XBOX Layoffs, "Manual" Ferrari, Circle K Lottery Dispute | Baiju Bhatt, Daniel English, Michele Catasta

25:44You think so? These are never rules that are written down anywhere, but they are understood. The details are hilarious and kind of brilliant. Listen to this. You can skip gears, heel-toe downshift, and even stall the car if you mess up the clutch. But the system will also stop you from doing something truly stupid, like over-revving the engine or money-shifting the car into the wrong gear. If you're not familiar with the money shift, that's where you skip a gear too much, and it grinds the gears, and you have to pay to fix your engine, which costs a lot of money, especially in a 12-cylinder Ferrari.

26:25it's slower if you shift it yourself and you need automatic mode to hit the full 211 mile per hour top speed but that's basically the whole point Ferrari customers apparently told the company that they were willing to trade performance for the old school physical joy of driving a gated manual V12 Ferrari ultimately I like that they're partially listening to customers it seems like they're not necessarily fully listening to customers because I don't know any of Ferrari's you know out of the handful of Ferrari's top customers that I know I don't know any that were like, yeah, give me a fly-by-wire gated manual.

26:59They were not asking for that. But they were asking for the experience. They were asking for a knob that you can put your hand on. And three pedals. They want the third pedal. I am thinking of the Hyundai Ioniq 5N. Are you familiar with this vehicle? You've told me all about it. So the Hyundai Ioniq 5N is an electric hatchback, essentially. But the gentleman who runs Hyundai's N division formerly ran BMW's M division. What's the letter that comes after M? It's N. So he went over to Hyundai and said, give me a bunch of your cars and I will create M versions, performance versions of these cars. Now, Hyundai is funny because it's like a family car company for the most part, not the same muscle car, German performance, ultimate driving machine base to work with, like at BMW.

27:55But that individual has done a fantastic job adding some drama to what it feels like to drive an electric Hyundai, specifically with the Hyundai Ioniq 5N. It has something like 600 horsepower, very quick on the track. Because of the position of the battery, it stays very planted, even though it is a heavy vehicle. So it is good on the track in automatic mode, but they added paddle shifters and a simulated dual clutch transmission. LARP mode. LARP mode. And it pipes in fake noise from a fake engine, and you can redline it virtually. And it's almost like a— roll it physically you can physically roll it if you get really crazy i'm sure um but it's a very interesting uh it's very interesting because it has all the hallmarks of something that would be hated by the car community but in fact when i watched a lot of reviewers a lot of car fans drive it they said yeah after a couple laps on the track it just felt like a lot of fun and it It was just fun.

29:00And also, at the price point, you're getting the performance of a$200 ,000 to$300 ,000 car probably, 600 horsepower. It feels like a manual. And you can really throw it around and drift it and do all sorts of fun stuff with a much lower entry price. And so I was surprised that we didn't see that technology quickly come to the Taycan and other electric sports cars. I think it will eventually. I think it takes time. Also, the sound choice was interesting. They used the exhaust from another Hyundai instead of licensing something more brawny or powerful or more exciting. But there's clearly something there that I don't know if the car is selling very well, but it was at least satisfying to the critical eye of Matt Farah, which was interesting.

29:54Yeah, it's funny because our dear friend TJ, no matter what Ferrari does, he just hates it. He's just, I haven't seen, there has not been a launch. He was sort of pro-Luce. He was relatively. But he says this is far more embarrassing than the Luce. Yeah. You're saying that's a positive stance? He took a heretical stance on the Luce. I'm actually, the Ferrari that I'm most excited about is the street legal version of the 296 challenge. I think that's going to be a hit. Because that's obviously, it's going to be paddles. Sure. But internal combustion engine, they're ditching all the hybrid stuff.

30:33They should have a version. You know, the really old Model T, like the really old cars we need to crank them to start from the front? They should have a virtual version of that. So it's like a fully electric car, 2 ,000 horsepower, 400-mile range. But you can get out a crank from the back of the trunk and crank it to start it. That would be very fun. Yeah. Something like that. But anyways, step in the right direction. Give them some credit. They are partially listening to their customers, I think, between the Luce and the 12C manual. They're solving their emissions problems headed in the right direction.

31:13And I do think that the Luce will have been a big enough wake-up call because it's something that no one can defend. Okay. The Luce, famously low-slung, famously small windows. Should they do a version with huge square windows like this old Land Rover? Do you see this? Was just noticing how bad this has gotten. One of the primary appeals of retro cars is the big old square windows. Are you a fan of this? Is this a discovery? I don't know which one this is. But I was watching an old 90s. Is that not a range? I don't know. I was watching an old 90s like. Okay, pull up the car. They're comedy or something.

31:56Which one? If you click in. Whoa, that is so ridiculous. Why are we building cars where the window sills are at chin level? Why is greenhouse? Why is the greenhouse less than a third of the height of the vehicle? Oh, the greenhouse is the top. Interesting. I've never heard that term. Why is the DOT... Where's the DOT? Can we maybe add seat height or reduce waistline? You know where we're headed, John. You know where we're headed? A pod. No windows. TVs on the inside. Reels. Scrolling reels. Waymo. They own YouTube. YouTube shorts. Put them right in the Waymos. They like to put YouTube shorts everywhere.

32:36The experience of using YouTube today is just searching for a long-form video. There's a lot of shorts. Would you like 25 reels? Yep. Would you like to scroll past 25 reels before we get to what you actually want? Yeah. And I wouldn't be surprised if we see reels going up the front of the Waymo. Maybe. Maybe. Separate companies. We'll see. We'll see how long they stick together. The Model YL from Tesla is coming to the United States. It's now available in the United States and Puerto Rico. So deliveries are still a couple months out, but it's a three-row, six-seat configuration for the Model Y.

33:14It's longer than the standard Model Y. It brings exceptional interior space with ample headroom and legroom for all passengers, 0 to 60 in 4.4 seconds, 325 miles of range, front row, heated, ventilated seats. They all have power recline, improved airflow, more trunk space, active damping, staggered tires for an enhanced grip, Longer tailgate for better rear visibility. Upgraded 50-watt wireless charging pads. I haven't seen the wireless charging pads in the wild yet. That seems like a cool innovation for your home charger. It can be a little bit slower because it's overnight, but every night. So you don't even need to deal with the plug.

33:56I remember at one point Tesla was going to build that crazy robotic snake that was going to plug in. Do you remember this thing? No. We've got to find a video of this. Look that up, Tyler. The Tesla Powerwall at one point had a robotic snake. I can only describe it as a robotic snake. And it would find your Tesla's power port no matter where you parked, as long as you were in range of the robot. Oh, that's cool. And it would plug in. And they were pitching this as something that they would roll out. Probably extremely complicated from a mechanical perspective. And so it never wound up delivering to the United States, at least.

34:34Or anywhere. But cool idea. But wireless charging pad, obviously much more easy to just throw on the floor. Also, used in the McLaren Speedtail. The McLaren Speedtail uses an inductive wireless charging pad that is, and I think the Macan EV might also have, or maybe the Cayenne EV. One of the Porsches also has the wireless charging pad. And there's a whole bunch of smart technology in it to make sure that if like a mouse doesn't go across, it doesn't get fried or an animal is not injured by it. It's a pretty high tech device. But we can find the Tesla charger snake. Here it is. The image. Look at this, Jordy.

35:15This is a crazy image. Look at that. This is clearly a demo unit. But you can imagine how you pull into your garage and it finds itself and plugs itself in. seems like depending on where you park that could be extremely annoying because if it if it if it plugs in you have to kind of climb over climb under this thing that could actually be uh worse than just a normal yeah it'll also be unfortunate when it racks discover a back door yes rises up and it you know kills you in your sleep yes so i can see why they didn't ship this at least yet Well, there's other Tesla announcements. The Tesla Model Y dual zone fridge,$600, fits in the sub trunk and has two separate compartments that can be fit, set to different temperatures from zero to 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

36:04You plug it into the outlet. I love this. I think it's so cool that there's like this gadget that fits into the other thing they have. Like they have the front trunk. No one's really doing anything with it. Why not throw a couple? Yeah, not a lot of manufacturers are really willing to promote having 30 to 40 beers. Hit the road and having 30 to 40 beers. I don't think these are beers in this image. What is this? Tesla went there. Is this Olipop? I don't know. I think it's Blood Orange. I don't know which one this is. But they did put some ice cream. The ice cream looks pretty generic. I don't know if that's a known brand.

36:40There's also a mattress. Yeah, mattress is in there. Cybertruck mattress. I don't know. They've always had those mods. I've always thought their accessories are quite cool. I think it's difficult for other car manufacturers to do first-party accessories because they have so many SKUs. Whereas when you're selling as many Model Ys as they are and as many vehicles that have that exact trunk configuration with that exact port, you can underwrite the mass manufacturing a lot easier than if you're Kia or Hyundai and you have 25 different vehicles all with slightly different configurations. Well, where else should we go?

37:20Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They have stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. There was a team that figured out how to order pizza with iMessage using artificial intelligence. And people are not as impressed as they should be because the image is, AI, please press the order me pizza button. And it is wired up to press the order pizza button. Yes, DoorDash sort of already created an artificial intelligence for having food delivered to you. There is a button, and you can sort of reimagine the UI in a different way.

38:04VibeCode, a button that orders you the most recent thing or interfaces with a text message. Somewhat cool. I think the bull case for what Arlen is working on is that iMessage is a more universal interface. Text is the universal interface in a future world where everything is done via voice or via an agent or via text stream. Having a centralized place and not having to use a bunch of different apps and have the best app at the right time. And this one's on discount. That one's not. And this one's your payments information saved. Having all of that happen below the fold is just another layer to the user experience in the modern era that it feels like it's on the way.

38:47You've been able to order an Uber with Siri for a decade, but no one does because it's not ready. It was not ready for prime time, but we are getting there to the point where this will happen. But it is a slow, slow rollout. The AI chat apps were on a dominant run for a long time. OpenAI at the top with ChatGPT. I think Gemini and Claude were sort of going back and forth from number two and three, and you were lamenting. You were saying, like, what's going on in the app store? Yeah, this morning I was checking the App Store charts. It's actually going up. Good indicator of interest. We have Calci at number one.

39:25It's the World Cup. Netflix Game Controller at number two. Peacock at number three. Fox One at number four. Let's give it up for Fox. Trump Accounts at number five. ChatGPT at six. Threads at seven. Let's give it up for Connor Hayes. Connor Hayes. Telemundo at number eight. Telemundo? Oh. Polymarket at number nine. Gemini closing out the top 10. Yeah. 11, Fubo. Fubo. 12, Claude. Okay. 13, Depop. Depop. Depop out of nowhere. That's shopping. Google, number 14. Okay. The fact that Google. All over the place. Yeah. And then from there, it's a bunch of, a lot of, you know, real short drama wave, all these short.

40:12There's a company called Vibe Short, AI Comic Dramas. bite-sized comic dramas. Tyler, can you watch like a few hours of these and report back? Absolutely do not. Tomorrow. Absolutely do not. No, I'm genuinely curious. This app has come out of nowhere. Yeah. And we talked to the founder of True Short, or is it Real Short? True Short is the American company. Real Short is the Chinese company, correct? And he's, at TrueShort, he's working on true crime AI-generated short-form video. Interesting to see where that's going. I mean, certainly demand for this stuff. The trough must be filled. Let me tell you about Railway.

40:54Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider, user-favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Can we play this video? Yeah. From Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is talking to the CEO of Perplexity, Arvind Srinivas. Two paths to curiosity, one that can kill it and one that can supercharge it. In my opinion, the one that kills curiosity is algorithmic feeds. The brain rot that you're fed every day with just continuous doom scrolling, that's bad. And the one that can supercharge it is AI. Okay, like now that you could just ask.

41:38Pause. Whatever you want. Thank you. This is probably true from a maybe more macro sense. Like if you're sometimes good ideas do come to you. Some people say in the shower. To me, it's in the sauna. I think there's clearly inspiration that comes when you're not doing anything at all. But that being said, I get so many ideas from the feed. Ooh, okay. Don't you? Hot take. I like that. So how many, yesterday I sent you something. Pro feed, yeah. Yesterday I sent you a link that I saw on X, and I was like, hey, we should do something like this for this other thing. Sure. I don't remember what you were talking about because I completely zoned out.

42:22You were just, you were in the feed. Maybe. And I don't typically, once I have inspiration, then I'm going to AI, right? Yes. Then I'm going and exploring the idea and saying how has this been done before in this way. Yes. Or I was looking at incidents where heads of state have interfered with the World Cup, which was interesting. So I think that I like your hot take pushing back on that idea. Because where would we, you know, pre-internet, if you wanted inspiration, you would go to the library. StumbleUpon, baby. StumbleUpon. That's PostInternet. PostInternet. That's not PostInternet. That was like web one boom.

43:07It was like, take me to a random website. Yeah, but I'm saying before the internet was popular, if you were an artist and you wanted inspiration, you would go buy books, you would watch movies, you would go look at media to get ideas. Yeah, yeah. I think my take on this is that he is pointing to something that is correct, which is that AI feels very pull. You choose what to pull out of the AI system. You prompt, you ask for information about a specific thing. So you have to come with an idea and then you're exploring that idea. And that's very satisfying for curious people. whereas the algorithms feel very push.

43:48You go to YouTube Shorts or TikTok or Instagram and you're just being fed things and you're not starting your journey with an affirmative declaration. I want to learn more about the new Dolce Trilindri Manuale and I'm going down that rabbit hole. And I think your frustration that you voiced early about YouTube shoving a bunch of random shorts in your face is that otherwise you would be more likely to search for something specific. You want to learn about a history of a specific thing. And this was the case at the dawn of YouTube. It was just a search box. They'd surface a couple things with the editorial front page.

44:27But by and large, you would go and be like, I want, I remember people would just go and search like sick backflip. And then they would just watch like backflip videos, right? I had friends who would just search like cool thing, cool video. And they would just find cool videos because they were in the mood for that. And it was sort of algorithmic in one sense, but it was very like the user was driving that direction. And with the algorithms, you are taking a much more passive seat. Now, the odd thing is that where does AI go? Where does perplexity, ChatGPT, where do these apps go? Do they become more push in the sense that you show up and there's already a bunch of interesting prompts already done for you?

45:11I was talking about this a year or two ago. Oh, yeah, that was Pulse. Pulse was that, but I was also, when there were the rumor about the social network features, I was saying that I would love to just scroll a timeline of what are the deep research reports that Tyler Cowen is doing. He probably searches a ton of stuff. If there's something interesting in there and he can just click share, I would love to scroll that feed. And I'll also subscribe to Tyler and see what Tyler's deep researching and share. And it's so funny because StumbleUpon is such a good example. Yeah, great feed. Because there was random elements, but you could also make it more focused.

45:44Yeah. And that's generally what a feed is now. It's just stumble upon for, like, X is just stumble upon for, like, things happening online that you're interested in. Random is an algorithm. That is an algorithm. Yeah. You know, chronological is an algorithm. But I think what we're getting at is more of this algorithm where the optimization function is attention and time on site that people find dissatisfying because they have regret afterwards because they're like, yeah, you sucked me in with a bunch of stuff, but that's not actually what I wanted. I wanted something more focused and directed.

46:22I wanted more CrowdStrike. I wanted to know that your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. I also want more videos of peregrine falcons flying at 390 kilometers an hour. That is incredibly fast. You were giving me a little bit of shade about falcons last week, and so I needed to put you in the falcon zone. Okay, the truth zone on the falcons. What is this video? This is a video of the fastest attack animal in the animal kingdom, peregrine falcon content warning 390 kilometers hour also they live all over america fantastic animal beautiful creature crazy yeah and you think that there's a business to be built around home defense peregrine falcons take me through your thesis i did i did yes an andrel for the aviation aviary world andrel meets falconry yeah sort of an organic andrel for the home yes uh yeah a lot of you know guard dogs are popular why not have peregrine falcon you know perched in you know the highest tree on your property ready to go i like this chat from nicola a falcon with a bicycle is the most efficient animal on the planet i completely agree this hits very well with the early idea from the show with like bear security yes yeah bear private military contract i think that was the idea early on yeah i think it's probably easier to domesticate a falcon than a bear.

47:53Many falcons are already domesticated. Falconry is a historic technique. I just reached out to a local falconer. You did? To set up some time. Okay. I'm not even... Before the show? No, not for the show, but that would be cool. Wait, wait. No, no, no. Before the show, you did this? Yeah. Wow. You moved fast. The team had that video pulled up, and I just thought, you know. Yes. Now, the question is, can we bring back carrier pigeons? Yes. Because we send a lot of texts to each other. John, Sunday morning, he's often reading an article. Yes. He'll text me, hey, you should read this. Yes. But what if he could send, what if he could just take the newspaper?

48:33He didn't have to go find the link because obviously he's reading on a physical copy. Yes. What if you could just hand it to a smart bird and have it fly it over to my house? It'd be way more convenient for me. I wouldn't need to be on my phone. It's a weekend. I don't want to be as online as during the weeks. and you don't have to be going, getting on your phone, trying to find the right article. Yeah. So I think there's something there. I think. I wonder, I know Mike Tyson was really into pigeons. I don't know if he got into carrier pigeons, but it does seem like it could have a huge boom. I feel like there's an Instagram account to be built around someone who gets really into using carrier pigeons for everything and lives some sort of like pastoral trad life and amasses millions of followers on the back of of falconry and, and carrier pigeon home Falcons.

49:23Yes. Home Falcons. It's good content for social media. Uh, also if you don't want to fly in a Falcon, you want to fly on a helicopter, be like Michael Dell, get a helicopter and then branded. He was caught on a hot mic talking to president Donald Trump. He said, sir, we don't have a helicopter. We have a Dellicopter. What a funny portmanteau. man toe and what a funny way to correct the president he's really speaking the president's language yeah let's play it every question we don't have a helicopter we have a delicopter

50:06i like how it kind of flopped in per in real life but is doing numbers online it did it did it did Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Let me tell you about finally some good news. Finally, finally some good news. Circle K, the company, won the lottery. Did you hear about this story? No way. It's true. Yeah. So there's a crazy story out of Arizona. They needed a win. They needed a win. Actually, they've been a fantastic partner to my company, Lucy. Shout out Circle K. But let's tell you about the Circle K winning lottery.

50:43So there's a crazy story out of Arizona that's been brewing over the last six months. Back in February, a Circle K customer named Soon Chun Kim asked the cashier for$85 worth of$1 lottery tickets. So she shows up. She wants 85 tickets. But after all 85 were printed out, Kim found out that she only had$60 on her, only$60. So the cashier gave her 60 tickets and left the remaining 25 tickets on the counter. The next morning, Circle K manager Robert Galitsa learned that the leftover tickets included the$13 million winning ticket. So he clocked out, took off his Circle K shirt, and bought the tickets from another Circle K employee being like, what?

51:32No one's going to notice. 25 tickets, please. No one's going to notice. So when Circle K, the company, found out about the purchase, it ordered the ticket be held in its corporate office and filed a complaint against the manager who bought the tickets and the Arizona lottery and claimed that Circle K, the company, is the rightful owner of the lottery ticket. As of a week ago, at least three people slash entities are claiming ownership of the ticket. Wait, so the original buyer that didn't have the cash? Yes. The manager who's like, I don't care if I lose my job as long as I win the lottery. Circle K is like, we really need a win.

52:10We really need, we need a win. We need 13-0. We need this. Yeah. So Galitza, a Circle K employee that Galitza got to sign the back of the ticket. Not sure why he had to do all of this. And Circle K. Additionally, the judge presiding over the complaint has ordered that the woman who bought the tickets but couldn't pay for them, Soon-Shun Kim, be found and brought into court before making a decision on who gets it. So she's going to have to testify and explain her side to make sure that that's exactly what happened because this is just claims at this point. How did the local Circle K wind up with 25 lottery tickets?

52:46Who are you going with? I'm going with manager. I'm going with big corporate. Big, big, big. I'm going with the manager. Not because I think it's ethical, but I think that there's – No way. I think it's unlikely that there is a rule at Circle K that says. 100 % there's a rule that if you work at that company, you can't buy lottery tickets at all from your own store. Oh, okay. Obviously, because you have the machine right there. You can tamper with this million things. Okay, but they don't control. That's probably line number one employee handbook. No, but it seems very unlikely that the Circle, like it's a machine that just prints tickets.

53:23Yes. It's like. Yes, but there's so many ways you could tamper with it. You're watching the news. You're printing the ticket at the right time. You have access. You refill the ticket. Oh, there's one that's not filled out. Wait, John, but you're saying the corporation can buy its own lottery tickets? Yes. Why? But the manager can't? That seems also strange. Maybe. Maybe you got it. I think I got a ride with the woman. You think she's owed it? The manager? But then the strategy becomes the OG. Or the original buyer. The original buyer. But then you can just shift the odds in your favor by constantly going to Circle K's and going and$100 of$100 of tickets.

53:56Oh, I only have 50 bucks. And then you're basically doubling your odds because you still have a claim on those. Goldrock says these clerks aren't super hackers. Just wait, just wait. You get the right amount of AI. I think it's an, I think it's an edge case. And I think ultimately the, the, the person that, that paid for the winning ticket wins who paid for the winning ticket. Like if it comes down, but the manager knew that the ticket won, he didn't have to put any money. We don't know that yet. No, no, no, no. He did. He did. So there were 25 tickets there. They go through that. Okay. If there's a rule that managers cannot buy lottery tickets at their own store, then you're correct.

54:34But if there's no rule that explicitly, you know, basically spells that out, I think he might be golden. He might be golden? Do you think so? I don't know. Let me tell you about Shopify. Lottery expert. AI is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And our next guest is here, I think, a few minutes early, so we can bring in Baju from Cowboy Space Corporation. Actually, oh, we're good. Let's bring him in. Hi, Jim. How are you doing? Didn't want to keep you waiting. Welcome to the show.

55:10Hi, boys. How are you doing? How are you doing? Good to have you back. Good to have you back. How was your fourth? How was your fourth? It was good. It was good. I went up to Oregon, got a little sunlight. It's pretty cloudy out in my part of California. Going to Oregon to get sunlight, it's kind of a contrarian move. Florida or something? Florida's far. Yeah. What is your reaction? We've got to get to the important news. What's your reaction to the Ferrari Dolce Trilindri Manuale, the manual by wire? You knew this question was coming. I'm smitten. I'm waiting for this. Yeah, I think it's awesome.

55:52Yeah. Yeah. And so the natural pushback is, oh, this doesn't count because it's an unnatural manual transmission. Why? Why is this cool? Why is this good? Why do you like this idea? And I also want to know, do you think it will spread within the Ferrari portfolio? Leo? Why do we like this idea, first of all? Because I think at this point with cars, we take what we can get. And I think this is going to be pretty cool. I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard that the reason they're doing this is because the gearbox, they needed it to be able to handle that much power. That's why I didn't go with a totally normal manual, but who knows.

56:33And do I think it is going to get to other cars? I hope so. I really hope so. I mean, just in general, right? The landscape of modern cars is, pardon my language, but it's fucking apocalyptic. You guys ever go driving down the road? Every car on the road is either gray, black, silver, toilet bowl white. The number of cars that look like toilet bowls on the road is just exploding. It's depressing. I feel like it's a weird commentary on human society this day and age? Like, why does everybody need to drive the exact same ugly, boxy car? Hey, we're having some connection issues. Can we flip you back to the production team?

57:23We'll bring you back in a couple minutes. Does that sound good? Yeah. Thanks a lot. We'll see you in just a few minutes. Let me tell everyone about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We got them in. We asked the questions that were on our mind, and we can now. Sorry, we were having an issue, and he's dropping some gems. Okay. We want to get it right. Wait, is this a real video? No, this is fake. No. No? This is good, though. Costa runs the fastest-growing oil change-only QL in the USA. He says, for kicks, I started using Chachi Biti to give our employees huge muscles in social media posts we use.

58:06And finally, last night, an employee told me on Slack, a customer said something about them not being as jacked in person. Look at this second picture here. That's massive. This guy, if you look like this, you're not changing oil. You're going for the Arnold. You're going to the Arnold. This is so good. I like that Max Sparrow is in here just tagging Pangram data. Is this the idea that he's always adding to the training corpus? Interesting that he just goes around on the timeline hunting for known edited images to build the model. Very, very cool. Let's talk about Maggie's Refuel. Speaking of cars that need to be refueled, if you got your Dolce Trilindri Manuale and you need to get a full tank of gas, you might stop by Maggie's Refuel here in Los Angeles.

58:59A new high-end gas station brand just opened in Los Angeles. It builds itself as a high-end convenience store brand, planning to modernize and innovate the current gas station experience. Think Auto Grill meets 7-Eleven Japan. Matcha, local croissants, premium CPG, and yes, a soft-serve cone, all alongside a gas or EV fill-up. Will they have white monster? Got to jump in. It's not actually open yet. It's not open yet. It's not open yet. It's open as soon. This is going to be their first location. If you've been in L.A., this location is incredible. It's an incredible historic structure. We actually don't know how to make gas stations like this.

59:39Yeah. If you go to the first image in that thing, you can see the sort of curved ceiling that looks very, I don't know. It looks nice. It also looks like it's a nightmare in the rain. Tyler. Some people are saying this is just Buc-ee's for Californians. Have you guys ever been to Buc-ee's? I've never been to Buc-ee's. Buc-ee's is an elite gas station. It's mostly south of the U.S. There's only like 20 of them, but they're like sensational. There's like a wall of beef jerky, every flavor. It's incredible. You guys got to go next time you're on the East Coast. So it's just great selection. They have.

1:00:12I mean, so there's like kind of like a restaurant inside. Because I have been to a Bucky's. But I just went in and said, hey, where's the bathroom? She used the bathroom and left. I didn't get to. I didn't even. You didn't get the full experience. Everything inside a Bucky's is trying to kill me. Okay. So I tend to avoid. But Maggie's is very cool. I actually invested in Maggie's with my friend Jonathan. Cool. And this was like almost a couple years ago at this point. So building a gas station chain is a lot harder than it sounds. Yeah. But the idea, and Alex, John Rossi in the chat is sharing, Alex's family started Cantor's Deli, very popular deli here in Los Angeles.

1:00:58So lots of lore in the family. But the idea and the frustration that I had had, you know, even prior to meeting Alex, is like everything inside the average gas station is trying to kill me. Yeah. Right? It's like almost end-to-end, wall-to-wall poison. And there's a lot of instances where— I got a backhoe there. It's fine. Poison. Not poison. There's the drink of kings. We're running the A-B test. The drink of games. Running the A-B test, John. Okay. That's going to be in a gas station soon. Heberman's ripping. It'll definitely, it'll be in Maggie's. But yeah, the idea is like, okay, how much money would you spend if you were getting gas at a place where you could get a nice coffee or maybe some organic fruit?

1:01:45I do hate getting gas at a boring gas station. Yeah, it's going to be fun. I would probably stop by there if I saw it. It'd be good. How are we doing on our guests? We're going to bring them in in just a minute. Make sure that connection is dialed. we can talk about common printers. We are big on printing. We print every day. I got some papers here. But I agree. Printers have not seen enough innovation yet, but CR1337, LEET, I like that, says we all know what the three biggest problems with common printers are. One, ink ripoffs. Two, planned obsolescence. And two, got the numbers wrong. You know it's not AI.

1:02:23Unrepairable hardware. Today I stumbled upon OpenPrinter, a fully repairable open source inkjet that uses cheap refillable HP cartridges without DRM. Print sheets on rolls with an auto cutter. Raspberry Pi powered. No drivers needed on any operating system. If I ever get a printer again, this will be the one. OpenPrinter. It's so funny. This person is like gassing up this printer and is like, yeah, if I ever get one again, I would do this one. This is the story of so many. Like we have to go back to this thing where it's like, oh, I really want this. and then somebody makes it and they're like, well, I don't need that thing at all anymore.

1:02:58So now we understand why it doesn't exist and it became an extreme niche. There's another making things the old way. I like this video. Look at this, the series of machines. This is a paper organizer. Look at this, Jordy. So this will just take a messy stack of paper and jiggle it until it's nice and even. Look at this. So you just take a bunch of papers, and then it just sort of shakes it, and then you've got a nice, clean stack of paper, and you have a whole machine for this. Can your iPhone 17 Pro Max do that? No. You've got to get the Paper Jiggler 9000, whatever it's called, the Electra Jog, the Electra Jog.

1:03:44We don't know how to name products like that anymore. Tyler, are you in the market for this? Should we get one of these for the studio? This could be good, yeah. This could be good. take all the newspapers and jog them together. It's just such a beautiful, simple machine. You just want a nice... Look at how clean that looks. You got papers around your house. Don't you want them nicely lined up like that? It's great. I like it. So Open Printer, the thing we just looked at, it's not even actually available for pre-order yet. So we'll see if they get crowdfunding. It's getting there. Well, let me tell you about Codex.

1:04:16Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. There's a new job in Washington, D.C. If you're looking to make your name on Capitol Hill, you can be the Rocco's Basilisk explainer. You go and read less wrong, and then you break it down for our elected officials on Capitol Hill. Put it into the form of based memes. Yes, yes. This is a real job in the modern economy. The Financial Times has a bunch of news around AI. There was some news that Anthropic might be joining up with their World One.

1:05:00They're closing China loopholes. That seems like good news. They're also potentially involved in the public ownership. But this Financial Times report says, among his strange duty as Silicon Valley's translator to Washington, he said was explaining Rocco's Basilisk, an internet thought experiment about a vengeful future super intelligence, quote, to a bunch of the cabinet. Fun times in Washington. But we have our guest back in the TVP and Ultronome. Let's welcome, by June, back to the show. How you doing? I'm back. There we go. So back. Fantastic. Crystal clear. Crystal clear. Yeah, it was extremely painful listening to you do this incredible riff on the state of modern cars.

1:05:42and I couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. You'll be happy. The three cars in my driveway right now are blue, green, and brown. I'm rebelling against more subtle, toned down, toned down far away. They don't look too crazy, but I'm rebelling. Rebelling against the beige and the blacks and the whites. Why do you think the colors went away? I understand the transition to electric because of environmental concerns, the move to automatics because it's less to learn for the average consumer. But why do we lose red? I don't know, man. It's sad. Honestly, it's just sad. And I think it's like a commentary on the modern state of society and human affairs.

1:06:36Like, why do we all want to have cars that just disappear into the background? um i well well one thing is like to me when i think about like a vw buck right a very popular car throughout history even if it's regardless of the color it's like a fun car but then you add some like exotic color yellow or green or red yeah like it's it's even more fun and i and i just feel like when every car every car blends in just the silhouette now yeah and so i think people are just like blending in is just the current meta we're seeing it's funny fiat has some new car that they're coming out with uh what is the i think it's the topolino maybe uh there i think cute is going to come back.

1:07:29You think so? Sounds like Topo Chico. Topo Chico. Yeah, no, it's the, uh, the Multiplina. Hmm. I think it is. I don't know. I guess they all, they all kind of run together, but it still sounds like Topo Chico. I mean, some of it's safety standards. A lot of things have had to standardize around crash crumple zones and whatnot. And I think that creates somewhat of a consolidation around silhouettes, but the color thing I would imagine is more like tall poppy syndrome you don't want to stand out and be the guy with the red car that became too flashy so everyone went quiet luxury and that meant black white or gray why did why do why does everybody need to fit in why does everybody need to be the same like people should just be individuals like that's kind of the natural state of human affairs in my opinion i don't know at the same time something crazy comes out and people reject it look at the ferrari luce that car doesn't really look like anything else.

1:08:25It looks weird. To be clear, I rejected it purely on the price. I'm getting one, by the way, guys. Let's go. There we go. Let's be honest. Let's be honest. They said if you want the 12C manual, you're getting the Luce. It wasn't said out loud, but it was understood. No, guys, I got it because I'm a huge Johnny I fanboy. Yeah. I think the interior is going to be incredible. and the spec matters a lot. What color did you go with? What do you like? Did you do anything to make it your own? I haven't done that yet. I'm going to confess right now that I'm going to probably make my wife drive it. Okay.

1:09:06Yeah. So I think it's going to be the baby mobile. Hey, I mean, if you want a five seater, it's the only option. It's the only option. No, it's going to be an incredibly fun car to drive. It'll be an experience. My only criticism was purely like it felt like they set out to make a$300 ,000 car and they accidentally made a$600 ,000 car. But fortunately, there's not millions of Bai Jus in the world, but there's enough that they're going to sell some. Let's pull up the picture of this Fiat. Let's take a look at this thing. I want to get Bai Jus' reaction to see if he's going to pick up one of these.

1:09:44Can we share this image that's in the timeline of the Fiat Topolino? Hilarious that it has a – what is that? By the way, I like that you guys brought me on just to talk about the cars. We're going to get to your business. We'll get to the news. But it's July. We also got a half an hour here. We're hanging out. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Can we share the image of the Topolino? Yeah, let's see this. It has like a rope that you would expect at like a nightclub, like a velvet rope to stop people instead of a door. It looks great. Anyway, we'll try and pull. I put a link here that you can pull up as well.

1:10:26What is this? Why don't you guys put that up? Yeah. Have you guys seen that – what is that? That new Audi, the one that looks like it's like out of Cyberpunk? Yes. Yeah. I think that one looks really cool. Same designer as the new Jaguar. Yeah. Did you know that? Oh, God. Guys, I was excited about that for a minute. Come on, why are you going to do that? No, but the issue with the Jaguar was not, the silhouette was, like, very cool. It was one of those, like, the future is here moments. And then the way that they did the rollout of it and the rebrand, like, obviously got a lot of pushback. But, like, fundamentally, I thought, like, this is what Batman would drive in the year 2050.

1:11:06You see that thing in matte black? It looks a lot different than, like, the pink and pastel blues. There was just like a little bit too much contrast, but then we're getting out of the colors. Maybe we got to spec it in some bright pink. If I were specing one of those, I would go full Batman the Animated Series. Like I would go with like a cream color and make it look as like art deco as possible. Yeah, yeah, that'd be good. The new Valari is crazy. I have a friend specing one of them in like this crazy, crazy color. I'm not even going to say what it is. I want to let him have his moment. I think it will be one of the world.

1:11:43And also a lot less pushback for the Audi because it's built on the Lamborghini platform, I believe. So it's a V10 or V8. It has an internal combustion engine. And I think Jaguar changed a lot of things at the same time, going electric, going huge sedan, going crazy colors, very bold marketing. And when you shift seven different things, you get a lot of visceral reactions. Let's pull up this Fiat. Let's see this. There we go. What do you think about this? You picking one up?

1:12:13Oh, nice. You're not ripping one of these things around with the boys. Imagine having... Okay, so one of these is kind of silly, but if you're with your buddies and you each have one and you're rolling deep, that's pretty cool. Put a Mansory kit on that. That's pretty cool. I don't know. A Mansory kit on that thing? i think we got a picture of a there's a convertible version i guess with doors can you imagine i just cannot imagine hanging out my friends and us like caravanning these would be we look like such dweebs i'm sorry sorry fiat you might say that you might say that just wait until you fire up the v12 engine that you swap in that thing that'll i think i can hold it off i know it wouldn't do it at all uh we got we got one more okay what else we got uh the twizzy the renault twizzy have you seen these the doors go up the doors go you sit one behind we saw this in europe we were in france last week or two weeks ago and these were uh extremely popular with like young teenagers they'd have a whole bunch of them sort of caravanning around seems like uh particularly good for narrow streets again it's the right tool for the job is it gonna take it to track day probably not but uh and the right in the right environment i think the twizzy the is a reno right yeah reno twizzy let's see the team's pulling it up imagine look at this imagine at least two of us in here together going on a coffee wait is that a three-person no no no one somebody's got to stay behind okay yeah it looks like that person sitting in that person's lap yeah it's a tight squeeze of a motorcycle more than a it's not it's not very spacious i will say that but how many wheels does this thing have on it is it two or four it's four it's four okay it's four i can't quite tell from that angle it might be a bicycle look i know you have a great car collection but clearly there's some holes right no twizzy Yeah.

1:14:17Yeah. You don't have five. At the same time. You don't have five fiats. At the same time. Yeah. That this hot garbage is coming out. The restomod community is making some good stuff right now. I'll just put that out there. Okay. Yes. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about this. Hot girl cars. Old Land Rovers. Old Defenders. Modified. Sydney Sweeney has one. What is your take on what makes for a good restomod in the SUV world? as long as you're not swapping it out for an electric powertrain, I think I'm, I'm, I'm down with it. You're good. I had, I had a, I saw one this weekend. I have people that are like, Oh, I'm into cars.

1:14:58And I'm like, okay, cool. Like what kind of cars are you into? And they're like, well, I bought, you know, like an old Bronco and I made it electric. And a little part of me just sort of dies when I hear that. I'm like, ah. Yeah. So yeah, I'm, I'm in favor. I like when they're kept like very pure, right? I don't like when the badges or any of the markings are changed. I saw a Bronco on Saturday where all the badges were swapped to just say vintage. And I was like, clearly it's a vintage car. You don't need to spell it out. And so I personally, I appreciate when it's like as left, as pure as possible, and then just like modified to make it slightly more comfortable or redoing the interior.

1:15:45etc what about a 1955 what about a 1955 cadillac coupe deville swapped with a tesla model plaid so you get 200 miles an hour in it that seems good i like uh john's just trying to just try to trigger the model s battery in sorry what were you saying i was saying i was with you until we got to the electrification bit of it yeah but at 200 miles an hour bombing down the autobahn in a 1955 Cadillac Coupe Develle So that thing is going to be a rattle box at 200 miles an hour. Can you imagine just the whole thing? Death machine. What's your Are you going to be racing at all? Ferrari Challenge? Challenge maybe?

1:16:31You're too Not much of a racer. I'm much more of like a hot rodder and like driving on beautiful beach roads kind of guy. Sure. Yeah, I, I, you know, it's one of those things like a lot of people really love that side of it. I've never had that much of a need for speed, personally. Yeah, I, we enjoy, we enjoy, to be totally honest. Yeah, we enjoy going to the track, but there's, there's people that enjoy going to the track that are like putting it all on the line every time. And I, I can't do it. Like with young children, I just like, uh, I, I, I'm, I'm building out like a, a really robust sim right now to, to see what you got.

1:17:16Yeah. just to just to actually try to push myself but again i don't know that i would ever want to replicate what i'm going to do in the sim actually on the track but are you are you guys going to car week it's really poorly timed with the arrival of my next child like very like within within days uh so days huh yeah so i'm i'm gonna probably have to get ready to deliver the baby in the back of a home birth at car week car week you've heard a baby's delivered in backs of you'll be at the racetrack watching vintage racing and like the beating sun uh and having to rush the hospital yeah yeah so i'm i i as much as it pains me i think i'm gonna be sitting this Maybe next year.

1:18:07Maybe next year. If you had to do one, which one would you do? Cannonball, New York to L.A., Paris to Car Rally, or Gumball 3000? The Gumball 3000 is across the – what is that across the – Is it like Siberian Tundra? Oh, I would definitely do that one. They move around a little bit. I think the Gumball moves around, but it's a long rally. But it's less of track focus. It's less at the limit as the cannonball, which is New York to La Jolla as fast as possible. I feel like that one would have a lot more of eating beans out of a can on the side of the road, which is kind of the vibe I'd go for. Yeah.

1:18:50No, it seems really fun. Anyway, we're not here to talk about cars for 45 minutes. Let's talk about space. Let's talk about business. We totally could. Okay. So get us up to speed on progress since we last spoke. I want to specifically talk about launch vehicles, what it takes to get to space at scale, what you're thinking there. So take us through just the general update, and then we can go more specific. Then we can get back to that. Pretty busy times here at the Cowboy Space Corporation, which I love the mission statement. We're on a mission to power humanity from the high frontier. It's just like got that little bit of country twang to it.

1:19:27That's good. So we announced fundraising and the plans to vertically integrate into launch vehicle plus data centers and space architecture. And a little bit on that, right? We've talked a little while ago, but since I started the company, I've been pretty focused on figuring out the energy economics. And in particular, trying to figure out what the path is to making compute from space or energy derivative services from space competitive on a cost basis with doing a terrestrial. That's kind of the North Star. And when we kind of got to the architecture that we announced, that was the aha moment is like when you look at the whole, when you look at the entirety of the problem, including the launch vehicle, the path to get into the data center in space, along with the architecture of the data center part in space, and you optimize the entire thing.

1:20:26that's one of the paths to getting to the cost competitive economics was when we really doubled down on building the launch vehicle as a part of the data center in space. And I think also it's become more and more clear over time that the launch capability that people will need to do all this interesting stuff in space, like it's going to be a while before it's there. SpaceX is obviously running ahead with that, but they're going to end up using a lot of that capacity for themselves. And so we knew that if we wanted to control our destiny, we'd have to go down this path, which I did not think I was going to start a rocket business when I started this company.

1:21:06So what are the dials that you're turning on launch vehicle? Are you going bigger, smaller? Well, first he's funding the anti-data center movement here. Oh, yeah. He's going to create even more of a catalyst. That's a tinfoil hat conspiracy. No, it's not a tinfoil hat. It's a blue hair conspiracy. Sure, sure. You guys will see me protesting outside of Adidas Center. Maybe, maybe. Put them in space. You got to go boots on the ground. People will be protesting that in due time. Don't you worry. But on the launch vehicle, what dials are you turning in terms of the amount of mass to orbit or the size of the vehicle, the fuel?

1:21:42Like, how do you want to develop something that's different? Or do you just want to have a secondary option that's as close to the sort of standard interoperable market standard launch vehicle? Or do you want something that fulfills a specifically different role and fits a different piece of the stack? Yeah. So first things first, you guys will see a much more detailed update from us on overall launch vehicle architecture, kind of an unveiling of what the rocket looks like, how pointy it is, stuff like that. So stay tuned on that. But I'll give you a couple of breadcrumbs to that right now. First one is on the launch vehicle itself, we want to optimize for simplicity of architecture and speed to market.

1:22:32Those are kind of high-level objectives. we don't have to build the Bugatti Veyron of rocket engines here. We want to build something that's much more the Honda Civic of rocket engines. And what that looks like, it's down-selecting each one of the core trades in the system to optimize for what can we build relatively quickly that gets the job done and starts getting payloads to orbit. Because there's different paths we could take with this. the north star for me is like cut out the arts and crafts projects. Like just focus on building data centers in space, building a rocket architecture that is purpose built for that.

1:23:13And notably not focused on reusability at all, at least initially. Is that right? No, I think we're going to aim for reusability as quickly as possible. One of the things that we hope to do on the path to getting there is having economics that support making something that's viable with a non-reusable version of it so that we're not waiting forever to start getting payloads up. I imagine with some of the AI projects, the AI compute is so valuable economically, so economically dense that non-reusable payloads might actually make sense, at least in the short term. Of course, you want to save money over the long term.

1:23:54But when you think about the value of a large-scale compute in orbit, that could be potentially higher than some of the other payloads that are going up right now, right? So that sort of pulls forward your roadmap. Yeah. I mean, I think this – if I understand you right, I think one of the things that is an interesting observation here is more on the sort of business and economics of the rocket business. One sec. My light just cut off here. You're good. Let me tell you about consoles. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password results.

1:24:34We got an add-in and a nice view of the art right behind you. I can't get away from the technical difficulties, you say. My goodness. So, as I say, on the economics and the business of rocketry, I think there's something that's pretty interesting that's happened here. which is if you look back in time towards kind of when the first commercial rocket businesses were getting started, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et cetera, et cetera. The primary business model, as I understand it, was third-party launch. Build a rocket to take stuff to space, and the taking the stuff to space is the monetization. Yeah. Which, if you rewind the clock 10 to 15 years ago, the majority of that activity was driven by government, right?

1:25:18It was government needs, government payloads, national security, et cetera, et cetera. What we're seeing now is the bulk of the payload that at least, you know, that is going to be going to orbit. A lot of it is commercial. And in particular, the AI component is commercial in nature by and large. And when you realize that that fundamentally changes the way that you think about the rocket business, you realize that the development path starts to change. Because if you're launching first-party payloads, you look at the economics of what does it take to get a successful launch to orbit? What is the cost of a failed launch to orbit?

1:26:05And you control the entire economic stack there. So if you have a failed launch to orbit and the sort of consequence of that is a first-party payload, it's very different than if the failed launch is for a government payload. To say it differently, when it's purely commercial, the incentive, I think, is much more to try early and often and to get to that sort of like successful launch and eventually to get to reusability and get payloads to orbit that start monetizing along the way. And I think that flows through the entirety of the decision making of how you build a rocket company in 2026, right?

1:26:49said differently, we're building this thing for our data center and space payload. We're not building it for third-party payloads. We're not building it for human space flight or any of that stuff. We might do that at some point in the future, but we think that the majority of the actual substance and the revenue of this is going to come from the first-party payloads of data centers in space. Yeah. Yeah. Very different company from Robinhood. What lessons are you actually taking? What are you drawing from the Robinhood playbook, if anything, for this company? Well, it's kind of interesting because the techno-economic analysis of how do you make a service make sense like this?

1:27:38There's some overlapping and thinking there, like how do you make the economic cases make sense? The other part is building engineering teams like that. That translates over pretty well. And building them, I think the interesting thing here is that it's a largely distributed engineering workforce. A lot of it is quite different, I'll be honest. There's less consumer product involved. There's much more manufacturing involved. but at the end of the day the the the circumstances in some ways are similar right it's like starting out from the standpoint the Robin Hood you know era of my life I guess is still going on but the the starting of that was how do you build something that competes against these existing brokerages and how do you really really focus on a very specific set of things that gets a meaningful use case in the market.

1:28:34I think that part is actually kind of similar. It's like, how do you make a meaningful rocket space company by being hyper, hyper focused on a small number of things? Because like I said, we're not in the business of doing human space slide and all these other things. But how do you find that niche that you care about and say ultra focused on making that happen? In 30 seconds, because I know you have to hop. SpaceX is in the cloud business now. They have a launch business. You can imagine that Elon just wants more and more and more and more of that end market. Has that changed the dynamic of conversations that you're having with, let's say, other hyperscalers and labs that are competing with Elon, Inc., and don't want to end up in a situation where they are basically forced to purchase from a monopoly or cloud from a monopoly, et cetera?

1:29:30Yeah, I mean, I think the overwhelming dynamic here now and in the future is just the need for compute, right? I think there's definitely people that are concerned about controlling their own data centers. But if you kind of look around at the marketplace right now, people are trying to get capacity whenever and wherever they can get it. So I'm sure there's a little bit of that behind the scenes. But I think the primary thing that I'm seeing is just the need for compute and trying to bring it online as quickly as possible. and I don't know, I feel like we all kind of live with that on a day-to-day basis.

1:30:03I was asking Fable to make some Magic the Gathering decks for me over the weekend. And you hit your limit? I kept hitting my limits. I'm like, come on, guys. Just make the deck for me. No, it is a crazy time. Apple is leasing GPUs from Google. Google is leasing GPUs from SpaceX. and they're all big like everyone's telling meta like yeah sorry we don't have capacity we have too much capacity to sell and so everyone's doing a deal with everybody else so uh it's a good it's a good business to be in since everything's growing and demand is uh demand solves so many headaches and and and justifies so many all right i know you have to jump let's get a couple of these fiats let's bomb around car week the three of us maybe a few others maybe car week 2027 yeah so i I'm totally down.

1:30:57Totally down. I love it. I go most years. Amazing. Well, great to see you. Congrats on the progress. Congrats on the progress. And we'll talk to you soon. Thanks boys. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Our next guest is Daniel English from legacy investments. He's a managing partner there. We'll bring him in to the TV. And I'll try to go from the waiting room. Legacy investments does private real estate and infrastructure investment platform. Daniel, welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's going on? Thanks for having me. How was your 4th of July? In the nation's capital. So I was here for all the storms and the fireworks.

1:31:35Very fun. Electric. Well, since it's your first time on the show, I would love for you to kick it off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself and legacy investments. Get us up to speed. Yeah, absolutely. So my original background was tech entrepreneurship, probably similar to you guys, and then saw the opportunity in infrastructure for the build out of the Internet. and 15 years ago started investing in data centers. And data centers are an extra e-commerce warehouse. Yeah, e-commerce warehouses as well. And also some life sciences real estate, is that correct? Yeah, sort of all takes the same kind of infrastructure.

1:32:10So the whole idea was own the infrastructure that the digital world is being built on top of. Yeah. This just makes a ton of sense. Take us through the very first deal. Like, did you have to marshal capital? Is it like raising a venture fund? Are you just deploying your own capital and working with a bank for a mortgage? What was that first deal like? It's very similar to venture, right? So just huge sums of money. I mean, today our typical deal is$600 million, just each. And that's a small data center investment, right? So big, big dollars. But yeah, I mean, you go out, you raise your money, you have a pitch deck, the same basic process.

1:32:50So we started, you know, I think 15 years ago, nobody understood what a data center was. So it was fascinating. In fact, I got laughed at a lot by Private Equity, who was like, you left tech. Whoa. Wow. Who's laughing now? Which is amazing now. Yeah, exactly. They're like, hey, we'd love to catch up and get coffee and you can tell us about how this all works. So I want to understand data centers went from being something that no one really cared about to suddenly everyone cares about them all the time, so much so that if anything happens at a data center tied to any hyperscaler, it gets reported to the front page of the Wall Street Journal or even the New York Times, right?

1:33:32It's like satellite photos monitoring the build-out. Yeah, so through that process, how did the game change from an investing standpoint, you know, rewinding, let's say, early 22 to 23, and then I want to go from 2023 to 2024 and understand those changes because it's just been ramping up to such an extreme degree and it still feels like there's a ways to go. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the first transition was in, call it 2010, when cloud really came on the scene, right? So you had data centers before 2010. 2010 to sort of 22, you had a big run-up in cloud. And so that was a whole era of data centers that shifted.

1:34:14but really with the introduction of AI, you've got this huge increase in density and demand. I mean, demand was already growing astronomically, but as you guys know, AI is really pushing that. And at the same time, and we're also constraining on power. So the biggest transition was just the amount of power. So in 2010, a five megawatt data center was a good one. 30 megawatts was sort of peak. now you know 30 megawatts is a small data center uh you're you know everybody wants a gigawatt uh and so that scale is just astronomical versus what we had before and so what we're seeing is you know really everything we're doing including this show is happening in a data center and what's fascinating to me is most people somebody's got to tell theo von that i don't know if you saw saw that clip where he's like no one wants these on his like video podcast distributed via a million data centers all over the world.

1:35:13It's fascinating. But when we talk, like my branding firm interviewed a bunch of 20-something-year-olds and they're like, where do you think everything that's happening on your phone is happening? And they're like, well, it's happening on my phone. And we're like, no, it's not. It happens in a building. But that creates an arms race right now around AI because everything we do in our lives happens in a building, in digital infrastructure. And there is a massive supply constraint because of that increase in power demand. I mean, there's only so much power. And frankly, there's only so much land, particularly with the political sentiment right now, that you can build these.

1:35:48And so having access to a building to house your compute becomes a distinct competitive advantage in the AI. So what does your search process look like? I mean, I've seen data centers in downtown where it's like a converted office building, no windows. That's probably for a CDN or some local delivery. But if you're just driving through the middle of America and you see some land, are you thinking about power or is there natural gas in the ground? Are you – or are you doing more of the deals where it's like what happened at Colossus where there was a building that already had a lot of power for manufacturing appliances like washing machines and then it was easier to convert and upgrade that building?

1:36:35Do you do everything? Like what's the process for finding a site? Yeah. I mean, data centers are really giant machines, right? I think that's probably obvious. And what's exciting to me is it's the first time in human history we had buildings that weren't designed for humans, truly, right? You think about most buildings you interact with or real estate or private equity invest in are designed for people. Data centers, it's not about a person. It's about a machine. So in terms of where do you pick a data center site, you're really picking on where the machine wants to go. So machines care about power, right?

1:37:08So power is, you know, to get quick power, you need infrastructure. So we're really looking at infrastructure. And then you're looking at fiber so that we can get all the digital bits around. So that's also a form of infrastructure. So you're really going to power and fiber first and foremost. Water obviously is a hot topic. Anymore, most of particularly what we're building, it's all closed-loop systems. So you're not using a lot of water. And so really it's fiber and power infrastructure. And then the third piece is latency. So how much time does it take to deliver those digital bits? How close are you?

1:37:40And so historically, you did not see data centers downtown other than for networking. Today, we bought the Chicago Board of Options Exchange building on LaSalle Street downtown, and we're turning that into a large AI data center right now. And that is wonderful because I've got great latency, great fiber, and lots of power infrastructure I can tap into. But what's fascinating is I can put 50 megawatts in about 40 ,000 square feet in that building today because of densities. In 2010, I may have gotten four megawatts in that building. Wow. Interesting. Fascinating. What does your government relations team or strategy look like, interfacing with neighbors to data centers, regulators, senators to mayors, all sorts of different – who are the important constituents to get on board when you're working on a project?

1:38:38Right now, you guys obviously are highly aware of this. The political problem with data centers is very real right now. And it's interesting because we all use them. Our lives are dependent on them. But I think there's a need for partnership with the cities and the communities. So that's something we take very seriously. I got a question recently about data centers are bad or ugly or using all our water and power. A lot of those are either misconceptions or somebody did build a bad building. You can always build a bad building. And so I would say something we work very hard at is partnering with cities on deploying data centers that are not using all the water, are using existing grid infrastructure, and frankly are not ugly.

1:39:27I mean, I think part of the problem is it's not ugly. yeah is there a i mean we were talking about the the cell phone towers in los angeles they're sort of dressed up like trees uh i don't know that's that effective at being beautiful although they do sort of they do sort of melt in the background of course like when you're up close you can clock it but when it's just on you know the horizon you don't really notice it um have you seen any trends in sort of like low hanging fruit in like oh if we just do this yeah it'll increase the cost 1%, but the response from the community is going to be 50 % better because we did X, Y, or Z.

1:40:06Yeah, no, absolutely. So I converted a glass, or my team and I converted a glass office tower in downtown Minneapolis into a large AI data center. It's a beautiful building. And in fact, nobody even knows there's a data center in there for the most part. We're doing, you know, the Chicago Board of Optional Exchange building is a beautiful architectural building. Part of what I love about data centers is it's really infrastructure. And so you can bury it underground, you can put it on top of a roof, you can do these mixed use. They do not have to look like prisons, which some of them do. And so that gives you a lot of creative flexibility.

1:40:42Like we're building a Greenfield data center in Texas right now. And our architecture team found ways to do fencing that effectively, you can imagine Frank Gary's, you know, museums, it sort of looks more like that. And so there are actually a lot of windowless buildings that we all like culturally. And so we take a lot of inspiration from that. Yeah, basically every sports stadium is sort of windowless from the outside, and yet we love them and they look great. Are you involved in any conversations or have you heard of any conversations where local communities are effectively asking for direct payments in order to provide support for a data center?

1:41:26Because you said, like, we all use data centers. But the thing about data centers is Google is going to find a way to serve me no matter what, regardless of if they're my neighborhood or my community. And it's like three milliseconds of extra. latency to put it five counties over. And so it's very easy to push the not-in-my-county rhetoric if the only impact of that's going to be a millisecond of latency or something like that. We're seeing, yeah, I mean, there is a lot of pressure, obviously, on where data centers go right now. We are seeing communities make direct asks. We're seeing tenants and investors such as ourselves do as much as we can to benefit the community.

1:42:09There are significant benefits. So let me take my building in downtown Minneapolis. That building's recently sold for, we still manage it, but it recently sold for the highest price of a building in Minnesota. And so you imagine that building when I stepped into it was basically mostly worthless. It was an office building, mostly vacant. Let's call it less than$30 million of value. And now it's one of the highest priced buildings in Minnesota. I mean, that shift is, and it still looks like a beautiful glass office tower. It's not using huge amounts of water. And you're saying there's like massive, yeah, massive increase in property tax revenue.

1:42:49Because the new sale price, that makes a lot of sense. Interesting. And then you also have hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure going in from the tenants. Sure. We've got hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from us. We did create new jobs. Yep. And so those are good. Those are obviously positive benefits. Yeah. On a, you know, we are seeing everything from tenants and investors sponsor everything from new fire stations and fire trucks to, you know, benefits for housing, schooling, in addition and on top of sort of just tax benefits, right? What is your process for sequencing out finding tenants?

1:43:27I imagine it's sort of a if you build it, they will come moment for you. But in terms of talking to hyperscalers, neoclouds, doing something yourself, partnering with a chip company, I mean, everyone is participating in various levels of the stack. What does it look like for you as you're sussing out an opportunity? Yeah, and obviously it's a big deal right now for anybody to have access to infrastructure for compute, right? So the hyperscalers, the neoclouds, everybody's competing for the same space. In fact, we often see that the same – we've had video game companies, neocloud, cloud users all try and get in the same building, right?

1:44:12So everybody's competing for a fairly limited supply. It is very – I would say it functions much more like partnerships. Cities, it's very partner-oriented. Tenants, it's very partner-oriented because these are huge, massive capital investments. So on the low end, you're looking at half a billion dollars. On the high end, you're looking at$10 billion. But they're making just as big of investments. I'm guessing that's obvious. But they're the ones providing the chips. and serving their customers too. And so there's a mutual investment on both sides. So there's a, I would say, a tight relationship between the tenants and developers and capital partners such as ourselves to help make sure these are successful.

1:44:56Nobody wants them to not be successful. But it is speculative on the capital's part. So these are not build-to-suits. We're not sort of buying land with a tenant in tow. So we're buying land and getting the development going and risking capital to make sure that they have it on time that they need it. A friend of mine is in the art business. I know you're a collector. He was telling me over the weekend about what a mess the art world is right now in the art industry. Does that make it a great time to be a collector?

1:45:32What I love about art collecting is it's a lot like investing. Yeah, you want to buy low and sell high. So if the market's in turmoil and it's bad, it's probably a good time to acquire things that you love before a correction upward. But how have you been approaching it? Yeah, I would say exactly that. I think the art market, the argument is always bet on art history. So what's fascinating about art is it captures this moment in time where there's a shift in perspective or ideas or thinking. and that's where the great art really is and the value tends to be captured in those pieces and so I would say my particular art investment leanings, collectings are on what's big in our history I just picked up a Dan Flavin who was famous for light bulb art in the 60s and so I got the piece this month the first piece he ever did with multiple light bulbs and the whole thesis to that is, well, one, it's beautiful and I love it, but two, it's an important moment in art history.

1:46:43And so it's like betting on core real estate or I suppose a great tech company that's building something brand new. Does buying a historically significant piece of art feel more risky than buying, than buying, let's say, like a rundown building or a building like you described in Chicago? Or does it feel about the same? Do you have a similar confidence level when buying both? I would say what I love is both of them have a lot of specialized knowledge. And so if you have the specialized knowledge, you can do sort of that risk-adjusted analysis. So I would say they feel equivalent to me, at least the ones that I've been, the bets that I were making feel equivalent to me, but, you know, data centers, uh, adaptive reuse, you know, real estate, all, all of that is just highly specialized.

1:47:39Right. And so, so, you know, I like a lot of people, I surround myself with other really smart people to give me good guidance, but it feels like a safe bet. Have you ever thought of combining the two passions? I know that you're describing this glass building, which, which sounds amazing, but have you thought about working with a contemporary artist to try to make the world's most beautiful data center. I feel like that would be a good kind of flagship project for you that I at least would like to see. Yeah. Yes. We have some things in the works in Chicago. In fact, uh, one of my favorite, this is maybe slightly different than where you're going, but my favorite example of this is what Louis Vuitton did on fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where they wrapped a construction project in what looks like a giant Louis Vuitton trunk and I have an apartment right around the corner from it and I see people photograph it constantly.

1:48:30And, and I love that idea, but, but I keep thinking, can we wrap data centers in something that's interesting and beautiful that, that people want to photograph instead of hate? Yeah. Something where if aliens are, are monitoring us, they're like, what, what are these crazy things that they're so obsessed with? Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Yeah, thanks for the update. Have a fantastic week. Yeah, absolutely. Pleasure. Thanks for having me. We'll talk soon, Daniel. Cheers. Goodbye. Our next guest is the president and head of artificial intelligence at Replit.

1:49:07Michaela is in the waiting room. And we're excited to talk all things Vibe Coding. The shift from Vibe Coding to Vibe Building. Break it down for us. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. How are you doing? Thanks so much for taking the time. We're doing great. Three-day weekend. What did you build? Ooh, good question. I built a sunburn on my back. I worked hard. I was flying to Paris. I'm calling you from Paris for now. I'm going to be sticking to the race summit. Well, thanks for staying up late. So why don't you set the table for us, introduce yourself a little bit, and explain how you fit into the organization and what the top projects are for Repl.it and your world they are these days.

1:49:57Yeah, so as you said, I'm president and head of AI. Basically, it means everything technical the company currently rolls up to me. I'm the person who came up with the push of creating Repl.it agent and led the project from day one. And this happened back in September 2024. If you recall, backcoding didn't even exist as a term back then. It was coined in February 2025, if I recall correctly. So we're the first one to launch in the space and we basically pioneered and we charted this new market that keeps expanding like crazy. We had four major agent releases in the meantime. And if anything, I'm more excited about the months that are about to come rather than the crazy roller coaster we went through in the last couple of years.

1:50:40Because the capabilities are expanding so much that naturally the scope we have as a company will just extend like crazy. So pitch me like it's three months from now. It's September and October. And I'm non-technical. Someone who has heard about the AI boom but doesn't really know where to start. What are you instructing someone in a few months from now? How should they be interacting with Replit and Replit agents to do something? What's a good Hello World on Absolute Steroids project for them to get started with? Think about it this way. For the last two years at least, we've been talking about agents all the time, but it's still extremely difficult for everyone to build their own agents.

1:51:26And in a sense, we've been lucky because a company like Rural Rep could grow so much because we pioneered the space. But now I want everyone to be capable of creating their own agents. And the reason is fairly simple. If I can make a prediction, I do believe that sooner than later, we're going to be seeing far fewer apps being used rather than agents. And the reason is we built UI as we built computers in this way in the last decades, because the only way we had to interact with them was keyboards and mouse and click and data input, which is very much error prone. The way you work inside is you talk to your colleagues, you discuss, you decide what to do, you express in natural language or intent, and then you either delegate or you get the job done yourself.

1:52:11But guess what? Agents do exactly that. The more autonomous we make them, the more capable we make them, the more they're going to be able to complete tasks end-to-end. And I want everyone to be capable of building their own customized agents. So three months from today, if we chat again, I will be mostly talking about that. And our product will be pushing that direction very much. Okay. Talk to me about the split between these three use cases that I see coding agents generally being used for. One is the ad hoc, go and do something, pull a bunch of information. I did this most recently looking around my neighborhood, looking at different lots and registrations of the government.

1:52:57Go pull a bunch of data, organize it into a spreadsheet, turn that spreadsheet into an infographic, work through all of that. Like you were a super powerful executive assistant who knew how to write Python and scrape the web to produce a single report. Basically, deep research on steroids. Then the second bucket that I see a lot is I want a daily summary. I want you to do something for me that requires AI and LLMs to summarize information, put something together, something that runs continuously. And then the third is go build me a piece of software one time, deterministic software, and then I will interact with that software on a regular basis.

1:53:34So Ben Thompson just went on a vibe coding journey. He built an inventory management system for his house. It is a piece of deterministic software that runs on his local network. And then once he is interacting with it, it is pure deterministic software. There is no AI inference that's happening, really. Maybe it calls out to an API. But those three buckets, is that a good way to think about the way people are using AI today? What's the breakdown, and how do you see it evolving? I think it's a great way and the last bucket you mentioned the deterministic software, the fact that you can build a lot of internal tools and you see a lot of solopreneurs creating software 0-1 on replete that's where most of the effort went in the last couple of years.

1:54:21I think we're going to be seeing a shift very quickly away from that. Apps are not going to be disappearing overnight, they still play a role. SaaS will play a role in companies for a long, long time but it's also true that some of the software can be replaced by agents accomplishing tasks hand to hand and that's what i think if yeah and is that is that is that the fat models like you used to go to an llm and ask it to do two plus two and it would guess four then it was able to write a little bit of python but and and that's just expanding to the point where the actual LLM itself, the API for the model can do more and more capabilities and the agent harness will be able to do more and more as well.

1:55:06So you essentially instantiate whatever software you need ad hoc on the fly and you expect that to grow. Exactly right. LLMs have become much better at long horizon tasks. You see them working like even four hours in a row. The additional layer that we put on top of them, the agent harnesses are such that you You can also introduce verification criteria so that, for example, you come up with a high-level goal. Say you've built an app on Rabbit and then you want to optimize the conversion rate and you set a 5 % as a goal. But guess what? You can have an agent doing that for you. You don't have to prompt it on the specifics for how to make that happen.

1:55:46He will connect to your app. The agent will decide to improve conversions. Maybe I need to change the copy of the website. Maybe I need different images. Maybe I need a different pricing page. And And then you keep measuring until it accomplishes the goal. That's what you've been hearing more and more being told in the industry as loops. And I would call this like the post-prompting era. We don't put much effort in prompting anymore. Even if you hear anthropic researchers and engineers explaining how to use Fable 5, the main insight is stop giving it prescriptions, stop giving it rules. Just tell the model what you want to accomplish and then trust the process.

1:56:24But that's the type of product I think we're going to be seeing more and more in the future. The goal finding, Jordi. The goal finding, exactly. You mentioned, going back to your earlier call out on people building customized agents.

1:56:44Is this entirely personal software? Or do you see this as one-person companies where they'll build an agent and sell it to other people? Is it both? I'm having trouble. I've been just experimenting lately and trying to, every time I think, oh, I should try to use, oh, I need some information from an app. So, like, I use Surf Report as an example. Like, I'll just ask Chad, hey, what's the Surf Report for this spot? And it does it quite well. You can do it for the weather. You can do it for so many different apps. And I expect that agents, as they get better and better, will just be able to, anything that I could imagine a custom agent to do personally, the agent, the models can just do.

1:57:33And I've seen this a lot where people will go and build a vibe code, a solution to something that the model can do natively. And then you'll be like, yeah, I have a piece of determinants of software that does all, it summarizes all my emails. And it's like, well, you can actually just integrate your email directly. Yeah, and so part of me is like I just don't know if I'm being creative enough to think of use cases or what. The role of time to be as creative as possible is you need to think in general terms. You don't have to narrow down on, I want an agent that helps me to connect to the few applications that I use on a daily basis.

1:58:11You need to start to think in goals. And the moment you have a goal and you want to get some type of work done, then allow the agent to decide what are the steps necessary and allow the agent to create the code in order to make that happen. Now there is one advantage only if you actually create a piece of deterministic software, is that you trade that inflexibility for the cost of tokens. So every time you just allow the model to do the majority of the work, you're actually spending quite a bit of money, especially if you need to use frontier capabilities. So a lot of the tools, the internal tools built on Rapid today, they tend to be very deterministic also for the reason, because if they start to be used by hundreds of thousands of people in a company, you don't want them to be hitting with the frontier models.

1:58:56Otherwise, it's financially responsible to do that. Last question for me. Get me up to speed on the state of solopreneurship. And I want a prediction from you on when you think we'll see the first one person, one billion dollar company. It doesn't really happen. You probably read about that on the New York Times. I don't think that one counted. I don't think it counted. It was close, but there were too many complaints from customers. It seemed like they bent the rules of the marketing and they were getting hit with some FTC, FDA issues. I want a clean$1 billion valuation. Let's give it another shot.

1:59:44I will say by the end of the year. We have several nine-figure companies built on Rapids. so it's going to happen yeah we're almost there I love it I love it well yeah definitely shoot us a note when it happens if you see it inside Replit have them pitch us we'd love to talk to them hold me accountable yeah yeah but thank you so much for coming on the show great to meet you enjoy France safe travels safe travels and we'll talk to you soon goodbye will do thank you guys goodbye should we close out with this Raul post die selling post-trained open source models If you don't own your own models, you don't own anything.

2:00:23Guy selling harness on top of models, if you rely on one model, you are cooked. Guy selling tokens, instead of manually prompting your models, just put them in a loop where they prompt themselves. And Paula says, guy selling GPUs, yes. Yes. Which is accurate. Everyone has a very different version of their modern sales pitch. We did not. Let's close out on this. Yeah. What? Tony Robbins says his AI agent bought a robot dog to merge with. Oh, I didn't realize it was a dog. I thought it was a humanoid, but he's talking to Ray Kurzweil. It's a one-minute clip. We'll pull this up and play Tony Robbins in conversation with Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, one of the most accurate AI forecasters in history.

2:01:10Ray Kurzweil called the date of the Turing test 20 years in advance, almost to the day. Very impressive forecast. he's calling singularity 2035 i think maybe 2040 this might be technology's daily show but today is not our day with technology but this this is not a technology issue this is a this is a near peer adversary attacking us they want to keep us from watching this video and so well people are talking about a space xai rebrand oh what's going on i thought that was already a thing. I thought they already said they were going to call it SpaceX AI, which really is sort of a mouthful. Let's pull up this video.

2:01:54SpaceX is doing well. It's still a$2 trillion company. The float is still low and they're unlocking more and more of the shares, but the value has been holding strong north of$2 trillion, which I think a lot of folks who were giving very bearish takes saying that, oh, the company doesn't make that much money, that it It would be, you know, it would be worth a paltry,$100 billion by now. But no, it has been cooking. Don't try and pull things up, George. This video live stream does not have the technology to do live video. The timeline was in turmoil before the break on July 2nd over some Anderle SPV action that happened.

2:02:36And Matt Grimm took a shot at Paki McCormick saying that Not Boring raised an SPV that bought into around a couple of years ago Vanderall. And then Paki came back, set the record straight and said that he didn't sell. And that, in fact, it was an LP that had sold. And it all underscores just how complicated some of these later stage investing deals get. But sometimes if you're an investor and you have an LP and they're going through some financial situation, maybe a divorce, maybe a lawsuit, they could need liquidity for something, they're moving things around. The ask can be more serious than I think people normally jump to.

2:03:21They always jump to, oh, they're just trying to flip the stock or something. And that is not the activity that you want to have happen. But it is a very tricky situation. Lots of gray areas. And I think the end result is that open conversation almost always benefits. No surprises is the rule. And also, I don't think you should be able to buy or sell Anderil Secondary unless you can beat Matt Grimm in a MRF. I think that would solve a lot of this. I think it should all come down to your MRF time. In order to redeem your shares in Anderil, you should have to post video evidence of you doing a MRF.

2:03:56probably sub 45 minutes, maybe sub 40 minutes would be ideal to really get access. That is the future of investor relations. Could apply to all companies, honestly. You want to buy or sell, you got to run a mile, do 100 pull-ups, 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups? 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats. 300 squats. He's been practicing. He's trying to get in on the next Android SPV for sure. Win Matt over. Anything else you want to touch on today, Jordy? Yes, Ben, the video is playing for me. Okay, well, it's a skill issue apparently. It is a skill issue. Anyways, folks, Portugal, Spain, 0-0 at the half.

2:04:41We missed nothing. We missed nothing. Thanks for tuning in with us. We'll be back tomorrow. It's July. That means we get a little silly around here. You're going to hear lots of car questions from our interviewers, for our guests. But if you have tech news, hit us up. You know, it is funny. It is funny. You know, we get into these slower summer months, and then all of a sudden you have just insane days. Yeah. So you've got to be live every day. You've got to be ready. Yeah, I mean, the basic cycle of tech news will slow down. Venture capitalists are famously on vacation from May 15th to September 27th, right?

2:05:20That's when they go on vacation, right? I think usually mid-October is like realistically. When they come back, yeah. But that leaves opportunities. Last year we got the talent wars. Zuck didn't take any breaks. He was poached in left and right. So there's always a chance we get a wild card. But things have been slow. So lots of time to discuss vehicles and other fun topics. But stay with us. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Have a great week. Have a great day. Let's go USA. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Say it right up for our newsletter, tppn.com.