SaaSpocalypse Revisited, Singer x Louis Vuitton, Aman vs Ryan Walker | Igor Babuschkin, Brannin McBee, Garret Langley, Sonya Huang, Sean Cole

Summary

TBPN Podcast Summary

Episode: SaaSpocalypse Revisited, Singer x Louis Vuitton, Aman vs Ryan Walker | Igor Babuschkin, Brannin McBee, Garret Langley, Sonya Huang, Sean Cole
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Date: August 13, 2026

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Overview

This episode of TBPN is a whirlwind tour of tech’s hottest subjects, from the “SaaSpocalypse” reversal and the evolving moat for SaaS business models to gaudy luxury car collabs and the drama of a viral YouTuber-vs-hotel feud. The hosts are joined by an all-star line-up of tech founders and investors—Igor Babuschkin (River AI), Brannin McPhee (CoreWeave), Garrett Langley (Flock Safety), Sonya Huang (Sequoia), and Sean Cole (Prasma/Biocompute)—to dissect new realities in AI labs, infrastructure, data privacy, and the wild frontiers of both hardware and “wetware” (think: brain cells trained for computing).

Throughout, the tone is fast, sharp, and irreverent, with recurring themes of technological acceleration, shifting industry power, and society’s tangled relationship with surveillance and automation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. "SaaSpocalypse" Revisited: Market Bounceback and AI Moats

[00:00–12:00]

• The 2024-25 selloff in SaaS erased ~$2 trillion in market cap, giving rise to fears of a “SaaSpocalypse” as AI threatened to commoditize many software companies.
• Recent 6-month rally: Tech & software ETF up 30%—many companies have bounced back, powered by sticky customer relationships, network effects, and being foundational to other businesses.
• CrowdStrike and Palo Alto as “unsloppable” SaaS examples: Cybersecurity importance has skyrocketed with AI adoption.
• Survivorship themes: Companies with widespread integrations, low wallet-share, or vast distribution networks (Spotify, Shopify, Roblox) show resilience. Newfound risks for those providing higher “taxes” to customers.
• Not all return: Chegg (homework help SaaS) seen as a canonical AI casualty—down 99% in five years, displaced by free AI assistants.

Notable Quotes:

• “Shopify isn’t a victim of AI, AI is a victim of Shopify.” – Jordi [06:06]
• “If you’re just a pile of code, your moat is toast.” – John [03:00]

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2. The AI Labs & Customization Revolution

[55:00–71:00, 105:00–116:00]

Guest: Igor Babuschkin (River AI)

• River AI’s vision: Democratize AI ownership—let anyone (companies/individuals) train and own their custom models, running even on-premise.
• Shift from a few giant labs (OpenAI, xAI, DeepMind) toward distributed, “personal” AI.
• AI agent training: Progress in games is a meaningful benchmark for capability, but translating this competence to the real world remains tricky due to consequences and retention issues.
• The "compute bottleneck": Scarcity, demand planning, and the rise of custom silicon for inference at scale.
• On the proliferation of new labs: There's still vast green space for “neo labs” to experiment.

Guest: Sonya Huang (Sequoia) [105:00+]

• Application-layer companies are building their own labs/research capabilities—“democratized intelligence.”
• Trend: Startups want to “own their weights”—not-your-weights, not-your-product, echoing crypto’s “not-your-keys…”
• Outsourcing is fine for some stack components, but strategic talent and direction must be held in-house.

Notable Quotes:

• “If you’re not controlling your weights, you’re not controlling your destiny.” – Sonya Huang [109:00]
• “We want to distribute AI so you own it—run it in your home, in your office.” – Igor Babuschkin [56:00]

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3. AI Infra: CoreWeave & The Compute Arms Race

[71:12–84:00]

Guest: Brannin McPhee (CoreWeave)

• Market demand for GPU/data center capacity remains unrelenting; key differentiator is ability to finance, rapidly deploy, and supply compute at huge scale.
• Shift toward shorter contract durations, flexibility, and more enterprise (not just AI labs or hyperscalers).
• Power is less a bottleneck than "powered shell" (operational data center capacity)—bottlenecks include construction, components, and, surprisingly, skilled trades like electricians.
• Domestic buildout faces local political pushback, but demand is global and growing.

Notable Quotes:

• “This is the most important commodity on the planet right now.” – Brannin McPhee [72:06]
• “We’ve proved you can finance shorter-term compute contracts—even with renewal risk.” – Brannin McPhee [73:28]

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4. Surveillance Tech & Social Backlash: Flock Safety in the Spotlight

[86:41–104:00]

Guest: Garrett Langley (Flock Safety)

• Flock faces a mounting backlash as city councils debate privacy, TikTok influences anti-camera activism, and vandalism of the cameras spikes.
• New audit & accountability tools: Reviewing access logs, cities mandated to use oversight features, with double-checks (city managers as backup to police admin).
• Debate: Locally managed, democratically approved surveillance vs. fears of “Big Brother” and AI-powered enforcement.
• Regulatory pace lags technology; founders pushed for faster, more transparent state and federal guardrails.

Notable Quotes:

• “We helped a million crimes last year and did over a thousand missing persons last month—there’s responsibility that comes with that.” – Garrett Langley [95:45]
• “To push back on Flock is through the democratic process—call your representative, get it on the city council docket.” – John [98:42]

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5. Viral Feuds & Influencer Drama: Aman vs. Ryan Walker

[39:27–49:00]

• YouTuber Ryan Walker sparked outrage by posting a viral video about being denied entry to Amanvari, a new ultra-luxury hotel, after a last-minute booking was canceled.
• Wall Street Journal’s deep-dive report revealed Walker arrived during a media blackout, at the wrong entrance, and was notified days in advance of the cancellation.
• The spread of the viral version outpaced the facts, fueling anti-hotel sentiment online but finding support for the hotel on mainstream media comments.

Notable Quotes:

• “Any hotel that bans influencers is doing regular guests a great service.” – WSJ Comment [48:59]
• “It takes a special sort of jack*** to make me side with the ultra-luxury resort with holistic wellness temples.” – WSJ Comment [49:10]

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6. Design, Branding & Collab Excess: Singer x Louis Vuitton Porsche

[24:17–30:00]

• Instagram’s new wordmark refresh brings back the eternal debate over logo redesigns; echoes in luxury fashion (Louis Vuitton), streetwear (Aime Leon Dore x Porsche).
• The Singer x Louis Vuitton 911 collab car: Hosts and chat pan it as peak “AI slop IRL,” too maximalist, excessive, “chubai” Dubai-style—versus the subtle ALD collab.
• Segment morphs into exploring sheep (yes, actual sheep) as alternative luxury goods.

Notable Quotes:

• “It feels like AI slop IRL.” – Jordi [26:15]
• “That is the ugliest display of good craftsmanship I’ve seen in years.” – Listener comment [29:18]

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7. International Schemes: North Korea’s Secret Remote Workforce

[33:29–38:18]

• Explosive Wall Street Journal investigation: North Korea builds a massive remote IT workforce inside US companies, using stolen identities and AI to ace technical interviews.
• US facilitators unwittingly help mask operations. Up to $800 million funneled to the regime in 2024.
• Many North Korean IT workers earning substantial US salaries, remitting the majority to the state.

Notable Quotes:

• “Passive income, free money—for you the American, for Kim Jong Un, the regime.” – John [35:23]
• “Are they doing a good job? If they’re just working, and not hacking…” – Jordi [37:38]

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8. Biocomputing: Training Brain Cells for Compute

[118:11–126:08]

Guest: Sean Cole (Prasma)

• Prasma is pioneering training human stem-cell-derived neurons (brain cells) to perform compute tasks like token prediction (basic language modeling).
• Current scale: ~200,000 brain cells achieve “hot dog or not hot dog” prediction accuracy, potentially more nonlinear than silicon chips.
• The key motivation: Orders of magnitude higher energy efficiency, biological continual learning, and the promise of drastically faster adaptation.
• Short-term business model: Automate lab processes, offer drug-testing as a service, and build to eventual “brain as a substrate” for computation.

Notable Quotes:

• “We’re renting brain cells out… They got above 75%—beating silicon on a constrained task.” – Sean Cole [120:00]
• “Why do this? Massive, massive energy efficiency—and continual learning is free!” – Sean Cole [121:59]

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9. Rapid-Fire: Branding, Emojis, and Collectibles

[128:08–131:31]

• Silver Lake is in talks to buy Workday ($50bn+ take-private).
• Crying face emoji: Hosts discuss their favorite forms.
• Quirky collectibles: JP Morgan 1886 mortgage bond and Microsoft’s 1996 wine CD.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Shopify isn’t a victim of AI, AI is a victim of Shopify.” – Jordi [06:33]
• “If you’re not controlling your weights, you’re not controlling your destiny.” – Sonya Huang [109:00]
• “That is the ugliest display of good craftsmanship I’ve seen in years.” – Listener comment on LV x Singer [29:18]
• “To push back on Flock is through the democratic process—call your representative.” – John [98:42]
• “We’re renting some brain cells out.” – Sean Cole [119:03]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00–12:00 – SaaSpocalypse revisit, winners & losers, market comeback
• 24:17–30:00 – Instagram’s new logo, LV x Singer collab, design maximalism
• 33:29–38:18 – North Korea’s secret remote workforce in US tech
• 39:27–49:00 – Aman vs. Ryan Walker, the influencer/hotel viral feud
• 55:00–71:00 – River AI’s Igor Babuschkin: democratizing AI labs, compute bottlenecks, model ownership
• 71:12–84:00 – Brannin McPhee/CoreWeave: Data center build-out, power & labor constraints
• 86:41–104:00 – Garrett Langley/Flock: Surveillance backlash, privacy guardrails, democracy debate
• 105:00–116:00 – Sonya Huang/Sequoia: Application AI labs, “own your weights,” talent strategy
• 118:11–126:08 – Sean Cole/Prasma: Brain cells as compute, biocomputing frontiers

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Conclusion

This episode of TBPN weaves together hard-hitting takes on the state of SaaS post-AI, new models for AI ownership and customization, the wild logistics of AI infrastructure, heated social debate about technological surveillance, plus quick forays into branding, collectibles, and synthetic biology. It's a masterclass in the kaleidoscopic landscape of 2026 technology, culture, and industry—all delivered with the show's trademark wit and momentum.

Transcript

[John]

and you're watching tvpn today is thursday august thirteenth twenty twenty six we are live at the tvpn ultradome the temple of technology the fortress of finance the

[Brandon McPhee]

capital of capital oh la la let

[John]

me tell you about ramp dot com time is money save both easy use corporate cards bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place sign up for ramp dot com and you will be king in the castle king in the castle it just might happen it just might happen we gotta take a victory lap you want start taking a lap jordy you want to take a lap while i tell everyone about our saspocalypse victory lap yeah so

[Jordi]

i was just appreciating some various software as a service companies there's some real charts yesterday bunch of companies up like crazy and i was thinking i texted john i was like when did we cancel the saas apocalypse yep and you pulled up our original sub stack that we sent back in february we just decided at that time

[John]

it's not happening

[Jordi]

it's not happening we canceled it and

[John]

there was a lot of maybe too

[Jordi]

early to take a victory lap but

[John]

in hindsight but there were some good arguments there were some interesting arguments and there was a lot of fear but there were a lot of companies that were getting thrown in the saas bucket as just a pure pile of code you could vibe code it and while that thesis might play out over a few years it was a little bit too soon seemed a little bit too aggressive and so we wanted to revisit the saas apocalypse and the cancellation of the saas apocalypse see where things are now so just to set the stage the saas apocalypse is a rough rough go two trillion dollars of market cap lost across the saas apocalypse the major sell off of technology software companies broadly two trillion dollars wiped out gone over moment of silence but a lot of it's come back the ishares etf that tracks tech and software is up thirty percent just over the last six months

[Jordi]

did we want to do a moment of silence yes brought to you by

[John]

crowdstrike absolute tear let me tell you

[Jordi]

about crowdstrike this moment of silence is

[John]

brought to you by crowd your business is their business is securing it crowdstrike secures ai and stops breaches no crowdstrike's been on a tear so yeah it appeared only logical at the time that every company would be vibe coding their own crm and this would happen imminently and that any company built on a big pile of code would go to zero of course the core thesis still holds over the long term but it's a lot messier in reality so yes having a huge monolithic piece of software is less of a moat today than it was a decade ago that's for sure competition is increasing especially for point solutions but many of those saas companies that were so beaten up in the saas apocalypse were revealed by to have sources of strength that didn't fit neatly into the lots of lines of code written bucket so babies were thrown out

[Jordi]

of thousand business development representatives yeah source

[John]

of strength that's big also just another thing that's very valuable is what percent of revenue are you claiming from your customers so if you are going to a customer and you're saying i'm taking thirty percent cut you're probably at more risk than someone who's saying i'm an it solution and you're going to spend one ten of one percent yeah or

[Jordi]

shopify is the best example right i talked to loosen them up yeah a lot of a lot of e commerce entrepreneurs ask them like what's your biggest expense yeah none of them will say shopify yeah even even a brand that

[John]

is like a day old shopify shopify plus for a business that i know very intimately i think is around one thousand dollars a month in cost and the business is doing almost one hundred

[Jordi]

million a year and even with one percent even with how models are today you would need multiple people basically vibe coding around the clock yeah to have a product that was comparable and that's not even to mention a lot of the applications that already tie into to

[John]

the product yeah and you could just put those tokens towards something else that moves the needle and increases revenue by five percent or ten there's so many other ways to move the needle so a lot of babies were thrown out with the bathwater the most ridiculous one was i think doordash but there were lots of people coming for spotify and a whole bunch of different platforms that should be very enduring because their source of strength is a network effect or something like that so six months ago we identified six companies that we wanted to use as case studies for the saas apocalypse it was google meta your favorite company spotify shopify roblox and salesforce as evidence that large scaled software minutes

[Jordi]

to talk about meta

[John]

it always should

[Jordi]

have been don't get me started ever should have don't get me started it

[John]

never should have been beat up same with same with google and then spotify and shopify were the interesting ones spotify of course there is a world where you're listening to ai music but there's also a world where you're listening to ai music on spotify if you looked at phoenix flexen's rubbers the song of the summer in many ways probably ai generated i think it's almost confirmed at this point that it's an ai generated song it has hundreds of thousands of downloads on spotify specifically because that's where he chose to distribute it because if he had just left it on the internet somewhere he's not going to get any royalties from it and he's not going to get any distribution so that's where the audience is and having being an aggregator is extremely valuable ben thompson was writing about this a bunch at the time same thing for roblox yes you'll be able to vibe code a game but having all the roblox network infrastructure distribution that should be valuable in the future so there were a few different things that might make you resistant to the coming age of agentic coding tools marketplace dynamics network effects strong go to market organizations jordi put it really cleanly after shopify's last earnings and when shopify stock popped twenty percent he said shopify isn't a victim of ai ai is a victim of shopify and that really it really made me think yeah

[Jordi]

there was certainly some money flown out of semis oh that's actually true

[Igor Pavushkin]

i

[John]

guess you're right i guess you're right

[Jordi]

it's got to come from somewhere i

[John]

don't know victoria but yes clearly you know now you have a long list of unsloppable ai unsloppable saas companies companies that can't just be immediately spun up and replaced by an ai app there are ai winners now and it's a lot of who you'd expect cybersecurity is more important than ever you mentioned crowdstrike but palo alto networks is also on a tear palo alto networks over the past year is up one hundred twenty one percent it's a three hundred twenty billion dollars company crowdstrike's a two hundred thirty billion dollars company up one hundred seven percent this year over the past twelve months pretty remarkable nikesh arora taking a little victory lap as well so five months palo alto ceo bought the dip five months later he must have been reading us because a month after we canceled the apocalypse he was like i think i like this palo alto network stock is the ceo palo alto networks so but he put ten million dollars of his own money into the company it's now worth twenty six million nikesh arora invested as investors question whether i could disrupt cybersecurity palo alto has reached an all time you got to

[Jordi]

give him three hundred fifteen got to give him some trouble next time we see him why only ten oh ten should have that really move the needle

[John]

yeah he should when you're ten x levered yeah if you really believed come on but you know he has sixteen million of basically play money now i mean it's boy math you know you make you make sixteen million trading your own stock when you're the ceo you got to spend that on something fun and as we know nikesh arora was recently pictured on the golf course so i was wondering what does sixteen million

[Jordi]

get you probably buy a golf course

[John]

you might be able to buy a golf course but what does sixteen million dollars get you if you're a golfer in the bay area you can join you can pay for the initiation fees of ten elite clubs you can become members of sfgc cal club olympics sharon heights menlo burlingame palmetto club lake merced palo alto hills and one or two southeast bay clubs for when you get out there for six to nine million you can pay thirty years of dues at those clubs and then guest fees caddies carts food tournaments that's going to run you one to two million and so the thirty year lifetime total puts you around nine to twelve depends on what your tax rate is i don't know the residency status but for sixteen million you could plausibly fund a lifetime of belonging to essentially every major bay area private club that would admit you with plenty left for golf expenses fantastic i think i do it nikesh do

[Jordi]

it nikesh i want to see them

[John]

out every single day anyway i mean there are there are sass apocalypse victims that have not come back are probably not coming back need to completely reinvent the business because they have been made obsolete by just base level capabilities the

[Jordi]

class sixteen million you could buy six hundred forty thousand pounds of ribeye that's

[John]

another good usage of it i think that might be up there skip the golf course and start bulking season chegg is the canonical example of saaspocalypse victim that has not made a comeback the stock is down ninety nine percent over the past five years it was hot during COVID and of course when it comes to looking up answers to homework the basic free edition of chatgpt gets you there gemini whatever you want to use is going to answer those questions and hold your hand alongside your homework while you're doing it yeah so they

[Jordi]

had three hundred seventy six million of revenue in twenty twenty five but that was a thirty nine percent decrease year over year from six hundred seventeen in twenty twenty four yeah it's now roughly an eighty or a ninety million dollars

[John]

market cap yeah so very shrinking business very difficult you have to continue cutting every year to make any money pull any profit out of that business will be very difficult the newer company that is more in the headlines these days is the information is reporting that canva is slipping into a similar situation because a lot of canva designs can be one shot by image models like chatgpt images and dana banana pro grok imagine i saw the new grok image examples and a few of them were infographics they clearly figured out over there how to do high fidelity text that doesn't have misspellings or anything like that so you wind up with a product that if you're designing a you know birthday card invite that's something that you'd probably go to canva before now you can just go directly to the models and so there are there are there are saas companies that have to grapple with their product being more in the direct path of the models but there are so many other saas companies that are buoying the index because they are either in the token path like if you're a database or an analytics company or an infrastructure product that the labs are consuming and every ai company is using because they're like well we're generating a lot more data we need a lot more datadog or any other data company then those companies are doing really well on the back of that and then there's also tools companies like twilio is doing incredibly well i don't know if you've been tracking this it's up one hundred fifty percent over the past year another story where huge boom during COVID

[Jordi]

sell off thirty eight billion dollars company if you asked me what twilio was worth before i just checked this i would have said i don't know five

[John]

billion six billion yeah no and that's where it was a couple of years ago but it's done really really well and i think a lot of that is that it is difficult to go and vibe code all of the interactions that you need to actually send text messages across the network it's a gentic

[Jordi]

infrastructure john if you historically were a saas company pivot to just be calling yourself a gentic infrastructure it's more like

[John]

yeah i mean it's funny it's more like it's infrastructure that will be pulled off the shelf by the agent and so i mean we use twilio for our app where we want to be able to interface with an application via text message and we use twilio for that even though we could go and vibe code that all of a sudden you're dealing with the different mobile carriers and the cell networks and are they going to flag you as spam and twilio has all these huge decades of relationships built out and a real network there that even though it's just a tool and it's just consumption software at the end of the day it has this moat and so it's been doing

[Jordi]

really really well sebastian in the youtube chat says not a fan of these earphone wires what earphone wires mine mine

[John]

mine's yeah they're going crazy they're going

[Jordi]

crazy thanks for the call out we have to talk about jiahu yu oh yeah traded he is this was took us back in time as well let's try to pull up the original traded card that kicked it all off august of last year i sent it to jiahu you went from openai to msl was one of the first high profile exits in that whole saga and one year later he just announced this morning he said i'm leaving meta to start a new company building the tbd lab alongside mark and alex has been deeply inspiring and fulfilling i'm proud of what our multimodal team accomplished across muse spark voice mode muse image and muse video and even prouder of the team that made it possible over time i felt increasingly drawn he's calling out his laurels

[John]

but he's not resting them over time

[Brandon McPhee]

i felt increasingly drawn to a problem

[John]

that will matter deeply to humanity's future

[Igor Pavushkin]

yet remains largely underexplored it now has

[Jordi]

my full attention more to share as the work takes place takes shape so anyways i wanted to take a quick quick little victory lap because i believe it was monday or tuesday

[Igor Pavushkin]

the victory

[John]

lap

[Jordi]

monday yeah anyways monday are you

[John]

given the situation that you're in right now are you more of a victory lap guy or a pat on the

[Jordi]

back guy i like victory laps you

[John]

don't like patting yourself on the back

[Jordi]

no i've always found it awkward yeah

[John]

it is sort of awkward to pat yourself on the back a victory lap gets the blood flowing it's healthy more ergonomic it's more more ergonomic more ergonomics

[Jordi]

take your victory lap i forget what day it was maybe it was monday or tuesday when i was feeling a little spicy but i was just saying that msl is is basically operating up against a clock which is that they did this massive talent rate across all these companies about a year ago yeah and when you're paying these people nine figures ten figures many of those people are going to basically spend a year and hit a point where they're like okay i have one hundred million dollars in the bank and i'm kind of

[John]

good now twenty five percent of a huge pile of gold is still a huge pile of gold sometimes exactly and

[Jordi]

a lot of those people are just going to basically see the number in their bank account and be like am i happy doing what i'm doing is this fulfilling or do i want to go build a company maybe they've always wanted to build a company and so in the case of jahu you whatever package he had clearly clearly he's down to go take a risk you could argue how risky is it for him to actually really start a company i'm sure they'll raise a massive round out the gates i'm sure he could always get acqua hired in somewhere else too even if the company doesn't work so it's not like he's taking on i would say that much risk by going to start a company right now but that being said i don't think this will be the last of the exits that we see out of msl over the next even one or two months

[John]

what if he starts a social network that would be risky what if he's like i'm coming for it all i

[Jordi]

mean he says i've felt increasingly drawn to a problem that will matter deeply to humanity's future so maybe he's figured out how to make aligned social media better reels social media safety i like

[John]

that yeah well we should let tyler pat himself on the back for this

[Jordi]

reels that make you go like this

[John]

but first let me tell you about console dot com comma console builds ai agents that automate seventy percent of it hr and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets tyler take a pat yourself on the back because this card was the first tppn trading card and tyler whipped it up by himself and it doesn't even have our brand on it and it also has a literal baseball field in the background but this video or this this image went so viral the original post got thirty thousand likes on x

[Jordi]

was it did around one hundred k on instagram random account that again wasn't

[John]

ours it was crazy it actually broke

[Jordi]

containment for not watermarking it and it

[John]

was the it was the first it was the first moment where we had been talking about a story that really broke through to the mainstream because of this trading card we wound up cover

[Jordi]

on french television french television that's where

[John]

i was going that's where i was going so but because of this trading card we talked about this a whole this whole this story over a course of weeks it was very interesting and dramatic there were a whole bunch of scoops that came out around mark zuckerberg making people soup and stuff it was a lot of really entertaining stuff we were featured in the new york times daily podcast i think once or twice for talking about it they clipped us and included our coverage in their telling of the story for their broader audience and then french television sent out a bunch of reporters and cameras to come and interview us which was very funny because they kept asking us like exactly how much money did this guy make and we're like look we don't know exactly how much he makes and even if we did we probably wouldn't want to share that but it was a

[Jordi]

very fair you did tell them there's no salary caps that's true there are

[John]

no salary caps anyway let me tell you about figma agents meet the canvas your ai agents can now create and modify your figma files with design system

[Sean Cole]

context

[Jordi]

instagram branded pogrob says it's over it's over instagram the head of instagram adam mosseri just posted a new wordmark after ten years leaving it unchanged adam says the word mark at the top of the app hasn't changed in ten years so it was time for a refresh cleaner and more modern with references to the original and the simplicity and craft that's always made it instagram so yeah people people don't like it i don't i don't have necessarily super strong opinions on it personally immediately i do think i do think the the the original instagram word mark here on the left had started to feel extremely dated but it's still iconic and i felt like i feel like we're headed back to this sort of maximalism and branding right like however i don't know how many years ago it was like five years ago all the big fashion houses started going from their like historical word marks to updating them and making them like much more simple and yeah balenciaga yeah yeah and there's like ten ten different examples yeah and so this this move almost feels a little bit like lagging in some ways where i actually like that the instagram logo was like it did feel dated but it was so distinct yeah all that being said people see the instagram word mark so much that this is going to be normalized probably within days and people will just forget about it i sent a

[John]

different treatment that i thought they should go with but it's declined we can pull this up it's right i mean

[Jordi]

it's not too late they could this is their first time updating it but i could see them updating it again tomorrow if they like your version so

[John]

i think that would speak to me personally a little bit better but you know their treatment it's a choice it's clean no i think this is trey

[Jordi]

says look i'm not a fan of change this is a war on history just blanket hating change i mean that's actually such a funny perfect take because that's people's reactions to almost every logo change it's like look i understand that you want a new logo but personally i'm just against change i'm just against

[John]

change that's hilarious yeah this seems like a pretty a pretty minor minor iteration so congrats to them i'm sure i think this will be well received i wonder if there's going to be more brand unpacking around this is this is there a message like will this will this new logo ultimately be tied to like mark zuckerberg's vision for ai is there more is there more discourse that will come from like what the future of instagram means what the mission and values of the company are in this era is there something deeper here yeah

[Jordi]

the interesting thing is like they really just they just tried to combine like a new logo and the old logo

[John]

it's very readable i think it's fine it has a little bit of articulation

[Jordi]

a little bit of special treatment yeah i disagree on the readability part like the s which they're taking from the historical wordmark is way less readable in the new version but again it's such an iconic a lot of people are saying the r looks like a z

[John]

oh interesting when i see the when i see the s i see the tor logo for some reason i see an onion yeah an image of this

[Jordi]

yeah i do too little bit like an onion sitting there yeah onion mode

[John]

what are they trying to message us

[Jordi]

with that's subliminal messaging right in stag zambia says e z e yeah readable tone says that r is so so bad i'm getting dragged instag zan anyway instaguam says michelle it's got layers for

[John]

sure my company has a great logo let me tell you about cisco critical infrastructure of the ai era unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with

[Jordi]

cisco cisco cisco is matthew says lol jordy just never learned cursive the original logo is cursive i'm saying that that is to me more readable than this frankenstein but it'll be fine did louis

[John]

vuitton ever do the clean rebrand it looks like they might have is this the actual louis vuitton vuitton logo i mean they still have the classic lv but i think they did but the word mark is i think they were a participant in the new word mark in like the clean sans serif font i think it's time to move away from that and i think you know they're taking risks here i'll defend it and i think it will grow on me it's also not the like instagram's been through a number of rebrandings and iterations so we'll see but speaking of louis vuitton louis vuitton collaborated with singer and created this insane singer x louis vuitton collaboration for a nine hundred eleven that looks like a handbag they're calling

[Jordi]

it they're calling it the most tacky

[John]

car i didn't know where you were gonna go i knew i saw this all over the all over the feed i knew we were gonna be talking about it but i didn't know where

[Jordi]

you'd set yeah so why is it tacky it looks pretty yeah let's let's play this video this isn't that tacky

[John]

i like the color you don't like the color the blue wheels are tacky

[Jordi]

that this part that's nice well okay the bag interior is just brutal the stick is pretty cool the hood with the straps this part sort of crazy yeah this part's helmets i don't hate the helmet there's two there's there's multiple

[John]

cars yeah there's another version that doesn't have blue wheels it's a little more

[Jordi]

subdued but it is so to me part of the reason why it looks like you know a monstrosity is that it feels like they just it feels like ai slop irl oh interesting i was and and and to me it's not it's not actually you wouldn't surf

[John]

with that surfboard jordy but the problem

[Jordi]

is like the problem is like i think that if porsche had collab with lv mate there would have been like it would have been toned down like a lot and probably be they did

[John]

right didn't didn't porsche do a collab recently and we asked we talked about

[Jordi]

this you're talking about the toy story

[John]

collab oh that one was really good i like that one but i'm going

[Jordi]

back further but i'm just saying like this is not sanctioned by this is to me like a tacky unauthorized collab and i know exactly the kind of person that would buy this i'm happy for them we're sorry this happened this

[John]

when i saw this car i was thinking that it feels less like something that you would drive and more like an art piece that you would put in a house that has glass that

[Jordi]

you look through vladimir says that the singer looks like bdsm plus hampton's inheritance minus taste oh because of all the

[John]

leather straps wow that is wild

[Jordi]

maybe they just don't believe that taste is the new moat and they're just like fading that whole take this is the

[John]

one i was thinking of the it

[Jordi]

says buckles on the hood lol perfect for a pilgrim

[John]

it was the amy leon dore ald porsche nine hundred ninety three turbo that we discussed and i think you were skeptical about as well

[Jordi]

not big on these collabs yeah i think the main thing is they just went like three hundred percent too hard

[John]

they did yeah it is very aggressive

[Jordi]

it's not subtle it is very aggressive how do i add this avery says the shift boot is pretty bad not

[John]

gonna lie let me see yeah the ald was much more subdued now that i'm looking at it we can pull up these images look at this yeah

[Jordi]

people are saying next level gluttony aspirated

[John]

slop people do not like it well it's not for everyone it feels more like an art piece that you put in a luxury apartment that has glass between a seating area like a poker room and a in a garage like something in dubai yes oh it's chubai that's what you're referring to yes this is chubai yes okay i understand now but yeah pull up the pictures of the the ald porsche that was on the official porsche youtube channel so must

[Jordi]

be real someone else says that's the ugliest display of good craftsmanship i've seen in years yeah what they've accomplished clearly was incredibly difficult and they executed their plan seemingly very well it's just that the plan was way too much okay

[John]

pull up the ald porsche nine hundred ninety three turbo collab video because i want you to see i want you review you gotta pick one you're either driving loose vuitton or ald which one

[Jordi]

you going with jordy i mean this was a actual collab between ald and porsche and it was much much much more subtle it was more subtle and very well done and the creative is well done yeah i thought this was i don't own anything from from ald to my knowledge i've never been a part of been a part of that brand but i i liked this collab

[John]

a lot okay within this video so you're going ald over louis vuitton over lv correct you're going ald over lv if you had to pick between those two hundred percent within this video are you going ald nine hundred eleven or are you going flock of sheep which one would you take if they're if you're offered you can either have the flock of sheep or the porsche how many sheep look at how many sheep there are there's at least twenty look

[Jordi]

at those i think you gotta go i think you gotta go with the

[John]

sheep you gotta go with the sheep okay i don't know i don't know

[Jordi]

how much honestly i'm hoping that i'm hoping that the flock is quite a bit bigger but if you threw if you throw in the sheepdogs and with the sheep i think you gotta go with the sheep okay how michelle says sheeps are useless trey says those are nice sheep i agree they look like

[John]

fantastic sheep okay we're gonna find out how much a flock of sheep costs

[Jordi]

ben says that was a very wolf answer

[John]

okay about fifty ordinary sheep in california you're gonna spend about twenty thousand dollars that's for forty forty eight breeding

[Jordi]

so you're saying i should take okay so you're just saying i should take the ald nine hundred and eleven put it on bring a trailer and then

[John]

you can buy five hundred sheep a

[Jordi]

billion sheep not a billion cheap but i would love her up i would love her up on the flock you're

[John]

leveraging up okay let me tell you about codex codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with ai agents whether you're writing code analyzing data creating content or sorry or automating business workflows

[Jordi]

codex wants you to work for certificates satyris robotics which is the company that makes the what do we call it the centaur is in the youtube chat and they say i pay around dollar three hundred a sheep icelandic saint sheep cross so they don't need shearing good to know we got sheep alpha in

[John]

the chat we got some other alpha

[Jordi]

yeah they're saying the sheep don't depreciate at the same rate but honestly that

[John]

they reproduce so with your five hundred sheep if you have the right if you have the right mix of ewes and ewes and rams male and female sheep you could potentially grow your flock into the billions correct you could be become a full time sheep farmer sheep billion scale it up yeah the new shrimp farming hustle is sheep farming for sure the last one in here is i guess the supreme nine eleven which that seems not authorized nick in the

[Jordi]

team chat says i'm a sheep the same way odysseus is a sheep what

[John]

does that mean is he a sheep

[Jordi]

people think he's a sheep but he's really an absolute dog okay okay okay

[John]

there's a wolf in sheep's clothing what

[Jordi]

in the slop is this i can't even tell get that out of here

[John]

okay anyway let's do some other stories new bombshell reporting from the wall street journal reveals that north korea has built a secret workforce inside american companies using stolen identities ai and accomplices in the united states to cheat its way into remote jobs and funnel hundreds of millions of dollars back to kim jong un's regime it's a fascinating story the wall street journal article is posted it's a thirty minute documentary they spent over a year investigating this the fbi says that there are thousands of north korean it workers applying for jobs applying for jobs across america after a year long investigation the journal obtained a trove of leaked browser histories emails calendars and screen recordings from one cell of workers providing a remarkable look at how the operation actually works the north koreans apply for jobs at enormous scale one cell tracked by the journal applied to more than one thousand companies over just three months using ai at nearly every step and in the documentary they show a product that is basically clearly they will leave a voice agent running while they're being interviewed in a technical interview give the answer when asked about a particular technology if they are proficient they will simply have ai look up the answer give the answer to the interviewer get the get the job and in some cases they're using real americans as frontmen basically they will do the interview and then they will ship a remote laptop to say hey you're a new you're our new remote worker you are qualified to work on our software engineering team at this small company we'll send you a laptop and then you just collect a check send half of it to the north koreans and you don't have to do any work so it's like passive income free money for you the american so

[Jordi]

you said they're real americans but they're not patriots yeah that's what i'm hearing

[John]

the documentary is pretty gut wrenching like the individual who they talked to who was participating in this obviously is probably going to see some legal consequences for this but it did seem like he had a very very tough go and got into a very rough situation to be in that situation it was certainly

[Jordi]

his first choice ryan in the chat has a hot take kim jong un is such a lovable rascal it's hard

[John]

to stay mad at him boo boo the operation also relies on help from inside the united states north korean it workers pay american facilitators they're called facilitators to host company laptops in the united states allowing the actual workers overseas to remotely connect to them while appearing to be employees working domestically also the north korean workers they go to non extradition countries so they'll go to china and russia and a few other countries and then from there they will be remoting into an american laptop so it just looks like okay the web traffic is coming from it's not coming from north korea but it's coming from a country where if the fbi says hey can you send us this person they're a criminal that country says no way we're not sending them to you so for one job paying seventy five thousand dollars a year he said he and the north koreans split the salary fifty fifty the workers he also used stolen american identities to pass employment screenings often juggling multiple identities simultaneously and holding down several jobs under each name this all boomed during COVID and the remote work boom and the scale of the operation is enormous some north korean it workers earn as much as three hundred thousand dollars a year the treasury department says north korean says the north korean government can seize as much as ninety percent of the wages earned by its own overseas it workers and recently estimated that these operations generated nearly eight hundred million dollars in twenty twenty four alone pretty pretty big so the journal's thirty minute documentary titled north korea's secret us workforce follows the operation in detail it's a fascinating watch and i highly recommend that you check it out so go take a

[Jordi]

look i feel like it's important to ask like are they doing a good job because presumably they're not just like

[John]

hacking wow really you're going to steel man this okay i see where your loyalty is no it's like there's like

[Jordi]

the skit where it's like oh we're going to rob the bank and we're going to get a job there and over thirty years they're going to deposit the money straight into our bank account

[John]

every two weeks and what happens at the end yeah we walk out the front door it's like oh they're like

[Jordi]

hacking and they're stealing american dollars by

[John]

working at the companies yes so there are sanctions and because of those yeah like clearly america is not allowed to do business with north korea in any capacity including this one so this is

[Jordi]

sanctioning but like seemingly it could be much worse right they could just be like hacking the company that's true that's

[John]

true but they could also be doing both because once you let for a north korean it worker in your systems they could be planting all sorts of spyware a very dangerous situation to be in but yeah a wild wild wild story so everyone if you're running a small business with some remote headcount make sure to ask everyone to post something negative about kim jong un every day to prove their loyalty i guess or something but there is a it opens with a very very funny clip of someone doing a remote zoom interview and asking someone to say something negative about kim jong un and the guy's like oh i can't hear you i can't hear you i can't possibly say that anyway let me tell you about the new york stock exchange want to change the world raise capital at the new york stock exchange just do it a new luxury hotel canceled a youtuber's four thousand six hundred and sixty three dollars stay then came the viral feud reports the wall street journal a dispute between amman which we've talked about a lot on the show and content creator ryan walker illustrates the growing tension between commercial enterprises and influencers it's a fascinating story and somebody's got to stand up for the amman somebody has i'm ready no

[Jordi]

honestly honestly i don't i don't think the iman actually needs that much standing

[John]

up for no the wall street journal broke it down in great detail and it's bad for this guy anyway let's go through it so should we should

[Jordi]

we should we pull up a little of ryan's video yeah yeah for sure

[John]

for sure the social media video is

[Jordi]

he probably should have deleted it by now because it is crazy extremely misleading

[John]

it is crazy it's still up it's

[Jordi]

in the timeline and overly dramatic and not representative of what a normal guest experience would be like yeah it is

[John]

it is odd let me let me drop it a few different places see if we can get this in here boom so the wall street journal reports that it was supposed to be the hottest hotel opening of the year let's play a little bit of his video

[Jordi]

know me i am a luxury hotel review viewer here on youtube i specialize in very honest reviews of the world's best properties i'm not going to give away too much as to what happened

[John]

i want you to know and this is a cool thesis like he pays for the hotels himself he doesn't get paid by the hotel for the review the hotel doesn't pay for his stay and consequently he can be more independent this was the doug demuro strategy for years doug demuro said i'm not taking press cars i'm not going to your press event i'm going to borrow the car from just someone who owns it and i'm going to be able to drive it how i want to drive it review it how i want to review it and if you're lamborghini or ferrari or any other company you're not going to be able to have any thumb on the scale of my review very good in concept but the execution goes a little bit off the rails in this particular video so you can see him pulling up to a guard house that looks woefully unfinished it looks very very rough your name is brian walker yes yes i know you allow me to verify your information okay okay

[Jordi]

thank you what's going on

[John]

drama this

[Jordi]

is such a strange area it's kind

[Sean Cole]

of like

[Jordi]

they say cannot enter

[Igor Pavushkin]

apparently

[Jordi]

our driver's saying in spanish that they are saying he cannot enter or pass

[John]

good morning mister walker we don't have

[Jordi]

your reservation do you need the number

[Igor Pavushkin]

no we don't have your reservation all

[Jordi]

right we can pause let's get into the journals piece long story short that video sparked a bunch of views there's thousands of comments on there people trashing the property you know basically fully taking his side but he and his side

[John]

is basically that he showed up he had a reservation they didn't let him in the place didn't seem together he had a bad experience and he shares that with his youtube audience gets a lot of views for it but the journal dug in and provided a whole bunch more interesting perspectives so let's go through it the travel world was abuzz over the august first launch of amanvari the first mexican resort from amman the multi billion dollar ultra luxury hospitality group whose mythos is built on seamless service total tranquility and fierce guest confidentiality the new location is set within baja california suares private costa palmas community and the resort promised eighteen beachfront casitas so only eighteen keys a very small hotel but very luxurious so less than a week after its debut the hotel was the center of a viral controversy in that youtube video he said he tried to check in for a one night stay and he was turned away so an amman spokesperson told the wall street journal they went on record and they really clarified a lot they said the deceptively edited video created by someone unauthorized to be be on our property does not reflect the circumstances of the of the incident accurately their dueling accounts reflect a new reality where cameras are always rolling virality can outpace truth and public perception is shaped less by what happened than who posts first so on july seventh walker booked a stay at amanvari the youtuber with more than one hundred fifty thousand followers pretty solid giant channel has built a brand around paying full price price for hotel rooms to guarantee honest reviews standing out amid influencers accepting free trips in exchange for positive content he says i'm honest and transparent i'll tell you exactly what to expect and why he had previously paid twenty six thousand dollars for a four seasons yacht trip that he panned in may and sorry

[Jordi]

for the spoiler he's not honest or transparent

[John]

the same month walker posted a positive review of aman tokyo then he traveled to amanvari on august third to hear walker tell it in the video he showed the next day he was a victim of a hospitality nightmare and

[Jordi]

one thing that's i think very funny right away is so you're gonna review this hotel by a one night stay which means like you know maybe you check in doesn't look like he wasn't gonna get an early check in either way let's say you check in at four you gotta be out of your room by eleven yeah that's not you got a five hour window where you don't even know how could you how could you accurately review the property when you're missing that incredible window from eleven to four right yeah no you just it's a good point you just don't have any context yeah how can i trust your review so i'm already my

[John]

guard is up so his video which rapidly surged to more than seven hundred fifty thousand views shows his vehicle approaching an unfortunate unfinished wooden guard hut with stud walls still visible on the outside in the interactions that follow which appear to take place between two different gates staff recognize him inform him that he has no reservation and according to walker eventually call the police to escort him away sounds terrible as walker drives off he finds an email he says he missed sent the day before it apologizes for canceling his stay due to scaled back capacity during opening week not looking closely at the timestamp he tells viewers the email arrived late the previous night when later pressed by the journal walker revised his timeline saying it arrived the previous morning walker did not amend the timeline in his video or in a subsequent live stream the internet quickly took walker's side viewers of his youtube channel including people who identified as amman loyalists and travel industry professionals expressed disbelief we'll never book another amman property again read one of the more more than five thousand comments many of which express similar sentiments amon spokesperson said the company does not comment on bookings inspect the footage closely though and questions surface notably around an absence of the police invoked in the video's title amon said it didn't call police and showed the journal an incident report that made no mention of law enforcement in the video at one point in the encounter a staff member says i need to call the police now walker sees her on the phone says off camera yep she's calling the police right now but that might not have been related to him whatsoever so that's like a very confusing situation later he told the journal he did not see police arrive on site when the journal told walker that amon said it had not called the police he said he hoped that was true and that the information would make him reconsider how the result the resort had handled the situation there is also the arrival gate that does not look like a typical five star welcome and we can pull up a picture of the actual welcome gate because it does look pretty ramshackle the amman spokesperson said walker bypassed the main entrance and he was looking for

[Jordi]

trouble access my theory is he knows exactly what he was doing and the other thing is it also came out that they had reached out they had called him they had whatsapped him they had made numerous efforts to make contact and i just think he wanted he wanted the drama probably wyatt in the chat says i want to have my hotels call the police on youtubers

[John]

so the iman spokesperson said walker bypassed the main entrance ending up at staff access points instead instead ambient audio in walker's footage captures someone saying quote this is the employee entrance walker told the journal he had never heard the remark and that his driver followed gps directions to the first entrance showed in the video you can see it there so internal documents provided by walker show the resort emailed him five days before his visit telling him it was unable to allow stays involving content coverage until a month long media blackout and suggested he postpone his travel walker replied that the staff should consider him a standard guest the property replied that it was prepared to welcome him noting that he could post content after the media exclusivity window so i'm sure they're doing a whole bunch

[Jordi]

of different press so he comes during the first week books one night knows that he shouldn't be filming still decides to film and is effectively looking for trouble the entire time and the crowd over on the wall street journal loves it the top rated comment i'm on here i come any hotel that bans influencers is doing regular guests a great

[John]

service yeah yeah i mean that's a big thing is that people go to certain places to not have cameras all over the place and it's getting rarer

[Jordi]

and rarer and if it's so actually fascinating to look at the difference youtube comments are like wow i'm never going to go to the amman and then wall street journal is like walker is a complete tool says ray edward says seems mister walker struggles with the truth second most highly rated comment so walker says he didn't and then someone else says it takes a special sort of jack star star star to make me side with the ultra luxury resort with holistic wellness temples yep but that's the

[John]

case we're in a spokesperson for amman said the resort resort also said telling

[Jordi]

him to get a real job the

[John]

amman spokesperson said the resort refunded walker's booking in full pledged to cover additional travel and cancellation costs and help him rebook his stay walker said he received the refund but didn't take amman up on the other reimbursements he just showed up anyway the dispute highlights growing tension between commercial enterprises and content creators looking to record on property jack as on ceo of luxury travel advisory embark beyond noted that hotels maintain the right to cancel reservations or deny access he added that properties immediately after opening should be approached cautiously you don't need to be the guinea pig give it six to eight months to grow minimum in this case nearly every claim has a competing account did amanvari overreact to a content creators opening week visit to prevent an honest review or did walker turn a misunderstanding at the gate into a viral story the luxury world may still value discretion the internet values whoever says imagine

[Jordi]

staying on a twenty room property and having a youtuber there i would be seeing so true i wouldn't be surprised if they update their policies we got to talk about mcdonald's before our first guest joins in wired reese rogers says mcdonald's built a five hundred fifteen page dossier on me it says i'll never stop eating there he requested a copy of my data from the mcdonald's loyalty program and received an extensive personalized report that algorithmically predicts my next purchase this is amazing pulling up the the actual

[John]

article the actual article mcdonald's secret sauce is really commercial surveillance says jeff chester executive director at the center for digital democracy a group that advocates for consumer protections privacy experts i spoke with said this level of detail may feel invasive but it's fairly standard for how large companies in the us run their loyalty programs the report contains specific pieces of personal information about you that were identified by searching mcdonald's systems which contain information about our customers tyler you had the conclusion what does mcdonald's actually know about you what does mcdonald's know about an individual that they like hamburgers that's basically the takeaway right like the takeaway is like the number one most this guy likes hamburger product is a large diet coke then the spicy snack rack then the grinch mcshaker fry large we should

[Jordi]

figure out other companies that have these types of that have this type of data and request full reports yeah we need our own reports i would love

[John]

to read you want your ten thousand page report on what you like from arel on yeah you're really going to

[Jordi]

go there because i couldn't possibly know by looking at previous order glass bottled water mcdonald's anthropic is apparently in talks to buy for six billion dollars image generation we've had a bunch of awesome conversations with with dean over at descartes he's always he's very very early he was willing to take do live demos their product like really interviews completely on you know we didn't even test with him before the show he was just ripping them live so always had a ton of confidence in the product and they've been just cooking they were valued

[John]

at four billion a quarter ago himanshu has some extra context here says descartes could be one of the first ai labs focused on world video models to a be acquired by a frontier ai lab i think this also could mark an initial phase where frontier labs start treating world models as a major strategic capability alongside inference optimization as a major offering from descartes yeah interesting to imagine how this actually links to the core thesis of you know b two b and enterprise and and coding but certainly an amazing technology that feels like on the verge of a breakout the demos are amazing but we haven't had the ghibli moment for world models yet it's very much a prototype demo video go and see what it looks like but we've talked to a lot of people oliver cameron and fei fei li about world models there's a lot of optimism about how this all plugs into the agi pursuits of the frontier labs well we have our next guest already in the waiting room so let's bring in igor pavushkin but first let me tell you about railway railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider use your favorite agents to deploy web apps servers databases and more while railway automatically takes care takes care of scaling monitoring and security security and we'll bring in our next guest here he is hey guys thanks for having me hopping on the show welcome congratulations on the fundraise but maybe let's go back in time tell us a little bit about your history and journey to starting river ai and jordy already has the gong ready so just tell us the fundraising announcement i

[Igor Pavushkin]

guess yeah we just managed to raise one point one billion dollars

[Jordi]

he broke the mallet the chosen one you are

[John]

the chosen one okay so see if

[Igor Pavushkin]

it works out so thank you guys i started my career as a physicist i was really interested in understanding the universe yeah but then realized that there was something really big happening which which is ai started to happen and i think alphago was really the moment when i started to feel like wow i gotta switch and learn how to do ai so managed to join deepmind it was almost ten years ago wow i worked there on wavenet we trained a starcraft agent that was really strong so got into reinforcement learning there and then switched to openai at one point was really interested in reasoning coding with llms which now turns out to be something that works which is pretty crazy to see and then end up co founding xai together with elon so i thought it was time for another frontier lab i'm always in favor of more diversity in ai more companies doing different kinds of things so i was happy to support him building up xai and now with river ai we're kind of taking that to the extreme so i feel like the way we've been building ai is maybe not the way of the future a few large corporations building these super powerful models everybody has to pay them by the token we want to figure out how we can distribute ai to everybody in a way in a way where you own it you're able to shape your own ai systems maybe you have the inference running in your home or in your office that would be the best achievements if you figure out how to do that efficiently and we're running a few different bets on how to help people build up their own ai so we're helping companies build ai with the river api that product's already out so if you go on river ai api you can log in and you can start training models based on open weights so we support all kinds of very powerful open weight models and then we're also using that platform to build out personal ai agents that are increasingly personalized to you so as you're using them they understand you better and better and it should really feel like you're building the ai you're creating

[John]

it can we go back to your time at deepmind working on video games i'm so interested in video games as a benchmark i saw someone using codex to play slay the spire and i've played a lot of slay the spire it's pretty difficult now it's not a fast twitch game but i'm wondering if you like how would you think about the value of video games as a benchmark there was another story about the faa hiring flight traffic controllers who had previously played video games so there's some sort of transfer where if you're good at video games and maybe simcity you might be good as a flight traffic controller and you could imagine a situation where ai gets really good at playing video games and then becomes more useful in a whole bunch of different work related tasks but it feels like the gaming benchmarks are still toys they're fun they're people just doing them off on the side but how do you think about the role of solving video games or testing models on video games in the modern era i think it's a

[Igor Pavushkin]

great idea but i might be biased i used to play a lot of video games growing up i still do some gaming from time to time so i think it's awesome and i think the idea here is you want to test your ai on problems that it hasn't necessarily been trained on directly so you want to have some level of generalization and games are amazing because they have all kinds of complex things you might have to do all kinds of problem solving you might have to develop on the fly and that's kind of measurable how much progress you're making so if you're getting to the end of the game you're doing well if you're making progress from one level to the next that's measurable so they have many many properties that make them pretty ideal for measuring ai capabilities and the craziest thing today is we have these powerful agents that have been trained mostly on coding tasks you give them some code base and you ask them to fix a bug or develop a new feature and they go out and they do all this tool calling to figure out how to do it and rewrite your files but then you can also hook them up to a game and give them an api like here's how you control the units in the game or here's how you manage your resources or here's how you move around in pokemon and other games like that and i think it's crazy that these models are so capable at playing games and just shows you how much how far we've come in terms of generality where are

[Jordi]

the shortcomings though because i can think of one which is like with a game you basically run an agent have the agent play a game effectively infinite amount of times it can fail a lot it can learn things like that one of the challenges is in the real world let's say someone was making a sales agent like an agent that wants to help you get customers you can't necessarily just let the sales agent run wild in the real world as a business at least because you know it's going to mess up a lot a bunch of customers are going to have a bad experience and you could make maybe the agent get slightly better from that experience but you could have lost like a bunch of potential customers or pissed a bunch of people off or things like that and so how do you think about making the jump from agents that are very effective at playing these games in a generalized way to agents that can be effective at long running tasks in the real world that involve effectively complex groups that are third parties that's a good question because

[Igor Pavushkin]

most of the training today is done with synthetic environments so you're building up these rl environments inside of your ai team and you're training the models with reinforcement learning and so you kind of go for a simulation you could say and they're not really interacting with the real world when you're training them and i think one of the big frontiers right now one of the big developments you might see is actually the training moving into an online setting where the models are directly interacting with the users with the companies that are using them and as they're solving tasks as they're figuring out what to do we update the weights of the model they get better and better and it's a big research problem right now so nobody knows how to pull this off in general and the best agents they're all been trained in simulation so far but it's one of the things that we're working on at river ai so if any of the viewers are interested in doing some research on this reach out yeah

[John]

it feels like we're not that far at least in the gaming sense to you know in the training step just create an environment that's just like here's a steam account and a credit card go buy every game and try and get the platinum trophy or complete the game and feed that in but the gaming thing's sort of a pure benchmark at this point because it feels like the labs haven't identified it as something that really they want to focus on can you talk about the trade off between bench hacking for good and bench hacking for bad because there's the game that the labs are playing but then there's also if you show up with a product and it does the task and it classifies all of my taxes i don't care if you bench hacked on that as long as it gets the job done right and so there's this push and pull between those how are you thinking about communicating that with your customers the companies you work with who might be fine with a model that's only good at their specific task

[Igor Pavushkin]

yeah exactly i think that's a big opportunity for any company out there today because you own your own data that you've collected from your customers or from the work that you're doing and if you eval the systems on that data this is the perfect eval for you if you're able to improve your models based on that you might end up owning the best model in the world for your particular tasks i think that's actually huge for companies they should be building these specialized evals and they should be trying to build their own models and the river api makes it easy to fine tune your own model given your eval given your own training environments but in general when it comes to agi and improving the intelligence of these models i think we want to hit them with some surprising benchmarks if you want to measure generality then throwing in a game that it hasn't been trained on that it's never seen before i think that's a very very interesting measure to see how far out of distribution can they go can they do interesting

[John]

things we haven't trained them for huge fundraising round amp is in we've talked to ajnay a bunch and he has a very interesting thesis around actually going much deeper in the stack acquiring compute how are you thinking about the uses of those funds because i could see coming to you as a company and knowing that you have the capital to go and really optimize all the way down to the stack and become a neo cloud build a data center for me or help me with the more expensive expensive capex piece of the puzzle at the same time like i don't really have a rule like a solid frame of if i come to you and i say i want to fine tune a near frontier open source model is that actually that expensive and wouldn't you just ask me to pay for that upfront so that doesn't seem like a huge capital cost to you but what is the shape of the cost that you are planning on incurring over the next couple years yes so we're

[Igor Pavushkin]

charging the customers really by the token so if you have a fine tuning run you want to do it if you have an rl run you want to only pay for what you actually do choose some kind of model training run size that you that's perfect for your tasks some customers they end up training a really really small really fast efficient model because they've got the best data that has end up beating the largest and most expensive models out there other customers want something more general or they want to utilize these larger open weight models like kimik free and others that are coming out so that's a that's a more expensive training run but yeah we obviously need a lot of access to gpu's to make that happen the funding helps with that but even if you have the funding today you still need to get access to gpu's and gpu prices are increasing steadily so i think what we're going to see is more and more investors collaborating with their portfolio companies companies around compute bringing up gpu capacity distributing it among the portfolio companies maybe some of them need a little bit more in one month than others and so on and so forth and it's a new kind of strategy that we're seeing i think to deal with the fact that compute prices are going up this much scarcity yeah

[Jordi]

would you say that's like one of the biggest sort of challenges for for river at this point is just compute planning i mean we've seen it we've seen the full spectrum now we've seen sam last year you know getting really really really aggressive and then we saw you know earlier this year anthropic just sort of being caught off guard by the growth and it feels like that is as as a ceo you know you're you know it's a completely new

[John]

skill set for yeah it's like a

[Jordi]

new it's a it was never a

[John]

moment where mark benioff was like i don't have enough servers for salesforce i imagine there were way different problem set but now it's demand planning is like a key skill set for a ceo

[Igor Pavushkin]

exactly it's a totally new skill set that's super important and it's so difficult because as a startup by definition you have this variance for the future you don't know if you're going to go by ten x or if you're going to go by three x over the next twelve months so you have to play this really really difficult poker game to figure out what is the right allocation for me or maybe create some deals that are more flexible so you can actually scale up dynamically as the demand is growing so i think we're going to see more and more of that happening and yeah so we're bringing up quite a bit of gpu capacity and it's really important both for research and also to power the api so as more people are starting to tune their own models it's becoming very very popular now a lot of companies are reaching out about wanting to build their own custom models that they own and trying to turn on their own data using their own evals so demand is going to keep going up how do

[John]

you think about custom silicon over the next few years youtube i believe has a custom silicon chip for encoding video very efficiently because you upload one video they need it in three hundred sixty p four hundred eighty seven hundred and twenty four k hd and then we saw talus bake the weights of llama i believe into their chip and prove that that was you know exciting enough that amd acquired the company and i'm wondering if you imagine a future where a company comes to you like you know you can imagine like the visa network is like we want to run a transformer based model on every transaction and it's going to be like trillions of prompts effectively or more and so custom silicon might actually make sense but then the models jump forward and you can do batches and there's there's so many different trade offs how do you think custom silicon will play in the diffusion story of ai yeah i think

[Igor Pavushkin]

we'll see more and more custom silicon obviously companies like nvidia and amd also going to do extremely well especially on the training side yeah that's really unmatched what they're what they're able to do on the inference side there is some room for optimization because we believe that with personal ai agents coming up so this is kind of the next evolution of agents after coding agents which have been super successful we expect that the demand for tokens will go up even further so to the point where we don't even know how we're going to serve all these tokens for everyone given limited data center capacity given all the bottlenecks in the data center supply chain so i think we got to be smart and start to develop some custom silicon specifically for inference of these personal ai agents i could imagine being much more power efficient with these kinds of chips can we maybe bake some of the transformer architecture into the chip to kind of exploit the fact that we know what kinds of models we're going to run so that will make it more specialized you might not be able to run any kind of model anymore so thales takes that to the extreme so you can actually make the model weights but today you're not able to fit weights of very large models on a single chip that way so that's the big bottleneck so you're only able to do maybe eight eight billion parameters or something like that whereas the best models have trillions of params so hopefully we're going to see some chips that are able to run those top of the line models very very efficiently do

[Jordi]

we need more neo labs or you know basically like are there is there enough idea space that you know more people should be spinning up entirely new labs i imagine a lot of the people that would be candidates to spin up labs themselves you're probably trying to recruit but are we past peak neolab or are we just getting started

[Igor Pavushkin]

hopefully we're just getting started because this idea of building powerful coding agents having apis and so on we all had this a few years ago at openai and other places that that would be the future but now that it's actually arrived i think all of us are feeling like this can be the end of the line there has to be a different way to own and build ai systems and that means there are opportunities for research there are opportunities for new kinds of business models totally new talents can move in somebody who doesn't have a big name and ai can do something really amazing today because they have to kind of have to think out of the box come up with something that the ai experts that's doing it for ten years they might not come up with it because it's such a wild idea i think we're going to see a phase of innovation totally new approaches to how ai systems are built how you make use of them and some really cool products as well for consumers so that's what i'm looking forward

[John]

to the most yeah what an exciting time well congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time to come

[Jordi]

chat with us excited for the next

[John]

one yeah we'll talk to you soon you guys cheers to your day goodbye let me tell you about mongodb what's the only thing faster than the ai market your business on mongodb don't just build i own the data platform that powers it our next guest is the founder of core weave we have brandon mcphee coming back on the show after an insane q two congratulations give us the headline numbers how'd you do in q two q two was phenomenal beat

[Brandon McPhee]

for us right that couldn't have come in better we're extremely excited with the performance of the business and balance of the year is just going to keep

[John]

on improving from here what's the biggest bottleneck now for you is anything changing based on all the data that you've collected over the first half of the

[Brandon McPhee]

year no like bottleneck remains split chain right like that is the hardest part of this business and it's also what we're best at right we have fifty one data centers in operation today we know how to navigate this supply chain we know how to get this stuff online delivered to clients do so on time it's immensely challenging right this is the most important commodity on the planet right now and core weave is singular in its ability to deliver the best performing infrastructure out there mm

[Jordi]

you guys are spending a lot of time doing demand planning demand is obviously off the charts what are you we just had igor on from from river we were talking with him about this sort of like new skill set that that technology founders need to have around demand planning right you have a let's say you have a neo lab you're developing products it's very hard to gauge how much demand you're going to have for them the right strategy over the last couple of years was just to assume that demand was near infinite and sort of plan against that but for smaller companies that have smaller balance sheets it really feels like that is going to make or break a lot of these companies especially neo labs that yeah that you know their margin profiles and all these other factors are going to come down to how well they can predict their own their own demand for their products

[Brandon McPhee]

yeah i completely align with that sentiment but i'd probably take it a step further like what happens after that demand is planned for it's how do you finance it right and for us that's been just an absolutely critical skill set that we've assembled team wise over the last six years and the latest financing that we did ddtl five was a term loan b offering i thought was a fantastic example of that ability to work with demand planning and get the right financing in place for that demand that was the first facility that we've done where the contract duration is actually shorter than the amortization period right in other words it asks the investors in that facility to take on renewal risk on compute versus all of our prior facilities investors were fully covered by the original contract value right it was a five billion dollars loan there was seven billion dollars worth of revenue sitting behind it right now it's opposite like it flipped and what that enables us to do is to spend more time in the shorter duration contract market because we just proved that it's financeable and for us that type of client is predominantly enterprise right the ai lab cohort the hyperscale cloud cohort they like to sit in the five to six year range because they know that they need that compute they need a scale they need it for that long duration enterprise is at the shorter end of that curve and as you guys know historically we've been really focused on the longer duration contracts but having this proof point in the market now that we can go finance these shorter duration contracts is really important to us so i think that goes hand in hand with the demand

[John]

planning aspect there's a ton of hyperscalers i mean that have been building data centers for a long time there's a ton of neo clouds how are you positioning differentiation i imagine that demand is so strong that it's not the biggest thorn in your side by any means means explaining the value but it feels like it always has to be in the back of your mind as if demand ever softens we want to be differentiated we want to be differentiated in a market that's tight on demand so how are you positioning core weave specifically

[Brandon McPhee]

look i think it's widely recognized by our clients by third party analysts by our suppliers even that we are the best representation of this technology on the planet so that demonstration of value will continue to be through our technology product it'll be through our timeliness and deliveries our ability to scale across all different types of workloads whether it's training fine tuning inference it'll be in delivering the best performance adjusted flops and token tokens

[John]

out there jensen was on cnbc recently talking about a five hundred billion deal with a lot of big banks what was your interpretation of what that deal means for the industry overall where that project is going and how corey fits into that story i think it's wonderful

[Brandon McPhee]

for the space right it just continues to show the amount of capital that's willing to underwrite the build out of intelligence as you guys know we've been at the forefront of financing this market for years i think having more capital in here is just great for the

[John]

sector how have you been coaching people through there's some folks that are like i'm worried this is like dot com comma there's other people that i'm worried about this being like the mortgage you know boom what what pieces are different this time what pieces are okay we are actually borrowing from this particular build out a lot of people go to railroad roads there was you know a huge amount of value created there were booms and busts in various times what how are you dealing with the various critics of the build out so one

[Brandon McPhee]

of those points i feel like we talked about this last time i was on i believe was depreciation or useful life of compute and you know the the variable that we were able to introduce and highlight in our earnings is the a one hundred skew yeah right this is a twenty twenty sku and we still have clients coming in asking specifically for that sku right so like they're asking for hopper and like oh we only have ampere or they're asking for blackwell we only have ampere right like they're saying no we want ampere for workloads because that is the most performant platform for their workload and we signed a contract in the quarter that goes out through twenty twenty nine right that that is now an implicit so

[Jordi]

be a nine year old chip by

[Brandon McPhee]

the end nine year nine year chip right and this is a take or pay fixed term fixed price contract and pricing on a one hundreds for us have held solid since early twenty twenty five yep right it's like i think one of those big criticisms was well this is two or three year compute and it's useless after that we've been very consistent that six year depreciable life is accurate for this infrastructure and i think that there is really strong opportunity for it to have material useful life beyond that we see it every day right and it's it's just in the way that ai workloads are being optimized across different skus and it's this concept like there isn't one ai model to rule them all there is one gpu to rule them all it's just this matrix of different sizes of workloads relative to different sizes of gpu's where it's

[John]

filling in across yeah my thesis has been that there are ai workloads that get that get built out maybe a recommender system a basic text transformation system a translation system and then those will stay in place for a really long time and those will be used by more intelligent models but then there is the question of just will the chips burn out has any any thought change there or is that pretty well understood

[Brandon McPhee]

right like this stuff is meant to run the data center it's meant to run for long duration we're not seeing any acceleration of burnout or unexpected rates of errors the infrastructure is doing great

[Jordi]

yeah that makes sense what is going on on the power side i imagine there's a lot of people over the last year that have realized how important power is to this whole build out and are trying to front run players like yourself and get access to that power in hopes that they can resell it i imagine the utilities are somewhat sophisticated and at this point and hopefully for a while we'll just call around and try to go directly to the operators but what is actually what can you share about like the current dynamics around that that hunt for power i

[Brandon McPhee]

would say the power market is very competitive but there is power out there right and the bottleneck is less electrons for us it's more of powered shell right or like delivered data center capacity and that goes all the way down to the components that are in the data center right like think of the backup battery supply eyes transformers etcetera but it's also the people right electricians is a skilled trade that is significant bottleneck for the industry has been for some time will continue to be for some time because that's a trade that takes years to develop skill sets necessary to be able to work in a datacenter site so i believe that that is going to remain more the bottleneck than power is right now you're look absolutely correct i can't cap the number of emails i get a day from people i've never met before trying to offer powered land and all across the us but i that is less of the bottleneck and it's more on delivered powered

[John]

shell capacity are you hiring electricians directly or does this go through subcontractors for specific projects this predominantly goes through subcontractors

[Brandon McPhee]

subcontractors we have a little bit of self built ourselves where we're going out and sourcing gcs contractors etcetera but for the most part we lease capacity and that's been the way that we've scaled

[John]

business i imagine that there's a lot of folks in the organization that are technologists they understand the technology and the hardware and the software and how everything pieces together what are the other areas that you're hiring if somebody wants to join the core weave organization that draws from a different pool of human capital or talent

[Brandon McPhee]

going back to the point originally financing right it's deeply important to the business you know we've we've done a fantastic job assembling team up in new york we've raised i think it's north of forty billion dollars in debt and equity over the last twenty four

[John]

months yes and are you pulling people from wall street investment banking hedge funds consulting private equity like all of the

[Brandon McPhee]

above yeah i'd say predominantly private equity private credit investment banking guys like deep financial backgrounds yeah yeah but look we're hiring across the business right it's engineering it's physical deployment teams i think we're it is our hr organization is doing a great job let's put it that

[John]

way yeah busy how domestic is the footprint there's a lot of nervousness about the build out in america and my default interpretation would be if there's a lot of pushback in america like people don't mind waiting five hundred milliseconds for llm responses so yeah you can put them in space but you can also put them in another country how are you thinking about the international opportunity i

[Brandon McPhee]

think that's right but i'll qualify more on the county level right like we're getting pushback the whole industry is getting pushback at the county level in some places but that ultimately doesn't change the fact that the demand is there right getting county level pushback state level pushback it just means that it's going to be built elsewhere because the demand for ai is the strongest it has ever been the roi on ai is the strongest that it ever has been as well i mean inference is is absolutely profitable for our client base which means that there's going to keep coming back to core we products we're in canada we're in europe we recently announced an expansion into apac as well i expect for us to keep keep moving globally but keep a focus on domestic deployments

[John]

how strong is the correlation between social media pushback and and county level pushback at like a city council meeting because i feel like there's sometimes a big disconnect where something can go viral maybe it has some misinformation gets one hundred thousand likes but then the actual county and the residents are fine with what's going on and it's sort of this like getting mad on behalf of someone but do you see a correlation between a story or a news article that happens in this particular area and then there is actual movement on the ground at the local politics level look i'd

[Brandon McPhee]

say it's very specific to the sites right like we we are engaged in conversations where wherever the local communities would like to understand the value that we're

[John]

bringing to that region yeah that makes sense jordy anything else not for now congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time big one thanks guys

[Jordi]

for your day great to see you

[John]

goodbye let me tell you about shopify shopify is the commerce platform that goes with you business lets you sell in seconds online in store on mobile on social on marketplaces and now with ai

[Jordi]

agents it's very interesting it feels like one of core weaves and some of the other neo cloud's advantages is to just be able to be completely out of the politics and like the drama of ai right like oh yeah all of the labs hyperscalers and all these companies like they have financial relationships they have personal relationships some of them some of them hate each other and want each other dead core weave can kind of sit there like switzerland and be like anyone need tokens yeah yeah that's

[Sonia Wong]

true

[John]

when a niche hit tweet fails to bang james heel shares a quote from peter j when a sub editor complained that the times columns were too close complex peter j famously replied i only write this for three people the editor of the times the chancellor of the exchequer and the governor of the bank of england true not quite audience of one but audience of three mentality i think it's a good way to stay sane if you're posting online you probably don't want to be too sucked into the algorithm although this went mega viral i don't know anyway we have our next guest garrett langley from flock safety he's the founder and ceo he's been on the show before and we're very excited to talk to him about the latest news garrett how are you

[Garrett Langley]

doing he's back good how are you

[John]

guys we're good welcome back to the show thank you so much for joining

[Jordi]

i saw anything been happening since the last time you came on the show

[John]

i saw that you can imagine pretty

[Jordi]

chill imagine well let's kick it off

[John]

with the with the report in the journal flock ads privacy guardrails after surveillance backlash what happened what are you actually implementing what is the story yeah i

[Garrett Langley]

mean there's two big buckets right you've kind of got privacy and then accountability and i can start with accountability because i think that's the bigger topic or i think it's the bigger topic which is lo and behold law enforcement abuses their power at times and that's horrible right i mean it's it's really bad and we built a tool about four months ago as a as a test to kind of scan the audit logs that we've always had to look for abnormal behavior you know we solved a million crimes last year we know what good investigations look like we built this tool and the headlines over the last few weeks show you that we're pretty good at finding abuse and i thought this was maybe just an isolated to us but what i found out is like when law enforcement searches dmv they search criminal records there's no audit logs there there's no accountability so we launched that and i think you're going to see over the coming weeks more headlines of officers being arrested for abusing their position of power so that's the where

[John]

does that actual where does the oversight board live is this a separate product that's sold to like a district attorney effectively or like because if the person's like yeah i checked the audit logs i was behaving poorly that doesn't really do anything to stop the process right

[Garrett Langley]

no yeah so it's a free product that all of our customers are now required to use which we're the only company that i'm aware of in this industry that requires their customers to actually hold themselves accountable for most of our cities we work with there's a police administrator and then a city manager that is reviewing the audit log so in the hopefully unlikely event that the police chief himself is the one committing a crime the city manager is still there

[John]

as the double check yeah so the business has grown a ton and obviously flock products are deployed all over the united states i'm interested in the backlash that has grown you see a lot of videos with a lot of social media attention negative towards flock is this actually showing up in your financials at this point because i imagine you have to replace any camera that is destroyed but i can't tell if there's just one camera that's destroyed and then a million people view it and like it

[Garrett Langley]

yeah no vandalism is real it's always been real though just like weather has been a problem you know we deploy these products in florida and there's hurricanes in california and there's earthquakes and so we're used to that i mean if you looked at the data you'd be hard pressed to say when did this tiktok trend blow up sure you know i'd say the sad part to me is you've got these influencers on tiktok and instagram pushing this and they're convincing these sixteen eighteen twenty year old guys to go do it and they're committing felonies yeah and so i saw this guy that got arrested in new mexico and he's gonna face five to nine years in jail wow and i'm like that's horrible this guy's life is over he's got a felony on his record he's going to jail to cut a camera down it just seems really crazy

[John]

so one thing that i've been identifying is it feels like there is a gap particularly between liking a post on tiktok or engaging with anti flock or the deflock campaign and maybe even going out in the world and chopping one down versus at least trying to go to your city council meeting because i just have to imagine i've been to social city council meetings if there's fifty people there that are all taking the podium and saying look i am a citizen and i don't want flock in my city city council will usually respond to that is that is that disconnect real like what is going on there

[Garrett Langley]

yeah i mean look it's surprising to me too because you know city councils are normally pretty boring meetings and there's really only two topics that are being debated right now which is data centers and flock interesting and you guys probably have better tools than i do you can look at social media traffic and they're fully correlated which makes me wonder like why like why because i've been asked this question why now and i'm like i don't know we've been in business for almost a decade you know we went to thousands of city council meetings every year over like ten thousand last year we're not hiding anything yeah

[Jordi]

but no i mean to be honest i think like when you like i think a large part of it is like well everyone's been talked to about ai safety one way or another right it might have been a viral clip of sam altman talking about ai in twenty fifteen that gets resurfaced and like an instagram reel today and people assume that it was said today and the clip was out of context but you have to look at like i think people are like very scared of the technology overall which i think is fair because they've been told to be scared in a variety of different ways and then they're using ai in their life or in their work and that's cool but data centers present something that's like a data center in your backyard doesn't necessarily give you an immediate benefit and it could have some real downsides like noise or potential there's all these sort of possible negative externalities and then flock it's like when you when you know dario talked talked a lot earlier this year about ai getting getting so good at looking over sort of like vast quantities of data and maybe maybe the law is not sort of like staying you know moving quickly enough to respond to that and so like flock is like a very i can see exactly why people are fixated on that because the product is clearly very very good at fighting crime but then also also if you are a bad actor it's like the dream like basically tool set right it's literally like in a video game like god mode right and so i think like there's like very real i can see why there's like a correlation but i don't know if this is where you're going but i don't necessarily think it's like some organized nefarious group that is like we want to shut down we want to shut down these two technologies so anyways no i

[Garrett Langley]

think there's some truth i think the other thing that i think is true is as i was asking someone aren't you afraid of all the data brokers that buy your location data and sell it and they're like well i can't see it and i can see your camera i think it's like a valid point which is you drive by flat camera and you say well i see it i say i feel a lot safer and some people might say oh i feel like you know this is big brother and i go it's like but big brother wouldn't have an audit log and wouldn't have transparency and wouldn't do these things but i do think a lot of a lot of the feedback is fair you know which is like how long should this be stored and i think the thing we got wrong was expecting local government and state government to follow along fast enough and i just i don't think they are in this accountability measure like no states require this they all should and like we dropped our data retention recommendation from thirty days to seven days which means the majority of our customers will just simply accept the default sure and state regulators have moved to twenty one days but like we've done the analysis and we think we'll have a you know ten percent reduction in efficacy with that reduction but i think it's a fair trade off and look if the government wants to say like in new jersey it's a mandate five years of data retention that's up to the state of new jersey to decide we'll push for what we think is right but i might agree with dario there in that case like regulation is a good thing for this type of technology and it needs to move faster not slower yeah

[John]

it seems like the speed of regulation is a huge issue here because the technology moves moves much faster and i think folks on the left feel like they could be attacked by people on the right and vice versa and so if there's a new technology that rolls out like mid cycle all of a sudden you're grappling with it and your worst fears on the on sort of like the extremes of the political spectrum are that they will be used by the opposing side aggressively against you even if you are innocent and i think that's where a lot of this is coming from what do you think yeah

[Garrett Langley]

no i think that's true i think the other thing and i don't know who gets credit for saying this as a technology industry we still feel like we're this bubble this small part of the economy and the reality technology is the economy now and i don't think as founders and ceo's we've fully grappled with what that means and i think about someone like jamie dimon he has so much influence over our fiscal systems and i think he probably understands that responsibility because banking has always had this kind of austere posture of their responsibility in the world and i think as technologists we're catching up and i think i'm in that same boat of we helped a million crimes last year last month we did one thousand twenty five missing peoples that's real human life there's a real responsibility with that impact and i'm glad we're catching up we're not done we still have a lot of work to do but i think if i look around the table my other peers in public safety i think we all have a lot of work to

[Jordi]

do yeah i think yeah there's been a very real positive impact of the product and i think people have every reason to also be concerned because even with these guardrails in place and audits you have even if you assume like a very even a half a percent of police officers in the us are corrupt in some way or not shouldn't be in these organizations that's still thousands of bad actors that are in the system and so i think one of the challenges that i see is like i feel like this is like too much of an too big of an issue for just you and the flock exec team to be to be in charge of right like i think you're you're very smart i think this company was started for for all the right reasons i think it is having a positive impact in many ways like you said but at the same time like this is a national issue right now you know you're not elected it's not your job to decide you know american like privacy and so i think like my question is like what is happening at the national level obviously counties and cities and states are trying to figure this out but i feel like this issue is like beyond i don't feel like this issue should be decided by you i think it should be decided by our lawmakers because it comes down to our fundamental rights as american citizens so i actually i want this the issue is just blown up on on social media but i think it's time to like have a much more of a national kind of conversation about this and then ultimately probably new laws put into place to make sure something that you can point to and just say like look like we are abiding by the law in our country and our lawmakers who were and the correct path

[John]

to push back on flock is through the democratic process exactly call your representative that does feel like the correct outcome

[Garrett Langley]

that feels very self obvious and it is interesting i was getting saw someone pushed on x like you should require a warrant to use your product and the response that i wanted to make was yes when it is the law to need a warrant we will happily follow the law that forty courts in the last few years have all deemed this isn't a violation of the constitution interesting and this is tricky though because every state every city has a very different point of view on what safety looks like i mean you look at you guys hometown in san francisco san francisco's own version of safety has also changed a lot in the last decade totally and i think it's a better version today than it was five years ago but it's still changed and it'll probably change again and so it is a pretty tricky situation from setting the right laws because i struggle to see how the federal government could establish a law that matches everyone's goals and so my hope is like states we had nine state bills get passed this year i'd love to see twenty or thirty next year that at least start to move this in the right direction because i do worry like any federal regulation will just make half the country mad the other other half the country just

[John]

as bad in in theory like city even city by city there is a i think people might misunderstand that flock doesn't put up the cameras they sell them to police departments the cameras in those police departments have heads that are elected in many cases right there's like a sheriff that gets elected people who

[Garrett Langley]

get to pick that they vote for

[John]

but at the same time i'm sympathetic to someone that basically thinks you put them up because it is not opaque process many americans cannot tell you the names of everyone on their city council and who the mayor is and all these things or when the election is and how how solidified that particular mayor is and whether or not they can actually apply pressure around this issue it can take years to actually facilitate change in a community and if you're in the minority that might never happen for that particular community but yeah yeah i

[Jordi]

was referencing earlier was like more like friction like we there's historically been security cameras around in a lot of places that could get access to the footage but there was a lot of friction to doing that sure oh yeah which is good and bad right yeah it's good in that a bad actor is going to have a tougher time like putting together footage in order to understand someone's movement but again yeah yeah everyone's

[John]

comfortable with like there was an assassination attempt on the president we should look at all the cctv cameras but then all of a sudden when it's like okay now there's going to be an ai agent that's watching you jordi if you speed at any point during your commute you're gonna get a point on your license it just feels like an annoying society that a lot of people don't want to live in and then there's a whole continuum there and we're grappling with the potential for way way a way higher level of enforcement and way less of a gray area around our rule set and our laws which is something that the laws might need to change or we might need to adapt to i don't know i agree

[Garrett Langley]

and i think to your point like the i have a lot of sympathy for our elected officials at the local level because they now need to become experts in ai public safety data centers water like it's it's a like and these are most of these times these are part time unpaid positions yeah they're normally lawyers doctors real estate agents in their communities and so i mean they sign up for the job but it is it's not straightforward and you know we're we're we like the way the system works today where every one of our contracts goes to city council for vote that makes the job harder but makes it transparent like i saw the other day you know i was able to find the video from six years ago when we did our first ever city council meeting and how nervous we were because we'd never been to city council like what would that be like and i've never been to city council and now it is kind of just a part of our regular day yeah

[Jordi]

what's next because these updates are good but i don't think they solve i don't think millions of americans are still going to have are basically probably not going to read the updates and are still going to have an issue so what's on the roadmap what more are you doing to try to find a solution to the concerns and the issues

[Garrett Langley]

yeah i mean i don't think we'll ever be done because i think this balance of privacy and safety is a bit of a moving target someone asked me the other day you know wouldn't it just be better just to turn off all the cameras when i said maybe thirty years ago when every single police department was fully staffed maybe even overstaffed in today's standards but today more than eighty percent of police departments are understaffed so i don't think you know a draconian no more technology is a viable solution but i do think as a technologist we have an opportunity to make better products that deliver on that kind of combined goal and so for us like we're excited to get this these tools out there into the wild you know i anxiously await potential headlines of more arrests in the coming days i think that'll happen and that'll be tough because i think a lot of trust in communities will be broken i think that trust was broken many years ago and now light's being shined on it but i think for us we're going to continue building tools that allow law enforcement to both do their job and build trust with the community at the same time so we've got a lot of stuff coming up a few more announcements coming up in the coming months and we'd love to come back and share those when they're ready yeah

[John]

that'd be great thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us yeah don't every possible take is being enumerated it's a very interesting

[Garrett Langley]

you want to switch jobs yeah yeah

[Jordi]

yeah i don't think anyone in technology envies envy is your job right now but the consequence of being consequential is

[Garrett Langley]

what i tell the team yep yeah

[John]

that's accurate well have a great rest

[Jordi]

of your day good to see you

[John]

garrett thank you so much for the update and explaining everything we'll talk to you soon cheers have a good one we've been keeping sonia wong from sequoia capital waiting too long she's a general partner she's been on the show it'd

[Jordi]

be great to just talk about great to just talk about venture capital capital

[John]

for a little bit well now we get to back to ai back to hey guys how's it going how's it

[Sonia Wong]

going good to see you again we haven't seen each other in a while

[John]

congrats on the acquisition thank you thank you great to see you yeah so temperature check what's going on with this ai thing is there anything there temperature

[Sonia Wong]

check oh my gosh there is absolutely something there the numbers we're seeing from these companies yeah never seen anything like

[John]

it before for but interestingly it's less of a power i mean there's power law companies anthropic openai there's a lot of companies that are doing really great but then there's also this diffuse community of like neo labs and neo clouds and so many different application layer stuff where you're seeing just really solid business fundamentals that previously would take a decade to build up you're seeing it in

[Sonia Wong]

two to three years totally the anthropic and openai and xai are growing at a point pace that nobody has ever seen before but even if you remove them this next cohort of companies rv open evidence glean factory they're growing at rates that we've just never seen before one of the most interesting things that's happening right now is we used to have this separation in our heads of there's the foundation model companies and then there's the application companies and i would say one of the most interesting things that's happening now is that all the application companies are starting to build their own research capabilities their own labs and it's kind of like this concept of democratized intelligence so i would say it's not only revenue that's not just accruing only the first at the top two players it's the production of intelligence itself seems like it's very much democratizing yeah

[Jordi]

we were i don't know when dylan was on maybe it was last week but dylan from figma we were talking to him i was like i want to figma to work on the problem of yeah basically slop is like has been this like you know it's been slop has been getting better and better but you know it's basically like you have a new breakthrough and then for two months it's like wow it's so good now and then you realize that it can only do like one style over and over and over and i feel like there's all these application layer companies that are in such a great position to work on some of these fundamental problems that for better or worse the labs are not able to focus enough on maybe it's only a billion dollar revenue opportunity if you're a lab and you're adding billions of dollars of revenue a month with your core business why would you work on a problem like that and so i think there's so many examples of that from from figma to some of the other ones

[Sonia Wong]

you mentioned totally and i think if you look at it from the perspective of the startups there's just this huge wave towards companies wanting to own their intelligence and i think a smaller set of companies has been beating this drum for a long time like i'm on the board of fireworks their tagline is own your intelligence so they've been advertising this for a long time obviously cursor went on the journey two years ago of starting to train their own models but what's happening now is like both the giants and the ecosystem are starting to speak up and the startups are actually getting extremely good at building their own research so in terms of giants you have people like alex karp talking about sovereign intelligence he has this phrase own the means of production which i freaking love satya talking about your proprietary data jensen champion open weight so you have all these giants of the ecosystem speaking up of like hey guys you should own your intelligence and then if you look at it from the perspective of the little guys the startups who we are in the business of backing a couple of years ago they were primarily looking at you know moving moving some of their intelligence towards these open weight models primarily as a cost rationalization exercise the thing that's different now is like it is an existential and strategic imperative for them and so there's this there's this phrase you guys probably remember this from the crypto days not your keys not your crypto yeah this idea of like if somebody else is custodying your weights for you i don't testing your keys for you it's not yours because something could happen to that brokerage something could happen there and i think like i think the version of this meme is not your weights not your products because fundamentally if you don't own the weights if you are just making an api call you don't have ownership you don't have steerability the data file doesn't accrue to you and so like people are kind of waking up to this and so if your use case is like you want a coding agent for that i'd say close model close agents that's fantastic if it is like your core product i think companies are increasingly waking up to like not my

[John]

wake up it's what you sell to your customers it should be exactly that makes a lot of sense founder office hours coach me through you're on the board of my hypothetical company software company using ai five hundred million rr let's say and i and i buy this thesis and i come to you confident

[Jordi]

example there one hundred not bad there we go we're cooking we're cooking no

[John]

no no i mean like we have we have fully made it through we're you know an ai winner we're accelerating growing growth is great but i come to you and i say okay i'm all in we're going to own our intelligence stack is there a moment where we need to a have conversation about what the talent budget will be i mean we saw these crazy msl deals and for a lot of these companies they might be unicorns they might even be decoctions but they're not going to be able to staff a team of ai researchers and build a full neo lab doing like next generation fundamental research so what does the team build out actually look like is it enough to take your your best software engineers and have them them use coding agents to fine tune models for your team or are you hiring entirely new disciplines what is the correct shape of an internal ai lab at a successful scaled unicorn decacorn software company yeah so typically you're

[Sonia Wong]

not going to be pre training your own models there are specific use cases where you actually need to pre train models that's a totally different thing if what you are doing is trying to take off the shelf open weight models and then adapt them and make them really really excellent for your domain that's a much larger talent pool and what we've seen is there's actually two flavors of talent that are really good at this one is people that have done post training before okay so the post training teams at the labs are very very large at this point sure there's plenty of these people floating around and then the the second profile is actually interesting is just like engineer i guess just generally smart person smart person poker stuff is actually not that hard and like part of the reason it's even possible for all these companies have their own labs now is because the actual post training stack has matured so it used to be that only openai and anthropic had the infrastructure in house to to be able to do things like post training reinforcement learning especially but now you have companies like fireworks that gives you the post training infrastructure you have langchain that gives you the evals you have trajectory that helps with the continual learning you have you have mercur that helps you with the data factory stuff and so all these components now exist and so if you as a generally smart person see the menu of opportunities you can actually cobble together your own research stack in a way that wasn't possible a couple of years ago and so to give you a sense very very small teams can get very far the harvey team has put out i think pretty extraordinary research they're they're they just put an entire rl environment last week their benchmark is state of the art for legal and their their entire research team is seven people so you can get very very far we're definitely not you know you're not competing with with meta or openai for size of

[John]

talent budget here what about one click down i don't want to invest in building the team owning the stack entirely there are neo labs that will show up and fine tune a model for me is that is that the domain of growth stage startups or is that product going to be more consumed by enterprises that maybe don't have the dna to just move a bunch of amazing engineers over to do a post training stack and spin up and roll their own but the neolab offers i'm thinking of like a thinking machines tinker like what happened with ray dalio's fund and how they were able to fine tune a model get really good results that feels like its own new market of like post training as a service fine tuning as a service but how does that piece in is there a world where you don't necessarily necessarily have a relationship with mercur but your third party

[Sonia Wong]

does yeah look this is a huge huge ecosystem and a huge market because i think everyone sees the opportunity of you know you obviously like the closed model inference market will always be gigantic yeah but i think the open model inference market is becoming very large and for companies to actually be able to make use of open weight models there is a maturation process there is a hand holding process there is an entire like come work with us we will forward deploy people onto your staff to help you go on that journey and so there's lots of options fireworks has a fantastic team for this mercore has a fantastic team for this it kind of depends on the specific problem you have so the specific problem you have is hey i really want to do reinforcement learning on my online data fireworks is fantastic for this if you're like hey i can't train on my customer data i need to get my model really really good for this specific domain can we create a bunch of synthetic data around this opportunity mercur is fantastic for us so it kind of depends on the use case generally i think that it's like really important it's an end like companies need to have extremely smart people in charge of this in house this can't be something you outsource like your lunch menu outsourcing right this is so core and so you need to have smart people in charge deciding on your strategy deciding on your technical roadmap and then making judgment calls of which parts of the stack you want to outsource to others which parts of the stack you want to lean on others for harvey's actually done a really good job of this they lean on pretty much all of the five or six new labs i just mentioned as their partners but you need to intentionally own it and over time just like we saw cursor go on this journey i think a lot of application companies will go on the same journey that cursor did over time you become more and more incompetent more competent in house and you bring more of that expertise

[Jordi]

in house sure sure how are you processing the current price war you have sort of the lagging labs starting to compete more on price you have leading labs trying to make sure that they have competitive models at every part of the curve but yeah anyways what's your take and and where does this go

[Sonia Wong]

look i think jevons paradox not to be an annoying vc but devin's paradox is a freaking wonderful thing because what's happening is like i see the data from all this stuff right from oh there we go bam look our companies we see the margins going their gross margins going up because at the same time as like ai usage is going way up but their gross margins are also going up because they are the beneficiaries of intelligence getting cheaper and cheaper to meet either on the other hand i see this from fireworks i see this from the model companies we're in business with their cohorts are getting better and better and better so it's not like they're facing price competition and their businesses are going into the gutter they have phenomenal businesses where because they're able to provide intelligence at increasingly cheap prices their businesses actually get better and better so i actually think this is an

[Jordi]

everybody wins situation yeah part of the part of the challenge with i feel like x trying to process the price wars and how open source is fitting into all this is that when you have anthropic and openai still as private companies people just don't have the visibility and they don't realize that even with great open source models and even pricing price cuts across different providers you're still seeing that just massively accelerating revenue and it's not like it's not like the biggest customers aren't aware that open source exists and it's good and they are using it in a bunch of different ways so i think it'll be very yeah yeah it's an and yeah and i think it'll be very helpful when more of these players are public just so that everybody has the same access to information yeah totally agree thank you

[John]

so much for coming on the show

[Jordi]

let's do it again soon great to see you guys do it again soon great to see you we'll talk to

[John]

you goodbye let me tell you about public dot com investing for those who take it seriously they got stocks options bonds crypto treasuries with great customer service you ready for this next one jordy you're gonna love this company they put a brain in a vat basically really yeah we have sean cole from parasma he's the founder this is first time on the show sean how you doing

[Sean Cole]

hi guys thanks for having me welcome

[John]

to the show is brain in the vat appropriate or is that derogatory should i stay away from characterizing your company that way i think it's pretty good i think it's pretty good okay take us through it introduce the company introduce

[Sean Cole]

yourself so i'm sean i'm the founder ceo of prasma and we are training brain cells for compute so previously i think you guys might have seen we made brain cells play doom and we just launched like literally just launched and we got these cells to do token prediction so kind of the basis for

[Jordi]

language modeling that's amazing okay so how many cells do you need because many people have said that i have seemingly only a few brain cells and so how many brain cells do you actually need in order to do x token

[John]

prediction i can predict tokens all day with just a few brain cells it's no problem so seems like an easy

[Sean Cole]

job for you not that many so we're renting some brain cells out we're using about two hundred thousand brain cells to do token prediction and it's good

[John]

enough are these literally like donor brain cells from cadavers or are you growing them your brain cells stem cells like where are they coming from walk me through the full process what's your supply

[Sean Cole]

chain i think you got it exactly so we're using sort of stem cells and we're taking these stem cells differentiating them into different types of human neurons and putting those in a dish that we can stimulate and get responses from

[John]

basically okay and then you said you're able to do next token prediction i imagine that you're not anywhere near the frontier but how are you actually benchmarking like what is capable because this is probably all predicated on a very extreme exponential kicking in at some point but where actually are we in terms of

[Sean Cole]

progress i think so i'm going to give a pretty funny example which is it's currently at this current stage the token prediction is basically is this a hot dog or is this not a hot dog type of token prediction it's

[Jordi]

pretty basic well can you say say you're alive and then it says i'm alive yeah we could get it to

[John]

do that you could okay i think

[Sean Cole]

fundamentally what we've done is we've proved that these types of sequential context based architectures with electrical stimulation are a viable architecture on these biological substrates we had a specific example where it was a nonlinear task so let's say that to refer to context early in the sentence and if we used a linear decoder so traditional silicon it could only maximally get seventy five percent mathematically but we got above that so we got seventy eight percent we beat silicon on this very constrained task because it was able to model these kind of nonlinear dynamics in context

[Jordi]

how long do the cells actually last before you need to replenish

[Sean Cole]

them so i think currently they last six months but of course i think human brain cells last far longer like one hundred years eighty years so i think the goal obviously is to kind of extend them for as long as

[Jordi]

possible yeah my brain you were kind of getting at this but but not fully so why do this i have some ideas of why you might but it seems like kind of a hassle so you got to have a good reason is it like idea what do you have against silicon okay i'm assuming like there's like is it energy efficiency

[John]

yeah yeah yeah yeah play it out if this goes the way you want it to go is there actually a benefit over just a huge data center or something in space with the solar panel on it feels like the current chip stack the ai stack is is pretty efficient we've squeezed out a lot of the inefficiencies of being a human

[Sean Cole]

potentially yeah i think that's where it's really interesting because you know regardless of how efficient we make silicon like silicon we have right now is supremely efficient but we still haven't solved the efficiency aspect of it in terms of power efficiency i think human brains are extremely power efficient in comparison to silicon i think there are things that we can harness there on top of other stuff like sample efficiency human brains learn very quickly compared to silicon much fewer examples and continual learning is free on biological substrates because they keep learning over time but i think continual learning is something that has to be expanded on in the ai space we're still figuring out what's the optimal approach to use but yeah massive massive energy efficiency how do

[John]

you actually think about that energy efficiency though because i've seen i mean there was that that news of like five thousand dollars worth of soul tokens solved a bunch of math problems when i think about like not even the salary of a of a mathematician but i just think about the food that goes into generating the calories that generates the energy that generates the theorems from a mathematician you're way above five k so it feels like the models are actually pretty pretty efficient but what am i getting wrong i think if you think

[Sean Cole]

about the cells as growth as humans we are expensive we have to feed ourselves and all that i think with doom previously we showed that it's possible for us to inject information essentially force these cells to learn much faster than a human would learn so you don't have to learn the basics of language abcs we can tell it to just predict whether this is a hot dog this is not a hot dog something like that far quicker so we can skip that kind of like prior human learning building phase that would be very expensive normally so that's kind of the stuff that we are approaching it with

[Jordi]

yeah is it possible that golden retriever brain cells could be better at long running tasks like chasing a ball

[Brandon McPhee]

i

[Sean Cole]

think that human brain cells for now empirically they are the best however shots

[John]

fired you know we've tested it but

[Sean Cole]

yeah

[John]

you put the golden retriever in

[Sean Cole]

the vat we tested rat neurons right so there are rat neurons and then

[John]

they're human brain cells golden retriever rat these are not comparable animals let's give some credit what is like the business going to look like over the next decade because i imagine at the end of all of this there's some sort of business model where like you're selling intelligence but in the in the short term there's some venture capital that comes in through y combinator congratulations by the way thank you but but what's the middle step is it partnering with biotech companies is it nsf grants or government funding or something like that or partnering with a university like how do you you keep the lights on and keep the flywheel going i imagine you can raise more money off of scientific breakthroughs but i imagine that there also be an economic a commercial flywheel here even before you're you know selling the work

[Sean Cole]

yeah i think something that we're really looking at right now which is great because you know we've just started is with the kind of exponential increase in capabilities we're going to start building our lab from scratch to be automated we want to automate the stem cell research to differentiate them into neurons the optimal compositions the optimal kind of like spacing on the electrodes let's say so i think that the automation aspect of our lab can easily be branched out into different things like drug testing and i think that could be significant revenue in the short term to push this all the way to make sure that we get brain cells to be the fundamental

[John]

substrate for compute very cool well congratulations what a fascinating fascinating company thanks for taking the time and have a great

[Jordi]

rest we got to introduce sean to the guy that we had on yesterday what was put him together you got

[John]

a whole human yeah tissues he's doing

[Jordi]

drug testing vivodyne vivodyne they are doing some interesting stuff well have a great

[John]

rest of your day great to meet

[Jordi]

you sean thank you guys cool cheers

[John]

good one

[Jordi]

work day do you mind

[John]

shaving your head for me do you mind just just don't tempt me take a saw to the top of your head you think i'm gonna put your

[Igor Pavushkin]

brain in a vat

[Jordi]

you think i'm gonna put your brain in a vat

[John]

you want to come up to the

[Jordi]

roof with me i don't want to go on the roof john you think

[Igor Pavushkin]

i'm gonna throw you off the roof

[John]

i like that it's green now the

[Jordi]

green's fun we should we should we should get buzz cut sometime i think next summer summer buzz for both of

[John]

us well it's gotta be a bet it's gotta be oh you know sass apocalypse is over or something some prediction that then we can take a victory lap on or shave our head in sadness marques brownlee might have to shave his head right because he made a bet or he said if the sire if the cyber cab ships to elon's schedule i'll shave my head something like that and people were going back and forth and the tesla fanboys were saying like he's going to have to shave his head and he's like not yet because of course like you know all these all these projects take a long

[Jordi]

time i don't even need much of a reason to shave my head i actually have gotten a bunch of summer buzzcaps over the years so you'll be

[John]

like if the stock market moves by more than one percent through the end of the year i'll shave my head

[Jordi]

silver lake is in talks to buy workday sources say that's a big deal right isn't workday huge workday is let's see i'm sure it's popped fifty billion dollars seventeen percent wow the take pride and so now a fifty billion dollars company was forty three billion dollars company at least when this article was written and we'll see i'm curious what that is a bold bold bet but i can imagine there's a bunch of ai transformation that they'd feel like they'd be more easily able to do as a

[John]

private company are you a standard crying face emoji guy a tilted crying face emoji guy or a tear streaming down

[Jordi]

your face emoji emoji guy i'm normally okay i want to actually pull this up so i can see more closely

[John]

which one are you joe wiesenthal has recently transitioned to a tilted crying face

[Jordi]

emoji i've actually i don't dabble in the tilted i do the tears i do the tears and the straight on

[John]

oh wait do you do the streaming

[Jordi]

down the face yeah yeah yeah oh

[John]

i need to mix that one in it's the most popular emoji of twenty

[Jordi]

twenty five yeah i went through maybe a decade where i wouldn't touch any of the crying oh any of the

[John]

crying ones you do a smiley but

[Jordi]

i've been laughing a lot last couple years mainly because we've been doing this

[John]

show having a good time i like that in imessage you can do the haha but then you can also throw the crying emoji but i got to experiment with the the teo streaming you ever go with the cat versions no never larp as the cat never go never go cat but expect a cat emoji from me soon tyler in our group mass in our group chat because might be underrated there might be some alpha there i don't know anyway there was clearly alpha at this auction a jp morgan hand signed mortgage bond from eighteen eighty six sold at auction for just eight hundred and forty seven dollars someone got a steal says dylan abrascato this needs to go in the museum of business there's a bunch of these good ones i was looking at the

[Jordi]

yeah how did why did dylan find this after it had already the auction had already closed i don't know yeah get it together get it together dylan

[John]

there's another good one can i how do i drop this in the timeline microsoft in nineteen ninety five nineteen ninety six published a wine guide this is from the corporation the hyperscaler the mag seven company microsoft they released a wine guide the essential click to the next image and then the next one there we go okay the wine guide came on cd the essential reference from vine to glass if you wanted to know about wine this is where you had to go you had to get the official wine guide from microsoft the software company fascinating know your audience moment a lot of microsoft fans customers nineteen ninety six if you're implementing microsoft in nineteen ninety six probably enjoy a glass of wine every once in a while so

[Jordi]

why not that's good well john i'm going to read a buco capital bloke post that i think applies to this exact moment right now he says i think we're very close to the point where caring about ai or talking about it a lot is a bit embarrassing move on already who cares move on

[John]

already i mean there is a point where like we don't talk about the internet anymore we talk about what's happening on the internet we talk about particular internet companies this stuff does diffuse if it diffuses fully you stop talking about the underlying technology but there's a horse race on buco there's a lot of money on the line the entire global

[Jordi]

economy potentially that's right he's just horsing

[John]

around thank you for tuning in to tvpn sign up for our newsletter tvpn dot com comma leave us five stars on apple podcasts and spotify

[Igor Pavushkin]

great success