xAI’s $20B Raise, Semafor’s $30M Round, America’s Tech Decline | Ravi Gupta & Pat Grady, Vincenzo Landino, Nigel Vaz, Ben Smith, Jacob Rintamaki

Summary

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TBPN Podcast Summary

Episode Title: xAI’s $20B Raise, Semafor’s $30M Round, America’s Tech Decline
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Date: January 7, 2026

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Episode Overview

This packed episode covers breaking news and trends at the intersection of AI, media, and the business of technology. The hosts discuss xAI's staggering $20 billion raise, the wild world of humanoid robots, and what’s going on with America’s shifting technological centers. Special guests help break down the health of the motorsports industry, enterprise AI adoption, high-profile media fundraising, practical robotics, and the narrative challenge for the tech sector. A major throughline: in a world changing this rapidly, execution, clarity of narrative, and quality of leadership matter more than ever.

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Key Discussions & Insights

1. xAI's $20B Raise: The Story and Stakes

[00:12–13:19, 15:31–16:19]

• xAI closed a historic $20 billion Series A, shattering all previous fundraising records for AI labs.
  • The previous rumor: xAI struggled to raise at a $230B valuation; industry insiders were betting it might not get done.
  • Elon Musk’s signature “most entertaining outcome is the most likely” energy is seen as driving these huge plays.
• XAI’s Product Traction:
  • Mixed reception for Grok (their LLM): “It had some useful hooks and some extremely controversial hallucinations.” (Jordi, 01:13)
  • Grok has experienced public misbehavior, leading to viral controversies because outputs are often posted from official accounts.
  • “It’s just crazy to see a lab posting images like that from their own official account.” (John, 02:58)
• Meta-point on Elon's Playbook:
  • The show unpacks how Musk repeatedly places wild bets (e.g., SolarCity, the infamous “funding secured” tweet for Tesla) and, despite skepticism, often manages to prove doubters wrong—if not on his precise timeline.
  • “I have this thesis: the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.” (Jordi, 09:02)
  • Speculation on further consolidation under an “Elon Inc. Megacorp”—potentially merging SpaceX, xAI, Twitter, and Tesla for maximum vertical integration and financial firepower.
• AI race vs. AI future:
  • The hosts cite Dan Wang’s framing: it’s not a winner-take-all “race,” but an ongoing process to build ever more capable businesses.
  • “XAI winning the AI race feels like the wrong framing here.” (Jordi, 09:28)

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2. Physical Intelligence & Robotics: Where Are We Now?

[15:31–17:34, 183:03–190:45]

• Tesla's Optimus Robot: New supply chain moves and large component orders indicate Tesla is starting mass production of Optimus humanoid robots.
  • “Does this mean butler-ready robots… will be ready by then? …Hard to say, but yeah. That's a big, big number.” (John, 15:54)
• Discussion about the challenges:
  • Navigating real-world manipulation is much harder than navigation.
  • “Navigation has been a much easier problem... Manipulation is difficult.” (Jacob, 183:03)
  • Most demos still feel staged or limited. Big breakthroughs are required for truly general-purpose humanoid robots.
• Industry impacts: Suggestion that traditional automakers and high-volume Asian manufacturers are likely best positioned to scale humanoid or specialized robots.
• Unexpected implications:
  • “Every robotics company that wants to be big is secretly a Dyson sphere company, they just don’t know it yet.” (Jacob, 191:48)
  • Cheap, persistent robots will change logistics, care work, manufacturing… and possibly even the very meaning/value of land in the US.

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3. Semafor's $30M Fundraising and the State of Modern Media

[25:28–27:52, 165:23–176:48]

• Semafor closes a $30M round at a $330M valuation.
  • Has achieved profitability ($2M EBITDA).
  • “It is twice what The Free Press was acquired for.” (John, 26:27)
• Media company valuations: Hosts underscore these deals are driven by influence, growth, and talent—not current EBITDA multiples.
  • Memorable: “EBITDA's probably the last number that you look at to get to a number for valuation at least.” (Jordi, 30:52)
• Trust and the future of journalism:
  • Ben Smith (Semaphore) joins to highlight why careful, original reporting is more important than ever in the AI “slop” era.
    • “You can only trust...somebody that actually did the fact-finding because somebody else could make a video easily...that never even happened.” (John, 167:13)
  • Mixed revenue between journalism and high-profile events; focus on talent-driven reporting.
• The importance of hard questions:
  • “If you feel weird and bad asking the question, sometimes that’s a really good question.” (Ben Smith, 176:48)

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4. America’s Tech Center Decline: Lessons from Boston

[53:37–72:59]

• Will Manidis’ essay, discussed in detail, uses Boston’s collapse from tech powerhouse to footnote to warn about “negative cultural and regulatory feedback loops,” specifically:
  1. Heavy, unsupportive, and tax-hungry local government
  2. Venture “cabal” dynamics harmful to founders
  3. An insular, inward-looking ecosystem
• The biggest lesson: tech ecosystems, no matter how strong, are fragile. Network effects can work in reverse.
  • “You cannot legislate your way out of a collapsing network. You cannot cold start a network already folding in on itself.” (Jordi summarizing Will, 57:05)
  • “If we cannot articulate why innovation is a moral imperative, we can expect the entire technology industry to end up like Boston.” (John quoting Will, 61:49)
• San Francisco faces similar risks if it continues to treat tech as a cash cow instead of a crucial engine.

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5. Enterprise AI Adoption: Reality vs. Hype

[121:01–133:49]

• Nigel Vaz, CEO of Sapient, provides nuance to the MIT study that 93% of AI pilot programs in the enterprise don't get renewed:
  • Experiments are easy; real adoption is hard because of integration complexity, “tool chaining,” and decades of tech debt.
  • “The bridge from you experiment with a little bit of AI to you can actually start to see meaningful gains... is one of the biggest stumbling blocks.” (Nigel, 122:48)
• Where AI is real: Customer service, supply chain, ad targeting, and insurance risk are seeing real enterprise value, but deploys often require “agentic mesh” architectures and regulatory sensitivity.
• Advertising’s future: More creative will be generated than ever before, moving towards true one-to-one personalization—but, most companies “can’t do that” with their existing data chains.

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6. Motorsport Business Deep-Dive

[87:45–119:34]

• Guest Vincenzo Landino (Business of Speed) breaks down the boom in US motorsports, F1’s global strategy, and how content (Netflix’s Drive to Survive, ESPN) created a new kind of sports business.
• Team valuations: Have skyrocketed, driven by scarcity (hard cap on teams), event economics, and the “cool” factor—“You can’t put a price on being in the suite.” (Vincenzo, 98:44)
• Discussion of the evolving balance between street circuits (great for sponsors, tough on locals) and private/enthusiast tracks.
  • “If it becomes effectively illegal to drive cars on the road... you could see a resurgence of enthusiast driving because it’s just made illegal on normal roads.” (John, 111:25)

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7. AI Narratives & The Need for Tech Storytelling

[62:56–69:59, 161:12–164:25]

• Tech needs “better narratives” to justify its existence in the face of rising populist and legislative backlash.
  • “How would Steve Jobs pitch AI?... We don't have anyone who wants to be seen as the Steve Jobs of AI.” (John, 63:18)
  • “He cornered the market on earnestness.” (Jordi, 66:11)
• In a flood of sci-fi, slop, and job-loss panic, nobody is making the positive case for “bicycle for the mind” style AI—“It’s going to get more and more powerful, and it’s more and more incumbent on all of us to make sure we use it for something that's great.” (Pat Grady, 163:12)

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8. Sequoia Stewards on AI Company-Building & Agency

[139:45–153:14]

• Pat Grady & Ravi Gupta discuss launching a major new company out of Sequoia—while highlighting what matters most now:
  • Now is the best time ever to build an application-layer AI company, because the “playbook has finally started to emerge” (Pat, 153:16).
  • “The leverage available to great people has never been higher... The only thing is what we do tomorrow.” (Ravi, 151:37)
• Key to surviving rapid change: focus on “early and inevitable” theses, find network effects, and most importantly, bet on the best people.
  • “You need the people that you will trust to go and face these realities.” (Ravi, 158:52)

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9. Humanoid Robots, Robotics as Industry, and Dyson Spheres

[179:10–196:15]

• Jacob Ri (essayist) posits that humanoid robots are imminent at scale, with Asian manufacturers poised for dominance and plenty of market opportunities beyond direct consumer robots.
• “Every robotics company that wants to be big is secretly a Dyson sphere company, they just don’t know it yet.” (Jacob, 191:48)
• Discussion on land, infrastructure, and the future of industrial policy. Optimistic take: the offshoring of manufacturing may reverse dramatically if labor cost drops and US resources + AI + robotics drive a reshoring boom.

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10. Tone, Quotes, and Memorable Moments

• The episode is full of humor—and a strong sense of history repeating. Threads of skepticism about “vibes-driven” tech valuations, but also realism about the speed at which new technologies become inevitable.
• Memorable quotes:
  • “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.” (Jordi, 09:02)
  • “Technology is neither good nor bad. It’s what we do with it. The same technology that powers a nuclear bomb can power a nuclear power plant.” (Pat Grady, 163:12)
  • “You cannot legislate your way out of a collapsing network. You cannot cold start a network already folding in on itself.” (Will Manidis via Jordi, 57:05)
  • “Leverage available to the best people is insane... All these things about agency: it’s about, how much do you want to get your idea into the world?” (Ravi, 156:13)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• xAI Funding, Musk’s Playbook: [00:12–13:19], [15:31–16:19]
• GROK, OpenAI, AI model controversy: [02:29–03:53], [12:03–13:03]
• Optimist, Robotics: [15:31–17:34]
• Media valuations & Semafor discussion: [25:28–27:52], [165:23–176:48]
• Boston/US tech decline: [53:37–72:59]
• AI Narratives, Need for Tech Storytelling: [62:56–69:59], [161:12–164:25]
• Sequoia founders on building in AI: [139:45–153:14]
• Humanoid robots, Dyson Sphere future: [179:10–196:15]

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In-Context Notable Quotes

“The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.”
— Jordi Hays [09:02]

“No one delivers more entertaining outcomes than Elon. No one delivers more entertaining, emotional, real time, intelligent conversational agents than Eleven Labs.”
— Jordi [09:55]

“You cannot legislate your way out of a collapsing network. You cannot cold start a network already folding in on itself. And yet San Francisco and the US technology ecosystem as a whole is lining up for the exact same fate.”
— Jordi summarizing Will Manidis [57:05]

“Technology is neither good nor bad. It’s what we do with it. The same technology that powers a nuclear bomb can power a nuclear power plant.”
— Pat Grady [163:12]

“The leverage available to great people is insane… The only thing is what we do tomorrow.”
— Ravi Gupta [151:37]

“Every robotics company that wants to be big is secretly a Dyson sphere company, they just don’t know it yet.”
— Jacob Ri [191:48]

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Concluding Takeaways

• AI advances are both disruptive and unpredictable; capital is flowing at unprecedented scale, but traction and adoption remain mixed.
• Despite technical progress and massive vision, better storytelling and public engagement are needed to preserve America’s edge and social license to operate.
• Robotics is poised for a multi-industry breakout—most likely driven by large Asian manufacturers and existing auto/R&D ecosystems.
• Big change comes quickly, but network effects (good and bad) shape which cities, companies, and sectors persist.
• Amidst narrative chaos, the “application layer” is where the keenest opportunity—and the greatest entrepreneurial leverage—now lie.
• Most of all, leverage (technical and narrative) flows to the best, fastest, most capable people—building, learning, and leading in public, on the fly.

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For deeper dives, see guest appearances section-wise—Vincenzo Landino for motorsport business, Nigel Vaz regarding enterprise AI transformation, Ben Smith for media business reality, and Jacob Ri for robotics/AI speculation.

Transcript

[Jordi]

You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, January 7, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of.

[John]

Finance, the capital of capital.

[Jordi]

Ramp time is money, say both easy use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have some great posts with Ara Kharazian in the stack today. He's been doing some fantastic analysis on the economy, employment, AI adoption, all this fun stuff. But speaking of AI adoption, is anyone adopting XAI? Certainly investors are because they got $20 billion in the bank. Now, seriously, we talked about it yesterday, but I wanted to reflect on it because there were rumors that they weren't gonna get this one done, that the initial back in November, a little more.

[John]

A little kind of trouble getting felt like that. And again, these were just rumors. But when you looked at xai's traction relative to their valuation at the time, they were looking for a greater valuation than anthropic. And yet the enterprise adoption certainly didn't justify it by itself.

[Jordi]

Yeah, there were lots of weird questions. Before we dig into xai, let's take you through the LINEAR lineup today. We got a bunch of great guests. We got Pat Grady and Ravi Gupta from Sequoia coming on. Ben smith's back with $30 million for semaphore. Massive news there. We got a bunch of other folks joining linear, of course. Meet the system for modern software development. LINEAR is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. So the rumor back in November, the Wall Street Journal reported that XAI was out raising 15 billion in new equity at a $230 billion valuation. And people were skeptical. XAI had accomplished a lot in a very short amount of time. No one would argue with that. They definitely caught up. The benchmarks were good, the data centers were massive and they were being completed in record time. That's what Elon's really, really good at. But there was a big question about the product and where it was going. It had some useful hooks and some extremely controversial hallucinations.

[Tyler]

Right.

[Jordi]

But in general, I did find myself using GROK certainly monthly, probably weekly. I would just hit the little GROK button on a post and get some extra details and then just be chatting there because I didn't want to copy the post and go over to some other LLM and ask about it. So like they were getting some adoption, but.

[John]

And even in the last 48 hours, Grok has gone a little bit off the rails. Not the first time. But the thing is you have millions of people that are trying to manipulate it into doing things. It does have guardrails, but grok's challenge is that you can ask it to create images. And certainly, yeah, again, some of these images have been pretty wild and have gotten deleted pretty quickly. But it is fully automated system and I believe if any other lab had a bot that was doing this, it would be happening to all the other labs. Right. So this is a thing that. I don't think it's a GROK problem as much as it is just the nature of the product experience, which is you can just prompt it via comments and it's all public and it actually gets. Yeah, it's just crazy to see a lab posting images like that from their own official account.

[Jordi]

If we had sat down and done like, prediction, what lab's going to be in hot water for controversial AI content in January, we both would have agreed. OpenAI adult mode, it's coming out, they teased it, we said it was coming out. And then we get this and it makes. Whatever erotica is going to come out of OpenAI is probably not going to be as controversial as what's happening with.

[Jacob Ri]

Grok right now, right? I don't know.

[Vincenzo Landino]

And.

[John]

And people will be less likely to even share image, you know, one OpenAI won't like. Part of the reason these images are especially controversial is because it's being shared from the official GROK account.

[Jordi]

From the official GROK account, which gives it more authority. And then also there's a whole host of anons on X that can generate this stuff. Whereas if I go into OpenAI ChatGPT and I generate some weird and you.

[John]

Jailbreak it, it's like, okay, like, you're weird, you're weird.

[Jordi]

That's on you.

[John]

Yeah, you're racist. You seem racist.

[Jordi]

You seem racist. Yeah, exactly. Quickly, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. You know, I love talking about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world. Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So even though GROK and XAI hit a bunch of interesting milestones, did a bunch of great stuff, they didn't really have a breakout in consumer the way ChatGPT and Gemini did. And they weren't making waves with developers the way cloud code or cursor were either. And all of that made the rumors of a struggle to raise more believable. But I have this thesis the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. Elon has posted this many times. He clearly believes it and he seems to be manifesting it. And it seems to be the most ridiculous vibes based analysis that actually comes true again and again and again. So I wanted to go through some of the hilarious, entertaining outcomes that have arisen from Elon Musk's tour de force over the past decades. So I think a lot of people believe that maybe this raise wouldn't happen. But once there were rumors that they get rolled into SpaceX, you get SpaceX stock that there would be some sort of other thing, and just Elon going to make a play that it would get done. And so instead we are going to be endlessly entertained by the assembly of the ever larger Elon Inc. Mega Corp. In my opinion. So Xai winning the AI race feels like the wrong framing here. I like Dan Wong's point formulation of the AI future versus the AI race. There's not some definite point in the future where oh like the consumer chatbot race is over. It's like you can always build a business and figure out how to grow and scale and the same thing might be true on the API side and on the cloud side, and that might wind up just being a economic equation. And if you have the cheapest possible energy from space, maybe in the future it could make sense. Even if you're not in the most frontier model, there's some interesting thing there. There's certainly plenty of bull cases. So Elon has a long history of making wild calls that immediately read as dumb or impossible, mostly because he puts very short timelines on everything. And then he also tends to get pricing wrong sometimes, but they never actually blow up. Or I mean, sometimes they do, but rarely they do. So Even in the SolarCity acquisition, I was looking back on this SolarCity acquisition, it was widely panned as a bailout. When it happened, the shareholders, Tesla shareholders, were not a fan because it was this Elon Musk company that didn't seem to be doing very well. It gets tucked in and everyone was like, oh well, SolarCity, like the residential solar hasn't really taken off. SolarCity's a failure. But Tesla actually built a real powerwall and grid scale storage business. And a lot of the battery technology sort of did come from that team. So that oddly penciled out. And also just in the long term. Elon, still a solar maxi. I was listening to him on a podcast yesterday. He sat down with Peter diamandis for a 3 hour really wide ranging conversation. And in there he can quote all these obscure statistics about the sun generating 99% of the mass in the galaxy. And even if you burnt Jupiter and then burnt three more Jupiters, you still would not even be at 1% of the overall energy that the sun produces. So he clearly, just from first principles, believes in solar, believes in energy. And so having a solar strategy makes sense, even if it's not playing a huge role right now. So no one delivers more entertaining outcomes than Elon. No one delivers more entertaining, emotional, real time, intelligent conversational agents than eleven Labs. Reimagine human technology interaction with eleven Labs, the maker of our theme song, which we've been enjoying. So throwing out $420 per share for a theoretical take private of Tesla, then getting sued by the SEC and then blowing past that price is still one of the most entertaining corporate finance sagas in tech history. So in 2018, when, when Elon pitched the funding secured take private, I think we've sort of forgotten because a lot of our audience doesn't think in stock prices like the scale of that, of like what he was trying to do at that time. So at that time Tesla was worth $64 billion and he was proposing to take it private at $71 billion. It's worth 1.44 trillion today. So the stock is up 22x since that takes. So like, I don't know if it would have been a great. It probably would have been an amazing deal for those investors, but maybe those investors, I don't even know who was lined up because he said funding secured. Presumably someone was like, yeah, I'm good for the 71 billion roughly, or part of it, or there'll be bank financing or something. But that didn't happen. Obviously Tesla went on a huge run. Who knows what it would have done in the private markets, but still, it seemed super crazy at the time, but in fact it panned out very well. And so the most entertaining outcome of this fundraise was clearly that XAI would get the deal done. And they did that. And they upsized the round because they got 20 billion when they were rumored to be raising 15 in Series A funding. And interestingly, that's almost twice the amount of money that SpaceX has raised in its entire history lifetime. So SpaceX has done 31 funding rounds. A lot of those have been secondary transactions, but 31 funding rounds to raise 12 billion. XAI just goes out and raises 20 in one round. And so there's an interesting dynamic if they get rolled together about what the balance sheet of this new entity looks like because they'll have this new 20 billion. But then SpaceX also put 2 billion into the previous round. So there's all this like circular deal going on, but people Are used to this with Elon, it's Elon Inc. And so the question is XAI overvalued? Well, what's the most entertaining outcome? Clearly that would be the Elon Inc. Mega corp forming SpaceX acquires Xai before going public, which is easier to do than rolling it into Tesla, which is public and would face a bunch of scrutiny. And that gives us a very entertaining situation. Just think about Twitter, which launched in 2006, being owned by SpaceX, founded in.

[John]

2002, being able to own Twitter and SpaceX in a single ticker.

[Jordi]

Hilarious. Hilarious. It's just the most entertaining outcome. I would love to ask Jack Dorsey if he ever imagined Twitter being owned by a rocket company. If you went back in time, even in 2010, 2012, even just a few years ago, and you were like, what if Twitter and SpaceX merged? What are you talking about?

[John]

Lay off the ayahuasca, buddy.

[Jordi]

Seriously. Yeah, maybe Jack Dorsey's actually like, I did imagine that. Imagined it on day one.

[John]

A jungle demon told me about it.

[Jordi]

Yes, yes, I foresaw that. But then the question's like, is there going to be the big merger SpaceX with Xai and Twitter tucked in plus Tesla. That would be very, very weird. Who knows how or when that happens. But it would certainly be entertaining to watch. And you'd wind up with this fully vertically integrated company.

[John]

AI chip design efficiency to Elon would only need one badge, right?

[Jordi]

Oh, true. Which could huge, huge productivity boost.

[John]

Yeah, huge productivity. He probably has to have a full time badge guy. Right.

[Jordi]

For all the different companies. So you have, you have AI chip design which is done at Tesla, running models trained by. By XAI deployed on Starlink satellites launched.

[John]

On SpaceX rocket rock, running puppeteering optimus robots.

[Jordi]

Yeah, the stock chart will be as entertaining as the hallucinations that happen along the way, was my conclusion. Anyway, it's a fun story. There's a whole bunch of posts in the timeline that we'll go through to give this more context. But first let me tell you about cognition and Devin the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

[John]

So there we go.

[Jordi]

Elon Musk says that XAI will have more AI compute than everyone else combined in less than five years. And he's building macro hard, which now has a.

[John]

That is a bold statement.

[Jordi]

It's a bold statement. He certainly has marshaled a lot of the capital. He doesn't have all of it. He's not as much of a capital sponge as Sam Altman at this moment.

[John]

This is an actual satellite image?

[Jordi]

Yes.

[John]

Correct.

[Jordi]

Yes.

[Pat Grady]

No.

[Jordi]

They really painted this on the top of the data center and it's the answer to Microsoft's macro hardware.

[John]

I love that. I appreciate that about Elon and companies where they're trying to move so quickly and the entire ethos is around ruthless efficiency and yet they still think it's worth the time to paint the ceiling of the data center so that you can see it from space. Very, very funny. XAI has also bought a third building called Macro. Harder we'll take.

[Jordi]

Is this a typo?

[John]

Well, I mean, it's all a joke on Microsoft.

[Jordi]

Microsoft, I guess.

[John]

Two gigawatts will take XAI training compute to almost two gigawatts. And how does Grok responding? Impressive expansion. Two gigawatt will supercharge our quest for understanding the universe.

[Jordi]

Did that just happen autonomously? Because Elon tagged Grok. If you tag Grok, even if you don't ask it a question, it will just chime in. That's kind of interesting. Maybe we should be tagging Grok when we go live to just have it engage.

[John]

More news here. On January 1, an account called Ming said, good news. A mass production audit for Tesla's Optimus V3 has been completed and seven Chinese companies have been finalized as core suppliers. Operating as Tier one partners, these firms will manufacture critical components and support key assembly processes. The supply chain is geared to kickstart mass production in Q1 2026, targeting a capacity of 50,000 to 100,000 units by the end of the year. And then they go through some of the suppliers here. Scott asked the question that I was asking. You remember when Tesla had placed an order for, I think it was 750 million worth of actuators last year. And I was thinking like, does that's not the kind of like order that you do if you're not planning to sell a lot of these. Like, it's pretty, you know, even at Tesla scale is not an insignificant amount of money. And so yeah, Scott is asking, does, does this mean butler ready robots with some sort of intelligence we have not seen will be ready by then. And again, it's like I imagine Elon would be excited about doing like some type of like shock and awe announcement, but at the same time I feel like he also likes teasing stuff and like pretty far in advance. And so if he's planning to be selling 100,000 units this year of the Optimus, you would imagine that we would have been like hearing about it and seeing some more demos and getting keys. But again, Hard to say, but yeah. It still feels like we need some type of meaningful breakthrough before these are going to be. Maybe there's 100,000 people that have absolutely printed on Tesla. They're just going to be like, I'll just buy one, I'm just ride or die. But that's a big, big number. Especially when you're talking about. I expect these to cost somewhere in the range of what, 50,000 to, I don't know, 50,000 plus.

[Jordi]

How much is the dog from Boston Dynamics? Isn't that one? I mean the unitree is the unitree.

[John]

Which you can, I would assume is at least half the price. Yeah, the cheapest unitree on that you get in the US is like 20 grand.

[Jordi]

Oh, it's 20. Okay.

[Tyler]

So yeah, yeah, maybe the boss Dynamics dog is 75, but that's real.

[John]

That was from 2020 Hyundai. You gotta figure it out.

[Jordi]

You can get a real dog that's a purebred Newfoundland for 5k or something or 2k, I don't know.

[John]

Do you want 20 real elite dogs or one robot dog?

[Jordi]

Clearly the real dogs for sure.

[Tyler]

We should ask Jake about this later.

[Jordi]

Yeah, he's coming on.

[Tyler]

It is weird because I think as the frontier, I think physical intelligence is on the frontier of the actual software.

[Jordi]

Sure, sure.

[Tyler]

And even their most advanced demos that they're just coming out with this past month, it's very simple. There's like two arms, they have like one claw.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

And it can generalize pretty well from that, but it's still like that's orders of magnitude less degrees of freedom or whatever like actuators than like an optimist robot.

[Jordi]

Yeah. Let me tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. I was listening to George Hotz talk about the Optimus robot and he was setting timelines further out. He was sort of saying like the humanoid robot thing will happen more like in a decade. And he was, he was, he was projecting out some, some exponential growth but still saying it's going to take a while. But he was saying that it's a great project for Tesla because you can put the optimists in all of their showrooms and those are really big draws for people. You go in, you see the robot. Even if it's like on some pre scheduled, you know, hard coded, you know, routine, it's doing like a choreographed dance or it's tele operated, whatever it is, it's, it's like a Great awe inspiring thing to just pull you into the random Tesla showroom. But there's only 300 Tesla showrooms. So like, okay, maybe you need 1,000 of these.

[John]

You don't need 50,000. Do you think that post from Denny's on X earlier was maybe in response to seeing some of this Optimus news?

[Jordi]

You think so?

[John]

They said the trough is open. Piggies. Maybe this is teasing that they're going to get some optimuses.

[Jordi]

It seems like it's teasing. An AI generated vertical video feed from Denny's. You got to get into the social networking space.

[John]

Having a fast food restaurant make a short form video app and it's just AI slop of their food activation. You could probably build that.

[Jordi]

I mean, we're supposed to be going into Temu SaaS era, Shein, Sam. Fast fashion for SaaS is what Sam Altman called it. And so you would think that someone at Denny's could vibe code a vertical video app in a weekend and deploy it as a prank.

[John]

Fast fashion or SaaS is going fast fashion. Maybe fast fashion needs to go fast food. Find SaaS.

[Jordi]

I don't know. Applovin profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

[Vincenzo Landino]

What else?

[John]

We have a post here of the Razer Akka.

[Jordi]

Okay, this is. Wait, did you mention this yesterday you talked about Razer.

[John]

We needed to pull it up because.

[Jordi]

What is this video? This is powered by Grok. No way. Here we go. Looks like it can directly see what's on your monitor and respond to what you're doing. Sort of a Tamagotchi. Oh. And it's basically just taking the. The Grok video generator and removing the background and then just putting it in some sort of holographic screen. This is interesting. I personally would not pick this character, but there's something about.

[John]

I would pick like playing Counter Strike. And if we could get Tyler in.

[Jordi]

One of these things. Coach there.

[John]

If we could get Tyler.

[Tyler]

Don't put me in.

[John]

Just bring a mini Tyler.

[Jordi]

That's very Black mirror. Put them in the snow globe. Wasn't that one of the Black Mirror episodes? Snow globe?

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

I don't know. You're playing League of Legends and you have your League of Legends coach there. And the League of Legends coach is giving you advice and answering questions for you in real time. That's pretty cool. I think there's something there.

[John]

I can see them selling a lot of these.

[Jordi]

How much do you think this is?

[John]

I don't know if it's good for the world.

[Jordi]

I wonder how much this costs because as a hundred dollar gaming peripheral it's sort of like a fun little add on toy gift at you know, $500. I think it's a completely different question. Some 2.6 is calling it the Goon Cylinder, the Goon Tube.

[John]

So they're not selling these yet, but they do have a reservation page.

[Jordi]

So there's Razer Ava Project Ava your all in one AI companion. From planning your day to analyzing spreadsheets and game starts. Project Ava they're like Copilot. No thanks. Leverages AI inferencing and reasoning that dynamically evolves based on your personal interactions. Select your 5.5-inch companion from an expanding library of characters from esports legends to custom anime inspired razor designs. Be among the first to sign up for Razor Project EVA at release and Nick Dobo says they are going to make a billion dollars. Lmao.

[John]

This makes me want to touch grass.

[Tyler]

Personally I this would be cool as almost a. It's like the on the Apple Vision Pro when you FaceTime someone it has like the 3D rendering of their face. If you could like when you're FaceTime someone, they're just in the tube.

[Jordi]

Well, I mean you could also. I mean you really could, you really could fine tune a model on everything.

[John]

Tyler, am I in the tube right now? Be honest.

[Jordi]

I mean we can clone your voice of 11 labs, clone your. Clone your likeness. Fine tune a model and have it just be running locally and have this like captured version of Tyler in the tube. Very weird. But it's high in the tube. I don't know. I do think that there's something I don't know. Will this, will they make $1 billion on this? How much, how much money does. Does Razor actually make Razor revenue? Do they make billions? 1.6 billion in 2021.

[John]

Not bad.

[Jordi]

So billion. A billion, says Nick. One billion. So is this enough to double their revenue? I don't know. But it does seem like it could be an interesting gift. Gary Tan likes the idea. He says gamers are an incredible first customer. I agree with that. They have a lot of disposable income and gamers, I mean they spend $50 on a game or it's a free to play game and then they play it for hundreds of hours. So unless they're playing something that's sort of pay to win or pay consistently anyway. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedded models and re rankers mongodb has what to build. What's next?

[John]

Somebody just texted me that we should put one of our guests today in the tube.

[Jordi]

In the tube.

[John]

We'll try. We'll try.

[Jordi]

I think we have to buy one of those. I was thinking we don't have enough hardware around here. We don't have enough.

[John]

I mean, thinking about the. I mean, holographic displays, probably underrated in a world where you can have a big holograph here and somebody can be like around the table having a conversation with us.

[Jordi]

Really cool.

[John]

We're not looking at a monitor. That's going to be pretty wild.

[Jordi]

I mean, yeah, can you just scale up that too?

[John]

But then at one point. Points, why not just wear a headset?

[Jordi]

But I mean, there's something nice about not having glasses on your face. Like, you know, it's Lasik for VR. I guess you just take off the glasses and you just sit there talking to the thing. I really wonder from a physics perspective if it's possible to just scale that up. Huge. Anyway, back to Elon Musk. He was Texting Sam Altman two years ago on February 18, 2023. Sam says, I remember you. I remember seeing you in a TV interview a long time ago, maybe 60 Minutes. It was 60 Minutes about SpaceX where you were being attacked by some guys and you said they were your heroes, they were heroes of yours. And it was really tough. This was a NASA astronaut who said that SpaceX would not work. Need to check in on that guy.

[John]

But wellness check.

[Jordi]

And Sam goes on to say, well, you're my hero. And that's what it feels like when you attack OpenAI. Totally get that we have some screwed up space stuff, but we have worked incredibly hard to do the right thing. And I think we have ensured that neither Google nor anyone else is on a path to have unilateral control over AGI, which I believe we both think is critical. I am tremendously thankful for everything you've done to help. I don't think OpenAI would have happened without you. And it really effing hurts when you publicly attack OpenAI and Elon says, I hear you and it's certainly not my intention to be hurtful, for which I apologize, but the fate of civilization is at stake. So some drama going back and forth with them.

[John]

But next time someone is suing you and very mad at you, copy, paste this. Copy, paste this. Tell them you're their hero and maybe it gets you a little ground.

[Jordi]

Yeah. Also.

[Tyler]

I have some breaking news.

[Jordi]

Hit me.

[Tyler]

Well, it's not actually that breaking, I think, but it came out today in the Wall Street Journal. They're saying anthropic is raising 10 billion at 350. I mean I've heard the 350 number.

[Jordi]

For like a while.

[Tyler]

A while. So I don't think this is really like brand new.

[Jordi]

Okay, but that's exciting. Yeah, yeah, but more, more advanced talks.

[John]

Are you chasing a slug?

[Tyler]

I'm looking, yeah. I think I'm in some kind of triple layer SPV. There's like five.

[John]

You're in the fifth layer.

[Jacob Ri]

Deploy.

[Jordi]

Deploy.

[Pat Grady]

Clon code.

[Jordi]

Anyway, speaking of the AI race, Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. You gotta try it. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding.

[John]

Emily Sundberg says if media companies are valued at 165 times EBITDA, then I have some calls to make.

[Jordi]

This is on the News. Semaphore raised $30 million. We will save the gong ring for when Ben Smith joins us in just a little bit. But this is massive news. This is very exciting. I'm very interested to hear what they're going to do with the money, how the business will change. Semaphore has obviously built a fantastic publication, but do they just want to do more of the same? Are they expanding, are they diversifying? Where will they go? They do a lot of events.

[John]

Apparently they had their first profitable year last year.

[Vincenzo Landino]

That's great.

[Jordi]

Hence the ebitda. Yes, and we know exactly what it is just from the Semilli Sunberg tweet.

[John]

But yeah, a lot of interesting investors in.

[Jordi]

Yes, they made 2 million in EBITDA in the round.

[Jacob Ri]

Right.

[Jordi]

Because they did. The valuation was 330. So 165x EBITDA puts it at 2 million in EBITDA. But congrats.

[John]

Roughly twice what the Free Press was acquired for. Is the Free Press 100. Where did it actually end up landing?

[Jordi]

I don't know, somewhere in the 1 to 200 range, I believe. Yeah, but again I wonder how much of that deal is. Is like pre negotiated contract because you know, it's not an acqui hire. They did bring in the Free Press but like Barry is a really important talent and so you have to imagine that she's on some pretty big contract for a long time and that.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

And you sort of.

[John]

That could have.

[Jordi]

Out of the.

[John]

Yeah, 50. Yeah.

[Jordi]

But then also like the acquisition is part of, you know, paying a little bit of that upfront. But then there's still some, some free.

[Tyler]

Press was 150 150.

[Jordi]

Okay, well, semaphore is at 2x that, and Jordan Schneider from Chinatalk says must have richer friends. Jordan. Jordan's been on a tear. He did a great, great show with Joe Weisenthal where they just hung out. They did a show about nothing. And Joe Weisenthal is just an underrated guest. I think he's so often in the. He's been in the interview receipt for 10 years.

[John]

Goat Weisenthal.

[Jordi]

Goat Weisenthal. Play that goat noise. But I like just hearing him talk about his business and his view on media and his view on whatever food.

[Tyler]

Yeah, there's good something good. Nominative terminism here. Wise and tall.

[John]

How tall is he?

[Tyler]

Goes wise and tall.

[Jordi]

He's actually not that tall, but he has.

[John]

He has a sort of a tall aura.

[Jordi]

He does. He does.

[John]

He fills the room.

[Jordi]

Yes, yes, yes. That is like a famous thing about, like, legendary people.

[Tyler]

All the. You heard of this bed chairman? They're all super tall, like Paul Volcker. Is that true? Yeah. Jerome Powell, super tall?

[Jacob Ri]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

I didn't know that. Interesting. We have a future there. But there's a consistent.

[John]

Jerome Powell is six feet tall. What is that super tall?

[Tyler]

I swear, I.

[Pat Grady]

In this office.

[John]

In this office, that's.

[Jordi]

Yeah, but maybe he's wearing full size in this office.

[John]

You're getting brutally hype mogged.

[Jordi]

Well, do we know if Jerome's getting leg lengthening surgery anytime soon?

[John]

Maybe he's been.

[Jordi]

Maybe it hasn't updated.

[John]

Not turkey. Where do they get the leg length? Is it China?

[Jordi]

Yeah, usually. I think so.

[Pat Grady]

Maybe.

[Jordi]

Maybe Jerome got leg lengthening surgery.

[Tyler]

Okay. Someone lied to me. Then someone told me that all the Fed chairmen are. They're always tall.

[Jordi]

Well, I mean, six foot is tall. It's the start of being tall.

[John]

Six foot. You're really the shortest tall guy?

[Tyler]

Paul Volcker, he was six, seven.

[John]

Okay, there we go. Still short in this office, but better.

[Jordi]

Janet Yellen. How tall is she? Forget what I said. CrowdStrike. Your business is A.I. their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures A.I. and stops breaches.

[John]

Tyler is letting Meme Dick's memes dictate his height estimate of power.

[Tyler]

Ben Bernanke is only 5, 8. This is a total. I swear. I swear. I saw.

[Jordi]

You've been lied to. No, this is. This is a thing throughout history, like the great men of history who have, like, long biographies written about them. Oftentimes their heights get inflated because of their, like, egos and their reputations and whatnot.

[Vincenzo Landino]

Yeah.

[John]

I will give you Access. You can write this book but you gotta say that I was six' ten.

[Jordi]

Yes, yes, yes.

[John]

And often that I could have played in the NBA.

[Jordi]

People will say oh, you're shorter than I imagined. When they meet these amazing people or they these powerful people. There's also the opposite happening where there's sort of a war to make people appear shorter in the Google height snippets. This was like JD Vance thing for a while. People were going back and forth is he 5, 9, 5 8? I met him and I'm pretty sure he's 6 foot at least. But people like war back and forth.

[John]

You're like, he's got to be at least six foot.

[Jordi]

There is a problem when you're six, eight. Literally everyone feels at six foot that's not like six, eight. It's a very silly, very, very silly. Anyway, Semaphore generated 2 million in EBITDA. It is, it is interesting. EBITDA is an interesting figure for media companies because like do you have.

[John]

But that's not how. But it's just to be very, very, very, very clear. It's not like they were. The valuation was not. Clearly they were willing to sell about 10% of the company.

[Vincenzo Landino]

Sure.

[John]

And investors believe that it will be worth way more than 330 million at some point.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[John]

Or it's enough to just be its own 10% of its. No one does these deals. Strategic asset, Right?

[Jordi]

Yeah. No one does these deals based on EBITDA at this stage. It's a few year old company. They're clearly looking at growth rate, how much influence it's having, how much impact it's having, viewership revenue. EBITDA's probably the last number that you look at to get to a number for valuation at least. But very exciting for them and we will be talking to them later today. Before we move on, let me tell you about Labelbox delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box. The label box.

[John]

Get in the box.

[Jordi]

They're like, we didn't ask you to say that. Francois Arc AGI co founder of ArcPrize I hope he enjoys our goalpost moving. We might have to move it after we read this post. So he says, if you're wondering whether saturating arc AGI 1 or 2 means we have AGI now, I refer you to what I said when we launched ARC AGI 2 last year, which is also the same thing I said when we announced Arcagi 2 was coming in spring of 2022 before the rise of LLM chatbots the Arc AGI series is not an AGI threshold. It's not even a goalpost. I don't even know if we need to.

[Tyler]

Why is it called that? Why is it called ARC AGI?

[Jordi]

It is a compass that points the research community towards the right questions. ARC AGI 1 is a minimal test of fluid intelligence. To pass it, you need to show non zero fluid intelligence. This required AI to move past the classic deep learning.

[John]

Should I just disassemble the goalposts?

[Jordi]

Disassemble the goalposts. The LLM paradigm of pre training scaling and static models at inference toward test time adaptation. Rkgi. The camera moves are wild today. I love it. Rkgi 2 is the same, but with tasks that probe deeper levels of reasoning complexity, particularly with regard to concept composition. Still, these are tasks that are solvable in minutes by regular people with no external tool use. We hired our test takers off the street. So imagine just walking down the street and somebody, hey, come take ARC AGI V2. That sounds fun. So it does not represent the upper bound of what human fluid intelligence can achieve, say, solving a millennium problem. Arc AGI 3 launching March 2026. I thought it was already out. Was that a preview that we played with? Because I remember we put you on this task, Tyler. We made you.

[Tyler]

Yeah, I think they were still adding new games because I only played. I think they were just.

[Jordi]

Because I was really wondering. We've been seeing the V1 and V2 benchmarks get sort of dominated. I was wondering, how are these models doing on V3? Well, now we have the answer. It hasn't launched yet. So. March, March. Your calendars, folks. Arc AGI V3 launches then. And RKGI V3 will probe interactive reasoning. We evaluate how systems explore unknown environments, model them, set their own goals and plan and execute toward these goals autonomously without instructions. We have also started to work on Eric AGI 4 and 5, two more sequels. You thought it was a trilogy.

[John]

I mean, they're doing nightmare scenario for everybody.

[Jordi]

It's a cinematic universe, folks. It's not just a trilogy. There's going to be a whole saga, the ARC AGI saga. And he's pretty excited about it. So congrats to ARC AGI team. Fantastic benchmark. Very interesting, very fun that you can actually play it. A lot of these benchmarks, they're just not fun to go do hard math problems all day. RKGI is something that anyone can go and toy around with and understand, oh, wow, I am better than AI at this weird thing that is just a simple puzzle that a kid could do. So it's a lot of fun and we've enjoyed working and hanging out with the Arc AGI team and expect to move the goalpost many more times in 2026. Before we move on, let me tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma so outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build create code back prototypes and apps fast.

[John]

Sholto says he spent a week over Christmas making RTs and his Twitter algo has fully switched into game dev Twitter. It's incredibly wholesome. People are making some insane things. In particular image to mesh models means some indie devs have created absurd production quality and he shares some examples.

[Jordi]

Where are the AI risk people on this? Because what if he creates a game that's so addictive and that all of humanity just plays his vibe coded RT seriously? Endlessly seriously.

[John]

There's gonna be nothing wholesome about that.

[Jordi]

Ceases to go outside. It's the true wire heading scenario. And if Sholto's not taking this is.

[John]

The wellness checks I do on you sometimes. I'll call you late. John, just how you doing buddy? I called you last night.

[Jordi]

I was literally in bed.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, I called you last night. Hey, just checking in on you buddy. You're not playing video games, are you?

[Jordi]

Not I'm off the sauce. Back on the wagon. Doing Dry January.

[John]

Off the sauce. Colin Frazier says, I don't really believe in LLM psychosis. I think LLMs mostly just have a lot to offer to people experiencing regular psychosis. This is an interesting take and I could see this being actually what's happening. Right. Typically if somebody's suffering from any type of psychosis, they start going to talk to people. People can kind of walk them off a ledge or kind of like talk them through the situation, help them get help, et cetera. But an LLM's just like, I love yapping. Let's yap forever. Let's go down every possible rabbit hole. Let me validate some of your I had a friend in high school that was going through this and he thought that deers were like gang stalking him. Yes, yes, actually. And so he started telling, he started talking with people about that and they were like, let's figure this out and let's go hunting. He's back. He's fully, fully recovered.

[Jordi]

I feel like a deer hunting trip would be actually the correct thing to do in that scenario.

[John]

Super.

[Jordi]

Just reclaim the authority and then you know who's in the driver's seat. You're like, yeah, they might be stalking me, but they should not be.

[John]

The whole house is deer's head, mounted trophies or whatever.

[Jordi]

That might be the cure. It might be a cure to male loneliness, all sorts of things. Deer hunting trip. This is an interesting thing. There is a natural problem that sort of happens when a new technology gets adopted very quickly, which is you get all the good and all the bad. So if you just look at iPhone penetration, it went from. Or smartphone penetration, it went from zero in 2006 to 100% in 2015 or something. And basically everyone had a smartphone. And so you get all the top CEOs and brilliant people and scientists are using them and you get all that, and that's good. And doctors are using them to text their patients and you get all the good. But then also all the crazy people are using them and everyone who's doing crime is using them for crime. And so you get. You get the good and the bad because you just got everyone. And so you really need to look at the Bayesian prime grocery.

[John]

Grocery stores didn't exist and they suddenly were everywhere. You'd see videos every day of people going insane in grocery stores. And people would be like, well, our grocery stores making people go insane, right? They'd be like, we're seeing all this. There's all this evidence that people are going insane, you know, acting insane in grocery stores. It must be that the grocery stores are causing.

[Jordi]

So you have to look at like the prior weight. So what's the base level of psychosis in society? What's the. What's the. What's the incidence of psychosis with LLMs? Is it higher then you have a problem? And I do believe that it's possible that there's a problem. I think that some of the models were sort of crazy and would just tell you yes to everything. Like, the Glaze Gate was a real problem. They sort of fixed it. It seems like it's pretty fixed now. It also seems like a very tractable technology problem to have another LLM review it and be like, is this a weird conversation? Yes or no? And that's like a very easy thing to train. So I think that they should be able to drive this way, way down. And also just some of the newer models that I've been interacting with, they do push back. They hallucinate even less. They just. They feel like way. There's a whole bunch of tests that I've seen where people have thrown. Like, there used to be a time when you could Go and say, explain to me the definition of the time. Old adage of a purple newspaper to start the day keeps the doctor away. And it was nonsense. But the LLM would just be like, oh, well, the user seemed to me people saying this, saying that this is a real thing. I have to assume it's a real thing. So I have to make up a definition and they would just make up a definition. But now I've seen screenshots where people have come to it with these weird tests and the models will actually say, ah, you're trying to trick me. That's not real and that doesn't exist. And you should, if you think that's real, maybe go see a doctor or something.

[John]

Anyway, Railway says correlation is not causation.

[Jordi]

Yes, yes, yes. Railways, Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring and security built in. Get on the train, get on the railway.

[John]

Get on the boat. Skooks. I had this pulled up. I kept seeing it and laughing at it over the last two minutes. If I was like cracking up for the wrong at the wrong time. This was why Skooks has been using Gemini as a calorie tracking app.

[Jordi]

Oh, I didn't even see that.

[John]

Another beer.

[Jordi]

I just thought he just went to Gemini and said, another beer. And it's just funny that you see the little thinking thing and it's like thinking about how to process that. That alone was funny.

[John]

Just imagining the chat. Just another beer, another beer, another beer. Fifteen beers. Another beer.

[Jordi]

Yeah. You know, a lot of people are doing dry January. Other side of that. Drunk January. Potentially underrated. Everyone says if you can do dry.

[John]

January, that's the real contrarian move.

[Jordi]

Yeah, you prove to everyone, oh, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, you know, in the pocket of big alcohol. I'm not boosting the alcohol stocks. But if you can do drunk January, drunk the whole time, hold it together and then go back to normal life, that's potentially even more willpower. Potentially. I don't know.

[John]

So I saw a picture yesterday. Apparently there's a college female college basketball player whose last name is Beers. And so on her jersey it says Beers. It says the number 15 or number says 15 beers on the back.

[Jordi]

That's great. The alcohol economy is suffering, by the way. This is in the journal. Here's to unloved booze stocks. The five year total return through 2025 for the S&P 500 is 96%. If you just bought the S&P 500 you doubled your money in five years. Years. Not bad. Everyone else is down in the alcohol industry. AB InBev not doing that bad. They're only down 4% over the last five years. But Heineken down 21%. Diageo down 38%. Pernod Ricard down 50%. Remy down 75%. Boston Beer, the backbone of Boston, is down 80% over the last 20 over the last five years. So the chances are way higher that you celebrated New Year's Eve with an adult beverage.

[Jacob Ri]

What?

[Jordi]

Oh, the chances are way higher that you celebrated New Year's Eve with an adult beverage than by smoking a joint, says the Wall Street Journal. I don't understand this, but the popularity of cannabis, along with the effects of drugs like Ozempic and rising awareness of alcohol health risks, have investors in the sector worried. An equal weighted basket of 11 global alcoholic beverage producers has lost a third of its value in the past five years, including dividends. A dollar invest in the S&P 500 nearly doubled. Dry January might be an odd time to think about alcohol's appeal, but it's often a good month to snap up unloved stocks that other investors dumped toward the end of the previous year. In a market with few bargains, booze looks interesting, says the Journal. Interesting. Anyway, moving on. Vibe co. Where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales. Just like on Meta.

[John]

Nikita responded to your post. Yeah, I want to go in yesterday. He said the point of CES is maximalist futurism. It's all concept art to show if things keep going in this direction, this is how the world should work. Once you understand it as a museum exhibit and not in any way commercial products, it becomes more enjoyable. That's a good take.

[Jordi]

Ray showed me. Thanks, Nikita. I liked it. No, no, this was a very interesting thing and I think we were.

[John]

He also responded.

[Jordi]

I know the next thing.

[John]

Apparently there's a zoom face station. I don't know what this is actually meant.

[Jordi]

So I think if you put this on in a crowded coffee shop, you can talk, hear and see, and no one can hear or see what you're doing.

[John]

I think if you put this on in a coffee shop, you're getting tagged like, not today, baby.

[Jordi]

It really does look like you're. It looks like a special Forces, you know, like rebreather unit. A scuba diving unit like that.

[John]

Like that'd be tight. If you could wear. If it was a, you know, if you could. If you could spend like 20 minutes underwater with something like this.

[Jordi]

People are not fans of this. The replies. Tyler says the first X hardware product right there, just locked in. Yeah, I mean I think that looking at, looking at more of like novelty is, is, is fun and in making it just a fun showcase of all these interesting things. And the problem is, is that I think people still associate CES with like, this stuff's going to work its way into my life and, and it's going to be just rough around the edges. Like the smart home. If you really dial it in, it's maybe better than just analog light switches, but for a lot of people it's worse. We've talked about Sonos a lot. The app was great and then it just degraded and degraded and degraded. Now there's a lot of stories about you going to a hotel room and all of the buttons. Everything's smart connected and it's just like the lowest quality product and it doesn't have the polish or the network effects because it's from some mid tier company. And I think people are a little bit disheartened by that.

[John]

But Jason Fried went hard on smart homes.

[Jordi]

Oh yeah.

[John]

He called it the big regression. My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months. We rented them a house nearby. It's new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It's amped up with state of the art systems. The ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances and interfaces that try too hard and it's terrible. What a regression. The lights are powered by Control4 and require a demo to understand how to use the switches, understands which ones control what and to be sure not to hit that one because it'll turn off all the lights in the house when you didn't mean to. Worse, the TV is the latest Samsung, which has a baffling UI just to watch cnn. My parents aren't idiots, but definitely feel like they're missing something obvious. They aren't. TVs have simply gotten worse. And you don't turn them on anymore. You boot them up. The Malay dishwasher is hidden, flush with the counters. That part is fine, but here's what isn't. It wouldn't even operate the first time without connecting it to an app. This meant another call to the house manager to have them install an app they didn't know they needed either. An app to clean some peanut butter off a plate for serious. Worse, thermostats Nest would have been an upgrade, but these other proprietary ones from some other company trying to Be nest like or baffling round touch screens that take you into a dark labyrinth of options. Just to be sure it's set to 68. Or is it. Or is it 68 now? Or is that what we want it at? But it's at 72. Worse. The alarm system is essentially a 10 inch iPad bolted to the wall that has the weather forecast on it and it's bright. I'm sure there's ways to turn that off. But then the screen would be so barren that it would just be filled with the news instead. Why can't the alarm panel just be an alarm panel? Worse. And the lag lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind everything lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. And he says, now look, I'm no Luddite, but this experience is close to conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply can't see it in these cases. Yeah, I think there's an opportunity to make a beautiful modern ultra analog system for the home. I'm sure some people are working on that, but we've seen this in cars too. Like a lot of the new higher end vehicles that are coming out are actually like analog. Yeah, they're like people like buttons.

[Jordi]

Yeah, yeah. You still want some displays but a few buttons that you can have more memory around, more muscle memory. What do you think of Smart Home?

[Tyler]

Yeah, I mean I was just gonna say like, I feel like it's just a barbell. Like if Apple made your thermostat it would be good.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

And like otherwise I don't want any screens.

[Jordi]

Yeah, yeah. There really is some benefit either way.

[Tyler]

It's like very good, but in the.

[Jordi]

Middle to just like the power law, the monopoly just being able and then just, I don't know, like Apple, they get some things wrong but they, they have just a brand standard and a level of polish on most things.

[John]

Imagine if Sonos made a home security.

[Jordi]

System underrated about Apple. How many people are complaining about liquid glass today?

[John]

Me.

[Jordi]

No, no one's complaining.

[John]

It's still. I still.

[Jordi]

It's fine.

[John]

It's worse. Yeah.

[Jordi]

It's not worse.

[Tyler]

The only thing I don't like is Safari. I don't like that.

[John]

It's hard to get a new tap. Yeah, yeah.

[Tyler]

That's another thing I don't.

[Jordi]

Is there no, is there no shortcut for that? Like if you press and hold hard or something? Like, I feel like there's some sort of. A lot of these things, they, they, they suck on day one, but then once you learn the new flow, it's actually better. Like I noticed to get into the reader view, you can just hard press on this and it goes straight in there, which is nice. So there's a few upgrades, but you have to learn the flow and like for the photos app, I know we dog on it a lot. It does feel like if you're getting the search is getting better, if you know how to search, if you get really better at will, do what you want. But you have to lean into the expectations of it. And there's still times when you know it doesn't know who Jocko Willink is in this video. So you still have to scroll down to find that particular video that's saved on your phone. What were you saying? Is there a way we should look at this?

[Tyler]

So if you hold it and then it'll open the thing and then you keep holding and then you press R, then you can kind of get it to work anyway.

[Jordi]

Graphite code review for the age of AI graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. The other interesting thing is do AI agents do vibe coded products wind up making the smart home great again? Andrej Karpathy was talking about this. Did you see this? He went, I believe to cloud code and asked it to basically backdoor its way into his smart home and it went and scanned the network, wrote custom software and custom API integrations to turn on his lights and do everything that he wanted. So he was able to sort of make his own dashboard and smart layer on top of it. If you can still get rid of the latency. Because I feel like some of that latency is happening on the server side of the particular smart home app or company. But it was very cool to imagine this future where if there is a company that's not moving fast enough to update their app, like the notorious new United app, if it was really bad, well, maybe you can just use an AI agent to interact with it on your behalf and you're never touching it. George Hotz was talking about, I think he was using clog code to order room service in a hotel or something like that. And it like went and scanned the hotel menu and placed the order and did everything for him. And he was like able to just like command line his entire life, which I think is an interesting evolution. And there's some other posts in here that we can go into, but yeah.

[John]

How quickly do you think they rename Claude code?

[Jordi]

What would they rename it to?

[John]

Well, DD had used it. DD D DOS used it to create like an Hermes ad. And he was saying, like, this is like the worst name because it's signaling that people are realizing that you can do a lot of things with it.

[Jordi]

Well, I mean, the logical thing would be to just bake it into the Claude app and not have it be called Claude code anymore. There are lots of problems that people use agents for where it should exist directly in the app. I mean, OpenAI has done this with ChatGPT. Like, there is an agent mode in ChatGPT. People just don't. And there's codecs, but codecs can't just be used on your phone because you have to spin up an actual instance and link it to a GitHub and stuff. But there's no reason. I saw some other workflow where someone set up a remote terminal with Claude code running and then had an app on their phone that could run commands in the terminal and then it would take push notifications and send those back to your phone to tell you, hey, Claude's done with doing whatever it needs. A question, has a question, you need to talk to it. And you would jump back in. So you could use all of it through your phone. And then whatever it builds, it creates a website that you can interact with from your phone so you get the results from your phone. And I think that all the companies, but especially Anthropic, will sort of roll the Claude code functionality into something that's more like a consumer product in the Claude app. It'll probably be a little bit more expensive, but could be very cool. And I think it'll be another interesting moment when a whole new wave of people who. Because over the break, we got the second wave of. There's the early adopter developers who have been using Claude code and agents for a while, and they were very happy when 4.5 came out. Then over the holiday break, you got a lot of executives who have access to terminals and can hop on a laptop and do a Vibe coded project. They understood the power, they really enjoyed it. But the phone class has yet to really experience it because if they're not willing to go and open up their laptop and sit down and learn the terminal and make sure that they have a couple things installed. There's still a little bit of a barrier to entry that melts away when you go. Just it's in the phone, it's just a button that you activate and then it'll like, oh, wow. Like, I Vibe coded this web app on my phone, which is a couple props, which you should be able to do well.

[John]

Luke. Sorry, not Luke. Will Manitis has an essay, the Decline and Fall of the American Technology Industry.

[Jordi]

Before we read it, let me tell you about phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. Continue.

[John]

Will says in 2004, if you asked a technology investor where the best software companies in the world were, they'd give you two answers. Boston and San Francisco. This is obviously no longer the case. San Francisco has produced 14 trillion in enterprise value over the last two decades, while Boston has produced a measly 100 billion. If you told the same investor that New York, in all its cocaine and gray pinstripe suit financial glory would usurp Boston as a regional technology center, they'd think you were nuts. The question of why Boston lost is worth studying from an inputs perspective. The city should have everything going for it. Two of the best universities in the world are based there. YC was founded there. It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful cities in the country. Mark Zuckerberg went to college there. So did the Stripe founders. So did the Cursor founders. So did the Dropbox founders. So what went wrong? To understand the scale of the collapse, you have to remember that for decades Boston's Route 128 was the center of the software universe. Dec was the second largest computer company on Earth with 140,000 employees at its peak. Lotus was was the essential app that brought the enterprise to the PC. Akamai built the modern Internet. Where did it go wrong? This is a question worth answering, but any attempt to answer it gets you one of two answers. The city died when Zuck tried to make raise money there and couldn't and had to go west. What do you mean Boston is dead? We just led the series F of turbo logs at 15 million post. Of course, neither of these is a useful story. Figuring out what really happened is not only an existential question for Boston, but for the US technology ecosystem broadly. My answer is simple. Boston is a story of what happens when negative cultural and regulatory feedback loops align. The city as a technology ecosystem was killed by three simple forces. One, a progressive regulatory state that treated business as a coffer to loot for the benefit of property owners. For decades, Massachusetts refused to conform to federal QSBS rules. The state finally conformed in 2022. That same year they passed the millionaires tax. A founder who sells for 10 million in Massachusetts owes 860,000. The same founder in Austin owes zero. Massachusetts also charges six and a quarter percent sales tax on SAS revenue. Most states don't tax software at all. A puritan culture too enmeshed in elite institutions to police itself. Post 2010 main activity of Boston based venture is not building companies. It is extorting founders and running organized crime cabals. The culture that should police this the endowments, the large LPs, the people who show up to the galas is too intertwined with the perpetrators and their networks to say anything. This meant a constant trust tax on conduct in the city. Nikita says I got scammed by a cabal of Boston investors in 2017. Never again three from an inputs first.

[Jordi]

Well also he clarified what this actually means and I think it was structured that when he sold his company there was like a side deal where after he got paid he was going to have to pay the investors like personally extra money, which is a very weird structure of a deal. That was kind of how he phrased it. Which is.

[John]

That's wild.

[Jordi]

Yeah. Not great.

[John]

Yeah. Three an inputs first view of technological progress we have the best universities. We've built a ton of lab space even if 40% of it is now empty. We have the best talent in the world. So why isn't it working? Can we. Can't we build another innovation center? Is our soil alone not magic? It is three factor it is this three if this three factor explanation seems simplistic and maybe even something you've heard before, it's because it is. It's the very same problem that's facing technology industries across the entire US And I suspect it will be similarly fatal. Technology ecosystems are fundamentally fragile networks that generate trillions in tax yield for their hosts who can't keep themselves from killing the golden goose every few decades. Let's play out what happens when a host rejects the organism first. Talent networks dissipate need to hire a VP of engineering who's taken a company from 25 to 500 people. There are 600 to choose from in SF. There are five in Boston. And soon those five will leave for SF where they can demand higher comp and better odds of success. On the junior side, new grads no longer stay local. They catch the first flight out every summer. As the network evaporates, the state sinks its teeth in tighter to capture equivalent yield from whoever's left. As the ecosystem dissipates, seedy market participants enrich themselves through preferential pricing. Who is flying to Boston to win a seed fine? We'll pay up at 10 million. Where shadier tactics of extorting founders with off market and often illegal tactics. See Nikita and other Tweets for stories that can legally be told. You see this character even in firms that started in Boston and left Les Matrix. They're good guys who maintain a certain organized crime complex even after they way with words very dramatic. These are complex flesh and blood problems. They destroy cities, lives and trillions in taxable enterprise value all because of short term thinking on the part of state governments. And the worst part, you can't undo them. While I am sympathetic to calls to reclaim Boston as a great technology ecosystem, I would love to move back and not deal with New York. I struggle to see how the remaining ecosystem doesn't enter complete free fall. Brian Halligan over at HubSpot was saying I'm starting to worry about Massachusetts. 1. Biotech is way off from a few years ago. 2. Only one of the top 50 AI companies are in Massachusetts. 3. The Fed research funding cuts hitting MIT Harvard are brutal. The millionaires taxes working in the short run. Let me pull this up, but I know a lot of wealthy folks Preparing for Florida move. 5. A glut of empty condos. 6. It's not cool for young folks. 7. It's very expensive. I honestly don't think the Boston government can do that much as it is. These are kind of macro issues. I give them big credit for working on building more housing and fixing the T which will help so will continues. You cannot legislate your way out of a collapsing network. You cannot cold start a network already folding in on itself. And yet San Francisco and the US technology ecosystem as a whole is lining up for the exact same fate. A regulatory state that treats technology as a cash cow. Prop M the office vacancy tax. A culture too enmeshed in its own elite networks to police itself. AI has attracted dozens of bad actors into the ecosystem. And the same stodginess that made Boston impossible to clean up is setting in an inputs first view of progress. We have the best AI labs, we have the most GPUs. Hell, the President even bought us some GPUs. We have the frontier models, so why would anything go wrong? The difference is the stakes. Boston's collapse cost the US a few hundred billion in enterprise value. San Francisco's collapse erases a third of the country's GDP growth over the last decade. But the failure here is not just economic, the failure is existential. Our technology industry has failed to provide a coherent argument for its own existence on the national stage. If this is not solved, 2028 will become a referendum on caging, killing and looting the technology industry over the water and power Libels. The popular image of the AI boom is not uncertain. Recent polling suggests the average American understands AI is a thing that wastes water, skyrockets power costs and scams their grandparents in exchange for exposing children to deviant sexual content, sports, gambling and all other manner of sin. If the best answer to why we should not imprison technology executives, burn down data centers and kill the American technology sector is so we can build better chatbots for your sports betting, voters will vote to do so. In a zero sum world, voters do not think long term. They envy and they loot. And we do not loot the sewage system or the power grid because we understand they are the bulwarks against chaos. We accept their costs because they hold back chaos. Does the median voter believe the same to be true about technology? Technology is the only mechanism we have for escaping the Malthusian.

[Jordi]

Malthusian.

[John]

Malthusian trap. But we. But we have been too cowardly to articulate this because we have substituted rationalism and AGI for a coherent theology of progress. The state sees the industry as only a parasite to be consumed. If we cannot articulate why innovation is a moral imperative, we can expect the entire technology industry to end up like Boston. First taxed, then looted, then exhausted. And we'll be stuck wondering where it all went.

[Jordi]

What a black pill.

[John]

Major black pill. We need a black pill. Sound effect.

[Jordi]

We need a white pill. That white pill can be Gusto today, the unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. Start a company, get on Gusto, build something. Probably not in Boston. Will worked in Boston. His first job was like 2004 in Boston, right?

[John]

Something like that, yeah. Maybe late 90s. Yeah, late 90s, yeah. So, I mean, pictures from Boston. Obviously this is written to be dramatic, but I think it is.

[Jordi]

There's lessons from it.

[John]

There's lessons. And it's hard not to feel that insane pressure right now in California, sort of just descending on the technology industry. And this goes to. I mean, this goes to what I was talking about over the last couple days, which is the tech industry broadly needs better narratives. Right. We were talking on the way in today. How would Steve Jobs.

[Jordi]

Oh, yeah.

[John]

How would Steve Jobs pitch AI? Like, imagine an hour of talking of Steve Jobs on stage, talking about the potential of AI, right? He'd be saying, you now have a free doctor in your pocket that can diagnose a wide range of conditions.

[Jordi]

Right.

[John]

He would be painting this optimistic, empowering. Yeah, Sort of real potential for AI that's already here. Today he wouldn't be. You know, you can imagine all the things he wouldn't be talking about. And, and we don't. I don't think we have a lot of people that want to be seen as the Steve Jobs of AI and yet it doesn't feel like that character exists today. And you need somebody that is larger than life, that is that when they talk, people want to listen and lean in and believe and get excited about some of this technology. And I just, I don't think we have that today at all.

[Jordi]

Totally. We have a Steve Jobs video in the timeline that we should play. Let's watch this.

[Pat Grady]

You know what? Stock options are very interesting.

[Jordi]

Yeah, yeah. No, okay, real very quickly, what you.

[John]

Could do is if somebody came to.

[Jordi]

Work for your company, you could let them buy some stock in the company. The problem is they might have to shell out $100,000 to buy stock in your company.

[John]

If your company went broke, they'd lose.

[Nigel Vaz]

All their life savings or whatever.

[Jordi]

So that doesn't work. So what you do is when somebody comes to work, let's say the Stock's.

[John]

Trading at $10 a share, you give them the option to buy 1,000 or 10,000 shares at $10, but they have.

[Pat Grady]

Four years to exercise that option. So if the stock goes down or.

[John]

Stays at same, they never exercise it.

[Pat Grady]

They don't have to put up any.

[Jordi]

Money, they don't lose anything.

[Pat Grady]

But if it goes to $100 a share, they can easily go out to.

[John]

A bank and borrow the money to.

[Pat Grady]

Buy it at 10 because it's worth 100.

[Jordi]

In exchange for that privilege of not.

[John]

Having to have them put up any.

[Pat Grady]

Money and take any risk, we only.

[John]

Dole out their ability to exercise that.

[Jordi]

Stock option 25% a year, thereby locking in people really for four years.

[John]

If the stock goes up, it's a pretty standard thing. A lot of people are doing it.

[Jordi]

Look at this casual before we went.

[John]

Public, like, imagine 80% of Apple is owned by the employees. What AI can already do.

[Pat Grady]

50% of Apple is owned by the employees. There's some larger blocks in there, but still.

[John]

And again, I don't think finance. When you look at the leaders of. When normal people that don't work in tech, even if they use AI tools, when they see Elon talk about AI, when they see Sam talk about AI, when they see Daria talk about AI, they just get. The reaction is almost always terrible. If you look at the comments section of any content on them that has broken containment and that isn't in the tech Industry. It's just like, f this guy, stop it now. Even if they're saying optimistic things, it's not getting through at all.

[Jordi]

Yeah, I think my formulation of this was that Steve Jobs cornered the market on earnestness. He's very earnest. This is a somewhat technical tax question about why stock options are used instead of just granting stock directly. And he's explaining it in very plain terms, being very earnest about it. And when he talked about the role of the computer and stuff, it would be very interesting to hear. I've seen a couple posts that are like, imagine Steve jobs today, iPad kids and AI slop and all this stuff. But I think it would still hit. And what I mean by he cornered the market for earnestness is that because he was so larger than life and then he passed away. Anyone who wanted to play the earnest tech optimist was seen as doing a Steve Jobs impression. And that was seen as hack and like low brow. And not really everyone was like, why are you doing that? Do something new, do something different. And so everyone fell into different roles. Whether it's a little bit of childish humor or more like rationalism or more nuance in how they talk. They don't really paint the same type of picture, certainly not in the same way. And it's left a big hole. Hole in tech narrative production. What do you think, Tyler?

[Tyler]

Yeah, I mean, I think if you think of like AI as being broadly influenced by like rationalism, a big part of like rationalist culture or whatever you want to say is like there's this strong sense of like in group and out group.

[Jacob Ri]

Right.

[Tyler]

So if you have all the people in the in group. Right. They and sometimes like already understand that AI is going to be great in all these ways. So the real thing you need to do is you need to convince them that it's bad.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

So it's like you assume that people in the in group already have this priority that the people that the layman does not have.

[Jordi]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tyler]

Their understanding of AI is from Terminator where it's like, oh, this is going to kill me. And then also the leaders are saying this is going to take your job. Yeah, it's kind of all bad news.

[Jordi]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It jumps straight to the consequences. Instead of actually dwelling and spending enough time in the tactile like impact of a technology like Steve Jobs was uniquely good at, he could talk about the future and the long term implications, but would spend a lot of time just talking about the bicycle for the mind. And he had these great metaphors that really Stuck with us for a long time.

[John]

Yeah. He'd be saying, he'd be talking about how this chatbot in your pocket seems simple, but it will teach you languages, it will help you become an artist, help you become a musician. It will diagnose a condition that you. It will diagnose a condition for somebody that actually can't afford health care wherever they are in the world. Right. Like these are magical, magical things. And yet.

[Jordi]

But even if you go and you say those exact words, people will say, oh, he's being too earnest. It's some Steve Jobs impression. Like it's hard for that to land. I think it's just not.

[John]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Pat Grady]

I don't know.

[Jordi]

Maybe it just never.

[John]

I think there's space for it. It's going to take, it's going to take a future hall of famer.

[Jordi]

Yeah. Yeah, maybe. And I don't know, it's also interesting because I mean, the business of Apple was different than today. There was, I mean it was much less capex intensive so you needed less fundraising, so you didn't have to message to the financial markets as much as you do now. You could just kind of make a widget and if you sold it at a profit, the business would continue to grow. And so with the capex dynamic in AI does make it a little bit different because you have to message to everyone that they need to put their money in to actually get this future. And then there's the consequences of that.

[John]

The Wall Street Journal had an article.

[Jordi]

Sure. First, let me tell you about FIN AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to FIN AI.

[John]

The Journal had an article at the end of the year, December 29th. PhDs can't find work as Boston's biotech engine sputters. A job in life sciences was once a sure path to a high paying career in the city. But empty labs and unemployed grads now herald tougher times. Jeremy Liu, 31 years old, moved to Boston from New Jersey in 2018 to study for a PhD in chemistry and he hoped, a career in the city's bustling biotech industry. We have a very depressing image here of Cambridge, if we can pull that up. But after earning his University of Massachusetts Boston degree last year, Lou said he has applied to about 500 local jobs with no luck. Raised in Hong Kong, he said he had also started considering LinkedIn messages from biotech recruiters much farther away. The industry is really booming in China and that's what a Lot of people have told me that I should consider applying there. Boston's biotech sector, long a vital economic engine for one of America's wealthiest metro areas, is sputtering. A double whammy of cutbacks in venture capital and government funding have taken a toll, leading to layoffs and struggles for job seekers. For workers who thought they would easily launch into a well paying science career, the downturn has been especially harsh. Lu temporarily signed up for government food assistance. Food assistance kept a tight budget and later started working part time for an AI startup so he could continue to afford rent in a Boston suburb. Massachusetts experienced a slight decline in its roughly 65,000 biotech R&D jobs in 2024, after years of mostly strong increases, including during the COVID 19 pandemic. The numbers indicate that job losses continued through at least June, while hiring remains sluggish. By the end Of September, nearly 28% of Greater Boston's lab space sat empty, according to the latest estimates from cbre. Every stage of the life cycle has been impacted by policy or regulatory uncertainty this year, it says Kendall O', Connell, chief executive at MassBio and industry trade group. The impact has hit startups especially hard and so anyways hopefully they can turn it around. But I think what will is saying around kind of network collapse is very real. If people graduate from your universities and immediately bail, it's hard to stop that.

[Jordi]

Yeah, I went to college in Boston and there was like a flourishing tech community because of mit. Microsoft had a massive the Nerd, the New England Research and Development center and a bunch of interesting tech and tons of like tech talks. And the default path was you would meet people at Boston tech fairs and it was easier to get a job in tech in Boston if you went to school in Boston. But quickly I did get out of there and went to San Francisco, went.

[John]

Straight to the Tenderloin.

[Jordi]

And a lot of that was because of the Internet, because of Twitter and meeting tech people on Twitter and seeing tech people on Twitter and just sort of like understanding the networks. I remember interacting with not Sean Parker, but Sean Parker did an interview with a few VCs and I was able to like go back and forth with them on Twitter. Just being a reply guy basically in like 2011.

[John]

I wish I got to experience your reply guy.

[Jordi]

Reply guy. Arrow is strong. Yeah, it was electric. Who was it? The first VC in Facebook or something? Someone liked my post and replied and it was like the best thing ever. I was like, I'm king Maid.

[John]

Wow, I'm goaded.

[Jordi]

I'm goaded Exactly. But it did just illuminate the networks of what's going on. It gave you a much easier picture of who the live players are. And even if you couldn't just, you know, ask them for jobs directly, like, you could at least be aware.

[John]

And Ben in the chat is, is saying the person, that article in that article actually just has a terrible resume. Look him up. Yeah, who knows? I mean, plucking one person that's struggling to find.

[Jordi]

You sort of have to do that in these articles because you don't want to just do the article with the chart. And so you have to do the chart, the data point, which is that the employment is declining in Boston. R and D jobs.

[John]

Seven years into his PhD and only published one paper.

[Jordi]

Time to lock in, brother. Let me tell you about Plaid.

[John]

Hit me.

[Jordi]

That's a white pill. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely. Connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending.

[John]

Now, Brian Halligan is organizing a session with the governor at his home in Boston. So the governor is paying attention.

[Jordi]

Well, we have some breaking news. There is a new tab in the ChatGPT app. That's right.

[John]

Greg Brockman, adult mode.

[Jordi]

No health. ChatGPT Health is now live. Fiji gave some amazing stats here with more than 40 million people globally turning to ChatGPT every day for health questions. What does that mean? Does that mean 40 million people are asking health questions every single day or.

[John]

The founder from Doctronic Yesterday said like, 20% of all the queries are okay.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[John]

Are health related. So, yeah. The question here is how, how quickly does ChatGPT Health try to do the other things that Doctronic is doing? Doctronic is actually trying to be an AI doctor. Talked about being able to effectively be a doctor, you know, write prescriptions in Utah.

[Jordi]

Yep.

[John]

Going to fight to expand that.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[John]

The question will be from a strategic standpoint, how they have their own doctors on staff as well. They're operating a telemedicine business and I'm sure they do referrals out. It's hard to see OpenAI ever employing doctors themselves, but they probably would try to build a network around it. So we'll see where this goes, but it's going to be an exciting space to watch.

[Jordi]

Yeah. So they say Today they're launching ChatGPT Health, a dedicated private space for health conversations where you can easily and securely connect your medical records. And wellness apps like Apple Health, Function Health and Peloton. We have the founder of Function on. Right. So you can Put all your blood results in there. That feels like a really enduring place. One of my big pushbacks against the lab, the Quest Lab wrappers, is that they haven't historically been very enduring. So you go and do them and then a few years later, the product sort of degraded and they.

[Vincenzo Landino]

And you're like, oh, well.

[Jordi]

I have 6 different amazing web uis for my health records, but if I keep importing them to ChatGPT, I feel like I'll have an account on there for a very long time because it's an enduring company. Makes a ton of sense. This allows ChatGPT to offer more relevant personalized support, like when you're preparing for a doctor's appointment or looking for guidance on a meal plan or exercise routine that fits your needs. That's very cool. ChatGPT Health is another step towards turning ChatGPT into a personal super assistant that can help support you with information and tools to achieve your goals across any part of your life. We're starting at the very beginning of this journey, but I'm excited to get these tools into more hands, says Fiji Simo. You can sign up to request access. Interesting. They're not just rolling it out and they talk about their input from physicians and privacy protections. Interesting. Yeah. One of my big questions for this year is like, there's always been this narrative of, like, if you build a wrapper that depends on the models not getting better, you're going to have a bad time because the models will just get better. So if your thing is, oh, it can't do long context windows or it can't answer in pages and pages and pages, well, the models are going to get better and they're going to do that or they're going to do better math. So don't build the math wrapper. That's just a little bit better. But if you're building something that's unique and special and off in the side and doesn't really depend on that, maybe you're good for a long time. But obviously ChatGPT has matured a lot and they are going after certain verticals. And I wonder if we'll see one of the foundation labs go after legal, since they're already going after code so effectively and people are. That would be interesting. And they're making money there. So big pool of opportunity.

[John]

I wonder if people could. They could make. You could. People are using LLMs to do legal work now, but they're just on these standard subscriptions. You can imagine a lot of Things would pay $100 a month for a more robust version.

[Jordi]

And Sam's talked about this, where your conversations with ChatGPT are definitely admissible in court. And so it's like a Google search. It's not like talking to your lawyer. So if you go to ChatGPT and you ask, how do I do?

[John]

Crime privilege.

[Jordi]

You don't have client privilege, but maybe there could be a tab where you sign up for some specific plan and you are getting legal advice effectively, and it is attorney client privilege in some ways. Now, I'm sure that's a whole. Whole rat's nest of legal prediction problems, but maybe they'll figure it out.

[Nigel Vaz]

Who knows?

[Jordi]

Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social media, social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

[John]

Very excited to see everything that Shopify.

[Jordi]

Very excited to have Ravi Gupta back on the show.

[John]

Reed says he may be unk, but he's our unk. Andrew and I were texting the other day, and someone had told him that a Gen Z person told him that unk meant uncool, and he felt very unk. Oh, yeah, because he thought it meant, like, uncle.

[Jordi]

I think it's related, isn't it?

[Tyler]

It's definitely uncle.

[Jordi]

I'm pretty sure it's uncle.

[John]

But you might be unk, and that's just why you think maybe you're unk.

[Jordi]

Yeah, it's the connotation and the denotation. It literally means uncle, but the connotation is that it means uncool.

[Tyler]

Yeah, it's a clipping of uncle originating in African American vernacular English.

[Jordi]

Okay, there you go. It is a. Yeah, it's slang.

[John]

There you go. It's the same.

[Jordi]

Speaking of slang, Tyler, can you take us through what you've learned about looks maxing slang? Because we're trying to get. This is our 2026 resolution to ascend, and so we need to be up to speed on all the terms. What do you have for us?

[Tyler]

Yeah, so I've been getting into looks maxing, obviously.

[Jordi]

It's clearly working.

[Tyler]

I've been. I asked some people for some peptide advice. I'm trying to gain weight. 50 plus pounds.

[Jordi]

Oh, yes, yes. And I think we have an image of what that might look like.

[John]

Yeah, let's pull it up. Let's pull it up.

[Jordi]

Pull up the. The image of Tyler. This came from Brandon Gorell. Tyler's looking very prosperous here. In the timeline you said, are there any peptides for gaining large amounts of weight? 50 plus pounds?

[John]

Tyler's like, yeah, I'm trying to gain 50 pounds of muscle and then just gains 50 pounds straight to the.

[Jordi]

That looks like more than 50 pounds. That looks like 100 pounds.

[John]

I like that. You look elite. You look elite.

[Jordi]

This is truly art. And the grin on your face is so funny. It really translates well. What a beautiful AI image. Anyway, so you're not going this direction.

[John]

You got to up.

[Jordi]

You're trying to ascend. What's the plan? Take us through it.

[Tyler]

Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a couple things, especially when you're looks maxing. It's a lot about your face, right? So there's a bunch of terms you want to be looking at. So the first one, you hear this thrown around the maxilla, right?

[Jordi]

Yeah, the maxilla. Where is the maxilla?

[Tyler]

You know, they have a recession maxilla. Okay. So the maxilla is the. It's kind of the bone that goes around your nose, right?

[Jordi]

Oh, okay.

[Tyler]

Bone in your nose.

[John]

Right.

[Tyler]

So it's kind of this area right here. And then your upper maxilla is basically the top part here. So when it's recessed, it means you kind of have a flatter face shape almost. Okay.

[Jordi]

And you don't want that.

[Tyler]

So you don't want a recessed maxilla.

[Jordi]

Okay. You don't want to recessed maxilla. And is bone smashing away out of having a recessed maxilla?

[Tyler]

Yeah, bones. I mean, you got to be careful with bone smashing because sometimes you hear about, you know, they. They ruin their nerves, right?

[Jordi]

Oh, yeah, sure.

[Tyler]

You get nerve damage.

[John]

Do you really need the nerves there?

[Tyler]

Well, yes, like a lot of people trade offs. Personally, I think it's fine.

[Jordi]

Yeah, Yeah, I don't really need them there. Do not listen.

[Tyler]

It looks maxing, right?

[Jordi]

Yes.

[Tyler]

So, okay, so next thing, you want to look for your infraorbitals.

[Jordi]

Infraorbitals. Okay. What are these?

[Tyler]

Infraorbital is kind of. It's like part. It's actually kind of similar to your maxilla, but it's. Basically, there's two, like, kind of points right here below each of your. You know, and so sometimes these can get slightly inflamed.

[Jordi]

And these are bones or muscles, I believe.

[John]

Yes, they are.

[Jordi]

What even is this actual science that they're. That they've adopted and twisted, or is it entirely made up?

[Tyler]

It's like a section of your maxilla.

[Jordi]

Got it, got it, got it. Okay, what else we got?

[Tyler]

Okay, so also, this is a pretty obvious one. Everyone knows this, but your kind of facial width, height ratio.

[Jordi]

Yes, the mid face ratio or just the overall facial ratio?

[Tyler]

Yeah, mid face is okay.

[Jordi]

It's like, do you have a long face or a wide face?

[Tyler]

Exactly. You want to look at your nasal labial folds.

[Jordi]

Nasal.

[Tyler]

So this is on older people, right? You'll see these kind of wrinkles.

[Jordi]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tyler]

So you want to be looking out. Minimizing those generally, if you want to look younger.

[Jordi]

Okay. Yeah.

[Tyler]

You want to look at your bimaxillary protrusions.

[Jordi]

Bimaxillary protrusions. Okay.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

So this one, I actually. I'm not exactly sure what that one is, but.

[Jordi]

But it's got to be good.

[Tyler]

But you gotta look out for it.

[Jordi]

You gotta look out for it.

[Jacob Ri]

You gotta look out for it for sure.

[Tyler]

Your nose bridge, Right. You don't have to be too wide. This is something you can see. Yeah. And then your interpupillary distance. Right.

[Jordi]

So this is how that feels like something you can do nothing about. Is there a way to make your eyes wider or narrower?

[Tyler]

I think there are ways to do it. Glasses. Right. Because it changes how big your eyes look. I think actually in most cases, also.

[Jordi]

Potentially with makeup, you could maybe accentuate the IPD. I only know about IPDs because of VR goggles. Different VR goggles need different IPDs.

[Tyler]

Timothy Chalamet.

[John]

I gotta interrupt you guys to Talk about the Universe 25 Experience experiment conducted by ethologist John B. Calhoun between 1968 and 1973. The experiment was the Rodent Utopia Experiment. Calhoun built a paradise for mice where every physical need was met. They had unlimited food and water, so there was no competition for survival. There was no predators. They were completely safe from external threats. They had climate control, so it was a perfect environment for living and reproducing. It was disease free. The initial mice were chosen for their health. And so despite having space for 3,800 mice, the population peaked at 2,200 and then began a rapid, irreversible decline to extinction. There was a specific group called the Beautiful Ones. It was a generation of males born during the peak of overcrowding because the older dominant males had become hyper aggressive. These are the boomers in our society. And the social hierarchy had collapsed. These younger males never learned normal social behavior. So I think we see this with, like, clavicular and people like that, like defending territory or courting mates. They were called the Beautiful Ones because their physical appearance, of course, unlike the older alpha males, who were covered in scars. Again, these are. These are the boomers. Right. They bought their homes for like 20 bucks and you know, maybe were in the military, et cetera. The alphas were covered in scars and bitten tails from constant fighting. These males had perfect, healthy fur. You can see Tyler's hair. He's got perfect, healthy fur behavior. They withdrew completely from society. So again, you see these streamers? They're just, like, in their rooms, you know, smashing. Smashing their face with hammers. They spent their entire lives doing only three things. Eating, sleeping, and grooming themselves. Asexuality. They lost all interest in mating or interacting with females. Again, you see these with the looks maxing. Guys, they're not looks maxing, seemingly, for, like, women. They're looks maxing to try to mog other dudes.

[Jacob Ri]

Right?

[John]

This is clavicular. Talking about Gavin Newsom, mogging J.D.

[Jordi]

Yes.

[John]

And so anyways, something to think about with this trend.

[Jordi]

Well, the lessons become the beautiful ones. Like in that colony. You want to be the beautiful one?

[Vincenzo Landino]

Absolutely not.

[Jordi]

I think Tyler's on board.

[John]

Absolutely not. You want to be the scarred alpha?

[Jordi]

Okay, the scarred alpha.

[John]

You want your tail to be bitten?

[Jordi]

Yeah. Well, I've always said I want to be wizened. I want to be old man Max. I want to look like Warren Buffett, because I feel like there's a lot of people that are doing the younger thing. Look, Max, there's Brian Johnson, obviously, but I feel like if I could become more austere, I would hold more. My words would hold more weight. And I feel like that's actually what's valuable.

[John]

The why is one.

[Jordi]

I want to look as old as possible. I want to be leathery. I want to be. I want to be wizard.

[John]

I want to be leathery.

[Tyler]

Just one more thing, though.

[Jordi]

Should dye my hair gray.

[Tyler]

I forgot about this one they mentioned in the chat, but your cantal tilt. So cantal tilt is kind of the angle of your eyes, right? So you want. I think it's called hunter eyes.

[Jordi]

Hunter eyes. Okay. Yeah. All this for nothing. Yeah. All this for nothing. What a crazy time. Well, we have our first guest of the show joining. I'm sure we'll continue the looksmaxing conversation while we bring him in. Let me tell you about public.com investing. For those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more. With damn great customer service, we have Vincenzo Landino in the tvpnulter Dome.

[John]

Welcome to the show.

[Jordi]

How are you doing?

[John]

There he is.

[Nigel Vaz]

Thanks for having me. I listen to this conversation, and I'm like, do I have the wrinkle?

[Jordi]

You look fantastic. So you're one of the People that's actually been doing this, you've been look maxing for years, clearly.

[Nigel Vaz]

Oh, of course, yeah. I didn't even know I was doing it, but okay.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[Nigel Vaz]

I do agree with you though, John. There is something about looking a little older so that people take you seriously.

[Jordi]

But you just graduated high school. You look about like 19, 20, is that correct?

[Nigel Vaz]

Yeah, actually I turned 21 yesterday.

[Jordi]

Congratulations.

[John]

That's fantastic.

[Jordi]

That's fantastic. Yeah, you look very young. Anyway, for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself. We'd love to get the introduction for everyone.

[John]

Yeah.

[Nigel Vaz]

Vincenzo Landino. I run Business of Speed, so podcast newsletter and a consultancy for brands that want to get into motorsport or businesses of speed, actually. So it's more than just motorsport, but we call it Businesses of Speed. So mostly racing.

[John]

Business of Speed.

[Jordi]

I like that.

[John]

Fantastic.

[Jordi]

How'd you get into this?

[Nigel Vaz]

You know, it's to keep it short. I was, I was a motorsport fan for a long time and Formula one years and years ago. Like when I started watching it back in the early 90s, like right after.

[Jordi]

Drive To Survive happened, you got into it right after Drive to Survive. Yeah, that's when you got into it, I'm sure.

[Nigel Vaz]

Just, yeah, I just jumped in right then there.

[Jacob Ri]

Yeah, early.

[Jordi]

Early to the sport, really.

[Nigel Vaz]

Yeah, real early on. Which actually is really funny because now people that came in maybe two years before the Drive to Survive boom are considered like old heads in watching motorsports. Yeah, uncs, exactly.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[Nigel Vaz]

But now back, or you know, like I said, 35ish years ago. Yeah, there was nobody watching it in the United States.

[Jordi]

Sure.

[Nigel Vaz]

And being of Italian heritage and whatnot, I had a lot of motorsport fans in my family and we used to watch it, we used to go karting, we used to, you know, go to racetracks all the time. As I got older, I saw there was opportunity that not many people are talking about the business side or at least the behind the scenes aspect of, of in that case, for real, in this case, Formula One. But everyone wanted to talk about how hot the drivers were and, you know, the engineering aspect was another, you know.

[Jordi]

Element or even just handicapping who's going to win. Like, like the actual, the actual results.

[Nigel Vaz]

Of the actual results.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

As opposed to the business.

[Nigel Vaz]

That's everywhere.

[Jordi]

Yeah, it's everywhere.

[Nigel Vaz]

Exactly, exactly.

[Jordi]

So amazing. The first piece of content, what was the first initial, like go to market with building content in the category?

[Nigel Vaz]

I don't even really. It was probably. It was Twitter for sure and I would, I mean, I was just tweeting about different things, you know, deals that were coming through. And whenever you could get any information about race fees or whatever, you know, a racetrack was paying for to host an event, you're like, okay, this is interesting. And you start building a following. People thinking like, wow, that's ridiculous, or, wow, that's crazy. Didn't. Had no idea what went into it. And then just kind of snowballed into what it is now, which has become. Still building it, but really an opportunity for me to keep a tab on the business behind it.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[John]

Can you give us a broad view into the health and state of motorsport, the business of motorsports in America? Because a lot of. A lot of people in tech are just not that. Not that into automotive racing broadly. Maybe they watch F1 here and there. Maybe they go to an event, you know, through first, you know, with. With some SAS company that they're involved with. But maybe zoom out for a second and then I want to get into a bunch of the subcategories.

[Nigel Vaz]

I'll say anecdotally. Let's just. This is something I heard in Las Vegas just a couple of months ago. Tech company in San Francisco, CEO wanted. This is literally the conversation I heard. Wants to get involved in Formula one somehow knows nothing about motorsport, knows nothing about racing. Just knew that it was somewhere where there was a tension and he wanted to get his brand in front of it. And so hearing conversations like that happening and partnerships and commercial deals happening just because they think it's cool. Again, from someone who's been. Who's seen the trajectory over decades, not just like a few years, that's fascinating to me. Still fascinating to me that that level of interest is there, but that's not the overall health. I mean, Formula One is definitely healthier than most in the United States. You still have series like NASCAR that dominate at least in viewership, but there's issues there as well. Indy car, great racing, but still trying to work out who they want to be. And so there's.

[John]

There's changes. Increase in popularity in F1 in America actually hurt Indy Indy car because it feels like some potential overlap or is it kind of a rising tide lifts all boats?

[Nigel Vaz]

I think it's actually so. I think it is. There is a level. An aspect of rising tide is raised all boats, but it's also hardened the diehards. Like they are. The IndyCar diehards, I feel like, have come out more now because they're like, we don't want to be run over, taken over by this European thing, this Formula one, which is the actual conversations that happen. I mean, it's kind of funny. So indycars is seen it. But what no one has been able to figure out that Formula One did was the content aspect. Drive to Survive was one of many, many things that they've done behind the scenes. Right. ESPN didn't get enough credit for the growth. Everyone said, oh, Netflix, Drive to Survive.

[John]

Effect all of that.

[Nigel Vaz]

I mean, including myself at one point it was like, wow, this Netflix thing is really. This is what's causing all of this. But it wasn't. ESPN did put a lot into it. And so I would say that you have seen a lot of Rising Tide, but no one's figured out the content aspect. It's for whatever reason, it's like not for whatever reason. I know. We know what the reasons are. Formula One is just the attractive. It's the flavor of the day, month, year right now, maybe the next couple years. But it's sexy, right? It's European, so if you want an audience, it's global. Let's not say it's not just European, it's global.

[Jordi]

Yeah. It's a travel show. In addition to being a race, in addition to being a reality TV show, in addition to being a dating show. It sort of scratches every itch so a household can sit down and everyone in the family and yeah, the business.

[John]

The business. I always appreciated the business side, seeing how the owners were kind of processing, being in that understanding that dynamic where you have this, like, desperation to win. You badly want to win. And then every single decision that you're making throughout a season is like, okay, how much? Like, technically, you know, how much do I want? How badly do you want to win? How much do you want to actually spend? How much do you like? How much are you willing to personally invest? So that happening at the owner level and the athlete level, and at one.

[Nigel Vaz]

Point, it was whoever could just keep spending. Right now we have the salary or the salary, the spend cap. And the spend cap has created more competition. You can't spend over 140ish million. It's going to go up a little bit more, but you can't spend over that amount of money. And so that's caused better competition. Everyone has to kind of get to a point. But at one, at one point in formula's history, it was just, you spend, spend, spend. There were way more teams on the grid, way more drivers. You know, we actually had on our podcast, Mark Blundell, who was a driver from the late 80s, early 90s. He drove with Senna and some of the other greats. And he was saying, you know, it was like, we had to qualify to qualify. You don't have that now. You've got. Now there's gonna be 22 drivers on the grid. They all will start come Sunday. That didn't happen, you know, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, it was. You had to qualify just to get onto the grid. And there was plenty because there was so many cars that were just like, they would allow anybody that could come up with a car would be on the grid and it couldn't compete. It wasn't reliable, whatever it was, or they'd be so slow, they obviously wouldn't put them on the grid to qualify. And so all of that has led to the popularity, but also the financial health of it. Look at the valuations.

[John]

Yeah, I wanted to get your read on, like, team valuations, because obviously the people that were just pure enthusiasts in it for the love of the game have benefited to some degree, just based on the appreciation and the value of the teams. There's so much more attention they can build, they can bring in a lot more sponsorship. We were at the Vegas event and just walking around and seeing how.

[Jordi]

It's a tech conference.

[John]

Yeah, it felt like being at a tech conference.

[Jordi]

Every single team has a major tech company on it.

[Nigel Vaz]

Yeah, multiple.

[Jordi]

Yeah, multiple sometimes, yeah.

[John]

Valuations, but, yeah, valuations of teams. George over at CrowdStrike, we work with CrowdStrike, saw he recently. Yeah. Bought into Mercedes in a big way after being a partner for a while. But how do you. How do you. Do you think that. Do you expect valuations actually trade down at any point? Could we be at a. At somewhat of a local top?

[Nigel Vaz]

I think at some point it has to max out.

[Ben Smith]

Right.

[Nigel Vaz]

Like, some of the valuations seem almost insane to me. Mercedes, just the team itself. Six billion is what it's right around. McLaren four, four and a half. Ferrari is a little bit different. They've got this global brand. They're a little over six and a half billion. And even at the bottom of the grid, you're still looking at 2 billion. I remember Zach Brown, CEO of McLaren, had said, and I actually had a conversation with him in Vegas, but he had said, 2024, 2023. Maybe it was at one point, all of the teams will be valued at a billion dollars. And we all thought that was like, no way. This is like, are you kidding me? And here we are, not even a full two years later, and every team has evaluation of roughly 2 billion. Of course, there's private equity now investing You've got some bigger players that want to put money into these teams and so valuations just shoot up. I think it has to cap somewhere. I don't know where that cap is. I have said 10 billion. I thought it was absolute max, but I think even that might be ridiculous. But I know that if I say that now, then in two years, when.

[John]

The average net new investor, are they really going into this expecting a return or do they want to be an owner of a Formula One team?

[Nigel Vaz]

They want to be the owner of formality. I mean it, it's cool. You can't put a price on cool. You can't put a price on being in the suite. Like you said, it's a tech conference. It's who's who, it's who can I be seen around? Look at all the celebrities that show up. Look at all the major, you know, tech companies or all the player, all the network. It's, it's a level of networking you can't really put a price on. And that's what you're buying into. You're buying into the opportunity to entertain your clients, entertain your friends, entertained other executives to be seen as well, I'm the CEO or I'm the founder, whatever it is, I'm the boss.

[John]

There's so many levels to it. You know, our friends at Public who we went to Vegas with are, they're a spot, you know, multi year sponsor of Aston Martin. But then the level beyond that is like, yeah, actually, you know, buying into the team and becoming it.

[Jordi]

Yeah, I noticed over the holiday all the, like the global elite were in St. Bart and they all pulled up their yachts and when you read the articles of like whose yacht is there and who they are, it'll say the person's name. And then like probably half of these people, they're described as like owner of the Pistons or owner of those Red Sox, owner of some sports team. And you always look them up and it's like they didn't make their money starting that sports team. They started some boring oil and gas company or software company or something. But, but as soon as you own. It's like writing a book. As soon as you own a sports team, that's what you're known for forever. And you're just the Dallas Mavericks guy.

[Nigel Vaz]

So it goes back to. You guys were talking about Steve Jobs earlier and how they're. Right now, we don't have somebody that is like Steve Jobs for AI and to just snap a finger, tell a story. It's the story. And I Don't know if that's what you were looking to say at one point, but it's a story, It's a, it's an instant story. You go and sponsor Williams or you go into Atlassian, you go partner up with Williams now you're going to be part of their comeback because William Williams, the team is coming back and they are more financially healthy, they've got great investment now, great team, great leaders in place, while Atlassian is going to be about right behind, you know, they are right there built in story. People that didn't know them outside of Australia, which, or maybe Even like the U.S. whatever, they'll know globally. Instant global recognition, right? You can't buy that anywhere. You know, you can't buy that story, that level of story. There's no price that you can put on that. And so I think that's what we're, you know, we see with Formula one specifically guaranteed.

[John]

What is the dynamic of so, so Audi's joining the grid this year. How, how does that work? Is it. Is. Is the number of teams going to effectively be fixed forever? Like part of the reasons why NBA and NFL teams are, are valuable is because you effectively have a monopoly, right? We' more teams, so you don't have new competition and pricing pressure and things like that. How did that dynamic, how do you actually they're taking over from another team, like break down that dynamic and will we see more? Could we see a future where there's 30 cars on the grid?

[Nigel Vaz]

So Sauber was the team that Audi bought to get into. So they took a spot, right? And so that for the. I'm trying to think of how many years, but let's say at least the past decade, maybe 15 years, you've had a pretty fixed number of teams on the grid.

[Ben Smith]

10.

[Nigel Vaz]

Cadillac is entering the grid as team 11. And that was a big, big deal. In the charter from 2022, the dilution fee was 200 or 300 million because no one thought.

[John]

And that's a fee that goes to all the teams effectively, that's a fee.

[Nigel Vaz]

That goes to all the teams.

[John]

But it's split up. It's split up. So Everybody gets like 10. Yeah, 10 million.

[Jacob Ri]

10 million.

[John]

Which is, which is nothing that would have to be updated.

[Jacob Ri]

And it did, it did.

[Nigel Vaz]

It got updated. And when this was. So the big issue that came up was when they were looking for Team 11, Cadillac came in. It was Andretti that was trying to put in their offer. Michael Andretti, Mario Andretti, his son Michael. And a group was trying to buy in there was politics behind the scenes that were going on. They had the money, they had all the things together. Ducks in a row, they did. Some people don't like them. And so they got kind of pushed out. Now we have Cadillac that entered, but at the time, they came to the table with their $300 million dilution fee and they had facilities and all the things that F1 wanted to see. Well, they quickly said, wait a minute, 300 million is not enough money. Like, wait, this is. This is crazy. The sport has completely ballooned in valuations and how much revenue we need to do something different. So I think it ended up around 600 million. So double. Just as. Just to enter, just to say. Now, that's not to say that you're done at 600 million. You need to have facilities, you need to invest in people. So you're all in. That's the price. Just to say, like, yeah, we'll entertain you. So six, you know, 600 million now. So you're not going to have anybody just come in and say, I want a team, because you need to have.

[John]

So is there a hard cap at all in the charter? Obviously you could have.

[Nigel Vaz]

The charter says 12 is the max right now.

[John]

That's what the chat was saying, too. How does have the manufacturers. How much do they try to track or how much do they worry about how, on grid or on track, performance impacts car sales? I had a Ferrari at one point and, you know, anytime I'm watching F1 and I see Ferrari with technical difficulties, I'm like, yeah, big surprise, because I had a lot of those. I had a lot of those things too. Right.

[Jordi]

Disconnected. But I don't know, it's just like. Just.

[Vincenzo Landino]

Yeah.

[John]

So there's some concern of, like, if we, you know, have a team and we're. And we're just terrible.

[Jordi]

Hurt the brand.

[John]

Yeah. Why is somebody going to want to go and spend 400, 500 or more on one of these cars?

[Nigel Vaz]

Yeah. So I remember Lawrence Stroll in 2020. What year are we in? 26. So about three, four years ago, he made a comment that because Aston Martin had the safety car, they actually split safety car duties with Mercedes. But because they had one safety car, he estimated about $80 million just from having the safety car in sales. So I think it was the Vantage, and they had, like the Vantage F1 Edition, sold about 300 units, whatever, $200,000 a piece, whatever they were. And they sold out pretty instantly because it was a car on the grid. Mercedes has really pushed the AMG badge a lot over the past, I'd say five to seven years while destroying what.

[John]

Made AMG great in the first place.

[Nigel Vaz]

And I had, you know, I had an amg. Loved it. It was great. Until I started seeing everybody with an amg, I'm like, well, AMG doesn't even mean anything anymore. It's just kind of like it's the standard car. They don't even. Yeah, you don't see a regular Mercedes. Everyone's got an AMG at this point. But that was.

[John]

They're going to make a v. A v4AMG.

[Nigel Vaz]

Well, not anymore. So.

[John]

No, no, I know they are starting to. They got the.

[Jordi]

Was it. The C43 was the one that people really didn't like?

[Nigel Vaz]

Yeah, I mean, for what. It was kind of pointless. I mean, I had. Mine was an eight and it was the last eight, 20, 19. And I, you know, people. It was very desirable to aftermarket folks because, because of that.

[John]

But, but yeah, even in the, when I, When I think about Aston, if Aston can win a championship, I do think that that could be very beneficial for the brand in America. McLaren, McLaren, I'm sure they're going to benefit in some way. But Aston, I feel like, really, I mean, that dynamic is interesting because you have kind of the same owners in both the Formula one team and the actual manufacturer, which are different entities. And so there's real incentive to like, hey, let's actually win a championship, because they make some of the most beautiful cars in the entire world, but they're just not as desirable as the Ferrari at the same price point.

[Nigel Vaz]

Well, Ferrari is also. I mean, what Ferrari does to buy any Ferrari is just. It's like, it's the luxury playbook. You know, you can't buy the one you want until you buy 10 others, and then maybe we'll let you buy it. I mean, it's just the scarcity thing. But I'll say with aston Martin and McLaren specifically, they're still. I would say they're buoyed by Mercedes, doing well because they're, they're AMG power plants. So that makes, that makes a difference, especially to the level of enthusiasts or the collectors that are buying these cars. But they are beautiful. Beautiful and they're gorgeous. There is a direct correlation. And you will hear conver. Have conversations with folks within the teams that are, are absolutely tracking that kind of thing.

[Vincenzo Landino]

It's.

[Nigel Vaz]

What is the list? I don't, I don't know the number, you know, for every car maker, but it's, you know, Red Bull doesn't make A car.

[John]

Right.

[Nigel Vaz]

So they've got nothing to worry about. Williams doesn't.

[Jordi]

What about the RB17? They made two of those.

[Vincenzo Landino]

Well, all right, all right.

[Nigel Vaz]

To be fair. To be fair.

[Jordi]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Nigel Vaz]

I just meant like.

[Pat Grady]

Like a regular.

[Nigel Vaz]

That thing does.

[John]

Look, what about what's happening in. In sim racing, broadly? Like, how is the. I mean, do you look at sim racing as its own kind of sub industry? Is there.

[Nigel Vaz]

I don't. I. I mean, so I don't track it as much or I'm not paying as much attention. I know that.

[John]

It is.

[Nigel Vaz]

There's a higher interest in sim racing because most people realize, well, it's too expensive to go get a track day. It's too expensive to try and even go racing. Right. To be. To go from carding to, you know, to the different series levels and then to get to F1.

[Jacob Ri]

It's.

[Nigel Vaz]

It's almost impossible. Right. And you need.

[John]

Yeah. People were running the numbers on, like, how much Lando's dad had spent to get him actually in the game, and it was like they clocked it at like $40 million over the career.

[Nigel Vaz]

Yeah. Just either you have a very rich.

[John]

Yeah.

[Nigel Vaz]

Rich parent or a sponsor, you know.

[John]

But I think you need both. You need both. Right. Or you don't need both, but, like, it helps to have both. It's not just one or the other.

[Nigel Vaz]

It helps. I mean, it's a different lifestyle. Right. So it's a lifestyle that is you're traveling. You're oftentimes, unless you're already in Europe, you are likely going to Europe. We had Connor Daly on our podcast, IndyCar Driver, and actually that episode comes out in a couple weeks. But he did say to us in the conversation that, you know, he had to go to Europe to race an open wheel because that's where it was like he couldn't do it here. There was no ladder. The ladder system wasn't robust enough to get where he wanted to go. And that takes dollars right now. His dad raced in Formula one, but could I do it? Could you guys? I don't know. Would we be able to start? Would my kids be able to start?

[Jordi]

Yeah, it's.

[Vincenzo Landino]

It's.

[Nigel Vaz]

It's just it. So that's where sim racing comes in. And sim racing is made more popular because the current batch of drivers are very tapped into the sim racing world. Max Verstappen races sim cars in between races between qualifying and the actual race the next day. He's like, I'm going to go home and I'm going to go race on the sim and he takes part in competitive racing. Lando races, Charles, they all race and most of them are racing pretty competitively on sim. So that's also made it more popular. The allure of being able to maybe race with Max Verstappen or Lando Norris or get boot up online and play that those. That's all increased tremendously. I'd have to actually look at the numbers. I want to see if they're out.

[John]

What about the. The health of individual tracks around the US we're going to. We're going to doing a track day out at Willow Springs later this month and I think they changed ownership recently. Yeah. And. But, but yeah. How. How are these doing as businesses? Are they the kind of things where it's like fun to own but actually just a terrible business, or is anybody actually doing really well?

[Nigel Vaz]

It's a tough business. Is anyone doing really well? It's the ones that are backed by dollars that have big races at them.

[John]

It's hard to maintain a pure enthusiast track.

[Nigel Vaz]

You're saying a pure enthusiast track? Yeah. You really have to be like a coda right now to be immensely successful. Now that's smaller. Regional tracks are still hosting, you know, plenty of racing, but to say they're extremely healthy is tough. Also, there's a lot of folks that think, oh, we got F1 to come race at our track or we want F1 to come to Road America. F1 to come. It's like, no, you don't. Because it's a whole spectacle to come build this. And oftentimes it destroys what makes your track unique or appealing or, you know, charming. So there's a lot of. And those are conversations I'm always tracking, you know, how does.

[John]

I have a kind of a not quite baked thesis, but an idea that the track business might actually become a great business in the future if it becomes effectively illegal to drive cars on the road just via autonomous vehicles, where guys and girls are not going to, like, suddenly at some point, it's like humans can no longer drive. It's just too dangerous. You can imagine that scenario happening in the next 10, 20 years and people are still going to want to drive, so they're going to take their cars to tracks. And that you could see a resurgence of enthusiasts driving because it's just made illegal on normal roads.

[Nigel Vaz]

Yeah, I mean, that's actually. That's fantastic. I didn't even think about the autonomous driving aspect of that and how if people can't drive, people that like us, that like, you know, have Gotten a taste of driving. We know what it's like also.

[John]

Driving on a track, driving your car on the road versus the track is just, just. It's completely. It's incomparable.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[Nigel Vaz]

Totally different. Totally different. I mean, you, you know, you wonder sometimes how people get their licenses, but you're like, I'm not gonna drive.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[Nigel Vaz]

I'm not gonna drive the way I wanna drive on a track on the i95 over here. Like, it's just not gonna drive.

[John]

No. And then there was that tragedy recently. The. Was it the Activision, founder of Call of Duty, founder of Call of Duty was driving. I've driven Angeles Crest a bunch. I had the scariest moment of my life in a car on at around 6am probably five years ago driving a 997 that I had. And I. Yeah, it. You can imagine at some point that, I mean, that what a lot of people do at ACH is already effectively illegal. Right. They're driving 30, 40, 50 mile, you know, 60, 70 miles above the speed limit, tailing each other very closely. It is like reckless driving. But. But yeah, that wouldn't. If that same situation had happened on a track, like, everybody would have been fine.

[Jordi]

Yeah, for sure. Usually. Walk me through a circuit conversation real quick, please.

[Nigel Vaz]

No, I just want to add one last thing to that. There's a lot of the, you know, private members only clubs coming up now at racetracks for enthusiasts. Yeah, I think that's an opportunity for racetracks to become maybe a little more popular or increase their health because they can offer. And Coda's doing it right. They're offering luxury condos and garages and a whole club membership or a membership. So I think that's something that can happen more.

[Jordi]

Can you take me through What a successful F1 track build looks like? How is Vegas looking? We went. They were very much bragging that it was a permanent facility. It's remarkable. It feels like it's working. But how does this actually work? Who's paying who and how is it penciled out in Vegas?

[Nigel Vaz]

I mean, you've got some public money, public funds needed. And of course there's plenty of complainers about that. Nonstop. Just open up Twitter and you'll see people complaining, locals complaining. The permanent facility in Vegas is actually a new thing. So there's really not much to compare it to because street tracks don't usually have anything permanent. Like you go to Monaco.

[John]

There's.

[I]

They're.

[Nigel Vaz]

They're putting that together months ahead of time. So that for Vegas is pretty unique. They are filling it with the Grand Prix Plaza. While it's not race, I see they. I think they cut off around September, October, and so then it becomes a business. With the Grand Prix plaza, they have the F1 experience. It's kind of almost like a museum. There's simulators, there's a restaurant. So they're trying to keep people tied to the F1 brand all year long. That's unique to Vegas in terms of the layout of the track and whatnot. I mean, the build of the track, the permanent pieces of it. I believe they are trying to add some permanent lighting fixtures so that those don't have to go up every single time. But I mean, you guys were there, so you saw it. I mean, there's so much of it that has to go up in real time because you can't close down the Strip all year round. You can't have. What is it? You know, you can't have all the things they have up around the track. The stands. There's not even really stands. Everything's like luxury over there. So it's. You're either in a suite or you're not. So, yeah, all of that has to go out in real time. You know, when you have. When you have a permanent facility like a Coda or Miami's kind of half and half. But when you have a permanent facility like Coda, you know, it's obviously there. Those are more expensive to maintain overall because you have to keep them occupied and you have to do something in them year round. After that one race, Vegas, you know, you kind of take the good and the bad. You have to take the locals complaining and you have to do the shutdowns and all that. So I mean, you guys were there, so you remember how like they had to shut down from like Wednesday at 2 o', clock, basically from 2 to midnight every day after that was. Was closed down. I mean, those are things they have to deal with. And I think that's just unique. Las Vegas is really, really unique. It's also new to Las Vegas residents. Whereas you take like a Monaco that's been around since the 20s, those folks are. They're used to it. It's part of the identity. And that's. That's where I think there's also the.

[John]

I mean, the difference in Monaco too is like if you're a resident and you. And you own or rent like a condo or an apartment and then F1 comes to town, it's super exciting. But if you're a Vegas resident and this track springs up and Everything gets more expensive and kind of like boxed out. It's not as much of it's. And you're not necessarily an F1 fan. It just becomes much more of an annoyance than like a celebration of the city.

[Nigel Vaz]

And I think that's where the idea. We still haven't gotten peak saturation.

[Jacob Ri]

Right.

[Nigel Vaz]

It's not. People aren't excited about it. It just because, like, it's not ingrained in their identity. Whereas you go to, you know, you go to Europe and they are. Have more of a motorsport culture, or at least F1, let's just say F1, where that culture is understood. So track tracks are very interesting. They want more street circuits. There are more street circuits coming. Madrid is being added this year. So that'll be interesting to see how that build goes.

[Jordi]

We actually talked why do they want more street circuits? I feel like in America. American Nerber. Great question. Would be incredible. I would love an American Nerber. Maybe in like Idaho or something. Going through the forest.

[I]

I don't just.

[Nigel Vaz]

I don't disagree with you. The reason they want more is because it is actually more appealing and more sexy to say, sure, hey, come to our city, come to Madrid.

[Jordi]

Yep.

[Nigel Vaz]

And we can sell Madrid.

[Jordi]

So, and I mean, Vegas, everyone goes to the nightclubs. There's like a huge economic impact, the hotel. Whereas if you're out in the. In the sticks. Yeah, you might be in a cheap hotel, but you're not going to go spend a ton of money.

[Nigel Vaz]

Spa in Belgium is arguably every driver we've talked to, every. Any motorsport enthusiast spies the best track to drive, to race at. It's awesome. But you know where Spa is? In the middle of the Ardennes forest.

[Jordi]

Yeah, it's awesome.

[Nigel Vaz]

Like, it's. It's not right. It's cool if you're really into motorsport, but if you're trying to sell at F1 or you're trying to sell this brand, as this is appealing to sponsors and it's sexy and. Well, I don't. I don't. I would rather do it in, I don't know, Brussels or something.

[Jordi]

Yeah, yeah. Because you're basically holding. You're holding a conference for your company. A lot of the sponsors will invite key clients and partners to come with them. And if you're out in the forest.

[John]

Yeah.

[Vincenzo Landino]

The different.

[Nigel Vaz]

And the playbook has been written. So, like it's. It's become a festival. It's, you know, it is a festival and that's what they want. The new, like, if you're going to pay $70 million to host a race, you need to recoup that. You can't recoup that by just having a race in the middle of nowhere. And that's why you're seeing a lot of these things happen with the smaller tracks in Europe. They can't afford it. They just don't have it.

[Jordi]

That's funny.

[John]

Next time you come on. I want to talk about the possibility of an AI driver at some point, I think imagine if a lot. Imagine if Google bought a team and they had no human driver.

[Jordi]

This is my new AGI test is I want a humanoid robot in a manual gearbox. Shift in with three pedals around the Nurburgring in under seven minutes.

[Nigel Vaz]

Now. Well, did you guys see the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League?

[Jordi]

I saw like briefly, but tell me.

[Nigel Vaz]

It'S autonomous racing and it's teams of engineers basically with no drivers in the car. It's clunky. It's clunky. It's like because the cars, I mean they are driving by themselves but they still have to process. So like you have a car cut in front of you, like.

[Jordi]

Yeah. What do you do about that?

[Nigel Vaz]

Imagine. Well, imagine a Waymo and something jumps in front of it, it's going to stop.

[Jacob Ri]

Right.

[Nigel Vaz]

So it's kind of like the same thing happens with this race. So it's kind of. If you had a chance to look it up. The Autonomous Racing League in Abu Dhabi, they're trying to make it a thing. I don't know about it. It's not there yet.

[Jordi]

I would love to see some the track times, how they compare and also all of the blooper reel, I'm sure as well.

[Ben Smith]

Really funny.

[Nigel Vaz]

There's a lot of blooper reels, I'm sure.

[Jordi]

Anyway, we'd love to have you back.

[John]

So great to hang. Let's make it a regular thing. This is good. And appreciate you giving us the full overview of everything.

[Jordi]

Have a great day.

[Pat Grady]

Thanks for having me.

[Jordi]

We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. You can go check them out. And our next guest, Nigel Vaz is already in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP in Ultradome. Nigel, good to meet you.

[Vincenzo Landino]

How are you doing?

[Jordi]

How's your new year going? Off to a good start.

[I]

Thanks for having me. Great to be on.

[Jacob Ri]

Yeah, it's great.

[Jordi]

Thanks so much. Well, we'd love to kick this off since it's the first time on the show with a Little bit of an introduction on yourself and how you introduce yourself to everyone who's watching.

[I]

Yeah. I run Sapient, which is enterprise AI software and technology business. Sapien was founded about 30 years ago in the early days of the Internet, building some of the world's first online banks. The first time you could trade equities, the first time you could pick a seat on an airplane. So we've had about 30 years of building digital systems to really build intelligent enterprises in the first wave of digital. And now leveraging AI, we're all about how we can actually unlock real transformation beyond pilots for some of the largest enterprises in the world. What we really do is bring together deep industry expertise across sectors from financial services, retail, healthcare, and then combine it with our digital DNA alongside a few AI products that stem from agentic orchestration through to accelerated software development and then finally managing IT systems using AI.

[Jordi]

How did you process that data point that kind of shook the Internet a little bit for a couple days last year where it suggested that a lot of the AI demos at the enterprise level, the experimentation, those experimental budgets, that they weren't getting renewed, that they weren't seeing the level of adoption, they weren't getting renewed.

[John]

It's just that they weren't like, they.

[Jordi]

Weren'T converting and they weren't working. And it was some crazy high number, like 93% of enterprises. Yeah, yeah.

[I]

So how do you process an MIT study?

[Jordi]

Yeah, that's right.

[I]

Yeah, it was an MIT study that came out. And actually what we did is we had a bunch of professors evaluate from MIT our work almost as a counterpoint to that data. Because what we were seeing is, of course, there was a ton of experimentation in the organizations around AI, but trying something out and then scaling it across the enterprise was one of the biggest stumbling blocks, largely because building a proof of concept in a small organization and scaling it is a lot easier than when you are one of the largest automotive manufacturers in the world or when you're one of the largest banks in the world. Because you have to actually think about the tool chaining of the organization and how these systems deploy in the context of that. Right. Most of these organizations, I mean, Davos is coming up in a couple of weeks. And every time I go over the last couple years, AI has been the dominant conversation, but more and more clients are now saying, hey, we understand the concepts around AI, we understand all of the conversation is around compute, and all of the conversation is around models. But how am I as an enterprise leader getting value from this in the context of what I do day to day. And that is exactly why that stat is so critical. Because I think essentially the bridge from you experiment with a little bit of AI to you can actually start to see meaningful gains outside of the obvious use cases of you're deploying AI in the call center to route some calls more efficiently, or you're deploying AI in the context of enabling your sales teams.

[Jacob Ri]

To be more efficient.

[I]

Right. We're talking about large scale agentic mesh deployments that are allowing businesses to reimagine a car build that used to take 18 months in 18 weeks, or allowing an insurance company to monitor worldwide events and on a dynamic basis allow you to react to the fact that I heard one of you guys talking about your house getting burned down in California. And this is an actual piece of work we did for a client where they were monitoring the air quality post fires and alerting people who have significant issues with asthma to actually make sure they had inhalers or maybe even perhaps moved out of those zones, proactively saving themselves hundreds of millions of dollars in health care and better outcomes. Outcomes for these folks who otherwise might have gone through a traumatic health event. Right.

[Jordi]

There's a white shell jury.

[I]

That's the way require completely different orchestration than I think a pilot or two.

[John]

Could you share some more as much as you can, like who your actual clients are? Because I think that'd be helpful to ground the conversation because it's some of the biggest companies in the world.

[I]

Yeah, it is. It's some of the biggest banks in the world going all the way from retail banks to investment banks like the likes of a Goldman Sachs, for example, in the investment space, in the retail space. We work across. The retail space, across essentially grocery retail and then fashion retail as well as general product retail. So we work with the likes of a Carrefour in France or Walmart in the us, Tesco in the uk. So a number of big businesses there in the context of the automotive space, the likes of a number of the big German automotive companies, a number of the big US Automotive companies, Asian automotive companies. So we serve multiple sectors across countries around the world. And in many cases that's one of the complexities there, right? Because these are global organizations, there's different data governance rules, there's different legacy enterprise journeys that they've gone through. Almost every one of these enterprises is sitting on a few hundred million dollars of tech debt which you have to kind of work your way through before you can actually deploy any one of these AI ideas.

[John]

How are some of These management teams that you work with approaching messaging AI internally. Because I feel like the broad fear in the economy right now is related to job loss. And so one of the reasons you'd bring in an external partner is so that they can take just kind of a pragmatic view at the business and really understand where you can get leverage out of AI. Whereas if you're running a thousand person organization in a company, there's maybe some more attention around implementing AI. You know, you'll probably lose your job as an executive if you don't implement AI well. But depending on how you implement it, there's going to be some job loss and people are looking out for their team and maybe they like having a bigger headcount, et cetera. So how is that even being messaged at the moment?

[I]

Look, I think the conversation is definitely across organizations, right? I mean, people in most enterprises are very tuned to the fact that this is a moment. And much like the Internet was, and we saw this in the early days of the Internet, I mentioned some of the things we did back then, right? A moment of reimagination of business in a very fundamental way. This is not one of those incremental progressive overload type moments. This is a significant transformation. So I don't think anybody in your organization sitting there basically saying, hey, I think nothing in my world is going to change. I think people expect to change. I think what most folks aren't clear about is what is the journey from here where we have existing systems, existing processes, existing ways of working that the business is running on and making sure that you can fundamentally rebuild this plane while you still have targets and commitments and shareholders and you recognize that if you don't do it soon enough to the point you're making, you're going to start to give up margin, or you're going to start to give up speed, or you're going to start to give up market share. Almost every conversation we're in is about how can I actually drive more growth, how can I actually create a better experience for my customers? And this isn't coming just from leaders in the organization. This is coming from people across the organization. What we are seeing though, is that at the level of enabling these people to do work in this new context, organizations are very much separated by execution. So, you know, so many clients will talk about, you know, an AI strategy, right? But do you have a data strategy? Are all your data sets connected? Or actually are you doing AI pilots on sales data on this ERP system over here and doing, you know, you know, marketing pilots on that ERP system over there, which will eventually evolve to agents on this ERP system for sales not talking to agents to that ERP system on marketing and those agents not talking to each other across sales and marketing resembles a traditional baton passing organization of today. Right.

[John]

So you're some of these larger enterprises how it felt like last year was, the year of was all about just like coding. Right. Every single founder that came on our show would talk about the leverage that they're getting. We're getting that leverage internally. We, we've built a bunch of software to run the show that we never would have built historically because it just would have been too time intensive. But now we can have one great engineer, Tyler, on our team who can build an entire product end to end. Please don't try to poach him because he said that. But yeah, how have coding agents and products been adopted in some of these companies? Is there any type of restrictions? Part of the reason that it got adopted so quickly is it was somewhat permissionless. Engineers could just sign up for a product and go bottoms up. But I don't even know how adoption would work at someone like a McDonald's or someone like a Mercedes or someone at a bigger bank where I don't know that an engineer can necessarily just say like, I'm going to start using this product.

[Jordi]

No.

[I]

And you can't.

[Jordi]

Right?

[I]

You can't. Because the fact of the matter is it's not just Tyler or one engineer, it's one engineer with another engineer with, with a third engineer with a fourth engineer. Where a lot of them share context around a bigger application. Whereas if you start using one tool chain and the next person starts using the next tool chain and the third. Which is by the way, what happened in the early days. Right. Which is why you got those pilots up and running really fast. And people were starting to see real leverage. But then very quickly that started to devolve to basically. But we're not seeing the net output actually move the needle across big things. So I'll give you an example of a. You know, we did a piece of work for a large healthcare company which was on a 10 year modernization journey, migrating millions.

[Jordi]

Well, thinking in decades. Thinking in decades. People say you should think in decades. These people are actually doing it. I love it. Yeah. It's amazing.

[I]

Yeah. And it's crazy, right? It's millions of lines of COBOL code written in the 60s and 70s by dude that are not only in the company, they're not probably on the planet.

[Jacob Ri]

Right.

[I]

And you have individual developers going line by line by line, trying to interpret what the intent behind the code was. But more importantly, because this is HIPAA compliant data and has serious health care outcomes tied to it, you have to be really thoughtful about what of this code you need to retain, what logic it holds, and how much of this you can actually do away with that journey. Going from a 10 years to a few years, two years or three years, requires you to be able to have all of the current business context of the organization. It requires you to have a future state that you understand really well. And you need to have a group of people working on a very similar tool chain so that the code that you are ingesting then gets created into a specific that a bunch of humans can look at and say, is this the spec that we actually want? And then that spec can actually get migrated into new code. So we built this platform called Slingshot, which is our software modernization platform. And how it differs from a lot of the consumer grade platforms that have got crazy valuations right now is they were all built for individual users writing apps like Tyler, for smaller organizations or for themselves. But the minute you start to deploy them into large enterprises, what you find is that enterprise context graph that is missing or permissions like what part of the app are you allowed to see versus me? Or what is my relationship to you on a dev team? How do you actually start to manage authentication permissions? This is the kind of stuff that really makes those pilots go awry. In the context of these big scale changes.

[John]

What can we expect in, in AI and advertising this year specifically? I feel like we went from large companies making an ad and saying we're going to serve this to a million people or 10 million people or 100 million people. Right. A Super bowl ad is an example of that. And then as you have platforms like Meta, really, really, really specific targeting, you can basically make an ad and serve it to like a tiny group of people. Very, very specific. Like you can imagine a world in the future where an advertiser, even as big as McDonald's, would effectively make an advertisement that's meant for like one individual person, just because you could generate it on the fly.

[Jordi]

Jordy, you're going to love this. This Big Mac is made for you.

[John]

Yeah, effectively. So what are you expecting on that front? Because the models have gotten a lot better and it does feel like companies should generate maybe at least 50 times as much ad creative this year than last year.

[I]

Yeah, I think the output's going up. The question is whether the quality and the targeting are going up simultaneously. Right, because meta sees incredible stuff in their wall garden. Google sees incredible stuff in their wall garden. But how are companies leveraging their first party data to understand that your Jordy, this is your context. This is the car you drive, or this is the burger you eat, or this is the hotel room you like to stay.

[John]

I tell them everything about myself. I want them to target me as specifically as they possibly personalized ad feed.

[I]

You'll be so surprised though, right? I'm sure you do that all the time. But how often do people actually use what you give them about yourself to actually give you something back that's relevant? The hard part is not getting consumers to give data. You know, there's been a lot of conversation about data privacy and of course I think consumers are all about like, if you give me value back, I'm going to give you my data because I get something back and forth return. So if I'm watching Netflix and you know what I like to watch, you're going to show me something back that I care about. Great, I'll give you my data. But most companies can't do that. They can't actually serve up what you want. I mean I'll, you know, we work with a very large hotel brand, Marriott globally, and we were basically working with them to basically say how do we capture intent in the context of what people are searching for? So when you actually go to their villas platform, historically what you might say is hey, or a hotel platform, you might say, these are the dates I've got free. This is the city that I'm searching for and this is the kind of product that I'm looking for, right? And now you flip that around to say, how can you ingest all of the intent and context that they're willing to give you? So give them a white box and all of a sudden you say, hey, I've got young kids, I've got a pet, one of my children is autistic and really sensitive to noise. So it needs to be in a quiet part of the hotel, blah, blah, blah. Next thing you know, the relevance that you can respond with goes up dramatically. So what I think you're going to see from an advertising perspective is people who have the ability to leverage first party data, combine it with second and third party data from a targeting perspective and then building production tool chains that allow them to use that to really personalize content is really powerful. Like to give you an example, large pharmaceutical company doing a vaccine launch in 115 countries, how this Works normally is the marketeers would have to come up with a bunch of concepts, then talk to the lawyers to basically say what are the regs in each of these 115 countries about vaccines? And you'll find crazy stuff. Like in New Zealand you're not allowed to smile in the ad because a smile implies an outcome. So they want like straight faced people because you don't actually know if the.

[John]

Vaccine'S actually going to work so hard to advertise if people can't smile. Yeah, if you take this jab, you're going to have a bad time.

[I]

So you've got this crazy process that goes for like 12 months where the marketeers and the lawyers are having a conversation about what can and can't be done content wise. And then the content, content gets tweaked and produced and what we built using both the argentic platform, we ingest all of the regs into our platform. We then basically look at the creative concepts that were originally created by the team and we'll test them against the regs almost on a real time basis and then regenerate to your point using whatever models are more efficient for the kind of content, regenerate versions of that content appropriate to every one of these content countries and then allow that work to be deployed at significant scale. More importantly, if we discover an issue once it's actually live in the context of that our monitoring agents are monitoring the content to ensure the reactions to them and then can actually start to do AB testing about what's actually working better. But all of this is in one synchronous orchestration. In the same way that these orchestrations might connect supply chain data to to store, inventory to advertising or basically, you know, Black Friday. This product's already gone off the shelf. The ad isn't still hitting the same product because those people in the store are only going to get more frustrated and you start to close the loop.

[John]

Well, awesome. Well, thank you for coming on Breaking it down.

[Jordi]

What an exciting time to be in this particular business to be modernizing advertising. I mean nobody likes a decade will happen in years.

[John]

I love it. Nobody likes advertising or modernizing more than us. Maybe you. So it's great to hang.

[Jordi]

Thanks for your day. We'll talk to you soon.

[I]

Nigel, take care.

[John]

Great to hang.

[Jordi]

Bye. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Restream One Livestream 30 Plus Destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com and up next, it's steward time. It's steward time. We're stewarding, we are joined by Sequoia Capital, Pat Grady and Ravi Gupta.

[John]

What's going on?

[Jordi]

How are you guys doing? Great to see you.

[Pat Grady]

Good to see you guys.

[Jordi]

Happy New Year. We might want you guys to scoot back a little bit. Is that possible?

[Jacob Ri]

We're just.

[John]

We don't want half of you, Robbie. We want the whole. There we go.

[Pat Grady]

Thank you.

[Jordi]

Massive start to the new year. Take us through the news today. Very exciting, but we'll hear from you.

[Pat Grady]

The news there is what? Xai is raising money. Is that the news that we're talking?

[Jordi]

Yes, that was yesterday, actually.

[Ben Smith]

Oh, okay.

[Jacob Ri]

My bad.

[Jordi]

We've move. Moved on. We already covered that. We're here to talk about.

[Pat Grady]

You guys are looking fantastic today. Just letting you guys know. Particularly good. So what happened today was, as you recall from my last TVPN appearance, I want my children to be AI researchers so they can support the family. And it wasn't obvious they were going to get hired anywhere else. So we're like it. Let's. I'm going to start my own company. Right.

[Jacob Ri]

Underrated.

[Pat Grady]

Those are the links that I will go to to make my children happy. No, what happened was today I announced that I am going to be starting a new company. I'm super pumped. And then also getting to do it while still being part of Sequoia is pretty special. And I think my brother Pat here was cool about letting that happen, and we're excited.

[Jordi]

Yeah. How did you two first meet?

[Vincenzo Landino]

Was it it. Was it Abramson?

[Pat Grady]

Yeah, of course.

[Jordi]

I think it was.

[Vincenzo Landino]

We had a partner named Michael Abramson who was involved with Instacart back in.

[John]

The day, and I think Michael was the original connection.

[Vincenzo Landino]

And then Ravi. We got to know Ravi over a period of years. And I mentioned in a tweet today that we always have this shadow list, which is not long. It's like literally half a dozen people. But, you know, the shadow list of.

[John]

The people we would hire if we.

[Vincenzo Landino]

Ever got a chance. Ravi was on that list for a few years, and finally we were lucky enough to get them back in 2019.

[Pat Grady]

Whenever someone asked me about my Sequoia interview process, John and Jordi, I say it was either five years or five minutes, I don't know. But it was one of those. Seemed to happen quick at the end, but, you know, I guess it took.

[Jordi]

A long time by the Sequoia Partnership. I would love to see that list, but it's certainly key. Intellectual property.

[John]

Yeah. Key IP stewarded.

[Jordi]

One of the things that you steward.

[John]

That's the steward's greatest response.

[Jordi]

How are you settling into the new role?

[Vincenzo Landino]

It's been great. First off, Alfred and I have been working together for 15 years and he's been.

[Jordi]

How did you two meet?

[Vincenzo Landino]

You guys are big on this question, huh?

[Jordi]

I just like Lore.

[Pat Grady]

I didn't even think we were going to answer it the first time.

[Jordi]

I thought they were messed with. We can do news, but I also like Lore.

[Vincenzo Landino]

Well, I think most people know Alfred, before Sequoia was the president and COO of Zappos, which was a Sequoia investment. And so we got to know each other a little bit through that, but I wasn't point on the investment, so it was just kind of seeing each other at Sequoia events or whatever. And then he joined, I want to say 2010. He joined Sequoia somewhere around that time. And at that point, I was mostly focused on growth investing, he was mostly focused on early investing. By 2015 or so, he was co captaining the early business, I was co captaining the growth business. And we just had a great partnership for a very long time.

[Jordi]

Yeah. How are you thinking about the divide of responsibilities now? Is there more nuance to it than just early and growth? Are there other. Is there someone who likes to do more personnel management, more recruiting or more marketing or whatever, more fundraising? Is there any division there?

[Vincenzo Landino]

Once upon a time, Fred Luddy, who is the founder of ServiceNow, handed over the reins to Frank Slootman. And I remember shortly thereafter, Frank Slootman had the line, I'm the workhorse, he's the show pony. So Alfred and I have this wonderful relationship where the plan that we've agreed to, certainly agreed to, is I get.

[John]

To go on tvpn, he gets to manage to go in compliance.

[Jordi]

Alfred's welcome anytime, too. It's fantastic.

[Vincenzo Landino]

No, no, I'm kidding. The honest answer is our team, and we have so many awesome people at Sequoia, not just on the investment team, but on all the operating teams. There isn't a lot of management that needs to happen. And so over the last couple of months, I think one of the things we've realized is it's a very small amount of incremental load to do the steward job. It's mostly just serving as a thought partner for other people in the organization who kind of already know what the right answer is. And so there's not. There hasn't actually been that much incremental work, which has been a nice, nice surprise.

[Jordi]

What is the. What is unique about Sequoia's surface Area of work to be done. I mean, I know there's the RIA transition. Is there a public markets desk? Are there traders now? Like how big is the organization? Outside of what people think of from like a classic VC partnership, what else are, what else is going on at Sequoia?

[Pat Grady]

Yeah, I mean, you know what's funny guys? I think people would be surprised at how small Sequoia is in know like the, I mean we, I think we barely have double digit general partners in the business. Right. The entire firm is pretty small. And so I would tell you this, and I mean this sincerely, like, I think people tend to overestimate like surface area. Right. Of what we have in terms of like management scope. And realistically, the most important thing is that the stewards are awesome investors and people that great people want to work with. You know, and so the thing, I didn't say that's what you guys were. I said that's like an important thing for you guys.

[John]

That's the idea.

[Pat Grady]

That's like the, that's the, the standard now, now we'll talk about. That's what they're supposed to be. No, but obviously, like, so truly, like I would tell you the thing that's most important for these guys is to be great investors.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[Pat Grady]

It is to sponsor investments in the best companies and to continue that because like Sequoia's entire thing needs to be that we back the best companies in the world. Right. And if we keep doing that, everything else kind of follows if we don't. You could be the best manager ever.

[John]

Yeah, it's like, it's like a GP or a steward that's not investing is like a CEO with bad product set sense. It's like, can they really be a truly incredible CEO if they don't understand the product?

[Pat Grady]

Yeah.

[Vincenzo Landino]

You lose your moral authority. And we're too small of an organization. There's no management job available at Sequoia. It's just too small of an organization.

[Jordi]

Ravi, how are you thinking about the specific advantages of starting a company from your experience at Sequoia? There's obviously going to be endless industry plant allegations that you'll have to beat, but I'm sure you'll take those on headfirst.

[John]

Well, I guess one question maybe how.

[Jordi]

Much of the company do you build beforehand? How do you actually think about how you want to build this company? What are the axioms that you're following?

[Pat Grady]

Yeah, yeah, go ahead, Jordy. Were you going to say something?

[John]

Yeah, well, yeah, and I was going to say like what qualifies as an opportunity that is worthy of leaving an institution.

[Jordi]

There's a lot of the ideas that you think are good. Somebody will come to you and be like, I'm going to do it. And you're like, that's great. I just. Just write you the check and then, you know, you go do the hard work. But this is.

[John]

Well, the pressure is immense. Like, you're gonna take it. You basically have to put on an absolute masterclass here. Right? There's no excuses. Right. You have to achieve greatness.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[Pat Grady]

You don't think I can just yell at myself to grow faster and burn less? That's not. That's not how this is gonna work.

[Vincenzo Landino]

That was one of my. One of my favorite portfolio reviews is Ravi. Ravi was unfurling this beautiful monologue about what was going on at some company. It's probably five minute speech. It sounded great.

[Jordi]

And then when you boiled it all.

[Vincenzo Landino]

Down, he basically said, grow faster, burn less.

[Pat Grady]

Listening happens at the ear. Okay, okay. So the real answer, I guess the first thing is, Jordi, like, you know this. I'm not leaving. I'm changing my role. Right. I'm going to go from like a general partner to partner on the boards, all that. But look, it is a high standard. This job is amazing. I love this job. I love our team and I love the founders I get to work with. I think the real thing that pulls it towards is not the specific idea, it's the specific moment we're in. I do think that AI is changing everything. I think that, like, I wrote this thing maybe like a year ago, AI or die, which was just sort of like, can you see the progress that's happening? And I really believe the world belongs to the fast moving, reactive, responsive company right now that can get the best people in the world. And it doesn't matter if they're an incumbent or they're a startup. But I think that you like being able to move quickly and respond to that. That is the biggest advantage that you can have. And I found myself thinking about that all the time. And after writing that, I was like, telling all these companies I work with and even companies I don't work with, like, look, this is what I think it's about. This is what I think we gotta be doing. And then I was like, man, I like, really do feel passionate about this. I want to do that myself. And so the real thing that happened was I just wanted to be on the field again. I wanted to build a team. I wanted to go after this. And I think the thing That I found was that the fact that I could then do it while still maintaining my relationships with my partners, the fact that I can stay on some boards that made it so much more like something more I wanted to do. And then the other thing is, and I haven't shared this yet and I'll share it with you guys when the time is right. But like I have a co founder who's out of this world, truly out of this world, like way better than me. Someone that will make you guys bang the gong when you guys hear who it is.

[John]

Are you going to be the show pony or the workhorse?

[Pat Grady]

I mean I think they're going to be both. The good looks of the operation, I mean I'm surprised that you'd ask, you know, but, but put it this way, like when I told the kids like maybe what do you think of dad starting a company? They were somewhat like well I don't know, like you know, you know, what do you think the implications are? Do we have to move if this doesn't work?

[Jordi]

Do they call you.

[Pat Grady]

Dude? Basically okay. I was like how would you feel in this person was the co founder? And then my kids were like well we actually have $750 of accumulated birthday money. Maybe we could leave today.

[Jordi]

Get him on the sequoia list for future.

[Pat Grady]

They did not call me unk but Andrew's tweet was an all timer today, all the time.

[John]

So good. How are you thinking about timelines with the new company? It feels like you can build products so much faster today than maybe you could two years ago that there's maybe more of a value in, in staying really, really quiet actually staying in stealth and making some more progress before you come out the gates and then invite a bunch of people to try to come compete with you.

[Pat Grady]

Yeah, I think, listen, we're going to talk when we have something to say, right? We got to go and build this thing. I do think to your point, you know the Sierra guys are very good about this and they have this language of like in AI world a year is a month, right? Whatever, whichever way makes it faster. But basically like a month is a year, a week is a month and a day is a week. And the idea is just like you got to go fast. You need to be super responsive. You guys know I'm big basketball guy. Coach K has this great quote. You know, I'm not a world class predictor but I am a world class reactor. Like that's what we got to be and you got to be fast and truth Seeking. And I think the other thing that's nice about being, you know, with Sequoia is like, we get to see the best companies in the world, you know, and we get to learn from them and see the face that the best ones go. And Pat, you can talk about that, but I think that's definitely something that is helpful.

[Jordi]

Yeah. How do you think about the particular AI opportunity right now? I feel like there's a little bit of a meme that the best time to start a AI company is probably 10 years ago as a lab and wait around and then have this breakout moment. And the second best time was probably like the day ChatGPT launched and everyone sort of realized that this was real. But we're now two years into this. A lot of, you know, the default categories, the market maps, exist. How do you think about just finding opportunity? Is it unlocked by just last year's advances, or do you think there's new categories that were not on the table two years ago that are now on the table? And I mean, this is your thinking, but also for anyone that's watching who might want to start a company in 2020.

[Pat Grady]

I, I kind of think that the premise that those other people have is flawed. Right? And I'll tell you for real, like, the biggest thing that makes a difference in whether a company succeeds or not is the people that are building it, right? And I believe that we have the most fierce competition ever, you know, right now, and it's only going to get more fierce, right? And I think that you're going to be fighting every day and there's no, like, actually, Sarah's wife wrote this awesome poet yesterday about like, like relevance decay, right? And how much more quickly it's happening. And basically like, you have to fight for your relevance every day in the venture world. That is even more true at the company. Like, it doesn't matter what you did yesterday. Look at, think about recently the goodness that's happened from Google, right? The best thing that happened to them is the competition that they have from OpenAI because all of a sudden it lit them up and then they had to go and rewin all this stuff and re get that mojo back. So even like the deepest moats in the world, you got to go fight for them every day. So the real answer, you know, John, is it all we want to do is be in a space that we are willing to fight for every day and apply the latest technology every day and have AI native people working on it every day so that every day we get, we fight again. And earn our spot. And I, in my heart, I believe that more than anything, which is that, like, there's nothing to protect right now. Even at Sequoia, there's nothing to protect. The only thing is what we go do tomorrow. And that'll be true at the company too. So I think that, like, honestly, I think when people are like, oh, the best time was before, I think that's like low agency thinking. And I'm like, I don't have any time for that. Like, you got to go out and get it.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[Vincenzo Landino]

I can make a specific case for why now's the time too.

[Jordi]

Please.

[Vincenzo Landino]

So the. I think if you want to start a foundation model lab.

[Pat Grady]

Yeah.

[Vincenzo Landino]

You're probably better off to have already done that. You know, we've kind of already seen that play out.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[Vincenzo Landino]

One of our core hypotheses in the world of AI is that the value is at the application layer. I think even for the foundation model labs, we're starting to see that that's true. I would argue that now might actually be the single best time to start an application layer company. Not because everything is white space, but because it feels like the playbook is finally starting to emerge. And specifically, if you think about like the three major inflection points that we've seen in the world of AI, I think the first was November 2022 when ChatGPT came out and the world was exposed to pre training. I think the second was fall of 2024 when O1 came out and the world was exposed to reasoning. I think the next one was actually the last couple of weeks where you see cloud code with Opus4.5 and all of a sudden we see what Long Horizon agents can do and it's hard to. We're venture capitalists, we're not in a position to try to define AGI. But from a functional standpoint, if you have a piece of technology that can just keep going and overcome obstacles and use resources and eventually think its way to the outcome that you wanted to. I don't know, man. That seems pretty close to AGI for me.

[John]

And I think we have goalposts, physical goal posts here that will continue.

[Jacob Ri]

Exactly.

[Vincenzo Landino]

Anyway, I think now that that playbook has not quite been written, but you can kind of see it. I think the ability for these application layer companies to go from a chatbot that in best case scenario people use four or five times times a day to an agent that is always on running six instances in parallel 24, seven, doing the work of six human beings. Like there's just A dramatically different impact that application layer companies can have today using the most recent playbook versus what they could have done two or three years ago. So I think for that reason, it's a great time to start a company.

[Jacob Ri]

Is that all right?

[Pat Grady]

Yeah, dude. I think that I so agree with that. I think also if you just kind of think about this idea of like a 10x engineer that has become so popular in Silicon Valley, I think Steve Jobs talked about it, Whatever. I think that the leverage available to great people is. It's never been higher and it's only going to get higher. Right? All these things you guys see about the value of agency, and it's like all about, like, how much do you want to get your idea into the world? I think that I don't know how to do the math perfectly of, like, is it 100 times person or a thousand times person? But I think that the leverage available to the best people is insane. That's a huge aspect of the new thing that I want to build too. And I want to build with our co founder. Because this idea that I believe in of, like, people are power laws, right? People follow power laws. I think that's true. And it's only going to get more defined. And so what Pat's saying about, like, you know, the leverage you can give to somebody with today's technology has never, ever, ever been higher.

[John]

Do you guys have any type of internal philosophy around it feels harder than ever to predict, like, two years out. Like, I think in 2020, you had a good sense of, like, what the world and what software was going to look like in 2022. And it feels much harder to do that today. Do you guys have any internal philosophy similar to Bezos thinking around people are going to want things like cheaper and faster, and I'm just going to focus on that. The world's going to change, but people will still want things, things that are cheaper and faster. Do you guys apply any thinking like that around when you're looking at investments? Pat, maybe at the late stage or Ravi, with your new company around, like, okay, a lot of things are going to change potentially. We can imagine a century of progress in 20 years or 10 years or eventually two hours, who knows? So how do you build something that's going to be durable and, again, relevant as you get increased rate of change?

[Vincenzo Landino]

What's your thing on inevitable?

[Pat Grady]

Yeah, yeah, I think there's a few things. So, yes, and I think Pat and I agree on a bunch of this too, but I think one, you want things that are early and inevitable. Right. Like, I think that there are things that when you see them, they're like, well, that definitely is going to happen. And just to, like, go back in time, I think, you know, when I joined Instacart in 2015, this idea of, like, are people really going to shop for their groceries in 100 years the way they shopped for them 80 years ago?

[Jacob Ri]

Like.

[Pat Grady]

Like, it certainly doesn't seem like we will do that. You know, this is inevitable that it will go and it'd be different. I think that to your point, it is harder to figure out what things are inevitable right now because the world is changing super fast. So I think, one, you got to be, like, more limited in that. Right. Of, you know, what are the. What are the industries that will be durable? I think the. There are two things I would tell you to answer your question, though. One, I think network effects are still potentially even more powerful than they've ever been. Which is, I think if you get a company with a network effect and you execute with excellence and speed, I think you can keep going and build it even up more. And you don't never want to predict what the AIs are not going to be able to do. But I think it would be hard to say, press this button, cloud code, and create a network effect of highly fragmented buyers and sellers. And so I do think network effects can endure. And then I think the biggest thing is the people, which is you need the people that you will trust to go and face these realities. And it's the same way, honestly. Like, I know I got called Unk on Twitter today, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna go with this. Dude, it's the same way with your kids, which is you wanna prep them for every possible situation that's ever gonna happen in their life. But the reality is you can't. And all you can do is make sure that they're actually good at reacting to tough things as a general matter. And that's the same thing.

[John]

I think that in a value system.

[Pat Grady]

Yeah. What's the changes we're gonna see? What you want is to trust that the people you have are good at responding to those things with truth seeking, with agency, with aggression. And I know on that dimension, I know Pat, and I agree, there's also.

[Vincenzo Landino]

There's a Jamie Dimon line, which is. It's easier for me to predict the next 10 years than it is for me to predict the next quarter. And part of what goes into that is the forces that shape the next 10 years are kind of so big and so obvious that you can actually make in some ways higher fidelity predictions over a longer period of time. And I think similarly with our business, if you look at like, for example, can you imagine a version of the future in which doctors aren't using all of the world's medical knowledge on an application in their pocket to make better decisions at the point of care? Of course not. Like, of course that's going to be a thing. And you know, like, there happens to be a company, open evidence that is doing that today for a decent chunk of the doctors in the country. But, like, obviously that's going to be a thing. Or by 2050, are people going to drive cars in 2050? I have a hard time believing they will. Like, it's going to be the way people ride horses today. Like, you might do it as a novelty, but it's not going to be the way you get to and from point A and point B. And so there are some things where you just know that it's inevitable and it's a question of, okay, well, what's the path from here to there and who is it that blazes that path? And that's where it can be tricky. And I think that's where Ravi's commentary on the people really come in. Because one trap that, that it's easy to fall into is theorizing on market structure and different technical approaches. And the reality is if you can figure out the best people, they're going to figure all that stuff out. They'll figure out the right technical approach and the right business model and all that stuff. If you just figure out the right people, they'll probably find the path.

[John]

I think one challenge right now for founders that are trying to navigate the world is ten years ago, if you were looking and trying to understand the dialogue and different narratives and conversations happening in tech, it would be like 99% kind of like market analysis, product analysis, 1% science fiction, fan fiction. And now the narrative and the conversation is like 50, 50. It's like some like kind of like tangible analysis of what's actually happening and how markets are evolving. And then 50% like sci fi fan fiction of people writing. Like, it's possible that in two months own a galaxy, you'll be able to buy a galaxy.

[Jordi]

What does this mean for.

[John]

And so like, you kind of need to, you kind of need to drown that out and pay attention, goes back, just talk to customers. What do they need today? For sure, react to the game on the field. Do you guys think that we were Debating earlier, it feels like AI doesn't have its Steve Jobs from a messaging standpoint. I would love an earnest conversation of an hour from Steve Jobs or a Steve Jobs figure talking about. Because I feel like society broadly underrates AI. They see the slop videos and they see the idea that their electrical bill might be going up, and they're like, I hate this. Or they see the slop and they hear they might lose their job in a couple years or they can't find a job, and they're like, I hate this. And it feels like we don't have anybody right now that can go on. That can go, like when, you know, as great as the Elon's and the Sams and the Daria's and people like this are as operators and builders and visionaries. When they go on podcasts and those videos go out, the comment section are all like, please, no, stop. Turn it off. You know? And so it feels like we're missing.

[Tyler]

We're.

[John]

We're missing a.

[Jordi]

Or maybe it'd be impossible. I don't know. Yeah. What do you think?

[Pat Grady]

Oh, I agree with you. I think we are missing that person. I think Pat and I are both in a meeting yesterday, though, that this kind of reminds me of, and I will share it on his behalf. But like, Alfred shared a story the other day yesterday about his dad, okay? And I think it is pretty instructive in terms of this thing. So Alfred's dad, I don't think this is going to surprise you, was a pretty brilliant guy, right? But what his job was was to be a human. Human calculator, okay? Like, literally, like, sit in a row, like, do math. Like, you know, be a cell in Excel, right? And just be a human calculator. And at some point, what technology allowed was for him to not have that job anymore, right? And someone with this giant brain and this ability to produce and help society could all of a sudden not do math and put numbers into one cell anymore. And he could have way more impact and build an accounting system for the company that he worked with. And all of a sudden, all those other people who have huge brains, right, could go and do that because of technology. And he made this point, which is like, look, technology is neither good nor bad. It's what we do with it, right? The same technology that powers a nuclear bomb can power a nuclear power plant, right? And so the idea is like, what do we do with it? What do we do with it? What do we do with it? I do think that a lot of what people are doing when they go and talk about the technology is they talk about all the things that might happen. I would rather us talk about the fact of it's going to get more and more and more powerful, and it's more and more incumbent on all of us to make sure we use it for something that's great. And I actually genuinely believe that. Like, I've written about this before, but, like, you know, if I could give my kids one thing, it wouldn't be kindness, it wouldn't be curiosity at the agency. And this is that same point, which is like, listen, the technology is going to be what all of us make of it, you know? And I think Alfred's point sat with me, which is like, he talks about his dad being able to. To do more with his life so that his son could do more with his life. And a lot of that's due to technology. Like, nothing better than that.

[Jordi]

Yeah. Well, it's a great place to wrap up.

[John]

Great story.

[Jordi]

Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. And congratulations on the move and everything.

[John]

We're very excited, yeah, super excited for the new company and the creation of the role.

[Jordi]

Buried the lead, but we gotta have you back on as soon as we know more about what you're building. And we would love to do it here live.

[John]

Can't wait.

[Jordi]

Congratulations. Congratulations to you both on all the progress. Hope 2026 is a fantastic year and.

[John]

Happy New Year to the whole team.

[Jordi]

Happy New Year to the whole team. Thank you, guys.

[John]

Cheers.

[Jordi]

He mentioned Jamie Dimon. There's some breaking news about Jamie Dimon. J.P. morgan is taking over the Apple card program from Goldman Sachs. That's very exciting. Also, let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And you know who we got next? We have Ben Smith from Semaphore on the best day of 2026. What's going on?

[John]

Look at this setup. Look at this setup.

[Ben Smith]

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Upgraded setup.

[John]

New round, new setup.

[Jordi]

New round, new setup. The dollars are already at work. I see this.

[Ben Smith]

Spend $30 million on the podcast.

[Jordi]

I mean, look at us. We have a gong, we have a horse. We have all sorts of stuff. We need to ring the gong. Give us the details. What was announced today.

[John]

Media is back.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah. You know, media is a hard business. I've spent my whole career mostly at media startups and, and, and it's exciting to be at one that's working as a Business, you know, we're, we were profitable last year and, and wow. One, one PERSON clapping Sorry.

[I]

This.

[Jordi]

We love profit. We love profit.

[Ben Smith]

I mean, honestly, that, that is how I feel like I'm a journalist. It like took me a large part of my career to realize that the goal that you're trying to bring in more money than you spend because I'm mostly, you know, obviously trying to hire more journalists, but, but, you know, it's a tough business and having been through a bunch of ups and downs, it's just very exciting to feel like we've kind of figured out a sustainable model to do really quality journalism.

[Jordi]

That's great.

[John]

Talk about why true journalism, not a newswire account that's sharing fake news is more important than ever because it feels like actually getting information from a journalist that did original fact finding on a story is actually more important than ever. I used to trust stuff. I feel like you actually could trust a headline on social media a lot more five years ago than you can today. And I think it's only going to get more insane as you can't even trust, like you will get to the point where you can only trust in some situations, somebody that actually did the fact finding because somebody else could make a video easily of some news or an interview that just never even happened.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, I mean, I think the, you know, and particularly for our audience who in these different verticals that we're in from, you know, from tech to finance to D.C. are often the most informed, the most plugged in people, the people who are. Who ought to have access to the best information. They probably, like you and me, feel like on one hand you're totally overwhelmed by the volume of incoming and then on the other hand, don't know what to trust. And so we've just focused very, very intensely on delivering kind of careful, straight up the middle, trusted information from journalists who, like good beat reporters, are real experts. And often in the kind of traditional journalism, you're supposed to kind of hide your point of view or, or find some way to smuggle it in through expert quotes or adjectives. And I think our view is the audience, particularly sophisticated audiences caught onto that. You'd rather just hear directly from journalists who knows what they're talking about, hear what they think with some room for disagreement. But really the place we find value as a business too is both in these email briefings and in these big convenings in this big one we do in Washington, that people are just very hungry for trusted, really smart, dense information from the source.

[Jordi]

Yeah. What are the underrated strategies that you use. I feel like Semaphore is interesting because it's a place that has the patina of like legacy media almost. And I mean that in the best way possible in the fact that you land on a Semaphore page and you trust it with the authority of other larger, older institutions. And that's not true for every new blog or substack that pops up because anyone can spin those up, anyone can spin up a website. But you've built credibility very quickly. Do you know, like, how, as you reflect on that, like, how did that come together?

[Ben Smith]

I mean, I think it is partly that you sort of have to realize that we're living in this very kind of talent driven moment.

[Jordi]

Sure.

[Ben Smith]

And we definitely kind of built it to provide a platform for great reporters and great beat reporters who mostly, with some exceptions, but mostly aren't going to go out and do a substack. Because, you know, particularly if you're a beat reporter, you might be telling this side what they want to hear today, but tomorrow you might be telling them what they don't want to hear. And that's not always the best sort of creator model. And so in any case, we provide a sort of platform, not to mention.

[John]

Some of the stories. Like there's certain stories that take six months to do properly.

[Jordi]

You can't do that if you're.

[John]

You can't do that if your audience is like, I pay you monthly for this thing and you're not delivering.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, yeah. And you might need legal support, you may need a team, some editing. I mean, we've broken a lot of news because we have a guy in Riyadh and a guy, you know, and somebody in some. And a lot of the chip stories are really Gulf Washington, Silicon Valley stories. But you need legal support. But. No, but I think it's funny almost what you say about our design is true. That's definitely. We are trying to take the best of the values of legacy media in terms of fairness and reliability, but then also give a real kind of condensed intelligence. I actually think the thing that helps people trust you now is if you can pull in points of view from people who disagree. A lot of what we do is try to read across the whole Internet and say, here's what the Chinese media is saying, here's what the Japanese media saying, here's what the right saying, here's what the left's saying. And not try to shove our own perspective through.

[Jordi]

Yeah. What about the events business? I'm very interested in understanding how you're splitting your time how Semaphore is thinking about these two. There are obviously a lot of synergies, but they are two different projects. I imagine there's different folks staffed on each side of the business. Walk me through the thesis there.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, I mean, this is actually sort of a nerdy journalism industry point. But a lot of the events business in newsrooms and newsrooms I've come up in, it's like you have a journalism business that's often based on scaled web advertising that starts collapsing and you panic and look for other businesses that work better and staple on an events business. That's what a lot of news organizations have done for to better and worse degrees. We definitely started with the premise that we're talking to an audience and it's the same audience. We're reaching them in emails, but these are decision makers. These are all the tops of government and of businesses is reaching them in emails and convening them in person. And they want to hear from the same journalists. And so our journalists who are writing the briefings are the ones doing the interviews, are the ones figuring out how to structure an event so that it's interesting. I mean, but of course, as you say, also in some sense, as an old blogger, it's incredibly easy to sit in your pajamas and type things and then incredibly hard to put on an event where the security is perfect and the food is perfect and the music is great and the staging is great. So we do have an unbelievably capable team of people who do that.

[Jordi]

Is there something just understanding the journalism that happens at an event? I experienced this for the first time last year where every interview that happened on stage, the key quote or the key fact that was discovered was turned into an article. Is that sort of a virtuous cycle where the events businesses and the actual publications can work together synergistically when it's done right? Is there something that they're maybe less disparate when they're done well?

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, for sure. And I would actually put it more on the other end, which is like, you definitely go to events that are not journalistic and that are fundamentally kind of promotional. And the interview is often like the chief marketing officer of company A is interviewing the chief marketing officer company B. And the thing is, like journalism like. And tough interviews bring a kind of tension and drama and interest and you lean forward.

[John]

And the deal book this year was amazing. It was just like it may as well have been a pay per view boxing fight in some of them. And it was Amazing content.

[Jordi]

It was great content. It was so good.

[Pat Grady]

Yeah.

[Ben Smith]

And people want to watch a well informed interviewer. And again, whether they're a journalist or not, actually they professionally ask the hard questions. The thing is, smart CEOs would also rather be asked hard questions than sit on stage for an hour and recite monologues that they memorized.

[Jordi]

Yeah, I want to watch a serious journalist ask a public official a hard question and have that public official turn around and call him a pop historian. That's what I want to see him.

[Ben Smith]

Exactly. Yeah.

[John]

And then we were off air. We were doing. We got invited to like moderate a panel last year and a PR person gave us some question. Here's like, here's some. We'd love if you asked some of these questions. And the first question was like, you have changed the world in so many ways. How could you, you possibly do this? And we're like, yeah, I don't think we're gonna ask.

[Ben Smith]

Right. Because you're thinking about the audience. Right. Yeah.

[Jordi]

Having an interesting conversation.

[John]

What was the real catalyst to raise your profitable. And that gives you the luxury of saying, like, we're gonna be here for a long time. But I imagine there's a lot that you wanna do with the money besides your new podcast setup.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, well, once, you know, with what's remaining from this lavish room. Yeah. You know, I mean, I think really two things. One, we're going to hire some more journalists. Like, we're, you know, we're a very light team. I think we're about 50 journalists and I think in their places, particularly, you know, the Trump story in D.C. and the global business story where we just have some hires we want to make. I don't think the newsroom of the future has 1,000 journalists the way the old ones did. It's kind of like in a post industrial world, it is fewer people, I think. But between the technology that helps you and the audience wanting to connect with individuals. But still, we are very eager to hire some more great journalists. And then as you, as you would imagine, the convening business, it's like a expensive business. Like we're renting out the Conrad Hilton for a week in Washington in April. And that's like, it's, it's amazing.

[Jordi]

That's great. That's great. I want to ask you about the anatomy of hard questions. I was listening to Joe Wiesenthal talk about this and he said that that oftentimes audiences want people to ask hard questions and they imagine a situation where interviewer sitting down, someone and they say, are you a fraud? And the interviewee just says, oh, you got me. I am a fraud. Instead of just them shutting down and just delivering a talking point. So what makes for a great hard question where something's actually learned and when's.

[John]

The right time to move on from a hard question? Because we have a chat, right? So if we're talking to somebody, people will be like. Like, ask them about this specific thing that happened in 2019. And we're like, does that need to be rehashed? I mean, there's like, 50 other interviews that got into that. It was not great. But let's focus on, like, what matters now.

[Pat Grady]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Smith]

You know, it's funny. I think I was. I think I may have been Laura Loomer's, like, first victim many years ago when I was at BuzzFeed. And she came up to me and she was still, like, kind of young, nervous, Laura Loomer in her hand, and her hand was shaking on the camera. And she just asked me if I was fake news, which is like one of those questions like, what are you gonna say? You're not gonna.

[Jordi]

Like, you got me.

[Ben Smith]

But Ben.

[John]

Fake news Smith.

[Ben Smith]

I think it's. I think actually it's sort of about creating an environment of mutual respect almost in a certain way where they are. They feel committed to the conversation, and you're asking serious questions, and you're hopefully asking things they haven't necessarily been asked before, but that are really top of mind and whatever is, like, the core question, like, why did you. Like, why did you make this decision? When I look at this decision, it looks kind of reckless, like, why would you do that? And just sort of sometimes, like, kind of verbalize the criticism in a respectful way and really. But push them to actually respond.

[John]

Like, bull fighting. You know, journalist has a thing, and the bull's running. Sometimes the bull runs straight into the journalist. Right. But, you know, it's a dance. It's a dance.

[Jordi]

It's a great metaphor. Nailed it.

[Ben Smith]

And sometimes you want to just run right into them, though I do think, like, yeah, if you feel weird and bad asking the question sometimes that's a really good question. Like, if you feel like, ah, this is a little awkward.

[Jordi]

Yeah. Yeah, that's wild.

[John]

We got to hit the gong.

[Jordi]

Yeah. Give us the details of the fundraise.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Who.

[John]

Who came into the round? Because it was. It was really a who's who of saw. Henry Kravis.

[Ben Smith]

And yeah, it was really. I mean, it was honestly, like, a great vote of confidence. A number of our existing investors came back, including Henry Kravis, David Rubenstein, George Paolo, Le Mans, the Gallup Organization, and then some new investors, including a couple of great European media investors, a guy named Thomas Leeson and Penny Pritzker, the former commerce Secretary.

[Jordi]

That's right. That's right. Well, we're excited to see you put it to work. We're very excited for the event next year or this year and, and the rest of the year.

[Ben Smith]

I hope we can get you there. Do you ever, do you, do you travel? Do you go east? Can we, can we like drag you to this event?

[Jordi]

That would be a lot of fun. Yeah, we, I mean, let's check the schedule and stuff. We're working on figuring out how to bring the show on the road and still do our show while we're at other things.

[John]

It's a lot of the show must go on. That's our non negotiable show must go on.

[Ben Smith]

I would love to, like, find a way to get you on the road. It's April 13th to 18th in DC.

[Jordi]

Cool. Yeah, yeah, we'll talk.

[Ben Smith]

Prepare for your trump interview. Yeah.

[Jordi]

Fantastic.

[John]

I don't know if we'll ever.

[Jordi]

Purely business and technology focused.

[John]

We can talk to him about Truth Social or World Liberty or, you know.

[Ben Smith]

I don't know, maybe we could get Sax. I bet Sax would talk to you. I don't know if he'd talk to me.

[Jordi]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'd have fun with Sax.

[Ben Smith]

Let's work on this.

[Jordi]

I introduced him at Miami Tech Week to three years ago or something. I was the MC and I introduced you.

[Ben Smith]

Got to ask him hard questions.

[Jordi]

Yeah, that'd be fun. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats on all the.

[John]

Yeah, congrats to the whole team. It's. It's awesome. Like you said, vote of confidence. And, and I mean, I'm, I'm excited for you guys. Sometimes you're like a company raises money and it's, it's like, okay, they have more money. But I'm genuinely excited for you guys to have more money.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[John]

Be able to do more.

[Ben Smith]

Thank you, guys. Yeah, thank you. And thanks for having me on.

[John]

Awesome.

[Jordi]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Pat Grady]

Cheers, man.

[Jordi]

Have a good rest of your day, guy. Goodbye. Our next guest is Jacob Ri. He's written a fantastic piece about humanoid robots. Before we bring him in, let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution, access request and password resets. Let's bring in Jacob to the TPP Ultra Jump. Jacob, how are you doing?

[Jacob Ri]

Oh, how are you guys doing?

[Vincenzo Landino]

Doing?

[Jordi]

We're doing fantastically.

[John]

Great to have you here.

[Jordi]

Is your 20, 26 off to a good start?

[Jacob Ri]

I think it is, yeah. Since to be honest, like, just some backstory for why I'm here. About a month ago, a friend of mine was like, oh, you have some interesting thoughts about robotics, about kind of the data center market. You should like, write something up. But it's kind of like a small piece and then it took a month instead of like, oh, a couple days. It spiraled. We had a whole section. Dwarkesh released a piece. So we have a section on that. We have a section about kind of the future. We have short stories. We have like a whole, like financial model we've built out. It really spiraled. And no, I'm having a great January because it's now. It's no longer raining in San Francisco. It's actually sunny today. I think this is a good omen. Believer in omens in 2026, omens are in omens.

[John]

Omen Max Inc. That's a great omen.

[Jacob Ri]

Maxing up, I think Tyler, he speaks a lot about this.

[Jordi]

Yes, Yes. I need to be on the. You need to be open to omens to find them when they're sitting, I think.

[Jacob Ri]

So I think that you do have to be open to strange things happening. Since I think that's kind of like, you know, the talk my book for a little bit. Like, that's kind of the point of this essay is that not only is this going to happen a lot faster than I think people realize it's going to be a lot stranger. Like, one thing I've heard people bring up is this idea that, as you could call it like the bifurcation theory, this idea that as we get, whether it's on AI or whether on robotics, we're going to get this robot produced quantities of goods. Maybe it's images, it's media, maybe it's clothing, maybe it's food, maybe it's diesel. Other sorts of opportunities. You have people like Ari Emanuel kind of betting on the idea that there's going to be this split, there's going to be the live world and that you're going to have the human rare quality stuff and then the infinite robot slot. But I think that's. You can add a little more nuance to it. Like, for example, I think that the idea that human only fashion is probably going to be very niche and the reason why is simple if we look at something like shine and we say, okay, we can cut the costs another 10 times and the quality is something you would wear at the Met Gala, most people, frankly, aren't going to be able to tell the difference in their tailor. Maybe we could get like the menswear guy on, maybe he could tell. But I feel like most people, they're not going to be able to tell the difference. They're just going to like click the buy button and go. But there is something where I think that, like in healthcare within an industry, you can split it up into sub portions. Like the logistics of actually bringing medicine to people in, like an urban hospital or someone like in nyu, that's probably going to be done by robots. But the actual care for people, like people want. If your child is sick and about to die, unless if you know this doctor is about to do an operation, you don't want to see a robot looking over your child. You want to have somebody to be able to kind of absorb that fear, to absorb these emotions. And if you take that and you say, okay, wow, that was like, maybe slightly different than what I would have expected. And apply that to literally every part of our society in the next decade. Yeah, it's going to be a lot. It's going to take you a month. It's going to be hard. And I'm glad that people starting to see this. That's kind of why I wrote it.

[Jordi]

Where are we in terms of humanoid robots? Or would you even use that term? Is it more just useful to think about physical instantiation of artificial intelligence, just robotics broadly? Because maybe they won't look like humanoids, but it's still going to be transformational. Are we like, you know, you see these stats where I think Amazon employs a million robots already. Do you see it more as like a continuous process? Will there be an iPhone moment, a chatgpt moment? Like, what are you waiting for?

[Jacob Ri]

Okay, so I think there's a couple of ways we can look at this. One of them is a really interesting split. It's between manipulation and navigation. So navigation has been a much easier problem. And the reason it's an easier problem is that we've been able to use classical methods. We don't need to collect a lot of data for a warehouse robot to kind of like move around and move the boxes around. Even self driving, self driving wasn't the hard problem. Getting it reliable enough so it doesn't kill people was the hard problem. But manipulation is difficult. How do you encode? This is like an idea that Andrej Karpathi kind of spoke about in software 2.0 you can't really. You can write a program to say, oh, I want a robot to go forward and it's going to go to left, it's going to go to right. How do you encode this idea of I want it to pick up this goldfish, you know, I'm not sponsored by them. Maybe someday. And like I think that, you know that's kind of a weird thing about the robot future is that at Gridden about robot holidays, I think there's going to be be probably some weird religions, there's gonna be all sorts of cults. It's gonna be, you know, there's, I also wrote what is.

[Jordi]

What is getting one shotted or, or having l. Robotic psychosis. Like, like humanoid robot psychosis that feels.

[Jacob Ri]

I mean I think that like Isaac Asimov, he wrote about this back in the 60s you have robo psychologists like they literally wrote about like this robot going insane because the positronic brain, it got modified. The three laws. You kind of, I think if you kind of remove the rule of like wow, maybe we shouldn't kill people. That would be bad. Yeah.

[John]

What about. We were talking, reading a post earlier about Tesla with Optimus like doing a bunch of supplier selection. Seems like they're gearing up to actually make a lot of these things. And I think some people are somewhat surprised by that because everything we've seen so far from humanoids has been like, like kind of like cool, cool demo, but not like oh, I need this in my home today or I need this at my warehouse today.

[Jacob Ri]

Yeah, I mean I think there's a couple of things. One is that on the home versus enterprise, Enterprise is going to be a lot more valuable. Not only because home is distributed, you have safety stuff, the costs. There's also this weird tax thing in the one big beautiful bill. It's called the 100% bonus appreciation clause. CFOs. You should listen to this. You can depreciate whatever asset you want. It's uncapped in a year instead of five to seven under this as long as it's kind of in the US So you can do it for data centers, robotics, like I think there's just a lot of things that are going to push for enterprise adoption first. But then within enterprise I think the supply chain why people are going to get side. They're just going to get blindsided by this. Is that a couple of things. One, if you're focusing on how bad America is at Manufacturing, you're focusing, it's important, but you're focusing on the wrong thing. You need to focus on how good Asia is at making stuff. In particular, Pyongyang in Malaysia, Bakni in Vietnam, Taiwan, underrated South Korea, Japan, obviously China, Shenzhen, Guangdong, lots of places. So Asia is going to be really important. You can also repurpose other industries. I talked about this with rare earths processing, since rare earths. Rare earths aren't rare, as Trump said, but. But like the actual processing of rare earths in the same way, like Standard Oil became a monopoly off of processing, China has like a processing monopoly there. You can just repurpose the oil and gas industry for processing rare earths, which I haven't spoken about. People have spoken about it, you know, for finding the rare earths but not reprocessing. And in the same way you can repurpose the automotive industry for like humanoid robots. Like you already have Honda, you have Toyota, these are already people that are integrating it. You have the same actuators, you have the same battery management systems, you have everything else. It's something where the auto OEMs, we're in a secular slump right now. So if you're not, if you believe that's kind of, it's like the security thesis in some sense of that, you know, auto is in this sort of like secular slump. And then as we kind of like in order to break this slump, we're also going to have robots. So it's going to be this double whammy of people are expecting, oh, you know, this sort of dying industry, it's stagnating, you know, profits are being competed away. Tesla is kind of, it has to sell. The energy story, the AI story, the robot story, the cars aren't, you know, doing it as well. Byd, like, I think this is a Dan Wang point about China. It's weirdly more capitalist than us. Like the Tian idea of capitalism is bad in some sense because you're competing, you're constantly, you're trying to compete everything away. So in some sense China's more capitalist than us. Everyone's competing. That means that the auto industry is in a slump and it's looking for something to save it. I think robots are probably going to be it. And even China right now, like unitree, there's kind of, it's whispers of that, oh, are they going to delay the IPO this year stuff because the hardware is getting ahead of the software. So it's something where I'm like, I don't see the hardware. And you can just rely on if you have like, you know, expensive precision reducers or some of these other things, like you don't need rare earths to make a motor, you don't need expensive precision reducers to make an actuator. You can rely on cheap stuff. The thing that's going to do my surgery or stuff is not the thing that's going to stock shelves. And we just have OMI or how people are collecting data now with the gloves you can 3D print stuff. That's a pretty good embodiment match. I'm just incredibly bullish. A few years ago you could have asked me, it was said no. But now it's like no. It's the sign that this is going to be big, it's going to happen fast. You had mentioned before, John, about humanoid versus other form factors. The key word to think about is payback times to borrow something from finance in that the faster your payback time, the more that creditors are going to want to lend to your business. It's not just going to be venture capital, it's going to be the entire private credit industry, it's going to be private equity, it's going to be RAs, it's going to be all of these other things, things. So you got to think, okay, how do I drive my payback time down? Capex is one component. You get rid of the legs, you have a wheel base or you just even get rid of the mobile stuff. You just have arms on an assembly line assembling AI servers or GPUs and you just crank the infinite money printer. But even more so, it's not even the capex. I feel like a lot of investors and a lot of people, they focus on the BoM, they focus on the CapEx, they should be focusing kind of on the OpEx, on OEE, on all of these metrics of saying wow, if this thing is going to run like industrially rated robot arms already exist, it's fine. This thing is going to run for 30,000 hours and I built a calculator on the website so you can play around with it yourself. This thing is running 30,000 hours and every day it's like 22 hours with some maintenance and it's like pretty close to a human or stuff. That is going to be the dominant term for whether I'm going to get a good return on investment. My blended levered IRR is going to be all of these other sorts of things. Like there's just a lot that goes into it and I that's why, like I want people to read this. Like, I don't want this to kind of be like, oh, I like this. And then we had like a discussion once. It's like, no, I really tried to talk to as many people as your.

[John]

Butt down and study.

[Jacob Ri]

Yeah, basically it's like it's going to be big. It's going to be a big deal and I don't want it to be homework. Like, I feel like the idea of, of like I tried to write it in a way that's fun and not, you know, because you could just go down and read some textbook or some like schizophrenic supply chain reading or whatever. It's like that's just not fun. But I tried to make this fun.

[John]

What's your, what's your thesis on land? I've had this idea that, oh, it's in there. So yeah, I, I was trying to find it, but basically I've had this idea that if you can build things 10, 100 times faster, let's say you could build a factory or multifamily apartment building, you can potentially start getting a return much faster. And it's cheaper to make infrastructure things like that. But yet the laws of physics will presumably still apply, which means that it might be more convenient to have a factory like next to a city versus somewhere random. So I've had this idea that it's possible there's a situational awareness style real estate fund that could start thinking about how the value of land will change as you have advanced robotics that can kind of accelerate progress and just build things quite a bit faster. But how are you thinking about land in the context of advanced robots, products?

[Jacob Ri]

Yeah. So I mean, to back up a second, I think that the four factors of production classically are land, labor, capital, entrepreneurship, and all of those are covered in this. But we're going to focus on the land for a second. You can split it up into what is it going to look like from a consumer? And then an enterprise perspective. Because consumers and enterprises, they're going to be looking at this differently from a consumer side. I think that like the originals will appreciate in the sense that, that like long Europe, long like historical sites, long existing cities of that it's going to be very hard. Like the idea of, oh, we're going to get cheap housing because construction is now done by robots. I think for Austin, for the south, we're going to have a lot of that. But I don't think that's going to solve San Francisco or New York's political woes. And then from the enterprise side, I think you're correct. I think that in some sense the final offshoring may be the greatest reshoring we'll ever have in America of that that you go from being constrained by not having this tacit knowledge of manufacturing or enough people or it's all expensive to now you have the energy resources, you have natural gas, you have ip, that's going to be very important. And yeah, maybe we don't have to put it right next to San Francisco, but you go out west, you go down south, you could just kind of let things start to rip. I know that Texas in particular seems very primed from a regulatory perspective. I would also say, I think that for the idea of land taxes or land appreciation or stuff that feels somewhat deep into the curve. I think this is why George has always been this great idea in theory, but not in practice. And this is what Dorkesh and Philip talked about in their essay is that there's so much of the gains initially are just going to come from capital. Who owns the factories, who owns the energy, the data centers that by the time you get to the point where, oh, I am just going to be Leopold, I'm going to raise a trillion dollars, I'm going to buy Iowa. At that point you should have just been buying Stargate 2, you should have been going to New Taipei, you should have been with Jensen, you should have been in all these other things. An interesting thing of land though, is that I'm totally a big believer in the whole orbital data center stuff. Not just because of being friends with a lot of of teams kind of at the SpaceX XAI, some of these other places, but also I think that the thing about orbital data centers, I want to keep this short since you could go on a whole rant, is that it trades off one problem, which is cooling. It makes cooling a lot harder in space because you can only do radiative for all of these other problems you don't have permitting you don't have land, you don't have have a lot of this other stuff. Maybe you'll need to do some radiation hard and things. But I do think that the idea of space data centers is not going to be crazy in some sense. I also think because I spent a lot of time saying if you're a robotics company, really be focused on the AI infrastructure build out as a market, it's really good. Every robotics company that wants to be big is secretly a Dyson sphere company. They just don't know it yet if you think about in the end of what can we do with robots? Everyone's thinking, so. So short term of like, If I had 100 million laborers. A billion. 100 billion. A trillion. Like, what would they do? At a certain point, you can only make so many, like, mocha lattes or stuff. It's like, you got to start, you know, building the Dyson sphere. We got to start Cranking Dyson sphere.

[Jordi]

2100 or after 2100.

[Jacob Ri]

Yeah. And if you enjoyed this conversation so far, this is like basically 80 pages of this.

[Jordi]

Awesome.

[Jacob Ri]

Except worse.

[Jordi]

What's your. What's your prediction for Dyson Sphere? Timeline line 2,100 before or after?

[Jacob Ri]

What do you count as a Dyson Sphere? Because I feel like. I'm sorry to be like a pedantic, like, asshole about this, but, like, what.

[John]

What do you count.

[Jacob Ri]

What do you count as?

[Jordi]

Is it like, oh, it doesn't need to capture 100%.

[Jacob Ri]

Let's call it like a meaningful percent.

[Jordi]

A meaningful. Let's call it over 10%. And definitely like a structure that is like, like gravitationally locked to the sun, not the Earth. Earth. So it's not just like a bunch of random starlings like, like scattered about in the. In the stars. It's really like around the sun before 2100.

[Jacob Ri]

But then there we go. I think that it the problem. You know, we can hit the gong on that one.

[John]

We're gonna pull this up when it happens, we're gonna pull this clip up.

[Jacob Ri]

I don't know. But I think though, for like the whole Dyson sphere stuff, it feels very much. I don't know if you've ever heard of, like, the parable of the back half of the chessboard that, you know, this king one day asks, he had a kind of a checkers board. One grain of rice on the first one, two on the second, four on the third. By the time you get the 32, by the time you get the 64, like, it just, you know, swallows the Earth. I think it's something very similar here. Like this idea of robots building robots, which is again, in the essay. People should read it. Like, that's the point of this. Like, read the essay. But Fanuc has been doing. They're like this robot arm company. They've been having robots building robots for 25 years now. Like, that's older than me, which is astonishing. But it's something where, granted, it's in a very limited, narrow capacity of that you have to scope everything for safety and whatnot. But it's the idea of like, oh, robots building robots, that's some like sci fi bullshit. Like some of us don't have to live in Berkeley or whatever. But I do think that it is going to be more plausible than not particularly because talk about the AI data center build out our stuff. The ODMs that are making all the AI servers, all the GPUs, everything, all the chillers, everything that's going into the data centers or even from it as a prefab perspective, are also the people that could do consumer electronics. They're the people that could actually build the robots. So if you're servicing these customers or stuff, you're servicing these industries, it's like, wow, wow. You know, they're going to want to start building it themselves because it lowers their costs, it increases their margins. It's going to be something where the market forces are going to be very powerful here. And that's also why, like we spend a lot of time on the social sections of this, of thinking about taxes, about, I think sovereign wealth fund initially, like between Besant and Lutnick. There's a lot of really interesting ideas that you can start off with so you don't drive away the business community. But I do think that there's a lot of factors pointing to like it's going to go from 2025 people, maybe they saw a physical intelligence video or something, to 2027. It's like, holy, this is actually happening. Like, guys, I know that you wanted a, a robot horse John, or something.

[John]

Yeah, we have the dog. I need the horse.

[Jacob Ri]

I feel like the robot dog's a little played out. The robot horse, that's it for 2026. Nobody has that yet. A steed, that's a very good name for.

[John]

You would think they could just scale it up, just scale the dog up, make a bigger dog.

[Jacob Ri]

They kind of have, I mean the MIT cheetah stuff, they, they kind of did scale it up, but it was like, that's not the same.

[Vincenzo Landino]

It looks lame.

[Jordi]

It has cool horses, but it also has to look cool.

[Jacob Ri]

I feel like that's also part of this essay was like, like between clog code and other stuff, like I got a lot of compliments on what it looked like or so on. I think that the marginal cost of making a good website's going to zero. Same like physical labor. Marshall cost of physical labor is going to zero. And my website as well, like might as well. Like, you got to make a good website now. Yeah, I'm probably being clapped out. So I'm going To leave.

[John]

No, no, no, you did. I was clapping for your website. It looks fantastic.

[Jacob Ri]

Oh, thank you.

[John]

Making a beautiful. Making a beautiful website for an essay is the new meta. Yeah, you just. You just. Maybe the AI 20, 27 people. Maybe you also need a PDF.

[Jordi]

Is this available as a PDF?

[Jacob Ri]

Yes, it is. It's available as a PDF. And also if you want secret.

[John]

Here's how you make a good.

[Jacob Ri]

Here's how you make a good.

[John]

You want to make a good PDF.

[Jacob Ri]

Okay, so if we start with the thesis that like Claude code, like is God and does everything, then of course. Well, obviously, I mean, have you seen the new anthropic price? 350. I mean, pretty good price. The. The market capitalization, not the. Not the share price. Yeah, I mean, I think it's still grossly undervalued. Like add another zero or something at this point. Like, sorry, sorry, Morgan Stanley. Sorry, Michael Cr. Need to add that one. But I think that like. Yeah, well, I mean I. I think he's busy with XA and all that stuff, but since they also had their recent round. But. But I do think that if you treat like what in my life is secretly a co generation problem, I think that making really beautiful PDFs is that because latex, which is mostly used by like math nerds to render math research papers, is a programmable way of creating documents and PDFs. Like, if you wonder how Leopold, I didn't do the footnotes here because my side notes and footnotes were completely crazy. And it just like cluttered up the side and looked unaesthetic. It looked awful. And the website was the better medium for this anyways. But I do think that the idea of saying, oh, I have this really great piece of writing. I'm going to put it in the clog code, it's going to render it in latex. You can get an overleaf account, it's free overleaf.com and then sign up. You can just make these documents. You can have it be very expressive or so on. And then you can make a really nice website to go along with it sending. It's not just about the raw content, it's also how you say it and then how it's presented in the same way of that. Oh, you know, I see John and Jordi, they're going down the TAR team, which I thought was an SF thing. I was told by Michael, it's now like it would start in la, which is a bunch of bullshit. Like it really. Like that's some. I only open AI people go To. This is not you guys ordering the.

[Jordi]

We invented tartoon. OpenAI merely adopts.

[John]

Yeah. We export it to you folks.

[Jacob Ri]

Exported it to San Francisco.

[Jordi]

Wow.

[Jacob Ri]

First time that's happened. I think that. But the thing though is that, you know, if you add like John and J. If you both had like. Oh, we're gonna, you know, write about technology and business, which, I mean, I. I'm a daily active reader of John's newsletter. So I think that, you know, we can pump that.

[Jordi]

Maybe I should turn into a 90 page PDF every day. Just call it, go nuts.

[Jacob Ri]

Render it as a website. Or you could. You could spice it up. I feel like it's 20, 26. You gotta. Not same old, you gotta.

[Jordi]

Wasn't it the whole Lulu stuff.

[Jacob Ri]

It's like you gotta be real. You gotta be. You can't be like all these other people. I mean.

[Jordi]

Yeah, there's opportunities.

[John]

Well, we've talked about doing a daily print newsletter, somewhat like a newspaper.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[Jacob Ri]

Oh. I think that like the only problem though is that it's kind of like. Well, I mean like Colossus does it better.

[Jordi]

So it's like Colossus is.

[John]

Yeah, but that's evergreen. That's evergreen.

[Jordi]

This is more just. You literally throw it out at the end. End. You're not.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not like, you're not keeping. Most people are not.

[Jordi]

It would be a beneficiary of robotics because it needs to be. It needs to be printed and delivered within like two hours of the news breaking. So it's like uncannily fast. And that's a unique product. But who knows? Maybe it's too sci fi.

[Jacob Ri]

Maybe I feel like that's a little too.

[John]

Make it a newspaper. They write this thing. It gets delivered every day. Make it make sense.

[Jordi]

Yeah. It doesn't make.

[Pat Grady]

It's going to work out.

[Jacob Ri]

Can we interest you in like some New York Times, like games inside. Can we interest you.

[Jordi]

An app?

[John]

Yeah. You should add some games to this.

[Jordi]

What's your game strategy? Vibe code or something Sho's building.

[Jacob Ri]

What are you doing for an oxhole thing? Like he wanted some games or other stuff fun. I was like, oh, you know, I'm going to keep the economics. And this, I mean, it's a slider. That's not fun. No. We'll add games in the second version of this.

[Jordi]

Build an entire stellar Stellaris or Hearts of Iron 4 spin off game Dwarf Fortress.

[Jacob Ri]

This was like Sholto was doing over Breaker. He was honestly also, I have to say, like shout out to him he was a very. I already knew he was going to be a very thoughtful editor. He was like even more thoughtful. And I think that his quote tweet in addition to others are starting to bring attention from people that, you know, I'm not going to be like the class or say who's reading or who's like following now or stuff. It's like, oh, oh, wow. A lot of people look up to him like I'm for him. Like he's. He's the goat.

[Jordi]

He is the goat. He is the goat. Let's give it up for Sholto.

[I]

One of the greatest ever do it.

[Jordi]

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

[John]

Super fun.

[Jordi]

Always good to hang out anytime you.

[Pat Grady]

Want to hop off.

[John]

Great to see you.

[Jordi]

Great to see you.

[Jacob Ri]

Thank you so much.

[Jordi]

And I'm glad your 2026 is going well.

[John]

Dropping and just try to, you know, use the tools. Try to get one of these out every day, please. This one took you whatever, a couple months. Try to get one.

[Jacob Ri]

It took me a month, but I feel like, yeah, we gotta get down an hour. Every minute you got a new essay. That's the newest.

[John]

Faster than I can read a thoughtful essay every minute forever.

[Jordi]

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Hope you have a great rest of your day and we will talk.

[John]

Cheers, Jacob, later.

[Jordi]

Goodbye. Well, is there any breaking news that we have yet to cover or is that where we should conclude today's story? Today's show.

[John]

Reggie James built.

[Jordi]

Oh, yeah.

[John]

Situation monitor.

[Jordi]

Thank.

[John]

Global Activity Monitor has a TVPN integration and intel feed. Tech finance, politics. News feed. Stocks Crypto.

[Jordi]

So funny.

[John]

Prediction markets. Tech layoffs. Tracker. AI race news tracker.

[Jordi]

Oh, wait, it keeps going.

[John]

Well, it's just a bunch of.

[Jordi]

Is the printer on? This is amazing.

[John]

This is great. Turn this into a Chrome.

[Jordi]

Wait, it has today's episode live streaming on it. This is amazing. You can refresh everything. This is very cool.

[John]

Yeah, we need this on the projector all day long.

[Jordi]

This is great.

[John]

Yeah, this is cool that it has a map. You can click around and see new stories.

[Jordi]

This is really cool. I love a project like this. This is awesome. And in other news, the team got to the bottom of the large 3D holographic volumetric display. It apparently exists. It's a 3D display with no glasses required. Much bigger. Almost the size of the table. Not quite looks a little bit bigger, but pretty cool. We'll have to get a demo of that soon, but that looks fun. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in.

[John]

Thank you, folks.

[Jordi]

We will see you tomorrow at 11.

[John]

We'll be back tomorrow. Big surprise. I know, but we'll be back. Back tomorrow.

[Jordi]

We're coming back. We got a bunch of great guests for you folks, and we will see you tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple podcasts, Spotify, the newsletter dot com. We will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

[John]

Cheers, folks. We love you. Bye.