XBOX Layoffs, "Manual" Ferrari, Circle K Lottery Dispute | Baiju Bhatt, Daniel English, Michele Catasta

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Today's Monday, July 6th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Otridum, 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. Uh, happy July 4th to everyone. I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend. How was your 4th, Jordi Hays?

Incredible.

It was incredible. Cinema. Tyler, how was your Fourth?

It was electric.

Can you tell us about that white party that you went to? You can't talk about that? What about the wedding you went to? Was that a fun one? That was in New York, right?

New York.

Manhattan.

Yeah.

Madison Square Garden.

But you can't break it down for us?

Yeah, they told us not to.

OK, OK. Got it. Well, I'm glad you had fun. I'm glad you had fun. I'm glad everyone had fun. My Fourth of July was great. It was a little— was it humid?

Did you even get sunburned?

No.

You don't even look sunburned.

Not sunburned. Can't say that for the rest of the team. He's LARPing. Half the team over there is sunburned.

He's LARPing around saying, oh, I had the best Fourth of July, not even sunburned.

No.

Make it make sense.

Yeah. Shade.

Shade.

You stay in the shade at the right times.

UV index was—

You're not sunburned. Why are you—

Oh, I'm brutally sunburned.

Oh, on the back.

On my back.

OK, OK. That makes sense. UV index. Was it humid in Malibu?

A little bit.

It was a little humid in Pasadena. And it made it feel very East Coast. Like it felt like an East Coast Fourth of July to me. I did East Coast Fourth of July a couple years ago, and it was sort of refreshing.

I don't know.

It was nice.

But drone shows were in this year.

Yes. Fireworks are out given the Palisades fire, the Altadena fire. So a lot of townships are playing it safe with drone shows instead of fireworks, which is— I don't know. I feel like it's cool. I like a drone show. I've only seen one when we were in France. It was cool. I don't have a problem with it, but I'm anticipating a backlash. I'm anticipating that people will be like, we got to go back to the organic, authentic fireworks, right?

Yeah, but yeah, they're like, I like when the air quality is terrible.

Okay, it's an air quality risk for you. You notice that?

I didn't notice it this year.

Did you see fireworks?

I, I I honestly didn't see a single— I didn't see a single firework.

I was up at 6 AM, so I went to bed at like 9.

I did not see a single firework on the Fourth of July, which is crazy. I heard some around. But I remember when I lived in LA, the air quality would genuinely be terrible for at least a few days because it just sits in there and if there's no wind.

When I lived in Echo Park, it was like fireworks everywhere. It's the craziest neighborhood because people in the neighborhood buy the production-level fireworks. You know how normally you get like a sparkler or you get something that like shoots off a little? No, they buy the same thing that you see at like Dodger Stadium, like the cannon that goes off and goes boom, that, but they don't coordinate them. So it's not like there's music that's playing and then it's synced up and there's a finale. It's just whenever someone feels like lighting one off, it goes full fireworks scale. There's some really cool like helicopter video shots of Los Angeles during, I think Fourth of July, where they go really, really crazy.

But probably dangerous. I feel like that's something that a medallion would do, is like, I'm going to go fly my plane at 9:00 PM on the Fourth of July and just get into—

I have some crazy video of the fireworks show at Dodger Stadium before there were regulations around drones. I had one of the first drones, and I flew it through the fireworks. And then spectacular footage. I'll have to play it on the show one day. Wildly illegal by modern drone standards, but at the time, no one knew how to regulate those things. So you could just fly them anywhere, which was really, really crazy, but a lot of fun. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So big changes at Microsoft, big changes at Xbox. Xbox is cutting 3,200 jobs by the end of next year. And here's where it gets interesting. It's not because of artificial intelligence. AI, the new CEO of Xbox has been very clear that they're not stuffing AI everywhere. They're going back to their roots, but they are, but focused on efficiency. And so the newly appointed Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has announced this morning that Xbox will lay off 3,200 staffers by the end of 2027, with 1,600 layoffs taking place today. She posted her full email to Xbox employees on X, and it's very candid about the operational failures and trajectory of the company.

Very notable that the first major layoff from a major company just admits that the business is not healthy. Yes. Doesn't blame it on AI. Yes, we have. We haven't— we have not seen a layoff of this scale.

Yes.

That wasn't at least partially credited, credited to like the productivity increases that we're seeing from AI.

Yes.

And this feels like the most honest layoff and they're sort of forced into doing it because of the gaming community is like so anti-AI, right?

Yeah.

I think it's even worse.

Things that are going on. So yeah, we need to break this debate into strategic. Should they be doing layoffs? What does this mean for the Xbox business? And then the communications around it as well, because the communications— we can dig into what she actually said in her email. She says the business is not healthy and lists a bunch of surprisingly bad trends and aspects of the operation. One, Xbox is operating at margins 3 to 10 times lower than its competitors. It released its latest console to a smaller install base while the cost structure of the console itself was higher. Of course, memory prices are going up now, and so the cost these consoles is going to be even higher in the future. And in some of the parts— in some parts of the company, work has to pass through as many as 14 layers of management. Wow, that's a lot. In a typical year, Xbox lost 64 cents for every dollar it invested. In addition to the layoffs, Asha said that Xbox will spin out game studios that it acquired over the years. Compulsion Games, Double Fine Productions, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, and Arkane are all getting yeeted in one way or another.

From the company has been running Xbox into the ground for the love of the game?

You mean running it unprofitably for the love of the game? No, no, no, because I do, I do, you know, you're right that they face really fierce competition. No, PS5 has a ton of amazing exclusives, and then Nintendo has— Nintendo, the N64 used to compete directly with the PlayStation. It was like, did you get an N64 or a PlayStation? And then once Xbox came in, PlayStation and Xbox, they fought for every exclusive, and By and large, you could play Call of Duty on either. You could play most of the games. Madden was on both of them. And so you would sort of decide, oh, I got some friends on Xbox. I'm on the Xbox crew, or I'm in the PlayStation world. But then Nintendo went off and just did something completely different with the Switch. PC gaming continued to grow and became more and more accessible on more and more devices. So even a laptop that you might get for school can still play most of the library on Steam. And so you have more competition. And then you also have mobile. Like the hyper-casual games are taking mindshare. People are scrolling TikTok. There are tons of free entertainment resources that they compete with. This is something all the movie studios love to say.

Yes, people are making podcasts like you can have this.

Podcasts, no, you can be gaming while you watch this. We approve.

No, I'm saying because you're making this, you're not gaming.

Oh yeah, no, okay.

You were spending, at least back in the day, pretty penny on games.

That's true, that's true. So yeah, they're, They're tightening up operations at Xbox. The question I think on everyone's mind is will Xbox be spun out as a standalone entity at some point? Uh, is it too far afield from the core, uh, Microsoft, uh, mission? There was a move. Xbox was seen as a foothold into consumer for Microsoft. Of course, with the way Azure's grown and their cloud platform and their cloud business, really it feels like Microsoft is having the biggest win in enterprise and Teams and cloud and all of the workforce and productivity tools that they launch. Obviously they're very big in AI. And so the idea that the Xbox would be, at one point it came with the best 4K Blu-ray player, an Xbox One S, I believe. You can get one of these for $100 right now. It's actually a great steal. If you want to go physical media, which is very popular with parents these days, instead of, "Oh, yeah, scroll the, you know, endless feed of Netflix and Disney Plus." Instead of that, it's like, "You like Toy Story? We got you Toy Story on 4K Blu-ray. You can put it in the box and it's $100, which is 6 months of a streaming service." So, a lot of people are starting to physical media max a little bit more. But the idea was that you would get this Xbox and you would get it because you were a gamer, you want to play games, but you also had an HD DVD player a Blu-ray player, and it would also serve as like your home media console. And they would grow from there, get the foothold into the, into the consumer market. But that never really materialized. Most people, if they have an Xbox, they use it to play one specific set of games. They might have a PS5 as well and Nintendo Switch as well. And then if they're in the Apple ecosystem and they play Xbox games on the weekend, they're not lamenting the lack of integration there. They're like, yeah, that's fine. Like, I play the games over there. I talk to people on the iPhone. It's fine. So let's read through a little bit of Asha's post to see, because there's this, there's this key decision to announce 3,200 layoffs throughout fiscal year 2027, but announce only 1,600 today. The question is, strategically, what does that do for morale? Like, because you sort of have this guillotine hanging over everyone. Is this a good incentive for everyone to lock in and not— and make the cut because you know another cut is coming? Is it going to stop complacency in the organization? Or is it going to make everyone start looking for other jobs and think, "Oh, like, I could get fired at any moment. They've already teed up 1,600 layoffs. If I'm likely to be in that, maybe I should be looking for another job right now." Now, that could be good because maybe those aren't the missionaries who you want on the team. But what do you think about the idea of announcing to your company that there, there are layoffs today and there's also a whole bunch more coming down the pipe?

Xbox/Microsoft Gaming has around 16,000 employees. So this cut is quite significant.

Yes.

I think that At least in startups.

It's 10% today, 10% within the next year.

Yeah, at least in startups, the best advice that I've ever gotten and would typically talk with founders in my portfolio about is like, if you need to do cuts, cut deep, right?

Yeah.

And this is like maybe at least, this is like a talking point for at least like 5 significant founders and investors, right? Like a lot of people just repeat this, right?

Yeah.

And I think it generally, holds true, it's better to— I think the question is like, why did they feel like they needed to cut 1,600 today and then also keep a 1,600 cut in the, in the tank?

Yeah.

Like, do they need— like, is there some—

and do they know who those 1,600 people are? And they're like, yeah, we just— if they are 12 months to let them finish what they're doing, or is it that we haven't even identified them? We just—

and Either way, it doesn't necessarily seem that great, right? Because if you've identified who you're going to cut, you should probably just do it now.

It's much better to just do a big cut and then say, "Look, everyone who's still on the ship, we're going on the offensive. We're going to be hiring in these areas. This is where we're winning. So everyone get on because we're going on a big run right now. We had to shrink a little bit, but now we're on the offensive with this particular strategy." But who knows?

They certainly understand the implications of doing this.

Yeah.

So there's probably— there's certainly a strategy.

Microsoft as a whole is laying off 4,800 employees, which is 2.1% of its workforce. This is a massive company. And you have to wonder, because they're obviously hiring as well, like, will the company shrink this year on the back of these layoffs or will they just do 2% layoffs and then wind up growing the company 3%? And so they wind up a larger organization at the end of the year. There's some interesting history here because Microsoft has had a long history of rank and yank, stack ranking they invented. It was always a hardcore culture. People sort of forget this about Microsoft because it's such a dominant tech company that, of course, they got lumped in with the, you know, nap rooms and free lunches. But in fact, back in the late '70s and '80s, Microsoft was famously intense, very tiny teams, huge deadlines, technical arguments. Gates, Bill Gates was personally reviewing work and they had a culture that rewarded extreme competence. It was sort of an Elon Musk type endeavor at that time. It was not nice, still founder-led and product obsessed. Vanity Fair had a profile on the company in 2012, described young Microsoft as thrilling but also unnerving with Gates demanding intense commitment from hires and Ballmer joining in 1980 as the hard-charging business operator.

Maybe Asha wants the new culture at Xbox to be thrilling and a little unnerving.

Maybe, maybe. So in the '90s, they started to develop a monopoly. Windows 95, Office, there was a lot of lock-in to Excel, Word. Business was just printing cash. And Microsoft became enormous, rich, internally competitive. The company still had the old smart people, brutal review, ship or die energy. But it was becoming more layered, as we saw, 14 layers of management at Xbox in some cases, stack ranking. Became part of the culture. But no one really knows exactly when, exactly what date it went into effect. But a former Microsoft employee writing in GeekWire said stack ranking had been an integral part of Microsoft culture for decades and that when he joined in 1999, it was often viewed positively as a part of Microsoft's meritocracy. And so, this— so stack ranking was you rank all the employees, you put them on this bell curve, you're sort of grading on a curve. Are you have a couple A players, but then there's certain people that are falling behind, and, and everyone knows where they sit in the organization.

Could you illustrate this for me? Yeah, just with the team.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

That would be helpful.

Yeah, yeah. Um, I'd give myself S tier, U, F tier, and, uh, I think, I think we can start and end there. No, uh, but Ballmer came in and, uh, and And people started pointing to StackRanking as a little bit more of dysfunction. Of course, there were other strategic missteps during the Ballmer era. And the stock was flat. And this is what birthed Stratechery, is as soon as Ben Thompson left Microsoft, he had tons to write about because he was there during the pre-SATA era when they were trying to get into mobile and did so unsuccessfully. Then SATA comes in, the pivot to cloud, the business does very well. And everything's off to the races again. During the infamous Ballmer era, there was a forced curve performance review. Managers had to distribute employees into buckets. So even a strong team had to produce winners and losers. So even if you love everyone on your team, the bottom 10% is going to be labeled the bottom 10%. And that creates a lot of stress. But it can also create a lot of incentive and a lot of excitement. It can be tough but fair sometimes. But ABC—

Thrilling and unnerving.

Thrilling and unnerving. ABC.

How would you describe your corporate environment? Thrilling and unnerving.

Better than just unnerving. I'd rather have some thrill in there.

I don't know.

You sort of opt into it. You know, ideally, ideally this is all out in the open. It comes out in the hiring process. You don't go in blind. You know what you're getting. But of course, of course, cultures change over time. If you've been with a company for a decade, you might say, I signed up for, you know, a chill monopoly. Why are we wartime? I'm a peacetime employee, you know, or vice versa.. And then might— it might be time to find another opportunity. So ABC summarized it as managers grading on the bell curve. Vanity Fair's critique was harsher. They said former and current employees described stack ranking as the most destructive process inside Microsoft because it made employees compete with teammates instead of competitors. That's a good point. I mean, you should in some ways just be like, yeah, you smoke the competition. Doesn't matter that you were the worst at smoking the competition, at least you did some smoking. Yeah, but, uh, they always did normal. So the question is like, like, is the layoffs that are happening at Xbox, the layoffs that happened last year at Microsoft, they laid off 9,000 people, this year it's under 5,000. Is this new? Is this, is this a new trend, or is this just a continuation of the stack ranking process? It actually is new. Stack ranking would push out low-rated people. Sometimes it would block promotions, reduce bonuses, uh, force transfers, but they weren't necessarily doing mass layoffs around it. That's sort of a misconception. So even if they look at all the stack ranking at the end of the year and they say, okay, these people are clearly in the bottom 10%, they saw it more as an opportunity to reallocate talent from different pieces, different teams. And it wasn't always, okay, every— at the end of every year we're just firing the bottom.

Yeah, bottom 10% on one team might be top 10% on another.

Exactly. Which again, thrilling, but unnerving. But it's not, it's not full guillotine. You're going to be out of a job if you're in the bottom 10%. It's more, okay, you need to find a better opportunity within the organization. You're still on the team. Now we are in a different, we're in a different, different world because the first mass layoff at Microsoft actually came in 2009 after the great financial crisis. It announced a plan to cut 5,000 jobs during the financial crisis. And it was the first mass layoff for Microsoft. I mean, that's 40-year, 30-year run without any layoffs, just growth, growth, growth. But layoffs eventually became a more normal corporate behavior. In 2014, under Satya Nadella, Microsoft announced up to 18,000 cuts, mostly tied to integrating Nokia's phone business. So post-acquisition, they deduplicated some teams. Of course, Nokia has marketers and and finance people and a lot of things that are not directly tied to that product. If they're bringing the companies together, there might be some reduction in force. Microsoft's own announcement framed as reorganization focuses on this reorganizational simplification. Reuters reported that about 12,500 of those Nokia-related cuts were related to the acquisition directly. The system officially ended in 2013, so they're not doing doing stack ranking anymore. Just before Nadella took over, Microsoft killed the numerical forced ranking and moved towards more qualitative frequent reviews.

I bet there's still some, some OG managers there that are doing a little cheeky stack ranking.

I miss it. Maybe. Who knows? Um, but overall, is there cause for optimism with Xbox? It's the hardest gaming platform to be excited about when you think about Valve, it's just a money printing machine on top of PC. The PC gaming industry broadly is doing well. And PlayStation's done such a good job— Sony's done such a good job with PlayStation with creating true intellectual property. You think about "Last of Us," which is now an HBO series. And that is a PlayStation exclusive, at least for a certain amount of time. I believe they own Naughty Dog. The publisher of that or the game developer. And so there's a lot— there's fewer and fewer exclusives. And when Microsoft bought Activision, there was talk of, will Call of Duty go exclusive to Xbox? Because that would be sort of a killer feature that would get a lot of gamers, even if they're in the PS5 ecosystem, they say, ah, well, I wanna play Call of Duty, I'll get an Xbox as well. They chose not to do that. For potentially antitrust reasons, you can't necessarily cut.

Yeah, I don't follow the video game industry.

Loser alert! Loser alert!

I don't play video games, but the thing that gets you to get excited about with Xbox is Modern Warfare 2 Rust and 1v1ing your best friends.

Yes, but you buy it in the secondary market. That's not putting any pennies in Microsoft's pocket.

They're not printing on me.

Income statement. It's rough over there. 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. Well, if you've done enough Forza Horizon 5, Forza Horizon 6, you've burned out on your gaming simulator with your Xbox, you got to get over to Ferrari and pick up a Dolce Tre Lindri. Manuale.

Let's pull up this video.

The 12 cilindri is the first car with a gated manual shifter to come out of Maranello since 2012.

Have you noticed that they said shifter, not transmission?

Yeah, shifter. That's what people wanted, right? We'll debate it. Let's play this video.

And a shifter. It's a 6-speed.

Let's see.

Hell is frozen over, pigs can fly, and Ferrari is building a new car with a manual transmission. This is the 12 cilindri manuale. As you can see, it's a manual gearbox in a Ferrari. And what it really is is a mode of the 8-speed DCT. But Ferrari has added a clutch pedal and a shifter. It's a 6-speed shifter. When you switch to manual mode, the shift knob turns amber in color, but you can also leave it in automatic. Unlike the other 12 cilindri, there's no paddle shifters, which you'll notice. There's— if you want manual mode, You push the clutch in, provided you're going under 62 miles an hour, it'll go into manual mode and then you can start driving. They tell us you can stall it. So if you are too quick with the clutch, too quick with releasing the clutch, if you try to start it in second or third gear and you pop the clutch, you'll stall it. If you push the clutch in, you can rev it to the 9,500 RPM redline and do a massive clutch drop. It does have some safeguards. If you try to do, you know, a 6-to-1 shift or some shift that isn't allowable, it won't let you do it. Ferrari put a ton of effort into the shift feel. You can sort of, as you move from the center plane, there is a little bit of resistance to sort of simulate the synchronizers meshing. And then it sort of falls into gear. So it feels very much like a manual gearbox in a Ferrari has always felt, provided that gearbox is warmed up. As you can see, the gated shifter is here. The clicks are very much here. Although the DCT is an 8-speed, you only get 6 speeds with the manual transmission.

Which is strange. Which—

lowers the top speed from over 200 mph, I think 211 mph in 7th gear at redline, to 6th gear, which is at the 9,500 RPM redline, to 196 mph. So if you want to go just that little bit faster for top speed, you got to go in the automatic mode. The Manuale goes on sale at the beginning of next year, at the beginning of 2027. Um, Ferrari has said that the price will be right around half a million dollars for starters. I'm sure most of them will be optioned out with lots of goodies and cost a lot more. They're building 1,499 of them, and I would imagine they're already spoken for. But this sort of does give us a look that Ferrari sees the value in the manual transmission. They love the connection of it. Their customers had been asking for it. They didn't really have a manual transmission to put in the car. But with this solution, this essentially a manual mode with a shifter and a clutch, They have shown us that it is possible to take a dual clutch and make the manual experience happen for buyers. So I'm hoping this trickles down into the rest of the lineup.

Okay.

Manual by wire. They're trying to answer every— they don't make them like they used to complaint. How does it land with you? Do you think this checks the box? Does this count as a manual Ferrari? Are they giving their manual fans what they want, or is this a poor simulacrum of what it means to have 3 pedals?

I think it's an obvious step in the right direction.

I think a lot of people will be satisfied with this. I don't know, I think this checks enough of the boxes.

Purists are in shambles. Yeah, I'm in shambles over the spec that they use in that example.

Why?

Uh, I just think it looks terrible.

It does look very You haven't had bass back yet.

But, but, I think this is a fantastic—

TJ Parker does not like it. He says, "This is far more embarrassing than the Luce faceplant." And people are saying, "Wow, that's bad. As long as it's fun, who cares?" TJ Parker says he cares. It's corny, but Koenigsegg approved by the new Bugatti CEO seems—

Look, when I see this, I think that they're going to sell at least 1,000 $499 luches because you have to imagine—

You think so?

If you want an application—

They claim they're not doing it. They claim they're not doing it.

Then you're going to need to buy a luche. They claim they're not doing it. They obviously will be doing it.

You think so?

These are never things that are— these are never rules that are written down anywhere, but they are understood.

The details are hilarious and kind of brilliant. Listen to this. You can skip gears. Heel-toe downshift and even stall the car if you mess up the clutch. But the system will also stop you from doing something truly stupid like over-revving the engine or money shifting the car into the wrong gear. If you're not familiar with the money shift, that's where you shift, you skip a gear too much and it grinds the gears and you have to pay for, to fix your engine, which costs a lot of money, especially in a 12-cylinder Ferrari. Uh, the— it's slower if you shift it yourself, and you need automatic mode to hit the full 211 mph top speed. But that's basically the whole point. Ferrari customers apparently told the company that they were willing to trade performance for the old-school physical joy of driving a gated manual.

Yeah, ultimately I like that they're partially listening to customers. It seems they're not necessarily fully listening to customers because I don't know any of Ferrari's, you know, out of the handful of Ferrari's top customers that I know. Yeah, I don't know any that were like, yeah, give me a fly-by-wire, like, gated man— you know, gated manual. Yeah, they were not asking for that. Yeah, but they were asking for the experience. They were asking for a knob that you can put your hand on.

3 pedals. Yeah, they want the third pedal. Uh, I am thinking of the Hyundai Ioniq 5N. Are you familiar with this vehicle?

You've told me all about it.

So the Hyundai Ioniq 5N is an electric hatchback, essentially. But, uh, the gentleman who runs Hyundai's N division formerly ran BMW's M division. What's the letter that comes after M? It's N. So he went over to Hyundai and said, give me a bunch of your cars and I will create M versions, performance performance versions of these cars. Now, Hyundai is funny because it's like a family car company for the most part, not the same muscle car, German performance, ultimate driving machine base to work with, like at BMW. But that individual has done a fantastic job adding some drama to what it feels like to drive an electric Hyundai, uh, specifically with the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N. It has something like 600 horsepower, very quick on the track. Because of the position of the battery, it stays very planted even though it is a heavy vehicle. So it is good on the track in automatic mode, but they added paddle shifters and a simulated dual-clutch transmission.

LARP mode. LARP mode.

LARP mode. And it pipes in fake noise from a fake engine, and you can redline it, virtually, and it's almost like—

can you roll it physically?

You can physically roll it if you get really crazy, I'm sure. But it's a very interesting, uh, it's very interesting because it has all the hallmarks of something that would be hated by the car community. But in fact, when I watched a lot of reviewers, a lot of car fans drive it, they said, yeah, after a couple laps on the track, it just felt like a lot of fun and it was just fun. And also at the price point, you're getting the performance of a $200,000 to $300,000 car, probably 600 horsepower. It feels like a manual and you can really throw it around and drift it and do all sorts of fun stuff with a much lower entry price. And so I was surprised that we didn't see that technology quickly come to the to the Taycan and other electric sort of sports cars. I think it will eventually. I think it takes time. Also, the sound choice was interesting. They used— they used the exhaust from another Hyundai instead of like licensing something more brawny or powerful or more exciting. But there's clearly something there that I don't— I don't know if the car's selling very well, but it was at least satisfying to the critical eye of Matt Farah.

Yeah.

Which was interesting.

So, yeah, it's funny because our dear friend TJ, no matter what Ferrari does, he just hates it. He's just— I haven't, I haven't seen— there has not been a launch.

He was sort of pro-Luce. He was, he was.

But he says this is far more embarrassing than the Luce.

Yeah.

You're saying that's a positive stance?

He took a, he took a heretical stance on it.

I'm actually— the Ferrari that I'm most excited about is that is the street-legal version of the 296 Challenge. I think that's going to be a hit because that's, that's obviously it's going to be paddles.

Sure.

But internal combustion engine, they're ditching all the hybrid stuff.

They should, they should have a version, you know, the really old Model T, like the really old cars. We had to crank them to start from the front. They should have a virtual version of that. So it's like a fully electric car, 2,000 horsepower, 400-mile range, but you can get out a crank from the back of the trunk and crank it to start it. That would be very fun. Yeah, something like that.

But anyways, step in the right direction. Give them some credit. They are partially listening to their customers. I think between the Luce and the 12C manual, they're solving their emissions problems headed in the right direction. And I do think that the Luce will have been a big enough wake-up call, because it's something that no one can defend.

OK. The Luce, famously low slung, famously small windows. Should they do a version with huge square windows like this old Land Rover? Do you see this? Was just noticing how bad this has gotten. One of the primary appeals of retro cars is the big old square windows. Are you a fan of this? This is a Discovery. I don't know which one this is, but, uh, I, I was watching an old '90s—

is that not a Range?

I don't know. Um, I was watching an old '90s, um, like—

okay, pull up the car there, or something.

Which one?

If you click in—

whoa, that is so ridiculous! Uh, why are we building cars where the windowsills are at chin level Why is greenhouse? Why is the greenhouse less than a third of the height of the vehicle? Oh, the greenhouse is the top. Interesting. I've never heard that term. Why is the DOT? Where's the DOT? Can we maybe add seat height or reduce waistline? Maybe both?

You know where we're headed, John.

Safety standards.

You know where we're headed?

The pod. No windows.

Cars with no windows.

Yeah.

TVs on the inside.

Reels. Scrolling reels. It's the future. Waymo. They own YouTube? YouTube Shorts, put them right in the Waymos.

Yeah, they like to put YouTube Shorts everywhere.

Yeah.

I mean, the experience of using YouTube today is just searching for a long-form video.

There's a lot of—

how would you like 25 reels?

Yep.

Would you like to scroll past 25 reels?

Yeah.

Before we get to what you actually want.

Yeah.

And, uh, I wouldn't be surprised if we see reels going up the front of the Waymo.

Maybe, maybe separate companies. We'll see, we'll see how long they stick together. Uh, the Model YL from Tesla is coming to the United States. It's now available in the United States and Puerto Rico. Deliveries are still a couple months out, but it's a 3-row, 6-seat configuration for the Model Y. It's longer than the standard Model Y. It brings exceptional interior space with ample headroom and legroom for all passengers. 0 to 60 in 4.4 seconds, 325 miles of range. Front row heated ventilated seats, they all have power recline, improved airflow, more trunk space, active damping, staggered tires for an enhanced grip, longer tailgate for better rear visibility, upgraded 50-watt wireless charging pads. I haven't seen the wireless charging pads in the wild yet. That seems like a cool innovation for your home charger. Can be a little bit slower because it's overnight, but every night, so you don't even need to deal with the plug. I remember at one point Tesla was going to build that crazy robotic snake that was going to plug in. Do you remember this thing?

No.

We got to find a video of this. Look that up, Tyler. The, the Tesla Powerwall at one point had a robotic snake. I can only describe as a robotic snake, and it would find your Tesla's power charge power port no matter where you parked, as long as you were in range of the robot.

Oh, that's cool.

And it would plug in, uh, and they were, they were pitching this as something that they would roll out, probably extremely complicated from a mechanical perspective, uh, and so it never wound up, uh, delivering to the United States at least, but, uh, or anywhere. But, uh, cool idea. But wireless charging pad, obviously much more, uh, easy to to just throw on the floor. Also used in the McLaren Speedtail. McLaren Speedtail uses an inductive wireless charging pad that is— and I think the Macan EV might also have, or maybe the Cayenne EV. One of the Porsches also has the wireless charging pad. And there's a whole bunch of smart technology in it to make sure that if like a mouse doesn't go across, it doesn't get fried, or an animal is not injured by it. It's a pretty high-tech device. But we can find the Tesla charger snake. Here it is, the image. Look at this, Jordi. This is a crazy image. Look at that. This is clearly a demo unit, but you can imagine how you pull into your garage and it finds itself and plugs itself in. Seems like depending on where you park, that could be extremely annoying because if it plugs in, you have to kind of climb over, climb under this thing, that could actually be, uh, worse than just a normal—

yeah, it will also be unfortunate when hackers discover a backdoor. Yes, rises up and it, you know, kills you in your sleep.

Yes.

So I can see why they didn't ship this, at least yet.

Well, there's other Tesla announcements. The Tesla Model Y dual-zone fridge, $600, fits in the sub trunk and has two separate compartments that can be fit, set to different temperatures from 0 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. You plug it into the outlet. I, I love this. I think it's so cool that there's like this gadget that fits into the other thing they have. Like, they have the front trunk, no one's really doing anything with it. Why not throw a couple?

Yeah, not a lot of manufacturers are really willing to promote having 30 to 40 beers hit the road and having 30 to 40 beers.

I don't think these are beers in this image. What is this? Lollipop?

I don't know.

I think it's, uh, blood orange. I don't know which one this is, but they did put some ice cream. The ice cream looks pretty generic. I don't know if that's a known brand. Um, there's also a mattress. Yeah, mattress. Cybertruck mattress.

That's—

I don't know.

They've always, they've always, uh, had those mods. I, I've always thought their accessories are quite cool.

I think it's difficult for other car manufacturers to do first-party accessories because they have so many SKUs. Whereas when you're selling as many Model Ys as they are and as many vehicles that have that exact trunk configuration with that exact port, you can underwrite the mass manufacturing a lot easier than if you're, you know, Kia or Hyundai and you have 25 different vehicles all with slightly different configurations. Configurations. Well, where else should we go? Let me tell you about Public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. They have stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. There was a team that figured out how to order pizza with iMessage using artificial intelligence, and people are not as impressed as they should be because the image is, "AI, please press the order me pizza button, and it is wired up to press the order pizza button. Yes, DoorDash sort of already created an artificial intelligence for having food delivered to you. There is a button, and you can sort of reimagine the UI in a very— in a different way, uh, vibe code a button that orders you the most recent thing or interfaces with a text message. Uh, somewhat cool. Uh, I think the bull case for what Arlen is working on is that, uh, iMessage is a more universal interface. Text is the universal interface in a future world where, you know, everything is done via voice or via an agent or via text stream. Having a centralized place and not having to use a bunch of different apps and have the best app at the right time, and this one's on discount, that one's not, and this one's your payments information safe. Having all of that happen below the fold is just another layer to the user experience in the modern era that it feels like it's on the way. You've been able to order an Uber with Siri for a decade, but no one does because it's not ready. It was not ready for primetime. But we are getting there to the point where this will happen. But it is, it is a slow, slow rollout. The, the AI chat apps were on a dominant run for a long time. OpenAI at the top with ChatGPT. I think Gemini and Claude were sort of going back and forth from number 2 and 3 and you were lamenting. You were saying like, what's going on in the App Store? It's all—

Yeah, this morning I was, I was checking the App Store charts. Actually, good indicator of interest. We have Calci at number 1. It's the world Netflix game controller at number 2, Peacock at number 3, Fox One at number 4. Let's give it up for Fox. Trump accounts at number 5, ChatGPT at 6, Threads at 7. Let's give it up for Connor Hayes. Hayes, Telemundo at number 8.

Telemundo.

Oh, Polymarket at number 9. Gemini closing out the top 10.

Yeah.

11, Fubo.

Fubo.

12, Claude.

Okay.

13, Depop.

Depop.

Depop out of nowhere.

Shopping.

Google number 14.

Okay.

The fact that Google All over the place. Yeah. And then from there it's a bunch of, a lot of, you know, ReelShort, DramaWave, all these short. There's a company called VibeShort, AI comic dramas.

Oh.

Bite-sized comic dramas. Tyler, can you watch like a few hours of these and report back?

Absolutely do not.

Tomorrow.

Absolutely do not.

No, I'm genuinely curious. This app has come out of nowhere.

Yeah.

And we talked to the founder of TrueShort, or is it RealShort? TrueShort is the American company, RealShort is the Chinese company, correct? And he's— TrueShort, he's working on true crime AI-generated short-form video. Interesting to see where that's going. I mean, certainly demand for this stuff, the trough must be filled. 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.

Can we play this video?

Yeah.

What'd you think of it? From Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan is talking to the CEO of Perplexity, Arvind Srinivas.

One of the best of the show.

Two paths to curiosity, one that can kill it and one that can supercharge it. In my opinion, the one that kills curiosity is algorithmic feeds. Like the brain rot that you're fed every day, which is, you know, this continuous doom scrolling. That's bad. And the one that can supercharge it is AI. Okay, like now that you could just ask—

Pause.

Whatever you want. If everybody had—

Thank you. This is probably true from a, From a maybe more macro sense, like if you're— sometimes good ideas do come to you. Some people say in the shower. To me, it's in the sauna. I think there's clearly inspiration that comes when you're not doing anything at all. But that being said, I get so many ideas from the feed.

Ooh, okay.

Don't you?

Hot take.

I like that. Like how many— yesterday I sent you something.

Yeah.

Yesterday I sent you a link that I saw on X and I was like, hey, we should do something like this for this other thing.

Sure. I don't remember what you were talking about because I completely zoned out.

You were in the feed.

Maybe.

And I don't typically, once I have inspiration, then I'm going to AI, right?

Yes.

Then I'm going and exploring the idea and saying, how has this been done before in this way?

Yes.

Or I was looking at incidents where heads of state have interfered with the World Cup.

Yes, yes, yes.

Which was interesting. Yes.

So I think that I like your hot take pushing back on that idea. I do think—

Because where would we— Pre-internet, if you wanted inspiration, you would go to the library.

Stumble upon, baby. Stumble upon. You ever stumble upon?

Post-internet.

That's not post-internet. That was like Web 1 boom. It was like, take me to a random website.

Yeah, but I'm saying before the internet was popular, if you were an artist and you wanted inspiration, you would go buy books, you'd watch movies, you would go look at media to get ideas.

Yeah, yeah. I think my take on this is that he is pointing to something that is correct, which is that AI feels very pull. You choose what to pull out of the AI system. You prompt, you ask for information about a specific thing. So you have to come with an idea and then you're exploring that idea. And that's very satisfying for curious people, whereas the algorithms feel very push. You go to YouTube Shorts or TikTok or Instagram and you're just being fed things and you're not starting your journey with an affirmative declaration. I want to learn more about the new Dolce Trillindri manuale, and I'm going down that rabbit hole. And I think your frustration that you voiced earlier about YouTube shoving a bunch of random Shorts in your face is that otherwise you would be more likely to search for something specific. You want to learn about a history of a specific thing. And this was the case at the dawn of YouTube. It was just a search box. They'd surface a couple things with the editorial front page, but by and large, you would go and be like, "I want—" I remember people would just go and search like, "Sick backflip." And then they would just watch like backflip videos, right? I had friends who would just search like, "Cool thing." "Cool video." And they would just find cool videos because they were in the mood for that. And it was sort of algorithmic and in one sense, but it was very like the user was driving that direction. And with the algorithms, you are taking a much more passive seat. Now the odd thing is that where does AI go? Where does Perplexity, ChatGPT, where do these apps go? Do they become more push in the sense that you show up and there's already a bunch of interesting prompts already done for you?

I was talking about this, Oh yeah, no, that was Pulse.

Pulse was that, but I was also— when there were the rumor about the social network features, I was saying that like I would love to just scroll a timeline of like, what are the deep research reports that Tyler Cowen is doing? He probably searches a ton of stuff. If there's something interesting in there and he can just click share, I would love to scroll that feed and I'll also subscribe to Tyler and see what he's got.

It's so funny because StumbleUpon is such a good example. Great feed. Because there was random elements, but you could also make it more focused. Yeah. And that's generally what a feed is now. It's just stumble upon for like X is just stumble upon for like things happening online that you're interested in.

Yeah. Random is an algorithm. That is an algorithm.

Yeah.

You know, chronological is an algorithm. But I think what we're getting at is like, is more of this like algorithmic algorithm where the optimization function is attention and time on site that people find dissatisfying because they have like regret afterwards because they're like, yeah, you suck me in with a bunch of stuff, but that's not actually what I wanted. I wanted something more focused and directed. I wanted more CrowdStrike. I wanted to know that your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. I also want more videos of peregrine falcons flying at 390 kilometers an hour. That is incredibly fast.

You were giving me— I was skeptical— a little bit of shade about falcons last week, and so I needed to put you in the Falcon Zone.

Okay, the Truth Zone on the falcons. What is this video? This is a video of the fastest attack animal in the animal kingdom, the peregrine falcon. Content Warning. 390 kilometers an hour. Also, they live all over America. Fantastic animal. Beautiful creature. Crazy. Yeah. And you think that there's a business to be built around home defense peregrine falcons. Take me through your thesis.

I did. I did. Yes. An Anderall for the aviation, aviary world. Anderall meets falconry. Yes. Sort of an organic Anderall for the home. Yes. Yeah, a lot of guard dogs are popular. Why not have a peregrine falcon perched in the highest tree on your property, ready to go? I like this chat from Nicola.

A falcon with a bicycle is the most efficient animal on the planet. I completely agree.

This sits very well with the early idea from the show with bear security. Yes. Yeah, bear private military contract. Yes, domestication. I think that was the idea early on.

I think it's probably easier to domesticate a falcon than a bear. Many falcons are already domesticated. Falconry is a historic technique.

I just reached out to a local falconer. You did? To set up some time. Okay. I'm not even— Before the show? No, not for the show, but that would be cool.

Wait, wait, no, no, no, no. Before the show you did this?

Yeah. Wow. The team had that video pulled up and I just thought—

Yes. Now, the question is, can we bring back carrier pigeons? Yes. Because we send—

Because if we— if— yeah, John, Sunday morning, he's often reading an article.

Yes.

He'll text me, "Hey, you should read this." Yes. But what if he could send— what if he could just take the newspaper, he didn't have to go find the link because obviously he's reading on a physical copy. Yes. What if you could just hand it to a smart bird and have it fly it over to my house, be way more convenient for me. I wouldn't need to be on my phone. It's the weekend. I don't want to be as, as online as during the weeks. And you don't have to be going, getting on your phone trying to find the right article. Yeah. So I think there's something there.

I think— I wonder, I know Mike Tyson was really into pigeons. I don't know if he got into carrier pigeons, but, uh, it does seem like it could have a huge boom. I feel like there's an Instagram account to be built around Someone who gets really into using carrier pigeons for everything and lives some sort of pastoral trad life and amasses millions of followers on the back of falconry and carrier pigeon— Home Falcons. Yes. Home Falcons. It's good content for social media. Also, if you don't want to fly on a falcon, you want to fly on a helicopter, be like Michael Dell. Get a helicopter. Helicopter and then branded. He was caught on a hot mic talking to President Donald Trump. He said, sir, we don't have a helicopter, we have a Delicopter. What a funny portmanteau and what a funny way to correct the president.

He's really speaking the president's language. Yeah, let's play it.

Every question's a kill. Sir, we don't have a helicopter, we have a Delicopter. What if this is our line?

I like how it kind of flopped in real life but is doing numbers online. It did, it did, it did.

Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Uh, let me tell you about finally some good news. Finally, Hey, finally some good news. Circle K, the company, won the lottery. Did you hear about this story?

No way. It's true.

Yeah. So there's a crazy story out of Arizona.

They needed a win.

They needed a win. Actually, they've been a fantastic partner to my company, Lucy. Shout out Circle K. But let's tell you about the Circle K winning lottery. So there's a crazy story out of Arizona that's been brewing over the last 6 months. Back in February, a Circle K customer named Soon Min Chun Kim asked the cashier for $85 worth of $1 lottery tickets. So she shows up, she wants 85 tickets, but after all 85 were printed out, Kim found out that she only had $60 on her, only $60. So the cashier gave her 60 tickets and left the remaining 25 tickets on the counter. The next morning, Circle K manager Robert, uh, Litsa learned that the leftover tickets included the $13 million winning ticket. So he clocked out, took off his Circle K shirt, and bought the tickets from another Circle K employee, being like, what?

No one, no one's gonna know.

No one's gonna notice. So when Circle K, the company, found out about the purchase, it ordered the ticket be held in its corporate office and filed a complaint against the manager who bought the tickets and the Arizona Lottery and claimed that it's right, that Circle K, the company, is the rightful owner of the lottery ticket. As of a week ago, at least 3 people/entities are claiming ownership of the ticket.

Wait, so the original buyer that didn't have the cash. Yes. The manager who's like, I don't care if I lose my job as long as I win the lottery. Yes. And Circle K is like, we really need to win. We really need— we need to—

like, we need— we need this. Yeah. So Galitza, a Circle K employee that Galitza got to sign the back of the ticket. Not sure why he had her do all of this. And Circle K, additionally, the judge presiding over the complaint has ordered that the woman who bought the tickets but couldn't pay for them, Soonshun Kim, be found and brought into court before making a decision on who gets it. So she's going to have to testify and explain her side. To, to make sure that that's exactly what happened, because this is just claims at this point. How did the local Circle K wind up with 25 lottery tickets?

Who are you going with? I'm going with manager. I'm going with big corporate.

Big, big, big. I'm going with the manager.

Not because I think it's ethical, but I think that— I think that there's no way. I think it's unlikely that there is a rule at Circle K that says 100%.

There's a rule that if you work at that company, you can't buy lottery tickets at all from your own store. Oh, obviously, because you have the machine right there.

You can— okay, but they don't— but they don't control—

that's probably line number 1 of the employee handbook.

No, but, but it seems very unlikely that, that the circle— like, it's, it's a machine that just prints tickets. Yes, it's like—

yes, but there's so many ways you could tamper with it. You're watching the news, you're printing the ticket at the right time, you have access, you refill the ticket. Oh, there's one that's not filled up.

You're saying the corporation can buy its own lottery tickets?

Yes. Why? But the manager can't?

That seems also strange.

Maybe, maybe you got me.

I think I got a ride with the woman.

You think she's owed it? The manager? But then, but then, then the strategy becomes— Or the original buyer. But then, but then you can just shift the odds in your favor by constantly going to Circle K and saying, $100 of tickets, oh, I only have $50. And then you're basically doubling your odds because you still have a claim on those.

Yeah, Goldrock says these clerks aren't super hackers.

Just wait, just wait. You get the right amount of—

I think it's an edge case. And I think ultimately the person that paid for the winning ticket wins.

Who paid for the winning ticket?

Like, if it comes down—

but the manager knew that the ticket won. He didn't have to put any money in.

We don't know that yet.

No, no, no, no, he did. He did. So there were 25 tickets there.

They go through that. Okay. If there's a rule, if there's a rule that managers cannot buy lottery tickets at their own store, then you're correct. But if there's no rule that explicitly, I, you know, basically spells that out, I think he might, he might, he might be golden. He might be golden.

You think so? I don't know. Let me tell you about Shopify. Lottery expert. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows their business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And our next guest is here, I think, a few minutes early so we can bring in Baju from Cowboy Space Corporation. Actually, well, we're good. Let's bring him in. Baju, how you doing? Didn't want to keep you waiting. Welcome to the show. Hello, boys.

How you doing? Good to have you back. Good to have you back. How was your fourth?

How was your fourth?

It was good. It was good. I went up to Oregon, got a little sunlight. It's pretty cloudy out in my part of California.

So going to Oregon to get sunlight, that's kind of a contrarian move. Florida or something?

Florida's far. Florida's far. Yeah. What is your reaction? We got to get to the important news. What's your reaction to the Ferrari Dolce Trallindri Manuale, the manual by wire? You knew this question was coming.

I, I'm, I'm smitten. I've been waiting for this. Yeah, I think it's awesome.

Yeah, yeah. And, and, and, and so the natural pushback is, oh, this doesn't count because it's out of— and I'm actually— transmission. Why, why is this cool? Why is this good? Why do you like this idea? And I also want to know, do you think it will spread within the Ferrari portfolio?

Um, why do we like this idea? First of all, because I think at this point with cars we take what we can get, and I think this is going to be pretty cool. I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard that the reason they're doing this is because the gearbox, they needed it to be able to handle that much power. That's why they didn't go with a totally normal manual, but who knows. Um, and do I think it is going to get to all the cars? I hope I really hope so. I mean, just in general, right? Like, the landscape of modern cars is— pardon my language, but it's fucking apocalyptic. Like, you guys ever go driving down the road? I don't— every car on the road is either gray, black, silver, or toilet bowl white. Yeah, with the number of cars that look like toilet bowls on the road is just exploding, and You know, it's depressing. It kind of, I feel like it's a weird commentary on human society this day and age. Like, why does every— need to drive the exact same ugly, boxy car?

And ugh. Hey, we're having some connection issues. Can we flip you back to the production team? We'll bring you back in a couple minutes. Does that sound good? Yeah. Thanks a lot. We'll see you in just a few minutes. Let me tell everyone about Figma Agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design systems. That was great.

We got him in. We asked the questions that were on our mind and we do not— sorry, we were having an issue and he's dropping some gems.

Okay, well, wait, is this, is this a real video? This? No, this is fake.

No, this is good though. Costa. Yes. Runs the fastest growing oil change only QL in the USA. He says, for kicks, I started using ChatGPT to give our employees huge muscles in social media posts we use. And finally last night, an employee told me on Slack, a customer said something about them not being as jacked in person. Look at this second picture here. I mean, this guy, if you look like this, you're not changing oil. You're going for the Arnold.

You're going to the Arnold. This is so good. Uh, I like that Max Sparrow's in here just tagging pangram data. Is this, is this the idea that he's trying— oh, he's adding to the training corpus. Interesting that he just goes around on the timeline hunting for known edited images to build the, build the, build the model. Very, very cool. Uh, let's talk about Maggie's refuel. Speaking of cars that need to be refueled, if you got your Dolce Tralindri Manuale and you need to get a full tank of gas, you might stop by Maggie's Refuel here in Los Angeles. A new high-end gas station brand just opened in Los Angeles. It bills itself as a high-end convenience store brand, planning to modernize and innovate the current gas station experience. Think Auto Grill meets 7-Eleven Japan, matcha, local croissants, premium CPG, and yes, a soft-serve cone, all alongside a gas or EV fill-up. Will they have white—

gotta jump in. It's not actually open yet. It's not open. It's not open yet. This is going to be their first location. If you've been in LA, this location is incredible. It's an incredible historic structure. We actually don't know how to make gas stations like this.

Yeah, if you go to the first image in that, uh, thing, you you can see the sort of curved ceiling that looks very, uh, I don't know, it looks nice. It also looks like it's a nightmare in the rain.

Tyler, um, yes, some people are saying this is just Buc-ee's for Californians. Have you guys ever been to Buc-ee's?

I've never been to Buc-ee's.

Buc-ee's is an elite gas station. Yeah, it's like mostly like south, south of the US.

There's only like 20 of them, but they're like—

yeah, there's like a wall of beef jerky, every flavor. It's incredible. You guys got to go next time.

Okay, you're on the East Coast, so it's just great selection. They have—

I mean, so, so there's like, uh, kind of like a restaurant because I have been to a Buc-ee's. Yeah, but I just went in and said, hey, where's the bathroom? She's in the bathroom and left. I didn't get to— I didn't even— you didn't get the full— everything inside of Buc-ee's is trying to kill me. Okay, so I, I tend to avoid, uh, but Maggie's is very cool. I, uh, actually invested in, in Maggie's with my friend Jonathan. Cool. And this was like almost a couple of years ago at this point. So, building a gas station chain is a lot harder than it sounds. Yeah. But the idea, and Alex, John Rossi in the chat is sharing, Alex's family started Canter's Deli, very popular deli here in Los Angeles. So, lots of Lots of lore in the family. But the idea and the frustration that I had had, you know, even prior to meeting Alex is like, everything inside the average gas station is trying to kill me. Yeah. Right? It's like almost end-to-end, wall-to-wall poison. And there's a lot of instances where— Beer is fine. Poison, but— Not poison.

Beer is the drink of kings.

We're running the A/B test.

The drink of kings.

We're running the A/B test, John.

Okay, that's gonna be in a gas station soon. Heberman's ripping.

It'll definitely, it'll be in Maggie's. But yeah, the idea is like, okay, how much money would you spend if you were getting gas at a place where you could get a nice coffee or maybe some organic fruit?

I do hate getting gas at a boring gas station. Yeah, it's gonna be fun. I'd probably stop by there if I saw it. It'd be good.

How are we doing on our guests?

We're gonna bring 'em in in just a minute. Make sure that connection is dialed. We can talk about common printers. We are big on printing. We print every day. I got some papers here. But I agree, printers have not seen enough innovation yet. But CR1337, leet, I like that, says, "We all know what the 3 biggest problems with common printers are: 1, ink ripoffs; 2, planned obsolescence; and 2—" Got the numbers wrong. You know it's not AI. Unrepairable hardware. Today I stumbled upon OpenPrinter, a fully repairable open-source inkjet that uses cheap refillable HP cartridges without DRM, prints sheets on rolls with an auto cutter, Raspberry Pi powered, no drivers needed on any operating system. If I ever get a printer again, this will be the one. OpenPrinter.

It's so funny. This person's like gassing up this printer and it's like, yeah, if I ever get one again.

This is the story of so many, like, we have to go back to this thing where it's like, oh, I really want this, and then somebody makes it and they're like, well, I don't need that thing at all anymore. So now we understand why it doesn't exist and it became an extreme niche. Uh, there's another making things the old way. I like this video. Look at this, the series of machines. This is from, uh, this is a paper organizer. Look at this, Jordi. So this will just take a messy stack of paper and jiggle it until it's nice and even. Look at this. So you just take a bunch of papers and then it just sort of shakes it, and then you got a nice clean stack of paper. And you have a whole machine for this. Can your iPhone 17 Pro Max do that? No. You got to get the Paper Jiggler 9000, whatever it's called. The ElectraJog. The ElectraJog. We don't know how to name products like that anymore. Tyler, are you in the market for this? Should we get one of these for the studio? This could be good.

Yeah, this could be good.

Take all the newspapers and jog them together. Just— it's just such a beautiful, simple machine. You know, you just want a nice— look how clean that looks. You got papers around your house. Don't you want them nicely lined up like that? It's great.

I like it. So OpenPrinter, the thing we just looked at, it's not even actually available for preorder yet. Mm-hmm. So, okay. We'll see if they get crowdfunding. It's getting there.

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 finish. There's a new job in Washington, D.C. If you're looking to make your name on Capitol Hill, you can be the Rocco's Basilisk explainer. You go and read LessWrong and then you break it down for our elected officials on Capitol Hill. This is a clip from—

Put it into the form of based memes. Yes, yes. That's— If you really want to get big.

This is a real job in the modern economy. The Financial Times has a bunch of— there's a bunch of news around AI. There was some news— that Anthropic might be joining up with, with their— well, one, they're closing China loopholes. That seems like good news. They're also potentially involved in the, in the US public ownership fund. But this Financial Times report says among his strange duties as Silicon Valley's translator to Washington, he said, was explaining Rocco's Basilisk, an internet thought experiment about a vengeful future superintelligence, quote, to a bunch of the cabinet. Fun times in Washington. But we have our guest back in the TVP and Ultradome. Let's welcome Baiju back to the show. How you doing?

I'm back. There we go. So back. Fantastic. Crystal clear. Crystal clear. Yeah, it was extremely painful listening to you do this incredible riff on the state of modern cars. And I couldn't, couldn't agree more. Yeah. Couldn't agree more. You'll be happy. You'll be happy that my, the, the The, the 3 cars in my driveway right now are blue, green, and brown. I'm rebelling against more subtle, you know, toned down, toned down, far away. They don't look too crazy, but I'm rebelling, rebelling against the beige and the blacks.

Yeah, the whites. Why do you think the colors went away? I understand the transition to electric because of environmental concerns, the move to automatics because it's less to learn for the average consumer. But why did we lose red? I don't know, man.

It's, it's sad. Honestly, it's just sad. And I think it's like a— yeah, I think it's like a commentary on like the modern state of society and human affairs. Like, why, why do we all want to have cars that just disappear into the background?

Well, one thing is like, to me, when I think about like a VW Bug, right? A very popular car throughout history. Even if it's regardless of the color, it's like a fun car. But then you add some like exotic color, yellow or green or red. Yeah. Like it's even more fun. And I just feel like when every car, every car blends in just the silhouette now. And so I think people are just like blending in is just the current meta. We're seeing it. It's funny, Fiat has some new car that they're coming out with. What is the— I think it's the Topolino, maybe. I think cute is going to come back.

You think so? Sounds like Topo Chico.

Topo Chico. Yeah, no, it's the —Ti Plena, I think it is. I don't know. I guess they all, they all kind of run together, but still sounds like Topo Chico.

I mean, some of its safety standards, a lot of things have had to standardize around crash crumple zones and whatnot. And I think that creates somewhat of a consolidation around silhouettes. But the color thing, I would imagine, is more like tall poppy syndrome. You don't want to stand out and be the guy with the red car. That became too flashy, so everyone went quiet luxury, and that meant black, white, or gray. Why do—

why do— why does everybody need to fit in? Why does everybody need to be the same? Like, people should just be individuals. Like, that's kind of the natural state of human affairs, in my opinion. I don't know.

Um, at the same time, something crazy comes out and people reject it. Look at the Ferrari Luce. That car doesn't really look like anything else.

To be clear, I rejected it purely on —I'm getting one, by the way, guys. Let's go! There we go. Let's be honest. Let's be honest. They said, if you want the 12C manual, you're getting the Luce. It wasn't said out loud, but it was understood.

No, guys, I got it because I'm a huge Jordi Hays fanboy. Yeah.

I think the interior is going to be incredible. And the spec matters a lot. What color did you go with? What do you, like, did you do anything to make it your own?

I haven't done that yet. I'm going to confess right now that I'm going to probably make my wife drive it.

Okay, yeah. So I think it's going to be the baby mobile. Hey, I mean, if you want a 5-seater, it's the only option. It's the only option.

No, it's going to be an incredibly fun car to drive. It'll be an experience. My only criticism was, was purely like, it felt like they set out to make a $300,000 car and they accidentally made a $600,000 car. But fortunately, there's not millions of Baijus in the world, but there's enough that they're going to sell some.

Let's pull up the picture of this Fiat. Yeah, let's take a look at this thing. I want to get Baiju's reaction to see if he's going to pick up one of these. Can we share this image? That's in the timeline of the Fiat Topolino. Hilarious that it has a— what is that? Like a— it's like—

By the way, I like that you guys brought me on just to talk about cars.

We're going to get to your business. It's summer. We'll get to the news. It's July.

We also got a half an hour here. We're hanging out.

Yeah, let's do it.

Let's do it. Can we share the image of the Topolino? Yeah, let's see this thing. It has like a rope that you would expect at like a nightclub, like a velvet rope to stop people instead of a door. Uh, it looks great.

Anyway, I put a link here that you can, that you can pull up as well.

What is this? Why is this—

yeah, have you guys seen that, um, what is that, that, that new Audi, the, the one that looks like it's like out of Cyberpunk?

Yes.

Yeah, I think that one's the same designer as the new Jaguar. Yeah. Did you know that? Oh, that's— Oh God. And so the thing—

Guys, I was excited about that for a minute. Come on, why you gotta do that?

No, but the issue with the Jaguar was not the silhouette was like very cool. It was one of those, like the future is here moments. And then the way that they did the rollout of it and the rebrand, like obviously got a lot of pushback, but like fundamentally I thought like, this is what Batman would drive in the year 2050.

You see that thing in Matt Black black, it looks a lot different than like the pink and pastel blues. There was just like a little bit too much contrast. But then we're getting out of colors. Maybe we gotta spec it in.

So if I was taking one of those, yeah, I would go full Batman: The Animated Series. Like, I would go with like a, like a cream color. Sure. And make it look as like Art Deco as possible.

Yeah, yeah, that'd be good.

The new Valari, the new Valari is great. The new Valari is crazy. I have friend specing one of them in like this crazy, crazy color. I'm not even going to— I'm not going to say what it is. I want to let him have his moment. I think it will be one, you know, one of—

and also a lot, a lot less pushback for the Audi because it's, it's built on the Lamborghini platform, I believe. So Temerario, I think, or V8, it has an internal combustion engine. And I think Jaguar like changed a lot of things at the same time, going electric, going huge sedan. Going crazy colors, very bold marketing. And when you shift 7 different things, you get a lot of visceral reactions.

Fiat. Let's see this.

There we go. What do you think about this? You picking one up?

Oh guys, you're not, you're not ripping one of these things around with the boys. Imagine, imagine having— so okay, so one of these is kind of silly, but if you're with your, your buddies and you each have one and you're rolling deep, that's pretty cool.

Put a Mansory kit on that, that's pretty cool. I don't know, I think we got a picture of a—

there's a convertible version, I guess, with the ones. Can you imagine hanging— I, I just cannot imagine hanging out with my friends and us like caravaning these. It'd be— we'd look like such dweebs. I'm sorry, sorry. You might say that.

You might say that.

Just wait until you fire up the V12 engine that you swap in that thing.

That'll do it. I think I can hold that.

I think I can hold that. I know it wouldn't do it at all. Impossible.

We got one more.

Okay, what else we got? The Twizy, the Renault Twizy. Have you seen these? The doors go up. The doors go up. You sit one behind. We saw this in Europe.

We were in France last week or two weeks ago and These were extremely popular with like young teenagers. They'd have a whole bunch of them sort of caravaning around. Seems like particularly good for narrow streets. Again, it's the right tool for the job. Is it going to take it to a track day? Probably not. But in the right, in the right environment, I think the Twizy is a Renault, right? Yeah. Renault Twizy.

Let's see the team pulling it up. Imagine, look at this. Imagine at least two of us in here together going on a coffee. 3-person? No, no, no, one— somebody's got to stay behind.

Okay, yeah, it looks like that person's sitting in that person's lap.

Yeah, it's a tight squeeze.

Sort of a motorcycle more than a—

it's not— it's not very spacious, I will say that.

But how many wheels does this thing have on it? Is it 2 or 4? It's 4.

It's 4. Okay, it's 4.

I can't quite tell from that angle.

It might be a bicycle. Look, I know you have a great car collection, but Clearly there's some holes, right? No Twizzy. Yeah, yeah. You don't have 5 feet.

At the same time, at the same time, yeah, that this, uh, hot garbage is coming out, the restomod community is making some good stuff right now.

I'll just put that out there. Okay, yes, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about this. Hot girl cars, uh, old Land Rovers, old Defenders, uh, modified. Sydney Sweeney has one. What is your take on what makes for a good resto mod in the SUV world?

As long as you're not swapping it out for an electric powertrain, I think I'm down with it.

You're good?

I had— I saw one this weekend.

I have people that are like, oh, I'm into cars. And I'm like, OK, cool. What kind of cars are you into? And they're like, well, I bought an old Bronco, and I made it electric. And a little part of me just sort of dies when I hear that.

I'm like, ah, yeah. So yeah, I'm, I'm in favor. I like when they're kept like very pure, right? I don't like when the, when the badges or, or any of the, the markings are changed. I saw a Bronco on Saturday where all the badges were swapped to just say vintage, and I was like, clearly it's a vintage car. Like, you don't, you don't need to like, you don't need to like spell it out. And so I, I Personally, I appreciate when it's like as left, as pure as possible, and then just like modified to make it slightly more comfortable or redoing the interior, et cetera.

What about a 1955 Cadillac Coupe DeVille swapped with a Tesla Model Plaid so you can get 200 miles an hour in it? That seems good.

I like— I was just trying to trigger you.

Battery in. Sorry, what were you saying?

I was saying I was with you until we got to the electrification bit of it.

Yeah, but at 200 miles an hour bombing down the Autobahn in a 1955 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, and so that is going to be a rattle box at 200 miles an hour.

Can you imagine? Just the whole thing, just like, yeah, death machine.

Uh, what's your, uh, I Are you, are you gonna be racing at all? Ferrari Challenge, maybe? You're too— you're too—

not much of a racer. Not much of a racer. I'm much more of like a hot rodder and like drive it on, you know, beautiful beach roads kind of guy. Sure. Yeah, I, you know, it's one of those things like a lot of people really love that side of it. I've never had that much of a need for speed personally.

Yeah, I— we enjoy— we enjoy— to be totally honest. Yeah, we enjoy going to the track, but there's people that enjoy going to the track that are putting it all on the line every time. And I can't do it. But with young children, I just like— I'm building out a really robust sim right now to see— See what you got. Yeah, just to actually try to push myself. But again, I don't know that I would ever want to replicate what I'm going to do in the sim actually on the track.

But are you, are you guys going to Car Week?

It's really poorly timed with the arrival of my next child. Like very like within, within days. So days, huh? Yeah. So I'm going to probably have to get ready to deliver the baby in the back of a home birth at Car Week. Car Week.

You've heard of babies delivered in back seats.

You'll be at the racetrack watching vintage racing in like the beating sun and having to rush to the hospital.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm, as much as it pains me, I think I'm going to be sitting this one out.

Maybe next year, maybe next year. If you had to do one, which one would you do? Cannonball, New York to LA, Paris-Dakar Rally, or Gumball 3000?

The Gumball 3000 is across the, uh, what is that?

Siberian tundra? Oh, I would definitely do that one. They move around a little bit. I think the Gumball moves around, but, uh, it's a long, it's a long rally, but it's less of, you know, track focus. It's less at the limit as the Cannonball, which is, uh, New York to, uh, I think La Jolla as fast as possible.

I feel like that one, I feel like I would have, have a lot more of like eating beans out of a can, like on the side of the road, which is kind of the vibe I'd go for.

Yeah, no, it seems really fun. Anyway, we're not here to talk about cars for 45 minutes. Let's talk about space. Let's talk about business. You totally could. Okay, so, uh, get us up to speed on progress since we last spoke. I want to specifically talk about, uh, launch vehicles, what it takes to get to space at scale, what you're thinking there. So take us through just the general update and then we can go more specific.

And then we can get back to—

Yeah, so pretty busy times here at the Cowboy Space Corporation, which I love the mission statement. We're on a mission to power humanity from the high frontier. It's just like got that little bit of country twang to it. That's good. So we announced fundraising and the plans to vertically integrate into launch vehicle plus data centers and space architecture. And a little bit on that, right? We, I, we've talked a little while ago, but I'd kind of, since I started the company, I'd been pretty focused on figuring out the energy economics and in particular, trying to figure out what the path is to making compute from space or, you know, energy derivative services from space competitive on a cost basis with doing it terrestrially. That's kind of the North Star. And when, when we kind of got to the architecture that we announced, that was the aha moment is like when you look at the whole— when you look at the entirety of the problem, including the launch vehicle, the path to get in the data center in space, along with the architecture of the data center part in space, and you optimize the entire thing, that's one of the paths to getting to the cost competitive economics. Was when we really doubled down on building the launch vehicle as a part of the data center in space. And I think also it's become, you know, more and more clear over time that the launch capability that people will need to do all this interesting stuff in space, like, it's, it's, it's going to be a while before it's there. SpaceX is obviously running ahead with that, but they're going to end up using a lot of that capacity for themselves. And so we, we knew that if we wanted to control our destiny, we'd have to go down this path, which I did not think I was going to start a rocket business when I started this company.

But so what are the dials that you're turning on launch vehicle? Are you going—

well, first he's funding the data anti-data center movement here. Oh, he's going to create even more of a catalyst.

That's a tinfoil hat conspiracy.

It's not a tinfoil hat, it's a, it's a blue hair conspiracy.

Sure, sure.

You won't see me protesting outside of a data center. Maybe, maybe put them in space.

You gotta go boot them up.

People will be protesting that in due time, don't you worry. But on the launch vehicle, what dials are you turning in terms of the amount of mass to orbit or the size of the vehicle, the fuel? Like, how do you want to develop something that's different or do you just want to have a secondary option that's as close to the sort of standard interoperable, uh, market standard launch vehicle, or do you want something that fulfills a specifically different role and fits a different piece of the stack?

Yeah, so first things first, uh, you guys will see a much more detailed update from us on overall launch vehicle architecture, kind of an unveiling of what the rocket looks like, how pointy it is, stuff like that. Um, so stay tuned on that, but I'll give you, I'll give you a couple of breadcrumbs to that right now. First one is on the launch vehicle itself. We want to optimize for simplicity of architecture and speed to market. Those are kind of high-level objectives. We don't have to build the Bugatti Veyron of rocket engines here. We want to build something that's much more the Honda Civic of rocket engines. And what that looks like, it's down-selecting each one of the core trades in the system to optimize for what can we build relatively quickly that gets the job done and starts getting payloads to orbit. Because there's, there's different paths we could take with this. The, the North Star for me is like cut out the arts and crafts projects, like just focus on building data centers in space, building a rocket architecture that is purpose-built for that.

And notably not focused on reusability at all, at least initially.

Is that right? No, I think we're going to aim for reusability as quickly as possible. One of the things that we hope to do on the path to getting there is having economics that support making something that's viable with a non-reusable version of it. Yeah. So that we're not waiting forever to start getting payloads up.

Yeah, because I imagine with some of the AI projects, the AI compute is so valuable economically, so economically dense that non-reusable payloads might actually make sense, at least in the short term. Of course you wanna save money over the long term, but when you think about the value of a, you know, large-scale compute in orbit, that could be potentially higher than some of the other payloads that are going up right now, right? So that sort of pulls forward your revenue. Roadmap.

Yeah, I mean, I think this— if, if I understand you right, I think one of the things that is an interesting observation here is more on the, the sort of business and economics of the Rocket business. Hold on one sec, my light just cut off here.

Let me tell you about Consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant Resolution for access requests and password reset.

We got an add-in and a nice view of the, the art right behind you.

So thank you. I can't get away from the technical difficulties today. My goodness. Uh, so as I say, um, yeah, and the business of rocketry, I think there's something that's pretty interesting that's happened here, which is if you look back in time towards kind of when the first commercial rocket businesses were getting started— Blue Origin, SpaceX, et cetera. The primary business model, as I understand it, was third-party launch. Build a rocket to take stuff to space, and the taking the stuff to space is the monetization. Yeah. Which, if you rewind the clock 10 to 15 years ago, the majority of that activity was driven by government, right? It was government needs, government payloads, national security, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, what we're seeing now is the bulk of the payload that at least, you know, that is going to be going to orbit. A lot of it is commercial. And in particular, the AI component is commercial in nature by and large. And when you, when you realize that that fundamentally changes the way that you think about the rocket business, you realize that like the— how to say this— the development path starts to change, right? Because as you're— if you're launching first-party payloads, you look at the economics of what does it take to get a successful launch to orbit, what is the cost of a failed launch to orbit, and you control the entire economic stack there. So if you have a failed launch to orbit and you're— and the sort of consequence of that is a first-party payload, it's very different than if the failed launches for a government payload. To say it differently, when it's purely commercial, the incentive, I think, is much more to try early and often, um, and to get to that, that sort of like successful launch, and eventually to get to reusability and get payloads to orbit that start monetizing along the way. And I think that flows through the entirety of the decision-making of how you build a rocket company in 2026, right? Said differently, we're building this thing for our data center and space payload. We're not building it for third-party payloads. We're not building it for human spaceflight or any of that stuff. We might do that at some point in the future. Yeah, but we think that the majority of like the actual substance and the revenue of this is going to come from the first-party payloads of data centers in space.

Yeah. Very different company from Robinhood. What lessons are you actually taking? What are you drawing from the Robinhood playbook, if anything, for this company?

Well, it's interesting because the techno-economic analysis of how do you make a service make sense like this, there's there's some overlapping in thinking there of like, how do you make the economic cases make sense? Mm-hmm. The other part is building engineering teams like that, that translates over pretty well. Yeah. Um, and building them, I think the interesting thing here is that it's a largely distributed engineering workforce. A lot of it is quite different, I'll be honest. Mm-hmm. Um, there's less consumer product involved. There's much more manufacturing involved. But at the end of the day, the circumstances in some ways are similar, right? It's like starting out from the standpoint, the Robinhood era of my life, I guess, is still going on. But the starting of that was how do you build something that competes against these existing brokerages and how do you really, really focus on a very specific set of things that gets a meaningful use case in the markets. Yeah, I think that part is actually kind of similar. It's like, how do you make a meaningful rocket space company by being hyper, hyper focused on a small number of things? Because like I said, we're not in the business of doing human spaceflight and all these other things. But how do you find that, that niche that you care about and stay ultra focused on, on making that happen?

In 30 seconds, because I know you have to hop. SpaceX is in the cloud business now. They have a launch business. You can imagine that Elon just wants more and more and more and more of that end market. Has that changed the dynamic of conversations that you're having with, let's say, other hyperscalers and labs that are competing with, with Elon Inc. and don't want to end up in a situation where they are, you know, basically forced to purchase from a monopoly, you know, or, you know, cloud from monopoly, etc.? Yeah.

I mean, I think the overwhelming dynamic here now and in the future is just the need for compute, right? I think there's definitely people that are concerned about controlling their own data centers. But if you kind of look around at the marketplace right now, people are trying to get capacity whenever and wherever they can get it. So, yeah. I'm sure there's a little bit of that behind the scenes, but I think the primary thing that I'm seeing is just the need for compute and trying to bring it online as quickly as possible. And I don't know, I feel like we all kind of live with that on a day-to-day basis. You know, like I was asking, you know, Fable to— I was asking Fable to make some Magic: The Gathering decks for me over the weekend. You hit your limit? I kept hitting my limits. Come on, guys. Like, just make the deck for me.

Yeah. No, it is a crazy time. Like, Apple is leasing GPUs from Google. Google's leasing GPUs from SpaceX. And they're all like, everyone's telling Meta like, yeah, sorry, we don't have capacity. We have too much capacity to sell. And so everyone's doing a deal with everybody else. So it's a good— it's a good business to be in since everything's growing and demand is demand solves so many headaches and, and justifies so many.

All right, I know you have to jump. Let's get a couple of these Fiats. Let's bomb around Car Week, the three of us, maybe a few others, maybe Car Week 2027. Yeah, so I don't—

I'm totally down, totally down. I love it. I, I go most years. Amazing.

Well, great to see you. Congrats on the progress.

Congrats on the progress, and we'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, boys. Have a good one.

Cheers. Goodbye. Our next guest is Daniel English from Legacy Investments. He's a managing partner there. We'll bring him in to the TV3 Ultradome from the waiting room. Legacy Investments does private real estate and infrastructure investment platform. Daniel, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

What's going on? Thanks for having me.

How was your 4th of July?

Uh, in the nation's capital. So I was here for all the storms and the fireworks.

Very fun. Electric. Well, since this is your first time on the show, I would love for you to kick it off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself and Legacy Investments, get us up to speed.

Yeah, absolutely. So my original background was tech entrepreneurship, uh, probably similar to you guys, and then saw the opportunity in infrastructure for the buildout of the internet. And 15 years ago started investing in data centers and, uh, data centers and e-commerce warehouses.

Yeah, e-commerce warehouses as well. And also some life, life sciences real estate. Is that correct?

Yeah. Sort of all takes the same kind of infrastructure. So the whole idea was own the infrastructure that, you know, the digital world is being built on top of. Yeah.

Thesis makes a ton of sense. Take us through the very first deal. Like, did you have to marshal capital? Is it like raising a venture fund? Are you just deploying your own capital and working with a bank for a like what was that first deal like?

Yeah, it's very similar to venture, right? So, you know, just huge sums of money. I mean, today our typical deal is $600 million. Yeah, just each. So, and that's a small data center investment, right? So, so, so big, big dollars. But yeah, I mean, you go out, you raise your money, you have a pitch deck, the same basic, same basic process. So, we started You know, I think 15 years ago nobody understood what a data center was. So it was fascinating. In fact, I got laughed at a lot by private equity who was like, you left tech. Wow. Wow. Who's laughing?

It's amazing now. Yeah, exactly. They're like, hey, we'd love to catch up and get coffee and you can tell us about—

Well, so, so I want to understand, data centers went from being something that no one really cared about to suddenly everyone cares about them all the time. So much so that if anything happens at a data center tied to any hyperscaler, it gets like reported to the front page of The Wall Street Journal or even The New York Times, right? Like satellite photos monitoring. Yeah. So, so through that process, how, how did the game change from an investing standpoint? You know, rewinding, let's say, to early '22 to '23, and then I want to go from like 2023 to 2024 and like understand those, those changes because it's just been ramping up to such an extreme degree and it still feels like there's a ways to go.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, the first transition was in, call it 2010 when cloud really came on the scene, right? So, so you had data centers before 2010, 2010 to sort of '22, you had a big run-up cloud. And so that was a whole era of data centers that shifted. But really, with the introduction of AI, you've got this huge increase in density and demand. I mean, demand was already growing astronomically. But, but as you guys know, AI is really pushing, pushing that. And, and at the same time, when we're also constraining on power, so the biggest transition was just the amount, like, of power. So in In 2010, you know, a 5-megawatt data center was a good one. 30 megawatts was sort of peak. Now, you know, 30 megawatts is a small data center. You're, you know, everybody wants a gigawatt. And so that scale is just astronomical versus what we had before. And so what we're seeing is, you know, really everything we're doing, including this show, is happening in a data center.

And what's fascinating to me is most people— somebody's got to Tell Theo Vaughn that. I don't know if you saw that clip where he's like, "No one wants these," on his video podcast.

Distributed via a million data centers all over the world. It's fascinating.

But when we talk, like my branding firm interviewed a bunch of 20-something-year-olds and they're like, "Where do you think everything that's happening on your phone is happening?" They're like, "Well, it's happening on my phone." And we're like, "No, it's not. It happens in a building." But that creates an arms race right now around AI because everything we do in our lives happens in a building and digital infrastructure. And there is a massive supply constraint because of that increase in power demand. I mean, there's only so much power and frankly, there's almost so much land, particularly with the political sentiment right now that you can build these. And so having access to a building to house your compute becomes a distinct competitive advantage in the AI.

So what does your search process look like? If I'm— I mean, I've seen data centers in downtown where it's like a converted office building, no windows. That's probably for a CDN or some local delivery. But if you're just driving through the middle of America and you see some land, are you thinking about power or is there natural gas in the ground? Are you— how are you— or are you doing more of the deals where it's like what happened at Colossus, where there was a building that already had a lot of power for manufacturing appliances like washing machines, and then it was easier to convert and upgrade that building? Do you do everything? What's the process for finding a site?

Yeah, data centers are really giant machines. I think that's probably obvious. And what's exciting to me is, It's the first time in human history we had buildings that weren't designed for humans, truly, right? You think about most buildings you interact with or real estate or private equity invests in are designed for people. Data centers, it's not about a person, it's about a machine. So, in terms of where do you pick a data center site, you're really picking where the machine wants to go. Machines care about power, right? So, power is, you know, to get quick power, you need input. Infrastructure. So, we're really looking at infrastructure. And then you're looking at fiber so that we can get all the digital bits around. So, that's also a form of infrastructure. So, you're really looking at power and fiber first and foremost. Water obviously is a hot topic anymore. Most of— particularly what we're building, it's all closed-loop systems, so you're not using a lot of water. And so, really, it's fiber and power infrastructure. And then the third piece is latency. Latency. So how much time does it take to deliver those digital bits? How close are you? And so historically, you did not see data centers downtown other than for networking. Today, like we bought the Chicago Board of Options Exchange building on LaSalle Street downtown, and we're turning that into a large AI data center right now. And that is wonderful because I've got great latency, great fiber, and lots of power infrastructure I can tap into. But what's fascinating is I can put 50 megawatts in about 40,000 square feet in that building today because the densities— in 2010, I may have gotten 4 megawatts in that building.

Wow. Interesting. Fascinating. What does your, your government relations team or strategy look like interfacing with neighbors to data centers? Regulators, senators, to, you know, mayors, all sorts of different— who are the important constituents to get on board when you're working on a project?

You know, I'd say part of— right now, I mean, you guys obviously are highly aware of this. The political problem with data centers is very real right now. And it's interesting because we all use them, right? Our lives are dependent on them. But I think there's a need for partnership. With the cities and the communities. So that's something we take very seriously. You know, I got a question recently about, you know, the data centers are bad or ugly or are using all our water and power. A lot of those are either misconceptions or, you know, somebody did build a bad building. You can always build a bad building. And so I would say something we work very hard at is partnering with cities on deploying data centers that are not using all the water, are using existing grid infrastructure, and frankly are not ugly.

I mean, I think part of the problem is how ugly they are. Yeah. Is there a— I mean, we were talking about the cell phone towers in Los Angeles. They're sort of dressed up like trees. I don't know that that's that effective at being beautiful. Yeah, it's me every time. They do sort of melt into the background. Of course, when you're up close, you can clock it, but when it's just it's just on the horizon, you don't really notice it. Have you seen any trends in low-hanging fruit in like, oh, if we just do this, yeah, it'll increase the cost 1%, but the response from the community is going to be 50% better because we did X, Y, or Z?

Yeah, no, absolutely. So I converted a glass— or my team and I converted a glass office tower in downtown Minneapolis into a large AI data center. It's a beautiful building. And in fact, nobody even knows there's a data center in there for the most part. We're doing the Chicago Board of Options Exchange building is a beautiful architectural building. Part of what I love about data centers is it's really infrastructure. And so you can bury it underground, you can put it on top of a roof, you can do these mixed use. They do not have to look like prisons, which some of them do. And so that gives you a lot of creative flexibility. Mobility. Like we're building a greenfield data center in Texas right now and our architecture team found ways to do fencing that effectively, you can imagine Frank Gehry's museums, it sort of looks more like that. And so, there are actually a lot of windowless buildings that, you know, we all like culturally and so we take a lot of inspiration from that.

Yeah, basically every sports stadium is sort of windowless from the outside, and yet we love them and they look great.

Yeah. Are you involved in any conversations or have you heard of any conversations where local communities are effectively asking for direct payments in order to provide support for a data center? 'Cause you said like, we all use data centers, but the thing about data centers is Google's gonna find a way to serve me, no matter what, regardless of if they're my neighborhood or my community is open to a data center.

And it's like 3 milliseconds of extra latency to put it 5 counties over. And so it's very easy to push the not in my county rhetoric if the only impact of that's going to be a millisecond of latency or something like that.

We're seeing— yeah, I mean, there is a lot of pressure obviously on where data centers go. Right now. We are seeing communities make direct asks. We're seeing tenants and investors such as ourselves do as much as we can to benefit the community. There are significant benefits. So let me take my building in downtown Minneapolis. That building recently sold for— we still manage it, but it recently sold for the highest price of a building in Minneapolis or in Minnesota. And so You imagine that building when I stepped into it was basically mostly worthless. It was an office building, mostly vacant. Let's call it less than $30 million of value. And now it's one of the highest priced buildings in Minnesota. I mean, that shift is— and it still looks like a beautiful glass office tower. Yeah, it's not using huge amounts of water.

And you're saying there's like massive—

yeah, massive increase in property tax revenue.

Because the new sale price, that makes a lot of sense. Interesting.

And then you also have hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure going in from the tenants. Sure. You've got hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from us. We did create new jobs. And so, so those are good. Those are obviously positive benefits. On a, you know, we are seeing everything from tenants and investors sponsor everything from new fire stations and fire trucks to benefits for housing, schooling, in addition and on top of sort of just tax benefits, right?

What is your process for sequencing out finding tenants? I imagine it's sort of a, if you build it, they will come moment for you. But in terms of talking to hyperscalers, Neo Clouds, doing something yourself, partnering with the chip company, I mean, everyone is participating in various levels of the stack, what does it look like for you as you're sussing out an opportunity?

Yeah, and obviously it's a big deal right now for anybody to have access to infrastructure for compute, right? So the hyperscalers, the neo clouds, everybody's competing for the same space. In fact, we often see that the same— we've had video game companies neo-cloud, cloud users all try and get in the same building, right? So, everybody's competing for a fairly limited supply. It is very— I would say it functions much more like partnerships. Cities, very partner-oriented. Tenants, it's very partner-oriented because these are huge, massive capital investments, right? So, on the low end, you're looking at half a billion dollars. On the high end, you're looking at $10 billion, right? And so, but they're making just as big of investments. I'm guessing that's obvious, but, you know, they're the ones providing the chips and serving their customers too. And so, there's mutual investment on both sides. So, there's a, I would say, a tight relationship between the tenants and developers and capital partners such as ourselves to help make sure these are successful. Nobody wants them to not be successful. But it is speculative on the capital's part. So these are not build-to-suits. Like, we're not, we're not sort of buying land with a tenant in tow. We're buying land and getting the development going and risking capital to make sure that they have it on time that they need it.

Jordi Hays, a friend of mine, is in the art business. I know you're a collector. He was telling me over the weekend about what a mess the art world is right now in the art industry.— does that make it a great time to be a collector?

Yeah. Well, there's— what I love about art collecting is it's a lot like investing, right?

You want to buy low and sell high. So if, like, the market's in turmoil and it's bad, it's probably a good time to acquire things that you love. Yeah. Before a correction upward. But how have you been approaching it?

Yeah, I would say, yeah, exactly that. I think The art market, the argument is always bet on art history, right? So, so what's fascinating about art is it captures this moment in time, right, where there's, there's a shift in perspective or ideas or thinking. And, and that's where the great art really is. And the value tends to be captured in those pieces. And so, so I would say my particular art investment leanings, collectings are on, you know, what's big in art history. So like, I just picked up a Dan Flavin, who was famous for light art, light bulb art in the '60s. And so I got the piece this month, the first piece he ever did with multiple light bulbs. And the whole thesis to that is, well, one, it's beautiful, and I love it. But two, it's an important moment in art history. And so, you know, you're sort of— it's It's like betting on core real estate or I suppose a great tech company that's building something brand new.

Does buying a historically significant piece of art feel more risky than buying, let's say, like a rundown building or a billion— a building like you described in Chicago, or does it feel about the same? Do you have a similar— confidence level when buying both?

I would say what I love is both of them have a lot of specialized knowledge. And so, if you have the specialized knowledge, you can do sort of that risk-adjusted analysis. So, I would say they feel equivalent to me, at least the ones that I've been— the bets that I were making feel equivalent to me. But, you know, data centers, adaptive reuse, you know, real estate, all of that is just highly specialized. And so, like a lot of people, I surround myself with other really smart people to give me good guidance, but it feels like a safe bet.

Have you ever thought of combining the two passions? I know that you're describing this glass building, which sounds amazing, but have you thought about working with a contemporary artist to try to make the world's most beautiful data center? I feel like that would be a good kind of flagship project for you that I at least would like to see.

Yeah. Yes, we have some things in the works in Chicago. In fact, one of my favorite— this is maybe slightly different than where you're going, but my favorite example of this is what Louis Vuitton did on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where they wrapped a construction project in what looks like a giant Louis Vuitton trunk. And I have an apartment right around the corner from it. And I see people photograph it constantly. And I love that idea, but I keep thinking, can we wrap data centers in something that's interesting and beautiful that people want to photograph instead of hate?

Yeah, something where if aliens are monitoring us, they're like, what are these crazy things that they're so obsessed with? I like it. That's cool. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

Yeah, thanks for the update. Have a fantastic weekend.

Yeah, no, absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

We'll talk soon. Talk soon, Daniel.

Cheers. Goodbye. Our next guest is the president and head of artificial intelligence at Replit. Michela is in the waiting room and we're excited to talk all things Vibe Coding, the shift from Vibe Coding to Vibe Building. Break it down for us. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Hey guys, that's probably me. How are you doing?

Thanks so much for taking the time. We're doing great.

3-day weekend. What did you build? Ooh, good question. I built a sunbed on my back. I worked hard.

I was flying to Paris. Oh, okay. I'm calling you from Paris right now. I'm going to be speaking at the Race Summit.

Well, thanks for staying up late. Of course. Why don't you set the table for us, introduce yourself a little bit, and explain how you fit into the organization and what the top projects are for Raplet in your world these days?

Yeah, so as you said, I'm president and head of AI. Basically means everything technical the company currently rolls up to me. I'm the person who came up with the push of creating Raplet Agent and led the project from day one. And this happened back in September 2024. If you recall, backcoding didn't even exist as a term back then. It was coined in February 2025, if I recall correctly. So we were the first one to launch in the space and we basically pioneered and, you know, we charted this new market that keeps expanding like crazy. We had 4 major agent releases in the meantime. And if anything, I'm more excited about the months that are about to come rather than the crazy roller coaster we went through in the last couple of years. Because the capabilities are expanding so much that naturally the scope we have as a company will just extend like crazy.

So pitch me like it's 3 months from now, it's September and October, uh, and I'm non-technical, someone who has, you know, heard about the AI boom, but, uh, doesn't really know where to start. What are you instructing someone in a few months from now? How should they be interacting with with Replit and Replit agents to do something? What's a good hello world on absolute steroids project for them to get started with?

Think about it this way. For the last 2 years at least, we've been talking about agents all the time, but it's still extremely difficult for everyone to build their own agents. And in a sense, you know, we've been lucky because, you know, a company like Replit could grow so much because, you know, we pioneered the space. But now I want everyone to be capable of creating their own agents. And the reason is fairly simple. If I can make a prediction, I do believe that sooner than later we're going to be seeing far fewer apps being used rather than agents. And the reason is we, we built UIs, we built computers in this way in the last decades because the only way we had to interact with them was keyboards and mouse and click and data input, which is very much error-prone. The way you work instead is you talk to your colleagues, you discuss, you decide what to do, you express in natural language your intent, and then you either delegate or you do, you get the job done yourself. But guess what? Agents do exactly that. You know, the more autonomous we make them, the more capable we make them, the more they're gonna be able to complete tasks end to end. And I want everyone to be capable of building their own customized agents. So 3 months from today, If we chat again, I will be mostly talking about that, and our product will be pushing that direction very much.

Okay. Talk to me about the split between these 3 use cases that I see coding agents generally being used for. One is the ad hoc, go and do something, pull a bunch of information. I did this most recently, looking around my neighborhood, looking at different lots and registrations of the government. Go pull a bunch of data, organize it into a spreadsheet, turn that spreadsheet into an infographic, work through all of that like you were a, a super powerful executive assistant who knew how to write Python and scrape the web to produce a single report. Basically deep research on steroids. Then the second bucket that I see a lot is I want a daily summary. I want I want you to do something for me that requires AI and LLMs to summarize information, put something together, something that runs continuously. And then the third is go build me a piece of software one time, deterministic software, and then I will interact with that software on a regular basis. So Ben Thompson just went on a vibe coding journey. He built an inventory management system for his house. It is a piece of deterministic software runs on his local network. And then once he is interacting with it, is pure deterministic software. There is no AI inference that's happening really. Maybe it calls out to an API, but those three buckets, is that a good way to think about the way people are using AI today? What's the breakdown and how do you see it evolving?

I think it's a great way. And the last bucket you mentioned, the deterministic software, the fact that you can build a lot of internal tools, and you see a lot of solopreneurs creating software zero to one on Rapid. That's where most of the effort went in the last couple of years. I think we're going to be seeing a shift very quickly away from that. Apps are not going to be disappearing overnight. They still play a role. SaaS will play a role in companies for a long, long time. But it's also true that some of the software can be replaced by agents. Accomplishing tasks end to end.

And that's what I think if we— Yeah. And is that the fat models? Like you used to go to an LLM and ask it to do 2 2 and it would guess 4. Then it was able to write a little bit of Python. But, and that's just expanding to the point where the actual LLM itself, the API for the model can do more and more capable things. Capabilities, and the agent harness will be able to do more and more as well. So you essentially instantiate whatever software you need ad hoc on the fly, and you expect that to grow.

Exactly right. LLMs have become much better at long horizon tasks. You see them working like even for hours in a row. The additional layer that we put on top of them, the agent harnesses, are such that you can also introduce verification criteria so that, for example, you come up with a high-level goal. Say you built an app on Rapid and then you want to optimize the conversion rate and you set a 5% as a goal. Well, guess what? You can have an agent doing that for you. You don't have to prompt it on the specifics on how to make that happen. It will connect to your app. The agent will decide to improve conversions. Maybe I need to change the copy of the website. Maybe I need different images. Maybe I need like a different pricing page. And then you keep measuring until it accomplishes the goal. That's what you have been hearing more and more being talked, you know, in the industry as loops. And I would call this like the post-prompting era. We don't put much effort in prompting anymore. Even if you hear Anthropic researchers and engineers explaining how to use Stable Diffusion 5, the main insight is stop giving it prescriptions, stop giving it rules, just tell the model what you want to accomplish and then trust the process. Yeah, well, that's the type of product that I think we're going to be seeing more and more in the future.

The goal finding. Jordi Hays.

So, so, exactly. You mentioned going back to your earlier call out on, you know, people building customized agents. What are these? Are these— is this like entirely personal software or do you see this as like one-person companies where they'll build an agent and sell it to other people? Is it both? I'm having trouble. I've been just experimenting lately and trying to— every time I think, oh, I should try to use— oh, I need, I need some information from an app. So like I use Surf Report as an example. Like I'll just ask Chat, hey, what's the Surf Report for? This spot. And it does it quite well. You can do it for the weather. You can do it for so many different apps. And I expect that agents, as they get better and better, will just be able to— anything that I could imagine a custom agent to do personally, the agent— The models can do. The models can just do.

And I've seen this a lot where people will go and build— they'll vibe code a solution to something that the model you can do natively. And then you'll be like, yeah, I have a piece of Determinix software that does all— it summarizes all my emails. And it's like, well, you can actually just integrate your email directly and ask it to summarize.

Yeah, and so part of me is like, I just don't know if I'm being creative enough to think of use cases or what.

The rule of thumb to be as creative as possible is you need to think in general terms. You don't have to narrow down on, I want an agent that asks me to connect to the few applications that I use on a daily basis. You need to start to think in goals. And the moment you have a goal and you want to get some type of work done, then allow the agent to decide what are the steps necessary and allow the agent to create the code in order to make that happen. Now, there is one advantage only if you actually create a piece of deterministic software. Is that you trade that inflexibility for the cost of tokens. Yeah. So every time you just allow the model to do the majority of the work, you're actually spending quite a bit of money, especially if you need to use frontier capabilities. So a lot of the tools, the internal tools built on RAPID today, they tend to be very deterministic also for the reason, because if they start to be used by hundreds of thousands of people in a company, you don't want them to be hitting with the frontier models, otherwise it's financially responsible to do that.

Last question for me. Get me up to speed on the state of solopreneurship. And I want a prediction from you on when you think we'll see the first one-person, $1 billion company.

It has already happened. You probably read about that in the New York Times. That one— I don't think that one counted.

I know. I don't think it counts. Okay. I, I, it was close, but it, it, it, there were too many, too many complaints from, uh, customers. It seemed like they bent the rules of the marketing and they were getting hit with some FTC, FDA, uh, issues. Uh, I want, I want a clean baking document recommendations, clean $1 billion valuation. Let's give it another shot.

I would say by the end of the year. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, we have several 9-figure companies built on Replit, so it's gonna happen. Yeah, we're almost there.

I love it. I love it. Well, yeah, definitely shoot us a note when it happens. If you see it inside Replit, have them pitch us. We'd love to talk to them. All me accountable. Yeah. Yeah. But thank you so much for coming on the show.

Great to meet you. Enjoy France. Safe travels.

Safe travels. And we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

Will do. Thank you.

Cheers. Goodbye. Should we close out with this Raúl post? Guy selling post-trained open-source models. If you don't own your own models, you don't own anything. Guy selling harness on top of models. If you rely on one model, you are cooked. Guy selling tokens. Instead of manually prompting your models, just put them in a loop where they prompt themselves. And Paula says, guys selling GPUs. Yes. Yes. Which is accurate. Everyone has a business. A very different version of their modern sales pitch. We did not—

Let's close out on this. Yeah, what? Tony Robbins says his AI agent bought a robot dog to merge with.

Oh, I didn't realize it was a dog. I thought it was a humanoid, but— Let's play this. Talking to Ray Kurzweil, it's a 1-minute clip. We'll pull this up and play Tony Robbins in conversation with Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near. NIR, one of the most accurate AI forecasters in history, Ray Kurzweil, called the date of the Turing test 20 years in advance, almost to the day. Very impressive forecast. He's calling singularity 2035, I think, maybe 2045.

This might be Technology's Daily Show, but today is not our day with technology.

But this, this is This is not a technology issue. This is a near-peer adversary attacking us. They want to keep us from watching this video. And so, well, people are talking about a SpaceX AI rebrand. Oh, what's going on there? I thought that was already a thing. I thought they already said they were going to call it SpaceX AI, which really sort of a mouthful.

Let's pull up this video. SpaceX is doing well.

It's still a $2 trillion company. Company. The float is still low and they're unlocking more and more of the shares, but the, the value has been holding strong north of $2 trillion, which I think a lot of folks who were giving very bearish takes saying that, oh, the company doesn't make that much money, that it would be, you know, it would be worth a paltry $100 billion by now. But no, it has been cooking. Uh, don't try and pull things up.

This video livestream does not have the technology. Doesn't. It doesn't. To do live. There were—

the timeline was in turmoil before the break on July 2nd over some Vanderhall SPV action that happened. Matt Grimm took a shot at Paki McCormick saying that Not Boring raised an SPV that bought into around a couple years ago Vanderhall, and then Paki came back, set the record straight, and said that he didn't sell and that in fact it was an LP that had sold. And it all underscores just how complicated some of these later-stage investing deals get. Sometimes if you're, you know, an investor and you have an LP and they're going through some financial situation, maybe a divorce, maybe a lawsuit, they could need liquidity for They're moving things around. Like, the ask can be more serious than I think people normally jump to. They always jump to, "Oh, they just like trying to flip the stock or something." And that is, you know, not the activity that you want to have happen. But it is a very tricky situation, lots of gray areas. And I think the end result is that open conversation almost always benefits. No surprises is the rule. And also, I don't think you should be able to buy or sell Anduril secondary unless you can beat Matt Grimm in a MIRF. I think that would solve a lot of this. I think it should all come down to your MIRF time. In order to redeem your shares in Anduril, you should be able to— you should have to post video evidence of you doing a MIRF, probably sub-45 minutes, maybe sub-40 minutes would be ideal to really get access. That is the future of investor relations. Could apply to to all companies, honestly. You want to buy or sell, you got to do— you got to run a mile, do 100 pull-ups, 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups. What is it? 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats. He's been practicing. He's trying to get in on the next Andrew Ross SPV for sure. Win Matt over. Anything else you want to touch on today, Jordi? Yes, Ben, the video is playing for me. Okay, well, but Skill issue, apparently. It is a skill issue.

Anyways, folks, Portugal-Spain 0-0 at the half.

We missed nothing. We missed nothing.

Thanks for tuning in with us. We'll be back tomorrow. Back tomorrow. It's July. That means we get a little silly around here.

You're going to hear lots of car questions from our, for our interviewers, for our But if you have tech news, yeah, hit us up.

Let's go. You know, it is funny. It is funny. You know, we get into these slower summer months and then all of a sudden you have just insane days. Yeah. So you got to be live every day. So to be ready.

Yeah. I mean, the basic cycle of tech news will slow down. Venture capitalists are famously on vacation from May 15th to September 27th, right? That's when they go on vacation, right? I think usually mid-October is like real when they come back. Yeah, but that leaves opportunities. Last year we got the talent wars. Zuck didn't take any breaks. He was poaching left and right. So we'll always— there's always a chance we get a wild card, but things have been slow. So lots of time to discuss vehicles and other fun topics. But stay with us. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Have a great week.

Have a great day. Let's go, USA.

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