, this is funny. This is really, really, really funny. Yeah. if you know tim robinson yeah but my concern is i mean i don't know how i honestly don't know how

40:12Bill Bishop:he's pretty popular now i mean his show on netflix is pretty big yeah okay leave is like he's he's definitely funny and and i mean that that style of comedy can just be i don't know it is it is a

40:23Jason Fried:little no but there's so many tim robinson sections where he is in a workplace setting

40:29Bill Bishop:talking exactly like that i just love i i love when tech companies and founders become like patrons of the arts in the sense that like like this is probably like a pretty big payday for tim robin uh is robins or robinson robinson uh tim robinson love him want to support him and it's just like it makes me like the brand because i'm just like i like that he likes that they like the same person as i and they like you know got him to do yeah it's so funny because i've i've like

40:54Jason Fried:actually laughed at tim robinson content so many times seeing this i don't even know what what is baby Brack. I think it's just like

41:03Bill Bishop:a character that they made up that's like a Godzilla type that's going to wreck the city and these are like evil villains and they're planning but they're they need to onboard Ripley. We saw this ad in the

41:14Jason Fried:dangle him from the chopper.

41:16Bill Bishop:Yeah. It just assumes you know all the lore of this campaign that like who knows where it came from but he don't even know about a laptop is. What is what a laptop is? You don't even know what a laptop is. The hashtag. Yes, Rippling. Exactly one post with this hashtag. Killing it. This is so funny.

41:43Jason Fried:Yeah, I was waiting for... I know a number of companies have been circling Tim Robinson being like, be the first tech company to work with Tim Robinson.

41:52Bill Bishop:I really do think that there's some alpha in like, if you're just like on the fence... 55 GPUs, 55 NeoCloud. That's a great reference. That would have been incredible. We need to get some hyperscaler on that one.

42:11Jason Fried:Cadillac ran a full one-minute Super Bowl ad. Vincenzo, former guest.

42:18Bill Bishop:First, let's tell everyone about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. That's right. Okay, let's watch the Cadillac F1 video.

42:35Jason Fried:AI. I don't think so.

42:37Bill Bishop:Probably just CGI. I'm so excited for Cadillac F1. I think I'm the only one, but I'm very excited for it.

42:49Bill Bishop:See, that could easily be CGI. It could easily be AI, but it sort of depends on who you put on the team.

43:01Bill Bishop:I like building the car, like a car breakdown. It's a team sport.

43:06Jason Fried:Together.

43:08Bill Bishop:It's an engineering challenge. It's like the moon landing, is that what they're saying? TWG is the, is like sort of the presenting sponsor of Cadillac F1. Wow, I like the livery. It's hard when you don't have a really bold color. like McLaren orange, Ferrari red.

43:29Jason Fried:Yeah, the black and silver is kind of - The black and silver is cool,

43:31Bill Bishop:but it's a little understated for the grid. So it doesn't quite jump out at you the way an Aston Martin Green does. But over time, you know, hopefully they can kind of dominate that. But Mercedes sort of has carved out like the silver line a little bit, so.

43:46Jason Fried:TWG has range. They're a unique holding company, strategically investing in and operating businesses across investment management, securities, AI and technology, finance and corporate lending. Merchant banking and private investments and sports, media and entertainment. Thank goodness. There we go.

44:01Bill Bishop:Oh, I think they can do it all. Somebody from TWG once randomly.

44:04Jason Fried:But Apple Parker says, amazed Apple's finally going for the Spotify jugular, promoting the ability to switch easily to Apple Music during the Super Bowl.

44:17Bill Bishop:So the Apple Music brand reach during the Super Bowl, I think, was number one or number two right up there with Budweiser. It did very well. I saw it winning awards. I haven't seen the ad. Let's pull that up while I tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs.

44:36Jason Fried:Wow, we're pulling that up. Apple Music was also, they also presented the halftime show.

44:42Bill Bishop:Yes, they presented the halftime show.

44:43Jason Fried:They had a crazy box. They panned over and break it down. What happened?

44:47Bill Bishop:So we're in the stadium and they do one of those, let's cut to the box. They got the long lens looking inside the box. And who's there? Tim Cook. Everyone knows Tim Cook, so they didn't need to give him a little tagline. But there was this other guy whose name was Dave Grohl. And I guess they were worried that people wouldn't know who he was. So they put the little Dave Grohl tagline there. But they didn't need to give one for Tim Cook.

45:10Jason Fried:Tim Cook was aura farming.

45:13Bill Bishop:Yes.

45:14Jason Fried:His box was crazy.

45:15Bill Bishop:His box was crazy, actually. And it was funny because I'm, of course, joking. But Tim Cook was sort of in the shot, but on the edge of the shot. and kind of like the photographer or the videographer, the cameraman was like sort of moving Tim Cook in and out of the shot, really focused on Dave Grohl, who was like putting on a fun performance and like chugging a beer and being funny. And Tim Cook was just off to the side. And I was like, pan over, show us the big guy. Show us the CEO of Apple. That's who I care about at the Super Bowl.

45:42Jason Fried:While we can talk about the halftime show from our point of view since we were there, I would say the energy, the production value was insane. Like very, very like cool, unique looking. um you set up uh it was really funny uh because i was i was like looking away while they were setting up and i looked down i was like they basically created puerto rico they recreated

46:04Bill Bishop:the entire island it seemed plants and people in plants and the plants were so funny because

46:08Jason Fried:it seemed like the people in the plants couldn't see out very well and so they had like air traffic control people that were like moving the plants around like yelling yeah you could tell they would be forward they would be getting like right in the face of the plants and yelling like go this way it was crazy but the production value was insane the energy in the stadium was

46:26Bill Bishop:completely dead dead no one was dancing it was very actually no dylan patel was dancing yes he

46:32Jason Fried:was going he was he was like yeah it was so funny because he was going to walk down and sit next to you and then he was like he was like actually no i'm gonna stand up here i gotta dance and he just started dancing okay dylan dylan held it down for everybody yeah i think i think the audience of

46:44Bill Bishop:people that go to the super bowl it's a lot of like older folks and they were just not into the the new kid on the block, Bad Bunny, but it really was like a remarkable production. When I think about like what we do here in terms of live production, cameras, chyrons, all sorts of stuff, so much goes into it. And to do that and say, you have 20 minutes to build a city on the field, and then you're going to walk around with wireless cameras that look like Aria-Alexa's. it looks like a movie. It's like perfectly shot. You don't even see if you're watching from home, you don't see that you're at the Super Bowl until like a couple minutes in.

47:24Bill Bishop:And then if you're at the stadium, you don't see what's happening on the performance because it's not on a stage. It's like in this interior zone. Yeah. Like you can't even tell that that's at the Super Bowl until like they start panning out and showing you the full thing. But so much layered detail in the performance. So many Easter eggs. Going back to the era of Easter eggs.

47:46Jason Fried:It was very much felt designed for television.

47:49Bill Bishop:Totally, totally. And that's what the Super Bowl has become. And the Super Bowl halftime show has become. It is an opportunity to bring in a new audience who would not necessarily be watching the Super Bowl, but they come for this and then maybe some of them drop off, but some of them stick around. And it's just like a new introduction. But really, really crazy. At one point, he climbs up on a telephone pole, which again was constructed 20 minutes before. There's a camera that's, I think, battery powered and wirelessly streaming. And so you have talent who's like a multimillionaire. You can't fall down and get injured.

48:24Bill Bishop:He's at the top of this telephone pole. There's a camera there that shows him. And then fireworks start going off. And so the combination of like fireworks, camera equipment, and elite talent that cannot be injured was like a really remarkable, just, you know, magic trick from the production team. And of course, there's a whole bunch of fireworks and whatnot.

48:43Jason Fried:Yeah, I was a lot of people, obviously, you know, somewhat divisive online because there are people that are frustrated because they couldn't understand what he was singing about. But from a purely commercial standpoint, I think it makes a lot of sense for the Super Bowl, specifically because a bunch of people that wouldn't have watched the Super Bowl that are international are going to tune in. So it, you know, understand. I was in the moment thinking that it'd be great if Apple had their new, like, translating AirPods and you could actually appear in real time.

49:18Bill Bishop:Yeah, yeah.

49:20Jason Fried:Yeah, you could probably throw those on. Anyway. Yeah, and, you know, surrounded by a bunch of, like, AI ads and then you have this, like, insane IRL experience.

49:28Bill Bishop:Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was very much like a return to practical effects and there's all these cameos and details. And yeah, just really remarkable to watch the video. Not so remarkable seeing it from the stands. But anyway, do we have the Apple ad available?

49:44Jason Fried:No, no, no. Oh, they didn't even run that. It was like integrated into the show. Oh, that was the thing. Oh, okay. Let's go to the AI.com. AI.com.

49:54Bill Bishop:AI.com. You wanted AI, you know where to go. AI.com. They spent$8 million for a Super Bowl ad.

50:00Jason Fried:Oh, yeah, Bobby says, and the NFL is in the midst of a big international expansion. So they're playing a bunch of international games. Totally. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They play a game in Mexico, London, Canada and stuff.

50:10Bill Bishop:Trying to bring the sport of football to the world. What do we have here? AI.com.

50:15Dan Romero:It's only 30 seconds long, but it seems to have accomplished the goal.

50:18Bill Bishop:Oh, this is a reaction to the ads in the audience. Did they have a voiceover in the actual ad? I don't know. You can just kind of see it. But it was – Big Duka says, AGI is coming, and it's a 503 service temporarily unavailable screenshot because I think they got so much traffic. But it was a very odd question. So you go to AI.com. It asks you first to log in with Google. So you have to give this new website access to your Google account, which is a lot. Which is like insane because they're wrapping OpenClaw.

50:50Jason Fried:Yeah, which – It's an OpenClaw wrapper. Yeah. And so I go in there. It's a new company. And I was like, I don't have a single, you know, I have multiple Google accounts. I was like, I don't have a single account that I'm willing to just connect to some app that has existed for.

51:05Bill Bishop:Yeah, right there. Yeah, so we can't even find the ad online.

51:09Jason Fried:I can't find it anywhere. Chris, the founder, didn't, I don't think, share it anywhere.

51:14Bill Bishop:We're going to try and understand, like, the bigger project. Because it seems like the domain buy was maybe longer than the build out of the product. because it seems like it's an open claw fork of some sort. And the domain name was maybe$70 million. They say it's$500 for a vibe-coded site. Probably fake, but funny. Okay, we got the ad now. Oh, we do? Okay. Let's pull it up. Let's pull up the ad. What else we got? Okay. Do you think this is AI generated? Because if this ran first before Svetka, It's like I got scooped. No, this looks like maybe traditional motion graphics. I don't know. It's hard to tell these days.

52:02Bill Bishop:AGI is coming. Get your handle now.

52:06Jason Fried:You're going to want the perfect handle for the singularity. You know, I'm a sucker for locking down Sam.

52:11Bill Bishop:I know. I was interested in... What are they doing there?

52:14Jason Fried:Trying to get people to... Who's Mark?

52:16Bill Bishop:Oh, Zuckerberg? I was thinking Mark Chen. Yeah.

52:22Jason Fried:So... Yeah. What? Yeah, I mean, the whole thing is, I invited Chris, the founder, on. We'll try to get him on to understand more. The longer strategy. One of the things, so he had a lot of success clearly buying crypto.com. Yeah. Crypto.com arena here in LA.

52:37Bill Bishop:He got the arena.

52:37Jason Fried:He basically owns LA. Yeah. But the difference with crypto is like building an exchange is like somewhat like a commoditized platform, at least in its simple state. You're like, I want people to buy crypto in my app, in my exchange. They come here, they make their accounts. I'm going to buy crypto.com. The difference with AI.com is like, I think to actually compete in this domain, your product's going to have to be insane, right? Because you're competing with OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic. You're competing with Perplexity. Like there's so many, you know, a thousand different startups. And so I think this ad is not going to give people a lot of, the whole experience here is not going to give people a lot of confidence.

53:19Jason Fried:One, getting people to like sign up, connect there, not even giving them an opportunity to just create a normal account.

53:25Bill Bishop:But yeah, that is wild.

53:26Jason Fried:One that that's crazy. But I would have just created,

53:28Bill Bishop:it's going to be way better if you do give it access to your email. Cause then immediately it knows who you are, what you talk about, what you shop for.

53:34Jason Fried:But also running a super bowl ad and only having Google. That is crazy.

53:38Bill Bishop:Cause there's so many people that are on Yahoo and Outlook and you know, any, any other service. Like there are people that are like, I'm an iCloud guy. You know, it's, it's, It's rare, but it's still millions and millions of people. They're just not in your target market. Very odd. Vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pet channels, target audiences, and meta sales, just like on Meta. Jordy, do you have anything else on AI.com?

54:04Jason Fried:Adam Strong said, did you already cover this? He said,$8 million for Super Bowl ads,$70 million for domain name,$500 Vibe-coded site, Cloudflare basic hosting, priceless. Yeah, the app did not or the website did not feel polished.

54:20Bill Bishop:This is Paul E. Williams post with 18 ,000 likes. Love the idea of running a Super Bowl ad that just says go to my website and then not being ready for the traffic. Yeah, I mean, you can like cache the site like locally everywhere and have it be super static and bury the call to action. Like you can capture someone's email in the browser and then just hold it there for an extra minute while you give them some other experience. so you're like pushing the funnel so your server isn't on fire. Like to actually, usually like the thing that brings down the sites that are like deeper in the backend, like the database is not performing or whatever.

54:54Bill Bishop:It's very rarely like I couldn't get them HTML on time. Like that's pretty solved. And so it's very, very odd. But I don't know. At the same time, like, yeah, reflecting on the crypto versus AI thing, like there was never really a crypto talent war like there was in AI because there was never a moment where it was like, oh, this platform needs this particular feature and only that person, that scientist knows how to do it. It's like there were important features that got built, but a lot of them were done open source. And then the value of the platform was like liquidity, the scale, the features, the compliance, the regulatory, like all of that.

55:33Bill Bishop:And you can't just like poach one person and then all of a sudden be like, I have Coinbase's stuff. And so very interesting question of like, it's maybe not crypto.com how do you build something that's as performant as perplexity or Claude or Gemini without that team or maybe you're ready to invest in that team AI.com brand I've never heard of

55:56Jason Fried:if you can get through to the site requires you to authorize login and like I read through the privacy policy and the terms and I was like eh like definitely not. And so, yeah, again, what's the point?

56:14Bill Bishop:Yeah, it's interesting that AI is somehow more intimate in many ways. If you're talking about personal assistant, personal AI, then I would trust crypto.com with my money in many ways because I'm like, okay, if I buy a Bitcoin, there's a chance that it's an offshore exchange, it goes bankrupt. But it's contained to whatever you're doing there. Whereas if you're letting an AI into your life, it has access to all your Crypto and all your bank accounts.

56:37Jason Fried:Yeah, one reason to trust crypto.com is it made it through the last cycle. That's true. And I think a lot of people felt like, hey, I haven't heard. I mean, the company, I think, was mostly pretty much bootstrapped. I think it's mostly founder, you know, entirely owned by the founders. So they've been stable in that sense. But anyways, very funny.

56:56Bill Bishop:Speaking of mostly bootstrapped companies, you know what I'm going to say. TurboBuffer. Serverless Vector and FullTech Search. Built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

57:06Jason Fried:uh before we talk about jason carmen's uh yeah let's run through some ranking no we got to jump in with some breaking news oh yeah apparently open ai actually rolled out ads in chat gpt today

57:17Sara Hooker:let's go finally should we bring the gong for them we beat him to it we beat him to it we front

57:25Bill Bishop:breaking news ads have officially launched in chat gpt you can go to the free tier or i believe the go tier as well and enjoy ads in chat gpt you'll see probably enhanced rate limits and

57:38Jason Fried:extended functionality more Tyler can you can you work to try to find to get served an ad

57:44Bill Bishop:yeah I want to see what they actually yeah like you have to downgrade or create a new account maybe yeah new email new email I I would love to know you know how much how how how much do they exaggerate when you see an ad like they could do a blaring red background it's very obvious this is the ad and then this is the content. Will the ads be even at all related to the content, at all related to stuff you've seen in the past, or is it just going to be completely random? We'll see. And I'm sure we'll see a lot of screenshots in the timeline.

58:13Jason Fried:Yeah. I think from what I understand, it won't be related to the content because people are going to be annoyed at that. I would expect it in the future that is, right? That's just sort of the natural evolution, right and so that's like one one one way to justify anthropics critics you know kind of like uh original ad yeah which is like hey you asked about this thing you asked about how to get healthier and we offered you this drug maybe that's not that uh not super aligned uh but in the meantime i think it'll effectively be display ads based on your interest graph right what they know about you based on what you've searched in the past so yeah interested to see this i'm not going to say anything more uh anything more positive because your audience captured yeah everyone everyone uh it's so funny i went from like last year being like jordy's a hater hyper critical hater hyper critical opening i was like i was still everything yeah john was the steel man i was like sore is gonna fail yeah atlas is gonna fail they're launching adult mode i'm like the the like the

59:13Bill Bishop:most 1.4 trillions too much like where's the most like vocal critic i'm talking about like

59:18Jason Fried:throwing shade at Sam's answer on BG2, saying that was the worst possible answer you could have given. I have zero confidence. Suddenly I say, I just popped my head up at one point and say, hey, I think the ads are kind of deceptive. Parker says the amount of athletic greens and Squarespace hats is going to be tough. I'm excited for it. I'm excited for it. So anyways, we'll see what Tyler can dig up.

59:44Bill Bishop:Let's see what people get. Let's also tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

59:53Jason Fried:Yeah, Brian says, to be fair, Soar and Atlas have kind of failed. And yeah, I said that basically the day they launched. I was like, I think Soar is a cool way to generate a video. I don't think it's going to work as a social app. We talked to Sam about that, too.

1:00:05Bill Bishop:People are using it more as, like, generate something to send to a group chat, generate something that goes onto Instagram or something like that, or even just, like, use it as a tool in the tool chain for certain things.

1:00:16Jason Fried:Yeah, anybody that said, oh, you're just, like, pumping OpenAI, it's like, I'm sorry, we literally had Nick on the show last week. Anyway, so trying to provide a balanced point of view. I haven't been studying. Let's head over to Jason Carman. He built Tier Ranker with all 52.

1:00:38Bill Bishop:If you want to share where you think each brand landed, you can go to story.inc slash Super Bowl, and you can tap an ad, and then you can tap to rank it, and you can decide where you want to put Budweiser. Where does Pepsi go? What do you like? What do you hate? And you can take a screenshot of this and share it. And Jason, of course, he makes cinematic ads for science and technology companies, and he will be sharing his rankings tonight. I guess he probably already put them out. Let me see. I've got to find these. But anyway, go check it out at story.inc. He loves a good Super Bowl ad.

1:01:18Jason Fried:Serena Williams partnered with Roe. She's been partnered with Roe for a long time.

1:01:23Bill Bishop:Yeah. But partnered for a Super Bowl ad, which is a new level up. Let's see what she had to say about Roe.

1:01:31Jason Kelly:I'm on Roe. 34 pounds down on GLP-1s. Healthier on Roe.

1:01:40Bill Bishop:Supportive on Roe. FDA approved GLP-1 options. Now even in a pill. Weight loss expertise I trust. I'm moving better on Roe. Extremely clear. Yeah, a lot of repetition. It's just like, this is what it does. I'm famous and here's exactly the value prop.

1:02:00Jason Fried:Yeah, good pitch. On row at least five times. Yes, yes. If you don't know the brand by the end of that, that's good. Sticking with Rowe's kind of history and direct response. Yeah, totally. Growing up as a D &C brand. They're like, if we run an ad, it can't just be an or a farm.

1:02:14Bill Bishop:They were doing TV direct response super early. I remember seeing those ads in bars and random TV spots. They were doing NBA, MLB, all sorts of stuff.

1:02:24Jason Fried:They mentioned the pill. Do you think that's an actual, do they have an actual partnership?

1:02:28Bill Bishop:Yes, so it's the same thing. Front end to Novo. Front end to the big pharma companies. I think that they have fully stayed out of the compounding space, or at least a little bit, and really let them just be this seamless front end to deal with doctors. But anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business. and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

1:03:00Jason Fried:Let's pull up the CoreWeave ad.

1:03:03Bill Bishop:I love CoreWeave. I'm a big fan. This ad is controversial. You can't spell anything without AI. We were memeing this too. We were like, you can't spell Claude without AD. A as in aerospace. I like this transition. Academia. This is cool.

1:03:18Edward Mehr:N is for nanotech, navigation, neuroscience. Y is simply yes. Yes to predict in storms to keep people safe. Yes to empowering pioneers to go big. There's a lot of good stuff with AI. T is for translation. Trading. AI is great at translation. Transportation, the tools teachers need to educate each kid in their own way.

1:03:35Bill Bishop:That's a weird transition.

1:03:37Edward Mehr:H is for healthcare, to help keep humans healthier. Home automation and robotics. I is for ideas and the power to grow them exponentially.

1:03:45Jason Kelly:N. This is for now. The time to never say never. G is for the good we could do with AI. Genomics. The God says, sir, it's a bubble.

1:03:55Bill Bishop:Moon boots? Gravity? Oh, anti-gravity boots. That's what it is. Okay.

1:04:01Jason Fried:The Chance of Rapper.

1:04:03Bill Bishop:Core Weave. The essential cloud for you.

1:04:05Jason Fried:So the Chance of Rapper part felt super random. I haven't seen or heard from Chance of Rapper in a long time. Yeah. I think what they were trying to do is they're probably looking around and saying, data centers are the most hated thing in America right now. Yeah. We got to make the case for data centers. Yeah. This is what my point is. But I would have liked something like potentially even more direct and like tactile. Yes. And just kind of like rambling on. It wasn't, again.

1:04:34Bill Bishop:Yeah.

1:04:36Jason Fried:I don't know. It wasn't like, it didn't really like pull you in. Yeah. Just kind of like background noise.

1:04:42Bill Bishop:Yeah. There was one part where.

1:04:45Jason Fried:Dan says Chance the Rapper, W-R-A-P-P-E-R. That would have been good.

1:04:50Bill Bishop:Yeah. Yeah. There's a line in there where he says something about predicting the West.

1:04:54Jason Fried:Let's add, reprice their CDS spreads and bring down the refinancing cost.

1:04:57Bill Bishop:We will find out for sure. No, the business is doing fine.

1:05:03Jason Fried:Up 8 % today. Total victory.

1:05:07Bill Bishop:But no, no. So he's doing this cool alliteration thing where there's different, like it's T. And then he mentions predicting the weather, which I think is cool. And I think that's actually like a great story of AI. Like, you know, oh, there's a flood. No, it's not. Okay.

1:05:23Jason Fried:Just because we've had weather forecasts forever. So if you're trying to justify data center development and say like, hey, AI is cool, actually, you can predict the weather. People are going to be like, cool, the thing that I've been able to turn on my television and understand.

1:05:37Bill Bishop:Okay, well, I don't know. My point was that each letter had five or six things instead of like one concrete thing. Maybe you want to narrow it down and unpack it and actually make the case. Because clearly just mentioning that you can predict the weather with AI didn't hit with you, but maybe if they unpack it with three or four sentences, they can convince you a little bit more. And then it's just trading. I think a lot of people don't care about trading.

1:05:58Jason Fried:Yeah. Part of it is like, doesn't CoreWeave have like a handful of customers that actually matter? Yeah.

1:06:04Bill Bishop:And they're also like deeper in the stack than most companies. It's like, there will be a weather prediction company that uses a foundation model that is run on CoreWeave, but you won't even, you won't see Corweith powering that. So even if you are like, wow, I actually got a flash flood warning early. I moved out of town and it was amazing. Predicting the weather's IBM Watson.

1:06:30Jason Fried:Yeah, Cam, Cam, there probably was an IBM Watson Super Bowl ad at some point. It was like in the future, we will be able to predict the weather.

1:06:37Bill Bishop:Yeah. Oh, well. Oh, well. Yeah, this one was, this one was not that well received. Let's head over to Dunkin' Donuts first. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Let's head over to Duncan. Good Will Duncan.

1:06:55Sara Hooker:A much better version of Good Will Hunting was made as a sitcom with a real genius in the lead.

1:06:59Bill Bishop:So this is AI as well, right? De-aging.

1:07:02Edward Mehr:You arrange the munchkins in the Fibonacci sequence? I got a genius working for me.

1:07:06Sara Hooker:You're such a genius, then why do you put ice in his coffee, huh? Come on, Chucky. I'm just Will Hunting. I'm not a genius. I will marry the first man that can help me with the Fibonacci sequence. Just a case. How are you doing? Smooth. Don't you have a girlfriend?

1:07:25Edward Mehr:We're on a break!

1:07:27Sara Hooker:I don't need her. I still got everything I need right here at Duncan. Hey, kid, if you're still single, doing this Boston schtick and working for Duncan when you're 50, I'm gonna be very disappointed. Isn't that your girlfriend? in?

1:07:41Jason Fried:It's like cameo central. Do you like donuts? Yeah, very chaotic.

1:07:44Boris Sofman:Well, this is my new boyfriend. How do you like these buttons? Tom Brady? I'm sorry.

1:07:50Jason Fried:They really were like, how many cameos do you want?

1:07:54Bill Bishop:Yes.

1:07:56Jason Fried:The AI CGI was a little rough. Yeah. It wasn't...

1:08:00Bill Bishop:It was reasonable. The haircut is what's hilarious to me. Putting Ben Affleck in the Matt Damon haircut, that's very funny. but not not a great pitch for Dunkin Donuts I don't know yeah what's the takeaway

1:08:18Jason Fried:think about Dunkin sometimes all that matters is you get people to think about Dunkin

1:08:21Bill Bishop:they had fun with it I don't know it's interesting the Squarespace ad was particularly odd I think the Squarespace one was weirder to

1:08:29Jason Fried:me that was I like that one

1:08:31Bill Bishop:you like that one we'll debate this while I tell you about LabelBox RL Environments Voice robotics evals and expert human data label boxes the data factory behind the world's leading ai teams continuing to watch the squarespace ad with emma stone oh this is a gen spark ad oh what's Genspark.

1:08:53Sara Hooker:You should do, Stu.

1:08:55Bill Bishop:Monday, January 9th.

1:08:58Sara Hooker:This is today. Finish his slide deck.

1:09:01Bill Bishop:Okay.

1:09:01Sara Hooker:Now you're not working from home. Hey, you put on pants.

1:09:04Bill Bishop:This is practical. Genspark, dial in this video. Facetune went so hard. Parker's got it. You done?

1:09:11Sara Hooker:Circle back on out of here. Let Genspark automate your work and take a day off.

1:09:18Bill Bishop:Okay. AI for Enterprise.

1:09:21Jason Fried:Genspark. Unicorn raised around half a billion to date. But yeah, competing, I mean, effectively competing with Copilot, right? Copilot also ran an ad for Excel. Let's pull up the Squarespace ad now.

1:09:40Bill Bishop:Yeah.

1:09:44Bill Bishop:This is one where they just let the reactor go crazy. So find your domain name. She wants Emma Stone.com. It's unavailable. So she breaks the laptop and there's a whole bunch of laptops that have already been broken. So she's furious. She gets another laptop. It's still unavailable. She smashes it again.

1:10:06Bill Bishop:Now, I was thinking that this, get your, oh, this is a shorter version. So there's another version where like, there's this rollerblader who comes in and like continually like delivers her new laptops. She tries multiple times. And I was like, oh, I know where they're going with this. Domain brokerage. They're going to help her buy Emma stone.com from whoever owns it. Because that would be a killer works where, you know,

1:10:27Jason Fried:you pay$70 and then they just take your money and they're like, yep, couldn't get it. Sure.

1:10:31Bill Bishop:But you know, maybe their pitch is like, it works now. We're good at reaching out to the people that have the domains and we will, uh, we, we, and so we got Emma stone, Emma stone.com. You can go there right now. And like, we brokered it for her, but they don't, they just end and they're just like, get your domain before it's too late.

1:10:47Jason Fried:I don't think those products will ever work for everyday consumers. because they'll tell you, they'll literally reach out to like google.com and say like, hey, if you give us 70 bucks, we'll try to get google.com for you.

1:10:59Bill Bishop:Obviously, they need to have some sort of layer of interaction. But you could imagine that between AI agents, a small sales force, really top tier people, like you could, Squarespace could have a serious domain brokerage that could do 80 % of requests. Like, especially if you're Emma Stone and you have a budget.

1:11:17Jason Fried:Yeah, it's kind of a rough, the challenge with the ad is that a lot of people that do go on Squarespace and try to get a domain and make a website will have that exact experience. Yes. So you're kind of like advertising the experience you don't want. Yes.

1:11:32Bill Bishop:Also, if you go to EmmaStone.com, it is her website. So it doesn't quite match. Fake news. They do a good job of saying get your domain before you lose it. They tie it back to the Super Bowl ad. And it's the same video, like black and white texture. Yeah, you can see it. So it does complete the journey, but it's a little bit odd from the storytelling perspective because in the video she was unable to get EmmaStone.com, but then somewhere after the ad ends in the castle in the island, she gets the domain and spins up a website from Squarespace. Anyway, beautifully shot ad and fun that they went black bars.

1:12:10Bill Bishop:I believe they didn't do a full widescreen ad. They did a little bit squarer, which I think is like a nod to Squarespace maybe. I don't know.

1:12:18Jason Fried:We will see. We watched the Hems and Hers Super Bowl.

1:12:21Bill Bishop:Oh, they launched one too? Interesting. I thought Roe would be the only one. Okay. Let's pull it up. I'm dropping it in here. I will tell everyone about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference and scale from 1 GPU to hundreds of thousands. And then we will pull up. I like the thunder. The cloud. We're adding two different effects a day. It's amazing. Let's pull up the hims and hers ad. What does this one say? Live longer. Okay.

1:12:57Sara Hooker:Spend millions. Gee, they're taking shots at BJ. It buys more time. The wealth gap is a health gap. Okay. The rich have health care that comes to them. Custom formulated peptides, specialists on call, and preventative care. So it's democratizing health strategy. It's pretty wild. It's a bunch of biomechanics. Oh, okay. Diagnostic testing. I'm getting the EDM going.

1:13:25Bill Bishop:This is a lot of content here.

1:13:29Bill Bishop:Microdosing? Menopause is testosterone hormone.

1:13:32Sara Hooker:to keep you feeling great in early cancer detection through a simple blood test. The same science...

1:13:39Jason Fried:Raghav says, last ad before bankruptcy. Oh, no. Stock's down 17 % today because of this ad. No, kidding. It's down because they got a very angry... The admin, right? FDA came out hard against them Friday. Yeah. We had TJ Parker came on the show, broke it down on Friday. if you want to understand the HIM situation.

1:14:03Bill Bishop:And there's an article in the Washington Post, Eric Topal shared it. He says, Super Bowl spot will promote a cancer test that can produce false results. I mean, every test can have false results. The question is like, is it out of the bounds of what the FDA approves? You know, even an off-the-shelf pregnancy test can have false positives. That's why they say take multiple. but it does seem like the FDA is not a fan of the move fast and break things approach in this particular category.

1:14:36Jason Fried:So rough. Move fast and disregard IP. That's another one. Disregard studies.

1:14:43Bill Bishop:It's a rough time. Make your own drugs. Well, our first guest is joining in just a minute, but Michael Duda continued his reviews, which I'm enjoying at this point. Homes.com. No. Roe, not entertaining, but it will be massively effective for Roe's business. I agree. It was like, okay, I get it, I get it, I get it, but that's the point. Wix Harmony, I think they meant to have that on Grammys last week. OpenAI, expected better from the company synonymous with AI. So Michael Duda is going all over the place. Mr. Beast also collabed with Salesforce on a massive Super Bowl ad that had a lot of hype, giving away a million dollars.

1:15:18Bill Bishop:There's a lot of cool CGI in here. We had the chance to meet Mr. Beast at the game. Yeah.

1:15:23Jason Fried:Well, he's a Ramp customer, so he came by the Ramp box yesterday.

1:15:27Bill Bishop:That's right. Yeah, we're very excited for him. Well, without further ado, let's bring Jason in from the Restream waiting room. Well, a little ado, because I'm going to tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin.ai. Sorry, Jason. Welcome back to the show. Hold that thought. Hold that thought. It's a great product. I love it. It's great. Thank you. Well, how are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you. Did you watch the Super Bowl? Are you a Super Bowl guy?

1:15:53Jason Kelly:Not really, actually.

1:15:55Bill Bishop:Did you see any of the ads?

1:15:56Jason Kelly:Once I saw the end of the ad, I kind of tuned up.

1:16:00Bill Bishop:Yeah, you're like, okay, we're three hours before the game. Job's finished. I'm good. That's right. And you flew to San Francisco to see it because it was a regional buy. Exactly, of course. Couldn't miss it. Okay. Well, the news that we wanted to talk about.

1:16:14Jason Fried:Yeah, we were texting a little bit about the new Ferrari EV. Yes. And I think there's nobody that I was excited to talk to more than you about it. Just given your, I've always appreciated your personal taste in cars and just also in design choices broadly. And I think this is such a, for anyone that missed it, Ferrari is making their first electric vehicle, the Luce. Yeah. Am I saying that correctly? Italian, sounding Italian. Yeah, it sounds Italian. I thought they had canceled their new plans. We don't know exactly what the car looks like, but it's meant to be kind of a daily driver. It looks to be some sort of hatchback, something like that.

1:16:56Jason Fried:So not as aggressive looking as the GTC4 Lusso or the FF. But looks fine and highly anticipated. And then just on the interior, they partnered with Johnny Ive and the Lovefront team. So before I share my thoughts, I'd love to hear how you've been processing it.

1:17:22Jason Kelly:Yeah, so I saw it this morning like everyone else did. I think they came out with it this morning or announced it this morning. And obviously it's a demo. It's a 3D demo of kind of what this thing appears to be, at least the video was. And I think the first thing you go is, well, that's at least very fresh. It's about time. It feels like car interfaces have really gone mostly in the wrong direction, just like black glass screens and everything's touchscreen and they're starting to bring some switches back and dials back. But clearly this feels a bit more considered. There's more tactile stuff.

1:17:52Jason Kelly:There's more real stuff integrating with virtual stuff. And of course, a lot of the design choices were very beautiful. Transitions were lovely and there's no lag in all these things. Again, this is a demo. It's hard to say what this will really be driven on, but it looked great. I think it looked great. There was a really nice, I would say the thing that really stuck with me was the integration between the virtual and the physical switches that when you when you move them up like then a digital display comes up uh little buttons on the top right corner adjusting some display stuff really really nice a lot of inspiration from other brands i saw too i saw i kind of felt like there was a little aston martin thing going on here yeah so the the db9 era of aston martin's you take this key this glass crystal thing and you push it into a slot yeah to start the car and i think that's what they were showing here is they put this i like pushing it down like you can

1:18:41Jason Fried:imagine the experience of like pushing the key and having it lock in place and then tapping it because it is it's just a nice experience still there's i mean i feel like so often i'm like putting my key in random different places at different times and it's nice to just have a place in the car push it lock it in you know where it is and to leave it there that's yeah yeah

1:18:59Jason Kelly:exactly probably is magnetic so it probably snaps in snicks in and push down but that's kind of an astin derivative and also the way the um the dials when they light up they they go counterclockwise is also something that Aston was doing. So, Johnny, I being British, I wonder if there's a little bit of a call out to Aston there. Yeah, good point. But it's cool. I would say, though, one thing that no one knows is what the outside of the car looks like yet. And I think great interiors need to be matched up with great exteriors. The best interiors in history, I think, were complete ideas. You think about like the, and I'll go off on this, so you tell me to stop, but like the VW, first VW GTI Mark 1 special interior it felt like it fit with the exterior the like Lancia Delta Integrale is another car like that that just like the interior and the exterior just were perfectly built together the Porsche 928 feels like the interior had to be in that car it couldn't have been in a different car totally and so it's hard to evaluate with interior design

1:19:59Jason Fried:like this is like what does it look like fit in does it fit with totally that's the that's the Yeah, that's the big unknown for me right now, because I look at the mock-up that everyone's been sharing, and it's this like hyper-modern, sporty hatchback. And then on the inside, you have all this analog buttons, and you have what looks almost like a resto mod, like heavily inspired by some of the legacy Ferraris from traditional classic Ferraris. And so right now, when you look at Johnny's work and you look at the mock-up, it doesn't feel cohesive at all. and the experience when you get into this sporty hatchback and then you have like an old classic Ferrari kind of like racing inspired steering wheel, just, it looks strange.

1:20:41Jason Fried:So I think we need to withhold judgment there. Kind of going into some of the more negative, like I never have, something I've really disliked about some of the more modern AMGs is this like iPad, this like iPad interface. And you see this in some of the Astons too, where it's like, hey, we didn't know where to put this screen. so we're just going to like bolt it on to the front dash and like put it out in your face and the experience of being a car in a car it's just so incredibly nice when everything just kind of like blends in in the front and you're able to just focus and i don't want i don't want a screen kind of pushed into my face so some of the like it feels like like my big concern with this project is that ferrari is not apple so john is doing johnny doing work doing doing product design work and building products at Apple, one of the greatest hardware manufacturers in history, probably the greatest hardware manufacturer and consumer electronic manufacturer in history.

1:21:39Jason Fried:And then you put him in a team like Ferrari, and then he's going to be handicapped to some degree by Ferrari's own internal capabilities, which like anybody that's owned a Ferrari is like, I never in my Ferrari ownership experience was I like, oh, Ferrari's just exceptional at, you know, making electronic interfaces, right? Like they can't even, you know, there was like a very long period where the buttons would be sticky after a year, right? And that was just like an ongoing problem that they couldn't seem to solve. And so my concern is that Johnny's probably deeply handicapped, not just by the Ferrari team, even though they're so great at making vehicles overall, but also from regulation, right?

1:22:19Jason Fried:And that like just because you want to do something doesn't mean you can do it, even if it like is, would be a nice consumer experience. And so the excitement comes from like fresh look at the interior, a bunch of new ideas, bringing back these kind of like analog, tactile experiences, taking inspiration from history. But then the concern is that it's Ferrari and they don't they can't fully deliver on it. And some of these features like aren't as reliable as you want them to be and on and on and on. You know, yeah, I agree with all that.

1:22:53Jason Kelly:But I also think your point about the Mercedes AMG GT floating iPad, I love the way that car looks. I love that car. And I hate the interior. I will not buy one because it's so bad. The other thing that's interesting is he also seemed to kind of, you know, Mercedes has these iconic round vents. And I kind of got that vibe from this interior too. Yeah, in the back.

1:23:21Jason Fried:Yeah, in the back, the passenger vents look really cool, and they can point around in a unique way. Yeah, it had a bit of an AMG thing. But anyway, yeah.

1:23:32Bill Bishop:Not to go, like, too gigabrain, but is there any translation that you think you can do? Any, like, red string drawing from, like, skeuomorphism to flat design, like UI, to what's going on with the Ferrari interior design language? or even just like reflections on your career and how you processed skeuomorphic design, the transition to flat design, which sort of, I believe it was lead from Apple and then everyone else just fell in line. But what was your experience there? And then is there anything to pull from it?

1:24:06Jason Kelly:Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I think that we lost a lot, actually, when we lost skeuomorphic design and we went to flat design. And I think what we're seeing now is a pullback and you're seeing it everywhere. I think you're seeing it more in software too, where there's more sort of textures and transitions and different things happening and shading again. You're seeing it in car design now with knobs coming back and knurled surfaces. And like I saw in the new Audi, I think they call it the Concept C or something like that, this new TT-inspired design they're working on. Their interior is like very tactile.

1:24:41Jason Kelly:It's not just that there's buttons, like there's buttons, but there's also the buttons have texture and there's clicks and snicks and all these things that are going on. And I think that it's so deeply satisfying to know that when you put an interface into a certain position, that you did it right and then it works. And that satisfaction, that physical feedback, the spring tension, all that stuff. And I think we lost some of that. I love seeing that it's coming back. And I think, look, I saw some criticism online that Johnny Ives was designing stuff for billions of people and now he's designing something for like a thousand rich people, whatever.

1:25:16Jason Kelly:But I think this idea is going to make its way down the chain across. I think people are going to be inspired by this design in general and hopefully pay more attention to these things. I do think, though, it's very important that what we've seen, pretty much every car interior today can just be pulled out and put into a different car. It just feels like they're all the same. And I think that these brands need to figure out the whole idea and not just throw a bunch of screens and go, we've done it. We've made it.

1:25:43Jason Fried:I mean, the Aston Martin has been ripped apart on some of their halo cars, the Valhalla, the Valkyrie, where they just built this beautiful, like, racing machine. And then they're like, here's an iPad. Right. And it's like, we got it. We got to get beyond that.

1:25:59Bill Bishop:Is the Ineos Grenadier underrated, overrated? Is it a gimmick or is it the future?

1:26:05Jason Kelly:I like the outside of it. I've never driven one.

1:26:08Bill Bishop:So inside, it's all physical switches for everything. I mean, there are so many switches. I mean, they still have a screen a little bit, but you have switches up on the top of the ceiling and all the way down to the cup holders. It's a little airplane cockpity. Yeah, it's a little airplane cockpity, but people love it, but it feels like it's intentionally contrarian, which I think is a good exploration.

1:26:30Jason Kelly:I think they've leaned into what that is, which is like trying to become an old school Land Rover. I have a Land Rover Defender, the current version, and I think they've done a really nice job with the interior in that car. There's some screens that are relatively small, but a lot of things are still tactile. And also the interior really mimics the exterior. I think that's one of the best designed cars at the moment, actually. Inside and out, like combination full ideas. There's some good stuff, though. And I think Kia is doing some great stuff. There's a lot of cool stuff.

1:26:58Jason Fried:I was telling a friend, like, yeah, it seems like the Ineos is like a huge hit. It's like every fifth car. And it's like, dude, you live in Malibu. It's like the prime. It's like, I was like, but yeah, the one, the other criticism, again, I want to hold actual criticism until we see what the actual outside looks like. But, but the current renders that we're seeing just look like Kias. Like if this looks like it could be a Kia. Yeah. I mean, that was the same criticism of the Purasangwe, which is like, Hey, like this could be, you could put a Kia badge on it.

1:27:32Bill Bishop:And I would think like you, you contrast it with like the Lamborghini where like everything's an octagon or hexagon and like it looks like everything is the most extreme like just to turn it on you have to like click up and push down and there's like 25 different things it's like over-engineered but it's unmistakable and that's sort of the shtick and it works i don't know so

1:27:50Jason Kelly:my my prediction i agree but i think this is credit to kia though and not discredit i know

1:27:54Jason Fried:yeah that's good he is he is doing some amazing design work totally totally and yeah it shows who

1:28:00Bill Bishop:knows maybe they're a love from client and they just said keep our name off the web page quietly conspiracy theory here.

1:28:06Jason Fried:My prediction with the Luce is that it prices in the mid-300s, somewhere in that range. You'll be able to buy it for 200 within a year. Really? Because they're EVs? The EV thing is so rough. I think they'll sell well because there's certainly demand for a daily-able Ferrari, but the Pura Sangue being priced at over half a million dollars it just like really cuts out so much so much of the market who can who can actually there's very few people that will daily a ferrari that want that kind of brand surrounding them at all times it's twice an urus and then you're going to probably lose a quarter mil within a couple years like these cars are going to be available for a quarter million dollars and not that long yeah and uh and i expect the ev the depreciation to be even more vicious but i expect these to do numbers in Cupertino from the old Apple guard that wants to just feel like.

1:29:08Bill Bishop:I like that.

1:29:09Jason Kelly:I did comment on this on X about how the worst part of this interface is the Apple CarPlay integration. Yeah, why? And I feel like there's a sweet revenge in that for Johnny and I think Mike, who's kind of an iOS designer. I forget his name. Fantastic designer. But the fact that they made this look the worst. Yeah.

1:29:30Bill Bishop:Is that just because the design language doesn't match or it's not customizable? Okay.

1:29:35Jason Kelly:Well, that and we're - It doesn't match, but what's interesting in most cars, like, it's the best part because the rest of their interface sucks.

1:29:41Bill Bishop:Totally, totally.

1:29:42Jason Kelly:In this case, it's the Apple looks the worst. The Apple bit looks the worst. And I just think it's sweet revenge for them, frankly.

1:29:47Jason Fried:Yeah. We're still in this messy middle where cars have basically two operating systems. Yeah. And it's unfortunate.

1:29:55Bill Bishop:Yeah. Yeah. It's really bad in some cars where if you turn the volume knob, you can't access the CarPlay UI because it's a layer on top. And it's like, oh, come on, guys. I think Apple's working on solving that, but it takes years and years to roll all this stuff out. It is an odd revenge to spend your entire career building a walled garden and then be on the outside of that walled garden and be like, but I'd really like to get into the garden. And you can't because you built it.

1:30:23Jason Fried:That's right.

1:30:24Bill Bishop:That's right. Well,

1:30:26Jason Fried:cool. Uh, thank you so much. Great to catch up. Thanks for popping on. Yeah. Talking cars is always fun. Come back on. Come back on soon. Great to see you guys in person. Have a good one. See ya.

1:30:34Bill Bishop:Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. And without further ado, we have Bill Bishop. You run Sinicism. Welcome to the show, Bill. Good to see you again. Welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me back. It's great to see you. Happy new year. How's your new year going?

1:30:54Boris Sofman:It's going pretty well, although it feels like we're near the North Pole here in D.C. We've been iced in for two weeks. It's pretty nuts.

1:31:02Bill Bishop:Describe iced in. Are you actually, you can't go outside? No, I got everything dug out,

1:31:08Boris Sofman:but literally at one point the guys digging out my driveway were taking selfies with the blocks of ice they could pick up. It was so big. It was so big. It was frozen solid.

1:31:17Bill Bishop:Wow.

1:31:17Boris Sofman:And it still is.

1:31:18Bill Bishop:That's insane. Did you watch the Super Bowl?

1:31:21Boris Sofman:Of course, and congrats on your ad. That was awesome.

1:31:23Bill Bishop:Thank you, yes.

1:31:24Boris Sofman:The earned media was, I don't know what your ROI, like the multiples on your 50K, but that was, what a brilliant hack. Congratulations to you guys.

1:31:32Bill Bishop:Yeah, thank you, thank you. The game kind of sucked, but you know, other than that. Yeah, it was not the most exciting, just a lot of field goals in the first half.

1:31:41Jason Fried:Yeah, we unfortunately left like three minutes into the fourth quarter because it just, we knew it was going to be insane chaos getting out, and then it just got a little more exciting. Yeah. So I have a question, but was that an interception or a fumble?

1:31:57Bill Bishop:Oh, I don't know. You're asking the wrong people.

1:32:00Jason Fried:You're asking the wrong people. When did that happen in the game?

1:32:03Boris Sofman:That was their last touchdown, right? Oh, okay.

1:32:06Jason Fried:So we had left. Okay. We had left. We had to get to the airport. And to be honest, it was tough to follow because we went with the ramp team and a bunch of our friends. And so there was just –

1:32:19Bill Bishop:There were a lot of interesting conversations to have with folks. And so there's a lot of opportunity just to like get lost in conversation and then turn around and know they scored. Yeah. Anyway.

1:32:27Jason Fried:Any of the ads stand out to you?

1:32:31Boris Sofman:The robot vodka ad that you guys talked about a little while ago, which was pretty awful. But, you know, China's got the Lunar New Year's coming up next week. And Lunar New Year's Eve, the CCTV does this big spring festival gala with, you know, hundreds of millions of people watch. It's going to be full of robots. So I'm very curious to see how they spin the robot performances.

1:32:52Jason Fried:Yeah.

1:32:53Boris Sofman:Probably not drinking vodka through the neck. Yeah, that was very, very weird.

1:32:57Jason Fried:Yeah, associating your alcohol, which kind of tastes like engine lubricant with heavy machinery, is an interesting decision. I expect the robots to perform incredibly well, just based on some of the demos we've seen, where these things are flipping around, they're moving actual fighters or dancers. it's incredibly impressive and still worried that we're going to let them sell 10 million of those in before we kind of wake up

1:33:26Bill Bishop:Have you been following the DJI story? Which part of it? Just the ban and how fast it's rolled out if there's any loopholes because you always hear the headlines like NVIDIA chips banned zero NVIDIA chips are going to China and then it's like oh well there's diversion there's cutouts, there's Nerf chips that wound up You could train DeepSeek, you could do a lot, and then the trade deal gets renegotiated. And so I'm just wondering, like, there were a couple founders who were sort of taking victory laps in the drone, American drone community, and I'm rooting for them. I love an American DJI. GoPro famously failed at this, mostly because of the supply chain pricing, all of that.

1:34:06Bill Bishop:But it's always like I see people take victory laps, and I'm wondering, it feels maybe a little bit like will the new regulation stick? how all-encompassing is the regulation?

1:34:19Boris Sofman:I think it's a bit premature, and I think you've seen already bits of it whittled away where now you can buy previous models and parts for it. And so the problem, I think, really, is that DJI makes the best drones, both in terms of performance as well as cost. And so unless the American firms can actually make drones that law enforcement wants or various companies want, you know i mean it is it's an unfortunate situation i certainly hope the american drone makers can catch up but it but it and maybe this regulation will will help but

1:34:52Bill Bishop:you know and have we have to be competitive right yeah yeah i mean it also just seemed like dji i mean yeah there were a ton of like commercial applications but it was just such a go-to christmas present for you know a lot of people like you know the casual outdoor person that goes on hikes they want to take cinematic video like realistically it's going to be collecting dust in three months, but it's going to be an epic present on Christmas. And so, I mean, that probably propelled a lot of sales and just helps get to scale. And that's important in these manufactured products, right?

1:35:21Boris Sofman:Uh-huh. And again, as we all, you know, you've talked about ad nauseum with lots of people. I mean, China has a supply chain for this stuff and we still don't. And so whether or not these regulations will pull that supply chain creation here, it remains to be seen. The challenge, of course, is you have to balance cutting off access to products that customers actually not just want but need like police departments etc but then at the same time just making it so that some companies can take advantage of the loopholes have some sales but still kind of wash their components through third countries that actually still are probably Chinese components

1:35:59Bill Bishop:I remember digging into the small drone motor market so the motors that go on those drones the small Motors. And there are truly no American companies. There's one company in, I think, Seattle that sold to private equity and they immediately offshored all of the manufacturing. And it's just like this holdco now. And I think that now they're starting to bring some stuff back. So there's like green shoots, but these things take years and years and years. Just look at like TSMC in Arizona. It took years, maybe a decade to get actual to scale from like the initial plans. Anyway, let's dive into the PLA purges.

1:36:38Bill Bishop:We read through the Wall Street Journal's coverage, and I have a bunch of questions, but how are you framing it? How are you thinking about what's happening in China today?

1:36:48Boris Sofman:So the PLA purges have been ongoing for quite some time. They've accelerated over really the last 18 months or so. I mean, they are part of a multi-year process of Xi Jinping both starting out, you know, taking control of the PLA, but then also forcing through a whole series of reforms around structure, force structure operations to try and get the PLA to what they call world-class fighting force with a specific goal for 2027, the centenary goals, which are the 100th anniversary, the founding of the People's Liberation Army, where they want to be, you know, some people say they want to be able to invade Taiwan.

1:37:26Boris Sofman:Haven't explicitly said that, but it's to get a force to the point where it could actually undertake missions like that. and the latest round where um the pla has a top structure it's called the central military military commission and it's got a chairman who's xi jinping and then two vice chairmen and four members so seven members they're now two members she and a vice chairman because he's purged the rest over the last um year or so and the just for a couple weeks ago they purged the remaining the one Central Military Commission vice chairman and one member. And it was quite shocking both because there have been rumors popped up and then three or four days later they were gone.

1:38:08Boris Sofman:But also the vice chairman who was purged was someone who was considered to be close to Xi, who Xi had kept on past the assumed retirement age because he was supposed to be sort of Xi's guy. And so it's pretty shocking on the one hand. And on the other hand, it's kind of a continuation of what's been happening. We don't know why. There's lots of speculation. The Wall Street Journal article you referred to, I think, talked about possibly a briefing internally that said that this vice chairman, John Yung-Shia, was leaking nuclear secrets to the U.S. Wish it were true. Haven't found anyone in D.C.

1:38:43Boris Sofman:who actually thinks it is. We got it. It would be impressive, right, if you had that level of a spy. But what I think it points to is, and then the question is how you interpret what's going on. There are lots of people who are trying to sort of put out versions of what happened. You know, there was rumors that there was a gunfight. Total BS as far as I understand, but it's a black box, so you can't say zero.

1:39:05Bill Bishop:So before we go into the implications and the interpretations, can you break down anatomy of a purge, history of purging? It feels like a uniquely Chinese just event. Like, you know, like when we elect a new president, a bunch of positions turn over. A new head of the FDA comes in or whatever. And we don't think of that transition as purging. Although, of course, some people get fired midterm, even if they've been appointed by the president. And so what's actually going on? Are these like forced resignations? Are these purges? Are these firings?

1:39:41Boris Sofman:They are detained for investigation. Okay. So it's a secret process or alleged criminality or alleged violation of party. or military rules in this case. And then they are, and all we got, you know, all we got was a very terse statement from a very nervous looking Ministry of Defense spokesperson announcing that these two individuals, Zhang Yuxiao and Liu Junli, had been put under investigation. That was it. And so she has not come on the record.

1:40:08Jason Fried:She has not come on the record about any of this.

1:40:12Boris Sofman:Not publicly. There have been authoritative statements in like the PLA Daily, which is the military's newspaper, but he has not yet said anything publicly. And there may be, at some point, he probably has talked about it internally. At some point, maybe we'll get a publication of some of his speeches. But we have very, very little information that's public about what's actually going on, other than that these two have been taken away for investigation. And so far, they have not been replaced on this body.

1:40:43Bill Bishop:And then one way you could potentially read into this is that you're consolidating power, which makes it easier to perform military operations. The other is that you lost all your top guys who were going to help you with military operations. What's your interpretation?

1:40:59Boris Sofman:So it's a good question. And I think it kind of is both. There's clearly the number of generals and senior officers who have been taken out over the last two plus years is quite shocking. It's in the dozens. and so it it's hard to imagine in the short term it doesn't have some impact on the military's ability to fight um in but at the same time there are a lot of officers and a lot of you know younger up-and-coming officers in the pla you know the pla has historically been an incredibly corrupt organization and xi jinping has been you know he started he really kicked off this anti-corruption campaign in the PLA in 2014 in sort of full force.

1:41:43Boris Sofman:And so what may be happening is that he has realized that he just has to effectively decapitate one or two generations of the PLA to get down to a group of younger officers who were promoted not by buying their positions, as was very common through up until even, I think, into the Xi era.

1:42:04Jason Fried:How did those get priced? Obviously, under the table, very corrupt.

1:42:08Boris Sofman:You guys, your audience may find this interesting. It's kind of like an angel investment, at least in some cases, where actually people would collectively buy a stake in a rising officer. I'm not joking, right? No way.

1:42:21Jason Fried:So basically they'd go out and say, like the officer would be like, hey, I've got some potential within the organization. I think I can get this job. Let me pool together some capital. And then they'd pool together that capital. take over, they pay off the person or someone to get the role, and then there would be a revenue stream back to the original pool of capital?

1:42:42Boris Sofman:The idea is you're buying an option on a future revenue of corrupt goodies, right? It's a real thing.

1:42:49Jason Fried:Because if said person gets the job, they'll be able to generate a bunch of revenue not just with their salary, but through corrupt activities.

1:42:57Boris Sofman:They can create a whole bunch of opportunities for people who are close to them.

1:43:01Jason Fried:So he basically gets a certain job. He's got access and control over some amount of budget and creates basically a little economy around, uh, within the stack. That is insane.

1:43:13Boris Sofman:And, and, and this was, um, and there are, there's been certainly, I don't think it's been in the media, but I'd certainly heard that among the, uh, funders of some of these, uh, officers in years past was our America CIA,

1:43:23Jason Fried:because it was a great way to push people in and, and, and, you know, eventually they,

1:43:28Boris Sofman:they owe you. Right. And so it's actually, it's actually from the CIA. And this is something, without going into detail, the party has talked about, about, you know, getting rid of this process of buying and selling promotions. And you saw from some of the previous cases of generals who were detained early on in the Xi era. I mean, the stories of, like, you know, the cars full of gold and the, you know, these suitcases of millions of dollars and euros worth of cash hidden in one of their villas. I mean, the level of corruption was insane because there's so much money being thrown into the military buildup.

1:44:05Bill Bishop:Interesting.

1:44:05Jason Fried:Crazy.

1:44:06Bill Bishop:What's the state of...

1:44:07Jason Fried:And so part of that, if you have decades of corruption that has been intimately intertwined with the military buildup, maybe it doesn't give you that much confidence in a lot of the actual fighting force and the equipment, right? Because maybe it wasn't going necessarily to the best vendor. it was going to the vendor that was pushing enough money out the back door?

1:44:29Boris Sofman:I mean, that is certainly the risk and potentially the concern. I mean, you look at, in addition to all these generals, they've basically taken out a significant chunk of the leadership of the military-industrial complex, all sorts of defense contractors, defense weapons makers, heads of research institutes that were involved in weapons development. At the same time, the weapons look like they work. I mean, the thing about China and corruption is, you know, China has this great high-speed rail system, right? Well, the guy who really oversaw it is in jail because he was corrupt. But the thing is, is the corruption is just sort of like it's another tax.

1:45:02Boris Sofman:It still works.

1:45:03Bill Bishop:It still works. Interesting.

1:45:04Boris Sofman:Unlike maybe other countries, you still get it done. It still works pretty well. But then you make a little money on the side.

1:45:11Jason Fried:Wow.

1:45:11Bill Bishop:That's funny.

1:45:13Jason Fried:He's like, I actually got to make the trains run so I can keep the gravy train going.

1:45:17Bill Bishop:Yeah, exactly. The gravy train is important. Lots of lessons there. What's the state of communications or relationships between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping? Are they talking regularly? Are they meeting in person? Are we at like a local top or local bottom? Are things the worst they've ever been, somewhere in between?

1:45:39Boris Sofman:No, no, we seem like we're in a steady state. They had a call last week, which, you know, again, I think is an indication that so far or at least things are on track for President Trump's visit to China in early April. There was one sort of wrinkle, though, in the readout from the Chinese side of the call he had with Donald Trump last week. He had some pretty stark language around Taiwan, and specifically around U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, because the U.S. announced an$11 billion arms sales package to Taiwan back in December, which was, at the time, it's a very large number. The U.S. has sort of been doing billion or so kind of packages and rolling them out.

1:46:21Boris Sofman:The Chinese get pissed off, but, you know, they move on. 11 billion was pretty significant. I had heard that the reason Xi Jinping had mentioned sort of being prudent around arms sales to Taiwan last week was specifically because the U.S. was working on a big arms package. The Chinese had found out about it, and the Chinese ambassador here in D.C. had basically gone to the White House and thrown a fit. over the weekend we saw on Friday the Financial Times reported yes there's a$20 billion package in the works and it's something the Chinese don't want to have happen and they have threatened to postpone or cancel Trump's visit and I think they might actually meet it and so I would imagine that the Trump administration won't push forward that sale until after the meeting what's interesting though again is it's not clear Trump knew about it this is people in the administration who maybe are more interested who sort of more pro-Taiwan not happy with this kind of whether you I don't call it detente a little too early for that but this sort of steady state in the relationship over the last couple months and they want to make sure that Taiwan is still getting attention yeah um yeah

1:47:27Bill Bishop:that's fascinating uh how does China frame the Taiwan question internally in the west we sort of all accept the premise that if we're doing an aid package, it's for defense, and that the only possible scenario is that China would invade at some future date. But does China use rhetoric that's like, well, we don't want Taiwan to have weapons because we're worried about them invading us? Is that even something that they toy with? Or are they saying like, we don't want them to have weapons because we're planning to do this at some point?

1:48:00Boris Sofman:Well, no, I don't think they're worried about Taiwan invading. I think it's more, you know, they, Taiwan is the first of their, of their red lines, especially in the U S China relationship. And so they, but ultimately they, you know, they, they don't want, I mean, the U S saying, we're going to sell you a bunch of weapons, even if right now, for example, that Taiwan, because of the political, what's going on in the Taiwan politics, you know, the, the Taiwan legislature won't approve the budget to buy the last package of weapons because it's the opposition party controls with a, with the coalition partner controls the legislature.

1:48:34Boris Sofman:So this$20 million package.

1:48:36Jason Fried:Should we assume that CCP operatives have effectively infiltrated the opposition party, or is that too much of a tinfoil hat? Because I imagine that if you were, it would be worth the time to try to get your team elected.

1:48:54Boris Sofman:Good seed investment.

1:48:55Jason Fried:Yeah, good seed. Put it in venture term.

1:48:57Boris Sofman:There are no questions, a lot of influence efforts. The Taiwan government under the current president, Lai Ching-da, has definitely stepped up and talked more about these kinds of infiltrations and influence. I don't think there should be any surprise that that is going on. but ultimately for these arms packages it's also a signal of I think the US is trying to make it a signal of we still support Taiwan because what Beijing wants ultimately is for the Taiwanese people to think that there's nothing there's no help coming they have no other choice but effectively resistance is futile roll over and the faster you roll over the better you'll be treated is I think the constant messaging they're trying to put out there And so support from the U.S.

1:49:44Boris Sofman:in terms of either rhetorical or big arms packages messes up that messaging. The comments from the Japanese prime minister back in November mess up that messaging. And then they also complicate the PRC's planning in the event that there is some sort of scenario where they have to use some sort of force. It's going to be a lot harder if the Taiwanese have better weapons, better training and have support from the U.S. and potentially Japan has to get involved.

1:50:10Jason Fried:uh what economic indicators are you tracking in china broadly things like unemployment rate foreclosures general you know development infrastructure development housing development

1:50:24Boris Sofman:all that stuff um so i mean all those are worth tracking you know all you have to sort of filter through the the data i think the the consensus of a lot of the folks who really tracked this closely is that generally like the economy's not doing great but it's also not falling off a cliff right? It's not the binary like boom or bust. The things to really watch over the next, I mean, we'll learn a lot more by the middle of March because the first week of March starts what's called the two sessions. And the one that matters is this National People's Congress, their legislature. And so we'll get a work report from the premier that will then lay out targets for this coming year in terms of things like GDP growth and et cetera.

1:51:05Boris Sofman:But then also, this is the year where they roll out the 15th five-year plan. And that also includes not only high-level goals, but also some targets in certain sectors. And so those ultimately, I think, are more useful to look for over the next few months than some of the sort of high-frequency data, just because the high-frequency data is noisy. And ultimately, the Chinese, you know, again, the stock market's up 50 % or so from the lows. It's at a new high, I think, today. The tech sector is booming. There's, I don't want to say bubble, but there's a big AI boom in terms of the AI related shares.

1:51:39Jason Fried:Yeah, their AI companies are going public much sooner than ours, right? Yes,

1:51:43Boris Sofman:with much lower revenue, raising much less money, much lower valuations. And a lot of it is because they actually need the capital. I mean, it's, I think they, but the amount of capital they need in the raising is a, it's like, it's like, you know, a rounding error for what like open AI is

1:51:58Bill Bishop:crazy not quite but sort of right oh yeah i mean you see some what is the general pop how does the

1:52:04Jason Fried:general populace feel about ai i think most of america is uh especially after the super bowl nobody was seeing the super bowl ai ads being like yeah this is amazing because they kind of sucked well yeah okay so the ads yeah the ads weren't that great a lot of them weren't that rate, but there's just also a general fear around job displacement, lack of, you know, people are not excited to even to put a data center in their state, right? We have all this legislation going down the pipeline, but how do people in China actually feel? Unemployment rate for youth is already so high, it's hard to imagine it going much higher.

1:52:41Jason Fried:So maybe there, maybe people already feel like it's over.

1:52:44Boris Sofman:So, so I mean, data centers, energy, obviously you have another guest who talked about, it's not an issue for China, right? It's somewhere they could build as many data centers as they want as long as they can get the chips. That's the bigger issue. I think when you look at what the government is doing, they have this AI plus plan they rolled out a couple months ago where it's really to embed AI throughout the economy and throughout society. And so they're not really focused on as much as sort of getting to AGI and these massive models. They're really more focused on diffusing, you know, how do you use AI and all sorts of tasks in your apps, in WeChat, in for medical, for like seeing doctors for medical advice.

1:53:25Boris Sofman:I mean, there's a big boom right now in companies chasing sort of medical AI, including Alibaba. And so it seems like even though it may not be, you know, the models may not be like the ChatCPT or Gemini levels, at the same time, they're being taking a much more pragmatic and practical approach to just diffusing it through society. And then in terms of what it does to employment, there's been lots of discussions about the impact. I think, you know, it's a country where they can incentivize positively or more negatively companies to not necessarily lay off as many people as they would if they were operating just purely on an economic basis when it comes to sort of AI disruption.

1:54:06Boris Sofman:Doesn't mean unemployment is not a significant problem for the youth. And I don't know that they have a good solution for that but it isn't holding back what they're trying to do around ai

1:54:15Jason Fried:at this point that makes sense uh last week jensen was on cnbc i think it was thursday or friday talking about you know how the overwhelming demand obviously we had earnings last week everyone's raising their capex guides you have legacy ai chips that are sitting at very high utilization surprisingly high utilization and pricing compared to what a lot of the ai bears have been thinking about over the last six months saying like, hey, all these chips are going to be worthless. And it turns out so far - Like Michael Burry and others? Yeah, yeah. Those types. And so I think there was some conversation around, okay, and if Jensen wants to go like, hey, all these people are super chip constrained.

1:54:59Jason Fried:I think the question comes up, why? Okay. So then why are we selling chips to China then? Right? If our leading labs are not able to get the... Call Amazon.

1:55:12Bill Bishop:They'll buy them.

1:55:13Jason Fried:Yeah. Call Microsoft.

1:55:14Boris Sofman:It's a great question, and it's something that is... Certainly, you've seen some movement on Capitol Hill asking that question, asking the impact on HBM prices, memory prices. And ultimately, the answer is, well, Tsen Hwang can go direct to Donald Trump and convince him to approve these sales. What's interesting, right, I think it was the Financial Times reported last week that even though, like, the Department of Commerce has signed off on the licenses to sell to China the H-200s, that the Department of State, or the State Department, which has this Bureau of, I think it's Arms Control and Nonproliferation, they have yet to sign off on it.

1:55:51Boris Sofman:So the sales actually haven't happened.

1:55:54Jason Fried:Interesting. and and what is the general sentiment now from the ccp and and various groups because when the first time we we maybe agreed generally to a chip sale and then howard lutnik came out and said like we're going to get them addicted to the american ai stack and then they were like actually we don't actually they were like no we don't want them but clearly all the companies want them their compute they're more way more compute constrained than we are they're ready to rock uh and so where is that actually do you think that if it actually gets fully approved that they will all flow without any type of red tape on the china side yeah or no there's been reporting i mean various reports

1:56:32Boris Sofman:the chinese are being careful about who how who they allow to actually order and they're talking about the h200s they didn't want the h20s they need the h200s because china has enough like they can actually make looks like decent inference chips they just can't make the chips they need for training, right? And so that's the H200 fills that gap. And so I think the Chinese perspective is, look, we're not there yet. We can fill this gap we have to sort of keep competitive in the AI game. NVIDIA, the US government has approved these sales. NVIDIA will sell this to us. We're just going to make sure that if you buy these, you also have to also make sure you're buying Chinese chips to keep supporting our own indigenous ecosystem, right?

1:57:12Boris Sofman:And so, and then of course there are some, I think potentially some security concerns because of the whatever the security review the US is requiring, which is basically, I think, just to make sure that the chips get shipped to the US, charge the 25 % licensing fee as a tariff, which makes it legal, and then ship them back to China. But, you know, from the Chinese perspective, what's the security review? What do they have to do these? You know, who knows what they might do these ships? So there's certain places, I think that like state-owned enterprises, certain labs where they probably won't want these chips.

1:57:42Boris Sofman:But the issue also is, right, there's also still a lot of NVIDIA chips in China. So we should see in the next week or so. If you remember, you guys, it's been a year since the quote-unquote DeepSeek moment, right? And so now everyone's waiting for DeepSeek's next model, which is supposed to launch on or around Lunar New Year, which is next Wednesday the 17th. So we should have some sort of a DeepSeek model in the next eight or nine days. I think it was the information reported it's being trained on Blackwells, which they're not supposed to have, right? But somehow they have the Blackwells. and and they fell off the back of a truck and they can they can get as many nvidia top end chips as they want hosted overseas in these cloud facilities yeah right so so it is it is not a clean

1:58:27Jason Fried:set of controls by any means yeah yeah what what do you think china's reaction is to the uh the the latest election in Japan, obviously Japanese equities responded positively to, to the result. But how are you tracking that whole situation?

1:58:44Boris Sofman:I mean, I think that the Chinese helped Takeichi because their, their reaction to her comments in early November, which again, she said she reiterated the Japanese position on sort of a Taiwan contingency, so to speak. She said it in a, in a, in a setting where it hadn't been said before by sitting prime minister. And, you know, but their reaction really, I think, helped make her case and other sort of more defense hawks in the Japanese government make their case that we need to do more because China is a threat. And so now she really has a mandate. The question will be, will the Chinese continue to really push on her or do they sort of find ways to over the next, it won't be immediate, but over some period of time, find ways to at least calm things down and then start reengaging with dialogues.

1:59:35Boris Sofman:I think, you know, the fact that they clearly started playing the rare earths card again with Japan, you know, also, again, in some ways there's no going back for Japan, even if the Chinese were to find, they were to find an off ramp and find a way to sort of get back to kind of the US-China sort of detentish-like relationship around. I think the damage has been done in terms of Japan needs to, a stronger military, and Japan needs to move faster to protect itself from the weaponizing of certain parts of the supply chain that China can do, which we all know from rare earths.

2:00:11Bill Bishop:Yeah, yeah, that makes no sense.

2:00:13Jason Fried:Anything else, Rudy? This was super fun and fascinating. Thank you so much for taking the time. We love having you on. Thank you. The audience loves you too. And I'm going to follow up and ask what headset you use because we're making, because not every guest of ours comes in with a sound video set up like this.

2:00:30Boris Sofman:It's a Shure headset, and Ben Thompson got it for me because I do the Sharp China podcast with his team, with Andrew Sharp, and so Ben sent me all the gear. Very thoughtful. So I have this solid-state logic little box, and then I plug in this headset. Actually, is it? Sorry, it's a Sensenhauer thing. Sennheiser? Sennheiser. There we go.

2:00:51Bill Bishop:Sennheiser. Alpha. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you. Great to see you. Good luck with the weather. We will talk to you soon. Thank you. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risks. Before our next guest, let's go over to Tyler. Let's go over to Tyler. What's new in Tyler's world? Why are we X-ing out Tyler? Back to the show. That's it? That's it? Wait, wait. When are you going to drop the special effect, the latest and greatest special effect? This one? Yeah, Tyler, tell us the rest of your story.

2:01:28That's all, folks.

2:01:32Bill Bishop:Fantastic. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150 ,000 organizations use to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we have Jason Kelly in the Restream Waiting Room. He's the co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. Jason, good to see you. Wow.

2:01:50Jason Kelly:Yeah, good to see you guys.

2:01:52Bill Bishop:You look fantastic. Incredible setup. You sound fantastic. I don't know if you remember me. You gave me a tour of Ginkgo Bioworks over a decade ago, maybe 2012 or something, 2013? Yeah, that was a real long time ago. It was a long time ago. That was a different era. You were doing, yeah. Different era. Yeah, Soylent.

2:02:09Sara Hooker:Soylent stuff, yeah. I remember.

2:02:10Bill Bishop:It was remarkable. I mean, the facility was incredibly advanced. You had the pipetting machines. Everything was already automated. I'm seeing behind you, it's clearly grown. Break it down for us. Like, what is the shape of the operation today? What is the scale of the footprint? What's the business like today?

2:02:30Jason Kelly:Yeah. So when you would have come by, we were sort of early on this journey of trying to automate lab work.

2:02:35Bill Bishop:Yeah.

2:02:36Jason Kelly:So I brought you in the lab. I'll give you like a little bit of an introduction to how to do science. You know, you're hearing a lot about AI for science. We're just announcing the thing with open AI. So like what does it actually look like to be a scientist? So first off, glasses, lab coat. Lab coat, for sure.

2:02:51Jason Fried:Good, sir.

2:02:52Jason Kelly:Pipette. Pipette. There you go. The robot handles the pipette. If you remember like high school biology, this is a little like a very fancy straw. Yeah. And you suck up liquid and you squirt it out somewhere else. Yep. And you do that for five years and you get a PhD at MIT like I did. It is just a grind. You're actually doing the work of science primarily by hand. And that's still broadly true. Like all United States where our labor is extremely expensive, everything else, it doesn't matter. Scientists are working by hand at the lab.

2:03:21Bill Bishop:No, I remember I went and toured the Langer lab at Caltech. My co-founder was doing a PhD there. And I was like, oh, you're in the most elite lab at Caltech. It must be all robots and stuff. And he was like, yeah, this is my day. This? and then it just jiggles it and kind of just like gives it a little motion, and then centrifuge over here. It's just like moving little buckets from one tool to another all day and just by hand. Yep. Yeah.

2:03:47Jason Kelly:So, okay. So then the tech people hear this and they're like, That's crazy. Just automate it, bro. Like, why not? What are you guys doing? Like, it's crazy, right? And so the analogy here is the analogy.

2:03:55Jason Fried:They're like, trust me. I built a crud app. I can do this. Yeah, I got this. I got this.

2:04:01Jason Kelly:But like, let's take transportation, right? We had automated transportation 100 years ago. True. Trains, cars, subways. Yeah, exactly. Trains, right. Okay, and yet we had the car, which is this manual thing. So why didn't we just apply our automation to the car? And the answer was variability, right? Like the car needed to transport yourself to your front door. And once you had that extra element of like the variety of requests from the user, rails were screwed. Automation was screwed. And so up until four or five years ago, suddenly we start seeing Waymos around, and we don't even call it automation anymore.

2:04:36Jason Kelly:We start calling it autonomy because it's so surprising that you can automate that variability. And what they did with transportation at Google and Tesla, that's coming for every other, in my opinion, physical industry. And what's going to bring AI in is managing the variability. Yeah. And so this behind me is an autonomous lab.

2:05:01Bill Bishop:Yeah.

2:05:01Jason Kelly:The reason we were able to let GPT-5 drive this thing, which we can talk about, is first off because it operates like a Waymo.

2:05:07Bill Bishop:Yeah.

2:05:08Jason Kelly:A scientist can just tell this thing what experiment it wants. Yep. And it'll do the experiment.

2:05:12Bill Bishop:Okay. So break down the line between – That took 10 years to get there. True overnight success right here. True overnight success. I saw it first time. That's not a trivial thing to do. Yeah, break down the line between experimentation and manufacturing because once a discovery is made and we're hearing about GLP-1 scaling up, I feel like those pills are made in an automated factory. Yeah, already automated. So break down that.

2:05:35Jason Kelly:That's subways. Okay, that's subways. So manufacturing is the subway lines, right? You're doing the same experiment every day, no big deal. There's a ton of automation already in biotech and pharma and frankly, many manufacturing across the board, right? It's the research side of the house, those sad grad students at the bench, and I say that with love, that are doing all the variable work. And by the way, that's what's moving the frontier of science. And so if we want to – and by the way, this is both true at the nation's level. We want the US to lead in science. But I think what you're now seeing thanks to Sam and OpenAI and making hardcore bets on original research, you're seeing industry suddenly wake up again and say, oh, maybe we should be doing original.

2:06:17Jason Kelly:maybe it's time for Bell Labs again. We should be doing original research because it pays. If you really have fundamental discoveries, then you can be the first to the line to commercialize them. So I think unlocking this flywheel with science where the models can control autonomous labs, I think you'll see that in a lot more sectors than you'd expect because people are getting religion about research again, even in the industrial sector.

2:06:39Jason Fried:And talk about how you process the AI over the last maybe five years because the whole concept for the company originally wasn't predicated on people getting excited about LLMs. It was just like, hey, let's automate a lot of this work. So when did you start thinking about partnering with...

2:06:55Bill Bishop:In many ways, it was like a CRUD app on top of a lab, right?

2:07:00Jason Fried:Yeah, and I'm sure you always... I'm sure you... There's some people that have a company that's capitalizing on AI that you can tell. They just were like, oh, this is a better idea than what I was working on. I'm sure you and the team and your investors and partners always thought about a world where you could generate a concept for an experiment or do research with AI and then automatically, you know, sort of prove it out or study it in the real world. But walk us through kind of like how you've processed the developments of the labs and how all of that work can be integrated and applied within Ginkgo.

2:07:36Jason Kelly:Yeah, so we're laser focused on make that hardware layer and then the software that basically orchestrates and schedules this thing and makes it possible to put lots of experiments on it, make that robust and also make that have hooks into whatever. It could hook into a scientist placing an order, just like a person can sit in the back of the Waymo and tell it where to go. Or it could hook into an AI model placing the order, just like when a person's not in the Waymo, Waymo's AI is telling the Waymo where to go, right? Same exact idea. So we're not actually trying to solve the AI scientist problem, right?

2:08:10Jason Kelly:OpenAI came to us. We had that interaction. They were excited on the research department to see, hey, can these models be smart enough to design experiments? And we just announced on Thursday that we had a breakthrough where we let OpenAI do six rounds of experiments on the platform. And on the fourth round, it beat scientific state of the art. And then by the sixth round, it had beaten it by 40 percent on cell-free protein expression, which is just like a tricky biochemical reaction to set up and design. And so it's not a bad scientist.

2:08:41Jason Fried:Is beating it just a consistency thing? What does that actually mean?

2:08:49Jason Kelly:Yeah, so in this particular thing, right, so all the cells in your body are producing protein every day. So you as a human are basically a bunch of nanotechnology.

2:08:58Bill Bishop:Mine produce a lot of protein.

2:08:59Jason Kelly:Yeah, you guys are, I can tell. I can see the difference.

2:09:05Jason Kelly:Mog. Mog. So they're making all these, and all the proteins are different. They're like little pieces of nanotechnology. It's almost freakish to look at what they look like under a microscope. And so they're all interacting. They build your cells. When you cut your skin and it regrows, that's all the proteins in your body, like being able to rebuild that stuff. And so your cells can take DNA code and turn it into whatever protein you want. All right. So the question is, could you as a scientist print a piece of DNA, which you could do synthetically, you design it, add it into a mixture that has all the parts, the guts of a cell, and have it make your protein at a high level.

2:09:40Jason Kelly:It's like the world's smallest 3D printer. And so that reaction is cell-free. So there's no cell there. It's all in a test tube. It's in like these little guys. Cell-free protein synthesis. Sure. And it lets scientists design new drugs. If they're making a protein therapeutic, it could be a new material. Who knows?

2:09:57Bill Bishop:Right?

2:09:57Jason Kelly:And so we are able to let JAT-GBT bring the cost of that down.

2:10:01Bill Bishop:Yeah.

2:10:02Jason Kelly:And so that was the that was the big goal. Like how much cheaper could it get? And there was a paper out of Stanford just in August that set a benchmark and we beat it by 40 percent. So I think it's a it's a good demo. It had a clear benchmark so you could mark against what other people were doing. That's why we liked it. The experiments are fast.

2:10:16Bill Bishop:Yeah.

2:10:16Jason Kelly:But the model designed about 500 of these plates were each well. And that is a little experiment. And it designed the experiment for each one.

2:10:24Bill Bishop:Got it. Yeah. Talk more about the different applications across. I mean, we were talking about like synthesizing unique perfume sense at one point. Yeah, sure. There's obviously everyone jumps straight to cure cancer, but there's also a boom in GLP-1s. Like where are the bounds of like where we need more experimentation or even just like where experimentation is valuable? Yeah.

2:10:46Jason Kelly:So I'm pretty excited about what's happening with the GLP-1s. I think it's opening the door to applying the tools of biotechnology to wellness. Yeah. Right? Like right now, if you think about the pharmaceutical industry today, it's basically the disease industry.

2:11:00Bill Bishop:Yeah. Yeah.

2:11:01Jason Kelly:And like, how much of your life are you sick? Not that much. Not that much. That's on the person, but not that much. For the average person, not that much. How much of your life would you like to feel better? Would you like to sleep better? Would you like to have more muscles? You know, right? Like that. Like if you have something that adds muscle mass annually in your 60s, it's another GLP-1. It's a multi-trillion dollar drug. If you have something that adds a year to lifespan, what's it worth? Like, how do you even put a market cap on a thing that adds a year to people's lives?

2:11:33Jason Fried:And when you think about how much consumers spend on various wellness things today that have zero impact, like truly, like...

2:11:41Jason Kelly:Well, and you know why? Do you know why they have no impact? The reason is, the industry today, the pathway to apply all this to the problems of wellness is much more, it's like muddy, it's unclear, how do you get the FDA approval? There's lots of barriers. So we haven't actually thrown the full horsepower of biotechnology against that problem. We've only thrown the full horsepower biotechnology against disease. And I think that needs to change. And so that's my, if you ask, like, where do I see biotech? Because all that stuff, right, was ideas on, like, different areas we could bring biotech to that wasn't disease.

2:12:20Jason Kelly:And, like, people tried the food. People tried perfumes. People tried new materials. All kinds of things. And the one I like the best right now is, well, health and wellness. I think it's a monster.

2:12:31Jason Fried:If you had a 60-second slot in the Super Bowl and you wanted to get people excited about the intersection of AI and all the things that we're talking about, what would you want to communicate?

2:12:44Jason Kelly:So I think what would be cool to communicate is that science, like what it really is, is like the formalization of human curiosity. Okay? And everybody's curious. And the reason everyone doesn't do science today is this shit. Okay, right? You're blocked by the cost and expense of all the physical infrastructure. And if you took that away, if this was available cloud style, for example, how many people would want to be doing science? Maybe they have a health condition. They want to study themselves. Maybe they have a new idea for a material. Maybe they want to make a new pet. You know, they want to do a new, they're a gardener and they want to make a new plant variety.

2:13:29Jason Kelly:I have no idea what ideas they would have. Right. But I think that is going to be accessible to people coming up. And I know that sounds crazy, but I'll tell you something else that sounded crazy. In 1960, if you said random average people will program computers. Yeah.

2:13:44Bill Bishop:AWS. That sounded insane. Totally. 100%.

2:13:48Jason Kelly:Absolutely insane. And so I think you fast forward on the back of this, you know, the model's ability to access literature and be smart and tell you how to turn your question into an experiment. And then the autonomous labs that could do that experiment for you in the cloud. And I think we'll have millions of scientists, just like we have millions of programmers now, as we made it easier.

2:14:07Bill Bishop:Then what's the next step? Because it feels like... Yeah, that was perfect. That was perfect.

2:14:12Jason Fried:We'll run this next year.

2:14:14Bill Bishop:Models can...

2:14:15Jason Kelly:Your guy's ad was the best.

2:14:16Bill Bishop:Thank you. I think it was fun. So models, yeah, I mean, models can do a lot of reasoning around experimentation. If you have an idea and you come to it, it might be a little reality, check it against literature, do a deep research report, kind of flag problems. Then you're hooking up the automated lab. What's the next phase? is automating a mouse model or creating a fully digital mouse model or model of the human body or actual physical mice in a lab that you can test because that's a big piece of the FDA approval process, I believe?

2:14:51Jason Kelly:It is, but it's dropping out. So I think this is one of the things that this new FDA is doing is they're getting rid of the animal experiments. I think that's a great idea. Interesting. Animal welfare reasons is a good idea. It's not a good model. Okay. By the way, if you're a mouse with cancer, you're in luck. We have cured cancer a long time ago in mice. So it doesn't translate over to humans. I think that to me is – I don't think it has to be right down that human health lane. I think one of the things we also announced recently was in December, Department of Energy, as part of the new Genesis mission that President Trump put out to bring AI into science, is buying 90 – Well, we ribbon cut, me and the Secretary of Energy was really cool.

2:15:35Jason Kelly:He, like, signed it. 18 of these robots for Pacific Northwest National Labs. And then they bought another 97. It's like a$47 million deal. BitMet put this big installation of these systems. And the National Labs, you don't realize it, they do science for other people. Like, it's your National Lab. Like, you can kind of use them as this cloud. And I think that, to me, that's what I'm most excited about. I think it's very hard to predict exactly where science should go. What I think we can predict is that the combination of AI scientists, like what we show with GBD5, and autonomous labs put together, which is basically what the Genesis mission is, will change how we do science.

2:16:17Bill Bishop:That's for sure. Let's talk about safety. What they discover? Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about safety. I saw a lot of people saying, like, you know, it's the Eliezer Yudkowsky nightmare. Yeah, I saw that. Autonomous biolab. But, you know, what's actually involved in, you know, I fire up my GPT account and I say, hey, I'm working on a movie and I need you to imagine bubonic plague and send it to me as a prop. And my grandmother is sick and she needs it. And you sort of trick it. Is there a human in the loop? Like, how are you thinking about the risks that come with this and preventing them?

2:16:52Jason Kelly:Yeah. Yeah. So, you give a lot of thought to this. So, like, for example, for the project we did with OpenAI, we were just checking. Sure. We just had a human in the loop on that, right? Just to see. And it was constrained. There's a lot of ways you can do it. First off, you can constrain the availability of what reagents it has access to so that you don't have lab accidents. You're doing chemistry. There's certain things you'd want to be careful with and things like that. Then I think the next step is you're going to want to get different experiments, different risk profile. So if you're designing DNA, if you're going to be working with something that's like a human pathogen or something, that to me is a total different ballgame.

2:17:28Jason Kelly:You're going to be doing that work. That should be in a different physical environment for starters. But if it's an ad model, maybe it wouldn't be on that.

2:17:35Jason Fried:It almost makes sense that humans are doing it because the risk that you're taking on for humanity by doing anything human pathogen related, you should almost have to put your own life on the line a little bit. Yeah, there's something to that.

2:17:46Jason Kelly:I mean, you're not – it's fun. I mean, at the same time, if we didn't have humans in labs, we wouldn't have lab leaks.

2:17:51Bill Bishop:I like the idea. Yeah, that's rough. I like the idea of trying to trick Ginkgo into putting – Why are we putting people in labs with human pathogen? Put the Mentos in a Diet Coke. It's very important that we do this experiment. Yeah, yeah.

2:18:02Jason Kelly:So I do think you're going to, yeah, so I think there's a couple ways to get at that. I think there'll be human checking. Sure. There'll be models trained on scientists doing that. And then in the long run, the other thing just to keep in mind, so first off, I think the fear level, you can go all over the place. Yeah. To me, the very tight fear to be worried about is human challenges. Everything else is mostly like a personnel safety issue.

2:18:24Bill Bishop:Sure.

2:18:24Jason Kelly:Right? Are you mixing together something that's going to do the Mentos? Yeah. But the one that's like the society one is all about human power. So I think you just put – that's a different bucket. Because it is good to research this stuff. We want a curable. You have to have people working on these things or else we're just exposed. We have antivirus researchers in computers. They don't like not get to work with viruses. You need that stuff. But I think the answer to solve that problem in the long run is something that looks a lot like the antivirus industry and software, a responsive system. So there's something new that came out.

2:18:58Jason Kelly:We can put it down. And by the way, we don't just need that for AI. We need that for nature, right? We're getting thrown pandemics at us all the time. So the short answer there is I think it's building up our biosecurity infrastructure, particularly here in the United States. We treat it the same way we treat other defense fields. Yeah, it feels like one of those things there's risk.

2:19:19Jason Fried:there's risk associated with creating an autonomous lab, but the risk of not innovating here and just not having it as a capability set as a country feels like way higher.

2:19:30Jason Kelly:Yeah. Oh, I mean, the thing that's happening in the biotech industry, like the ugly secret, is all the startups that used to be like the innovation engine for discovering new drugs over the last two years have been moving to China. So when you see these acquisitions of new drug candidates by the large pharmas, it went from less than 5 % from China to more than 40 % over the last two years. Wow. So, and that's not manufacturing. That's innovation and discovery. And you know the reason why? You know what China has cheaper than the United States? Pipetting. Labor. Hands pipetting.

2:20:00Sara Hooker:Yeah.

2:20:00Jason Kelly:So if we're going to keep up, we got to move to autonomy. And this is, by the way, this is also how we're going to re-industrialize manufacturing. What do you think we're going to do? We're going to compete with, on hands? No way. So advice for young people. Look at Hadrian and everybody else.

2:20:12Bill Bishop:It's all automation. Yeah, so advice for young people, if you want to have an impact in science, should you learn to code? Should you learn to prompt? Should you learn to pipette? What should you learn?

2:20:25Jason Kelly:You should learn about the domain. So you should learn, if you want to have a breakthrough in biology, you should learn about biology. Sure. Right? So that you're the one who understands the limits of that. And then second, I think you do need to, like I don't think PhDs are not going to work at the lab bench at the start.

2:20:40Sara Hooker:Yeah.

2:20:41Jason Kelly:Because you've got to understand the limits of experimentation. Yep. So that it's just like today, who are the best users of the coding aid?

2:20:46Sara Hooker:Yeah.

2:20:47Jason Kelly:Coders.

2:20:47Sara Hooker:Yeah.

2:20:48Jason Kelly:Yeah. Right. So who are going to be the best users of autonomous labs? Scientists at the lab end. Yeah. Right. That already know. And I think the thing is people get scared. All is going to take scientist jobs? That's like there's a great IBM ad from like the 1951 IBM ad. It's like the automated calculator will do the work of 150 engineers. And it shows engineers with slide rules. Yeah. I swear to God. Like a sea of engineers with slide rules. And you might have said, oh, it will take 150 engineer jobs. And of course, total opposite, right? By increasing the return on investment of computation, what was in the minds of engineers became worth 100 times more.

2:21:27Jason Kelly:Jobs increased by 100 fold, all post-IBM, right? All post the automation of computation. So if we automate all these industries, whether it's science, it only favors the people that have the know-how in those industries. But we got to automate it because otherwise we're not competitive. And in the modern era, we already automated the easy stuff. We automated the subways. It's all the autonomy. It's the things that can handle the variability. That's what the hardware guys like us have to work on. And then let the AI models go nuts. That's awesome. This was fascinating.

2:21:57Jason Fried:Really enjoyed it. You're our new in-house science. Yeah, our science corner, our biotech czar. Yes.

2:22:07Jason Kelly:It's the CBPN science corner. It's happening.

2:22:10Jason Fried:I think that might be a trip marked already. Yeah, incredible setup again. So looking forward to the next one. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon, Jason.

2:22:17Bill Bishop:Thanks so much for coming by. All right, take care, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. There was some breaking news over the weekend. SpaceX has delayed Mars plans to focus on the moon. This is something we've been debating a lot. Are you moon-pilled or are you Mars-pilled? Well, SpaceX is going all in. They had previously aimed to reach the red planet in 2026, but Elon is focused on lunar voyages for NASA now. So the rocket company told investors it will prioritize going to the moon first and attempt a trip to Mars at a later time, according to people familiar with the matter.

2:22:57Bill Bishop:The company will target March 2027 for a lunar landing without humans on board. The strategic shift comes as SpaceX doubles down on plans to launch AI data centers in space. that deal. They acquired XAI, which we've talked about. In a memo announcing the merger, Musk outlined the plans to help build a permanent presence on the moon. He referenced aspirations to use it as a base for exploration deeper into space. He wants to build a mass driver on the moon. You've always wondered if this would happen at some point. Well, I've always thought that even though getting to the moon doesn't really solve the initial Elon pitch for making life multi-planetary creating like if something really bad just asteroid hits the earth and it's destroyed like does humanity continue if you're on the moon and the earth's just destroyed like you're probably in a bad spot as well um but if you're on mars like you genuinely are okay um and so it's not the long-term solution but yeah you probably need some resupplies but if you're if you're there and you're really set up and you got your systems humming like you're probably going to be okay

2:24:05Jason Fried:10 million Optimus robots.

2:24:06Bill Bishop:Yeah. There's at least a chance. But I've always thought the moon was a great staging ground for going to Mars because you can go any day of the week. You can only go to Mars, I think, every 18 months because the planets are only in alignment. Do you know the number? Is it 18 months? You're looking at me. No, I don't know. But it makes sense. There's a transfer orbit.

2:24:25Jason Fried:On Dworkesh, you talk about the moon driver. Yeah, the mass driver. Mass driver.

2:24:29Bill Bishop:Yeah, and so once you get to the moon, it's very easy to get elsewhere. You can build things. There's materials there. And then also underrated is that if you get people doing like moon tourism, you effectively, the moon always faces the earth. And so as long as you're on the front side of the moon, you could essentially have an escape pod where like, you know, in that sci-fi scenario, oh no, there's a crack in my helmet. You could just dive into an escape pod, smash a button and splash down in the Indian Ocean in like, I don't know, a couple hours probably. Because you're always facing the right direction.

2:25:02Bill Bishop:whereas if you're on Mars...

2:25:04Jason Fried:It's a shift, but Elon has been consistent. In 2019, he said, for sure, moon first, as it's only three days away, and you don't need interplanetary orbitals. Three days, not a couple hours.

2:25:11Bill Bishop:Yeah, but yeah, you can get your reps in on the moon, but it's less of like, okay, the final boss, like really, what is the vision of SpaceX? So this doesn't seem like a complete flipping of the narrative or flipping of the strategy. The first podcast on the moon is going to go so hard. It is, it is. You could do a very short podcast in space via Blue Origin for, I think, a couple hundred grand. It would need to be like a 60-second. It would be one of those man-on-the-street videos. What do you do for a living? Okay, we're back.

2:25:43Jason Fried:I started a company, a small retail business called Amazon. Amazon, yeah.

2:25:47Bill Bishop:I deliver packages. Anyways, this is cool.

2:25:50Jason Fried:I'm excited. Yeah, I want to, I think it'll be applying like SpaceX Pace to something that is not so far. out in the future is going to be super exciting. We've got to pull up this leaked OpenAI ad. It's very unclear. It seems completely fake.

2:26:13Bill Bishop:Yeah, OpenAI.com said it was fake. It was just completely fake. But what...

2:26:17Jason Fried:Shows the power of AI that you can make an ad as just like a fake leaker. Who is this?

2:26:25Bill Bishop:Can we get sound? Skarsgård? Yeah, there's no sound. This was leaked, right? But so is this is this AI generated or is this actually this looks photo real if this is AI generated? It's very very impressive.

2:26:38Jason Fried:I wonder if it's an ad for video model company. They're like oh that was actually us That'd be cool. That'd be a great because it looks like the actual act Yeah, it really does like this looks better than the Dunkin Donuts a I kind of like see yeah

2:26:52Bill Bishop:But also it might just be the actor but

2:26:54Jason Fried:Well, but if it is the actor... You've got to get to the bottom of it. This is a real actor.

2:26:57Bill Bishop:He should comment. Has he commented? We've got to dig in and see. What's his name? Michael Skarsgård? I'm going to box it. Alexander Skarsgård. Alexander. Alexander Skarsgård.

2:27:11Jason Fried:Nice to hear your voice, Ben.

2:27:12Bill Bishop:Yes. Swedish actor. I'm here. Does he have Alexander Skarsgård? Pop Crave has something. Does he have any social accounts? He's on Instagram. Has he posted about this? No. His last photo was, I don't know, just a picture of him looking at the camera. Really quickly, Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Yeah, I don't know. We'll have to dig in and fact-check this, put it in the truth zone. But opening is disavowed. So, I mean, it seems pretty clear that it's not a real thing. So, Ars Technica has a, Eric Berger has a piece in Ars Technica.

2:27:51Bill Bishop:Why would Elon Musk pivot from Mars to the moon all of a sudden? SpaceX has already shifted focus from building a self-growing city on the moon. That sounds amazing. As more than 120 million people tuned in the Super Bowl for kickoff Sunday evening, SpaceX founder Elon Musk turned instead to his social network there. He tapped out an extended message in which he revealed that SpaceX is pivoting from the settlement of Mars to building a self-growing city on the moon. I like this. For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus us from building a self-growing city on the moon to building a self-growing city on the moon as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years whereas Mars would take 20 plus years.

2:28:29Bill Bishop:This is simultaneously a jolting and practical decision coming from Musk. So we'll have to dig in more and talk to I still want to get Eric Berger on the show because I'm a big fan of his writing or his technica on space. Yes Elon is following and unfollowing all sorts of people on the timeline as part of his never-ending recruiting push. Also, Jeff Bezos posted just a picture of a turtle from Blue Origin. Do we know what's going on here? I think the theory is like a tortoise and a hare, right?

2:28:59Jason Fried:So they're taking the slow approach. They're going to get to the moon first. Elon said this. He said they might get to the moon before us.

2:29:05Bill Bishop:Okay, so Elon was sprinting. He was the hare sprinting towards Mars. And instead, you know, the tortoise is plodding along. Either way, good for America. Good for the space industry.

2:29:16Jason Fried:Good to have two beaners going head to head. Yes, yes. So Can Raptor broke it down.

2:29:21Bill Bishop:People are confused, so let me shed some light. Ever hear the tale of the tortoise and the hare? SpaceX is the hare, quick, active, but easily distracted by Mars and AI. Blue Origin is the tortoise, slow but methodical, dead set on the main goal, the moon. Bezos clearly implies here that they will beat SpaceX to the moon. Well, I like that it's a new race. It's going to be a lot of fun to watch. Before we bring in our next guest, should we talk about France? You got in trouble.

2:29:46Jason Fried:Let's save this one. Okay, we'll save this one. I don't want to keep Dan waiting. We did talk about it a little bit on Friday. It's too much fun.

2:29:51Bill Bishop:It's too much fun. So we'll dig into that later. Quickly, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And without further ado, let's bring in Dan Romero.

2:30:03Jason Fried:Wait, wait, wait. We're now entering the lightning round.

2:30:06Bill Bishop:The lightning round. The lambda lightning round. That's right. Thank you. This is our Lambda Lightning Round, and we will invite Dan Romero from the Reaching Waiting Room into the TV panel. There he is. Dan, good to see you. How are you doing? Good to see you guys. Welcome to the show. Great to see you. Give us the update.

2:30:23Jason Fried:I like this. What is this? A little sweater with a - I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm a lot. Yeah, I have new jobs. I'm dressing for success. What's the title? I love it. What's the role?

2:30:33Bill Bishop:What's the company? Break it down for us. Yeah.

2:30:35Jason Fried:So we sold Farkaster last month, and it's a five-year chapter. And now I am working at Tempo, which is a purpose-built L1 blockchain designed for stable coin payments. Stripe and Paradigm incubated it. And yeah, I am working on the go-to-market side of things. Okay. Makes so much sense when I saw the news. The first conversation we ever had was about stable coins. This was back in Venice in probably 2021, 2022. We were both so excited about stable coins at that time and kind of frustrated with how little they were integrated into the actual tools that businesses and consumers could use every day.

2:31:20Jason Fried:And specifically, yeah, just specifically making them valuable by integrating them with the rest of our global payment network. So the role makes a lot of sense. Yeah, what, I mean, kind of a silly question, but like why this opportunity? It's an existing business. You proved to be an extremely formidable founder with Farcaster. But I already know the answer. Tell the audience. For you to tell the audience. Yeah, I mean, look, I've been working in crypto for 12 years, first at Coinbase and then Farcaster. And I feel like, honestly, the time spent hasn't really resulted in that much real world impact, right?

2:32:04Jason Fried:Like crypto has been its own thing. and obviously the price of Bitcoin has gotten pretty high. But I genuinely think with the Genius Act, which was a law passed last year, the opportunity for stablecoins over the next 18 to 24 months is pretty massive. And obviously, I think Stripe figured that out. They bought Bridge last year and then they bought another company, Privy, which I think is a sponsor of TBPN. But yeah, I think banks are taking it pretty seriously. I don't know if you guys saw that Wall Street Journal article where Jamie Dimon had some choice words for Brian Armstrong. We were hanging with Brian yesterday, and I told him, I was like, you better have printed that out and framed it immediately because that is, like, it felt like he had been, the whole Coinbase team had been working forever to get that kind of quote because that was the whole ethos of the entire movement from the beginning.

2:32:57Jason Fried:It was like, hey, we can actually come in and be a real player in finance. Well, I mean, like, I started Coinbase in 2014, and it's the classic, first they laugh at you, you know, or first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you. This is clearly the fight you. But I think generally, though, there are a lot of banks that are very excited about working with stablecoins. We're really excited about working with banks with stablecoins. I think stablecoins are startling for money, is what I've heard from someone say that I think is pretty good. And I think generally you have a payment rail now that is global, fast, and cheap that moves at the speed of developers and frankly now AI, right?

2:33:46Jason Fried:So agentic payments, I probably have seen a bunch of the stuff with, I know you guys have been talking about CloudBot and things like that, but that I think is going to be on stablecoin rails. And so the opportunity is pretty massive. GTM is incredibly Probably broad role means you're going to be getting people to use Tempo. What is the role going to look like? I imagine are you interfacing with legacy financial institutions, new, you know, neobanks, all the way to wallets.

2:34:16Bill Bishop:Consumers.

2:34:17Jason Fried:All the way to governments, I imagine, interacting with those kind of groups as well. Yeah, everybody and anybody. I was meeting with a bank. I'm in New York right now, and I was meeting with a bank this morning. I'm about to be with the one right after this. But also neobanks, developers, anyone who wants to do payments globally, I think, is going to be on stablecoins. And I think Tempo is very focused on the features on payments, right? Like, I think there are a lot of blockchains out there that do a lot of different things. But Tempo's functionality is really dialed into payments. I mean, obviously, working closely with Stripe on that.

2:34:53Jason Fried:And so I think, yeah, that's the focus for the go-to-market stuff. how lay out the AI agent thesis a little bit more.

2:35:06Bill Bishop:Yeah, why wouldn't I just want to give OpenClaw or ClawedBot or whatever agent I'm using just like my credit card?

2:35:14Jason Fried:Well, I think one thing is the credit card itself is kind of like a private key.

2:35:18Bill Bishop:Yeah.

2:35:18Jason Fried:And so having that get prompt injected out is maybe not the best thing in the world. Sure. And then going and giving a bunch of other agents your credit card, one of those could be malicious, and then that gets popped. The agent's like, I promise I won't charge it again. You're signing each transaction securely, right?

2:35:34Bill Bishop:Yeah.

2:35:35Jason Fried:So I think naturally that, but also if you have these agent swarms, the idea of spinning up a new credit card for each individual sub-agent doesn't make sense, where you can imagine wallets, you can spin up as many as you want, and then be able to kind of manage programmatically the different balances for each agent. But if you think about it, like an API call to any of these frontier labs right now is a pay per call, right? So if you actually kind of break it down, you're eventually going to get to a point where every single API call, you can just pay some amount of stable coins in the background and keep moving, right?

2:36:15Jason Fried:So I think that's where the world is headed. And I think it's on us to kind of pull that forward a bit.

2:36:21Bill Bishop:Does that have a meaningful impact on the API business? Because most API companies are like, yes, I'm giving you the service piece by piece, but I'll invoice you at the end of the month and it's fine. Is there like an impact to cash flow if you pull that through or security or risk or underwriting? Like what is the benefit if you're open AI or Anthropic and you're like, yeah, technically we offer services on a per microsecond basis, but the Fortune 500s who are buying our API, they pay their invoices on time.

2:36:57Jason Fried:Yeah, look, there's obviously some amount of cost to using different payment rails. With stablecoins, it's as cheap as it gets. I think that there's also some amount of fraud. So when you don't have that because it's a bearer instrument with stablecoins, that's a settled payment, that also benefits. But I just also think that you just kind of have new use cases, right? So how does an agent decide what service to use to register a domain or to host a database? Right now, you kind of are using Cloud Code, and then it kicks you out to a web browser. And it says, hey, go set up an account over here, fill it out.

2:37:33Jason Fried:When you're done, bring it back, and then I can continue what I'm doing. Whereas you can imagine you have Cloud Code running, and it finds a stablecoin-native way of doing something. It's just going to sign up and do it for you. And so I think that's the kind of future where it just allows the agent to be unblocked, assuming the agent has some money to spend. What are your main lessons from the probably hundreds of L1s that have launched in the last decade? There's been so many that had a lot of potential, differentiated maybe approach from a technology standpoint. I think the opportunity with Tempo as you're combining these trusted brands, a deeply experienced team.

2:38:15Jason Fried:You guys, I imagine, are going to be incredibly focused on actually, you have the ability to sign up one partner that could drive billions of dollars of volume, I imagine. And so you guys feel like have all the right ingredients to be successful here. But having studied, I'm sure, the last generation, the multiple generation of L1s, what is it going to take to win? Yeah. So I think the differentiated thing for us, two things. One, the blockchain is specifically focused on payments. So there haven't been too many L1s. I think a lot of L1s tend to try to do everything. And we're really, really focused on payments.

2:38:51Jason Fried:And the second thing is we have a bunch of initial partners that we've been fortunate enough to work with. And part of that is also having kind of closely been working with Stripe since the beginning, we kind of are able to approach the payments use case specifically. And so you have, you know, publicly, like we're working with partners like DoorDash or Klarna and bringing that perspective in. Whereas I think traditionally in my decade in crypto, most of the time you launch an L1 and then you go spend a lot of time trying to figure out if anyone wants to work with you. Whereas I think since the beginning, Tempo, because of kind of like that focus on payments, have had these concrete use cases that we're going to be bringing to market over the next six to eight weeks.

2:39:32Jason Fried:We should be live by kind of Q2 this year, which is start to finish in less than a year. Has crypto sentiment ever been worse in your time than right now? Oh, yeah. Way, way, way, way.

2:39:46Bill Bishop:Yeah, this is an easy day.

2:39:49Jason Fried:What was your darkest hour? I think the Bitcoin scaling 2015, 2016, pre kind of Ethereum, it was pretty grim because everyone was assuming all the payments was going to, you know, peer-to-peer electronic cash. That was Bitcoin, right?

2:40:10Bill Bishop:Yeah, that was the thesis.

2:40:10Jason Fried:And so the fact that things weren't going anywhere. And then I think Ethereum in 2017 really kind of brought in the aperture from kind of just being Bitcoin. There were a lot more choice words to describe any other blockchain at the time. And it became crypto, right? And all the kind of stuff that's since come from that. So I think things were way more grim in 2015 relative to now. I mean, you have Genius Act, Clarity is still kind of in play in Congress. I mean, we had a Super Bowl ad yesterday that everyone was singing, right? So I think things are, I mean, 2022 is also pretty bad.

2:40:48Bill Bishop:Yeah, yeah.

2:40:49Jason Fried:So I think that the real world impact for crypto has never been closer. And so, you know, I'm really, really excited. That's why I wanted to come on the show today. 2022 is wild. I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving. I love it. I mean, I know the one thing that is maintained. I mean, I've seen a number of cycles now, and the people that I know that didn't quit are the ones that are either already retired or could be. But what I appreciate is the ones that could retire and are staying in it again just because the opportunity is brighter than ever. So I'm very excited to see this roll out. And when do you think the average, what's your timeline for the average internet user, just consumer?

2:41:36Bill Bishop:I don't even know.

2:41:38Jason Fried:No, no, no. I was just going to say to be basically doing something with tempo. Oh, okay. I'd say a year from now. Yeah. Maybe average internet user might be a little extreme, but how about the terminally online or savvy online? Okay. A year from now.

2:41:54Bill Bishop:I like that. That's good. Well, congratulations on the new role. Thanks so much for stopping by the show. Yeah, it's great.

2:41:59Jason Fried:I'm excited for you guys to talk about France. I was getting really confident at the bit for this story. That was an amazing exchange. How did you process that whole exchange? Because, I mean.

2:42:11Bill Bishop:Have you ever had an entire country mad at you?

2:42:14Jason Fried:I was actually. So the real bearish case for France is that I didn't get any death threats. Oh, yeah. I did not get a single. You're very polite over there. I didn't get a single mean message basically saying, hey, I'm here in St. Tropez. I have got my own cluster. We're going to win. We're going to win the ad race.

2:42:33Bill Bishop:Alive and well.

2:42:34Jason Fried:I'm usually a big France proponent because they're 70 % nuclear, but I do think you won that exchange. Okay. Well, thank you. Yeah, well, that's what Doug, we had Doug from semi-analysis on. He was saying like, hey, all the energy is there. A bunch of the labs have gone over, tried to get something done, and just walked away.

2:42:52Bill Bishop:Yeah.

2:42:52Jason Fried:And so as I said, until LVMH is spending$100 billion a year on data center capex, they're not really in the game. They clearly haven't read, they haven't studied situational awareness yet.

2:43:03Bill Bishop:And Louis Vuitton, hopefully on tempo. Great to see you, Dan. Thanks for having me, guys. Congrats to the whole team. Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And guess what? Sidney Sweeney just rang the opening bell for the stock market today at the New York Stock Exchange. Adam Aronson said it was bound to happen because what do Sydney and Sweeney have in common? NYSE. Right in the middle of the Venn diagram. She has the letters NYSE in both her first name and her last name. That is a fantastic coincidence.

2:43:39Bill Bishop:What an interesting fact.

2:43:41Jason Fried:Let's go back to Friday, February 6th. Yes. Macron posted in France. We do have our next question in the recent radio room. Oh. We'll go back to France. We will close with France. We badly want to talk about France.

2:43:54Bill Bishop:We'll close with France, but we have Boris Softman waiting for Bedrock Robotics. He's the CEO and co-founder, and he's here in the TV. Welcome to the show. Sorry to keep you waiting.

2:44:04Sara Hooker:Yeah, gentlemen. Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

2:44:05Bill Bishop:Thanks so much.

2:44:06Sara Hooker:Great to have you.

2:44:06Bill Bishop:Did we have a phone call like a decade ago about Anki because we were both in the Andreessen portfolio? Is that possible?

2:44:13Sara Hooker:It's very possible. That was quite a journey.

2:44:15Bill Bishop:I remember because we were the only two portfolio companies that were like selling something online. And so I was like, okay, connect me with the one person that's not just doing software. I need to know how this works. And you kind of broke it down, and it was very fascinating.

2:44:29Sara Hooker:Before the physical stuff became in style again, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it is in style. I had a hard time.

2:44:34Bill Bishop:Yeah. But first time on the show, please introduce yourself and explain what the company does. Thank you.

2:44:42Sara Hooker:First of all, pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Of course. Name is Boris Hoffman. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics. Yeah. And we're developing autonomy technologies for heavy machinery. And so these are the sort of machines you see in construction, like excavators, wheel loaders, motor graders, compactors, but also in all types of other industries like mining, agriculture, lumber. And so they're the workforce for a pretty sizable percentage of the world's GDP. And these are sectors that are going through pretty massive labor challenges. And so we're bringing autonomy solutions that can enable them to be fully operatorless, to be able to execute work with a lot of flexibility and bypass a lot of the constraints that right now are really challenging for not just the U.S., but the whole world.

2:45:28Jason Fried:Why is there a labor shortage? Why don't people want to drive cool trucks and tractors and mining equipment? It's every kid's dream. Yeah, it feels like a dream.

2:45:39Sara Hooker:They always want to drive it for a little bit, but it's a really, really tough work. So the amount of people going into this line of work is just way smaller than it used to be in the past. You also have a fragmentation where you can be an expert bulldozer operator, but you're not an expert excavator operator. And so you end up having these challenges. And what's happening is that the average age is getting higher and higher. Retirements are skyrocketing. People are not coming into this line of work. Temperatures are high. Vibrations of these machines are really painful. And it oftentimes takes many, many years to become even decently competent at these machines because they're very complicated.

2:46:19Sara Hooker:And so you end up having giant spikes in demand, for example, from the data center boom and onshoring and manufacturing, housing shortages, infrastructure work. But a lot of our partners are expecting half the workforce to retire in the next seven years. And so it's going the opposite direction in an industry that already had 800 ,000 worker shortage over the next few years.

2:46:41Jason Fried:Talk about, so it sounds like you guys are building hardware, software that can kind of bolt on to existing machinery. Talk about that decision-making process. It feels smart for a number of reasons. And I also want to understand how the actual equipment manufacturers are thinking about autonomy. We were talking about Caterpillar last week. It's been, if you were a hardware VC 10 years ago, you probably should have just put all your money in Caterpillar based on how the stocks traded. They've been like double digits every single year for almost a decade. But yeah, talk about kind of the approach that you're taking.

2:47:24Sara Hooker:So my roots and a lot of our roots from Bedrock, we actually came out of Waymo. So I was an executive there for about five years. I was leading trucking. Various technology teams supported the cars as well. And in that world, we had to redesign the fundamental platform every time you would make a new vehicle. So you want to put a Jaguar on the road or a Dimer Freightliner or a Hyundai, you're doing a multi-hundred million dollar many-year program because these are very complicated systems that needed to be redesigned for safety reasons. The advantage that we have in the space and the approach we're taking is that we can actually retrofit existing heavy machinery.

2:48:03Sara Hooker:So take a Caterpillar excavator, for example. We can turn it into autonomously capable with a sensor compute upfit. And now you take this half a million dollar machine that a general contractor already owns, and it can become autonomous for the scope of work that it's cleared for.

2:48:17Jason Fried:Yeah, and with autonomous vehicles, when you look at the cost of Waymo, that's been obviously one of the criticisms of it. if you have a half a million dollar machine and then you're put bolting on 50k or 100k worth of sensors in order to run it autonomously, the economics can make a lot of sense quickly because the operator was getting paid. Maybe you can't find the operator and they also were probably getting paid quite well. So I imagine like the economic trade is pretty good.

2:48:46Sara Hooker:Economic trade is fantastic because the cost of hardware is also a lot lower because now there's an ecosystem of components being driven by automotive space and others. And so we can enable these machines to be autonomous for a lot less cost. But then you're able to operate eight hours a day, 15 hours a day, 24 hours a day. You can compress schedules. You improve safety. You get visibility of your work, higher predictability. And so when you change the physics of how you actually manage the operations of a construction project like this, suddenly you can get a lot more productive and fundamentally expand the sector, and you can utilize your machinery a lot more with a lot less constraints, which immediately helps general contractors and subcontractors who are our customers in the end do work.

2:49:34Bill Bishop:Makes sense. One interesting decision from Waymo is the electrification of the fleet. That feels like It unlocks a specific acceleration curves, very precise, and people really rave about the driving experience sitting in the passenger seat because it's computer controlled. Is there a major barrier to electrification of construction equipment because of the energy density and the work that needs to be done and maybe charging infrastructure? Would you expect an electric tractor to be rolled out in a decade or are we further away from that?

2:50:14Jason Fried:Just plug it in like one of those vacuums that has a cord.

2:50:17Bill Bishop:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm just interested about electrification of construction equipment broadly.

2:50:24Sara Hooker:Yeah, it's funny. Life good things are actually easier to control because they're much more predictable in the output. That's right. Of what they have. So there's actually advantages from a vehicle standpoint. In construction, what's challenging is you get pulled into really strange locations in the middle of nowhere. And so infrastructure is just very complex. And so, for example, data centers are getting pulled into strange locations because of availability of power. So, you know, you end up having a practicality that's, you know, kind of tougher on that in that domain. And so for us, we're embracing the ecosystem that exists today, which is incredibly designed machines.

2:50:58Sara Hooker:They just happen to be, you know, still, you know, not electric yet. But I believe, you know, when you do a rubble tax, you can have hubs that have like massive large scale charging facilities. It'll take more time, I think, for that to propagate into construction, where by definition, you're going to areas that are pretty greenfield that don't have that infrastructure.

2:51:19Bill Bishop:Yeah. Based on everything you've seen over your career, do you think it's a good time to start a new AI toy company now?

2:51:31Sara Hooker:We were maybe a little bit ahead of our time. What's interesting is the technology that has skyrocketed over the last five, six years that has enabled autonomy on public roads and industrial equipment, it kind of applies everywhere. And I think more generally, the physical world is going to get reinvented because now suddenly you have these incredible interface capabilities through large language models and super sophisticated AI. You have lower cost of hardware. You have cloud AI that can now be on a wireless network connected. So those are building blocks for every industry effectively. And so I think that we've seen this transformation on the digital side with LOMs and OpenAI, Gemini, and others.

2:52:14Sara Hooker:The physical world is still 80 % of the world's GDP. This is the future where you comply this to every single sector, and every one of them can have a reinvented experience.

2:52:23Bill Bishop:Yeah, yeah. I just thought about like a lot of I mean the Waymos are incredibly reliable, but there's plenty of AI models that have little hallucinations. But if you design the kids toy to sort of embrace that, we talked to what was the company that was you take a pic or you describe whatever you want and then prints a sticker. I think it was called sticker box. Yeah. For kids. It was just like this. It was sort of leaning into all the rough edges of AI in a very positive way. that's low stakes.

2:52:51Sara Hooker:Content becomes so much easier because of the activity. Generally, I think it's going to reinvent gaming and entertainment like this just because you don't have to script the entire experience like you used to. The other nice thing is what you mentioned is that when you are dealing with autonomy in a lot of applications, you're so sensitive to the worst case of what happens, not the average case, which is what most of AI has to focus on. That adds an incredibly high bar to releasing a car and you know to go driverless in san francisco or a 110 000 pound machine to go and do a excavation project in a you know for a factory um there's a lot of other sectors that can benefit from the fact that there's a softer um you know kind of boundary and resilience to um certain mistakes and in general i think um uh that you see this shape in every industry that's why legal LMs or medical LMs have like a larger bar than a chatbot that maybe keeps you company and you know gives you some does some research that's not um absolutely like uh accuracy critical yeah

2:53:54Jason Fried:whoa oh sorry how many how many OEMs are you do you think you guys want to be working with in in let's say five years like can you reach a critic can you reach kind of critical scale working with Caterpillar and John Deere and kind of going down whatever the the kind of power law players or is there more of a long tail that I'm not aware of?

2:54:15Sara Hooker:So there's absolutely millions of these machines. And almost always the bottleneck is that the labor to operate them is, you know, is limited. In the United States, you know, every geographical region will have its biases. Today, we're working with on Caterpillar machines. Most OEMs are actually moving towards this drive-by-wire architecture where you can control these machines in a very efficient fashion electrically. that proves to be a big enabler, which didn't exist for the car and truck space, among other challenges. But what's nice is that the OEM ecosystem is probably not going to be the constraint for many, many years, mainly because there's such a prevalence of machines.

2:55:00Sara Hooker:And eventually, these technologies will probably influence the buying cycles into the subset of OEMs that actually have the capabilities like this.

2:55:05Bill Bishop:Is there an OBD2 port on these Caterpillar vehicles?

2:55:11Sara Hooker:Yeah, they have a CAN bus interface. And so you tend to have signals passing through. And so you can plug in. And in fact, I think the industry has benefited from the fact that there was a lot of foresight from companies like Caterpillar and Deere to interoperate with high-end GPS systems, the driver systems that help you auto level a blade, for example. And so you have the prerequisites of autonomy, even if the capabilities on the AI side weren't ready yet. That makes a ton of sense.

2:55:37Bill Bishop:Jordy?

2:55:37Sara Hooker:Got some news?

2:55:38Bill Bishop:Yeah. Tell us about the round. What happened? Let's bring down the mallet from the Lambda Cloud. We want to raise a gong for you.

2:55:46Jason Fried:Oh, my God. That's a big mallet. Yeah, we got some heavy machinery here. We got some gong machinery.

2:55:53Bill Bishop:How much did you raise?

2:55:54Sara Hooker:We raised$270 million. Oh, my God. We got a gong. There we go. That's a big number.

2:56:02Jason Fried:Congratulations. I'm super lucky.

2:56:06Bill Bishop:It's very dramatic here. We like theatrics on this show. And we enjoyed talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come.

2:56:14Jason Fried:Yeah, I'm super, super excited about where you guys are building. And yeah, glad you're glad you're doing it. Just like the even just all the speed ups. The more that we can speed up every single, you know, project in the real world from, you know, a train to an airport to someone's home, the better.

2:56:32Sara Hooker:The whole economy will feel it. it can be a radiation on the whole sector and hopefully this opens up a pretty broad generation of building at a scale we have in Hizken F.

2:56:44Bill Bishop:I love it. Well, thank you so much.

2:56:45Jason Fried:We didn't even get into software. I'm hoping it feels like a video game when I'm just kind of observing my fleet. Agent swarms. Yeah, agent swarms.

2:56:54Sara Hooker:The orchestration of these, that's the future. Yeah, for sure. Gentlemen, thank you. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Congratulations.

2:57:04Bill Bishop:Goodbye. In other news, Mr. Beast bought a bank. That's fun.

2:57:12Jason Fried:Yeah, he bought Step. Beast Industries.

2:57:14Bill Bishop:This was a Gen Z-focused banking app.

2:57:17Jason Fried:Yeah, launched in the 2010s, very hot in the 2020, 2021 fintech era. Remember when every one of these companies was trading at 100 times revenue? they raised something like a couple hundred million dollars of equity, I believe, and then a bunch of debt as well. So anyways, unclear. This felt, I don't think this was probably a great outcome for the venture investors involved. But who knows if they bought 100 % of it or whatever. But yeah, now you have one of the biggest distribution. It works in just the infrastructure. It's built in the world. I do wonder if they'll be able to go international from day one, just given that so much of Mr.

2:58:06Jason Fried:Beast's audience is very global. Well, we'll have to figure it out. But very cool. This was something, remember, people have been saying since at least kind of that 2021 era, Mr. Beast should have a bank. You should have effectively a commodity, a business that's differentiated by brand and your ability to get users to sign up in an expensive way, and something that he can offer to everyone, something that, you know, so anyways, and extremely scalable, obviously. So I'll be interested to track this as they, I'm assuming every single Mr. Beast video will have a call to action very, very shortly.

2:58:45Bill Bishop:It's going to be good. Well, we have Sarah Hooker in the Restream waiting room from Adaption Labs. Welcome to the show, Sarah. How are you doing? Hello.

2:58:54Dan Romero:It's lovely to be here. How are you?

2:58:56Jason Fried:Great to have you. I love the background. It looks like a beautiful day in San Francisco.

2:59:01Dan Romero:Are you outside in San Francisco? I'm not, but I was surrounded by glass, so it gives a good illusion. This is the outside. You can see how beautiful it is, and this is inward looking, but just high reflection density.

2:59:15Bill Bishop:Amazing. First time on the show, so please introduce yourself and the company.

2:59:20Dan Romero:Fun. So I did want to say, I was trying to, this might as a slight aside before we get started, but I was trying to describe to an AI researcher what this show was over the weekend. And what was funny was I was saying it's kind of like CNN New Year's Eve show. Oh, sure. But every day. Every day.

2:59:39Jason Fried:Every day, yeah. That's a great analogy. It's incredibly dramatic, yeah.

2:59:43Bill Bishop:We should go watch all the reruns. We should have a ball that drops from the ceiling. And when it falls, the show concludes.

2:59:49Jason Fried:You've got to protect that researcher with your life because they're locked in enough to not have ever heard about us. That's a very bullish signal. That's great.

3:00:00Dan Romero:I do think it's fine because you have the cerebral from Anderson Cooper and you kind of have the dash of drama from the Bravo.

3:00:08Sara Hooker:Sure, sure.

3:00:09Dan Romero:Anyways, just lovely to be here. Three months ago, I started Adaption with Sadiq, who's my co-founder. Overnight success. Thank you. That's lovely. Yeah, we just closed our$50 million. There we go. Congratulations.

3:00:31Jason Fried:Anyways, continue. Continue.

3:00:34Dan Romero:That was a lovely deduction. I thought that was very bombastic. But probably more important was probably the most important question I'll work on. So most of my career has been in Frontier Labs and building the biggest model that we can that's very performant. But this is fundamentally bucking that trend. It's about how do we continue to evolve these models real time? How do we not just build a static model, but how does a model adapt to incoming data in a really efficient way?

3:01:05Bill Bishop:Learning. Continual learning? Is that the buzzword? Is that a good buzzword? Do you like that phrase?

3:01:11Dan Romero:Continual learning I do because it's actually not a new buzzword. So for the first time, we're not introducing a new word, which is Foundation Models was introduced by Stanford. We often see these models kind of introduced as pretty well. Continual learning is an old problem. It's just increasingly urgent because it's now within reach in many ways. Like most of the last decade has been like you throw compute at the training, pre-training. but now we have expressive enough models that it can interact and that's fundamental the question here is how do you interact efficiently with the world and so I don't mind continual learning I

3:01:49Bill Bishop:think it serves its purpose that's good yeah how much are you thinking of like an entirely new architecture versus what we're seeing with folks building skills and markdown files compacting chats larger context windows there's so many different ways to sort of get continual learning light these days and everyone's solving it in different ways. What do you think the most interesting path is?

3:02:12Dan Romero:Yeah, that's such a fun question. And I'll tell you why, because there's almost like two crucial questions that continual learning has to solve. The most heavy handed version of continual learning is you basically have to train again. And that is something that's not all interesting, I think, to adaption, mainly because it's a very high barrier to entry. And if want to source it, adapt and interact, you want it to be real time. I would say like the light version you're talking about is probably another least interesting alternative. It's powerful, it's a lever, but it's really that you want to do two things.

3:02:48Dan Romero:Like we want to have control over the stack and be changing the weights without gradients, which I think you can do in powerful ways, especially if you do it jointly with GPU optimization. But the second thing, and this is interesting is that you really need to care about where you place compute. So the way with monolithic models now, I think people intuitively understand we throw the same model at every problem, which is a big waste of compute. And 90 % of problems every day that you solve using AI are extremely easy. It's a 10 % that matter. That's the long tail. But even there, we spend too much to compute because we do these massive rollouts.

3:03:24Dan Romero:And we only really have good verification for code in design right now. Why? Because those are people who care enough to give a ton of feedback. And that's where we see it working really well. And what's interesting is that the component that's most fascinating for us is let's care about interface and let's create really interesting interaction points that are adaptive to each task. And so when we talk about adaptivity, it actually includes interface because the type of feedback you should get to change based upon your problems. And that's how you make it efficient. So kind of on that spectrum of like heavy-handed you train but really for us our constraint is on the other end we want it to be real time and we want to use like a strong set of levers to get there what's oh sorry go for it oh

3:04:06Bill Bishop:yeah just what's the biggest uh sort of consensus take in ai right now that you disagree with

3:04:14Dan Romero:Oh, in AI? I mean, I think data centers in space is pretty bonkers.

3:04:19Bill Bishop:Okay, that's a good one.

3:04:20Dan Romero:I don't know if that's specific to AI, but it just feels topical, so maybe I'll throw that one out. I do a lot of work on systems as well, so serving really fast is really important for Frontier and Dynamics, but I just really tap with me to. I think there's two things that are changing that make it hard to do something like data centers in space. One is most co-located hardware is pretty much for training. I think that's why you care. Otherwise, you can distribute. And so inference compute, which is where everything's moving. You know, when we talk about real-time adaptation, a lot of it's inference.

3:04:56Dan Romero:You can spread that compute more easily. You can have multiple data centers. So if you care about space, you probably only care about training compute. and I think people underestimate the amount of failures that happen and you don't want to get your training job interrupted.

3:05:13Bill Bishop:Yeah, we unpack that more because it seems like if things are moving towards inference and inference does not need to be co-located, having inference happen on a single maybe wafer scale system on a chip in space, that seems like more possible in that case if we do move to inference and maybe the training still does happen in the co-located data center. but then the inference happens on the space data center. Is that possible, or is there some logical inconsistency there that I'm missing?

3:05:45Dan Romero:So you can distribute inference, but to be honest, that's pretty easy to do on Earth, right? Because you have less constraints that be co-located. The real shortage of data centers and, you know, where providers like Google...

3:05:56Bill Bishop:Is around training.

3:05:58Dan Romero:It's around training. Got it, okay. And so the truth is you can do inference distribution much more easily, But the real issue, frankly, is that GPUs still have failure rates. So there's 2 % of GPUs that just are considered done every year. You don't try and revive them from the dead. And that's really your cost. It's how quickly you can replace those and what it looks like.

3:06:24Jason Fried:Very interesting. What do you think your first customers will look like?

3:06:29Dan Romero:Oh, for us, we want to make workloads adaptable all the way from data to interface. And so there's two use cases for adaption that are both pretty powerful. The first one we're focusing on is customization. So right now, like if you're a developer, you typically have tried fine tuning. You haven't succeeded because it's too much. You have to bring your data. You have to wait. And then you become a prompt engineer again. And so most rapidly growing companies just have a ton of prompt scaffolding. And for us, like, frankly, if I think about our measure of progress, it's that we eliminate prompt engineering.

3:07:04Dan Romero:because that's really, I think intuitively it's a desire for control, but it's also an acknowledgement models don't work for people.

3:07:13Bill Bishop:Well, congratulations on the massive round and all the progress. I'm sure you'll be back on this year. Have a great rest of your day and enjoy sunny San Francisco. What a beautiful day.

3:07:23Jason Fried:And we're going to go watch CNN ball drops from the last like 100 years and just game tape, game tape, study up. So thank you for the inspiration.

3:07:32Dan Romero:Two years equal. You'll get the sense when you want to. It's a very fun banter, and I think that's the cross-section that you both capture, which is kind of fun.

3:07:40Bill Bishop:Style and substance, hopefully. Hopefully. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great thing, Sarah. We'll talk to you soon, Sarah. Bye. And without further ado, we have Ed from Mocano Labs in the studio. Good to see you. Good to see you. Fantastic. Welcome to the show. What's happening? Come on. Let's kick off. Whoa. So you got some heavy metal. Can we oh, can we knock this? Let's not thank God. What do you got? 124 minutes

3:08:14Edward Mehr:So you guys put our ad and our logo in your ad yesterday we thought she put you in metal amazing amazing Wow, Nathan our new engineer took some time off from customizing cars and so put this put this in yeah Look at this. Wow.

3:08:28Jason Fried:Very, very, very, very cool. It's amazing.

3:08:30Bill Bishop:Okay, so this is metal deforming. Explain what's going on here. Explain what machine made this.

3:08:37Edward Mehr:Yeah, so we build a machine called Robo Craftsman. It basically does different types of metal operations like a craftsman would. The core operation is sheet forming. This is a slight kind of indentation to kind of get your logo out, but we can form aircraft panels, missile airframes, car bodies. We do a lot of customization work with Toyota right now. But the system is designed to do all kinds of manufacturing operations. You kind of think about it as kind of versatile manufacturing robot that can do different types of operations just through software.

3:09:10Bill Bishop:And what unlocked the new round? Is it a partnership with a big automotive OEM or just sort of broad adoption, unlocking certain technical milestones? Like what jumped off the first slide of the pitch deck?

3:09:23Edward Mehr:Yeah, so we're now going actually from kind of like, you know, technology development at this stage to actually scaling, right? So we are deploying our facility number three, facility number four, right? So the third facility is going to be 250 ,000 square foot facility, which is twice the size, more than twice the size of our second facility, which is 75 ,000 square foot right here in the valley. And also, we're going to expand the scope of operations. So we initially built a platform to do sheet forming. Now we're adding welding. We're adding assembly, machining. So we can do full end-to-end complex metal structure assemblies for our customers.

3:10:05Edward Mehr:For example, we're doing a lot of work right now with aerospace primes to do missile airframes. So actually this first facility is going to do that at larger volumes. We're going to do thousands of missile airframes a year out of that facility. but the beauty is that tomorrow you can just switch it and do aircraft panels or do car

3:10:23Bill Bishop:and automotive panels yeah do you want to ever allow someone the flexibility of something that feels almost like 3d printing you know you're you're able to do r &d low volume but then when someone says okay i'm gonna make the cyber truck maybe you need a giga press is that something you want to get into or is that something you see as like antiquated we won't need stamping anymore in the future?

3:10:47Edward Mehr:Yeah, I think, well, in the short term, I think we could cover up to a few thousand a year volumes, right? And the big question is long term, you know, what does the manufacturing will look like? My view is that long term, we're going to have less high volume of making the same thing over and over again, and more just keep changing. And you look at the software, you know, how many apps you have on your phone, like in hundreds, like down to thousands. Yeah,

3:11:09Jason Fried:what software used to make it, it would get, you'd put it on a disc, sell it, and just pray, basically. Right.

3:11:16Bill Bishop:Right. Future your car, you don't have a daily and a weekend. You have different panels that you chunk off, change it.

3:11:21Jason Fried:I mean, Jeep does that.

3:11:22Bill Bishop:Yeah, they do.

3:11:23Jason Fried:They do. Already ahead of the curve.

3:11:25Edward Mehr:Yeah. Yeah. So that, that world is, I think, you know, you look at any sci-fi book, you know, it just tells you about this world where, you know, like every building looks different. Every car looks different. There's, you know, basically a lot more version

3:11:35Jason Fried:of a lot of variety.

3:11:36Edward Mehr:Yeah. So I think in longterm, we're probably not going to have as much of like make the same thing over and over again. Yeah.

3:11:41Bill Bishop:Yeah. Yeah. We talked to Lucas Singer about, uh, 3D printing for the hypercar he built. It feels like there's certain trade-offs that he's optimizing for where certain weight to strength ratios are only unlockable with certain structures. They look more organic. What are the other optimization parameters that you're looking at? Yeah, go for it. Yeah, I'm just thinking like cost, speed, flexibility, anything else that's like jumping off the page.

3:12:06Edward Mehr:Yeah, right off the bat is just the speed, right? You know, that's why also we start out of defense because like, you know, that's where you want, you want to have a new idea, a new weapon system. You want to scale it really fast. But not only just to scale it fast.

3:12:17Bill Bishop:Quickly, like quantize that speed because I've seen, you know, the image that I'm conjuring, you can correct me, is like two massive, like sort of robotic arms pushing against this metal sheet. And it's working for like a few hours. Is that right? Is that hours, days? How long are we trying to work?

3:12:32Edward Mehr:Yeah, so depending on the geometry, you know, the tack time could be a few hours up to maybe a day. Okay. Right? But you have to compare it to the traditional paradigm where you have to go make a dyes and tooling. So now you're looking at three months up to a year, depending on how many tools you need, can potentially be longer before you even get your first.

3:12:50Bill Bishop:Oh yeah, and that wait time's terrible. I've seen that for even just like plastic forming. It takes forever, injection molding. Like you make the mold that makes the mold that makes the mold. You know, seven steps and then someone goes on New Year.

3:13:02Edward Mehr:And it fundamentally comes down to like, okay, what is the dollars went into building a part? because you can horizontally scale, right? So if, let's say, hey, you know, I have to spend$200 million to set up a facility and pay for all the dyes to get to production. Okay, with$200 million, how many of RoboCraftsmen can run in parallel? Sure, sure, sure. And that's where it becomes a little bit more relevant because we get speed through parallelization versus, you know, traditional manufacturing gets to speed through decreasing tack time, right? Like, okay, I do it fast, but I have one assembly line that things go through.

3:13:32Edward Mehr:It needs to be fast. Whereas we're saying, okay, have a matrix operation. and have 200 of these cells. Same cost, but then to get you same throughput, but tomorrow you want to change from, you know, model A to model B, you can just do that.

3:13:44Jason Fried:Who are you actually competing with? Is it operations in China? Like, is that like when you're really, when somebody's kind of comping you out, I imagine there's not, there just can't be that many super tech enabled kind of manufacturing companies of the future in Southern California to where I often imagine your competition is overseas.

3:14:07Edward Mehr:Yeah, no, so I think, well, it could be for some of the sectors. In the commercial world, yes, but then in defense, these are already within the United States.

3:14:16Jason Fried:But I meant more like in auto manufacturing.

3:14:19Edward Mehr:Yeah, so I think going back to your question around what do we enable, speed is one thing, but a lot of times we also enable something that traditionally was just not possible. That's what we're doing with auto, right? Traditionally, you could not go, no matter if you did it in China or here, you still have to make dies and you know the economics doesn't make sense if you have to customize and make a new die and new mold for every panel or every custom car you're going to build um so in those cases we're actually creating a completely new uh paradigm like this is a new business model that toyota's going after like okay you know john or george can go on a website and say hey i want this toyota tacoma and i want tbpn you guys have to get fleet vehicles at some point yeah that for you so tbpn on the side door and i want 200 of them right yeah twitter would be like this is not impossible it's just not possible right so there's actually a big market i imagine

3:15:06Jason Fried:thinking electricians like all these different trades where you would want the custom truck because you're like we're going to run this into the ground it's not like a consumer buying something that that maybe they're like oh i'll be in it for a few years i just want a sticker on the

3:15:18Bill Bishop:side we want something that's like permanent yeah right yeah right sense uh i have an idea of what your capex looks like i mean you're buying big robotic arms uh what does the opex look like in a robotic factory? Are you buying a lot of like oil cans, like squeaking? Yeah. Like what, like, what, what are the, what are the parts that break when you're running a lot of robotic arms?

3:15:39Edward Mehr:Yeah. So I think like robot maintenance is one part of, right? Like, you know, changing oil. Yeah. You know, every once in a while you have gearboxes that wear out. So you have to change those things. Yeah.

3:15:47Jason Fried:Um, but, uh, but motors too, do motors burn out motors actually are pretty, I think,

3:15:53Edward Mehr:you know, I've had opera, I've been working with robots, this company in the previous one, relativity space. Never had a motor give on me. I've had gearboxes give on me, got power supplies, you know, but not motors.

3:16:06Jason Fried:When people talk about humanoids, they're often the criticism is like, hey, you have all these different motors that need to function and they're going to be under a lot of strain. And maybe that's kind of a risk from a depreciation standpoint or just operating expense.

3:16:21Edward Mehr:Yeah. I mean, at the end of the, I think the way I think about it is if you go like very fundamental right the bill of material that goes into making a robot is not that significantly different than the bill of material to go into building a die the difference is a die and a mold is a dumb material versus a robot is an intelligent material that can change its configuration yeah so so i mean it's the same argument even with molds like you know if you have your gearbox is kind of like you know getting worn out dies get worn out you have to repair dies right so the argument applies either way uh it's a question of like which one is a more longer term you know roi which is usually intelligence has more longer-term ROI than we've done.

3:16:58Jason Fried:Are you scaling outside of California yet? Yeah.

3:17:03Edward Mehr:So third facility is not going to be in California. Oh, okay. So volume production, I think, obviously, California, we have a lot of engineers, so we want our R &D development to be here. But productions, we're looking at Texas now for the third facility, New Mexico, Nevada recently, and Alabama.

3:17:22Jason Fried:What's the process with those states? Are they getting or is it fairly competitive? Is there states that are leaning? Does, does tech as, because I imagine Texas has a lot of momentum. If you're one of these other states, you may offer more incentives to get your, get your business.

3:17:37Edward Mehr:Yeah. I think Texas has the benefit. Like, you know, we're looking at Austin and nearby area, like lots of NJ, SpaceX used to Yeah. People want to live there.

3:17:43Jason Fried:That's the benefit.

3:17:45Edward Mehr:But then you go to New Mexico, New Mexico has, you know, actually they have a sovereign fund that can invest into the facilities that you're going to deploy. Obviously, taxes are, you know, estate taxes are minimal in all three. You know, Texas is more property-related taxes. So, yeah, it's different for each state. But you're right. I think Texas is becoming that premium state. So they value themselves a little bit higher than the rest.

3:18:07Jason Fried:What was the 10-year pitch for investors? Obviously, they're investing based on, you know, everything you've done to date and the current traction. But when everything goes right, what does the business look like?

3:18:20Bill Bishop:Custom hoods for Ford Raptors. What else do you need to know? Don't even open the docs app. Just wire the money.

3:18:28Edward Mehr:Exactly. I think what excites us and also everybody in the company is the world where when I got out of school, in order to build hardware, you have to work in big companies. If you're a software engineer, though, you can have a small team, put stuff on AWS. Suddenly, your app is accessed by millions of people. if you're a hardware engineer you have to go work for like you know big companies toyotas you know boeings why because your idea requires a lot of capex to be built so long-term vision is can we make that happen for hardware can we make what happened with

3:19:02Sara Hooker:software for hardware where you have an idea you go on a portal yeah you know the ai on it guides

3:19:07Edward Mehr:you to turn your intention into a design that's manufacturable and you say hey i want 200 of these you know in hollywood california and the right facility that might be in south bay when the bay area gets programmed and makes it for you. And, you know, a week later, you get it, you get it shipped to your door.

3:19:21Bill Bishop:Yeah. Talk about the abstraction layers on top of the robots. You, you obviously buy robots that are, you know, off the shelf. I mean, they're, they're made by large corporations, but once those arrive, I'm sure they have some computer control system. Have you had to build an abstraction layer on top of that? Or do you have a translation layer from a design you put in an image and that turns it into a 3D point cloud or something and then translates into robotic motions. Like what was the process to actually, you know, fire it up? Because you're not controlling this with an Xbox. No.

3:19:58Edward Mehr:In early days we did. Yeah. But, but yeah, no. So there's two pieces of software that we developed. So one we call like an offline programming software where it takes a design and then modifies the design, then prepares instructions that can be sent to the robot. and then once the robot is done, it gets the results from all the sensors and allows you to do some analysis or even train models afterwards that gives you better process parameters for the next time. So that's our offline software. We call it architect. And then there's a software that controls robots every four milliseconds. Look at the sensor data and say, okay, how did you do and do I want to adjust so I can improve it?

3:20:34Edward Mehr:So both of the software is internal. We did decide to try to be as much as we can off the shelf. So 70 % of our hardware bomb is off the shelf. There's 30 % like things that the robot pick up or the way we, you know, hold the material or the whole platform itself because it's a portable platform. Those are built and designed by us. But we wanted to be able to go to market with, you know, limited amount of CapEx requirements for something that can be easily financed with debt as opposed to try to spend a lot of equity dollars on building, you know, custom machines. But, yeah, so software is all us.

3:21:09Edward Mehr:hardware side 30 percent is designed and you know 70 percent off yeah talk more about the capital

3:21:15Bill Bishop:sources uh what's the role of debt in this business what's the role of uh strategic partnerships uh it feels like at this level of the stack we often see companies teaming up with bigger players what are the pitfalls of that best practices yeah you know i think yeah that's one of

3:21:33Edward Mehr:the things that i learned is like a company like this you need to basically have very diversified capital stack right so obviously get equity dollars for development but I think the best use of the equity dollars is just put into engineering yeah build something that gives you long-term money yeah most of our you know CapEx is fine finance with this even up to this day yeah mortgage base yes you basically get mortgage against the asset you know it's still pretty cheap used to be much cheaper now it's like you know you know maybe two percent three percent above the primary right so so and then and then I think customers play a big role for because we're such a fundamental change.

3:22:08Bill Bishop:Are those loans typically interest only or are you paying down the principal over like 10 year depreciation schedule?

3:22:12Edward Mehr:Yeah, so like -

3:22:14Bill Bishop:You do either? All flavors, right?

3:22:17Edward Mehr:So we have like some of them that like, you know, couple of years interest rate only and then you have five, six years of repayment. Got it, yeah, yeah.

3:22:23Bill Bishop:Just like a house but a little bit shorter because it matches the depreciation schedule. That makes sense.

3:22:28Edward Mehr:And then obviously you brought customers. I think for us, it was actually pretty crucial. Like most of the time people think of, okay, you know, if you're a venture funded business, don't go to customers. They change your direction. Maybe they give you a little bit. They kind of force you to do things you might not want to do. I think in our case, it's such a fundamental change. I mean, Toyotas of the world, aerospace problems of the world, manufacturing is their thing, right? So I found actually it's better to partner with them and actually get them involved because some of these manufacturing changes takes five, six years to do, right?

3:22:58Edward Mehr:So if the executives, even the CEO of the prime is not in it, you know, doesn't have a stake in the company, long term there might not be the success might be a little bit iffy because they're not committed for the long ride and then I think the last source of capital I think we talk about manufacturing as a national security kind of advantage so a lot of governments we work with a lot of governments to provide certain level of support so that we can deploy these factories in their countries we recently announced a partnership with UAE so that's going to be our fourth facility

3:23:34Jason Fried:yeah they have insane incentives around they have so much power and so much land and they just want things to be

3:23:41Edward Mehr:made there yeah and they have a huge I mean that area I mean speaking of I call it like you know Abrams Accord 2.0 that area is like so much going on there in terms of instability so all the kind of sane countries in the region are trying to you know have some level of defenses and I think UAE is doing a smart thing they want to become the defense manufacturer in the region next to Turkey in Israel. So spending a lot of money and time on it.

3:24:05Bill Bishop:That's great.

3:24:05Edward Mehr:How big is the company?

3:24:06Bill Bishop:What's the hiring plan? Big new round?

3:24:08Edward Mehr:So right now we are roughly 70 people planning to get to 240 in the next year and a half. Wow.

3:24:15Bill Bishop:That's a lot of people. Is that manufacturing jobs sort of, is there blue collar element to any of the work? Yeah, yeah.

3:24:23Edward Mehr:So we still need a lot of technicians. Technicians, that's right. I think, you know, there's a lot of scare when people talk about, you know, kind of AI and automation is like, okay, where are the jobs going? I think we're actually going to see a revival of blue color a little bit. I think the blue color is not just going to be not as blue as it used to be. They're going to be working with robots and iPads, and they're going to be enhanced. But, yeah, we still significantly need technicians, manufacturing engineers on the shop floor operating these systems. That makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else?

3:24:52Jason Fried:No. Thank you for this wonderful gift. This is a wonderful gift. Thank you so much. We will be growing in the wall.

3:24:56Bill Bishop:Awesome. Thank you. It's great to meet in person.

3:24:58Edward Mehr:Good to meet you as well. Have a great rest of your day.

3:25:00Bill Bishop:We'll talk to you soon. We've got to talk about France, right? Did we get to France? We've got to close with France. Tell us what happened, Jordy. They invested a lot of money. They did. How much have you invested in AI? Certainly about 30 million euros.

3:25:17Jason Fried:Macron posted on Thursday at 11.53 a.m. Pacific that science has found its home. through France 2030. We have invested more than$30 million to advance AI and a number of other initiatives. And anyways, I didn't actually see it until Steven from Lambda sent it to me. Throwing him in front of the bus. No, he just, you know, it was important news. I think he just wanted to share. He wanted to make sure that I saw it. The next morning I shared breaking. France is going all in on AI with their last 30 million and use this wonderful image. And it wasn't, I guess, like it took a few hours, but the French responded via the account, the official government account French response.

3:26:10Jason Fried:And they said, breaking. Jordy Hayes can't tell the difference between an investment in AI and academic grants for semesters in the south of France. Can we pull this up, guys? Yeah, here we go. You kind of have to see it to believe it. It's crazy. My original post did... Fully quote tweeted. Yeah, they quote tweeted.

3:26:29Bill Bishop:And tagged you by name.

3:26:31Jason Fried:They're quote tweeting podcasters. They are. But my post, of course, outperformed. I got a million views, 13 ,000 likes. They managed to rack up almost half the likes, 300 ,000 views, not bad. For what it's worth. But the problem is like, what does this even mean? So they're saying they're not investing in AI. They're just giving academic grants for semesters in the south of France. And I was like, you're supposed to be firing back, showing that you are investing in AI. And you're telling me that your whole initiative, France 2030, is just French vacations for researchers? Like, you're not giving me a lot of confidence here.

3:27:09Jason Fried:This is kind of insane. Macron later kind of, he made a more general response, which again, didn't. He came with the long post. He came in with a long post.

3:27:22Bill Bishop:He hit you with a long post.

3:27:22Jason Fried:And so if you're responding to people that are calling you a clown, I wouldn't start your own post in response with just, quote, this clown wants to make France a clown. Also, you didn't call him a clown, to be clear. You didn't use that term. I would never do that. I respect France. You compared him to Matt Damon in Rounders. I love France. I love France. I've been multiple times in the last few years. You won't need to check out your passport. He said it. He said it. This clown wants to make France an AI leader. with 30 mil. And then he goes on and on and on with a lot of basically coping and seething.

3:27:57Jason Fried:He then shows, it says hashtag for sure. And then he has, he showed a chart of just foreign investment in data centers. And it's apparently 69 billion. It's going into France, mogging the United States.

3:28:14Bill Bishop:Yeah, we only have 27 of foreign money going in. Completely disregarding the trillion. What about SoftBank? didn't they put in way more I mean it's open AI and then open AI funnels who

3:28:23Jason Fried:knows who knows but obviously it doesn't matter because you need to look at foreign and domestic yes actually accurate view I responded I'm sorry but until LVMH is spending a hundred billion a year on data center cap it's hard to believe you guys are taking AI seriously and I honestly think I know this sounds like really insane yes but in a fast takeoff scenario you would imagine that france actually getting serious about ai is getting their national champions of all types yeah france lvmh even the brands it wasn't christian dior actually owned by a big like infrastructure company back in the day um and so i could imagine uh i could imagine the arnault's getting getting uh getting back in the game at some point adorn i uh anyways a lot a lot of fun no disrespect to france i think we were just having fun having a little fun goofing around on the timeline.

3:29:15Jason Fried:I love France. I'm excited for them to invest in AI. I'm excited for my next trip to France.

3:29:21Bill Bishop:Ray says, hello, Emmanuel Macron. If you instead threw a week-long hackathon at the Palace of Versailles with a 30 million dollar, 30 million euro cash prize, it would unironically boost the French AI startup scene way more than investing it.

3:29:33Jason Fried:Palmer Luckey said, I hope the researchers are better at making charts than whoever made this one. Oh, no. Dr. Parikh Patel says, you are not a clown. You are the entire circus.

3:29:44Bill Bishop:It's a rough day on the internet, but you know, he's trying.

3:29:49Jason Fried:There's somewhat of a language barrier here. This, this, uh, again, they, and, and honestly, hire Lulu. That's all I'll say.

3:29:59Bill Bishop:So, I mean, unclear if they even need to invest that much. I mean, there's an entirely different world where you just become receptive to other companies coming there. They bring jobs, they bring economic opportunity, commerce. Like you don't necessarily need to build a competitor to Amazon, you can have Amazon come to town. You tax the local business, and then you employ local workers, and your consumers benefit from the experience of Amazon. You don't necessarily need a local copy of everything. Now, AI might be different, and you might need sovereign AI, and there's a discussion around that.

3:30:33Bill Bishop:But there are countries that will just say, yeah, you know what? GBT5 is good enough for us. We're just going to partner with Google for this stuff.

3:30:42Jason Fried:Anyway. We should have someone from Mistral on.

3:30:44Bill Bishop:That would be good checking with them, see how they're doing. I think they've found a nice little pocket of business over there.

3:30:51Jason Fried:Well, it has been a fantastic show today.

3:30:55Bill Bishop:Thank you for tuning in to our Super Bowl review special. We've planted the bomb. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. We're going to be playing with Legos. Yes, Ramp sent us these wonderful Legos.

3:31:07Jason Fried:Brian's office Legos. Brian's office. Real. Very real Hard to believe

3:31:12Bill Bishop:Really, really cool I mean, really just shows you the versatility of this execution Just all over Every touch point I want you to have the best afternoon of your life Computer, give every person in the chat the best afternoon of their life

3:31:25Jason Fried:TBPN.com for the newsletter

3:31:26Bill Bishop:Goodbye

3:31:30Jason Fried:Nice work, brothers I'll see you on the next one