John (3:57)

Yeah, one thing was notable is they weren't heavily teasing anything related to the next Gemini release.

Jordi (4:06)

Yeah, they wouldn't tease that at earnest.

John (4:09)

No, no they have, they have historically. So anyways, maybe they want to let the model speak for itself.

Jordi (4:15)

Yeah, probably announced Gemini 4 I would imagine. Announced it or a coding model. Yeah, yeah, something there. I mean there's certainly demand for it. They have the capacity, there's lots of opportunity. We'll probably be following that in three weeks when Google IO happens. So Microsoft investors wanted to see Azure growth copilot adoption and a solid justification for all the capex. The stock's down 2%. Nothing crazy but Microsoft beat on headline numbers. Revenue was 82.9 billion up 18% year over year and from an analyst perspective it was a clean beat. But there's more nuance here. So in terms of AI adoption, Microsoft added about.

John (5:01)

Look at this beautiful LED wall million. Yeah, let's give it up for the still underrated. We ordered this bad boy maybe like six months ago. Six months ago took quite a while

Jordi (5:11)

but it is fun. We need to figure out more things to do with it. We so on copilot adoption this is the big question. So for Microsoft, 365 like total seats, you think about Microsoft Teams Outlook, like the standard Microsoft Enterprise seat, I think it's about $30 per user per month. Competes with Google Apps Enterprise. But Microsoft's been doing this for much longer. They have 450 million paid seats. So in terms of copilot, they added 5 million, which is great. They're at 20 million now, so that's solid adoption, but it's still small compared to the 450 paid seats. Ideally, every seat would have a copilot alongside of it. That's the idea. The question is how quickly can they get that 20 million copilot seats up to 200 million, 400 million. Ideally, everyone has one of these, add on subscriptions and that's lifting the overall business market reaction was a bit choppy as the new OpenAI relationship gets digested. And so there's two sides to the Microsoft OpenAI deal right now. Of course, OpenAI is no longer limited to selling just through Azure. Azure no longer has exclusive access to OpenAI models. OpenAI is now available on AWS as well. And it cuts both ways. So on one hand, Microsoft, you know, they used to be the exclusive provider. If you're a sales guy at Microsoft on Azure, you're probably really excited to call somebody up and say, hey, you want to use GPT 5.5? We're the only place in town. Like, you should come over here. You should migrate more of your infrastructure. You should be using Azure. But it was probably frustrating because a lot of people say, no, we're locked into aws. We are stuck in that cloud and we'd love to, but we'll just use the API directly or we'll figure out some other workaround, but we're not moving for this.

David Marcus (7:03)

Yeah.

John (7:04)

Or people could be like, yeah, we're open to trying it, but it'll be take, you know, a couple quarters realistically to get to get ramped up.

Mike Isaac (7:12)

Yeah.

Jordi (7:12)

And so from an Azure perspective, losing exclusivity is a negative. But from a business perspective, the More growth for OpenAI is good for Microsoft's equity stake in the company. And so these two tensions, like the, the capital balance sheet side of the business versus the Azure sales and acceleration side of the business, like these two,

John (7:34)

not to mention Copilot versus Codex.

Jordi (7:37)

Sure. Yeah. And so these two, these two sides of the business are sort of butting up against each other. And Satya Nadella ultimately has to go and, you know, renegotiate the contract. And they did. And it seems like they're in a good place because a lot of people were sort of Saying like, oh well, is this going to get messy? Is there some going to be some lawsuit here? It seems like there was a very clean negotiation renegotiation and they OpenAI got rid of the AGI clause that allows them to stop sharing models, but they are sharing revenue and they're like, like the overall deal.

John (8:08)

Yeah, basically The I think 2032 end date, yeah is just the IP share instead of this like arbitrary AGI.

Jordi (8:17)

So over at Amazon, Amazon still of course the capex king. They top the capex forecasts. But as scary as that would be, AWS is reaccelerating and so that's very good news. So the stock moves slightly upwards. Q1 2026 sales for Amazon overall were 181.5 billion for the quarter. For the quarter. They're like on track to make a trillion in revenue soon. Up 17% year over year, beating expectations. AWS is expected to see 25% growth. That was the expectation. 25%. That's sort of where they've been. They came in at 28% so they beat on AWS growth and that's really, really important, especially for their scale. This was very good news. The ads business is still cooking, churned out $17.2 billion in revenue and the chips business just crossed 20 billion run rate, which is very, very good. And they have big deals. AWS is in this interesting position. Less of this like Google Pure Play Full Stack and more focused on working with both OpenAI and Anthropic at this point. And so that all justifies more investments in Trainium and AI infrastructure broadly. And the market seems to like it. Huge capex numbers, but reasonable response from the market and the stock. So Meta Meta had a rough go. Huge drop, nearly 10% down following earnings sort of jumping up and down now. But the core business was extremely strong. So Q1 revenue was 56.3 billion, up 33% year over year. So high growth for the overall business. Ad impressions rose 19%. Average price per ad rose 12%. They raised the CapEx outlook from this. They have this range. It's within $10 billion of 125. They added 10 billion to both. So instead of saying hey, we'll be between 115 and 135 now they're saying we're going to be between 125 and 145. And now will they actually get more compute for that or is that just a reflection of rising prices for all the inputs that go into compute spending? That's a big debate. Because there's one bull case where, oh, they're optimistic they're going to buy more compute, but it's like, no, there's a possibility they're just spending more to get the same amount of compute as they thought. But the big problem for shareholders, the big answer is it's not as clean of a.

John (10:32)

Can you imagine? Take one second and imagine that Meta is a private company and their pitch is that we make AI agents for selling products, and they're doing $200 billion. They're at a $200 billion run rate, growing 33% a year.

Mike Isaac (10:49)

Yeah.

John (10:50)

How's it price? 20 trillion, probably with those operating margins.

Jordi (10:56)

Yeah.

John (10:56)

Joking. It truly is one of the most incredible businesses of all time. But they don't have the cloud people. Yeah, yeah, they don't have the cloud thing. People are. He's kind of acting like the most AGI pilled CEO. Like hyperscaler CEO, right? Yeah, he. He was talking about, like, basically talking about, like, RSI on the earnings call. He's like, it's not just about, like, code, you know, coding. Like, he really seemingly believes, and he doesn't want to be in a position where someone else has actual super intelligence and he does not.

Jordi (11:35)

Yeah. And so.

John (11:36)

And that's just like, a little bit too fuzzy because when you look in the rest of the market right now, it's like productivity tools. Right. And so the market just, like, can't really read into it, and they're just kind of like, not even giving him full credit for the business that he has.

Jordi (11:51)

Yeah. And I forget if he's ever mentioned the idea of selling tokens, selling AI infrastructure, getting in the cloud market, but it's way easier for an aws.

John (12:01)

He kind of loosely mentioned that last year when he was, like, starting to ramp stuff up, like, basically saying, like, maybe we could do this at some point.

Jordi (12:11)

Yeah. Because it's way easier to justify the capex at Amazon when you say, oh, well, like, you know, if, you know, regardless of how this market plays out, maybe Anthropic takes some of the compute. Maybe OpenAI takes the compute. Maybe there's a whole bunch of new AI labs that take compute. Maybe we'll use it for our services, our own models. If models commoditize, it's still valuable. If they don't, it's still valuable. There's a whole of bunch, bunch of different ways to shift that capex around and justify it. Meta. It's got to show up in the AI figures. It's got to show up in the Ad business, at least right now. And so there are questions about how the big capex spend feeds back into cash flow when the company doesn't have a platform. With big enterprise AI contracts, massive RPO figures, there's not an easy place to just stuff compute necessarily and at least get a market standard return on investment. Of course they could spin up reselling, they could become a NEO cloud or something like that. But at their scale it's a whole new host of challenges if they go that direction. And I think that that's not the plan. I think you're dialing into it that they are in fact recursive self improvement pilled at this point. And so the other sort of tremor in the system was the fact that daily active people, which is something that they were. It's not users anymore, it's dap. Daily active people declined sequentially since the first time that meta began reporting the metrics. So less people were using meta platforms this quarter than previously. But they had some good explanations for it. They said that there were Internet disruptions in Iran and WhatsApp restrictions in Russia. And so this was not representative of a real change in Internet user behavior. And I think we all recognize that that is reality in the sense that there's not some up and coming social network that's eating meta platform's family of apps lunch, right? Like the TikTok threat came and sort of went. The Snapchat threat came and sort of went Sora. Sora came and went. Right. And so there was a different post. I saw that social media use is declining, especially under young people, but it was already so high it's now not really showing.

John (14:29)

It will truly be insane if we get this new alien technology. We get LLMs which in digital form can convince you that they are a person and we end up getting no new big social platforms that just strengthen the current ones. Well, yeah, no, I mean I think that's the base case right now, but it's still wild I think you would expect. I think again if you rewound to like 2020 and you said hey, we're going to have this technology where you can effectively have a digital twin of yourself, you would think that somebody would figure out some new use case mechanism.

Jordi (15:04)

I continue to think it just strengthens the incumbent's Roblox, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook. Like these platforms will just get more content on them that will probably be LLM generated, LLM enhanced. Even if it's not LLM written or developed, it's a creator taking less time doing other boring things and spending more time on their core output. So we'll keep tracking it. So overall, what did we learn this earnings season? One possible takeaway is that there's a little bit of a fracturing in the overall AI narrative. So the AI narrative over the last 12 months has basically been like say the biggest number, biggest capex number, biggest deals just grow, grow, grow. Now every, every hyperscaler reports a big capex number. But each company does have a different story. So Google's the full stack platform. Microsoft's focused on enterprise adoption and distribution. Amazon's most aggressive on infrastructure and partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic. They have the cleanest, less it's a less competitive range relationship with Anthropic and OpenAI because they don't have the DeepMind equivalent necessarily. Meta is all about ad optimization and Meta is also this, this interesting like high risk option on Frontier AI. Like it's possible that if TBD Labs, MSL, if that pays off, you wind up getting an OpenAI sized or anthropic sized business out of it. In the oligopoly world where they have a breakthrough, they get to something that's 5, 5 or 4, 7 level and then they're competing in an equal level and they're playing in that oligopoly. And so the metatraders are sort of, or the investors are sort of weighing both of those sides. You have a very solid ads business and then you have this call option on potential Frontier AI which is still early but showing some really solid signs. So the market likes short term revenue evidence right now. And, and there's still many strategies that will play out over the rest of the year. But this quarter was focused on can you justify your capex this quarter. And so we'll keep following it. Let's go over the timeline and see what people were saying. The headline numbers of course were huge. Cloud growth AWS 28%, GCP 63%, Azure at 40%. Absolutely massive numbers. Remember people were hoping for GCP to be at 40% and it went up 63%. Absolutely massive AWS. People are hoping for 30, they got 28. Not too bad. Take him we mentioned you can go subscribe to his substack@take him.substack.com he has a write up on the state of AI after Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft earnings.

John (17:56)

And Tae Kim's been right a lot lately, been doing well

Jordi (18:02)

and there's some people reflecting on crazy run ups, crazy numbers, crazy hype. Is this the dot com bubble? Always Fun to go back and comp to previous bubbles. The.com one is still fresh for a lot of people because some people in tech were alive during it. Many people in tech were alive during it. This poster ren is comparing the price to earnings multiples today versus the dot com boom. Today's mag4pe ratios. The companies that reported earnings. Meta's at 16x price to earnings, Google's at 17x, Amazon's at 24 and Microsoft's at 25 price to earnings ratio. Compare that to during the dot com Microsoft is at 73x, Cisco is at 200x plus plus. Yahoo was trading at 800x earnings. The NASDAQ as a whole traded at 200 times earnings during the peak of the dot com bubble. Today's bubble is trading at 16 to 25x earnings on companies generating hundreds of billions of dollars in real cash flow. Now they're drawing down on that cash flow. But even in some bizarre world where AI is a bubble and it's fake and we all go back to pencil and paper, we'll probably go back to digital advertising and spreadsheets in the cloud and SaaS and all of these companies will still benefit and be in fantastic positions.

John (19:23)

Yeah, the only thing that, one thing that's imperfect with these comparisons is when you look at the peak you can say okay, Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have relatively reasonable PE ratios. But if you look at the rest, you look at all the companies that have been started in the last five years, especially in the private markets that have been marked up from 20 to 100 to 500 to a billion and beyond, many of them have absolutely no earnings. And so you have to look at maybe something more like a Yahoo as a decent comp where Yahoo was trading a peak at 800x.

Alex (20:07)

Yeah.

John (20:08)

And so, and there is some, there

Jordi (20:09)

is some pushback in the, in the replies here. Reasonous4 says AMD is at 130, Tesla's at 350, Palantir's at 220 and intel is at 900 times earnings.

John (20:22)

I know. So it's like very, very convenient to just take the four of the greatest companies ever in the history of the world and say like there's no bubble, like they're reasonably priced.

Jordi (20:33)

Yeah. I think it is useful to go back to the fact that there's a lot of hype in tech, but what's driving the vast majority of the market cap right now is still fairly low. PE companies. Intel is so much smaller on a market cap basis than Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta that even if you're overpaying on earnings for that you, the overall market is anchored to a pretty decent earnings engine still. And that's the bull case here, what else is going on?

John (21:10)

George Hotz is back with a white pill.

Jordi (21:13)

What did he say May 1st?

John (21:15)

He says AI will create jobs. It's nice to see Jensen talk about this. And it's super obvious when you think about it. AI and immigration are fundamentally the same. There's new people showing up and hopefully everyone understands how and why immigration. Immigration creates jobs. Wants are effectively unlimited. It's classic Jevons paradox that if we make something more efficient, we end up using more of it. Or a cool aphorism I learned at Facebook. If you make the site 10% faster, people spend 5% more total time on.

Jordi (21:41)

It's funny, he worked at Facebook for

John (21:43)

using an Internet part of the machine. Now just like you get the Wawa crying people about how immigration lowers wages for native born Americans and we got to keep the hard working immigrants out because you have some right to be lazy or something, you'll get this about AI. AI will out compete some humans at some jobs. But protectionism is for losers. The important thing is that the overall pie grows and inequality stays somewhat in check. Not by redistribution, but by design. There will be more to do than ever before.

Jordi (22:13)

More to do than ever before.

John (22:15)

Can we pull up this video of Jensen? Yeah, let's do it in the production chat for you.

Jordi (22:21)

Yo, you have it?

John (22:22)

Yeah, we can play it.

Alex (22:23)

Great.

Jordi (22:24)

I'm excited for Eric Soufert's deep dive here. We'll get into that later.

John (22:27)

The Soufinator

Jordi (22:30)

and reminder. We have the Isaacinator coming on in just seven minutes. Mike Isaac has been covering the Elon Musk versus trial. Do they do.

John (22:40)

Is it like a four day work week with trials?

Jordi (22:42)

It is.

John (22:43)

Are they living in the future?

Jordi (22:44)

It is. Wait, wait, so can we pull up this screenshot because did you read Mike Isaac's full thread on his experience covering the trial? Did you read the whole thing? Because he's been live tweeting it and it's very funny because he will post. So we gotta zoom in here. This is a.

John (23:03)

Did you turn this into.

Jordi (23:04)

I turned it into an infographic. So this is a minute by minute chronological log of off topic personal, minor inconvenience moments. Because Mike Isaac will talk about. Oh, Elon Musk just said this on the stage. Oh, the lawyer fired back with this. The jury said this. The judge said that. Right. But then in between that he has been logging very, very Minor inconveniences that he's experienced. So he talks about his lunch, the roasted tomato and corn pizza. He says he forgot a pillow for his. For sit on.

John (23:40)

Wait, he said corn beef?

Jordi (23:42)

I don't know. He said he bought.

John (23:44)

That's a very oakland thing.

Jordi (23:46)

At 1607 45. This is transcribed from x I think the times are UTC or something. He brought a water bottle but forgot to fill it in the rush for a seat. Now he's increasingly thirsty. During an intense moment of testimony, someone's laptop suddenly blasted a loud YouTube video in the gallery. This is a garden hose nozzle. It said courtroom mishap. So he's going through it all. It's very fun to track his. And we'll dig into his experience both in the court and actually with what's going on with the case. But let's play this Jensen clip. This sounds fun. Jensen is insisting that jobs will be created in the future. Let's see it. What does he have to say?

Jensen Huang (24:30)

There's the things that. The things that are said are very counterproductive and in fact, hurtful. On the one hand, maybe a scientist thinks that by warning people that AI is going to completely permeate and proliferate across radiology and therefore radiologists are going to get wiped out. On the one hand, that might be considered warning and therefore helpful, but in fact the counter would have been hurtful if we convinced everybody not to be radiologists and we now need radiologists, that actually is hurtful to society. It is hurtful if we convince all the young college graduates to not be software engineers and it turns out the United States needs more software engineers than ever. That's hurtful. And so we have to be mindful of how we communicate the importance of this technology and what it's able to do to advocate for policy and advocate for guardrails, on the one hand. On the other hand, scaring people with things like saying nonsensical things which are not going to happen, that this is an existential threat to humanity. There's 20% chance that is existential. That's ridiculous. That it's going to wipe out 50%

Justin Wexler (25:45)

of

Jensen Huang (25:48)

new college grad jobs, that it's going to completely destroy democracy. I mean, these kind of comments are not helpful. They're not based. They're made by.

Jordi (26:00)

He's subtweeting. In real life. He's not vague posting. He's subtweeting. I do think the 50% numbers are so funny because it's like 50. 50 is like the most Neutral. You can be about some prediction. It feels like. I mean, I get that it's not. In that case, it's like 50% of the jobs, but whenever you issue like a 50, 50 proclamation, it sort of tells you nothing. Like, we were looking at like the prediction markets on the trial and we were like, oh, it's 50, 50. Okay. So that actually doesn't give me any information about what's going to happen in the future. And it's very easy to make a prediction that's like, oh, I predict this will happen, 50, 50. And then if it doesn't happen, you can be like, well, yeah, 50% chance it wasn't going to happen. Like, I had it really high that it wasn't going to happen. And then you can also say, you know, I predicted it.

John (26:42)

Yeah, it's so it is. It is truly universal. When we talk to these companies that are building AI products or selling AI products, it seems like the ambition level in every single industry is just going up. Even. Even Gabe from Roga was saying, yeah, there's an opportunity to cut costs or there's an opportunity to get aggressive and like, take market share.

Puneet (27:06)

And.

John (27:07)

And he said, like, a lot of firms are saying, like, let's just do more work, let's grow our revenue, let's take on more clients. Right. And so it is. It's harder and harder to doom about the job market.

Jordi (27:22)

Yeah. Do you need to doom about the task market if you're. It's over for tasks. Tasks are getting automated. No, it's serious. Like, there are tasks that, like the reading of the X ray or whatever it was, the radiologist scan. What do they actually read? Is that an X ray that they're looking for tumors in? You know what I'm talking about, Right? The famous Hinton.

Mike Isaac (27:44)

Yeah.

Alex (27:44)

I don't know if it's an X ray.

Jordi (27:45)

It's not. Right. It's a CAT scan.

John (27:47)

It's some scan where you can look.

Jordi (27:48)

Yeah, they do a scan. And of course, image generation and image models are very good at detecting cancers. But that is just one of several tasks, many tasks that a radiologist does through throughout the day. And so radiologists are currently making more money than ever and they are in more demand than ever. And I was telling you before the show about truck drivers. They don't just drive the truck. There was a survey that said 70% of them carry weapons because they are effectively, they are security guards for the truck as well as probably a bunch of other things that you don't think about. Light repairs. On the truck, Stopping for different. Different things. Rearranging things in the back, making sure that the load is like balanced and whatnot.

John (28:28)

Driving with kids in the car. It's not driving with kids in the car. And you drive by a big truck on a road trip, you can go like this.

Jordi (28:34)

Yes. And then that's another thing that the self proposed computer could never.

John (28:39)

A computer could never look out the window and see some kids in the car and honk.

Jordi (28:43)

But. Well, yeah, I mean, we'll see. Anyway, we have Mike Isaac in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultra dome. He's at the New York Times. Mike, how you doing?

Mike Isaac (28:53)

Yo, what's up?

Jordi (28:55)

Good to see you.

John (28:55)

Great to see you. So wait, so what's up? Yeah. So four day work week. Are they living in the future?

Jordi (29:02)

Yeah. Is this universal? Basic vacation days.

Mike Isaac (29:05)

It's. Court is incredible in that I got to sleep in till like 9am today, which was great. But I made up for it because like literally every day this week I've gotten up at five o' clock in the morning to get my cold ass down to the Oakland courthouse and stand outside for two hours. So I don't know, but it's fun.

John (29:25)

How does it, how does it work? Who gets priority? Is it first come, first serve? Like if some random person. If some random person shows up before you, they can just get it and do they.

Jordi (29:36)

You're just out.

John (29:37)

Or. Or do you get to like show some sort of like press? Like, how does it work?

Mike Isaac (29:42)

Yeah, I wish I was cool enough to like, cut. Well, here's the thing.

John (29:45)

You should get an artist pass.

Jordi (29:48)

VIP pass?

John (29:49)

No, not vip. Artist pass is a level above.

Jordi (29:52)

Okay, Artist pass.

Mike Isaac (29:54)

So there are 20 reserved seats in the front row for press. But the issue is only one person per outlet gets it. And we are doing like live blogging for. For like the big moments, like opening statements and for Elon. And so myself and my colleague Kade came on the first. The whole first week. And so we've had a trade off. He's gotten the like, press, skip the line thing. And I've been with the other folks in the 30 unreserved seats in the

John (30:25)

back that are watching YouTube videos.

Turner Caldwell (30:28)

Yeah.

Mike Isaac (30:28)

Yeah. Oh my God.

Puneet (30:29)

Or literally.

John (30:30)

Or stripe sessions.

Mike Isaac (30:32)

Literally. One dude fell asleep. I was actually impressed.

Jordi (30:36)

Asleep.

John (30:37)

Yeah, it seemed pretty entertaining. Didn't seem like you were falling asleep. I was keeping up on the. Through the live blog.

Mike Isaac (30:45)

Reading my nightmarish Twitter too. I. It's been fun, honestly. Have you guys ever done like court Case things or have you ever been sued or been in court?

John (30:55)

Never been in court.

Jordi (30:56)

I went to mock court in high school where everyone picks a role. I think I was.

John (31:03)

Yeah, we larped in court.

Jordi (31:05)

Literally larping in high school. But other than that, never.

John (31:08)

I. The whole. This whole time, it seems. It seems insane. Like, with the recent NASA the moon mission, I was like, this should be a live stream plus a pay per view for the key moments for this trial. It's like, we have huge budget deficits and we have these incredible media products. Why are we not doing pay per views? Right.

Mike Isaac (31:29)

But that's the funny thing. I was just gonna say that's the funny thing about, like, federal courthouse stuff. Like, there's a lot of different rules around filming and electronics. I covered some cases in D.C. and I can't even bring a laptop or phone in those courthouses. So, like, this is actually a very permissive judge just because she believes in, like, press access and stuff. And we've had. There's way more access than you would normally get in federal court cases.

Jordi (31:57)

Okay, so you've been to these court cases before, but if I follow your Twitter, it feels like you're making a bunch of rookie mistakes. You only had egg bites at 5:30am Your bite energy's wearing off. You forgot your butt pillow. You forgot to fill your water bottle. Like, is this amateur hour or are you a professional? What's going on?

Mike Isaac (32:18)

I think that you guys might know me well enough that that is kind of how I operate most of my life. Kind of chaotic, but it is focused

John (32:26)

on the important stuff.

Mike Isaac (32:28)

That's right. Yeah.

Kyle Harrison (32:29)

Yeah.

Mike Isaac (32:29)

I mean, look, I can file. I may be, like, bleeding and hungry, like, limping across the finish line. But we're getting. I'm tweeting for you.

John (32:40)

What are some, like, high profile cases that stand out that you've covered in the past?

Mike Isaac (32:46)

So I got to do. Let's see, my first one was insanely boring, but important. The Apple vs Samsung thing back in the day. And like, them suing for Samsung, copying, like, literally everything they do. I did Dallas, actually. Zuckerberg's like, I think maybe one of his first testimonies on the stand when ZeniMax was suing Meta for the Oculus acquisition. You remember that?

Jordi (33:13)

Yeah.

Mike Isaac (33:13)

Palmer, Lexi and I was in Dallas. That was super fun that I almost got kicked out of the courtroom for tweeting.

Jordi (33:19)

Whoa.

Mike Isaac (33:21)

And then I did the DCFTC meta one and I almost got kicked out of the courtroom again. Actually, I did get kicked out of the Court for. For wearing the meta ray bans. These are not it. But I wore the meta ray and then they started put. I was. I was fucking super stupid for doing it. But then they started putting signs up saying, do not wear these glasses in.

John (33:42)

But you weren't.

Mike Isaac (33:42)

You.

John (33:43)

You were just using them as glasses or you were being sneaky and you're recording.

Mike Isaac (33:46)

No, I was like, look, I can't record. I won't record. I was trying to play by the rules. And, like, they were. They are my prescription glasses.

John (33:53)

Yeah, but the bailiff. The bailiff was like, yeah, it's too high risk for them because you could just turned off the light or whatever.

Jordi (34:02)

Talk about the fans. Are there really Elon Musk fans in the courtroom? What motivates someone to go and watch that live? Is this their UFC front row ticket? Why are they there?

Mike Isaac (34:17)

So you guys would have fun. Like, it actually is. A lot of court cases are boring to people who don't care about this stuff. Right. Like, you and I may be super into. Like, the FTC trial was super fun for me because it's like, oh, my God. Mark Zuckerberg emailing Sheryl Sandberg and talking about Path. Like, this is incredible. And, like, the average person has no idea what we're talking about, but this is like a circus. There are people who genuinely love Elon or are genuinely worried about the end of the world happening. And I think it's a really good thing that there's public access to these courts. Like, I think, like, the average person can come in and show up. And that's what I think. After the buzz of Twitter and, like, people seeing that this is an event, we got a much longer lines and, like, folks who are local. Like, just like, I know a PM in tech from Meta that came. I know, like, a guy from Box made it in. Just if you get a seat. If you get there early enough, then you can get a seat and you can just hang out. It's like. And I think it's really great. I think it's great that people are. Yeah. Are there for it. You know, it shouldn't just be me.

Jordi (35:24)

Yeah.

John (35:26)

What about the jury? Does the jury seem excited and honored to have the opportunity to be a part of a case like this? Or are they nodding off? It'd be so funny to be, like, so out of just, like, off the

Jordi (35:41)

Internet to make selection. You can't be super biased. Not a psy.

John (35:47)

Sam, this guy. Sam and Greg and this guy who makes cars, and I don't even know what they're talking a bunch of whole bunch of mumbo jumbo. Like there's got to be one person on the jury that was just so not tapped in that they're just confused.

Mike Isaac (36:02)

I think jury selection was super interesting for that. I can't say it's actually interesting. I can't say too much about the jury right now because like there's all these rules about. Oh sure, like some random person could go up to them if you identify

Jordi (36:15)

them or try to alter it. Something like that.

Mike Isaac (36:17)

Totally. But I will say like during jury selection on Monday, it is an incredible slice of life and you get like how familiar or unfamiliar people are with the tech industry despite being here. You know, like some folks are like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know what AI is. I don't know what AGI stands for. So it really, it really played and voir dire and jury selection is so important for cases like this. Just it makes the dynamic of the facts don't necessarily always matter, but the vibe can really matter, which I think is a benefit for Elon, honestly.

John (36:56)

Yeah. Were they. Were they trying to weed out. They're trying to weed out people that are a little bit too excited about the case. Right. You want the people that are like in order to have. But. But then talk. I didn't understand. Why is the jury just like giving like an advisory decision? What is the history of like, why do you. Why do you have a jury when the judge is ultimately going to make the final call? It feels like just kind of putting on like a show. Because like theoretically the judge could just sit through a bunch of depositions and make a call.

Mike Isaac (37:30)

Sure. No, I think so. I do think they want more often than not want a jury of these CEOs and companies peers to be the deciding factor in what they feel like is good for a civil claim like that I think is fairly standard. But to your point, the judge can throw out their verdict, which is like is. And judges, I don't think tend to want to do that because like they want to have reliance on this is the public. The public should have a say in what goes or whatever. But the judge can do that. I will say also she is responsible for if they are. If Elon or sorry, if OpenAI is found liable judge decides on remedies, damages and things like that. So she still has an active role in that regard and in steering the case. But I really do think that

Jordi (38:25)

courts

Mike Isaac (38:26)

often prefer or often appreciate a jury of your peers making some of these decisions. So I don't think it's gonna be like completely disregarded is what I would say.

Jordi (38:37)

Yeah.

John (38:38)

How has Judge Rogers done so far in your view? Just reading the live blog. She seemingly has like zingers. Pretty good one liners the time. I'm just kind of imagining what it's like in there because obviously I'm just reading text, but she's had like, seemingly like some pretty good comedic timing.

Jordi (38:59)

Yeah.

Mike Isaac (39:00)

Oh my God, she's so funny. She's like real, like, as you might imagine, there's like a number of different types of judges and how they handle their court or whatever. And she just takes no BS from anyone, including the lawyers. And like when they try to like tap dance or break the rules or whatever, she's like, no, shut up. Or like get back on track or no, no, no. Actually the best part or the most insane part. So one woman in the overflow room who is just not just. It was a civilian going to attend and watch it started recording, which is again against the rules, if not the law, in a federal courthouse. So the judge brings her in and in front of a room of like 100 people, just like dresses her down, yells at her, saying, did you not see any of these signs? What are you doing? I will kick you out. I will. It was like, I would have like peed my pants and started crying if she had done that to me. It was deeply, deeply intense.

Jordi (40:01)

It's teacher, you know, berating a student.

Everett Taylor (40:04)

Yeah.

John (40:04)

Class is in session.

Jordi (40:05)

Classes in session here.

Mike Isaac (40:07)

It was brutal.

Jordi (40:10)

How have you been processing Elon's position? It feels like the two, the two stories that I've heard him sort of telling are one, about his commitment to technology, humanity saving the world through Tesla and the electrification of the internal combustion engine and SpaceX making humanity multi planetary. And that's like a very high level, you know, high concept pitch. And then he also sort of brings it down and starts beating this drum on like, you can't steal a charity. You can't steal a charity. Is that the correct framing that he's trying to go like high and low there? How much have he's been beating each of these drums and how useful is that?

Mike Isaac (40:57)

So I totally agree. That's the framing. And I think this really goes to the point of a lot of these trials are. Pageantry is the wrong word, but let's say theater in that you are. This is a jury trial. And it's a different thing than just convincing a judge who I would say is much more attuned to the Facts and merit of the case and like hammering in on the evidence and like something that may be boring to you or me or whatever or the jury is gonna be more important to a judge. Elon, I think from day one has leaned into the Persona of Elon and just from him being on the stand and saying, I care about humanity. I mean he, he says he does whatever he does or doesn't, but like just leaning into this like, I'm a world changing entrepreneur and this stuff is existential and I'm the one who has cared about it. And like that may work on a jury. You know, like there are people who still love him and you know, OpenAI is really hammering the facts of what they feel are their side of the case and saying Elon has known about. Elon has never been in the dark. He quit in a huff. He's made it very clear he hasn't been there. He's trying to sue now or he's trying to file this claim now because he's catching up because he's behind as an XAI competitor. But again, this is all stuff that maybe it doesn't play. This is why jury trials are so risky for companies. A lot of the time it's fun for me. It's probably not fun for everyone in there, but it's fun to see it play out, if that makes sense.

John (42:30)

How did the distillation comments come up?

Mike Isaac (42:36)

That was the news of the day yesterday. You guys obviously were.

John (42:41)

You broke it, right?

Mike Isaac (42:42)

I think I did, yeah. I think it was one of those things where I was like, holy shit, this is news. And I think folks started figuring it out, but I was like, gotta put it on Twitter. So the point. So Bill Sabitt is lead counsel for OpenAI. He was sort of talking about. The point was made in the context of they want to hammer home. Elon is creating a competitive product. And also he keeps stressing that this is doom world ending technology. But at the same time he's ripping off the toss and using the technology to improve his own technology in an explicitly for profit company.

Jordi (43:26)

Yeah.

Mike Isaac (43:26)

And so the point is like hammering him as a hypocrite. And I think, look like, I think Elon has history in his businesses. It would not be controversial to say to like say one thing and do the other. And I think he sees it as like rules of engagement. That's the game in the, you know, no holds capitalism land. But like that is how it came up and that they didn't go super deep into it, but they wanted to make the point, he's using OpenAI's tech, he's breaking the toss, and he's partly distilling it. And I want to say also that Elon went out of his way to say everyone kind of does this. It's like an open secret in the industry, which I think is like, also kind of true. But that doesn't make it. There's like. It's fraught, I guess, is what I would say.

Jordi (44:10)

Yeah, yeah, it's a. There's obviously a continuum there, which is why he tried to hammer that. It was like, partly. I imagine most car companies have taken a rival car for a spin. Have they taken the car apart? You know, there's a line there and there are laws, but that's a separate issue, of course.

John (44:28)

Has, has anything come up with a jury around prediction markets? Because I was thinking we've now seen insider trading across every possible prediction market, right? From, you know, very interesting. You know, even, even the Maduro thing was, was. Was interesting because a lot of people were like, oh, he's just betting on himself. But then I saw that, I was like, hey, that's sending a signal to the entire world that an attack could be happening, which puts your entire team at risk. Right? So very, very clearly, like US Military personnel should not be able to trade against our own military's actions ever. Right. And they need to come down really hard on that. Are you a jury jury on this?

Jordi (45:11)

Are you just trading on this crazy? Are you, are you going to retain hierarchy?

John (45:16)

The reason, the reason that the jury thing is, is, is bad is it creates potentially an incentive for the jury to basically work together and say, like, hey, like, we all have to be here for like a month. Like we could at least make some money on it. And then you only need to get like four. You only need to get like four or five of these people.

Jordi (45:35)

The chat is saying, monetize jury duty.

Mike Isaac (45:39)

Oh my God.

John (45:40)

No, but like, it seems like very important that this does not happen, right? Because, because there's very pot. Like they, they tried to select a jury that just doesn't care about the AI race. They don't care about this or that. And, and, but if they are self interested in some capacity, they could be like, well, my, my decision is not, is not even really legally binding. It's just advisory. Like, I may as well, you know, I don't know. Right.

Mike Isaac (46:08)

I think that's a great point. And like something that I imagine, like court systems aren't even prepared for fully yet because, like, well, there hasn't Been a big.

John (46:18)

There hasn't been a big trial. Like, there's been, I'm sure, some, like, epic apple stuff that was slightly big, but nothing where. Nothing, Nothing. Anything at this scale with this much, even just this much volume already from people that are generally interested in the story, the outcome.

Mike Isaac (46:38)

And I think the other thing you should know is they're not sequestered. They show up kind of before, like, anyone else.

Turner Caldwell (46:46)

Right?

Mike Isaac (46:46)

Before they. Yeah, literally, like, we see them walking in, and the marshals. There's like, a ton of, like, U.S. marshals there. They're like, is anyone a juror in this line? The juror gets to go in, and at the end of every day, the judge is like, goes back over the rules saying, do not discuss this case with anyone. Do not watch it on tv. Do not look at it on your phone, which is like a verbal command.

John (47:09)

Yeah. Don't go on your phone, taking your phone.

Mike Isaac (47:11)

Just don't exactly.

John (47:12)

Hey, don't use the most addictive thing that has ever been created in human history. Don't use the thing that you use for six hours a day that you

Jordi (47:20)

probably turn your lights on and adjust your thermostat.

Mike Isaac (47:24)

Totally. I mean, that's something I had not thought of, Jordi. But it's a really good. Like, when does that come up? At some point, you know, like, that's very worried.

John (47:34)

Not just seems like.

Mike Isaac (47:36)

But just ever.

John (47:36)

Yeah, it seems like something that the court should be paying attention to heading into a decision from the jury. How much is the history between OpenAI's counsel, Bill, who represented. He represented Twitter when Elon was trying to get out of the Twitter buyout. And ultimately, it feels like the X Twitter acquisition has worked out pretty well for Elon. He's made a number of plays. So hard to imagine him, like, you know, deeply regretting buying it, even though at the time, he was happy to get out until Bill said, now we're doing this.

Mike Isaac (48:23)

You know, it's funny. He is. I can't underscore enough how different the tenor chain. I mean, look, it's like, it's opposing counsel, so it's always going to be different. But Elon went from, like, I am a entrepreneur, sort of like Rosalie explaining to you what I think the future should look like and, like, very concerned for the. The future of the human race to, like, openly antagonistic to Savitz questioning and, like. And the thing that I'm very curious how this plays with the jury is, like, Elon was very. He's like, I'm a literal Guy, like, the questions you're asking me are like, too complicated or like, they're not yes or no questions, which is like, fair, like, as a grievance. But also the thing he either doesn't understand or doesn't care about understanding is that that's just lawyers. Like, that's the whole point of a cross examination is to ask these questions as, as reductively as possible to, to get a type of answer they're looking for. And his job or his, you know, pretrial sort of discussions with his own lawyers is to know how to navigate those essentially, while also telling the truth. So I don't know, they just don't like each other. Or at least Elon doesn't like Sabbat. And you can very. It's very clear that he's just like, mad at that. And whenever Elon gets sassy, I would hear, like, clearly people who are fans of Musk, like, laughing behind me or being like, yeah, you got him. Like, it's just, it's very. It's very funny. It's like kind of a. It's different than the usual vibe is what I'd say.

John (49:58)

That's very interesting outlook. What's going on Monday? What's the outlook?

Jordi (50:04)

It feels like this week was the Elon side for the most part. Are we going to flip to Sam and Greg and some other OpenAI folks, or is there an intermediate step? Do you have a clear view of what the next couple weeks look like?

Mike Isaac (50:19)

Yeah. So it's a little rough because we have witness lists in full that they presented and are in evidence, but you don't really learn who's coming until very soon that week. It's actually a giant pain in the ass for me and for reporters who are trying to schedule. But so we, Jared Birchall, who's like Musk's family office guy, just finished testifying. We're going to get this guy. Stuart Russell. No, no, sorry, that was yesterday.

Jordi (50:48)

And you said Berchal was very dry. Like, was that intentional? That feels like that does not work in favor of like, swinging a jury. Was that more for the judge? Like, what was the goal of that, of that testimony?

Mike Isaac (51:01)

I think it was to really just sort of show how Musk was trying to set up this like, like structure things as a non nonprofit and like Hammer Home. Like, he's always wanted it to be a nonprofit and he's not sort of like. So it was, it was, I believe it was Musk's witness who OpenAI then cross examined and OpenAI used the occasion to show an email that had like a proposed equity structure for Musk. And so, like, they both kind of used him differently. But I think, like, Bertrand is like a, essentially an accountant books guy, like behind the scenes. So I think it was like, here's a peek behind the curtain. Here's how they were dealing with the finances. Here's how Musk was like, this is only a charity. And then OpenAI's lawyers are like, actually, check this shit out. So. But I think, like, I don't. I honestly don't know. They also struck some of his testimony because this is a little complicated. But if you remember last year, OpenAI or Musk made a bid with Ari Emanuel and some other companies buy the whole company. And that opened the door or that sort of complicates things for Musk's side because there might be some of those discussions around that bid admitted into evidence. And that may not be good for Musk because if there's like weird compromising emails in there. So, like, it's gotten complicated, but next week we're getting Stuart Russell's safety researcher. We got Greg Brockman, maybe Sam Altman, maybe not. It's four days a week in court only, so we may not have time, but I gotta be ready. I'll be there most of the time, but I'll be there for Sam for sure. And then, I don't know.

John (52:53)

Sorry, rewinding a second. Did they bid, did they bid on the pvc, like the, the for profit arm?

Mike Isaac (53:00)

Yeah, it was the. Yeah. And they, they wanted to just sort of. I. I don't actually know what their plans were afterwards, but like, it was like trying to take over the asset, those assets basically, and then, you know, morph it into what they. I mean, and they knew that it wasn't gonna get accepted as a bid, basically, but it was like. And then Birchall in court was saying this was us trying to sort of establish a pricing mechanism to like, value the actual entity itself and that was gonna help them somehow. I actually am not quite sure how that would help them somehow, but someone in the chat is probably smarter than me on that. But like, it was them trying to sort of take that over. And I think OpenAI said publicly at the time, this is like a stalling tactic. They're trying to like, slow us down while also using this in court in this concurrent lawsuit later, basically. So it's all like, really messy. And I think even Musk's side took a risk there if those emails get into discovery. But it's unclear to me, if that's going to happen. If they are, then we may see them next week.

John (54:14)

Why would that kind of discovery process around that bid be coming up now when everyone involved was well aware that it had happened quite a long time ago?

Mike Isaac (54:26)

So I think because of a line of questioning with Virtual yesterday about the bid that like, if that happens on the stand and again, like a lawyer gut check me here because I'm a stupid tech reporter, but if that happens on the stand, then it gives an entry point for OpenAI's lawyers to be like, okay, well we need to, you know, now admit basically the judge said to Musk's side, you open this line of questioning now, it's fair game to go into this and then you can start calling new evidence in around that, like to open up discovery. It's like really like strategy and like you have to be careful in your strategy when you're asking certain questions in court. I've been learning a lot about it. So maybe it's a strategic misstep by Toborough Elon's lawyer, but it's not quite clear yet.

Jordi (55:14)

Do you have a idea of the purpose of the AI safety researchers testifying, what the goal is there? Like, does that align with one particular side? Like, if there's more nonprofits, like, you still probably wind up with anthropic DeepMind Xai having one like, you know, more focused non profit going on for a long time doesn't necessarily necessarily lead me to like, oh, then we wouldn't be in an AI race. Like it's not a clear solve for me. But I imagine that one side is trying to position this as important. But do you have any predictions for what that goal is?

Mike Isaac (55:53)

Totally. So this is Musk's witness and your point is well made, which is like, okay, even if you kneecap one, like good luck on literally everyone else. And like there's been a lot of time spent Elon talking smack about Larry Page and how he like doesn't trust him anymore. That's actually been really fun to hear. But the point, I believe is this is actually a point of contention. So the judge does not. The judge prohibited like going too far into like doomerism into the world stuff. And she's like, look, that's kind of a sideshow distraction, like extinction humanity stuff is not the point of this case. But must side called this guy because they want someone. And this my understanding is that Stuart is like very aligned with the idea that AI is super dangerous and gonna harm us all. And so if you get that point.

John (56:45)

How does that not. Like if this guy's gonna come on and say that AI like the most insane like doomer point of view, which I think is. Everyone's going to have their own opinion around this debate. It's completely worthy of having and talking about. But how does Elon square that with like I'm trying to build the biggest cluster possible and distill on the rest of the industry's model and create tens of gigawatts of space compute. And how does that does that? Like can't this kind of witness potentially backfire in some capacity?

Mike Isaac (57:32)

No, I mean you're exactly right in that squaring that circle is pretty hard and like exactly what opening is hammering on.

John (57:43)

I should be trusted with the, you know, all powerful.

Jordi (57:47)

We're going to be in the Terminator situation no matter what. You want me in charge of the Terminator, not some other guy, not some nonprofit, not some well positioned holders.

John (57:58)

He's basically making, he's, he's, he's pivoting Tesla production to Terminators. The Terminators basically.

Jordi (58:05)

Optimus. Yeah, great.

Mike Isaac (58:08)

No, I, I. And can I just make one last point is that I think he, he misunderstood the Terminator because like we still survive and we fight back in that world. Do you remember this?

Jordi (58:20)

I've been saying this. People haven't seen the movie. Movie. Geordi actually hasn't seen the Terminator. But in all of these movies.

Mike Isaac (58:25)

Are you kidding me, dude?

Jordi (58:27)

In all of these movies it completely leaves out that there is a problem and then humanity overcomes it. And so it's like if there is a Terminator scenario, I just want to know that you're on my side as the resistance fighting back and like one of the Terminators.

Mike Isaac (58:44)

You are John Connor.

Jordi (58:45)

Hopefully. I mean, I would. Yeah, it's. I don't know. I don't want to get into the full Yuda Ski thing, but like, like it is reasonable to, to, to, to sort of Steel man that like if it is bad right now. It's not. It's sad.

John (58:59)

Says I have to watch Terminator. I got to watch Terminator tonight.

Jordi (59:02)

You got to watch Terminator.

Mike Isaac (59:03)

Okay, so I just saw this on Twitter. Terminator 2 is coming back into IMAX pretty soon. Like you can go see it in the theater. So you have to go see it. Jordy. Like it's, it's required viewing.

John (59:14)

Let's go together.

Jordi (59:15)

Yeah.

Mike Isaac (59:15)

I'm down. I'm down.

John (59:16)

Do you, do you have any. I would say that so far the trial is less. I Mean, it's hard for the trial to go very viral because there's no audio video, and it's just like, live blogging. And you can imagine. You can imagine some of these scenes, like, just the stuff that you're typing. I'm like, if that was on video, that gets like, 50 million views in, like, you know, in a few hours on. On. On X, you know, across a bunch of these different aggregator accounts. But part is. Is maybe part of, like, my. My feeling is like, it's just so. It's just so, like, I feel like the entire tech industry, it's like, it's just kind of depressing to see. To see these groups, like, fighting in this way when we have so much bigger problem. Like, we have so many bigger problems as an industry, right? The big problem being, like, public perception of AI is, like, already so bad. Like, people, you know, don't. Don't like, you know, and then you just have protests.

Jordi (60:18)

No matter who wins, we all lose. Or something like that. Like, there's some very negative stuff.

Mike Isaac (60:23)

I mean, that. So I totally agree. And I do think, actually everyone, not everyone, but, like, many in the AI industry have started realizing, oh, we have, like, not everyone loves us. Like, this is a perception problem in a lot of ways, which, like, to me is funny because, like, I. Not that I'm smart, but I feel like I've known that for a little while. But it's. The issue is the industry's coming around to that, or at least certain folks are, and know that they want to change that perception. But this case has been in the system for, like, years now and sort of like, actually happening at a time where they wouldn't want it to necessarily, necessarily happen if they're trying to change it. So the timing just sucks for. For folks who don't like that, if that makes sense.

Jordi (61:10)

Yeah. There's so many different, like, little tidbits,

Mike Isaac (61:13)

and I don't know if they're going

Jordi (61:14)

to be exact quotes, but you can just imagine plenty of things that are going to happen on the stand. Winding up on a Bernie Sanders post and being like, stop it. Pause.

John (61:21)

AI.

Mike Isaac (61:21)

Right.

Jordi (61:22)

Because, like, you know, it's always like, give the tech people enough rope to hang themselves, and, like, there's a lot of rope going out the next couple.

Mike Isaac (61:30)

Oh, my gosh. It's totally. You gotta. One of y', all. Both of y' all should just show up to the courtroom at some point and, like, experience it, because, I mean, you have an actual day job. But it's like, literally, it's really interesting and like, an experience.

Jordi (61:44)

So you can't record video, you can't record audio. But is there a world where you have, like, five of your own stenographers there taking a perfect transcript? Would that be possible? With enough resources and then we could

John (61:59)

do a table reading on the show.

Jordi (62:00)

That's what I'm thinking.

Mike Isaac (62:01)

Is that.

Jordi (62:01)

Is that you could use voice cloning. I don't know if you noticed this, Tyler. What was it? Grok launched voice cloning today or something? Which is. Why is that controversial again? Well, for like. I mean, we've had this technology for,

Alex (62:13)

like, five years, and then no one

Jordi (62:14)

released it because, like, you don't want people to make deepfakes of other people's voices. Okay. Yeah, because it's like, textbook. Like, I can.

John (62:19)

It's like, oh, I call you. I call you John. I need, like, I need 500 bucks. Can you give me your credit card for a second?

Jordi (62:27)

So obviously, there's a bunch of risky uses of that. The good use is the comedic table read in the voice of Sam Altman, in the voice of Greg Brockman, in the voice of Elon Musk that we can all enjoy.

John (62:39)

I was thinking more of, like, doing like, a. End of the day. Yeah, there's like, we do a play here.

Jordi (62:45)

Yeah, that's probably best.

Mike Isaac (62:47)

Oh, my God.

Jordi (62:48)

Full makeup, full costume.

Mike Isaac (62:51)

So, you know, there are transcription services and even, like, you could do.

John (62:55)

You could be Mike Isaac by like. Oh, yeah.

Jordi (62:57)

We need someone playing you for sure.

John (62:59)

No, no, no. It's like. It's a cameo. He's playing.

Jordi (63:03)

Oh, he's playing himself.

Mike Isaac (63:04)

Okay.

Jordi (63:04)

Nah, I think you gotta go full Nathan feeling.

John (63:06)

And the whole time just crashing out like, I forgot my lunch. I forgot to fill up my water.

Jordi (63:13)

I had a banana. I'm good now. I had a banana.

Mike Isaac (63:16)

Oh, my God. Okay, so can I just say there is an attorney there that looks exactly like Nathan Fielder. That I'm like, almost like, are you

John (63:23)

sure it's Nathan Fielder?

Jordi (63:24)

Looks like Nathan Fielder. Okay.

Mike Isaac (63:26)

Every time I see him, I'm like, is this like, a bit like, am I going to be on TV in some way? It's very intense. And you're going to ask him next year.

Jordi (63:34)

I mean, Elon Musk says the funniest outcome is the most likely. And that might be. Seriously, what is the funniest outcome? The funniest outcome is, like, Elon wins. And the. And the penalty is like. Is like 50 bucks or something. Yeah, it's like, Elon, like, you win. Here's $150. Enjoy.

Mike Isaac (63:54)

Oh, my God.

Jordi (63:55)

Just the most inconsequential fine for the AI industry, which is flush with cash at all times.

John (64:00)

Well, I find that, like, fine. Like there's so many. Anytime a company in tech gets fined or not every time, but often it's

Jordi (64:09)

like, sometimes it's a fine for ants.

John (64:11)

Yeah. Like they did something that was bad. They generated 100 million of revenue and the fine is like $1.5 million. Yeah, it's like, did that.

Jordi (64:21)

I think the current Meta YouTube lawsuit was like maybe a $10 million settlement. Of course there was like, knock on of potential for class.

John (64:29)

Yeah. That was for one individual.

Jordi (64:31)

One individual. But still it was like you have this like, landmark case, this big build, and then you're like, oh, how damaging is it going to be? It's going to be like five minutes of revenue.

Mike Isaac (64:42)

But the stock actually in meta earnings as far, I mean, there was a lot of shit that took the stock down, but, like, I think one of them was them saying, like, this might have a material impact. Like these cases, like, may have a material impact in the future if it opens the door. So, like. Yeah, I agree. Like, it's always. Remedies are always, like, it can be existential from a financial point of view, but also just from a Guess what this is is about to become your whole fucking life for the next 10 years or whatever, if that makes sense.

Jordi (65:09)

Yeah, yeah. We talked to a law professor who said, like, the question is, does social media exist in the future? Like, this is an existential moment. I'm not sure that we're quite there, but there's definitely a risk and you need to consider that if you're an investor.

Mike Isaac (65:25)

Totally.

Jordi (65:26)

Anyway.

Mike Isaac (65:26)

Totally.

Jordi (65:28)

What's the game plan for next week? What's going in? Are you doing trail mix? Are you doing protein bars? I want you fueled up, ready to go.

Mike Isaac (65:36)

Camelback blogging.

Jordi (65:37)

Yeah.

John (65:38)

You should be able to do like a sponsored camelback, you know?

Mike Isaac (65:44)

Did you ever watch Jury dude, the show Jury?

Jordi (65:46)

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

Mike Isaac (65:47)

I want to be the guy with like the chair pants and like the water thing attached to my back. And like, I need. I've got a. This is blogging. This is back in my blogging all things digital blog days, man. This is. This is it.

Jordi (66:02)

So I will train this weekend more prepared. This weekend. You should go sit in a chair for eight hours straight.

Mike Isaac (66:07)

Are you.

John (66:09)

Are you going to do all four days? Are you doing all four days?

Mike Isaac (66:12)

I think we're going to switch off a little more. I apologize. I Will not be my like disastrous falling apart self every day of the week, just maybe two days of the week. So you should follow Kade Metz, my other colleague who's there. Although he, he is much more put together and does not tweet like a person off their meds like I do. So it'll be a different vibe each day. But I will be there next week.

Jordi (66:36)

Last question. Is this book material? Does it rise to that quality, this drama?

Mike Isaac (66:41)

I feel like someone's gotta write a book.

John (66:43)

I would write a book on your coverage of this trial.

Jordi (66:46)

Yes, that's what I want to read the mic.

John (66:50)

And then I would do a podcast about it. I would do a podcast about it and then someone would make a book about the podcast about the book covering.

Jordi (67:00)

We'll create a content or

Mike Isaac (67:03)

keep it going someday, I don't know, we'll see.

Jordi (67:05)

Anyway, thank you so much.

John (67:07)

Great to catch up. Good to see you, Mike.

Mike Isaac (67:08)

Thank you.

John (67:09)

Thanks for the update.

Jordi (67:10)

We'll talk to you soon.

Mike Isaac (67:11)

Have a good one. I'll see you soon.

Jordi (67:13)

Goodbye. We're running late, but we got Kyle Harrison in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the CBPN ultra dome. He wrote a book about the Andorl thesis. 300 pages of defense tech lore. History, knowledge. You know, what's more valuable than any of these cars up here in the Hollywood Hills? Knowledge. And you wrote a book. Tell us about it. What was the process, what was the thesis of the book? The Anduril thesis?

Kyle Harrison (67:38)

It was an incredible experience, I would say. I think the thing that I came to appreciate the most was everybody talks about Anduril like it's just any other company. All these high growth companies that are defined by an awesome team chasing a big idea market turns out to be bigger than you possibly expect. You know, Ben Horowitz has to tell databricks that they're underselling themselves at 10 billion. It's 100 billion, it's 200 billion. Like those stories are very common. The Anduril story is so underappreciated because it is counter positioned to. There's like over almost 100 years of military, geopolitical, industrial history that really define the company that people just, they just, they don't know. Like they think about, oh, this is an interesting strategic choice. And it's like, no, this is actually because of things, decisions that people made in the 50s and 60s that we literally have to do things this way. That was the biggest takeaway.

Jordi (68:28)

Yeah, I feel like Sham Sankar at Palantir with the first breakfast has done a good job shining a light on the last supper. So many people in tech are familiar with that sort of key moment of industry consolidation that led us to this moment. Were there any anecdotes or historical stories that you discovered that were more under the radar, more like, less discussed as like the founding moments of this whole journey?

Kyle Harrison (68:57)

The biggest appreciation that I got was for this sort of like dual pairing of people pushing forward a specific project. So in the Kill Chain, which is Chris Bros, who now is the kind of co president, chief strategy officer at Anderil, but at the time was coming off the Armed Services Committee, he wrote this book, the Kill Chain, he talks about this idea of like military mavericks. And I kind of combined this with this kind of founder founder mode energy that people bring. And so you have this like founder plus military maverick pairing where you have folks like the team. So Bernard Shriver, I think his name, the guy who basically led the team inventing ICBMs. He absolutely needed Eisenhower as his kind of military maverick to like pair that effort. There's countless stories of this, the modernization of the Navy. There's all these different things that were like that one, two punch was kind of required once you get away from like, you know, at one point the DoD was 36% of global R and D. Yeah, they had a pretty good handle on the cutting edge. Once you've. The further away you get from that, the more you need founder mode people digging in to figure out the solution. And. And it's heartbreaking because you see these like countless examples of like profits of urgency throughout time where like, once we lost that, that sort of like desire for founders to come in and solve problems. You have all these people who are like, throughout the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, they were releasing reports and writing white papers and talking about how, hey, this is going to be a problem. Warfare is changing. China's going to school on how we do conflict and that's problematic. And none of them had sort of founders to be able to come solve problems because no one was willing to pay attention to the actual problems. And so we lost that pairing.

Jordi (70:41)

There's reports of Anduril raising a new round, $60 billion potentially. Is this book a financial thesis? Is this financial advice? Is this something that investors, potential investors, maybe future investors.

John (70:56)

Yeah. There's four chapters dedicated to price targets.

Kyle Harrison (70:59)

Price targets multiple for entertainment purposes only, right across the. No, this is. This does not constitute financial advice, entertainment purposes only. You know what's crazy is I think if I remember correctly, in secondary Markets if there is any secondary volume that Andrew's founders haven't already gone to war on. I heard somebody say that it was like 100 billion indication even just tracking what people are willing to pay because of Matt Grimm's war. There may be no, no supply for the demand, but the demand is priced at 100 billion. So it's not, you know, where the new round ends up. Whatever. The appetite continues.

Jordi (71:38)

Sequel. Sequel. The and financial thesis. Let's go.

Puneet (71:42)

That's right.

John (71:42)

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

Puneet (72:38)

Yeah.

Kyle Harrison (72:39)

So there's a couple of pieces of the puzzle. So first, like in terms of how acquisitive Anduril has already been, our, you know, our good friend Paki McCormick has described it. Well, I think that calling it an API into the DoD where Anduril is effectively enables this like plug in mechanism of somebody can go very deep into a very specific capability in a way that like, like companies like the company that made dive, like it'd be very difficult for them to sort of become a standalone large company. But by being acquired by Anduril immediately, they're able to plug in and get a $100 million contract with the Australian Navy and stuff like that. So I think like the acquisition muscle plugs in a lot of this stuff pretty capably. The second piece of that puzzle is I think that a lot of times we do a disservice. Like the venture capital industrial complex does a disservice by focusing everybody on this sort of like Neo Prime North Star of everybody needs to be the 10, 20, 50, $100 billion outcome. I think that there are a lot of opportunities for companies to be very, very good at a very specific thing capability and then to plug into some of these systems, whether it's through partnership or through acquisition. And what's funny, probably the most frustrating part about the book is we wrote it over the Course of two years. In part because it's difficult to sit down. We all have day jobs and stuff, but in part too because the world is constantly changing. When we originally sat down thinking about what would this would look like, you know, none of the things that happened in, in Israel, like Ukraine was sort of just continuing to evolve. Venezuela happens, all these different conflicts happen over, over time. But then on top of that, Anduril as a company continues to ship. And so even six months ago I would have said, you know, what is the kind of like signal. And what's interesting is you look at some of their product launches, some of these requisition get some through partnership. But I don't know if you guys have seen their like anime style product launch videos, right? So I don't know if everybody has noticed this but the last two videos had teasers of their future products. So I think it was the video that, where they talked about Fury and then it was maybe Fury or the Barracuda. And then at the end of the video it kind of went under the water and you started to see these assets moving. But then it cuts away and you don't know what it is. A couple months later they, they announced Copperhead, which is their like torpedo product. And that paired with dive and stuff. And then they have a video about that and at the end it pans above the water and you start to see this thing kind of come out of the corner of the shot and it cuts away and then just whatever it was. Last week or so Anduril announced a partnership with Hyundai about building autonomous surface vessels. Right. So it's like kind of going into all these different surface areas. I think that that is indicative of like where the signal is is that whether it's through partnership, whether it's through acquisition. Acquisition, a lot of the stuff that's happening in Ukraine, what you're, what you're kind of exposing is that there is significant opportunity for like networked assets. And Anduril is absolutely has its mindset on becoming the, the sort of networked everything the military. Military Internet of things is what Chris Bros calls it.

Jordi (75:49)

Where can people find the book?

Kyle Harrison (75:51)

Amazon.com Our own Jeff Bezos is hosting it for us. We're not in the book printing business

Mike Isaac (75:56)

so we're going to do an audiobook.

John (75:58)

Oh, they print, they have a print on demand.

Kyle Harrison (76:02)

It's great. You put in the thing. It takes a lot of time.

John (76:04)

You think of what I'm thinking, John, what you're thinking.

Kyle Harrison (76:07)

It's pretty good.

John (76:08)

I'm Telling you what it's time to ship books.

Kyle Harrison (76:11)

You gotta write a book about pvpn, the novelization.

John (76:14)

We want to make ad supported business books. They're free but they come with ramp ads.

Jordi (76:20)

Yep, that's great.

John (76:21)

You get yourself a good designer as easy as it could be. Last question from my side. Do you have we reached peak early stage defense tech investing boom? Has it already passed? Is it. Are we still on the up? Like what, what is your feeling at this?

Kyle Harrison (76:40)

I think that it is going to take to, to take the air out of the balloon is going to require some type of black swan. Hopefully, hopefully micro sweet swan Micro black swan event. We don't want it to be too

John (76:56)

bad and like wait, you said to take the air out of the defense tech investing sales, you would need a black swan event. So you're saying like we declare global peace.

Kyle Harrison (77:08)

So I think it's more about the capability. I think it's going to take like either there is a company that has been highly valued, highly sought after, kind of held up as one of the goals, golden children of the neo defense industrial wave that just something.

Jordi (77:26)

It's terrible.

John (77:27)

It's really bad.

Kyle Harrison (77:29)

Like something very bad happened. And so then investors start to say, oh crap, wait, you're telling me not every company I invest in that does Defense is going to be the next Android? I can't underwrite to every company. Maybe they're not 60 billion, but at least they'll be 20 billion. Like if that underwriting muscle goes away. You have a whole swath of carpetbagger VCs that suddenly get very panicked. Like something like that happens.

Jordi (77:49)

Social. There were a whole bunch of like 5th wave social companies that didn't get the Instagram acquisition, they didn't get the WhatsApp acquisition. They raised a couple hundred million bucks and they just sort of burned it down and just went away and nothing really happened. And the VCs sort of woke up and they were like, okay, we got to be much more careful if we, if we're investing in that category. So.

Kyle Harrison (78:09)

Yeah, yeah, because I think it's like, I think the problem is like there are sort of like three varieties of VCs are in and around like defense tech more broadly. And it's like the people who invest and get it and they're actively built, they understand the moral implications of the types of technology they're investing in. Then there are still people who have said we will not invest in weapons, we don't want to invest in defense. Whatever. It's this middle ground here that is problematic. It's these people who they have no real philosophical weight behind why they do what they do. They just see big number and pursue shiny object regardless of consequences.

Jordi (78:44)

Line go up. Well, we hope that the line goes up on your book sales. Head over to Amazon.com and buy the Anduril Thesis by Kyle Harrison of Contrary. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't wait to see you soon.

John (78:57)

Great to see you.

Mike Isaac (78:58)

Have a great day.

John (78:58)

Congrats dude.

Jordi (78:59)

Goodbye.

Alex (79:00)

Thank you.

Jordi (79:01)

Up next we have David Marcus from lightspark. He's the co founder and CEO and he's launching Grid Global Accounts, a bitcoin powered system of enabling global USD accounts cards and cross border payouts. We talked a lot about crypto payments yesterday. We'll let you introduce the business yourself again. Welcome back to the show. Give us the update and what's Great

John (79:22)

to see you in your world.

Jordi (79:23)

Great to see you.

David Marcus (79:25)

Thanks for having me back guys. Well look, so the, the big announcement we had this week. So lightspark has been around for about four years and you know, in the last four years we've been building connectivity into payment systems all around the world like 65 countries now. And the announcements that we added this week is Grid Global Accounts, which is basically a global dollar account that any platform can issue and give to their stakeholders. And that dollar account is what I think is the most powerful money account ever created because you can move money in real time to 65 countries Payment systems like really at any time of the day or night, you can move money on any chain. With any stablecoin you want, you will have a Visa debit card that can allow you to spend that balance at 175 million merchants around the world that Visa supports. And LightSpark is becoming a principal member of the Visa network as part of that process. And it's got like this nice feature that enables those platform to actually be ready for the complete change of interfaces as we move from websites and apps to conversational interfaces driven by agents. And so this idea that you can delegate safely money to agents so they can buy things or send money around the world for you is really part of that whole Grid Global Account platform that we've announced and launched this week.

John (80:48)

Very, very cool. So like when did you guys start thinking about this opportunity? Obviously you know everyone's thinking about stablecoins. We have more regulatory clarity than ever. Was this always on the roadmap or did you guys start to get customers saying like hey, we want support for stables and not just BTC related products?

David Marcus (81:13)

Yeah, I mean look, I think you know we, so we've been working on stablecoins for a long time but the concept of a global dollar accounts that can actually live everywhere is really novel and like there was no chance of us like actually doing that like even 12 months ago because like the prerequisites, the stars were really not aligned.

Jordi (81:35)

Right.

David Marcus (81:35)

And right now with the genius act here in the US with MICA in Europe and similar legislation all over the world, plus really, really great embedded wallets, like you know the self custodial wallets of like two years ago where you had a seed phrase that you could lose and you would never give that to a family member because like they would lose money. Almost invariably all of that is gone. Right now you have really great wallets that you can log in with Google, with Apple, with a passkey, with any login that's familiar and never lose your keys or your money. And the last part of it is actually really stablecoin backed debit cards where the networks have really leaned in hard on and like now gives us an opportunity to really basically connect those dollar accounts to 175 million merchants around the world, making that balance really useful for anyone receiving money on them.

John (82:28)

Yeah, very cool.

Jordi (82:29)

Is the pivot from crypto miner to AI neo cloud that's happening across the industry having any sort of effect on crypto markets or is that a. Because we, we talk to companies all the time that are compute constrained. There's this CPU crunch, there's GPU crunch, there's backlogs for power and data centers are delayed and that's what's going on in the AI world. But bitcoin as a network needs compute as well. Many other chains need compute. And is compute scarcity bleeding over in any way to the upside or downside? I just, I don't know the effect at all. Does it matter or is there enough compute for crypto to do everything that they want to do as a community?

David Marcus (83:13)

Yeah, I mean look, I mean proof of work is definitely, and so you know, more, more specifically for the bitcoin network, proof of work is definitely using the, the level of energy that at times will compete with like AI data centers. But, but you know, the hardware is like you know, started GPU based but it's very asics driven now. But on the energy side, definitely, definitely competes for the same source of energy. But look, I am personally an acceleration maximalist then I actually think that we're actually going to unlock unbounded energy in the next like you know, 1015 years. So I actually don't think that we're going to have these types of issues of actually competing resources with massively forward deployed amounts of capital on bitcoin miners being replaced with GPUs. And also those data centers for bitcoin mining are so specific. A lot of those miners are liquid cooled in a certain way and operate on certain grids that they're able to, to actually like turn on and turn off the, the mining capabilities really easily.

Jordi (84:26)

Whereas like, you know, harder for you don't necessarily want to do that. If you're like actively serving inference or even just like training, you might not want to bring the, bring the train down. Interesting.

John (84:36)

Where, where are you expecting to see the first real hockey stick growth when it comes to agents leveraging stablecoins? Like right now it feels like there's like, like it's a lot of like potential early experiments going on but at least to me it's unclear where we'll see that you know, really breakout use case.

David Marcus (84:56)

Well, I mean I can share a little bit more about like, you know, my thoughts and my experience. Like, you know, the first thing is I think that everyone competing to build like an agent to agent protocol standard is kind of like you know, really future forward and there's not much happening there, right? It's like there's a lot of like big news and big announcements and very little volume and that's normal because like you know, agents are not moving money at scale by, by any stretch of imagination. We took a little bit of a different stance, right, which is that we want to build a mass market money account that suits the needs of people and businesses all over the world. And then we've built a safe scope delegation framework that enables those agencies to actually use the debit Card, use the 65 countries reach of moving money around, use the multichain support for stablecoins and then you can delegate that. And so what I've done with mine and I've lived with it for the last five weeks or so, so I have my great global account and then I have an open claw running on Mac Mini at the office and I connected both and so it just takes a scoped debit card goes buy things online which is actually more difficult than I thought, you know, starting this. But like it now works it, it can message people on WhatsApp that I need to send money to and offer them like you know, seven or eight different ways to pay them and I don't have to worry about it. And it really works real time really, really well. And it's been, it's been so much fun to actually build on OpenClaw and have like a money account that Lobster could use. It's been a lot of fun.

John (86:32)

Yeah, Lobster accounts.

Jordi (86:34)

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the progress.

David Marcus (86:38)

Thanks for having me.

John (86:39)

It's great to get the update. I'm sure we'll see you back in the next. Hopefully in the next one or two quarters.

Jordi (86:46)

Yeah, Fantastic.

David Marcus (86:47)

Sounds good.

Jordi (86:48)

We'll talk to you soon.

John (86:49)

Goodbye.

Jordi (86:49)

Have a great weekend. Up next, we have Turner Caldwell from Marina Mariana Materials. Mariana materials. Like the Mariana Trench. We'll get into it with Turner Caldwell, the co founder and CEO. Help me understand how to pronounce this company's name. I don't want to get it wrong.

Turner Caldwell (87:07)

Mariana Minerals.

Jordi (87:08)

Mariana.

Alex (87:09)

Okay.

Jordi (87:10)

Where does the name come from?

Turner Caldwell (87:11)

It comes from the Mariana Trench.

Jordi (87:13)

Mariana Stretch.

Turner Caldwell (87:14)

But that's because we were looking at,

John (87:15)

Let me guess, they've got some crazy minerals down there.

Turner Caldwell (87:18)

Or do we even guess there are some minerals at the bottom of the ocean? That's right, that we are.

John (87:25)

So you're saying you yearn for the trenches?

Turner Caldwell (87:27)

That's right. There you go.

Jordi (87:29)

Okay. The business is an autonomous copper mine. Can you take me a layer deeper? Explain the history of the business, the current shape of the business, where you're taking it all?

Kyle Harrison (87:40)

Yeah, sure thing.

Turner Caldwell (87:41)

So we just restarted a copper mine that we acquired at the end of last year with a major focus on autonomy across the entire stack. So that includes the kind of orchestration layers around mining operations, as well as autonomous execution, which we'll do with partners, and then also autonomy around the refining processes. So the site is a mine and

Mike Isaac (88:03)

a refinery in practice, what does that look like?

Jordi (88:07)

You go into the mine and there's some ERP system or maybe just some manual paper based workflow. And you're saying, let's go vibe code a software solution for it. Like, yeah.

Turner Caldwell (88:18)

Or is it like coding? Basically the way to think about mining is that you have a whole bunch of different disciplines that have to collaborate. It's a big coordination problem. You have geologists, you have a geologic block model. You'll have a mine plan. You'll usually have multiple mine plans, like a long range, medium range and short range mine plan that has to be transferred to the mine operations teams that are running like large scale or not autonomous large scale manual mining equipment. Then the like, what is actually in the ore usually shows up on a piece of paper to the refinery saying like, get Ready to process this. And then the refinery, the folks who are running the refinery have to figure out, like, kind of the optimal process conditions to maximize recovery of copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, iron, graphite, kind of the whole thing, all of the metals through the processing circuit. And so what we're doing is we're kind of integrating everything into one, like, integrated data frame first. And so there's a lot of work that goes into kind of bringing all of the data feeds back into one, like, kind of aggregated architecture. And then we'll build world models of the mines, of the refineries that we then use to kind of do a reinforcement learning training that we feed up into a reinforcement learning training pipeline. And then you want to close the loop between what reinforcement learning agents are recommending and the policies that are developed to the actual thing that's happening in the mine. And so we'll bring autonomous haul trucks in, we'll bring autonomous drill rigs in, we'll bring in autonomous loaders and dozers and graders and water trucks, Kind of like all the assets that are being used to run a mine that today are, you know, 99% of mines are manned. And we want to go full closed loop between kind of the world models and the reinforcement agents and determining what the autonomous assets actually do. And then that's the refinery.

John (90:06)

What do you think the potential efficiency gains are from going from legacy copper mine to the kind of end state, fully autonomous system?

Turner Caldwell (90:16)

Yeah, I think it'll happen in two phases. I think the first phase is going to double productivity through just like better orchestration and better logistics management and better utilization of all the equipment. That's productivity and unit costs. Diesel is a good example for heavy haul machinery. Like half of the diesel consumption, up to half is from like idle time in the, in the pit on the equipment. And so there's a lot of kind of like short term potential gains. But I also think that autonomy is going to fundamentally change. It's going to unlock a lot of like, operating modes that can't really be done with humans. And so the way that the mining industry has kind of driven down cost over an extended period of time has been through scale. So the haul trucks are getting bigger, the shovel getting bigger, and it's all focused on kind of reducing your labor intensity, so, you know, maximizing tons of or tons of ore moved or tons of material moved per unit of like labor hour. But as you move into like autonomous systems and eventually kind of like design the mines themselves to be autonomous, I think we're Going to see things get smaller and like swarm mining is going to get unlocked and that's fundamentally going to enable you to actually kind of like be more selective in how you mine. Your roads get smaller, which means you can maximize kind of recovery of the ore from the pit. So I think it'll all happen in two phases. It's like take the existing architecture, make it autonomous and maximize utilization and availability of equipment. And then there's going to be this like once autonomy is kind of like fully demonstrated across the stack, there's going to be this opportunity to actually attack like fundamentally how is how our minds mind.

Jordi (91:49)

You started the company in 2024.

Alex (91:51)

Yep.

Turner Caldwell (91:51)

End of 2024. Raised a seed round in August. We're at 220 people now across the company. We have, we have two projects. One is a lithium refinery. One's a lithium refinery in East Texas that's extracting lithium from oil and gas wastewater. And the other is kind of first large scale commercial mine.

Jordi (92:12)

Another one, he's got two.

Turner Caldwell (92:14)

Yeah, exactly.

John (92:16)

I have a question pitch for you. Robotic canaries, do they.

Mike Isaac (92:22)

Well,

Turner Caldwell (92:24)

we have a Boston Dynamics spot that is basically like mobile sensing system instead of the canary in the coal mine. And we use them mostly for like undercarriage inspection. So like you want to keep humans away from like heavy haul machinery. The closer they get to it, obviously the more hazards that are present. But also like the chemical refineries, ideally humans aren't walking through chemical plants all the time kind of doing thermal inspections. There's a lot of stuff that's like auditory. So you're like listening for sounds of the motors sounding weird and the. Exactly. And then that all, that all needs to feed back into, into like again the integrated kind of like sensing integrated like data frame that tells you like how. What's the healthier systems?

Jordi (93:09)

Okay. Did you start with copper 2024?

Turner Caldwell (93:13)

We started with lithium in 2020.

Jordi (93:16)

And because, because it feels like, it feels like, you know, there's this whole autonomy story, more efficiency, all that makes sense. But the price of copper has doubled since you started the company. And I feel like that just makes bringing a copper mine back online just wildly different from an economic perspective. And it's very interesting that you're sitting at the tailwind of like two AI trends which are just demand for copper for data center development, wires, circuitry, all this other stuff. And then you can actually be more efficient, but you can be as, you can be as efficient as they were a couple of years ago and just reap twice the price. It feels like the oil dynamic, right?

Turner Caldwell (93:51)

Yeah, that, that's right. But I don't think so. The reason you want to be diversified is because like all metals are cyclical and really like live and die by a single commodity price. And so the plan was always to diversify and the plan is to continue to diversify into nickel and cobalt and uranium and graphite and rare earths and you know, as we, as we kind of work to build 10 projects in the next 10 years. But the, you know, we started working on this project kind of like well before copper had its like little explosion and that it's on because you don't really want to jump into projects in the middle of the hype. Like that's when you pay the most for an asset. That's when you're going to like the labor pool is most constraint is like most in demand. The equipment suppliers that make the equipment that is specific for a specific metal are going to have longer lead times and have higher pricing. And so you really do want like we jumped into lithium when lithium was like at the bottom of its recent trough and jumped into copper before it started to go on this run. So generally we want to work on metals that we think have a long term supply, demand imbalance. And for copper it's very much felt like grades are dropping or deposits are getting deeper, mineralogies are getting more complex and it just means it's going to be a lot harder to make copper in the future. And that's what we want to work on.

John (95:07)

What were you doing before this?

Turner Caldwell (95:09)

I was at Tesla for about a decade. Most recently was running our minerals and metals team. So I was building our lithium refinery in Corpus Christi in Texas and running a lot of our battery recycling work.

John (95:20)

Very cool. Kind of like the absolutely most perfect background for a company like this. A vc Couldn't dream of a more perfect resume for this business.

Jordi (95:32)

What's all the text in the Gulf behind you for that map?

John (95:35)

Yeah.

Jordi (95:35)

What does that say? I understand that it's a map of America, but what's all the text for?

Turner Caldwell (95:41)

So these are all. It's basically calling out like things that don't have space for the words on the map.

Jordi (95:47)

Okay.

Turner Caldwell (95:48)

So it's just, it's a legend. You got crazy detailed legend.

Kyle Harrison (95:53)

Yep.

Turner Caldwell (95:53)

Well, our project is right on the border with Louisiana. So that's the, that's why we got it in the background on the list. Nothing.

Kyle Harrison (95:59)

I'm sad.

Jordi (95:59)

Well, you're a legend and thank you for coming on the show. Legendary appearance.

John (96:04)

Yeah, great, great to meet you.

Jordi (96:06)

Have A fantastic weekend. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

Mike Isaac (96:12)

Another one.

Jordi (96:14)

We got another guest, Everett Taylor, he's the CEO of Kickstarter coming in the Ultra Dome. He's in the waiting room right now. Everett, how are you doing? Well, welcome to the show.

Kyle Harrison (96:25)

I'm good.

Everett Taylor (96:27)

It's sunny Florida right now, so I'm escaping the cold in New York right now, so I'm feeling good.

Mike Isaac (96:31)

How you got it going?

Jordi (96:32)

Amazing. I'm very excited to talk about the Next Wave fund, But first, I'd love to know a little bit about your journey to Kickstarter. Where the business is today, what your day to day is like, how big is this company? Sort of set the ground for us.

Everett Taylor (96:48)

Yeah. So, I mean, Kickstarter started in 20 2009. I've been here about four years now. And you know, we're the largest creative crowdfunding company in the world and we still are today. When I came into the company though, the company was in a bit of decline. We were down 20% year over year.

Jordi (97:09)

Really?

Everett Taylor (97:10)

Since then, you know, we've grown dramatically year over year. Last year we had another record breaking year. This year we're already up 52% year over year over last year. So the company has been scaling and growing as we are transitioning just from a crowdfunding company to more of a creator economy company.

Jordi (97:27)

How has the AI boom, the gen AI boom benefited or changed Kickstarter projects? When I think about the catnip of Kickstarter project, it's like a board game that probably took a lot of time to build. And if the idea is great, I might not care if somebody used an imagegen model to speed up the graphics for a tree on the back of some playing card. I could see this being a bit.

John (97:55)

Yeah, not at all. I'm sure a lot of Kickstarter creators historically were spending a ton of money on renders.

Jordi (98:01)

Totally, totally. But at the same time, does this exist at all or is this just AI slop? And there's a community dynamic and there's an artist displacement dynamic. And so how have you grappled with the pros and cons of the last two years? Crazy boom in AI.

Everett Taylor (98:16)

Yeah, it's a great question. On the AI side, funny enough, gaming is where it's probably the most controversial. Right. Because gaming tends to be very artist forward.

John (98:27)

Right.

Everett Taylor (98:28)

And so we've gotten probably the most pushback and some of the most negative pushback on the AI side from gaming, because they really want to See, artists be able to have jobs and do their thing. And so, you know, we were one of the first major tech companies to have our own AI policy. Every Kickstarter creator, if they're using AI, they actually have to say up front how they're using AI, crediting the artists if they're using another artist, et cetera, et cetera. But on the design and technology side, these new AI powered tech products, especially in the hardware side, it's booming. Right. So both categories are growing, but you, you see the differences in how people are accepting of AI.

Jordi (99:07)

Yeah, that makes sense. Talk about the partnership with Google. What's the news?

Everett Taylor (99:12)

Yeah, so this week we announced the Next Wave Fund with Google to power the next generation of tech innovation. I'm a founder myself. I saw the struggles being an early stage tech founder, struggling to get funding. And so what we really wanted to do was give early, take early stage tech startups and small business owners the funding they need, the tools to be successful, the guidance that they need, and also be able to leverage Kickstarter's audience of millions of people to really get their first customers and scale their product. So this fund is focused on innovative products and hardware, software, gaming and connected technology. And people will get $10,000 upfront non dilutive capital from Kickstarter and Google to launch their products and their companies on Kickstarter. And we wanted to focus on these areas because Kickstarter has just a natural product market fit for technology and gaming. There are two largest categories and we also have a large audience for both.

John (100:11)

So you're going to have a huge portfolio.

Everett Taylor (100:18)

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

Jordi (100:54)

Where can people get started? Take us through the. Is there an application process? Where does the journey start for someone who wants to participate?

Everett Taylor (101:03)

Yes. So you can go to our website and check out the Next Wave Fund. You can apply. This is for entrepreneurs or small businesses with fewer than 20 full time employees. Like I said, your project has to be focused on technology or digital gaming. And unfortunately we've been hearing this and we got a shout out to our international creators. But this is for the US only, so at least one member of your team has to be a citizen of the US and be 18 years old.

Jordi (101:34)

Well, lots of opportunities and thank you for taking us through it. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us. Great to meet you and great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon.

John (101:44)

Cheers, Everett.

Jordi (101:44)

Goodbye. There are many, many more conversations going on in the timeline today. One was kicked off, I think by Josh Kushner. I think he sort of started this. There were some other people talking about data center beautification and he summed it up perfectly. He says make data centers aesthetically beautiful. And so people have been quote, tweeting, posting, riffing on this, sharing different ideas. More people would be pro data center if every data center had a beautiful open to the public heated pool. That's an interesting twist. Full water slide. I think half pipe is a big idea. Monster truck rally constantly going on. These are ways to win people over. Sort of a nitro circus going on in a data center.

John (102:34)

Monster truck rally on the roof of a data center.

Jordi (102:36)

Yeah, sort of a universal basic nitro circus. So you get. Are you familiar with nitro Circus? Is this a three fingers moment for you? Are you? I'm familiar.

John (102:46)

No, I'm just imagining that.

Jordi (102:47)

Just say you've never actually been to Nitro Circus.

John (102:50)

I'm imagining they're building the dirt bike ramps over the data set.

Jordi (102:54)

Exactly.

John (102:54)

Back flipping over.

Jordi (102:55)

Exactly. Julie Young shares a trick. This one neat trick that Los Angeles uses to hide oil deckers. We have a few oil derricks in LA that are disguised as synagogues. They are literally just sitting in the middle of the city. Lowell. Surprisingly few people are aware. There's a number of data centers that are disguised in Los Angeles as well. Usually you can tell because there's no windows in the building, but these exist in downtown usually for edge computing for like the content delivery network. You put store in your Netflix videos there, that type of stuff. Not doing training runs, not gigawatt clusters. I did look up anthrop how energy intensive Bitcoin is relative to what we think of AI. I think the numbers are OpenAI and anthropic are around 2 gigawatts in terms of capacity. Something like that. We've heard about the Colossus Data Center. The average meta campus is around half a gigawatt. Zuck's building something in the one gigawatt range. There's gigawatt a week plans but if you were to put the bitcoin network current sort of estimates using between 120 and 170 terawatt hours per year, what is that an average power in gigawatts? It's between 14 gigawatts and 19 gigawatts and so that's where you should sort of comp bitcoin to if you're putting it in AI terms in the numbers that we throw around which are usually

John (104:24)

like a one before our next guest which Palmer Lucky has been getting into it with someone on the timeline he says Cliff responds to someone named Clifford by saying dumb tweet Toto has been fabricating advanced ceramics for semiconductor manufacturing for many years. They make more money from that than toilets Strong technical moat in a rapidly growing industry. Clifford says perhaps fair point but call me dumb under your real name or STFU coward just like not realizing that

Jordi (104:53)

he's talking to but isn't Cliff Asness like a big deal? I think he's an author. He's his papers I've heard of Cliff Asness before. It's funny because and so it is funny that they just like didn't over oh he's the co founder of AQR Capital Management hedge fund manager. Is this the right person? Forbes estimated net worth of $3 billion I believe I think this is accurate. I think he yeah Global Alpha. He started career in 1990 worked at Goldman Sachs, AQR Capital.

John (105:25)

I think he missed the Anduril.

Jordi (105:28)

He just hasn't seen the SPVS or something Stable Asset management and other institutions in the aggregate made commitments of several hundred million dollars to a new multi manager hedge fund. He's published in academics, he's done a bunch of stuff I've heard of of him before. So this is very funny.

John (105:46)

He runs, he has aqr.

Jordi (105:49)

Oh aqr. Yeah, interesting.

John (105:51)

Anyway, very very funny.

Jordi (105:53)

I believe we have our next guests in the waiting room. Let's bring them in to the TVPN Ultra Dome Natomi Wonder company welcome to the show. Would you mind both kicking us off with some introductions on each of you?

Justin Wexler (106:07)

Yeah, of course. Hey Jordy, John, great to see you both. So Justin Wexler, one of the general partners at Wonderco working closely with Jeffrey Katzenberg and you've met all of us. Yeah, Sujay Chen Li, Jeff Anthony. So it's been an amazing run. I've been with the firm since early 2017 and also on the board of Natomi.

Jordi (106:30)

Okay so yes,

Puneet (106:35)

great to see both of you. My name is Puneet. I'm the founder CEO of Natomi. We are an agentic application tier company focused on the customer experience use case.

Jordi (106:46)

Okay, what specifically in customer experience is that different than customer service? Or are we doing surveys to understand how companies and products are being received? All of the above. What's the shape of the business today?

Puneet (107:00)

Yeah, we look at customer experience a little bit differently than how most companies in AI have, have looked at this. So if you, if you think about it historically, businesses were designed as a sale, as marketing, as customer service because that's how the customer journeys were created. And they had to keep those silos to keep cost efficient. But you know, with, with the Gentex now there's a resource that has become abundant. You could apply it through the journey. That's what we are doing. And also one of the key factors is if you think about traditional customer service, it looks at customer journey, then it says we'll wait for something to break and then fix it after the fact. And then hopefully we regain that trust. We are saying, hey you, you can address this upstream, you can address this in digital experiences. You don't even have to wait for the problem to occur. So that's what we are doing and that's why we are excited to partner with extension and Adobe in this financing that we just announced. And we're going to do this for all the Fortune 500.

Jordi (107:55)

Talk about the decision to go with enterprise versus small business, was it ever on the table to go broader self serve or is this, is there something unique about the technology where you're. It's actually more suitable for enterprise use cases right now or is that just your personal DNA where you flourish?

Puneet (108:16)

Actually all of the above. So my personal DNA. I grew up in automated trading, building event engines for different firms on Wall Street.

Jordi (108:24)

You're born in the enterprise.

Puneet (108:26)

I like born in the enterprise.

Jordi (108:28)

Exactly.

Puneet (108:28)

Born in the enterprise. Born and loaded. Low latency systems, born in event correlation. All of those things that just came together for this. But also we looked at where is money getting spent for this problem. So if you look at broadly human capital spend is about $500 billion a year. About 75% of that comes from the world's largest enterprises, literally under a thousand companies. Right. So that's how fragmented the market is. And now with the Tommy's technology, you could run the autonomous front office. So when you do that, not only is that a cost efficiency which more than pays for itself, it really transforms the entire company because you can connect all the systems processes right in those agentic flows and in that sanctioned architecture presented safely to your customers. So, yes, love that medium to high complexity. Love the enterprise. Complexity comes in the DNA. That's what we are the world's best at.

Justin Wexler (109:21)

Yeah. Just to add to that. Yeah. So at Wonderco, as you all know, we invest in consumer, we invest in different areas of technology. But a big focus for us is enterprise and how enterprise is going to evolve with technology, particularly AI technology. I'm fortunate that I work with Jeffrey, who has a lot of great relationships across enterprise and thinking through how to apply agentic capabilities in these organizations is very top of mind. We invested in Punit actually before the. This AI paradigm of, you know, ChatGPT and everything that we know today. And so we've been a little early to this, but new Puneet cna, as these advances became more prominent, was really the right leader to build for large enterprises. And so with Puneet, we sat down with leaders at Delta, United, MetLife, who have all had huge success deploying Netomi. A big proud moment for us is when the. Yeah, no, it's pretty incredible. Anyone could go on the United mobile app and see Powered by Natomi interact with Natomi. And then earlier this year, OpenAI recognized Natomi on one of the case studies, calling it the blueprint for deploying large scale gentek AI. So it's just had a lot of great moments over the last couple of years, and that's what inspired Puneet and me to really sit down and think about, okay, this has been proven at scale, but what's the coalition around this technology that would really allow it to be in the hands of many, many more millions of consumers? And so that's why this round brings together Accenture. No one knows enterprise cloud complexity better than them, and their seal approval on this company is a huge sign to enterprises that this is what they should be deploying. Yeah, absolutely. And then with Adobe, the idea with Adobe is many times chat interfaces sit on top of websites. And while it's a step above prior technology, the next generation is going to bring those capabilities into the digital layer itself. So not having the website and then the chat disconnected on top, but fusing these two layers and the work that Natomi and Adobe are doing together, and we can talk a bit more about it, is going to bring about a gentic digital experience.

Jordi (111:42)

Sure. Tell us about the round. I want to hit the gong. How much came together for this deal? What's the total?

Alex (111:49)

Go ahead.

Puneet (111:50)

We raised $110 million.

John (111:52)

There we go.

Jordi (111:55)

Awesome.

Puneet (111:55)

Damn.

John (111:56)

Well, that shook the whole.

Jordi (112:00)

Look at this.

John (112:01)

Yeah.

Puneet (112:02)

Yeah. We are here to shake the room.

Jordi (112:04)

Fantastic.

Puneet (112:06)

So, so, yeah, all focus towards enterprise deployment. All focus towards the last mile of AI. You know, we think I really needs a big enterprise win that's ROI positive, where large companies can go on their earnings call and say, this is what I did for me. That's what we want to deliver for the entire community.

Jordi (112:22)

I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come. Break it down for us. Congrats on the round coming together and the pleasure progress.

John (112:28)

At this rate, I'm sure you'll be back on this year.

Jordi (112:30)

Yeah, we're excited. We'll talk to you all soon. Have a great weekend. Have a great rest of your day.

John (112:35)

Talk soon.

Jordi (112:35)

Talk to you soon. Goodbye. We have an update from the chat. Cliff Asness has been on Patrick o' Shaughnessy's Invest like the Best. You know who else has been on Invest like the Best?

Alex (112:48)

Palmer.

Jordi (112:48)

Lucky. They've both been on the same podcast back on didn't know about each other. They gotta do a crossover episode back to back. If you're looking to get up to speed on both Palmer and Cliff Asness, head over to Invest like the Best with Patrick o'. Shaughnessy. You can listen to both episodes. Although Cliff was on in 2018 almost a decade ago, he's got to go back on, set the record straight on who he knows, who he doesn't know. Anyway, there's more debate over the data center thing. Some very cool renders, some very cool ideas. I think the problem is that the plans are delayed. Plans are set years in advance. Any move to actually make data centers beautiful is going to take a long time. Hopefully.

John (113:33)

Yeah, this feels like one of those things where data center operators would say, I would love for my competitors to focus on making their data centers beautiful and really make that a part of their strategy. While the zucks of the world, you know, throw up like REI tents throwing GPUs.

Jordi (113:52)

Exactly. People will do the minimum viable beautification potentially. But Dan Lincoln Harris has some comments here. Love that we are having this conversation. The questions that flow from Josh comment are why and what we should aim towards. These should be places of wonder that we can marvel at Modern cathedral for the Silicon Age. Not to worship them but to stoke our aspirations. Square gray boxes do not inspire. Speak for yourself. I like a square gray box every once in a while. Given the epicenter of this technological revolution was California, the light and space movement seems a fitting direction. James Turrell is The most well known for this movement and he shares some James Turrell images which are absolutely beautiful. Good inspiration. If you're a data center builder, you can also just throw some trees, do some AI imagery here. Perhaps people wouldn't be so against data centers if they were built in the style of the elf city Rivendell. That'd be kind of cool. Greco futurism. They do look cooler this way. But it looks a lot more expensive than just some walls. So who knows we will see any.

John (115:01)

This video progress. What just in Skin exams are getting automated.

Jordi (115:06)

Oh yes.

John (115:08)

This is a very cool product.

Jordi (115:09)

Okay, break it down for us. Let's pull out.

John (115:11)

We have video here. Yes. I think anybody that's been to a dermatologist, it's like looking for potential, you know, skin cancers, things like that, that abnormalities. Has had the experience of like the, you know, when you're, you know, that video or the meme where the. The guys like walking through security and the security guys just like, you know, does this like really? Yeah, I mean it's like that's basically what like a lot of dermatologists are doing where they just like take a quick glance and they're like, oh yeah, looks good.

Jordi (115:43)

Yeah. They might be busy, they might be

John (115:44)

sleeping in like a couple of years. But this robot, a robot that just does it like really, really precisely, consistently. Ideally, hopefully. Hopefully a lot more accessibly. I can see this making a lot of sense. And then you actually. It doesn't even replace the job of the doctor. It just helps them speed up the process.

Jordi (116:05)

Where is this company? What stage are they? Do they have to go through FDA medical device approval process? That could be a couple years maybe. But this seems like once you get it through, it's going to be massively successful. I wonder where they are in the FDA process. Hopefully they can move along quickly. ArcPrize put out an update on Arc AGI v3, which. Tyler, are you still on the human leaderboard for that or. I don't think I'm on the leaderboard anymore.

John (116:33)

That was still early on.

Jordi (116:34)

I think there's actually more games now. Roasted. Well, Arc AGI V3 has been very tough for even the most frontier AI models. But. But the good folks over at ArcPrize have benchmarked the two latest and greatest AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic GPT 5.5 scored 0.43%. Opus 4.7 scored 0 point.

John (117:02)

That's state of the art.

Jordi (117:02)

1.8%. It is state of the art. This is the weird thing about these ARC AGI tests is that they start with such a low baseline, 0%, and then they start shooting up as the models get more capable. But it is very interesting and reassuring to see these powerful models that you sometimes hear these narratives. It can do everything. And then there's something that you know to continue working for, to look forward to in the future. There's more applications here. And so they found three total failure modes. True local effect, false world model, wrong level of events. Abstraction from training data solved the level, but didn't reinforce the reward. And so the ArcPrize account goes through a little bit of what's going on when an AI model tries to play Arc AGI V3, which is basically a 2D video game. Simple enough for any human to progress through, but increasingly difficult for AI models.

John (117:59)

Okay, yes, we got to talk about one of the most exciting new products created in the last hundred years. According to Katie at Business Insider, Amazon will now create an AI podcast about their products where two AI hosts discuss the products and take your questions as if it's a call in show. Yes, let's play.

Jordi (118:20)

We don't need to play this one. This one is so rude. But you can imagine the type of products that people are generating AI podcasts for. Only the silliest things will be generated. I don't know if people want to listen to a full podcast about every product they buy on Amazon, but you have had some very strong opinions about paper towels. You wanted paper towels from like the 1950s or something. Remember this whole thing?

John (118:45)

You didn't want to. Well, I just wanted a filter to be able to buy only shop for things on Amazon.

Jordi (118:50)

Well, now instead of a filter, you can listen to an hour long podcast about every possible skew and then you can make the most determined, determined decision available. Well, we have Alex from OpenAI. He's a member of product staff here to talk about Codex and GPT 5.5, I believe. He's in the waiting room, so let's bring him to the TVP and ultradome. Alex, how are you doing?

John (119:10)

Hey, doing great.

Alex (119:11)

How are you guys?

Jordi (119:11)

We're doing fantastic.

John (119:13)

Close to the camera. You make me want to. You make me want to scoot up some people.

Alex (119:16)

Come on.

Jordi (119:16)

And it's standoffish. Yeah, there you go.

John (119:19)

Now you're locked in. You're locked in.

Jordi (119:21)

Okay, so give us some updates on Codex. We've seen some crazy numbers. Things seem like they're going well, but what I'm most interested in is applications, usages. Just as I'm talking To friends and folks that are outside of the most intimate tech community. What are the magical experiences? What are the prompts, the usages that are seeing adoption? How should people even be thinking about Codex and ChatGPT these days?

Alex (119:53)

Totally. I mean, it is such an exciting time. I feel like last year was the explosion of agents for coding.

Jordi (119:57)

Yeah.

Alex (119:58)

You know, now we bring it to everyone else. Codex now is becoming this amazing tool for just like general work or honestly, anything you can do on your computer.

Jordi (120:06)

Yeah.

Alex (120:06)

So the model launch, was it. Was that only last week? I think it was last week.

John (120:12)

It really feels like a month ago.

Alex (120:14)

Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I lose track of time, but, like, no API revenue for that model is growing 2x faster than any prior release. Like, Codex, revenue actually doubled in the last week. So. So it's just like the growth is insane.

Jordi (120:25)

Yeah.

Alex (120:26)

And what's cool is that obviously the growth in usage and the way people are using codecs for coding is like getting way better. But I think that's kind of what you're asking for. There have been. We're making Codex great for everyone. That's all the way from like, what the agent can do and also just like, how simple it is to use. Yeah. And so now we have, you know, Codex being used by like, salespeople, marketing people, finance people, data science people. Whatever you have, whatever you're thinking.

Puneet (120:50)

Yeah.

Alex (120:50)

It's like 85% of the company uses Codex and we're seeing this happen outside as well. So. Yeah. I'm happy to jump into some fun use cases if you want.

John (120:57)

I wanted to ask about, like, how you feel the. The perception around computer use has been like. It felt like there were so many things that got released at one time that that kind of was quite magical. And you see some posts popping up here and there. But do you feel like that's getting the attention that it deserves now?

Alex (121:17)

Yeah, I mean, like, so broadly what we have is we have this amazing agent that can write code, and if we wanted to do more work than just coding work, it needs to be able to do anything you can do on your computer. And so computer use is this big step because it's like, hey, well, now it basically can do anything you can do on your computer. But the magical part of computer use and that the team really cooked here, is that it can use applications in the background. So you could be doing something in one app and the agent can be doing something in another app. And that's important because it means you can actually delegate, which means you can give the agent hard Tasks that take it some time to do. Yeah, I mean the reception around that was actually awesome. I thought we got people noticed sort of just how hard and magical that is. More so than I even expected. So, yeah, we've been really happy with that.

Jordi (121:57)

Yeah, I've noticed that Codex puppeteering a mouse cursor has gotten good. It feels like it crossed some sort of like Turing test where when I see a video of codecs moving a mouse around, it doesn't read to me like, oh, that's a jittery, like the AI is using it. It just looks like, oh, somebody just recorded themselves moving the mouse. Is there a benchmark? Is that something that just comes from the new model or work that's being done on codecs? Like what is going on with the progress there?

John (122:28)

The sky team acquisition?

Alex (122:31)

Yeah. So there's kind of like three things going on there. Like first of all, GPT 5.5 is our best model ever for general work or knowledge work. And so it's really good at using computers. The next thing is, well, what harness do you give the model or what information is the model seeing and what tools does it have to use the computer? A lot of early versions of giving a model access to a computer, we're just giving it screenshots of the computer computer. But there's a lot of secret sauce in our implementation where the model actually gets text representations of what's on screen from like frameworks, like accessibility.

Jordi (123:02)

Sure.

Alex (123:02)

And so the model is like much more efficient when it has access to all this information. And then the last bit that I honestly think, well, I don't know if I would say it's underappreciated because I feel like people really appreciated it. But it's the level of craft that was put in to how it feels when the agent is using the computer. So for instance, you could totally just have the agent like click around on your screen and just have that be invisible and you wouldn't even. It's just like the computer is updating as clicks happen. But the team put a ton of care into exactly the animation that this mouse cursor takes as it goes between the different click positions. And it was really fun to talk about that and jam on that with them. We actually made some interesting trade offs. Having this animation actually slows down how quickly the agent can work by just a tiny bit. But it means that it's so much easier as a human for me to understand the system and therefore to trust the system.

Jordi (123:56)

Yeah, that's interesting. It sort of goes back To. I remember the initial ChatGPT app launch on iOS had haptic feedback as the token streamed in. And so it felt like it was typing. And that could have easily just been generate the response, give you a little waiting wheel, and then boom, it loads like a webpage. When I go to the New York Times, the whole page loads. It doesn't stream in, but that streaming made it feel more like a conversation. Those little UX cues help create this more interactive motion back and forth. That's very interesting.

John (124:36)

Someone's trying Codex for the first time. You've got one minute to explain the three things that they should do to get the most out of it. What do you tell them?

Alex (124:46)

Okay, cool. Is this person an engineer or are they like a knowledge worker?

Jordi (124:49)

Let's say engineer, because I feel like.

John (124:51)

Well, no, let's do. Let's do both.

Jordi (124:52)

Sure, yeah, let's start with Engineer.

Alex (124:55)

Okay, start with Engineer. If someone's using Codex for the first time, I just say, download Codex, you know, attach. Connect it to your project, whatever you've been working on, and then ask it a question about your code base, like a hard architecture question. And it's just going to give you an amazing answer. Then the next thing you do is you say, cool. Give it a bug that you've been trying to track down and ask it to solve the bug. And I hear this all the time on Twitter, etc. People will be like, hey, I was trying to solve this bug myself, couldn't do it. I gave it to all the other coding agents. They couldn't do it, but Codex could do it. And then maybe as a final thing, to experience a little bit of the magic that has shipped in the last week or two, if you're working on something that's has a web view, like maybe a website or something like that, ask Codex to make a change and then, like, watch it just, like, iterate on that change by opening the in app browser and sort of observing its outputs, clicking around and then like naturally just like fix and improve the change that it made. It's like, it's super magical because you just realize when you see it, like work in that loop, you just realize how powerful it is now.

Jordi (125:54)

Okay, speaking of loops, explain ralph loop, explain, slash, goal.

Alex (126:00)

Okay, so basically we've had this interesting thing for a long time where people. This is like months ago, people would tell us that they knew the Codex was super powerful, but it felt annoying to work with because they had to constantly tell the agent, you can do this. Keep going. So you have this Brilliant model, but you have to encourage it constantly. We then shipped a feature called queuing, which you can use to give the agent a message that it will receive whenever it thinks it's done. And people use that to say, do this, then do that, then do that. But actually a lot of people started using that to just say keep going. So they would just queue 10 messages like, keep going, keep going, keep going,

John (126:36)

keep cooking, keep going, keep cooking.

Alex (126:38)

Yeah, exactly. And so now at this point we have these amazing models that if you know how to use in the right way, you can have them do hours of work or even days of work just like independently, autonomously. However, you know, the average person doesn't necessarily know how to do that. You have to do like all this contrived harness setup. And so with Goal, which is a feature that we shipped into the, into the command line interface and we'll come to the app soon, we wanted to make that super easy. So now you can basically describe to like, hey, like I want you to keep going and until you achieve this goal. And then Codex will just take care of working for however long you need until you can do that. And so internally this is something that people have been really excited for for a long time when we do a lot of long running work. So for example, when you're babysitting a training run for a model, you don't want to just tell Codex to do something and then have it return in five minutes. You actually want it to pay attention all night. So that's what goal is. Yeah, go ahead.

Jordi (127:34)

I was wondering about the, for the non engineer use case, the thing that gets you to move from ChatGPT to Codex, like the first more complicated query, more complicated project that you would recommend someone say, oh yeah, like ChatGPT can do a decent amount of research, but for this you should spin up Codex and start working with that as your primary workflow. Like what is the entry point, what is the appetizer into the Codex workflow For someone who's non technical, not writing code, wouldn't mind if code was written behind the scenes, but really just is interacting with typical knowledge worksuite. So email, spreadsheets, word docs, generating graphics, research, there's a lot of stuff and ChatGPT satisfies a ton of that. And so when are they jumping over to Codex?

Alex (128:37)

Yeah, so I kind of think about the way that you can do general work when Codex, there's maybe three categories of work, there's like just very easy tasks. And that's not to dismiss those actually Most of my usage of Codex is like easy tasks, and those are the first things you try. Then there's like hard tasks that are like really cool demos, but actually if you start trying to do a hard demo, you might, you might just like waste a lot of time. And then there's automating. So everyone should kind of go through this progression. It's like easy, hard, automated, and if you think about it, it's kind of like a human teammate, right? Like, if you hire someone onto your team, you know, you don't usually. Well, maybe at OpenAI we do. But you don't just say like, hey, just like, figure out what you want to do. Maybe what you do is you say like, hey, like, why don't you do this, like, small starter task or something? And then from there give them a harder and harder task and then eventually you say, okay, just like, go figure it out and work automatically. Oh, okay. Easy tasks. The thing I always recommend people do is like, wherever your company works at OpenAI, that's Slack, maybe for you, it's teams or it's email. Connect Codex to that tool and then just ask it like, hey, like, am I missing any urgent. Like, do I need to reply to anything urgently? Just like, draft some answers for me. Or maybe like, I get tagged on these really long threads all the time. It's like, hey, just summarize this thread. What am I supposed. What am I being asked? What should I, what, what should I answer? You know, just ask these, like, these questions like, or maybe someone mentioned something, you don't know what it is, and you're just like, hey, like, search all my company information and tell me what is xyz. You know, the thing. So those are really basic easy queries that Codex is amazing at. And I have found that even though those may not sound that hard, people just get hooked on doing that all the time. And then from there, once you're hooked and you kind of become fluent in using this tool to answer any even small question. Use it for harder things. So, for example, one of the use cases that I do a lot that tends to like, really get other people excited when they see it is I, you know, we, we don't like meetings. Try to keep meeting attendees to a minimum here. So often instead of adding people to a meeting, I'll post in a channel and say, if anyone wants to talk live about this, just reply. And this is something I used to do from before, but now what I do is I tell Codex, post in this channel, see who wants to join and Add anyone who wants to join to the meeting.

Mike Isaac (130:39)

Sure.

Alex (130:40)

Super basic thing, right? But the fact that you can ask an agent to do a thing and then monitor that post and then like keep it up to date is actually really powerful. And then when people reply to the post and then the agent replies back saying like cool, you're in the meeting, it's at this time. Here's the link that always mind blows people. And then people start trolling people like add Sam to the meeting. The agent knows not to.

John (131:04)

Yeah, because that's just like functionally, what if you're lucky enough to have an ea, you get something like that where it's like, hey, I need to get this thing done. I'm going to kind of set it. I want to set off the process, but then someone else monitoring it, kind of backfilling it.

Alex (131:20)

I think any, any work that requires like a lot of work, like a lot of time from you, but is not hard. Those are good starter tasks. You know, same for like managing tasks, you know, tracking issues coming out of a bug bash or like pre launch, we do this thing where I'll have Codex monitor a bunch of channels I'm in with internal and external users and I'll just say, hey, if anything comes up, put this in linear, which is where we track our bugs and make sure it's deduplicated and then let people know that we're tracking the bug. So very simple task, but actually incredibly useful time wise. Last thing I'll say on this, we have executive assistant kind of plugin internally that I would love to ship externally. We should get on that and it's really taken off internally. People basically have this thing that is keeping track of all their information and just like helping them organize their day and like stay on top of things. It's pretty cool.

Jordi (132:14)

So then, yeah, talk to me about automation because I understand from integrations and computer use how a single prompt could go into Slack or go into your email or pull some documents together, write code, do whatever it needs to on the Internet APIs. I understand all that, but then what is the workflow to get Codex to do something every morning, morning at 7am to prepare me a digest or take the same actions to really get rid of that rote work that I've demoed and I've seen the results, it's working and now I just don't want to think about it ever again forever.

Alex (132:50)

Yeah, I mean it's honestly super simple. You just tell Codex, hey, do this every morning.

Jordi (132:55)

There we go.

Alex (132:56)

Right.

Justin Wexler (132:57)

Well like in My case, Yeah.

John (132:58)

I mean, that's kind of an interesting thing with these kind of products that have effectively unlimited potential is like, where's the line between like a feature and just a prompt?

Jordi (133:08)

Yeah.

John (133:08)

And when, when should, as a company, when should you just launch something and make a big moment out of it? Or when should you just let people just understand the full potential of it and then when they want something, they can just ask it. Right. They don't need to, like, request a feature, just like literally just request it.

Alex (133:25)

Totally. With the agent, it's really interesting as we design the product, like, I like to think that we need to keep sort of all the rules and like sort of the heavy UI and stuff around the agent to a minimum, because it kind of constrains how much better the product can get when we have a smarter model. So the more things we can kind of like let the model decide, you know, it's like it's AI soon AGI the better. And then sometimes you just need UI so that people can learn that this thing exists, but even that the model can suggest things. So I'll give you the most powerful, I think example of a use case I heard recently was this person on the growth team needs to figure out, like, what experiments to run, and then they need to write code to run the experiment. And then they need to analyze the experiment. And it turns out they were using. They started using Codex individually for each separate things. They would have it run a bunch of analyses and they would sort of interrogate the data. You know, they would just talk to Codex about the data and then they would pick an experiment and then they would like write. Ask Codex to write the code. Then they would run the experiment and they would ask Codex what the results of the experiment were. And then they would like produce a deck. Right. So all steps they were doing individually. And they didn't start by saying, I'm going to automate this entire thing because that's like hard and scary. Right. They just started with using codecs, like to accelerate themselves individual productivity for each task. Then they started basically connecting all these things together into a giant skill. And then one day they just said, hey, why don't you do this every morning? And they gave it a name. It's called Lord Bottleneck because it's like solving the bottlenecks friction for new users. And basically this is the thing the team does now. Every morning, Lord Bottleneck evaluates past experiments, looks at data, looks at new things, proposes some experiments and offers to the team, hey, let's run these Experiments, the team picks, let's do this one or that one. Then Lordbot is like, okay, cool, here's some code or whatever config that needs to be done, runs the experiment and at the end they go and do the same loop the next day and analyze the results. That's actually really serious value in automation. That's like, I forget the numbers but it's produced like, you know, significant company value just automatically through Codex.

Jordi (135:25)

How are you thinking about game development? It feels like all of these tools are super useful and could really accelerate game development.

John (135:35)

Especially with images too.

Jordi (135:37)

Totally. I think there was a time when like everyone had an idea for a meme, but not everyone knew Photoshop. Now everyone can go and use images and ChatGPT to sort of make the exact meme that they want very quickly, very easily. And there's this takeoff in like everyone can create the thing now. Everyone can vibe code a Python script pretty easily. And it feels like the next thing is like going and shipping something and we're starting to see these simulators and these little one off like web games. It's still a little bit like Prosumer I would say. But is this something that you think just is like a natural outgrowth or something where you might actually spend some cycles thinking about that as a particular like workflow?

Alex (136:24)

Yeah, I mean I think I'm really just excited about how easy it's becoming for everyone to bring their ideas to life. ImageGen, you bring up ImageGen, that was actually a really big deal in a way that I still think people don't really realize. Like having an agent able to just generate images as it's working is massive. Yeah, I mean image in itself is actually really popular and is great even outside of codecs. Like I think, let me see here. Yeah, like I think we are like people are making like 50% more images with Image Gen 2 just like a few weeks after launch than they were before. So it's like really taking off and it was already popular. But then with Image Gen we see all these cool use cases where people will have the agent. Let's say we'll take a development and a non development use case for development. They'll have it build a bunch of sprites. Sprites is a term for the image that you use in your game. So one cool example of this is in the GPT 5.4 blog we have some example prompts to try and one of them is, I forget, it's like build an roller coaster simulator or arcade simulator or something and you can just Copy paste that prompt into Codex now and it's just like even better because Codex will like create all the assets for the game using ImageGen and then like build a game using it and then play the game for you to test it in the in app browser. So yes, this is happening very naturally and I suspect it would be quite interesting to lean into it to make it even better. Yeah, a cool like non coding use case is we're seeing people use ImageGen to create slides or like slide templates or assets go on slides and then produce the slide deck which again you can iterate on just inside the Codex app. So yeah, images are massive for us.

Jordi (138:01)

Yeah, yeah that makes total sense. Jordy, anything else?

John (138:03)

No, this is great. Appreciate the update. I'm sure there will be many more ton more news by this time next week.

Alex (138:12)

Yeah, we're joking about like how many Thursdays can we ship in a row?

Jordi (138:16)

You know like

John (138:19)

well the more, the more you ship, the easier it is to ship. So it's a good feedback.

Jordi (138:23)

Luke, that's fantastic. Thank you so much for taking it.

John (138:26)

Great to see you, dude.

Jordi (138:26)

Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great weekend. Goodbye. Should we show everyone the game that we made? Should we show everyone TVPN simulator? Do we have that pulled up? Can we play that? Would now be a good time? It's a later.

John (138:39)

We might not have enough time.

Jordi (138:42)

We can have them pull it up while we read through the.

John (138:45)

Let's pull up this packaging of the Neo robot over at 1X.

Jordi (138:51)

The Neo robot over at 1X.

John (138:53)

Have you seen this? They got a suitcase.

Jordi (138:55)

They got a suitcase. That is remarkable. Let's pull this up. This, this packaging is so cool aesthetic, this warm tone. It's. It's welcome.

John (139:07)

I gotta say it's really cool. Until it's 2:00am and you hear a shaking in your house and you go and you turn on the lights and this little suitcase thing shaken and then Neo pops out and goes Terminator mode. I wouldn't know what that actually is like but I'm going to watch Terminator this weekend and report back.

Jordi (139:28)

Ridiculous.

Alex (139:29)

Wow.

Jordi (139:30)

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta collectively are spending more money than the Manhattan Project every single month. That's insane. Wow. Wild. Anyway, in the mansion section there is a record breaking home in Los Angeles with a question. Will a Los Angeles area mega mansion become America's most expensive residential property? $400 million they're asking 70,000 square feet. The guest house is 30,000 square feet. It's absolutely insane. 39 bedrooms, 8 acres, 3 pools. It has an X ray machine. This is in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal. Fascinating, because Tyler was unimpressed. And I was wondering, like, what could possibly be better than a $400 million mega mansion in Los Angeles? But you found something.

Puneet (140:22)

What?

Jordi (140:22)

Absolutely.

John (140:22)

Well, I was comparing it to, you know, some kind of palatial manor, Right?

Jordi (140:26)

So clearly it's like versailles.

Mike Isaac (140:27)

Versailles.

Jordi (140:28)

You know, 10x bigger. It's like. It's like 700,000 square feet. 700,000 square foot. Just the indoor space, obviously, with the gardens.

Alex (140:33)

It's like millions of square footage.

Jordi (140:36)

Millions of square footage.

Alex (140:37)

Kind of just getting brutally mobbed.

Jordi (140:38)

What about on bedrooms? This one is 39. You certainly can't go higher than 39 bedrooms. I think it was. Yeah, 2300. 23. Oh, no, no, that was just rooms, actually. Those rooms. Okay, so not all bedrooms, but I mean, if you need a buddy who crashes, like, they can crash in any room, right? Like, you know, have you ever slept in a kitchen you've never had? We don't have any room. If I've ever got to sleep in the. You got to sleep in the living room. You got to sleep in the dining room.

John (141:04)

Let's pull up the trailer for TVPN Simulator.

Jordi (141:06)

Oh, we have a trailer.

John (141:07)

Yeah, we got the trailer.

Jordi (141:08)

Oh, let's go. Let's watch this.

John (141:10)

I think TVPN needs a game.

Jordi (141:11)

Yeah, we definitely need to build some sort of game. This. This project has evolved so so much to the point where you can move the goal posts. I don't know that you can interact with the horse. You can definitely hit the gong, and then any team member is now playable.

Alex (141:33)

Okay.

Jordi (141:33)

Oh, wait. So there is a mechanic. You have to gain the most subscribers. Interesting. Yes. You have to puzzle piece everything. You can watch the stream in the game. You can explore the ultra dome. It's a full backup replication. Tvpnsimulator.com Sloppy. That was Image Gen1. Image Gen2 would never do that. But can we pull the actual game up? Hope so. Hopefully.

Justin Wexler (142:03)

Yeah.

John (142:03)

Here it comes.

Jordi (142:04)

Didn't pop up. If we can pull up the actual game. Let's see. There's a whole bunch of good stuff on here. Okay, so this is TVPN Simulator, the latest and greatest version. A remarkable. Ben, how did you actually get this, like, the geometry in here? Was this all described via prompt here

John (142:26)

we've got intern Ben here to talk.

Alex (142:28)

Yeah. So basically the whole process is kind of like. I'm like, okay, look at that wall right there. Yeah, I need that to be Taller. I'm going to place a desk right at that wall. So the whole idea was that I looked at every single object. So I was able to like talk about.

Jordi (142:41)

Is there someone else in the game?

John (142:43)

Wait, it's multiplayer.

Jordi (142:44)

It's multiplayer. Wait, so we're getting other people in the game right now? Oh, no. People are coming in. There's Mark. TVPN Simulator.com. i can't believe it's multiplayer. I can't believe you created a multiplayer game. Okay, so we got the bathroom. Okay, this is incredibly. No, no, no, no. Get out of there. Get out of there. Okay, so there's a chess board which was gifted to us. Us. Ring the gong.

Alex (143:08)

You can ring the gong to the actual studio.

Jordi (143:10)

Okay. Oh, gong. Cool down. And then those are the photos that we take. And there's the ultra dome.

Alex (143:18)

It's a one to one lidar scanned measurement.

Jordi (143:21)

Did you wait, did you actually LIDAR scan?

Alex (143:22)

I lidar scanned it.

Mike Isaac (143:23)

We know.

Jordi (143:24)

Okay.

Alex (143:25)

Yeah, the measurements and you could play as any character. So. Yeah.

Jordi (143:27)

Yeah. Okay, so yeah. What does it take to make it in TVPN simulator?

John (143:31)

Camera cut.

Jordi (143:33)

Okay, so you're watching the show and you need to cut between. Oh. So you get a current cue and you have to cut between different cues at the right time to produce the show live. Okay, we have Tyler, we have Mark in TVPN simulator. Okay, what else can you do here?

Alex (143:53)

How much activity?

Turner Caldwell (143:54)

Like 35%.

Jordi (143:55)

Is this from yesterday? Oh, this is yesterday's show is playing currently. So they're using the wallet. And if you're jordy, for example, like you play as. You have to do a mini game, which is Guitar Hero, but with Soundboard, basically. Is that the game? Let's hear Overnight. Overnight success. So you have to. You have to hit the soundboard at the right time as the blocks come down. Okay.

Alex (144:22)

Things like.

Jordi (144:22)

I think I was doing some ad reads for a while. There's a gong. Of course. We're really packing the ultra dumb. We'll see if this thing has high throughput networking. You can play as the guest. What do you play as the guest? You just see what it's like to be a guest on tvpn. Okay. You get. Someone's moving the goalposts. Okay. We got a new definition for general intelligence.

David Marcus (144:45)

I didn't realize that.

Jordi (144:46)

Yeah, the chat has joined the. Oh, yeah. Someone says make it a Roblox game. This does have some Roblox aesthetics. But this is not. This is vibe coded. And so this is creating the daily newsletter. You have to stack the different blocks, the strips. It says perfect alignment, published clean. That's Brandon Gorell's job. Nick has to, of course, fix the schedule for everyone to come together. We're watching some Tetris Calendar. Tetris. You're trying to calendar Tetris? How are you going to get Patrick Collison and Brian Chesky on the show with Alex Karp and Marc Benioff all at the same time? How will you do that?

John (145:26)

Paul Coogan.

Jordi (145:28)

There we go. And then this is Tyler organizing the show, figuring out how to get different posts into the show. Okay. Oh, here you go. You're moving the different. Oh, you're jammed up there. You're jammed up there. You got to keep working on that. What else is this? What is Jackson up to? Making cards. What are we doing here? Oh, whack a clip. Okay, the timeline. Sniper. There's breaking news. You gotta. You ramble. You don't want to cut that. Okay. You want to hit the good hot takes at the right time. That is fantastic. I cannot believe the number of mini games here. This is insane. What a remarkable. Oh, this is me. Okay, so I have to read different phrases. It's a typing game because I have to read without a teleprompter. Live from the TVPN ultradome. Uh oh, someone's typing incorrectly. Phrase deck. Okay, well, we got a whole bunch of people. You can go enjoy it. Hopefully people are playing TVPN simulator all weekend long.

John (146:30)

Yeah, I expect people to put up.

Jordi (146:33)

I mean, if you're launching a TVPN type show, this is a great way to get your reps. Get some practice. Get some practice in before we go live until we get our mastermind. Yeah, it is. It is the path of financial freedom for a lot of folks. So we recommend it. We endorse it. Get your reps in on tbpnsimulator.com and we will see you on Monday. Anything else, Jordy?

John (146:55)

Is it actually live?

Jordi (146:57)

I think it's live, yeah.

John (146:58)

Wow.

Jordi (146:58)

Oh, yeah. People are in there. They're playing tv.

John (147:01)

We got to change the slop images.

Jordi (147:04)

Okay, we'll work on those.

John (147:06)

But a lot of this incredibly well done.

Jordi (147:08)

Bad. Our first video game shipped.

John (147:12)

Truly hilarious.

Jordi (147:14)

And people are asking for a wave pool.

John (147:16)

That's true. We do need a wave pool.

Jordi (147:18)

We don't have a wave pool in here. Well, that's not a simulation.

John (147:21)

But if we make it in the simulator, it's probably increases the likelihood.

Jordi (147:26)

I think the key is you have to be able to sit down on one of those laptops. And play an even rougher version of TVPN simulator. Two layers deep.

Alex (147:35)

That's how you simulate Ben.

Jordi (147:37)

Yeah, yeah. When you simulate Ben, it should go into a 2D version. Top down low, even lower res graphics, pixel art.

John (147:44)

Yeah, yeah.

Jordi (147:45)

A pixel art version of TVPN simulator. Two layers deep. And we can see how deep the rabbit hole goes. But will you break out of the matrix? We certainly hope you do this weekend. Go enjoy your weekend. Enjoy your Friday. We will see you on Monday. Goodbye.

John (148:04)

Love you.

Jordi (148:05)

Flashbang.