Elon Doubles Down, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Andrew Yang, Ishan Mukherjee, Tony Holdstock, Tomer London, Andrei Serban, Tim Higgins

Summary

TBPN – “Elon Doubles Down, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions”

Date: September 16, 2025
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Guests: Andrew Yang, Ishan Mukherjee, Tony Holdstock, Tomer London, Andrei Serban, Tim Higgins

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Episode Overview

In today's marathon livestream, John and Jordi celebrate their first-ever print feature in the Wall Street Journal and cover a sprawling lineup:

• Elon Musk’s re-commitment to Tesla
• Extensive reactions to Meta and AR/VR innovations
• The latest in the AI hype cycle
• New business launches and guest company updates
• Detailed explorations of platform monopolies, pricing revolutions, and the SaaS apocalypse
• A graphical web of tech world connections
• Interviews with founders, corporate leaders, and journalists

The vibe is playful, insidery, and occasionally irreverent—blending spontaneous product demos and deeply technical discussion with Silicon Valley humor and startup lore.

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1. TBPN in the Wall Street Journal & Show Banter

[00:00–06:00]

• TBPN makes it into the print edition of WSJ, a major milestone for the team.
• The hosts joke about the anatomy of the show: “the timeline is the femur, the Journal is the backbone, and sponsors are the tibias.”
• Tomorrow, live interviews are slated with Meta’s Alexander Wang and Mark Zuckerberg.
• The crew reminisces about printing social media posts and the essential role of Brother Printers in scaling their show.

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2. Meta’s New VR/AR Glasses: Demos & Hot Takes

[10:21–17:46]

• In anticipation of Meta’s new glasses announcement, the team demos the XReal One Pro AR glasses; Tyler offers live user feedback.
  • Glasses act as external screens but are bulky, dark, and offer a narrow field of view.
  • Tyler: “I would not buy these for $700. I would buy them for like 150 bucks.” [17:42]
• Lively debate: would anyone become a daily active user (“DAU”) if given these for free? Consensus: not likely.
• Comparison with Apple Vision Pro and Quest 3s; TV remains the more compelling default for most.

Memorable Quote:

"This seems much worse than having your laptop on the tray table."
– Jordi [16:44]

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3. Elon Musk’s “Daddy Is Very Much Home” Post & Tesla Focus

[20:53–33:12]

• Elon posts a detailed schedule reflecting intense hands-on leadership at Tesla:
  “Daddy is very much home. Burning the midnight oil ... deep technical reviews for Tesla’s AI 5 chip design... autopilot, Optimus production...” [21:34]
• Hosts discuss Elon's context-switching away from politics and doubled-down commitment to hardware—Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, etc.
• Discussion of the $1T Tesla pay package and Tesla’s place in the future of robotics, self-driving, and chip design.

Memorable Quote:

“You got a lot of houses, brother, but House Elon does have some synergies—especially now that politics is out of the mix.”
– John [22:47]

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4. AI, Fast Takeoff, and the Red String Conspiracy Board

[33:56–50:14]

• Meta-analysis on AI progress: Is the singularity upon us or are we plateauing?
• Tyler walks through a detailed, comedic “red string” conspiracy map connecting OpenAI, investors, X, Zuckerberg, Teal, Musk, researchers, and influencers (see [36:13–50:14]).
• Notable, tongue-in-cheek connections: researchers, tech founders, Joe Rogan, Tyler Cowen, raw milk, the Illuminati, and even chess/NPC meme culture.

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5. AI in Code & The 90% Autonomous Software Future

[51:42–56:26]

• Exploration of claims that “90% of software code is now being written by AI” in frontier labs—supporting evidence cited by Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) and Brian Armstrong (Coinbase).
• Guests join to discuss shifts from seat-based to consumption-based/agent pricing, leading to what some call the “SaaS apocalypse.”

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6. Guest Interviews: SaaS, Workflow, Money & Automation

a) Ishan Mukherjee – Rocks2GA

[89:41–95:19]

• Rocks revenue agents now running in the Global 2000, $25M revenue, adoption in banking, construction, and energy.
• Competitive edge: fast ROI, agent-action pricing ("pay when the agent works, not by seat"), Palantir-style deployed service.
• Small but engineering-heavy team: ~25 in applied AI, 10 in sales/field.

b) Tony Holdstock – Ingest (Series A with Altimeter)

[97:03–104:00]

• Ingest: Async execution platform—lets users build durable, code-based workflows without heavy devops.
• Originated from pain points in healthcare engineering.
• Notable use case: Enabled SoundCloud to reduce time-to-production for complex internal tools from months to weeks.
  • “Async execution lets you code workflows without queues, workers, or managing infra—build in days, not months.” [97:45]

c) Tomer London – Gusto

[107:19–122:12]

• Gusto now rolling out same-day, next-day, and instant payroll—major upgrades for small business cash flow.
• New “Payroll Bridge” feature provides short-term credit for payroll (in partnership with Paraffin).
• Experimentation with international stablecoin payments for freelancers.
  • “Payroll is the largest expense, but bills, invoices, and cash flow are all connected—Gusto money is our move to broaden solutions.” [118:36]

d) Andrei Serban – Console (Series A with USV & Thrive)

[125:11–136:31]

• Automating IT support with AI agents that interface with enterprise systems, policies, and company data.
• Focused on security, flexibility, and quick onboarding (console handled 50–60% of employee tickets for customers like Ramp, Scale, Webflow).

e) Andrew Yang – Launching Noble Mobile

[137:41–151:10]

• Details his new project, Noble Mobile, a telecom MVNO designed to disrupt US mobile pricing and encourage phone-life balance.
  • $50/month unlimited, $20 “data dividend” if you use less than 20GB; savings grow at 5.5%.
  • Celebrity-backed acquisition flywheel: “Instead of one Ryan Reynolds, we’ll have 30…all telling their followers.” [144:35]
  • Raised $10.3M; investors include Scott Galloway, Charlemagne, Corazon Capital.

f) Tim Higgins – Wall Street Journal; Author of ‘iWar’

[156:27–172:26]

• Deep dive into the “App Store rebellion”—the battle over Apple’s fees, rules, and ecosystem monopoly.
• Apple’s strict, generally 'no special deals’ policy discussed; contrast with Google’s deals for big developers.
• Impact of regulatory and legal pushback: cracks appearing in Apple’s wall, especially post-Epic/Spotify legal changes.

Memorable Quote:

“The judge came down hard when Apple made it so difficult to steer users outside… a remarkable crack in the Apple ecosystem.”
– Tim Higgins [165:01]

g) Alex (Product Lead, OpenAI Codex)

[172:27–187:07]

• Major new Codex release: optimized for interactive and autonomous code writing; model adapts speed and token use depending on complexity.
• Over 10x usage growth in last month.
  • “The main limiting factor is not model capability, but the human’s ability to prompt and use the agent effectively.” [181:48]
• Internal culture shift: Everyone can code more, stack compression, rapid prototyping with agents; code review and ownership are next bottlenecks.

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7. The AI Hype Cycle & Market Sentiment

[84:01–89:41]

• Interactive “Hype Cycle” poll at hype.tbpn.com reveals most guests and the audience think we are “just past the peak of inflated expectations” for AI.
• Debate: Have we even started? Are we sliding into trough of disillusionment—or entering the “plateau of productivity”?

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8. Gaming, Tech Platforms & The Next Generation of Apps

[54:00–69:12; 63:45–69:12]

• In-depth look at Roblox’s staggering growth (now bigger than Xbox + PlayStation + Steam based on active users).
• Discussion on generative AI’s future in gaming and the potential for consumers to “vibe code” entire new worlds.

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9. Rapid-Fire Chart Watch, Timeline Reactions, and Monetization Models

Throughout

• Observations on price wars (AI vs. SaaS), vertical vs. horizontal search, the move to consumption-based pricing, and the meta-dynamics of X timeline memes (“Be Jeff Bezos” storyline, viral post mechanics).
• Productized AI: Notable SaaS companies are struggling to adapt to outcome-/consumption-based pricing without cannibalizing their core business.

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10. Podcast Culture, Timeline Lore, Final Notes

• Show’s unique humor: ongoing jokes about researchers (final bosses of nerd culture), the “menace” list, instant payroll protests, and the virtues of raw milk.
• The community is deeply engaged—regular shoutouts to active chat members and their contributions to storylines.
• End on the note of celebrating technical achievement, company building, and the evolving intersection of AI, productivity, and digital society.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Musk: “You got a lot of houses, brother, but House Elon does have some synergies—especially now that politics is out of the mix.” [22:47]
• On New AR Glasses: “This seems much worse than having your laptop on the tray table.” [16:44]
• On Codex Adoption: “Over 10x growth in the last month... the bottleneck is humans prompting the AI, not the models.” [175:30–181:48]
• On Apple’s Monopoly: “Cracks are appearing in the Apple ecosystem—Spotify, Amazon, Epic can finally steer users out.” [165:01]
• Andrew Yang’s Pitch: “For every person you tell, you help them, and we reward you. Instead of one Ryan Reynolds, there’ll be 30 of us.” [144:35]

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Suggested Listening Order / Timestamps

• 00:00–06:00: TBPN / WSJ milestone, show banter
• 10:21–17:46: XReal Glasses review
• 20:53–33:12: Elon doubles down at Tesla
• 36:13–50:14: OpenAI “Red String” conspiracy map
• 51:42–56:26: AI code, SaaS apocalypse trends
• 89:41–104:00: Guest company interviews (Rocks2GA, Ingest, Gusto, Console, etc.)
• 107:19–122:12: Gusto’s cash flow features (Tomer)
• 125:11–136:31: Automating IT (Console)
• 137:41–151:10: Andrew Yang on Noble Mobile
• 156:27–172:26: Tim Higgins, Apple’s walled garden
• 172:27–187:07: OpenAI Codex new release
• Throughout: Memes, meta-discussion, audience participation

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This episode is a rich tapestry of real-time tech industry reactions, first-principled analysis, entrepreneur interviews, and meta-media. The language is candid, self-aware, and filled with insider winks—best suited for those already immersed in the ongoing drama of technology, AI, and the future of business.

Transcript

[John]

You're watching DBPN. Today is Tuesday, September 16, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Good morning to everyone who's watching. We see you. We appreciate you. Welcome to the Tuesday Stream. We have a ton of news to go through. First up, ramp.com, time is money save, Both easy use of corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Second, we made it to the print edition of the Wall Street Journal. We made it to the print edition. This is really, really huge. If you're not familiar, not every article that goes out on WSJ.com makes it to the print edition. You gotta pass the second hurdle, the second test. You gotta be newsworthy. Thank you to everyone who clicked on the link. That probably helped, I don't know, send signal. I mean, we got a lot of views on the screenshots that we shared, which was crazy.

[Jordy]

People were excited about Dylan joining.

[John]

Yeah, people were excited. It's a. It's a fun time. It's a big. It's a big moment, and we're happy to make it into the Journal since the Journal has very much in the same way, the backbone of the show.

[Jordy]

As much as the timeline is the back.

[John]

The timeline might be the femur of the show, but the Wall Street Journal is the. Is the backbone and our sponsors are the. Are the tibias of. Of the show. Anyway, we made it to the actual print edition of the Wall Street Journal. This is really, really big. We're very happy about this.

[Jordy]

We've been waiting for this moment since we started the show.

[John]

Another bit of Wall Street Journal lore you might not be familiar with. The headline that they use online is often different than what they print in the paper because it's a slightly different audience.

[Jordy]

Liked the.

[John]

I like the print edition print. So in the online version, they said, this podcast is 11 months old. It just h to manage ad revenue. Fact check. True. But then in the print edition, they needed to kind of tighten it up. They didn't have as much ink to work with, so they shortened it to young tech Podcast hires president, which I like a lot.

[Jordy]

I think they could have shortened it even more to just young tech.

[John]

Young tech.

[Jordy]

Young technology.

[John]

Yeah, Young technology. So we've been very, very happy with this. Anyway, you can go check it out if you're interested. And people have been really, really supportive of the show. Thank you to everyone in the. Thank you to everyone who's been engaging with posts On X, of course. Tomorrow we are interviewing Mark Zuckerberg live.

[Jordy]

And who else are we interviewing?

[John]

We're interviewing Alexander Wang.

[Jordy]

There we go.

[John]

I've interviewed him twice. He's a phenomenon. He is probably the greatest entrepreneur of Generation Z and he's the Chief AI Officer.

[Jordy]

This photo doesn't get shared around that much, but it's surprising because he looks.

[John]

He looks fantastic. He looks fantastic. He's been lifting the weights and training the weights.

[Jordy]

That's right.

[John]

He's all over the place. It's great. So we're very excited to sit down with Alexander Wang tomorrow.

[Jordy]

He really put New Mexico Tech on the map.

[John]

Yes, yes. Not much going on there before until he showed up. But he's been on a generational run and is continuing to build a whole team at Meta as their chief AI Officer. We're going to have him break down the structure of the team, how he's thinking about hiring folks. Obviously, he's been on a talent acquisition spree. He got something like 20 to 30% of the Metis list together in one room and said, start cooking. Also, Cryptox has been. Has been posting about us. I have a printed post, a little throwback to crypto. Crypto says, never stop printing. Crypto says the rise of TVPN has to be studied. They. How did it happen? They were printing my posts and now they're hosting the Zuckerberg. Not Zuckerberg. Not the. The Zuckerberg. Well, it's little lore.

[Jordy]

We still love to print.

[John]

We still love to print so much.

[Jordy]

Though we've been running through.

[John]

We've been pushing printer and technology to its limits. Familiarity with the Hewlett Packard or Brother Printing system is a prerequisite for employment at TBPN Incorporated.

[Jordy]

Yeah, underrated that we ran the show on Brother Printers.

[John]

Brother Printers did. They took us a long way. The first 10,000 subscribers were probably built on the back of the Brother Printer, which served as a real brand.

[Jordy]

We're not joking.

[John]

Yeah, this is a real brand. It's called Brother Printers and they're pretty reliable. We got the black and white version so it print fast.

[Jordy]

They have a great domain.

[John]

Yeah. Some folks in the chat say, bring printing back. We're going to. There was a. We got to a point where we had so many posts that were in, you know, color and black and white and like, this is a lot of ink. And we would hit print and it would take like 25 minutes to actually print the full run of show. And then we'd want to look things up and we want to Play videos. And so I think there's a world for printing posts. We want some printed posts, we want to keep the lo fi vibes. But then also every once in a while it makes sense to pull up a video for everyone or pull up some audio and play it and of course share it all. And restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream. Reach your audience wherever they are. If you're streaming. Gotta get on restream anyway, tomorrow, obviously everyone has seen the leaks. At this point, Meta's announcing some new glasses. We're going to be hands on with them, take you through reactions to the keynote, and then interview a bunch of folks from Meta's leadership team, which we've shared. We shared Baz, we shared Zuck, we shared Alex Wang, of course. But I wanted to get a State of the Union on what's actually going on in the VRAR market. I've tried the Apple Vision Pro. One of our first shows was talking about the Apple Vision Pro. I had it for two weeks. I watched Citizen Kane in it. I experienced some of the demos, wasn't able to really stick with it, and so wound up returning it.

[Jordy]

At any point did you say, this is the future? This. This is it.

[John]

There were pieces of the future that I liked. I liked the external battery pack.

[Jordy]

Some of the other people that came out and said, this is it, and then retracted it.

[John]

Like, I remember, because we had. I don't think we'd started the show yet, but you called me and you were like, do I need to get one of these things? Like, my timeline is just flooded with like, insane. Like, the future is here, like, missing the boat. It was like FOMO around Apple Vision Pro for a couple weeks and then it sort of died off. But I thought that there were a few things that they did really well. The screen was fantastic. It really was a step above anything else in the category. And the external battery pack was smart. Of course, the overall headset was still really heavy and I liked it. Even though I liked Oculus for gaming, I played all of Robo Recall, the shooting game. I have a funny story about this too. Did I ever tell you about the first time I went skeet shooting with shotguns?

[Jordy]

No.

[John]

So I go to my friend's ranch in California, Avocado farmer.

[Jordy]

That's actually impressive because eventually we're going to run out of stories that I know.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. You'd think I'd run out of them by now, but. So I. I go to the ranch, my buddy's ranch, and at some point.

[Jordy]

We have to explain.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. We will be taking you through the simple.

[Jordy]

We made a simple.

[John]

We cracked the code on OpenAI, by the way.

[Jordy]

Get a wide angle, please.

[John]

So we will. We will be sharing the full breakdown. Tyler will be breaking it down for us.

[Jordy]

It's quite simple if you actually just, you know, look at all the individuals.

[John]

And we will be calling. We will. Thank you for the zoom in. We will be calling Dylan Field to help us create a red string mod for figjam. Of course, if you want to take this level of design to a little bit more professional level, head over to figma.com think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. So anyway, I was going out to my buddy's ranch and as one of the activities on the ranch, they had skeet shooting. So shotguns, the over, under two shells. And I. This is the first time I'd ever shot a shotgun. Never really shot a gun. And. And they were playing this game where it's kind of like knockout and everyone goes. And if you miss one, you lose. But if you, if you. If you miss and then someone else hits it, they get you out. And it's a competition and the best shooter wins. And I don't know if there was a prize, but I'd never shot completely new, but I'd been playing like four hours a day of virtual reality shooting in Robo Recall. This is a fantastic game.

[Jordy]

How old are you at this time?

[John]

Oh, this was like 25 years old. 26 or something. I don't know. I was. I was a man. I was an adult.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

I wasn't kid.

[Jordy]

Four hours a day of Robo Recall.

[John]

Something like that. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, exactly.

[Jordy]

No, you can still put in996 and robo recall and.

[John]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

As long as we know this while.

[John]

You'Re playing Robo, we know this. Yes.

[Jordy]

And then. So.

[John]

But I. So I believe I had one of the highest scores in the world at the time. I was going up against, like, a friend of mine who was like, actually a developer at Meta, and we were like, setting different scores and they were like little tricks that you could do to get better scores. But basically the whole conceit of the game is that there's a whole bunch of robots that are, like running at you and you have to, like, shoot them. So I'm practicing in virtual reality and I'm shooting all these robots and I get out to the real world and I'm phenomenal and I win and I beat everyone in this shotgun shooting competition. And it actually transferred sim racing. It was sim racing.

[Jordy]

It was transfers.

[John]

It transferred recall, it transferred. It was fantastic. It was like a remarkable moment. And I think that quest, even though some of the hype has died down, everything's moved over to AI. There's still a massive opportunity to win gaming. There's also a massive opportunity, I think, to win just replacement for your tv. We were talking about this, like, the TV is maybe, maybe goaded, maybe going to be around forever. But when I watched Susan Kane in. In Apple Vision Pro, I was like, this is cool. I could see doing this if it was lighter and cheaper and a little bit cooler. And it also.

[Jordy]

We can wait to talk about the implications of Meta's new releases until tomorrow because there's been some leaks. But we've also been able to demo the products a couple times now and can't share.

[John]

But what we can share is the xreal One Pro, which is a augmented reality. I don't even know.

[Jordy]

I had never heard of this until this morning.

[John]

So this has been pumped very heavily online. They do a lot of sponsored content, they do a lot of ads, and it's an augmented reality. Glasses. We got them. They're on Tyler's face over there. He's looking. Give us a little review. Jordy, how do you think the styles. The style looks?

[Jordy]

I mean, Tyler's just a cool dude.

[John]

He looks pretty cool.

[Jordy]

He looks like he just has a pair of sunglasses. You do look kind of like. Like an old man. Yeah, kind of old man coated.

[Tyler]

They're very far away from my face. Like the lens.

[Jordy]

Oh, yeah.

[Tyler]

Like offset.

[John]

Yeah, it is. It is a little bit farther. So describe what you're seeing.

[Tyler]

Yeah, so it's. It feels basically like I'm wearing sunglasses. I don't know if you'd be able to see if I turn them around, but there's like the main lens, which you can see from, like, looking at me, and on the inside there's like a smaller lens that doesn't cover the entire thing. Yeah, so I'm seeing. I'm looking through that. So my. The field of view of the actual, like, screen area is not actually that big, but it's basically just like I'm wearing, like, pretty dark sunglasses.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

And then I can just like, see I have, like a screen pulled up. It's just mirroring from my laptop right now. Okay, so it's over here.

[John]

So basically, if you unplug these, there's no battery on board that I can tell you have to plug it. You have to plug in the end of the. What's the arm on the sunglass arm? I don't know, the side little bar. You plug a USB C cable into that, and then you plug that into your phone and it mirrors your phone. Or he's plugging into his laptop. Is it a second screen or it's mirroring right now.

[Tyler]

It's, like, extended. So it's extended screen.

[John]

Okay. Because you have two screens. Yeah. Well, there we go.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

Yeah. You need to rub it in.

[Jordy]

I mean, that's. That's pretty. That's pretty.

[John]

So. So how much can you see? Can you see how many fingers I'm holding up?

[Tyler]

Yeah. Three.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

I mean, I can see pretty well.

[John]

You can see pretty well.

[Tyler]

There's three, like, levels of darkness.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

So I'm on the lightest one right now.

[John]

In the lightest.

[Tyler]

It's still pretty dark. Like, it's basically like I'm wearing dark sunglasses.

[John]

I think I had it on. On the darkest setting, and I was using it at night last night, and I couldn't see Tyler Gold, really, in the. Yeah.

[Jordy]

In the chat, says, looks like he belongs in the Blues Brothers, I think.

[John]

I think it's a pretty good look. I watched a full YouTube video on it about 50 minutes last night, and it truly was full HD. Like, I was not seeing pixels. I thought the visual resolution was quite high. What's your. What's your review?

[Tyler]

I just turned on, like, the darkest setting, and I cannot see you guys at all.

[John]

You can't see us?

[Tyler]

I can see the lights we have.

[John]

Okay, that's it.

[Tyler]

Like, very faintly, but I can't see you guys at all.

[John]

So it's really. Oh, it's actually changing the darkness of the glasses, too. That's pretty cool. I can see the change when you change those. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Wow. There we go. Yeah, it goes dark. I don't know if you'll be able to see that on the video, but I can certainly see it from here anyway. So what have you think about the.

[Jordy]

User experience of having the screen on your face have to connect to the screen in front of you?

[John]

I don't think it's that crazy. I always thought, like, I want a very concrete, like, first, like, killer app. And so for the iPhone, you know, I was debating this with Marc Andreessen. I think the killer app for the iPhone was just the phone. And then, yeah, it had some problems later, but most people bought it just to be able to make phone calls.

[Jordy]

Chat's asking For a risk check. That's a Seiko, right?

[Tyler]

Yeah, Seiko skx.

[John]

There we go.

[Tyler]

Not really a hitter.

[John]

Yeah, you're getting there.

[Jordy]

It's a college hitter.

[John]

It's a college hitter.

[Jordy]

It's a tasteful choice.

[John]

And so I thought that there could be a future where this is a $650 product. It's in the range of an external monitor. And so I think that maybe it's not going to be today, but if you have a college student who has a laptop and they want a second monitor and they're judging between these glasses that are portable, they can bring to the library, if they're going there and have a nice big second monitor or a physical second monitor from Apple or Samsung or anyone else, they might be able to compete on that, even if you just have to plug it in. But what do you think, Tyler? How close are you? How much cheaper than a true external monitor would these have to be for you to choose this over an external monitor?

[Tyler]

I think they'd have to be a lot cheaper than $750.

[John]

They're not close.

[Tyler]

Yeah. They're also like, I don't think I would wear these not sitting down, like, if I was moving around.

[John]

Yep.

[Tyler]

They're, like, a little too clunky when you have it. So there's like, two modes. You can have it on, like, the world tracking or just like, face tracking where it moves with your face.

[John]

Yep.

[Tyler]

And it's, like, pretty clunky. So it's like, a little bit. I could see someone getting, like, motion sick.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

In VR, I don't really get motion sick ever. But, like, my dad does a lot, so I could see him, like, not using this comp.

[John]

The visual fidelity to the. To the Quest 3s that you tested.

[Tyler]

I would say it's very close.

[John]

It's close.

[Tyler]

Yeah. It's. So it's definitely worse than the Apple Vision Pro. Like, I can still see kind of like, I can like, do essentially, like, pixel peaking.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

And if I. If I move my head like this, it gets blurry.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

But overall, like, I could.

[John]

I mean, the field of view is a little narrow. Like, it's pretty easy to cut off the edges if you.

[Tyler]

It's a little narrow. But, like, text is totally readable. Like, you could easily read.

[John]

Or so far, I'm on the train of. If I was on a plane and I was leaning back, I would watch a movie on this over just holding my phone like this and watching it there. But outside of that, there aren't that many occasions that I would select this. And even though it is AR and it is pass through, it's still.

[Jordy]

I would just say this seems much worse than having your laptop on the tray table.

[John]

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[Jordy]

When are you on a plane and you don't have your laptop?

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Would you really use it? So I give these.

[John]

What's your review? Two thumbs down.

[Jordy]

Two thumbs down. That's my official review.

[John]

Brutal. What about you?

[Tyler]

I think it's pretty cool. I've never used AR glasses before. I've only ever used VR that has pass through.

[John]

Sure.

[Tyler]

And I mean, it's like, you know, infinitely better because in pass through you can't really like, you can obviously walk around.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

But it's like, it's a little jarring still. You have to walk a little slowly with this.

[John]

You can actually use your laptop. You can move your. Your hands around and it doesn't. It's real time because it's just actually you're seeing the real light rays and stuff.

[Tyler]

Yeah. I would say. I would say one thumbs up.

[John]

One thumbs.

[Tyler]

One thumb up.

[John]

One thumb up, One thumb.

[Jordy]

Are you being honest with us, Tyler?

[John]

Are you being too.

[Tyler]

No, I think this is really cool. Yeah.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

I mean, I don't know if I.

[Jordy]

Really cool doesn't mean you're going to use it.

[Tyler]

It's a cool demo. I would have to buy these.

[Jordy]

Okay. One thumb up on the demo.

[Tyler]

I would not buy these for $700. I would buy them for like 150 bucks.

[John]

Okay. The question, the age old question here is we're always trying to get to a churn rate.

[Jordy]

Goldman in the says ripping analog bogeys. Glad the youth are keeping it going. I don't think. I think he missed the part where they're like, there's cigarettes.

[John]

Oh, there's cigarettes in his pocket. Oh, oh, there's cigarettes in his pocket.

[Jordy]

I thought he was calling the sunglasses.

[John]

No, no, no.

[Jordy]

Tyler's got some heaters in the pocket.

[John]

Yancey here saying, wish I had a third thumb to give it three thumbs down. But. So let's assume that they're free. Let's assume that you have won them in a TVPN gap semester challenge.

[Jordy]

You're not even. You're not. You're not using these.

[John]

Do you think you'll be a dau in a month? Because we've tried to make you a dau of clulie. We failed. We tried to make you a DAU of the quest 3s.

[Tyler]

We failed on the quest. I actually have used it.

[John]

Oh, you did?

[Tyler]

I'VE used it in the past month. I've used it maybe like three times.

[John]

Okay, what'd you use it for?

[Tyler]

I was playing. I think I was playing Call of Duty.

[John]

Okay. Back in the. Back in the trenches. The new Call of Duty. The new Call of Duty is dropping soon. Maybe.

[Tyler]

I don't know which one it was.

[John]

Maybe the last 16 or something.

[Tyler]

Oh, well, I would. I don't.

[Jordy]

I mean, Call of Duty needs to do the same thing as Apple at this point. Black Ops 2025.

[John]

Oh, yeah, they really should.

[Tyler]

Black Ops. Modern Warfare 2020, I think.

[John]

Yeah, they did that. Yeah. Well, no, it was because they. They reset the whole counter. So it was Modern Warfare 1, 2, 3, 4. And then they just. Where like, let's start over. Let's do Modern Warfare again. And so anytime that you would. You would need to confuse the old Modern Warfare and the new Modern Warfare. People would be like, Modern warfare. But the 2020 edition, it wasn't Modern Warfare Coiling.

[Jordy]

Dan Ratliff in the chat has a good idea. He says, get the chat ripping an inch from Tyler's face.

[John]

Ooh, I like that. Yeah.

[Jordy]

Pull up chat, plug the chat, and.

[John]

You can just see the chat. Right.

[Tyler]

So I'm looking at myself right now and it's.

[John]

They.

[Tyler]

They're really dark. It looks like I'm like, blind.

[John]

Yeah, it does so well, I mean, that's mostly because you're indoors. Like, if you were. If we were outside beach or something, I feel like you would look a lot more.

[Jordy]

To be clear, that is incredibly sub. Like, that's not what you want. You want.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

Look like normal glass.

[John]

Yes, yes, yes, I agree. And so, like, the meta Ray Bans, just the current ones that are already out. If someone is sitting at their office with those and they have them in their clear frames, you would just be like. It's as weird as having headphones in. Like, it's just like, oh, yeah, they're wearing glasses. Like.

[Tyler]

Yeah. You can immediately clock these as, like, something is going on.

[John]

Totally. The water coming out of your. Coming down your chest really is a nice accent. You might have to thread that through the tie or something.

[Jordy]

You're like, yeah, something. Something's going on here. You look like an intelligence asset. You know, you're just like.

[Tyler]

If you're in an SF party and.

[Jordy]

You know, and someone's wearing these.

[John]

Yeah, that's great. Anyway. Vanta Automate Compliance. Manage risk, Prove Trust Continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and Replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Okay, the current thing, Elon, he posted Daddy is very much home. He's burning the midnight oil with Optimus Engineering on Friday night, then Red Eye overnight to Austin, arriving 5am, wake up to have lunch with my kids and then spend all day Saturday afternoon in deep technical reviews for Tesla's AI 5 chip design. Then he flies to Colossus 2 on Monday, walks the whole data center floor, reviews transformer and power production. Excellent progress there, he says. Departs midnight. Then up to 12 hours of back to back meetings across all Tesla departments. But particular focus on AI, autopilot, Optimus production plans and vehicle production delivery. 16,000. He is back in it. He's in wartime mode.

[Jordy]

No, it's great to see, like clearly you add politics into his current responsibilities and it's too much.

[John]

It's too much.

[Jordy]

Like, it's just too much. So it's great to see that he's out of that, focused on what he does best.

[John]

Yeah. Like the Context switching between SpaceX and Tesla always seemed like, wow, how does he do SpaceX and Tesla? But like at the end of the day you are talking to an engineer in one place and then an engineer in the other place and it's fundamentally the same conversation like how can we design the parts, get them made, put them together and then do the thing with the parts that at least it's. That instead of politics is like completely different.

[Jordy]

It's crazy to be an entrepreneur and think to yourself, I gotta focus more, but then still have like six companies.

[John]

It is crazy.

[Jordy]

It's like I have to work harder and I have to focus more.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

And normally if you're running one company, you can say like, all right, we're gonna like deprioritize this product.

[John]

Totally.

[Jordy]

Like shut this down. We're not gonna do that acquisition. Totally this or that. But he doesn't have that luxury. He just has to.

[John]

This was the, this was the odd take. Daddy is very much home. You got a lot of houses, brother. You got a lot of houses. But at the same time, house Elon, as I'm calling it, does, does have some synergies between it and a lot more now that you take politics out of the mix like you mentioned. So I was thinking, and I don't know if I want to dox them, but I was visiting two friends of mine who design consultancy together, pulled into their Los Angeles office space which they had designed from the ground up. These guys are super into Design. They have custom furniture, custom tables. Everything is custom. And I noticed they had two identical Tesla Model Ys parked in front of the building. And I was like, that's kind of a funny choice for guys who pride themselves on finding like unique and creative design ideas all day long. Like everything they do is considered. Considered unique. I would have expected some bespoke car like the bespoke office building. And when I talked to them, they had a good, they had a good rationale behind their decision. They said, what true luxuries are left in the automotive world? It's just self driving and nothing comes close to a Tesla. That was their take. You can disagree, but for a lot.

[Jordy]

Of people we've had self driving. It's called having a driver. That's the truth. That's the truth.

[Tyler]

That's the last.

[Jordy]

Clearly you could make the argument that that is the final yes, because we drove with them to dinner and both cars.

[John]

I wasn't in there, but yeah, you were.

[Jordy]

I drove with them to dinner and both cars made an extremely illegal left turn.

[John]

Oh, oh. So a human driver would never do anything illegal in a car.

[Jordy]

I would fire a human driver that made that turn.

[John]

Oh, okay. That turn.

[Jordy]

It was a Greece.

[John]

It was a Greece.

[Jordy]

But of course I agree with the point.

[John]

Broadly, yes, sure, maybe it's not superhuman level, maybe it's not the best self driving better than an actual professional driver, but it's on the path and it's clearly a notch above the rest of the OEMs. And so Tesla's always been a bit of a wild ride. Company wasn't founded by Elon Musk. He sort of refounded the business. He joined the company seven months after two other co founders started the initial corporate incorporation. It's been a wild ride in the public markets. There's a barrage of skepticism the whole time. Pressure from short sellers. The stocks never traded like a traditional carmaker, but it's also never operated like one. So on November 6th, Tesla shareholders. In just what, two months or so, Tesla shareholders will vote on a very non traditional pay package. It's $1 trillion for Elon. And Elon's already restating his commitment to the company with this post. Daddy is very much home, he wrote on X this morning. I was debating whether or not the post was ghostwritten. And where do you sit on it? Jordi, you've read the post. Do you think this was written by Elon? The original one we called not the Tesla. So the Tesla Secret Plan V4 that felt like it was not written By Elon. It wasn't really in Elon's voice from what I know about him. It seemed like it was sort of written by a team or a committee or there were multiple people at the table. There were a lot of em dashes. So maybe there was like a ChatGPT pass or a Grok pass at some point. LLM pass on top of it.

[Jordy]

Just talking into his phone.

[John]

Sure. And then it instantiated it into a, into a multi paragraph essay. But this, this post, I am burning the midnight oil with Optimus engineering on Friday night. Then red eye overnight to Austin arriving at 5am does this feel like Elon's voice to you?

[Jordy]

I mean his voice to me is reposting on timeline.

[John]

Reposting Crying emoji. Wow. So true. Yeah. I don't know. I thought this, this did feel like him. It felt like he just fired it off. But I don't know. There's people debating it. I don't know. I think the more interesting thing is just like, just like does this reflect rational prioritization at Tesla generally?

[Jordy]

And so 20% in the class.

[John]

Yeah. And so he's prioritizing Optimus, which Optimus feels like this sci fi project. That's far off. It feels like the demos that we've seen have been very teleoperated. It's not. There aren't these crazy demos, certainly not shipping. But if you just think about like what is technically possible right now and we've seen these videos out of China with companies like Unitree, it doesn't seem that far off. Right. Like even if, even if you assume that like he hasn't. Tesla hasn't done any like Quantum Leap, done something that no one else can do. Just catching up to unitary with great execution and engineering should be possible. Right. Like they already make tons and tons of cars. It's a somewhat similar project. And there's also certainly investor demand for an American humanoid robot play today. Figure robotics raised a billion dollars at a 39 billion post money valuation. When was that?

[Jordy]

Around this well.

[John]

So months ago or six months ago.

[Jordy]

It felt like something that was designed to generate interest.

[John]

And there were screenshots.

[Jordy]

I was like, I was pretty blown away because that round was being what it was rumored to be getting done at was greater than the market cap of Ford Motor.

[John]

That's right. Where's Ford today?

[Jordy]

Ford is at 45 billion today.

[John]

Oh.

[Jordy]

And so I was, I saw that.

[John]

Take age like milk. Jordan.

[Jordy]

Yeah. I said to John, I said, you might not like this, John. This might trigger you. But Brett Adcock has created more enterprise value than Henry Ford. That actually proved to be true. Henry Ford as of current marks has generated about a billion dollars more. Okay, yeah, we don't need to get into revenue or really try to get too into the math.

[John]

Yeah, let's skip all that.

[Jordy]

But yeah, the question.

[John]

I mean my read on this is just like, this is like figure is nowhere near as like in the Zeitgeist as Tesla. And there are clearly investors who want to bet on humanoid robots in America. They can't even buy unitary stock. I don't know how you would. And so if you just believe that robots are going to be a thing like investing in Tesla doesn't seem like that crazy of an idea. Right. But I mean he's not just focused on that. He's also focused on the next Tesla chip design called one thing too.

[Jordy]

Unitree is planning their IPO around the $7 billion mark.

[John]

Sure. Oh, that's low. Wow, that's low. Where are they in Hong Kong?

[Jordy]

Maybe it's gonna be the Hong Kong stock exchange.

[John]

I wonder what it'll do.

[Jordy]

And given that they are.

[John]

They're shipping a lot of those robots.

[Jordy]

They're selling a lot of.

[John]

Selling a lot of. Oh yeah, there's robots. Robo pups. Anyway, worth a big deep.

[Jordy]

I want. I think a Tesla Robo pup would crush.

[John]

That would be good.

[Jordy]

I would.

[John]

What would you use it for though?

[Jordy]

Would you not churn just a. Well so I pitched you on an office dog and you said that's insane. And I thought about it.

[John]

Tragedy of the commons situation.

[Jordy]

But a Tesla pup that Elon would just be able to zoom into at any time and kind of bark at us. If he had announcements I would be pretty interested in that.

[John]

What about a Tesla Pufferfish? A turbopuffer fish? A turbopuffer you could search every bite. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Check out turbopuffer. He's also prioritizing AI 5, the new chip he's partnering with Samsung on. That makes sense. You need edge computing in a self driving context. You can't do all the inference in a data center colossus. You can do inference in the data center. You're probably training a big model. Regardless of what Xai is doing with Grok, having a bunch of being GPU rich seems valuable to Tesla. Right? And there's rumors that maybe those companies merge at some point. But the plan overall, how he's actually spending his time, it Seems in line with the opportunity in front of Tesla. Doesn't seem like wildly.

[Jordy]

He's managed to almost 2x the stock since April.

[John]

He certainly got the flow back.

[Jordy]

And I remember, I distinctly remember mid curving it around April thinking, just looking at Tesla earnings, look at them losing market share globally. Look at the quarters that they had had just in the core business of selling cars and it was just looking really, really, really abysmal.

[John]

The cybertruck was rough, the Roadster 2 was delayed. They're just model 3's not selling well.

[Jordy]

None of the cars have been replaced.

[John]

And then there was all this political stuff. Where were conservatives gonna pick up and start buying Teslas?

[Jordy]

Well, no, you think about it, the left wing. And then he was losing the right by fighting with Trump. So who's the base?

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like losses on both sides. But I think that the car buyer has a shorter memory for these things and will when you're selling, when you're.

[Jordy]

Leasing cars for 299. Exactly less than an equinox.

[John]

And like it does perform well on all the benchmarks, essentially self driving compared.

[Jordy]

To any other car in that price range.

[John]

Yep, totally. And so the bear case here for Elon bringing it back and returning home is that he has multiple homes. SpaceX, Neuralink, boring. Company X Xai. It can't be easy to juggle everything, but at least he's been able to pull back time spent in dc.

[Jordy]

Neuralink.

[John]

No, I said Neuralink. Yeah, and it seems like there are new plans in the works to consolidate House Elon down to fewer entities, so it's easier to manage. Overall, his current Tesla plan outlined in this post is a lot clearer to me than the Tesla Secret Plan V4 that felt written by a committee or even worse, an LLM. Even if you see, even if you're seeing signs of being stretched too thin, it's very hard to root against someone who's already built such a large automotive company in America and is taking a serious run at a self driving network and a humanoid robotics play. There's lots of froth, but I like Elon being home at Tesla and focused on making science fiction reality. So that's my take on Elon's latest paper.

[Jordy]

John.

[John]

Anyway, whatever they're building, they gotta do it on graphite. Graphite.dev, code review for the Age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. We didn't really talk about the Sam Altman Tucker Carlson episode that went out. It was a crazy news Day, of course, with the Kirk assassination. But Chrisman went viral. Who's a friend of the show? He said after spending seven minutes very politely accusing his guest of murder, Tucker just resumes a normal conversation to round out the interview. Incredible. Best to ever do it. And so it goes straight from suspicion is insane to thoughts on Elon Musk. What jobs will be lost to AI. What are the downsides of AI? Is AI religion, the dangers of deepfakes. I love it.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Do you think this was not a win for Sam? Kind of went into every.

[John]

I think every PR person thinks it's a. It's a own goal or it's like a mistake to do. I don't know. It was so bold. It was just. It was so unexpected. Like, it was.

[Jordy]

Remember Tucker had sushir's parents.

[John]

No. You know that that's what's going to happen. So you're going into the arena. You're going into the lion's den. You're, you're, you're, you're debating, like, the most critical critic possible. And there's something brave about that. I don't know.

[Jordy]

Not afraid.

[John]

Yeah. Yeah. I took it as where you're able to overcome your fear as bullish. I think Luke Metro had this post where he was saying that his fear of the going direct movement was that CEOs would never do a hard interview ever again because there was always someone who was willing to do an easy interview with you. There was always, oh, just do your own podcast. OpenAI has their own podcast. Sam Altman's brother has a podcast. He is friends with tons of people. He can come to us and we'll talk to him just about AI and tech and the core business and stuff, and have, like a business conversation. To go to Tucker is a. Is a very, very aggressive, bold move. And I think it's. I think it's good leadership. I don't know. I think it's. I think it's like, it's hopefully closing the book on that very sad and tragic saga. But who knows? I haven't really dug into, like, the actual response. Were people in Tucker's community swayed? That's the real metric. Probably, because you don't want to come out of that and be like, tyler, wow, I have more.

[Jordy]

You're going to middle America. You're going to interview thousands of Dr. Carlson superfans.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And ask them, did he do it?

[John]

Just ask them. No, no, no, no. Explain them. Explain to them this. Explain to them the full history of OpenAI, all the connections and See if they're bullish on the stock. That's what I want to know. Do they think 500 billion is undervalued or overvalued in middle America? That's what I care about. So we have our chart of the OpenAI and all the connections. Tyler, you were late here last night. You didn't leave last night. You were here.

[Jordy]

Kind of an all nighter.

[Tyler]

Yeah, I was. Basically the goal was try to, you know, I want to explain kind of in an easy, simple way, like how to think about OpenAI. Broadly.

[John]

Oh, yeah.

[Tyler]

How to think about people who are influencing it. I think you nailed it in as clear of a way as possible.

[John]

I think you nailed it. So who do we have here at the center?

[Tyler]

Yeah, So I think it's obviously best to start here.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

This is right here in the middle.

[John]

OpenAI.

[Tyler]

Okay. So obviously, Sam Altman, OpenAI, this is the core.

[John]

Yes. So every line of string here is a real connection. Correct. Okay, take us through some of it.

[Tyler]

Yeah. So we can see over here. These are some of kind of the main deals. So we have Larry Ellison, Oracle.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

We have Microsoft.

[John]

$300 billion plan to build data centers. And then Broadcom is obviously doing chips, custom chips for OpenAI. Now SoftBank is bankrolling some of it with Stargate. Microsoft has the.

[Jordy]

What's the connection between Jony Ivan, Growing Daniel?

[Tyler]

Okay, so this is actually, you know, double. So this is. Most people on Twitter, they see this picture, they think Growing Daniel, but I mean, that's.

[John]

It's actually Steve Jobs.

[Tyler]

That's Steve Jobs.

[John]

Steve Jobs.

[Tyler]

So it's really, you know, double. So you see this? Yeah, this is pretty good. I want to talk about this. So we have Marc Andreessen.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

You know, famous kind of interplay between Growing Daniel and Mark Andreessen. But also, you know, with Steve Jobs and Johnny.

[John]

I've. Yeah, got it.

[Jordy]

And then saying this goes deeper than this.

[Tyler]

It goes really deep here.

[John]

How deep does it go? Let's find out.

[Tyler]

Okay, so then let's just keep moving. So let's go from. Let's go to some investors, please. So we can go from OpenAI. Let's see. Josh Kushner.

[John]

Josh Kushner, of course.

[Tyler]

Okay. But who's Josh Kushner's brother?

[John]

Jared. Where's Jared?

[Tyler]

First Trump administration.

[John]

Okay. Yes.

[Tyler]

Okay. Now we're, now we're in, you know, politics. Let's go down P.T.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

Right. You can see a lot of strings coming out of here. This is a core player.

[John]

Core player.

[Tyler]

So, I mean, there's so many directions we can go here. But let's go to Delian.

[John]

Right? Yes.

[Tyler]

Delian. Where does Delian work? Founders Fund. Who is.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

You know, it's obvious. Okay.

[John]

Yes, it's obvious. You're putting it together.

[Tyler]

Okay. Delian's first company.

[John]

Yes. Varda.

[Tyler]

No.

[John]

Oh, first company.

[Tyler]

His first company. YC company.

[John]

Oh, yeah, it was a YC company.

[Tyler]

What was another YC company? Alexander Wang.

[John]

Oh, wait, Scala was a YC company. Okay, where does Alex work now?

[Tyler]

Where does he work? Mark Zuckerberg.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

Nat Friedman. They work together. Msl.

[John]

Okay. It's so clear.

[Tyler]

Who did Nat Friedman sponsor?

[John]

Who?

[Tyler]

Luke Fairtor.

[John]

Oh, Fair. Tor.

[Tyler]

And where does he work? Doge. Elon.

[John]

Elon.

[Tyler]

It's all connected. And who did Elon start a company with? Pt. It goes back.

[John]

There you go.

[Tyler]

Okay.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

So Willmanitis.

[John]

How is willmanitis connected? This is just a joke. He's not actually involved. Right.

[Tyler]

Well, Willmanitis was a. What kind of fellow?

[John]

Oh, a teal fellow. That's right. This does get pretty deep.

[Tyler]

So. And then we can go from Willemitis. He's obviously, you know, very popular on X.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

This is another kind of. Why. At some point there were too many strings. I didn't want to cover too much.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

But there's a lot of connections here. Obviously. We can go down to Dwarkesh. Okay, so he's kind of another superpower.

[John]

Yeah. Super connect. He's interviewed most of these folks.

[Tyler]

So let's go to. Let's go from. From Dorkesh to Gwern.

[John]

Right. Okay. Yes.

[Tyler]

Gwern. Obviously connected. Scaling hypothesis. Very influential on Ilya.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

This obviously goes back to OpenAI.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

It also goes to Karpathy.

[John]

Yes. One of the co founders of OpenAI.

[Tyler]

Yes. Also Tesla Autopilot.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Back to Elon.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

Okay, let's go to this side of the board here.

[John]

Yes. Who we got?

[Tyler]

So let's.

[John]

How is. How is Scarlett Johansson involved?

[Tyler]

Yeah, so there's a couple ways she's involved. So obviously the first one, she was in her. Right.

[John]

Movie. Yes, yes.

[Tyler]

Famously, when OpenAI voice mode was coming out, they wanted to do her voice because, you know, that's like the movie and then she was maybe suing.

[John]

And was it Sam or the official OpenAI account that just tweeted her and that.

[Tyler]

Yes, I believe it was Sam.

[John]

Yes. And. And. And it was unclear if the licensing was proper at that point. So there's maybe some backlash, maybe some. Some. Some legal.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

So letters traded.

[Tyler]

Who else was in Her. Who else is Joaquin Phoenix?

[John]

Yes, Joaquin Phoenix.

[Tyler]

He was also the Joker. This is not related to other things. Yes, but.

[John]

Okay, we're getting Joker fied.

[Tyler]

Yeah. So let's go back to Scarjo.

[John]

In a fast takeoff, we all become Joker fide.

[Tyler]

She was in a movie with another actor.

[John]

Yes. Who?

[Tyler]

Joseph Gordon Levitt.

[John]

What movie?

[Tyler]

Don John, I believe it's called.

[John]

That's right, Don John. Yes.

[Tyler]

Okay, so who is Joseph Gordon Levitt?

[Jordy]

Deeper than I. Whoa.

[John]

This does go deeper than I. Lovett's.

[Tyler]

Wife was previously a board member of OpenAI during the ousting.

[John]

That's true.

[Tyler]

Took Sam Altman out.

[John]

Wow. It's all obvious.

[Tyler]

How can you not see this?

[John]

It's so clear now.

[Tyler]

Okay, so now we're in kind of this.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

You know. Yes. This is all connected here, obviously, to really.

[Jordy]

It gets really jammed.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Because we can go from here to EA and then to Eliezer.

[John]

Eliezer, of course.

[Tyler]

Right. And here's, you know.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Eliezer's first organization, Miri Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

That was, I believe, early on, funded by pt.

[John]

Okay, how is Eliezer connected to Grimes? Is that Grimes on.

[Tyler]

Well, okay, do you not remember this famous picture between Grimes, Eleazar and Sam?

[John]

Oh, I do remember this.

[Tyler]

Yes.

[John]

Good sound cue. I completely forgot that image. That is lore.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Okay, so then, Eliezer, very influential on this famous book about safety superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.

[John]

Okay, Bostrom.

[Tyler]

Yes. He is kind of this online.

[John]

Yeah. Philosopher.

[Tyler]

Almost part of the blogosphere a little bit. Sure, sure. And connected to Scott Alexander. Right. Who was on Dwarf Keshe's podcast.

[John]

Yeah, he was AI 2027. Part of that crew. Right. Or Lucy.

[Tyler]

No, he was a commentator on. Oh, I guess. I think he was actually an invisible advisor.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

If he was a co author involved. He was involved.

[John]

He's implicated. He's. It's never been clearer that there's a connection.

[Tyler]

So let's go. Okay. Let's go back to our cash from here. He was on the podcast.

[John]

Yes. How did Will catch. Catch a red string? Just from being a poster on Axe. Oh, he also works at Open.

[Tyler]

He was just through. Oh, Will. Oh, well, he's. Yeah. I mean, he's at xai. He. You know.

[John]

No, no, he's. He's on x. He's at OpenAI. Right.

[Tyler]

Yes. Yes.

[John]

Okay. Things mixed up here. Got it.

[Tyler]

Okay.

[John]

But.

[Tyler]

Okay, we're at Dwarakash.

[John]

Yes. Dwar Cash back to Dwarkesh.

[Tyler]

Yes. An early guest of Rajkesh was Tyler Cowan.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

Now Tyler Cowan runs the Progress Studies Institute. Yes, I think that's what it's called with Patrick Collison.

[John]

Whoa, this does go deep now.

[Tyler]

Patrick Collison, famous for being Irish.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rushing]

Oh, okay.

[Tyler]

And we sit here. We see here this is linked with a lot of, you know.

[John]

Yes. Who else is Irish?

[Tyler]

Irish cabal. Some kind of thing.

[John]

Conspiracy. Yeah. Willow, Bryan. Willow.

[Tyler]

Bryan. We see Geordie, John.

[John]

Yeah, we're Irish.

[Tyler]

Joe Lonsdale, I believe.

[John]

Oh, he's Irish.

[Tyler]

I believe that's true.

[Jordy]

Fact check that.

[John]

I have no idea.

[Tyler]

I think that's true. But, I mean, the main connection here is Ireland to the Illuminati.

[John]

The Illuminati are Irish. Why are they Irish?

[Tyler]

Well, it's just, you know, general conspiracy. And then here we get a little off the rails. You see, George Soros and Fauci connected with the Illuminati as well.

[Jordy]

Okay, you're saying we're one degree away?

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

We're not beating the allegations here, but.

[Tyler]

Let'S stick with Illuminati. Let's go up to Brian Johnson. Right.

[John]

Okay. How is he connected to all this?

[Tyler]

Well, there's some sense rumors about, you know, blood of children, maybe transfusion or something, but really, Brian Johnson is part of this kind of health movement.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

So who else is part of that? Obviously, Andrew Huberman.

[John]

Yes, Andrew Huberman, of course.

[Tyler]

And so he's a, you know, health influencer.

[Jordy]

Now you're kind of in the category of just experts, broadly.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

That takes you over to Joe Rogan.

[Tyler]

Yes, obviously, because, you know, he's a health influencer, but really, he's a podcaster at heart.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

So. So now we're in this kind of manosphere. We see Theo Vaughn, who's obviously connected in many ways to Alexander Wang, to Zuck, to Sam the Ovon's.

[John]

Really. I mean, he could potentially be at the center of this whole thing.

[Tyler]

Yeah, for sure.

[John]

Potentially. I mean, given how many in the.

[Tyler]

Past year, he's become kind of a tech power player.

[John]

That's the point of all this. All this red string. You have to see who has the most connections. Moss has got two TBPN has like 12.

[Jordy]

And I see Raw Milk up in the left corner. You're kind of dancing around that. Are you afraid to talk about.

[John]

Yeah. How does Raw Milk.

[Tyler]

Justin Mary, we're at Joe Rogan. Let's go back to Andrew Hughman.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

Another kind of person in the health, you know, area. Justin Mares.

[John]

Yes. I believe, former guest.

[Tyler]

He is a fan of Raw Milk.

[John]

He's A fan of raw milk.

[Jordy]

Certainly is.

[Tyler]

But then we see the second string here. Let's just follow this down.

[John]

How does raw milk. Oh, Jordy implicated.

[Tyler]

Not beating the raw milk allegations. Okay, but then Cuban.

[Jordy]

Cuban was. Was Cuban.

[John]

Was anti. Yeah, but he's not on the.

[Tyler]

He didn't make the board.

[John]

He didn't make the board because he's not implicated.

[Tyler]

He would have made the board. I think the next iteration is 3D print.

[Jordy]

What's going on with Larry up there in the center?

[Tyler]

Yeah. So Larry.

[John]

What is he connected to?

[Tyler]

Larry's implicated in a lot of ways. So let's just implicate. So we're in this kind of, you know, podcasting space. Obviously. David Senra.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

James Dyson.

[John]

James Dyson, latest episode.

[Jordy]

Look, I mean, this is a very pure. That's the most pure placement on the board, right?

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Hanging out on his own.

[Jordy]

Just connected to Senra.

[John]

He's connected to. Yeah. Oh, yeah. James Dyson's just in his lane. Just hanging out in Founders podcast.

[Tyler]

Exactly.

[John]

But.

[Tyler]

But let's go from. From Senra to Larry Ellison. Right. There's been, I think, three episodes. Three episodes, yeah. On Larry Ellison.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Larry Ellison is also in a lot of ways to Sam, because of the, you know, the deal. But also to Elon.

[Alex]

Right.

[Tyler]

This famous.

[John]

He wrote a billion dollar check.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah. I think I recommend 2 billion. But whatever you think, you know.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Help fund the buyout. I see Rahul Sunwalker on there.

[Tyler]

Exactly. Yeah. So Rahul is kind of an interesting person here. So he's connected to growing Daniel, obviously, because they did this famous stunt.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

His company is in yc.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Which again, I think we covered YC before, but obviously Sam.

[John]

Yeah, it all adds up now.

[Tyler]

Yeah, it's pretty obvious there, Delian. Yc YC is also. I mean, there's not a lot of strings here, but you can. You could, you know, pull a lot of strings.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Just from yc.

[John]

Now take me through the chessboard. What's going on over there?

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah. So let's go. Let's just start with PT Again. Right, so famous chess player.

[John]

It all comes back.

[Tyler]

Famous chess player.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

So obviously connection there. David Sacks also.

[John]

Oh, yeah, they played chess together.

[Tyler]

Yeah. There's that famous image where Sax is beating him.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

And then, yeah, we see from chess, we see two other famous chess players.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Botez sisters and Magnus Carlsen.

[John]

Clearly they were.

[Tyler]

I believe they were speaking at the all in Summit.

[John]

Oh, they were.

[Tyler]

I don't know about this most recent one, but in the past. They certainly have.

[John]

Puzzle pieces are starting to fit together.

[Tyler]

Yeah. So. So chess is, is a board game, right? What's another board game? Go Lee Se Dole.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Okay.

[Jordy]

Whoa.

[Tyler]

Famous. Let me, let me go over here also.

[John]

Cigarette smoker.

[Tyler]

Exactly. Yeah. Lisi doll go to smoke during the, the famous DeepMind AlphaGo.

[John]

That's happened. Yeah, I remember.

[Tyler]

So then obviously Dennis. Yeah. Then we see the rest of the Google team here. We see Eric Schmidt again connected to pt. Ok. And you know their famous debate.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

You know.

[John]

Is that Will Brown?

[Tyler]

Will Brown, how is he? So Will Brown is.

[Jordy]

I think you're letting him off easy here.

[Tyler]

Will Brown is teal backed.

[John]

Okay. Yes.

[Tyler]

Prime intellect.

[John]

Prime intellect.

[Tyler]

Of course he's also frequent engager.

[John]

Reply guy. Reply guy.

[Tyler]

Reply guy.

[John]

That'll get you on the board these days if you're a reply guy in Narune.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

If you're going back and forth ruin around the board.

[Tyler]

There's also a lot of strings coming out of here. He has his hands in a lot of. A lot of places.

[John]

Yes. Fingers in a lot of pies.

[Tyler]

Exactly.

[Jordy]

Donald Boat.

[John]

Yeah. How's Donald Boat link?

[Tyler]

Yeah. So Donald Boat was also one that I could have had a lot more strings coming from. But the main one, I mean Donald Boat's real recent rise to fame was asking Sam for a GPU which was sent.

[Jordy]

And he also just offered Sam some rice. I think he.

[John]

Oh really? I didn't hear about this.

[Jordy]

He got about 600 pounds of rice on some online arbitrage and he was offering it up.

[John]

Symbolism will be his downfall potentially. Let's figure it out.

[Tyler]

And then obviously Will was also heavily implicated in these kind of Donald Boat sagas.

[John]

Yes. I believe he sent him a CPU case.

[Tyler]

Yeah, I think, I mean those are, I would say those are mostly the broad strokes.

[Jordy]

I think you're close to figuring it out.

[John]

I think it's pretty clear now. I think I understand.

[Tyler]

Yeah. So that's kind of like if you want to think about OpenAI in like an easy way, like who's kind of. Who's kind of, you know, making a lot of the decisions. How are they being influenced if they're not making the direct decisions? I would say this is kind of a good picture. It's a good place to start.

[John]

Who the players are.

[Jordy]

Masa. You didn't cover Masa. But he's sitting, you know, sort of quietly confident, you know.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Not totally in his own lane, but not, you know.

[John]

So he's the connection between Sam Altman and Donald Trump on Stargate. Because he was. He was announcing the Stargate project.

[Tyler]

Obviously Trump is linked to a lot of these people, like Sergey David Sacks, just because of the recent dinner.

[John]

Oh yes, they had dinner together. That merits some string.

[Tyler]

Here's the sheik of uae.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

I think there is some Stargate development.

[John]

Stargate, uae.

[Tyler]

Uae.

[John]

Yeah, they're working on it. Well, thank you for taking us through it at all. It's pretty crystal clear to me. Jordy, what do you think?

[Jordy]

I mean. Yeah, I mean it's surprised it took people this long. Kind of crack the code.

[John]

Yep, Yep.

[Jordy]

It's all been. It's all been out there in the open.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Symbol is pretty. They're down pretty.

[John]

Pretty easy. Pretty easy to figure out. Well, thank you for the hard work, Taylor. Well done.

[Jordy]

Well done. All it took was one intern and an all nighter.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And I guess a gap semester.

[John]

We got to load up all this into Julius and analyze it, find more connections. What analysis do you want to run? Shot with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. We saw Raul up on the board. They're loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG and Zapier. Let's continue. Run. Also on the board was on the timeline talking about making the argument that we are currently in the fast takeoff scenario. Very fun post. He says right now is the time where the takeoff looks the most rapid to insiders. We don't program anymore. We just yell at Codex agents but may look slow to everyone else as the general chatbot medium saturates. And so Prins, there's a bunch of reactions to this. We'll go through it. Prins says fast takeoff does not require automation of AI research. The loop starts when AI researchers productivity starts accelerating due to availability of better and better AI models including coding agents. Super. Dario says the. That the. This is a. This is a little bit of confusing post. But he says Dario was wrong about 90% of coding being done by AI boys in shambles. So if you were, if you were thinking that 90% of coding would not be done by AI, you are in shambles because 90% of coding is being done by AI. There's also.

[Jordy]

We have Alex who's running Codex at OpenAI coming on.

[John]

Yeah. Later today we will, we will press him on. Are we, Are we just writing 10 times as much code or are we writing the same amount of code just 90% more efficiently? What's actually going on? There's a lot of.

[Jordy]

Are you placing engineers yet or are we just now that engineers can do.

[John]

10 times as much more leverage. Yes. At what abstraction layer are we operating? And then also just how much is just raw coding a gate to better and better super intelligence? Is that the critical path? Is it just an engineering problem where you need to write a lot of code, or is there something where we need a vast amount of. I was listening to Mark Zuckerberg on Dwarkesh this morning, and he was saying that he's not a believer in fast takeoff because he thinks that at a certain point it just takes time to marshal the resources to build all the chips and a certain amount of time to build all the infrastructure to generate all the electricity and that that will act as a natural slowing function. But there's some good economic news. There's some, there's a variety of different data points that we've been looking at to track. How fast of a takeoff are we in? Are we going exponential or are we on our sigmoid grind set and will we be plateauing at some point?

[Jordy]

That'd be a good name for somebody's.

[John]

Alt account, Sigmoid Grindset. I mean, progress historically has been a series of sigmoid functions and overall progress looks smooth when you zoom out. But if you go inside of a chip company inside of intel, like the creators of Moore's Law, Moore's Law looks very smooth. But if you actually interview the people inside of intel, they'll tell you that there were tons of little gains that then plateaued and they added all those up to get incremental gains. And when you zoom out, you see the density of the transistors and the the cost per performance increasing exponentially. But it was a lot of hard fought wins along the way. And we're probably seeing something similar in AI. Well, if you need a generative media platform, if you're a developer, go to fall the world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.

[Jordy]

Look at those logos, John. Adobe, Shopify, Canva, cora, Perplex, Love it. Genspark and many more.

[John]

Dean Ball is replying to Roon. He says if this mirrors anything like the experience of other Frontier Lab employees, and anecdotally it does, it would suggest that Dario's much mocked prediction about AI writing 90% of code was indeed correct, at least for those among whom AI diffusion is happening quickest. And Mark Zuckerberg's been on the record saying that he thinks that Meta will write 90% of code with AI as well. And Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has also said that the amount of code that's being written by AI is growing exponentially and is probably on the path to being 90% AI written. Certainly haven't laid off 90% of the engineers. And so there's some interesting dynamic going on there, but we'll continue to monitor.

[Jordy]

It's been on terror he's posting. Yeah, he's been posting it up. He says AI models with consumption usage based pricing are decimating seat based pricing in ways most teams don't understand yet. SaaS Apocalypse in full swing yet. Some good supporting charts on that yesterday showing a bunch of seat based SaaS companies down and to the right.

[John]

Yep. Yeah, very tricky. We've seen some of them reposition. I mean Salesforce, I think like over a year ago Marc Benioff was saying like, we're going to outcomes based pricing on AI agents. We're going to charge per resolution, per value. But it feels like some of these models are really sticky and a lot of the clients are like, we like our current setup or we're going to go somewhere else. And it certainly allowed other people to.

[Jordy]

Kind of eat off their outcomes based pricing. When you're providing software to manage a process is difficult because if somebody's selling, for example, like coding agents and the agent can do something and there's a certain economic value to that and somebody's saying, well, if I had an engineer do this, it would have taken them this much time. It has like a clear value. But if somebody's using Salesforce to close a $20 million deal, are they going to want to pay Salesforce some percentage of that just because they had that when it could have been one sales rep just grinding to get that deal done.

[John]

Yeah. Lots of questions for the public company SaaS CEOs. A lot of them will have to set up new narratives for how their pricing works going forward. They should be able to bring their products in line with consumption based models. But I wonder how different difficult it will be for them to actually convince their customers to switch over to something that's more.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Which the alternative is. I mean, you know, Palantir specifically has said, you know, we're, we're doing value based pricing.

[John]

Right.

[Jordy]

We're, we're gonna, you're gonna get this much value from what we're doing for you.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

And we're gonna charge you this much and you can run the calculus.

[John]

Prices are high.

[Jordy]

So prices are high. But the example, I think we were covering it yesterday said, and somebody is willing to pay $10 million to do something that's going to make or save them $100 million. That's a trade that people will take.

[John]

It does seem highly aligned when it can work. And so, I mean, it makes sense that so many of these companies that have the new business model are kind of ramping so quickly. And that's certainly the result of those crazy revenue ramps that we've been seeing. Anyway, get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT with profound reach. Millions of consumers who are using AI to discover and brands get a demo. David Sender has some sage advice from David Ogilvy, investor in profound.

[Jordy]

Yes, he rarely invests. Rarely.

[John]

David Senra says, quoting David Ogilvy, I admire people who work with gusto. If you don't enjoy what you are doing, I beg you to find another job. Remember the Scottish proverb, be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead. Good message. Find something that you love doing and stick with it. Work with gusto. And he's not talking.

[Jordy]

What's going on here with World Labs?

[John]

Yeah, if we can pull this video up. So this is one of the latest persistent generative 3D world. So world Labs is Fei. Fei Li's project. She's hiring generative AI model optimization engineers, Bisoft Biz ops folks, research engineers, lots of different folks. But they have a new world model that we can play the video for. And see this. This is generated in real time. I think they upload a single image and then you can move around it. And all this is he. Like the music. It's pretty remarkable. Yeah. I mean, it does feel like a video game game.

[Jordy]

It's very pleasant.

[John]

I have a big question about how this productizes. Still. I was noodling on it months ago, or maybe it was a few weeks ago when Google came out with their model. Tyler, do you remember that?

[Tyler]

Yeah. I mean, so this is. Were you talking about like the video model that you can control around?

[John]

Yep. Yeah. This is the same thing, right?

[Tyler]

No, so this is different. So this is. You can actually go on. If you go to Marble worldlabs AI.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I'm on here right now. It's pretty.

[John]

You can play with it.

[Tyler]

Yes. So if you move around, it's basically. It's a Gaussian splat.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

So it looks really good. And then if you keep going, you'll start to notice the little artifacts and stuff. And then if you go far enough away from kind of the center spot where the world was originally generated, you'll notice it's like, you know, completely, like random, like. Okay, yes, this is a different. Completely different architecture than the.

[John]

Than the Google one. Yeah.

[Tyler]

Because that was basically just a video model.

[John]

Sure.

[Tyler]

But it would have the overlay of the keyboard and then when you would interact with the keyboard, it would overlay like the keystrokes onto the video and then it would continually be like rendering new frames.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

So this is just like this one. It generates the world, the Gaussian splat once, and you can just like move around in it. But it's not like a video that's constantly being rendered.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, it looks really weird once you leave. This is bizarre. Yeah. I remember Gaussian splats being popular like a year or two ago.

[Tyler]

Yes.

[John]

And then they sort of fell out of favor. It felt like they were very compute, intense just to generate a single one. And we never got to like the one click app that people can just download and then play with. There was no, like, game mechanic built around it. It was very much like tech preview mode.

[Tyler]

Yeah. So I. The big thing that came out with Gaussian splats, like, yeah. Probably a year ago, was that it became very easy to render your own. So, like I made one, I think it's on my website, but it's basically like my room that I made. And if you can shoot on raw, you basically take a ton of pictures of your room from all different. Or whatever it is from a bunch of different angles, then you can, like load those up. You load those up. You basically train a model to figure out where the images were taken.

[John]

Sure.

[Tyler]

And then from there you can train a model from that, which you can do on everything. Yeah, I trained it locally on my PC.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

So it's not that.

[John]

Do you remember, like, roughly how long the training run took on?

[Tyler]

So I have a 4090. It took like 45 minutes.

[John]

Well, that's not that bad.

[Tyler]

Yeah, not bad at all.

[John]

Yeah. So you imagine with some optimization, you could wind up. And if you're running it on server quality hardware, you could imagine an iPhone app where you take some pictures, upload it, and then it's like push notification in five minutes or 10 minutes.

[Tyler]

Yeah, for sure.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

But this is the first kind of thing, at least I've seen, where it's like totally like generated. Like, I mean, usually when you see a gasket and splat, it's of like a real physical location that someone's taken like drone shots of or something. But I mean, these are very clearly like AI generated in some way. Like Maybe they trained on video games or something like that. But yeah, usually when you see a Gaussian splat, it's of like a physical location.

[John]

Yeah. Can you think of any practical application for these? Everyone always says like, oh, you'll use it to train robots or robotic models or something like this is like synthetic data for, for training robotic systems. But I feel like there's a consumer app in here somewhere. Whether it's generating video game levels or something or using this as some sort of pipeline for creation of some video game. I keep wondering, and this is a question we'll have to talk to the meta team about tomorrow. I keep wondering about the getting close to a point where someone should be able to make a game as easy as they make a meme and post it on Instagram. But there isn't really a place where that lives right now. We've talked to a couple YC companies that are like, we will vibe code an app for you that you can put in the in straight to test flight. But I feel like they're like we're going to do a deep dive on Roblox at some point. But I feel like there's like something that's going to happen in like AI enabled Roblox world where you, you can, you can kind of like describe and be leveraging a lot of AI tools to describe a world.

[Jordy]

Blocks for AI will be Roblox maybe Definitely not asleep at the wheel here. You got to get some of their updated numbers I think they were pulling.

[John]

Yeah, Brandon sent me the data. We're going to do a whole deep dive on it. It's pretty, it's in the deck at.

[Jordy]

Some point, but probably set up an ultradome in Roblox that people can watch the show to get the next generation hooked on.

[John]

So Dextero has a post here that says steal a brain rot. Game has broken all time high concurrent player records. Roblox topped out at 23.4 million, while Fortnite reached 50 542,000. Are these similar products or.

[Jordy]

The platform wide record, I guess was August 23rd. Roblox hit a record of 47.4 million players simultaneously across the platform.

[John]

Wow, that is a ton. Roblox by itself has more monthly concurrent users than all of Steam, Xbox and PlayStation combined. And Jeremiah Johnson says even the most chronically online people have no idea how staggeringly, unfathomably big Roblox is right now. Is Roblox a public company?

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

Yeah, right. They got out. Are they ripping?

[Jordy]

They had a Hindenburg research.

[Rushing]

Whoa.

[John]

Hindenburg got blown out then, because Roblox is way up. It's a $94 billion company now, isn't there? I think there's a VC that David Senra did an episode about, or at least like Met, and kind of did a deep dive on, who invested very early and did very well. Fantastic. Do you have any more context?

[Tyler]

I mean, not about robots specifically, but I think broadly for gaming. I think there's kind of like, two ways to think about how we can have AI gaming. So one is like the Google kind of strategy of what they've been doing, where it's like the frames are literally, like, rendered real time, where everything is like, all the mechanics, all the, you know, the person, the setting, it's all completely, like, generated on the fly.

[John]

Yep.

[Tyler]

And then there's like, this kind of strategy, which is where, like, the world is generated, but you're still going to have, like, the mechanics of the game are still going to be, like, written normally.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

So, like, if you, if you play around with this, you'll notice, like, there's no mechanics at all. You just. You can move around, but there's no interaction or anything. I assume they're. They're working on, like, inventory.

[John]

Health bar.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Or even just like, you can't go through the wall.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

[Tyler]

So, yeah, I guess we'll see.

[John]

But yeah, I. I wonder. It feels like it'll be really slow. Like, I haven't even heard about a.

[Jordy]

Gabe says IKEA has a Roblox store that they pay employees a real wage to work at.

[John]

Oh, yeah. That's hilarious. So you can go shop in Roblox and you can buy stuff in the Metaverse.

[Jordy]

I wonder what kind of sales that drives.

[John]

Or if it's just 75% of Roblox's revenue or something we did just printing for ikea, it's probably. Roblox has got to be bigger than ikea. What's ikea's market cap? IKEA market cap? Let's see. Oh, it's. Wait, not. It's private. Interesting. Okay. Private company. Anyway.

[Jordy]

John, I don't know. IKEA's revenue, I think, is well beyond. Way, way beyond.

[John]

Oh, yeah.

[Jordy]

How big is it for 2024 was 45 billion euros.

[John]

Okay. But, you know, it's not SaaS margins here. There is a marginal cost to making a table and shipping it, but yeah.

[Jordy]

I mean, seems like fantastic business order of magnitude more.

[John]

Yeah. I do wonder. Like, it feels like Even the basic LLMs, like, we passed the Turing Test. We have the ability to just like talk to an NPC in a way that's more convincing than the pre scripted chats that go into most video games. And yet I still haven't at least heard like a successful story of just a game that broke through. That's really leveraging like GPT4 level technology. So interesting and even, and even the generated images, like just being able to use a older mid journey model to generate textures on the fly. There's this game called no Man's Sky. Are you familiar with this? Probably not. Are you familiar with no Man's Sky?

[Tyler]

I've never played it, but I.

[John]

It's a space exploration game. You move around from planet to planet and all the planets are procedurally generated. So they're generated somewhat randomly, but then they are like baked down into a database. And so there's a whole bunch of different variables that are randomly. Like different sliders for like the size of the creatures on this particular planet, the color of the plants on this planet. Yeah, exactly. And all of that's generated and then saved into the database. But it creates this like kind of unlimited canvas to explore. You could do that in a much more aggressive way with generative AI, but I haven't seen anyone break through. I think it just takes time to actually implement this stuff.

[Tyler]

Yeah, I mean that's kind of what like Genie 3 is. Yeah, I remembered what it was called. Yeah, Genie 3, but it's just so compute intensive. I mean they still are like. It's very much a research preview that they can't run because it's so expensive.

[John]

Yeah, you would just think that there would be a, like a. Like if you go two versions back, you get a model that can actually be baked down to the point where it can run on an Xbox or run on a PC and can generally.

[Jordy]

All right, gamers, we got some breaking news for you.

[John]

Give us the breaking news.

[Jordy]

TikTok's US business details are starting to emerge. One, the deadline for the ban has been pushed back and details are coming out. The Journal has some reporting.

[John]

What's the polymarket at? Let's pull that up.

[Jordy]

Poly Market is crashing, right? Yeah. So right now there is a 24% chance that a sale will be announced by September 30, 60% chance that it'll be announced by the end of the year. But the Journal is reporting that TikTok's US business may be controlled by a consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake and guess the last one, Larry Ellison personally. Andreessen Horowitz.

[John]

Andreessen Horowitz.

[Jordy]

Their framework the US And China are finalizing as talks shift into high gear.

[John]

Let's go.

[Jordy]

The arrangement discussed by US And Chinese negotiators in Madrid this week. Remember we talked to Bill Bishop yesterday about the meeting in Madrid would create a new U.S. entity to operate the app, with U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake in Chinese shareholders owning the rest, the people said. This new company would also have an American dominated board with one member designated by the US Government. Existing users and I wonder if Trump ends up with a with a state Uncle Sam. Existing users in the US Would be asked to shift to a new app, which Tick Tock has built and is testing. People familiar with the matter said TikTok engineers will recreate a set of content recommendation algorithms for the app using technology license from TikTok's parent ByteDance.

[John]

Okay iffy.

[Jordy]

US software giant Oracle, a longtime TikTok partner, would handle user data at its facilities in Texas. Both sides are still working out the final details of what the proposed deal and terms could change. Negotiations over TikTok came as both Washington and Beijing lay the groundwork for potential meeting between President Trump and Xi, with Beijing pushing for a Trump visit to China. That would be. That would be crazy, they said. Thank you for they want that meeting to happen somewhere where Trump can't fly.

[John]

The Alaska shot. That was wild.

[Jordy]

TikTok plan to comply with US law tech industry executive argue its algorithms must be created and maintained by an American engineering team insulated from Chinese influence beyond the financial terms. Deciding how to handle TikTok's algorithm has been a tricky part of the deal because as it is seen as arguably the most lucrative part of the company. We've got a deal on TikTok. I've reached a deal with China. I'm going to speak with President Xi on Friday to confirm. Trump set out of the White House Tuesday morning before leaving for a trip to the uk. These are very big companies that want to buy it. The framework of the arrangement came together anyways. Starting to just repeat itself here but this is big.

[John]

Well if they may if they want to manage their software development process in the new American TikTok they got to get on Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. I think if Andreessen's buying it it's got to be all Mark and Ben show whole the whole feed. 100% of TikTok content should be the.

[Jordy]

Mark and Ben show and Elon the attention he gets on a 16Z.

[John]

It's a media company that monetizes through venture Put the Andreessen content Put your thumb on the scale. Brent Eric Torenberg we want your thumb on the scale.

[Jordy]

Every other person give.

[John]

Every other person give a little bit of a snack in the new TikTok. But I want mostly Andreessen Horowitz content with a couple American Dynamism vibe reels, please. That will make America great again. This is the plan.

[Jordy]

Portfolio company launch video 1 Mark and.

[John]

Ben clip yes, just make the whole feed. Every single TikTok user. They'll love it. There won't be any backlash. I want the thumb on the scale. Truly that would get me to use TikTok. I enjoy the Mark and Ben show. I enjoy Andreessen's content. It'd be a lot of fun. Anyway, our buddies [e-mail] launched a new account on X that you can use to just tag like ask Grok. Grok is this true? You can tagassets and you can tag it in any thread that mentions multiple tickers and this bot will automatically run a back test on their performance against the S&P 500. So I went to a post that was about Tesla and Google and I asked how are they doing as a pair? And it immediately told me that I massively missed out. Because over the last 10 years those two stocks, the Tech Titans, as they're called here, had 10 year returns of 7,548%. Of course you'd have to deal with a max drawdown of 56%, but if you held, you did very well with a 70% annual return. And it gives you the link right there if you want to jump in to that. So if you're interested in investing, head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously.

[Jordy]

Very cool.

[John]

Ashwin, who is. We've featured him on the show before. Ashwin says he's opening a coffee shop in Southern California. Here's how he's going to win. He's gonna open at 5am he'll have baristas from New York. So it doesn't take eight minutes to make your cortado. I don't know what a cortado is. That must be some sort of coffee beverage. But I like the idea of opening early. We were running into this earlier. We left the gym and there's this, there's this cool new cafe on the corner that's making a big push into breakfast. They don't start serving breakfast till 9am and we were like, they didn't get the memo about the great lock in. Like you can't. How can you compete in the great breakfast wars?

[Jordy]

I've always thought it's funny. Have you, have you, have you tried to get a coffee early in Manhattan?

[John]

No.

[Jordy]

It's terrible.

[John]

It is. Ashwin is saying that it's the best in New York.

[Jordy]

I don't know. I've had a rough. I mean if you wake up at 5:30 in New York, good luck getting a coffee that's not, you know, something, something pre made at Whole Foods.

[John]

Gotta bring a. Bring up a case of the Mata podcast in a can.

[Jordy]

This post was funny. That Zoolander ification of Kyle Simone should be studied.

[John]

He's looking great. He's looking dice called a glow up. It's a glow up.

[Jordy]

I think this happens. I've seen this happen to other people that make billions of dollars. It tends to happen, but it's not always. And I love it.

[John]

He locked in. He's clearly hitting the gym. He's looking fantastic. I think this last image is from his guest spot on our show.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Which I love. So I'm glad that we're, we're helping people understand the Zoolander location.

[Jordy]

Buccal fat to fund the.

[John]

I think he's just working out. He's just getting in the gym.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

We'll have to get his routine. We got Alex Karp's workout routine. We'll have to get everyone's workout routine.

[Jordy]

Geiger Capital here S&P 500 all time high. Nasdaq all time high Gold. All time high. Bitcoin. All time high. Home prices. All time high. Time to cut rates.

[John]

Time to cut rates. Cheers. Geiger Capital was on a tear. Another post. The Atlanta Fed is now projecting that Q3 GDP will be 3.4%. A massive expansion. The US economy is running hot. I mean, GDP growth is good. I wouldn't really call that running. I mean it's running a little hot, but you don't want to necessarily want to pull that back if you're so hard.

[Jordy]

Now we're in a fast day off some of them. All data is is either real or fake. That's all I'll say.

[John]

I know what's driving the higher GDP growth for sure. It's businesses spending less time on sales tax compliance.

[Jordy]

That's true.

[John]

They got a numeral. NumeralHQ.com, they put their sales tax on autopilot. They're spending less than five minutes a month on sales tax compliance. And now they're growing their businesses. They're growing the US Economy it's all America empire continues. The most extraordinary Fed meeting has yet to be kicked off or has been yet has just kicked off. This is from cnn. Federal Reserve officials are convening Tuesday and Wednesday for a pivotal meeting under unprecedented circumstances. On Wednesday, at the conclusion of their two day policy meeting, central bankers are expected to announce their first interest rate cut since December to support America's slower slowing labor market with hopes that President Donald Trump's expensive tariffs might only have.

[Jordy]

A limited impact on the Fed decision in September. September on polymarket has 163 million of volume betting on it currently pricing that's total volume but they're currently pricing 95 95% chance of a 25 basis point decrease.

[John]

So yeah, I mean the market's at all time highs, gold's at all time highs, bitcoins at all time highs. But drop growth during the summer was at anemic says CNN business Employers added an average of about 29,000 jobs in three months ending in August, according to Labor Department data, slightly higher than July's average, which is the weakest three month pace since 2010. Outside of the pandemic, there are now more unemployed people seeking work than there are job openings. New applications for jobless benefits in the week ending September 6th rose to the highest level in early nearly four years. If the Fed cuts, maybe that will stimulate investment in business new, you know, take on extra debt that works its way through the economy. You wind up levering up something crazy.

[Jordy]

Martin Shkreli shorting opendoor oh, he is right.

[John]

Is this happening?

[Jordy]

Going into a rate cut is crazy.

[John]

That is bold.

[Jordy]

He said I shorted open today at $9. This is the first trade I've made in the stock. I will be doing diligence calls with former employees, customers, competitors and hopefully management too. I will send invites to the calls or anonymous transcripts as appropriate.

[John]

He is becoming a provocateur. Yeah, I mean he's taking up the mantle of so many short sellers before him. Won't be making a lot of friends but good luck to him. We already covered TikTok. You put this post in here in Brazil, an Australian pilot.

[Jordy]

Oh, you know why I put this down?

[John]

Break this down. Yes. Why did you put this in here? Well, tell us the story and then explain why you.

[Jordy]

Yes, this popped up in Brazil. An Australian pilot, Timothy James Clark, died in a plane crash with 180kg of cocaine on board. Drugs packaged with SpaceX branding.

[John]

Yes. Why SpaceX branding?

[Jordy]

I have no idea. That's why I just Thought it was kind of totally tech story, that it's really you.

[John]

You saw SpaceX and you were like, this is business news.

[Jordy]

Well, you know, I like following the.

[John]

You love the traffickers. You love.

[Jordy]

It puts me to sleep and I can't. When I'm trying to fall asleep, I can't listen to, I can't watch tech content and my brain's going to start working. I have to just follow the.

[John]

So the drugs were packaged with SpaceX branding. They were recovered from the wreckage of a sling aircraft.

[Jordy]

I just need to know the mindset of somebody who's like, packaging, making, making drugs look like their SpaceX branding. Thinking, okay, if the authorities find this, yeah, they're just going to be like, oh, this is, this is something from SpaceX. I don't need to dig in here at all.

[John]

Yeah. What were they thinking?

[Jordy]

This is, this doesn't look sketchy at all.

[John]

This is blatant trademark infringement. You did not license this logo. I wag my finger on this. I do not like this. And a very odd photo of the culprit, the Australian pilot, Timothy James Clark. He has a very odd photo with some scantily clad women, but dark story. Hope they prevent future drug trafficking. Since we do not endorse anything of.

[Jordy]

The sort, we do endorse any members of our audience trying to get. Trying to give tips on Nicolas Maduro.

[John]

Yes, yes, stop the narco trafficking. We also got to get on Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. We also endorse chess, which was on the OpenAI board earlier. Joe Lee has a story here. My friend was a chess grandmaster at 14. By 15, government officials invited him to dinners and he was giving talks to thousands. Every other type of nerd has gotten their pop culture recognition except researchers. We're lucky to live in an era where the weird nerd is celebrated. Chess GMs post their moves on Instagram and it's cool, not weird. Tech founders are household names. YouTubers get invited to the Met Gala. Poker players have TV shows. Gamers have become Twitch millionaires. Researchers get maybe two celebrity moments winning their state fair at 10 and a Nobel at 70. Unless you're Demis. Demis got a Nobel. What? How old is demis? He's not 70. Beyond that, the people working on the world's most important problems are invisible to everyone outside their niche. Demis, the founder of DeepMind and the Nobel Prize winner, is 49 years old. Wow. What a run. He's got another 50 years in front of him. Just researching. Easy.

[Jordy]

Hopefully he's on Xi's timeline. 150.

[John]

150. He could be. He could be, you know, 20 years out from a midlife crisis. He could be at 75. Does that mean how old is Xi Jinping? Because if he's Gonna Live to 150, he's 72. So in three years, he'll be half. He'll be at half life expectancy. We should expect to see him picking up some sports cars, maybe, you know, crashing. Crashing out as a. As a going through a midlife crisis at 75. If he's gonna live at 1:50, maybe.

[Jordy]

He decides, I don't want to be in the party anymore. I want to do something else.

[John]

I want to. I want to just be an entertainer. Maybe I want to be a musician. Maybe he turns into a DJ or.

[Jordy]

He wants to create a social network like Trump.

[John]

Maybe. Maybe beyond that. The people working on the most important problems are invisible to everyone outside their niche. Researchers are the final boss of nerd cult that we haven't figured out how to celebrate. Time to change that. Tyler, what's your job?

[Tyler]

What is he talking about?

[John]

She Jolie. Oh, yes, we're celebrating. We have figured out how to celebrate.

[Jordy]

We celebrated so hard. We had researchers emailing us saying, please take me off the menace list. I don't want the attention.

[John]

Yes, yes.

[Jordy]

Which we obliged.

[John]

And the traded cards. We need to continue to celebrate the final bosses of nerd culture, the researchers.

[Tyler]

I think they are being celebrated. And I feel like in sf, if you see, like, if you see Ilya.

[John]

Walking around, oh, yeah, you're taking paparazzi photos of him.

[Tyler]

People go to the OpenAI, that cafe that Johnny and Sam were at.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

They're like, oh, I'm at the OpenAI Cafe.

[John]

Give us an update on hype.tbpn.com how's that going?

[Jordy]

Well, the video completely flopped.

[John]

It did. Maybe the Vibreal Meta is off. Maybe something is tricky. It's very hard to draw attention to a URL in general, but if you're interested in participating in our little questionnaire, where are we in the AI hype cycle? You can go to hype tbpn.com and we have the full Gartner hype cycle there. Starts with the innovation trigger.

[Jordy]

We should screen share.

[John]

This goes to the peak of inflated expectations. Then, of course, the trough of disillusionment and finally the plateau of productivity. And Tyler has shared some of the results. We're still collecting results and I believe that the consensus estimate of where we are in the AI hyper cycle. They're putting their hands up there. I think they're. So the yellow dot is where Tyler is just past the peak of inflated expectations. You're cooling off, is that correct? Yeah, I mean, I justify what.

[Tyler]

So I don't know if I'm exactly there. I mean, it's very rough. I would say I'm near the peak. I don't know if I'm. If I'm on the left or right side of the curve. I don't know if we're going down yet.

[John]

Okay. What about you, Jordy? Where are you? You're not in the trough yet. It's hard to be in the trough. Given all the good news. The market's at an all time high. Products are shipping, like, products are getting better.

[Jordy]

I'm like effectively in where the yellow dot is.

[John]

Yeah. Just coming.

[Jordy]

That doesn't mean things aren't hyped. It's just people realize like, wait, it's just like better search, you know?

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

You don't have like there was.

[John]

I mean, if you were, if you were following the Eleazer Yuda Kowski crew, it was like, in next year there's not gonna be any jobs and you're gonna be fighting for your life in a Terminator scenario.

[Tyler]

Right.

[John]

And it's like if I'm not holding a gun, mowing down robots, I'm in the trough of disillusionment, because that's where my expectations were.

[Tyler]

Yeah. You can see the bulk is. Is basically where, where my dot is.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Fast speak. But you can see all the way on the left. There is one dot.

[John]

Yes. Did you see this?

[Tyler]

All the way on the left.

[John]

Did you see this? I don't know. Can we go full, full screen on this? Yes. So there's one person who says when it comes to AI hype, we haven't even started yet.

[Tyler]

Okay. So I made a tweet about this.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

And then friend of the show, Jacob Rinnamacki. Yes, that's him.

[John]

That's him.

[Tyler]

He's all the way in the left.

[John]

He's all the way.

[Tyler]

Rationale.

[Jordy]

He was basically, you know, technology trigger yet.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

We're at, you know, 1/10,000th of, you know, usage of the sun.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

We're not even close. I mean, we're like. We're not even close to what? I could be sure. So he's just mega AGI pilled. We're not even close to.

[John]

We're not even close to being until we have the Dyson sphere.

[Tyler]

I mean, how can we be going down if we don't even have a Dyson sphere?

[John]

That's a great take. I love Jacob. He's so much fun. I also like that there's someone on there, there's a few people that said, yeah, we are with the Hype cycle's done, I'm in the plateau of productivity. We went through it. They experienced the full. And I would love to know from those people, maybe we should have some of the show or ask them to write out a little bit more of their rationale for where they are. Maybe that's in the V2. We could have put your point and then write a little free text response on why you said that. Because for that person, what is their hype cycle, obviously, is the innovation trigger GPT1? Is it GPT3? Is it ChatGPT? The default assumption is probably innovation triggers ChatGPT, then peak of inflated transformer architecture. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, maybe you go back further.

[Tyler]

It's neural nets, sure. Like, GPTs are probably a little bit higher on the curve.

[John]

Yeah. So maybe, maybe the trough of disillusionment was like year five of OpenAI as a nonprofit, and you're like, yeah, okay, they did okay against dota, but they haven't really created anything. I was so excited about this. My expectations were inflated a year or two ago, and now I'm really disappointed. But now ChatGPT comes out, slope of enlightenment. Plateau of productivity is, hey, we're building in Codex. We got Claude code, We got different products coming together. We're actually delivering value. Then they're in the plateau of productivity. I don't know.

[Tyler]

Yeah, I think in that scenario, it's like early, less wrong posts. Those were the peak of inflated expectation. And then you see actual people killing.

[John]

Well, we'll have to ask the folks who responded. And if you want to play along, go to hype.tvpn.com and vote for where you are in the AI hype cycle. One thing that's under hyped customer relationship magic from Adeo. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. And we have our first guest of the show coming in to the TVP and ultradome from the Restream waiting room. Whoa, look at this. How you doing? Let's go, Ishan.

[Jordy]

We're hitting the gong for all you guys. What's the news, folks? What's the news?

[Rushing]

I'll bring the hardcore team out. We launched Rocks2GA.

[John]

Fantastic.

[Rushing]

We crossed 25 million Rocks revenue agents running in the global 2000. It's real, there's real ROI and we're coming. So we're ready for business and ready to go.

[Jordy]

Amazing.

[John]

Fantastic.

[Jordy]

Give us the update since the last time you were on.

[Rushing]

We came on February. We'll come back and launch. We've landed. Obviously we still have Ram, Cognition and some of the biggest AI companies that we've landed. The number one for Global 2000 in banking, construction. Also Saudi Aramco. We built a sales team which is amazing. They're now kind of going head to head with some of the big incumbents.

[John]

So how are you positioning the product? Shouldn't you be dogfooding? Why do you have salespeople?

[Rushing]

Exactly. So we ran up until recently without a sales team, but now gotta go for market share. So we have a small elite sales team who can go basically work with boards who are rolling out kind of rocks revenue agents after the coding agent. So every customer has rolled out coding agents over the last year. Now they're rolling out revenue agents and it's a game of market share and delivering roi. And we're the fastest to it.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

What's the competitive dynamic like? I don't know, a bunch of other companies in your guys kind of like category broadly. Meanwhile, because of of how quickly coding agents have got to market. I know I can name a bunch.

[John]

The big question is like seat based versus consumption based. This is the debate that a lot of people are having on the timeline these days. The SaaS apocalypse or something. How are you thinking about pricing as a durable advantage against incumbents?

[Rushing]

Absolutely. So our incumbents are obviously salesforce. I saw the CARP episode. We're Team Carp here. We focus on time to value. Like we deliver ROI in 90 days instead of nine months. We focus on pay for agent actions so the agents do work and customers only pay when the agents do work. It's not seed based pricing. And the last is we do the Palantir style full service deployed model.

[John]

Right.

[Rushing]

So you don't need consultants, professional services firms to implement the software. We do the whole lot. So competitive dynamics is boards want ROI in a quarter or two so that they can change the hiring plans for next year. And we're just trying to basically pedal downhill and deliver ROI fast. And it's only possible because of the team. We can outship the market and have built product that works. And now is the time.

[Jordy]

How big is the team today?

[John]

I was about to ask.

[Rushing]

Yeah. So kind of obviously competing with a multi thousand employee organization. So core applied AI is about 25 and kind of field plus sales is about 10 more. So about 35 people.

[John]

Wow, that's a crazy balance. I like that. That's great.

[Rushing]

Yeah, engineering as much as possible.

[John]

Yeah. And then what's the feedback cycle like from the sales folks that you have that are actually using the product? I feel like are you hiring folks from product management into sales roles or vice versa? Or are there some product management skills that are uniquely useful?

[Rushing]

A great question. And one of our sales leaders is actually our pseudo PM. So we have no PMs, no product managers, no project managers. We have engineers who ship and then we have salespeople who ship, ship revenue. So the feedback cycle is once we land customers, we are pretty much embedded with these customers. We have field engineers or fiber deployed engineers. They feed it back to all engineers. And our engineers, everybody here, they're all founders, they're customer facing and they take all that signal and we try to ship in days. So we ship multiple times a day. We have major release every week. And that's kind of been the flywheel.

[Jordy]

What is the typical for deployed engineer process look like for your guys's product? I imagine it's not quite as complex as some of the build outs that Palantir is doing for different companies. Or is it down to like you need to land an engineer at a company for or a small team for a couple weeks, a week, a few days. What does that actually look like?

[Rushing]

Absolutely. So we try to do ROI. 90 days with the first three weeks is essentially set up. So we don't do any core engineering out in the field. So that's all done in San Francisco. What our four department engineers do is deeply understand the domain. So the number one global 2000 in the construction vertical is different than healthcare is different than, than kind of the military. So we try to really understand the domain, how do they do customer acquisition and success, encode that into our agents and then we actually build training content to reskill the whole org. Right. So our core mission, if you remember, is to build agents that makes the best better and then reskill the rest to give them a path to be kind of AI native. So that's kind of what our field is doing. So supercharging and then reskilling.

[John]

Well, I feel like the opportunity cost of having everyone on your team stand behind you for this interview is insane. We're going to hit the gong and let you get back to the important work that you do. But thank you so much for coming on TVPN today.

[Rushing]

Thanks for having us on and thanks, Rushing. We're all huge fans. Thank you.

[Jordy]

Congrats on all the progress, guys.

[John]

Super impressive.

[Jordy]

Cheers.

[John]

Bye. Let's go to this post on the timeline from Jerry Howell quoting the Internet. Hippo. This screenshot looks aged. Have you seen this screenshot? It looks like it's. It looks like it's screenshotted multiple times. It has like lore to it. It's vintage the Internet. Hippo says I stepped away from my computer for a moment. When I returned, it was building something. I did not ask it to do this. We're not ready for what's coming. Tyler, do you have any idea what this image is in reference to?

[Tyler]

I don't know.

[John]

You've never seen that? Wow. Jordy, do you know what that's a screensaver.

[Jordy]

Right?

[John]

Do you know like from what machine or what era?

[Jordy]

Not a Mac, no.

[John]

I believe it's like a Windows 95 screensaver. Maybe Windows.

[Jordy]

I just remember this like from like Computer Lab. You remember school would have classes. Imagine for sure that was underrated to just think that.

[John]

Oh yeah.

[Jordy]

There I learned to type called for us it was Computer Lab.

[John]

Yeah. No, no, you learn how to type on the computer. You know, you get your. Your, your words per minute up. Anyway, how did you sleep last night?

[Jordy]

I actually. I put up the best.

[John]

Rough night? You got me beat. I got like a 54 is a rough night. But if you want to get. Whoa. 99. Let's go. Play some sound effects for yourself. Go to 8sleep.com. Get a pod 5. Five year warranty, 38 risk free trial free returns, free shipping.

[Jordy]

You know what I did yesterday?

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

I reduced my caffeine intake by about 120 milligrams.

[John]

Okay, that's good. Dialing it back.

[Jordy]

I might have done something.

[John]

Dialing it back. That's good. Well, we have Tony from Ingest joining the stream. He's in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring him in. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

[Jordy]

Welcome.

[Tony]

Hey, thank you so much for having me. How's it going?

[John]

It's going great. Kick us off with just a brief introduction on yourself and then give us the news.

[Tony]

Cool. Yeah. I'm Tony, one of the founders and CEO of ingest.com here just to talk about our series A without submitter. We closed the 21 mil round with them.

[John]

Congrats. Thanks. Thanks.

[Tony]

Yeah, they're great people. Jamin's a really, really smart guy. And we also had the Follow on. And the continued investment from Andreessen, notable. And NF4, which is. Which is great. So, yeah, fun times, you know.

[John]

Love it. Jordy, you want to hit that?

[Jordy]

Let's talk about. I'll wait till the end.

[John]

Okay. We'll hit the gun.

[Jordy]

Let's talk about what the company does. What are you guys up to? Yeah, yeah.

[Tony]

So we were an async execution platform. Dribble execution. We allow you to build workflows as step functions, make it really, really easy so that you abstract all of the infrastructure, essentially write a couple of different things like step run, step run, step run. We make sure they execute durably. You can write any code in those step functions. And a lot of people use this for AI and AI agents because turns out that that's a really big thing, as you've heard all the time.

[John]

Yeah. How did you pick the level of abstraction that you're operating at? There's so many other, like there's companies that they just do the inference or they just do fine tuning or they go at an even higher level and they sell a complete SaaS solution with an agent wrapped in it. You're in this kind of in between zone. How'd you land there? Do you see yourself moving up or down the stack? It feels like such a flexible time right now in the market.

[Tony]

Yeah, super flexible. Super flexible. Maybe I'll talk about the origin stories and then see. So I used to run engineering for a healthcare company and healthcare is like, dude, healthcare is so hard. I would not recommend it. Really nice to help people. But the engineering is crazy super workflow driven and it would take months to build out what should take days when a patient does this, if they don't do something in a certain amount of time. X, Y and Z. And so those are workflows. So we initially built the SDK to make it really easy for your product engineer that might be full stack to build these workflows without mucking around with infrastructure. So you don't want to have to create workers, you don't have to create queues, you don't want to terraform new things on Kafka. You just want to write some code, deploy it in your existing code base and have it work basically in a minute. And that like, that level of abstraction is really key because I think if everyone has access to the same models and if everyone has access to the same sort of compute, what really matters now is how fast you can iterate on your product, how fast you can actually build the experiences on top of Those models. And it turns out that yeah, you can build agents for other people, but this particular layer that executes the AI that runs the workflows is really tough and you have to have it done right in order to iterate fast. And so it's sort of this interesting sort of layer on top of the infrastructure that allows people to build and execute. So that was kind of always the plan. I think like one of the things that we talked about is just infrastructureless infrastructure so that you can just write code, deploy it and have it work. Which is sort of, I think like a modern version of what Terraform should be.

[Jordy]

What categories of agents are you most bullish on today and over the next year we just. Yeah, yeah, because, because you know, again on the consumer agent side felt like deep research was the first killer breakout killer app, consumer agent. Before that. Everyone was excited about agents, but weren't necessarily daily, even weekly active users of a lot of them.

[Tony]

Yeah, it's interesting. And you were just talking about with it, with it with the person number four, you know, like the whole stuff. Right, right forward deployed stuff and you see a lot of like support I think like for the day to day things that everyone uses internally. You know, like it's kind of the, the stuff that you're probably using day to day. Claude Codex, that sort of stuff is like killer. You know, I use it for tests. It doesn't do distributed systems well enough for us right now. Yeah, but is pretty, is pretty good. And then like in the future, you know, I think it's really interesting to see people craft experiences inside their own products. You know, like Decagon and whatnot have done that for support for some time, which is super interesting. And I'm really, really curious where we go with context engineering and how people can build their own custom agents which are essentially workflows. So I like day to day for sure, the average, the average ones that people are using. But you're like, you take Nano Banana, you throw that in a workflow and you have this really sick agent experience. On top of that is like, it's pretty good. The world is changing pretty fast and it feels like everything will end up becoming this, which is craziness.

[John]

How does, how's SoundCloud using this? I think that's an interesting case study you have there. I'd love to understand more about how a company that just does. You know, I think of it as like a music player library of music. Like, like what's their strategy?

[Tony]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So music is tough. It turns out that every industry has a lot of depth that you wouldn't realize when you go into it. Everything from making sure that there's no, I guess piracy, making sure that there's no terrorism, making sure that if people want to produce their albums and send it out to Spotify, itunes, stand time music distribution is also kind of insane. It requires a lot of workflows too. So there's a lot of stuff that you have to do to operationalize music either distribution, production, content. And essentially they were trying to hack together this for nine months. Their CTO at the time found us somehow and he had a lot of stuff up and running within a week. And their time to production was like insane from like nine months to one week. They ended up pushing us out to production relatively quickly within the first few months. And I think they were live in maybe like the first six weeks. So they use this for a ton of their stuff. I think they just shipped. The ability to create vinyls for your.

[John]

Own music that you upload to Spotify. Like physical vinyls.

[Tony]

Like physical vinyls.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jordy]

I'm gonna hit the gong for physical vinyls.

[John]

Yeah, we need.

[Jordy]

We've been looking to make vinyl.

[John]

We want to press the show onto vinyl.

[Jordy]

Of course, we've had people reach out and complain that they want to listen to the show every day, but they only listen to audio.

[John]

They've listened to. Listened to the whole catalog, but they want to list it at the highest possible fidelity. Do you remember, do you remember there.

[Tony]

Was that Stripe thing? They made that physical magazine back in the day.

[John]

I don't know if you'd actually like.

[Jordy]

With paper.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

It was like physical magazines. This is from Stripe, the payments company. Wow. I know. I somehow missed this. I know Stripe, they are print maxis. I gotta get a copy of that. That probably trades at a premium. Probably in the museum. It should be in the business hall of fame. The business museum, yeah. That's fantastic. Well, we don't want to keep you too much longer. Thank you so much for hopping on this show. Congrats on the round.

[Jordy]

We'll see you at the Bee.

[John]

Say hello to all the folks in Altimeter. We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

Cheers.

[John]

Take care. Bye. Let me tell you about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising Only Adquick combines technology ad of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Emmett Shear has a post. The way that ChatGPT and Claude et cetera are all trying to be the portal for the entire Internet. Reminds me a good deal of the first Internet boom in Yahoo. I think the ultimate winners will wind up specialized just like last time. Shopping, entertainment, search. So he's thinking Amazon, Netflix, Google and we'll have similar breakouts. It's interesting. I don't know that I completely like in this comment.

[Jordy]

Kind of puts him in the truth zone. To be fair. Google, Dwayne says control alt Dwayne says to be fair, Google did become the portal for the entire Internet. Yahoo tried but Google executed better. ChatGPT has already won for the moment. But whether they're the next Google or Yahoo of AI remains to be seen. They're doing a lot of things right.

[John]

Yeah. I wonder how much consumer AI or.

[Jordy]

Like Emmett fires back just to close it out. Google's not a YouTube Yahoo style portal. They are still way behind on shopping versus specialists. For example, they are search first and foremost and then also have extended into portfolio of adjacencies. It's not one interface to everything.

[John]

Yeah, I don't know. I do wonder how the consumer AI apps will fragment. We're obviously going to talk to the metafolks about personalized super intelligence. And we saw this chart that went up just recently about how people actually use ChatGPT and there are some pretty clear buckets. Like there are different people using different modes of chatgpt from practical guidance, tutoring, teaching, seeking information was 21% of searches, writing was 28%, multimedia, creating an image that was 6%. And so you could imagine some of those getting peeled off and kind of becoming their own apps that are highly specialized. I tend to believe in aggregation. And like Ben Thompson has this point about Google, there was a moment when everyone was saying Google's cooked because of vertical search. So there's going to be Yelp for restaurants, the Google of restaurants. They will do it better than Google can. Yeah, There will be travel sites, there will be mapping sites, there will be different sites for searching specific things that people will remember to go to. And Google really did change their entire model. They adapted, they improvised, they overcame. And well, I think the question here.

[Jordy]

Vertical search, the question, I mean you have to kind of ask yourself how bullish you are on agents. Right? Because historically you would search something in Google and then you'd go to a standalone, maybe you'd go to a website or an application. Yet there's a lot of websites and applications that I only maybe use once in my life, once a year. Do I actually want it? Do I do. I oftentimes I'd prefer to have an agent, for example, like, book me a hotel. Right. These are classic examples. And so I think that. I think the paradigm is shifting. But without further ado, we have Tomer, our next guest, Gusto, coming in from.

[John]

The Restream waiting room. Welcome, Tomer. How are you doing? We're great. Thanks so much for hopping in. Great to see you. I'm such a huge fan because I went through YC in 2012. I believe you were in the 2013 batch, correct?

[Tomer]

We were in winter 2012. Yeah.

[John]

A winter. So is that. I think winter at that point was after summer or maybe just before.

[Jordy]

It's usually after summer.

[John]

Yeah. It usually does come after summer. But I remember that I was running. The first payroll we ran for our YC company was just literally a $5,000 wire, like, from one account to the next, and we were like, yeah, everyone needs to figure out what to do with the taxes. And then we got on Gusto, which was then, I believe, Zen Payroll, right?

[Tomer]

That's right.

[John]

And it solved a ton of stuff, and it was an amazing experience. And, yeah, Jordy and I have been using Gusto for a long time, since ever since.

[Jordy]

Big launch today.

[John]

Yeah. Take us through it.

[Tomer]

Thank you. Yeah.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tomer]

Well, very, very excited to be here. I'm also a big fan of yours, in fact.

[John]

No way.

[Jordy]

There we go.

[John]

There we go. Thank you. That's fantastic. And sorry, I need to stop you for a second before we get into live. Where are you? The office behind you is teaming. Is this just your hd?

[Jordy]

This is the same place that Josh was calling in from.

[John]

It's remarkable.

[Tomer]

Thanks. Yeah, we're in Pier 70 in San Francisco. We actually have our office here, right.

[Jordy]

Next to the yc.

[Tomer]

Right in front of yc. Exactly. And today, actually, we have this showcase conference. We're doing it for the first time live, and it's really, really cool because you have hundreds of small businesses here, accountants, who are all coming in, and we're unveiling a bunch of new products to them. So, you know, we have showcases twice a year. We've been doing it for a while. It's kind of our big, big two product moments of the year, telling the world about all the new stuff you can do with Gusto. We started with payroll, expanded to benefit. We announced a couple of weeks ago about the guideline acquisition, pending approval, and, you know, all the different things that we've been doing over the year time, tracking HR and, you know, tax credits compliance and other things. But yeah. Today we're launching a bunch of really, really important functionality around cash flow. So you know, when I speak with small businesses often what I hear is that, you know, in the context of gusto is that the hardest thing where they get frustrated the most and feel like most anxious and kind of unhappy is when they can't make payroll for their employees. They don't have enough money in their bank account. Right. And when you dig into it and learn why and what's going on. Exactly. It's not that you don't make enough money as a business. The business is growing, they're doing really well, they're doing better than ever. So how can that be right? And it's all about cash flow. It's all about this tricky thing of like when does money come in and when money goes out. So often, you know, think about, I talk with a customer who's like, you know, they do like equipment for, you know, different, you know, conferences and things like that. Right. Like you know, lighting and, and AV equipment and stuff like that. So guess what? They need to buy the equipment and buy the stuff before the event. And they get paid 30 to 60 days after the event. Right. So you have all this money going out, you have payroll going out, all these expenses going out when you didn't get paid yet. And this is like not a random like one off story. Like this happens all the freaking time for small businesses, you know, and, and that's true like for consultants that work before get paid and many other type of businesses. So that's what this showcase is about. I'm really happy to share more about like you know, this, the features, functionalities.

[Jordy]

I, we're one of the few shows on earth that actually want to understand.

[John]

I'm super interested, I guess.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we run businesses our whole life. I've been in that position, you know, early on with my first business which is like oh like totally. It's like every two weeks it's like, you know, the public companies, they got the quarterly reporting maybe, maybe it's going to switch every six months soon. But with a, with a, with a small business, you know, it's like every, every couple weeks it's like that.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Crazy.

[John]

So I mean where, where I want to start is like this sounds like you're going to be lending money or bridging on a short term basis with small businesses who are on the platform. Where does the money come from? I feel like when we usually hear about a fintech company or business to business company starting to offer some sort of Credit, like product. We usually hear, oh, well, they have a facility on the other side. They raised money for this. They're not maybe funding it off their balance sheet. Like structurally, how does the money flow to the actual customer?

[Tomer]

Yeah, exactly. That's a really, really great question. So listen, there's a few kind of products here that come together in order to get people to have better cash flow so they're not late for their payroll. One is just a set of functionalities about making faster payroll.

[John]

Oh, sure.

[Tomer]

If you remember, often people need to run like the historical standard is four days.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tomer]

So you run on Tuesday for people to get paid on Friday. Well, that's four days of cash that could be in your bank account. And that makes a really big difference because payroll is often the biggest expensive customers that small businesses have. So we're launching next day payroll, we're launching same day payroll, and we're also launching instant payroll. So these are three new products all about making sure you have enough money to bank on the last moment. So that's.

[Jordy]

How do you actually. How do you actually do that? Because payroll companies forever have love. Probably love to say, like, people ask, can you make it instant? And they say it's not possible.

[John]

Yeah, we've heard like, oh, it's the ACH system. It's the government regulation. What's the unlock?

[Tomer]

Exactly. Okay. So for these set of products, it's all about actually our relationship with the bank. So, you know, the nice thing about being one said, we're a tech company, we're still a startup. We look at ourselves as a startup, but on the other side, we've been around for 12, 13 years now. Over 400,000 small businesses use gusto every day. And, you know, I knew you'd do that. I love it. I want a gong too, today. Tell me when the gong is coming. But yeah, over 400,000 small businesses use our product every day. And you know, with that scale, we now have the ability to work with each individual bank and kind of create partnerships. So in the end of the day, we're actually not taking credit risk on it. And it just uses the, you know, the kind of some of the newer rails that banks have. I can't go into all the specifics. It's not like us. But we didn't need to raise any money for this.

[John]

But it's a technological solution which is exactly what you want. You don't want just like, oh, wow, now we have this great massive liability that's growing on the balance sheet forever. No, that's not happening.

[Tomer]

There is one thing, though. There is one thing, though, which is payroll bridge. So payroll bridge is a different product, and that's like, not about making payroll faster, but that's like, even if you still don't have the money in your bank account, even on payday, and you still need somebody to finance that payroll, we can come in and help, or.

[John]

Maybe even just a piece of it, because it's totally possible that I have $100,000 in payroll going out, but I'm just 10k short, and I don't want to hold up everyone, and so I could maybe take a smaller amount.

[Tomer]

Exactly. Yeah. So that happens more often than you would think. You know, again, it's that kind of cash coming in, cash going out. So we partnered with a company called Paraffin as an embedded partner who's helping us with the loans here. So what happens here is, again, as a customer, you come in to run payroll. Let's say it's a Friday. You need to pay instant payroll on Friday. And then, oh, Gosh, I'm missing 10K. I'm missing $20,000, $50,000, whatever that is. You know, with our partnership with Paraffin, we take a look at all of your history and we figure out like, hey, can we help you? Kind of basically make that payroll on us, and then we're going to pay a spot later on. So that's kind of that piece. And I think, you know, honestly, it's the biggest, biggest, biggest pain point in the world of payroll. It's funny, like, we've been doing it for 12 years. You would think, like, oh, you've already innovated in everything around payroll. There's nothing else coming in. That's not true. Even 12 years later, there's more.

[Jordy]

SaaS is forever basic payroll stuff.

[Tomer]

We're also doing it on the international payments, by the way. That's another fast payroll, faster international contract store payments using stablecoin as again, technology that is available now was not available when we started.

[Jordy]

What percentage of the businesses on Gusto do you think are. I'm sure you looked at the data, right? There would have been opportunities to launch this feature. You could have launched this a while ago. I'm sure you guys wanted to wait until there was regulatory clarity on stablecoins, but was this something that customers were asking for? Because it's one of those things that it's helpful. I mean, it's helpful to both sides. Like the freelancer benefits, because they're like, okay, when the person hit pay, I got paid. I don't have to wait for it ends up being more than four days. It can be longer than that. And the companies too, historically would just be using these random, either dedicated and international payroll platforms or special freelancer payments platforms, things like that.

[Tomer]

Yeah, so totally. I think the past couple of years, again, there's new technology so we can use now. And that's both on the banking side domestically as well as on the stablecoin side. That's why we were able to do it today. It takes time until you, you know, we work with these partners and often we're the biggest kind of partner with. They work with. And the reason is, you know, you may have a bunch of startups, technology, fintech companies that are using stablecoin payments or using, you know, kind of instant payments through banks, but they usually have small amounts. Payroll is huge amounts. Right. Tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars per transaction. So, you know, you really. A lot of these kind of protocols, fintech protocols, when they come out, they have like a maximum limit. So we need to kind of work with the providers and get there. And then. Yeah, you're right about the compliance side of it. Like, you know, we work really, really closely to figure out that, you know, one of the things that we do is, is, you know, I think that was a little buzzword before, you know, I came in and like, took away all the buzzwords, but compliance, compliance technology, you know, so there's financial technology, fintech, compliance technology. And in that world, you know, that's kind of what we do every single day. We think about how do we take all the compliance worries and anxiety that small businesses have that they don't want IRS knocking on their doors and then help them, you know, kind of figure out all the compliance for them. There's a couple more features that I want to talk about. So one is just gusto money. It's a new platform, it's a new area for us. You know, when you think about gusto, you always think about people, right? Pay your people onboard, your people, benefits, all that stuff. Gusto money is us entering and expanding into a new world. So that's the world. Just, just really focus on cash flow. So, you know, one of the things when we talk with customers is like, hey, you know, I get paid so much later wouldn't be like, can you help me get paid faster? Or, you know, when I pay my bills, like, oh, gosh, that takes, you know, that, you know, they need to be paid immediately. Can you delay that payment for me? And that's why we brought in invoice payments as well as like bill pay into gastro. And we're going to keep investing in that area because it's all connected. You know, payroll is your largest expenses, but you have a bunch of other expenses in the business. So if you bring it all together to one platform, I think that we can really, really help people with that big anxiety around not having enough money to run payroll and kind of to run their business.

[John]

Does that change? Are a lot of these different products feel like they might have different underlying economics? Do you think that the structure of the economic model of Gusto is going to change over the next few years? Or is this sort of like purely additive? How are you going to think about actually underwriting the core business? I don't know what your plans are for the future, but it does feel like some of these are exchange fees or interest rate based or volume based. Others might be seat based. There's a variety of different financial models or economic models. Is any of that changing the overall structure of where you think the business will be driving value in a few years?

[Tomer]

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I think for us, you know, I would say, number one, we're really, really focusing on understanding what are the biggest pain points for business, for small businesses and figure out how we can help them. Now sometimes it means, you know, business models for different products are different and we're okay with that. However, if you still zoom out at Gusto and you look at Gusto as a product and where we're going by far, like really our majority of what we do is in terms of business model is software, Software as a service, you know, pay per employee, pay for services, very high margins. This is not like a, like a fintech sort of, you know, play. And as you notice, we're using a lot of partners on the embedded side when we do things. And you know, that, that are those type of kind of fintech businesses and we really obsess and focus on the user experience to make sure that for the customer, they don't feel like they're being moved from one, you know, one system to another. It's all behind the scenes, solely API. So for you it's just one service, it's Gusto. But you know, that's kind of the core of what we do. We're really, really focused and are really strong on the user experience side for small businesses.

[John]

That's great.

[Jordy]

What's the most exciting thing in tech to you, outside of payroll, in technology at all?

[Tomer]

Let's see. You know, I Know, and it's okay.

[Jordy]

To say that your eyes never stray and that. Payroll compliance. Compliance. Payroll compliance.

[Tomer]

I love compliance. Listen, I love compliance every single day. That's what I'm living and breathing and, you know, but jokes aside, like, the truth is that when you talk with customers, this is not a cerebral sort of, like, analytical kind of question and, like, you know, world for them. Like, for them, it's missing Friday night with their kids because of this sort of stuff. Right? For them, it's like, you know, the pain of, you know, the embarrassment of, like, needing to call every single employee, telling them they got. They can't make payroll on time, and they're on the employee on the other side sometimes, you know, you know, needing to manage all that, what that means to your family. So, you know, for me, it's. You know, I love technology. I live and breathe technology every day. I love your show. That always keeps me up to date what's going on in the world of tech. But, you know, I think the biggest connection for me and the thing that gets me going is that customer pain point and see what software can do to help them.

[John]

Yeah, that's great. Fantastic.

[Jordy]

Amazing.

[Andre]

Well, hey, I want you guys to.

[Tomer]

Come in here next time, though, by the way. We have. We have the. Again, the showcase.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tomer]

Here. It will be really cool in six months when we do the next one. It'll be cool to have, like, a live. Live performance here from Gusto.

[John]

How many people are there?

[Jordy]

How many people?

[John]

Let's ring the gong for the total attendees. How many?

[Tomer]

I think there's around. Around 5. Hundreds of small businesses. All right.

[John]

We got small businesses to show up to payroll.

[Jordy]

Amazing.

[John]

You love it.

[Jordy]

Great to see you.

[John]

Congratulations. Thanks so much for hopping on the show. We'll talk to you sooner. Have a good one.

[Jordy]

Great to see you.

[John]

Bye.

[Jordy]

No one loves software for small businesses more than me.

[John]

I don't think so.

[Jordy]

I don't think so.

[John]

Don't go.

[Jordy]

Daniel Tenrero says the core political divide today is pickleball Americans vs. Letterboxd Americans.

[John]

I would. I'm in neither camp. I don't really participate in either, but I would put myself in the letterboxd American camp. Tyler over there is a pickleball American, right?

[Tyler]

I guess. But I'm also. I would say I'm more of, like, a cinephile than a pickleball player.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

But I've never used letterbox.

[John]

You've never used letterbox?

[Tyler]

It's just like. It's like Goodreads for movies.

[John]

Yeah. It's Goodreads for movies. I feel like there's a underrated that.

[Jordy]

Tiny, snap this up.

[John]

Oh, Tiny owns it.

[Jordy]

They bought a 10 cent steak.

[John]

Whoa, I had no idea. That's fascinating. Well, the Antichrist lecture is in full swing up in San Francisco. The private church.

[Jordy]

Did they find the guy yet?

[John]

Did they find him? The hunt for the Antichrist continues and it has spawned a ton of fun posts on the timeline. Pablo Peniche says Peter Thiel talked about this at the Antichrist lecture. No, he didn't. Did you attend the lecture? No. Did you? No. People memeing Daniel growing Daniel says Peter Thiel announced the name of the Antichrist but I'm not telling and people are having a lot of fun. Will Manitis said that it's crazy.

[Jordy]

I saw some of the protesters showed up like disguised as Satan.

[John]

I needed to put some of the protesters because one of the protesters said Peter Thiel's latest acquisition, the US government. If you know anything about pt, he doesn't buy whole companies. He believes in founder led firms. He doesn't do private equity deals. So a little bit of a misunderstanding of the financial markets there. Protester. Anyway, Tyler, are you bummed that you're missing out on the Antichrist Lecture series?

[Tyler]

I was just gonna say the protesters are like pretty hilarious. Some of the signs I sent them in the.

[John]

So the protesters. It's easy to get riled up by the images of the protesters and see the protesters as like this, like, oh, they're really over the top. They must really be aggressive. But for the most part, like I've seen, there were protesters at just some random FAI conference I spoke at. I actually interviewed Alex Wang there who we're talking to tomorrow. Tune in. And this is just like foundation for American Innovation, like a very vanilla tech conference.

[Jordy]

And also being able to protest things is important.

[John]

Yeah. And so the protester was outside with a funny sign, but people were taking photos of each other. Like it was very, very funn friendly. When I first heard like, oh, we're being protested, I was like, oh, what does this mean? Is this like serious? Are they going to be really.

[Jordy]

I was going to be protesting outside of Gusto if they didn't roll out instant payroll.

[John]

For sure. For sure. Anyway, we have our next guest in the restream waiting room. We have Andre from Console. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

[Andre]

Hey guys. Doing good. How are you?

[John]

Thanks so much for joining. Kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself. What you do, what the announcement is, is sure.

[Andre]

Thank you for Having me. Big fans here, actually, the whole team. I don't know if you can see them kind of watching.

[Jordy]

Hey, turn around, guys, we can see you. There's a little bit of a time delay.

[John]

Hello?

[Andre]

There's some delay maybe. Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, today we're here to kind of, you know, talking about a Series A announcement. We just.

[Jordy]

There they are, a little delayed.

[John]

What you got?

[Andre]

We just raised our Series A DM UST Global and Thrive Capital.

[John]

How much? How much you raised?

[Andre]

$23 million.

[Tyler]

There you go.

[Jordy]

There you go.

[John]

Congratulations.

[Jordy]

All right, all right. What do you do?

[John]

What do you do?

[Jordy]

What do you do? I gotta know. You gotta tell us.

[Andre]

I'm not gonna tell you.

[John]

Stop burying the lead. Stop burying the lead. Tell us what you do.

[Andre]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we automate IT support using AI agents that understand how your organization works.

[John]

Fantastic.

[Andre]

I know.

[Jordy]

We're fired.

[Andre]

We're not just a chatbot under the hood. We're basically plugged into all your systems, your apps, your devices. We understand how everything's laid out. So we know. This is John, this is title department manager. The direct reports, the apps. He has access to the permissions in those apps. All this data is flowing into Consul from all these different systems. And then we let you build company policy and processes above that layer in natural language. So we call these things Playbooks. But essentially you're able to say, you know, when someone needs a password reset, first ask them this question, then run this action and then do this thing. So that's not converted to code, it's just natural language. Instructions, uploads. The agent just handles that directly in Slack.

[John]

How modern is the wheelhouse customer for you? Because when I started my first company in 2012, we were late enough in the rollout of SaaS that we had no on premise servers whatsoever. We had no local network, we just had Google cloud apps and Gmail accounts. And so everything was managed in various dashboards. And it was an immense hassle to deprovision and provision. But there is a whole other world of companies that have much more complex IT policies. Where are you seeing the most value? What does the wheelhouse customer look like?

[Andre]

Yeah, so we've started with the kind of more like modern tech companies to get started. So a lot of our customers. Ramp's actually one of our customers. There you go. You know, shout out to them. They're a great customer. Scalia, Flock Safety, webflow. These are all customers that are. They're kind of like internally looking to. They're starting to think about what does it look like. What does it look like in the age of AI, right? And I think kind of what happened was we got it right in the 70s, the 80s, right, where computers started being a thing. And, you know, it was really this department that was coming in and showing people like, look, get off your typewriters. Here's how computers work here, so you can be more efficient. And they were like, kind of optimizing business process. And somewhere along the way, kind of like you mentioned, right, we started adding too many apps and too many. There are too many things that were being kind of managed, right. And, you know, it kind of lost focus from being this kind of driver of innovation in the organization to just like stuck in. You know, they're like on this ticket treadmill, right? You come in, you've got 10 tickets, you log out, you've got 15. So you're kind of just like always just handling tickets. And so our kind of mission here is, you know, how do we take it back to where it was, where, you know, take. Take off the support load from them, handle of those tickets for them using AI that again, works the way they do, and then get them back to working with other teams and finding ways to optimize their process, essentially.

[John]

How does security fit into all this? I feel like the IT professional is very much the unsung hero, the enemy of the fishermen. The phishing scams. I mean, every place I've worked that's like professional or had a professional email, you get these phishing scams. And I feel like Sherlock Holmes when I clock it and send it to the IT guy, hey, we're getting a phishing scam. And he's like, I set that up. I sent that to you. I was testing you. It was a test. But, yeah, talk to me about security and how that fits in. It feels like I really don't want my IT professional to be able to be prompt, injected. There needs to be a human in the loop still. Maybe, but maybe, you know, something else.

[Andre]

Yeah. So, yeah, I guess you hit on a couple of things, so. But first, we obviously spent a lot of time internally on security, making sure things work really well. This is my second company. First company, we were doing application security company. We're selling to U.S. government Fortune 100. So very familiar with building secure software. That's the first thing I think next we think about, well, how do we actually give the LLM and the AI agent control over the process and the order that things get done? And this ability to flex with the user and work with the user. But then build more deterministic processes for things like API calls and actually the things that are more sensitive, our sensitive actions are actually quite locked down. And you have the ability to get approvals on them, do MFA checks, honestly, just lock them down. Some companies say, hey, we don't want to reset any passwords with console. Right. Like we just don't have to. Right. So you can kind of adopt it as you're comfortable. And then lastly, yeah, if you don't support, you know, let's say password resets, your company, you decide that's too risky. We will loop in a human when those requests come through. So the way, you know, the way kind of console works high level is we sit in Slack instead of having to go to, you know, like a JIRA ticket form or something and you have to fill out, you know, the subject line and then you're answering, you know the laptop you have and you're like, shouldn't it already know what laptop I have? And you're just going through this list and you hit it and wait for some response. You go into console, you type in your issue just like you're messaging a coworker. That request goes in 50 to 60% of the time. We handle it entirely with the end user. And then when we can't, we actually loop a human in. So on the back end we'll basically message them and say, hey, John is having this issue. Here's everything you need to know about John. And they can jump in and then the end user stays in Slack. They don't have to go to a separate portal or anything. Anything like that makes sense.

[John]

What's the go to market share?

[Jordy]

Did you share any numbers related to the fundraise outside of the headline number? Anything on the business side? Are we stay.

[Andre]

I don't know that we're sharing too much yet. We're doing really well. So we are watching sign that the.

[Jordy]

Company'S ripping.

[Andrew]

Give it away.

[John]

The number that I got like kind of off the record but I'll share is one one and that's contracts with Ramp. So that's really the headline KPI. It's more of a binary metric for success, but it's really the only metric of success that matters in Silicon Valley these days. So congrats on passing that binary test. Talk to me about the go to market based on the size of customer. I'm super interested to know. Is this like steak dinners, hand to hand combat phone calls, you know, just direct response? Are you G2 hacking what's going on.

[Andre]

I mean, we are very flexible. We'll do what it takes, right? I think the standard process is actually, you know, we'll connect with some, you know, some folks, you know, someone on the IT team, usually some, you know, head of, head of it, director of it and we'll give them a demo. Usually they have some AI initiative internally where they're, you know, looking at again, how do we make it more efficient or kind of like rethink how we do this. We do a demo, usually they're sold. We do a POC right after that. So to get into a poc, we do like an. On, Prem. Sorry, we do like a full, full product deploy into their systems. We'll do things like company security review, legal, whatever. Then we'll go live about three weeks is usually how long we do like a POC for. So usually within the first week. What we like to say is you're actually in a good enough spot to go live company wide. We spend the rest two weeks just kind of like dialing it in. But we go live pretty, pretty quickly. I think scale actually went live in about three weeks during the POC company wide because they were just seeing so much success with it.

[John]

Are you positioning the product as like purely additive to the existing IT systems? Plug in with everything. Are you seeing folks rip out legacy systems that they maybe develop themselves or legacy competitors? What's the, what is the trade off that the buyer is making at the moment?

[Andre]

Yeah, shouldn't be any trade off. We, our goal when we started the company was like, look, you're already managing a bunch of systems. If we come in and we say, well, if you want to use console, you want to use AI, you have to replace half your systems. Like that's just going to be a non starter for really busy teams. And so what we do instead is we actually build really deep integrations into as much of your tool stack as possible. So we integrate very deeply into like Okta, Google, Slack, even your Jira, right? We don't have to replace your itsm. So your ticketing tool, you can actually keep that. You've spent a lot of time configuring it and building it out. You can actually build. You can basically put Consul in front of that and act as your first line of defense. And the reason we're able to do that. I know it's kind of like an odd situation. What do you mean you're not replacing any core system is, you know, we're actually like doing work so we don't need to replace your ticketing tool because we actually do 50, 60% of your, you know, the requests that you're getting, again without human involvement. And so that's often.

[Jordy]

Do you just try to generally charge for the value? Obviously if you're doing 50 to 60% of the work, that's saving. That's at least like sounds like one to many people's time. But how do you charge for it?

[Andre]

Yeah, so we, we just charge per end user per month, basically. So the number of employees you've got in the company, we kind of have like a base price that we use and we discount as a company gets larger. But we try to keep pricing pretty static. I know there's this trend to look at usage based pricing and so on. What we found is one that can be a little confusing. Credits and things are hard to estimate, especially up front. And so what we found is like it teams actually really like the predictability of knowing, okay, for this year, I'm going to pay this much money for this tool. And you know, we kind of think of it as if you feel like you're getting, you know, you're getting more value out of it than you're paying, then, you know, great, that's good for you.

[Jordy]

So awesome. Well, thank you for driving efficiency in the enterprise.

[John]

This is something we need. I don't want to share, I don't want to dox anyone, but you know, we definitely have some interns running wild with access to systems that I would love to be able to just fire off an agent to go clean up because you can't trust Tyler with the access to the root keys to this kingdom. Anything could happen. I want to be able to snap my fingers and deprovision him turn off his ramp car before he buys more.

[Jordy]

Awesome.

[Andre]

Well, you know where to find.

[John]

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk to you.

[Jordy]

Great to hand. Congrats on the round.

[John]

Bye.

[Jordy]

What else we got going on?

[John]

We got getbezel.com, your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Also, we got a new news from Donald Boat.

[Jordy]

He's been traded big trade deal.

[John]

Trade deal. He's going over to Substack. He says he's. Unless he's granted a retainer and a favorable contract from Nikita and Elon Musk, he will be taking his talents to Substack. He's been having some fun. Is he really 6, 7ft tall? That's very tall if that's true.

[Tyler]

Yeah. So I didn't meet him in person. But I know someone who did meet him. He's apparently super tall and very, very slim.

[John]

He says John size. Yeah. In order to get him on the team, you got to give him a low mileage. Use Corvette Z06, C5 or C6. It's funny. He's funny. Funny guy.

[Jordy]

How much is a low mileage Zio?

[John]

Probably $30,000, I would estimate. I mean, Z06 is like the performance package. I believe we have our next guest in the restream waiting room.

[Jordy]

Do we?

[John]

Yang is joining. Oh, thank you so much. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

[Jordy]

Welcome to the show.

[John]

Good to meet you.

[Andrew]

Hey, guys, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

[John]

Thanks so much for hopping on early. Great to meet you. Wanted to be on the show to get an update on you and everything going on. But then also there's so many questions about AI, AGI, ubi, so many acronyms. I'm sure we'll go through all of them. But why don't you just give us a little bit of a reintroduction for those who might not be familiar what you're up to these days?

[Andrew]

Sure thing. People remember me from my 2020 presidential campaign saying that AI was going to come, it was going to eat the jobs, and that we should shift to putting money into people's hands more quickly and broadly. Imagine making that case in Iowa in 2020 at truck stops before AI had actually arrived on the scene. But now here we are five years later and I dare say a lot of the folks who are watching this are nodding their heads, being like, oh, yeah, we're going to do a number on a lot of rank and file entry level workers. Over the last number of years, I've been trying to figure out how to get money back into people's hands. I was inspired by my friend Mark Cuban, who started Cost Plus Drugs. You guys had Mark on recently, right?

[John]

We did a couple weeks ago. He was great.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

I thought, can we Cost plus anything else in American life? I realized that we're spending 170 billion or so on our cell phone services and data. I was paying Verizon over $100 a month. $100, 140amonth to be precise. And meanwhile, Verizon and AT&T paid out 18 billion in shareholder dividends in the last 12 months. So you can kind of start doing some math and realize that Americans are paying twice as much for our data as people in other countries. So today is the kickoff of Noble Mobile, where we try and put money back into American hands and hopefully have people dooms grow a little bit less, live a little better. We're having having a big party in New York City on Thursday night. You guys are not in New York right? And have you guys come as VIPs and hang out.

[Jordy]

We'll be there spiritually but breakdown. I know kind of the mechanics of Noble Mobile but break it down for the audience. How does it actually work?

[Andrew]

Well before I get into this I'd actually love to put you guys on the spot and ask who you use for your wireless provider. So I said I was I use Verizon.

[John]

They've been fleecing me for years.

[Jordy]

Verizon?

[John]

Yeah, I actually have a, I actually have an imessage here. Your bill is ready. This is not a joke. 11:45 this came in.

[Jordy]

Your bill is ready.

[John]

I just pay it and I, and I don't, I don't think too much about it but I'm sure I'm getting fleece because I probably signed up on some like super cheap contract about a decade ago and it's gone up every month and it's dude it's ads are.

[Andrew]

Like lock in the price in parentheses because we're just going to keep on raising it. But the craziest thing is when you guys travel abroad. When I was on Verizon I went to Europe with my family this summer and the Travel pass cost 10 bucks a day to put yourself on the foreign carriers towers. You know how much Verizon AT&T are spending to put you on their partner's towers? About $2.50. So why on earth charge us $10 or $12 a day if it's gonna cost you 250? Like the entire industry when you start digging in there's just a lot of profiteering.

[Jordy]

So you guys pay people to use their phone less. Does that mean I start out with a like but break down the actual mechanics of how that works on a month to month basis.

[Andrew]

Sure thing. So check it out. I'll use myself. I know I use my phone for doom scrolling and social media a little bit too much but at the same time I consider myself an effective in touch individual and kind of need my smartphone and don't want to count how much data I'm using. So the way Noble Mobile works is that you pay a $50 flat fee for unlimited data and if you use it up the wazoo then you paid 50 and that's the end of it. But if you use less than 20 gigs per month then we'll give you cash back in the form of an end of month payment data dividend, we call it of up to 20 bucks. And then any money we give you will then grow at a 5.5% interest rate annualized so that your cell phone plan becomes like a mini savings vehicle without you having to think about it or do anything. And so this way you get the money.

[Jordy]

Do you guys hold on to those funds as long as somebody's like a customer? Is that how that works?

[Andrew]

Or you can take the money out anytime you want. It's your money. But if you leave it with us, we'll grow it at a higher rate than you're going to get someplace else, risk free. Because we wanted it to be a set it and forget it savings plan. One of our first investors was a guy named Scott Galloway, Prof. G. Who you guys probably know. Has he been on the show?

[Jordy]

Not yet. He's got to come on sometime.

[John]

Yeah, I'll try it.

[Andrew]

I'm seeing him later this week.

[John]

That'd be amazing. Yeah.

[Andrew]

Please let them know in your direction. But Scott's very passionate about trying to help young people, in particular young men, save money in a set it, forget it way. And so Noble Mobile, we want to do three things at once, which is a lot, but whatever. Number one, we want to see you actually pay closer to what you should be paying. True value for your data. It's about half what you're currently paying. Number two, we want to incentivize you to doom scroll a little less and look at your families face a little more. And number three, we want to make it easier for you to save money without having to think about it. So those are the things that we think we can accomplish.

[John]

That's a really cool flow.

[Jordy]

What's the customer acquisition strategy besides you telling as many people as possible about it? You're starting there. But what's the GTM look like?

[Andrew]

Sure thing. So one of the things we figured out was that I've got a following, Scott Galloway's got a following, Charlamagne's got a following. A lot of people have followings. And so if you want to help them save money and live a little better, you can tell them about Noble Mobile. And for every person you tell, you help them, but then we also will reward you. So what you're going to see is that there's going to be something of a collective that's now helping acquire customers and let people know about this. The model that everyone's familiar with is Ryan Reynolds made mobile. Ryan Reynolds shows up on Commercials and whatnot. And so one of the jokes I tell is like, I'm talking to various celebrities or influencers is like, look, instead of one Ryan Reynolds, they're going to be like 30 of us or 50 of us or whatnot. And then when I tell them ryan Reynolds made $300 million, then they're he did.

[John]

Fantastic.

[Andrew]

Enlightened self interest kicks in and people.

[John]

Are like, okay, enlighten, selfish.

[Andrew]

I'm definitely ready to tell my people. So we're in conversations right now with some very, very fun, fascinating figures with followings. That's a lot of Fs. But this is like a consumer centered, human based movement to try and make this industry work better for us.

[John]

That's very cool.

[Jordy]

What does it take to actually build a new telecom company like this? You guys obviously aren't setting up your own towers, but are you partnered with some bigger existing players or what did that look like?

[Andrew]

Yeah, it was a lot of work setting up our own towers. I had to get out the tool belt now. So you're obviously right. What we did is we licensed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of data from one of the big carriers. And the point I want to make to your incredibly savvy audience is like, look, you talk about you chose Verizon 10 years ago. I chose Verizon 25 years ago. And we chose it based on something that we thought was like network quality. Like, I'm an important person.

[John]

There was a map and Verizon map was more red than the other maps.

[Jordy]

Well, it was like in little towns where you were cities. It was like, well, this network's better than that one. This one vibes based. Basically.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So over the last 10 to 20 years, what happened is all three carriers bulked up their networks to the point where they're all pretty excellent. And then now you have some satellite data that's getting piped through the network. What happened is that we made a buying decision X years ago and then in the time sense it got leveled up and became commoditized. What we're doing is we licensed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of data from one of the carriers, T Mobile, and then now we can make it available to people in a way that's really going to again accomplish multiple goals. And the great thing is that it's in this day and age too, because check this out, guys, you're like me, I bet, and have approximately zero experience actually switching carriers. Maybe you've done it zero times. I was the same way. I've been on Verizon for 25 years. Every device manufactured from 2018 on now has an esim where you can direct it to another network. You keep your number, keep your phone, takes five minutes and you can just bingo bango, switch to another network. Most consumers do not understand this. And even I knew it technically, but then when I actually switched from Verizon, even I was like, holy shit. I just ended a 25 year relationship in five minutes and now I'm saving myself, you know, $1200 a year like that. This is like magic. So now in many ways the goal is to spread the magic to as many Americans as possible.

[Jordy]

Are you guys like, how does it. What's where your. What's T Mobile's or Noble Mobile's integrations with the actual hardware manufacturers? Are you guys working on deals with like the. With companies at the device level?

[Andrew]

We think most people are happy with their device and will just bring their own phone. There are some people that are under a contract with their carrier. And obviously there was a new iPhone launch just last week. There are some folks who. And by the way, this is true of you guys too. I love talking to people like you because we're on the same boat. So there was a period when every time a new iPhone came out, we were all like, oh my God, I need that line up.

[John]

Camp out.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah, remember the lines, yeah. And then that stopped being true like a number of months ago where we're like, what's the difference of this one? You know, the camera's a little better. Like I'm not even really seeing it.

[John]

This one's orange.

[Andrew]

And you can see that the device replacement cycle has gone longer and longer. So I talked before about how the networks have become at parity and commoditized. Our devices have kind of converged around a level that we're perfectly happy with. And so most people we think don't want a new phone necessarily, this one to not be getting gouged every month. If you do want to get a new device and you decide to go through the carriers, by the way, I've done this. So I get a new iPhone and Verizon and like the device is free, but I'm tied up in a two year contract where I'm paying Verizon a certain amount over this period. And I want the folks listening to this just to think about it for a second. The carrier's contracts with us are so profitable that they can zero out and subsidize $1200 device or $1000 device and be like, hey, it's free to you because we're making so much money off. You are going to pay. I mean, obviously Apple's not giving them that device for free. Apple's like getting paid a lot of money. So it would be more cost efficient for someone who really wants the iPhone 17 to buy one unlocked and then sign up with Noble. If you did the math, you'd actually save money on that versus versus getting it for free from a carrier. But most people are perfectly happy with their current device and might just want to try a different network.

[Jordy]

Well, congratulations on the launch. Super exciting. I'm excited to see the different partners that you put together and I feel like you just can hit the campaign trail again, but this time for noblemore.

[John]

Yeah, you know the playbook.

[Jordy]

Hang in. Just go truck stop to truck stop and just like help people switch over.

[Andrew]

Yeah, you guys just read my mind. I'm coming to a truck stop near you in a hot minute. It might not just be me, it might be Scott Galloway. It might be someone else in the Noble collective. But this is going to be a really fun company to grow because it's an industry that's really past due for some modernization and some humanization.

[Jordy]

Last question. Did you raise a bunch of money for this already?

[Andrew]

Yeah. And I think you guys get to do a sound effect. But yeah, we raised 10.3 million from.

[Jordy]

Sound effect and authentic.

[John]

We have a real gong in the studio.

[Andrew]

I did enjoy that. I want to bang that gong in person.

[Jordy]

You're welcome anytime.

[John]

Anytime you're in la, let us know.

[Andrew]

Oh, yeah, I'll let you know. I'll be in LA before you know it. Scott's an investor.

[John]

Great.

[Andrew]

A lot of other fun people are investors. Shout out to Corazon Capital for leading the round and you know we're gonna grow like a weed. It's gonna be fun.

[Jordy]

Amazing.

[John]

Well, great.

[Jordy]

Great to get the update and we'll see you soon, hopefully.

[John]

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Andrew, thanks so much.

[Andrew]

Thanks, guys.

[Jordy]

See you in la.

[Andrew]

Appreciate you having me.

[Jordy]

Cheers.

[John]

Bye. And if you're thinking about going to his event in New York, you need a place to stay. Book a Wander with inspiring views hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks find your happy place on wander.com. hey, there's some folks that are traveling, some folks that are going to be in la, some folks wondering, John Exley.

[Jordy]

Says, what's the Scott Galloway appearing on tbpn would be a Milestone for me the very first time I force crack my YouTube app.

[John]

So yeah, I was about, literally I'm about to DM John Exley to know like, is he that anti Scott? Because I feel like we have some. We have a wide breadth of guests here. We can have a conversation with all sorts of people. But if he's. But if he's.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I'm interested. We got it. We gotta, we gotta let John weigh in on key decisions like this.

[John]

I think so, but.

[Jordy]

But yeah.

[John]

Anyway, what else is in the news? Someone's hosting a website on disposable vape. Did you see this on Hacker News? Taylor Otwell says me stressing about how we're going to build the best back end infrastructure for the future of agentic workflows and quantum mcp.

[Jordy]

Are they making Internet connected vapes now?

[John]

Is that they are. I've seen these, I've seen these in person. Finally, the LCD screens, the actual screens have gotten so cheap that you can run an entire computer on them basically. And these are disposable.

[Jordy]

Can you run an AI factory or a supercomputer?

[John]

I don't think you can mine Bitcoin effectively. I don't think you can inference the most cutting edge frontier AI models, but you can do a lot more on a disposable vape. We should get Tyler to build something.

[Jordy]

Bobby Cosmic, the lone soldier on our TVPN Twitch.

[John]

Yes. Thank you. For what?

[Jordy]

If I want to stream TVPN for 3 hours a day on 5G, would Noble Mobile be a good fit?

[John]

That's the benchmark. You can't have a carrier.

[Jordy]

I have a feeling that three hours.

[John]

Of live streaming a day, I think.

[Jordy]

I think it's interesting. So Noble Mobile, I think the messaging is like a bit, you know, they're trying to do a bunch of things at once. I think just a $50 phone plan that helps you use your phone less is like enough of messaging and I think that they can get a bunch of people to sign up for that.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

Is it going to be a competitive bloodbath? Yes.

[John]

I don't know. There's something about saving savings money that can create these interesting flywheels. Remember Acorns? Didn't that company do very well? It was a. I believe it was a consumer credit card that every time you swiped it it would round up to the nearest dollar and put the cents in a savings account and compound. And so it was a way to save money. And I believe they got to maybe a billion dollar valuation.

[Jordy]

It felt like it was yeah, they almost spacked. It got canceled. They had 120 million of revenue. This was one of the those things like early fintech company that was like winning but then didn't. I don't think they've ever gotten out of it. I'd be interested to see what happens with that business. But yeah, the just save money on your mobile plan is like a simple message. I think Andrew, building a coalition of celebrities that feel good about promoting this, use your phone less. But again, I mean it's going to be like, like you said, you, you don't think that much. There's. We're not the target audience, I think for Noble Mobile, but there's a bunch of people out there.

[John]

Yeah, I think I like the savings concept. I'm worried about the revealed preference of people say they don't want to scroll. People like to scroll.

[Jordy]

No, I think his argument would be even at $50 a month, it's still cheaper than.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Well, if you're scrolling X, you're going to be treated to a somewhat tweaked algorithm that Nikita has been working on. Peter Yang breaks it down. He says he hasn't seen a quote. It's so over rip product or this changes everything. Cringe tweet on here in days. The algorithm must be working. And so Dylan Field put it to the test. Founder Figma. Of course he said it's so over Rip cringe tweets, new X algo changes everything. And as funny as that post is, it didn't go viral. And so I think that they might have nerfed that meta. We're seeing a new meta emerge already with the B b. Jeff Bezos, be Sam Altman, b Elon Musk spawn in like the 4chan style.

[Jordy]

1 meta dies, another is born.

[John]

Yes, there is always a new meta. Never lose hope. Never stop spawning.

[Jordy]

I've been liking the new ones. I think it's a funny way to tell a story. And I've actually been learning something.

[John]

Yes. And it is more in depth, like it has more to unpack. It's typically hard to get a lot of text to go viral. The viral posts tend to just be like one or two sentences. But these longer stories, when they're told in this format, seem to do quite well. At the same time, they're, they're rife with misinformation. A lot of times, as we've. As we've learned from actually reading them. But you got to go to the. You got to go to the source sometimes.

[Jordy]

Well, I think we have Tim Higgins.

[John]

We have our next guest from the Wall Street Journal, Tim Higgins. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

[Tim]

Hey, thanks guys for having me.

[John]

We were, I believe we were just reading some of your reporting about Elon Musk and the pay package. I believe you authored that, correct?

[Tim]

Yeah, I write a lot about Elon and it's the trillion dollar man.

[John]

Of the month.

[Jordy]

You have trillion dollar hair.

[John]

Fantastic here.

[Jordy]

So it's fitting that you would write.

[John]

But I mean, we don't need to wade into Elon territory. Give us the update on that. The book.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Congratulations on the launch.

[Tim]

Well, thank you, thank you. I wore it is out today. It's a great corporate drama about Apple, about all of these rivals who want to displace Apple as the gateway to the digital world. The gateway being the iPhone, the app store that really changed the world almost 20 years ago.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

The ultimate tollbooth.

[John]

We were feeling the power of imessage and the lock in there and how hard it is to, to build other products that want to deal with communication in your life. If you're in the imessage world, Apple has you.

[Jordy]

I mean there's so many, there's so many, there's so many different angles and people don't.

[John]

Yeah, people think, oh, you just switch the phone and then you're in a different ecosystem. Like there's, there's a lot of threads holding on. So. Yeah, walk us through the inspiration, the reporting process. How much was FOIA'd? How much was reading through, you know, leaked tech emails versus original reporting, talking to sources? What is the process?

[Jordy]

When did you start writing this book, by the way? Because this is a story that's been unfolding for years.

[Tim]

Well, to your point, it's been a 10 year fight for Apple. People started complaining about that power almost from the get go. But you really started to see the seeds of what I think of as a rebellion, almost like a Boston Tea Party moment of these colonists in the new world that Apple created. Kind of rising up over that Apple tax, what they call it Apple tax, the 15 to 30% commission that Apple takes on digital services and sales.

[John]

Right.

[Tim]

And also more so the rules. Right, exactly. And so when I. So I'm a business columnist at the Journal, but I had been the Apple beat reporter at the Journal, had been the Apple beat reporter at Bloomberg. So I'd written about Apple for many years and I followed the Tim Sweeney epic lawsuit against Apple very closely and it paid attention every day during that lengthy trial in 2021 and just was struck by the scale of the drama. You know, in one way, Tim Sweeney is a very interesting protagonist. He's started the company from scratch, had this vision. He's a world builder beyond just being an entrepreneur. He's thinking about the future, whether it's. It's the Metaverse and how Fortnite might play in that. And he was looking at Apple as going too far, taking too much, really kind of against that idea of the open Internet.

[John]

Right.

[Tim]

Then you have Apple, which is also a storied US Company, which had really built something very important to everyday life, the iPhone. Clearly the center of many people's digital lives, digital experience. And their kind of argument is, we built this, we keep it running, we're giving you all of these customers, you kind of owe us a little, and isn't that fair? And so you have this really great clash of how should this play out? And so it struck me as interesting. And as I started kind of thinking about it in a bigger way, it really seemed as if it wasn't just Tim Sweeney. You got the Spotify element, you've got the regulators in Europe, you've got other tech companies in the US and around the world really kind of rising up in this kind of interesting moment, which I thought in a lot of ways was surprising.

[Tyler]

Right.

[Tim]

If you went back several years ago and talked about monopolies in the US And Microsoft, the old Microsoft, of course, was attacked by the DOJ and fought those allegations. But in the more modern era, Google, Amazon, those were the big tech companies that were painted with that monopoly brush, fairly or not. But Apple in a lot of ways, especially in Washington, D.C. was seen as, you know, something to aspire to. And, you know, what we've seen in the last few years because of Epic, because of Spotify, because of others, has changed the conversation around the power of Apple and the power it has. Not just that tax, if you will, but about the control they have on the digital world.

[John]

Yeah. How did you.

[Jordy]

Is Apple good or bad? I'm kidding. I'm not going to make you condense it down. I did have a. So, you know, we're extremely sympathetic to the startups, businesses building in the Apple ecosystem and creating a value for Apple users and then obviously paying the tax. I had a funny experience, John, and I the other day. I was like trying to download an app. I realized I downloaded a fake app.

[John]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jordy]

And then I got to get the benefit of the Apple tollbooth because I just immediately went into my subscriptions and canceled it in one click. And I was just thinking at that time, if this was just some regular app on the Internet, it would have just made it way harder. They maybe would have like tried to not let me.

[John]

And that's Apple's argument. They say, you know, this isn't a tax, this is. You're licensing our software.

[Jordy]

Yeah. And it's. And it can be, it's a fee, it's fair.

[Tim]

They're providing a service, they're providing security, they're providing an ecosystem that the user wants to be part of.

[John]

Yeah. Were you able to uncover any special deals that Apple has brokered with big companies? Yeah, I feel like 30% sometimes. They certainly don't want to mention that that's ever been, you know, negotiated down.

[Jordy]

But there's also like the way, like the way in which Audible does their pricing. You can't buy books. You got to subscribe to that. Part of their weird. Is their system like designed to like get around these rules. I'm curious, interested to know about like, what are the weird Edge cases? What are the. Absolutely.

[Tim]

So one of the things about Apple, and you compare it to the Android system, Google's operating system, is that Apple likes to pride itself on not doing special deals. Now, you know, its critics would point to some Edge cases that they feel are leaning towards helping others. But generally that's kind of the deal is that Apple has some rules and wants everybody to kind of follow them. Now they get. It's confusing because sometimes there's categories and we can get into that sometimes Roblox is perhaps treated differently compared to Epic games in the old way, but they just kind of put it under the category of they don't like to do special deals. Whereas Android does do special deals in part because they feel that they have to compete against Apple to win those hot apps.

[John]

Right.

[Tim]

The hot video games that drive so much of the sales in this ecosystem. If they're seeing the games go into the App Store and Apple, they feel at a disadvantage. So they're always trying to create an Apple like experience in the Google world, if you will. And it creates an interesting dynamic out there and kind of shows how these kind of things play out.

[John]

Right.

[Tim]

And so one of the things you see in the book is, well, why did Tim Sweeney, why did he go to war against two of the most powerful companies at the same time? When I say those companies, I mean Apple and Google. It's because he first went to Google and tried to get his app so you could go outside of the App Store in the Google world. In the Android world and download it that way. And he didn't get a lot of success. And part of that was he would find out later was that phone companies and some of his competitors in the video game world who he was trying to partner with to create an alternative app store that would be available on the Android system, they were getting deals from Google not to do stuff like that. Now they could do that, but they didn't have any incentive to do it right. So he figures this out and then he's like, you know, he's got to go after them both at the same time because Google is accusing him of, of basically not complaining about Apple's deal when he's got a lot of complaints about that. So really he gambles that he can take to the courts this case that Google and Apple are out of line. And it doesn't go very well for him at the beginning. You remember his lawsuit against Apple, he basically lost most of it. Now he would be successful against Google later on, but Sweeney essentially loses most of the case. And Apple, the way they handled it, probably pushing too far, angering the judge over the one thing that she was upset about, this idea that Apple wouldn't allow developers to steer users to other websites to make payments. And she wanted them to be able to do this. And Apple made it so difficult that she really came down hard on them earlier this year. And essentially, very cleverly, these companies now are able to do that. And you see Spotify and Epic take advantage of it immediately, directing users right outside of the walled garden of Apple to make their upgrades to the apps or pay their video game stuff. That is pretty remarkable crack in the Apple ecosystem that I think.

[Jordy]

Have they been super effective at driving the majority of users to pay outside of the ecosystem, or is it more like half of the users are opting for these alternative payment Rails and half? Or are they just saying, like the only way to buy is now outside of the Apple walled garden?

[Tim]

Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. What I understand is that the early data is pretty good for companies that are doing this. One of the other kind of data points that I look at is that Spotify, several years ago, as it was thinking about how it could fight Apple in this regard, essentially started doing AB testing in Europe with its Android app just to kind of run a testing that was essentially like, if this was Apple, this would be the Apple rules and without the rules and kind of a variation of all that to see how much that was hurting them. And the data, according to the records that I've looked At was pretty significant that it was a. Considered a bad user experience and balance. They were losing out a lot of upgrades. And so the early suggestion is that users like to do that.

[Jordy]

Like to go outside. Yeah, Interesting.

[John]

Bullish.

[Jordy]

Bullish for everybody but Apple, it's exciting. What else are you following? Going, you know, I don't want to. I want people to buy and read the book.

[John]

I just bought it on Audible. I'm looking forward to listing.

[Jordy]

Perfect. But.

[John]

But downloading it now.

[Jordy]

Did you just pay the Apple tax?

[John]

Yeah. How much do you get? Charged me 16 bucks. Are you gonna get.

[Jordy]

Well, we don't need to break it all down, but what is Audible's deal? I'm actually curious. Do you have any idea?

[Tim]

You know, it's one of those. It's interesting. Just take a step back to Amazon and Apple and how they were some of the early fights in this kind of war. You go back several years ago, and this is back when Steve Jobs was alive. And Amazon is advertising that you can buy your books and not have to. You can read it on the iPhone and you don't have to pay for it. Doesn't go through Apple's system. And Apple was just steaming over this and essentially they came out with these rules that if you were selling it in the digital world, you had to basically use Apple's system. And so. So that's why you would see on the Apple. On the Amazon app, you couldn't buy through the app. You couldn't buy books through the app because they didn't want to pay the Apple tax, if you will. One of the first companies after this rule earlier this year was changed because the court ruling was Amazon, you can go buy your digital books now through the app because it's directing you outside the Apple system.

[John]

Yeah, I remember I would click and wind up in a web browser even though I had the Amazon app installed every time.

[Jordy]

What should people be paying attention to going forward? I know a lot of these cases, Apple has an opportunity to kind of fight. You know, even after the judge decides one thing, they can come back and say, you know, continue to. Continue to fight it, but what else is working its way through the courts?

[Tim]

I mean, Apple's appealing. They feel the judge got it wrong in the US they have been fined in Europe, where regulators there find them over their conduct of how they treated music apps like Spotify. Spotify behind along with other tech companies pushing for the dma, that kind of landmark tech bill that was passed a few years ago that aims to limit big platforms like Apple Apple's already been fined for that. But they are working to make rules that they think are fair, but that the folks that are against Apple would say don't kind of take the spirit of the law and really kind of an example of how Apple fights this stuff tooth and nail. So that's to watch. The bigger issue here perhaps is just the way that Apple has been kind of painted as a monopolist. Fairly or not, it overshadows or it kind of tails them. Now as they go forward into new technologies, everything they do is looked at. Is, is Apple abusing its power as they move into new spaces. So in AI, for example, I think investors would say Apple's behind in AI right now. There's a lot of frustration out there. And so even when they do a deal with OpenAI to help kind of bolster their chat capabilities with Siri, you see Elon Musk come in and sue and say, wait a second, this is, this is monopoly behavior. Apple is using its power to hurt other AI companies with this kind of deal. Right. So put aside the merits of the lawsuit you got. Apple's getting this position where it's having to defend basically everything it does against the idea that it is a monopoly. And that is a distraction that the company has to deal with. And it makes me remember a generation ago where Microsoft had a very similar situation as the DoJ went after it and regulators in Europe went after it. And Bill Gates and others at Microsoft have talked about how that period was a massive distraction and contributed in them falling behind as the new edge technologies took over. They missed out on mobile, if you will, and some other things. And there's some similarities here as you look at AI and where Apple is at this moment.

[John]

Yeah, that's fascinating. It is such a distraction because with these high stakes losses, the CEO has to go like you just can't delegate it fully. I mean, I'm sure there's teams of lawyers and whole legal departments that handle 90% of it, but it's still something.

[Jordy]

Done any big M and A, right. They're doing these little, they're doing a bunch of little deals.

[John]

It's hard to get locked in and focus on the next generation technology.

[Jordy]

Well, congratulations.

[John]

Congratulations. The book is iwar. It's available everywhere. Books are sold. Please go.

[Jordy]

I'm excited to read it and come back on anytime.

[John]

Leave a review. If you buy it, leave a five star review.

[Jordy]

We said earlier on the show we made it into the Journal for the first time ourselves yesterday.

[John]

It's a full circle.

[Tim]

I read that.

[Jordy]

Congratulations, guys.

[John]

Thank you so much.

[Jordy]

The Journal is the backbone of tvpa.

[John]

It really is. The reporting is fantastic and we appreciate everything you do. Thank you so much for hopping on.

[Tim]

Thank you both.

[John]

Have a good time. Bye. And up next, we have Alex from OpenAI coming out of the restream waiting room into the TVP announcement. I will kick it off with Alex from OpenAI. We are bringing in Alex. How are you doing? Good to meet you.

[Alex]

Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you too.

[John]

Fantastic. Thanks so much for joining. Would love to get brief introduction on yourself, your role within OpenAI and then the update today for sure.

[Alex]

So, hey, I'm Alex. I'm the product lead for Codex. And yeah, actually it's been a pretty fun morning. We've spent the morning looking for GPUs because we shipped a new model yesterday and demand was a little bit too higher than forecasted. And so we were running the model actually a lot slower than we were hoping. And luckily we just fixed that. So the update, we just shipped a new model for Codex. Codex is our coding agent. It's an agent you can work with everywhere you code. So, like in Your terminal, your IDE, GitHub, even your phone, which is actually a crowd favorite.

[John]

That's great.

[Alex]

The goal for Codex is to build it into an AI teammate. So just like a human teammate, you start out working together with it, eventually you start delegating tasks to it, and then eventually you just give it a laptop, some permissions and a job and you just say, please prompt me with tasks that you think are worth doing. Yeah, so go ahead.

[John]

Yeah. I have so many questions. I mean, first I'm interested. Running the model slower actually helps you if you're in a GPU crunch. Is that just because you're spreading the amount of inference across, like a broader user base? Essentially, yeah.

[Alex]

Just think like, if you, you know, on your laptop, like if you open, like way too many programs, they all just kind of run a little slower.

[John]

Okay.

[Alex]

So that the solution? You know, you could close programs on your computer, but we don't want to do that.

[John]

No, of course, because you have other clients and other users and businesses and stuff where, like, take me through some of the use cases. I mean, we were talking to Doug o' Laughlin over at Semianalysis Fabricated Knowledge, and he was saying that he'll use what is traditionally like a coding agent to actually go and do something that looks like a deep research report. I had a sort of magical result where I used a coding agent to do a deep Research report, but then instantiate it in HTML and then I was able just to open an HTML page locally. And it was this amazing thing because it just has different set of UI that it can pull from, from that's not native to just the ChatGPT app. And so that's one world. But then I'm sure there's people that are using this in the business context, deploying it into like large code bases. Where are people having the most success these days?

[Alex]

Yeah, totally. I mean, coding agents are really flexible. The primary use cases for coding agents and, you know, in Codex as well, are to write code, answer questions and review code as well. And that's really what's been sticking. So we've seen like well over 10x growth in usage just over the past last month. And most of that is improvements in how people use it to write code and answer questions. But we're now just.

[John]

You said 10x growth in the last month?

[Alex]

Yeah, over. Over that.

[John]

It's.

[Alex]

Yeah, it's growing like crazy. And most of this is just because we've been improving a ton.

[John]

Yeah.

[Alex]

So, like, you know, if you go back rewind a little bit, over a month ago, we had the Codec cli, which is a coding agent in your terminal. We've landed a ton of improvements to that. Some people like buttons and they like using the coding agent next to the code that they're editing themselves. So we shipped the vs code extension.vs code is a really popular IDE and that's quickly becoming a super popular surface as well. One of the special things about codecs is that it doesn't only run locally on your computer like a teammate, it can also run on its own computer. And we call that Codex Cloud Tasks. We've landed a bunch of improvements there as well to make it way faster, you know, and other things.

[John]

So that's a huge unlock for mobile probably, right?

[Alex]

Yeah, yeah, it's a huge. I mean, you basically can't really code on mobile unless you have that. And so a lot of the work we've been doing is just like making those like fundamental surfaces where you use codecs better.

[John]

Yep.

[Alex]

And you know, that kind of started that growth curve, which we're really excited about. And then yesterday, sort of building on the success of GPT5 and listening to a lot of the feedback we've been seeing around how people use GPT5 specifically for coding in Codex, we shipped a new model, which is GPT5 Codex. A version of Codex is like basically further optimized specifically for the Codex type Use cases. And that's been really cool. You know, for example, one of the. The big areas of feedback people had was that, you know, they sometimes GP5 would think a little longer than they were hoping, specifically when they asked the coding question in Codex, sure, when they were just asking a quick question, but in sometimes they wanted it to work longer. And so one of the things we did is we made it so that with GPT5 codecs, we can actually more dynamically change how much time we're spending solving the user's question. And so, for instance, if you ask a quick question, you just get an instant answer. But also we're seeing people, you know, using this thing and just like letting it run for over seven hours. And that's an arbitrary number. I'm sure you can get it to go longer depending on the problem. And yeah, so we're seeing a lot of feedback like that that people are really excited about. The model is also so because we had the opportunity to really go deep on software engineering and train for those use cases. The model is also a little better at things like code quality, front end steerability via agents md, and some other things like that.

[Jordy]

I saw a post earlier from theo. He said GPT5 Codex is, as far as I know, the first time a lab has bragged about using fewer tokens. Hope this becomes a trend. Do you think that's going to become a trend?

[Alex]

I mean, I guess, like tokens or not tokens, like really, the thing is like, fast speed is really important and I think we're going to brag a lot about speed. It's kind of fun. We want to brag about both sides of it. Right? We want to brag about being really fast for the interactive use cases. And we also want to brag about being able to do a ton of work independently. So, yeah, that graph got mixed reactions on Twitter. I don't know if you guys want to pull it up, but it's. It's a little hard to read. But I think it's a really fun graph where you basically see the skew of like, well, I don't know how I'm mirrored here, but basically on easy queries, we're using like 90% fewer tokens to answer your query. And then on hard tasks, complex tasks, we're like, basically using like double.

[John]

Are you using the term model router? Is. Is there something that you can share on the architecture there that. That is actually driving that? Because that feels like a huge unlock. It was, of course, magical the first time you went to ChatGPT and got it to dump out pages and pages of coherent text. And you get to the bottom and it's all coherent still. And you're like, if you're coming from the GPT3 world, you're like, wow, this is a huge breakthrough. But then quickly you realize, I don't necessarily always need 20 pages of response. I can have a smaller output. And so is there anything that you can share there?

[Alex]

Yeah, I mean, the team really cooked here and I expect us to. Part of the exciting stuff that we're doing with Codex is these very bespoke interventions. But no, it doesn't have a router. But there's a little bit of secret sauce there that we're not going to go too much into.

[John]

Yeah, of course. How are you thinking about model naming conventions and model numbering conventions? There was a time when model number correlated to big circle, and then GPT5 was a much more almost holistic set of improvements. You've brought those to codecs with codecs 5. But is there a world where Codex diverges? Are you always building on top of the same release cadence now? Is there anything about how you think about messaging? What actually changed to the actual user to know, hey, it's time to dip back in. If you tested this or you want to go deeper in a certain area.

[Alex]

Totally. I mean, so our goals with Codex are just to build an amazing coding agent. And if you think about what an agent is, it's a combination of like the model and what we call the harness, which is kind of like the set of tools that the model has and then an interface for the user around that. And so the reason we put Codex in the name is because basically we wanted to just, like, we're really investing in codecs and like in software engineering generally. And so we wanted to have the opportunity to go, like, much deeper and push harder on things that, like, might not benefit like, sort of general users of a model. And in fact, we wanted even the ability to, like, make certain things worse. So, not that I've gone and checked, but like GPT5 codecs, if you're not using it for codecs, is probably going to do worse at like a bunch of general tasks than GPT5 will sure.

[John]

React to this Rune post Right now is the time where the takeoff looks the most rapid to insiders. We don't program anymore. We just yell at Codex agents, says Roon on X, but may look slow to everyone else as the general chatbot medium saturates. People have been saying, oh, this is the 90% of code being written by AI agents. And there's this debate on are we just writing 10 times as much code? Are we doing 10 times less work? Give me a little bit more color on how you're using Codex internally to build the actual product.

[Alex]

Yeah, I mean, we use Codex internally a ton of or a lot. And I think we're at the point now where for writing code, these coding agents are massively adopted. And it's kind of a stylistic choice, like how much of the code it's writing. But it's like the vast majority. I will say that our goal isn't to. We don't actually have a goal of, yeah, let's make sure the maximum amount of code is written by agents. It's like, really what matters is your velocity as a team.

[John]

Right?

[Alex]

But my maybe slightly spicy take here is actually one of the greatest limiting factors on the utility of coding agents right now is not the model's ability to write code, but it's actually the human ability to just prompt it and make use of the agent. For example, we shipped a code review feature that's doing really well a few weeks ago, and the model is capable of doing code review. We actually did a ton of work to make it. It even better at code review. So when Codex does a code review for you, it'll actually get a whole copy of the code base. It can go read everything even outside of your pr. It can even execute code to validate, which a human is probably going to be a little too lazy to do normally. But the big unlock isn't even necessarily that. Even GPT5 is a great code reviewer. But the limiting factor is are you going to go prompt the model to code review every single PR that you get? And the answer is no. So what we did is we just automated that that built it in a nice way, like integrated with GitHub. And now we're seeing, you know, it's just reviewing the vast majority of PRs in the bin, open OpenAI repos, and catching, like, serious bugs. It's actually kind of become a meme when, you know, so we ask people internally, like, hey, react with thumbs up if it's good, just so we can like, kind of see and whenever and like reply with what's wrong with this review if it catches an issue that the engineer disagrees with. And, you know, often it'll be the case that an engineer will kind of see this issue, reply and say, yeah, I disagree. And then like two days later it'll be like, actually, this was a Mistake. And we need to. We need to actually follow the model's catch.

[John]

What does it take to make it on the OpenAI Codex team these days? I mean, it feels like the skill set of just someone who's a programmer is changing. Now you're prompting, designing. What is it? Give me some advice for young people or people entering the workforce.

[Alex]

I think the thing I would say for OpenAI code team, and by the way, we are hiring both folks externally and then also see people can transfer internally. Probably the two most important things is kind of you can just do things, attitude and speed. And I think those are pretty general things that I would recommend if you mentioned advice for young folks. I think it's a sort of crazy time now to be early career because so much is just possible to do and possible to learn quickly. But at the same time, because of that, everyone else is just doing a lot of stuff and learning a lot of stuff quickly. Right. So I think to like really make the most of that, the key is to just like really do stuff. Especially like if you're in a technical field, start doing stuff beyond your coursework, but actually start building things.

[John]

Yeah. Increasing returns to like high agency. It's funny, we're in the era of agents, but then also, also high agency people seem to be doing better than ever. It's kind of a paradox. But it's a good time to be able to have a positive attitude and actually go and just try and build things. It's a good time.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And I think this is true.

[Alex]

Go ahead.

[Jordy]

No, go for it.

[Alex]

Yeah, no, I was just going to say I think this is true as well. At work.

[John]

Right.

[Alex]

Like, maybe before you would have a number of like, very specialized role like PM designer, front end engineer, back end engineer, sre. And now because of all these coding agents, everyone is able to just do a lot more. And so you can have people owning entire problems end to end. One fun example actually, leading up to yesterday's launch is our designer built this really cool ASCII animation of a coin that's rotating and that's kind of a hard thing to get, right.

[John]

Oh, yeah.

[Alex]

And so over the weekend he just vibe coded an ASCII ASCII Animation editor. Like, he buys an app that lets him like edit the. You know.

[John]

Yeah.

[Alex]

And like, that's like such like stack compression.

[John]

Totally.

[Alex]

And it's awesome.

[John]

Yeah. I mean, there used to be a time when it was like, you're a front Engineer, you know, JavaScript, but you don't know Ruby on Rails or Python in The back end. And like the back end guy doesn't know or gal doesn't know JavaScript or whatever, and they got to talk to each other and there's lots of awesome translation stuff. So, yeah, it's an entirely new era. Very exciting.

[Alex]

Yeah. And it comes with problems too, right? Like if you have all these folks like the Ask Animation Viewer I mentioned, like, that's throwaway code. So I guess there's not much tech debt. It's just like pure acceleration. We actually write a lot of throwaway code, like different kinds of dashboards, editors, mini tools. But then, you know, sometimes you have folks who are like specialized. The one thing now, like able to write code for a different thing and that actually creates a different kind of problem, which is code review and expertise. And so that's why what we're trying to do with Codex now is we're investing in making the fundamental code gen experience great and just writing code. But we're also starting to reach out now. So we're really investing in code review because that's actually becoming the bottleneck, like having qualified people be confident in code. We're really investing in validation. So before you review the code, can you assert functional correctness? One thing that Codex can do now is like take screenshots. It'll like actually write a playwright script to like manipulate the website and then take the right screenshot of it so you can actually look before you read the code. And then we're thinking about, you know, where else can we make it really easy to engage the agent before it actually like gets to you on your computer doing work?

[John]

It's amazing. Congratulations.

[Jordy]

Thank you for the update.

[John]

Thank you so much for hopping on the stream. We'll talk to you soon.

[Alex]

Thanks, guys.

[Jordy]

Good luck out there.

[John]

Have a good rest of your day. Fire. Good luck. Well, that concludes our guests for the day.

[Jordy]

Basically, we got a jump.

[John]

We got to catch a flight. I got to listen to iwar, which is in my audible now by Tim Higgins. You can go find it in audible, find it on Amazon. We will see you tomorrow live from Meta Connect.

[Jordy]

Later show tomorrow.

[John]

Later show tomorrow, 4:30 where I think we're starting. We'll be posting updates on X. Keeping you updated, Updated and stay tuned. Thank you so much for tuning in. Have a wonderful thanks to Bobby Cosmic for holding it down in the Twitch chat.

[Jordy]

The whole legend.

[John]

Thank you to John exley in the YouTube chat. We'll see you.

[Jordy]

The team's like unfading it out. We love you guys. We'll see you tomorrow.