Apple Unveils iPhone Duo, Muse AI Agent, Keith Rabois Joins | David Cahn, Mikey Shulman, David Perell, Jim Reilly, Fletcher Richman

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106 days until Christmas.

The countdown really makes it feel like it's going faster. I feel like—

It's flying.

Just the other day we were at 112.

It's flying.

It's flying by. Start shopping. Just do it.

Yeah.

And you actually have time to, again, like we talked about yesterday, remove your flooring, floorboards, all that stuff, and just dig straight down and install a permanent Christmas tree.

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Pull this up. Pull this up.

iPhone Duo is going to be—

This is more important.

Under a lot of Christmas trees. But what's more important than the new iPhone foldable?

Pull up this graphic.

Pull up this graphic.

What graphic you got?

I was hoping that Apple would announce this today. If you zoom in—

What is it?

You can see the tree is actually— the house is actually built around the tree.

Yeah. OK. Yeah.

Stop building a home and adding a tree to it.

Yeah.

Find a Christmas tree and build a house around it.

Exactly.

Yes, that's the Christmas spirit.

Our mutual friend John sent this to me this morning. So he's on top of it.

Cool. Let's do it. Well, Apple has announced the iPhone Duo, their foldable phone. It's— we'll pull up some video and react to a little bit of it. I separately—

Big question. Right away.

What?

How is this going to impact screen time? Does your screen time go twice as fast because you're actually locked in on 2 screens?

Should you do pixel-adjusted screen time too? Like, if you're watching a laptop versus an Apple Watch, if I spend an hour on an Apple Watch, is that like 15 minutes on the laptop? On the triple monitor setup?

Yeah.

Getting triple the screen time?

We have the AirPods with the cameras. They didn't do that.

They haven't announced those. I don't think they're going to.

Yeah. But when that comes, that could potentially help you add to your screen time by tracking screens out in the real world that you're seeing that aren't getting picked up.

True. Yeah. Digital billboards, that should go in your screen time. Eventually, it's going to be 24/7 screen time. Everyone's looking at a screen everywhere. There's a screen everywhere. You're looking at the windshield of your car. That's the screen.

Can we pull up some Real pictures of the Duo. Here it is.

Here it is, the Duo. So in this video, there is no crease. I'm sure the YouTube tech reviewers will be hunting in all different lighting for creases, but it feels like Apple waited long enough to avoid a crease whatsoever. So you will get no crease in here.

That is crazy. Sitting there, boom.

It's cool. It's cool. I think this is going to sell like hotcakes. I think people are ready to spend. It's gonna be like $2,000, maybe $3,000 when you max it out. I think the Apple buyer, the Apple fanboy, is ready for something that actually is a flex beyond like a slight upgrade. You paid 30% more for the Pro. This says you pulled out the big bucks. You dropped $2,000, $3,000.

Well, and that's been the thing.

Relative to how much value you get out of a phone, phones have always been incredibly cheap, even the highest-end Yeah, you spend more time on your phone than you do in your car, and your car is 10 times the price of your phone, always. Like, that's—

if not more.

And so, I think this will sell very well. It'll be interesting to see if anyone— if any new apps come from this, if people need to redesign stuff. Like, we're having Mikey from Suno on the show later today, and Suno has an app that's really full-featured for iPhone. You can make songs. You can scroll a feed of other people's songs. But you do have to pop over to desktop if you want to get into their composer and actually deconstruct the song and shift around different pieces of the song.

Yeah.

And then you get a sort of GarageBand interface. What's his plan? Is he thinking, okay, this is going to sell enough that I need to re-engineer my app for a different flow? You've seen— even using a lot of normal iPhone apps on iPads, it usually just doesn't feel quite right. Scrolling. So I think there'll be a couple UI/UX opportunities, challenges, both. Interesting little bezel there where you can see the screen is curved, but it's on a blocked-out squared-off edge there in the center. 2 cameras on the back, 1 on the front.

Yeah.

Leaving room for the iPhone Duo Pro with 5 cameras or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah, really. It really shows that the phone seems to be— at least the iPhone is, is certainly in its final form. Right. This feels like the biggest step forward in a long time. And yet it does absolutely nothing new for you.

A rave review until they do. No, it's like paper that folds out.

It's moderately— it's moderately exciting because we're all— it's moderately exciting because everyone's addicted to their phone and it's like, cool, new New screen, but it does nothing new for you. It doesn't move humanity forward in any way at all. Jordi, you're gonna be able to watch 2 Reels at once, and they're both gonna be vertical.

You think so?

Yeah.

What do you mean? From the demo that I saw, it looked like it was— you put the video up top and then you iMessage your— Well, that's because that was horizontal video. I don't think you'll be able to open 2 copies of Instagram at the same time.

No, I think it'll be more like the iPadOS where you can have different windows.

So you think you'll be able to do YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels side by side?

Ideally.

Hopefully. Ideally. Brain rot final boss over here wants to do it.

And then you can have the third one on the back.

Well, it's definitely going to be better for looking at charts on Public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. What is— what is Apple actually doing today? In the markets.

Brian says this could literally 2x GDP.

Does the market like this? I mean, all this has been priced in, but let's check on Apple, down 1.27% today, down 5% over the last 5 days, but sort of flat on the month. So it's exciting to see John Ternus get a big win like early, like first thing as the CEO, first major, you know, Apple event. And it's an entirely new product, the foldable phone, something that's been rumored for years. They didn't tee him up just to do a minor refresh. Exactly. Yeah. It's exciting that he got to come out strong with this. And it's also less of a risk than the Apple Vision Pro if they'd thrown him there. Then he'd be remembered, oh, his first thing was sort of a flop.

Yeah, I think this is going to be a hit, even though it doesn't matter at all.

I think it's going to sell very well. I think a lot of people are going to buy them for a variety of reasons. But I think it's just a good way to kick off a really strong decade-long run, hopefully 4 decades. Cook couldn't make it to '95 in the seat, but Turnus, I think he got it, what it takes. I want to see Turnus running this place.

So you're 100% getting the duo?

Yeah, I think I'll get it. I'll need to feel how it feels in my hand. But at one point, I was considering carrying an iPad Mini as my daily driver phone because I was like, they— so they come with Wi-Fi.

6.8.

6.8, so I have big pockets. And so it would actually fit in my pocket. And I don't like the phone feature of the phone. I don't like getting phone calls. So you lose that because it doesn't have a cellular connection. So it doesn't have a phone. So you can never call me.

And it's not like you need a phone number for anything else besides calls, like logging into pretty much any service.

Yeah, you can do 2-factor on an actual authentication app. I think you could get by. You might need to have a Mac Mini hooked up somewhere that has a phone number attached to it that can route you 2-factor codes or something. But it did seem doable. Or you just check your phone, your actual phone with the phone number at home later. But every day, One day, you just have this iPad Mini that you pull out and it has a cellular connection. I don't know that it can actually get phone calls, but it has a cellular connection. So you can get data while you're out and about. So you can be out in the world and scroll Reels.

Data.

What else do you need? You don't need to make calls.

Big data.

I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, it really comes down to, look, the phone is lighter, thinner, faster.

It's not lighter. It's not thinner.

It is probably faster.

It's bigger. This is the opposite of your meme. Typically, they come out and they say, it's lighter, thinner, faster, thinner, faster, thinner, faster, 12 times. It's the best iPhone ever. This is actually a different direction.

This is exciting.

This is a response to your joke.

Here's something. Would you rather search work in iMessage or be able to get the Duo?

Search work in iMessage? What do you mean?

So like search in iMessage.

Yeah, oh, you want that to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Personally, I would be excited about functional features of the core software that I use with the iPhone.

Yeah.

Among, among, you know, many other things. But Kate over on X says, mentally ready for my iPhone to start being slow, laggy, and having a bad battery.

You have that to look forward to. So did they— they also updated like the normal iPhone, is that right? Did you watch a little bit of the earlier keynote?

Yeah, I already said.

That one is thinner, lighter, faster, better, stronger, all the different things.

They updated Apple Intelligence a bunch.

So, oh yeah, there was like all the things. I thought they haven't launched it yet. I thought this was the launch of the Siri, like it's actually going to go out now.

Correct.

Yes.

Yeah.

This was in the launch video.

Okay.

And also the old iPhone or not the old iPhone, but the new normal iPhone 18, they were like, oh, the battery is like much better. So all those things that Jordi they said about the new iPhone stuff.

Which one do I have? Because I got mine last year, I believe, about— I have a 26— no, 17. I have a 17. So they launched the 18, which is the same form factor, just lighter, thinner, faster, better, stronger?

Correct.

OK, but looks exactly the same?

From what I—

I mean, I'm sure some people can tell a difference.

OK. OK.

But yeah, better chip or something. So I don't know. Maybe you'll notice it with Apple Intelligence. I wonder if there's any gated features, because I know that there were initially some gated features. For the Pro models, you need more memory for the on-device stuff. I don't know. It'll be interesting. I'm excited to get it in hand, see how it works. I don't— it might be too much to open that thing up. I'm thinking like it's pretty easy just to flip it back.

No, for you it's great because you're such a newspaper guy.

I do like a newspaper.

Put your feet up on the desk and fold your phone open.

I'm scrolling. Yeah, something like that might make sense. I don't know.

I don't know.

I was reflecting on Steve Jobs. I saw a viral video about Steve Jobs predicting ChatGPT in 1985. And the video is incredible because he arrives to this talk. He's giving a talk at a university on the future. It was just Steve Jobs' view of the future in 1985. And he arrives on a helicopter with an entourage. And they all get out of this helicopter and they go into this— it's amazing. Kind of unrelated, but— More of a where is it? King in the castle, king in the castle. Because the video kind of takes kind of takes place in a castle. But we can but we can probably play this this video here. Let me let me pull this up. I'll send it in because you got to watch Steve Jobs in 1985 predict modern AI pretty well. What is that sound?

No idea.

Is that us or is that? The soundboard? You got a new, like, just like vibe chatter in the background? Anyway, while we pull that up, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. So yeah, let's play Steve Jobs predicts ChatGPT in 1985 because I had a bunch of thoughts based on this.

Aristotle, and I read this, I became immensely jealous.

And I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal. So, pause. He's— the lead-in to this— what is that second video that's playing? I think you guys have 2 videos playing. He's saying— I'll just read the transcript. He says, do you know— did you know that Alexander the Great's tutor for 14 years was Aristotle? When Alexander the Great had a question, he would just go to Aristotle. I think we can play the clip from the beginning now. Let's see.

Who Alexander the Great's tutor was for about 14 years? You know, Aristotle. And I read this, I became immensely jealous.

And I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal. And through the miracle of the printed page, I can at least read what Aristotle wrote without an intermediary.

And maybe if there's a professor, they can, they can add to that, but at least I can go directly to the source material. And that is, of course, the foundation upon which our Western civilization is built.

Blazing the printing press.

But I can't ask Aristotle a question.

I mean, I can, but I won't get an answer.

And so Perfectly timed soundboard.

My hope is that in, in, in our lifetimes, we can make a tool of a new kind, of an interactive kind.

And so my hope is someday when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle. in a computer. And someday some student will be able to not only read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question and get an answer. And that's what I hope that we can do.

It's so crazy. He's just like, we got to compress all the data down and be able to give it a conversational interface.

Large language models with a simple interface that anyone can use.

It's a crazy, crazy prediction. 40-something something years ago. And I mean, there's so many interesting details about that video. Steve Jobs is probably the most famous techno-optimist, the most successful techno-optimist. The bicycle for the mind quote, that one continues to hit constantly. But you can see his excitement every time he gives a keynote. He'll just be on stage like giddily testing GarageBand. But his delivery there too is something really, really special. I mean, you notice that, right? Where he asks a hypothetical question, then, well, I could ask, but I wouldn't get an answer. And he kind of lets the laugh lines kind of land and lets the audience— he has really good timing.

He's basically the Mark Gurman of CEOs. Mark Gurman is the GOAT journalist.

Yes.

And he is one of the greatest founder CEOs ever.

It's just really, really cool timing.

I'm surprised it took you that long to come.

Because I thought you were talking about Mark Gurman's comedic timing, which is fantastic.

But, uh, Mark Gurman's delivery of Apple truly— he truly has Apple intelligence.

That's true. That's true. Um, so yeah, uh, I mean, you can see, uh, Ben Thompson's called this out a few times, but when Steve Jobs introduces GarageBand, he is just so excited about this product. You can see him in this one video, uh, introducing GarageBand 1.0 with John Mayer, which is really cool. He has John Mayer come out and just like play some stuff on the guitar.

This is where I want to show you loops. And I'm going to show you what a non-invasion computer sounds like.

And he's just like chilling there on this computer on this stool using this tool and just doing a live demo. And if you scroll forward about halfway, you'll see John Mayer comes in and plays some songs. It's toward the end. There you go.

So British Invasion.

He's just having fun. And so, you know, with the power of modern LLMs, like you can ask, you know, an AI version of Steve Jobs, what would he think about AI? I did. And I think the answer's somewhat interesting. He said, probably yes, with very strong opinions about what makes AI worth using. That's speculation, but his own words give us a surprisingly good basis for it. In 1985, Jobs imagined computers capturing a thinker's underlying ideas so that a student could interact with them. you could actually ask Aristotle a question. He was already enthusiastic about something resembling a central promise of conversational AI, but his enthusiasm would come with 3 demands in this hypothetical Steve Jobs analysis. One, you got to give people new abilities, learning, designing, composing, building would probably excite him most. 2, you have to make it effortless. I'd expect him to push for AI that understands what you want with minimal instruction. And 3, you have to make something excellent. I suspect he'd value AI's ability to help someone realize an original vision much more than its ability to produce enormous quantities of generic content. He would be anti-slop but pro-AI. Aristotle also had an interesting AI take in this imagined LLM version of Aristotle. He'd care more about what AI does to our character than how intelligent it becomes. The conclusion of this is Aristotle would favor AI as an instrument of human Flourishing while resisting the idea that a life requiring less human effort is automatically a better life. You must continue to create. You must continue to work. You will be unsatisfied if the robots—

Create more than you consume.

Yeah, exactly.

Forever.

Exactly. AI that strengthens our ability is what's important. And so, what I was going back and forth with you about was like, was like, it seems pretty clear that Steve Jobs would be excited about AI or some form of AI, but what would the reaction to that be in the modern era? Because I tend to think that there would have been the natural cycle of reaction because of— there's a whole host of things, political polarization, economic stagnation, wealth inequality, negativity bias on social media. There's so many different incentives that the desire, the impetus to tear someone down is unavoidable. And so, I think we would be in this weird era where a lot of people would be excited about that particular vision for AI, and yet there would still be viral videos complaining about the latest Steve Jobs keynote. But what do you think? Because you've called for like the Steve Jobs of AI, someone who's an optimist, someone who talks about empowering, humanity, focus on human flourishing, agrees with the Aristotelian philosophy around AI. But what would the actual reaction be? Is that actually a panacea, or would it fall by the wayside like all other attempts at positivity seem to have fallen by the wayside?

Yeah.

I've come around to the technology itself being fundamentally scary, even though it's very cool. And then you factor that in with certain actors that are trying to position it as even more scary than maybe it is inherently.

Yeah.

And I think even if we still had Steve with us, it would still be a mess.

Yeah.

And he might be nicely counter-positioned, but it doesn't stop other people from Maybe not poisoning.

Maybe not.

Maybe not poisoning the discourse.

What do you think his P doom would be? Over under 10%?

Like 1%, probably. He seems like a 1% guy.

He's the 1%. What did Joanna Stern have to say about the Apple launch? There's a video here you wanted to react to.

New feature called Live Rewind.

What is this feature? Let's play.

Let's see it.

Hi, welcome.

Today's specials are the heirloom tomato BLT, Caesar salad, coleslaw, lentil soup, chicken Alfredo, the smoked salmon, and the avocado tartine.

Just double press the digital crown and Live Rewind transcribes what was just said. You can ask Siri about the content of that transcript.

What if you can't read?

Or save it to the Siri app to revisit later.

This is great for when you're trying to recall a book recommendation, a colleague's brilliant idea, Or something you didn't hear the first time. The next audio intelligence feature will help you remember key moments from daily conversations so you can be more present.

So is it just recording everything? Because that seems genuinely useful. Probably not in the— I mean, Joanna Stern, her take here is, I don't know, maybe just ask the waitress to repeat herself. That's a good point. But if you're actually talking to someone, you know, like your lawyer is breaking down a contract and you forget which part of the contract that the lawyer flagged as important for you to go dig into and get to the bottom of, having a transcript there makes sense. And you could ask the lawyer to repeat themselves, but it costs $1,000 an hour. So maybe you do want to just transcribe it. I don't know. What do you think about this?

If I was a client— There's got to be some people out there that are, you know, thrilled and, you know, incredibly excited about this new feature. And I would be surprised if there's more than You know, 100 of them globally.

Yeah.

But, um, you know, there's, there's some— it's just, it, it just feels like, um, it's just hard. It's, it's— this whole event is hard to be excited about anything at all.

A lot of these, a lot of these demos, they get harder and harder to feel natural and human. Like The GarageBand example is pretty— it's so much easier to make it look cool because you're there with John Mayer and you're imagining, OK, I got a buddy who can play drums, but I can't play bass, so I'm going to get GarageBand to fill in the bass digitally. And I needed to compose everything together. I don't really have an alternative that's super logical, like just asking someone to repeat themselves. Anyway, it's got to be a tough job working through the like how do we showcase this in a non-black mirror?

At Semi Analysis says how we feeling on the crease? Yeah, are we feeling it? I haven't been able to get my eyes on the crease.

No, it feels like whatever they did in the photography or oh, and that's the that's the one thing you would expect from them entering the foldable market. You would expect them to absolutely they are not gonna get there's not gonna be a crease on the.

thing.

I will be shocked if there's a visible crease whatsoever. Is there— ooh, Arthur from Vibe just resigned today.

That's a joke.

Oh, that's a joke?

It's obviously a joke.

Oh, okay.

I didn't— Read it out since you brought it up.

Sorry. I spent the last 3 years doing TV ad performance at both Vibe and Walmart. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving TV advertising performance and gambling with our ROI. More thoughts below. I like it. Very good. I was like, I only read the first line. Stupid. Apple foldable crease. Let's see if there's anything here. Okay, this is how Apple dealt with the crease issue on the iPhone Duo. This is definitely gonna be the best folding on the market, I think. Passport size of it. There's some photos. This is a canyon. It's not a crease, it's a canyon. The crease in the middle isn't very noticeable. It's been handled well. I don't know. We'll see. It definitely seems like they were waiting for the technology to become post-crease before they launched this because foldable phones have been out for 5 years, 7 years or something like that. And they've always been a little bit rough. The hinge gets dirty. This feels like it will hold up for at least, for at least 1 year to get you to the next one. What do you think? I think that's the plan. Yeah, until the battery dies. Hinge lifespan of 11 months and 27 days. We engineered it.

I'm trying to find an image of the new Apple Watch, which I think they're calling the Apple Watch, What Is That For? Because it is just crazy to look at.

It's got the Jubilee bracelet, right? It's got a really chunky metal bracelet on it. Anyway, let's see what the Grubinator says about the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro. So last year, an unplanned personal hiatus coincided with the time I should have been reviewing the then-new iPhone 17 and 17 Air. He said, 354 days is arguably more than a few, but given I missed the window for reviewing them when they were new, I thought it might be interesting to consider the iPhone 17 Pro and Air on the cusp of their being obviated by the next generation of iPhones. So the iPhone Air is the nicest phone Apple has ever made, probably the nicest device Apple has ever made, period. It's just so nice. He loves it. I have 17 Pro. I'm eagerly awaiting the Daring Fireball review of the new foldable phone, but he's got to get his hands on it. I got to know what he's thinking about. Yes, the Hermès Paris Apple Watch. Is this the Ultra? That is a chunky, chunky device.

Yeah, this is the Ultra 4.

Ultra 4.

You don't like this? What's not to like?

It's horrific.

It's horrific? Is that the dial or the bracelet?

Everything about it.

It does have a very odd interface to the actual watch with that bar that comes out of the clasp. Like, the clasp doesn't actually integrate fully into the watch. It sort of has these 2 points that bolt on there. Yeah, pretty chunky. But honestly, the The Apple Watch Ultra, this device had gotten so chunky that I think the chunkier band might fit better with the chunky watch. Because if you put a really thin strap on that, then you just have this massive bulge on there.

Yeah, I almost think they should have launched it as an ankle bracelet. Imagine checking your super chunky watch by just pulling up your foot.

An ankle monitor?

Yeah.

The bottom is the Boston.

And you could be in a meeting just looking down.

Yeah. I've seen some guys doing that with their Whoops. They put it on their ankles.

Or yeah, people are saying— Bobby Cosmic says, no pendant. Imagine you have this really gunky—

The Flavor Flav. Yeah.

This clock.

Yeah. John Turnus was vague posting before this at 6:00 AM. He posted just a light, and it was— Maybe a little bit too vague. Was that it? It was just a light. It didn't it didn't really hint at anything.

Was this a what's wrong, Ternus? Afraid you might say something.

Was this a teaser that is there a folding thing here that's that I'm not picking up on? Is this an homage?

Samsung Mobile U.S. hit X and said so far so same hashtag it's time to switch. Throwing shots.

Using the hashtag in 2026. They're going to go so— they're going to be so dedicated to the hashtags on that brand account that it's going to become ironic and cool again to use hashtags, and they're going to be in the perfect spot. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. In the Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal, they didn't talk about math. It made it to the digital version, didn't make it into the paper. Navier-Stokes did not make the paper edition of the Wall Street Journal, but Meta and their new personal AI agent did. It's right here. Meta launches—

The absolute state of traditional media.

Hey, this is probably— it's more profitable as a business perspective, right? It's like, what are you going to do, sell math theories? Navier-Stokes was a $1 million prize. You don't think Alex Wang can pull a million bucks out of this?

This could be a trillion-dollar prize.

They can get— they haven't monetized it yet, but they got to put ads in this thing. And will they do agentic commerce? What will they do? We were very excited talking to Soufer Sufinator yesterday about AGI for small businesses, for folks who run ads on Meta. I still love that idea, but they're going a different direction. They're doing personal superintelligence. Zuck's been talking about this for a year at least. He's put out a lengthy blog post about how he wants AI to diffuse, how he wants everyone to have AI. And now everyone does with the Meta Muse app. That's a separate app that you get that will book restaurants for you. The Wall Street Journal has a little bit of a story here. Meta Platforms is betting that making AI agents easy to use will get mainstream consumers to start adopting them in their daily lives. The company on Tuesday announced a new personal AI agent that can buy goods online. I think they partnered with Stripe on Link. So I don't know if that just means that when Link is enabled on a particular checkout, it'll be a little bit smoother, or if it's like it's going to try and steer you towards things that are linked, right? Because some websites do it. It's really nice when they do. But certainly getting closer to this. It can respond to emails. And— So do you have to link it to your Gmail, I guess? To get that working and complete other tasks users authorize you to do for them. The agent called Muse is accessible via a dedicated app. Users operate the agent by conversing with it like a typical chatbot and can choose their own names for it. I saw some really funny ones. Tyler called his Mark. I saw someone else that's— someone gave it a really funny name like Like they said, like, you can pick one. And then the name of the agent was just You Can Pick One or something like that. A bunch of funny hallucinations always happens with these products. Everyone's going to have fun with them. The new tool is Meta's latest attempt to monetize its massive AI investments, which are expected to top $130 billion this year. The AI agent is free to access for most of what people need and has 2 tiers of subscription plans for power users, $100 a month. and $20 a month. Anthropic and OpenAI have quickly built multibillion-dollar businesses around agents capable of performing complex computer tasks, but most of that usage is driven by software coding or other business applications. Consumer adoption of technology lags behind, offering Meta, Apple, and other companies potential for catching up. The fact that we've given such a powerful technology in a package that is going to be really digestible for the product is one of the things that will set us apart from lots of other agentic products, Meta's AI chief Alex Wang said in an interview. Ben Thompson was raving about the fact that it gives you a pretty powerful VM, 8 gigs of memory and 8 gigs of storage that is yours, sequestered. And they're also implementing a lot of the security features that they have done with WhatsApp, where there's end-to-end encryption.

Yeah, they got Moxie pulled into it, apparently.

That's really cool. Moxie's a legend. So great on the recruiting front. Everyone loves Signal. And great team there.

Yeah, the question is how— it sounds like if they're actually giving every user a computer.

VM, but yeah. It's like virtualized. But yes, serious computing resources.

Yeah, yeah, but the cost is going to probably be pretty significant.

So the VM most likely spins up when you use it and then gets taken down when you're not using it. So the actual compute hours that are associated to anyone but a power user. And of course, very quickly you can wind up spending $20 or $100, and that's enough to just pay for a virtual machine. Like, you can go and rent, you know, a true virtual machine to like host your website on DigitalOcean for like $20.

So Kaz, the CEO of Opendoor, went to X and said— posted a screenshot of him asking Meta AI in WhatsApp. And he said, please make WhatsApp the main interface for these things, Alex Wang, please. And he just says, how do I use Muse? And Meta AI responds, Muse is a free AI assistant from Anthropic. You can use it on the web, on mobile, or through their API. Yeah, go to Claude.ai, create an account, and log in. So I'm looking at this post, I'm trying to find why is nobody talking about how Meta AI thinks that Muse is a product from Anthropic and is telling people to go log in there?

That is weird that it would hallucinate that Muse is from Anthropic because there's not even any connection between those. It's not like Anthropic ever had a product called Muse. That I know of. Very odd. But Meta AI, of course, is running an older LLM. And then I believe you get— you still get thrown into a LLaMA model, I think, when you're on Instagram if you wind up in an LLM chat. And so there's going to need to be unification around all of these different products and they're going to need to eventually talk to all the same models. But of course, there's like scaling and all sorts of different issues that you need because some of these products that they've gotten to scale are pretty significant even And even if they're not the most talked about, when you are a hyperscaler with billions of users and you vend an LLM into something, you've deployed that at scale. It's doing a lot. And it's like the new Gemini 3.7 Flash, bunch of great reviews, great benchmarks on things. But they can't just stuff that in Google Search on day 1. They have to actually scale it up.

Yeah. The question I have is, do you think they— does this seem like this was something they were working on prior to Instinct gaining traction, or is this an Instinct clone? I saw one post that was saying, you know, that, that rumor that they tried to buy it, which makes sense.

Arfarok says there's a rumor going around that Meta and others made a 10-figure offer for Instinct. That's a crazy valuation for What, a 1-year-old company, something like that? Instinct turned it down. Now Meta has launched Muse. And that's literally what the post is. Meta has launched Muse, and now the timeline is reacting. It'll be a big deal. Sounds familiar. Yeah, I saw some people saying, like, now the people with distribution are coming in. It'll be interesting to see how much— what distribution looks like in the Meta ecosystem, because yes, Like Meta was able to win Stories. How did they do that? They didn't win by launching a Snapchat clone as a separate app. They won by putting it in Instagram, which already had the install base. And so if Muse works its way into Instagram, which a lot of people do use, it'll probably get a lot of adoption. If it's a separate app, it's a little bit trickier. Now the Threads playbook worked. They routed a lot of people to there. Threads shows up on Instagram. It has an advertising surface area. It's pulled over— what are they at, a couple hundred million MAUs?

Hundreds of millions of MAUs. And again, it's hard to fully understand the value of that because they're counting somebody who clicked through clickbait on Instagram.

Yeah, there's that. And then also—

But there's a really robust— there's a robust, like, real community of just pure Threads users. The other thing that I think about is, like, Meta has the advantage of being able to, when you open all their apps, just put a huge billboard. They make ad inventory just for themselves.

Yeah, with the Ray-Bans.

The specs where you open around Christmas.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Sorry. Just a little slip there. But when you opened Instagram in Q4, it's like, buy some of our glasses. And so I would expect— I don't think they're going to do that until Muse has like, yeah, they'll get the early adopters on and figure out all the kinks and stuff. Growing Daniel Kim anyway.

John Chu says Meta has been working on Muse for almost a year now. You have to believe that that's true. The Manus acquisition ties into that. The Zuck messaging around personal superintelligence. I mean, when we interviewed him a year ago, we were asking about, oh, am I going to be able to use your AI to actually buy— if I see a pair of shoes, will I be able to just buy it? And he was kind of like, I'm not ready to announce that yet. But it was very clear that that's where this was going. So I don't think it's an Instinct clone. I think it will compete with Instinct, and I think it's tricky because Instinct is pretty early and they are going up against a big company that's been investing and has a lot of resources to go after this very, very hard. At the same time, consumers come to Meta to be entertained. Muse feels like a product for productivity, and I'm not sure that people will put them in the same buckets. It's very unclear. At the same time, people do a lot of shopping on Instagram, basically just scrolling.

Really?

Oh, for sure. Not actually checking.

Wow.

Are you joking?

I'm just messing with you.

No, no, no. So like—

It's like it is the most dominant shopping app of all time that's positioned as—

But particularly people will go there and not just search things, but just casually scroll and linger over things so that they get retargeted, visit websites, and then have the ads come to them. And so you can imagine that on the shopping side that there's a lot of traction there.

Yeah, a lot of excitement around this climbing the chart. It is currently— Muse is number 3 on the charts in the App Store after ESPN Fantasy Sports and More and ChatGPT.

ESPN Fantasy Sports?

Growing Daniel came in with an absolutely brutal ratio.

What'd he say?

He quoted Zuck's announcement with a screenshot of the exchange. that Zuck had with somebody during the early days of Facebook where he said, yeah, so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, and student numbers. What? How'd you manage that one? People just submitted it. I don't know why. They trust me, dumb Fs. Anyway.

Wow. Growing Daniel never forgets.

Zuck has grown up a lot since then.

Who punched him in the nose? That's the question Ryan Peterson is asking. Let me find the— you sent me the image. Is this true? So, yeah.

So, here's the thing. His nose is starting to look like this guy, Merab, who's a UFC champion. And Merab has one of the most busted-up noses in the UFC, and Merab was the UFC fighter that Zuck was training with on that deck. That's a really good sign. So pull up this picture of Merab, and you can see their noses are starting to look quite similar.

That's a really good sign.

Look at this. Zoom in there. Zoom in there.

He's pushing.

Look, their noses. Zuck was like, give me one of them right now. Give me a nose like that right now.

I like it. Do you think?

And I would expect. I you know who knows? Rob could go and get probably surgery to correct this. One, it's a very cool battle scar.

Yeah.

Aura.

Yeah.

And two, it you know it this this tells me that Zuck is going way harder in training than he lets on in the video.

Totally, totally.

Which I which I love to see. He's like he's ready for that Elon fight.

Yeah.

He's like there's a chance. I might catch Elon on a good day. He opts in. Yeah, I got to be ready.

He's also going extremely hard on the Irish countryside, buying castles. We call them Lord Zuck. We got a video now breaking down his latest real estate purchase, Strancalee Castle in Ireland. Let's play a little bit of this because there's some good voiceover, some good context. Castle, and it can be found on the banks of the River Blackwater in County Waterford.

This Gothic Revival mansion was designed by the famous Penn brothers for John Kiley, a local landlord, former Tory MP for Clonmel, and High Sheriff of County Waterford. The house was complete in 1830, and its scale—

I think he's got a bunkie under there.

According to records, it took a brisk 4 and a half minute walk— That is a bunker.

Just to get from the kitchen To the dining room.

Within the grounds, there was a folly, a Chinese pagoda, and an aviary.

The folly, which is known as Stran Callie Tower, was built in 1826.

We're having David Perell on the show later to talk about architectural revival. Look at this.

And it served as a fishing lodge.

This is awesome. He's gonna have the resources to actually restore this and, and do this. Some of these castles are like cheap relative to like how epic they are, but the carrying cost of actually renovating or living in, even visiting any of these places, just like cleaning out the cobwebs is probably 6 figures a year. Um, and the landscaping's got to be extremely expensive. But I think this is the answer to like, where's the tech wealth going? Like, at some point he's either gonna get bored of this or donate it or pass it on, or it's gonna fall out of the family because 7 generations later the family's like, yeah, we don't really want this castle anymore. And boom, you got a beautiful museum that was properly renovated and brought up to modern standards in 2026 and is prepared to actually house a bunch of prints of AI artwork.

Okay, pull up this other video.

We're gonna watch this quick video and then we're gonna talk about absolute doom and despair.

Okay. Okay, let's doom it up.

But first, this little palate cleanser.

What are we doing?

Emperor, dude.

Does that feel like that ever?

No.

Um, I wish that people did what I wanted them to do. It's like, that would be, that would be fun. But, but in the meantime, you can have some fun.

Yeah.

Oh yeah, I would have a chopper.

I'd have a— I don't even know what I would have. I would have an underground tunnel.

I do have an underground tunnel.

Do you really?

Yeah, it's like more of underground storage situation. But, um, but yeah, no, it's, uh, Oh, wow. Oh, wow.

I'm like a damn emperor, dude.

Does that feel like an emperor?

I love that the Theo Von arc happened where, like, for some reason all the tech CEOs were like, it's rite of passage now, we gotta go. I'm disappointed we didn't get Sacha on Theo, and I'm really disappointed we didn't get, uh, CC Yungblud.

I think he got a bunkie.

Zucky got a bunkie.

Zucky got a bunkie. All right, let's talk about Doom.

Doom. An Anthropic researcher is quitting the artificial intelligence industry. Whoa, he didn't just quit the company, he quit the industry over fears that the lab and its competitors are racing to build systems that could spiral out of control and destroy humanity. This was not received well. A bunch of back and forth with another researcher chiming in saying that they have a P-doom of 10%, which is something that's come up years ago and we kind of went back and forth on. This all started with Jacob Coxon, who said, I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last 3 years doing pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. He is not happy with where things go, and it got 100 million views and 600,000 likes. It's going straight on a Bernie Sanders billboard for sure. I worked on an actual thermonuclear weapons project, Martin Casado from a16z says, and the dissonance was less bizarre. And so he's comparing it to what it was like working on very scary technology. very different than what's going on today. And Evan Hubinger, who works on alignment science at Anthropic, previously MIRI, OpenAI, Google, Ripple, Yelp— I guess he works with the— Ripple is the cryptocurrency, is that right? Isn't Ripple XRP?

Yeah.

He says, Jacob is correct here. We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it's above 10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are clearly not on track to. So everyone's sort of pushing for a slowdown now, but then you go into the regulatory capture thing. I've been seeing— What?

Jess Buckingham says, bro got that pip.

Yeah, a lot of people are like, are you giving back your equity? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

Odd. Nick Carter says, if you actually believe this, you'd be committing acts of violent sabotage and terrorism against your employer. You clearly do not, so stop self— stop it with this self-aggrandizing twaddle. On the other side says, thank you for saying plainly what you believe. I do appreciate it, and the world could be even grimmer than it is otherwise. We have Eliezer Yudkowsky's co-author coming on the show tomorrow, Nate Sorez, to talk about If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. We'll continue the doom debate. It seems like it's in the news. Lots of people were just going back and forth on everything. Ryan Peterson sees it as a bull case. He says, I need to buy more stock in this company. I've never seen such a commitment to making money regardless of the consequences. Yeah, it is—

Adair says, if you publicly assign a greater than 10% probability to human extinction within a decade, you owe people a clear explanation of how you reach that number, plus what would change your mind.

Yes. Yes. So, yeah, a lot of people were upset that this felt like a vibe prediction, very, like, you know, unresearched. And he did link, Evan did link to the Anthropic risk report, which you can read in full. They have a reasonable scaling policy, and they're talking about pacing the frontier, collaborating with other labs. I'm oddly optimistic that this will happen. Obviously, there's the Sam and Dario can't even hold hands on stage in that India conference. But AI has made strange bedfellows out of people. If you had said, oh yeah, in 6 months, Elon Musk, the guy who's calling Anthropic misanthropic, will be doing a deal and bringing Sholto to watch rockets take off at Starbase, I would have been like, no way, no way can Elon Musk and Dario become friends. Like, that just seems like impossible. But the funniest outcome is the most likely, to quote Elon again. And yeah, maybe there's this weird, you know, oh, people wind up working together. There are other consequences of that. There are some very serious—

Just thinking that, you know, believing in your whole heart that things are that serious and then just rage quitting and not leaning in and trying. Like, do you really think that the rage quit method is—

Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, some of these organizations are really big, and if you're at a certain level, it can be very hard to actually get things done in a large large organization. So you can be there and say like, yeah, I've been sending a Slack message and emailing the whole executive team every day that this is the thing that I wanna have happen and it's not happening. And like, I don't have the authority within this particular role to actually have the change. People sort of tend to think, oh, if you work for the company, you can exact your will, but that's not true. Like you can work in the marketing organization and think you wanna run billboards in Tallahassee, Florida and not be able to get that done because someone higher up than you said, no, we're not doing billboards in Florida, right? Like things get vetoed. for a variety of reasons. So it's not like, you know, you just take a job at a 5,000-person company and then you can just do whatever you want. That's not the way companies work. It's, yeah, it's a weird, weird time. We'll see. But there are serious, there are serious like regulatory frameworks for not allowing collusion between big companies. And so we might wind up in this other weird scenario where if all the big labs are like, yes, okay, the government's not stepping in and regulating, we're gonna self-regulate, we're gonna work together, then that could actually be a legal problem because you're not allowed to price fix, you're not allowed to collude with your— that is like textbook antitrust, right? And then the other thing is that there's this weird dynamic I've seen playing out where people, the AI leaders make a prediction and then the outsiders criticize that prediction as like, they're only saying that to raise the next round or they're only saying that. And this is the same thing with like all the labs were saying like, we want regulation And then they're like, they're only saying that for regulatory capture. And it's like regulatory capture might be a side effect of regulation, but the labs can still want it. And now I'm seeing people online look at what's happening and say, we do need regulation, and I'm willing to put up with that regulatory capture that may happen under that scenario. And so there's all these weird predictions that happen Way too early for everyone to digest, because the people inside the lab see things much earlier and understand, oh yeah, OK, the next leg up is going to work. The agentic era is going to arrive. Swarms are going to be a thing. We're on track to solve this. Anyway, Jordi, one last thing, and then we'll bring in—

One last thing.

Trump, Sequoia.

A friend at the Sharbuko Capital quoted Evan with his 10% prediction and said, hey, quote, hey, Dario, congrats again on the great quarter. Nice to see enterprise reacceleration. Hoping you could provide a little color on that 10% extinction number and some of the puts and takes that might have on further enterprise adoption. And then just quick follow-up after.

Yeah. What are Anthropic earnings calls going to be like? It's just going to be CFO and Dario or are they— Daniela going to be on?

I don't know.

It's like that. That's not that crazy to imagine that that happens.

Yeah.

That that's like a thing that happens on the call. Very, very odd. I mean, I guess you do have like defense tech companies that have earnings calls and defense primes and they might get asked about geopolitical things that are pretty heady. I don't know. Anyway, we'll figure it out. In the meantime, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Up next, we have David Khan from Sequoia Capital to talk about the state of AI. Good news, there's lots happening, so plenty to talk about. Welcome back. Thanks so much for helping us. How you doing?

Good to see you guys again. You guys got a lot of range from Zuck's castle to P Doom.

There's a lot of range. There's a lot of range. You think he's got a bunkie in the castle, or do you think he has enough bunkies? It seems likely.

I think he's got. I think he's got a doomsday dungeon.

Dungeon? OK. The Doom dungeon to go with Zuck's bunkie. Zucky's bunkie. Anyway, what is on the top of your mind? Because there's so many different things happening in the application layer. We had Cognition on. Harvey just raised a bunch of money. Things are going really well with diffusion and the actual application of the technology. There's value. Jobs apocalypse is delayed.

And should he, Doom, be factored into financial models for Series A investments?

Well, I think broadly in AI right now, I mean, the thing that seems really interesting to me is just the concentration of capital going into these big companies. It does seem like the thing top of mind for me is just like the way the venture landscape has changed.

Yeah.

When you think about doing this job 5, 6 years ago, you had 100 interesting companies that everybody was looking at and you're trying to find the next one. And that's still happening. And yet so much of the conversation today is about the top 10 companies.

Yeah. And then on that point, is the biggest— is the concentration of capital into OpenAI, Anthropic, maybe xAI, SpaceX too? Is that the biggest driver? Or is when you're talking about reshaping venture, I've been much more keyed in on the fact that you get Hugging Face and OpenRouter and there are now many decacorn liquidity events that I would think changes the underwriting. If you're a VC and you're like, yeah, it's an early round, it's a billion-dollar valuation, but But there are plenty of examples of 10x returns at this scale.

Well, I think— I mean, to me, that's always been the case. We were early investors in Hugging Face, and I think there's always been this thesis on you have a big community and you have a lot of bottom-up adoption and that there's a lot of option value in those type of companies. I think you'll see that get reflected back into the market where there's always these companies where investors ask 100 questions about what does this become, and yet you just have so much sucking sound from the market. That those are going to become interesting companies. And it's so hard to be relevant and build something important. And I think Hugging Face did that and OpenRadar did that. And so I think there'll continue to be examples of that. The thing that's interesting to me just in this moment, and it's like the fall of 2026, we're about to see these IPOs, yeah, is this precipice of moving from so much capital. And honestly, this is not even like a tech market, VC market thing. Like the entire universe of capital has concentrated concentrated on this one sliver of the market, which is kind of pre-IPO, late-stage AI companies. And we're about to see that transition into the public market. And so I don't think anybody knows what exactly— how exactly that's going to play out. But it does feel like we're on the precipice of something pretty interesting.

It is wrong to think that it will play out as a binary one-day liquidity wave, correct? Because there will be lockups and then many LPs will receive their stakes and want to hold. Some venture capital firms, registered investment advisors will hold as well. So we're looking at like, how exactly does that change the market? Because there will be the optionality of liquidity, but not necessarily actual cash on balance sheets ready to go into the next generation of startups.

Yeah.

I mean, one thing I've been thinking about, if you guys remember 2021, you had like CrowdStrike and Datadog were public and then you were investing in like private CrowdStrike and Datadog, right? And there was Databricks, right? And you could go invest in Databricks and it was the same business model. You sort of understood how this thing was going to trade when it was liquid. And I think that's what's, that's what's interesting about AI right now is like there's no real public comps for any of these private companies. But as soon as one of these companies, let's say Anthropic is the first to get out, as soon as one of these companies gets out, then I think you actually have a better valuation framework for the rest of the market. And so I think it is a healthy thing for the market when you kind of can look at the liquid, you can look at the illiquid, you see how these things trade and it will provide a lot of clarity, I think, to the private market.

Why is, why is SpaceX not a good comp for Anthropic, OpenAI, and then even the smaller firms?

I think it is. I think SpaceX was the beginning of this. Obviously, it's held up really well for all the volatility. And every day, my brother and I always joke of like, you know, every day you see a news headline that's like stock was up 2% and it's like stocks go up and down 2% every day. Nothing happened. There's always some reason why it happened, by the way. You know, it's like, oh, and up and down. I mean, SpaceX has done— has held up well. You know, there have been liquidity unlocks. Everyone was super worried going into the liquidity unlock. In the media and nothing. It was like a non-event, you know. We're still—

I remember the day of the big unlock somehow traded up like 7%, if I remember correctly.

Like a short squeeze where all these guys were short and then they got squeezed out. But yeah, um, so I do think SpaceX is the bellwether. And it's not— to your point, it's not going to be a one-day event. But I think it's an exciting time that these companies are growing so, so fast. I think there's a lot of demand for these companies. And, um, it's going to be interesting to see that play out. I think the second thing that we're paying attention to, and I think a lot of investors are focused on, is just like the full stack of the data center buildout that's happening. Yes, there's— I wrote this blog post maybe a year and a half ago. Server, steel, and power are kind of the 3 pillars. Obviously, everyone's paying attention to the server side, which is chips. Steel side is the industrial side. You know, you have Elon now making his own gas turbines. There's a lot of emphasis on the industrial revolution component of this where, you know, we're out of— we can't make more, more of the components that go into data centers. And then, of course, the power piece where everyone's looking at at, hey, we know how to get power for the next— there's no, there's no more power for the next 24 months. And what are the timelines? And with these CapEx, these big CapEx projects, you have to plan 2, 3, 4 years out. Who even knows what the world's going to look like 2, 3, 4 years from now? So I think that, you know, deeper below the cusp of OpenAI, Anthropic, the frontier models, is all the things that make them possible. And I think the market is pretty well educated on the compute market now, and investors are familiar with all parts of the stack. But I think there's gonna be a lot of innovation all across that.

Do you think that the opportunity in the grid, opportunity in power plays out more like the Neo cloud market than the rocket launch market? Like I've always said, like, ah, it'd be amazing if we had an Elon of solar or even an Elon of nuclear. And there's some nuclear companies that are doing really well. Some of those founders could go on to build like the trillion-dollar energy company. But it feels like everyone's focused on it. There's so much capital flowing into energy. Default would be very oligopolistic. Bunch of great outcomes, but not this winner-take-all behemoth. But what's your model for where energy and grid buildout goes?

Yeah, my mental model is probably closer to the Elon case than NeoCloud case, and I can explain why. I think on the NeoCloud side, the primary innovation was financing. That's, that's sort of how I look at it.

It's like real estate private equity deal.

Yeah, exactly. Like we're buying a bunch of chips from Jensen and Jensen And to his credit, was an amazing player in the ecosystem and has helped really build the ecosystem. He made CoreWeave what CoreWeave is today. There was sort of this moment where CoreWeave realized we can buy these chips, we can finance them with Blackstone, somebody is going to finance the GPUs. So there's a lot, a lot of financing innovation. Now there's a lot of companies that have followed suit. Obviously, you need to be a good dealmaker. But in some ways, you know, you could start a NeoCloud tomorrow. You know how to do it. Getting access to power is hard. It's not easy. But there's 15 NeoClouds. There's going to be more. I think by contrast, and my partner Sean Maguire always has a great framework around this on the hardware side, he wrote this hardware manifesto long before hardware was cool. And he had this concept of, you know, in hardware there's potential energy and these hardware companies spend 5, 6, 7, 8 years building this potential energy. And it's because they're doing real, very difficult R&D work. And then at some point that potential energy converts into kinetic energy. And that's when stock prices move and And you see that with SpaceX, which took 24 years to bake, and you see that with some of these hardware companies. And so when we, you know, at Sequoia, as we're looking at the energy ecosystem, we've sort of chosen a few places to make investments. Sean was on the show talking about Valor, which is our nuclear investment. Last week, we announced our investment in a company called Form Energy, which is doing grid-scale batteries. That's a company founded by the guy who ran the energy business. He actually started the energy business at Tesla, a guy named Yet-Ming Chang, who is He's probably one of the top 3 battery experts alive today. So just a very, very strong team. And they're 9 years in. They spent 9 years building these billion-dollar batteries. They just signed up a big project with Google earlier this year. And so— and then you ask yourself, okay, well, we're gonna have a lot of solar and wind. Are we gonna have a lot of batteries on the grid? I think the answer is yes.

Yeah.

And then it's— you have a company that spent 9 years building IP to go put those batteries on the grid. And then this unique moment. To go scale that up for AI. So I think there's going to be, to your question, like I think there's going to be three, four, five interesting kind of companies with deep, deep IP that you can go invest in. But I think it's different from the Neo Cloud space where what you really need is capital and access to GPUs, whereas on the grid side, you actually need you ideally want some real fundamental IP that is that is difficult to replicate. And then of course, you need access to capital, right? So I think on the nuclear stuff, what's interesting and a lot of these companies, you need to raise billions of dollars before. you get to the promised land. And so that alone— one thing I say to founders when I meet a lot of seed stage founders in hardware, and I'm like, even if I think your IP is amazing, I can't invest if I don't think you can raise $1 billion because you just won't get there, right? And you'll end up getting consolidated. And so access to capital, um, and, and consolidating capital obviously is an important part of building these companies as well.

So what are you looking for? Like, what, what, what are the tells of a founder who can raise $1 billion? Is Is it a great storyteller? Is it just actual—

I mean, Isaiah is like a great example because even early on at the seed stage, honestly, if I look at the Gundo crew and I look at Augustus and Isaiah and their ability to sell you their vision was just on another level even before they had raised like $10 million. Like, when they were raising their first round, they were just different. Like, they had a natural talent, and then they've refined that. And you have to be in a category that allows you to sell this vision of a trillion-dollar opportunity, $100 billion opportunity, what that is. But I think you have that, like, natural talent and selling ability that is somehow inherent to some people.

Mm-hmm.

Like, there are people that are just way less compelling naturally, and they get more compelling over time 'cause they get more confident.

Yeah.

In their business and round after round and hundreds of pitch meetings and meetings with candidates, and they just get better and better and better, but then some people just start on, you know, at the 10-yard line, and they just refine it a little bit, and then they can go from raising the $5 million round to raising $1 billion.

Yeah. In our partner meeting, we actually talk about this a lot. I mean, actually, this is probably the most important question that you have to get right in early-stage investing, and the framework we often use is, would you go work for this person? Because I think everything is sort of subsumed in that. Like, if other people have to be willing to go work for this person, the decision of whether to go work for a person is effectively putting 100% of your equity in this one company, right? So would you put 100% of your equity in this company? And, um, and often, you know, we had Mateo, the former Energy CEO, come in. You have people kind of come and say, wow, like, this person seems really serious. This person seems like they're, you know, they have an incredible track record. In his case, he had built the energy business at Tesla. Um, they've sort of done something that's really impressive early on in life. Um, and I believe, and then there's a clarity of thought component, which is, so sometimes pitches are coherent and sometimes they're not coherent, right?

Like there's sort of a coherent story, which is like, okay, you know, we're—

Form Energy is building an iron-air battery. Uh, iron's really cheap. Air's really cheap. That is why they're building an iron-air battery, right? It's so simple and yet kind of makes sense.

Mm-hmm.

And then it's like, well, why do we need batteries? Well, you know, there's, there's no sun out at night. You know, it, it's really simple things. I think something we look for in a lot of these conversations with founders is clarity of thought. If you can articulate to an investor who's not the most sophisticated— the investors are never the most sophisticated people around the table— if you articulate to an investor a very clear articulation of why this vision makes sense, why your plan makes sense, then you're able to articulate that to an employee. And then we have people like Sean who have PhDs in physics and can go incredibly deep on the science and technology behind it. And you sort of marry those 2 things. And I think that's kind of how we make these decisions. And we spend a lot of time with people. We spend a lot of time getting to know the founders as well. So Matteo, I had known for 6 years before we invested. Sean knew Isaiah for a long time before we invested.

Yep, that's right.

You're not making the decision in a single pitch.

How are you thinking about trying to time the acceleration of the real world? Right now, it feels like it's much faster to do things on your computer, and it's creating efficiencies and a bunch of it for a bunch of people and companies and all these things. but we're not seeing the kind of GDP growth that has at least been predicted. And it feels like in order to have that, we're gonna need to see, one, a general advancement of models and AI models that can actually be a drop-in sort of addition to your team or replacement or whatever that ends up But it feels like we're gonna need to make a lot of— do a lot of things in the real world to feel that acceleration. And even with the launch of Astra, we haven't actually played this video on the show yet today, but somebody had basically hooked up Astra, like, and it can just drive your car now, right? And it's not designed to— it wasn't something that the model was designed to do, but the models are getting sufficiently advanced at understanding the world. And it feels like we're on the cusp of this acceleration of the real world, which I think is going to be way— it's very a magical experience to say, generate me an image of this scene in my head and be able to see it on your screen. It's going to be 100 times more magical to be like, make this thing in the world. And then it just makes it, right? And that can be applied to real estate to building widgets, the list goes on and on. But robots building other robots and building things, I feel like will be the greatest investment cycle ever and much more exciting for normal people than just, hey, we made this software feature in 2 weeks versus 20 weeks.

Yeah, 2 thoughts on that. I mean, one is I think it's so important to synchronize the timeline of your investment with the timeline. It's your point on like, uh, you need, you need to understand when the market opportunity is going to convert. And ideally, you're synchronizing the timeline of the company with the timeline of the market. So for example, if you're trying to solve AI power and you're starting today, it's kind of late. Yeah, we need, we need more power like literally in a year. So it's like, you hopefully you've been working on that problem already for a few years. If you're trying to solve nuclear and that's a 2040s problem, great, you can synchronize the timeline of being an early-stage company chasing an opportunity that is really going to hit its inflection in the 2040s. So I think So I think that synchronization matters. And then I think the second thing, you know, it is interesting that VCs have really shifted toward hardware investing, right? There's this broader trend. I think Andrew came on the show and talked about SendCutSend. Like, we've been doing a lot of stuff in the hardware reindustrialization space. Part of that is because of this feeling that the timelines are so fast in the digital world that it's hard to create moats and it's hard to create value. So I think there's a reason why in hardware there's a feeling that you can create moats over many, many years. And eventually, obviously, the ultimate moat, to your point, is going to be the machine that makes the machine, right? It's the, it's the, it's the reindustrialization of this country. And I hope we're going to get there. I think we're going to get there. I do think sci-fi kind of preempts reality. And so Isaac Asimov obviously imagined the most— in I, Robot, the most valuable company in the world is the company that makes all the robots. And there's a reason I think a lot of investors own Tesla for that reason, because they think that he's going to, he's going to win on Optimus. So anyways, I think there's a lot of companies that should benefit from acceleration in the physical world. And there's a lot of investment going in there.

That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, working it down with us. Thank you, guys. Excited to have you back soon. Always a good time to see you. Have a great rest of your day.

Appreciate the takes.

We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We have Mikey Schulman, co-founder, CEO of Suno, here with us in the waiting room.

Let's bring him in.

I go.

I go.

Yes, since I think since you came on the show last, we have all been completely one-shotted by Suno. It's time to talk about Suno safety. Every time we come into the studio, we're blasting Suno songs. We have a lot of fun with them. Make a Suno song for our friends, whatever the news is of the day. We're having a great time. But how are things going with you?

Much better now that I know that you guys are enjoying the product. Yeah.

Yeah.

I will say, okay, I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give you like, I'm gonna give you, uh, I'm gonna tell you one thing. I'm gonna tell you one thing and then I'm gonna tell you another thing.

Okay.

This is compliment sandwich?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, compliment sandwich.

Let's go.

You don't need to compliment sandwich me. That's fine.

No, no, no. So one, the product is like the, the AI, you know, is probably the AI product that has brought me the most belly laughs, period. Like, it's just a joy to use.

Yep.

Daily user. Like, we have so much fun with it on the team. I've pulled it up in situations in my own home that I think are hilarious to me, less funny to members of my family. But anyways, the product is just amazing. It's wonderful. I get so much joy out of it. I think the software quality is bad in the app. Like, I think that it—

Not on the model side.

Not on the model side. Like, the model is amazing. Like, the things that matter are— like so good. Like, it's so unbelievably fast. And I haven't even tried the new model yet. But the actual software, I think you've been—

Hard to navigate?

No, no, no.

It just feels like it's kind of buggy and it feels like you guys— feels like you've been vibe coding too hard. I want you guys to like, you know, basically do some cycles on just cleaning it up a little bit.

Okay.

More optimal.

What do you think?

That's a good compliment sandwich. Let me, um, let me say I only got bread on one half.

The final bread, and it's amazing. No, no, no, no, the actual quality of the, of the output is, is at the level of listenable. Whereas like video generators, you're looking at it and like no matter how much ever you put in, it's still like not quite there. This is like, it passes the Turing test of like listenable, so you can have fun with it. Anyway, continue.

I appreciate that. We should probably stop releasing models while you guys are on air so you can actually have some time to test them out. But, um, yeah, well, I'll just take the opportunity to talk about what we're doing today, which is releasing a new model.

Okay.

And so way better than the last one.

Okay.

It's actually way faster. And so you'll see the way that you can use it when the songs come back so faster is just very different, much more fun, way more expressive.

Wait, it's faster?

I don't know why it needs to be faster. Like, it was already fast enough because I would type the prompt and I would click the button and then it'd be available immediately. And I think that's because you stream it in, right? Like, it's still rendering in the background, is that right?

No, we're still streaming it. Okay.

But no, when I, when I feel like it's slow is when I'm, when I'm in one of these, you know, when I'm one-shot by a song but I want to change like a certain word in the lyrics and I'm like, change this or that.

Okay, well then B6 has you covered.

But yeah, that, that was the thing when I When we first started using— when we first got OneShot by Suno, we would fire off a prompt and put your phone down and be like, I'll come back to it in like, you know, 5 minutes, see where it's at. But then it'd be back in like 20 seconds.

Yeah.

Okay.

I think the thing that people don't realize is that when you're building things in entertainment, actually the loop speed, how quickly you give something to your users, ends up mattering a lot. We can actually measure that pretty directly and we know how much it matters. Going back to the model, so V6 is better, it's faster, the songs are way better, it's more expressive. We have V6 Wild, which is a model that makes just some of the most interesting stuff, even though the songs themselves may not be quite as good. I'm having a ton of fun with that one. And it's actually like a big day for Suno and actually for the whole music industry where this is done in concert in partnership with some of the best music companies in the world. It's really kind of laying out a blueprint for how we think AI can really grow the entire music ecosystem. So we're super, super excited.

Yeah, we were talking to John—

Say more on that.

Yeah, we can go there, sure.

On the partnership part?

Yeah, the partnership.

Everyone's waiting for a partnership. Everyone's been interested in how the economics will flow, what happens to songs that are used in training. Obviously, there's a fair use argument. There's obviously the Spotify, I want a royalty on everything forever. And it feels like this is the start of moving the conversation forward at least one click.

This is definitely an amazing start.

Yeah.

The way I think about this is, yes, these are now not only new business lines and new revenue streams for rights holders, for artists, for all kinds of creatives, Most importantly, these are really long-term partnerships that let us build products together with the greatest music companies, with the best creatives. And the thing that's so exciting is that for the first time in a long time, there's actually product differentiation. There's the ability to build things that are just different. And I think we've been so ingrained in the last 20 years just to think about digital music as one thing. And so we'll be releasing more products in the near future that let you play with with the content from your favorite artists when those artists opt in. When users play with their content, the revenues that are attributable to those users, a portion of that will flow to those artists. And then again, just building more from that in the future of what should the future of music look like? What are the most engaging fan experiences? How do we pull people deeper into music and change the place that music has in their lives to change the place that music has in culture? And the thing that's so amazing is that that there's kind of acknowledgement from all sides here. Like, we have a very good start. We don't know what the— all of the products should look like, and we're excited to build them together.

How does AI video play into this? I noticed that when I open Suno, I often get served a vertical video feed of other Suno creations that are often AI video animated in a pretty convincing way. Like, you get a full music video basically. Is that something that you're planning to— is it already available for everyone? Is there just a button that can make these, or are there sort of like more pro creators that are using outside models, bringing a music video to the platform?

It's a great question. Right now, that is mostly creators bringing outside technologies to bear. I would just back up though and think the purpose of Suno is actually to inspire you to do things that you haven't done and not just to do the old thing of scrolling again. And so what you may have noticed is those videos are actually really tailored to get you to lean in, to take a piece of content. You can actually remix it right off of that video. I think we're not used to thinking of ourselves as creators, us mere mortals. Maybe you guys are. You guys are, you know, on TV every day.

Sure.

But it feels amazing to be creative. And just getting people over the hurdle of, actually, I am a creator, And I will find it really enjoyable to be creative. That's kind of the magical spark that we're trying to bring to people.

Yeah, and I have that all the time. John will send me a Suno song, and I'll be thinking to myself, John, even though John, even though all I know, I know that John just wrote like a handful of sentences, and he put the words and the letters in the right orders, and it got that output, I'm still thinking there's a spark of like, John is a genius for putting this set of ideas together, and I know that he was, like thinking about the lyrics and how to arrange it and things like that. And so that joy of creation and compacting it into something that— and again, I just, I've always seen this as like net new, right? Like, John, like the idea of like a gag song, you know, like a joke has been around forever. But the friction to do that—

I thought we were enjoying it specifically because it allowed us to go after music that was basically low TAM. So we could make a song about the most feared lawyer, about John Quinn, a corporate lawyer that would never exist in any timeline other than when you drop the cost of creation to effectively zero. Then you can actually get this. And I thought that was just us, but when I was scrolling Suno, I saw similar experiences happening in other pockets. Like, someone made a song about the Revolutionary War, and they took a bunch of history, and it's like George Washington. Have you seen this video? I don't know.

No.

But it's all animated with AI. And I was like, oh, like, this sounds like a 4th of July banger, but it's historical. But no one is really going to sit there and arrange that. And all of a sudden, you have this, like, very niche overlap of, like, you want a July 4th hard-hitting song, but you also want to learn history and and like it puts it together in this really weird niche way, which I think is like happening all over the place.

Yeah, look, let me say 2 things to that. One is I'll plug, you can go all the way down to a TAM of 1 or 2 people. You guys, I'm sure, have iMessages with one another. You can actually access Suno right from iMessage if you have the latest version of the app. And so it'll just be easier to interact there.

Let's go.

But the other thing I would say is I think maybe the best examples, I don't know if you guys saw, this so-called Oreo Gate.

No.

Of, oh, this is a lady who took the text messages from her mom's chat about her kids eating Oreos or sending Oreos to school and just using music as a platform to express, I don't know, what is special and absurd and banal about everyday life. And when I think about what was the alternative for her to be expressive like that, to use her vantage point, she basically would have had to become a stand-up comic to bring this to life. And now you can use something like music to do this in an entirely new way. And it's something that I think like tons and tons of people really can relate to on a fundamental level.

How do you think about all the ways other than speed and overall feeling of music or musical quality going from, you know, model generation to model generation. One thing I noticed with the last generation was that it would just constantly be referencing like glass in different ways. Like in a bunch of different songs, it would come back to this, like, you know, the glass shattering, you know.

Yeah, I was talking to John Curtis about this.

To me, it was like a tell that—

Like, Suno developed It's not this, it's that. Yeah, it's not this, it's that, or you're absolutely right. Like the Suno version of that was different, but it seemed to exist. How much are you hunting for those tells?

You know, it's a, it's a really tricky thing in music. Unlike, let's say, the big labs, LLMs, intelligence, there are no benchmarks. And so these questions of taste end up mattering a lot, lot more. And even just measuring these things is really hard. So we are always on the hunt for that telltale sign. And then, yeah, there's a good amount of judgment that goes into how do we fine-tune, how do we post-train these models. Actually, what we're releasing today, having both a V6 and a V6 Wild, V6 Wild being very differently post-trained to be way more interesting and basically a little less good at making full songs, It's kind of a start at bridging that of how do we make sure that people actually have the most creative experience that they can.

Back on the deal with Warner Music Group, BMG Believe, I'm interested to understand how you're talking to investors, how you see the market evolving over the long term, because the the most extreme economic share might be something like what we see with Spotify. I think they give maybe 30% of top line to artists across everything. There's a huge stake of revenue that goes to creators. Still a $100 billion company, fantastic business. We love Spotify. And I'm interested to think about, as the industry outside of Suno, but just AI-generated tools, what type of economic structure would you see landing in equilibrium?

Yeah, I think about this in a couple of ways. There are things where we can think about how do we take the existing technology and really lower the cost and give it to way more people. And that's what you said before, and you would never be savoring these moments if it weren't so easy to make music.

Yeah.

And then there's the whole other side of things of how do we actually now apply this to markets that people couldn't even fathom before. And this is actually something that I kind of live and breathe every day. If you rewind a couple of years ago and people think music is really small, I don't want to invest in it. And then you realize that it's not just that old TAM. Actually, what we're doing is fundamentally changing how people interact with media, how people entertain themselves, and realizing that that actually is much bigger. And so to answer the question more directly, this is actually evolving. This is like we have some economic models now We have a lot of alignment to build products together and figure out the economic models that go with those products instead of having to figure everything out all at once. The crazy time that we live in about AI progressing so quickly, we kind of don't have the luxury of trying to get it right in this very moment because things change so, so fast.

What's the— what is the demand side from consumers on editability, the pro workflow? Obviously, the model is outputting basically a complete waveform, but you can also use AI to deconstruct that into stems, into notes, into sheet music, and then a more experienced musician can go in and make fine-grained tweaks, and just like you can generate an image and bring it into Photoshop if you want. What is demand like? What are you building there? Where do you see that side of the business going?

We have a pretty broad product suite here from— you can type in a few words or access it from iMessage all the way down to Suno Studio, which is our digital audio workstation, which is really professional workflows. What we've seen is actually by making those workflows not only different and powerful, but actually much more fun, more of the professional tooling ends up just appealing to average people who fall in love with making music. I think this is a lot like I might buy the signature guitar of my favorite guitarist. I don't think I'm gonna be a famous guitarist, but it actually makes me feel really good knowing that I use the same tools that the greats use, and it makes me feel better about my creativity. And I think that it's only for lack of— or it's a failure of imagination to think I can't actually fall in love with digital tools in the same way. Like, I know I'm using the same toolset, at least in part, that makes some of the best music. I feel more creative as a result. I fall in love with making music, and there are virtuous cycles there.

What are you learning from the early sparks of progress in AI video? I was trying to think about the biggest AI video, the most viral AI video from last year, and I was— I couldn't put my finger on it easily. I can think about the previous year because that was Harry Potter Balenciaga. That was the moment we were like, wow, this really like worked. And I think for this year, music like Rubbers by Phoenix Flexing, it's now out that it was AI generated. I don't know if he used Suno or not, but it sparked the conversation. And then I'm wondering what next year looks like if we are trying to pattern match against the ebbs and flows of progress in AI video.

It's a great question. I almost think video is having a super interesting moment right now, as there's a lot of new models and they're getting more convincing. They're getting easier to use. And so we look at that very closely. I think the one maybe easy thing for me to say here is that actually speed ends up mattering a lot.

Mm-hmm.

And as it becomes more affordable to really iterate a lot on video, because if you rewind, let's say, 6 months, it's actually kind of prohibitive to make a full-length video.

Yeah.

I would imagine that we're going to see some very interesting cultural moment. And I think of these less as technology per se. It's actually you gave the technology to somebody who has an interesting point of view, who's able to express that point of view to the world with these tools. And so I think it's very hard to predict exactly which point of view that will be. very cultural zeitgeisty moment.

Yeah, I remember I talked to Ahmad Mostaq.

There are gonna be, there's gonna be at least one very big cultural moment. I will tell you that. That's all I can say right now, but there's gonna be a big cultural moment involving music and technology.

Yeah, I was talking to Ahmad Mostaq after Stable Diffusion launched years ago. This was maybe 2023, 2022. And he was predicting that by 2024, 2025, there would be full movies that were AI-generated. And we kind of got there, but they didn't really break through. But AI video is actually really successful. It's just taken a very different approach, and it's diffused in an interesting way where it's making its way into VFX workflows all over the place, and it's become very useful. But there hasn't been, like, the fully AI-generated, you know, movie that is so good it gets over the hill of, like, oh, I don't want to like it, but I have to like it because it's good. And I'm wondering if that will be what next year in AI music looks like. It's a tool that's in every studio, every production, and it's something that certain artists take off the shelf occasionally, but it's not fully AI-created albums that are out, but it's also not fallen by the wayside. Is that a reasonable prediction, or do you think that's too conservative?

No, I think that's actually not too conservative for the reason that an album is a— or even a song is a point of view. And it's very hard to just one-shot the point of view that is going to to really resonate with the whole world.

Yeah.

It does happen. But I think of this as it is a process of refining your own point of view over and over again. And you may use an AI toolset. You may not use an AI toolset. And so I think that a year from now, it's actually quite mundane that there's a lot of AI in music. It's used in every single part of the production chain. Some of it will be soon. Some of it will not be soon. But the idea that there's just going to be charts full of one-shotted AI bangers, to me, actually kind of misses the point of— it doesn't express the point of view of the artist. And I think that this is kind of a faulty comparison to, let's say, we just saw OpenAI maybe prove a huge math theorem.

Yeah.

And this is something that is long-running, that is verifiable. Music is just not that way. And so I'm not sure we expect to see the state— the same types of things.

Wait until I'm spinning up 1 million agents to command 1 million, 10 billion instances of Suno to create the giga banger chart topper that sits at Billboard Hot 100 number 1 for 100 years straight.

Yes, yes, the final song. I'm sure you can do it.

Um, yeah, what was your—

what was your takeaway from like the Astra launch over the weekend because the lots of like Blender models, lots of video games created. And I feel like the, the answer isn't going like, like a million one-shotted web games were spawned this weekend. And I could not be more optimistic about GTA 6 blowing out the predictions. At the same time, I feel like as soon as I stop playing GTA 6, I'm going to get a text from a friend with a really hilarious microgame that they vibe-coded that's GTA 6 but for TBPN or for tech or something. And I'm going to be, oh, this is cool. This is the special thing that only makes sense to me and you. And so, is that how you process that? Or is there anything new on the overall AI capability side that's exciting to you these days?

Maybe I'm too dumb to predict the future. And so, I would just look at, let's say, the last revolution there, which would be Roblox letting people really start to make their own games.

Oh, yeah.

And, at the beginning, it starts really small and people are really just playing their own games. And eventually, the technology progresses where you get more of that power law, you get people playing other people's games, et cetera. And then, you make an ecosystem there. It's not crazy that we'll see something similar there. But again, I think a game is a very— a game's purpose is to be played by people. And it is very different from the general intelligence model of things. And so I think it's hard to really apply logic from one into the other.

Yeah.

Do you think that— how much should we read into the iPhone Duo launch? Do you think Apple's so Suno-pilled that they want, you know, every person to have more real estate to be able to make music? What's your read?

I really hope Apple's so Suno-pilled. You know, humbly, I don't think we're the reason that they're making that phone, but if you want to suggest that, I'm very happy to take it.

I'm suggesting that.

Yeah.

As somebody who makes mobile apps, do you— have you guys— are you guys already looking into like the implications of this and how it'll like— how you're going to need to change your application to be able to adapt to this kind of thing? Kind of new—

Might just be one prompt, make it work on the Duo. For a lot of developers, that might be the answer.

Yeah, absolutely. I think about this as opportunity of if there is different interaction with your phone, we actually are able to now inspire you at different times. And like, you can take out your phone and do something without unlocking it. You can use one camera versus the other camera. You know, I don't know what the plans are for the Vision Pro, but when I think about a final form of Suno. It's actually, how do I get a Vision Pro app that I can put on and conduct an orchestra? And so I think when we think about interfaces, this is where in the creativity game we will just work on forever. There's no end to working on how we delight people by letting them interact with technology in new ways.

Last question. Have you ever— have you guys ever run any billboards or wheat-pasting campaigns Not that I know of.

Why? If you, uh, if you have good ideas for billboards, we should talk.

Well, I just feel like you should be running a billboard that says, make a song with a sentence. And you should just go, go hard on that. Because it's just like people, people need to experience the magic of this product. It's just like—

We gotta not get people to pick up their phones while they're driving. That would be, that would be bad. But we gotta place those billboards in the right place.

Everybody's in Waymos now. Tesla Cybercabs, maybe.

Bull case for billboards. Waymos, you can—

No, no, no. It's actually a bear case because—

Oh, you're looking down.

Everyone's going to be on their phone.

Yeah, maybe.

It's going to be rough.

Anyway, thank you so much for having us on.

The future is bright. You know, you're going to have— you're going to be sitting in your Waymo. You're going to have a lot more time to be creative. Way better than driving. Way safer than driving.

Yeah.

Yeah. You say nothing from my end, thanks. And then you go back to making Suno songs. Great to see you, Mikey. Congrats on the launch. See you guys. I'm excited to try the new model.

A little, uh, a little high this time. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Uh, Thieves rated The Renoir Museum in the latest French art heist. We'll get to that story after we chat with Keith Rabois, Managing Director at Coastal Ventures, returning to the show for the 4th, 5th, 6th time. It's always a great chat. Keith, how are you doing?

Great. It's great to be back.

Have you been following this French art heist? Is this bearish for France?

I have not been following it. I don't know how I missed it. I was just in France last week and somehow—

Oh, you were in France last week? Are you guilty? Let's figure it out.

Yeah, maybe. You never know. Maybe I was stealing, purloining some artwork.

Okay, okay. Well, you're back in America.

You're like, private markets are too frothy. I'd rather swipe some fine art.

Yeah. Are they too frothy? It feels like there's a lot of value. A lot of the companies, they're growing revenue. The products work. They're magical sometimes. Is it too frothy right now?

Well, I think the revenue traction is real, as you pointed out. And then there's a variety of different categories of companies. Some are producing meaningful margin on that revenue and others are not. And so I don't think you can paint with one broad brush and say, hey, all these companies, you know, are worth X or Y or not worth X or Y. You have to kind of understand the fundamental drivers. But many of these companies have significant traction. I'm not worried about that. And, you know, I don't think multiples are the right way to evaluate private companies typically anyway. But if you work backwards from 2030 and say which of these companies are going to be sustained, which ones have durable advantages, as I like to talk about it or communicate it through accumulating advantages, that's less clear. Like, the traction is off the charts by any historical norms. The ability to go to $100 million in revenue from 2 years or so or hundreds of millions in 4 years. Basically unprecedented. But you still do have to ask questions about what's the sustainability of that revenue, not just because customers may or may not change their mind or there may be new competitors, but like different— the way the ecosystem evolves around AI is not at all easy to forecast. So we struggle with this and debate this in our partner meetings constantly. The founders are impressive, the teams are impressive, the revenue and the adoption is impressive, and even the usage often is impressive. But if you still said, is this gonna be an iconic company that's around for 20, 30 years? In many cases, the question is not so— the answer is not so obvious. Now, if you play your cards correctly, you may be able to get acquired.

Yeah.

And that's— that can be fine.

No, and it feels like— it feels like the, the, the powers that be in AI— I'm thinking of one guy, I won't name him— is almost not willing to let any AI companies fail at the moment. At this moment.

At the moment, he is playing an interesting— so that company mints money. Yeah, they're growing really fast and they have lots of profits. If you're in those shoes, you know, and your revenue depends upon people buying what you sell that are mostly AI companies, the strategy is incredibly coherent. Now they are starting to move from being a platform company to a product company. You can see it with the recent acquisition. Yeah, as they start shipping products, maybe they ship products in other areas. They will compete with more people than they ever have before. Right now, any AI growth is great for Nvidia, but as they start having their own products, that may change how people perceive them and how they perceive others. And I think to continue and sustain their growth, for whatever set of reasons they believe they need to have their own products.

Yeah. And there's one thing that's interesting is there's so many companies that are marked up into the tens of billions of dollars that are actually insignificant to the overall AI trade, but their valuations are such that if one were to fail, you would have all over the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, all the newspapers, $30 billion company— Yeah.

It would be like a WeWork or Theranos-level failure. Which, like, it would be for a very different reason, but like, it wouldn't be that big.

Yeah, and I think that the market would be able to process it generally. But like you said, there's just— when the cash is flowing, there's an incentive to make sure that, hey, let's buy this company an extra 2 years, right? Even when there's no other investors lining up to back the company.

Yeah, I mean, it's in self-interest. The, the longer the AI wave continues, the better it is for Nvidia, without a doubt. And the bigger the amplitude, almost surely is better for Nvidia, unless and until there's a better version of Nvidia or somebody obviates their competitive advantages, which could happen. It always happens in technology at some point. You know, we're seeing this play out now. What's the future of Google? Who knows? But that was, you know, even 5 years ago, for even formulating that question kind of felt silly.

Mm-hmm.

But now it feels very realistic that, you know, a chat or similar interface may displace all of searches. I mean, the advertising revenue will, will like lag.

Mm-hmm.

And so the business, the business itself will show signs of life for a while. But people I know, and not all of my friends and colleagues, in different fields are tech-forward, have substituted huge fractions of what used to be searches with things they do with ChatGPT. Yeah.

No, the last 3 things— yeah, the last— obviously, I'm quite biased here, at least like— but I went from last year not making any real commercial decisions with AI to suddenly everything I buy, all that research is happening within ChatGPT. And I feel like I'm buying better products and I'm having a better experience, right?

Mm-hmm.

I don't need to— I have like very specific, you know, I have very specific things. Like my frustration with Amazon was always, I just wanna buy products that where the company has been around for 50 years, right? I don't wanna buy these, the dropshipped thing with a name that doesn't make any sense, that's going to fail within the first year or whatever. I want to buy the thing that I'm willing to pay 30% more to buy the thing where the company has been around for 50 years. And so now, I can—

Now, you can afford it. It's great.

Yeah, but I'm talking—

The example he uses is like paper towels or like the paper towel holder. That's very funny. Jordi, where are you? Anyways, I wanted to get right into how you are— like, what is your— how much are you pricing in a data center freeze or real friction to bringing in? And what is your mental model for what happens then? Because on one hand, existing compute that's in a powered shell becomes potentially a lot more valuable and starts to trade hands as certain companies are able to monetize it much better than others. But then there's potentially millions of GPUs that aren't plugged in that the world is figuring out how do we shuffle these around the world to get them to places that they can be plugged in and the capital flows that happen there and the impacts to the labor market. There's so many downstream implications of that. And when you both sides of the political aisle that are realizing, hey, I can get points for pushing back here, then it's hard to imagine that there isn't very real friction ahead.

So, let me simplify the AI exposure first and then come back to that. The most devastating thing to the frothy, high hype and the traction that we're seeing with AI and the funding of it from VCs would be if Anthropic and/or OpenAI have a blip in their public exits, their public IPOs. Do they have to show metrics over the next month to first few quarters that cause people to value either company less than the current belief that they will trade in the trillions? So they could have a miss on revenue traction, a miss on margins, something, something Like, that would be catastrophic and immediately reset virtually all valuations in the AI world and probably deprive half the companies that are raising money from access to capital.

Well, yeah. And I've been asking—

I've been asking that happen. I'm not saying that's going to happen or is likely. And I think if they miss, it would be more on the margin side than on the revenue side right now. But if they do, everybody is predicating the idea— their valuations in new investments in dollars on the idea that you can build a trillion-dollar company within the lifecycle of a venture fund. There's 2 examples currently. And there's several companies that people believe have the potential to get there. If that changes, and you cannot predict that more trillion-dollar companies can be created, then the valuations that people are investing in and the dollars that are being do not make that much sense. Let me backtrack one second. Like, basically in the history of venture, a very successful company was $10 to $50 billion, maybe $100 billion at the max. That's like a home run. That's like we all like dreamed about sort of thing. It is possible now that at least one order of magnitude, possibly 2 orders of magnitude, have been added to the upside potential of a startup, which does adjust the prudence and rationality of a VC investing $50 million at $500 million or whatever, whatever the case is. Compared to when I invested in Airbnb, it was at $1.7 million pre or post, $1.7 million.

Crazy.

Yeah. So, that world may or may not be coming back, but certainly, by adding a zero or 2 zeros to the upside potential, you can rationally look yourself in the mirror and say, okay, sure, I'll take a shot on goal here.

But how do some of these investors— and I'm seeing these rounds, let's call them Series B and C stage rounds, a company has a much richer revenue multiple than, let's say, the labs, leading labs, and they're growing often not even necessarily as well, and you know they're not as talent-dense, and all these rounds are getting funded. And that's the place of frothiness that I don't understand, where I don't understand how—

Yeah, I understand.

I mean, but I don't understand how you look at the business and say like, oh yeah, this has a path to a trillion when it's like, okay, every single person working at this company tried to get a job at like 4 other companies, couldn't, and then is now here. And that doesn't mean they're not great and they could very well build a billion-dollar company. But I just, I don't know how you, you underwrite these things to that, to that trillion-dollar mark.

Yeah, it's crazy. No, it's a very astute observation. Nor do I, which is hopefully on your list of companies that are getting funded. that have those 3 criteria. None of them are my investments. But if you told me, like, hey, company is growing at a less rapid clip than the Frontier Labs with less density of talent—

At lower scale, at 100x lower scale.

And wants a higher multiple, my answer would be no. I have some competitors I'll introduce you to if you want. I'll be in France stealing some fine art. I'll go find— I'll go find a startup in France. Like, you know, there's one or two apparently that are quite good. Um, but the, um, fundamental driver though you identified, which is key and a lot of people lose sight of, so it's worth double-clicking on, the critical density of talent does matter.

Yeah.

And so if a company is in the short term at low scale growing at, you know, X clip, that's not that critical if they have the right team assembled against the right challenges. that is investable, you know, up to some dollar amount. And whether you're like multiplying, you know, using Meta's multiple or OpenAI's implied multiple or Nvidia's multiple doesn't matter in the earlier stages if the team is stellar. But your point is the team is often not stellar. Now, it doesn't have to mean the same people that would work at Anthropic or OpenAI, but they have to be world-class at what they do, at their craft. And you have to be able to, you know, assemble a density of them. You know, in some ways you want to find people who are mispriced. And that the labs don't necessarily value you as much as they should. And there's an archetype you can scale a company on, but you still have to believe you're scaling with incredible talent, like top 1 basis point, 10 basis point on some dimensions, to really believe that you're going to create a trillion-dollar business from scratch in less than a decade.

Do you think that differences in philosophy, whether it's P-doom or AGI-pilledness, can create sub-pockets of talent density. We just had Scott Wu on the show, brilliant mathematician, cognition's on a tear.

He—

I don't know if this is just because he's at the application layer, but not a lot of doom, a lot of optimism because he's interfacing with the real world. And I love that energy. And you see with RAMP too, where incredible talent density, but not of the crazy doom scenario, weird— Like, you know, that pocket is a different group. Those folks are really talented, but they have different beliefs. And so I'm wondering if there's— if there's like the hyper talent actually scatters across different pockets of philosophical alignment.

Absolutely. You know, it drives back from Peter's old expression of, you know, you're building a cult. Yeah. Well, think about it. Cults have tenets. Yeah. And so some of that is a philosophy of life. And I think that's right. Like, at Ramp, we're optimistic about the future.

Yeah.

We use technology to improve society, and we're optimistic about, A, our ability historically to do that, and our ability in the future to do it. That's why people come to work at Ramp, and that's what they do every day. And all of them are thinking, like, the world's gonna be better than it was a decade ago, and it's gonna be better than it was 20 years ago, and we're gonna, we're gonna wave our magic wand and make it better if we have to.

Yep, yep. Uh, yeah, I am a firm devotee of the cult of saving time and money. That is for sure. But what do you make of the conversation around doom? There's been this back and forth around regulatory capture and the evolution of this. And I've watched some people from the outside, friends who are not in tech but critique tech from a political angle, and they were upset about the rhetoric leading to potential regulatory capture. But now they are worried about some of the developments in AI, and they're calling for regulation. And so they're sort of begrudgingly giving the labs their due on the calls for regulation. But how have you been processing just this year? Has it updated you at all on how we should think about the probability of the bad outcome and doom and all of that?

Well, I'll be— I think people still start off in life with, you know, orientation optimism or doom.

Yeah.

And, you know, maybe from the time they're like 7 years old, I'm an optimist, I'm a tech optimist, that's what I do. If I wasn't a tech optimist, I wouldn't be investing in tech companies. And there's a question of whether these people should be building or working there or forfeiting their equity if they really believe they're doing something that's bad or evil. Um, in my opinion, like, the world is getting a little tired of some of this because, you know, we had the gloom and doom about jobs. All jobs are going away, there's no jobs. Could still happen, but all the evidence as of today is to the contrary. Every single piece of evidence. There's— you could look through— you could be Sherlock Holmes, you know, look with your magnifying glass. You can't find any evidence that AI is causing— creating job loss. If anything, it's creating jobs.

Yeah.

So, okay, so they're 0 for 1, let's say, as of now. Then they're like, oh my God, the world's gonna end. Okay, well, hard to falsify that. Like, AI jobs, at least you can falsify. You're like, no, that's not happening false. This one's a little harder to falsify. But then I think as a couple of people pushed back today online is, well, articulate how the world ends, because then at least the precepts or the predicates, we can start trying to falsify.

Sure.

And then prove or try to disprove that there's some risk there. And I do think that the reality is the world is always going to be subject to some risk. People like to compare to the advent of the nuclear Yeah. And there's a very strong argument. It's not QED proven, but the nuclear bomb in many ways probably made the world more peaceful. If you went through the arc of history, and how many citizens died as a fraction of the population of the globe in conflict before and after the advent of the nuclear bomb, you'd have a pretty strong case. It certainly wasn't negative.

Yeah.

But was that known that it would play out that way on day one when we dropped a nuclear bomb or 2 in Japan? No. Even there's a scene in Oppenheimer where they don't even really know what it would do to the atmosphere, and they go to consult with Einstein to make sure it's not going to blow up the world. And he's like, doesn't give him a very compelling, definite answer. So the world is not risk-free.

Yeah.

And I think all of us make decisions every single day. We drive a car, we fly in a helicopter, blah, blah, blah, blah, that take that into account. So I don't think a zero defect approach to life really works either for humans.

Mm-hmm.

But I think the burden is on the people arguing for regulation or slowing progress down of articulating, well, what goes wrong, why, and how? And so that people can probe and push back and, and try to evaluate and quantify that risk. And I've yet to see a compelling answer to that that's not just like, oh, I know it because I was working on this and it's really dangerous.

How many of these, how many of these ideas do you think—

Wait, wait, hold on. Let me layer on one other political point. Even if that was 100% true, the idea that politicians are going to make it better is also subject to historical debate.

Yes.

Like, if you said we have a world-class problem on our hands, would you entrust it to the federal government or to a bunch of private citizens? Not obvious.

Yep.

Yeah. Do you think that basically these ideas around PDUUM end up in the S-1? Because I would expect them— I would expect Anthropic to actually put this in the S-1 as a real risk factor. People are saying like, oh, they got to stop the employees from posting this stuff. But if it's coming top down, then—

SEC disclosure?

It could very well end up in there. And it would be—

I used to be a securities litigator, so I can argue a couple of fun points on this. You could say, hey, if the real risk is the world's going to blow up, up, buying Anthropic shares is no more dangerous or risky than buying anything else.

That's a good point. So it's not a particularly—

it's not a risk factor associated with Anthropic.

Sure.

A more nuanced view might be, hey, if the political environment were to appreciate that—

No, no, no. Couldn't you make the argument that there's like— that the company could, with a runaway AI, incur such massive liability that it is Oh, sure.

Yeah, that's probably fair. And there probably will be language like that, but it'll be so toned down that most people won't even understand it. There's an old Peter Thiel lesson here too, which is if you have risk factors, you want the most possible risk factors so no one can really tell which one's really important. So you might see an Anthropic prospectus that has hundreds of pages of risks. So you can't isolate, oh, this is the one I should actually care about.

Got it.

But the most acute risk probably would be something like, hey, we scare enough politicians that, yeah, you know, they implement policy that's particularly in— you know, not necessarily imprudent, but it could— it would— it could, you know, constrain our growth. And that is, you know, a real risk if they can't control their employee, uh, blog post or X posts sooner rather than later.

Is there—

you know, I think people are seeing through some of this.

Sure.

You know, there, there has been been significant exposure of the fact that many of these anti-data center crusades are being funded by China intentionally, by our adversary. There is real proof that these data centers certainly do not waste energy, waste water and things like that. It's kind of silly. It's almost like a walking IQ test. That doesn't mean that the political class doesn't have to rebut it.

Sure.

But it is kind of a walking IQ test for someone if they really believe that data centers are going to Like, make the world run out of water somehow.

Yeah, yeah. It's very ridiculous that the origin of that is just a simple calculation error that was off by a couple orders of magnitude, and it just ran away before the horse could catch up.

Well, fortunately, you can use ChatGPT now to solve math problems. I know.

But it reveals a different problem, which is that people don't do the calculations. They don't even need to. They just go off whatever. Yeah.

And it's one of these— Tell me about your read on the dynamic between effective altruism and venture capital, because I think there's a lot of VCs out there that are just sort of— have generally pretty down-the-middle beliefs about the future, and maybe they're generally optimistic. And then, you get the pitch from a budding young effective altruist, and part of it is like, you know this person is just going to be extremely, generally, at least we've seen points like extremely risk-on, it does qualify as a pretty good venture investment. But there's, I feel like now there's been enough of a pattern of blowups that you need to be like kind of wary, right? Where there's like extreme upside, potentially catastrophic. Your downside's capped as a VC, so you're kind of like, if you blow up, it's more your problem than my problem.

Sure.

But there's so much upside. And so, I just think that that specific dynamic, there will be a book written about it fast forward 10 years, but I'm curious your view on it.

Well, I think venture, when it's practiced as a craft at its best, is a matchmaking exercise between founders and a team and a vision and your views about the world. So, I think that I think that some types of founders with some beliefs about the world, whether you label them, you know, effective altruism or something else, could be a good match for a VC who sits around all day and worries about that stuff and would be a bad match for someone at Founders Fund, let's say.

Mm-hmm.

So I think that, you know, the best relationships between a founder and their investors and a consigliere or board member are when you have alignment, kind of double entendre, Yeah. Between how you think about the world and what's good for society and how the founder does. I do not, for example, I do watch and am friendly with many people who work at Prediction Markets, but I personally don't believe Prediction Markets are good for society. I believe in the Trump quote, and actually, I actually used the line before he did, but there is just another casino for Americans at the And I don't think we need more forms of speculation in the United States for normal people. And the evidence is that 99% of the people who engage in prediction markets are going to lose money. And I don't think that's necessarily a positive thing either. I don't really love sports betting, even though I love sports. But that's why I would probably be a bad match for someone who wants to build Polymarket, even though I like Shane or Kelsey, even though I hang out with Tarek too.

Sure.

But it's just not what I believe that the future of the world makes the world a better place.

Yeah, yeah.

No, and, and I would just say that I think there's a lot of investors that have their beliefs about the way the world should be and then are willing to completely discard their values and beliefs to back companies because they're just like, well, the return is just going to probably be so good.

I got it.

And I would say the percentage of The number of investors that will discard their beliefs in order to get returns is like— it feels like it's like 80%, 90%, 95% in a bull market.

I agree with that assessment. It's just why do you do what you do in your professional career? And at least at KV— and this is true at Founders Fund, too— we wake up and say, is this going to have a positive impact in society? We have more money than we need. We have more money to deploy and invest than we need. We could be doing lots of things with our time, and we want to apply our energies to solving problems that we think would move the world forward. Peter and Trey have pretty strong filters on this stuff, and Vinod and I do, and I think all my colleagues at KB do. But that's not for everybody. Some people work at hedge funds. I don't want to work at a hedge fund either.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is always great.

Great to catch up. It'd been too long.

Too long.

Enjoy that art.

Let's make it happen.

I missed the first month of you guys when I was like on every day.

Yeah, yeah.

Come back soon. Hey, you're always welcome. This came up because I was like, we haven't talked to Keith in like way too long.

It's been way too long.

It's always a good hang. So we'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week. Cheers. Bye-bye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We have David Perell here with us live. Live in the TVPN UltraDome. David, good to see you, man. How you doing? What's up, man? Uh, not much, hanging out, doing the news, talking about the new iPhone, talking about AI.

You were excited for another screen, 2 screens in one.

Yeah, yeah, the news and the Uber over.

Yeah, yeah, you getting one?

Of course.

Really?

Of course.

Okay, the Fold thing.

He's gonna be writing by hand on the screen more.

It's got a bookish look to it.

Yeah, you don't need an iPad Mini anymore.

Yeah.

Do you do the iPad for the notes when you do an interview? Have you toyed with that? You know how Chris Williamson, a lot of people have the iPad there.

Not the full—

I do the full computer, but—

You know, I've actually gone—

That's the key to a good interview.

I've actually gone full smartphone.

OK.

I've gone full smartphone.

Interesting.

So what I do is, if you watch the interviews, on the right side, I just kind And I keep the phone. And then what I can do is I can just do quick pulls of like, hey, check this thing, check that thing.

I feel like if I go on my computer right now, it's like, oh, he's doing something serious. But if I pull out my phone right now, you're like, this guy's really distracted. He's scrolling Reels. It feels a little disrespectful, but you've gotten over that hump.

Well, the other thing is, I don't do it live. So I do a bunch of editing. So I think—

So you might say, hey, I'm going to look this up, and then I'll hit you with the next question. That's what I do.

I say, hey, if I'm looking something up, just keep talking. Prep them on this.

Cool, cool, cool.

And then what I do is I watch every interview back.

Yeah.

Which I've now done 130. So I just, that's my game film, you know?

Yeah, what's been the biggest one? Dark room, dark room.

Yeah, exactly.

Screen on, just locked in.

Just locked in, sitting there.

What's been the most recent interview that you came away from being like, this is what I want the show to be?

There's an interview I did with Dana Joyce. Yeah, um, he's Ted Gioia's brother. You might know the Substacker. And Dana is just so, so well-read. Um, he lost a son when— he lost his first son, I want to say, to sudden infant death syndrome when he was 4 to 6 months old. And you can just feel— you know, our friend Jeremy Giffen has the line where there's pre-fall and post-fall.

Yeah, seriously.

And you can feel when somebody is post-fall, they've sort of wrestled with grief.

Yeah.

Um, and then you combine that with— he's really well-read. And so I flew out to Sonoma, we were for 7 hours, chopped into a 3-hour interview. And it was, it was phenomenal. You know, it's funny because you're asking about recent interview, and this is what I love about YouTube, is that interview did okay, and then the algorithm found how to distribute it like 15 months in, and now it's ripping. So like last month, that interview was our most watched interview in terms of watch time, and it's 2 years old.

Wow, that's fascinating. How much are you thinking about Booking guests that can go viral in the YouTube algorithm. You sitting down with Clav anytime soon?

Yeah.

You know, there's always, like, these people who come up on the cusp.

I don't care about that.

And it's like, if you get this person this time, you got one of the first interviews, you know, playing that game.

No, the game I'm trying to play is— I think Patrick O'Shaughnessy's crushed it. It's like, you know, you have these people who are coming on. Uh, you don't hear a lot of— who's the guy who he did the, the hedge fund guy with, like, John Paul, uh, speak slowly.

Paul Tudor Jones?

Paul Tudor Jones, exactly. Like, I wanna do interviews like that, right? Like, Paul Tudor Jones hasn't done a bunch of podcasts. Get him on. I don't really care about having something that crushes right away. I want, I want it to be like the Paris Review interview series, where you look back, and I want in 50, 60 years, people to be like, this was—

Snapshot.

Yeah, exactly.

That makes sense But to give Patrick even more of his due, I feel like he has a couple of products in one in the sense that, yes, he does those interviews where it's like, wow, I haven't heard from this person in a long time. I'm so glad I did. This is amazing. But then he'll also do like a super timely interview with like Sam Altman about the news and the expectations for that company right then at the turning point. And then he'll also do, you know, a catch-up with Gavin Bates.

Mm-hm.

Regularly, just getting up to speed. And so it feels like he has a couple series, a couple like, okay, this person's coming out of stealth, and it's Gavin Uberti at Etched, and it's the first time you're hearing from this person. He's almost breaking the news. And I'm wondering how calcified you think about different products, if you want to add. We have a few. We have like a lightning round interview, founder, young, hasn't done hours and hours of interviews, comes on for 10 minutes, tell us about. We hit the gong. Another person we might yap with for 30 minutes. We might have somebody in studio for an hour. We have different products. And I'm wondering if you're thinking about where How I Write goes, and whether you want to have different SKUs within the main feed.

Dude, 100%. OK. So here's how I think about it. I want to get the best writers in the world. That was my first goal. And so, like, this month is Andy Weir did Project Hail Mary, Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl, Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell.

It's so good.

We're like, let's get the best writers.

Yeah, yeah, you nailed it. Wait, are you the reason you're in LA? J.K. Rowling's yacht is in LA.

Is it happening? Oh, I wish.

You saw this, right? I wish I was here for the big reveal.

That way the mystery yacht—

The mystery yacht has been unveiled to be J.K. Rowling's. I love it. But I mean, you're gonna get— like, I'm just so excited for that level of interview to happen soon.

And so then the game is, it's like a T, so then you go up, you kind of reach the top here, and then break into— I want to do music. I want to do music. I want to have screenwriters. Um, and then just trying to break into that. But the thing is, we're kind of in a local maxima with the YouTube algorithm. So this is sort of the grand irony of the whole thing. I got into this because I love posting.

Like, I love posting.

That is my thing. Like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Isn't posting on YouTube a form of posting?

It kind of is, but the people who I like really feel a kindred spirit with It's like you guys, like you, you know, you had the YouTube channel, like you're kind of going there. But then what happened, but then what happened was, um, the novelists, the poets, they were the best interviews and they were the ones that, that, that crushed. And so now I'm in this like weird situation where like, that's what I do. Uh, but I like, I don't know.

But, but, but it's just being a nimcel in a particular community. It's niche, but that's valuable.

What's a nimcel?

Nimcel is niche internet micro celebrity. It's like, it's like, you know, If we go to YC Demo Day, we'll get recognized. We'll get a sound effect for that.

We'll get a sound effect for that.

But we can walk around anywhere else and you don't get recognized. There are certain areas where there'll be some cooking influencer where every chef knows them, or an auto influencer where every car guy, Cars and Coffee, everyone will stop Doug DeMuro. But he doesn't get stopped if he just goes to a Costco, right? It's just the modern incantation of the celebrity as we've created these pockets. But interesting. What are you excited about in terms of actual growth? You're growing on YouTube. You're also growing on Instagram. You have some stats for us? I want to hit the gong. What you got? You got some stats?

I got some stats, yeah.

Give me some stats. How's the product doing?

It's been a crazy year. So we're going to do 6 million views on Instagram this month.

What about YouTube?

3 million.

it on YouTube. No, that's been good, that's been good. But the big thing, I think this one deserves the big gong. So we started a, uh, a YouTube channel. I found this guy named Sheehan Quirk. Crazy story. Um, and we made this pilot episode with him.

His last name is Quirk?

Quirk.

Quirky Quirk. That's what I call him. Quirky Quirk.

He's the cultural tutor.

The cultural tutor.

Yes.

And so, uh, I found this Twitter account, 2022, And I was like, this account rips. Like, this is so good. And so it was anon, and I was like, hey, we gotta talk on the phone. So I get on with him, and I expect like 65 years old. He's writing about culture and like ballards and like buildings. And he's like 24 years old. And I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, you know, I live in the north of England. My parents just got divorced. I have no money. I'm like, cool, like, what do you do for work? He goes, I just quit my job at McDonald's. And I'm like, okay, that's a little bit weird. He's like, yeah, that's why I started this cultural tutor thing, 'cause I'm gonna tutor people in culture to make some money.

Mm-hmm.

Terrible way to make money. And then he goes, yeah, I'm gonna go join the British military if it doesn't work. It's been my dream to die for my country. And I'm just like, I've known him for 10 minutes, like about as long as I've been on the show right here for, you know, today. And I'm like, dude, that is a bad idea. So I just raised some money for my writing business at the time, and I made him a writer in residence. Okay. He had 100,000 followers at the time. 3 years later, 1.6 mil on Twitter.

Insane.

We're in London. And last year, walking around, he's giving me a tour every day. I'm like, dude, you can write well, but you are an amazing speaker. You are the next Bourdain.

Sure.

So I said, hey, let's make a pilot episode. Put in $150 grand of my own money. I really believe in this guy. And we went to Hollywood. They said, no, we're not interested. Go make a pilot episode. So we had a pilot. Tommy Lee, the director, in the back right there.

Tommy Lee, there we go.

And we published it from an account with zero subs. It was our goal to get 100,000 views. and then go pitch Hollywood. And we did 100,000 views in 18 hours and then 5.6 million views now. And just from that one video, almost a quarter million subs.

Are you optimistic about being able to break into Hollywood? This year has been like the crossover year with Markiplier, Obsession, Backrooms, right? Like Hollywood is seeing that they can print on adaptations of internet IP.

But do you need Hollywood? Hollywood.

Do you need Hollywood?

Now you walk in with your pilot, it's like, I shot your freaking pilot.

Yeah.

There you go.

Yeah.

But then it's like, do you actually need them? Can you figure out a way to—

This is the driving question of my life right now.

Yeah.

This is— we're trying to figure it out. Being on a spaceship. We went to one of the major studios here yesterday. We had a meeting with them. This is what Hollywood tells us. They want exclusivity of person or exclusivity of place.

Sure.

So if you can go film in the Sistine Chapel and other people can't, they love that. And then if you're, you're like, hey, Brad Pitt's really interested in architecture, let's have Brad Pitt be the host, they also love that.

Yeah.

They're like, we'll give you money for that.

So Brad Pitt in the Sistine Chapel, and they're like, one more change, it needs to be a low-budget horror film.

Low-budget horror.

We're just gonna have a one-note— no.

But I don't think, I, I don't think we're gonna go that No, no.

I mean, I would—

I don't think we're gonna go. Their pitch isn't compelling.

Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, the thing is, is that—

What is the actual pitch? It's capital, and then we'll get you—

Yeah. Well, I would say even more like, in what way is a streaming service exciting? I think that streaming service is exciting in 2 ways. One, you have Amazon, HBO, Apple, whatever. They can give you budget to make something awesome. That's the first thing, budget. The second thing is prestige. And, you know, I think the root of prestige translates to illusion. And I just always try to remind myself of that because YouTube is, you know, you can really get views now.

Yeah.

They are not going— they're not in the business right now of talent development. They will attach Brad Pitt, but they are not going to allow you to spend their money building the cultural tutor into the next Anthony Bourdain. You're gonna have to do that on your own platform. And then when you're ready and you ready to rest on your laurels, they'll be like, welcome, the door's finally open.

So this is what's funny about that. So Sunday I was at Sundance in Utah, not at the festival, but just at the, just at the hotel. And that's where Robert Redford started the film festival.

Yeah.

And so as you walk through the main room, they just got all these photos of old Hollywood, and it was so cool. It was like a bunch of risk-taking and all that. And what happened, the reason why Hollywood is born And the reason why a lot of the modern world is boring, and I credit Derek Thompson with making this observation, is the moneyballification of our world.

OK.

What happened is things are boring now because we've gotten smart.

Yes.

And it's— they've gotten good at pricing risk and all that sort of stuff. But the problem is then you end up getting Spider-Man 74, Lord of the Rings 7, rather than some new show. And that's just the state of our world.

The funny thing is that the late— I feel that.

It's over.

I feel the stagnation.

Or also, the internet will strike back.

And also, the latest Spider-Man made a billion dollars. So, like, the irony is, like, I feel the same, you know, Marvel fatigue that everyone does, and yet the latest Spider-Man was a fantastic success.

But here's a counterexample. Nathan Fielder is on an incredible run.

Started very local.

I feel like that is a set of new ideas and forms of content, right? Where that are meaningfully novel, that are rooted in this talent. So I would almost argue there's not a shortage, like anybody can make media now. It's cheaper than it's ever been. Production and distribution. And like, as much as you can argue, like, all the capital is flowing into these like big bets— Spider-Man 12— at the same time, for talented people, it's like the best time in the world to do anything.

I agree.

And a lot of— and, and in, in some ways, like, Nathan Fielder is like the best modern instantiation of like being yourself in Hollywood.

Mm-hmm.

And like finding that mix of commercial appeal and, and new ideas. Where like for me, I'm more excited to see the new Elizabeth Holmes movie than anything. If you— if I could only watch like The Odyssey or the new Nathan—

Did you see The Odyssey?

Yeah, yeah, I did.

What'd you think?

I thought it was a good movie.

It was a good movie? Have you seen it?

Yeah. I liked it. It was good. It was a lot. I don't think it's like a rewatchable it every year like The Dark Knight.

Yeah.

That was my ticket.

So I got to see it at the Chinese Theatre, which—

Yeah, we went there.

Amazing place to watch a movie.

Holy cow.

Nah.

You don't like it?

Absolutely not. I came out of that and I was like, you gotta be kidding me, guys. How did we end up— how did we end up—

Universal is— you're much closer to the screen. Same size IMAX screen, but you're closer.

No, but you have to walk out of the theater. The theater is fine. I thought it would— I didn't personally like that it was grungy and dirty feeling, but—

Historic. I did feel like I was gonna get robbed on my way in.

But the second that you get out of it, it's like, you know, you're watching this beautiful film work of art, and then you come out and it's like the worst place on earth, you know? Sunset Boulevard. It's like completely, completely brutal.

Hollywood is so seedy. That's been my biggest takeaway. away of being here. What is going on?

Kind of always has been. That's like the—

I didn't realize that. Yeah, it's crazy, right? Because you're just like, wow, it's my dream to go to Hollywood, and then you get here, you're like, this what it's like?

I'd like to go to West Hollywood instead. I'd like to go to Beverly Hills. Uh, what's on your wrist?

Oh, good question. I just went to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

Yeah.

Uh, so this museum opens, uh, September 22nd.

Okay.

Uh, so it's just kind of like these previews, preview tours. Dude, so good. Oh my goodness.

What's good about it?

Okay, so the reason I have this—

Is that not— is the whole project not like a massive white pill that we can still make?

Honestly, it is such a massive white pill. The only thing that bums me out is San Francisco and Chicago said no, but then LA got it.

So let's go. Well, is that not victory for Los Angeles?

Were they saying no, like, this needs to be in LA? This, this— I don't know, it would just be wrong for us to take this, or they were just like, yeah, the idea is kind of mid. Like, it would suck to have a billion-dollar museum.

It's like 4,000 pieces of art in George Lucas's collection, 13,000 at the exhibit or at the museum, only 6 of them on loan.

Yeah.

And so I thought that what I was gonna walk into was like Star Wars land. Yeah, that's actually not what it is.

Getting ready to dress up as Chewbacca.

So this is what the next art museum gets, which is modern art, most of what you see kind of stinks because it's super abstract.

Okay.

And you're like, what is going on?

Yeah.

This is the best non-canonical collection of modern art museum I've seen. What does that mean? And what I mean by that is I think the MoMA has a better collection.

Okay.

But at the MoMA, you see the canon pieces of modern art. You see everything from Van Gogh's Starry Night to, you know, Cubism to then stuff that comes out of World War II. This is very different. This is a lot of paintings that I did not know, and almost every painting feels like a freeze-frame in a movie. And you almost feel like somebody stopped it. So the lighting is super dramatic. There's like these dramatic scenes. Then there's a whole range of styles. And then the other thing, for people like Norman Rockwell, it must be one of the largest collections of Norman Rockwell paintings.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah, love it.

And then also the way that they organize the museum is super different. So usually it's all around jargon or time period. This is different. This is around family, school, like friendship, stuff like that, or specific artists. So because of that, it doesn't feel like heady as a museum. It feels like the kind of art that'll be both good and super mass market.

That's cool.

Almost like Star Wars itself.

Is there at least one Chewbacca? Did you see any Star Wars? I only saw—

so this is why I have this.

Okay.

I just went, and I went up to the front desk, yeah, and I was like, this is so good, can I leave, go on TV, and then come back?

Yeah.

And she was like, fine, we'll make an exception. Okay, so we're booking it back to downtown.

Okay, there you go.

Chewbacca for you. And I will send you—

I will send you a selfie.

I will send you one Chewbacca selfie. I want that. I, I see this modern art. I love Star Wars. Um, what do you think of, uh, Mark Zuckerberg's new castle? You know, the critique is that tech tech wealth is not going into beautiful things.

Which is true.

And he just bought a beautiful castle in Ireland. And it feels like the beginning, you know, I think the Stripe founders bought a castle in Ireland.

Yeah.

There's the seeds. And I think that there— I understand the critique of tech wealth is not going into beautiful things. We're not getting the museums, the libraries.

Yeah.

But I think that there is a world where wait until they're 45, they'll buy the castle, They'll get sick of them at 65, the kids won't want to live there, and then they'll be museums and libraries because that's what happens when you renovate an 18th century castle.

Yeah, Museum of Zuckys.

And you stop wanting to pay the $5 million a year to maintain it.

The Museum of Zucky's Bunky is gonna go so hard.

Okay.

All these, what'll then be antique firearms that are like Halo style. And you're really—

he's got a Needler.

He really had that.

He really had that in 2026.

He had the, the, the good supply of—

if he has a Needler and we don't know about it, that's a, that's a major issue.

It's interesting, those 2 examples, both of them bought existing places.

Yes, they didn't. Okay, so building's important.

They did not build them. Uh, like you look at Hearst Castle, you know, William Randolph Hearst.

I'm actually staying I love the story of Hearst Castle, and I both aspire to personally embark on such a crusade that I die with it unfinished like he did, and also I encourage other people to take on projects that are so unwieldy that they will ultimately never be— never see the fruits of their labor, and only the next generation will.

Yeah, I mean, beyond that, you know, it's really easy to talk about castles and palaces and stuff like that, that. What about just like the tech initiative to make the Panhandle like one of the most beautiful parks in America?

Sure.

You know what I mean? Or like, let's restore Fillmore Street. I heard of a project that's exactly that. It's like 4 or 5 blocks of Fillmore. Like, we— I think that the beauty conversation is way too much about these giant big buildings.

Yeah, you got to start small. Corgi Cafe.

Corgi Cafe.

They're starting with the cafe. You scale that up— Corgi Library, Corgi Museum, Corgi Central We'll save the world. Could happen. You never know. They're a reinsurer now.

Well, this is what's so great about New York. Like, I think it was, uh, is John Paulson the investor?

I think so.

Who made a lot of money in the financial crisis?

He's the one.

Yeah, exactly, one guy. But he donated $100 million to Central Park.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's cool.

Good. Okay.

The simple stuff for the people.

Yeah. What about on the overall Architectural malaise and just this— is there a linkage from housing prices, we can't build anything, stagnation, and the critiques from you and the Cultural Tutor on—

Oh, that's interesting. So I think that the way that people see it is something like this. We can't build. And because of that, we need to make it cheaper and uglier And it's like a cost problem. Actually, there's a new article in Works in Progress that basically makes this point, that one of the reasons why it's hard to build is that things aren't beautiful enough.

Yeah.

So, like, if I look at—

Yeah, why go through the hassle?

Yeah. And also, for the neighbors, they're like, I don't want something new being built. It's gonna be butt ugly. It's gonna make my neighborhood less nice.

Yeah, it's gonna be a square box.

And so, it's this weird kind of compounding loop where things are ugly, so then there's more regulation, then there's more regulation, so it's more expensive, Then we need to save money, so things get ugly. And maybe there's a way to reverse that, where you have nice buildings, and people are excited about building a little bit more, and you begin to change that.

Yeah, I've been— there's some— there's things coming down the pipeline. I was hanging out with a friend of a friend who's an architect based in Europe, and he was just showing me, like, all the stuff that he has in the works. And to me, I got incredibly excited, because I was like, every single one of these things you know, he's a rising star. Every single one of these things will end up being in every mood board. Like, they are like net new creations that are inspired by the past, but also just new ways for buildings to exist. And I have another friend who does real estate development in the American Southwest, and he is showing me things that he's actively building right now. And I'm like, entryway to the home is gonna be iconic.

Mm-hmm.

And so, a lot of these are like— I still, in some ways, I think you're gonna see, like, the world is so Instagram-driven now that there are beautiful things being built purely for the feed to basically, like, stop people and to get attention. And I think that I'm excited to see what you're pulling out Oh, you got it.

I'm trying to get them to pull it out.

I gotta show you this.

Yes.

So I think that the side-by-side format will change the world. It already is. And all the side-by-side format is super common on Twitter, super common on Instagram. All it is is you show one old thing versus one new thing and you just say what happened.

Yep.

And this is one of those formats that we've all seen that no one has taken seriously.

Yeah.

So this This is— oh, hold on. Okay, we got to cut that for the clip.

We're gonna pull it up on the big board.

This is the old Home Alone house.

Here you go.

There we got both of them.

This is the old Home Alone house.

Scroll up.

Scroll up.

This is 1990.

1990. This is the old Home Alone house that we all love. Iconic. Yes.

Wallpaper, carpets on the stairs.

Character.

Lots of texture. Lots of warmth.

Yep.

What happened?

This is what they did to it.

Stunning. Stunning and brave.

Okay.

So, the white— the different shades of white and gray.

So much white. It's so much white. So, this sells better—

I mean, look at the rug. I mean, who would be bold enough to—

Well, so, here is what happened. So, there's a few things that changed. One is that housing went from something that people would build for themselves to something that was done by real estate agents and real estate companies. And so, housing became a market that you thought of as something liquid, and then you basically need to increase the— how generic something is so that it basically is a more liquid asset, right?

Yeah, makes sense.

And then the other thing is a lot of these projects are built by people who won't live in them, and so they sort of see the world through a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet, that's exactly what it's called.

It's called a spreadsheet. It's called a spreadsheets.

So they see the world through a spreadsheet.

And yes, but when I look at this, I think buying opportunity. Buy this and, and remodel it to look like the home. The home can't be that hard to put carpet down on the staircase, right? I like this style. I think it's called premodern. This is generally the, the like what this is referred to now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're saying something that's very real. A friend of mine Bought a place years ago, invested a bunch of money into it, and, and I think like legitimately for 99% of people made it way worse.

Like, for him— Oh, I know what you're talking about.

Like, for him, you know, for him, he's like, he's like, yeah, it's like, it's just so much character. I'm like, maybe too much character there, buddy. Like, some, some of the rooms, I'm just like, this is horrific. And, and you need— and it actually, even though he invested a lot of money into the property, you actually have to Deduct that, basically, an equal amount from the new purchase price, which is going to be lower than what they paid, because you have to rip all this stuff.

You liked blue. You made your house blue.

But I do think that— I think that, like, maximalism is 100% coming back. And you're seeing this in— You think loud opulence, maybe? Like, even look at cars. are a wonderful way to express yourself and just enjoy the road. And it's this like symbol of freedom and all these things. And cars got very boring to the point where if somebody was like spicing it up, they're like, I got a green car.

Yeah.

And tan seats. And then it's like, well, now there's a whole— for years there's been Instagram accounts dedicated to this combination, which I think is beautiful. I have a green car with brown seats. But it's almost to the point where it's no longer even a way to express yourself. It's just like, it's as basic to me as like a black car, right? And so, I've been intentionally going the other direction. I'm—

What's the next color you're going with?

I'm in the process of speccing a car that is like a rose metallic, and it's like completely insane. I've shown it to some people and they're like, oh, yeah, that's interesting.

We need a—

You know, like, it's going to be— it's going to be—

We need a CPAP car that looks like a NASA NASCAR that you guys can drive around with all the sponsor logos.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've thought of it.

We have a place to play TVPN over there.

Right there. Um, and, and I, and I think that you're not just naturally seeing a shift. People are rejecting minimalism. And I, I actually already— as much as, as much as this is happening, again, I don't think you're gonna ever get back to spec house. Like, the spec house is naturally designed to appeal to— it's like, I view a spec house like the one you're showing here basically as like a canvas on which someone else can come on and paint, and it allows you to have that liquid asset.

The thing is, I'm not pro-maximalism or anti-minimalism. I'm just pro-quality and anti-crap. And I think that what has happened is we're like, okay, here's minimalism, and we're like, okay, minimalism is cool. Like, Jony Ive really understands minimalism well. The Japanese really understand minimalism well. But then what happens—

I got a house. I got a house to— I got a house to sell you.

If you don't really You end up with that meme of the guy who just has his mattress in the room and nothing else with like the little video game.

Yeah, the ultimate male living situation.

Hey, you know, you gotta invest in that guy.

Would you like the glass or the cup for whatever you're drinking?

Um, wash these sheets in 6 months.

Do you know the, um, what you got, Jordi? Do you know the, the architect, uh, John Lautner? No.

Oh, you're talking about the place in Alaska?

You blew the punchline. Oh, I'm sorry. You blew the punchline. But, um, but yeah, the, uh, John Lautner is the protégé of, of, uh, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Okay.

Has created some of the most, to me, the most beautiful homes, uh, uh, in, in the US. There's, there's even like this weird, uh, sort of like roadside motel out in Palm Desert area that you can go stay in. That's a Lautner. I recommend you check it out. I think you would enjoy it. But I track John Lautner homes that are for sale, and there's 2 right now that stand out. One is in Pasadena, which is seemingly an extremely— at the time, it would've just been like, I'll take one home, please. It's like a 2-bedroom, 2-bath. But then there's this other one that's—

Wow.

$1.37 million, potentially a great starter home candidate. And, uh, this is the one in Alaska. One issue, it's in Alaska.

That's not an issue, that's a plus.

And so this is 2 acres. You got a John Lautner, an architecturally significant home in nature. And I think you gotta go— I think you gotta go for it. I think you gotta, like, you know, take some of your own medicine here. And I want— I think you need to No, no, no. This is this is Redfish.

This is for sale.

This is for sale. One point three. I've been extremely tempted just because I'm like, yeah.

Let's start a group chat. See if we can pull one point three.

Spot for a bunkie too.

Yeah, yeah.

It's bunkieville.

This would be good for like a TBPN satellite satellite studio.

Look at this.

Look at this wood wood wood paneled interior. It's like every material in this home was actually. designed to last for—

There's room for the Christmas tree there.

Indoor waterfall-ish thing.

It's awesome.

So, anyways, what I'm hoping to see is the young John Lautner that just build a couple— just dedicate your life to building a couple hundred homes like this. But I think that the truth is that we look back and we look throughout history and we see home— we, we see things that were built like this and we're— and people are like, we, you know, we got to return to like that era of design. But the truth is that for every one of these homes, there was 100, 1,000 that were just cookie cutter.

The thing is, I don't want to return to any era of design. I want us in 2026 to have a sweet era that like reflects who we are, what we value, that like projects a bold vision for the future that's It's like, let's go. And we should have all these awesome visions of what tomorrow can look like. And what I love about talking about homes and like making nice streets is like, that is a way for every single human being to like put their footprint, their, you know, their stamp of optimism and like promise for a better future into the world. And, uh, that's why I think this is important.

Yeah. Uh, we have about 10 minutes. No, I want to go through the rest of the show and tell. What else do you have for us in the stack? The team has the PDF you shared. So are there any other images that you'd like to share with us?

By the way, we definitely don't—

We do. We're rearranging the schedule. Fletcher Richmond from Type will be joining us at 1:50 after Jim O'Reilly from Charleston AI.

Have you seen the new Obama library?

I have.

Yes.

New Obama presidential—

People are going back and forth about it.

Yeah, let's get it up on screen.

I'm a fan.

You're a fan.

You're a fan.

Because, because it's a— because it's clearly a data source.

A data center.

It does seem like aliens.

No, I just—

It has an energy source inside.

I'm generally in favor. I love, uh, brutalism, just period. I think it's beautiful when contrasted right with, with nature.

Yeah, here's the thing with brutalism. Okay, good brutalism rocks. Yeah, but a good style is— works when average people do it. And so the problem with brutalism is the variance is so big. Like, most brutalism absolutely is awful and tyrannical, but like you're saying, you get some Brazilian brutalism, some DC brutalism, and when it works, it is absolutely awesome.

Yeah.

Every time I think brutalism, I go to Abbottabad and Osama bin Laden's compound. You know what I'm talking about? The Osama bin Laden house looked— is very brutalist. I lived in a house that looked exactly like this for a while. It's crazy.

Would you practice in there in case you got the call?

No, no, keep it in California.

So the new Obama Library, this is where— this was built in 1893. And so the Obama Library, this was for the Chicago World's Fair. There's 3 photos here. And these were in 1893. Basically, these were temporary houses. So they were made out of plaster. They were not made to last.

The center one was a temporary house?

The Chicago winners. It was for the World's Fair. So, like, it was a big deal.

Don't get me wrong.

For sure.

Um, but I think it says so much about who we are. Like, first of all, I'm not sure that we could build this now.

Yeah.

And there's no way that we would do something temporary like this now.

Yeah.

OK.

Uh, yeah, what, what, what else is going on? How, how many other How many other photos do you have here?

We don't need to go through all of them.

Oh, I wanna know the story of the—

Well, so what we did in the— yeah, so I think this is another— actually, here's one that has a personal story. So this is San Francisco. When I was a kid, I don't know if you guys have walked here, when I was a kid, this is—

Beautiful photo.

Where I would walk. Wow.

And I used to like marvel at these chains.

Yeah.

I think these chains are sick.

Yeah.

And also like, this is the kind of world I wanna be in, like, you know, it's by the bay, there's always the big cargo ships coming by.

Yeah.

And I'd always used to, you know, check out these chains. My mom would say, if you touch those, you're gonna get tetanus. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, you know, it's time to replace the chains, which is fine. And they replaced them with this.

Oof.

And like, this is the thing, you know, each one of these is not a big deal. But if you have 10,000 or 100,000 decisions like this in a country and a culture, you really stamp out the soul and vitality, the spirit of who we are. And that's what I want to fight against, you know?

Yeah, yeah, rough. What's going on in the world of high fashion?

What's wrong with stainless steel?

Well, it just lacks character.

Well, I think it's because it's new.

Yeah, what happens when that gets patina and starts giving you tetanus? Will you be satisfied then? Will you be satisfied then?

then.

I think we could have done better.

We could have done something with like little Golden Gate Bridges in it, something that would tie to the aesthetic of the space, or like a Louis Vuitton monogram. Yeah, we talked about cost. There's an artist somewhere that would happily do this at cost to make something else.

Yeah, you know, might be a safety thing. You trip over the chain, but you don't do this. But again, yeah, you're getting into the R-word—

regulation.

I think they want to keep people from Surfing. They don't want you to discover the thrill.

No, they want you to lock in and continue building your startup because, as we know, if you go surfing, you'll be less productive. So, you got to stop people from surfing in San Francisco. They got to get the share price up.

Patagonia founder, his book is called Let My People Go Surfing.

Oh, really?

It's like the whole premise. They're like, yeah, we're gonna build a company.

And that's why we never get to a billion market cap. Yeah, Patagonia would have been the first trillion-dollar company.

It could have been. It could have been if they had a little less surfing. Lock in better.

Yeah.

And then we got the same thing happening in logos.

Yeah.

Just see, it's the same pattern everywhere.

And this is what's—

this has to change soon, though.

This is insane.

This is an opportunity. You have to imagine that there are plenty of brands that see this. I don't want to be a part of the meme. I'm going to go a different direction.

The reason why I've just utterly astonished by this and think about it every day is I think that aesthetics, people think of like a little icing on the cake.

Mm-hmm.

You know, like you put on a tie, now you look good or something like that. But the thing is, like, society's aesthetics represent the spirit of a time. Like, it's the outer reflection of the inner spirit of an age. And all this is how we see who we are, what we value. And the thing is, when I look at these designer logos, is, you know, it's easy to say, oh, there's no style there. Really, what you see is a culture that values efficiency and—

Conformity.

Conformity above all else. And I just— I don't want that to be who we are. And also, a kind of global sameness. Like, I want a world where there's like radical diversity. You go to different places, they feel completely different. And that the things that are made have the unique character of the people making them. That's the world I want to live in. That's the world that inspires me.

Mm-hmm. How do you get into a museum if it's closed?

There's actually a hack for this.

Tell me.

Okay, so if you go to Paris or something—

Spend a decade developing a personal—

spend a decade building a reputation of someone who cherishes millions and millions of views on YouTube.

So there is a hack So, if you go to Paris, I was in Paris like a month and a half ago.

Buy a flight to Paris.

Any, any city, any city, New York, LA, Chicago, and you show up, often they'll say, hey, you can't get into the museum, you needed tickets in advance. A ticket at most museums costs like $30, so if you're going with a friend, it's like $60. And you'll say, can I get in? They'll be like, there's no way. You'll say, can members get in today? They'll be like, no problem. You say, how much is a membership? membership, $120. So if you just pay $60 more, $30 per person, you can basically get into any museum in the world, no lines.

Your answer is just pay? Just pay for it.

It's one simple trick.

But here's the thing, it's just about the membership, which is not advertised.

Yeah, okay, that's a good point.

Good hack.

But the new Lucas—

I thought there was gonna be some like go in the back door, walk, you know, like dress up.

The new Lucas Museum is also So I don't think if you're a member, they're not— I'll take— if I walk up there and say, I'll take one membership please, they'll be like, come back when we're open.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You gotta get a job. That's the real hack.

You gotta get the job.

Gotta get the job there. Or build a great brand, build a great crowd.

I feel like my first you can do anything moment was sneaking down at Warrior games. Had season tickets, convinced my dad to get season tickets as a kid. We're all the way Up on the 3rd deck.

Again, you paid to get in. Trick to sneak in, buy season tickets.

We got the cheapest tickets. I sat, I sat outside of the 1st deck for only 6 games. Went to every game for the season. I just snuck through.

Okay, yeah, this is a good turnaround. That's a good one.

Got really good at getting the free pizzas and the t-shirts. I knew like where the t-shirts were like most likely to go.

Okay, Thunder coming out of the t-shirt gun or not?

Yeah.

OK.

Actually, my, my, my ultimate hack for sports was when I was a kid, I was obsessed with catching baseballs at games. So, you know, you can get the baseballs off the bat.

Yeah.

But what I would do is I'd go to the stadium, I'd get the away team hat, the away team shirt, then sit by the opposing team dugout.

Less competitive.

I went to Wrigley Field, Darren Oliver starting pitcher. I knew the name of Darren Oliver, the bullpen catcher, I was like a 5th grade kid.

I was like, let's go.

Oh, that's fantastic. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

All right, boys. Thank you. Great to see you.

Have fun at the museum.

Great to see you.

Chewbacca picture. Have a great rest of your day.

And I will tell everyone about Cisco Critical Infrastructure for the AI Era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And I'll also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Up next, we have Jim Riley from Charleston AI. You've seen him on the internet. We've discussed him multiple times through his partnership with Sam Blunt's Monaco. And now we are pleased to be joined by Jim Riley from Charleston AI. Jim, how are you doing?

Welcome to the show.

I'm, I'm doing real, really well. Thank you. Thank you very much.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. I would love to know a little bit of the backstory. I'm sure a lot of people have seen the viral video, but, uh, what, what is your career story? How did you get into this particular business? And then of course we can talk about where it's going from here.

Okay, well, um, I've been doing different things for many, many years. You know, the only boss I ever had was my father. Other than when I was a busboy and worked in a movie theater.

Wow.

So it was a family business I grew up in, and, uh, I did many things.

Yeah.

And, uh, where do I go from there? Recently, uh, during the pandemic—

Yeah, what, what got you, what got you in at least interested in AI?

Yeah.

Okay, well, my partner, we started this produce delivery business during the, uh, uh, pandemic because the farmers couldn't sell produce. There were no farmers markets. Markets and people were kind of locked down. So we saw a need, we saw something that we could do together. And he's the geek, I'm not. And so we put together delivering produce directly to people's houses. We put it right on their front porch by their door. Our model is that we deliver it. They don't come pick it up. We deliver 7 days a week. Uh, 365 days a year. And so then he's—

Yeah. Did this business grow out of that?

Yes.

Well, we're partners in Rainbow Packaging, and he's always been into, uh, AI. You know, he was a, uh, an engineer from IBM, so he's, like I said, he's a geek. And, um, this is one of his, like, pet projects. He's really into AI, so he got— he infected me a little bit with it. And, uh, we saw the opportunity, we thought it was time, let's open up a storefront. That's what we have here is basically a storefront, even though it's a nice office. Yeah. To just introduce people to AI, help them where they need it. And that's what we've been doing. We started January 1st.

Amazing.

Jordi?

So January 1st, what, what, who were the, who were your first like customers, clients that were coming in? When, when we originally saw the viral video, So, it made so much sense to me to actually put something like a storefront because everyone in Charleston is, I'm sure, reading about AI, watching videos online. Some of them are excited, some of them are scared. And to give people the opportunity to come in and—

Yeah.

To give people the opportunity to come in and just talk to somebody who's actually in their local community and learn about it actually makes Makes a ton of sense.

Yeah, right.

In the beginning it was slow. I have to admit it's taken a while. But what I've come to realize, this is the FUD period, which is fear, uncertainty, and doubt when it comes to AI. And people are gradually getting over it. So my partner, he can do the elaborate stuff. He can do the, you know, systems integration. I'm the one who can talk to people and tell them how it's benefiting me. And that's what I do.

Do you see more people coming in with sort of a consumer lens on? They want to know how to use AI products in their personal lives, or is it mostly other businesses in the Charleston area?

It's a combination of both.

Okay.

Okay. So like, I'm pretty good at talking to people and I'm asking using AI. So, you know, I don't want to plug it, but my favorite is OpenAI work right now. It's fantastic. So I'll tell people about my little experiences, how I've saved time by using it. And they said, really? So I'll say, here, load ChatGPT, you know, play with it for a week or two, and I'll come back and I'll show you how it can benefit you. And mostly, you know, they're small business owners, so it's easy for them to, you know, adapt to it. I mean, a lot of people would like to do it, in my opinion, but they don't have And they're so used to doing what they do that this is just not natural to them.

Yeah, totally.

And then the other side of the coin are the people that have larger size businesses who are really into AI. So they spend 2 or 3 days or 2 or 3 hours a day doing it, and then they realize they're falling behind on their work. And so that's why they need us to come in and help them, you know, put it together and make it work for them.

What is your business model? Do you charge people hourly for training sessions, or do you work on affiliate commission if you refer someone to a particular product?

No, we're just— we're like vendor neutral. We will work with any— anybody's AI. You know, my partner will learn it and he'll install it, and, um, it— our customers choose the AI they want.

Sure.

And we just help them So training, implementation. Correct. And, you know, we charge. The first visit's free. We're not, you know, you come in, sit down, let's talk about it, see what you want, what you need. And, you know, we'll come up with a plan for them.

Do you think the model will be scalable? Do you think you'll be able to hire technicians and educators in other markets and set up similar franchises?

Absolutely. Absolutely, yes.

That's exciting.

I think it has appeal. The time is now, we have a few years, and AI is changing so drastically, so quickly, in my opinion, and people can use it. And the other thing I noticed, like with individuals, we take this OpenAI work, which I refer to it as, I went away on vacation for a few days, I'd get up at 5. I normally get up at 4, so I slept in late. And then for 2 hours I would do my work.

Yeah. Found him.

And in 5 days I did more than I would do in 6 months previous. So that sold me.

Yeah.

You know, so I have an agent that works for me every day. And if I don't have her working on something, then that's my fault. That's my, you know, my bad. Yeah. It's just, I find it fabulous. I think it's tremendous. And with that too, that I noticed personally is that I'd be uptight with, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. I'm short on time, I'm thinking about it. But now with this AI companion, she does it and I'm free to think about other things during the course of the day. I'm freed up. And I think a lot of people, once they adapt it and start using it, they're gonna be the same way. They won't be so uptight. tight and so bothered with what they think they have to do because it's already done or it's being worked on.

What's business been like since the video that broke the internet?

A lot of attention, people stopping by. Sunday, I work 7 days a week, so Sunday, and we're still continuing our produce business, so we have customers there we got to satisfy. So I come in early, pick, pack, go deliver, and then I start working, contacting people, responding to emails. And people stop by randomly. We're in Charleston and we're going back to Florida. We're in Charleston, we're going back to Charlotte. Well, come on in. Let me give you a little tour. Let me talk to you. Tell me about your story. What is it?

That's great.

Because I like to talk to people myself.

Yeah. What are the most common concerns that people cite when they're talking to you, what, what, what are they worried about? What are they nervous about in terms of AI?

Mostly unknown fears.

Sure.

You know, and they, you know, they, they read something, they hear something that somebody said, and they're not, they're not real. So until they get to know it, hold it, see it, and use it, they'll have that. But I'm trying to break that barrier down, you know, and kind of infect them with the, you know, the benefits Yeah, that's good.

How much do you wish you had today's AI when you were starting your career in your family business?

I can't do that. It's not realistic.

I like this super grounded, grounded, so grounded.

I mean, because did I have it? I wouldn't be here now talking to you.

That's true.

You'd be retired.

You know, I had to experience everything I experienced to get to this moment. Yeah, all my mistakes, all my, you know, my failures, my victories, things I did right, things I did wrong. But, you know, I needed all to do all that. And I know I could save a lot of time and be more efficient by using my agent in the morning. Yeah, that's my AI agent.

Yeah. When's, when's the second location opening up? How aggressive do you guys want to get around expansion? Are you still kind of dialing in the the curriculum?

Well, everything has to be done in its proper time and place. This has to be up and running, functioning, and then we can devote a little time to the next one. I believe there's going to be demand for it. I believe there is demand for it. And now that it's arriving at the point where AI is being more accepted by people and being used, they're still confused. And AI is changing so much. with all these different applications they have, they're going to need some help. So, uh, I want to get a firm foundation and then we talk about expanding.

Yeah.

Do you, do you pay much attention to the, to the conversation around AI fear and doom and safety that's happening, you know, primarily in, in San Francisco? Or do you kind of ignore all that mumbo jumbo?

No, it's noise in my opinion.

Yeah.

I'm looking at the If I spend an hour, 2 hours, and it takes care of 6 or 7 hours worth of work, I don't have to worry about that. I can enjoy life. I could spend more time in the moment than having my head filled with things that are not going to happen, that may happen, but now it's done. So next.

Yeah. That's a good mindset.

Great mindset.

Well, congratulations on the project.

Yeah, this has been amazing. You're welcome on the show anytime. Let us know however we can help. If there's any AI founders that you want to meet, there's a good chance that that we've spoken to them at some sort. We'd love to we'd love to support, and hopefully we can we can stop by the store at some point.

Please do. You're always welcome.

Thank you so much.

And Charleston is a nice city to visit.

Yeah, I've heard.

The restaurants are really good.

Fantastic.

Amazing.

And the people are friendly.

I love it.

See.

It's great to meet you, Jim. Thanks so much for coming on and congrats on all the success.

Have a great rest of your week.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Have a wonderful day.

We'll talk soon.

Cheers.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

Amazing story. Amazing mindset.

Yeah.

And I've seen enough. Give him $200 on a billion.

There are some wild I saw a lot of posts in the chat, which I really enjoy. So thanks everyone who's tuning in and chiming in with some fantastic takes about what's going on. We have Fletcher Richmond from Type, the co-founder and CEO here building a shared AI workspace. Welcome to the show.

What's going on?

Sorry for the mix-up.

Hey guys.

We got caught up with David Perell. He brought a whole show and tell for us. We had to go through with it, but we appreciate it.

Then we had to, of course, talk with Jim Reilly, who I would already suggest you should pursue some type of partnership with. Anyways, introduce yourself and the company.

Yeah, nice to meet you guys.

Thanks for having me.

Funny enough, I actually go to the same gym as David, so that's a small world moment of the day.

Yeah, nice.

That's great.

Who lifts heavier?

I can't disclose that.

Oh, that's why I got a pause for sure. Anyway. Tell us about the business. What are you building?

Yeah, so Type is a—

you mentioned it—

shared workspace for teams to build with AI. A lot of work right now in AI is still happening very single-player mode. People are working with Claude or ChatGPT on their individual computer, and that's not really how businesses work. And so we make it really easy to take that work starting in Claude or in ChatGPT and push it up into a shared workspace where you're all actually building together. Crazy as it seems, multiplayer AI still isn't really solved.

Yeah.

Are you trying to narrow in on a particular type of work, whether it's code that's generated, the Blender 3D models that we saw, spreadsheets? Like, there are collaborative environments that are point solutions for each of these to some degree. GitHub sort of collaborates with code. But how do you see finding a beachhead, or is Is it important to be sort of omnipresent across the organization?

Yeah. So, we're focusing more on non-technical teams. We think that the engineering teams have a lot of this pretty figured out, like you mentioned. They've been doing these workflows for a very long time. But the non-technical teams that are suddenly all now writing code that weren't used to writing code, they don't know what GitHub is. They don't know how to deploy to Vercel. They don't know how to do a lot of this stuff. And so, we've just given them these magical agents that can do it all. But they need tooling to actually make that work.

What are you targeting in terms of early adopter? Do you want to go into new companies that don't have anything to rip out, faster-moving startups for early adoption, or are you going to go duke it out in the Fortune 500 and try and get someone to, you know, either add this on to all the other tools they're paying for or maybe rip something out?

Yeah, so what we found at the very beginning, you got a couple people You can just use Claude. It's not a big deal. So that's not really a pain point.

Yeah.

We've been targeting, I'd say, more in the 25 to a couple hundred employee range has been our sweet spot so far. I know you know a lot about this space. Interestingly, the direct-to-consumer e-com space.

Oh yeah.

Those teams have just been loving it.

Interesting.

It is, I think, one of the best use cases for agents. If you kind of think about the business and what it is.

Yeah.

It's a series of pretty structured inputs.

Yep.

Hey, I have this landing page, I run these ads, I have this Amazon listing, it runs this stuff. And then that comes out, I need to order more inventory because this ad is doing really well. And the whole loop just kind of runs. And so agents are— it's crazy what you do in some of these e-com businesses.

Totally. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we talked to Sean Frank at The Ridge, and yeah, every, every e-com business is like, okay, there's the churn spreadsheet and there's the, there's the script for conversion and there's something that synthesizes all of our performance marketing. And then we have all of our influencer ads over here and how much we're spending. And the opportunity to bring it all together is huge.

Jordi, when did you— when did you actually start the company? We started a year ago, so we were just obsessed with this multiplayer AI concept. I've been, crazily enough, it's weird to say now, but spending about a decade building in that space of collaboration and chat.

Yeah, exactly.

And I, uh, built a company before this that was acquired by Slack— or sorry, that Slack was an investor in, and it was acquired by Atlassian.

Okay.

Um, OpenAI was a, was a user of it. It was called Help. So I've been thinking about how do people collaborate in this, in this chat environment for a really long time, and this just felt like the next generation of tools was necessary because we've got these agents now, and it's just a totally different way to work.

Very cool. Give us the funding news.

Tell us about the news. Yeah.

How much did you raise? Yeah, we raised $4 million.

Our investors on the app are Leader Hippo here in New York City and Haystack as well out of the West Coast. And my buddies Matchstick, I'm from Colorado, so Colorado firm in there as well. Love those guys. Very cool. Well, we're gonna— we'll get the team on it, give it a spin. Yeah, you guys should play around.

I think you'd like it.

That'd be awesome.

Awesome.

Have a great rest.

Yeah, great to meet you. And we'll see you in the next round.

Nice to meet you.

Goodbye.

Let me tell you about Shopify. Speaking of D2C e-commerce, Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Jordi, do we have time to tell the story of the, of the heist? The thieves, they raided—

Absolutely not.

Our museum.

We'll see you tomorrow.

See you tomorrow.

It's been an honor, a privilege. I mean, today, today, this is, this is TVPN at its best. Yeah.

In my opinion, we got Jim O'Reilly, Mike, Mikey, got the hot AI power, got the VC, got everything.

Living the dream here.

Yeah. Yap about the current thing, the doom, the The the new iPhone, all of this. Let us know what you think. Are you picking one up? Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com, and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific sharp. That will be Thursday.

Hundred. It will be 105 days until King in the Castle.

King in the Castle. Goodbye.

Love you.

What?