Muse Wonder, Social Reckoning Review, Apple HomeView | Eli Manning & Michael Waldron, Anjney Midha, William Chu & Negin Oliver, Neal Stephenson, Ravi Gupta & John Hegeman, Jack Goldburg, Oege de Moor, Nick Talken, Jeff Holden

You're watching TVBN.

Today is Tuesday, October 13th.

We got something in the mail.

We are live from the TD UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy-to-use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. What did we get in the mail, Jordi? Are you gonna open it or?

I don't know what it is.

Okay.

You guys can guess.

Something.

What could it be?

How many days is it until Christmas? Do we have that counter?

We should pull up a countdown if we have one. It'd be kind of crazy to have one, you know, before Thanksgiving.

Yeah, it is a little early, but it would be nice to know how many days until Christmas.

Boom!

Wait, only 72 days?

We're really—

I think it's fair game now.

It's totally fair game.

Totally fair game.

Not even— it was funny earlier. Now it's just serious business. So, uh, anyway, uh, how was your weekend?

It was great. Too long.

Yeah?

Too long.

Yeah, 4 days is way too much.

I missed you.

Yeah.

I missed us. I missed the UltraDome. But I'm glad to be back.

We are back. And yeah, it was a good weekend. I saw The Social Reckoning. Big, big drop, big weekend, because I think it was opening weekend this weekend. The theater was completely empty. But it's interesting. Do you think that the Meta team tried to time up Muse Wonder? all the good news to like fight back, like the Cheeky Pine appearance, because they completely steamrolled the movie.

They won.

I don't even think they needed to because the movie got really panned.

The crazy thing is that I had— I have zero desire to see the movie. I will not be going to the movie. And in many ways, it's my job to at least go. I feel like I figured you were gonna go. So I felt like we were covered.

So I did go.

It's crazy that I'm like, It's crazy how excited I am to go see the Nathan Fielder film and how little I even care to even know about— I don't even care about your review.

OK, well, you're about to care.

Others might.

My review is going to be riveting, OK?

OK.

So it's Saturday. It's a little rainy in LA. And so I'm like, oh, I'll throw on this jacket. I'll get a little cozy.

You'll go see a film.

I had to go to some other events, went over to our friend's place, and then I go to the movie. So I walk in and I think I'm looking good. I'm dressed for like a nice rainy day in LA. I walk into the theater. I sit down for The Social Reckoning and it stars, it focuses on this Wall Street Journal reporter, Jeff Horowitz. And in the movie, I'll pull up a picture of what he wears in the movie because I looked like a kid from Spider-Man. Who dressed up as Spider-Man going to see Avengers. And I was like, wait, that's my exact jacket, my exact— I had the same jeans and boots too. It was really, really striking. I just accidentally wore a costume to the movie. So it was very funny. And I was like, that is exactly my jacket. Like, it's not even just the same brand. I think it's the exact same jacket. Anyway.

That's so funny.

It was a very funny moment. But It's not quite a sequel to The Social Network. Like, it's not the same structure of protagonists, antagonists. It's not really about the internal operations at Meta, at Facebook. It's very much about the— so the Mark Zuckerberg character is now played by Jeremy Strong instead of Jesse Eisenberg, and it's much more peripheral. The story follows data engineer Frances Haugen and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horowitz. The whole thing feels very out of date in the scaling era, the race towards superintelligence so dominant in the minds of tech people right now, I'm not surprised that this movie is underperforming because it doesn't answer the questions that people are asking about tech companies right now. Worldwide opening was $9 million on a budget of $40 million. So, it's like gearing up to be a flop, but not— the game's not over yet. And Rotten Tomatoes has a 55% score across 215 reviews. The acting is fairly compelling, the lighting, and it moves quickly. The story ebbs and flows nicely over the 2-hour runtime, but it feels like a time capsule from a completely different era. Mark Zuckerberg has so thoroughly reinvented himself that it felt like I was like, who is, who is Jeremy Strong playing? And I'm like, oh yeah, Mark was kind of like that in 2019. But since then it's like UFC, complete fashion makeover, changed the company's name. They have fashion line now with like glasses and so many different elements. And then AI, obviously personal assistants, like even hearing the word Facebook feels antiquated. Now, because people have actually shifted to, well, Instagram is the more important social platform. And then MSL and the AI stuff is really important. So Muse is a more important buzzword than Facebook. And then they renamed the company and stuff. So it felt like a blast from the past. You know, people often say the job of media is to speak truth to power, ask the hard questions. And I came away thinking Aaron Sorkin refused to ask the hard questions. There are so many hard questions to ask about Meta. You could ask, Will Muse margins be comparable to Meta's core ad business? But Sorkin doesn't ask that. Or you could ask, does Muse Wonder jumping really good on the benchmarks, does that change the underlying—

Is it benchmarks?

Is it benchmarks? That's a hard question.

And even Cheeky Pint was pushing on that.

Exactly.

Corporate media.

But Sorkin completely drops the ball. Doesn't address the fact that if Muse Wonder is competitive, does that change the underlying frontier model economic thesis? That's the question that people want to ask. That's the question that media has a responsibility to ask and to investigate and to interrogate. And yet, Sorkin completely shirks his duty there. Will the retention curve for Muse smile? You know, right now, there's some— there's a post by Didi Dosh showing that Muse, you know, there's a lot of excitement on day 1. After 14 days, a lot of people have stopped using the product. Sometimes these things come back. What's going on there? Completely ignored by— the movie. It was very, very odd. And so instead, he focuses on old stories that have been settled in the courts essentially. But there were a bunch of other funny things. I was taking notes. And it's hard because— Michael, are you here to give your review? I have to be very careful because I'm a fan of Aaron Sorkin.

OK.

I think he's great.

OK.

He has made a lot of great work. This did not feel like one of those great movies. What specifically was lacking? Because I thought the acting was pretty good, and I thought like, if it had been 3 hours, I would have been like, oh, that was a drag. But like 2 hours, I thought it was okay. Was it just like too contrived? Because like, I feel like my critique of it is probably very different than yours. Yeah, contrived feels like a good word.

It just feels like— it felt like all the character dynamics and the dialogue and everything just felt so forced.

Yeah.

And it felt like it was trying to be like an '80s like journalistic thriller like All the President's Men or something like that, but it just felt like kind of out of place and it felt too polished to actually fit in that scope.

I don't know.

It was a total glaze piece on the Wall Street Journal because— Well, Jeff Horowitz—

maybe I wanna watch it now.

Jeff Horowitz, I mean, sure, he's in shape, but let's be honest, Jeremy Allen White, the guy is diced. He's absolutely shredded and they've made— they cast him as like the ultimate Chad. There were a bunch of other funny moments where Jeff Horowitz, the character, the journalist, shows up and he's like, I don't even have a Facebook. I don't know how to use the GPS stuff in my— he's like the extremely offline guy. And there's a whole bunch of funny moments where the benefits of social media are kind of revealed through this because part of it takes place during COVID And the Frances Haugen character is like, oh yeah, I set up a Facebook group for all these scientists and everyone like really understands how serious COVID's gonna be. And the journalist Journalist who's like offline and like doesn't care about tech is like, "That's a bunch of mumbo jumbo." And it's like, wait, like you're kind of pitching me the whole idea of like the internet. Like it's like the biology calling COVID so much earlier. Like there clearly are some benefits here, but there's a bunch of other stuff. They what stuck out? They oh, they have this funny moment where they're like Mark Zuckerberg has a bulletproof couch, and they're framing it as like, look at how weird this guy is. And it's the meme like literal coolest thing ever. Like, this thing sucks. Because I'm watching there, I'm like, bulletproof couch, that's amazing.

A couch that's always watching your back.

Yeah. So the idea is that you can hide under it. And they kind of frame it as like he's being a coward by having it, because you should obviously charge straight into the hail of gunfire if you're being attacked. And they're like, he would be hiding behind his bulletproof couch.

But did I not kind of call this like 2 months ago that no one would care at all about the whole premise of this movie anymore?

Yeah.

Like, the whole narrative, like, even the media itself has so far moved on.

Yeah.

That they— I would have liked to see this kind of production on the current AI race.

Yeah.

Right?

And I think we're getting something like that with Artificial.

Yeah.

But it's interesting because, like, The Social Network.

Yeah.

Cult— I don't know if I can say this. Is it a cult classic?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it was a box office success as well.

Box office success, but within tech, it's like it's a classic. It was so influential on the culture, sort of had the opposite effect that the makers of the film maybe wanted it to have, where everyone was like, I want to be like Zuck. I want to be that guy. at least on the inside of the industry. And in some ways, like, I could imagine that Zuck and his team were worried about—

Totally.

This movie because the last one was like such a hit in the outside world and within the tech industry. And they've had to— it was like, I'm sure, hard to reinvent like Zuck or figure out who he was outside of, you know, at some point in the 2010s, it felt like he was just becoming the character he was looking more and more like the character in the movie in some ways, like almost like becoming—

Wait, when?

This was like late—

Yeah.

And then PT has that idea that it's funny and ironic that Mark Zuckerberg became the Justin Timberlake character from the movie.

Yeah, or that was it. But it was like so influential on— it was so influential on the industry. And especially the next generation of founders, that it seemed like it had an influence on Zuck.

Oh, interesting.

Like Christelle.

I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's funny. I mean, it definitely feels like the post-2020 UFC—

Yeah, that was like, wait, who am I? Who do I want to be?

Yeah.

I have to figure out.

And it created a ton of distance, because the Jeremy Strong character, it feels like it's a completely different person. And then he also— Jeremy Strong reads as kind of older. But he's playing a much younger character than what you see on Cheeky Pint, who's like actually Jeremy Strong's age but has become something else. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of interesting weird things. There's, yeah, there's also a bunch of things where you're like, oh, that just doesn't, that doesn't, that's not how things work. Like, there's a scene where Mark Zuckerberg is like addressing the board and explaining how the algorithm will work, and he's like, emoji reactions will be worth 5 points and retweets will be worth 50 points. And it's like seen as like, oh my God, he designed the algorithm for controversy. And it's like, that's— you know that the algorithm is like 12 levels deep. It's like he goes to Adam Mosseri who goes to the Chief Technology Officer, goes to VP of Engineering who says like, okay, what are we doing? He's like, well, we created this optimization pipeline for retention that balances all these things. It's a bunch of— It's a bunch of data and we have no idea what's going on in the black box, but we saw the retention went up. There's no one at Facebook who's like, add another 3 points to retweets or reposts or whatever, shares. It's like more signal than can be humanly understood for sure. Also, it's just a hilarious view of Hollywood's perception of tech that the final shot of Mark Zuckerberg is him sitting in front of like a 42-inch TV in this like war room. And he's just like sitting there like this and he's just watching code scroll by, just like really fast code scrolling by. And it's like, why would you be reviewing code at extreme speeds during like— it happens during like January 6th. It's like, that's not how you monitor a situation.

Yeah, you can just open Instagram.

Yeah, yeah.

And then also like they go through the Trump ban in this weird way where it's very much— it's framed as like his decision. And it's like, if you were paying attention on that day, it's very clear that all of the different tech CEOs were in a group chat together talking about, hey, if we're going to do this, we all got to do it at once because otherwise we will be singled out as the one that did it. So there's a bunch of interesting things.

Yeah.

Also very weird that Aaron Sorkin seems to be under the impression that Frances Haugen and Jeff Horowitz had a romance of some sort, which they deny. And Jeff Horowitz was like, Aaron Sorkin, please don't make it seem like it was romantic.

We were—

I would— she was my source and we just worked together on this, but we weren't romantically involved. And there's like so many scenes where you're like, okay, they're trying to make— they're kind of making it look like they're gonna date. And then they like sail off into the sunset and you're like, oh, so did they get married? And you look it up and it's like, no, they were both married to other people the whole time. Very weird. Anyway, funny movie. But the big news, of course, is Meta, Zuck says Meta has reached the frontier with its new Muse Wonder agent. What was the exact line? He said, he said he knows—

Let's get it.

We'll get into it. We'll get into that. Let's talk about it.

So this is from the Financial Times. Mark Zuckerberg says Meta has reached the AI frontier. FT interview, tech billionaire touts release of new Muse Wonder model after vast spending to challenge rivals in AI race. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So speaking with the FT, as Meta released its Muse Wonder AI model on Monday, this is Watermelon, right? Everyone's doing the fruit thing. There was Strawberry, and then there's Banana, and now there's Watermelon. Internal code names. I mean, I guess the fruit code names are like hard to read into, like unlike the Greek mythology, which is like laden with all sorts of pitfalls and you can be in a hubristic—

Yeah, hidden meaning.

Or a cautionary tale all of a sudden. Anyway, he said, The new system was going to allow much more sophisticated behaviors that are at the frontier of what's being done in the AI field. Silicon Valley Group— the Silicon Valley Group claims Muse Wonder outperformed or performs better than comparable models released by Anthropic and OpenAI in some tasks, according to technical benchmarks. The release marks a major milestone for Zuckerberg, who since last year has committed billions of dollars to shake up Meta's AI leadership, build vast data centers, and hire star AI researchers on multimillion-dollar salaries, all in a bid to keep pace with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Quote, getting to this point required both a large amount of compute and investment and a lot of very rigorous scientific work by the group working on it over an extended period of time. So he's bullish. He's posting on X about it. What's your take, Jordi?

I was trying to I think I understand how Mark and Alex really felt about the model by watching Cheeky Pint on the drive to work today. I was listening. It's great to have Cheeky Pint back. I thought that they were all like— I mean, this was the most candid I've ever seen Zak. He felt like he was just hanging out, having a beer, trying to have a couple beers. And so I thought it was great.

Tyler cataloged it.

He did. How many exactly, Tyler? I think that's about right. It was 1.4 pints.

1.4?

OK.

OK, and I will just go out and say, as somebody who's had a couple drinks while recording a podcast, as we would celebrate whenever we would double way back in the day, I certainly— we always felt that the content just got worse.

Totally.

Like, it was like each sip, it was getting like a little bit worse. And so we basically—

No, it's a funny idea. You think, oh, I'll be looser, it'll be better content, but that's just not what happens.

You're just not as sharp. not as sharp. Like, you're just, period, not as sharp. And, uh, yeah, it wasn't like— suddenly, it was like, there's no reason we're here for 3 hours.

So, if you're gonna do it, you gotta practice. You gotta be drinking 6 to 12 Guinnesses a day. Yeah.

So, anyway, if I'm Zuck, and I have to launch this new model family, and talk about views, and all these things, you gotta give him credit, 'cause either one, he was practicing having, like, 10 beers a day, so that When he had 1.4, he was still feeling, like, sharp.

Yeah.

Uh, I like to imagine—

Oh, his tolerance.

He built up his tolerance.

Yeah, he built up his tolerance. Um, but either way, ballsy to come on and, and, uh, and just start throwing them back. Um, so yeah, I was, I was trying to understand, uh, you know, the benchmarks are all amazing. Muse is a great product.

Yep.

People love it. They, like, manage by, by being, like, later movers, they managed to solve a bunch of problems.

Totally.

And, like, created just a more compelling user experience. I thought it was cool. They were even talking about how— they even talk about their experience with, like, OpenClaw.

Sure.

Which was cool. But I was trying to— if you actually listen to the wording, Zuck's wording, he said— the quote that stood out to me, and I had to play it back a few times to get the exact— String of words. He said, "This is the beginning of like MSL kind of being at the frontier." This is the beginning of like MSL kind of being at the frontier. I mean, it's so hard at the twenty four at the twenty four minute mark. And then and then and so Miss Brother Collison then said, "So you think this is Astra or or or Fable level?" And, and they— and then Alex and Zuck kind of both like fight over each other for a second, which can't knock them for. We do the same thing. But then they said, by looking at the benchmarks, one would conclude that. Which to me is like, yeah, we all see the benchmarks. They look amazing. Yeah, we all— but you've been accused of benchmarking before, and so we all want to know.

No, no, I don't think they've been accused of benchmarking before. Oh, maybe like the early Llama stuff.

I mean, Spark, like everyone went through this with Spark. Spark's bench— you know.

OK.

But it's not like—

And so, to me, it's like, so you think this is Aster or Fable level? And then you answer, by looking at the benchmarks, one would conclude that. So, again, like, I don't think that they are actually— it doesn't— based on a few of these factors, I don't think they're really at the frontier.

Okay.

And I think it will become pretty obvious that that's the case as people—

I mean, these things always like the crown goes back and forth so quickly. Like, they're— They've been working on this for a long time. They launched it. Who knows what the other labs have up their sleeves to fire back, et cetera. But I do think the language is odd because it feels like there's pretty little downside to just being like, yeah, this is a fable-class model, and just use the Anthropic terminology because everyone has an idea of what fable means. It's like big model, really expensive. And you're like, yeah, we're giving this away. We're putting it in the same category, but it's basically free because it's integrated into the product.

But here's what I think is interesting.

And then people can quibble over, like—

I think you have to be way more excited about what MSL is doing than Google or SpaceX at this point. And you have to give— everyone should be giving Mark credit for that, because if you're thinking about— Rewinding a year, even after the talent raids. Hey, a year from now, you're going to be more excited and more interested about what MSL is doing than Google and XAI, SpaceX.

Yeah.

You know, this was this was pre merger. But yeah. So yeah, they're they're competitive for sure.

For sure. Yeah, it is interesting that that SpaceX has yet to launch a model. Elon's been very very. cautious with the words on like when the progress will come from that team on Grok and different versions. But obviously, they have Cursor, they have a great team inside, so you would think that there'd be more progress there. But he's been sort of downplaying it a little bit more.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's interesting. The big debate, the funny thing about the interaction with like the meta-universe and like the EA world is, I mean, going back to the movie, there's this moment where Somebody asks Frances Haugen, what percentage of teenage girls having a bad experience on Instagram would be acceptable to you, like developing body image issues? And she's like, 2%, maybe 1%. She backtracks it and they're like, it's 34%. And that's like a bombshell. But from an EA perspective, it's like, oh, so potentially net good if 46% are positively impacted and only 34% are negatively impacted, it's like you take that trade all day long because it maths out in the spreadsheet. Not how people actually think about things, but it really goes to show you how different philosophical— how different philosophically some of the worlds are right now. And this is like the AI safety world is colliding with Mark Zuckerberg right now. Andrew Curran summed it up. He said, Pacing is out the window for it to work. Every American lab needed to be on board. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly made it clear that he is not interested. One defection among US labs breaks it all as the others will be forced to accelerate or get past. Mark has a staggering amount of compute and has been all in on compute CapEx for years, even in the face of some investor opposition. He never stopped building his infra once. He said on the earnings call a couple of years ago that he'd rather overspend now and potentially even be wrong than not have the compute when he needed it for the next 10x. He's finally hitting his stride and he's not going to slow down. For Team Pacing to solve a defection like this, they would have needed a supportive pro-pacing administration that was passing capability regulations and was willing to use the power of the federal government to enforce them and bring non-compliant labs into line. They don't have any of this. In fact, it's the opposite. Mark has Trump's ear. President Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jensen are all completely aligned on policy. It's full speed ahead. And if you want to pace yourself, go ahead, but don't tell anyone else what to do. That this breaks pacing. And so the interesting thing is like the, like, are we on the frontier? Are we not? There are benefits to being on the frontier from a prosumer adoption perspective. Like people will be like, oh, I got to try the new model. It's Fable Class or it's, it's, it's Astra, but it's cheaper or it's Astra, but it's integrated with my Instagram. People will be excited to try that. But if you actually say, like, now we're on the frontier, we're the most important AI lab, it's like, okay, so what are you doing about the potential problems from AI? Like, now you're the one getting the hard questions about that stuff.

Yeah.

And so, it, like, being, like, a strong second, a strong third, actually gives you a little bit of COVID because you can say, oh, well, like, the, you know, the most dangerous stuff, like, yeah, like, MuseWonder is great at coding, but it can't build bioweapons. Like, that's not— That's not anything. Like, we'll see that emerge at the frontier labs first. We'll see those problems confronted by anthropogenic AI.

And that's one of the reasons why you can say, like, they're not at the frontier, because the researchers that are at the frontier sometimes have this, like, you know, stare where you're like, oh, you've seen things that no— you've seen man-made horrors, you know, beyond—

Beyond all comprehension, yeah.

Yeah.

Let's pull up this video on Saturday. Zuck went live.

He went back to the barbecue.

Went back to the barbecue, back to the egg.

Wow.

Let's pull up this video. Let's get some sound on.

Yeah.

Yeah, Tank, we're smoking sausage. Smoke whatever the fuck we want.

Wow.

Okay, so is this real? This is not air. I was just a boy.

Yeah.

During this era, but he didn't used to like post selfie videos during the Social Network era, right?

Well, he was in and out of going direct through the entire journey.

Okay.

So he like—

'Cause like part of the reason that this new movie doesn't hit is because you just see Zuck all the time talking to people.

Totally.

And he'll go on podcasts a couple times a month.

And you could do an impression of the new Zuck and make fun of him and do a more exaggerated version of this character. And poke fun at the quirks of this character. But it's a completely different vector of comedic attack than the previous arc. Yeah, so I mean, early on he did an interview where he was talking to some interviewer and he was drinking a beer out of a Solo cup. And it was very casual and funny. Then he went on stage with Kara Swisher and she was asking him hard questions and he started sweating and and sort of pacing in his sweatshirt. And it was like a really bad moment where it was like, oh, he couldn't handle the pressure. He crumbled in the hot seat. And then—

I'm sure he was just getting his steps in, but—

Yes.

And then there were a number of other things where he would start doing long posts on Facebook directly, writing blog posts. He did— he tested the livestream functionality with that Smoking Meats video. And Sam Lessin was in that video, and that was actually like a longer livestream.

So, so this new livestream was almost the 10th anniversary of that. It was on October 9th, 2016.

Yeah.

And so I think, I think he tested it out with the Sweet Baby Ray's smoking meats thing, but there was like some backlash. He'd— but he'd, he'd livestreamed like other presentations, other talks, keynotes and stuff. So he'd always been dipping his toe in and out of going direct and working with the media and And being quiet. Like, there's been, you know, arcs and ups and downs throughout the entire journey. But the Sweet Baby Ray's thing, I think he embraced as a meme pretty quickly because in a future keynote or, you know, video, he had a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's on the shelf and it was sort of like a nod. And he's made jokes about that like many times and sort of leaned in. And so this is just further leaning in.

Yeah.

But anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So, what else is important to review here before we move on? Because there are a lot of other posts. People really enjoyed the Cheeky Find. I'm so glad it's back. And this is a really good format. Doing like 2 interviews, 1 host. It turns it into a roundtable. We've seen Alex on David Senra. We've seen Mark on— I think he did Sources recently. There's been a couple other interviews, but this roundtable format really, really works.

Oh, yeah.

It is funny that they're talking about deploying capital for AI spend, and Alex is like, you have to make this very large investment. You have to make big decisions about how you're going to invest and develop the technology. Before you know that there's data to support this. And it's funny because you go back and listen to Dario on Dwarkesh, and he's like, there's these people that are just YOLOing, and everyone's like, oh, he's talking about OpenAI. But, uh, it's like, oh no, he was actually— he was talking about Meta too, and it was absolutely the right thing to do. So it's just funny.

Yeah, it seems that way so far, but I— this didn't— yeah, the, the using like this line to try to criticize Zuck's management style is like he's always operated the business this way. He's always been willing to bet the company. He's always been willing to invest more. He did this with the metaverse. You think like it's— I don't think if you look back, I don't think if you look back, it's like company if you're just spending. Yeah, not betting, not betting the company. He's betting.

He's just—

that's not the right word.

He'll just be like, I have this cash machine and I'm going to spend it. Like he actually treats $10 billion like it's $10 because he makes $200 billion, you know.

Yeah.

And like, to him, it's like, you know, a nice car.

Yeah.

And for other people—

Yeah.

And I just never thought that with the metaverse, he was like, oh, like, this is 100% going to work. So that's why we're going to invest so much. It was like, there's a chance that this is the next paradigm on a shorter time horizon than the rest of the world thinks. And we're going to invest against that.

Yeah.

And it's okay if it doesn't work out. Clearly, the company has been fine.

It is remarkable how, how quick companies can catch up in AI, can get another foothold, can train a new model, can get near the frontier or to the frontier with enough effort versus metaverse and VR where Microsoft has HoloLens and it didn't really go anywhere. And Apple, when are they going to fire back with the next Vision Air or Vision Pro or something? It's just completely— when you're operating in the domain of Pure software, things move so much faster. Anyway, speaking of Apple, Apple just announced Home View, a $299 smart home hub. John Ternus posted it on X. Let's play the video. And I want to know, are you in the market for this? Looks like a big Apple Watch, like the rounded rectangle is, or the rounded square. You're spinning like it. Yeah, we heard about this, and I thought it was going to be much more like the Pixar lamp, like with an articulated arm. It has a much simpler design to it. I think it just swivels and then you can manually adjust it up and down. But I guess it can follow you around the room if you put it on a kitchen island. And they're touting the new Apple intelligence and they think that will catch up. It is interesting how— what they will have to do to catch up to Muse and Instinct and Dot and Crock-Pot. Like, there are several AI agent products that are fairly fully featured at this point, and they all have pros and cons based on what they integrate with. Apple has an incredible integration point and an incredible model partner with Gemini. I think if you, if you went to Noah Shin and said you can only use DeepMind models, he would— but they're free— he would say, yeah, game on. Like, I can build a great product, but it'll be interesting to see, like, when do they have The, hey, go and plan a birthday party, make a reservation, create the invite, send it out to all my friends, and just come to me with the key decision-making questions. And I don't want to be involved. I want you to actually do this agentically. That functionality, that ability feels far off.

Yeah, to me, it screams— stagnation.

OK.

And, yeah, it's hard to get excited about this. I would be— so here's where I would get excited, Jon.

Yep.

If Apple actually— and maybe this is where they're going.

Yep.

But if Apple was committed to actually making this device be able to control all of the electronics around my house, from, like, my gates to cameras to lights to HVAC, all that kind of thing, I would be extremely excited because the current system I have in my house is like some random tablet thing. I don't even know who makes it.

Sure.

Attached to the wall and it controls everything and the software is really bad. And if they were going to actually— is that what they're doing or is this literally just like a half iPad, half computer that sits on your kitchen counter?

Yeah, it's an iPad. And that functionality exists. Astra or Fable can like straight up reverse engineer the API to your garage door clicker and make it work on the smart home. But then they bump into the OS layer all over the place. But I think they're going to reverse engineer that too.

Yeah.

I think the end state might be buy this and jailbreak it and run your own software that's It's sort of instantiated on the fly or forked from something. But in terms of industrial design, it looks pretty nice.

Yeah, really solving a problem that no one has.

Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

John needed to break the ice, so he ran another ad for the New York Stock Exchange.

Oh, I did?

Sorry.

Yeah, solving a problem that I don't have. You know when you're FaceTiming and you need the phone to follow you around the room and it's hard to hold it because you're cooking and you want it and you want the camera to follow you around the room?

Yeah.

Well, we built the solution for that.

So Meta had a product that competed with this called the Portal.

Yeah.

Same thing.

And I was— I like that for the name. It's Portal time, baby.

Yeah.

I actually did get a bunch of them for family members during COVID and we used them like once and then they started collecting dust. They worked as like picture frames basically. But they did not become like the smart home. Although maybe they should bring that back now that they have Muse. Like they basically have a direct competitor to this prebuilt. They just need to update some software and like—

Yeah. One of the other videos was like highlighting— one of the other videos was highlighting Siri.

Yeah.

Like the Siri integration here.

Works with Siri AI.

And we know they're working on making a better Siri. But I actually— it made me realize I think they need to change the voice of Siri. Because at this point, anybody— everybody has had so many disappointments using Siri that I just associate the name with, like, I tried to do something, it didn't work, or I accidentally triggered Siri. I definitely don't want to do that. And so I think they have to, like, rebrand.

You want Tim Cook?

I want— yeah, I want— I want the chairman speaking to me.

That'd be great.

Good morning.

Let's see. Is software actually dead?

But here's the thing.

Okay, continue.

Can you—

so I use FaceTime with family members.

Yeah.

Usually like with the kids.

Yeah.

And like it's very chaotic.

Yeah.

The kids are like jumping all around.

Totally.

Can you imagine trying to have a successful FaceTime with the home view with a bunch of kids running around. It would just be getting kicked over.

Yeah, you'd need to put it on the floor in the playroom, and then they would get kicked over. Or they would need to be tall enough to stand, in which case they could maybe just hold the phone.

Yeah, it's odd.

Yeah, and I'd just be curious how Apple thinks about this. Is this like, yeah, we have enough customers that a million people will buy this? Does it actually move? Anything. I would just like to— I would love to see that really bold bet on, like, we are actually going to provide iPhone-level software for your entire home.

I mean, it would be— I mean, Amazon has gone on a tear and bought a smart lock system, and they bought Ring cameras and all sorts of different— they have Eero Wi-Fi mesh routing. And so it would be very cool. This could be so much cooler if it was like, oh, yeah, Meta— Apple also has a garage door company and a smart doorbell company. And they also have a product for the cameras in your home. And they have a wide range of speakers. And they make a TV. And so, like, you can actually get all your consumer products from them. And if you go all in, you get a great experience, but you got to be in the walled garden. Instead, it's like even if you go all in on Apple, you just don't wind up— you're still going to have so many devices because they don't have a thermostat. Google has a thermostat, but they don't have a thermostat. And so, You're going to wind up with like all these weird integration points where Google's like, oh well, like yeah, we're happy to integrate with Siri AI, but, uh, like let's make sure you're still in— you're logged into your Nest Google account or whatever, and they're going to be fighting. So anyway, um, let's, uh, let's move on to Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password People are going back and forth on software being dead. There's no moat. The moat is you, blah, blah, blah. The one that I wanted to cover was—

oh, there.

Did you see this spa sign? The AI-generated sign outside of a spa that is a sign of a sign?

I love it.

They went—

they really took me into a different world.

And they zoom in because they generated an image of a sign and they printed it and put it on a sign.

Sign-ception.

Yes. They should add a not for you tab. I want to see what the algorithm thinks I'd hate. That's funny. This one had me dying. Well, that's a new one. My Mustang came back from a Turo trip fully tinted. Someone rented this guy's Mustang and they tinted it so that they could enjoy tint while on the Turo trip.

It makes me think they were maybe doing something that was illegal. Very questionable.

Very, very questionable.

Very, very questionable. People were going back and forth. Elon He posted, I think, his mailing address just right on Main.

Did he?

He said, I asked Grok to research the most fun LEGO Star Wars kits for young kids and order them. As easy as that. But if you zoom in, you can see that he's sending product to somewhere. And it has a shipping address and billing address.

That's a crazy leak.

That's a crazy thing to post. And I don't know if this is true. It's probably not, but somebody said, I just canceled your order. Don't share your info online. So they had the order number, all that other details. Who knows?

Yeah, this seems maybe Photoshopped because—

And he says, that's not my address and the order isn't canceled.

Yeah.

Got him.

But yeah, I mean, yeah, it's a tell because the first reply by the bot is, hi Elon, thanks for waiting. And it's like, it wouldn't know that. Until you actually went and said, I'm Elon, here's my information, please cancel. It would be potentially possible to do that with a bad prompt injection or something. But did you see this F1 camera transition?

I did. Break it down for me.

This is elite, elite transition. Play this. So it goes from one camera to the next, and everyone thinks they're using AI to merge the two. The 2 video feeds, which is really, really cool. Way, way more immersive. So there's levels. We got to get the AI transitions in the UltraDome for sure. We got to figure out how they did this. But that is such a cool, such a cool move. What are you drinking over there?

OJ.

Orange juice? Why does Mert think F1 is a scam? F1 might be the greatest scam of the decade. Totally unwatchable IRL. 50% oversupplied for paddock tickets. that are just random IBM and Oracle employees. That's a dream come true. Who else do you want to be hanging out with other than tech employees? I agree.

It is completely unwatchable IRL.

It's not about following the race directly. You can still watch the TV or the map if you want. It's about being there to feel the cars go by really fast, I think.

But it's really just like a big spectacle now. It's not about—

It's like a weekend. And you're there to watch the performance. You go to the practice. Sometimes you'll take a ride on a vehicle and go on the physical track. It's much more experiential than you're locked in watching a—

Yeah. No. And the biggest challenge with motorsports is that the viewers, live viewers, whether you're watching at home or at the event, you have no way of understanding what the drivers are going through.

Oh, sure.

Because—

Yeah, it's all abstract.

Because it's so normalized because the cars are going around and they rarely crash. And so, it doesn't feel nearly— and they're so precise, they're so technical, they're so highly skilled that they just normalize it very quickly even though it's completely ridiculous. Like, it's one of the craziest things that we do as humans. No, it's insane. And it's an insane workout. But again, like, you can't tell that they're They're they they have like the equivalent of like a ridiculous fever the entire time that they're driving, right? Like you can't tell that that at all.

Well, it gets kind of snippy on them on the comp sometimes. Yeah, and that's but that's the most you get. That's it. Well, speaking of cars, Alfa Romeo launched a new car. I want your review. The Curesco Cura Cura Rosso launched. And they put up a YouTube video here breaking it down. There's also an article that we can click through from Autoblog. But let's play the actual video. I think it's a cool launch and I want to know what you think about the front, the wheels, the back. Let's play this video. They almost forgot how to make our hearts race. But not us. Every Alfa Romeo An Alfa Romeo has always been built around the same engine. Not the one beneath the hood, the one inside our chest.

That's why an Alfa Romeo has never simply taken you somewhere. It has always taken your breath away. As much as I want to keep watching this, We have our first guest.

Give us your review first.

Uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave it as a cliffhanger.

Cliffhanger?

Cliffhanger. We'll get back to it.

I think the, I think the front looks great. I think the side looks great. The back is a little crazy, but it's, it's pushing it. Uh, 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. And let's bring in our first guests of the show. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining. Let's start with some introductions so everyone knows who's who.

Hey, guys. Go ahead, William.

Hi, I'm William Chu. I'm the head of private equity over at Zurich Alternative Asset Management. Thank you guys very much for having us here. Longtime fan, first-time joiner. Diet Coke enabled.

There you go. Cheers. Great to have you. What about these other 2?

Who are they?

Hey guys, good to see you again. Some of you know me. My name is Franz-Ange. Friends call me Ange. You guys should feel free to as well. And you got my partner Nagin over here.

Hey there.

Hey, Nagin Oliver. Nice to meet you guys.

Amazing. Where are you guys calling in from? Side of the road somewhere? Data center?

You can probably see.

You can Doesn't it look good?

Isn't it obvious?

Isn't that the Golden Gate Bridge?

I mean, your hat was kind of blocking it, I gotta say, at least at the start. But now, now I see it. I thought you were going to be somewhere down in like West Texas or something like that. But it's amazing to have you guys.

We are on federal land. We're at the Presidio in SF, which is where our campus is. This is where Amp is headquartered. And so we just stepped outside for some sunshine and to talk to you guys. Thanks for having us.

Amazing. Well, why don't you kick it off, Ansh? Why are we all here today? And why is this— why will this day be remembered throughout? Why will it echo throughout history?

Yeah. Well, as you guys know, compute is getting expensive. And as sheriffs in the infrastructure world, we started getting a lot of calls for help last year from startups who wanted access to compute at scale, but because they weren't as rich as the hyperscalers, they were getting told they could not access the compute they needed. So they called us in. We're the cavalry. And I'm excited to announce today that we're kicking off a $100 billion program called the Grid Trust that's being anchored by Zurich. Zurich Asset Management is one of the biggest institutional investors in the world. They have over $300 billion of assets under management and they have anchored the Grid Trust program with a meaningful amount of capital that we are using to bring up capacity, compute capacity for startups. all around the world. And we're really lucky that we had Negin join us from AMD to lead this effort. When Negin was at AMD for over 8 years and helped build the GPU business over there from scratch. So between Negin and William, we're in pretty good hands.

That's great.

Where should we start from here?

I'm going to hand it over. I'm going to call on William a little bit to explain what Zurich does. I think the big question every time you guys have asked me, do you want to build out 2 gigawatts? Yeah, your question has always been, how are you going to pay for it? And so the good news is we've got William to answer your question.

That's a, that's a heavy ask there. But look, happy to give you some perspective from our lens here. And just for some context as well, what I do here over at Zurich Alternative Asset Management, we are the alternative investing arm of Zurich Insurance Group. Obviously, you know, it's a publicly traded company. I will slightly correct Ange. We have a little bit more than $300 billion. It's actually $440 billion.

There you go.

Oh, wow.

It's just a rounding error. $100 billion rounding error.

You know, what's that among friends, right?

Exactly 2 gigawatts.

Isn't that convenient?

You know, look, we are super thrilled, super excited with our partnership here with Amp and And a dear friend of mine and the team as well. I've got to know them for some time and really are excited about this ambitious endeavor. Super proud to have this opportunity and privilege to showcase with you guys live today. As you said, this is kind of a very memorable day for us and obviously for hopefully the future of compute. I mean, there's a number of reasons why we're super excited about this. Opportunity. And, you know, I think from a perspective of what really kind of got us over, over the hump, so to speak, is a few reasons. One, I would say, is Ange has been kind of the lead catalyst around the whole world of compute. He's, he's looking to change the game in venture in the very core and what the essence of it is. I cannot be more excited about partnering with someone like that. Who is not just kind of be yet another venture firm, because I think the reality is, you know, we've seen a lot of those folks out there. But I think for those that really kind of have an ambitious plan to really change the DNA of what it means to be a venture capitalist today in today's environment, I think that's one of the reasons why we're super excited. And I think from the specific opportunity set here, I think a few reasons. One is I'll break it down into a few categories and I'll try to be brief.

Right.

But, you know, the spending curve, one is people often think about the frontier AI labs and the compute is always speculative. But frankly, the infrastructure side behaves a little bit more like a utility than a startup. And that's, I think, a testament to what Andrej has been kind of evangelizing. And we're a believer as well. Obviously, some data and research has kind of shown that. I think model capabilities have improved. I mean, we know the obvious ones, particularly on the frontier side. And likewise, higher compute consumption has followed, right? So labs may compete, models come and go and change, but the demand, frankly, for the compute has followed consistently. So as investors, institutional investors at that, we're looking for a pattern of spending that's durable and observable, right? A few other things I'll just highlight. You know, I think that we've seen what Jensen's been doing, particularly on the Nvidia chips and really just kind of making a big splash around all the various different parts of infrastructure being now financeable because of this pattern of spending.

Right.

And there's demand and you get reasonable confidence in that. So that helps. We're not relying on any single model provider to win the game. And this is going back to going now into my third piece of it, why we're super excited, which is pooling. Pooling actually reduces the risk. So instead of kind of putting all your eggs in one basket where you have a single tenant build out, you know, you're basically going for the Hail Mary, one customer, one roadmap, one growth trajectory. Pooling actually changes the economics. It actually helps diversify. And from a risk perspective, as you can imagine, I work at an insurance company. So risk is a natural big theme. This is actually an incredible diversifier here. So And last but not least, you know, I would say, why does it matter? I think we all know, like, look, AI is not a fad. AI is longstanding here. And we're investing here not just in the promise of compute and what it can bring, but, you know, in terms of the high utilization that it, of course, compute can deliver over a long period of time. And so we're super excited. And of course, it starts with AMP in our partnership with them. They are— I mean, Ange doesn't need yet another plug. If you follow Ange, he's successful in his own right.

He's been writing a lot.

He's well-spoken and he's got his X account. For those that don't follow, they should. It's quite entertaining on many levels. But I think what's important as well is there's a lot of players in this space, but you have to have the right one. And I think AMP is the partner of choice for us and And they're one of the very, very few that we are doing business with.

Yeah, very cool. How are you thinking about timelines here? You have a bunch of portfolio companies. You're going to have a lot more in the future. You also have, I'm sure, companies reaching out to you all the time. Ange, we don't work together yet, but I need compute. You're looking to bring 2 gigawatts online. That's not going to happen instantly, but how are you communicating the timeline?

today? Typically, I introduce them to Nagin and then she takes over. So why don't I turn to her? Because, you know, at AMD, the last thing Nagin helped assemble over there was the 2-gigawatt partnership each with OpenAI and Anthropic. And I think those will be looked on as templates for scaling across the ecosystem. But, you know, Nagin, how would you answer that question?

Yeah, I mean, I think it is going to take some time. And as Anj mentioned, my focus is really to figure out how we get the 2 gigawatts online in a reliable way. You know, one of the things that William talked about, pooling for the end customers, there's also value in having multiple cloud providers and NeoClouds on the grid. So our customers are now, you know, have a little bit more security and they're less dependent on a single cluster and have more of a reliable vision of where the capacity is going to come online and whether it's one or the other kind of doesn't matter. When people come to us looking for compute, I mean, we have compute live today. The grid works. We have people running on it. It's been unbelievable. We have Nvidia and AMD. Our hope is to get all chips onto the grid because that's what's really going to make this fungible for, for people. And, you know, we've got capacity coming online between now and, say, 12 months from now that we have very clear line of sight to where it's going to be, how much it's going to be. And it's a process to educate our customers on how best to utilize that capacity because our goal is not to have them lock it up and just sit idle. The goal is to make sure we get the most utilization out of those GPUs that we have on the grid. So that's really what my focus is. I've spent my entire career in the semiconductor industry focusing the last 8 years just on the infrastructure side for AI. And so that's what's complementary with what that Anjha's bringing to the table and looking forward to getting this built out and getting our labs access to GPUs the way they need it, really, when and where they need it.

Amazing.

So next time any of our friends listening in wanna know exactly when their next cluster's gonna come online, all you have to do is message nagin@ampbbc.com. You no longer need to go, I'm no longer the bottleneck, as many will testify. I hope you don't mind me sharing your email.

Most people won't know how to spell it. We'll be good. We're good.

Yeah. No, the motivated ones will find out.

Yes, the motivated ones will find me. John, what were you going to say?

I'm interested to know about how do you think about the diversification, the spreading of risk across different customers at different levels? That seems like it's important. to the philosophy here? Obviously, there's a number of labs and hyperscalers and neo-clouds, but then there's also startups. But how do you think about actually spreading out the long tail of demand across all the potential customers? Is there like a portfolio strategy in place?

This is a great question. So if you go to the website nationalcompute.com, which is where the grid is hosted, you'll see it says the grid is now in public access. Public sector access. You know, we, we started with a public mission, which means the, the compute, the infrastructure that's being built out has to go on the grid to people who need it the most. Today, that means for us, .edu users, .gov users, .mil users, where as far as we're aware, we're one of the only places where these folks can access live, like hundreds of chips on demand at subsidized rates. You can get an AMD chip there, an MI355 for $3 an hour, and you can get a B200 from NVIDIA for about $4. The commercial pool we have, there's over 60 different commercial labs also on the grid. They pay a much higher price. So we've had several millions of dollars being spent on MI355s at about $12 an hour as of yesterday. And so just to give you a sense of the spread, commercial customers do pay higher for on-demand access. But public sector users get to compute at subsidized rates. And the benefit of pooling is we get to essentially load balance across these different customer types and ensure folks who need access the most can get it at prices that don't sort of exclude them from the market. Does that make sense?

Yeah, totally.

Last question from my side for now. How, like demand planning, it feels like the greatest challenge for applications layer companies, even, even obviously the labs as well. But is this something that can be solved or like it feels like this is the solution where you just get the most number of chips in a single sort of platform all over the world? And because it just feels like, it feels like demand planning for, for these companies is entirely unpredictable. You have like an instinct moment where suddenly you go from obscurity to, you know, overwhelming demand, or you've seen labs release a new model and it's— you get that new capability increase and suddenly you have customers that you weren't even imagining. And so this feels like the only solution. But what are you guys seeing the smartest companies do around forecasting? Is it really just napkin math and sort of like guessing, or is this a new kind of core skill set?

I think each company on their own is doing the napkin math and guessing, and they're looking at their neighbors like they're looking at what is this guy doing, what is that guy doing, and trying to like extrapolate that. I think the beauty of what we're doing is, is that our grid members are sharing their napkin math with us. So we get visibility across a larger number and then we're the ones taking the bets on some of the unknowns, right? Like, like the instinct moment you mentioned, you know, we're going to plan for that so that there is capacity. for those that didn't know better than to plan. And the idea is that if you have enough users across it, some may plan too high, some may plan too low, but you should be able to sort of smooth out that demand curve and make sure that the people who need it most have access to GPUs at the time they need it.

And, and like everybody else, we also use AI. So the first thing you'll see when you log into nationalcompute.com is our agent. Called Marshall. Marshall is named after, you know, the general who helped unite the United States and Europe post-World War II after the Marshall Plan. And Marshall is an automated system that ingests all of that data that Nagin was talking about and then actually does demand forecasting for us. And every grid member can go talk to Marshall. Do you— can kind of think of Marshall as your chief AI compute officer. And we're using reinforcement learning to improve it. And over time, I think this will really unblock a lot of bottlenecks for folks who don't have their own infrastructure teams, their own procurement teams. You know, it's not uncommon today for the largest labs to have 100+ people doing this job, but I don't see why we can't relieve some of that stress through automation.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down.

Amazing milestone, and so excited that a lot more companies will will get access to this compute. And yeah, it feels like we had this beautiful sort of hacker moment, hacker culture emerging, and then the sort of like financial realities of like how do you access massive amounts of compute as a small team, kind of you run into that. So very excited about this and congratulations on the partnership.

Fantastic. A big shout out to Zurich. It takes a village to raise AI infrastructure. And as you can see, between And William, with his good background and us over here in San Francisco— William's actually based in New York. We think this has to be a cross-country scaling approach, and we're really lucky to have Zurich believe in us at scale.

I love it. Amazing. Well, looking forward to having all 3 of you back on the show soon. And good luck out there.

Have a good rest of your week.

We'll wear our cowboy hats next time. Thank you, guys. See you.

Cheers.

Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Our next guest is Neal Stephenson, the fantastic author you know and love. His latest book is D. Heavy Water.

Here he is.

Welcome to the show, Neal.

How are you doing?

I'm good. My voice is still working because this is day 1 of the book tour, so you got me at a great time.

I'm sure.

How have, uh, book tours evolved? I imagine your book tour now is like 8 podcasts a day for 2 weeks.

Well, yeah, of course. That's obviously new during the time I've done it. It used to be like the first book tour I did, it was old school and they would sort of put you on like drive time shock jock radio programs and you'd try to explain your book to a, you know, a shock jock in 30 seconds. It was pretty challenging. I like this better.

Is there a trade-off between talking the book too much and not leaving enough for people to actually go and convert versus like talking about anything, talking about other topics, anything that just gets people interested. We've talked to some people— I think it applies more in nonfiction where someone has a thesis and then they lay out that thesis on like a 3-hour podcast, and then people are like, well, why would I get the 6-hour audiobook if I can just listen to you for 3 hours?

Yeah, I kind of had that experience with Sometimes with nonfiction books like business advice books, you know, it's like, okay, I get it. I don't need to read it. Obviously, you don't want that as an author. I think with fiction, you've got a big advantage in that if you can kind of set up the general thesis of the book, that, you know, that hopefully gets people interested in the story and gives them a reason to actually pick it up and read it.

Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

What do you— how do you think about the responsibility that, like, do you feel like science fiction authors have a responsibility? And do you think, like, how much of a weight do you feel like there is to the work? Because, like, in my view, you guys, you're sort of predicting the future and you're entertaining, but then also It inspires so many people that you impact the world in a very unique way just with your words. And I think you have to assume that something about it, these ideas just sort of weed their way into people's consciousness and it affects their actions and affects the products that they make. It affects the weapons systems that get built in the future. And it seems like there is some weight to it.

Yeah. I mean, I think the good thing is that To tell a story that intelligent readers will actually enjoy, you need to be realistic. You need to include some of the actual complexity and ambiguity of the real world. Otherwise, it just comes off as kind of a one-dimensional screed. And so I try to do that. The last book I wrote that had some of that potential was Termination Shock, which is about geoengineering. So, I mean, it depicted people doing geoengineering, and one of the main characters was a big advocate of geoengineering. But there are also characters in the book who took a different view and who were ambivalent or openly hostile to the efforts that were being made in that area. So I think if you— to begin with, that just made it a better book.

Hmm.

But, you know, if you're reading a book like that with an eye towards, you know, starting a company or something, then hopefully you notice the fact that there's different points of view on it. There's complexity. And you take that into account in your decision-making going forward.

Do you believe in nominative determinism?

Well, in, in In novel writing, sure, because you get to pick the names.

Yeah.

And so the, um, uh, so Dickens, for example, you know, was, was really good at giving his characters names like Scrooge or Uriah Heep or whatever that immediately gave you a clue as to the nature of that particular character. Uh, whether that really translates into real life, I'm a little less Yeah.

Well, how do you grapple with it as an author? It can sometimes be tempting to say, the main character's name will be Chad Goodman, and the bad guy will be named Evildoer. And it can be a little bit on the nose. But sometimes it's—

Hero protagonist.

Yeah. Hero protagonist is a great one. But how do you personally deal with that balancing act?

I mean, it's just a question of Trying to have a little bit of a light touch, you know, make it a little funny, a little witty. If it feels like you're hitting the reader over the head with something obvious, then they're not gonna take that very well.

Yeah.

But on the other hand, if you can kind of slip it in there and have it be sort of clever and funny, then the reader feels like Okay, I'm in on the joke.

Sure, sure. Can we go back to 2013? I'd love to know how you met Seamus Blackley, who I think sort of kicked off this arc. Do I have that correct?

Yeah, yeah. I've known Seamus, I don't know, since the late '90s probably. He, after he left Microsoft, he got interested for a while in trying to help gamers fund their projects. And that, I think, led to him being kind of running the game division of CAA, the big Hollywood talent agency. And at the time, my agent in LA, Richard Green, was working at CAA.

Sure.

And so one day Rich said to me, hey, you know, um, if you're in town, there's this guy Seamus, you know, uh, you guys should meet. Uh, so we went out, had lunch, and immediately kind of, I think, understood each other and became friends. And, um, so we're— we've been in touch ever since. I saw him just, uh, 2 weeks ago when I was down in LA.

How are you thinking?

Yeah, he—

He sort of inspired the book, right? Sorry.

Yeah, he made me aware of the existence of some of the story content that this book is based on, specifically the Earl of Suffolk. And so since then, he and I have sort of traded notes as the occasion warrants. about, you know, when we come across some interesting piece of information, we'll email it back and forth to each other.

How are you thinking about the current moment in video games and AI? There's all of these mashups that are happening. People are using AI to decompile video games, and it feels like we're at a moment where fan-made video games are going to be more of a thing. Like a fan-made Halloween costume, I can imagine that fans will turn many of your works into AI-generated video games. There's obviously a lot of intellectual property discussion around there, but how are you churning through it? Is there a part that excites you, part that is nerve-wracking? How are you dealing with that moment?

Well, I'm more of a just hands-on guy, so I I'm a co-founder of a startup called WinAIR that's actually working in kind of in this area. Not exactly what you're talking about, but, you know, the premise is to allow fans of story worlds to tell stories in their favorite fictional universes by giving them an environment that, you know, represents part of that world and a script editor that they can use to determine what they want to see happen. So, and, and we've actually just last week made an announcement. We've been working with a company called Dreamlands.ai that has made some incredible strides in this area and made it possible for a tiny team like ours to generate environments, realistic, high-quality video game environments that a few years ago would have cost, you know, $1 million So that's kind of the way I come at this. If I haven't followed the, you know, the mashup scene very much, though.

Yeah. Jordi, please.

So you published Snow Crash in '92. And then we went through a period of like, what in hindsight feels like total stagnation, where you get, you know, the internet, Yeah. ...becomes big and that's cool, but it sort of just extends a lot of existing technologies. And then, it feels like the 2020s, I think generally people have felt the sort of acceleration and the speed-up and new capabilities. From your view, having written about a lot of the things that we're starting to see in the real world and experience today, even in small ways, Did it feel like a period of 20 years of stagnation and then a real acceleration? Or what was your lived experience? Because it just feels like such a big— it feels like a big gap where reading the Wall Street Journal or reading the mainstream media has at times felt in the last year like you're reading science fiction.

Yeah.

And it certainly didn't feel that way That's a good point. The early 2000s and the 2010s was like, great, we have new database software and we have more wars. And it didn't feel like there was any— it didn't feel like it was— the news was not—

That wild excitement.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I kind of wasn't even aware of it, but now that you point it out, it's like, yeah, it was sort of that way. And I mean, you know, the internet came along, it was big, it was very important. And there was kind of a period of consolidation, I think, where it changed from, you know, sort of like, you know, rampant grad students, you know, stringing things together to big business and the consolidation of power and influence on the internet by the, you know, the FANG companies basically. And So, so yeah, I think gradually over time you begin to— you get tired of it. You begin to lose the sense of wild excitement and, you know, big things happening and the sense that, hey, there's— I could do something. You know, there's opportunities here that I could grab. That starts to fade after a while. And now it's sort of back. Because of the things that you mentioned.

How are you thinking about—

Yeah. And then on that, I don't know what your process is like for generating ideas for your future work, but do you feel like this is a time where you can open the newspaper and start to— because what's been interesting is many people in the technology industry, the people closest to the frontier of AI have started writing their own science fiction, right? So, you have work like AI 2027, which is like—

2040, yeah.

And AI 2040, where it's like, hey, let's look at the technology that we have today and sort of just try to extrapolate it out quarter by quarter and see where this goes. And you have to— you basically have this series of compounding assumptions that lead to these really Insane outcomes. But in some way, you were running that same process, but over maybe a larger timescale where it's like, if you assume the technology we have today is going to improve this way and make jumps in this way, then I can imagine this whole world where this would be the way that you travel around the Earth, or this would be the way that individuals interact with large corporations.

Yeah, I haven't read the things you mentioned. I wasn't aware of them, but now I am. I'll check them out. But I think to make a good yarn, you need to— there's some elements that you need to include in the story that give it a feeling of of realism. And one of those is, you know, it's one thing to posit a new technology and think about what you might be able to do with it just on a pure engineering level. But in addition, you know, real technologies answer to other masters as well. So you've got kind of the social and creative side. You know, what do people do? With new technologies that's unexpected, like electric guitars. You know, we had electricity. Everyone knew there was going to be light bulbs and washing machines. But electric guitars were kind of an unexpected thing that came out of a more social and cultural milieu. And then there's the business side. You know, you've got to, you know, you've got to have a plausible business plan for why some future technology in a science fiction book actually makes sense and can get funded. So those are some elements that I think in a way it adds some additional work and some additional challenge to the process of writing science fiction, but it more than pays off because what you end up with is something that feels a lot more organic and realistic and as such can do a better job of drawing the reader into the story.

How are you thinking about AI in the process of researching, writing, fact-checking, proofreading, and the trade-offs of using tools that might atrophy your own skills? How have you grappled with all the different opportunities and risks?

I think you answered the question. I'm not real big on I'm atrophying my skills.

Yeah.

So I do think that it's, you know, it's a little bit difficult to explain, but there's something about the serendipity and the randomness of doing it yourself that is very productive in the end. And so, like, when I was writing My Baroque Cycle series of historical novels, I would just make notes by hand in comp books. I had a huge stack of these notebooks, and it was all hodgepodge. It wasn't organized. It wasn't searchable, certainly. And so I would have to flip through them trying to find stuff. I think it's somewhere in here kind of deal. And in the course of doing that, I would stumble across things I'd half forgotten about or Connections would get made, new ideas would emerge. And so, so for me, having that work done by a research assistant, whether it be a human or an AI, would actually be counterproductive. And I'm just not interested in it at all.

Yeah.

But I mean, I already know how to write books, so I don't need help.

That's a good point. Is there a science or technology that you think is underrepresented or underexplored in science fiction? Like, there's a lot of space stuff explored. There's a lot of robots, basically. I mean, we maybe need to advance that. But is there something that sticks out to you as potentially fertile ground or underexplored?

I mean, I think— A lot of the story of the next half century or century is going to be how we get carbon out of the atmosphere.

Sure.

And that is a straight-up technology engineering project that's going to have to be carried out on a really large scale. So I'd like to see more about that for sure. There's all kinds of different different carbon sequestration technologies that are being talked about. Some are biological, some are kind of industrial facilities, some are sort of like enhanced weathering of stone and so on. So there's a lot of ideas floating around right now, and we haven't really settled on what the right one's going to be. But it's an interesting area right now of engineering ferment. There's like bright people going into it. And so I hope that we'll be seeing more in that area.

What about, would you ever write something about algorithmic social feeds? Like, it seems like an idea that you would have imagined and maybe you have like, you know, decade ago or 2 decades ago, where this idea that everyone would be spending 4 hours a day immersed in this device that is showing them entirely different worldview and set of facts and all these different things. I was scrolling on X over the weekend, and there's this new— I mean, it's not really new, but it seems to have gotten worse where people would just share fake fake news, fake images, and the only— and these things have, you know, 10 million views. And I can see that it's in the process of getting community noted.

Sure.

And you can click in and see that, like, oh, this is not a real image. This never appeared or whatever. But AI is making it— we've had this technology for years now, but it's so much easier. And if I wasn't in the, like, community notes program, I never would know that I would just be scrolling past these things seeing fake news. And so, there's this sort of fake news element that is still underexplored, but then also this idea of like, I'm just seeing—

Living in a filter bubble.

I'm living in an entirely different online world than somebody next to me in traffic. And then, what are the downstream implications of that?

Yeah, I kind of went there briefly in my book, Fall or Dodge in Hell, and it's sort of a minor sideshow. to the main story. So, um, uh, but it kind of depicts a semi-near future in which big swaths of the country have been kind of colonized by the sort of thing you're describing, with, uh, the results that— That part of the country in my book is, is called Ameristan. And, you know, it's this kind of war-torn, uh, place inhabited by people who who have absolutely no idea what's going on, but they're sure that they do. And so it's— to me, I mentioned carbon before. To me, the 2 big problems facing us right now are carbon and what you just described. And with carbon, I can see that's an engineering problem straight up. The other problem, people living in their own realities, is you could address it with engineering or by blowing up a few Yandex server farms. Oh, yeah.

That's crazy.

But it's a harder problem because people like it.

Yeah.

So that means you have to police. What are you going to do? saying, like, it can get kind of dark if you're like, okay, well, now the government is gonna decide all— they're gonna try to enforce a rule set around what can be seen and shown. And it's this weird thing where, like you said, like, the fake stuff just naturally is absurd often, so it gets more engagement. It is more entertaining. People spend more time, they get served more ads.

Yeah.

But at the same time, if you have government intervention— and so, yeah, it's like I think we're much— the human race is so much better set up for engineering problems where we have this monumental problem that we're facing.

At least we all agree on it.

But in that situation, you have one hacker, theoretically hacker in their garage or at some university lab or whatever, and they can have this one breakthrough that can then get global adoption because there's an incentive to have that global adoption. And right now, with this Like, problem of us all living in our own world, there's no obvious incentive structure that will fix it. If anything, there's an incentive for it to get worse.

And in some ways, the videos and the images are— for me, it's a little easier to look at those, at least at the current stage of technology, and say, yeah, I don't think that's real. But what's more insidious in a way is lots of posts underneath that video. You know, by, by— so mostly by bots. Right. And so in a way, that's a sneakier way that the same bad actors can influence the way we think because, you know, we read these things and we tend to think, oh, well, there's a real person out there somewhere who's actually typing this when, you know, that's, that's not actually the case at all.

Yeah.

I know you've studied the fall of Rome a lot. How do you How do you compare those problems that you just described to the problems that were faced by Rome? They feel extremely modern, but is there some connection that we could actually learn lessons from the past here?

Yeah. Well, there were 2 falls of Rome. There was the fall of the Republic, which finally bit the dust around the time of Julius Caesar. And then there was the much slower fall of the Mm-hmm. And they're kind of different phenomena in a way. It's easier to get a grip on the fall of the Republic because you can just see what happens. Just certain people like Marius and Sulla just decided that they were going to sweep aside the norms that until then, all of the important people in the Roman Republic had agreed to observe. And they just decided to flout those norms and do what they wanted to do. And that's a little bit, I think, where we are right now in modern society. The fall of the empire is a slower and more complicated process that took another 1,500 years to fully you know, reach its, reach its end. And, um, and there you're talking about a lot of things like migration and, um, and changes in religion, uh, and so on and so forth that, um, uh, make for good reading. I recommend, you know, studying this, but I don't know if I have a quick, um, answer for you.

Well, one solution for algorithmic feeds picking D, Heavy Water, is available.

I wanted to ask you before you leave, who do you think is the most underrated science fiction author that you think would resonate with our corner of the internet, our small corner of reality? You're among venture capitalists, you might laugh at this, but you're certainly the most widely recommended And read. If you ask any of them, they'll tell you.

I mean, if I just had to pick one off the cuff, first thought is Matt Ruff, R-U-F-F, who wrote Lovecraft Country, which got turned into a TV series. So that's his most widely known book. But every book he writes is different, and they're all great. And he's got one he's winding up now called Black Sheep, but I don't think it'll be out real soon. But I know it's about AI. So if I had to pick one, that's my first thought.

Well, thanks for the recommendation.

Well, it was great to meet you. Thank you for coming on.

Thanks for having me on the show and congratulations on the book launch.

Yeah, good luck keeping your voice over the next couple of weeks.

Yes, good luck.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk to me in 2 weeks. We'll know.

Fantastic. Cheers, Neil.

Goodbye. Thank you.

Our next guests are already in the waiting room. We have Robbie Gupta and John Hagerman from Ithaca Holdings, the co-founders, co-CEOs, here to discuss the landmark deal. Welcome to the show, guys. Thank you so much for coming on and hopping on such a big day.

Look at us. You put a smile on our face.

It's great.

It's good to see you guys. Sorry, before we get started, why are you guys so bundled up?

It's 70 degrees in LA. It's the coldest it's been in about 9 months.

And I am dressed as the gumshoe journalist from The Social Reckoning. There's a Wall Street Journal reporter. He wears this exactly. And we were doing a movie review earlier, so I decided to draw on that.

And Jordi, you're just cold because it's 70.

It's freezing. It's freezing. It's, it's, uh, it's a—

yeah, it's nice.

It feels like the tundra.

It's only 72 days till Christmas. So, you know, you got to warm up inside. Yuletide is here. We want to warm our hands by the hearth. But things are heating up in the world of dealmaking. You are buying Bumble. Take us through.

Let's go. Yeah, we signed it. We signed it. We announced it this morning. So we're pumped. We are partnering with Whitney Wolfe Herd, who's the founder of Bumble.

Yeah.

And we are taking it private. It's the first thing that we're doing as Ithaca and John and I are Pretty pumped.

Yeah.

Take us through the thesis, because, I mean, we talked about the idea for Ithaca, the structure, and there's so many different ways this fund could have gone. There's so many different activities that different funds and different teams are working on different opportunities. Why is Bumble the right move right now?

Yeah, well, listen, the first thing is I'm going to tell you, so we're not a fund, we're a technology company.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, so, you know, so the first thing is What we're looking for is companies that matter. Right. And companies that are going to matter even in an increasingly abundant world.

Yeah.

Right. And so when you think about that, it's actually pretty hard, right? Because what consumer value propositions are going to endure?

Yeah.

But when you think about human connection and you think about meaningful relationships, you think about bringing people closer to love. We think that's only going to get more important.

Yeah.

And so in all the companies we've looked at in the last 6 or 7 months, Bumble was crazy unique.

Yeah.

And the thing that's pretty cool about it is Whitney saw that 12 years ago. And so this starts with her.

Yeah.

I mean, she founded this company. She started a movement. You know, millions of people have better lives, right? Have found their spouses, have, you know, had children. And because of Bumble. And so when we think about important missions, you know, John and I had the best jobs in the world before we started this. I came on TVPN that day, if you guys remember, you know, and like, you got to work on something that's a worthy journey. And there's nothing more worthy than Bumble. And then I think, John, you should talk about it. But we think that we can actually really help and really make the product even better than it is now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. So, you know, AI is not going to replace human relationships, but we do think it can play an important role in just making the product a lot better and helping people connect with other people. Not just that they're going to swipe right on, but that they're going to have a great conversation with, that they're going to, you know, go on a great date with and hopefully form a lasting, meaningful relationship. So just really excited about the opportunity to work on an important problem and one where we think we can do a lot to help people.

Yeah. So I feel like one of the main benefits that's always touted about a take private of a public company is that you have an opportunity to actually rethink the business model basically from first principles, as long as you have the cash on the balance sheet. And I feel like there's a lot of different monetization paths that have been tried. And you could imagine everything from the product's free the whole time, it's just ad-supported. Obviously, you have experience there, to, you know, what would people pay to actually find the one? Like, people pay— what are they called— matchmakers, like $20,000 for one person.

What would you have paid to find Jordi?

A million dollars.

I want to know that.

I want to know, what would you have paid?

It is like— it is a marriage.

To find a real spouse is incredibly valuable. So there's this wide gamut of business models, but then there's also just, hey, maybe it's time to bring in some new operational talent and, and keep the business model the same and just be more operationally efficient. What are you thinking that might change? What's going to stay the same? What are you excited about?

Yeah, I mean, so I think the number one priority is just on making the product create more value for people and getting more people to use it. And like, I don't think we're at all worried about ability to kind of grow revenue and monetize better over time if you to do that. I think there will be plenty of good opportunities. But yeah, it's such an important problem to people where, like, you know, if you have the best possible version of the product, that is like, it's priceless. And so, you know, I think there will be great ways to monetize that over time.

Yeah. The other thing I was— it's so, it's so funny. This is going to be a reference. I don't think it's made very often on TVPN. Okay. But I was watching The Post this weekend with our family, with my wife and our boys. And there is a line where Katharine Graham is writing it down and it's like, You know, profits follow quality. Yeah. Listen, like you have to actually help people find amazing dates. You got to have them find amazing relationships and like the monetization will come. And one of my favorite things about John is like, John was responsible for $200 billion of revenue at Meta.

Right?

I don't know. I don't know if we're gonna hit the gong, but that feels like it could get the gong. It may, we hope.

But like, we'll get there.

The only thing that gets you that, what'd you say?

We'll get to the gong.

So, okay, good. Please. We appreciate it. I think the, the only thing that gets you that is if you actually provide value. for people, right? And so ultimately for us, like, the monetization will come, but what you actually have to do is be great at getting people great dates, getting them matches that they wouldn't have gotten, and getting them matches that are the best matches that they could ever get.

So what's the low-hanging fruit on the product side? Do you need to, like, kill off more bots or bring new people in with top-of-funnel advertising? Like, where— how do you make the product actually better?

Yeah, I mean, I think those are some of the themes. You know, I think we can do more to improve the matching algorithm so that it's showing you matches that you're not just going to swipe on, but that will lead to great conversations, great dates. You know, I think there's, you know, is I think more work to be done to make sure that, you know, all of the profiles you're seeing are high quality. You know, I think there's been some good work on that already. And yeah, and then I think there is room to kind of integrate AI in kind of more ways over time, too, that will, I think, facilitate that whole process and just make it work better for people.

Yeah. And I think on that, guys, one of the things that I think Whitney started it with the quality reset, right? This idea of like we are going to make sure that we have only the best profiles, only real profiles on Bumble. Like, that's a hard decision. That's courageous. And she did it as a public company CEO, which is baller. And then the other thing I would tell you that I get some inspiration from is like, listen, like, I, I see Instagram ads and I think they're magic. I can't imagine how they understood what I wanted. Right. And that was Sean and his team when he was there. And I think that what you hopefully want people to feel is that same kind of magic But even more important, right, because it's on a much more important problem, right, that they get to feel because of the matching algorithms and because of some of the work that we hope we can do in the product.

How have you guys thought about developing your own internal thesis around AI winners versus losers? Because over the last year, we've just seen in the public markets, it's extremely violent, right? Like the general investors, like you sort of bubble up there, there's a more sort of like broad ideas like SaaS is dead, and maybe you want network effects, but then there's also looking at all these subcategories. In the public markets, even if you don't think a company's an AI loser, other people might, and then you probably should at least get out of it, whereas you guys can take a longer-term view and actually apply more rigor, and I think that's an advantage. But How much of that— you've looked at hundreds of companies since starting Ithaca, and so what are your updated models there?

Well, so the best part for us is concentration actually is extraordinarily helpful. We're not trying to build a portfolio. We have signed an agreement to buy Bumble. We're going to go operate it. John and I are going to be the co-CEOs. So there is a real look into each other, the whites of each other's eyes of, do you really want to go do this? for a long time. That actually is extraordinarily helpful because on a lot of companies, it's not that we're like, oh, we know that this is gonna break this way. It's honestly that we don't know. It's uncertain. Right? But if it's uncertain, that's good enough for us of like, well, we're not gonna go do that. Right? We better be— if it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no. Right?

For us.

Yeah.

And so that really helps. I think the other thing is, you know, one of my favorite things about working with John is like, despite being so smart, like, There's just a lot of humility. So a lot of times I'll ask him like, hey, what do you think is going to happen here? And he just kind of like, I don't really know. You know, I don't really know how to think about the way that's going to go. And I think that's kind of missing from a lot of people's perspectives in the markets right now because they're sort of trying to take a strong point of view. And the reality is, on a lot of businesses, nobody knows. Right. The reason that we think Bumble is unique is we do fundamentally believe, and we believe this with all of our hearts, that like humans want relationships with humans.

Right.

And they're going to want relationships with humans. And those relationships are going to be even more important in the future. And what we hope is that this is pretty obvious in retrospect as AI has advanced the way it has.

So I think it's betting on the biggest— betting on the— betting exclusively on the why and being okay with not knowing exactly the how, right? Is that like another way to put it? Because like there's software companies where like their why is the how. It's like we create like a database, and then we sell that to companies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And with this, it's like if human connect— well, the company exists to drive human connection, but how exactly you do that, whether it's like opening up digital twins or agents or whatever it might be, or just better matching algorithms, like that feels like all of that can be figured out in time. But knowing that like the end goal of the company will never change is like something that you feel like you can lean on and like bet the next chapter of your career on. Is that—

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I honestly, I'll be— I will do this for John rather than him having to do it himself. I think we are more confident in the how. Right. And I think specifically, maybe I would tell you, I think that, listen, like, you know, I sort of think like, John, like, couldn't you— couldn't we fix this? What about this product? What about this product? I think this one has a pretty good overlap with stuff that I think John has done. In the past. And so I think we do believe that the matching algorithms and maybe just like the way that you actually go and show people, people they might really like, I think we can do that really well. We really believe that we can do that. And I would say like that's very difficult, you know, to do, but we think we're uniquely suited to do it. I think the thing that is more of a question mark that we think will follow the why is the monetization, which is like we will figure out how to make sure that people are feel like they're paying for something that's fair. But the most important thing is that you actually deliver the value. And I would tell you that we have real confidence that we can deliver this value in this sector and that people are going to want this value for a long time. You know, so I agree on the monetization side, but on the product side, you know, we feel confident. I'm using we liberally because of my, my co-founder here, John.

Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming.

It's great. You guys are fantastic. Fantastic duo, and yeah, I can tell that there's so many things like with John and I where it's just like, yeah, I never would have been able to do this if we didn't have what John is so capable at.

So you guys— Isn't it just so fun that this happened in consumer? Like, I think everyone was like, oh, they're going to buy some database thing or something.

I'm so happy you said that, and I think that's the thing for us.

It's got to be fun. If you want to get the best people in the world, it's got to be fun. This one's going to be fun. So we appreciate it and we appreciate you guys.

Yeah. Thank you.

Awesome.

Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with agents on Public. Our next guest is with us in the waiting room. We have Jack Goldberg from YesChef Group, the co-founder and creator.

We're very excited.

How you doing?

What's going on?

Welcome to the show.

What's going on?

Not too much. Good Tuesday. You have a good weekend?

It was good.

It was good.

We did our first— I feel like you have like a million things going on.

Yeah, we do. For good or for bad. We're trying to, trying to cool us down. By the way, I'm super pumped to be here.

Thanks.

I, you know, you guys have been inspiring to our team in many ways. I feel like I love this story and the trajectory I mean, I think people think it probably was like, oh my God, this happened so fast. Obviously it's taken time and you put in a lot of fucking work to get to this point. And I think a lot of people don't maybe not realize that. Yeah. But congrats on everything that you guys have done. It's been very cool for our team to watch.

Inspire us. Yeah. The meta, the meta story behind like media companies now is like more important than ever. Totally. Like I, I saw you guys posted a recent, a video recently about like one of your events, like having— it was a weather issue with one of your events and like giving people— like so much of TVPN has been about like giving people behind— we sort of— we came out and we were like, don't believe in like building public in the traditional sense. Like in tech, when people build in public, they just post their revenue every single month and then usually they stop because they go through a rough patch.

Yeah.

But like in media, you're sort of forced to build in public because people People just see everything that you're working on.

The interviews you're getting, the sponsors you get, whatever you're doing.

Yeah, it's like creating that meta-narrative is actually really important to driving engagement.

Yeah. But I mean, let's go back and set the table for everyone. How'd you get started? I want to hear about the first product and the growth trajectory there. How fast was that? I'm sure everyone labels you an overnight success. as everyone does. It was probably a lot of hard work, but take us through that because I want to then explore how the footprint has grown because there is a lot going on now.

Yeah, 100%. Um, kind of the high level. So about 4 years ago, my co-founder Liam and I, we met studying abroad. Actually, before 4 years ago, we met studying abroad in Australian college.

Yeah.

And 4 years ago, we posted our first video, and it really has always just been rooted in passion and love for food. Like, I was working at PwC doing tech consulting at the time, and he was at Capgemini doing management consulting.

Thank you for your service.

Seriously, it's, it's a little disappointing that you left, but, uh, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

It's actually funny because the first full circle moment, the first job I did at PwC was for Pepsi.

Oh, okay. I hated it.

I didn't—

and I was a consultant for Pepsi. And now fast forward to today, Pepsi is one of our largest partners. I'm really close friends with Mark Kirkham, the CMO.

Very cool.

And I told him, I was like, I actually worked for you before in a different way. So we, we did our first video at this Mexican restaurant, Aldama, like literally 4 years ago. And we'd be working till 8:00 PM, go to dinner. We, we didn't know what we were doing. We were like pulling a lobster tail like this and holding this and just like doing it. 'Cause we felt that there was a need for innovation in the food space. Everyone was kind of the same and we were like, like, it doesn't feel like there's someone who is relatable, who when you go and watch their content, that's like me and my boys or our friends sitting and eating that. That's what we want to put out. Like, there's no difference between us talking here and me talking on the internet. Like, it's just the same thing.

Yeah.

Um, and we went, we did that first video and it did like a quarter million views and we were like, oh shit, like that was crazy. Let's go into every single restaurant in a square mile and show them what we just did and run it back.

Yeah.

So Liam was living in San Francisco, he was literally— he canceled his flight home. He was supposed to come for a couple days. He stayed on my couch literally for a month. And he's like 6'4 and the couch is like 5 feet tall.

I had to put him into the closet with 3 people.

Yeah.

And we just run and gun every day. Same thing, like work during the day, 8 PM dinner, edit till 3 AM, post, boom, boom, boom. And it just kind of compounded and you know, the next video did like half a million and a million. We started gaining followers. And our big moment, I think in every founder story, there's like that moment that you work towards and that lucky moment that allows you to take the next step.

Sure.

And I think a lot of people say luck is involved in all stories, and it totally is. Obviously, you need to be ready to like take advantage of a lucky moment, though. And we were at dinner and the CEO of Sports Illustrated at the time was at the table next to us, and we just kind of started getting some followers and we have a bunch of food on the table. And these moms come up to us and are like, my daughters know you. So we kind of had a little bit of motion for the first time. And he kind of looked at us. He's like, who are you guys and what the hell's going on? And we give him the pitch. We're like, we make content, but we do consulting. This is only 10% of the time. We've done 30 million views in 2 weeks. And he was like, what if we're looking to get younger and do more social-first content on SI? And they also— it was the company Aruna Group. They own Men's Journal and they own a couple other magazines and different sites. So he's like, what if we did short-form content with you guys? And we kind of just like pitched him the entire world that night. A week later, we got on a call with their whole C-suite team and they offered us a full— so they offered to match our consulting salaries plus a 50/50 on rev split. And we literally never looked back and just went for it.

Yeah.

And consulted and did— we created shows for them. So we came up with 2 new shows. And that's kind of like since then, we've just, we've just never really looked back and we've just doubled down on the content. And then the experiential side of the business has been really a big part over the past 2 years.

Quick side note, Sports Illustrated. Did you know that they're sitting on an absolute gold mine?

Yeah.

You know the website, si.com. If you're going to rebrand to Superintelligence, someone's going to have to pay $1 billion for that domain at some point. Anyway, focus, focus, focus. That's the mantra. Eventually, everyone realizes that there are opportunities, but you got to be really careful not to get over your skis and ruin the golden goose while you go and explore the next thing. Like, what was the first side project or line expansion that you got enough confidence to actually go after aggressively and know that it wouldn't degrade the core product?

Yeah, it was our festivals. Because we spent the first 2-ish years doing, at that point, probably like a couple billion views. And we were doing all these cool things and seeing all these different foods and tuna cuttings. And we're like, this is all awesome. What if we could bring this together and not only have people watch it? Because I wanted to prove to ourselves and our team and me and Liam that we're not just creators that live online, but we can actually move bodies and create real community. Because I think there's such a difference between—

Totally.

People that go viral on the internet, but people that can actually create communities and move people together. I've always said, I think it's harder to get 10 people in a room on a Tuesday night than get 10 million videos on— 10 million views on a video on a Tuesday night.

Yep.

So our food festival, we kind of took all the cooler things that we saw and restaurants that we loved and, you know, tuna cuttings and different moments and put it into this experience and made content about it, just like we made content about everything else. We're like, we have the Yes Chef Food Festival. And we sold out on like 2 posts. And that was our first ever festival in New York about, that was like, that was 2 years ago or 2 and a half years ago. And since then we've sold out 10,000 people again. We did New York the year after, then we moved to LA, we did LA, we just did New York recently, but we had to move because of the storm. But experiential for us is so important because it doesn't take away from what we're doing. I actually think it builds a stronger connection and community into the people that watch the content and they feel like it's more real.

Yeah.

And we try to think about events on a way that we can hit different consumers in different parts of their journey. So we have Yes Chef Tailgates that we just launched this past weekend with Pepsi in Penn State. We have Penn State, University of Florida, Texas A&M, and then we're doing an NFL one with them that is geared more towards the college sports crowd. We have the festival, which is 10,000 people, and the demographic is awesome because you have every type of person there. We have Yes Chef Reserve, which are like these super invite-only premium one-on-one dinners that we do with super high-end guests and celebrities, billionaires, athletes. We have a wrong club that we do that focuses on the health space. So for us, we're like, food is this underlying connection. Everyone in the world eats. So essentially your total addressable market is 8 billion people.

Yeah, I was about to ask about TAM because it's funny, like, I'm not a foodie at all. Like, if I'm traveling somewhere and I have a meal that I actually like, I'll just go back to the same restaurant like 3 or 4 times because I don't even care to try something else. I'm like, I like this. It's solid. I don't want to roll the dice and like have a bad meal.

Yeah.

I'd rather just stick with what I know. So, I've never been a foodie, but like, I'm curious of like what percentage of people actually describe themselves as foodies and like, is that actually relevant? Like, the TAM feels a lot bigger because like, if you guys do a pop-up at like a sports, you know, sports event or something like that, uh, I feel like a bunch of people will just happily participate even if they are not like self-described like foodies that are just obsessing over it day to day.

I think it's unique because you guys have talked about how you knew your audience is kind of finite and like you wanted it to be that way because You have this super niche and you've done such a good job of that.

Yeah.

I think in some ways, like, I, I guess it's the opposite for us. Like, I truly do think that Tan is like the whole world. And if, if maybe, you know, you're not the biggest food guy, but you love sports, you know, when you go to sports, you're still eating and you can pair it. So food's kind of like this underlying connecting layer to food and music and travel and sports. So So, you know, I like to think of it as food and food being the part that everyone can connect on initially.

Totally.

How do you think about when you launch a new product or event or series or something that's going to have its own name, its own brand? Are you the type where you effectively want to be the CEO of that project and you're maybe hiring younger, more up-and-coming talent, or are you trying to bring in a general manager, someone to run that process? Like, what does the team building look like as you're expanding into different areas?

Yeah, that's a really good question. Um, we know, I mean, in order to scale anything, you're only as good as your team. I think it's really important that as we look to this next year and we're really kind of focusing on the content side of things. So for us, it's one of our first partners that we brought in was a live events expert. Who did that for 10 years and threw Drake and Justin Bieber Super Bowl parties and other huge concerts and events. So we like to bring in, partner with people who are really good at what they do. One of our big focuses, as I mentioned, is content and also stepping into long form. We just announced this really big deal with 101 Studios, David Glasser, Taylor Sheridan, who do Yellowstone, Landman, Lionets, Tulsa King. Our thought is like, sure, could we spend the time to maybe try to go create it ourselves over the course of the next 5 or 10 years? Like, maybe, yeah. But to do it really, really well and kind of break through the noise of everyone else making content in the world, you have to partner with the best in class. And that's why we partnered with 101 to launch Yes Chef Studios, which we feel like for us, like, I think that's going to be the next Food Network where people grow up, bring in new talent. I want to be We have an incredible team and me and Liam are so involved in all the processes and main decisions of why certain brands launch. But ultimately, I would love to have people that on the team run and manage these things on their own. And I'm focusing on the content side, still being involved, of course.

Yeah.

But I think it's always great to add people who are focusing and specializing in those areas to help them drive so we can expand and scale up other parts of the business.

What is the state of livestreaming in food? I feel like YouTube is really well, you know, like defined in terms of you can do everything from like food challenges to specific recipes that you follow very closely.

Well, we went on a show and we were like, we thought that like TVPN for cooking would be an interesting niche, like a daily live show where it tells you a day in advance Hey, at five o'clock every day, I'm gonna cook you know this thing.

Yeah.

The funny thing is, I think someone in tech watched it, and then they made a tech podcast cooking show.

We were like, no, no, no. These are like actual amazing chefs. Actually, you can watch them step by step make the whole thing. They got to be entertaining enough to talk about it. But with us, the reason we went live was because like the tech news happened so fast. There's like a new release. There's new financing. Like being The live matters. But with food, I don't think foodies are like, there's a new cut of beef dropping, I gotta get a review right now. But maybe I just don't follow it closely enough. I mean, certainly for restaurant openings, maybe you wanna know that minute. But what is the state of live streaming in food? Where do you think it'll go? Where are the opportunities? Or is it maybe farther off?

Is it cooked?

Is it cooked?

No pun intended. I think there's definitely an opportunity for live. We've gone live as we travel a bunch to Spain and Japan and these different markets, and we're walking around showcasing these crazy things because a lot of people too are so interested in these other places. And obviously you can get that from videos, but I think there is a value of seeing it live there that you can kind of get the surroundings and understand where the person is that you can't get just from other content. So it's something that we definitely think about. You know, we in Barcelona recently were at dinner and we were shooting a short-form video, a YouTube video, and we're simultaneously live on X, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, all at the same time. So it was just like, like a content overload shooting out to millions of people. So I think that there's, yeah, there's totally like room for that. And as every Genre of content and topic innovates. I think there there will be ways that live finds its way in the food space, and I think live cooking thing is cool.

Yeah, I could imagine it working, but you gotta have really good talent for sure.

Would you guys ever create like a Yes Chef kind of cafeteria, like an ongoing physical space that had basically like individual food stands? There's a place where I went. college where it was like one building and there was probably like 10 different restaurants inside. And each one was like a very opinionated, individually operated. So, it wasn't like— it wasn't the building being like, oh, we're gonna make 10 different restaurants inside. But it feels like over time, you go from like, okay, making videos that people love to events that people love to eventually like a— maybe it starts as a pop-up, but then like a— A brand.

Yeah, definitely. I think I've always thought about like this golden triangle of content, community, and products. And if you can pair that kind of like the famous Disney flywheel, each part helps the next. So yeah, we, we've ideated a bunch on some different brick-and-mortar concepts and different CPGs that we have, but I think the most important thing is content. I think it's really easy to think about a million ideas and to, like you've said, forget about the golden egg. For us right now, that is content. That's why we're so focused on the studio deal. We're looking to hire the best-in-class editor and video editors to add to our team so that we can really double down. And I think the more this world, I think you guys have seen it, is really just like whoever gets the most amount of attention wins.

Yeah.

If you can get the most amount of attention and eyeballs, and then you have all these AI companies and Instinct and the other one that they have, their values go from $50 million to $500 million in 2 weeks because a million people use their app and they don't even monetize. But the public thinks they can monetize in the future. I think it's how we view it is like we're building the largest and most engaged food community in the entire world, and we don't need to rush to monetize that right away. We want to really thoughtfully and carefully come out with things that we're passionate about. So everyone launches a product and sells you something.

Yeah.

We don't want to do something to do something. And we know that long-term value of what we're building with the studio and the Next Gen Food Network and the content and these events and experiences of We want to just continue that. It doesn't need to happen overnight tomorrow. And we know the value that all that is going to combust and explode over time.

Hopefully not explode, but launch into the stratosphere. Launch, but in a good way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How—

are you seeing any interesting technology in kitchens? Like, people have— some of the QSR concepts have been promoting their their robots for a long time now. Unclear, like very unclear as someone who's, you know, far from the industry, like how, how much adoption these kind of tools are getting. One thing's for sure, I don't think consumers are going to care. If anything, it'd be a turnoff. It's like, hey, this sandwich was made by a robot, like kind of an interesting novelty gimmick. But like, you would think it would be hitting in coffee so hard by now. Like you'd think we'd have like Yeah, really good coffee robots, and yet, like, people want to go to a barista that they know, and that seems pretty Lindy.

Yeah, I agree. I feel like, especially in the coffee space, you'd see it explode. I'm sure you guys have seen Mark Thorey from Wonderbar. He's a friend, and he invested a ton of money into the robotic systems to automate all the food. And I'm curious to see how that plays out, because if it works, I think it It's great. I don't know. There's so many people that every day at work, you don't care. If your food tastes good, you don't really care who made it or how fast it was made for a large part of the population. But on the other side, I do think there's a huge population that does really care and doesn't want to just let a machine make their food. I think it's an interesting balance.

I don't know.

I think that technology has killed lunch, though. Lunch is dead. No one goes to lunch anymore. You know, it's all slopples. Like, like technology, literally, like lunch used to be a thing. Lunch does not exist. Like, RIP lunch.

Yeah, you used to have like, you know, some, some, a nice salad, some salmon, 3 or 4 cocktails, 3 or 4 cocktails.

Yeah, you walk around in London and everyone's pounding Guinness.

I like—

yeah, where did that go? We forgot.

Where did that go? Like, we're too locked in, I guess. Capitalism has overtaken life.

Totally agree, we gotta bring it back. My last question for now, should your metabolism be studied? Like, do you think there's any sort of like—

My personal?

Yeah, your personal metabolism. Do you think there'd be any sort of like breakthrough, scientific breakthrough that we could get by understanding how you process such a high volume and diverse set of foods?

Potentially.

I guess I'll, first of all, thank you. I'll take that as a compliment.

It was a huge compliment. Came in the chat.

And there actually is, there's something that we're working on.

Whoa.

I can't give too much, but that, you know, is, it kind of helps digest and something that I think would be valuable to a lot of people that—

Testosterone.

Yes, chef. GLP-1/testosterone. Yeah.

Okay, last question.

Not crazy.

Not crazy.

Last question on AI. I think we've all had this experience where like the model progress is really good. Everything's like, whoa, this is amazing. And then you go and you talk to the models about the thing that you're the expert in and you're like, ah, like it's not good at the thing that I'm good at. Jordi always has this with like surfing and cars. It'll make weird recommendations. Are you seeing that in food if you ask for recipes? Like, we noticed with music, the lyrics will always have the word glass in it, which is just an odd thing that doesn't need to be in every song. And I'm wondering if there's like, you know, you're absolutely right, or it's not this, it's that, but for food or for recipes. Have you picked up on any like telltale signs that like a recipe is AI or like AI is in the food world or something like that?

I think when it comes to recipes, It's, it's fine and works because recipes are pretty like, okay, yeah. But when it comes to actual recommendations, I think there's a, yeah, there's a huge lacking because it, it kind of just pulls like what it sees. But then you go on Uber Eats and a lot of people pay for reviews. It's not, it can't really actually, it can't intuitively think about like who this chef is and, and what they're doing and the seasonal.

Yeah.

So I think it kind of spits out like not great recommendations. I think there's a huge area for growth in the food world that is very interesting to me. But yeah, I don't, I don't think it's like perfect yet.

It also goes back to like often the models are good at like what the researchers care about. If they don't care about going to lunch, it's not going to give you very good lunch recommendations. They care about chess. They care about math. It's really good at math, but whipping up the best possible, the super slop bowl, power lunch.

Super.

Yeah, I think it has some room to catch up.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for coming on.

Yeah, great to have you on. Amazing. Yeah, amazing business and journey. And, and, uh, I love when we meet a company that's crushing it and yet it feels like there's just a million, you know, new opportunities and And ways to expand. So come back on soon.

Yeah, I'd love to come back on.

And thank you guys for inspiring our team from afar. It's been awesome to see your growth and journey. Hopefully we'll meet in person and get some food soon.

Yeah, that'd be great.

Let's do it.

Yeah, give our best to the team.

Cheers, Jack. Goodbye. 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. Our next Our next guest is Ugo de Moor from XBOW.

That's right.

Founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Here he is.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

Hey, what's happening?

Welcome. Thanks very much for, uh, for having me. Thank you for joining. Yes, uh, I would love to, to get a brief introduction on yourself and the company first, and then I want to go into, uh, just cybersecurity and what you're seeing What is interesting? How big is the problem? How effective is the solution?

Expo is a company that automates security research. So, it does the work of an offensive security researcher. You point it at a target, and it will report the vulnerabilities it finds, working like a human expert. Now, today, we are announcing a A particular vulnerability found by our team, a full-chain vulnerability in Chrome.

Okay.

What that means is that you just point your web browser at one malicious website, and the attacker will own your entire Windows PC.

Okay.

Your email, bank account, passwords, keystrokes. And so this vulnerability affects a billion users.

Wow.

Google acknowledged the problem, paid their maximum bounty. But what's really interesting is that it only took 6 days.

Okay.

6 days by a very skilled security researcher.

Yeah.

Who was joined by a swarm of agents.

Sure. That makes sense.

Yeah, and the other thing that's notable is like, you know, finding this, Exploit that would impact 1 billion users in a very meaningful way. And congratulations, your prize money is $250,000, which—

Yeah, do prize monies need to go way up so you can offset compute? I don't know what you spend. I don't know if you wanna share, but I've heard of like million-dollar agent swarm runs, essentially prompts that wind up working for days of wall clock time and they're burning GPUs GPUs for hours and hours, and it feels like it can get expensive. But the value of catching these bugs is so high, especially right now, that should companies be spending more on these like white hat bounties?

So definitely everyone should get their defenses up. But no, it was not that expensive. We used an off-the-shelf model, GPT-5.6. So, wow. It only costs $40,000.

Okay.

Wow.

Yeah.

All right.

And so how integrated are you with OpenAI to be able to do offensive cybersecurity testing? Do you need to get whitelisted with them in some way to actually be able to run prompts that might get rejected just by the default ChatGPT frontend?

So OpenAI are great partners of ours. all of the other Frontial apps. Yeah. In this case, it was a publicly released model, but we are part of Daybreak and of course we also got to play with the restricted models.

Yeah.

However, we really wanted to make the point here that it's possible to do with a publicly available model.

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Sure.

Sorry.

So yeah, break this down a little bit more because, so the browser Like you would simply have to navigate and land on the website. You don't need to. You wouldn't need to download anything or run any software. It's literally just you land on it and it's over for you. Is that is that generally correct?

That's exactly right. And so this this type of bug in Chrome is really really hard to find. Every major security intelligence agency in the world has a team of people doing this kind of thing, and some of my contacts have been telling me that it takes. months, something like 6 months to do this with a team of people. And this time it was done in just 6 days by one person, admittedly building on previous experience that he'd gathered with his colleagues. Yeah.

When you find an exploit like this, does it ever go through your head like maybe somebody would have found this before but wouldn't have the incentive to share it publicly, or obviously they—

Well, obviously.

Yeah, like a malicious actor could make a lot more than $250,000, like, exploiting this. Then— and so it begs the question, yeah, was this all, you know, already being abused for a while?

So we have no evidence of that. I don't know. For sure. But we don't know whether someone else has found this particular bug before. But what the story does tell you is that everybody really has to get their defenses in order. Cybersecurity is now right at the top of what everyone needs to be worried about. Take action. Find the bugs before the bad guys do.

Mm-hmm.

What are your predictions for the next 3 to 6 months? Like, it feels like everyone inside of tech is well aware of the issue and, you know, making sure that their walls are as strong as possible. And it feels like the sort of Mythos moment really helped bring this sort of risk into even outside of the tech industry. Let's call it like the Fortune 500, things like that. But for every one of these that your team finds, there's a concern that there's more risk out there that's not being found. So how are you advising your customers In a more— maybe in a more specific way.

So this particular research that we're reporting today is part of work that we're doing towards new products that test desktop applications like Chrome. We have an already released product used by hundreds of enterprises around the world that that autonomously tests web applications. So you point it at a website and it will do the work of a skilled hacker, but do it carefully, not doing any damage, just reporting the problems that are there. Everybody needs to do this type of autonomous scanning. There's just not enough security experts in the world to do it all manually or even with a human in the loop. And so, while this particular bug was found through the combination of human ingenuity and AI, our ultimate aim is to do this completely in a completely automated fashion. We already do it for web apps and now we're also starting to do it for desktop applications and firmware.

Yeah.

Talk about progress in open source. You know, people, people on X have, have, you know, gotten access to Obliterated models and been very concerned about, about their, their capabilities. What are you seeing? I'm assuming any, any— I'm sure you guys are like experimenting and testing open models so that you understand what people around the world, even people that aren't a part of, let's say, nation-state groups or more sophisticated groups, could get access to?

Totally.

So whenever new models drop, we immediately run them through our tests. That includes the OpenWaze models. I'd say that the OpenWaze models are 3 to 4 months behind the frontier and cyber capabilities. And so that just shows the urgency of the problem. We all need to get ready for models that are as powerful as the very best ones in the frontier labs being available to all, everybody, including the attackers.

Well, thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you for coming on the show.

Thanks for helping out a billion people. It's great work.

Seriously.

Not many of our guests get to do that every day, at least.

And hopefully, I don't know, many more bugs found before anyone else does. I guess that's it. We want as few bugs as possible, but we want you to be as successful as possible.

Yeah, I would hate— personally, I would hate for another company company to save as many— save more people than you guys do.

Yes. Thank you very much.

Awesome. Well, yeah, great to meet you. And I'm sure we'll have you back on soon.

Yeah.

Have a great rest of your day.

Awesome.

Thank you very much.

Cheers.

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. Next, we will be talking to Nick Talkin at Albert Invent, the co-founder and CEO.

He's in here. We go.

Let's bring him in to the TVM Coffee Realm.

What's going on, Nick?

How you doing?

Welcome to the show. I'm doing well, guys.

How you guys doing?

We're good. I think we need to warm up this gong first. Gong hit.

We had another couple other big announcements, but we kind of missed the gong moment. It's been a little crazy today.

people on. So, but this is, this is clean gong hit territory. So take us through it. What's going on?

Yeah. So excited to announce today Series B, $55 million led by TCV.

Let's go.

Great hit, John. Congratulations.

Yeah.

Great. Well, we'll talk soon. All right. Yeah, yeah. Introduce yourself, the company, how you got here, all that good stuff.

Yeah.

So at Alberts, we make chemistry-native AI. And so we're helping scientists in the lab with the white coats invent faster. A lot of people don't really appreciate the chemical industry, but it's, you know, the entire physical world is made of chemistry. Everything in your guys' studio, everything you're wearing is chemistry. And traditionally, it takes years to invent and launch new products. And so we're replacing paper notebooks, bringing AI into the lab and help them invent faster.

And what's your thesis between fine-tuning models, training your own models versus using the advancements that are happening in the foundation model companies and then diffusing that with software integrations, et cetera?

Yeah, I mean, there's no sense in reinventing the wheel if the wheel is working well. But it turns out that in chemistry, it doesn't work too And so as part of this announcement, we actually are announcing a new frontier retrieval model that we trained. It's 45x better than OpenAI and Voyage and some of the traditional retrieval models.

Sure.

And what it really comes down to is the models that are trained on the entire internet are really good at discriminating between this is life sciences, this is chemistry, this is legal. But when you get down to what's the difference between a nanoparticle encapsulant in a paint coating and a some sort of cellulite there, they cannot differentiate between that. And so we had to build our own models for that, which is fun.

45x feels like a different type of lift from when we talk to a legal company that's like, yeah, we fine-tune this and we do 20% better on this benchmark. Do you expect that to hold for a long time because of the data? Because there's constantly this back and forth, and then the specific models get leapfrogged, and then they go back and forth. How are you thinking about this over the long term?

Yeah, super good question. So it all comes down to the data and the availability of the data. It turns out that in chemistry, all of the publicly available data is the successes, right? So if you think about science, right, you publish your successes, and the failures you basically discard or you keep in your paper notebook. And so we have customers who are using our platform that have more tokens of chemistry information in their single enterprise than the entire public corpus of chemical information out there. And so that allows us a pretty big advantage to build something that's very domain-specific to them.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, how is— people that work in chemistry and material science, how are they reacting to model advances? advancements. I can imagine, you know, you're working with commercial companies, they see model progress, they probably get excited because they think we can do more work faster. Whereas, like, mathematics that's happening on university campuses, that can be a little bit more jarring because you're sort of like—

Yeah.

Hey, there was a bunch of work that was being done that we were enjoying doing and now there's no point in doing it anymore. What do we do kind of thing?

Yeah. So I think it's scary to a lot of the people, right? I mean, a lot of our customers are 100-year-plus-old companies. They, you know, change is hard. And the other thing that's different is that you have to get into the physical world to close the loop, right? With math or coding, right, you can have a model that just reinforced learns on a computer and you can just set it and run it and it will just get better and better and learn. In our world, we have to get to the lab. You have to actually run that experiment. You actually have to do that. And so we like to think of, you know, software engineers are turning into software architects, right? You're architecting systems, you're architecting, you know, your applications. I think the same is happening now in chemistry, maybe a little bit delayed, where instead of you being the person doing the work in the lab and maybe designing every nuance of the experiment, you're now architecting an experimental system, and then you're letting the AI go and actually do that work for you. I think, you know, problem solving has become is becoming commoditized. So now the question is, what is the right problem to solve? And so that is, you know, get close to your customers, understand their needs, and then you can figure out what to actually point the AI at to go solve.

What is the holy grail in chemistry and material science? Like everyone in bio says cure cancer, but what is like crazy advanced success over the next decade look like?

Yeah.

I don't know if it is one problem. And I think that's kind of the fun of it, right? I mean, if you want— if you— if Elon wants to go to Mars, he needs better ablative materials for the outside of the rocket. Like, they know how— what the trajectory looks like to send a rocket to Mars. They need better materials. If we want batteries that last longer, if we want better solar cells, we want plastics that degrade and don't pollute, we want to get rid of PFAS that's leaching into the environment. That's all chemistry. Those are all chemistry problems. And so I think I think there's a lot of holy grails, and our hope is to give the tools to the people that are innovating and trying to solve those problems, because if we don't, they're not going to be solved fast enough.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's fascinating that there's so many different opportunities and applications here, and probably lots of companies, lots of potential customers, and lots of work to be done up and down the stack. So yeah, what an exciting time. Congrats on the fundraise.

Very exciting.

Yeah, I'm hoping that you're I've gone back and forth on this idea that when you see all these math breakthroughs, you have to assume that a bunch of other breakthroughs in other fields that are going to be much more impactful directly on people's life, like an alternative to PFAS or new—

You weren't frustrated by Navier-Stokes on a daily basis?

I mean, personally, but I don't want to speak for everyone.

Personally, but most people weren't affected by it. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, congratulations.

Great to meet you.

Great to meet Nick. And congrats to the team.

We'll talk to you soon.

Goodbye.

Cheers.

Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have Jeff Holden from Atomic Machines, founder and CEO, with us here at re:Invent TV in Montreal. We are working on Jeff.

Here he is.

Welcome to the show. How you doing, Jeff?

Good.

How you doing?

We're good. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Uh, since this is your first time, I would love for you to kick it off with an introduction of yourself and the company.

Oh, great.

Yeah, so, uh, so let's see, the, the nutshell version of me is, um, uh, you know, I'm a computer scientist who went very multidisciplinary over my career. Um, my, uh, my first manager out of college was Jeff Bezos. Um, he was my manager at D.E. Shaw and Company. In New York, and I followed him to Amazon. And so I was engineer number 10 at Amazon, um, and, uh, it really built the, you know, led the charge to build the whole backend of Amazon, kind of all the fulfillment aspects of it. And then went over and I joined Ed's team, um, and ran the consumer side for about 4 years and built Amazon Prime, amongst other things. Um, so I'm the one to blame.

So if you're building the Matter compiler from the Explain for everyone what that is and how you're actually going about building it.

Yes. Atomic Machines has just come out of stealth after 6 years. We're like turning into mushrooms.

Overnight.

How much did you raise in the process of coming out of stealth?

$250 million.

Boom.

A very humble amount for your pedigree, I will say.

But it's a good start. Thank you.

Yes, it does.

seem small these days, um, but we've, we've made it, we've made it, uh, work well. So, yeah, um, so yeah, so what the Matter Compiler does, it's a, it's a new kind of manufacturing technology, a new manufacturing system. Um, it's new because what it does is it takes, um, you know, digital code and produces a complete working micromachine out the other side. Mm-hmm. Um, and that's, that's, you know, there are, there are just, uh, this is, you know, the technical name for this is a combinatorial constructor. Um, so David Deutsch reference. But, you know, this type of technology doesn't exist today. You know, the closest thing would be something like a 3D printer, which can make different shapes in a material. But this is, you know, complete working micromachines with moving parts, you know, that, you know, serve a purpose you basically describe to an AI.

Yeah.

So this is building the gray goo machine from the book Don't Build the Gray Goo Machine?

We're not quite at gray goo yet.

Okay.

You know, so yeah, so this is, uh, you know, it's actually, um, Neal Stephenson, who was obviously just on a little while ago, is, you know, is one of— is like my favorite author. Um, and, uh, and, and we— the Matter Compiler is actually attributed to, you know, the Matter Compiler in the Diamond Age.

Sure.

Um, but I would say we're closer to the, uh, the manufacturing technology in Snow Crash.

Okay.

Um, yeah, yeah. So it's like the auto factories of Snow Crash, you know, we're, we're We're still working with material, kind of like macromaterials. We're building micromachines, so features in the microns, but we're not working yet with atomic scale. So that's part of our mission.

Features in the microns, but the actual machine might be a centimeter?

Millimeters in scale.

Yeah.

Our first device is called PrimeSwitch. It's a new class of power relay, and that's a 9.5-millimeter diameter by 3-millimeter thick device, and it can carry 150 amps.

Yeah.

And open in 50 microseconds. So yeah, new thing for the world.

What is the TAM on these types of machines? Like, it seems like if they're used in data centers, they're used probably all over the place, but like, what is your go-to-market? Are you going to conferences for people that need these particular machines at this scale? Like, it feels like it's very diffuse. It's probably like a piece in the supply chain of, you know, so many Everything from consumer electronics to medical equipment to data center equipment, etc.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true. Like what, what we did is we essentially planted a flag in a relatively unserved space, right? Micromachines. You know, it's a— and this is the reason we started here is because it's out of reach of conventional manufacturing. You just can't use traditional kind of macro-scale manufacturing technologies because the physics kind of fails you as you go down into the low-digit microns. And so what you, what you have left to make something, anything at any kind of volume at that scale, is semiconductor manufacturing. And semiconductor manufacturing was invented to make one kind of machine, right? It's the semiconductor transistor and circuits built around that. So that leaves the whole world of micromachines, which is— you can think of as kind of several different domains of physics. Crossed with, you know, kind of a couple of different purposes, you know, it leaves that whole space unserved. And so, you know, we've built the first manufacturing system that can actually really fully address that space. But we also went beyond that and we built it in a way that is a combinatorial constructor so that, so that we know what we're hoping to trigger is a massive, you know, kind of innovation explosion at that scale. And, you know, and you mentioned, you know, some of the, some of the kind of domains that Apple Applications. I mean, you know, this is a negative space, so it's hard to put a TAM on it. You know, I think it's extremely large, of course. But, you know, things like, you know, robotics, micro robotics that can go into difficult environments, including the human body. You know, medical micro robotics is something people have talked about forever.

Right.

It's like, you know, like early 2000s, people are like, it's here. You know, it's not really here. It turns out you just can't build those things. You know, like one example. Yeah. An example of that is I was actually talking to Eddie Chang, who's the head of neurosurgery at UCSF. He said, what we need for a watershed in neurosurgery is like a millimeter-scale microrobot that we can insert through the cranium into the brain, and then steer it to its destination. It sounds creepy, but imagine if you could carry a little drug payload to any place in the brain. limited to, you know, you make a hole in the cranium and then whatever you can reach with a straight-line tool is what you can get to. And that limits the areas you can operate on. And that's a really simple idea, you know, and it's— but like, there's just never been the manufacturing technology to make that device. And so, you know, so medical applications, you know, little tiny, you know, grain sort of size of a piece of rice kind of dosing pumps, these kinds of things, that's the stuff we'll be able to build. And I And super excited about medical applications.

Yeah, yeah, very exciting.

One of the— yeah, it's a very fitting day to have you on the same day as Neal. When you were— prior to 6 years ago, post-Amazon, did you just decide, I'm going to read a lot of science fiction and figure out what to build? Like, where was the— I was asking Neal about how he feels, like, what kind of weight he feels in terms of writing science fiction because, for better or worse, you sort of come up with ideas that are plausible, believable, but far out and entertaining. And yet, then generations of humans read that and imagine what's possible. And then it becomes possible because somebody imagined it in a sort of fictional context.

Yeah, right on. Yeah, no, I mean, I was definitely influenced by science fiction. I mean, it started for me at 5 years old with Star Trek. In fact, there's an Enterprise right behind me. That's the original series, which you guys probably don't even remember. But Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock and those guys.

Yeah.

Basically, this idea that you could— a purpose for existing is exploration and learning and curiosity, it blew my mind. And the idea that you have the ability, our species has the ability to edit our future, you know, to build for problems we can't yet anticipate, you know, to create new knowledge and to build new types of technologies, new physical things. And I just wanted to be part of that. Like, from when I was a kid, I wanted to— I want to kind of push on the frontier of what humanity can do. And so, you know, I've done that in different ways. I was at Uber. And another thing there is my Uber, you know, that's the Elevate aircraft. Yeah. So, you know, the eVTOL world. That's been a passion of mine for a long time. I developed a thesis around this that I call the human command of matter. It led to the creation of atomic machines, and it led to our very ambitious mission, which is on-demand universal command of matter. To get there, you're really at the point that Neil envisioned in the Diamond Age, where it might not be done— there's the feed and the seed. Those are 2 different versions of that world. I hope it's the seed, not the feed, you know, but where you can, you can literally create any sort of physically stable configuration of atoms that quantum mechanics allows. Right. That's what we want. That's, that's when we're done with that. I'll probably take a vacation.

But what's a more— what's a more— leave us with a sort of maybe a more cute or trivial use case besides medical. applications? Like, I'm imagining, could we get mosquito-sized robots that defend your home from mosquitoes? Like, how far can you take this?

Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, there's all kinds of things like that, you know, and our approach is going to be to open up the Matter compiler as a foundry. And so we'll let the world invent what those devices should be, if it's mosquito-killing machines or it's graphene on copper supercapacitors or it's a cooling, two-phase cooling loop for a GPU, right? Something you just can't— you can bond to the chip and put inside the package. I mean, these are all kinds of applications. But our goal is to get to the point where you interact with an AI just the way you would with Claude Code or Codex, right? You interact with an AI and the AI is is generating output tokens, some of which are physical. And the reason, like, yeah, if you think about it, like, the reason you can do Claude code is because beneath this— now you have this new layer of intelligence which lets you write code, right? You can, like, talk to the intelligence. The intelligence will map your messy natural language into formal grammar of a compiler. And you have a compiler with a formal grammar. There isn't something like that for atoms. You can't do the same thing. You might even— even if you presume that there's a Claude Code 2.0 now for atoms, and it says, hey, go ahead and design anything you want, any machine, there's no formal language to express the machine in to then compile it into a physical thing. You then have to go figure out how you're going to manufacture that thing. That's the world we live in today, is like the manufacturing line, is a kind of per-device thing or per-kind-of-device thing. You have to build kind of from scratch and figure it out and tweak it and tune it over years. You know, that's the game we're trying to change so that there is a formal grammar that you can express, you know, the thing you're trying to build. In our world, it's called a process graph. This is real. And if you can express the correct sentence in that formal grammar, you get the machine out the other side. So that's a very hard thing to build.

Yeah.

That's why we went in a hole for 6 years.

Yeah, well, yeah, it's fascinating. I, I feel like we're going to look back in 50 years and look in and, and look at, you know, pre-2030 and be like, back then we could only build big machines. Like, the only machines that you could build, like, you could—

Car.

Were just— were massive. Yeah, the, the car, you know, the plane, et cetera.

Right.

Um, so, uh, very, very fascinating. I'm sure you'll be back on a lot, and we'd love to have you.

Congrats on the fundraising. Coming out of stealth.

Yeah, thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Let's do it again soon.

Have a good one.

Cheers.

Up next, we have Eli Manning and Michael Waldron, the executive producers of Chad Powers, and we have some special—

I know what time it is.

Time to put on—

here we go.

These are insane. Let's bring in Eli Manning and Michael Waldron to discuss Elena season.

Here they are.

How you guys doing?

Doing great. Thanks for having us. We're gonna try to keep— I'm gonna try to keep it together.

You're gonna keep it on?

I'm gonna try to keep it together. It's a lot.

It's really upsetting.

It's a lot.

Yeah. So on Halloween, we, we, we do the full Hollywood makeup, and last year we did Marc Andreessen, and, uh, and it was 3 hours. It took forever.

It was a lot more than 3 hours.

It was so worth it. And when I watched the 2022 clip of you, Eli, Putting on the makeup, I was like, that is us. Like, this is so— this is so us. I know how much time that takes. And then in the show, you show all the different prosthetics and how much work goes into that, both— like, it's almost an athletic endeavor to get into that makeup every day. But anyway, thank you so much for being here. Of course.

Looking forward to it.

Thank you.

Can we go back to that 2022 original bit you did. Like, what was the inspiration? What were you drawing on? Like, what led you to come up with that idea?

I think just the idea of the fact that Penn State still, you know, held open tryouts for kids to try to walk on and to, you know, to try to go out there and see if you could still throw a little bit and compete with these guys. So I was excited about that. The fact that James Franklin was into it, didn't want to tell any of his coaches. I felt like he was kind of pranking his coaches to see if they would recognize if someone had a little talent and showed up for one of these tryouts. And definitely after sitting in that chair for 2 hours to go through the prosthetics and the hair, sweet mullet, great mustache. And once I started competing, I was definitely worried about the 40-yard dash that I might pull a hamstring and risk I just ruined this whole thing. All that hard work and logistics of pulling this thing off just go to waste on the hammy. But then just started making up stories and just kind of did not worry about getting caught in the lie. And just, I'm going to make every lie more outrageous than the other. And kind of like how Michael's continued to do that with the show.

Yeah.

It just keeps going lie after lie that you got to kind of COVID up and figure out. And sometimes you just kind of run away and, and like, don't, don't over, over, uh, you know, complicate things in the sense of explaining too much. Just kind of say random stuff and, and then get out of there.

That's great. So Michael, what was your, what was your reaction to that and your journey to getting involved and actually taking this into what it's become today?

Uh, well, I was— Glenn, Glenn and I were buddies and we'd been looking for something to to do together. And I'm a big— I'm a big college football fan. I went to Georgia, Glenn went to Texas, uh, and obviously a fan of, of Eli and the original sketch. And so somehow this thing came to us that they, that they wanted to adapt it. And I, and I think our initial reaction was, that's an insane idea. Uh, but, but as, but as Glenn and I started talking about it, and, and, and Glenn was the one who said, well, what if you really, you know, took— what if, what if you did the Mrs. Doubtfire thing and it was a story about a guy putting on prosthetics, um, to try and do this for real? We, we got really excited because I think what we thought about was just how insane some— someone would have to be to do that. And also It's weirdly believable in the world of college football, like, that someone would do something that insane. Like, if I saw that story, I think I'd believe it. And, and so we said, all right, let's, let's do it. And let's take the story really seriously. And let's, like, let's try and make it dramatic and romantic and, like, elevate the filmmaking. And, and so we did. And I think the other thing that about, about it that was fun for me, everything that Eli said, It's stupid improv. Like, Eli, it's like he's just saying the first thing that comes to mind. So really, it allows me to be a very lazy writer. The funniest thing that Chad can say is the first thing that comes to mind. He's an idiot. He's terrible at improvising. So, it's actually a very joyful, easy show to write. So, So yeah, it's just— I think it's just a lot of fun. And I can't believe here we are. There's 2 seasons of it.

How did you think about the transition from season 1 to season 2? I mean, the reviews are incredible. And a lot of shows, I feel like, have 10 years of, we're going to do this. They do the first season, and then they're like, oh, we caught the— we're the dog that caught the car. We got to figure out season 2. It feels like there's much more planning or much more thought, but is this something that's evolving organically? Are you responsive to what the fans and the critics are saying, or are you more of like, I know where things are going 5 years from now?

20-season plan.

Okay, lock it in.

You're like, no, I live my life one episode at a time.

This thing, if any idea has legs, It's Chad Powers. We're gonna chase down The Simpsons.

He's going to space eventually.

I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, you have an idea of maybe where you hope something would go. But I think that you're, you're an idiot. And if you're not responding, if you're lucky enough to get a second season, and you've got fans, and you've got sort of audience reaction, you you know, you—

that should inform what you do.

And, and we're making the show hopefully to, to hit as wide of an audience as possible. And I, at the same time, I think for season 2, I kind of did more of probably what I always wanted the show to be, which was just make it more of a thriller.

Yeah.

Maybe more dramatic, um, and lean into those elements. And I, and I think that While perhaps unexpected for audiences, seems like it connected with them, which is good.

Eli, what advice are you giving to young athletes that want to get into media or even just have a great career in a world where you're expected to do some sort of media, even if it's just some social media? How are you thinking about the challenges faced by young athletes today?

Well, I think, you know, I mean, don't do anything you don't want to do. If you don't want to be a media source, you don't want to be on social media, if you don't want to be out there and doing it, don't do it. But if you have interest in it, if you have a personality and you want to pursue that or just kind of enjoy being in front of the camera or behind it or doing interviews or having fun with it, then I think just got to be yourself.

Yeah.

Be someone you're not. And so I think that's kind of the idea that you can have fun. I think nowadays kind of being an athlete and being a personality and doing things outside of your sport is kind of more acceptable. 20 years ago, that wasn't really the case. Like maybe you could do a commercial, but you didn't want to kind of be seen as like, well, this guy's doing too much or he's not taking his day job seriously. All these athletes take their day job very seriously, but they can also kind of show the lighter side of themselves and do something and go undercover or do a skit or do a prank or, you know, what— or whatever, kind of show a little that you have, you have something going on besides your, your kind of your everyday, your day job, your, your sport that you, you know, spend 90% of the time doing. You know, you can have a personality, you can do other things, and if that's an If that's your interest, you should pursue it.

Yeah, it's interesting. I noticed like it— like being great at the media side cannot take you from a good athlete to a great athlete, but it can take you from an okay athlete that maybe wouldn't have a career to somewhat of a career, you know, not necessarily in every sport. But there is a new generation of athletes that are actually not elite, but they're just so good at social media that they can get the attention Yes. To kind of make a career out of it. I wanted to ask, like, what are the ups and downs across creating a new season of a TV show like this? Most of the people, most of the entrepreneurs that come on our show are building companies and products, and it's kind of like this, it's a roller coaster, but you go from like concept, everyone gets excited about a concept, maybe you raise some money, You build a product, you launch it, but the point of launch is when the work begins because you have this flood of customers that come in. For you guys, when the customers are coming in, people are watching, it's like the work has already been done and you have to be thinking about the next one. The next thing. But during the actual creation process, I imagine you get all sorts of roller coasters where you're going, maybe we're going in the totally wrong direction with with this part of the story or whatever it is?

Yeah, and we have our investors that we have to contend with, the Walt Disney Company. But that's it. I mean, there's probably—

I hadn't thought about it.

There's probably a ton of similarities between the two. Filmmaking, making anything, it's a collaboration. It's a, it's a lot of people with a lot of different skill sets collaborating. You know, you're working with the studio and the people who are paying for the thing. And, you know, they've got a perspective on what can make something a success for their platform. And, and you, unless you're really up your own ass, you want it to be a commercial success.

Mm-hmm.

And so, you know, you take that into account and then just in the making of something, yeah, there's a million different departments that you're, you know, the actors, the costumes, whatever, you know, and these things take a long time.

When you—

once the thing launches, it's true, we have to sort of sit back and just see, you know, all right, how's—

Let Chad take the wheel.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's up to Chad then. And, you know, you hope that a thing connects, and there's no guarantee. That's hard, you know. And so when something like this, that's really, you know, people don't know what to think of an adaptation of the Chad Powers sketch.

Yeah.

And so when it does break through and you're able to get a second season, then it's like, all right, that's a gift. And so, really, I think the goal of season 2 is just elevate it and you want to grow the audience and keep, I guess, making a better product over time.

Eli, I'm sure you have a lot of ideas for different characters that you've seen across your career. How do you think now about which characters should end up in Chad Powers versus are entirely other cinematic universes that you could— you guys could build shows around?

Well, yeah, I always, I always try to think of like, you know, and, you know, when kind of talking with Michael a lot kind of around the first season, just about the characters like on the team that you could, you could have, or just funny stories that happen in the locker room or things that happen at practice that maybe you could make into a funny skit. So So it was a lot of fun, I think, working with him and just kind of reminiscing on just the great things that happen in a locker room. A lot of it you can't quite tell the public, but you can tell a writer that he could kind of get this story out without me saying, this has happened to me, or, my teammate did this.

So kind of a secret way to release some of these stories.

Yeah.

And maybe the greatest way to tell a story is like a guy, all of a sudden your teammate's watching, it's like, Wait a minute.

That's me.

I did that.

I'm the pervert that said that. That's my— I did— what the heck's going on here? But so I think that's kind of the fun way with shows or movies and these type of things, doing these things. It's kind of another way to tell different stories and how you— and also you can make it how you want it to happen also and how you wanted it to remember. And you don't have to let the total truth get in the way and just make it a little bit better. Hollywood it up.

Yeah.

Someday, 20 years from now, you should put out the watch-along guide.

With the director's commentary.

This is this guy.

This is this guy. This is this guy.

Yeah, that's great. I'm interested in understanding a little bit more about Glen Powell. There's this take that goes around Hollywood. Tom Cruise is the last movie star. And when I saw the new Top Gun, I was like, I think we might get another movie star. But I'm wondering about how you're processing just the changes that are happening in Hollywood, what's actually not changing, and what's it like working with Glen?

Eli, how are you processing the changes in Hollywood?

Yeah, I mean, uh, Yeah, I think you should take this one, Michael.

I mean, Glenn, you know, Glenn, clearly a movie star, is so, so amazing. And that's part of the joy of this show is getting to show audiences what he can do, you know, one half of this handsome leading man, and then the other half is this Jim Carrey idiot performance, which is so insane. So it's like, I, I love just what a showcase it is for, for his incredible range of talents. And, and it's, it's a really like— for a guy that is— everybody's like, oh, there you're the, you're the next guy. This is, this is a really brave performance. Like, like not, not every, um, leading man is always able to go and play an idiot.

Yeah.

And, you know, really humble themselves and lose scenes the way that Russ and Chad does. And Glenn, as that character, is so happy to be the butt of the joke and let other actors win. And it makes you root for him and root for Chad, root for Russ. And so it's really an incredible performance. And as far as, you know, I don't know, I mean, I'm not that old, I guess. People are always saying— I mean, Hollywood's— everybody's always saying that Hollywood's changing. I suspect that's a thing that everybody's heard.

Yeah.

And it probably is always changing. But I think the thing that I believe, at least, is that you know, and maybe we're seeing it this year more than ever, is that audiences will show up for original, cool stories and great actors, great performances, and great filmmaking. So if you make good shit, people are gonna want to watch it. And it's like, that's not really a subversive idea. And I actually don't think that that's gonna change.

Yeah, it feels like this year's been particularly like, we've just seen so many breakouts, the Backrooms obsession thing, Iron Lung, all these like indie filmmakers. Are you finding talent in un— in like non-traditional places for your team across the organization? Like, uh, because we, we hear about the YouTuber who turns into the director, right? But I don't know if we hear about—

What about the, the Friday Beers guy in Artificial Intelligence?

That's right. Yeah, he was an Instagram comedian, right?

Yeah, we're seeing this. And I, I have a, I have a buddy who's just started making skits and he's getting cast and stuff now.

Yeah, but what, yeah, are you seeing the same effect or is it just starting to heat up?

I mean, yeah, I, well, well, I can at least speak to like, you know, casting, you know, these, these people that, they're just casting folks, digital creators or, or whatever folks who are just, just have little niche followings online are oftentimes really exciting to see them break out in these big movies. Like the guy who played, uh, Timothée Chalamet's friend in Marty Supreme, um, was amazing, that guy. And I think he had like maybe a little— he was like a little minor internet presence before that, I think. But like, he was so good. And, and so I, I think it's a great place to find, find actors. Certainly we're seeing these, you know, awesome industrious filmmakers and writers come, come out of YouTube and all that. So yeah, I mean, of course I want to work with those people. Yeah, I want to give me a job.

Well, thank you, guys. Well, We're super excited for everyone else to get to watch. And yeah, really amazing work.

Have a great rest of your day.

Appreciate it, fellas. We'll see you soon.

Goodbye.

Go fish.

Well, 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 Some big news on the timeline. What happened?

We're just getting, getting it live, so I'm gonna try to figure out what happened. OpenAI discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of their offices. They used models to understand the device and where it came from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we're grateful to the agents and Prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest. The FBI's investigation is ongoing, and we will continue to support their work. Just reading the OpenAI newsroom. At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated. We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance. Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risk to cybercriminals to nation-states. And this case is an example of how an AI— of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats. So reading the SF Standard, if I can pull this up.

This photo is crazy.

Federal prosecutors say an employee from Saudi Arabia planted an audio recorder and left another unattended in his bag. I'm not going to be able to fully pronounce this. Abdulrahman Al-Fazan, a Saudi national, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He made his initial appearance in federal court today.

This photo is crazy. They have a camera back there that caught it. What is going on?

Well, no, was this maybe his own device that he recorded himself with?

Maybe. I don't know. I don't know why you need video from behind the TV. That's very odd.

No, but it was a— it said it was a recording device.

But maybe I thought it would just be audio.

I know, but maybe it just happened to—

well, that's crazy, crazy, crazy. Um, interesting.

Yeah, really, really wild.

He wanted to be a fly on the wall for the wrong reasons. You got to be in those meetings just for the mindset, like our friend the poster who wanted to be the fly on the wall at the White House dinner. You know, this is very, very crazy. Really underscores like the stakes here that there are like potentially like nation states and spies afoot, all sorts of crazy, crazy stuff going on in the AI race. But thanks for breaking it down, Jordi. Anything else we need to cover today on the show, or should we say—

I'm sure I'm sure we'll get more on this story by tomorrow, but fun show.

Yes.

Fun show. Ending on a brighter note, are we gonna get the Roadster this week?

It's a crazy week for cars. On October 15th, both Porsche and Tesla should be announcing vehicles if the Roadster is not delayed again. They said it was delayed for weather. The weather seems like it might be getting worse.

I don't know.

We'll see. But yeah, October 15th, both the—

And if this doesn't launch, I think a lot of people will accuse SpaceX and Tesla of manipulating the weather to hide the fact that their car might be a bit behind schedule.

And they might wind up competing more directly than people think. Like, they're going out on the same day. I know that they'll have different price points. But like in terms of like new supercar, like these are not. I'm not saying I'm not saying that they're I'm not saying that they're going to be direct competitors or anything. I just think they're wildly different. I'm just saying in terms of like it's not it's not that it's not that Porsche's Mission S is going up against the new Model Y launch. Like it's the both companies are launching a product that is above their normal level. They're both launching special.

Yeah.

And that's what's interesting is that it's happening the same day.

Yeah, no, I think—

So they will go head-to-head. Obviously 2 wildly different camps. I agree with you on like that they don't actually compete, but they are, they are both special announcements.

You might, you might be the one person that is equally excited about both.

Yeah, well, I'll have to see day of. And we're going to invite some, some car journalists and car content creators on the show over the next couple weeks to discuss this.

We should, uh, yeah, we should get Yeah. I'm hearing a lot of amazing things about the new Porsche, hearing it all— hearing and just seeing because they have some teaser images, but something between a 959 and a GT1. I think they're going to make a lot of them. I think people are going to love it. Even the key that they're teasing now looks incredible. So, can't wait. I can't wait for this to get out. I can't wait to drive it. Nick, if you're listening, let's figure out a way to take it for a spin sooner than later. But thanks for hanging out with us today, folks. Kind of all over the place, but that's what we do.

Yeah.

We'll see you tomorrow at 11:00 AM Pacific. Sign up for our newsletter at tbn.com. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And we'll see you tomorrow.

Cheers.

Bye.