Tech Earnings Recap, Beautiful Data Centers | Mike Isaac, Kyle Harrison, David Marcus, Turner Caldwell, Everette Taylor, Puneet Mehta & Justin Wexler, Alexander Embiricos

29:05it's court is incredible in that i got to sleep in till like 9 a.m today which is which was great but i made up for it because like literally every day this week i've gotten up at five o 'clock in the morning to get my cold ass down to the oakland courthouse and stand outside for two hours so i don't know but it's fun how does it how does it work who gets priority is it first come first serve like if some random person if some random person shows up before you they can just get it and do they you're just out or or you get to like show some sort of like press like how does it work yeah i wish i was cool enough to like cut well here's the thing you should get an artist pass no not vip artist pass it's a level of okay So there are 20 reserve seats in the front row for press.

30:00But the issue is only one person per outlet gets it. And we are doing like live blogging for like the big moments, like opening statements and for Elon. And so myself and my colleague Cade came on the first the whole first week. And so so we've had a trade off. He's gotten the like press skip the line thing. and I've been with the other folks in the 30 unreserved seats in the back. That are watching YouTube videos. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. Or Stripe Sessions. Literally one dude fell asleep. I was actually impressed. Fell asleep. Yeah. It seemed pretty entertaining. It didn't seem like you were falling asleep.

30:42I was keeping up through the live blog. Be reading my nightmarish Twitter, too. It's been fun, honestly. have you guys ever done like court case things or have you ever been sued or been in court i've never been in court i i went to uh mock court in high school where everyone picks a role i think yeah we larped in court literally larping in high school but other than that and never i the whole this whole time it seems it seems insane like with with the with the recent nasa uh the moon mission. I was like, this should be a live stream plus a pay-per-view for the key moments for this trial. It's like, we have huge budget deficits and we have these incredible media products.

31:25Why are we not doing pay-per-views? Right. Um, but, uh, that's the funny thing. Oh, I was just going to say, that's the funny thing about like federal courthouse stuff. Like there's a lot of different rules around filming and electronics. I covered some cases in DC and I can't even bring a laptop or phone in those courthouses. So like, this is actually a very permissive judge just because she believes in like press access and stuff. And we've had way more access than you would normally get in federal court cases. Okay. So you, you've been to these court cases before, but if I follow your Twitter, it feels like you're making a bunch of rookie mistakes.

32:04You, you, you only had egg bites at 5 30 AM. Your bite energy is wearing off. You forgot your butt pillow. you forgot to fill your water bottle like is this amateur hour are you professional what's going on i think i think that you you guys might know me well enough that that is kind of how i operate most of my life like kind of chaotic but it is focused on the important stuff that's right yeah yeah i mean look i can file i may be like bleeding and hungry like limping across the finish line but we're getting, I'm tweeting for you. What is your, what is your, what are some like high profile cases that, that stand out that you've covered in the past?

32:46So I got to do, let's see, my first one was insanely boring, but important. The Apple versus Samsung thing back in the day and like them suing for Samsung copying, like literally everything they do. I did Dallas, actually Zuckerberg's like I think maybe one of his first testimonies on the stand when ZeniMax was suing meta for the Oculus acquisition remember that yeah that was in Dallas that was super fun that I almost got kicked out of the courtroom for tweeting and then I did the DC FTC meta one and I almost got kicked out of the courtroom again actually I did get kicked out of the courtroom for wearing the meta Ray-Bans these are not it But I wore them then or maybe.

33:34And then they started putting, I was fucking super stupid for doing it. But then they started putting signs up saying, do not wear these glasses in court. But you weren't, you were just using them as glasses or you were being sneaky and you were recording? No, I was like, look, I can't record. I won't record. I was trying to play by the rules. And like they were, they are my prescription glasses. Yeah. But the bailiff, the bailiff was like. Yeah, it's too much. It's too high risk for them. Because you could have like turned off the light or whatever. Yeah. Talk about the fans. Are there really Elon Musk fans in the courtroom?

34:09Like what motivates someone to go and watch that live? Is this their UFC front row ticket? Like why are they there? So you guys would have fun. Like it actually is. A lot of court cases are boring to people who don't care about this stuff, right? Like you and I may be super into like the FTC trial was super fun for me because it's like, oh my God. Mark Zuckerberg emailing Sheryl Sandberg and talking about PATH. This is incredible. And the average person has no idea what we're talking about. But this is like a circus. There are people who genuinely love Elon or are genuinely worried about the end of the world happening.

34:50And I think it's a really good thing that there's public access to these courts. I think the average person can come in and show up. And that's what I think after the buzz of Twitter and like people seeing that this is an event, we got a much longer lines and like folks who are local, like just like I know a PM in tech from Meta that came. I know like a guy from Box made it in. Just if you get a seat, if you get there early enough and you can get a seat and you can just hang out. It's like and I think it's really great. I think it's great that people are there for it. It shouldn't just be me. Yeah.

35:25What about the what about the jury? Does the jury seem excited and honored to have the opportunity to be a part of a case like this? Or are they nodding off? It would be so funny to be so out of just off the internet, not online. To make selection, you can't be super biased. You're probably not a P.I. Sam, this guy Sam and Greg and this guy who makes cars, and I don't even know what they're talking about, a whole bunch of mumbo-jumbo. Like there's got to be one person on the jury that was just so not tapped in that they're just confused. I think jury selection was super interesting for that. I can't say, it's actually interesting, I can't say too much about the jury right now because like there's all these rules about.

36:11Oh sure. Like some random person could go up to them if you identify them or try to alter it. Totally. But I will say, during jury selection on Monday, it is an incredible slice of life, and you get how familiar or unfamiliar people are with the tech industry, despite being here. Some folks are like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know what AI is. I don't know what AGI stands for. So it really played. And voir dire and jury selection is so important for cases like this. just it makes the dynamic of the facts don't necessarily always matter but the vibe can really matter which i think is a benefit for elon honestly yeah were they were they trying to weed out they're trying to weed out people that are a little bit too excited about the case right you want the people that are like in order to have a uh uh but but then talk i i didn't understand why is the jury just like giving like an advisory decision what is the history of like why do you why do you have a jury when the judge is ultimately going to make the final call it feels like just kind of putting on like a show because like theoretically the judge could just sit through a bunch of depositions and make a call sure no i i think um so i do think they want more often than not want a jury of these ceos and company's peers to be the deciding factor in what they feel like is good for a civil claim.

37:46That, I think, is fairly standard. But to your point, the judge can throw out their verdict, which is like, and judges, I don't think, tend to want to do that because they want to have reliance on this is the public, the public should have a say in what goes or whatever. But the judge can do that. I will say, also, she is responsible for if OpenAI is found liable, judge decides on remedies, damages, and things like that. So she still has an active role in that regard and in steering the case. But I really do think that courts often prefer or often appreciate a jury of your peers making some of these decisions.

38:33So I don't think it's going to be completely disregarded is what I would say. How has Judge Rogers done so far in your view? Just reading the live blog, she seemingly has zingers and pretty good one-liners. I'm just kind of imagining what it's like in there because obviously I'm just reading text, but she's had seemingly some pretty good comedic timing. Oh my God, she's so funny. She's real. As you might imagine, there's a number of different types of judges and how they handle their court or whatever. and she just takes no BS from anyone, including the lawyers. And like when they try to like tap dance or break the rules or whatever, she's like, no, shut up.

39:21Or like get back on track or no, no, no. Actually the best part or the most insane part. So one woman in the overflow room who is just, not just, it was a civilian going to attend and watch it started recording, which is again, against the rules, if not the law in a federal courthouse. So the judge brings her in and in front of a room of like 100 people just like dresses her down, yells at her saying, did you not see any of these signs? What are you doing? I will kick you out. It was like, I would have like peed my pants and started crying if she had done that to me. It was deeply, deeply intense.

40:01It's teacher, you know, berating a student. Yeah, classes in session. Classes in session here. It was brutal. How have you been processing Elon's positioning? It feels like the two stories that I've heard him sort of telling are, one, about his commitment to technology, humanity, saving the world through, you know, Tesla and the electrification of the internal combustion engine and SpaceX making, you know, humanity multi-planetary. And then, and that's like a very high level, uh, you know, high concept, uh, pitch. And then he also sort of brings it down and starts beating this drum on like, you can't steal a charity.

40:47You can't steal a charity. Uh, is that the correct framing that he's trying to go like high and low there? How much have he's been beating each of these drums and how useful is that? Oh, so I totally agree. That's the framing. And I think this really goes to the point of a lot of these trials are, pageantry is the wrong word, but let's say theater, in that you are, this is a jury trial, and it's a different thing than just convincing a judge who I would say is much more attuned to the facts and merit of the case and, like, hammering in on the evidence and, like, something that may be boring to you or me or whatever or the jury is going to be more important to a judge.

41:26Like Elon, I think from day one has leaned into the persona of Elon and just from him being on the stand and saying, I care about humanity. I mean, he says he does whatever he does or doesn't. But like just leaning into this, like I'm a world changing entrepreneur and this stuff is existential and I'm the one who has cared about it. And like that may work on a jury, you know, like there are people who still love him. and OpenAI is really hammering the facts of what they feel are their side of the case and saying Elon has never been in the dark. He quit in a huff. He's made it very clear he hasn't been there.

42:08He's trying to sue now or he's trying to file this claim now because he's catching up, because he's behind as an ex-AI competitor. But again, this is all stuff that maybe it doesn't play. This is why jury trials are so risky for companies a lot of the time. It's fun for me. It's probably not fun for everyone in there, but it's fun to see it play out, if that makes sense. How did the distillation comments come up? That was the news of the day yesterday. You guys obviously returned to it. You broke it, right? I think I did, yeah. I think it was one of those things where I was like, holy shit, this is news.

42:46And I think folks started figuring it out, but I was like, got to put it on tour. And so the point, so Bill Sabat is lead counsel for OpenAI. He was sort of talking about, the point was made in the context of they want to hammer home, Elon is creating a competitive product. And also he keeps stressing that this is doom world ending technology. but at the same time, he's ripping off the toss and using the technology to improve his own technology in an explicitly for-profit company. And so the point is like hammering him as a hypocrite. And I think, look, like I think Elon has history in his businesses.

43:34It would not be controversial to say, to like say one thing and do the other. And I think he sees it as like rules of engagement. That's the game in the, you know, no holds capitalism land. but like that is how it came up and that they didn't go super deep into it but they wanted to make the point he's using open eyes tech he's breaking the toss and he's partly distilling it and i want to say also that elon went out of his way to say everyone kind of does this it's like an open secret in the industry which i think is like also kind of true but that doesn't make it there's like it's it's fraught i guess is what i would say yeah yeah it's a there's obviously a continuum there which is why he tried to hammer that it was like partly i imagine most car companies have taken a rival car for a spin have they taken the car apart you know there's a line there and there are laws but that's a separate issue of course has um has anything come up with a jury around prediction markets because i was thinking we've now seen insider trading across every possible prediction market right from uh you know i'm sure from like very interesting you know even even the maduro thing was was was interesting because a lot of people were like oh he's just betting on himself but then i saw that i was like hey that's sending a signal to the entire world that an attack could be happening which puts your entire team at risk right so like very very clearly like U.S.

45:02military personnel should not be able to trade against our own military's actions ever, right? And they need to come down really hard on that. Are you just up crazy trading on this? Are you just trading on this crazy? Are you going to retire off this? The reason that the jury thing is bad is it creates potentially an incentive for the jury to basically work together and say, like, hey, we all have to be here for like a month. like we could at least make some money on it and then you only need to get like four you only need to get like four or five of these people the chat is saying monetized jury duty oh my god no but but like it seems like very important that this does not happen right because because there's very like they they tried to select a jury that just doesn't care about the ai race they don't care about this or that and and but if they are self-interested in some capacity they could be like well my my decision is not is not even really legally binding it's just advisory like i may as well you know i don't know right uh i i think that's a great point and like something that i imagine like court systems aren't even prepared for fully yet because like well there hasn't been There hasn't been a big trial.

46:20There's been, I'm sure, some epic Apple stuff that was slightly big, but nothing where, nothing, anything at this scale with this much, even just this much volume already from people that are generally interested in the story. Yeah. And, like, I think the other thing you should know is, like, they're not sequestered. Like, they show up kind of, like, before. Like anyone else. Right before they, yeah. like literally like we see them walking in and that the marshals there's like a ton of like u.s marshals there they're like is anyone a juror in this line the juror gets to go in so and at the end of every day the judge is like goes back over the rules saying do not discuss this case with anyone do not watch it on tv do not look at it on your phone which is like a verbal command yeah don't go on your phone just don't exactly hey don't use the most addictive thing that has ever been created in human history don't use the thing that you use for six hours a day that you probably turn your lights on and adjust your thermostat totally yeah i mean it's that's a it's something i had not thought of jordy but it's a really good like when does that come up at some point you know like that's very worried not just seems like but just ever yeah it seemed it seems like something that the court should be paying attention to heading into a decision from the jury.

47:48How much is the history between Opening Eyes counsel, Bill, who represented Twitter when Elon was trying to get out of the Twitter buyout? And ultimately, it feels like the X slash Twitter acquisition has worked out pretty well. For Elon, he's made a number of plays, so hard to imagine him deeply regretting buying it, even though at the time he was happy to get out until Bill said, no, we're doing this. You know what's funny? He is... I can't underscore enough how different the tenor chain... I mean, look, it's opposing counsel, so it's always going to be different, but Elon went from like, I am a entrepreneur sort of like Rosalie explaining to you what I think the future should look like.

48:42And like very concerned for the future of the human race. So like openly antagonistic to Savitz questioning and like, and the thing that I'm very curious how this plays with the jury is like, Elon was very, he's like, I'm a literal guy. Like the questions you're asking me are like too complicated or like, they're not yes or no questions, which is like, fair like as a grievance but also the thing he either doesn't understand or doesn't care about understanding is that that's just lawyers like that's the whole point of a cross-examination is to ask these questions as as reductively as possible to to get a type of answer they're looking for and his job or his uh you know pre-trial sort of discussions with his own lawyers is to know how to navigate those essentially while also telling the truth so I don't know they just don't like each other or at least Elon doesn't like Savit and you can very it's very clear that he's just like mad at that and whenever Elon gets sassy I would hear like clearly people who are fans of of Musk like laughing behind me or being like yeah you got him like blah it's just it's very it's very funny it's like kind of a it's different than the usual vibe is what I'd say.

49:58That's very interesting. Outlook, what's going on Monday? What's the outlook for next week? Yeah, it feels like this week was the Elon side for the most part. Are we going to flip to Sam and Greg and some other OpenAI folks, or is there an intermediate step? Do you have a clear view of what the next couple of weeks look like? Yeah, so it's a little rough because we have witness lists in full that they presented and are in evidence, but they you don't really learn who's coming until like very soon that week. It's actually a giant pain in the ass for me and for reporters who are trying to schedule.

50:35But like, so we, Jared Birchall, who's like must family office guy just finished testifying. We're going to get this guy, Stuart Russell. No, no, sorry. That was yesterday. And you said Birchall was very dry. Like, was that intentional? That feels like that does not work in favor of like swinging a jury. Was that more for the judge? Like, what was the goal of that testimony? I think it was to really just sort of show how Musk was trying to set up this, like structure things as a non-profit and like hammer home, like he's always wanted it to be a non-profit and he's not sort of like, so it was, I believe it was Musk's witness who OpenAI then cross-examined And then OpenAI used the occasion to show an email that had like a proposed equity structure for Musk.

51:32And so like they both kind of used him differently. But I think like Burchall is like essentially an accountant books guy like behind the scenes. So I think it was like, here's the people behind the curtain. Here's how they were dealing with the finances. Here's how Musk was like, this is only a charity. and then OpenAI's lawyers were like, actually, check this shit out. But I think like, I honestly don't know. They also struck some of his testimony because this is a little complicated, but if you remember last year, Musk made a bid with Ari Emanuel and some other companies. To buy the whole company.

52:11And that opened the door, or that sort of complicates things for Musk's side because there might be some of those discussions around that bid admitted into evidence and that may not be good for Musk because if there's weird compromising emails in there. So it's gotten complicated. But next week we're getting Stuart Russell's safety researcher. We got Greg Brockman. Maybe Sam Altman. Maybe not. It's four days a week in court only so we may not have time but I gotta be ready. I'll be there most of the time but I'll be there for Sam for sure. And then I don't know. Sorry, rewinding a second. Did they bid on the PVC, like the for-profit arm?

53:00Yeah. It was the, yeah. And they wanted to just sort of, I don't actually know what their plans were afterwards, but like it was like trying to take over the asset, those assets basically, and then, you know, morph it into what they, I mean, And they knew that it wasn't going to get accepted as a bid, basically. But it was like, and then Burchall, sorry, Burchall in court was saying, this was us trying to sort of establish a pricing mechanism to like value the actual entity itself. And that was going to help them somehow. I actually am not quite sure how that would help them somehow. But someone in the chat is probably smarter than me on that.

53:42But like, it was them trying to sort of take that over. And I think OpenAI said publicly at the time, this is like a stalling tactic. They're trying to like slow us down while also using this in court in this concurrent lawsuit later, basically. So it's all like really messy. And I think even Musk's side took a risk there if those emails get into discovery. But it's unclear to me if that's going to happen. If they are, then we may see them next week. Why would that kind of discovery process around that bid be coming up now when everyone involved was well aware that it had happened quite a long time ago?

54:26So I think because of a line of questioning with Burchall yesterday about the bid, if that happens on the stand, and again, a lawyer gut-checked me here because I'm a stupid tech reporter. But if that happens on the stand, then it gives an entry point for opening eyes lawyers to be like, okay, well, we need to, you know, now admit, basically the judge said to Must side, you open this line of questioning. Now it's fair game to go into this. And then you can start calling new evidence in around that, like to open up discovery. It's like really like strategy. And like, you have to be careful in your strategy when you're asking certain questions in court.

55:07I've been learning a lot about it. So maybe it's a strategic misstep by Tobaroff, Elon, but it's not quite clear yet. Do you have an idea of the purpose of the AI safety researchers testifying? What the goal is there? Does that align with one particular side? If there's more nonprofits, you still probably wind up with Anthropic, DeepMind, XAI. Like having one, like, you know, more focused nonprofit going on for a long time doesn't necessarily lead me to like, oh, then we wouldn't be in an AI race. Like it's not a clear solve for me, but I imagine that there's that one side is trying to position this as important.

55:49But do you have any predictions for what that goal is? Totally. So this is must witness. And your point is well made, which is like, OK, if even if you kneecap one, like good luck on literally everyone else. And like, there's been a lot of time spent Elon talking smack about Larry Page and how he like doesn't trust him anymore. That's actually been really fun to hear. But the point I believe is, this is actually a point of contention. So the judge does not, the judge prohibited like going too far into like Doomerism into the world stuff. And she's like, look, that's kind of a sideshow distraction.

56:27Like extinction humanity stuff is not the point of this case. but Must Side called this guy because they want someone and my understanding is that Stuart is like very aligned with the idea that AI is super dangerous and going to harm us all and so if you get this guy in there at that point How does that not like If this guy is going to come on and say that AI is the most insane Doomer point of view, which I think is everyone's going to have their own opinion around this debate. It's completely worthy of having and talking about. but how does Elon square that with like, I'm trying to build the biggest cluster possible and distill on the rest of the industry's model and create tens of gigawatts of space compute.

57:21And like, how does that, how does that, like, can't this kind of witness potentially backfire in some capacity? No, I mean, you're exactly right in that squaring that circle is pretty hard and, like, exactly what OpenAI is like on hammering them. I should be trusted with the, you know, all-powerful. We're going to be in the Terminator situation no matter what. You want me in charge of the Terminators, not some other guy, not some nonprofit, not some shareholders. He's basically making, he's pivoting Tesla production to Terminators, basically. Optimus. Yeah. Great. No, and can I just make one last point?

58:10I just think he misunderstood the Terminator because we still survive and we fight back in that world. I've been saying this. Do you remember this? I've been saying this. People haven't seen the movie. Jordy actually hasn't seen the Terminator. Are you kidding me, dude? In all of these movies, it completely leaves out that there is a problem, and then humanity overcomes it. And so it's like, if there is a Terminator scenario, I just want to know that you're on my side as the resistance fighting back. Who is John Connor here? You are John Connor. Hopefully. I mean, I would say, yeah, I don't know.

58:48I don't want to get into the full Yudkowsky thing. but like it is reasonable to sort of steel man that like if it is bad, right now it's not. It's sass. That says I have to watch Terminator. I've got to watch Terminator tonight. You've got to watch Terminator. Okay. So literally I just saw this on Twitter. Terminator 2 is coming back into IMAX pretty soon. Like you can go see it in the theater, so you have to go see it, Jordy. Like it's required viewing. Let's go together. Yeah. I'm down. I'm down. Do you have any? I would say that so far the trial is less I mean it's hard for the trial to go very viral because there's no audio video and it's just like live blogging and you could imagine you can imagine some of these scenes like just the stuff that you're typing I'm like if that was on video that gets like 50 million views in like you know in a few hours on on on x you know across a bunch of these different aggregator accounts um but part is is maybe part of the like my my feeling is like it's just so it's just so like i feel like the entire tech industry it's like it's just kind of depressing to see to see these groups like fighting in this way when we have so much bigger problem like we have so many bigger problems as an industry right the big problem being like public perception of AI is like already so bad.

1:00:11Like people, you know, don't, don't like, you know, no matter who wins, we all lose or something like that. Like there's some negative stuff. I mean that, so I totally agree. And I do think actually, um, everyone, not everyone, but like many in the AI industry have started realizing, Oh, we have like, not everyone loves us like this is a perception problem in a lot of ways which like to me is funny because like i i not that i'm smart but i feel like i've known that for a little while and but it's the the issue is the the industry is coming around to that or at least certain folks are and know that they want to change that perception but this case has been in the system for like three years now and sort of like actually happening at a time where they wouldn't want it to necessarily happen if they're trying to change it.

1:01:06So the timing just sucks for, for folks who don't like that. Yeah. There's so many different like little tidbits and I don't know if they're going to be exact quotes, but you can just imagine plenty of things that are going to happen on the stand, winding up on a Bernie Sanders post and being like, stop it, pause AI. Right. Cause like, you know, it's always like, give the tech people enough rope to hang themselves. And like, there's a lot of rope going out the next couple of weeks. Oh my God. It's totally, you gotta one of y 'all both of y 'all should just show up to the courtroom at some point and like experience it because i mean you have an actual day job but it's like literally it's really interesting and like an experience so you you can't record video you can't record audio but is there a world where you have like five of your own stenographers there taking a perfect transcript would that be possible with enough resources and then we could do a table reading on this that's what i'm thinking is that is that you could use voice cloning i don't know if you noticed this uh tyler what was it grok launched voice cloning today or something which is why is that controversial again well for like i mean we've had this technology for like five years and then no one released it because like you don't want people to make deep fakes of other people's voice okay yeah because it's like textbook like i could it's like oh i call you john i need i need i need like yeah 500 bucks okay give me your credit card yeah so So obviously there's a bunch of risky uses of that.

1:02:30The good use is the comedic table read in the voice of Sam Allman, in the voice of Greg Brockman, in the voice of Elon Musk. We can all enjoy. I was thinking more of like doing like end of the day. Yeah. There's like, we do a play here. Yeah. That's probably all of a bunch of makeup, full costumes. You know, there are transcription services and even like, you could do, you could be Mike Isaac. by oh yeah we need someone playing you for sure no no no it's like it's a cameo he's oh he's playing himself and uh and you gotta go and the whole the whole time just crashing out like i forgot my lunch i forgot to fill up my water i had a banana i'm good i had a banana oh my god okay can i just say there is an attorney there that looks exactly like nathan fielder and i'm like almost like are you sure it looks like nathan fielder okay every time i see him i'm like is this like a bit like i'm am i gonna be on tv in some way it's very intense and you're gonna ask him next year i mean elon must says the funniest outcome is the most likely and that might be yeah seriously what is what is the funniest outcome the funniest outcome is like elon wins and the penalty is like is like 50 bucks or something like that it's like it's like Elon, like you win, here's$150.

1:03:52Enjoy. Hard one. Just the most like inconsequential fine for the AI industry, which is flush with cash at all times. Well, I find that like fine, like there's so many, anytime a company in tech gets fined, or not every time, but often it's like, okay. Sometimes it's a fine for ants. Yeah, like they did something that was bad. They generated a hundred million of revenue and the fine is like$1.5 million. Yeah. It's like, did that? I think the current meta YouTube lawsuit was like maybe a$10 million settlement. Of course, there was like knock-on of potential for class action. Well, yeah, that was for one individual.

1:04:32That was one individual. But still, it was like, you have this like landmark case, this big build, and then you're like, oh, how damaging is it going to be? It's going to be like five minutes of revenue. But the stock actually in meta earnings as far, I mean, there was a lot of shit that took the stock down but like i think one of them was them saying like this might have a material impact on like these cases like may have a material impact in the future if it opens the door so like yeah i agree like it's always remedies are always like it can be existential from a financial point of view but also just from a guess what this is about to become your whole fucking life for the next 10 years or whatever if that makes sense yeah yeah we talked to a law professor who said like the question is does social media exist in the future like this is an existential moment i'm not sure that we're quite there but uh yeah it is there's definitely a risk and you need to consider that if you're an investor totally anyway uh what's the game plan for next week what's going in are you doing trail mix are you doing protein bars i want you fueled up ready to go you should be able to do like a sponsored camelback you know did you ever watch jury do the show jury oh yeah of course i want to be the guy with like the chair pants and like the water thing attached to my back and like i need i'm gonna this is this is back in my blogging all things digital blog days, man.

1:06:01This is it. You should train this weekend. I will be more prepared. This weekend, you should go sit in a chair for eight hours straight. Are you going to do all four days? Are you doing all four days? I think we're going to switch off a little more. I apologize. I will not be my disastrous falling apart self every day of the week, just maybe two days of the week. So you should follow Cade Metz, my other colleague who's there. Although he is much more put together and does not tweet like a person off their meds like I do. So it'll be a different vibe each day, but I will be there next week. Last question.

1:06:37Is this book material? Does it rise to that quality, this drama? I really think someone's got to write a book. I would write a book on your coverage of this trial. Yes, that's what I want to read. And then I would do a podcast about it. I would do a podcast about it and then someone would make a book about the podcast, about the book. covering. We'll create a content Ouroboros here. Just keep it going. Someday. I don't know. We'll see. Anyway, thank you so much for taking time. Great to catch up. Good to see you, Mike. Thanks for the update. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. I'll see you soon.

1:07:13Goodbye. We're running late, but we got Kyle Harrison in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the CBP and Ultradome. He wrote a book about the Andoral Thesis. 300 pages of defense, tech, lore, history, knowledge. You know what's more valuable than any of these cars up here in the Hollywood Hills knowledge? And you wrote a book. Tell us about it. What was the process? What was the thesis of the book, the Anderil thesis? It was an incredible experience. I would say I think the thing that I came to appreciate the most was everybody talks about Anderil like it's just any other company. All these high-growth companies that are defined by an awesome team chasing a big idea.

1:07:53Market turns out to be bigger than you possibly expect. Ben Horowitz has to tell Databricks that they're underselling themselves at$10 billion. It's$100 billion. It's$200 billion. Those stories are very common. The Andurl story is so underappreciated because it is counter-positioned to, there's like over almost 100 years of military, geopolitical, industrial history that really define the company that people just, they don't know. They think about, oh, this is an interesting strategic choice. And it's like, no, this is actually because of things, decisions that people made in the 50s and 60s that we literally have to do things this way.

1:08:27That was the biggest takeaway. Yeah, I feel like Shamsankar at Palantir with the first breakfast has done a good job shining a light on the Last Supper. So many people in tech are familiar with that sort of key moment of industry consolidation that led us to this moment. Were there any anecdotes or historical stories that you discovered that were more under the radar, are more like less discussed as like, you know, the founding moments of this whole journey? The biggest appreciation that I got was for this sort of like dual pairing of people pushing forward a specific project. So in the Kill Chain, which is Chris Brose, who now is the kind of co-president and chief strategy officer at Anderrill, but at the time was coming off the armed services committee.

1:09:14He wrote this book, The Kill Chain. He talks about this idea of like military Mavericks. And I kind of combined this with this kind of founder, founder mode energy that people bring. And so you have this like founder plus military Maverick pairing where you have folks like the team. So Bernard Shriver, I think his name is the guy who basically led the team inventing ICBMs. He absolutely needed Eisenhower as his kind of military Maverick to like pair that effort. There's countless stories of this, the modernization of the Navy. There's all these different things that were like that one-two punch was kind of required.

1:09:50Once you get away from like, you know, at one point the DoD was 36 % of global R &D. They had a pretty good handle on the cutting edge. The further away you get from that, the more you need founder mode people digging in to figure out the solution. And it's heartbreaking because you see these like countless examples of like profits of urgency throughout time where like once we lost that sort of like desire for founders to come in and solve problems. And you have all these people who are like, throughout the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, they're releasing reports and writing white papers and talking about how, hey, this is going to be a problem.

1:10:27Warfare is changing. China's going to school on how we do conflict, and that's problematic. And none of them had sort of founders to be able to come solve problems because no one was willing to pay attention to the actual problems. And so we lost that pairing. There's reports of Anderle raising a new round,$60 billion potentially. Is this book a financial thesis? Is this financial advice? Is this something that investors, potential investors, maybe future investors? Yeah, there's four chapters dedicated to price targets. Price targets, multiples, cash flows. For entertainment purposes only, right across the – this does not constitute financial advice, entertainment purposes only.

1:11:10You know, what's crazy is I think, if I remember correctly, in secondary markets, if there's any secondary volume that Andrews founders haven't already gone to war on, I heard somebody say that it was like$100 billion indication. Like even just tracking like what people are willing to pay because of Matt Grimm's war, there may be no supply for the demand, but the demand is priced at$100 billion. So it's not, you know, where the new round ends up, whatever, the appetite continues. Sequel. Sequel. The Anduril financial thesis. Let's go. That's right. This is investment advice. Anduril's been very, very acquisitive.

1:11:47And it feels like some of the most meaningful innovation and founder mode behavior in the last 20 years has come out of Ukraine and what they've been doing to basically figure out how to innovate and create these R &D loops around drone warfare. I don't know if you can make predictions, but does Anderil end up buying any of these companies? Have you uncovered anything on that front? Is that even a possibility? it just feels like they've done some very impressive work to protect their country. And a lot of it seems relatively aligned to Anduril's own efforts. Yeah. So there's a couple of pieces of the puzzle.

1:12:41So first, in terms of how acquisitive Anduril has already been, our good friend Paki McCormick has described it well, I think, calling it an API into the DoD, where Anduril is effectively enables this plug-in mechanism. of somebody can go very deep into a very specific capability in a way that companies like the company that may dive, it would be very difficult for them to become a standalone large company. But by being acquired by Anderil, immediately they're able to plug in and get a$100 million contract with the Australian Navy and stuff like that. So I think the acquisition muscle plugs in a lot of this stuff pretty capably.

1:13:22The second piece of that puzzle is I think that a lot of times we do a disservice like the venture capital industrial complex does a disservice by focusing everybody on this sort of like neo prime north star of everybody needs to be the 10, 20, 50, 100 billion dollar outcome. I think that there are a lot of opportunities for companies to be very, very good at a very specific thing, capability, and then to plug into some of these systems, whether it's through partnership or through acquisition. And what's funny, probably the most frustrating part about the book is we wrote it over the course of two years, in part because it's difficult to sit down.

1:14:00We all have day jobs and stuff. But in part, too, because the world is constantly changing. When we originally sat down thinking about what this would look like, none of the things that happened in Israel, like Ukraine was sort of just continuing to evolve. Venezuela happens. All these different conflicts happen over time. But then on top of that, Anduril as a company continues to ship. And so even six months ago, I would have said, what is the kind of signal? And what's interesting is you look at some of their product launches. Some of these are acquisition and some through partnership. but I don't know if you guys have seen their like anime style product launch videos, right?

1:14:39So I don't know if everybody has noticed this but the last two videos had teasers of their future products. So I think it was the video where they talked about Fury and then it was maybe Fury or the Barracuda and then at the end of the video it kind of went under the water and you started to see these assets moving but then it cuts away and you don't know what it is. A couple months later they announced Copperhead, which is their like torpedo product and that paired with dive and stuff. And then they have a video about that. And at the end it pans above the water and you start to see this thing kind of come out of the corner of the shot and it cuts away.

1:15:12And then just whatever it was last week or so, Andrew will announce a partnership with Hyundai about building autonomous surface vessels, right? So it's like kind of going into all these different surface areas. I think that that is indicative of like where the signal is, is that whether it's through partnership, whether it's through acquisition, a lot of the stuff that's happening in Ukraine, what you're kind of exposing is that there is significant opportunity for like networked assets. And Anderil absolutely has this mindset on becoming the sort of networked everything, the military internet of things is what Chris Brose calls it.

1:15:49Where can people find the book? Amazon.com. Our own Jeff Bezos is hosting it for us. We're not in the book printing business. Are you going to do an audio book version? Oh, they have a print-on-demand functionality? Yeah, it's sick. It's great. You put in the thing. It takes a lot of tweaking. You think of what I'm thinking, John? I'm thinking of what you're thinking. It's pretty good. I'm telling you why. It's time to ship books. You've got to write a book about this. TBPN, the novelization. We want to make ad-supported business books. They're free, but they come with ramp ads. Yep, that's great.

1:16:21You get yourself a good designer. It's as easy as it can be. Last question from my side. But have we reached peak early stage defense tech investing boom? Has it already passed? Are we still on the up? What is your feeling at this one? I think that it is going to take the air out of the balloon is going to require some type of black swan, hopefully micro swan, micro black swan event. We don't want it to be too bad. Wait, you said to take the air out of the defense tech investing sales, you would need a black swan event. So you're saying like we declare global peace. World peace. I think it's more about the capability.

1:17:12I think it's going to take like either there is a company that has been highly valued, highly sought after, kind of held up as one of the golden children of the neo-defense industrial wave that just something, it's terrible. It's really bad. Like something very bad happened. And so then investors start to say, oh crap, wait, you're telling me not every company I invest in that does defense is going to be the next and roll? I can't underwrite to every company. Maybe they're not 60 billion, but at least they'll be 20 billion. Like if that underwriting muscle goes away, you have a whole swath of carpetbagger VCs that suddenly get very panicked.

1:17:48Like something like that happens. In social, there were a whole bunch of like fifth wave social companies that didn't get the Instagram acquisition. They didn't get the WhatsApp acquisition. They raised a couple hundred million bucks and they just sort of burned it down and just went away and nothing really happened. And the VCs sort of woke up and they were like, okay, we got to be much more careful if we're investing in that category. So yeah. Yeah, because I think it's like, I think the problem is like there are sort of like three variety of VCs are in and around like defense tech more broadly.

1:18:17And it's like the people who invest and get it and they're actively built, they understand the like moral implications of the types of technology they're investing in. Then there are still people who have said, we will not invest in weapons. We don't want to invest in defense, whatever. It's this middle ground tier that is problematic. It's these people who they have no real philosophical weight, um, behind why they do what they do. They just see big number and pursue shiny object, regardless of consequences. Line go up. Well, we hope that the line goes up on your book sales, Head over to Amazon.com and buy The Andrel Thesis by Kyle Harrison of Contrary.

1:18:54Thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't wait to see you soon. Great to see you. Congrats, dude. Goodbye. Thanks. Up next, we have David Marcus from LightSpark. He's the co-founder and CEO, and he's launching Grid Global Accounts, a Bitcoin-powered system enabling global USD accounts, cards, and cross-border payouts. We talked a lot about crypto payments yesterday. we'll let you introduce the business yourself again welcome back to the show give us the update and what's great to see your world great to see you thanks for having me back guys um well look uh so the the big announcement we had this week so lights park has been around for about four years and you know in the last four years we've been building connectivity into payment systems all around the world like 65 countries now and the announcements that we added this week is grid global accounts which is basically a global dollar accounts that any platform can issue and give to their stakeholders.

1:19:51And that dollar account is what I think is the most powerful money account ever created because you can move money in real time to 65 countries' payment systems, really at any time of the day or night. You can move money on any chain with any stable coin you want. You will have a Visa debit card that can allow you to spend that balance at 175 million merchants around the world that Visa supports and LightSpark is becoming a principal member of the Visa network as part of that process. It's got this nice feature that enables those platforms to actually be ready for the complete change of interfaces as we move from websites and apps to conversational interfaces driven by agents.

1:20:36This idea that you can delegate safely money to agents so they can buy things or send money around the world for you is really part of that whole grid global account platform that we've announced and launched this week. Very, very cool. So when did you guys start thinking about this opportunity? Obviously, everyone's thinking about stable coins. We have more regulatory clarity than ever. Was this always on the roadmap or did you guys start to get customers saying like, hey, we want support for stables and not just BTC related products? Yeah, I mean, look, I think, you know, so we've been working on stable coins for a long time.

1:21:19But the concept of a global dollar accounts that can actually live everywhere is really novel. And like there was no chance of us like actually doing that, like even 12 months ago, because like the prerequisites, the stars were really not aligned, right? Right now, with the Genius Act here in the US, with MICA in Europe and similar legislation all over the world, plus really, really great embedded wallets, like the self-custodial wallets of two years ago, where you had a seed phrase that you could lose and you would never give that to a family member because they would lose money almost invariably.

1:21:57All of that is gone. Now you have really great wallets that you can log in with Google, with Apple, with a passkey, with any login that's familiar and never lose your keys or your money. And the last part of it is actually really stablecoin backed debit cards where the networks have really leaned in hard on. And now it gives us an opportunity to really basically connect those dollar accounts to 175 million merchants around the world, making that balance really useful for anyone receiving money on them. Yeah, very cool. Is the pivot from crypto miner to AI neocloud that's happening across the industry having any sort of effect on crypto markets?

1:22:43Because we talk to companies all the time that are compute constrained. There's this CPU crunch, there's GPU crunch, there's backlogs for power and data centers are delayed. And that's what's going on in the AI world. But Bitcoin as a network needs compute as well. many other chains need compute and is compute scarcity bleeding over in any way to the upside or downside i i just i don't know the effect at all does it matter or is there enough compute for uh crypto to do everything that they want to do as a community yeah i mean look i mean proof of work is definitely and so you know more more specifically for the bitcoin network proof of work is definitely using uh the the level of energy uh that at times will compete with like AI data centers.

1:23:27But the hardware is like started GPU based, but it's very ASICs driven now. But on the energy side, definitely competes for the same source of energy. But look, I am personally an acceleration maximalist. Then I actually think that we're actually going to unlock unbounded energy in the next 10, 15 years. So I actually don't think that we're going to have these types of issues of actually competing resources with massively forward deployed amounts of capital on Bitcoin miners being replaced with GPUs. And also those data centers for Bitcoin mining are so specific. A lot of those miners are liquid cooled in a certain way and operate on certain grids that they're able to actually turn on and turn off the mining capabilities really easily.

1:24:26Whereas it's harder for you. You don't necessarily want to do that if you're actively serving inference or even just turning. You might not want to bring the train down. Interesting. Where are you expecting to see the first real hockey stick growth when it comes to agents leveraging stable coins? Right now, it feels like it's a lot of potential early experiments going on, but at least to me it's unclear where we'll see that really break out use case. Well, I can share a little bit more about my thoughts and my experience. The first thing is I think that everyone competing to build an agent-to-agent protocol standard is really future forward, and there's not much happening there.

1:25:10There's a lot of big news and big announcements and very little volume. and that's normal because agents are not moving money at scale by any stretch of imagination. We took a little bit of a different stance, which is that we want to build a mass market money account that suits the needs of people and businesses all over the world. Then we've built a safe scope delegation framework that enables those agents to actually use the debit card, use the 65 countries reach of moving money around use like the multi-chain support for stable coins and then you can delegate that and so what i've done with mine and i've lived with it for the last like you know five weeks or so so i have my grid global account and then i have an open claw running on mac mini at the office and i connected both and and and so it just takes a scoped debit card goes buy things online which is actually more difficult than i thought you know starting this but like it now works.

1:26:10It can message people on WhatsApp that I need to send money to and offer them like, you know, seven or eight different ways to pay them and I don't have to worry about it. And it really works real time really, really well. And it's been so much fun to actually build on OpenClaw and have like a money account that Lobster could use. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, that's awesome. Lobster accounts. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the progress. Thanks for having me. Great to get the update. I'm sure we'll see you back in the next, hopefully in the next one or two quarters.

1:26:46Yeah. Fantastic. Sounds good. Great to see you. Goodbye. Have a great weekend. Up next, we have Turner Caldwell from Marina Mariana Materials. Mariana Materials, like the Mariana Trench. We'll get into it with Turner Caldwell, the co-founder and CEO. Help me understand how to pronounce this company's name. I don't want to get it wrong. Mariana Minerals. Mariana. Okay, where does the name come from? It comes from the Mariana Strench. Mariana Strench. But that's because we were looking at... Let me guess. They've got some crazy minerals down there. Or do we even know? There are some minerals at the bottom of the ocean.

1:27:22That's right, that we are looking at. So you're saying you yearn for the trenches. That's right. There you go. Okay. The business is an autonomous copper mine. Can you take me a layer deeper? Explain the history of the business, the current shape of the business, where you're taking it all? Yeah, sure thing. So we just restarted a copper mine that we acquired at the end of last year with a major focus on autonomy across the entire stack. So that includes the kind of orchestration layers around mining operations as well as autonomous execution, which we'll do with partners, and then also autonomy around the refining processes.

1:28:01So the site is a mine and a refinery. Yeah, but we're in practice. What does that look like? Like you go into the mine and there's and there's some like ERP system or maybe just some like manual paper based workflow. And you're saying like, let's go vibe code a software solution for it. Like, yeah, or is it like vibe coding? But basically the way to think about mining is that you have a whole bunch of different disciplines that have to collaborate. It's a big coordination problem. You have geologists, you have a geologic block model, you have a mine plan. You'll usually have multiple mine plans, like a long range, medium range and short range mine plan.

1:28:34That has to be transferred to the mine operations teams that are running like large scale, not autonomous, large scale manual mining equipment. then the like what is actually in the ore usually shows up on a piece of paper to the refinery saying like get ready to process this and then the refiner the folks who are running the refinery have to figure out like kind of the optimal process conditions to maximize recovery of copper, lithium, nickel cobalt, manganese, iron, graphite kind of the whole thing all of the different metals through the processing circuit and so what we're doing is we're kind of integrating everything into one like integrated data frame first.

1:29:12And so there's a lot of work that goes into kind of bringing all of the data feeds back into one like kind of aggregated architecture. And then we'll build world models of the mines, of the refineries that we then use to kind of do a reinforcement learning training that we feed up into a reinforcement learning training pipeline. And then you want to close the loop between what reinforcement learning agents are recommending on the policies that are developed to the actual thing that's happening in the mine. And so we'll bring autonomous haul trucks in, we'll bring autonomous drill rigs in, we'll bring in autonomous loaders and dozers and graders and water trucks, kind of like all the assets that are being used to run a mine that today are, you know, 99 % of mines are manned.

1:29:56And we want to go full closed loop between kind of the world models and the reinforcement agents and determining what the autonomous assets actually do. And then actually getting that to the refinery. What do you think the potential efficiency gains are from going from legacy copper mine to the kind of end state, you know, fully autonomous system? Yeah, I think it'll happen in two phases. I think the first phase is going to double productivity through just like better orchestration and better logistics management and better utilization of all the equipment. That's productivity and unit costs. You know, diesel is a good example for for heavy haul machinery, like half of the diesel consumption up to half is from like idle time in the pit on the equipment.

1:30:40And so there's a lot of kind of like short term potential gains. But I also think that autonomy is going to fundamentally change. It's going to unlock a lot of like operating modes that can't really be done with humans. And so the way that the mining industry has kind of driven down cost over an extended period of time has been through scale. So the haul trucks are getting bigger, the shovels are getting bigger. And it's all focused on kind of reducing your labor intensity. So, you know, maximizing tons of ore, tons of ore moved or tons of material moved per unit of like labor hour. But as you move into like autonomous systems and eventually kind of like design the mines themselves to be autonomous, I think we're going to see things get smaller.

1:31:21And like swarm mining is going to get unlocked. And that's fundamentally going to enable you to actually kind of like be more selective in how you mine, your roads get smaller, which means you can maximize kind of recovery of the ore from the pit. So I think it'll all happen in two phases. It's like, take the existing architecture, make it autonomous and maximize utilization and availability of equipment. And then there's going to be this, like, once autonomy is kind of like fully demonstrated across the stack, there's going to be this opportunity to actually attack, like, fundamentally, how is PowerMind's mind?

1:31:48You started the company in 2024? Yep. End of 2024. Raised a seed round in August. We're at 220 people now across the company. We have two projects. One is a lithium refinery in East Texas that's extracting lithium from oil and gas wastewater. And the other is kind of first large scale commercial mine. Another one. He's got two. Yeah, exactly. I have a question. Pitch for you. Robotic canaries. do they well we have we have we have we have a boston dynamics spot that is basically like mobile sensing system uh you know instead of the canary in the coal mine and we use them mostly for like undercarriage inspection so like you want to keep humans away from like heavy haul machinery the closer they get to it obviously the more hazards that are present um but also like the chemical refineries ideally humans aren't walking through chemical plants all the time kind of doing thermal inspections uh there's a lot of stuff that's like auditory so you're like listening for sounds of the motors sounding weird um and yeah exactly and then that all that all needs to feed back into uh into like again the integrated kind of like uh sensing uh integrated like data frame that tells you like how what's the healthier systems okay uh did you start with copper 2024 we started with lithium in 2020 twice um and because it feels like it feels like you know there's this whole autonomy story more efficiency all that makes sense but the price of copper has doubled since you started the company and i feel like that just makes bringing a copper mine back online just wildly different from an economic perspective and it's very interesting that you're sitting at the tailwind of like two ai trends which are just demand for copper for data center development wires circuitry all this other stuff.

1:33:41And then you can actually be more efficient, but you can be as efficient as they were a couple of years ago and just reap twice the price. It feels like the oil dynamic, right? Yeah, that's right. But I don't think, so the reason you want to be diversified is because like all these metals are cyclical and you can't really like live and die by a single commodity price. And so the plan was always to diversify and the plan is to continue to diversify into nickel and cobalt and uranium and graphite and rare earths. Yeah. And, you know, as we kind of work to build 10 projects in the next 10 years. But, you know, we started working on this project kind of like well before copper had its like little explosion and run that it's on because you don't really want to jump into projects in the middle of the hype.

1:34:26Like that's when you're going to pay the most for an asset. That's when you're going to like the labor pool is most constrained, is like most in demand. And the equipment suppliers that make the equipment that is specific for a specific metal are going to have longer lead times and have higher pricing. And so you really do want like we jumped into lithium when lithium was like at the bottom of its recent trough and jumped into copper, you know, before it started to go on this run. So the generally we want to work on metals that we think have a long term like supply demand imbalance. And for copper, it's like very much felt like grades are dropping or deposits are getting deeper.

1:35:00mineralogies are getting more complex and it just means it's going to be a lot harder to make copper in the future and that's what we want to work on. What were you doing before this? I was at Tesla for about a decade. Most recently was running our minerals and metals team so I was building our lithium refinery in Corpus Christi in Texas and running a lot of our battery recycling work. Very cool. Kind of like the absolutely most perfect background for a company like this. A VC couldn't dream of a more perfect resume for this business. What's all the text in the Gulf behind you for that map? I understand that it's a map of America, but what's all the text for?

1:35:41These are all... It's basically calling out things that don't have space for the words on the map. It's a legend you got. Crazy detailed legend. Our project is right on the border with Louisiana, so that's why we got it on the lithium side. Well, you're a legend, and thank you for coming on the show. Legendary appearance. Yeah, great to meet you. Have a fantastic weekend. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Another one. We got another guest. Everett Taylor is the CEO of Kickstarter. Coming in the ultra-dome. He's in the waiting room right now. Everett, how are you doing?

1:36:24Welcome to the show. I'm moving. I'm moving forward right now. So I'm escaping the cold in New York right now. So I'm feeling good. Amazing. I'm very excited to talk about the Next Wave Fund. But first, I'd love to know a little bit about your journey to Kickstarter, where the business is today, what your day-to-day is like, how big is this company? Sort of set the ground for us. Yeah. So, I mean, Kickstarter, you know, started in 2009. I've been here about four years now. Yeah. And, you know, we're the largest creative crowdfunding company in the world. We still are today. When I came into the company, though, the company was in a bit of decline.

1:37:07We were down 20 percent year over year. Really? And since then, you know, we've grown dramatically year over year. Last year, we had another record breaking year. This year, we're already up 52 percent year over year over last year. So the company has been scaling and growing as we are transitioning just from a crowdfunding company to more of a creator. economy company. How has the AI boom, the Gen AI boom benefited or changed Kickstarter projects? When I think about the, you know, the catnip of Kickstarter projects, it's like a board game that probably took a lot of time to build. And if the idea is great, I might not care if somebody used an image gen model to speed up the, you know, the graphics for a tree on the back of some playing card.

1:37:54I could see this being a big boom. Yeah, not at all. I mean, I'm sure a lot of Kickstarter creators historically were spending a ton of money on renders. Totally, totally. But at the same time, does this exist at all or is this just AI slop and there's a community dynamic and there's an artist displacement dynamic? And so how have you grappled with the pros and cons of the last two years, crazy boom in AI? Yeah, it's a great question. On the AI side, funny enough, gaming is where it's probably the most controversial, right? Because gaming tends to be very artist forward, right? And so we've gotten probably the most pushback and some of the most negative pushback on the AI side from gaming because they really want to see artists be able to have jobs and do their thing.

1:38:39And so, you know, we were one of the first major tech companies to have our own AI policy. every Kickstarter creator, if they're using AI, they actually have to say up front how they're using AI, crediting the artists if they're using another artist, et cetera, et cetera. But on the design and technology side, these new AI powered tech products, especially in the hardware side, it's booming, right? So both categories are growing, but you see the differences in how people are accepting of AI. Yeah, that makes sense. Talk about the partnership with Google. What's the news? Yeah. So this week we announced the next wave fund with Google to power the next generation of tech innovation.

1:39:19I'm a founder myself. I saw the struggles being an early stage tech founder struggling to get funding. And so what we really wanted to do was give early stage tech startups and small business owners the funding they need, the tools to be successful, the guidance that they need, and also be able to leverage Kickstarter's audience of millions of people to really get their first customers and scale their product. So this fund is focused on innovative products and hardware, software, gaming, and connected technology. And people will get$10 ,000 upfront, non-dilutive capital from Kickstarter and Google to launch their products and their companies on Kickstarter.

1:39:59And we wanted to focus on these areas because Kickstarter has just a natural product market fit for technology and gaming. there are two largest categories and we also have a large audience for both. So you're going to have a huge portfolio.

1:40:17Well, Kickstarter doesn't take Kickstarter doesn't take any equity. I mean, I have an aura ring right now. I wish we did take some equity on that. But yeah, we don't take any, we don't take any equity. And so this is really as a way to support people, give them the tools that they need to be successful, and also build a relationship with Google, right? These people will have an opportunity to apply to Google accelerators for their business. As they grow and scale, they'll get access to our team that has a decade-plus of experience in scaling new products. So it's a great opportunity for a lot of people.

1:40:53Where can people get started? Take us through the, is there an application process? Where does the journey start for someone who wants to participate? Yes. So you can go to our website and check out the Next Wave Fund. You can apply. This is for entrepreneurs or small businesses with fewer than 20 full-time employees. Like I said, your project has to be focused on technology or digital gaming. And unfortunately, we've been hearing this, and we've got to shout out to our international creators. But this is for the U.S. only. So at least one member of your team has to be a citizen of the U.S. and be 18 years old.

1:41:34Well, lots of opportunities. And thank you for taking us through it. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us. Great to meet you. And great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Everett. Goodbye. There are many more conversations going on in the timeline today. One was kicked off, I think, by Josh Kushner. I think he sort of started this. There were some other people talking about data center beautification, and he summed it up perfectly. He says, make data centers aesthetically beautiful. And so people have been, quote, tweeting, posting, riffing on this, sharing different ideas. More people would be pro data center if every data center had a beautiful open to the public heated pool.

1:42:18That's an interesting twist. Oh, water slide. I think half pipe is a big idea. Monster truck rally constantly going on. These are ways to win people over. Sort of a nitro circus going on at every data center. Monster truck rally on the roof of a data center? Yeah. Sort of a universal basic nitro circus. Are you familiar with nitro circus? Is this a three fingers moment for you? Are you like, oh, I'm familiar? No, I'm just imagining they're building a ramp. Just say you've never actually been to nitro circus. I'm imagining they're building the dirt bike ramps over the data center. Exactly. Back flipping over the data center.

1:42:55Exactly. Julie Young shares a trick, this one neat trick that Los Angeles uses to hide oil deckers. We have a few oil derricks in L.A. that are disguised as synagogues. They are literally just sitting in the middle of the city, Lowell. Surprisingly few people are aware. There's a number of data centers that are disguised in Los Angeles as well. Usually you can tell because there's no windows in the building. but these exist in downtown, usually for edge computing, for like the content delivery network. You put store in your Netflix videos there, that type of stuff. Not doing training runs, not gigawatt clusters.

1:43:32I did look up how energy intensive Bitcoin is relative to what we think of AI. I think the numbers are open AI and Anthropic are around two gigawatts in terms of capacity, something like that. You know, we've heard about the Colossus data center. The average Metacamp is around half a gigawatt. Zuck's building something in the one gigawatt range. There's gigawatt a week plans. But if you were to put the Bitcoin network current sort of estimates using between 120 and 170 terawatt hours per year, what is that in average power in gigawatts? It's between 14 gigawatts and 19 gigawatts. And so that's where you should sort of comp Bitcoin to if you're putting it in AI terms and in the numbers that we throw around, which are usually like a one.

1:44:24Before our next guest, Palmer Luckey has been getting into it with someone on the timeline. He says he responds to someone named Clifford by saying, dumb tweet. Toto has been fabricating advanced ceramics for semiconductor manufacturing for many years. They make more money from that than toilets. Strong technical moat in a rapidly growing industry. Clifford says, perhaps, fair point, but call me dumb under your real name or STFU coward. Just like not realizing that he's talking to Paul. But isn't Cliff Asness like a big deal? I think he's an author. He has papers. I've heard of Cliff Asness before.

1:45:03That's funny because - And so it is funny that they just like didn't over - Oh, he's a co-founder of AQR Capital Management. Hedge fund manager? Is this the right person? Forbes estimated net worth of$3 billion. I believe. I think this is accurate. I think he, yeah, Global Alpha started a career in 1990, worked at Goldman Sachs, AQR Capital Management. I think he missed the like and roll verified. He just hasn't seen the SPVs or something. Stable asset management and other institutions in the aggregate made commitments of several hundred million dollars to a new multi-manager hedge fund. he's published in academics he's done a bunch of stuff I've heard of him before so this is very funny he has AQR oh AQR interesting I believe we have our next guests in the waiting room let's bring them in to the TVPN Ultra Dome Natomi Wunderko welcome to the show would you mind both kicking us off with some introductions on each of you yeah of course hey Jordy, John great to see you both So Dustin Wexler, one of the general partners at WonderCo, working closely with Jeffrey Katzenberg.

1:46:17And you've met all of us. Yeah. Sujay, Chen Li, Jeff, Anthony. So it's been an amazing run. I've been with the firm since early 2017. And also on the board of Natomi. Okay. So yes, please introduce Natomi. Awesome. Great to see both of you. My name is Phunit. I'm the founder and CEO of Natomi. We are an agentic application tier company focused on the customer experience use case. Okay. What specifically in customer experience? Is that different than customer service? Or are we doing surveys to understand how companies and products are being received, all of the above? What's the shape of the business today?

1:47:00Yeah, we look at customer experience a little bit differently than how most companies in AI have looked at this. So if you think about it, historically, businesses were designed as sales, as marketing, as customer service, because that's how the customer journeys were created. And they had to keep those silos to keep cost efficient. But with Degentec, now there's a resource that has become abundant. You could apply it through the journey. That's what we are doing. And also, one of the key factors is if you think about traditional customer service, it looks at customer journey, then it says, we'll wait for something to break and then fix it after the fact.

1:47:36And then hopefully we regain that trust. We are saying, hey, you can address this upstream. You can address this in digital experiences. You don't even have to wait for the problem to occur. So that's what we are doing. And that's why we are excited to partner with Accenture and Adobe in this financing that we just announced. And we're going to do this for all the Fortune 500. Talk about the decision to go with enterprise versus small business. Was it ever on the table to go broader, self-serve? or is there something unique about the technology where it's actually more suitable for enterprise use cases right now, or is that just your personal DNA where you flourish?

1:48:16Actually, all of the above. So my personal DNA, I grew up in automated trading, building event engines for different firms on Wall Street. You're born in the enterprise. I like it. Born in the enterprise, exactly. Exactly. Born in the enterprise, born in low latency systems, born in event correlation, all of those things that just came together for this. But also we looked at where is money getting spent for this problem? So if you look at the broadly human capital spend is about$500 billion a year. About 75 % of that comes from the world's largest enterprises, literally under a thousand companies.

1:48:51So that's how fragmented the market is. And now with Natomi's technology, you could run the autonomous front office. So when you do that, not only is that a cost efficiency, which more than pays for itself, it really transforms the entire company because you can connect all the systems processes right in those agentic flows and in that sanctioned architecture presented safely to your customers. So yes, love that medium to high complexity. Love the enterprise complexity. Comes in the DNA. That's what we are the world's best at. Yeah, just to add to that. Yeah. So at WonderCo, as you all know, we invest in consumer, we invest in different areas of technology.

1:49:31But a big focus for us is enterprise and how enterprise is going to evolve with technology, particularly AI technology. I'm fortunate that I work with Jeffrey, who has a lot of great relationships across the enterprise. And thinking through how to apply agentic capabilities in these organizations is very top of mind. We invested in Puneet actually before this AI paradigm of, you know, chat GPT and everything that we know today. And so we've been a little early to this, but new Puneet's DNA as these advances became more prominent was really the right leader to build for large enterprises. And so with Puneet, we sat down with leaders at Delta, United, MetLife, who have all had huge success deploying Natomi.

1:50:21A big proud moment for us is when the, yeah, no, it's pretty incredible. Anyone can go on the United mobile app and see Powered by Natomi and interact with Natomi. And then earlier this year, OpenAI recognized Natomi on one of the case studies, calling it the blueprint for deploying large-scale agentic AI. So it just had a lot of great moments over the last couple of years. And that's what inspired Puneet and me to really sit down and think about, okay, this has been proven at scale, But what's the coalition around this technology that would really allow it to be in the hands of many, many more millions of consumers?

1:51:00And so that's why this round brings together Accenture. No one knows enterprise complexity better than them. And their seal of approval on this company is a huge sign to enterprises that this is what they should be deploying. Yeah, absolutely. And then with Adobe, the idea with Adobe is, you know, many times chat interfaces sit on top of websites. and while it's a step above prior technology, the next generation is going to bring those capabilities into the digital layer itself. So not having the website and then the chat disconnected on top, but fusing these two layers. And the work that Natomi and Adobe are doing together, and we can talk a bit more about it, is going to bring about a gentic digital experience.

1:51:42Sure. Tell us about the round. I want to hit the gong. How much came together for this deal? What's the total? So we raised$110 million. There we go. Awesome. Wow, that shook the whole room, Josh. It's a good one. Look at this light. Yeah, we are here to shake the room. Fantastic. So, yeah, all focused towards enterprise deployment, all focused towards the last mile of AI. You know, we think AI really needs a big enterprise win. That's ROI positive where large companies can go on their earnings call and say, this is what AI did for me. that's what we want to deliver for the entire community. I love it.

1:52:23Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come break it down for us. Congrats on the round coming together and the progress. At this rate, I'm sure you'll be back on this year. Yeah, we're excited. We'll talk to you all soon. Thank you so much. Have a great weekend. Have a great rest of your day. Talk soon. Talk to you soon. Goodbye. We have an update from the chat. Cliff Asnes has been on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best. You know who else has been on Invest Like the Best? Palmer Luckey. They've both been on the same podcast, didn't know about each other. They got to do a crossover episode, back to back.

1:52:56If you're looking to get up to speed on both Palmer and Cliff Asnes, head over to Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy. You can listen to both episodes. Although Cliff was on in 2018, almost a decade ago. He's got to go back on, set the record straight on who he knows, who he doesn't know. Anyway, there's more debate over the data center thing. some very cool renders, some very cool ideas. I think the problem is that the plans are delayed, plans are set years in advance. Any move to actually make data centers beautiful is going to take a long time. Hopefully, you just put some trees around them and paint them better.

1:53:36Data center operators would say, I would love for my competitors to focus on making their data centers beautiful and really make that a part of their strategy. while the Zucks of the world, you know, throw up like REI tents throwing GPUs. Exactly. People will do the minimum viable beautification potentially. But Dan Lincoln Harris has some comments here. Love that we are having this conversation. The questions that flow from Josh's comment are why and what we should aim towards. These should be places of wonder that we can marvel at. Modern cathedrals for the Silicon Age, not to worship them, but to stoke our aspirations.

1:54:14Square gray boxes do not inspire. Speak for yourself. I like a square gray box every once in a while. Given the epicenter of this technological revolution was California, the light and space movement seems a fitting direction. James Turrell is the most well-known for this movement. And he shares some James Turrell images, which are absolutely beautiful. Good inspiration if you're a data center builder. You can also just throw some trees, do some AI imagery here. perhaps people wouldn't be so against data centers. If they were built in the style of the Elf City Rivendell, that'd be kind of cool.

1:54:49Greco Futurism. They do look cooler this way, but it looks a lot more expensive than just some walls. So who knows if we will see any progress. This video. Just in. Skin exams are getting automated. Oh, yes. This is a very cool product. Okay, break it down for us. Let's pull it out. We have video here. Yes. I think anybody that's been to a dermatologist, it's like looking for potential, you know, skin cancers, things like that abnormalities has had the experience of like the, you know, when you're, you know, that video or the meme where the guy's like walking through security and the security guy's just like, you know, does this like really pat down.

1:55:36It's like, that's basically what like a lot of dermatologists are doing where they just like take a quick glance and they're like, oh yeah, it looks good. Yeah, they might be busy, they might be sleepy. Come back in like a couple years. It's a robot that just does it like really, really precisely, consistently, ideally, hopefully a lot more accessibly. I can see this making a lot of sense. And then you actually, it doesn't even replace the job of the doctor. It just helps them speed up the process. Where is this company? What stage are they? Do they have to go through FDA medical device approval process That could be a couple of years maybe, but this seems like once you get it through, it's going to be massively successful.

1:56:17I wonder where they are in the FDA process. Hopefully, they can move along quickly. ARC Prize put out an update on ARC-AGI V3, which, Tyler, are you still on the human leaderboard for that? I don't think I'm on the leaderboard anymore. That was still early on. I think there's actually more games now. Roasted. Well, ArcGi V3 has been very tough for even the most frontier AI models, but the good folks over at ArcPrize have benchmarked the two latest and greatest AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic. GPT 5.5 scored 0.43%. Opus 4.7 scored 0.18%. It is state of the art. This is the weird thing about these ArcGIS tests is that they start with such a low baseline, 0%, 1%.

1:57:13Then they start shooting up as the models get more capable. But it is very interesting and reassuring to see these powerful models that you sometimes hear these narratives. It can do everything. And then there's something to continue working for, to look forward to in the future. There's more applications here. And so they found three total failure modes, true local effect, false world model, wrong level of abstraction from training data, solved the level but didn't reinforce the reward. And so the ARK Prize account goes through a little bit of what's going on when an AI model tries to play ARK AGI V3, which is basically a 2D video game.

1:57:53Simple enough for any human to progress through, but increasingly difficult for AI models. Okay. Yes. We got to talk about one of the most exciting new products created. What's that? In the last hundred years. Tell me. According to Katie at Business Insider, Amazon will now create an AI podcast about their products where two AI hosts discuss the products and take your questions as if it's a call-in show. Yes. Let's play. We don't need to play this one. This one is so rude, but you can imagine the type of products that people are generating AI podcasts for. Only the silliest things will be generated.

1:58:32I don't know if people want to listen to a full podcast about every product they buy on Amazon, but you have had some very strong opinions about paper towels. You wanted paper towels from like the 1950s or something. Remember this whole thing? Well, I just wanted a filter to be able to buy, only shop for things on Amazon. Well, now, instead of a filter, you can listen to an hour-long podcast about every possible skew, and then you can make the most determined decision available. Well, we have Alex from OpenAI. He's a member of product staff here to talk about codecs and GPT 5.5. I believe he's in the waiting room, so let's bring him to the TVP in Ultradome.

1:59:09Alex, how are you doing? Hey, doing great. How are you guys? We're doing fantastically. Nice and close to the camera. You make me want to scoot up. Some people come on and it's standoffish. Yeah. It's just like a little bit of a little... There you go. No, you're locked in. You're locked in. Okay, so give us some updates on Codex. I mean, we've seen some crazy numbers. Things seem like they're going well. But what I'm most interested in is applications, usages, just as I'm talking to friends and folks that are outside of the most intimate tech community, what are the magical experiences? What are the prompts, the usages that are seeing adoption?

1:59:48How should people even be thinking about Codex and ChatGPT these days?

1:59:53Alexander Embiricos:Totally. I mean, it is such an exciting time. I feel like last year was the explosion of agents for coding. Yeah. Now we bring it to everyone else. Codex now is becoming this amazing tool for just general work or honestly anything you can do on your computer. Yeah. So the model launch, was that only last week? I think it was last week. I think it's really fast. It really feels like a month ago. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, I lose track of time, but API revenue for that model is growing 2x faster than any prior release. Codex revenue actually doubled in the last week. So the growth is insane. And what's cool is that obviously the growth and usage and the way people are using Codex for coding is just getting way better.

2:00:33Alexander Embiricos:But I think this is kind of what you're asking for. We're making Codex great for everyone. That's all the way from what the agent can do and also just how simple it is to use. And so now we have codex being used by salespeople, marketing people, finance people, data science people, whatever you're thinking. It's like 85 % of the company uses codex, and we're seeing this happen outside as well. So yeah, I'm happy to jump into some fun use cases if you want. I wanted to ask about how you feel the perception around computer use has been. It felt like there were so many things that got released at one time that that kind of was quite magical.

2:01:10And you see some posts popping up here and there. But do you feel like that's getting the attention that it deserves now?

2:01:17Alexander Embiricos:Yeah, I mean, like so broadly what we have is we have this amazing agent that can write code and if we wanted to do more work than just coding work, it needs to be able to do anything you can do on your computer. And so computer use is this big step because it's like, hey, well, now it basically can do anything you can do on your computer. But the magical part of computer use and the team really cooked here is that it can use applications in the background. So you could be doing something in one app and the agent can be doing something in another app. And that's important because it means you can actually delegate, which means you can give the agent hard tasks that take us some time to do.

2:01:47Alexander Embiricos:So, yeah, I mean, the reception around that was actually awesome. I thought we got people noticed sort of just how hard and magical that is more so than I even expected. So, yeah, we've been really happy with that. Yeah, I've noticed that Codex puppeteering a mouse cursor has gotten good. It feels like it crossed some sort of like touring test where when I see a video of Codex moving a mouse around, it doesn't read to me like oh that's a jittery that like the ai is using it just looks like oh somebody just recorded themselves moving the mouse is there a benchmark is that is that something that just comes from the new model or work that's being done on codex like what is going on with the progress there to the sky team yeah acquisition yeah yeah so there's kind of like three things going on there like first of all gpt 5.5 is our best model ever for like general work or knowledge work.

2:02:38Alexander Embiricos:And so it's really good at using computers. The next thing is, well, what harness do you give the model or like what information is the model seeing and like what tools does it have to use the computer? A lot of early versions of giving a model access to a computer, we're just giving it screenshots of the computer. But there's a lot of secret sauce in our implementation where the model actually gets text representations of what's on screen from like frameworks like accessibility. Sure. And so the model is like much more efficient when it has access to all this information. and then the last bit that I honestly think well I don't know if I would say it's underappreciated because I feel like people really appreciated it but it's the level of craft that was put in to how it feels when the agent is using the computer so for instance you could totally just have the agent click around on your screen and just have that be invisible and you wouldn't even the computer is updating as clicks happen but the team put a ton of care into like exactly the animation that this like mouse cursor takes as it goes between the different click positions.

2:03:38Alexander Embiricos:And yeah, it was really fun to talk about that and jam on that with them. Like we actually made some interesting trade-offs. Like having this animation actually slows down how quickly the agent can work by just a tiny bit. But it means that it's so much easier as a human for me to understand the system and therefore to trust the system. Yeah, that's interesting. That sort of goes back to, I remember the initial ChatGPT app launch on iOS had haptic feedback as the token streamed in. And so it felt like it was typing. And that could have easily just been generate the full response, give you a little waiting wheel, and then boom, it loads like a web page.

2:04:18Like when I go to, you know, the New York Times, like the whole page loads. It doesn't stream in. But that streaming made it feel more like a conversation. and those little UX cues help create this more interactive motion back and forth. That's very interesting. Someone's trying Codex for the first time. You've got one minute to explain the three things that they should do to get the most out of it. What do you tell them?

2:04:46Alexander Embiricos:Okay, cool. Is this person an engineer or are they like a knowledge worker? Let's say not an engineer because I feel like... Well, no, let's do both. Sure, yeah. Let's start with engineer. Okay, start with engineer. If someone's using Codex for the first time, I just say, download Codex, connect it to your project, whatever you've been working on, and then ask it a question about your code base, like a hard architecture question. And it's just going to give you an amazing answer. Then the next thing you do is you say, cool, give it a bug that you've been trying to track down and ask it to solve the bug.

2:05:18Alexander Embiricos:And I hear this all the time on Twitter, et cetera. People will be like, hey, I was trying to solve this bug myself, couldn't do it. I gave it to all the other coding agents. They couldn't do it. but Codex could do it. And then maybe as a final thing to experience a little bit of the magic that has shipped in the last week or two, if you're working on something that has a web view, like maybe a website or something like that, ask Codex to make a change and then watch it just iterate on that change by opening the in-app browser and observing its outputs, clicking around, and then naturally just fix and improve the change that it made.

2:05:49Alexander Embiricos:It's super magical because you just realize when you see it work in that loop, you just realize how powerful it is now. Okay, speaking of loops, explain Ralph loop, explain slash goal. Okay, so basically, we've had this interesting thing for a long time where people, this is like months ago, people would tell us that they knew the codex was super powerful, but it felt annoying to work with because they had to like constantly tell the agent, you can do this, keep going. You have this brilliant model, but you have to encourage it constantly. We then shipped a feature called queuing, which you can use to give the agent a message that it will receive whenever it thinks it's done.

2:06:28Alexander Embiricos:And people use that to say, do this, then do that, then do that. But actually, a lot of people started using that to just say, keep going. So they would just queue 10 messages, like keep going, keep going, keep going. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, now at this point, we have these amazing models that if you know how to use in the right way, you can have them do hours of work or even days of work, just like independently, autonomously. However, you know, the average person doesn't necessarily know how to do that. You have to do like all this contrived harness setup. And so with Goal, which is a feature that we shipped into the command line interface and will come to the app soon, we wanted to make that super easy.

2:07:03Alexander Embiricos:So now you can basically describe to like, hey, like I want you to keep going until you achieve this goal. And then Codex will just take care of working for however long you need until you can do that. And so internally, this is something that people have been really excited for for a long time when we do a lot of like long running work. So, for example, when you're like babysitting like a training run for a model, you don't want to just like tell Codex to do something and then have it return in five minutes. You actually want it to pay attention like all night. So that's what that's what goal is.

2:07:32Alexander Embiricos:Do you want? Yeah. I was wondering about the, like, what is, for the non-engineer use case, the thing that gets you to move from ChatGPT to Codex, like the first, the first, the first, like, more complicated query, more complicated project that you would recommend someone say, oh, yeah, like, ChatGPT can do a decent amount of research. But for this, you should spin up Codex and start working with that as your primary workflow. Like, what is the entry point? What is the appetizer into the Codex workflow for someone who's non-technical, not writing code? Wouldn't mind if code was written behind the scenes, but really just is interacting with typical knowledge worksuites.

2:08:25So email, spreadsheets, Word docs, generating graphics, research. there's a lot of stuff and ChatGPT satisfies a ton of that. And so when are they jumping over to Codex?

2:08:37Alexander Embiricos:Yeah, so I kind of think about the way that you can do general work in Codex. There's maybe three categories of work. There's like just very easy tasks. And that's not to dismiss those. Actually, most of my usage of Codex is like easy tasks. And those are the first things you should try. Then there's like hard tasks that are like really cool demos. But actually if you start trying to do a hard demo, you might just like waste a lot of time. And then there's automating. So everyone should kind of go through this progression. is like easy, hard, automated. And if you think about it, it's kind of like a human teammate, right?

2:09:03Alexander Embiricos:Like if you hire someone onto your team, you know, you don't usually, well, maybe at OpenAI we do, but you don't just say like, hey, just like figure out what you want to do. Maybe what you do is you say like, hey, like why don't you do this like small starter task or something? And then from there, give them a harder and harder task. And then eventually you say, okay, just like go figure it out and work automatically. So, okay, easy tasks. The thing I always recommend people do is like wherever your company works at OpenAI that's Slack, maybe for you it's Teams or it's email, connect codecs to that tool and then just ask it like, hey, like, am I missing any urgent, like, do I need to reply to anything urgently?

2:09:35Alexander Embiricos:Just like draft some answers for me. Or maybe like, I get tagged on these really long threads all the time. It's like, hey, just summarize this thread. What am I being asked? What should I answer? You know, just ask these questions. Or maybe someone mentioned something, you don't know what it is. And you're just like, hey, like, search all my company information and tell me what is XYZ, you know, the thing. So those are really basic, easy queries that Codex is amazing at. And I have found that even though those may not sound that hard, people just get hooked on doing that all the time. And then from there, once you're hooked, then you kind of become fluent in using this tool to answer any even small question, use it for harder things.

2:10:11Alexander Embiricos:So for example, one of the use cases that I do a lot that tends to like really get other people excited when they see it is I, you know, we, we don't like meetings, try to keep meeting attendees to a minimum here. So often instead of adding people to a meeting, I'll post in a channel and say, if anyone wants to talk live about this, just reply. And this is something I used to do from before. But now what I do is I tell Codex, post in this channel, see who wants to join and add anyone who wants to join to the meeting. Super basic thing, right? But the fact that you can ask an agent to do a thing and then monitor that post and then like keep it up to date is actually really powerful.

2:10:49Alexander Embiricos:And then when people reply to the post and then the agent replies back saying, like, cool, you're in the meeting. It's at this time. Here's the link. That always mind blows people. And then you start, people start trolling, you know, people like add them to the meeting. The agent knows not to. Yeah. Cause that's just like functionally what, what, uh, if you're lucky enough to have an EA, you get something like that where it's like, Hey, I need to get this thing done. I'm going to kind of set it. I'm going to, I want to set off the process, but then someone else monitoring it, kind of backfilling it.

2:11:19Alexander Embiricos:Yeah, I think any work that requires a lot of work, a lot of time from you, but it's not hard, those are good starter tasks. Same for managing tasks, tracking issues coming out of a bug bash, or pre-launch we do this thing where I'll have Codex monitor a bunch of channels I'm in with internal and external users, and I'll just say, hey, if anything comes up, put this in linear, which is where we track our bugs, and make sure it's deduplicated, and then let people know that we're tracking the bug. So very simple task, but actually incredibly useful time-wise. Last thing I'll say on this is we have an executive assistant kind of plugin internally that I would love to ship externally.

2:12:03Alexander Embiricos:We should get on that. And it's really taken off internally. People basically have this thing that is keeping track of all the information and just helping them organize their day and stay on top of things. It's pretty cool. So then, yeah, talk to me about automation, because I understand from integrations and computer use how a single prompt could go into Slack or go into your email or pull some documents together, write code, do whatever it needs to on the internet, APIs. I understand all that, but then what is the workflow to get Codex to do something every morning at 7 a.m. to prepare me a digest or take the same actions to really get rid of that rote work that I've demoed and I've seen the results, it's working, and now I just don't want to think about it ever again forever.

2:12:50Alexander Embiricos:Yeah, I mean, it's honestly super simple. You just tell Codex, hey, do this every morning. There we go. Right? Well, like in my case, I... Yeah, I mean, that's kind of an interesting thing with these kind of products that have effectively unlimited potential is like where's the line between like a feature and just a prompt? Yeah. And when should, as a company, when should you just launch something and make a big moment out of it? or when should you just let people just understand the full potential of it? And then when they want something, they can just ask it, right? They don't need to like request a feature.

2:13:23It's just like literally just request it totally with the agent.

2:13:26Alexander Embiricos:It's really interesting as we design the product. Like I like to think that we need to keep sort of all the rules and like sort of the heavy UI and stuff around the agent to a minimum because it kind of constrains how much better the product can get when we have a smarter model. so the more things we can kind of like let the model decide you know it's like it's ai soon agi uh the better um and then sometimes you just need ui so that people can learn that this thing exists um but even that the model can suggest things so i'll give you the most powerful i think example of a use case i heard recently was um this person on the growth team needs to figure out like what experiments to run and then they need to write code to run the experiment and then they need to analyze the experiment and it turns out they were using they started using codecs individually for each separate thing.

2:14:11Alexander Embiricos:So they would have it run a bunch of analyses and they would sort of interrogate the data. They would just talk to Codex about the data. And then they would pick an experiment and then they would ask Codex to write the code. Then they would run the experiment and then they would ask Codex what the results of the experiment were and then they would produce a deck. So all steps they were doing individually. And they didn't start by saying, I'm going to automate this entire thing because that's hard and scary. They just started with using Codex to accelerate themselves, individual productivity for each task.

2:14:37Alexander Embiricos:Then they started basically connecting all these things together into a giant skill and then one day they just said hey why don't you do this every morning and they gave it a name it's called Lord Bottleneck because it's like solving the bottlenecks like friction for new users and basically this is the thing the team does now every morning Lord Bottleneck evaluates past experiments looks at data looks at new things proposes some experiments and offers to the team like hey like let's run these experiments the team like picks like let's do this one or that one. Then Lord of God is like, okay, cool, here's some code or whatever config that needs to be done, runs the experiment.

2:15:11Alexander Embiricos:And at the end, they go and do the same loop the next day and analyze the results. And so that's actually like really serious value in automation. That's like, I forget the numbers, but it's produced like, you know, significant company value just automatically through Codex. How are you thinking about game development? It feels like all of these tools are super useful and could really accelerate game development. especially with images too totally uh i think there was a time when like everyone had an idea for a meme but not everyone knew photoshop now everyone can go and use images and chat gpt to sort of make the exact meme that they want very quickly very easily and there's this takeoff in like everyone can create the thing now everyone can vibe code a python script pretty easily uh and it feels like the next thing is like going and shipping something and we're starting seeing these like simulators and these little one-off like web games uh it's still a little bit like prosumer i would say but is this something that you think just uh is like a natural outgrowth or something where uh you might actually spend some cycles thinking about that as a particular like workflow yeah i mean i think i'm really just excited about how easy it's becoming for everyone to bring their ideas to life image gen you bring up image gen that was actually a really big deal in a way that I still think people don't really realize.

2:16:36Alexander Embiricos:Having an agent able to just generate images as it's working is massive. Image Gen 2 in itself is actually really popular and is great even outside of Codex. I think, let me see here. I think people are making 50 % more images with Image Gen 2 just a few weeks after launch than they were before. So it's really taking off and it was already popular. But then with Image Gen, we see all these cool use cases where people will have the agent, let's say we'll take a development and a non-development use case for development they'll have it like build a bunch of sprites sprites is like a term for like the image that you use in your game yep um so for so like one cool example of this um is like in the gpt 5.4 blog we have some example prompts to try and one of them is like i forget it's it's like um build like an art uh roller coaster simulator or arcade simulator or something and you can just copy paste that prompt into codex now and it's just like even better because codex will like create all the assets for the game using ImageGen and then build a game using it and then play the game for you to test it in the in-app browser.

2:17:38So yes, this is happening

2:17:40Alexander Embiricos:very naturally and I suspect it would be quite interesting to lean into it to make it even better. A cool non-coding use case is we're seeing people use ImageGen to create slides or slide templates or assets to go in slides and then produce the slide deck which again you can iterate on just inside the Codex app. Yeah, images are massive for us. Yeah, that makes ton of sense. Jordy, anything else? No, this was great. Appreciate the update. I'm sure there will be a ton more news by this time next week. We're talking about how many Thursdays can we ship in a row. Well, the more you ship, the easier it is to ship.

2:18:21So it's a good feedback loop. It's fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time. Great to see you, dude. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great weekend. Goodbye. Should we show everyone the game that we made? Should we show everyone TBPN Simulator? Do we have that pulled up? Can we play that? Would now be a good time? It's a late Friday. We might not have enough time. We can have them pull it up while we read through. Let's pull up this packaging of the Neo Robot over at 1X. The Neo Robot over at 1X? Have you seen this? Oh, yes, I did see this. They got a suitcase that is remarkable.

2:18:58let's pull this up this this packaging is so cool aesthetic this warm tone it's it's welcome i gotta say it's really cool until it's 2 a.m and you hear shaking in your house and you go and you turn on the lights and this little like you know suitcase things shake in and then neo pops out and i and goes terminator mode i wouldn't know what that what that actually is like but uh i'm gonna watch terminator this weekend and report back ridiculous wow amazon google microsoft meta collectively are spending more money than the manhattan project every single month that's insane uh wow wild um anyway in the mansion section uh there is a record-breaking home in los angeles with a question will a los angeles area mega mansion become america's most expensive residential property.

2:19:54$400 million, they're asking. 70 ,000 square feet. The guest house is 30 ,000 square feet. It's absolutely insane. 39 bedrooms, eight acres, three pools. It has an x-ray machine. This is in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal. Fascinating because Tyler was unimpressed, and I was wondering, what could possibly be better than a$400 million mega mansion in Los Angeles? but you found something. What absolutely - Well, I was comparing it to, you know, some kind of palatial manor, right? So clearly it's like Versailles. Versailles is, you know, 10X bigger. It's like 700 ,000 square feet. 700 ,000 square feet.

2:20:32That's just the indoor space. Obviously with the gardens, it's like millions of square footage. Millions of square footage. So you're kind of just getting brutally mogged. What about on bedrooms? This one is 39. You certainly can't go higher than 39 bedrooms. I think it was, yeah, 2 ,300. 2 ,300. Oh, no, no, no. That was just rooms, actually. That was rooms, okay. So not all bedrooms. But I mean if you need a buddy who crashes like they can crash in any room, right? Like you know, have you ever slept in the kitchen? You've never had? We don't have any room. I don't know if I've ever slept in the kitchen.

2:21:01You gotta sleep in the living room. You gotta sleep in the dining room. Alright, let's pull up the trailer for TBPN Simulator. Oh, we have a trailer. Yeah, we got the trailer. Oh, let's go. Let's watch this. I think TBPN needs a game. Yeah, we definitely need to build some sort of game.

2:21:19This project has evolved so, so much to the point where you can move the goalposts. I don't know that you can interact with the horse. You can definitely hit the gong and then any team member is now playable. Okay. Oh wait. So there is a mechanic. You have to gain the most subscribers. Interesting. Yes. You have to puzzle piece everything. You can watch the stream in the game. You can explore the ultradome. It's a full backup replication TBPN simulator.com That was image gen 1 Image gen 2 would never do that. But can we pull the actual game up? Oops Yeah, here it comes. Didn't pop up If we can pull up the actual game Let's see there's a whole bunch of good stuff on here okay so this is tbpn simulator the latest and greatest version a remarkable how ben how did you actually get this like the geometry in here was this all described via prompt we've got intern ben here to yeah talk yeah so basically the whole process

2:22:30Alexander Embiricos:is kind of like i'm like okay look at that wall right there yeah i need that to be taller okay place a desk right at that wall so the whole idea was that i labeled every single object so I was able to like talk about it. Is there someone else in the game? Wait, it's multiplayer? It's multiplayer. Wait, so we're getting other people in the game right now? Oh no, people are coming in. There's Mark. TBPNSimulator.com I can't believe it's multiplayer. I can't believe you created a multiplayer game. Okay, so we got the bathroom. Okay, this is incredibly... No, no, no, no. Get out of there. Get out of there.

2:23:03Okay, so there's a chess board which was gifted to us. You can ring the gong. You can ring the gong.

2:23:09Alexander Embiricos:To the actual studio. Okay. Oh, God, cool down. And then those are the photos that we take. And there is the Ultradome. It's a one-to-one LiDAR scanned measurement studio. Did you wait? Did you actually LiDAR scanned? I LiDAR scanned it. Wait. No. Okay. Yeah, the measurements, and you can play as any character. So, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, what does it take to make it in TBPN simulator? Camera cut. Okay. So, you're watching the show, and you need to cut between, oh, so you get a current cue, and you have to cut between different cues at the right time to produce the show live. Okay, we have Tyler.

2:23:47We have Mark in TVPN Simulator. Okay. What else can you do here?

2:23:53Alexander Embiricos:How much activity? Like 35 % of - Is this from yesterday? Oh, this is yesterday's show. Is playing currently. Okay. So they're using the wallet. And if you're Jordy, you play as, you have to do a mini game, which is Guitar Hero but with soundboard basically is that the game let's hear overnight success

2:24:16so you have to you have to hit the soundboard at the right time as the blocks come down okay things like I think I was doing some ad reads for a while there's a gong of course we're really packing the ultradome we'll see if this thing has high throughput networking uh you can play as the guest what do you play as the guest you just see what it's like to be a guest on tbpn okay you get someone's moving the goalposts okay we got a new definition for artificial general intelligence i didn't realize yeah the chat has joined the the game oh yeah someone says make it a roblox game this does have some roblox aesthetics but this is not this is vibe coded and so this is creating the daily newsletter you have to stack the different blocks the strips it says perfect alignment published clean that's brandon gurell's job nick has to of course fix the schedule get everyone to come together we're watching some tetris you're trying to calendar tetris fit how are you going to get patrick collison and brian chesky on the show with alex carp and mark benioff all at the same time how will you do that paul coogan There we go.

2:25:29And then this is Tyler organizing the show, figuring out how to get different posts into the show. Okay. Oh, here we go. You're moving the different. Oh, you're jammed up there. You're jammed up there. You got to keep working on that. What else is this? What is Jackson up to? Making cards? What are we doing here? Oh, whack a clip. Okay, the timeline sniper. There's breaking news. You got to turn, you ramble. You don't want to cut that. Okay. You want to hit the good hot takes at the right time. That is fantastic. I cannot believe the number of minigames here. This is insane. What a remarkable.

2:26:08Oh, this is me. Okay. So I have to read different phrases. It's a typing game. I can, because I have to read without a teleprompter. Live from the TBPN Ultra Dome. Uh-oh, someone's typing incorrectly. Uh-oh, bodged. Phrase deck. Okay. Well, we got a whole bunch of people. you can go enjoy it hopefully people are playing tbpn simulator all weekend long yeah yeah you can learn people to put up i mean if you're launching a tbpn type show this is a great way to get your reps in practice get some practice in before you go live until we get our mastermind yeah it is it is the path of financial freedom for a lot of folks so we recommend it we endorse it uh get your reps in on tbpnsimulator.com and we will see you on monday anything else jordy is it actually live i think it's live yeah wow oh yeah people are in there they're playing tv we gotta change we gotta change the the slop uh images okay we'll work on this incredibly well done bad job and uh like our first video game truly hilarious and people are asking for a wave pool that's true we do need a wave pool we don't have a wave pool in here well that's not a simulation but we if if we make it in the simulator yeah it's probably increases the likelihood i think i think the key is you have to be able to sit down on one of those laptops and play an even rougher version of tbpn simulator two layers deep that's how you simulate ben that day you don't know no yeah yeah when you simulate ben it should go into a 2d version top down low Even lower res graphics pixel art.

2:27:44Yeah, yeah. A pixel art version of TV fans. I mean, they're two layers deep. And we can see how deep the rabbit hole goes. But will you break out of the Matrix? We certainly hope you do this weekend. Go enjoy your weekend. Enjoy your Friday. We will see you on Monday. Goodbye. We love you. Flashbang.