Loading summary
Transcript760 lines
- [00:01]
Jordy
You're watching TVPN.
- [00:03]
John
Today is Wednesday, April 1, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome template technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital 50th anniversary anniversary of Apple. We're very excited. Eddie Q is joining at 12:10. We're going to go through his has
- [00:19]
Jordy
to be one of the most elaborate April Fool's jokes building a company for 50 years.
- [00:24]
John
Yeah, that is incredible.
- [00:25]
Jordy
It's a really good bit.
- [00:26]
John
It's a hilarious. Just create trillions of dollars in shareholder value.
- [00:30]
Jordy
Like just kind of as like a bit with your voice.
- [00:33]
John
Yeah, it's great. Yeah, I can actually hear you really well on this because I have three sets of headphones on now. I have headphones.
- [00:39]
Jordy
You can't even tell that I've got these new AirPod Pro Max.
- [00:44]
John
The Pro Max AirPod Max. Anyway, we are very excited that Eddy Q is joining. We're also excited about ramp.com time is money save, both easy use corporate cards, GoPay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Well, we're also excited about the rest of our linear lineup. So let's pull up the linear lineup. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspace linear are using agent.
- [01:04]
Jordy
We have Eddie Q at 12:10.
- [01:07]
John
Gary Tanz coming in.
- [01:09]
Jordy
We have Aaron Tarazas using fresh data signaling. He's got fresh data signaling a rebound in small business hiring and labor market activity.
- [01:18]
John
Love it.
- [01:19]
Jordy
We have from Gusto Pratap from Arena Physica. Oh, we printed on both sides Abhishek Das got a new product turning web agents from monitors into autonomous task executors. And of course, Gary Tan as John closed out with a new line of code world champion.
- [01:35]
John
Yeah, line of code world champion. I think a lot of people have questions about, you know, how much is Gary doing himself? What does he think about the future for YC companies? I think no one really disputes the question that in the vibe coding world, the role of a startup changes. The roles change. Everyone's sort of coding, pushing code. Very interesting to hear. You know, YC's typically gone after teams that are highly technical. Does that change in the future? There's a lot to answer and of course we'll be digging into Gstack and Gary's list and then trying to understand what the goal is there, what's real, what's a meme. He's obviously trolling people. He's a master of the timeline. So that will be fun to dig into. But we got to kick it off with this video from NASA administrator and more importantly, former TVPN guest Jared Isaacman. He says, tomorrow we launched at sunset. Tonight, Artemis 2 waits on the pad ready to carry astronauts potentially farther than any humans have traveled in more than half a century. The next era of exploration.
- [02:39]
Jordy
We have the countdown here right next to John.
- [02:42]
Pratap
Yes.
- [02:42]
John
So it is about 4 hours and 20 something minutes until the launch starts. You know, they might delay by a few minutes. Who knows, they might scratch entirely. But if things go to plan, the official NASA stream, it's up now, but stay with us. And then once we wrap in about three hours, head over there and watch NASA take you through the final stage of the Artemis II launch. But let's play NASA administrator Jared Isaacsman's video because it's very exciting. This is what I lived for as a young child and what I live for to today. 50 years, very. You know, a lot of people, people have been going back and forth. SpaceX versus SLS. I think it's more rockets, the better. More space launch capacity, the better. I want 10 of these companies, I want them all to be successful. Very exciting. Well, we will be following it closely throughout the day. We might get updates, we might have breaking news. Apostruck says you can hate SLS for being obsolete, massively late and over budget. I certainly do. But you got to concede it looks incredible. And I couldn't agree. More importantly, some people were joking around saying the space shuttle is launching today. They're not using the space shuttle because they're going farther than they normally go with the space shuttle. And the space shuttle was decommissioned. So then the astronauts will be in a pod on top. Capsule mode. Exactly. Capsule.
- [04:14]
Jordy
Blake Scholl shares. I'm genuinely excited to see America headed back to the moon, back around the moon. But Artemis is a moondog.
- [04:22]
John
That's a good wombo. That's a really good wombo. Wombos are the new meta. We'll be breaking it down soon.
- [04:28]
Jordy
You don't even need to Lorraine it.
- [04:30]
John
You don't.
- [04:30]
Jordy
It's just plainly. Yeah, brain is lore. And explain.
- [04:34]
John
Lore, explain.
- [04:35]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah. Remember that Apollo did not result in durable progress in space. It marked a literal high point. For more than half a century, the cost of space access remained prohibitively high until we had a rebirth of space entrepreneurship. Thank you for showing the way. SpaceX. Apollo was history's greatest tech demo. The moon landing. This is inspiring. It shows the triumph of ingenuity, science and reason. But also Apollo led to half a century of stasis and regression yeah, complacent. It was fundamentally uneconomic, contributed to creation of a cost insensitive space agency and supply base. All more concerned with perpetuating their own existence. More concerned with make work jobs than accelerating human progress. Now we're going back to the mood, essentially the same way we did in 1969, again uneconomically, again with central planning, a disposable rocket, no answer to how we create a self sustaining lunar economy. Again we're taking communist approaches in competition with the communists. Communism didn't work for the Russians and it won't work for America either. The sooner we can get done with this Moondoggle, the better. But there's also reason to be optimistic. This time around. There's a nascent commercially led vision for the moon. Lunar hotels, mass drivers, data centers in space, Helium 3. The commercial programs that gave SpaceX an early assistant show a different and better path forward. This is where the better future lies. And this is where America should be focused. America should take the moon and we should take it the same way we took the American West. Let's encourage and protect lunar value creation. How about a homestead act for the moon? Most important, let's stop dumping money and more importantly, the time of our engineers and scientists on glory projects that will never lead to a better future. It is indeed time for another space race. Last time we fought communism with communism. This time let's remember what made America great. This time let's fight communism with capitalism.
- [06:23]
John
Yeah, there's some good points in here. I think the flip side of this is that we are in a wildly different position than 1969 in terms of the maturity of this lunar economy, the space ecosystem. We have SpaceX filed for IPO today. You're looking at a trillion dollar company. It will instantly be one of the largest companies in the world. It already is. But in the public markets, when it goes, you have a lot of companies and startups and venture capitalists that are fully ready to commercialize any findings that come out of this and see this as an inspirational moment. And overall it just feels like 1969. The capital markets, the entrepreneurship, the capitalism was not quite ready for. Okay, let's take this to the next step. Let's privatize this. Let's build businesses around this. It was much more of a science experiment that went off into its corner and then was not immediately capitalized on. But I think this time could be different at the same time. I do understand what he's saying.
- [07:30]
Jordy
Yeah. Ryan and Hunter over at Pirate Wires shared, they wrote about this mission in pirate wires today. And they shared a quote from Jared last where week saying this time he said the goal is not flags and footprints. This time the goal is to stay. America will never again give up the moon. So I think generally, generally aligned with. Generally aligned with what Blake is saying.
- [08:00]
John
Tyler, what's your take on this?
- [08:02]
Tyler
Yeah, I was just going to say I think Blake is kind of underestimating the value of just like vibes.
- [08:07]
John
Yeah.
- [08:07]
Tyler
Like people have been pretty black pilled on the moon.
- [08:10]
John
Totally.
- [08:10]
Tyler
I think for the last, I mean, basically since like everything kind of stopped.
- [08:14]
John
Yeah.
- [08:15]
Tyler
So if you can just have like a white pill, everyone's like, sure. Like, maybe it's not a good idea to continually launch these to the moon. They're not economical.
- [08:21]
Aaron Tarazas
Yeah.
- [08:21]
Tyler
But if you can just get one and say like, yeah, we actually, we can still do this.
- [08:24]
John
Yeah. It's also, I mean it's, it's over budget, but as a percentage of gdp, it has to be a fraction of what we spent in 1969. So on a relative basis it's a, it's a, maybe a better investment. And yeah, I do think that there's something that's just inspiring about being able to do something like this and prove that we still got it.
- [08:43]
Tyler
I also like from Hunter and Ryan's post, you know, they're dropping the article. It's just moon, right? It's not the moon.
- [08:49]
John
Yes, yes.
- [08:50]
Tyler
I like this idea.
- [08:51]
John
Yes. We only got one, so we can just say moon. It has its own name, you know. You don't say the California, the Texas, the Florida. You just say moon. You say Texas, Florida. Let's watch this video of Neil Armstrong ejecting just seconds before his lunar trailing training vehicle crashed.
- [09:07]
Jordy
Space cowboy.
- [09:08]
John
Space cowboy. True heroism here. This is such a crazy video. I had no idea this happened. Good music too. What is this? Interstellar? Yeah.
- [09:18]
Sam
Oh, yeah.
- [09:21]
John
Like, how did he know it was not gonna go? Oh, it's tipping. Okay. I would definitely know. That would be very obvious that you would want to get out of there at that point.
- [09:29]
Gary Tan
Wow.
- [09:30]
John
And he gets out on the parachute. I wonder, I wonder how much of that was like planned to be. Okay, we're testing the ejector seat. Or he just knew. Okay, I got a. Yeah. Why haven't I seen this video? It's been available on the Internet for a long time. It just doesn't get a lot of views. Well, it is getting a lot of views today. It was called nicknamed flying Bedstead for good reason. It looked like a bed frame and it flew like one too. Yeah, flying that on Earth. It's not exactly the most aerodynamic vehicle, but Kalshi has a market on when will Artemis II launch? It is soaring. We are now at 89% before April 2nd. So 89% chance it launches to basically 92% chance that it launches before April 4th. And there's more information there. So in general, like even, even it scratches all the way to May to the end of April, you're still looking at a 95% chance. So everyone is very optimistic that this launch will happen and we're excited to keep following it. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike, your business's AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows develop what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So Jamie Dimon's been on an absolute tear. He is hiring people. He's restating his vision for America. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal here. He has a plan for JP Morgan to rescue the American Dream. That's a very exciting idea and it is in the Wall Street Journal. I think it's in the print edition, maybe today, which I'd love to Jamie Dimon, is he in here? I don't know. Maybe he is yesterday. Anyway, let's run through Jamie Dimon's plan for America. He's running. I think he should. Jamie Dimon thinks the American Dream is on life support and he is planning for JPMorgan Chase to step in. The nation's largest bank announced the American Dream initiative on Tuesday, a commitment from JP Morgan to support small businesses, homeownership, access to health care and other economic priorities that Dimon believes are crucial for the well being of Americans. The bank already finances all of the above and says it's ready to put more resources into the effort. Dimon, 70 years old and CEO of JP Morgan since 2006, has long worried about the future of the American economy and wealth inequality. More recently, he has warned that the country is sleepwalking into economic stasis thanks to bad policies and rules that make it hard to invest in new ventures and run companies. I am deeply frustrated by our own policies in America, he said last week at the Hill and Valley Forum, which we covered. We've become like Europe. We're unable to move and change. That's strong words. J.P. morgan hasn't been slowed, bringing in more profit than any bank in the U.S. history, in U.S. history. But it reaches across Main street and Wall street and does better when the whole economy is chugging along. Dimon has a habit of making big commitments a little bit. It's a big commitment having that on. Dimon has a habit of making big commitments in tune with the zeitgeist, JP Morgan announced a $1.5 trillion investment platform focused on national security and supply chains just as the federal government started to invest in critical suppliers. It made a $30 billion racial equity commitment after the murder of George Floyd and a $2.5 trillion climate change plan in 2021. Now the bank is committing to adding 3 million new small business customers on top of 7 million today. They want to get to 10, they want to get to 10 million. And it wants to lend them up to 80 billion over the next 10 years through loans and support for community oriented banks and investment funds. The bank reported 33 billion of loans to other customers at the end of 2025. So they want to expand significantly. It's just a 30% bump in total number of small businesses, but they want to basically triple the amount of the loan book. Broadly, the American Dream means you can buy a home, start a business, you can build wealth and you can afford health care for your family. JP Morgan's head of corporate responsibility, Tim Berry said in an interview. We want to bring our capabilities and make that more real to families and customers. Barry, the chief operating officer, said they're helming the new American Dream initiative and acknowledge that a lot of it isn't really new. JPMorgan has been looking to grow deeper roots in the cities and towns where it does business, rolling out specialty branches focused on community education. For years it has invested big in cities where it has found business friendly leadership, including Detroit and San Francisco. The initiative and ambitious goals are supposed to jumpstart JP Morgan bankers and employees to do more. When we think about the impact that we've had locally in a place like Detroit, we know that success can be replicated in other places. So they are opening up the pocketbook to spur small business. Very exciting. In other Jamie Dimon news, he just hired or recently hired Warren Buffett's protege. There's a profile in Barron's by Andy Serwer. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon doesn't usually make high profile outside hires for his senior executive team, preferring instead the homegrown variety that makes Todd Combs, formerly a top investment manager Berkshire Hathaway poached and brought in to head up JPMorgan's Chase new 10 billion strategic investment group. An exception, except that Holmes is hardly a bolt from the blue. I like that. That's a good turn of phrase, having served on JP Morgan's board since 2016. Okay, so he's board member, so he clearly knows everyone already, he says. I know the company well, combs tells Barron's in his first interview as a bank employee. I know everyone from Jamie to the operating committee and the next layer of management. I'm well aware of the balance sheet, the excess capital and how Jamie and the team think and operate. Like the bank's other top executives, Combs, who's been CEO of Berkshire Geico Insurance Unit, is still settling into his new office on the 47th floor of J.P. morgan's new Manhattan headquarters. I hope you don't mind the warm office, says Combs, a tennis playing Florida native. I don't like the cold, he says. Combs mapped out his new gig, which began in January, on a two column chart he sketched on a notepad. Interesting. He's old school. Old school.
- [15:52]
Jordy
Powerful.
- [15:53]
John
He's not creating a second brain, he's just ripping it on a notepad. On the left are five rows of industries such as defense, supply chain reindustrialization. On the right are their future manifestations such as defense tech, US Semiconductors, respectively. The plan is to invest in everything our country has outsourced and abdicated over recent decades, combs says. We want to invest in places where the puck is going so that America can control its own future. That means deploying the group's 10 billion into middle market and large companies in US defense, aerospace, healthcare and energy sectors to help them grow. Recent investments include mining company Perpetual Resources and defense tech startup Shield AI. Combs, who reports to diamond, will also act as a special advisor to the CEO. Combs endeavor is part of the Security and Resiliency initiative JP Morgan announced in October, in which the bank will commit to facilitating 1.5 trillion in investments for companies deemed critical to the national economic security and resiliency. He joins the Initiatives External Advisory Council, chaired by Dimon, which includes Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Condoleezza Rice. What a stacked roster. Combs says investments come to him directly or through Jamie or other senior bankers. What about the Trump administration? There are times that they'll reach out and look for our help, like Intel. I can imagine we want to be a good partner to the government regardless of who's in charge. It's the GOP now. It can be someone else in the future. We're trying to Let capitalism send the right signal. We'll look at every opportunity on its own merit. We want an impact and a return. Highly regarded as an investor, Combs is a boyish looking 55. He helped return Geico, which was burdened with outdated technology and bloated cost to profitability. Berkshire watchers thought he might play a role in the company's post Warren Buffett era, either overseeing its multibillion dollar investment portfolio or its massive insurance operations. Or he could have been up for other high profile jobs. But why this one? It's a unique opportunity with both Jamie and the institution and the mission of the job, combs says. This is critical to the future of the country. You want to find things in life that are big and important, that are worth doing and doable. Combs has an anti bucket list for his new role. I had about 10 or 12 things that I didn't want. The anti bucket list list is sort of, sort of underrated. Your anti bucket list is just never go skydiving. I don't want that to happen. Never buy a car.
- [18:19]
Jordy
Never visit.
- [18:20]
John
Never buy a skydiving.
- [18:20]
Jordy
Never visit 30 countries.
- [18:22]
John
Become supercar less dumbest thing, he says. Jamie and I would talk every day after he brought this role for me. I didn't want to be measured on var, which stands for Value at Risk, a statistical measure that quantifies financial risk. I didn't want to get bogged down in bureaucracy. None of that occurred. In fact, it's better than I could have imagined. I'm sure there will be rough spots that will happen when I make a bad investment, which is invariably going to happen. Was jumping from board member to management awkward? No, he says. I'd like to think that there's an implicit trust factor because of the decade of relationships. I don't need years of random interaction. Getting up to speed. He talks about riding the subway with Laurie Beer, the bank's global chief information officer. Back to our respective residency the other night and talking about our tech roadmap for a specific vendor. We're being pitched on a $500 million deal and walking it down the hall to Troy and Doug, the co CEOs of J.P. morgan's Commercial Investment Bank. As for Combs role as a strategic advisor to Dimon, he says that's about looking at the bank's operation from an outside perspective. It's a kind of investor mindset. You see failure everywhere, all the time. Whereas maybe inside a firm you can have an insular view. He didn't talk much about his time at Berkshire. He Said I was back and forth from Omaha to D.C. for six years running GEICO. That was a long time. I'm very proud not to go down that rabbit hole of what we accomplished at Geico. Berkshire is an animal unto itself that is completely unique. I like that he's probably just saying like it's a unique animal, like it's a unique species. But I like to think that he's like, it's an absolute animal.
- [19:55]
Jordy
And I'm an absolute dog.
- [19:56]
John
And I'm an absolute dog. Well, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. And let me also tell you about Turbo Puffer, Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.
- [20:11]
Jordy
Why is no one talking about Snapchat?
- [20:15]
John
Explain.
- [20:16]
Jordy
Irenecapital came out seeing Snap now with a well executed activist campaign. Let's see, I'm pulling up there does
- [20:29]
John
feel like there's a big opportunity with AI better targeting. Like I'm, I'm receptive to this pitch but I want to hear it from Irenek. I know that this is an activist, an activist shareholder. This could be very, very confrontational.
- [20:44]
Jordy
Yes. They come out with a website, savesnapnow.com you land on the website, they hit you with Snap. Back to reality.
- [20:52]
Sam
Yep.
- [20:53]
Jordy
So taking a fun approach here. They say Snap has the potential to be a great company and a double AI winner through meaningfully improved operating efficiency and monetization. Irene has outlined six steps to 7x SNAP share price to $26 per share. They put together a presentation as well as a letter. I'll kind of read through some of the highlights. They say at Snap's crucible moment, AI creates a dual pronged opportunity for significant cost cuts and accelerated product development. So they go into cost improvements, monetization, governance. On the cost side, they want to spin or shut down specs. I'm sure Evan like happening right there was the spin that was happening. The spin is seemingly in the works. There were some leaks over the last six months around that. So I would expect that to happen. They want to rationalize cost. I can and should replace many existing roles. Now remember the, the constant criticism of Snap has been the stock based comp. If you actually look at it, they from, from the kind of rough math we were doing like every 10 years they're basically giving the entire company.
- [21:59]
John
Yeah.
- [22:00]
Jordy
To. To the team. And so investors, long term investors have been very frustrated by that and it
- [22:07]
John
always has been weird because I understand that like back in the day when they were competing directly with Twitter and Meta and Instagram and Reddit and all these different upstart high growth social networking companies, I believe the talent war thesis, it makes sense that they would have to probably pay top dollar. But you have to imagine that as the business has stabilized, there are people that would come into the organization that would be happy to just have a salary and just do the work because it's better than working at another company. It's not necessarily like the AI talent war or the social media talent war that I'm sure happened back 10 years ago. It's a different time, so maybe different structure.
- [22:55]
Jordy
Yeah. So Sage Snap now is recommending a thousand person Rift to get fit and competitive and to empower your highest performers. Again, if you're Evan reading empower your highest performers, you're probably thinking like, oh geez, I never thought of that.
- [23:13]
John
But again, they do have 5261 employees as of late 2025. So this would represent roughly a 20% riff. Not block level cuts, but more in line with what we're seeing at Oracle, Meta, some other tech companies that are
- [23:29]
Jordy
going through a transformation on monetization. The recommendation is to improve monetization, which I think is a good idea for any business. But they say AI will massively accelerate product development and enhance advertising monetization tools. Again, everyone by this point should be well aware that Meta has done a fantastic job in leveraging AI ML to just make a better and better and better ads process. Yep, and they say product led improvements across users, advertisers and subscriptions to break out of Snap's monetization ceiling. Then they say deploy AI properly, monetize Snap's proprietary AI data sets and then concentrate AI partnerships on clear winners like Gemini, OpenAI and Anthropic. Again, Snap partnered with Perplexity and it seemed like Snap got a fantastic deal out of that. It was something like a $400 million deal, if I remember correctly. Some of it was stock and Perplexity, but there was a huge cash component and unclear if the other Companies mentioned Gemini, OpenAI or Anthropic would have been able to match how aggressive Perplexity was getting. And so it's possible Snap's logic was, hey, we can do this deal with Perplexity and then it's native in our app. It's easy enough to swap it out at a later date. It's like basically take the cash while we can get it.
- [25:02]
John
Yeah. I saw this post from Sean Frank that Somewhat relates. He was talking about one of our sponsors, Applovin, which I will tell you about in a second. But he said, in less than 12 months I've spent 2,872,000 of my own money profitably on Applovin. I don't own the stock, I don't trade the stock. This is the net amount of money that left my bank account. And he shares a couple other points and he says he's spending 17,000. So 2.8 million on AppLovin, clearly like a scalable large platform. Spent 17,000 on Pinterest, 266,000 on Reddit. You have to imagine that Meta ads are up there. But the question is, for a lot of advertisers, Snap has not become this like, oh sure, maybe you don't get, maybe it's not going to be your number one platform, but it's in the marketing mix very regularly and I think a lot of that should start working even if the pool isn't super deep, even if you don't have 99% of your customers there, maybe only 20% of your customers are there. But even if they're there, you should be able to find them and AI can help that. And so I would expect that if this works, you'd see like really solid data from Ridge saying like, oh yeah, we're spending on Snap.
- [26:11]
Jordy
Yeah. And they've been experimenting with Snap as far back as 2018 when I was hanging out with Sean and Connor. Back then they were getting results on Snap, but there was a ceiling. Then finally they want to, on the governance side, commit to investing in safety and capital return, use newfound cash and profitability to further invest in privacy, safety and parental controls and allocate new cash flow generation to capital return and demonstrate conviction in Snap's creation. Yeah, it's interesting on the parental control and safety side, I don't think, I think Snap has been able to stay out of the at least Lanier's targets. Oh, they ended up.
- [26:51]
John
Yeah, they settled before it went to trial. Oh, Meta and Google fought it.
- [26:55]
Jordy
Interesting.
- [26:56]
John
And so yeah, I'm not exactly sure what that, what that means, but I think that they've been trying to sort of like step back from all of that.
- [27:02]
Jordy
Yeah. And then on the corporate government side, giving shareholders a vote can unlock a multiple re rate through broader index illusion. And enabling one vote per class A share still preserves Snap as a founder controlled company.
- [27:16]
John
Probably 10x voting power like that.
- [27:19]
Jordy
Anyways, there is a 70 page slide deck that they put together with all these different recommendations well, the market's reacting
- [27:27]
John
really popular, really positively to this and I think Evan Spiegel has shared some some statements that sort of mirror this. Actually, it seems like there's a maybe a little bit more reception than you might expect. The stock's up 14% one day after publishing this piece, says Bose Weinstein. Adam is a rock star in the making. So smart. Definitely worth a follow. And that's Irene.
- [27:51]
Jordy
Cap carried no interest, gave some feedback on Irene. He said a few critiques Feedback Daily opens are not equal to time spent on app. App Love and Meta clearly have higher time spent on app, but therefore parity on monetization is flawed. Arguing that Snapchat can hit targeting levels of Meta is farciful. The amount of data that Meta has on me versus Snapchat is astronomically different. I guess I'm open to being proven wrong since you compare it to Applovin, who IMO has always used other targeting sources. 3 Proprietary data slide is a one time flash in a pan moment. Sure some companies are selling deranged amount of data, but it's that's not lasting. MRR ARR monitor monetization although it is fair to call them out on it. I like the monetization per user slide. I think my feedback around Snap's ability to monetize relative to those peers stands literally. Screen time is much lower and you don't have data for targeting the way peers do. And what else was relevant? Calling out the founder's net worth growth was either God tier petty or brilliant or some combination of both. Fun presentation.
- [28:54]
John
Fun presentation. Well you can go check it out. Arena Capital as opposed to it Save Snap. Now you can listen to our interviews. I think, I think a TVPN slide or quote made it into one of these presentations.
- [29:09]
Jordy
Where was it?
- [29:10]
John
I think we're in.
- [29:11]
Jordy
Yeah, it was. It was on the slide. I should be an accelerant for Snap's core ads business. As Zuck had said on Q4 earnings. He said we're also working on merging alarms with the recommendation systems that power Facebook Instagram threads in our ad system. Our world class recommendation systems are already driving meaningful growth across our apps and ads business. But we think that the current systems are primitive compared to what will be possible soon. Adam at Applovin said, if we believe that AI technologies are going to be two times more efficacious in five years, just based off of that, if we do our job right, our system is going to be two times more predictive for its task. The sequence of problems that it's predicting in five years. And speaking Evan said our Smart Campaign Solution suite, including Smart Targeting and Smart Budget, uses AI to identify incremental high value audiences and dynamically allocate spend across objectives, reducing the need for manual setup and ongoing optimization. And then in our interview they highlighted Evan saying, as you look at glasses in the near term, I wouldn't expect AI to be a major accelerant. So.
- [30:16]
John
Well, since we mentioned them, let me tell you about Applov and profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about FIGMA agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your FIGMA files with design system context. It's in beta already.
- [30:36]
Sam
Yeah.
- [30:36]
Jordy
So anyways, closing this out, Irenic clearly thinks that, he says specifically Snap is a special asset. He thinks it's it has a ton of potential. He's overall positive. He just thinks like, you know, he really wants them to get in the game. And I think that honestly a lot of people have felt the same way over the years, but have just ultimately been frustrated because some of these things that seem somewhat straightforward just haven't been done.
- [31:01]
John
Okay, I got to go back to the moon. We're going back to the moon. I'm going back to the moon because Artemis 2 is launching in 3 hours and 52 minutes. In 4, 3, 2, 1 seconds. Because Brandon Gorell wrote the op ed today in the TVPN newsletter about some of the technology that they're using to document the trip and it's a very different take, very livestreamer coded of us. We only care about the camera equipment that's on board. Obviously there's a lot more that goes into it, but it's a fascinating deep dive. So let's read through this so that everyone has the update on how you can actually experience this because there's a bunch of interesting deals that went into documenting this. So as you know, today The NASA Artemis 2 mission will launch, sending the Orion spacecraft carrying a four astronaut crew on a high energy free return trajectory to get to the moon and back in about 10 days. It's longer than the Artemis 1 mission, which was six days by the way, which went around the moon. But can you imagine uncrewed?
- [31:59]
Jordy
Can you imagine the stress when you're just like being sent straight out into space and you know there's a big turn coming up and it's pretty important
- [32:07]
John
that you actually don't miss the off. Yeah, you can't be like texting and like, miss the off. The off ramp. If you miss the off ramp, you're going to Saturn. It's over for you. Orion will enter a 24 hour highly elliptical orbit with an apogee 44,000 miles above the surface of the Earth. For context, the ISS orbits at 200, 200 to 280 miles in altitude. So way, way higher. 100 times higher. 200 times higher. During the first day, the crew will test critical life support communication systems. After reaching its apogee, Orion will essentially fall backward towards our planet. This will cause the craft to start picking up massive speed. If you scroll down, you'll see that the path is a little fishy. And I think a lot of the tinfoil hat crowd are going to be suspicious about the path that the rocket will be taking because it's fishy. It's fishy if you scroll down. Don't you think that's fishy? That's a fishy orbit. That's just a fishy orbit. I don't know, I don't want to be too conspiratorial about this stuff, but
- [33:06]
Jordy
like, it does look like a fish.
- [33:08]
John
It's a fishy orbit. It's fishy anyway, as it approaches its perigee, for those who are just listening on audio, it literally looks like a fish. As it approaches its perigee, or the lowest point in its Earth orbit, the crew will conduct a system to review. Wake up the main engine system, organize the cabin to make sure radiation shielding bags and water supplies are positioned to act as shelter in case of a solar flare. Put on their survival suits and strap in. They're locking in. So Brandon said it's shaped like a figure eight. I think it's very generous. I think it's shaped like a fish, and I think you should have just said fish. There's a little bit of truth zoning that needs to happen right now, but it's not bad. It is a figure 8. It is elliptical, but I'm gonna still say it looks like a fish. After the burn, the crew will take more than four days to reach the Moon. The craft just coasts there, the lunar flyby, where it will orbit the moon at a maximum altitude of 6,000 miles. A minimum altitude of 60 to 70 miles from the surface of the Moon is expected to happen Monday, April 6th. It will probably end up being the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth due to the high altitude at which they'll orbit the moon.
- [34:11]
Jordy
And remember, we still don't know if this is like apple. Another elaborate 4-6-Fools joke. They could. We could get to the countdown here and Jared Isaac man could say April fools. But let's continue.
- [34:23]
John
Yeah. Imagine if that giant rocket, they cut it, it's just cake. That would be a good one. NASA is essentially aiming for a Netflix quality livestream on the flyby. And this is what the video creators, the content creators, live streamers, this is what we care about. It will feature 4K. UHD video streams the beam back to Earth with a 3 second latency and some additional latency from encoding in terrestrial distribution using a Frontier laser communication terminal that can transmit data at 260megs a second. The stream will probably be compressed to 1080p for live video, but it will be saved in 4K. The craft has 28 dedicated cameras on board. Externally mounted, an astronaut handheld. Externally mounted cameras will be on the tip of each of Orion's 4x shaped solar arrays. And they can rotate, which will allow them to take selfies of Orion with the Earth or the moon in the background.
- [35:14]
Jordy
We got selfie sticks in space.
- [35:16]
John
Space selfie sticks in space. This is sci fi. Now these specific cameras will be heavily modified versions of the GoPro Hero 4 Black, which is interesting. The GoPro Hero 4 is a pretty old camera, but they probably had to start working on this. You know, it's a nine year old project, so they probably locked in the specs a long time ago. And then of course they started ruggedizing them. So that camera on the left making
- [35:42]
Jordy
the GoPro even more rugged.
- [35:44]
John
Yeah, basically they actually have to. There's a lot of radiation, there's a lot of pressure, and obviously no pressure when you're in a vacuum. Which uses a 12 megapixel CMOS sensor and can shoot 4K at 30 frames a second. NASA contracted Red Wire Space. So it's not all communism over here. Blake Shoal. There's some privatized companies involved in the process.
- [36:07]
Jordy
Let's give it up for government contract.
- [36:08]
John
Let's give it up for Red Wire Space. They ruggedize the cameras to protect them from the vacuum, extreme temperatures and intense radiation of deep space. Some of the external cameras won't even generate imagery for the public. The optical navigation camera, for example, is a high res monochromatic sensor that feeds image data of the moon and earth against background stars to Orion's central computer, which runs machine vision algorithms to calculate the craft's exact position and velocity. They're doing slam in space. Inside Orion, astronauts use a tricked out Nikon Z9s handheld cameras that can shoot massive 8K video at 60fps. NASA actually entered into an agreement with Nikon to develop these four Artemis. Two astronauts on the ISS use unmodified Nikon Z9s. But because Artemis is going into deep space, the cameras needed to be ruggedized for the conditions out there and power optimized for the huge data transfers the cameras will need to make on the ship, which can be incredibly power intensive. Nikon even wrote a dedicated operating system for the cameras for this. Wow. Finally, NASA partnered with National Geographic to essentially record the footage for a documentary during the mission. The launch is expected no earlier than 06:24 Eastern Time, 03:24 Pacific Time. On NASA's YouTube, they are already broadcasting the live stream. The main program commentary starts at 1250 ET. So they're going to start talking and that'll be a lot of fun to follow along with throughout the course of the mission, NASA will broadcast real time coverage from Orion's cameras as bandwidth allows. This will be on the agency's YouTube channel. So they're gonna just like really embarrass us with this because 10 day livestream we've been talking about, we will say, oh, we're doing a giga stream. We're gonna interview a bunch of founders from YC and it's like a 4 hour, 5 hour, maybe a 6 hour show. They're like 10 day, 10 day livestream. Nice try. TVPN. Yeah, it'll be rough for us anyway.
- [38:09]
Jordy
I mean it's still, it's still almost unfathomable. Unfathomable, the amount of risk that these astronauts are taking on. Yeah, and my thoughts are with them for sure.
- [38:21]
John
For sure. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits and hr built to evolve with small and medium sized businesses. And let me also tell you about Vibe Co, where DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales. Just like on Meta. So the Kit Kat heist. This is the story you all have been waiting for. Kit Kats, the candy bars were stolen and in massive quantity. The Wall Street Journal has a story of how the company reacted, how they turned a massive Kit Kat heist into crisis PR gold. We've seen this before. People were talking about Tucker Carlson having his nicotine pouch shipment stolen and how it sounded like the plot of a new Fast and Furious or Zoomer Fast and Furious movie. Well, something similar happened to Kit Kat and they took advantage of it and made the best out of it. So Kit Kat of course is owned by Nestle but let's dig into what the Wall Street Journal had to say. Just how much are 12 metric tons of stolen Kit Kat bars worth? A lot of promotional gold, it turns out, says the Wall Street Journal. It was the brazen hawk. It was the brazen chocolate heist heard around the social media world. Oddly, this is the first time I'm hearing this. I don't know why. I don't know how I missed this. Had you heard of this before?
- [39:39]
Jordy
Yes.
- [39:40]
John
You had?
- [39:40]
Tyler
Okay, yeah, I've seen this.
- [39:41]
John
I literally found out about this in the Wall Street Journal. I don't know why I only heard about this in the reaction. But anyway, it's an interesting story. So, over the weekend, Nestle confirmed that thieves had swiped 413,000 units of kit Kats somewhere along their way from a factory in central Italy to Poland. Both chocolate bars and the truck carrying them remain missing, though no one was hurt in the theft, it said. With the Swiss company lost in chocolate, though, it gained back in a public relations coup, as did multiple other companies quick to hop on the meme bandwagon. We need to pull up some of these memes. I haven't seen a of them. We've always encouraged people to have a break with KitKat, but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 metric tons of our chocolate. The company said in a statement.
- [40:34]
Jordy
I don't get it. You have to. They would have had to steal the truck for it. 2.
- [40:38]
John
Yeah, they stole the truck. I mean, it sounds like Fast and Furious. It sounds like they stuck it up and you said, get out of the truck. You got to call a cab.
- [40:47]
Tyler
The truck is missing.
- [40:48]
John
The truck is missing.
- [40:49]
Tyler
They took the truck.
- [40:49]
Jordy
They took the truck.
- [40:51]
John
Wow. They took everything. Yes, it really happened. A spokesperson confirmed that it wasn't an early April 1st joke. Taking their cue from Nestle, other companies soon joined in with some social media spoofing. We would like to share our thoughts and condolences with KitKat following their sad news. The account for Domino's Pizza in the UK posted Monday morning. Then it added. On a completely unrelated note, we're pleased to announce that we'll be selling a new KitKat pizza. It's very silly. Charlotte FC, the major league Soccer club in North Carolina, jumped on the same riff a couple of hours later. On an unrelated note, we are happy to share that we will be offering roughly $413,000.
- [41:30]
Jordy
I don't know about you, John, but I love when large corporations can just jump in on the fun.
- [41:34]
John
It's extremely millennial. This is like, this is my culture is not your costume. If you're not a millennial and you're the one posting this like, stop. Only a millennial has the right to post jokingly as a corporate account. The discount airline Ryanair, meanwhile, simply posted a cartoon of photo of one of its planes with a face in the jet's mouth. Are five bitten off KitKat bars? Not long ago, most companies would have said little, leaving it to law enforcement authorities to disclose such a potentially embarrassing revelation. Now any bad news is good news, as long as a corporation corporate brand can turn it into a viral meme.
- [42:10]
Jordy
I wonder if this is a global crime ring that also came after Alp
- [42:17]
John
Nicotine, Carlson nicotine patch.
- [42:19]
Jordy
It's possible. Or it's possible that they're going to try to combine them. Kind of one plus one equals three type situation where they think that merging Kit Kats and nicotine could produce incremental value.
- [42:31]
John
Who knows? Who knows? Typically, typically nicotine products are much more economically dense. So a single can of pouches might retail for anywhere between like 6 and $10, whereas a kit Kat might be the same size but only retail for a dollar. And so stealing a truck full of nicotine products is typically like 10 times more economically valuable than Kit Kats. But who knows, maybe the thieves weren't thinking about economic density when they chose to stick up this particular truck. What do you think about this take? It's a master class in public relations. I agree with your intuition that this is not that funny. This is sort of just like corporate cringe. It's a little rough, some of these. I'm not getting belly laughs out of this. But just in terms of corporate comm strategy, this feels like the best of all possible worlds.
- [43:23]
Jordy
Yeah, I agree with that.
- [43:25]
John
I think it's like a reasonable thing.
- [43:26]
Jordy
Am I entertained? No. Do I think that it was worth doing? Yes.
- [43:34]
John
Yes. It's like the least bad way to.
- [43:38]
Jordy
Does it make me want a Kit Kat? No.
- [43:40]
John
Also, no.
- [43:42]
Tyler
I was not thinking about Kit Kats
- [43:44]
John
and now I'm thinking about Kit Kats and.
- [43:45]
Jordy
Well, now I'm thinking. I just think. I think I've never really had a Kit Kat in and thought, oh, that was so good. And so now I'm just remembering why I don't care about it. Okay.
- [43:59]
John
Okay. I think that the two options were put out some sort of like serious sad statement about how you got owned, basically.
- [44:10]
Tyler
I think that could have been funnier.
- [44:11]
John
That might have been funnier if it's just. Yeah. Maybe a CEO viral video would, would have done the trick that kicked off. This reminds me of that McDonald's burger thing. That sort of all talk about that, all the brands. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where, where, where does that go nowadays? Other companies want to profit from potential buzz from a rival's misstep too. After a video of McDonald's CEO polite bite into a burger went viral this month, top executives from Burger King, Wendy's and Wendy's pounced with similar videos and a lighthearted dig at their competitor. McDonald's said his new burger, the Big Arch, got a sales boost for all the attention too. So it worked.
- [44:48]
Jordy
Wait, they got a sales boost from having the CEO?
- [44:51]
John
They claim, they claim that getting dunked on all press is good press. That's their claim. I don't know. It doesn't seem, doesn't seem crazy like you know, we found out about the Big Arch, we talked about the Big Arch, we sort of processed the value proposal at least.
- [45:09]
Jordy
Yeah. I keep catching you leaving early. You're like, oh, I gotta, I gotta get home, I gotta.
- [45:14]
John
I have not had a big arch
- [45:15]
Jordy
and I just, I drive by the local McDonald's and John is there, he's got, in the passenger seat, 20 big arches just plowing through them.
- [45:24]
John
I don't think so. I don't think so. Not for me. I'll stick to the other.
- [45:28]
Jordy
Microsoft is in talks with Chevron.
- [45:30]
John
Break it down.
- [45:31]
Jordy
Engine number one over $7 billion Texas power plant.
- [45:33]
John
That's good. Exclusive news.
- [45:34]
Jordy
Exclusive talks.
- [45:36]
John
Okay.
- [45:36]
Jordy
And investment fund with Chevron and Engine One over a long term deal for a giant power plant in West Texas to provide electricity to a large data center campus. The proposed natural gas fired power plant is projected to cost just 7 billion and initially generate 2,500 megawatts of electricity.
- [45:54]
John
2.5 gigs. 2.5 gigs. That's a huge campus. Wow, that's really, really good. Chevron. Microsoft and Engine 1 have entered into an exclusivity agreement related to a proposed power generation and electricity offtake arrangement. Chevron and Engine 1 had previously discussed some details of their proposed power power plant, but not the end user of the electricity. A deal with Microsoft would secure a long term customer for the plant's output and help finance construction. The project, which could be up and running before 2030, still requires tax and environmental approvals as well as agreement of commercial. Commercial terms. Microsoft is a longtime backer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI is doubling down on constructing data centers. The pause is unpaused. This is fully. We are in unpause mode, Satya is going all in on AI. Access to reliable baseload power is emerging as a key challenge one of the Chevron and Engine Number one partnership expects to address, given its extensive natural gas production in West Texas and contracts for large turbines. What is LNG doing right now? Is natural gas spiking? It spiked in November and December, but is actually fairly low and is down since the start of the geopolitical conflict in the Middle East. So it at least does. You know, Chase Lockemiller from Crusoe was telling us that the Although the energy markets are somewhat intertwined, oil and natural gas do not move in lockstep because of the production supply consumption. Are you a net exporter? Are you a net importer? So the pain at the pump does not always translate into pain at the data center, which is, I guess, good for data center operators. The Permian produces so much natural gas, a bright a byproduct of oil, that it often overwhelms pipelines. As a result, some gas has to be burned off because it can't be transported where it's needed, making the region an ideal location for power plants. I believe these are called peaker plants, where the offtake normally is just getting flared off, just going into the atmosphere. You capture that and turn that into energy there, but then you're stuck with electricity, maybe at some weird mining plant where there's no housing so there's no one to power. So the next thing you do is you build a data center there. And that's sort of the Quiche Lorraine of why Crusoe started mining Bitcoin at peaker plants. At natural gas plants, they had extra natural gas. They flared it off. Used the very cheap or almost free energy to mine Bitcoin.
- [48:36]
Jordy
Well, yeah. And of course Quish is a wombo for quirky.
- [48:40]
John
Quirky and niche. When you're trying to explain the lore, you say you're lorraining something. Quiche Lorraine is the quirky niche lore explained.
- [48:49]
Jordy
Apple just removed anything. Okay, $100 million vibe coding app that lets anyone build iOS apps with prompts from the App Store. Also blocking updates for Vibe code and Replit. The founder tried moving code execution to a webview. Still rejected the walled garden versus AI builders war is here. So Apple has been saying, according to some reporting in the information, that they don't have anything against Vibe coding specifically, but the apps still have to adhere to guidelines.
- [49:22]
John
Yeah, and this and this particular policy has been in place since like the start of the App Store. I remember Facebook, you know Dealing with this when they launched their initial mobile app, which was it was an app but it would load a lot of HTML and it was like. And that was sort of slow. They went back and forth, but there was always a question about like how much custom code could Apple could meta or Facebook at the time serve within the Facebook app? Like, could you have farmville exist as its own app on the Facebook mobile app platform like it did in the Facebook desktop app? So when you loaded Facebook on desktop, you could load farmville basically as like an iframe and the farmville developer Zynga could change farmville, add upgrades, do whatever they needed to, and that would all be vended through Facebook. And of course your Internet browser doesn't care what you're loading. But the App Store is different and has had different terms of service for a very long, long time. Mostly because Apple's one of their primary pitches to customers is that, hey, we review all the code that will run on your phone. And so we don't want that code to change after we review it. And so we have a process for reviewing it. And that reduces the risk of bloatware or crypto mining behind the scenes or spam or viruses, all sorts of different stuff. That is the value prop for why people choose to buy iPhones. And so Apple has maintained that for a long time. Let me tell you about phantom cash fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. And let me also tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces.
- [51:11]
Jordy
And now Apple specifically mentioned guideline 2.52 which is is the rule anything apparently violated App apps should be self contained in their bundles and may not read or write data outside the designated container area normal nor may they download, install or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Educational apps designed to teach developer allow students to test code may in limited circumstances download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes. Such apps must make the source code provided by the app completely viewable and editable by the user. Anything launched on iOS in November with no issue and the tool has apparently been used to publish thousands of apps in the App Store. Yeah, you can imagine Apple being like this app is pushing so many other apps into our review process, we got to make it stop. The app lets users create and preview vibe code apps on the iPhone and it raised 11 million at a valuation of 100 million back in September. Apparently Apple had been blocking updates to the app since December. So it been basically a full, full quarter that it was frozen. But clearly users are excited about the product. So I hope they. Yeah, I hope they can work something out quickly.
- [52:35]
John
Well, global venture capital dollar volume has incredibly spiked. Look at this chart. A bunch of interesting things about this chart. So clearing order inbound. Indeed. It's pretty loud. So Ryan Hoover shares the chart From Crunchbase here. Q1 2026 was absolutely massive with global venture capital dollar volume spiking from just over $100 billion to almost $300 billion. So a massive, massive growth. A lot of this is OpenAI and Anthropic, but even if you remove those two rounds, it's still up 40%, quarter on quarter. What's interesting to me about this is what has been happening for the last 10 quarters before, before Q1 2026, it's felt like a funding boom. It felt like we had the ChatGPT moment at the end of 2022. 2023 was the start of like, okay, let's lick the wounds from the ZIRP era and start ramping up venture capital. We saw new funds raised, we saw more deployment. Tons of up rounds were always hitting the gong. And yet that the prior trend line was pretty flat prior to Q1 2026. It feels like venture is still in this K shape dynamic. I don't know.
- [54:01]
Jordy
Yeah, I mean, the answer here is that this is not venture at this point. Yeah, it's a big factor, right? You have these, the biggest companies in the world investing tens of billions of dollars into single companies. And so of course the chart looks insane, but because this is the largest, you know, the largest private financing ever.
- [54:22]
John
Yeah. Is Julie Black getting the scoop of the day? She says new funding, new model, new policy push. I think it's a scoop. She says exclusive, exclusive opening policy push. She says OpenAI will begin releasing a series of policy proposals next week meant to spark conversation about how to rethink the social contract. It's going to be an interesting year.
- [54:49]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [54:55]
John
She asked the question, is OpenAI's chief futurist prepping for a major breakthrough or just another hype cycle? And you can go and read this on Vanity Fair.
- [55:05]
Jordy
Vanity Fair, the tech publication?
- [55:07]
Abhishek Das
Yes.
- [55:08]
John
I mean, Julia covers tech very well.
- [55:10]
Jordy
Very, very well.
- [55:11]
John
There's a lot of good stuff.
- [55:12]
Jordy
Metab over at OpenAI says we are excited to share a new paper solving three further problems due to Erdos. In each case, the solution was found by an internal model at OpenAI. Each proof is short and elegant, and the paper is available here. So there's a breakthrough for you.
- [55:32]
John
Yeah. Prinz asked, would you be able to comment on the delta between the unreleased model and G GPT4.5.4 Pro? I'm reading correctly. You tried fewer than 10 identical prompts for each of the three problems with GPT 5.4 Pro. And that GPT5.4 Pro got the first problem correct twice the result which you link in the paper, plus one other similar solution, the third problem corrected twice. Interesting. I saw another interesting paper from Google that apparently just repeating the prompt twice improves LLM performance. Did you see this, Tyler? So if you say, like, you are Shakespeare, write me a poem, because of the way the tokenization works when it first processes that u, it doesn't know, like, it doesn't. It starts thinking and it doesn't necessarily know what's coming.
- [56:25]
Brandon McBee
Right.
- [56:25]
John
It doesn't know that Shakespeare's coming. So if you just repeat the prompt, the exact prompt, twice, it improves performance on a bunch of different benchmarks. And it's this funny paper because it's like something that anyone could just do at home. It's like the classic prompt engineering thing.
- [56:38]
Tyler
Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, you would think that wouldn't work, right? Because still you attend to all the previous tokens at the same time. Right. This is the whole thing.
- [56:46]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [56:46]
John
You think so? I don't know.
- [56:47]
Tyler
Yeah. But I remember early on there was all these things where you would prompt like, you are Shakespeare, write me a poem. And it'd be a way better poem than if you. If you said, write the bomb.
- [56:55]
Brandon McBee
Right.
- [56:55]
Gary Tan
Totally.
- [56:55]
Tyler
Or like, pretend that you're Terrence Tao when you solve this math problem. Way better.
- [56:58]
Sam
Right?
- [56:59]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Whatever. In the training data, you know, whatever.
- [57:02]
John
It just knows to go down that path as opposed to, like, the other paths of, like, oh, it doesn't pull any April Fool's jokes because it's not being an April Fool's jokester.
- [57:12]
Tyler
There's these basins or whatever if you can, like the personality basin, where you can get the model to act like a certain thing. And it does much better on that.
- [57:20]
John
At the same time, I think this paper was specifically on, like, vanilla LLMs. And I think reasoning solves that even more because you're basically repeating the prompt a bunch through, unpacking it, compressing it, doing whatever you need to do to actually set the LLM up for success in answering the question. And so it might sort of hydrate through that process into something that yields those results but interesting how simple some of these hacks are.
- [57:49]
Jordy
Well in biggest number news.
- [57:52]
John
Yes.
- [57:53]
Jordy
Yesterday OpenAI announced the closing of their latest funding 22 billion. Yeah hit the. Hit the gong.
- [57:59]
John
Hit the gong.
- [57:59]
Jordy
It would be would be an honor John. Boom. Probably probably the largest gong hit 120 hits. 122 hits. Oh 120 upsize the round.
- [58:13]
John
Remember they did upside for a ton.
- [58:15]
Jordy
Yeah. So take him hold out some highlights Post Money valuation of 852 billion Nvidia remains the foundation of our infrastructure, our training fleet and the majority of our inference stack to continue to run on Nvidia GPUs. We are now generating 2 billion in revenue per month, raising over 3 billion from individual investors. ChatGPT is the overwhelming leader in consumer AI with more than 900 million weekly actives and over 50 million subscribers. Our ads pilot reached more than 100 million in ARR in under six weeks. Momentum is just as strong on the enterprise side, which now makes up more than 40% of our revenue and is on track to reach parity with consumer by the end of 2026. Codex now serves over 2 million weekly active users, up 5x in the past three months, with usage growing more than 70% month over month. And they talk about the vision for a unified AI super app. One app that lets you basically access every product that OpenAI is making. So ChatGPT, Codex, browsing and other agentic capabilities.
- [59:19]
John
Yeah, I'm very excited about linking Codex to ChatGPT in some way because right now there's really, I mean, you can sort of set reminders, but there's very little that you can do if your question requires building some sort of like small system. Like the textbook case that I'm thinking of is like, if I want to be. If I want like a deep research report of, you know, how the Artemis mission did when the astronauts land. I'm probably going to see that on social media, but what about just automatically letting me know one year from today, remind me that the Artemis III mission is coming, Give me an estimated Are we on track? Pull all the news that I probably won't be following that closely because I'm not like a daily consumer of space news, but I might be interested later. There's all these different things where you could track things, but you, you need to build something that just sort of runs.
- [60:29]
Jordy
We're entering a new era. Our astronauts are now Twitch live streamers.
- [60:33]
John
Are they on twitch?
- [60:34]
Gary Tan
No.
- [60:34]
Jordy
Okay, YouTube. But it's fun. It would be fun. It'd be fun to get over on Twitch.
- [60:41]
John
Yeah.
- [60:42]
Jordy
Well, there's some other news. Apparently new iPhones are being packed into the suits of the Artemis 2 crew. Owen Sparks says there's something very familiar about the iPhone look that will make the moon feel accessible. We are going to see the lunar surface through the same lens we used to capture our own lives every day.
- [60:58]
John
Oh, that's cool. Take some phones. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about smartphone proves too big for most. We were debating this earlier, and I'd like everyone else to chime in too. The original iPhone launched in 2007 had what was considered the largest smartphone screen at the time, 3.5 inches. The biggest iPhone now is more than double. Double the size of the original at 6.9 inches. Or is. Yeah, is now more than double. Wow. In 2019. The 2019 introduction of Samsung's Galaxy Z fold introduced foldable devices to the masses. Opening up like a wallet. It has a 7.3-inch display. And Samsung Galaxy Z Tri Fold in 2026, when fully opened, unfurls to roughly the size of an iPad. Ken and the journalists in the Wall Street Journal asked the question, can a smartphone be too big? Tyler, what do you think?
- [61:57]
Tyler
Yeah, I'm in favor of a smaller phone.
- [61:59]
John
Okay.
- [62:00]
Tyler
This is a 16 Pro and it's
- [62:02]
John
not max, but it's not max. It's the normal one. And why don't you want a bigger phone?
- [62:09]
Tyler
It's just too much.
- [62:09]
John
What if you're on a plane and you want to pull it out and watch a movie or something? Do you just.
- [62:13]
Tyler
Yeah, but I feel like if I want a bigger screen, I have a laptop. It works great. Yeah, like, there's.
- [62:18]
John
But you don't always have the laptop with you. I mean, you always have it in your backpack. Like, what if you're, like, on a train or something?
- [62:24]
Jordy
You've never thought about getting an iPad with a cellular connection and then maybe like a strap on the back that you could hold and have and be able to hold it up to your head and use it like a normal phone.
- [62:34]
John
I was seriously considering the iPad mini for a while. Just as an everyday carry phone, you could do it. I don't know if you can get a phone number on it.
- [62:42]
Tyler
Like, is that even going to fit in my pocket?
- [62:44]
John
It would fit in my pocket. I tested.
- [62:45]
Tyler
Does it fit in your suit pocket, though? Maybe.
- [62:47]
John
You would definitely fit in the suit pocket. You should get all of your suits custom tailored so you can fit an iPad mini in here. I don't know.
- [62:55]
Jordy
The foldable phones are really fun. Zyt says they're restreaming is on Twitch.
- [63:01]
John
They're restreaming. Let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream NASA go to restream.com hopefully they're on restream.
- [63:14]
Jordy
Ryan Peterson yeah, what'd he say? Is joking around. He says Elon filed for an IPO on April Fool's Day and apparently they they filed last night. So off by just a little bit according to Blood Love. But but yeah on the news on pace for the kind of June listing.
- [63:36]
John
June listing. Okay. Yeah, we'll have to track that. That will be fun. I think a lot of people are really excited. Should be good.
- [63:45]
Jordy
Austin Larson says our team at Google is releasing more details on the recent NPM Axio supply chain attack. Notably, we now attribute this activity to UNC 1069, a financially motivated North Korean Nexus threat actor active since at least 2018. We made this attribution based on their use of Waveshaper v2, an updated backdoor previously used by the group alongside clear overlaps in C2 infrastructure. Check the blog and they wrote more about it on cloud.google.com
- [64:22]
John
and yeah, we also have we also have an expert from CrowdStrike coming on the show tomorrow. Adam Myers is going to come on and help us break it down, which we're very excited for.
- [64:34]
Jordy
In a note to staff this morning shared with Max Tawny over at Semaphore, Business Insider said it is giving out a new quarterly AI award for best use of AI at the company. The winner gets $400. As soon as we talked about this this morning, Tyler asked us to create a similar award, seemingly signaling that he's quite confident.
- [64:58]
John
You think you can win this one, Tyler?
- [65:00]
Jordy
Take it home, everybody.
- [65:02]
Tyler
Pretty confident right now. We'll see, you know, the incentive that goes out, right? You know, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. We're going to have a lot of people in office gunning for this, but
- [65:10]
John
I still do want to run that experiment of like the race to see the true leaderboard of how long it takes everyone at our company to generate 10,000 lines of code as fast as possible because there's a bunch of shortcuts that you could take. Tyler thinks he can do it in like five seconds, but for other people it's going to be a lot of copy paste. It's going to be figuring out how to open a text editor. Like everyone's on a different learning curve here. So I think the results would Be interesting.
- [65:35]
Tyler
Yes. I'm feeling pretty good about my odds there.
- [65:37]
John
Okay. Yeah, well head over to business anyways.
- [65:41]
Jordy
I think this is smart. I would say that maybe, maybe add a zero to the. To the number. But given. Given that PI is, you know, massive, massive company. Right.
- [65:53]
John
Matthias Daphner knows that money doesn't grow on trees. Okay. He's running that thing is a real business. He's a businessman.
- [66:01]
Jordy
Rebecca Torrance is scooping.
- [66:04]
John
Scooping.
- [66:05]
Jordy
Scoop is a Valor Atomics, a nuclear nuclear energy startup backed by Palmer Lucky Pl, backed by PL himself has raised 450 million at a $2 billion valuation. There's no investor named here, so that's still. Yeah, unclear. But Isaiah and the Velar team have been on a tear. They're talking about building clusters of small nuclear reactors to power data centers and
- [66:33]
John
they got some access to some government programs and government resources and it seems like there's been a bunch of blockers that have been knocked down one after another. He's been on absolute terror. We'd love to have him back on the show to chat more. Augustus Dirico is having fun with it. Ooh ahuh. I'm gonna invest in another energy company besides Volar Atomics for boo ba boo ba boo bah reasons. That's what you sound like. Do you see how far they've come? Do you understand that they will make the world's energy? I love that he's pumping up his buddy. Always riding with the crew. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.
- [67:24]
Jordy
In other nuclear news, currently Utah is going nuclear to keep ski runs cold for the 2034 Winter Games.
- [67:33]
John
How does that work?
- [67:33]
Abhishek Das
Explain.
- [67:34]
Jordy
State says new this is in townlift.com okay. State says neutron based atmospheric technology could lower ski run surface temperatures by up to 20 degrees and offset drought impacts through enhanced snowpack retention. Interesting, because when you've given your case for Alaska, historically you've talked about how with abundant nuclear energy, you could take an otherwise cold area and warm it up. But they're. They're thinking about cooling things down. State officials confirmed Wednesday that Utah has entered a $1.2 billion agreement with a Vienna based energy consortium to install three micronuclear reactors along the Washoe Washok Mountain range as part of an unprecedented effort to stabilize snow conditions on Utah ski slopes. Ahead of the 2034 Olympic Games. The project, designated the Wastock Atmospheric Retention and Mitigation Initiative, or warmy, could make Utah the first state in the nation to deploy nuclear powered atmospheric cooling infrastructure at altitude. Utah is not going to sit back and let the climate dictate the terms of our 2034 legacy, said a spokesperson for the Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity, who confirmed the project has received preliminary approval under SB114, the legislature's infrastructure acceleration statute, which removes local government approval authority over projects designated as state economic priorities. So apparently Juniper Peak selected as the first nuclear test site. I'm sure everyone at Juniper Peak will be thrilled about being able to ski around a nuclear test site. The three microreactors are proposed at elevations above 9,000ft in what project documents describe as thermally neutral subterranean containment pods. I like the sound of that. Designed to blend with the natural terrain.
- [69:35]
John
So anyways, well, we have some other news. Will Depew I think he won April Fools with the joke that he he says he is joining Deep Sea. He says like many of my friends, I set a goal at the start of 2026 to become more Chinese this year and I plan to fully follow through on it. After nearly three years at OpenAI, I have decided to leave and pursue new opportunities. After much deliberation, I'm thrilled to announce that effective today, I'll be relocating to Hangzhou to join Deep Seq Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co Ltd dedicated to building Chinese style AGI. I simply couldn't pass up the opportunity to become a billionaire in our in rmb. He had a lot of fun with it. We had fun putting up a card and we're big fans of Will Depew. Well, without further ado, we have Eddie Q in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP in ultradome. Eddie, how are you doing?
- [70:24]
Jordy
What's going on?
- [70:26]
Eddie Q
It's great finally to be here. I've wanted to be on this show and I got to tell you I've got gotten more text messages from friends about being on here, including my kids, than probably anything I've ever done. So it's great for you to have me.
- [70:40]
John
That's amazing. What a special moment. What an amazing time. I would love to just start with some reflection. I want to hear particularly about your first decade at Apple. What was that like leading you know, what led you to the company? What were some of the first projects you worked on? Sort of take us through some of the early history.
- [71:05]
Eddie Q
Yeah, I was lucky. I Was I was a junior in high school when the Apple II was out and I wanted to be an architect. And when I discovered a computer, I realized I wanted to be a programmer and engineer. And I said, there's two things I want to do. I want to work at Apple and I want to meet Steve Jobs and dreams come true. Here I am 38 years later at Apple. I came in as a programmer and was working on HyperCard and sort of the precursor to blue links with lines underneath linking. And I've been done so many things here at Apple. I've had an amazing team and continue to have the. I'm working with the best people in the world at what they do.
- [71:47]
John
Yeah. What was the lore of Steve Jobs like when you first sort of heard about him? Because my generation knows the iPhone keynote. There's videos online, there's interviews, there's whole books, there's multiple books written. But what was your experience learning what drew you to Steve early on in your career?
- [72:08]
Eddie Q
I just think it's the innovation of creating these products that let people do amazing things. And I felt that way when I was using the product. The attention to detail of those products, there was a connection that you could just feel. And so it was more than just what you could see. And then it let me do things that I couldn't imagine doing before. And I think that's something that we've continued over our 50 years.
- [72:37]
John
Yeah. Can you talk about the launch of the original Apple online store? I feel like a lot of people assume that this always existed. No, it was a Herculean effort, I'm sure. What was the inspiration? What was the backdrop there? What was the mood like as you entered into that market?
- [72:57]
Eddie Q
Yeah, it was a crazy time because people forget, but in those times we sold all of our computers through channels like CompUSA and local computer stores. And the idea of building an online store and selling direct. There were a lot of people inside of Apple even that felt like if we did that, the channel's going to walk on us and they're going to stop selling Steve. And we wanted to move forward and be able to do custom configurations so people could order exactly what they wanted. And we thought it was something that customers, it was just beginning, but it was something that customers really wanted. And. And Steve and I and a small team worked on it and built it and launched it at the same time that one of our best products we've ever done was the imac, the Bondi blue one with the clear. And so we launched the store and The Bondi blue imac at the same time. And I remember at the end of the day we were wondering, you know, Steve, I came by his office and he's like, well, how did we do on the first day? And we had sold a million dollars worth of imacs and we were high fiving each other and going, this is amazing.
- [74:07]
John
How did you drive people to the. Did you just have apple.com were people already typing in apple.com, like, how do you tell people that a website is launching before you can go viral on social media or do live interviews on, you know, how do you promote this?
- [74:22]
Eddie Q
Yeah, we were lucky in that we had apple.com already and so some people were coming from that. And so that part was a little bit easier. In those days you relied a lot on press interviews and print.
- [74:34]
John
Sure.
- [74:35]
Eddie Q
And so we did a lot of, you'd want to be on the COVID of a magazine and the front page of the newspaper. And so we had all of that pretty well. And I think our design, when we did this, it was called good, better, best. You could buy different configs and change them. But our design for shopping for a computer and a Mac at that time was something no one had ever seen. It had all of the things that we cared about, the simplicity, really easy to check out, easy to buy, all of the specs and the questions you would have, things that were difficult when you went to other sites. I thought we did a great job and it really resonated with customers.
- [75:16]
John
Yeah. Can you help me understand? And the services division of Apple is massive. It's a huge growth engine. There's so many interesting pieces of that. I want to go into a lot of those. But when was the first time in your career that you realized that there was something that you could sell or actually turn into a business line that was not a physical product and would live in this services category. When did services even become a division or concept or an opportunity?
- [75:48]
Eddie Q
Yeah, I think we started as a hobby. You know, there wasn't a lot there. It was very early days of the Internet and doing things like email and things like storage in the cloud. But it was very, very early. The thing that was a big change for us was really music and it was iPod plus iTunes. And that was something that was. It truly revolutionized music and it really gave us a whole different perspective of what services can do. When you take the hardware product, in a sense, the operating system and the software and the services and you tie them together, which is something I think we do Better than anyone. It really showcased when we did iPod plus iTunes. And so all of a sudden we did that. Not only did we do it for the Mac, but we also did it for Windows.
- [76:39]
John
Yeah.
- [76:39]
Eddie Q
And so it opened Apple to a whole new ecosystem of customers that had never used our products before, but were using itunes and ipod for the first time.
- [76:48]
John
That was my first Apple experience was itunes and ipod on a Windows PC. Yeah. And now I have 25 Apple.
- [76:55]
Jordy
My first is I was so loyal to Apple products that I refused to get a, like a PC for gaming. And so I worked, I probably ref like 300 soccer games like some absurd amount to get the maxed out MacBook Pro at the time. That's amazing because I was just so, so loyal that I was like, I'm not, I've gotta, if I'm gonna stay in the ecosystem, play video games, I'm do it on Mac.
- [77:19]
John
Yeah, it's great.
- [77:19]
Eddie Q
You know, when we launched itunes on Windows, I remember we did a poster and Steve called it on the presentation. It was like hell froze over.
- [77:29]
John
Yeah. What was actually getting itunes off the ground like? And how is it different than the other just motions that Apple had developed? Because it's not only a software product, but it's deeply linked to rights holders and agencies and musicians. And you have to get so many different groups. It feels much more permissioned than just building a computer and selling it. Of course you need manufacturers and you need a lot of people on board to build a computer, but it's a very different go to market or building motion. How was that different?
- [78:05]
Eddie Q
Yeah, it was painful because I think there were three pieces. You had us, you had the label and you had the artist. We were really good with artists, which is something we've always been about the creators. And I think when we look, when you look at all the things that we've done, the two primary people that we focus on and think about are people that are the end customers that are using it and the creators that are creating all these incredible products. So we had a good relationship with musicians at the time, but we really didn't have any relationship with labels. And ultimately they did control the environment. And at the time they had a different perspective. It was really the beginning of Napster and Pirate. And instead of thinking about how to move forward into a future, their view was to lock things down and really stop it. And as you know, when you have something that's better like that, there is no stopping it. And so we went to the labels and we had this idea of selling songs at 99 cents. And they kind of told us to go pound sand. They weren't really interested in us at all. And their idea was they were going to build some music services. So there were five or six major labels and they built two music services. And we told them, like, what you guys are doing is not going to work. They had different pricing for each song. They had different rules. Sometimes you could buy.
- [79:27]
Jordy
So they would, like, price a hit higher than like some random song on an album.
- [79:32]
Brandon McBee
Yeah.
- [79:32]
Eddie Q
I mean, it was all over the map.
- [79:34]
John
Yeah.
- [79:34]
Jordy
And part of. Part of the pushback against, like, just $99 a song, 99 cents, I mean, is like, you know, typical Apple style. It's just like, let's just make it simple, easy to understand. But was their pushback, like, kind of concern that people, you know, hey, we're used to getting people to just buy an entire album. And maybe what's going to happen if people just buy, you know, a song here or there?
- [79:59]
Sam
Like.
- [80:00]
Eddie Q
Yeah, the problem was whether you sold it at $1.29 or 79 cents, that wasn't going to change that. The key to. There were two keys to 99 cents that we really believed in. And people didn't see. There were two primary things. Number one is when the price is 99 cents and it's consistent, you never have to think about price. And so you would preview a song, decide whether you like it or not. And if you did, you bought. And so there was never any transaction, a billing transaction that you had to think about because you knew it was 99 cents. It's not a lot of money at the time, and it was really easy to do. The second thing was that people could never do that because at 99 cents, if you're charging a credit card, you would lose money. Because credit cards have a fixed fee and they have a percentage that you pay. Well, the fixed fee and the percentage on a 99 cent song was like a quarter.
- [80:54]
John
Yeah.
- [80:55]
Eddie Q
And the vast majority of the money went to the labels. So every time we'd sell a song, we would lose money. And so nobody wanted to do that. And so no other service did that. What we decided to do is, as we were building this, and I remember it was a huge discussion because we would lose a ton of money. Obviously, if you're losing on every song, we said, look, this thing is amazing. You're not going to buy just one song. You're going to buy a lot of songs when you go on there. And when you do that, instead of closing the transaction, on every single one. Why don't we just combine them over a period of time? So let's keep the transaction open for a period of time, let's call it 24 hours or 8 hours. And everything you buy we're just going to give you and then we're going to charge you at the end. And so therefore that's exactly what happened. Very few transactions were just 99 cents. Most of the transactions were multiple dollars and the fixed fee didn't matter.
- [81:50]
Pratap
Interesting.
- [81:53]
John
How important was it to position itunes as sort of a step up from the status quo from like the Napster era, and a positive, because I feel like anytime the economics of an industry change, there's natural uncertainty from artists. And itunes did represent a change in the economic structure, but it was such a great countervail force. What were discussions like at that time about positioning the economic opportunity that artists would have in the new regime?
- [82:29]
Eddie Q
Yeah, I think we wanted. During that time, the music business was cratering from an economic point of view. And our feeling has always been the vast majority of people want to do the right thing and they want to pay artists. And so. But what they don't want is they don't want to be forced into something that doesn't make any sense or isn't really friendly or isn't the right way to do it. And so we were. That's part of the 99 cents. It was part of. Like in those times you were burning a lot of CDs. They had limitations on the number of burns. We didn't want any limitations because that's not something a customer would understand. And so our feeling around this was, if you let us do this,
- [83:12]
Gary Tan
you're
- [83:12]
Eddie Q
going to grow again as opposed to cratering. And I remember Steve asked me once before we had launched, he says, well, what is success around this? And I said, honestly, I don't know. I'll go ask. And so I went into Universal Music and I asked them, what's success for you guys in this business? And they said, well, if you could sell a million songs in. In a month, anytime in the first six months, that's success for us. So I came back, I said, okay, that's the goal. Then we sold a million songs in the first six days.
- [83:48]
John
That's amazing. I love it. That's great. Yeah.
- [83:54]
Eddie Q
So it's like that's what we. Obviously it surpassed even our expectation. But it was an example of if you give people the right way, people are willing to pay, but it has to be done well.
- [84:07]
John
So talk about the shift to subscription because it feels like a much more natural experience for all the Apple service that I subscribe to. What was the thinking? How long, what were the hurdles along the way to get to the current situation with Apple tv or you could can consume everything. Was this just a market dynamic? Was it something that you saw in the future early on and it was more of how do we get there smoothly? What was the process?
- [84:38]
Eddie Q
Yeah, the key to this is it's hard to remember this now because we're so used to it, but it's having Internet connectivity anywhere you are sure. And all the time and pretty much it's almost impossible now to be anywhere and not have actually fast Internet. So that allowed a whole different thing because before that you didn't have one, you either didn't have it or two, you were paying by usage in a sense so you wanted to limit the amount that you actually used. And so things like downloading and keeping things on device all the time was really important. When you have unlimited in a sense Internet access or a network access, then you can provide all these capabilities and not have to worry about whether you have it downloaded or not. It's now invisible to you. You don't even think about it. Most of the time we put things on device just to cache them or whatever, but you don't need to worry about whether it's on your device or not.
- [85:37]
John
Yeah, we have a question from the chat. It's a bit random, but I'd love to know your favorite keynote moment throughout your, your career.
- [85:47]
Eddie Q
That's great. I'll say. Look, there are two. There's a personal one which was the first one when we launched the imac and the Apple Store because that was the beginning of turning Apple around and it was a big moment for Apple.
- [86:03]
John
We were.
- [86:04]
Eddie Q
It's hard for people to imagine this, but Apple was going bankrupt at that time and Steve came back and that moment was the beginning of a change where you at least we knew now that we, we weren't going to go bankrupt. And so it really gave us life. And so it was an incredible moment. And I remember going backstage with Steve after it was done and hugging actually because it had gone so well. And we knew that was a big step. The second one, and honestly now in hindsight I completely underestimated. It was the iPhone launch. It's the only time I made my wife and my dad, kids, my two kids come to the event. They were eight and eight years old. And I was like, this is a historic moment because I had had the ability of using the iPhone for a few months before we launched and played with it. And it was just amazing. It's the coolest, best thing I'd ever
- [87:01]
Jordy
seen in the world.
- [87:02]
Eddie Q
And so I thought, this is going to be amazing now. I completely underestimated it because now you look at it and go, it's like, I don't even know what the world is like. What would you do without an iPhone?
- [87:14]
John
Yeah.
- [87:15]
Jordy
What lessons from Steve or kind of memories do you find yourself coming back to the most in the present day of Apple?
- [87:27]
Eddie Q
Well, I think something that people take for granted. But nobody worked harder than Steve, and these things don't come easy. And he was the hardest worker of anybody I know.
- [87:38]
John
How did that manifest? Like, long hours, just deep focus.
- [87:43]
Eddie Q
It's focus because it's focus and long hours. What it was, was there are only two things that mattered to Steve. And I think when people ask me, what's the difference between Tim and Steve? The reality is that's not the right question. The question is, what's the same things between Tim and Steve and their work ethic? They worked harder than anybody. They were completely focused on two things, their Apple and their family. Those are the only two things that mattered. And the third thing was the attention to the products themselves. It was about the products and what we delivered to customers, believe it or not, not the financial results. That was a secondary function that you obviously needed to keep going, but it was never the primary thing. And so those three things are something that I still, you know, take to heart and. And I feel I, you know, that's what I try to do and how I feel.
- [88:37]
John
Can we talk about F1? I love that there's a movie. And also you can watch the. You can watch the actual races. This feels deliberate. What's the strategy? It seems to make a ton of sense, but how long has this been cooking? What's the thought process?
- [88:52]
Jordy
I remember it must have been last year. John. John had talked about this on the show. Wanting this to happen, to see it come together the way it has is amazing.
- [89:01]
John
And it seems like soccer, football, sort of faced a similar strategy. But I'm very interested in how you see different media properties connect together.
- [89:11]
Eddie Q
Yeah, look, the F1 thing is personal. 1. I've been an F1 fan for a long time. I learned about F1 by going to the library and reading magazines because, believe it or not, F1 just wasn't televised
- [89:24]
John
at all in the United States.
- [89:26]
Eddie Q
So you didn't know anything about it. So I knew a lot about it. Stefano who's the CEO of Formula one is somebody who was at Ferrari and then later on at Lamborghini. And I've known him. So when he took on Formula one, I remember meeting with him in London and saying, you know, we're not quite there yet, but someday I hope we can be working together on F1. And so I always envisioned that there was things that we could do that no one else could do. The movie came about separately, not kind of related, but this. This idea of doing a movie and Jerry and Joe Kaczynski. It was really Joe's idea. And I just love the idea because there hasn't been a huge racing movie. Most racing movies have not done that well.
- [90:13]
John
Yeah.
- [90:13]
Eddie Q
And I thought there was a real opportunity with F1 to tell an incredible story and Brad Pitt and the cars and the excitement and that we would, for the first time, had enough technology to show what it was actually like to be in an F1 car. Because when you watch on TV, it kind of looks like they're on a Sunday drive. You don't get the G force. And so we had these ideas of taking the iPhone camera, and putting them in all. All over the cars and different ideas that we thought would give that experience. Now, the movie took a lot longer because we had to go through Covid strikes, all kinds of things, but it turned out spectacular. And when we would show the movie, one of the questions we would ask to people in the US is, how many of you have seen an F1 race? And the truth is, very few hands were ever raised. And then after the movie, you asked him how many people would want to see an F1 race? And, you know, every hand went up. And so we thought, wow, if we did this together now. And these ideas of how we can really innovate on the whole experience of what it's like to watch an F1 race. We really can make a difference here. And it's been great. We've done three races so far. The ratings are way above what they've ever been in the US and we're just getting started. But things like multi view. 30% of the people watching F1 races are watching with Multi view, so they can get different cameras see their favorite team. So it's definitely changed a lot of how people are experiencing it.
- [91:48]
John
That's amazing.
- [91:49]
Jordy
All product requests. Such a great Apple racing sim. You'll have two buyers.
- [91:54]
John
Yes, man. It's.
- [91:56]
Eddie Q
You know, we just did Vision Pro.
- [92:00]
John
Yeah.
- [92:01]
Eddie Q
With sim racing, so you could do that.
- [92:03]
John
Okay.
- [92:04]
Jordy
There you go. There you go.
- [92:07]
Eddie Q
We got it for you.
- [92:08]
Jordy
Yeah. The racing and the automotive world has a man on the inside.
- [92:11]
John
So I'm the strongest supporter of the Vision Pro. I watched another movie in it this weekend.
- [92:17]
Jordy
Jordy, if I call when I call John at 10pm on a Friday night, he's always, you know, he's always.
- [92:22]
John
I love the product. I'm a huge fan. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the show.
- [92:25]
Jordy
It's truly, truly been an honor.
- [92:26]
John
It's truly been an honor. Congratulations on 50 years. What an amazing accomplishment. We'll talk to you soon.
- [92:32]
Eddie Q
I appreciate it. Thank you.
- [92:34]
John
Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. And let me also tell you about fin, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin AI. And without further ado, we have Aaron Tarazas from Gusto coming into the Restream waiting room now. The TVP and ultra room. Aaron, how are you doing?
- [93:03]
Aaron Tarazas
I'm doing great.
- [93:04]
John
Thanks so much for taking the time. We were very excited to dig into some of your research and reporting, but since it is the first time on the show, would you mind introducing yourself some of your background background and what you do for a living?
- [93:16]
Aaron Tarazas
Sure. No, I'm an economist by training, currently working with Gusto. Previously been through the tech industry at Glassdoor, at Zillow, at a company called Convoy. Started my career at the Treasury Department.
- [93:27]
John
Okay, so maybe, maybe start with like what, what is unique about being an in house economist? What, what data do you have access to that others might not? Not what data is anonymized. Like how do you do your job and what are you actually looking for? What are the questions that you're trying to answer?
- [93:48]
Aaron Tarazas
So most economists play with this public data that the government produces. That's great. It's been around a long time. The really exciting thing about being an in house economist is that there's all of this data behind this private walled gate. We get to understand what is happening in the economy. Sometimes we pick up on things before the official data say sometimes we pick on trends that the official data aren't necessarily showing kind of what's happening beneath the surface. So it is this really exciting place to be as an economist.
- [94:15]
John
Okay, let's go into some of the findings, but first I want to know about data skew and how you account for the type of customers Gusto is a sponsor. We talk about small and medium sized businesses. So I imagine that you have some sort of calibration step where you're adjusting your internal data to some sort of benchmark to make sure that you're not biased towards your particular sample set, Right, Absolutely.
- [94:41]
Aaron Tarazas
Such an important point. Gusto is like a small business payroll platform. We do reweight our data so that it reflects the broader labor market, the broader small and medium sized business ecosystem.
- [94:52]
John
And how do you do that? Do you have ground truth data that's public that you can bet reference against?
- [94:58]
Aaron Tarazas
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the government produces this census of all small businesses based by industry and size. And so we take that distribution and match our internal data to that distribution.
- [95:10]
John
That makes sense. And then so I mean, the big question is the small business jobs report. What is the health of the American economy? What is the health of the small business community? What questions were you trying to answer? And where did you, where did you wind up?
- [95:24]
Aaron Tarazas
I mean, every month we get this headline jobs report from the bls. We're watching for this Friday. I think what we're trying to do with the small business jobs report is get a much firmer pulse on what's happening with small businesses. In particular, some businesses with less than 50 employees. You know, that is the majority of businesses in the American economy, but just a small minority of total employment. So it often gets buried in the headline jobs report numbers. And we know they're a driver of job growth, they're a driver of innovation, they're a driver of kind of the bread and butter work that gets done in our economy.
- [95:58]
John
Yeah. And where, where does net hiring stand? Give me some of the headline numbers. What are expectations? What should we, what should we by default assume is happening? I mean, there's a lot of doom and gloom in the economy, honestly, broadly because of geopolitical conflicts and nervousness around AI. But what are you actually seeing?
- [96:17]
Aaron Tarazas
You're right. There is a lot of doom and gloom. Our headline jobs number for March showed that small businesses created about 120,000 new jobs in March. That's an exceptionally strong number. That's the strongest numbers we've seen since 2022.
- [96:32]
John
Yeah.
- [96:33]
Aaron Tarazas
And you know, I think it's important to note that's not an outlier. Other kind of payroll providers are showing similar strength. So I think this, this narrative that we all have in our minds of the great freeze kind of businesses paralyzed by uncertainty, that's in some ways last year. I think 2026 is shaping up to be the great unstucking after being stuck last year.
- [96:54]
John
That's amazing news. Do you have any thoughts on. I can throw out a bunch of random theories off the top of my head, but this is paired with just yesterday. Oracle is slashing staffing over costs. There are big headline attention grabbing job cuts that are happening at name brand companies and those that news will fly very far because everyone knows Meta, everyone knows Oracle, and maybe they don't know that the small business just down the street actually increased headcount by 20% but they only added two people. So it's not going to be on the COVID of the Wall Street Journal. But is there some sort of, how crazy am I to think about the large companies maybe being overstaffed and maybe changing their business model so they need to recalibrate. Whereas small businesses are benefiting from artificial intelligence, maybe trying to do more, trying to expand, trying to compete. And so they're actually expanding their labor force even while the bigger companies have like much larger questions to ask about, you know, what happens over 20 years.
- [98:04]
Aaron Tarazas
Yeah, big business grabs, big headlines. And you think about the shocks that our economy has experienced over the past year, the past few years. Big businesses are kind of, I say, like a big freighter. You know, they're a little bit more resilient to the tsunami, but they have a really wide turning radius. Yeah, small businesses are like a schooner kind of there. You know, they have to adapt and pivot really quickly in response to shocks. And I think we saw that, you know, business, big businesses are just catching up. Whereas, you know, all these shocks we experienced last, last year, small businesses are already ahead of the curve and are thinking about what comes next.
- [98:40]
John
Yeah.
- [98:41]
Jordy
If you, if you were tasked with doing job reports for the federal government, how would you approach it given your exposure to having access to data sources like Gusto? You know, everyone by now is kind of used to seeing a jobs report from the government and then, you know, a few months later or six months later, you get these massive revisions and it's sort of confusing and it feels like we have all this real time data and like the data of people, like adding an employee to Gusto and starting to pay them is like much, much more obviously accurate, real time. And so it feels like the process could evolve. But what's your view?
- [99:22]
Aaron Tarazas
Yeah, I was a government economist. I have enormous respect for government economists. They have a big job. Their job is to look at the 40 year trend in the economy. These are tools that were designed over multiple decades. The reality is kind of there is so much data exhaust, real World exhaust right now in our economy that we can capture. And companies, companies like Gusto are, you know, we don't have data from 1963, but we have kind of much better data from what's happening right now. And so I think, you know, the two go hand in hand. They complement each other. One's going to give us that longer, more stable view of the economy. The other is going to give us these, these deep windows into these, you know, what's happening in different parts in real time.
- [100:05]
John
Do you have any insight into subcategories of jobs, how job titles are changing? I keep using this example that we're a small business, we have 10 people on staff and we have Tyler, our intern, who's basically a full time software developer as well as a co host of the show in a hybrid role. We have other folks who have Vibe coded whole systems. But in a previous business, if I was building a media company, I would have had to think extremely hard about developing a software engine organization. And I would have assumed that would have been extremely costly, a very big build versus buy decision. Instead it was just, oh, we hired Tyler because we liked him. He can do a bunch of different things and he starts Vibe coding and all of a sudden we have six systems and they all work really well. And so we've become like this hybrid tech media company. We're developing video games now too. That happened randomly, but we're not a game studio. And so I'm wondering about just, are you seeing any, any data that suggests that more people are picking up hybrid technology jobs or software engineering jobs or even if the titles are changing yet? Anything you're seeing on that side?
- [101:14]
Aaron Tarazas
Yeah, everything's in flux right now, kind of. I think all the traditional lines that used to be bright lines of businesses are being blurred. People are taking multiple hats, founders are doing more things. You raise a really good point. You think about how does a big business hire? You know, you ask for a head, the head goes to your manager, the manager sends it to finance the finances, to recruiting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's, you know, a week here, a week there. You're talking about months when the small business hire, when you hire, they decide, oh, we need someone yesterday, let's hire them next week or the week after.
- [101:47]
John
Yeah, yeah. What, what, what economic data points are you tracking that are potentially upstream of small business hiring in particular, because we all know gas prices surge, consumers feel pain at the pump, they cut back on travel, the economy potentially decelerates. There's These logical chains. And then in the big companies it might be like interest rates or something, geopolitical risk or tariffs. There's all sorts of things that could drive hiring at the large scale. What, what, what are the biggest needle movers that you would watch that might lead to some expectations about what might happen over the next couple of months in the small and medium sized business market?
- [102:32]
Aaron Tarazas
Yeah, I mean obviously you look at things like kind of hiring and job openings, that's, that's plans that are already in place. But yeah, almost more important than that, I think the sentiment, you know, expectations, particularly among decision makers who have, have the power to shape the future. So things like kind of CFO expectations, CEO expectations, that's how business leaders are thinking about the future. And future is partly prediction. Future is probably creation.
- [103:00]
John
Yeah. How good are those surveys? I feel like I've been a hiring manager for maybe like 15 years now. I don't know that I've ever answered a survey. Maybe I just did it and I forgot about it. But is it broad based? Are you confident that enough CFOs are actually picking up the phone or answering the survey? Because you could imagine that some of the most high performing managers are too busy hiring people to answer questions about whether or not they're going to hire people.
- [103:29]
Aaron Tarazas
Totally. This goes back to the conversation we're having about the strengths and weaknesses of different data sources. When the government goes out and service people, there's a lag in response biases. And who responds when we're looking at payroll data that's not kind of responding or not. I see what you're doing. And so in some ways that just gives, particularly for smaller businesses where people are busy, they're not picking up the phone, they don't have time to twiddle their thumbs. Kind of responding to a government survey that's capturing a real, real phenomenon.
- [103:58]
John
Yeah. How are you thinking about feeding that into Gusto's actual product offering? Because I could imagine if I'm in there hiring someone and I sort of get like the survey after I hired one, I plan to hire more people next quarter and it's just, you know, like leave a five star review type thing on an E commerce website that would probably have very high, you know, survey completion rate. Are you looking at doing more to get like qualitative or quantitative data that's more optional from the user base?
- [104:30]
Aaron Tarazas
That's a really cool idea. I certainly have not thought about that.
- [104:33]
John
You got to pitch it.
- [104:33]
Abhishek Das
Yeah.
- [104:34]
Aaron Tarazas
Serving people in the platform, that's something we haven't really done a lot of. But cool idea.
- [104:38]
John
I would love that because even just more qualitative, just, you know, with LLMs, there's so much that you can do to compress down qualitative data and whatnot. Like there's so many interesting things you could do.
- [104:47]
Jordy
How is, how is AI changing your approach to work?
- [104:51]
John
It's a great question.
- [104:52]
Aaron Tarazas
Yeah, obviously, kind of. It's completely transformative. Yeah, it's, it's transforming the way certainly I work as an economist. I think it's transforming how everyone works. It's transforming how businesses start and hire. I think there's just a growing body of evidence that AI is making it a lot easier to start a business, to incorporate, to do all of that front leg work. And on top of that, it is changing kind of the skill profile that you need when you hire. You need more of these people who manage processes, particularly at the start.
- [105:27]
John
Yeah. And then day to day, I would randomly predict like IPython notebooks a few years ago. Is it all command line prompts today? How is that changing for you?
- [105:41]
Aaron Tarazas
Yeah, I mean, I still work a lot in Python, but I'm doing more things at once and I think that's true for most economists. Anyone who's. In some ways it's lowered the, the barrier to getting that data. And that's great because that accelerates decision making, that helps these businesses adapt in real time and pivot to a rapidly changing world.
- [106:03]
John
Yeah, it's very cool. What a fun position to be in. Congratulations on the success. Thank you.
- [106:09]
Jordy
I'm sort of laughing in my head about imagining you if you had like a secret LLM subscription back when you were working as an economist for the federal government. They're like, how is Lisan al Gaib? How does Aaron do what he does if you're just sitting there?
- [106:27]
John
Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent, real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. And let me also tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineer engineering team.
- [106:48]
Jordy
Scoop. Scoop from Charles and Business Insider. Meta is forming a new elite AI lab.
- [106:55]
John
What?
- [106:55]
Jordy
The tech giant quietly reorganized its recommendations division. Rexis. It formed a top AI team run by TikTok's former head of growth reorgan Rex. SIS has been luring OpenAI, Google and Amazon talent. So just one more lab One more lab would fix me.
- [107:16]
John
That does seem like a great place to apply AI. I feel like the recommendations on Instagram are pretty good these days. I do feel like I get caught in. What's that called, Tyler? The local minima or the basin or whatever. Basin? Is that the term you used?
- [107:32]
Tyler
I said basin.
- [107:33]
John
Basin. Yeah. I feel like it's like, okay, yeah, I watched a few snowboard videos. It doesn't need to be all snowboard videos. We can go back to some vibrations Gabriels about airplanes or something like that. It goes back and forth. But in general I've had a good experience and I expect it to get better. Let's pull up this photo from Kirk Evans showing an advertisement for Tiger Woods. It says, step into the mind of Tiger woods and Kirk Evans says, I think I'll pass. Very, very unfortunate situation. Anyway, we can move on. What else is going on? Let's see. There is news from Perplexity.
- [108:18]
Jordy
Yeah, I can't find any actual reporting on this. Zerohedge said Perplexity was accused of sharing information of its users with Meta and Google. But there's zero source here.
- [108:27]
John
Yeah. And they might be within the terms and conditions. It could be anonymized the sharing personal information. I mean I guess it's personal if it's de. Anonymized. The quote here from the all in podcast is every single penny we make, we make profits on that. But the overall company is still yet to be profitable. So the other thing is, I think
- [108:47]
Jordy
he's talking about kind of large. The way that's phrased tells me we make money on subscriptions, saying for every single penny we make, we make profits on that.
- [109:00]
John
Yeah.
- [109:00]
Jordy
To me kind of ignores like free users potentially. Right. Because they've tried ads and they killed it.
- [109:06]
John
Sure.
- [109:07]
Jordy
So. So they're basically saying like on our consumer subscription business we make money.
- [109:11]
Eddie Q
Yeah.
- [109:12]
Jordy
But the overall company is not profitable. Yeah.
- [109:14]
John
And you would expect that like free users, if there's not ads like it's going to be negative margin on those. You just hope that it's not that bad and you hope that it all blends out across your subscription profits. Well, new job alert for Omar Shaheen. Yeah, new job at Microsoft. He's bringing OpenClaw plus personal agents to Microsoft 365. My goal is to help usher in a new generation of workplace proactive assistants. Ones that lighten your load by taking on tasks end to end and that can also step in proactively when they can help. Interesting that this to see this counter position against the Facebook Manus deal. Where isn't Manus open source as well? Is it? I don't remember. But it's like every company will need to have a partnership or an in house LLM to vend into every service. It does feel like the next couple years are going to be just like the chatbots popped up in every single app with varying degrees of success. Some of them are great, some of them I wind up using and I'm actually glad that I didn't need to export the data and I can just ask the question directly in that app and I have faith that they're using a good model and so they'll give me a good result. And mostly I'm happy that I know that the data is going to be clean and also secured in that app, in that ecosystem, in that walled garden. I'm fine with that. It does feel like the Open Claw agents actually build some software to answer a question is going to be vended into another box or another button with a star or something. Maybe it'll be a claw, just like how every app got a star during the AI boom or the chatbot boom. Now the agent boom will need a claw next to the star. Star will be Chatbot Claw will be okay. You want to do something where it actually goes and works through this. I feel like Google launched something similar. Not necessarily a full like Open Claw personal agent, but they did announce something along the lines of like an agent for your inbox that processes all your emails. They said goodbye Inbox zero. Is that the news? I don't know if we have it pulled up. I can search for it. Was it Sundar who posted it? Goodbye inbox 00. Let's see if this pulls anything up. I saw a friend of the show posting about it, but I will try and figure it out.
- [111:41]
Jordy
Open Claw setup that just deletes every email as soon as it arrives in your inbox.
- [111:46]
John
Yeah, it's archive all you know. When were you ever an Inbox app user? This was like the pre superhuman era.
- [111:58]
Eddie Q
It was.
- [111:58]
John
It was like the hot email app that a team of software developers, iOS developers in particular, built a very well designed email app for iOS. And this was at a time when a lot of the other native iPhone apps for popular email services were still a little clunky. They didn't have all the great features. And the inbox team sort of went and reimagined it using Inbox zero as this philosophy. And so if you're not familiar with Inbox zero, basically it's the idea that at the end of the day, you should have nothing in your inbox, which to some people sounds impossible because they have like 50,000 emails in their inbox. How many emails are in your inbox right now? How many emails?
- [112:42]
Jordy
Name every email.
- [112:44]
John
You're a 10,000 text message guy. You don't even do inbox either. On your.
- [112:48]
Jordy
I have 20,000, 20,000 in the inbox. I don't have 10,000. I have 5,000, 750.
- [112:54]
John
That's really close. That's closer to 10,000 than zero. Anyway, the whole idea is that email is a metaphor for a literal office. It's supposed to be a desk and you receive mail that comes to your inbox. If you want to send something, you put it in your outbox and then your team will send that out. But once you've actually taken something out of your inbox, read it, processed it, you can physically throw it into the trash, or you can physically file it in a cabinet, or you can physically write a response and put it in the outbox. Like, this is the way people did business back before email in like the 60s when they were just sitting at their wooden desks, their mahogany desks. And so the inbox team said, let's copy that paradigm. And this was popularized in books and management philosophy for a long time, but let's copy that and have the idea that you should get to inbox zero by the end of the day. And so they made it very easy to inbox to basically archive all your emails. There was this big, long waiting list. It took months, it was really, really hyped. In Silicon Valley, they eventually sold a Dropbox. It was a very good outcome, but it became a very popular product that everyone had to install because it allowed you get to get through your emails much faster. So the main feature that is now in basically every email client is that you could just swipe and archive the email, which does not delete it. You can always search for it later. But it says it's just a way. If you're in a to do list, it's saying that this email, I don't need it. Like, I don't need it on my to do list. Like the inbox is your to do list. If you archive it, you can always search for it later. It's not deleted, it's there. You could also shuffle it away folder, you could delete it. But then they also had a snooze functionality where you could swipe to the left or to the right or something and say, hey, I'm not ready to deal with this email right now. I'm not responding to it right now, but this is a receipt or a ticket for a flight. And I want this to come back into my inbox the day before the flight or something like that. They made it really easy to both archive and snooze. And when you archive and snooze every email, you can very quickly get to Inbox Zero. By the end of the day they did a bunch of gamification stuff to make it fun and be like, you got Inbox Zero. Like take a screenshot of it. People were sharing the screenshots of their inbox 0 lineups.
- [115:10]
Jordy
UPDATE. What's the update from NASA administrator Jared Isaacman.
- [115:13]
John
What's happened?
- [115:14]
Jordy
The Artemis 2 crew is boarding Orion.
- [115:16]
John
They're boarding. Okay, good news. I'm on the edge of my seat. I didn't know what you were going to say.
- [115:21]
Gary Tan
Each one with who turn up? Reed or Jeremy.
- [115:26]
John
So it looks like Andre is with Reed. And this is the locked in image. This is the fully locked in with
- [115:36]
Gary Tan
25,000 buttons while Andre is buckling him in. That's a five point harness.
- [115:42]
Jordy
Tyler, would you stay in a little box that small for 2 weeks? 8 days, 10 days? 4.
- [115:48]
John
Getting the displays ready so that they can monitor $400.
- [115:51]
Tyler
If I went to the moon, then for sure.
- [115:54]
Jordy
What if you. What if you're just sitting here in the ultra dome, you have access to a laptop but you cannot move out of.
- [116:02]
John
Yeah. Should we do a simulated moon mission where he has to live in a pod for 10 days in solidarity with the astronauts?
- [116:10]
Jordy
That's good, that's good, that's good.
- [116:12]
John
In solidarity, in solidarity you will Wait. We can send you to the moon in VR. We can't afford to send you to the moon, but we can send you to the moon in aggregate. Well, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. First, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange? Just do it. And let me also tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And without further ado, we have Pratt from Arena Physica who's the CEO and co founder.
- [116:51]
Jordy
How are you doing?
- [116:53]
Pratap
Hey, Jordy and John. Great to see you guys.
- [116:55]
John
Good to see you again.
- [116:56]
Jordy
Great to have you.
- [116:57]
John
Welcome back.
- [116:58]
Pratap
Yeah, it's been a bit.
- [116:59]
John
It has. Please reintroduce yourself. Give us a little Backstory and then we'll go into the company.
- [117:04]
Pratap
Yeah, perfect. So yeah, Top Pranay, CEO and co founder of Arena Physica. You know, we were on your show announcing some fundraising about, I would say just about a year, a year and change ago. Maybe a year and a quarter.
- [117:15]
John
Yeah.
- [117:16]
Pratap
And companies evolved a bit since then. We were, you know, started with bringing AI to hardware engineering. So hardware engineers, that's evolved actually quite a bit as we've seen the whole AI space evolve, which is what is, you know, if we think about modern hardware, it's software defined, right. Like that's, that's happening everywhere. But software defined hardware is really like electromagnetically governed. Like the key problems are it's the electronics interfacing with the firmware interfacing with the mechanics. And it needs to obey physics and behave well. And turns out humans can really use one of those forces of physics really well. Electromagnetism and it's a rate limiter for progress. And so what we released yesterday is the first foundation model for electromagnetism. Think about it as a large, similar to a large language model in architecture. But the training tokens, they aren't words, they're materials, geometries and electromagnetic fields. So learning us, helping us speak another language. Basically the kind of language of the universe.
- [118:13]
John
So what's the data set for that? Like is this crawl the website? Mind blowing for sure. April Fools. It's actually digital chat.
- [118:22]
Jordy
Appreciate.
- [118:25]
John
It's a new LLM, it's a new chat box.
- [118:27]
Pratap
No, yeah, no, for sure the data set doesn't exist.
- [118:32]
John
Okay.
- [118:32]
Pratap
Yeah, which is why this has been hard.
- [118:34]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [118:34]
John
So what did you do? Is it simulated or did you have to go collect this? How does that work?
- [118:38]
Pratap
Yeah, that's a component. So the reality is like what we've done is basically build a data factory. We spent about a year and a half building that. And how do we get all of the data that a model of this sort of architecture transformation, transformer type model needs? So it starts by creating random patterns. So that's layer one of the cake, if you would, is large amount of random generation and that's different geometries with different material stack ups and then running them through simulation to see how they behave. That's sort of think about it as layer one of the cake. But you know, the number of possibilities here explode, you add more layers, you think about modern design, it's happening on silicon. How does you know, how do these actually behave in the real world? You can't explore that whole universe. You can't randomly explore it. And this has been one of the big bottlenecks, is there's very few of these experts in the world. I think Starlink is a great demonstration of what you can build when you've actually mastered such capabilities. But few people have achieved that outside of SpaceX, and it's bottlenecked by experts and simulation. The second layer of the cake is our experts have been creating designs that work. Then the final step is we actually fabricate those designs and then we pipe that back into the system. I think you guys might have something over there.
- [119:50]
John
We do, we do. We received something in the mail, but we have some news because it was intercepted. Somebody opened it and stole maybe half the package. I don't know if there's two things. I only have one, but I do have a screwdriver.
- [120:04]
Jordy
And this presented in quite an amazing way. I think somebody basically was like, okay, this looks valuable.
- [120:11]
John
I gotta figure out that's what happened. So I will open this, you can can tell me what this is, and then if the other piece of the puzzle is missing, you can break that down and we can go find the thieves at some point.
- [120:24]
Pratap
I will talk through the other piece. That is a booklet that describes the background of what you're opening.
- [120:29]
Jordy
They stole the booklet. Stole the book.
- [120:31]
Pratap
I know.
- [120:31]
Abhishek Das
Weird.
- [120:32]
John
That's extremely.
- [120:33]
Pratap
I'm going for the metal box.
- [120:34]
Jordy
Yeah, the metal box feels like it's probably a nation state.
- [120:38]
John
I have no idea. This is so weird. We're not making this up. Like, we opened it, we received it, and it had been ripped open and the booklet had been stolen. But, I mean, I hope that's not like intellectual property or something. But inside it says, caution, electromagnetic superintelligence. Hand handle only if you are ready for the future.
- [120:57]
Abhishek Das
Love it.
- [120:57]
Jordy
There we go.
- [120:57]
John
And so let's open this up.
- [120:59]
Jordy
All right, so break it down.
- [120:59]
Aaron Tarazas
Yeah, break it down.
- [121:00]
Eddie Q
What.
- [121:00]
John
What is this? Okay, great.
- [121:03]
Pratap
So I'll flash through a bit, some of the booklet for background, and then I'll tell you what that is. But if you look at what the booklet is focused on, so what can we do with electromagnetism? What can we do with structures like the one you're holding? What you're holding is an RF circuit. Okay, so. Circuit used for radio frequency communication. And if you think about what's happening right now, communication and sensing is kind of the big bottleneck for robotics, for satellite communication, for a lot of the bottlenecks in data centers. And that's gated by this small group of experts. And these really slow simulators from about the 80s, right?
- [121:36]
John
Yeah.
- [121:37]
Pratap
And so what we've done here is actually create a design from scratch from nothing but a prompt. So the way it works, and it's actually live on our website, on our research page, arena physica.com research you can read the technical blog and you can play with the product. You can literally type in a prompt and that goes to an LLM. And then the LLM basically passes it to our foundation model. So the LLM interprets the prompt. It's like, oh, John's trying to build a 10 GHz bandpass filter for his new satellite company.
- [122:09]
Sam
And it passes.
- [122:13]
Jordy
You guys sort of like hydrate the prompts to make sure it's structured and has the necessary information or what does that pass off look like?
- [122:23]
Pratap
Yeah, it's a great question. So the prompt, that's where we actually will rely on the LLM. So let's say you give an incomplete description. You're like, hey, I'm trying to build the space antenna. But you didn't specify that it's a filter. The LLM, you will make some good assumptions and say, are you looking for this? And then that prepares sort of the inputs that we need and then it calls our model. So in a way, what I'm really excited about is I see a future where you have multiple AI foundation models working together. And we've got one that speaks English really well, which is your interpreter, which is your front door. But now it needs to go and create a structure which is physically valid. That's where it calls Heaviside, our EM foundation model. What you're holding is a 10 GHz band pass filter, which is one of those key components inside a modern phased array system, which is used for radar, for satellite communication. You think about, there's a lot of conversation about data centers in space. We're not going to fiber optically cable them together. You're going to need to transmit that data again between them wirelessly. And so that industry basically started off in about the sort of 60s with phased array radar.
- [123:29]
Jordy
Actually, I think the first one was
- [123:30]
Pratap
back in World War II. And so what you've got in your hand is like, if you look at it, it's an alien geometry. It's a strange structure. It doesn't look like something that came from a human brain. Right. It's like it doesn't look like a nice geometric pattern. It's not a line, it's not a coil. The crazy thing is that it works.
- [123:52]
John
And Jordy just To be clear, you're not supposed to touch that with your bare hands.
- [123:56]
Jordy
Yeah, it's over.
- [123:57]
John
Highly radioactive.
- [123:58]
Jordy
It's over for me.
- [123:58]
John
I'm kidding.
- [123:59]
Jordy
No, I'm not convinced this isn't alien technology, but cool story. It's very, very cool.
- [124:08]
John
So I mean I appreciate the example of like the connectivity and space data centers. Obviously that's like frontier. But walk me through the actual like market map, industrial scale of like, I imagine there are like certain power law buyers of RF equipment. Like it's in everything from like that Bluetooth connected toaster to your phone to your car. It's everywhere. But what is the actual shape of the industry where, when I'm thinking about like subdividing the industry and getting down, like the satellite industry is here, the smartphone industry is here. Walk me through the map of the potential customer set.
- [124:52]
Pratap
Totally. Yeah. If you think about that, there's a few different buckets. So if you can harness electromagnetism in rf, which is, let's say application one, you've got satellite communication. So phased rays for satcom. So that's your user terminal, your satellite. So if you think about a Starlink satellite, I believe it needs to track 64 different locations on the ground. So make 64 different beams. You have to do that with a phased array. So anyone launching, anyone in the space industry, which I think is exploding right now, needs communications between earth and space. So phased arrays are key there. Radar, radar is another really big one. So if you think about that, we've obviously got Raytheon as the incumbent here. But if you think about advanced radar, they're incredibly expensive today and we have few of them on ships. You know, we should have backpack based radar for soldiers, for counter drone, we should have a whole variety. This, this, we want to debottleneck this field and basically democratize it. Almost like aws ify that for companies building for space, for radar, radar makers also for companies, you know, if you think about data centers, chip to chip communication. So these channels that let chips talk to each other are incredibly difficult to get right. In some way, you're trying to build a very bad antenna there because you don't want it to pick up random interference, you want it to send the signal you want. So just those alone are massive markets. Actually we looked at the forecast for the phase ray and RF components and it looks like this line, and I feel like it's something I would have done right out of school is, oh great, let me take the historic numbers and propagate them forward. But it does doesn't seem to account for the fact that we're expecting a boom in space. We're expecting growth in AI data centers. And if you think about imaging, I heard something from a chief scientist here that blew my mind. I always thought about radar as detection. You're trying to detect something. And he said radar is an imaging platform. So as you get to higher frequencies like lidar, you've got this high frequency beam that's echolocating things like a bat. And it's useful for all weather imaging. So when light's getting blocked, you can actually use a radio wave to kind of create your lidar map. So if you think about that being used for robotics, which is another application. So each of these pieces we feel, haven't been sized into the forecast. And so that's, I think, where a lot of the opportunity lies and when we talk to customers. So we work with AMD and Anduril as examples. So our mission is partner with companies at the frontier that are trying to challenge existing cost models and push frontier technology harder. Those are sort of the places where we're seeing early adoption.
- [127:27]
John
And do you want to be like selling intellectual property like ARM or software for chip design or the actual finished chips? How vertically integrated do you want to be?
- [127:39]
Pratap
Yeah, I would say like realistically, as of where we are today, our model is closer to the model of like a Palantir or an arm. Obviously my own heritage last company was bought by Palantir. And so partnering with companies using our whole tool chain. So this is the latest product Heaviside, the EM foundation model. But Atlas, our current product, is an agentic product that lets you use LLM agents to debug parts of the hardware process. So that plus our fdes that are not just software engineers, but also electrical and RF engineers forward deploy as partners to drive major outcomes. What we are seeing and what you're holding is a piece of this is the existing IP industry has let me license you ip and this is where it's an open question. We haven't figured it out, but you now have an IP generator as a machine. And so we're really excited about the ARM kind of model as I think probably the most proximate to where we are today and our way of having the most impact because we can empower more teams. Like our mission is to empower more teams to build more advanced stuff. If we think about a lot of the AI doom and gloom where, like, where do the jobs go? The conclusion we come to is companies just need to be More ambitious. Like, that's how we create jobs. Let's assume we're working with AI. How do we enable you to do that? How do we enable others and more companies to do this? The last thing I want to say on that is if you look at what happened with language models, it was all possible because of scaling laws. And like, you know, before language models, there was a lot of machine learning where we were trying to go and solve problems at that use case level. We were solving like language translation, summarization, spam detection, separately. But once you pointed a huge model at language as A substrate and OpenAI published that seminal paper in 2020 on scaling laws, you could scale it up and it started to generalize. Now these things can do remarkable things. We believe we will see, and we're seeing early hints of scaling laws for electromagnetics and this might be true for physics in general, electromagnetism being one of the four fundamental forces here. But that's sort of what we, what we think is possible. So each of the industries you talked about doesn't need a specific solution. We think in the future, as you scale this up, this central brain could power any industry that's bottlenecked by electromagnetism. You know, phased array, radar, satcom and data center interconnects being a starting point.
- [129:54]
John
Yeah.
- [129:54]
Pratap
Wow.
- [129:54]
Jordy
What's the reaction been from the experts that you've mentioned? Are they experiencing a ChatGPT moment with the new model yet or you still need to iterate? How are people responding?
- [130:06]
Pratap
Yeah, it's a great question. I think the reaction's definitely been really positive in some pockets and deeply skeptical in other pockets. As you can imagine, getting this stuff right is really difficult. Right. I would say we're at like a GPT1 moment here. We're not at a ChatGPT moment. We have about tens of millions of data points in the training set. As I mentioned, this data doesn't exist. We had to make it all in the data factory. So that's sort of one of the keys. And so we're finding as the models get larger and as the data set gets bigger, they're capable of more. But today, what you're holding, a human could design an equivalent component like what you're seeing with a normal structure, and it would work. We're not yet at a superhuman point with the model, but what we are is transforming the cost structure. This is 800,000 times faster than a commercial solver, for instance. And the expertise is not locked up in an expert. You could go and just get that kind of on demand from the AI. So that's what we're seeing today and I think it will take some time to move up that stack. But that's why I'm super excited about the scaling laws. And I think from as I mentioned, AMD and Anduril, I think we're fortunate enough to get partners and customers that I think are really on the frontier that are leaning in and believing in this. And so we're super excited about that.
- [131:24]
John
Can you talk about the FDE model in this case? I feel like a lot of people don't even understand the typical engagement of having Palantir FTEs inside of an organization. They might be more familiar with McKinsey coming to the organization, doing a delayering or some management consulting engagement. Like how long is a product life cycle, development life cycle? How long do you imagine that a typical engagement with FD's might be? Is it going to be the same as Palantir? Different? Like how is this unique?
- [131:57]
Pratap
Yeah, so right now we definitely see the engagement models being we're partnering on an array of problems. So we'd start with one. For example, let's say that new product innovation cycle is, you know, for something like a new chip or a new data center that might be in the number of like a year, it might be a couple of years. But what we're seeing is then those architectures are used across multiple product lines by a lot of these companies. And so could we become a partner long term across all of these electromagnetically limited products? That's sort of where we see sort of that. That outcome driving, you know, that driving really big outcomes across the stack.
- [132:32]
John
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations Jordy. Anything else?
- [132:35]
Jordy
Amazing progress. We will put this to use. We will as many of these as
- [132:40]
John
the entire show will run through that. We'll figure it out. We'll do might take a lot of queries for us.
- [132:45]
Jordy
Incredible queries.
- [132:46]
John
We might hear fte, you have to
- [132:48]
Jordy
send one over next time and let's have you back before another year passes.
- [132:53]
John
Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.
- [132:54]
Pratap
Awesome. Thanks guys. Great to see you.
- [132:56]
John
Goodbye.
- [132:57]
Jordy
Cheers.
- [132:57]
John
Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI8 that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Phase Clan Let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers with training and inference that scale from 1 GPU to hundreds of thousands. And I think we're in the Lambda Lightning round now or are we in close something serious? Let's fire up the Lambda Lightning round. I love the Lambda Lightning round. The cloud is working overtime.
- [133:28]
Jordy
Kik.
- [133:28]
John
Yeah?
- [133:29]
Jordy
What's going on with acquired Faze Clan?
- [133:30]
John
Oh, that's interesting.
- [133:32]
Jordy
Strategic acquisition of Faze Media.
- [133:34]
John
Yeah, opening at some point. There was some that was public.
- [133:39]
Jordy
They were public and private.
- [133:41]
John
Okay.
- [133:41]
Tyler
The transaction is real. It's not April Fool's. Oh, I'm just throwing that.
- [133:46]
John
I don't know. Okay, yeah, Kick. I don't know. Can we dig into this? Is this an April Fool's joke? Somebody already asked Grok. Yes, 100%. It's an April Fool's prank. The press Release is dated 41 2026. There's zero real news of confirmation of any Kick Phase deal. And it fits the classic nostalgic streamer org acquisition troll vibe. Nice catch.
- [134:07]
Jordy
I'm so unk. I didn't realize this was. Is this supposed to be fun?
- [134:12]
Tyler
It's on their Wikipedia, though, so. I don't know.
- [134:14]
John
Actually, I think this might be real. I don't know. I mean, it seems like if Faze was taken private and is looking for, you know, a new home integration into Kik, like this doesn't seem like that crazy. It's not like, yeah, if it is a. If it is April Fool's joke, it's not like, oh, wow, I never would have imagined that Kik and Faze teamed up. Like, that's. There are people that are making that joke. There was some company, high frequency trading firm that was joking about being acquired by Anthropic or something.
- [134:43]
Tyler
It was like a crypto company.
- [134:45]
John
Crypto wallet company. Like, that feels a little bit more non sequitur. Right?
- [134:49]
Jordy
Well, Adam Faze has a good story. He says Faze Media owns the trademark for his born last name, Faze, and sent him a cease and desist in 2023 when he originally named his production company Faze World says I want my last name back.
- [135:03]
John
I'm rooting for you. I'm rooting for Adam Faze to be able to use the brand.
- [135:06]
Jordy
You should have bid on the ip, buddy. You should have bid.
- [135:11]
John
Yeah, I mean, also, what were your parents doing not trademarking your name in every possible category as a child? This is seriously deep alpha. I need to lock up Coogan rather than later.
- [135:22]
Jordy
Tawny on a roll today says it's never been a better time to be in the fake wood panel industry. If you sell fake wood slats that can be quickly installed in a room somewhere. Business is booming with no signs of slowing down.
- [135:34]
John
I love the slat walls. We got to get one in here so we can just like step back and go and hang out and do a little slot wall podcast.
- [135:41]
Jordy
Wait, that.
- [135:42]
John
That would have been April Fools. What were we thinking?
- [135:45]
Jordy
You know, we struggled with April Fools this year. We. We think it's a little bit overplayed. It's not that it's. That would have been. It's not that funny. And kind of every single day is April Fools for us.
- [135:56]
John
Yeah, we do a lot. Yeah.
- [135:57]
Jordy
And there's a lot of fools. It's a good day for us to just get serious, Right. Get in the white suits, focus on the market. The market's up. Wearing white suits, Dylan. Really serious. But, you know, the actual play would have been to rebuild like the typical podcast set with like the bookshelves, the slot walls, but then make it miniature, right?
- [136:15]
John
Oh, yeah.
- [136:16]
Jordy
So we're sitting there. We're sitting there. We look like, you know, giants.
- [136:19]
John
Giants. Giants of the industry. Do you know why the slot wall is so popular?
- [136:24]
Jordy
Isn't it Huberman?
- [136:26]
John
Yes, but do you know why he selected it?
- [136:29]
Jordy
I do not.
- [136:30]
John
So when you are recording a podcast, you want good audio quality. You don't want reverberation. You don't want a lot of flat walls that will bounce the sound back to you and create echo and distortion and hollowness in the sound. You want a nice bassy response. You need a nice microphone, but you also need a sound treated area in the ultra dome. We have some sound treatment over there. We have some sound treatment over there. We. We do have a hard floor. Maybe that would make the audio quality better, who knows? But we, for a long time, people would put up that sort of. It's a egg crate style. I don't know if we have a camera. Maybe the reverse PTZ would do it. But that egg crate style soundproofing works incredibly well. And if you're ever in a professional recording booth as doing voiceover for a film or recording a song, you will be there. That has a lot of spike. Yeah, it has a lot of spiky. Yeah. You can see right here. So this sort of egg crate, it creates a lot of little holes for the, for the, for the sound to get caught in effectively and very fun journey. And the problem is that that makes it look like you are in a sound booth. It's not very aesthetic. It doesn't look like a natural environment. And so there were companies that said, let's get the best of both worlds. Something that's Aesthetic, but still sound treating. And so they launched these wood slat walls. Of course, the space in between the wood captures the sound a little bit, acts as a little bit of deadening. And then of course you can also hide, you can also hide soundproofing material behind the wood slat wall. And so it was a very logical way to have an element elevated aesthetic while still getting the benefits, at least some of the benefits of sound treatment. Then Andrew Huberman did it went mega viral and everyone sort of copied it over and did the same thing. And it's become a huge trend. He wound up painting his black, I think, and who knows?
- [138:34]
Jordy
I think they got sick of being.
- [138:35]
John
Now, you know, if you're in the black paint industry, that's where the money is because everyone with the face wood panels is going to be painting it black. We have yet to do this. I've looked at this in the past, but I've never, I've never actually done it. Anyway. Do we have the right person, guys?
- [138:52]
Jordy
I believe so.
- [138:54]
John
Are you sure? Sorry. We are figuring out who. Oh, yes. Okay, got it. Sorry, I'm, I'm.
- [139:01]
Jordy
I thought it was.
- [139:02]
John
Yeah, I thought we were jumping ahead to Gary Tan. I'm sorry. Anyway, without further ado.
- [139:06]
Jordy
Let's run it back.
- [139:07]
John
Let's run it back. Abhishek, I messed up. Abhishek, great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time. I got a little mixed up on the schedule, but it's great to have you here with us today. Anyway, please introduce yourself and the company.
- [139:21]
Abhishek Das
Hey, thanks for having me. I'm Abhishek. Abhishek Das. I'm the co founder and co CEO
- [139:26]
John
of UTOTI and introduce the company. What are you building?
- [139:30]
Abhishek Das
Yeah, so at utoti we're building web agents, so agents that can take actions and complete tasks on the the web. So we think that the future of interacting with the web is going to look quite different than it does today. Where we're not manually navigating web pages, clicking buttons, filling forms, etc. We're going to be operating at a slightly higher level of abstraction where we have AI agents who we delegate tasks to that carry on a lot of these tasks in the background on our behalf.
- [139:56]
John
And does that mean like virtual machines loading the full web page and clicking on it, like a mouse and keyboard interaction? Or are you interacting with the APIs and reverse engineering the routes to sort of just build clis on the fly? What are the different strategies that are working and not working right now?
- [140:16]
Abhishek Das
Yeah, so it's everything you mentioned, basically. Okay, both we should probably think of it in layers. So there's the core LLM that's looking at how webpages are laid out, how to click buttons, navigate websites to take a task to completion. Then there's the agent harness which surrounds that LLM. So whether on the web we have APIs available, it'll make use of APIs where there's no APIs use this kind of a visual linguistic model. And the agent harness takes care of things like persistence. So if it makes a mistake and it has to backtrack and try something else that it knows how to do, that the agent harness would take care of memory, orchestration, breaking a task down into subtasks, all of that. And then the third layer is putting all of this together. What does the product experience look like? Where this works for everyone?
- [141:06]
John
Makes sense. How are you thinking about the divide between consumer versus business to business enterprise? How do you see the customer mix evolving?
- [141:15]
Abhishek Das
Yeah, most of our users are prosumers, so individuals who are using it for work. So like small to medium business owners or individuals working at bigger companies. The model layer that I talked about, we do train our own model in house. It is as accurate as Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 but is 2 to 3x faster and much cheaper. So that we make available as an API as well.
- [141:42]
Pratap
Sure.
- [141:42]
Jordy
So what was the process creating the model? Did you take an open source model and fine tune it?
- [141:49]
Abhishek Das
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So most of our focus is on mid training and post training with a mix of SFT and autop. We started off of an open source Gwen based model and we collect our own data both in simulation and actual websites and we train on this.
- [142:05]
Jordy
Yeah, so sorry, the big labs don't scare you? Talk about how you see the competitive kind of environment evolving. This is something that I think everyone should assume that all the different kind of consumer prosumer and enterprise products do maybe not super well right now, but will do. How do you see the market evolving?
- [142:30]
Abhishek Das
Yeah, I think the market for non coding knowledge work, digital work is massive. There's, there's a lot of work to be done that it hasn't quite hit the kind of inflection point that coding agents have. So yeah, there's a huge opportunity there. The area that we do peak on and we care about is tasks that happen on the web. So browser use capabilities, specifically anthropic OpenAI etc. Have models for computer use which is more general purpose, but for browser use currently Ours is the best model that's out there both for accuracy and latency.
- [143:05]
John
How do you think about the, the textbook use cases? I'm sure you get asked about booking a flight that's more of like Agentica on the web. Go do something for me. I can also imagine there's a huge value in just monitoring websites, scraping data, putting things together. We were talking yesterday about how will we see an explosion of token consumption among financial professionals like we've seen among programmers. And my bull case that we will is that yes, you're just maybe building one financial model, you're not necessarily building 1,000 financial models a day, but that one financial model might interact with thousands and thousands of web pages to collect every possible data point, to create aggregated data sets that then can be compressed and compressed down into a 12 tab Excel sheet that eventually results in should you buy the stock or not or whatever the financial analysis is.
- [144:10]
Abhishek Das
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. The first thing you mentioned where logging into a website and booking a flight or ordering food or something. We actually shipped a big upgrade today and it's basically possible today. You can connect your favorite websites and apps to our product, which is called Scout Stor, and you can just give it a task like a bunch of us internally have been using it to automate, like our quiz orders, Instacart orders. We've had people externally try it out as well for LinkedIn, other websites as well. But a lot of that is possible today and it makes use of our core model, the agent harness. All the tech components coming together. Now in terms of how I see the token consumption and usage of this going forward, I think it's still quite early in this space. Like a lot of non coding digital work hasn't quite gotten the kind of attention and hit that inflection point yet. So the cheaper and more reliable and more accurate it gets, I think we're just going to see an explosion of usage of this technology.
- [145:17]
John
Yeah, it feels like there's a little bit of a capability overhang. Like you can do really deep research and you can do deeper research with a coding agent in many ways. But that workflow and that just, it just hasn't broken through to everyday consumers that they should even think about, you know, asking an LLM or an agent a question like, you know, build my financial profile from every data source all over the place and analyze everything. They come to it with like, you know, how much should I invest in the stock market? A basic question that's basically just web search yeah.
- [145:53]
Abhishek Das
So there's two or three aspects here. One is that we actually had someone try this recently on our product where they gave it access to their email and they had a bunch of expense reports that had come in on their email and they asked the agent to prepare sort of a nice categorization and spreadsheet of all the expenses and they were able to one shot it. Wow. So that's one part of it. The other part of it is that the previous version of our product was primarily meant for agents that can monitor anything on the web. So kind of like Google Alerts, but on Seto it's like an AI native version of it. But with today's release, one of the things we released is the capability to build live artifacts. So now these agents don't only don't just monitor, they can prepare a single sort of spreadsheet or a website or a dashboard that stays updated as new information comes in. So like if you want to track anytime a startup comes out of stealth or like a startup announces a fundraise, you can now use scouts to make a single. Maintain a single spreadsheet for it.
- [147:00]
John
Yeah.
- [147:03]
Jordy
How, where's, where's the company at? When did you start it and what were you doing before this?
- [147:06]
Gary Tan
This?
- [147:07]
Abhishek Das
Yeah. So we started the company in 2024. I'm. I'm an AI researcher by background. I grew up in India, moved to the US in 2016 for my PhD. That was at Georgia Tech. After that I spent some time at fair at Meta as an AI researcher. Both, there's two other co founders. All three of us are AI researchers by background. We're about 15 people. We raise a lot of little beyond our safe drawing.
- [147:34]
John
That's where we are. Are you compute constrained at all?
- [147:37]
Abhishek Das
Massively.
- [147:38]
John
Massively. Well, I mean, what's the plan? Is the best practice just like hunt around for cheap GPUs or slide around different services or use your product to
- [147:53]
Jordy
monitor when availability comes online on the neolabs.
- [147:57]
John
Yeah, Neo cloud.
- [147:59]
Aaron Tarazas
Yeah.
- [147:59]
Abhishek Das
So we definitely do a lot of that and we are, I think, quite compute efficient from that, from that point of view. But compute is one part of it, the other is data. Right. For a lot of tasks on the web, it's not easy to collect and generate data as, let's say computer use tasks where you can just hire a bunch of annotators to, let's say, simulate certain tasks on Microsoft Office apps and so on.
- [148:25]
John
Right.
- [148:25]
Abhishek Das
Like on the web, many of these are irreversible actions. Like if you actually buy something, then there's a real cost associated with it. So it's not as easy to collect data, do a mix of like simulation and sort of using our product to visit web pages, especially websites where there's a few clicks and navigation steps in board so you can't like index or crawl them in a naive manner.
- [148:51]
John
So are you building RL environments for particular websites? Is that programmatic or are they like handcrafted? Like how many? Like what's the scale? I imagine that you need to build a lot of these for generalization that's very cumbersome and there's going to be like flaws with every single different system that you try and build.
- [149:10]
Pratap
Yeah.
- [149:10]
Abhishek Das
So we wipe code, a bunch of simulated websites and use that to generate data and like evaluate. There is a good amount of in category generalization that we see. Like for example, if you imagine how Amazon is laid out or how any e commerce website is laid out, there's not that much variance between them. But if you compare that to for example how Zillow or Redfin is laid out, totally huge difference what the UI looks like. Yeah. So just being intelligent about how we're
- [149:38]
John
sourcing data and then are you like stack ranking those? Like is Amazon more valuable than Zillow because consumers will demand that or prosumers will demand that over Zillow or vice versa. And how do you evaluate that?
- [149:51]
Abhishek Das
I think it's a, it's a mix. We do keep a close eye on making sure that mix looks good and like as we want it to be. A lot of our users use it for more work related things as opposed to in that, in their personal lives. So we keep a focus on that.
- [150:09]
John
Yeah, so it's log into my erp, my payroll system, pull stuff from all different dashboards. I can imagine us pulling analytics from all the different analytics providers and they all have separate websites but they all have some similarities in the design philosophy and the best practices and what color the CTAs are and whatnot. Anyway, yeah, this is fascinating. Congrats on the progress and thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us.
- [150:33]
Jordy
Thanks for breaking it down, we'll talk to you soon.
- [150:36]
John
Cheers, have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about a very related company, Labelbox, RL environments, voice robotics, evals and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we should have Gary Tan joining us just a minute, but we can go back to the timeline.
- [151:03]
Jordy
We can pull up this post from Marek Hazan. He says we just rebuilt every startup in YC's latest demo day batch. Here's what our agentic founders pulled off and what it means for the future of startups fully usable products. At the bottom of the thread below, he's like, I one shotted all of your companies.
- [151:22]
John
I built everything. What a crazy.
- [151:25]
Jordy
Let's play this video.
- [151:26]
John
Yeah, let's play this video.
- [151:26]
K
Rebuilt every startup in YC's latest demo day bash. At Feltsense, we build agentic founders that source ideas, build product and build source
- [151:35]
Jordy
ideas from the YC demo day.
- [151:37]
K
So we asked Page, could our killer agents compete with these cracked founders? On demo day, our agents swarmed the YC website, found every startup in the batch and locked in to reverse engineer each build. They reconstructed their own priority based on public product specs and started to rebuild each application. When they hit snags or needed input, they called in a human to help resolve every problem. Core technology that took founders months or even years to create was rebuilt, rebranded and ready to go to market within 24 hours. So what does this mean for YC and the startup ecosystem more broadly? It means AI replication. Risk is becoming more and more of a threat to every business. So what makes a startup more or less replicable? This is what we learned. Several obvious protections exist for startups. Building things in the physical world and owning data that others simply can't get to are a few examples. But there's a third one that caught us off guard, and it's more interesting. Most people think the best protection in an AI world is human creativity. Meaning or ingenuity?
- [152:43]
Sam
Ingenuity.
- [152:43]
K
The positive parts of humanity. But that's not what we're really seeing. The real protection seems to come from the messy stuff. Industries filled with politics, lack of trust, turf wars and bureaucracy. Markets that are painful to work in due to complex or even failing social dynamics are exactly the ones that are hardest to deploy into and therefore the most protected. A company that has learned to pick apart that mess and embed their solution has something few competitors can copy overnight. Difficult markets aren't bad markets. In an AI era, they may be the safest ones to spend your rare time.
- [153:19]
Jordy
I'm saying this hard. Hard companies are hard analysis company by company.
- [153:24]
John
This is sort of cool. It feels like a blog post as
- [153:30]
K
to get a DM of the full full video.
- [153:32]
John
Like it has a lot more. There's like more of a thing Thesis and meat on the bones.
- [153:35]
Jordy
He ratioed himself in the video. He got way more likes in the video than. Well, we have Gary Tan here.
- [153:42]
John
We can ask Fantastic.
- [153:43]
Jordy
If all these.
- [153:44]
John
Gary Tan in to the ultra Dom. Gary, how are you doing?
- [153:48]
Gary Tan
Doing great.
- [153:49]
John
Is it over? Are we back? Is it over? Are we back? Everyone's saying it's over. We're back. We're back and forth. How are you feeling today?
- [153:56]
Gary Tan
Oh, we're so back.
- [153:57]
John
Okay, break it down. How are we back?
- [154:00]
Gary Tan
Oh, my God. How are we. How could we not be back?
- [154:03]
John
Explain what's exciting.
- [154:04]
Gary Tan
We are at the dawn of being able. Software is totally fungible now and then. Basically the tricky thing now is you just got to spend the money on the tokens. That's one of the things I think people are very, very afraid to spend money on tokens. And the things that you can do right now, you can literally make open claws.
- [154:27]
John
Yeah.
- [154:28]
Gary Tan
And the reason why Pete could do that was he's actually, like, really, really successful previously.
- [154:33]
John
Sure.
- [154:34]
Gary Tan
And he could let it rip. Like, I think one of the key things that people have to understand about, like, the current moment is you cannot be precious about your, like, Claude codemax account. You have to, like, really just let it rip. And when you let it rip, you can create, like, these things that, like, set the world on fire.
- [154:54]
John
Actually, what about all the other things? I mean, so YC is interesting because there was a. You know, for a long time it was about technical founders. You know, writing code oftentimes still is. Right. But it was like, okay, you're technical, you are going to write code while you're here. But also you're going to talk to users, you're going to figure out a go to market motion, you're going to find a hard problem, you're going to figure out secrets of how this business works, what makes your moat deep and whatnot. And it feels like, is AGI capable of that or are we in, like, the software?
- [155:27]
Gary Tan
Oh, no, we still need people. I mean, like, this stuff is. It's like a. You know, it's like Jiminy Cricket, man. But you still gotta be, you know, Jiminy Cricket's gotta stand on someone's shoulder and it might as well be yours.
- [155:39]
John
Okay, so don't you press.
- [155:42]
Jordy
So obviously if somebody sent you an investor update, a YC port company, and said, and the only number they shared was how much they spent last month, based on what you're saying, you might be like, okay, you're on the right track, but that's clearly not a metric yeah, it's not a metric to optimize for how, you know, what. What should founders be optimizing for, you know, when they're locked in making something people want.
- [156:07]
Gary Tan
Right. It's crazy. I don't know. I mean, I've been. I feel like I'm at the center of a lot of, like, weird controversies. Like, did the guy lose his mind? What's going on? I've been thinking about it, and it's like, it's not actually about me. It's about, like, people's relationship with their craft, and that has to change. And so I think my response to the haters is like, have Fun Coding at 1x speed, bros. Well, I don't know.
- [156:32]
Jordy
I don't know that the. I don't know that the haters are not also using the tools and not generally excited about it.
- [156:38]
Sam
How are you?
- [156:40]
Jordy
I think it's just primarily, like.
- [156:42]
Gary Tan
I'll give you a concrete example, please. Like, I noticed yesterday I threw. I had a throwaway comment because I created gstack. It's got 60,000 stars now. Like, I'm actually growing faster than Openclaw by stars on GitHub right now. And, you know, I mean, they had their moment and, like, I'm, you know, on my way. Right. About 30,000 people use GStack every single day. I've been getting emails that are pretty awesome, actually. Like, people trying to start consulting firms and they just want to feed their kids, and maybe they lost their job. And then they literally are, like, starting this consulting firm. I'd never done this before. I sit down with a client, I just open office hours with Gstack, and as they talk, I type in what we're talking about. And then I'm live talking. And they assign a customer on the spot within 20 minutes of talking to someone because of the Gstack office hours
- [157:37]
John
skill to build custom software for that.
- [157:40]
Gary Tan
Yeah, exactly.
- [157:41]
John
Okay, yeah.
- [157:42]
Gary Tan
And then maybe the thing is custom software. I was at Palantir when Stefan Cohen and Shyam Sunkar basically invented the idea of your forward deployed engineer.
- [157:55]
John
So everyone's an fd.
- [157:56]
Gary Tan
That's what you're doing. Everyone can be an fde. And. And the thing is, if you don't know how to do it, this thing is the training wheels that will teach you. And then it was the training wheels for me as I was learning how to do it. The original prompt I had posted on Twitter right when I was working on Gary's list and those things, both my engineering prompt to shake out all the bugs and get to 100% test coverage. That was my Plan Eng review that is in Gstack today. And then the other one was Plan CEO review. I call it my Brian Chesky review. It's like having Brian Chesky sit on your shoulder and be like, I mean, that would be a heavy person to sit on your shoulder.
- [158:38]
John
But, like, he's going to ask, are you in founder mode? Are you moving fast enough?
- [158:41]
Gary Tan
It's like, what's the ten star experience? Right? If you've ever seen him talk about the 10 star experience, that's what having CEO plan CEO review and the Gstack skill feels like to me. And I really think that that's awesome. Like, I want everyone to have that. And so I was like, having a throwaway thought. Like, you know, one of the core things I made was a browser plugin that wraps Playwright. And so, you know, the reality is like, I'm just solving problems for myself. Like, I was building Gary's List and I found myself, you know, the Plan CEO review worked well. The Plan End review worked really, really well. And then I found myself like, you know, I'm using Conductor. I have like six or seven windows open at that time. I'm up to 20 right now. And I found myself, like, running between windows just doing manual testing. And I'm like, great. Like, I work so hard to, like, build all these skills to, like, get way faster. And then now I'm just a black box QA engineer for the robots. Like, this is so boring. How terrible. Can I automate it? So I opened another Conductor window and I was like, man, why does Claude in Chrome MCP suck so much? I don't know if it sucks now. Like, it's been a month or something. Maybe they fixed all the bugs, but it literally couldn't do it. It's like two or three seconds, five seconds. Crazy context, bloat. It was unusable. And then I said, okay, well, I know Playwright exists. Can we make a clique that's like a thin shim over what Playwright does? And then basically it did it. And then that was what the first v1 of GStack was. It was those two scripts and a Playwright browser plugin that allowed me to not QA anymore. I could just say, okay, now qa. You know what we did in this branch, we have all these plan files, go line by line and act like my QA engineer. And it did it. The first time I used it, it was like 100 milliseconds. It was doing it. It could log in. It could click on things, it took screenshots of things that were broken, and then it would fix immediately. I was like, oh, my God, this is how to do it. This is how you build a software factory. It's like, I automate each of the steps. I've built so many pieces of software over the years, and I've helped so many people do that. And it's like, this is the process. And so now there are 30 of these skills. And then now you still. I think we're still in manual mode. I built an auto plan so that now all of these different pieces, there's a recommendation in each of them. And if you really want to be in the weeds and understand what's happening, you can just read the recommendation. You can talk with it. You can be like, well, I like option A, but option B sounds better for X, Y and Z. Reason. Let's talk about it. Right? So, yeah, it's interesting because I'm arriving at similar things to what I think Devon or other automated software factories are doing, but I'm doing it in the open, open source MIT license. Like, anyone, like, if you don't like something, just fork it, man. And like, you know, yeah, just make it yours. And I have like 200 PRs I have to look at right now.
- [161:47]
John
You know, well, PR review, md, we'll take care of it.
- [161:51]
Gary Tan
That's right.
- [161:51]
John
What was the. Is Gary's list more of just an experiment to put this to work? Because, I mean, it.
- [161:59]
Jordy
It's because in some ways, like, you didn't have to build Gary's list. You could have used like substack, substack, WordPress or.
- [162:07]
John
Or fork something that's already open source, but building it from scratch? Like, are there clear benefits where you're like, I'm really happy. Or was it more like the process
- [162:17]
Gary Tan
experiments I'm having right now that you can't. You know, if you use package software, you can't do. Is all the emails come from me directly. Like the from line is from me. And when you reply to it, so I don't send. You know how like you sign up for New York Times or something like that, you get an inbox, like a daily digest, the same digest that everyone gets. You get a personal one. Oh, you know, you do have to apply to get into Gary's list and you have to like, sort of tell me what you're into.
- [162:43]
John
Interesting.
- [162:43]
Gary Tan
But, you know, all the emails come from me directly and I don't write them. The AI writes them, but I do read them.
- [162:49]
John
Interesting.
- [162:50]
Gary Tan
So Everything that. And you know, when you reply you're. It's going to my own inbox.
- [162:55]
Aaron Tarazas
Wow.
- [162:55]
Gary Tan
And AI is helping me read it.
- [162:57]
John
Yeah.
- [162:58]
Gary Tan
And it's like going into the personalization system I built so that we can send you things that are more relevant to you but like in some sort of weird parasocial way. Like Gary's List is my experiment in
- [163:11]
John
like communication at scale, personalized communication.
- [163:13]
Gary Tan
Like I can be your personal assistant on like hey, I'm mad about politics or like my kids getting, you know, can't get a good education in school. What should I do?
- [163:22]
John
Yeah.
- [163:22]
Gary Tan
And like obviously I have a chat and it's like, you know, state of the art like Opus 4.6 thinking like all that stuff. Like, you know, it has data sources. You know, there have been users on there that have gone online who are like just engineers like living in Pleasanton. Like there's this one guy who never got involved in politics before and he said sending letters to all of his representatives based on the policy, things that are like screwed up in his life. Like his kid, you know, his kids school is messed up. Like there's all the, you know, and you know, he's having you know, 100 conversations a month with our agent about like this, you know, and then he emails me about it. I'm like, oh cool. Well I like this and maybe you should send this email to, you know, such and such person. And so I don't know. This is because I think all of these are just fun experiments. But I'm learning a lot. It isn't. I am trolling on people about the lines of code thing. But I will say that there's a grain of truth here where I am not about lines of code. I don't work for anyone really. I work for the institution of YC as the steward of it. But aside from that, I'm not here to max lines of code to, to good heart law something. What I've learned is that the machines aren't good heart lawing lines of code either. So that means that if 100% of your code is written by the machines and you are earnestly trying to solve the problems of your users and yourself, like I am with GStack in the open, you can look at it and I'm doing 36,000 lines of code a day and not a single one of them is like for me to be able to say that it's actually like I'm just having the time of my life building software. Like we're about to launch something really awesome at yc.
- [165:11]
John
Oh, I was about to ask, can you tell us the story of bookface and then where you think software development will go at YC?
- [165:18]
Gary Tan
Yeah, I mean, Bookface, we have 20 engineers at YC, and one of the funniest things we found out was, like, actually, a lot of people seem to have access to Book Face. Book Face is this internal social network used by. We have about 16, 17,000 people who are YC alums now who have access. About 40% of them use it every single day. And I've started to realize, actually, anyone who has a friend of someone who works who went through yc, you know. Yeah. Like, people basically share their logins. So, I mean, which is cool, actually. Like, the reality is we should probably open it up. Like, we probably should have a. Like, if you're a builder, I don't think I want absolutely anyone. Like, I want, like, techno optimist people who are psyched about making the future. And, like, I think bookface should be open to people, you know, that might be one of the things we work on this year, you know?
- [166:11]
John
Yeah. There's so much interesting, like, wisdom and stories in there. Some of the stuff is maybe private, and people don't want it to be screenshotted and shared, but. But there's definitely a process to open it up.
- [166:23]
Jordy
How are YC founders in the latest batches adapting to the change of pace of software development? There was a guy yesterday who made the claim that he rebuilt the whole batch with the troll.
- [166:38]
Gary Tan
Congratulations. God bless. Big respect. And of course, incredible troll.
- [166:44]
Jordy
I'm not sure he made a anything that people want.
- [166:46]
John
A good demo for his product got some attention.
- [166:50]
Gary Tan
Shout out to Tim Draper. Big respect, man. You got to do what you got to do. I love it.
- [166:56]
John
Yeah. But in a world where a YC founder might have, in a previous era, been very proud of the system that they built, the code that they wrote, even if they're not tracking lines of code, they said, look, this piece of software did not exist. I spent three months grinding with my co founders. We built a piece of software that solves that problem. And now that's, you know, five minutes of work. Where will the moats come from in the future, YC companies?
- [167:25]
Gary Tan
I mean, basically the future. Like, what's funny is basically all the people who already did that, like, you got to speed up. Like, it's time to let it rip, guys. Like, software is too. We treat software like it is so precious. And in the new world that we're going to, it is going to Be much more fungible. But that's the good news. Like, that's where taste and agency and trust matter a lot. This is something that only crystallized recently. Like, we've been talking about agency and taste for the longest time. Agency is being able to prompt, and taste is being able to do evals. Right. And then the third part that I only started thinking about, I think there was a tweet I reposted today that, like, said it really, really well that, like, trust is the third thing. And so, you know that. I mean, that's probably the thing that's the most important. Like, when you have an enterprise company that is selling to real businesses and they're relying on you, like, that's your moat. Your moat is actually trust. Like, they went to the effort to try you, to get you onboarded and to incorporate you into how, you know, they work. And then, you know, I think that either you can hold onto that and that's a real moat, and you can build something over the long haul, like someone gets promoted or someone avoids being fired because you exist and they're never going to switch and they trust you. Like, that's like, even more important than those other things. And so, you know.
- [168:49]
Aaron Tarazas
Yeah.
- [168:50]
Gary Tan
Like, what is this story about? It's not about, like, is someone going to try? Like, if someone came along to you, like, this is this impressive Draper company, Like, troll on YC companies is a good case study in that. Right. I'm impressed by the volume of software, and they clearly built a software factory. But maybe you should open source it. That would be cool. Aside from that, it's like, are people going to trust things that are, like, trolls? I don't know. I mean, I hate to bring up. You know, let me state plainly. Like, I actually really respect Roy. He's always been really cool to me on the Internet, and I feel like I've been unfair to him. You know, I think that Clulee Legit is like, we were talking about it, YC partner lunch today. It's like, oh, yeah, like, the guy actually has real revenue and the idea is good. Like, not, you know, the troll marketing part. Like, drums with. We talked about that a lot.
- [169:47]
Jordy
Yeah. The interesting thing with the product, from the. The beginning, I think some of the criticism was, okay, if this product works, like, there's going to be some big companies that roll it out. And so that's like this other question. Right.
- [170:00]
Gary Tan
And that's the trust thing again. Right. It's like, there are things that can get you here, but they're not going to get you there. Right.
- [170:09]
Jordy
Is sleep overrated in the. Is sleep overrated in this moment? Is it a weight of time? Are you a down sleep?
- [170:16]
Gary Tan
No, sleep is great. I'm starting, like, last night around, I don't know, 1:30am I was, like, getting foggy and I probably could have kept going, but I'm like, let's go to sleep, man. I'm gonna wake up in the morning and I'm gonna dream about a bunch of the things I want to do, and then I'm gonna wake up and I get to wake up and go to my computer and go to Conductor and Claude code and let's see what the workers are up to.
- [170:42]
John
I love it. I love it. I have two questions. One, what was your stack like back when you designed the Palantir logo? Was that a tasteful exercise? Was that, like, what went into designing the Palantir logo?
- [170:56]
Gary Tan
Yeah, I mean, basically what's funny is. Yeah, that was such a weird, formative year. Like, I'll paint the picture like we're in Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, like the iconic downtown Palo Alto office we were a year away from even moving into. This was like, across from where I think Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto is now on Page Mill. We only were 12, maybe 10 or 12 engineers at that point. And I was working on the hiring site for palantir, you know, palantir tech.net or something, I think. We didn't have the dot com yet. And the original logo was created by my high school school buddy, Stefan Cohen, who's still at Palantir and billionaire many times over. And, you know, basically I was like, how do I get engineers to want to work here? The logo, kind of like, it was like six hexagons, I think. And people came and they thought it was like a biotech company or something.
- [171:51]
John
Oh, interesting.
- [171:52]
Gary Tan
And then we just. Basically, I took maybe, I don't know, a week. It wasn't more than a week of, like, working on it, but we made like a thousand different versions of it, which is really funny because, like.
- [172:04]
Jordy
And that was pre Gstack.
- [172:05]
John
Yeah, yeah.
- [172:06]
Gary Tan
Now in Gstack, you can go slash design, shotgun, and you can say, design me 100 of these things, and then it'll pop a window. It'll use Codex.
- [172:17]
John
That's amazing. Wait, so, yeah, I mean, how do you think. Do you think AI is changing design? Do you think there's still room for. For taste in this world? Do you think that all the same rules apply, or is it somehow different?
- [172:30]
Gary Tan
Oh, no, I mean the machines don't have a point of view. Like they'll give you lots of options. And you know, I think if you don't have taste and you're using these tools, you'll make something that's like marginally better, but it'll still just be like, you know, marginally better than average. Whereas I think it's clear that like, you know, I mean there are tools like Variant ui. It's like Oyster company that we funded is like awesome. Like you just go in and it's like that's the real version of Design Shotgun. Like, you know, you can't, you will have design tools that have taste and if you use those, you will have, you will have a leg up. But I don't know, I guess it just goes back to the agency part again. It's like, you know, one of the principles I built into Gstack recently that has served me really well is before you start coding or before you, you start making technical plans at the engineering level, I tell it always search the web. It's like figure out what's, you know, you want to. Someone else has figured it out. Like there's something open source, there's something that's out there. Go all the way to the edge and then, you know, basically don't, don't try and reinvent the wheel.
- [173:35]
K
Right.
- [173:36]
John
Interesting.
- [173:39]
Gary Tan
Yeah. I mean I think in the world
- [173:40]
John
where it re implements Gary's list in
- [173:43]
Gary Tan
Jekyll or something, who knows really? I mean we'll see. It might, I mean it's using a
- [173:49]
John
lot of open source software. Obviously it didn't write its own programming language, it probably didn't write its own database. It's using off the shelf tooling there. But the core app, I mean, I guess with the right flexibility and the tools that you wanted and the features that you wanted, like it makes sense to it. We're almost, it's not build versus buy any anymore. It's like fork versus inference or something.
- [174:12]
Gary Tan
There's like a new, I mean increasingly you don't even fork. Like, I mean, you know, it's funny, like all of these things are very strange. We're in bizarro land right now. Like we're in mid transition and like all of the transitions are not in distribution yet. Which means like if you try to make a product right now and you ask it to estimate how long the hyper is going to take to make it, it says human terms. So it'll be like it'll take a human a month to do this and then you have to ask it explicitly, well, how long are you going to take? And it's like, well, I'll probably take like 15 to 20 minutes. And it's like literally across the board, like, I am coding 90 my output in terms of real products, not just lines of code. Is like 90x that of what I did when I was in 2013. I made post Haven that year. I made Bookspace that year. And it's, you know, I was at a CEO conference last week at JP Morgan 100 and I was talking with a bunch of like, former tech. They, you know, very technical CEOs who like now are full manager mode. And like, I was like, good news, man. It's time to come back. You know, you're Peter Parker right now. Time to put on the Spider man suit. Because this is the time. And I was blowing their mind. And I'm like, they're like, oh, no. Like, I shouldn't do this. It's not worth my time. I was like, dude, it is worth your time. Like, you can still be the manager during the day, but by night you can be Spider man or Batman. Like, you can don the suit and
- [175:41]
Jordy
pull out the G stack.
- [175:43]
Gary Tan
Yeah, pull out the G stack and you, you know, and my pitch to them was like, Look, I am 90 times. I am 90 of myself.
- [175:52]
Jordy
I'm a really good manipulating time.
- [175:54]
John
Yeah, that's remarkable.
- [175:56]
Gary Tan
And you can have 90 of yourself working on things tonight and be the CEO. Right?
- [176:03]
John
It's fantastic. Well, you won a ton of people over in the chat. They were skeptical and they're very fired up. So thank you so much for coming on controlling the haters. Keep building, keep shipping those lines of code. And we want to talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Plaid Plaid Powers. The apps used to spend, say, borrow and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI and we are running over time. But let's bring in our next guest. Brandon from coreweave is in the Restream waiting room. Sorry for keeping you so long. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us on how are you doing?
- [176:43]
Brandon McBee
I'm doing great. Thank you for having me on today.
- [176:45]
John
Of course. Could you introduce yourself and take us through some of the news? I mean, there's so much going on, but I know that there's some big announcements more recently.
- [176:55]
Brandon McBee
Yeah, absolutely. My name is Brandon McBee. I'm one of the co founders of Coreweave. I'm the chief development officer. So I lead all things debt, equity, M and A ventures for the business. This is where all the money is raised within the organization.
- [177:08]
John
Yeah. And this new project, this new vehicle, how are you positioning it? How are you explaining it to people who are familiar with coreweave as a stock that they can buy and they understand that you might use debt to finance the purchase of a facility. They're familiar with a mortgage. How are you introducing this product?
- [177:28]
Brandon McBee
Yeah, so this product is one that we brought in the market about three years ago and it was with our facility DDTL1. And what we've introduced today is the continuation of just continuing to build upon and execute within that original product. We're effectively taking this GPU infrastructure along with revenue associated with the GPU in these long term take or pay contracts, put them together and then take them out into the debt market and finance them. And I would say it's a financing strategy that has occurred across many different sectors. Right. Like this is how LNG facilities or power plants get financed. You have the infrastructure in one hand, you have these long term contracts in the other hand. Put them together, marry them and you can stand up very scalable financing mechanisms around. What's really important about the one that we announced yesterday. This is our largest transaction at 8.5 billion and it's our first transaction being done. Thank you. Yes, it was awesome.
- [178:31]
John
Big moment, Huge number, massive.
- [178:34]
Brandon McBee
You know, sometimes like forget the numbers
- [178:35]
John
that were working
- [178:38]
Brandon McBee
and it was done at an investment grade cost of capital. So this was done at SOFR +225 or you know, approximately 5.9% cost capital, which is incredibly important to us given the capital intensive nature of our business.
- [178:53]
John
And what, what, what gave the market, what gave the, the rating agency or you the confidence to put this in the investment grade bucket. How are you, how are you providing the data in the back and like the backbone of that strength?
- [179:10]
Brandon McBee
Yeah. To your point, this all comes down to market validation. The the clearest signal out there is pricing and confidence grows as cost of capital comes down. Doesn't really work the other way. So being able to drive down cost of capital here just shows the amount of demand there is for the core weave credit product in the market.
- [179:34]
John
How much of this is how important was sort of beating the depreciation gate allegations, to put it sort of silly. But a lot of people were wondering like, oh those, those H1 hundreds, they're not going to, they're not going to age well. And what we've seen is that there's a lot of data points out there that seems like aging older. They're aging like find whine from what we've seen. But take me through your your. Do you always know that that was going to play out the way? Was there any unexpected surprise to the upside? And then how important has it been to have more data about how these GPUs monetize over a longer length of time?
- [180:11]
Brandon McBee
The depreciation subject has always been very interesting to us. We've been very consistent. Six years is the appreciable life of this infrastructure. And I would say if anything, we're expecting for the infrastructure to have useful life beyond six. I mean you see that today and like late 2010 SKUs that are available in market on clouds, like they're not running that infrastructure unprofitably. Right. And it means that there's client demand for it. But as we look towards like Ampere and Hopper generations, you know, I think in our last earnings we have noted that our pricing on Ampere went up during 2025 and our pricing on Hopper stayed within 10% or so of where we started the year. Why is that happening? I think it's largely driven by inference, right. And ultimately this concept that not every workload only needs the latest, greatest piece of compute, right. Which we're incredibly well known for running. But you know, there are different types of workloads that need different types of infrastructure and the market is simply efficiently pairing the right computer with with the workload that they need. So we see incredibly robust demand all the way back to the Ampere generation, which I believe is 6 years old at this point from its original Skew launch date. And we're really not seeing any deterioration of these older skew demand profiles while also seeing accelerating demand for latest generation infrastructure as well.
- [181:37]
Jordy
I think everyone's heard the stories of Electricians being flown around in private jets and kind of the chaos of actually building out data centers over the last two years. Any funny stories from the core Weave team recently around all? Yeah. On all the effort going into building out these clouds? Yeah.
- [182:01]
Brandon McBee
It would take a lot of private planes to fly all those Electricians. I mean we're talking hundreds to thousands of engineers on these sites. And I think that's. It's a great point you raised because I believe it's an underappreciated aspect of what is being done here in the true scale of the engineering effort out there in market. You truly just have to go see one of these sites. Right. They are massive, massive engineering feats that are being executed on with an Incredibly intense supply chains, all the while moving in a extremely high velocity technology sector. It really boils down to rich risk management, which is the DNA of our management team.
- [182:45]
John
It feels like in terms of inference demand, we've seen a number of sort of exponential jumps. When we went from LMS to reasoning models, the number of tokens generated to answer a question increased exponentially. Saw something similar with agents, coaches, agents. Are you guiding or expecting for just a smooth trend to continue? Are you thinking that this is more discontinuous? Is there some sort of next next generation that you're already looking forward to in terms of increased inference demand?
- [183:17]
Brandon McBee
It's, it's really hard to predict where the technology goes since the technology itself is meant to be so disruptive.
- [183:26]
John
Yes.
- [183:27]
Brandon McBee
I think what's super important for us is our client base and our clients represent the organization that are at the front lines of pushing this technology as far as it can go. And we're consistently supporting them and it gives us this really interesting information flow, understanding where they're going in their organization so that we can be orienting ours to be moving with them in lockstep.
- [183:53]
John
What do people misunderstand most about Core Weave right now?
- [183:58]
Brandon McBee
You know, I would say there's three real pillars to our success. It is having the best product in the market for running this infrastructure. Our product is purpose built for AI and supports today the leading AI organizations on the planet. You have to have the right physical infrastructure capacity, the ability to navigate the supply chain. Right. And that, that is not something anyone can just stand up and do. It's incredibly challenging and detailed. But today we have over 43 data centers in active operation. That, that's a key component of how we've been able to pull down our cost of capital so aggressively is just simply through execution. And that final piece is financing. Right. You can have pieces one and two, but if you can't raise the capital needed to, to bring that infrastructure online, it's, it's sort of meaningless. And so we've spent an immense amount of time focused on the credit market and driving an ability to navigate it effectively and scalably while driving down our cost of capital. And thus why this instrument that we announced yesterday is so incredibly important to us and will serve as a blueprint for future transactions.
- [185:20]
John
Are you in a rough agreement with the broad consensus that I'm feeling in the AI industry around a chip bottleneck being more of a gating factor factor in scaling AI progress over the next four years than power constraints?
- [185:39]
Brandon McBee
You know, I would qualify it as Cloud connected infrastructure, incredibly important. So it's really marrying power with chips, getting them online, delivered to clients. Yeah, that, that bottleneck within there is delivering power shell capacity, at least within our business. Right. We can bring online more capacity to our clients as we have more powered shell within the market. So we're consistently scouring the market for incremental capacity to be able to market to our consumers.
- [186:11]
Jordy
How, how have the sort of mom and pop data centers done over the last two years? I'm talking about people maybe like 18 months ago that, that were realizing, hey, this AI thing is going to be pretty big. We have, we can find some power here, let's throw up a shell, let's get some GPUs and try to bring it online. How have they fared? Because I think there was a lot of, there's obviously so much demand, but a lot of, there were a lot of questions.
- [186:39]
John
Clouds or like micro Neo.
- [186:40]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah. Just, just somebody saying like, hey, we can get some power here. Let's jump on this. How have they fared? I imagine some of them end up being kind of rolled in to, you know, a platform like Core Weave or the other, other Neo clouds or they end up. But, but how have they fared?
- [186:58]
Brandon McBee
You know, it's really tough to comment on, on their businesses. We don't see them in market too frequently. I think our product looks a lot different than the other offerings that are available out there.
- [187:09]
Jordy
Well, yeah, and these people were like, oh, it's like, it's like real estate. You just like put up a box, there's GPUs in it. And I would say like, no one, no one. You know, none of the leading Neo clouds are saying like, oh, it's just like real estate, you just like throw up a box. So there is that disconnect there.
- [187:26]
Brandon McBee
I would agree with that. There is a chasm of execution between, you know, signing a contract to deliver infrastructure and actually bringing it online and making it revenue generating. And that's where the core we product sits.
- [187:40]
John
Yeah. Well, it's fantastic progress. Thank you so much for coming and breaking it down for us. Yeah, great to meet you and congratulations on the deal. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. Tyler, do you know how to count cards? In poker?
- [188:07]
Tyler
In poker.
- [188:08]
John
In poker. Do you know how to count cards?
- [188:11]
Jordy
No.
- [188:11]
John
You have exactly one day to learn because you have to go to Sam Blond's Monaco Invitational. You have to bring home the $100,000 cash prize.
- [188:20]
Jordy
You gotta win.
- [188:21]
John
It's a no buy in poker tournament. Founders from all.
- [188:23]
Tyler
Is counting cards a thing in poker? That's for blackjack. No. Am I.
- [188:27]
John
You're going to learn how to apply counting cards from blackjack to poker.
- [188:32]
Jordy
You're going to invent new manipulate time,
- [188:34]
John
new card counting techniques, methodology. I think it does work in. Oh, maybe you're right in blackjack. Maybe it doesn't work in poker. I think it does work in poker. Anyway, you're going to learn, you're going to cheat and you're going to win. That's the plan. You're going to cheat, you're going to win, you're going to get thrown out of Monaco, you're going to get thrown out of San Francisco. Sam Blonde will be putting hands on you. But it'll be a good time.
- [188:55]
Jordy
Put out an article that says the Artemis moon base project is legally dubious. Says, oh no, someone call the moon police.
- [189:07]
John
Well, we have our next guest in the restream waiting room. Let me tell you about MongoDB first. MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB? Don't just build it. Own the data platform that powers it. And without further ado, we have Sam from corezone. Welcome to the stream. Thank you so much for taking the time. Hey guys, how you doing?
- [189:25]
Jordy
All right, great. Great setup here. Great setup, great background.
- [189:28]
John
Looks great.
- [189:29]
Jordy
Great polo, great. Nailed it across the board.
- [189:31]
John
But we'll let you introduce.
- [189:33]
Sam
I don't look like you guys.
- [189:34]
John
Well, white market's up.
- [189:37]
Sam
I got the memo.
- [189:37]
Jordy
So we're all in white.
- [189:38]
John
Yeah, we're happy. How are you doing? Please introduce yourself and the group. Fun.
- [189:44]
Sam
Hi, I'm Sam Yeagen, co founder of Corezone Capital. Spent most of my life as a founder, SparkNotes, OkCupid, involved with Tinder Grindr. So hopefully got you through school and hopefully got you some dates markets and now investing in the future of consumer AI.
- [190:01]
John
Do you want to focus on the dating market with this fund? Do you think that there's opportunities for new platforms in AI?
- [190:08]
Jordy
Yeah, I mean the biggest question I have for you is are you surprised that we're, you know, a few years into the AI boom and when you look at the top 25 chart in the app store, it's still like pretty much just alarms and incumbent, you know, consumer products?
- [190:23]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, that's that's going to change. I think the entire consumer stack is going to get rebuilt. I think the incumbents, most of the consumer incumbents are at risk.
- [190:34]
John
Yeah.
- [190:34]
Sam
I do think dating is a pretty protected category because you need liquidity. The big, the big apps are always the big apps.
- [190:40]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [190:41]
Sam
But I think for almost everything else, I think the way we message each other, I think the way we connect with each other, I think the way we find jobs, the way we find friends, I think all that's going to change and it's going to be AI
- [190:52]
John
powered at the same time. So on a relative basis, isn't there maybe counterintuitively more opportunity if you're building in consumer AI? If you go into something that needs a liquidity pool like the dating market and you can maybe use AI or just come up with a unique wedge, get over the cold start problem, get some liquidity on the platform and then maybe you're better positioned because. Because you can't be fast followed by a copycat that's just cloning all your features because they won't have liquidity. But you do if you can get
- [191:22]
Sam
past the cold start problem. That's right. But I actually think in the case of dating, I think the incumbents are much better positioned to leverage AI. But I think there are lots of other places where, and I'm surprised so many VCs are running from consumer right now. But I think AI is going to change, transform the way consumers interact with, with technology in a way that has never happened since the dawn of the Internet itself.
- [191:45]
John
Yeah. So talk about some opportunities.
- [191:46]
Jordy
Yeah. Well, I mean I wanted to ask, what are you actually looking for in an early stage consumer founder? Because it's very rare. Your case, you've had like multiple big hits. It's hard enough to have one in my consumer, you know, the random consumer tech investments that I've made, it doesn't matter if I'm investing pre product or after they've gotten to a million users, they usually end up as zeros. So it's an absolutely brutal game.
- [192:17]
Sam
Welcome to venture capital.
- [192:18]
Jordy
Well, I would just say the handful of zeros that I've had, I've concentrated in consumer.
- [192:28]
Sam
Yeah, I do think consumer tends to be much more variable than B2B businesses. You tend to either find product, market fit and find a way to scale or you don't. It's very hard to end up, I think in the middle range in consumer businesses, which I think is why it's so attractive as a venture capital investment. If you can get them right, you get them really right. And that's what we're looking for. You asked about founders. I think AI founders are no different from previous types of founders. In the early stage, we're really looking for founders who understand the process of finding product market fit. That's all that matters in the early stage. And I actually think AI can be a little bit deceptive that way because you can get the first few users to adopt because people are so curious right now. But I don't think that means you've necessarily found product market fit that's scalable in the way that it used to be much harder to get that first million users. And I think it's a little easier to do that now.
- [193:18]
Jordy
Totally. Yeah. Just this year I've seen the exciting kind of one aspect of why now is I think exciting to make a consumer fund is you're just seeing like, you know, 1000x the number of apps. I'm talking to a family friend later today that's like, you know, built, built their own, built their own app. Right. They're very excited about it. They want to, they want to get my feedback. And I just think there's so many people that were kind of gated by not having access to engineering talent or didn't know how to code themselves and now they're building apps. So I think like the bar is going to go up pretty dramatically. I wanted to ask, do you think there is room for taking the capital intensity of deep tech and bringing it to consumer And I'm specifically asking because of TikTok. TikTok spent how many billions of dollars on customer acquisition? They had a product with product market fit. They did some interesting things around juicing engagement from at least my point of view. But then they also spent like hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on acquiring users. Is that something that you think, you think you'll see in the fund in some kind of breakout companies?
- [194:33]
Sam
Yeah, I think that's a, that's a great and very nuanced point that you make, which is are a company is going to be more effective at acquiring customers or not? And I think it hasn't really. You know your example earlier about an AI based dating app, you just kind of assumed you'd get over the cold start problem, but you can really explain how you were going to do that. And so I don't think, I don't think other than there's a bit more word of mouth early on because people are so curious about any new AI app. I don't think Any, you know, they've really figured out how to leverage AI differently to scale these apps. And so I do think your point about bringing some of the capital intensity, do you think that'll all be reduced? But I don't know if it's going to be reduced on the marketing side specifically for sure. On the engineering side.
- [195:16]
John
Okay. So, yeah. Does that change anything about the investment strategy? When I hear 100 million fund, I have some conception of the type of checks at various stages that you might write, but do you think there will be anything about running a $100 million fund in 2026 that will be different? If I just look at the size of checks and spaces that you're occupying versus five, ten years ago, Yeah.
- [195:41]
Sam
I think people are going to have to spend a lot less of that early capital building the infrastructure, getting the code written. I mean, when I started Spark Notes, we had to go lease servers and plug them in and, you know, colo facilities back in the 1900s.
- [195:53]
Pratap
Right now you just, you know, you're
- [195:55]
Sam
going to be able to get, you're going to get your app into the app store so much cheaper. And the real, the real separation among founders is going to be can you really figure out product market fit? It's not going to be about writing the code. It's not going to be about doing the marketing. It's about can you actually build a product that consumers love? And that's really what we know how to underwrite here at Corazon and what we have, what I've done throughout my
- [196:13]
Jordy
career, yeah, consumers love and has positive unit economics because we're seeing this whole other dynamic right now where there's products that people love, but if they were actually charging as much, you know, I'm thinking like image, image and video gen products where, you know, if you actually price it the way you would need to to be building a business, you know, would the demand still be there?
- [196:36]
Sam
And if you think about when the Internet started, the beauty was that everything became free to publish. And so you had all. The first business model that came out was like Spark Notes, just take Cliff's notes and make it free. And tons and tons of companies did that. And now you actually have marginal costs associated with the tokens and the AI that you're using. And so now all of a sudden, for the first time, you have cost of goods sold in a consumer tech business, which has really never happened before. And so that's one thing that founders aren't necessarily thinking about so much is what the end unit economics are. But I don't worry about that early stage. I worry about let's make a product people love and let's figure out the business model later.
- [197:12]
Jordy
What have you learned about pivoting?
- [197:16]
Sam
That all the best founders have to pivot multiple times. It's very rare that you hit the product on the head the very first time you do it. And I think that's why any memorable.
- [197:28]
Jordy
Any memorable pivots across your founder journey.
- [197:33]
Sam
Yeah. The original idea for SparkNotes was a humor site that was very much like the Onion. It's probably older than you. Yeah. It was called thespark.com in fact, the corporate name for SparkNotes was thespark.com, it was a humor site. And then we kind of realized that that was a.
- [197:49]
Jordy
We made a website for humor jokes.
- [197:51]
John
I love the Onion and I love Spark Notes.
- [197:53]
Sam
Yeah, we basically tried to knock off the Onion first. We realized that was a really crappy business to be in, and then we pivoted to do study guides and that ended up being the business.
- [198:03]
John
How did you think. This is an odd question. I'm not sure to be aggressive because I loved SparkNotes. It helped me through high school. But how did you think about the moral implications of potentially helping you cheat? Because we just went through this moral reckoning and in Silicon Valley last year, around Clulee, this company that was like very, very, you know, in the marketing, like, cheat on everything. Very aggressive about that. I don't remember Spark Notes ever marketing to me as like, cheat. It was very much like supplemental, additional. Sometimes, you know, I'd read the Spark Notes chapter instead of the full chapter if I was running later, late on sleep, or wanted to hang out with some friends. But how did you process like the trade off or like the impact of that business?
- [198:45]
Sam
That's such a funny question. Here's the thing. People who want to cheat are going to cheat.
- [198:49]
John
Yeah.
- [198:49]
Sam
And so what we focus on is let's make the best product, both for the people who want to get A's because they're doing the work. And if you're going to cheat, you might as well actually learn something in the process. And so we didn't give you the paper that you could turn in. We gave you the best path to learn the material. And honestly, if you didn't read Romeo and Juliet but read the sparknote, you probably understood the book.
- [199:10]
John
Yeah. Yeah.
- [199:11]
Sam
So that's probably better. Rather than. And I think CliffsNotes never really did that. CliffsNotes was always about just trying to get you through. And we really tried to make sure that you learned what you were doing.
- [199:19]
John
Yeah, yeah. Did you ever think about, like, deliberately how you position it in the marketing? Because you clearly had that philosophy, but you could have had the choice to, like, flyer every college campus with, like, cheat and, like, maybe that would draw people's attention. Did you ever think about, like, clickbaiting, rage baiting, reading, any of that?
- [199:37]
Abhishek Das
No. No.
- [199:38]
Sam
In fact, our. Our approach is the opposite, which is try to actually get the teachers to recommend us as the preferred study guide. So there were a bunch of teachers who would write us and say, hey, I've told my students you can't use CliffsNotes, but you can use Spark Notes.
- [199:49]
John
Interesting.
- [199:50]
Sam
And then now all of a sudden you've got the teachers endorsing you because you've made the better product. And so what seems like a cheating product gets repositioned as a study aid. And that's really what we wanted to do.
- [199:58]
John
Yeah. And now teachers, there are moral questions.
- [200:01]
Sam
There are moral questions in every business.
- [200:04]
John
Yeah.
- [200:04]
Jordy
How do you think about investing in anything kind of education focused when it feels like LLMs are just naturally quite good at that, but still there's possibilities to build harnesses and stuff at the application layer.
- [200:19]
Sam
No, no, I think AI is going to transform the way we learn, for sure. There's a company we're invested in called Brilliant, which is a native AI tutorial. And, you know, in the 1900s, you had a graphing calculator. You know, that was your, like, you know, to get through high school. And I think the next generation of kids, you're going to have your personalized AI tutor that's going to get you through school. And, you know, we're funding that in our fund.
- [200:44]
John
Yeah, yeah. It's very funny. I completely agree with your intuition that, like, oh, AI has already solved education. But then you look at, like, Andre Karpathy is building something in that space, which is just, like, fascinating because, like, he has the most insight and has worked at OpenAI and Tesla. Like, I wonder if there's.
- [201:00]
Jordy
I wonder if there's actually like an AI hardware device specifically for learning. Because, like, think about the chat. Like, if a kid is sitting there and they're, like, trying to use their
- [201:09]
John
phone to learn, but I could ask it about anything.
- [201:12]
Jordy
But then you're getting a push notification from your friends. Right. You know, there's potentially some of these AI hardware devices that have flopped because they were trying to replace the phone.
- [201:20]
John
Yeah.
- [201:20]
Jordy
Or maybe replacing it in the wrong context. And you should be thinking, like, what is the next TI84 that every student has that they're actually, you know, learning.
- [201:28]
Sam
That's cool.
- [201:29]
John
Cool. Well, congratulations on the fundraise. We want to ring the gong for you.
- [201:33]
Jordy
It would be an honor.
- [201:34]
Pratap
Oh,
- [201:38]
John
thank you.
- [201:39]
Jordy
Great stuff. Well, hopefully get many of your founders on in the coming weeks and years
- [201:46]
John
and we'll talk to you soon.
- [201:47]
Jordy
Great to have you.
- [201:48]
John
Thanks guys. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you later.
- [201:52]
Jordy
Deep into the fourth hour.
- [201:54]
John
Deep into the fourth hour.
- [201:55]
Jordy
We got a one hour countdown.
- [201:57]
John
We're coming up on one hour, one minute, 14 seconds until the launch. We have an interesting post from Andrew Reed sharing on the 50th anniversary of Apple. The investment memo. This is the victory lab of all victory lapse for a venture capitalist writing $600,000 into a piece of paper. On a piece of paper. There are some handwritten notes on here. It said will be tough to do this deal. Small amount, minuscule high price. Second position CMS wants to guarantee it's a very interesting document. Proposed financing structure 600K to A and 60K to 8G. Friend a company 480 to 1. Venture investor invitees Venrox Julian Julian Weisser
- [202:47]
Jordy
says 600K buys 10%. Very rich deal I'm used to buying 60% for.
- [202:54]
John
Basically it's actually crazy crazy lore. Well, if you need something to do, it's not out yet but maybe tomorrow if you need kill some time. Donald has made up documentary about a bunch of friends of the show Will Depew and Riley Walls and the creators of the J Mail suite. It's an attempt to capture what it feels like to be a young person in San Francisco. Right now he's dropping that tomorrow so you can go check it out.
- [203:23]
Jordy
We have one last video to play for you today. Let's pull this up. Production team, what you got? It is in the chat for you.
- [203:31]
John
We also need to send profanity warning. Oh, profanity.
- [203:34]
Jordy
Apparently someone was swearing on cnn. Let's get the audio on.
- [203:38]
John
Okay. Cover your ears. Why do you love being a part of history?
- [203:44]
Jordy
We're going back to the freaking moon.
- [203:48]
John
This kid rocks.
- [203:55]
Jordy
Glad I warned everyone.
- [203:56]
John
I'm glad you it was worth it. We don't normally do it but we're in the fourth hour and we got to sneak one in because it doesn't hit without it. So sorry for the profanity but that is a fantastic moment and we're very excited for the launch which is happening in just one hour. So you can head over to NASA's livestream YouTube, Twitch, probably other places and check it out. Leave us 5 stars on Apple podcasts, Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter tvpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11am can't wait. Pacific Goodbye.